What Happens If Peace Breaks Out and Hate Increases…Sunday Reads And Listens
Good morning…
Last night Ellen and I went to see Kevin Nealan with soime friends. He was hysterical. he controlled the room of 300 plus people at The Improv for over an hour. He did it all, from audience work, to long stories that tied together with previous jokes, to straight silly jokes. Ellen is a tough audience and she was laughing out loud the whole time. He did a meet and greet at the end and we grabbed a picture:
Kevin is one of Conan’s favorites and also has a funny predi.
In this weeks sign of the ‘degenerate apocalypse, Liquid Death launched a ‘pit diaper’ for men that go to concerts.
The good news is that a man jean with this technology is right around the corner.
To get serious now…
At the end of every year in this blog/newsletter I share some predictions.
One of those prediction posts last year was titled – Goodbye and F@*k You 2023…You Paid Me Well But Will Not Be Missed AND Is Peace The Big Trend of 2024? You can read it again here. The gist:
My biggest prediction of 2024 is ‘More Peace’. I only predict this because the markets seems to be predicting it/pricing it in.
How can this be?
We know Hamas only wants war and Iran can’t hide their joy in Proxy wars. We know Qatar is evil, we know Harvard is the Bud Light of Academia and The New York Times is a click farm no better, possibly worse, than Facebook or Musk Or TikTok. Every ad based company big enough has done the math and knows the Arab and Muslim dollars will offset the US dollars. Twitter is full of Qatar ads and Blackrock will sponsor anything, so don’t start with me.
We know peace won’t come with the term ‘proportionate’.
We all also know that the far left (Rashida et al) is despicable and ghoulish and that any person that has the ‘simple’ worldview of ‘Oppressor/Oppressed’ is not someone you should hire and a likely menace to your corporate culture.
We know the UN and UNRWA are Hamas or at least sympathizers. We know they will triple down on this as Harvard and MIT have done.
BUT…
The markets KNOW all this!
So here we are with the US markets and many other global markets at all-time highs and as I have been saying, climbing the largest real and man made wall of worry of all time.
So I will say Peace is out there in 2024.
I guess the next question is what happens to the market if ‘peace’ breaks out?
I would be thrilled to have that problem.
Have a great day.
A lot of this came further to light in 2024 and while the recent change in the war in Syria could make things worse, there is an optimistic bent to what I am reading about the US and even the middle east heading into 2025 versus what we were reading in 2023.
If we have learned ONE thing from the networked world of the internet, there will NEVER be real peace. Peace is now a relative term. My thinking last year was that ‘war’ was peaking.
As we enter 2025, peace may be bottoming.
If peace is back in relative vogue as we head into 2025, my gut feeling is the markets will have a tougher time advancing. The fact that interest rates continue to stay elevated is not helping.
Other signs that peace are breaking out is the collapse of defense stocks, down 20-30 percent since the election.
While defense stocks are taking a beating, space is at all time highs as Elon’s SpaceX is rumored to be trading at $350 billion.
In what may be the trade/suck-up of the century, Elon has been the biggest beneficiary of the Trump election with Tesla up 70 percent and SpaceX at all-time highs.
One thing that is not going to bottom is hate. We can thank the networked world.
Even Elon Is conflicted here, because his version/platform of ‘free speech’ is just another place for hate and division. While Tesla is tied to the consumer discretionary index and spending and I believe that Elon is anti-war, hate and conflict is good for attention and clicks and that is how Twitter pays for itself.
It is not just Elon and Zuckerberg and Tik Tok that are fostering hate and division.
The Free Press had a terrifying piece titled the ‘Explosion of Jew hate in Trudeau’s Canada’.
While Trump is worried about the Mexican border, it is the Canadian border that might matter most to American safety in the years ahead.
A few more reads to end the week…
This week on Trends With Friends is a summary of my favorite pieces of the week.
‘Death by a thousand substacks’ by Beehiiv founder and CEO Tyler Denk is a great summary of how ‘social’ platforms have been a disaster for users/customers over the long term. I am a biased investor in Beehiiv and if you read me know how little I think of social networks ‘follower’ and ‘algo’ structure like Facebook, Tik Tok and Twitter. The sooner and faster creators own their own ‘domains’ and customers via email, the better.
