A Mania Is Brewing (EP. 431)

28:10Wait, is he saying it has to double over the course of a year for it to be sort of bubble-like, or what's the rule? Yeah, he's showing that this is nothing compared to the prior manias. Right. So even though those unprofitable or in cases, pre-revenue names that we mentioned earlier are going bananas, a lot of names have gone sideways. The 2022 thing is the hard part to square with this. The fact that a lot of these companies fell 40, 50, 60, 70%. That's the weird thing here. But that was kind of before, that was before ChatGPT really. Yeah. ChatGPT stopped that from, So the S &P is going to 10 ,000.

28:48I won't dare to put a year on that. Let's just say it happens in our lifetime, but I think this bull market takes it there. Needless to say, there will be corrections and bear markets. It's not going to be a straight line. So from current levels, which is, I don't know, 6 ,700 to 10 ,000. So you're talking about a 50 % move higher or so. Not even. I'm doing the math here. Isn't that like 35 % to 40 % higher? Math. Hashtag math. Wait, 35 % to 40%. My bad. All right. Do I dare do this on the internet? No. No. It's a percent to chire. It's a percent to chire. And guess what? You tell me what it is.

29:30I don't care. I'm not doing this. But the funny, when you say S &P 10 ,000, it seems like, oh my gosh. But then when you do the percentage, it's like, wow. All right. It's 50%. Yeah. That's what I said. You're right. that's like two more, by the way, I'm helping my, my daughter is in sixth grade and she has math homework and it's stuff that I haven't thought about in forever. And she'll send me a problem. Like, it's kind of funny how awesome technology is. I was on a plane last night from Detroit, Michigan to Calgary. And in the, in the flight, I'm getting text messages from my daughter about her homework.

29:59I help her with her math homework. And, um, I, I will do the problem and I'll say, Hey, I'll help her like, think about these three things. But then I will always like take the probably uploaded in a chat GPT just to check my work. It's kind of amazing. I'm how many thousands feet in the air asking AI to help me with my daughter's homework, who is 500 miles away from me or something. And I'm relaying that back to her. I wonder if, as I use AI more and more, specifically the LLM models, the large language model models, that's like ATM machine. Yeah. I feel like I'm like doing more than ever and I'm just filling the time.

30:42And now I, instead of, I am just cramming more work into the work. That's what I think. We're going to become more efficient. We're just the same amount of hours. There's a name for this. Productivity. We're doing more with, we're getting more, I'm getting more work done in the same amount of hours. I'm doing, my output is at an all time high and it's not even close. Could you really see Americans going from 50 hour work week to 30 because AI makes us more productive? No, we're not Europeans. all due respect love the croissants but also the cool thing is though like the the it doesn't just give you the answer it shows you how to do it like for my daughter like I'll I'll tell her like look at this and see because she herself she doesn't just want the answer she wants to know how to do it which I really like because she's like no no no don't just tell me show me and so she has to see if we ever put it and we do chat GPT at the end like I tell her we got to work through it first and then we're going to put it into the AI and she has to see the work that it goes through but it does show you.

31:36It'll say, take this and start with this and then narrow it down to this. And it is pretty amazing. They're just going to grow up with that. All right, back to the money market thing real quick. You've talked forever about how that money is sticky. And I think it could be because I think it's probably mostly baby boomer money. So they interviewed people in the Wall Street Journal. Tom Ward, a 64-year-old executive recruiter in Michigan, said rates going down is not going to chase me into stocks. I really don't have a problem sitting on the sidelines. And he has 40 % of his portfolio money market.

32:01Wait till the S &P goes to 9 ,000. Let's check back with Tom then. So this is interesting. This is from Brian Jacobs, friend of the show from Aptis. Anytime you have a society with more wealth, you would expect them to hold more cash. People hold cash for the cushion, not because it's yielding higher than assets. And it could just be that the lull we saw in money markets in the 2010s was just the fact that rates were so low. And unless we somehow get back there, that this money, even if it gets down to 3 % or 2%, probably is kind of sticking. I think a lot of people have decided, I saw what happened to bonds in 2022.

32:34I don't want that. I'm just going to hold cash in T bills, CDs, whatever that is. I think there's money markets. I think there's a lot of that to this. Well, Brian's exactly right. And anytime you see this chart, you have to adjust. You have to adjust for a percentage of S &P market cap or something. Yes. For what? There has to be a denominator. You're right. And to your point, it's like, all right, I want cash. I have all this money in the stock market. I want cash. And when you do that, the$7 trillion or whatever it is, all of a sudden, it looks a little bit less. But that's why it's also hilarious to me that people say, just wait.

33:04when the stock market rolls over because the top 10 % are spending 50 % of the economy, just watch out. The economy is toast. Guess what? Guess who's going to be buying stocks when they fall? The rich people. But the top 10%, they're going to be the ones who are buying. By the way, they're not going to get nuked. Speaking of this guy, there were two There He Is in the first couple episodes of Black Rabbit. And the virus is spreading. You send it to me. I totally missed it. By the way, this is not, this is, I'm just, people say this all the time. I'm just pointing it out. It is common vernacular.

33:43Oh, you're right. Trust me. Every time the dads on the soccer sideline see each other, you get one of those. Hey, there's that guy. Of course. Yeah, it's great. I see it all the time. All right. But I follow Rob Wilson on Substack, and he posts about retailers and the retailing industry. We got a report last week. Non-store retailers, which are e-commerce, huge, huge growth. Two percent. What is that? Month over month? Can't be, right? I think I accounted for 1.5 % of this gain. I couldn't tell you the last time I bought something at a store. It's been years. So I opened up chat GBT and I said, make me a chart of non-store retailers as a percent of total retail.

34:33Look at this chart. Two seconds. And we saw that crazy. So obviously it was trending higher. Duh. And then you saw the spike in 2020. You saw a cool down. Now it's coming back. I mean, that's amazing that it's right back on trend. That's pretty wild, right? So because remember, everyone said, okay, we're pulling all this stuff forward from the pandemic. We did. But then it went right back. Oh, I should have had to draw a trend line. Nature finds a way. Okay, it's literally a perfect trend line. So I was going out to dinner. I went to dinner last Wednesday. And it was like a nice restaurant. And I was wearing a future-proof, one of the green future-proof t-shirts.

35:10And I said, ah, shit, I should probably change. Buy a shirt. So I was walking to dinner, and I was going to stop at Macy's and buy something with a collar. And on the way over - You were eating dinner at a mall? can't call it a nice place if it didn't at the mall sorry no no no no i was gonna stop on my walk i was gonna run into a macy's oh okay all right on in herald square okay so you're okay i got i was making sure you're not walking through a mall not walking through a nice dinner although uh there are uh what's the mall in columbus circle there's nice restaurants there There's a difference between an indoor and an outdoor mall, though, too.

35:53There's no outdoor malls. That's a thing? It's an outdoor mall. Outdoor mall. It's in nice places. Okay. Oh, that is true. You're right. You're right. The Grove, I believe? Yeah. Okay. Really nice outdoor mall in Naples, Florida. We saw last year. So I passed the Banana Republic, and I feel like you were a huge Banana Republic guy. Were you not? Oh, definitely. All right. Guilty. so yeah i feel like banana republic was always like a stretch door for me like in in high school like if i wanted something very nice and uh i think when i got yeah i graduated from gap to banana republic after college i think that was you a big abercrombie guy i surprisingly i was never an abercrombie guy uh you know the you know you know you know the vince mcmahon meme of like it's three of him like having an explosion on his face in PG-13 terms.

36:46I feel like for you, it was like J. Crew, Banana Republic, Hollister? What was it? No, J. Crew was always top of the line there. Oh, yeah? Okay. Oh, yeah. That was always the... Well, anyway, my point is this. I didn't even know that Banana Republic was still a store. So I went in and I bought a button up or down. We won't relitigate this, whatever it is. And it was a perfectly nice shirt. I saw the tag,$75. Ooh, 50 % off, done. 37 bucks for a shirt. Guess who's not participating in e-commerce? That store. Those guys. What do you mean? Sure they are. Are they? People buy stuff online at banana.com?

37:26A nice shirt was$37. Yeah, you don't buy stuff from those stores unless there's a sale, and they always have a sale. They must be getting absolutely torched. I don't, that's a public gap. Oh yeah, that's right. I remember back in the day, that was like, I remember that was like one of my earliest like business memories when I learned that banana Republic, old Navy, and the gap are all owned by the same company. You were like, wait, they could do that. So here's a good segue because that is like the higher middle and lower classes of the economy back in the day. Right. Yeah. Okay. Two speed economies back as low income Americans give up gains.

38:05We've talked a lot about this, but it's after-tax wages, change from a year earlier, and the higher end is going up. Middle is kind of stuck, and the lower end is going down. And this is something we've been talking about for a few months now, that this is a total sea change from where we were in 2021, 2022, even 2023, when the lower end was seeing the biggest gains. There's a bunch of quotes in here that maybe you can pull from. My only big takeaway here is that there is never, ever going to be an economic environment that's going to make everyone happy. because it was the higher end that was unhappy when the lower end was having big wage gains.

38:39Because it was like, hey, I own these things, or my margins are getting hit. There was a white collar recession. You're right. Yeah, now it's reversed. And there can't be an economic environment that everyone's happy. It cannot exist. Yeah. One of the quotes in here that stood out to me was their premium cabin revenue for United Airlines was up 5.6%, while the economy cabin was negative. Oh, yeah. Yeah, which makes sense to me. Yeah, no, but that's a really good bow on all of this. But don't you think part of that increase is the fact that they can probably charge rich people more because they know that they'll pay for it?

39:15Yeah, but there's also more demand for rich people. It's part of the same thing. You know, Josh's book was based on this. What was Josh's book or his blog post? Well, he wrote the blog post coming out of COVID saying - They didn't want you to see that? if we gave everyone money like we did in COVID, it broke the economy, essentially. That was his, yes. Oh, you weren't supposed to see that, right? That was it? Yeah. And Josh's point was, yeah, you weren't supposed to see that. That was Josh's book based on that blog post. When everybody is winning, we all lose, effectively. Like, that broke the economy.

39:52Too much winning. By the way, the Charlie Sheen doc, speaking of winning, It was kind of weird that it was entertaining, but they didn't go into why he was so insane. Because he was an actor in Hollywood for 30 years? I know, but why was he so damn destructive? I mean, they went into it a little bit. Bizarre. Anyway. Ryan and Sonu have this chart. They have a proprietary leading economic indicator index.

40:26and slowing economic momentum, but no sign of recession yet. What was the thing Neil Duda said about leading an economic indicator? Aren't they all kind of like backfilled essentially? Well, this is proprietary. Okay, well. Maybe you missed that part. All right. What's this? You have a new sub stack here? Oh. So a listener created a sub stack called Chartinay. Chartinay? Yeah. It's a play on words. Chardonnay. Okay, that's actually not bad. I remember someone early on said, why didn't you call it a wealth of common sense and spell it C-E-N-T-S? I'm so happy you didn't do that. Because then I would have to punch myself in the face.

41:04No, sorry. You ever see this chart before? Chardonnay, that's pretty good. I've never heard that before. I'll give him credit. So I was poking around his sub stack and there are some wonderful looking charts. So the one that I pulled out for today is, he breaks down, he shows a bubble chart of the monthly inflation rate by decade. And he shows it's gray circles, and then the blue is the average, and then the red is the most recent one today. Isn't that wild? It is kind of funny. People are talking about inflation heating back up when it's like 2.9%, and that is below historical averages. To your point, like if you showed someone this chart and said inflation is heating up, you'd go, no, it's not.

41:48Yeah, I think just - From what? directionally is but but this is a gorgeous chart i've never seen it laid out this way yes i like the little charts good good job chart tonight okay um so i last week i went on a bit of a tirade about how annoyed i was from that financial times article just pure harsh shit it really got you going. It really did. Cause it was just, it's just so, it's just the perfect representation of everything. And sorry to pile on them specifically, cause they're certainly not alone in this. Um, and I understand the motivations and why they have to do that, but man, it just grinded my gears because it was just such nonsense.

42:33They led for people that missed last week. They led with an inflammatory statement about private credit that pensions are pulling back and they had on the cover, the Cincinnati pension fund CIO, they managed$3 billion. And then the footnote at the end was like, but not all they're convinced, but, but, but, uh, not all they're slowing down. New York city pension,$300 billion says they're all in or, or permanently committed or whatever they said. And the article was backward. Also, I don't, I don't blame the authors for that because the people who write the articles do not pick the headlines, the editor, whoever runs the, okay.

43:07But the article, that's true. And also the article was backward as well. If it was telling the truth, it would have led with New York City. And then it would have said, but not all are convinced that the momentum is going to continue. Cincinnati's blah, blah, blah. Okay. All right. Anyway, so I wanted to get it on paper, but I just, I'm moving. I felt lazy and I just want to see what Chad Chibiti could do. And it wrote a pretty damn good article in a second. Now, it was apparent to the reader and myself that I didn't write it. So I wasn't trying to like pull the wool over anybody's eyes. And at first, like, I felt like, oh, this is lazy.

43:41I felt dirty, sleazy. No, sleazy. That's the wrong word. Misleading, whatever. I didn't feel great about it. But you know what? This is just what it's going to be. I felt sleazy reading it, though. Here's the thing, though. But this is just what it's going to be. Like, the genie is out of the lamp. And it's not going back in. But here's the thing. Like, even on Grammarly now. So I have Grammarly because I have Grammarly and I still somehow get grammatical errors in my post, which I don't know how, but, and I have one guy I told you who's for the last seven years has sent me, Hey Ben, there's a grammar error in your blog.

44:16Fix it. You know what? You are too nice. I can't believe that you still allow somebody to, to fix your grammar. It's just like, dude, buzz off. So I forgot to mention. He's, he's a very nice guy. He never says it in a, there's people, people will say it in a condescending mean way. And then, then you tell him to buzz off, but this guy is very nice about it. All right. I'm sure he is. Here's the thing. No, wait, no, wait. You're very nice. You told me on your trip out to California that a lady next to you, was she on her speaker phone and the flight attendant came up and told her to knock it off.

44:56Most other Americans, certainly outside of the Midwest would have turned to this woman and said, lady. No, I'm just kidding. It was a mind. It was a lady behind me and everyone was doing the look behind like, like, and find the flight attendant said, ma 'am, do you have any earbuds? And she said, no, I don't. And then the flight attendant very sternly said, you're going to have to get off speakerphone now. And everyone was like, I wanted to stand up and clap. It was absolutely amazing. But here's the thing. When Grammarly gives me the things to say in your, your, to your point, you can tell that you didn't write this.

45:28It was like when Grammarly says, change this from this word to this word. I always think I would never in a million years write this word. So I'm not going to use it because it doesn't sound like me. But that's the thing. This is why the AI being a commodity, if you want to stand out, you have to be creative and have your own voice now. You can't just do, because ChatGPT, if you want to sound smart, is going to be smarter than you. Yeah, I think you're right. I wonder if people just start tuning out things that are obviously written by ChatGPT. Unless it's like a news story that they want to be caught up on.

45:59But if it's an opinion piece, I don't want to read an opinion piece by Chad GPT. No, of course not. Of course not. So Mike Shields, I'm not familiar with who that is, but our friend Alex Kantrowitz had him write a post on his sub stack talking about - You know, you are like a, you are pushing a lot of sub stacks today. I feel like this is an all-time high for Michael's sub stack recommendations. I love supporting the artists in our industry. These are great creators and I pay for all of them. It is funny. I can't remember someone at Future Proof asked me saying, hey, I want to start a sub stack.

46:31I'm a little nervous about charging money. And I said, dude, everyone does that now. This is not the kind of thing where people are afraid of it anymore. If you have something to say and people want to read it, people will pay. You shouldn't be shy about charging money if this is going to be part of your - Isn't that kind of crazy? Hey, I'm afraid to charge money for my services. Now, I understand that there's a lot of things that are free on the internet, so I get that feeling. We were definitely there at some point. But if it's good, and if it's quality, and if it's work, you deserve to be paid for your time.

47:00crazy idea. Right. Um, all right. Anyway, this article was about Amazon's rise in the ad business. And one of the things that we didn't mention earlier in the stock market conversation is that a lot of the stocks that are being disrupted by tech and Amazon specifically, like the trade desk, for example, are getting smoked and are probably, unless they somehow pull a rabbit out of their hat are permanently impaired. Okay. You mean like the college textbook places, all that shit. Yep. There's so many of them. I, I, didn't we have a chart on, on the companies that are impacted by AI that are getting their teeth kicked in, come here.

47:34So is that a long, short ETF yet, or should it be? It should it be. Look at this little guy. We have temple today, right? Love you. That's a nice looking haircut he's got there. So I took him the other day in Robinson, not too short, and they went very short in size, but gosh, is he adorable. All right, anyway, sorry about that. My point is this. Amazon's ad business. So Mike Shields writes, backed by a massive audience, reams of consumer data and strong technological chops, the company pulled in$56 billion in advertising revenue in 2024 and another$13.9 billion in Q &A this year. So Ben, the conversation earlier about what if it takes 10 to 15 years, nothing takes 10 to 15 years.

48:19Back to Mike. He said, considering that Comcast NBC Universal, which had a hundred year head start, brought in just north of$2.6 billion in ad sales last year. It's fair to say that Amazon now runs the world's greatest side hustle. Dude, NBC Universal brought in$2.6 billion in ads. Amazon did$13.9 billion in the first quarter of this year. These companies move so fast. Their moats are so wide. It's unbelievable. It's also funny that Amazon is now in the same business in a lot of ways in television. They're in every business. These companies are in every business. So again, using ChatGPT. I love how you, did you tell ChatGPT put an animal spirits thing in there?

49:00I did, I did. So this part didn't work very well. At first I put it in the middle. I'm like, no, lower left. No, below the axis. I'm like, all right, that's good enough. The simple stuff it always has hard time with, which is funny. So advertising revenue. I had, I compared Amazon with Meta and Google. And obviously, well, this kind of surprised me. I didn't realize how far ahead Google was of Meta, did you? Google's at like 260, Meta's at 160. It makes sense. It's such a long head start. Yeah. But Amazon is coming up the rear. So then I had it show me the growth. It said, do you want to see the growth since 2019?

49:34So I said, sure. Amazon's up 400 % since 2019. Off a much larger base, Meta and Google are significantly behind. And then I said, all right, that's not apples to apples because, again, the base of these things. So I said, show me the year over year ad revenue growth. and Amazon came out smoking, has since cooled off as they grow. And now their year-over-year growth rate is roughly in line with Facebook and double that of Google. Anyway, my point is all this in two seconds, pretty magical stuff. All right. And your other point is that this stuff is going to happen really fast. Really fast. Dude, this isn't like crypto where we're still waiting for a consumer use case, like a killer app.

50:17you know which just might never happen might or might not but this is this is coming oh you guys talked a bit about the board stuff but i remember a couple years ago michael was buying some of those basketball card nfts where he owned highlights whatever happened with those can we please get a full pnl breakdown uh yeah i was having a lot of fun during the pandemic i shockingly didn't lose money on this or if i was that called again top shot top shot or if i did lose money at one point you talked me into buying one of those i bought it and i sold it like a month later. I was like, I feel gross.

50:46I can't do this. Yeah, it was a hell of a fun. I think it probably lasted five weeks for me. I remember I bought, I spent like a thousand dollars or maybe two on a Devin Booker one. And I was like, what am I doing? But I didn't lose any money. So that's the P &L update. Or if I did, it was, it was nominal. All right. Last week. Oh, last week, we spoke about all those zombie unicorns from 2021. Right. Waste raised huge. Klarna was one of them, right? They were at a$45 billion valuation. They IPO'd it 16 maybe. Yeah. So StubHub, those sons of bitches, they raised at a valuation of$16.5 billion in 2021.

51:23Now it's down to 8 billion. How many people made StubHub extra fee on their IPO jokes on social media? Yeah. Doug Bonaparte definitely did. You know he did. that's a that's yeah that's right up doug's alley speaking of that um skipping ahead a little bit of duck so mark rubenstein net interest that's a sub stack one of the best wrote about uh ipos we've been speaking a lot about these lately he's at three quarters so he's talking he was talking about the zombie ones the fintech one specifically from 2021 that's his beat is fintech Three quarters are trading down from their IPO, including one that went to zero and eight that were returned to private markets at steep discounts.

52:10Robinhood is up 200%, over 200%. Affirm, 86. New Bank, 78. And Coinbase, 37. The average return of the other 35s, of the other 35, negative 30%. Interestingly, though, he also says that's not to say these new issues didn't create a buzz at the time. all but nine popped on the first day of trading, gaining an average of 30%, while the few that declined lost only 7 % on average. Right. So if you didn't get shares, you got hosed on these things. So the FinTech class of 2021, not great. And last thing on this topic, we mentioned the cost of going public. I've never seen it broken out this way. So this was interesting to me.

52:52I'm sure there's data out there. But he said, talking about the cost of going public, Look, Chime incurred$14.8 million of offering costs in addition to$43.5 million in underwriting fees on its$829 million of gross proceeds. So that is wild, no? So 15, 14, it's 5%. 5 % to go public. Okay, that sounds like a lot. Blockchain should fix this. I mean, I guess 5 % sounds like a reasonable number, but if you think about the dollars, my gosh. Yeah, but to my point about last week that most IPOs are crap investments. That's true. And one good one can probably dwarf all the bad ones, but there's a lot, a lot of bad ones out there.

53:39We had a reader a few years ago when I was talking about like the luck involved in holding a lot of the biggest winners. This guy said, hey, dude, this is like my strategy. I bought all the new issues or a lot of the new hot issues, and I just held them all. And the ones that went to zero went to zero. but the couple that went up 4 ,000 % took care of everything else. And yeah, valid, good strategy. Credit to that guy. All right, let's talk about the housing market. I've been on this beat for a while. I said this when Trump got elected president to you and Josh, and this is from MarketWatch. This long shot move could get the 30-year mortgage rate to 5 % next year, says B of A Global.

54:15So team of Bank of America strategists said that they think there's a probability that the Fed once again engages in mortgage-backed security QE, meaning they buy mortgage back bonds, which they did in the pandemic. That brought mortgage rates down way, way low. That got them to 3%. And they're saying we could see 5 % by 2026 midterms if Trump exerts more control over the Fed. And I think once someone gets in his ear about this, and honestly, to me, this makes sense because if that's your really concern is getting housing activity going, this makes more sense to me than the Fed lowering rates.

54:50The Fed lowering rates is not going to automatically push mortgage rates. down. I agree. So I think that this actually, I've been pounding this to get the spread lower. I think this makes sense. I think that they probably should do this. People would be up in arms about free markets and this kind of stuff. Nobody cares about anything. Fair. But I actually think that this is a better policy than the Fed just trying to lower rates and hoping that bond come down. Yeah. Yeah. The housing market is obviously a massive story in and of itself, and we're not going to cover all of it today. But one of the big stories is the decline in building permits.

55:27Kevin Gordon showed a chart of the consecutive monthly declines and it's the highest since the great financial crisis. Now, there's obviously a lot, lot, lot more to the story, but the housing market is all sorts of impaired. Yeah, the hurdle rate right now to build is too high probably. So somebody, who's sharing this chart? I think Lenar just reported, I didn't dive into it, but Lenar was subsidizing a lot of the buyers of new houses, and they were helping ease the burden of high interest rates. They were doing that, and I think D.R. Horton wasn't, and the spread between the two. I apologize to who I'm lifting this from.

56:06I can't remember where I saw this. Yeah, I think I saw this too. And it's just saying that the home builder that cut back is doing way better than the home builder that went all in and was building more. And that was subsidizing buyers, which is, I guess, not that surprising. but that was really good stuff. Right. It should be the government subsidizing the buyers, not the home builders. Come on. Yeah. From Redfin, the median US home sales price rose 2.2 % year over year. The biggest increase in five months. And why isn't 2025 on here? Is this old? Oh, the green one. 2025 is the green one. Yeah, my bad.

56:45Wild, huh? It's still at all time highs. We're right there. Anything? Of course. No, of course. Rates are high. Prices aren't coming down, right? Yeah. This makes sense still. All right. We are getting long in the tooth, as they say. Somebody had a really good email about, what is this? 40 % of mortgages are adjustable rate. The guy was like, dude, that's complete nonsense. And Mike, why don't you give us an update on your housing move, which I will do next week. but because there is there's I got some some good stuff to share but uh we're getting longer I got I got a couple charts then I'm done okay well actually skip the charts I want to go to this okay so this one I tweeted this and I got a lot of angry responses which one this is from yeah finance 61 percent of boomers never plan to sell their homes well 76 percent say they're tired of being blamed for the housing market this is a survey obviously just take it what's worth um nine out of ten boomers 88 say they don't care if remaining in their homes prevents younger buyers from entering the housing market.

57:46Yeah. Why would they? Three quarters say they're tired of being blamed for the housing crisis. It is just funny because it's like, what are they supposed to do? Where are they supposed to go? Right? Duh. Yeah, it's not their fault. I think just the way that this survey was worded, though, is hilarious to me because they're trying for inter-demographic warfare. Well, you know why I'm bored with this inter-demographic warfare stuff? It's because this is always the case. This is not unique. Now, I think it's, I think it's going to get worse though. I think the housing, I agree. It's going to make it even worse than ever.

58:19Assets, retirement assets, wealth is a 21st century phenomenon largely and generational transfers. Like, so it, boomers are the richest generation ever. And so it's going to be worse than ever. I feel like in the next 15, I agree with you. I don't really want to partake in the, in the, uh, I mean, unless the boomers move into old person homes, like where are they supposed to go? Yeah. I'm not going to participate in the discourse. It's just not that interesting to me. And I love my parents, so there. Yes. But there's going to be a lot of really angry young people that are mad at the wrong thing in the years ahead.

58:54All right. Oh, here's another chart in a. Look at this chart. So we haven't really done many Survey of the Week type diatribes recently. But one of the problems with surveys is that people don't answer them anymore to the degree that they used to. So Chartine has this amazing chart title, Believe It or Not, No One's at Home, the response rate for the BLS Current Population Survey of the unemployment rate from January 2019 to August 2025. And he shows the monthly increase or monthly decrease, and people respond anyway. It's down to the right. Nobody's answering the phone. So it was 83 % pre-pandemic.

59:31Now it's 69%. I can't believe that it was as high as over 80 % in the previous period. It still seems high to me. Higher than I would have thought, but we know that the quality of the responses is deteriorating and he quantified it very nicely. I guess the hope is that we have so much other data to go on to back this stuff up that it doesn't matter that much, but I don't know. All right. Hulk Hogan. According to TMZ, the WWE Legends' son, Nick, filed court documents Tuesday, obtained by US Weekly. which says, man, how is us weekly still a publication? Oh, us weekly. My bad. Right. Is it us? Us weekly.

1:00:19Yeah. So his son, that was a member of his, he had a reality show. Yeah. Um, all right. So he left behind$200 ,000 in cryptocurrency. Wonder what it was. Looks like a fart coin guy to me. Light coin. Um, $799 ,000 in personal property and intellectual property. as well as his bandana collection uh don't don't besmirch the hulk as well as his right flags his right to publicity worth about four million dollars i'm not exactly sure what that means but not a lot of money so this is saying that he was worth i don't know five million dollars wow how is that possible i guess he enjoyed his money and spent a lot of it okay i would have guessed he'd be worth 50 million dollars i would have said 20 i think i don't know we have we have to give a mea culpable to our european people okay someone emailed in in the uk it's true that last week we talked about how but i feel bad about i feel bad about my croissant truck earlier on that was that that didn't didn't feel great coming out of my mouth i apologize don't want to be uh in the uk it's true that equities only make up 10 of household wealth but that excludes money purchases for DC pensions.

1:01:35I think the US data probably includes retirement accounts. These pension accounts, these pensions account for 35 % of total wealth in the UK. A lot of those assets are in target date style funds. So it will vary, but you could probably assume that means at least a further 20 % in equities. Side note, there are relentless bid effects here too, because we have auto enrollment with minimums of 8 % of earnings going into money purchase pensions. That links up with what you've spoken about in the past of foreign flows into US stocks. A lot of these target date funds are market cap weighted. So anyway, they have to put money into their pensions.

1:02:06And that money is getting invested in equities. So it's just not being counted as direct purchases. But it is there. Okay. I've talked in the past about people on flights, the people you see on flights. There's a new business traveler that I see every time I fly. Okay? This is a gentleman. And usually he's in a group of three to five other gentlemen. Okay? Is he drinking? They wear, of course, when they're at the bar, they have Bud Lights or they have Michelob Ultras, okay? The tall ones. They wear jeans. They have boots on. They wear polo shirts. Many of them wear hats. And I'm pretty sure there's a 95 % chance they are either owned by a private equity company or about to be, whatever their business they're in is about to be purchased by a private equity company, right?

1:02:49HVAC or, but if you start looking at the airport, you will see these guys. Polo shirts, jeans that are a little too big for them, boots, and probably a hat with a really bent brim. and there's three to five of them together all the time. When you say boots, what type of boots are we talking about? Worn in boots. Could be not cowboy boots, but work-ish boots. So these guys are like people who have come up in physical work but now are in the management roles. Okay. And that's a new line. I saw four groups of these guys yesterday. I swear to God. Are these like landmen men? It must be. Manitra's coming back.

1:03:26Because they were drinking McUltra. So they had to be, and guess what? I got one too, because I'm going to be Billy Bob now. I've never had a McUltra. I don't drink anymore. It's McUltra. Here's a question. Will you have hair by age 50? Definitely not. I am bald for life. Scientists at UCLA found a drug called PP405 that reactivates dormant hair follicle stem cells, potentially enabling new hair growth rather than just slowing loss. So is it possible we'll solve obesity and hair loss in our lifetime? Okay. obesity it seems check hair loss if you could just take a pill in your hair and grow back you would definitely take no i wouldn't i would only take the hair loss i would only get my hair back if i got divorced here's why i mean that's the why there is obvious here's why you'd have to get it if you got a convertible uh here's here no uh here's why i'm out on hair i don't want to have this conversation with everybody that I see for the next 10 years.

1:04:27I see a lot of different people and there's a lot of people, oh, there he is, that I haven't seen in four years. I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that for the rest of my life. Okay. I don't care. All right. We'll see. Just real quick. 37 years of America's favorite drink, Charter. There's some Charter. A lot of people drink Dr. Pepper, which surprised me. This is like the only one that's really straight up to the right. Actually, Fanta and Coke Zero. No, not Fanta. Coke Zero. Coke Zero. That's a thing? All right. Anyway, Diet Pepsi. This thing's going to - It's Coke Zero. I drink that.

1:05:01What are you going to do when Diet Pepsi goes away? Because this thing is on the decline. Nobody should drink Diet Pepsi except for you. I drink Coke Zero and Pepsi Zero now. Oh, Pepsi Zero. I think Coke Zero and Pepsi Zero better than Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi now. That's my new caffeine intake. Okay. All right. So this is just perfect. We're moving and Robin's getting frustrated. I'm probably on my computer. I'm like, what? So Robin says, I'm doing like 30 things at once. So I very nicely said, what can I do to help? Nothing. They're already done. It sounds about right. I have a little youth sports diatribe.

1:05:41I feel, so when we were growing up, I don't know that my parents ever said two words other than hello, nice game to my coaches, like football and such, you know? Right. Right. Now we have all these apps where parents can chat with the coaches and send them messages. And it's cool because they can say, hey, practice time has changed. The game's going to start here instead of here. So it's helpful. Hey, my son, I can't get a ride for him. Can someone pick him up? So it's cool, but it's also, I think there's way too much communication because now the parents that want to complain about playing time, my son is playing football and we've gone from flag football where there's like five kids on the field and hey, everyone gets to carry every game to we're playing tackle.

1:06:18there's 11 guys on the field and guess what? There's five guys on the line. There's like a tight end, a couple, not only two or three guys are going to get the ball every game. And guess what? The parents don't like it. So the coach had to send out this thing saying like, Hey, I tried to set expectations at the beginning of the year. But so I feel like the, the access to coaching has to make it way worse for coaches. Right. It's great for scheduling. It's gotta be bad for Pete, the complaining parents. And obviously as, as our kids get older and many sets of parents have been through this before us, but we are now seeing that, guess what?

1:06:52The kids that are good play more. Duh. And there are parents that live in this reality and understand how the world works and go with the flow. This kid is obviously more talented than my kid. He deserves to get the ball more. Yeah, and then there are parents who live in an alternate reality who are just, I don't know if not great people is too far because they're just, you know, they're children and they want to do what's best for them. But this is not what's best for them. Just get over it. Relax. Come down. And they're, yeah, naive, I guess. Yeah. Okay. Last thing that I didn't consider is, this is not a subtle detail as we talk about like us drinking back in the day and enjoying our party days.

1:07:33Somebody said they were born in 96. Their wife was born in 01. And he's like, listen, there's a big gap between us in terms of like technology, even though it's only five years. when I was in college and when we were in college, certainly there were no phones. Like people weren't recording every detail and that changes obviously everything. If you had to worry about what somebody was going to put on TikTok the next day, dude, my behavior, I would have gotten canceled to oblivion every time I drank. You know what I mean? I would have been a different person instead of hearing from my five friends.

1:08:06Hey, the thing you did last night, that was embarrassing. Like, oh, I forgot about that too. Imagine if it's like see it. The whole school can see it. Yes. It would change everything. So that sucks. I agree. That would totally change your behavior. It's like living in a reality show all the time. Yeah. So that was like a light bulb. Like, oh yeah, yeah, of course. Of course I get it now. All right. So we watched, you mentioned Black Rabbit a few times. We watched it. Listen, it's a very cliche show. The brother who's the black sheep comes back and the restaurant stuff. I feel like every restaurant show or movie now has to have the one night where, hey, the Times Critic is coming and it has to be perfect.

1:08:44But having said this, so it is a little cliche. I only saw two episodes, but I'm all in. I love the Black Sheep Brothers. It is a little cliche. I think Jason Bateman is underrated as an actor. No, he's not. He's good in everything he's in. No, he's not underrated. Everybody, who doesn't like, who doesn't love Jason Bateman? But I feel like he seems like he's kind of just playing himself, but he's always believable in every single part he plays. He's fantastic. I don't think anybody would say otherwise. He's properly rated. Jude Law's American accent, but. Oh, really? I was going to say, I thought it was very good.

1:09:10He's deeply British. I don't think he slips in some, anyway. So they're trying to get money to pay off these people that they own. And they got to come up with 20 grand a week to pay these guys off. Otherwise they're dead. Jude Law doesn't have a 401k or an IRA he can tap. Nothing. Nothing. At that age. I guess he works in the restaurant business. Anyway, I like it. It's, it's, it's a little cliche at points, but I still, I'm, I'm all in. Obviously I'm watching it. Was that a Grand Rapids hedge? What was that? you like it there's like a hesitation your voice you like it it's cliche but you're all in no you're all in all yeah so here's the thing it's a seven seven out of ten not an eight out of ten i feel like if you want to be prestige tv you gotta be eight out of ten this is a seven out of ten but it's still enjoyable i started the paper which is the offshoot of the office that's on peacock now there's an offshoot of the office like a new one it's like a new office okay it's like so it's the same format as the office of like the mockumentary and Oscar from The Office is on it playing himself.

1:10:06So it's like, say, hey, we did a documentary on The Office paper place. Now we're going to do a new one on a newspaper that's dying. And there's a handful of actors and actresses that you've heard of, and it has the same vibe as The Office, like the feel of it, you know? And it's not nearly as funny, obviously. And it's stealing some stuff, but it got me to laugh a few times and it's a good background show. Okay, wow. So not terrible. Table Pounder. Finally, Robert Redford passed away last week, I think. and for whatever reason, I'd never seen Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid. I've always heard it's one of the best Westerns ever.

1:10:38Have you seen it? No. Fantastic. Yeah, okay. I'm usually a, okay, it was because it came out in 1969 and I'm usually like, ugh. And right when it started, I was like, oh, it's going to feel old. But those two guys, Paul Newman and Robert Redford, I think Newman was in his 40s, Redford was in his 30s. They were just oozing charisma. And it's like, oh my gosh, we do not have actors like this anymore. And I thought the only thing we've had as a modern comp would be Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with Brad Pitt and Leo, who were older at the time. But I thought the first hour of the movie was unassailably good.

1:11:12I thought it kind of drifted away at the end and slowed a little bit, but it was really... And it was written by William Goldman, so it had to be good. Okay, I will definitely watch it. It was good. And you got me listening to an audiobook somehow, and I decided I have 10 biographies that I've started to read, picked up and started and stopped and started and stopped. and I said, you know, I'm just going to listen to biographies. And so I listened to Hamilton by Chernow and wait, did you finish it? I'm three quarters of the way through. How long would have taken you to read that book? Oh, so long.

1:11:43And I got it on a 1.75 speed. And the thing is that you said that you stopped listening to some podcasts. I have sports podcasts and pop culture podcasts and then market podcasts. And I'm realizing like, wait, do I want to listen to this dumb podcast or I'm going to listen to the audio book? And I'm finding myself choosing the autobook more and more i haven't listened to a podcast uh in a month i'm gonna go on a hike later in the mountains here and i'm gonna bring my airpods and listen to the thing the thing i picked up from the hand with the book and i'm not obviously he had his run of popularity and i'm way late to this but just how young those guys were and how impressive they were and they would be shaking their heads and rolling over in the graves at the politicians from both parties these days because they were they were obviously they had their flaws but they were such high character intelligent individuals.

1:12:27Integrity. They had it. Yes. They would look at the politicians of today and go, I can't believe this is what we have to choose from. These two poo-poo platters, this. So anyway, that's what I got. You're welcome. I too am listening to a biography. This might shock you. I'm listening to The Power Broker and it's 66 hours on one time speed. So I don't know how long it's going to take me, but this will probably take me three weeks. That's the Long Island guy. What's his name? So Robert Moses built New York City and the surrounding area. Long Island as well. Everything. Built it all. um okay uh oh you're not watching task on on max of course i am okay we didn't mention that i i i i think what the move has really buried me i that and and future proof getting behind in work my calendar is is my head is spinning so i've only watched one episode but i i'm excited to watch more um it's good all right last thing i popped on field of dreams the other night i haven't watched that movie in full in 20 years like why would i i know that movie like the back of my hand i saw when I was four in the theater, not to brag.

1:13:25And the scene that I popped in on was Kevin Costner with a fake gun in his shirt. And of course, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The chemistry between him and James Earl Jones was ridiculous. So I only caught 10 minutes of it. What a dumb movie. Only in the sense that the plot is so insane. It really shouldn't work. The fact that they were able to turn that into an all-time, all-time, all-time great, all-time classic. So the scene with Go the Distance when they're at Fenway, it's so dumb. It is so dumb. And it never occurred to me because I saw it when I was a baby. But God, what a movie.

1:14:08It's a movie that really shouldn't, I watched it with my daughter last year. It shouldn't work, but it still does. All right, I got to show it to my kids. I'm going to cry at the end, obviously. I got a little teary-eyed at the end. I'm not going to lie. All right, so an hour and 16 minutes. This might be a new record for us. I didn't even know this would be a long podcast. So with that, I want to thank Duncan and John and Nicole, Daniel, and Travis. The team is going above and beyond. We are doing 19 podcasts a week. Graham and Rob, of course, too. So in addition to that, we are full steam ahead on Talking Wealth, the show that we're doing for advisors.

1:14:49It is now on its own audio feed, Spotify, et cetera, called Talking Wealth. We understand that advisors probably don't want to sit in front of their computer watching an interview. So if you wanted to tune into that content, but you don't have time to watch it, you can now listen to it instead of audiobooks. So check us out. We're at Talking Wealth and we're doing one or two conversations every week. Talking David Blanchett last week. In and around the industry. That was very good. Very good. So, all right. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Happy New Year to my Jewish brethren and sister-in.

1:15:22Animal Spirits at the compoundnews.com. See you next time.