Transcription

• Speaker #0

  All right. We are here for another episode of Millennial Money Matters with Kelly Turner.

• Speaker #1

  And Derek Mazzarella.

• Speaker #0

  And what are we talking about today, Derek?

• Speaker #1

  We're talking about trends of 2025.

• Speaker #0

  I feel like a over 40-year-old and an almost 40-year-old are definitely the perfect people to be talking about trends.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, we're hip. We're still with it.

• Speaker #0

  We are totally hip, totally with it. We know all the coolest things.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, I don't call them young people at all.

• Speaker #0

  You're like, no, I am one of them. I'm not. I'm over 40. I am not cool.

• Speaker #1

  I'm like, I don't see any difference between you and me.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. No, you'll see. When you hit 40 and everything hurts, just everything hurts. I think I've said this in other episodes. You literally roll out of bed on your 40th birthday and you're like, oh, my back hurts so bad. And then it's all downhill from there.

• Speaker #1

  Sweet. I got six months to go for that. Yeah, you got six months to go. That'd be great.

• Speaker #0

  So I went on a small adventure to the chat GPT and I said, chat GPT, tell me what's trendy in 2025. So

• Speaker #1

  All right, lay it on me because I'm going to guess all of these. I'm going to probably know them before you even say it.

• Speaker #0

  Okay. What do you think the color is for 2025?

• Speaker #1

  Color. Color. That sounds ridiculous.

• Speaker #0

  The hot color. There's always a hot color. You know that, right? I didn't know that. There's a trending color every year. So the trending color.

• Speaker #1

  What was last year's color? Do you know?

• Speaker #0

  I don't even know. Maybe like orange. I don't know.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, it's going to be magenta, right?

• Speaker #0

  Magenta. Magenta. This year, it's ox blood.

• Speaker #1

  That's a very specific. Is someone going around me like, oh, yeah, this is this.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Rhino blood versus donkey blood.

• Speaker #0

  Very specific. So it's a dark crimson. I don't know what we're like putting in that color. Like, are we painting walls? Are we wearing clothes? I'm not sure.

• Speaker #1

  No, we're obviously getting a little lockets and putting it around. Yes,

• Speaker #0

  oxblood. Oxblood, trending color.

• Speaker #1

  Okay, what's next?

• Speaker #0

  The trending clothing for 2025 is skinny jeans.

• Speaker #1

  We're back? We're back.

• Speaker #0

  millennials rejoice.

• Speaker #1

  I thought there was like this is never happening again. We love our baggy jeans. Correct. Boyfriend jeans now. See, I know things.

• Speaker #0

  No, no. The Gen Zers have declared skinny jeans are returning. Skinny pants of all kinds because they realize leggings are really comfortable. Now, as I sit here in my wide leg jeans that it took me months to purchase because I'm a millennial who only owns skinny jeans. I'm going to have a hard time giving these up. I am. I'm going to have a hard time giving them up.

• Speaker #1

  I just find it funny that all of our 2000s fashion seems like it's coming back.

• Speaker #0

  Oh, yeah, 100%. Well, because we went through the 90s, right? Like last year, we were in the 90s fashion. We are now heading towards the 2000s. So it's all just coming back again. See,

• Speaker #1

  my style never changes. So every 20 years, I'm like, great.

• Speaker #0

  You're like, cool. I'm back in again. I'm trendy. Yeah, no, I don't know. I dress like a grandma at this point. I think I knew that I was a true elder millennial the day that I walked past Talbots. And I looked in the window and said, oh, that outfit is so cute. I remember in my 20s thinking Talbots. was for grandmas. That was for grandmas. No, it's cute now. It's cute. It's cute.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. I think we had this conversation before, like probably off air, but I feel like I'm at that weird age where like, I don't know how this is made. I don't know where I'm at right now.

• Speaker #0

  Brooks Brothers, Vineyard Vines, me and my business partner were having a conversation this morning about a brand called Aviator Nation that's very in right now.

• Speaker #1

  That sounds really cool.

• Speaker #0

  It's like $198 hoodies. $198 for a hoodie.

• Speaker #1

  No, thanks. I'm already out.

• Speaker #0

  Daria's like, I'm a financial advisor. I'm done here. That is not a financially responsible thing to do.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, screw the Starbucks $5 a day. That's way too expensive.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. Aviator Nation, though, if you want to sponsor us, I'm just saying. We would wear your picture.

• Speaker #1

  I love them.

• Speaker #0

  That was the case. Love them. Okay. The last trending topic I got for 2025 is ready for this. It is the friendcation.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, that sounds lovely. I love friendcations.

• Speaker #0

  Millennials love. to vacation with their friends. We don't want to vacation by ourselves. We don't want to vacation with our family. We want to vacation with our friends.

• Speaker #1

  You know why it's awesome doing that when you have kids is because when you have a group of kids that play together, they're so much nicer.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. Then just your own children.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. If it's just like the four of us are together or in your case, the five, I'm sure just like everyone's yipping at each other. Just like, right. But like, there's like eight kids. You're like, oh, there's more. There's like twice as many kids, but everyone's super chill.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. And every, all the adults are able to have eyeballs. So we are actually the, the. kings of francaisons in our house. It's actually funny when my husband and I vacation alone, because we're like, hi, we don't usually do this. How are you? What are you talking about? Yeah, we always have francaisons, but apparently it's becoming very popular for the mid-30s crowd, both pre-kids and post-kids to francaisons.

• Speaker #1

  I'm hoping that's not a trend. It just is a thing that happens.

• Speaker #0

  We just do it now. Yeah, I'm in for it. But there's some other trends for 2025.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. This is a finance podcast. Why don't we talk about some financial trends?

• Speaker #0

  Financial trends for 2025. Okay. So I read the things to Derek this time, the cool stuff. Now Derek is going to read them to me and I'm going to be like, oh, my God.

• Speaker #1

  The nerdy stuff. Yeah. We're at it. Stop. We're at it. Okay. So the first one on the list is called thematic investing.

• Speaker #0

  That's a lie. That's not a real thing.

• Speaker #1

  Well, it's a made-up word. No, it's not a made-up word. It's been a thing that's actually been around a while, but I think it's just gaining a little bit more traction. So for those that don't know what thematic investing is, it's, oddly enough, theme-based, right? So they'll pick a particular, like, usually it's like a big kind of trend going on in the market.

• Speaker #0

  Like Harry Potter.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, Harry Potter investing. Yes. I have never seen that movie, so maybe to Dumbledore we're going. Is that a phrase?

• Speaker #0

  Pokemon.

• Speaker #1

  Well, we just started reading a little bit of Harry Potter to my kid, and I'm reading it to him. I'm butchering all the names, and my wife's laughing at me. So that's where we're at.

• Speaker #0

  I love Harry Potter. Well, I did love Harry Potter.

• Speaker #1

  All right. Well, back to refocusing. So thematically, it's more like, all right, so big trends right now are artificial intelligence, right? People are talking about cybersecurity because China's probably going to steal a lot of information from TikTok. They already have, yeah. So it's like, all right, so people are like, well, why don't I just invest my money there? Or. And honestly, half the time, it's a political thing. We're like, oh, so-and-so has an office, so this is going to be really good for X. People think, oh, it's clean energy. That's a theme, right? It's a theme in the market. Does that make sense?

• Speaker #0

  It does make sense. So I'm going to summarize here, right? So it's a bunch of investments that are based around a particular theme. Who's picking this theme? Is the consumer picking the theme?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, so they're generally packaged as either funds or exchange-traded funds, also known as ETFs.

• Speaker #0

  Different than an NFT.

• Speaker #1

  Correct. Yeah, not the same. So there's no pictures. There's no artists. It's not like scamming your money. It's just ETFs are instead of just buying because people would say, all right, I want to invest in, let's say, just AI. So I'm going to invest in a chip stock, for example. They say like, well, maybe there's other companies out there that also do this thing that could also blow up. Why don't I just see if there's some nerd out there that's searching this for the whole market, right? So instead of buying one stock, you buy 30, 60, 70 of those individual stocks packaged into one fund.

• Speaker #0

  Okay, so I'm assuming if we're going to do this, it's because these are going to perform better than regular investments.

• Speaker #1

  Well, you know what? I did some research for you on that one. So Morningstar ran a study looking back basically three years. Do you know what the average well, here. The S&P fund over that same timeframe averaged 11% per year.

• Speaker #0

  Good. I'd be totally in for 11%. Sounds great.

• Speaker #1

  If you get 11%, your money is doubling like every six plus years or so. Perfect. So the average thematic fund did negative 7%. What?

• Speaker #0

  What?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, so the opposite of good. okay um so actually they're kind of being a little cheeky here but um a lot of people know arc fund you know kathy woods fund again a lot of claim to fame in 2020 they crushed it in 2020 but then had a huge drop off and still have not recovered um so if you take out that one because that's the largest quote-unquote thematic fund yeah um they lost six percent oh so still not winner winner no no still not great um and then also like all right well i kind of nerded out so let me just um let me kind of figure out like where other things were um so I looked at the S&P over a kind of a three-year, two-year span, basically. It was up almost 72%. And then I looked at a fund called BOTZ, B-O-T-Z. It's an ETF. It's robotics and AI. So everyone's like...

• Speaker #0

  Cool. It sounds good.

• Speaker #1

  We like that stuff. AI basically carried the S&P, right? That fund was up 62%, same time frame. So still underperformed, still up, but underperformed the S&P. Then I'm like, all right, how about cybersecurity? How does that do? That's been in the news all over the place. That one was up 50%. 3% roughly. It's called IHAC. It's out of BlackRock. So like a lot of times we think like, oh, we've hit the winning lottery, take it with these funds and we'll allocate a large percentage of money towards it, but it doesn't actually work out that well.

• Speaker #0

  Still not really winning.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. I'm not saying it can't work out, but I think I would just say my advice for the thematic theme for 2025 is like maybe just be judicious with this and really pick it. And it's not something you're going to pick for 20 years because themes come and go.

• Speaker #0

  Okay. Yeah. I know you're right. It would be like sort of a short-term thing.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, because you know how many people I had asked me about it like... Like pot stocks and cannabis stocks, like, you know, when I think like, oh, it's going to become legal everywhere.

• Speaker #0

  Got to get in on it.

• Speaker #1

  Terrible. Everyone lost money on those. So just be careful with it.

• Speaker #0

  I heard, you know, it's funny. I think that I was at a conference last week and the speaker had this sort of theme of if it's new, it's not true. And when you first hear that, you're like, oh, it's kind of hokey. But when you really kind of think about it is like stuff in the markets that tends to perform well has some sort of historical data to back it up. right? Even if it's something sort of new, you can sort of look at an older thing and say like, yeah, this is similar. Something that's brand new, this is some of the stuff that sometimes happens. It's just not, it's not going to turn out the way you expect it to.

• Speaker #1

  It's hard because at the end of the day, markets look at who's making money. Because you think you're investing in companies and you can invest in a company that has revenue or is going to have revenue in the future. And the answer is no, or it's like, oh, we don't really know or could.

• Speaker #0

  Maybe.

• Speaker #1

  Good luck.

• Speaker #0

  Good luck. And if we all knew what those things were, everybody would be billionaires. Exactly.

• Speaker #1

  Okay. What's the next trend? Trend number two. Everyone's going to be talking about debt, specifically the national debt.

• Speaker #0

  So we like to talk about our personal debt here on this podcast, but now we're going to talk about national debt. I don't really want to talk about national debt, Derek. That's not a fun and exciting topic.

• Speaker #1

  It's not. But it's something that a lot of people are worried about. Yes. you know natural reasons so one of the metrics we use to see like oh are we do we owe a lot as a country or not is uh we use what's called percentage of gdp or gross domestic product which is basically everything we make think about like everything we make and sell and service-wise that includes goods all that stuff so it's like kind of like the country's revenue okay um so we do as a percentage of that right um so the highest ever before this period do you know what it was It was 106% of GDP, and it was right after World War II. Okay. Makes sense. You know, we had a lot to pay for. A lot of tanks. It's currently at 126.4. Woo! Way over that. We are not currently at war. We're, you know, obviously. Well,

• Speaker #0

  sort of. I mean, we kind of always are.

• Speaker #1

  We're poking our nose in the neighbor's businesses, for sure. But we're obviously a lot. So a lot of people are concerned about it. I know there's probably one of the biggest reasons that our current presence in the office now and the whole Doge thing. Let's see how that works out.

• Speaker #0

  Well, and the trending thing with debt ceiling is that I think as the average consumer, we don't really necessarily like lock into that regularly until we get the news alert from the website on your phone that says, you know, government freeze coming up, right? There's going to be another government freeze because we can't agree on the national debt ceiling and all that.

• Speaker #1

  So the debt ceiling is a little different than the debt.

• Speaker #0

  Than the debt. But it's related.

• Speaker #1

  So the best way to describe this is like the country put stuff on a credit card. So Congress approves. what we're spending right and the debt ceiling is like hey you know that that money you already approved that we're spending like you already put that money in a credit card like we actually pay for that and like i don't know we should pay for that it's like no no you already you already you already bought the thing like we need to pay for that like oh okay but we should be more responsible but like so you got to be responsible in the future like it's funny i actually recorded a uh thing for uh wfsb so channel three for uh about the discipline they want to be really really hyperbolic by it and they've never actually aired it because it doesn't happen it always comes up but it never it always gets tough it gets it comes up but i think like again like the debt piece to it is right like that

• Speaker #0

  is a lot of what's going on politically right now is talking about the debt we just had the um at the time that we're recording this episode um All the stuff came out this week where we were freezing federal grants and aid. That is all related to national debt.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. And it's honestly, it is a problem that we're going to need to fix. It's probably not a problem right this second, but we can't keep going on at this pace. So the reality is either we're raising revenue, so that's going to increase your taxes, or we're cutting or significantly cutting. And I think we're going to eventually have to do both. Like I looked up on JP Morgan has a guide to the markets. And, you know, we're spending on defense. We're spending about $964 billion a year on. defense. So a lot. We're spending just over a trillion dollars on debt servicing. So paying the interest on the debt that we borrowed.

• Speaker #0

  Wow. Wow. And that's just the stuff that people don't really contemplate in like, it costs so much money to hold debt. And think about your own mortgage, if you have a mortgage yourself, right? People on the last page of your closing disclosure, there's this lovely number that we tell people not to look at. And it's like, what your mortgage is going to cost you if you pay it off over 360 months?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, the full cost of loan.

• Speaker #0

  Yes, it's the old poop number.

• Speaker #1

  I looked at it.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I'm like, don't even look at it. Don't even look at it because it's often double, right, what you're actually buying a house for because holding debt is expensive. Yeah. Both interest, servicing fees, there's a lot that goes into it, but it's expensive.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, and the challenge is it's not like all of the debt we have in the country is, hey, you know, we had a really great 15-year run where interest rates were stupid low. The rates are higher. And they have to actually renegotiate the debt every so often. So it's not like we have like a 30-year low interest rates on this debt either.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. And a lot of it's like adjustable. And yeah, it depends a lot. So it's a complicated topic.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. So I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about that this year. And we may have another thing about it. Do you want to hear the next exciting?

• Speaker #0

  Is this as exciting as skinny jeans?

• Speaker #1

  No, it just gets boring. Keep listening, though,

• Speaker #0

  please. OK. I'm here.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. Inflation. I know it's something we've been talking about all last year. It was one of the most Googled trends or questions of last year. It's still trending that way. It's like the thing that just won't go away.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, no, we...

• Speaker #1

  They won't leave the house after a party. It's like, get out of the house.

• Speaker #0

  We've been chilling with inflation since the pandemic, really. This is a pandemic-related problem. Kind of came out of 2021 is where we really started to see inflation take off. I love and hate to talk about inflation from the interest rate standpoint, because interest rates are related to inflation. Right. And for two years now, two and a half years almost, we've been like... inflation is going to go down. So the interest rates will go down, but instead they just keep going up. So inflation went down. Yeah. Interest rates just didn't go down like they're supposed to.

• Speaker #1

  Well, that, and this is the reason why, right? Cause if, if the, you know, as we had in other previous episodes of please check them out, they're going to be tied to the treasury, right? It's not necessarily the housing rates or mortgage rates are tied to that. They're not tied to what the fed sets as rates. So even though the fed's dropping it, you've noticed the, what'd you say? Like the other day was like mortgage rates last year or what? And now they're what? Oh,

• Speaker #0

  so I, it was kind of a painful lesson for me as I was helping a borrower who had pre-qualified literally a year ago. It was like a year ago, February 1st, and I had done their whole pre-approval. So it's like a file that lives in my computer and I have to put an interest rate in at the time. So I put in 7% because that's what their interest rate was a year ago. They ended up kind of falling off the home buying wagon, decided to renew their lease, went silent on me, right? I knew they were taking a break. They have just resurrected themselves. And after a year, you expect to open a loan file and the interest rate to be wildly out of touch.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, it's very different, at least minimum, right?

• Speaker #0

  Very different. I pulled rates for them again, and it was exactly the same interest rate. And we've had ups and downs over the last 12 months, don't get me wrong, but it was like a little, like a shot in the heart to see that here we are a year later. literally in the exact same spot that we were.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. And that's tough. And that's with rates, federal rates dropping, right? So there's a couple of things I'd probably mention on inflation, like what needs to happen and where we are now. But I would say there's two main components of it. So there's the goods piece of it. So stuff we make, that has come down and that has come down pretty significantly. So that's like the supply chain piece that people are talking about. That has essentially kind of, you know, not 100% been fixed, but it's been mitigated.

• Speaker #0

  And that's most of inflation going down is related to that.

• Speaker #1

  Correct. The other part is a service. And that's something like, hey, where if you own a business or you're, you know, run a cycling studio or whatever, you're not all of a sudden be like, I'm going to drop my rates again. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  no. Once they go up, they never come down.

• Speaker #1

  So that'll be a little tough. And the biggest piece of all of this.

• Speaker #0

  Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

• Speaker #1

  Housing. Ding. Yeah, yeah. So and housing is just not going to come down. It's the challenges like the interest rates are high. So it's kind of like this vicious cycle or circle or whatever you want to call it. Right.

• Speaker #0

  We're stuck in a cycle of real estate where we have limited inventory because there's a bunch of homeowners sitting in low interest rates who don't want to leave. There's also a bunch of boomers sitting in single family housing stock that they normally would have vacated, but they don't have anywhere to go. So they're sitting in a 2%

• Speaker #1

  interest rate. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  they got a 2% interest rate. They're maybe two people, maybe one person living in the four bedroom, three and a half bath house. But it's cheaper for them to live there than to move to a one floor ranch. So they're not going to go anywhere. So we have this stagnant housing supply where nobody's getting out.

• Speaker #1

  And also nobody's building.

• Speaker #0

  Nobody's building. It's very expensive to build right now. Land is very expensive. Everything's very expensive because inflation is high. Right. So nobody's building houses. And then you have these people that want to get into the houses. Okay. Because they're renting at $3,000, $3,500 a month. They're dying. It's time, right? They're grown adults. They want to get out. Yeah. They want to buy. So when a house comes on the market, a million people make an offer on it. It. escalates the sale price exponentially, and it goes for way over what asking is, therefore, keeping the price of housing up. And that was part of keeping interest rates high, whereas exactly for that reason, it was trying to discourage buyers from buying to bring the price of housing back down again. But in fact, that's not...

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, demand hasn't gone anywhere.

• Speaker #0

  Demand has not gone anywhere. And in fact, I actually would tell you, I think demand, at least in the Northeast, has gone up. So yeah, we're... And what has to happen for this to to change like new housing stock, which isn't really happening to family. Yep. Or people selling, which isn't really happening. Right. And it's the chicken or the egg is the people who want to sell need rates to go down in order to sell rates are not going to go down until people sell.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. I mean, that's the hard conversation I'm having. Some retirees like, yeah, I would love to downsize, but why would I pay, you know, 50% more than what I'm paying to live in a smaller house?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. Doesn't make any sense. So what we're finding is a lot of older people are actually just retrofitting their houses for aging, right? Instead of moving out, they're just, you know, turning the den on their first floor into a bedroom.

• Speaker #1

  Lining the doors.

• Speaker #0

  Lining the doors, yeah. Making handicapped accessible bathrooms on the first floor. And they're just like shutting down the second floor of the house. Like ain't nobody live up there, turn the heat down, turn the lights off. I know people like winterizing toilets on their second floor. Oh, yeah. No one's going to go up there.

• Speaker #1

  Put some ice up there, being all good to go. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  it's good. Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Good stuff. Anyway, so inflation. So that'll be a thing we keep talking about probably for the rest of the year and it'll probably stay a little longer than people think.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, that's not going anywhere.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. So the fourth and final trend we're going to talk about today is artificial intelligence.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, ChatGPT.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, just ChatGPT. Nothing else is going on there. Oh, no, actually, there's this new model. Did you hear this one thing that came out?

• Speaker #0

  What is it called?

• Speaker #1

  DeepSeq from China.

• Speaker #0

  Of course it is.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, well, the biggest impact there, it had a 17... percent drop in NVIDIA stock in one day because they basically, the deal with this model is they basically built it off ChatGPT initially that they iterated some models, but it's like, hey, look, we did this open source model, which means everyone can use it and code on it and all that fun stuff. But we did it for $6 million.

• Speaker #0

  So cheap. They did it for very cheap now. Yeah. We don't really know how cheap it was to make this.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. It's from China. And there's some different arguments I've heard slash read about. This says it may not have been that cheap, but. like I mentioned earlier, was built off of mainly a more expensive model. But so now they're saying, okay, do we need as many chips and how does that impact all the other? Because we have this massive AI trade basically in our industry, which is like, hey, you know, we need to buy these chips. So the infrastructure spend there and also, hey, like, well, they need to build these massive buildings to house all these servers and all that stuff. So we need to have Like even utility companies had banner years. Like actually the number one performer last year was a utility company. It wasn't NVIDIA. It was a utility company.

• Speaker #0

  Right. And I think what people don't realize about AI is we're calling it a trending topic. I'm making air quotes right here. Trending topic. This is not a trending topic. This is not skinny jeans, my friends. Okay. This is a change in the way that we live.

• Speaker #1

  This is actually called a mega trend.

• Speaker #0

  What's a mega trend?

• Speaker #1

  So mega trend actually has typically three phases. So there's the. emergence of it. So like, Ooh, what is this chat GPT thing? So we're kind of, we're kind of in that phase now.

• Speaker #0

  That's when people were like downloading it. Like, what is this? Can I make my grocery?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. But that's also like, we're like the nerdy people are probably doing it. People are like, Oh, trying to, you know, understand new technology, but there's still a whole, whole swath of the population probably never even touched. Yeah. They don't know what even chat GPT. Right. Then there's the acceleration of it. So we're kind of like trying to figure out what are the use cases for? Like, how do we make money on this thing? That's kind of like this weird, like usually it's like a lull period. And then finally, at some point we just get like, like think of like a Facebook, like massage option, right? Like.

• Speaker #0

  Everybody's using it. Yeah, because Facebook in 2005, and I'm gonna tell you that's when I graduated college was 2005 The only people who could get it who could get on Facebook were people with college email addresses To the point where people were trying to get fake college email addresses just so they could sign on to Facebook and now like the average Age of a Facebook user 62 at your grandma. Yeah grandma was like happy birthday little Johnny. Yeah, such a cute photo That's who's on Facebook now. So yeah, it's that sort of shift in who's utilizing this technology.

• Speaker #1

  Right. And one thing I would say from like kind of a market slash investing standpoint to watch is it kind of like think of this as probably going to mirror somewhat like the internet boom of the 90s. And, you know, we had basically this huge boom where all these companies came out, people throwing money at them. We weren't really sure like who's going to make money. A lot of them didn't have any money. So it's slightly different than now because companies actually are making money. But we have this massive kind of rug pull where, you know, like what were we doing? Like what? Well, these companies aren't making money. We're getting all this money. So we're probably going to have this accelerate right now, probably a lull or a pullback in some form. We kind of saw a little bit of that with the deep sink thing. But then I think in three to five years, we're going to see all these companies come out of the woodwork and say, like, we're making this profitable. XYZ people's using it. Like Google came out of the. internet boom, like all these other companies that you weren't really thinking of Amazon, you know, Facebook again, like all these companies are going to come out of here that we've probably never even heard of that are gonna be massive companies in three to five years.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. And I think the other piece of that too, is just where it's going to get implemented in your life. And this is why I say it's not, this is not a trend as much as like, welcome to 2025 and your new living is, you know, even like Gmail is a great example. Have you used Gmail recently where you log on to Gmail and you start typing an email and then Gmail starts finishing it for you? Because Gmail is reading all your other emails. And they're saying, oh, when somebody asks A, you usually respond B. We're just going to type that out for you. That is going to be how you text message. You're out like everything we do is now going to be this like predictive information where it's going to predict what your next move is. So, you know, this is something that is trending, but also, you know, kind of kind of coming in hot. And if you're not going to embrace it, it's probably going to be problematic. Now, there's a lot of people from the financial standpoint who think that AI is taking our jobs. Right. No one's going to have jobs. What's your thoughts on that?

• Speaker #1

  I think they will take two thoughts, I guess. They're going to take some jobs in general, right? You've already heard the CEO for Salesforce say, like, this is the first time in forever that I'm not going to hire new coders because the ones we have now are being more efficient with the AI tools. So that's one piece of it. But if you're the person that doesn't look at AI and avoids it, you're going to be replaced by someone that does use it. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  100%. I agree. I also think there will be new jobs. So social media is a great example. 20 years ago, nobody had a job in social media. There was no social media account execs.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. If you went into 1995, it was like, hey, I'm a social media guru.

• Speaker #0

  People would have laughed you right out. Where now, this is a legitimate field with people getting paid legitimate money. And we're going to see that happen in the AI front as well, where we're going to go from People doing job A to job A now being done by AI, but now there's a job B. It's AI consultant. It's whatever those jobs might be. AI educator. There's going to be a million.

• Speaker #1

  AI implementation specialist. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  there you go. Yeah, add all the corporate. Clearly, you work in a more corporate place than I do. That's a corporate jargon. I'm going to circle back around for you, Derek. But we're going to just see new jobs form. I also am actually a believer, too, from the financial standpoint that AI is going to give the average person, the ability to increase their income in a way that no disruptive technology ever has.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. I think the one thing about most technologies is that they've kind of democratized a lot of things. Like if you look even like my industry, like, you know, like mutual funds way back when you were like the older people in the office were telling me like, oh, it's like 8% you had to pay upfront. Like that's absurd. Like imagine paying like we have, you know, ETFs now that are 0.07%. Imagine paying 8% just to buy an investment because the internet came along, they had pricing. So AI is probably going to do a very similar thing where they're going to democratize something that is currently very expensive. Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  And it's also going to streamline a lot of services, and it's going to make things much more effective and efficient. So companies will save money in other ways that they can invest in new things and new technology and new stuff.

• Speaker #1

  Right. You may not be talking to a customer service, right? You're probably going to be talking to an AI bot about something.

• Speaker #0

  Well, that's already the life. If you've talked and people, I have a lot of people who, cause I teach them AI classes, especially for realtors. And they're like, I've never used AI. And I'm like, have you talked to the Amazon bot? Have you talked to Amazon? Have you chatted? And they're like, of course I've chatted with Amazon customer service. I'm like, that's not a person. You're not talking to a person. When you talk to Amazon customer service, you were talking to a bot. What that is, is that's like 50 bots talking in one human monitoring all those conversations. And then the human will step in if something looks problematic. But the bot, like 99% of the time, can handle whatever the question is. The bot has been fed, this is all of the things that people are going to come to you for, and this is your responses for it. Somebody says A, you say B. Somebody says B, you say C. And I think we're going to start to see a lot more of that. But a lot of people who think they've never used AI, I'm sorry, you've used it. You just don't know.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, I mean, even Siri's AI.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, Siri, Waze, I had this argument with somebody, Waze is AI. So what it's doing it's taking a look at like an algorithm of traffic to say like hey there's a build up here the shortest distance would be to get you off this exit but we now see another traffic problem off this exit so we're gonna recalculate and we're gonna send you over here which doesn't even seem like it makes sense and we have this conversation in our household all the time that you never argue with the gps it's always right okay

• Speaker #1

  yeah whenever yeah although boomers don't love love like giving directions and talking about which asking which road that you took to get there

• Speaker #0

  They also love saying that they're going to beat, like my dad, love him. God bless him. He wants to beat the GPS. Like, oh, it says I'm going to get there at 9.02.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, no, I'm the same way. I can get there at 9. That's not a time. That's a challenge, in my opinion.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, he agrees.

• Speaker #1

  I'll just accept the GPS.

• Speaker #0

  But you do that GPS thing where you're like, this doesn't seem like the right way. The GPS knows things you don't know.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, they can see in the future.

• Speaker #0

  You can't see in the future. It knows things you don't know. So you listen to the GPS because anytime I'm ever like, nah, I always do that in New Jersey. I don't know how much you travel in New Jersey, but anytime I go to New Jersey.

• Speaker #1

  No, I don't travel to Jersey.

• Speaker #0

  I travel to New Jersey. I'm like, the Garden State Parkway. What are we doing? Or which bridge are we going on? He's trying to tell me to go on the GW. I'm not going to the GW. I'm going to Japan Z. And I argue with it. And I'm always wrong 100% of the time.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. Well, I can see that. Well, my bold AI prediction is we're going to have a driving list. Like our kids are not going to have to learn how to drive.

• Speaker #0

  I would love that. I'm not a great driver. So that would be great.

• Speaker #1

  And I think we're actually not going to own cars. It's going to be like, we're going to pay $200, $500 a month and have a car. Boop,

• Speaker #0

  show up so now it's talking about new jobs that means we're gonna have like all these redesigners suffering yeah shout out to sharon uh she's gonna be redesigning garages in 10 years yeah there you go to like personal feet heads you know or something well i want a personal sheet shed i love it all right so these are the trends for 2025 now my challenge for you derrick is i think you should keep this list and at the end of the year let's

• Speaker #1

  revisit it on the podcast and see where where we've landed i think that's a great point and i'll be wearing oxblood doing it and my skinny jeans oxblood

• Speaker #0

  After your friendcation.

• Speaker #1

  After my friendcation, yeah.

• Speaker #0

  I love it.

• Speaker #1

  Perfect. All right, everyone. Thanks for listening.

• Speaker #0

  Another episode. See you next time. Bye. The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you, consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision.