9B: Episode 4: The Blue Collar Swap out

In this episode, we discuss the blue-collar swap-out — trading spreadsheets for sheetrock. It's the desk-to-ditch revolution. 

This business and BS is hashed over a beer, a bourbon, and a Boulevardier cocktail by our three bombastic, bloviating blokes in Bryan, TX — the 9B’s.

Work with us  Fidelis Creative Agency 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

9B. Uh well, welcome to 9B, which is Beer Bourbon, Boulevard Boulevardier, and Business Talk and BS by three Bluviating Bombastic Bros in Bryan, Texas. We are starting the show. That's amazing. And today, today, our topic is for episode four The Blue Collar Swap Out. Trading spreadsheets for sheet rock.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Yep. All right. This is about the Great Resignation 2.0. This is white-collar workers eyeing blue-collar jobs. There's a shift. There's a shift. This is the desk to ditch revolution. White-collar workers are trading laptops for ladders. A significant portion of the white-collar workforce is considering a move to blue-collar trades. Driven by a desire for better pay, job stability, and a sense of fulfillment, this trend, led by Gen Z, is challenging the long-held belief that a college degree is the only path to success. Join us as we explore the erosion of the traditional college to career path and the growing disillusionment with corporate life. We'll highlight a generational shift in values where practical skills and tangible results are increasingly prized over prestigious titles and office perks. Do you guys remember uh Quiet Quitting? Yes. What was that, 2021? Something like that. Amazing.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Yeah. Um, and only allowed because of how much labor was in the workforce and how much uh sort of leverage it seemed like employees had over management. And then it was like, what do you what have you done for me lately?

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Yeah. It just seemed like it. Like, okay, we all left for a couple of years and now we realize you need us. Yeah. It was like that.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

And there was so much money coursing through the system that everybody's salaries kept going up and the demands of the employee also kept going up. And then they you were kind of leveraged over a barrel. Yeah. And then reality hits and there's an economic ouch. And then people are now like scrambling. Here we are, 2025, the end of 2025. And it's like, I'm very thankful for my job because who knows? You know, we're laying off tens, hundreds of thousands of people, and now the workforce does not have quite the leverage that they enjoyed.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Yeah, I saw a thing uh trending on LinkedIn last week was quiet cracking, which is like, oh my gosh, the stress of the work. The stress is unbearable. And what you see that in relationship to is the pay. The pay is not as great as we were told it was going to be. And there's fewer people in my workspace because I'm going to do more for them. They keep promising AI is going to make my life better.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

And really, it's just it just keeps notching up in terms of how much content is supposed to be produced, how much is supposed to be delivered. And it it hasn't calibrated. Yeah. Like it's ramping up, but it does make people crack.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

And so this is all driving the decision to go pursue a blue-collar career that you get can't be touched by AI.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Yeah. You get that handsome devil micro in there saying, hey, the trades is where it's at, and there's huge demand. Huge demand.

SPEAKER_02 3:41

And he's not a lot of people, a lot of people don't have talking about quiet cracking, they don't have the crack to be able to do be a plumber to a blue-collar job.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

You know? Yeah, there's there's probably a pendulum swing that's going to happen here again. Oh no. Yeah. Because those jobs are not easy jobs.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

No.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

But so I'm glad I'm glad for people going into the trades. I mean, it's the the not just the economics of it, but like the you get this country moving again. You get them working, you get them product producing.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

And the the big looming threat to that is robotics. Yeah. And if they can start instilling the AI in the robotics, it's just that it's going there's going to be, you know, probably decades worth of time between now and when a AI-powered, fully informed robot can come into a personal address and fix a bathroom vanity sink. Like that or terminate you. Or kill you. Right. Um the the I just think there is going to be a lag. There is that. Yeah. But but you have, I don't know, 15, 20 years before something like that could probably happen.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

I think I I think I might be dead by then. I don't know. I saw a robot up on a roof putting in a root like tile uh shingles. I didn't see that. I saw this. I saw it was like picking up uh what do you not pallets, but the bundles of shingles and it was opening them, laying them out. Boop, boop, boom, boom.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

It was wild. There's a giant billboard in Houston uh off a 290 uh that's like, hey, we're high, it's a construction company. We're hiring uh come get a job AI can't replace. And I drove past it and I was like, for now, like you get a you get a little army of those little tiny short stack remote robots coming on. Man.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Okay, so I want to pick apart some of your opening here. So challenging the long-held belief that a college degree is the only path to success. So one of the factors that's driving this is that the value proposition of college and university for the cost is not it's not increasing. That is going down. And especially, and I I want to talk about this in a minute, among men, among young men. So um I as I understand it, the college enrollment has tilted strongly in favor of fem female students. The the male to female ratio like the acceptance rate? Yeah. Okay. And those who are still in college and graduating with degrees has tilted strongly female. So men are looking at it going, I don't see the value of all this money for a degree that is for a corporate world that doesn't feel like it fits me, and that I'm not favored, or at least um, I don't know, the prospect doesn't look as good.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

Incentivized.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Incentivized, so what am I gonna do? And so I think that's a big part of this.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Yes? Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm thinking about uh I've got three kids up and coming, boys and girls, and it's like as I look at as I look at uh my son entering into the the college arena, my thing is before you start college, because the price is so high now, you have to have a plan for what it's gonna do for you. It's gotta be it's gotta have an ROI on it.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Yeah. And you're also trying to guess at what what field is going to be viable post AI. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Which is there's a certain kind of sadness. I have a I have a friend who her daughter says, um, I want to I want to be uh a writer. I want to go into college and learn uh how to write stories and prose and poetry. And uh her the mother says, AI's taking all of that away. There's going to be zero money in that. You have to do something far more than that.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

That is a line of thought.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

It's a line of thought. What I appreciate about the appreciate about that line of thought is that it is a we're making an investment, it has to pay. Yeah. Like that's true. You can write. You can always write. You can study. But I think some of those um the arts is going to move out of college and move more into like you have to want it. You have to self-educate on some of that.

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Isn't there a trajectory though where yes, for a time, that's it's taking all that away, but then the sameness, the blandness of the yeah, um the of that of that bot writing, because it it all is just um it's just synthesizing and summarizing and guessing that that human voice that's truly creative and truly original in in the way that humans are original thinkers, is gonna it's gonna come back and and be more valuable and more prized than maybe it is now. Isn't that a possible trajectory also?

SPEAKER_01 9:10

You already start to see some of that with uh like in our industry, copywriters for a while were like laid off in droves, and now some of the agencies are like, actually, no, we're gonna we're gonna rehire some of that because it is But your process is different now.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

Now your process is gonna be process is different, um aided by artificial intelligence.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Yeah. So it does seem like um if maybe say ten years ago, um there was a pretty solid uh humanities-driven uh high concept artistic thinking class, there was a huge middle section, which is white-collar corporate jobs, and then there was the trades and actual physical labor world. It seems like this middle part is draining out, and it's either going to increase the value of the of the high cognitive conceptual work or push more value down into the trades. So this middle set, the college, educated, white-collar corporate life, where you actually are supposed to make something like a career where you're at least trying to make a lateral move and then make a bump up and build that kind of career, that feels like that's the thing going away.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

You'd also think that with the in the thinking class, that as AI generated thought and summarization and answers begins to predominate in terms of how people see the world, then all the more contrarian ideas that push back against that, that challenge that is going to be all the more valuable. Yeah. The humanities. Right. The ability to ask critical questions, the ability to think of multiple perspectives, to consider multiple perspectives, true creativity. Right.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Yeah. But that's kind of like the embedded promise in our current moment where we have so much hope on AI. Well, if we can normalize and vanilla-ize everything, then we don't need the thinkers and we can figure out robots for the doers.

SPEAKER_02 11:29

And it's like, I mean, I really chafe efficiency. I chafe against the idea of there has to be an ROI on education because the liberal arts originally conceived the free arts, were those disciplines that were not tied to an ROI as we would define it right now, right? They were supp the return on investment was they were going to make you fully human. They were going to make you more able to realize your humanity, your God-given talents and gifts, right? And and so that's why when you're really conceiving what the humanities are supposed to do, you run up against that of, well, where is the where is the return on investment? Yeah. I don't either society. Yeah. The problem is that how do we fight?

SPEAKER_01 12:25

We've made you fully human, but now you have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt enslavement for the next 20 years. No, I think it's a real it's a real problem. I'm not Yeah. They drove the price way high. Like when I was in college, going into college, it was hey, take some time and figure out what you're good at. AM's line, I remember very distinctly, was we want you to be a generalist for the first year or two, and that's why we've programmed that you taste everything. So you can make math and history and writing and all the things. And you can do that if as long as it's affordable. When? Look at us now.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

As long as it's affordable.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

As long as it's affordable. Well, you triple the price on that, and it's like, well, what am I trading here?

SPEAKER_00 13:20

That's right. So I as as we uh as I read this sort of framing, I thought I don't know how you talk about this topic without thinking about the psychology of men, which is I want to do something that is hard. I want to do a thing that makes a difference, that has some prestige to it, that I can build something that may be outlast me. And there is something about the nature of corporate work, white-collar work, where you're part of a larger institution, organization that um doesn't have allegiance to you, clearly. Not in 2025, it doesn't. And I think that is part of the psychology driving. I want to get into the trades, I want to run my own electric company, I want to build my own thing. And there's like that taps into something deep in young men. Yeah. And I think that's a very good thing.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Yeah. I mean, you get a lot of that in Texas.

unknown 14:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

Texans like an art.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

We covered that in the previous episode.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

But I'd like to come back to that. We like things to be difficult. It does, it does kind of bring up this question of like uh young men who or old men if they are trading corporate life for something more uh physical. Uh how good is the work gonna be? I mean, desk jockey to ladder hiker, yeah. You're gonna fall off that ladder. Yeah. You don't have the inner ear for that.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

So a guy who spent 15 years in a white-collar job behind a desk and now wants to jump out and go into trades, and you want to do that in in a very different work culture in Texas in the heat, right? Um, the physical load versus mental load. That's yeah, that's very big. And you are going to wear your body out. That's it is hard. Um, getting on and off ladders, in and out of trucks, and that's something that I think everybody has to like evaluate. Like the how long can I do be in the laboring versus move toward management or own the company?

SPEAKER_02 15:45

Well, what's fascinating about this too, this trend that we're predicting is this is happening amidst a society that is more obese than ever, is more afflicted with various kinds of degenerative diseases than ever, is more afflicted by various kinds of mental uh afflictions than ever. Like we're not we're not a healthy society in our bodies, yet we're we're considering adopting jobs that are highly physical in nature so that we can have a uh have a career path and an economic stability in the face of technological development.

SPEAKER_00 16:27

I mean that is You're saying we got we're not a nation full of 1915 farm boys from Iowa.

SPEAKER_02 16:33

Meeting Yeah, compare pictures of groups of people from today to a hundred years ago to 1925. Save us our F Day.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

I mean you're saying that you're gonna you're gonna scrape out of you know Houston suburbs all these kids that have been at best in high school sports and put them into the trades, right?

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Yeah, it it doesn't seem like a recipe for success. Yeah, we need to get fit.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

It'll sort itself out. It'll sort itself out. Um well that's what that's what I I mean. I don't know where this conversation goes because we don't know what's about to happen.

SPEAKER_01 17:10

It's gonna be a wild future.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

There there is a transition that's happening. I mean, Mike Rowe has been on about this for a long time, which is there's you know, 130,000 blue-collar jobs that are not able to be filled in America right now. Where are those people? They're in junior highs and high schools all across the nation. They need to be trained. Texas is trying to come up right now with lots of extra training and institutions and funding to be able to get that kind of workforce, but the workforce is not able to meet, especially as we're reshoring all this manufacturing uh to the United States. You know, we have to build nuclear subs. That's that's electricians, that's putting metal together.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

There's lots to do.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

There's a ton to do, and so this there is demand, and it's probably gonna pay very, very well.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

It's gonna pay well, and the training is on the job. Or you can take a two-year and get right into it. Yep. What an equation.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

It's a very strange day in America. And so as we have kids who are trying to sort this out, we're having these conversations all the time.

SPEAKER_02 18:26

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

That's what I've got on the topic.

SPEAKER_02 18:30

To the future.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

To the future.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

A brave new world.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

Nine B.