Sam Caucci on 180Podcast Talking New Book

Flipping the Script on Work: My 180 Podcast Conversation

I love when a conversation flips your thinking upside down — or in this case, 180 degrees.

Last week, I joined Mike Fazio on the Workforce180 Podcast, where we talked about everything from the future of work (and why I’m done with that phrase) to why training is broken, and what it’ll take to finally fix it.

Mike kicked things off by saying Chapter 3 of my new book Wasted Talent — titled “F** the Future of Work”* — was his favorite. And yeah, I had to fight to keep that title in. But that chapter isn’t just about being edgy. It’s about calling out the hard truth: the future of work isn’t working for most workers.

Why We Need a 180

The team at Workforce180 has a mantra: if you took a 180-degree turn on the way you look at work, what could you uncover?

That question sums up exactly why I wrote Wasted Talent.

For the last decade, I’ve been running 1Huddle — a company that uses quick-burst games to make training more engaging and data-driven. In that time, I’ve seen a lot. From restaurant floors to corporate boardrooms, it’s the same story on repeat: companies spend millions trying to understand their customers, and almost nothing trying to understand their workers.

So yeah — we need a 180.
We need to flip how we think about talent.

Instead of calling workers “unskilled,” start measuring the skills they actually have.
Instead of treating training as a checkbox, make it a competitive advantage.
Instead of saying “AI will replace jobs,” use AI to reveal hidden strengths and create new ones.

We don’t have a “skills gap” problem.
We have a visibility problem — a failure to see the talent that’s right in front of us.

What We Talked About

On the podcast, Mike and I dug into some of the biggest “realities of work” from my book:

• Training is stuck in the past.
  90% of corporate training today is compliance-based. That’s not development — that’s maintenance.

• AI isn’t the enemy.
  It’s not about replacing people; it’s about amplifying them. The best companies use technology to elevate human potential, not erase it.

• Education needs a reboot.
  We’ve turned classrooms into testing centers. The handoff between school and work is broken. Students are graduating with debt but no direction — and it’s not their fault.

• We’re not down and out.
  I said it on the show: work today feels like halftime, and we’re down 14 points. But the game’s not over. If we can rally — if we can coach better, train smarter, and play as one team — we can win.

The Moment That Stuck

One of my favorite moments from the conversation was when Mike pushed back and asked, “Didn’t we all figure work out before? Why is it harder now?”

He’s right — the world is different, but not impossible.
What’s changed is the environment. The path from education to employment used to be clearer, the cost of opportunity used to be lower, and there were more safe places to fail.

Today, we’ve made it harder to gain experience and easier to lose hope.
That’s not a worker problem. That’s a system problem.

And that’s what Wasted Talent is all about — how we got here, what’s broken, and how to fix it.

My 180 Takeaway

Every time I talk with people like Mike and the Workforce180 crew, I’m reminded why conversations like these matter.

They give us a chance to pause, flip the lens, and reimagine what work could be if we stopped wasting talent and started winning with it.

So if you care about building stronger teams, better training, and a fairer path to opportunity, give the episode a listen.

It’s not just about the future of work — it’s about the reality of work, and how we can all turn 180 degrees toward a better way forward.

🎧 Listen to the episode: “Wasted Talent with Sam Caucci on Workforce180 Podcast”
📘 Read the book: Wasted Talent: How Greed, Exploitation, and the Promise of the Future of Work Failed Workers — and a Plan to Fix It.

Published in: Minding the Campus