Animal Spirits Podcast - Everyone Back in the Boat (EP. 460)

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

On episode 460 of Animal Spirits, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠���⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ben Carlson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ discuss: Tax Day, the benefits of writing, energy vs. tech, a confusing labor market, a rite of passage for younger generations, millennials vs. boomers, AI uncertainty, Bitcoin vs. software stocks, the downfall of Nike and more. This episode is sponsored by Goldman Sachs and Janus Henderson Investors. To learn more about GS, visit https://am.gs.com/en-gb/advisors/products/active-etfs Learn more about JHA at https://www.janushenderson.com/ Sign up for The Compound newsletter and never miss out: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thecompoundnews.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find complete show notes on our blogs: Ben Carlson’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠A Wealth of Common Sense⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Michael Batnick’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Irrelevant Investor⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Feel free to shoot us an email at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Goldman Sachs Asset Management Disclosure: Investors can lose money by investing in the Funds. ALPS Distributors, Inc. is the distributor of the Goldman Sachs ETF Funds. Investors should consider a Fund's objective, risks, and charges and expenses before investing. Call 800-526-7384 to obtain a copy of the prospectus. Read carefully. Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. It is everybody's least favorite week of the year. It's tax week. April 15th. There is a drain on liquidity. Usually not great for the stock market,

but, you know, not always, obviously. And one of the best decisions we've made at Riddholt's wealth management over the years is adding a tax team. It has been an incredible addition, incredible service for clients. And it makes sense. Like, everybody has to do their taxes. It's not an option. Not an option.

You got to file him. No offense. I don't think anybody is, well, that's not true. You might be married to an accountant. I was about to say nobody's in love with their accountant. But for the most part, it's like, you know, sort of a fungible. I love Bill Sweet. I'll say it.

Well, I love Bill Sweet too. I really do. You know, fun fact, Bill Sweet is the only man that, I say not all the time, but I say I love you to, like when I hang up, the phone. Here is, you don't say to me. Here is one of the things I think the big realizations of the past 10 or 15 years that people have made. I think the transition has gone, because of the index fund revolution, the transition has gone from finding alpha in the markets, which people still do.

There's still plenty of money and brain power that goes towards that. But I think most wealth management clients have realized, I can actually control the tax. I would rather have tax alpha because I can control that piece of it. And so I think that's been a huge sea change. So if your advisor is focusing on after-tax outcomes, which increasingly advisors are, then it makes great sense to have the account in-house. So I held off until the after-taxies it out of respect for everybody who's in the business. But we need enrolled agents and we need CPAs.

We need to grow our team because there is more demand from our clients and supply of hours from the tax team. So Bill Arts in a squad worked relentlessly, relentlessly over the last couple of months coming up to the deadline. But the demand is not slowing down. So if you want to work on the team, please reach out to hiring at writholtswealth.com. If you want to reach out to bed and I directly, that's fine too. You know where to find us. And we'll forward to hearing from you. Can I tell an annoying tax story real quick? Sure. So back and forth on some tax things every once in a while. Something slips through the crack.

The state of Michigan sent me a letter. Bill Sweet says, you know what, Ben, handed it to me. He's my account and he takes care of it. He sends them a letter. We get on the phone with them because they keep sending me letters about this thing. Hey, you owe us $3,000 for something. Okay? Bill says, no, no, you're wrong.

We don't. Look it. Here's the paperwork to prove it. You're wrong. They send me this thing. He said, final notice. If you don't pay this money, we're putting it lien on you, a tax claim. Ben replied, it's our final notice.

sending this. We sent more letters. We sent, we got on the phone with someone. Don't worry about it. It's taken care of. Guess what they did last week? Put a lien on me. Shut up. For $3,000. Bill Sweet says, don't worry, Ben. We're taking care of this. Hold the line, Ben. He said, I think that the collectors don't talk to the tax people. Anyway, there's not enough people working in the taxes for the state of Michigan either, I guess. All right. Well, that's a great segue. Oh, by the way, thank you to the white charts for the snazzy looking. hat. I like it. For listeners, they got me a blue hat, says, there he is.

Very nice. Fits well. Love it. Thank you. I bet you get some smiles when you wear that out in the streets. I've, first time. All right. Let's see. You know what? This is coming to D.C. All right. We're going for a walk tomorrow. It's like 90 in D.C. What in the world? Suck it up.

Okay. I don't complain about, I live in cold weather most of the time. I do not complain about hot weather. I do. All right. So we were in Florida last weekend. It got to like the mid-80s one day. Oh, it's so hot. No, you're not going to hear me complain about it. I love the hot weather. You know, if you're not complaining, you're even living? All right, Ben, I've officially reached middle-aged status because... I've been telling you this for years. I'm listening to an audiobook, phenomenal. My first foray in earnest, I might add, into World War II. There's a book by Max Hastings called Inferno, The World at War in 1939 to 1945.

And it is a, it's like from the lens of the people. So from the civilians, from the fighters, it's much less like top down. Of course, there's top down stuff, but it's a bottom up story of the war. And it's wonderful. Somehow I got into my World War II phase was in college. I read 10 books on World War II in college. I don't know how, well, because of that. That dude, that's weird.

that is no when I visit a year up yes oh okay fine and my my favorite book of all time even though most people just know it as a series

is band of brothers read the book it's my favorite book I've ever read okay well maybe I'll get to listen but anyway I only brought this up to say

that we are we are lucky SOBs everybody who's living right now that we weren't living you know right back then or really any other time in modern in pre-modern human history

things weren't great So forgive me for complaining about the heat, but hey, we got used to good life. Okay. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal, America's new tax mantra. The IRS isn't going to catch me. Probably true. Audits of people with at least $10 million in income dropped 9% last year, and they are on track to decline another 39% this year.

A few charts in here. They're still, so we have like 90,000 employees at the IRS, full time, mind you from 06 to, I don't know, 2010. And then there was like a, you know, a dip and a little bit of a rally into, I guess, I don't know what this ramp up is. But it's still, it's still 70,000 people. And guess what? It's going lower.

I feel like like taxes, taxes in like the bull's-eye sweet spot of AI efficiency, is it not? But think about the, you'd think so. Think about the fact that they, we have fewer people working at the IRS in 2006 and how many more people are in this country now. The population has grown. And how many more people have more complex tax structures? Yes. Right? Like a lot of, a lot of things going on on people's tax returns. All right, the IRS workforce reduction so far would cut an estimated $46 billion in federal spending over the next decade, which should be an outrageous number, but I guess,

you know, 70,000 people working annually. But what's the decrease in tax revenue from that? So they estimate $643 billion. Okay. So you save $40 billion for the employees, but you lose that on... Okay, there he is. All right. All right.

And so the IRS says taxpayers as a group pay 85% of what they owe as they file returns, which to which I say, yeah, good enough. The problem is the tax code is so complex that you're never going to have... it be perfect, obviously. Let me mute.

I got the dinghies going on. All right, one last chart. If you and I went to coupled counseling, I would tell the therapist the first meeting. You know what he did? He never silences his notifications, ever. He always has dings going off. That's you.

Is that fair? It's actually not, it's fair or not fair. Like most of the times, because we do a lot of pods, but most of the times actually, my do not disturb is on. Duncan, come on. Michael has the most things that have anyone. I mean, you note, first of all, Josh does.

But you don't notice when they're not digging. Listen, your credibility is out the window after you declared my word that I've said six times in 2025. You have no like to stand on, Mr. Hang on. Someone said that, someone said Michael's word isn't ostensibly. It's directionally. Yeah, that word I use. That word I use.

Okay. Guilty assured. Direct revenue from IRS enforcement actions. check this out. All enforcement, $100 billion in 2025. Now, what's an enforcement? That's like, hey, we caught you and pay up? Yeah, like the letter that I got probably.

Like, you were supposed to pay this tax, you didn't pay it. Pay up. Okay. And then an audit, I don't know how they define an audit. It's an audit just like a random we're going to pick people above. It's like we're going to bend you over and give you a full body cavity search. That's an audit. But I guess how do they differentiate?

What's an enforcement? Like they caught you without doing an audit? And enforcement is like a letter. Hey. Oh, like, yeah, okay, got it. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. So anyway, it says that like people are being, you know,

cowboys about not being caught, but still $100 billion worth of enforcements. The thing is this stuff, the people who like try to just skirt by this. Like, I, again, I get, I don't know, one letter a year. Hey, this thing is different. And we have tax people help take care of that for me. Like, if you didn't have tax people,

people. What do you do? You wait on the phone for three hours to talk to an IRS agent and they still don't answer your question. Yeah. All right, Ben, I want to give you, I want to give you, I don't like the word flowers. I know it's like a thing. Is that like the thing that people say, like give that person their flowers? It feels weird. I feel like I can't say that. I want to give you some, a pat on the head sounds disrespectful. I want to acknowledge you. I love you. I want to give you a hug. What do I say? I want to give you some, some respect. That sounds too formal? What are you typing? Sorry, my donut disturb wasn't on. Oh, man, this guy. I went to text in me and it. Unbelievable. All right. That's karma. All right. Well, Ben, you deserve a ton of admiration because I read the Barron's

profile that they did of you. And they wrote, in just over a decade, he has written at least 3,660 blog posts, co-hosted in more than 765 podcasts. And in May is publishing his fifth book, Risk and Award, how to handle market volatility and build long-term wealth. So two things. Two things I don't want to mention. You are like the exact embodiment of the more you practice, the better you get. Fair.

I was a terrible writer when I first started. Your ability to. write consistently high quality things like that. I just give a pretty weak snap is amazing. And chart kid was blown away. He was telling me like, oh my God, I can't believe how fast Ben did, blah, blah, blah, blah for like the chart report that we're doing for advisors. And I said, well, yeah, like he's, he's incredible. He's got his muscles, his writing muscles are bulging out of his face. So credit to you. I, again, And I never liked writing before I started the blog.

Like in college and high school, I wouldn't enjoy writing papers. But I viewed writing as a way of learning because I realized I did not know enough. I needed to learn more if I was going to enhance my career. And that was one of the reasons that started writing. And it just, and I thought, I'll give it up after six months when no one is reading it. And that'll be that. And I'll have this thing to like, what I don't know, show my kids someday or something. And then I just enjoyed the learning process so much.

And now it's just part of my routine. So yeah, it's very, it's like. like second nature now. But if I stopped for a year, it'd be harder to pick back up, I'm sure. When I tell you to write something or when I ask you to write something for like a client letter and you do it in an hour, I'm just, I'm always blown away. So all right, they asked you, you wrote about getting started at Ridholtz in 2015 by criticizing the industry. What was wrong then and now? And you responded. It just felt like everyone and everything was negative. People were coming up with reasons to not invest and to change their investment plans.

A lot is actually improved because I think one of the big things that was that people were making decisions that weren't really tied to their goals. They were freaking out about what happened to the markets with the crashes and the recessions. A lot of wealth management has changed and gone towards a goal-based idea of investing money. That's one of the positives that we've seen. And I remember reading this when you posted this on Josh's site, you reached out to Josh and you were disgruntled with the state of the industry specifically the corner that you were in with all the alts and the returns, you know, the lacking, whatever. And you wrote confessions of an institutional investment. And you wrote confessions of institutional investor in 2013.

So for people, for newer listeners, for people that just discovered Ben, you know, in post-post-COVID, he's been banging this drum for a long, long time. You've been consistently fighting the good fight and championing better outcomes for investors for a long time. I'm not taking credit for it because there's a lot of people who came before me. I read them after the fact, like, oh, this person's been saying the same thing I've been saying. Who would you think? like Charlie Ellis, Bill Bernstein.

Yeah, Jason's Wyke. Those are the three of them that I grew up, like, idolizing and they're writing in words. But I do think that this decade, you can see, I think the behavior has improved for the better. Like all the people who have been espousing these messages over time, I think a lot of it is, and you and I hear this all the time, hey, I made it through this bare market because I listened to you guys or I read what you wrote or whatever, and I would have freaked out in the past, but I did it anymore. To me, that stuff is really cool to hear. That's the best.

And all right, here's another one, Ben. We made it through. The market just opened. And we are higher than when the invasion began. And, you know, that's pretty nuts. The market was right. The market was right. And we sided with the market.

So I guess, ergo, we were right. But the market did not whistle past the great. graveyard, the burden of proof was in fact on you. It's now earning season. And on the, you know, obviously not to minimize what happened. It's horrific and all that sort of stuff is obviously true. But through the prism of the market, the market got it right. And if you stayed the course and you didn't let the market dictate your outcomes, then you survived another one. And you're now a better investor for it. So the S&P is up 1% on a year or so. Emerging markets are up 12 or 13%,

EFA's up almost 8%. There was a lot of give back, but then it came rushing all the way back. Here's my general feeling about this market environment. Oil prices did not want to go higher. Like the $200 a barrel that all the oil in essence have been screaming

about, and stock prices did not want to go lower. That's my captain obvious take for what's been transpired. Like, why aren't oil prices way high? Why aren't stock prices way lower? they didn't want to go that way. They didn't want to go that way. That's my only explanation. Oil prices want to remain stable. Stock prices want to go higher. Not always. That's what it felt like

in this particular cycle of me. Don't you feel like the reckoning has to come from AI? Like if there's going to be a reckoning that everyone's waiting for, it's not going to be a war. You would think that... Like the reckoning. Yeah, yeah. You would think that the bull market and... whenever it will be caused something with AI. Maybe it's the SpaceX and OpenAI. IPOs. Like that would certainly suck a lot of liquidity out of the system.

Who knows? But it's just whatever. If it's not one thing, it'll be something else. Yes. I just think people are looking for like the thing to do it. Everyone, I think a lot of people immediately said, this is not it. This is not the thing. And maybe this lasts longer.

I don't know. Who knows? can I do a quick Seinfeld reference though and what's going on? You're not a Seinfeld person, but George Costanza knew his girlfriend was going to break up with him. He's like, what am I supposed to do? I have no hand in this situation. She's going to break up with me. I can feel it. So Kramer said, no, no, you break up with her. And George says, I'm breaking up with you.

Okay? That's us blocking the straight of Hormuz. No, you're not going to block it. I'm blocking it. I'm breaking up with you. That's my geopolitical analysis. That's all I got. bad. Man, the market is just so interesting, obviously. It's what we love. It's our passion, Ben. Oracle is up, was up 15% yesterday. It's up another 8% today. Everybody threw in the towel on semis, on software, excuse me. I said it was looking uninvestable yesterday. Biggest bounce of the year. Can you explain to me? Here's another one. Explain to me why Intel fell like 30% and now is

just taken off like a rocket ship. I don't follow Intel. This thing was in a 50% drawdown, and it came screaming back all the way higher, back to new highs. Well, all of these, the semiconductors are on fire. They are now a larger slice of the S&P 500 than software,

which is kind of amazing. I got this chart in here. This is from duality research. Okay, so today, software makes up about 25% of the technology sector, record low weight. Not that long ago, on January 2020, it was 54%. And you can see semiconductors have eaten into it. Hardware is basically the same. So this is, so that's a, that's an enormous, this is just in the tech sector, went from 54% to 25% software edit. Holy cow. I know we spent

a lot of time talking about this, but the moving the software names really is amazing. And not just the megas, like not just Salesforce and workday, which we spent a lot of time talking about this. spend a lot, and Adobe, which we spend a lot of time talking about, but like a name like Snowflake. Snowflake was at $280 in November of 2025, which is six months ago. It went from 280 to 120. 280 to 120 in six months. There's a lot of stuff that's in my too hard pile. Sorting through stuff like this, the AI winners and losers are trying to pick, like,

no way. I would not want to try to do that. I know you and Josh have been dabbling. I made a lot of money, well, a decent amount of money. All right, a little bit of money. In the February, the late February, early March bounce. And then I sold, credit to May. And then it puked again.

But if you, I guess this is at the risk of sounding totally ridiculous. Like the software, so software went to as low as IGV went to $76. It bounced. It fell at undercut let, though. And now it's like the high. highest volume, obviously, like when you make a new low, it's like, oh, no, like we're going so much lower. And not always, not always, but oftentimes, that is how bottoms happen, where it's like the second

puke, where it's like literally get me out at any price. And if you were bottom fishing and you didn't sell the second puke, you have to ask yourself, like, who was left to sell? So completely disconnected from the fundamentals, what AI might or might not do to this group. Like, if you didn't puke on the second rollover, there's no, there's no more sellers left. So it's not to say that, that they're going to recapture a quarter of the bounds,

half the, half the, half the loss. I mean, who knows? But these names, these names could be dead money for a year or two. They'll be, they could be tradable bounces and stuff, but. But this is when you really need to determine, is this a trader in investment? Correct. Because you and I always say, like, listen, the market's not stupid, but the market has puked up names 50, 60, 70% in this cycle, and they have come back.

Like, that has happened. So you could say, like, maybe it made sense at the time. But so that's what people are trying to grapple with now is like, gosh, these stocks are down 60%. Why wouldn't I go hand over fist on this? I think this is, this time feels different to me that trying to pick in the AI loser bin is way harder. I agree. This is very difficult. But most of the time, I don't, I don't know that I could say for, well, I would bet that most of the time when industry groups get rocked like this, there is a damn good reason.

And guess what? AI is a damn good reason. Now, 60% too much. Of course, who knows. But in the individual stock level, there's so many examples of, like, Nike is a great one. Of, oh, like,

this has got to be a buy, this has got to be a buy. And, like, it just, the market usually doesn't get it that. I made that mistake. Luckily, I got out quick enough and didn't compound my mistake. The market usually doesn't get it that,

that, that wrong. So maybe soft throws bounces 20%, maybe bounces 30%. Who knows? but going to be an interesting couple of years, that's for sure. So I said a few minutes ago, like just how fascinating the market is. I saw a chart from Todd's zone this morning. There were more flows into semis than into tech, like in general.

And people were done with the Mag 7. Could you imagine? I mean, of course, like you can imagine. It's happening right now. The Mag 7 comes back and the market's up another 15% on the year. Could easily see that happening. It's possible. So we are now, the S&P is, I don't know, percent and a half, maybe even less from a new all-time high.

And if the cues get their mojo back for whatever reason, like the narrative shifts on AI, maybe, you know, for whatever reason, it doesn't matter. But like, look at the move into Amazon. Insane move over the last four or five sessions. That's the bull case. Yes. And I think this is what most market participants were thinking. AI is going to matter more than geopolitics. And that seems to be what's winning out right now.

The Wall Street Journal, you got a cool thing in a year about how sometimes things change. It's like gold prices versus real interest rates. And the idea was that they tend to follow each other. But it's inverted. Inverse. Yeah. So if real rates are lower, that's good for gold because gold doesn't have, doesn't pay any dividends. It's not an income producing asset, right?

And it completely changed after the war in Ukraine. and now it's just a supply and demand thing. And that macro thing went away. I thought this was a good lead into the Walser Journal had the thing about energy stocks. Energy stocks are having a moment. And they show the percentage of energy and tech in the S&P.

And they were both at the exact same spot in 1996, which is insane to think about. Energy and tech had the same weighting. It was like 9%. 9% tech waiting in 1996. Unbelievable, right? I'd say. In the 1970s, Energy made a quarter of,

quarter of the index, according to Carlisle, I think it was close to 30% in 1980. Today, it's like 4%. It got as low as, I think, 2.5% or something in 2020 when oil went negative. That's a 40-year re-rating, 50-year rerating in sectors. I don't think it ever goes back, comes close to going back. Like, energy never gets above 10% again. That'd be weird. Oh, it never gets about 10%? Maybe. I mean, 30, forget about. So I found another AI re-rating. Can remember where I filed this, but the consulting firms, Accenture, Booz Allen, Gartner, they're all down 50 to 70%.

Yeah, I mean, those are, that, that's it. So McKinsey is a public company, if McKinsey was a public company, would be down the same as these companies, right? Yeah. So wait, so I looked at the, I also looked at the SMH, which is a semiconductor ETF versus IGV. This is over the past five years. IGV in the past five years is up a total, a grand total in five years of six percent. Not annualized, total.

IGV? Yes. And the biggest names is, like, Microsoft's the biggest name in there. Is meta in IGV? No, no way. Oracle and Palantir are. So yeah, five percent or six percent in five years. You know what else is bouncing big?

Yeah, you're right. Microsoft is in there in Palantir. No, I know. Microsoft's the biggest name. But SMH is a semiconductor, that's up like 260%. So it just, again, it totally consumed it. I did sell the loads in Blackstone, by the way. Happens. The actual lows.

The alternative asset managers are bouncing pretty aggressively, too. Okay. So we've moved on because we can only worry about one risk at a time. Private credit worries have subsided? I don't know. For now. Well, I don't know. Separate things.

Private credit worries have not subsided. the equity is bouncing. Not, not, you know, separate things. But don't you think investors eventually, unless there's more headlines, investors are going to get bored of that story? Because it's a slow-moving story. It's not something that happens. In private markets, things don't blow up overnight, typically. Yeah, yeah. It's a slow move, especially in credit like that.

Where are we going next? Economy. Let's talk about the economy. How much, how much would podcasters pay for a silent, leaf blower. Like an EV leaf, do they have electric leaf blowers that don't make noise? This is loud, isn't it? That's pretty loud.

Boy, Dwight, I love a good, as a middle-aged dad, I love a good leap. My kids always make fun of me because I'm constantly blowing dust out of the garage and getting the woodchips off the sidewalk. It's a great feeling. It is great. Leaf blowers, not something you thought that you would be spending money on when you were younger. So I'm skipping ahead in the dock.

somebody had a good response on my rejecting of the title, Lifestyle Creep. Okay. Somebody said, man, we've got a lot of in the doc this week. My bad, we've been moving slowly here. Very nonchalant podcast we've got today. You know what I mean? Good word. Okay.

This person says lifestyle creep should be referred to as the expense curve. Not bad. That's not bad. He said lifestyle creep implies you are violent. voluntarily spending more money on an inflated lifestyle. But as you get older, there are not inflationary cost step-ups embedded in everyday life that you cannot escape. Property taxes.

Kids consume more as they get older. Kids start playing sports, participate in more activities, cap-batch products come up, leaf blowers, college tuition. So even if you try to keep your lifestyle spending fixed, there's no way to escape the expense curve. That's true. I also believe that you should allow lifestyle creep in your life. If you make more money, you should prioritize spending it on nicer things.

I'm totally okay with that. And Ben is not just talking the talk. He told me how much money he spent on his Airbnb. And I was very impressed. I told my wife next year we're not spending as much. Wow, Ben. Very loose with the purse strings. No, I love it.

No, you're 100% right. That is what the money is for. Enjoy it. You know, my wife told me four years ago. Here's the one thing in our budget I want to prioritize. Because my wife, she doesn't spend a lot of money on clothes or purse. or shoes, like, I probably spend more on my wardrobe than my wife. She's, like, very minimalistic in that sense.

She said, I want to prioritize vacations. That's the thing I want to do with our, that's like the carve out for my piece of the pie or whatever. That's what I want. So that's what we prioritize. That's the number one thing. Yeah, it is. Right?

The memory's come with you forever. It is. And your kids, more importantly. I think we got a text from our Fred Michael Antonelli about this. We talk about the The big vacations We went on and I was a kid and there weren't as many We talk about them all the time still

I'm sure my kids will remember these vacations More than anything else they got for their birthdays or Christmas or whatever it is Any toys any whatever The memories of that stuff go away immediately All right so back to the economy A couple of quotes from the transcript Which is Phenomenal

I highly recommend They are really good of it. about just pulling out the little paragraphs you need to end. Yeah. Okay. So Walmart CFO, I would start with the fact that I am probably more constructive on the consumer than what one would glean from reading the headlines of news publications. There are a lot of alarmist headlines about the impact on the consumer, but the consumer

continues to be very resilient. I think the consumer has shown resiliency and probably is a little healthier and then what one would, okay. It's interesting coming from Walmart. Yeah. Dick's sporting goods. Our consumer is very, very healthy. So in addition to everything I said about the sport and culture coming together, the consumer is obsessed with sport.

We haven't seen trade downs from best to better and better to good. And one more, Levi-Strao, we continue to closely monitor the consumer response to pricing actions and to date. We have not seen an impact on demand. That's a pretty wide assortment there. Anecdotally, everywhere in spring break was busier. We've been going to the same place for four years. Everywhere was busier than we've seen it. more people spending money.

Boy, trying to get out of a restaurant with three kids and a meal, the ceiling keeps raising, or the floor keeps going higher. For the price? Yeah. Yeah. Right? It's like, wow, this is what I spent on a meal because the kids got chicken fingers and meck and cheese. This is life now.

People don't care. All right. Let's talk about the labor market because I think the way that, the best way to describe the labor market right now is confusing. I, if you're trying to make a hard stand on the labor market right now, I think you're crazy. So last week we talked with the unemployment rate. People said, Ben, stop using the unemployment rate. It can be fudged. So I said, all right, fine. U.S. labor force participation rate, prime age, is 25 to 54 because you want to take out the people who are older because they're retiring,

is near the all-time highs of 1999. It's within a stone's throw. And it was way, way lower through much of the 2010s. So you say the labor force participation, now this is, again, people who are in the labor force, actively seeking a job or want a job, have one. But a lot of other people poked holes in this theory, right? I feel like there's a lot of data and anecdotes that could support either side of the equation. Fair? You've got some in here.

I did think this is interesting. I had the unemployment rate from 16 to 24-year-olds. And remember, we were talking about this going higher, like back in the summer, fall, and we just stopped talking about it. Well, because it started going lower again. And I was like, hmm. So we got a few emails. One person said, I fully agree with Michael in the labor market impact-based on AI.

I've been hiring some junior folks straight out of college within a few years of graduating, and it is absolutely grim out there. Talking to an old professor of mine in computer science, what used to be almost every student getting internships and post-graduation jobs has dropped down to around the quarter of students. Even if it's not fully in the data yet, the vibes are grim for that age cohort, and it definitely seems like that is only going to continue getting darker. Elicitor sent us Derek Thompson did a podcast about this.

I listened to it recently. And I found they referenced a report by Adam Ozumick and Nathan Goldschlach called AI and Young Adult Jobs, the real mystery. Start by using the right measures. So they said the unemployment rate only counts someone as unemployed if they were actually looking for work. The problem with this becomes obvious when glancing at the labor force participation rate, which shows how many people are either working or looking for work. The labor force includes both as a share of the total income population. Over the last year, non-college young adults, age 22 to 25, have disproportionately given up looking for work.

These discouraged workers won't count as unemployed, which means that the unemployment rate is lower than if it did count them, a misleading sign of the labor market health. So look at this chart. Young worker employment rate, it shows 26 and up, young college and young non-college. And the young non-college is, it's not crashing, but it's certainly heading in the wrong direction. It's not great. Here's my problem with this chart. It only goes back to 2021. And the number today is way higher than it was.

Not way higher. The axis is very low here. I think it's really hard to make comparisons this decade of the labor market because we went from the literal hottest labor market we will ever see in our lifetime in 2021, 2021, to today where things are slowing down. And I think trying to figure out what is AI and what is that. Because remember that we had the wage growth for people who changed jobs versus didn't change jobs. And the gap between the two is about as large as I've ever seen it. People who were changing jobs were getting huge raises. And that's not happening anymore.

And it's the upper hand has gone from the labor back to capital, right? The business owners have the hand right now. And I just, I think this is. How about both? How about both? We are coming off the hottest labor market ever more than full employment over. employment. That's true. And it's also true that probably even absent that the AI fears and the data would show and the anecdotes and the vibes would feel that people are slower to hire

young people. And the reason the vibes are so bad now is because of the uncertainty, obviously. I don't want to sound insensitive, but I've seen a terrible labor market for young people. I lived it. After the GFC, that was a real crisis. But back then, people kind of told us, you should be happy you have a job. You want to raise? Get out of here. You know? Like, that was the kind of the mentality back then, because that was a real bad labor market. Now, the hard part is the uncertainty is so much higher. That's the part I get why the vibes are so bad. But the actually market itself is not as close as bad as it was back then.

No, get out of here. Yeah, true. But also, like, I don't want to, I don't want to, like, hindsight. You could say that things were probably going to get better post-GFC. But, like, right now, it just feels like we're, we haven't even seen how bad it's going to get. Yeah, you're right. That's the concern. Are we falling off a cliff here? Look at this. Average number of applications per entry-level job. So there was a stupid article. Anxious parents are spending upwards of $50,000 to land their kid a job. No, they're not.

I mean, that's like saying, my brain just broke. I was about to use a bad analogy. Whatever. On the fringe, there is a parent or dumb idiots that are doing this. Those are the same people that are spending a million dollars on their kids to get into college. but there are legitimate like job coaches for younger people that, you know, parents are spending $3,000, $5,000. Whatever. Anyhow, the point is that the average number of applications per entry-level job is so much higher than a loss historically.

Save your money. Just talk to people in your network. That's how you get your kids a job. Right. Not by spending money on a life coach. Right. All right, not to belabor the point, but one last email. Hang on.

So it shows the average number of applications per entry-level job is way higher. Isn't that just because it's easier than ever to do it? do. You can have chat GPT, write you up a cover letter and a resume. And don't you think this is, this number is never going back down? Yeah. It's, you're going to have your AI agent applying for every single job they can for you in the years ahead. It was just like when, when the, when the CareerBuilder.com came out in the mid-2000s, late 2000s, and you could apply to a job online. You couldn't, you couldn't do that before. It was way hard. It was way harder to find a job, because now more people could apply to jobs easier instead of like going to a company website.

and writing a letter and sending a resume, it got easier. So this number's never going back down. That's right. We got an email that corroborates what those guys were saying about the labor force participation rate. So I have a take on Torson's belief that AI is not impacting the recent grad unemployment. These recent grads aren't hitting the unemployment rate because they're just picking up jobs at restaurants, retail, et cetera, just to make ends meet. I luckily finally got a job after a year.

It's not the best, but it's adjacent to what I want to do. But I'm definitely overqualified with my degree and such. I can give you stories of friends, people I graduate with, just taking a job bartender so they can pay their bills. Meanwhile, they have business analytics or finance degrees from good schools and we're good students. I'm a data guy, but I don't think the impact is on the data yet. This is what happened in 2008, too. This is not a new story. I'm just, I don't want to, again, don't be insensitive.

This, this has happened before. It has. I think young people are going to be okay. Maybe I'm in a minority. I think it's going to be all right. I think people are going to figure this out. I don't. You don't, all right.

You don't think young people are going to be okay. I don't know, man. Not to be so, so grim, but like, why would, why would you hire as many entry-level employees as you have in the past when literally the AI can do it for you at a fraction of the price? Who's going to be the middle employee eventually? Eventually, I think companies are going to realize, like, who's next in line? We need someone to step in here who takes a lower wage, too. But businesses don't think that way.

Businesses don't think, well, what happens when these people are 35? Like, who's going to be the 35-year-olds here? That's not how they hire. Okay. You're right. The transition period may be bumpy. I think eventually business- No, no, no.

It's going to be bumpy. I just hope it's not as bad as people think. Fair. And there's going to be a ton of baby boomers retiring the years ahead too. That's the, there's something has to give there. All right.

Speaking of baby boomers, the Wall Street Journal had a piece. You hate these topics, the generational warfare. Did millennials or boomers have it harder? We went searching for the answer. So there's some really good charts in here. You know why?

Because all of this stuff, I'm about bringing people together. This is divisive and I don't like it. Like there's enough, there's enough divide in this country. But this is like going to a bar and arguing about Jordan versus LeBron. There's never going to,

there's never going to be an answer, but it's fun to argue about. Not for me. It's not. Okay. Jordan is the best and that's that. It's settled. Obviously.

So they looked at the median total income by age group, boomers and millennials. And 25 to 34, 35 to, and millennials are higher. Not, and this is, everything is inflation adjusted. Not like,

noticeably higher, but it's, it's higher. This one is going to make people mad. How affordable was a house? So they look at inflation-adjusted, median price of a new home in 2025, affordability is based on median household income and mortgage rates. They're saying in the late 70s, early 80s, it was way more expensive for boomers to buy a home than it is for millennials today. And for much of the 80s and 90s, it was as high as it is today or higher. This is surprising, Right? Boomers would say, see, told you, we paid 18% mortgages. It was harder for us.

I still don't quite believe it because they could refinance all the way down. The houses are so much nicer today that millennials are buying. They are. Yes. I agree. Then they also show average household net worth. Now, some people would say, hey, I'm not an average person. I'm a medium person.

But they did average. And millennials' average net worth now exceeds baby boomers at similar ages. And it's by a decent amount, too. And someone shared this with us a long time ago. This is from money in, and it mentioned this in the Wall Street Journal article. The baby boomers, can they ever live as well as their parents? They're prospects for job housing and having children in retirement.

And it's basically saying, like, baby boomers are screwed. And this is in 1983. Yeah. Well, in 1983, they did feel screwed. This is my point that I just feel like every young generation goes through something like this. And I know now seems scarier than ever because of AI. But this is a right of passage for younger generation. everyone has it.

Except maybe Gen X. No one cares about them. Let's be honest. Gen X pretended to have a hard time in the 90s, even though it was the greatest decade ever. Right? Reality Bites and Fight Club and all that stuff. Like, come on, get out of here. Nineties were great. Best decade ever.

Gen X trying to... They were trying to... What's the opposite of oral farming? I don't know. Okay. All right. But let's be honest. boomers had it way easier. It's just, it's true.

They're the easiest generation of all time. It's not even close. I'll die on that hill. I know you don't want to make a pronouncement, but it's true. Boomers had it way years than any generation in history. Then how come the divorce rate

amongst our parents, mine included, was so much higher. Because when life gets easy, you try to make, make, uh, I just reject that. I think life is just constantly not easy.

I think it's nonsense. Yeah, but we're, like our parents had it so easy. On a relative basis. taking care of their of their World War II Depression parents. My dad, so, okay, my parents got divorced, obviously, but my father had to pay for three young kids,

which he couldn't afford, on top of paying for his parents to make ends meet because his mom didn't work and his dad was pushing carts in a grocery store. And it didn't do great things from my family. And that is a very not unique story. Like, life was hard and it always is hard. That's against a basic point. Life was never easy. Fair.

I guess I'm thinking economically, like the overall economy. But also think, okay, but think about it. Fine. Go back to our parents. How my parents were in their young 20s. Like my dad had probably just graduated dental school when they started having babies. And the pressure of being a child yourself raising babies and wasn't easy. I guess the thing is like my dad paid.

$50 a semester for college. Finding a house was easy. Finding a job was relative. These kind of thing that young people worry about today, I think that was stuff was easy for boomers. I think we moved the goalpost bigly with the benefit of hindsight. I don't think anybody felt that life was so easy

back then. I mean, it's just nonsense. Come on. You could also say that the boomers being such a large cohort were one of the reasons that we're doing so well today. Like, they're spending and their, like, the boomers charged the stock market. Like, they were the ones who, like, brought it out of the doldrums of the 70s essentially, like getting into anyway.

Anyway, I love my parents. So I will die on that hell. Oh, that's going on a limb for a take. All right. Let's talk about venture capital. So, actually, artificial intelligence. So Q1, this is from A16 Z. Q1, 2026 was the largest venture quarter ever by a lot.

This is like the charts from COVID, the unemployment charts that just broke everything forever. So this is obviously, Open AI, Anthropic, Open AI did their $190 trillion round or whatever it was. Yeah, it's all. And when you look at, like, AI companies in terms of their fundraising, again, a broken chart. Q1 was $242 billion. Q1, 2024 was $16 billion.

So did AI save venture capital? Because it was all these unfunded commitments that they were waiting on. But it's so concentrated in these mega rounds and the mega funds. Like, think about how much money is being let on fire right now, all these bullshit AI companies that are just straight up zeros. True. But just all the dry powder people were sitting on it finally got it out of there and invested. So, Ramp, who's the, the economist at Ramp.

I can't remember his name, forgive me. We had him on the show. Ara. Okay. So ARA has a chart showing the Ramp AI Index. Anthropics sees its largest monthly increase to date up 6.3%. They're showing the share of U.S. business with P. subscriptions to AI models.

And it's at 50%. Obviously, it's going way higher. Anthropic is going vertical. And it's going to pass OpenAI within months. They're showing... So Redpoint did a deck on this about software and AI. And they have a chart called AI is enabling unprecedented efficiency. And they show the ALR divided by the full-time employees.

Hang on. Back to the Aras chart here. So they have Open AI Anthropic, Google. XAI and DeepSeek on here. Do you remember the Deep Seek freak out? I do. That is obviously a distant memory at this point. Matter of fact,

is Invidia, is still not recovered from the Deep Seek? Invidia is right at pre-deepseek levels. No. Are you sure? Oh, I'm positive. Okay. That doesn't sound right to me.

I bought Nvidia on Friday. I think the first time I ever owned Nvidia. Probably not. Maybe I can't remember. No, we both bought Nvidia in the Liberation Day thing. Oh, that's right. I made a ton of money on Nvidia. How could I forget?

That's, yeah, that's right. So a company called Cursor has $6.1 million in AOR per full-time employee. Lovable is $3.4 million. I'm not familiar with these companies works. Open AI is $1.5 million and Anthropics is $1.2 million. Salesforce, $540,000. Data dog, $510,000. This is the inequality stuff I was talking about.

If you can create a company this efficient and the money goes into the hands of so few people, they're going to, I mean, the AI people who are going to create so much wealth themselves, they better start building libraries and they better be, they better turn into Rockefellers. Or they're already some of the most hated people on the planet, it feels like. They're going to have to do something to really give back to humanity for this, because they're going to get so rich. Well, people are angry. Sam Altman's house has been attacked twice, I think, in the last couple of weeks.

Not great, but, you know, not, not, you know, I'm not trying to like, suggest that he deserved it or anything. but the message that they are putting out into the world is obviously deeply, deeply, deeply unpopular. Well, and so you saw that anthropic news that they created this, and Michael Semblech wrote a piece about it yesterday. They created this new, new program that could essentially look for holes in cybersecurity. And they said they found millions of them. Like, we could, we could go and hack every, this system could go in and hack everything right now if it wanted to. We're going to have something go off the rails.

Something's going to go off the rails here at some point. And unfortunately, this is going to become a political issue because it can't not. Oh, it has to do you trust government? This is going to be the political issue. For the next presidential election, AI is going to be the issue. Unless we're going through a big recession. Does anybody trust government to step in and protect us? No way.

There's no way they understand half of what's going on right now. So we've spoken a lot about what Microsoft's performance in a negative way is a straight-up reflection of, you know, a public proxy for Open AI. somebody emailed us. I'm sure you are aware of this already. I was not aware. But in case you're not, in 2023, the South Korean firm SK Telecom invested $100 million in Anthropic. Today that stake is worth over $2 billion in the latest round.

And look at this stock. Holy smokes. Going vertical. Okay. Interesting. That's not bad. It's up 75% year to date. I thought this is notable.

I bought Bitcoin on Friday, haven't bought it in a while. It broke. So in late February, when the SaaS crash really started to happen or mid-February whenever it was, there was a lot of charts showing, actually, it turns out that Bitcoin should suffer all along. Remember, they were like one-for-one? Yeah. And no longer.

So Matt made two charts, one showing like Bitcoin finally support, the other one showing software breaking down. Now, software has since, you know, bounce of the last two days. But look at the bottom chart. Like they were tracking damn closely. And I don't know if Bitcoin is going to lead software higher, hopefully, I suppose. But it is kind of crazy how close these charts look, though. And that's like the gold versus religious rates chart.

It looks great for a while. And eventually it'll break somehow. One will go up and the relationship will change. But for now, it's pretty darn close. Yeah. All right. Bill McBride, my favorite real estate analyst. Sorry, Logan.

Logan's over two. at Calcutor Risk has a piece about housing demographics. And he kind of pour some cold water. A couple weeks ago, Nick Majuli was on S compound, and he asked, what's going to be worse returns for the rest of the decade? Housing market or private investments? Like private credit, private. And I think housing would be the easy one there.

Obviously, it's hard because both use leverage and calculating returns, whatever. So here's what Bill says. My sense is there will be a pickup in boomers selling their homes in a few years and lasting until 2040 or so. These homes will be older and most will need updating. You and I have talked about this. But many of these homes will be in prime locations. We should also see a pickup in retirement community construction during that time period.

And he shows this chart that says, like, that boomer's selling. So he says that the biggest two cohorts are in their 20, like mid-20s and mid-30s. So he's saying the second circle, which is the mid-30s, suggests less home buying demand of the next decade and more existing supply. There are other factors that this likely hold down housing prices. We're saying the fact that boomers are getting older and likely selling and a big cohort of millennials are now kind of through that home buying age in a lot of ways means housing prices for a while at least could be just kind of stagnant, which would make sense with the amount of pull forward we had. Yeah, who's bullish on housing prices? I'm not.

That's a good point. I don't think, I haven't heard many bullish cases for housing recently. In terms of return on your investment? I mean, not to open that can of worms, but there is no return in your investment. It's where you live and it's damn expensive. Yes. If housing prices keep up with inflation for the rest of the decade, I think that would be a win. I haven't had hot water. My hot water like ebbs and flows. Remember I told you I'm like the type of process?

It's like, I'm slow to like fix things. Still having problems with hot water? Well, here's the thing. The kids get the fresh shower and they get the hot water. And it's not like cold, but it's not hot. And I did call plumber. He didn't respond. I will get this fix.

But it's going to, I'm probably going to do Navian, which is like $8,000. for the privilege of having hot water. Got to have a hot shower. My wife runs it really hot. Like she would be extremely mad at me if I was doing what you're doing. One of the things in that World War II book is, and this is going to be, and I'm very consciously saying the word directionally right here, if it's not 100% accurate.

17,000 U.S. soldiers lost limbs during the war. 100,000 Americans lost limbs in factories preparing for the war. Wow, because it's such a big ramp up. 100,000 factory workers lost limbs. So I could take lukewarm water, know what I mean? Okay.

This book has really put things in perspective for you, huh? I have great perspective. I'm always enjoying life, but this is, yeah, this is a big one. Okay. All right. What else on the housing band? Oh, this is a good one. Lance Lambert, the current housing market bifurcation.

So we talk about this all the time that housing is discussed as this monolithic thing. And it obviously isn't. It's very regional. Check this out. So Lance Lambert has a chart. Did that get created on Long Camp Polly? You know what's so funny? I literally was watching it this week.

And I thought I had the exact same thought because Philip Seymour Hoffman, they're at an art gallery and he goes, dude, we got to go. I just sharded. that might have been the first time I've ever heard it. Yeah. I had the same thought, I guess, did he, did they invent it? So the chart shows the median days to pending in February at the onset of spring across the country. And in California, in New York, in the Midwest, Ben, homes are selling really quick.

But in the Sunbelt, they're just not at all. 70 days. I think eventually people are going to, I think it's going to turn. And like they, they've gone into like the correction phase earlier than the rest of the country and they're going to be the first ones out of it.

Do you think? The southeast. Sunbelt, whatever. Could be. I don't know. Okay. All right. You talked about Nike here.

Oh, this just blew my face off. So found this in transcript. For this quarter, revenues were flat on a reported basis and down 3% on a currency neutral basis. Nike Direct was down 7% with Nike Digital declining 9%. And Nike stores declining 5%. Holy shit. Gross margins declined 130 basis points.

My God. So, all right. Last five years, Nike is down 66%. The market is up 76%. Last 10 years, Nike is down 16%. The market is up 300% almost. Down 16% versus the market up 300. Nike going back to 1993 has lost its edge compared to the market.

Obviously, at one point in time, Nike was, you know, trounce in the market. So I had a friend over, we were talking recently about, I don't know, the stock market came up. And he was saying that like, you know, the things that he bought, he's like, I knew they were going to bounce. They always do. And I couldn't help myself. I said, well, not always.

Like, listen, do the great companies usually bounce when they're selling off, you know, whatever? And I was like, sometimes. Like, he's like, I learned my lesson. I said, no, but you're learning the lesson for this market environment. It doesn't always work this way. And even now, like, you could have said about Nike. And there's a lot of stocks. Disney, Nike.

United. I mean, there's a million of them. Yeah, Disney's a great one. I don't view Nike as a brand that has been totally tarnished either. It's, I still feel like I see I wear a lot of Nike still. My kids, like maybe this is just anecdotally. It doesn't seem to me like it's a tarnished brand that people don't wear anymore. No, it's such a good point.

I feel like it's a shitty investment and the company is legitimately not doing great. Obviously, stores are down 5%. But like, it's still the premier brand in footwear and in athletic retail. But from an investment point of view, it sucks, shit. It sounds like they're really... And it is, it did and is losing market share.

Yeah, it does sound like their big thing was they said, we're just going to sell direct. We're not going to sell on Amazon and that stores anymore. And they just made a huge mistake. And now it's compounded. Yeah. Horrible mistake. All right, did I put this in here?

I did. I did. I did because I think it's interesting. So quarter said that they've integrated Claude and they said what it is, you can ask any question about any company, any event, any speaker, any metric and get an answer pretty quick. And it's funny, I was going through this the other day. I was asking about like recession comments and it was like, would you like me to break

this down by all companies or just companies? They're well known. Like, the prompts back to you are so amazing. And it just got me thinking, you and I've read all the puppet books probably. He had those stories where he would go to the GEICO CEOs. He knocked on GEICO offices on the weekend, and he sat down with the CEO to talk about the company. And he used to have to send away to get quarterly reports from companies. Like they wouldn't just have them out there.

You'd have to ask a company. They would send it to you in the mail, this huge thick thing. And now people have the ability to answer any question and parse this data. And it's just there. And it's not like you even have to go digging for stuff anymore. It's just you can ask for it. And it'll give it to you. It's amazing.

It really is kind of amazing. And this just shows also why investing is harder than ever. Yeah. Like it was kind of fishing a barrel back. Everyone knows everything. But like that's a great point for knowledge workers. AI is, uh, AI is incredible. I mean, obviously, the hot take, it works.

Um, but you know what's interesting? They're, they're, I saw on the demise of software. Um, the, so the playoffs started on Saturday. And prices for Nick's tickets has went up a, hot. And last year, like, so I split tickets with my friend. We go together to the playoffs. And we were very pleasantly surprised about the prices for last year. Like, they were reasonable.

And this year, they're a lot higher. And we were thinking about like, hey, should we just like sell one game one round? Because, well, certainly for the Raptors, we were very confident that we were going to like, Hawks will be a little bit harder. Who cares? Be that doesn't I. I went on to Claude. And I said,

what is the cheapest ticket on stubbubber ticket master in the lower bowl in the 100 section at Madison Square Garden for round one or Saturday? And it couldn't get in. There's no API allowed to access it. It's like in JavaScript or a different sort of thing. So I think a lot of people are just overestimating like the ease with which these things can integrate and operate. Right, because they don't want the AI to help you parse through that market.

Correct. Another great example of that is, so there are people that write like basically blog posts on Twitter. And I was curious to read one, but I didn't really feel like spending the time. So I asked Claude to summarize it for me. This was about like what's going with Mythos, the new Claude thing. And I don't have time for that. And I needed to summarize because I wouldn't understand 90% of what I'm reading, right? Yeah.

Not surprisingly, Twitter blocks Claude, blocks chat. Because you have to use grok. It doesn't block rocks. So I went on Grock and Grock works. Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. Barrier's to entry are going to make it harder in a lot of ways. All right.

Let's just do some survey stuff real quick. So University of Michigan, consumer sentiment hit an all-time low. And look at COVID. COVID broke everything. Yep. Forever and ever. It just broke everything. The response rates, it didn't break that.

That was in secular decline. But nobody responds to these surveys anymore. It's crazy that it used to be 90% response rate. Yeah. And not long ago in 2013. Now, on the flip side of consumer sentiment, or consumer survey sentiment, I should say, to be precise, Zikarty shared a chart of Bank of America total credit card and debit card spending per household. It rose 4.3% year over year, marking the strongest growth since early 2023.

Now, is some of this gas prices? Yeah, probably not a small amount of this. and maybe, you know, fueling the frustration, but people are still spending. I was thinking about this in terms of the sentiment readings being so bad. And watch what they do, not what they say. So the number is something like 60 to 65 percent of all households own stocks, right? By that metric alone, people have some optimism about the future. Regardless of what they say about the economy, what's going to happen going, like,

so that's the disconnect between these surveys. If people still hold stocks, they're optimistic about the future. That's my tip. That's my read. And the sentiment surveys. That's a good point. Like, you ask somebody, like, are you optimistic? No.

How much stocks do you on? It's like a complete, like, well, then, yeah. Exactly. All right. Good email about the millionaire thing. We talked about a million is the worst amount of money last week. For those of us in decent paying jobs when I elite jobs, maybe we have a great year at work,

but then they throw us an extra $3,000 bonus or something. But if the market has a great year, and someone with a million dollars could see $250,000 gains more than their salary. So you don't have enough money to retire, but you're still at a point where your investments matter more than your labor. It's just a different mindset as all. And maybe it's also more common than it used to be. The prior generations, you work to some specific date and collected a pension. That's a fair point.

But I think that also just shows how important the markets are to people. Right? Like, if you can make that much money in the markets by compounding and saving and investing, like that's why you save and invest. because the payout is much better. That's like a good thing for it. You don't want to touch that money. All right.

One more thing we talked about last week. We talked about, I said, I saw these old people in Florida. They were kind of crouched over and got a lot of response to that for people about like, you know, you're right. That's a big mindset change. It's like health is wealth, right?

Like you enjoy it while you can. So this guy, Dan Haylet, someone said us, a bunch of people sent us this substack. He says in the UK, a 60-year-old man can expect to live on average around 84, a six-year-old woman to around 87. Those are the headline numbers. The ones that make retirement planning calculated that have you prepare for 25 to 30 years. But those numbers don't tell you that most of those later years aren't healthy years. He says the data shows from someone who's 60 today, you're looking at roughly 12 to 15 more years before health limitations start to intrude in meaningful ways.

So his number, his baseline is you have 12 good years in retirement if you retire at 60 before your health starts to potentially make it harder for you. You don't want to travel anymore. You don't want to sit on a plane. You don't want to go for those walks on a tour or something. And again, these are average numbers, obviously. My parents are both, my dad is turning 80 soon. He looks like he's still like 55. He looks great.

He still goes on walks all the time. And, like, my parents are both in good health. But this, for the averages, this is, I think this is probably not a bad way to look at it. You want to front load your spending in retirement because that's when you can enjoy it. The counterpoint is, and I agree with you, the legitimate counterpoint is like, senior living facilities that you're going to want are a fortune. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I remember my grandmother, when she moved into one in her 90s, it basically sucked up all of her savings. It was gone. Right. And, uh, yeah. So there's like, obviously levels. There's tears. So my grandfather, Sergeant Battenick v.

P. died in one of the shitty ones. And it was horrible. It was the most depressing, fucking place in the world. Yeah, not. places to go. Alternatively, at that point, the kids can take care of you, right? What do you mean? Sorry, kids. You're paying for my senior living. I paid for your whole life. You pick up

the tab now. Assuming that your kids have the money. It's like a, it's, you know, it's like a hundred grand a year. By the time we're, by the time we're that age, though, we're going to have robots to take care of us. We're not going to have to go to senior living center. We're going to have two robots taking care of us. I want to die with the human by my side. Okay. Well, if you wanted to, could you tell the robot to kill you or think there's going to be an off switch? Like, hey, I'm done.

Strangle me. All right. Ben, box office is up 26% year over year. Scott Mendel said a puck wrote an article. It's a family-friendly box office revival for real. There are 26 PG-rated movies slated for wide release this year, up from 18 and 2024. This year, we had hoppers, Mario, goat, hell,

and there's a lot of, A lot of winners. The family stuff is carrying this year. A lot of winners. So he said studios tend to suffer when they default to legacy IP. Tron sequel, Springsteen biopics, the Snow White remake. By the way, I think that shit is done. I hope.

I know there's still like a lot of garbage. That's like, you know, we're still working our way through. Like there's another mortal combat coming out. By the way, mass of the universe. I don't know if I said this last week. The He-Man looks horrendous. Well, they're already doing a live-action Moana, which looks terrible. I know.

I know. Yeah, but that was like in the hopper. Like, they didn't, you know, snap their fingers. They made that two years ago. I think that there's like a hopefully like a sea change in terms of studios being wise to like giving the audience what they want and they don't want Tron. I hope so. This made me laugh. Fun roller coaster though.

Great roller coaster. This made me laugh. And Texas or the South in general will say soda sometimes, but never pop. Never. Usually we say Coke as an all inclusive name, which can lead to conversations that go like this. Me driving. Hey, you want to pull over and get a Coke at the next town? Wife.

Sure. What do you want? Wife. Die Dr. Dr. Pepper. that one doesn't make sense to me. That's why I say pop.

Yes. The Coke thing, that's a Southern thing, right? They call everything to Coke. All right, Ben. Some recommendations. I listened to a book about Spielberg, Coppola. So really, Coppola was the guy, and then Spielberg and Lucas. And the book was called... Wasn't it like the Three Kings or something like that? Yeah, something like that.

Was that what it was called? Three Kings? I don't know. That does sound familiar. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Well, actually it doesn't matter what it's called in case somebody wants to read it. The Last Kings of Hollywood. Oh, there you go.

And there were some really, you know how I love this stuff, like the could have beens for movies? Yes. So check this out. First of all, Star Wars was a joke at the time to the point where,

Harrison Ford was an architect, it was not an architect. That's being very generous. He was like a carpenter. He was like Brad Pitton once upon a time in Hollywood. Right. You know what I mean? Like the handsome guy with a shirt off,

like doing, like, you know, fixing houses and stuff, building fences and whatever. Harrison Ford and the cast on Star Wars, like the original one, were like laughing and mocking him because he had no idea what he was doing. They didn't, obviously when you're making a movie, you don't know what the final screen is going to look like. So it was just a complete debacle of a production. They wanted Han Solo to be played by Al Pacino.

That would have been weird. Could you imagine? Here's another very, very weird one. they wanted Christopher Walkin from the Mark Hamill role. That would have improved the movie. My one Star Wars take is that Mark Hamill is awful. He ruins the movie for me. He was terrible.

This is widely known. I knew this. Tom Selik was cast as Indiana Jones, but then he had to do, what was that? What was that Tom Selperl in the 70s, 80s, I guess? Magnum PI. Yeah, that one. He was in contracting Magna P.I.

Good Paul. Last anecdote, I thought was interesting. Harvey Keitel. He played the Martin Sheen character in, my brain really is breaking in Apocalypse Now. They shot him for a month. And Coppola was like, this isn't working. I feel like you would read a whole book about this.

Like people who could have been cast in a movie and didn't. It's great. Well, the movie about, the book about creative artists had a lot of this stuff. Yeah. The craziest one was Belushi and Carvey. and bad boys. Yeah, I did listen to that book.

I don't think that would have worked. All right, DTF St. Louis ended. God, I love that show. That was freaking awesome. Okay, I got to pick stuff back up because I essentially unplugged for a whole week. We didn't watch any shows. The only thing I watched was college basketball

a little bit, Final Four. And spring break, we unplugged. I didn't watch any shows. I don't watch any movies. I only read, like, beach books. I didn't really, the only thing I watched was that Crime 101 that you recommended,

You said you didn't like it. I was really bummed out when I turned it on. It was two hours and 20 minutes. Like, no action crime movie should be that long. Did you finish it? I'm almost there. It's just, it's trying to be heat. And even heat was probably too long.

It's just not that good, right? Like at all. Yeah, I try to, I don't know. It's just too much. So you think, so I'm, I don't know, three episodes into the DTF show. Keep going with it. It ends well.

It's only seven. I loved it. It's just the quality of HBO that we've all come to know and love. Yeah. It's unmatched. I will say, though. Somebody, screw this up, Paramount.

Yeah. Somebody, somebody recommended recently to finish or to jump back into Paradise Season 2. Because I was sort of like, eh. So I'm halfway through it. And I will say, credit to Hulu. Like, it's not HBO at all, but, like, it's pretty good. And it's a totally different show in season two.

It's completely different. Oh, did you finish it? No, we watched the episodes, but it's good. It's good. It's good. Yeah, it is good. I'm surprised. It's better than I thought it would be.

All right. I forgot to mention a few weeks back that I watched Bone Tense, Temple. Holy shit. Was that movie awesome? Okay. Like, obviously, it's not, it's not a, it's not a U movie. But like, those movies have no business being as good as they are.

Better than the 28 years later or not? Because the ending of that was just hilariously bad. So, oh, you thought so? You don't remember the ending of that movie? It was just very weird. Like the, the, the literal last scene where those wild boys came on. Yes. So that was the, that was how, that was how this, this one followed those.

crazy guys. So it was just, it was just, yeah, it was, it was awesome. Very gnarly and grisly and extremely violent. It was great. Lastly, there's a bummer of a way to end it, but to end the episode. But I saw a tweet, the most dangerous year of a man's life is the one right after he finally gets what he wanted. And in the book, in the Spielberg-Copola book, each of them We're, like, pretty depressed after, after Jaws and Star Wars and Godfather. I can see that because it's like, I've climbed the mountain. Now what? Right.

I've, the peak of my professional. Now what I'm like. So life is, I guess, it's always, you know, growth and once you get what you want, there's like an obvious chemical letdown. Well, in your money and your brain, Jason Zweig says that the anticipation is a, everything's firing off in your brain. And then when you get it, it's like, you're nothing in your brain,

nothing hits anymore. Like, you get it and you go, there's no, like, relief, there's no, it's just, oh, I got what I wanted. Of course I did. Right. Same thing with vacations. I mean, obviously vacations are great,

but it's at least as much fun looking forward to it. Yeah. Than getting what you want. So, um, that's it. That's one of the, you know,

one of the tragedies of being human being, I suppose. Getting what you want is not as good as it should be. Yeah, you got to move on to something else. Yeah. All right. Okay. Nope.

No. That's it. Give me a stock market check real quick. Stocks are up. Everybody back in the boat. Yeah, NADs except more than a percent. Gold is up again. Everybody back in the boat.

All the noise are not far away. All right, but let's be honest. Something's going to happen tomorrow and then it'll reverse and then something will happen the next day and that'll go reverse again and double reverse and We're never out of the woods. We're always in the woods. It's fun. The stock market is fun.

Okay. Animal Spirits at the compound news.com. Hiring at ridholt'swealth.com. We want to hear from you if you are interested in joining the tax team. Hope everybody is enjoying life. We'll see you next time.