Compound Growth

When people talk about wealth in America, the conversation usually splits into two groups: the billionaires and everybody else. A new book from economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, argues there's a huge group in between. Wheeler and Colin dig into it this week. The book focuses on "Main Street millionaires...

Everyone seems to agree AI is a bubble that's about to burst. But what if everybody's wrong? This week starts with a contrarian column arguing that roughly $1 trillion in AI build-out since 2024 is only about 2% of GDP, while past build-outs like the railroads and telecom reached closer to 25% before they peaked. At today's pace, AI wouldn't get there until around 2030. The hos...

This week opens with a genuinely funny mishap — one host asked Gemini to research video ideas and got rickrolled by the AI itself, complete with a self-aware "busted" when called out — before the show turns to a much bigger AI story: a wave of doomer warnings from Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and now Elon Musk, including a widely repeated claim that there's a 10% chance AI ends humanit...

This week Wheeler and Colin sit down with Dan Wilson, CoFi Advisors' newest financial planning associate and a CFP® candidate, to get his full story — after months of him quietly feeding the show's news segments from his own five-newsletter-a-day habit. Dan likes to work backward, so they start with how he landed at CoFi (a LinkedIn search for "para-planner near Amesbury" while...

Wheeler's Whoop sent him a pop-up after his first Rolfing session, checking in on how his body was feeling — which kicked off a bigger question the hosts have been circling for a while: is AI actually adding value, or is it just smoke and mirrors dressed up as a feature? Colin pushes back with a skeptic's case (a check-in doesn't move revenue, and everything these days claims an AI...

Wheeler opens this week's headline discussion after a conversation with his partner Jess, who came away from an NPR Up First segment thinking that countries lending the U.S. money are charging higher interest rates because the U.S. looks riskier — and that the resulting interest payments now exceed the national defense budget. The hosts use it as a jumping-off point to explain how U.S. debt a...

Moderna jumped roughly 130–137% in a single day this week on a major mRNA cancer breakthrough: a personalized cancer shot, built using AI to sequence a patient's own tumor, completed Phase 3 trials with strong results. The hosts trace it back to Keytruda, the immunotherapy drug that's driven much of Merck's revenue for about 14 years, which works by helping the immune system detect...

The market keeps notching new record highs, and this one opens with the case for why: the S&P 500 is up roughly 13% year to date, 63% of the index has now reported Q2 earnings, and the beat rate sits at 86%, well above the 5-year average of 78% and the 10-year average of 76%, with reported results beating estimates by 31% on average. Communication services and healthcare are running 100% beat...

A listener noticed something: when Wheeler and Colin talk about the market, they talk about it like it's alive. Like it knows things. Like it's learning. So this episode starts with that observation and goes somewhere genuinely surprising. The stock market and artificial intelligence turn out to share more DNA than most people realize. Both process enormous amounts of data to generate an...

Maddie Tudor has been part of our marketing team at CoFi Advisors for going on four years, and this week she sits down with Wheeler and Colin to make an argument she can't always sell to her own clients: going viral is often exactly the wrong thing to chase. Before founding Maddie Tudor Consulting, Maddie built the first-ever marketing department at a major TV and film production company, run...

A book about how people picture the future kicks off this one: close your eyes and imagine what's ahead, and it turns out most people picture something quiet and grounded, not the flying cars or dystopia a futurist might expect. From there the show moves into two dramatic single-stock stories, SpaceX down 40% from its highs (called on this show months in advance) and IBM's one-day $70 bi...

Debit card users are quietly funding everyone else's credit card rewards. Wheeler and Colin trace the three ways credit card companies actually make money, interchange fees, net interest income, and annual fees, and land on why swiping a debit card doesn't opt you out of the cost, it just means someone else collects the reward. A client story backs it up: a couple who paid off $40,000 to...

The personal savings rate sits at 2.6%, and Wheeler and Colin argue it tells you almost nothing. Someone making $100,000 who saves $10,000 is saving at 10%. Someone making $1,000,000 who saves the same $10,000 is saving at 1%. Both count exactly the same in that national number, which isn't weighted by income, doesn't separate working professionals from retirees on Social Security, and s...

June brought rotation, not direction. The Nasdaq finished down almost 3%, the S&P was flat, the Dow was up, and small caps led with the Russell 2000 up 3.6%. Taiwan's index is up 62% year to date, but it's essentially two stocks, and that same concentration shows up in the margin debt numbers. The US just hit $1.28 trillion in margin debt, an all-time high, while Taiwan's is up...

Colin came in from fishing. Wheeler was trying to buy Olivia Rodrigo tickets mid-recording. They still got through a packed week. The Road to Housing Act passed with bipartisan support — a bill to cut red tape on home construction and limit corporate ownership of residential properties. Then the president refused to sign it, tying it to a separate voter ID bill. Wheeler and Colin get into why buil...

This week Wheeler and Colin open with a conversation about inflation — what it actually costs to travel in Vegas and California right now, why broad inflation numbers don't tell the full story, and how the experience varies dramatically depending on income. It's a grounded setup for everything that follows. From there they get into the week's biggest stories. Big tech collectively s...

In this episode of Compound Growth, Colin and Wheeler sit down with their colleague and the third leg of the stool — Shae Murray — for a candid, wide-ranging conversation about non-traditional career paths, what it really takes to build confidence in a new field, and why growth often looks nothing like you planned. Shae shares her journey from early childhood education — working across Montessori...

Did you know that in the United States, anyone can sign your tax return — no license required? Katrina Kowalski found that out the hard way when her husband got hit with a $50,000-plus IRS audit, courtesy of an unlicensed preparer who was a family friend. That moment set her on a path from mortgage industry burnout, to quitting a Big 5 accounting firm on the day after Christmas, to eventually buil...

Ferrari announced a $640,000 electric car with worse performance than a Tesla Model S — and screened the journalists who came to see it based on how they felt about EVs. It's a strange move for a brand built on confidence. It's also a pretty good lens for what's happening across a lot of big institutions right now. The bigger conversation this month is the SpaceX IPO. One theory flo...

Buy now, pay later has gone from a niche checkout option to a fixture of how Americans spend — on everything from concert tickets to groceries to medical bills. The industry processed over $114 billion in transactions in 2024 alone, and the numbers are still growing. But the conversation around it rarely goes deeper than whether a specific purchase is worth it. This episode does. Wheeler and Colin...

There's a gap between what the data says and how people feel — and right now, that gap is enormous. Wheeler and Colin sit down with Seth Buks, a market strategist and thought leader who has spent nearly two decades translating complex financial ideas into clear, actionable guidance for advisors and their clients. The conversation covers a lot of ground: where the economy actually stands on gr...

One year ago, Wheeler and Colin hit record on a podcast with no script, no audience, and no certainty it would go anywhere. This episode marks that anniversary — and uses it as a lens for the thing the show has always been about: what does it actually take to build something that compounds over time? The conversation opens with a riff on jargon — why professionals in every field lose the ability t...

April was one of the more eventful market months in recent memory, and Wheeler and Colin are breaking it all down. The S&P finished the month up 12%, the Nasdaq up 18%, and semiconductors — led by an almost impossible 116% single-month run in Intel — stole the show. But the real story underneath the numbers is earnings: more than 85% of companies that reported beat expectations, with average e...

Most people think of an IPO as a news event. A company goes public, the ticker starts flashing, and you decide whether to buy in or not. But what's coming in the next 12 to 18 months isn't just a news event — it could be one of the most consequential reshufflings of capital in stock market history. Wheeler and Colin use the story of Uber's IPO as a starting point: a company that was...

Ben Anderson didn't set out to build a community venue. He set out to buy a house near the seacoast and do more of the work he'd been doing his entire career — connecting people through music and live events. The Word Barn, located in Exeter, New Hampshire, happened almost by accident: a band needed a place to play, all the other venues were booked, and the energy that night made it clea...