Is AI a Mistake? (EP. 452)

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If you want to take a closer look, you can learn more at YCharts.com and get 20% off your initial YCharts professional subscription, new customers only. 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 am recording this in a hotel room without a chair. So sitting on my bed, leaning forward, not great for an already bad back. I will be probably having to take a standing break or two. You don't have a desk in your hotel room? There's a desk, but there's no chair. Okay, that's a choice. Yeah. They want you out enjoying the fun and sun. You know what else is a choice? Listen, I'm not the greatest looking person without a shirt on. I think most people fall into that category. You're one of the exceptions, Ben, not to brag for you. Here's a choice. If you're going to a place where you're going to take your shirt off and you're a man and you've got a mane of pubes on your lower, your lower back. I mean, that's a choice. And specifically, I saw a few dudes that like, aren't like, weren't, aren't the hairiest guys, but just were cursed with a, bush on their lower back. They just need a little manscaping. Oh, my God. Those poor guys. So that's when the spouse needs to step in and say, hey, listen, I'm just going to tidy you up a little bit. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that's what you got for us from vacation. I didn't think I was going to bring that up, but you gave me an opener and I took it. All right. Anyhow, last week, this week, this has been a week, huh? You said, hey, are things going to slow down? Obviously, they didn't. This felt like another week of, I don't know, just light bulbs going off and people getting more worried. And so you said we got three topics today. Software, stock blowups, AI killing everything in prediction markets. Yeah. And obviously, the AI stuff is just not. This is it's getting more interesting. It's kind of scarier by the week, I would say. Equal parts for me. Let's start with this. I think this is a good lead from Derek. Uh, Derek Thompson wrote, I cover a lot of topics in this newsletter and my podcast, inflation, GLP ones, politics and loneliness, but the biggest divide in my audience and the biggest divide among the people I read and listen to and trust is on the subject of artificial intelligence. The news in the discourse spaces I see it often seems divided between outrageous extremes. This technology is billionaire, a billionaire hyped vaporware versus this technology is 12 months away from automating all white collar tasks or destroying the world. So I think the first argument is a bit more ridiculous. If you spend any time with technology – I think a lot of people want that to be true. They want it to be nothing. But it's not. Of course it's not. That part is disprovable. The technology is incredible, and it keeps getting more and more incredible. I think there's some head in the sand people that just – I know what this could potentially be, and I want it to be fake. Like, hey, the metaverse was fake. hey, crypto didn't do what people said it was going to do. This is the next line. I think that's where that line of thinking comes from. Yeah, but I think it's misguided. I do too. So how many people would you say, so those are the extremes. I would consider myself more in the middle ground. Shocker. Well, but how many people do you think are in the middle ground? What is the middle ground? I don't know. I think a middle ground is calm down. A lot of the, yes, there will be disruption. obviously. But this idea that a vibe-coded app is going to replace some of the software titans, I think is probably a bit nuts. Well, obviously, replacing 50% of all entry-level weight-collar jobs, that number seems high. But I mean, here's the thing. Let's say we took the unemployment rate because of AI from, call it, 4% to 8%. 8%. That would be what? Seven or 8 million people out of a job. And I think. Are you minimizing that or. No, I'm not. I'm saying I'm saying like, what if that that's not like that might not even be extreme, extreme. That might be just like what happens. So I guess where I'm I'm kind of landing on this is what if AI is a mistake? What if everything these tech people are saying is true in AI and in a majority of people in the future think, why did we do this? I'm a huge fan of innovation and progress. I'm not a Luddite at all. I think a lot of people, because I think AI is probably going to help a lot of knowledge workers that know how to use it. But I think there's a lot of people are going to be left behind. Inequality is going to get way worse. And I think if you just put the public, I think more people are going to hate AI than like it going forward. What do you think about that? um it well it depends on what time from you're talking about so is it possible that by 2033 people think that ai was a mistake perhaps i don't think i agree with that but by 2080 or like 100 years from now like i think that take my would age poorly like every other take does okay yeah now they see that some people say no you don't realize we're creating like god here that can cure cancer so the i think one of the big things that really set off this matt schumer guy posted on Twitter, something big is happening. And it was this really long piece. And I tell you what, if you have a 20,000 word piece on AI or software right now, you should shoot your shot because it's all these people that no one's ever heard of who work tangentially in software AI and putting it out. This thing got like 80 million views or something. I read four of these this week, I think. I know. They're very long. I think most of them are probably written by AI. I've never heard of a lot of these people. They're really well written. So again, I think a lot of it has to be written by AI. But the main point of this one, I thought, was just like, you're not scared enough what this is going to do. The stuff that used to take me weeks or months now takes me hours. And what happens when this kind of stuff hits other things? And he goes through a list of things that could be impacted, financial analysis, legal work, writing and content, software engineering, medical analysis, customer service, a lot of this stuff. He's saying, like, some of these things aren't going to be safe. And AI is rapidly improving to the point where a lot of these jobs are in peril. I think my opinion – I'm trying to keep an open mind and not have strong opinions here because things are happening so fast. Yeah, it's really – It's probably not satisfying for the audience. Strong opinions loosely held essentially. Yeah, I agree. um but a lot of these people that are writing these articles are tech workers that assume that people are like them and yes so much of the population is so oblivious to what's happening and i'm not saying that's good or bad but i think there is a lot of extrapolating being done matter of fact i think in the stock market itself i don't i don't i can i don't know that i can remember a bigger case of recency bias than what's happened the last week or two. And maybe that's recency bias talking, but it really does seem like everybody is thinking that, well, even if Salesforce and ServiceNow, which by the way, I did hold my nose. I bought the stocks and I'm planning on holding them until I make money or get scared and sell them in a panic. But there takes like well even and i feel like this this got consensus so fast even if even if this was a warranted re-rating lower and even if these companies aren't going um the way of the dodo like they could just flop around to be dead money for years yeah i feel like that's consensus already it does kind of seem like that i think that it's a shot across the bow to the moats and i kind of i don't say like dead money but i i kind of agree that like the you have to be worried about the rating 100 well but that just happened yeah but that just happened i agree you're right you're right this is this was a shot about against the mode it's like listen these are 60 70 gross margin businesses they're growing fast and they were trading for rich multiples that used to be deserved now they're no longer deserved what's the right multiple for a company that is 15 times earnings the right multiple for a company where who knows what the earnings are going to be in 15 years. What if it's like seven times? And I know that sounds even more extreme, but who knows? Who knows where, where, how low it goes? I think your other point is really good too, that, that tech people are extrapolating. And I'm not the only one to make this point, but maybe coding and programming is the perfect thing for AI to automate away. And most other jobs have way, way more functions than just automated tasks. There are a lot of jobs that do just have tasks that you were, that are acquired but i i think that software is probably the biggest and easiest one for ai to take over for people that's obviously what we learned here so the people that are hysterical should be because their jobs are being replaced and i'm not naive to think that like other professions especially white collar ones won't come under pressure i'm sure they will but i also think that ai is it's not just a tool like anything else right it's not like just the internet that's kind of ridiculous because it's so much more than that but i hope that this is a tool that's used uh for good and not just to wipe us out so did you listen to the anthropic ceo on the dworkesh podcast i listened to the entire thing on the flight and i don't know man i just don't understand anything these guys are saying there's a lot of stuff that i don't i don't get either obviously but there there was like there was maybe like here's here's what i understand when there are people that like pull clips and post the video in isolation on Twitter. I understand that better than me watching the two hour podcast and probably dozing off at some points, but these guys are not speaking my language. I honestly, I have almost no idea what they're saying. No, there's a lot of it that I didn't get, but there's something I did pull out. And I think we're probably guilty of this too. Or if you and I go off into some other niche that we don't understand very well, we, we hear from people being like, you idiots, how do you not understand this? Because it's not our area of expertise. So I think the one area I picked out when he talked about the economy and he's talking about the fact that we could see 10 to 20% GDP growth. And that's one of those things where I go, this is probably one of the smartest people alive. His IQ is through the roof, but he doesn't understand because 70% of the economy is consumer spending. If we're going to put all these people at a job for AI, where do you get 10 to 20% growth? Productivity can't fill that gap. People have to spend money still. So one person's lost job is another company's lost spending. So I think that's where the total disconnect is. And that number, the one thing that I thought that I really pulled out of that interview is he just kept saying over and over again, people aren't ready. People aren't ready for what's coming. People aren't talking enough about this because obviously he's seeing what we're not seeing yet. And he's saying like, people don't understand what's coming. And that was the part that was like, okay. But I think my middle ground is I think you can still have that thought and not think that the world is going to be different in like 18 to 20 because people are saying this already 18 to 24 months weight color work is just like going up in flames. And I don't think that a lot of these people realize that, yeah, there's so much more that goes into people's jobs than just performing these tasks that can potentially be automated. There's way more to it than that. As I'm like thinking through this, I think I'm starting to more and more reject this idea that it's just going to replace every job. So people want to work with people and maybe their teams will be better optimized and leaner. And yeah, sure. Like, of course. And as we have these conversations and we'll continue probably for the rest of the for the rest of eternity. Right. Because artificial intelligence is not going to slow down or get worse or go away. We're going to spend just very little time, unfortunately, thinking about all the positives that might come from this because it's right. Like we who cares about the upside? That'll take care of itself. we as human beings are much you know we're programmed to worry about how this goes wrong but think about think about how many amazing things are to come as a result of this some of the advances in medicine oh yeah no of course and i i think the the thing that gets people worried is when they asked him the thing that i pulled out of that interview that worried me he's talking about like biological weapons and stuff that could happen because of ai and they asked he asked dorkesh asked him like well what are you going to do about it he's like well that's up to the government he didn't say he didn't he's not putting any like the the ai people aren't worried about this like someone else needs to worry about that like they're not worried about the unintended consequences of this he asked about what about inequality he said well we got to figure it out and so i that's the one thing that scares me about tech people is that i don't think they have a lot of common sense they are the some of the smartest people alive i don't think they think about unintended consequences that's the thing that really worries me about all this is that they don't they don't seem to care they're kind of like someone else will figure it out that's not on us we're building this thing here's an email that we that we got from uh from a listener this guy's 31 he's a data scientist does a lot of machine learning engineering work um previously worked at a hyperscaler he's at a large payment company now all right you're missing why companies are investing in ai they're investing in the trajectory of task completion time horizon and it's terrifying um so i guess last week we were like uh 200 billion dollars from amazon and capex spending on all this stuff. Like, how? What are they even doing? All right, so this person breaks it down a little bit. All right, three years ago, AI could write a line of code for me, saving 60 seconds. Last year, I could give it a block of code, saving 600 seconds. As of February, I can give it a four-hour piece of work, and it mostly does this. This is task completion time horizon, and it's doubling every seven months. Big tech largely operates on sizing. Someone proposes we build a future. People like me estimate the future ARR. Engineers estimate headcount required and time to market. And leaders do their calculations about anticipated ROIC and sign off or don't. Engineering is extremely expensive. At Hyperscaler that he was at, I heard one headcount for one year pencils at one million between comp, management, facilities, hiring, firing, onboarding, et cetera. Per feature, AI is decimating headcount and time to market. Features are starting to cost a fraction of the price. You understand compounding and financial math. This is why 12-figure investments aren't crazy. His total comp is pretty good. He can now accomplish what previously took a team of four. I'm very well-respected. People love working with me, and I'm terrified. I don't know what's going to happen over the next 12 to 24 months. I don't know if I'll have a job. Leadership would never say anything like that. They just love AI. I wonder if my career ends abruptly, whether my assets will appreciate correspondingly to allow me to retire. This is the math I run through in my head. So, yeah, this person is terrified and rightfully so. And everybody that is feeling these sort of thoughts that we're hearing on the internet, they're seeing it before we do. But also I think – and it's not to sound so naive that, oh, their jobs are at risk. Ours are safe. but and also those engineering teams at these hyperscalers are spending all these all this money yeah those those jobs probably are going to be on the chopping block it does seem like a lot of people assume like man ai is going to disrupt a lot of jobs but my i'm going to be fine you're right the tech people are the first line of defense right to see this and they're going oh no this tool is magical i can see i'm thinking three steps ahead what does this mean for me eventually and i i totally get that So Anthropic – all right, so would you agree that the last two weeks Anthropic really took the baton? It's really sucking a lot of oxygen out of the room from OpenAI. So they raised money. I can't remember. Was it 30 on 380? Whatever. It was a lot of money. And in January 2023, they had zero revenue. And a year later, they had $100 million in revenue. And a year after that, they had a billion dollars in revenue. And today they're at a $14 billion run rate. I thought the interesting thing Dario will kept saying in the podcast was cause Dworkesh is like, why don't you just, if these tools are, you're creating a world of geniuses, like why wouldn't you spend infinity money to make this happen? Keep spending more. And he's like, listen, we can't, we, we really don't know if we spend too much. Cause the whole thing is it costs a lot And I think that like the transistor here is that the costs are so astronomically high to run this stuff and to build these data centers That seems to be like the thing pushing back a little bit is he like we want to we would if we could But it's so expensive to do this that we have to be kind of careful. We can't push the RPMs all the way to the red line or whatever. I thought that was interesting. But here's a question I have, and neither of us are smart enough to answer this. What is the moat of these AI companies? How hard is it for the AI companies? Any of them. If they create a tool, why can't – because it seems like that's what DeepSeek did. They just stole it all. Why can't all the – what is the moat that protects these AI companies? I mean obviously a lot of it is just their researchers and stuff. But once you put a thing out into the world, why can't the other AI companies just steal it? Okay. I don't know. This is obviously not our lane. But isn't it just – there's only so many AI companies. There can't be 400. There's three or four, right? Aren't the costs associated with running these companies are massive, massive, massive, massive? Yeah, right. You're right. Yeah, there's going to be, I don't know. I would say the ones we have now, Gemini Anthropic and OpenAI, that's kind of, they're it, right? So the chief economist at Ramp, who we had on the show a couple of months ago, are tweeted one in five businesses on ramp now pay for anthropic a year ago is one in 25 that's nuts latest ramp ai index shows anthropic surge from 16.7 to 19.5 percent of business while open ai slipped to 35.9 percent so the natural question is is anthropic winning at open ai's expense and he says um the overlap in anthropics customer base with open ai is 79 percent so i mean for me i'm in i'm going between gemini claude and open ai i use all three of them now and i feel like there's certain tasks that i want to use for one not for the other i'm using them all why do you so i only use i haven't used google is that more for imaging is that what you're using it for i maybe this is just in my head i feel like i feel like gemini is smarter than chat gpt and i have no basis in reality to make that claim it just feels cleaner to me um i asked chat gpt so i finished the ed's wick book that i was talking about last last week which was great by the way the we were talking about this the matthew broderick and glory having bring his mother in to read the script yes and then michael ovitz at the center of this story as he's with all other Hollywood stories that was a fun read but anyway so um Ed's Wick used to put his father-in-law into a lot of his movies and I asked Chad GPT who it was because I just wanted to see a picture see if I recognized him and it gave me the wrong answer three times of who somebody's public figure's father-in-law was and when I went to Wikipedia I mean it was it was right there so you say like chat gpt is dumber um well this is the rain man stuff we were talking about it yeah anyway um so so wait my wife and i started watching the new game of thrones show again and that the it can never be on game of thrones can never be on the pantheon for me because i never understand what's going on half the time but i like the new one because it's a little dumbed down and it's kind of it's got a little more humor i really like the tone of the show but i'm like where is this in the game of thrones universe so my wife just typed in a chat gpt it's like this one is 90 years before this one and this one's 100 years past this one and these people related to these people and like wait who's that guy again and so it gave me a good family tree of game of thrones at least yeah anyway this like just complaining about that that chat tv got this father-in-law wrong who cares i mean it's it'll fix that it's not a big deal and it's really not important but um all right whatever okay so i i'm trying to be careful to not like over extrapolate myself because i really don't know anything about the software stuff obviously but But last week when Schwab was down 10% in a day and Raymond James and LPL and a lot of the publicly traded companies in our space, I was looking for a headline. I'm like, what the hell is going on? Out of nowhere, Schwab is down 10%. Schwab is not a company that moves 10% even after earnings reports. The last time Schwab swung like this, I guess, was March 2022 when there was the banking type stuff. so what what what moved the stock was altruist um our friends at altruist have this really new have this really neat new ai tool called hazel that um is starting with tax stuff and i'm sure it's gonna do all sorts of other things the idea that it would take 10 out of schwab and all these other companies is a joke and it tells me the market if the market doesn't understand what's going on in our space so fundamentally gets it wrong, then maybe it's getting it wrong on a lot of other spaces. Not maybe, I'm sure it is. I don't know which areas it is getting wrong, but the market is totally nuts right now. You're right. That was the massive recency bias overreaction. And I just can't wrap my head around how much of this is just algos. Yeah, that's not human. Nobody's selling that. But anyway, Chris, so just getting back to the technology and like, yeah, it's real. My partner, Chris, took a look at it on Thursday. I haven't spoken to me yet about it, but he was blown away. Like the technology is real and not just at all choice with Hazel, but like, yeah, it's real. Obviously it's very real. Right. And this, this is the hard part people have wrapping their heads around is that like this technology is going to make us so much more efficient. Our financial advisors are going to be so much more, their lives are going to be easier. So it'll make them more efficient. Have them. Here's the thing that I think why we really need AI, because people have been talking for the last few years. I know you're not a demographics guy, right? I'm going to talk demographics. That's okay. Like people keep talking about the birth rate falling, right? And how this is a huge problem for the world. And the fertility rates are collapsing even faster than they thought. We need AI robots productivity to fill that gap in the future. Otherwise, economic growth is going to fall off a cliff. So I think it's actually coming at a perfect time for humanity in a lot of ways, where we're going to need this stuff. It's going to have to pick up the slack and productivity is going to have to be better if we want to stay in the same trajectory. Otherwise, just because that's economic growth. It's population and productivity, essentially. If population stops growing, we need productivity to fill the gap. So, yes. The article for that altruist story said, an artificial intelligence tool, this is from Bloomberg, aimed at creating tax strategies sparked a sell-off in wealth management stocks Tuesday as investors feared the business could be at risk from automated advice. And it's like, wait a minute. What in the world? That doesn't even – that literally doesn't make any sense. And I imagine this is how software people feel about reading whatever company it is. It's like that is completely a misdiagnosis. So for example, SAP Global, which is a stock that I want to buy. I'm going to buy actually. I'm going to buy it today when we're done recording because this is not at risk of disruption. I understand the thesis of why it would be. So on the call, Martina Chung, president and CEO, was asked about AI a million times. and she said, we maintain control of the commercial relationships directly with those customers and we don't allow the LLM providers to train on S&P global data. So this is where you and I are different on this. I want nothing to do with these companies that are in the crosshairs being disrupted. I know there's a lot of babies being thrown out with bathwater here. I want nothing to do this because I think the back and forth on this is going to go on for years. Yeah, could be. So let's talk about some of the, in defense of SaaS names. So this one was by Finbar Taylor. Ripping out your system is not like switching from one note-taking app to another. ServiceNow implementations can take 12 to 18 months. Workday migrations are multi-year projects. The switching cost isn't the software license. It's the organizational upheaval. Ding, ding, ding. Here's the thing. If the only thing standing between you and your competitors was that your features were slightly better, you were already in a commodity race. AI coding tools don't change the fundamental dynamic. They just accelerate the clock speed. By the way, S&P Global is not in the crosshairs. The market is wrong, I think. We'll get back to that in a second. But here's what people miss. That race is now one that everyone runs at exactly the same speed. If your competitor can vibe code a clone of your feature in a weekend, you can vibe code a clone of their next feature in a weekend too. AI is a symmetric weapon. It doesn't selectively advantage attackers over incumbents. In fact, it arguably advantages incumbents more. They have the existing user base, the distribution, the data, and the brand. They can ship AI-powered features to millions of users overnight. A startup with a weekend project still needs to acquire every single customer from scratch. And this, to me, was a coup de grace. There's a fundamental truth about enterprise software purchasing that the SaaS-pocalypse thesis completely ignores. And this is the human element, Ben, that we say that these people, these tech dorks, might not appreciate. When you buy software for your company, you're not just buying features. You're buying someone to blame when things go wrong. You don't always pick the cheapest option. You don't always pick the most innovative option. You pick the option that if it fails, you can defend to your boss. We went with Salesforce is a defensible sentence in any boardroom in America. We went with an app I vibe coded over the weekend as a resignation letter. This is the same dynamic that kept IBM dominant for decades. And that keeps McKinsey and Deloitte in business, despite armies of cheaper, often smarter competitors enterprise buyers optimize for career risk not unit cost they want to i was just let's say career risk that's like he nailed it they want a vendor that will still exist in three years that has a support team that they can call 2am that has a track record of not losing their data so i guess what i think with these um with these names is yeah there's more than a kernel of truth the re-rating is appropriate i just think that the market will overreact and in my opinion it has overreacted um it is interesting to think about how the fact that these you're right if this stuff becomes a commodity what's the differentiation so josh had a good piece that talked about the difference between intel and intelligence and it's like qualitative versus quantitative and if everyone has access to these tools then everyone's on the same level here right like what's the differentiation so why so why would so why would a weekend company come and beat the incumbents it just ignores like what we know about human beings who is who is the author of the article you shared this morning? I don't know. I'm starting to worry that some of the, one of these articles is going to be created by a fake bot and an AI, and it's going to get us all because we never heard of this person. Um, so another SAS one. All right. So this was from Nicholas Bustamante at Nick BS TME. And he said, here's the thing the market already understands. And this is, this is very good because this is the stock perspective mixed in with all of this. So bottom line shit. You don't need revenue to decline for the stocks to crash. You need the multiple to compress. A financial data company that traded at 15 times revenue when it had a pricing power and 95 retention might trade at six times revenue when the market believes both are eroding. Revenue stays flat. The stock drops 60%. That's exactly what's happening to some companies right now. The market isn't pricing in a revenue collapse. It's pricing in the end of the premium multiple because the modes that justified the multiple are dissolving. So he breaks down these companies, these vertical software companies, into does it have proprietary data? Does it have regulatory lock-in? Does it have embedded transactions? And then what's the risk level? So if you don't have those things, you are in deep shit. So FactSet, for example, has none of those things. But S&P Global, like a ratings agency, this is like regulatory stuff. An LLM can't slap a rating on any of these companies. well and you don't think you can do you don't think you do credit analysis on ai that's not the point these companies need to be right you're right it's it's career risk and they don't want to blame no it's not career risk it's it's not career risk they need to be rated by a legitimate ratings agency you can't spin up a ratings agency it's not about the technology right okay that that makes sense but i agree here that the whole because one of the things people don't recognize is the fact that valuations are just emotions like how do you feel about something How do you know if the valuation should be 20 times or 10 times or 15 times? It depends what people feel. Yeah, you can't. So that's a very good point. Okay, let's move on to talk about the stock market because we're going to keep having this AI conversation for a long time. And again, I'm not trying to poo-poo AI. I'm just thinking I'm trying to do the beauty contest thing where I try to think about what other people are going to think. And I think, I don't know, call it 60% of the population within 10 years is going to say, let's go back. I don't want this. I think that's a real possibility inequality is going to get worse white collar jobs are going to be disrupted and people are going to go you changed way too much I don't like this I think that's a real possibility do you think in 20 years there will be people that are married to robots of course I'm not kidding robots that look and feel human yes and they'll be able to say you treat me this way and this is your personality that wouldn't shock me no not at all It's going to be a weird, weird – and I'm worried about what AI is going to do to just videos and social media and like that kind of – that part of the thing scares me. I don't think that the tech overlords are going to put any guardrails on that at all. I think they're just going to let it be wide open. Netflix will have a reality show with people and their robot spouses. Or can you tell the difference between – is it a real person or is it AI, right? Who do you want to date? All right, so you had a chart that went viral last week. This went mega viral, which is kind of funny because this is like a detailed stock market. So you talk about the fact that 115 stocks in the S&P have declined 7% or more in a single day in eight sessions. Not quite 20% in a day like I talked about with NVIDIA. And the average drawdown when that happens is usually 34%. Right now we're basically at all-time highs. And just your whole point was like seeing this amount of volatility in single names, this is the kind of thing that happens in nasty corrections in bear markets. and it's happening while we're basically at all-time highs, what the hell is going on? I'm still bullish for the record. I know there is some late cycle market stuff happening, like the rush into staples, and I don't think that the rest of the market needs to catch down. The fact that the rest of the market is holding up so great in the face of all this disruption that's being priced in, I think that's, you're right, that's a bullish signal to me. I think the macro backdrop is still healthy. And listen, I'm not talking about a 5% correction, right? Those are always – 5 and 10 and even 15 are really always on the table at all times, even in bull markets. But one of the interesting dynamics of this current market is that the bubble we were promised is not so bubbly. So bespoke as a chart. Here's a look at the NASDAQ 100's action in the year leading up to and the year after its March 2000 peak versus its action in the year leading up to its 1029-25 peak. So if that was the peak – by the way, that was the NVIDIA day. I think, right? Was that the day that NVIDIA opened up 4% and closed down like 5% and it was like a really nasty outside day? Anyway, this is a weak-ass market compared to the dot-com bubble, obviously. So I guess just juxtapose that with if people thought that I was like comparing this market to the dot-com bubble because that's the last time that this dynamic happened. I wasn't trying to do that. Well, and the fact that the rest of the world is going off right now. So Mike Zaccardi says US versus world ex-US is off to its worst start to a year in decades. So they look at all these different years, and this is the spread between the two. I mean, we're whatever, a month and a half into the year. But the rest of the world is absolutely taking off. And this is like the catch-up trade. And I know there are a lot of people who poo-poo this and say, zoom out. Look at the last five years, seven years, 10 years. The U.S. has crushed international stocks. And that is a great stance to take over a 12-month period. I get that. But if this goes on longer than that, you can't keep falling back on that. If this trend really takes hold and equal weight works and small cap works, you can't keep saying, well, what about large cap outperformed before? Eventually, that point loses its luster. Yeah, that's true. I thought this is a really good observation. by Vivek Aria at Bank of America. Okay, investors are simultaneously pricing in two mutually exclusive scenarios. Either AI CapEx is deteriorating to the point that it won't deliver ROI, so it's bad for the AI thesis, or AI is so powerful that it will destroy all software companies. Both can't be true at the same time. If AI is powerful enough to destroy SaaS, then the companies building AI infrastructure are going to see massive returns. And if AI infrastructure spending won't pay off, then AI isn't actually powerful enough to destroy SaaS. See? This is another middle grounder. He's saying take the extremes out. I'm a middle grounder. There's dozens of us. The market is in a fog of fear, and fear doesn't do nuance. Well said. That's really well said. That last line feels like AI might have written it, though. See? You know, though, I tried. I did. I uploaded every chapter of my book when I got finished it. I would upload it to ChatGPT or Claude, and I would ask for feedback. And sometimes it would say, can I rewrite this for you? And I'd say, yeah, let's see it. And I can still tell the difference between AI writing. Like I saw some guy on Twitter the other day say, hey, I just wrote 90,000 words today for a book I'm writing with open AI. And I just don't think people are going to want to read that. I don't think people are going to want to read AI stuff. Maybe I wildly off base here I feel like you can still tell what is written by AI Maybe that get better I just it definitely will get better Don you think Don you think that you going to be able to say to it, make this look less generic, throw in a typo, throw in, make it look like I wrote it. I mean, I'm pretty sure it's gonna be able to do that. I still think the human touch, like I don't, I know people will watch slop videos. We're already seeing that, but I don't think you're, we're going to have this paint by numbers where you're going to be able to create your own TV shows and movies and it's going to be high quality. I just don't believe that. All of the best, all the best stuff comes from personal experience. All the best movies, all the best TV shows comes from, from personal experiences. Like you can't create a good comedy using AI. I'm sorry. Just, it's not going to happen. It's not going to be funny because the funniest stuff comes from personal experiences that people have had, right? Super bad was Seth Rogen and his writing partner, Evan Goldberg. It was some of the actual stuff that they, that happened to them in high school and they wrote a movie about it. Like you can't, AI can't recreate that. It's never going to be able to. That, I will die on that hill. Okay. Gungeon from the Wall Street Journal. The average stock reporting so far this earnings season has moved 5.2% up or down. The biggest post earnings move since at least 2012. And a bunch of stocks moving more than 15% after earnings. So yeah, I mean, the individual stock market is getting damn volatile. So AI is opening up the VIX, I guess. This is interesting. This is from MauiBoyMacro. I don't know where this came from. Maybe this was one of the chart of the day things. It compares operating cash flows as a percentage spent on CapEx versus buybacks for S&P 500 companies. And buybacks peaked in 2022. Funny and interestingly enough, when ChatGP came out. And then since then, CapEx has taken off. So CapEx went from, sorry, buybacks went from 46% to 15% of CapEx operating cash flow. So way more money is being spent on CapEx now than buybacks. It totally reversed. And it's funny because for years, people kept saying, buybacks are pointless. What are they doing? How much good in the economy can these be doing? And now companies are finally investing. And there's certain people who hate that. This is like, I think this is companies finally saying like, okay, fine. We're doing something. Warren just wrote about this too and I can't remember exactly what the MAG7 were doing like obviously an overwhelming amount of the buybacks which was definitely helping put a floor into these stocks or tail end or whatever and if that's going now the other direction yeah could make for some more volatility alright this is news to me amongst all the crashing stocks We are in the middle of the highest quarter of revenue growth for the S&P 500 since 2022. Huh. 9%. Or 8.3%. 9% is expected for next quarter. Is that wild or what? It is. Like lost in all of this because we're just looking at the stock prices. And this is as inflation is stabilized. You can't say it's just higher prices. because it's continued to go up even as inflation has been fallen. That's interesting. Okay, so remember a few weeks ago we talked about are Japanese bond yields rising good or bad? And you said, no, maybe it's neither. And I went and listened to that podcast about the PIMCO CEO on Odd Lots that you told me about. And he was saying, no, I think this is a great thing. This is good. The Japanese economy is opening up. No more like financial repression. And so I pulled some of these things where people compress the charts and show like, oh, no, this line is going up. It's really scary. And it was like this one tweet was like, at what point does something break? because Japanese bond yields are going up. They surged to a new record of 3.5%. And this other guy says, oops, the slump in Japanese bond yields deepen, sending yields soaring to records and saying like, this is bad. And then look at Japanese stocks. They are going nuts. This is absolutely a good thing. There's no more financial oppression. Japan is allowing rates to rise. They're allowing inflation to rise. And Japanese stocks are going crazy after going nowhere for 30 years. So people that worry about, oh no, line going up, bonds, that must be bad. this is actually a good thing because in the Japanese economy, they're pricing in higher inflation and higher growth. Fair? Looks it so far. How about this for a mind blower? This is just over the past 12 months in Japanese. This is MSCI. Japan is up over 40%. The S&P is up 16 or something. So it's killing it. The MSCI Japan ETF is outperforming the S&P 500 over the past five years now. How about that for a stat? Wow. Five years is a real time horizon. We were talking about this the other day. international small cap value stocks are beating the nasdaq 100 over five years just crushing they're going it sounds it's like that sounds made up international small cap value stocks right things that work absolutely left for dead all right this is a story from the wall street journal that you and i have been all over gen z locked out of home buying puts its money into the market actually i would say you were all over this because i uh i think i found this hard to believe i think i poo-pooed this. Like, come on, they're not actually doing this, but no, they really are. All right. The share of people 25 to 39, making annual transfers to investment accounts more than tripled between 2013 and 2023 to 14.4%, outpacing increases from those 40 and over, according to JP Morgan. Share of 26-year-old who transferred funds into investment accounts since turning 22 shot up from 8% in 2015 to 40% as of May 2025. These numbers do not include 401ks. So this is just brokerage account stuff. And they interview these people and two people. And because we paint a lot of this stuff about not being able to buy a house as a really bad thing. And this person says, what you get for your money right now and how much of it is going to interest feels hard. This is a 33-year-old. I can just keep renting and have more flexibility with my money. And she now thinks she could be content never buying a home. And I thought the numbers would actually be worse. They have this number for homebuyers. So the share of young people in the housing market has plummeted since the turn of the century. That's not a surprise to anyone, right? But it says Americans aged 18 to 39 made up 51% of homebuyers in 99, but only 40% in 2025, according to Redfin. That doesn't seem plummeting to me. Don't you think that's higher than you would have thought? The share of those 18 to 39 is relatively high still. That is way higher than I would have thought. Sorry, I just got distracted. We've had this conversation like when your kids start texting you. Yes, it's very weird. so meet us at echo echo is the the restaurant we've been going to for breakfast apparently kobe discovered that he likes pancakes meet us at echo with tip love kobe um because yesterday i was like saying to robin oh no i feel bad i don't have any money uh let me go back to the room and get money to tip these people and kobe's asked me what a tip is and i told him these people work off tips i was a waiter i i used to work off tips so um so anyways i said was this really from kobe he said yes love kobe so i sign off all right uh let's look at this so the if you look at the labor market it's funny we're talking about ai disrupting all these jobs and i think what's happening now though is companies just aren't hiring as much anymore they're not really laying people off because look at this. This is the labor force participation rate from 25 to 54. That's called prime age. It's basically at the all-time high now, which was reached in the late 1990s, back to 84%. And this is not people dropping out of labor force. There's more people than ever in the labor force in this prime age. Because you want to look at prime age because so many baby boomers are retiring. So 25 to 54, this is back at an all-time high for labor force participation rate, which was falling pretty much since the turn of the century until the pandemic. so how do you square this with the fact that ai is changing everything because obviously it's not it's not happening yet let me post let me post you two possible outcomes surely neither of these will be right but option one everyone's head is in the sand they're not head in the sand people are just naive and oblivious to what's happening and we wake up and overnight wipe out like unemployment goes quickly from 4% to 8%. Option two, same course. People are naive, don't understand what's going on because they're living their life. They're not listening to our podcast and every other podcast. They're not reading a million subsets. They're just living a normal life off of the internet. And in 12 months, all of these fears have dissipated because all of these companies are the ones benefiting from AI and they're incorporating into their workflows and life goes on and yes in in in option two scenario people will be displaced the email earlier jobs like that um i think it's a very plausible outcome so i guess you you could say what if what if ai takes the unemployment rate from four percent to six percent and six percent was about what it was for most like the 80s and 90s and there are that's i don't know three million jobs disrupted and it's painful like is that doesn't i don't know it doesn't i know ai is different because it's the culmination it's the it's the whatever the ultimate technological disruptor it's the end it's it's the it's the it's uh it's the mike tyson it's bowser it's the final boss as they say but doesn't doesn't history just show that with every technological advancement things get better this is maybe and maybe this is the one that proves everything else i think you could i think you could say social media is the first one where we go i think if we could snap our fingers and get rid of social media society would be better i agree i mean i that's not controversial no so i that's i think that's one but you're right and i think this is a different this is way different than social media obviously all right i guess just just specifically i'm talking about just this this dystopic fear that we're living with of massive massive job destruction end of times type stuff just that's not that's not the course of human history no the course human history is there are we figure it out we're resilient we we survive we're dynamic and we will make up new jobs that that's kind of probably where i land on this whole thing is that like and people will will focus more on the downside because yes nobody's minimizing like job casualties and real people's lives. And like, you know, that's the way the world works. All right. I think the way the world works now is that economic data is so granular. And again, I hate that word, but it's really useful here that I think economic data is so detailed now that it exists to only make certain groups mad all the time. Like you can't have economic data and not make someone mad. So Axios has this piece on the share of US consumer spending by age group. And it's 54 and younger and 55 and older. And 55 and older is slow. it was below 30% back in the turn of the century. And it was over 70 for 54 and younger. Now it's almost converging. And I'm guessing in the next 10 to 15 years, this thing might even flip. And so now it's like 55 and 45, where 45 is 55 and older. And it seems like you look at this and you go, oh, those damn baby boomers. They get to spend everything. They have all the money. They have all the wealth. Is this health care spending? Or is this like they're just, they're enjoying their life more because they're healthier? Well, look at the next chart. I had Gemini make this for me. The percentage of U.S. population 55 and older. It used to be way lower. Now it's higher. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. There's more older people. That's part of it. You cracked the code. I mean, part of it is, yeah, boomers are – but it's a bigger percentage of the population. All right. Credit to you. Okay. Good news of the week. I feel like we've been kind of dire today. But the thing is, here's the thing. The tech people, they're the ones fear-mongering. They're doing this to us. I don't feel dire. I feel like – No, I don't either. I'm of the mind that with you, the US economy is dynamic. We're going to figure this out even if it's painful to get there. But you have to call it like it is. The fears are not unfounded. It's not crazy. No. But I think we need to push back a little bit and not give in. All right. This is from Gail Pooley and a subject. Someone shared this on Twitter. Discretionary time, so it's the amount of hours you spend in a life. how many are work hours how many are leisure hours and in 1880 something like 20 of all your time was spent in leisure 80 of your time was spent working and it was really hard and it was bad conditions by 1995 it was more like 60 leisure 40 work and by 2040 it's people think it's going to be it's estimated it's going to be like 76 leisure and 24 working so this is kind of the Keynes thing about in the future, we can automate a lot of stuff and people will do less. I think this is one of the reasons that people are so miserable though, because we have way more time to spend in our head and think about stuff and complain. In the past, people's lives were so much harder. They didn't have time to complain and think it was like, I'm working because I have to work and I'm going to work till I die. And now like having so much time on your hands and being, I don't know. I don't know about that. You don't think having time to like, just sit and be alone with your thoughts. is bad for a lot of people no but i just i don't i think i might reject that premise that people used to work and not have time to think and now we i just people are people everyone we all like awesome people 50 years ago have the same fears and the same this and the same that yeah we have more i mean there's obviously differences in the way that we live but i think just psychologically it's the exact same i just i my whole contention is that i know people think like oh nostalgia for the youth like things really were different in the 90s because you didn't have all this stuff shoved down your throat all the time i think that's a big part of it yeah a lot of it was a lot of it is better but but a lot of that leisure time is spent scrolling through your phone and looking at it and going oh my gosh um look at how bad this is i don't know man we said this before a lot of my leisure time was me staring at a window like i i vividly remember staring at a window, my front window, and just being bored. My friends are away, or whatever. Nobody was around. Boy, did I watch a lot of movies on USA and TBS when I was growing up. That's how I know the whole 80s catalog. I'll watch MacGyver, I guess. Right. Speaking of things from our youth, by the way, rest in peace Bobby Duvall. 95 years old. What a life. Underrated performance. I watched again over the holidays. It was Four Christmases as the dad. He's great. I know everyone, he's gotten all the classics fine, but Four Christmases. He was great. Was that Vince Vaughn? Yep, and Reese Witherspoon. They're making a sequel of Demolition Man. With Sly Stallone? And Wesley Snipes? I don't know why I called him Wes. Wesley Snipes. What about Sandra Bullock? She's definitely too big for that. True. She's not playing that role again. Although maybe her and Stallone got married, right? They were a love interest. I saw it in the theater. I don't think I ever watched it again because it was me. Eh? You're a Demolition Man guy? I mean, do you really have to ask? Alright. Love Demolition Man. Alright. Anyway, they're making a sequel to Face Off. Are you kidding me? you need to take his face off how would that work yeah hey i can't do that hey i can't come up with something so utterly stupid that's by the way um dvd uh remember this remember the movie um over the top i don't know if we ever spoke about this on the podcast yes what about it all right so here's the premise it turned 30 this this week the premise of over the top was sly stallone is a truck driver who has to win a um arm wrestling a national arm wrestling contest to save his son in a divorce and the guy he fights in the last one the bald guy is from muskegon michigan my dad's hometown no kidding that's the claim to fame yep okay more you know the 80s were a crazy time all right uh we did this last week. Duncan did a survey. You won in a contest. You get a $3 million house, $3 million portfolio. It was 91% said they'd take the portfolio, which is what we said, 90%. A few people said, I agree with your position in the house. My question is, which would you say has better prospects for returns, housing or stocks? I would say probably sell stocks, especially if you got a house and you didn't have leverage on it. You got it free and clear. You don't have the leverage component i would say stocks all day although i do think there's something to real estate being a an ai hedge like in a technological world i think real estate is going to be even more important than ever land i i think the i think that's a good ai hedge um it's not it's 10 o'clock and silver is crashing again this is weird what is happening why silver is down six percent uh just because strange strange times um by the way you know that amc getting back to if silver is like the a reddit thing now um which it never got to the point of like game stop or any of that stuff i don't i don't think or amc people were like painting amc on their garages and their cars and that stock is down 97 yeah remember how many people that was like that was like this is we're going to stick it to the man we're going to buy amc yeah and yeah we don't 99 sorry it's on 99 um all right so the prediction markets are doing to gambling stocks what ai is doing to software stocks so draft kings reported last week and they show the wallet share of leading sports books and leading predictions operators and they show as a percentage that um the prediction markets are at one percent um but it doesn't matter right it's the same thing with software it's like yeah yeah it's one percent draft kings is in a 60 drawdown right now so if you're a sports podcast you're getting a little nervous right um all right draft kings uh revenue increased 43 percent year over year holy moly market doesn't care still got smoked wow market doesn't care um all right so i feel like there's been these these the prediction markets have been becoming a bigger and bigger part of conversation. Giannis took a stake in Kalshi. There's going to be more scandals. Vlad keeps talking about it. Like on every earnings call, it's a bigger and bigger story. So Vanity Fair wrote a long piece over the week, last week, and sort of the New York Times. So Vanity Fair said that these prediction markets seem destined to last for two reasons. First is that these markets have found unusually warm support in Washington. Okay. And the second reason, and this is sort of the part that like, eh, don't love this, but it's true. Prediction markets are gaining momentum in an era when experts have been burned, have burned through their authority. Institutional knowledge is almost universally scorned and shared reality is splintering into an algorithmic hall of mirror. The pollsters missed the polls. The networks can't agree on the facts and the Trump's government is backpedaling a two cent. All right. That part of it is kind of shitty, but it's, it's a big part of it. So I guess it makes sense that a lot of people in the future are just going to say, I trust whatever AI tells me and I trust whatever the prediction markets tell me. It's going to be interesting to see because eventually the prediction – because these are percentages or probabilities. Eventually the prediction markets are going to say 60 percent this presidential candidate is going to win, and then they lose. And people are going to go, see, prediction markets were wrong. That's going to happen. Yeah. Yes, it will happen. Like there's going to be a close one, and it's going to – there's going to say prediction markets were wrong, and it's not necessarily wrong. It's just those are the odds. But it doesn't matter because the experts are always wrong. Like that's the point. So hold on. Put a pin in this. In terms of people looking to these markets for a source of truth, they found a 22-year-old who studies philosophy at Berkeley and said that when he wants to know what's going on in the world, he is more likely to check the odds of Calci than to watch CNN. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. I mean, who cares about news when it's all about opinions? It's like, just show me the numbers. All right. Here's the New York Times. over the five years that cal she has existed it's thousands of gamblers have proved as accurate on average at predicting certain economic indicators as the highly trained forecasters a working paper published last month by the national bureau of economic research found okay so not exactly a company that's like in the pocket of big prediction markets um the crowd is also pretty good at predicting interest rate decisions from the fed um betters have he realized have one advantage they don't and this is the thing why i think that this is going to be a thing and not go away. Betters don't have to make a prediction if they're not highly confident that they're right. Professional forecasters don't have a choice, right? Even if the data are confusing, they don't have much conviction in the number they guess because they have to. It's their job. Another paper by the London Business School and Yale found that polymarket bettors as a whole forecast corporate earnings more accurately than the analysts who are paid to advise investors on whether to buy or sell. This is just wisdom to the crowds. Wizard of the Crowd, yeah, I was going to say that, yeah. So some of the stuff that, like, I saw that there, now you can bet on, like, five-minute increments on the price of Bitcoin. Like, nonsense. Nobody should be betting on the price of Bitcoin on five-minute increments. But, actually, let me give the final word to Thomas Pederfee on this. All right, so Vlad Tenev. um vlad said i think we're just at the beginning of a prediction market super cycle that could drive trillions in annual volume over time vlad has been very very very bullish on this and driving results so i forget what their prediction markets have been is it a i don't want to make up the run rate but like it's it's getting massive massive trash don't you think that this just can't if that's true that it just cannibalizes the rest of their business like you can't have both high stock trading and high crypto trading and high prediction market training like can't we it can't all happen i totally agree i totally agree so it's also very similar to um josh was saying netflix which i finally pulled the trigger and i don't care what happens if i'm buying netflix and 40% drawdown don't care um there's just too much competition netflix youtube spotify prime whatever it is prime video whatever it is and so maybe it's like a similar argument it's like it's crypto it's stock trading it's predict on this predict on that So Thomas Pederfee has been around the markets for a long time. Thomas Pederfee is a legend on Wall Street. He's the founder of Interactive Brokers. Listen to what he said on this. This was at a conference recently. I am extremely bullish on the prediction markets. I think this is going to be the biggest thing that happened in our business in the last 100 years. I take this guy's word seriously. So I look at prediction markets as the ultimate synthesis of human imagination and economic incentive. Our participants are rewarded for accuracy and penalized for error. This transformed guessing about the future into rigorous analysis that forces a continuous real-time collaboration – I'm sorry, calibration of expectations based on the new data. If you aggregate a diverse pool of incentivized rational actors, the resulting consensus is mathematically likely to be the most accurate proxy for reality available. By assembling these forecasted facts, we are mapping the future with high resolution. Let me read that again. By assembling these forecasted facts, we are mapping the future with high resolution. We create a model of which we can plan our investments, our businesses, and our lives with better results. This is the most significant utility of instantaneous global communication, decentralized voluntary collective that replaces a government fiat with free individual initiative. eventually all traditional markets will operate within the framework established by the prediction markets i'm not really sure what that means um but he said he goes on to say um i think sports betting is a distraction from all this i totally agree i think right now we're focusing on a lot of the nonsense um because that's the reality is most of these most of these markets right now when you look at the stuff that's available on chain it is sports betting that is where most of it is taking place and i am much less interested in that than i am the economic ramifications of people able to not rely on the think tanks for opinions about whatever just make a market so i've been thinking you're talking hey prediction markets will help me forecast earnings better for netflix and tesla prediction markets will help me predict the direction of interest rates in the future that that's everything that's going to be more everything Everything. But there's been a lot of shitty things about the prediction markets that need to be cleaned up. The CEO of Calci was asked recently about some of the halftime stuff, and he couldn't give a straight answer. He was squirming. He should have just said, yeah, we need to work on this. And obviously, they've thought a lot more about it than I have. Here's some of my solutions for getting rid of just breaking down public trust, right? Because I think sports is a sacred type of thing. If people can't watch sports without thinking that there's all sorts of illegal shit going on, here's how you fix one of them. Make prop bets illegal. Sorry. Right. How many points you're going to get, how many rebounds you're going to get, that sort of thing. You cannot bet an individual athlete performance. Just remove it. I agree. That's fair. Okay. No bets where there can be a leak. At all. so for example um the prediction market should exist where nobody knows the outcome so who's gonna win the oscars sorry people know that right like yes it's a small group of people but it could get leaked and you can't trace it yeah the thing where you bet on will this person say this word right yeah that's take that out so anything that can be known in advance by one person by a group of people can't have game systems eliminated you can't bet on that stuff so what can you bet on the weather the price of of a H100 ship in the future right like that sort of stuff I think I think it's fair game or fine let's say that you could bet on something where maybe there can be a leak for the Oscars all right so cut it off you can't so a week before make it so that you can't bet in the seven days leading up to the Oscars or make a max wager right you can only bet a hundred bucks on this i like having some guard reels you're right there needs to be some sort of rules here um good points barry sent me this podcast called if books could kill i'd never heard of it before and someone else asked me to it's about the millionaire next door apparently the whole uh thesis of this podcast is like this this collective wisdom from this book it's wrong we're gonna do a takedown okay so it's a little it's kind of cynical in a way but i think it's a good pushback. And someone asked me for my thoughts on this. And the millionaire next door, they're basically saying, like, listen, this whole idea that people are rich because they're disciplined and they save and they're frugal and people aren't rich because they're not, they're undisciplined and they don't save. And that makes them poor. That's the wrong way to think about this. And I felt like that's a little bit of a stretch. Like, I think a certain percent of the population, yes, they do spend too much and they could be rich if they didn't otherwise. And a certain percent of the population does get ahead by being frugal. But it's not a big percentage. Like most people get ahead because they have high income. That's it. Right. Like if you have a higher income, it's 10 times easier to say. And it's not like if you double your income from a hundred grand to 200 grand, your savings doesn't necessarily double. It could like quadruple because it just, it's more disposable income. Right. And obviously there are certain people who spend too much and so people don't, but they're, I thought their biggest point of takedown on Miller next door. And they're, they're kind of saying like, listen, the whole idea is just, it's, it's, it's a little too simple and neat and easy. And listen, I read this book when I was like 23 years old and it was my Bible for probably the first 10 years of my career. And I was, I was overly frugal and I saved a lot and probably helped me a lot. But then I realized like, what am I doing? I just need to make more money. That's the thing. That's, that, that's 10 times easier than being frugal. And, but their takedown was actually a survey thing. Like, listen, this is like, this is a survey of like 3000 people. And they, they think the survey went out to people who are ultra frugal and they didn't go into people with like a nice neighborhoods. They went into people who they thought they could find or millionaires next doors. And so it was kind of targeted and direct saying like, this isn't everyone. This is just a select group of people so that you can have, I don't know. Anyways, it was kind of interesting takedown of a book that I know a lot of people use and love. I like that takedown. I don't love the frugal mindset. And you know what? This is just like people's personality. So if that works for you, I don't want to like judge people, right? Some people just, they get pleasure out of saving money and fine. That's not my mentality, but that's not even like, I kind of, I kind of, I kind of, I kind wonder how much of that is something that you learn in a book versus like oh like oh yeah this is how millionaires do it's like i just think that's your personality and yes if you read a book and it's already and you already jive with that it'll maybe resonate stronger but i do i'm not a fan of the frugal mindset i think life is too short for that but that's you know i think at a certain point of your life it's okay but you should probably graduate from that adventure that's what i did i had that for a certain point in life when i needed it when i i didn't make a lot of money out of college and I needed to be frugal. But then you, you, you realize you can graduate from that mindset. I think that's the thing. A lot of people never graduate. And I don't like, I don't like the celebrating, Hey, this rich person drives a 1998 Honda Accord. I don't think we celebrate that. Me either. Anyway. Okay. Um, story time. All right. I've reached some middle aged dad milestones I want to talk about. Uh, we have some teen teens on our block, you know, that drive and they have their friends come on and we just had, you know, you've seen where I live it's a little cul-de-sac they the posted speed limit's like 17 miles an hour like go slow there's a lot of kids around a lot of young kids and these teens drive through the neighborhood so fast and when there's like snow piles and stuff around the corner you can't really see and these kids drive so fast and i want to like shake my hand at them like slow down you kids and there've even been emails going around like hey tell your high school kids just to take it easy in the neighborhood you're going way too fast so i'm an old guy who now wants to yell at teens because are driving too fast i got it fair unfair f them kids yes thank you and finally who's gonna side with the kids yeah let let teenagers drive dangerously i mean i know they always have we were teenagers once but so one of the things that being a middle-aged dad now um i'm realizing i'm always very sarcastic with my kids and one of the things i'm most proud of i think is the fact that my kids all have a pretty decent sense of humor like they kind of get when i'm messing with them um but one of the things that they've been doing lately is like and i don't know how they got into this school they like to roast each other right like hey we were roasting each other today and we got we're like just careful don't like say anything to me so anyway um we went out to lunch yesterday because it was president's day or whatever and the kids had school off and i met him for lunch by my office and uh my oldest daughter libby had a friend with her and like in front of the friend they have to now show off and so guess what for the whole lunch i was getting roasted just everything was dad doing wrong like i in front of the friend to show off all my kids roasting me you know and before it was i can what are they saying i i don't even really they just constantly were attacking me and some of the stuff was kind of funny and i'm like oh man that's totally a dad thing i'm at that dad stage where i get roasted out by my kids you know for doing stuff and uh that's just another milestone that i've reached i can't believe it and by the way one of the best roasts i finally let my kids watch christmas vacation this this year it's my all-time favorite christmas movie i think it's the best one ever made i watch it every year and there's the part where the neighbor the yuppie neighbors say hey griswold we're gonna put a tree that size and he says bend over and i'll show you and so now every time i ask my kids for something like hey george where's your shoes and he'll go bend over and i'll show you and it gets me every time i just it's just like it's just such a great line all right recommendations you probably have some movies from the plane ride down um nothing okay i will give you i'm gonna give you a plane move I've flown on Delta too much lately. I am out of Delta. They need to recycle. What the hell did I watch? Did I not watch anything? I might have just listened to the Dwarkech podcast. Okay. I started downloading movies on my iPad because, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. I was so dry. I remember what I watched. I'm so dry with Delta's movies. I watched Curb. Okay. A TV show. Yeah, I'm a movie-only guy on planes. I don't watch TV shows. Robin told me to stop laughing. She said, watch something else. you're on an airplane all right i've got an airplane movie for you for the way home it's on apple now and uh it's called eternity it's got miles teller and it's got elizabeth olsen the younger olsen sister and uh callum thomas some newer actor-ish guy um and it's a rom-com and it's about this old couple dies but the wife had a previous husband who died in war and they get to heaven and they have to figure out who they want to spend eternity with and it's kind of a fun little it's it's it's kind of got some funny parts about like how to spend your eternity and how to think through heaven and uh it's a great airplane movie i really enjoyed it some funny parts that made us laugh out loud i watched my wife really good uh i think the pit is the best show on tv it just keeps getting better and better and i think season two is better than season one and robbie is the most likable tv character on right now it's so good it's so beautiful yeah the one with the Louie guy who was the alcoholic and he died and what happened with his family and it was really really good. I took my boys to the movie on Thursday night. Kobe has been dying to see Goat. My kids went and saw it yesterday. And what did they think? They loved it. Yeah, it was very good. You liked it? Okay. They enjoyed it. Alright, before we sign off here, let's take the market's temperature, shall we? You're looking for some more knives to catch. Software is down another 3%. Yeah, okay. Not all heroes have there, Ben. Software and silver, huh? Software and silver. Listen, if I lose money on these stocks, it won't be the first time. I'll tell you that much. Are you losing money in the casino? So, I was ready to bring this up on the pod. because I lost at the first three tables. I'm like, why do I keep losing? I mean, I hit what I'm supposed to hit it. I say what I'm supposed to say, and I don't play games. You've seen me gamble a million times, right? I hit on 16s when there's a 10. Sometimes you just have to eat it. You have to eat your losses, just like the stock market. Yeah. No, I'm a professional loser. I don't get mad. So I was down to my last $300, and I said, all right, I feel like this is enough losses, I think, on my fourth table, and I ran it all the way back to even. And now I'm down a little bit, but who cares? Not, not, that's a, that's a great feeling. That's a great feeling. So honestly, I feel like if I lose it all again, I still won. That's right. There we go, man. That's what I'm trying to say. All right. Thank you, everybody. Sorry for a bit of a rambling, maybe some, maybe some fence sitting, but what do we know? I feel like having strong, strong opinions is probably. Now is the perfect time for Grand Rapids head. This is a situation. situation. I don't think you should be pounding the table either way on AI. The only thing I'd say, if you're pounding the table that AI is not going to do anything and it's going to be useless, you're wrong. That's the only thing I can say definitively right now. Fair? That's a good way to end it. All right. Animal Spurs at the compoundnews.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. you