Dan Martell - August 12, 2025


6 High Income Skills That AI Won’t Replace in 2026

Topics
creative director robotics engineering full stack software engineer
Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Kevin Kiley Lovable Brett Revio Atlas Veve Zuck
You need a reality check #podcast #dothingsyoudontwanttodo #yourbusiness #danmartell I don't care about my kids grades #podcast #dothingsyoudontwanttodo #yourbusiness

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

198.22

Word count

2,337

Sentence count

159


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Whether you re switching careers or just starting, many people are about to waste years building skills for jobs that will disappear. But I m going to save you from that mistake. I ve been analyzing thousands of cutting-edge AI companies and market trends, and I ve outlined 6 highest-paying jobs that'll survive the next decade. These aren t just trendy jobs everyone s chasing - they re the ones that will still pay six figures without having to go to med school or learn rocket science.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 If you're scared that you might be on the wrong career path, you should be.
00:00:03.400 Whether you're switching careers or just starting, many people are about to waste
00:00:06.880 years building skills for jobs that will disappear. But I'm going to save you from
00:00:10.660 that mistake. I've been analyzing thousands of cutting-edge AI companies and market trends,
00:00:15.800 and I've outlined six highest-paying jobs that will survive the next decade.
00:00:20.160 These aren't just trendy jobs everyone's chasing. They're the ones that will still pay
00:00:24.220 six figures without having to go to med school or learning rocket science.
00:00:27.320 So now if you're done settling for mediocre pay,
00:00:30.480 these are the jobs that will make you real f***ing money.
00:00:33.380 Starting from the bottom, creative directors.
00:00:36.680 The whole philosophy is being a director over a doer.
00:00:40.680 In the artistic world of AI,
00:00:43.220 understanding the taste, the vision,
00:00:46.180 what are we trying to create here?
00:00:47.640 And getting people to move in a certain direction,
00:00:50.580 that's valuable.
00:00:51.540 When I think of like the three areas of intelligence,
00:00:54.180 you've got like analytical intelligence,
00:00:55.720 you have creative intelligence and you have emotional intelligence. The director level is
00:01:00.640 one of the most valuable because it challenges people to have a vision for the future that
00:01:05.140 doesn't exist yet that should. And when you can take taste and caring about people, the emotional
00:01:10.840 side, that's how you become valuable in this world. I mean, the truth is there's already
00:01:15.120 single person marketing teams taking over complete agencies. And the cool part is the salary for
00:01:20.880 those kind of roles are between 100K to 130K per year. Six figures. You can learn this.
00:01:28.900 The learning curve is medium. It's not that complicated if you work on you. And the
00:01:33.680 competition is also medium because not a lot of people are watching this video. They don't
00:01:37.960 understand what's available to them. So they're stuck in the past doing the same thing they've
00:01:42.100 always done. Hoping AI doesn't completely catch them flat footed and you're going to be first.
00:01:46.220 But if a creative role isn't right for you, then you might be interested in being a data analyst.
00:01:52.860 Essentially, you use data to figure out what's working, what's not, and how to guide strategy.
00:01:57.700 The salary is also between $100,000 and $130,000 a year in pay.
00:02:02.280 The learning curve is medium.
00:02:03.860 The competition is high because there's already a lot of people entering it,
00:02:07.260 but it's got stronger potential in regards to being defensible long-term than a creative director.
00:02:11.900 because every company is sitting
00:02:13.920 on thousands of terabytes of data.
00:02:16.580 Without data, you're just another person with an opinion.
00:02:19.920 I always say, I love what you're saying,
00:02:22.080 bring the data to back it up.
00:02:23.580 What data did you look at?
00:02:24.740 Which customer did you look at?
00:02:26.140 Show me.
00:02:26.680 But somebody needs to see that inside of the business,
00:02:30.040 the data, the reporting, the business intelligence,
00:02:32.520 the analytics.
00:02:33.440 Somebody has to look at the data, the numbers,
00:02:36.000 the text, the information, and make sense of it
00:02:38.680 so the business can actually grow.
00:02:40.080 The amount of data is always going up.
00:02:42.580 The amount of information companies capture about their customers, about the product, always going up.
00:02:47.980 And somebody needs to be able to look at it.
00:02:50.340 And somebody needs to come in and learn how to extract insights from the information.
00:02:54.980 But analyzing data might not make you as much as protecting it.
00:02:58.560 Which brings us to number four from the bottom, cyber security specialist.
00:03:05.220 As long as there's digital information, there will be people trying to hack it.
00:03:09.920 There are more people today empowered by the AI to steal your information than ever before.
00:03:15.740 I mean, it's gotten to the point where we have a key word that only people know to say that if
00:03:20.640 somebody calls acting as me in my voice or anybody else on my team, they have to ask them, what's the
00:03:25.780 word? Because AI can literally mimic everybody. Video. I mean, there'll be a day where somebody
00:03:30.620 jumps on a Zoom call and tells the team, hey, can somebody run down and order a new MacBook Pro
00:03:35.520 and ship at this address? And you'll be like, well, you asked me to do it. And it's like,
00:03:38.480 i was on vacation what are you talking about there needs to be somebody that is using the ai
00:03:43.520 to counteract the bad people using the ai to try to steal and if you're kind of that person that
00:03:48.000 likes to like protect stuff and like you got this like bodyguard mentality this is the perfect role
00:03:52.320 for you you can literally spend your day protecting digital assets from breaches people doing ransomware
00:03:58.160 where they're asking you to send bitcoin to unlock the computers or internal threats from literally
00:04:03.440 people inside the company that are sneaking around and doing sneaky deaky stuff and you
00:04:07.440 you got to be like, oh, you did something you shouldn't been doing. And here's the deal. You
00:04:10.760 might go, that sounds so boring. Guess what? Boring pays well, extremely well, which leads us
00:04:16.820 to the salary. It's between 110 and 140,000 a year. The learning curve is higher, a little bit
00:04:24.340 more difficult, but the competition is low. Most people want to go do the very creative activities
00:04:29.620 like directing and analysts versus the hard stuff like security. But that's why it makes the
00:04:35.360 competition low because most people are not going to be doing it. One moment of vulnerability can
00:04:39.680 bring the whole business down to zero. But if you want to work in the most exciting industry,
00:04:43.980 you're going to love robotics engineering. You might not have seen some of these demos,
00:04:50.320 but let me tell you this. You essentially have the opportunity to design the machines that will
00:04:55.180 automate the physical world. I'm talking about picking up after your kids, loading the dishwasher,
00:05:00.620 going and getting groceries, driving the cars.
00:05:03.900 Everybody's talking about self-driving cars.
00:05:05.600 What about when the robots just drive the cars?
00:05:07.480 Then every car that isn't even set up with the sensors
00:05:09.960 just can drive because the robots do it.
00:05:12.400 And you go, oh, that's science fiction.
00:05:14.200 That won't happen for years.
00:05:15.720 Go search the Optimus Robotics from Tesla.
00:05:18.260 There is literally 10 robotics company in the world.
00:05:21.280 Three of them are from China that I monitor every week
00:05:24.660 to see what's coming so I can get ready.
00:05:27.240 If you want to get paid top dollar
00:05:29.480 and future-proof your life, get in that field.
00:05:32.600 And the cool part is the salary starts at 115 to 150,000 a year.
00:05:37.140 The learning curve is high
00:05:38.360 because you might need a degree to get into these companies,
00:05:40.740 but the competition is only medium.
00:05:42.740 And that's why it's way more desirable
00:05:44.420 than the security role.
00:05:45.900 I had a friend that got a massive order,
00:05:47.640 20,000 boxes for their jewelry product,
00:05:49.960 and they needed to pack the jewelry into those boxes.
00:05:52.620 And I told them in the future,
00:05:54.400 you'll be able to rent a robot and just show it once.
00:05:57.480 And they will do that over 48 hours
00:05:59.260 and you'll bring the robot back.
00:06:00.540 That's going to happen in the next six months.
00:06:02.880 So if you want an opportunity
00:06:04.320 to be at the forefront of innovation,
00:06:06.900 then you got to get into robotics engineering.
00:06:09.420 Here's why I think it's stable.
00:06:11.200 Robotics engineers combine the hardware
00:06:13.200 and the software, making it hard to replace.
00:06:15.720 See, most people just focus on like AI prompts
00:06:17.720 and automation, and that's all fun.
00:06:19.280 But dude, you want to be defensible?
00:06:21.560 Be the guy that understands the hardware and the software.
00:06:24.860 And then what happens is labor costs rises,
00:06:27.660 robotics become the need.
00:06:29.260 Not a nice to have.
00:06:30.400 You know, Brett, the CEO of Figure, he said it.
00:06:32.760 The future is selling work.
00:06:34.720 That is his North Star metric.
00:06:36.400 But I get it.
00:06:36.920 If you're not interested in a degree,
00:06:38.640 you can still create massive value with number two,
00:06:41.500 full stack software engineer.
00:06:45.760 This is the person that not only knows
00:06:48.260 how the code can get written,
00:06:49.560 because AI is writing 90% of the code today,
00:06:51.580 but they understand how to design scalable systems.
00:06:54.500 That's the part.
00:06:55.140 You can't just like ask Lovable,
00:06:56.860 which is an AI company that build an app
00:06:59.220 And trust that that will just be like secure and deployable and have the ability for people to log in and create accounts.
00:07:05.860 No, you need somebody that understands the security infrastructure, the digital foundation of great software and platforms and manages that.
00:07:12.960 And that's what a full stack software engineer does.
00:07:15.140 The median salary for that rule is $120,000 to $160,000 a year.
00:07:20.040 And that's what they're making today minimum, but some are making way more.
00:07:24.540 And the cool part is the difficulty is only medium.
00:07:27.520 So that's awesome.
00:07:28.460 and the competition is higher because a lot of people are being retrained and replaced
00:07:32.940 in these big companies to be a full stack engineer. Back in the day, being a specialist made sense.
00:07:38.600 No, today you need to be a director of engineering, understanding all the different things you can
00:07:43.160 build and directing that code. And I saw this firsthand. One of our portfolio companies at
00:07:47.680 Martel Ventures, Revio, the founder of Veve, built a whole platform by himself. One developer,
00:07:53.840 full stack, engineered it, not only solving our problem, but solving it for hundreds of other
00:07:58.960 customers. I'm seeing companies start today with a business and a technical person. Two-person
00:08:04.340 companies build 10 million a year companies, and they need somebody that's going to be able to do
00:08:08.560 the full stack engineering. And if you weren't aware, code is one of the highest forms of
00:08:13.060 leverage. And this is why it's stable for today and into the future. This role creates immediate
00:08:17.400 and massive business value. High leverage productivity built with the new AI tools is
00:08:22.580 what companies want more than anything. Many businesses are realizing they have a ton of stuff
00:08:27.160 that they built in the past that need to go away to create a new experience for their customers
00:08:31.740 that's simplified and leverages AI, not an if-then statement in the code, so that they can be way
00:08:37.040 more productive with a leaner team, but they need the person to understand the full stack.
00:08:41.920 But the best way to make sure AI won't replace your job is to be the one building it, which makes
00:08:46.340 AI and machine learning specialists our number one job on the list. This person is a very special
00:08:52.040 person. They understand how to build models that power recommendation. They understand how to
00:08:56.340 diagnose problems, to develop autonomous systems, essentially agentic systems. This person is
00:09:01.800 special. I have dozens that work for me at Martell Ventures because that person's going to allow me
00:09:07.080 to scale at levels that no other company in the past has ever done because they understand the AI
00:09:12.200 at the core level. See, most people just play with the AIs talking to it, generating images and videos
00:09:17.720 and text. If you actually go on a website called Hugging Face, you will see all the language
00:09:22.640 models, all the different data sets, all the weights, all the inference systems, all the
00:09:27.060 vector database structures, all of the tooling needed to build innovation. That person is going
00:09:33.700 to make a lot of money. And the minimum starting salary is 130K. Six figure minimum, but they're
00:09:39.500 making 180 plus way more. If you can literally master these tools, you'll be highly sought out
00:09:45.740 for and highly compensated. The learning curve is high. The difficulty is there and the competition
00:09:50.940 is low. Have you seen what Zuck just paid his top engineers for his new AI team? A hundred million
00:09:56.360 dollars a piece, 18 people. It is wild. Why? Because these people know how to build the future.
00:10:01.380 So yes, that's where it's at right now. But if you decide to master this craft and go all in,
00:10:06.380 you will be valuable next year, in 10 years, in 50 years. The way I like to think about it is that
00:10:12.000 like normal developers and engineers,
00:10:14.100 they use AI tools like Chef uses a recipe, right?
00:10:17.140 They just follow it, but AI specialists,
00:10:19.700 they create entirely new recipes.
00:10:21.860 When I look at Omer, the founder of Atlas,
00:10:24.380 one of our portfolio companies,
00:10:25.960 he looked at a completely broken system
00:10:28.320 of manual lead follow-up and built an AI platform,
00:10:32.480 built to automate the entire lead follow-up process
00:10:35.760 and honestly, every other aspect
00:10:37.660 of the customer interaction.
00:10:38.840 He built this because he understood how to use the models.
00:10:41.460 And think about it this way.
00:10:42.340 If you want to elevate yourself,
00:10:44.240 understand that million dollar companies
00:10:45.940 are not built off $10 problems.
00:10:47.980 The bigger the problem, the bigger the business.
00:10:50.260 You have to use AI to be able to solve those problems
00:10:52.980 because you can't do it with basic logic anymore.
00:10:55.760 Demand is rising in every sector,
00:10:57.740 including the laggards like government,
00:10:59.760 agriculture, and education.
00:11:01.740 They want this.
00:11:02.860 They need innovation.
00:11:04.240 These are the jobs that are driving real product innovation.
00:11:07.280 AI isn't a trend.
00:11:08.520 It's literally the new foundation.
00:11:10.060 There's this great quote by Kevin Kell and he said,
00:11:12.260 what can be electrified will be cognified,
00:11:14.900 meaning it will have memory.
00:11:16.420 The person that knows how to write the code for that
00:11:18.900 is going to be in a really great position.
00:11:21.280 These six jobs will make you incredibly wealthy.
00:11:23.600 The reason I create these videos
00:11:24.840 is because I wanna ensure that you understand
00:11:27.120 where the world's going.
00:11:28.440 Don't put your head in the sand.
00:11:29.920 Don't pretend like it's not happening.
00:11:31.600 If you're inspired by anything I share, just go learn.
00:11:35.720 Ask the AI to teach you, talk to it,
00:11:38.200 make it part of your habits.
00:11:39.540 the more you do that the more competitive you're going to be in any job now if you want to learn
00:11:44.060 the laziest ways to make money with ai click here and i'll see you on the other side