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WARNING Santa Clarita Homeowners: Do NOT Sell Your House Until You Watch This! · Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Interest rates, oh my God.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about this.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: What's happening with mortgage rates and the part most people get backwards?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: So let me start with a thing almost everybody misunderstands, including a lot of people in my own business.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Your mortgage rate is not set by the Federal Reserve.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: The Federal Reserve, often just called the Fed, you've heard of this, is the government body that manages the country's money supply and sets one specific interest rate.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: The rates bank charge each other to borrow overnight.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's the lever they pull.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right now that rate sits around 3.5%.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: But a 30-year mortgage doesn't follow that number.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: It follows something called the 10-year treasury yield.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what that is in plain words.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: When the U.S.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: government needs to borrow money, it sells what are basically IOUs.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they call those treasury bonds.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: The 10-year yield is the interest rate the government has to pay people to lend it money for 10 years.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Mortgage rates right on top of that number, usually about one and a half to two percentage points higher.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to know where mortgage rates are going, you watch that 10-year Treasury, not the Fed.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, why does this matter to you?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because the Fed constantly tells the people, the Fed, Fed meetings coming up.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, we have a new leader of the Fed.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: So your mortgage rate's going to change, and that's wrong.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: It can cost you money if you wait for the wrong signal.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the proof it's wrong.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of 2024, the Fed cut its rate three times.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: The mortgage rates went up anyway and stayed above 7%.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: The Fed went down, mortgage rates went up.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Same period.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: That happened because mortgage rates follow inflation and the bond market, not the Fed funds meeting.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: So what actually moved rates this week?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, oil and war.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's been a war with Iran that pushed oil prices up.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And when oil goes up, the price of nearly everything goes up as well.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's called inflation.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Inflation just means your dollar buys less than it used to.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: So this week, the news that the war might be ending pushed oil prices down, which calmed inflation fears, which pulled in the 10-year treasury yield down a little, which nudged the mortgage rates down.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So rates are sitting around 6.5% right now.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Where are they headed?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's the honest part.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's a guess, not a fact.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: The forecasts come from groups like Fannie Mae, which is a government-backed company that buys mortgages from banks.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it has direct interest in the housing market staying active and the people feeling good about buying.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: They predict rates stay on the low to mid-six percent range for the rest of the year.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Take that for what it is, a prediction from a group that benefits when you buy a house.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Their guess could be right, but it's still a guess.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: So now the local picture here in the Santa Clarita Valley and places like it.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Home listing prices are down about 2.5% compared to a year ago.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's been seven and a half months in a row of small declines.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: First-time buyers are now about a third of everybody buying in the market.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of homeowners who locked in cheap, those 3% loans a few years back, they're not going to sell.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because selling means buying their nest house at almost 7%.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody trades a cheap loan for an expensive one unless life forces them to.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: So fewer homes come up for sale, prices soften slowly, and the market just sits in a slow standoff.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: The bottom line for a regular person, don't let the headline about a Fed meeting tell you when to buy or sell.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Watch inflation, watch the bond market, because that's what actually moves the number on your loan.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about artificial intelligence, what it's doing to jobs and people.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, first, what we're even talking about, artificial intelligence or AI, that means a computer program that can now do things that used to need a human brain, like writing, answering questions, making decisions.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: The newest versions can do a surprising amount of office work.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the most important thing to say up front, and you nailed this almost everything, we're AI headed, it's a guess.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not because the people guessing are dumb, but because nobody really understands these systems, not even the people who built them.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: The building, we're building something that may end up being far smarter than any human.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can't confidently predict something smarter than yourself.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can't even fully explain how human intelligence works, nor can I people.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: So when you hear confident predictions about AI's future, treat them as educated guesses, not facts.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: What I'll separate for you below is what has already happened, which is fact from when somebody predicts what will happen, which is going to be a guess.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: So here's a fact a company called PwC put out a report in mid-June.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: PWC is one of four giant accounting and consulting firms in the world.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now their angle, a consulting firm that publishes a big AI report, also sells AI advice to businesses for a living.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So they have a reason to make AI sound important and worth paying them to help with.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Keep that in mind.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make their data fake, they just read over a billion job ads and it shapes how they frame it.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: So what they found is real and useful.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: They found the job market is splitting into two roads.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: On one row, the computer takes the boring, repeated parts of your job and leaves you for the thinking and judgment, and those jobs are growing and paying more.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: On the other row, though, the computer makes your whole job so simple that anybody could do it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: So the jobs are falling behind.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the lesson for your own work, if you want to be on the first row doing the part only a human does well.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's where you want to be.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, another fact and a sobering one, in 2025, about 55,000 job cuts were blamed directly on artificial intelligence, which is more than 12 times the number from two years earlier.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: That number comes from the layoff tracking reported across business news outlets.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Who gets hit first?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Goldman Sachs says it's young people starting out.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Goldman Sachs is one of the biggest investment banks on Wall Street, meaning they manage money and advise huge companies and they study the economy closely to guide their bets, their angle, their forecasting, the economy to make money for themselves, and of course their clients.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: So they have every reason to read the data carefully and call it straight because being wrong, well, it costs them.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: They say the workers most likely to be hurt are people in their 20s and 30s in office and writing jobs.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: The damage shows up first as fewer beginner positions before it ever shows in the big national numbers.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: So if your kid can't land on the first desk job, the machine reaching for the bottom round may be part of why.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the counterweight, and it's also real.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Boston Consulting Group, another big firm that advises companies for a living, says about half of U.S.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: jobs will be changed by AI over the next two to three years.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But they stress the world change.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to change, not lose.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Most jobs stay and just become different.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: The same human skills keep their value in every one of these reports, judgments, creativity, and leadership.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Same caveat with PWC, though.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: A consulting firm makes money helping businesses adopt AI.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: So change, don't panic, hire us to help is a message that happens to sell their services.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: One more, in plain honesty, some investors openly expect that companies will blame AI for layoffs, even when the AI isn't really the reason, using it as a cover story for cuts that they've already intended on having.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: So when a giant company says AI cost these jobs, sometimes it's true, but sometimes AI is just taking the blame for the human decision.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: The bottom line for all of us: this tool can lift you up or it can flatten you.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the honest truth is nobody knows exactly how it's going to play out, including the experts, including the people building it.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: What we do know is the human skills, the judgment and the care are the ground to stand on.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's coming to sort out where you fit that part on us.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about dropping fat.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: The newest research and what it really means is exciting, kind of.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: The biggest month is muscle.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the science is honestly arguing with itself right now.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: So let me give you both sides of it.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: First, the drug everybody knows about, Ozempek, Weguvi, Majaro, Zapbound, doctors group these together and call them GLP1 drugs.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: GLP1 stands for glucagon-like peptide one, which is a hormone your own gut makes naturally after you eat.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hormone, just a body, a chemical body sends through your blood to tell other parts what to do.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: What a particular brain you're full.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: The shots copy that messenger so your hunger gets turned way down and you eat less.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole trick.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now the warning that came out this month is reported in a meeting of the Endocrine Society.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Let me explain that because the name means nothing to me or most people.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Endocrine refers to your body's hormone system, the network of glands that make up those chemical messengers.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: The Endocrine Society is the main professional group by the doctors and scientists who study hormones.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Once a year they gather to share new research.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And preserving research builds their members' reputations, but they're not selling the drugs, so they tend to report risks and benefits fairly openly.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: So when they reported, people on these drugs started moving less, fewer steps, less exercise after starting the shots.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's the opposite of what you would expect.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And here's why that's a problem.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: These drugs can take muscle off your body along with fat.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you have less muscle, less movement at the same time, and the muscle does something most folks don't realize.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: Muscle burns energy even when you're sitting still.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Lose muscle, and your body burns fewer calories all day, which makes it easier to regain the weight after, and that's the trap.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now the other side, because this is where the science fights itself, a different study in mice and small group of people found that muscle fear might be overblown.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: In that one fat about 70% was about the weight people lost.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And even though a thigh muscle shrank a little, the people's actual leg strength held steady.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: So one set of scientists say that muscle scare is too much, another says it's real.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Both studies are recent, both are published, and the truth is not yet settled.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who tells you these drugs are totally safe or totally dangerous is picky a side that evidence hasn't chosen yet.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a guess wearing the costume of a fact.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's the genuinely hopeful brand new part.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: On June 23, researchers showed results from a study called Believe, when they combined the weight loss drug with a second drug built to protect muscle, and the combination burned more fat while keeping or even building muscle.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And on June 3rd, scientists described an experimental pill.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, that's tough, which is totally works totally in a different way.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of shutting down hunger, it speeds up how much energy your muscles burn.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Stanford University researchers also found a drug that helped mice rebuild muscle while still losing fat.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Worth a note on the stakes here.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of this research funded by the drug companies who actually sell these next generation treatments.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So there's good money on riding on good results.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: The findings still look promising, and that's the angle to keep in mind.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And underneath all of it, the one fact that hasn't budged, about half the people who start these drugs stop within a year because of side effects, costs, or being tired of the shots, and most gain the weight back.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: This ties straight to the muscle story.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you lose weight by killing your hunger, moving less, and losing muscle, then quit.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: You're worse equipped to keep it off even than when you started.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Every piece of news this month circles that same quiet truth.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: A shortcut that only removes hunger leaves you weaker for the day you stop.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: The work that keeps you moving and keeps your muscle, that's the part that lasts.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: The bottom line for all of us, these drugs are a real tool.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Getting smarter fast.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the honest good news for millions who fought this their whole lives.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: But your body keeps a ledger.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Lose fat in a way that keeps your strength and it stays gone.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Lose it in a way that hollows you out, it comes back.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: The shot was never the whole answer.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: It might buy you time, and what you do at that time is the answer.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Connor with Honor.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of stuff online.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Connorwithhonor.com.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk to you soon.