Morning Brew Daily - Is Tech In an AI Bubble? & Why English Teachers are the Best Investing Mentors

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

Episode 660: Ann Berry joins the show! Ann discusses her new show Brew Markets with Neal and Toby and delves into her background as an investor, board member and former CEO. She also shares if she believes the tech sector is in an AI bubble and what executives should do when they find their companies in the middle of a marketing blunder. Plus, she explains why English teachers are the best investing mentors and why CEOs definitely look at stock prices. Finally Neal and Toby wrap up with a game of overvalued,or undervalued.  Check out Brew Markets here: ⁠https://swap.fm/l/9Qk4z73Z2nEwFiCB4qee⁠    Get a $500 match on your first $500 spent with code BREW500 at https://www.ads.roku.com. Terms apply.  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consider this comparison. PWC data found the percentage of CEOs who report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is almost equal to the percentage who say they're still stuck. What separates these two groups? PWC points to a clarity issue. Even for CEOs, it's hard to tell what's AI hype, what's reality, and where this tech can make a tangible difference. Learn where AI can actually make an impact and what successful adoption looks like at

pwc.c.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brewAI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today a special holiday episode for Labor Day. Brew markets host Anne Barry dropped by, and you're definitely going to want to hear her take on Jim Kramer.

It's Monday, September 1st. Let's ride. Good morning and happy Labor Day. I hope you are all enjoying the day off and honoring the American Labor Movement by relaxing on your couch. We have Anne Barry in the soup. today, a name that might be familiar to some of you as she stepped in to co-host the MBD podcast over the last few months.

Anne's LinkedIn is longer than the Irishman. She's been a CEO, founder, broadcaster on TV channels like Bloomberg, invested billions of dollars as a private equity dealmaker, and now host two shows for Morning Brew, including brew markets, which you should definitely go and check out. We sat down with Anne last Wednesday to see if AI is a bubble chat about her new show and hear why your English teacher could be your most valuable investing mentor. First, an ad for our sponsor, Roku. Neil, what do Americans love more than anything else?

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You win? Details at Yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. And you've filled in as a host on Morning Brew Daily. You now host your own show, but our listeners may not know who you are, what you're about, besides that you're British and more articulate than me and Toby. So tell us a little bit about your career path. It has not been a straight line. It hasn't been a straight line. And gosh, where do you want me to start? Should I start backwards?

Or should I start at the end to go backwards or should I start the beginning and go forwards? Christopher Nolan's style backwards. Yeah. Okay. So here I am today. I do have. a podcast, it's called Brew Markets, and it drops every afternoon in about 420, and just to set the stage for what it is and what we try to do. And then I can explain why my career has led me to sort of position it with the team the way that we have done. So 420, every day rolls around. We start filming at about 350. So we are literally filming as though live right as the bell rings at the market closed. So we're capturing the day's news. We're honing in on some of the

biggest reasons that the market moved. And we're really focusing on the why. Why did the story matter and we try and focus on what are we able to say because of our backgrounds that other people aren't talking about. So for example, and this is something you and I talked about, Neil, when we were covering, I was covering for Toby who was gallivanting around on vacation. We were talking about Target CEO leaving. And one of the things I've done in my career is I've served on boards. I've been on public company boards. I've been on private company boards and I have lived through the process of exiting a CEO and I've lived through the process as a board member of trying to hire a CEO and figuring out what kind of leadership is appropriate

for a company at a particular point in time. And so in that conversation, you and I talked about, was this the right decision? What was the board thinking? Is this really going to drive any change? My opinion was probably not. And my background is the reason I think probably not. It's not sort of coming out of nowhere. That's what Brew Markets is trying to do. We're trying to bring the facts We're rigorous about research. We fact check very rigorously. We do our own primary research. During the day, we're calling people.

We're reading the underlying filings. I'm a nerd. I go into the numbers. And we're very rigorous about that. And then we say, now let's put some real life experience around that. So what got you interested in investing in markets to begin with? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, if you go all the way back in time, I didn't think I was going to be interested in investing

in the markets. I absolutely did not grow up. When I was a little girl, no part of me was going, one day I want to grow up and be an investor. Absolutely not. I wanted to be a writer or a journalist. And just a side note, for anyone who's listening or watching, who's an English literature major or an arts major, when I actually ended up in investment banking, and I'll go back to answer your questions to how that happened. A couple of years in, I wrote a letter to my English literature high school teacher.

So I just want you to know the best training I ever had for being an investor was English literature. Because when someone puts in front of you a poem or a play or a piece of prose, you've never seen before. And you need to figure out what is it saying and what is it saying to me specifically and argue the facts around why you have that perspective, nothing comes closer to the investment decision process in that, right? Looking at a company from a cold start, getting through the facts and coming up with an opinion, it's exactly the same process. So, look, I ended up being one of those kids who I enjoyed math and I also enjoyed the arts. and I wanted to find a way to bring those two skill sets together. And so I ended up doing economics. I was always fascinated by public affairs.

I'm a complete politics junkie. I wanted to know what was going on in the world. I wanted to know what was moving things globally. Did economics. Sort of, you know, Goldman Sachs turned up at college and said, you know, we have a great analyst program. One other thing I would say, I came from a family with absolutely no money. I was the first in my family to go to college. And financial security was really important to me.

And I'm the eldest child. And, you know, banking turned up with a path to a potentially lucrative career. And I was like, I need to do that, not just for myself. I have a whole family I want to look out for. Is there a moment that you look back on now in your career as it's unfolded where it was an inflection point where you said, I'm really hitting my stride now or I know what I want to do now? Yeah. You know, the inflection point was a moment where I started to hit my stride, but at the time it definitely didn't feel like that.

And so to get to that point, after college, I went to college. Goldman Sats had a great time there. I also went to business school, which I can also talk about. And I was in investing in private equity and buying companies' control positions for a long time. And I left Goldman to start a private equity fund. And I was a partner at a firm. And I ended up becoming CEO of the biggest company we owned. It's a long story around how, but this happened in late 2019. And what this business does, actually, it's thriving today, is provide services for hotels and restaurants and spa. Well, no one told me that four months into the gig, COVID was going to go happen and shut down literally 99% of the business. So I'm a first time CEO.

I'm pretty early in my career. And talk about an inflection point. This was just drinking from a fire hose. And I had the most unbelievable board to go back to the conversation Neil and I were having of extremely seasoned CEOs. One gentleman called Larry Bossetti, who has devastated, passed away recently. who's a very famous CEO, another woman called Gail Mandel, who'd been very senior at Wyndham.

And I returned to them and said, being a CEO is an incredibly lonely job. And being a CEO through a crisis, when you have got to keep moving, you've got to make decisions, really hard ones, every single day at scale that are going to impact people, the homes that they go home to, the energy that they bring to their families,

the income levels that they have, or in that case, do not have because of the pandemic. It was an extraordinary inflection point. And to answer your question, Toby, did I hit my stride? In terms of realizing I had the capacity to do something really challenging and to throw my energy into it and be drinking from the fire hose and learning something new every day, then I hit my stride. It was the fastest, most incredible learning I've ever had to do in my life. How big was this company?

We had 6,000 people until the moment we did it, which was quite soon after March 2020. Yeah, wow. That is truly a drink from the fire hose. moment. I do want to pivot now to another company and CEO that has kind of become the de facto CEO of the market in recent times. That is Nvidia. We are recording this just a few hours before Nvidia reports earnings, which has become one of the most important events in the financial markets these days. Some analysts have been warning of an AI bubble and tech stocks have been a little bit wobbly for the last few weeks or so. So there is a ton at stake. What is your read on the

AI trade right now? Oh gosh, the crystal ball. So I'm going to be really honest. And when you host a markets daily show like Idyabrew Markets, this is like not only honesty, it's real vulnerability. In the last couple of months, there have been many, many days where I've woken up, looked at my personal portfolio. We don't give them investment advice, but I do sometimes talk about things I've invested in that have gone really well, like Netflix, for example, and things where I'm like, oh gosh, we've really got to figure out what to do. Over the last couple of months, there have been more days than not, I've woken up going, I think I should just sell everything. I think I should just take profits. You know, I look at my Invidio holding. I do own Invidia. I look at my Microsoft. I look at my alphabet.

I look at I met and go, ah, this could go away, right? And I am nervous that we are in not just an AI bubble, but an AI driven bubble for the entire market. And here's the specific reason why when you look now at the expected returns on US equities, when you look at the concentration in the MAG 7, or just sort of tech generally, the equity risk premium. I'm going to explain what that is, is tiny. It's practically zero.

And so just to bust through the jargon for a second, you've got different kinds of assets. You've got less risky assets. And the closest thing to being riskless in theory is the US Treasury. And then you take a look at equities, at stocks and shares, and they typically trade in a way that the return you get is at a premium. It's more than you would get from treasuries. That difference is your reward for taking the risk.

of owning equities. And typically that difference, that reward for risk has been meaningful. It's almost nothing right now. And it just cannot be in my mind that owning a share in Palantir, which I do, by the way, or owning a share in workday, which I do, is the same level of risk as a United States government bond that does not make sense. That's a very long way of saying, yes, I do think that we are in bubble-licious territory. Well, if you've sold any tech stocks over the past 30 to 40 years, you would probably regretted that.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I'm tortured by it. It's why we're all tortured by it, right? It's why I wake up in the morning, go, should I sell today? And the answer is, I haven't. I haven't for exactly that reason, yeah. So after NVIDIA reports, that basically wraps up earnings season. And you've listened to a lot of calls and heard a lot of CEOs say a lot of things. What are your major takeaways from what you've heard over the past few weeks and what companies are saying about the economic environment and how their businesses are doing? So I would say that the strength of the US consumer in the aggregate has surprised me to the upside. So the places that I go to to try and figure that out, and there are so many of them, for the following reason,

there is no such thing as the US consumer or a US consumer. We've got so many different demographic groups with different income levels, with different employment horizons, with different needs about providing for a family, with different regions, right? The diversity that we've got in the US is extraordinary. and so the diversity of businesses that we need to serve all the different populations of consumer is huge, which makes earning season when you're in my seat, a complete nightmare because every day we're just flooded with data

and we try to sort through that on brew markets. When you look at things like credit card information, it looks as though most consumers are doing all right. People aren't defaulting on their credit card debt as much was feared because interest rates have stayed up for as long as they have. When you take a look at some of the retailers, not just the Walmarts of the world,

but, you know, Colts just released earnings before recording today, and it's done pretty well. A couple of the home furnishings businesses have done pretty well. So that has surprised me. The other place I've been impressed is for companies and businesses that have taken seriously the tariff threat. And I know that both of you are really concerned about, and you turn out to be exactly right, both of you were really consistent towards the end of last year when I listened to you talking about your concern about tariffs that were likely to come. The ones who took it seriously, the ones who moved quickly, the ones who diversified their supply chain and had a plan and focused on executing have done really well and they've been rewarded and you see that. I do just want to zoom in on one of those particular consumer cohorts that you were mentioning. And that are people who eat, you know, $18 sad desk lunches.

We like to call it bowl slop. Those companies have not done very well. I'm thinking of Chipotle, Kava, Sweet Green. They kind of got wrecked during this last earning cycle. What do you see on the horizon for those bowl slop companies? I think it's going to get really difficult. And just because the contrast, who's done really well? Chili's has done really well.

Yesterday I had a conversation with the CEO of Potbelly. And back to my point on execution, Potbelly, which is a small market cap business, has been very attentively going out to customers and saying, but which products do you want? How should we price it? How can we give you bang for your buck? How do we give you a prime rib steak sandwich,

which I ate yesterday in preparation for my conversation, and pack it full of a, of calories so you feel you're getting a good outcome. I think the sad salad group are going to have a tough ride for the following reason. Are you going to save your money for dinner with your friends or for something when you can have a sandwich at your desk? I think it's going to be difficult. The second thing I would say is, and I loved sweet green, a lot of it tastes the same, right? I don't care what the salad's called, but at the end of the day, it kind of tastes the same, no matter whether it's chicken with, you know, sweet potato or whether it's something else. Carver, and I say this,

And Kava, if you're listening, please don't pull sponsorship. We love you. It's just not as flavorful, I thought, as it used to be. And I love Mediterranean food, and it's heavy, it's dense. And it just doesn't, it just doesn't excite me in the way that it used to. It's tough. They've got to do something new. Toby's a big pot belly guy.

I love pot belly. Well, I love them all. I literally love Kava, and I love Sweet Green as well. You do. Pot belly was slept on for so long, so I'm glad they're kind of getting flowers right now. It's one of the few fast casual chains that actually reported. same store sales growth this past quarter. Another theme of the business world this summer has been marketing fails.

I've seen a number of recent marketing campaigns receive a lot of pushback. I think in American Eagles, Sydney, Sweeney, jeans ad, cracker barrels, now nixed, logo change. As an executive, how do you know when to pivot because of criticism or when to block it out and just charge ahead with your strategy? That is a really great question. And I think, well, I'm sorry. of stumbling over my words, not because I don't have an opinion. I'm trying to make sure that the answer that I would give to that is different depending on what the mistake relates to. Okay. So if it's a marketing error, I think you own that as quickly as humanly possible.

I think crack a barrel, to its credit, said, we got this wrong. We're going to turn this around and they made that decision very quickly. It is very hard for people to say, I got it wrong. It's hard for them from an ego perspective, and it's hard for them because they feel as though it's a sign of weakness and that they can be held up as a leader. So when I think they do it, it's a sign of strength. When I think about the Sydney-Sweeney situation, I think that is different. I don't think that was a decision that the company was trying to make around did they make a mistake or not. I think it's a decision around whether they wanted to make a statement that certain motivations for criticism was going to change their behavior or not. And that brings me to a broader theme, which is around what do you do when your shareholders

start having a more emotional reaction to what you're doing than thinking about you as an investment in a business. And that brings me to the issue of meme stocks because I don't think that Cracker Barrel has become a meme stock. I do think it's become a highly emotional stock. But I think we're starting to see more and more, whether it's crispy cream, we saw it with GameStop. We've seen it, I think, with Open Door.

What happens when you've got retailers wanting you to do things as a business person, you just don't think it's the right move? And do you want that job? I would not want to be the CEO of a meme store. I think it's a miserable job. You've interviewed a lot of CEOs, and they will say in interviews that they don't pay attention to the stock price.

Yeah. But do they? Of course they do. Absolutely they do. And here's why. Lots of CEOs, like Toby, we're talking about what it's like to be an athlete. They're really competitive people. The barometer of their success is the financial performance,

the revenue and the revenue and earnings. And usually, again, take meme stocks out of it. it. The correlation between your share price performance and your financial performance historically has been pretty close. If you're competitive, you want to be a winner. You want to see your share price going up, right? That's number one. Number two, your employees want to see your share price going up. You want to get the best talent. You want to get winners. They want to be part of something that's rising as well. The third thing I would say is money, right? The cash, the dough, the ends in their pockets, the motivator in American capitalism. Public company CEOs are explicitly

compensated using stock. Stock shares, options, they are highly motivated for that share price to go up because their net worth is on the line. So you bet. If anyone says, I don't pay attention from one day to the next, yes, I believe them. If they say, I wish I didn't have to pay attention from one quarter to the next, 100% agree. But I never look, calling BS. I love that. Let's put yourself in the shoes of another CEO that's been put in a tough position recently. The US government just took a 10% stake in Intel and Signaled it wants to do that with a few more companies in the future. What do you make of this administration's interventions into private companies? This one's tricky. This one's tricky for lots of different reasons. And I'm going to share,

again, being very honest, what my reaction was intellectually, so read business response and then viscerally for a couple of these examples, because there's actually been more than one. Before Intel, we had MP materials, right? the Pentagon becoming now the biggest shareholder in the rare earth miner, rare earths for those who are listening, really important component in military items, in phones, in mobile devices. It's critically important. And the US has historically been extremely dependent on China to get a hold of them. And the negotiations for trade, China are happening now. We know it's happening now. It's not getting a ton of coverage. People are traveling to go meet each other right now. And this is on the table as a massive issue.

when I saw that the Department of Defense was becoming a major shareholder in this particular company, the economist in me, the classically trained economist in me, the Wall Street trained banker in me, the private equity investor in me, the public company shareholder in me, thought this was the beginning of a new chapter that I have concerns about. Because this kind of interventionalism is not something that you've, think of when you think about the US economic model at all. And I think newness can be very disconcerting for the market. But the policy wonk in me, the kid that grew up wanting to know what makes the world go around and we looked at that and went, we need to do something about securing

supply to these critically important components. And my visceral reaction to it wasn't as negative as my intellectual one was, I do understand a play for this. But here's also just to go back to Intel because you brought up Intel, I want to answer your question. Intel was a struggling company. Intel got it wrong. What I worry about, different from MP materials, is that this becomes propping up companies that, frankly, should be forced to be held accountable for poor performance. So if you were an investor looking at this deal, should you be chasing these interventions or you should be staying away from them? Okay. So this is a controversial piece, and this is where there's a difference between trading and investing. I think somebody who's day

trading all day, I thought about it. I mean, I really thought about it. I saw Howard Lutnik come out and say, oh, we may want to start picking up positions in defense stocks. And I sat with my producer, John, for brew markets. And I just watch, they're going to rip. Defense stocks are going up. Should I buy just to trade? That's the trading part of my brain. I didn't do it because I'm an investor back to Neal's point.

I want to hold these stocks for as long as possible. And my fear is that we see a short-term pop because we see that's what happened with Intel. We see that's what happened with MP materials. But at some point, we have an election, right? And policies reversed. Or at some point, the market says, oh, wait a second, we don't feel quite so confident anymore that market forces are going to dictate the outcomes of this business and poor performance is going to be changed or forced to change.

Are we going to go into a world where government contracts can now prop up the stocks of these companies because the government's now a shareholder? We don't know the answer to that. And if those things happen, I think these stock gains remove. So the trader in me wants to nip in and start, you know, looking out for posts on truth, social. The investor in me is like, no, I actually want to know what the playing field is going to We'll be back with more Ann right after this.

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Exclusion supplies to home depot.com slash price match for details. Let's talk about private equity. You've been a long time investor into private markets, which regular folks like us typically haven't been able to access. But we should talk about that. Yeah. But that is changing dramatically. 401Ks are now adding private assets like crypto, real estate, pre-IPO companies to their holdings in addition to classic stocks and bonds. Is this democratization of investing or a risky path to go down? It's both at the same time. And I want to start with the democratization piece of it. Because if you go back, to before the pandemic, if we go back to prior to 2020, 2021,

and this extraordinary run that we have seen in the US stock market, initially driven, initially, and I say before all the AI news popped and captured our attention the way it has done, low interest rates was a huge, huge driver of what pushed up the stock markets. If you go back further in history, private equity funds, the good ones, not all of them, the good ones have outperformed the stock market. And for the following reason, I believe, and I'm going to own the fact that I feel some bias on this point,

because when you've seen it done well, you know that the following happens. When a private equity firm owns a business, they lean in. And I'm going to say what that means. They hold the CEO accountable. They drive change. We can debate good change, bad change, the change is made. Public companies struggle to make change.

they struggle to change their management teams. They take years to exit this, years to exit their CEOs, even if they're not performing, or they turn around and bring them back, right? So that doesn't tend to happen. The patience for that doesn't tend to exist. And so as a change agent, private equity is there. So when it's done well and it is not always done well, it can drive outsized returns.

Now, one thing that Fed Chair J. Powell said on Friday, I know you covered it, Jackson Hole, buried down in the bottom of his comments was the following statement. paraphrasing. The neutral interest rate, meaning the interest rate we should all expect to be around for long term is going to be higher than it has been. And it's going to be higher than we saw the pandemic. So he's basically saying rates are going to be higher for longer no matter where they end up. In that environment, private equity tends to do quite well because they double down and making operational change. And so it's a long way of saying, if we're back to a sort of quote,

more normalized world, do I want everyday investors, pension investors, pension foldholders, people working hard? Do I want them to get access to those better returns? All day, every day, absolutely I do. I think the democratisation of that is fantastic. Where I worry, private capital can look different. I'm talking about private equity that I've been in, big mature businesses, cash flowing, stable, hopefully not going anywhere if they're well run. Venture capital's a different beast, and we've all fallen in love with venture capital. We all want to find the next SpaceX. We all want to be the early seed investor in the next, you know, pick your glamorous in the next open AI. Highly unlikely. Highly unlikely. And a lot of venture capital funds fail and the vast, vast, vast majority of

early stage investments fail. I've made them. Look, I've got some that they've done really well, some that haven't. I am worried that, please, I do not want people to use their retirement funds as lottery tickets. And that's where I worry. I think it's both at the same time. What about SPACs? We've kind of seen a SPAC resurgence recently, Chamath, the king of SPACs, as he likes to call himself, is back in the game. Where do you see that road kind of leading? Gosh, anytime you've got someone whose self-enointing titles, you're into a tough spot, right?

So here's what I say about SPACs. They've been around for a long time. They've been around since the 90s, and I'm lucky that I've spent time with folks who are around as that first generation of SPAC innovators. And in theory, SPACs can be a good thing. thing. They've gotten bad wraps and I'll come back to why. But in theory, here's how they work. So just to explain what a SPAC is, it's a shell entity, it's a legal entity, it doesn't have an operating business in it. So you can have the Neil and Toby SPAC. And what the Neil and Toby SPAC will do is go set up

a legal framework, go make itself public. And then I can turn up, buy a share in the Neil and Toby SPAC. You take my cash, you stick it in a trust, and then you guys have got two years to go find an actual operating business to go by. So what am I doing as the investor? I am basically buying a share in the Neil and Toby SPAC because I trust that you two have got great judgment, great experience, and you're going to find a really good company to go by. That's what I'm buying into. And I don't get the right to ask many questions around that. I just have to stand by and watch where you've done it. So anyway, if you go back, SPACs lifted off in 2020, 2021, it was the Halcyon days of SPAC, a bunch of deals that didn't work out so well, meant that businesses, perhaps the diligence wasn't as good. Or when

these SPACs happened, the Niels and Toby's equivalents were getting special equity, which meant they were perhaps motivated to get a deal done. That's why things sort of went wrong and then they went away. So now they're back. Here's why I think they're not terrible in practice. What SPACs can do if they're done well is give the opportunity for companies to go public where for whatever reason it perhaps, the market at a point in time just wasn't allowing them to go to go public. It is a way for a retail shareholder to partner

with really good investors and really good deal makers if it goes well. That's not a terrible thing. And at the end of the day, if that SPAC doesn't do a deal, I get my money back with some interest. So the problem is what happens if deals go poorly? Well, the new generation of SPACs, they're being structured a little bit differently. A lot of them now

have the feature that you can't have this quirky incentive piece around it so that the Niels Toby's in the SPAC get like special VIV, right, if they get a deal done. I think the level of skepticism is high enough. People would do more work. That being said, you've got to do your homework on who the SPAC manager is. At the end of the day, and all said and done, that's it.

If you trust that SPAC manager has a track record, a history of getting things right, go at it. If they don't, I don't understand why you'd go put your mind. Would you trust us? I trust you guys. The Neil and Toby's SPACCHA. I trust Neil and Toby. I don't think so. All right, all this newsy stuff is great.

Very interesting, but just to finish up the podcast, let's get a little dessert here. Anne, we want to turn back to you as a person. Who's an investor or a business leader that you look up to? Who's inspired you? I would say, gosh, there's so many of them. I'm going to say there is a business leader, and I'm going to focus on the word business as opposed to as a leader in my statement. I do want to talk about Elon Musk for a minute.

He's wildly controversial. I don't like the stuff that he puts out there on social media. that's unpalatable. I will say that very clearly. There's a book I read that really stuck with me. I read Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk and someone wrote into Brew Markets the other day and said, what should I read?

And I said, I think you should read this for the following reason. For anyone who's been inside a fast-growing company or who's run a business or has just stood there going, what is it that this guy does that's just so different in out there? I was fascinated by the fact that Elon Musk has been able to not only come up with the ideas for, but actually go make happen and bring to life in this world as many different successful businesses at the same time as he has done. It is extraordinary. And the fact that he is able to stay as leader of all of them with the vision and the passion to stick with it for as long

as he has is extraordinary. And here's the last thing that caught my eye. Because do I look up to it kind of? And I think he's the only person who's allowed to do this. When he's got an issue at one of these companies, let's say he's got an issue at X, he'll go find engineers at SpaceX or Tesla, who can drop in as a SWAT team to go figure it out. And here's why I like that. He is unafraid of something I have learned works. Go find great talent. Go find great problem solvers and have some confidence that even in a different environment, a different company, they will go figure it out. You know what it reminds me of is you stepping into co-hosts, Morning Group Daily. You are kind of that executive talent that we are looking for. We are going to

finish off the podcast with a fun segment that we're just calling overvalued, undervalued. Basically, we're just going to give you something. Maybe it's a company, maybe it's something else. And you give us a little spiel on why you think maybe it's overvalued or undervalued. Or properly valued. Or properly valued. Okay. So up first, Palantir.

Palantir. Overvalued. Can't help myself board a lottery ticket just in case FOMO kicks in. Jim Kramer. Jim Kramer, fairly valued. And here is why, now as I do what you guys do, doing a daily show, and these guys are nodding. If you can't see the camera, they're nodding if you can't hear them.

You can hear their nod down the microphone. Doing a daily show, fresh ideas, bringing the energy to do that day and day out for as long as he's done it. He may not get his stock picks wrong all the time no one does, but I've got to tell you just for sheer longevity, fair value. His energy is unbelievable. Unbelievable. I was watching his show last year, and I'd never seen it before, honestly. and the amount of energy he brought to the table and the fact that when we are up at 430 and I'm scrolling through Twitter to see what happened, he's been tweeting for an hour already. He definitely kind of puts us to shame on, so we've got to step it up a little bit.

Okay, the original Cracker Barrel logo. Oh, gosh. Well, the market has just spoken and said it was undervalued. So I'm going to go with the market. How about Dubai chocolate? Oh, okay. So I love Dubai. chocolate. I love chocolate in general. I love going to Dubai. You put the two together. I think that's a

winning combination. I think it's still probably undervalued. And here's why. I think there is a world in which we see a lot more Dubai chocolate ice cream. It's under penetrated. I want to go into Trader Joe's. I want to open up the ice cream thing. I want to see Dubai chocolate. I cannot believe the penetration. It's achieved at bodegas in New York City where I am seeing some awful combinations I don't know. I'm saying that's way overvalued. Now I'm getting involved. Let's go with another trendy item, Labuboos. Oh, Labuboos. Okay, so this is where to go. Once upon a time, I talked to a bunch of people who were senior in retail. And one of them was Mickey Drexler, who was behind the rise and rise of J. Crew. And I said, Mickey Jets, what's your superpower?

He goes, because it's merchandising. When I look to buy stuff, I don't think about do I like it. It's being able to put my shoes in the shoes, myself in the shoes of the customer and say, well, they like it. That takes an amount of an imagination, creativity and empathy that is hard for most people. I don't have it, which is why I don't get the boo-boos. I don't understand it.

But I appreciate that lots of people love them. Do you see Naomi Asaka rocked out onto the US Open with her sparkly shining? She said it's not Billy Jean King, it's Billy Jean Gling, which I thought was super cute. So I'm going to say that they're fairly valued, but I say I don't personally understand it.

Okay, here's another one. Stainless Steel cookware. Oh, undervalued. I love stainless steel cookware. But can I say, do you know what's even less appreciated? That's copper. Don't you love walking into a kitchen and seeing fabulous copper cookware everywhere? I genuinely cannot cook with stainless steel, though. I am tried. I only do this so Toby would bring this up.

I just can't make it not stick. Like, I know you're supposed to do the water test. I know you're supposed to get it to the proper temperature. But I put a salmon on there and it doesn't come off. I don't know what I'm doing. You're definitely an air fry guy. I feel like I'm looking at an air fire. I'm going to take that at face value and say you're 100% correct.

Oh, yeah. I don't have it anymore, though. Yeah. You need to please give us a cooking lesson. Neil knows how to do it, but I'm rough. I love to cook. We'll do that. We'll get a team meal.

Any others, Neil? Yeah. How about Thomas Tugel? Pass, what's that? He's the new English manager. The new manager for the English football team. Oh, that's so mortifying. And you do not have to edit this out.

You have my permission to send that out as well. Do you know what the great irony is here? Last time I was in London, I loved to go to the theater. and I went to the National Theatre, go check it out next time anyone's over there. And there was a fantastic play. It was funny about Gareth Southgate as manager of the English football team.

So I clearly tuned out when Gareth left. That's my excuse. England, I love it. I'm a very patriotic football soccer sport. Well, then on that note, here's a final one. The West End. The West End of London. Yeah.

I think it's undervalued. And here's why. I think that going to the theatre in the US, and I'm going to talk specifically about New York, which is where I live and we all are. I find it heartbreaking how expensive it is to go to the theatre now. And I say the same thing about museums. And when I think about young people,

particularly if you grew up in a family like mine where there was no disposable income, you can't afford to go and see Hamilton, which is one of the most fantastic shows I've ever seen. Tickets are hundreds of dollars, if you're lucky to get a lottery one, you know, the odds are just not in your favour. The West End, go to see the same play or theatre musical in London,

costs a fraction. I'm literally like 10% of the cost to go. see it here in New York. So I think the West End is not only undervalued. I think it's a treasure and I just, I wish there were more of it. Another great part of the West End is there's a great pre-show tradition of just hanging out in the lobby and drinking and hanging out. That just doesn't exist here. Well, that's true of football games here. That's true. That's a tale game. That's like weird to tell game. And let's start it for podcast. Let's get listeners in here early 430 in the morning. Irish coffee in the morning. Have a pint. Well, Anne, thanks so much for joining us. Always fun.

to hear your perspective on investing life and I guess the West End as well. If you want any more, Anne, go listen to Brew Markets anywhere you get your podcast. It drops after the market closes every Monday through Friday. And thanks for stopping. Thank you, bye. Thank you, Ann.