Full Transcript: Cameron Dawson and Dave Nadig on the SpaceX IPO
Index Flows, Bubble History, and Market Structure Chaos
Matt: Those other podcasts, those are clickbait, but this, this is Click Beta. Should market professionals have private conversations in public? Well, only to prove that all we know is that we don’t know nothing. Clearly, we’ve got three rules. Number one, we pre-agreed on a topic. We picked it out in advance. Number two, while we’re live, nobody Googles nothing. Number three, everybody brings a surprise topic to the table, for which anything goes.
Who’s with me today? The Madonna of clickbait. Not gonna make a pre-IPO Virgin joke, but I will say his version of Confessions on a Dance Floor Part 2 is his current part two at etf.com, which we in the industry lovingly refer to as his Electric Boogaloo era, Dave Nadig.
Dave: I’ll take the Electric Boogaloo era. What else could it be?
Matt: What else?
Cameron: It’s not an era, it’s a lifestyle, man.
Matt: It is a lifestyle.
Dave: It’s the now.
Matt: It is the now. And she’s as Florida as Ariana as Starbuck from Battlestar as a Starbucks grande, and knows how to drop new projects mid-tour. Clickbait is but her petal. And all you other podcasts who have her on, thank you, we’re next. New Edge Wealth’s Cameron Dawson. How you doing, Cameron?
Cameron: Thanks. I don’t know if I should take she’s as Florida as Ariana. That’s a compliment. I like that.
Dave: Take it as a compliment.
Cameron: Yeah.
Matt: It is a compliment. And I have very, very little knowledge of many Ariana Grande things, and was very surprised when I remembered she was from Florida. But for a tortured thank you, next joke, I will go there. So we got lots of stuff. I almost got ruined on those just for the way I was trying — I was like, “What’s happening in pop culture these days besides a new Madonna album and a new Ariana Grande apparently?”
This Backroom and Obsession thing, did you see these box office numbers for the movies this weekend? Huge. Do you know anything about this, Cameron? Do you feel old as I did reading these things?
Cameron: I’m not a go-to-the-movies kind of person, so.
Dave: Really?
Cameron: Mm-mm.
Dave: You’re like a more stay home, Netflix and chill?
Cameron: Yeah. I can’t even stay awake through a full movie, so.
Dave: That’s fair.
Matt: That’s fair.
Cameron: So I’m not the best person to watch a movie with, ‘cause I’m like really excited for the first five minutes and then I just...
Dave: You’re just out.
Matt: Nap time. It’s quiet and relaxing. Well, I’m amazed that we’ve got basically the YouTube generation has now taken to cinema and just grossed $100 million in a weekend to people who’ve made stuff on YouTube before. My mind was kind of blown by that, but I know nothing about these films.
Dave: On the backs of Markiplier’s Iron Lung. Yeah. That’s one I followed because Markiplier’s a YouTuber my son was obsessed with for a long time. So like, this is the new model, and I’m here for it. Like, by all means, let these kids get out there and get this going.
Matt: Hell yeah. I think it’s super cool. Even if I also had to look up Creepypasta to make sure I knew what that was, but I’m just trying to join the modern era. It’s a thing. Just Google it later. It’s not a bad thing to Google. It’s a safe thing to Google. Creepypasta. It’s a mode of creativity that the kids are into, and they’re making blockbuster movies out of it.
So our one agreed-upon topic is the thing that all of us are probably sick of talking about, which is why I’m happy to talk to you about it, which is this SpaceX IPO. And this is just everywhere. It’s in client conversations talking about index inclusion, fund flows, fund inclusion, if you have a fund that has pre-IPO shares, if you have something that’s gonna be forced to buy it. That’s every due diligence call of the last month or more of my life, and I can’t help but think of the poor value analysts with their precious Shiller CAPE ratios who are trying to wrap their brain around something that’s gonna IPO at 100 times sales with no earnings, and what that even means. But hey, the TAM is space and time ad infinitum. So what could go wrong? What could go wrong?
Cameron: It’s just the Ben Graham book being put into the garbage.
Matt: This is that meme. That’s what should’ve been on the cover of the S-1. So number one, can we — consensus — are we all sick of talking about SpaceX? Can we admit that out loud?
Dave: So sick of it. So sick of it already. But I guess we’re doing it one more time.
Matt: We’re doing one more. I’m treating this as a therapy session. Last bump. One more time. There we go. One more time. Well, Cameron, I know in my life it’s the client questions, it’s due diligence, it’s just all the stuff about this. What’s the dominant theme with SpaceX in your life right now?
Cameron: Oh. Well, obviously there’s a few observations. The first one is the degree of access and all the different access points from which we’ve seen it over a long period of time, and this has been going on for a couple of years, and it speaks to that broader theme of if you want exposure to something, you can’t just think about it from the investment case, you also have to think about the structuring of that exposure.
And that’s really important when we’re thinking about these pre-IPO shares, because one of the things we’re really trying to be ultra clear on is that if you were thinking this is just a quick flip to be able to take advantage of an IPO pop — as we saw with an IPO today that did pop — that you won’t be able to take advantage of that necessarily because of all the lockup restrictions, and to be aware that there’s all these different stages of the lockup restrictions that expire, and understanding where you sit.
Then it’s a conversation of fees and making sure that you fully understand that if you’re trying to get it in some more complex way, that the fee structure is not something that’s so onerous that it starts to make it unattractive. And then the last portion is just trying to have a realistic conversation about what’s being valued here, and the actual price of the moon, the stars, and everything beyond.
And that’s where I think it’s really interesting if we’re just looking at it from a price-to-sales basis. Obviously we have to do that because there aren’t any earnings. And you look at this 80 to 100 times range for price to sales, and some people say, “Oh, well, but this is a great growth stock, and of course, like, you can grow into it.” But this is still a company that’s large, as far as whether it’s a — if we’re just thinking about the market cap weight within the QQQs or the S&P 500. So the 80 to 100 times sales, if you screen the S&P 500 for all the names on a price-to-sales basis, still the most expensive name is Palantir.
And what’s fascinating about Palantir is that it had its epic run as a stock over the course of the last — not, it’s kind of been sideways to down over the course of the last year or so. But in the two to three years prior to that, what you saw is a ton of price-to-sales multiple expansion. Effectively, the market was astute. The market was saying, “We’re going to get massive sales growth,” and the market was right. Sales are growing, for this calendar year, 72%. And so when you traded at a 90 times price to sales back in the fall of last year, and then you eventually got your 72% sales growth in 2026, what’s been fascinating is that the stock has stalled out.
So it priced in all of that sales potential in the 92 to 96 times price to sales that it had reached back at the peak in 2025. So it’s a word of not necessarily caution, but like historical wisdom just to say when you trade at such a high multiple, even if the great news happens, what tends to happen is you kind of hit a ceiling, mostly for a stock of that size.
The only caveat to say — and I’m sorry for this being so long — the only other caveat to say is that you’ve been in a world, in Elon Musk’s world, of fundamentals not necessarily mattering for the way that the Tesla stock trades. So you’ve seen the 12-month forward earnings power for Tesla since 2022 fall by nearly two-thirds in that time, and yet the valuation multiple has gone from being a high valuation multiple to being over 100 times earnings, because the stock has continued to move higher.
So all of that to say is that valuations actually do matter, even for growth stocks. As I just went through the Palantir example, we have to take it with a grain of salt because it hasn’t applied in the Muskian realm.
Dave: I think that covers the boundaries of the story. The piece that I find most frustrating here is that there are really two components to this story. There’s the over-hyped growth stock coming into a hot market, which is just a story we’ve seen before, whether it was Tesla or whether it was stuff in the ‘90s. Like, we get that things can get ahead of themselves, and there’s a lot of narrative manipulation that goes on around that. So that feels actually somewhat normal.
What’s abnormal here is the size and the impact on the capital markets, right? Having a company this big come to market with such a small float and accelerated index inclusion, because everybody has rolled over on that front, means that we’ve now got these very strange gates, just from a capital market structure standpoint.
To heck with whether you think SpaceX is a good company or not. Just the trading widget that we’re going to move around is going to have bizarre, and I would say very unpredictable, supply and demand components for at least the first 30 days. I mean, everybody’s talked about the Nasdaq 100 buying 15 days after, and everybody knows that multi-billion-dollar trade’s coming, which is always bad when the Street everybody knows something, because everybody tries to pre-position and it just adds volatility. There’s no real price discovery that happens.
That’s bad enough, but then we’ve already got this weird cascade of — we’re already trading perps on the IPO price today, outside the US, so people are already doing price setting for the IPO. The IPO’s gonna price and supposedly the $75 billion in shares will start trading, and everybody will start trying to inventory that for the mandatory buyers of the indexes. So we’ve got that classic speculation front-running Russell 2000 rebalance trade effectively going on there. And a lot of people wanna get short this, and three days after it goes public, we’re gonna get the options trading. And all of a sudden, all of that basis is gonna have to find someplace to unload again in the same $75 billion of floated stock.
The market dynamic stuff I find completely unpredictable. I’ve spent my whole career tracking it. I don’t think you can create a case that says it should go up, it should go down, because you’re betting on people’s positioning, and we don’t know what people are gonna position. So we’ve got two things. We’ve got a very difficult to justify core IPO hype cycle and this very strange market manipulation capital markets problem that are all gonna come to a head in the same 30-day window. I made it very clear to my financial advisor: I don’t wanna be on any side of this trade. I don’t think that there is an edge to be had here, so I don’t wanna be long and I don’t wanna be short. I think this is a great one to sit out.
Matt: Will you spend a minute as a resident financial advisor on this call? You’ve been — everybody’s calling you to talk about this thing. I know it ‘cause I’m bugging you to talk about this thing, and I think this is enlightening. Walk us through what you were talking about before, the free float versus what’s actually gonna be in the S&P. What happens by taking the 12-month rule and moving it to six months? Just break down some of those things because I am still talking to people who I think have no clue about how this actually works.
Dave: Well, we can just run through what the numbers are. So let’s call it T0, it’ll get priced and at 3:00 in the afternoon we’ll see our first trade. Whatever. Something will happen.
The next thing that happens from a cap structure perspective is probably three days later, the options start trading, right? So that’s another giant volatility vector, which probably gives some relief on the short side, meaning people will be able to express a negative opinion. We might get something closer to rational price discovery.
Five days later, a percent or two of the float is gonna get grabbed by smaller indexes and smaller products that have accelerated, whether it’s the IPO indexes that are specifically IPO indexes or the space indexes, which have all accelerated their rules to get in in five days, whether it’s the Russell or the broader S&P complex, which is gonna accelerate. So you’re then gonna get that sort of smaller level of index buying, which is gonna be another percent-ish across all of those various indexes of the float that will have to get bought.
And then 15 days out, SpaceX won’t be included at its full capitalization at $1.75 trillion. The Nasdaq 100 has no free float adjustment in it by default, meaning that if Apple is worth whatever a trillion dollars, that’s what it’s in the index at, at that weight. Because they’re accelerating SpaceX, they’re adding for the first time a free float adjustment. So 4% of the company will be available. They’re gonna multiply that by three for arbitrary reasons, so it’ll be as if it was 12%, not 4% floating, and they’re gonna adjust it down. And then as shares unlock, which is going to happen, I think, a lot faster than people expect, once they get to 33% floating, it will be as if they are just fully floated. So that position that would normally be a couple percent of the index will show up as soon as we get about a third of it floating.
That’s just the Nasdaq and sort of early index stuff. And then at six months, we get the QQQs rebalancing again, which will then probably have to recognize the then-higher float from all those initial unlocks. So then the QQQs have to go back and buy another giant slug regardless of price at six months. So precisely when SpaceX is trying to get their six-month earnings released and make that look as good as possible to get the maximum amount of unlock, we’re gonna get big insensitive buyers into the market at the same time.
Matt: Spend an extra second on — beautiful. Applause all around. Nicely done. Nicely done, sir. The free float versus the actual market cap weighting and how that works at the index level —
Dave: Because this is another one that super confuses people. So something like the S&P, which is free float adjusted — the company will be worth, let’s just call it $2 trillion, but if only 10% of the company is floating, it’s included in the index as if it was a $200 billion company, not a $2 trillion company. The S&P and the MSCI, and most of the Russells, are free float adjusted. That’s a pretty common institutional thing to do for precisely the reasons you would expect. If you’re only floating 1% of the company, you can’t possibly buy enough to put it in the index. Those are very rational institutional quality rules. Then the Nasdaq 100 has always been a bit of a cowboy, and therefore has never had any of the adjustments in it.
Matt: Okay, one more on that topic, and then Cameron, I see the bubbling questions are about to —
Cameron: Not a question, just a fun story. When I was writing the Coheed piece last week — the “Here to Mars” piece — I was sitting in a coffee shop overhearing some guy bragging about his trades and how he owned like a bunch of the space ETF. I mean, he’s done really well this year. It’s up like 100%. And he’s like, “As soon as SpaceX goes public, then we’re gonna see this huge bid ‘cause everyone’s gonna realize how big this market is. It’s gonna be amazing.” And I’m sitting there like writing this piece about speculation and the history of bubbles, and I’m like, I’m getting my shoes shined. This is me getting my shoes shined.
Matt: This is the perennial misunderstanding of what this process is, and what Dave said at the beginning, what we’re all saying. This is so friggin’ confusing. Nobody can predict what’s gonna happen here.
So one more thing for you, Dave, on flows in this whole thing. We’ve got a, call it seventy-five-billion-ish dollar raise on the IPO itself with the unlocks to follow. But what are we looking at for flows for that first wave of buyers, for the second, third, six-months-in wave of buyers? What do we think is looking to chase these shares?
Dave: From a raw sort of index and products that are going to be tracking this stuff, it’s very tough to call. It’s gonna be something like 10% to 15% of the available shares in the first month are probably gonna have to get acquired — sort of, again, price-insensitive demand that just has to be in the index. Once you get out to the full index allocation, it starts looking more like 20%, right? So you start getting out towards, if you look at all the large-cap stocks, they’re generally owned roughly in the 20% range by passive. You would certainly expect that to be the case here as well.
Matt: Cameron, you wanna talk through the history of bubbles at all? I feel like we have to pay some mind to this piece because — in the truest spirit of Click Beta — we have a deep music nerd research report in the wild, people. Explain the piece.
Cameron: Yeah. Well, one of my favorite books is a book by this duo named Quinn and Turner. They wrote a book back in 2020, 2021 timeframe called Boom and Bust, and effectively it was a historical analysis of financial bubbles, and they have a very distinct framework for what a bubble is.
And what’s interesting is the bubbles that they looked at were specifically those that had broader economic implications on the upside and the downside. So for example, they did not include in their analysis and their study of bubbles over time the tulip bubble, because it didn’t have a broader economic impact, whereas they included bubbles like the bicycle bubble, the railroad bubble, the 1920s telecom radio bubble. Of course the 1990s was a big look.
And the framework that they use is taken from what they call the bubble triangle, which is taken from the fire triangle. This idea of what are the things that are needed in order for there to be a fire that breaks out? And it’s the fuel, the oxygen, the spark that starts it. And so they break down the three components of the bubble triangle — the main things are marketability. So this is the access that people have to being able to trade. So when you see marketability get better, typically it coincides with a bubble. This can be a technology change — like, for example, back in the 1920s, the ability to use a telephone to call up your stockbroker versus having to actually go to the stock exchange, and radio as well — that caused more trading, more ability for... Then the other component is speculation. There has to be some kind of cultural acceptance of speculation, and they define that as people making investment choices based on the idea that you will do a quick flip — just the expectation of the price going up, not actually buying into the fundamentals. So that’s kind of like housing speculators, for example, saying, “I’m just gonna buy this, not to live in it, but to flip it at a higher price.”
And the last one is money and credit, right? You need liquidity in order to have a bubble. So when you have those three components, the spark that usually causes the fire to break out or the conflagration to come is either government policy or technology. The government policy one is a little bit more rare. It’s happened in places like China, where they started to push people to be more involved in stock markets, and that kind of set off different kinds of casino capitalism bubbles that they had. But the spark is oftentimes technology.
And I think what’s fascinating about this book is it talks about how every single technologically driven bubble has a real component to it. There are real earnings that come from the investment in this technology. So I went back and I said, “Well, what did Intel and Cisco do in 1998 to 2000,” kind of the peak of the bubble? ‘Cause everybody says, “Oh, it’s not a bubble, ‘cause there’s earnings, and look how great the earnings are.” I’m like, yeah, the earnings are amazing. I get that. However, look at the 12-month forward earnings estimates for Intel and Cisco. They were up over 100% each in 1998 to 2000. There were real earnings that happened.
Now, of course, there was real speculation that happened. You had your pets.com of the world, and paying per eyeballs and clicks, and the whole shenanigans on that front. But to say that what we’re experiencing today does not have bubble-like characteristics because there are earnings actually ignores the long historical record that any time there is a technology-driven bubble, there are always real earnings. It’s just that we’re pulling those earnings into the future — we’re pulling those earnings into today. We’re taking from the future into today, and then we’re pulling returns from the future into today. And that’s what makes it have this dynamic where returns are greater today than they will be in forward years in a bubble-type scenario.
So it’s just an interesting kind of pushback to the “No, everything’s fine, don’t worry about anything because there’s earnings.” Actually, that happens every single time.
But one last point, which is: calling something a bubble is very different than calling it a top. You can acknowledge the speculative behavior, you can acknowledge the low-quality-ness of certain things, you can acknowledge the pull-forward without saying that, like the All American Rejects, it ends tonight.
Dave: Right. The liquidity one’s a really interesting angle because it would be easy to say, we’re just drowning in cash. It does feel like we’re just drowning in liquidity. But you start looking at things like swap rates on equities, and those have come way up. We’re over a 1% spread on SOFR now. Just very recently it was like 30, 40 bps. So clearly there’s some tightening going on in the more speculative parts of the market, like people who are trying to get overnight swaps and things like that.
And the question everybody always asks is, “Well, where is all the money going to come from to buy these $150 billion worth of IPOs we’ve got coming down the pike over the next year? It has to come from somewhere.” I think that’s a legitimate question because we do see in some of the rate markets some evidence of tightening happening organically. And we certainly have seen in the private credit space, people are running for the exits a little bit there. We’ve seen people hitting the 5% gates and having to slow people down on some of these. So I’m wondering whether or not the sort of surprising restriction in liquidity might actually tamp some of this down.
Cameron: Well, yeah. Look, we’re going into new territory that we haven’t been in for a really long time, where equity supply is going to be positive, right? So we’ve been in a long world where you’ve had so many buybacks and so little issuance. And actually, I don’t know if we get into a full net equity supply with these IPOs, but of course Google moving to issue shares and not buy back shares is obviously a sea change. And I think that in context of what you’re talking about, these signs that there’s pockets of illiquidity starting to show up — that’s where these two things hit a head, because you can have a lot of supply hit the market, but as long as you’re in a world where liquidity is super robust, then that supply can be taken down.
But the fascinating thing is that liquidity has been abundant because it feels like we’re drowning in it, but it’s nowhere near as abundant as it was in ‘21. Remember, we grew money supply at 25% in 2021. Money supply is around 5% today. So it’s not as if this is in any way a tight liquidity environment. But we’ve seen things get sillier, I guess is the point.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: And in that historical analog — this is the kind of behavior, I just wanna really put the Sharpie highlighter on everything here. In prior bubble situations, what you see is the framework is all there for stuff to be looking pretty good. Like, doesn’t have to look great, but earnings are healthy, cash flows seem good, there’s enough liquidity. There’s maybe not too much, but there’s enough to keep blowing this thing further. And that can extend the behavior. That’s one of the other takeaways from looking at these bubbles, right? Because I’m thinking about this in terms of, yes, SpaceX now, but Anthropic, OpenAI, blah, blah, blah. Like, this could extend. We might be living... Surface tension can take you so far.
Dave: I think there’s plenty of room for this to continue for the next three years. Like, I think it’s very tough to say that this has to pop at a certain point in time. I can absolutely create a very credible, in the middle of the bell curve, scenario where SpaceX comes out at 1.75 and trades up to 3 trillion over the next 24 months, and has a series of big wins, and everybody gets on board, and we get all the unlocks out of the way, and it’s sitting as the largest company in the S&P 500 two, three years from now. Absolutely we could have that path. I can also create a path where we have a 50% sell-off next week. I mean, this is nothing but a volatility enhancer in my book.
Matt: Any thought on that, Cameron?
Cameron: Yeah. Look, I think that we’ve taken this stance of being early is the equivalent of being wrong. And what this moment requires is a great deal of discipline to know that you may not capture all of the up cycle. Like, you may not capture all the upside in the silliest parts of the market, but if you have a five-year-plus time horizon — to Dave’s point — all this does is introduce volatility within a portfolio. It doesn’t introduce necessarily incremental return.
And this is why if you look at the long-run studies about quality as a factor, what you find is that quality actually sees lower volatility and higher returns over long windows, because what you miss is the ascent of the rocket up and then the descent down on the other side. And what we’ve seen — we obviously saw it in ‘21, the last kind of silly time that we had, ‘20 to ‘21 — if you were invested in low quality, you were an absolute genius in 2020. And then in 2021, you end up reversing all of that outperformance through ‘22, and it started to come back. But that kind of allocation in a portfolio didn’t add any incremental return. All it did was add volatility.
So I think it’s our obligation to have that sort of steady hand through all of this, to say, look, there are great, exciting technologies and there are real things that are being driven by all of these advancements in technology, but we can’t completely lose all of our religion and all of our discipline — and ignoring, you know —
Dave: Let me ask you two then, because you guys have real clients, right? You have actual wealthy families that entrust you, or at least ask your opinions about what they should be doing. So what do you tell a client who’s coming in who is very bullish on SpaceX and is looking to get an allocation, or maybe already has an allocation from some pre-IPO vehicle? You’re talking about having to have those conversations to calm people down, but also people get attached to these things and they have real belief in them. So how do you in an advisory position balance those things out? Because if a client comes to you and says, “I want 10% of my portfolio in SpaceX,” are you gonna tell them to go find another advisor?
Matt: So if a client wants 10% — and this is a client who wants any percent — first off, having conversations with people: you are going to own this whether you chose to or not, unless you’re Dave Nadig. Because Dave Nadig has already called into the office and said, “Exclude this from all my things.” So most people, if you own that index fund or if you own that ETF, or you have some type of allocation — it might be via some type of direct indexing tool, and you’re targeting growth or tech or quality even in some cases, and you’re going, “How is this gonna factor into the underlying index that I’m supposed to be buying?” Or you own the S&P 500, or you own the QQQs, or you own some weird niche thematic ETF in some corner of your portfolio.
So the first question is, I wanna own this, or I wanna participate in the IPO. Let’s also talk about where you’re gonna own it already. Now, if you wanna own more, let’s talk about to what extent, because now we have to go through the exercise of how do you get out of this? What’s the max amount of exposure you feel comfortable with? I’m gonna go through all those risks with you. I’m gonna talk about the crazy valuation. I’m gonna talk about what flows could and probably won’t do to this thing, and talk about the chaos that is going to be being a shareowner in this thing for the next however long.
Maybe it’s the greatest thing ever. Maybe it does conquer the known living universe. Maybe that’s where this goes. Maybe President Elon makes this the new GDP of the solar system. I don’t know. So if you want that exposure, you should also have the plan that says lessen this on the way up.
And what’s interesting is for a lot of people who have interest in larger allocations, they either have it or they’re just weighing: should I do this? Because they’re looking at some other success they had previously. And that’s always the gateway to the conversation. You knocked it out of the park with Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, pick your Mag Seven of choice. Somebody had a grand slam, whether they worked for something, they bought a good amount early, or they owned Micron, or they owned one of these other companies, and it went up a ton. And it’s like, do you think you’re gonna win that lottery twice, number one? And number two, you’re uncomfortable with some of this now. What do we need to do to pre-commit to even if you wanna have this allocation and you get it, how do we start unwinding it?
Talking to some institutions, talking to some other investors who are trying to wade through this with private shares that they own, it’s really like, well, what’s our unwind strategy? And let’s talk about that over a five-year period. Let’s talk about, okay, let’s say it goes as well as you hope it goes. What are you gonna do when, according to some crazy projection somebody just threw on the table, this is 10, 20, 50% of your fund? What if it’s bigger than your whole fund because you think this is gonna take over the world to be a $27 trillion market cap thing? You have to think through that.
And I think that’s the only answer that I have as an advisor, is just helping people rationalize through, okay, let’s say you get what you want. Now what?
Cameron: And the last part of structuring is very important, which is that you don’t have to make a value-based judgment whether or not something is a good investment or not, but saying, “Let’s do it in a safe way. Let’s do it in a transparent way. Let’s make sure you’re not in, like, one of these fake SPVs that they say they’re on the cap table, but they actually aren’t.” Like, there’s a lot of —
Matt: The ones who are texting me — like literal text message and WhatsApp scams over this stuff — I’m horrified. Oh God, yeah, I’m horrified.
Dave: Every single day I have gotten a text message offering me SpaceX exposure in some random way, which I’m sure is all BS.
Cameron: Why do you get offered SpaceX exposure and I just get phone calls about my car insurance, and I’ve never owned a car in my life?
Dave: Business loans. I’m regularly offered at least a quarter million dollar business loan for a business I don’t have.
Matt: Business loans, personal loans. Yeah, forget it.
Dave: SpaceX. Insurance. It’s always insurance.
Matt: They’re all legitimate, I’m sure. But I think to your point, it’s what is the safe approach to now doing this thing? So you wanna try Ayahuasca. Can we do it in a controlled environment? That’s how this feels.
Dave: Well, it sounds like this is prime time for advisors earning their keep, right? Because thank God your clients have somebody like you to have that conversation with, because somebody else is just pushing buy or sell without thinking about any of that.
Matt: Or jamming it down people’s throats. I have just — I have trauma from working with a few hedge funds on IPO strategies previously in my career that participate in this stuff, and I have visceral memories of like the Facebook IPO and some other things that we went through, and watching them burn through that green shoe and what’s gonna happen, and fights with compliance over what people are trying to do. And I can’t even imagine the size and the scale of this one. And it’s gonna be...
We got front row seats. This is — let’s take this elsewhere. You got some good surprise topics for me. I have something totally non-markets related for you guys.
Dave: I have something totally non-markets related. I have a question.
Matt: Excellent.
Dave: Here’s my question. We’re in June now. In New England, this is sort of prime time summer, June, July, August. Everybody’s got their places. I have never once in my life gone anywhere prime season, and this year we won a thing in an auction where we’re going out on the Cape in July, which is like, never in a million years would I do that. Do you guys have any place, or are you fans of going at peak season anywhere?
Cameron: I’m from Orlando. Like, my life is —
Dave: You live in peak season.
Cameron: Yeah. No. I’m always trying to find a place that is, like, not the most popular at exactly that time. I am viscerally allergic to a scene, so I cannot go to a place where it is a scene place.
Dave: No Ibiza raves for you?
Cameron: No, unfortunately not. I usually do take some kind of holiday in August, but I think there’s always — and even the most scene-y place, there’s always a place that will be a respite to avoid the max crowds, the mass crowdedness. But I will say one thing that just grinds my gears these days, which is that we always talk about we have, like, the death of the monoculture because of all these different pockets that people can live in. I think TikTok in some ways is actually making the real world more monocultural, because people see, “Ooh, I have to go to this spot. I have to go to that spot,” whether it’s on Instagram or TikTok. And then you see these massive lines for something that might be delicious, but you can never —
Dave: It’s always, like, a donut shop or something. It’s always something very narrow and specific.
Matt: We talked about the Bad Bunny Super Bowl lady, the old lady at the bar, that thing.
Cameron: Oh. Yeah, Tonita. Tonita.
Matt: Tonita. I’ve had friends who were like, “This place is great, and we can never go there again because Instagrammers made it...”
Cameron: Yeah.
Matt: I actually think this is an underappreciated point, and I do have a place for you, Dave, that we are more monoculture. TikTok and the internet have far exceeded MASH in my book, because I can be on the sidelines at a youth flag football game and realizing that kids from all walks of life are all using the same language to talk to each other and describe... There’s no — I miss regional slang, and I feel like the internet is ruining regional slang in front of my eyes, with all sorts of ways that this whole generation uses the same means of communication in a sense that I don’t think we’ve ever had before, and it’s breaking my brain a little bit.
Dave: Yeah, I think that’s fair. But where’s your place? You said you had a place.
Matt: All right. I got a place, and it’s actually a favorite off-season and on-season place, which I hadn’t really thought about it this way before. So Ocean City, New Jersey — it’s one of my favorite places in the world, kinda like the Cape and the beach town and the summer thing. My wife and I, I spent my 40th birthday there. Like, that’s where I wanted to be in the middle of December, is I wanted to see the sunrise on the ocean, the sunset on the bay in my happy place.
Dave: I love it.
Matt: And my wife grew up going there as a kid. Like, we both went there independently as children, and it’s a special place. We’ll go — my brother who lives in Europe is gonna visit this summer with his family, and all of us will descend on it for a week in mid-summer. Peak season. And it’ll be peak season. There’ll be way too many people there. It’ll be chaos. But there’s something about — to what you said, Cameron — where the chaos of nighttime on the boardwalk in peak season is just a beautiful thing. It’s chaos. It’s unbridled just madness on the Jersey Shore.
It’s great because it’s a dry town. That’s actually my favorite part about it, so you don’t have drunks everywhere. I mean, there are drunks everywhere ‘cause that’s every town anywhere. But you can’t buy a beer on the boardwalk, which really changes the dynamic and the family friendliness of it. But then you can go to the beach during the day, and all you have to do is just go a series of blocks down from where the boardwalk ends or where the stores and the rides are, and you’re just on a great beach. I mean, a great New Jersey beach, which is pretty much a subpar beach by every other definition. But it’s a special place. And so I am so excited to go there peak season, even though that comes with all the things that peak season comes with. But then I’ll be back there in November or December and I’ll be thrilled walking around with everything closed.
Cameron: My grandmother would go to Ocean City in the ‘40s and the ‘50s. And dry town, and she would talk about how occasionally they would stop people going over the bridge into town and check their trunk to make sure that they weren’t bringing anything in, even into their houses. But she’d say you’d be leaving town on a Sunday afternoon and you’d see all the beer bottles like flowing out of the garbage. Yeah, she loved the place.
Matt: It’s a special place. We stayed when I was a kid — my grandparents had a place where they would camp, like you’d pitch a tent, and it was across not the big beautiful bridge, the smaller bridge like halfway down the island. And right on the other side there’s like a giant super liquor store that’s right there. And so it would literally be — my vacations as a kid we stayed in a trailer park two miles off island and down the road. But it was those trips like with the family over the bridge on the way home, you stop to pick up the beer and have a fire outside of the trailer and hanging out with the people, and it’s just, those are cherished memories.
And I’m not surprised. As a proper Philadelphia sports fan, she would take the Jersey Shore route for her vacations.
Dave: Love it.
Matt: It’s a beautiful thing. What do you got? You got anything good for us? Wait, Dave, you excited for this trip?
Dave: Oh, I’m very excited for this trip. It’s just very unusual. I never go anywhere in peak season. I am, I am even perhaps more allergic to a scene than Cam.
Cameron: I don’t know. I don’t know. I have a very strict rule if I’m ever in Miami, which I get pulled down there for work, that I refuse to eat or go to a place that has any sparklers in any bottle, any food. If it’s a restaurant and there’s a sparkler in it, I will say, “Absolutely not. I’m not going. I’d rather eat at a taco stand. It’s just not for me, but you do you. And go spend your $1,000 on a piece of crappy steak.”
Matt: Safety first. Safety first. What do you got, Cameron? You got anything good for us?
Cameron: Well, I’ve been listening obviously to a lot of Coheed. And I love Coheed since I was a teenager. “Devil in New Jersey,” of course, being a great song from their second album, The Second Stage Turbine Blade. And I’m going to see them in Jersey in July. And my bone to pick is that they’re opening — being the amazing band that they are, with an incredible depth of amazing pop metal songs, like every album has bangers on it for decades — and they’re opening for Shinedown.
And like there’s — and like this is no hate on Shinedown, but like Shinedown has like two songs.
Dave: Do you think they have two? I don’t really think that they have two good songs. I mean, they have one good video that’s a cover. Like, that’s the one everybody knows.
Cameron: And I, like, I don’t mean to be offensive to... But so sometimes I —
Dave: The bill’s upside down. The bill’s upside down.
Cameron: I get that. Well, it’s a big tour and it’s at the Prudential Center, so it’s like a big arena kind of tour.
Dave: They’re just opening.
Cameron: So I’ll be there alone in my dinky little seat like screaming to like “Favor House Atlantic,” and like nobody will be around because it’s not a Coheed show, it’s a Shinedown show. So sorry. It’s not a question, not much to engage, but sometimes you have these bills that are flipped and that makes me sad.
Dave: Have you seen them do full albums in concert before? Like full concept albums? Because I love it when a band does that. Like, one of my favorite concerts ever was Flaming Lips doing Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots start to finish. Phenomenal. At Boston Calling like three years ago. Just one of my favorites. Or the Protomen, if you know the Protomen — like all of their stuff are giant concept albums too. I think it’s the best. And I agree, if you’re gonna have your full concept album concert, you’re not the opening act.
Cameron: Most people just play the hits. They’ll play stuff from a bunch of different albums. I saw them open for Incubus, and it was a similar situation, which is all the Incubus fans were hanging out and buying merch. And then like I’m sitting there alone, like absolutely screaming my brains off to “Welcome Home.” It’s just — I wish — and I guess they did. I just haven’t seen them do a tour where they headline. And I just want people to appreciate good music more. That’s all I’m saying.
Matt: Do they play out that often anymore though? Or is this kind of an event for them? How much are they touring and playing around these days?
Cameron: I mean, they tour every year.
Matt: Every year they do something. I see their names on flyers.
Cameron: Yeah, they just released an album, so they’re still working. It’s not like they’re not working.
Matt: You could always be surprised though. I’ve been to shows where there’s been like an opening act that has a shocking amount of turnout.
Dave: Other than Coheed, like, does anybody have a big concert or big tour they’re going to this year, this summer?
Cameron: Jimmy Eat World. I’m doing both shows because I love Jimmy Eat World, and those albums — like Bleed American, they’re playing that whole album in full ‘cause it’s the 25th anniversary, I think, of Bleed American, which is a little bit daunting. But yeah, I’m super excited for that. Weezer’s doing their big show, I think with The Shins, which is gonna be awesome in September.
Matt: Man.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: I’ve never seen The Shins. That was one that I remember trying to see a couple of times and it didn’t work out, but that’d be a fun —
Dave: Everything I wanted to see this summer is the wrong weekend and the wrong place. So I literally don’t think I’m gonna see a band all summer long, which is killing me.
Cameron: Come to New York. Come on.
Matt: Come to New York. Go see Coheed and Cambria. I know the one I’m excited for — I know we’re going to see Bikini Kill. Yes, we locked down, got in. That was, not a bucket list item, but just one of those where it’s like, “If I could see Bikini Kill —” You gotta go see them. And if I can make sure my wife sees Bikini Kill and/or Le Tigre and/or a few other things, just — any little micro chance that we get to say, “Oh, let’s go do that,” ‘cause there’s a lot of good stuff going on. That’s the amazing thing too.
Dave: Pavement’s playing Chicago in two weeks. I mean, come on. There are so many bands that are on tour this year. It’s great, and it’s just every place I’m going, I’m missing it.
Matt: Well, that’s what you get for going places. So speaking of things that are not going places — La Casa Zeigler got a new car this last week, and one of the weirdest things about the new car is cleaning out the old car. And I had this moment, and I didn’t know what I was gonna do for this. And so right before we were recording, I’m looking around the office, I’m like, “Oh crap, I gotta come up with something.” And I’m looking at this pile, which is, I think it’s the pile of CDs that’s moved from my car from probably, I’m guessing, late ‘90s through present.
And it’s — is it all in one thing?
Dave: All in one thing?
Matt: No, no. These are like when we migrated from the giant CD books to only what would fit in a center console of, in some cases, a smaller car, and then whatever. So there were like maybe 10 random CDs in the center of the car. And they are —
Cameron: Come on, you gotta list them.
Matt: And it’s a weird time capsule. I’m not gonna go through the entire stack, but I’m gonna give you five here. So we have The Absolute Best of Al Green.
Cameron: Okay.
Matt: Which this is still my go-to —
Dave: No notes. No notes at all.
Matt: What’s that? No notes? Yeah.
Dave: No notes. Timeless. That’s great.
Matt: Timeless. And on streaming, this is still the collection that I’m always looking for when I want to listen to it, which I also realized — this two-CD set is exactly what I want when I wanna put on some Al Green. I have, uh, the great New York regional act, the Ska Flaws, Ska on Hi-Fi. This was a classic. Very, very good.
Cameron: Very on brand for you, yes.
Matt: Very on brand for me. Lots of great stories. There is a song and a video for “Nude Beach,” which is possibly one of my favorite Barry Sacks songs of all time, and the video is — it’s worth your time. Okay. There’s no nudity. It was on TV. But it is a quality music video.
Cameron: My favorite description of ska is that it’s the music that plays in a 13-year-old’s head when he’s eating mozzarella sticks.
Matt: Or chicken nuggets. It’s one of those two.
Dave: That’s perfect.
Matt: Yeah, it’s exactly that. That’s great. And I’m shuffling the deck for this just because it’s related and I love this. So this was Rancid’s Life Won’t Wait, which is — and I will still stand as one of the best actual Rancid albums. I think this is great. They have the success of Out Come the Wolves, they go to Jamaica, they record this. I mean, the other features that are on this album are just ridiculous. Shout out to Vic Ruggiero from The Slackers, who ended up in the band and recorded some of these. I gotta plug the Amoeba Music sticker. Like, I must have gotten this used at an Amoeba at some point somewhere in the ‘90s.
Another classic: the Reverend Horton Heat.
Dave: Oh, yeah.
Matt: Love, love me. Probably one of my favorite guitar players. So this is my opinion of not just psychobilly and the rockabilly stuff I love, but there’s a certain Southern quality of “Where in the Hell Did You Go with My Toothbrush” that makes it one of my favorite country ballads ever. Really makes me happy.
And then of course I’ve got — there were multiple De La Soul albums in there, ‘cause they weren’t on streaming, so they didn’t even survive the iPod. The iPod transition was the only thing that could replace them, so — Stakes Is High was hanging out in there just because. A lotta ‘97, ‘98 energy. So I’m just curious, does stuff like this exist in your car still? Cameron, you’ve already established there’s no car in your life, so.
Cameron: I’ve never owned a car in my entire life.
Matt: Amazing.
Dave: Shocking. So what would the equivalent be? Do you have, like, an old iPod sitting in a drawer?
Cameron: I do have an old iPod sitting in a drawer, and I should find it, and I bet it’s amazing. Because I used to find, like, interesting covers of songs and stuff that you’d never find on Spotify. That’d be actually a really fun exercise.
Dave: The closest I can come to that — I have vinyl, but I don’t have CDs or anything anymore. I gave up that a long time ago. But I did find, maybe six months ago, I found an underwater MP3 player from back when I was doing triathlons in, like, 2010 maybe, so like 15 years old. And I managed to, like, charge it back up and see what was on it, ‘cause I don’t keep MP3s around anymore, right? I stream everything. And it was the wildest collection of, like, mid-’90s mediocre grunge bands and post-punk bands that, like, half of them I don’t even remember. It was the worst playlist I had ever made, and I don’t know why it’s sitting there on that MP3 player. But it’s just truly forgettable grunge bands from the ‘90s. It was like the most — maybe there was a Stone Temple Pilots song on it, and that was the one thing you’d remember.
Cameron: So I’m writing my weekly piece, and I’m using “I Alone” by Live. And the title —
Matt: Ed Kowalczyk. Shout him out.
Cameron: So the opening line of it is, “Writing a piece about how strong earnings are and how much they’re driven by AI is like trying to release a grunge album in the mid-’90s. Everyone’s doing it.”
Matt: It hurts —
Cameron: Because it — that’s literally, I was writing that opening line right before coming in.
Matt: So the running joke was — number one, they’re a Pennsylvania band, so they had good lore in the area just as being semi-local boys. It wasn’t Latrobe. Do you remember, do you know what town they were from? Does anybody remember? Latrobe is where Rolling Rock was from, and they were from basically the same town, I feel like. Yeah. Good old Rolling Rock.
Dave: And because we have to — from the last line, something like “cast of Latrobe, Pennsylvania” — we have to say that regarding Palmer. Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. So we had a, there was a girl in my, whatever, middle school class probably, and she had — so number one, a lot of Polish kids around where I grew up. And so with a last name like Kowalczyk, it was just like — well, we can all pronounce that name, but it looks like gobbledygook. So she really took kindly to the singer of Live, and she had a necklace, but it just said “Ed K.” And we used to harass her all the time why she didn’t have beads for all the letters of his name, because it would be a much larger necklace.
But it is fun though, the stuff that didn’t exist. Like the De La Soul stuff that wasn’t on streaming. I had a bunch of — we won’t go through it, but I have like these old rap mix things that existed in New York City that God knows where I got them from or who I got them from at the time.
Dave: And that’s coming back, too. Like Panda Bear just — Panda Bear and Sonic Boom just dropped their latest thing, and it’s vinyl only. Like, literally they’re not streaming it anywhere. You could, you’d have to rip it and put it in your own MP3 player.
Matt: I —
Cameron: One of my —
Matt: One of my good friends — I love it. Like, I can’t wait to put this on on a CD player. I don’t even, I have to figure out if my new car has a CD player in it, just so I have one, ‘cause I don’t know if I have any other place that I could play this.
Dave: I have no device in my house that will play a CD. Like, no computer — my computer won’t — has a CD drive, nothing.
Matt: Yeah, I have an old tape deck with a box of tapes and whatever else.
Dave: I have a tape deck, I got a turntable, but I have no CD player. It’s not hooked up to anything.
Matt: I gotta figure that part out, but —
Cameron: One of my Gen Z friends made a mix tape, like an actual mix tape for his crush.
Matt: Like a mix tape?
Cameron: And it was like, that’s the cutest thing in the world.
Dave: Did he also give them a cassette player to play it on?
Cameron: Nope.
Matt: They gotta figure that part out. Did they write liner notes? This is important.
Cameron: I... That’s a good question.
Dave: Really should come with a whole zine. Like —
Matt: It should come with a whole zine.
Dave: A quarter-page zine fits right there in the sleeve.
Cameron: As the zine expert, yes.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. Were either of you big liner notes writers to your mix tapes or mix CDs of choice?
Dave: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Matt: Yeah, same. Were you?
Cameron: No, not at all.
Matt: No? Not the focus for that?
Cameron: I don’t have the focus for that.
Matt: I would put — did you even write — is there a track list?
Dave: I still write blog posts to go with playlists.
Matt: I know, so do I. I didn’t have to ask you that question. You’re the same affliction as I have with that stuff. Were you track listing? Or was that like —
Cameron: I track listed. I track listed.
Matt: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. On your burned CDs.
Dave: But no poetry.
Cameron: No. I was a nerd and homeschooled in high school. Come on, like, really?
Dave: Fair enough. Who were you gonna give it to?
Cameron: Yeah.
Matt: We always would do — when you would make a mix for your friends, your friends would ask you for a mix, it was in the era of the visors in the cars. And so the trick was to always write either the most offensive or suggestive thing on the outside of the ripped CD cover so that somebody else or their parent would get into the car and be like, “Oh my God, why?” And it became a horrible game, many of which I still have, of like the mix CDs we would give each other and the stupid stuff that we would write on them to get a rise out of people.
I am happy to hear these parts of the culture are coming back, and maybe slightly less so for a SpaceX IPO. So Dave, if people want to bug you on the internet, where should we send them?
Dave: @davenadig pretty much everywhere. etf.com for ETF stuff, nadig.com for Nadig stuff.
Matt: Cameron, where should we send them?
Cameron: Cameron Dawson everywhere. You’ll find it, except that there is an English footballer also named Cameron Dawson. So just pick the chick one.
Dave: Not the English footballer —
Matt: Not the English footballer Cameron Dawson. Yes, the etf.comer, Electric Boogaloo part two, Dave Nadig. I’m Matt Zeigler. You’re watching Excess Returns. Like, comment, subscribe, all the things below, and we are out.