Animal Spirits Podcast - Paycheck-To-Paycheck on $500,000? (EP. 462)

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

On episode 462 of Animal Spirits, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠���⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ben Carlson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ discuss: how AI will impact wealth management, a stock market boom for the ages, why the Fed never created a financial crisis, an ode to Tim Cook, the world's biggest ETF, ridiculous car payments, AI job market winners and losers, surveys are broken, the dreaded mid-life crisis and more. This episode is sponsored by Betterment Advisor Solutions and ClearBridge. Learn more about Betterment at https://www.betterment.com/advisors Rising geopolitical tensions, continued market uncertainty, stocks backed by can offer more predictable cash flows as volatility increases. Visit https://www.clearbridge.com/ to learn more. 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

What growth strategy are leading RAs using that most firms don't? Segmentation. Some clients' needs are sophisticated and require deep ongoing planning. Some clients' needs are simple, like those in the wealth accumulation stage. The smartest firms know planning shouldn't look the same for every client, but the experience should always be exceptional. And now it can be with Betterment Advisors Solutions. It's the platform built for segmenting your book and streamlining those smaller and

simpler accounts. The onboarding experience is automated and paperless, the portfolio management, the streamlined and tax-efficient, the client experience, modern and consistent. And the impact isn't just felt by your clients that's felt across your entire practice. Imagine a backoff that's humming, a team that's thriving and a service model ready to scale. Betterment advisor's solutions, your biggest regret will be not doing it sooner. Learn more at betterment.com slash advisors. Today's episode is sponsored by Clearbridge investments. Amid rising geopolitical tensions and continued market uncertainty, investors are looking for stability. Even before recent developments

in the Middle East, stocks backed by real assets we're gaining momentum and can offer more predictable cash flows as volatility increases. Position your investment portfolio for wider equity participation with fundamentally driven Clearbridge Active Equity Strategies, Clearbridge, a Franklin Templeton company, go to clearbridge.com to learn more. 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. Update on my HVAC issues. So I got a quote from one of the guys, and I had like four guys coming here.

And the first one that I got, he prepared me a very nice detail for proposal. And it was $18,000 plus I also need to whatever, whatever, I forget what the details are, but the cost ended up being like $29,000. So I took his proposal and I uploaded it into Claude and we started having a little chitty chit chat about what my options are. What should I be doing? and this was a, oh, moment for me with AI. And there's obviously been a few for me along the way and for everybody listening who's experienced the technology. It started asking me questions,

and it was leading me the horse to water and teaching me about the difference between modular units and on off and this and that. And so I spent a couple of minutes getting educated on the different options that I have. And then later in the day, I was speaking with the company in our space who, it's like an LLM for advisors, basically, as long and the short of it. And part of what they're, what they were showing me is you upload a document and

you ask questions and it's giving you advice and should I do it well with conversion. And like, it's leading you, right? Like asking you yes or no questions and then the decision tree and then taking you through the journey. So the takeaway for me was pretty clear the information asymmetry gap in the knowledge economy and really everywhere, not even just the knowledge economy. Like when you go to a mechanic and you don't know anything, I remember Josh saying years ago, like talking about the younger generation investors that you can't bullshit them. And I remember him saying, like, they'll fact check to you right in front of your face. they'll just open Google and say, like, is this true?

And with the LLMs, it's set on steroids. So I thought this has implications for everybody. Like, everybody, of course. And I thought about our industry. And I think there are a lot of advisors that, frankly, are asleep at the wheel, that don't see what's coming. And I am definitely not being hysterical and saying, that advisors aren't going to be valued or anything like that.

But the information gap, the knowledge that we have about the planning, the tax, the this, the that, that's going to disappear pretty damn quickly. It's table stakes now, right? Table stakes.

Just as a side note, the fact that you started out this podcast talking about your HVAC system shows that this was probably the most boring week we've had in the markets in a long time. Thank God. It was finally like, all right, not a lot going on. Thank God.

I know people are still screaming about oil prices and how the oil market is messed up. No one cares about it, apparently, until the markets tell us to, right? You're right. The stock market, you said last week is so much more important. Financial markets tell us when we should be paying attention to something and when we shouldn't. Absolutely. Of course I do. So I love it.

I think that... Wait, hey, did you actually, like, get a better quote from your HVAC because of this research? Well, so the long and the short of it is I am spending $6,000 on a split-level unit in my bedroom. I'm going to close off the ducts in my bedroom and have more air flow through to the rest of the house. And we're going to start there. Okay, that makes sense. You have different gauges. So you have like one temperature gauge for your bedroom, one for the rest of the house. Anyway, we could spend 30 minutes on the implications for advisors and I do plan on doing a talk a wealth episode about different thoughts. I was asked this last week at an event. Like, what is the

implication? I think for the wealth management business, what it means is that anyone stuck in the middle is screwed. The big firms are going to get way bigger because they're going to have really great AI models and systems, and the little firms will have a niche. And if you're stuck in between there, you don't have a niche and you're not huge and can scale, you're screwed. How's that? It's going to be hard. It's ready hard.

It's already a hard business. It's not going to get any easier. But think about what this does to the efficiency of the overall system when the ability of people with knowledge to rip off those without closes or shrinks. True. Counterpoint. Google has existed for a large. long time and it maybe made people dumber. I'm just throwing it out there that this.

That's that bad counterpoint. No, you're you're existing in a world of Econ 101 where everyone is a rational actor. No, no, no. I do. There's also going to be so much slop and misuse of this stuff. And I think that's the part that you're missing is that, yes, if you take advantage of this stuff, it's going to be, it can be so helpful for your knowledge. You can learn anything now. And it can, like you said, it can, it can poke and prod you to ask questions. Hey, you just learned about this. Why don't you read this research paper about? Like, that stuff is, Fantastic. But will people be motivated enough to use it correctly? I don't know. That's my big question is like, who will use it? Yes, you're 100% right. So I don't, I'm not suggesting this

happens tomorrow. I'm not suggesting that everybody is going to act like you and I do. I understand a lot of the economy, a lot of the population, you know, is on a sixth grade education. But the ramifications cannot be overstated of what's going to happen. I agree. And this is one of the reasons, I think if we're taking a step further to financial markets, why the idea that I'm just going to invest in the U.S. and not the rest of the world is nuts. Because the rest of the world, things continue to be flattened for the rest of the world in terms of knowledge and opportunities. And if you think all the good ideas are now going to come out just out of the U.S. are nuts.

So, all right, this morning, speaking of AI, open AI, misses key revenue, user targets, and high-stakes sprint toward IPO. That was a Wall Street Journal headline. And some of the names, the Max 7 names that are that are really tethered to the Open AI story like Oracle in particular are getting smoke. So it's funny that they're treating this like a public company already. Yeah, well, it will be soon enough. Oracle is down 7%. So all right, here's what they said.

Open AI recently missed its own targets for new user and revenue stumbles that have raised concern among some company leaders about whether it will be able to support its massive spending on data centers. CFO, Sarah Fryer has told other company leaders that she is worried the company He might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn't grow fast enough. Here's the LOL. OpenAI recently raised $122 billion in what was the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history. But the company has signed up for so much computing power that it expects to burn through that amount in the next three years.

Are you kidding me? It expects to burn $122 billion in three years. And let's just say that that's even remotely right. $100 billion, $120, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years, whatever. Holy mackerel. Are they screwed? Is Open A.S. Screwed?

I think that's a crazy talk. Screwed? They just face $120 billion. That buys you some time. You just said three years. Is Open AI screwed? In the race to AI supremacy. Are they too far behind Anthropic at this point?

Scrood is a strong word, but I hear what you're saying. They've made some missteps, for sure. And I think Anthropic has definitely taken the title from them or the belt. All right. We've been speaking a lot about the stock market and what it's doing and why it's doing what it's doing. And we keep going back to one thing in its earnings, right? Like that's it. That's a whole kit and caboodle.

Is it kit and caboodle? Yes. Where did it come from? I don't know. Probably Shakespeare. So the S&P 500 blended in actual. So what's already reported and what's expected to report. 13.7% year-over-year growth.

Technology. 43% growth. And even if you take out Nvidia and Apple, I think it goes higher. I think it goes to 45%. Jeez. So they're still driving earnings growth

even though they're spending so much money. Pretty amazing. Like, this whole thing just might happen. Which whole thing? The whole thing of, we're going to spend a lot of money on AI and it's going to work. The ROI piece.

I don't think anyone believe that was possible when you first started seeing the numbers of, oh my gosh. I still think there's a lot of skepticism that meta and Amazon and whatever, all the other companies that are spending, $600 billion in CAPEX. If there's one obvious risk that's going to cause excesses to happen in a big downturn, like AI has to be it. It has to.

Yes, both things are true. But do you think, do you think that the leaders of these, these companies are really that dumb, that they're just pissing away money. I keep giving this example. Facebook literally changes name to meta, and then they got rid of the whole thing. Are they really dumb enough? They can be. That's one example.

A pretty big example. You think they're all collectively stupid people? No, I don't think they're collectively stupid, but I think the fact that they all decided if one person is going to jump off the ledge here, I'm going to do it too. Like, we have to all jump. Oh, come on. Literally the first thing your parents say is, if you're, your friends jumped off the bridge, would you?

He was a Brooklyn Bridge specifically. Come on, I know it's, I know it's cute to say like, yeah, Meadow was stupid. But come on. But I'm saying the tech leaders are holding hands jumping off the bridge together. They just, they all said like everyone in the boat, let's go. I think that's like a jackass comment,

like too cute behavior. But isn't that what happened though? They all decided it's a big circular thing. They invest in them. They invest in them. They're all into this. Regardless of what happens. But they said like, remember they all said,

I'd rather overspend and underspend. That's the risk. But like, I just don't think that they're all willing to risk at all and them just, this completely flop. Like, I was looking back in three years, like, what the hell were they doing? Possible, obviously, but I would not, I would not bet on that. I sure doesn't seem like that right. I agree. It doesn't seem like that way now.

But the thing is, all this Ben can still create excesses. Sure. That's the thing. Okay. So last week we talked about how this bull market is like fast approaching the 1980s, 1990s one. I wrote a little piece on this. And I just want to talk about how crazy this whole run. has been. So we're now, this is from the bottom. And a lot of people, every time I read about this,

someone we work with, I'm not going to name any names. His name rhymes with Larry. He sends me something saying, you can't start a bull market from the bottom. Like 2009, you can't start a bull market. And my argument is, things are different now. Like, all bull markets almost start from the bottom by now by definition, because that's when, like, things move faster now. This is how markets work. Regardless, splitting hairs. The S&B 500 is up almost 17% per year from the bottom in 2009. So That's 17% per year for 17 years. Okay? I can't believe it.

The 2020s have a higher annualized return than the 2010s did. 2010s did 13.4% per year. 2020s are doing 15.1% per year right now. Wow. Totally different environment. Here's another crazy thing. Despite all the government spending. And I want to unpack this one a little bit.

Okay. That was a podcast line. So some people here who are younger, I might not remember this, but when the Fed took rates to zero and the government printed money to save us in the great financial crisis, there were tons of people who said the dollar's going to collapse, we're going to have hyperinflation. This was not just like some perma bears spouting off. This was real people saying like, oh my gosh, the Fed took the rates to zero percent. This is going to cause a massive crisis down the line. Just wait. From 1982 to 1999, biggest U.S. bull market in history, arguably. CPI was up a total of like 80% essentially. Okay, cumulative inflation was 80%.

From 2009 to 2026, cumulative inflation is 56%. Despite the 9% huge upswing, right? Because it was so low. So 0% rates, and I put the Fed chart in here, we had 0% rates essentially for 8, 9 years. They never led to a financial crisis. Of course, there's no headlines that say like, hey, this thing some people thought would happen didn't happen. That's not a headline event. This thing didn't happen. Guess what? But there was all these people saying like, you can't take rates that low without having a financial crisis. It has to happen. We never had one. All that spending, all the monetary QE, all that stuff, the dollar was stronger throughout most of the 2010s. And inflation wasn't that much higher than it was in the 80s and 90s. This has been like a miracle of a bull market.

You know those stories of people like prematurely born babies? They're like, oh my gosh, they were born at like 30 weeks. They're in the incubation thing for so long and they're like, they can't believe it. They survive. That's this bull market. This is the incubation bull market. It's a preemie. It survived.

I can't believe it. I'm just taking a step back and like giving flowers, kudos, whatever you said a couple weeks ago to this bull market. It is something to marvel at, for sure. This is why bull markets are so important. I think most investors make their money during a bare market by just hanging on and not tapping out and selling. But if you miss this kind of bull market because you got scared and you went to cash or you tried

to time the market or some dumer scared you out of it, this can impact your investing life cycle for decades to come if you miss out on something this big. Yeah. Yeah. This is why you stay invested. And I think the longer this continues, the more it feels like this has to end eventually. and eventually being soon and later. And it will.

But is it a bang or a whimper? A bang would be a crazy financial crisis. A whimper would be, uh, returns are lower than average going forward for five to seven years or something. Yeah. Pretty credible. All right.

We've talked a lot about markets moving faster. Intel has one of the craziest charts I've ever seen because this thing was in a 70% drawdown. It came back, dropped, came back, dropped. It was dead. It was dead money. Basically, essentially in the last, I don't know, six months has taken off like a rocket ship and completely erased a 70% drawdown and then some to go back to all-time highs that hadn't been reached since the dot-com bubble. Markets move so fast these days.

And obviously there's reasons for this. The government taking a piece of intel and where they sit in the tech stack has something to do with it. But this move is absolutely insane for a company this size. What's their market cap? At this point, I don't know. $300 billion? How much? I guess three.

I have no idea. I don't either. We both guess that. I feel like for an also-ran tech company, $300 billion, and it's $250. $4.27. Wait, where did you get $250? It's $4.27.

Oh, nope. I put the wrong ticker in. Okay. Wow. Philip Morris. All right. Overnight. Markets just blinking, you missed it these days.

Really wild. All right, it's the end of an era. Tim Cook is retiring. And going back to things that people got wrong. Nobody was like, don't worry when Steve Jobs died. It was a huge worry. It was in the fall of 2011. And that was also when the European debt crisis was in full swing.

The S&P was almost in a 20% bare market. I fell 19% in change. And Apple was, people were like, this is it. It's over. not to pat myself on the back and to my own horn, I was buying Apple then because I said, there's no way this company's over. Like they got such a long run with the iPhone.

But it was not like people are like, oh, yeah, Tim Cook's going to take over and it's going to be great. This is a multi-trillion dollar company. So I've shared this chart before. The numbers are so ridiculous that, like, I had to fact check them. Since he became CEO 15 years ago, Apple's market cap has added 684 million.

million a day. $684 million a day. So $250 billion per year? 4.8 billion per week. 4.8 billion a week. Here's something that Tim Cook deserves credit for. Mark Rubinstein has a great substack called An Interest. He wrote about Apple Pay.

Apple Pay is used by 785. million people worldwide. It is accepted at over 90% of U.S. retailers, where it has a market share of 14.2% in online payments and 5.6% of in-store purchases. Cook said on his latest earnings call that last year alone, it eliminated $1 billion in fraud. I still don't want to use it. Stop. You're kidding, right?

I've used it like five. At a store, I've used it like five times. you just double tap. I know. I've used it to pay for stuff on my phone, obviously. You're too embarrassed to tap your phone. You still take out your wallet? I just, yeah, use a credit card.

Okay. You know your credit card, you know you can link your credit card to the, that's what happens. It's linked. Okay. All right, just checking. Last thing I'm putting Apple revenue context.

We've shared this before in terms of the services, the segments of Apple, comparing it to other companies. I just want to... If you stacked, dollar bills all the way from here to the moon of Apple's revenue, right? It would go to the moon in Project Talmarian back.

Yeah, it would go to Tau Setti. So the iPhone did $226 billion in revenue in the last 12 months. That's more than Nvidia. That's pretty nuts. Is that true? Nvidia's done $216 billion in revenue over the last 12 months. Please smokes. Okay.

That's a mindblower. That packs a punch. Services, $113 billion. Tesla, $97 billion. Johnson and Johnson, $96 billion. Not bad. Wearables, $35 billion. AMD, $34.6 billion.

So watches and AirPods, more than AMD. The Mac, $33 billion. The Big Mac, $27 billion. McDonald's. I got it. More max than McDonald's. And then finally, the iPad, $29 billion and whatever. Again, McDonald's, $27 billion.

Charles Schwab, $25 billion. Pretty good business. Just think if they could actually get a functioning AI assistant on the phone for you. Speaking of that, multiple people have recommended a product called Whisper Flow, which I downloaded. And it does work very well. It's kind of a pain in the ass because every time you use talk to text,

you have to like open the app. It's inside the messages, but so it takes you to a new screen and it's annoying and it says, we wish you didn't have to switch apps to use flow, but Apple nap requires us to activate the microphone. It does work a lot better. It does work a lot, lot better.

Hey, Apple, buy whisper flow. Or build something better. You cheap pricks. I'm talking about the Nix and it kept saying next. I'm like, Knicks. And even if you say... Well, why don't you just type? Everyone can type really fast on their phone.

Why don't you just type? Well, if I'm walking, I'm not for a walk or if I'm driving, I don't want to... That's fair. Because I think if you're walking somewhere, a sidewalk wherever, a store and someone goes into zombie mode in their phone in the middle of everyone, I feel like you should be able to like either arrest that person or give him a shoulder to the back. Because you just stand there in the middle of everyone. Oh yeah. In the way.

Says the person who climbed out of his window. Yeah, I want to make it a lot. Yeah, that's fair. All right. Let's talk about something I was wrong about. But what's good about whisper flow is at least you can say like, no, no, no, delete. And it will delete. If you type them to Siri, if you say in Siri, it will type out no, no, no delete.

Okay. Oh, I got you. I won't use it. I'll talk about something I was wrong about. Two things, actually. Airbnb, look at the stock price. This thing went public in 2021, and I bought it at the IPO,

and the entirety of the gain in Airbnb's share price is from the opening day pop at the IPO, which how many people actually got subscribed to that? Not many. This stock has gone absolutely nowhere. They completely changed an industry. They created an industry out of thin air effectively. they were they were going to be the Uber of homes and I it's it's changed the way that my family

vacations obviously rental houses existed but Airbnb made it so much easier and I think them getting into it made like a place like VRBO 10 times better too because we use them a lot as well and the stock has done absolutely nothing during a boom in technology stocks hand up I never would have expected this well two things it came the the value which when it came public was obviously very rich. But ironically, ironically, stocks looking pretty good for the first time in a long, long, long, long time. It's, might be breaking out here, Ben. Do you still own it? No, I got rid of it a long time ago. It didn't do that. It's not doing anything. So yeah, I don't know. It came, I think it came public at what, $100 billion or something? Yeah, I forget it. I think it was a

hundred times sales type of thing. But that's the, the easy thing to say is, oh, it came, it was way too pricey. But you would have, if this turned into a $600 billion company, you go, oh man, it was cheap at the time. Of course. Well, yeah. Well, now we have more information. But no, I mean, no, there was people saying, like, this is a crazy valuation when an IPO did. Yes, I do remember that.

But it was a crazy time. But one more thing, Zillow. I was bullish on the housing market through all the early 2020s, late teens, early 20s. And I said, Zillow was the best brand in housing. Everyone checks it all the time. I think they have two or three hundred million users or something that check the website. Like, look at, not that many people obviously buy houses.

this stock has absolutely stunk. So, absolutely horrible. I don't know. It's in a 50% drought on still. I think I bought it after it was down 40%. I still lost money. I don't know. It's crazy how the name brand.

So I nailed the housing thing. Nailed it. I was bullish on housing at the perfect time. Housing went crazy. And Zillow stock stunk. Well. This is why I'm not a stock picker. I've been way wrong on more stocks than I've been right.

So you're not alone. I think everybody listening, if they're being honest with themselves, hey, turns out stock picking is kind of hard. It's true. And this is why. All right. Two things are true. All right. One, there are way more degenerates in the economy right now.

Everything is a casino. Everything's a market. People are gambling more. Day trading. Zero day options. Prediction markets. Two, there are way more people who are behaved. And that swamps the degenerates by a factor of, I don't know, a thousand.

Here's from etf.com. VOO becomes the first ever ETF to cross $900 billion in assets. Here's from the story. VOO has pulled in $36.9 billion this year so far more than any other ETFs on a pace to surpass $100 billion in annual flows for a third consecutive year,

a feat no other ETF has ever accomplished even once. So I know there's a lot of press today about how everyone's a gambler and no one invests in financial nihilism. This is the opposite of that. Vanguard is 12. trillion dollars in assets. Black Rock is fast approaching $15 trillion. This is not the behavior

of a bunch of people who are gambling. This is the behavior of people who are putting money away at a low cost in a tax-efficient product and leaving it alone. This is the classic like if it bleeds, it leads. Nobody wants to read these articles. They're boring as shit. But they dwarfed the degenerate economy 5,000 times over. Yes, I found this article on Twitter. I think the article had zero retreats and one like. No one cares. Nobody cares. And this to me is the investor class winning. And this is why it's so hard to beat the market now.

Because most of the suckers have left the poker table. The only people left are the really smart people trying to beat the market. Well, that's not true. The degenerates are the easy pickings. That's why there was an article in the FT. Jane Street made more money the last year. I did see that, yes. Yeah.

Jane Street, but made more money than Walmart. What? So your point is well taken, but except for the last part. The suckers have not left the table. They're actually,

there's more suckers than ever, even though there's more investors than ever. How about this? On a market cap basis, more suckers have left the table. The suckers at the table don't have a lot of money. Well, but it's worse because they're professional suckers,

and they're not suckers. I saw I don't want to be disrespectful. The professional active managers, these are short and bright people that set the market prices. They do every single day. They're still there, but their market cap has shrunk.

Fair. All right. This is not a great story. From the Washington Journal, Doug Horner has seen plenty of customers walk into his Northeast Ohio Mercedes-Benz dealership who are more on their trade-ins

than those cars are worth. But being $40,000 under water on a pickup truck is a scary sign of a growing trend, I'd say. A prospective buyer recently sought to trade in a Ford F-150 lightning for a Mercedes GLE coop, but that potential customer owed about $87,000 on the pickup truck. Horner estimates the Ford pickup truck was worth about $47,000. Check this out. In 2026, buyers with negative equity financed an average of nearly $56,000 for a new car in the first

quarter, about $12,000 more than the typical new vehicle buyer, and that translates to a monthly payment averaging $932 for negative equity borrowers, the highest level ever recorded. So, Robbins Audi. Wait, they could have interviewed you for this story. Robbins Q7, I pay $1,27 a month. And I know that car does not cost so much money, but I was underwater, you know, a lot, Big League underwater. Now, my, my intention with my previous car that I was underwater on was, all right, well,

just drive it until we paid off, right? Like, I don't love being on. That's the obvious advice for this guy who owns 87,000 owes $87,000. Guess what? Don't buy the Mercedes. Yeah. Weight it out. Of course.

So it's not a catastrophe in general. It's not fun being underwater, but just drive it until you're, Finish the payments. And then... Yes, exactly. With our car, and unfortunately, you know, this is not like super unique to us. The car started having problems and we were putting more money into the negative equity. Remember my engine, my engine was busted and it was going to cost like $18,000 to fix.

I was like, no. Like, we already are under one and $20,000. I'm not putting $18,000 into the car for a new engine. So we had literally no choice. But if you were under one of $20,000,000, but if you are under one, water. You just drive it until you're done and then that's it. But the pandemic, the pandemic

f***ed everything up. Yeah, isn't this a one-time thing? This isn't like something that's going to keep happening. This is, the car prices got so out of whack. It'll normalize in a few years. But yeah, we're working, we're working off all of these, all of these overpriced pandemic purchases. Yes, but so

that average payment of 900, it's crazy how high car pants are now. Yeah. Just nuts. All right. Last week, I talked about how we're in a new era of higher, just higher inflation. 3% is the new 2%. What that means is also that we're in higher wage growth environment as well. So this is the Fed wage tracker.

I think the Atlanta Fed does it. And you can see it through the 2010s, it was kind of rising. But we're just in a higher shift. And now that inflation is turning back up, guess what else is turning back up? Wages. And look at the job switcher thing is still much higher if you switch jobs. So wages remain much higher. And I still think most people, if you ask them, honestly, would rather have the 2010s.

I would rather have lower inflation and lower wage growth than higher inflation and higher wage growth. 100%. Most people would say that. Oh, yeah. People hate inflation. It's tailing our country apart. It's funny because we just keep making it worse. What do you mean?

Spending more money and going to war. I can't stop spending money, Ben. Ever since inflation started. Look at this thing. This is my new workout tool. What is that? That looks like a sex toy. What is that?

So this is, I'm not a boxer, but look. Right? So instead of paying your $200 fee for a personal trainer, you're going to do that. Listen. That looks like something to my dad. So my dad would always, the infomercials back in the day of the exercise tools, my dad would always get taken for those. So I actually bought two things recently. I bought this thing.

I'm using it. I don't know if you could tell. I'm starting to feel results. Where did you see? Is that an Instagram purchase? Yeah. Of course. All of my spending happens in Instagram.

Okay. So my dad would always get taken for the infomercials. He had this one thing called a body blade. And it was like this long thing. And you would hold it and you'd shake it. And it would like put resistance against you. And it was kind of like the original shake weight.

The thing. Oh yeah. The shake weight. Everyone, you'd get one of those for someone at like a white elephant. gift party in Christmas. I don't remember the Body Blade. So your dad had this. Listen, your dad's in great shape, so.

Just get a membership to a gym. What are you doing? I can't, I don't have time for a gym. Go to the gym. I don't have time. You're an early riser. Kids go to school. No, I'm not.

I thought you wake up pretty early. What am I going to the gym? I get up at 6.30. That's pretty early. All right. Let's talk about AI. Oh, you go first. So,

for the first time, and maybe I'm oblivious to this stuff, in fact, I think I am, but it's, it became overwhelming. The AI writing, I just canceled one of my substack subscriptions. I was reading, like, wait a minute. This is like, this is so, it's a huge turnoff. When I, when I notice it, I immediately check out and I leave. I'm not reading. If I can tell it's AI read, I'm not.

Sorry. So I will never read this person again. And like on the flip side, so Nick Majuli just wrote his 500 blog post. And guess what? It sounds exactly like Nick Majuli. There's such a difference between like what somebody writes warts and all versus just something that's like made by the computer. I don't want to read it. So when I first started my blog and I thought about doing it, I went through and I read, remember the one thing back in the day in the early 2010s, the blog thing was you'd have on the side, it would list the 20 most popular blog posts you did or something.

They don't do that anymore, but you did. So I went through and I read the one. like all the old blog posts from Eddie Elfine and Josh and Barry and all these people who are blogging. And the one thing that I took away from that is, oh, these people write in their own voice. That's what you have to do. That's how you stand out. You don't just like have this monotonous robotic thing. And that's what AI. That's so people who write in their own voice, I think, are going to be able to stand out more. That's what I was trying to do. Okay. I got some AI job anecdotes. So I was in Oklahoma last week. I was speaking at the annual Oklahoma CFA conference.

Very nice place. It was kind of, it was very topy though, because it was in downtown Tulsa and this like art deco kind of place. And they just re-renovated this place. And it looks like a great, Gatsby kind of hall, like 1920s, very rare in 20s. So it was very topy. Anyway, talking to people there and sat next to, they had all these college students there who were there because they were in this equity contest. And so their professor was there. So I asked a professor, I said, how is the job market for young people? Because I keep hearing about it. And he said, it totally depends on what your major is. Every finance student we have is getting placed in a job. That's not a problem anymore. He said, people in finance are getting hired. It's the humanities and other jobs that are

not getting hired. So he said it's totally dependent on what you're going into. Another one, I talked to one of the largest asset managers that there is. I will not name them. They told me about how they have built their own AI system internally. Okay. And they use it for their equity research analysts, the buy, sell, hold people, right? So he asked me a question. He said, we built this whole AI tool. It allows us to more efficiently track every company we're following. Every company in our universe, we can track them way more efficiently. It's unbelievable how much more efficient this has made us. He said, do you think our employee headcount has gone up by 40% or down by 40%?

Since they implemented this new tool that allows them to track more companies, what do you think? More or less employees? I mean, I would think. The answer is obvious, right? Okay. Right, but now that you're asking it that way, is it the opposite of what I would think? Yes.

He said, actually, no, we've hired 40% more people on this staff. He said, you know why? The whole line used to be in the past, that these small cap stocks and midcaps are totally underfile and that's where the alpha is. He said, guess what? There's so many stocks that aren't being covered

that weren't covered before. We can cover a wider universe now and it's allowed us to hire more people because we can produce more research to sell. So we actually have hired more people. It wasn't a huge number. I thought that was very interesting. Anyway,

I think if there is going to be a moment for AI that resets certain parts of the labor market, and my whole point here is, You're not going to know which ones they are, I think. I think it's going to be hard to guess which parts of the white-collar labor economy are going to be impacted the most. So this is Ernie Tedeski now writing for Stripe Economics, which is a great substack. And he shows the decline of travel agents over time. And he said it's like kind of a slow burn, but it really happens during recessions.

That's when you see this massive waterfall of travel agents going away. And I think that's going to be what happens. The next recession, that's going to be the big time. tell when you're going to have people who have big layoffs and they don't get hired back. That's when you're going to know like, okay, this is the industry. These are the industries that are really impacted here. You're going to see a huge divergence in the recessions. Do people get hired back or not?

I think that's going to be to tell. There was an article in the journal that I've had up for two weeks. I haven't read it yet. I don't know why. The CEO preaching straight talk about AI and job losses is the Verizon thing. Did you read this article? No. Okay.

Well, I got home Okay, sorry, I guess I said the headlines. Okay, I got home on Sunday between kids sports games and my internet was out, like just out, like no internet connection. So I called Verizon and I'm going through the automated thing and I was getting so frustrated like pressing zero, customer service, sorry, we cannot record.

It's like, are you fucking kidding me? How is this not any better at all? Like, at all. It's the most frustrating thing. How are these automated phone solutions? Like, not immediately overnight better. And I understand that, like, they're not dumb people. They're, you know, they're trying to fix it.

And they know it's frustrating. I always just say, talk to an operator, talk to an operator, talk to an operator. Talk to an operator. It never works. So how many content jobs do you think AI is going to create? Because the Wall Street Journal had this piece about how. big brands boost creator spending. And they say,

Dove Parent Unilever has led many other large companies to its embrace of creators. The company now is 300,000 people recommending its products up from 10,000 to two years earlier. So this is like the, and I know this from having daughters. Like the whole skincare, beauty, whatever, is such a huge thing.

That's a, this is one company with 300,000 creators. And it just got me thinking about all the jobs that exist now that didn't exist in the past. Uber driver, DoorDash driver, but people who are content creators, right? People who just go create content on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, podcast, whatever, social media managers. Like, what is AI going to lead to that? We're like, oh, yeah.

But obviously it's like AI fact checkers. There's going to be in-house AI experts like they have IT now. AI video producers. They're going to have to be more data managers because the data is going to be so much more important. There'll be like AI governance people. But there's going to be all these jobs that exist from AI. we just don't think about.

Totally. I'm trying to look at it as a positive. All right. We got a few emails from Austin residents saying that our explanation last week was totally off the mark. And I think the gist of it was like more supply leads to lower prices, right? Like they built more and prices came down. Somebody said, I've lived in Austin for 20 plus years and I listened to your talk about Austin.

There has been a booming building, especially apartments. But to say that more housing loan is the reason for lower rents is way over simple I can't tell you just how much of Boomtown Austin has been, and since the pandemic, that's slowed way down. The fallen rents is as much demand as it is supply. So, I mean, that was pretty much the long and the short of it. I don't buy it. The fact that the thing is slowed down and they built more, that's supply. Well, that's what this person said.

This person said, the fallen rents is as much demand as it is supply. I think what we spoke about last week was only supply. Oh. There has been a massive slowdown in Austin. Okay. So he said there's still 18,000 people moving here the past three years. That's a huge slowdown. It's not like they're seeing a net migration, though.

That's not what he's saying. Don't move the goalposts. Yeah, he is. I'm reading it. He's saying there's been a huge slowdown on people coming here because they're adding way more people per year before. The slowdown is demand slowing down. Sure.

But this wouldn't have happened if, They didn't build all those apartment buildings. I'm disagreeing with the feedback here. Sorry. Great email. I don't believe it. It's the supply. They built more apartments.

That's why prices fell. This is a weird. This is you failing to it. This is a weird take by you. This person said this is the fall in rents is as much demand as it is supply. Which part are you disagreeing with? I'm saying it's more supply than demand. Okay.

But last episode, we didn't speak about demand at all. And this person's saying, hey, it's not that simple. Yeah. Don't be so defensive. This person's right. It's not being defensive. I'm just saying it's a lot. But you're being defensive.

All right. Bethany McLean and two other authors from Hunthbrook wrote a piece on Hamilton Lane, a publicly traded alternative asset manager, which they are short. And they gave credit to the journal and the FT for highlighting the accounting shenanigans that are commonplace across the industry. It's not just Hamilton Lane. But basically, they buy companies. that are private equity backed called secondaries,

and they're buying them for the secondary market has boomed because there's been a lack of exits, and you hold the company for three years, five years, seven years, eight years, and there's no exit. Like investors won't take a, quote, discount to, I guess, quote, again, air quote, nav. And so the explosion of secondaries happened. Fair enough.

All, you know, that all is above board. But the problem is that Hamilton Lane, will buy a company for 80 cents on the, again, air quote, dollar, and then just mark up to a dollar. It's like, buddy, if you could buy a company for 80 cents, it ain't worth a dollar. Now, fine. You buy something for 97 cents? Yeah, it's probably worth a dollar. And not only that, but then they're obviously doing that to charge fees on that.

And that's responsible for a large portion of the growth of the last three years, like a large, large portion. So they wrote, last year, Hamilton Lane brewed another accounting portion, changing the way the firm is compensated. It used to be paid incentive fees when gains were realized, meaning when the underlying assets were actually sold. Now it can collect fees regularly based simply on increasing its own marks. The change allowed Hamilton Lane to pull forward fees that may have taken years to accrue. Thanks to the new fee structure, Hamilton Lane took in $58 million of incentive fees

from the private assets funded in the year that ended in March 2025. In a statement to Hunterbrook addressing the issue, the company said that because semi-liquid funds typically reinvest proceeds rather than distribute them, traditional carry calculations based on distributions are less appropriate, making nav-based carry a better fit. So they do this because their employees need to be paid. Right? They're worried they're going to lose employees because they're not getting carried. They're not getting the fee.

they're not getting the 20% of the 2-20 because there's no... Well, it might not be that quite that innocent. They also wrote later in the article about the co-ceos, I believe, getting a huge restricted stock grant with performance-based, you know, numbers in there, like every other executive pay package. Okay, so are you going from a long, the private equity industry is short now? No. Paper-wise?

No, no, no, no, no. I think that, well, first of all, Hamilton Lane is particularly exposed because they are much more in the retail space. They are much less of an institutional-based company as opposed to like Carlisle for example. So the gist of that is like these easy markups, it could go the opposite, easy come, easy go type of thing. The stock is in a 55% drawdown, which is actually not as bad as Blue Owl, which is still 66% down from the highs. No, I, I, I am not pounding on the table that I think that like the private credit stuff is overblown because how would I know how bad the loans really are? But I do think, so is there smoke? Yeah, listen, obviously, if there's 25% of your, of your portfolio is loaning

money to these software names that are in trouble. Yeah, you're probably going to have a few write downs. But I guess my take is like, yes, some of these funds will have maybe negative three returns. Like forget about the 9 to 11% returns. Like maybe it goes, maybe it goes to 2%, maybe it goes to negative 2% Kger for the next three years. Do I think that there's going to be like blowups that take down like an entire industry asset class?

That's where I think it's hyperbolic. This is why it's easy to pound the table on both ends of the spectrum though because it's so hard to understand what's going on with these portfolios. Yeah, how would we know? That's the thing. That's why you can say like,

there's way more trouble underneath the surface than you realize or no, no, things are actually fine. Like people in the outside don't know. Correct. That's what makes it hard. We're speculating. Goldman Sachs, this one was fly on social media,

and this shows a survey from Goldman Sachs, and I had to look this up because I kept seeing the numbers on social media, so I went to the actual source. Meb Faber posted it. It says 40,000 or 40% of people who make $300,000 of $500,000 and 40% of people who make $500,000 or more live paycheck to paycheck. Okay?

40%. People who make a half billion a year report living paycheck to paycheck. Now here's how they define this, though. I looked because a lot of people look at this and go, see, lifestyle creep. It doesn't matter how much money you make. If you spend it all, you're never going to get ahead. And they take this stuff at face value. My way of looking at this is two things.

One, surveys are broken. Two, brains are broken. That's way more of a reason here than people who make a half million dollars aren't saving any. Because it asks, primarily living paycheck to paycheck means I find it tough to make progress on any long-term financial goals. That's how they define living paycheck to paycheck. I'm so glad that you said that, Ben,

because almost always, we never see the questions. I had to go to the actual report to find this. Good for you. I find it tough. And the funny thing is, it says people who make $200 to $300,000 a year, only 16% report living paycheck to paycheck. Then all of a sudden it jumps to 40%

for people who make a half a million. All right. So I find it tough to make progress on any long-term financial goals. Now that means you live paycheck to paycheck. Right. If you make a half million dollar year, what if your long-term financial goals are, I want to own a big house on the ocean? I want to fly private.

Well, I'm not making any progress for those goals. I think most people find it tough to make progress on any long-term financial goals. Because it takes time. Yes, that's the problem. Unless you have a windfall, it takes time to hit your goals. Isn't that like the nature of what a goal is? It's something that you strive for. So by definition, it takes time to reach.

Yes. Nobody's goals are what they can accomplish tomorrow. This is such nonsense. That's why that's not paycheck to paycheck. And there's also a lot of people who max out their 401K and also their Roth IRA and their HSA and their 529 and maybe make a brokerage account and then say, I'm living paycheck after all that, you know?

But I also think the other part is social media has just broken brains. Like we're not meant to see how people, the other people live, how the better the top 1.1% live. Like, we see that on a daily basis. We just, we, our brains weren't evolved enough to see that all the time. I just don't think social media is great for society, but I think it's just had all sorts of impacts that we can't quantify. So look at this chart from, go ahead.

Are you about to say something? How much does that thing weigh? I don't know. Not that's not that heavy, but it's got some good resistance. Look, uh, one to five, one to five. I'm on five, not to brag. Derek Thompson More than $20 on that

You got ripped off I think it was 30 Okay that's not bad Derek Thompson wrote a post Like if Americans are so rich Why they're so unhappy Something like that And the gist is

Well there's a bunch of things It's inflation and social media It's all that But it's the pandemic broke everything Yeah Look at this chart I forget where he pulled this from Reported Happiness

1972 to 2018 It was steady you know, you had your ups and your downs, but basically you could draw a straight line through it. And then permanent crash. Never to be recovered ever again. Yeah, I agree. It's COVID. All right, on the flip side, going back to my transcript stuff, new week, same story.

The consumer is in pretty good shape. Key Corp. The consumer is in great shape. If you look at all of our credit metrics, if you look at the fact that these tax refunds from the beautiful bill will exceed what they did last year. If you look at spending, spending is kind of up mid single digits year over year. Online spending is up maybe double digits. So on the consumer side, the consumer actually, our consumers in good shape. Sycreenery financial. And then the consumer is still in pretty good shape. It's been very consistent over the past few quarters.

We've seen signs of strength and you can spend the patterns. Wells Fargo, the economy is still extremely strong. Loan demand is decent. Delinquency and the consumers are extremely well controlled. Listen, we're not making this up. When this, when this changes, we'll read the new quotes. Someone asked me, I'm going to be doing a lot of podcasts in the month or two ahead. I've already done a lot for a book because this is what you do. You go on a podcast book tour. And I was on a Seeking Alpha podcast. And they asked me about how I think about earnings reports.

And I said, I think it's a great macro tell. I said, I'm not a forensic accountant that digs into the numbers. That's not my forte. But if you listen to like the credit cards and the banks and the retail about how they talk about a consumer, I think it would have saved you a lot of poor economic takes over the past four to five years. earnings calls over headlines. If you want to hear about what's actually happened to the consumer, don't read the Wall Street Journal.

No offense. You can pick any publisher. I love the Washington Journal. But, all right. I listened to the kindergarten coffee watchables. And I thought this was a movie that I had seen in theaters because I had just seen it so many times as a child. Came out in 1990.

Did I see this when I was five? Probably not. I showed it to my kids about six months ago. Because we were going through an Arnold phase. and they absolutely loved it. It's so good. He's just a one of one. Yeah.

The accent, you can't recreate that. The accent is just perfect, how he says words. So that was, did you listen to the Rwatchables episode? Yeah, I did. Thoroughly enjoyable. It was good. All right, the most watched movies right now on streaming. So the shitty movie thrash.

Garbage. so bad. 904 million, what is that? Minutes, hours? Whatever it is. Oh, minutes, there is. It's eight times number two.

Netflix is so dominant. Number two is balls up. Wait, wait. So here's the thing. You talk about people using AI to better themselves. You know what everyone does when they go on Netflix? Instead of searching around, they go to the top ten. And oh, this Thrasch movie is number one. I'll watch that.

That's the amount of research people do. They look for shortcuts. I've never heard of any of these other movies, by the way. All these other four movies, I've never heard any of them. So I started watching balls up. I fell asleep after 10 minutes. But it's Mark Wahlberg and who's the guy from, let me just Google his name.

Paul Walter Hauser. So he invented a condom for the Olympics. Like they're the biggest, they're the sponsoring condom brand. and it goes over your penis and your testicles. And it's called Balls Up. Okay. So, haven't finished it, but...

Is that a Keanu Reeves movie on Apple TV? All right, so check this out. What is Apple doing? So Apple made a movie with Jonah Hill, Keanu Reeves, and Cameron Diaz. Seriously? I've never heard of it. Well, it got a 29% from the critics,

which is sort of not relevant for comedy. but it got 30% from the audience. So, you know, it's straight trash. It's got a 4.5 on IMDB. Holy cow. Anyway, Netflix is so dominant. It's eight times, number two. Number three is outcome, the Canterbury's movie.

Number four is the truth and tragedy of Mariah Wilson, another Netflix movie I've never heard of. I watched the most recent one, Apex. It was so, it's with Charlize Theron and Perrin Edgerton. Okay. George wanted to watch that one. so bad. Don't let him watch it. It was like, but like,

I know we've mentioned this a million times. There's just something hollow about these Netflix movies. Yes, obviously. Like this was, it was just garbage. Really, really, really, really not a good movie. All right. Also in streaming news. So, Peacock is now where a lot of the NBA playoff games are homeed.

How is, uh, yes, I learned this by, we went to a restaurant to try to watch the Pistons game. Like, I said, we don't have Peacock. Can't watch it. So they reported earnings last week. And they posted a first quarter loss, this is from Comcast. Peacock lost $432 million.

They've lost $6 billion cumulatively. I mean, that's a lot of money. No, Lucas Shoss had $11 billion since they debuted in 2020. Oh. Okay. So I just pulled this from since 20. Okay, so six billion was since 2020. Okay.

So since they debuted, they've lost $11 billion since 2020. Subscriber growth is, oh, it's growing a little bit, you know, 46 million up from 41 million in previous quarter. But look at their churn. So Lucas Shaw is a chart. Peacock has started to draw on lots of viewers with live sports, so football, basketball, Olympics. But it struggles to keep them as a worst churn of any service.

By far. Look at that. So who do they Combine with? Like they need to obviously they need to be Consolidated into someone else I don't know if I don't know I don't know what happens

But it's not it's not working All right I was right about this Ben No offense you were wrong Michael Jackson is a Michael Jack Michael the Michael movie is a smash it So I heard they didn't go into the later stuff Of his life

No no no because the family had the family was You know they had They were able to take to that $97 million domestically. Biggest opening forever for a biopic of any kind. Biggest opening of the year for a live action film. First biopic in history to surpass $100 million worldwide in a single day. Monster movie.

Monster movie. Okay. Do you be watching this one? I won't be watching it. I'm not watching this one. $270 million worldwide. Huge numbers. That's from Matt Bellany.

No, I don't love these movies. I like The Queen, but a Bohemian Rhapsody. but I just don't care about them. I didn't see Bruce, the Bruce one. Didn't see the Elton John one. It's too much. Didn't see. Oh, I saw the Bob Dylan one, but I fell see him on the plane.

It's just not my thing. All right. Real quick, prediction markets, which are essentially just gambling, sports gambling websites. Somebody posted this chart outside of sports, potty market owns the market. So, Cali is 87% sports.

Wow. Polymarket is only 39% sports. Okay, so most of it, so they have both platforms at $12 billion in volume. Wow. Okay. But Calshare is predominantly sports, which is why they're fighting so heavily with, you know, for their survival, I guess, with the states and whatnot. Okay. I saw this tweet.

Ben Eisenhardt on Twitter. Being in your early 40s is weird man. People around your age are in every stage of life. You have people who are grandparents. You have people who have newborns. People who are grandparents. I don't have people in my age that are grandparents. Yeah, that'd be weird.

I guess late 40s. You have people dating 25-year-olds. You have people celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary. Some of them look 60 and some of them look 30. All the bases are covered in your early 40s. I was thinking about this recently. I can, being that, like, you're at a touch point where you're like you're thinking about, you're right in the middle of like retirement age and like your 20s.

And I guess I'm just, my point is I understand where the midlife crisis comes from. Being at this age, I totally get it. I get why it happens to so many. people. Because you look back and you go, oh, my like super duper fun days, like my, woohoo, those days, like those are gone. I've been thinking about this a lot as well. I saw somebody recently who I haven't seen in a while and they looked old and I thought,

well, yeah, we are getting old. So I've been thinking that I eat a lot about life and our age and our kids and all that stuff. And I still very much view myself as like a baby because I was the youngest of three kids. So I grew up the baby. I was a jackass for people that have not listened. to every episode. I was an idiot in high school.

I got kicked out of college twice because I was just a clown. I didn't take anything seriously. And I still very much identify with like being that person. But also obviously like I very much more identified thank God at this point in my life with like not being that person.

But that push and pull between like I still feel like I'm 25 but I need this thing because my body is breaking down. Yeah man. it's real. It is. I'm just saying I totally get where it comes from. I read all the stuff about like how it

happens and why it happens and guess what? It's everything people tell you before and you kind of like brush it off when you're younger, like eh, like it's all true. Everything they tell you is true. The time goes fast at the kids, all that stuff. It's so, it's true. Funny how that works.

That's right, Ben. All right. Recommendations. I got two non-recommendations. I was on a flight. and I said, like, I'm going to try some new release movies. And I tried The House Maid. That's a Sydney-Sweeney one. And I tried Mercy with Chris Pratt.

And for me, they were both- Well, they were both five-minute movies. Five minutes and I ripped the cord and I cut my loser short. Both of them are like, I'm not going to like these movies. I can tell five minutes in. Housemade is a good airplane movie. Okay. I can just tell, like, I'm not going to like this.

Mercy was, mercy was, jeep-o. I mean, it was an obvious minority report rip-off two minutes into the movie and it could tell it's going to be worse. So what's the point of why? watching it. Right. I did finally finish DTF St. Louis. Just one of the weirdest shows ever. Did you enjoy it? Very funny. So weird. Yeah, I enjoyed it. It was very weird. But then someone emailed us last

week and said, hey, the guy who wrote and produced all these and the showrunner for DTF St. Louis, he also wrote and did one of my favorite shows in Amazon called The Patriot. And my brother pounded the table on this show for me forever. And so I'm like, you know what, fine. I'm going to watch this. And I'm about five episodes in. And so again, it's the same guy who did DTF and it's got to be tonally one of the weirdest shows ever. It's a dark comedy slash dromity, but a guy in the CIA. Did it give you a toner? It's one of those shows where the people who love it will like fall on the sword for this movie or this show. But I'm sorry to interrupt. That was a weird reference. That was I didn't, I know that was a sexual innuenda that I did not

make up that that was a reference of a movie called Pitch Perfect. A toner is a musical boner. So just for the audience. Okay, sorry, I'm behind on pitch perfect references. I did not get that reference. Okay. But this is the kind of show where you either love it or you hate it. There's no in between.

You're like, oh my gosh, this is my kind of comedy. It's very subtle. And I really like it. And I know, I bet a lot of people would probably hate it. But if you like DTF St. Louis, you should probably at least give it a try. Okay. I feel like you were talking to me when you said people would hate it. Would I hate it?

Okay. Well, you liked DTF St. St. Louis. I loved it. But I don't know that I, yeah. I think because Baitman. and the other guy were so good. True.

That was part of it. But it's got John Locke from Lost, the guy who played Joe Pickett and the Joe Pickett series on Paramount. Anyway, that's what I got. One other thing,

I've realized something, why movies of the past 10 years or so just don't hit anymore. Marty Supreme is on HBO, right? Awesome. It's a one, but every good movie

from the past 10 years is you watch it once and that's it. You never rewatch it again. Yeah, it's not very watchable. There's like, No good movies are rewatchable anymore.

Oh, ooh, ooh, ooh, uh, Topkin Maverick. By the way. Okay, that's fair. They're making a third. Yeah, they probably shouldn't. Yeah, they should. Obviously, I'm in. Tom Cruise probably die.

Let's be honest. One of these, he should die. Did he die? I thought he did die in the last one. No, he should have. Okay. That's my thing. There's no more rewatchable movies anymore.

Like, even if they're good, high-quality movies, they're very few that are rewatchable. I think that ended in, like, 2015. to rewatch a bit. It's probably because there's no comedies anymore. Yeah, that's probably right. Oh, speaking of that, though, I did see on Instagram a quote

from Jonah Hill, and he said, I'm back. Like, he basically said I spent the last decade being all serious and not happy and get ready to turn your brain off because I'm back to making the stupidest shit you've ever seen. And I can't wait. There was nothing better.

That's good. There was nothing better than Jonah being Jonah. He's one of the best, like, sarcastic line readers that there is. The best. The best. So, that is a good. No recommendations for you know horror movies this week? Well, been busy with playoffs, so that's been cutting into my watch time.

I did watch the Hulk Hogan doc. I think we spoke about Hulk when he died. You were not a wrestling fan, right? I mean, until I was like eight. Okay. So I wasn't like a weirdo, but like I watched it like in middle school, like DX and the attitude era NW. Like that was a big part of my seventh and eighth grade childhood.

And Hulk Hogan was like he was bigger than wrestling. I mean, obviously, right? He was like one of the legitimately the most famous people in the world. For as big as the rock is and Stone Cold was like Hulk Hogan was up as famous as like Michael Jackson. Globally. And then he had the reality show.

I know that one. Yeah. Hogan knows best. Sure do. So if you're a wrestling fan, nothing in there that you don't already know, but I enjoyed it. Okay.

Okay, okay. All right, Ben, everything else is good. There's not a lot of talk about the market these days. Oh, there's tons to talk about. You think so? Oh, yeah. Okay. I think the stock market just for the last week or so is boring again.

That's all I got. Certainly more boring than March, which is a good thing. Okay, Animal Spirits at thecompannews.com. Appreciate everybody's emails. Hope everybody's getting ready for spring weather to roll around. I sure am. Thank you for listening. See you next time.