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Slip into something more comfortable and delve into personal finance with Josh Sheluk and Colin White, experienced portfolio managers at Verecan Capital Management. Each episode demystifies complex financial topics, stripping them to their bare essentials. From investment strategies and financial planning to economic headlines and philanthropic giving, delivered with a blend of insight, transparency, and a touch of humour. Perfect for anyone looking to understand and navigate their financial future with confidence. Subscribe now to stay informed, empowered, and entertained.
Verecan Capital Management Inc. is registered as a Portfolio Manager in all provinces in Canada except Manitoba.
Announcer:
You're about to get lucky with the Barenaked Money Podcast, the show that gives you the naked truth about personal finance. With your hosts, Josh Sheluk and Colin White, portfolio managers with WLWP Wealth Planners, iA Private Wealth.
Josh Sheluk:
All right, Barenaked Money coming at you, Colin and Josh here. And we're covering topics du jour, Colin?
Colin White:
I believe that's what we were calling it. Because we couldn't come up with a good theme, it was almost like leftover day at the restaurant, we took everything that was laying on the cutting board and we throw it into a pot, we're calling it stew and hopefully people will like it.
Josh Sheluk:
Yeah, well, I was thinking we usually have one big idea coming into a podcast. Today we have a number of medium ideas, so it's like medium idea day, medium-sized ideas, something like that.
Colin White:
And to the critics out there who think this is scripted. I have no idea at all what is on Josh's list and Josh has no idea what I've put on my list. So this will be a live react. It'll be exciting.
Josh Sheluk:
So you're really excited about what you have to share with me, what you have to throw at me, Colin? Why don't you kick it off?
Colin White:
Oh, now see, now there's pressure, like the big buildup and stuff, and what if I disappoint people? Well, as I said Josh, I have been maybe a little attached last couple of days, haven't been reading as much as I normally would because I've been distracted with stuff. So I just quickly went over the headlines just to see if there was anything in there that caught me by surprise. And low and behold, guess what is back? You don't know.
Josh Sheluk:
Do not leave me in suspense.
Colin White:
Bitcoin.
Josh Sheluk:
Well, yeah.
Colin White:
Bitcoin is zing. Bitcoin breaks above 30,000 as investors eye the end of rate rises. So Josh, I'm going to read for you the opening paragraph of this article that comes from The Globe and Mail. And I want you to live react to this. Major cryptocurrency. Bitcoin breached the key $30,000 level for the first time in 10 months on Tuesday, adding to its steady gains as investors raised bets that the US Federal Reserve will soon end its aggressive monetary tightening campaign. Josh, does that make sense to you?
Josh Sheluk:
The words make sense, it's a coherent sentence. I understand the premise of what they're trying to say. I don't know that I believe it or would say that it's a valid premise.
Colin White:
Well, I'm just trying to figure out how far you have to go to connect the value of Bitcoin, which is anti-establishment to US Federal Reserve policy in real time. I'm pretty sure if you polled the dark web where everybody's been trading their Bitcoin, you would be unlikely to have this as one of the top five answers as to why they were doing what they were doing.
Josh Sheluk:
That's probably fair. That's probably fair. For the record people don't trade Bitcoin on the dark web anymore, to my knowledge, not too much anyway.
Colin White:
Where else would those people talk, I'm just saying-
Josh Sheluk:
Sure, sure, sure.
Colin White:
The whole point about it being anonymous and being counter everything and well, we've made this comment about market moves, the market will move and oh, the jobs report caused that market move and the market moves the other way. And oh, same jobs report caused that too. So this whole attribution thing of attributing an observed move in something like Bitcoin and attaching it to the closest thing they had on their desk.
Josh Sheluk:
Yep. That's what this is.
Colin White:
I really, really don't see... Well this is probably the first time I've seen a major article trying to connect monetary policy to a Bitcoin rally. It's just I'm might have lost her words. Maybe this is normal. Maybe you expect this kind of stuff, but I don't.
Josh Sheluk:
Okay. Let me try to draw a line between the two and you can crap all over it because I'm grasping as straws here. So Bitcoin has to me basically proven to be a risk asset over the last few years when people are in a risk on mood, it goes up. When people are on a risk off mood, it goes down, trades like what we would call a high beta asset. So it's a lot more volatile than something like the stock market has been. So market's going up right now, and part of the reason market's going up is because interest rates may be peaking, may be coming down a little bit. And if you see that, then your opportunity cost of holding Bitcoin might be a little bit lower going forward. Crap away.
Colin White:
So you're saying that when people get drunk, they do risky things and it sounds like people are getting drunk, risky behavior increases when people are more optimistic, is that the road you were going down?
Josh Sheluk:
Yeah, you're connecting the dots there. So I like your, people do stupid things when they're drunk idea. So maybe that's what it is. Maybe they've been drinking a little bit too much lately.
Colin White:
But I think the other thing we can infer from this and watch me infer away, watch this inference, there's nothing stupider that's come along in the last six months. We didn't go back to NFTs, we didn't go back to Dogecoin, we didn't go back to some of these fringe things that come with it, and it hasn't been replaced with the new fringe thing. Does this mean that Bitcoin is now becoming part of the permanent lexicon? This has become one of the stalwarts that we're going to be dealing with going forward.
Josh Sheluk:
You obviously missed the article about Elon Musk putting a Dogecoin icon on Twitter, Dogecoin hopping up in price, and then a couple days later, Elon Musk pulling down the Dogecoin icon off of Twitter and Dogecoin subsequently falling in price. I think he's just screwing with us on that one, but well, yeah, look, you're right. There's been less of a preponderance of stupid things for people to throw money at, so maybe they're circling back on Bitcoin. To me, if I was writing this article and trying to draw a line between something, I'd say while these bank failures have led people to trust less than the establishment that's there, and hence they're looking for other options, that to me is the most natural line to be drawn between this Bitcoin rally and me trying to come up with some semblance of rationale for it.
Colin White:
So it's a proxy for people's trust of the traditional system would be another way of maybe framing that.
Josh Sheluk:
Over the last two months. But that whole argument falls down over the last couple years in my opinion. So again, I'm grasping at straws here and there's probably no real explanation for what's going on. It's aside from people getting a little bit more risky with some of their bets and that's not a very good article, so they had to come up with something I guess.
Colin White:
All right, well just suffice it to say Bitcoin is now back in the conversation because we couldn't go back to SPACs or NFTs. Those things all died, I think. So now, no, we're back to Bitcoin.
Josh Sheluk:
All right. Fair enough.
Colin White:
I'm going to watch this story just because I want to see what's causing Bitcoin to move going forward. So I'm going to watch more carefully now. So now that I've warmed the crowd up, Josh, you you're much better researched list of questions and or issues I'm excited for.
Josh Sheluk:
Well, mine's a lot less interesting, I would say. It's just coming back to very, very, very basic economics and market things. The debate over interest rates and whether we've seen the peak of interest rates. To me, this is maybe the most meaningful story, actually having some practical application in our day-to-day lives, whether we've hit that crest in interest rates and are now maybe on the other side of these interest rate hikes. Certainly it seems like in Canada we are paused here for an indefinite amount of time, and maybe the next step is going to be a rate cut, not a rate increase. The US seems like they still have a little bit to go, but I think the narrative has changed over the last few months from one where interest rates going up, up, up, up, up over call it the 12 months prior to a situation where there may be peak and may be coming down from here.
Colin White:
Well, yeah, and I think part of the issue here is we're seeing the things develop in real time that are going to actually allow this to go on its path. So the Bank of Canada, Tiff has made his call that he thinks that he's dejuiced the system enough at this moment in time, and he is waiting for the signs. Now he's going to sit there very quietly until he runs out of patients for seeing the signs like this most juice and jobs number, that wasn't helpful. So that's not helping him keep on his path, but the people that are making the policy decisions are reacting in real time, which makes it really difficult. It's an organic situation. They're expecting certain things to show up at certain intervals, and I'm not even sure they're telling us where all the intervals are, or they may not even know all the intervals that they're looking for things to manifest themselves.
So yeah, I think that, let's put it this way, it's an interesting conversation. It's a conversation that has a lot of meat on it that you can discuss. I always roll it back to, but I don't think there's anything really investible here. I don't think that there's a clear path from this moment, and that's what makes it interesting to talk about. There's not a clear path from here. Again, I always use the example of Vladimir Putin's body shows up in a ditch. We're going to go in a whole new direction, and it could be something as symbolic as that. I mean, we've already watched OPEC makes an announcement out of the blue. I didn't hear any rumblings that OPEC was thinking about making an announcement, and that dramatically shifts the conversation in my opinion. And again, we've had the conversation where that seems to be inflationary and how that's going to affect the overall balance that we need to establish going forward. And what is the new balance? Are we going to reach a new balancing point at a sustainable higher rate of inflation? Is that where this all ends?
Josh Sheluk:
Yep. Is that rhetorical or do you actually want me to answer that?
Colin White:
Oh, if you have an answer, I'd love to hear it.
Josh Sheluk:
Well, I wish I did have an answer then I'd know a lot more about what we should be doing going forward. But I think my guess, I guess I'll go on record saying this is I think the next five to 10 years inflation wise is going to be higher than the last five to 10 years inflation wise. And that's not that bold of a statement because we are basically at all time low levels of inflation over the last really since 2007, 2008. So I think we're probably going to tick up to a little bit of a higher level going forward, but I don't think going to be 5%, I don't think it's going to be 8%, and I'm talking about maybe where they're targeting 2%. Maybe we settle in at 3% over the next five years instead.
Colin White:
Yeah, no, I mean I'll absolutely go on record saying that I think interest rates over the next five to 10 are, sorry, inflation rates over the next five to 10 years will be higher than what they've been over the last five to 10. I'll absolutely go on record with that. And I think, yeah, to your point, I'm not saying that it's going to stick at 8%. I don't think that that's tenable. I don't think that that would be acceptable to anybody and wouldn't be allowed to exist. I think we could get to a point where we learn how to live with three to 4% inflation going forward, but I also think that that would mean a regime change at a few of the central banks because a few of the central bankers have got the 2% tattoo. And I think at a certain point there could be a shift in personnel that's going to allow for a shift in policy.
Because even back in the days before inflation became a thing, inflation couldn't be over 2% to... Well, let's average 2% inflation, which is a big deal in that space. Yeah, let's talk about we can go to average, that's stop the presses we have to announce to the world, we're now going for an average or 2%, the rest of the world shrugs. But in their world, that's a huge deal. So changes tend to be, as far as their policy, the changes tend to be fairly small by many standards. So I think you'll need to see a regime change in with the personnel involved to allow those kinds of things to persist. But I don't think that would be terrible. I think it'd be a new reality that we'd have to get used to, but I don't think it would be the end of the world by any stretch.
Josh Sheluk:
Yeah. So you mentioned OPEC curtailing production, that means reduction of supply, that means probably higher prices is now the time to buy oil or oil companies?
Colin White:
Well, no, because you don't know what OPEC's next announcement's going to be. I see so much writing about the commodity super cycle or commodity cycle or this is how these things play out. But behind the scenes, you have a couple of very major players that can wake up in a bad mood and completely change the trajectory based on a policy announcement. Exposing yourself to that in a large way, investment wise, I don't think is all that smart or prudent long term. I think that in times such a complicated lexicon because you have OPEC that controls a significant amount of supply, but oil is such a commodity that's used in economies all over the world. So economic rate of activity is going to be one of the factors, but you can get fairly significantly derailed by policy announcements in that space. That's what scares me by taking a big position.
We did play in the oil patch a little bit when oil went negative on spot price because you said, "Okay, that's not going to persist." So there are at the extremes, I think, ways to play with it. But no, I'm not a huge fan, although I will say it was interesting, I was listening to a comment by a former Dynamic Mutual Fund manager, Dave Taylor, and he's an interesting character, and he was going on with something that I've said for a lot of years that the oil and gas industry actually is a relatively good steward of capital.
Those companies tend to behave in the shareholder's best interests more often than not compared to the gold sector, which they basically shut up shredding machines as they raise billions of dollars, they run it through a shredder and they spit it into a field. So in comparison to some other commodity sectors, oil and gas, I think they're relatively good stewards of capital. It is a required thing, but again, trying to make big predictions on positions or paths forward. There's too much political interference with the medium term trajectory of prices in that spot.
Josh Sheluk:
Yeah. Comparing to the lowest common denominator, the capital allocation of the gold sector couldn't pick a lower hurdle there, Colin.
Colin White:
Oh, no, absolutely. But I mean, it's one of those things that when you start talking with sectors, yeah, I mean, sectors can have a reputation or have a propensity towards being good stewards of capital, bad stewards of capital, that's a thing. And you're right, as long as you're better than gold companies.
Josh Sheluk:
I remember somebody said to me a long time ago, it's probably going back seven or eight years now that the CEOs in the gold sector have destroyed more capital than any other sector on the planet. So for what it's worth.
Colin White:
That was in that quarter.
Josh Sheluk:
Oh yeah, sure, sure. I think the more time I spend looking at commodities and researching commodities and investing in commodities, the more I realize or come back to the idea that you only want to buy commodities when the prices are low and sell them when the prices are high. It's almost as simple as that, and I don't know what, it's hard to tell you what low and what high is for any given commodity at any given time, but I think intuitively when oil was negative, like you were saying that's probably low.
And when oil went up to however much it was, it tripled over two years and was over a hundred dollars and everyone was panicking over the Russian invasion of Ukraine and all that for commodity prices specifically, that that was probably high and that's about as much as I can tell with this commodity cycle is you buy when it's low, no shit, and you sell when it's hot. But I think for commodities, it's more necessary than ever to really keep a focus on that because it is such a cyclical item. And the commodity companies have no source or no control, rather over their revenue, really the price of their good.
Colin White:
Well see, and this is where people would find us less interesting to listen to because we don't have a prognostication backed up by charts and slides and graphs, but this is what's real. Oil drops below 30 bucks a barrel. We might go, "You know what? Let's put an extra percent in exposure into that area. Let's dip our toe because that is low and it can't persist." Those things are reliable. Those things are not going to blow you up. It's the really buying into some of the larger prognostications that are out there about with certainty this is absolutely where it has to go. And here are the three reasons it has to go there. That's what you'll want to keep a close eye on, which makes it way less interesting and way less consumable. And people don't listen to podcasts that don't talk about nothing.
Josh Sheluk:
Isn't that what Seinfeld was about? Are we the Seinfeld of podcasts?
Colin White:
Okay, Josh, that's just it we're going to have to remarket this whole thing, the Seinfeld of podcasts, the podcast about nothing.
Josh Sheluk:
We might be setting a high bar for ourselves there actually, but we can try.
Colin White:
What else do you want us to blow up?
Josh Sheluk:
Well, so I think this is something that's been noticeably absent in our discussions, in my opinions and this whole thing about AI and ChatGPT and all these large language models and reinforced learning and all that stuff that's coming along and I don't know how many articles have been written about this stuff over the last couple months, but it is all over the newsfeed all the time.
Colin White:
That's because AI is writing all the articles.
Josh Sheluk:
It can, it's certainly capable of it.
Colin White:
Well, yeah, this is one of those things that crosses the streams, in my opinion. I think from a technology perspective, it's fascinating. It's beyond fascinating, and I really can't pretend I understand more than... I have read enough to understand the difference I believe between machine learning and true artificial intelligence. And there's a very important line there that gets crossed, and I think some of the writing doesn't pay enough attention to that line, and they confagulate the two. But I think it's an interesting philosophical conversation. I think it's an interesting ethical conversation. It's nowhere near being an investment conversation, just nowhere, this is so brand new. This is almost like trying to project what computers were going to do to the economy back when they said, "Yeah, there's a worldwide market for maybe six computers." But we're sitting at that moment.
If I was going to draw a parallel from history, we're sitting here with four or five of these seemingly viable platforms that are seemingly doing magical stuff, but we really don't know. We don't really completely understand. And there's all kinds of idiosyncratic things where people are doing really odd things with them and either embarrassing them or proving them to be genius. And so there's a whole exploratory thing that's got to go on. But we haven't addressed the question of, should we? We're not having that philosophical conversation about should we be using this or what boundaries do we want to put on it?
Actually, I literally saw it today where US Congress is now meeting to talk about putting curbs on the development of AI, and I don't know about you, but watching their performance and other spectacles that they've put on, I'm not all that comfortable that the US Congress is going to do a great job of shepherding this into any kind of a usable format that's going to be for the benefit of humankind. But we're at that stage, we're at the stage of what should we be allowing this to do? What parameter should we put around it? And there's a lot of buzz. And have you checked lately, Josh? Is there an ETF for investing in AI yet? An AI ETF?
Josh Sheluk:
Yeah. There's thousands of ETFs, so I'm probably wrong, but there might not be one specifically for AI or the large language models or things like that that have been created, but there are a lot of broadly speaking technology related to that. So you'll find something that hits close enough to the mark, I think, but I haven't seen that exact thing yet.
Colin White:
Well, Josh, I mean, we just wandered here and I just set you up by asking that question, but while you were trying to answer the question, I googled it, I found the four best AI ETFs to buy in 2023. There's one, two, call it $3 billion in them as of March 14th. So yeah, I think you should have had more confidence. If we're talking about it, there's probably an ETF.
Josh Sheluk:
That's right. That's a good point. Yeah. So let me go back to one of the things you said there. So first of all, just to address one thing, I have heard quite a lot of conversation around should we be doing this and what boundaries should we be putting in place. I don't think that the Congress has any potential to be able to police it properly. I don't think they understand exactly what they're doing, but we'll leave that conversation for another day. But coming back to your other point on, is it investible? So computers, yeah, maybe we're at that nascent part of the production of AI where we're not sure exactly where it's going, but it's going to be a thing. And you could maybe have said the same thing about computers early on and maybe said the same thing about the internet early on. So why shouldn't we just buy an AI ETF and hold it for 10 years and figure out that at some point one of these companies or a bunch of these companies are going to do well and it's going to be a thing.
Colin White:
Do you remember Netscape, AOL?
Josh Sheluk:
If I said no, would I be aging myself?
Colin White:
See whoa, and it's funny, this is what a few more trips around the sun. There was some very dominant players in the early days of the internet, in the early days of computers, very dominant players who didn't make it. There's again, I search through my memory, but IBM was huge in the initial PC space for sure. Then there's a whole bunch of brands that just disappeared who were household names for a while. So I guess I don't buy into the idea that any of the current companies are going to survive in their form, that you can invest in them now because we see the examples of the ones that made it, like the Apples of the world and the Microsofts, but they had competition. They were not the only players back in the day. And so no, I'm not even at a stage that this industry's investible, even if you bought an ETF that had found a way to be invested in all the right companies, because we're still at a stage where a startup could come in and not bend the whole thing, in my opinion.
But again, I think it's a fascinating area. It's fascinating to watch the applications that they're trying to put together for it, but you're going out there in front of the internet, when they try to crowdsource say it, let's name a boat the internet all votes and turns into the Boaty McBoatface, you're throwing something out there and letting it be formed by the masses. The masses have a wicked sense of humor, and they may or may not come up with the most practical applications for it early on. So yeah, put me in the camp of people that's fascinated. I think it's amazing. I think it's going to change our lives for the better. I've got no idea what's investible here yet, and I'm not prepared to take any flyers and put money into it until somebody demonstrates something that actually can turn a profit.
Josh Sheluk:
Yeah, I think that's fair. And often buying the stuff at the right price is super important, and the speculation in the space and the valuations in the space are astronomically high right now as you'd expect them to be, because the promise is extraordinary. So people are willing to pay extraordinary prices for that extraordinary promise. But to your point, it's hard to figure out whether any of these companies are going to live up to the promise, and it could be none.
Colin White:
I think the problem is is that the promise is having to rise to the level of the hype. It's the hype that's really driving the price.
Josh Sheluk:
That's always the problem, and this is why the NASDAQ cratered in 2000 and took over 10 years to get back to where it was. So maybe we're in Nasdaq 2000 territories with this stuff, maybe we're not, maybe we're somewhere along the spectrum, but it's hard to say, and if that's what you're dealing with where it's 10 years from now, it could be still not at the previous peaks and valuations for these companies, even with a massive application, a real use case for it, this is why you say it's not admissible.
Colin White:
Well, what I'm looking for is a true sign of something that really isn't fully formed is again, back to when the internet took off and all these companies came to fruition and had these huge valuations on them, but they had no earnings, so price earnings wasn't working. So they came up with peg ratios. They started inventing new ratios to use to value these things because there was no actual earnings to work with. So I'm thinking that's where we are now, and I haven't seen it, but I imagine if I going to go looking for it. Somebody out there has come up with a new way to value these companies that involves something that's nontraditional.
They're now running across the whole space and comparing one company to another based on this brand new measure that they've invented that they feel has some empathy to it. So when you see people creating units of measure to compare things, that's something I've seen happen a few times in my career. The one that sticks in my mind is when the internet came out. But I suspect that's what we're going to see here. And then I'm just going to sit back and giggle because I know how this movie plays out.
Josh Sheluk:
Yes. Do you give any credence to the idea that this is really going upend the economy, and we're all going to be sitting at home, we're going to have an AI financial advisor 10 years from now, and you and I are both going to be out of jobs and we'll have AI podcasters, we're not going to have a podcast anymore. They'll be calling it like Barenaked Robots or something like that. Is that a thing? You think that's a thing?
Colin White:
Barenaked robots. There's a visual that's going to haunt me. Humans have had this concern since the steam engine. You don't have to go back too far in human history when 87% of us worked on a farm and somehow we're all still working, not on farms, but we invented other shit. So no, computers were going to kill jobs, computers were going to put all of accountants out of a job because see, if an accountant doesn't have to add things up, the computer can do that, what do you need an accountant for? I was there when that conversation was going on. I was like, "Oh my God, I picked the wrong career path here. They're not going to need workers for offices anymore." It is never been true, and I don't think it's true now. I think it will change work. It will change jobs. Look if I want to know what the 15th President of the United States is, I ask my phone, school is still making kids memorize that stuff.
You're going to need a different skillset to exist going forward than what has been the case for the last 20 years. It's not that we're not going to need people, it's just we're going to need them to be skilled differently and they're going to have different jobs and they're going to have to be a bit more fungible because again, the automation of these things takes away the more mundane tasks, the more repetitive things, honestly, the stuff that probably is not that rewarding to do anyway. And if you're up for a challenge and you're up for a change. I remember, my brother-in-law had one of the last jobs in a movie theater back when you basically need a stationary engineering certificate to project a movie because of the technology used to project movies back when they had the reels and the big expensive projectors and all the rest of it.
And these people were getting paid engineering wages to run movies. Well, of course, when that technology went away, it became digital. That whole class of work got wiped out. Now, if you couldn't pivot to something else, then that is a problem. Or if you were 55 or 60 years of age and couldn't pivot to another career, yeah, that's a problem that's going to be a dislocation for you. But it's not as if that caused a fewer people to be employed in the movie industry. I mean, they just started doing other things now there's different jobs.
So things are going to keep changing. I don't think that people... There's a creepy factor about computers, and there's a very real creepy factor. I've had my phone tell me how long it was going to take me to get home, and I didn't tell it I was going home. So there's a factor in technology that is going to keep it at arm's length for me, and I think for many people, but it is going to change our world, Josh, and I'm going to trust you to help guide me on this as to how we can use these new tools to do a better job for people. But I don't know what that is.
Josh Sheluk:
Yeah, well, It's in its infancy for sure, but that's going to exist for sure. So the labor force thing and the economy thing, I was just interested to go back 50 years and look at how the labor force has changed over that period of time. And it's pretty significant. I would've probably guessed that it was even more significant over that time. But for example, just percentage wise, here's a good one. Manufacturing in Canada made up about 19% of our workforce in 1976. So this is using stats data going back about 50 years, 1976 to today. Today it's about 9%. So you're taking literally millions, multiple millions of people that would've been in manufacturing jobs today had those percentages stayed the same and moving them to other jobs and what's increased? Well, professional scientific and technical services.
So I guess that falls into people like us, professionals and IT science for example. And then healthcare as well has had a massive jump. So the professional scientific and technical services went from 2% of our workforce in 76 to 9% today, healthcare 8% and 76 to 13% today. So we've seen massive change in the past. We'll see massive change again, I'm not going to hazard a guess as to how these numbers are going to be different 50 years from now, just to say that they will be significantly different. I guess the biggest contrast is if you just look at goods and services as a whole, goods has gone from 35% of our workforce to 20% over a 50-year period of time.
So people are physically producing less stuff. More stuff might be getting produced, but people are physically spending less time and less hours to significant extent, like hundreds of billions of dollars of our economy worth of less focus from a manpower perspective on that. And that's all gone into services. So things are always fluid. Things are always going to change. I'm in the camp of this is going to revolutionize probably the way that we do work, but not in a different way that computers or the internet has revolutionized our work in the past. There's still going to be jobs that are just going to be different.
Colin White:
Yeah, no, look, absolutely. And to spend time worrying about it, you react in the moment as you watch things around you change. For example, right now, if I was starting out again and I was thinking about doing long haul trucking, you know what? That's probably one where that's got a sunset to it. That is something where the technology's out there being trialed right now, that's going to reduce the demand for it. I don't think it's going to ever delete the entire demand for it, because when new technology comes along, it doesn't often mean the complete replacement of previous technology.
Cars still have radios on them. They're still using technology that has been supplanted a couple of times now. So again, it's nuanced, but given the jobs, our problem right now is not lack of jobs. Our problem is lack of workers. That's a bigger problem. So to jump from, we have a lack of workers to computers are going to steal our jobs. Come on, there's something else easier to worry about. There must must be something else that's way closer to the surface we can worry about than that.
Josh Sheluk:
I forget where I read this or heard this, but somebody was surmising what an incredible life we would have if we were able to dedicate more time to leisure and less time to work and would just lead to more profound creations in one way or another.
Colin White:
I don't think I can handle more profound. I think things are as profound as-
Josh Sheluk:
Profound enough.
Colin White:
Well, yeah, then again, the part of this is how many times around the sun I've been like two. I started giving financial advice without a computer. To go from that to where we are today in my lifetime. All right, I'm holding on, I think I'm still contributing, but holy cow, there was no way that anybody could have come close to predicting the reality that we're living in now. So to think we could sit here and predict what the next reality is, oh, shut up. Just enjoy the ride. It's going to have challenges. Life should have challenges. That's what makes it worthwhile. And you just need to find joy through it. But I'm not for the record, investing in any of the four ETFs I've just discovered that are focusing on the AI space because wow, just no, just way no.
Josh Sheluk:
What else do you have on your list as Topical right now?
Colin White:
That was my whole list was that one thing, Bitcoin.
Josh Sheluk:
Yeah. Wow. Wow.
Colin White:
It was a flashback. A throwback.
Josh Sheluk:
Yeah. You really are focused.
Colin White:
I threw it all the way back to Bitcoin.
Josh Sheluk:
The only other thing that's been piquing my interest lately is some of the stark contradictions that we have in the market right now, economically, especially. So you have the bond market that's painting what has historically been a pretty negative picture, but stock market that is at least somewhat positive. You have economic indicators that are pointing to quite a bit of weakness, but unemployment at an all time low and jobs numbers coming in still very strong. You have inflation that's still too high, but it's going down aggressively, but people think it'll be a lot lower long term. So there's just a lot of contradiction right now out there, and I guess there always is, but it seems to be opposite ends of the spectrum right now and hard to really draw conclusions from that.
Colin White:
Yeah, but I think, again, looking at it from watching the evolution that we've gone through, I mean, again, one of the reasons we had such a low inflationary period for so long has been argued globalization. And I think that that's fairly well documented, and I think that's a fairly strong opinion. I think it makes a lot of sense because we did as a planet get way better at cooperating for an extended period of time. And the industrialization of China and bringing a lot of the labor force out of Indian and Pakistan and places like that dramatically improved the global efficiency and kept inflation at a low and loud very accommodative monetary policy to exist. We're seeing that unwind to a point. We're seeing it go in the other direction. I see it over and over again in talking with individuals and looking at stories on the companies, they're now on shoring inventory.
They're now becoming specifically less global in their approach to things. And that is a material change. And I think that that's the backdrop that all this other stuff is playing out in front of. So there's this swell of a movement in the background that's moving in that direction, and then you've got all of the other ancillary things playing out in front of it. And I think that's what's going to lead to some, I wouldn't say permanently, but sustained inflation above a 2%. But it's still going to be manageable range, and that's going to more likely be where we settle in going forward, and we're just struggling to get there because we're still trying to play by old rules, which means inflation under 2% and not everybody's buying that. It just doesn't fit.
Josh Sheluk:
Yeah, right. So structural changes, regime change. We'll add that to the list for next podcast, I guess, hey, Colin?
Colin White:
We'll solve that one for sure. Just give me 10, 15 more minutes I'll use one of the AIs. I'll ask them the question. I'll come back and, oh, Josh, there's our next podcast buddy. Let's come up with a list of questions to pose to one of the AIs and come back and discuss the answers that we get.
Josh Sheluk:
Well, my first question for the AI was going to be what should be our next podcast, but you've already solved that one, one point for human ingenuity, and so here we go. We'll have some fun with ChatGPT and come back next time.
Colin White:
There you go. That'll be exciting. I can't wait for that one.
Josh Sheluk:
That's it for the podcast. Talk to you in excess.
Colin White:
Based on observation, it seems that the time and investor is most likely to move his or her portfolio to a new advisor is when the old advisor dies. Let us go on record is saying that having a pulse is not a great reason to trust someone with your entire financial future. Stop putting your life in the hands of stillbreathingwealthplanners.com and call us.
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