Animal Spirits Podcast - The Nothing Ever Happens Market (EP. 418)

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

On episode 418 of Animal Spirits, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ben Carlson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ discuss why investors are ignoring scary headlines, war vs the stock market, a slowdown in the labor market, not every bad thing is a crisis, all stock markets are concentrated, it's getting more expensive to own a car, Mark Zuckerberg is desperate, the stablecoin opportunity set, baby boomers are never selling their houses and more! This episode is sponsored by CBOE and YCharts. To learn more about Innovator's Dual Direction Buffer ETFs, sign up for their webinar at: https://innovatoretfs.zoom.us/webinar/register/2417506967204/WN_Fd98HRiuRBCw2OUqGRPyJw Visit https://go.ycharts.com/animal-spirits to start using AI Chat today and get 20% off your initial YCharts Professional subscription when you start your free trial through Animal Spirits (new customers only). 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 Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠twitter.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/company/the-compound-media/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tiktok.com/@thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Feel free to shoot us an email at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode is sponsored by Innovator ETFs, brought to you by CBO, the Exchange for the World Stage. Michael and I have had Innovator ETF CEO, Bruce Bond on the show a number of times to talk about their different strategies over the years and how they've changed and evolved, and they're definitely a leader in the defined outcome space. They are coming out with a new strategy, July 1st, with the first dual-direction buffer ETFs. These ETFs allow investors to make money in both positive and negative markets. So they're offering a 10% inverse and a 15% inverse version. For example, the 10%, if the market is down 10%, you would be up 10%, not just flat. So it's a different kind of hedge, right?

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Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, I have a take to get off my chest for you today. Someone asked me last week, what are you thinking about? What's going on? what's percolating your brain about the markets? And my thought is this decade is about market amnesia. Okay? I said before that the market can really only focus on one thing at a time.

I think if you just add up all the stuff that we've been through from the pandemic and all the stuff that went on to that, the meme stock craze, the 9% inflation, the rates going from 0% to 5%. Remember the little Silicon Valley bank dust up that lasts for like a weekend? I'm pretty sure I wrote a 1907 post about that. It lasted at least five days. You had the carry trade blowup was a thing. Liberation Day, obviously. Now the U.S. bombing Iran.

It just kind of feels like investors get jittery when this stuff happens. Maybe the market nosedives for a little bit. And then we kind of forget about it and move on. And I started talking about this last week about how the whole LL Nothing Matters kind of thing. But Mike Byrd from the economist wrote a piece on this. And he said, this is the headline. And a bunch of people sent us this because we had discussed this last week. investors ignore world-changing news, rightly, the nothing-ever-happens market.

And I almost think that this sort of market amnesia is a good thing. If you're a successful long-term investor, you almost need this. And I know a lot of people think, well, well, eventually this ends badly. But this was interesting from the economist piece. So there's a paper going back to 1988, these researchers from MIT. Apparently Larry Summers, too, was part of this. They wanted to figure out what actually moves stock prices. And then they look at five decades worth of world-changing events.

So they looked at Pearl Harbor and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. And they figured that the volatility of returns on the day of these news events, these geopolitical, big things that happen, was less than three times as large as on an ordinary day. Several of the biggest one-day falls identified by the authors occurred on days without an obvious news-related spark. And I think a lot of this stuff is probably counterintuitive. And I think maybe investors have finally learned their lesson on this stuff. And this is another feather in the cap of my idea that investors are becoming better behaved because it's like, listen, we've been fooled a million times on these headlines. This bad thing's going to happen.

That bad thing's going to happen. I'm just going to ignore it all. And I think that actually this is another step in the right direction for investors. Thoughts. It's good take. And I agree. but I think we have to also discuss the why. Why are investors ignoring all of this?

It's because it doesn't impact Nvidia, right? Like earnings for the stock market are not going to be impacted by a lot of these geopolitical flare-ups. If we were in a different market environment with slow or no growth, if energy was 15% of the index, if, if, if, if, it would be different.

But right now, what's driving the train are the expectations of long-term earnings growth. Now, I don't think that investors like day to day are thinking about that. But ultimately, that's where this is going. Yeah. And Bird and his piece talked about how I can't remember the time frame. It was 10 years or 15 years. The earnings are up like 250%. And like, you're right.

That is the thing that matters. Right. Higher gas prices is going to impact Apple and Nvidia. So how about this? if we were in a stagflationary environment, each one of these cuts would take us down. Because it would just be like, oh my God, just another thing.

Like, how much could we possibly take? But we're in an opposite environment in which none of this seems to matter. It is interesting, though, that just, because I know stuff happened in the 1990s and 1980s, but it doesn't feel like it was quite as earth-shattering as what we've lived for this decade. Maybe that's recency bias on my part.

But it is just weird to see all, these things happening and then the market still not caring. Well, here's the other thing. Right now, the supply chain is built on AWS or whoever's cloud provider it is. Companies are so much less reliant on like, quote, real world stuff. We have the ability to dial up and down productivity so much quicker than we did in the past. So yeah, it's a different world. Yeah. And I've written before on the whole stock market versus war thing. I'll put a link in the show notes. But just I look at all these events, World War I and World War II and the Cuban Missile

Crisis and Vietnam and the Korean War. Are those comparisons relevant for today in any way, shape, or form? They're relevant in the fact that it's the, the relationship between the market and those events is typically counterintuitive. Like, in the past, war has been bullish. Right. Which is the, I think I always say the stock market is heartless, but if you look back at almost all those periods, the stock market did great. You know the stat that World War I, the greatest year for the Dow ever, was 1915.

Oh, 1950. Oh, well, because the market was close. That was after the market closed. But that was during World War I. That had happened. It was up like 80-some percent. Yeah. And Israel stock market hit an all-time high last week.

Yeah. So, again, if you think these headlines are like somehow bad for the market, then in Josh has got this thing on like the straight of Hormu's order. I don't know what to say it because I've only read it before. But when you start seeing people talk about that, that's a buy signal. I just think investors have become accustomed to these things. And sure, there's going to be a rug pull at some point or one of these situations is really going to matter. I just don't know what it's going to be.

And I don't think anyone else says ahead of time either. So I think just ignoring this stuff and continuing to invest, I think the thing that's hard to recognize for a lot of investors is that the reason you make a change in your your portfolio should usually be dictated by something that's happening in your life, not the markets. And that's very hard to realize and recognize, right? It's like a change to your financial plan or you're making more money or you get an inheritance or you're making less money. Something like that, that should have a greater impact on your portfolio changes than what's going on in the headlines. Ben, it seemed like this was the week where a lot of the media started to publish on the biggest companies across America are cutting their workforces.

It isn't just Amazon. There's a growing belief that having too many employees will slow a company down and that anyone still on the payroll could be working harder. That was the headline from the Washington Journal. So they show that U.S. publicly companies have reduced their white-collar workforce by 3.5% over the past three years. Over the past decade, one in five companies in the S&P 500 have shrunk their employee count. And they show this great chart, number of white-collar employees at U.S. public companies,

the change since the end of 2021. And they break it down by staff, executives, and managers. And everything is negative, but particularly executives and managers, which makes sense. These middle managers that are not revenue generating whose job it is to oversee a lot of these people, just world of pain. Can I make a claim on this, a take that there's a short-term take and a long-term take? Over the long-term, I think you do have to be concerned about the labor market and what AI could do. Over the short term, I think a lot of these stories are

huge overreactions. Because this is from May 22 to May 2025. 2025 was perhaps the hottest job market we will ever see in our lifetime. And so places were overstaffed. Remember how many job openings there were compared with, so the Wall Street Journal also had this piece. And you can go against me on this take if you want. But they had this piece about recent college grads. And there's saying young grads are facing an employment crisis. Crisis in the headline, okay? And they say, the overall national unemployment is down to 4%, but for college grad looking for work, it is much higher,

6.6% over the past 12 months ending in May. That does sound bad. They put a chart in here that shows ages 20 to 24, the unemployment rate for bachelor's degree is rising. But if you also look, they have one that shows high school degree, no college, and it's obviously much higher. So it's not like you're still. getting a better deal there. But look at this unemployment rate age 20 to 24. I pulled this from

Y charts. Look at, look at this going back historically. It's moving up slightly. Look at, it's probably at or below average going back to the 1950s. This has been way, way higher. It was higher in the 80s. It was higher in the 90s than it is today. So I think we're throwing around this crisis term way too loosely just because we're comparing something to three years ago. I think people are overreacting. Yeah, I will take the other side of that. I don't agree. I think that...

Look at the stat. Look at this chart I just put in here. If you look back historically, I think we just talk about this stuff more than we did in the past. Is this chart going to go back down in the next year, two or three years? No. Do you think it is? I don't.

Probably not, but look at how many times in the history that it's gone up. It's still got a lot of room to run to get anywhere near what things were like in the 80s or 90s. Revenue per employee is back in favor as a metric, investors, and executives track carefully. Yeah, no, I will take the other side of this. I think that this is not going to reverse. And I think that a lot of people are in for Walderpane.

No, I don't know that it's going to necessarily, like, tip the economy into a recession or anything like that. I don't know. But I think that the white-collar manager that was very comfortable should be very uncomfortable. My sense is, I think these things take time to play out. Maybe you're, but so another one from all your journal was Americans are side hustling like we're in a recession. So they said the two-dob trend these days is the necessity not pursuing a passion. I'll take the other side of this headline. I think that the idea of a side hustle, and let's be honest, like, I don't always said, let's be honest.

What percentage of side hustles are done over the internet? Right. I think it's just easier to do a side hustle these days. How could you have done a side hustle in the 90s? Like, what were you going to do? Like, mow lawns on the side? And I put multiple job holders as a percentage of employed. here. And again, this is something that was much higher in the 90s. And it's still like five or

six percent of total employees. So, so here's one that kind of is, to your point. This is from Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon. He wrote a piece about thoughts on generative AI. There was a lot of throat clearing in there. It was basically like a page and a half of enhancements of generative AI and how they're using them all over. And then it's like, yeah, we're going to need less people. Yeah. He said, yeah, he talked a lot about what it's going to do. But he said, as they roll out more gender of AI and agents, it's going to change the way their work just done. We expect this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company. And I just, I asked you, I think on Slack, how do we separate the actual AI productivity gains from the fact that tech companies probably overhired and need to cut workforce?

It's a balancing act to think through what the actual reason is, right? Well, it's also the, I think it's also getting ahead of we're spending a lot of money. Let's try and cut some employees. It's kind of like Doge, though. It's like a drop in the bucket. How many people are you really going to let go to offset the spending? So I also think that just the labor market dynamics in the years ahead, if you combine AI with 10,000 baby boomers retiring every single day, I think we're going to get some weirdness in the labor market data. I think it's going to be very bizarre for the next 10, 15, 20 years.

Yeah. All right. This is surprising to me. Bob Elliott tweeted, it seems the hard and soft data have converged toward each other. and it happened with soft data, a lot of the survey stuff catching up. I would have considered this to be, let's say, like, plus 280 if I was a betting man four months ago. So sentiment turned around. It looks like the hard data did fall.

I don't know what this is. I don't know what this is measuring here, but you're right. The sentiment, I mean, the sentiment there to me looks like the stock market. I would have said, like, the odds of them converging because hard data is falling fast. And now, to your point, hard data did fall out. I would have said minus 115. So, yeah, surprising. So V-shaped rallies are still here in everything.

Everything's a V. All right. This is something. The Financial Times put out a report that said, X, as in Twitter, chief executive. You're a narc if you call it X. Got to call it Twitter. Sorry. I'm just reading.

I know. The worst is when people say Twitter, I mean X, like, it's still Twitter. Sorry. Linda Yakarino has said that users will soon be able to make investments or trades on the social media platform, as she outlined a push into financial services and owner Elon Musk's quest to build an everything app. No one's doing this. You already can do it on Robin Hood or where, like, no one, this isn't going to work. Yeah, I would agree with that.

This is going to be a flop. Yeah, no one's going to do that. There's, I, no way, sorry. Who's ever been able to make the Everything app? It's not a thing. Ryan on the office. Wuff or whatever it was called, right? What do you mean, Ryan?

I don't know what you're talking about. Okay. He had this, Ryan on the office had this idea where you put one social media post out and it goes immediately to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and then it would send a fax, and it would do everything for you. All right, you still got to catch up on the office. I guess. Okay, Torson Slok chart of the week. I don't know when this is through, but he's saying a record high foreign ownership of the U.S. stock market. So I don't know if this is through April yet

or not, but it is kind of crazy that we've gone from essentially five or six percent foreign ownership in the stock market in the mid-90s to nearly 20 percent now and how important globalization is to our financial markets. This is like the rest of the world catching up with us. too and realizing, I've seen all this study. I think Van Gogh had a good study a number of years ago showing that home country bias was even worse in foreign countries. Probably not anymore. Which doesn't make much sense because those countries' stock markets are so concentrated and there's such a small piece of the global pie. Like, foreigners should have a much higher ownership share of U.S. equity. Kind of like how we talked last week, how people have a higher

allocation of stocks than cash and fixed income they did in the past. This is the kind of thing that is a trend that shouldn't really reverse and probably should continue to go higher. How high can it go, though? If we're 65% or 70% of the global stock market, it should be higher. Why? What is, why? Foreign owners own almost 20% of the market. How high should it go? That's a lot, no? Yeah, I don't know. I'm just saying if we're two-thirds of the market, there should be a really high ownership of U.S. stocks by foreigners.

Yeah. Pension funds and sovereign wealth funds and individuals and family offices, think about it. All right. We spend a lot of time talking about concentration in the SMPA 500. Schroeder's has a chart that shows market concentration is a global phenomenon. This is what I was just talking about. Top 10 stocks in UK are 50%. Wow. So the top five here are 26%. The top five there are 35%. 25% in Japan, 23% in EM, and 70% in the AQUI. So it's not just us.

I've looked at this before. The rest of the world is way worse because their stock markets are smaller. So I think if you look at like Korea, Samsung makes up like 25% of their index or something like that. I think we spoke like years and years ago about Greece. I think it's like hilariously skewed. Yes, that's the thing. In other countries, it's even worse. That's why.

So, yeah, Samsung is 20%. So there's two names that make up 30% of the South Korean stock market ETF. And so, yeah, the concentration over there is way, way worse. All right, here's another good one from Bank of America Global Research. Once a diverse index, the S&P 500 is now 50% growth. So they broke it down by pure value, pure growth, and blend. And pure value has gone from 25% in 2005 down to 15% in 2015, down to 9% in 2025, while pure growth went from 35% up to 50%.

Remember when Apple was a value stock for like a year? Yeah, it really was. Trader for like 12 times. Is that when Buffett was buying, basically? That's when people were talking about back out the cash. And I think a lot of nitwits, myself included, were like, LOL, back out the cash. Well, back out the cash. Great investment.

Yeah, it sort of worked. I mean, this is, I guess, another one that makes a lot of sense. Because that's also 2005 period, value had had a really good run for about five years following the dot-com bubble. Ben, let's talk about cars. Also from the journal, light vehicle sales have fallen by about $1.7 million a year since 2016. This was a really good piece, by the way. It was. It really was.

I agree. Reflecting the number of younger consumers declining in the pleasures of ownership. Millions more remain trapped in toxic relationships with abusive elders. They're talking about cars. The average age of passenger cars on the road is currently 14 and a half. half years. A friend of mine... It's kind of crazy. Has a Cherokee,

EV, and the thing just died. It doesn't sound like your Jeep E's are doing very well, because you say yours isn't great either. No, it just died. It won't turn on. It's like a year old. The total cost to own and operate an automobile averaged a frightening $12,296 in 2024, roughly 30% higher than a decade ago. So that's insurance,

gas, maintenance, all the stuff that goes with owning a car. New cars are 50 grand almost. In 2024, the AAA calculated the average new vehicle losses. I'm sorry, the average new vehicle loses an eye-watering $4,680 in value every year. Big time depreciation. Dude, it's wild. Like, cars suck. That's nuts.

Every year for the first five years. So they're saying because some people are now priced out of new cars, which is almost $50,000, demand for used cars is up. That means the average used cars now over $25,000, which is kind of insane. Obviously, these cars are lasting longer. I wonder if some people are going to be like, you know what, I'm just going to start taking Ubers everywhere I go. There's no way I'm spending $13,000 on Ubers a year.

If you calculated it out. So especially for two-car households. You know, I see a lot more of the electric bikes on the road. If you live in a nice climate, that would be appealing to me. Cars have become a huge pain in the ass. They're so expensive. They're so reliant on computers. They spoke about how much plastic is in cars and how they're basically built to die,

sort of like the iPhone. The other thing that this touched on was the cost of insurance and the cost of maintenance has risen a lot because of all the sensors and such that we have in there, that it's anytime you get it fixed, it's not cheap either. And that's one of the reasons that the prices keep going up because the cameras and the sensors and all the stuff they're putting in there, is more expensive as well. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people assume that having, like, a two-car household now is the thing, right?

But you're right, it's hard to get off of that. Maybe some people will these days, but yeah, some of the stats in here were pretty crazy. Okay, so Mark Zuckerberg is desperate. I think this is kind of his whole thing. And I guess it really kind of goes back to the social network movie about him. He just seems like a guy who's constantly searching for. something. I don't know if it's approval or he kind of changes up his style and his he just seems like a nerd who like is constantly trying to be in the in crowd, right?

And I think that that's actually been a good thing for him in his career. I think Mark Zucker rumors his image today versus, I mean, five years ago, forget about it, or 10 years ago, even too, during the election was not great. I think he's, his approval rating is maybe at an all-time high. Just because he grew his hair out curly. Yeah. Right? Got a tan. and started doing, like, Moytai or something. So Sam Altman talked on a podcast recently, and he said, META started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team, you know, like $100 million signing bonuses,

more than that in compensation per year. And I think Altman was bragging, like, hey, a lot of our people are turning them down. So you mentioned Scale AI a few weeks ago, I think, with Mary Meeker's presentation. And I think right two days later, Facebook made a $14.3 billion investment in them. And they wanted the founder to help now.

And they also made a big investment. Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, who are on this trajectory podcast, everyone's not talking AI. I don't know if you're hearing those interviews. They brought them in to, like, run their AI efforts. And so it's interesting to me because this all, to me, sounds like they are behind.

But I also wouldn't, because of, again, his, like, desperation. And I'm not saying this almost in a bad way. I'm saying, like, I think it's worked for him. But he seems so desperate. it. And you almost think, like, God, they must be really far behind. But I wouldn't put it past him to make all these investments and then come out ahead still and be okay. You said you don't mean desperate in a bad way. I think he's paranoid in a good way. Yeah. Well, and that was like the Grove book, right? The Intel guy? Yeah. Only the paranoid survive. It seems, but obviously,

he's, whatever they've done, he's looking at it and going, oh my gosh, we're behind someone or something. I do, I just do wonder, with all the money being thrown around, what's the, what What's the breakdown between people who are just true AI believers, and this is going to be our next God or something, or this is going to, you know, the some total of human knowledge and is smarter than humans versus people who are just like, all right, this is signing bonuses. I'm going to get my five-year max to play for the grizzlies or whoever. Like, I would love to know the breakdown. Who cares? I don't know. I'd like to have some morality, I guess, in AI because it's going to be this life-changing technology.

I just want someone behind the wheel who's going to be like, look out for, like, humanity. and all this, I don't know. What was the name of the AI in Mission Impossible? See, I didn't watch the new one yet. What? Alta Lvaito comes out on video, I don't care. All right, I mean, you're Mr. T.C. I am.

Yeah. I don't know. I'll get to it. Okay. But yeah, that's a big thing, though. AI as the villain. That's going to be, because we couldn't make the Chinese the villains in movies anymore because you have to sell movies.

over there. And so I think the Russia thing has kind of been played out. You can't really do Nazis anymore because it's too far away from World War II. So AI is just going to be the villain in like every movie going forward. Yeah, I've probably seen a dozen in the last 12 months. Right? It's not that great of a story, though, anymore. Right? Can we just have an off switch for AI if it gets too powerful? Just turn it off. What's this piece about radiologists? Okay, this is interesting. This is why I think the labor market stuff is going to be um hard to predict so this is a story in the new york times and they say nine years ago one of the world's leading ai scientists singled out an endangered occupational species he said at the time

geoffrey hinton people should stop training radiologists now it's just completely obvious that within five years AI would outperform humans in that field and they say today radiologists are still in high demand and it's true they said at mayo they're using AI to help identify any like medical abnormalities and predict disease, and it can also serve as a second set of eyes. Hey, I'm looking at this. What am I missing or what, you know, check me? But they say that there are more radiologists than ever. And actually, AI is helping them. And they're, because of the demand for healthcare, they're needing more radiologists. So it's not putting them out of business. It's just becoming helpful to them in their job. And there's actually,

somehow it's increasing the demand for radiologists. So there's three things that are going to happen, I think, and probably a lot more than Matthew Knove. industries are going to get displaced entirely. The thing that you... Customer service. The thing that you just mentioned, no, no, no, actually radiologists are going to be in higher demand and AI is going to help it be more productive. And then the third and hopefully biggest category of the three are new jobs that we cannot

possibly predict today because we don't know what technology is, what technology is going to exist. Yes. And that would be the hope that there's going to be new demand for new jobs that we just don't know about yet. And unfortunately, most people will pay attention to the first one and get really mad about it. Right. So, for example, a little teaser, on talking wealth over at the unlock, I'm speaking on Wednesday at 11 to Dave Notting.

And you and I could talk about this Ben next week to rehash. I want to get your thoughts. Yes, I have thoughts. My kids will not use a financial advisor. a human being, a human being will not financially advise my children. More to come. You know, you're selling your kids short there. You're saying you're not going to have any money. Is that the problem? Yeah, okay. You laid this out to me and I definitely have, but I agree with you. Those three things, and the hard part is going to be the transition phase. I just, it's really going to be

interesting how the next 10 years plays out because there's going to be a lot of people who are really, really mad. I mean, so, wait, so we have the tariff thing and we argued about, like, we need to make our iPhones in here again, right? There's going to be situations where AI is all customer service and people are going to go, we need to have real people again for customer service. Nah. I'm going to be the guy saying, I remember one, there was not real people.

There was real shitty computers that always broke or never worked. You think the AI, you think AI is also going to go, hang on just a sec, my computer's running a little slow today. That's every customer service person in history. so they can look up your whatever. But there are going to be people. The other day I posted, I did a blog post and I like to include a picture

or something there for social media, right? And I just did, I think I did a keeping up with the Joneses when I pulled something from Daniel Crosby's book since we talked to him and I used some studies. And I did people standing in front of their toys and houses that are unhappy, right? Joneses aren't as happy as you think they are. And some dude hit me on social media with,

oh cute, you're using AI to create pictures like making fun of it. Like, there's going to be people who are, like, anti-AI and, like, totally, like, I'm not going to use this technology. They're going to be people who are too cool for AI. I mean, that's going to be a thing. That was due with Facebook and coffee. But I'd never used it.

Right. Either of them. Okay. So I never had a Facebook account. This is meta. I just asked chat, CBT, how many people in the United States work in call centers doing customer service roles? How many people do you think, Ben?

A million? $500,000? 2.8 to 3.4 million, according to the chat. Do you remember the presentation? This is a long time ago. By the way, that's a lot of people. There's a lot of people. We had a presentation or a conference in New York number of years ago.

Back before we knew how to do actually good conferences. But we had Scott Galloway there, and he did one of those presentations where he went through a million slides. And remember the Amazon store where it was going to be like, you walk into Amazon store, you put the stuff in your car and you walk out and it charges you. I don't know if that still exists or if it just seems like it never... They're in the airport.

But Galloway was saying, listen, there's two to three million people who work at cash registers and those people are going to be out of business. How come stuff like that never happened? I think it did happen to a certain extent with self-checkout lanes. There's way fewer cashiers

at like the grocery stores and they used to be. There are still people who do not know how to use self-checkout lanes. And I don't get it how at this point Like, there are certain people. I feel like you should have to pass a test. Like, there should be a timer, a shot clock for self-checkout lanes and the drive-thru.

If you take too long at the self-checkout lane of the drive-thru, sorry. You either go inside or you go to a person to pay. I agree. The cashier should say, nope. Yeah, you can't hold up society. Sorry. There's going to someone come to sweep all your stuff and move you over here. You lost your privilege for this as a human being.

All right. I don't have a ton to say on this topic other than I just don't like this. Brian Armstrong and Coinbase said, the world needs crypto now more than ever. Now, as a fellow bald, I appreciate his baldness. And I guess it's like, you know, a barber's going to tell you needed a haircut so what I were expecting to say. But it goes on to say debt is growing exponentially. Inflation is crippling entire nations. Economic freedom is declining. It's time to increase economic freedom globally with crypto. Actually, you know what? Maybe, okay, maybe I will give.

a pass here or try and interpret what he's saying. Because he didn't say Bitcoin. If he said Bitcoin, I would have just said hard no. But stable coins, I think, stable coins actually do increase economic freedom, I think, or can. Not an expert. But if I am, if I am somebody who lives in a country with not this more stable currency, the idea of digital dollars sounds pretty good. I feel like people don't even make that anymore. Or are you going to stable coins in a minute. How many CEO pictures do you think are them not looking at the camera, but looking away? Yeah, yeah. Look over here. Look over here. So someone also sent us the Coinbase. And I feel like they should almost be spiking the ball instead of trying to make weird arguments. But there was a commercial in the NBA final. Someone sent this to me. And it was saying how like five years ago, it cost X number of Bitcoins to buy a house. It was like, you know, 10 Bitcoins to buy a house. Who uses Bitcoin to buy a house? Now it costs two Bitcoins to buy a house. And it was kind of saying it was just a weird way of, um, set number go up. Yeah. Okay. So back to stable coins. So the Genius Act. I love what they're doing now. This is, maybe this is another AI thing.

By the way, I saw somebody tweet, was it? Who was it? About it's called genius because Trump refers to himself as a stable genius. Ah, okay. Is that why? All right. Pretty good. So all the articles these days now have the key points. And I think that's just taken from AI. But so this Genius Act, it regulates stable coins. And it also mandates. You have to have one dollar of reserves for. every $1 of stable coins, right? So this is like, if you're going to be used, this stuff has to be backed. And ironically enough, this stuff is just going to increase

the demand for dollars, obviously, right? This is bullish for U.S. dollars, correct? I would think so. And T-bills, probably, because isn't most, or treasuries, isn't most of this money just going to be invested in T-bills and treasuries? I don't think anybody wants a stable coin

that's backed by the lira. Right. But so this is going to just, people always say, like, who's going to buy our debt? I guess it's stable coin issuers. So Sam Lee, who's a great follow, and probably one of the most successful crypto people that no one ever talks about because he just kind of does, he used to work at Morningstar.

He runs his own financial advisor firm. He tweets about crypto every once in a while. But he is probably one of the best crypto people I know who's not completely into, he's like more the human side of it. All right. What do you say? So he just talked about how this is like a huge, huge deal potentially. So he's saying, listen, it's profitable.

So someone like Tether earns $6 billion a year and risk-free because their stuff is backed and they just put it into T-bills, right? Also, he said, big corporations now have permission to go after the market and grow. They can more easily compete with Visa and MasterCard and American Express. Retailers, in particular, have a strong incentive to cut credit card processing fees. Most importantly, the act grants stable coins legitimacy, which will spur adoption by individual. So one of the stories I saw said, like, why wouldn't Amazon and Walmart just create their own stable coins? and totally do away with the 2 to 3% processing fees.

He's saying, let's see, in the long run with more legitimate non-specative economic activity occurring on stable coins or cryptocurrency networks that power them will become increasingly attractive places for commerce. We can see huge growth in decentralized financial protocols. So this is obviously like recreating the rails of the financial system. So he's kind of saying like, listen, a lot of this stuff is not imminent. It's going to take time to build out. But the fact that this stuff is a possibility now is one of the reasons that a company like Circle is going bonkers, right? And trying to bet on who the winner is going to be. Like, it's kind of like, if you can build, you know, rebuild the rails of the financial system and potentially,

you know, challenge credit card companies, like the possibility for this being a huge, huge companies is really there. Wisenthal tweeted, here's Circle on every day since it's IPO, incredible a run. So this is literally daily returns. Up 168, that's IPO day. Up 29, up 7, down eight, up 10, down 9, up 25, up 13, down one, up 34, up 21, LOL. Those look like annual returns for the S&P. Let me tell you a quick story. It's long. I'll try to make it quick.

So my house that I rented out is closing hopefully soon. I have paid either three or four months of my mortgage without a tenant, which was not that much fun. She laughed, not abruptly, but I was like, all right, she's been there five years. And she's like, no, actually, I'm leaving in 30 days. I was like, oh, well, could use a heads up. Anyhow. So just in terms of like eating away whatever return I made, which, you know, I got very lucky, but still, four months of mortgage payments and a decent amount of repairs, unfortunately, to pass, you know, inspections and all that sort of stuff. So I had a plumber come in. And there's a couple of issues, like, not important. But, but. But, you know, but.

But the bill was $2,800. And I said, huh, can I see the breakdown? There was four different things. And one of them was $1,000 for a sink, you know, $200 for Fawcett and whatever, the rest of labor. I said, that sounds really high. I'm going to phone a friend. And the rest of the things I spoke to my broker and said, yeah, everything else is reasonable, but that's crazy talk. So I said, all right, instead of $2,800, what if I'll,

I'll give you guys cash. Can I give you $2,400? He said, okay, fine, we'll do that. I went to the bank and I, on the way to the bank, I called my friend that I said, hey, can you install a sink, a faucet? He said, yeah, great. All right. So I went to the bank and I got $2,000.

Now I owed them $2,400. I owe them $2,500. I had them $2,500. I asked $24. Okay, fine. The bank was closed. It was Juneteenth. And the maximum amount of,

if cash it, you could withdraw is $2,000 from Chase. Did you know that? Did not know that. From your debit card. Now, the bank was closed. There was no tellers. I couldn't go to the window. So I called them up.

I said, hey, could you please increase my limit? She said, no, you're maxed out. I said, really? The most cash that I can access on a day is $2,000. And she said, yes. But I said, but I need more cash. She said, well, I'm sorry. You can go back tomorrow.

I can't override. You're at the max. So obviously, I'm thinking about stable coins and all this. I'm like, this is crazy town. So I, and then they pissed me off. I called them back and I said, listen, I'm not going to do the faucet. You know, so whatever that is, a thousand bucks just knocked it off the price and I'll just, I'll give you cash. He called me back and said, actually, you don't, you no longer get the cash discount. Now it's, uh, whatever, $2,000. And I'm like, come on. Really? Like, so now, so now why even pay my friend's 500 bucks?

I might as well just have you just do the whole thing. So he's like, anyway, we're, We're going back and forth, and he said, all right, fine. You can put $2,000 cash, $500 on the credit card, no additional fees. I said, all right, fine, just do it. What you wanted to pay me in Bitcoin? I went back to the house, took $2,000 out. And I said, hey, is it cool if I just leave the money in the drawer? I'm going to, you know, and I don't want to sit there and watch you do this.

He said, yeah, no problem. Nice kid. He called me later that night and said, there was only $1,800 in the drawer. And I said, no, there wasn't. I took out $2,000, put in an envelope, took the money out of the envelope, and put it in the drawer. I said, I will go to the house over the weekend and hopefully it's there. And he said, okay, I, you know, what would you have done in that situation if the money wasn't there? No way to verify, you know?

Yeah, it's my word against says. Yeah. Anyhow, the $200 was in the drawer, which may be very happy. I was like, I don't want to call the credit card company and tell him to reject it and then get this getting in trouble. So he just didn't see it? Yes, I'm like, dude. Oh, okay.

So he just, because it was, you know, it's a small stack of bill. So I guess he just picked it up and there was just two that he didn't pick up, which is just odd. But anyhow. So, so the whole point of the story is buying an investment property, not that much fun, right? Paying several months of a mortgage, not that much fun. Paying to repair a window, the paint, to this, the that, going to the town to make sure the, not that much fun.

The return on hassle, as Nick likes to say, not great, not doing this again, even though it was a very good financial outcome. Still, pain in the ass. And also, $2,000 at the bank, come on. Yeah, you don't deal with this with index funds, right? No. Come on, Chase. Did you see... Wait, wait, but what is this, so is your crypto thing?

Do you think crypto, like, makes this sort of transaction either? Because I think, I heard this story once, and I'm outing one of my uncles here, but one of my favorite stories for my uncles was I think this is in the 70s. He's riding a 10-speed bike home from a party. and he hits a crack or something and this is like downtown I can't remember Detroit or Grand Rapids or something and he falls over in front of a cop and a joint rolls out of his pocket

and they brought him into the and this is on a Saturday they brought him into jail to like book him for a night of jail he had weed on him and my mom and her sister were going to go pick him up at the jail and they didn't have any money

no banks were open they couldn't afford his bail they had to wait until Monday to go to the bank to get some cash out to go pay 50 bucks or whatever it wasn't the time to get them out of jail. So we had to spend the weekend in jail. There were no...

This is pre-ATM. There was no ATMs back then. So my point is that it could have been worse. You could add nothing. Now, I guess a listener or you or even me could say, well, why didn't you just Venmo them? Like, what's wrong with Venmo? Right?

I don't know. But the point is, banks, as they currently exist, are just a bit... A time of a different era. Yeah, maybe on purpose. All right. You know that I'm not leaving me? I guess it's Leo from Wolf of Wall Street.

Sure. Overrated movie. I think so, too. A good movie. A good movie. I watched it once, overrated. That's boomers with their housing. Redfin says one in three baby boomers say they'll never sell their house. And another 30% say that they'll sell at some point, but not within the next decade.

Boomers aren't leaving it. I kind of tend to believe them. because they've lived in their house for a very long time. I think the number is, they said, two-thirds of boomers have lived in their home for 16 plus years. And it also shows that younger people say that they are more likely to move if they can. I'd still do think that there's a cohort of millennials who are going to be in their house for a long time. I am personally with a 3% mortgage.

I mean, my oldest daughter is 11, youngest or 8, at least until the kids are done with high school or college, probably. We're in this house. I really want to be on the water Given that I'm a nautical man But I'm not leaving Right, it would be hard I mean, you know, things do happen

But I can't see it And plus, listen, we're finally taking some of that home equity line of credit I'll talk about this more than weeks ahead, I guess And we're doing some... Are you doubling the size of your mudroom? I wish Mudroom's not being touched But we're doing like new flooring and

Oh, well, if we're doing a new flooring, we've got to do a new paint job Hey, we're doing new a paint job. We have to change the banisters. And so I'm like, one decision leads to three or four in housing. And this is another point of the return on housing. But sometimes you make these decisions about how you want your house done. It's like almost an experiential thing. Are we going to get a one-to-one return on what we're doing?

Absolutely not. And it's very expensive, way more expensive than I thought. We're putting like Harvard floor store at our whole house. It's not going to be cheap. But we're going to live there for a long time, so I don't mind making this investment. Yeah, if you amortize that cost, you know, it's nothing. All right. Oh, wait, wait, one more thing about the negotiating, though.

Like, you said paying in cash. Like, I think that's a really, that's a thing you should do for any type of renovation. Okay, if I pay cash, will you make it cheaper? And I was going to do that tactic. But they offered me zero percent financing for a year. Done. Don't ask me again. Of course I'm going to do that.

I'm going to get it, let them carry the cost for a year for a very high cost thing. Sure. Was that through climate? Put it on my tab. No, not buy, not pay later. I'd be fine with that, though, if it was. Let's run through some stuff in private markets. We're getting along so we can do this quick.

There was an article over the weekend or last week. Fidelity rolls out custom models with alts via investment partnership. We are in the early innings of this megat trend. It feels like it's, I think financial advisors feel like it's a bubble because there is just so much activity. from these alternative investment managers, like just hounding us relentlessly. So from that respect, you could say there is way too much supply, which I'm calling the relentless ask, there's way too much supply of these investments and maybe not enough demand to soak it up. Now, that may be true, but they're coming. And if you want to learn more, another plug

for talking wealth on the unlock for advisors. I spoke with Phil Huber. And it was great because there's just, there's a lot of negative press. Some of it very fair. Some of it kind of nonsensical that we got into. But there was a... And Phil comes from both sides of the aisle, so he can speak. He was an R.A. But the thing is,

this thing getting like the model portfolios and the target date funds, like that is the entrance. That's the foot in the door. When you have it, when it's in the models, and a lot of people use those and a lot of advisors rely on those,

like that's when it's a really big push. So there is a, JP Morgan has this guide to alternatives. Like they've got to the markets, got to retirement, Guide to Alternatives, want to run through some quick charts. So they show public and private manager dispersion. And when you look at global large-cap equities, the dispersion over a 10-year period,

it's nothing. On the high end, it's 8.9%. On the low end, it's 7.2%. Wait, and this is like top and bottom quartile or guess I'll or? I don't know what it says exactly. But like the point is, if you throw a dart at large-cap managers, even if you hit the worst of the worst, whatever. Okay.

So the market did nine, you did seven two. You know what I mean? Like if you selected the worst, if you're throwing darts at private equity, you could be in for a wall to pain. And let's be honest, most people are throwing darts. This is a great chart.

David Twenson talked about this a lot. Like, if you're not in the top quartile, top decile for these private assets, it's not worth it. So, all right, so here's what it is. It's 75th percentile. And then on the bottom is 25 percentile. You're right. So it's top and bottom quartiles.

So 21% of the high end for private equity, 1.5% of the low end and no liquidity. How do you like that? That's fine. And the bottom quartile for venture and real estate are negative returns. Horrible. So, yeah, you better be careful and you better, you better be right. But this is why private credit is the thing. Private credit of all the privates has the lowest dispersion. So this is why I think most advisors will be most comfortable using private credit. And it's also the easiest thing to sell. I agree with you.

Yield. We're going to give you 10% yield. What else you need to know? Yep. Sign on the dotted line. Investor asset allocation. So institutional investors, 22% to alternatives, 78% to traditional assets. Very high net worth in family offices.

So 30 million plus have 19% in alts. High net worth investors, 5 million to 30 million, 2%. So they are pushing. and I don't know how much winning they're going to do, but they're going to win in my estimation. Right. You want to bet against those places. That chart you had that showed Black Rock versus Blackstone and the assets versus the market cap. It's unbelievable. So Black Rock has 10 times the amount of assets as Blackstone, yet Blackstone's market cap is 10 to 15 percent larger. Right. It would be like Vanguard versus any active manager. Like Vanguard's market cap,

if they're a publicly traded company, would be much smaller than a lot of the active, even though they have trillions of dollars. That's exactly right. I spoke with Phil about the story about Yale. Well, listen, if the pioneer are dumping their private investments and like, they're just, they're not dumping their private investments. There are other parts of the story, but the chart that I want to point to is secondary market volume has gone from $25 billion in 2012 up to $162 billion in 2024.

So a lot of this is rebalancing, too? There's just so much more liquidity. Yeah, it's easier to trade now. But again, I think a lot of that is rebalancing. Perhaps, yeah. There was a story again about, Zweig wrote about this, about marking up to Nav when you buy something in the secondary market. And Phil and I spoke about this. If you're buying something for 40 cents, you're marketing up to a dollar and you're taking care, that's horseshit.

But a lot of these buyouts in the secondary market are at a, to six percent discount to NAV. So, okay, that's the price. That's the cost of liquidity. If somebody wants to dump a billion dollar stake in private markets and the buyer pays 95 cents, I have no problem with them marking that up to NAV. Right. Yeah.

Lastly, private company buyout multiples versus the S&P. This is wild, Ben. So for large cap and middle market, large cap is considered a billion dollars plus. Middle market is 100 million to a billion. they're looking at median enterprise value to EBITDA up the trail in 12-month multiples. There's no, there's no discount. There's no discount. And part of the whole appeal of locking up your money was that if you are going to give up

liquidity, the higher returns better come from a lower entry point in terms of valuation. That disappeared. I can't remember what the podcast was, but there was an interview with Mitt Romney a number of years ago. And he was talking about how Bain Kappa, when they bought company, and he started out in like the 80s and 90s, and they were buying these companies like two to four times. Yeah, shooting fish and barrel. And yeah, he's like, of course our returns were great. The valuations were ridiculously low on these companies.

That's not the case anymore. So the small cap, so under $100 million, yes, there still is a substantial discount there. It's 8.8 times, as there should be, right? So anyway, JP Morgan, guide to alternatives, very good resource, the Unlock, Talking Wealth with Phil Huber. All right, then let's move on to the Sapphire Reserve. You threw it out there at the end of the show last week. Yeah, I didn't have a time to go through it. Are you bailing?

Well, I may have changed my mind. I may be overreacted last week. Credit to me for raising my hand and saying it. So you said, well, they're raising the fee to, what, $7.95 a year, which just sounds insanely high. So here's, this is from the points guy. They broke it down what you get. So you get the, you get a $500 annual statement for their curated luxury hotel brands.

You have to do it through them, which I hate using the portals on the credit cards to book travel. This sucks. Split into $250 buy-annual credits. That's amazing. So that means you have to book twice. So that one you're probably not going to use. So you get a $300 annual statement credit. Here's for you for Stubhub. Okay.

Again, split it between two six-month periods. $300 in DoorDash promotions. So that's not bad. Oh, wow. $300 in dining credit. But wait, but wait, but wait, Ben. Yes, there's all of these things, but you really have to be on top of it. So for example.

Yes, exactly. For DoorDash. Oh, 300. So you do the math, you're like, oh, this is, they're paying you. No, they're not. For DoorDash, it's a $5 restaurant promo and two $10 promos on everyday essentials each month. All right. And you have to activate it. You get a statement credit for Apple TV or music. So I would use that. That's fine. $120 for Peloton membership, 10 bucks a month. So I'll use that. The DoorDash dash pass membership, which takes away some of the fees.

Dude, this is a job in and of itself. But yeah, it's a lot. So you're right. you have to be on it, and that's why they know, plus they have the $300 travel credit applied to all purchases made in travel category. So you get that. So listen, this is a decent value. So it ends up working out for me, but they know people aren't going to use all these guys. That's, that's why. So wait, but you're not, you're not canceling.

You're not fucking leaving. I'm not leaving. I'm still here. All right. I also grabbed this chart from the J.P. Morgan's Guy to Alternatives. I just wanted to flag this one thing. They show retail real estate per capita. Look at us.

We are so far, number one. We've got 23 and a half square feet per person. Canada's number two at 16.8. Then Australia at 11.1. UK is 4.6. Japan is 4.4. China's 2.8. So think about it.

When you drive through America and you pass a town on a highway, every town in America, you see, look, there's a best buy. there's a T.J. Max. There's all these, you know, there's all these retail target, whatever. You don't get that when you drive in other countries, right? You don't see all this big box retail. So you're right. That's what, that's what we have. And obviously, we love to spend money. Ben, I put, I put the travel, the car stuff in the travel section. So I just wanted to pull out two, two quotes. We spoke about this earlier, how cars suck. Quote, this is David Francis Kelly. Credit to David Francis. Kylie. I'm sorry. Great quote here. The gizmo that failed to my Ford Escape that pivots to direct either hot or cold air

and the HVAC is plastic. The cost to replace was over $2,000 because the geniuses at Ford buried it with no access unless the whole dash was pulled out. By the way, we forgot to mention this, I think. Maybe I did, but I don't think we did. A couple of months ago, somebody emailed us. It was like, hey, you guys are always talking

about people like David Francis Kylie, like where do journalists get these people? There's a website that matches journalists to everyday people. Did you know that? No. Yeah. I forget what the site is,

but there's a repository of people waiting to talk to journalists. Probably people who leave Yelp reviews. Here's another one. My 2013 BMW X-5 rear-ended a small car in the damage to my car, like minor, said Tom Walken, a psychologist in Raleigh, North Carolina. But the electronics in the front bumper area pushed the repair costs to more than 75% of the car's value. So North Carolina law required that it be totaled.

Yeah, this sucks. Car sucks. And his insurance probably went up a lot, too. All right, Ben, continuing the, another mega trend of remaking movies from our era. A new Howl and Kumar movie is officially in the works. I like Howl and Kumar when I was younger. I'm probably not going to see this. These movies didn't do it for me.

I probably watched the first. Because you weren't a stoner. Yeah. Yeah, but I loved half big, though. Okay. Well, who didn't? So this one, and it just didn't do it for me. You know what I saw last night?

So during the finals, when Halliburton's Achilles exploded, which was disgusting. And that sucked. Feel bad for him and Pacer's fans. During halftime, I said, you know what? I'm going to the movies. I will watch the rest of the game of my phone if I need to, but I'm not anticipating a nail bitter.

That's a pretty good choice. So I went to see, because I'm not going to be able to see it for a while, I've got stuff coming up. I want to see 28 years later. Fibing awesome movie. See, I kind of want to watch the first two before I watched that one again, because it's been a while. So 28 days later, I rewatched.

That movie was like a phenomenon when it came out. It was. I never saw it 28 weeks later and I was told to skip it, so I did. Oh, I like that one. Okay. 28 years later was a certified banger. It was awesome. Okay.

Awesome. But anyhow. See, that's one of the ones where you and I are actually in the same wavelength here for kind of a horror-ish movie. Yeah, I'm surprised that you like that sort of stuff. I like that. Anyway.

Was the guys walking through the hospital in the first one? And be like, what? And it's the guy, it's... Kelyan Murphy. Oppenheimer, yeah. there was a trailer for I thought it was a full reboot it's not a reboot

I know what you did last summer because Jennifer Loaf Hewin and Freddie Prince are in it I'm in for that even though that was a good So one of the two of them is going to be the killer Spoiler alert That was like a sea level teen harm movie In my opinion but I'm going to see that Definitely saw it in the theater

But let's be honest One of those two is is the killer now Yes that I've not seen it I saw the trailer One of them is the killer Stop Trust me Yeah

No. Okay. What else is going on, Ben? All right. Before recommendations, we'll keep it short for Duncan this week because we went so long last week. This is just another old person, middle-aged thing. My wife and I, with some friends, went to a new restaurant this week. Just kind of in the middle of nowhere in northern Michigan, it was on a golf course. And there's a farm in the background. It's called the farmhouse. And this place was spectacular. It looked awesome. The vibes were great. The food was absolutely amazing.

If I would have gone to a place with that and I was young, I'd be like, oh, this place is pretty cool. never think of it again. My wife and I were talking about this restaurant for the next 24 hours. I can't believe how awesome. It felt like a New York kind of restaurant. And that's the kind of thing when you're older that you get excited about. Finding a new restaurant. Oh, yeah. Right? When you're young, I don't care. I didn't remember what the name of that place was. I don't remember what I had to eat last week. When you're older, you find a new restaurant. It's like, you tell everyone about it. Yeah. That's a big topic of conversation amongst 40-year-olds. Right? Did you guys try the new place down the street yet? Amazing.

Dying to. Yes. Oh, we're definitely going to go next time. All right, I got some recommendations. Okay, you got nothing in here this week. No, I just recommended 28 years later. Okay, I got two this week. We watched The Accountant 2 on Amazon Prime,

and I don't know if this went to the theaters or not or for the straight Amazon Prime. Okay. Did you watch Accountant 1, the first one? I didn't love it. See, I liked it. I honestly, my wife and I were talking before we watched this. I don't remember what, I remember.

It's very forgettable. I saw it recently, again, it's very forgettable. I kind of liked it. The second one, I feel like had no connection to the first one at all, like a little bit, minorly. But then John Bernthal is the brother, who I think he was in the first one a little bit. Again, I don't remember it. He was a little of them. It's a totally unnecessary movie.

Didn't need to be made. Completely unnecessary. And I was totally entertained. Great, like there was some great scenes with Affleck and Bernthal. And Bernthal is probably the best character actor there is right now. Bernthal's the best. He is so, he has so many good lines in this. And again, a totally forgettable, like, unnecessary movie

that was completely entertaining and I totally enjoyed myself. Did you see, we own, what is it? We own this, we own this city. Did you see that on HBO, the Bernthal mini series? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was pretty good. He's the cop. He's the cop.

He's great. Yeah, he's the Baltimore cop. All right. And so the new Owen Wilson show on Apple called Stick. Have you seen this yet? I saw two episodes. I don't love it. Okay.

My wife and I, I plowed through five episodes this week. It's a little bit of a coming age, so that's maybe, but it's a, it's one of these shows where, like, you don't have to invest a lot of yourself in it. Okay. It's just light and breezy and entertaining. And you know what always, always works? So in the fifth episode, they did a montage.

Put a song, you can see people talking and you can't hear what they're saying. A montage? It's like the fast forward button. Yeah, we're going to this town. We're going to this time. So it's a road trip show. It's got a little bit of heart on it because there's people dealing with grief in the show. But it's not a kind of show you have to be totally invested in. It's just

very light. And I was thinking, Owen Wilson just always plays himself. He literally is the same character in his show that he is in wedding crashers. And he looks exactly the same. He's got literally the same haircut still as he always had. He's the best. But he's the best. He plays himself. But he, I mean, it seems like he's playing, I don't know. My wife and I both really liked it. Mark Maron plays the sidekick. I like, I really am into it. We've plowed through that own very quickly. Okay. I have another quasi wreck.

It's not a wreck. It's just a movie that I saw that I like, but it's, uh, I feel like it was, it was, it was fun but underwhelming. And it was just a little vibes were weird. You ever see Plain with, uh, Gerard Butler? Okay, it's funny because I was having this conversation last night with my wife. It felt like hollow. Like, I should have loved that movie.

But do you ever, do you ever go on Netflix or one of your streamers and you see, they have the continue watching thing? And it shows you the movie, the movie their shows you're watching. Yeah. And you see something that your spouse is watching and you go, what the fuck? What are you watching that? She was watching Plain. That's bizarre.

And I wanted to be like, what are you watching this piece of garbage for? You watching it, I get. Plain was a high-quality piece of garbage. Okay. Yeah. Total junk. I mean, it's a Gerard Butler movie.

I have a man crush on Gerard Butler. I love him. But aren't all of his movies high-quality pieces of garbage? Let's be honest. Yeah. Well. No offense to him. He's carved out a nice lane.

300 was not garbage. So watch your mouth. Careful. Okay. Do not talk about Leonidas that way. That movie's okay. That's a great movie. All right.

We went looking on. Not bad. As you hear this, we will be recording a live show at the Morning Star Conference on Navy Pier in Chicago, which should be out as like a bonus episode. And we're going to do something a little different for that. So that should be fun. Come say hi if you're there. Anything else? Hey, stay cool.

Stay cool in the heat. Okay. I got nothing. I got another time for weather. Sorry. Bed hates weather talk. That's true. But what else is it to talk about?

No, that was it. You just say, yeah. Stay cool. All right. Go fuck yourself, Sandy. All right. Thanks to the production team. As always, email us, Animal Spirits

and Compond News.com. We'll see you next time. You know,