Today, the cost of energy — things like electricity, or gas, or heating oil — is considered an essential piece of economic data. But it turns out that for much of America's history, we've been overlooking a crucial economic figure: the cost of firewood. For decades, firewood was the dominant energy source powering the US economy. And yet there aren't really any official statistics about firewood prices. After all, how would you even go about putting a price tag on something that's growing in a lot of people's backyards? On this episode, we speak with Nicholas Muller, a Carnegie Mellon University economist and author of the new paper, "Firewood in the American Economy: 1700 to 2010," which attempts to fill in this crucial gap in our economic data. We talk about how Nicholas went about finding 300-year-old firewood prices, and what the new data series can tell us about the development of the US economy and the relationship between growth and energy.

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People talk all the time about the potential for huge turning points in history. And they've been talking about the possibility of the US losing its dominant position in the international financial order for some time. So far it hasn't really happened, but there are plenty of people who think that the Trump's focus on tariffs and higher deficits could mark a sea change in the appetite for dollar assets. In this episode we speak with Inigo Fraser Jenkins, strategist at Alliance Bernstein, about some of the big changes that are altering the investment landscape including: higher debt loads across the world, the rise of AI, de-globalization, demographics, and more. As he points out, the difference right now is that we're not just talking about one possible regime change for investors, but a long list of them. Inigo talks about how these shifts might play out and what investors can do to prepare for them.

Read "The End of US Exceptionalism?" by Inigo Fraser Jenkins

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Probably the most controversial proposal from New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is his promise to freeze the rent on a substantial chunk of rent-stabilized units in the city. There are concerns that this will cause a major downshift in housing development and that landlords that are heavily exposed to rent-stabilized units will be driven deeper into distress. But then separately there are major real estate owners who may be threatened by other aspects of Mamdani's real estate vision. For example, he has promised to, in some instances, expedite approvals for new buildings, which could take away the competitive edge from major building owners that know best how to work the approval process. But there are also players in the real estate industry who are excited about new opportunities. If housing production does, in fact, slow down, that could mean higher rent on market-rate units. And if Mamdani significantly expands the supply of free childcare in the city, then that could present an opportunity for some owners of commercial real estate. On this episode of the podcast, we speak with past guest Ben Carlos Thypin, a NYC landlord himself, as well as the founder of the analytics firm Quantierra. He gives us the overall lay of the land on how various players in the real estate industry are preparing for Mamdani's possible victory.

Read More: Mayor Eric Adams on the Future of New York City

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