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Guaranteed Human. Welcome back to a numbers game with Ryan Gurdowski. Thank you guys for being here. We have an amazing show up for you guys today. A big guest coming up and a lot of data to break. So let's really get into it. On Monday's episode, I talked a lot about affordability. It's the buzzword right now, especially since Mundani won the New York City's mayoral election. I received a lot of feedback about young people,

especially how they fill in the economy, the worries of their ability to live and buy a home,

and the worry that AI is going to wreck havoc on their opportunities going forward. And I have data on it, but I think that's a really good thing to kind of hone into

and think about right now. And I want to use a pop culture reference to really a misunderstanding

of how young people are doing financially in this moment. Let's go all the way back to January

2025, right? The world was shaken. And it wasn't about the upcoming midterms or about the Iraq war. No, it was

an announcement that came out that America's sweetheart's Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were

breaking up because he had cheated on her with Angela and Jolie. The concept entered the

American zeitgeist afterwards, known as Sad Jennifer, right? Jennifer Aniston has been two decades

since she broke up with her then-husband Brad Pitt, but that she's sad, and it lingers in the air to the state, follows her, that Jennifer Aniston is sad because her marriage isn't work and she didn't get to have children. And whether it's true or not true, I don't know with Jennifer Aniston, but it doesn't make a difference because the narrative prevails. Jennifer Aniston is sad and she'll never really find happiness.

That same prevailing narrative was created just a few years later around the global financial

crisis about millennials, the poor millennial, like sad Jennifer, poor millennial.

The words just kind of always fit together.

Millennials enter the workforce at a really bad time. There's kind of no way to shake it. They'll never be able to get

ahead is what the pervasive idea was after that happened, that they're always going to spend their

money on like avocado toast and they're just going to live in dead and in their mom's basement

and it's just going to linger with them forever.

That prevailing narrative somehow carry, though, into Generation Z, the generation afterwards,

who were just children when the global financial crisis happened that didn't have to look

for a job when unemployment was heading to the double digits. I don't know how they got lumped into

it, but they've been lumped into it.

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