Why The Meme-ification of Investing Is Here To Stay

0:00Hello, everyone. We've got a lot to discuss today. Speculation has infiltrated every corner of the financial market. New data proves that the average investor is not very good. A generational job crisis may be underway, and the latest robot video means you ain't ever going to have to do laundry again. We're live today from the desk of Anthony Pompliano.

0:28Before we get into today's show, We have 17 ,714 subscribers on YouTube, and I need your help. My goal is to get to 1 million subscribers, and I can't get there unless you hit the subscribe button right now. Do it, and let's get into it today. All right, ladies and gentlemen, the government ain't ever going to stop printing money. That is my main investment thesis for the foreseeable future. Plenty of people, they want to politicize our addiction to money printing. They claim that the opposing political party, they're the ones responsible for the undisciplined destruction of our currency. But here's the truth.

1:01Money printing isn't reserved to any specific political party. Creative Planning's Peter Malouk, he's a smart guy, he writes, red or blue, the national debt goes up. The only thing that both parties can agree on is sending the bill to future generations. Next stop,$38 trillion national debt. Now, this level of government spending has created one of the fastest debasements of the U.S. dollar in recent memory. Truflation tells us that the U.S. dollar has lost 28 % of its purchasing power since 2020. That's an insane debasement rate over a half decade. Now, this accelerated debasement is driving what Will Manitis calls casino culture.

1:36He writes sports betting, shit coins, meme stocks, vibe coding,$100 million in six hours. It is all expressions of the same deep cultural rot. If youth don't believe there's legitimate ways to get rich through work, all of culture will become a rotten sports book for the soul. A decent way to think about where things are headed is that all aspects of human life, It's being turned into lotteries. You do whatever minimal labor you can, which is often demeaning work. You tithe your wage into the system. And occasionally someone hits it big publicly enough for you to still believe. Maybe Will's right.

2:10Maybe he isn't. But it is clear that sports gambling, altcoins, and mass speculation have become a very large part of young people's culture. I just don't know how much more prevalent it is today compared to generations in the past. Now, I personally remember spending inordinate amounts of time playing poker with my friends all the way back in high school. We gambled on fantasy football or weekend sports games. In our friend group's choice of speculative work in college, a bunch of them were running around participating in whatever the latest multi-level marketing scheme being popularized was.

2:40So this brings me to the idea of meme stocks today. On one hand, meme stocks exist, but maybe not in the way you think. Most people point to GameStop and others as examples of the meme stock craze. However, I personally would point at Berkshire Hathaway as the boomer meme stock. The second Warren Buffett announced his retirement, the stock has fallen approximately 10%. The meme is dying, and shareholders are revaluing the company without the Buffett premium, aka the Buffett meme. You may not like that Berkshire Hathaway is a boomer meme stock, but it absolutely is. Buffett's disciples will spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year.

3:15They participate in capitalism's trip to Mecca, aka Omaha, for the Berkshire annual meeting. These meme investors will parrot the Buffett talking points like they are spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ himself. It doesn't mean Berkshire is a good or bad investment. It just means that it is a boomer meme stock. So if Berkshire is a meme stock, then every stock is a meme stock to a degree. Tesla, Palantir, Amazon, Meta, Walmart, or Procter & Gamble, they all have a narrative that people buy into. And those people are willing to defend the narrative. Memes are the message. Anyone denying this modern truth is ill-prepared to allocate capital in today's dynamic environment.

3:52But there's another argument, which says that if every stock's a meme stock, then no stock is a meme stock. They're all just companies with revenue, expenses, profits, and losses. They either convince the market the future is bright or they are left to die because the market believes the best days are in the rear view mirror. Now, I believe everything is speculation. Buying the S &P 500, that's speculative. Buying Bitcoin, that's speculative. Buying commercial real estate or a primary residential home, those are both speculative too. You are constantly taking risk. If you're right, you'll be rewarded.

4:25If you're wrong, you'll get punished financially. And everything is a meme. Own your home rather than rent. That's a great meme. Buy Bitcoin, an even better meme. And hold the S &P 500. It's the granddaddy meme of them all. So stop buying into the nonsense narratives that are coming from the mainstream media. They want to use the word speculation or the phrase meme stocks as a creative slur to downplay what retail investors are doing with their money. Sophisticated investors are speculating on memes too. Everyone has to do it. The government can't stop printing money. So either we all push out on the risk curve to build our investment portfolios, or we are left to watch our hard-earned economic value melt away.

5:05Oh boy. JP Morgan just came out with a brand new study that's going to blow your mind. Fran Walsh points out that from 2002 to 2021, the average investor earned just 3.6 % per year in their portfolio, less than 4%. S &P 500 during the same time period, 9.5%. Fran says that the gap wasn't the market, it was just behavior. See, here's the thing, holding the S &P 500, it's boring. And if it's boring, people don't like to do it, but it was better than the average investor's return. And so, buy great assets, hold them for a long time, timeless investing principle that will never, ever, ever go out of style.

5:42Are we on the verge of a generational jobs crisis? Well, my friend Adam Kobisi thinks so. The three-month average youth unemployment rate, according to him, jumped to 17 % in July. It's the highest since 2020. This metric includes unemployed individuals aged 16 to 24, and that youth unemployment rate has climbed by about five percentage points over the last two years. Adams says that this is nearly in line with the peak during the 2001 recession and the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis. Now, he says that this also signals that the U.S. labor market could weaken further with young workers typically the first to feel the impact when the economy turns.

6:17The job market is rapidly deteriorating. Now, it makes sense. Young people, they have the least amount of experience. They've got some skills, but they haven't proven it yet in the market. And so they're the first ones to feel the pain. Obviously, the youth unemployment rate is going up. And that means that there could be problems on the horizon. Now, how much of that is because of economic issues versus things like artificial intelligence? AI, of course, everyone wants it to be smarter than the smartest human. But right now, AI is really good at doing entry-level jobs. It's really good at replacing those youth workers.

6:47And so naturally what you have is you have AI assaulting a bunch of entry-level jobs and the people who normally would be taking those jobs, they're finding themselves in a much harder situation. So as the youth unemployment rate goes up, sure, maybe it's going to signal something going on in the economy. But my guess is it's more of a telltale sign of what's actually happening from a technology standpoint and how prevalent AI is becoming in all of these companies across all these industries. Nobody likes doing laundry. I don't like doing it. You don't like doing it. And now we're going to get humanoid robots that are going to do it for us.

7:20And the latest video coming out of Figure means that we're closer than I previously thought we were. Take a look at this video here. This humanoid robot can actually fold clothes, put it out on a table, fold it up. Eventually, it's going to put it away. This is the promise of these humanoid robots. They're going to do all of the tasks, both in your home, at work, and everywhere in between that you and I don't want to do. the more that we can get robots to take human labor that isn't actually taking jobs, but is merely freeing up our time to do things that are more productive and actually let us have a higher quality of life, I'm all for it.

7:52And now the humanoid robots, they're coming to do your laundry. All right, guys, that's it for today's show. Remember, we've got 17 ,714 subscribers on YouTube. I need your help to get us to 1 million. Make sure that you subscribe. Please make sure that you're still following us on X and I will see you guys live tomorrow from the desk of Anthony Pompliano.