Animal Spirits Podcast - Sudden Wealth Syndrome (EP. 485)

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

On episode 485, ⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ben Carlson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ discuss: what can stop the hyperscalers from spending, why the stock market is neat all-time highs again, speedball capitalism, how capex cycles work, it's a high beta decade, how to lie with statistics, young people are going to be fine, the top 0.1% is really rich, the problem with getting rich young, private markets are overvalued, no more dinner parties and more. This episode is sponsored by Fidelity Investments and the all-new Fidelity Trader+, Fidelity’s most powerful trading platform yet and Federated Hermes. Learn more at http://www.fidelity.com/TraderPlus Explore their full ETF lineup at ⁠https://federatedhermes.com/ Sign up for The Compound newsletter and never miss out: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thecompoundnews.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Us On Social Media: Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠twitter.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/company/the-compound-media/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tiktok.com/@thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Fidelity Disclosure: Fidelity Investments and The Compound are not affiliated. Views, opinions, products, services, and strategies discussed are not endorsed or promoted by Fidelity Investments. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, Member NYSE, SIPC Federated Hermes Disclosure: ETFs are subject to risk and may lose value. Federated Securities Corp., Distributor. Before investing, carefully consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read this and more information in the prospectus or summary prospectus available at FederatedHermes.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Read this and more information in the prospectus or summary prospectus available at federatedhermise.com. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, are you a Giants fan? Long pause. Ben, I know, I know. I know no, there's, you know what I was about saying nobody cares. There's 11 people listening that are going to care that are going to laugh at what I'm about to say. Yes, I'm a Giants fan.

It's been. I can't, for people who are listening, Michael's just decked out in head-toe Giants gear. It's been over a decade since we were alone in first place. So I committed a Cardinal said, the Arizona Cardinals, pun intended, I suppose. Well, unintended, actually. The Arizona Cardinals were favored two and a half points against my Giants. Giants are not a good football team. Be honest, I thought the Colorado.

Cardinals were going to beat us. They're not good either, but they're competent. So my biggest bet of the day, Ben, for five-team teaser, shame on me. But I teased them all the way up, like all the way up, very conservative. The five-team teaser was like a plus-130. I said, I think the Cardinals are going to beat us, but we're not going to beat them by more than nine and a half points, are we? No fucking way. I mean, and I don't know if anybody saw the end of the Giants game, guessing most of you didn't, but the Giants were up by three points, whatever it was. So there was a pick six at the end

in that screen. There was a pick six with zero seconds on the clock. Zero seconds. All Deontay Banks had to do was go out of bounds or go down, which normally happens. It would have preserved my biggest bet of the weekend. Shame on me. Okay.

Shame on me for opening up that can of worms there and letting you talk about your bets. I probably was, I probably was just going to keep it in. but I couldn't help it. Misery, my misery needs to, it needs to breathe. That's an emotional hedge because you're team won so that you can't complain about that. It can't let each other out.

You're fine. I'm okay. From the economist, the era of speedball capitalism has dawned. I like this. So one of my things that I've been on for a long time now is just everything is getting faster. All right, I want to read you this opening paragraph here because I think this is really good. I read this and I go, oh, yeah. Every time something big happens, we think it's going to be like a signal of something in the market.

This is it. This is the sign of the top. Everyone wants to. In the past year, American markets have digested the largest ever initial public offering, SpaceX,

equity raised by a public company, Google, or foreign firm, SK Hynix. I'm sorry. The Giants have been so bad for so long. I have all this gear

that's been stuck in my fucking closet for three years. You're like Tom Banks on big right now. Like this, the starter jacket. All right,

sorry, I'm sorry. Sorry to interrupt the flow of this show, go on. No, that's, that's really a great-looking jacket. Private funding around OpenAI, private debt deal, Broadcom, as well as most of the biggest bond issue in history, Amazon. There was the first one trillion-dollar exchange traded funder ETF, Vanguard, record-breaking cash pile, Berkshire Hathaway, stock buyback program, Nvidia, and consummation the largest ever levered buyout deal, electronic cards. I didn't realize that was the case.

Then there are enormous mergers in railways, utilities, and media, the last of which led this week to the largest ever junk bond offering, beating a record. said only last week. New markets have been created out of thin air or become much bigger, worries about massive corporate scandals and hedge fund blowups, which would have once occupied investors' attention for months, are steamrolled by the relentless, totalizing an extraordinarily flexible machine that is American finance. Speedball capitalism. I thought this was very well put, because every time one of these things happened, someone goes, uh-oh, that's it. Fine. That was, this is sign of something. You've been on this beat for a long time, credit to you.

This is just the way things are now. Markets are everything is bigger now. Everything is part of the markets and things move faster. And when there is something to worry about, we worry about it for one week and then we move on. Think about SpaceX was the biggest story for, I don't know, two or three weeks. When's the last time we've heard anyone talk about SpaceX?

It finally today, it round-tripped back to the IPO price. So we had all that worry. I'm so glad you mentioned that SpaceX-X wasn't in the dock, but I'm glad you brought it up because- I put it in here a little bit just before we got out. All right. The price round tripped. Yeah.

We spoke a lot about it when the price is going down. Oh, no. The unlock. Oh, no. It's going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now that it's back at 170, I know we're talking about it. But who cares? We only talk about bad things.

So the one, obviously the worry now is just, AI is just consuming everything. So this is what the day can worry. Wait, Ben, do you know the straight of Hormuz is still closed? Is it? I haven't followed my tracker lately. there was probably one guy who's been tracking the ships by hand. No, this is, hold on. I know you're sweeping out to the road,

but to your point, to this is one of the biggest stories of the decade, and nobody cares. I know, not nobody cares, but. Here's the other thing, though. They're, like, because this happened, they're going to figure out some sort of pipeline to make this not be a worry anymore in the future. So, like, the fact that this event happened

means it won't happen again in the future. It won't be as big of a worry in the future. There's no way they're going to let this little piece of land take the whole global geopolitic, everything hostage again. It's not going to happen. Hear me out. I'm no energy expert. I'm no scientists or astronaut for that case. Pipelines in space. All right. Let's do it. AI is now 53% of the S&P 500, so they break it out by hyperscalers, semiconductors, hardware, power, and software. And all these stocks are having massive gains, obviously. Okay, the FT is on my corner. Last week I said, listen, the stock market has the,

it has it. If you want to take it, it can take higher rates and say, fine, we're going to sell off. So the FT put this into historical, I said every time this has happened historically, that's what it was. Higher rates kind of was the pin in the bubble. So they look at the railways and the utilities in the 1920s in Japan, a dot-com bubble and shale, and they say that stocks roll over first, CapEx follows. So they say the stock market tends to peak early. The stock market sniffs this stuff out, rolls over, and then a few months later,

CAPEX eventually slows down. Can I just kind of rephrase it a little bit or add to it? I think it's a combination of maybe the stock market sniffing it out, but I think it's actually causal. I think the stock market rolls over forcing these companies to slow down. Yes, that's a good way to put it. So the New York Times had this piece. They say higher interest.

rates aren't slowing the AI boom, that's a problem for the Fed. And they're kind of going of what I said last week. I said, well, what if these companies are just so big, they don't care about higher rates? So they quoted a guy from Barclays here. He said, the problem for the Fed is that there is usually a built-in correction mechanism in the U.S. economy, which interest rates rise, and at some point, the rate-sensitive parts of the economy led by housing, slow down hard. And then that propagates the rest of the economy. But if a large part of the economy is just less rate-sensitive, and that is what is pushing the economy to grow faster, then the Fed unfortunately has to hurt the part of the economy that has more rate sensitive. So the question

is, I feel like this is what people always say. Well, it's too big. The Fed can't do any interest rates can't touch this sector. But to your point, the markets can. So if the markets tell these companies, no, rates are higher. There's a higher hurdle rate. We're going to part of money elsewhere. We're not going to give you the debt anymore at these levels. Then the market can force their hand, no matter what the tech CEO say. Right. Correct? Like the market is the captain now. To say that rates can't slow this, I'd be very careful with that stance. I will throw that stance out and flush it down the toilet. That's insane.

They can't. Oh, really? 9% can't? Right. That won't change risk appetite? Of course it will. But we've been saying like when, how, where is the boogeyman? Where is the pinprick going to come from?

And one of the things that we have thrown out as a potential is that investors will walk away from a debt offering. Right? They will just say, all right, meta wants to borrow $30 billion and investors don't show up. Well, guess what? Paramount just came to market looking for $52 billion in debt. You know how much money showed up? Getting back to my team that there's just so much fucking money, $150 billion. And guess what, Paramount Warner Brothers? That's, that coincides with the weekend of the biggest box office flop. maybe in the history of movies. We're not going to talk about that.

We're going to talk about it. Don't be Spurge's name. We're going to talk about Declared in the show. But yeah, the idea that there is not going to be money showing up for these companies, maybe someday, not today. So the thing people would be counterpoint would be, I'd put another one from JP Morgan in here. If you look at the economy, so it's the share of GDP employment and then the stock market percentages. And technology makes up 50% of the stock market. And it's not even close to that for the rest of the economy. It's kind of funny. Technology makes up

2% of total employment in the United States and 50% of the S&P 500. So this is the whole stock market is not the economy. That would be the things like it's just it's so big. So I think they could extend this for longer than maybe many people think. But I agree that the financial markets. That's the that's the stopping point here. That's what could I don't care what Mark Zuckerberg or any of the other CEOs say like, hey, we're going to go big. We don't care. eventually the markets can slow that I'm with, if it wants to. But it's up to the market to say it. The market so far hasn't said anything.

You're right. There's so much money flowing around. Ben, you opened the show last week asking me. Can I remember how you phrased it, but it was something about the breath. Like can the market, oh, can the market, was it, I think it was, can the market hold in there when so many stocks are going down? And I said emphatically, yes, unless interest rates continue to rip higher. Wrong for the, right for the wrong reasons, wrong for the right reasons?

because interest rates keep going higher. We're recorded this Monday afternoon because Ben has something tomorrow. But new cycle highs for the 10 year, for the 20 year, for the 30 year. And yet the S&P is having a great day. It's bright near all-time highs. The equal weight is bouncing a little bit. I don't believe it as too strong of a word, but I'm surprised. As somebody who's like I'm bullish right now, I think that the equal weight will catch

I'm not worried about the lousy breath. I'm surprised. I am surprised the market is holding in like this. The weird thing is if you plot the rates and inflation and all this stuff before the war, right before the war started was like the bottom and everything, inflation was only 2.5%. Rates were barely below 4%. And if you plot it to now, it looks like the war caused all of that stuff.

And obviously it did a lot of it, right? Because if Chart Kid Matt's looked at inflation and inflation X energy, and inflation X energy is a totally different story. But is it also possible that initial burst we got of rates and inflation was all that story. It's the war. You said the straight-up remus is still closed. And now it's, okay, fine. And AI is taking over now, too.

And AI is pushing it up. And people are really believing this higher growth story for rates. And that's why the stock market keeps going up even as rates go up to. It's surprising that the market hasn't said, all right, fine, 10% correction. Just take it. something's got to give. I feel like that quote is in the bull market. All right.

You and I recorded a talk of your book today with Victor Capital. We're talking about high beta versus low beta. This is the high beta decade. High beta and high beta momentum, however you want to phrase it. This decade alone, 2020's, high beta is up 260% low volatility. So I'm using S&P invest go funds here is up 40% in 20%. total. Low volatility has just done nothing, right? Very steady. Not very much returns. It's actually slowing down. So you're just getting like the difference between high beta and low beta. Now,

if you were a diversified investor and you got both of them, you probably did okay, probably like matched the market essentially. But that divergence between the two is got to be about as great as it's been in the last 30 years. It's this assault in the wound for I guess dividend-focused investors. Right. Because this is the area of the stock market. that is extremely vulnerable to higher rates, both in terms of actually like financing the businesses, as well as investor preference. Right?

Well, I don't throw a 3% dividend yield, just give me on stock market volatility, I'll just take bonds. Right. Yes. Yeah, you're right. At this point, there's actually competition for those dividend yields.

And for years there wasn't. You know what the funny thing is here? So again, high beta is SPHB, Low volatility is SPLV. SPLV has about seven times the assets. The high beta has. Low volatility has way more assets. It's like $7 billion where the high beta has about,

we've talked about this, the fact that no one really owns like momentum type strategies. That kind of makes sense to me, only because high beta is not a good strategy. And I'm not saying low value is a great strategy, but it kind of makes sense. If you want areas of, if you want exposure to juice, high bait is not a great way to do it.

So you just own the NASDAQ 100, you're saying. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I guess that, you're right, that's where all the money is gone for that. Speaking of crazy AUM stuff, read this stuff from Luke Kau. You put this in her, I think.

All right, so Luke at Sherwood tweeted from J.P. Morgan. That was horrible podcasting. Saying too many names. J.P. Morgan says that the largest, rotation into the long-end treasury ETFs, TLT, on record, and driven mainly by outsized inflows into TLT, as yields keep drifting higher. So they show a cumulative retail imbalance, and I have to be honest, don't know what that means.

But it is going up and to the right. That just means that I assume that means retail is the ones doing a lot of the buying here. Sure. which jives with the chart that Balchuna shared over at Bloomberg. Basically, money just keeps pointing to TLT as it keeps going down. This is surprising because you and I have talked about the fact that there's been, this is the worst bond bear market of all time, this decade, has been by far the worst bond bear market that there is.

And there was a really simple and easy hedge for it. You go short duration. You go to T bills, you go to one to three of treasuries, whatever it is. You don't have the interest rate volatility. But the before. this crash happened. Okay, and TLT is still in a 40-some percent drawdown, a 45-percent drawdown, that's including income reinvested. It had, I think the total assets were $17 or $18 billion in 2022. Then it crashed 40%. Today there's almost 50 billion in assets. So money has been

pouring in to this asset during a, it's been in a 40% drawdown since November of 2022. And money has continued to pour in and not being taken, care of very well either. Okay. Not saying again this year. Not exactly true. So I'll show you. Torson Slock has a chart that zooms out.

And he shows, the title is households don't like the long end of the treasury curve. And this chart goes back to September 2024. And money has absolutely gone into the hedge into ultra short-term treasury ETFs to the tune of $75 freaking billion. while $5 billion has come out of TLT. Now, Ben, you see a little bump in the line in that green bar? So in the last, I don't know, six months,

a lot of money has come in. But this is instructive. So we're talking about this later. Sometimes you have to zoom out, think a little bit critically, and this is a dangerous posture that like not all numbers are accurate because there's a lot of distrust

in society these days. And if you can't trust the numbers, what can you trust? But very often in conversations, numbers are either framed or cherry-picked. They can be misleading. You can lie with numbers. Okay, you're right. So actually, it shows most of the money went in in in 2023 and 2024. You're right.

And then it kind of slowed down. But still, a ton of money. And obviously, people kept getting kicked in the shins and said, all right, fine. But there's still a ton of money in this strategy for what has been a big-time money loser, one of the biggest all decade. Right, but it is also accurate to say that during the rip-in rates, as Eric is showing, during the rip-in rates, people are definitely running into a burning building. Right.

And you're getting, I think, 5.7% on a 30-year now. Again, this is not like, boom, generational buying opportunity pound the table, but this is the highest level they've been in 20 years. Yeah. So I guess I get it. The funny thing, I've been thinking about this. People are saying like, hey, listen, this is especially kind of a boomer thing to say.

I don't mean to pick on boomers, because we always get emails with people being like, hey, I'm one of the boomers you guys always talk crap about in a joking way. But there's a lot of people who say, like, listen, 7% mortgages aren't, those are normal. We've had 7% mortgages our whole life.

But there's no such thing as a normal interest rate environment. I plotted the 10-year treasure. Look at this chart. Going back to 1940, the start of World War II, essentially. This shows a 10-year treasury. It goes from 2%. And during the war, it essentially stayed really, really low for a long time. Got up to 15% or so in the 80s,

and I got this data from Schiller that has been down ever since. There's no such thing as a normal interest rate. Right. And in fact, people say, well, I don't know. I think if you had to give people a guess a number, what's a normal interest rate? What would you say 5%? Like historically, what's the norm?

Since 1940, I put these into different bands. 0 to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 6, 8, and 8 and up. the most normal, quote-unquote, is actually 2 to 4%. So actually lower interest rates have been the kind of the norm most of the time. And then the 4 to 6% range that people would call normals happened one quarter of the time or so. But you can't look at this chart and then just draw an average and say, yep, that's normal because interest rates got so high in the 70s and 80s that that skews the average too. Well, another example of lying with numbers.

Yes. Factually, there is an average. You can calculate it, but it's completely meaningless. It is kind of funny, though, that you can also say, you know, the thing was like, hey, there's a whole generation of investors who's never lived through a bear market. That was the thing people would say. That was so annoying. You could make a case.

It was said by old people to, like, somehow scold young people for making money. I hated that shit. I still. By the way, speaking of boomers. But wait, no. It really is true, though, that there is a whole generation of investors who've never lived through 5% bond yields before. It's been a long time since we've had.

us. So you and I, our inbox has been flooded with people asking questions about bond because no one ever had to think about bonds for the last 15 years or so because rates were so low and no cared. Yeah. All right. My dad returned this book to me. Hey, dad. Tell me something I don't know. A fun and memorable activity and family keepsake. I would agree. So it's just a bunch of like, what is your favorite memory of us? And if I read this, I'll probably cry because I haven't read this yet. But it's awesome. I would encourage anybody who is of mine and Ben's age-ish, who has aging parents that aren't going to be around forever and ever. This is great. This is something that I will probably keep with me for this my life and just a plug. Wait, tell me how it works

though? So it is. This is where you ask them information and they fill it out for you to share forever or what? So like, did you have a nickname growing up? I'm just scrolling through. Who was your first crush? I mean, just random shit. Like, as a child, Tina Dolores, favorite sports and hobbies. How do you come up with my name? Oh, I haven't read that one. I haven't read this all yet. Yeah.

It's great for your kids too, obviously. Yeah, it's awesome. So it's very meaningful. I'm glad you said that because I've been thinking about doing something about my dad as well. Yeah. Who's fast approaching 80 years old. Okay. Duncan sent us a poll at the compound.

How do you feel about the current state of the economy? 30% say the economy is strong. 47% said the economy is okay. And about a quarter of people said the economy is weak. And obviously, I think when people are asked this question, they don't think about what the actual economy is doing. They think about what their personal economy. And I think about this a lot because we are part of a podcast,

a finance podcast. And if we talk about different income groups, people, ever since we do this podcast, people say, you guys are so out of touch. You don't understand A, B, or C. And my, you don't understand people in this group or that group. My thing is literally everyone is out of touch when it comes to the economy. because if you've one of these people who've been saying for years, this economy stinks,

you know, inflation and it's only the, like, if you've been saying that, then you're out of touch. But if you also say, listen, all my friends are doing great because they're rich, then you're out of, like, my take is everyone is out of touch. Okay? Is that fair enough to say? I think it's such a great point. In some ways, everyone about the economy is completely out of touch with reality. And that's the way it's probably always been, but we just have more data now.

Speaking of which, this is from Mb Faber, this, this is from BCG Group. They see the kids are all right. The timeless angst over young people and money. And you talked to Ed Ellison about a lot of this the other day. And so I thought this was kind of a good for the TCAF you guys did. So exposure to the markets. This is corporate equities and mutual funds as a percentage of assets at age 34. Baby boomers had 7%. Gen X had 11%. Millennials, it's 19%. So young people are getting into the markets earlier. Great news. They also look what happened to millennials in terms of how long did it take them to overtake previous generations in income, wealth, and home ownership. Income happened in the 20s, wealth happened in the 30s,

and homeownership didn't happen until the 40s for the generation ahead of them, Gen X. And the whole point is younger people now are waiting to do these things much longer, right? How many people do you know that are getting married right out of high school or college anymore? That rarely happens. But it's still happening. It's just taking a while. Jeremy Horpidol has this one where he shows the average age for millennials in Gen Z, much greater than where Gen X was at the same age. Can I say one thing that cut you off? Yes. Okay.

I think Ed Elson is terrific. He's an incredibly impressive speaker, writer, person, like, huge fan. Me too. I like it. One of his beats... Sneaky tall. He's one of those guys that you see him in prison. Oh, sneaky tall guy.

So one of his beats is... how tough young people have it these days. Yes. And I'm not here to say that he's wrong about everything he's saying. Or in fact, that he's wrong about most of what he's saying. That's not the point that I'm going to make. There's like two different spectrums of this. One is everything is terrible.

One is everything is amazing. Who is the, there was like a social scientist that passed away recently that it wasn't Stephen Pinker. It was another guy that just all of the ways that the world, world that's improved. Right. Just like objectively. All right. So, but nobody wants to hear how great things are. Hans Rosling. His book was awesome. Amazing. Okay. The audience wants to hear negativity, right? Of course. If there was a podcast that just described how great everything was, nobody would listen to it because it's super boring, right? Like, um, I would listen to it,

but yes, you're right. Most people wouldn't. But I feel like with stuff like specifically to what we're talking about. Everything is viewed as a problem. Oh, young people aren't getting married anymore. So that must be bad. Really? Because my parents got married when they were way too young. And like many of our parents got divorced because they were kids having kids and couldn't

handle the responsibilities of bringing kids up, which fucked up a lot of people my age. Like dealing with divorced parents is not the easiest thing. A lot of this is preferences, not just, hey, the world is falling apart. Yeah. So I don't view this data point as, hey, why aren't people having, and there is some negativity wrapped up in there, obviously, right, obviously. Another, so I've been thinking about this the past week after Ed's podcast, but also after reading Derek wrote a post.

Sorry to, should we, I'm jumping all over the place, but Derek Thompson wrote a post about like, people. Onlyness. Yeah, people don't throw parties anymore. Yeah, people don't throw parties anymore. And I'm not saying Derek said this, but my first thought was, well, so fucking what? What, dinner parties are so awesome? And everything that we used to do that we don't do, it's not all bad.

Yeah, there's a ton of bad shit in the world. Income and equality, we don't need to get into it. There's all sorts of horrific shit. But, but matter of fact, I watched the, I rewatched the invite with Robin finally. finally. It just came out. You see that movie? Loved it. hilarious. That was a great movie.

I rewatched it already. I watched it twice. So funny. I really liked it. And there's another movie where people have people over called The Invitation. You know my take about why we're having fewer parties? Restaurants are so much better and nicer now. People have dinner parties in the past because restaurants sucked. Today, restaurants are so much nicer. Why would you want to have people over to your house when you can go to a nice restaurant?

So Derek, exactly. So Derek wrote, The Death of the Host is the story of lonely, unmarried people. and Harry married dual earner households, anxious parents spending more time without children and less time with friends. That part is true. Like, kids take way more bandwidth. But this, to me, is like 70% of it.

And the typical home becoming such a ride of diverting comfort that people no longer have to invite human beings to interrupt their boredom. Right. Yeah, being home is fucking awesome. We've said this in the past. Back in the day, I remember, like, I remember staring out my window.

Like, I remember that visceral feeling of boredom. Now, have we overdone it? Is there no boredom? Is boredom? Maybe he's good? Is TikTok too much? You're right. It's a give and take. It's a give and take. And I'm saying there's just too much giving and not of taking. So I have one more point in the young person too. The thing is it's great that we have young people with voices now, Ed Elson, Kyla Scanning, these people who are young and also speaking for the generation. It's needed. Here's the thing, though. In the past, young people did not have a microphone. No one ever listened to what young people said. Young people couldn't complain because no one would listen to them. They didn't get the chance to share their plight. So if you would have

given people in the 90s, like, guess what we got? A bunch of movies about disaffected young people who were pissed off. So it's just now we have social media and podcasts and young people can now complain. They didn't have that opportunity in the past. So it feels like, oh my gosh, you just never heard from them in the past. You hear from them today because there's a microphone. Now here's one of the reasons. Yes, last thing. It's hard to be a young person today. It's always been hard to be a young person. Doesn't mean that you're not taking their their struggle seriously. They're going to grow up and they're going to be fine. Yes. Every older generation has always thumb their nose at younger generation saying you had it easier than me, grow up,

you're going to be fine. You'll be fine in the future. That's true. And it's also true that young people have had got dealt the bad hand in some ways, as always. This is one of the things that despite all those graphs that I just shared, this is why people are really angry from the Wall Street Journal, they talk about the 0.1%. It's not talking about just the top 10% anymore or the top 1%. It's the top 0.137 households control $28 trillion or 15% of total household network. So people say, I don't care how much better things they've got for this group or that group or this group. The top 0.1% having this much money, and I guess their wealth has doubled this decade. People go, that's just, I'm just going to be pissed off, okay? That's going to make me mad.

Yeah. Understandable. It's out of control. The wealth inequality only goes one way, unfortunately. Speaking of which, I never heard of this one. I missed this a couple weeks ago from Bloomberg. This is really funny to me that this is like, this shows how much progress we have made. Tech's new rich are suffering from sudden wealth syndrome. A growing post-exit ecosystem is helping founders deal with the unexpected difficulties of becoming extremely wealthy. So they're talking about people. These are the post-economic people. people. Yes. Post-economic, post-economic, yes. So they talk about how, like, after this happens, people, they sell their company. They interviewed this woman who started a podcast, and she sold her company for $100 million or something. And afterwards, she's like, I've never been more depressed

in my life. I got a divorce. Like, it ruined my life, essentially. And they say, they ask, like, how 15% of people who go through this are a pretty sad place, 70% are comfortable, and 15% are thriving. So, like, people who make a ton and ton of money. We're talking life-changing amounts of money by selling or getting shares in a company, whatever it is. They're not all saying, I'm doing amazing. This is awesome. Most of them are really depressed.

People want to be normal. Yes. If you have a $100 million exit, and let's assume that you're like a real, like you're a normal person, you're not one of these psychomaniac driven people. You're a regular person who happened to build something awesome and whatever. You had this outcome. And you can't hide that wealth. No. Right? It's like how people that are like six foot 10, they just want to be normal.

So I think one of the things that we've learned working in wealth management and dealing with people with lots of money, it's kind of like a doctor who becomes kind of immune to like pay, not immune to suffering of their patients, but they just get used to it, right? You get used to blood, you get used to people getting whatever it is. I feel like for us, you get used to the money and it doesn't impress you as much anymore. And then, but you see the people that are more well-adjusted. And it's the people who had time to slowly but surely get adjusted to each new level of income and wealth. And if it happens all at once, it's like the child actor, like the year you become a child actor, that's when your maturity stops growing. Like if it happens at a very young age, it can really screw you up. And so this is like the world's tiniest violin thing. But it actually does make sense to me. So they say that up to $20 million, you're still thinking about how do I use this resource well. And they say anything above that, it's like monopoly money.

It doesn't, it has no meaning. It has, like, it screws you up. I think scarcity is, is helpful in life. Yes, I agree. And having too much money where you're like, you need to strive. You never have to make a decision about anything, right? Whatever you want you can do. Yeah.

Should I get another Ferrari? It becomes very monotonous, I'm guessing. Okay, I want to give one more data point on how rich we are as a nation. Because it's weird to say that, like, we are the richest society in history right now. there's never been a society is richer than the United States of America at this moment right now. Okay? It's going to be painful if we go through a crash or a down cycle or whatever, right now. So someone sent me this New Yorker about how we are the American religion of self-storage facilities.

Have you ever used a self-storage facility before? Sure. You've used where you block stuff in a garage or whatever. I use it for, yeah, for six months or something as we're moving. Like when you're moving or something. Yeah. So there are more self-storage. I love these, there are more self-s, I love data points like this.

There are more self-storage McDonald's, Walmart's, Home Depot, Domino's, Dunkin' Donuts, and Costco's combined. The United States is the world leader in storage units, roughly 90% of global capacity. So this is a United States thing where we have so much junk that we have to put it somewhere else.

And they said that this survey in 2022 from Black and Decker found that more than a third of the country's residential garages were so full of overflow possessions that their owners were unable to park their cars in them. You've seen this. Everyone has a house or two on their street where you go by the garage, when door when it's open, and you go, oh my gosh, look at all that stuff.

Like, they can't fit their cars into the garage because they have so much stuff in there. This is how rich we are collectively as a nation. We can't fit all our stuff in our houses anymore. And so just getting back to the bigger point I was making about focus on the negative. Yeah, it is obviously understandably f***ed up that there are so many people struggling big time getting crushed by inflation. and there's tens of millions of these people and there's also tens of millions of people

that have more money than they can wipe their ass with it. But we spend, we, content creators in general, over index on the suffering and spend no time, forget it, I'm not talking about the billionaires, but there's so many people that are doing incredibly well financially.

Right. And it's sort of like, you know, fuck those people, who cares? Right. 4,800 dedicated RV and boat storage facilities United States. If you see how big RVs are now, like you drive past a house,

like one of these old boomer houses that was built in the 70s, and it's got an RV parked on the side that could barely fit. It's like it's size of a bus, and you go... We don't have room for RVs here. Oh, that's true.

But you look at you know, that RV is worth more than the house, probably. They're everywhere. How much it costs to fill up an RV tank? I don't. It's got to be like $1,000. Yeah. All right.

No more good news. Let's talk about bad stuff. All right. So, trying to call Balls, strikes with the data that comes in. And we've been saying that like for 10 quarters, the CEOs are telling the same story for the most part that the consumer is holding up to various degrees. Well, that might be changing. Heather Long tweeted,

economist, I think she was at the Washington Post. American consumers are struggling right now. Yes, they're still spending, but the strain is clear. Personal spending in August is up 0.9% personal income in August is up 0.2%. That's a big gap. People are still spending, but many are dipping to savings. You know, another thing with all this data stuff is, it's just really hard to compare like national, to think about national numbers. See, I can't look at a number that says 0.9 versus 0.2 and get super worried about it. It's just too small of a, I know that's probably a big gap in the aggregate. It's also, it's also like, you know, we haven't seen a trend like this. It's one month. But when you're talking about how people are doing, it's just like a

ridiculous premise. How is, how is, how is, how is, uh, how is the housing market doing? Well, I guess in general, the house market is doing pretty shady. But a lot of, a lot of the economy is really local. So the Wall Street Journal has a story that kind of refutes this, not refutes it, but says the mighty American consumer is crashing through inflation and driving growth. And says, spending is rising because prices are climbing and Americans are buying more stuff despite long run frustrations over inflation. I thought this is a really good chart. It shows real consumer spending. So it's adjusted for inflation since 2022. is basically a straight line up.

It looks like a T bill yield that you buy a T bill in overtime, it's slowly but surely goes up in a straight line versus consumer sentiment. It's showing that inflation-adjusted spending just continues to inch higher and higher and higher and people have powered through everything this decade

in terms of spending and just keep going no matter what. All right. So if I'm going to do like an aggregate view of the economy, a sign of a strong economy is how much bad shit it can absorb. A frozen housing market, consumer sentiment for what it's worth.

Zero, actually, so disregard that. 9% inflation. Inflation, gas prices. And yet. Yeah. Two wars. Right. Things aren't that bad.

This is the most resilient economy that we've probably ever seen. All right. One more thing about consumer sentiment surveys. A bunch of people sent me this. We talked about, like, we were trying to figure out why is it that consumer sentiment so low?

And someone says, you guys missed the biggest one of all. And in 2024, I mean, sentiment had already fallen off a cliff during COVID, but in 2024, they went from phone-based surveys to web-based surveys. We've talked about this a million times. So I remember seeing Louis C.K. a number of years ago. And he said, I am a different person when I'm behind the wheel of a car and someone cuts me off. And I say, oh, that guy, you know. But he says, but if someone cuts me off in the elevator, I'm not going to scream at them and yell at them at the top of my lungs. Right.

That's online person versus real-life person on the phone, right? It's two different people. You answer differently an online survey than you would if you were talking in the phone to someone. Right? Right. Right. So, okay. Do you read this A16Z state of the markets?

It was charts. And yes, I went through all 90 of them. Okay. It's a lot of charts. A lot of charts. Okay, you've been on this one for a while now. It says more and more households are paying for AI, but it's a very small number. What a 2% or something?

2.2%. and it's climbing, but it's just, there's nothing there yet in terms of households. It's going to be, are we just going to make the assumption that... I disagree with that. Well, you and I have different takeaways. So you're... What's your takeaway? That it's rising rapidly and who knows how high it's going to get?

Okay, it's right. It's right. I guess it's rising rapidly. That's a small percentage of the, of the... Especially since taking on software is very easy. easy for people to do. It's not like you're buying and waiting for a finished product. I'm just saying, I'm guessing almost all of the growth is just happening with businesses still and not in individual. Well, another thing that I'm thinking about is just the disconnect between all the

shit that we spoke about on this episode, right, about what's real, what's not, how people feel, blah, blah, blah. It's really like, are you online or are you not? Are you online or are you a normal person who just lives their life? It does feel like a different language. When you hear especially the tech people talk about what's going on in AI. It sounds like they're speaking a different language. And they're living a different life than other people. But I feel like people that spend, people that spend an hour a day on Twitter are, their brains are different.

Their consumption habits are different. Yes. Definitely. And not for the better. And I'm one of those people. But don't you agree that this is just a very small number? My whole point is there is so much room for more growth ahead. Oh, yeah.

Totally. By the way, speaking of Twitter. So now, so now. not just now, but Instagram takes you to threads, which is Facebook, Twitter. And it is, as far as I can tell, because I go to the thread and I just scroll for a second, it is 500 times stupid or more toxic than Twitter. Oh, really? Okay. I try to plug a month than I kind of gave it up. I don't know if that's representative or not, but yeah. Twitter is the, like, Bitcoin is to crypto. Like, it's, it's just the brand that everyone kind of falls back on and knows. People thought the other one, like,

The shit coins are going to take over Bitcoin. It just never happened. It's just the same thing with social media posting. Remember blue sky? Yeah, it's still there. Is it? Okay. Whatever.

All right. This is a good one from Tors and Slok. How higher rates now are going to cause big time problems down the road. So we had lower rates earlier this decade. There wasn't a huge boom in building houses. There was a huge boom in building apartment buildings. Multifamily housing. There was a ton of building that went on.

So Tors and Slok says when rates are high, builders build less. When fewer homes and apartments are built, rents go up, which pushes inflation higher and keeps rates high. Call this the higher rates, higher rent doom loop. With owners equivalent rent alone making up roughly one quarter of the CPI basket, this reacceleration and rents is a problem for the Fed because it puts upward pressure on inflation by driving higher rates. It does feel like we're just never going to get more housing being built. Like, keep talking about this. And higher rates, obviously right now are just totally suffocating the housing market from any activity happening. Lumberg is crashing

Lump because no one's building houses Yeah Remember when that was the biggest story In the when lumber was going crazy People were posting the pictures of them in Home Depot Take me somewhere expensive And it was a lumber Sitting next to the lumberyard

But he's right though I'm happy that we haven't seen anybody I try to remake office space That would be I don't you can't touch anything Mike judge is done I don't think I hope he's like he's like in his own box Yeah

Idiocry any of those things. But I do agree with him, though, that this is just going to make, like, rents, we talked last week, it's great news. Rents have been falling. But that's not going to last. They're going to go up more. All right. Jason Zweig from the Wall Street Journal, wrote an article, private equity is a problem. Uncle Sam says your wallet can fix it. This is such a great line. I'm jealous of this one. Robert Plays, a veteran fund attorney. That's a cool name. Robert Plays and former deputy director of the SEC's Investment Management Division.

was talking about the dynamic between democratization of alternative assets, why is it only for rich people? And he said, quote, these new rules aren't about giving retail investors more access to private funds. They're about giving private fund sponsors more access to retail investors. That is a good line. Well done. And as we've been talking about, these private markets, they need a new pipeline. there was Joe Wisenthel pointed this one out.

Aura Rings. Smart ring maker aura becomes latest company delay IPO. And it's like they talk about all these other companies that have delayed IPO in recent days, citing market conditions. And Joe was like, isn't the stock market up 15% this year? It wasn't up 20% a year before. And 20% the year before that. How can you cite market conditions for not going public? And the only reasonable conclusion here is these companies are way overvalued. otherwise they would have gone public a lot, a lot sooner.

You know when Pauli says smacks Ray Liot in the face says, don't make a jerk of me? That's how I felt reading this headlot, reading this stuff. Right. What do you think we're assholes? Marking conditions. You know, we know that the stock market is up. What are we, schmuck on wheels?

Also, I have a problem. I know people like these things, the aura, it tells you like how your sleep score was and stuff. You know what I need to know to tell I had a good number? night sleep, I wake up the morning feeling good. I don't need some readout to say. You're old school like that. Yeah, you had a bad night sleeper. I think this kind of thing, because if you change like one little, oh, I had sugar past 8 p.m. I can't do that again. Oh, I had a glass of wine. Now I didn't, my sleep score was off. I think it's ridiculous. Ben, you're preaching to the

choir. I want to slap those people in the face and say, come on. You're, you're going to die one day. What are you doing? So, wait, another one from 816 Z that kind of gets to this. This is, I don't know if you saw these ones. These are crazy. The top, how the power law in venture is driving everything. The top 1% of exits accounts for 84% of exit value. Now you could say, well, that's all SpaceX. The top 10% accounts for 94% so. Yeah, yeah. It's like this stuff is totally on steroids, the power law, and it says the VC dispersion has never been wider. So the dispersion of VCIRRs by vintage. And in 2024 and 2025, the top 10% and bottom 10% is just the, they're getting wider and wider and wider between if you weren't in like this best fund that owned this company, you're screwed.

It's interesting. Good. Really good. It is. All right. We got an email. I see four tech movies potentially entering the cultural zeitgeist. The social reckoning.

You can see everything now. Musk is a documentary and artificial. And they said this feels like a moment in our culture. I worry we may be entering a bit of tech exhaustion. Yeah, I agree. Do you think audiences will show up for these? Number one and four, no. I think...

Oh, no. I'm... I think, I agree with you, number one. I think the social reckoning... Social network is such a... Like, one of the best movies of the century. You can't try to recreate that magic. I think...

Especially with Jeremy Stone. I'm pretty bearish on that one as well. I am. I'm curious about the Open AI one, because that feels like... that feels more akin to the social network where it's the beginning. I don't know. I just feel like all of the movies that tried to come after the social network tried and failed.

There was a movie about the Uber Guide or the show of the Uber Guide. I feel like every one of these got that same treatment and none of them were any good. Well, I agree with you there. And with the emailer, yeah, there's tech fatigue. I think people are like, people don't want this. It's enough. I will watch the Elizabeth Holmes one, though. But that's not really, I don't know if you can call that tech.

but I guess ish. Digger absolutely bombed. I think it did $8 million. The budget was a buck 60, 180. Did you, did you listen to Sean and Amanda? And hear the spoiler on the big picture? I did, because I'm not interested. Please don't spoil for me.

But did they like it or not? Well, neither here nor there. But there is a twist that again, I'm not going to say anything. thing. Are you planning on seeing it at all? Of course I'm going to see it. I have to watch it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious. I'll see it when it comes out. I mean, right from when I saw the preview, I thought, okay, this is a swing here. He's taken a huge, huge swing. I would like just...

Goes to show, you cannot manufacture demand. It's true. They spent a ton of money marketing this. He was on all these shows. He was everywhere. Nobody gives a shit. You what he's got to do? He's got to get rid of the, he's got to let his hair go gray and get rid of like the floppy hair.

Like he's still trying to look young. He did some fillers on his face probably. He just got to age and play an old guy. That's like what Redford did and Clint Eastwood and like eventually you have to graduate into playing an old guy. I know he tried to like look like an old guy in this, but he's got to naturally become an old guy. That's his next step. That's how he gets his Oscar. Yeah, that's not going to happen.

He's not going to naturally. No, probably not. Yeah. It's a, hey, listen, you can't win them all. I still ride for T.C. here. So I got one more thing from this Derek Thompson piece. He had one that said percentage decline in the share of each activity since 1975. And the one that stood out to me, not dinner parties, but playing cards.

He's down 67%. Okay? And another one, Alison Schrager, who was just on Talking Wealth of Josh, talking about a new book, says bowling. There used to be like 10 million people who were in bowling leagues in 1970. Now it's down to a million. These are two things that I am going to beat into my children's heads. These are traditions from my family.

They're going to keep playing cards and they're going to go bowling. These are two things that I do not want to. It is funny. If you ever go to a bowling alley now, like they're always empty. Every time we go, they're empty. It's easy to get a lane. Really? We've had an opposite experience.

Oh, really? Because you probably go to like an old school one. I go right across my office, actually. What were you about to say? Where do I go? Like the lucky. Like, there's nicer ones now. You like the ones that have, like, the bars and the...

Sir, I go to the bowling alley in my town. Okay. Still smells like cigarette smoke, hopefully. That, you know, that kind of, the old ones. It stinks like beer. Yes, okay. Good. I'm just making...

Because there are the newer ones, I'm sure that are... That's probably harder to get a lane. I don't like going to those. I want to go to the old school bowling alley that smells... Well, I grew through there. I grew through there. Yeah.

Okay, so these are the things I want to keep in my family, bowling and playing cards. Because, listen, I tried to get a card game. going at Future Proof at our Airbnb. No one knows how to play cards anymore. I love playing cards. It's one of my favorite things to do of all time. My family has done play cards for years.

I love it. No one plays cards anymore. I love, I love her. I love playing a gym. I'm going to teach out of play card game. Okay. All right, I'm in. I'm down.

One other thing about dinner parties. Back in the day, like I said, my parents were divorced, so I didn't have many dinner parties at my house. But even even my mom and stepdad, Like, we never had people over. You know why? Yeah, they never had people over.

Two things there. Number one, I feel like when we were growing up, people's parents were like a different species. Right. Like, we just, I didn't know what anybody's deal was. Right. And I feel like with parenting today. Yeah, you didn't talk to people's parents, really? Kind of said hello and that's it.

Yeah. I feel like every kid knows the parents. Yeah. Like, decent. So anyway, so if we had our friends over for dinner, what would we do with our kids? What, they like hang out with us? Nobody wants that. Hey, get out of here.

But where are they going? I had the kids go in the basement. So my parents had a really core group of friends from college. They still, to this day, are really good friends with these people. They all would invite each other to their own kids' weddings. It was kind of just known, like, hey, there's like 20 people that are our friends from college. They're going to everyone's wedding. They all went.

That's very nice. And on Friday nights, they would have the older kids of the girls. group would babysit the younger kids and all the parents would go to the bar. They had a local bar on the corner. Every single Friday night, they would go to the bar and they would leave the kids together and say, you guys spend for yourself. The older kids will watch you. Yeah.

That doesn't have as much anymore. All right. Oh, but I got a problem. Interesting problem because I'm not the friendliest guy in the world. I'm not like unfriend, but I'm not, you know, I'm just keep to myself sort of guy. You're not a hey guy. So at my daughter's soccer game this weekend, these two guys were giving each other,

like one guy's a Bears fan, one guy's a Lions fan. And I can tell they do this every week, you know? Like just razzing each other about the Bears and Lions. And I thought, yeah, that's, I'm never going to do that. And I respect it. I love that. I love that, but I'm not mad at that's not me.

Anyhow, by the way, no, one observation I had over the weekend at a sports game, you know, there's always one or two wide stance guys. And I mean like a deep wide stance. Yes. It's usually the dad who wears shorts even in the winter, right? So, yeah, I mean, literally this guy was wearing a tuitary. It was pretty damn cold. And when I say wide stance, I mean, this guy is making himself a foot and a half shorter that he otherwise is. Just really getting into it. But so there was a block party that we went to over the weekend. Oh, see, people still do have parties.

Yeah, black parties are a thing. Big thing here. and I'm walking. So like obviously the street is blocked off. So I'm walking to my car. And somebody did a double honk. And I waved. I don't know. I thought it was somebody I knew.

Just just instant wave. Like double honk. I was like, who is? Oh, just instant wave. My hand came up. And he was honking because somebody was back out of the drive when he was, it was not a honk.

It was not a hello honk. It was a, hey, hey, hey, don't have me honk. You're pretty good at. I keep getting get with the false waves. All right. Hey, better to wave and, you know, I like it. All right. All right.

All right. First of all, this is awesome. Someone put AI to good use and emailed us and sent us a list of all of our recommendations we've ever done. It's movies, books, TV shows, and you can look at them by category. So horror for Michael. You can look at everything. You can look at just books.

And then it also has a little synopsis of what we said. Like Michael enthusiastically praises this movie. calling it fun and saying it rips. Friday the 13th, Michael Battening explicitly calls the 1980 film a big piece of shit in a terrible movie. And it also has a little picture

of the show in it. So we emailed this guy back and said, how did you do this? And he said, AI, of course. We'll include a link in the show notes. It's really well done. This is the best one. People have tried to do this

over the years of all our recommendations. This one is really, really good. Somebody emailed us about Letterboxed. And I don't know why I'm not more into that platform. I've used it sporadically. I just never, I just never really got into it. All right.

I think this is a movie you might have turned me on to. This is one of my favorite, like, under the radar movies I watched this year. It's called Tuna on Paramount Plus. I did recommend that. And so it's a guy who is a piano tuner. He has a hearing problem, but he uses it to break safes.

And Dustin Hoffman still got it a little bit in it. He kind of plays the wise, cracking old man. But the young guy, I only know him from White Lotus. He's on White Lotus Season 2. He's really good. the love interest in the movie who I'd never seen before. She was really good. I thought they had actual chemistry. And it kind of reminded me of

the Aubrey Plaza movie, Emily the Criminal where it was like this little kind of like caper kind of movie, but it never went too over the top. It felt always kind of contained and not, it didn't like jump too many levels. And the French guy, I mean, what a classic that guy. So anyway, Tuna, yeah,

yeah, John, what's my name is. Yeah, something. My wife and I both had, man, that was a really enjoyable movie, right? 7.0. I liked it. Finished Patriot on Amazon. I'm probably eight years late to this.

I mentioned that for us. You've probably never seen it or heard of it. It's the kind of show where there's only two responses to it. Oh my gosh, I love it. This is a masterpiece. Oh my gosh. I hate it. Why would I keep watching this? It's probably, it's the guy who did DTF, Atlanta, or DTF St. Louis, whatever was called on HBO.

This is his first show on Amazon. and this is a show that AI could never create in a million years, recreate, because it's the weirdest, quirkyest show I've ever seen in my life. And the whole time you're thinking, how does a human being think of this as a premise for a TV show? What's the premise? It's a CIA guy, but it's kind of a dark comedy, but it also has a heart to it, but they're also, the guy explains the plot through folk music at times. Oh my God, I'm out. You would not like it. But But I kind of, and I, the end of the show kind of fell flat. Like the ending, I didn't really appreciate that much.

I'm like, eh, kind of left me wanting more. But I laughed a lot. And I, I just thought, like, this, this show is kind of a masterpiece, even though 70% of people who watch it would probably hate it. I watched two seasons. It was essentially one long season. And it was just, I can't believe how well done it was. And how it ever got on the year, I have no idea. Hmm.

Are you still watching the, not still? You mentioned it last week. How is the John Hamm Show on, um, Jim? I really like it. It's good. Four episodes in. What's it called again? American hostage. One more. I got a book. Another book. A fabulous debt by Robin Wigglesworth from the FT. The Epic Stere of How Bonds Build the Modern World. So we've been getting a ton of questions they said about bonds. If you want to know why bonds are important in the story of how debt helps grow the economy and how it also can wreck the economy, this book is fantastic. Really well done. I want to reuse something. It was written by Thomas McCauley in 1848. Now, it sounds a little weird because back then people actually used to, like, write, like, in proper English. So he talked about how everyone for years, this is, again, this is the 19th century, worried about government debt that it would lead to a crisis. And this guy explains why it never happened. So this is 200 years ago almost. He said, they erroneously imagined that there was an exact analogy between the case of an individual who is in debt to another individual and the case of a society which is in debt to part of itself.

in this analogy led them into endless mistakes about the effect of the system of funding. Say a letter. They were under an error not less serious touching the resources of the country. They made no allowance for the effect produced by the incessant progress

of every experimental science and by the incessant efforts of every man to get on in life. They saw that as the debt grew, they forgot other things grew as well as the debt. They greatly overrated the pressure of the burden. They greatly underrated the strength by which the burden was to be born.

And his whole thing is saying, like, one of the reasons that we grew as a, society in the first place is debt. That's one of the reasons it grew. It's a really, really good book. It's like, this is like the historical bond market book. Really well done. Highly recommend it. Okay. Love it. I also got through two books this week. Roll call with Ari Emanuel or buy Ari Emanuel was freaking awesome. So much fun. And if you don't care to listen to six hours of it, he was on with Matt Bellany and what a character that guy is.

really one of a kind. You can tell he just loves that was a great podcast. They were going back and forth at each other and like neither of them cared. It was really well done. It was so much fun. I enjoyed the conversation.

All right. So the other one is the steps by one Sylvester Stallone. And he read the book. And I think we all Rocky fans generally know the story of how difficult it was to get made, that he was made an offer. And he insisted on playing Rocky and back and forth.

but it went deep into his childhood until he made Rocky. And it stopped there. So it stopped in 1976. And it was effective. It was well done. His upbringing is truly insane. Like his parents were some of the biggest pieces of shit in the world. And say what you will about helicopter parents.

Take that any day over the sons of bitches that he grew up with, which was not. Who I didn't care about him? worse, not entirely uncommon for that generation. When you first realize that he wrote those movies, I can remember when I learned that, I go, no, are you kidding?

Really? He wrote them? You don't, with that voice he has, you can't, into like the muscles and how is, how did he write? Yeah, how did he write these movies? You do, yes.

Yeah. All right, what else is going on? Logan is watching Big Daddy. My seven-year-old might be a bit of inappropriate, but I wet my own ass. We couldn't get enough of that line. I think that's one of the more underrated Sandler movies that there is, actually. I love that movie. The S&P 500 right now has been about 25 points of an all-time high.

So the stock market, as of yet, does not give a crap about higher interest rates. Doesn't care. We're going to hit new all-time highs again, and people are going to be so confused. It is an interesting dynamic. We're heading towards another 20% year in the S&P. Oh, yeah? What's it now? 15, 16?

Yeah, 15%. Let's get crazy. Let's get stupid. That's where we're at. I'm going to get nuts. Let's get nuts. All right. I think so.

What's email? Where are you going to tomorrow? Montreal. CFA Montreal event. And I'll be at a CFA Houston event latest week. I'm all over the place this week. Okay.

All right. Safe travels. Oh, one more thing. One more thing. This pains me to say. On the flight home, I tried to watch Disclosure Day. What a piece of garbage. Right out of the gate, I thought that I missed the first, I, like,

rewound. I thought I missed like the first minute or something. The start of the movie is bizarre, isn't it? It just starts. And you're like, wait, what? It's very strange. So I turned it off after 20 minutes. I probably will give it another shot because I'm kind of curious to see.

There's like a half hour over the movie. You're kind of like, I can see something here. But other than that, it's tough. It was so disappointing. My God, Mr. Spielberg. Nobody's perfect, but yikes. Hey, Spielberg had disclosure day. T.C. had Digger.

But they gave us in the greatest movies of our lives, so I can't be mad at them. Yeah, no, I'm not mad. Just a little. Hey, father time is undefeated, as they say. LeBron has a sciatica. We all get old and die. You and I are going to be doing animal spirits

in our 60s and people are going to go, man, really? You hear what they say this week? That's going to be us. such as life, Ben. All right, Animal Spirits at the Compound News.com. Personal emails, personal responses. Thank you to Duncan and the entire team behind the mics.

Behind the mics, find the scenes. Terrible close. We'll see you next time. And here, the Mona Lisa gaze into Mona's eyes in perfect health with no undiagnosed problems and her optic nerve in excellent condition. Anyone here got eyes like Mona? Mine are brownish.

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