All right, everyone, happy Friday. Welcome back to the Loopcast. Today, I am joined by Josh and our good friend Tom McCluskey.

He made, so many people were clamoring for a reappearance. We had to bring him back. Tom, thanks for coming on this Friday.

I'm happy to be on. I'm sure it was because of my good looks and my humbleness.

Obviously.

Visual props don't work exactly for podcasts, but they're doing the life show.

Yeah, the physical comedy was there, but might not have projected.

So, yeah, we're live 11 a.m. Eastern Time, Monday, Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday,

Friday shows typically going to be a little bit more fun.

Yes, we have, Are You

Smart than Josh Mercer making a reappearance? Good luck to the chat this time. Oh, and one. I think

Josh had a big win last week off of a coin flip. So we'll see if we can keep that run going.

This Friday, when we're looking at, when I sat down to think about topics, I read a few

really interesting articles.

Okay. So one provocatively titled, How Gen Z is becoming the Tool Belt Generation. And the other is how McKinsey destroyed the middle class. That was written by David, Daniel Markovitz.

He's a professor of law at Yale. Super interesting. I dug into more of what he was saying. But I think I'm going to separate this with this being kind of the private sector conversation. And then we have Tom McCluskey on for more of the public sector analysis as another jobs report was released. So starting with how Gen Z is becoming the tool belt generation. This really was interesting to me because there was a study published by the National Student Clearing House in saying that there has been a 16% increase in enrollment at vocational schools in 2023.

The main quote that I took away, it feels good at the end of the day.

I'm physically doing something and there's a sense of completion.

As a lot of Americans kind of see college as not a great option, really anymore, in terms of job security,

as well as going into crazy amounts of debt.

I mean, we see 43 million Americans owe a collective $1.3 trillion in student loan debt,

average power at $37,000.

This is according to the U.S. Department of Education.

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