There you have it! The Department of War just gave $10 million to the Mike Rowe Works Foundation …
July 5, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
AI Defense Cybersecurity Workforce
There you have it! The Department of War just gave $10 million to the Mike Rowe Works Foundation to put more Americans into the skilled trades.
For twenty years we told an entire generation the same lie. Learn to code. Get the degree. Sit at the desk. And we sneered at the kid who wanted to be a welder, a plumber, an electrician, a lineman. "Blue collar." Said like an insult. Parents were embarrassed. Guidance counselors steered kids away. A whole culture decided that working with your hands was for people who couldn't cut it.
I'll say this plainly: I never made that mistake. I always respected the trades. The builders, the welders, the mechanics, the electricians, the linemen — the people who actually make the physical world run. I understood their value long before AI came along and made it obvious to everyone else. I knew better. The rest of the country is only now catching up.
I wrote an entire section of my book REPLACEMENT about exactly this, and I'm going to say it here plainly:
The people who mocked the trades are about to regret it more than any group in America.
Because the white-collar job is the one getting wiped out first. I run thirteen AI agents today. They already do the work of a research team, a trading desk, forty developers, a financial analyst, a chief of staff. Not assisted. Replaced. I believe fifty percent of non-blue-collar jobs can be eliminated within five years. That twenty-three-year-old CS grad who says "AI hallucinates, I'm not worried" is exactly the one who should be terrified.
Now look at the electrician. The plumber. The carpenter. The HVAC tech.
Software is instant. Hardware is slow. A robot that can rewire a house, crawl under a sink, or climb a pole in an ice storm is at least ten to twenty years away at real scale. That gap is not a weakness. That gap is a moat. It's long enough to build a career, a business, a life.
So when the Pentagon — the largest, most strategically serious institution in this country — writes a ten-million-dollar check to grow the trades, that is not nostalgia. That is a national security decision. You cannot build ships, power grids, munitions, or data centers with a country full of laid-off knowledge workers who never learned to hold a wrench.
The people we laughed at are about to become the most protected workforce in America.
The joke was never on them.
It was on us.
Push your kids toward building. Toward skills AI can't fake. Toward the trades everyone told them were beneath them.
That advice used to sound old-fashioned.
In five years it's going to sound like the smartest thing anyone ever told you.
REPLACEMENT — out July 28.
If you want the special signed edition, there are a few left (100 total): https://lnkd.in/eEwXNwrf
For twenty years we told an entire generation the same lie. Learn to code. Get the degree. Sit at the desk. And we sneered at the kid who wanted to be a welder, a plumber, an electrician, a lineman. "Blue collar." Said like an insult. Parents were embarrassed. Guidance counselors steered kids away. A whole culture decided that working with your hands was for people who couldn't cut it.
I'll say this plainly: I never made that mistake. I always respected the trades. The builders, the welders, the mechanics, the electricians, the linemen — the people who actually make the physical world run. I understood their value long before AI came along and made it obvious to everyone else. I knew better. The rest of the country is only now catching up.
I wrote an entire section of my book REPLACEMENT about exactly this, and I'm going to say it here plainly:
The people who mocked the trades are about to regret it more than any group in America.
Because the white-collar job is the one getting wiped out first. I run thirteen AI agents today. They already do the work of a research team, a trading desk, forty developers, a financial analyst, a chief of staff. Not assisted. Replaced. I believe fifty percent of non-blue-collar jobs can be eliminated within five years. That twenty-three-year-old CS grad who says "AI hallucinates, I'm not worried" is exactly the one who should be terrified.
Now look at the electrician. The plumber. The carpenter. The HVAC tech.
Software is instant. Hardware is slow. A robot that can rewire a house, crawl under a sink, or climb a pole in an ice storm is at least ten to twenty years away at real scale. That gap is not a weakness. That gap is a moat. It's long enough to build a career, a business, a life.
So when the Pentagon — the largest, most strategically serious institution in this country — writes a ten-million-dollar check to grow the trades, that is not nostalgia. That is a national security decision. You cannot build ships, power grids, munitions, or data centers with a country full of laid-off knowledge workers who never learned to hold a wrench.
The people we laughed at are about to become the most protected workforce in America.
The joke was never on them.
It was on us.
Push your kids toward building. Toward skills AI can't fake. Toward the trades everyone told them were beneath them.
That advice used to sound old-fashioned.
In five years it's going to sound like the smartest thing anyone ever told you.
REPLACEMENT — out July 28.
If you want the special signed edition, there are a few left (100 total): https://lnkd.in/eEwXNwrf