I'm John Bachelor, and I'm joined by my colleague and co-host, Jim McTague, formerly Washington editor

of Barron's Magazine, now a novelist in Lancaster County, the best county in the Keystone State,

and we're joined by our colleague Chris Regal, the CEO of Scholar.com, a global technology firm

transforming the retail space with business on all the major continents.

But we are concerned with the American economy right now,

the so-called K economy, where the upbar of the K is doing very well,

tend to describe the boomers and the millennials.

And the downbar, the working class, those work with their hands,

and the young, the Gen Z, are not.

Is this something that we saw coming?

Jim, you have a question for Chris.

What I see now, there's what I call the broken dream economy,

that we have highly intelligent, highly educated young people

going into the job market thinking that their talents will be recognized and embraced,

and nobody wants them. And I'm wondering if you see this as a temporary phenomenon or if a pre-sage is something else in our economy.

So there's a bifurcation in the economy very clearly.

Mr. Ford, the chairman of Ford Motor, came out several weeks ago and said that Ford across the nation and Ford dealerships is short 120,000 mechanics.

So there are ample jobs for those who are willing to weld a seam, turn a wrench, paint a house.

That physical part of the economy is absolutely lacking in applications, employment. So become a

plumber, become a welder, become a mechanic.

You can make a great living, and there's tremendous demand for those skills.

What they are not demand for, soft demand, is more of the entry-level professional services that AI is really starting to step on and being able to reduce.

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