transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] This message is brought to you by Fidelity Investments. When timing is everything, you need powerful tools and research that can meet you in the moment. With the all new Fidelity Trader Plus platform, your charts and preferences show up consistently, synced up across all your devices, so you can act fast whenever and wherever you're trading. You can save an order on your desktop at home, get a mobile alert when you're at work, and complete the trade in the Fidelity app without starting over. And with a downloadable Fidelity Trader Plus desktop platform, you have more control with multi-monitor views, enhanced tools and customization options, and integrated screen sharing with Fidelity trading specialists. Try Fidelity's most powerful trading platform yet at fidelity.com/traderplus. Fidelity Investments and The Compound are not affiliated. Views, opinions, product services, and strategies discussed are not endorsed or promoted by Fidelity Investments. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC member NYSE SIPC. Today's show is brought to you by Janus Henderson. At Janus Henderson Investors, we believe working together is the way to work better. Like combining your portfolio plans and our in-depth strategy, your valued assets and our valuable insights, your mission and our vision, always working in perfect harmony to find the right investment opportunities. Janus Henderson Investors, investing in a brighter future together. Visit janushenderson.com.

Speaker 2:
[01:20] 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.

Speaker 1:
[01:49] Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Ben, good morning. How are you doing?

Speaker 3:
[01:53] Good morning. Someone said last week we didn't say welcome to Animal Spirits, so I threw them off.

Speaker 1:
[01:59] All right. Well, welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome. All right. We're going to start the show today with an op-ed in the New York Times. I am generally a praised by name, criticized by category person. That's like the right attitude in life. Especially when you're talking to a public audience.

Speaker 3:
[02:17] That's true. I criticize perma bears. That's my thing.

Speaker 1:
[02:21] So there was an article over the weekend by our friend Kyla Scanlon, and it broke my heart a little bit, like what Anakin did to the Queen in Revenge of the Sith, which I just rewatched with Logan and the Boys and Kobe. I still love that movie, even though Execute Order 66 was a bit silly.

Speaker 3:
[02:41] Are we talking prequels here? The prequel, Star Wars prequels, as I was saying?

Speaker 1:
[02:44] Yeah, 123, yeah, Revenge of the Sith.

Speaker 3:
[02:46] Yeah, they're all terrible. I went to see them at the theater. I thought that was like universal knowledge, that those are just really bad.

Speaker 1:
[02:52] Well, the first one was a complete joke.

Speaker 3:
[02:55] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[02:55] Clone Wars was no better, but Revenge of the Sith was fun.

Speaker 3:
[02:58] I didn't mind, is that the one where he turned into Darth Vader? I guess I didn't mind that.

Speaker 1:
[03:01] That was pretty cool. All right. All right, so anyway, so I'm going to criticize Kyla's piece, because I think she's phenomenal, super talented, but this one didn't hit the mark for me. The title of the post, which she didn't choose, but still, this was the topic, so it was fair. Why the stock market makes no sense right now. And Ben, is this text like a, you pulled this straight from the article?

Speaker 3:
[03:30] Yes, if you want to read it.

Speaker 1:
[03:32] All right, more broadly, and listen, I think what she's saying is what a lot of people are feeling. Every day, investors, every day Americans are like, why is the stock market going up? She says, more broadly, the markets are showing the single lesson that the past 40 years have taught them. It will always be saved. Markets are not properly pricing risk because they really don't have to. They have assumed that the US government will allow them to implode, and that assumption is putting the world economy at stake. What's more, the new rescue where investors are counting on artificial intelligence is vulnerable to the exact risks markets are ignoring. This was the populist rhetoric that has taken the country over the last decade or whatever, and this article is nonsense. This argument is nonsense because I think generally, yes, I think everybody agrees that the government will not allow us to implode. The Fed put, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, but that's not what happened in this, in this go around at all. I think the markets made perfect sense. Now, I think like in the beginning, yes, everyone's like, wait, why aren't markets going down? Why aren't markets going down? But after like, let's call it two to three to four weeks, I think investors settled in and said, well, this actually does make sense because we know that these headwinds are going to pass. Everybody, air quote, knew. No, we couldn't know for sure, but everybody had a feeling. And the market was right, that we were going to move on, that crude oil would come down, that the dollar would come down, that rates would come down, and all the while, earnings estimates kept going higher. And so it was like a pretty linear, it was very understandable. This had nothing to do with the government or any of the things that we hate about the system.

Speaker 3:
[05:22] I understand why people say that because we did get saved in the pandemic. It could have been way worse if the government didn't throw trillions of dollars at it. But also in 2022, it was the opposite of being saved. Remember, the Fed was literally trying to make the stock market go down. They said that. Neel Kashkari said, I want the stock market to go down. It's a good thing when it goes down. We brought rates from 0% to 5%. That wasn't them saving. That was them trying to destroy the market. Liberation Day wasn't the government saving the market. It was the government saving them from themselves. Right? And that's the same thing that's going on now, is that it's not a saving thing. I think the thing that really makes people mad is that the stock market has been more right than anyone this decade. It was right about the vaccine coming. It was right about inflation being transitory, which kind of was. It was right about the Russia-Ukraine war not sending oil to $200 a barrel. It was right about the fact that AI would matter more than tariffs. And it was right about, so far, the Iran war not having a huge impact on earnings. And that's the thing. I heard Steve Iseman on a podcast a few months ago, and he said, the stock market is amoral. It doesn't care about anything other than the numbers. That's all it cares about. And if this was impacting earnings, the stock market would be lower. That's it. That's all that the stock market cares about.

Speaker 1:
[06:32] Yeah, remember a couple of weeks ago, I said, if you think that the market is going to crash or whatever, like the burden of proof is on you, because the market was telling you, again, I understand the first two weeks, the reaction, we were scratching our heads too, right? Because it was like, wait a minute. I thought the straight of her moves was the Black Swan event. Like, I don't understand, we didn't understand, but as it kept going, the lack of the sell off, you had to say, okay, the market is probably right. And it was right. And so I do feel uncomfortable calling Kyla out by name because she's a friend of the show, and I think her work is phenomenal. But this particular piece of hers, I didn't care for, and I'm still a fan of hers.

Speaker 3:
[07:15] Yeah, I am too. I think she's done great work. I think that we see this, we've seen this every sort of downturn where people ask this whole decade, why isn't this worse? Remember how many people predicted when the stock market came rushing back in 2020? Like, yeah, okay, fine. It's gonna roll, this is a dead cat bounce. It's gonna roll over. We're definitely retesting the lows. Every smart investor was saying that at the time.

Speaker 1:
[07:34] I said that, I remember in May-ish as the market was approaching new all-time highs, and we erased the 35% decline. I very much remember saying on the show, you're telling me that the market, the economy, businesses are in a better place today than they were pre-pandemic. And the thing is, that's not how the stock market works. I was an idiot to say that. I mean, listen, I think it was forgivable given all the deaths and stuff and all the scaryness that was the pandemic. But that's not how the market works. It doesn't work on today. It works on the future and what it anticipates the future to be. So, a really great compliment to that essay was Duality Research. He wrote, we're in a market environment that doesn't care much about how things looked today. All that matters is whether things are getting better at the margin because that's what actually moves prices. Like we said last week, we want to avoid static thinking and focus on where things are going, not where they are right now. Improvement alone can be enough to sustain momentum, so long as that dynamic holds. The case for staying constructive remains intact. All right, so this is his coup de grace. If you're having a hard time grasping the idea, remember that the stock market's job is to make you say, this makes no sense. So, lean into it because this market isn't exactly rolling out the red carpet for anyone trying to jump back in. That's kind of the point here. Yes, not always, but many times, the stock market fools the majority. That's just the way that it is.

Speaker 3:
[09:11] There's going to be a point where we're going to be complacent about risk. We're going to be too complacent. We're going to think, oh, this will blow over too. That is going to happen. I think that's what people are waiting for. Like, oh, these idiots are way too complacent. This should be getting worse. And it's not, that's going to happen at some point.

Speaker 1:
[09:25] When you say these idiots, do you mean us two or the market? Because I was-

Speaker 3:
[09:28] Every, no, not us. Everyone, I think, I just think that, but trying to predict that ahead of time, when the market is too dumb, like, and when the market is, you know, that's impossible.

Speaker 1:
[09:39] That's one out of a hundred. Listen, this is Michael's number one rule of investing. If the market is doing one thing, and most people are saying this makes no sense, most people are wrong and the market is right. That is just, that's it. It is the collective wisdom of the crowds. And yes, the crowd is wrong once in a while, but just assume that you're wrong, not the market.

Speaker 3:
[10:02] Yes, that's a good baseline assumption.

Speaker 1:
[10:05] I don't understand why the, yeah, you don't understand, you're wrong.

Speaker 3:
[10:09] Bezos once said, contrarians are mostly wrong. It's true and it has to be by definition.

Speaker 1:
[10:16] Okay, so here's a great chart from Alex at Duality Research. S&P 500 price returns versus forward EPS growth. So it's looking at the price return year over year, and the 12-month forward EPS year over year. And would you say these move in the same direction, Ben? Because I would. So based on this, the stock market makes perfect sense right now. Now, I understand Kyla's post, right? She's talking to everybody, right? The average investor that really is like, wait, this doesn't make any sense. And I think she would probably agree with what we're saying here.

Speaker 3:
[10:46] She's not alone either. So this is from Lisa Abramowitz tweeted this from one of the chief investment strategists, HSBC. This doesn't make sense. Risk assets are detached from reality. This is how a lot of our meetings start right now. And the thing is, it's just that back to your EPS growth, it's earnings.

Speaker 1:
[11:02] That's it.

Speaker 3:
[11:03] I pulled up from Exhibit A. Look at, I pulled this consensus, expected estimates from Exhibit A. Earnings are, expectations are accelerating. They're going up. Now, could it be that these expectations are too high? And like if actual earnings come in lower than the market is getting out over the skis? Yes. But look at this one from Mike Bird at The Economist. Earnings expectations for American stocks are rising faster than after the 2017 tax cuts. They're rising at a pace you usually only see during recovery from recessions. The profit machine will not stop. So this is 12 month forward earnings per share, a percentage change from the year earlier. And again, it's accelerating. This is the thing the stock market cares about. And it could be wrong, but that's not what the stock market is paying attention to right now. Like could this be wrong? It's no, this is what's happening.

Speaker 1:
[11:50] I forget who I saw this from. I think a lot of people have done this chart. You've never seen this sort of multiple contraction outside of a recession.

Speaker 3:
[12:00] Because prices were falling as earnings were rising.

Speaker 1:
[12:03] Yes. So it was like leverage on leverage.

Speaker 3:
[12:06] So that was like the rubber band being pulled. If you want to make sense of the market, the earnings are this, this is the Occam's Razor. This is the simple explanation.

Speaker 1:
[12:14] I think this, I actually think the market makes perfect sense right now. Everything that was holding the market back receded. Earnings growth is accelerating. And also the biggest part, or one of the biggest parts, is people were way under allocated. Because there was the biggest rush to cash ever. Now I know it's like on a dollar basis, but still. People were under invested and now they're chasing. And will the chase go too far? Yeah, probably. Always does.

Speaker 3:
[12:39] This is also a really good explainer in the stock market, not always being the economy. Energy makes up 4% of the index. Technology is 40 or 50, depending on how you define it. And I know oil impacts everything, but obviously with these big companies that matter most to earnings, it doesn't matter all that much. All right. I looked at this. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here. Everyone said, someone emailed me last night and said, you know, that was really heartfelt kudos Michael gave to you last week. I think he actually meant it. I said, yeah, I kind of think he meant it too.

Speaker 1:
[13:06] What do you mean? Of course I meant it.

Speaker 3:
[13:08] I'm kidding. But I don't want to pat myself on the back. But look, the first blog post I ever wrote about everything is getting faster was 2014. And even I could not have anticipated how much faster things have gotten since then in like the last decade. So this is from Bespoke. Since 1928, this is the first time the S&P has made new all time highs in 11 days or fewer after falling 5 to 10 percent. Mata's Proposal posted this, the 13-day NASDAQ return. So I think it was up 13 days in a row. Is that right? And he posts it on the greatest 11 day or 13 day returns ever. And he says the other dates are hilarious because it's all 2001, 2009, 2000, 2008, 2020. Like after massive, massive crashes, like the snapback rallies, this one is in that same boat.

Speaker 1:
[13:56] And this was a weird one because the phrase is the markets take the stairs up and the elevator down. And that's usually true, right? Markets go up slowly and then they come down really fast. This was the opposite.

Speaker 3:
[14:12] But this is the new normal though. We've done that. We did, listen to this, 2018 V-shape rally. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1:
[14:18] This wasn't, but my point is this wasn't a V because the V is V down, V up. This wasn't a V. This was a J, a sideways J.

Speaker 3:
[14:27] Oh, we rolled over slowly. Yeah, so it was like a backwards.

Speaker 1:
[14:29] It was weird. We took the stairs down. Remember everyone was like, why are we going down fast? We didn't even have a 2% down day. The market took the stairs down, the elevator back up. It was very bizarre.

Speaker 3:
[14:38] But I feel like every single downturn we've had this decade, you get stats like this going, this has never happened before. This is happening more and more often. So three weeks ago, the S&P, for year to date, this is not the downturn, this is year to date returns. On a total turn basis, we're down seven, the Nasdaq was down nine, and the Russell 2000 was down three. Now, the Russell 2000 is up 13%. The Q's are up almost 6%, and the S&P is up over 4% year to date.

Speaker 1:
[15:04] Wow, wow, wow.

Speaker 3:
[15:05] Huge, and this is in three weeks.

Speaker 1:
[15:07] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[15:08] So I had Matt look at this for me. We've had seven new highs this year. I think we had three in a row. So we had like two months between all-time highs. It was nothing, essentially, right? We came racing back to all-time highs. So I looked at new all-time highs by decade. And then I thought, like, man, this is fast approaching the 80s and 90s bull market. So if you look at from 1980 to March of 2000, which is when we peaked for the.com bubble, it was 505 new all-time highs in the market. Since 2013, when we hit new all-time highs again, after the GFC for the first time, through now, we're at almost 450 all-time highs. Look at the next chart. I had Matt update this chart for me. The bull market, the 1982 bull market versus 2009.

Speaker 1:
[15:50] Oh, that's pretty good.

Speaker 3:
[15:51] A 57% move higher, and we equal the 1980s and 1990s bull market.

Speaker 1:
[15:58] That's where we are. I know this comment is a reflection of where we are in time, but I also genuinely believe what I'm about to say. This is why buy and hold beats almost everything else. It's just too difficult. It's not to say that, like, yes, people don't have great calls, and of course they do, and of course there are very talented traders, but we can't all be talented traders. And this idea that you're going to jump in and out and in and beat taxes is such a f***ing joke. And if you don't understand that by now, now I'm not saying buy and hold is easy. It sucks s***. I'm not saying that you don't get lost decades. All that sort of stuff still applies. But if you think that you're going to do better by whatever, like using your intuition or whatever like, you are very delusional.

Speaker 3:
[16:42] Can I give you a sneak peek of my book that's coming out in about three weeks? So Churchill had the quote that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other ones. And my play on that was buy and hold is the worst form of investing except for all the other ones.

Speaker 1:
[16:55] Yeah, it's good. And to be clear, we are not, we are not, I was going to say I am not, but we are not, I speak for Ben and I. Like at Ritholtz, we are not shut up, nothing matters, buy and hold forever. Like we run a trend following tactical strategy. So we understand the behavioral difficulties of staying invested, but just this idea that like you're going to non-systematically use your intuition and your feel and do that successfully over the course of your investing career, nonsense.

Speaker 3:
[17:25] If you include, I think if you include the last 20 years, which is like 2007, right before the GFC to now, I think it's proven beyond like a shadow of a doubt, investing in your intuition is nuts. The best people in the world can do it. Just Stanley Druckenmiller, knock yourself out. Everyone else, you have to have rules in place to guide your actions. You have to. It's never going to work. All right. I love this one from Sam Rowe. Question, is investing supposed to be fun? What do you think?

Speaker 1:
[17:52] I will say this. No. Parts of your portfolio can be fun. So even though I think that whatever percent, the vast majority of our overall portfolio should be boring as shit, you're allowed to have a little fun. I have a little fun.

Speaker 3:
[18:05] So I like this one.

Speaker 1:
[18:06] But no, it's not fun.

Speaker 3:
[18:07] Sam had a piece at TKR and he said, wait, I would get it wrong every time.

Speaker 1:
[18:12] TKR?

Speaker 3:
[18:13] Ticker.

Speaker 1:
[18:13] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[18:15] As much as I enjoy the intellectual exercise of researching and running about financial markets, I find the act of investing can be very unpleasant. When stocks are up, I worry they'll go down, and when they're down, I worry they'll go lower. I think that's the sound of many, many, many people.

Speaker 1:
[18:26] Nailed it.

Speaker 3:
[18:27] You've said that before too.

Speaker 1:
[18:28] Well, my take on that is every time I think, every time stocks fall a little, I think they're going to fall a lot.

Speaker 3:
[18:33] Yeah, so he says, even when I look back and see progress in my portfolio is made toward my financial goals, I struggle to recall moments when I felt totally sanguine about the money I had at risk. Sure, in hindsight, I'm grateful for how far I've come, but my memory of the process is of anything but a smooth ride. I'm glad he said this. So he shows, get this thing where he put money in last year right at the peak before Liberation Day. He put a big lump sum in right at the peak, had a huge crash, but now the stock market came roaring back. Now that buy doesn't look so terrible, which is kind of my Bob the World's Worst Market Timer. So he's saying, I'm the world's worst timer because I put a lump sum in at the peak. But he's saying, even though it worked out, that was not fun. I didn't enjoy that. I think that is a good point that it's easy to look back and go, oh man, that wasn't too bad. This has been a bull market, but it has not been easy the whole time. I am in complete agreement.

Speaker 1:
[19:23] Yeah, this has not been a smooth ride.

Speaker 3:
[19:26] In a million years, if you would have told me, in 2013, when we hit new all-time highs, remember people were saying this, the market reeks of euphoria, our favorite quote from a perma bear we know? In 2013, people were saying this.

Speaker 1:
[19:38] By the way, we were laughing in 2013 about that quote. Josh and I were in Austin, I'll never forget, we were on a bus giggling. Now, it's been easy for people that are completely disinterested in the stock market. I would say like for the average person that goes to work, contributes to the 401k, checks our balance once a year, yeah, it's been really easy. But for people listening to this podcast, that are checking their balance, that are looking at the headlines, ain't been easy.

Speaker 3:
[20:10] No, no it has not. It's funny, I had a client conversation, I may have told this story already, stop me if I have, and kind of asked, this is like a week ago, how have you felt about all this stuff, the geopolitics, the macro, whatever's going on? And they said, honestly, I've been so busy in my job that I haven't been able to pay attention. And I said, all right, I'm not gonna say anything else. If that's working for you, keep at it. There's no reason for me to show you charts and that's not a bad place to be. Okay, I think one of the more interesting reasons why people would have had disbelief is that we're heading into this decade about not just all the stuff that's going on, but we're in a totally new environment, economic environment. So it's crazy to be that we have the S&P essentially has the exact same annual returns in the 2020s as it did in the 2010s, but it's a totally different environment.

Speaker 1:
[20:58] So can I say the G word?

Speaker 3:
[21:01] What's that?

Speaker 1:
[21:02] It does feel like this is like Goldilocks for the economy.

Speaker 3:
[21:06] Well, here's the weird part though.

Speaker 1:
[21:09] I mean, it's like not too hot, not too cold. It's sort of, you know, it's sort of just right.

Speaker 3:
[21:14] So Matt Klein has this thing where he shows what the inflation outlook looked like before the pandemic and after. And even though like it looks like the inflation was kind of transitory because it went up and it went came down really quick, like we've reached this new equilibrium, it seems, where it's like 2% really is 3%, 3.5%. And it seems like such a small number, but that's a totally different ballgame. I mean, obviously the guess what? The wage growth has been a little higher. The economic growth has been a little higher. Rates have been higher, but that's a totally different world that we're living. Like this is a totally new environment.

Speaker 1:
[21:49] Have money, we'll spend it. I feel like for years, particularly you have been asking the question, like what stops us? And it's just, it's the labor market. That is it. And what stops that? You know, who knows? Pull this chart, yeah, probably. Pull this chart from a daily chart book. Naila Richardson. For the four weeks ending March 28th, 2026, US private employment added an average of 39,250 jobs a week. Doesn't sound like a very big number, but it was the fourth straight week of improvement in hiring.

Speaker 3:
[22:24] I believe they call that a narrative violation.

Speaker 1:
[22:26] That's it.

Speaker 3:
[22:28] You know, the funny thing about all the risks that we've been talking about for God knows how many years is that a risk happens, we dissect it in every detail, and then it kind of just goes away, and then we forget about it. We move on to another risk, and then we worry about that for a few weeks.

Speaker 1:
[22:46] Do you think that the biggest candidate for that, the risk that we're obsessing over is private credit?

Speaker 3:
[22:51] I do. I think people, it's likely because again, the workouts on these things takes so long. Even if it is bad loans, it's not going to be like one day there's going to be a headline going, all the loans went bad.

Speaker 1:
[23:03] Right.

Speaker 3:
[23:03] It's going to take years and years to work out and they'll probably, they have all these covenants to go through and and we get a ton of money. Yes.

Speaker 1:
[23:11] What movie was the squirrel from?

Speaker 3:
[23:13] Where the ice age? Right? Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[23:16] Is that it? Okay.

Speaker 3:
[23:18] Or he can't get the nut ever? Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[23:21] Yeah. This is an interesting one. I forget who shared this. We spoke about this. The Internet didn't do anything for productivity. If you just look at the trend line, which kind of sounded like maybe a legitimate data point that just was hard to believe, can't be true, right? Internet did nothing? Then maybe we're measuring productivity wrong. So I saw this from Morgan Stanley. We are likely in the early stages of another productivity boom. Now, the way that they're measuring this is non-farm business labor productivity. So output per hour. Okay. I'm not exactly sure how you measure output per hour, but according to this metric, Internet adoption had a massive impact on output per hour productivity, which is sort of intuitive. And they're showing that AI adoption. And interestingly, this chart did go straight down.

Speaker 3:
[24:17] Why didn't it go down?

Speaker 1:
[24:19] Well, it wasn't increasing at as large of a rate.

Speaker 3:
[24:22] Oh, okay.

Speaker 1:
[24:23] It wasn't like negative.

Speaker 3:
[24:24] The derivative, okay.

Speaker 1:
[24:25] Right, but they're showing AI adoption potting and potentially turning higher. And I mean, I would expect this.

Speaker 3:
[24:30] I mean, it has to. Otherwise, there's no other choice, right?

Speaker 1:
[24:36] I... What was I doing this morning on the machine? Whatever it is, like just everything that you use it for, it's just like, this would have been so much harder without with just Google, right?

Speaker 3:
[24:47] Yes. Yes. It's turned into my search engine for anytime I need like a question answered. That's it. So I got some angry emails from GenX people in recent weeks. I just want people to... Oh, yeah, because they're the forgotten generation. And I think I said something that like GenX never had anything and they had it easy. When I talk about demographics, my tongue is usually planted firmly in cheek.

Speaker 1:
[25:12] No, it's not. What do you mean? This is the lamest Grand Rapids head I've ever seen. Stand on something. You're allowed to say what you feel.

Speaker 3:
[25:22] Well, I said last week, I think boomers had it easier than anyone by far.

Speaker 1:
[25:26] That wasn't tongue... Wait, hold on, hold on. Not to be a dick. That's not tongue in cheek.

Speaker 3:
[25:29] No, I was being tongue in cheek about GenX not mattering and never having it. Because GenX... So the Wall Street Journal did something and they showed GenX charts now. And they were saying that like... Actually, buying homes for GenX from 1990 to 2015 was a pretty great time to buy a home, obviously. Rates were coming down and prices were pretty low. But GenX did have to, like when they were just hitting...

Speaker 1:
[25:53] There's two crashes.

Speaker 3:
[25:55] Yes, the 9-11 into.com bubble bursting, into GFC. Now in hindsight, because I remember I had this story of someone telling me, one of my brother's friends said, I started working in 2000. I lived through two recessions. Stock market went nowhere for a decade. I put more money in than my account is worth in 2010. He's telling me, like, tell me something good here. And the only thing I could say was, you just dollar-cost average for a decade. And think about what that's going to be worth. Think about what it's worth now 15 years later. So the good news was, you get the dollar-cost average through a bad. The bad news was, you had to live through a crappy decade. But here's the one that, like, I think is just the, what do you say, the coup d'egre? So they show the average household net worth by millennials, gen-X, baby boomers. Here's the one thing to take away from this chart.

Speaker 1:
[26:40] Which chart are we looking at?

Speaker 3:
[26:41] So the very, that shows average household net worth in $20, $25. On an inflation-adjusted basis, eventually, every generation is richer than the one before it. Gen-X is ahead of baby boomers. Millennials are ahead of gen-X and boomers. Like, this is the thing to put, hang your hat on. People always say, like, are we better off than our parents' generations?

Speaker 1:
[26:59] But it's average.

Speaker 3:
[27:02] I don't care. Come on.

Speaker 1:
[27:04] No, well, if you care about wealth and equality, then you know how much the average skews things.

Speaker 3:
[27:08] I think the median would be pretty similar.

Speaker 1:
[27:10] Do you? Okay. Well, here's my take on the intergenerational stuff. I think every generation has it hard because life is hard. Life is not easy for anybody. Everybody goes through the same shit, the same personal stuff. Now, the environments and the things in the background are changing, making things maybe different. But we all, us, our parents, our kids, we're all people, and we all have the same-

Speaker 3:
[27:30] Generations are like 18 years wide, so you and I, being older millennials, we have a totally different experience because of when we bought houses than younger millennials do who got boxed out of the housing market. But we also had 2008, so it's like, you can go back and forth a million different times. All right, I was gonna talk about young people one more time with the labor market, but I guess I don't really have to. My one thing I wanna say here is that economic data has gotten so good, and there's so much of it now, that you can always do an exception to everything. Yeah. Like, good news, bad news, slice and dut, like, within the data. So I did this thing a couple weeks ago, where I posted, so if you look at the, so the Fed has this great thing that I look at all the time with, like, net worth and assets and what they're worth since 1989. And if you look at, since the end of 2019, if you look at the top 10%, the next 40%, and the bottom 50%, the bottom 50% and the next 40%, so the bottom 90%, okay? Had higher asset growth than the top 10% this decade. By a pretty decent margin. Does that make, so, the growth in assets or the growth in net worth for that cohort, the bottom 90%, has grown faster than the top 10%. And I said, this is surprising data. I don't think anyone would have believed you if you would have told them that. And then people say, well, yeah, of course, it's coming off of a lower base. Which is in fact true. That's a true statement. But I still think it's good news that like the bottom 50% and the bottom, you know, or the bottom 90% owns more stocks, has seen their wealth rise. I think that you have to start from somewhere is my point.

Speaker 1:
[29:07] Yeah. How could you say that's bad news?

Speaker 3:
[29:09] A lot of people on the Internet did.

Speaker 1:
[29:13] Right.

Speaker 3:
[29:13] Anyway, I think that's the thing that kind of irks me with economic data is that it's so great that we can slice and dice it. But you can always find some little thorn in your side to say like, yeah, but what about this? But what about that?

Speaker 1:
[29:25] Definitely can. All right. Transcript pulled some stuff this week from them, as I always do, more on the economy. This is from Pepsi. And I would say that Pepsi serves a pretty wide, diverse Pepsi serves everyone. Who doesn't drink Pepsi? You drink Pepsi.

Speaker 3:
[29:43] I'm a convert. I used to be a diet Coke slash Coke zero drinker. I now drink the Pepsi zero, whatever it's called. It tastes better.

Speaker 1:
[29:51] Here's what their CEO said. And I must say, obviously, we're looking at this every day, globally, not only the US but globally. And we're seeing the consumer quite resilient, very resilient. We haven't seen an impact on demand since the war started. Here's Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan. The US consumer continues to spend through all these different platforms here at Bank of America. Again, company that serves everybody, Main Street, America. To put that in context, the total spending by consumers across all the ways they move money into the US economy, at Bank of America, is $4.5 trillion a year. For 2025, you could see that it was up 5% in 2024, and the 5% growth has been consistent in the first quarter of 26, compared to the first quarter of 25. Lastly, Wallace Fargo.

Speaker 3:
[30:35] That's above the rate of inflation.

Speaker 1:
[30:38] The financial health of consumers and businesses remains strong. Consumers are spending more than a year ago, which includes spending more on gas, but they haven't slowed spending anywhere else. And if you look, not to belabor the point, but if you look at the state of the consumer, which powers 70% of the economy, and if you look at the tech giants, which powers a lot of the growth in the S&P 500, it's not hard to see why the stock market is going higher. It actually makes perfect sense.

Speaker 3:
[31:11] But you don't check your mentions on Twitter anymore, but some guy wrote us and said, how could the consumer possibly keep spending through all this stuff? How is this possible? And my simple answer is just the amount of wealth that's been created in the stock and housing markets this decade is probably on par with anything we've ever seen. And that piece gives the 65% of people who own a home and own stocks so much of a backstop and a margin of safety.

Speaker 1:
[31:43] I'm a perfect example, and I know that I am fortunate, and I am blessed, and I am at the upper end of the income. But here's an example. So I don't know what compelled me to, and I can't be that because anytime I talk about this stuff, oh, it's easy for you to say, you got blah, blah, blah. Okay, I get it. I get it. We're very blessed. I got an envelope from one of the credit card companies, and I don't know why I opened it, but I opened it. They always go straight in the trash, right? I opened it, I looked at it, and it was a 0% APR for the first 12 months. You've done this before. We spoke about this. I said, hey, how does this work? So you said, and what it is is you could transfer a balance from a previous card, but usually there's like a 3% charge to transfer the balance. So no free lunch. I went on Clawed and I said, hey, are there any 0% cards, 0% interest for the first 12 months with 0% transfer fee? Turns out, I found one. The company is called Fairwinds. All right. And I applied. Listener of the show got my application, took care of me. Thank you very much. And this ties into what we've been speaking about with like how expensive it is to own a home. So my Navian for listeners who were with us last week, my cold water, the issue has been fixed. There was an issue with the whatever. It doesn't matter. Who cares? Boring.

Speaker 3:
[33:14] You finally have hot showers.

Speaker 1:
[33:15] I have hot showers. $1,200 bucks. I have hot showers. Worth it.

Speaker 3:
[33:20] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[33:21] But my house is always the wrong temperature. It's either too hot or too cold. Not goldy rocks.

Speaker 3:
[33:29] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[33:31] So, AC guy came yesterday, and it was a recommendation from a friend who is a GC, so he confirmed that I'm not being ripped off. I genuinely need this. $18,000. That's fun. Not. $18,000 to not have a properly heated and cooled home. So guess what? I'm taking advantage of what the economy has to offer. 0% transfer, 0% APR for the first 12 months. No, I will have to pay this off eventually. Can't blow myself up. But there's so much access to cheap capital still for people with means.

Speaker 3:
[34:11] It is nice that those... I had the same thing when we redid our floor. They said for 12 months, we'll give you 0% financing. Of course, I'm going to do that. It gets you because people who don't repay it. But so you've managed to pick lemons for both cars and houses now.

Speaker 1:
[34:32] This freaking jeep, man.

Speaker 3:
[34:35] You got to be getting close to getting rid of it, right?

Speaker 1:
[34:39] I pulled out of the parking lot yesterday and I just turned the car and it was just like, oh my God, I almost got into an accident.

Speaker 3:
[34:47] So I'm looking at our next few things on the Google Doc here. For artificial intelligence, for the first time in probably three years, there's nothing there. But I want to have a little conversation we had. We went to Washington, DC last week. The group at FM Investments brought us in. We talked to Alex Morris, one of our favorites, recurring guest on Talk Your Book. We've talked to him before for live shows. Always a great conversation. One of the things we kind of ended on, people were asking questions about AI and such, and it does seem like the vibe shift there is completely locked in now. I feel like the whole, we moved to the other side of the boat and the whole, this is a bubble, stamp it, double stamp it, triple stamp it, the end of story, I feel like a lot of people have backed away from that, a lot.

Speaker 1:
[35:31] Well, yeah, the prices did that.

Speaker 3:
[35:34] Well, the prices and just the amount of spend that's going on, the amount of usage is getting, the baton handoff is kind of here.

Speaker 1:
[35:42] Although, you know what's interesting? Yes, you're right.

Speaker 3:
[35:45] We're not building railroad tracks from no town to no town, right? Like there's being this usage.

Speaker 1:
[35:52] Their narrative has shifted as the hyperscalers have pulled back, right? Microsoft is a proxy of OpenAI, it fell 34%. Okay. Todd Stone sent out a chart this morning. Maybe here's where the bubble is. Semiconductors. Semiconductors are 16% of the S&P 500. They are closing in on Ben. Energy, healthcare, staples and utilities. Now, a lot of this is Nvidia, but still, it's not just Nvidia. Micron is half a trillion. Again, to reiterate, semiconductors are 16%. Energy, healthcare, staples and utilities are 90% of the market. That's insane.

Speaker 3:
[36:33] Can I read you the returns, annual returns for the VanX Semiconductor ETF, which is SMH? This is the past four years. So, here today, it's up 29% already. The year obviously is still young. Last year was up 50%. The year before that, it was up 40%. The year before that, it was up 73%. This thing is on a generational run as a group.

Speaker 1:
[36:54] Unreal. All right, on the airplane to DC, I read, I've been saving some of Dom Cook's articles. So, Dom Cook writes these deep profiles for Colossus. Patrick O'Shaughnessy's company.

Speaker 3:
[37:09] Yeah, very good. We've mentioned a few of them before.

Speaker 1:
[37:12] He's unreal. He's such a good writer. And the most recent one, or one of the ones that I saved, yeah, the April edition, was on this guy, Jeffrey Yan. So, we've spoken about this. Hyperliquid became very prominent. At least like, what's the word I'm referring to? Your brain breaks. It was, whatever. It became, Hyperliquid entered the lexicon because that was how people were tracking crude oil futures on the weekend.

Speaker 3:
[37:39] Right. And the S&P 500 and yeah.

Speaker 1:
[37:41] Right. So, I just wanted to read some of his writing. All right. So, he said, last year, it's 11 employees generated over $900 million in profits. It is three years old, has a market capitalization of $10 billion and has never taken a dollar of venture capital. So, we've said repeatedly and the world has asked like, what is crypto going to give the world other than, I mean, other than a new asset class, the stable coins, like what else is there? And maybe this is part of the answer. A new financial system.

Speaker 3:
[38:15] You'll forgive me. I read this and it's very impressive, super impressive what they're doing. I feel like we get one of these every three years in crypto. Like you'll forgive me for saying this article sounds a lot like Sam Bape and Fried. Could you not have read the same profile on him? This genius who doesn't care about the trappings of wealth. It sounds a lot like that, doesn't it?

Speaker 1:
[38:36] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[38:37] I'm not claiming hyperlipid is that. I'm sure it's something different. It sure reminds me of that though. And I feel like we've crowned these crypto kings and princes or whatever over the years, and then it kind of just fades away. I'll just be interested to see if one of them takes hold. That's all I'm saying.

Speaker 1:
[38:55] Fair. But this guy is nothing like Sam Beckman Fried, who was very much limelight, putting their name on everything. These guys are in Singapore, hiding, like staying anonymous to the extent that they can. This is not what I'm saying.

Speaker 3:
[39:12] This is not that, but I feel like we get one of these, and that just makes me, I wonder, like, okay, is this fine? This is the thing. Because there are finance people like Corey Hoffman, who like pay attention to stuff, and he tweets about this, and I have no idea. I still am frankly not up to speed on this hyperliquid stuff. But a very impressive piece and individual, obviously.

Speaker 1:
[39:32] Anyway, Dom Cook is just an incredible writer.

Speaker 3:
[39:36] So yeah, the profiles are really good, and they're really long too, which you don't get a lot of long form these days. All right. So you've seen this picture. Let's talk about real estate. You've seen this picture of Austin before, which was Austin 10 years ago versus today, and it looks nothing like it. There's just a million new buildings. And so Pew did this research report on Austin about what happened. And they talked about how Austin had this huge growth in the 2010s. Rents were up like 100 percent, prices of homes were up 80 percent. It was like they had some of the fastest growth in rents and home prices anywhere in the country. A big part of that was people coming to the area, right? But then they said in 2015, they did all these policy reforms that encouraged development of new housing, especially rentals. And so, they did a ton of new buildings. And they said they added 120 units of housing stock, an increase of 30 percent more than three times the overall growth rate of the United States. And they said, what happened? Rents fell. They went from being the highest, like $1,500, to being some of the lowest, and they fell 15 percent. And they're lower now than the overall market, which is crazy, because they said population still grew by 18,000 residents in the three years.

Speaker 1:
[40:45] Austin rents are lower than the national?

Speaker 3:
[40:48] In the national medium, yes. Which is a place people are obviously still moving, wanting to go.

Speaker 1:
[40:53] So what's the point that like policy can have a good impact?

Speaker 3:
[40:57] And I don't think that it's going to come from the federal government. They'd have to do like, they'd have to paint such a wide brush and just give carte blanche to the home buildings, I guess, like, hey, we're backing your loan. It's got to come from local politics, unfortunately. And for whatever reason, the residents of Austin were OK with having all this building going on. And obviously, a lot of other places aren't. But if you want to lower housing prices and lower rent, this is the way you do it. You make it easier to build. Seems relatively simple. I don't know why other, why are there not other municipalities that are following their lead and doing the exact same thing?

Speaker 1:
[41:33] Couldn't tell you. Know nothing about this stuff, but good.

Speaker 3:
[41:37] Look at the chart here that shows how much more affordable it is after they built a bunch of houses. This is the answer to everything.

Speaker 1:
[41:45] We got to build. It's time to build.

Speaker 3:
[41:47] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[41:48] All right. Some stuff that I pulled from Bank of America's report, they show the first quarter credit and debit year over year growth and look at entertainment and travel. Entertainment volume is up 12 percent year over year. Number of transactions, so not just price, 7 percent. Same thing with travel, up six and up four.

Speaker 3:
[42:13] Look at how much higher the entertainment budget is versus the food budget for people. That's a bull market. It's like four times as high for entertainment as it is for food.

Speaker 1:
[42:23] They showed the asset quality, net charge-offs, consumer net charge-offs of $1.1 billion declined $60 million versus Q1 2025. Credit card charge-off of 3.64 percent in Q1, down from 4 percent, 4.05 percent in Q1 2025.

Speaker 3:
[42:49] I'm surprised those numbers are that low. I don't think people realize, if you have-

Speaker 1:
[42:53] Low and getting better.

Speaker 3:
[42:55] So you mentioned that you can do 0 percent credit card and transfer fees. There's ways if you have credit card debt, that you can consolidate it and get a lower rate and maybe lower your payment. But you can also call the credit card company and negotiate with them. Hey, I'm never going to pay this back. And especially if you're charging me 25 percent interest, it's never going to happen. What can you do for me? A lot of them will actually negotiate with you.

Speaker 1:
[43:17] I thought this was interesting. They showed credit risk transformation reflects responsible growth strategy. And they showed the loan mix in the fourth quarter of 2009 compared to today. And in 2009, it was 67 percent of the book was consumers. Now it's down to 40 percent. And then they break out the consumer loan portfolio. Consumer credit card is down 36 percent. Home equity loan is down 83 percent. I know nobody is comparing now to 2009, but still I just thought this was interesting.

Speaker 3:
[43:54] Isn't it weird that the loan book is so much smaller now? Just because the economic pie is so much bigger. You would think that even if it was a slow, but that's a really steep decline.

Speaker 1:
[44:05] It just goes to show, because you're right, if you were to throw a denominated on this, it just goes to show how much leverage was in the system, leading up to the GFC. And there's just not that much today, even though there's obviously still shitload of borrowing.

Speaker 3:
[44:18] This is the reason why I think the economy has a margin of safety though. Because if we do get into trouble, there's a lot of households with the ability to lever up still. They can borrow against, they haven't had to borrow this decade because the assets are all up so much. But if they need to and the asset price growth slows, and they need to tap their equity or whatever, there's capacity for borrowing if people need it. And people are obviously going to tap it. People aren't going to stop spending.

Speaker 1:
[44:47] Yeah, in a moderate recession, for sure.

Speaker 3:
[44:51] Yes, a non-financial crisis situation.

Speaker 1:
[44:54] He was asked about their headcount being down, 1,000 people this year, thought this was very interesting. Brian Moynihan. In the long arc, if you look at 2007, before we bought Maryland Countrywide to give you a sense, we had more employees at Bank of America than we have today in 2007. The application of technology, the process and the customer utilization of our technology has led us basically to run the company 19 years later on less people. This is not a new trend. What you're seeing now is a continuation of those trends. Anyway, that's the story of technology.

Speaker 3:
[45:28] I want to talk prediction markets real quick. Look at this chart from Bloomberg has put in here. It's the volume of prediction markets on PolyMarketing, Cal-She. And look at this thing take off in the past year essentially. From a very low, there was not a lot of volume on these platforms. And it's essentially gone from, I don't know, half a billion dollars to six billion dollars in about a year. Why did this take off so much? Why is there such a massive ramp in these things?

Speaker 1:
[45:59] Sports betting.

Speaker 3:
[46:01] Just because they added that? So that was it?

Speaker 1:
[46:02] Yeah, that was it.

Speaker 3:
[46:04] Okay. Doesn't that make all the sports platforms shorts? Why would you not short Fandu and DraftKings if these things are all just going to take the volume?

Speaker 1:
[46:14] Well...

Speaker 3:
[46:15] Or is it just because the whole pie is expanding, just more people are doing it?

Speaker 1:
[46:19] The Fandu, Flutter and DraftKings stocks fell like 60% because of this. There is...

Speaker 3:
[46:27] So this isn't people betting on the price of oil in a month is going to be this. It's just sports betting.

Speaker 1:
[46:33] This is sports betting. I think like 90% of their volume is sports betting.

Speaker 3:
[46:36] That makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[46:37] Now it has since increased to other areas of the market and economy. This is like a regulatory thing because the DraftKings and Fandu have to share, I think, 50% of their net revenue with the states.

Speaker 3:
[46:52] Oh, so these platforms have a better business model.

Speaker 1:
[46:55] Cauchy doesn't have to share anything. And the states are obviously fighting back, right? You see like, I forgot one, I forget which states said that like, I want to make a legal shift, but yeah, the states aren't thrilled with what's going on with these platforms.

Speaker 3:
[47:11] Okay, I have a few travel thoughts from the last few weeks. First, a great leap forward for humanity. I had multiple flights where the flight attendant gets on the mic before the flight and says, listen, if you do not have earbuds, talk to us, we'll give you some. Otherwise, you or your child cannot listen to a phone or an iPad with volume turned up. It has to be turned down. They're making these announcements now. We're shaming these people. Finally, we were flying back from spring break a couple weeks ago. I like to go find a place away from all the people. It's me and my family. We sit down where we had a layover. This older gentleman-

Speaker 1:
[47:57] Why, you're afraid of GenX people finding you?

Speaker 3:
[48:01] No, I just want to keep my kids away from the population. This older gentleman comes and he sits on the other side of the seats with us, and he puts his phone on, and he turns the volume as high as he can, and he's watching TikTok videos or Instagram Reels. So loud, and we can...

Speaker 1:
[48:14] What is wrong with people?

Speaker 3:
[48:15] People think this is okay behavior. I wanted to say something, and we ended up just moving, but I should not have let him win.

Speaker 1:
[48:25] Wow, Ben, that's embarrassing.

Speaker 3:
[48:27] Right, well, my wife, my wife is alive.

Speaker 1:
[48:28] I wanted to say something, but we just moved.

Speaker 3:
[48:30] My wife won't let me. I want to say something all the time, my wife will never let me say anything.

Speaker 1:
[48:34] One more thing. Yeah, hold me back.

Speaker 3:
[48:36] Yeah, I'm that guy. I think probably one of the great technological innovations of the past 20 years is Uber showing you where the car is on the screen. Cause if you go to an Uber line at the airport, everyone is like this. Everyone's eyes are locked up. You think psychologically, if you stare at the screen harder, the car is going to get there faster. Everyone in an Uber line is doing this. Just looking, looking, looking, like you can't take your eyes off the screen. You know the car is two minutes away. I'll just wait. But you have to watch it come in the whole way. Everyone in the Uber line does that same thing. It's like one of the big psychological, if they would have not done that, would they have been this successful? Probably not.

Speaker 1:
[49:17] I enjoy it. I'm mad at that guy for rooting your secluded spot. Right? It is really incredible how inconsiderate people are to others.

Speaker 3:
[49:29] Yeah, and it's never like a low volume. It's always a really, really high volume. These people should be shunned from society.

Speaker 1:
[49:39] All right. There was a new trailer. Now, you know what? I like to rawdog a lot of movies. If I don't know what's going to happen, if it's a new movie, if it's like an original movie, I don't want to see the trailer. I just, right?

Speaker 3:
[49:54] Yeah, you and I are opposites there. I love watching trailers. I would watch trailers all day long.

Speaker 1:
[49:58] Okay, but for a movie like Street Fighter, where there's no mystery, I watch the trailer and holy shit, it looks really good.

Speaker 3:
[50:08] You were playing, you played that video game growing up?

Speaker 1:
[50:11] We did.

Speaker 3:
[50:11] A roo kick or whatever the noise is, right?

Speaker 1:
[50:15] I think it was Hayugin.

Speaker 3:
[50:16] Okay, I can't. I remember they tried to make, I think, didn't they make a Van Damme movie with that? And it was really, really bad.

Speaker 1:
[50:22] Now here's what's going to happen. Video games are the new Marvel, are the new superheroes. They're going to overdo it, but for now the point is working. So I'm a little bit nervous about Street Fighter because it's the same people that did Mortal Kombat, which was terrible, but the trailer looked like they know what they're doing. Like they're leaning into the cheesiness and the silliness. Looks really good. Netflix reported earnings last week. Island Stock got smoked. Oh well. There's a new movie. You know, we've said a million times, how cool is it you just turn on Netflix, you find it up, it's like, oh, there's like a movie. All right. There's a movie coming out called Here Comes the Flood with Denzel and Robert Pattinson and Daisy Edgar Jones. And it's a bank heist.

Speaker 3:
[51:02] Okay. I thought it was an actual flood because my son has been really into flood movies. What was the really terrible one that you've mentioned to me? Thrash with the sharks?

Speaker 1:
[51:11] Recently Thrash, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[51:12] Yes. So yeah, my son watched it, loved it. And he's like, we gotta watch, are there more flood movies? So we went through all the flood movies. We watched, you know, I can't believe, the nineties were such, I feel like I'm just an old man shining at the clouds. Remember the movie Heavy Rain? We found it on Paramount Plus or something.

Speaker 1:
[51:29] Is that Christian Slater?

Speaker 3:
[51:30] Christian Slater, Morgan Freeman. It's about a huge, a dam breaks and a flood happens. Mini Driver, it's funny that they used to have really good actors and actresses in movies like this. That was just a crappy throwaway action film.

Speaker 1:
[51:44] Did you show him Daylight? Wait, what was the movie with Stallone?

Speaker 3:
[51:47] Yep, we watched Daylight and then we watched Crawl, which I remember was one of your original crappy movie recommendations.

Speaker 1:
[51:54] But it wasn't crappy.

Speaker 3:
[51:57] So, it's a hurricane and the people have an alligator nest in their house, right, and they can't get out of the alligator because the house is flooding. They can't get around the alligator because the house is flooding. Yeah, it was, I heard Tarantino said it was like one of his favorite movies of the past 10 years.

Speaker 1:
[52:11] Tarantino, all right, listen, Crawl got an 84% from the critics.

Speaker 3:
[52:16] It looked like a lifetime movie.

Speaker 1:
[52:18] Thrash got a 42, yeah, Crawl was twice as good.

Speaker 3:
[52:21] Yeah, but yeah, you're right, Thrash was the same.

Speaker 1:
[52:22] Crawl did not look like a lifetime movie. What are you talking about? Just take the L, I think Tarantino knows a little more than you, no offense.

Speaker 3:
[52:29] Okay, I like Paul Dano, he doesn't.

Speaker 1:
[52:32] That's true. There's one more thing, there's a sequel, sort of, I guess, to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. You know about this?

Speaker 3:
[52:43] Well, I can't wait. I love that movie. That's, I love that movie.

Speaker 1:
[52:47] So I was wrong about that movie. I rewatched it and it turns out it is a good movie. It's called The Inventions of Cliff Booth, Brad Pitt, and Tarantino wrote it and Fincher is directing it.

Speaker 3:
[52:58] Wow, okay. I actually read the book, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino also wrote a book about it. Not about the movie, like a different version of the story. Not bad. Netflix has got, what was their break up fee, $3 billion? So they got money to spend. They might as well roll some stuff out.

Speaker 1:
[53:17] I've been getting very into Talk to Text lately. I know I'm probably like five years behind. However, do I mumble or do I not talk clearly? I honestly don't think I do.

Speaker 3:
[53:30] I think Talk to Text isn't very good.

Speaker 1:
[53:31] Okay, well maybe that's, it gets it wrong all of the time. Come on, Siri, what are you doing? And you can't say like, no, I didn't say this because it will just continue with the Talk to Text.

Speaker 3:
[53:47] I don't understand as great as Apple has been on stuff. I don't understand how Siri has never gotten better from like day one. With the improvements we've seen in AI, how could Siri not be better? Like I sell, my kids are always asking me, play this song, play that song, and I'll just say, hey Siri, play this song. And it gets it, it's like a 50% hit rate, maybe.

Speaker 1:
[54:05] Yeah. Talk to text. Good idea, bud. All right, Ben, what do you got? What recommendations?

Speaker 3:
[54:10] All right. So finished season two of The Pit last week. We actually pulled my oldest daughter into watch this time. She loved it. She like caught up on the whole season.

Speaker 1:
[54:18] The whole season she watched with you?

Speaker 3:
[54:20] She probably caught up halfway. She watched the first season, she binged it and caught up halfway through the second season. And it's a 16 episode or 15 episode maybe. So it's a little long and definitely like slows down in the middle because it's so much. I think we're not used to watching shows that long, but the last two episodes were fantastic. Like they did it again, they landed the plane. That show just like pulls on the heart, tugs on the heartstrings and like the acting, Noel Wiley is just like on another level with his acting. It's kind of crazy. And I thought the last two episodes were really, really good.

Speaker 1:
[54:49] Me too.

Speaker 3:
[54:50] I thought they landed the plane. All right. I had an airplane movie on the way home from DC last week. It's called A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. And it was Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie. And I'm going, wow, that's two very charismatic people in the same movie. It's a rom-com. I'll watch it. And it was the guy who wrote the menu. Remember that movie where they like breeding people on the island? It was kind of a weird one. So I thought, all right, I gotta go into this thinking it's kind of weird. And the premise was really good. These two people meet at a wedding and they get these weird rental cars that they have and the rental cars take them back through points in their life. So they kind of join up and they're driving their car and they stop along the way and they go in these doors and it's like reliving memories of the past. It's like, oh, this is a very interesting idea. It's an idea that they didn't land the plane on. It just didn't have the greatest, boy, just for like really good acting by them. Like they had like great chemistry and the movie was just, the plot was just all over the place.

Speaker 1:
[55:49] I have two favorite compound movies. Number one, Phone Booth.

Speaker 3:
[55:55] I remember that one.

Speaker 1:
[55:57] Number two, SWAT.

Speaker 3:
[55:59] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[55:59] No, no, no, not SWAT, not SWAT, not SWAT.

Speaker 3:
[56:02] Two of his worst movies.

Speaker 1:
[56:03] Not SWAT, not SWAT. What's the movie with him and Pacino, where he goes into the CIA?

Speaker 3:
[56:08] Oh, yes, The Recruit. That's a good one.

Speaker 1:
[56:11] Recruit, ah, that was a good one.

Speaker 3:
[56:12] So In Bruges is my favorite compound movie. I love that movie. But he finally plays himself in this movie because I feel like he plays different people now. There's, I think, there's a lot of midlife crisis TV shows and I think the reason you like them, you and I like them because they're catering to us. So there's the DTF St. Louis, which we're still watching.

Speaker 1:
[56:29] Hold on. DTF St. Louis was so good.

Speaker 3:
[56:33] Yeah, it's so, it's like a weird.

Speaker 1:
[56:35] These two signing with each other face to face, like just everything, it's just such a, it's such a, such a good show.

Speaker 3:
[56:44] Yes. So that one, that's like midlife crisis people. Your Friends and Neighbors is a midlife crisis movie.

Speaker 1:
[56:49] How's the second episode? Second season.

Speaker 3:
[56:52] I'm into it so far. They added James Marston as like the great Gatsby kind of guy.

Speaker 1:
[56:58] Oh, that guy, that guy.

Speaker 3:
[56:59] Yeah, you've seen him in everything.

Speaker 1:
[57:00] Yeah. Wait, I have a question for you. Did you see the episode of Rooster, where it ends with him going to the refrigerator?

Speaker 3:
[57:08] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[57:09] Okay. If we saw that in high school, probably taking bombing hits, we would have been laughing for four hours.

Speaker 3:
[57:18] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[57:19] How hilarious was that?

Speaker 3:
[57:20] That was pretty good. Yeah, I'm caught up on that show.

Speaker 1:
[57:23] But you're right. Those are all for us, aren't they?

Speaker 3:
[57:25] They're all midlife crisis movies. People like, yeah. Yeah, that's all I got.

Speaker 1:
[57:31] Okay. Thanks to you or somebody who told me to catch up on Paradise Season 2.

Speaker 3:
[57:36] That's me.

Speaker 1:
[57:37] It was good. Now, DTF and Rooster are up here. The writers at HBO, I don't know what they're feeding them or whatever, but it's obviously just head and shoulders with everything else. There's nothing even remotely close, but I will say the writers on Paradise are very good, but I said it after Season 1 and I really meet it this time after Season 2. I'm not going to watch the next season unless you tell me it's good again. I don't need a Season 3, do you?

Speaker 3:
[58:02] Probably not, no. All right.

Speaker 1:
[58:05] New show, new series of Beef.

Speaker 3:
[58:08] Yeah, how's the second season? It's on our list.

Speaker 1:
[58:11] Oh, I only saw the first episode and I'm all in. It's Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan.

Speaker 3:
[58:16] Oh, okay.

Speaker 1:
[58:17] I'm a big fan of both of them. They are husband and wife and they run a really fancy golf club with the $300,000 initiation fee. Okay.

Speaker 3:
[58:28] I enjoyed the first season of that show. It was very unique. I loved it.

Speaker 1:
[58:30] Loved it.

Speaker 3:
[58:31] All right. So I did not realize that.

Speaker 1:
[58:32] Is TV, TV, I feel like TV is having a moment.

Speaker 3:
[58:35] I think we had the strike that pulled things back. And now, yeah, I feel like there's ton, I'm way behind on shows. I can't catch up on everything.

Speaker 1:
[58:42] Yeah, it's a lot.

Speaker 3:
[58:43] All right. Where's the market at? Market check. Stocks are up again.

Speaker 1:
[58:52] Look at the Russell 2000, dude. Just straight up.

Speaker 3:
[58:58] From the Liberation Day lows, the small cap stocks are almost double the S&P, I think, at this point. Is that right? What? Hang on. What was the Liberation Day lows? The 8th?

Speaker 1:
[59:07] April, I don't know, something like that. Huh.

Speaker 3:
[59:12] Well, over the past year, small caps are up 50% and the S&P is up 35%.

Speaker 1:
[59:18] Software, highest levels in a while, taking out the previous highs, big, big, big, big bounce. You like to see it? I like to see it. Is this another thing, the panics that we move on from? I don't think the software disruption story is going away anytime soon, despite what the stocks do. But I will say, if Salesforce rallies 25%, 30% off its bottom, the stories will chill out for a little while. The stock market drives everything in terms of the narrative. I mean, not breaking any news there, but just does. All right. animalspirits.com, compoundnews.com. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you, Duncan and the entire team for doing what you do. We'll see you next time.