Hi, everybody. Welcome to today's Firelight Chat. We're going to be talking about Gen Z economics

in this episode. You know, I'm a mother and like most parents, most caretakers of children,

that colors and pervades everything in my life. And I've had a very strong feeling about

America's children and America's young people for quite a while because it seems to me like there's

a neglect here, a systemic neglect that has taken crisis proportions. Other times we talk about

children, but what we're going to talk about tonight is Gen Z. You know, I feel about an entire

generation, what I feel about my own child. You give them the opportunity to succeed,

that's what it seems to me society should be doing, setting our young people up to win. But in

policy after policy, whether it has to do with healthcare, whether it has to do with tuition

costs, whether it has to do with housing, there are so many ways in which public policy actually

thwarts rather than supports the dreaming and the self-actualization of America's young. You

know a couple of months ago I spoke at Cambridge University in England and I was struck by a feeling

there of hope among the young people in a sense of possibility and their lives ahead of them

and an excitement about it. The too often I do not feel here and I do not hear it here. And I wanted

tonight to give you the opportunity to hear the kinds of stories, hear the experiences of some

young people because they are so indicative of the kinds of stories and kinds of things that I hear

everywhere I go throughout this country. So these are three people but know that for each story that

you hear in this Firelight Chat there are probably millions more who would say pretty much the same

thing. We're going to be talking to Thomas Beardsley his 23 years old. He recently graduated from

the University of South Carolina with a major in sociology and a minor in business administration.

He currently works as a dominoes driver on Daniel Island. He's lived in Charleston for his entire

life. We'll also hear my new friend, Skrylo Hollinsworth, she's 22 years old, she's an esthetician,

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