Home Buyer's Remorse (EP. 458)

Looking to diversify your portfolio beyond stocks and bonds? Commodities are getting more and more attention as we enter 2026. Tuquerium's agricultural ETFs offer a way to access the futures prices of essential crops. These funds may help manage inflation risk and add diversification to your portfolio, ask your financial advisor, or explore Tuquerium ETFs on your own. Visit Tuquerium.com, click the link in the show notes for more. At Janice 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, Janice Henderson Investors investing in a brighter future together. Visit JaniceHenderson.com. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life and investing. Join Michael Batnik 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 Ritholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Ben, it's good to see you. You too, as always. You got a big profile in Barron's drop this morning. Congrats. Thank you. It was the first of probably many media appearances for my book that's coming out soon. I was talking to Barry about this, how the book tour is now the podcast. There's still some legacy financial media, but I'll be doing a lot of podcasts in the weeks and months ahead. When does the book come out? May 12th. Okay. All right, soon. All right, speaking of Barry, Barry and the team are going to San Francisco the week of April 14th. My partner Chris will be out there. We'll have a bunch of financial advisors out there. If you are a prospective client, if you want to learn about how we work with clients here, or if you are a financial advisor out there who is looking to learn more about how we onboard advisors here, reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. Info at Ritholt's wealth.com. So you did it for my roast. What's that? You said my partner Chris. Wait, I forget what you said. Did I say that again? I said that because nobody knows who Chris is. I know, but it's funny that you call him your partner. That's the funny part. Okay. Well, there's an audience band. I'm not just talking to you. When I'm talking to you, I don't call him my partner Chris, but when there's an audience of people who don't know who Chris is, I have to... I think it's funny when you call him your partner. That's all I'm saying. Well, what should I call him? I don't know. My colleague Chris. He's more than my colleague. We started this business together. He's my partner. Anyway, any who. I've been waiting to drop it ostensibly and I can't figure out how to do it. Oh, you know what? I forgot to go back to the tape. I meant to ask Rob to... I want to tape check you and find out how often I actually use that word that I'm now so conscious about. I won't be using it. I bet we could word cloud that. How often do you say ostensibly? Well, what does all the time mean? I feel like that's got to be at least once in an episode. No? Yeah, pretty close. It's just for a big word. I feel like... Hey, I'm jealous. I wish I could use a big word like that. I will set the over under so less than one. I'm going to say 0.5. I'm going to say every other episode tops and I would even still take the under. Okay. You sure about that every episode? No, I said not. I said every other episode. No, you didn't. You just said every. I said every other. It's close. I would even go as far to say as one out of three. You use that word way more than the average person. How's that? Because I've never used it in my life. Keep moving the goalposts. Keep moving the goalposts. All right. Okay. So a couple of weeks ago, I said into this here camera that the burden of proof is on you, meaning if you think that we are about to enter an actual bear market, then the burden of proof is on you because the market generally overreacts. So right now it is just not overreacting. It is a very orderly sell-off. That's a good way to put it. The VIX has not really spiked at all. Joe Wise as well tweeted the other day, we haven't had a 2% down day during this war. So I pulled all the returns. If you look at them, there's nothing. Like the worst return is like a negative 1.7% on a daily basis. We haven't even had one day that's like, oh geez, here it is. Not even close. So all of this leads me to believe to stick with the courtroom analogy. The stock market has to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And when I say stock market, I'm talking about things that actually drive the stock market on a longer term basis. Inflation, interest rates, and most especially, earnings. And last week was anecdotally the first time that I started to hear the R-word, recession. And I suspect, and I could be wrong, but I suspect more than a little, that this is a classic case of the stock market predicting nine of the last five recessions. And let me just introduce to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, two pieces of evidence. I pulled this from our friends at the transcript. This quote is from the chairman and CEO of Arthur J. Gallagher, which is a, I believe, an insurance brokerage type of thingy-majiggy. Through mid-March, our daily revenue indications from audits, endorsements, and cancellations are still in positive territory, indicating continued solid business activity, and no signs of a broad slowdown. We're just not seeing signs of economic weakness. And I'll give you one more, maybe more relevant to the broader economy. Paychecks, CEO, and Paychecks processes, processes, Paychecks, accounts, all that sort of stuff. Ostensibly, they process Paychecks for people. I looked this up, over 700,000 smaller mid-sized businesses in the United States, okay? So they've got their finger on the pulse, so to speak. What we're seeing, this is from the CEO, what we're seeing is a stable macro environment, no signs of recession in any of our data or indicators. Nothing that would indicate that we would change what we're thinking in terms of pace on any of our segments at this point in time. Now, of course, as always, you could point to the housing market weakness, you could point to the hiring weakness, you could point to AI fears and private credit fears and, of course, oil. And I'm not saying there's nothing to worry about, so don't misunderstand me. But I think this is a wonderful long-term opportunity for investors. I think that assuming that this ends at some point in time, and I don't know when it's going to end, and I'm not suggesting a V-shaped rally, and in fact, let me be very clear, the sellers are clearly obviously in control right now, right? So I'm not saying like a throw caution to the wind. I respect trend. And right now, the trend is lower. The path of lease resistance is lower, but that can and will change in my opinion. And I think once all of these headwinds subside, assuming that the economy doesn't roll over, assuming that earnings stay positive, I think that this will, in the second half of the year, maybe next year, who knows, will be looked back on as I can't believe I didn't buy. That's how I feel. I think it's important that you're distinguishing between a recession and a correction because, listen, most corrections don't lead to recession. Or you're right, the stock market predicts them because guess what? We haven't had one, a real one in 17 years. So all the corrections we've had along the way that thought the economy was slowing, they were wrong. And every time, we do this every time. So we show the chart every year of the average of the of the max entry year drawdown and the average of overtime. And what is it, 14%? Depending on when you look at it, 14 or 16%. So every year on average has an entry year, 14% decline. And right now we're at 9%. Yes. So I feel like every year we forget that this happens every year. Yeah. And my take on the economy would be it's proven to be so strong. I totally agree with you that like, it's got to be lawyer speak, beyond a reasonable doubt. This would have to the whole energy crisis would have to last a lot longer for it to have an impact on the economy. That's my general feeling now. Now there is, there are, so again, we're just normal crutching chart. You mentioned that the S&P from the highs is down nine. The Russell 2000 is down 11. So is the EFA emerging markets are down 13. NASDAQ 100 is down 12. Gold is down 16%. There are some areas that software is down 34%. Silver is down 40% from the highs. Bitcoin is almost in a 50% drawdown. Ethereum is down almost 60%. So there are places you can look at that. Okay. These are pretty bummed up things. 40% of the index last I checked with of the S&P was down 20% and more to your point. There's things that are getting absolutely destroyed. Let's look at a company like Micron for example. So Micron reported next week and this is one of the best performing stocks right. So it went straight up. So the fact that it's giving some back is whatever pretty normal. But Micron fell 30% in a few weeks after reporting earnings. And this is what the CFO said on the call. Micron sent new records across revenue, gross margins, EPS and free cash flow. Fiscal Q2 DRAM revenue was a record $18.8 billion. Up, listen to this Ben, 207% year over year. Up 207% year over year and the stock has been a 30% decline. For all the talk that we had in 2025 about the inevitability of a bubble forming, like it's coming, just wait for it. The fact that the market has rejected it with both hands, I think is awesome for long-term returns. So I think you could make the case that if this is just a blip and there's no big economy wide like tail on this, then there's a lot of stocks that are probably pretty cheap because he shows that the forward price to earnings is now at new all-time highs while the index is rolling over. And if you look at the, he shows how equity, and this is on exhibit A as well. If you go there, exhibit A for advice.com. He's showing that this year's fundamentals, earnings growth is strong 5%. Dividends are kicking in a little and P's have contracted by 10%. So the reason that stocks are down is because valuations have fallen. Now you could say, Hey, wait a minute, that does kind of make sense. Inflation might be higher. Like, you know, these things do happen where earnings and stock prices don't always exist in the same. They don't always follow each other. So that could make sense. But I think that if this is a blip, this is a taco liberation day kind of thing, you're going to go, man, there are some cheap stocks out there that were getting bombed out that I could have bought. Yeah. So the sell off makes sense. I'm not saying like people are being stupid for selling their stocks. I understand why the stock market is falling. We had a bunch of emails about the taco stuff. And this is a very fair point. It takes two sides to taco. In this case, it's like, what if Trump is like, all right, mission accomplished, we're done. And then Iran's like, well, we're not done. We're not done. This is not as easy as the tariff thing. I totally agree with that. There's a lot more going on here. So duality research has a similar chart that Matt did where he breaks down the sector returns of the S&P into the price return, the EPS growth, and the PE multiple. And every sector has positive earnings growth, every single one. And the only three sectors with multiple expansion, obviously energy stocks and utilities and staples. But where it really matters, technology, earnings are up 18%. 18%. And yet technology stocks are down 12%. That's 25% multiple compression. I actually think that some multiple compression is warranted in tech stocks. Of course it is. With all the money that they're spending and they're becoming more asset heavy and less asset light and less intangible, like the valuation compression there makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. So two things can be true. Two things can be true. The market is sniffing something out that doesn't smell too good. Redpoint did a big report on what's going on in software and they estimate that 95% of the current price action is by terminal value. So that's why all of these companies, Adobe, Duolingo, where you see their earnings per share at an all-time high and the stocks are down 70%. Right. Yeah. The market's not dumb. It doesn't matter. It could put up record earnings for the next six quarters. But if the market believes that ultimately Adobe's business will be a fraction of what it is today in 10 years, that's all that matters. Yes. And that's why stock picking is hard. Because you could probably buy a basket of companies right now and be okay. But if you try to buy a few stocks that you think, well, the market is wrong because I got the P and I got the E, I can calculate that. It's not as easy as that. Yeah. So anyway, interesting market as always. Carl Kintanay tweeted, this is from Goldman, since the start of the war, long only trading activity in our desk has essentially been non-existent. It is eerie. I worry that we are now approaching the point of this conflict where the long-only community will become unfrozen and start cutting some real risk. I think every day investors are looking at the screen and we were, market fell yesterday, tried to open higher, sold in today. But where is the trap door down 3% day where the VIX gets to 45 and people like, now there's always a camp in a bear mark, in a correction. There's always a camp that says unique capitulation. I don't know where that comes from. I mean, I get it. You need people to like really like throw in the towel. I understand where that's coming from. No offense to the vampire squid though, but are we really, I can't really put Goldman in the same bucket as like the long-term Vanguard target date investors. Like those are real long-term investors. I don't put Goldman in that bucket. No offense to that. It didn't say long term. It didn't say long term. It said long, long. Long only. Sorry. Okay. Sorry. Long only. So you mentioned the volatility being normal thing. I just had a, I've been totally clawed pilled. I just want to go on record saying this, took me, probably took me too long. Dude, wait till you discover coffee. It's, but it's by far the, it's by far the best financial analysts of all of the LLMs. It's not even close. Is that fair from our perspective and what we use it for? Yeah. So I did this thing where a chart can help me create this chart that showed just volatility is normal, right? And the number of drawdowns since 1928, and we looked at 10% worse 15 and someone said, okay, Ben, what's the forward return from there? I said, all right, yeah, you know, I've probably done this in the past with me. And so I just said, at the end of a month, the S&P finishes down 10%, 20% of 30%. What are your forward returns look like? Okay. So I still had to do some calculations because I'm, I want to make sure I get these numbers right at, I don't quite trust it 100% yet. So I did some calculations really quick. It takes me five minutes. And then I upload that spreadsheet to claw. I say, I need you to figure out from these dates, mix and match with these returns that I calculated with these specific drawdown points, right? And it does it immediately. Now this probably would have taken me, if I did this five years ago, like I would have by hand, it would take me two hours, probably it did it in 30 seconds. And oh, by the way, I said, Hey, just so you know, I color coded these drawdowns for you and I color coded the gains as well. And I calculated the average returns and the win rates. Okay, so I still have to go and check these because I want to make sure but it just shows look at the win rates if you buy at the again, this is the end of the month. And the reason I did end of the month is because I like total returns, right? I'm not a price return guy. I'm a total return guy. But the win rates are all in the 90%. If you just buy down 10%, your average returns going forward are like the next 12, 36 and 60 months are 15, 42 and 72. Like it's pretty good. They're all pretty close. If you buy down these 10, 20 or 30%. And the win rates are all 93, 94, 90, 99. Like it's really, really high win rates if you buy stocks and they're out. But when you don't win, you lose bigly. Yes, obviously. Yeah, I thought this is kind of interesting too. Now, some people will say like, why does it matter how often how long it takes the earth to rotate around the sun? Right? Why do we why do we care about calendar years? I don't know. This is kind of fun. So since 2009, and I knew this, but you're ready. Wait, hold on. You think calendar years are kind of fun, but birthdays aren't. And to be clear, I am not a birthday guy. So even though Ben is a birthday Grinch, it's not like I'm like, oh, everybody texts me celebrate my birthday. Like I don't like to celebrate my birthday. In fact, I hate to celebrate my birthday from my bar mitzvah. So I am not a spotlight guy. I don't like, I get like social anxiety in large crowds like that. Last year in Miami, you did that. I did what? You got socially anxious when everyone's celebrating you in that steakhouse with the fireworks in. Yes. Yes. So that I don't get anxious about a lot of things, but it makes me sweat. I just, I really feel uncomfortable in those situations. For my bar mitzvah, I get so uncomfortable that I had like a sports party because my nightmare was for bar mitzvahs, they bring the boys and girls out and like all the people look at them and they dance with the dancers. And like that's, that's the worst thing for me. So anyway, back to calendar years, Ben. Let's, let's see why you like calendar years. Since 2009, there have been exactly two down calendar years in the S&P 500. Okay. So we're like 17 years. There's been two down years. 2018 was negative 4%. 2022 was negative 18%. Okay. That's it. Those are the only down years that we've had since 2009. So far, 2026 as of the close Monday was on 7%. The point is down years don't happen though. And like I said, well, this has been an extremely great run. So from 2000, who cares? Give us a down year. I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to fall 30%. But if we fall, if the S&P closes down 7% this year, is that the end of the world? No, that's what's funny. If the S&P closed down 7%, it would be the worst year. It'd be the second worst year since 2008 essentially. It's just crazy to think about that. Like right now, that's how good investors have had it. Because you have the market fell of four out of 10 years from 2000, 2009. So my point is that like this is, and to be clear, investors have had it so good and they have because companies have delivered so good. Yeah. And now obviously, two down years, but there's been plenty of corrections along the way. That's what I'm saying going on the sun. Okay, Torsten, I just think it's fascinating to think that the, as much worry as there's been, there's been literally two down years in almost two decades. All right. So this is my whole point about as much anxiety about the market and the economy with AI as people have, and the market's only down 9%. I just don't buy that we're whistling past the graveyard. Sorry. I mean, it's, you know, maybe there's a lot of egg on my face coming if there's a financial crisis that I missed, but I don't know. Not my base case. Okay. So Torsten Slock says the same thing. Markets are too focused on the near-term challenges from higher oil prices. The real trade-off for investors is four to six weeks of instability paying off 50 years of stability in oil market supply chains and geopolitics. The Gulf region will be more stable and even more closely integrated with the global economy. And I put the Tobias Fumke thing in here. Did it work for those people? No, it never does, but these people somehow dilute themselves. I think it might, but it might work for us. What's this mean from? It's an arrested development one. I mean, really, I might have to rewatch the whole first three seasons of the show. It's one of the great sitcoms of all time. And it's full of memes that you don't understand. And the thing is, it wasn't a popular show and it's not, but... Wait, hold on. Is that Bateman and Will Arnett? Yes. It was like, that was Bateman's comeback, essentially, from being in non-existent forever. That was his, and Will Arnett's... Did you watch the Madison? I did not yet. Okay. Will Arnett makes a very interesting appearance in that show. Not exactly the person I thought would be on screen. Okay. All right. I feel like there's too many Taylor Sheridan shows. I can't keep up with all the shows. We'll get to that later. What about DTF, the Bateman show? Yes, I'm still under that one. I like it. I can see how a lot of... I can see how some people would be turned off by it and wouldn't like it and go, what is this? I think the guy from Stranger Things, his name is Escaping Me, I think when he does the sign language in terms of dance, I think he's hilarious in this show. It's very funny. Yeah. But anyway, my point is, I just... The idea that this is all of a sudden, things in the Middle East are going to be fixed, I feel like every president has said, like, I'm going to go in and fix the Middle East, and I just don't think it's fixable for us. I don't think we can fix it. Well, yeah, there's been thousands of years of conflict. I think you're probably right then. All right. So my worry is like, okay, Iran goes, oh, the Strait of Hormuz is more important than ever. Like, we're going to use this as a choke point. This is going to be a worry for the next 20 years of them using it as a choke point. Like, I can't imagine this is the last we're going to hear about this. Even if we say, all right, we're done, we're out of here. Like, this is more important than it was before this. So I don't think... 50 years of stability, I don't buy that at all, no way. Yeah, I don't think anybody buys that. I mean, hello, were you born yesterday? The Bloomberg made a chart of the difference between European gas prices, natural gas specifically, and US. And look what the fracking revolution did to our country and our energy independence, which was like very much a political issue in the 2010s. Right? Like, that was a very heated argument and it turns out energy independence is a good thing. So my new audible is I'm listening to how the world really works. Backlub Smiel is his name. I think I can pronounce that right. And it was one that I tried to read and I just couldn't get through it, but I put on audiobooks. And the whole point of the book is everyone, a lot of people think that fossil fuels are bad and they're really bad for the world and they're destroying the world. But he says like, we would not have gotten to where we are as a society without fossil fuels. And it's looking at kind of both sides of this and saying like, how much more energy efficient we've gotten over time. And it's kind of like the leaps forward are insane. But it's an interesting look at just like, listen, the world is not the way it is if we didn't have fossil fuels. You can hate them if you want, but it's anyway, interesting look at it. So what this chart is showing is that our natural gas prices are basically unchanged over the last four years. There was a there was a blip short term spike that came back down. But look at what it's doing to European gas prices. I'm really interested to see what how much bigger the European response is going to be, because they have to think, listen, we didn't do anything, we didn't start the Ukraine-Russia war. And we got hope our energy prices spiked, we didn't start the Iran war, our energy prices spiked. Like what is their response going to be? They're not just going to sit there and take this, are they forever? I mean, I just wonder if their if their fiscal defense spend is just going to go through the roof, if that because they can't just sit there and take this every time something happens that their energy prices spike and ours don't. I just asked Claude, okay, roughly 40% of European homes use natural gas as their primary heating source. And it's higher in other countries. So yeah, this sucks for them a lot. Right. Yeah. Like this really hurts. I guess the good thing is that it's not the winter. But still, they don't use air conditioning in Europe. So in the summer, they're going to be okay. Everyone just walks around sweaty with BO. So it's like, it's like medieval times. All right, so I put this price of I put the long term chart of US retail gas prices in here. This spike is insane. I'll quickly went from three to four dollars a gallon. I continue to think that if we it's just a temporary spike, I don't think gas prices matter anymore. Like I know people see the big signs and they get angry with them. But I don't think for the economy, gas prices matter all that much. Is that a dumb statement? Yeah, it's pretty dumb. I think it's a short term. I don't think a short term spike. I'm saying for the economy. I'm not talking about people's pocket books. Yeah. I for the overall economy, does a short term and does a short term rising gas prices matter? I don't know, probably very, very, very much on the margin. I don't think you'll see this in the data. That's what I think it's going to be marginal if it's just as short terms. But all right, DFA had a cool chart. They looked at the correlation between oil price changes and energy sector returns from 1964 to 2025. And the correlation was 0.29, which is kind of shocking. You would have think oil and energy would move in lockstep. I don't even believe this. Look at the chart. You don't believe it? Nope. If this is trying to show that energy stocks don't react to the direction of oil prices, then I reject this chart. Okay, so they show, for example, oil was up over the long term, it might not matter as much as you think. Fine. Nobody, not everybody lives in 10-year periods. But they're showing annual returns. They're showing 12-month periods. Okay. Then they say, for example, oil is up more than 150% in 1974, energy stocks fell. On the other hand, energy stocks were up in 2025, despite a market drop in oil prices. So what? Everything, every stock fell in 1974. And every stock rose in 2025. This chart doesn't do it for me. Sorry. Not impressed. I think the point is there's a lot of people who think energy stocks are a perfect, like why buy oil when you can just buy energy stocks? And the point is it's not always a one-to-one hedge. That's the point. Have you seen energy stocks? Yeah, they're doing well this year. But the point is it's not always like that. All right. You're right. Rejected. Regency bias wins. Reject the historical data. You're right. Oh, what? Because in 1974, energy stocks fell. This chart is crap. They show every year since 1964. How about this? Okay. There's no rhyme or reason to this chart. That's the point. Show it chart. Show this data presented differently. Show me rolling 30-day returns of energy stocks. And I bet you this looks a lot different. Yeah, you're zooming in. I'm zooming in. Okay. The zoom out is 12-month period though. I think that's not like a totally like takes away all the little... It's a zoom out. Okay. I agree to disagree. All right. No, you just agree to not trust the data sometimes. You're a data truth at times. Nope. You can manipulate the charts to show what you want. That's fair. I'm not a data truth. The data is the data. And I don't like the way that this data is presented. All right. I think it's interesting. The correlation being that low is surprising as all. There's no... I think the whole point is that... Energy stocks don't last 12 months all the time. You're measuring the wrong thing. All right. So I mentioned before like tech valuations probably should be compressed. And this chart from the FT, this is the reason why. So it shows revenue generated per dollar of fixed assets. And for Facebook and Google and Microsoft and Amazon, it's going down, down, down. And for Apple, it's continued to rise a little bit because they're not spending money. All this means is that there's just much... These companies are going more from intangible to tangible because of all the investments in AI. And it will be very interesting to think like, listen, we had to do this, but is this the thing that finally changes this cycle of the tech premium? But it's more than a short-term blip. This changes it maybe forever. Like this whole 15-year cycle or whatever we've been on, this is the... The AI thing is the thing that finally changes it. The cost of data setters and the cost of compute, it's going to finally change this. This is a very plausible story. I could buy this. So if these companies were living in a world of 40 to 70% operating margins with high cash flow, and now this is... We have reached an inflection point. And that's the thing. And people go, wait a minute, earnings are still growing 15% per year. Why is my stock going down? Or why is the valuation compressing? I think that's going to be a thing that people are saying about a lot of these stocks going forward. God, I don't get it. That's what happened to Microsoft after the dot-com bubble. Earnings were growing like crazy and the stock did nothing. People are going, this doesn't make any sense. Why isn't it matching the fundamentals? Yeah. The difference is the stocks were... The valuations were absurd back then. So Facebook is trading at 16 times forward earnings. So yes, obviously, investors are saying, time out, this is not 2021 anymore. But I would also argue that at 16 times forward earnings for Facebook and 20 for Microsoft or whatever, the re-rating has sufficiently de-wrist these stocks. I'm not saying Microsoft is a screaming buy today, but I think if you could put the stock away for a couple of years, I think you're going to make money. Duncan asked me the other day, all these stocks that have gotten crushed, where would you look? And I said, my boring answer, and we talked about this and asked the compound, I could go through a lot of different charts, is just, I think you'd probably say, if I wanted to go bottom fishing right now, these stocks are at around 30% or more. Every time Metta and Microsoft follow it. If you're going to bottom fish, bottom fish in a mega cap name. Yeah. And guess what? One of these times, maybe you're wrong and it takes a lot longer to come back, but that's where I would do it. That's like the safe answer, I would say. We had a really good podcast, Josh and I did a really good podcast with this guy, Jonathan Boyer, who's a value investor. And I said to him, there's no extra points for difficulty with investing. And if you are a value investor and you're buying stocks because you think the market is wrong, the burden of proof is really high. And guess what? Most of the time, most of the time, the market's not wrong. And buying 52 week lows is a really, really, really, really, really bad long-term strategy. So I asked him, why not just wait until these stocks stop crashing? I'm not saying that you could know when the bottom is, who can? But why at least wait for some sort of signs that, okay, the selling has stopped, right? Like the stock's not crashing anymore. At bottom, they rallied, it failed, it failed, like it's gone sideways, some consolidation. And he basically, he had a good answer. He said, I do. I buy over time. And that's as good an answer as any. So just for the listeners, like if you, you know, I wouldn't say don't go all in on a stock that's in free fall. That's not a great, that usually doesn't work out well. You don't blow your whole lot on the first dip, right? Because you're probably going to keep dipping. All right. 2025, it turns out was a really, really bad year for stock pickers. 79%. Man, I thought it was going to be a stock pickers year. Shoot. Well, 2026s. Should be. No, it is. No, yeah. First, I'm saying it should be. I don't know what, we don't know this, how the stock pickers are doing. Okay. That's a good point. So, so yesterday, the equal weighted index was flat. It was down 1% in the year. And the S&P was down 7%. So by definition, it is a stock pickers year. I hope they picked the right stocks. So I hope they avoided the mega. I hope, I hope they were underweight. Listen, they're underweight. If you're not a closet index, so that's the point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure. You figure out how many, are you a closet index? That's what you figure out. Yeah. The crazy thing to me is that I wrote about this a little bit after we talked about last week. If you look at the, for this Beaver report, if you look at the 10, 15, 20 year numbers, and it's across, it's not just large cap, it's small cap, mid cap reads. It's all these different categories. International. It's something like 90 to 95% of active managers underperform the index. And my, my baseline was always for index funds. And I don't even make fun of you on index funds, but I, I, I assumed it would be 70, 75%. That, that seemed like a good baseline to me. Like that, that, that's how many active managers you all perform just because of costs and fees and all that stuff usually. The fact that it's been 90 to 95% is kind of insane to me. I didn't think it would be that high. Yeah. And you could say, you could say this is the hardest period ever for stock pickers. And I wouldn't argue that you has, but the fact that it's that high is pretty crazy to me. The fact that like indexing became so, so popular and people were talking about it being a bubble and it's going to lead to all these things. And guess what? It worked better than it's ever worked in history for indexing. That's the crazy part. All right. This story from the Wall Street Journal was flying around. People love to share these charts. They're rich, but not famous. And they're suddenly everywhere. The number of Americans worth eight or nine figures is up markedly it's transforming the U S economy. Now they show this chart and they show there are 430,000 us households worth $30 million or more. Hold on. Time out. 430,000. Isn't that crazy? And this is as of 2022. So this number is definitely higher. 74,000 people that are worth $100 million or more. Okay. Even adjusted for inflation, the wealth of the top 0.1% of households has grown more than 13 fold over the past 50 years. Again, adjusted for inflation. That is a face blowing stat. That's hard to believe. Yes. So, so they show, they break this down. They show the number of households by 30 million and up 50 million and up and 100 million and up. But again, they're adjusting for inflation for these figures and the hundred million one just keeps going up. Even 50 and 30 is kind of a little more volatile, but there are so, so many rich people these days. And this is why there's, there's like rich person anxiety too. You, you saw that viral story from the New York Times last week about the couple in New York who makes $500,000 a year and they say they're middle class. Okay. That shit really pisses people off. Oh yeah. Rich people claiming that they're working class people for good reason. That's if you have make a half a million dollars a year in the top 1%, but this is why those people feel that way because they go, yeah, sure, I make half a million dollars a year, but I'm not worth $30 million. Like my neighbor is Park Avenue or whatever. Like, and I just 430,000 households are worth 30 million or more. You sure that says of 2022? It's insane, right? Yes. As of 2022, because that's the last day of the fed, fed data for this. All right. And think about how much more the stock market is up, which is where all the wealth is since then. So what is it now, 700,000? That's the thing. That is, that is honestly like a, that is hard to believe. Wow. 2022 is also a bear market. So think about that. There's, so yeah, it's, it's probably now 600,000. So a couple things here. One, I think if you take this and the fact that it's not just like the top 10% of the top 5%, it's really, it's not even the top 1%. It's like the top 0.1. Yeah. I may be even short here. In the next 12 years, we're going to elect a socialist president in this country. Stamp it. No, don't say that. Rubbers with AI, AI is going to make inequality worse. Okay. Think about what happened in New York. This is going to happen on a national basis. I hope the rich people collude and have as much power as we think they do to make sure that we don't get a socialist president. I'm just saying if, if this trend keeps being in place and AI is going to make it worse and we see all the corruption going on in the government right now, okay, we are going to elect a socialist president. All right. So I don't know. Mark it down right now. Anything about, obviously I'm not saying I want that. I'm saying this is going to happen. This is where the country is going. I think. But, but, but, but isn't it really expensive to put somebody in office? It is. So where does the money come from to get a socialist person to the top? How did the guy get elected in New York? I don't know. You don't think that's, I think it's different at the national level. All right. I just, I think that's, I think we're going down a bad path here is what I'm saying. I think that's where we're heading. Well, yes, this is, this is tough. Because again, AI is going to make this worse. AI is not going to make any quality better. It's going to make it worse. But why? Why? You're going to be able to start a business with far fewer people. Guess what? That's more, that's more money in the hands of fewer people. All right. Let me ask you a question. I'm being serious. So when we say wealth inequality is going to go get worse, let's just assume that the bottom, I don't know, 10% will see no improvement from AI. The bottom bottom of the K. What if AI impact, what if AI lifts the, lifts 70% of the economy? Then it would be a miracle technology if it did that. I don't think it's like, I don't think it's been decided that this is going to make things a lot worse. I'm not like, I'm not saying that it's, that it's going to make things better. So like, that's not what I'm saying. But I don't know, I don't know that we can say that. I'm more sure about this than anything right now. I'm really. Yes. AI is going to make any quality way worse. Think about starting a company with fewer people and you can, you keep all that equity yourself. All right. Let me, let me, let me read an email that we got. Okay. Okay. This is a, this is actually exactly what we're talking about. I own a manufacturing firm in the rural Midwest, cutting to the chase. My production people, employees are generally lower quarter in IQ. Now this sounds made out of, I don't, I don't think this person's trying to be mean. It's hard for many people to imagine, but if I asked them to pick a half gallon, 1% organic milk out at a grocery store shelf, they would be flummoxed too many ideas to hold at one time. Let's remember what AI is, artificial intelligence. In the same way the barcode scanner allowed a new cohort of people to be checkout people versus keying in all groceries or how spell check helps some people communicate by fixing almost every word. The adoption of AI actually extends the runway of employment for lots of people that graduated high school with a fourth grade reading level, which is a sixth of the population. He said, he said one sixth of the population can't qualify to be in the military due to low IQ. So this is a real issue. That's wild, but whatever. Different topic I suppose. In short, the AI doomerism about it spreading the gap among halves and have nots forgets that a lot of have nots can use even the simplest AI to extend their skills on the workforce. That's a good alternative. I, yes, I hope so. I, yes, I agree. The ability to do it will be there. A lot of these discussions, because obviously the same thing with every discussion, it either, it's either all good or all bad. Yeah. Right. The barriers to entry have been completely flattened if you want to learn about something. Right. You can ask as many questions yet you're right. If you want to learn about a specific topic, it can give you step by step. It's, yes, it's there. The ability there, people take it. Wow. 430,000 people with 30 million dollar net worth. That's just, it's just unbelievable. All right. Here's another one. So Delta, speaking of the upper, upper end of the K, so Delta Airlines, they said, our consumer is really healthy. We live at the top end of the K that people talk about, the premium end of the K, and that's where over 90% of our revenue is sourced from. The group of folks that want to travel, they're investing in themselves, they're investing in the experience economy. We've seen eight of the top 10 sales days in our history this quarter, and five of those within just the last two weeks, within just the last week of this past March, even with fuel prices, even with the war going on, our bookings are up 25% year of year. So I'm sorry. I'm not sorry. I just think that the stock market is leading a lot of the discussion right now and assuming that we don't get a recession that earnings don't contract from the point of the stock market. It's not even the stock market, it's the oil market that's leading the discussion. Right. This is good. This is good stuff. For years, we talked about when will the travel boom stop? Remember, we thought it was, okay, this is just, people are going to take a couple trips after the COVID and then it's going to stop and it hasn't stopped at all. 30 million, I mean, okay, I keep hoping it was 30 million. Go down like two steps. How many people are $5 million? Right. And what stops them? All right. Back to my socialist stuff here. This is from Alison Schrager at Bloomberg posted this. Financial nihilism is generational. And it's saying that more young Americans say they feel behind financial and believe speculative investments will help them reach their goals. Now, it says 80% of Gen Z feels this way and 75% of millennials. I understand the zeitgeist behind these kinds of things, but these, I think if you look at the difference between people online and people in the real world, it's never been starker because the whole thing that people think that this financial nihilism exists and the only way you can do it is by speculating on crypto and prediction markets. And what percentage of the population is that really? It's just, it's people online who talk about it. If you go in the real world, most people are happy. Most people are doing fine. When you talk to regular people, they're not like, I don't think most people are happy. I'm going to go that far. But I would say most people aren't miserable. Yeah. Most people you interact with on a regular basis. When you go to your kids games and you go to the school events and when you go out to dinner at restaurants, do you see people who are moping and unhappy? No, most of the time you see people smiling and having fun and laughing. And I think this idea that everyone is, is miserable and everyone wants to just speculate because their life is horrible. That's, that's supremely 100% online people and that's it. The real world is not like that. I could not agree more. Okay. So yes, Colonel, like more than a kernel of truth as to why people are doing this and there is a segment of the population that's doing this, obviously, it's not all nonsense. But this idea that it's like an epidemic. I think the number is something like two to four percent of people who gamble on sports become totally addicted and it ruins their life. That's a way higher number than it should be. And it's not everyone. And two to four percent of people that are doing it, unfortunately, is probably hundreds of thousands of people whose lives are ruined, whose families lives are ruined. So it's tragic, obviously. But let's not, let's not conflate that with the idea that everybody is like that. All right. So you started out with the recession stuff. I use Claude again and I said, Hey, so the National Bureau of Economic Research, they're the ones who say it's a recession. And usually they tell us like six months later, they have to wait for confirmation. They have these six different indicators they look at to determine are we in a recession or not. And they have to look at the weight of the evidence, right? They look at payrolls and personal income and consumption and industrial production and households, employment and then manufacturing and trade sales. And I did this. I said, Claude, make me a make me a dashboard of this. And they show, is it weakening? Is it positive? Is it slowing? It's so right now, it basically says elevated watchfulness. That's what Claude tells me. My little French buddy, Claude. This is certainly the, I'd say like the worst state the economy's been going into one of these conflicts. Is that fair to say? Yeah. I think that's where that's why I think that's why people are the economy is is flat flat to week. Yes. I think that's if you look at this data, you'd go, yeah, it's, it's fly. It's not, not doing great. It's not doing horrible. It's just, it's okay. Yeah. Speaking of Claude, how do you feel? We haven't spoken about this. How do you feel about the 824 remake of Bloodsport? Oh, really? I don't know, man. Can they find a guy with the chest as big as him that could make a dance like that? What was it guy's name? Chun-Li or something? The bad guy? What's Chun-Li's name in real life? That guy was terrifying. I had, I had to introduce my son to Van Damme the other day because he's watching Expendables 3 and he goes, wait, who's this guy? The new bad guy is Van Damme. I said, ah, we'll have to get through his catalog too, I guess. I love Van Damme. George will love Son of Death. Yeah, you're right. He will like that one. So good. He knows all these guys now because every single cheesy action star is in Expendables at some point. So for the younger audience, Jean-Claude Van Damme was this really handsome, amazing kickboxer, martial artist, I suppose. He's not a kickboxer. The kind of guy who would never be in movies today because there'd be too much unintentional comedy. Yeah, it was just the movies are hilarious. He's an artifact of the 90s. Yeah. So in Son of Death, there's a bomb in a hockey stadium. Is that Pittsburgh? Is he a penguin? I can't remember. He becomes the goalie. I saw that in the theater with a friend and we were just like, I don't know. And no, no, no. In the 90s, you did not question it. At least, I mean, I was too young to question it. I probably thought that could happen. He made a save because he was like, yeah, it was so good. The 90s were a simpler time, much simpler time. A lot of self-awareness back then. All right. Torsen Slak, no signs of AI replacing offshore workers. So they're looking at the, this chart's super blurry, but he said, we are monitoring the unemployment rate in the Philippines and India for any signs that AI is reducing the need for outsourced workers in corporate America. So far, there are no signs of AI replacing offshore workers. So I feel like my AI thing is inequality. Your AI thing is labor replacement, right? We both have our sort of like, demerism. We're dabbling in demerism for AI. At what year would you have to say, okay, I was wrong about this. Like what year would the unemployment rate have to spike enough to be like, okay, fine, maybe this isn't going to happen? Would it be like 2028, 2030? Like at what point, if the unemployment rate was still like five or 6%, would you go, okay, AI is just not having to your impact like I thought it would? That's a good question. I would love to know what the end date is. Like end of this decade, if we haven't had a huge spike in unemployment in productivity, like then maybe it's just not going to happen. I don't even think you need to go that far. I would say if by the end of next year, the labor market looks similar as it does today, then yeah, we should be okay. Right. Because again, we're still not seeing mass layoffs. We're not seeing, it's just people have kind of stopped hiring. And it's but it's hard because it's never just one thing because what if there's a recession? Are we going to blame AI for that? I do think the recession will be the thing that like, do people get hired back? That's when you'll really know because in a recession, people don't, the companies don't mind laying. They'll lay off. They don't care. Will they hire people back? That'll be the tell. Check this out. So I mentioned Red Point earlier, the Lincoln bio, what do we call it? Lincoln show notes, if you want to see this report. They have a chart showing, so it's a 2026 market update. They go deep into software and venture and what's going on and all that sort of stuff, comparing public markets to private markets and valuations and all that good stuff. All right. So I thought this chart was fascinating. They're showing the top 20 largest VC deals as a percentage of total enterprise software funding. And it was eight, six and seven percent to 2020 through 2022 that it spiked to 23 percent to 2023, 31 percent to 24 and 44 percent to 2025. And open AI and Anthropik and XAI are sucking up all of the funding. So just like the public markets, private markets are extremely concentrated. Everything is, it's concentration all the way down. Right? That is interesting. I also, I saw a chart from Balchonis. I didn't put in the show notes about people complaining about how concentrated the US stock market is. And then he showed it compared to the rest of the world. If you look at South Korea, which has been extremely volatile market lately, huge run-up. And now it's, I think it's down 20 percent now. Two stocks make up like 45 percent of the index. It's way more concentrated elsewhere. I think Japan is really the only one that's more diversified than us. All right. Mike Duda said this tweet. Let's talk about crypto. Total crypto market cap is flat over the past five years, despite significant inflation from existing protocols and plenty of new protocol launches. You don't need to look particularly far beyond this chart to understand why crypto sentiment isn't great right now. So this is going from another peak, obviously, a little bit. But still, this is kind of crazy. All the, I guess, all the VC dollars that poured into crypto, all the different protocols, all the different layers, it is pretty surprising at this point that more hasn't come out of it. Besides Bitcoin essentially being... Well, stablecoins is a huge, huge industry. I would say also one of the other problems with crypto is that I'm doing, this is not my world, but I'm just assuming that a lot of the talent is gone and is now in doing cool as shit in AI and probably not going back. That was the thing where it was like everyone is going to work in crypto now. This is the new cool thing. Obviously, AI is probably that. Now, I tend to agree. So what's going to be the... Are we ever going to get the thing for crypto? Is it just stablecoins? That's it. I think if that's the outcome, most people in crypto would call it a failure. From what they laid out at the beginning of this, I think if stablecoins are the thing, that would be looked at as like we didn't do what we set out to do. Is that fair? I would agree. I would agree. But it's still a $2 trillion asset class. It's still a... Yeah, that was effectively created out from thin air. Yeah. So a market check. S&P is up 1.5%. The NASDAQ is finally bouncing. NASDAQ is up 1.7%. I don't know if there's news or not, but all right. The news was last night. Basically, Trump said, even if we don't take back the trade off our moves, I'm willing to end the war. He's ready to call it. All right. So I said what happened last night actually. And in any other day, Ben, I would have known what happened. But guess what? I finally blocked Twitter on my phone. Okay. I do wonder about this. I got this thing called BRIC and I installed it yesterday. What does it do? And so I blocked Twitter on my phone. I can't go on Twitter. So I've not checked Twitter in the last 24 hours. Because of Twitter, I see all these headlines. I see these stories and there's all these stories people are talking about. And I often wonder, there's obviously people who aren't on it who never have any idea these things are happening. Because most of the stuff that gets reported on Twitter, it rarely jumps into actual news, lexicon, or the big, sometimes Twitter moves the news. But all the stories that people pay attention to all the time, that's just online people paying attention to them. So I mean, it's not my computer, so I'm still here. But the reason why I did it, I feel like most of the time that I'm on Twitter on my phone is when I'm home with my kids. That's not a good feeling. So I don't need to be on Twitter and laying in bed with them, obviously. All right. Let's keep moving. All right. Torsten Slak had his housing update and he shows the average monthly mortgage payment on a new 30-year mortgage. Okay. And it goes back to January 2000. And this thing is remarkably stable from January 2000 to January 2020. Obviously housing prices crashed, mortgage rates came down. But it's kind of crazy that the price, the monthly mortgage payment, wasn't that much higher in January of 2020 than it was in January of 2000. I think this period they're going to look back on and go, that was a historical anomaly. That will never happen again. So this is also obviously, obviously a huge part of why people are pissed off. So we mentioned 20 minutes ago that a lot of it is social media and true, yes, social media is amplifying it. But the spike in inflation that we're still living with, the unaffordability of home prices has nothing to do with social media. And everything to do with this just genuinely sucks. I have a movie idea. I'm going to pitch you. Okay. You want to now or yeah, right now. So I think there's two premises and movies that always work for me, body swap and time travel. Those two premises always work. So here's what I'm going to do. Okay. Movie producers, feel free to call me. I'll help you with the script. Hold on. The last body swap movie on Netflix was awesome. Which one is that? Is that the one that you, me and you, watched together where they sit in a circle and swap bodies? Yes. Body swap Netflix. That was called It's What's Inside. Yes. You gave me that. That was awesome. That was a very good movie. I watched it and then I made my wife watch it with me. I liked that one too. That's a very good movie. So here's what I want to do. My body swap movie is going to be a baby boomer. Okay. Has to be a young person now with housing costs where they are. And a young person now, so a Gen Z person, has to go back to 1980. Okay. When housing costs were way lower, but there was no technology. Let's send send, send the ramp capital back. So we're, ramp loves to hate on the boomers. It's going to be a person who's a boomer, swaps into a young person today to see what it's like. And a young person today has to be a young person back in 1980 when housing prices were lower, but there's a lot less to do. There's a lot less technology. So that's, that's my body swap movie. All right. So if Ram goes back to 1980, immediately he does the jack from lost. We need to go back. Yeah. So there's got to be nobody, nobody wants social media. Yeah. Yeah. Come on. Nobody wants to go backwards. That's a good premise. All right. So last week, we were talking about people potentially regretting buying a house. Yes. And speaking of socialism and housing, there was a line in the book, The Prize, which I finished, which was, which was a, that was, that was a long ass book. Good. Listen, it was, it was the history of oil, which is obviously the history of economics and policy and the world. And it was, it was, that was a great book. So there was a line in there from this guy, Bill Levitt, who started Levittown, one of the first suburbs of Long Island. And he said, no man who owns his house and a lot can be a communist. He has too much to do. We can use more Levittowns in this country. So I thought that was a nice segue into this email that we got in June 2024. So this is a person who was like, yeah, guys, man, buying a house in June 2024, we closed on a three bed, two bath ranch in Long Island. You may recall, I reached out about two years ago. Okay. Oh, this is the guy who reached out about how his friends became competitors. Remember that? Oh yeah, that's good. Like buying a house. Yeah. So he said, while my wife and I don't have full blown buyers or mores, holy shit, is this home a money pit. All right. So here's how it's gone so far. June 2024, we closed on the house. June and July, new water heater, 2500 bucks. We knew it was all, but didn't realize the prior owners were living with lukewarm water. By the way, I'm living through that. Not great. I went out of hot water at like nine o'clock. Wait, isn't that on the, can't you, isn't that on the inspector? The inspector missed that? Oh, I'd go back to the inspector and say, hey, I want to refund. Do you, do you miss this? Isn't that one of the things they're supposed to inspect? Love it, Ben. Thank you. Good idea. All right. August 2024, one week after our daughter was born, rain coming through the ceiling, new roof, 12K. January 25, basement renovation. All right, self-inflicted, he said. Fair enough. June 2025, two AC units died and it would have been six K to replace all of them. So we want central air, which he said was the best decision they made, 14 grand. December 2025, new dining room, table and couch. I'm like adding up these things in my head. Yeah, that's a choice. But nevertheless, like, yeah, you know, table and couch. April 20, 26, winter destroyed our old front porch, bricks falling off beyond patching, 10K, not including the landscape, and we'll need now. So, and this, you know, this is like, this happens. This is what this is, what it's, this is what owning a house is. It is. Yeah. This is a particularly shitty experience, but so yeah, I mean, needless to say, anytime, oh, our parents bought a house for $200,000 and then 30 years later, it's like, Hey buddy, first of all, that's, that's, that's 2.4% compounding over 30 years, you know, compound interest. But what about taxes? What about all this stuff? Like, don't tell me that a residential home is your primary home is not an investment. So my parents bought their home. My parents have lived in the same home since 1991, still live there. And the house is probably built in like the 1970s. And they've spent more on renovations, I'm sure, than they paid for the house. Between new siding, new deck, new hot tubs, new, probably two times over new floor. Yeah, exactly. They knew windows. They had, they've replaced the whole house essentially. Are you a hot tub guy? I think we've done this on the show. I do like how my wife is pushing my, my parents have had them for years. My mom goes in it every single day. She's home. She's in a hot tub at least once a day. She brings a book and a beer and she goes in it. That's her thing. Every day she relaxes in the hot tub. A book at a beer. Love it. Yeah. Good for her. I could, I mean, I could go for a hot tub. Yes. My wife has been pushing for one for a while. All right. When you come to a hot tub person, guess what? I would much rather have a hot tub than a cold tub. All right. So when, when, when you come here, we're going to go to Chris's house, we're going to Schvitz and we're going to Sauna and we're going to, we're going to cold plunge. I don't want to cold plunge. I'm not, not from it. No. Uh, how about this? I prefer a hot tub to a sauna. I like both. Okay. I, yeah, I don't mind, don't mind, but yeah, cold plunger, you're not going to pay me to do that. Okay. Let's talk private markets a little bit. Uh, this is from the Blue Owl CEO or something. There was a big story in Bloomberg about this. The industry could have done a better job explaining these dynamics in terms of illiquidity, how the, how hard to get your money out. You know, it's in the advisors who sell our products. I don't think we made it clear enough. I can't believe they said this out loud. I don't know who has the worst PR team, people in private credit or AI people, because they say a lot of stuff that they probably shouldn't be saying out loud. Right. That's the whole thing. Like you, you have to talk to your clients about what illiquidity risk means, how hard it is to get your money out. That's the number one thing with these products. Hot tub, California. It is. Uh, do you want to get into all this other stuff by like what stops these redemptions? And I don't know if that, I don't know if there's anything new to say on private credit at this point. So yeah, it's a lot. I guess just, there's so much to say, but I do want to say this. One of the, one of the, um, problems that is not discussed enough is if you could get your money out. Now, I don't think anybody's actually doing this. So maybe this is sort of hypothetical, but if you could take your money out of private credit, out of one of these intervals at nav, right, which is basically at an ultimate high, if you can get a dollar off for a dollar and then you could turn around and buy a publicly traded BDC that's trading at a 25% discount, why wouldn't you do that? Right. I'm sure that people are doing that. That's what Matt Levine said, like, what if the underlying assets are really worth a sense, not a hundred, but you have to pay out NAV. So you're, you're getting more money than you probably should right now. So what stops us paradoxically, what stops us is if these private funds, the private BDCs and the interval funds, if they say, all right, you got us, we're going to mark it down by 15%, then maybe investors say, ah, you know what, we'll just ride it out. Problem is, I don't think they can afford to mark these things down because of the leverage requirements because then there are even more upside down on the leverage and then do banks start pulling some of these financings? So that's a bit beyond my pay grade, but it's not that simple. So their hope right now is just that these redemptions slow down and it's more they will slow down, but it might take, but it might take six quarters. But I think we're learning that there's way more hot money in this space than that people thought. One of the big, big problems here is that the media is all over this and it's not their fault. I mean, some of it is, but it's not like this is their job to report on the stuff. And the real problem is in terms of like slow redemptions is that guess what? If 20, 25% of these portfolios are in names that are going to be impacted by AI and these companies will be impacted by AI and there's more bankruptcies and there's more reporting on the bankruptcies, there will be more redemptions and I don't know what slows that down. So this could be this could be a minute. Now you would think at some point after, I don't know, 10 quarters of 5% redemptions, if you were going to sell, if you were going to sell, you probably would have at that point, but I don't know man, this is not going way overnight. No, it's not the thing like the public markets where if something comes back, you go, okay, and if I'm not going to sell it now, these are long held assets. It's not like this, all of a sudden rectifies itself quickly. I can't believe that they're still thinking about, that they're still rubber stamping and greenlighting the putting alternative assets to foreign K plans. This is going to be a disaster. So a great timing here from the US Department of Labor, they released this yesterday. US Department of Labor proposes a landmark rule to democratize access to alternative investments to foreign K plans. It's just wonderful. Great. Chef's cast nailed it. Think if advisors and their clients aren't able to stick with this stuff, people in foreign K plans, this is going to be an utter disaster. The only place for these to go is a target date fund. That I kind of agree with. Yeah, that makes the most sense to me. And I would trust Vanguard to steward that process. If they want to have an option, but it's got to be an option. It's got to be opt in. It can't be forced into these target date funds. It's got to be like a different share class or whatever, a different fund that people opt into. Yeah. I don't know. I just, there's no way that's going to work. All right. So, Ben, I teased earlier about you discovering coffee after Claude. You got into Seltzer. How did this even happen? How does one get into Seltzer at the ripe young age of 40? How old you are? I never was big enough. I think my wife probably had more of a pop addiction than I did for like diet pepsis. And she said, you know, I have to stop drinking so much. So I'm going to start drinking these Seltzers. And I started drinking too and found something I like. The Whole Foods brand one is really good. Just I like simple sparkling water. That's it. I don't like the flavors. Yeah. I don't like the flavors very much. Although let me ask you a question. So I call it Seltzer, but I think some parts of the country call it club soda. What do I, I don't, I'm trying to think of what I call it. It says sparkling water on the case. That's what I call it, I guess. Sparkling water. Yeah, that works. Awesome. Sounds cuter, right? Oh, this made me laugh. So a subject line, the cable guy shit in my toilet. I had to laugh this morning when listening to the most recent episode where Michael brought up the repair guy shitty as bad. The cable guy was at my house two weeks ago to repair spotty internet service. He was in a completely different part of the house and presented to shit in my bathroom without asking. I would have had no idea, but he decides to help me out. I'm curious if he was flexing on me or just being polite. I live in Milwaukee, so I'm guessing it was the Midwest polite thing to do. Sneaking one in, that's a move. So when he said I would have had no idea, but he decided to tell me, I emailed him back and said, what did he say? Something of the longer time I was up. Hey, man, I had to use your bathroom. Had a colonoscopy yesterday and my stomach hasn't been this. That's that. I didn't have the email or chef kissed this and said I guess it could have been worse. At least he did an upper deck. Wow. That's basically I totally blew out your toilet. You should have it clean. All right, before we get to recommendations, my wife used my own advice against me. So kids got really into Michigan basketball this year. They're one of the best teams and they were playing their regional matchup this weekend in Chicago, not that far from us. Right? Less than a three hour drive. They won their game on Friday. They played again on Sunday after my wife said, let's surprise the kids with tickets to the Michigan game. They have Michigan Tennessee, Michigan's favorite. Let's go watch the game. And I was like, no, dude, it's kind of expensive and you have to drive down there. You have to park, drive back. You have to all these crowds of people. You're more of a live sporting person than me. You go to way more live sporting events than I do. My thing is like like movies, the experience at home is way better watching sporting events than watching it live. That's not true. It's true in some, it's true for football. It's 100% true to be watching at home is a better experience. That's true. That's true. But your basketball is different. And so we got pretty good seats. My wife said, listen, our kids are only going to be young ones. Isn't this the kind of stuff we want to spend our money on? I said, you know what? She got me. She's my own stuff against me. We got tickets like the day before, surprise the kids that night. I said, hey, lay out all your Michigan gear and drove down to Chicago, went to the United center. It was awesome. It was so much fun. The energy in the building for like a March Madness game was spectacular. Michigan destroyed them. They looked awesome. We had these really drunk obnoxious Tennessee fans sitting behind us who were just going crazy. They were using like karate kid lines like, put them in a body bag, Johnny, like with the Southern accent, which was actually kind of funny. But so, so my kids, like my daughter Katie's the cutest little thing she has. Michigan Jersey on Michigan hat. She's got Michigan socks pulled all the way up. She's got they, they said they wanted to make signs. I'm like, no, you can't make big poster boards because the people behind you, they can't see. So they made little signs like with construction paper and they, they made little signs. My son George has his foam finger, you know, and they both got on the jumbotron with their signs. Oh, no way. Michigan's best player is Yaxel Lendibor. He's from Puerto Rico and they call him Dominican LeBron. And my daughter made a sign that said, go Dominican LeBron. They put it up on the, on the jumbotron and her whole face turns red and then George got on later. And so we say it afterwards for them to cutting the nets down and stuff. And man, it was fun. It was just an awesome, awesome experience. So my wife is right. I was wrong. You're right. basketball is basketball is better in person. Yeah. Anyway, fun time. Now we're on to the final four, which we're going to spring break. People could be asking me, like, Hey, you're going to the Indianapolis one. The final four is in Indianapolis. And I probably would have thought about it if not for the fact that we're on spring break. But also I don't want to go to a final four game and see if they potentially lose because them in Arizona is like the teams. It's a toss up. Yeah. I'm so unplugged. I don't watch college sports. Who are they? Michigan's playing? Who did you say? Arizona? Michigan Arizona. They're the two best teams by far. And it's going to be, it's going to be, it's a toss up. I think it spreads like a point, point a half. It's, they're both played the best all year. They had the best records, essentially. They're the best two teams and they're playing the first game in the final four or the second game in the final four. And it's going to be an epic game. I can't wait. It's kind of a game where like if they lose, it's like, okay, it's a really good team. I'm not going to be upset. My sports consumption has, has crashed. And I think it's a permanent bear market and I'm not upset about it. It just is, uh, this life, right? We're getting older. Yeah, I've been like that too. So I stopped completely listening to, so I, from 2015 until like I said, listen, you grow up, I stopped listening to Howard Stern. And that was like, it was like a massive part of my life, like a massive, massive, massive part of my life, like part of my identity was listening to Howard. Um, I stopped listening to Simmons or Riselo, like, because all this, and I was audiobooks, I don't have time for anything else. So between that and listening to sports podcast, just from big events, I listened to them now. So that was, that was how I was plugged into a lot of the NBA. And like, I'm even like, I've, I've like missed Nick, Nick's games, which I never, ever, ever did, but I've gotten more into it now. I had a lull to big bear market now that my kids are into it again. Now I'm watching more. Like I gave up on college basketball, essentially, but my kids get back into it because we've got a good team. So I watched them anyway. So, um, okay, speaking of experiences, never, never, never thought it would happen to me, Ben. It's crazy, right? Um, stuff happens. Uh, so I took George C. Project Hail Mayor, you said take him. Uh, it was unbelievable. Just the kind of movie that makes you realize why you love going to movies. Smile on your face all the time. People keep saying it's 20 minutes too long. They're probably right, but I don't, I didn't really care. Um, that's an 8.5 movie. It's just, it should have been a summer blockbuster, probably. I don't know if it matters. Gosling has the movie star belt. I think there's, there's only a few people who could have handled that role. It's a Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Tom Cruise kind of thing. Like that not only is the performance good, but it's, that's a movie star person that does it, you know, and I think he has that belt right now over anyone and it's not even close. Um, question for you. So you, you, uh, there's this whole idea of in shitification going on that like things are getting worse and quality is worse. And I go into movie theater and I think this is crazy. When I grew up, I had a little fold down seat. It was so uncomfortable. My movie theater is stunk growing up. Now you can recline, lay back, you have a heater on your seat, you know, huge recliner. Um, and I'm thinking about this, but the people next to me in the whole row, it's all these young teenagers, they take their shoes off at the movie theater. That's straight to jail, right? Are you kidding me? Yeah. I said multiple kids shoes off underneath their seat, socks, and I'm thinking new. No, we're not getting that comfortable. Teenagers, high school, probably. And my son absolutely loved it. I took Kobe to see it and I cried. Not like, not like, I mean, I had two little tears. I got emotional, not even over something on the movie, but just seeing the movie with him. So like your kids, he's nine years old and I just, I got emotional making like a lifelong experience for him. Like he will a hundred percent remember seeing that. The way that we do remember seeing moves when we were kids. It was, it was, well, it was better the second time from mix assault with him, but I just, it's just different when you see a movie second time. First, first second movie that I've seen in the theater and I can't even tell you how long probably since I was a child. My wife's going to go back with her. His, there was many points where my son's jaw was open, like, like he was just blown away, but he loved it so much. And how funny was it? Yes, the whole Rocky thing. He loved the alien for sure. It was such a great movie. It made me very, very, very happy. Anyway, I was impressed with how well they did it, like from the book. And I liked it. I had to go, but I'm reading the book again, because I've never done it with piece of fiction because I want to get more of the, because the movie didn't go into the science as much as the book, obviously. I thought that was one of the cool parts of the book, but yeah, very well done. So $54 million in its second weekend. That's a bigger second weekend than Sinner's Oppenheimer and Dune. But think about, and Dune too, think about how massive, massive Oppenheimer was. So this movie is getting tons of word of mouth, obviously. Bigger than Oppenheimer. Holy shit. It was so phenomenal. It just, just made me happy. Oh, based on your lead, I watched Anaconda with Kobe. He loved it. It was terrible. Really bad movie, but it made me laugh like four or five times. Like actual, actual laugh. It was kind of, there was some really, is a really dumb movie. It was way too meta, like with the original Anaconda. Oh, and then Ice Cube at the end. Yes. Ridiculous. One more wreck for me. I listened to the Amy Pollard's Got a New Podcast. I can't remember what it was called. It's been out for a year now. So she interviewed Steve Carell. I don't think I've ever heard Carell on a podcast before, but listening to them, having been a huge watcher of the office and Parks and Rec, and I was, for both of those shows, I was out immediately. Like, I don't want to watch an office that looks dumb. And I got into it and I'm like, oh, Parks and Rec is just a, it's a female version of Michael from the office. Like that's, that looks dumb, but Parks, like both of those shows, I love both of them and hearing them talk about the shows together was awesome. It was really well done. He was on Howard years ago. He is just a regular, regular guy. That's what it's, it does seem like that he is kind of down to earth. Yes. What you see is what you get kind of deal. Okay. So watch the Madison with your wife. All right. This is a borderline table. It's a table pounder. Right. I'm a Shelf Life fan. I'll watch it. She looks incredible. And who, wait, who's the lead in it with her? So here's the, here's the plot. Kurt Russell. It's a six episode show. Okay. I can handle that. And it is not anything like Taylor Sheridan's other stuff. So the premise is, and I can't not spoil it, but can I, can I reveal a spoiler if what happens 10 minutes into the show or should I just not do it? Hit me with it. Okay. So this is a spoiler for the Madison. The spoiler happens in the first 10 minutes. We got a few emails about spoiling that there was an alien in Project Homo area, even though that was in the trailer. So I'm sensitive to spoilers too. Okay. So fast forward if you want. So Kurt Russell and Michelle Pfeiffer are a very wealthy couple that live in Manhattan. They have two stuck up spoiled daughters that are grownups, 27 and 36. The 36 year old has two kids and divorced and the 26 year old is married. Kurt Russell goes to a lake, a hunting cabin in Montana with his brother. He's been going there his whole life, his whole adult life, and they go fly fishing and they just, they do what dudes and bros do. And he's begged his wife and his family to come out there. They won't come out. There's no, there's no indoor plumbing. So in the first 10 minutes of the episode of the show, maybe his first 20 minutes, he goes out there fly fishing and he dies in a plain grish. And so the rest of the show is about Michelle Pfeiffer and the family going out there and just experiencing it. And so I watched the first episode, Robin comes in, she's like, what is this? Oh, Michelle Pfeiffer. So she took ahead and she went ahead without me and then I caught up. But probably not a show that I would have liked that you would think I would have liked, but it was just awesome. It was just a good show. Okay. Talk me into it. Really enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it. All right. And that is about that. So market check. All right. Holding game so far, but four o'clock is a long way. Why you got to start somewhere. All right. We get a 2% update, maybe we're not a 2% down day. Yeah. All right. We'll see. Anyhow, thank you as always for all of the emails, animal spirits at thecompinenews.com. Remember, if you want to see us in San Francisco, info at writholzwealth.com. We'll see you next time.