Podbit · The Shawn Ryan Show
Eliminating shop class didn't just redirect kids away from trades — it made skilled work invisible. A generation grew up walking past where shop class used to be, never once seeing what real work looked like. You can't pursue what you can't see.
Where this was said
At 1:03:35 · chapter starts 1:01:30
The stakes of the skills gap escalate dramatically in this chapter. Blueforge Alliance needs 400,000 skilled workers in 8 years for submarine production. Larry Fink says BlackRock portfolio companies alone need 300,000 electricians. A projected $9–10 trillion infrastructure build-out is upon us. China built 1,000 ships last year; the U.S. built 3. Rowe is now embedded with the Department of War on a campaign called Build Freedom and just announced Meta's America's Workplace Academy alongside the company's president — a $150 million, 4-state pilot that pays students to train for 5 weeks and guarantees jobs. Lowe's has $250 million in HVAC training. Home Depot's Pathway to Pro is $100 million. The first time an administration has actually responded to Rowe's message, he says, was when they said: 'You tell us what to do.'
There are 7.5 million open jobs in America right now — most requiring no degree — while 6.9 million able-bodied men aren't working or looking. We have a supply problem, not a jobs problem.
There are currently 7.5 million open jobs in the U.S., most of which don't require a 4-year degree but do require training and willingness to work.
$1.7 trillion in student debt. 7.5 million open jobs. 6.9 million men not working. America keeps lending money it doesn't have to train kids for jobs that don't exist while the jobs that do exist go begging.
Outstanding U.S. student debt stands at $1.7 trillion, much of it held by people who attended university but did not graduate.
Approximately 6.9 million able-bodied men are neither working nor looking for work in the U.S. — a historically unprecedented peacetime figure.
Mike Rowe argues that eliminating shop class from high schools was possibly the single dumbest decision in modern education history, removing the trades from an entire generation's line of sight.
A baseball-playing junior who learned about compound interest now wants to quit the sport to start working and investing. George says let him decide and own it. Jade says team sports build something a job can't replace — try doing both during off-season first before making the call permanent.
May is 33, carries $69K in combined household debt, and wants to spend 11–13 years training to become a forensic pathologist at $14K/year in tuition. The prerequisite is non-negotiable: zero debt before a single class. Then, with the spouse earning $4,500/month and able to run the household debt-free, cash-flowing medical school is genuinely possible.
Kavak launched the Jedi Academy, an internal program where every employee — from CEO to mechanics — completes a 6-week training and ships a production-ready AI agent. The message to staff was blunt: train and adapt, or this may not be the right place for you.
The worst AI outcome for young people isn't cheating on homework. It's that passive, mindless consumption strips away the motivation and agency their brains need to develop. The second worst outcome is banning AI from classrooms entirely. The winning path is giving students AI-powered agency.
Prompting AI effectively is a skill that should be taught in K-12. The best prompter in history? Socrates. His method of relentlessly asking precise questions to uncover truth is exactly what powerful AI interaction looks like — and schools should explicitly teach it.
When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Fei-Fei Li's first move was to email her child's elementary school principal and offer to lecture teachers and students. No investor or tech company did that. Teachers are scared, forgotten, and lectured at — and if they're not helped, neither are the kids.
After the KSI show exposed how hard physical comedy really is, Andrew Santino sincerely proposed doing a semester at clown school in France. Bobby agreed. This is apparently a real plan.
K-12 schools ask students to sit still, raise their hand, use fine motor skills, and be pleasers — behaviors that describe girls more than boys. Boys are twice as likely to be suspended for the same behavior, and five times as likely if they're Black. The system needs male teachers, national service, and kindergarten starting at 6 for boys.
Sunk costs are gifts from your former self — and like all gifts, you're allowed to decline them. Godin reframes every stuck-due-to-sunk-cost situation as a single question: knowing what you know now, would you choose this again?
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