Is Financial Education Working? (EP.413)
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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. I think I've been on this corner for a while now saying that I think investors are getting better. The whole mom and pop thing used to be a derogatory term and retail was like, oh, they're... When I worked in the institutional investing world, the hierarchy was the endowments and foundations looked at themselves as we're the best here. Pensions are a little lower than us. And then it goes down to like advisor clients and then retail, the lowest of the low.

Right? We're better than them. They're not any good.

I don't think that that hierarchy exists anymore. You have been on that corner. And I remember, I don't know how long ago, but I do remember like scoffing at you saying that or investors getting smart. Maybe they're like, eh, I don't know about that. And I think it's a combination of a lot of things. Certainly Vanguard, not even Vanguard today, but back in the day providing easy, cheap access to the market and reinforcing the long-term discipline. And on the other side of the equation, I do think Robinhood helped to flatten the hierarchy a little bit, as ridiculous as it sounds, because we know that is the home to a lot of

D-Gen behavior. And at least that's like the, you know, people say that, but I do think that, that they've done a lot as well to, Ooh,

Democratize. I can't say that word. I want to punch myself in the nose, but to bring access to the individual investor and help them learn about the market. Just to make it easier. Okay. So this is from friend of the show, Michael Antonelli. He texted us the other day. He said, guys, I have a strongly held view on this and I'm going to compliment you too. I think that education of retail investors is better than it's ever been psychology of money, animal spirits, bull and bear blog, the proper education about how crazy markets are and not to overreact and think long-term is working.

Wait, hold on. Did, did Michael just text us that? I didn't even realize when he, did he just text us that just to get a plugin for himself? Yeah, I think he put his own blog in there. That was, that was, that was smooth and not to overreact to long-term and long-term thinking is working. That's why retail is a smart money. Now, could this be a good topic? It's financial education working. We have data that it is. And I think, listen,

I think the great financial crisis was a seminal moment for investor education because we saw a lot of bad behavior in that 10 year window of the lost decade of people saying, all right, that's it. I tap out. Even if you held on during the.com crisis, there were people who tapped out during the great financial crisis going, I cannot live through two crashes like this. No. And hold on, but, but I don't want to overstate the fact that some of this may be resulting because is selling in October, 2008. It's hard to say it's bad behavior.

It was the second 50% crash in a decade that went nowhere. And it looked like the world was ending in hindsight. Panicking is never good, but man, I, I don't, I don't point to people that panicked in, in 2008 and say you idiot. Well, but the thing is the people who then, cause we talked to so many of these people who said in 2015, I'm still in cash. I sold it.

in, you know, February 09 and I'm still sitting in cash and I can't do it. I think there was enough of that where the information age came and there was blogs and sub stacks and podcasts and people in social media are just beating. I mean, think about the early days of finance, Twitter and the blogging stuff and how, I mean, some of the stuff we were writing about at the time seems so basic, but we were drilling it into people's heads.

constantly. Everyone there, the whole finance Twitter community was just saying like, listen, this whole trying to guess what's going to happen and acting in the short term and panicking, that is not a way to invest. And so I do think that people, the education is working and this is what we're seeing in the data. And now- And also, and anecdotally in our inbox, I mean, we see it every week. People thanking us for helping them on their journey. We got some emails, right? Some.

Oh, yeah, we've got zillion. Oh, did I put some in here? Um, Hey guys, just listen to this week's episode where you guys talked about people who sold in April or in the immediate aftermath of the election and figured I'd share my line of thinking as someone who had the same concerns regarding Trump's trade policies, but chose not to sell. Uh, I decided to keep my 401k contributions as a hedge to my doomerism. I figured if I was wrong, I'd feel good knowing that I made some money along the way. I'm in my late twenties for reference. Yeah, it's wonderful.

Another one, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills in this market, but I am being disciplined as ever thanks to you guys. Now, granted, we made those two emails up. I put them in the chat, but they could have come in time, but no, I'm kidding. Those are really nice. Yeah. Eric Balchunas says that VOO, which is the S&P 500 ETF for Vanguard, has taken in $46 billion more than any other ETF, 400% more.

He basically said this is like unheard of. And I mean, this thing is like on its way to a trillion dollars in assets almost. So it's it's six hundred and sixty billion dollars in assets. And the money is just going insane. Now, again, the other side of this is people saying, listen, long term thinking doesn't always work.

There are lost decades. There are crashes. There are all this stuff that could. Stocks don't always have to go up forever and ever. And so that's the idea that just wait. And when we have one of these periods, it's not going to be very fun. The alternative side of that is we've had three bear markets this decade alone, right? One of them lasted a decent amount of time. The other ones were pretty short.

I don't think that just wait is just wait for what? So you could trade around it. I mean, what are we even talking about? Exactly. So you could, so you could perfectly time the market, right? I don't think that the behavior, that type of behavior is going to change where, I mean, there's going to be people, there's always going to be people who panic, but we've seen the number of people who panic, especially on the retail side has gone down drastically. Well, who sold in, in April, it was institutional investors for the most part retail bottom, bottom up.

Yeah. So this is another one from JP Morgan yesterday. This is from Bloomberg. So I think futures were down 1% and maybe at the beginning of the day, the stocks were on 1% on Monday. And this is from Bloomberg. They said an individual investors purchased a net $4.1 billion in us stocks through 1230 PM, the largest level ever for that time of day and broke 4 billion by threshold by noon for the first time ever. I have to, I have to confess. I don't, I don't get it. Um, I know the numbers on this chart keep, you know,

They, for the most part, keep getting larger because the dollars amount, you know, inflation, all that sort of stuff. There's more dollars in the system.

Where does the money keep coming from? I feel like I've been asking this for years. So this is what I tried to answer. I want to read this quote first. So this is head of macro trading at Buffalo Bayou Commodities, Frank Moncam. Never heard of this. But dude, $46 billion year to date. Like, where is that money coming from? All right, go ahead. I got that. So he says, retailers are in the hard way, getting left behind during previous shock stock recovery supported by policy puts. There's an almost unwavering commitment from retail to never make that mistake again.

And I think that is part of it, just the fact that, listen, if things get super, super bad, the government and the Fed is going to step in and make it right. So in some ways, the really bad left tail has been – the funny thing is then the risk then is probably a policy mistake. That is the thing that kind of ends us. But it makes sense. But yesterday, yesterday on a 1% down open. I know. After a huge rally, people are still desperate to get in. It seems wild. So that's not even buying a dip. That's just buying. Yeah.

Right. So I went to chart kid Matt and I said, what's going on here? Where is this coming from? Show me the total cash and money markets. And you can see money markets is still $6.9 trillion. Nice. It's a lot of money still in there.

Um, but then he took it a step further and he looked at the dip. What happens to money market changes in the weekly change of money market versus the S and P. So look at this chart. This is a great chart. So in credit to you, credit to Matt, this is wonderful. So he, he was the one who did this. I said, look into it. He, he created this chart. So he's showing last, last spring, April and may, there was a dip in the S and P and there was $112 billion outflow from money markets. Guess where that money went? The stock market this time.

In April, there was $125 billion that came out of money markets. And I'm guessing, I can't prove this, my guess is the same thing happened to the bond market too. Like money goes into bonds because people think there's a recession. When the recession doesn't happen, that money comes out of bonds and goes back into stocks. And that's got to be where the dry powder is coming from. Otherwise, I don't know where it's coming from. Because it's insane that we're seeing these huge spikes. So it's got to be

Yes. And yes, I believe that a good chunk of that $125 billion, let's say half, I don't know, making that up, found its way into the stock market. But what about the $46 billion a year to date into VOO? And what about every single year? Is it just wages? That's part of it. That's why these numbers are getting so big because yeah, wages, inflation is up 25% this decade. Wages are also up 25%. So it's more money coming in. There's just money everywhere. What else is the explanation? I don't know.

So, so people were a little nervous about bond yields and I'm going to, I'm going to poo poo this a little bit because the 30 year hit 5% this, this week, people are getting worried. Okay. This is the bond vigilantes again. And this is worried about deficits and tax cuts that are coming and all this other stuff. And the Moody's downgrade, which do you think is even worth mentioning? I feel bad completely sweeping down to the side, but it's really, if we're not triple a who is,

We're the global reserve currency. We have the ability to print our own currency. If we're not AAA, then no one, no one, no other country is. I'm going to, I agree. I'm, I'm going to talk about this with Josh on what are your thoughts? I don't really need to discuss it twice. It's relatively, it's a, it's a non-event. People want to freak out about it, but we've lived through this twice already. It doesn't matter. Nah, you know what? I don't, I think most people are like, this doesn't matter.

Yeah. There's a few people who are trying to make it a thing. Most people are not. Stop trying to make Fetch a thing. But I do think that – I think this was – I'm stealing this from Warren Pies who said this before, but this is – for the last three years, the bond market has been people think a recession is coming, so they buy bonds. Then yields fall, right? Then people worry, oh, no, there's a recession. Yields are falling. And then the recession doesn't happen, so people sell bonds. Yields rise, and people go, oh, no, yields are rising. Right?

It's terrible. And I think that that's the cycle we've been through. And eventually maybe some macro feature does break that. But until we see a prolonged period of rates being above a certain level or going down, I just don't think you can worry about bond yields as a macro indicator. I think it's more flows. I think what matters though is the interest expense on our bonds. That does matter because that's part of the reason why bond yields are creeping up, the deficit. I do think, I don't think it doesn't matter

I think the downgrade might be whatever, but it matters. So don't you think though that if things really got bad and I always say the biggest constraint against deficits and government spending is inflation. Inflation right now is 2.3%. If inflation was screaming higher,

Because of the deficit in government spending, I'd be probably a little more worried. But it's not. It came way back down. And it's in a good spot. The weird thing is if you took just a snapshot of where we are right now, right? My daughter's got back into the pool. What's with the pen? What are you, taking notes? I'm sorry. I hold the pen guy, you know? I'm not a pen behind the ear. I just…

You know, do you ever write anymore? Like actually write? When I go to write a check now, I feel like my hand is going to fall off because I just never do it anymore. I wrote three checks yesterday. Funny you should ask. My handwriting has gotten just considerably worse. I'm expecting one of them to not go through. I could barely read my handwriting. It's abominable. Imagine starting checks today and telling someone you have to literally write out like

the word of it's so, why do we still do this? We were, we were at the, I was at the Broadmoor last week in Colorado and they have an, they have a crazy cool antique shop. Matter of fact, which way do I lean that map behind me on my wall? Okay. But that last year, 1950, uh, long Island map. Um, so they had a copy of the declaration of independence from 1818. I don't know what, what, what the story is there. That Nicholas cages version. Yeah.

But needless to say, it's all handwritten. I don't know if you know this. There was no computers back then. And they could write so well, right? And it's all script. And everything is lined up. Like, it looks like art. Everything lines up perfectly. Think about how little education people had back then, but how well they spoke and wrote. I told you my daughter has been texting me lately, and she hit me with a THX the other day. I don't know why. The THX always annoys me. Josh does that.

I said, well, how much time are we saving here by not writing out thanks and just writing THX? I said, listen, I don't, I'm not going to like look over your shoulder on everything you do in life, but you're not going to be a THX person. I'm sorry. Teaching you the important things. I agree. We don't, we don't THX in this house.

Yes. I don't remember where I was. Anyway, government debt. Yeah. But so if you took just a snapshot of where we are right now, the inflation rate is 2.3%. The unemployment rate is 4.5%, I think, 4.2%, something like that. And the 10-year is at 4.5%. If you just ask someone, name me a normal economy or an average economy, if there is such a thing, that would probably be it. And we're trying to break that for some reason. Yes, and...

Your people are allowed to be concerned just because things aren't going kablooey today. It doesn't mean that this is not the setup for that. Oh, I know. And there's certainly reasons to worry. I just think with bond yields, let's let it play out for a little while longer. I feel like there's been so many ups and downs. And every time they go up, people say, ah, bond vigilantes, they're worried about the government. Every time they go down, it's a recession. Just like

Let's chill. That's all I'm saying. Also, this is from Mike Zuccardi. He said 30-year tips yields are at 2.73%, the highest in 23 years. Now, you get almost 3% in real in tips. So let's say inflation is higher because of tariffs or whatever, government spending. Inflation is 3% or 4% now. We're talking a 7% return almost on tips. Now, long-term tips are, I don't know. You have to be kind of a psycho to own those, I think, because they're so volatile.

But my comment on Twitter yesterday that got people really mad was the so we've for baby boomers have been handed a 15 year bull market, 50 percent gain in housing this decade. And then now we're talking like three percent real yields on on Treasury inflation protected securities. They just never lose like heading into retirement. Talk about a perfect setup heading into retirement.

Your biggest financial asset is going to go up 50%. The stock market is going to be booming. And you're going to get high bond yields. I don't like demographic wars. It's lame. I know. Listen, I'm just poking the bear. And I'm more... Because there's always people in my mentions who go, oh, yeah? 12% mortgage in 1982, buddy. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I get it. But let's be honest. Also, no iPhone. I mean...

Yeah. But I think that's a positive. They had to bank on people just being there when you scheduled an appointment. My brother used to always say that my dad was the luckiest SLB on the planet because he never had to bring his work home from, he didn't have, he didn't deal. He was an executive in the pre email, pre Blackberry, pre iPhone days. And he's like that, that Lee, you know, he had a briefcase he'd bring home, but he never did work at home because it was left at the office. Um,

And yeah, I'm mostly saying this stuff about boomers tongue in cheek. But also, if we're being honest, every generation has had their thing. They are the luckiest generation. I don't think there's any debating that. Speaking of briefcase, you know what's weird? When I was in Boston for the nickname, not to brag, there was a lot of briefcases and trench coats. Like a lot of, what is it? Is that like Sherlock homeless looking people? So do you think people are just carrying their laptops in a briefcase now? I saw like three or four. What town was I in?

Damn it. See, in New York, it's all backpacks, though. I feel like all the guys in suits and Patagonia vests, they wear a backpack. Which is a better look? Where was I? Briefcase is more of a baller look. Oh, I was on Beacon Street. I'm walking around. Yeah, a lot of briefcases. I kind of like it. It's like these people were in costumes. I mean, when I walk around New York in the financial district, it looks like a bunch of kids, older kids were going to school. Not just briefcases, big umbrellas.

Duncan says boomers drafted into the war have entered the chat. Vietnam is a good, that's a fair. Yeah. No, but listen, nobody's had it easy. Life is hard. That's true. Except for boomers. Financially. All right. So the Wall Street Journal has this piece on valuations and they look at all these different valuation metrics to show them over time. They look at the CAPE, they look at PE and forward PE. And I hate to keep saying this, but it just, it really feels like valuations don't matter anymore. Okay. Okay.

My counterpoint to that would be the reason – and you know this – the reason why these ratios are elevated is because the quality and the growth of the businesses are off the charts. We've never seen growth rates like this with ROEs as high as they are, all the sort of profitability metrics. We've never seen it, and it's the bulk of the index. So that's the answer. That's it. No, but I also feel like there are no –

lines in the sand anymore where people think, I feel like back in the day, people thought like, listen, you buy stocks when they get to 15 P or like those, like those levels, those levels don't matter anymore. I guess the counterpoint to what, to my counterpoint as well, why is Walmart trading at 40 times earnings? Why is Costco trading at 45 times earnings? Okay. I had this, I had this in here for later. We talked to, um, a couple of gentlemen from JP Morgan on their value investing team. And they shared with us, I didn't realize this.

We know we're getting to Walmart later. Let's save it for that. We'll pin this. All right, here's a stat from Jason Gepfert at Sentiment Trader. Both S&P 500 and the NASDAQ 100 are on track for perfect weeks, rising every day for an entire five-day calendar week. Needless to say, that's me, not him. Needless to say, this doesn't happen during bear markets. It's kind of wild. We need like our AI chat assistant here because remember someone said we got to start tracking these stats. Yeah.

Once we have an AI chat bot that's on a corner of our little recorder here. Well, hire a year later 93% of the time. All right. Steve Cohen is another retester of the low guy. Steve Cohen says stocks could retest their April lows. Sees a 45% chance of recession. I think they're just putting these headlines to troll me now. Well, he said could.

I know. So he said he- Guess what? Michael Batnick, I also think we could. He expects maybe a 10 to 15% decline from here. He says Trump, by backing off, essentially raised the floor. It wouldn't surprise me to see a two double digit correction this year. Yeah. I think that- I have a huge bone to pick.

with the media and the consumers of the media. And this is old and stale, and it's a repeated take, but I'm just going to take it anyway because it's timely. Bring it. So the headline here, Steve Cohen says stocks to retest their April lows sees a 45% chance of recession. And then when you look at the quotes, it's like, oh, it's nothing with nothing. He's not like alarmist or anything like that. But people post this headline. And similarly, yesterday,

There was a lot of people sharing the Klarna news. So Klarna is the buy now, pay later company. Oh, people love to dunk on Klarna, don't they? People really want that company to do bad. People love to dunk on it, at least on the internet. I saw that. I saw that headline a million times too. I didn't read the article. So you give me some context. Here's the headline. This is from the FT. Klarna's losses widen after more consumers fail to repay loans. Now, I don't blame Klarna.

the FT and every other outlet that puts this headlines because they're in the business of people reading their stuff. Like I would do the exact same thing. And I don't even necessarily blame people that are like tweeting the headlines because like, they're also looking for attention too. So that's the game that we're all playing. Yeah. However,

It's a fun game most of the time. Yeah, I get it. I'm not, I get it. Okay, so here's the detail. The FinTech, this is from the FT, which offers interest-free consumer loans to allow customers to make retail purchases on Monday, reported a net loss of $99 million for the three months to March, up from $47 million a year early. Now, the natural reaction is to go, oh, f**k.

The ultimate subprime lender, the buy now, pay later nonsense, their losses double from a year earlier. Uh-oh. People are using Klarna to buy Chipotle burritos, right? Maybe everyone's in trouble. They say revenues rose in the first quarter 13% year over year. They have 99 million active customers. Kind of impressive. All right, so here's the thing. This is towards the end of the article. Klarna's credit loss rate

as a percentage of its total payment volume remains relatively low at 0.54% up from 0.51% a year ago. Give me a break. I'm surprised it's that low. 0.54%. Yeah. So, I mean, do you think in a recession this company is a short though? What's that? This company is a short or no? I have no idea. Paper trading, paper account? No. Okay. Okay.

This is, I mean, this is people, people seem to be into it. If you think all the young people are going to suddenly default, I don't know the financials come back. No idea, but yeah. So I want to talk about why stock picking is hard. So United Health is as of, I looked at the Dow ETF. Did you know there's a Dow ETF? It's like DIA. Of course. Yeah. Who invests in that thing though? There's what? 50 billion in there? 30 billion? How much is in there? What do you think the average age of that ETF owner is? 69. 60 plus? Yeah.

So UnitedHealth in that ETF was the third biggest name in the Dow. It's down 50% in a month. Look at this chart. And this is the month it was rising up through. It was doing okay even through the tariff stuff at the beginning of April. And in the last month, the thing is down 50%. This is why stock picking is hard. Who the hell is picking UnitedHealth though? But I mean, if this happened to the overall stock market, it would shut the world down almost. Yeah.

It happens to individual stocks all the time. I think it's just crazy. All the time. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about Walmart. Okay. This is from CNBC. I think this was their CFO was going to talk. He said,

Not a surprise because the tariffs are higher than they've been in whatever, 90 years. I got to check this out. Sorry to cut in. I listened to the earnings call yesterday. These are my highlights. This is a face blower. You might be surprised. I was, Doug, to know that nearly 60% of our suppliers in the US are small businesses. That is a surprise. So they're saying that the small businesses are probably themselves getting hit with tariffs, which is trickling down to Walmart. Yeah.

I just kind of figured that they were way more reliant on China and the rest of the world. Here's another one. So earlier you mentioned the quote about raising some prices. They said, we won't let tariff-related cost pressure on some general merchandise item put pressure on food prices. So they're going to raise prices on items where they're seeing price increases.

But as it relates to food tariffs on countries like Costa Rica, Peru, and Colombia are pressuring imported items like bananas, avocados, coffee, and roses. We'll do our best to control what we can control in order to keep food prices as low as possible.

Bananas have some room to run. The bananas are still so cheap. I always say this. Don't you think that Walmart probably has the best supply chain of any company? I mean, when I went to business school, that's all, whenever we talked in a supply chain class, it was how amazing Walmart supply chain is. If they can't handle this, I can't imagine what it's like for other smaller companies who don't have a good supply chain like they do. So Donald, the president tweeted or truthed

Walmart should stop trying to blame tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made all caps billions of dollars last year, far more than expected. That part made me chuckle. Between Walmart and China, they should, as I said, all caps eat the tariffs and not charge valued customers, all caps anything. I'll be watching and so will your customers. So the liberal Wall Street Journal opinion section

wrote an article, Donald Trump plays Walmart CEO. He goes full Kamala Harris and demanded that the retail giant not raise prices. We've called out, obviously, every time Bernie Sanders and more so Elizabeth Warren said this nonsense about Kroger, for example. It's like, either you are really stupid or you think we're really stupid or maybe both.

And it's offensive. And to see the president doing this is, I don't know, pick the adjective, however you're feeling. But Walmart, I have a chart from YCharts looking at- Is he going to personally track prices across everything? I'm sure he is. Look at Walmart's revenue compared to their net income. The revenue has grown-

at least I believe, I don't know, so much faster than the income. But the bottom line is, talking about their profit margins, there's no room. Their profit margin is 2.8%. It's averaged 2.4% over the last decade. They can't absorb the price increases and neither can any other business in this country. What are we doing here? And this makes an important point about a lot of our messaging, getting back to what we've been saying publicly and others like us for the last however long we've been doing this is,

It's okay to have political opinions, right? Like it's okay. You feel what you feel. You believe what you believe. But for the love of God, whatever your beliefs are, do not let it invade your portfolio. It's too much. You're going to live through administrations that you love and administrations that you hate. And if you look at the raw numbers, it does not support however you feel. So just live with it and don't make any drastic decisions. Okay. And then in comes 2025.

And the policies that the president laid in place blow up the stock market temporarily. Stocks fall in a straight line, 19%. And everybody who was afraid of Donald Trump and what he would do feels vindicated. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. And people like you told me politics don't mix politics with your portfolio. Okay. Now that we're on the other side of it, as some of the rhetoric around the tariffs have been relaxed,

It is interesting, and I was thinking about this morning, policies that can impact the market and the economy obviously matter a lot. We just saw that. Nothing else does.

nothing else does. Whatever he's saying to Walmart, whatever he's saying to these companies, none of the rhetoric matters. It's policies or nothing else. The market can look through a lot of the nonsense, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, the market will look through a lot of the rhetoric because whatever, the market just calls BS. But when it comes to actual policies-

that's how politics can impact the market. What's the actual change? And that's, this is the thing people keep saying is, listen, we have not felt the impact of these tariffs yet. They're, they're way, way lower than they were on liberation day, but they're still higher than they were before. And that there's going to be an impact. This was interesting. So we, we talked to a couple of portfolio. Hold on just in conclusion. I think the belief that you should not mix your politics with your portfolio still holds true. Even now, someone now so more than ever, because if you thought that you were right about your intuitions, that Trump was going to ruin America and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And now we're even from like, now what? Yes, exactly. Now, yeah. Well, now what do you do? And most people probably dig their heels in. So we talked to a couple of portfolio managers from JP Morgan yesterday on their value team. It's going to be on one of our talker books in a couple of weeks. And they made the point that Walmart is actually cheaper or Amazon is cheaper than Walmart now. And I did this in a 4P ratio and they talked about it in a couple of different metrics. But so it's actually way, way cheaper than Costco too and Walmart. Why is Walmart so expensive?

Can you explain this to me? Walmart's trading at 37 times earnings and Amazon's at 33. Costco's at 57. I think it's a combination of like their e-commerce business growing dramatically. It's not, this is not like the Walmart of 10 years ago. But wouldn't we say that tariffs with Costco, I know Costco, the whole deal with Costco, people always say is that they-

They essentially break even on their, on all the stuff they buy. And then they make money on the memberships. That's, that's their profit margin is the memberships. So if Costco and Walmart have these pretty razor thin profit margins, and we're having tariffs that are going to impact a lot of their supply, shouldn't these companies see their, their valuations decrease? You would think it's a very fair point. I don't even know what the counterpoint would be. Why would, why would, why would the multiples not go down?

I don't know. Especially from these levels. They're not exactly cheap. So Joey Politano at Apricitas, his sub stack, looked at all the major tariffs. And I think he said, again, they're the highest in 90 years. He said, even if, so he has this chart that shows, and it looks like cars and SUVs and minivans are the biggest hit. That's like a 19% tariffs.

Vehicle parts is 10%. So these are still pretty high, right? He said, even if you walked them back to just 10%, it will leave tariffs at the highest level since 1940s and make America as the only high-income nation with double-digit tariff rates.

He may be easing his trade war, but it's far from ending it. So again, I just keep thinking that the corporations and the investors have to keep thinking like, okay, yes, this is true, but they're not going to remain this high. That's the only explanation I can come up with. I think the market is saying that there's going to be exemptions on everything. Yeah. That's the only thing I can think of. Now, market may be wrong, but I think that's the interpretation because it's hard to imagine anything else being true. All right.

Did you, when I first came out of college and realizing I know nothing, and I'm reading through all the personal finance books, because again, I know nothing. This is one of the first books I read. Did you read this? I feel like if you're a financial advisor, this is on your bookshelf. You know, I didn't. Okay. So this is The Millionaire Next Door. You know what? My Millionaire Next Door equivalent read was The Wealthy Barber. Okay. So, but this was kind of, to use your term, face-blowing to me. So I think this came out in 96. I read it probably...

2005 ish. And again, knowing nothing, I thought, oh my gosh, I've cracked the code. I figured out how to get rich. But, and so the one thing that really stood out to me that I still remember, this is back in 96. So this is self-employed people, entrepreneurs, business owners make up less than 20% of workers in America, but account for two thirds of the millionaires. So the point is like, you want to be people that missed it.

Less than 20% of workers in America are self-employed or own their own business, but they make up two-thirds of the millionaires in this country.

And so the Wall Street Journal – and so the question is like this is 96. Does it still hold? Wall Street Journal has an article called Meet the Stealthy Wealthy Who Make Their Money the Boring Way. And the whole point of this too is also like these are not people who own flashy high-tech businesses. It's mostly slow and steady but profitable businesses. They're not showy. That's most of these millionaire next doors. One of the ones that the article highlighted was –

A guy whose business is cleaning or ripping up carpets in elementary schools. Oh, really? You didn't read the article? No, I did. But they had the weather tech guy too. I use those in our cars. Oh, the formats. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, they say the largest source of income for the 1% of highest earners isn't being a partner in an investment bank or launching a one in a million tech startup, owning a medium-sized regional business. Many of them are distinctly boring and extremely lucrative like auto dealerships, beverage distributors, grocery stores, dental practices, and law offices.

And they found that the number of people who are in the 1% of earners, the share of income that ownership generates has increased to 35% in 2022 from 30% in 2024 for the top 1% of earners. I'll read the next one. The number of such business owners worth $10 million or more just for inflation has more than doubled since 2001. And it's saying a lot of it. So the takeaway here is equity, right? You want to own equity in a business if you want to get wealthy. Yeah.

And it's not saying you can't be a nine to five person and say, we know plenty of those people who have done that. But if you want to get really, really wealthy, it's owning equity in a business. I'm always surprised, but we are always surprised about the anecdotes that they find from these articles. There was a family who said like they made $550,000 and-

They just spoke about his family's luxuries include two Land Rovers, private school for the kids, and a month-long summer vacation and all of those sorts of personal financial details. Why would you talk to the Wall Street Journal about that? I don't understand. Are you showing your friends like look at this article that I'm in? It's so bizarre to me.

I mean, there are certainly people who brag a lot about their vacations. But yeah, you're right. Can you imagine going around town and like there's already gossip about people enough as it is? If you're worth $50 million or whatever it is, you can't hide that. Everybody knows you're rich. Right. But yeah, I agree. The bragging of, yeah, we went on a month-long vacation to Europe. And yeah, you're getting talked about. Maybe you don't care. Maybe you want people to talk about you. I don't know. Good article, though.

Okay, this one from Food & Wine is, I think we've talked something about this similarly, but so they say a whopping 75% of restaurant traffic now consists of takeout orders, according to National Restaurant Association, NRA. I think they want to rethink that one. And let's see, 95% of consumers deem speed as critical to the experience, while 90% see it as a top priority. So convenience is just a huge part of the economy. And I think this is one of those

pandemic takeaway things that no one really would have foreseen ahead of time. I was so wrong on this. What did you think that just restaurants were? I mean, people still go to restaurants, but it's no, particularly no, the door dash thing. Look at the stock. What a beast. This is, it's a great looking chart. And I just couldn't believe that people would continue to pay the outrageous fees. I guess I should have asked my wife.

But the numbers don't compute. Everything's so expensive. Like I don't, I don't use these services. I think once you get a taste of convenience, I probably do DoorDash once every other week at my office. I'm really busy and I don't want to get up to go to get lunch somewhere.

down the street. I'll door dash and have them send it here. And it is really, really easy. And I think once you get a taste of that convenience, it's really hard to give up. It becomes the, it's the luxury becoming a necessity kind of thing. I agree. I thought people would for sure go back in it. So we have a friend who actually owns some restaurants and he said, he's thinking about doing a restaurant that is takeout only. Like that's the whole thing. It's just a pickup counter. And he's like, why,

you save on overhead. You don't, you know, it's, it's easier to manage the staff and that's all people want. So he's like, I'm thinking about just doing a takeout only restaurant. Uh, it's just interesting. Yeah. All right. I want to, I want to talk AI real quick here.

By the way, the other AI story was with Klarna was that the fact that they had AI agents, like remember they had like 700 AI agents and now it sounds like it's not working very well. Yeah. So Klarna is just, they're a lighting bolt of, you know, everything. Do you think that is one of those things that, I think there's two ways looking at it. One is, well, see, AI is not as great as we thought. It can't take over the customer service for a human. Or is it just like, yeah, fine. But in two years it's going to. Oh, a hundred percent. It's going to, are you kidding me?

For the call center stuff,

please press one four. I was screaming at the phone the other day. I can't remember who it was on with. I was like, no customer service. That's what I always do. Talk to operator, talk to operator, talk to operator. Yeah, no, that we will not be doing that in five years or pick a number. Okay. So I decided, so we've been in our house for eight years now. Um, you know, boys, you know, this boys with potty training, not always the greatest, just my son would wake up in the middle of the night to go pee and wake up in the morning and see just

all over the toilet seat just full of pee right boys are just they're not good at aiming right and so i looked at it and i thought like i think i just need to get in like he's eight years old now he's better but like why don't i get a new toilet seat i'm like how do i how do i do this without like so i just took a picture of it and i uploaded a chat gpt and i said what do i need to buy here what's the toilet seat replacement you can see the name of the brand of the toilet

And it looked at the, it looks like an elongated toilet and the measurement, if it's 14 by 17 or whatever, then here's the kind you need to get. So easy. And that kind of stuff is for me is slowly migrating from Google to chat GPT. Like if I need help with something, I don't go to Google anymore. I mean, sometimes if you need a video, but yeah.

You can still do that stuff on Google, but yeah, but it's, I find the answers are better with Chad GPT. It's easier. They, everything, if you ask it, like, how do you do this? How do I cancel my subscription to this? Chad GPT takes you through the steps. It's amazing. Whereas Google, it's just, it's one more step to try to find it through the junk. No, now Google built Gemini into the search feature.

Okay. But I still am just finding myself going more and more to chat GPT for that type of stuff. Yeah. All right. So did you look at Torsten Slak's real estate update? He has this US housing market outlook. It's 120 pages or something. And people were posting a lot of these charts on social media just saying, listen, housing is broken. It is. And the point, I think it's partially broken, but I also think demographics play a big role here. Okay. So

This is the conventional mortgage rate versus the effective. So effective is what people are actually paying. And throughout history, this has been very close. And I think we just really screwed things up with the mortgage rates. I think that's part of it, is just taking them so high so fast and allowing people to still pay so much lower. He's looking at the demographics saying the demand is still there. Like 33-year-olds is the most common age.

So the people who are home buyer age, it's still there. But now it says the median age of all home buyers is 56 years old, up from 31 in 1981. And this is where people go, okay, come on.

And this is back to the baby boomer thing. Like they're the ones who have paid off mortgages and can afford to buy a house. This is why this number is rising. And the whole point is 40% of homes don't have a mortgage. So this is interesting. This guy on Twitter replied to someone who was tweeting about these. And he said the median home buyer in 2007 was born in 1968. The median home buyer in 2024 was born in 1968. Wow. That's a crazy stat. But then Jack Rain said, fair.

But the median American is also nine years older today than they were in 1981. So he says we have a housing affordable problem, but we also have an older population where many people switch homes later in life. So I think, yes, the housing market is broken, especially for first-time homebuyers. But I think so many of these demographic numbers in the years ahead are just going to be broken by baby boomers, too. We've never had a cohort this big before. 70 million baby boomers with all this money, $82 trillion in wealth.

I think that they also make these numbers look more skewed than they are. An article in the journal said baby boomers homeowners hold, baby boomer homeowners, excuse me, hold $17 trillion in home equity. And they share- So that's half of the total, right? They show a chart, the share of US home equity held by people who are 70 or older. It is actually less than what's in the GFC. I don't know if that's surprising or not, but it's around 30%, a little bit more.

So the millennials look at this and the younger Gen X say, all right, fine, but we're going to inherit that money someday. Sure. Because the baby boomers aren't spending enough of it. You're not going to get it until you're 65. Yeah. Nick Maggiuli and I talked about this on The Unlock recently, if you want to check that out. It's our channel for advisors. But his whole point was, this is why you need to give now and not later.

like to help the young people who are struggling in the, especially when it comes to homes and such homes, childcare. And I would think a lot of people are like for the people that are able to, for the young people that are buying houses today, there's just, there's no way to do it without helping your parents. Yeah. Unless you're in the top 10% of income for your cohort. Yeah. You're right. You need, you need help. Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine telling someone, no, just save 20% for a down payment. And also the

set aside 12 months of expenses for the emergency fund. And also, yeah, it doesn't work. Max out your 401k. And also like you can't make it all work. Right. Surveys. So sentiment surveys came out last week and it feels like they're already stale because they were all tariff related, obviously. But, um, they looked at consumer sentiment. Hey Ben. Yes. Pen guy. What's the problem? You don't like my pen? I just think it's funny that you hold your, you hold your pen in your hand as if you've got like a,

like paper notes in front of you that you're going to pound on the table. Like you're like a reporter, an anchor. I'm writing stuff over here. So consumer sentiment slides with second lowest level on record as inflation expectations jump. So they looked at inflation. This is Michigan survey. Your head inflation expectations surged from 6.5% last month to 7.3% this month. This month's rise was seen among both Democrats and Republicans alike. I just think we have to throw these sentiment surveys out the window. Yeah.

I don't, they're so, people go to such extremes and it's, there's such recency bias that it's, and I understand why people thought this because the tariff stuff and it was crazy. And, but having these types of extremes when we've lived through so much worse times before, it's just, I don't think they're useful anymore at all. I agree with you. I also used to be of the mind that, well, ultimately people will act the way that they feel.

But that's not true. No. People say stuff on the internet that they don't mean in person. Right. These, the answers that they give are not how they actually feel. And they don't, people are not stopping spending or spending more because the price is good. Like they just, the way that they behave does not match the answers that they give. Here's a chart from Sembliss. Wait, hang on. I want to, I got a point on this. So my wife and I, before he got canceled, we went to see Louis CK a bunch of times. My favorite comedian ever. He's great. Um,

So he had this thing or his bit where he talked about how you yell at other people when you're in your car. Unlike ways you would yell. Like you yell at someone for cutting you off and you go, hey, idiot. And you swear at them. But if someone cut you off in the elevator, you wouldn't say, hey, moron. You wouldn't yell at someone the same way in your car versus the elevator. It's the same way on the internet. People say stuff and do stuff on the internet that they would never do in real life. Yes. Accurate.

So he has a chart showing all these different surveys that should be catching the same thing. The conference board, one of your households, Michigan, New York Fed, Atlanta Fed, Philly Fed, whether it's business people or professionals or households or consumers, and

I mean, they're sort of all going up into the right, but some are, the Michigan one is way more dramatic than the others. To this point, Mike Sicardi tweeted, you missed 7% inflation expectations. And then he said, ask, want to bet? And that figure drops to 3.7%. So on Cal she, it shows how high will the level of inflation get in 2025, putting your money where your mouth is. Yes. That's an interesting. Okay. So, so it's at 2.3% now, 3.7% is the forecast. Are you an over under that? Like what side of the bet would you take here? Under.

I think I probably would too. I feel like… I'm not going to bet on it, but… I mean, we're almost halfway through the year. I feel like the corporations can keep kicking the can. And my worry would be a 2026 story. Yeah. That we'd be seeing the higher inflation if these tariffs stay on. So, Ben, we were in Del Mar last week. We took a nice long hike.

You know, I was impressed that that's usually my type of outdoor adventurous thing. I got to San Diego later than you and you said, get your shoes and shorts on. We're going for a hike. And it was a way longer hike than I had anticipated. Uh, credit to you. You're, um, on the health kit kind of, I don't know about that, but I did 30,000 steps out there, 15 miles. I was impressed with the trails there. That was, I really loved it. So, uh, at the end of the trail, he said, you know, let's go get some tacos. And I said, uh, you down for another, for more, it's, it's another 50 minutes.

You thought I said 15. Yes, I did. It was another 50 minute walk, but we got there. And when we got there, I didn't have my wallet. I just had my, my phone, which has my Apple pay on it. No big deal. But, uh, the restaurant didn't take Apple pay. So you, thank you. Paid for lunch.

I was surprised to learn that you have a Hyatt credit card and I want to know what's that, what that's all about. It's an interesting choice. There's a reason for this. I'm sure there is. I know you've thought about this. Go ahead. I just got it probably a month ago. That's why I'm using it. Oh, you're playing the game. Well, my, what's, what's your Bahama? But you don't even use Hyatt. You don't even stay at Hyatt. What's your Bahama resort that you go to? Oh, but I'm sorry to say points don't work there. Okay. Well, that was my idea. Yeah.

Okay. There's a resort in the Bahamas. And so I figured I might as well become a Hyatt member and you spend $3,000 in the first three months and you get all these extra bonus points. So that's why I'm doing it. Okay. Well, I wonder if a new member, if you could, if you could. No, but you're right. I'd probably say at one Hyatt every five years. Yeah. If that. Actually, I don't, I don't think I told the story on the show. Maybe I did, but.

So last December, we went to Bahamar. By the way, future-proof Bahamar this year. Holy shit. October. That's going to be awesome. Holy moly. What do they have? A water park? A casino? Yeah, it's going to be a good time. So last December, we stayed at Bahamar and a friend of mine told me that he used points to book it or he was thinking about using points to book it. And I said, you can't use points. He said, yeah, you can. I'm about to. So what is it? A million points to get a night or something? So I had already paid.

using my credit card. So shame on me, I guess I should have asked, but he showed me a screenshot of pay with points. So why wouldn't I believe it? So I took all of my reserve points, all of it and transferred it to my Hyatt card. They wouldn't take it and the points are not reversible. So now I've just- So now you have to find a Hyatt somewhere else to stay. So now whenever I'm going to a city, I just, I stay at the Hyatt.

Okay. More San Diego Talks in a minute. So it was something we were talking about that I didn't really realize until going through this. So once a year, you get an email from Social Security saying, hey, check out your new Social Security statement. I don't. You don't get that? Okay. I signed up for something. And it gives you, like, if you keep earning this amount of money, if you take Social Security here, here's what you're going to get. Here's what you're going to get. But it also shows your survivor benefits. And so it showed, this is for me, it showed, like, if you pass away,

your children will receive this much money a month and your spouse will receive this much money. And it says your total family benefits cannot be more than like $6,500 a month for each kid. And we went through this. My brother, as he was getting his finances and his financial affairs under order when he got sick, said, listen, we're going to receive a check for each kid from Social Security because essentially if you die early, you don't get your Social Security, but your kids do until they're 18.

And I never really thought much about this or realized it, but it's a lot of money. It's like a couple grand a month, depending from Social Security, that these kids get until they're 18 years old tax-free. Amazing. Kind of amazing, right? I know people poo-poo a lot of government services. This is unbelievable.

And so it gave me the amounts. If you sign up for your, you can just enter your email and create a profile on socialsecurity.com and they send you an annual statement every year. And it shows like how much money you made and it shows how much social security you paid and what you're getting. Anyway, New York Times, this is Tara Siegel Bernard wrote this piece. Why many retirees are taking social security early?

Because they'd like to get cash. It feels good. An additional 276,000 retirees claim benefits on their earnings, a 13% jump from a year ago. So it's more than they would expect based on how old people are. And they say this rise was dramatic. And they say, why is it happening? This guy, the agency's commissioner said, fear-mongering has driven people to claim benefits earlier because they're afraid they're not going to claim benefits at all. Oh, wow. And so I don't know if that's because they think they're going to die or Social Security is going to run out. But

This is the spreadsheet versus feelings kind of thing. Like if you look at the spreadsheet, you are better off taking it at age 70 because you get like a 7% or 8% return from 62 to 70. Like your benefits are going to be much, much higher. But most people can't or won't wait for that. My dad didn't wait. And I was like, well, but…

Why? And he's like, because I want the money now. And I was like, all right, fair enough. Yes. So people don't use time value of money to make decisions like this, especially in retirement. It's like, no, no, no. Give it to me now. I'm going to spend it now. I don't care if it's more in the future. No, that is time value of money. It's worth more today than it is in the future. Okay. But it's not like, yeah. Anyway, it's just interesting. That's how things work. All right. Let's do some more travel thoughts. We had horchata. At least I had it. You tasted it? You did. Yeah.

Do you still, it's like a milk cream soda? It's like rice pudding in a drink, I guess, ish. I loved it. Delicious. I don't know how you weren't ready to take a nap. I took a little sip and it was not- I don't know that it goes really well with a burrito, but it was delicious. So last week I was talking about how the line at Clear was as short as I've ever seen it. And I couldn't help but think, well, I guess this makes sense. Economy is slowing. We know that. Travel is slowing. We hear it from the airlines. But then San Diego-

My friend guilted me into changing my flight to the 6.30 a.m. flight to get home from the Knicks game. True fan, my friend. I woke up at four o'clock, got my ass to the airport, and I thought I would sort of stroll through. It was packed. San Diego, five in the morning, packed. So I don't know. I don't know if that says anything or nothing. Did you see the line at the lounge? The line at the lounge was like circled around the airport, like...

People really wait that long to get into a lounge. I'm sorry. Going to lounge. I don't mind waiting for a lounge. I don't think I would wait for lunch. Uh, so when I was at the Broadmoor, I ordered a pastry and a cup of coffee and it was $18. And I thought to myself, wow,

That's a lot of money. I also thought in hotels, there's no limits to what they could charge. When I was in the Bahamas, I told you, I got like a little bag of Doritos and a ball and some sunscreen and this and that. It was $110. And yeah, sure. Charge whatever you want. What are you going to do? But then I got back to my room and I've got this travel case of cords, right?

I got one of those too. And every cord was wrapped up perfectly lined up. My room was immaculate. And then I thought, all right, I guess you get what you pay for.

So we, you and I were just, I had never been to San Diego before. I think you had never been either. Or was it, had you never, never to the part that we were at. Okay. So it was, it was beautiful. And we were in a great set. We at the Torrey Pines, we did a live podcast there with Vanak and that's going to be coming out shortly. I think next week or so. It was fun. Cool group there. Um,

But I had never been to San Diego before. You and I were just speaking glowingly of it the whole time because we were hiking and seeing the great spots and these outdoor restaurants. This is amazing. Yeah. Like, why doesn't everyone live here? And we asked a few people who lived in San Diego, like, because we said, do you think people here appreciate it enough? Like the weather is perfect. You can be outside all the time. The ocean is amazing. And so we asked people, like, do people here appreciate it? And most people said, yeah, but the housing costs.

And we had multiple people say that exact same thing. Well, of course we appreciate it. The weather's great. It's beautiful. The hills and the mountains and the cliffs. But yeah, the housing is insanely expensive. And our retort was, yeah, like this is the kind of place where housing probably should be expensive. It makes sense that more people would want to live there than can. Yeah. Because it's so magnificent. I still don't know what the excuse is for New York, but. We have a great port.

That's true. All right. I have a question for you. Why—maybe I just never paid attention growing up, and this is all in my head. Why does it seem like school drop-off is so much harder these days than it was when we were younger? Because I had to drop my kids off this morning. My wife had to take my son to—he thinks he—my son got a new swing for his birthday. You know those big round circle swings? Like a big—it's a big circle. You see, Matt, we got one for our back of the place. Like a tire? No, it's just a round, flat thing. Anyway. Okay.

He was on it last night, and he goes too high. He fell off, and he thinks he broke his hand. Oh, no. He was screaming bloody murder. He's already broken his hand once. We'll see. So he had to go get an x-ray this morning. So I dropped the girls off at school. And the line for drop-off and pick-up is so long. Maybe it's just because kids don't take the bus anymore. I don't know. But it seems like I don't remember ever being an issue when I was young to drop off at school. Mostly because I did take the bus.

And if I ever got dropped off, it was kind of a special thing. But if my mom dropped me off, it was just kind of pull up, go. Now there's a line. You have to like follow certain instructions, which way to go. Is it like that for you too? Well, you know, that's one of the benefits of living in New York then is that our drop off is actually super easy.

Is it really? Well, most of the 95% of the time my kids take the bus, uh, here and there I drop them off, but yeah. See the problem is ours is the, ours is the very first stop. So our kids would be in the bus for like 45 minutes in the morning. They'd have to get out really early. So we just said, uh, that's not worth it. Yeah. Um, anyway. All right. Recommendations. What do you got? What'd you watch on the plane? I watched inheritance movie. I had never heard of.

It was like a spy. It was actually a good airplane movie. Yeah, it was a good airplane movie. Not the 2021, the 2025 or 2024. See, I don't like it when movies use the same name. Actually, wait. There's a 2020 and a 2024. Which one did I... I didn't watch either of those. Which one did I watch? Is there a 2025 one? Yeah. Okay, so not the 2020 or 2024. Here's... When Maya learns that her father was once a spy, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an international conspiracy.

Okay, so this has got a 5.6 on IMDb. Yeah, 54% of Rotten Tomatoes, airplane movie all the way. It was quick and easy. I went to see Final Destination last night. Okay. Killed it at the box office, over $100 million. Wow, okay. That's still kind of stuff still has legs, huh? How many of those have there been? I remember when the first one came out, it was like kind of a thing and then- Oh, it was a thing. And the second one was a thing too. That was Allie Lauder. I don't think I've seen anything beyond the second one, but a rip-roaring good time. A lot of fun. Great deaths.

I guess it's one of those movies that just makes you think, like, why doesn't stuff like this happen more often? Like, I could have died there, and if this would have broken this way or that, like, I could have totally died there. Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. Oh, so...

Not to beat this dead horse. I'm still, I'm enjoying The Last of Us. I'm really surprised because I'm not even like a super fan, but did you watch the most recent episode, episode six? Well, yeah, you won't because they brought Joel back. That's why you're enjoying it. When I saw him come back, it's like, yeah, this is why I like the show because of him. Yeah, but we knew he was going to come back.

That he was going to make another appearance in the show. Not that he was brought back from the dead. By the way, this is not a spoiler. Some people got mad at us for this. It's not a spoiler. All right? We'll be more conscious spoilers going forward. But you knew that Joel was going to make another appearance in the last episode. And it was already in the video game. Yeah. But anyway, my point is... But here's the thing. All the video game people don't like the show anyway, I guess. Like, they complain all the time. So why did we have to appease them anyway? You know what's odd? It's only seven episodes this season. So next week is done. But...

So are you back in, or you still don't like it, or you're mad? No, I'm just saying, Joel coming back makes you realize, like, oh, why did they get rid of him? It's better when he's on the show. Yeah, he's a good character. Okay, I tried Nosferatu on the plane. This has got a 7.2 on IMDb. My score is far lower than that. Did you finish it? I gave it a 5.4. No, I made it halfway through. It just...

When the vampire... So it's actually a movie about real estate. The vampire wants a new estate. He wants to get... And Nicholas Holt is going to come find him a new estate somewhere. And when he comes to talk to the vampire, it's like unintentional comedy. It was... I don't know. For something about it, to me, I wasn't scared. I was laughing. Maybe this kind of movie is not for me. It just...

I'm shocked. I'm surprised that you would even try it. That's definitely not a you movie. I heard a bunch of people talk about it. I figured I'd give it a shot. Not for me. Uh, I rewatched easy a for the first time in a while. I never heard of it. Emma stone. It's Emma stone. Penn Badgley's in it. It's a early, it's a 2010s ish teen movie and it's a little over the top. Uh, Stanley plays her mom. Wait, why did you rewatch it? I was on American. They didn't have a great movie selection. Um,

Emma Stone is just so good in this. And I think, is she on the list of, like, best teen movie stars? Because she was in this and, this century, she was on this and Superbad. She's been in some classic high school movies. And they do play up to a lot of, like, it's an homage to previous high school movies. They do a good job of kind of wink-winking at you. Like, yeah, we know this is how a lot of high school movies are. But she's just amazing in it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so she needs to get back to rom-coms. I watched Crazy Stupid Love recently, too, with her and Gosling. You know what? My big take on Gosling is that's his best performance ever. I never saw that movie either. Good, obviously. I mean, it's a rom-com. Steve Carell, the very last scene of the movie is really, really funny. It's got Kevin Bacon, Steve Carell, and Ryan Gosling. Those are airplane movies. Yes. Absolutely. That's why I watched it. Yes. And I finished the four seasons. I know you didn't like it and you fell asleep. I really liked that show. Yeah.

I enjoyed it. There's a new show on Max. Oh, we even get to the Maxes now, HBO. Again, what a cluster that is. There's a new show with this guy Sawyer from Lost. New Max show. I always wondered why he wasn't bigger. I liked him. It's called Duster. I watched the first 10 minutes. I think I'm going to wait. I think I'm going to wait to hear how it goes. All right. If it's good, I'll jump in, but I wasn't gripped. All right.

Waiting game. I think everything's a waiting game now to see what the actual impact. What are you waiting for? Tariffs? Tariffs. I think everything that is just a waiting game. I think that's one of the biggest reasons that stocks came roaring back so quickly. Not only did Trump back off, but like show us first. Show us the actual impact. Then we'll react. I think the stock market doesn't have patience for like waiting and waiting and waiting anymore. It's like show us some actual impact. Then we'll react.

Maybe we will. But I think there could be, I think the risk is like a retailer gets dinged really bad in earnings report in the months ahead. But that's going to be, how long is that going to take? Third quarter, probably? I don't know. I'm not following like the tariff news that closely. Like, I don't even, I don't know what the current tariff policy is. I don't know if anyone does. All right. Personal emails, personal responses, animal spirits at thecompoundnews.com. See you next time.