Two Degrees of Kevin Naked

Show Notes

Dan and I opened this one over the Paris Olympics, clicking through Peacock and trying to figure out which little blue icon meant beach volleyball — and somehow that turned into a meditation on the FBI warning at the front of old VHS tapes. That's the shape of this whole episode, honestly: we let one thing roll into the next and just followed the thread. From the Olympics we got to the movies, because I'd just taken Jamie down to the AMC downtown to see Longlegs — Nic Cage as the serial killer, first two acts great, third act wobbly — and the soda situation there spun us off into what I can only describe as the great Cola Wars debate. Who, I asked Dan, is intentionally buying Pepsi? It deterred us from a whole theater chain. Dan one-upped me with a mountain town that's gone full Pepsi, picnic tables and all, molded out of old bottles.

Then we got serious, or as serious as we get. I've been chewing on the original Fourth Turning and wanted to map our moment onto the last time a president ran for a non-consecutive term. That's Grover Cleveland — the 22nd and 24th, the only man to do it — and the other obvious analog, Teddy Roosevelt getting shot on the campaign trail. I floated that this rhyme feels more like the Teddy version than the Grover version, and Dan, to his credit, did the thing I always want him to do: he called me Nostradamus. Tease the data and you can get it to tell you anything. He's right. I'm finding funny coincidences, not causes. But the foggy, factions-realigning, nobody-knows-where-we're-going feeling — that part I think we both genuinely believe.

From there it was straight into the economy, which is where Dan and I are usually most useful and most unqualified at the same time. I've got friends at the industrial-supply shops — the gloves and sanding belts and Windex crowd, MSC and Fastenal and the like — and every one of them is down 20 to 30 percent year on year. That's the kind of softness that doesn't show up in the headline data yet, the canary in the Colombo as Dan put it. We talked ourselves into a September cut, walked through the commercial-real-estate debt wall on five-year fixed loans, and landed on the cleanest idea of the night: with inflation falling and rates flat, we've effectively been hiking all the way to today. Real rates are the only rates that matter.

And then, finally, the title. Two degrees of Kevin naked. Dan and I had been promising each other this bit for a while — it comes out of a townie conversation Jamie and I had, probably over a libation. We both grew up and went to college in the same town, which makes us townies whether we like the label or not (my rule: you're a townie until you actually leave, because plenty say they will and never do). And when your whole social world is the townie crowd instead of the campus crowd, the dating pool shrinks until you're playing a game where everyone at the table is roughly two degrees of separation from having seen everyone else naked. High school locker rooms alone will get you most of the way there.

We closed on the part of the show I love most — the riff that goes everywhere. Whether the next generation gets called the nAItive generation (Dan's branding, capital A-I, and I'll admit it's good), whether bubbles are required (yes — you need enough failures to get the blast-off outcomes), David Deutsch and teleportation creating infinite Ricks, and a long, surprisingly accurate Dan lecture on why CrowdStrike took down the world: a faulty kernel-level update, an EU competition deal that kept Microsoft from locking the kernel down, and a whole lot of IT folks pulled off summer vacation to type encryption keys into dead machines one at a time. Hug your IT guy. We probably weren't qualified for any of this, and I'm not sure we gave a single piece of advice — but we lived up to at least half the name.

This too shall pass — just keep moving, and don't let anyone hack your disposition.

— Sean