Transcript: Millennials & Boomers Need Infrastructure Now! - w/ Ken Gronbach

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, episode number 34. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, The Best Way to Build It. This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships within your project teams and help you understand how to lower risk be under budget and on schedule in your construction projects. Most importantly, exceed your end user's desires.

So this episode features Ken Grondback, who is a demographer at KGC Direct. He's also the author of Upside, profiting from the profound demographic shifts ahead, which just released this past April. Ken is often a keynote speaker for organizations and companies and he contributes in a way for them to be prepared before undergoing major changes. He takes them into the future using demographics and predicts a positive and accurate approach to their business decisions. Now, the reason we brought Ken on to the podcast is because I've been looking for interviewees certainty around the decisions companies are making for their businesses, especially around investing in different aspects of their business.

So I wanted trends and metrics to support really good decision making. So for those of you who listened to the past couple interviews, for instance, episode number with Anirban Basu, economist, we have the same purpose and approach. You will see that although economists and demographers usually disagree, the two of them actually aligned in some areas. And I'll point out some of these during the interview. So let's get into the interview.

Good morning, Ken. Welcome to the Constructor Podcast. Good morning. Thanks for joining us today. Pleasure.

Yeah. So first things first, just want to know a little bit about you. Who is Ken Grombeck? And I just want to know, like, how did you how did you even get into this field? I lost a major client.

We had a my wife and I had a a advertising marketing company in Connecticut that we grew to about 40 million dollars. And one of our signature clients was American Honda Motorcycle. We had 140 dealers from the tip of Maine to Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C. And we would every year Honda would send us a bunch of money. We'd run millions of dollars worth of ads.

They'd send us thousands of motorcycles and we'd sell them at asking price until 1986. The bikes came in, ran the ads, and I got a call from American Honda and they said, Ken, did you run the ads? And I said, yeah. And I said, I said, that's not a good question. And they said, yeah, we know.

But it's like somebody turned a faucet off. There's no traffic in the dealerships. And they said, but Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha all have identical problems. So it's not just us. What do you think's going on?

They said, this crazy old fashioned motorcycle called Harley-Davidson, I can't get out of its own way and leaks oil is selling like crazy. And I said, I really don't know. Between 1986 and 1992, we tried everything. We tried every we came up with all kinds of new products. We reduced the price on our signature bikes and business for the Japanese brands fell 80 percent.

And they all we just we we just got sick of closing dealers. But that's all we did. We shook hands with American Honda, the client went away. We lost a lot of money. Never knew why until 1996.

When I'm in my office, it was an election year. It was Clinton versus Dole. And October, the election process was heating up and there was a full page editorial in the major paper here in Connecticut that said that Generation X that was born 1965 to 1984, as they were entering the age that they should be getting involved in the political process, were not doing so anywhere near the volume of the baby boomers. And they were not voting. They were not giving money.

They were not giving time. They were not running for office. And it was crazy. It was like it's like what happened to this whole generation, 20 year generation? And they were a bunch of lazy slacker couch potatoes.

And what was America going to come to if Generation X was our future? So I mean, I had 40 people working for me, 30 of them were Gen Xers. I didn't have any lazy people, so it didn't make any sense to me. So I called in our research department and had them dive into Generation X through all the secondary research has already been done through the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the census data, CIA Factbook, you know, you name it. And he came back and said Generation X will never perform at the level of the boomers.

And I said, they're lazy. And he says, no, there's fewer of them. And I said, what do you mean? He said they weren't born. He said the fertility in the United States between 65 and 84 dropped like a stone.

It went way below replacement level. In fact, the bottom of the of the inverted bell shaped curve is 1974. And he said there were only three million babies born in 1974. And at the height of the boomers in 1957, there were four million three hundred thousand. He says, so do the math.

He said what you have is as a whole in our population, we're a market economy. So there's there's we're missing millions of people. And I said, how many? And he said nine. I said, we're missing nine million people in a 20 year span.

He said, yep. And I said, what's the difference between the boomers and Generation X? And he said, 11% critical mass. And I said, so we determined that that was a whole. I'm hoping that over answer the question, but let me finish this.

Yeah. The, the. I said, you got to be kidding me. He says, so there's like a hole in our population in our market economy population. I said, we just answered what happened to the motorcycles.

So we went back and looked and sure enough, we were selling motorcycles to men 16 to 24. That was it. Twenty five. They sold the bike, got married and you didn't take the death wish into the marriage. So yeah.

So the, we determined that once the baby boomers exited the very narrow demo that we sold motorcycles to, uh, it was over. That the generation right behind it was, didn't have enough bulk, didn't have enough mass to satisfy the footprint. So then that was wherever Gen X goes, it causes trouble. So we went back and tracked it. We went back and determined that Generation X born 65 to 84 closed maternity wards.

They shut the hospitals consolidated their maternity wards. They, they shut down the toy industry. They shut down 30% of the public schools. They shut down bicycles. They shut down motorcycles.

They shut down automobiles for Detroit. And they essentially caused the housing crisis in 2008 because the boomers were trying to sell their houses to a generation that couldn't buy them. And the, it, so it goes on and on and on. Well, that's, I said, this, this is enormous, enormous power, uh, for, in marketing and no one understands this and no one is talking about it. And I got to tell you, I've written four books now and, and, uh, I, I speak to very, very high level people, presidents of corporations, um, presidents of corporations that are about to build billion dollar plants in China.

And, and I will tell them about the effects of, uh, the one child only policy in China and how that's going to affect their economy going forward. And they have no clue. None. So that's why I'm excited about this. So, so that gives us, gives us a really good sense of where you got started and how you were really thrown into having to learn about demography in the first place.

That's correct. I don't have a degree. Just let me tell you this too, just, just only for, to, to authenticate, uh, my process. Uh, I found the state department demographers name is Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt.

And he's brilliant. He's con you know, if you Google him, he's forever Nicholas Eberstadt. And he, my wife was reading a story one day and she said that you have to talk to this guy because he sounds like you. And, uh, I called him and we talked for an hour and now we're friends. Uh, I went to Washington DC and we compared notes.

We just compared notes and we are identical. And what he said was, he said, the only difference between you and me is you can express it and you can explain it to people and we can't. So I take it. He, he's a studied well, well read and, uh, degreed demographer and, uh, okay. PhD.

There you go. So you, you are the mouthpiece for all the demographers that, uh, that are very much into the data doing the analysis. Uh, okay. Awesome. Correct.

Um, me, me and Harry Dent and Harry Dent, unfortunately, God bless him. It's kind of lost his mind. He's, he's 180 degrees long all the time. Okay. Well, so with that being said, can you just give the audience a really good, like quick understanding of what demography is?

It's populations. It's live births, migration and deaths. It's as simple as that. So once you understand live births, which is, and fertility, uh, migration, and that is immigrants coming and going, uh, and death, you understand demographics. It's, it's, you know, one of the things that I, I, you know, when I speak and I speak about 50, 60 times a year, I tell my audiences, uh, 95% of the business decisions made in the United States are made on what, on money.

I said, money is a concept. Money is nothing more than an idea. Money has value because we all, all pretend it does. We agree that it does. It's paper, it's electrons on a computer.

Why would we want to be dealing with the symptoms when we can understand the cause and the cause of money is people. I think that makes it clear. Um, yeah. So I don't want to miss the opportunity to ask, what do you enjoy most about it? Um, accuracy and forecasting.

I'm, I've my 2008 book, the age curve. I made about a hundred forecasts and I got 80 of them right so far. That's what I enjoy. I enjoy people thinking I'm smart. I love it though.

But I mean, if you're accurate though, in your, in your findings down the road, it does give you that sense of fulfillment. Right. And, and I think that's what I'd like to invite the audience to take part in here. Um, just to have a better sense of what to be looking forward to in the future. And obviously this is a constructor and construction based podcast, um, for.

Owners. Um, but I think we want to understand a little bit more clearly about the trends we should be expecting in the market as it relates to Gen Xers, Gen Yers. Um, and then whoever is after that, I don't know what we're calling that. Um, just to give you a quick rundown. The, the generations that we deal with are the GI generation.

They're born 1905 to 1924. These are the people that are currently, um, uh, 93 to dead. And, uh, then we have, uh, uh, the silent generation that was born 1925 to 1944. It was a tiny, tiny generation because there was very few babies born during the great depression and very few babies born during the war because the men weren't here. So, and, and those are the people that are our current elderly.

Those are the people that are 73 to 92. Then you have the baby boomers, which is a monster generation that refuses to die. Uh, and the fact they've really, really screwed up the death care industry. Uh, they're, uh, currently, uh, 53 to 72. Then you have generation X, which is we described with it that are causing all the problems and they're 65, 1965 to 1984, and they are 33 to 52.

Uh, the, the generation behind them is very, very interesting. It's Gen Y, the millennials are currently 13 to 32 years old. It's the largest generation in the history of our nation. It's 86 million up and they're almost two birth years bigger than the baby boomers. So what we have is essentially is a barbell demography and a barbell economy, which means we have a large group of people that are 13 to 32, and we have a monster group of people that are 53 to 72.

And, and so what are they going to need? What kind of construction products will they need? Well, we know at one end with the baby boomers, we're going to need, uh, healthcare, elder care, and death care. We're going to need those things to be built because the, the current, uh, the established footprint for that generation is for the smallest generation of the last 100 years, and those are the people that were born 1925 to 1944, the silent generation and the generation that's about to fill in that, that elderly part of our population is the largest generation ever to retire.

So it's, it's, I speak in Florida all the time and I, and I freaked them out because I tell them, I said, you guys are nuts. You don't have enough roads down here. You don't have enough roads. You don't have enough houses. You don't have enough storefronts.

You don't have enough anything. I said, in top of that, you know, everything elderly is going to overwhelm you and then you're going to have to support the people who support the elderly. So you're going to have to have low income housing. Where is it? I don't see it.

Where are people going to live in tents? So it's the construction. Yeah. The canard, the construction industry is, is going to go ballistic. It's simply, and let's go to the other end of the population.

Let's go to the 13 to 32 year olds. They're just now leaving home. Finally, finally, they're, they're late to leave home, uh, moving out of their parents' houses and it's not their fault because their parents didn't leave the labor force. Their parents held on because they didn't have enough money to retire. But now things are kind of working out.

There's actually, you know, if you go to savings accounts, you know, how much money is in savings accounts now? It's 9 trillion in the 2009. I think we had a trillion. So people, people have money. We have, there's plenty of money in the United States and the United States, the economy of the United States is going to spike and not look back for at least in my lifetime.

So it's, it's things that are very, very good. So if anybody's thinking about capitalizing, investing, hiring people, taking chances, do it because there's nothing, it could, the stars could not be aligned better. Go back to this, the group of kids that are 13 to 32. There's, there's 155 million housing units in the United States, 155 million. Uh, there are 330 million people in the United States when you count the illegals and I do the, the, uh, um, the two largest parts of our population, the baby boomers at 80 million and their kids at 86 million are living together.

One is moving out unless they're going to sleep on the ground. We have to build 25 million new houses. And when 25 million new houses get built, everything else gets built because it has to, there's all kinds of, you know, you have to support them with everything, with services, with other kinds of buildings, with hospitals, you name it. Uh, so construction, I couldn't think of a better industry to be in. Well, even in investment into healthcare facilities, um, just looking at where the baby boomers are going to, well, uh, we don't want to call it healthcare, you know, nursing homes, but assisted living communities, right?

Because baby boomers don't want to move into the typical, uh, so, so tell us a little bit more about what the baby boomers, like, what is their lifestyle? What, what do they want to move into? Where do they want to go? Well, the most important part of their lifestyle is they're not going to die. They're not going to die like their parents died.

They're not going to die at three score and 10. They're not going to die at 70. 70 is the new 50. So right now the baby boomers, this monster cluster of people is 53 to 72. When are they going to die?

The way healthcare is going, they're probably going to die bouncing off a 90. So you have 20 years of satisfying the baby boomers. I mean, and more than that, even more than that. So, um, what are they going to over 55 communities? Have you seen some of the over 55 communities that they have?

Yeah, they're, they're outrageous. What did they, they replicate cities? They, the, the, the boomers, um, you know, drive these golf carts that they've hot routed to make them look like 57 Chevy's, uh, it's, it's, it's a new ball game, it's a whole new ball game. They are not their parents. They're, they're so not their parents that they're going to, they're going to dress differently.

You can, you're going to have a 90 year old guys do an air guitar. And I, it's, yeah, I, it's, it's a, it's a, so, uh, understanding them. What, what, what I tell folks is, you know, um, Lee Iacocca, Lee Iacocca in 1960 is down on Woodward Avenue in, uh, Chicago, not Chicago, but Detroit. And he's looking at the cars the kids are building for themselves, which are lightweight two-door cars that are powerful and fun to drive. And he's looking at the cars Detroit is building and he's saying Detroit is building 6,000 square foot, uh, uh, lead sleds that kids will never buy.

He said, we need to build a new car. He knew the baby boomers were coming. So they built the Mustang and he, he would have been a hero if, uh, from 1964 and a half to the end of model year 65, he sold a hundred thousand units. He sold 700,000 units. And you know how many he could have sold?

He could have sold five times that it just, it, it didn't anticipate the power of the boomers. Well, that's exactly what's headed towards the construction industry is the baby boomers are going to demand new structures. So, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, just thinking about those, uh, those communities, right? There's, there's gotta be golf.

I'm just thinking you, they got the golf carts are ready. They're hard rotting them. There's, there's gotta be retail. Plenty of that. Um, because they have, they have money to spend.

Right. They have, I, I just spoke to assisted living in, um, Palm beach and it's assisted living facilities costs $2 million to get in. You want, you want to join 2 million bucks and then it's $10,000 a month. Yeah. Well, that's Palm beach too though.

So, but that's, that's, that's, what the heck is that? Yeah. So as far as, uh, where, where are these, where are these baby boomers going? Or are they going to Florida still? Or are they everywhere at this point?

Just because, you know, they're a little bit more broad minded than say the previous generation. Well, I just, I just spoke with Ben Carson and, and I say spoke with him. We shared a platform. He spoke right after me. We both keynoted a convention in Florida.

That was the high end one. And, um, he, he explained what, what, uh, what HUD is up to. And he said, HUD is trying to get boomers to retire in place. And so they'll pay for your stair glides. They'll pay for all the things necessary to keep you in place.

It's not going to happen. What will happen is boomers might not give up their homes in the Northeast. They might come back in the summertime, but everything from Virginia down to Florida, over to Texas, through Arizona, uh, up California, it's going to blossom in terms of a boomer population. The, the static populations are going to be in the Northeast and in the Midwest, but they're still going to be healthy, but they're going to be essentially static. The big increases are going to be where it's warm.

Totally makes sense. Um, okay. Yeah. So, so that's healthcare assisted living. Um, and that's in relation to, to baby boomers.

Is there anything else that we should be looking for to accommodate baby boomers and what they're, what they're looking at? Well, three things, healthcare is one, uh, assisted living, of course, is, is, uh, you know, elder care is the other, but finally the, the one that, uh, is totally asleep and, and this unfortunately will change and I hope it doesn't go to like a Walmart and that is death care. Uh, we don't have enough places to bury the boomers. We don't have enough crematoriums. We don't have enough, uh, uh, funeral homes.

And so I think the concept will change somehow. We're going to do death differently. So it is, it is really quite a bit, but it's something to consider. Uh, yeah, maybe burial. Let's see.

Well, I mean, I don't know. It, it, and that's not so outlandish. The, the, um, you know, if you have to understand right now, the number of people that are dying are about 2 million people a year and what will happen when the baby boomer, uh, baby boomers hit that will double to 4 million people per year. And, and for some strange reason in the nineties, all of the, uh, death care industry decided to upgrade and invest just in time for the number of people to die to go down.

And so you have a lot of people that went out of business and so that's why we have no footprint now. So it's the, the death care industry is wide open. Okay. Well, if anybody's looking for a transition and wanting to start investing in, uh, homes and things of that, uh, nature, um, definitely a broad open market there. All right.

So, so that's baby boomers. Um, let's talk a little bit about infrastructure for millennials. Well, less cars. They, uh, you know, I have two daughters, 22 and 25, and they were someplace and needed a ride home. So I said, I'll come out and get you.

And I said, dad, you don't need to do that. We'll just call an Uber. And they did. And they get a ride home in no time and it didn't cost anything. It was, you know, it was ridiculously cheap.

And, uh, they said, you know, we all talked about it. They said, well, why don't we need cars? Why don't we, you know, you can call Uber and then as soon as we have Ubers that don't need drivers, you know, isn't that going to be interesting? Uh, the, uh, traffic jams on major highways are going to go away when cars drive themselves because they can drive it 80 miles an hour bumper to bumper. So we have some major changes ahead.

To follow up on the brief discussion that Ken and I had about driverless cars, especially since I came across an article written by Andy Cohen at Gensler architecture firm. This article is entitled the game changer for future cities, driverless cars. So I've included the link where you can find the article in the show notes, but I did want to just note a couple of items that Andy highlighted. Most experts agree that the automobile, as we know it, will be largely obsolete by 2030 in its place will be fleets of driverless cars that shuttle people safely and efficiently through our city streets, but it's the broader impacts of this technology that are game changer for the future of our cities and the human experience.

The opportunity is not only to create new places that accommodate driverless cars, but to reshape our existing cities and towns into a kind of amenity rich, vibrant places that we all enjoy. So that's a, that's the one thing from the article, but I do, if you haven't found this out already, he goes on to say, and he goes on to say Budweiser has successfully completed a 120 mile shipment with a driverless tractor trailer in Colorado and retail giant Amazon is rumored to be working on self-driving delivery vehicles.

Isn't that awesome? So if you didn't know about that already, I think that's freaking amazing. And then you can go ahead and check out, obviously videos of driverless cars on YouTube and find out more. So moving on to another note that Andy has the ripple effects of the driverless car will require architects and real estate professionals to completely reimagine how space gets allocated. There's a man for parking will drop dramatically and its impacts will be enormous.

America's parking footprint takes up land. That's pretty much just about the same footprint as Delaware and rollout, Rhode Island combined. So check out the article. You can learn more about driverless cars and how it impacts the new and refurbished developments. So we have one thing's happening with, with this new crop of kids that are 13 to 32 is Amazon.

And so does that mean that we're going to erase retail stores? Well, yeah, in a lot of ways. I mean, well, they still exist. Of course they will. But they're not going, you know, we're not going to have great big malls anymore because it just don't need them.

These kids are very used to just, you know, going on their computer and, you know, if they see something they like, literally my, my daughter told me the other day, she, we were driving someplace and she saw some, somebody had something that she really liked, a pair of shoes or something. And she said, dad, look at those. And I said, yeah, those are great. And we got to our destination and I said, are you going to get those shoes? And she said, I already did.

She, she ordered them on her phone. Yeah. So I said, so that's, that will change everything. The increase of distribution centers. Um, we're looking at, we know Amazon, um, just what acquired whole foods is it.

So grocery shopping is going to change quite a bit. Um, so I think that's something to really consider. You're, you're not going to, like you said, you're not going to have those. Those stores. Well, it's very interesting to see, um, retail somehow is still holding on.

When I look at the, how much work is taking place for construction companies right now, general contracting firms. They're definitely holding on, but that's today. So as we transition into gen, gen wires or millennials, um, going ahead and. Pretty much shutting off that buyer's experience. It's going to really change.

I mean, we're looking at, I mean, I obviously I'm a millennial. We're looking at either user reviews, um, you know, looking at Yelp, looking at reviews of like everything you can possibly find about a product before it is, before you buy it. Um, so, I mean, that's how you determine what you're going to get. You don't actually have to see or feel or touch or like even experience somebody telling you more information about it. You get all the information you need online.

Correct. It's, it's where it's a whole new ball game and it's happening right in front of it. I, one of my major sectors is, um, food. So, and I'm speaking, I'm addressing to two supermarket chains in the next, uh, six, eight weeks and they're scared to death. They're scared to death about Amazon and whole foods, but I explained to them that the, the, the food experience, uh, I really don't think people are going to simply back away from going into a store where they can see and experience and smell and touch the, uh, the food.

I really don't think that's going to happen. And the, the, the here's, here's an irony for you. I was talking to you with supermarket chain and they said, they've done studies on shopping lists and they said, you will never see a Kiwi on a shopping list. Never. There's no, it doesn't, this doesn't ever appear, but they sell tons of Kiwis.

And why is that? He said, because it's a, it's an impulse item where people pick it up. So people are not going to all of a sudden go to, you know, boring food because it's available on Amazon. It's just not going to happen that way. Yeah.

That's an interesting way to think of it. I mean, there, there are so many things that are positioned so that you can impulse by, um, you know, there's whole, whole studies and the psychological approach for that. Yeah. I, I, I like that perspective that that won't go away. Um, people do, I mean, this is the thing.

Millennials even will pay for those experiences if they know their friends will come with them. If they, if they know that they're going to really, really enjoy the experience, but they have to know that before going in. Yeah. Correct. It's, it's, it's your, uh, your generation's a strange bunch, but then we were to, well, when you think about it, you know, uh, you know, my generation were the hippies, you know, I was never, I was never personally a hippie, but, but what is, what is odd culture that was and went away, but your, your generation is, is a generation of friends.

My daughter doesn't do anything unless she's with about eight people. So I mean, I don't know what that is. I used to like to be alone. All right. So, so let's talk a little bit about, uh, infrastructure specifically for, for Gen wires and so, so living facilities.

Um, we talked about low income housing. Um, we should probably touch on education a little bit as well. Um, how do you think these will play out? Well, a couple of things to back up a second. I think that, uh, uh, Gen Y millennials are going to build, uh, max 2000 square foot houses.

I don't think they're going to ever built a 6,000 square foot starter castles that their parents are rattling around in now. And the, um, as far as other structures, um, I was, I recently spoke in Virginia and I was walking around in Virginia, marveling at how many apartment buildings they're building. And they said they cannot, you know, and I had an opportunity to talk to the people, uh, that were nearby and they said, they can't build them fast enough. And they're outrageously expensive. We physically don't have enough space for the, the Gen Y to live.

So apartments are going to be a real solution and then eventually housing. Uh, the, the, uh, relative to other structures don't know yet. It's really don't know yet. I think we're going to see, but education, um, the, the, the, the, the movement in education is, is in terms of colleges, as small colleges are, are shrinking, uh, going away. Uh, colleges with big endowments are going to, are, will be fine, but, uh, it's a massive open online courses.

Everything's on education is going to be, you're going to be able to do that in the privacy of your home and get a, and get a PhD. No problem. Yeah. I definitely see that trending for sure. Going.

I mean, if they don't offer, if they don't offer an online course, why, why go to that school at that point? Um, yeah. Right. My daughter's in nursing school and for the, for her first couple of years, she, uh, went to school from home. Now she's actually doing clinical.

So she had, she physically has to be there, but, uh, it's very different. Hmm. It's just kind of blowing my mind a little bit. Yeah. I want you to relax.

Listen, the bottom line on all this. The bottom line on all this, the United States couldn't be really in a better position demographically, the other nations of the world, like all of the EU, Eastern Europe, Russia, especially Russia's demography is, is a total crash and burn flaming disaster, which is why, uh, Vladimir Putin is trying to annex 50 million healthy Ukrainian. And, uh, because that's the only way he's going to save Russia. He's got an old sick population, old and sick. And, and so he's not, he doesn't have enough taxpayers.

Uh, China has had a, uh, a one child only policy for, uh, about 37 years, which means they have a, they have a hole in their population. That's 37 years long. You can't recover from that. You can't do a market economy if you don't have consumers. You can't do a market economy.

If you don't have taxpayers, you can't have a market economy. If you don't have labor. And what they did is they killed all those categories with their one child only policy. United States is fine. We have a good population.

Our immigrants are from, uh, our Latinos. I don't think we can invent a better immigrant. So we're fine. They really are. Oh man.

Okay. So, well, as it relates to investment, well, actually backing up as it relates to, I'm trying to figure out how to ask this question. I really want to talk about diversity and I meant to, so we're at the 31 minute mark. I wanted to talk about diversity as it relates to real estate. Is there anything that we should be looking for in relation to design and construction?

Yeah, Latinos, Latinos, Latinos, Latinos. I don't figure out what kind of house is Latinos like the, uh, the Latinos, uh, a healthy part of the Latinos that poured into the country by the millions to satisfy the demands that were not being met by the diminutive generation X. Uh, in terms of, of entry level labor, uh, are going back to Mexico. So if Trump builds a wall, he's actually going to trap them in the, the, uh, the remaining millions of Latinos actually filled in exactly where we needed them in the deficit of generation X right in between 30 and 50 years old, satisfy their needs.

I don't particularly know what their needs are. I I've never studied that, but they are going to need. Structure housing, uh, infrastructure. Um, and they're here to stay. And according to Pew research, they're advancing very nicely.

Okay. We're going to be fine. And we, we have another issue. We have an issue with African-Americans, unfortunately, that has not been solved and no one will even talk about it. Um, we have, we have 2 million people in jail.

We have a million African-American men in jail and, um, it's essentially 10% of the crime committing age that's in jail of African-Americans, very, very high. And once they've been in jail, once they have a felony on their records, they can't find work. So we have that there's a whole crop of people in the United States in the prime working years of 25 to 54, about 7 million that are not working and not looking for work at all, just essentially watching television and, uh, uh, the, the, the data shows that the lion's share of that is African-American.

It's not good. We need to fix that problem. That is a symptom of something else that is not being addressed or even talked about. As you're talking, I just have a sink in my stomach and I'm just shaking my head. Um, it it's disheartening and it's something that it's something to be addressed from so many different directions.

Right. And, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you specifically about, uh, diversity as it, as it comes to accommodating for different populations. Right. It's, it's something that we can't ignore. You take into account all of the population and this is a huge part of it.

Um, so one thing that I'm seeking to do, and I've been finding that there are the people in the construction industry who are seeking to do something similar, um, is provide again, those shop classes in the school setting. Um, and maybe it's not that right. Maybe it's not in high school. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's like via meetup or something that again is a, is appealing to actually engage in what are they going to get out of it?

That's always the question. Right. Um, so it's maybe reintroducing, um, the exposure to things that are more. Tangible. Um, when it comes to making career goals, right.

Um, what am I skilled at? What can I actually go into that I enjoy? Um, how do I, how do I create a business out of this? Um, you know, lots of, lots of that population is very enterprising. Um, and, and we know because they're in jail for selling a lot.

Uh, there are a lot of them. Um, so, so kind of taking their, their natural ability and, and mapping on skills, actual business building skills. Um, that's something that I, I personally have a, a desire to help in. Um, and I've done some mentorship in the past and I'm looking to, to do that maybe on a broader scale, if anybody's interested in that, go ahead and send me an email, britney at constructor.com. Um, really interested in, in finding out how to help that community.

Is there anything that you would recommend to the listener, um, to that property owner who might be leasing, thinking about what they should be doing? Is there anything that you would recommend to them right now? What should they be doing? Well, one of the things that, that, and everyone is vexed with right now is, uh, training. And so you have, I just want to encourage your people, your industry that you have a monster generation of potential workers headed your way.

Don't be discouraged by the fact that the, uh, the one, the leading edge is, uh, still having difficulty adapting to the work environment. You, you, you're going to have young people who will be competing for jobs. Train them, train them, train them, and then give them a golden, uh, handcuff. Don't let them leave you and you'll have plenty of labor to get the job. I'm already kind of seeing that trend with some of my clients, which is really interesting.

All right. Well, I think that's, that's wonderful advice with that. Thanks once again, Ken, for joining and talking with us. You can find the show notes at constructor.com slash EP 34. You can find out how to get in touch with Ken ground back at KGC direct.com.

He is a keynote speaker that travels all around the country. You can also view and purchase his most recent book upside profiting from the profound demographic shifts ahead that just released this past April. So please do check that out. Last but not least, do check out on your bond. Basu's interview at constructor.com slash EP 32.

We definitely coincided on. Yes, we need to definitely invest in talent and development of the millennial generation. Um, we see growth in the healthcare. We see growth in, uh, commercial offices. We see growth in hospitality.

So there definitely is some alignments that Ken validated in, in his, uh, his talk with us today. So I do want to give you guys a little bit of a sneak peek for the next episode, episode 35, um, we'll be talking with Chris Wilson. He was in prison for 15 years and is now owner and founder of the Barclay investment corporation, a multi-service social enterprise, and also contract contracting firm, general contracting firm in Baltimore, Maryland. Chris is hugely dedicated to helping ex cons acquire skills, jobs, and even start their own companies through his social enterprise.

So we'll be tackling the black male demographic discussion that we had today with Ken. All right. So if you liked this episode, please don't forget to subscribe at constructor.com to get email updates for me about upcoming podcasts. If you haven't subscribed at iTunes or Stitcher, uh, go ahead. And then also please leave a review to show you support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast.

I look forward to talking with you guys next week.