March 8, 2025 - Epoch Times
09:27
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| We're kind of in an unusual time. | |
| I think American manufacturing is on the road back, but just at the very beginning of that road. | |
| Tell me your thoughts on this. | |
| Well, I'm optimistic on the one hand, but I'm a little troubled on the other. | |
| I think maybe the best way to sum it up is with a series of phone calls that my foundation gets every week now. | |
| Most recently, I heard from somebody over at the Blue Forge Alliance. | |
| Blue Forge Alliance oversees the Maritime Industrial Base. | |
| The Maritime Industrial Base consists of 15,000 individual companies who are collectively tasked with building our country's submarines, our nuclear-powered subs. | |
| Their current cadence requires them to deliver three a year. | |
| I think two Virginia class and one Columbia class, or maybe the other way around. | |
| Regardless, it's a massive undertaking. | |
| These things are technically breathtaking. | |
| And the amount of skilled labor it takes to make one real is mind-boggling. | |
| So the guy calls and he says, look, we have to deliver 30 of these things over the next decade and we need to hire 100,000 skilled workers right now. | |
| And then he says, do you know where they are? | |
| And I thought for a second and laughed because I get phone calls like this all the time. | |
| And I didn't mean to be too glib, but I said, yeah, man, I know where they are. | |
| They're in the eighth grade. | |
| That's where they are right now. | |
| And you guys at the Navy and through Blue Forge Alliance, just like Ford and Caterpillar and every other big brand in this country that relies on skilled labor, you guys have to make a more persuasive case for the 7.6 million jobs that are currently open, currently open, that employers are struggling to fill. | |
| These are good jobs, six-figure jobs. | |
| They're all welding. | |
| Pipe-fitting, steam-fitting, electric, HVAC, and so forth. | |
| Because that skills gap is real. | |
| And if the president succeeds in truly reinvigorating American manufacturing, he's going to run into all of the challenges and obstacles that we are constantly talking about, whether it's tariffs and unions and so many other things come into play. | |
| But he's also going to run into not just a skill gap, But a will gap. | |
| And if we don't have a workforce that is enthusiastically prepared to go to work, if we don't have a workforce who is disabused of the stigmas and the stereotypes and the myths and the misperceptions that have kept millions of kids from giving these jobs an honest look, we're going to have a whole different type of problem. | |
| Sorry for the filibuster, but one last thought. | |
| Back in 2009... | |
| When we started Microworks, President Obama announced a commitment to three million shovel-ready jobs. | |
| And I wrote him an open letter, and I said, listen, I'm rooting for you. | |
| I love this idea, but have you thought about the fact that the country, by and large, is not all that interested in picking up a shovel? | |
| And if you don't create some kind of enthusiasm for the very jobs you're determined to create... | |
| Then you're going to wind up in a pretty nasty feedback loop. | |
| And that's what we've been working on for the last 16 years. | |
| And the ship is finally starting to turn. | |
| Before we continue, as I'm listening to you, I can't help but think of this crazy irony. | |
| Because I remember back in those days, there was this idea that people who had some of these jobs would need to, quote, learn to code. | |
| Do you remember that? | |
| Oh, sure. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, now we have this massive kind of AI revolution, chatbot, and much more revolution. | |
| And that's mostly impacting, as I've had a few shows on this now, right? | |
| The white-collar workers. | |
| Yeah. | |
| There's a whole lot of people that have quote-unquote learned to code that are actually going to be out of jobs because the AI does it better already. | |
| On the other hand, and yes, robots are doing some of the work or are going to be doing some of the work, there's a whole lot of the skilled labor. | |
| That's where actually the jobs are going to be. | |
| That's what strikes me. | |
| What are your thoughts here? | |
| Well, my first thought is Elon Musk just spoke and he would probably be better suited to answer that question. | |
| But from what I've seen, You're absolutely right. | |
| For a long time, the robots were coming to upend the jobs in many, many factories. | |
| And then there was thought about, well, when the AI and the robots get together, God, what's that going to do? | |
| But now the whole thing is kind of the other way. | |
| The real fear and loathing in the working class that I've seen is like paralegals and lawyers and people who really and truly... | |
| AI is just bigger IQ. Bigger and bigger and bigger IQ. And when you apply that level of intelligence to searching and researching, right? | |
| I don't know how the humans are going to compete. | |
| But neither do I know how AI is going to supplant the plumber. | |
| Who I'm currently waiting three days for, right? | |
| They're in such short supply. | |
| Or the electrician. | |
| I don't understand how it's going to make the process of physically building a house move faster, right? | |
| So many of these trades that we've been talking about elevating and reinvigorating for the last, I don't know, 16 years now, are suddenly in demand in a different way. | |
| Because when people look at them, they realize you can't outsource that. | |
| That job's not going to go away. | |
| It might be impacted to some degree by AI. I think AI to some degree is going to impact everything. | |
| But these jobs are not going to be replaced. | |
| And the 7.5 million positions that are open now, if we don't get in front of it, that number is just going to explode. | |
| You're basically saying that we have to have a make the trades great again effort. | |
| Or make them sexy, make them cool. | |
| Make them cool. | |
| And it's happening, right? | |
| God help us, but if you go on TikTok, and if you go on Instagram and some of the other platforms, you'll see tradespeople making a really persuasive case for their jobs. | |
| They'll share videos, and they'll show you the wonder of fixing a thing in no uncertain terms. | |
| And that helps a lot. | |
| But we really, I just think, on a broad level, have to understand What we did to incite this. | |
| We took shop class out of high school. | |
| And we did it for a lot of reasons that may or may not have made much sense at the time. | |
| Loved shop class, by the way. | |
| I think I probably was one of the last... | |
| I know I was. | |
| When I was in high school, 79, 80, it was still there. | |
| But it was winding down. | |
| And through the 80s, we really took it out. | |
| And what we did when we... | |
| When we took it out was not just shortchange that cohort of kids who might have seen something in the vocational world that made sense to their brain. | |
| What we did was we removed those jobs from sight for everybody. | |
| So like on your way to English class from math class, maybe once upon a time you would walk past the wood shop or the metal shop or the auto shop and maybe you'd look in there and maybe you'd... | |
| You'd see something that looks like work. | |
| And maybe that would get your brain thinking, oh, I wonder what that means, I wonder what that is. | |
| That was all removed. | |
| So I think, I can't prove it, but I feel like I could draw a pretty straight line to the removal of shop class to $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans for non-shop degrees. | |
| I think I could draw a pretty straight line from that event. | |
| To the 7.6 million open jobs that exist now that don't require a four-year degree, but instead some level of training, right? | |
| And I think you can also just look around more broadly. | |
| You can look at Hollywood. | |
| You can look at Main Street. | |
| You can look anywhere, and you can see the stigmas and the stereotypes that are still in people's minds that really make it difficult to recruit. | |
| All that crap has to be debunked. | |
| People still don't believe me. | |
| Even when I show them, not just the stats, but the actual humans who are making $150,000 a year welding with an $8,000 certificate, they just don't believe it. | |
| You have to show them, right? | |
| That's why I'm here at this thing. | |
| I really think that part of what has to be on the table in the next couple of years is a concerted effort to debunk that nonsense. | |
| Because if we don't get the next generation really thinking affirmatively about the possibilities of mastering a skill, then those submarines aren't going to get built. |
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