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Excess Returns
The Precarity Line | Ben Hunt and Adam Butler on the Broken Math of the American Dream
01:19:24
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- [00:01]
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- [01:00]
Adam Butler
This captured me from an emotional standpoint before it captured me from a cognitive standpoint.
- [01:04]
Matt
Right?
- [01:04]
Adam Butler
Why? Because I've got three children. One is 21's 19, one's 15. I've been thinking about what their future looks like and the extra challenges that they have to achieve, you know, somewhere approximating the lifestyle or choices, you know, that, that I had.
- [01:22]
Ben Hunt
It's not poverty per se. It's precariousness. Precarity. It's debt is that source of precarity. And when there's. When that, when that credit starts to be withdrawn, as is absolutely happening today for vast swaths of the consumer economy, then that's when the precarity starts to bite.
- [01:48]
Adam Butler
What this concept to me reflects is a clear and growing disconnect between the metrics that we use to measure human flourishing and the reality on the ground that reflects true human flourishing.
- [02:06]
Matt
All right. It's a special Excess Returns Resolve Riffs Epsilon Theory Collaboration Episode we're in the midst of this poverty debate that's taken over at least Twitter, in the wake of Mike Green's post. And not just the actual back and forth debate, but it's the reaction to this topic that's just been mind numbing. And a lot of us found ourselves about a week or so ago reading this follow up, the Bureau of Missing Children, which sounds like a sci fi novel, especially because it opens up with the child who was never born, and it closes on a Washington filing cabinet full of ultrasound printouts that never made it to refrigerator doors. And that doesn't sound like economic analysis. But beyond the methodology and the math here, where this got us thinking was, what's this relationship that we're all proclaiming to talk about between the measurement problem and the narrative problem with inflation. What about when inflation says it's 3%, but people turn around and say it's closer to 6%? I live in financial planning world. This is the water in which we swim. I don't even talk about inflation at the statistical level.
- [03:06]
Ben Hunt
It's like, what do you buy?
- [03:07]
Matt
That's the only way we'll get close to this number. And I think that's part of the moment. This is having the reaction to actually seeing these things quantified. So no better way to parse the methodology and the math than to get these two together. We've got Adam Butler, author of the Bureau of Missing Children essay on substack and head of Resolve. And we've got Ben Hunt, narrative architect behind Epsilon theory. Guys, you ready to do this?
- [03:30]
Adam Butler
Am I ever.
- [03:31]
Ben Hunt
Can't wait. Can't wait.
- [03:34]
Matt
All right, I'm launching us right into the deep end. What are we even measuring? Adam, Mike Green's article, it was the poverty line. That's where this whole thing started. He was taking it to these 1963 food costs. You took it further to precarity rather than poverty, participation in modern economic life rather than subsistence. How did you even decide to approach the problem from the way you did?
- [04:00]
Adam Butler
Well, I mean, look, this captured me from an emotional standpoint before it captured me from a cognitive standpoint.
- [04:06]
Ben Hunt
Right.
- [04:06]
Adam Butler
Why? Because I've got three children. One is 20, one's 19, one's 15. I've been thinking about what their future looks like and the extra challenges that they have to achieve, you know, somewhere approximating the lifestyle or choices, you know, that I had. And I've been worried. I've been worried about AI. I've been worried about the inflated cost of housing. I've been worried about inflated asset prices, meaning, you know, we have this illusion that everyone's wealthy, but what it implies is low future returns on investment and how that shapes the opportunity set that they have in for their future. So, you know, that's the emotional energy that. That I brought to this debate, Right. And then when Mike Green wrote this article and did some of the early calculus on this, a lot of the pieces kind of clicked together for me that I had struggled with assembling into a coherent narrative. I had kind of all these pieces that I was observing, but I hadn't quite figured out how to fit them into a story or into a problem space that I could communicate as a coherent story. Right. And so. So that's the emotional thing that I. That I brought to it. And then there were some I was reacting to a lot of the technocrats who challenged Mike's thesis. And I felt from the very start that everyone was. Or these people were really missing the forest for. For the trees. And they were accusing Mike and I and others who were expressing that this piece really resonated with them, you know, focusing on vibes, but where the vibes were not. There's nothing real or legitimate, you know, so it felt very like being gaslit to me, and I think it felt like being gaslit to the overwhelming number of people who reached out in support and who connected with that piece. Right. So I wanted the piece that I wrote. I wanted to address some of the technocratic objections, but. But I did want it to do that by going down the endless rabbit hole of precision economics. Instead, I wanted to sort of change the. The direction of conversation. Right. So there was a lot of focus on the poverty line as some. As a very technical definition. You know, it's weird because we had people from the far left and people from the far right attack us on that. And I actually get it. On reflection, I totally get why that's the case. But also, I feel like that was a major distraction, and it was a distraction that worked to the advantage of the technocrats, many of whom, I think have conflicts of interest or very clear interests in obfuscating or diminishing the value of the core thesis. So I wanted to move away from the discussion of poverty and instead discuss precarity. And that required me to sort of define what was positioned as precarious.
- [07:35]
Matt
Right.
- [07:35]
Adam Butler
And then once I define that, then the rest of the narrative kind of followed.
- [07:40]
Ben Hunt
Let me jump in here on this, Matt, because, you know, I. I was struck by Mike Green's original piece.
- [07:49]
Adam Butler
Like, you were Adam, but.
- [07:52]
Ben Hunt
And there's a big but here. Mike is not a careful writer. I mean, you. You and I both. All three of us know Mike well. Yep. Mike's not a careful writer. And because of that, there is an opening to. I'll say, go after him. That you can just drive a truck through. You can drive a truck through it, and it's made. There are lots of personality aspects here. Right. Mike also has a certain personality, for sure. He's one of those. He's one of those people who will say, no, you. You know, missed the number here. I mean, so he's. He can be one of those guys.
- [08:37]
Adam Butler
Definitely. Yep.
- [08:39]
Ben Hunt
So. And yet there was. There was. There was a meaning. There was a truth to Mike's writing. I actually was more moved and impacted by your piece than Mike's piece, because, A, you are careful. B, you're not one of those gotcha guys. And so it doesn't land with you on either the. Oh, you're not being careful, or you're not humble enough, or you're not, you know, you're not. You're not. Whatever. None of that lands with you. So I thought you wrote your piece. It's not poverty per se. It's precariousness, precarity. And that really struck me because. Growing up, we were not below the poverty line. So I don't know what that's like. And in my own life as a. As an adult, I've never been below the official poverty line with a family my wife has growing up, and so she knows that world, but I didn't know it like this. The world of poverty. Oh, I know. The world of precarious, though. Right, right. That just hit me like a ton of bricks, because I have absolutely, in my life, been in a situation of precariousness where, you know what? I gotta get a little. I've gotta be a little lucky here, or this could all go sideways really badly. Now, Matt, I'm gonna ask you. Cause you know every song. What's the. It's like. It's a Canadian, right? You know, I never had to knock on wood, but I hear it's not good. Or, you know what. What's that?
- [10:44]
Matt
The Mighty, Mighty Boss Tones. We can't go to the Mighty Mighty Boss Tones.
- [10:48]
Ben Hunt
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. I knew. I knew Matt would know immediately.
- [10:54]
Matt
Shout out to Dick.
- [10:55]
Ben Hunt
I've always. I've always liked that song. It's a great song because I've had to knock on wood in my life sometimes from an economic perspective, and kind of. I've been precarious. So when he wrote that piece, that. That is a. It's. Where is that precariousness? And how is that meaning? How is that feeling? And, yes, it's a vibe, but that's a pejorative phrase that I just hate. If you felt precarious in your life, you know, it ain't just some freaking vibe. It means you're on the. The edge of your whole life going in a really bad way, and the people you love the most, taking them with you. Yep. Nothing motivate. I mean. Yeah, vibe. Give me a break.
- [11:48]
Adam Butler
I know the weird thing about vibe.
- [11:50]
Ben Hunt
It really hit me. Yeah.
- [11:52]
Adam Butler
Thank you, thank you. And, you know, the whole vibe thing, really, it drives me bonkers, actually, just how dismissive the classical economists are. Or the technocrats are on this idea of Vibe. Because what this Vibe session. I love Kyla's term.
- [12:11]
Ben Hunt
Yeah, I do too.
- [12:12]
Adam Butler
What this concept to me reflects is a clear and growing disconnect between the metrics that we use to measure human flourishing and the reality on the ground that reflects true human flourishing. And so, you know, when the technocrats or the politicians gaslight citizens about the fact that they feel precarious or they don't feel like they're able to participate in all the opportunities that the economy has to offer, et cetera, instead of, you know, looking more closely at where some of their measurement criteria may have gone off the rails and where that off the rails has compounded over many, many years. So we're now like so far off the rails, many of us can't even see where the rails were. Right. I just think that's so profoundly destructive. And obviously we're seeing that being externalized politically in so many ways, in so many obvious ways in the current moment.
- [13:20]
Ben Hunt
Well, two observations about this, Adam and Matt, and this will get us right back to Adam's piece. So the first observation I'll make is that words like poverty, all of our words, have lost so much meaning. So if you call every political enemy a terrorist or a traitor, those words lose their impact. If every international episode of war is a genocide, that word genocide loses all of its meaning. If every thing that kills people is now a weapon of mass destruction, then those words, they don't mean anything anymore. And I, I believe so vehemently that the effort, and it is an effort to drain words of their meaning is intentional. And this is where it's going to get Back to your point of your note, Adam, the big point. I see all of this, the draining of meaning from our words, the technocratic policy set that has been embraced by every political party and every institution of power over the last, I don't know, 30 years. It's all profoundly anti human. And I believe that that anti human impulse has been accelerated in the last couple of years around AI. Not that AI is itself anti human. You and I, Adam, we're both big believers in the there's actually pro human, profoundly pro human aspects that AI can help us capture and augment. But I absolutely believe that the forces of state and oligarchy that have captured AI and are moving it forward in a very specific way are also profoundly anti human. So that's why your most recent piece about the missing children that hit home for me so dramatically as well, because they're what you're describing is the epitome of anti humanness. And that's where I'd love to for you to describe for our audience. Most of them have probably read it, but a lot of them haven't. I want you to describe what you're talking about when you talk about a bureau of missing children.
- [16:21]
Adam Butler
Yeah. So the idea is that there is a threshold below which a rational actor, you know, to use the, the conventions of the technocrats themselves will acknowledge that it is almost impossible for all of the things that are necessary to come together at once to form a family are not going to come together for them. And so I think what Mike originally tried to do was define that level and he did some really good calculus on that and he identified the core pieces that are involved. Right. So what's involved? Well, in a modern context, you need, first of all, you've got to have a source of income, so you've got to have a career. How do you get a career? Well, typically to participate in the modern economy, it means you had to go to college or you had to go to university, which means you, in many cases you've got a meaningful amount of student debt.
- [17:24]
Matt
Right.
- [17:24]
Adam Butler
So you've got to service that you've also got. You need to either buy or rent a home in or near an area that you can get work that is commensurate with the training that you've, you've gotten and the debt that you accumulated to get that training. You also typically, in order to service a mortgage or rent near the urban settings that represent, you know, over 50% of those types of job opportunities, typically both spouses need to work. So if both spouses need to work, then you need child care.
- [18:07]
Matt
Right.
- [18:08]
Adam Butler
So what is the cost of childcare for let's say two children?
- [18:13]
Matt
Right.
- [18:14]
Adam Butler
You've also got to have transportation to get around, you've got to have health insurance to cover the potential health catastrophes or just normal life health challenges of this nascent family. Right. So, so the question is like when you add all these things up, does the, does that the typical two income family, are they able to in expectation or even in ambition exceed the threshold of that cost bundle?
- [18:49]
Matt
Right.
- [18:49]
Adam Butler
And there was a bunch of sort of weird things that are not captured by traditional economic measures that kind of fell out of that.
- [18:58]
Ben Hunt
And I want to add something to that, Adam. So it's, we're three guys talking about this. One of the things that really struck me about the whole Mike Green, you know, debacle or what have you was it's all Guys, it's all, all guys of a certain age, you know, phenotype, you know, arguing with each other. Yep. And I, you know, my wife has a career or had a career. I've got four daughters. There is a dynamic. So there's the issue of, well, how do you find your mate for raising a family? So there's an element of that as well that just adds to the level of difficulty. And then there we can, it often falls out of the rational actor paradigm, but there are a whole set of other, I'll call them issues or considerations for the woman who bears the child in terms of that, the actual, the bearing of a child and its, its impact on all those other attributes that you talked about, you know, the education, the job, the, where that goes from here. So I just wanted to throw that in there because that was another aspect of this whole debate that I'll say, kind of wrinkled and you addressed pretty well.
- [20:42]
Adam Butler
I'm so glad you raised that because it was never the, the, the thesis that the financial challenges are the only challenges or frictions. And it was, it's not even that those are the primary challenges or frictions. You know, like, I don't have anything strong to say about that.
- [21:04]
Matt
Right.
- [21:05]
Adam Butler
I'm just saying that this is one of the contributing factors.
- [21:09]
Matt
Right.
- [21:10]
Adam Butler
But the problem in the, in the modern discourse is that if you don't cover every conceivable angle on a thesis, then you're getting attacked on all of the angles that you left out. It's like you've got to write, you know, a multi thousand page PhD thesis covering every conceivable cause, effect, relationship with all the potential models that you might bring to bear. And like, no, like I did my best to harden the thesis that I was putting forth, which was mostly a financial thesis, but I got contended with by, by people from all sides on what I, on what I didn't discuss. Yeah, no, absolutely right.
- [21:50]
Ben Hunt
And in everything I'm bringing up, it, it only adds to your notion of precariousness. Right. It's just the, the, the tightrope that one must walk today to raise children the way you want to raise them. It's just, it's just, it's just crazy. A tiny thread to walk and you're over a real pit these days.
- [22:17]
Adam Butler
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [22:19]
Matt
Adam, you and I actually think this, this bears worth calling out even more detail because of the point Ben was raising there too. You came up with this basic participation budget. And I'm kind of curious. Before Adam's brain, before this went public. You come up with a basic participation budget. You Monte Carlo test it, you try to think through. Because in my mind, you're trying to think through these defenses of what the technocrat take on some of this point is and where they're going to try to shoot holes in you. I'm curious how you felt about doing that Monte Carlo analysis and building out from the ground up before it was in public and now how you feel about it afterwards.
- [22:59]
Adam Butler
Well, the original article, I leaned a little bit more on, on Mike's original math and I think to be fair, that some of the critics did raise some good points. Right. Like you're not a median. The median household income counts a lot of households that, that you wouldn't. That are not in the family formation.
- [23:29]
Ben Hunt
Right.
- [23:29]
Adam Butler
So I wanted to give credence to those valid points. And so, you know, someone said, well, yeah, you can measure the, the expected income of a two person household, assuming that you've got two median, two people of median incomes that are coming together. But even that wasn't quite right.
- [23:51]
Matt
Right.
- [23:52]
Adam Butler
What you have coming together is a woman of childbearing age. So somewhere between kind of 18 and call it, I went as high as 49, though I think that gave the benefit of the doubt to the naysayers a little bit. But I leaned into that. And then the distribution of the ages, the typical age gap between a woman of childbearing age and spouse. So I modeled that as a distribution as well. And then I also modeled the third dimension of the distribution, which is the actual wealth distribution for men and women. And so there was this like joint distributional modeling exercise. And it was, I was gratified to see that the model actually came out so that the median household income was almost exactly the actual measured median household income for two person households. Right. Kind of made sense. But now I also know what the distribution of that household income looks like. Right. And so I can, I can add up the cost side and say, okay, well, it costs about $120,000 a year to put together the basket of expenses required to have the bundle.
- [25:13]
Matt
Right.
- [25:13]
Adam Butler
Of expenses required to have a family. I can then back out the pre tax income required for that and then determine what percentage of the probability density of this distribution that I've just modeled is below that threshold.
- [25:29]
Matt
Right.
- [25:29]
Adam Butler
And so it turned out that that Approximately kind of 60% are below that threshold. Right. So I didn't really have, I didn't really know going into that latter, more comprehensive exercise what was going to fall out of that. I think obviously the total household income number on average was higher than I had originally modeled. And then Mike modeled. And then that I guess motivated me to think about, well, what are some of the other expense categories that are kind of fixed expenses, but that Mike didn't bother to include because he didn't need to, because the modeled income that he'd used was sufficiently low that you could kind of just lean on the cost of childcare, the cost of a home, and the cost of healthcare, and that already swamped the average income. Right. So I added in the cost of transportation, the cost of servicing student debt, and I think that was it, actually. And then already we're into the fact that you need $150,000, $151,000 pre tax income to service all of those. You know, that household budget.
- [26:48]
Ben Hunt
Hey, what's up, y'? All?
- [26:48]
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- [26:52]
Ben Hunt
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- [26:53]
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- [26:54]
Ben Hunt
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- [26:56]
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- [27:15]
Ben Hunt
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- [27:29]
Adam Butler
Did I burn down the joy?
- [27:30]
Ben Hunt
I don't think so. Then snuggle up with the Polar Express.
- [27:33]
Adam Butler
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- [27:38]
Ben Hunt
Very big Christmas treat this season.
- [27:40]
Adam Butler
There's something for everyone with Hulu on.
- [27:42]
Ben Hunt
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- [27:50]
Matt
Is this where financial nihilists come from? Ben, where's your brain going on this?
- [27:56]
Ben Hunt
Well, the brain goes. When I was reading this, when it went a couple of different directions, one is, and I even hate to use this word, right, ergodicity, Right? So, I mean, because, I mean, it's a horrible word and nobody. I mean, I'll speak for myself. I mean, I always have to think, okay, what the hell does that word actually mean?
- [28:12]
Matt
Not some celebs about to jump out of the corner and tackle you.
- [28:15]
Ben Hunt
Right, right, right, right.
- [28:16]
Adam Butler
But, but, but.
- [28:20]
Ben Hunt
The reason I'm using That word is that I think there's such a meaningful difference between the experience of an individual and the experience of the distribution. And that there's a, I'll call it a tenuous relationship between the two, the experience of the individual. And where I'm going with this is that for an individual, and by individual I mean a family, you know, you know, an atomic unit, a man and a woman, right? Yeah. So we're going to have kids and this is what we got to do. For us to not feel precarious with this, I, I think that it has gotten more difficult over time in terms of the individual experience. What do I mean by that? I mean that so many aspects of our economy are driven by efficiencies of capital to extract more and more from the elements of the experience that we want to associate with having children. What do I mean by that is I remember speaking personally, interviews with my wife, experience. And all I need is that we have enough money so that I don't have to worry if we have to buy the kids Little league uniform. And I kind of laughed or chuckled at that because we always, I think for those of us of a certain age, we remember, oh yeah, Little League uniforms. And she remembers as a young girl that that was an issue. Right. For their family and for her meaning being not poor, not precarious means I've got enough, I don't have to worry about buying the kids Little League uniform. Well, ask any parent today what it means for their children to play sports and that expense of playing sports. It's not buying a little league uniform. Right. It's often and kind of, it can be thousands of dollars a year, right. For that, for what used to be, I can afford a little uniform having a pet, right? It used to be okay, yeah, you've got the puppy, the dog, you've got the local vet and there's an expense, you got to buy the dog. That's fine. You can't go into a vet today and come out without the bill starting at $400. You just can't. And I do believe that there's been a rationalization of the veterinary industry, there's been a rationalization of the youth sports industry to extract more and more rents from those services to families who want to have children. Right. It's just like prime feeding ground for the roll ups and the rationalizations that we have. Because if you're a parent, you'll pay whatever you fucking need to to, to save your dog or to buy that, to give your child that experience of Little League or for their sports. So on an individual basis there's both the individual experience versus the distribution. And I think that all of us, every individual is going to have that precarious experience. And the industry rationalizations have gone after the distribution saying oh my God, there's so much money that we can suck out of this. So again, I, I, yeah, yeah, I, I think, I think it's, it's even, you're presenting this atom and people are saying, oh my God, this is so high. I'm, I read it, I say, well, I believe in scratching the surface of it. Agree, agree, agree.
- [32:45]
Adam Butler
And you know this. So just, you mentioned ergodicity, you mentioned rationalization or kind of roll ups or, or you know, the monetization of compassion or, or ambition, right?
- [32:58]
Ben Hunt
Yes.
- [32:59]
Adam Butler
And then there's, there's also this. Are you familiar with Robert Frank's work on Darwin's wedge and, and positional goods?
- [33:09]
Ben Hunt
No. No.
- [33:10]
Matt
Tell us more.
- [33:11]
Ben Hunt
Yes.
- [33:11]
Adam Butler
So, so Bob Frank wrote this book in the mid-2010s called the Darwood Economy. This is where I first stumbled on this concept. And in the opening chapter he describes a couple of examples in the animal kingdom. Right. So one is the, is the bull elk. So elks have these massive antlers and they compete by bashing each other in the head to lay claim to mates. Right? So what happens evolutionarily is you've, you know, those with larger antlers have an evolutionary advantage. They get access to more baits. So over time the antler, the average antler size grows and grows and grows.
- [33:56]
Matt
Right?
- [33:57]
Adam Butler
This is advantageous for the individual relative to the group. But having massive antlers is, is enormously disadvantageous for all elk. You know, majorly screws up their neck, it makes them easier prey for predators, they can't get through the woods as easily, etc. Right. So you've got this like this very naturally competitive situation that, where you've got constructive competition leading to negative outcomes for everybody. They, they use it, he uses another example of, well, I think it's like bull seals, but you know where you've got these massive bull seals in the Antarctic and they're also competing for mates and the largest ones end up getting the mate and therefore they get, they grow larger and larger and larger and they're just totally unwieldy, they can't move. It's a miserable life, but it just happens naturally through selection. And then he shows how this also applies to many human decisions. Right. Like imagine a group of humans with access to credit who are looking For a home. You want a home in a safe, good school district, right. Every. There's a scarce. It's a scarce resource. You're measuring the value of the school.
- [35:21]
Ben Hunt
Right.
- [35:21]
Adam Butler
Relative to other schools. Even a bunch of parents who are willing to desecrate their fiscal balance sheet to whatever extent necessary borrow up to their absolute maximum to get the best house. What happens? Well, that individual gets the house in the neighborhood they want, but the cost of shelter for everybody goes up. It's exactly the same phenomenon in kids sports, right, where you know, the competition heats up, but now everybody's gotta go to five morning hockey practices, everybody's gotta buy 5,000 bucks worth of hockey equipment or, you know, judo equipment, name it, right. In order to even have a chance for your child to be competitive in this domain. And if you look around, the presence of these Darwin's wedges, coupled with access to more and more credit and ways to access credit on different types of goods leads to just, you know, a higher cost of living, more resource extraction. Just everybody ends up worse off just competing for this, you know, scarcity goods.
- [36:39]
Ben Hunt
Well, I'm so glad you brought this up because housing was where I was going to go next. Right. Because the way we solve in most Western countries for the child care problem, the child care expense problem is through public education, right? That's how we solve it. And so. And to solve for it, to your point, you have to buy a home in a certain district because that's how the schools are paid for through the homeowner, the property taxes in your area. So the way we fund it, the way we fund childcare in this country is through property taxes on homes. That's how we fund for childcare. And so you've. All of our home prices are a reflection of childcare, period, full stop to exactly your point. So I'm so glad you brought that up. And the other point I bring up because it does require credit and maxing out your credit to get that home credit. And the precarity of debt is exactly what drives your overall family precarity, right? It's the debt. You know, as Warren Buffett's old line saying. Yeah. I mean, debts like that spear coming out of the steering wheel, you know, you drive more carefully, but if you had a pothole, you're done for. Well, that's where I've been in that situation all my life. Right. You must embrace debt in order to provide my view for your family on the housing, slash childcare, slash education point. And let's not even get started talking about, you know, post secondary education, which is also purely debt driven. Purely debt driven. It's debt is that source of precarity. And when there's, when that, when that credit starts to be withdrawn, as is absolutely happening today for vast swaths of the consumer economy, then that's when the precarity starts to bite.
- [39:12]
Adam Butler
Definitely.
- [39:14]
Matt
Can we talk? Because it's, I'm tying this to the credit side of things and access to credit. Adam, you were writing too about the hidden subsidy, basically the role, Graham, all the other ways that people will overextend, not just themselves, but other basically immediate family members to make this whole thing work. And I feel like that further obscures this data in a way that I don't see many people talking about this. Can you explain that angle too?
- [39:41]
Adam Butler
Well, yeah, this actually really frustrates me because, you know, in, in the, in the technocratic.
- [39:49]
Ben Hunt
Frame.
- [39:52]
Adam Butler
Everything is, everything must be measured. Right. But, but because of that, what's, what's not measured doesn't count.
- [39:59]
Matt
Right, Right.
- [40:00]
Ben Hunt
Yeah.
- [40:00]
Adam Butler
And so, you know, you want to measure all these things and be able to make the case that everybody's, everybody's so much better off. Which, you know, I, I don't dispute is true.
- [40:11]
Ben Hunt
Right.
- [40:12]
Adam Butler
Like to, to capitalism, such as it is, or like free markets, they have for sure improved everybody's life in profound ways over time. Right. But that doesn't mean that we have channeled markets in the most productive way we might have and that the externalities from those markets should not be contended with.
- [40:38]
Ben Hunt
Right.
- [40:39]
Adam Butler
And so like you've got this unmeasured liability or asset, depending on how you measure it. But you've got your, these grandparents who are liquidating their time asset right now. In many cases they would, they're, they enjoy it. This is what, how they want to spend their, their time in retirement. Right? For sure. I'm not discounting that. I'm just saying that because we don't measure, doesn't show up in any of the statistics or it doesn't help guide any of the conclusions. And there it does play a very specific role economically insofar as if a grandparent cares for the child, that is one less unit of demand for child care. And simple economics 101 says it, you know, when you remove that unit of demand, then the cost curve goes lower for all other consumers of that commodity. Right. And so these grandparents are playing a very meaningful role. But the, the free market zealots are claiming the success as their own. Right. And not acknowledging that this only happens because there's a non free market mechanism that acts as a very meaningful release valve that allows the free market to function, even ads precaritively as it does. Right. So I just think part of the conversation needs to bring the things that are off balance sheet on balance sheet so we can have an honest conversation about what matters, not just what we're counting.
- [42:25]
Ben Hunt
Amen, brother. Can I make an observation here? So there in the formal definition of what a social animal is, right. And there are four species on Earth, probably four of the most successful species on earth that are definitionally social animals called eusocial EU social animals. Three of them are insects, the termite, the ant and the bee. And the fourth is human. Now there are very specific definitions, attributes of what it means to be a technically social animal, which is why most mammalian species don't fit for one reason or another. The the aspect that I spend most of my attention on is that social animals are immersed in intra species communication. Right? So that's the pheromones of the insect species. It's the words of and the messaging of the human species. But one of the definitions, and it's the one that I thought about the least, that is exactly what you're talking about, Adam, and is why a lot of mammalian species don't fit the definition is that intergenerational care for the brood. Now all these definitions use words like brood because insects are the most typical social animals. But it's a very rare thing in the animal kingdom for non parents, non direct parents to care for the brood. It absolutely happens in termites, ants, bees and humans. Right. And again it's why a lot of mammalian species aren't social animals because they the grandparents are nowhere involved. There's no care for the brood outside of the direct parents. So what you're describing, Adam, it's not just an off balance sheet that needs to be brought in. It's not just, it's not tangential. It is absolutely core to what makes the human species as successful as we are. Right. And it's such an important point and again I'm so glad you brought it up.
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Adam Butler
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Ben Hunt
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Adam Butler
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- [46:10]
Matt
Weird counterexample maybe, but differentiate for me, Adam, like if we were going to do this analysis, I don't know, a hundred years ago and I'm a farmer in the Midwest and I'm thinking about my kids working on the farm and everything else versus having help from my grandparents getting the kids the lacrosse practice or something today. How would this data set have evolved over time alongside of our understandings?
- [46:34]
Adam Butler
Yeah, a lot of people sort of pointed to the fact that this is almost like a postmodern conversation. Right. I mean if you go back 100 years, you, you don't have children to self actualize.
- [46:54]
Matt
Right.
- [46:55]
Adam Butler
You have children to subsist.
- [47:00]
Matt
Right.
- [47:00]
Adam Butler
To to help harvest the crop, to help care for you when you get old, not that you get very old. Right. So like it's a completely different calculus for, for why you have children back in the, the early 1900s or like really, really sort of pre industrial revolution.
- [47:24]
Matt
Right.
- [47:27]
Adam Butler
I don't think we're, at least, I'm not sure we want to have a conversation about whether like what the, what the economic utility of children is or at least that wasn't the, the conversation that I was trying to have. I mean, I think we can have a strong argument that there's substantial economic utility to having children. But I think that utility, the source of that utility definitely changes over time.
- [48:00]
Ben Hunt
Yeah. I mean there's a phrase for this called the demographic transition. Right. Where having children, it becomes less about old age insurance. The demographic transition, why you have a lot of kids in I'll call it more typically agrarian societies is two things. One, it's lifespan of the kids and two, it's that's your old age insurance. So what you've seen in the west and now also in countries where this transition has also happened, so China, India, examples of this, especially China. But as soon as there is a old age insurance, as soon as there is Social Security put in place, that has an impact and also just child mortality rates. So there's a name for the phenomenon you're describing, Matt. And it, I think we are, it's not that it's a postmodern conversation we're having, but it is a. Post industrial revolution, post post modern, you know, in not in the sense of nothing matters anymore, but in the sense of the role of the state and technology and healthcare.
- [49:30]
Matt
Okay, split the difference then on that for me, Adam, between then 100 years ago to like 40 years ago. I'm thinking of Chris Abdel Messiah wrote a piece or had a, had some tweets about this too. You know what I'm talking about where he was like, I text my mom.
- [49:45]
Adam Butler
And I was like, I did read that. And you know, I think he raises a fair point, right? That the middle class has always been at least partially defined by that constant feeling of precarity.
- [49:58]
Matt
Right.
- [50:00]
Adam Butler
I think what I have oriented toward is trying to have more of a conversation about what might be instead of what has been. You know, I don't know if you, you're familiar with, I know you're familiar with the Rand Corp, but this particular study, Rancor published a study in 2018 and then an updated in 2023 and they analyzed the how much richer the average American would be in 2023 than they are if the distributional mechanics of 1975 were still in place in 2023 and concluded that the average. Sorry, that there would be $3.9 trillion in extra income flowing to citizens in 2023 than flowed to citizens in 2023 because of how wealth is, how wealth flows through the economy today versus back in 1975. And the total cumulative gap in what citizens might or households might have earned over that time period is $79 trillion. This is rancor. This is not like some, you know, ultra progressive think tank. This is like the most centrist, clinical, scientific, engineering oriented think tank that you might invoke right in the U.S. so yes, it's true that the middle class has, has often had it hard and had to make trade offs. But what's missing is that there is, there's the opportunity for, for the middle class to not have to make nearly the amount of trade offs that they currently are required to make. That was true back in 1990 when I was growing up with boomer parents and it is vastly more true now. And it's just a matter of the political choices that we want to make and what we want to prioritize in our society. There's plenty of wealth to go around. How do we want to channel that wealth in order to achieve the long term objectives that we have?
- [52:42]
Ben Hunt
Let me give you a specific example, Matt, of one of the aspects of what Adam is talking about. So one of the primary engines of both aggregate economic growth and I'll call it lifting the individual family above the precarity line has been labor mobility. So when Adam's talking about opportunity, if there weren't economic opportunities in your local area, and this is, I think, for my money, this has been the greatest engine of American economic growth, both in the aggregate and the individual has been the ability to. You pick up stakes and you move, you go to where the jobs are. And that I cannot overemphasize what an important contribution labor mobility has had in this country. So household formation and labor mobility, you can pick up stakes and you can move for a better life. One of the real, I think, pernicious impacts, and it first really hit with the gfc, the great financial crisis, was that if you owned a home, you were stuck. So our dynamics with home ownership and the use of credit, the precarity you take on by taking a level of credit that it is much more difficult today, I think it's really an order of magnitude more difficult today to pick up stakes and move to a place where the jobs are. Instead, we've got a new sorting hat for labor mobility or labor immobility, and that is our higher education system where you've got this narrow period of time where you've got to find a mate, find a job, and find the place where your job can work. And Matt, you're nodding your head on this because, I mean, we've lived this. We've all lived this. I think you probably more than the mere Adam because you're younger than we are, Matt. But that compression, the limitation of opportunity, as Adam is saying, to make the choices that allow you to choose how you're going to make this work, they have been shrunk and narrowed so dramatically in the aggregate and on the individual level, that to me is the difference between today and 40 years ago or even 20 years ago. It's exactly what Adam is saying. Your. Your range of options to make, choices to make it work, have just compressed so enormously.
- [55:58]
Adam Butler
Yeah. I mean, the threshold to, to, to own or rent around the sort of top 20 major urban centers where all the jobs are.
- [56:06]
Ben Hunt
Right.
- [56:07]
Adam Butler
Like the threshold is just so large, in addition to servicing your student debt and all the other aspirational expenses around family formation, etc. And then you compound, like you said, Ben, the fact that you've got all these homeowners that were underwater for 10 or 15 years after the financial crisis, and then you've got another whole cohort of homeowners that that's squeaked in a. A very, very large mortgage when interest rates were very Low and interest rates then subsequently went up and now they're, they're, they're kind of locked in because they can't afford to own a home anywhere near as large or close to where they might want to work at the same monthly expense if they were to do it. Finance.
- [56:55]
Matt
Right.
- [56:55]
Adam Butler
So there's all these weird craps.
- [56:57]
Ben Hunt
Yeah, right, Right.
- [57:00]
Matt
It's wild and it's, it's extra wild. As somebody who's lived, you know, my wife and I decided to put Chicago and the Northeast behind us to come back to northeastern Pennsylvania because we had the opportunity to do so between local work and nursing for her. And you know, my job allows me to be mobile post Covid especially. So it was why would we pay these prices and penalize ourselves with debt and all these other service costs?
- [57:27]
Adam Butler
Yeah. And I think we should acknowledge that there are some release valves.
- [57:31]
Ben Hunt
Right.
- [57:31]
Adam Butler
Like the work at home. Sure is, is a nice, that's definitely a meaningful release valve. I'm not sure it benefits a material proportion of the population. Nor can it, nor can it difference.
- [57:48]
Ben Hunt
Yeah.
- [57:48]
Matt
Yeah. Right person, right place in life. Sure. But most people know. Absolutely bizarre artifact. Can we talk about. And I'm really happy you did the. Because I wanted to ask you, Adam, about the progression of. How would we think about this a hundred years ago? How do we think about it 50 or 25 years ago? How today? Because I read your piece and I go policy now. How do we think about this going forward? Because the antlers are getting big, man. They're getting big. This is getting scary.
- [58:20]
Adam Butler
So I, I've got two pieces that I've been kind of crafting. One which is going to really appeal, I think, to Ben about basically the streetlight effect that we've been living under where like we've got things we can measure and things that matter and they almost don't overlap anymore and all the problems that that causes and then negative types of competition, Darwin's wedge, Moloch, all that kind of stuff. But then there's another lengthier piece which is more of a policy prescription piece. And it's informed to a meaningful extent by a new report that Michael Malbison just published on capital allocation trends in corporate America. By this study on the Rand, by the RAND Corp. And by the most recent update of the annual study by the Society of Civil Engineers describing the infrastructure debt. And then also heavily influenced by the work of Maria Mazzucado, Michael Kramer, Joseph Stiglitz with the idea of leaning into this operation warp speed type mission based economic policy. Right Like, I think we've been operating under this, this, I call it kind of the neoliberal framework. But, but that word has been so diluted by like 15 different definitions. But it's, it's not useful anymore. Yeah, it doesn't mean anything. But it's the general idea that humans should not be using our own judgment to set the direction of society or community, that markets are vastly superior to human judgment in every conceivable domain of human life. And so we've set about since Thatcher probably dismantling the judicial, governance and decision making apparatuses that were in place. Call it kind of FDR maybe put some of that in place and, but you know, institutions that are not totally captured by private sector interests and not captured by the technocratic state that is just really trying to perpetuate its own existence. Right. What we need is visionary leaders again, who are channeling the ambitions of citizens to try to build great things again. You know, like we had imagination in the 50s and 60s, 60s that brought us to the moon. That brought about DARPA and other amazing state funded science and research organizations that ended up actually being the source of a very substantial portion of the fundamental science and tech that we've been commercializing so successfully over the last 30 years. The idea is, I think we just lost this imagination. And what we need is a visionary leader to say, no, you know, we're going to cure cancer in the next 15 years or we're going to, we're going to put, we're going to mine asteroids or we're going to, you know, like pick your major objective and then unleash the private sector in pursuit of that objective, with the government guaranteeing some proportion of the purchase of whatever comes out of that.
- [62:26]
Matt
Right.
- [62:26]
Adam Butler
Like Operation Warp speed worked because there had already been fundamental science done in this case mostly in Germany, that, that came up with this MRNA MRNA vaccine. The technology was commercialized jointly between Germany and the US through pharmaceutical companies and the. But, but it happened so quickly because the government both provided for a diminished regulation that reduced liability. But it also said, we will buy whatever you're able to create. We guaranteed the purchase of it. Right. And then it allowed the private sector to commercialize and do what it does best, which is find the most efficient ways to scale. Right. And do all of the other things that it does. But there was a mission that was conjured by leaders that motivated the private sector to move in directions that were beneficial to humanity. Instead we've got a, you know, this free market zealotry operating that says the market only knows best and the consumers are always rational actors that don't operate with hyperbolic discounting where all they want to do really is feed their appetites on a day to day basis and they're not thinking about what society or themselves or their family is going to be like in 10 or 20 or 50 years.
- [63:59]
Ben Hunt
I've got a different view Adam, because I recognize the power and it moves me to when you speak about this I think my issue is that I'm not going to agree on what your notion of what a visionary leader with a plan for the betterment of humanity. I may not, may not agree with what other people think is that visionary leader because I think a lot of people would say that Donald Trump is that visionary leader that yes there are elements of the free market uber alles post but other aspects he's saying nope, there's going to be a state directed to do X or do Y or Elon Musk is that person saying no, we're going to go to Mars and we're going to do this right. I'll be damned if I want to have Elon Musk as my visionary leader. Right. Yeah. I'm just saying I'm out amount. Right. But, but, but why wouldn't it be Elon Musk as being the so, so I'm, I, I, I think that in a mass society the risk and danger of visionary leader is outweighs the potential enormous benefits you're describing. So how, how would I get to try to achieve some of the benefits you're describing? I'd actually propose. And, and I there, there, there are problems with what I want to say too. Right. But a profound decentralization combined with an infrastructure that lets lots of experiments actually happen. I think that's very hard to implement from the top down especially if you living in a world where other countries don't have that approach. So I get why what I'm describing is as unlikely to lead. That's why I'm so down on top down decisions policy initiatives. Well I feel like where if I've got anything to say it's on a bottom up perspective to try to and honestly I think that a lot of humanity for a long time was I just want the government to leave me alone and I feel like that is as much as we can do as anything and so when you ask how do you get out of this I say I want to find my pack so that I want to reclaim those bonds of off balance sheet connection so that if, yeah oh if one of you two guys had an issue, you know, you'd call me up and I'm going to help if I can and I really mean that. I wouldn't feel bad about calling on one of you to help financially, emotionally, socially, whatever that means. It's, I'm more interested in finding these. Non state, non market connections and finding ways to, to encourage those, including using policy to try to encourage those. That's what I mean by decentralization. You know, it's as simple as, all right, I'd give a million dollar capital gains tax exemption. Right. Your first million dollars of capital gains. There's no taxes on that. Yep, none. And over that. Look, it's, it's, you know, your usual ordinary income rates. Because I want a thousand millionaires more than I want one billionaire.
- [68:19]
Adam Butler
Yep.
- [68:20]
Ben Hunt
But it's things like that that I see as kind of small building block policy initiatives to encourage decentralized and bottom up community building more than I want the visionary leader with a moonshot because I don't trust that the moonshots not going to be an Elon or a Donald. So.
- [68:45]
Adam Butler
Yeah, and I mean really good points. Right. I think the challenge is that we've kind of run the experiment that you're proposing a little bit.
- [68:55]
Matt
Right.
- [68:56]
Adam Butler
Like Silicon Valley is kind of this decentralized experiment factory that is outrageously well funded. And you know, what's come out of Silicon Valley over the last like 25, 30 years has mostly been exploitative technologies that earn extraordinary outsized profits from immiserating an increasingly sizable portion of the population. Right. And I think that's because like free markets are going to, to optimize on the most profitable, not the most good.
- [69:46]
Matt
Right.
- [69:47]
Adam Butler
Now look, what you're saying is I don't know who gets to decide the most good. And I think that's a totally fair, fair point. Right. But I think what we, what we've seen is that we've asked the markets to optimize on what's the most good. And, and here we are.
- [69:59]
Ben Hunt
Right.
- [70:00]
Adam Butler
So I don't, I feel like we've run that experiment and I also think maybe the, the strong leader is not really. Are you familiar with the Taiwan governance model at all?
- [70:13]
Ben Hunt
Pretty much, yeah. Yes. Yeah.
- [70:15]
Adam Butler
Right.
- [70:16]
Ben Hunt
Yeah.
- [70:16]
Matt
Say one.
- [70:17]
Ben Hunt
Right.
- [70:17]
Adam Butler
So, so maybe a model where, you know, we're using technology to, to pull and engage citizens about what their long term goals and priorities are, facilitating small, small, diverse conversation, you know, discussion groups, you know, this type of grassroots orientation, but then using the federal balance sheet to, to, to empower it in A way.
- [70:47]
Ben Hunt
But anyway, I hear you and I think that works on a nation the size of Taiwan. I think it's harder to work on a nation size of the United States. I think what I'm describing is less of, you know what I want. I want a civic religion based on. I'll call it the founding principles. It's liberty and justice for all, autonomy and the like. That often gets warped into treating capitalism as that civic religion. And that's not what I mean. I'm looking for ties that bind along a shared sense of meaning that is human and family oriented. Human oriented. That didn't. That. That sounds highfalutin and the like, but it's. I think it's what. It's that notion of a shared identity that is separate from the balance sheet as you're describing that we have to have. And I think the shared notions of identity that are being presented to us are identity that is. It is again anti human because it. It's a more effective way for the consolidation of power of institutions that don't give a damn about humanness. So I hear you, Adam.
- [72:31]
Adam Butler
In group trust, in group reciprocity, you know, in group.
- [72:36]
Ben Hunt
Civic.
- [72:37]
Adam Butler
Civic obligation or civic buy in.
- [72:40]
Matt
Right.
- [72:41]
Adam Butler
And then so if you kind of model this out right now you've got like kind of trust clusters, right?
- [72:49]
Ben Hunt
Yes. Y.
- [72:50]
Adam Butler
That. That are going to be now. Now you've got intra group competition like assuming finite resources. Finite like the.
- [73:00]
Ben Hunt
It.
- [73:01]
Adam Butler
It kind of from an incentive standpoint. Gear game. Theoretically, I think you kind of end up in. In the same. In the same place. Right? Yep. Like we. It just. You've got all these different ways you end up in races to the bottom. And the question is like what is the third attractor that can get us out of like leaving too much to free markets or the strong. The strong, you know, authoritarian rule. Both of those extremes are dystopias. Right?
- [73:39]
Ben Hunt
I agree. Adam.
- [73:41]
Adam Butler
Architecture.
- [73:42]
Ben Hunt
Here's what I'm trying to figure out. So I loved your project warp speed analogy because I thought. And I was so totally wrong about this. I thought that Covid would be that third attractor. I thought that a disease that killed a million Americans, more than a million Americans. I thought that would be the thing. Okay, here's the common enemy. We come together and we fight that. And I was so wrong.
- [74:12]
Adam Butler
Right.
- [74:13]
Ben Hunt
That it was the opposite of bringing us together. And I think that's why I have this aversion to the notion of the visionary leader that's going to provide that third attractor that brings us together. Because we've, the three of us are old enough to remember when there was a plague that hit us, and our response to it has only driven us farther apart.
- [74:41]
Adam Butler
Yeah, Adam, you wrote the note.
- [74:43]
Matt
You've seen the reaction. You're having conversations like this, which I think is one of the most important things we can do right now is to have these conversations, talk about how messy the policy path looks forward, but at least we're pointing at this problem. What do you hope happens next with this? Who else should be hearing these ideas? Where are you hoping this gets spread?
- [75:02]
Adam Butler
Yeah, I mean, I understand that Mike is actually having conversations with politicians, people in think tanks, et cetera, who write things, get read by people who make policy. You know, I don't, I don't hold out a lot of hope in the near term for, for this to go anywhere. But I, I think, to Ben's point, right, like, I, I know a lot of, I have a lot of friends who I have deep respect for who, who I chat about these topics with privately and for the most part have kind of thrown up their hands and said, yeah, man, I'm just gonna, like, take my ball and go home. Right? Like, I don't.
- [75:52]
Ben Hunt
I've had these conversations too, Adam.
- [75:54]
Adam Butler
Yep. Right. Like, I don't see any, any path forward. So, like, I'm not gonna put myself out there. It might impair my relationships with potential clients or it might offend potential, you know, business relationships and what have you. So, like, why, why put myself out there and cause potential friction when I am confident it's kind of. It's not going to go anywhere? And, you know, I genuinely sympathize with that. And I think, honestly, I, I feel like I don't have any choice. Like, I am frothing energetically with the desire to have these conversations rationally. They don't serve me very well professionally. But I can't help it. You know, I'm passionate about it. I'm interested in it. I want to connect with other people like you guys. I want to have good faith discussion and sometimes debate about how we can facilitate a good path forward that we can all feel good about that won't necessarily devolve into some other, worse race to the bottom. And, you know, I personally think that Ben's widening gyre is the guiding framework here. My personal view is that we've sold everybody that what we've been practicing is capitalism hasn't been capitalism. It's been cronyism or corporatocracy or some horrible bastardization of capitalism. It hasn't worked out well for most people. At least that's their perception. That's the vibes. Because we're, you know, I don't think that we're measuring what matters. As we've already discussed, people seeing they capitalism doesn't serve me, are going to point at the opposite of capitalism, think it's socialism, and, and we're going to get some kind of Mamdani style socialist in power in 2028 or maybe 2032. It's going to make things vastly worse even than they currently are. And that the opposite side of that is going to be some handmaid's tale fundamentalist Christian orientation that falls out of that when we realize it's not the economic model that's wrong, it's our value system that's wrong. And we're going to impose some kind of, you know, hard stakes religion framework on things. So, you know, I don't hold out a lot of positive hope, but I do think it still matters to try to, to put out in the universe potential choices we could make that might be better. And I don't, I can't help myself. This is the way I'm wired.
- [78:53]
Ben Hunt
So Adam, there's nothing more important than what Cormac McCarthy called carrying the fire. Right? So this is the end of the country for old men as the dream. His father is there carrying the fire to the campsite at campsite ahead.
- [79:11]
Adam Butler
I had goosebumps.
- [79:13]
Ben Hunt
You can't choose the time you live in. And this is the times that the three of us live in. And so what we have to do is we have to carry the fire and it recognizing that the, the lighting of the bonfire is at some point in the future, I don't think I'll, I, and I'm not saying this in a negative way, I don't think I'll live to see it. I hope my children live to see it. I really do. My job is to carry the fire forward so that when there is an opportunity, we light the fire. And look, there have been tons of periods of time in history when this is the case. I mean, we're like the Irish monasteries that are, you know, record the ideas. You can't lose the idea. You can't let the fire go out. We just got to keep the fire alive. And we can do that, Adam. We can do that. Yep, we really can.
- [80:17]
Matt
We need more conversations with this. We need more conversations about this.
- [80:20]
Ben Hunt
Adam.
- [80:21]
Matt
People want to bug you on the Internet and tell you how they think about your ideas. Besides, in the comments on this video. Where should they send? Where should we send them?
- [80:29]
Adam Butler
I am at Gestaltu G E S T A L T U On Twitter. I have started publishing a substack called the Choice Engine. So you should find more articles in future there. There's already two or three and otherwise find me at investresolve.com returnstacked.com or returnstacked etfs.com for what I do as my day job.
- [80:59]
Matt
Oh, the day job. How we must carry that fire. Ben, same question. People want to take issue with your comments or they want to say, hey, I agree and I need you in my private chats. Where are they finding you?
- [81:11]
Ben Hunt
I am Epsilon Theory on Twitter on the web. DMS are open on Twitter. So send me a note. The day job is percent and so that's important too, right? That's right, Adam. We got to keep the day job.
- [81:30]
Adam Butler
Your Persian notes have been really cool.
- [81:33]
Ben Hunt
Thank you.
- [81:33]
Adam Butler
The whole vision is just radically awesome, so can't wait to see where that goes.
- [81:39]
Ben Hunt
Thank you Adam. Same on you. Appreciate it.
- [81:43]
Matt
Here's to having this conversation in public eyes. We're going to push this conversation out. If you see this, if you liked it, share it with somebody. Share it with somebody younger than you, please. That torch needs to get passed. Thanks guys for joining me today.
- [81:56]
Adam Butler
Thank you guys.
- [81:57]
Ben Hunt
Thanks Matt.
- [81:57]
Matt
Thank you for tuning in to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting and valuable, please subscribe on your favorite audio.
- [82:03]
Adam Butler
Platform or on YouTube. You can also follow all the podcasts.
- [82:07]
Matt
In the Excess returns network@excessreturnspod.com.
- [82:10]
Adam Butler
If you have any feedback or questions.
- [82:12]
Matt
You can contact us@xsreturnspodmail.com no information on.
- [82:17]
Adam Butler
This podcast should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the Pocket podcast may be holdings of the firms of the hosts.
- [82:25]
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