Kyla Scanlon

Thank you.

Yes.

I think it's an interesting question and it actually becomes an American dream question.

So there's something called aspirational displacement where people who can't afford to buy a house, which is that traditional path of the American dream, they start buying experiences, they start spending on their pets because they have additional income, but they can't, you know, make a huge purchase like a house.

And so it's an interesting thing that we're seeing in the economy and

And on the previous episode, I talked about Bommel's cost disease and how goods were getting cheaper and cheaper because we've gotten better and better at producing them.

Services have taken a longer time to get cheaper because it's much harder to make services more productive.

It's very easy to automate a car factory, much harder to automate a physician facility.

And so I think that's also part of it is that it's much cheaper to access these accessible luxuries.

We also have international trade, which has informed a lot of the access to these luxuries, oftentimes which come from abroad.

And then the experiences part is a lot of travel, too.

And so the average American travels a whole lot more than they used to.

And so these are interesting indicators of economic health.

So a lot of people have a sense of financial nihilism because they might not necessarily be on the path that they want to be with the American dream, but they can afford these things.

And so it does create a weird discrepancy in the economy where we see strong retail sales, but we see consumer sentiment so low.

And in terms of how...

It's changing the economy.

You see companies catering to it a lot more.

Like there is a whole airline that caters just to dogs.

I think it's called Bark.