Animal Spirits Podcast - Measuring the Wealth Effect (EP. 425)

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

On episode 425 of Animal Spirits, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ben Carlson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ discuss 1990s nostalgia, the growing importance of the stock market on the economy, the Nifty Fifty vs. the Mag 7, buying Nike as a falling knife, the K-shaped economy, flying private, Tom Lee likes ETH, the 50/30/20 rule and more. This episode is sponsored by Pacer ETFs and Fabric by Gerber Life Learn more about COWG at http://paceretfs.com/ Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes at: https://meetfabric.com/SPIRITS 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.   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

Today's show is sponsored by Pacer ETFs. You may be familiar with the Pacer Cash Cow series, which has grown to over $30 billion in assets under management. That's right, then. The Pacer U.S. large cap cash growth leaders ETF, ticker Cow G, aims to identify top growth companies in the Russell 1,000, by screening for above average free cash flow margins, providing diversification outside of the max seven. Free cash flow margin, which is free cash flow divided by sales, has historically been a

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Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company. Not available in certain states, prices subject to underwriting and health questions. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion

of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben.

Michael, one of the things that happens in middle age as time passes, which I know you are well aware of. Summer's already gone. It's just nostalgia. In the 1990s nostalgia, I feel like, has really kicked in for me in the past few years of middle age. And you and I are going on a 90s nostalgia tour in about a month. So we just announced this last week at Future Proof. The musical acts are blues traveler as the opener and Bush as the main show. And I don't know which one I'm more excited about. I never realized you were such a big Bush fan. I mean, listen, I'm a child in the 90s.

Bush was I had the What was the album called With everything's in And little thin Yeah I had that That was in That was

In every movie Like there was There was five number one singles in that On that album Machine Head was in the Mark Wahlberg Reiss movie

Fear Yeah And I could Google them But I'm not going to But I know for fact Many movie Yes I don't think that movie

Would fly today But also You and I are going out Earlier A day earlier To see Oasis At the Rose Bowl So we're doing

A complete 1990s tour, and it's going to be fantastic. Obviously, you don't just go to Future Proof for the musical acts, but it's like the perfect send-off for the conference at the end, right? You have all these meetings, you run into all these people, you do all this networking, and then at the end, you have, you know, a thousand people in finance, drinking beer and whatever, highnoons and listening to music. It's amazing. This is a perfect send-off to the conference, and I can't wait. I can do the whole fast thing on hook I used to be able to do that in high school

You printed out the lyrics and memorized them I don't think I printed them out I'm pretty I'm positive you printed them that Or you wouldn't have been out my head There's no way that you can memorize those legs Without printing that's okay There was stuff I know every word No but can I sing the thing? Yeah probably

See how many how many Modellos deep I am before I But so check out There's still time to register Yeah what do we got So FutureproofHQ.com to register there's still time, and the spots are filling up fast, so hurry up and get there because it's going to be awesome. All right, we have an announcement to make.

Chart Kid Matt has his own blog now. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Chart Kid Matt.com. That's right. It's going to be very chart heavy, obviously, late in the words. So he had this chart last week on one of his blog posts, measuring the wealth effect. And he looked at the change in household net worth versus a change in the S&P 500 just to show

that there basically has never been a time where now. worth has been this tied to the stock market, right? Which makes sense. So this is increasing every decade. It gets a little bit higher and higher. And the 2020s are the highest. And some people look at this kind of data and they say, oh, this is very worrisome. Because if the stock market falls off, that's going to really hurt people, the households. But I look at this as a positive development because most people don't realize that very few households actually owned stocks back in the day. So this is a sign of progress that that stock market is this big part of of a wealth driver. And it's, I think it's an important thing because it makes households

richer. The fact that there's 60% of households who own stocks now versus 19% in 1983 or whatever it was, I think this is a sign of progress, not something to worry about. And we continue, well, it cuts both ways. But yes, yes, I would agree with you. We've heard from a bunch of listeners over the last couple of weeks who cannot afford to buy a house right now and they've put at least a portion of it in the market, which is... So you're coming around to this idea, aren't you? What idea? That people are doing it?

I mean, people are doing it. You kind of poo-pooed it a little bit. No, no, no, no, no, no. I poo-pooed the fact that these people are moving the market. Okay, right. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's... But the idea that these people are probably better off financially than they would have been is interesting to consider.

There's not irony might be the wrong word, but I would never give this advice to somebody who was buying a house. Now, I guess just put, take some of your down payment and just make more money. Why would you put, why would you, why would you protect it in cash? Would you could just make more money? That's true. But I think a lot of them are probably going, I think I'm just going to keep putting the house. I think that's what we've heard from a lot of people is, especially in big cities.

You know, I don't, I don't buy that for a second. So when the market, when the housing market, uh, unfreezes, thaws out. I think that's the when it thaws out, when it thaws out, they are going to say, hey, I saved up $110,000 for a down payment, and now I've got $150, I could afford a bigger house. Let's go. Now, people are going to buy houses. That's what they do. Yeah. What do you think the magic number is for mortgage rates? It's under 6%. Like five and a half? Like people go nuts. Like 575. 5 and 70ths. Boom. Unlock. There it is. All right. Gunjohn at the Wall Street Journal has a piece about the new generation of people buying the dip. This is itching. So she says

similar to Matt's point. As stocks have more entertained with Americans' finances than ever, stocks as a percentage of household assets surged of 36% in the first quarter, the highest on record going back to the 1950s. The share of total options activity that stems from these individual traders recently hovered around 20%,

even higher than the peak during the 2021 meme stock mania. That surprises me. So that, like, the meme stock thing for most of this stuff wasn't the peak. It was just another goalpost along the way. Another mile marker. I think it's hard to argue at this point that the stock market is not driving consumer spending and consumer decision making. Now, I had been on the other side of that probably, I don't know,

20, 23. Josh was very vehement that, of course, it drives spending. I think my point was, and I still stand by this, if people don't look at their 401K and decide to spend more. So let's just say the middle cohort, the 20 to 40% of earners that do have a 401k, but don't have a brokerage account, don't have a side crypto account, don't have this and that. If their 401k goes from 55,000 up to 59,000, that doesn't impact your life decisions you're spending. However, if you have a JumboE 401K, a brokerage account, a crypto account, an NVIDIA and a Palantir account, then yeah, you're having a great time.

I always kind of dismiss Josh's thoughts on the wealth effect as well. But here's the way that I personally think about it. As someone who's been saving and investing for 20 plus years, I almost look at it as like the, I don't really like this term, but like the coast fire thing, you know what that is where you save up a bunch of money and then you get to the point where the pile is big enough where you don't have to save as much anymore

or anything and you just let compound interest take from there. And so I look at my balance and it's probably higher than I expected because this bull market has been going on for so long. And I think, well, if it just grows at X percent a year over the next 10, 15, 20 years from the current level,

I can let compounding do the most of it. And so, like, if I'm not putting as much in, that's okay. and I can just spend it instead. So I personally have that mentality. Like, well, geez, if I save a little less this year, is it really going to hurt me that much? If the growth is going to override the savings anyway,

I think that's what's happening too. Yeah, like I always fell back to the labor market. If people have a job, they will continue to spend money. But it's part and parcel of the same thing, right? If you can't, you're not going to have a bull market in a recession. Right. Yes, these things go hand in hand. All right.

We've been talking a lot the past couple of weeks about the mood of the nation, juxtaposed with the stock market, a lot of angst, anxiety about AI, college grads. Like, it doesn't, things don't feel, things don't feel that good just based on the way that we're ingesting information. Do it ever anymore, though? I don't think, I don't think we're ever going to get to the point where things are euphoric, even if people are acting euphoric. I'm just saying, I don't think that we're giving positive vibes on the show over the

past couple of weeks, do you? Oh, that's interesting. It was pretty topy a few weeks ago, but yeah. Was it? Okay. Well, either way, either way. I've said this before, I'll say it again. As much as we love the publications,

they provide us with a lot of nuggets for the show, I always will fall back to listening to what the companies are saying. Listen to the companies, not the newspapers. So, for example, this is from the transcript. The CEO of MasterCard said, consumer spending remains healthy, supported by low unemployment and wage growth that continues to outpace inflation,

that is true across both affluent as well as mass market consumers. While macro uncertainty remains due to government actions and geopolitical tensions, overall we remain positive about our growth outlook as the fundamentals that support consumer spending have been strong. Here's another one from Visa within the U.S. While spending growth differed among consumer brands, spend bands, all spend bands in Q3 remain resilient and consistent with past quarters. Amazon, what we can tell you is that, we've seen so far in the first half of the year, in the first half, we just haven't seen

diminished demand. And then sofi, which serves a younger clientele, turn it to credit performance. The health of our consumer remains strong, and we're not seeing any signs of weakness. Our credit trends continue to be strong after seeing delinquencies peak early last year. So I know people feel how they feel and that, you know, it's important, of course, and there's obviously winners and losers in the economy. And maybe there's just more losers relative to winners, and there have been. I don't know what the deal is, but things are okay,

even though we got a slowish... What report did we get last week that spooked the market for seven hours? It was, was it retail sales? I can't remember. Oh, it was a job support, of course. How could I forget? I feel like pulling this stuff

from the transcript, these sound like the same quotes we've been reading for three or four years. For years. They keep saying the same thing. The credit card company, and it's always a credit card company. There was one quarter of recently

about like Macro uncertainty and Recession Watch, of course. but they keep saying the same thing. So I put my favorite cartoon in here. The one where they talk about the pilot said, we're going to have a little turbulence, and the guy screams, we're all going to die. And then the lady says he's a financial reporter.

That's a little extreme, obviously. But there's maybe something to that. No, there's a lot to that. There is. All right. I had a little discussion. I think Lee Drogan was putting this out on Twitter, and I wanted to get your thoughts on this.

So he was saying, can you really call it a bubble if it's literally just a handful of stocks? So JP Morgan has this thing that shows the top 10. and they're trading at 29 times earnings, and the remaining stocks are trading at 21 times. So, like, if it's, if the only things that are quote unquote overvalued, however you want to say that, is a handful of stocks, can it really be a bubble? Okay, that's obviously not true, though. It's not just a handful of stocks, but I guess if you think about, so if you look at

the performance with the NASDAQ and the S&P versus everything else, the small caps, the midcaps, international stocks, those ones are obviously very muted. I guess the point, of course, there are other speculative areas, but it's not. not like in 1999, Koch was trading for 40 times earnings or something. And GE was trading for 40 or 50 times earnings. Like all these other stocks were overvalued. That was one of the biggest polls in history. So I'm looking, yeah, so I'm looking for a better, a better way to look at this. And I think it's the Nifty 50. So the Nifty 50, I don't, do you read this thing from Jeremy Siegel about this? He wrote this in 1998. And he looked at the Nifty 50 and he looked at

all their different P.E. ratios. And, you know, Avon was trading for $6.000. 60 times or whatever. That was a big one in Polaroid and all these these companies were trading. What is Avon? Coca-Cola. What do you mean what was Avon? I don't know that what company is. Do they make makeup? Yeah, it's a makeup sales. It used to be like door to door. But all these companies were trade, Coke was trading for 46 times earnings. Why was a makeup company? Door-to-door sales. That was a big innovation. Exactly. Right. So Siegel had this and he looked at the Nifty 50 and they were, the Nifty 50 was trading at 42 times earnings in 1970 something. S&P was at 19. So it's an even one. wider spread than today. But the S&P ended up falling 36%, but American Express fell 63%.

This is, I think this is when Buffett bought American Express because of the salad, whatever thing. McDonald's fell 62%. Walt Disney Company fell almost two-thirds. Xerox fell by 70%. So these companies all got slaughtered and the market did, didn't do quite as bad. But I think that's probably the better comp than the dot-com bubble. It's an 50-fifth. Three things. Number one, these companies that are propping up the market, they all did just have their crash. Less people forget. 22 happened. And Nvidia fell 70 and Netflix fell 70 and Medved fell 70 and Amazon fell 50. That just happened. And it just happened again in the first quarter. Not quite the extreme, but Nvidia fell 37 percent, something like that. 40 almost.

The difference is obviously these stocks recovered. But I don't know that I buy that argument. Can you call it a bubble if it's just concentrated in a few stocks? Of course you can. I saw a stat yesterday from a substack called the following night. People were sending this round about the Russell 2000. Somebody wrote, between 2022 and July 2025, the earnings of the nine of the largest companies in the S&P 500 grew by an impressive $290 billion, which is quite remarkable. But their combined market cap grew by over $13.3 trillion. That is a 45 times multiple on incremental earnings over that time.

I also find the whole conversation about this is a bubble, isn't it, to be sort of not helpful, right, because we've been having a version of this conversation for when did I create that first pie chart? And that was even late in the game. Yeah, and they just keep trying. I agree that any washout would probably be similar where you could have, yeah, 30, 40, 50 percent downturn in these stocks, but it's probably not going to last like the dot-com bubble. Like, Microsoft is underwater for 13 years following that. Yeah, I find that, I mean, Nvidia can I suppose, but just not helpful in the sense. that if we do have that level of, of wipe out 40% of they don't recover. All right, so we're back

to what, 2022? Right. Yeah. And what if you, what if you're like, this is a bubble? I don't want to be on the S&P. I want to go somewhere else. What if that, either you're going to be safe. I mean, maybe value stocks can can hold their own like they did in the, in the dot-com bubble, but I just think that small caps and value stocks. Following the historical playbook. I mean, not super original. Right. All right. Duality research was a great follow-on subset. has some of the best charts out there. And he looked at the different sectors by P. ratios, which is really cool to see.

Obviously, in a bull market, you'd expect the P. ratios can you to rise. And technology is trading at 30 times. Communication services is essentially technology. That's 20 times. But look at healthcare. It's the only one really that's below the, they show the five and the 10-year average as well.

And health care is way down. It's now down to 8% of the, or 9% of the total S&P. So if you had to guess, is health care the next energy or is this like a massive buying opportunity? Not being a health care expert, like, how is there not going to be just massive health care spent by the baby boomers for the next 30 years? I literally know nothing about health care, but so I hate to give an opinion, but I would say opportunity. Sure seems like it, right? Here's another thing. I know you and Josh talk about falling knives a couple weeks ago, maybe last week got more of your thoughts.

I feel like I just should buy Nike and just close my eyes and. plug my nose. For the record, Nike is not a knife at all. Nike has, Nike is where it was in June of 2024. So Nike has stabilized. It is above, it is above the 200J moving average. This is, I mean, it's in a downtrend. Well, I guess depending on how you define it.

But this is not a falling night. But why should you buy Nike? Well, it's 60% below the lows. It's at levels that started first trading at in 2018. It's now the 98th biggest stock in the S&P. Here's my bull case. all my kids wear Nike. No, but head to toe. It's like, and that's all they wear. The Caitlin Clark thing. I think you're riding Caitlin Clark for 20 years. She's going to have her own shoes coming out soon. This is like that time I pitched the mining company because they were having the Olympics in Australia. I just, is the Nike brand really? Because I know they had missteps. They tried to go straight to consumer and they like took it off of Amazon and they tried to just, hey, buy straight from us. And it was. a disaster, and they need those other retail channels, and it sounds like they're figuring that

out. But this just seems to me like a brand name thing where anytime Netflix falls 60 or 70% you buy it because it happens so often, this just seems like a buy-the-brand type of dip. Fair. I don't own it, but not the worst thesis I've ever heard. All right, what's your Schwab thing? I feel like you've been tracking the Schwab Index very closely lately. I have been. Well, listen, I don't know. The Schwab is the biggest brokerage in the world? Is it not? Is it not like,

is there not $11 trillion there? It seems relatively important, no? Okay, what do you got? Why are you pooping Schwab? I'm not, I'm just saying you. It's not, it's not Weeble, no disrespect to Weeble, but this is a, this is a big, big company, a lot of people here. S-Tax or Stax?

What do I call it? I call it Stax. No, I called S-Tax. Either way. Either way. I guess the theme of this show is, it's, I'm confused. narratives are all over the place, right? It's a longer thing.

If you're not confused, you're not paying attention. But especially now, there are obvious pockets of wildness. There are a lot of stocks that are not working. You could support whatever case you wanted to make about this market. You can make a credible argument. Right? I think so. All right.

So why I find this noteworthy is because, as we know, we had an all-time high in the S&P 500 in July. But Schwab clients, again, took a careful approach. The S-Tax climbed for the second straight month after three straight declines. But look at this. I mean, it's very low relative to where the market is. There's a huge gap. However, they measure this proprietary index, which is quantitative. There's no feelings in here. But here is an interesting nugget. Clients tracked by S-tax remained large net sellers on a dollar. basis in the information technology sector once again, but flipped from selling to buying shares of NVIDIA.

So for the past two months, NVIDIA was the single largest dollar stock sold on the platform. And then in July, it flipped to the number one buyer. Oh, wait, was it number one buyer? I don't know if it was number one buyer, but they were net buyers. So I think the most interesting thing about this is that they have the data going back to the meme stock mania in 2021. And it's nowhere close to that. That was, yeah, and that actually tracked the market perfectly.

So, I think young people, and I'm overgeneralizing here, that are participating in the meme stuff, some of the newer issues, some of the ETH treasury companies, which we're going to talk about later, I think there is a sense of euphoria there, but the older investors, I think, are very skeptical. And that's a pretty clear divide. That makes sense. And guess who controls most of the money? Older investors. And when you say that Schwab probably skews older as well? Yeah, obviously.

Yeah. All right, we've had this conversation a million times over the years, but I think it's time to have it again because, like, what I'm trying to think through what if Trump, what happens if Trump gets his wish? And he puts, like, Kim Kardashian and Eric Trump and Donald Jr. on the Fed Reserve Board, and they lower rates, like a decent amount. Sounds like that's what he wants. Let's say he gets his wish. this the money in money market assets keeps climbing chart kit did this for me it's 7.2 trillion this thing kind of looks like the stock market in a lot of ways lately at least are people going to finally get out of this if rates go to I don't know two and a half percent or something

if rates come down to 2 and a half percent which they're not going to but if they do then yes this money will leave money market funds but it's not going to happen overnight and it's be very gradual. Yeah. I just think that the increase over the last two or three years is so substantial that a lot of it has to be money that's just chasing yield. But I think that I think that you could still see this go up if money market rates stay at 3%.

Do you think more than 3% is going to come out? Yeah, I don't know. I'm just, I'm preparing for a world that, what if rates are lower than people actually expect? Trump study wants 1% rates. Obviously, that's probably not going to happen, but I don't know. I don't know. He's firing everyone to do whatever he wants. All right. Apropos of nothing, but this just happened.

My puppy needed to get spayed. And so we used to use one vet in Merrick. They didn't have an appointment for like a month out, so we switched to another vet. But I think what happened was I booked an appointment with the first vet, and I forgot to cancel. So this morning, we had an appointment and we overslept. I had to drive Logan to camp. He missed the bus. Robin's getting mad at me because there's too many things and we overslept.

And she says to me, well, you made the appointment. And my response was like, what does that do with anything? Who cares who made the appointment? How is that relevant? Would I ever say that to you about something you're running lately? You made the appointment? That's neither here nor there. So she's getting flustered.

I took Logan to camp. She takes Root to the vet. She texts me, there is no appointment. So you didn't. I got a voicemail from the original vet that I forgot to cancel. And, uh, eh. So you said to her, I see, I didn't make the appointment. Yeah.

Yeah. Whoops. Okay. I got screamed. I got yelled that. I got like, I got positive and negative because I was the one who pushed to get new floors in our house,

which is turning out to be just really putting us out of house at home for a while. But once it's all in and it's, It's three quarters of the way done. My wife is like, thank you so much for forcing my hand to do this. I love it. It looks great. I wish we would have done this sooner. But then the guy said, well, we're going to be here for an extra week probably

because it's taking a longer than we thought. And she goes, see, this was your idea. Why did you make me do this? So it's just the time of day kind of thing. By the way, you're making, you're doing a home renovation. I'm buying a new house. I think we forgot to mention the obvious part earlier. I wouldn't be doing this if the stock market wasn't doing what it was.

If crypto wasn't where it was, there's no way. Well, if it was a, if it was a bare market, you, um, you have more negotiating power. Yeah, but no, but let's be honest. There's no way that you would have done that, and I would not have bought a new house if the market wasn't doing what it was doing. But I do think that the housing market

could see a massive spike in activity even during a recession. I think that's... That has nothing to do with what I just said. But I'm saying, I think we're going to... The stock market could be falling and we're in a recession and we could see housing market activity explode

and people are going to go, wait, what? More people are borrowing from who equity line of credit. There's more buys, there's more sales. I think that is a very, likely possibility, and people are going to be like, what? Yeah. Why is this happening in a recession? Aren't you going to be borrowing more money if rates fall substantially?

It might be borrowing more money to do what? Yeah. Just, I don't know. If rates fall back to four or five, yeah, to do something, I don't know. You have to spend a lot of money on a new house, probably. I don't know. Yeah, sure. If rates go back to down to two percent, I will borrow all the money.

The only thing you need, my only suggestion, if you're, if you're going to do a renovation eventually, you need an outdoor shower if you're on the water. Outdoor shower is the best thing you cannot possibly have on the water. You get off the boat. Kids don't go inside. Take a shower outside immediately. Then you're clean for the day. Good tip.

All right. Heather Long, the top 10% of earners now drive about half of spending. According to Moody's up from 36% three decades ago. This chart is pretty crazy. And you and I have been talking about a few people have commented. And usually we don't read the comments. But like, why are you talking so much about, like, rich people and all this

which stuff. It's like, it matters a lot now. It's substantially higher. And it's kind of leveled off a little bit. I like this interesting thing. She said the bottom 80% of households are basically keeping their spending in line with inflation. This is a notable shift from the revenge spending era from 2022 to 2024, when people of all levels of income were splurging somewhat after the end of the pandemic lockdown. So you can see the, it really ramped up over inflation for the middle class and the bottom 40% or whatever. And now it's just back to inflation levels, like back on trend, essentially, whereas the top 20% continues to be way, way above trend in terms of spending. She said whether we go into a recession will depend almost entirely on whether the top

10 or 20% of earners keep spending. So this is why we keep talking about rich people. And also, I think that isn't there a K-shaped recovery or a K-shaped economy in the stock market? Look at how many stocks are getting annihilated. How many stocks are doing nothing over a five-year period? I feel like the K-shaped thing is a relatively new term. I kind of like it.

I don't remember hearing about it prior to this decade. But do you agree with this that if we go into recession will depend almost entirely on the top 10 to 20% of earners keeping spending? Oh, yeah. Yeah. But what stops them from, it's like it's kind of a chicken and the egg thing. Like what stops them, the stock market falls? But what makes the stock market fall to a recession? I guess it's just AI, but that's the thing, right?

But a lot of like the luxury spending stalled out in 2022. The handbags, the Ferraris, the nonsense. Yeah, but you had other people. revenge spending then. I think that's the thing. So is this the case where we could actually see this for once? Because usually it doesn't happen like this. Usually it's still around. Could we see the stock market cause a recession? If the stock market falls because of AI spend and expectations and that causes people to pull in their spending and that causes a recession. Because that usually doesn't happen. So could the stock market actually cause a recession this time? Definitely.

Okay. All right. Another one from the Wall Street Journal. Was this, uh, Gungent again? Another Gunger one. All right, speaking of rich people. The U.S. added more than a thousand millionaires every day for the last year. That's nuts. Billionary Club group by number of 50% between 2015 and 2024. This, the story is how flying on a private jet became the number one marker of real wealth.

This was interesting to me because they talked about all these people who fly private and they said this one guy, Kevin Hook, so I guess he sold his company like 20 years ago. He's a flex jet client said he spends around $800,000,000. annually on private flights. He has noticed plane hangers around the country growing more crowded because of increased demand since the pandemic. So way more rich people means way more people flying private. Now, I looked at this. Nick Majuli talked about this with me a couple weeks ago. So I listened to this podcast on MoneyWise, which is the kind of podcast you don't want to listen to if you get very jealous of really rich people. It's all about people who have founders

who have had exits and how they spend their money. Sam Parr puts it on. That's really bad done. But if you get like, again, very jealous and envious, don't listen to this podcast because it's how like the other, the top point one percent lives. So they said to start flying private costs around $10,000 an hour. And that's like buying shares in a one of these, you know, you're essentially a timeshare private jet. And it goes up substantially from there, obviously if you own your own jet. But then they looked at, this was this private jet expert. They looked at what income and net worth do people start flying private. I don't know if you looked at this, but what do you think is a net income or net worth

where people start flying private? Not all the time, but sometimes. I'll answer your question in a second, but this chart is a faceblower. There are 475,000 people worth more than 30 million. Is this just in the U.S. or is this global? That's a good question. I don't know. That sounds impossible, right? There's that many people with that much money. All right. So what level of income, do you need to start? They did a study, a net income, right, net of taxes and everything, like, how much you take home? Or net worth when people start flying private. All right, I would say a net income, I would say a net worth of 50 million and a net income of, I would say the net income is surprisingly low relative to the net worth. I would say a net income of

the $4 million. Okay. So they said $2 million in net income and $20 million in net worth. That doesn't sound high enough for me to fly. That's not high enough. Yeah. Pump the brakes. Wise guy. You're not that guy. There was a story a number of years ago about Abigail Disney. I think she's the granddaughter of Walt Disney. And she talked about how she flew private for her whole life and she thinks it screwed her up. Because she like never had to deal with real problems or people.

Never had to wait for anything. Never had to like sit with normal people and just constantly skirt of the line. I think most people don't envy this. I think most reasonable people that are, that, are successful, I should say. I should caveat that. Most people that are doing just fine don't need to fly private. Don't envy the lifestyle of these people. I mean, I think your friends and neighbors is pretty spot on. These people suck and they're miserable. And there are obviously exceptions or obviously phenomenally philanthropic, wonderful people that, you know, but as a group, like I do believe that

your friends and neighbors is pretty accurate. These people are just stab each other and back. It's the same people. It's the same bullshit. They have nothing to talk about. They're just one up in each other. this watch, that car, this flying private. Like, I think most people are like, you know what, I'm okay. I'm pretty comfortable. And yeah, you think when you have a delay or something and you wait and go through security, boy, my time is so much more valuable if I just flew private, but $10,000 an dollar valuable, probably not.

And it's probably more than that, too. Yes. All right. Can we talk AI? Let's do it. All right. I, sometimes when they launch a new model, and this could be any of them, now Chad GPT just did a going from four to five and Grock has a new model and Clark has a new model and Clark

God has a new model. When this happens, all the AI people talk about, and it makes me feel inadequate because there are two extremes. And one of them is, oh my gosh, this new model is so good, it's going to be the end of humanity. Or, oh, man, this model is so much worse. I wish they would go back in the end of hypergrowth, or this is the end of AI hypergrowth. And to me, I never noticed a difference. Yeah, same. Yeah. I don't notice, like, this is so much better or so much worse. To me, it's the same. So maybe I'm not using AI enough, so I feel inadequate. What do you think? Yeah, I think I'm in the same boat as you. Like, I use it daily, but I'm not using it all day. But like, and it must be people who are coding and it's so like we had, we had to get new rocks for

our fire pit because the old ones were breaking and and gunking it up. So we had to take all the rocks out. And then I look and I said, okay, this thing is, it's a circle and it's 39 inches around and it's four inches deep. How many bags of 20 pound bags of rocks we need to get? And it said, probably five and a half, make it six to be safe. And it was perfect. It calculated it perfectly. But then I took a picture of our railing last night and I said, hey, here's our floor coloring. What color should we stain this railing? And it sent me back these really awful, terrible, funky pictures. And I said, hey, these pictures stink. Do it again. And it did it pretty good. But again, I don't notice a difference between that and what I was doing last week.

No, neither do I. Okay. I have an AI idea. If anyone wants to fund it, they can. All right. I want to create a country music AI because I was never a country music listener until we like started going on the lake more.

And it wasn't like I was anti-country. Like, I know some people were back in the day. Just country music I didn't grow listening to it. Well, country music in the 90s was not cool. The music stunk. No, no, yeah. It was basically Garth Brooks, right?

It's way better these days. It's more poppy. but when you go out on your boat, country music is great. Because where we have our, on our lake, I'd say it's like half redneck, half yuppie. Like, there's a very good diversification. And I like the redneck side of it on the lake because all they talk about in country music,

and this is what my AI is going to be. All my songs, I'm going to release an album every year on Memorial Day. Okay? And the album is done Labor Day. Because you want it to coincide with summer, right? People are outside on their boat. And all the songs are going to be about cold beer, drinking, getting drunk, getting drunk on a boat,

margaritas, tequila, whiskey, okay? And so I'm going to have AI create these of drinking cold beer and whiskey and tequila on the water. Yeah, on Friday night. Maybe some stuff about cowboys and call girls and that's my country music AI generator. All right, good. All right.

So AI is disrupting a lot of things. Here's one that I write in the transcript. In the second quarter, this is from Chet. a company that I never heard of. I had to Google it. Well, that's like rental of textbooks, right? Yeah, which is ironic, given what I'm about to say. In the second quarter, total revenue was 105 million, a decrease of 36% year over year. This includes subscription services revenue of $90 million.

We had 2.6 million, all right, 2.6 million subscribers during the quarter representing a year-over-year decline of 40% as we continue to feel the impact of lower traffic largely due to Google AI reviews, or overviews, excuse me. So what did I do? I pulled up the stock. I mean, obviously, this was not a surprise. Holy smokes. Yeah.

And at a market cap of $15 billion in 2020, and now it's $120 million. Whoa. And this is obviously all their stuff going on, but AI put the nail in a coffin. Yeah. But there's going to be a lot of this. Yeah. In fact, the transcript didn't mention a lot of other companies that are just, Google is no longer sending people out to different links.

They're just answering the question in Gemini. So did you see this AI usage by? date that just shows like once college was over, it dropped off a cliff. I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing in terms of AI though. Like if much of

the usage is just college students writing papers and doing. That's today. Fast forward. I think that this is I think that we've got universal basic income coming in the next two or three elections. Maybe even sooner. You don't think we're just going to make up a bunch of new jobs?

Like hey, sit in the robot. taxing, make sure no one is doing it in the backseat. I don't think that there will be, I don't know. Who might, I'm not qualified to speak on this, but I'll give an opinion. The history of, the history of labor says, we always create new jobs. Sometime that's going to be wrong, maybe, but I, people need something to make them, otherwise, like, there's going to be riots in the streets. Like, we saw what happens, how pissed off people gave you just pay people to do nothing.

It's not, the outcome is probably not good. Yeah, no, I am not, not worried about this. All right. I hope not. I'm of the opinion that we have a dynamic economy and the transition from here to there will be painful, but we'll just make up a bunch of new jobs. Someone has to oil the robots, right?

I hope so. All right, let's talk about crypto. Harvard Management Company, which oversees the university's $50 billion endowment, to disclose a $116 million position in BlackRock's I share as Bitcoin Trust, which is not an insignificant amount of money, $116 million. Kind of amazing how slow these institutions were to adopt this stuff, since they looked at themselves as like being on the forefront for so long.

I don't like the last adopters. Yeah. So this week was the week that, or maybe not just this week, but especially this week, ETH exploded relative to Bitcoin. Bit underscore Hedge has a chart showing the ETH volume explode in the upside over Bitcoin volume 14 days in a row now. So I want to give a mea culpa on the dumb money comment they gave last week, but also more context. Not a full mea culpa, but just, I don't know if we mentioned Tom Lee last week. Maybe we did, maybe we didn't.

And this was the idea that all the, of all the treasury companies. Yeah. Okay. So I listened to Tom on bankless. And Tom Lee might be the person that has gotten more things right over the last decade than any other pundit talking. talking about the market, who's been more right than Tom? He's definitely been more right than wrong, which is not something you can say about a lot of people. Who's been more right? Who's been more right than him?

That's a good question. Because there's not a lot of pundits who've been right about stuff. So yeah, you're right. He probably is. So I didn't know this. I listened to him with the bankless guys talking about BMNR, which is, what does that stand for? Can't remember.

But did you know that Tom was responsible? for the digital gold analog. He was the first one to, like, put that out there into the world. Hmm. Didn't know that. All right. So, anyway, he was talking about the company, how it got funded, some of the early investors. Bill Miller is an early investor.

What did this company used to do? Because it's been around for a long time. Is it what it's called? But it's been around since 2008? No, no, no, no. It was a spec. Bitmind of Merchant technology, yeah. All right.

So I think Druck Miller's an early investor. It might be Pulitzer Jones. I can't remember. But he was explaining that Michael Saylor laid the blueprint for what he's trying to do. And you might sell, say, well, micro strategy is nonsense. All right, well, fine. But it's worked remarkably well. And that is what Tom is trying to do.

So we spoke about that liquidity and the number of eth per share count and the liquidity. Did I say liquidity already? And the velocity. And the velocity. And also the liquidity. So anyway, look at this chart that Matt made for the listeners. Matt charted the S&P 500 constituents, and he looked at the market cap versus the 30-day average trading volume.

And he included BitMine technologists, which is obviously not in the S&P. Look how far off the charts this thing is. It traded more yesterday than like it's one of the top volume stocks in the market. So the thing that you were saying last week, the whole idea is like, so these companies are just going to borrow money to buy an asset. Like, how does that end up well? Right. That's the word. Like, oh, okay, you're just going to borrow money to buy stuff and then it'll keep going up and up forever.

That's like the rational response to this. So Tom just, I think Tom, bit mine or, yeah, they just did a $20 billion equity offering or at least that hit the wires today. So Ryan Adams tweeted that Tom is the first. first to a million dollars in ETH, they're trying to get to 5% of all ETH supply. And if anybody can do it, I suppose it's him. Tom Dunleavy tweeted, for what it's worth, I'm still getting Dex for nine figure eth and Bitcoin digital asset treasuries that are close to being filled. No stopping this train anytime soon.

Okay. However, so I would say Tom is in a different category because if there's anybody that can galvanize the crew and get people to believe and the velocities. and the liquidity and the ball, the wheel spinning and dilution and more than, blah, blah, blah, it's him. However, this will not end well for a lot of copycat companies. Like, I don't think everybody can make the strategy work. So, for example, the FT just did a post.

The title was why struggling companies are loading up on Bitcoin. So here we go. Three months ago, George Coram had never considered for a moment that his semiconductor company might start buying Bitcoin. Shares of his New York listed business had been struggling for some time when he, read about a health care company that had bought the digital currency and seen the stock price soar, the French chief executive says he began reading about Bitcoin and became intrigued after a failed deal spooked investors. He says I was looking for ways to unlock the value of the company.

Sequence communications raised $384 million from debt in equity markets to spend on buying the world's most popular token. Its share price surged 160% of the news. So this guy just now started reading about Bitcoin? Yeah. So anyway, so I immediately pulled up that chart of sequins, and it went straight up and straight down. So for everybody else, for all of the 154 public companies, according to Financial Times, that have either raised or committed to raise a combined total of $98 billion in order to buy crypto, I can't imagine this working for all of them. In fact, I would bet a lot of money that it won't.

And for people that are piling in, I mean, this, if you're piling into these other ones just because you're hoping to save a company or whatever, like this, I'm sorry, this is dumb. Yeah, the funding will dry up or it might work for top. Not everybody could have a premium to their nav. No. It's Michael Saylor and it's Tom and maybe it's the Trump's, but it's, this is, so that was just my media couple, ish. That makes sense.

Anyhow, all right, moving on. So the spread between the 30-year mortgage and 10-year U.S. Treasury yields is coming down, but it's still too high. 2.6%. See, this is. how we lower mortgage rates, though. All the Fed has to do is say, we want this spread to be lower, and it immediately happens, don't you think? I've been saying this for a while. All right, you've heard of the 50, 30, 20 rule. Personal finance rule. What is it? So you, the rule of thumb is

you spend 50% of your budget on necessities, housing, transportation, etc. 30% on your wants and desires, whatever, entertainment, eating out, clothes, that sort of thing. And then 20% on saving, paying down debt. This is a rule of them, obviously, and they're not always close. But of that 50 for your necessities, typically the number that's thrown out is you want to spend $30 on your monthly housing payment, be it rent or mortgage. Okay. Redfin says a household on the median income would need to spend 39% of their earnings on a house to buy a medium price home today and basically saying that it's you know it's pretty unaffordable for anyone in the you know most of the population to afford today obvious right you're spending a much but this got me thinking

for anyone who owned pre-2021 it's got to be in who refinanced at three percent or lower it's got to be way way lower than 30 percent for them especially as incomes have risen so for the 65 percent of households that own a home already it obviously it stinks if you're one of these people doesn't but if you own a home already, you are in such a good position relative budget-wise, you got so, it's like the luckiest budgeting thing that's ever happened for people. I mean, the average for them probably has to be 20% or so. Think about that gap between what you'd have to spend now and what you currently spend and what the difference is. And all that money is going into money markets and the stock market and whatever, right? Renovations, all this stuff.

All right, Jeffrey Patak had a piece in Morningstar. 75% of alternative mutual funds have died. There are lessons in that for would-be private market investors. And he starts the piece by saying, on January 1, 2015, there were 1,345 alternative mutual funds in existence. Those funds follow the approaches that utilize hedging, shorting or trend following. Guess how many of those alternative funds still exist? 341. The other thousand or so have been liquidated or merged away a 75% mortality rate.

That is crazy. I think this actually is a perfect encapsulation of the what's coming for private markets into 401ks and individuals. I totally am on board of this as an analogy. I'm not at all. Not even a little. Not necessarily that, like I think just not working very well. I think that this is, I understand what Jeffrey is saying, but I think the big difference is,

And I don't, I'm not, all right. These strategies were launched to save people from a bear market, to save people from a colossal bear market, and to do the impossible, which was not have any downside and get most of the upside. A lot of these strategies cannot work by definition. Right? I think the, I think they did in the past. you're saying they got like They were launched as a result They were launched as a result of the great financial crisis

And a lot of these strategies were just impossible They're trying to beat the market Not have downside, get the upside Just cannot be done These were dumb strategies And private equity and private credit I'm not saying that they're all going to work Or that they're all going to deliver alpha

Or excess returns or any of that But these are apples and oranges I just think that trying to roll this stuff out to retail and the illiquidity mismatch that's going to occur, I just, I don't think that it's going to work very well. I think the results are going, it's not going to be a catastrophe and it's not going to blow up people's retirements. I just think people are going to be very disappointed in the results. Well, that I'm 100% in board with.

I think that people, so there was a law passed last week, or was it signed, about letting private assets into 401Ks? It's getting there. So I think you mentioned the illiquity mismatch. There is no liquidity in 401K. I mean, like, if you're going to have it anywhere, I guess it's a sensible spot to put it. But I am fully on board with investors being disappointed. But I also don't think it's going to be the catastrophe that a lot of people are saying it's going to be.

What's the opposite of virtue signaling? I don't know. But I just think that introducing the high fees and I agree with your point that you said before that like this is going to open. up the kimono a little bit and make it so these companies have to be more above board and I think that's just going to lead to worse and worse results

and people are going to go, why did I not just have my money index fund instead of this? What was I doing? So I think the main entrance it's going to be target date funds and do, listen, do I want this to exist? No, but there's a lot of things

that I don't want to exist that do. So whatever. Here's the thing, though. The alternative, it's much, so it's kind of like if you invested in actively managed mutual funds that underperformed, you were still invested. You didn't do as well as the index. I think this is probably kind of the same thing, only the bigger spread because

fees are higher. You're still going to do okay because you're going to be fully invested into equity of something. But it's just, you're going to look at it and go, oh, I could have done way better if it had just done this simple, easy thing. I'm not sure that private credit is going to underperform the ag. Oh. No, it shouldn't. I hope not.

It's going to be like high yield, right? Yeah. So anyway, I think there's a lot. a lot of Hemming and Hong. I think people are getting a little hysterical. We don't even know what's coming yet. And I get it. Will investors be better served in these products?

Probably not. Will the managers be better served, obviously? So I understand why people like us are writing articles and pushing back. I totally get it. But I don't think that this is going to like cause a retirement crisis or anything even of the sort. Yeah, I hope not. Yeah, it's not like people are going to be right.

I don't think this isn't something that people are asking. asking for. So it's not like people are going to go, okay, great, I can put all my money to this? Yeah. All right, you know, can we just skip this whole article? There was an article in the FT about the troubling decline in consciousness, the critical life skills fading out and especially fast among young adults. Can we just like skip it? It's enough. I was going to short this one. All right, me too. It's, you know what? It's, it's, it is fucking enough. It is really enough. We understand that, uh, social media and a lot of different forces are converging and making it hard to be a young person. Guess what? It's always been hard.

You know, the thing is... I don't want to like add to the, uh, to the misery. So I've had four or five conversations in the past two months with college students who've reached out and said, hey, I'd love to talk to you and pick your brain, that sort of thing. I'm always happy to have those conversations. And these kids, this is, maybe this is like a sample size bias thing or selection bias or whatever. These kids are so far ahead of the game where I was. And I talked to a high school senior yesterday. I talked to, like, college seniors. They know what they want to do.

I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had no clue. And the only reason they do is because they have the internet now. And so, like, these people are so far ahead of the game in terms of learning and understanding what they want to do than I was at that age. And so they're obviously there are negatives of this stuff. But the positive. Oh, yeah.

You know what I did when I was 17? I remember sometimes being home in the summer looking at my window. I did that too. Looking at my window. I was like, who should I call? I don't really know anybody. All right. My friends are.

I don't know what that person is. right right yeah it's enough yeah i i agree for the college people that i speak with again small sample size but like they seem perfectly fine and i'm sure not they're they're all not i'm sure that this is not like completely fabricated but it just is enough it's getting too much too much oxygen let's move on they just need to party a little bit more that's all they need to do all right big big big big week for uh streaming and entertainment so alice morris wrote after seven years with the ESPN plus diversion, a product compromise made in 2018 that reflected a combination of an unclear strategic vision, concerns about business model disruption, and significant technical

challenges that needed to be addressed. The day has finally come where court cutters can directly access all of ESPN's content. This is big. We've been talking about this for a long time. How much is this going to cost? I think this is going to be a, I don't think this is going to work. 25 bucks? Who's going to want to pay 30 or 40 bucks for ESPN? That's your only way to access it? Why not just double that and buy YouTube TV for 80 then? Why would you pay for just ESPN? I think this is going to be a bomb. I don't think this is going to work at all.

You're up. You're right. Here's another one. It's way too much for you. Because you still don't get all the games for everything else. Like, I know they're trying to buy stuff, but you still have all these other places you have to go to get games. It doesn't give you everything.

I don't want to pay 40 bucks a month to watch Stephen A. Smith and screwing me all day. Well, nobody watches that. It's for the games. All right, here's another one, Paramount. So no more pay-per-view for UFC fights. Mark Shapiro, TK groups present in COO, said the paper-per-view model is, I think, of the past. What's on pay-per-view anymore? Boxing.

Oh, so instead of pay-per-view, you pay for Paramount? So Paramount Plus is getting UFC fights. So they're paying $1.1 billion to UFC for seven years. that is good for them. So what is there going to be more overspending on, AI Capax or live action sports? Because eventually these places are going to overdo it. Because they're going to go, listen,

we need live action to get people to pay and they're going to way overspend and they're going to go, oh my gosh, what were we thinking? This is. It is interesting. Although I still think the streaming, like today's options,

even though we're probably not saving money. In fact, I'm sure I'm paying more because now I have, I pay for cable and I still pay for all this stuff. Oh, yeah. But I'm a much happier viewer, much more to watch. Yeah. It's just not as easy to switch back and forth.

But yeah, it's more... You know what stinks, though? I have the app that looks where stuff is streaming like a movie. You pull up a movie and go, it'll go, this movie is not streaming anywhere. That means it's just gone forever. Do we have to buy a Blu-ray player? You buy everything on Prime for the most part.

Yeah, but I'm saying some of these streamers, these movies, I wanted to watch PCU. I'm going back in the 90s nostalgia. It's not streaming anywhere. You can't even rent it. Nothing. There's something like that. All right.

Story time. So, one of the cool things about being a parent is seeing your kids do stuff that you like and doing it with them. My daughter loves to shoot baskets in the driveway. That's one of my favorite pastimes. I would go out for hours and hours and just shoot baskets. Back to being lonely, right?

By myself. I had a loneliness to die of the night. Yes. What was that word? Loneliest epidemic, right? But I think it's also cool to like experience things that you never did through them. Like my two daughters both love playing soccer. I never played soccer when I was growing up. I never watched it.

I was never a soccer fan. And now I love it because they play, right? And my son, God bless him. He has a little bit of redneck in him. And I say that as a term of endearment because I have plenty of rednecks in my family. Again, term of endearment. My dad was never like an outdoorsman. But all of his brothers hunt and fish.

And a lot of my cousins do, too. It just never, that bug never bit us. But, and I think my son got this aspect of them. He got the Carlson Redneck gene in him. And so fishing is literally his favorite thing. He loves to go fishing. And I don't like fishing, but I like to do it with him. And all I do, I'm just there to service him.

I change the hooks when he gets tangled, it cuts the line, you know. I'm afraid to pick the hook out of the mouth. Yeah. No, he does that now by himself. He, like, grabs the fish by the mouth. Like, he knows all this stuff. He puts the worm on himself. We're getting into lures.

So for the whole summer, he's wanted to go charter fishing. He's never done it. So we went on Lake Michigan this past weekend, charter fishing. And he absolutely loved it. I put some pictures in here for you to look at. We got these huge king salmon something, huge fish. Oh, those are salmon? Yeah, on Lake Michigan, huge.

I mean... Did you eat them? They flayed them for us, and we're going to cook them up. I can't wait. Getting being salmon for weeks. But there was a good... And he had so much fun, and the guys on the charter did a great job of, like, adhering to him. But what they do is the boat kind of trolling to him.

But what they do is the boat kind of trolls around slowly. It idles, essentially. And it's got a thing that, you know, it marks it off and it drives by itself. But the guy was saying there's an investing lesson here. I'm thinking this. He said, because eight-year-olds like George are the best fishermen. And I said, why? He said, because the older people come in and think they know what they're doing.

And they move it all around and whip it and stuff. And he said, because the boat is moving, when we get a fish on, it immediately hooks. Like, you don't have to hook it. All you have to do is literally reel it in, which is a fun part. But you reel it in for like 15 minutes because it took a while because it was so far. It was like 80 or 100 feet deep. That's where you found the salmon. But he's saying all these guys come on the boat and I tell them once or twice,

don't whip it or otherwise it's going to come off the hook. And they never listen and they're terrible fishermen. But he said, your son, he'll just reel it in and pull it in. And those are the best ones because they don't move around so much. There's an investing parallel there. Right. Anyway, try to fishing. Buy ether treasury companies. Is that what you're trying to say?

Exactly. Not something I'd ever want to do on my own or again, Now that he's got the bug, he had the best time of his life. He told me it was the greatest, greatest day he's ever had in his life. A lot. And again, this is not something I would choose to do, but my brother-in-law came. He's a big fisherman. My father-in-law likes to fish.

And I'm just kind of there for the beer and outdoors. I've also got a little redneck in me. My stepfather is a redneck. And he, so he took me hunting a few times. Not for me. I love animals. I want to shoot animals. And it's boring.

Oh, wait. sorry, speaking of that, the first fish he took out of the water, he gets the fish out, and you have to, like, put it out of his misery, right? So the fisherman punches the fish in the face to knock it out. My son just goes, he just goes, oh, he thought that was the coolest thing ever. I think he was just showing off, but. Yeah, my stepdad has got the big grizzly beard. He wears a cowboy hat, like really and truly.

He does not look like he's from around here. So anyway, so he bought a cabin in, like, the 90s, and he gave it to us and his, his, sons. And so we take care of it now. And I had to go to the bank to deposit a check for something for the cabin. I don't know what it was. So I went to the bank. I filled out a deposit slip for $1,500. I gave it to the teller. And he said, you got the money? And I said, yep, there's a deposit slip right there. And he's looking at me and I'm looking at him and he's looking at me. I'm like, I gave him like, what's the problem? And he said, sir, do you have money? so you had no check just a deposit slip oh it's been a while sorry it has been a while you

actually i actually need to give you money that's right so i yeah i had to go home and get a check whoops all right recommendations uh so last week you're like oh right light week for you i have i forgot i did go to the movies last week i saw together the james the david franka movie excuse me not James. He's in a couple of horror movies. Now, what's the other one he did? Cabin, something in a... Is it a cabin movie?

They did an Airbnb? I don't know. I watched that one. You did? Because he's doing these movies with his wife. Oh, he directed that movie. Yeah. Did he direct this one too?

You know what? You're right. He did not direct this movie. Okay. Dave Francoe Cabin movie. What was that? The rental. Yeah.

It was okay. I saw the rental. Yeah, it was good. I enjoyed it. Anyway, together was good. Together was a good time Right down the middle Genre horror

Horror thriller It wasn't really horror But it was fun And then speaking of fun The Naked Gun So that is I don't know if we've ever spoken about this That is like my number one laugh track

That is the first comedy That I remember dying laughing at We still talk about it all the time Yeah So the new one held true Like it was just joke joke joke joke joke joke joke I belly laugh two times. It was everything I wanted.

It was an hour and a half. It was an hour and a half. You know what? I know we're getting old. I fell asleep twice. Like I was falling asleep during an 80-minute movie. My friends and I grew up, we quoted Naked Gun quite a bit. Yeah.

That was a movie for us, for sure. Really good. All right. And finally, actually not finally. I have one more. Weapons. The hype is real. Are you seen this?

You're not seeing this movie, but you've seen the hype, right? You've never heard of it. What is it? Really. So my dad texted me yesterday. My dad went to go see weapons during the middle of the day. And he does not go to the movies a lot, but that's how hyped it was. Okay.

Weapons is, you like Barbarian. Okay, I like that one, yeah. Right? Same director. Okay. Julie Garner. If I like Barbarians, I like this or not. Josh Brolin.

This is a great movie. It really was. Okay. So here's the plot. At 2.17 a.m. All of the children. in a classroom, except for one, run out their front door, and disappear.

Okay. So it's like a mystery, horror thriller. Okay, all right. Very funny. Very good. All right. And lastly, I was talking about this with Chris. He was asking me about Parasite,

and I was trying to explain to him the plot, and I totally forgot what it was about. Okay. So I rewatched it. That is a good movie. I think it's one of the best movies of this century. Yeah, not a hot take at all. Did it win best people?

picture? Yeah. Okay. That was a great movie. I liked it. Okay. I had an email from a listener a couple weeks ago saying, how has Ben not watched lessons in chemistry yet? And I said, hmm. Never heard of it. It's a miniseries on Apple. It's got Brie Larson stars. And it's got Bill Pullman's son on it, who is fantastic. He is really good. He's going to be a great actor, Lewis Pullman. I don't know. He had a son. I kind of didn't really, I had to look him up. So it's a mini series based on a book. It's about, I love shows and stuff set in the 1960s, Madman style. It's like, Brie Larson plays a chemist, and she's sexually discriminated against because she's a woman.

They don't think she can do it. Then she takes her chemistry lessons and turns it into a cooking show, like using chemistry and heat and stuff, an understanding of chemistry to make better food. And it's just really well done. Apple, just, not a Michael show, sorry, but Apple's shows are just very high quality. Good acting, like it looks good. it's just very high quote we're two episodes away we cruise through the first six episodes very good I liked it um finally my daughter and I watched credit kid too after the first I forgot how bad the

second one was oh my god what a fall off uh just awful did she she she kind of liked it okay but one of the things she said but again after watching both movies was it's so funny to see all the teens wearing jeans like Daniel does his final fight he's wearing blue jeans she said no one wears, like all the kids today are slabs. They wear pajama pants or yoga pants or joggers. Kids don't wear jeans anymore. I never would have thought in a million years you could have disrupted genes. And what if jeans are just like totally disrupted? Interesting. If young people don't wear them anymore. Do you remember jeans with the stretchy waist? Oh yeah. That's right. You're not talking about like for like pregnant people, right? No, for for little boys.

Okay. I don't remember those. It was like an elastic waist, right? Because seven-year-olds don't want to wear belts. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. That makes sense. But, yeah, kids don't wear jeans. Like, maybe a little bit, but my daughter's like, I'm probably never wearing jeans.

I said, you need to be the one who brings it back. What a shame. A bunch of slabs. Uh, all right. What else? Nothing. Sign up for Future Proof. Check out Talking Wealth.

Our advisor-only channel. What else? Good talk of your books lately we've been having. Summers over. Animal spirits at the compound news.com and see you next time.