This program is actually something I started when I was state treasurer of West Virginia, the Jumpstart Savings Program. And it comes from my experience as a welder. That's actually how I started my career. I was a welder. I went to trade school, went out and was working in the trades there.
And what this does, it allows individuals to save for tools, equipment, licenses, certifications, and most importantly, new business startup costs. Because in the trades, a new business can cost anywhere around $100,000 to get going. And so it mirrors somewhat of the 529 college savings plan, which I used to manage at the state level. And it does also allow individuals to roll over tax-free 529 college savings money into one of these jumpstart accounts.
So it has the same tax benefits as it relates to capital gains. That's pretty cool, right? Jumpstart Savings Act for people that want to go to trade school or change their mind from going to college to with 529s or 4. I had three of them going, just finished them off. And you could always transfer that.
Why not take it the rest of the way?
So, for high school kids, you know exactly where you're heading. For the parents of kids who want to go into the trades, you'll have a program to jump into. Mike Rowe knows all about it. He's the founder of Mike Row Works, named after himself. He does that a lot.
He's the CEO there. Hosts of people you should know. He came up with that idea and he came up with that idea too. His name will eventually be on that too. He's definitely the host and executive producer.
Mike, welcome back. Oh, well, it's great to see you and to hear you, ideally at the same time.
So first off, now everyone's calling you, Mike. In the beginning, you're like, we should go back to the trades. Then now all of a sudden, you basically need another phone because everyone's calling you, can I get electricians? Can I get pipe fitters? Can I get plumbers?
Not a week goes by. I don't hear from the not just a company, but like the leader. Of an essential industry, and they are freaking out. The math is no longer deniable. You know, five retire, two come in, five out, two, and it's been that way for over a decade.
Throw in the stigmas and the stereotypes and all the nonsense that surrounds these careers historically, and you can start to understand why suddenly we've got millions of openings. The crazy thing is, AI comes along, turns everything on its head. And now there's this understanding that, oh man, you know what? We told everybody to code.
Well, And nobody to weld.
Well, they're not coming for the welders, man. They're coming for the coders. And so everything's upside down. The skills gap is massive. The marine industrial base needs 400,000 workers.
To build nuclear subs like CNC operators and welders and electricians. The data centers are just, the demand is off the charts.
So, yeah, you know, the headlines caught up with my modest little attempt to shine a light on these jobs. And so I'm talking to Wells Fargo and BlackRock and NVIDIA, and they're paying attention to it. The Department of War is paying attention. And that congressman that you just, Highlighted Riley Moore. He's got his head screwed on straight, man.
This is a great way to focus on a barrier to entry that a lot of tradespeople experience when they try and hang out their own shingle.
So it's really a love letter to skilled trades and entrepreneurship at the same time, which is why I'm pulling for him and hoping people hop on board and get this thing through Congress. Have you noticed more kids? I know you got 2,700 roughly students that you help pay for their trade school tuition. Are you getting more applicants? We're up to 3,400 now.
Yeah, we've got This year, my goal is $10 million in work ethic scholarships. Last year, we did five. The year before that, we did two and a half, maybe two.
So, yeah, the applications were 10X last year.
So, that's good. I mean, Gen Z is getting the memo. A lot of parents and guidance counselors and teachers, I think, have gotten the same memo, which basically says, hey, $1.7 trillion in collective student debt is a problem. You know, we're lending all kinds of money we don't have to these kids to train them for jobs that don't exist anymore.
Meanwhile, the trades are on fire. People aren't trained for them yet. I don't even know that we have enough human capital standing by to fill the gap. But You're turning around a tanker. Right?
I mean, it's perceptions and hearts and minds and ideas and beliefs. Those things don't change overnight. But, yeah, to your earlier point, you know, we've been at it 17 years. And even though I did put my name in the title of the foundation, I'm a smart guy.
Well, you know what, to be honest, it was supposed to be M-I-C-R-O. Micro works like a small Attempt to help one individual at a time. Bill Gates was going to sue me, so I just went with my name and it stuck. But call it what you will, the skills gap is real, and the memo is out, and people are paying attention. And I think you're going to see, I mean, you've heard my smack for years now, but the chickens have come home to roost.
This is going to be a Manhattan-style. project with regard to retraining the entire country. And, you know, my prediction is next time you and I sit down in person, I want to tell you about what a lot of individual companies are doing on their own to close the gap. And I don't have any relationship with Home Depot, for instance. They've got a great program.
Caterpillar has an internal program. Palantir is taking kids right out of high school, giving them a liberal arts background, and then teaching them something really useful. These kids are hitting the job market, making a few hundred grand a year with a decent background in Western civilization and zero debt.
So I think you're going to see a massive retooling of the way we think about education, the way we define a good job. And yeah, my scholarship program just happened to be sitting there at the right time, and we are. Flooded. Overwhelmed, and I'm happy to tell you that. I know they're big, have a huge data center being built in Louisiana right now, but listen to Governor Gretchen Whitmer yesterday talking about what's happening in Michigan.
Listen. Michigan is open for business. New factories making batteries, cars, chips are opening in Marshall, Lake Orion, Holland, Bay City, Calumet, Hemlock, Ann Arbor, and Delta Township. Probably not on the bingo card, but I want to thank President Trump for his work on this.
So there you go. I mean, they're going to need some people. There's no robots for that. No, there's not. And look, I doubt that the governor and I agree on a whole bunch of stuff, but credit where it's due.
You know, it's this truly is. Should be. One of the last great nonpartisan unifying things that people on both sides of the aisle can truly get behind. Again, because in the end, it's math, dude. It's math.
We're fighting, we're having less kids. The world is, there's a whole population collapse narrative that's not getting nearly enough press either. And it's impacting our country too.
So there's just so many reasons to take a deep breath and think differently. About how to train this next generation. And I don't care if there's an R or a D next to your name. That's something to stand for. If you'll pardon the metaphor, vis-a-vis half of the Congress's inability to get on their feet just two nights ago.
Mike, I'm going to bring you to another area. I'm not sure if you want to dive into, but on energy.
So on energy, the President says, listen, I'm for oil and gas. And I just had the West Virginia Center in there and they're mining again and the coal workers are going the coal miners are going to work again. And now we're hearing less and less about foreign companies building windmills off our shores. Have you felt yet people want to go back into energy? I did a shoot over in Midland, Texas, and they were saying that a whole generation's been told: don't follow your parents' footsteps into oil and gas.
Uh go to college, uh that's ruining the planet. When guys like Bill Gates say maybe I overstated it. And we're seeing the Paris climate change. No one's even yelling at Trump about getting out of it again. Has that transferred over to the blue-collar world?
It's getting there, man. I'll tell you, one of the most consequential conferences, I've been to two in the last year. One was an energy summit in Pittsburgh in July. That's the one where. 35 CEOs pledged $93 billion simply for Pennsylvania to build out AI.
Or data centers there. The president was there at that one. That was huge. And that exact topic came up. And when I left, I was like, you know something?
That ship is turning around too. A lot of air is leaking out of climate catastrophism. The other conference is one you should know about. That's coming up early this April. My friend Alex Epstein puts it together in Newport.
There'll be a couple hundred CEOs there as well. And this will be the topic. It just one of the great lies that has been purported and put upon us. Has been this idea that fossil fuel is somehow our enemy and somehow the harbinger of the end of the world. It's not.
No crystal ball. But I I think energy independence is going to go back near The top of the list. And you know what else you're going to be hearing about real soon is metal independence, rare earths, these things. I'm up to my neck in this. That's a polymetallic nodule.
Like golf ball size, billiard size little sphere. They are. On the bottom of the ocean. hundreds of billions of them. These things are packed with nickel.
Cobalt. Manganese Copper All the stuff we need. A year ago, in April, the president signed an EO, and we're going to go get them. I mean, the insides of these things are unbelievable, Brian. That's a chunk of a megalodon tooth, and the metals form around it like a pearl.
And they're sitting there at the bottom of the ocean.
So you're going to hear. In the next couple of months. A real shift in the energy narrative. You're going to start hearing about metal independence. Going to be a thing and all that.
Needs hundreds of thousands of workers as well. Everything comes back to workforce. And in the end, look, I'm MicroWorks. I got 10 million in a fund to help train these people. We need macro works.
We need the biggest companies in the country coming together with the help of the feds. To jumpstart this thing. Which brings us back to the name of the bill that Riley Moore is trying to get through Congress, and I hope to God he does. This is Ainsley Earhart. Thank you for joining me for the 52-episode podcast series, The Life of Jesus.
A listening experience that will provide hope, comfort, and understanding of the greatest story ever told. Listen and follow now at FoxnewsPodcasts.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. For number one, that's a challenge to John McEnroe, because I think that would be an interesting fund. If it's going to be Mike Rowe, you want Mac Rowe, I say Mackenroe, and maybe he could take it up.
Number two is: you would love Doug Bergham. Because Doug Bergham is a rare earth guy. That's his mission now, because China sent us a message. We're going to cut off rare earth if you keep those tariffs on it. We realize they have 90% of the world's rare earth.
That can't happen anymore. We've cut massive deals. I think it was Indonesia, now with Australia, now with Argentina, to start mining with them. And get this, Mike. Maybe mining here, people might see the benefit of that.
So I 100% think this is, we have to do it for national security. And I think this administration gets it.
Okay. I think you're right. And Doug is definitely on the list. I've met with Pete several times over at the Pentagon. Chris Wright is certainly on board.
Howard Lucknick gets it. They're all singing out of the same hymn book. But yeah, Doug is playing a really important role in this. And I haven't had a chance to really sit down with him yet. He may be at that conference I mentioned.
We sat across the aisle from each other at the funeral of the great Clint Hill, who died. Later last year, Yeah, man. He he was the guy that that dove on top of Jackie Kennedy after her husband was murdered back in '63 and just a a legend in the Secret Service. Great North Dakota guy. Yeah, so Okay, so I want you to hear this.
So we watch business work with this administration. And then we watched the last administration go after the President and his allies and debank them, literally say, if you work with President Trump, JPMorgan, Bank of America, they froze and kicked out all their funds. This is what I worry about.
So I don't know who Jeff Bezos is going to work with, who he voted for, but he's working with the president. I looked at Meta, Zuckerberg, whatever, the Zuckerbergs. He's like, I need to work with the president, these rare earth, these gas and oil companies. But then I'm hearing this. This is what worries me.
It's going to drive you nuts as someone who just wants to get things done for the country. Listen to Susan Rice. I think they're now starting to realize: wait a minute. You know, this is not popular. Trump is not popular.
What he is doing, whether on the economy and affordability or on immigration now, is not popular. And that there is likely to be a swing in the other direction. And they are going to be caught with more than their pants down. They're going to be held accountable. As I talked to Leaders in Washington, leaders in our party, leaders in the states.
If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules and say, oh, never mind, we'll forgive you. I think they've got another thing coming. That attitude is sickening. If I'm a business person, Government has a lot of control over me.
Now you're going to go after me because I did business with the party that that had and a president that had the power? Does that bother you? It bothers me. Sure, it bothers me. But she's she's She's playing a different game with different rules.
That's a very political thing to say, and it's a very. short term way to think. I'm telling you. I believe genuinely, like you, maybe a conversation like that was happening, you know, as the atomic bomb was being. uh built, you know, I I don't know, but I think There was a great quote years ago by Oh, the prime minister after Neville Chamberlain.
What was it? Howard Macmillan. You know, he was asked. A question by a reporter concerning the immediate future and why he was unwilling to commit. To a to a hard and fast plan.
And his quote was, Events, dear boy. events in the end All that bluster, all that stuff, it gets trumped, if you will, every generation or so by an event, by something truly existential. Maybe it's polymetallic nodules. Maybe it's energy independence. Maybe, as I think, I think it's workforce.
I think it's the terrible arithmetic, the human arithmetic. Great book, by the way, by Nick Eberstadt. But we're dealing with that right now. And all of that, oh. Wait till the next party gets in, this and that.
Sure, that's consequential. And in the near term, it can have an impact, I guess, on a businessman's decision. Long term, it's forget it, man. That's table stakes. Can't believe I had Mike Row.
I had I had a Like had visuals. You had rare earth. For a rare interview. And we have John McEnroe's been called out to start a Macrow Works. Mike Mike Mark.
MacroWorks. You got it. Mike, thanks so much. Help him out. Help out get his scholarship.
Mike Work MicroWorks. Uh dot com, right? If people want to contribute to the ethnics uh to microworks.org. Yeah, I'll take your money. We're raising all kinds of it, but I also got ten million earmarked for the kind of jobs we've been talking about.
The scholarship program is open. I'm keeping it open all year. Nice. Go get some. Absolutely.
