Today's track: Connan Mockasin — B'nD.

Let me tell you about John Yudkin.

In the 1960s and 70s, Yudkin was a British nutritionist with a theory everybody hated. He believed sugar — not fat — was what was actually destroying people's health. He wrote a book called Pure, White and Deadly that laid the whole argument out in plain English.

For that, the sugar industry paid to have him buried. A rival researcher named Ancel Keys led the academic charge, and between industry money and institutional momentum, Yudkin's career was systematically ended. Conferences stopped inviting him. Journals stopped publishing him. Colleagues distanced themselves. He died in 1995, ridiculed.

Today, his book reads like a prophecy. The low-fat dietary guidelines of the 80s and 90s — the ones that replaced fat with sugar in every aisle of the grocery store — were followed, almost in lockstep, by the obesity epidemic. He was right the whole time.

Yudkin wasn't right because he had the most prestigious job or the loudest platform. He was right because he was obsessed with something nobody else could see yet — and obsessed enough to keep saying it when every single person in the room was telling him to shut up.

That is the profile of the person who wins the next decade. Not the credentialed. The obsessed.

Hold that thought. Because I want to walk you through why it matters more right now than it ever has.

Yesterday, the CEO of ServiceNow said the quiet part out loud.

"AI agents could easily send college grad unemployment over 30%."

Read that twice. Not 3%. Not 13%. Thirty.

ServiceNow is a $200 billion enterprise software company — the platform half the Fortune 500 uses to run HR, IT, and operations workflows. When the guy at the top of that company tells you AI is about to erase a third of entry-level white-collar jobs, he's not theorizing. He's describing the roadmap his sales team is already selling into boardrooms.

And the data backs him up. The 2026 skills obsolescence rate just hit 44% — meaning nearly half of everyone currently working has a skill set on borrowed time. Last year it was 39%. The line is moving fast, and it's moving in the wrong direction.

The Gen Z kids who saw this coming tried to get ahead of it. They chose what felt like the "AI-proof" careers — education, biology, pharmacy. The jobs where a human body is still required in the room. Those jobs pay less than $50,000 a year. In 2026. In an economy where the median home is over $400,000 (for reference, the median home in Louisville, Kentucky is right around $250,000).

So even the smart ones — the kids who played defense on their careers — can't afford a house. They picked the wrong safe harbor. And frankly, the four-year degree itself has been watered down to the point where the paper doesn't mean what it used to. The real credentials now are certifications, apprenticeships, and the ability to actually do something.

That's the top of the squeeze. Here's the bottom.

Car repos at record highs. Credit card defaults at record highs. Student loan delinquencies climbing fast. The American consumer is already tapped out, and the squeeze hasn't even started.

So everyone keeps asking, when will housing crack?

Wrong question.

Housing doesn't crack because of rates. Housing cracks because nobody has liquidity to buy.

And speaking of rates — the 30-year is sitting at 6.10% right now. Not low, but lower. Every basis point matters in a market this tight.

The first-time buyer can't buy — no job, or a job that pays under $50K. The move-up buyer can't move up — because the first-time buyer can't take their starter home off their hands. The parents can't help with a down payment — they're busy refinancing the car loan. It's not a cliff. It's a slow-motion freeze. The gears just stop turning.

Which is why where you live matters more in 2026 than it has in twenty years.

Kentucky sits right in the middle of the manufacturing belt that runs from Wisconsin down through Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and into Tennessee. It's where things still get made. Not analyzed. Not reviewed by committee on Slack. Made. And Governor Andy Beshear has been pushing hard to make this state a player in the nuclear energy future — with new legislation aimed at opening the door for nuclear development in the commonwealth. That matters more than people realize. The data centers powering the AI revolution need baseload power, and baseload power in 2035 is going to be nuclear. The states that move on it now own the next industrial expansion.

We are not in the storm. We are in the part of the country people are going to run to when the storm hits.

But here's the thing — and this is where Yudkin comes back.

Geography alone isn't the answer. Neither is picking the "right" safe job. The people who are going to win the next decade aren't the ones with the cleanest resumes or the most prestigious degrees. They're the people who are genuinely, stupidly excited about a thing — whatever that thing is. Pottery. Making music. A niche corner of a business. Restoring old houses. A weird YouTube channel about raising chickens.

Yesterday's newsletter — When's the Last Time You Created Something? — was the most-opened email we've ever sent. It hit a nerve for a reason.

An AI can do a lot of things, but it cannot be genuinely passionate. It cannot care. It cannot go to sleep frustrated about a problem and wake up with a solution at 3 AM (albeit Claude is getting close..). Only you can do that. Yudkin did that for forty years while the entire field told him to shut up. He was right, and the people who mocked him are a footnote.

The point isn't to know about the storm. The point is to move before the rain.

See you Monday. Enjoy your weekend — get some sun.

Warmly,

Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

PS:

Twenty-three hundred years ago, the guy who basically invented logic figured out that all the knowing in the world doesn't matter if you never do anything with it. We are drowning in knowledge right now — every feed, every podcast, every newsletter (yes, including this one). You probably have more market intelligence on your phone this morning than a hedge fund had in 1995. And what are most people doing with it? Scrolling. Reading. Forwarding. Go do something with it.