The Bull Market Where Everyone Feels Broke | Behind the Rise of Financial Nihilism

Summary

Excess Returns – "The Bull Market Where Everyone Feels Broke | Behind the Rise of Financial Nihilism"

Date: November 18, 2025
Podcast Feed: Excess Returns (Episode from “Click Beta” with Dave Nadig, Matt Ziegler, Cameron Dawson)

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Episode Overview

This lively episode centers on financial nihilism—the sense that, despite a bull market and technological innovation, many Americans feel left behind financially. The hosts dig into how risky behaviors, monopolies, and a disconnect between market returns and everyday prosperity are cultivating an ethos where investing, speculation, and even day-to-day economic decisions have become detached from deeper meaning or benefit for most people. They touch on risky new products (cash delivery!) as symptomatic of this situation, reflect on monopoly power in tech, discuss housing market woes, and muse about nostalgia, community, and the search for value amidst a culture obsessed with novelty and consumption.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Financial Nihilism?

• Definition & Symptoms:
  • People feel prosperity is out of reach and engage in riskier, more detached financial behaviors (prop betting, high-leverage trading, etc.).
  • Despite the S&P 500 doubling over four years, most Americans don't feel wealthier ([24:39]).
• Generational Divide:
  • Younger generations see markets as a game because real financial security seems unattainable.
  • Cultural embedment of gambling, sports betting among younger cohorts ([08:40]).

2. Strange New Financial Products & Behaviors

• Robinhood’s Cash Delivery:

  • Robinhood will deliver up to $100k in cash to your door in an unmarked bag.
    • “...you can now get cash on demand delivered to your doorstep by some DoorDash driver up to $100,000. They literally say it's an unmarked paper bag...” – Cameron Dawson ([03:33])
  • Hosts lampoon the lack of legitimate use cases (except drugs, sex work, or gambling) ([04:17–05:44]).
  • Parallels drawn to how financialization is reaching every possible market.

• Innovation ≠ Progress:

  • In social media and search, most “innovation” is about extracting more revenue per user, not enhancing the product.
    • “All of the innovation that has happened in things like social media and in search has not come by making the product necessarily better. It's come by getting more revenue out of each individual.” – Matt Ziegler ([00:26], [12:03])

3. Markets and Capitalism’s Structural Issues

• Monopolies & Rule-Changing:
  • The winners set new rules to fortify their dominance.
    • “I think that capitalism, where the people who win and then change the rules so nobody else can win, is not capitalism.” – Matt Ziegler ([17:35])
• Tech Companies as Capital Marketers:
  • Tech giants now act as their own capital markets, soaking up innovation and stifling broader capital formation ([21:00]).
• Underinvestment and its Consequences:
  • Old assets (like homes in rural areas) are cheap because they have been under-maintained; investing in these areas is risky and unappealing to young people chasing opportunity ([20:10–22:00]).
  • Society faces a “snake eating its own tail” dynamic: supernormal profits breed complacency and underinvestment, risking long-term returns ([22:17–24:38]).

4. Value, Values, and the Meaning of Wealth

• Detachment of Price from Meaning:
  • High prices and investment returns feel abstract to young people, who struggle to attach meaning to traditional milestones like homeownership ([13:02–16:29]).
    • “Figuring out where that landing part is for the meaning. Because whatever your parents said to you doesn't really make sense...” – Dave Nadig ([13:02])
• Is Prosperity Real?
  • Data shows market booms don’t translate to daily life improvements.
    • “If you ask most people, do you feel like the country is twice as wealthy as it was four years ago? I don't think anybody, no matter how bullish they are, would say yes.” – Cameron Dawson ([24:39])
• Prosperity vs. Perception:
  • Top 10% drive 50% of consumption; sentiment surveys do not reflect spending power ([26:07–27:31]).

5. Societal Consequences & Public Policy

• Infrastructure & Energy Crunch from AI:
  • Surging AI investment is straining compute and electricity capacity:
    • “50% of the AI spend is going towards energy right now. 50% of that spend, that's huge.” – Cameron Dawson ([31:56])
  • US grids are stretched compared to China’s overbuild; leads to talk of future energy subsidies to paper over the imbalances ([33:15–34:17]).
• Redistribution Instead of Reform:
  • Rather than regulate over-consumption, the US has a habit of subsidizing individuals to compensate for structural abuse (as with health care, energy) ([33:15]).

6. Novelty, Community, and the Search for Meaning

• Why are risky/novel behaviors appealing?
  • The pursuit of novelty and conventional milestones is disconnected from any sense of permanent community or stability ([48:27–51:00]).
  • Cultivating quirks and personal traditions becomes a way to anchor oneself amid this detachment (discussion of family rituals, themed birthdays, and holiday idiosyncrasies, [44:43–47:40]).
• Internet & Monoculture:
  • National “monoculture” dominates attention (same stories/distractions for all), but local, personal meaning is eroded ([48:27]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Robinhood’s Cash Delivery:

  • “You can now, on demand, use your phone and have them deliver in a brown paper bag up to $100,000 in cash on demand to your door.”
    — Cameron Dawson ([03:33])
  • “It feels like a lot of DoorDash guys are going to get mugged.”
    — Cameron Dawson ([04:44])

• On Drawing the Line in Financial Risk:

  • “Is it 2x leverage is okay, but 3x leverage is not?”
    — Cameron Dawson ([08:40])

• On Capitalist Monopolies:

  • “Capitalism, where the people who win and then change the rules so nobody else can win, is not capitalism.”
    — Matt Ziegler ([17:35])

• On Market Prosperity Perception:

  • “If you ask most people, do you feel like the country is twice as wealthy as it was four years ago? I don't think anybody, no matter how bullish they are, would say yes.”
    — Cameron Dawson ([24:39])

• On Seeking Meaning:

  • “Figuring out where that landing part is for the meaning. Because whatever your parents said to you doesn't really make sense from what they did 40 years ago. Like, it's this really confusing part of going, how do I make the meaning for the thing that's under the surface here that I now have to attach a price from and how do I make sense of that?”
    — Dave Nadig ([13:02])

• On Monoculture and Novelty:

  • “We certainly do live in a weird Internet monoculture ... We all can't keep up, but at the same time nobody knows their local news anymore...”
    — Cameron Dawson ([48:27])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:26] Search & social media “innovation” extracts more from individuals
• [03:33] Robinhood’s $100k cash home delivery launch
• [04:41–05:44] Hosts skewer the concept & consider payment logistics
• [08:40–10:59] Debating regulation in financial markets; generational attitudes towards risk/gambling
• [13:02–16:29] Value vs. values—meaninglessness of market prices; struggle for meaning
• [17:35–21:00] Monopoly power & the “capital markets” of tech giants
• [24:39] S&P 500 doubles, but “no one feels richer”—disconnect between asset returns and real life
• [26:34] Top 10% drive most consumption; surveys vs. spending
• [29:19–33:06] AI’s impact on infrastructure, energy, and corporate spending
• [33:15–34:17] Energy subsidies and the policy pattern of redistribution
• [44:43–51:00] Nostalgia, family traditions, and searching for personal/community meaning
• [48:27] Internet monoculture and societal loss of local meaning

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Tone & Style

• Conversational, irreverent, and self-reflective.
• Frequent use of humor—personal asides, pop culture/literary references, and banter.
• Empathetic regarding younger/average Americans’ difficulties.
• Notably cynical towards corporate and government fixes, but warm toward community and family rituals as sources of meaning.

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Final Thoughts

The episode weaves together finance, society, and the psyche of a generation facing prosperity that’s everywhere and nowhere at once. Risk-taking, novelty, and monopoly power are symp­toms—and join the hosts in their playful, slightly anarchic search for value and meaning in a market narrative that no longer seems to belong to most people. The answer, perhaps, is to create small communities of novelty and authenticity amid the noise.

Transcript

[Narrator]

The stock market is still not far from all time highs, but the optimism that would typically come with that just isn't there, and many investors continue to utilize very risky products in the pursuit of higher returns. In the latest episode of Click Beta, Matt Ziegler, Dave Notig and Cameron Dawson take a deep dive into what is going on and what it means going forward. We have included this episode in the Excess Returns feed, but if you want to keep receiving new episodes, you can subscribe to Clickbaita on all major podcast platforms or our YouTube channel using the links in this episode. Description thank you for listening. We hope you enjoy the show.

[Matt Ziegler]

All of the innovation that has happened in things like social media and in search has not come by making the product necessarily better. It's come by getting more revenue out of each individual.

[Cameron Dawson]

What I have a hard time with in financial markets in particular is coming up with a credible reason to draw the line at a particular spot, right? So is it, is it 2 2x leverage is okay, but 3x leverage is not?

[Matt Ziegler]

I think that capitalism, where the people who win and then change the rules so nobody else can win is not capitalism.

[Cameron Dawson]

If you ask most people, do you feel like the country is twice as wealthy as it was four years ago? I don't think anybody, no matter how bullish they are, would say yes.

[Matt Ziegler]

There's an incredible chart that I put in my weekly charts on Monday which showed the earnings growth ofTech and WorldX Tech and since 2007 World X Tech is flat flat. And then world the World Tech is, you know, straight line up.

[Dave Notig]

Those other podcasts, they're clickbait. This this is Clickbait of the show where we market professionals click record on a conversation that we'd have anyway. Should we be doing it in public? Probably not. But we're gonna prove once and for all that all we know is that we don't know nothing. Who's with me today? I didn't know her in high school, but I have a hunch she lost less homework than Carolyn Levitt's lost job and inflation data. Our favorite anything but boring or laborious source of statistics. Cameron Dawson, welcome to the show.

[Matt Ziegler]

I thought that was going to be for Dave and I thought we were doing something.

[Dave Notig]

Well. Don't tell, don't tell his achy breaky heart that move over breaking rust Walk My Walk has become the first AI song on top of the country music charts. He's a genuinely identifiable human performer, the Billy Ray Cyrus of clickbait.

[Matt Ziegler]

Can I tell you that I had a crush? I had a. I, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I had a speech impediment as a kid and I couldn't say my, my, my hard Cs. So I had a crush on a kid named Kyle and I called him Tyle and I used to sing him Achy Breaky Heart as my, as my like plea to have him notice me, but it didn't work.

[Cameron Dawson]

Okay, did you have to sort of ape.

[Dave Notig]

You called him tile.

[Matt Ziegler]

Well also my name was Tamarin, so.

[Cameron Dawson]

Well, now I'm just going to call you Tamron from now on.

[Dave Notig]

Fantastic, Tamron. Dave, we're going to have a good time talking about some stuff today. The rules are we've agreed on one topic. That topic today is financial nihilism. Nobody googles nothing while we're live. And we each have a surprise topic that we brought to the table for us to talk about. Markets or non markets related apparently. My wave of morning meetings and other things. I've missed some headlines. Dave, you were all excited.

[Cameron Dawson]

I've been.

[Dave Notig]

Financial nihilism.

[Cameron Dawson]

I'm so excited that you know this news and I get to tell you this. So you know Robin Hood, like the third horseman of the apocalypse of financial nihilism.

[Dave Notig]

Not the Prince of Thieves Robin Hood?

[Cameron Dawson]

No, no, no Hood. H K dollar sites H o o D either Will. Now, if you're sitting in New York and you've got your Robin account, you can now, on demand, use your phone and have them deliver in a brown paper bag up to $100,000 in cash on demand to your door.

[Dave Notig]

Why?

[Cameron Dawson]

Well, I mean, as far as I can figure out, it's the last three markets that financialization has really not tackled yet, which is sex, work, drugs and gambling. Gambling's getting close, but we gotta work on the other two. And clearly this cash system is designed to help move financialization forward.

[Matt Ziegler]

AI is working on the OpenAI is working on the first one, effectively the sex work part.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, like on our path towards financial nihilism, you can now get cash on demand delivered to your doorstep by some doordash driver up to $100,000. They literally say it's an unmarked paper bag. They say it on the press release.

[Matt Ziegler]

Not even in like some kind of like lock bag or something.

[Cameron Dawson]

I'm. I'm sure that it'll be like early days of weed. There'll be some little thing that a child can't get through. Mostly it feels like a lot of door dash guys are going to get mugged, but. Right.

[Dave Notig]

I'M I'm thinking of the, the John Mulaney bit about like when he's post confession of like relapsing into drug use where he was like, why are, why is anybody on these cash apps? That's not. I, I don't even know. So again, is there any market need. Have either of you needed a hundred.

[Cameron Dawson]

Thousand dollar in cash at two o' clock in the morning in Manhattan? No. Really? Never.

[Dave Notig]

Is this available nationwide?

[Cameron Dawson]

I think this is a press release. Whether this ever actually turns into a used product, we'll never know. At least I'll never know because I'll never use it. I suppose there's a world where you need $300 in cash to go on your trip tomorrow morning and you don't feel like going downstair over to the atm. But boy, you really got to stretch to come up with an excuse that's not drugs, gambling or sex work. At least I haven't come up with one.

[Matt Ziegler]

I'm be fascinating to know what the fee they're going to charge for that. That's my next question. Delivery fee. And then do you tip the driver in the app or with the cash as a percentage?

[Dave Notig]

Like that's like, like Uber eat style.

[Cameron Dawson]

Right.

[Dave Notig]

Like where you're like this burger all of a sudden went from being a $10 overpriced burger to being like a $30 burger.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yeah. Your accidental hit on that tip button could be like, wait, my hundred thousand dollars is $120,000 and it's gone. All right, well, that's South Park. Yeah.

[Dave Notig]

This is a fascinating twist that I was definitely not even, I couldn't even guess that. That is staggeringly weird.

[Cameron Dawson]

It's staggeringly weird, but I mean absolutely symptomatic of the topic of the day. Right. Financial nihilism. Right. The reason this is even in the M, everybody's out there like, you know, Robinhood's also trying to bolt on sports betting and everything else into that, you know, prediction markets. It's all part and parcel.

[Dave Notig]

What are you seeing about that stuff in particular? Like the sports betting markets, I think on odd lots, maybe was. Was Cliff Asness just talking about sports betting? And he's hinted at this in excess returns interviews too, where it's like they're just looking at every available data set with machine learning now and going where else can we eke out returns? But I don't know, Cameron, like where are you in even thinking about these places or just not thinking about them?

[Matt Ziegler]

Yeah, I mean it doesn't really factor into what we do, you know, we're not going to build a portfolio with it. Is there an investment opportunity at some point? Maybe there is. You know, I think for some people would be inclined to put some kind of ESG filter on it and say, no, that's not something we'd be interested in doing. But I, you know, it's not something that, that for our subset of clients really makes any impact whatsoever.

[Cameron Dawson]

But at the same time, these things do impact markets. Right? That's, that's the part where, like I get into this argument with Eric Balchunas from Bloomberg all the time, right? Because he's very much on the libertarian side of the fence where it's like, hey, I can get on a plane to Vegas tomorrow with my life savings, put it all on black and lose all of my money in five seconds. And that is completely legal. And nobody would take you to court because you should not have been allowed to do that. And so his whole thing is like, of course you should have 5x Nvidia trading. Of course you should have prop betting on Robinhood accounts. Of course, like all of these things, like, everything should be legal. And on the one hand, I can't really mount an argument against that. Like, I can't really mount a moral argument to say all gambling should be illegal everywhere in the world. Like, that doesn't feel right either.

[Matt Ziegler]

Seltzers and cigarettes, like, right. Like at a certain point, like even, like there's, there's certain bounds that we put on things to say. Like if left completely unbounded, it could be dangerous. I agree.

[Cameron Dawson]

Oh yeah, I, I, I get it. Like, no, I'm not trying to argue that like, that he's right that it should be a free for all. What I have a hard time with in financial markets in particular, is coming up with a credible reason to draw the line at a particular spot. Right. So is it, is it 2, 2x leverage is okay, but 3x leverage is not? And is 2x leverage on Nvidia the same as 3x leverage on IBM? Like, I mean, you can get into these sort of endless arguments where all of these things are imperfect. And yet at the same time, I do think that, you know, Kyla Scanlon sort of observation that we have an entire generation here who feels like prosperity is just out of reach and therefore it engenders all of these behaviors that feels very real. True. I mean, I have kids in that generation and I think they're avoiding those things, but I see it around them, right? All of my friends, all of my kids, friends are in sports betting and prop betting and like, it is just embedded in that culture at this point.

[Matt Ziegler]

Has there been any studies about. If you look at a, at a country like the UK and you go in all of these smaller towns, there's lad bets or whatever it's called, all these, you have all these little mini casinos. I don't know. Have there been any studies about what the effect of like social impact has been?

[Cameron Dawson]

Oh, I'm sure, like we can't Google them now, but because those are the rules. Look, I'm sure that there are no studies that say it's beneficial. Let me put it that way. Like, I know locally we put a casino in Springfield, Massachusetts, that was a big deal eight years ago or something like that, 10 years ago. And a lot of those studies got trotted out around what happens to a town when casinos move in. And the reality is, yeah, you get economic activity, but you also get increased deaths of despair. You get all sorts of stuff that comes along for the ride that the industry tries to sort of push off to the side as much as they can, because that's their job, so it can't be beneficial. How detrimental it is, I think is a real question. And then there's sort of the age thing too, is right, like the boundaries here. If you're 18 years old, basically the world is your oyster, right? You can take out $100,000 in loans and then go gamble all of your excess away.

[Matt Ziegler]

I wonder if there's something similar to this notion of, you know, when, when we were all kind of waking up to the perils of social media and it's like, if it's free, you're the product, right? So if the supernormal return seems free and there, then you, you are the product. And how much of this idea that there is this, this kind of scrape of people looking for more and more way to like squeeze the, the juice out of society, get more and more money out of each individual eyeball. I was thinking about this as well, I mean, not to, to, to turn us in a different direction, but you know, as everybody got really excited about the AI browsers and how amazing these AI browsers are. And my first thought was, well, they are amazing because we've had the same browser for 30 years. Like Google doesn't look that different than it did when it was first launched. And obviously there's been a lot of innovation around it, right? You can text and it's finishes your text and all the predictive stuff. I remember when that came out, it was like Such a big deal. And they're like, we're now having to do millions more searches. But the reality is is because of the monopolistic nature of search, they actually haven't had to innovate that much. So now all of a sudden you're seeing forced innovation because people are saying wait, this is a product that actually hasn't, hasn't changed. So it end, oh, this is how I bring it home. I was like, why was I saying this? Oh, this is it. Because all of the innovation that has happened in things like social media and in search has not come by making the product necessarily better. It's come by getting more revenue out of each individual. So, so it's like it's sort of similar of, of this nihilism is that this is, these are not products because it's making things better. It's just trying to get more revenue out of each individual trader. I knew I had a point.

[Dave Notig]

That's a great point because you're a conversation I had this morning and it was with kids of like young adult child and soon to be spouse of current clients and part of this thing that was going on and I could just, you see the Weirs wheels turning in the head. The, the part that you were describing, and this is Dimitri Kofinas when he was talking about financial nihilism originally was talking about just the, we have the price of the thing and it's just devoid, detached, completely unrelated to it having any meaning at all. And I'm talking to this young couple and they're basically thinking about like we know at some point it doesn't make sense for us to rent anymore and that we'll want to have a house maybe around we get married or whatever else in the coming couple of years here. And they're, they're actually, they're planning so thoughtfully and so carefully and just trying to be, they're feeling out the questions of what is the actual meaning besides these things that have these completely abstract prices related to them. And I'm sitting there in this conversation with these 20 somethings going, figuring out where that landing part is for the meaning. Because whatever your parents said to you doesn't really make sense from what they did 40 years ago. Like it's, it's this really confusing part of going how do I make the meaning for the thing that's under the surface here that I now have to attach a price from and how do I make sense of that? Because none of it's clicking for them and it's very, very disorienting and it was interesting because they're still placing the same value set on. We realize this would be a good idea.

[Cameron Dawson]

Like home ownership still has the value hook.

[Dave Notig]

Yeah. And partially because they've probably experienced a bunch of rent increases in the last several years and are like, this sucks.

[Cameron Dawson]

And they've seen their parents, who.

[Dave Notig]

My parents never complained about this. They put new siding on, you know.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

I mean, I wonder if, you know, if meaning in that sense, it almost feels like it's zero sum because me buying a house means me not. Is locking up money to not be able to do other things versus is the meeting something that's actually positive sum, which is I'm doing something that I would have a feeling I wouldn't be able to, to experience otherwise spending the same amount of money in theory, but it's not coming off with this, like coming with this one for one trade off, if that makes sense.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yeah, I feel like there's that, that idea of that like there's a. This disconnect between the value and the values in a sense. Right. Like there, there's this. I've been thinking a lot about like Persian and the American stories and all that stuff that you've been working on, Matt. And there's this whole thing about homeownership and George Bush's ownership society and like we're, you know, we have been pushed to be a nation of owners. Right. And individual capitalists where we manage our own capital pools, et cetera, et cetera. And I, I wonder whether or not that value has maintained. But now the thing it's assigned to, I. E. A house has just gapped too far from like when you're 30 and you can actually think about buying a house. Right. I mean, I'm just trying to imagine my kids actually being able to buy a house and like I look at like what they're going to make for wages and where they're living and what their housing would actually have to cost. And it's like, okay, so that's going to be 50 to 100 times your annual salary. That's a really tough one to say. And that's what you should go do, you know, right.

[Dave Notig]

That that values versus the value piece or whichever way you put that in the order is. I think it's, it's really telling because back to what Cameron, what you were just saying a minute ago too, of. You made, you made some of the stuff better. You made some of the stuff worse too. Using Perplexity for search feels infinitely better than Google because I'VE been using Google since the 90s for search, when I chose it over Ask Jeeves or whatever in 1997 and never looked back. But now being able to.

[Matt Ziegler]

And as, as soon as you never look back and everybody else never looked back, they stop innovated. Ooh, Monopoly, right?

[Dave Notig]

Ooh, Monopoly. And now all of a sudden somebody's innovated and I'm willing to pay for search. Like the idea that I pay two separate AIs for different functions in my life for a version of something that I got for free. Yeah, that, that's very disorienting. On the value versus the value set. How much, Cameron, do you personally. I don't want to say we're like assigning who the bad actors are, like, what's good capitalism versus bad capitalism, but it almost feels like there's a little bit of that judgment thing going on in my head when I'm thinking about this. I don't know how to weigh it or communicate it.

[Matt Ziegler]

I, you know, I think that capitalism, where the people who win and then change the rules so nobody else can win, is not capitalism. But there's obviously a lot of that in the US Kind of capitalist structure. So the fact that people are getting caught off guard or having to now invest billions of dollars because they probably, and I think we could look back under, invested potentially billions of dollars over the course of the last few years. That, that would, that would suggest that, that I, I, Roger McNamee, he had a really great point back. I guess this is after Zucked before his most recent recent book. His argument was that as we look at tech monopolies, it's not that we should split them up and say YouTube and Google can't exist together. It's that we should really be asking, should Google search have nearly 50% operating margins? Like, is that, is that an operating margin that reflects something that can't be replicated, or is it an operating margin that reflects a monopoly that needs to be challenged? And should we, should we argue that that operating margin should be lower and it's the market figuring it out, right? Like now we're in the state where the market is actually figuring out. It's not by regulation, it's by competition. And so I guess the question would be, is that, you know, is there. Are we in a state, though, where, where, because these people, these companies have so much of the money that they're still able to do the innovation that they're forced to do, and thus they continue to have their monopolies.

[Dave Notig]

I think herschel Hofland, whatever the HH index thing that you measure monopoly by. Shots have been fired here. Cameron's coming for you. The underinvested idea. Yeah, I, I love that idea and I've. This is my own bias that I keep tapped down, but I think about it a lot. And Dave, you and I specifically have talked about this, but you made me think about it with your kids. My wife and I moved back to this part of northeastern Pennsylvania in part because cost of living homes, all these things were cheaper and we were trying to simplify a bunch of aspects of our lives on top of being near family. So that was the driving force was family. Second part was holy crap, it's a lot cheaper than living in big cities and stuff like that. A huge theme here is you can still buy a house well below the national averages. And you can only do that because the people who are living there under invested in maintenance. So you will buy a friggin nightmare, right?

[Cameron Dawson]

You're buying. Everything's a fixer upper. Yeah, everything is a fixer upper.

[Dave Notig]

You could still buy a million dollar house here. You do nice stuff if you want, but you could also buy a hundred thousand dollar house here. There was a house on my block that sold six, seven, eight months ago and like it's been under renovation since like after the closing, since the sign came down, there's been a dumpster out front and they've had to gut the thing to studs and they're to catch the whole thing up. And that offset represents the under investment right in that physical asset. And that poses a really interesting dilemma for people who are looking at stuff. Do the kids need to chase the job, the income and the thing in those cities which unfortunately I kind of feel like it's their right to do. And that's a great place to go when you're young.

[Cameron Dawson]

I mean, look, I know a few folks that have really fallen in love with Detroit for exactly these reasons over the last decade. Right? Because it's a young rebuilding community, the music scenes on fire, there's a bunch of tech folks moving in like Detroit. Those things happen kind of naturally, that ebb and flow of, of where things are underinvested and then where things are overbuilt. But back to your point about like where the monopolies come in on this and like how all of that potential investment is now captured in these larger companies. I do worry that we have entered a world where we. It's not so much that we have all these monopolies that need to get broken up in a really traditional stand at and t kind of way. It's that they're now all of these multi business conglomerates where they may not have a prosecutable, you know, Herfandahl index monopoly in any given product but they now are so huge that they become their own capital markets. Right. Which is why nobody goes public. You wait to get bought by Google or Meta or whoever. So these companies become larger and larger and on the one hand yay, you can innovate really quickly and deploy a lot of capital which we've seen and that can be a net benefit. But boo. On the other side it means the capital formation is just not happening anymore. Right. Everything's a moonshot and I wonder whether it just, it continuously will exacerbate this top of the food chain problem that you're talking about.

[Matt Ziegler]

Cameron, you know, at what point does it become the snake that eats its own tail though? Right? So if you under invest for so long, I think that's one of the reasons why AI has been able to capture the hearts and minds so quickly is part of the reason is because of the degree of underinvestment or only investment in kind of a scrape of, of of getting more revenue out of people through advertising. So it's not necessarily making experiences better. So yeah, you know I think I do wonder if you, and we talked about this the last time. You have businesses that are monopolized, very low capital intensity, high return on invested capital businesses that are taking the cash flows from that business and investing it into capital intensive competitive lower return on invested capital businesses. And it might not be lighting the cash on fire that you get delivered by doordash and Robinhood but, but it likely comes with a lower return and if you have those lower returns that means then that this arc of earnings growth, I mean if, if you look and I can, I can share it with you guys after maybe we can put it in the show notes. There's an incredible chart that I put in my weekly charts on Monday which show the earnings growth of tech and World X tech. And since 2007 World X tech is flat. Flat. And then world the world Tech is know straight line up.

[Dave Notig]

Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

And so is that indicative of the fact of, of weak economic growth? Is that indicative of the fact when you have such powerful monopolies that you just, they just gather everything and, and you they're the only ones that can generate this kind of supernormal growth and this concentration. But I think the question for us as investors is is that super normal Growth sustainable? The answer may be yes over the next year. Is it sustainable over the next 15 years to the same degree it was over the last 15 years? The answer may be yes because of everything we're talking about. It may be the nihilistic thing of you just go, if you can't beat them, join them, just, you know. But I do think it becomes a snake that eats its own tail where they end up shooting themselves in the foot because of the underinvestment. That kind of, that kind of outperformance typically breeds complacency.

[Dave Notig]

Yeah.

[Cameron Dawson]

And it also feels like the, it's an accelerant on the societal issues of it too. Right. I mean I did the numbers yesterday. I think yesterday is the day we crossed the mark for four year returns being 100% in the S&P 500. Like so the total returns for the trailing calendar 800 trading days or whatever it is 100% off the lows when we had our horrible down year where we down 20%. Right. Like which was going to be like the thing that reset us all. Like that's a weird thing to say because if you ask most people, do you feel like the country is twice as wealthy as it was four years ago? I don't think anybody, no matter how bullish they are, would say yes, I think America is twice as valuable as it was four years ago. That just doesn't feel right. And so when I talk to younger folks who are investing in the market, they see those numbers and they realize they're ridiculous. They realize that there is no basis in reality. So it is just a game. Right. I think that's where that nihilism comes from. Because to your point Cameron. Yeah. There may be earnings at the top of the tech stack and that may be what's driving the market numbers, but none of that shows up in food prices particularly.

[Dave Notig]

Right.

[Cameron Dawson]

That's not where the investment's going and making any of that stuff better. We know it's not showing up in other kinds of infrastructure investment, whether it's, you know, non AI, data center, grid or housing.

[Matt Ziegler]

When you said I've done the math, I thought you were going to start quoting schism by tool. Enough to know the dangers of our second guessing.

[Dave Notig]

Let's get into some odd time signatures then, shall we? Yeah, yeah. It's pretty phenomenal that point. The 10%, what is it? 10% of. Of earners. Like the 10. The 10 top 10% pays for 50 of consumption. Right. And like all that math stacks up pretty cleanly and pretty painfully in the most tool of senses. Like it's a grueling thing to actually look at.

[Matt Ziegler]

Yeah. And so here's. Okay, you know how everybody's been hemming and hawing about how, how consumer sentiment surveys have been so weak and we've been saying for years, watch what they do, not what they say. Right. The problem is in the spending data that is weighted. It's a weighted average, effectively. And that's why you get 10% generating 50% of consumption.

[Cameron Dawson]

Right.

[Matt Ziegler]

But the sentiment surveys, everyone's got the same weight. You know, University of Michigan has. Somebody online doesn't, you know, of course we know what their socioeconomic weight is, but they don't get a greater weight in the survey. So each person gets the same. It's like the equal weight index versus the S&P 500. The same is true for voters. Everybody's vote counts the same even though their dollar of spending or their socioeconomic. Socioeconomic level doesn't count the same in the aggregate spending data.

[Cameron Dawson]

So this is what's called the Bill Ackman effect. Right. Like, no matter how much money he spends in New York, he still only gets one vote and no mayors. Right. It turns out you cannot buy a mare.

[Dave Notig]

This is a related mayor.

[Matt Ziegler]

I can get you a mare with a thumb.

[Cameron Dawson]

I get. You want a toe, I get you a toe.

[Matt Ziegler]

Speaking of nihilism. Those are nihilists, Donnie.

[Dave Notig]

Those are nihilists, Donnie.

[Cameron Dawson]

Want a toe?

[Dave Notig]

I can get you a toe.

[Matt Ziegler]

I can get you a mayor in an hour.

[Dave Notig]

Well, Robin. Robin Hood might be.

[Cameron Dawson]

You probably can't. How much does a toe go for? It's got to be less than 100 grand because you still.

[Dave Notig]

Okay, I have.

[Cameron Dawson]

This is way off.

[Dave Notig]

The. Rupert Mitchell said this to me the other week and it's been, it's been haunting me inside of this idea of basically the balance sheet composition, especially of US Companies. And we look at the AI spend, he's like, the balance sheets are already changing tremendously. Instead of just change, instead of just chasing SaaS, now all of a sudden we're looking at physical assets. There's all this stuff that's coming in that's going to change the return on invested capital, return profile of these companies. And that pendulum is swinging wildly quickly. And. And now on top of that, he was pointing out he just came back from a trip from China and he was like, if you look at like a 10 cent, you look at these companies like they're spending maybe thanks to Deep Seek, maybe not. They're like, oh, 10% is going into these fixed costs and this other stuff, they're just assuming they'll do more and they're happy with the manufacturing base that they've set up. That's a really weird thing because it to me I start to go oh, is, is US gdp, is the entire US economy just a long AI bet at this point? Like, and what the hell is going on at the company level with who we bet on? Cameron, I see the wheels turning so.

[Matt Ziegler]

I want to ask you guys a question because this has been something that's been bothering me and I need, I still need to do research on it. So if I able to figure out, but you might know what's been the key reason why all these companies have been able to justify the spending. A. It's the existential we need to get to AGI first. But the, the other key one and Microsoft will say it a lot. They'll say, well, we are at capacity with compute. We like there is so much compute demand we can't meet demand. Have you heard one company, one company come out on their earnings call and say ah, you know, we were going to move something to the cloud, but Microsoft said that they don't have room for us. There's no more room in the cloud. Like usually when we talk about capacity being constrained, let's use the example of, of, of airlines buying aircraft. You've been in a long period where narrow body aircraft have been capacity constrained. So you get the CEO of Ryanair coming on, on, on Bloomberg and saying, hey, we need more aircraft guys. You need to, you know, kick up the production of the A320s and the, in the 737s. Usually when there's capacity constraints, you hear it, you hear it from the customers saying yes, we would do more business if there were more. So wait, I, is that the right question? I don't even know it is.

[Cameron Dawson]

But the problem is that the, where computers being bought now is so dominated by AI spend that that's the only place you're hearing it. But you do hear it a lot. Like hop on the Reddits for any of the coding ETF coding subreddits and you will see every single day crap. Claude dropped the, you know, dropped the compute quota for my $2,000 a year plan again without telling me like there's a lot of compression on available compute already happening within AI spend. And so I think that's mostly where you're seeing it. But the, but I think where you're really going to see it is electricity. And that's I think where the, the you're seeing that show up most dramatically, lots of national stories about electric prices being impacted by data centers. The flip side, that story about China, Matt, like another story coming out of China from the AI folks has been just the ridiculous amount of overbuild China's done on grid. On grid capacity. Right. Where they're sitting at over 100% excess reserves in most major metropolitan areas in the U.S. we run around 15. Right. So there's literally excess 85% power sitting on the ground in China that we're scrambling to build with all that money. 50% of the AI spend is going towards energy right now. 50% of that spend, that's huge.

[Dave Notig]

The whole energy consumption component boggles my mind, especially against the capacity component weighted against. Here in Pennsylvania, there was a thing, one of our nuclear power plants where the Amazon server farm that lives next to it was just like casually was like, so next year you could just like quintuple our request for energy. Right. And the, the state regulator had to get involved and basically say like, no, you have to say no to this company. You can't give them all that. There's only so much that we have for output. There's only so many things we can do it. And the regulator had to step in and say like, you have to say no to this.

[Cameron Dawson]

Right.

[Dave Notig]

You can't just turn all these things around. That is a weird other problem that I feel like Cameron, and maybe this is to your point of figuring out the right question to ask. I don't think that question has become a, has become common knowledge in the sense of we all agree we're asking that question yet. And I don't know if it takes electricity rates up another 15, 20 or 1000% before people go, hey, policymaker, what is actually going on here and how are you addressing this and pitting it against the AI growth strategy? That's weird.

[Matt Ziegler]

Yeah. Because effectively we are all effectively paying a tax for you to continue to earn supernormal profits off of arrivals.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yes. Right. And the challenge is the way the United States structurally handles those imbalances is, and I feel very confident saying this is not by regulating those industries down in consumption, it's by redistributing back out to the individual in a way to sort of make it okay. Right. We've seen this in health care too, right? Where instead of solving any of the core problems, you just figure out how to subsidize more and more people. Right. So we're just going to end up like Most third world countries where most people get an energy subsidy from the government to cover the cost of gas or electricity or whatever. So, you know, if electricity spikes, prices spike in Massachusetts by a hundred percent. I feel a hundred. I will take the bar bet that Massachusetts will have electrical subsidies like within a. Within a week, because that's what Massachusetts does. Louisiana, probably not. And so we're going to end up with this further bifurcation of where you live determines what kind of subsidies you get to offset this underinvestment in public infrastructure.

[Dave Notig]

Well, that sounds like a good time to hit the Robin Hood app. Get that cash of yours and shift.

[Cameron Dawson]

Get that bag of cash.

[Dave Notig]

Can I just get lottery tickets? Can I get a bag of scratchy rattles?

[Cameron Dawson]

Just skip the step. Just take my hundred grand, go buy scratchers and deliver those to me.

[Dave Notig]

Just deliver me the winning. All right, so I have a. I have a goofy topic that's not related to anything of real consequential value. Does anybody have anything more important they want to kick us off with?

[Cameron Dawson]

No.

[Dave Notig]

All right. We're post Halloween by several weeks here and this was just rattling in my head this morning. I think I saw some Halloween pictures and stuff. I was thinking about the kids new neighborhood this year, thrilled with how much the neighborhood turned out for Halloween. We had a ton of trick or treaters and there was just pure, pure joy in my month of listening to misfits songs and thinking about this holiday that I so dearly love. I'm asking best or most memorable Halloween costume that either of you had from youth, childhood, whatever. I have a weird one, but I was thinking about this in asking the nieces and nephews what they're going to be and hearing them talk about it and I was like, this is a weird thing. Which one is the most memorable to me? Either of you have a, have a good one. I'll gladly share mine.

[Cameron Dawson]

I want Cameron's go gab.

[Matt Ziegler]

Oh man. I love Halloween as well. And I will never forget as a kid my mom dresses both my sister and I up as brides, which is weird. Like it's a, it's a weird costume.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

But in the neighborhood we had a little Halloween contest and we'd all do a little parade and you know, this little like common area. And I won the Halloween costume contest and my sister didn't, even though it was dressed up in the same thing. And it still is like one of those, those epic family stories.

[Dave Notig]

So yeah, that I, I can't think.

[Cameron Dawson]

Of a single one of my own costumes, but I Can think of every single one my kids wore. So I'm gonna punt and I'm gonna say my favorite Halloween costume was the year that my son got lice. And so we convinced him to shave his head and go as Aang from the last Airbender. Oh, like, painted the blue arrow in the whole nine yards. It was a baller costume. It was fantastic because he actually shaved his head. He was so into it. And it wasn't until he was, like, 14 that we let him know that, like, actually you had lice. So it wasn't. We gave you this whole spiel about how great your costume was going to be, but it was that or we were sitting there for a day and a half picking the crap out of your fun.

[Matt Ziegler]

Funny.

[Dave Notig]

That's amazing. And a great costume and a great Committing to the bit.

[Matt Ziegler]

Yeah.

[Cameron Dawson]

Huge goodness. Yeah.

[Dave Notig]

So it was. I was thinking about how. And I'm sure I did as a young. Like, I'm sure I dressed up as some of the. Whatever you get at the. The grocery store, the Target. You know, you get the chintzy plastic. Whatever costume this is before, you know, I matured into, you know, going in drag for the bulk of, like, high school and college. And you're like, well, Monty Python. And kids in the hall told me this was funny, so I should just do lots of that. But I remember as a kid in elementary school, it was a campfire story that my dad would tell us when we would go camping with his college buddies, and we'd all be out in the woods with the kids, and it was this, like, headless lumberjack story. And I remember telling my parents, like, I want to be this. And it's something that no one else knew of, aside from, like, my brothers and, like, two friends. And they didn't go to my school.

[Cameron Dawson]

Did you go as a headless lumberjack with an accent?

[Dave Notig]

So I can't. I'm going to have to ask, because I think my mom and dad helped figure this out. But it was like, we got an old flannel shirt. There was a piece of, like, plywood that, like, sat on the top of my head, like, poked two eye holes in the shirt. And it was this ridiculous, like, severed head, boxy lumberjack thing that we invented from nothing. And I remember just thinking, like, this is the coolest thing ever. And then realizing nobody else knew what I was. But being like, you wouldn't understand, but I do.

[Matt Ziegler]

You would be a great kid with the red bike from Are youe Afraid of the Dark? The scariest. Are youe Afraid of the dark episode was the kid with the red bike. Remember the boy with the red bike?

[Cameron Dawson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

You could do, like, a white cast on your face. I mean, that.

[Dave Notig]

All right, that might be next year.

[Cameron Dawson]

How much do you want to know?

[Dave Notig]

Kid with the red bike and Dr. Seuss, the pants with nobody in them. Horribly traumatizing to me, those things.

[Cameron Dawson]

And I just.

[Dave Notig]

Immediate chills. Immediate chills.

[Cameron Dawson]

All right. Mine's very similar to yours, Matt, and it'll be very quick too, which is Thanksgiving is coming up, which is my favorite holiday. And as I was writing this week's zine this month. Zine. I have a little Thanksgiving page in there. Um, and I realized it's also the weirdest holiday because nobody controls it. It's not associated with the church. It's not really a government holiday. Like, there's no. There's no jingoism around it. It's just kind of whatever. Your family made Thanksgiving. So my question was, what weird thing says Thanksgiving to you? Like, what does your Halloween, your Thanksgiving tradition that, like. Well, it's Thanksgiving if. Dot, dot, dot.

[Dave Notig]

All right, I got a weird. I got a weird one for you. While Cameron's thinking about this. So Grandma Ziegler, Dad's mom, rest in peace, she, Grandma Joe, would a not known for her culinary abilities, let's just put it that way. There were many, many things for my dad and his siblings that later in life they were like. I didn't realize. I liked this because of the way it was presented to me for the bulk of my life. But we went there for Thanksgiving every year. It was great. They lived not far out of where, like, where Penn State is in the center of the country. Like, lots and lots of great memories of that house and going out there and, like, playing basketball at the local Penn State campus, like with my grandfather while we're waiting, 10 o' clock in the morning and after the parade and on weird, steamy November days when it's not too cold yet and not too hot. So something that always happened that I think about every single Thanksgiving is Grandma Joe would leave. She'd forget something in the kitchen, and we'd be like, at dessert and, like, the pumpkin pie, whatever would be on the table. And she'd be like, the creamed onions or something like that makes no sense, would come out of, like, the microwave and you'd have, like, your pumpkin pie. And she'd be like, you have to eat some onions. And you'd be like, A, I'm already full. B, these things do not go together whatsoever.

[Cameron Dawson]

I love that.

[Dave Notig]

I feel like there should be a lottery. Regrettable part of the meal that gets trotted out at an inconvenient time and that we all laugh about it, like endlessly and still joke about it to this day.

[Cameron Dawson]

That's awesome.

[Dave Notig]

I love that.

[Matt Ziegler]

So we're pretty traditional. You know, just traditional food. Usually easy breezy day, always stayed home, didn't have other people over. But there was a time when it was very popular in Orlando that people would go shopping on Thanksgiving night because all of the outlets started opening up earlier and earlier and earlier in order to take advantage of the Black Friday rush. And the poor people who had to work this wouldn't be able to have things with their family. But one evening I had the exchange students from business school and brought them over and I was like, guys, I'm going to give you America. And I brought them to like this, like pre Black Friday Thanksgiving night. And we like made cocktails and like, brought them up in like thermoses and stuff and like, were part of like the rush of everything and got dropped off, for the record. And their eyes are from Mexico and from France. Their eyes were like, what is this? And I was like, look, man, I don't know, but you just got to go for it. And now, of course, those have been outlawed by the outlets because they're like, yeah, this is. This got to be a little bit ridiculous when you're opening at, you know.

[Cameron Dawson]

Thanksgiving, even four o' clock on Thanksgiving Day. Yeah, no, retail's always been anathema. Like, we've always been very anti retail. No Black Friday sales. The. The only weird tradition we've had is I had an uncle who passed recently and late in his 80s and he was always a bit of a rogue. And anytime he was there for Thanksgiving, if anybody ever said something like pass the whatever it was a food fight. Like, pass, pass meant it got thrown. So you had to be careful what you asked him for. Like, pass the rolls was usually a pretty safe one. Pass the yams could end up with a. So food fights remain a proud tradition. Not every year, but it definitely is Thanksgiving if somebody throws food across the table.

[Matt Ziegler]

I like that.

[Dave Notig]

That's fantastic. You have to have something that goes a little bit off the rails to make it a proper tradition.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dave Notig]

Yeah. I love the non commercial framing of it. I guess I hadn't really thought about Hallmark. Hasn't taken it over. It's still about your degenerate family and whatever your traditions are.

[Matt Ziegler]

Is it my turn?

[Dave Notig]

Yeah. Okay, Fire away, Cameron.

[Matt Ziegler]

Okay, so we're talking about holidays. And my personal favorite holiday is my grandmother's birthday. She loves her birthday more than anything. And because she loves it so much, we celebrate it for a long time. And my parents started celebrating it a month and a half ago. They go out to dinner. They're like, it's her birthday and she's turning 98 in a couple of days. And so that's why I'm in Florida to celebrate her birthday. But a few years ago, and this probably like 10 or so years ago, we started this tradition where every year we did a themed party. And the theme involved pretty substantial costumes and food themes and a drink theme and decorations and sometimes activities and games. But what's really powerful about it is that when you have a theme, nothing blends together. You don't necessarily remember exactly what year it was, but you remember the fact that all four of us, my mom, my dad, my grandma and I were dressed up as the Golden Girls. You remember my. My dad was so cute.

[Cameron Dawson]

Which incidentally, need a picture.

[Matt Ziegler]

But yes, yes, pictures. Incoming. That you remember the fact that we all wrestlers one year. The fact that this year is under the Sea themed and grandma will be dressed up as a mermaid princess. And I think that there's something really special. And we used to even do this on Friday nights as a family is we would decide on a theme and cook some like a casino night or a steakhouse night, whatever it was. And it makes it so that things just don't blend together. Because in a busy life, everything can become, oh, yeah, we went to this nice restaurant or we went to. To whatever we. We took a trip here, whatever. Not that we take trips, but I think that there's something about inserting novelty where you can. In order to avoid the almost the blurring of the lines that can often happen over the course of the years and in very busy lives.

[Cameron Dawson]

That's amazing. I love that. I'm going to think about that a lot.

[Dave Notig]

Do you roll like birthday strategy? So birthday strategy is a really interesting thing. A never heard anybody taking it quite that far, which is great. I am, yeah. Now I am. I am thinking of in all sorts of ways. Do you have any crazy, like non holiday, forgive me, on your grandmother's side, non national holiday holidays. Trying to figure out how do I, you know what, how do I frame that?

[Matt Ziegler]

I was thinking about writing to the great city of Philadelphia because she is the biggest Philadelphia sports fan and be like, just know you have your longest fan who never misses a Phillies Game. Never misses an Eagles game. She sits there on her iPad and is like. Is like visibly upset when things don't go away. Which is a Phillies fan or Eagles.

[Dave Notig]

Fan all the time.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yeah, that's a lot. They.

[Dave Notig]

We got to talk about that one. We got to get them to do something. And especially at 98, I can't tell you how many times we've been to games and like, their. They're trotting out the. You're like, what is that person doing here in all of like, almost a hospital bed or something. And it's because they're there and they're.

[Cameron Dawson]

Like, they're 100 years old, they're 90.

[Dave Notig]

Years old or whatever it is. And you're like, that officially becomes the coolest thing ever when you see that and you're in community with those people celebrating that event.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yeah, that's really cool. We're kind of anti birthday people in our household. Like, birthdays have never been a big deal. My wife went through a string when we were like, in our late 20s or early 30s where something terrible happened on her birthday over and over again, like several years in a row. It became a bit. And so what started. What I started doing was anytime. And I still do this to this day, anytime I make a reservation for the two of us to go out to a nice romantic restaurant, it's her birthday several times a year, you know, so, like, and at this point, she's. She sort of feigns being surprised by it. But, like, by the hundredth time, somebody comes out with a little cake going, hey, hey, yay, it's your birthday. You know, like, and it's June, not October.

[Dave Notig]

She.

[Cameron Dawson]

She. She's gotten over it.

[Dave Notig]

That is a fantastic way to do it. Okay? This idea of. I, I'm not, I'm not trying to crowbar this idea, but I'm really now entranced by this. The. The novelty, the very personal small. This is what we and these people around us care about to do. Like, is that part. Is that part of this whole financial nihilism thing? I am not trying to put a neat bow on this. I just can't help but think the cash app delivering you $100,000 is actually only great because it's interesting for novelty value, but it's devoid of meaning. You dressing up as, like, grandma's birthday and just saying, we're all committing to this bit together. Dave shaving his kids head over liars and airbending together, like, is that is maybe what we just need? Do we just need more Novelty. Do we need more goofiness?

[Cameron Dawson]

I mean we certainly do live in a weird Internet monoculture, right? I mean it is shocking to me how few things we talk about as a society on a day to day basis now. It's an infinite number. We all can't keep up, but at the same time nobody knows they're the local news anymore, right? So it's this bizarre thing where I think we are all very tuned into the 20 big national stories going on and maybe we care about 10 and folks in another tribe care about another 10, but we still all have the same 20 things that are the thing we're talking about, whether it's Taylor Swift or the AI Morgan Wallen or whatever it is today. But like, you know, we probably don't know what's going on in our city hall election. Like so I feel like there's a, there's a yes, we need the novelty, but the novelty is already here. We're just not paying attention to it. It.

[Dave Notig]

What do you think about that, Cameron? And is it we all have to do it for our own weird group and just not worry about it ever being. Is it me and my, my headless lumberjack costume where it's like you literally have to not care what the rest of the school thinks.

[Matt Ziegler]

I, you know, I think about like how community when I was growing up felt really big. Like meaning big meaning that we had, you know, I was part of this thing called the Sunshine Generation, the Razzle dazzle Nation. But, but like we had this.

[Dave Notig]

Was that the whole formal title just to pack that up.

[Cameron Dawson]

It sounds very Florida.

[Dave Notig]

It sounds very Florida. Can you repeat that one more time?

[Matt Ziegler]

Sunshine Jenner. Yes. But you know, I think about how there were three families that we were all friends and we were all part of this and we would, we would spend holidays together and, and you know, the fact that like we do these little things that introduce novelty for us as a family almost is because the novelty of the community isn't the same way. And maybe it's because there's so many bounds that are put on of like what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. You got to pay to be part of this community or whatever it is. But you know, I think about it now, even with my, with my nephews of like, they don't have that same kind of novelty of community type events that I had when I was growing up.

[Dave Notig]

There's the weird thing too, the compression of. He still got the emotions down. This is very important.

[Matt Ziegler]

He had a song called Love in Any Language. I was on the news for it. On the local news. If we're talking about the local news. Because I got really emotional. I was like, we had to sign it. And the whole thing was great.

[Dave Notig]

That's fantastic.

[Matt Ziegler]

I'll find it again.

[Cameron Dawson]

Need pictures.

[Dave Notig]

Need pictures. We might need to do a times. You were on the local news segment. I might have to back pocket that one because I'm sure I got a couple. I think they're all.

[Cameron Dawson]

But.

[Matt Ziegler]

Matt, you strike me as somebody who might have had an I like turtles moment.

[Dave Notig]

No I like turtles moments here.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yeah.

[Dave Notig]

Probably got close. I think my highlight moment was. So I graduated when I was in kindergarten. They knew we were going to graduate in the class of 2000, which very amusingly was referred to by the kids in 99 and 01 as you were the class of zero and you were a bunch of zeros or whatever. So the news crew came to, like, my kindergarten classroom and this was like a whole thing. Like, the news is going to be here and you're going to be on the news tonight and, you know, wear something nice the next day. Like, all that stuff was like, beat into our heads as we're maybe entering first grade or whatever. And so like, I'm Z. I'm in the back of the room. I'm like, forgettable. I'm like, nothing is going to happen. So right before the commercial break on the news, the cameraman decides, like, he's going to like, zero in on me. But I'm in some itchy sweater or something and I have something in my eye. So it's like this extended thought. Why they read me out of me being like, ah. Like, what is this?

[Matt Ziegler]

Future Leaders of America?

[Dave Notig]

Yeah. I was like, I'm ruined.

[Cameron Dawson]

That was. It was all over for you. It is totally like zombie kid, I like turtles moment.

[Dave Notig]

That was the closest that was close to my eye.

[Cameron Dawson]

Like, that's the one with the zombie kid, right? With the black eyes and the white face and. Oh, God, yeah. That's ancient. That's like 20. That's proto Internet.

[Dave Notig]

That is proto Internet. Well, in the interest of clicking beta and not ending this on nihilist note, Dave Notig, you're up to all sorts of exciting things.

[Cameron Dawson]

I mean, ETF.com, baby.

[Dave Notig]

ETF.com all day, every day.

[Cameron Dawson]

Yep.

[Dave Notig]

Let's do it. Cameron Dawson. Same. I need to go find that. That note that you referenced. This was. This past week's not.

[Matt Ziegler]

You can. You can sign up for the Saturday piece and the Monday charts now, I do believe. But if. If you don't if you're not even signed up from Ping me, I'll get you on the list.

[Dave Notig]

Ping Cameron I'm going to say check out Panoptica AI yes, this week I did compare housing policy to the movie House party and I'm still pretty proud of that reference because, well, we didn't make a belt reference in the end. I edited that out selectively. But if you know, you know you're watching Excess Returns. This is click Beta. We'll see you real soon.

[Narrator]

Thank you for tuning in to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting and valuable, please subscribe on your favorite audio platform or on YouTube. You can also follow all the podcasts in the Excess returns [e-mail] if you have any feedback or questions, you can contact us@excess returnspodmail.com no information on this.

[Dave Notig]

Podcast should should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of the firms of the hosts or their clients.