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Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion 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.
Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Ben, good morning. How are you? I'm doing good. Okay. It's good to see you. I want to mention in case anybody missed it, on Saturday, Ben and I did a podcast with Dr. Daniel Crosby. Title is The Joneses Aren't That Happy. We spoke about his book, The Soul of Wealth and The Joneses Aren't That Happy as a
post that Daniel wrote on LinkedIn. That was the jumping off point for the conversation. And it was great. I love talking about money, how it makes you feel. I really enjoyed it because we dug deep and his book is great because it's almost like, I guess, short blog posts, the book, but he covers the whole gamut of how money impacts you, the psychology behind it, and we dug deep. And I love those kinds of conversations where you just think deep about money. And obviously, I think
It's in a privileged place to think about that kind of stuff. But there are so many different ways that money can screw with your head. And we get into a lot of them on the show. We got a lot of emails about a topic that we discussed, the reverse flex, people that are super rich in the way that not just financially successful, but in the way that like everybody knows they're rich money that you can't hide who drives like a beater. It's like a reverse flex.
And what was the consensus? Saying it's a good thing or a bad thing? It varies. It varies. We had a few people who were like, listen, I make— Here's the thing, though. If you're going to do the reverse flex, you have to flex in other areas, though. I'm fine with a reverse flex, but it's not on everything. Nah, it's a dick move. It is. It's like, I'm so rich, I drive a beater. It's like, come on, dude. Don't flex on me. All right. So, wait. But when I drive in a court again someday, is that going to be a reverse flex or not? It depends how rich you are.
Okay. And you're never going to be that rich. Okay. So no, I'm not talking about the person with a nice income. I'm talking about the uber rich person. Yeah. If you have a nice income and you drive in a car and more power to you, like that's, you know, you want to be frugal and spend your money in different ways and give more to charity or whatever. That's one thing. I never liked this. Yes. I'm not, never a fan of the Warren Buffett has lived in the same house for you. You read snowball, right? Yeah. Buffett literally had a racquetball court in his house. He was not living in this tiny little shack.
I've made this joke before, but what they don't tell you is he had a 90,000 square foot basement. There you go. Underneath, right? All right. I want to make the case, Ben, that, and this just hit me this morning, just 30 minutes ago. I have to think hard about this, which I haven't yet, but this is a take that's baking in the oven. Three quarters bake, because I believe it. This might be, right here, right now, in the year 2025, the most interesting market environment ever.
that I've ever lived through. Now, I haven't lived through all of them, but in my professional career, I think this is the most interesting one. And I'll make the case as follows. For the setup going forward, the current market? Today. Right now. These are some of the cross-currents that investors are dealing with. Number one, first and foremost, we have Trump and the tariffs. Cross-currents. Great, great word. Tons, many cross-currents. We have Trump and the tariffs, and we are still living through what the tariffs are going to be.
where they're going to land, how they're going to impact the global economy. And not to mention the global world order, the fall of the dollar, the mooning of gold and Bitcoin, all interconnected. All right. So you've got that one. That alone would be a big one. Arguably 1A. Yeah. You know what? I would say this might even be bigger is AI, the industrial AI revolution. In fact, not might, let me not caveat that. This is bigger than Trump and the tariffs.
The AI industrial revolution, I went through Mary Meeker's 340 slide presentation, took me a couple of plane trips and several hours to get through. It was meaty, very dense. And I think the average person, in fact, let me stop caveating. The average person and the average investor is wildly underestimating how impactful this is going to be.
We're going to talk about that later in the show. I agree. I've been spending a lot more time thinking about this too. And I, I, it hurts your brain a little bit to think about the ramifications of it. So a little teaser, a bubble is coming. I'm sure of it. We've never seen a case in history where a life altering technology didn't cause a bubble. Okay. Um, then you've got the wheel. You think there was a wheel bubble back in then, you know, back in the day that you've got the rise of the retail investor, big story, right?
Yes. The retail investor makes up 25% of all trading volume, something like that. In the Compound and Friends live show last week, I made the case, what if this is secular? This whole appetite for risk. And that, to your point, could mean more bubbles. You've got the post-COVID environment, a permanent shift in spending habits, which we'll talk about later in the show. You've got the Federal Reserve, will they or won't they? When they? Will they? Cut interest rates, what are they going to do with potentially inflation?
on the back end, coming to the back end of this year. And then you've got percolating under the surface, the rise of Europe. And I saw these two headlines from Carl Coutinho over at Blue Sky. I'm no longer on Twitter, not making an official announcement, but I, I deleted the, I haven't been tweeting in a long time, but I deleted the app off my phone last night. That's a big move. So now you just check it on your desktop more? I just check my desktop, but I was, I was in bed with, sorry, Tanshid, I was in bed with Logan. Um, and, uh,
I mean, I am ashamed to admit, but I have my phone in with me in bed while I'm putting them to bed and it's horrible.
Yeah. But to take it, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm in bed with little Logan, my angel. And I'm like, yeah, the alcohol got me. I'm looking at murder videos. I'm like, oh my God, this is sick. The thing is, when you watch one video, you're watching a sports highlight or something. The next video is like two dudes brawling in the street. Yeah. So, but they know how to get you because you're going to turn away when two guys are just
beating the daily tide of each other. Here's the thing. I, my Twitter thing is I finally opened up a burner account and it's just news feeds. It's all the financial news. So, you know, maybe I'll do that. I did that a few years ago where I just, just follow just the people that,
Keep our content going. And not to make this whole Twitter conversation. Obviously, a lot of great things happened there and it's been instrumental. But that was a show that broke my back. All right. But no, but I just followed all the news organizations, like financial news stuff. And there's probably 12 to 15 of them. Yeah. And I was scrolling this morning and realizing like, oh, this is an Captain Obvious thing to say. The amount of news that is produced is absolutely insane.
It was almost overwhelming. This also coincides with me getting an alert for screen time. I got 10 hours last week and I said, all right, this is ridiculous. 10 hours. I was like, how many hours am I awake? Shame on me. Doing something about it. Okay. All right. So the rise of Europe. So Carl on Quintanilla put this on Blue Sky. Here's a headline from this morning. Netflix to invest over $1.1 billion in Spain until 2029.
Blackstone plans to invest $500 billion in Europe over the next decade. What if their executives just really want to go have meetings in Europe because it's so beautiful over there? So in conclusion, and I'm sure there's things that I've missed because this is just off the dome. I thought about this 20 minutes ago. This is right here, right now, June, 2025, the most interesting investing environment I've ever lived through. Okay. I appreciate the take. I don't think we're ever going to beat March, 2020.
But that was a moment in time. So you're saying this has like legs to it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. But I still think that the changes that we're seeing from early 2020 to now, like that situation led to this situation. Yeah, but 100%. And that was a bullet point, like the post-COVID world. But I do think, and I said this to you earlier, you could make the case of the 2020s. We're going to look back on this decade because it really does. The 2020 started immediately, right?
Like there's this whole thing that the 1990s didn't end until 9-11, right? And that's like the last real decade. I think the 2020s actually has the potential to be the first decade since 1990s. Like we didn't have a decade the first 20 years of this century. The 2000s and the 2010s totally blend together. 2020s has the, like this is going to be a decade we look back on and go, oh my gosh, can you believe everything that happened then? Yeah. All right. That's a good take. I like it. Thank you.
All right. Here's some awesome news from the Wall Street Journal. And this gets down to Josh's theory of the reliance bid. Workers are putting away a record share of their retirement. The average savings rate in 401k plans. You saw this story already or not? I did not read the article. Okay. What percentage is the average 401k savings rate now? 14.3% in the first three months of this year. Isn't that crazy? It's according to Fidelity analysis of their millions of accounts they manage.
And that includes a 4.8% contribution from employers. So call it 10% from the individual, another four or five from the employer. 17.5% of people increased their savings, or at least 5% decreased. Less than 1% stopped saving altogether. This, I have to say, I've always said like your goal when you're starting out should be double digit saving percentage. This number kind of boggled my mind. I did not realize it was this high. You know, I have an analogy for this.
Robin and I, Robin is frequently late. She's great at a lot of things, but being, being on time is not one of them. She's always scrambling out the door, four bags, overpacking, rushing, like calm down. So can you ever get out of the house on time with kids though? I can. It's almost impossible. Not, not, I can. I was on my own for Logan's baseball games twice this week, 15 minutes early. The coach said, whoa, panic. What are you doing here? Hey, just me. Easy peasy. No drama. But my point is this, we were taking two separate cars to go somewhere and
And we're on the phone and I'm like, why are you driving so fast? She's like, so I can, so we can get there fast. And now mind you driving fast. The difference between I'm driving 62 and my crappy Jeep. She's driving, I don't know, 74. However, the death rattle on that thing or got rid of that. Not yet. Not, not right now.
But she's like, I don't know, half a mile ahead of me. I see her. You know what I mean? She's not making up that much ground. Right. In a short, in a short distance, you can't make up that much time regardless of how fast you drive. Yeah. So, so we're going 23 minutes away and she got there perhaps 40 seconds before I did. And you can't make up time by driving fast. You got to leave early. Same thing with investing. There you go. You brought it around. Good analogy. Thank you. Yes. Take your time. But I, I, this is unequivocally great news. Here's some more good news from Gallup stock market ownership.
It hit roughly 60% in the late 1990s from the dot-com boom. And that decade, the 80s and 90s, I think it was 19% in the early 1980s of households owned any stock in some form, individual securities, mutual funds, whatever. It went all the way to 60% by the 90s. And then it flatlined because we had the last decade. And then it fell and it dropped to 52% in 2016. Now it's back up to 62%, which is close to an all-time high. This is the great news about the pandemic.
and getting people to accept more risk. So we've seen an increase in the number of people who own stocks. I think- You know, one of the takes that I'm proud of is in 2021, it was really popular to just destroy Robinhood and what it's doing to our culture. And I'm sure I threw some of those takes in there. Like if I went back to the tape, I'm sure that I said that a few times. The confetti stuff for sure annoyed me, but yeah, you're right. It
It's been a net positive. But I think that I was fairly balanced. Now, you know, maybe this is just me misremembering and giving myself too much credit, but I'm, I w I'd like to think that I wasn't over that, that the introduction of people to the markets, I thought, at least I think I thought was not a bad thing that whatever, um, gambling habits they might have developed early and sure. Some of it sticks with people, but ultimately people grow up and grow out of it and reintroducing or introducing people to the market.
And saving and whatever, gambling, eventually investing is on balance a good thing, even if it's not all good. So credit to Robinhood. Yeah. They have 26 million accounts and 13 million of them, half of them, are the first brokerage account ever for that person. Remember we had the whole thing where I invested in the Robinhood IPO and we had the argument about being bigger than Coinbase. And I sold like a week later, I think.
And Robinhood is now barely or a lot, I guess. It's bigger than Coinbase now. No, but it's 110% above its IPO price. Remember it had that huge run up right afterwards and then it crashed, I don't know, 95% or something. I spoke about this with Josh a couple of months ago. Schwab used to be like 14 times bigger than Robinhood and now it's less than four times. Wow. Yeah. So Robinhood had a 90% drawdown.
And then came all the way back from it. Don't say that too often. It's crazy. All right. Larry Fink was in the FT. He wants more tax breaks for investors. Now, a lot of people read this and go, oh, of course, the guy who owns an investment company wants more tax breaks because he's rich too. But he's talking about tax-deferred retirement account breaks, right? He wants to help more people invest in the economy. So he says, take Japan. Until recently, he had no tax-incentivized way to invest for retirement, which is kind of crazy. No 401k, no IRA. Right?
Now its NISA program is booming. Enrollment surpassed 25 million last year. Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers are weighing a market-based twist on Baby Bond, an investment account for every American at birth, which is the new Trump account. So I don't know if you looked at this at all. Yahoo Finance had us throwing this yesterday. So this is- Brad Gerstner's been pushing this. Yes. Credit to him. No, credit to me. I've been pushing this. Yeah, but you haven't been doing anything about it. He's actually- I've been writing about this for a while.
So under the proposal, so from 2025 through the end of 2028, any newborn child will get a thousand dollars put into their account and it's going to be automatically opened and it's going to be invested from what it says in a total stock market index fund. I hope they use someone that is dirt cheap, right? Vanguard or BlackRock. By the way, Vlad was at the white house yesterday with Garstner. Is this going to be done to Robin? Is that the idea?
Possibly. I'm not sure exactly. So then you could make contributions up to $5,000. Now, I saw a few stories that interviewed financial advisors, and they're like, listen, the tax breaks aren't very great. You're probably better off investing in a 529 plan. I don't care. The whole automatic piece of it to me, I think that's great. Yeah, love this. Like the fact that they get people invested in the stock market, and I don't know all the rules and regulations yet about when they can take it out and stuff, but-
This is a case I've been making forever. So I think this is great news. I love it. You know, there's a lot of cynicism in our society, understandably so, especially when it comes from people like Larry Fink. Because we love to complain. It's something that everyone loves to do. But it's not all bad all the time. This is a good thing.
Yes, I totally agree. All right. So we talked last week about the cash holdings and how it's kind of this like dichotomy of everyone's taking risk, but there's also these $7 trillion in money markets and there's all this money. So I got an email from someone who said, listen, I'm retiring at 65. And he said, so retirement has completely changed our cash profile. We're holding much more cash and short-term bonds now than ever before in our life.
That would decline over the next decade as these funds get spent and Social Security comes online for us. But he ran down his whole thing about how they were holding more T-bills and more short-term bonds. And I think that's going to be the case for a lot of people. So I think trying to use the cash holdings and some of this stuff as a bullish or bearish sentiment indicator, I think is going to be really hard for the next 5, 10, 15 years because of baby boomers. They're going to be raising cash for spending purposes, right? Yeah, absolutely.
But also why not bonds? I mean, if, if, if overnight rates come down to two and a half percent, that's going to look a lot different. Yeah. But I mean, I think the whole, I'm going to keep two years worth of spending in cash or something. I think a lot of people are going to do that. Yeah. So I think you're, you, you've always made the case pounding the table that money market assets, those are sticky. If they're not going to come out, I'm coming around to that idea. And I think you're probably pounding the table with fists, fisting the table. Absolutely. Something like that. So we mentioned the 2020s has been just mind boggling.
crazy. I looked at this the other day. I looked at all the annual returns. We've had, you know, one bad year in 2022, some drawdowns otherwise, but the decade now we're up over a hundred percent for the decade. That's annualized at 13.7% per year, roughly 14%. All things considered now the retort is, yeah, we threw trillions of dollars at these problems and blah, blah, blah. Still, if you would have laid out everything we've gone through, the pandemic, the
14% unemployment, negative oil prices, 9% inflation, all that. What are you going to have for annual returns? No one would have said 14% per year. The stock market has been outperforming, I don't know, happiness, contentment, well-being for the last X number of years. Yes. It's a good thing the stock market is not powered by sentiment exactly. Yeah. I mean, it is in some ways, but then again, it isn't. This makes go back to a point you made a couple months ago.
Like what would the mood be like if there was like a four year bear market? Right. Right. Not just like a, you know, run of the mill. Yeah, I agree. All right. This is a bit of a face blower. Jeffrey Kleintop tweeted. It's not just this year. As we have been saying for years, Europe has been outperforming the US over the past two and a half years since the current bull market began in mid-October 2022. That outperformance is now 30 percentage points. Wild.
He said it's still not too late to diversify if you're overly concentrated in US stocks. Look at this. So MSCI Europe index versus the S&P 500. Who'd have thunk? So this is from the bottom in 2022. I never would have believed this. It's a huge spread. And yeah, I've always had this thing where like bear markets are resets in many ways, which is funny because the pandemic bear market was a reset at first because like small caps and value stocks took off. But then you had the reversal and the growth stocks came back. But maybe this is one of those things
Those things, I never would have guessed this. Not me. All right, from Urien Timmer at Fidelity. He looked at what happens after a 20% drawdown and then like showing the rally. And this goes back to like the 1900s, I guess. And showing that this is one of the quickest V-shaped snapbacks we've had. Now, to be fair, it didn't go down as far as the other ones, obviously. This was like barely, barely hit 20, right? We had to round up or do intraday like you.
Is it possible? By the way, it didn't hit 20%. Even intraday? No, no, on a closing basis. Yeah, no, it didn't. Are you finally coming around to the intraday? No, but that was a bear market for sure. Okay, thank you. Even though it was brief. But are we almost ready to say, you can never say anything with complete certainty. Are downturns different now? Are they just going to be faster and more frequent than they were in the past? They have been for the past couple of years. So let's say you had two bear markets per decade on average, going back to history.
And they lasted 36 months. Are we just going to have three or four now and they last six to 12 months instead? I'm not ready to say that. I'm starting to come around to that. I'm starting to come around to this idea that everything moves faster and the market just prices stuff in so quickly and then moves on. Eventually, but even if it's 10 years from now, I mean, eventually there will be a bear market that doesn't V-shape recover. Yeah, there'll be a financial crisis and that will be less longer. I agree. But I think
The run of the mill. I'm going to reject that theory. I know things move quicker, but, and we can say that recoveries over the last five years, 10 years really have been quicker. But to say that this is just what it's going to be on a go forward basis for the rest of our lives. Can't do it. How about this? 75% of corrections of bear markets are just going to go quicker than they did in the past. Like I think a lot of them, that's the world we live in now because we process information so much faster.
I also, not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but I also think the way that companies respond to adverse economic conditions, the ability to lift a few levers, dial a few knobs. And the government. Now you could say, well, eventually there's going to be a policy mistake or the government's going to say, no, we're not. And that could be it. All right. I was perusing the latest JP Morgan guide to the markets. And this caught my eye. The yield to worst and subsequent five-year annualized returns for the Bloomberg U.S. aggregate total return index.
It's the forward five-year the yield currently is like 4.7% that implies a return of around 4.7% going forward from here because take the starting yield go out five years or so So my case is the 60/40 is in pretty good shape Even if the stock market doesn't do quite as well as it has for the last five years fair Yeah, the 40 piece is finally gonna pick up the slack a little bit. Yeah, that's good news. It's great news All right
Not a ton of tariff news, thank God, moving the markets lately. But libertistry economics... What if they just did the Larry David and pretended like we never did it in the first place? Would anyone really care besides the taco memes? So the New York Fed did a survey and they asked manufacturers and service firms, what percentage of the price increase are you going to pass through to your customers? And...
The things that stand out are 100%, like all of the cost increase, was almost half of service firms and about 30% of manufacturing firms. And then on the other end, you had 20% of both-ish, a little bit more, said they're going to eat it. They're not going to pass on the costs. And then the middle is a little bit flatter. But yeah, that's how it works. Cost increase, pass them on. I wonder if the ones that said they're going to eat it are kind of lying too. If this is like a sentiment survey. Are they really going to eat the whole thing? I don't know.
Okay, let's just hope it doesn't come to pass. All right, I'm going to make it. You made a case earlier. I'm going to make a case. I think I've done this before, but I think the Fed should cut rates. Let's hear it. Let's do it. Rip the bandaid off. So the EU has already cut eight times, I believe. They're back down to 2%. And people can say, well, they're getting ahead of the tariff stuff. Well, why don't we get ahead of the tariff stuff?
Trump actually said inflation should come back, then he can raise the rates to counter. Saying, look, if the Fed cuts rates and inflation comes back, you can always raise them back again. Torsten Schlack, M&A activity is about the lowest it's been. I don't know how they actually, this is by deal count. Global M&A activity, very weak. IPO market, pretty darn low. This is from Renaissance Capital, which tracks all the IPO stuff. The IPO market is just
It's heating up a little bit. There's a few more IPOs, but compared to the past, it's still pretty darn small. But so what? The Fed should cut because there's low M&A and IPO activity? This is the big one, though. U.S. existing home sales are now at the lows of the great financial crisis. David Kelly says the National Association of Home Builders Market Index fell to its lowest level in 18 months, while single-family building permits fell to a two-year low.
High mortgage rates, high prices, weakening demographics are all impeding home building. So I think we need to have more activity. I think the housing market is the big one here. I agree. Fully. Fully on board. And a lot of people say, well, if the Fed lowers rates, that doesn't mean that longer term rates are going to come down. But the Fed could say, hey, we want lower mortgage rates. I think they could say that. Yeah, it does. I mean, maybe it doesn't, but you would think. Okay. I agree with you. To me, the big one is- And then AI is deflationary.
Put it all together, I think the Fed should cut. Neil Dutta agrees. Neil Dutta said, slowdowns don't always stop on their own. And in this case, it feels like a policy response will eventually be needed.
Between now and then, the pressure on the economy will continue to build. Even if tariff noise subsides, the longer the Fed waits, the more they will end up having to cut later. I agree with you. I agree with Neil. Matthew Klein, did you read his piece? He had a piece saying the Fed should not be cutting rates. Right. I think the Fed is always late though. And I think they like it being late. I don't know. For some reason, they like it. So, but just to push back on the IPO market a little bit, the IPO market, even though we're not getting a tidal wave, we are getting more activity and the deals are scorching hot. Coreweave,
IPO at 40, it's at 160. Circle did a double the first day. Mike Sicardi tweeted that Chime Financial IPO demand blows past share supply ahead of pricing, exceeding the number of available shares by more than 10 times. So there is a speculative frenzy going on in some corners of the market. But is it speculative because there aren't enough IPOs?
Right. There's appetite for it, but there's not enough companies that are going public. Either way, that argument to me falls on deaf ears that the Fed should cut because there's not a lot of M&A and IPO activity. I just think that, yeah, that's down the list. But I think housing activity is a really big one and it's really important for the economy. And it's essentially just slowed to a crawl. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Cut.
And it does seem like the business, I was talking to a friend this week saying that, listen, our company has essentially completely stopped hiring new grads. Like that's a thing people have been talking about lately. And that's like, that's an AI worry. And I don't know for sure if that AI worry is going to come to fruition, but there's a lot of people who are just, it's the tariff stuff. And I think the labor market is slowly starting to, you know, stop a little bit. We haven't spoken about it yet on the show, but both Neil Dutta-
and Cali are definitely putting a lot of notice on the cooling labor market. Market seems to be unperturbed for now, but
Something to keep an eye on. It is crazy because the unemployment rate basically hasn't budged in 18 months or so. It's been like 3.9% to 4.2%. Yeah. Both Neil and Callie say, but like if you look past the headline number under the surface, there are some concerns. Nothing red, but maybe a little bit of a yellow. Yes. I just think for whatever reason, the Fed never wants to try to get ahead of these things. They've never done it. Yeah. And so if we have to get a 50 basis point cut again at some point, that's probably what's going to happen. All right. Let's talk about artificial intelligence.
So Mark Rubenstein has a sub stack called net interest. It is one of my absolute favorites. He writes about financial services companies and it just turned five years old. That went fast. Been there since the beginning. I think he said one major development. So he did a reflection on the last five years. One major development has been the integration of AI tools into my research process.
While the core analysis remains human-driven, AI has enhanced my ability to process vast amounts of financial information and surface relevant insights. For a solo operation like mine, the impact has been profound. I once considered recruiting London Business School students for research support, but AI has largely filled that gap. Sorry, MBAs. I now use AI to analyze earnings transcripts, source relevant publicly available research, and edit my writing, all in a fraction of the time it once took, allowing me to focus more on the interpretive work that adds value.
I was a pretty slow adopter of it, and now I'm using it. It's now a daily thing, maybe like an hourly thing where I'm constantly using it and asking questions and did I miss anything? So I have a scenario for you. So let's say like this, it really does ramp up productivity and millions of jobs are at least disrupted or they're not filled or whatever, or they're not put out there.
So that's disinflationary deflationary. So I'm picturing an economic environment of rising unemployment. And I said this at the live show, like what if we get rising unemployment, but not a recession? I can, I can see that deflation. And then, but then you have rising profit margins, profits and margins. There's going to be a ton of people who are really angry at the stock market. And that does not sound far-fetched at all, right? That's when people are going, these corporations are doing better than ever. Their profit margins are rising and I'm out of work.
This is when people get really, really mad at corporations in the stock market. I don't know, maybe- I could easily envision a cover of The Economist along those slides. So we got an email that expresses a sentiment. I'm confident AI is still early and going to take up many white collar jobs in the next few years. Could you speak about what a bold but responsible AI investment would look like? 40 years old, W2 jobs, standard investments. So he said, this is the kind of tweet getting my attention.
And Buko Capital. Wait, so this guy wants to know, like, how do I invest in this? Yeah, basically. So Josh wrote a blog post years ago just by the damn robots. Yeah. That was an early prophetic post from Josh. So Buko Capital, one of the best on Twitter, said, I asked Gemini and ChatGPT to construct a portfolio based solely on the new 300-plus slide Mary Meeker AI trend report.
So my take is this, as I mentioned earlier, a bubble is coming and allow me to present some charts from Mary Meeker. I understand a lot of people are listening. Wait, hang on. Before you get into this, my simple Ben answer is just you own the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ 100. Yeah. I mean, 35% of the S&P is now direct beneficiary of AI.
Yeah. I think that's, if you don't want to get too cute about it, that's the simplest route. All right. So she has a chart. I believe we mentioned this because she pulled this from Stripe, from Stripe's annual letter, but she's showing the top 100 AI companies versus the top 100 SaaS companies, the median time to annualize revenue of a hundred million dollars. I'm sorry. Faster ramp to, okay. To 5 million, my bad, to 5 million. It took SaaS companies 37 months to
It's taking the median top 100 AI company 24 months. SaaS was revolutionary or evolutionary. This is revolutionary. Everything is faster. So she has a few slides in there and I only grabbed a few, but she has many highlighting different companies and how fast they're growing. So Cori, for example, Cori revenue is up 730% from 2022 to 2024. Q1 revenues were $982 million. That's up 420% year over year.
Like I said earlier, the Cori IPO, it IPO-ed at 40 two months ago. And that first week or so, remember, it kind of just went nowhere and fell, I think because of the tariff stuff still. Now it's at 160, 40 to 160. Palantir, certainly in the AI category. Palantir, so she has a chart showing the global public market cap leaders, 83% of them, 25 out of 30 are based in the US, by the way. Palantir,
now has a market cap of $302 billion. What? It's just behind Coca-Cola? I have a chart in here showing Coca-Cola's market cap from 1990 to today versus Palantir, which IPO-ed a couple of years ago. And basically the bridge is closed. Palantir is trading at 105 times price to sales. Hang on. What does Palantir do?
AI defense? I don't know. It's one of those companies that, eh. It's stock goes up. That's what it does. Zoom, the poster child for the bubble in 2021, traded at 125 times sales. Palantir, not so far behind, 105. Now, I know there's a Palantir army. Don't come at me, please. I understand that there's things going on other than price to sales ratio. I understand the explosive economic growth and margins and moats and blah, blah, blah. Plus their CEO has that little thing here. Yes. Nevertheless, wow.
$300 billion market cap. Palantir, just behind Coca-Cola. Unbelievable. All right. There's a company called Scale AI. It did $335 million in revenue in 2023. It did $870 million in 2024. There's a company called Vast Data. It's data infrastructure engineered for insight. Basically went from zero in 2019 to $2 billion in sales in 2025. And this one caught my attention. I actually went to the website. I'm like, wait, what is this now?
It says specialized AI legal workflows. So Harvey, it's a company called Harvey. It went from 10 million to 70 million AOR in 15 months.
In 2024, we saw four times annual recurrent revenue growth and expanded from 40 customers to 235 customers in 42 countries, including the majority of the top 10 USA law firms. So they're doing something in law with AI to enhance productivity. Not my world, but my point is this. If you are not inside of this and you are not aware of what's going on, you will be very soon. All of us will be. And it's coming like a freight train.
And there will be a bubble if we're not in one already. Do you also think most people just, it's going to be integrated into their lives in a way that they don't even realize they're using it? Yeah, sure. One of the companies that she highlighted was customer service agents. You know, when you're like, no, no, I said customer support. Like that whole stuff is going to be upended. All of it. Here's my thing. I agree with you about a bubble. I would be more surprised if we didn't get a bubble than if we did. Like I've been saying since the early days of ChatGPT, like,
History tells us that anytime there's an innovation like this, you get a bubble because people pull forward expectations. And there is the thought that without hyperbole, this will be the biggest revolution, technological revolution we've ever seen. And I wouldn't fade that. Ben Thompson wrote a piece a couple weeks ago about just the amount of money that the big companies, the hyperscalers, as he called them, are spending on. And he's like, how long is the market going to let them
Like how far would their free cashflow margins have to fall before the market finally slaps them on the wrist and says like, okay, if you're not seeing the returns yet, that's like the only case against it is, is there this immaculate handoff of the baton from all the, all the investing right into returns that, and, and the market says, you know what? We're not going to let you or buy these companies 50% lower. So that is the question. That is the question. Um, and, and her slide deck, what she has a lot, and I'm going to talk with Josh about this, about
the hyperscalers and the CapEx as a percentage of revenue. And it's crazy how much they're spending. And yes, to your point, their free cashflow margins of Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, it has gone down pretty substantially as they just dump money into these things. And the market doesn't seem to care right now. Given the unabundance of that, at what point does the market start? That's the thing where I always say that we got everything we wanted and more from the dot-com bubble.
Like, I think the stuff people were asking for in the 90s, they would probably be shocked at how much stuff we have. Just YouTube and Spotify and all these things. And we still had to go through the dot-com blow up to get there. Like, can we get the AI handoff without that? That is the question. Now, I would be remiss if I didn't say it because I understand this might sound like, oh, Michael, so bullish, LOL, top. The stock market. This really is neither here nor there, but I do just want to throw this out.
that the stock market has gone straight up for the last month, basically uninterrupted. And I'm not calling for a 5% pullback tomorrow, but it feels like things have gotten too easy in the stock market in the very short term. Yeah. And you had the chart last week that we shared on Exhibit A of the MAG7 drawdowns that they've seen already this week.
in 2022. Yeah, I have that here. So just pin this for one second because we're right there. So there's a great chart shared from Daily Chartbroke via VandaTrack, and they show the retail purchases of the Mag7. So it's a 10-day moving average percentage of total retail inflows. And interestingly...
People bought the shit out of the liberation day dip and credit to them. They've been selling ever since. If you look at the retail purchases, they've been going straight down. Wait, just because the purchases are going down. It doesn't mean they're selling though. Right. Just means they're not buying as much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is interesting. So they only buy when like they see, they only buy the dip. I mean, okay, here's another one. You can't really call it a fat pitch, but you can call it like a, a meatball kind of, it was a fat pitch. It was a fat pitch.
JP Morgan has a great chart. Retail portfolio weights in MAG7 have been declining. Look at this. In the summer of 2024, it hit 10% in MAG7. Now it's under 2%. Big time high. So Ben, to your point, last week you mentioned this, but look at this. The drawdowns for Apple in 2022 were 37%. And again, 31%. Is that 31 or 37? I can't even tell. In 2025. Yeah.
Uh, NVIDIA fell 63% in 2022. It fell 37% in 2025. Tesla fell 49% in 2025. Meta fell 34% in 2025. I am sick and tired. And this is the last time I will say this, I think for now, I'm sick and tired of people just like mocking the retail investor. All they had to do was buy and hold the max seven. Right. There's been two monster drawdowns in the last three years. Amazon, Facebook, NVIDIA, and Tesla all fell more than 50%. And some of them fell even more than that.
So instead of like a, cause the.com bubble, but the NASDAQ crashed more than 80%. That was a complete wipeout. Amazon fell 95%. We're not going to get that. No. Right. That's not going to happen. Um, because when that happened, Amazon was still hemorrhaging. I mean, Amazon was obviously a fundamentally different business, but their free cashflow is wildly negative. Yeah. None of those companies were making money. That was the problem. But
Thinking through what, if there is an AI bubble, what could that look like? Could we just see, back to my point about faster markets, could we see a series of like 20 to 30% drawdowns in these as they work through? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Now somebody might say, Michael, what are you talking about? Did you hear what you just said five minutes ago? Palantir is trading at 105 times sales. What do you mean there can be a bubble? Now, if somebody wants to say we're in one right now, okay, I'm not going to fight you.
Um, the market cap for core weave is currently, and again, I'm, you know, don't really know much about the fundamentals of this company, but the market cap of core weave is $75 billion. Knowing human nature, things can always, always, always get stupider. That would be if, if this AI stuff and people really start, oh my gosh, paying attention to it. To your point, I don't think what percentage of the population really is paying attention to this right now. How many of your friends are asking about the AI trade?
it's, it's minimal. I've had a few AI conversations with friends more about like how you use it at work and stuff, but it's, it's tiny in the grand scheme of things. Tiny. Um, all right. We've, we've shared these charts before, but it's kind of wild. Um, if you index the mag seven versus the remaining 493 stocks, damn it. I, I,
I didn't put the tweet in here. So my apologies, whoever I'm lifting this from. Looks like a Goldman chart, but I can't remember. The MAG7 up into the right and the remaining 493 stocks, not great performance, but okay. This is cap waiting. This is how it works. It's like saying, well, take KD and Steph off the 2016 Warriors. No, you can't.
This is part of the deal. There's another chart. And that's why I think that's the, if you really want to make an AI bet, the easiest play is just that. And you wait, you'll let the stock market pick the winners for you. So here's another great one. And we've, we've mentioned this before, but bears repeating. They have a chart showing the MSCI Acqui XUS.
Now we're looking at earnings- So that's just the rest of the world. The rest of the world. We're looking at earnings per share versus the S&P 493. Kind of remarkable. They track each other almost identically, right? Yeah. And then again, there's the MAC 7, which is on its own chart. And this is it. I know we keep repeating ourselves, but this has been the dominant story. Nobody could have imagined, certainly myself included in 2015 and 2018 and 2019 and 2022, that all of these sort of things were going to happen. That the margins and the moat, which is going to keep getting wider and wider. Maybe we're at an inflection point.
Maybe AI is the big disruptor that comes for everybody or some people. Yeah. And if the people are getting out of the mag seven trade, they're going down to the next tier, the Palantirs and whatever. They're looking for the next NVIDIA that's going to be in the top 10. Michael Semblitz was on odd lots recently. He said, AI is the stock market bet of the century. And I, and his, the bet part is just not that it's going to change the world. And it probably is, but it's also just the amount of money that's flowing in there. That is the bet.
That's it. Yeah, I tend to agree. That's it. So not to say nothing else matters because it's stupid hard to tune out the drawdowns of the bear markets because they're coming along the way. There's no doubt about it. We just had one. But you got to keep your eye on the ball. Now, the story will crack eventually. I don't know when, but you're right.
Crypto we haven't spoke about crypto in a while. No last week you and I were talking we were in Chicago We're looking at all the Bitcoin ETFs and how much money they have we looked at I bit which is the I shares one That's the biggest one has over 70 billion in assets. I think the fidelity one had 30 billion. It's a huge thing I saw some I can't remember who did it and I'm not throwing shade at this person But someone tweeted that they came to our event last week and their crypto person. They said hey, so I went to a trad five event and
And I keep talking about our event. Yeah, we're TradFi guys. But people in crypto use the word TradFi. And it's I think it's a derogatory term. Don't you? It depends. Not always. Okay. I feel for me, it feels like a derogatory term. And I have a secret to share for the crypto people. Crypto is TradFi now. Bitcoin is TradFi. You have $100 billion plus in crypto ETFs. And that's been the big story of the past year for crypto.
Crypto is TradFi. When stable coins come up, stable coins is the big thing for crypto. Like that's the, that's the rails to get people on or whatever. That's the entrance ramp. I mean, you're a hundred percent right. Where's, where's, where's crypto without the ETF? If it's TradFi doesn't come into crypto, crypto is, what are we talking about these days? Bitcoin's what? 40,000. So sorry. Crypto now is TradFi. Yeah. Um, so BlackRock. And there's nothing wrong with, there's nothing wrong with that. That's what that, if you're a crypto person, that's what you want.
Well, it depends which, which, but you can't, can't pretend like it's, it's separate now. It's the same thing. Um, black rocks. I bet took in a record amount of monthly flows in may. About tunas has his chart showing, um,
how long it took to get to $70 billion. Now, obviously GLD, VOO, it's not an apples to apples comparison because ETFs were much different in 03 when GLD, but nevertheless, 341 days versus 1700 days for VOO, pretty remarkable. And this is what we've been looking for. Balchun has also tweeted, a nice look at the breakdown of holders of the spot Bitcoin ETFs via 13F filings. Advisor has surged up the list now to number one by a mile.
These 13F filers make up 20% of total assets. But in my opinion, that is likely to rise to 35%, 40% as more adoption comes. And James Seifert is the origin for this data. But look at this investment advisor.
See, it's funny. RIAs have so much more power now because the idea at the beginning of crypto was just wait till the institutions come. You can see endowments are on there, insurance companies, but they're much smaller than... I mean, they're dropping the bucket compared to advisors, right? This is why all the private...
The endowments, endowments and insurance companies like the institutional, like they're tiny, tiny pensions. Look at how family offices are very small compared to investment advisors. And so here we are. Bitcoin is at an all time high end. I'm not getting any questions from friends and family. Are you not really? I guess there's just so much going on now. Are you it's hit one 10. That's that was your top of your range. You're ready to sell. Oh, by the way, in terms of, in terms of interesting
moments in markets. I mean, I mentioned Bitcoin briefly, but like, holy shit, Bitcoin, a new asset class at all time highs. Yeah. Yeah. It's now just no one has the conversation anymore. Remember the beginning it was, listen, you put 2% of your portfolio in it and if it goes to zero, who cares? No one ever says anymore. Well, if it goes to zero. Yeah. That risk has been taken off the table. So wait, so I was looking at this as we were talking, do you know how much money is in VOO now, which is the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund?
This is going to be a trillion dollar ETF. It's $660 billion. Well, Jeffrey, I have this tab open. I haven't had time to read it yet. Sorry, Jeffrey, but I will. The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund has $1.7 trillion in assets. Oh, it does? Oh, if you include all the ETFs and see that this is just ETF as well, right? Holy smokes. Yeah.
That's unbelievable. 1.7 trill. All right. This was a headline. JP Morgan plans to offer clients financing against crypto ETFs. And why wouldn't they? They're in the money-making business too. But obviously, Jamie Dimon has been, I would say, fairly vocally harsh. Let's take out the fairly. He's been very anti-crypto. So this is just margin loans against Bitcoin ETFs? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, why not? I wonder what those rates are. All right. Real estate? Dental crypto? Let's do it.
All right. Older millennials just got super lucky. So this is the share of first-time homebuyers, again, from Torsten Slack. And in 2010, it was 50% the share of first-time homebuyers buying a house. That's crazy. It went from 50% to 24%. So still, it's been falling a lot. And you could say that wasn't normal either. Half of all homebuyers shouldn't be first-time homebuyers. And the thing is, there wasn't a lot of activity back then either.
But that's pretty, if you were an older millennial, you timed things perfectly. Like there's going to be a divide. I feel like everyone puts baby boomers in the same cohort, even though it's like an 18 or 20 year window. Or like my dad was born in 1947. I hope I'm not getting that wrong. He was a big part of the baby boom. I think people in like the early 60s are still called boomers, but that's a completely different part of the demographic, right?
The difference between older and younger millennials is huge. There's going to be a massive difference there. You could say we also got F'd.
to the teeth of a financial crisis. Oh, yeah, the labor market was awful. Yeah. Every generation has its shit. I mean, without fail. I heard a lot of, in 2008, 9, 10, I heard a lot of people just say, like, you should be happy you even have a job, right? I didn't have a job. Wow. I was paying 400 bucks a month for my job. Hey, you were a waiter there for a while, right? Speaking of real estate, this caught my eye. Now, I know this is Apple's and Apple's
I don't know, pencils, not a direct comparison, but holy mackerel from Mary Meeker's presentation. She compares data center build time. Now we're talking a fully operational data center, 750,000 square feet, which is the equivalent of 418 homes. That took 122 days to build. I don't know where that, I forget where this was. It took 122 days to build this thing.
versus the average home that's 1,792 square feet, on average, takes 234 days to build. Much more money in the first one than the second one, obviously. A little bit of a bigger investment. A little bit more incentives. We've built three homes in the course of our home-owning lifetimes. It is such a...
onerous process with all the permits are holding us up here or the, this is holding us up and that this, we can't do this until we do this. And it is one of those things where I don't know until they just 3d print a house for you or something. It seems like it's always going to take while it's, it's never going to be easier or more efficient. It's all like rules and regulations and stuff. I think. All right. Private markets are getting
a decent amount of negative press these days. A lot. Yes. Um, you're right. The negative press is, I think it's warranted in some ways, but in other ways, it's like this whole industry is not garbage. Like there wouldn't be this much money in it if it didn't do something for investors. I think we all understand the downsides and they will continue to be reporting about it because, because it's, it's valid. There was a lot of shitty behavior that is happening. That is coming that we need to be vigilant against, but
There's a chart that is going around, that's been going around. We've seen it before. This is from Bloomberg, Source's pitch book. Private equity distributions have plunged. Investors haven't yet gotten all their cash back since 2016 vintage. Okay, okay, okay. But-
It's a cliff, right? It basically goes to zero from like 2021 to today. And you might see this and be like, oh my God, investors aren't getting their money back. Yeah, obviously if you invested two years ago, you're barely getting your money back. Duh. These funds laid out. They're not trading stocks. Most of these funds have a seven to 10 year window in which they can invest the capital. And a lot of them have an extension that they'll let investors vote on saying we're going to go an extra two years because we need more time to invest.
It's a long period just to get the money invested. I mean, this chart is hot garbage. Right. This is the way it should look. Yeah, exactly. But getting back to the point that like remaining vigilant because my God, is it coming? The tidal wave, we've spoken a lot about this and we will continue to. Ben Johnson has a chart showing the number of launches of interval funds. And this is just going to go. Yeah, this is how advisors invest in this. Yeah, but this is going to hockey stick higher. Ben Johnson was at our live event yesterday.
Yeah, he was. Shout out to Ben. I saw this headline this morning. I have not had a chance to dig in. Maybe we'll talk about this next week. Withdrawal requests at Starwood Property Fund are at $850 million. The fund sold $1.6 billion worth of property from December to May to meet redemption requests. Not great. But this is why those interval funds have like a 5% cap on how much they can and will sell. They don't want everyone rushing for the exits they want. So Bill Gurley was talking about- But wait, hold on. One thing. One thing. We'll last thing on this. And but also-
The fund sold $1.6 billion worth of property from December to May to meet redemption requests.
They sold it. There was so much money out there. Yeah. So it's not like they got, they had to lock it up and gate it because they couldn't sell it. Who knows what type of return they got, but like they're, my point is there's so much money. My God, there's so much money. Distressed funds, LOL. So Jason Zweig wrote a piece about secondary funds and how they work. And it's kind of a weird thing where you buy the fund at a discount, then you immediately mark it up and it looks like you have the, so it's, it's hard to like,
People are trying to wrap their brains around that. So Bill Gurley quote tweeted this, and he said, in all private, all the time world will be much messier, a much messier world with even more opportunists and charlatans. Transparency is an investor's friend. Darkness, I can't even say that word. Obfuscation is not. That is a tough word. Yeah, it is. But it looks better when you write it and say it. Bill Gurley is a venture capitalist. He's in this world.
So he's not, he's talking, he's talking his book. He's not saying like, he's not a guy from the outside. He's a person in this world. And I'm sure he gets, he gets a lot more transparency because he's such a big, well-known investor. But so for people that are not familiar, his point is true.
The meat of the story was, and I want to talk to some people and find out how common this is and is this shady or are there like, yeah, no, this is how it works. And also there's something else. So Jason reported on a fund company. Was it Hamilton Lane? Yeah. Who bought...
distressed assets or whatever, bought assets in the second day, marketed a discount from their NAV, immediately marked it up to the NAV, and then it's taking performance fees on that. Now, I saw some other people tweeting about this, and I want to talk to somebody to get more information that, yeah, this is how it works, but there's also clawbacks and high watermarks.
And they have to do all of that. Otherwise, this goes backwards. Now, I don't know. This is like a little bit outside my lane, but it certainly doesn't sound great. When I worked in the institutional investment world and we invested in some secondaries, we thought it was great because we would invest in it. They'd buy it at a 40% discount and our IRR immediately would look great because they market back up to 100 cents of the dollar, right? So for us, and I don't remember how the performance fees work for all of those, but
But as an investor, you were going, this is awesome. Look at how great I am. I mean, here's maybe a stretch, but imagine a hedge fund manager bought a stock that was trading at 50 down from 100, and they just marked it at 100 and just started taking carry on that.
Right. Like, oh, I bought it at a discount. But the private equity manager would tell you that, no, the marks on this are true. The reason there was a discount is because it's hard to get out of these things. There's no market for it. Right. So I can actually see both sides in this one. Well, if there's no market for it, then how do they sell? Well, true. All right. So your point is, can you trust the marks? And you don't know until they have a liquidity event, which we don't have those anymore. The fees are real. The marks are questionable. True. All right. So we reference the transcript all the time.
And I want to make the case that transcripts are more valuable than macro data, or at least as valuable. So following the company earnings reports and then the quarterly earnings calls. Yeah. So I pulled a couple of quotes that, bear with me, I want to read some of this. Well, they've been really helpful for us for understanding the consumer for the past few years, for sure. So a tractor supply.
President said, I'd say what we're seeing on the consumer is really not much difference in this last two or three years. I think consumers continue in their rhetoric and in the qualitative comments, talk about being cautious and even some modest kind of confidence kind of variations we've seen over the last few months. But if they can practice in terms of their spending, consumers are holding up very well. As the weather has come out and has come out and the spring has finally arrived, our seasonal products are selling very well. So when the sun's out, the business has been very good.
Here's the CEO of Marriott. If you and I had been sitting here a year ago and you had said to me, imagine a circumstance where your biggest market gets to a 52-year low in consumer confidence. How do you think about average? I mean, how do you think about rev par? Was that revenue per average room, I guess? That sounds about right. I don't know what my answer would have been. I'm fairly certain it wouldn't have been north of 4% growth.
Okay. So this is what I mentioned earlier, that the post-COVID spending environment is a permanent shift. I lifted that from, again, the CEO of Marriott. He said,
One of the takeaways from our perspective, we talk often about the shift in consumer spending patterns. Pre-pandemic, you had younger demographics already prioritizing travel and experiences and how they deploy their disposable income. When we look at the credit card spending data today, that phenomenon has spread across demographics and feels pretty permanent. And I think that the shift is offsetting some of the indicators that would have historically led to much softer REF PARs.
I think a lot of people look at travel as a necessity these days. It's not a discretionary purchase anymore. It's like, no, we are going to travel. I think a lot of people just have that feeling. Here's SoFi. And they serve probably, not probably, they serve the median price
Financial person in terms of income may be lower just because it's younger people. Probably younger, I would say. We underwrite on the personal loan side to a 7% to 8% average life of loan loss. Losses are trending well below that. Okay. All right. Here's some of the downside because it's not all roses. From TransUnion, there's unemployment, which we mentioned earlier. The only, I think, concern that we see at this point is with the unemployment rate. If you unbundle the number,
The percentage of consumers that are working part-time but wish they could work more hours has increased in a material way. And that could be an early indicator of a slowdown in the jobs market. And then lastly, from Dollar General, during our recent customer survey work, 25% of Dollar General customers reported having less income than they did a year ago. And nearly 60% of our core customers noted that they felt the need to sacrifice some necessities in the coming year.
So shout out to the transcript for this. I am subscribed to their sub stack. If you're interested in this, I suggest you check it out. But also Ben, this goes back to the point. So like you could read this and be like, see there's cracks. There's cracks forming on the lower income side. But what we said earlier last week, that data point from Savita, that the lower income consumer is responsible for two percentage points of earnings per share in the S&P. They don't matter to the stock market.
Not talking about the human side to the stock market. It's, it's the hyperscalers. That's why if AI really is this big booming productivity tool, then the stock market, what if it doesn't care about a rise in unemployment? That's, that sounds really dark. That sounds really stupid to think in your head. Like, of course it's going to care, but what if it, what if it leads to more productivity and it doesn't care that that's a world I'm like preparing myself for. All right. Two things on the personal finance front. A bunch of people sent me this because I'm a big truck fan, as you know,
Wall Street apes. I don't know what this is. How is this legal? American finances a truck that costs $111,000. He makes 84 payments of $1,900. And the amount he will pay in total for the truck is 160-ish.
So that's because he's paying 10% interest on this. 10% interest, the finance charge is almost 50 grand. So the total is 160. They want to know. This person says, I don't care what anyone says. This is usury and the bankers doing this should be locked up. No, no, no, no. The person making this purchase should be locked up. Take away their checkbook. Take away their credit card. This is insane behavior. 10 at 10.6% borrowing cost.
Sorry. All right. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. I'm doing some math. Bear with me. So this person. See, when people say, Ben, why do you hate trucks so much? My bad. My bad. My bad. I completely misunderstood. I thought that after the car. No, no, no. Yeah. That's almost what it looks like. Okay.
Um, so that's the, yeah, this, the, the word of this really threw me off. Yeah. All right. So yeah. So that's, yeah, that's called interest. I'm sorry. Yes. Yeah. You're making a decision to do this. Right. And that's the going rate of interest. Um, that's the Jamie Irons. People are willing buyers at blah, blah, blah. Uh, okay. So this is crazy. I never look at this stuff, but I, I booked a hotel room in Chicago yesterday cause we're going there for the Morningstar conference in a couple of weeks. And, uh,
They're worse than hotels are worse than ticket master destination fee, $25 city tax, $16. This is for a one night stay state tax, $35 destination fee tax, $4 and 35 cents. The city of the state that is what it is, but the destination fee and the destination fee tax is hot garbage.
Right? That's just like a, we know you're going to pay. And people say, well, we don't mind taxing tourists. We'd rather tax tourists than people who live in our city and state. And I know people will pay these because, but it's just, it just seems, I don't know. Gross. Yes. Unnecessary. Can I ask you a question about laundry? Okay. So I have a bench in front of my bed. Okay. Is that where you put the clean clothes or the dirty clothes? Well, here's the rub. They're not dirty. Or are they?
If you put on a hoodie to go out to a Little League game and you come back an hour and a half later and you drop it on the bench, should that be washed? No, no, no. Hoodies and jeans, those are fine for multiple wears. T-shirts, wash a T-shirt every time. You can't re-wear a T-shirt. So I've been having this thing with Robin lately. Stop. I wore that for an hour. That's not laundry. Because the more times you wash something, the more the quality degrades. Yeah. The kids, if the kids wear it, then you wash it because they're
T-shirts, automatic wash. I'm smelly. T-shirts get washed. Sweatshirts, sweater, jeans. Those are, of course, you don't wash those every time. Okay. We're on the same picture. All right. Just an idea for...
because we did our live show last week in Chicago. Do you think that live shows and events have a different feel since the pandemic? Like, do people appreciate them more now? And obviously our events, we're always trying to have a little fun because we, you know, we had people at a bar for an hour before our show and at Future Proof It's Outside on the beach. But I've been to a bunch of other things where I've spoken at conferences. I feel like people now appreciate the live because there's so much more Zoom. I feel like they appreciate it more being in person. Yeah, I think, I think it's, well, we didn't really do it. I don't, we don't want to,
big frame of reference. We weren't really on the road that much pre-pandemic doing live shows. Yeah. I just think every sort of conference I've been at, like, I think people appreciate them more than they did before. I think that's one of the outcomes we've seen since the pandemic. So at the live show, I got a little bit roasted and you know what? It was fair for my attire. Normally I am the least dressed person on the stage.
And I look, I dress pretty nice in our Chicago event. And, uh, it was embarrassing. I don't know what I was thinking. That's not me. I, I totally signed off on it. I thought you looked good. You had some nice leather loafers on. I thought you looked good. I think people are just not used to you dressing like that. Neither am I. You had like a, you looked like a total, I said, you looked like you could work for Steve Cohen. You had a vest on with a nice shirt. You and I went shopping. It felt like I was wearing, it felt like I was wearing a costume.
That's why people were roasting you because they're not used to seeing it. But I thought you looked nice. Okay, thank you. All right, story time. So we took an Uber in Chicago and we got in and the guy is blasting Creed.
Right. And and he said, do you guys want something else? Oh, yeah. Like I was that was hilarious. And you said, no, I'll keep your creed on, man. It's OK. I said, turn it up. Yeah. And then we had a discussion about like you were like, do people really like creed or they like it ironically? Because sometimes you can't tell. And I feel like the Internet has allowed people to ironically, but also really like stuff more because other people like that, like it with them.
Right. It's you can you can find your groups about this stuff more easily than you could pre-internet days. It's hard to unpack that. That's a good point, because my friends were asking me this. If I want to go to a Creed concert this summer, I was like, like to like to laugh. I don't. Right. I don't understand. Like, do we do we like Creed? The lines have been blurred between like, do I actually like them? Ironic. I've said this about the Guy Fieri theory. Like at first, everyone hated him. Like, you know, highbrow people. Then it's like, actually, I like him ironically. And now people just like him.
That's how things work. And the funny thing is, is that we got out of that Uber, went back to the hotel and I go for a run on the, what's that high line thing called? 606. And you know, I listened to my run. Great. Great.
Okay, this is a good question. Hey guys, can you elaborate on your movie show rating? On a 0 to 10 scale, I would consider 5 average, but it seems that your system is different. In the most recent show, you guys talked about a show that was bad, but Ben gave it a 5.4. Is 6.4 an average for you guys? So I said 5.4, and this was the mountainhead one. Here's the thing. It was a high quality movie, but it was a bad movie. Like good acting, but not good. I've heard some people zag and say they actually like it.
Oh, that's just contrarian behavior. Trust me. I rarely go below a five. Five for me is bad. It'd have to be really, really bad to get into fours or threes for me. You know, I have a whole list of my movie ratings. Like The Tree of Life. I remember that one with Brad Pitt. I never saw it. Never heard of it. Is that what it's called? It's like a 2.5. Duncan probably likes it. Okay. I'm a harsh critic, even though I like bad movies. Like, how about this? I don't know why this popped in my head. Deep Blue Sea. I love that movie.
I love that movie. I saw it in the theater. You know what I would give it? Eh, six, eight. Okay, yeah. Those ones have to be in the sixes. If you give Deep Blue Sea over 7.5, you're a clown. That's true. Acknowledge that I love that movie, but you can't rate it high. Let's be real. All right, so we've been watching The Better Sister lately on Amazon. I think we're halfway through. It's a miniseries. I think it's eight episodes. Jessica Biel in Elizabeth Banks. Are you watching it? So...
That sounds like a show you and Robin could watch together. Right? So we're in bed the other morning, and she pops it on. I think she was on the second episode, and I'm like, this looks good. I'm like, what's going on here? I watched 20 minutes. I said, why aren't you watching this? And she goes, I...
So I'm watching it. I'm like, yeah, but obviously this is like, I, this is good. Like, obviously I would like it. And she's like, okay, well, I just started. And so I'm like, well, what the heck? So then when we went to Chicago and now she finished it, it's rich people. Husband is murdered. Hamptons, New York city apartment. It's Corey. What's the guy's name? Stole, stole her. Yeah. And yeah, it's, it's great. Um, it's worth watching. Uh, I think I have the most by myself.
I don't, yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, the ending could totally fall apart, but I think, yeah, I think it's pretty good. I think that the chemistry between Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks as sisters is really good. I think I found the most 1990s movie of all time. Ooh. So the algorithm got me. I rewatched Dazed and Confused for some reason the other day, and then it gave me Mallrats.
And I have not seen, and Mallrats is one of those nostalgic movies. It's on Netflix. I almost pressed play last night. So funny you mentioned that. So I put it on. And this is one of those movies that for some reason, the timing and the place of when you watch the movie totally messes with like how much you remember it. And this is one of those movies in high school and college, my friends and I watched all the time. And I haven't watched it. It's not a school dinner, it's a sailboat. Yeah, I haven't watched it since, but I rewatched it. And I did, I think I memory hold, there's some really, really dumb parts in it.
But if you can overlook those, this is the most 1990s movie of all time because it's only an hour and 25 minutes, which wouldn't happen today. That takes place in a mall, obviously. The mall was the center of the universe for people in the 90s. That's where me and all my friends would meet. Every Friday night, we'd meet at the mall and we'd go to a movie. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I have to pile on here because you said there was a moment in time you remember things. I remember seeing that for the first time in Josh Cohen's basement. And-
It was definitely inappropriate. What year did that come out? Was that 93? No, way down that. Maybe. I don't know. I don't actually don't. Yeah. Maybe it is 93. Maybe. And holy gazoli. Is that. Oh, 95. Okay. All right. So I was, I was 10 appropriate. Uh, what a movie.
Yeah. I mean, there are some inappropriate parts, but so here's the other 90s parts besides them all. It's got Shannon Doherty in it from 90210. It's got Ben Affleck pre-teeth getting fixed. He got pre-Hollywood teeth. Claire Forlani, who was like head of thing and then meet Joe Black happened and she fell off. It's got one of the London brothers. I think one of them was in Days Confused and one of them was in this. This was the Party of Five one, which I also watched, obviously. The hidden pictures thing where you, I could never do those. Oh, that was the thing. I never saw them.
I could never do them. I could never, oh, just cross your eyes and I could never do them. Jason Lee as a sarcastic, like sarcasm was a personality trait in the 90s. Like being sarcastic was the thing.
All the pop culture references, that was more because of Kevin Smith, but it's all Star Wars and Batman. Jay and Silent Bob had their own movie. And do you remember the khaki coat with the corduroy collar? Everyone had one of those in the 90s. This is the most 1990s movie ever. Yeah. And I'd give it, for the nostalgia premium, I'd give it a 7.2. Ooh, high, okay. But me and my friends used to quote this movie all the time. Again, it's really, really dumb, but it's got some great lines. I mean, the scene where Kevin Smith goes through the dressing room
With his head? Yeah. It's great. All right. Then two kids' movies we watched recently. My daughter is working through the sports movies still. We watched Rookie of the Year where the guy breaks his arm. I forgot John Candy was the announcer. Yeah.
I hadn't probably seen this since I was 10. And then The Electric State is a Chris Pratt movie with the girl from Stranger Things on Netflix. Straight to Netflix movie. Never heard of it. Awful. Terrible. Like a robot war. And my son loved it. Okay. I worry about his movie taste sometimes. George is going right down my highway. I love it. I feel like he wants... He keeps asking us to watch horror movies and I won't let him. But he's going to get there someday. Okay. That's all I got. All right. I have one recommendation and it is a double table pounder. I...
finished, started and finished. Thank you to all who recommended Mobland. Ah, the Tom Hardy one. I watched one episode. I need to get back into it because I love Tom Hardy. So I did the same thing. I watched one and I was just like a little bit like, yeah, it didn't help. Holy shit. Keep going? Okay. Double table pounder. It's Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, and it's two families in London going to war. It's kind of like The Gentleman except a little bit less silly.
Like, a little more serious. But not too serious. It is dark and violent and... Okay, I'm going to get back into that one. It's good. It's good. And I'm looking forward to season two. How about that? Tom Hardy as the enforcer. He's perfect for that role. You know how normally I'm like a one season type of guy? Yeah. I'm signed up for season two. Opening day. Good to know. Yeah. It was weird though because the first episode, same thing. I was like, eh. And then it gets going in a serious way. Okay. Okay.
All right. We went deep today. We went long. Yeah. We mentioned it a few times. Thanks to everyone who came out in Chicago. Our production team did an amazing job putting that event together. It was spectacular. And especially Daniel. But everyone, but especially him. He was up super late. And we're hoping to do more of those in Chicago and elsewhere. But thanks to everyone who came. Animal Spirits at CompoundNews.com. See you next time.