So we had Nvidia’s earnings that came out yesterday. How did they look? What are you talking about? Willis? that’s right. We are right on the precipice though. So Nvidia comes out tonight, half an hour after the bell and here we are recording right before that happens. What do you ⁓ what do you think is going to happen? I think we’re going to have a beat. they’ll be there 13 straight if they do. Just because you know how they do it. Every company manages their expectations and you know, they’ll be not saying by a mile or anything like that. Jensen had said at the end of October, I think it was maybe the day before the stock topped out that they anticipate having $500 billion of orders in 2025 and 2026. That’s a lot of orders. a lot of revenue. All right. So they come out potentially in an half hour and, they beat, here’s a better question. How does the market respond? It’s been muted responses lately, hasn’t it? Um, yeah, I mean, it’s been hard to beat expectations, but they’re coming into it this time down about 15 % from their highs. Like I said, at the end of October. So this is a little bit different of a situation, right? Um, so maybe we will get a, a little pop, you never know. Being down 15 % already, we already know the read through from the other hyperscalers how much money is coming into them. So I think there’s a floor underneath. I’m not saying, you know, maybe they could go down another three, 5%, what have you in the midst of this growth, rotation, sell off, but I think there’s a floor beneath. So it hit 210. In middle of October, we’re in the middle of November. It seems to me that it would be hard to get back up to new all time highs unless something dramatic newsworthy is talked about tonight. And maybe that could be selling to China, although we certainly haven’t heard that from the administration. Everything that we’ve been told from Jensen is that is not in the guidance. So you should not anticipate that in there. Yeah, it does seem over the last month or so, I mean the market topped out, ⁓ SP 500 and think and NASDAQ topped out on October 29th and S and P’s down about three and a half percent from there. It’s somehow it feels worse than three and a half percent. Does, right? Yeah. ⁓ but you know, I mean the market’s still up for the year growth is up 15, ⁓ values up 11 and a half mid caps have underperformed. They’re only up about a percent small caps, Russell 2000 of about six. but the S &P 600 small caps, they’re actually down a percent. Doing a little better this month so far though. A little bit better this month, but they’re still down for the year when the S &P is up, you know, over 12. So that doesn’t really feel great. And obviously S &P driven by these big mega cap companies in terms of earnings, 92 % of the S &P 500, excluding Nvidia have reported 82 % of those companies reported positive earnings surprise and 76 % reported positive revenue. So overall the expectations for this quarter have jumped from about 7 % earnings growth to around 13, 13.2 something like that. So things look swimmingly, right? but still massive ramifications here on Nvidia reporting today. So they’re projecting estimating 55 billion in revenue for the quarter. $1.25 for earnings per share. we’re just get over that. Let’s get a hurdle over that. We’re bringing you tomorrow’s earnings yesterday. Yeah. So not a lot of economic news out there, right? We had a government shutdown, longest shutdown in the history of the United States, 43 days. ⁓ Things are being patchworked back together. ⁓ They’ve signed the bills. ⁓ You know, parks are back open. TSA is being paid. ⁓ You know, all of the airport employees that are paid by the government are getting paid. So I feel like that’s a positive thing. Um, but it’s still, it did some damage on GDP wise, right? So they’re estimating about $10 billion a week. Um, so we were, you know, roughly seven weeks, something like that. So it could be worth $70 billion to GDP, uh, over that, or there’s 43 days. That doesn’t make me feel great. It was interesting though. The Atlanta feds GDP now function was actually ticking upwards during it. So, um, the last I saw it was up at 4%. I’ll be honest. I didn’t check this week. Uh, but last week it was up at 4 % predicted GDP. Um, which was interested to see because they are the ones putting out that stat about 10 billion per day. And yeah, it was going upwards. So that Atlanta fed GDP, that thing moves around all the time. ⁓ And quite frankly, if there was a government shutdown, how would that Atlanta Fed be operational? Huh? It’s still working, I guess. Some of them. Well, Fed minutes came out today ⁓ on the 19th. We didn’t get anything earth shattering from there. You said to me earlier that Mirren is still looking for a cut of 50 basis points, but it’s pretty uneven in ⁓ different fed governors in terms of what they’re saying. Cause really you see people suggesting that inflation is, ticking back up. And at the same time there’s this quagmire because inflation is ticking back up. ⁓ but unemployment is slowing down. Unemployment is increasing. unemployment is slowing down. So, so yeah, they basically in the minute said expectations for inflation ticking up, ⁓ higher unemployment. So those are two contradictory things sort of in their minds of what they can do to respond. ⁓ But they still had that we had moderate strength in the economy. So interesting little, as you said, a quagmire. Yeah. But Mirren still 50 basis points. 50 basis points. He doesn’t care. I mean, it’s interesting, right? The Fed has a dual mandate. We talked about this many times on here. So, you know, full employment, which I I suspect is anything under 5%. They’d be reasonably happy with and then price stability, which obviously is code for inflation. you know, whether inflation is, I think the number is 2.8 year over year right at the moment. ⁓ that’s still higher than they’re looking for at their target of two. I personally don’t think two is an appropriate number. I mean, it hasn’t been two in a long time. It’s been, I mean, and I’m not talking about COVID error, right? Like that was nine, but know, historically speaking, I think long term trend is closer to three than it is to at what point do they change their target? I mean, yeah, well, we always joke about how they change the inflation index for health care. And you know, maybe they’ll change a few more things and suddenly, boom, we’re down to 2 % inflation. Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know where 2 % comes from. It’s just a number that’s floating out there in ether. I mean, hey, I would say anything from one to 3%, like an average, which is they sort of changed their verbiage to say an average of 2%. Well, listen, in order to get an average of two, you have to go way lower. Yeah, you have to go way lower for where we’ve been the last three years. Exactly. You’d have to have some possibly negative, you know, some deflation to average 2%. San Francisco Fed just had a I think it was a San Francisco Fed, one of the feds had a paper talking about how over the intermediate term, tariffs are deflationary. So maybe we’ll get there because they destroyed demand. Well, that’s not the way that I’d like to see deflation happen. Right. ⁓ you know, so when you talk about affordability, I’d rather see prices come down than to see demand slow down. Right. Right. I mean, that’s probably from an economic standpoint, if demand slows down, ⁓ that’s because people are faring worse at, at, you know, at their home front. Right. Right. I mean, so let’s cut those coffee and beef tariffs, right? Well, absolutely. You know, to, be able to put a tariff on Brazil and then expect beef prices to say the same or coffee prices. I mean, we get a lot of coffee from coffee and oranges and things of that nature from Brazil. And so then to see those prices go up and to think that they wouldn’t go up when you have a 50 % tariff on them seems a little bit convoluted, guess. So Fogo de Chow, are they going to cut their prices? You know, let’s, let’s talk about affordability for a little bit. I mean, one of the things that people have been, uh, politicians have been talking about over the last few weeks and certainly people like myself as a, as a carnivore are, uh, beef prices, right? And when you think about beef prices, I don’t go to store and buy beef. I go to store and I buy burgers or I buy steak. You know, don’t like, I don’t think about it in other terms. And one of the things that has struck me over the years is as I’ve as I’ve aged a little bit, I go with a higher quality beef, right? And a higher quality steak and then a higher quality beef. And I think a lot of people are in that camp where when you’re young and you’re first starting out, you know, you’re going to buy maybe a thin steak or a cheap steak like butchers cut. But then you kind of, you know, you start earning some money and you move up to, I don’t know, a deli or a T bone or, know, God forbid a filet, right? And then you get to the point where you move from the butcher’s cut and you move to black Angus and then you move to prime. And so we’re all out there fighting for the same limited number of resources when it comes to beef. I mean, there’s only so many head of cattle out there. ⁓ I read a stat the other day, ⁓ Super Bowl is coming up obviously in a few months. Do know how many chicken wings are consumed on Super Bowl Sunday? Absolutely no clue. We’ll call it a 40 million pounds. Okay, well don’t know how many pounds it is, but it is 1.2 billion chicken wings. 1.2 billion chicken wings consumed on Super Bowl Sunday and there’s only about seven and a half billion in the United States. Only about seven and a half billion chicken wings consume. If I do my math right, and I could be wrong on this, you divide by two to get a chicken per chicken wings. Unless there’s a new way of unless there’s a new thing, there’s an uptick in rotisserie chickens around that time or legless. I’m saying if we eat, you know, seven and a half billion chicken wings in a year as as a as a as a in a country in the country. Doesn’t that mean that there has to be, you know, three and three quarter billion chickens harvested for that? Right. So when you think about stakes, obviously it’s not the same thing, but everybody’s fighting over limited resources and we all want, I say we all, people have moved up market in the steak, in the steak game. Everybody wants to go to a steak house and have one of those big, beautiful prime stakes. Right. I know I do. ⁓ And so we’re all fighting for those limited resources and it drives the price up. Then you have a situation where there’s tariffs on ⁓ Brazilian steak. I don’t know about anybody else, but that’s going to drive the prices up. You go into store here in Reading, Pennsylvania, ⁓ you know, even a grocery store and you’re looking at a prime filet, you’re talking about like $35 a pound to me. That seems expensive from where it was pre COVID. Yeah. Right. I agree. But I’m a carnivore. I’m not going to stop eating steak. may. And here’s where that whole idea of price elasticity comes into play. Do you slow down? know that we have slowed down. mean, there’s a, there’s a probably more than one reason why it’s, it’s just not the dollars and cents of it. It’s because I don’t need red meat every day. Right. But so your doctor says, my doctor did actually say that. ⁓ I went in, I said this to you the other day. went in, have my checkup. He says, well, your triglycerides are high. said, okay. He goes, well, do you eat a lot of red meat? yeah, doc. I’m good. I’m good there. Well, you know, it’s like a Scotch and a steak. Is that bad? He goes, well, those are the two things that you want to lower. You want to reduce to bring your triglycerides down. Alcohol content and red meat. and, you thought you were ahead of the game. You did your homework. You’re already doing it. And he said, like, no, don’t do that. Yeah. He definitely did not want it. me to eat a scotch and a steak. did not, uh, he did not think that that would be beneficial in reducing the dragless rides. Yeah. Yeah. No. Uh, I guess it’s just one of those things where, you know, there was probably a little bit of a balance and I don’t mean in, health wise, but in, in that price elasticity. So if it goes up from here, will I slow down a little bit? I suspect I probably will. Cause you’re making a healthy decision. Yeah. Cause I’m making a healthy discussion. ⁓ but I mean, affordability is certainly an issue. We had some elections a few weeks ago and that was one of the main things that Democrats were driving home was affordability. And I suspect that that’s going to be a continued, ⁓ piece of the political puzzle. mean, I, it’s always, it always is, but I think it’s going to be more and more pushed. And one of the things that was talked about, Um, and I’m sure a lot of people out there have heard this, the idea of that 50 year mortgage, what do you, uh, what do you make of that? And you know, affordability. So, what I’d say, I like what like Robinhood is doing by democratizing everything, giving access to everything. Like you’re bringing in the, the, you know, prediction markets and all these things. I like that. But just because you have prediction markets and stuff on there doesn’t mean you should be doing that right next to your IRA and stuff like that. I think it’s the same thing here with the 30 and 50 year mortgage. Just because you can do a 50 year mortgage, if it comes to pass doesn’t mean you should. The stats don’t look good. When you do that. I think we were looking at a $500,000 more alone a $500,000 alone at 6 % at the 360 payment mark. on a 50 year mortgage, you would only own approximately I think it’s a little below 30 % of the home meaning 30 % of the principal paid off. Yeah, versus you would have the whole home and you would just so your property taxes, which I also hate. Well, in a 30 year, I don’t think you’re gonna get it. But the point being is, I think you have the stats on the interest difference, but it’s massive. Yeah, we looked at it earlier. And the on the 30 year mortgage on a $500,000 home. of at 6 % which is probably a little bit lower than the average today. think the average is around 6.3 right at the moment. Just the principal and interest and not not the full payment, but principal interest for 500,000 at 30 years is going to run you let’s call it $3,000 at 6%. On the 50 year mortgage, it’s going to be about $360 lower 2633 bucks. And so I get that $360 difference, but you’re talking about an interest difference of around half a million dollars. So that that 6 % at 30 years is going to run you roughly $500,000 in interest. And on 50 years, it’s going to run you approximately a million dollars in interest. And so I just, not convinced that extending the payment structure on a house is the way to read. to bring in or to help affordability. because it’s cheaper on a monthly basis, monthly payment doesn’t make it more affordable. It seems Pennywise pound foolish type of scenario. So here’s what I want to come up with. Or here’s here’s my suggestion for the administration. And tell me if you think this is crazy or not. So to help affordability, a lot of times when you have a new home buyer, or even a second or third home buyer, one of the biggest issues is that down payment, especially, you know, $500,000 house, you want to get rid of that mortgage insurance, you’re going to need to come up with $100,000. So here’s my idea. Don’t call me a commie or socialist or any of this nonsense, right? What if instead of 50 year mortgages, the government lent you at a reasonable interest rate, say zero, the 20 % for your down payment and It’s not just a loan, but they’re actually a co owner in the house with you where they have first lien mortgage on that first 20 % down payment. And when you sell it, they get paid out. If you’re really talking about affordability and how to get new home buyers into homes, that to me seems to be the easiest way. And I say easy with technology, we should be able to, to have those mortgages out there. But I said this to a few different people and they said, well, that sounds like you’re socialist. They’re them being first lien holder. Like if you go belly up, then the government owns the house. Well, they own that 20 % or the down payment or however much money gets the rest. If you get your clothes, however it would be normally, except the government gets their money back. If you sell it, the government gets their money back. To me, that doesn’t seem like socialism. seems like a to help new homeowners. And I’m not saying that you can do this for everybody in every income bracket. You don’t need the government buying 20 % of a $20 million house. ⁓ And I don’t think it should be just first time home buyers, but maybe houses indexed for the state that they’re in. and have a million dollars be the limit, but based on whatever state, obviously it’d be higher in California, lower in Oklahoma. ⁓ I don’t think it would be that much of a lift from a tech standpoint. I don’t know that you could get Congress, I don’t know if there’s an appetite to do it, but when you think about what ⁓ Biden tried to do with paying off student debt, just paying it off. That’s not this. This is lending money in investing in an American properties as a first lien holder to help people get out of, I want to say parents basements. I don’t, I don’t know anybody who’s living in their parents basements today, but you know, to help people buy homes, to get out of the rental market and to own, whether it’s their first, second, third home, the tax payer is not on the hook for this. The federal reserve, can print as much money as they want to. We already do. I mean, they print it for everything else. Why don’t we print it to actually help American home buyers? Yeah. I mean, that’s definitely an option. I just think of something simpler for first time home buyers. Like they do a subsidized rate of two or 3%. I think it’s just easier. I think over the long term, it makes out better than even a down payment in at the market rate. ⁓ So it just comes off as a one time you get one shot at this subsidized government loan for your first home buying, you know, but then you instead of six percent, then you have a situation Chris, where you and I, the taxpayer are subsidizing somebody else, and the banks are still making the money. In this case, that 20 % down payment wouldn’t go to the banks. they’re not going to make any money on it. They’re still going to make their money on that 80%. Right. But I’m not paying a bank interest as a taxpayer. Yeah. And that’s what I really don’t like banks. No, sure. love banks as much as the next guy does, but I don’t necessarily want to subsidize everybody else’s mortgage with my tax dollars. Just giving them the money. Well, 2 rate, the government’s gonna end up owning it anyways. Like they’ll just sell it. Fannie Mae, right, Matt, but it still requires the bank to be paid the difference between the subsidized rate and the actual rate. And that’s the part that I wouldn’t want to do. I don’t think it would work. I do not envy people of age coming into, you know, just graduating college. It’s, I feel like it’s a tougher market, job market. It’s a changing job market with AI, you know, right here on the horizon. ⁓ College has grown at a significant rate of higher inflation than other goods. And then houses have gone up to X in the last seven, eight years. And over that time, interest rates have gone from their lows to now they’re up three times what they were. Definitely not a good time to be and I’m glad I got a house got in before that rush. I’ll tell you what I mean, my first home in 2002 was at a higher rate. than the average rate today. We, got in at 8.75 % but the first house I bought was only $80,000. I mean, so there’s a, there’s a big difference. I don’t think in 2002, I know in 2002, I wouldn’t have been able to afford a, I think the average house price in throughout all of the United States is 404 or 444,000. don’t, wouldn’t have been able to afford that. You did not go full boomer there because you’re not a boomer. But I just, I just find it so rich when boomers do pull that like, well, when I got my first house, it was an 18 % loan. Well, yeah, well, the charts show in terms of median income to buy a medium house, medium priced house, we’re at the highest levels ever. Yeah. So no matter what your interest rate was, the cost was so much lower that you were not paying 44 % of your income to be in that house. Yeah. It’s unfortunate. And we do need to figure it out. Because I think that’s going to unlock money for the economy as well. And people deserve a home. I mean, there’s you’re not owed a home, but people deserve a chance at home. need to build more homes. Yeah. I think one of the things that happened, maybe we need to do some sort of tax credit for home builders, subsidizing some more some more capitalism. No, I don’t know about subsidized capitalism. that doesn’t seem 100 % to me. How about as it hasn’t been done before, right? Right. Yeah. Intel. How about just making it easier for homes to be built? mean, we really had a lot of massive, yeah, we had a massive slowdown after the global financial crisis. I think pre global financial crisis, we were annualizing at about 1.6 million new homes. Um, After that, like 2010 and 11, it dropped to under 400,000 and it’s, it’s worked its way back up, but we never made up for the lost time in terms of homes and people were still having kids and growing up and life continues. And we’re at a home deficit in terms of what’s available. If you travel to Europe, that it’s kind of a similar situation over there because they have so much red tape and so little open space. That’s why their prices have gone up dramatically. Ours have gone up dramatically. Number of reasons, including that. But the red tape is definitely there. Yeah. So maybe centralized planning, right? That’s a little, little socialism there. No, but we need to do things to encourage home ownership. And in order to encourage home ownership, you can’t just tell people to go get a new mortgage at, you know, three or $4,000 or $5,000 a month. It’s not gonna happen. You’ve got to be willing to put put something in there to build new houses. Because that’s what’s driving. That’s one of the main keys in what’s driving prices up. Totally agree. Either that or another global financial crisis. Bring prices down, right? Who knows with our demographics, we’re probably heading back to ⁓ gosh, in 3040 years, we might have a lower population in the US. Yeah, based on birthrate. What what’s the replacement rate to keep population stable? 2.1? And where are we now? 1.9? Yeah, something like that. I mean, you play that out over a long period of time. If we have reduced immigration, however you particularly feel about that reduce immigration, lower birthrate. Did you ever see? ⁓ Idiocracy. I have seen parts of it. I know the entire premise. And yeah, we’re here. The beginning of that movie is all about all about the birth rate. They set that up to to tell you how that happened. And all the as they described it, lower IQ people were having tons of babies and all the smart people were not, you know, they were waiting. It’s weird. That’s like, mind. All right. So we touched on affordability. mean, do you have anything out there that’s going to change the way people spend money and what they spend it on. know about that, but I’m big on the AI causing deflation over the intermediate term. Play that out for me. So we’re going to have much more efficient capital being, ⁓ productivity is going to be way up, which automatically is deflationary in the simplest form. That’s what I see. But doesn’t that also mean that profits will go down? Not necessarily. you’re saying activity is going to outpace to such an extent. Like, you know, you have your normal $15 an hour person or you can have a robot that’s one time 20 30 grand to do the same job. And you don’t have to pay for healthcare for that robot. So over a five year thing, it costs like six grand a year. And they do the same exact job with maybe higher quality, they’re more reliable, they don’t get sick. Robots don’t get sick. I don’t think so. They have to download some firmware or something. But you’re a big proponent of universal basic income then eventually. Eventually. I mean, do really think that that’s the way it’s gonna go? I think we will farm out our robots. I’m gonna buy two or three optimuses. And what are you gonna go do some minimum wage job? They’re gonna drive my Tesla around and pick people up. But isn’t the Tesla supposed to drive itself? Yeah, but it needs a safety inspector. That’s my robot. I don’t need someone to plug in the charging cord Noah. I’m gonna not get into the Uber thing where you pay them a cut. Just gonna have my robot do it. You’d just be sitting at home anyway. This makes sense. Trust me. I thought it out. So I’m going to have five Tesla’s and five optimists. I know some people that actually run a Amish Uber here in Pennsylvania. No, I’m dead. I’m dead serious. I’m dead serious. I know some people that live closer to the Amish country and they run an Amish Uber. There’s no technology except a cell phone and it’s in the Amish community and they just drive Amish people around. when they need to go somewhere. Don’t the horses do that? Well, I mean, I guess they do, but if you don’t want to take a horse, you can just hop in and Amish Uber. It’s a real thing. So the horses are equivalent to my Tesla. I don’t know. There’s a driver in this scenario though. It’s a real driver. It’s not a robot or anything. It’s a real person and a real Amish people in the back, I guess. Yeah. Just wait until there’s like future smart children, like 12, 13 year old hacktivists who hack into like a Tesla car and they’re like driving from their game controller in their room and they start crashing. You talk about hacking. ⁓ We started watching Zero Day, Robert De Niro. you seen that? I’ve seen the first two episodes. you did? Yeah. Okay. What did you think the first two episodes? I see a number of angles that it could be playing towards and I’m wondering which one they’re going to go down. Yeah, for the uninitiated. I don’t think there’s any spoilers here. Essentially, there’s a one minute timeframe where all the technology in the United States goes down. That’s the first episode. So everything goes down, all the cell phones. And then there’s this little message that pops up that says this will happen again. A lot of people died, some airplanes crashed in the show. And it really gets you thinking. We watched it as, you know, limited series. I think it’s six episodes. I didn’t think the ending was spectacular. Kind of bobs and weaves a little bit. But the idea of everything relying more and more on technology and when that technology goes on, seems to go down. Excuse me. That seems to be a trend that’s popping up. And maybe I’m only maybe I’m noticing it now. I guess it’s maybe have been in movies for years and years and years, but it seems like the closer we get to technology, the more this is popping up in storylines. And at some point, I mean, we had the, was it cloud fair down? was this week. Yeah. Yeah. You you’re starting to see that strike was a of years ago. Yeah. You’re starting to see that pop up and you get these emails from your vendor that’s like, Hey, I’m sorry. We’re down today because of the, you know, the this other vendor that we operate through and we’ll let you know when it’s back up and you’re like, huh, okay, well, what do you do? I mean, as an end user, I can’t do anything. If that were to happen, the way ⁓ this zero day lays it out in there, I mean, we’re essentially all at the mercy of these hacktivists. As you said, I don’t really see a way around it except ⁓ living off grid, right? Yeah, basically. Yeah, I don’t think they have prime out in the woods prime venison maybe not any prime fillets from ⁓ from any beef. I’ve been watching those people online like the reels of the people who just build a shelter by hand. So cool. I wish I could do that. You a 30 second video and you’re like, I could do that. Easy. Easy. ⁓ I don’t I’m not sure that it works like that. ⁓ Well, at some point, you know, maybe we have to slow down on our beef. intake and our carnivore intake and maybe we’re just eating pasta. But here’s what I heard about pasta the other day. This is no lie. I didn’t hear it on Facebook or Instagram or X or any of those things. But apparently there is a hundred percent tariff that is coming on imported Italian pasta and that a lot of suppliers are going to just stop stocking it here in the United States. This is real. You can you can look it up. This is not my like San Giorgio stuff is it is that knockoff? I mean the name is but it’s not if it’s coming from Italy. There’s 12 major pasta manufacturers that produce pasta in Italy that ship here to the United States. Why are they getting some from China? What’s what’s the deal here? Why are we doing they’re they’re they’re accused of dumping pasta. Like they have so much of it. It’s like 90 cents anyways. It’s a real thing. We’re trying to lower prices now. That’s I thought that might come on. I that might be the case for affordability as well. Pasta for everyone. Do we have a lot of American pasta manufacturers out there? I’m sure there’s some. Barillo, San Giorgio. Well, I again, I don’t know which ones are US and which one are Italian. I just assume the ones I’m buying are US. bad assumption. don’t know. I don’t check the tag. You’re gonna get like grocers pride. That’s the only thing that’s gonna be out there after this whole thing happens. Oh, well, I could do without pasta. Lex loves pasta. don’t Lex Lex is Italian, but me. You don’t do pasta. I will just eat a plate of meatballs or sausage or something or chicken parmesan. I don’t need the noodles just filling. Okay, don’t need the pasta. So as a consumer. Our consumer spending equates to about 68 % of GDP. And so I think what we’re seeing right at the moment is this scenario where there’s this balance between our consumers healthy or are they in the midst of a slowdown? And that seems to be what everybody’s concerned about in the market. I said earlier, we were down what three and a half percent from all time highs. That’s not a thing, right? Okay. That happens all the time. You can’t just be at an all time high forever, but you’re starting to see layoffs, right? We talked about Amazon laying off 27,000, came out since last time we were in here, AT &T is laying off 15,000. And maybe that is, you know, over hiring in, uh, after COVID. Maybe that is, Hey, we’re just becoming more productive through artificial intelligence and robotization of processes. Or maybe it’s, we really need to get our earnings in place and make sure that we’re right-sized. They love that word, right-sized. ⁓ But you start to hear these things, and then you think about consumer spending, and you think about the productivity that you mentioned for artificial intelligence, and you really question, are there gonna be more jobs out there? Right now, we’re a little over 159 million people employed in the United States. Are there going to be more jobs next year or in two years than there are today? We need 70,000 jobs a month to maintain that 150 million jobs. That’s how many people leave the workforce every month. Uh, and as the fed noted, we don’t have any data on that for the last two months and the, the, uh, the jobs numbers that are come out, the survey is always taken in the week in which the 12th day of the month, falls in and we were closed over that week. The government was closed. That was last week. So we may go another month. think December 16th they said we’ll get the next jobs data. Yeah. December 9th on Joltz. but we may go another full month without the jobs numbers. Now some people say, it’s a survey. It doesn’t matter anyway, but that’s what we’re going on right at the moment. So federal reserve is going to be flying blind. ⁓ we had that challenger Christmas report came out, said there was a hundred thousand more layoffs this year, ⁓ over the month than there was last year. The ADP numbers were kind of flip flop in between negative and positive. I mean, it’s going to be a big tell when they come out with that first number. I figured they’re leaning towards keeping an eye on the labor market more so than inflation, just because what’s the matter if you’re paying a 10th higher for something versus not having a job. But you saw those minutes come out today and it didn’t seem like there was many dovish folks. ⁓ So I don’t know, I would say with that weakness, you would expect another 25 basis point cut. not a huge cut. It’s not like they’re going 50 or 1 % or something like that. But there’s people in dealing with a softening job market for sure. Well, going back to the Fed, I mean, they’re they’re stuck in this quagmire. If if if unemployment goes up, but inflation also goes up, right? We would call that stagflation, I guess if if GDP is not rising at the same time, which it could I mean, it’s not it’s not binary like that. You could have all three things happen. I don’t I don’t suppose it would happen. But it could happen. What would they do in that scenario? They choose which one to prioritize. Which one do they prioritize? That’s a dual mandate. Which one? No, ⁓ I would lean towards job, the labor market. Yeah. Yeah, that is a that is I’m not sitting on the FOMC. So no, no, neither. Neither am I, obviously, eventually, there’s going to be an issue where it doesn’t matter what they’re doing, because of like I said, AI and robots, where there’s going to be a crossover threshold where the whole labor situation is going to change where, you know, historically, you know, you look at the production function, there’s your GDP on one side, there’s technological process, there’s labor input and capital inputs. And eventually capital is going to be equivalent to the human labor quantity aspect, because robots are going to be able to do just what we’re doing. So they’ll have to figure that out. I’m telling you HVAC plumbers ⁓ mechanics. auto mechanics, they’re going to have jobs for a long, long, long time. Yep. Anybody that comes to your house, they’re going to have a job for a long, long, long time. That entry, not so much. Yeah. ⁓ research analysts. Hey, hey, come on now. But no, like an entry level research analyst in the medical field. I don’t know. Yeah. That can all be done. ⁓ that can all be automated these days. Maybe there’s no question about it. I guess. If you fast forward that and you think, okay, well now you have, I don’t know, 20 million people, 30 million people that are on universal basic income. What are they going to do? And I mean that quite literally, like all of in the matrix. Well, yeah. But so you have income coming in, you don’t have a job. What are you going to do with yourself? Everybody’s going to be self-actualizing. Maybe they can. do their own little garden and feed themselves then to make up for it. To make up for what? Not having a job and universal basic income is going to be like social security. It’s not going be enough to truly live off. Just going to be a supplement to make your life a little less bad to say that yeah, robots worth more than you to that company. Are we going to tax these robots? Companies get taxed on their profit, which their profits should go up because they’re more efficient. So maybe the tax rate could bleed upwards because they’re more productive to pay for the UBI. less workers means less social security doesn’t mean less you be that’s going to be gone in 10 years anyway so don’t say that sorry that’s it’s going to decrease substantially I’m not going to get a lot of social security but I’d like to get what I’m entitled to you’ll get what you get and you like it okay 70 % you don’t think you’re gonna get any I’ll get maybe 40 % of what the current people are getting. I don’t gonna scale down like that. It’s gonna go down to 70 % in 2034 2035. And eventually just going to go down till it’s gone. I don’t think it’s possible. They should have been in equities. I. Well, they should have been in equities. What were they in Chris? They were in treasuries fixed income only. Yeah, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. No, maybe they should have been in Nvidia. Just imagine we’d all be funded then. Maybe you could get 120 % of SSI the next year. Yeah, yeah, maybe. All right. As we wrap it up here, what else do you have? Anything good? Um, I would just recommend anyone checking out that Warren Buffett letter Warren Buffett put out, I guess what could be his last annual shareholder letter. is his last annual. Yeah. To me it read as like the spark notes of a future biography and what will be a very researched person. Undoubtedly. He talked about all his connections with Omaha, obviously, and all the amazing people who were in insanely close proximity to him. Obviously, Munger lived a couple streets away, which he didn’t know because Munger was a few years older than him. The CEO of Coca-Cola, Don Kiyog, lived was his neighbor. ⁓ Obviously, he made huge investments in Coca-Cola over the years. Stan… Lipsy was his name. He was he was one of the early people Buffett invested in turned around Buffalo paper newspaper and made Berkshire a lot of money. ⁓ All these people that just happened to be living in Omaha. So it was very interesting. He is a great writer and we’ll miss his ⁓ annual letters. I I don’t know that I shouldn’t say that he’s not cracked up to not he’s not all that cracked up to be the expression. ⁓ I don’t want to dunk on him in any shape or form. I started in the business in the nineties and he was, you know, the Oracle of Omaha back then and his lure has only grown. ⁓ He was one of the guys that actually helped bail out long-term capital management in 1998 when they went belly up because of the ⁓ tie bat Russian ruble. And, you know, at the time it was a massive undertaking. Looking back on it today, ⁓ the bailout of long-term capital management and, Buffett putting that together with some other big banks, it was only about $500 million. I say sweet deal, like with the great financial crisis, he got a sweet deal on bank of America, cetera. You know, so he has done an amazing job and there’s always been, I guess, a little bit of a, a Buffett premium in Berkshire. ⁓ I would take the other side of that and say that maybe, yeah, okay, it was it’s warranted. He’s stepping down, I would take the other side and say that they might be a little bit more aggressive without Warren Buffett there. We’ve already seen that a little bit. I mean, he’s not gone yet. But clearly there was a recent purchase of alphabet that probably didn’t come from Warren’s desk. You don’t think he would buy? He he missed out on Google way back when Obviously it’s a great business, but yeah, we’re seeing a little bit of that already. His greatest skill was his impulse control and his, his, think. Comfortability with not doing things, which saved him a lot of money and gave him opportunities down the line when things hit the fan. He didn’t blow up really in the.com bubble. didn’t, he didn’t understand the internet at that time and he didn’t invest in it. And so he missed some of the run up. in the late nineties. And then he completely missed. mean, the Berkshire was down when the rest of the market was down, but it wasn’t down like 50 60 % pets.com. Whoa, one random thing at the beginning of the letter he talked about when he was a child, and like the 1930s, and when he had appendicitis. And did you read that part? He was talking about how his dream at that time. So what you did he was at like a Christian or Catholic hospital, and it was worked by all nuns. And he said he was convinced that nobody would ever fingerprint nuns. So if they committed a crime, it wouldn’t be in the FBI database. So he went around and fingerprinted all the nurses on his floor. And he just figured someday Jager Hoover would come to him and say, Thank you, sir, you solved this crime, whoever would have done this and documented the fingerprints of these nuns you solve this crime. Fingerprinting nuns. Yeah. Fingerprinting nuns. That’s hysterical. Yeah. What a guy. What a guy. For anybody that’s still listening, Connor is out there running. ⁓ Great World Race, the Great World Race. which is seven races in seven days in seven continents. And, ⁓ I’ve been following obviously him and his trials on Twitch today. He was in, ⁓ today he was in Portugal. They had flown in from Abu Dhabi. he raced in Abu Dhabi. He did a four six, four hours and six minutes in Portugal. They hopped on a plane. They’re on their way right now to Cartagena. And they’re going to be winding up Friday for the seventh marathon in seven days in Miami at seven a.m. So that’s the great world race on Twitch. If you’re interested, you can always see updates on LinkedIn. You think he’s going to do permanent damage to his foot? Yeah, he’s running on a stress fracture in his foot. A bit nutty. Yeah, I don’t think I would do one marathon on a stress fractured foot. let alone seven in seven days and seven continents. wouldn’t even want to do the flying in seven days, let alone the running. Yeah. Yeah, to me. All right. That’s it for everybody here. Appreciate it. We will see you next time on the market enthusiast. Thanks for listening.