Is Gen-Z Secretly Rich? | Ep. 039 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Speaker 1 Welcome to my court.

Speaker 1 I didn't think we'd all be here alone like this.

Speaker 2 Oh hey.

Speaker 1 Didn't see you there. Did you know you can check out the lemonade stand page?

Speaker 2 Look,

Speaker 1 it's been some downtrodden years for the king.

Speaker 3 What are you doing?

Speaker 1 I'm trying to film the read for the Patreon.

Speaker 2 This is embarrassing.

Speaker 1 It is embarrassing. It is embarrassing.
I'm here alone.

Speaker 1 I'm here. You left me alone.
And it's just...

Speaker 1 I like it. I like it.
And I just want them to check out patreon.com/slash 118 stand if they want an extra hour of the show every week.

Speaker 3 Well, that's actually a really good idea.

Speaker 1 I've made Atriarch disappear because I forgot one more important thing about signing up for the Patreon. And this goes for all of our current subscribers as well.

Speaker 1 The evil corporation Apple tax on a fee if you do it on mobile operating systems. And I recommend that you go make the subscription on a desktop device or maybe your Android.

Speaker 1 And then you'll pay the the actual price we mean to charge you guys. Okay,

Speaker 1 and we're gonna go to the episode. Hmm.

Speaker 1 It's interesting.

Speaker 1 Look at the time, Brandon Ewing. Look at the time.

Speaker 3 What time is it, Aiden?

Speaker 1 It's uh, it is 3:20 p.m.

Speaker 1 We were supposed to start at 2:30. Supposed to start at 2:30.

Speaker 2 What are we doing?

Speaker 3 I thought you'd take longer to put on this outfit.

Speaker 1 Don't speak to your king like that.

Speaker 1 Do not speak to your king like that.

Speaker 2 My lord, what whist we talk about today?

Speaker 1 See? See, I need you to be a little more like that.

Speaker 2 He's already given in. The people, they're clamoring for information.

Speaker 3 He's already given in.

Speaker 2 And what befalls our kingdom?

Speaker 1 The people need the information that they complain too much, especially the young people. Especially the young people.

Speaker 1 Peasants, you're complaining too much. The king came across some information recently

Speaker 1 that the youngest generation, or one of the younger generations making money, Generation Z, seems to have more money than their predecessors ever did at the same age, even if we account for 2024 inflated dollars.

Speaker 1 And I find that intriguing because the young people, all they do is complain online.

Speaker 3 You bought this.

Speaker 3 You saw that Gen Z.

Speaker 2 Shall we punish them, my lord? And if the young people had just started a podcast like me.

Speaker 2 Government-mandated podcasts, my lord.

Speaker 1 If they had just started a podcast like me, they could have chewed be dressed in finery. Look, everybody out there is talking about it.

Speaker 2 Young people are screwed right now. Everybody.
It's like I've seen every

Speaker 2 columnist or article, journalist

Speaker 2 talking about affordability or are young people screwed?

Speaker 2 Including this article by Derek Thompson, who co-wrote Abundance with Ezra Klein, and on his sub stack literally wrote, Are young people screwed? And there's a lot of discussion around this.

Speaker 2 And as we know, we've talked about there's a lot of anger, there's a lot of uh uh vitriol and feeling of frustration with the younger generations, millennials, and even more so Gen Z that everything feels fucked right now.

Speaker 2 Aiden, you don't seem to disagree, but I'm going to try to make a case.

Speaker 1 I have simply looked at the data.

Speaker 2 I looked at one graph,

Speaker 1 but that graph seemed pretty clear to me, which is that the average young person is actually earning more money now than they did, than any previous generation did at the same age.

Speaker 1 They're able to afford more than they were.

Speaker 1 Also, in over the course of the past 25 years, 30, you know, or more than the past 25 years, we have seen the things like cost of food overall fall dramatically, cost of consumer products that they love buying.

Speaker 1 The young people love buying.

Speaker 3 They be shopping.

Speaker 1 They be shopping.

Speaker 2 Do we have that graph?

Speaker 3 The one that went viral?

Speaker 2 Yes. I think it would be.
Sure. You'll start with that.

Speaker 1 And this old man wonders how they could complain all the time from the comfort of their iPhones and bedrooms.

Speaker 1 And I think in all seriousness, if you do look at that graph, it makes you wonder, you know, why are young people so incredibly...

Speaker 1 unhappy compared to previous generations around the same age and so increasingly dissatisfied with the jobs available to them. Keep in mind, unemployment, still not that low.

Speaker 1 The king has kept you all employed.

Speaker 1 Do not think about what the jobs may or may not be, but that you are employed.

Speaker 2 And plus, look around. I mean, look at, I don't know, your closest friends, Nick, Slime, Ludwig, they're all doing great.

Speaker 1 Look around in a C of the generation Z that I know.

Speaker 2 Actually, they're all over the world.

Speaker 2 And they're all

Speaker 2 pure by far than what did they do?

Speaker 1 They simply chose to start a podcast.

Speaker 2 That's true. That's true.
The data is clear here.

Speaker 1 But but i i think i think

Speaker 1 it is fair to look at this and ask the questions is perhaps perhaps

Speaker 1 the sentiment of people is not a good way to gauge an actual problem perhaps there is no significant difference in the quality of life for these people than there was before but we simply have echo chambers that encourage them to think more negatively than they ever have that was the big debate that is what kicked this off on social media is this a vibe session are we vibes based and there is debating with

Speaker 2 my first sentence and should be

Speaker 3 single shot camera.

Speaker 1 I think that's the end of the discussion.

Speaker 2 All right, so we've all looked into this a lot. There's a lot of different people taking a lot of arguments on this.
And I think that's particularly relevant to our audience, to all of us.

Speaker 2 So let's dive into this. Derek Thompson summarized and kind of compiled a lot of the different arguments for why the economy does suck for young people.

Speaker 2 And again, again, we're talking about millennials and Gen Z in particular. So first off is consumer sentiment.
This is from the survey of consumers. It is the lowest it's been in like 50 years.

Speaker 2 So the yellow line, if you're watching on YouTube, has gone up and down over the last, whatever it is, you know, 50 years. But since 1978, we're basically hitting the lowest point.

Speaker 2 That is a long, long, long period of time at which people currently feel that it is worse than ever, with the buying conditions for housing feeling like they are worse than ever.

Speaker 2 So the sentiment is real bad. There's this very viral chart, which has been going around showing that the median age of a U.S.

Speaker 2 new home buyer, like the first, the age of somebody who's buying a home for the first time, is now 40, indicating like only old people can buy homes.

Speaker 2 None of us young people are able to buy them right now.

Speaker 2 Then the labor market looks really bad. The band of 20 to 24-year-olds has a higher rate of employment than all the other bands by a substantial margin, 9.2% right now.

Speaker 2 And that's around the same as a decade ago when things were not great.

Speaker 2 And it's even worse for recent college graduates who weirdly seem to have a lower unemployment than the average group of workers. This chart here shows that of basically

Speaker 2 historically over time, if you have a college degree, you're more likely to have a job than the average person, including folks without a college degree. That has somehow flipped.

Speaker 2 Having a college degree actually means you have a higher chance of being unemployed right now. If you're a recent college graduate, 22 to 27.

Speaker 1 The king does have a question.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 Aren't young people collectively, young people are always experiencing a higher level of unemployment than the older generation above them, no matter what era of time?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but scroll up.

Speaker 3 I mean, there might be some kind of voices argument, but you can see the gap is much bigger at the end here than it is normally, even if it's always a big gap.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 As in, like, right in this very moment of 2020.

Speaker 3 A lot of inbreeding in the king's lineage.

Speaker 1 The grafts, they go up, they go down.

Speaker 2 They go down.

Speaker 3 They rise, they fall.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the army is.

Speaker 2 The unemployment for young folks right now appears to be worse than the average than normal, like you said.

Speaker 2 And then I think, and we'll get to this in this ongoing discussion, is what that's a really fascinating trend that is basically a first in decades, which is that you're basically hurt to be a recent college graduate right now and trying to find a job.

Speaker 2 That is extremely unusual when did that flip what you can see about three years ago 2022 so something happened a few years ago where it is now worse

Speaker 2 you're less likely and and again this is you know that's different than all college graduates it's different than all workers you're talking about people have recently graduated college which gets we will get into this later with the likelihood of finding a job it's pretty insane it's it's an insane stat like the one you know and we're gonna one of the key things that we've told are that our generation the Gen Z, Gen Alpha has told you, you have to go to college.

Speaker 2 That's what gets you ahead. And that is proving to literally do the opposite.
That's crazy.

Speaker 1 A counter-argument the king might make

Speaker 1 that he heard from his grandfather, who's even older than he is,

Speaker 1 is that the young people have too high of expectations when they come out of college. They will not seek the jobs that are best fit for them.

Speaker 1 They want to make $200,000 a year out of their college degree. And how unreasonable is that?

Speaker 3 Far be it from me to contradict the king.

Speaker 3 But you might say that

Speaker 3 if someone took on four years that they weren't working and then spent that time learning and accruing debt, they have to have some expectation of a higher salary.

Speaker 2 So they were lazy for four years.

Speaker 3 They're not going to take any all job because that won't cover their student loans and the

Speaker 2 shouldn't have taken on such large loans.

Speaker 1 Perhaps it falls to the individual's responsibility to pick an adequate size of loan to go to school.

Speaker 3 You know, the king has a lot of good arguments.

Speaker 2 Layoffs since 2003, they're getting higher than ever.

Speaker 2 A lot of layoffs have been happening quite recently over the past few years, and it's just spiking dramatically in 2025.

Speaker 2 And unemployment expectations, again, this is a sentiment of people feeling like they're at risk with their job and their employment is the highest it's been in like 45 years.

Speaker 2 There's not a ton of evidence that AI is necessarily destroying jobs right now. I personally tend to believe that it's people companies are using that as an excuse.

Speaker 2 I haven't seen a lot of evidence that AI is literally replacing jobs yet. It's more that Microsoft wants to lay people off and then they say AI is the future, but it doesn't seem to be relevant.

Speaker 2 However, that's a whole other discussion we'll get into.

Speaker 2 But what is true from economists at Stanford researched that the intro-level jobs that are most exposed to AI seem to have a relative decline in employment.

Speaker 2 So it seems that maybe not people are getting getting fired because of AI, but roles that would have been open to humans are maybe hiring less often because of AI.

Speaker 2 So job growth is slowing because of AI rather than laying people off. But again, this is a very new topic that is being developed.
So, you know, the conclusion for all this is obvious, right?

Speaker 2 Young people are completely fucked. Obviously, if you look at all these numbers, this is horrific.
This is awful. And Derek goes on to make a counter-argument.

Speaker 2 But first, I want to hear the counter-argument from the king. Any of this data seem fishy to you? Anything that feels like, you know, maybe young people aren't considering something?

Speaker 1 The king's.

Speaker 2 King is golf.

Speaker 1 The king's primary argument has to do with some of these indexes relying most heavily or most dependent on things like consumer sentiment or we could say vibes.

Speaker 2 And I,

Speaker 1 as a excuse me, my son, my son who's young, and

Speaker 2 he, he has never been.

Speaker 3 I thought you were the Gen Z king who was wealthy because Gen Z is not.

Speaker 2 We're talking about the prince. We're talking about his 24-year-old prince.
We're talking about my 24-year-old prince.

Speaker 1 And if you listen to him talk about the economy, he has been rather doomer for a much longer time period than some of these graphs get bad.

Speaker 1 I think there's been an outwardly negative look at things like the job market, job prospects, my future as a young person, much longer than some of these things have turned badly, I would say.

Speaker 1 So with that in mind, and also the, let's say, the

Speaker 1 perhaps fear-mongering of a recession that some of us at the table have profited off of.

Speaker 3 A bad sweater to be wearing if I'm going to defend myself.

Speaker 1 But the recession.

Speaker 1 But the recession isn't, it's not clear if it's actually come or not, that if we're actually going through one or not.

Speaker 1 And we can look back at other social phenomena, such as the

Speaker 1 80s, when people were really, really worried about their kids being kidnapped because of a variety of high-profile stories about children being kidnapped or murdered that made national news.

Speaker 1 Much like certain narratives that may or may not be being perpetuated about migrant crime now. I see.

Speaker 1 And there is a wave of news about a thing that makes people buy into that feeling further and further that then creates consequences that are disconnected from the perhaps data reality of what we are facing.

Speaker 2 My lord, I've heard the peasants are fomenting on TikTok.

Speaker 1 They are. And I fear that they foment.

Speaker 1 But I think that

Speaker 1 the most solid counter-argument I think I've heard, and I'm not here to say, the king is not here to say that you cannot push back. You can push back in Discord.

Speaker 1 Is that the consumer sentiment is not, contrary to what Bezos said in that fucking thing he said on stage years ago, that consumer sentiment is not a reliable indicator of what actual problems are.

Speaker 1 And people's feelings can be drastically warped about things and

Speaker 1 greatly different from the data reality of what is unfolding. And it seems like that may be the case for a great many things here.
The king feels that

Speaker 1 the young people may be complaining unjustly.

Speaker 2 Things are great for the king.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 things have been.

Speaker 2 How could things be bad for the young people?

Speaker 1 Things could be bad. How could they be bad for the young people if they've been so good for the king lately?

Speaker 2 That is true.

Speaker 3 That is a great argument, actually.

Speaker 3 The king's living so large that it should be dragging up this sentimentality.

Speaker 1 Well, the king appreciates data and looks and

Speaker 1 he seems to encounter some data that would not fully back up all of the plights of young people, only to some degree, because they were complaining when things were better.

Speaker 3 I guess the counter argument that I would get to is that I don't think things were much better when the sentiment started to decline. But we can get to that.
I don't want to jump onto that right now.

Speaker 3 We have some more stuff. Let's go down to this.

Speaker 2 So let's look at Derek Thompson's data to back it up. It's not only the vibes of what you're talking about.
Maybe this is all sentiment. Maybe people just have bad vibes.

Speaker 2 Maybe TikTok is making people upset. And to be clear, Derek Thompson is very clear.

Speaker 2 Like, he says in this article multiple times, I know how obnoxious it is for me as a middle-aged guy to say you're not actually screwed. He acknowledges young people, it's bad.
It's bad.

Speaker 2 So he's not saying it's not bad. However, here are some counter arguments to those same arguments that we made earlier.

Speaker 2 So first is that article about housing where it says that the median home buyer is now 40. Like you have to be 40 years old to even have a chance at buying a house.

Speaker 2 Well, it turns out that some of that just appears to be wrong or at least a major outlier. So that chart was very, very popular, but Conan O'Brien, who does research on

Speaker 2 Wikimedia. Excuse me, Connor O'Brien.
Connor O'Brien.

Speaker 2 Oh my god, Conan's doing a lot in this retracement who does a lot of studies and research on this stuff, basically looked through a wide variety of other sources about first-time homebuyers and did not see any major change.

Speaker 2 The American Housing Survey does not show a change in the age of first-time homebuyers at all.

Speaker 2 And you can actually look at, so this is from the New York Fed, finds that first-time homebuyers hasn't changed in terms of that age. It's still like early, early 30s.

Speaker 2 If you look at agency MBS data, which I looked into this essentially, mortgages, information about them has to be reported so you can get a rough sense of age groups and who's getting mortgages for homes.

Speaker 2 More than half of the people who are getting mortgages for homes for the first time are 34 or younger. And that means the median has to be age 34 or younger, according to this data.

Speaker 2 So his conclusion is that the folks who made that viral graph, which is like, oh my God,

Speaker 3 your National Association of Realtors.

Speaker 2 Right, right. So the National Association of Realtors made this graph that has been sort of viral recently and saying the first time homebuyers, the median age is 40.

Speaker 2 He's saying all the other data seems to not back this up and seems to show that it hasn't actually changed. And his conclusion is.

Speaker 2 The National Association of Realtors seems to have changed the way that they pull data or something like that. So one of them is wrong.
But this is like American Housing Survey microdata through 2023.

Speaker 2 Again, it shows first-time homebuyers at 33. So

Speaker 2 quite possibly, it seems that at the very least, the people who pulled this data and said the average age is 40 for a first-time homebuyer, it's a major outlier for what most people are saying.

Speaker 2 So that's the first argument is that might just not really reflect reality here.

Speaker 2 The second is that housing is actually falling, or let's say the cost of housing is actually falling for a lot of people, because it's not just one housing market in the United States.

Speaker 2 There are many different housing markets.

Speaker 2 A fact that I wasn't able to personally verify, but in the last year, more than half of U.S. housing markets had falling rents.

Speaker 3 That is true.

Speaker 2 Okay. Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 3 I've looked at this as well. But, you know,

Speaker 3 if rents and housing prices are falling in some markets, it's usually a sign of like real stress in them. Like, it means there's probably fewer jobs there.

Speaker 3 There's, you know, there's other, it's correlated with pretty bad economic outcomes. It's not like things are going down because.

Speaker 2 Yeah, at the same time, then you get into this of like, so here's Austin's, Austin, Texas's rental market.

Speaker 2 And so you can see that it has spiked dramatically in 2022 as there's a huge surge into Austin and that it has been falling massively.

Speaker 2 And the argument is, well, they've been building way more housing than everybody else.

Speaker 2 And if you look at the amount of housing that they actually permitted, this is from Storage Cafe, who pulled this from the U.S. Census Bureau.
In the last decade, they permitted 135,000 homes.

Speaker 2 And then you compare that to San Francisco, which same-ish population, only 34,000. So there's an argument that actually, if you build a shitload of housing, the rents actually drop.

Speaker 3 I fully agree with that. I'm just saying that the

Speaker 3 implication is a lot of people were boomtowning into Florida and Texas, especially around COVID.

Speaker 2 And now those are retracting, yeah.

Speaker 3 And it's retracting. And they built a ton of stuff that this created like construction jobs and this inflated the values of homes people there.
So they spent more money.

Speaker 3 All these things are reverting, which causes economic. I mean, it's long-term, it's good.

Speaker 2 We want more houses,

Speaker 3 but it's not like everyone is super sunshine and rainbows. It's more like it's a benefit.
It's a cast-off benefit of like things declining.

Speaker 2 Yes. So

Speaker 1 the King's third home in Palm Beach does not bring in as much as it wants to.

Speaker 3 The Airbnb is not going to be looking for the King.

Speaker 2 So that's an argument that's being made. It's like, look, yes, rent continues to go up in San Francisco, but it's going down in a lot of places around the country.

Speaker 2 Getting back to this chart,

Speaker 2 there's a whole bunch of evidence, and this is from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, that shows that Gen Z and millennials are actually richer than their parents were adjusted for inflation.

Speaker 2 And this is one of the core things about the whole argument that's been going on.

Speaker 2 Oh, the kid was correct. And that's the end of our episode.
Thanks for watching, Lemonade Stand.

Speaker 2 So this graph has really been going around and is one of the strongest pieces of data to push back against the doomerism. And, you know, know,

Speaker 2 usually by boomers, but, you know, this data is basically showing you guys are richer than we were. Adjusted for inflation.
You millennials were the richest generation.

Speaker 2 And now Gen Z, you're on track to be even richer than them. So if, you know, let's say in quotes, the objective data shows that we're going to have some counter arguments.

Speaker 2 And again, there's plenty of evidence around the average wealth by 34 seems to be higher for our generations.

Speaker 2 Even the unemployment rate, which feels really bad, and this was really shocking to me, the unemployment rate for 16 to 24 year olds, if you look at historically, right now it's let's say about 10%.

Speaker 2 There's actually a huge chunk of the last 75 years where it's been worse than that. From 1970 to about 2000, it was...
it was worse than it is right now.

Speaker 2 And that's like when the boomers were growing up. So the idea of 10% unemployment for young people obviously sucks ass, but it's not a major historical anomaly.
I think you can objectively say that.

Speaker 2 Even if

Speaker 2 everything else, right, like it is not true that the current level of unemployment is way, way worse than some other part of history. Again, it blows, though.
So that's what Derek Thompson ends.

Speaker 2 He says, look, here are the arguments for, here are the arguments against.

Speaker 2 I think this situation sucks, but on some objective metric levels, it's actually not as bad, especially looking at this thing of like adjusted for inflation, you guys are actually wealthier than previous generations.

Speaker 2 Gang, anything you want to cap off before we begin making the peasant counter argument?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's just the data speaks volumes.

Speaker 2 Look at that line.

Speaker 2 My lord. The line is higher.

Speaker 1 It's like I can feel you. I can feel you

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 1 exploding with the counter-argument. But I want you to be careful in the presence of the king with the words that you choose.

Speaker 3 I do recognize your authority. You are the king.
You are quite wealthy.

Speaker 1 The king thinks back to when he ran tournaments for the video games that he played and carried a CRT both ways.

Speaker 2 Princess Peach, of course.

Speaker 1 And now what do the kids have? As much money as they want to buy the flattest TVs imaginable, the lighter in every way. Okay, let's get to that.

Speaker 3 Let's talk about that. So I...

Speaker 2 Wait, hold on, hold on. You got to talk into the microphone.

Speaker 2 Ow!

Speaker 2 He has yelled ow

Speaker 2 for those listening.

Speaker 3 Okay, okay. So we have this graph up that shows that Gen Z and millennials have more dollars, even adjusted for inflation.

Speaker 3 And again, you know, a graph that has no source on it, it's similar to the National Association of Realtors graph.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. This is St.
Louis Federal Reserve. So I can, this is, this is backed up.
Like, this is from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
They have a whole bunch of takeaways. All right.

Speaker 2 It is, yeah, it is real.

Speaker 3 Because before we even get to this, I mean,

Speaker 3 how you adjust for inflation is

Speaker 3 extremely important on a graph like this. And there's different ways you could take that.

Speaker 3 And also, you know, this is a general thing I have across most of these graphs is that they use averages across all of Gen Z.

Speaker 3 And what we're seeing, not only in Gen Z, but in all generations, is real marked divides among different economic cohorts. So like

Speaker 3 averages don't often do a great way of explaining what people in the bottom end of, for example, the K are really feeling. But okay, this is the graph that I think is worth

Speaker 2 talking about with regards to this.

Speaker 3 Because you can easily have more dollars and yet feel like you are poorer relative to those older than you in getting certain key things.

Speaker 3 So this is price changes of consumer goods and services over the past 25 years.

Speaker 3 2000 and now.

Speaker 3 I would like you guys to guess. Actually, how do we want to do this? What's the best way of doing this?

Speaker 3 What if I

Speaker 3 name a category and you tell me up or down? That seems like the best way to do it.

Speaker 2 Cool. Okay.

Speaker 3 I'm going to name a category of item and then you tell me if it's gotten more expensive. By the way, I mean,

Speaker 3 does the St. Louis Fed have what they use for inflation over the past?

Speaker 1 Yeah, let me check. Will this include a lot of items sold at grocery stores?

Speaker 2 Say again?

Speaker 1 A lot of items maybe sold at grocery stores and department stores. The king has not been to one in a long time.

Speaker 3 You have to imagine what your shopper is paying for

Speaker 2 the king.

Speaker 1 What Nick Yingling is paying at the store.

Speaker 3 This is a little bit accurate. Okay, all right.

Speaker 2 No, all right. So really, this is super critical.
They just, the St. Louis, this graph, which everybody's talking about, uses CPI.
Okay. It uses CPI.
Okay.

Speaker 3 And I, you know, which we'll dive into. There are some issues with CPI, which will dive into it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which you want to talk about.
Okay.

Speaker 3 So what do you guys think? New cars. Everyone needs a car.
Gen Z needs a car. Where are cars at on this graph?

Speaker 2 It's a horseless carriage, my lord.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 3 What would you say for cars?

Speaker 2 They've probably gone up a little.

Speaker 2 Like up a little? I feel like you can always bought a car for like a couple tens of thousands, right? Sorry, since 2000?

Speaker 3 Since 2000,

Speaker 3 have cars gotten relatively more expensive or relatively less expensive?

Speaker 1 Relatively more.

Speaker 3 You both say more.

Speaker 2 I'm saying more. But only by a little bit.

Speaker 1 I think because the availability of auto loans has gotten so broad. So I imagine that pushes the prices up.

Speaker 3 Less.

Speaker 1 Dude, fuck my life.

Speaker 3 I mean, it has actually gone up a little bit, but this is below the rate of inflation.

Speaker 1 I i have my shopper buy my car

Speaker 3 increased income you can actually get a car slightly cheaper than you would be able to get to in 2000.

Speaker 3 what about what about clothing

Speaker 2 down for sure yeah clothing down clothing down

Speaker 2 that's something i was thinking about today i'm like dude price of everything has gone up so much since i've been an adult and i still buy a shirt online for 20 bucks like i said yeah yeah it's crazy yeah Because remember, if something is the same price over 20 years, that's incredible.

Speaker 3 That means it's getting relatively much cheaper because your wages do go up with inflation.

Speaker 3 What about

Speaker 2 food?

Speaker 2 Damn. Food?

Speaker 2 It's gone up. I mean, it's obviously gone up, but I don't think it's gone up as much as other things, right? So I'd say it probably matches inflation.

Speaker 2 I mean, the last couple of years have been fucked.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's on up recently, but I feel like in the last, or did we make most of the gains on reducing cost of food like before 2000?

Speaker 2 The thing is, I know that there's there's because of globalization and whatnot you know importing tons of food and we're able to keep it pretty cheap because of that i would say it's like down still down you think down okay i would go down it's up shit but not a crazy amount but not as much i feel like

Speaker 2 yeah and i might be missing it slightly yeah okay so it for a lot of the last 20 years it was going up but not crazy and then it it spiked a substantially more in just the past couple years yeah recently and again i think this is probably 24 numbers.

Speaker 3 If I'm being honest with you, if I had to, if I, you know, these usually things are like one year out of date, so uh, could be spiking up a little bit more.

Speaker 3 But food and beverage has recently gotten more expensive, but overall is up.

Speaker 2 Uh, all right, I'm gonna go through a couple of them here.

Speaker 3 Let's let's let's start revealing because I think the quiz thing might not work. Let's talk about what's going down.
What do you think is the cheapest thing?

Speaker 3 If you had to guess what category has gotten relatively insanely cheaper,

Speaker 3 you can get this so much cheaper than someone could as a young person in college.

Speaker 2 my dad, he just had to work at the farm at the summers, and he paid off all the medical school.

Speaker 3 That would that sounds like it was cheaper back then. What do you think got cheaper now?

Speaker 2 What do you think is oh, has it gone up?

Speaker 3 You think working at the farm for summers was too much, and now it's even easier.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I would assume. So I would assume over time we would have made this more efficient and cheaper.

Speaker 3 Certainly, okay, we can we can do that. College tuition and fees is here.

Speaker 3 One of the most dramatically increased costs, 170%.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 Something so critical to the well-being of the every man that's happening in the kingdom.

Speaker 2 And it's almost like that disproportionately affects young people and not old people.

Speaker 3 So that, I mean, that alone is already a big strike, sort of this graph, because you may have more

Speaker 3 median dollars, but if...

Speaker 3 things that are super scarce and critical like college are that much more expensive than the same time then you're gonna feel a little bit screwed compared to the journey of someone older than you who went through it cheaper.

Speaker 3 Even if you can get, let's reveal it.

Speaker 2 No guesses?

Speaker 2 It's TVs, bro. Oh, thank God.
TVs are super screwed. We've never been better off at TVs.
TVs. You guys remember when we were young? We saw CRTs.
They're like, imagine we get a big ass TV.

Speaker 2 Dude, everybody can get a big ass TV. These fucking Trinitrons were like a thousand dollars.

Speaker 3 I mean, they were insanely expensive for a crappy TV.

Speaker 1 Now you get your OLED LG, whatever it is, and it plays ads on it when you get into

Speaker 1 sleep mode.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's awesome. Are people unhappy? Do you know how big these TVs are?

Speaker 3 This is a really good argument.

Speaker 1 Has Gen Z seen how thin they are?

Speaker 2 I think they don't understand. They're raised.

Speaker 1 OLED pixels. Do they see?

Speaker 2 Not because TV is but toys. Young people love toys.
God.

Speaker 3 We're in an abundance of toys. Young people have never had more money to buy toys.
Toys have never been relatively cheaper.

Speaker 2 If you want laboo boos or if you want to buy a king outfit on Amazon for the podcast.

Speaker 1 The king has this family. This has been in my family for hundreds of years.

Speaker 2 Those are cheaper.

Speaker 3 If you want to get, this is actually pretty cool, but if you want to get computer software, never been cheaper. You can get, I mean, you have an incredible act.
I remember having to pay for,

Speaker 2 well, I didn't have to pay for it, but

Speaker 3 Photoshop, I definitely stole. But you can definitely get access to like incredible software now.
People still pirate it, actually, no matter how cheap it is.

Speaker 2 But yeah, it's all, it's like most software stayed this well i don't want to say that a lot of software has stayed the same price and even if you think about video games you know it's been 60 bucks for a game for like most of our adult life right it's only now increasing and inflation you know basically just means that's a discount silk song was 20

Speaker 3 that's incredible that's a seven-year game those guys are insane though um

Speaker 3 this is

Speaker 2 cell phone services that's true

Speaker 3 Cell phones have gotten cheaper and more capable. You're getting more for less in general than people did way back in the day.
Of course.

Speaker 3 And this one here, clothing and household furnishings. So, you know, you notice you're not seeing a house on here.
But if you want to furnish the house.

Speaker 2 Well, could I make a house out of couches?

Speaker 3 That would be interesting.

Speaker 2 Do you think that Beverly Hills will give me the permit for that?

Speaker 3 I think he's got an answer to that. Okay, so let's reveal what got more scarce because I think this is the core of the divide here on whether or not people were screwed.

Speaker 3 And that's why I think, while there is some points there, using median dollars does not capture the feeling that

Speaker 3 the real markers of a successful life are getting more expensive.

Speaker 3 While you can afford more cell phones and TVs and toys and software, you can't get

Speaker 3 when this is housing. And this depends on where you live a lot.
And young people like to move to

Speaker 3 scarcer cities, you know, San Francisco. Things where they have an opportunity for a better, high-paying, long-term career, which is where this has gone really parabolic.

Speaker 1 What if, what if all of the greedy, lazy young people weren't just moving to New York City? Yeah, what if they moved to the house?

Speaker 2 Token a job in South Dakota.

Speaker 3 What if they build a future career in Tulsa?

Speaker 2 I just don't care. This is where we learn Aiden's king of South Dakota.
He's trying to get everyone to come there. It's a tourism thing.

Speaker 1 I think the young people should move to Sioux Falls.

Speaker 3 That should be such a funny tourism ad as a king, like getting all the Gen Z to come to live like a king.

Speaker 3 Like a mattress ad.

Speaker 3 Child care, medical care,

Speaker 3 college textbooks, and tuition fees.

Speaker 3 And then number one, worst of all.

Speaker 2 I actually thought housing would be the most inflated. And I'm surprised it's not.

Speaker 3 What's number one? This is where a lot of political damage is. Hospital services, healthcare.

Speaker 3 So, you know, you could make a strong argument that these things are for pleasure and these things you need to kind of live. This is like the cost of a life.

Speaker 1 I mean, the expenses for medical care and hospital services seem to have gone up by so much. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I know that we produce radically better outcomes in the United States compared to everywhere else.

Speaker 1 So it's probably fine.

Speaker 3 That probably hurt you to say, Sweet Boo.

Speaker 2 You didn't even do that as a job. I feel like the college textbooks started to drop briefly in like 2019.
And then somehow after the pandemic, they convinced everybody.

Speaker 2 It's like, no, you should pay even more for these books that have not gotten any better. Yeah, I wonder why that was.
I definitely remember

Speaker 3 even, you know, this is like fucking my era.

Speaker 3 The insane, palpable frustration I had with

Speaker 3 they would put like the

Speaker 3 key that you had to buy in the official store of college. You couldn't like get a used copy.
Right. You couldn't buy a used copy.

Speaker 3 you couldn't get a pdf online you had to buy the otherwise you wouldn't want to register it was like very very frustrating um so this is like i think this is the general high level counter argument which is that telling people they are better off just because they have more dollars is missing some nuance on the things they really want which have gotten out of control uh they want college education to have it formerly to have a chance at a better career where you're even mentioning that that right even the value of that is dropped yeah and i you know i didn't see that graph, the one you showed of

Speaker 3 college education having a higher unemployment rate than non, but I have seen one that I should be clear.

Speaker 2 It's not that having a college education makes you worse off. It's just that you're, it's no longer an advantage.
Right. Right.

Speaker 2 The average worker, which includes everybody, college degree or not, is actually better than you if you're 20 to 27 with a college degree.

Speaker 2 So important to say it's not having a college degree is worse. It's just not benefiting you in the way it did.

Speaker 3 But the thing I saw from that was especially, this is especially for men, which is that it was a graph that basically said that in that there was absolutely no advantage they were given to getting the degree.

Speaker 3 So they were just four years behind and they were in terms of employment rate. They were getting out of the market, which was which was

Speaker 3 pretty insane.

Speaker 2 So yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 Thoughts, King? Is this anything?

Speaker 3 Should I throw this away?

Speaker 1 The king is not impervious to data.

Speaker 1 And he can begin to see the shape of your argument that perhaps some of the most essential things that you have to spend money on as a young person eat up a larger and larger portion of your budget which he would guess would leave you with less disposable income than you did before to save and put away

Speaker 2 and i would also say

Speaker 3 go on this one more thing you know another thing that's gone up like this other than just housing stock market but they haven't had the chance to get on the they haven't owned when it was cheap so the chance to buy assets is also out of their reach so they have this cash but they're buying generational highs in housing and stocks the things they really want which is college and health care and child care are up and what i would say is if it was just vibes if they were actually doing really well you'd think you wouldn't see such a precipitous decline in

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 3 having kids you and and constant reporting of

Speaker 3 i'm just saying like i feel like there's actions that are also showing negative outcomes not just polling sentiment i feel like king would argue that king has been listening to nick fuentes

Speaker 2 and nick's saying it's the women

Speaker 1 the king's son showed him rumble.com and he's been an avid viewer recently and

Speaker 1 it i'm in all seriousness on the birth rate

Speaker 3 i'm not sure if that is i we could do a whole episode on birth rate now it's definitely more than just income but there's a lot of evidence that like when people have not just stable income, but some kind of free time,

Speaker 3 they do the kid, the birth rate goes up. And so there must be some correlation here,

Speaker 3 especially with cost of childcare rising so rapidly.

Speaker 1 Is that true, though, on the birth rate thing? I think that, isn't that the big problem with the birth rate?

Speaker 1 Like if we took that as its own standalone problem or, you know, potentially connected to this, which I think it does have connections to this.

Speaker 1 But on the whole, even if you control a lot of these costs and make a lot of these circumstances better, you don't just see birth rates skyrocket.

Speaker 1 It seems to have a deeper tie to like industrialization than it does to factors like this.

Speaker 3 Definitely true to that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. We should probably do a deeper episode on that.
There's no nuanced skin.

Speaker 1 I like

Speaker 2 it.

Speaker 2 You'll have all the babies.

Speaker 1 He's like my evil advisor.

Speaker 2 He's like, here, King, King, take your iPad.

Speaker 2 Take your iPad and keep swiping. You'll have to evoke Prima Nocta.

Speaker 1 You've been on a weird Prima Nocta game.

Speaker 2 Primanocta. We've been on a weird king coming back, all right?

Speaker 1 In Japan, we keep going out in Japan, and then Doug would be like, What do you think?

Speaker 2 Get a couple beers and

Speaker 2 what else is there to talk about, dude?

Speaker 3 You don't know, by the way, Prima Nocta is the right of the king to have the first night with any wife

Speaker 2 when you get married. I want my country.

Speaker 1 The king is not opposed.

Speaker 2 Okay, dude, on this CPI stuff, I didn't realize this until we dove into it this week. Of like when everybody talks about inflation, I mean, you go because you see you have something.

Speaker 3 But no, I have one more thing. Was just there was a graph you had where you had, you said sentiment.

Speaker 2 You were like, consumer.

Speaker 3 Sentiment's not really, you know, like people have bad vibes, but it doesn't mean anything. These aren't that bad.
I would, could you pull this up, Perry?

Speaker 1 There's plenty of my overall kind of real argument that I don't necessarily have to that I think is the situation exactly here is that

Speaker 1 we have misplaced vibes about things literally all the time.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 1 Like reality is often very disconnected from what popular sentiment actually is.

Speaker 3 I think that's fair, but I would say historically, this is the graph of consumer sentiment. The shaded parts are recessions.

Speaker 3 There is a clear correlation between dips on this graph and actual real world recessions.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but what if everybody is brain rotted this time?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Like the only one that would really break this one is the current one. So if you're telling me that all the previous ones, people knew they were in recession, that's why they were mad.

Speaker 3 But now they have become brain rotted.

Speaker 3 There's a possible argument that like the internet has changed something about sentiment and people and vibes are worse.

Speaker 2 In the previous recessions, like in the 80s and 70s, did they have TikTok?

Speaker 3 This is a fair argument. It's actually a fair argument that maybe things are different this time because social media has broken people's brains and things are actually good and they're mad.

Speaker 3 But I would say, let's just, if historically, it's probably the same as last time. They're really pissed because their opportunities are measurably worse.

Speaker 3 That would be my argument. It's like, it's just like 07, 08, or 2000 in the middle of COVID, or 2001 after the dot-com bubble.
Like, the opportunities get worse. Day nine is streaming.

Speaker 2 I can't believe you have Discord notifications for day nine.

Speaker 1 On for your

Speaker 2 Zoomer here.

Speaker 3 So that is my argument.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 3 to make make the case that people's vibes are just willy, now they are kind of willy-nilly in general. I know on a lot of things.

Speaker 3 But when they talk about the economy, especially if you ask them questions like, what are my odds of getting a job in six months? If I were to lose it now,

Speaker 3 like they, they generally track performance of real things.

Speaker 3 It's not completely disconnected gibberish. It tracks.
actual recessions, actual bad economic feelings, actual slowdowns. Again, we're having rising bankruptcies.
We're having rising default rates.

Speaker 3 These things aren't made up. And so I do think people aren't, I think it's frustrating to call it vibes.

Speaker 2 I think I crashed out on someone on Twitter recently, actually.

Speaker 3 I saw that. I crashed out because it's like, bro, I think it's like spitting in someone's face until it's totally vibes-based.
Not that there aren't Gen Z doing well.

Speaker 2 Some people clearly are. I think we have a real

Speaker 2 conversion. I want to talk about that.

Speaker 2 Setting CPI and inflation aside. So as we're doing all this research, one of the things is, you know, again,

Speaker 2 people keep coming at this graph.

Speaker 2 Younger generations are richer than their parents and one of the things that derek brought up was like oh well in the last five years you know and we've all heard about this more people are investing in the stock market than ever before right the game stop craze and and the crypto craze and all this has made people far more people the average person invest in the stock market earlier than they did before whereas in the past that used to be kind of an old person's game you'd spend the first couple decades you buy a house you know later decades in your life you invest in stocks.

Speaker 2 And so imagine that you're somebody in Gen Z or a millennial who started investing in the stock market in the last five years. I'm in that category, right?

Speaker 2 Once I started saving money in whatever it was, I was, you know, when I was 30 or something like that, I started putting my money into the S P 500. S p 500, the giant index most people invest into.

Speaker 2 If you look at the history of the S P 500, which you could very roughly correlate with where people are putting their savings, from

Speaker 2 September of 2000, it was $1,500 to buy one, what's it called, stock in S P 500?

Speaker 3 Like a unit, I guess. A unit.

Speaker 2 One unit in the S SP 500.

Speaker 1 One gram of the S P 500.

Speaker 2 Give me a gram.

Speaker 2 So if you itch it fiending. If you do a line of the SP 500 back in 2000, you're talking 1,500 big ones, okay?

Speaker 2 And then 19 years later in 2019, it finally doubles to $3,000. It took 19 years for it to double.
It has doubled again in the last four. Okay.
So like

Speaker 2 five, excuse me. So the SP 500, one of the main indices that people are investing into, has doubled at what, four times faster than it had in the past.
This is an insane explosion of wealth.

Speaker 2 And so for people like me who put some money into the SP 500 four years ago, I'm like, oh, wow, holy shit. Like this is incredible.
Stock markets are awesome.

Speaker 2 And there are probably many people in Gen Z in the millennial generation who've done that. And so when we look at these graphs of, oh, they're actually wealthier, this is going to account for that.

Speaker 1 It's going to affect that somebody's savings that they put into the stock market five years ago have fucking doubled that's crazy the king did have this thought when he was looking at one of the other graphs is that your your barrier to entry like it was comparing wealth of these of like the boomer generation at the same age right and it's so disproportionately lower and so many of those like when you go that far back the

Speaker 1 bottom rung of the ladder to getting into a house was so much lower, right?

Speaker 1 So you had the ability to save your money and then buy a home, which wasn't necessarily skyrocketing in value for like much of the previous century. Right.

Speaker 1 So your wealth that was primarily put into the home wasn't exploding.

Speaker 1 But now for a lot of younger people, I'm imagining that what money you do have is nowhere near enough for a down payment on a home. So you just put it into the stock market instead.

Speaker 1 And you happen to be investing at a time when there's record performances.

Speaker 2 But then I think on top of of that, I don't, you might have data on how many millennials and Gen Z invest in the stock market. Presumably, most don't still, right?

Speaker 2 Because of all the issues we're talking about.

Speaker 3 I heard like investing as in putting a small amount in, it's actually higher than ever. Like, people are trying it a little bit with Robinson.

Speaker 3 But not at like, but like 90% of the total value of the assets in the stock market is owned by boomers.

Speaker 2 Okay. They own all of the value.
So much. That's what I mean.

Speaker 1 But it's, it's like somewhat reasonable, right? For somebody like in a pretty normal job, middle of the road, like you're 28, 29 years old, to maybe have like 10, 20, $30,000 in savings.

Speaker 1 It's pretty reasonable for that to be the case, right?

Speaker 3 And you grab it, it seems like an outlier.

Speaker 1 And really, really high. Yeah, but any amount in that range of like, whether it be like a couple, like a couple thousand versus like a 30,000 on the high end, right?

Speaker 1 Now, instead, you have no, I go back to this feeling that I told you guys about a while ago.

Speaker 2 I'm normal right now.

Speaker 2 Oh, you're so normal.

Speaker 1 Where when I had my previous job job and I was making 60K a year, I had no conceivable path to owning a home.

Speaker 1 Like it wasn't even on my mind because there's no realistic timeline with the amount of money that I'm saving right now that I can even afford a down payment.

Speaker 1 But I was saving money and getting close to what I'm describing right now and then thinking about putting it in something like the SP. So I do think it makes sense.

Speaker 1 You don't necessarily, it's not that Gen Z have like this outsized portion portion of overall money put into it. They're not necessarily the reason that it's going up so much.

Speaker 1 But I do think it makes sense that for what portion of savings that you do have that will never, from your young person mind, will never translate into a home, at least not anytime soon.

Speaker 1 You may as well put it into this thing that happened to explode over this like 10 year period.

Speaker 3 That's a really good point. I think that's why a lot of people in this argument came back to,

Speaker 3 even people that were like, they're not as screwed as we think. they came back to housing because there's clearly something broke.
I think there's more screwed up.

Speaker 3 I'm on the side of a lot of these are screwed, but even most people can agree that there's a, there's a through line here, which is that housing has divorced itself.

Speaker 3 And again, can we pull the screen up, Perry? This is from, this is the crash up, but

Speaker 3 housing has so clearly divorced itself from income, even with increased incomes, that people.

Speaker 3 They use this excess money in a lot of weird different like they're traveling more like they're doing more things because they don't they meaning like boomers who have homes i'm talking about no even gen z gen z is like because they have this little nest egg that's not enough for a down payment oh rather than putting that down and starting to put down roots like like their parents might have or their grandparents they are

Speaker 3 making speculative bets on on on the stock market or crypto or they're traveling more or they're like they are enjoying more purchases than the people that that range they're buying taylor swift tickets or they're buying t-swift tickets yeah but it's because they have given up it's like it's a hedonic spending because they have given up on the chance of getting a house.

Speaker 1 I think that's a really good way of putting it. I feel like that, that's how I felt.
I was like, I'm saving what I reasonably can.

Speaker 1 And I actually do feel like I have a lot of disposable income because the idea of

Speaker 1 saving for a house is just, it's not existent.

Speaker 1 There's no chance I will ever get there and something drastically changes about my income in life. So I may as well just, I can just spend it on fun things.
And I'll go travel.

Speaker 1 I'll do this with my friends. I'll buy the concert tickets.

Speaker 1 Like you can do all that because it's not being put towards that greater goal because of how out of reach it is and i agree with that i think i think but i do like just personally that applies to

Speaker 3 you know the the the half that's doing better of gen z or whatever like the the portion of gen z that like has found a stable maybe white collar employment and because there's like there's a bigger group of people that can't get a job at all and there is a rising youth unemployment and there is uh you know even food like more basic costs that are eating into that, that they're not even thinking about.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's, that's my argument as well.

Speaker 2 So, like, for me, the SP 500 explosion, as an example, which is basically anybody who put money into the stock market, you, you would have seen it blow up over the past five years.

Speaker 2 But even with someone you're talking about, right, who's let's say 28, they had $10,000 saved up, they put it into the stock market, now it's $20,000, like that, that's great.

Speaker 2 That doesn't move the needle in any way, shape, or form.

Speaker 2 But then anybody who, let's say, has been working at Google for five years out and they've been making $200,000 a year and they could put $100,000 grand in and now they have 200 they're crushing right and so I

Speaker 2 because this graph is like oh see Gen Z and millennials have more money than anyone else I think frankly it's people like us three who have been very fortunate where if you've been fortunate over the past five years you've been really it's just it's fucking skyrocketing and then and then everybody else is being farther left behind but the average is being shot way the fuck up because it so i i get the sense that this is indicative of severe wealth inequality between like within generations right and so the king has heard that young millennial millionaires you're back king

Speaker 2 young new record numbers of young millennial millionaires are being made every day yeah record i i bet these numbers about wealth look way way worse if you actually separate it into income bands like it's probably substantially more depressing yeah and it's because i i just

Speaker 3 i know it could be vibes but it feels so crazy to think that everyone simultaneously is encountering these similar problems.

Speaker 2 I don't know. Well, let's, okay, let's dig into housing.

Speaker 2 So like, like you said, what a lot of people, and again, I've seen like every news outlet has been talking about affordability and are young people screwed?

Speaker 2 So two arguments from some surprising people. First is Peter Thiel.

Speaker 2 Peter Thiel, for those who are not aware, is a venture capitalist who is, I don't know, very libertarian and right-leaning, let's say. There's various controversy around him.

Speaker 2 He, interestingly, in 2020, wrote an email to the Facebook executives basically saying that it's completely understandable that millennials are moving towards socialism and says, when 70% of millennials say they're pro-socialist, we need to do better than to simply dismiss them by saying they're stupid or entitled or brainwashed.

Speaker 2 We should try to understand why. And he argues that there's

Speaker 2 a broken generational compact, which is if somebody has too much student debt or if housing is unaffordable, they won't be able to accumulate capital and they won't be able to benefit from our whole kind of capitalist system where it's meant to grow over time.

Speaker 2 So, this became viral in the wake of Mom Donnie winning and all of, you know, many people of Gen X, boomers, and everywhere going, how did a socialist just win in New York?

Speaker 2 And they're looking at Peter Thiel, a kind of unexpected source of this, going, it's obvious the younger generations aren't getting the same contract that their parents had.

Speaker 2 And so, the Free Press did an article with, did an interview with Peter Thiel this past week or two. And he basically expanded on this and makes the argument that the

Speaker 2 real thing this comes down to is housing. He says you can reduce 80% of culture wars to economics and you can reduce 80% of that to real estate.
So he basically argues.

Speaker 3 I think that's such a powerful line where he compares going to college in 1970 to now because

Speaker 3 you go to college in 1970, you graduate with no student debt, you worked in the summer. The college has a material, immediate impact on your earnings.
You are immediately going to get a better job,

Speaker 3 highly chance, better job, more money. The alternative is you go now, you have way, way, way more debt.
And I'm talking about literally right now, if you're graduating right now,

Speaker 3 no advantage in terms of employment. People are chat GPTing everything.
Your teachers are chat GPTing everything. There's no like guarantee you're getting an education of any like severe quality.

Speaker 3 And then you're graduating into an environment where I think I agree with you, Doug, that most people are doing layoffs, not actually because of AI. They're just saying it.
But they're, I mean,

Speaker 2 we use AI. We've used it.
Like,

Speaker 3 it does often have the capability of like an entry-level employee. Like, it has that.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think, to be clear, I think it is harming entry-level jobs, but just not in the way that people, it's not like. It's not the layoffs.

Speaker 3 I agree with you. I think the layoffs are.

Speaker 2 I think the layoffs are not what's going on.

Speaker 1 They're looking to dump the people no matter what.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 2 And they're just trying, they're using it as an excuse to hire less, basically.

Speaker 3 But if you are a company, one of these big companies, and you see AI is getting better and it does entry-level stuff, you're clearly going to be like more

Speaker 3 safe about throwing up a bunch of open roles and trying to hire things.

Speaker 2 Well, more so, you're rewarded in the stock market right now if you talk about how much AI you use.

Speaker 2 So you are incentivized to not hire people and brag about how much AI you're using, even though in practice right now, AI is not having a big impact for most companies and most economies, right?

Speaker 2 So everybody's talking about how great it is. And

Speaker 2 again, even for me who's generally an AI optimist, I think the benefits have yet to be seen.

Speaker 2 I'm an optimist because I think where it could be in the future, nobody, I think, is sincerely making the argument that, oh my God, it's revolutionizing everything right now. It's like.

Speaker 1 I'm reading this article

Speaker 2 through my glasses.

Speaker 1 And it feels like Peter Thiel is not, he's not touching on how lazy people are.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he didn't mention that at all.

Speaker 2 People used to be harder working back then.

Speaker 1 And he also fails to address the TikTok concern.

Speaker 3 That was a concern. We should talk about that, Stu.

Speaker 2 So I actually, actually think Peter Thiel is very smart in this article and really just says, like, he, you know, he tries not to speak categorically and basically just says, look, we have screwed people over.

Speaker 2 Like our generation have screwed people over. He has a quote that's like,

Speaker 2 boomers are strangely uncurious about how the world is not really working for their kids. And I'm just like, yes, thank you.
I don't understand.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so it talks about this and then says, like, yes, of course people are going to move to socialism. And I think essentially it comes down to housing.

Speaker 2 If people feel both because of student debt and the price of housing, they can't accumulate capital. They are not going to buy into a capitalist system.

Speaker 2 And his argument is people are less supportive of communism and socialism than they're just angry at capitalism. No opinion also.

Speaker 2 So this is an economist who I don't always agree with, but has a found an interesting graph from Ben Glasner, which is from the Economic Innovation Group, that shows that he also makes the argument of housing is ultimately what this is, where this doomerism is coming from.

Speaker 2 He shows the same data about, oh, the current generations are wealthier, but he says homeownership rate across the generations. Gen X has still not caught up to the same level of

Speaker 2 home ownership that boomers had, meaning that Gen X

Speaker 2 has always had a lower percentage of home ownership than their parents, or I guess, you know, whatever, their older brothers.

Speaker 2 And then millennials, our Atriarch and my generation, we are just now catching up to Gen X, but we're still nowhere near boomers, right?

Speaker 2 So it took us way longer than Gen X did to start getting homes, but even then then we're behind the boomers and Gen Z is currently a small gap from us.

Speaker 2 So there's this argument of like, look, the boomers and the silent generation, they were the ones most able to actually get a home relatively early in their life.

Speaker 2 And the next kind of generations are struggling. Basically follows up a lot of the same things that

Speaker 2 the other does. And, you know, says, look, the vast majority of Americans build their wealth.
Like if you're on the middle class, you build your wealth through a home. And if we lock that out of,

Speaker 2 if we lock people out of that opportunity, that is a fundamental break of the American dream and the feeling things are going to get better.

Speaker 2 And obviously just the core sense of like, oh, I'm going to build a family. I'm going to put down roots.

Speaker 2 And so even if we talk about vibes, if the vibes are particularly bad because of this one issue, housing, I think it's a real valid argument to go, well, that actually might be the most important thing, right?

Speaker 2 It's how it's not just where you live. It's also the way that you would build your wealth long term and it's where you would build a family.
And that feels broken to people fundamentally.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, when when I did that Gavin Newsom interview, I said radicalism is win-no-house.

Speaker 2 I agree with you.

Speaker 3 I agree with you 100%, Doug. I think, I mean, I don't know that I agree that it's only housing because I do think, you know, maybe hospital or college.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the argument is just, it's the price.

Speaker 3 I agree because I think, like you said, once you have a house, you, I don't know. I think it's a

Speaker 3 calming thing where you feel like you have roots or some

Speaker 3 piece of society. Right.
Instead of being adrift, like you're a cog in someone else's machine that is just there to deliver Uber Eats or whatever. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 This is like a getting on the ladder kind of thing. And feeling like you can't do it is

Speaker 3 incredibly demoralizing, incredibly alienating.

Speaker 2 And it makes you, I think, more radicalized, more unwilling to listen to politicians' yap. I want to read a comment.

Speaker 2 from a guy on this Peter Thiel free press article, which just feels so, it encapsulates my frustration.

Speaker 2 The more we've done research for this show, the more I've become upset at boomers, unfortunately. This is from Rick H.
in response to Peter Thiel.

Speaker 2 USA's older generations, which includes me and many here in the comment sections, have, one, left younger folks in the U.S.

Speaker 2 with $38 trillion in debt to fund nice retirements and healthcare for us older folks.

Speaker 2 Two, set up a system to encourage young folks to go into insane levels of debt for what often turns out to be useless college educations to keep aging professors and administrators employed.

Speaker 2 I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, but three, set up a system to enrich themselves by artificially inflating home prices.

Speaker 2 We did this by supporting government policies and electing officials that implemented all this.

Speaker 2 And then in quotes, capitalism isn't working for young people, more like government-enforced intergenerational theft isn't working for young people. And it's just like, God damn.

Speaker 2 So I appreciate the awareness and I just get the sense of like, dude,

Speaker 3 what's fucking crazy is right now, like this year,

Speaker 3 There's this big push in a lot of these states, especially no income tax states like Florida, to get rid of the last tax that hits boomers, which is property tax.

Speaker 2 Property tax, yeah.

Speaker 3 So like the boomers get houses, you know, back here, the price inflates all the way up here.

Speaker 3 And now the only tax they have to pay that funds schools, roads, hospital services in their area is property tax.

Speaker 3 And they are flipping out about it and using their last gasp of political power to rip that out, which means all those things are paid for by the remaining smaller amount of younger people.

Speaker 3 It's crazy.

Speaker 3 It's so frustrating.

Speaker 3 I think this guy's pretty much spot on, which is like it's using the power of the government government to steal money, to steal money from the working people and give it to the older people who already have all of the money.

Speaker 2 I don't want to get too, I try not to get like too riled up because, you know, ultimately, like my parents are boomers and I love them. They're great people.

Speaker 2 And I, and every boomer I know, I don't think ever was like, yes, we should spend $38 trillion for us, the boomers.

Speaker 2 But collectively, it feels like it's going to go down as like the most selfish generation ever. Like, it's just unbelievable to me that this is the system that we are being left with.

Speaker 3 This is what a lot of our episodes episodes turn into this.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 1 The king was hoping that

Speaker 1 the argument would be more in support of the older folks like himself.

Speaker 1 King is getting a little sweaty in this cape.

Speaker 2 Did you know the king likes skateboarding? Hey, Daley Swift. I'm like you.

Speaker 2 No, you're right. I do.

Speaker 2 Dude, I just ended up ranting about boomers every time we talk about this because just I've, yeah,

Speaker 1 I think this is horrific, like the way the system is set up. And then you, I mean, the last thing is like our political system is a disaster.

Speaker 2 It's boomers sitting around in Congress doing nothing.

Speaker 2 It's like, how does that possibly inspire hope when the people who might make a change are boomers who just keep voting for themselves or not doing anything? Ah, ah. Sorry, King.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I spoke out of line, sir.

Speaker 3 You know, we don't have to go into the whole Graham Plattner thing, but I was just reading a stat, which is if

Speaker 3 Graham Plattner gets elected this time around and then serves 36 unbroken years, like six full terms, he would still be younger than his opponent if they won today.

Speaker 3 So like, I think this kind of thing just frustrates people, bro.

Speaker 3 I think it rightly does. I have a counterpoint.

Speaker 2 What if the king is most deserving of rule?

Speaker 3 Experience. It matters.
Maybe there's something to it.

Speaker 1 Have you considered that the king has the finest blood in his veins and he deserves to have the money?

Speaker 1 And my good friend Peter Thiel, it seems it's weird to see him on the side of the young people.

Speaker 2 He talks about it.

Speaker 1 When me and Peter, we meet every week to discuss the way that I will be rolling out my surveillance program.

Speaker 3 And your blood boys.

Speaker 2 And my blood boys.

Speaker 1 Well, I already have, I actually taught Peter about the blood boys.

Speaker 3 You put him onto that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 2 I mean, this, this, maybe this isn't. They showed a picture of this interview and Peter Thiel was drinking a smoothie made of human blood.

Speaker 2 Made him smarter.

Speaker 3 It's smart. He's smaller.

Speaker 1 Like Bella in the last Twilight movie.

Speaker 2 She's just hidden the cup.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Hidden the cup like it's a lady.

Speaker 2 Wait, wait, one more thing.

Speaker 3 If you could show this graph,

Speaker 3 because you talk about government spending a 38 trillion in debt. You know, there's just...

Speaker 3 a really, really unavoidably strong correlation between when we drastically increase the money supply and and then 12 months later, we get massive inflation.

Speaker 3 Like it happens consistently over and over again.

Speaker 2 And we always act shocked.

Speaker 3 Like, where did this inflation come from? What the hell is going on?

Speaker 2 We're all trying to find out. We're all trying to figure out the guy who did this.

Speaker 3 And it's like, there's no fucking secret.

Speaker 1 There's no

Speaker 3 when they make the choice to borrow or print money we don't have to fund something. There is going, it's not magic.

Speaker 3 It's not, there will be a consequence in some way, but we as a society just collect the money like.

Speaker 2 Merlin told me

Speaker 3 so I think that's frustrating too.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 3 was there more on this? Like, I think there's a lot of ways we can go this direction. I think it is interesting.

Speaker 2 To me,

Speaker 2 the biggest learnings I had from this is that when people talk about inflation, it is talking about everybody

Speaker 2 in the economy, right? It talks, that's referencing what boomers are currently spending. It's referencing what somebody's middle age is spending.
It's referencing what a young person is spending.

Speaker 2 Not only that, when you talk about CPI, they choose how much to weight each thing. There's something crazy, like college tuition is 3%

Speaker 2 of the CPI, meaning that they don't account for the cost of college very much. That's only like 1% to 3% on average.

Speaker 2 Whereas something like medical care is really higher, food is 14%, transportation is 15%. But if you're a young person, that doesn't reflect what you actually spend money on.

Speaker 2 If you are going to college, a gigantic portion of your life and lifestyle depends on how much college is going up. And that went up almost 200% in the last two decades, right?

Speaker 2 that is way above what your salary went up and so i think that's a really important thing as people talk about oh well you're richer accounting for inflation but inflation broadly does not reflect you in your age demographic and what you actually care about if all the things you care about went up by 300 it doesn't matter that inflation only would have 80 right

Speaker 2 crazy i think i i i i that's a really powerful point i'm too riled up how do we how do we what's a positive thing what's fun about all this

Speaker 2 dude this is depressing reading all this. What are you talking about?

Speaker 3 The TVs. The TVs are.

Speaker 2 TVs are huge.

Speaker 2 They're really thin. They're really cheap.

Speaker 1 I mean, if we're being real, it's like you can.

Speaker 1 But then they make the TVs bad at the same time because you got to go into the settings on the LGBT.

Speaker 2 Who puts ads in my TV?

Speaker 2 Why are they doing that?

Speaker 1 You got to take off the motion screen. I will take off the motion screen.

Speaker 2 They're better.

Speaker 3 They're just people aren't remembering enough.

Speaker 2 Shopping for the. Terry, bring this up.
Look at this. Look at that monitor.
Sorry, keep going. I'm just going to pull monitors.

Speaker 3 You used to get like a 480p PTV was a fucking thousand dollars. I mean, it's insanely better now.

Speaker 1 Do you know how monitors are so much cheaper than they used to be?

Speaker 3 You're so fucking sick monitor.

Speaker 2 Y'all time is up, Patrick.

Speaker 3 I think we wonder why everyone is just fucking gaming addictively.

Speaker 1 I mean, the only part of this I felt like we glazed over a little bit.

Speaker 1 The king is realizing he was very disconnected from.

Speaker 1 you know, perhaps the plight of younger people upon the exploration of the data

Speaker 1 is that that on the unemployment front, even though unemployment is relatively good across the board, we did make this distinction between like your college degree no longer helps you in the same way that it once did,

Speaker 1 the quality of jobs that people have now, like people, like young people being pushed into lower quality gig work positions that would qualify themselves as unemployed.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 this separation.

Speaker 1 I think a big theme of what we talked about here is this attaches to this other thing we've been talking about, this like K-shaped economy where, you know, people are, an exclusive number of people are splitting off into like higher level lucrative positions

Speaker 1 while a lot of people desperately try to find just jobs to make it through every week that

Speaker 1 are their employment and they count as employed, but they're not in a good spot.

Speaker 3 We got a quote here from this FT article that came out today. An affordability crisis is sweeping the U.S.

Speaker 3 high prices of food, rents, and healthcare forced lower income Americans to cut back on necessities. Here's a quote.

Speaker 3 It feels like everything's just closing in around us, honestly, said Anissa Camacho, a 26-year-old florist in Bethlehem. She recently moved in with her grandparents because renting was too expensive.

Speaker 3 So like, you know, I obviously want to tell her that she's an entitled asshole and that things are better for Jetsi, that she should not complain. Right.

Speaker 2 Look at the graph. Make sure.

Speaker 2 Well, did she see the new Samsung monitor?

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I think she's not, she's, she's actually deliberately leaving that out, which is a bit of a miss on her part. But she says, I work two jobs.

Speaker 3 My partner works two jobs, and it just feels like we're scraping for crumbs here. So, like, clearly, this person exists.

Speaker 3 Like, there's, there's a cohort of people who feel like this, and it's not vibes

Speaker 3 for them. You know, on average, I'm sure there are people who are doing well, but these people exist.

Speaker 3 And I think in an increasing numbers, and that is what's causing this polarization in the okay, so I do want to get your guys' honest opinions on this.

Speaker 2 How much do you think social media is affecting this stuff? Because

Speaker 2 I think it's got to be to some degree.

Speaker 2 There is no world where you can consume doomer media every day and not feel worse. In this, right? Like, and we're all aware of this.

Speaker 2 If you watch news telling you that everybody's in danger and that your neighborhood is horrific, you're going to feel your neighborhood is horrific. And then you go outside and it's fucking fine.

Speaker 2 Right. So we're all aware that this can happen.
I don't know the specifics around TikTok or Discord or what's doing what.

Speaker 2 I would, as I think we all agree, I think the underlying situation is actually bad for young people.

Speaker 2 But do you feel like it is exaggerated at all by the fact that we have social media platforms and YouTube that, for example, every day will feed you stuff that's like, look at how shitty it is.

Speaker 2 And you have people, you know, on both,

Speaker 2 not to call them out specifically, but like Hassan and Asmendold on both sides of the political spectrum are streamers who have 50,000 people watching them every day.

Speaker 2 And they're just telling you how fucked up everything is all day. I mean, it's going to mess with you.
And so I do wonder if that is, let's say, exaggerating an underlying problem.

Speaker 2 And I'm curious what you guys think. I have no idea.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's tough. I mean, my gut tells me, of course, it's doing something, right? Of course, right?

Speaker 2 But like, how

Speaker 3 is chicken in the egg, right? Because is there just so much demand for that content?

Speaker 3 Like, if these streamers started talking about how great everything is, would their viewership just go down and someone goes elsewhere? Like, is it not really

Speaker 3 people feeling this way and looking for this outlet?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't know how to quantify it. I think the proof in that it is the case is that a lot of people, like, you can

Speaker 1 pull sentiment about different aspects of life, like per perception of crime, as an example, right?

Speaker 1 Or

Speaker 1 honestly, you could take so many different issues in the U.S.

Speaker 1 And then you could pull the demographics that are performing the best, have the most access to wealth, have homes, have stable jobs, have a retirement.

Speaker 1 And their sentiment, because they engage with the same like news and social media to a similar degree that young people do, is

Speaker 1 down in a bunch of different categories, right? So there's proof that even if everything is perfect, there's something manipulable

Speaker 1 about your perception of things because of the media that you're consuming. Like there's that, that problem certainly exists.
I don't know what the, but when we're like,

Speaker 1 if we were mapping out sentiment against like affordability of housing, I'm sure that the sentiment for young people right now. is matching up with the reality of that.

Speaker 1 But if you could somehow magically pull the world where we didn't have a bunch of short form video platforms that people engaged with all the time, I bet the line would still be down, but just like up slightly more than that.

Speaker 2 And I don't know how much of that

Speaker 3 impact. I will say this.

Speaker 3 There's a study that just came out, the American Psychological Association, which found a direct link between watching TikTok and Instagram reels and damaged cognitive performance, aka brain rot.

Speaker 3 Like it is a real thing.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I think that is also part of the despair, though. I think people feel trapped in algorithmic media.

Speaker 2 This is why I don't post anything on TikTok. I want my viewers to be smarter.

Speaker 2 We're an intelligent bunch. He's a noble guy.

Speaker 3 I've seen the chat.

Speaker 2 We've got two words that we know: rigged. Bald and rigged.

Speaker 2 And that would only be bald. It would only be possible.
We never would have learned bald if I had TikToks.

Speaker 2 Can I

Speaker 2 drop it for a second?

Speaker 1 Can I take my king uniform?

Speaker 2 You want to drop a theory?

Speaker 3 associated with poor cognition, attention, inhibitory control, language, memory, and working memory. All of these things were down.

Speaker 2 I appreciate that you're committed enough to the king character that you wouldn't break the

Speaker 2 illusion by doing this smoking weed bit with the crown on.

Speaker 1 The king would never. The king would never.

Speaker 2 The king would never.

Speaker 1 The king enjoys inedible from time to time, but

Speaker 1 my my

Speaker 1 un maybe unsubstantiated theory in that I haven't seen like some study that pieces all of this together. This is kind of piecing a few things together.

Speaker 1 Okay, is that uh and and also anecdotally, what I'm witnessing in the large amounts of young men that I'm friends with, uh, we're seeing like

Speaker 1 At this increasing time of economic strife, you're also seeing a growth in a bunch of these bad,

Speaker 1 bad habits or like bad communities forming, people being like pushed to extremes on the internet, uh,

Speaker 1 and congregating in small insulated communities where their perception of reality or conspiracies is really just

Speaker 2 they were great, they were great, really distorted.

Speaker 1 You're, you're, uh, you're struggling to get a job, and you, maybe you stay at home all day, like, uh, browsing the internet and, uh,

Speaker 1 and playing video games. Like, you just play video games all the time.
You're addicted to something like sports gambling.

Speaker 1 You're, there's so many things that I think, as a result of how connected we are, that can prey on our free time and our sadness.

Speaker 1 So, when you encounter problems, real problems in real life, like feeling bad because

Speaker 1 you can't find anyone to go on a date with or you can't find a job right now or you just got laid off or your college degree isn't panning out or you can't afford a home.

Speaker 1 You're more likely to like become entrapped in these predatory systems that are being funded and grown around you. Take something like sports gambling, for instance.

Speaker 1 And also, from what I understand, there is a like performance gap between young women and men right now that I think is interesting.

Speaker 1 Like if you're a young woman, you're more likely to be employed than a young man is.

Speaker 3 And for college educated, but yeah.

Speaker 1 For college educated. And there's an assortment of like reasons as to like why that may be the case, right? But one thing that I've been thinking about is

Speaker 1 men are like more likely to become addicted to things, like

Speaker 1 destructively addicted to things. Like you're, if you're a guy, you're more likely to be addicted to sports gambling.
You're more

Speaker 1 likely to be addicted to drugs. You're more likely to be,

Speaker 1 I don't know, you're more likely to like die in like adrenaline related sports. Like

Speaker 2 I think,

Speaker 1 so I and then I'm ignoring the couple other arguments for like why that gap exists, but I think there is something here to be said about

Speaker 1 the systems at hand are like built to like prey

Speaker 1 abnormally so on young men right now in a way that I think is really sad.

Speaker 1 And this is it doesn't mean young women can magically afford homes right now.

Speaker 1 It's just that anecdotally in my life, all the young women I'm friends with are like more staple, put together, like happier people. And they're still struggling to afford homes.

Speaker 1 A lot of them are getting laid off, but they like find jobs quicker. They're more like they're.

Speaker 1 I would say they're more productive and engaged members of society than like all of the men I know in my life.

Speaker 1 And I think there's something to be said about like all of these things, like psychologically, you're more likely to fall down some like psychological rabbit hole as a guy right now.

Speaker 1 And then all of these systems are like built to acquire as many like users and take as much money from you as possible.

Speaker 3 No, I think that's there's something uniquely vulnerable, young man, that's getting hit with video games, porn, and fucking sports game. Like these three things are just,

Speaker 3 they're just running roughshod over a generation, bro. They're going fucking crazy.
And there is something to be said there. I don't know the math on it.
I agree with you, but you can see it.

Speaker 3 I mean, you can see it among people. It's just, it is, it makes every challenge bigger.

Speaker 1 I think the one, the conclusion I'm drawing here, too, it's like, it's not like these are things that are the source of this crisis that people are facing when you look at affordability, right?

Speaker 1 But I think it's the difference in when

Speaker 1 it affects your ability to like get knocked down and like get back up and engage in society again.

Speaker 1 It's like when the bad bad thing happens or when you see the insurmountable mountain of the unaffordable home,

Speaker 1 you're more likely to like the glue trap that you're more likely to walk into is there now, which sucks. It sucks that all of these things are like forming at the same time.

Speaker 1 And that's something I've been wrestling with recently.

Speaker 2 No, I think that's that seems spot on, man. I agree with that so much.
If you could press a button and make every video game less fun, would you do it?

Speaker 1 Dude, I fucking might imagine all the people who are like trapped where they play counter-strike all day they blow all their money on counter-strike scams hundreds of thousands hundreds of thousands of dollars it could have been a down payment on a house but instead it's a ordota like i butterfly knife i'm not saying video games are inherently bad but i do i think i have I've now been around long enough and have enough friends and know enough people that play something like a competitive video game like addictively that I can see the way it saps their ability to do other things in life.

Speaker 2 The same way that I drugged the op from Counter-Strike to save the men.

Speaker 2 Oh, 100.

Speaker 1 I mean, we'd play more Counter-Strike maybe.

Speaker 2 They fucking hate the op.

Speaker 3 It's God, they play more.

Speaker 3 Did you guys ever get addicted to WoW growing up?

Speaker 2 Yes. Yeah.
This is the one time where my grades were like horrible. Yes, dude.

Speaker 3 I distinctly remember, it was like 2006 or like early on after WoW.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 And it came out and I started playing it and I blinked and I lost six months. I lost a summer and into school and it hurt my grade.

Speaker 2 And I just blinked.

Speaker 2 It was gone.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it was like heroin, dude. To me, someone like me, because it was like steady, measurable progress.
I felt like I was getting better.

Speaker 2 Everything that life doesn't

Speaker 2 design. It's just never going up.

Speaker 3 And games have gotten way more advanced since then.

Speaker 2 And I can totally see that.

Speaker 3 I mean, I fucking love games. I play games all the time.
I was addicted to League of Legends all my

Speaker 2 college years.

Speaker 3 Fuck my grades too.

Speaker 3 But I totally get it that I think the things people are looking for are so much harder to find in real life, these steady, measurable success and progress and moving up a ladder, and so much easier to find in a digital world that are like better and better at giving it to you at every step of the way.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I see that.

Speaker 2 I see that hard.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And it's tough because I don't think any of these things are inherently wrong.
I think it's these games are fun.

Speaker 2 I'm a fucking gamer. I love games.

Speaker 1 Do you want these things to be available?

Speaker 1 Like, I don't think it's, it i don't want all gambling to like be illegal and non-existent i think it's fun to like have your back ripped off by atriarch's slap at the crafts table like

Speaker 1 and i i don't think that should go away i uh and and i also don't mean to say that i i think women deal with a ton of unique problems in society that they are also encountering all the time as well.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but social media hits them in a different way. There's the suicide rate among

Speaker 3 young women on Instagram is higher. Yeah.
Anxiety, stress, like there's it's impacting everyone in different ways, but I think we just see it more among, especially young men in our lives.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think I'm privy.

Speaker 1 I'm privy to just being friends with more men as well. So I have a more pronounced view of it.
But

Speaker 1 I just see

Speaker 1 I think when I do compare the men and women in my life that are around the same age, I see the women finding success in hard times in ways that the men seem to be like unable to do. And

Speaker 1 I've been thinking about like why that's the case, you know.

Speaker 1 Okay. Well, you know what?

Speaker 2 You know, just adding that on a very maybe bit of optimism

Speaker 2 is just now the political kind of trend is towards affordability, like that term, affordability and abundance. And like, that's what Mom Donnie, I would argue, largely won on, right?

Speaker 2 He just focused on the affordability of living in New York City. And that was like the main thing.
And everybody else was talking about the normal political stuff.

Speaker 2 He was like, no, this is what I'm going to do to make this more affordable. Right.
And like that really resonated. And even this morning, I saw J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance was like, he made this tweet, and it's mostly attacking other Republicans or whatnot and about Ukraine. But essentially, he was like, after four years of house pricing, doubling.

Speaker 2 many young people feel priced out of the American dream of homeownership. And later says, we're really, our administration is working hard at this.

Speaker 2 Like a lot of politicians now are talking about affordability.

Speaker 2 So I think there is hope that in theory, if the political system decides that that is the big measure of what people care about, there might be really substantial momentum in this direction.

Speaker 2 Whereas I just don't like, I haven't heard this type of vernacular from anyone really in our lifetimes. Yeah.
I will say that. I'm not giving him credit.
No, no, no.

Speaker 1 I understand what you're saying.

Speaker 3 I would just say that not only Vance, everybody.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 3 after the Mamdani win and the horrendous Trump polling lately,

Speaker 3 there's been a switch flipped and everyone is saying affordability. Everyone is saying it.
They've realized that that is the fucking the ticket.

Speaker 3 You know, we're going to have to parse who means it and who doesn't. I will say as a canary in the coal mine example, Japan is now talking about affordability a lot in Japan.

Speaker 2 We've wjim

Speaker 3 and they are preparing a massive stimulus bill to deal with the cost of inflation that resulted from their last stimulus bill. Like we might end up a world where I snipped that in the bud.

Speaker 3 Like my biggest fear is that because everyone's mad about affordability, we get politicians who do

Speaker 3 counterproductive things. Counterproductive things.
So, but I agree that

Speaker 3 I do think that people are finally recognizing it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's at least clearly recognized.

Speaker 2 Everyone are like, oh, shit. This is the issue.
We can't just ignore this anymore. So that's at least

Speaker 2 mildly encouraging. Yeah.
I agree.

Speaker 3 Speaking of Japan, you guys want to talk about a little update to...

Speaker 1 Yeah, what's going on?

Speaker 1 Because I haven't been paying attention since we got back, and I've been seeing headline after headline of how China is, they're ramping it up in the wake of Japan saying that they'd step in for Taiwan.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's, I mean, that's the long and short of it. Japan said they'd step in.
China said, well, we'll behead you for that. And then it was a little bit of a tiff.

Speaker 3 And it was kind of expected like they would back channel, solve this, move on. It has not been solved.

Speaker 3 The escalations keep continuing. So China, one of the first major things they did was encourage every traveler in China to not go to Japan.

Speaker 2 That was the first thing.

Speaker 3 And then a bunch of people canceled their flights, causing some economic damage in Japan. Then Takeuchi kind of doubled down.
She called Trump to try to get him in on it.

Speaker 2 He, actually, I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 For the first time since 9-11, a Chinese leader started a call with an American president. It's always been us that engaged first.

Speaker 3 The first time, Xi Jinping reached out to get a call with Trump and told him we have to keep the post-World War II.

Speaker 3 He made a lot of World War II references to how we beat Japan.

Speaker 3 He's like, we have to keep the post-World War II system.

Speaker 2 Us,

Speaker 2 the G2. The little guys, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, America and China, we're going to work together. We beat Japan.

Speaker 3 This has become a real defining issue because nobody, I think, of a major economy has ever openly acknowledged Taiwan in this way in the past few decades.

Speaker 3 This is the first time someone with influence, which is Takeichi, has said Taiwan is basically its own country. We're going to defend if you try to attack it.

Speaker 3 And that's so past the red line for China and how they see the world.

Speaker 2 So there's a bunch of other examples.

Speaker 3 You know, Perry mentioned like there's Chinese video games that are cutting out Japan stuff. I know that there's

Speaker 2 sorry, I'm boy, you know,

Speaker 3 I don't give any feedback on like what was just said there. I'll pull up some of the examples, but

Speaker 2 it's wild.

Speaker 2 It is, it is wild.

Speaker 2 The World War II stuff's,

Speaker 2 you know, in part what they were saying, what G is saying about like, remember World War II, how we worked together and we

Speaker 2 stopped Imperial Japan?

Speaker 1 I like the idea of him making that call and being like, and we've been homie.

Speaker 1 And we've been tight the whole time.

Speaker 2 No rough batches. Yeah, and he was like, you know, and the argument is like, look, the World War II era was Taiwan was part of China.
It was after World War II that Taiwan split off.

Speaker 2 And clearly, we should be aiming for the World War II era alignment. That was kind of the golden X-ray that we should aim for.

Speaker 3 So okay, a couple more examples of things that happened.

Speaker 3 One is China brought back this

Speaker 3 repudiated

Speaker 3 myth about how Japanese sushi is contaminated by nuclear fallout because of Fukushima. And so we can't be eating it.
And so they stopped importing of sushi.

Speaker 3 Taiwan is labeling all Japanese sushi as like hero Japan sushi.

Speaker 3 And they're trying to get people to buy more of it. Obviously, they can't make up for the Chinese loss, but I thought that was pretty funny.

Speaker 3 Um, there's been military drills all through the water space between Japan and China, especially around those islands that we mentioned in our last podcast, the Sinko, Sinkaku Islands, Sinkoku Islands.

Speaker 1 I wonder what the sentiment is in Taiwan, because I can see it going kind of two ways:

Speaker 1 awesome, somebody's like stood up for us in a public sense. You're like publicly acknowledged, publicly acknowledged.
This is cool. Thank you for the support.

Speaker 1 And then another way of, guys, shut up. You're rocking the boat.
You might be making things worse. And I'm curious what sentiment is more pervasive of those two or other feelings that may be the case.

Speaker 3 My understanding is that those are the exact two pieces of sentiment that are split along party lines in Taiwan.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 The current ruling party, the DPP, the Green Party, is very, very like pro-Taiwan independence. So they love this.
Like this is a big moment for them.

Speaker 3 But the other two are more like, we're just going to get along with China.

Speaker 2 We're going to just like don't rock the boat, keep things going. And they, they don't like this at all.

Speaker 3 Concerts from Chinese stars have been canceled in Japan and also blocks from Japanese J-pop stars in China.

Speaker 2 Like there, there's like a cultural risk.

Speaker 3 Like it's, it's, oh, there's things every day. Like you mentioned, there's new headlines.

Speaker 2 It's heating up.

Speaker 3 Like it's not really de-escalating.

Speaker 3 And I think I don't see a path for it to de-escalate unless China gets Takeichi to back down and say something something like a public apology.

Speaker 1 Is that what it would take? Like, that's what they would want? Because it feels like one of those things you can't take back.

Speaker 2 The U.S. Ambassador Japan also came out and super explicitly was like, We back up Takaichi.
We absolutely have, like, I'll find the exact quote for it, but yes, it was like very, very explicit.

Speaker 2 Trump didn't do that, but our ambassador Japan very publicly did and was like, We have Taiwan's back. China is used to bullying people.
We got him.

Speaker 3 So it's cheating up. I mean,

Speaker 2 that's like, I don't know.

Speaker 3 Like, this is a big, uh,

Speaker 3 every day. This is a bigger story, is what I would say.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 do you think that we can ask people about this in China when we know? No, it's like it might be dead ass.

Speaker 1 It might be the one thing that we're thinking.

Speaker 2 I think Taiwan is the one line.

Speaker 1 Because I've heard it's, I've actually, the general

Speaker 1 feedback I've gotten is that it's not, it's not as uptight as we make it out to be. And you you can add people will tell you their opinions there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's not it's not this like insane thing where like people can't talk about like public figures and stuff like that

Speaker 1 But my understanding that this is the one thing you should this is their red line

Speaker 2 They

Speaker 2 okay, all right. This is so this is from this is from a US ambassador to Japan George Glass last Thursday said this is a classic case of Chinese economic coercion.

Speaker 2 And I just want to say directly from the president and from myself and from the embassy for the prime minister, we have her back, referring to Takeichi.

Speaker 2 While Beijing appears intent on fanning the flames of discord, the U.S.-Japan alliance is focused on ensuring that peace and prosperous spirit thrive in the region. That is pretty clear.

Speaker 3 That's pretty shocking from which is crazy.

Speaker 1 It's got to be crazy to be in that position and hit send tweet on that. Like your intern at the embassy hits send tweet.
And you're,

Speaker 1 the domino effect of what you could be inciting.

Speaker 3 I will say for Trump, they've asked him about this directly and he avoids criticizing China and doesn't answer it directly. He's never, like, which is the U.S.'s response for most of it.

Speaker 3 He's continued our normal

Speaker 3 diplomatic strategy here, which is to never...

Speaker 1 Our whole schtick is that we never talk about it and we never acknowledge them, but then functionally treat them like a country anyway.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we visit them diplomatically as a separate country, but we never ever, it's the one China body. We never say they're separate.
It's

Speaker 2 a part of China.

Speaker 1 I'm more of a one-China policy guy, but I'm the other way around.

Speaker 2 You think

Speaker 2 all of China is Taiwan?

Speaker 3 You're getting stopped. You're getting stopped at the border.

Speaker 2 You think we can ask about that in China?

Speaker 2 Oh, the video game thing about them cutting out Japanese sections is a rumor. So there's no official announcement from the company.
They're just now people are talking about cutting out

Speaker 3 right now for that.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Integral part of the post-World War II international order, which is really funny.

Speaker 2 Glass also said for the fishermen who have worked so hard to finally get a contract back to be able to sell seafood and other products in China and have now been denied that, we have your back.

Speaker 2 So now we're not only we have the backs of American soybean farmers, also Japanese fishermen is the Trump administration's backing them up.

Speaker 3 Russia weighed in, saying Take's remarks were extremely dangerous and that Japan should deeply reflect on its history and learn from the lessons of World War II to avoid serious consequences caused by wrong words and deeds.

Speaker 2 Can we just forget what's happened the last 80 years? Let's 1945 was the peak.

Speaker 1 It just, I gotta be honest with you, it feels different when it comes from them.

Speaker 2 There's no one here from Russia. Because it just feels like.
Can we cool things down?

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 1 in a way, like, I agree with some of what they're saying.

Speaker 1 It just feels like any other guys,

Speaker 1 if any other guys were saying that, it'd be like, I agree a little more.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Anyway, I guess we'll keep up with this story.
There's not much more to say right now. It's still only, I guess it is economic actions, but no military actions, just

Speaker 3 escalating economic stuff and words. But it doesn't look like people are going to let it go,

Speaker 3 especially China. China's not going to let it go until they get a public apology because I think for them,

Speaker 2 it has to maintain maintain the the the agreement among all major countries that Taiwan is functionally a part of China they have to have that so they will keep pulling levers economically and otherwise to make that a case what would we what would we the world except for China have to give China for them to just agree to give up on Taiwan oh I don't know I don't think Alaska

Speaker 2 you mean to actually just give them land

Speaker 1 Dakota what would what would you be willing to trade we give them an enclave

Speaker 1 in the United States Dakota is just in the fitness let me let me put the king outfit back on.

Speaker 2 It's like, South Dakota will not be traded.

Speaker 1 Well, do you want to end on a maybe, maybe like one more fuck boomers thing?

Speaker 2 Quick? Sure, yeah.

Speaker 2 Let's get upset about boomers.

Speaker 1 So I saw this interesting article in the New York Times, and it was called The Housing Strategy that Has California NIMBY's in a corner. And

Speaker 1 this one guy

Speaker 1 didn't discover or create, but brought a loophole in California housing policy to light, which is that in places that have really restrictive zoning laws, I think every year, every couple years, California cities have to make their presentation of here's how many units of new housing we're like committing to building.

Speaker 1 Here's how we're going to do it. Okay.

Speaker 1 But when you submit that plan, oftentimes in like higher or more expensive areas like Beverly Hills, those plans are intentionally put in areas that are very difficult to build in or can't realistically be built in at all as kind of a way for not having to fulfill the obligations of the commitment.

Speaker 1 And this guy sued Beverly Hills

Speaker 1 on the basis that if you are creating these plans that can't be fulfilled and you're breaking the state guidelines or requirements for how those units need to be built, then we can push forward new building structures that would otherwise break your existing zoning laws.

Speaker 1 So he's using this path.

Speaker 3 I'm not fully following. Can you break it? Can you bottom line what was it?

Speaker 1 Basically, Beverly Hills is saying, hey,

Speaker 1 we're going to put together like 3,000 new units of housing. And here's how we're going to do it.
Here's the areas that are going to be developed.

Speaker 1 And here's how we're going to meet this goal that we're setting up.

Speaker 3 If they don't do it.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 he sued on the basis that if you dig into these building plans, they actually don't meet the code or requirements for how these buildings are supposed to be built. Like on the, on a California basis.

Speaker 1 And because this local ruling is breaking the state law, now you can use that as like leverage to get something built that would otherwise break Beverly Hills's really restrictive zoning laws. So now

Speaker 1 he's getting like a, I think it's a nine story. nine story or 19 story okay building uh apartment building built in beverly hills like getting the the development started.

Speaker 3 Dude, a 19-story in Beverly Hills would tower over everything.

Speaker 3 It would be like the thing in City 17.

Speaker 2 Yeah, 19-story tower.

Speaker 2 That's awesome.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 this is, you know, naturally, this loophole is not being received well by the residents who live there.

Speaker 2 They don't want to be there.

Speaker 1 And I thought it was interesting because

Speaker 1 the reaction.

Speaker 3 Is the loophole just to say, like,

Speaker 2 well, they didn't follow the rules and that's the government. So I gotta have to follow the rules.

Speaker 2 It sounds more like Beverly Hills found a loophole and they are now unable to use that loophole, which means they're like,

Speaker 1 Beverly Hills and a bunch of other cities in California. It sounds like other cities in other states around the country.

Speaker 1 Apparently, the first time this came to prominent light was a case in New Jersey.

Speaker 1 But these cities like Beverly Hills were abusing the fact that nobody was willing to, no developer or person involved in the building of housing was willing to sue on these grounds before because they want to maintain good relationships in the area to get building projects.

Speaker 1 So, this like third-party guy found out about this problem and became like the bastion for bringing the court case and said, Beverly Hills is not following the laws or commitments that they say they are for building these 3,000 units of housing.

Speaker 1 And because they're breaking that, a state law loophole overrides all of this and allows us to build new types of buildings that we couldn't there before. Okay.

Speaker 1 And the reaction from the local community

Speaker 1 is they're ecstatic, weirdly. Like time and time again, the story we've heard is that people like don't like changes to the neighborhood.
People, they make up all of these excuses.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's a peasant spincer, right?

Speaker 2 They called it.

Speaker 1 And anything but saying this lowers the value of the home that I am currently in. And from

Speaker 1 the quotes in the article are: none of of us are opposed to affordable housing, said Kenneth Goldman, president of the Southwest Beverly Hills Homeowners Association.

Speaker 1 But a building that's almost four times the city's height limit, you don't have to be a NIMBY to say that's just so far out of line.

Speaker 2 He said,

Speaker 2 but hey, how dare they?

Speaker 1 And I read this section and I was like, well, what's in line, Kenneth? Yeah. Because

Speaker 1 we're not making any progress. It's not like anything has substantially changed in affordability of Beverly Hills homes.

Speaker 3 We should lower that guy's property taxes.

Speaker 1 That's what I'll and then he'll have the economic incentive to make more.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm sure he will.

Speaker 1 And I just on the whole, you know, the boomers are ruining society argument from earlier.

Speaker 1 I just, the quote stuck out to me when I was reading the article of like, anytime there's kind of like ground made, because this whole thing in this article is this guy is stepping up to sue and get a building made in this way or getting a developer to make a building in this way because there's been no progress in any other common method before.

Speaker 1 Beverly Hills is blocking housing developments and projects previously.

Speaker 1 So it's not like you were taking a good faith approach to this prior and now you're upset this 19 building, a story building is getting built instead of like a 10-story one.

Speaker 1 And I found that frustrating.

Speaker 2 I'm glad it's 19 stories.

Speaker 3 That's sick.

Speaker 2 I mean, I

Speaker 3 worry they'll find a way to get them.

Speaker 2 They might.

Speaker 2 It's like the richest people in the country all in one little enclave. They're going to find a way.

Speaker 3 They're going to find a way, but it is fucking cool that he got that through. I do hate.
I mean, I just hate the language they use.

Speaker 2 It's always like, we love affordability.

Speaker 3 We love it. It's like, oh, God.

Speaker 1 It's so important to me that we have it. It just doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 This particular example

Speaker 2 right here.

Speaker 3 This one doesn't work in my backyard.

Speaker 1 Thank you for joining us on another week of Lemonade Sand.

Speaker 1 You know, if you want to join my kingdom, you can check out patreon.com slash Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Or move to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Speaker 3 To all our boomer viewers, we have a Patreon episode where we talk really nicely about you.

Speaker 3 We saved that for because you have the money. We pretend for the Zoomers in the free version, but we promise we're all on your side.

Speaker 1 I will 180 all of my values for money.

Speaker 2 Wait, we were talking about adding a tier three at some point. It's got to be boomer tier.
Dude, the boomer tier. We just glazed.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Talking about how hard they had it.

Speaker 3 Thanks guys for watching. Thanks, everybody.