Justin Lahart

And also just the uncertainty about these tariffs.

For a company to commit one way or the other to build things out based on tariffs that possibly, you know, in a new administration in three years from now, right, could go away, right?

And then where are you?

People notice the prices of things that go up a lot.

And they don't notice it so much when they go down.

Right?

So, like, egg prices went up a ton.

And then egg prices went down.

And we were still getting emails from people complaining about the high price of eggs, right?

It's just, you know, once you see it, you just remember it.

And it's hard to forget it.

The people just, they're so ticked off about prices now.

It's pretty much healthcare and social assistance is growing, and everything else is kind of dead in the water or shrinking lately.

AI isn't necessarily like replacing a lot of jobs already, but I think that a lot of CEOs believe deeply in what AI could mean for their workforce.

And that makes them more willing to let people go and maybe less willing to bring a bunch of people on because they think, well, you know, any sort of shortages that I might face in the future, well, maybe AI will take care of them.

I think we should bring up another thing that's going on, which is that, you know, there have been some big layoff announcements.

But really, you know, there aren't a lot of layoffs and there's not a lot of hiring.

So this low hire, low fire environment does different things for different people.

So people who are older, who are comfortable in their job, they're not worried, right, because there's not a lot of firing going on.

But people who switch jobs more frequently, so a lot of lower-income people will switch jobs more frequently, they're having a very hard time because you can't switch as often.