Barron's Streetwise - Government-Proofing Your Portfolio

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Vanguard's Joseph Davis talks about megatrends, including the tug of war between AI and US government deficits. UBS's Mark Haefele discusses investing where governments spend.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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in stock market outside of the tech sector. Hello and welcome to the Baron Streetwise podcast. I'm Jack Howe and the voice you just heard, that's Joseph Davis. He's the global head of Vanguard's investment strategy group. In a moment, we'll hear from him about mega trends, including the tug of war between artificial intelligence on the upside and US government deficits on the downside. We'll discuss how to government proof your portfolio. We'll also hear from UBS's chief investment officer

for global wealth management. He writes something different in a new book. "'Investing in free markets is out, he writes, buying what the government is buying is in. We'll talk about it. Listening in is our audio producer, Alexis. Hi, Alexis. Hey Jack.

No, I'm not going to ask you to tell us about your politics. Okay. But I want you to do some political stock picking, some political fund picking. If I told you that you could have picked one of two ETFs the day before election day back in November, you got your choice. The only thing I'm gonna tell you about the two ETFs

is that the ticker on one of them is MAGA, M-A-G-A, and the ticker on the other one is DEMS, D-E-M-Z. What do you think you'd be better off having bought? I think, logically speaking, I would say the Republican ticker. Right. But I wouldn't be asking you if it was just so simple. There has to be an ironic twist or turn here. Right. Yes. What's the twist?

Well, that's the twist. The twist is the Dems has done a lot better. I mean, someone who made this trade and got this right during the election, it was like a red wave, right? Republicans took control of everything, the house, the Senate, the white house. Right. Republicans took control of everything, the house, the Senate, the white house. So this should be a golden era to be a MAGA ticker symbol MAGA investor. That fund is called the point bridge America first ETF.

It's an exchange traded fund that promises exposure to quote companies that align with your Republican political beliefs. But I looked at it recently toward the end of May. And since the day before election day, it had made just 1.7 percent. And the S&P 500 index, just a regular stock market index, had returned 4.5 percent. So almost three percentage points higher. Well, and how are the Dems? Well, if you mean Dems is in Democrats, I leave that up to you about how

they're doing right now, but if you mean DEMZ, the ETF, it's doing well. That's returned more than the market, 6.3% during that same stretch. That is of course the Democratic Large Cap Core ETF, which favors quote, companies that have made over 75% of their political contributions to Democratic causes and candidates. You can consider this one of my periodic reminders that investing based on politics is nonsense. It doesn't work. It sometimes backfires. The difference in performance between MAGA and Dems has nothing to do with ideology. It's just industry weightings. MAGA has plenty of oil and chemical stocks. Those are down because of high inventories and economic concerns.

And it has home builders. Those have been hit by a fall in housing starts. Dems has more in big tech entertainment and high fashion. And there are companies there that have produced healthy double digit returns. Just in case the post-election performance of those funds isn't ridiculous enough. Would you believe that there are two companies that are in both funds? Which ones? One's Paychex and the other is Kimberly-Clark.

If you, let's say, created an ETF with just those two stocks, right? Which, you know, there are some diversification rules against that, but forget about that. Suppose you have an ETF, it's called the Bipartisan Fictitious ETF ticker, BPZN, and you have just Paychex and Kimberly-Clark. Over that same time stretch that we talked about earlier, you've made 10%. You've beaten both MAGA and the Dems

with your bipartisan ETF. Jeez. And the takeaway from that is absolutely nothing. It is also mathematical nonsense. Look, we've talked about this before. I think actually in the run up to the election, because everybody always tries to figure out who's going to win. And what does that mean for stock returns? Well, let's look at history at how these different combinations of

parties in the different layers of government have worked for stock returns in the past. And the problem is one of sample size. There have been 47 US presidents. 47 of something is not enough to tell anything about anything. There's something called the law of large numbers where if you have these random events, the more of them that you have, the closer the actual outcomes draw to the predicted outcome. and just know that 47 ain't a large number. You'd never have an insurance industry or a casino industry if you had to rely on just 47 as something to tell what's gonna happen. So 47 is not enough to know about anything and it's even a little worse than that because then you

have to think about how long have we had modern stock indexing which is how you tell how stocks have done. I guess you could start with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but that came out during the McKinley presidency. He was the 25th president, so now you don't even have 47 presidents. And if you want a broad stock market index,

you have to wait for the S&P 500, the modern version of it that has 500 stocks. And that happened during the Eisenhower presidency. He was a 34th president and he have all kinds of other problems like hidden variables. Presidential terms, those are set by the 22nd amendment to the constitution. Economic expansions and bull markets,

those end when they end. So the two don't correspond neatly. You also have to factor in wars, crises, starting valuations for stocks. Maybe the returns that you get during a particular president's terms are to that president's credit or blame, but maybe not. But just because you should leave politics out of your investing doesn't mean that you

shouldn't consider the government and its influence on markets. US spending, if you look at the combined federal and state level, that's been running between 35% and 40% of gross domestic product. That's a big influence. Mark Hayfully, he's the chief investment officer for global wealth management at UBS. He talks about this in a new book called The New Rules of Investing Essential Wealth Strategies for Turbulent Times. He makes the point that during the Biden administration's CHIPS Act, there was a corresponding run up for semiconductor stocks. Is that cause and effect

or coincidence? He makes a similar point about the Inflation Reduction Act and infrastructure stocks. The book was published in January when President Trump took office. Since then, I've seen a lot of government influence on markets, but it's hard to pinpoint how investors could have taken advantage of it. Stocks were whipsawed by the announcement

of high worldwide tariff rates, and then the partial pause on those rates how investors could have taken advantage of it. Stocks were whipsawed by the announcement of high worldwide tariff rates, and then the partial pause on those rates amid trade negotiations. And more recently, we have courts deciding whether those tariffs are legal. That's a lot of change in a short amount of time. When Mattel and Walmart discussed

tariff related price increases with investors, the president threatened supersized tariffs just for them. Apple received something similar for talking about moving iPhone production to India rather than to the US. The New York Times reported recently that companies have started using euphemisms for tariffs in their discussions with investors to avoid drawing anger from the White House. They're calling tariffs

sourcing cost or input cost or supply chain cost. I joked on the Barron's TV show recently that they should start referring to price increases as Patriot Hickeys or big beautiful restickering. It's a little bit weird to say Patriot Hickey, I grant you, but you know, you gotta stay out of trouble. I also recommended for Walmart in particular that they could start calling Price Hike's price rollback rollbacks. That's a double rollback, you're rolling it forward, right?

Maybe you're on the president's side on those things, maybe not. But all this is frustrating for investors. I can see this government influence, but I wanna know how to position a portfolio for it. It seems difficult with day-to-day changes. I wanted to know whether the new rules of investing have even newer rules on the new administration.

So I reached out to Mark Hayfully at UBS. It's overthinking of it to say, well, I want to get in front of this and predict what the Trump administration's agenda is and, you know, anticipate it. I'm not saying it that way. I'm saying buy what the government is buying, like what they're actually paying money for, you know, what's written into actual law.

Mark says there are three investing themes that are likely to prove more durable than others because they relate to societal challenges that are spurring spending by governments around the world. Not necessarily every government at the same time, but many of them. These are digitalization, including artificial intelligence,

decarbonization, including alternative energy production, and demographics, including providing healthcare for the elderly. Mark recommends a top-down investing approach that prioritizes these themes, rather than starting with the standard country and industry weightings. He says that asset allocation and not stock picking will

determine the bulk of investor returns. He's a wealth management guy. So as you might imagine, he recommends professional wealth management. If you want to devote your life to picking stocks and go to bed thinking about them, wake up thinking about them, I don't recommend this for a life. But if you want to do that, this is what we do. Far more important than any particular stocks that you put into your portfolio is your asset allocation. And they are, I think, a global allocation for most investors. You know, most people tend to be home bias to their home country, but you should fight that, you know, one of the new rules is kind of the old rule that diversification remains the only free lunch and investing. Thank you, Mark. That's a good place for a break.

We'll be back in a moment with the global head of Vanguard's investment strategy group, Joseph Davis. At Desjardins Insurance, we know that when you own a law firm, your bar for everything is high. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage. Whether it's a family member, friend, or furry companion

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Visit your GTA Volvo retailer or go to volvocars.ca for full details. Welcome back. I wanted to learn more about investing mega trends, investing mega trends, trends, trends, and government influence on returns. So I reached out to Vanguard economist Joseph Davis, who has recently written a book on just that. Here's part of that conversation.

I feel like I'm hearing a lot about mega trends. I guess is our mega trends themselves a trend? Is this a time for trend investing? What's the importance of finding the right mega trends? Mega trends aren't new. It's just another way to think about the big forces that move the global economy and markets. It's globalization and the patterns of trade across countries.

It's been going on for centuries. Technology is arguably the most important and most standard of living force since the industrial revolution. AI, technology, demographics, immigration, fiscal discussions right now, and then the tariffs are related to globalization. So they're living breathing factors that always influence the markets. The key question that is always faced us is, do you have some sense of where the risks are till the next five or 10 years? And given the research we did, we could see some of these events coming,

was eye opening to me, and I've been in the business for 20 years. I heard this idea from someone, they said, boy, government's involved in everything. Now there's a heavy hand of government on business and you have to be. On top of it as an investor and you have to anticipate it and you have to position your portfolio for it. And I'm thinking, how in the heck am I supposed to do that? It's just, I can't get my head around it, but, but longer term trends, that sounds like something that I could, you know, that I could figure out a little better.

So what do you think of that? If you have some sense, if you can put some probabilities on it, because I hear a lot of narratives out there. If you had asked me three years ago, what's the prospects for AI? I was there. I don't know. It seems exciting, but that's not really an an answer that's just more of an opinion. No again what we tried to do and why do you miss book at a very accessible way say where the factors are really gonna matter for next three or five years like beyond even the election cycle.

What are the sort of investment implications of a portfolio trying to save. are the sort of investment implications. I have a portfolio I'm trying to save, trying to run a business, what things are more of distraction and what things are more material. In the heart of this book is there's two that are material, AI in a positive way more often than not versus the fiscal deficits

that continue to rise in the United States. And it's gonna be that tug of war that's gonna dwarf all other factors, although those factors are important and nowhere near as important as those two. Let's talk about a few of these, um, mega trends one by one. I guess we'll start with AI and I know what you're going to hear from some people or what some people are going to think they're going to think.

Well, I've been hearing this now for a couple of years and I've been watching these AI stocks run up and it's been good for my S and P 500 fund and it's too late for me to just go, you know, pile all in on a couple of these AI darling stocks. Am I, am I too late as an investor latching onto this trend or is there, do you see the world sort of underestimating the impact that AI is going to have? Well, I think there's a lot of hype. And usually when there's hype, there's also means it's expanding rapidly.

So it's not that people aren't aware of it, they're more fascinated by it. It's not a foregone conclusion that AI is, for example, ranks up there with the combustion engine or personal computer or the internet, but there's a 50% chance, which is meaningful for growth and profitability. However, if you are thinking long ahead and how do you profit from AI, if it is

going to be transformational, like perhaps counterintuitive, the greatest opportunities and history is very clear on this front is investment opportunities in the stock market outside of the tech sector. And the reason for that is if this technology is actually useful, it gets out of Silicon Valley. That means hospitals are using it to drive profitability and efficiency, right? It means banks or asset managers such as Vanguard are using it to be more productive and generate new products and so forth. So it spreads. I call it the second phase. The first phase tends to be euphoric and not all the tech darlings survive.

Unless you're trying to pick individual stocks, I'd be strongly suggesting on the value side. Okay. So that's interesting to me, but what do I do about it as an investor? There, there are so many industries or types of companies that come to mind that stand to benefit from AI. So how do I pick the ones that are most exposed or like if I'm just an index investor, is that enough?

Is there a way to get some more concentrated exposure? What do I do? First of all, you're invested in the markets or you're compounded over time. It isn't technology stocks are going to have negative returns. If AI is transformational, it's just like, Hey, there's already been a significant run up. The base template would be safe. It sounds simple, but it can be powerful.

Things such as like the value and value index under ETF. It's mark cap weighted, but you can have significant outperformance on a five or seven year basis that happened during periods of electricity, it happened during the automobile, it happened during parts of the transistor phase and personal computer for that matter. Now the second part is, okay, can you find those 4% of companies that are going to be the next dominant, whether it's using AI or producing AI, either one, it doesn't really matter. That is classic active management, but there's outside gains to be had.

I mean, here's the stat that just stuck with me, and I can't let it go from research a few years ago. It's that 4% of the companies have accounted for more than half of the excess returns of stocks over just a cash investment in the past 100 years. 4% of companies. That means two things. If you're not smart enough to pick the 4%, that's why indexing is powerful. Because if you don't own the 4%, you're going to underperform as an active manager. I'm not against active management. It's just that the odds are stacked a little bit against you. You just have to know what you're getting in for. When you say the demographic shifts are going to be one of the most powerful mega trends,

what do you mean? People getting older? What are we talking about? Well, first of all, aging is a positive, generally speaking. There's a lot of handwriting sometimes on aging. The fact is that the human species has been aging for a million years. Longevity has been going up and so has wealth. The headwind in store for the United States and many other countries is just the fact

that we tied some of our government spending to social security and Medicare to the aging of society. There's been a lot of positive to that, right? Reducing elderly poverty, helping those who lived a really long life and didn't have adequate savings. These are positive government programs. They're just expensive. And so that's what I mean by, you know,

it'll have a powerful effect. There'll be a change in terms of how long we continue to work. But the fact is we just tied our spending levels in the United States to the percentage of the population is really over the age 65. It's beneath the surface in these fiscal deficit discussions that we're having. That's not to say you have to cut those programs, by the way. You just have to narrow the gap between tax revenues and the spending we have mostly on those programs. How we thread that needle or if we do, we'll have a large barren on the bond market and stock market over the next seven years. I do not sense a gathering movement in Congress right now to meaningfully

reduce deficits. That doesn't seem to be where we're going right now. And it's going to, it's going to have to happen at some point. Right. So if it's not now, it's going to be harder down the road. Um, but, but where are we headed? Is it possible that we could get these deficits under control in a way that's going to be benign? Or are we headed for some type of nasty, uh, financial event down the road?

There's only two genuine scenarios over the next five years. The one is, is that we do nothing about it yet. AI, much like the personal nothing about it yet. AI, much like the personal computer, it boosts growth enough. Is that a positive outlook? It's positive for the stock market, keep interest rates down. By the way, Jack, we haven't solved the problem, but it pushes out, you know, seven or 10 years. I'm not condoning that. What I'm saying is that seven or 10 years, a

long time. The other scenario is no, and that's why this tug of war coming. AI is really more of a dud. It's more like social media. We all use it, but it hasn't lifted growth meaningfully. And you have no political will, bipartisanship to address this issue. That's what I call it in a high probability. It was called a deficit dominate scenario. It is a drag on growth. Growth is lower, interest rates are materially higher, and the stock market is not prepared for that outcome. I'm not trying to be alarmist. I'm just saying this is what the math shows,

and we've put probabilities of magnitude on this. And that's really the future in store for us. It's one of the two outcomes. There's generally not a third in our simulations, and there's millions of them. That's really the two. We've been seeing these long-term bond yields in the US and other parts of the world rise recently.

On one hand, I feel like we've been scolding the government about its debt problem for decades. And there really hasn't been a lot of harm that's come from it, but we've had globalization helping to keep down price growth and keep down interest rates. And now that seems to have stopped or maybe shifted into reverse. So I don't know, maybe this is the moment when we start to see the real negative effects

from this and we have to take it more seriously. What should an investor do? Let's just say, hypothetically speaking, that I don't have an abundance of faith in Congress to act, uh, you know, early or, or, or judiciously, like, let's just say that I, I'm assuming that Congress is not going to act until it absolutely has to, because it's forced to by, by, you know, some type of severe, you know, negative market reaction. So what should I, as an investor,

do to shore up my portfolio to protect myself from what might be coming from all this government debt? What you're describing, Zach, is a potential outcome that I talk about, which some would call a fiscal crisis, in quotes. It is that the bond vigilantes, investors, you name it, demand higher interest rates for the growing debt levels. Now, a lot of people have said that's been going for some time. It hasn't mattered, right?

Our framework, pinpoints, the type of things that do actually move interest rates and it's called structural deficits, which is a fancy way for saying we're just running them every year. That's why it hasn't mattered as much in the past, but they're starting to compound. Right. This is like, this is like crisis type spending that we're in right now. I know it's growing and it's a gap. I mean, the fact is we have 24% of our nation's income and GDP is

going to spending and 18% taxes. I'm not judging one is too high or one is too low. I'm just saying the gap is 6%. That is called a structural deficit because of 6% plus or minus last year. And so that's the issue. So how do you think about this? Let's say you assume, which in our simulations generally you find that there's no preemptive reform. We could see it, but let's say there's none. Unless AI kicks the can for 10 years, what you're talking about is ultimately interest rates continue to rise. And I showed the numbers in the book, an average over the next decade of 6.5% 10-year treasury

yield. Today, it's 4.5%, with spikes material above that. Sometimes you get 7%, 8%, even 9%, almost double the rate we're at now. The deficits do matter when they're structural and they're compounding. Now that could happen four years from now, could happen two years from now, could happen five. So how do you think about this?

Obviously bond portfolios would be hurt for a time if you have a sharp spike in interest rates, but once that settles, you actually get higher interest rates because the Federal Reserve would be trying to fight the inflation from weaker dollar and other things. The equity market would have a period of underperformance. So this is not a fun, rosy scenario. How you can mitigate it is saying, okay, modestly overweight fixed income, particularly short duration vehicles,

it has less so-called interest rate risk. Think of a short term, gradually or corporate fund versus longterm. You said modestly overweight fixed income, but stay short. So plenty of bonds, but don't go out too long. Overweight, stay short. And then why would you do that? Some will argue, well, once we have a fiscal crisis, the dollar will weaken and we'll have hyperinflation. Possible, but our simulations show less than 5% probability. And if that happens, you're thinking about things such as gold. You're talking about like change of financial systems. That's really serious stuff.

And by the way, people are, I'm not saying it's going to happen, but people are buying that stuff. So they're clearly anticipating that they're buying gold. They're buying Bitcoin. Jay, one of the big investment banks called this the debasement trade. Everybody's buying things based on, you know, dollar debasement. It is, it is, it's at the basement. And my only job in this conversation is not to say one is right or wrong.

We, to our knowledge are the first firm, academic, private firm, public organization has put probabilities on these in one holistic system. This is not just me making up numbers, Jack, trust me. It's a 5% chance we have such debasement risk that we have a return to the high inflation scenarios we had, right? And high interest rates, of course. Now three things have to happen for that,

which is why the odds drop from roughly 35% down to five. You have to have three assumptions. A, AI turns out to be a dud. Either way, you get some fiscal problem. B, you get alternative sort of bond markets, reserve currency stuff. Maybe Europe rises. Maybe China opens its capital account. Doubtful, by the way, but maybe.

In other words, there has to be somewhere else for people to go with their money. Yeah. Where are you going to park the treasuries? And then the third one, which many are missing, which is the Federal Reserve does nothing to fight the inflation. They just roll over. Now, to be fair, they made mistakes in the seventies. More often than not, the Federal Reserve is fighting this. So if in this scenario, there's a war on over the yield curve, the Treasury yield curve between the Federal Reserve trying to hold their mandate, keep inflation low, and

then interest rates that are pushing up because of the government spending. Now we've said for several years to not just have just us stock exposure. That was like, eat your vegetables for three decades. It was good in theory and it's stunk in practice, but now people are starting to pay attention. Should, should we be putting more money overseas? We would say definitely have some reasonable people can debate if it's 20%, 40%. I would say at least think about 20% for two reasons.

One is a technology. Like if 4% of the companies drive 100% of the excess returns, you think all the companies are just coming from the United States? Secondly, is there, yeah, you don't want to have all reliance on the U S dollar. You know, when you have just U S based assets, if you're a US worker, US investor, that's just all of your liabilities and assets in the same currency. I'm not here being a doomsday person. I'm not that at all. I'm just thinking about like having modest diversification in non-US investments from the currency side. It's just having a modest

diversification. Yeah. We looked out a touch last year, Jack, to be fair. Now we're looking pressure. I think the truth is in between. Do I need to think beyond stocks and bonds? If I just have, if I do what you're staying, I got my mix of stocks around the world and I've got my bonds and I'm staying short and the quality is decent. Am I doing enough? Or is there a major asset class that I'm missing and I'm going to be sorry? Well, if you think about the private markets, that's one, you hear a lot about private equity,

private credit. Our view is, I think, distinct from others. So the answer is not no. In Vanguard, right, we generally don't have a large offering of private investments. It can have a role. It's just really around which strategy you pick. So I see a lot of mistakes from a lot of investment committees with all due respect. They call it an asset class. They take all the private funds out there, they take an average and it looks really smooth. And then they say, Oh, I should have 20 to 40% of my portfolio in that, right? Then they fill that bucket with just two or three funds. That'd be like saying I should have us stocks, but I'm only going to put two stocks in there. I'm just saying the type of strategies you select as a form of active management with illiquidity. If you pick top or tile funds,

they're going to do exceptionally well if history is any god. And so you should have a high share for somebody who can take some risk, right? If however, you pick just an average middling fund, you're going to underperform after fees to public markets. The other things would be things such as gold. I wouldn't call gold a general investment sort of holding. It doesn't mean you wouldn't have it. I would align that weight in your portfolio. Generally with the probability you think there's going to be a significant fiscal crisis in deep basement, like the dollar is no longer the reserve

currency and it's not coming back. That's like a mad max scenario where it's a post-apocalyptic. I mean, if the dollar has lost its value, you know, people are going to have bigger day-to-day problems to solve. I don't know. Gold might not be that thing, you know, Warren Warren Buffett had the best idea I've ever heard. He said in that kind of scenario, he's like, if you're the best dentist in

town, you're going to be okay. Like you got to have talent. So I don't, unfortunately, I don't know any dentistry. But again, you know, and so I think there's two ways, you know, and I don't want to dismiss those scenarios out of hand. The past few years have shown that there's a lot of things possible and our simulation show a lot of good things that could happen, you know, some things you don't want to think about, but we have to think about this if it's our money. But what I, I think I do lose my tolerance for is assuming that's the only scenario that's going to happen. Well, then that'll lead you to one asset portfolios.

If you think the world's ending, then it's just gold. And that's all that matters. Right. Or, or you pick your sort of doomsday vehicle. I don't think anyone really thinks that this is all around risk management. And that's what this book is about. Let's put probabilities and magnitudes on something. If you can do that, you can thoughtfully talk about a portfolio plus or minus some weights. That's what I'm trying to do. What matters on the economic front? And then what's sort of the trade-offs from a portfolio? Can you think about as a starting point? And then

you can deviate from there based upon your other views, you know, that you'll have and other considerations. That's really what this book's talking about. Do you think if, if, uh, if you were talking to a young person who's playing around with one of those retirement calculators and they're trying to dream about if I save such and such a number of dollars each month, you know, for the next 40, whatever years, and then, for the next 40 whatever years. And then so they got to put in their rate of return.

And historically, you can say, well, stocks have, on average, were, you know, modern history returned 10% a year, and maybe you got to take off 3% for inflation. And you know, if it's a stock and bond portfolio, while you come up with some kind of mixed return, do we now have to dial those numbers down because of some of these problems coming up that you're talking about because of the debt? Because of the drag on growth, are we entering a world where for a decade or even longer that we might have lower average returns than we're used to? I think on the equity side, for sure. It's not doomsday, but it's not 10%. It's closer to six, but if you can invest also a little bit outside the U S you can get those numbers up, maybe to seven. That's before inflation?

Yes, before inflation. So then after inflation, we might be talking three or four. Which is not bad. That's close historical average. The past 20 years we've been going well above the bad. I mean, if it's got a plus sign in front of it, that's a good start. And here's the thing, but the time in market matters more than the market return. You know that you've talked about it. It's the most powerful force in finance compound interest.

The fixed income outlook is actually a little bit better. Let's just take a side that 5% of the basement scenario. Our view has been for two years. It looks really pressure now that we were already into a higher interest rate environment where interest rates are going to exceed the rate of inflation on average. That's good. So the bond out looks better.

The equity market's a little bit weaker. It's still going to be above fixed income, but not like by massive threshold, right? So if I'm 30 years old and I just started saving my 401k, you're going to skew on the equity side, probably given your longevity. Instead of putting in seven, you put in five and a half, six. That doesn't sound as great, but hope is not a strategy. And that either may mean you have to save a little bit more. Unfortunately, you have to work a little bit longer if you're a little bit older, but that's preparing for the best. If things turn out better than expected.

Wonderful. Well, Joe, thanks so much. You've given us something to think about. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Thank all of you for listening. If you have a question that you'd like played and answered on the podcast, you can send it in, could be in a future episode. Just use the voice memo app and send it to jack.howe. That's H-O-U-G-H at barons.com. Alexis Moore is our producer. You

can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. If you listen on Apple, please write us a review. Thanks and see you next week.