Andrew Norcross built NASA's website. He built the New York Times' website. He's been engineering the infrastructure of the internet for 20 years. Now he's building fences and painting houses in Florida, because AI ate his job and he refuses to be complicit in what replaced it.
This is an episode about what happens when someone with real skill, real principles, and zero interest in using AI suddenly has no market for the thing they're best at. Norcross didn't rage-quit. He just stopped pretending the emperor has clothes. He watched an industry swap craftsmen for pattern-recognition machines, compared it directly to the 2008 subprime collapse, and walked away to do work with his hands until the inevitable correction comes.
If you've ever wondered what integrity costs in a labor market that no longer rewards it, this conversation is for you.
In this episode, you'll hear:
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How Norcross built the architecture for NASA.gov, the New York Times, GitHub, and Disney, and why that work has disappeared
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His direct experience with bad AI-generated code
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Why the AI investment bubble looks a lot like subprime mortgage lending, and why the math doesn't math
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His reminder that AI is not intelligent, it's a pattern-recognition machine, and why the word choice matters
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Why no machine will ever account for the chaos and unpredictability of human behavior
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His pivot to referral-only handyman work
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A frank conversation about college vs. trades
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Why he gave up on long-term career planning entirely
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Why going to sleep sore from physical labor feels better than putting money in the wrong pockets
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