Animal Spirits Podcast - The Stock Market Is Doing Something We’ve Never Seen Before (EP. 463)

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

On episode 463 of Animal Spirits, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠���⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ben Carlson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ discuss: Paul Tudor Jones on market valuations, how many people own stocks, mind-boggling numbers from the hyperscalers, a lost decade for bonds, why higher gas prices sting, some macro prediction rules, government debt levels, Jevon's Paradox, prediction market winners and losers and much more. This episode is sponsored by Grayscale and Janus Henderson Investors. To learn more, visit https://www.grayscale.com/ For more information, visit https://www.janushenderson.com/securitizedmarkets Sign up for The Compound newsletter and never miss out: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thecompoundnews.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find complete show notes on our blogs: Ben Carlson’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠A Wealth of Common Sense⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Michael Batnick’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Irrelevant Investor⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Feel free to shoot us an email at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Grayscale Disclosure: Grayscale is the world’s largest crypto-focused asset manager based on AUM as of 12/31/2025. For other companies in this category, AUM is considered as of most recent public disclosure. AUM is subject to change. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. For more information, visit grayscale.com  Janus Henderson Investors Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal and fluctuation of value. Janus Henderson® and any other trademarks used herein are trademarks of Janus Henderson Group plc or one of its subsidiaries. © Janus Henderson Group plc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, I want to start our podcast off by talking about another podcast. Okay, Paul Tudor Jones is on Invest Like the Best with Patrick Boshanasi. you listened, I assume. Very good. He's a very engaging person. He seems like the kind of guy

that you'd want to sit on a porch with and have a whiskey. Seems like a great guy. Yeah. Very like happy, jovial. Something about the Southern accent, I think just makes people sound nicer. Anyway, I thought this interview

was very instructive in how to think about the personality of investors, hedge fund managers. I want to get into that. I want to read you something that Patrick shared on Twitter that was from the interview.

So he says, we're 252% of stock market kept the GDP now. In 1929, we were 65% in 1987. We got to 85% to 90% in 2,10070%. He says, if you think about the curiosity of significant bear market since 1970, we get a mean reversion out every 10 years. And he also says, but basically,

we're over-equitized as a country. We have the highest individual equity weightings in the history of the country. He says the problem is that if you, you buy the S&P at the current valuation, with a 10-year forward return is negative when you buy the S&P with a P of 22, that's what history shows. Okay? So he's saying, like, listen, he said valuation matters a lot and the stock market's really high, and it's going to be really hard to make money from here with any kind of long-term view. Now, if you just pull that out of there, there'd be two ways of looking at this. One would be, oh, this guy's right. If you look at the history, and there's been charts of this, forward PE at 22, 23, whatever it is, forward returns are not very good. So you'd say, how could you argue with that? The other person would say, these hedge fund managers have been saying this for years, and they've been wrong for years.

Don't listen to them. After listening to this interview, I didn't take any of that away from this. Here's what I took away from this. And you can see, I want to see if you took the same thing. He started the interview talking about how he always was kind of a Warren Buffett hater. I thought that was pretty interesting. I didn't realize that. He's like, I poo-poohed whatever Buffett did.

I thought his just thinking and acting for the long term, he kind of got lucky. he got a few ideas. He just rolled a long-term trend. He just wrote a long-term trend. And he said, my personality won't allow me to do that. I'm a traitor. So I just, I don't have that Buffet in me. And he's talked about how in 1987, he was predicting there was going to be a depression after the crash. And I thought, oh, man, that's very interesting because Dallio in 1982 predicted there was going to be a depression in the United States, the start of the, perhaps, the greatest bull market of all time. And I just thought that I think certain personality types are more well suited for certain types of investment disciplines.

And that's why these kind of predictions, like you have to take it with a huge grain of salt. So I thought him explaining his personality and the way that he is hardwired, like he has to be a trader. He has to be a speculator. He doesn't have the ability to be a long term. And that's why he constantly is talking down on markets.

Like that's why a lot of hedge fund managers are. And anytime you see a bond manager go on CNBC, they talk about how bears they are. It's because it's part of their personality. It has nothing to do their forecasting abilities. It's all personality driven. Thoughts.

Totally. Yeah, 100%. And you get that out of his, like listening to him explain his background, because I've never heard many interviews with him, him being bare, because he's been bearish for a while,

I think. He's made many bearish comments over the years. It makes so much more sense when you think about it in those terms. Yeah. It is kind of wild that we're now here in 2026. And it doesn't happen so much anymore. But like in 2015,

2014, people were talking like it was a daily thing how expensive the stock market was. I don't think new participants realize that we used to argue about the Cape ratio and why full-tenthurner returns for stocks were going to be depressed in 2014. You remember when Jesse Livermore did that whole huge 5,000 word epic on philosophical economics, which if you weren't in the blog game around them, those were the must reads. He was talking about that in like 2015, about how the market is in his, expensive as you think it is based on Cape.

Yeah, that's true. Now, in fairness, I was pushing back against Cape, making the point that it is, it is different this time. But also, I didn't, I expected returns to be lower. I genuinely did. Yeah, we were saying temporary expectation. Yeah. I also think that the market is obviously not cheap.

Okay. Do without what you will. Probably not going to have another 14% compound annual growth the next decade could happen? I don't know. What if AI and robots keep going? It could certainly could happen. But the part that I thought that I would push back against is like the over-equitization of America. Yes. This is the richest country on the planet. And almost all of the wealth has been created by equity, by being a business owner. Why wouldn't Americans piggyback people like Elon Musk, who we'll talk about later, and all these people who made their fortunes

building businesses. So look at this. Why would we not be overact? Why would we not do that? Look at this chart I just put in here. Paul Kodroski shared this today. He says no country comes close to the U.S. and stock ownership. And it's the United States at the high.

And this is through 2024. So it's higher now, I think. United States is by far the highest at 55%. Canada is almost 50. You go to India. 6% of the country owns stocks. China is 7%. Germany is 14%.

Japan, 15%. And here's the thing that I don't get to about the, this is the Buffett indicator, the GDP to stock market in GDP. It's so much higher now than it was in the past. In 1929, 2% of the country owned stocks. In 1987, 20% of the country owned stocks. Today, it's 60%. Of course the stock market is going to be higher as a percentage of GDP.

More people own stocks. There's more wealth in the stock market. Yes, this is exactly what you would expect. It would be weird if it weren't the case. Yes. if more money kept pouring in and it wasn't growing it. So that, yes, my question is what you look at this country ETF or country and ownership thing, a lot of people would say, well, the U.S. is going to come down.

But what happens when the rest of the world catches up? No, the U.S. is not going to come down. This is the share of household with stock market exposure. Yes, this is going to only, this only, I'm saying, some people would say this is going to come down. It has to. It's never been higher. My, my contention.

By the way, by the way, I know you're not saying that. Yes. it absolutely is not going to come down. This is a permanently high plateau. Yeah, as a percentage of like, you know, household exposure, that's a different story, right? Because of the market corrects, that number will pull back. But in terms of the percentage of people owning stocks, this number will only go higher, which it should go to 100%.

I know it never will, but that's the goal. And more people in other countries as the barriers to entry have now been broken down are going to continue to there's going to be India in China are not going to be under 10% forever. They're going to have way more equity investors in the future as people gain more wealth in those countries. Yeah. So last week we got, we got Big Seven, the Max Seven reported earnings. And part of what the bears could not foresee, nobody could have foreseen this, I don't think, is that these companies would continue to grow at the pace that they've been growing at, and not just continue, that it would accelerate. These are, so this got, these are, these are

mind-boggling numbers that we're looking at right here. Yeah. So I listened to all the calls last week, except for, I don't think I'll say, not Microsoft. They're not doing Microsoft. That one's too complicated for me. Wait, when you go on quarter, do you still listen to the CEO talk or do you go straight to Q&A? It depends who the CEO is.

That's fair. I'm still a Q&A guy. Well, I mean, that's where the good stuff is for the most part. All right. So anyway, just, you know, I was talking with you. and Josh, the numbers, the top line numbers just defy anything. There's this guy Evan Armstrong who has a subset called The Leverage. And he has a chart that shows on one axis, the market cap.

I'm sorry, the annualized revenue. Yeah, the, okay, the annualized revenue on one on the X and then the year-over-year revenue growth on the Y, okay? Okay. And he calls this the quadrant that shouldn't exist. And it's meta, Microsoft, alphabet, Apple, and Amazon. And it shouldn't exist because at that size, at 80 billion, 100 plus billion, whatever it is, at that annual revenue growth, you should not be able to grow at the rate with which they're growing.

Right. The size and the scale. There's no precedent. No. So I know we've been beating this drum for years, years, years, years. years, you cannot compare these companies to companies in the 70s, like, or the 60s or the 80s or the 90s or the 90s, or the 90s are a little bit closer, I suppose, but not really, not really. But if they weren't doing this, the reason why, like, the reason why some of these calls are

hard to digest is Amazon, for example, there's so much going on. There's so many different business lines in there. And Google as well, and Microsoft, of course, forget about it. This is the whole, every time that bull market keeps going, someone says, yeah, but if this would have happened, then it wouldn't have kept going. This is the thing, if you had told me in 2017 when Scott Galway's book, what was it called, the four? The four.

Yeah, it was about Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft. Yeah, you told me that wasn't the top. Nope, not even close. If you would have said these companies are still growing just as fast now as they were then, I would have said impossible. It's impossible. They can't. So Warren Pye has had this thing where he says, earnings boom is really accelerating now.

Forward estimates are now 25% year over year. And this is, he's saying like, This is insane. So I look, I'll go up and I said, why is this happening? Of course the Mag 7 is part of it. But so I looked at this is from FACCET. Seven sectors are now reporting double digit earnings growth for Q1, 2026. Led the communication services, 53%, tech, 50%.

And communication services basically is tech. And then consumer discretionary at almost 40%. Listen to what these companies beat on their EPS surprises. Alphabet beat by over 90%, Amazon by over 70% met it by over 56%. It's absolutely insane. The Mag 7 was 61% above expectations so far with earnings. Forget where I pulled this from.

Or maybe you pulled this from somewhere. During the past week, earnings growth for the S&P 500 for the first quarter increased to 27% from 15%. If 27% is the actual growth rate for the quarter, it will mark the highest year-over-year earnings growth rate reported by the index since Q4, 2021. And guess what? Which included low base effects. Yeah, a little bit of a different story.

Remember, that was a thing for a while? Like, once the base effects go away. Yeah. Remember the other one was, what happens when the excess savings when the pandemic goes away? You don't hear that one much anymore, remember? And at the risk of just sounding insanely bullish. How do you not sound like a true? How do you say data like this and not sound like a cheerleader?

It's impossible. I know. No, but I don't know. I feel like we're telling the truth. If it sounds like we're being cheerleader, it's all right, guilty is charged, I suppose. I'm telling you what's happening. the market. What if we had a conversation with crane shares early in the week?

What if robotics is the next thing, like human and robots? And maybe that's a pipe dream, but maybe it's not. What if that's the next $5 trillion market? So, Andreessen Horowitz, A16Z has these charts of the week now, which is pretty cool. And they show the margins. To your point out of the 70s, they see not your grandpa stock market. Profit margins at all time high again. Yeah, don't ever show me the Cape ratio or this, that from the 50s.

when profit margins were 5%. You are comparing computers and something else. Something else, Ben, think of something clever. So, Financial Times says they talk about Google's numbers, and they say big techs, AI spending plans rise to $725 billion. And they show the CAPEX just keeps, every quarter gets higher and higher. And it's not coming back. This is from Mike Socrates.

Wait. I'm just staring at these numbers. I shared this with you and Josh. Let me just pull this up. Okay, sorry. The one was the big four, which is Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, are together expecting to spend 77% more in CAPEX than last year, which was a record. 77% more than the $410 billion they spent last year, just these four companies alone.

So, Meta, a company that the stock market is not, excuse me, super excited about right now. I think it fell 9% after earnings and there's no bounds. You a buyer here? I'm not. Purchases of... Your paper account? Nope. Purchases of property, plant, and equipment was $6.4 billion for the quarter in 2024 in the first

quarter. All right? Just two years ago. That is $19 billion. So it went from spending $6.4 billion to $19 billion. Well, you would expect free cash law to get destroyed, right? Because that's a lot of the part of the narrative is their free cash flow is eroding really quickly. It's all being financed by debt.

They're not going to be able to pay for this. Their free cash flow in the first quarter was $12.5 billion. And the most recent quarter is $12.3 billion. How? Well, their net cash provided by operating activities went from $19 billion to $32 billion. And one, two, three, four, in eight quarters. Wow. 19 to 32 in eight quarters.

And think about how long the pandemic, how long ago the pandemic was. I'm only looking back to 2024. What was Facebook pre-COVID? And the stock's in a 24% drawdown at the moment. So, yeah, I don't, I don't think the market is, the market is certainly not showing signs of euphoria, at least not in the Mac 7. The stuff that's going on with the chip names is starting to. worry me a little bit. Now,

digital, Sandisk, Micron, yeah. Now the earnings are up. I did this with Josh last year. Last weekend, what are your thoughts? The earnings are up like 10x.

So maybe what do you expect the stock to be doing? I think in one case, I think Sanchez the owners might be up 50x year over a year. I'm not kidding. Something nuts. So I guess you would expect the stock to be, you know,

going along in concert. But it's a lot of market cap. It's like, so you feel like microin goes up 8% every day. day. There was a lot of, there was a lot of chasing. Yeah, those stocks were off. Those stocks, they're like the new quantum computing stocks seems like. So you mentioned the cash flow part. Bank of America via Mike Sicardi.

Hyper-scalers, CAPEX has a percentage of operating cash flow with 70% in 2025, expected to be greater than 90% in 2026. Holy smokes. They are just going for it. This is crazy, too. This is from the Atlantic. Hold on a sec. Cap-X as a percent of operating cash flow. That's nuts, correct? So this is below 25% in 2012. Now it's going to be 90%. This looks like a stock chart. Okay.

Give them the Zach Alfanakis gift there, Duncan. This is another crazy one. So the Atlantic had this piece on Anthropic. Okay, so they say, Anthropics' revenues increasing faster than Zooms during the pandemic, Google during their early 2000s, and even standard oil during the gill of age. If the company's current growth rate were to continue,

By early next year, they would be taking in more money than any company in the world. Not like 10 years out, not five years out. Just the current trajectory to next year, their revenue would be higher than anyone else. I don't know, man. No precedent. No. We've never seen this before. Yes.

If you're comparing this to anything in history. We've seen high growth. We've never seen gigantic rapid growth like this. It just never happened before. it's nuts. I'm going to take the under. I'm going to guess that they don't have the most revenue in the world a year from now.

I'm going to guess that the growth slows down. You know, going on the limb. That's probably fair. Maybe we'll be wrong. Exhibit A chart of the week. This one surprised me. I didn't know this. Chargant Matt sent us out last week.

Exhibit A for Advice.com if you want to learn more. We're now a double from the lows of 2022. The S&P 500 is up 100% from the lows. See, when inflation was at 8% in the fall of 2022, in the world seemed like, okay, there's recession is like any day now, or we're already in a recession. You bought back then, you're up 100% in ESP. It's pretty good. That's, I didn't think that.

Should have got an all in. All right. Damn it. Let's give some bad news. I think this is bad news. TLT. I share is 20 year plus treasury bound long term. government bonds now have a negative return over the past 11 years.

Nowhere for 11 years. Still in the 40% drawdown from the highs of early 2020, mid-2020, because rates have gone from essentially 1% or something to 5% now or something. Was this the easiest crash of all time to hedge of a pretty substantial asset? This is long-term government bonds are a substantial asset. I don't know how many trillions of dollars are worth, but it's a lot. What do you mean? Was it the easiest thing to hedge?

Because all you had to do is go short-term. Oh, oh, oh. It was the easiest hedge of all time within fixed income. Oh. Yeah, I think that's fair. I don't think that's hindsight buy, so I think that's fair. I think if you sat through a 40% crash in this thing and you've been in it since 2020 and didn't diversify your bonds, that's your fault.

Harsh but fair. I did notice for the first time. Gasoline is expensive. I felled up the tank, my wife's tank. By the way, I got a bone to pick with my wife. I don't know if your wife does this. There's never any gas in her car. Ah, okay.

Never. It's somehow miraculously, the light is always on when I go in there, except this time there was only 10 miles left. And I had to take Kobe and his front of art. So the gas light was like going on and off. And Kobe was like, to pull over. It's saying pull over immediately. And I was like, I think we're going to be okay. So I felt up with a tank. I think it costs $90 or so.

So look at the text message I put in here for my wife. Holy shit, gas is $5 a gallon. There's something about rounded numbers that get the human brain to, you know, no one ever says, oh my gosh, gas is $4.75 a gallon. It's the round number thing. I paid way less relatively. I think mine was like $4.25. But I noticed the bottom line, that would, that happened to feel like that happened fast, no? Very, look at the price of, look at the chart of average gasoline prices. It shot up like a cannon. And it seems like the way that this works is that when oil prices rise, they rise like, what do they say?

Rise like a rocket, fall like a feather. Is that kind of how gas prices happen? I've never heard that before, but I like that. I mean, I didn't make it up. But that's what's happening now. And it still seems like, I mean, we're probably, I don't know, it seems like, we could get $6 a gallon gas in the country on average and the stock market still won't care.

Is that possible? The stock market still won't care? It's funny because we're in a place where it seems like every energy... $6 is high. I think... I mean, in a lot of places we're getting pretty darn close. Oh, you know what?

I asked chart could to make this from me. A chart of... gasoline versus the S&P 500. I bet there's not much of a correlation at all. My suspicion was there's nothing there. Yeah, I'm guessing there's not either. But here's the thing. Every single oil analyst, every single geopolitical analyst,

every single investment pundit right now is thinking, like, listen, the energy markets are all screwed up, and no one is paying attention to this. But doesn't this seem like the most telegraphed risk we've ever seen? Like, it seems like everyone knows about it. There's no one that if you're paying attention, you know about this. You know that energy stuff is screwed. So look at the chart from the Financial Times.

Scroll down a little bit. The loss of oil supplies in 2026 is the biggest of them all since 1973. Bigger than the Iranian Revolution in the late 70s, bigger than the Arab oil embargo, bigger than the invasion of Kuwait, Iran-Iraq War, all these other things that have happened in Middle East. This is by far the biggest supply. And obviously, oil is more, there's a bigger supply than ever because there's more people. but this is the Austin Powers where the guy is standing in the way

the steamroller. Get out of the way! Get out of the way! That's what this is, right? Yeah. This morning, I think Robin rolled over onto the remote control.

And the TV turned on, and it was the local news. So I guess before Good Morning America, whatever it is. Local news. And it started with gasoline prices,

fire in the city, another fire, somebody got stabbed in the face murder, and then somebody spray painted a swastika on somebody's front door. I was like, what the fuck is this? Is this for real?

And I feel like we've had this conversation over the years, like this is just what the news is now. But this wasn't like, it wasn't like Channel 12. It wasn't like that local news. It was like, it was one of the major networks. It was either Channel 4 or Channel 7. And I don't know why I'm talking about this, but like this is just what the news is. It's unbelievable.

Literally. Hang out. Hang out. And then I turned it off. I'd had enough. Sorry, I got a busy day. Doorgests just came for me. That's okay.

You don't have to apologize. This is why I've essentially checked out of news. Like I don't really, I pay attention to financial news, economic news. I've checked out of the actual news. networks, I don't like to watch them on my remember because it's just depressing. Does that make me a bad citizen? No. No. They're not, they're doing you no favors. I have mixed thoughts about this, Ben. I mentioned that I have that brick thing, right, where you lock your phone and I primarily did it because I don't want to be with my kids on my phone. But I realize, like, one of the

problems is in the morning, I wake up, but now I'm just on Instagram for an hour in the morning in bed. Oh, so from doing one thing to another? Well, my screen time did not decrease. I'm embarrassed to tell you how much time I spend on my screen. You know, Apple gives you, like, your screen time for the week? So I blocked Instagram, and I have hardcore mixed thoughts. I feel like I'm, it's a little, no, I haven't, I'm still, I'm on Twitter and Instagram.

I'm on Twitter on my computer, and that's enough. I've logged into Instagram today on the computer for the first time. I've never done that before. I was a mobile only. Desktop, I know you could do that. But this is a big step cutting off Instagram. That's huge. Where am I going to shop?

How am I going to find my fitness influencer stuff? Speaking of that, somebody, I did peek into the comment section because you guys shared something funny. You had to get roasted for that thing last week. I said, I wonder what people are saying about my fitness. So, LaRosa, our colleague, said, this has to be the most ridiculous shit you've ever bought. right? I almost crashed trying to zoom in for a better view while driving. Somebody wrote, that was the dumbest workout machine I've ever seen. And then somebody replied, I know, oh, well, can't you just swing your fist without a guide?

Now, yeah, imagine I'm just doing this. There's resistance. There's resistance. So my Instagram purchases are obviously going to tank, which I don't really love that. That's where I get on my shit. But I did buy one more thing, Ben. One more. My transition to fitness influence is almost complete.

So I'm not feeling great about my body. There I said it. Feeling old. I'm looking old. Don't feel great. Body issues, Ben. You know what I bought? So I also bought this for practical purposes.

You know, I have a rickety back. My back is like just aching all the time. I can't play basketball anymore. So I need to strengthen my core. Planks are very good for you. Now? Yeah, I do planks. Yes. Yeah, of course you do. The problem with planks, Ben, hurts your arms. So I bought, you know the wrestler Edge? So Christian and Edge, you don't know wrestling.

They have a mat. So it's like two inches of foam with grips and a timer. So guess what I've been doing every day, Ben? Planks. I'm getting in shape. And it doesn't hurt your arm or elbow at all. Pureplank.com. Get 20% off. Now you can't get any percent off. But it's working for me. Why do you buy a yoga mat? Yoga mat. Those are this thick. Your arms are that sensitive. You can't go on the... I have sensitive.

I have sensitive bones. Okay. Got a bridge to sell you. Okay. So I think you put some charts in here from duality research. But why gasoline is... Part of it is percentage of wages, price of gasoline hasn't gone that much farther.

Average cars are more fuel efficient than they were in the past. that matters a lot. This is great stuff, no? Yeah. Adjusting for fuel efficiency, like, it's much lower. I had Sean do... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

He did three adjustments. He did three adjustments. Fuel efficiency, wages, okay. He adjusted for wages. Uh-huh. Right? Because we're comparing, yeah, guess what? Average hourly earnings have gone up a lot over the last 50 years.

He adjusted for average fuel efficiency. And then as a percentage of wages, adjusted for fuel efficiency, the double adjust. That's pretty good. So I had Sean just giving me an inflation-adjusted gas price going back to 1990. And we're essentially today on an inflation-adjusted basis where we were in 2004 and 1990 for gas prices, just inflation-adjusted, which obviously takes a dope. So not adjusting for inflation, which is obviously absurd, not adjusting for wages and fuel

efficiency. That's like saying houses cost so much more money than they did in the night. 1970s on a nominal basis without talking about A, inflation, and B, houses are a lot bigger and better. There's double the square feet. Obviously, they're more expensive. But this is also why gas prices will annoy people and people will complain about it. And it isn't more annoying to spend more to fit their car. It is annoying. It sucks.

It does suck. But consumers will probably be okay as a whole. Some won't. Most will. That's probably where we fall on this, right? That's right, Ben. This is a garbage survey. But that's kind of the way that things have worked for this whole cycle.

Something happens. It annoys people, but people kind of just still push through it and we're okay. That's where we've landed. See the economist covers? That's still in La La Land. Why oil prices are not high enough, not yet high enough. They're kind of thinking the same way, I think. You know, I thought there's a macro forecasting rule here. Because people have talked about, hey, if the Strait of Hormuz is not open by X date, we're screwed.

If you're a macro forecaster, never give a date. Always just keep it open-ended. Listen, if the straight-of-Hamoose doesn't open, energy markets are screwed. Oil is going to dot, dot, dot. Give an amount. You have to give an amount. Never give a date. Because the date thing, it always comes to pass, and then you realize, like, oh, wait, nothing

happened. Push back a month. Don't give a date. Something to think about. Sage advice, Ben. All right, this is a garbage survey. The share of Americans who say their financial situation is getting worse. So it's at an all-time high as far as this poll is concerned.

Yeah. This is a Gallup poll that we're doing. Yes. And Axios did this. So right now the reading is 55%. And for context, during the great financial crisis, which was both great as well as a crisis, that number did not reach quite close to 50%. So more people are saying that the financial situation is getting worse now.

then in 2008 or more likely surveys are broken and or more likely this survey is complete bullshit. You can't trust them anymore. These surveys, you can't trust them. There's no way in any objective measure that people's finances are worse off today than they were in the financial crisis. All right, but I want to read a tweet to you from this guy Peter Diamandis MD. I don't, I'm not, I read his book. He wrote a book about 10 years ago talking about like the abundance in the future or something. Pretty good.

Not familiar with his work. He said Elon Musk just crossed $800 billion. Roughly 2.7% of the entire US GDP. The last person to hold that much of the American economy, John D. Rockefeller in 1913, it took a century for anyone to match him. Rockefeller had oil. Musk has the future. Now, that, obviously this is a.

lightning rod of a tweet, right? Yes. That in a vacuum doesn't bother me so much. Now, I say what you will about Elon. He's created a lot of wealth for others, obviously for himself. But that's what we do in this country. Now, you know, is it crazy? Yeah, it is crazy.

But that's how, that's how this country works. That's capitalism. That's our system for better and certainly for worse. I don't love his response. his response was 10 trillion or bust. Now, I don't know if he's kidding or not, whatever. He's obviously provocative. But come on, dude.

All right. So I was reading this week, don't scroll down. I got a trivia question for you. So today, the top 10% holds roughly 67% of the total wealth in America. Obviously, very wealth inequality is a thing, right? Two-thirds of the wealth is held by the top 10%. I'm reading this book called Wall Street of History. You're talking about the wealth concentration

in the early 20th century, like heading into like the roaring 20s. The top 5% of the population back then controlled what level of wealth? This is in the early 1900s. When Vanderbilt died, and I guess, when did he die? The late 1800s,

he, there was some crazy stat. He had like as much money as, I forget what it was, whatever, it doesn't matter. It's way, way worse. Top 5% controlled 80%? 90% of the wealth. Crazy how much worse it was back then. This book says Matt.

It's not wealth inequality. It's like it's massive wealth inequality between not just the haves and the half-nots, the people that controlled this amount of money and everybody else. Yes, right. And power. Right. It's the people with, you know, whatever. That number just-

20 billion and up. That number blew me away that it was that it was that much worse back then. But the thing is, no one knew about it. There weren't these stats that, like, showed people, right? Yeah, Rockefeller wasn't tweeting. Right. All right. Government debt.

This is from the Wall Street Journal. As of March 31st, the country's public debt, publicly held debt was 31. Well, they got three decimal points. 265 trillion just over GDP. So it's 100% of GDP now, the national debt. This is the kind of chart you show people. that you really want to scare them, right? Look at this.

U.S. publicly held debt as a share of GDP. Yes. So I pulled this Steve Eisenman quote from when he was on T-Cath with you guys, which was what, six months ago or so, is 10 months ago? Sounds about right. The deficit is Wall Street's version of virtue signaling. People get on TV and they're like, they try to one-up each other. I am against the deficit.

And then the next guy says, oh, he's not against the deficit. I'm so much more against the deficit than me. I hate it most. I hate it more than him. He's nobody. Okay. And nobody ever asks the question,

given all the, the adjada about around the deficit, why have none of these predictions ever even come close to happening? Yeah. And I think what they all miss is that, the entire, like I said, hinted to that before, the entire financial system

of planet Earth runs on treasuries. All right. So true. It's like what? You don't care about putting all this debt on your grandkids? How selfish are you?

You're leaving them the bill to pay for it. It's all virtue signaling. I just, my whole thing is, I agree with him that like, we run the financial system for better or worse, until there is a something better

than treasuries that people are willing to put their money. into how is this ever going to be a crisis? I don't know. Well, I guess maybe it's worth worrying, but only in the sense that if it does, if we go over the line like this is the system itself. Right. Like, you can't like, it can't break because it's everything.

The whole, it's a whole kitten caboodle. Right. I said that last week, didn't I? If a better system comes along that, if something, if there is a better alternative to treasuries in the U.S. No, I know. My point is it's worth worrying about even though I don't like the hyperbolic constant worrying. It seems to be a waste of time. I just seem to think that inflation remains the biggest risk of all this spending, not like a system-wide crash.

That's where I fall in. Like, oh, my gosh, everything's going to implode. I just don't see that as being a big worry. Well, I have good news on the inflation front, at least here in Midtown Manhattan. I got Chipotle today. It has been a minute then. 1285. I feel like you're in an abusive rule.

relationship with Chipotle because you you like break up once every six months and then come back and tell us you got back together. I'm basically done ordering Chipotle only because I'm just not in the city that much, you know? I mean, there is one right next to our office in New York. Yeah. So. Convenience. But I remember it broke the $14 dollar barrier. So you think that they've lowered prices at Chipotle? I know they did. Okay. That's good. It is good. All right. Do you think that the AI people finally got the mental. This is Sam Altman tweeting last week. We want to build tools to augment and elevate people, not entities to replace them. I think a lot of people are going to be busier and hopefully more fulfilled than ever, and job dumerism is likely long-term wrong.

Okay? I'm hopeful for a future where people who want to work really hard, have incredibly fulfilling things to do, and people who don't want to work hard, don't have to and can still have an amazing life of prosperity. PR people finally got to them, right? Said, hey guys, come on. Stop talking about how this is the end of the world. Stop talking about labor market apocalypse. Not doing the many favors. Maybe I am, what do you call it, a Cassandra? I'm a glass staff full person.

I tend to agree with them. Even if he, I don't know if he believes this or not. I agree with his statements more than I do with Dario from Anthropic. So do I. So, Ezra Klein was writing in the New York Times in an op-ed, why the AI job apocalypse probably won't happen. And he said, the more automation there is, the more people value a human's touch. Take coffee.

It was once a laborious to make espresso at home. Now, an espresso machines are everywhere. Has that led to Starbucks closing in neighborhood coffee spots dropping? And prices, of course not. There are more barrisas than ever. There are more coffee shops than ever. Coffee as a commodity led to more demand for coffee as an experience. He said, in 1979, so bear with me.

I'm going to read for a second. In 1979, Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet was released for the Apple 2. It could do in minutes what previously took teams of accountants' days. There were predictions of mass unemployment for bookkeepers. Instead, the number of accountants quadrupled over the next 40 years. The spreadsheets didn't replace the accountant. Maximoff writes, it unleashed latent demand for financial intelligence that had been there all the long, waiting for cost to fall far enough to be demystified.

So they talk about Javon's paradox, and he says, This, Maximov thinks, is what AI is likely to do, even in the industry's most exposed to disruption. He thinks that in part because it happened before. Quote, in every major occupational group that adopted computers heavily, employment grew faster than in groups that did not. Computers eliminated specific tasks within jobs, but the resulting cost reductions created so much new demand that the occupations expanded overall. And here's Ezra speaking. Computers can do much that humans once did, but they didn't put humans out of work. The ability to do more made people realize there was more to do.

I agree with this. And someone's going to say, you idiots, this is different. It is different. It is different. But and also, it's confusing because for all the reasons we don't need to get into about the obvious thoughts that AI poses. but there will be layoffs that are blamed on AI and part of them will legitimately be AI. But like we heard from Coinbase this morning. Coinbase is cutting 14% of their staff.

It's 700 people. And they're citing AI. Of course, the stock is, you know, crypto's not, you know, not hot right now. He also said like, yeah, crypto's in a winter. We're in a bear market. So it makes sense to, yeah, they obviously overhired. But yeah, this is. And there are going to be certain industries.

I just, I'm having a more positive view about this now, probably than I did six months ago, even. Well, here's another one, positive, positive view. Torsten Slack, he said AI's most exposed industries keep hiring. Nearly two million workers in the Philippines now work in call centers, up every year since 2016 and through the AI boom. Again, this is Javon's paradox in action. As AI makes call center work cheaper and faster companies are buying more of it, not less. And then finally, Derek Thompson, Patrick Collison, founder Stripe tweeted, Stripe Atlas just hit 100,000 all-time incorporations.

And Derek said, Stripe data shows that startup incorporations are way up. And startups and AI are seeing faster growing revenue than is historically normal. For now, AI agents are better at creating firms than destroying jobs. So I haven't all of a sudden gone from worrying about AI to not worrying about AI because I think, I, I don't think this. I know this. Everybody knows this. That there will be displacement. Yeah, the worries are legitimate in some areas, for sure. Yeah. But it's not black or white. Yes. And I do agree that the business formation is going to explode and it's going to keep exploding. And the ability to start your own thing will be easier

than ever. Because you can ask all the questions in the world that you want. Alec Sapp put this in. The housing bubble in late 2000 is quaint by comparison now. Imagine showing this to someone 10 years ago and trying to convince them that today is not a bubble. When the last one looks like it's, we left it in the rear of your mirror. This is cute, but it's like, this is kind of a dumb chart, no offense. Only because, or it's not dumb, it's incomplete. Because it was the leverage. It wasn't the prices.

Wait, what? This is showing the national price index. Yes. And the reason why there was a real estate bubble in, the 2000s isn't because real estate prices were going up 15% every year. It's because prices were gone with no equity down. Yeah, you're right. It was both.

It's just, it's interesting to try to explain to someone how prices could be up as much as there on the 2020s without having that stuff happen, without having the leverage, without having the home equity line of credit crazy in it. Like without the, it's hard to fathom. It would have been hard to fathom we could have this boom without that stuff, without the speculation and people buying eight houses and eight condos, right? And the strippers who were buying three condos in Las Vegas or whatever. Like that, we didn't have that this time.

Yeah. Look, I found this. I'm not trying to pat myself at the back here. We've been talking about this forever. I wrote why this is not another housing bubble in April of 2021. What was the TLDR? It's just because people locked in low rates. People had way higher credit scores and people weren't borrowing their faces off and they

weren't doing the adjustable rate mortgages. Like all the bad stuff that we learned our lesson on last time, we figured out. And it's another thing we just kind of moved on. And we dealt with it. All right. Let's do private markets real quick. So Pitchbook did an analysis of private credit loans and top public BDCs. Does I feel like we moved on from this risk in terms of like the zeitgeist?

Well, because, you know, you said it best, we can only pay attention to so many panics at once. Yeah. We move on. And also, price is stabilized, right? Like that, that helps. So this doesn't sound great. They're Q420, 25 takeaways. Key takeaways.

Software exposure on related AI disruption risk is larger than surface level number suggests. Uh-oh. Software alone accounts for 25% of the top 10 BDCs portfolio of fair value, and the real exposure runs deeper once you look past sector labels. Not great. First, lean yields contracted by roughly a point over the past year, lower base rates and tighter cash spreads drove the decline. Not great.

Non-acrual stress is growing in dollar terms, even as headline counts hold flat. Not awesome. And then lastly, borrowers overlap is deeper than investors might assume. Some names appear across five or six BDCs simultaneously, meaning a single credit event ripples through multiple portfolies at once. Okay. All right. So that makes sense.

Yeah, not awesome stuff. And then I was looking at some of the performance of the biggest publicly traded BDCs. Gallup Capital, Blue Owl, Aries. And I'm looking at the total return. You're a date. And it's like, what are we talking about? Gallup is up 4.5%. Blue Owl, like the,

which is like the eye of the storm, is down 1.2%. Yeah, sure. It was down, it was down worse. It's just, it's a lot of energy. And I understand why.

I understand why we spent so much time time by our private credit. It just feels like outsized given, uh, it feels unfair and fair in certain ways. But it's, it's flat. So this could be a situation where a lot of the weekends got chicken out at the same time. Yes, and also TBD, right?

Because we don't know what AI is going to do to the software in these portfolios. So we shall see. But I'm glad. I'm going to take a while. I'm glad that we were moving on because it did feel like it's, you know, it's getting overdone. All right, let's do. So survey prediction markets, Bloomberg and the Washington Journal both ran some stories on this. So I made the joke on Twitter that this was like the same summer when Deep Impact came out at the same time as Armageddon.

And remember there was Dante's Peak and the volcano movie came out at the same time? Yeah. I think there was a Mars Red Planet one. It was like they got the same idea. So Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal both did independent studies of somehow they opened up the books and figured out who's making money and who's losing money. They both did it. Good numbers. And the TLDR is not great for people who are on these platforms.

No. Shocker. Here's a good one. On Polly Market, there's Noah Cullwin tweeted this. On Polly Market, the journal found 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts. That means less than 2,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars. I said this a couple months ago, and I will bang the table on this, bang the drum on this. You should not be allowed to wager on outcomes that can be known in.

in advance. For example, you can't know who's going to win a basketball game. Now, there might be a player, if you want to, whatever, be annoying. There might be a player that's like trying to throw the game. But in general, just stop. You can't know who's going to win a basketball game. You can't know how many Teslas will be delivered in 2030, right? Or how many humanoid, like things like that in the future events, nobody knows.

but if there are things that you can bet on where a small number of people might have that information, cannot bet on it. Well, so obviously, yeah, that 0.1% is obviously mostly insider trading. The thing is... Cannot do it. You would think that they would want to get rid of this because that's causing people on their platform to lose money.

That money comes from the losers of those bets. The fact that the 0.1% accounts for all the take-home profits, they should want to root out that bad behavior, right? they should not want that to stay there. So you said this is what the prediction markets are for. Will GameStop buy eBay? Great. Nobody knows.

Right. You want to wager on that? Get closer to the truth because there'll be a marketing. I'm all for it. Should Ryan Cohen be able to bet on that from GameStop? No, he should not be able to bet on that. Yeah, but even he doesn't know. Now, maybe I guess as it gets closer, but you would assume that's reflecting the data.

Either way, stop that people can know at advantage. Get rid of it. What is this thing? What is a part from Bloomberg that says that bots netted 131 million at the expense of other polymarket users? Is that just algorithms that are trading? It's like market makers. Okay.

This is hilarious. This is really hilarious. The head of comms at Cal Shee, the Wallsheet Journal came to us with a profitability analysis of public Cali profiles, which was inaccurate because the majority of traders keep their profiles private. So we did the analysis ourselves and gave us. it to the Washington Journal. Our analysis showed that Cali traders win more than they do on day trading, options,

sports books, and futures. Are you fucking kidding me? That's like saying cocaine is healthier than crack and like doing a victory lap. It's the first time we've given out that data. We debated whether or not to give it out, but we figured it was better than a shoddy analysis that showed people lose a lot more than they actually do. So this is the chart.

they showed the percentage of traders who lose. And yeah, prediction markets, only 75% lose. This is a brutal chart. I didn't see this. Only 75% lose, whereas with day trading, 80% lose. Are you out of your mind? You're bragging about this? You have a better chance of making money in prediction markets and options.

Look at these numbers. I'm not a prediction markets hater. I love gambling. And I think that, like, yes, even though I hate that it's rude. ruins lives. There's lots of things that ruins lives. I mean, it's a straw man. I don't want to go there. I love gambling, but clean it up. Yeah. Clean it up. You can't have the insiders. These numbers that options lose money 90% of the time, sports books lose money, 95% of people who are on there. Lukawa made a chart at Sherwood showing that Rob would have made more money on event contracts and

cryptocurrencies in the most recent quarter. Wow. Which says a lot about both industries at the moment, obviously. Yeah. Ben, let me ask you a question. Are TV is now movies in terms of, like, quality? How come beef is so good in terms of production? Now, somebody emailed me, like, beef went off the rails. It jumped the shark in season two. I'm guessing this person didn't watch season one because it was the same thing. It was sort of plausible and then it just went completely cabloy.

Yeah. Right? Like, I don't know. It's absurd. That's sort of the point of the show. That's an absurd show. But just the production. Now, you might not have liked the way that's season two and I did or season one.

I did whatever, but that's not the point. The point is, like, the gap and quality between shows and movies is massive and it's, it's like backwards. Whereas, like, all of the Netflix movies are such garbage. Like, they're just garbage movies. They're crap. They're not well done. And I think they know it. It's quantity of quality.

Whereas, I'm not all TV. A lot of the TV is crap, too. But it just seems like the quality in TV is better in a lot of cases. It's also crazy to think that almost every show now has a movie star in it. there's movie stars in all the shows now. There's shows that are out with movie stars that you've never heard of these shows before. And you go, wait, that's on right now?

Nicole Kibben's in another TV show? It's kind of hard to wrap your mind around. Yes, the quality is way better. So we started beef. It's a hard show to watch because just things keep happening that are bad to people. But you want to keep watching

and see what happens. It's like the opposite of Rooster. It's not a very chill show. You don't watch that to relax. Yes. I can see why you like it, though. All right, Derek Thompson did a good piece on millennial parents. And they have the numbers here. Millennial dads do four times more child care than Boomer Dads did.

And it shows that every generation does more child care per day than the previous. The silent generation didn't do a whole lot, right? Baby Booers do a little more. Gen X did a little more. Now millennials do more. This is just obviously a sign of learning and progress. And then it's not like saying one generation is better than the other. Because I think you could make the claim that there's a lot of millennial parents who are

so a helicopter that it's bad for their kids, right? But this isn't something new. You notice this is all the other dads around you, too, right? That they are just so much more involved than the previous generation was. It's obvious. A lot of factors in here. I feel like I am with my kids all the time. All the time. I'm home when they get home. I'm home when they go to bed. I guess it's like normal. I'm with my kids all the time. It's all weekend. and if I sound like I'm complaining, eh, maybe a little bit. It's a lot.

It's a lot. I had a fantastic relationship with my dad growing up, still do. And I never saw him. We didn't even have in the same house. I mean, my parents were divorced. So I saw my dad like twice a week. And I think it probably spoke to him every day. I can't remember.

I'm, you know, we're getting old. But so I'm not saying that like, that was good. This is bad. This is good. That was bad. Like, it's, you know, it's not black or white. But I am, I was thinking this weekend, like, we just kid shit the entire fucking weekend.

Yeah. And it's, it was, it's, I don't know, it doesn't, it kind of feels, it kind of feels a little nuts.

It's impossible to go to a kid's event of some sort, sports or whatever without hearing another parent talk about how busy they are with sports for other, for their kids. Oh, this morning we did this and we did this. You hear that same conversation, every thing you go to.

But, and we're not, we, we don't, we don't, we don't overdo it with activities in the sense that like, my kids are not doing 19 sports. I don't have like superstar athlete kids.

Like, but it's just it is, my goodness is a lot. Derek says something that I'm going to, I will take on in budge with. Oh, did not put this in here? So anyway, there's a chart in here. I'll get back to them a second. Birth of first child. So there's a chart that shows dad's health declines. Guilty is charged.

But his life satisfaction remains high. Look at this health. That's kind of wild, right? I mean, that's been my experience. Not yours, Ben, you buck the trend, but not that I was a model of health before my kids were born, but holy shit. When we had twins, I realized that if I'm going to have energy to continue living my life like I want to, I need to change, like, my health because three kids and no sleep.

And like, so I made a concerted effort to change my health when my twins were born. Oh, yeah? I mean, I got one of these weights that I do this with. And I do it all day. Oh, here it is. All right. This chart, I'm going to call bullshit on this. maybe this doesn't make me sound good,

but I'm giving you my opinion. Dad's like child care more than watching TV. Really? Like it more? I'm making a face. Do they really? Do they really? Because I got to be honest.

I don't. I love watching TV. And I love my kids. But so Kobe is now staying up until, I don't know, 915. Give or take. When the kids used to go bed at, Seven o'clock, you had a lot longer to just, like, decompress, right?

So guess what time I go to sleep? I'm, like, sleeping at 9.45. I'm exhausted. And with these playoffs, forget about it. I'm really tired. And I wish I could watch more TV. And I know we talk a lot about TV. But it takes me a lot longer to get through a show.

And listen, I know that's like, that's normal, right? Like, you know, we have to prioritize our kids and we do what I do. But I'd like watching TV more than I like being with my kids at 9.15 at night. I'd rather be watching TV. At a certain point. we have figured out how to I'm going through the 90s catalog with my kids now and it's like if we're going to watch

TV I want to watch TV with you so this week we watch the River Wild with my kids loved it so good I introduced my daughter Libby to she likes rom-coms now we watch. That's a that's a River Wild is a tough watch for kids yeah

it wasn't as bad as I thought when they when they connect when they when they take the dad and they're beating the shit out of him oh yeah sleepless in Seattle I watched with my dog the other night. Just perfect rom-com. So anyway, I'm trying to, yes, make them sit more still and watch with me too. But yeah, you're right. Give and take, right? There's tradeoffs, as always. I like this comment from last week. We need the Bat E-TF, BAT, Batnik ETF. Invest in all residential HVAC, like carrier,

unreliable automakers, stalantis, Tata Motors, auto finance ally, auto parts, what is that, O'Reilly, new refrigerators and even mudroom components, Home Depot and Lowe's. All tracking Michael's major consumer purchases. Let's see if it outperforms the S&P. Well, I haven't said it yet. Track this? I haven't said it yet, Ben, but getting a mudroom. I am getting a muddrum.

You haven't been to my new house, but... You walk into my house and there's like little tiny, like, there's like tiny little cubbies for the sneakers and stuff. And there's no like hangers, so we just throw everything down. And then you walk up the steps. So I don't know where to put everything. we're getting mudroom. I'm selling, I sold more crypto to, I know I said, I bought more crypto a few weeks or whatever. I need some cash.

What are you going to do, right? Got to buy muddrum. So it's like you're like doing, you're moving walls and stuff. I'm moving walls and stuff. Yeah. All right. That's fun. I think we should have Claude tracked this portfolio for us.

All right. A bunch of people sent me this. You had the, what do you call it, this guy, that guy. There was a LeBron thing going on where he said, get a load of this guy is a new meme. and that's when we hadn't added to the list. Get a load of this guy. Get a load of this guy. That's a good.

That's pretty good. Ben, I tagged you on Instagram because you wrote a new book and your handle is Ben Carlson, 007 or something, 007? Is it? Are you a huge bond guy? No, seven was my number in high school. I was just trying to get seven into it. So I'm not a bond guy at all.

And to be honest, I don't, I'm not really on Instagram. So I didn't even know that you tagged me on someone. Okay. Well, I did. Oh, okay. Well, I am quite torn about this Instagram stuff. I got to be honest, because I really love it. You're right. And I'm worried that if I don't have Instagram or Twitter on my phone, I really am

going to lose connection with the outside world a little bit. See, I just, I don't, I can't help myself. I'm an addict. I only have the bandwidth for one social media thing. My wife always gets mad at me because she sends me like funny memes on Instagram, but I never check it. And she always gets mad at me for not checking. Like, that's how I know what people are doing that I,

care about, you know, like friends and family and stuff. We have to be like me. I don't care what my friends and family do. That's fair. They're fake lives. But I think, but I think if I just look at Instagram for 20 minutes a day on the computer, that should suffice. I don't need my phone.

Okay. 20 minutes, I'm going to do an hour and then you're back to square one. Yeah, yeah. I need some recommendations, people. I've got a nonstick pan and guess what? Doesn't work. Shut sticks. I know there's probably chemicals.

I know there's like a whole, you know, people have a lot of feelings. I'm sure Duncan could chime in on a, uh, The nonstick pans. I got like the hex pan or whatever it's called. And I remember when you bought them. My eggs are sticking. So I also, I need a full, I need a full reboot on my kitchen stuff. I still have like plates from my wedding, I suppose.

But like if you were to look, if you were to walk to my house, my kitchen is a disaster in the sense that nothing matches. I've just like hodgepodge. I have forks and spoons that don't match. I have cups that I need like a, I just need like to throw everything out and start over. We did an Airbnb and we found some silverware we really liked and we bought the silverware because it like the functionality of it. I've been using AI for so much more when it comes to shopping. Would you, I want to buy this? Well, what about these things? And I, well, how about

this? And I have back and forth all the time about shopping now about big ticket items. Okay, let's do recommendations because we had to go soon. Marty Supremes on HBO Max. I watched it. I feel bad because I feel like I'm constantly a hater of the new movies that everyone loves. You didn't like Marty? Come on, dude. Listen, it was really well acted. It was really well. It was like a cinematic.

It was very visually pleasing. I'm not sure what the point of this movie was. I thought I'm going to watch a guy who was like a ping pong prodigy. Yeah, true. You're right. It wasn't about absolutely nothing. Well, what was the point when like the bathtub fell through the floor and then they lit the gas station on foot? Like weird.

It was the plot jumps that happened in this movie were so bizarre and I didn't understand. Like, what was the point of, like, a bathtub fell on top of a guy and his dog? Like, I don't, it made, it had nothing to do with the plot. It was bizarre. The stuff that happened to this movie, from a plot perspective, I was like, well, I just didn't get the choices. It didn't make sense to me. It was very high quality. The acting was great.

I love seeing Gwyneth Paltrow again. Shalame was, you know, he was, he was good. I didn't understand what the point of this movie was. You're breaking my heart, Ben. I can't get behind you on this. I'm sorry. Are you ever going to watch this movie again? one time in your life.

There's no way. It was very high quality. I will watch it if I'm on a jet blue flight and there's nothing else to choose from. I had a great time watching it. It was high quality. I don't understand the point of it. It's just like one bad left on it. It's no train dreams, a guy looking at the sky, missing his family.

Yeah, that actually has a meaning to it. Sure. All right. What else do you hate? My Audible recently, The History of Money by David McWilliams, and it's a history book that just goes through the power of incentives and money and how to happen. And there was two stories in here. Anytime I have a new nonfiction book, I just want some anecdotes to pull out.

There was two of these that I've never heard before. Tell me if you've heard these before. One, during World War II, because he lived through Weimar, Germany, in hyperinflation, Hitler was planning on, Hitler had counterfeiting going on day and night, and he was going to drop out of planes like $10 billion on London. and try to give them hyperinflation. He was going to try to wreck the system using money. And supposedly the war got too far on and it never happened.

But this was a actual thing. They had counterfeiters at concentration camps making money that they were going to drop in London. And the funny thing is that that happened today, I don't know. You would never have enough airplanes or currency. Think of how many trillions of dollars were spent in the pandemic? It would be impossible to do today. Two, supposedly there's a theory that the Wizard of Oz was a movement. or a book written about the downsides of the gold standard.

I'd never heard this theory. I've heard that before. Okay, I never knew that. Anyway, two anecdotes from that book. I really like, like most history books, there's a lot in there that, you know, it's probably unnecessary, but I enjoyed that one. Okay. Oh, one more thing.

Yeah. I listen to your CAA book and I listen to your Three Kings book, the Spielberg one. Oh, you listen to the CAA book? How good was that? Here's the thing that it's, those books are very interesting with the stories. Also kind of depressing that I feel like to be. in a position of power that big, you have to kind of be a bad person. And I don't know

how to reconcile that in my brain. Not a bad person. You have to... Obit's partner. Everybody loved him. But the people in power, you almost always have to step on next to get there. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Take money that could have gone to other people. And that's the part that's kind of bummed up. Did you like the... Did you finish the

the King's book? Not yet, but it's I never knew the story of Dreamworks like that. So it's news to me. That's great. All right. Last thing, I saw episode one of your friends and neighbors. And you know what's interesting about that show? I'm not sure how the season is going to unfold. Whatever. It's a fine show.

I enjoyed enough. I feel like there's like this weird paradox where the characters are simultaneously so unrelatable in terms of the life that they live, right? like the luxuries and the way they all look and whatever. Like I don't know anybody like that, right? I don't live near people like that. I don't know anybody who would be on that show. And yet,

the characters themselves feel very relatable. In terms of what's, you know what I mean? Like, just in terms of what's going on, like what actually matters to their life, the relationships, like, I love John and Amanda,

John Hamm and Amanda Pete. So that's why I watch the show. I'm still, I think season two is, we're all caught up halfway through the season. I like it. Zach Lowe was on the last show. Okay, okay.

Yeah, I heard he's with an O.G. Makes it, makes an appearance. Yeah, there's an NBA players. Okay. All right. Okay, that's about it. We are out of time. Audible spirits at thecom.

Thank you very much for listening. Hey, listen, it's not always going to be like this. There's going to be a correction. Stocks will go down. It's not always going to be like, oh, my gosh, this is so amazing. But enjoy a while less. All right. We'll see you next time.

Thank you.