'Cause Nissan, for example, decided, "You know what? We'll go EV, but let's start with, um, hybrids." And as it turns out, consumers like hybrids better than EVs.

[lip smack] Yeah.

So preferences have shifted, but so have incentives, because one of the things that, um, you know, if we take a look at the sales of EP- EVs, uh, they've been softening over the last couple of years, but so have the incentives.

So there was a much more broad rebate program for buying electric vehicles, and there was a period of time where it had exhausted, and it has been replaced with a new program, which is phased out over time and is more restrictive as to what, uh, types of vehicles it applies to.

So it, it remains to be seen if this is purely incentive driven or if consumer preferences have changed.

But all around the world, you've seen, uh, auto manufacturers say, "You know what? We're, we're changing our strategy.

We maybe went a little bit too hard with all EV all the time, and we're finding that there's maybe a portfolio between gas, EV, and, and hybrids that, you know, seems to work quite well."

Part of this is that the Ukrainians are taking down Russian diesel production.

Now, I understand the concern about getting overwhelmed, but shouldn't that just be then a supplementary prompt that says, "Give it to me in three bullet points like I'm seven years old"? Surely the system would be sophisticated enough to do that.

Yeah, and I think that, you know, down the road, I think there is some promise to what can happen in this space, and I think particularly the promise will be in more of the mass market, uh, side of the industry.

So, you know, high net worth individuals, million dollar plus portfolios, they've got access to, you know, financial advisors with lots of experience and, uh, really well, um, created, uh, financial planning software that helps them create really personalized advice, and they have the, the economics to support spending that time with that, that household.

When it comes to people who have, you know, less than $100,000, most people feel that they're just getting a sales job when they speak to someone who has financial advisor on their business card.

And so this has long been where a lot of people thought, "Well, this is where the benefit can be, where we can get some kind of standardized advice that is free, hopefully, from some of the biases that exist, um, that people are exposed to right now." And so maybe people with more simple situations will be able to get more clarity with their money, but I still think it's gonna take some time.

I wonder if that is diminished if the, um, if the technology is so solid that I can input scenarios and it'll just tell me what to do in the accent of my choice.

[laughs] Yeah, that's a good point.

Um, I think the, the potential pain is so much higher in the decumulation phase.

Surely the technology exists today.

Yeah, I think if you look at it on a spectrum, so let's say you're looking at a high net worth household, it's going to be human led, augmented by technology, in this case, AI, to provide maybe better quality advice to those households.

And on the other end of the spectrum, it's probably gonna be more technology led with some kind of human guidance or oversight still required to some extent.

And there's always gonna be people who are gonna do it themselves.

Whether they do it well or not is a different story.

But I can tell you in my own experience, having been a financial advisor and working with financial planning software, you know, 15, 20 years ago, you make one small mistake on the inputs and it dramatically changes the outputs because you're extrapolating over 30, 40 years.

So a small little error compounds over 30, 40 years and your projections can be horrifically wrong.

How did it feel for you giving a plaid or perplexity access to your data?

I know that the food professor who seems to be coming under increasing fire insists that it's not greed that has driven up prices.

right uh so the competition bureau is uh taking a closer look at uh you know how things are set uh in terms of the prices at the grocery stores it's looking at things like algorithmic pricing which means the use of software to adjust prices using data to try and extrapolate as much from our wallets as possible uh it's looking at shrinkflation you know where The package gets smaller, but the price stays the same.

It's also looking at things like skimflation.

So that's where the quality drops and the price stays the same.

It kind of reminds me of when I was a kid, you know, I'd read my parents' liquor cabinet.

If it was gin or vodka, I'd replace what I took with water.

So that's reducing the quality of the product, hoping that they wouldn't notice.

Have things ever gone upside down?

OK, so let's get back to this, that when the provincial government announced they wanted to rip out bike lanes, apparently the city of Toronto said, OK, how about we reconfigure them like this? And the province said no.

Yeah, I feel like it was not the province just saying no, the province just saying, we don't want to hear anything from you because we're in charge here.

That's the way that we want it to be.

And what seems really odd is that apparently there are studies that the province themselves have commissioned that say protected bike claims do not increase congestion and removing them would actually increase the risk of collisions and negatively affect businesses.

And so when the mayor says, listen, you know, you're not making these decisions based on any studies or analysis of the facts.

You're just sort of waging this based on how you think is going to pull well with, you know, the residents of the city.

whether or not it actually leads to an improvement so i'm just wondering you know why can't we actually refer to some of these studies and have an evidence-based approach as opposed to hearing a different strategy every other month about what to do with bike lanes

And they're kind of lying about them ever having been on the table.

What say you?

I think it really depends.

The good thing is we kind of have a template for what happened the last time because Canada did put retaliatory tariffs last year.

Because as you know, this tariff tit for tat has been going on for quite some time.

So when that happened last time and we imposed 25% tariffs on a number of items, It turns out that only about 6% of it translated into increased prices.

So about a quarter of those headline tariff rates actually affected the prices that people were paying.

There's a couple of reasons for that.

How sensitive do you think people are necessarily to tariffs? Because, I mean, if you want to go all Chicago school, people will pay what they want to pay because they want something.

And no, it's just your complete and utter inability to actually predict something.

I got to tell you, John, in all my years of contributing to News Talk 1010, I got to say, I don't ever remember hearing a good news story about Metrolinx and project management.

Like, what is the deal? I mean, don't even get me started on the Edmonton Crosstown, because I don't know if I'll stop, kind of like them.

And now hearing that story, This project has a tripling in costs in just seven years from $10.9 billion to $34 billion in seven years.

If I was a betting man, I would also bet that the final bill is going to be even higher.

So we need way more answers behind supply chain shocks and trade uncertainty, which is what I think the official line has been from Metrolinx so far.

That's just not going to cut it for Ontario taxpayers, but I feel like we're doomed to To repeat this pattern over and over, we must be living in hell.

So effectively, he's kind of polaxed.

Mm-hmm.

And also as someone who was quite controversial.

Uh, he's got quite a bit of baggage that, you know, when you're coming to a diverse city like Toronto, um, I think a lot of people still remember Uh, him being a pretty vocal supporter of the, uh, the barbaric practices hotline, if you remember that controversy from about 10 years ago.

Um, and then there was also, um, you know, his, uh, a l- it looked like he was pr- maybe giving support to a, a crowd, uh, that were chanting, uh, "Lock her up," uh, with respect to Premier Rachel Notley at the time.

And I remember he had to go on, you know, into the media and defend himself there.

So, I mean, that's what he's known for.

Um, and he's sort of come in with this, uh, idea that, well, what's your plan for what Toronto needs? Um, better transit and housing affordability.

I mean, do you think it, it could represent these decisions, and clearly them being on different points, uh, on the spectrum on these, uh, uh, coming apart of what has been a very important relationship, uh, for the country and for the two of them with each other, meaning Carney and Ford?

But I think the very fact it's under discussion will mean the big chains won't be doing it no matter what.

Yeah, that was sort of my initial response as well.

I didn't think that this is a municipal issue.

If anything, it would be provincial or federal.

But the concept of surveillance pricing is that it is very much price discrimination.

So around the world, it's been shown that, for example, some ride hailing apps can detect when people are desperate for a ride and when they are more price sensitive or not, and then they will charge them a different price for the exact same variety at the exact same time to two different people based on what they know of your behavioral signaling on these apps.

And I think that's where people draw the line, especially if it were to apply to staples like milk and eggs.

But that, I'm not sure, is going to go very far.

year.What do you make of a KPMG survey? It was only 237 business operators, but still that's fairly significant, and more than 40% of them said they're thinking about moving operations to the US to get around Donald Trump.

Yeah, it's interesting.

You know, when you interview business executives to say, "Hey, tell us what your plans are," usually they don't volunteer too much information.

They try to hold their cards a little close to the chest.

And sometimes I think when they get the opportunity to answer these polls, they're like, "I wanna send a message." So you have to take these with a bit of grain of salt.

Having said that, I think it does give us evidence that the US has always had the upper hand in negotiations because the way things are going, it makes sense to make this consideration about moving down to, to the US because things are so uncertain and the US has a lot of leverage.

This also puts business executives into a tough position right now because you've got the midterms are right around the corner and Trump has two more years.

She's a social influencer apparently, and here she is about to star in a movie.

What was it about that, that finding that made you want to write about it?

Well, you know, in terms of my Globe and Mail columns, um, the process that I follow is I do a scan of all the recent, um, articles that have been published in a variety of, of journals that I follow.

There's about 15 or so that I kinda scan every two weeks, and I look for ideas, just a little kernel of something that sounds kind of interesting that would be relevant to, uh, either personal finance or wealth management.

And I thought this one was great because, you know, confidence and overconfidence in particular is something that we talk a lot about in this business, and it has a, um, a, a pretty profound impact on people's results, especially when it leads to making decisions and, and having suboptimal returns.

So when I saw this, this article, that's what, uh, intrigued me in that it's very relevant to, you know, decision-making in general and investing, and also working with, uh, advisors or not.

Because one of the shifts that we've seen in the last while is just an explosion in how many do-it-yourself accounts have been opened.

Um, that really was a hockey stick moment when the pandemic hit and the lockdowns hit.

And we think it is, but it's, [chuckles] it just isn't, right? Can you walk us through what that research actually found?

And then we'll jump into what the heck is Robinhood and why is he maybe not saving the people this time?

Yeah, absolutely.

So when you talk about friction, that's a perfect way to frame it.

Over the last couple of decades, we've seen the reduction in the friction to access capital markets.

50, 60 years ago, if you wanted to invest in stocks, you needed, first of all, a lot of money to get started, and you needed a guy to help get that money into the market for you.

And then slowly over time, we had discount brokerages, which allowed people to place their own trades first over the phone and then on the internet through discount brokerage accounts.

We've seen account minimums drop.

That's one of the biggest drawbacks was the lack of foresight that the audience could get bigger versus access to the market could get easier so you could go make a bunch of money if you could just sit on your social media as soon as the post was made make your trades knowing that 10 other million people are probably going to jack up the price now i mean that's that emotional part but that's the gambling part and so does it work maybe if you are not too late to the instagram post but But at the same time, boy, oh boy, that's a lightning in a bottle or a forest fire, depending on which way you go.

How do you react to that?

Well, you know, it's interesting 'cause that ties into the announcement of the sovereign wealth fund.

Um, and a lot of people look to a country like Norway, which, uh, produced a lot of, um, uh, energy revenues, and they captured that over the long term to the tune of a sovereign wealth fund being about $2.2 trillion, uh, since it was first, uh, instituted.

Now, that and many other sovereign wealth funds around the world were generally created when countries were operating surpluses.

Uh, and, and when Canada says, "Now we're launching a sovereign wealth fund," one of the big criticisms or questions has been, "But we're operating.

We have a huge debt, and, uh, we have this, uh, large deficit.

Is it really the same thing?" And so I think people are drawing the similar parallels as to, you know, how is this being framed? It's not really like other sovereign wealth funds in that sense.

Well, maybe you'll argue with me, but I have been for the last 24 hours characterizing that, uh, sovereign wealth fund as a fancy schmancy name for corporate welfare.