The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - How AI Anxiety is Upending Career Ambitions

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

It's a Wednesday End Bits special with lots on the menu. Starting with concerns about AI -- how many jobs will be lost, are you in the right job lane for technology that's changing everything. Are Meta glasses ruining your dinner? Wacky sports. And how being a grandparent can help you live longer. It's all here and more on today's Bridge! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. It's an end-bit special day. With this story headlining things, how AI anxiety is upending career ambitions. We'll get to that right after this. So how long did you stay up watching the U.S. president

in his state of his union speech last night? I don't know. I guess as many of you didn't watch it at all. And those who did had to decide whether to go through the, what was it, one hour and 48 minutes, something like that? It was a very long speech. In fact, it was the longest on record. Now, they've only been keeping these kind of records on State of the Union speeches since the early 60s. But that one was the longest.

I didn't watch it. Because I've heard the parade of lies before, so I didn't need to hear them again. Apparently, threw a few new ones in there last night. It was enough to keep fact checkers busy. It was enough to keep, in some cases, at some news organizations, fact checkers had to go on in the middle of the speech

to catch up to the lies. It's become a new career in journalism. I mean, there's always. always been fact checkers. But now there's like, that's a permanent assignment, fact checking. And at the top of the heap of fact checkers is Daniel Dale at CNN. And we know Daniel, right? He's Canadian.

How did he make his name? He made his name by fact checking Rob Ford, the late mayor of Toronto. Anyway, CNN hired him because they thought, there's a guy with something we could use, and they brought him in to cover Trump, and he's a rock star now. But he's as meticulous as he was on Rob Ford. He knows his facts. I assume he has a team that works on these things with him now, because this has become a major part of CNN journalism.

And away he went. Anyway, so that's gone for another year. You know, 108 minutes, really? Okay. Just before we get into the NBits for today, a reminder of what the question of the week is, because you've only got until 6 p.m. Eastern time today to get your questions in.

So this is your question of the week, because it's an ask me, anything. And we've had some interesting ones so far. We'll see how we can tackle as many as we can tomorrow. We still have ones left over from January, but we've had a lot this week as well, so there will be some sorting out and having to do.

The rules are simple. The headline has asked me anything, so you can try asking me anything, and I will see whether I can answer it. You have to have it in by 6 p.m. Eastern time tonight, as we said. 75 words or fewer. And that's a hard condition. All these are hard.

You have to include your name and the location you're writing from. And I still find it puzzling after all these months and years for the Thursday your turn program that so many of you forget or assume that I must know because you wrote a year ago or something. I don't know. Always add the name, your full name, and the location you're running from. It helps us get a sense of the country, right? So those are the major conditions.

In today, 75 words or fewer, name and location, and you send them off to the Man's Bridge. podcast at gmail.com and look forward to reading what you have to say on that. All right. Let's get to our lead and bits. And in some ways this was inspired by, we went out to dinner the other night, well, here in beautiful downtown Stratford, Ontario.

And it was with our, with my sister. and her guy. And as we always do when we have dinner, we kind of catch up on various things. And the one thing that she, my sister was very concerned about. And she's brought this up before, but she's concerned about the impact AI is having

artificial intelligence, not the good that it can do, but her concern is about jobs, who's going to lose jobs? Who's going to find jobs? What will this AI economy offer up, especially to young people who are either just hitting the job market

or are concerned that the job they're in is going to be lost because of AI. And there's reason for that cause of concern. And so she's, you know, quite worked up about this, about, you know, what's going to happen. And, you know, she's not unaware of the fact that we're in a changing world and a changing economy. And these kind of things happen every once in a while through history. And so I was looking around for once. And, you know, this article is pretty good, actually.

It's in The Guardian. and the headline is real fear how AI anxiety is upending career ambitions. The subheadline is AI has convinced computer science students to shift majors and white-collar workers to change careers while some are embracing it. So let's get into this. It's written by a fellow named Aaron Mock, and it was just last week. So if you're looking for it, that's, those are the basics to find in the Guardian.

But let's read a bit of this because, you know, as a result of that dinner the other night, I've been thinking about this. And this answers some of the questions. Gives you some pathways if this is where you feel that you're trapped. So here we go. Matthew Ramirez started at Western Gun, Governor's University as a computer science major in 2025, drawn by the promise of a high-paying,

flexible career as a programmer. But as headlines mounted about tech layoffs and AI's potential to replace entry-level coders, he began to question whether that path would actually lead to a job. When the 20-year-old interviewed for a data center technician role that June, and never heard back. His doubts deepened. In December, and that's, you know, just two months ago, Ramirez decided on what he thought was a safer bet,

turning away from computer science entirely. He dropped his planned major to instead apply to nursing school. He comes from a family of nurses and sees the field as more stable and harder to automate than coding. Even though AI might not be at the point where it will overtake all these entry-level jobs now, by the time I graduate, it likely will, Ramirez said. Now, that's just, you know, one interesting example. But Ramirez is not alone in reshaping his career out of anxiety over AI.

As students like him are reconsidering their majors over concerns that AI may disrupt, disrupt their employment prospects, more established workers, some with decades of experience, are rethinking their trajectories because they're encountering AI at work and share the same unease. Some workers are eschewing it entirely, others are embracing it. It's not clear when AI will become advanced enough to replace certain white-collar workers and just how many jobs it will be capable of taking over. But jitters around its potential impact are already pushing people to change course, reshaping the labor market before automation fully arrives.

Okay, that's the opening of this article, and it's a long one. I'm going to read a little more from it, from the Guardian once again. But that kind of sets you up, puts you in the headspace for what it's. about. So let me go on a little bit. I'm not going to read it all. It's a law, as I said, it's a long article. But let's give it a little more here. What is clear is why workers are feeling on edge. The World Economic Forum projects that AI could displace 92 million. Let me say that number again. 92 million rolls worldwide by 2030. That's just a couple of years down the road, including many white-collar positions.

In the U.S. employers cited AI as a factor in nearly 55,000 job cuts in 2025, according to Challenger Gray and Christmas, a consulting firm, as job seekers navigate a tougher market. While AI is still just one factor among many that are leading to layoffs, ADP, the largest payroll company in the U.S. found that professional and business service roles, alongside information services, jobs in media, telecom, and

IT, collectively lost 41,000 jobs in December of 2025. It's just in one month. In that same month, employment grew in health care. Okay. Got it?

In that same month, employment grew in health care, education, and hospitality, per the firm's data. Many of those white-collar roles involve writing, data analysis, and coding risks, generative AI tools, can increasingly perform. Hands-on people-facing work remains less exposed. Jobs that emphasize interpersonal and hands-on skills are increasingly appealing to young people who are wary of automation, according to Dr. Jasmine Escalera, a career development expert at ZETY,

a professional development platform. She pointed to research showing that 43% of Gen Z workers who are anxious about AI are moving away from entry-level corporate and administrative rules and towards careers that rely on what she calls human skills, including creative, Interpersonal Connection and Hands-on Expertise. One more paragraph. In that same report, 53% of young respondents said they were seriously considering blue-collar or skilled trade work.

Escalara said it was a move that workers were making to reduce their exposure to AI and one that the Wall Street Journal, the paper of record of white-collar work, had recently urged its reading, to consider. Okay, sorry, one more, one more line, one more paragraph.

This is fascinating, really. Keep in mind, this isn't, this option isn't for everybody, but it is for some who are, you know, anxiety-ridden. They're anxious about what's happening here, and you can understand why. But here, here's this last one.

But the pivot may come with sacrifices. Many of the white-collar roles that workers worry could be automated, from software development to financial analysis, are paid median salaries well above $75,000 a year, with developers raking in about $133,000, according to the Bureau of Labor stats. These are all U.S. figures, right? Blue-collar jobs pay less.

Many skill trades like electricians, and plumbers receive closer to 60,000 a year. These types of jobs also often require in-person work, physical labor, and less predictable schedules. All trade-offs workers may accept in their attempts to future-proof their careers. Well, there you go. That's where we are in this world we live in today. We're in a much different world than we were in, you know, even a year.

even two years ago. It's certainly considerably different than the world we were living in 10 years ago. And I have to keep shaking myself to recognize that because, you know, it was only seven years ago. I was doing what I'd done for 50 years. Worked at the CBC, 20 years as a reporter, 30 years as a anchor. And it was a very predictable, exciting, challenging, wonderful job. But that was a different world than the one we live in now. And it's certainly different for those who are growing up in it,

who are just leaving school, university, college, and entering the job market. You know, I had somebody write me, a university student yesterday once talked to me about what's happening in journalism. And I'll talk to her today. You know, we'll have a conversation. I'll tell her what I know and what I think. But, man, you know, like I'm out of date. It's very different for me to look at the world I used to be in because it's not that way anymore.

It's very different. And, of course, it's not just journalism. All right. Moving on. Next story. This one's in the New York Times. and, you know, in a way, this is the same kind of stuff. It's the advancement in tech.

The headline is dinner is being recorded whether you know it or not. What's this story about? It's about meta-smart glasses. You know what those are? You know, I didn't know, I went shows just a little while ago and I got suckered into buying some for the wrong reason. I was misinformed about them. But they're glasses.

It could be sunglasses or just ordinary glasses that are prescription or just glasses that are glass, you know. There's no prescription on it. That's not the trick about meta glasses. Metaglasses record. They record video. There's a camera in them. And they record audio.

And I can tell you, the quality is perfect in both. Both cases. But why would you have these? What's the point? So here's the subheadline. As meta smart meta, is meta or meta? Meta. As meta smart glasses capture scenes in restaurants for social media,

Service workers and customers are becoming captive participants. So let's read a little bit of this. It's by Luke Fortney, just last week in the New York Times. Last summer, Tom Wong was working at the chubby crab, his family's seafood boil restaurant in Manhattan's Chinatown. When a regular approach the counter, she ordered a combo, steamed clams instead of sausage, please, and ate it at a table near the door, muttering to herself in between bites.

Mr. Wong, 32, didn't think anything of it, but a few days later another customer came in and asked for a selfie. Then the asks kept coming. He had been recorded without his knowledge using a lentil-sized camera embedded in a pair of meta-ray-band glasses. The resulting video had been viewed more than two million times on TikTok. turning Mr. Wong and the restaurant into unwitting stars. At a certain point, I stopped working in front of the restaurant.

It was really uncomfortable. To be in public is to risk being filmed. And these days, there's a good chance it's happening surreptitiously with smart glosses. Their wearers are filming in restaurants, cafes and bars, capturing warped eye-level video. of drive-through pranks, Michelin-starred meals and work shifts at Texas Roadhouse. Servers, owners, and customers can end up as captive participants.

There are people who are using them in slick ways, said Maddie Elder, a bartender at the Brooklyn wine cellar in downtown Brooklyn. It can feel like harassment. In a recording of her interaction with the customer last month, Mrs. Elder, 31 years old, notices his meta-glasses, and asked him to stop recording or leave. The man states that he is filming a vlog.

I'm not turning it off, he replies. The video which Mizzelder was unaware of until a reporter contacted her for this story has been viewed on Instagram nearly 200,000 times. The thing about the, I mean, kind of glasses that can record have been around for a while, but they were kind of clunky and obvious.

These aren't. These just look like glasses. right now there is one one way you can know what's going on there's if you're taking pictures with your glasses there's a little a little tiny little light the front of the glasses that you can see if you're in front of them that goes on just as like on and off when you when you take a still photo if you're taking video it goes off and on continuously. So you can tell if you're being videoed

unless they find some way of dismantling that light. So there are privacy issues here, but you are in public, you're outside, you're walking on the street, or you're sitting in a restaurant, or you're serving in a restaurant. So that's why the headline is dinner's being recorded, whether you know it or not.

There's lots more in this article as well. So New York Times, right? And the writer is Luke Fortney. So you can find that. You know, search meta-glasses in the New York Times, something like that. I'm sure you'll find it. Okay, those are our opening two stories. We'll have a little more fun with some of the other ones.

But why don't we take our break first? We'll do that, and then we'll be right back. After this. And welcome back. You're listening to the Wednesday episode of The Bridge. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, are on our favorite podcast platform.

A reminder that tomorrow is, well, it's Thursday, and that means your turn and the random renter. They'll both be by on tomorrow's program. And, of course, your turn tomorrow isn't asked me anything. I explained earlier how you can get your questions in for that. So look forward to that program tomorrow. And then Friday is, as always, good talk with Bruce Anderson and Chantilly Bear. That's Friday.

I got a couple of changes coming up for the early part of next week, and I'll go through those tomorrow or Friday. You'll hear everything you normally hear, but you just may hear it on different days. Just next week. And you'll understand why when I explain. Okay, I don't know about you, but I watched a bit of the Olympics. Not as much as I usually watch. At Olympic times. I'm not quite sure why this year, but obviously I watched the hockey and the curling

and a bit of the downhill skiing. but not a lot more. However, some fantastic athletes at the top of their game. This headline, it was actually put out by Olympics.com, because they knew people were watching sports, so they were wondering, what are some of the wackiest sports from around the world that aren't featured at the Olympics?

and they found some. I'm not going to read them all, but I'll give you some of them. Grace Goulding for Olympics.com. I wrote this. I wrote this piece, and she wrote it just a couple of days ago. That's how she starts it off.

She says, sports come in all shapes and sizes, far beyond conventional football fields and basketball courts. People have always created games to compete, connect, celebrate, and most of all, to have fun. Whether it's chasing a ball, racing the clock, or testing one's physical limits, the instinct to play is part of who we are. But this universal love of sports takes on wildly different, sometimes downright, bizarre forms around the world. From the wonderfully weird to the completely absurd competition knows no bounds.

Okay. So are you going to explain to us, right? Yes, we are. There's a couple here that start off. They say they're the wackiest sports in the British Isles. Well, there's a lot of wacky things happen in the British Isles, as we know, always have been. But that's where they choose to start. Here's the first one.

Cheese rolling. A downhill dairy dash. I know some of you have heard of this. How much do you really love cheese? Enough to throw yourself down a near vertical, in pursuit of a rolling wheel of cheese. Welcome to the annual cheese rolling festival at Gloucestershire, England, where participants chase a nine-pound double Gloucester cheese down Cooper's Hill,

tumbling, flipping, and often crash landing in the process. The first to cross the line wins the cheese and possibly a few bruises. While the exact reason for its creation is a lot, unknown. It's believed to be a way for the locals to mark the arrival of spring. Bring on the cheese rolling festival, I say, we could use spring. Soon. Over the years, the event has grown from a small rural tradition into a globally recognized spectacle, drawing crowds and daring, dairy cheese chasers from all over the world. Now, I'd heard of the cheese rolling. I had not heard of this one. If hurtling downhill or breakneck speed isn't your thing,

perhaps you'd prefer a sport that requires staying put, theoretically. Toe wrestling, another uniquely British pastime, is exactly what it sounds like. Competitors lock toes an attempt to pin their opponent's foot to the ground. Toe wrestling has gained a niche following, with dedicated athletes participating in various international, competitions such as the world toe wrestling championships where the reigning champion receives a trophy in the shape of a golden toe totally worth it.

It's a sport that demands strength strategy and ideally a good pedicure. I know some of you're going, Man's Bridge, really? Toe wrestling. That's where you're talking about on the bridge today. Got to finish some of these. Hurling. You've heard of hurling? If you're Irish, you've probably heard of a hurling.

Across the Irish sea, another battle takes place. Not with toes or tumbling bodies, but with sticks. Originating over 3,000 years ago, hurling is one of the oldest field sports in the world. With its origins. I don't get it here. While the game is fiercely competitive, it's also a symbol of Irish pride

and often considering the beating heart of Irish sporting life. What do they actually do? It doesn't tell you. Well, whatever they do, they do it with sticks. Here's one that's a little... Here's one that Canadians could get into. Underwater hockey. Not all of the British Isles wackiest sports are on dry land.

Enter underwater hockey, a game invented in the UK in the 1950s as a way to keep Navy divers fit, also known as Octopus. Underwater hockey is played at the bottom of a swimming pool where teams equip with snorkels, masks, and fins use small sticks to maneuver a weighted puck into the opposing team's goal.

Players must hold their breath while diving, ducking, and darting to out-maneuver their opponents. It's a game that demands both lungs of steel and strategic thinking, proving that the Brits know how to make hockey as wild as possible, even in the water. And there's swamp football, originating in Germany, played in the bogs of Finland. This sport involves two teams slogging it out in knee-deep mud. The slippery terrain adds an extra layer of difficulty, making every goal extra sweet.

If swamp football isn't quite the fit for you, try slump football. Cycle ball. Football on bikes. Cycle ball or rad ball is a sport where players ride bicycles without brakes using their wheels to control and shoot a ball into the opponent's goal. Okay. Is there one more here that we might find interesting on this list? I like this one.

You can see this one in your mind. Pole vaulting meets... Canal vaulting. In the flat landscapes of the Netherlands, where canals criss-crossed the countryside like veins of water, locals have long-needed creative ways to get across. The solution, Fjepin, which translates to far-leaping. I don't imagine what I just said was the correct pronunciation,

but far-leaping and dates back to the 18th century. Originally a practical security, used by farmers and laborers to navigate waterways without a bridge in sight. This necessity evolved into a full-fledged sport. Modern far-leaping involves sprinting towards a long pole planted in the canal, vaulting up and scrambling to control the pole's movement before landing as far from the starting point as possible, ideally on solid ground or sand rather than in the water. Today the sport has official competitions, dedicated training,

facilities, an athlete to take the art of pole vaulting without a mat to new extremes. You know, that one I can imagine in my mind, and I would, you know, I'd watch that. If they made that an Olympic sport, I'd watch that. You know, full credit to those pole vaulters in the official pole vaulting competitions. But don't you think you'd rather want to. watch somebody trying to vault across a canal. That sounds pretty good. There's a lot more in this article.

I'm not going to read it all. I'll leave it for those who find this interesting. You can find it at olympic.com. All right. Let's see how we make out with this. This is from one of my favorite websites. It's not funny. You can't find it anyway.

You know, study finds. is what I like, but no, this is from prevention.com slash health. Prevention.com slash health. Here's the headline. Being a grandparent can help you live longer. Okay, well, that makes some sense. If you're a grandparent, you've already lived a healthy and lengthy life. But it can help you live even longer.

So says this study. There's a lot of talk about activities that could possibly lower your brain age. Did you know that being a grandparent could be one of them? Specifically, if you're a grandparent who occasionally helps care for the little tykes in your life. You both could benefit from the quality time in more ways than one. And for you, it would be with a sharper mind and a potentially longer life. Here we get to the guts of this thing.

A study published in psychology and aging looked into this scenario and found that older adults who help care for their grandchildren, but don't raise them full-time, show better cognitive functioning with age than those who don't. We tend to think about brain health in terms of puzzles, exercise, or eating the right foods, says Mary Ellen Eller.

A psychiatrist said, radial. But growing research is pointing to something just as powerful, connection. She adds, to break the results down even further, grandmothers, who played active caregiving roles, showed less cognitive decline over time than any other group studied. Both grandmothers and grandfathers, involved in caregiving, also demonstrated stronger verbal fluency and memory. There's a little more on this, how the study was conducted. Researchers use data from, because, you know, you hear about these studies and you go, okay, like, who did they actually talk to?

Who were they watching? How many people were involved? You know, was this like six people in one home, retirement home? There was it more than that. Well, this was more than that. Researchers used data from the Health and Retirement Study, HRS, a nationally representative longitudinal panel study of U.S. adult, age 50 and older, that surveys participants every two years to collect data on health, cognition, family structure, caregiving, income, and more. From the study, they pulled a sample of 2,364 adults over 50, controlling for age, gender, race, education, marital status, employment and financial status, and depression, who are cognitive healthy and reported whether or not they provided non-custodial, meaning non-parental care, to their

grandkids. They were then followed over a 12-year period, and their cognitive functioning was assessed using several standardized tasks, including immediate and delayed word recall, subtraction, backwards counting, object naming, and other mental status-related questions. You know the one that always gets me is when you sit there, you know, those of you who are my age, and I know there are some in the audience who are, but this is a warning to others who are, who are approaching those ages, that when you go to your doctor-free annual check-up, and they say, oh, we're going to try a cognitive test with you. And you go, oh, my God, I don't know, please don't do that. I don't, you know. But one of the tests they do, you know, but one of the tests they do,

in there is they say, okay, you've heard this because Trump brags that he was the best at it. Of course he does. He's Trump. But they'll say, okay, I'm going to give you five words. And they'll go, you know, elephant, clock, purple, baseball, mathematics. And then they'll say, okay, just say those words back to me. So you say them back. And then they move on to the next test.

Not realizing that five or ten minutes from then, they're going to say, okay, tell me those five words again that we started with. So as you approach these tests, when you hear them say, I'm going to give you five words, think of ways to remember those words because it's going to come back at you. you don't have to remember them in the order they were given. You just have to remember the words. So what were the five I said?

Come on. What were they? All right. Moving on. This is a good little piece, but it's basically the argument that grandparents and grandparenting improves your lifespan. Keeping up with toddlers is a full body cognitive, workout, says one of those who did the study. There's planning, problem solving, social navigation,

and emotional regulation. The interactions demand that grandparents stay mentally flexible, responsive and creative. She adds, which is exactly the kind of stimulation aging brains thrive on. The interactions typically also work on memory and impulse control, areas that tend to decline with age. So there's lots more in this article, and I know that some of you are probably going to want to grab it, or you already recognize the fact that the time you're spending with your grandkids is time that's not only good for your grandkids.

It's good for you. And it's improving your own health. It's helping you live longer. So we'll keep that in mind. There was another piece here that we're not going to have time to get to today. But the headline in it is, and I hadn't realized this. But it's basically, we just marked the 50th anniversary of the first commercial flight by a Concord Genliner. January 21st, 1976 was the first commercial flight.

flight took off from Heathrow Airport in London. And if you go to Heathrow, even today, now Concord doesn't fly anymore, that tragic accident in Paris, or everybody on board was killed shortly after takeoff, and then they shut her down. But there are still Concord aircraft around. Some are in aircraft museums. and there's one in Heathrow. It kind of sits idly by at the end of, you know, a built-up area at Heathrow.

And you occasionally see it, depending on which runway you're taking off from, you can see it parked over the sign. You know, a symbol of aircraft technology passed, and yet it still looks present. It still looks like the most modern, jetliner ever. And in many ways it was. This was the jetliner that, you know,

crossed the Atlantic in what it was two and a half, three hours. Cut timing in more than a half for that distance. And so some business people loved it because they could, you know, drive from London, have a full day. I have work in New York and then fly back. Same day. Now, it was extremely expensive and not necessarily that comfortable. They were all kind of business class or first class seats, but they were small.

It was a small fuselage. But nevertheless, it was speed and people wanted speed. They still want speed. But now you comfortably leave, say, Toronto to go to London. You fly overnight. And if you can sleep on a plane, it's a great way to travel. sometimes it can get a little crowded and squishy and especially on full flights

nevertheless that was the story we didn't get to but that's basically covering it 50 years ago that the first Concord flew commercially I mean it had flown for a couple of years before that as they were testing it out and getting it ready for a commercial

Okay, that's going to do it for NBits this week. I'm glad you to have had you with us. Tomorrow, your turn, ask me anything along with the random ranger. I'll be here, and you'll be there. And we'll meet again. That's all in less than 24 hours. Bye for now.