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When the Data Stops Working | Cameron Dawson and Dave Nadig on What Aggregate Economic Numbers Hide
00:57:40
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- [00:00]
Narrator
In this episode of Clickbaita, Matt Ziegler, Dave Nadig and Cameron Dawson break down what's happening beneath the surface of the latest economic data. They discuss the headline jobs numbers, what may be distorting the picture, and what it all means for markets. We've included this episode in the Excess Returns feed, but if you'd like to continue receiving new episodes of Clickbait, you can subscribe on all major podcast platforms using the links in the description. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoy the show.
- [00:20]
Dave Nadig
Performance of the equity market is suggesting that there's an expectation for a cyclical reacceleration. I'm just asking, I'm raising the question of could that performance just be a function of the fact that these areas have underperformed and they're, they're benefiting from this like liquidity tide moving from point A to point B and we're finding the narrative about an acceleration in order to like justify that stock price move.
- [00:45]
Cameron Dawson
All these folks that are, you know, spending the moonshot level of capex that we're, we seem to be going on like we seem to be fighting another world war in terms of capex spend most of that capex is not accruing to the average investor or the average company.
- [01:01]
Matt Ziegler
If you actually unpack this over the last year and it was plus 615,000 private jobs, 758,000 to Dave, to your point, we're in healthcare and social service, social assistance and if it weren't for healthcare taking care of the elderly in the US we would have lost 143,000 private jobs over the past year. Foreign those other podcasts, they're clickbait but this is click beta. Should we market professionals have private conversations in public? Probably not, but we'll prove all we know is that we don't know nothing. Who's with me? If Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir had a baby, it would be this host and the parents would tell it like it is to this young bedazzled blades of steel baby that they aren't skating anymore. They're doing scoreography little white Christmas reference for you. It's our favorite commentator. Not complimentor just of markets but of course. Cameron Dawson. Are you ready to click some Veda?
- [01:59]
Dave Nadig
I wasn't sure if that was going to be for Dave or movie. Please be me. Please be me.
- [02:03]
Matt Ziegler
I love and if Bad Bunny and yes, I'm going to go there. If Bad Bunny and Kid Rock made a sweet little love child, this one was he'd still have grown up loving turning point as much as he does today. A turning point. Not the turning point, but thanks to Papa Rabbit and we all know Kid Rock is the mama in this case. Captain James T would be his Kirk of choice. It's the ba with the ba da bang nod. Diggy diggy Dave Bunny himself. Dave Nautica.
- [02:32]
Cameron Dawson
Man, how do you come up with these? I don't even know. It's ridiculous and I always feel like it's not fair we don't have one for you.
- [02:38]
Dave Nadig
I know. Next time we're going to surprise him.
- [02:40]
Cameron Dawson
That's true. We'll work, we'll break, we'll workshop something.
- [02:42]
Dave Nadig
You workshop AI generated? Definitely.
- [02:44]
Cameron Dawson
No, not AI generated.
- [02:45]
Matt Ziegler
You can't go AI caffeine at 5:30 in the morning is the only tip that I have for this. All right, rules are simple. One agreed upon topic. Nobody Googles nothing while we're live. And we each bring a surprise topic to the table. Big topic today. You both had great pieces in the last month and so since we haven't gotten to talk, I want to go through these. Cameron, you wrote this piece, the Master Plan. I want to just spend a moment shouting out the idea that I've been trying to reclaim 1995 here on top of my head. Last year I had, I think, the Casingal of, of Oasis that contained this. I remember learning the guitar part from the Casingal. So extra, extra props for taking me back to that memory. You wrote this piece. Raise the top. Consensus forecasts are average. And that's a problem. Yeah, I love this. We're coming out of forecast season. We're in the beginning of February. Why, why is that true? Why are consensus forecasts average? And that's a problem.
- [03:40]
Dave Nadig
I mean, the, the whole point of choosing the Master Plan song from Oasis, which is really funny, it's a collection of b. It's from a collection of B sides that Oasis released. It was effectively like Liam Gallagher and Noel Gallagher being like, we're so upset that all of these great songs never got the play that they needed.
- [03:59]
Cameron Dawson
Here you go.
- [04:00]
Dave Nadig
We're going to put them into. Into a compilation album. And it ended up, you know, being. Being quite the album. But, you know, the one of the lines in it is that all we know is that we don't know. And I think that that's the, the observation when everything is effectively expecting average returns, you know, 7 to 10% returns, or everybody's expecting, effectively, at the start of the year, it was 2% GDP growth. Now that's been revised up to 0.4% GDP growth. Nobody's going out on a limb to say that either the economy is slowing in a meaningful way or the economy is accelerating in a meaningful way. That's changed. We can talk about how the new narrative this time around is big global reacceleration because of what's going on in certain pockets of the market. But I think it, that that's where it becomes fascinating because it's almost as if nobody's really willing to stick their, their neck out in their forecast. If you look at how people are positioned though, in some places people are positioned for things to be absolutely awesome. And then other places we can see institutional positioning is still in that neutral camp. So it's like I have no conviction on where the, where the forecast should be. I'm not going to have conviction in my positioning. And I think the last place where conviction is sort of lacking within this market is if you look at the, at the bond market. Bond yields on the 10 year have effectively been flat for quite some time and all the moving averages have coalesced into this tiny area. And we're just oscillating around these small points. And you know, one day bond yields drop and everybody's like, the world's ending and then they go up and they're like, inflation's coming back. And the reality is, is like there's no direction. So it's just, you know, it's always a good practice whenever trying to make your own forecast to know what everybody else's forecasts are. And that's why we, why we did the piece back then. We probably should do an update because some of those forecasts have become a little bit more extreme.
- [05:51]
Cameron Dawson
Percent is part of the problem here that we get the headline forecast of like, what's the market going to do? Or what's the economy going to do? And then we keep, I, to me, it seems like we keep getting increasing data that shows dispersion in actual economic data, maybe not in stocks, although we've certainly seen some real, real return for dispersion in stocks as well. I mean, we had these weird days where the Dow was up and the NASDAQ was down. Like when does that happen? Right? So we've had some like, real movement there. But then we get things like the last set of payroll numbers where it seems like every job in the entire country is now in health care or higher education and manufacturing has fallen off a cliff. And so, but, but again, on a net basis we had a good jobs report. So like, I feel like that's A lot of what's going on is these sort of averaging numbers are in fact pretty average. But there's this giant blow up going on in the pieces of the economy. Is that just me as an idiot or you think that's true?
- [06:49]
Dave Nadig
No, I just gave a lecture about this where I argued that data died and what to do about it. And of course I started the lecture by reciting, not singing, because I can't sing the first few lines of American Pie and said the day that the data died. So the whole idea behind data dying is that we've seen data diverge, which is effectively what you're talking about, where the aggregate data very much belies what's going on under the surface. So K shaped economy, K shaped markets. Lots of dynamics where in the jobs market driven by non cyclical things versus cyclical hiring. So if you just look at the headline, it tells a very different story than the components underneath. But there's also a lot of examples with data having challenges where data relationships have also broken down in meaningful ways. Where we used to say if X happens, then Y will happen. And those relationships have completely broken down since arguably the pandemic. Something like the relationship between freight data and durable goods consumption. It used to be that they moved together, but now they don't. And so there's a few interesting examples of like where data is far less reliable today than it was, I would argue, at any, in any time in recent history.
- [08:22]
Matt Ziegler
There was a crazy point, Eric Pakman, Data for the People. He put this out the other day, it was on Twitter and he was talking about how you can look at this report, the BLS jobs data and you can basically say here's what's in the report. But if you actually unpack this over the last year and it was plus 615,000 private jobs, 758,000 to Dave, to your point, we're in healthcare and social service, social assistance, and if it weren't for health care, taking care of the elderly in the US we would have lost 143,000 private jobs over the past year, which is also on top of 256,000 government jobs of the jobs that are actually been adding back to that K idea. Peter Atwater, thank you for this word because those jobs that we added are all in like the $40,000 and less range. Normal circumstances, this looks like a recession.
- [09:16]
Dave Nadig
Well, so, and here's, here's another fun paradox, right? You revised out all of those jobs from 2025 and there were quite a few months where you had Job losses, and yet personal consumption expenditures and total retail sales continued to make new highs. So, you know, and that speaks to the distortions of the K shape, how if you have a big portion of the economy driven by something like the stock market, for example, and the wealth effect, which is helping to support consumption at the very high end, that it can really, really mask some of the pain going under, you know, happening underneath the surface. The question is, when does it matter? Right? Like, like when does it actually matter for markets that there are significant cohorts of people in the US Economy who are in a very perilous state and, you know, markets as of right now haven't cared because we have all the AI spending and all of that. But at the end of the day, you know, the people spending all this money are primarily advertising businesses. People don't have money to spend when you advertise to them, then, you know, arguably you don't live in your own economic bubble being these tech businesses that you actually have to have a reliable US consumer under the surface.
- [10:39]
Cameron Dawson
Well, and all these folks that are, you know, spending the moonshot level of capex that we seem to be going on like we seem to be fighting another world war in terms of capex spend, most of that capex is not accruing to the average investor or the average company. We're seeing the potential benefits basically accrue to those companies that are either doing the spending or talking about the spending the best as much as anything else. And yet you see other sections of the, of the market, whether it was, you know, Reuters and Morningstar, like all of these sort of data and analytics type companies just got shellacked right over effectively 200 lines of text that got released by anthropic showing that they could do some legal work. Right? I mean, that's. We're in this weird position where we're talking about wiping out hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap with literally a text file that shows you can do a thing. So, like, there feels like a big disconnect between perception and reality on that stuff right now.
- [11:38]
Dave Nadig
Well, and to add to that is that where is the money going to? You've seen huge rallies in energy and consumer staples, stocks and industrials, and people are making this argument. And look, the most dangerous thing oftentimes is to ascribe narrative to price action. People are seeing the price action and they're like, oh, why are people racing into staples and. Or why are they racing into energy stocks even though oil prices haven't broken out and people will Say, well it's because they want to find anything that can't be disrupted by AI. You know, you can't, you can hide out in these states. Now the idea of hiding out and like highly cyclical stocks is, is, you know, is, it's sort of like my straw house is fire retardant. Right? No, like that's probably not the best, best plan. I would argue it's more about just positioning of effectively. Like you're going from a very liquid part of the market in tech and software that got really crowded and you're repositioning into a much shallower liquidity part of the market that's under owned. So you get these mega upside moves. Not necessarily about the fundamentals but you know, it's, it's, it's interesting. If the narrative continues, we're hiding out in these things, you hope that the earnings will eventually support it, but we'll see.
- [12:53]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah. And I mean this speaks to the challenge of entering a reshuffle period like this with so much concentration at the top because people just deciding to lighten up their Nvidia exposure by a percent or two. If they're reallocating that back down into the 497 that's going to have an enormous effect on the 497 because of how much a percentage of the Nvidia would matter to the bottom companies in the index. Right. So there is this sort of weird dynamic we've seen. It does show up in the numbers like RSP has had the best year it's had versus SPY and God knows how long. We're in a bit of an anything but market cap waiting environment which we've been in before the 2010s. We had a couple years that were like this as well where just anything but market cap would give you some juice. It doesn't quite feel that bad yet, but it does feel like we're heading there.
- [13:48]
Matt Ziegler
Feels to me that there's a lot of. And maybe this is part of the flow story too where it's like anybody and everyone who takes a little bit of money away from these large cap names wants to take a little bit of money away from there. And then to the magnification effect that I think you're talking about here, Cameron. It's like if some sovereign wealth fund decides they want to own a little bit less spoos or they want to own a little bit less Nvidia or something like that and put the tiniest amount of money into utilities, energy, oil field services. Get as small as you want That's a giant ripple effect at the opposite end of the spectrum when you go from something that's several percentage points of the index down to something that's or.
- [14:24]
Cameron Dawson
Just same thing's true happening in international diversification. Right? I mean we've seen yes, the S and P had a pretty damn good year, all things considered, pardon my french. But it was also like the 23rd best performing developed market. I mean like we were the worst performing developed market last year and we're still pretty much on that track this year, even though we're having a supposedly relatively okay year. I think some of this is just that, you know, the, the endless bid is still a very real thing. And you know, we, we had a whole bear market last week that lasted exactly as long as we all thought it would about a trading day. And then lo and behold, Friday payrolls show up again, markets back up. I mean we've seen this pattern over and over again. We can't sustain a downturn. So when we get them, they're really violent and really fast.
- [15:09]
Dave Nadig
So here's a predicament which is that last year we started the year where non US markets were effectively trading in the 50th percentile of their of their last 20 years of valuation rating. You go back it actually, I'm sorry, last 10 or 15 years. You go back further in that it's good to remember international stocks actually used to trade at a premium to the US stocks which seems absolutely wild. But where you're in that valuation range, you're now effectively in the 90th percentile of your valuation range. For these non US markets after the rallies that they've had now, they are still significantly cheaper than the US market. So the question is, does that gap, which has been a gap that has not been able to be jumped over over the course ever since the bursting of the international bubble back in 2007. And I will argue it was a bubble back in that time mostly in em. But since the bursting of that, you have not seen that gap be able to close. So is this time going to be the time that the gap actually starts to close where we go above the 90th percentile in recent history and we go way, way back to those glory days of the 2000s and everybody has to wear low cut jeans again?
- [16:28]
Matt Ziegler
That's probably on the part of it. They're coming, they're coming. I mean they already, they're already here. I'm waiting for my Kendrick super bowl flares still to come back. I got em ready. I Got em ready. What about the, so the dollar impact on this? Cause the other part that I keep hearing, I talked to international investors and they're like, yeah, we had the US allocation and it was up 30 last year. It felt pretty good for us, but then we looked in our local currency and our local currency and our local country index was up 50 and they're going all of a sudden the justification to hold that US got way diminished last year in a way that is becoming more of a reality on paper for these allocators. I'm just curious, I know Cameron, you wrote in this piece about the dollar too. They got the dollar wrong last year, you think they might get it wrong again this year? Could you explain that?
- [17:10]
Dave Nadig
Yeah, I mean dollar positioning has been probably the most important factor for the dollar in my opinion. Right. So there's FX gurus out there who will be like absolutely not, you're wrong. But what we can see is that when you get positioning to extremes, you should expect a reverse in direction of the dollar. That's exactly what happened last year. Everybody was America first super long and we saw a max overweight position in the dollar. What happened? The dollar weakened by a significant amount, caught everybody off guard. Everybody started to have to hedge. It created this feedback loop dollar weakness. And what you ended up having is that that super long position became a super short position. And then as we've moved through effectively the last nine months or so, you keep have the, having these moments where the dollar will rally a bit, everybody will close their shorts and then of course the dollar falls and then they'll get short again and then keep kind. Which you know, now as we're looking at it, given the recent weakness in the dollar, people have actually gotten to a point where they're as short as they were back in the, in the spring of last year. So that would suggest that we should have the imagination that we could see dollar strength just given the fact that people would be offsides. Obviously there's a lot of other drivers for that too. Right. Like all of the Fed independent stuff and growth and et cetera, et cetera.
- [18:34]
Cameron Dawson
Politics and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [18:36]
Matt Ziegler
The point that you landed this one on Cameron was positioning versus narrative. And that's where the real surprises hide. Unbear that.
- [18:44]
Dave Nadig
Yeah, yeah. I mean that's, that's the thing is like whenever we all agree on something and that's why I was mentioning like the, the cyclical upswing, everybody seems to agree that the, that we're having a cyclical re. Acceleration not Everybody, obviously there will be some people that push back, but it's a very popular narrative and they have the evidence for it. Look at what's going on within trucking stocks. Look at what's going on within trucking data. Look at what, and that's typically earlier cycle than what you see, than what you would see show up in employment and manufacturing, for example, which is a very lagging piece of data. So there's performance of the equity market is suggesting that there's an expectation for a cyclical reacceleration. I'm just asking, I'm raising the question of could that performance just be a function of the fact that these areas have underperformed and they're, they're benefiting from this like liquidity tide moving from point A to point B. And we're finding the narrative about an acceleration in order to like justify that stock price move, but it really is just more about positioning. I, I, I, I don't know which one the answer is, but I think we have to consider both as, as potential outcomes. I do know that everybody and every industrial person I talk to is like super, super bowled up and they're so excited to be cool for the first time ever, industrials, we weren't cool because it was the industrial recession. So now I feel like I missed my opportunity to actually be relevant.
- [20:11]
Cameron Dawson
We'll have the door open for you.
- [20:12]
Matt Ziegler
Thanks Dave. You wrote an outstanding piece over on ETF.com tokenization, real important and not for you. And this is one of those areas that I feel like I haven't paid a lot of attention to since the pandemic. It keeps cropping up and all of a sudden I'm going, okay, tokenization isn't hype anymore, it's plumbing. And I'm like, oh no, I missed a lot. I fell asleep in class. Well, I missed a lot.
- [20:36]
Cameron Dawson
You know, again to the point maybe this is the theme of the episode, that narrative, you know, narrative is not reality. We've had so much attention in the last 18 months on crypto, like that's the story, right? And then that tends to get rolled basically into a conversation about Bitcoin because it's the big one that everybody sees on the top of the Wall Street Journal page scrolling by. Meanwhile, the actual sort of decentralized finance ecosystem we used to talk about back in the day when we weren't just caught up in the hype cycle, that's actually moved on apace pretty well. And the interesting thing is that while a lot of the hype cycle was around how we individually were all going to be trading tokens with each. And the New York Stock Exchange was going to disappear. And there was a big push towards that, like no institutions, no central clearing. What's actually happened is that the dtcc, the, you know, clearing corporation that runs the US Stock and ETF markets, put out a quite useful proposal on how to sort of baby step into real tokenization by taking the same kind of creation redemption process we use in ETFs for essentially portfolio tokens. Either whether you call them ETF tokens or index tokens doesn't really matter. So they're taking those very first steps of figuring out how to roll exposures into something that is in a private blockchain or a secured blockchain with known wallets that institutions can start moving big exposures around in. And that bolts along with a bunch of work that the institutions themselves have been doing around cash collateral. So we've got BlackRock out there now with a $2 billion token called BUIDL, which is again basically just a money market token that moves around whose sole purpose in life is effectively to be collateral.
- [22:23]
Dave Nadig
Right.
- [22:23]
Cameron Dawson
It's a liquidity maintenance token more than anything else. And that's a big business now. Right. There are major firms out there building those kinds of tokens, actually having them used by large institutions that are, you know, overnight needing to pledge $100 million because they have a cash management issue. Right. Core, core corporate finance stuff. And, and that's sort of going on in its own bucket while the DTCC is sort of building these rails along with New York Stock Exchange primarily for a future where individuals or, or asset managers would actually be transacting in tokens. The missing piece here and the reason I'm sort of, I would say not bullish or slightly bearish on this as a big thing that gets adopted is this is actually a problem for most players in the market. Right. Right now if you've got big institutional players moving a lot of money around in the day, they rely on the fact that they don't have to have all that cash all the time. They rely on the fact that at night the NSCC will match everybody up and the only thing they have to deal with is the net difference between how much they owe Goldman Sachs and how much Goldman Sachs owns owes them on any given position. All this token stuff is atomic settlement that happens instantaneously. So if you're on a trading desk and you trade that Tesla token, well, you're either going to get handed that cash right away and need to do something with it. Or if you're the buyer, you got to have that cash in the bank right now to make that token transaction happen. So it takes this, this, you know, what was previously a sort of net capital problem that the industry had figured out how to maximize, meaning how to, how to get the maximum juice out of their capital, reuse it as much as possible, pledge it in as many places as possible, and it destroys that entire capital ecosystem and makes everybody have to work out of their actual wallet all day long. No institution really wants that. They're too reliant on the other system. So we're in this really interesting place where we're building this sort of atomic settlement system that the major institutions, it's actually creating a problem, not solving a problem. So I think it's really interesting. The technology is clearly right there, but I'm very skeptical on adoption of this outside these narrow institutional use cases, even when all the plumbing gets solved.
- [24:44]
Matt Ziegler
Cameron, is any of this even on your radar or are you like, where.
- [24:48]
Dave Nadig
I mean, it raises a few questions, right? It's like, does the adoption of the technology have any correlation to the price of the ecosystem? That's like question number one, right? So if you do these bull cases and people are like, we're going to tokenize everything. And that's why I'm, I'm bullish crypto.
- [25:08]
Cameron Dawson
Or whatever.
- [25:11]
Dave Nadig
I've never, I, I guess I know that there's specific arguments for specific tokens or whatever, coins that have maybe higher prices with greater uses, but.
- [25:22]
Matt Ziegler
The network effects of some of these things may exist at a certain scale.
- [25:28]
Dave Nadig
But I think that that's, you know, that's question number one and then question number two. You know, David, kind of reminds you of the stablecoin question, which is that, like, it seems like with stablecoins, if they're going to be this big buyer of treasuries, effectively, isn't that more inefficient use of capital? Because if now all of a sudden I have to hold Treasuries when I didn't have Treasuries before, that suggests that I have to have more cash that's just sitting around versus cash that's working and doing stuff, whatever it is. I don't know, I, I, I don't like, sometimes it's like coming up a solution and then finding the problem.
- [26:05]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah, I think, I think you've nailed it. I think that this sort of issue, I mean, I think that the banking is actually a nice imperfect metaphor for this. Like, everybody forgets about fractional reserve banking until somebody asks the question, well, what if everybody wants all their money out in one day? Right. Which never happens in the history of the US Really. But it is a legitimate question. If in fact everybody wanted all their money out of every bank all at once, it wouldn't work. Right. We know how fractional reserve banking works. I think the crypto and token ecosystem is going to have similar qualities there where we're giving up a lot of sort of reuse and hypothecation of capital that the system relies on. That's actually what sort of generates liquidity, is that I don't have to have this stock in my hand to sell it to you. I have a window to go get it from someone else. All of our, not all, most of our clearing and settlement processes work like that. And once you go with this atomic tokenized settlement, you destroy that. So it's sort of like the, the stablecoin example, I think is great. The difference between a bank account and your stablecoin account is largely who's sitting there with the capital flow.
- [27:15]
Dave Nadig
You know, I know this is a, is a very different topic, but it's somewhat related with what's going on with all these discussions of shrinking the Fed's balance sheet and this idea that you could increase leverage ratios at banks in order to allow the Fed's balance sheet to shrink so effectively you get this offset. And you know, I, I, there's been a bunch of notes. I was writing with some, speaking with some research analysts. I was like, why, like, why would we want to do that? Why would you want to go back to the leverage level seen before the gfc? Why would you want to go back to leverage levels that clearly created the capability for financial crisis? You know, we haven't had a financial crisis since we put some of these restrictions in place. And we had some pretty big whoopsie moments when it comes to the, to the economy. So, you know, it raises the question, and that's where I'm tying it back. It's like, just why, why are we doing this? Are we doing this because it's an interesting intellectual exercise and it's a technology that exists and is cool, or is there actual benefits? And then to your point, Dave, maybe the benefits are more narrow than this universal kind of, it's going to solve everything. Everything's going to be on the blockchain.
- [28:34]
Cameron Dawson
I, I think, I think that's absolutely right. I think the, the use cases are going to be narrow. And that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. I mean, think about something like escrow, right? You can create all sorts of reasons why escrow should not have to exist in the modern world anymore. And yet it happens thousands of times a day. I mean, escrow is a standard part of contract law, real estate, et cetera. And it's deliberately a way of slowing down and intermediating a transaction that you could just do, right? You could just walk up and hand somebody a gold bar and then take the deed to the house. But nobody does that. Everybody uses an escrow agent. Because at some point you actually want a little friction because that friction allows you to catch error. And that's the big issue here, is if there's no friction, there's no way to stop a fat fingered trade, right? Somebody accidentally sells the wrong decimal point number of tokens and that settles and that cash moves. Good luck. Like there's not gonna be a clearly erroneous trade rule on your atomic settlement. You're gonna get screwed, right? Maybe you get to sue somebody and get it back, but it ain't gonna be instant.
- [29:41]
Dave Nadig
I remember that one with Citi. I think it was Citi.
- [29:45]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah.
- [29:46]
Dave Nadig
They transferred a bunch of money into.
- [29:48]
Cameron Dawson
$400 million or something like that.
- [29:49]
Dave Nadig
Yeah, yeah.
- [29:52]
Matt Ziegler
I mean, what could go wrong? I mean private credit can blow the bubble all by itself. We might as well let the big banks get in on the bubble blowing too. And then we'll have a proper crisis.
- [30:01]
Cameron Dawson
A good, good solid crisis. Good hard rain, that's what we need.
- [30:04]
Matt Ziegler
A good hard rain's gotta fall.
- [30:06]
Dave Nadig
You know what, like on that point though, it's like I, it, I, I, I really do resent all of the, like, the, the we should, we, you know, recession is healthy and a reset and this and that. Because they suck.
- [30:21]
Matt Ziegler
They suck. I would really not like to go.
- [30:23]
Dave Nadig
Through one like kids nutrition goes down, suicide goes down.
- [30:27]
Cameron Dawson
No, it really sucks for poor people. Like that's what people don't forget. Like the dollar value may look like it's all happening at the top, but recessions really suck for the poor.
- [30:35]
Matt Ziegler
Back to that BLS data, that K economy. We put a lot of people down there right now. Don't look at the Gini coefficients on wealth and income distributions because that recession torches and pitchforks might be on their way faster than we're thinking.
- [30:50]
Dave Nadig
That was a really popular thing after Liberation Day. A bunch of people came out and were like, no, like recessions are good. They reset stuff and it actually would be healthy and, and this and that and, and that. That's someone who hasn't bought their own groceries in a really long time.
- [31:06]
Cameron Dawson
And I think people mistake the. We need a good hard recession to. Maybe some of the stocks that are overvalued should become less overvalued and maybe some of the forgotten ones should get up a valued or, you know, get their value increased. Which is different than saying we need a recession. Right, right.
- [31:21]
Matt Ziegler
Because a rotation, a rotation in market cap or valuation is not a recession, especially if you're a value investor and that's what you're asking for.
- [31:29]
Dave Nadig
I mean, you do, I mean you do need like these, these kind of clearing events within markets. Trees don't grow to the sky and the more they do grow to the sky. We've, we've been arguing that with, with the precious metals is that they end up becoming like the Sword of Damocles. And it's a victim of your own success that the more parabolic you go, the greater the risk is. Not just to the downside, but to the greater risk is to the correlation of the rest of your portfolio. Meaning that like, like the more gold was going parabolic up, the more likely it was going to become highly correlated to other risky assets in your portfolio and not provide the diversification benefit that you wanted.
- [32:08]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah, an extra sort of Damocles. We know what happens in Rocky Horror. We know that Eddie was the failed experiment. Rocky didn't make it better. It's just not the way it's going to work out for anybody. Take me to a surprise topic. Cameron, we might lose you earlier than expected here on this one. What do you got for us? You're going.
- [32:23]
Dave Nadig
I mean. Well, now you said Rocky Horror. I love meatloaf. Like I really love meatloaf.
- [32:28]
Cameron Dawson
Unironically.
- [32:29]
Dave Nadig
Unironically love meatloaf. And I think I would do anything for love, but I won't do that. Not the radio edit version.
- [32:36]
Matt Ziegler
No, you need the full, you need.
- [32:37]
Cameron Dawson
The full long one.
- [32:39]
Dave Nadig
The opera is one of my favorite songs ever and I just get disappointed that it's not ever. The full version's never on karaoke. Not that I would sing it. I can't sing. Well, my random topic is actually a life update a little bit in the sense that. Remember I asked what was. Is it. Is it appropriate to shush somebody in yoga when, like people were talking.
- [33:02]
Matt Ziegler
Right, Shushing.
- [33:03]
Dave Nadig
Yeah, the shushing. I'm not a shusher. I can't shush. I'm like, let people be people. But it was, it was a very cold Sunday morning and it was such a peaceful room. And these, you know, two Gabby's, like, come in and, like, start talking very loudly. And I got up and I was like, is this silent? And I got the dirtiest look. And then it was in my brain the whole time. And, like, they hate me, they hate me, they hate me. But then other people looked at me afterwards. Thank you. Respecting the space. So, like, I. Now I'm thinking, oh, gosh, I'm a. You know, I'm a Karen and the whole thing. But at a certain point, there's also, like, a reverence for certain things that make a space special. That I think keeping that reverence in end and defending it in a way is good. So I shushed. I shushed for the first time. I hope I never have to shush again, but there it is.
- [33:53]
Cameron Dawson
But you're the guardian of the space. That's a right. I mean, that you should. You should own that role, right?
- [33:58]
Dave Nadig
Yes.
- [33:58]
Matt Ziegler
You didn't just become the David Spade church lady. Like, you became, like, a proper guardian of the space.
- [34:04]
Dave Nadig
I just now see myself as a little raccoon with an Uzi.
- [34:07]
Matt Ziegler
So as long as you're not the one coming out of the dumpster fire behind you, you're fine.
- [34:13]
Cameron Dawson
No raccoons with Uzi. Okay.
- [34:15]
Matt Ziegler
No. Yeah, we support this shushing exercise. I will also say I've got a Meatloaf story coming out with Roger Mitchell on an intentional investor. And it does include a publicity event, I think, in Italy in the 90s with meatloaf running down a hill and a young intern possibly tied or held by hand by Mr. Meatloaf saying, Mr. Loaf, Mr. Loaf, please stop. Because he doesn't know what to call him. It's amazing.
- [34:43]
Cameron Dawson
Oh, gosh.
- [34:44]
Matt Ziegler
Mr. Loaf. Mr. Loaf. Every time I hear Meatloaf's name. Dave, you got something for us? You shushing anybody these days?
- [34:50]
Cameron Dawson
Uh, no, I'm. I was trying to think, if I had a special topic. I think here's my big news, is that I think I finally let go of Twitter. Like, or X or whatever we're calling it, like, off the jump. I think. I think I'm off. I'm off the drip. Uh, and. And I would encourage everybody to do their own analysis of their media diet. I've been trying to take on board the idea that we are what we consume mostly. And I just realized that 90% of the people that I actually wanted to hear from on Twitter, I could hear from elsewhere. And it just hasn't become a platform where real conversation happens anymore. And that's the reason I cared about it. So I don't have enough to promote that. It's that important for me to be saying things out loud and nobody's having a real conversation, so people want to find me. Bluesky. LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Oddly, for all the jokes we've all made about LinkedIn over the years, there have been more actual intellectual conversations about markets and finance and all this stuff going on on LinkedIn than anywhere else right now, which is bizarre if you.
- [35:51]
Matt Ziegler
Can get past the AI bot thing on LinkedIn, because this. I feel like there's more, maybe not more. I run into a lot of AI on LinkedIn.
- [35:59]
Dave Nadig
You know, I'd love to. I, I'd love to do a proof of life check. Of all the people of. Like, this is what this taught me about software sales.
- [36:08]
Matt Ziegler
I saw one the other day and I was like, oh, no, no chance, no chance. You're in. I, I don't.
- [36:15]
Cameron Dawson
I mean, I'm pretty good about only following people I want to hear from on, on LinkedIn and, and muting people who are just spamming their advisor practice or something poorly. And, and that seems to work pretty well. But yeah, there is, there's still plenty of that and a lot of it is very ridiculous.
- [36:30]
Matt Ziegler
It gets pretty ridiculous pretty fast. Okay, I've got one more thing for Cameron to hear. And then, Cameron, if we have to let you go, I'm gonna let you go so I can ask Dave an AI related question after this whole thing. But the thing that I have was first off, halftime show. Did we watch the halftime.
- [36:44]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah. Loved it.
- [36:45]
Matt Ziegler
That part of life. Yeah.
- [36:46]
Dave Nadig
Did you see Tonita?
- [36:48]
Matt Ziegler
Tonita. Was that the, the New York City lady who's Tony.
- [36:52]
Dave Nadig
Yes, yes.
- [36:53]
Matt Ziegler
With a drink.
- [36:54]
Dave Nadig
Yes.
- [36:55]
Matt Ziegler
That you can't go there anymore because he took that picture on Instagram.
- [37:01]
Dave Nadig
Like she runs this beautiful little bar, dive bar in Williamsburg and she's amazing. There's like a big street festival that happens for her birthday every year in June. And she's just an icon and it was really cool to see her in there.
- [37:12]
Matt Ziegler
I had only heard of her from my New York City friends and that they can't go there anymore. They were just like, it's. There's so many people there every time we look. Yeah. Which is amazing and ridiculously cool. Shout out to the marriage. I don't know who. The young couple.
- [37:26]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah, I was gonna say the marriage was my favorite part of the whole thing. And I read there's an article from the, the, the pastor who actually. Or the minister who actually did the marriage live. And like Was convinced until, like, three weeks beforehand that he was, like, marrying Bad Bunny or something. Like, it was like.
- [37:43]
Matt Ziegler
That would have been a move. That would have.
- [37:44]
Cameron Dawson
That would have been. That would have been a ball and move.
- [37:46]
Matt Ziegler
Okay, so favorite moment was Tanita. Was that your. Was that your. Your highlight, Dave? Was that the marriage.
- [37:52]
Cameron Dawson
The marriage was when they actually. When you could see that they were actually three people doing something insane and laughing about it. And it wasn't just actors and dancers. Like, I could tell in that moment, it was like those people just got really married. And I was shocked. It was great.
- [38:07]
Matt Ziegler
All right, on your scale of prior, like, halftimes, where. Where are you rating this one? How high?
- [38:15]
Cameron Dawson
The problem is, is that I remember the Michael Jackson one really vividly.
- [38:20]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah, that one.
- [38:21]
Cameron Dawson
So, like, that one's. I don't think anything's ever going to.
- [38:24]
Matt Ziegler
Permanently prove the, like.
- [38:25]
Cameron Dawson
Wait, he's on the billboard. No, he's down here. Wait, he came up. I mean, it was so amazing at the time. That was, like, hard to imagine beating that.
- [38:35]
Dave Nadig
I have a confession to make. I love divorced dad Butt rock.
- [38:41]
Matt Ziegler
Okay. Okay, there you have it.
- [38:46]
Dave Nadig
Show is amazing.
- [38:49]
Matt Ziegler
Wait, the Creed halftime show. Doc, my ears. Deceiving.
- [38:53]
Dave Nadig
Okay, yeah, but also.
- [38:54]
Matt Ziegler
Go on, go on. We're here for this.
- [38:56]
Dave Nadig
Prince was really good too, so. But Creed. Oh, man. And rest in. Rest in power, Mr. Three Doors Down.
- [39:04]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah.
- [39:06]
Dave Nadig
And the Cake guitarist.
- [39:08]
Cameron Dawson
Really?
- [39:09]
Matt Ziegler
I miss Cake guitarist, too. Hand on James Vanderbeek. It's been a rough day for the era. Too bad. All right, Dave. We're. We're one. We're one person down. So now the real question. I. I bled into it in the intro. Did you watch the alternate halftime pre recorded?
- [39:29]
Cameron Dawson
I watched some YouTube coverage of. I watched. I watched it after the fact. Ironically and with a sense of humor.
- [39:35]
Matt Ziegler
And with a sense of humor, I do suggest the Pat Finnerty live stream.
- [39:39]
Cameron Dawson
Oh, God, Finnerty do.
- [39:42]
Matt Ziegler
I was holding off.
- [39:45]
Cameron Dawson
Because I was.
- [39:45]
Matt Ziegler
Like, you will love this. You will also love the Bawa Duba emergency update video that he did a daily.
- [39:50]
Cameron Dawson
I can't imagine it didn't take him like, four hours to go through the 15 minutes of it.
- [39:55]
Matt Ziegler
Well, he livestreamed it, so he opted.
- [39:57]
Cameron Dawson
So it's all. He doesn't pause anything?
- [39:59]
Matt Ziegler
No. Yeah. Well, I think he does rewind at least one ouch note from the violin player. He has the debate over the lip singing thing. And so first off, you took this in, at least ironically, just to be aware of what it was. Okay. Also need to check in on. Have you followed through on this story where Kid Rock is accused of and.
- [40:20]
Cameron Dawson
The whole thing clearly lip syncing. Yes.
- [40:24]
Matt Ziegler
Have you followed through the outcome of this, though?
- [40:27]
Cameron Dawson
All I heard was that he was trying to claim he wasn't, that it was pre recorded, but he wasn't lip syncing. And none of that made any sense to me because I could sit there and watch his mouth all the way over here while his voice is coming from over there.
- [40:41]
Matt Ziegler
So there's an amazing video of him clearing his name and trying very hard not to throw the turning point people under the bus, but also trying very hard to say, like, we pre recorded this. They sent me an edit. I said, your sink's off. Like, it looks good, but the sink's off. And they couldn't get the sync right. He's like, I told them, I sent it back. They're very good people.
- [41:02]
Cameron Dawson
They do very good events. Just for his part.
- [41:05]
Matt Ziegler
Just for his part.
- [41:06]
Cameron Dawson
Just for the parts where it looks.
- [41:07]
Matt Ziegler
On his most popular song. So because he's been performing that song since 1997, I think he's in Nashville, he gets Paradigm or Freddy, whoever his DJ guy is, he flies them in from Detroit and they're live doing the entire poetapa thing acapella with each other.
- [41:23]
Cameron Dawson
To prove once I was fairly certain he knows the words. Like, that wasn't my concern. I don't know the words, but I'm pretty sure he did.
- [41:33]
Matt Ziegler
All right. So I fully encourage, if you have not seen Kid Rock and Paradigm doing their live acapella rendition to prove that they weren't lip syncing and that there was a sync issue and they're pinning it back on them, but trying to say very nice things. It might be the most interesting political debate right now that I've just stomach.
- [41:52]
Cameron Dawson
God.
- [41:52]
Matt Ziegler
And I just think it's been okay. So the thing, and I'm wrestling with this to write about is a reliance on distribution for an idea. And I'm really intrigued by this in particular because I think a lot of people encountered Bad Bunny for the first time, I think. And I don't think there's any shame in that. Bad Bunny's like a wildly popular artist. But I still remember. I remember when we were in Nashville.
- [42:14]
Cameron Dawson
Not in English, like, and like, let's be honest, like, I don't listen to a lot of non English music. I listen to more French music probably than I do, you know, Spanish music. But, like, I think it's very fair if most people who do not speak Spanish as either a first or second language did not know who Bad Bunny was or did not know the music 1000%.
- [42:35]
Matt Ziegler
1000%. Because it's not part. So there's this distribution mechanism that happens here, and I think it's really interesting. I think it was a. I'm going to say it was a good decision, both for Bad Buddy and the NFL to pick this as a distribution mechanism and for Apple, let's be honest, like, behind this event, to say, let's take somebody who already has this much steam over here and try exposure to a larger audience.
- [42:58]
Cameron Dawson
Do you feel like Kendrick was the same thing? Because, like, I mean, 1,000%, a lot of people like I talked to afterwards were like, I don't listen to rap music, music and hip hop, and who is this guy? And I'm like, got nothing for you. But, like, you know, if this is not on your radar, if you don't know Kendrick Lamar, then you just don't listen to very much popular music. And that's okay, right? That's. You're right. Yes. It's a distribution platform for artists 100%.
- [43:27]
Matt Ziegler
So, interestingly, in that same regard, because I'm watching, ironically, I'm watching this thing basically to, like, probably laugh at it. I'm gonna give Kid Rock his credit. He still had the best quality voice. Pat said this too, on his live stream of it. I was like, yeah, the guy. The guy has an immediately recognized voice. He could still sing. He's infinitely better in that regard than the other people who are part of that performance. And to the guy with the. The brass knuckles on the microphone, I just.
- [43:52]
Cameron Dawson
I mean, I got nothing for.
- [43:54]
Matt Ziegler
I got nothing for that one, but. And Pantsuit lady, whatever that whole thing was. Anyway, Kid Rock trying to reframe himself as adult rock or whatever. He is now using his real name and doing his Bible thumping song. I'm also looking at that and going, this is the best distribution platform for him to take this message into.
- [44:16]
Narrator
Yeah.
- [44:16]
Matt Ziegler
Even though this thing is not for most of America now, and it's probably just driving off a cliff, if not into a wall, as far as just like sunsetting the end of his career because it's so far removed from what he was previously famous for. I'm like, this is actually the right distribution choice if this is the lane that he wants to exist in right now.
- [44:32]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah, I totally agree with that. You know, and I think you have to pick, you know, horses for courses. Right. You got to be in the right place for the horse that you're running.
- [44:42]
Matt Ziegler
I think there's. It's just a very, very interesting point of these two pop cultural events that everybody wants to politicize. And I think there's actually some very intelligent and thorough marketing strategy inside of this, of going if you want distribution for your thoughts, your ideas or something else, you gotta pick the right place to put that message across.
- [44:59]
Cameron Dawson
Well, I think also there's. I've increasingly been realizing that a lot of the cultural stuff that we seem to be fighting about isn't so much that it's they reject, like I rejected this person's culture and they reject mine. It's that there's still this idea that somehow there's going to be an American monoculture. Right? That, that there is going to. That Everybody, you know, 400 million people are all going to agree we love X, whether X is football or God or Kendrick Lamar or whatever it is. And I think the reality of modern life is that partially because of technology allowing us to pick our echo chambers, but also there's twice as many people in this country as there were when I was a teenager. Like that's a real thing. Population growth happens. People are more crowded. Like inevitably things that used to be niche are going to now have hundreds of thousands of people who are into them. And I think that's a tough thing to onboard, right? Because we all think that the world looks exactly like it looked when we were kids. We get locked into that. And the reality is that somebody like Bad Money can be the best performing and best selling artist on Spotify and yet half of America may literally not have any idea who he is. And that's a, that's a weird place to be. And the answer isn't probably that everybody should know who Bad Bunny is and that's the American monoculture for a week. It's that we need to acknowledge, hey, you know what? Opera's really cool. Maybe not for me, but I love that other people are really into opera. It doesn't mean it has to become the American monoculture.
- [46:37]
Matt Ziegler
I think it's so interesting. I'm going to tie it back to this idea of like everything is AI or everything is tokenization or Bitcoin or crypto or whatever else. And it's like this desire to make everything follow the same rulebook. And I feel we are starting to look at all these examples, or at least I feel hyper, hyper aware of all these examples of. It's like, so clearly this can't be everything. Like clearly NFL over here and Bad Bunny over here, and there's some of that Venn diagram that crosses over and there's a Whole bunch that doesn't. And we are being reminded over and over and over again that this is not representative of anyone anymore and that monoculture is leaving us behind. It's weird because it seems like we're, we're getting down to these, like, final pillars of like. Again, AI is going to solve all the problems in the world. It's like, well, what if it solves a bunch of little problems? Like, what if it just continues to solve? Trying to think. In Kai wu's paper it was. Did you read their investor letter for Spartan?
- [47:34]
Cameron Dawson
No, I didn't.
- [47:35]
Matt Ziegler
I'll send this to you. It's phenomenal. Go look up this. He was just on excess returns talking about it, like storage facilities and rental units. He's like, the biggest gains from actually applied AI. When we comb through all the earnings reports, he's like, the companies that are actually implementing them, it's like, yeah, this bank did some of this and this, this tech firm did some of that. But like, oh man, you have a bunch of rental units and a bunch of storage facilities, like they're getting their money's worth. And it's fascinating the way these things, even those will splinter in use cases.
- [48:07]
Cameron Dawson
Interesting. Yeah. I mean, the AI thing, I think that's absolutely. I still think that small and medium businesses are going to be the biggest percentage beneficiaries of AI. Right. I'm just in my own case. Right. We run a very small company@etf.com, you know, we're probably a couple bodies short of where we would have needed to be to do the exact same amount of work six years ago. Right. Hard to quantify.
- [48:30]
Matt Ziegler
What do you think for that? Especially, and I'm saying this from a small company too, where it's. We have three or four different AI vendors that we use in the very regulated. As it should be, you know. As it should be Financial services.
- [48:44]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah, yeah.
- [48:46]
Matt Ziegler
So we have to use different AIs in, in different areas to do different tasks. However, I'll go as far as to say that's probably like 10. It's either 10 people or four good vendors that we don't need anymore or that we use at a fraction of a cost because of the productivity gains here.
- [49:05]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah.
- [49:05]
Matt Ziegler
And that is a massive boost that's hard to point at, you know, bottom line profits, where this is showing up. But if we actually mapped back out how we would possibly do some of this stuff without these tools, there would not be profits left over.
- [49:18]
Cameron Dawson
Well, I think that's the tricky thing about AI is that A lot of this stuff is going to be extremely difficult to quantify in any meaningful way. I mean putting aside to the like, does it make your company more profitable thing? Just think about how it's impacting people's day to day lives. I have two people in my family who are in nursing school and the ability for them, my wife in particular to take a two and a half hour lecture and before she's even home from class have that transcribed and not just transcribed, but here's the outline, here's the slides copied out. And by the way I went to the professor's website and I grabbed the slide deck. So now I've got the transcript that he actually said with the slides he actually used. And before she sits down to study at night, she's got a two, three page study guide for a two hour lecture she was in. How do you quantify the time savings of that or the mental like just the exhaustion of having had to have done that in real time as a normal student.
- [50:18]
Matt Ziegler
It's.
- [50:18]
Cameron Dawson
I think these things are going to be really tough to measure and instead what we're going to do is we're just sort of going to say everything's great and you know, economy is going to continue to do this and there's going to be this sort of hidden AI tailwind underneath all of it that's keeping that afloat. But it's not going to show up as a step function in every business.
- [50:36]
Matt Ziegler
You know, I increasingly share that view. It's not going to be a step function in every business. There will be some that experiences that the step function reality but I think it's going to take most of step.
- [50:48]
Cameron Dawson
Functions seem to be that way. Right. Like Thompson, Reuters, LexisNexis. Right.
- [50:52]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah, it's, it's very, very real. Do you think this helps solve the K problem at all in any way, shape or form? Does it have to get worse before that?
- [51:00]
Cameron Dawson
I do. Only in the sense that I think for those people in the economy who have both the capital and the intellect and the animus to actually build a business, to go do their own thing, to use these kinds of tools to find a wedge into the economy that they might not have found otherwise. That's. Yes, that is net positive for people who might otherwise be left behind. Um, I think those of us who live in the Internet cognosphere of ideas are deeply out of touch with how little this matters for most people. Right. Most people don't interact with the Internet continuously for work. They interact with the Internet for a little Bit of information and a lot of entertainment.
- [51:43]
Matt Ziegler
I was told the other day by someone in their mid-70s that they used, I think it was ChatGPT and based on a Facebook group, which is because I was asking, I was like, where did you learn to use this? And she's telling me, well, through this Facebook group. And like, this is how we figure out where to go to lunch. Like this is how we. And I was like, I am amazed and delighted that this is the use case for this. That people are like experimenting with this and actually at least playing around it. I don't know what the economic value is for that.
- [52:12]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah, that's the challenge is I've seen this with, with my mom as well and some of the older folks that I know. ChatGPT has made great inroads because it doesn't require anything technical from the user. It's actually ideal for somebody who's 80 and doesn't use a computer because as long as they understand I push this button and talk and then it will talk back to me, that is, that is just a categorical removal of, of detritus in their world. Before, if they wanted to understand when Jeopardy. Was on, they would have to find a newspaper or maybe they would be smart enough to type on their phone with their thumbs. Or maybe they knew how to use a voice note and ask Google and maybe they got an answer. Now they just click the Chat GPT button and said When's Jeopardy. On it it says 7:30 on your a, B, C station. Right. Or whatever.
- [53:02]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah, it takes the whole voice thing and actually finally makes voice useful, which I think is partially understood.
- [53:07]
Cameron Dawson
But I've. It's completely changed my workflow. I do 90% of my writing now by dictating, which has not been the case in the past.
- [53:15]
Matt Ziegler
Really. 90%? That much you think?
- [53:17]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah, absolutely.
- [53:18]
Matt Ziegler
Dialogue, conversationally or like dictate and then reflect on the screen with the writing.
- [53:23]
Cameron Dawson
What I've actually started doing is like if I'm, if I' sitting like meditating or if I'm doing sort of. I tend to do some contemplative stuff where I'm sitting there with a pad. Like I'll just be sitting there with my eyes closed thinking through something. I'll now just record a voice memo. And the voice Memo might be two hours long and maybe I spoke for 15 minutes, but it doesn't matter because it doesn't take, you know, it compresses. So a two hour voice memo with me not talking doesn't take any space. So I just dump Voice memos into my Claude instance. And it just transcribes it all back out to me and says, do you want me to add this to this article? It seems like it's part of your tokenization thing. And then it bolt it in and then I manually go back and edit the way I always have.
- [54:01]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah, that's incredible. I do think we're going to just continued use cases in this. My only hope is that that bottom leg of the K doesn't fall off before we start to get a generation of people through figuring out how to be students who can still think for themselves, but also use these tools to maybe improve some of the industries that we're most worried about. Like, yeah, education, like healthcare, like, taking care of those seniors, because I heard we got a few of them in our country.
- [54:25]
Cameron Dawson
Yeah. And I think there's. There's real pros and cons there. Like again, with two. Two kids and two family members in nursing school, on the one hand, this huge acceleration of the academic part, but also complete irrelevance in learning how to do 25 blood pressure screenings in 25 minutes. Like, that's a. That is a physical skill that you're gonna have to learn. Or, you know, doing rounds with the doctor and the doctor's quizzing you. And what kind of side effects should we expect from this? Like, no amount of chatgpt learns that for you as the nurse, walking, doing rounds, getting quizzed by the doctor. Maybe it helps you study. Like, maybe it made you better flashcards, but it's not going to do that job for you.
- [55:04]
Matt Ziegler
I had a moment in our veterinarian's office the other day where I'm trying to figure out, you know, it's like nobody's taking notes. I've got the two people in there, they're having the dialogue with each other while they're checking out my dog. And I'm realizing that they're just dictating. There's. There's a sign on the wall and they're just recording the whole thing. And I finally figure it out because they say something and they're like, oh, like, that doesn't go in the record. And I forget what they said to strike from the record or some version of that, some veterinarian version of that. And I was like, this is changing the way that all this gets captured. And I should also not make a snarky joke.
- [55:36]
Cameron Dawson
You should be thinking about this in your own writing as well. Because while I'm militantly on the I will never let AI write For me camp, which is a whole nother long conversation we can have when you're dictating and you know that it's going to be heard first by an LLM. It lets you do things like say something, you know, I, you know, like we were just talking about the K shaped economy and how this is impacting healthcare workers in particular. You can mid sentence say, go find me a chart of the healthcare versus manufacturing jobs for the last 13 months. Keep talking. And the LLM is smart enough to, when it pulls it out, don't forget to literally drop you the chart with the Department of Labor link in the file that you just made. Like that's a huge time saver.
- [56:22]
Matt Ziegler
All right, let's go save some time. Maybe save the world. I don't know Dave, ETF.com anywhere else.
- [56:30]
Cameron Dawson
We should send people to Blue Sky, LinkedIn, places like that.
- [56:33]
Matt Ziegler
Dave, make sure Dave Notting everywhere. Look up Cameron Dawson everywhere. New Edge wealth, all of her stuff. I know she's got a new a new note coming out soon, but by all means that one from January is still very, very relevant.
- [56:47]
Cameron Dawson
And hey, if people are down at Future Proof Citywide in Miami the first week in March, ETF.com is going to have a big booth. We're just going to be having conversations just like this.
- [56:56]
Matt Ziegler
Just like this. So financial advisors, investors, allocators, tech people, venture people, we know you're listening. You might have even made it this long in this episode. Go say hi to Dave Notting. Tell him that you like Click Beta. Nothing would make my day more than that. Dave, thanks for joining me.
- [57:10]
Cameron Dawson
Thanks for having me.
- [57:12]
Matt Ziegler
All right, we're out.
- [57:13]
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 network@excessreturnspod.com. if you have any feedback or questions, you can contact us@excess returnspodmail.com no information.
- [57:32]
Matt Ziegler
On this podcast should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of the firms of the hosts or their clients.