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Millennial wealth in the United States has nearly quadrupled since 2019, outpacing both Gen X and baby boomers, yet most millennials don’t consider themselves rich. Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996 (give or take a year or two), are now worth a staggering $15.95 trillion, about four times what they were worth just five years ago, according to data from the Federal Reserve as reported by CNBC. As of 2024, the average net worth of a millennial was a whopping $333,096, according to Empower, a financial services company. Its data shows millennials managed to grow their wealth more than any other generation in 2024, increasing their net worth by 13.7% (compared to 7.7% for all Americans), and increasing their 401Ks by 15.6% (nearly double that of the average American). However, as millennials face high costs of living, due in part to inflation and high interest rates, many say they feel less wealthy than they appear on paper, a phenomenon known as “phantom wealth.” That’s because much of their net worth is tied up in assets not readily available, like 401Ks, homes, and the stock market. That’s as there are three main areas of growth that are driving millennial wealth: real estate; stocks and mutual funds; and money they are either inheriting or getting as gifts from parents and family. In the past several years, home equity has emerged as the greatest driver of wealth accumulation, and many millennials who bought homes before or during the pandemic are seeing their value greatly increase. Millennials have also, on average, contributed more to their retirement funds, increasing the value of their holdings both in stocks and mutual funds. Finally, they are also benefiting from their parents’ generosity, receiving financial gifts and inheriting wealth to pay off high student loans, mortgages, car payments, and high child care costs, financial planner Sophia Bera Daigle told CNBC.
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E-Commerce
Isnt AI supposed to make things simpler? asks a student in a new Saturday Night Live sketch. Technically, the answer is yes. Artificial intelligence is often pitched as a future-forward omni-tool for removing friction from everyday tasks. Of course, the student in this sketch (SNL cast member Sarah Sherman) only asks her question after AI has made one such task even more complicated. And thats just one of the many glaring flaws with AI, as it exists in 2025, that the shows writers illustrate to perfectionpresumably without any help from Sora. The premise of the sketch finds a high school investing in a new AI program that turns textbooks into educational podcasts. Its a barely veiled allusion to Googles NotebookLM, a program that creates breezy, conversational summaries from dense documentsand which quickly went viral after debuting last October. Unlike in real life, the SNL version of the fake podcasts has a video component. What the sketch portrays accurately, however, is the way AI products often have questionable utility, overinflate whatever utility they do have, and come brimming with glitches. The hosts of the podcast strain to sound natural, repeat key phrases again and again, and ultimately leave the skeptical students with more questions than answers. According to Gavin Purcell, a (very much human) cohost of the AI-demystifying podcast AI for Humans, the product this sketch is based on actually does offer some benefits. NotebookLM can struggle with getting all its facts right and, over time, the voices get repetitive, but its an interesting use case of how AI can break down complicated topics and make them more digestible, Purcell says. Try throwing an extensive Wikipedia page into it and see what comes out. You might be surprised. In the sketch, though, the program uses full textbooks rather than the smaller documents NotebookLM was made to condense. (The length of the average podcast the real product churns out is five to 10 minutes.) Condensing a whole textbook into a podcast would create something closer to a breezy, conversational audiobook than a short podcast snippet. And its exactly this kind of redundancy that AI tech too often offers. One need only visit the most recent CES to see this redundancy in action. That event was overflowing with AI-assisted devices like Boschs new smart crib, which lets parents know when their baby has pooped overnightas opposed to the age-old technology that has historically done so: a screaming baby . . . not to mention Samsungs new, AI-powered washing machine, which not only alerts users when their laundry is done, but also lets them take phone calls through the machine, for some reason. Beyond satirizing AI products whose usefulness is dubious, the SNL sketch also taps into AI true believers’ tendency to get overhyped too early. Anything that is useful at all suddenly becomes revolutionary. A student might understandably use a fake podcast to briefly learn about a specific topic, as Notebook LM demonstrated, but that doesnt mean the program is going to disrupt learning as we know it, let alone destroy the podcast industry. “NotebookLM was one of these small, quirky AI products that I don’t think Google even thought would blow up as big as it did, Purcell says. And, unfortunately, as often happens when something AI-based explodes into the mainstream, you get a lot of “OMG, PODCASTING IS SO DEAD!!” posts from hardcore AI people. In the past few years, experts have claimed that AI products like ChatGPT may fully reshape the legal and medical industries, among others. But ChatGPT has not yet demonstrated anything like the immaculate reliability it would need to truly revolutionize either field. Instead, its exhibited enough fallibility to only underscore the inherent value of human judgment. In one infamous example, a lawyer used ChatGPT to help a client sue an airline, and the program ended up hallucinating at least six precedent cases that did not actually exist. As long as such mistakes can ever happen, the hype around AIs power to remake every field in society should be taken with a grain of salt. And at this still-early stage in AIs evolution, mistakes happen all the time. The most prominent bug in the SNL sketch is an AI classic: One of the podcasters is depicted with six fingers. Generating anatomically correct extremities is something AI has long struggled with, but glitches manifest in all sorts of ways. McDonald’s recently had to shut down its experiment with AI drive-thru, after a flurry of viral TikToks showed unwanted bacon on ice cream and other bugs, and Apple has reportedly paused AI news summaries on its new iPhones due to persistent glitches. Maybe one day, malfunctioning AI will become a rare exception, but for now, its much closer to the rule. The final turn in the SNL sketch reveals one problem with AI that humans, so far, have only scratched the surface ofits malevolent side. Do we eat? Do we exist? asks the AI podcaster played by Timothée Chalamet.
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E-Commerce
Is it a coincidence that this year’s Super Bowl LIX logo turns out to have the exact same colors of the teams playing? Did the National Football League know the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles would be playing Super Bowl 59 on February 9 in New Orleans all along? Or are fans taking this conspiracy theory one step too far? That’s what some fans are claiming on social media: that the Super Bowl LIX logo, which was revealed in 2024 before last year’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas, is proof that the game is rigged because it’s red and green, the colors of the Chiefs and the Eagles (along with a mixture of some yellow and purple). Those fans’ theory, which is now making the rounds but is unconfirmed, speculates that the NFL picks the Super Bowl teams in advance to increase profits, or possibly, for political reasons. (Some right-wing conspiracy theorists have said Taylor Swift‘s relationship with boyfriend Travis Kelce, the Chiefs’s tight end, is a PR stunt meant to increase NFL viewership, and also that Swift was a liberal plant at Chiefs games to help President Joe Biden win the last election.) This is not the first time fans have made this claim about the Super Bowl logo. Ahead of last year’s AFC and NFC championship games, social media account @NFL_Memes wrote on X, “Anyone else notice this?” and showed a picture of the teams that played in past Super Bowl games, which matched the colors of the Super Bowl logos. But, as USA Today noted, the meme lost steam after last year’s teams broke the trend. https://twitter.com/NFL_Memes/status/1722101822410633666 This year’s big game will be played at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, with the Super Bowl Halftime Show featuring Kendrick Lamar with a guest appearance by SZA. The game will air on Fox and stream live on Tubi, DirecTV, Fubo, or the Fox Sports app. Stay tuned! We’ll have more details closer to kickoff about how to watch.
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E-Commerce
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