The Compound and Friends - Delete Your DMs

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

On episode 42 of The Compound & Friends, Michael Batnick, Nick Maggiulli, and Downtown Josh Brown discuss: Elon's Twitter bid, Nick's new book "Just Keep Buying," lump sum vs dollar-cost averaging, inflation, and much more! This episode is sponsored by KraneShares. To learn more about KraneShares' suite of China-focused and climate themed ETFs, visit: kraneshares.com/?adsource=wealthcast Grab a copy of Nick's book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0857199250/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_32DZJGHZ56VYTCAH5A3X Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at: https://www.idontshop.com 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/disclosures/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Besides for like the Tom Hanks night, take that out of the equation. Is this not potentially, maybe this recency bias, the most obvious recession incoming that we've ever seen? Like if we get a recession, will this not have been the most obvious recession of all time? Yes. You agree with me? Well, the few that I've lived through, and this is the one that I feel most qualified to even speak about so maybe that maybe there's not recency bias but there's like some personal bias there because now we haven't left this stage of my career I basically know

everything is how I feel of course of course I don't oh my god guys no don't delete it that's how I feel I'm very I'm very confident the Fed is already tightened with their mouths into an economic slowdown and something's going to break. So, OK. Very, very confident. That being said. Very confident in my assertion. When do we cut rates?

When do we cut rates? I'm bearish, but you can't possibly sell stocks. I'm not that bearish. Cancel. No. Just keep buying. This might be a recession where stocks are great. Yeah.

I'm saying that stocks are, I mean, if you look at the yield curve data, right, like the last five out of the last six led to a recession, right? The one in August 2019 didn't. I don't want to count the- No, it did. It did. No, don't count the COVID recession. Why? That doesn't count.

That's ridiculous. In August 2019- Because it was three months long. Wait, Nick- No, it shouldn't count because in August 2019, COVID didn't exist. I understand, but are you data x data? Well, I'm data person. Are you dollars x data? No, but the data, that's

not fair. It's in the data. Based on a future pandemic that no one knew about? No, that's ridiculous. The yield curve is undefeated, although I would agree. I would agree. It has lost some predictive power just based on the fact that the Fed is so involved in the yield curve. I would agree. I think it still has predictive power. I think it's like five out of six times.

It's pretty good. It's not five out of six. It's like every time. What do you mean five out of six? The last time it didn't, but every other time it did. Mike, you and Ben were saying this on Animal Spirits like two years ago that for the rest of our lives, every conversation about the economy is going to include the phrase X coronavirus or X lockdowns.

Because the shit was so completely off the charts that if you were... Whose hand is that? It's Duncan's. He's redoing something right now. He's on the ladder. Duncan, where did you find that? Is that a thrift store shirt? I don't mean it in an offense way, but where did you find that?

They just made them available again. You bought that? No shit. That looks like retro, super retro. Yeah, it's the Bjorn Borg shirt. So, Mike, I just had Tara driving me home. We went, you know the temple on Fox Boulevard? What do you mean, my temple?

Merit Jersey Center? Of course. I know it. Screw up there, bro. So I took her there to drive around the parking I took her there to drive around the parking lot she got her permit uh uh three weeks ago so I took her there to drive around the parking lot and she's like dad I got this like let's leave the parking lot there's cars there's cars parked oh yeah yeah we left we left the parking lot she drove me home and so that's the craziest thing I mean I taught her how to ride a bike in the same parking lot, she drove me home. And so that's the craziest thing. I mean, I taught her how to ride

a bike in the same parking lot. You understand what I'm going through now? Yes. No, but like six, six or seven years old, I taught her to ride her bike. I'm teaching her to drive. Um, it's a, it's a total trip. She's good though. She, she can drive a jet ski already. So it's not like her first vehicle that she's handling, but she's like could do it what shirt are you wearing what is that stand up a sec where'd you oh nice oh that's all right where'd you get that instagram uh i don't know i think it's from last summer looks good looking good but i am i'm like amped about the setup this like works like we could do this remote if we had to well they just put they just put the screen it right blocking your

face. So now I see all of Nick. Well, they're adjusting your settings right now. They're lowering your saturation. So I was in Madison Square. I want to see those baby blues. I know. I was in Madison Square Park all day. Oh, you were?

Not to brag. Getting high? Had tacos for lunch. I had meetings. I only meet in the park. That's my new thing. Oh, my God. Wait, Madison Square Park? I only do meetings in Madison Square Park.

Yo, I told somebody, meet me- He was occupying Madison Square Park. I told somebody, meet me on the corner of 24th where 5th meets Broadway. There's like 40,000 people standing outside. That's the original Shake Shack Park. Yes. You know that, right? And it's still open for business. And it's still there. And it stunk original Shake Shack park. You know that, right? And it's still open for business.

And it's still there. It stunk like Shake Shack in the best way possible. It was in the air. It permeates the air. Oh, so good. 20 years ago, there was a camera on that location. So you would sit at your office. It was like one of the first webcams that had any real use.

Everyone that worked in Midtown or Midtown South would sit with the camera up on their web browser. What do you mean? For what? Because there used to be a 200-person line to get to Shake Shack. It was the only one in the world. So you would wait for the line to get reasonable and then leave your office to get on it. Josh, what charts are you looking at to gauge the market health? I'll tell you. I'll answer my own question. I'm looking at financials.

Yucky. Semis. Semis. I'm looking. Oh, I haven't. Okay. Oh, ooh. Okay. On the flip. Transports. Oof. Ooh. Semis. Homebuilders. Homebuilders. Yes. On the flip side, look at staples new all-time highs yeah look at this is interesting xma metals ripping this is a weird market it's very intuitive it's exactly what it's exactly what you think stocks would be doing that's what each sector is doing like the most right now it's this is where the most intuitive story you could tell is the one that's working bad or good. So for example, like travel stocks are the best of consumer discretionary. That makes sense.

Every anecdotal thing you hear about travel is that can't get a room, can't get a flight. Prices are crazy. Everybody's going away, blah, blah, blah. Same with home builders. They're down, I think they're down 30% year to date. Interest rates, yep. Yeah, mortgage, 30-year fixed mortgage hit five and a quarter percent.

What do you think they would be doing, right? Like, so it's like very intuitive right now. It's not always like this, but it is today. And so look at like, look what ripping. Coca-Cola, right? Not great. Walmart. Yeah. Verizon.

Yeah. And then, oh, God, SoFi, new lows. Coinbase, new lows. Oh, my God. Where do we buy this? Where do we buy this SoFi? I said under 10, it's cheap. Wait, I said under 10 is where I might buy it.

As soon as it got under 10, I said, oh, this thing's going to seven. It's seven. Is it seven? It's 727. Where do you buy the snot out of this thing? Because I'm just waiting. They should just take it private at this point. I'm not even talking about Selfie specifically, but like, I don't know, man.

I can't buy these names. They're just crashing. Maybe they're a great buy here, but i'm not in that business right now what is anthony noto like telling himself um because this this this guy's like the gold standard of a you know a venture-led tech ipo whatever blah blah i know they did it as a spac with chamath but like what is this guy like saying to himself? He's looking in the mirror. I'm the CEO of a $6 stock. Like, what is he going to do about this? Yeah. I don't know. And you know what's looking like garbage again too? Well, not, yeah, go ahead. What? He, he should buy Betterment. Stop. Disney.

What do you mean stop? Stop. It's on the run. It's on the runway to go public. He should buy it. Disney. SoFi plus the runway to go public. He should buy it. Disney. SoFi plus Betterment. Do something. Facebook. It's all bad. Even Google's puking.

I mean, you lose Google. It's a big market cap name. Microsoft. These are big names. Apple's going extinct. Just kidding. That's me because I haven't recorded. Nick, what's on your mind? You just keep buying or what?

What are you doing? Yeah, I don't look at individual stocks. Nick started selling today. How are we looking on timing? Wait, I thought we were showing. I thought the show was good. I thought we were done. This opens cold. Super cold.

We haven't introduced the show. Ooh, Nick. Super cold. We haven't introduced the show. Ooh, Nick. Bold decision. Show Josh and back your computer. Nick covered up the Apple logo with the Y charts sticker. That's a move. Remember when they used to glow?

They still do, no? No. Oh, they don't. Yeah, I guess they don't anymore. Oh, they're black. Yeah. Yeah, they used to glow. I had like a Wu-Tang logo over the apple and it would glow it was kind of cool but it doesn't work anymore nick when did you start talking to hailey she loves you

uh is that today i i started chatting with her a little on instagram but i haven't really chatted with her ever no she just found me through Ramit. So Ramit was repping. Ramit was what? Repping? Yeah, repping my work. She texted me. She's like, let's go out to dinner with Nick. And I'm like, okay, you guys have plans.

You're inviting me. She's like, no, no, no. You're setting it up. But I've been DMing with Nick. It's going to be with Chanos too. Yeah. I hope it comes out. I hope it comes out. I hope it comes out.

I'm sorry. So you and Haley are basically the same person. We've only been together a couple weeks. Oh. I'm just kidding. Really? Oh, I was just like, huh? No. I haven't met her, so.

I was thinking more like the exact opposite, but close. The exact opposite. No, in a good way. Opposites attract in life and in life. We're not trying to set up anything like that. I'm just saying. Here we go. Are we good? Three clicks coming in.

Compound and Friends. The Compound and Friends. Episode 42. Just keep buying. Josh called a TCAF to me yesterday. I like that. TCAF. I like that. TCAF. TCAF. I don't know. Somebody else said me yesterday. I like that. Teacaff. I like that. Teacaff. Teacaff. I don't know.

Somebody else said it, though. Oh, it's Lois. I think that was Bill. Bill Sweet said teacaff. We were talking. We were talking. I forgot what we were talking about, but it's just. I love it.

It's sticking. It kind of stuck. Welcome to the Compound and Friends. All opinions expressed by me, Michael Batnick, and our castmates are solely our own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions

in the securities discussed in this podcast. Duncan, are you reading ChinaLastNight.com? No? Well, you should. Listen, if you want to get your information, that's where you go. Brendan Ahern, friend of the show, ChinaLastNight.com. So today's show is sponsored by CraneShares. We've mentioned their K-Web a million times. I don't know when they started

that thing, but they were early. Is it 2014, 2015? They've been around for a while, but they also have just, it's not just the internet. They have a suite of China ETFs. They have clean technology, electric vehicles, healthcare, 5G, and semiconductors. If you want to learn more and learn about their research, go to Craneshares.com. That's with a K. Craneshares.com to learn more. All right, Compounded Friends, episode 42, I want to say. Yes?

Yes? Is that the doc? Oh, he doesn't have his bullshit, his clicker today. No. Duncan, make some noise. No, Duncan doesn't have his bullshit, his clicker today. No. Duncan, make some noise. No, Duncan. Make some noise for daddy. That's right.

All right. All right. Episode 42. I am remote. I'm remote today. This is a new experiment. Nick Maggiuli is here. Nick Maggiuli, author of Dollars and Data and the brand new red hot bestselling book,

Just Keep Buying. Michael is here. Nicole is here. We're all here. John's in the house. Duncan's in the house. Welcome to the show, everybody. Really glad that we could pull this one off.

The reason I'm remote is because if I get the new variant of COVID and I land in St. Martin and they test me, rapid test me on the dock or whatever, and I have it, my marriage is over. Because we will be quarantined in the Caribbean for, I'm hearing, two weeks and they put a guard outside your door. So I really couldn't take any risks whatsoever this week. I had a health scare last week i'm a i'm a disaster so i want to thank uh both you guys for helping make this thing happen and tolerating me on a screen right now nick say hello to everybody how's it going good hey everyone how you guys doing that was a big intro yeah you really you might want to save something i released i released two days ago it's just been non-stop it's just been crazy how many literal podcasts have you done i've done probably 20 already or

maybe 22 and then i'm doing we'll link we'll link to all those in the show now it's been a lot there's a lot i've done a lot so far and all of them haven't been released yet but a lot of them have so hey what's the what's what's the most unlikely one that you popped up on? Like, what's the one that it was like? OK, this is really different. The rewatchables. I'm trying to think. I mean, most of them are. I mean, modern wisdom.

Chris, that's not really a financial thing, but I saw Morgan did it. I reached out to him. That was cool. And then, well, not investment advice. That was that. They're just so fun. It was just the most fun I've had on a podcast. Who are I?

Don't know. I don't know. This is Trung Balal and Jack Butcher, Trunk fan. I mean they're all on Twitter and it's just so fun. Like while we were having discussion, like Jack like live tweet replied to one of them and it was just like insane. Oh, chaos. Yeah, it was just chaos on the show. We got his like reaction like on camera and it was just so good.

It was just the funniest thing. So you're a published author. You're doing the thing that authors have to do. You're making the rounds. I hope you saved some interesting stuff for us that you haven't shared elsewhere. Even if it's about your personal life, that's okay. We'll take it. But no, but listen, we're going to get to the book in a second.

But I feel like this is a very obvious place we have to start. Elon Musk went into full goblin mode, um, started off the day with an actual like bonafide, not jokey takeover offer for Twitter. Um, which basically is his private chat room at this point. Anyway,

I think he's the only celebrity of any stature that actually uses it the way it's intended to be used. He uses it very effectively and very well. Um, why shouldn't he own it? And with $41 billion being the offer, there's not any actual attempt to make money from this. So what's really going on? Mike, what's your take? There's no actual attempt to make money on this in terms of him. There's no actual attempt to buy the company. He's not really trying to buy the company. That's not going to happen. Yes, he is. First of all, okay, first of all- Yes, he is.

No, he's not. How much stock would he have to sell to do this? Or who's financing this if he doesn't? Anybody he wants. $41 billion? Dude, get out of here. Anybody he wants. No. What do you mean, get out of here? Who, the Fed? Calls? Nobody. No, he calls. Are you crazy? Goldman? He calls MBS. He calls Masayoshi Son. By the way, Jack Dorsey's

shares will vote with him. It's too much money. It's too much money. Here's what I think he's doing. It's not that much money. Here's what he's trying to do. He put in... Mike, wait. He's worth $300. On paper? He's worth $300. Okay, I understand. He doesn't have to liquidate $300 billion worth of stock.

He has to take a $15 billion loan I get it. Who's making a $40 billion loan? Fine, whatever. Here's my point. My point is this. I think he... This is not my idea.

I saw somebody tweet this. He's f***ing with the SEC. He put $5 billion into Twitter and now he's going to make a good faith effort to buy the company. They're going to say no. He's going to dump his shares

all legally or I don't know why I use air quotes, all legally and he's going to make a good faith effort to buy the company. They're going to say, no, he's going to dump his shares all legally. Or I don't know why I use air quotes. All legally. And he's going to make whatever, 20% of his $3 billion in a week. That's what I think he's doing. That's definitely. Listen, I wouldn't say that there's nothing that's impossible. But I honestly think if they accepted his offer, he would go through with it.

Would he have to legally? Is that a binding offer? I don't think so. Is it? I don't know. No. Deals fall don't know. No. Deals fall apart every day. Yeah.

I think if they called up and said, you know what? Take it. He would find a way to make that really, really worthwhile for him to do that. Yeah, I agree. I agree with Michael. I don't think he's actually serious. I think everything he does is like misdirection. He's like the master.

You know, he's like the Wizard of Oz behind the thing. Like, I don't think he's trying to buy. Like, he's like, oh, I'm going to join the board. And then, oh, no, he's not on the board. And then, oh, I'm going to buy Twitter. Like, I don't think it's real the master. You know, he's like the Wizard of Oz behind the thing. Like, I don't think he's trying to buy. Like, he's like, oh, I'm going to join the board. And then, nope, now he's not on the board. And then, oh, I'm going to buy Twitter. Like, I don't think it's real at all. I mean, just what a piece of shit stock this is. We were talking about it before the show started.

He offered a 20% buyout and the stock traded down. I've never seen that happen. What is that indicative of? Does that mean that most people agree with what you guys are saying? Yeah, he's not going to buy. Not only is he not buying it, but he's going to sell his shares. You imagine who bought it this morning in the pre-market? What kind of dipshit you have to be?

Do you have to have been born this morning to pull the trigger on that trade? We don't throw stones. All right. Listen, I sat in the stock for eight years and made zero money while the Nasdaq quadrupled. So allow me to take a stone and hit myself over the head with it. while the Nasdaq quadrupled. So allow me to take a stone and hit myself over the head with it. When you see all of the,

first of all, the number one trending hashtag today is hashtag leaving Twitter, which is extremely ironic for that to be trending on Twitter. I got a lot of enjoyment spending 10 minutes scrolling through that. Most of it was sarcastic. Nobody's actually saying they're going to leave with a straight face.

I think someone said that this is the new, oh, if Donald Trump wins, I'm leaving the US. This is the, oh, if Elon buys Twitter, I'm leaving Twitter. Like, no, you're not. Hey, let's just pull on this thread, though, for a second. Hypothetically, he does take control of Twitter. What are the ramifications what are the ramifications of him saying there's no more moderation basically this is going to be

reddit anybody who's been banned can come back anyone could say whatever they want and we're going to decentralize the way this thing is overseen the users are going to police it if that were you style, whatever, or it's a DAO, would that honestly be the end of civilization as we know it? Would that be the worst thing that could happen? Twitter is, well, there was, so let's just jump right here. It's horrible. It's horrible now. So would that be much worse? So Jonathan Haidt wrote this really long article in The Atlantic. He wrote a great book a couple of years ago, The Coddling of the American Mind. Is that the right title?

Yeah. So he said once – so he has a whole post about what happened to our society in the aughts – or not the aughts. Is it the 2010s? What do we call that? I don't know. The 10s? The 10s, I guess. The teens.

OK. He said once social media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009, the intensification of viral dynamics. This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics. Users were guided not just by their true preferences, but by their past experiences of reward and punishment and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. It is, end quote, it is such a shit show. Twitter did that. Twitter did that. Twitter did that.

Almost, nope, Facebook's different. Twitter, what you just described is literally single-handedly done on Twitter performatively every day by politicians, journalists, progressive activists, alt-right trolls. That is literally what happened. And it is tearing apart the fabric of our society.

Like, I'm not exaggerating. It's done. It already – it's torn apart. We don't – we no longer have a shared objective truth. We'll never have one again. So my point is if Elon takes Twitter private, he ceases to make this an ad-supported thing. He doesn't care about centralized oversight. He just says, everybody do and say whatever you want. Would that be

materially worse than what we have now? How does it get worse? How does it get worse? How does it get worse? I don't think it does. How does it get worse? Yeah, I don't know. I don't think you would. It could balkanize though. If youanize though if you decentralize something there's no guarantee it'll remain as influential um if you balkanize this thing meaning if you allow a million different mini twitters to exist using the twitter platform instead of there being one big centralized twitter maybe that's the best outcome because it nullifies the current state of influence that this platform has. So maybe people are galvanized by the fact that there is moderation and it drives people nuts. So if you just get rid of it, then what do they attack?

Something. I saw yesterday Bill Simmons was getting canceled because he said, f*** Jalen Green. So I listened to the podcast as I do, and they were laughing and joking. And it was so obviously a goof. do. And they were like laughing and joking. And it was so obviously a goof. And I was reading like the replies and it's just piling on a joke. And that's what Twitter and our, that's what our society has become. I think Twitter has already been losing influence though. I think 2017, 2018 is probably the peak of Twitter's ability to dictate how we're going to run the country, the world. And there have been pieces of evidence. First of all, in 2019, the company said they're

going to stop counting monthly average users. So they stopped issuing that guidance to Wall Street. I don't think that's accidental, that timing. I think you've really seen that those numbers subside. The pandemic gave Twitter a big burst of usage, like everything else online, that now they don't really seem like they've fully monetized that as well as they should have. And now that pop is fading. We just watched Dave Chappelle say something somewhat controversial that I think in 2017 would have gotten Netflix maybe shut down by the government. I don't know. At this point, the formula has been figured out that actually you can ride Twitter out. You need about seven days because within seven days, the news cycle will

have turned so sufficiently like Will Smith will slap someone or Russia will try to take over the country and you can ride things out on Twitter now. You can't really cancel people as easily as you could have a couple of years ago. It is weird. Twitter is punching above its weight class because it is tiny, relatively speaking. There's not just a lot of people on it. If you go to – we're obviously in our little bubble here. But in the country – 60 million Americans. Most people are not on Twitter.

But it still influences everything. Like with the Oscar slap, that was on Twitter and it exploded outwards. And it's a tiny group of people that just dominate like the civil discourse. I agree. Because it's influencers and media. It's all journalists. I mean, I think a lot of the stuff with Twitter, like them getting rid of the monthly average users, it's like a lot of the followers are just bots. So they're not there.

People like I have followers that have haven't probably haven't logged in in like, you know, five years or something since they created their Twitter account and followed me or something. It's like it's a lot of it is not real. And I know that like I can tell because is not real, and I know that. Like I can tell because I'm like, you know, that's just how it is on all these platforms, right? There's just like dead accounts that are just sitting there not doing anything, and they just need to show numbers to like, you know, for investors,

even though those people aren't using it. The other problem, though, is the way that they decide who's going to amass these big follower accounts, the more you act out and create an uproar with the shit that you're saying, the more you're rewarded. And so that's why you don't necessarily have the most successful people in their fields being the biggest accounts. You have the people who are the biggest shit stirrers in every vertical, including finance.

And I'm not saying that's 100% bad. I know it's great for quote engagement, but it's not really the way if this were community driven instead of advertiser driven, it's not really the way you would do it if you had the choice. I'm not even going to talk about how it could get so much worse with all the bots and the AI stuff, but I just want to talk about a potential solution that Jonathan Haidt raised, which I think was refreshing because usually it's just piling on and just complaining without any solutions. I thought this was a common sense one. He said, banks and other industries have KYC rules so that they can't do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises.

Large social media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean that users would have to post under their real names. They could still use the pseudonym. But it does mean that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify that you are a real human being in a particular country and are old enough to use a platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. End quote. At least they could do that. Yeah.

If you want it, right. There should be some verification that you exist. So you could be anonymous, but at least give your real information. Pseudonymous. Fine. At least not anonymous. Pseudonymous. I think there's, I understand there's a need for that.

You might be tweeting from a country with political repression. You might be highly placed in a sensitive place where a whistleblower might be needed. Like there are reasons that you should be granted a pseudonymous existence, but it can't be a free-for-all. Last thing on this Given that Even if you guys think that the whole thing is a joke Let's say there's even a 5% chance That a single person A person who's been known to

In the past been vindictive And Lashed out at critics You're talking about Ben Carlson? Yes If there's even a 1% chance that any single person Elon Musk especially that any single person, Elon Musk especially, but any single person could ostensibly obtain control of this thing,

isn't the most important thing you do right now delete all your DMs? Like, would you really keep open DMs? I'm not even joking around. My shit's closed. I close my DMs. What are you talking about? I don't get it.

What are you talking about? No, he means delete your existing conversations. Every DM you've ever had, he says delete all of them. There should be no record. There should be no record of your direct messages at all to the extent that you can delete them all. I don't DM with people. I don't even think I can do that. I'm saying generally.

They can't go and get them? Fine. But I think that Elon would be like Bain. He would give it back to the people. He would give Gotham back to the people. No, that's my point. DMs are now open. They're now tweets.

Oh, free for all. Oh my. Do you understand? You're making my point for me. Oh, they wouldn't do that. That would be insane. They wouldn't do that. Listen to yourself, man.

There's no way. That is super villain level shit, though. And that's what that's where he that's where this guy is listen i am now releasing i am now releasing the dms of every wall street journal reporter who's ever written skeptically about tesla so he's not he's not baby twitter's dead he's the joke everyone would leave everyone's dead that's atomic yeah you know that uh some people just like to watch the world burn? He would be the Joker.

There was a meme of that today. Someone put that on Twitter. It had that clip with the money burning. Do yourself a favor. Delete your DMs. All right. Let's get into just keep buying. Nick, we're so proud of you.

Thank you. I want to ask you about the structure of the book because a lot of personal finance books have been written. I think where most of them go wrong is they spend so much time trying to like make themselves unique or make themselves appear to be smarter than everyone else. I thought what you did was you started with a different question. How can I make this book the most usable version of what I'm trying to say for the people that are going to buy it? So tell us about why it's structured the way it is and how that works. Wait, hold on. Before we do that, I think this is important. Sorry to jump on top of you, Josh. Yeah, I'll just go to the pub. Yeah, delete everything you just said. Before we get into the book, I think that people love origin stories.

And for everyone that didn't read Josh's post, I was talking to Nick yesterday. That's a good point. I was talking to Nick yesterday and just congratulating him, or maybe two days ago when the book came out. And it's just kind of crazy. I was like, wait, have you even worked with us for five years? So how the hell did you do this? Like just for the audience that doesn't know your story, like how did this happen? Yeah. So basically I started the

blog in the beginning of 2017, January, it was like a new year's resolution. So I was like, Hey, I'm going to start this thing. I'm going to write once a week. And I started writing and it's actually funny. So the book came out, um, April 12th, 2022, and it was April 11 or 12, 2017. So about four months into this thing, I actually wrote a post called Just Keep Buying. And that post became like my first like semi-viral. I don't want to say viral. Like relative to my views, it was viral relative to getting nothing. I actually got like a couple thousand views, which for me was crazy because I was unknown.

And I just kept – that was like a proof of concept. I was like I can do this, and I kind of had to keep pushing forward. And so I just wrote once a week, and I did that that. It was like a proof of concept. I was like, I can do this. And I kind of had to keep pushing forward. And so I just wrote once a week and I did that for four years. And then I basically was like, Hey, I think I've, you know, COVID happened. I was like trapped inside. I was like, you know what? I feel like I have enough material here. I have enough stuff to write a book. And because I'm going to be trapped inside anyways, I might as well use this time. And I slid into the book or perfecting a sourdough loaf. But I guess what I want to say is there's such a valuable lesson

that Josh hit on in his post for how you did what you did. You came to our conference, a complete outsider, and you said, I want to work with you guys and here's my skill set. And you came to our office,

you stood in our little tiny office with Josh and I, and you were like, all right, make your pitch. You gave us a presentation and we were like, we don't really know exactly what you can do for us. Like data analytics, we have a lot of data, but we want to work with you.

And you made it happen. Yeah. And it was kind of, yeah, it was interesting. I still remember giving that pitch and everything. And I was like, you guys are sitting on a lot of data. You're not doing anything with it. Maybe there's something useful there. It was in this room.

Yeah, yeah. It was in this room because you guys just moved to this office. Yeah. So probably one of the first things. I think your slide, yo, I think in your slide deck, there was a Hydra, a three-headed Hydra. Slaying the Hydra. It was like, well, what did that mean? What was each head represent?

No, the heads didn't matter. The analogy is like, okay, when you're doing data analytics, every time you answer a question, it usually leads to more questions, right? And so there's going to be more and more questions. Because like the Hydra, another head would grow in the place of the head that you chopped off. Yeah, exactly. And we actually have more questions now than we've ever had about the business if we're being honest. Like, okay, we figured this out, but we didn't figure this other thing out or this led us to – Yeah, chill.

I'm just kidding. I also think, though, that we were producing a little bit of data, but the business wasn't big enough and we didn't have enough time having produced this data for it to be useful. enough time having produced this data for it to be useful. Now it seems like when I throw a project at you or you throw a project at yourself, there's like, we can actually come up with answers because there's enough stuff going on, which, which is like a chicken and egg problem. It's like, do we need somebody to analyze the data? Well, there's not enough of it. Okay. But you start now and then eventually count on, there'll be more so that we can produce actual actionable insight. Yeah. I mean, our data has never been better when I, when we first got here, it was a mess and we've cleaned it up since. And now Michael can say, Hey, can you pull this number for me? And then within,

you know, three to five minutes, I usually can get it, which used to take me like a week or something. Right. And that's, that's what happened. Yeah. Are we at the point though, where we can, we can have some of this data start to be more predictive. Just about, I know we're doing that. I know we're doing that with new client onboards. Who are the people most likely to actually become a client? I know we've done a really good job there. So now I'm thinking more about doing the lifespan of an employee at the firm

or doing the lifespan of a client at the firm. Are we getting to that point where we have enough data to really do serious stuff there? I think so. I think as long as the data is clean, I think that's the hardest part is making sure everything's clean. You once said to me, if the data's good. It's good. It's good. The data's right. It's right. All right. So let's get into it, Josh. Let's get back. So let's get back to the structure. Let's get back before. Yeah. Before we get into the content itself, just like talk to me about like how you want people to approach using this. Of course they can pick it up and read the whole thing in order like any other book,

but they don't have to. Yeah, exactly. So I say, you know, jump around. I really think everyone should just read the intro and the first chapter because the first chapter is what kind of lays out the entire structure for the book. And basically it's, I mean, cause I remember I'm writing this without knowing who's reading it, right? I have to write it in a way that's like, I have no idea your background. So like, you're going to read this first chapter. And then based on that first chapter, you're going to, it's going to, you can make it a choose your own adventure. You can read it all the way through. It's up to you. But in the first chapter, I basically come up with this idea called the save invest continuum. And it's just,

it's a very simple idea. It's like, okay, I just need two numbers from you. And I can then tell you where you should be focusing on in your financial life. That's it. Just two numbers, right? First number, how much can you save in the next year, right? So you say, oh, I can save, you know, you know, 500 bucks a month for the next 12 months. That's six grand. So that's number one. Second number, let's say you're like, okay, how much could I, you know, how much can my investments earn me in the next year? So let's say you have, you know, $10,000 invested and you think you can earn a 10% return, right? So that's $1,000. So your first number was 6,000. Your second number is 1,000.

And you're like, okay, which one's bigger? Whichever number is bigger is where you should be spending more of your attention. So what do I mean by that? So because in this case, I said 6,000 is bigger than 1,000, how much you can save is bigger than how much you can invest.

You need to spend more time getting those savings and getting them invested to raise the other number. You want to raise your investment income over time. And what should naturally happen is young people should have a very high amount of saving or be able to save a lot, but have very little investment income. But as you get older and older, imagine a 65-year-old, they probably can't save anything, but they have a lot of money saved by this point, ideally, and invested. So they're earning a lot of investment income. So you should see this over your lifetime. Like those numbers should, like at my point now in my life, after

working for 10 years, those numbers are about the same. In a given year, I can save about the same amount as what my investments can earn me in a good average, you know, whatever, 7% return year. As you're explaining that, I can't help but feel like from what I've seen in my lifetime, and I'm sure a lot of people would agree with this, there's almost like a male-female divide to those two numbers and how much they would be focused upon. I feel as though young women instinctively understand that they need to get that saving rate up. So they would say, okay, I could put away $6,000 and then spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do I get that six to really be 8,000 saved a year, right?

A lot of young men would say, okay, yeah, it's great. I could put away 6,000, but how do I make that 1,000 turn into 4,000? And you would see them spend a lot more of their time on like what to be doing in the market versus like what to be doing about how much they spend versus save with their income. And of course, nothing is like universally applicable, what to be doing about how much they spend versus save with their income. And of course, nothing is universally applicable. But I really have observed that. And I know there's a lot of academic literature about that stuff too,

which I don't have any of the stats with me. But it is interesting when you author a book like this that is universally applicable to anyone who picks it up at any level, it's going to be interpreted differently, but based on where people are coming from to start with, like even from age, from gender, et cetera. Yeah. And I mean, based on the example you said, assuming what you said is accurate, if that's true, then I would say the young women are acting more optimally because they're trying to raise their savings to get higher income. And then ideally, they invest that so they can raise the other. Like raising your investment income is going to be much easier, especially when you're young and don't have a lot of assets. It's going to be much easier if you do that by saving more money,

right? It's only later in life where you really need to focus on your investments. And the simplest example, when I say in the book, because I was 23 years old, I had $1,000 invested in my name. i spent all this time all these spreads she's trying to analyze my investment should i be five percent bonds ten percent bonds it didn't matter like if you know i got a ten percent return that's a hundred bucks i was blowing that in a night like going out in san francisco drinking like taking ubers that's that's josh's point yeah that's yeah that's exactly that's exactly no sense yeah there's this old trope in um you know amongst like middle class or maybe some wealthy families in New York, New Jersey, like the kid that blows his bar mitzvah money. That trope is never used as the girl who blows her bar mitzvah money.

It's just – it's not even – like it's just not even a thing. So you think about a young man who's like got excited about the stock market in 2020, like every other young man in the country, there is going to be a bias toward how do I quadruple the money I have versus, hey, what's the real thing that's going to make a big difference? And of course, we all know it's how much you put in and how much time you have with that money in. Yeah, early on, it's income. Later on, it's you've got to really optimize your investments, tax, all that stuff. And so that's what I'm saying. I'm not saying not to care about it at all, but just you're going to shift your focus over time. Imagine someone with 10 million bucks, a 10% return or 10% drop, it's a million dollars, right? You couldn't save that in a year unless

you're really, really high income. So that's where it starts to matter, right? So in the extremes, it's very obvious, but for most people, it's not obvious, right? Nick, what was your most favorite piece of advice that you think is just widely accepted that you think is garbage that you were able to bust with either anecdotes or data or what? I think the, the most widely accepted advice is you should max out your 401k and this is still a hot take. Besides that one, I think the second or the second biggest one is that, um, there's like, oh, there's this coming retirement crisis and you're not saving enough. And so you need to save enough to like make sure you make it through retirement.

If you look at the data on that, basically like retirees, only one in six retirees are pulling down principal in a given year. Most of them are just living off of their social security and their investment returns. Like they don't sell down principal. And like the data on this is overwhelming. And you look at like the inheritance data. Back up. Five out of six retirees aren't pulling any money out of their investment account? Aren't pulling any principal.

They aren't pulling any principal. So let's say your investment. They're pulling income. Dividends. Yeah, exactly. Plus social security. That's it. So it's like, I think it's one in seven.

Thanks, Jay Powell. Yeah. So that's, and let's say, if you look at the data, like retirees think they're going to run out of money and stuff. And it's like, what actually happens is they usually get richer and richer. I just read this yesterday. Was that in the, when can you retire chapter? No, it's in the second chapter.

Okay. So. Oh, how much did you save? Yeah. So, and there's another, like my favorite, I think like tidbit in there from Kitsies. He did a study. Yeah. Got it.

I actually, I took a note. I wrote a note on that part because I found it so mind-blowing because Ben and I were just talking about this fact that there's no, I understand why people say for rainy day, but I think people tend to oversee it because life is unpredictable. So I get it. I get it too.

But here it is. Across all wealth levels, 58% of retirees withdraw less than their investments earn, 26% withdraw up to the amount that the portfolio earns, and 14% are drawing down principal. 14%. Now think about this. Now think about this. We've just had a 10-year period of like 14% or 15% S&P 500 returns annually, which is almost unheard of. So that idea that rich people actually never spend the money, they just get richer.

I'll add to that record setting stock returns. Bonds did pretty good during that period of time too. Now there are new ways that they don't even have to take the money they can borrow against their own portfolio and access it anyway. It's like everything is stacked in favor of the person that's been over-saving and over-invested. And they just continue to find new ways to have that be something that separates them from everyone else. And even when you look at like wealth management firm multiples getting bought out, they're paying numbers for these firms as though none of these people are ever taking their money out of the account. Like it's going to go from one generation to another and never be spent. That's the way that they're valuing wealth management acquisitions. I think that's more or less managing money. That's never going to leave.

I think that's more or less true. Yeah. So most, and if you actually look, I think I said this in the book too, the required minimum distributions, which are just like money that you're forced to take out of your account by like, I think 70 and a half or 72, whatever it is, whatever age it is, you're forced to take it out so you have to pay taxes to the government. Most people that take RMDs end up like, they don't spend the money. They just reinvest it.

It's like crazy. It's like, oh, I took money out. It's 72, I think. Yeah, so it's 72 now, whatever it is. And it's like, they just take that money out. They wait as long as possible. And then they take the money out and then they just reinvest it.

It's like, they don't know what to do with it anyway. It goes back to BlackRock. It comes out of the IRA and goes right into a treasury bond. I stand corrected. Nick is right. Nick is right. If you turned 72 and a half before January, 2020, anyway, it's 70 and a half. You're right. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Whatever. It's not important. Look it up, look up the law. I'm not a, this is not tax advice. Okay. So knowing this, then what is, what does that mean for the people that aren't in their seventies who are approaching this question of am I saving enough? Am I investing enough?

What do you do with that information? Wait, hang on. Hang on. I'm sorry. But this is important because I don't want to forget. Before we get there, how do we square the circle with the fact that, yes, this is true, but then also the median retirement balance for ages people 60 to 69 is like $27,000. It's one of the different groups of people. Well, that's one piece of it.

But also, remember, Social Security is still paying people. So that's a decent – I mean, I'm not saying – some people can live off of that alone and some do. But let's just say you have that plus you have your investment returns. There's something there for people to – I mean, the data is showing this. So I don't know how people are doing this. But they are, unless there's some massive flaw is showing this, so I don't know how people are doing this, but they are, I mean, unless there's some massive flaw in these studies,

and I don't see them, so I don't know how to answer that, to be honest with you. So, I mean, it's just, it's not happening. You're saying like, oh, the median retirement balance is showing everyone that, like, you need to look at retirees, I think. I think if you control for age, it's more tired than that. I also think, as we were talking about at the top of the show, there is

people are incentivized to write headlines that are not just kind of stories that spread like wildfire. Yeah, like millennials are all broke and all this stuff. You're not going to write a story. Don't worry. Everyone's fine. Yeah, no one's going to click on that. But that's more – I'm not saying everyone's fine. There is a subset of the population that will have retirement issues.

And that's – I'm like we're talking about policy and ways to help people. We need to address those people and not say, oh, there's a coming retirement crisis. It's not happening. How about this? Everybody is definitely not fine, but there's not a nationwide crisis. Yeah, that's what I would say. But one of the things that's interesting is how when you talk about aggregate numbers of people, inside of that data, people's lives are not constant. People hit it big in their career and they move out of a certain zone and maybe somebody replaces them. And so you see two people out of that population that are still in bad shape.

And it could be very easy to look at that and be like, oh, nothing's getting better. No, you're not following each person within these populations that we're studying. And we had that problem with wages. And people say, oh, wages are stagnant or people aren't getting raises. Russ Roberts. Russ Roberts did this. Right. Here's the problem with that.

You get a boomer at 65 at the top of the income scale for his position, retires. He gets replaced by a 25-year-old at the bottom of the income scale. And you're looking at a million versions of that and saying in the aggregate wages aren't rising. No, you don't know what you're talking about. The population is changing and it's younger people coming in willing to do the job for less like every young person since the beginning of the world.

It's people moving around the income spectrum. Yeah, you're looking at the median, but there's social mobility. Yeah, that's the big thing to look at. If you follow people more closely, you understand that and then you say, okay, maybe we're not measuring the right thing. It's not mobility. Yeah. So if you follow, if you follow people more closely, you understand that. And then you say, okay, maybe we're not measuring the right thing.

It's not aggregate wage growth. It's what is the opportunity for somebody to move up in life. And of course there are issues there too, but I think it is, is the real issue. Yeah, I agree. I think like looking at that stuff and like controlling for, you know, cohort demographics, things like, I agree. I think looking at that stuff and controlling for cohort demographics,

things like that, really adjust. I mean, so the whole millennial thing, I think is not, all the millennials are broke. You look at that data, average per capita wealth of millennials, it's on the same path as where boomers were, where Gen X was, given their ages, their average ages. So it's a very similar thing.

So I want to say- That's in the book as well. I want to say that, Nick, I've read literally every single blog post that you've done over the last five years. I haven't missed a single one. And so I thought that I would read this book and I've read it all before, and I probably have, but it was still an amazing read. I started yesterday and I'm halfway through it. And I just want to say to you, congratulations. When young people ask me, and I get asked this question all the time, where should I start? I think in my list was like, I will teach you to be rich, Morgan's book,

Ben's book, Jason Zweig's book. But this is going right to the top of the list because it is not just, it's just so rich in information, actual actionable advice and just bravo, kudos, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. Which one of Ben's books do you normally tell people? Wealth of Common Sense? Wealth of Common Sense. That's an incredible book. Yeah. It got me into this stuff too.

But this is like really – it's a how-to. It's sophisticated and simple and elegant and bravo. I appreciate it. I think that's a good point. It's a good first book for pretty much anybody because of how basically – not that it's basic but how basically it lays this out for you. Like if you don't even know where to begin, you will get the answers in this book. What didn't you cover?

You didn't cover credit card points. So Ramit did that, but you covered pretty much everything. Yeah, and I think even the whole credit card points thing, I don't want to get into that right now, but that's the point. Yeah, so I think, and the other thing too, it's like this is half old material, half new roughly. Like I haven't talked about buying versus renting, but I talk about it in the book and things like that.

So when's the next book coming out? If I'm going to do another one, it's like probably 2023, I'll write it. It'll come out in 2024. And I do kind of have some ideas, but we'll see. We'll keep that under wraps. That's the first time I've announced that,

but let's just keep that under wraps. You should wait till the next bear market and your follow-up to this should be just kidding. Just keep short of that. But wait, hold on. We didn't even, before we move on to the next topic, just to synthesize the TLDR is just keep buying income producing assets through thick, especially through thin. We should be on our knees praying for better prices to buy. So a bear market doesn't invalidate the book.

That's part of the book. It is the book. Yeah. I mean, there's going to be a 10-year period where US stocks or international stocks don't even beat inflation. There's going to be 10-year periods we're going to go through. And I'm telling you, you'll come back to this video later and say, I told you, it could happen. We could be starting it right now. This yield curve inversion could be starting this. And eight years from now, they're going to be like, Nick, you're an idiot. You put out this book and the market's below where it was eight years ago. So what? That's going to happen. But a lot of this time, when you look at that, when you try and do those analyses, that's always using snapshots.

If you actually buy over time, the returns are very different, right? So unless the path is straight down, like you can still make money. Like I even showed it. Everyone's like, what about Japan? Well, if you had put a dollar a day into the Japanese stock market from 1980

to like whatever, 2010 or something, just followed that, there'd be a lot of times when you actually made money. Not a lot. You didn't make a lot of money, but you were above. Who went all in on Japanese stocks in 1989?

The person that sold his Japanese business and then lump summed in, which is crazy. But like there are people that did. There's like two or three people that did that. But like, I'm sorry. Yeah, you got kind of screwed. But most people were buying over time. So that's less of an issue.

And if you're diversified buying over time, it's unlikely you're going to lose. Josh, anything else you want to say? No, I think we covered it. Let's pivot to- Nick, do you have any tickers for us? No. Zing, zing, zing. JKB, is that a ticker? Any stock ideas in the book? No, I say don't buy individual stocks, and I stand by that, but we don't want to get into that now. So I take homage with that. No, just kidding. All right, so we've spoken about this theme

over the last couple of months at this point that when stocks started getting demolished, I guess to JC's credit, enthusiasm, some stocks peaked in February, but whatever, they all got crushed. And it wasn't for no reason- February 21, over a year ago now. It wasn't for no reason. Yeah, sure. Some of it had to do with interest rates and normal, of course. But what initially started that was companies lowering their guidance and investors responding like that. And so Jim Bianco has this amazing chart, a scary chart, but an amazing chart showing the three-month average of up guidance minus down guidance. And it has generally in the course of the last bull market been positive, as you would expect companies giving down guidance. And it has generally in the course of the last bull market been

positive, as you would expect companies giving good guidance. That has flipped pretty dramatically. And so it's not just inflation, consumer spending being pared back. It's companies telling you, hey, our earnings are going to miss expectations. And that is what ultimately drives the stock market. Not expectations of earnings, although it's that, what ultimately drives the stock market. Not expectations of earnings, although it's that, it's actual earnings eventually matter. And how could they not right now? They got a gimme. You're an executive at a company. You never want to come out and tell shareholders this might not be the best year ever. But if everyone else is doing it and everyone that you're saying it to can see the reasons for themselves right before their eyes, why wouldn't you lower guidance? I'm not saying kitchen sink it, but look what JP Morgan did this

week. Jamie Dimon basically said, there are treacherous forces threatening the economy. He said, we got to take an extra, I don't know what the number was, trillion dollars in whatever, loan loss reserves, just in case this Russia thing gets way worse or inflation starts inflicting actual losses from our borrowers. This is a perfect opportunity for companies to be like, hey, it's not the greatest time ever to be in business. So you're going to see more, not less. You're going to see – we just – the earnings season started two days ago. It's going to be juicy. You're going to see more, not less. You're going to see... We just... The earnings season started two days ago.

It's going to be juicy. You're going to see more, not less. So they... Everyone pulled forward business in 2020 or 21, whatever it was. Except travel, pretty much. 2020. Every business except for travel. That's right.

And so they were going to have difficult comps regardless before all the inflation supply chain issues. So not only is it difficult comps regardless before all the inflation supply chain issues. So not only is it difficult comps, it's lowering that we might not even be where we were a year ago. That's right. Stock prices, look, stock prices have outrun 2019. It'll be interesting to see when comps go negative versus 2020 and start threatening going negative versus 2019 in some segments of the market. It'll be interesting to see where stock prices have to fall out in order to compensate for that. And I think where you're going to see it show up very early is in mortgages

and housing related stuff like the amazing boom in housing. we don't have to have a crash because you still have good demographics and money is still cheap enough relative to history. But you could see a lot of what went on last year reversed this year. I would argue you already are. I will repeat the fact because this is just very important that we've been saying I think for months now is that we can have a recession that doesn't absolutely bring us to our knees. I think, for months now is that we can have a recession that doesn't absolutely bring us to our knees, right? We can have a recession that doesn't cripple the entire global financial economy. It's true. Also, we can have regional booms and busts carrying on simultaneously. So a really good example of that is that Texas and Oklahoma had like a mini recession in 2015 and 16 when the price of crude oil crashed and stayed down for 18 months or whatever.

So this idea that like a country of our size, 350 million people, we're all going to experience the same economic climate at the same time is in and of itself ludicrous. Maybe that made sense 100 years ago when half the men working were in agriculture and the other half were on an assembly line. But that is just not the way we're living right now. So we could have a recession and you're going to know people who have never been doing better professionally. And that's just something that the headlines don't pick up, the data shrieking headlines don't pick up. But we all see it with our own eyes. Do you write about the economy or the effect of recessions on people's personal finances in your book, Nick? Do you touch on that at all?

No, I don't talk about that type of stuff at all, right? I'm trying to – How come you left that out considering how much of a focus there is on that like in the media? I think I have a longer term – It's not that it's not important. Like the real, like a lot of times when we talk about crashes and stuff, everyone's like, oh my gosh,

my portfolio is down 30, 40%. It's like, that's not really as important as what's happening in the real economy. Because usually what's happening in the real economy is like, for example, the Great Depression wasn't terrible because like, yes, asset prices end up going down 90%

because most, like a lot of people lost their jobs. They couldn't, there's bread lines. Yeah, that's bread lines. That's more important. Your immediate survival is more important. So I don't think talking about that – I'm going to kind of move away – like the focus of the book is going to move away from what it's about. And so I didn't really discuss that in particular. And I really do think like having a longer-term focus is what's important.

So that's one piece of it. In terms of like what you were saying about like certain parts of the economy are in a recession. It's not. We saw that in COVID, like the, the hospitality industry got wrecked and travel got wrecked, right? Yet everyone that could work remote, most financial services were probably okay. Right. And so we're already, we already saw that happen before during a pandemic. And now whatever happens in the future, it's going to affect people in different ways. So I'm looking at Nvidia right now. I don't know if it's quiet or not, but it's almost in a 40% drawdown. It's getting totally bushwhacked. Another area that we had Sean do

some work on was the fintech companies. This is crazy to me. So this blew my face. We're looking at market cap declines from PayPal, Intuit, The Block, Square, Coinbase, Fiserv, a list of 10 or so names. NewBank, Affirm, Bill.com, Robinhood, Toast, Upstart, SoFi, Black Knight. So these are the biggest publicly traded fintech, quote unquote, disruptors, or a very good selection of them. And the change in market cap percentage wise and in actual dollars. What's the numbers? $400 billion. That's how far they are below their high. I guess this is being led by PayPal. Actually, I haven't checked in on PayPal stock in a while. Wait, so this is

November 1st. All those companies I just listed were $940 billion collectively in market cap. And today, not even six months later, they're $534 billion. So they've lost a total $400 billion or 43% of their market cap. Hold on, Josh. Where did that money go? It doesn't go anywhere. It's losses. No. Yeah. So PayPal- It never existed in the first place, right? PayPal, for example.

I'm looking at this chart of PayPal. Can you guys, Josh, can you see this? Yeah. So PayPal just straight down 310 to 92. It had a pretty vicious bounce. It went from 92 up to 120. So a 30% bounce and it's giving that up. It's one of the worst pieces of shit I've ever seen over the last year, the way that stock has acted.

You would think that the app is causing cancer. I can't even understand. Imagine it was a $300 billion market cap. It was bigger than Goldman Sachs. And now it's, what is it? What's the market cap? 70, 90? PayPal?

No, it can't be that small. Can it be? I don't know. You tell me. Talk to yourselves. We have the data. 271 to 121. Yeah, I mean, it's a disaster.

So they lost $150 billion in market cap since November 1st. I don't even know this. The business is growing in that period of time. This is not like they're taking losses or whatever. It's really inexplicable. Somebody asked me, would PayPal consider buying like legacy, like Western Union? I'm like Western union. That's like that. They're like disrupting that piece of wall street. Wall street. We love that. Uh, listen, I have a very strong take on the quote unquote FinTech revolution. Um, I really don't believe in it. I think some revolutions don't result in the incumbents losing. Some revolutions result in the incumbents getting much smarter and much stronger. I want to share something with you guys

that a fan of ours sent from the UK last night. And I think it's like one example of a much bigger story that maybe Wall Street hasn't figured out yet, which is that these companies are not just going to sit back and say, oh, yeah, block, take all our business away, PayPal, take away all the banking. Their apps are getting way better, and they're going to get way more aggressive. There are no Chase Bank branches in the UK. That's not what they do. And England has a banking system with some of the most entrenched corporations in the UK. That's not what they do. And England has a banking system

with some of the most entrenched corporations in the world. They have banks that have been there for 400 years. Jimmy Donovan said they're spending tens of billions of dollars on fintech. So listen to this. They're attempting to take on the entire British banking establishment without opening a single branch.

Who's that? I don't even think they've – JPMorgan? JPMorgan Chase has launched what's called a UK consumer current account. We would call a current account a checking account, okay? They're doing it under the Chase brand, which does not exist there. Nobody knows what Chase is if you live in London. The entire thing is app and card based.

So they're doing like 150 basis points in interest, one and a half percent interest. Marcus is about 0.7% over there. They've had to up theirs to 1%. This comes from Tom in the UK. And they are getting a ton of signups. The message boards are going crazy about people switching from Marcus to Chase. So the question is, can JP Morgan operate a large number of bank accounts, millions, let's say, ultimately, in a country where they

have zero branches? If they can, what are the implications for fintech companies in America who look like, I mean, these companies look clownish to compete with a JP Morgan that decides, you know what, actually we're gonna have the best app and we're gonna go wherever we feel like going. So that to me is an under told part of the story. Yeah, but what do you mean you don't

believe in FinTech? Elaborate. I don't believe that it's a revolution is what I'm trying to say. I think what ends up happening is, and we saw this with the robo advisors, they were too good and too loud early out of the gates and they forced the incumbents to say, oh yeah. And then Schwab competes and then Vanguard competes. They were taken very seriously and subsequently demolished. You think, what about Robinhood? Robinhood's a similar story there. Yeah.

You think Schwab saw what Robinhood was able to do during the pandemic and was just like, yeah, take it under no circumstances, fidelity either. take it under no circumstances uh fidelity either so we always talk about like uh fintech in in these terms of like oh we're disrupting you're not disrupting shit there are more people with bank accounts at chase and bank of america now than there were a year ago and three years ago robin hood was severely disruptive severely disruptive to the brokerage business. There's a counter revolution. I understand. There's always a counter revolution.

Of course, but it was supremely disruptive. I agree. It f***ed their shit up big time. I agree, but that's not how the story ends. Right, right, right. Oftentimes the story ends with an incumbent saying, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We could do this. This is no, this is no, what do you have an app? We could do an app.

It's no big deal. And I think you're seeing that now. Anyway, I thought that, I thought that was interesting. Shout out to Tom in the UK. Oh, where are we going next? Inflation. This week, we got a consumer price index reading of eight and a half percent for the month of March.

A little bit hotter than expected, but the expectations seem to have caught up. It is the hottest reading since 1981. Nick, what do you think in these days? I mean, I actually have an interesting take on inflation. I'm going to be blogging about this next week. I think, because you see this, I don't know, trope online. You see people say things like, oh, well, if you're not getting paid 8.5, you know, it's 8.5% was the latest print, right? So if it's like, if you're not getting paid 8.5% more than last year, then you're losing money, right? This is a very, oh, because if inflation is 8.5%, my wage should go up 8.5%. People are saying that?

Oh, yeah, that's all over the place. That's like, that goes viral all the time. Super childish. What I'm saying, you actually think about, well, what does inflation, no, inflation is based on your costs and what you're spending. So it's like, that's only true if you actually think about, well, what does inflation? No, inflation is based on your costs and what you're spending. So it's like, that's only true. If you actually convert to dollars, this doesn't make sense anymore. That argument breaks down instantly. And I'll use a very simple example to do this, right? Let's say you spend, remember, this is a little extreme, but let's just go with it. Let's say you make $100,000 a year after tax, that's your income, and you spend $10,000 a year after tax, right? Or sorry, yeah, $10,000 a year after tax. And let's

say the inflation rate is 10%. So now instead of $10,000 a year after tax. And let's say the inflation rate is 10%. So now instead of spending 10,000 this year, you're going to spend 11,000, right? Do you need another $10,000 on your income to make? No, you need 1,000. You need a 1% raise to catch up with your 10% inflation, right? So it's not true that like, oh, your raise needs to match CPI. It really has to do with your spending. It's actually kind of- If you're living- But you do need returns on your savings that you're not spending. Yeah, if you're living paycheck to paycheck, that's obviously true that your raise needs to

match that. And what's worse is actually inflation really, really hurts low-income people because a lot of these people don't have investable assets. So they're not participating in any upside like stocks and equities and things like that and REITs, whatever, that'll get that. And then on top of that, their spending is moving with their income basically to the point where they do need a bigger raise to kind of get to even. So it's a double whammy and it's really bad. You know what's interesting is that people have been saying the Fed is behind the curve. Not only is the Fed behind the curve, but so are expectations for inflation. As much as people are expecting high prints, Bespoke has this chart showing the 24-month rolling total of weaker-than-expected headlines.

And right now, it's collapsing, meaning there have only been three weaker-than-expected headline CPI reports over the last two years. So it keeps coming in. We keep raising the bar, and it keeps coming in even higher. That's the fewest in over 20 years. But that's now turned on its head. we keep raising the bar and it keeps coming in even higher. That's the fewest in over 20 years. But that's now turned on its head. And we, I think, are now at parity. Our expectations are just about where the data is coming in. And maybe we'll start overshooting as we get into the summer. And maybe all of a sudden, inflation will start coming in below expectations for some of these items. I think used car and truck sales just had its biggest monthly decline in 50 years. So that was one of the first places for inflation to show up.

Up only 30- And right on schedule, it's going the other way. Up only 35% now for the last year. Do you think that inflation is close to peaking or did it peak? I think inflation is not a monolithic thing that we can say that it all does the same thing in any one period of time. So I don't think if you bought a dishwasher and a new truck in 2020 and in 2021, you're not buying one in 2022. So this idea that everybody is going to act the same way every year forever is kind of silly. And then the second part of that is actually there's a logic to why we're seeing the inflation where we're seeing it right now. The anecdotes are shrieking about travel-related inflation.

Like I dare you to try to book a trip. The flights for Florida this Christmas just came out, which is an annual event on Long Island. Florida this Christmas just came out, which is an annual event on Long Island. All of the moms go on the JetBlue or the dads go on the JetBlue site the day those flights come out, which usually happens end of March, early April, and they book the flight immediately. Flights for my family, $600 a person last year, this year looking like $1,000 a person. Here's what that's a function of. JetBlue has to pay their own employees $1,000 bonuses just to show up. They are, every airline is now canceling flights, which is resulting in even higher costs for airlines. So now they're actually proactively canceling before they even put them out.

And you just don't have enough capacity relative to the demand. So in other words, while you're starting to see inflation fade in some of the things that it was red hot in, like home furnishings or whatever, last year, the year before, it's just moving somewhere else. And now it's in services, it's in rents, it's in travel, it's going to be in leisure all summer. You'll see it in concert tickets. You'll see. Right. So it's a moving thing. It's like moving through the snake. It's a big lump inside of the snake. So is inflation peaking in what category? I'll give you the answer. Nick, anything to add there? Nope. I don't really. I mean, I don't know what's going to happen with inflation. So like, I don't I have no clue. So I don't I don't do macro. I don't really – I mean I don't know what's going to happen with inflation. So like I don't – I have no clue. So I don't do macro. I just told you. Now you know.

No, it's – listen. Some places it gets better and the only reason that happens is because people are spending elsewhere. In other places it gets worse. So – but this is the point is that this has yet to work its way through the economy down to the consumer. And how does this not hit earnings? What do you mean it has yet to? I don't think that the consumer is changing their consumption habits. I don't think the average American is not changing their consumption habits yet. It's not hitting them yet. I think

it's going to. I don't think, yeah, I think you're right. I don't think we have any data in any of the big surveys or studies that there's been this mass shift in consumer behavior. But stay tuned, because look how suddenly inflation just came out of nowhere. You could start seeing consumer pushback. You could see it in this quarter's earnings. So if you're listening to conference calls, you could start hearing it everywhere out of the blue. And I also think that just the speed at which the market digests this and gets ahead of this is amazing. Like we could be out of a bear market before we even know that the recession happened,

like empirically through the data, where we could say we could be out of the bear market as the economic news is getting worse. Oh, yeah. Forget about it. Right? Like 100%. That happens all the time. All the time. Yeah. But. Forget about it. Right? Like 100%. That happens all the time. All the time.

Yeah. But I feel like especially now. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about the S&P 500 turnover. Who brought this in here? Let's see. Where are we?

From Sam Rowe. I got lost. But this was interesting. One of the things about investing in the S&P 500, Nick, which I want to talk about in the context of your advice in the book. You talk about not owning individual stocks, owning the index, which of course, for a million reasons, is very sound advice. This might be another reason why that's very sound advice. Sam is talking about the fact that the S&P 500 has had a ton of turnover really just in our lifetime. Since 1995,

728 tickers have been added, while 724 tickers or individual stocks have been removed. And that obviously has huge implications if you're trying to beat an index that's that much of a moving target. Like good luck always being on the cutting edge of which companies are going to stay and which companies are going to go, let alone adding all of the new companies, many of which you wouldn't have even have heard of at the time that they're being added to the index. I don't know. Did that number surprise you, that amount of turnover, or were you kind of aware of it already? I knew turnover was high.

I didn't know the exact number. What's this annually? Do we have that breakdown? We would say 1995. How many companies come in and out of it? It's 25 years, 7, 28. Yeah, I'm seeing. It's usually like 5 or 10 stocks coming and going.

I think at the current— Well, it says 30 a year, I guess. 30, so 15 in, 15 out? Well, if they're adding, well, let's say they added 728 tickers over 25 years, that's about roughly 30 a year. So here's the question that I have. So we were talking about the implications of companies staying private for longer and getting added to the index at such gigantic valuations. Tesla's an extreme example. How much was that when it kind of added half a trillion? It was something nuts. But my question is this. If you look at that relative to the total market cap,

it's still a drop in the bucket. The same way that when Amazon came public at a $400 million valuation, I don't know what it was when it got added to the S&P, but I'm guessing that the S&P was way smaller back then too. So maybe if you normalize that, then it's sort of apples to apples. Yeah, we could check. I mean, there are ways

to test that. Yeah, I agree. One other. Oh, I'm sorry. One other point that Sam was making one of the arguments against the S&P 500 you'll hear people make is that it's very heavily driven these days by, you know, the top five stocks and you really just like buying Apple, Amazon. And of course, there's some truth to that. But Sam talks about how like those companies in particular, those big five, each one of them is like 50 or 60 companies. But he's saying that there are also a lot of acquisitions within the S&P 500. So you're getting like a lot of diversification that maybe you're not really getting on the surface internally. So I just feel like there's a, I feel like it's surprisingly tough when you understand this to make the case that you're going to materially be able to beat

an index that's doing that automatically day in, day out. Yeah. I mean, I look at it as a momentum strategy and you have the people at Standard & Poor's that are picking the stocks for you. automatically day in, day out. Yeah, I mean, I look at it as a momentum strategy and you have the people at Standard & Poor's that are picking the stocks for you and they have some criteria they use and as a low-cost index investor, you're getting basically a free ride off their research. And so this is not my idea.

Well, not their research. Or whatever, their process, whatever you want to call it, not their research. No, no, the research of stock pickers. We're free running off that. Yeah, I'm saying, yeah. So this is something that William Sharps talked about for a long time. Most people get this.

S&P Dow Jones Indices says there's $5.4 trillion parked in funds that are deliberately tracking the S&P 500 as of the end of 2020. That is a lot of money all tracking the same strategy. That is a lot of money all tracking the same strategy. And that number just goes up pretty much maybe not every single year, but it's trending higher both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the overall investing pie, which is probably an argument to stay with it more so than anything else. Yeah, but the S&P was down 1.2% today. Which is a tragedy. Okay. I wanted to go into dollar cost averaging versus lump sum. Nick, this is probably the area of your research and writing

that people are most familiar with. Some of your biggest dropped bombs come from these topics. First of all, why do you think, not that you're controversial, but why do you think there's such a raging controversy about whether or not people should drop a lump sum into the stock market versus dollar cost average over a longer period of time? Why does that get people so worked up? I think it gets people worked up because I'm saying like, hey, look, the evidence shows this is generally the right move. However, the problem, there's a lot of risk. What's the right move? I'm sorry, the right move is to lump sum, right, to buy sooner. And I think so in the

book I talk about this. In chapter 13, I discuss this. I don't call it dollar cost averaging and lump sum. I think the issue is dollar cost averaging technically has two definitions. The original definition that Ben Graham used was like just buying over time. So when you're buying your 401k, you're dollar cost averaging. What this is doing in this example, that we want to throw charts up and all that, this version of dollar cost averaging is like, you have $100,000 because you sold a business, you've got an inheritance. And do you put it in right now or do you slowly average into the market, like waiting? Well, it depends on what the Fed is doing. Yeah. Well, the point is, generally, the main premise here is the only thing that matters is you

generally want to invest sooner. So like whatever it is you're doing, just the sooner, the better. So that's the main takeaway. So it doesn't matter what terms use in this case, lump sum is investing right away. It's sooner. Right. And I think that the thought experiment that does this, I said, let's say you had a hundred thousand dollars or let's know, let's say you had a hundred million dollars and you want to preserve as much purchasing power over the next century. Right. Would you rather put a hundred million dollars invested today today or would you rather put a million dollars a year for the next hundred years? Now you're saying, you think about that and you're like, yeah, that makes no sense. Inflation is going to destroy me. I would easily put all the money in

today. Well, if you wouldn't wait a hundred years and you shouldn't wait a hundred months or a hundred days even, right? Point taken. But I think, I think I, I don't know if I disagree, but you are sort of robotic in your, in your personality. I think there's something to be said about the psychological comfort of not putting a lump sum in and having to just have the anxiety of, holy shit, what did I just do? So I think that there is a limit of time that makes sense. You don't want to dollar cost average a lump sum over a five-year period. That's idiotic. But if you want to give yourself a year, even two years to psychologically, especially if it's an inheritance

where there is a big emotional component attached to that money, I can get behind dollar cost averaging even though quantifiably it is undeniably the wrong decision. Yeah, so the question is, if you're willing, so on average,

that's about like over a year, let's say you did 100% stocks, you're probably not going to be doing that, but let's say you did 100% stocks, I lump sum, you dollar cost average. On average, you're going to underperform by 5%. So if you're willing to give up, like if you're

willing to pay- Which is meaningful. Yeah, I'm saying, I mean, if you're willing to pay a 5% premium on average to do this for this peace of mind, do it. I don't care. I'm just telling you that's what the data shows. So on average, that's what's going to happen. The problem- Nobody- No, the problem is that people feel that there's got to be some brainpower involved, and most of them will say, okay, that's probably true, but look at the valuation of the market. And so it's not going to be true this time. That's the thing that smart people are always going to come back at you with. Oh, that's definitely true.

Yeah, but here's my counter to you guys even. You're saying, okay, well, I'm going to average in over the next 12 months. Okay. The only time when that average in method beats buying now is in a falling market. And that's the time when you're least likely, you're gonna be least enthusiastic. So I'm not going to seed this point because of behavior. Well, by behavior, yeah, it's going to start crashing. Like imagine crashing in March, 2020. And then you're like, Oh, I'm just gonna wait for the dust settle. And then six months later, you're at a new all-time high, and you just lost on a 100% annual return. That is a great counterpoint, but let's also stipulate that most of the time that doesn't happen.

Yeah, I know. And because most of the time it doesn't happen, you should be lump summing. That's my point. You just proved my point. Oh, my God. We have this chart that makes that point. It's dollar cost averaging performance over 24 months versus lump sum investment using the S&P 500 total return. And there are these two distinct periods where DCA is winning versus lump sum.

And both of those are during stock market crashes. One of them starts right after the year 2000. And then the other one is seven years later, starting at about 07. But so those are the only two periods of time and they're short where the DCA line is above 0%, meaning it's outperforming most of the lifetime of this chart. Lump sum, meaning you just invest it and let it fly. You did much better. And you actually quantify, on average, DCA underperforms lump sum by 8.8% over this period on rolling 24-month periods. So in 77.8% of all months shown, you were better off with a lump sum investment.

But are you really going to fight the Fed? People have- Are you really going to fight the Fed? Wait, what is the Fed? I thought the Fed's pumping up the market. So you should be doing lump sum investment. But are you really going to fight the Fed? People have, are you, are you really going to fight the Fed? Wait, what is the Fed? I thought the Fed's pumping up the market. So you should be, you should be doing lump sum,

right? We haven't, it's been, it's been an hour and a half. Almost. We haven't even discussed the fact that the, the adage for the, for,

for the last 10 years has been, don't fight the Fed. I mean, they've got your back. Literally it's reverse. They're 95. Now you can fight them. Now you fight it. No, fight them now you can fight it no

they are pulling back 95 billion dollars a month of less liquidity in the markets is that going to matter I think it mattered on the way up

I don't see how it doesn't matter in reverse but we will see that's cause that's cause that's why that's why that's why

when they point a gun at you you charge it's a knife you run away what's that from you charge at a gun my cousin Vinny, you charge. It's a knife. You run away. What's that from? You charge at a gun. What's that from? It's a knife.

My cousin Vinny. You run. No, it's not. Oh, no. It's Pacino. It's Irishman. That's right. It's Irishman.

Because I got it confused. It's all in my head. Because they're in a courtroom, too. They're in a courtroom, too. That's why it's so confusing. So the guy tries to take a shot at Watson. And his son comes and charges the gunman. He says, you charge at a gun.

It's a knife. You run. Now you can fight the Fed. What is this table? Bitcoin, DCA? What are we doing here? Are we taking psilocybin mushrooms? I'm saying in every single asset, this is true. Like I have

not found an asset where if you had just averaged in, it would have been better than just putting all the money in right away. Because guess what? Most assets go up to the right. Yeah, that's the issue. Most assets go up into the right over the long term. So let me give people an idea of what that means. Dollar cost in bitcoin this is obvious would have been underperformed by 471 percent versus uh and this is over 24 month rolling periods yeah so all right i mean that one's obvious but even treasuries uh treasuries you underperform by four percent on average over two years dollar cost average over two years. Gold, 9% underperformance. International stocks, 60-40 portfolio.

So, all right. So if you're going to invest, it pays to be invested early with as much money as possible, not on every month or every day or every year, but just generally speaking, put the money in the investment and shut up. Yeah, and if you're worried about risk, maybe what you're investing in is too risky for you.

That's my other counter. There's a way of like, okay, why don't you lump some into something that's a little bit less risky? Instead of going 100% stocks, maybe go 80-20 or something. I don't know. I'm just trying to throw something out there. All right, so now I have a bones pick with both of you guys. Why won't you guys do my experiments for me? I don't have the skills to pull this off myself. I know there's something here. I know there's something here.

I just know that somebody has to want to spend a little bit of time and brainpower on it. You're asking to just, how do we time the market? No, it's better than that. It's better than that. What if we have a dollar cost average, not to beat lump sum, to beat traditional dollar cost average. This is my idea. Dollar cost average on steroids.

Here's what we're gonna do. And I don't know the numbers or the cadence, like the intervals, right? But just hear me out. I know for a fact, without knowing, without the data, I religiously believe this. If we can come up with a way where we have a standard dollar cost average

that within a range bound of the VIX just operates like any dollar cost average would, and then when the VIX gets above a certain level, I don't know if that's relative to where it was, like a moving average or it's a number, we say 25, whatever. The dollar cost average amount doubles. We're putting in twice as much as we would in a standard period of time. And then when we get back below that threshold to make up for the fact that we've

done that, we have to cut back on how much we're putting in. So it's like a smart dollar cost average that is literally doing the opposite of what most humans would do if left to themselves. And it's actually adding even more investment during very volatile markets. I'm not saying the payoff of that is immediate. I'm just saying I know over 10 or 20 years, you are way better off investing more in the midst of the highest volatility readings. Why can't we do this? Well, you can't do this because where's that extra money going to come from? It's just going to wave a wand. I told you. No, I told you. No, we're going to invest less to make up for it when the volatility comes down.

Okay, so let's say you're investing $100 a month beforehand and then volatility goes up, you double it to $200, and then after it comes down, you go back to $50 or something? I double it every... Let's say I'm doing monthly DCA. I double it every month during which the market is in that higher VIX level. Now, markets don't tend to stay at that elevated VIX level for very long. So you're not going to have to be doing these doublings for nine months in a row. It's just not – the VIX is an oscillator. It's not the nature of the thing.

And we want to do this during extremes. We don't want to constantly be changing the DCA amount. I just feel like if you do this over 10 years or 20 years, you have to be coming out ahead. Well, I think the question now is like, where do you get the cash, the extra cash? You're saying extra cash. I'll get you the money.

That's the prep. I just want you to do the data. I can tell you, this is like the buy the dip. I're saying extra cash. I'll get you the money. That's the prep. I just want you to do the data. I can tell you, this is like the buy the dip. I've done these analyses. I can get you to tell. I'm telling you, this will not work.

You're right. Why won't this work? Because you're sitting- Tell him it'll work. No, when the VIX is below a certain range, you're going to be holding extra cash waiting

for the VIX to go up and you're going to wait too long and that's how you're going to lose out. That's how you lose. I already know it. That's going to be the tax on it? Yeah, you're like, if you can magically double your your contributions while the vix side then yes do it but like dude get us all right so just run the i'll get you the money

just run the number that makes no sense how does the money just materialize it doesn't make your when the vix spikes you get a side hustle hello yes that's great the vix spikes it when the vix spikes the connection to your bank let's say you're doing this. We have liftoff as our robo. Liftoff, when it triggers liftoff telling my bank, hey, put an extra 100% deposit into Josh's account this month. Let's say I'm putting in $500 a month. Put in $1,000 this month because we's say I'm putting in $500 a month. Put in a thousand this month because we're in our higher VIX regime.

That might happen two or three months in a row. I can live with that. I have decided that I'm willing to do that as the investor. I do that manually. Forget about where the money comes from. Let's say that's possible. Then what? Could I have something here?

So you can't forget where the money comes from because arguably that money has been sitting in cash. You could have been investing it earlier. That's my argument. Nicholas, I didn't earn it yet. I hadn't earned it yet. It was just money that's going into my bank for my paycheck. money accumulating in the bank and i had the ability to make a double deposit in a higher vix regime automatically over time you don't think my dca on steroids is beating the shit out of regular i agree no i agree that if you have the cash to invest if you have the cash to invest you

should do it during it do you know how much money we're leaving on the sidelines do you have any idea uh let's wrap what do you mean let's wrap? Wrap up my data set. All right. No, I want to do this crazy article real quick. Every line in this is dumber than the one before. This is like, what is going on? Michael, before I insult anybody that we're doing business with, who is blockchain.com?

Just be nice. I don't know. I will. I don i don't know i don't know i've never heard of this is this like a big deal is it a big thing i've never heard of blockchain.com honestly okay kathy wood for some reason was on tv and said it's like i guess we're asking about coinbase which i don't know what what is she down, 90% of that thing or something? And she was like, well, actually, the public market valuations make no sense because look at what's going on with private companies. So she's saying, quote, if you look at the others like blockchain.com, its valuation over the past year has tripled while Coinbase in our portfolios is down 40%. That makes no sense. Coinbase is a far better and well-diversified company, right?

And I would argue a better managed company. So I think she's right about that. But the causality is the issue. So I'm at – go ahead. Finish your thought. The stupid thing is that blockchain.com is not really up 3x with Coinbase down 40. Blockchain.com doesn't trade. It's a private company. Nobody actually knows what it's worth. So I'm at blockchain.com. It says the world's most popular way to buy, sell, and trade crypto.

Okay, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, whatever. But speaking of things that don't make sense, on top on the banner, it says blockchain.com is the first digital asset platform in American football. What the hell does that mean? What's American football? Like as opposed to soccer? Literally. Look at this. Today, Jerry Jones and I announced that blockchain.com is the official digital asset partner for the Dallas Cowboys.

Okay. All right, whatever. Oh, so then it's definitely worth 3x then if they're the official crypto nonsense. Wait, so but this does raise an interesting question.

Oh, so the guy clapped back is the point. The guy was very insulting and he was basically like, well, Kathy's whole portfolio is filled with stocks that have collapsed. And meanwhile, our valuation is up 3x. So the market has spoken and we're better than her or something weird like that. This is such a ridiculous statement.

Like these are two different – I mean companies. Like what was – what's the value of these companies though? Like it's not saying that like blockchain.com is three times more valuable than Coinbase. No, it's like it could have gone 3x from, I don't know, $100 million to $300 million. The other one could be down 40% from $10 billion. You know what I'm saying? You need actual values. Kathy Wood's point, though.

Mike, what do you think about this? This is up threefold in one year and Coinbase is down 40%. Does that make any sense to you? I think the private market has this more right than the public markets. Nah, I'm going to go the other way. The public markets aren't efficient. I'm going to go the other way. They are not doing the research.

I'm going to go the other way. What? So would I. Yeah, come on. That sounds crazy to me, right? Let's just be nice. Every line in this article is crazier than the one before. I don't think it has anything to do with public-private.

It's like these are two different companies. Like one company, something can happen that's completely independent. No, but her point stands, and I don't agree with her point. I don't agree with her point either. I think she has it backwards. In the public markets, that's where we're getting the real valuations, and unfortunately, Coinbase is where it is. In the private markets, it's not that people are doing more or less research. It's that they're kidding themselves

if they think they can get liquid at whatever they were just able to raise money at. That's what I think is the real issue. I just don't see how you can take one company and maybe one company did very well and they 3X'd, and now you're saying, well, oh, just because this company 3X'd, everyone else should have 3X'd.

That makes no sense. It's completely idiosyncratic to that company. This is a ridiculous argument. I'm with you. That's an article that should not have been written or an argument that should not have been had. All right, we're going to do favorites. Michael, why don't we start with you this week? Okay. My favorite is also my least favorite. I wrote about my friend who passed away and I was just sent this for my friends. This is me in middle school. That's me. That's my friend, Dan, who's not around anymore, who just passed away. That's another kid at this table who's not around anymore. There's a few parents that are gone. So it is my least favorite thing. But to be able to see

some of my friends that I haven't seen like literally for 15 years was incredible. And I just want to say to people that are listening that have people in their lives that they haven't seen for whatever reason, we all have our reasons. Life is so short and it takes like something like this to shock our – like an electrical shock to your emotional system. So if there's people out there that you've been meaning to reach out to, for God's sakes, just do it. I mean this was one of the people passing away in recent years that was most affecting to me. And I wasn't as close to him, obviously, as you were. I didn't grow up with him. I grew up with his sisters.

But just like the amount of friends that were there, young people who showed up to the funeral, showed up to the Shiva calls. There were just like hundreds and hundreds of people. Like the whole community came out and it was just like, it was a lot. It was a lot, I think for everybody. And I mean, for obvious reasons. That was a really nice post that you wrote. And I didn't realize that that's how you ended up meeting your wife. Yep. Was because you took that job. Yep. So anyway, if you want to read what Michael's talking about, go to Irrelevant Investor and the blog is called What Actually Matters. So I thought – who is that?

That's me. All right. So I thought that was really well written. Nick, have you brought us a book or a show or something that we should be paying attention to? What's your favorite this week? I haven't even like – the last two weeks, I have not spent any time consuming content. Like I haven't even been reading blogs to be honest. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to just pump my book more, but like, I've literally just been thinking about like, I've been on podcasts like myself, so I haven't, I'm not going to pump my own podcast. Like, no, I'm not, I don't have

anything. Did you do, uh, did you do, did you do Jim O'Shaughnessy's yet? Yeah. I mean, it comes out in May, so we're not, we're not sure. Yeah. That's the one I'm going to, that's the one I'm going to check out for sure. for sure you guys have a really good relationship and a good rapport it was great it was a fun time was it fun to do?

yeah it was a fun time Josh what do you got? oh we haven't spoken about this A what did you think about Severance and do you want a second season because I'm staunchly

in the anti-season 2 camp well I was gonna say to you you made a really bad call because that was a cliffhanger that's a guaranteed second season. They announced it. I'm saying...

No, I know, but the way they ended the show, no choice. No choice. I would have preferred to just get my season one in and be done, but I thought it was great. So one thing that I'll tell you is that every series is destined for a season two unless you hear them use the term

limited series. And even in that case, there's still a chance. I am all in on limited. They would never green light. They would never buy a piece of intellectual property like a novel, hire writers,

hire producers, and then get, have Ben Stiller be involved and get actors of that caliber and be like, let's hope seven is enough. They would just, the economics that don't work.

You need a hit that you can make a second season. I just can't imagine liking season two. I can't imagine what they're going to do that. I'm going to be satisfied with, but we don't even know how we really don't even know how this whole thing is going to go now. There's no satisfying answer. What are they?

Who gives a shit what they're doing? Just, just wrap it up. I really give a shit. I very much. I care. I'm all in it up. Oh, I really give a shit. I very much give a shit. I'm all in on season two. But they're not doing anything. John has his hand raised.

No, same. I was just like, really? That's how? Really? You were pissed at how they ended it? I didn't like how they ended it, but I'm still in for season two. Only because now we have to have season two. Yeah, yeah.

I'm ready for season two. Great show. Not a good show. Great show. There were some big reveals, which I guess gave you something, but it was very Lost-like. Anyone remembers the show Lost? a good show. Great show. There was no – there were some big reveals, which I guess gave you something. But it was very Lost-like. Anyone remembers the show Lost? Yes, exactly.

That's what I don't want to put the bomb into. I had this feeling – the same feeling at the end of a season of Lost, which is like I love you, I hate you. Yeah. Last thing I'll say on this is I think this is the first thing that Apple TV put out that like everybody is watching. Do you think so? Is everyone talking about it? Yeah, it's pretty hot. I don't know if I noticed that.

The big one for me, like my next big show that I'm dying for is Peaky Blinders is coming back. Can't wait. I think May or June. So that's one of the best shows of the entire streaming era is coming back for its last season. And that's the big one for me um i i guess for my favorite it's a it's a it's a it's a dislike i'm gonna just tell people do not spend even nine seconds of your time on marvel's moon night glad you said that it's terrible please don't it is one of the worst things i've ever seen

uh maybe ever on any streaming platform and it it sucks they squandered oscar isaac i don't know how you do that but this is completely indecipherable nonsense there's not an enjoyable uh moment of it so if you were thinking about diving in, there have only been three episodes. Don't do it. I'm out. Tapped out after three. Well, I'm out too. You're out, I'm out. Public service announcer. All right, listen, everybody's got to go buy Nick's book right now. If you haven't bought an investment book in a while or ever, or if you have people in your life who are trying to start investing or trying to better themselves, this is a great gift. It's great for you to read personally.

Buy five copies. Do you care where people buy it? You want them to try to find it at a bookstore who gives a shit, right? I mean, they can do whatever. Yeah, I mean, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, whatever you guys want, Audible. Yeah, actually, the research suggests

they should DCA the book. So they should. All right, listen, go buy Nick's new book, which is called Just Keep Buying and follow what he's telling you. And it's probably better information than you're getting in 99% of other places where you're consuming financial information because it's data. It's data and then data leading to opinions, not the other way around. So I think he killed it. Are we still doing the reviews or is that limited time? Was that a limited series?

It is. I think today will be the last one for a while. Okay, good. But yeah, so I do have one that I want to read because it's kind of a stream of consciousness and it's about Josh. So today's is from Super Jeff 911. And the subject is, I don't think Josh Brown likes country music. And I hope you can maybe shed some light on this because I don't understand this. But it says, a while back, I ran into Josh Brown in an elevator while we were both ducking out of a

Clint Black concert. Didn't even realize it was Josh until after the fact. All that is to say, if Josh truly does not like country music, then I will add a six star to this review. Great podcast, always fun and insightful with excellent guests. I am in the financial planning industry and enjoy the perspectives and focus on markets and asset management. The crew does a great job of presenting this info in a straightforward way. No hidden sponsorships, etc. If you want to learn a bit, stay up to date All right. So first of all, I was not at the Clint Black concert. I don't know anything about Clint Black. I mean, I know he's famous.

I know he's married to the famous actress. I went to the Dynasty Wealth Management event. My friend Sheryl invited me to speak. I actually interviewed Cathie Wood there in November. And one of the firm's clients, one of Dynasty's clients is Clint Black. He's become a good friend of Sheryl's. So he actually gave one of the most amazing one-man show performances I've ever seen. It was an audience of maybe 200 people, tops. He did 90 minutes, all his best songs and these incredible stories.

He's had a career for 30 years. In between every song, he would tell these great stories about other famous country it was it was off the chain i think i probably was there for 80 of it and then i need to go to sleep so it's not ducking out of a clint black concert i uh and i actually do like some country music i've seen chris stapleton a bunch i'm going back at the end of august he's gonna play uh jones beach one of the biggest tours in the country this summer.

And you like Nelly. And you like Nelly. Is Nelly country? Yeah, I like Old Town Road. Does that make me a country fan? All right, listen.

Listen, Duncan, great job with the review. I agree. Let's give that a break for now. Hey, thanks so much to John, to Nicole,

to Duncan. You guys did a great job with the setup today. Thanks, Mike, for making time for us and being on the show this week. We appreciate you. Of course. Nick, great job.

I know you've done a million podcasts. Hopefully you had some fun with us. Hey guys, like and subscribe, like and subscribe. We will see you next week. Oh, my ears.

Oh, my ears. Is this a prank? Oh, come on. Shit, it's a prank. Let's start recording. Josh, you ready to roll this back? You ready? Oh, wait.

Are we doing this live now?