The Careers AI Can’t Replace ft. Mike Rowe | Fortune Daily

0:02I think we're entering a time where the color of collars just doesn't matter anymore. Mike Rowe's long-running, very popular show Dirty Jobs gave America's trades workers the flowers that they deserved. And for nearly two decades now, he's argued that America made a huge mistake when it treated a four-year degree as the only path to success and turn the skilled trades into what he called a consolation prize in the process. And today his argument is more urgent than ever because as we've covered on this show, the AI boom is calling into question the value of academic degrees. Well, the industry itself right now is in desperate need of electricians, of pipe fitters, of HVAC technicians and line workers, all in service, of course, of its sprawling operations inside data centers and power grids.

1:00But are these trades jobs truly sustainable career paths? Are they jobs that AI won't turn out to be able to replace in, say, two, five years' time? Is any job safe from automation in today's climate? Or is college actually still worth the price in the long run? From New York, I'm Ellie Austin, and you're watching Fortune Daily.

1:27Okay. Mike, thank you so much for joining us on Fortune Daily. So you've really been advocating loudly for trades work since 2008. Tell me a bit about how attitudes towards those jobs have changed since then and where we are right now in this moment. Well, on a personal level, it's beyond strange to see the headlines catch up with the message. You know, we started Microworks in 2008, and nobody really disagreed with me back then. The basic argument was you got a couple million good jobs that don't require a four-year degree, that employers are struggling to fill. The jobs are essential, but for whatever reason, they're not lauded, they're not celebrated, and most of them are out of sight and out of mind.

2:14The premise for my foundation rhymed with the show I was working on, Dirty Jobs, pretty well. So it gave me a reason to both promote the show and talk about something that was creeping into the headlines. Mostly it happened because in the recession in 2009, the only thing people talked about were the number of people who weren't working. But when you have a couple million open jobs during a period of high unemployment, it kind of forces you to think about the possibility of another narrative in the country. And that's really how it all started for me. I believe the skills gap is real. I think it's wide and getting wider.

2:52And I think it's a result of a lot of different things, including the removal of shop class from high school and a lot of misperceptions and myths and stigmas and stereotypes that have always bedeviled the trades. But today, to answer your question, it's in the headlines because we're entering a completely new infrastructure build out, a completely new economy. And the pinch point in all of it is the lack of skilled labor. So now the grownups are paying attention. You said it feels beyond strange to have your cause suddenly so loudly trumpeted. Do you feel vindicated? Well, I'm not going to take a victory lap or say I told you so, at least not in so many words.

3:35But what I am doing, I'm doubling down on the mission that Microworks started. I'm in Detroit right now to speak at an alliance, a conference put together by Jim Farley and a bunch of guys, you know, Walmart and BlackRock and Carhartt and a lot of big financial, Google is here. Everybody is here. And then tomorrow I'll go up to Defiance, Ohio to tour a manufacturing plant company called DECT, who's making stuff in the USA and hiring like crazy. So I've kind of, I guess the honest answer is I woke up a couple of years ago and I realized that micro works was the sun in my solar system. It was never supposed to be that.

4:21I've got other things that I do and a business to run, but this cause was always near and dear. And now it's above the fold. And so there is an opportunity, even with the Pentagon, we're working together on projects. Meta and I are... Tell us a bit about what you're doing with the Pentagon. We're going to come on to matter, but tell us about the Pentagon. Oh, this is wild, man. You can find footage of me online and you'll laugh testifying in front of Congress 15 years ago about the need to reinvigorate the trades in the industrial base, right? Six months ago, they got back to me. And we settled on a program called buildfreedom.us.

5:03You can go to the site. There are 400 ,000 AI proof six-figure jobs sitting there right now in the industrial base. They donated$10 million to my foundation. We already had a bunch of money for scholarships and training specifically for these jobs. So when you see the Pentagon and Meta and Ford and BlackRock and down the list it goes, Lowe's, Home Depot, FedEx, they're all focused on trying to crack this code in a way that makes sense for their industry and for their company. What's fascinating to me is I've been able to get a look at all of these disparate efforts, and it's almost like some kind of singularity is happening around this issue.

5:52And I think it's going to come to a tipping point this year. And I want to talk about that. But first, I want to give our audience a bit of context on the Meta partnership that you just mentioned. So Meta is going to invest$150 million in a training program. It's calling it a nationwide unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. You've partnered with them. What does a tech juggernaut like Meta get out of a project like this? Oh, the future is some combination of AI and data centers. And I know it's very controversial, and I know we're having an existential freak out right now about the fact that nobody really has a crystal ball.

6:32But I think the sound of inevitability, the way they put it in the matrix, it's happening. We already have 4 ,000 data centers. We're going to build another couple thousand. Meta's going to have a big part in doing that. And there is no way all that construction can occur with the workforce that we currently have. So what they've done that I like is they've come at it almost through the lens of a pre-apprenticeship program. It's an accelerated five-week course called America's Workforce Academy. They're in four states now. It looks like they're going to expand. And what they're doing is giving men and women a chance to get their certifications, to get up to speed very, very quickly.

7:19So they're basically job ready, right? They're not fully, fully finished their learning process, but they're ready to work. So Meta guarantees them a job. They pay them during this process. They guarantee them a job. And if you don't want to build a data center for Meta, you can take your certifications and you can move and you can do something else. What kind of jobs are they? So they're going into jobs with Meta. Are they long-term jobs? Do they come with benefits? What can you tell us about the jobs that these people end up in? I'm going to paint with too broad a brush, but I'll tell you in general, electricians, plumbers, steam fitters, pipe fitters, CNC, operators, welders, they need all of these skilled construction trades.

8:00Now, there's a whole separate conversation about, well, is it a union state? Is it a non-union state? How are we going to figure all that out? We'll sort that out in the eternal struggle between labor and management. This conversation is really work and skill. And if you can't reinvigorate the workforce, by getting people fired up around the business of learning a skill in the first place, you're never going to have a chance to get the other conversation. So yeah, perks, benefits, all that stuff. I can tell you in general that we're seeing now in the skilled trades, what we saw in Silicon Valley 10, 15 years ago, when companies were doing whatever they could to attract the coders and the engineers they were desperate to have.

8:47I just talked to three electricians, Ellie, in a data center in Plano, all under 30, all making well over$200 ,000 a year. But are they outliers, Mike? Are they outliers because they're attached to these? Let's say they are. Let's say they're outliers, right? They're not. But let's just assume that three electricians in Plano are making a quarter million dollars a year and they'd all been poached three times in the prior 18 months. The reason they can't be outliers is that because they're in the business of being poached. Companies right now understand the workforce they need is in the eighth grade, right?

9:32You can't hire out of the eighth grade. So there is a massive, it's a knife fight in a phone booth to get the talent that you need right now on a construction site. Before coming to speak to you, I researched what the median electrician is making nationally, and it's closer to$60 ,000. So do you anticipate that changing drastically over the coming years? Well, I would say to you that the average show host, the average actor, the average reporter is going to make some number and it's going to be average. So it's a trick question. I mean, I appreciate it and I get it. But look, it's a very macro kind of question, right?

10:13What does the average electrician make? What does the average and so forth and so on? In my foundation, anyway, I couldn't care less about the average. We award work ethic scholarships to people who want to get up early and stay late and be of use and master a skill and go to where the work is and crush it. That's the offer, right? Whatever trickles down into C-plus world, into the median world, okay, we can have that conversation. But the honest answer is a rising tide will lift all the boats. And I believe you'll see all the median wages increase in every single trade right now. Every skilled trades report that came out this week, and there are three or four of them, all presage the same basic prognostication.

11:04But I don't have a crystal ball. I do not know. But I also do not care about the average. And what happens in five years if capital flowing into these data center builds slows down? What if this is just an incredible, booming moment? What happens then to all these skilled workers who are being trained up and flowing into the industry at this point in time? Well, you take your skill and you go to where the work is. And, you know, it's not like it's a data center economy. That's, I think, part of what's gotten conflated in this whole conversation is the only thing that we need are data centers. Those 400 ,000 jobs I mentioned in the defense industrial base are not data centers.

11:44Those are ships, right? Those are so many different opportunities in so many sectors. So yeah, the data center is getting all of the headlines right now. And I don't know what they look like when they're finished. What do you do with a Costco when you finish building it? Well, you bring in maintenance crews, you bring in facilities managers, you bring in heating and air conditioning people to manage the infrastructure of the structure itself. so the jobs never really go away but they'll always be ebbs and flows and spikes i mean we've spoken on this show a bit and i totally hear you about um advances in robotics and humanoid robots who can now you know go in and run factories with very dexterous hands so you i guess there's a question around what will the manning the staffing of these data centers look like in the future Yeah.

12:36We'll see. I have no idea. But I'll tell you what. I've been in the last two months, I've visited mock industries, which are making highly lethal, very cheap weapons at scale. I visited Apex. They're mass producing satellites, right, for the government. I just got back from Oak Ridge Labs, their MFD. It's basically the test kitchen for America. What's happening in manufacturing is so crazy. Sure, there's robots. And yes, there's a ton of tech. But there are hundreds of people. And many of them were recruited straight out of high school. Some have engineering degrees. Many used to work at SpaceX.

13:23Every place I go, there are people that used to work at SpaceX. There's just a giant ecosystem, Ellie, that's living like right under the primes. I think they call them the Neo primes. So we could talk at length about Lockheed and L3 and Raytheon and Thiokol and so forth. But right under that, you know, you've got your Andurils and you've got your, you know, your Palantirs and you've got your Mox. And it's just, there is, they're all hiring like mad. So I'm not really sure what to tell you about the ambiguity of what might happen two years from now if the work that we can't currently get done doesn't get done.

14:02I don't know. But right now, the house that's on fire is the one we're in, and it's right in front of us. We're speaking tomorrow to the CEO of a new academy run by Andreessen Horowitz, which is going to be taking in highly capable students who want to be what they're calling builders. And it's ultimately going to charge Harvard-level tuition, but it's going to focus on pursuits, as it's calling it. So starting companies, writing novels. Is that part of your cause in terms of offering alternative models, or is that in your mind something separate? That's a great question. And I would love to tell you that, yeah, when I sat down to try and war game this whole thing, I was thinking of a way to blend the collars, blue and white.

14:47And I think that's what you're getting at. And I think you're right. I think we're entering a time where the color of collars just doesn't matter anymore. And Mike, you've articulated really clearly why there's no point in demonizing either side of this equation, whether it be the academic institutions or whether it be trades jobs. What's your advice to a 17-year-old trying to make a decision about what their professional future should look like right now in 2026? Pick the tires on everything. Look at all of it. Try not to get pulled in to the inertia and the suppositions and pre-existing ideas that a lot of well-intended people in your life might have.

15:33I'm very stingy with advice, Ellie, and I don't want to overreach. But, you know, I've gotten some terrible, I got terrible advice when I was a kid from people who loved me a lot. Well, Mike, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Safe travels as you hit the road again. And thank you so much for giving us your time. Anytime, Ellie. Thank you. Kat, thank you for joining us. So it's a massive week across the nation. It's Fat Bear Week. I have to admit, I have no idea what that is. Maybe it's because I'm British. Maybe not. But please educate me. Sure. I mean, bears, they go through hibernation somewhere between seven to nine months, depending on where they are.

16:08And Fat Bear Week is done at the Katmai National Park in Alaska, where they go through around like almost 8.5 months of hibernation. So it's a competition to see which bear becomes the fattest before it goes into hibernation. For sure. And then we members of the public vote on it. You explained it right there. See, come on. What more do you need to know? We vote on it, but this competition last year raised a huge amount of money, almost a million dollars. So where is that money coming in from? All donations. Last year, Katmai, which is one of the least funded national parks, received$900 ,000 from donations of people really excited to vote on Fat Bear Week.

16:43And again, voting is free. Voting is free. And you vote because, and I've just logged on here, you can watch live footage of the bears padding around. Actually, it's really adorable. And so you watch this footage, you decide who your chunky little guy is going to be. you vote. When is the winner announced? The winner is announced today. Okay, the winner is announced today. A huge amount of engagement in this competition, a huge amount of money flowing in, the kind of money and attention that most brands would dream of. Why has this quite kind of low stakes competition organized by a national park taken off to the extent that it has?

17:20Sure. I mean, like, I want to go back to it started in 2014 as like a one day Facebook vote. And now all of a sudden it's grown to this massive one week long voting where people file out a google form and they say hey here's my vote for the chunkiest guy and it's really cute or gal of course don't want to you know misgender a bear but that being said it's all these fans who really appreciate bears really appreciate the national parks and they're able to access it in a way that they're not able to access let's say living in a concrete jungle like you and i do if i see a bear in the middle the street, I would necessarily not want to see one.

17:53But if I were to see one from the comfort of my home or at work when I was to be doing other work, I will be glad to see, oh, cute, a little live stream of a bear hanging out at the river trying to catch, you know, a salmon. And so we're always looking for business insights on the show, even from the most surprising places. So what can a CEO learn about the huge success of Fire Week? One, maybe it might be helpful to go into hibernation, pack in a few pounds. I don't want to say that's here or there. But two, it's really all about, again, engagement, really all about having genuine trusting and tangible engagement, right?

18:29This is free. Two, people trust it's not AI. It's just a live stream of a camera. You can watch live cams of all the national parks. And again, I was a park ranger at the Statue of Liberty, so you could have seen a live cam from the Crown or the Torch, for example. And it's really just building that kind of community. It's free, it's engaging. It's also very peaceful. It's a return to nature. For sure. And And again, this goes back to it. It's inaccessible for you and I to go to Alaska right now, but we could go by a quick Google search of, give me a live cam of this conservancy. OK, well, I'm waiting with bated breath to see which bear wins.

19:00Kat, thank you for joining us. Thank you. That's it for Fortune Daily. I'm Ellie Austin. Please remember to like the show, subscribe to it. It really helps other people find us. And you can also find us on podcast platforms. I'll see you tomorrow.

19:25Mike that was brilliant thank you brilliant brilliant