Everyone Back in the Boat (EP. 460)

9:29Michael Batnick:I mean, you know, first of all, Josh does, but you don't notice when they're not digging. Listen, you, your credibility is out the window after you declared my word that I've said six times in 2025, you have nothing. You have no like to stand on, mister.

9:43Ben Carlson:Hang on. Someone said that someone said Michael's word isn't ostensibly. It's directionally. Yeah, that word I use.

9:50Michael Batnick:That word I use. Okay. Guilty as charged. Direct revenue from IRS enforcement actions. Check this out. All enforcements, a hundred billion dollars in 2025. Now, what's an enforcement? That's like, hey, we caught you and pay up.

10:06Ben Carlson:Yeah, like the letter that I got, probably. Like, you were supposed to pay this tax. You didn't pay it. Pay up.

10:14Michael Batnick:Okay, and then an audit. I don't know how they define an audit. Is an audit just like a random, we're going to pick people above.

10:22Ben Carlson:It's like, we're going to bend you over and give you a full body cavity search. That's an audit.

10:28Michael Batnick:But I guess, how do they differentiate? What's an enforcement? Like, they caught you without doing an audit? Yeah, enforcement is like a letter.

10:34Ben Carlson:Hey.

10:34Michael Batnick:Oh, like, yeah, okay, got it. That's what I'm saying.

10:36Ben Carlson:Yeah.

10:37Michael Batnick:So anyway, it says that like people are being, you know, cowboys about not being caught, but still a hundred billion dollars worth of enforcements.

10:44Ben Carlson:The thing is this stuff, the people who like try to just skirt by this, like I, again, I get, I don't know, one letter a year. Hey, this thing is different. And we have tax people take help, take care of that for me. Like if you didn't have tax people, what do you do? You wait on the phone for three hours to talk to an IRS agent and they still don't answer your question.

11:01Michael Batnick:Yeah. All right, Ben, I want to give you, I want to give you I don't like the word flowers I know it's like a thing is that like the thing that people say like give that person their flowers it feels weird I feel like I can't say that I want to give you some a pat on the head sounds disrespectful I want to acknowledge you I love you I want to give you a hug what do I say I want to give you some some respect that sounds too formal what are you typing

11:29Ben Carlson:sorry my do not disturb wasn't on

11:33Michael Batnick:oh man this guy i went to sex at me and it was unbelievable all right um karma all right well ben you deserve a ton of admiration because i i read the the baron's profile that they did of you and they wrote in just over a decade he has written at least 3 660 blog posts co-hosting more than 765 podcasts and in may is publishing his fifth book risk and reward how to handle market volatility and build long-term wealth so two things that two things i don't want to mention you are like the exact uh embodiment of the more the more you practice

12:17Ben Carlson:the better you get fair i was a terrible writer when i first started your ability to write

12:27Michael Batnick:consistently high quality things like that. I just gave a pretty weak snap is amazing. And chart kid was blown away. Like he was, he was telling me like, oh my God, I can't believe how fast Ben did, blah, blah, blah. For like the chart report that we're doing for advisors. And I said, well, yeah, like he's, he's incredible. He's got his muscles, his writing muscles are bulging out of his face. So credit to you.

12:55Ben Carlson:I, again, I never liked writing before I started the blog. Like in college and high school, I wouldn't enjoy writing papers. But I viewed writing as a way of learning because I realized I did not know enough. I needed to learn more if I was going to enhance my career. And that was one of the reasons I started writing. And it just, and I thought, I'll give it up after six months when no one is reading it. And that'll be that. And I'll have this thing to like, whatever, show my kids someday or something. And then I just enjoyed the learning process so much. And now it's just part of my routine. mean.

13:23Ben Carlson:So yeah, it's, it's, it's very, it's like second nature now, but if I stopped for a year, it'd be harder to pick back up. I'm sure.

13:30Michael Batnick:When I tell you to write something or when I asked you to write something for like a client letter and you do it in an hour, I'm just, I'm always blown away. So, all right. They, they, they asked you, you wrote about getting started at Ritholtz in 2015 by criticizing the industry. What was wrong then and now? And you responded, it just felt like everyone and everything was negative. People were coming up with reasons to not invest and to change their investment plans. A lot has actually improved because I think one of the big things was that people were making decisions that weren't really tied to their goals.

13:57Michael Batnick:They were freaking out about what happened in the markets with the crashes and the recessions. A lot of wealth management has changed and gone towards a goals-based idea of investing money. That's one of the positives that we've seen. And I remember reading this when you posted this on Josh's site. You reached out to Josh and you were disgruntled with the state of the industry, specifically the corner that you were in with all the alts and the returns, the lacking, whatever. And you wrote Confessions of an Institutional Investor in 2013. So for newer listeners, for people that just discovered Ben post-COVID, he's been banging this drum for a long, long time.

14:38Michael Batnick:You've been consistently fighting the good fight and championing better outcomes for investors for a long time.

14:45Ben Carlson:I'm not taking credit for it because there's a lot of people who came before me. I read them after the fact. Like, oh, this person's been saying the same thing I've been saying. Who would you think?

14:53Michael Batnick:Like Charlie Ellis, Bill Bernstein?

14:55Ben Carlson:Yeah, Jason Zweig. Those are the three of them that I grew up like idolizing in their writing and words. But I do think that this decade, you can see, I think the behavior has improved for the better. Like all the people who have been espousing these messages over time, I think a lot of it is, and you and I hear this all the time. hey, I made it through this bear market because I listened to you guys or I read what you wrote or whatever. And I would have freaked out in the past, but I didn't anymore. To me, that stuff is really cool to hear.

15:24Michael Batnick:That's the best. And all right, here's another one, Ben. We made it through. The market just opened and we are higher than when the invasion began.

15:40And, you know.

15:41Michael Batnick:That's pretty nuts. But the market was right. The market was right. And we sided with the market. So I guess, ergo, we were right. But the market did not whistle past the graveyard. The burden of proof was, in fact, on you. It's now earning season. And obviously, not to minimize what happened. It's horrific and all that sort of stuff is obviously true. But through the prism of the market, the market got it right. And if you stayed the course and you didn't let the market dictate your outcomes, then you survived another one. And you're now a better investor for it.

16:17Ben Carlson:So the S &P is up 1 % on the year or so. Emerging markets are up 12 % or 13%. IFA is up almost 8%. There was a lot of give back, but then it came rushing all the way back. Here's my general feeling about this market environment. Oil prices did not want to go higher. like the$200 a barrel that all the oil and s have been screaming about and stock prices did not want to go lower. That's my Captain Obvious take for what's been transpired. Like why aren't oil prices way higher? Why aren't stock prices way lower? They didn't want to go that way. That's my only explanation. Oil prices want to remain stable.

16:57Ben Carlson:Stock prices want to go higher. Not always. That's what it felt like in this particular cycle to me. don't you feel like the reckoning has to come from AI? Like if there's going to be a reckoning that everyone's waiting for, it's not going to be a war. You would think that if - Like the reckoning.

17:17Michael Batnick:Yeah, yeah. You would think that the bull market ends whenever it will because something with AI, maybe it's the SpaceX and OpenAI IPOs. Like that would certainly suck a lot of liquidity out of the system. Who knows? But it's just whatever. If it's not one thing, it'll be something else.

17:38Ben Carlson:Yes. I just think like people are looking for like the thing to do it. Everyone, I think a lot of people immediately said, this is not it. This is not the thing. And maybe this lasts longer. I don't know. Who knows? Can I do a quick Seinfeld reference though? What's going on? You're not a Seinfeld person, but George Costanza knew his girlfriend was going to break up with him. He's like, what am I supposed to do? I have no hand in this situation. She's going to break up with me. I can feel it. So Kramer said, no, you break up with her. and George says, I'm breaking up with you. Okay, that's us blocking the straight of Hormuz.

18:09Ben Carlson:No, you're not going to block it. I'm blocking it. I'm breaking up with you. That's my geopolitical analysis. That's all I got.

18:17Michael Batnick:Not bad. Man, the market is just so interesting, obviously. It's what we love. It's our passion, Ben. Oracle is up, was up 15 % yesterday. It's up another 8 % today. everybody threw in the towel on on uh on semis uh on software excuse me i said it was looking uninvestable yesterday biggest bounce of the year can you explain to me here's another one explain

18:43Ben Carlson:to me why intel fell like 30 and now is just taken off like a rocket ship i don't i don't follow intel this thing was in a 50 drawdown and it came screaming back all the way higher back to new highs.

18:56Michael Batnick:Well, all of these, the semiconductors are on fire. They are now a larger slice of the S &P 500 than software, which is kind of amazing.

19:08Ben Carlson:I got this chart in here. This is from Duality Research. Okay. So today, software makes up about 25 % of the technology sector, a record low weight. Not that long ago, on January 2020, it was 54%. And you can see semiconductors have eaten into but hardware is basically the same. So that's an enormous, this is just in the tech sector. Went from 54 % to 25 % software did. Holy cow.

19:37Michael Batnick:I know we spent a lot of time talking about this, but the move in the software names really is amazing. And not just the megas, like not just Salesforce and Workday, which we spent a lot, and Adobe, which we spent a lot of time talking about, but like a name like Snowflake. Snowflake was at$280 in November. of 2025, which is six months ago. It went from 280 to 120. 280 to 120 in six months.

20:08Ben Carlson:There's a lot of stuff that's in my too hard pile. Sorting through stuff like this, the AI winners and losers and trying to pick like, no way. I would not want to try to do that. I know you and Josh have been dabbling.

20:19Michael Batnick:I made a lot of money. Well, a decent amount of money. All right, a little bit of money. In the February, the late February, early March bounce. And then I sold, credit to me. And then it puked again. But if you, I guess this is at the risk of sounding totally ridiculous. Like the software, so software went to as low as IGV went to$76. It bounced, it fell at undercut let though. And now it's like the highest volume, obviously. Like when you make a new low, it's like, oh no, like we're going so much lower. And not always, not always, But oftentimes that is how bottoms happen, where it's like the second puke, where it's like literally get me out at any price.

21:01Michael Batnick:And if you were bottom fishing and you didn't sell the second puke, you have to ask yourself, like who is left to sell? So completely disconnected from the fundamentals, what AI might or might not do to this group. Like if you didn't puke on the second rollover, there's no more sellers left. So it's not to say that they're going to recapture a quarter of the bounce, half the loss. I mean, who knows? But this is the thing where - These names could be dead money for a year or two. They could be tradable bounces and stuff, but -

21:32Ben Carlson:But this is when you really need to determine, is this a trade or an investment? Correct. Because you and I always say like, listen, the market's not stupid, but the market has puked up names 50, 60, 70 % in this cycle, and they have come back. Like that has happened. So you could say like, maybe it made sense at the time, but so that's what people are trying to grapple with now. I was like, gosh, these stocks are on 60%. Why wouldn't I go hand over fist on this? I think this time feels different to me that trying to pick an AI loser bin is way harder.

22:00Michael Batnick:I agree. This is very difficult. But most of the time, I don't know that I could say for, well, I would bet that most of the time when industry groups get rocked like this, there is a damn good reason. And guess what? AI is a damn good reason. Now, 60 % too much. Of course, who knows? But like at the individual stock level, there's so many examples of, like Nike is a great one, of, oh, like, this has got to be a buy. This has got to be a buy. And like it just, the market usually doesn't get it that bad.

22:32Ben Carlson:I made that mistake. Luckily, I got up quick enough and didn't compound my mistake.

22:37Michael Batnick:The market usually doesn't get it that, that, that wrong. So maybe software's bounce at 20%, maybe bounce at 30%, who knows? but going to be an interesting couple of years, that's for sure. So I said a few minutes ago, like just how fascinating the market is. I saw a chart from Tadstone this morning. There were more flows into semis than into tech, like in general. And people were done with the MAG-7. Could you imagine? I mean, of course, like you can imagine. It's happening right now. The MAG-7 comes back and the market's up another 15 % on the year. Could easily see that happening. it's possible so we are now the s &p is i don't know percent and a half maybe even less from a new all-time high and if the queues get their mojo back for whatever reason like the narrative shifts on ai um maybe you know for whatever reason it doesn't matter but like look at the move in Amazon.

23:36Insane move over the last four or five sessions.

23:39Ben Carlson:That's the bull case. Yes. And I think this is what most market participants were thinking. AI is going to matter more than geopolitics. And that seems to be what's winning out right now. The Wall Street Journal, you got a cool thing in here about how sometimes things change. It's like gold prices versus real interest rates and the idea was that they tend to follow each other but it's inverted so inverse yeah so if real rates are lower that's good for gold because gold doesn't have doesn't pay any dividends it's not an income producing asset right and it completely changed after the after the war in ukraine and now it's just a supply and demand thing and that that macro thing went away i thought this was a good lead into the wall street journal had a thing about energy stocks energy stocks are having a moment.

24:24Ben Carlson:And they show the percentage of energy and tech in the S &P. And they're both at the exact same spot in 1996, which is insane to think about. Energy and tech had the same weighting. It was like 9%. 9 % tech weighting in 1996. Unbelievable, right? I'd say. In the 1970s, energy made a quarter of the index, according to Carlisle. I think it was close to 30 % in 1980. Today, it's like 4%. It got as low as, I think, 2.5 % or something in 2020, when oil went negative, that's a 40-year re-rating, 50-year re-rating in sectors. I don't think it ever goes back, comes close to going back. Like energy never gets above 10 % again.

25:08Ben Carlson:That'd be weird. Oh, it never gets above 10 %? Maybe. I mean, 30, forget about. So I found another AI re-rating. I can't remember where I filed this, but the consulting firms, Accenture, Booz Allen, Gartner, They're all down 50 % to 70%.

25:23Michael Batnick:Yeah, I mean, that's it.

25:26Ben Carlson:So McKinsey is a public company. If McKinsey was a public company, it would be down the same as these companies, right? Yeah. So wait, so I also looked at the SMH, which is a semiconductor ETF versus IGV. This is over the past five years. IGV in the past five years is up a total, a grand total in five years of 6%. Not annualized, total.

25:49Michael Batnick:IGV? Yes. And the biggest names is, like, Microsoft's the biggest name in there. Is Meta an IGV? No, no way. Oracle and Palantir are.

26:00Ben Carlson:So, yeah, 5 % or 6 % in five years. You know what else is bouncing bigly? Yeah, you're right. Microsoft is in there in Palantir. No, I know. Microsoft's the biggest name. But SMH is a semiconductor. That's up, like, 260%. So, it just, again, it totally consumed it.

26:18Michael Batnick:I did sell the loads in Blackstone, by the way. happens, the actual lows, the alternative asset managers are bouncing pretty aggressively too.

26:27Ben Carlson:Okay. So we've moved on because we can only worry about one risk at a time. Private credit worries have subsided. I don't know.

26:34Michael Batnick:For now. Well, I don't know. Separate things. Private credit worries have not subsided, but the equity is bouncing. Not separate things.

26:42Ben Carlson:But don't you think investors eventually, unless there's more headlines, investors are going to get bored of that story? Because it's a slow moving story. It's not something that happens in private markets. Things don't blow up overnight, typically. It's a slow move, especially in credit like that.

26:59Michael Batnick:Where are we going next?

27:00Ben Carlson:Economy.

27:02Michael Batnick:Let's talk about the economy.

27:05Ben Carlson:How much would podcasters pay for a silent leaf blower? Like an EV leaf. Do they have electric leaf blowers that don't make noise? This is loud, isn't it? It's pretty loud. Boy, as a middle-aged dad, I love a good leaf. My kids always make fun of me because I'm constantly blowing dust out of the garage and getting the wood chips off the sidewalk.

27:27Michael Batnick:It's a great feeling. It is great. Leaf blowers, not something you thought that you would be spending money on when you were younger. So I'm skipping ahead in the dock. Somebody had a good response on my rejecting of the title lifestyle creep.

27:46Ben Carlson:Okay.

27:47Michael Batnick:Somebody said, man, we've got a lot on the dock this week. My bad. We've been moving slowly here. Very nonchalant podcast we've got today. You know what I mean? Good word. Okay. This person says lifestyle creep should be referred to as the expense curve. Not bad. That's not bad. He said lifestyle creep implies you are voluntarily spending more money on an inflated lifestyle, but as you get older, there are non-inflationary cost step-ups embedded in everyday life that you cannot escape. Property taxes. Kids consume more as they get older. Kids start playing sports, participate in more activities.

28:20Michael Batnick:Cap-action products come up. Leafblowers. College tuition. So even if you try to keep your lifestyle spending fixed, there's no way to escape the expense curve. That's true.

28:30Ben Carlson:I also believe that you should allow lifestyle creep in your life. If you make more money, you should prioritize spending it on nicer things. I'm totally okay with that.

28:40Michael Batnick:And Ben is not just talking the talk. He told me how much money he spent on his Airbnb. And I was very impressed. I told my wife next year, we're not spending as much. Wow, Ben. Very loose with the purse strings. No, I love it. No, you're, you're a hundred percent right. Like that is what the money is for.

28:59Ben Carlson:You know, my wife, my wife told me, my wife told me four years ago, here's the one thing in our budget I want to prioritize. Cause my wife, she doesn't spend a lot of money on clothes or purses or shoes. Like I probably spend more on my wardrobe than my wife does. She's like very minimalistic in that sense. She said, I want to prioritize vacations. That's the thing I want to do with our, that's like the carve out for my piece of the pie or whatever. That's what I want. So that's what we prioritize.

29:24Michael Batnick:That's the number one thing.

29:27Ben Carlson:Yeah, it is.

29:28Michael Batnick:The memories come with you forever. It is. And your kids more importantly. I think we had a text from our friend,

29:34Ben Carlson:Michael Antonelli about this. We talk about the vacations, the big vacations we went on when I was a kid and there weren't as many. We talk about them all the time still. I'm sure my kids will remember these vacations more than anything else they got for their birthdays or Christmas or whatever it is. Any toys, any whatever. No doubt. The memories of that stuff go away immediately.

29:53Michael Batnick:All right, so back to the economy. A couple of quotes from the transcript, which is phenomenal. Highly recommend.

30:04Ben Carlson:They are really good about just pulling out the little paragraphs you need to, yeah.

30:09Michael Batnick:Okay, so Walmart CFO. I would start with the fact that I am probably more constructive on the consumer than what one would glean from reading the headlines of news publications. There are a lot of alarmist headlines about the impact on the consumer, but the consumer continues to be very resilient. I think the consumer has shown resiliency and probably is a little healthier than what one would, okay.

30:29Ben Carlson:That's interesting coming from Walmart.

30:31Michael Batnick:Yeah. Dick's Sporting Goods. Our consumer is very, very healthy. So in addition to everything I said about the sporting culture coming together, the consumer is obsessed with sport. We haven't seen trade downs from best to better and better to good. and one more Levi Strauss CFO. We continue to closely monitor this consumer response to pricing actions and to date. We have not seen an impact on demand.

30:54Ben Carlson:That's a pretty wide assortment there. Anecdotally, everywhere in spring break was busier. We've been going to the same place for four years. Everywhere was busier than we've seen it. More people spending money. Boy, trying to get out of a restaurant with three kids and a meal, the ceiling keeps getting, or the floor keeps going higher. For the price? Yeah. Yeah. Right? It's like, wow, this is what I spent on a meal because the kid's got chicken fingers and mac and cheese? This is life now. People don't care. All right, let's talk about the labor market because I think the best way to describe the labor market right now is confusing.

31:31Ben Carlson:If you're trying to make a hard stand on the labor market right now, I think you're crazy. So last week, we talked about the unemployment rate. People said, Ben, stop using the unemployment rate. It can be fudged. So I said, all right, fine. U.S. labor force participation rate. prime age, that's 25 to 54, because you want to take out the people who are older because they're retiring, is near the all-time highs of 1999. It's within a stone's throw. And it was way, way lower through much of the 2010s. So you say the labor force participation. Now, this is, again, the people who are in the labor force actively seeking a job or want a job have one.

32:04Ben Carlson:But a lot of other people poked holes in this theory, right? I feel like there's a lot of data and anecdotes that could support either side of the equation. Fair? you've got some in here.

32:16Michael Batnick:I did think this was interesting. I had the unemployment rate from 16 to 24 year olds. And remember, we were talking about this going higher, like back in the summer fall, and we just stopped talking about it. Well, because it started going lower again. And I was like, hmm. So we got a few emails. One person said, I fully agree with Michael on the labor market impact based on AI. I've been hiring some junior folks straight out of college within a few years of graduating. And it is absolutely grim out there. Talking to an old professor of mine in computer science, what used to be almost every student getting internships and post-graduation jobs has dropped down to around a quarter of students.

32:48Michael Batnick:Even if it's not fully in the data yet, the vibes are grim for that age cohort. And it definitely seems like that is only going to continue to getting darker. A listener sent us, Derek Thompson did a podcast about this.

33:00Ben Carlson:I listened to it recently.

33:01Michael Batnick:And I found they referenced a report by Adam Ozimek and Nathan Goldschlag called AI and young adult jobs. The real mystery, start by using the right measures. So they said the unemployment rate only counts someone as unemployed if they were actually looking for work. The problem with this becomes obvious when glancing at the labor force participation rate, which shows how many people are either working or looking for work. The labor force includes both as a share of the total income population. Over the last year, non-college young adults age 22 to 25 have disproportionately given up looking for work.

33:39Michael Batnick:These discouraged workers won't count as unemployed, which means that the unemployment rate is lower than if it did count them, a misleading sign of the labor market health. So look at this chart. Young worker employment rate, it shows 26 and up. Young college and young non-college. And the young non-college is, it's not crashing, but it's certainly heading in the wrong direction. It's not great.

34:02Ben Carlson:Here's my problem with this chart. It only goes back to 2021. And the number today is way higher than it was. Well, not way higher. The axis is very low here. I think it's really hard to make comparisons this decade about the labor market because we went from the literal hottest labor market we will ever see in our lifetime in 2021, 2022, to today where things are slowing down. And I think trying to figure out what is AI and what is that. Because remember that we had the wage growth for people who changed jobs versus didn't change jobs. And the gap between the two is about as large as I've ever seen it.

34:33Ben Carlson:People who were changing jobs were getting huge raises and that's not happening anymore. And it's the, the upper hand has gone from the labor back to capital, right? The business owners have the hand right now. And I, I just, I think.

34:47Michael Batnick:How about, how about both? How about both? We are coming off the hottest labor market ever more than, more than full employment, over employment. That's true. and it's also true that probably even absent that the ai fears and and the data would show and the anecdotes and the vibes would feel that people are slower to hire young people because

35:06Ben Carlson:and the reason the vibes are so bad right now is because of the uncertainty obviously i don't want to sound insensitive but i've seen a terrible labor market for young people i lived it that's after after the gfc that was a real crisis but and back then people kind of told us you should be happy you have a job you want to raise get out of here you know like yeah that was the kind of the mentality back then because that was a real bad labor market now the hard part is the uncertainty is so much higher i that's the part i get why the vibes are so bad but the the actual market itself is not as you're right close to as bad as it was back then no get out of here

35:39Michael Batnick:yeah true but also like i don't want to minimum i don't want to like hindsight we we you could say that things were probably going to get better post gfc but like right now it just feels like we're we haven't even seen how bad it's going to get yeah right that's that's the concern

35:56Ben Carlson:Are we falling off a cliff here?

35:58Michael Batnick:Look at this. Average number of applications per entry-level job. So there was a stupid article. Anxious parents are spending upwards of$50 ,000 to land their kid a job. No, they're not. I mean, that's like saying my brain just broke. I was about to use a bad analogy. Whatever. On the fringe, there is a parent or dumb idiots that are doing this. Those are the same people that are spending a million dollars on their kids to get into college. but there are, but there are legitimate like job coaches for younger people that, you know, parents are spending$3 ,000, $5 ,000, whatever. Anyhow, the point is that the average number of applications per entry-level job is so much higher than it was historically.

36:38Ben Carlson:save your money. Just talk to people in your network. That's how you get your kids a job. Right. Not by spending money on a life coach. Right. All right, not to belabor the point, but one last email. Hang on. Don't you, so it shows the average number of applications per entry-level job is way higher. Isn't that just because it's easier than ever to do. You can have, you can have chat GPT, write you up a cover letter and a resume. And don't you think this is, this number is never going back down. Yeah. It's, you're going to have your AI agent applying for every single job they can for you in the years ahead.

37:08Ben Carlson:It was just like when, when the, when the career builder.com came out in the mid two thousands, late two thousands, and you could apply to a job online. You could, you couldn't do that before. It was way hard. It was way harder to find a job because now more people could apply to jobs easier instead of going to a company website and writing a letter and sending a resume. It got easier. So this number is never going back down.

37:27Michael Batnick:That's right. We got an email that corroborates what those guys were saying about the labor force participation rate. So I have a take on Torsten's belief that AI is not impacting the recent grad unemployment. These recent grads aren't hitting the unemployment rate because they're just picking up jobs at restaurants, retail, et cetera, just to make ends meet. I luckily finally got a job after a year. It's not the best, but it's adjacent to what I want to do, but I'm definitely overqualified with my degree and such. I can give you stories of friends, people I graduate with just taking a job, bartenders so they can pay their bills.

37:55Michael Batnick:Meanwhile, they have business analytics or finance degrees from good schools and we're good students. I'm a data guy, but I don't think the impact is on the data yet.

38:01Ben Carlson:This is what happened in 2008 too. This is not a new story. I'm just, I don't want to, again, don't want to be insensitive. This has happened before. It has. I think young people are going to be okay. Maybe I'm in a minority. I think it's going to be all right. I think people are going to figure this out. I don't. You don't? All right. You don't think young people are going to be okay?

38:20Michael Batnick:I don't know, man. Not to be so, so grim, but like, why would, why would you hire as many entry level employees as you have in the past when literally the AI can do it for you at a fraction of the price?

38:34Ben Carlson:Who's going to be the middle employee eventually? Eventually, I think companies are going to realize like, who's next in line? We need someone to step in here who takes a lower wage too.

38:43Michael Batnick:But businesses don't, businesses don't think that way. Businesses don't think, well, what happens when these people are 35? Like, who's going to be the 35-year-olds here? That's not how they hire.

38:52Ben Carlson:Okay. You're right. The transition period may be bumpy. I think eventually businesses... No, no, no.

38:56Michael Batnick:It's going to be bumpy. I just hope it's not as bad as people think. Fair.

39:01Ben Carlson:And there's going to be a ton of baby boomers retiring the years ahead, too. That's the... Something has to give there. All right. Speaking of baby boomers, the Wall Street Journal had a piece. You hate these topics. The generational warfare. Did millennials or boomers have it harder? We went searching for the answer. So there's some really good charts in here.

39:19Michael Batnick:You know why? Because all of this stuff, I'm about bringing people together. This is divisive and I don't like it. Like there's enough divide in this country.

39:26Ben Carlson:But this is like going to a bar and arguing about Jordan versus LeBron. There's never going to be an answer, but it's fun to argue about. Not for me, it's not. Okay. Jordan is the best and that's that. It's settled. Obviously. So they looked at the median total income by age group, boomers and millennials. and 25 to 34, 35 to, and millennials are higher. Not, and this is, everything is inflation adjusted. Not like noticeably higher, but it's higher. This one is going to make people mad. How affordable was a house? So they look at inflation adjusted, median price of a new home in$20,$25, based, affordability is based on median household income and mortgage rates.

40:04Ben Carlson:They're saying in the late 70s, early 80s, it was more, way more expensive for boomers to buy a home than it is for millennials today. And for much of the 80s and 90s, it was as high as it is today or higher. This is surprising, right? Boomers would say, see, told you, we paid 18 % mortgages. It was harder for us. I still don't quite believe it because they could refinance all the way down.

40:27Michael Batnick:The houses are so much nicer today that millennials are buying.

40:31Ben Carlson:They are, yes. It's, I agree. Then they also show average household net worth. Now, some people would say, hey, I'm not an average person. I'm a medium person. But they did average. and millennials average net worth now exceeds baby boomers at similar ages. And it's by a decent amount too. And someone shared this with us a long time ago. This is from money in the, in the mentioned this in the wall street journal article, the baby boomers, can they ever live as well as their parents or prospects for job housing and having children in retirement? And it's basically saying like baby boomers are screwed.

41:02Ben Carlson:And this is in 1983. Yeah. Well, this is my point that they did feel screwed. This is my point that I just feel like every gender, every young generation goes through something like this. and I know now seems scarier than ever because of AI but this is a rite of passage for younger generations everyone has it except maybe Gen X, no one cares about them let's be honest Gen X pretended to have a hard time in the 90s even though it was the greatest decade ever right? Reality Bites and Fight Club and all that stuff, like come on, get out of here 90s were great, best decade ever Gen X trying to they were trying to what's the opposite of oral farming?

41:40Ben Carlson:I don't know. Okay. All right. But let's be honest. Boomers had it way easier. It's just, it's true. They're the easiest generation of all time. It's not even close. I'll die on that hill. I know you don't want to make a pronouncement, but it's true. Boomers had it way easier than any generation in history.

41:59Michael Batnick:Then how come the divorce rate amongst our parents, mine included, was so much higher?

42:04Ben Carlson:Because when life gets easy, you try to make a... I just reject that.

42:08Michael Batnick:I think life is just constantly not easy. I think it's nonsense. Our parents had it so easy. On a relative basis. Taking care of their World War II depression parents. My dad, so, okay, my parents got divorced, obviously, but my father had to pay for three young kids, which he couldn't afford, on top of paying for his parents to make ends meet because his mom didn't work and his dad was pushing carts in a grocery store. and it didn't do great things for my family. And that is a very not unique story. Like life was hard and it always is hard. That's like, that's the basic point. Life was never easy.

42:47Ben Carlson:Fair. I guess I'm thinking economically, like the overall economy.

42:52Michael Batnick:But also think, okay, but think about it. Fine. Go back to our parents. How my parents were in their young 20s. Like my dad had probably just graduated dental school when they started having babies and the pressure of being a child yourself, raising babies and wasn't easy.

43:12Ben Carlson:I guess the thing is like, my dad paid$50 a semester for college. Finding a house was easy. Finding a job was relative. These kinds of things that young people worry about today. I think that stuff was easy for boomers.

43:24Michael Batnick:I think we moved the goalposts bigly with the benefit of hindsight. I don't think anybody felt that life was so easy back then. I mean, it's just nonsense. Come on.

43:33Ben Carlson:You could also say that the boomers being such a large cohort were one of the reasons that we're doing so well today. Like their spending and their, like the boomers charged the stock market. Like they were the ones who like brought it out of the doldrums of the seventies, essentially. Like getting into anyway.

43:49Michael Batnick:Anyway, I love my parents. So I will die on that hill.

43:53Ben Carlson:Oh, that's going out on a limb for a take.

43:57Michael Batnick:All right. Let's talk about venture capital. So actually artificial intelligence. So Q1, this is from A16Z. Q1 2026 was the largest venture quarter ever by a lot. This is like the charts from COVID, the unemployment charts that just broke everything forever. So this is obviously OpenAI, Anthropic. OpenAI did their$190 trillion round or whatever it was.

44:21Ben Carlson:Yeah, it's all.

44:22Michael Batnick:And when you look at like AI companies in terms of their fundraising, again, a broken chart. Q1 was$242 billion. Q1 2024 was$16 billion.

44:36Ben Carlson:So did AI save venture capital? Because it was all these unfunded commitments that they were waiting on.

44:42Michael Batnick:But it's so concentrated in these mega rounds and the mega funds. Like think about how much money is being let on fire right now. All these bullshit AI companies that are just straight up zeros.

44:51Ben Carlson:True. But just all the dry powder people were sitting on it finally got it out of there and invested.

44:58Michael Batnick:So Ramp, who's the economist at Ramp? I can't remember his name. Forgive me. We had him on the show.

45:02Ben Carlson:Ara.

45:03Michael Batnick:Okay. So Ara has a chart showing the Ramp AI index. Anthropic sees its largest monthly increase to date of 6.3%. They're showing the share of US businesses with paid subscriptions to AI models. And it's at 50%. Obviously, it's going way higher. Anthropic is going vertical.

45:22Ben Carlson:And it's going to pass OpenAI within months.

45:25Michael Batnick:They're showing. If not sooner. So Redpoint did a deck on this about software and AI. And they have a chart called AI is Enabling Unprecedented Efficiency. And they show the AR divided by the full-time employees.

45:41Ben Carlson:Hang on, back to the ARS chart here. So they have OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, XAI, and DeepSeek on here. Do you remember the DeepSeek freakout? I do. That is obviously a distant memory at this point.

45:52Michael Batnick:Matter of fact, NVIDIA, is nvidia still not recovered from the deep seek nvidia is right at pre-deep seek levels no are you sure oh i'm positive okay that doesn't sound right to me i bought nvidia on friday i think the first time i ever owned nvidia probably not maybe i can't remember but no we both bought

46:11Ben Carlson:nvidia in the liberation day thing oh that's right i made a ton of money on nvidia how could i forget

46:16Michael Batnick:Yeah, that's right. So a company called Cursor has$6.1 million in AOR per full-time employee. Lovable is$3.4 million. I'm not familiar with these companies' works. OpenAI is$1.5 million and Anthropoc is$1.2 million. Salesforce,$540 ,000. Datadog,$510 ,000.

46:36Ben Carlson:This is the inequality stuff I was talking about. If you can create a company this efficient and the money goes into the hands of so few people, they're going to, I mean, the AI people who are going to create so much wealth for themselves, they better start building libraries and they better be, they better turn into Rockefellers or they're, they're already some of the most hated people on the planet. It feels like they're going to have to do something to really give back to humanity for this because they're going to get so rich.

47:01Michael Batnick:Well, people are angry. Uh, Sam Altman's house has been attacked twice, I think in the last couple of weeks, not great, but you know, not, not, you know, I'm not trying to like suggest that he deserved it or anything. But the message that they are putting out into the world is obviously deeply, deeply, deeply unpopular.

47:19Ben Carlson:Well, and so you saw that Anthropoc News that they created this, and Medical Sembles wrote a piece about it yesterday. They created this new program that could essentially look for holes in cybersecurity. And they said they found millions of them. Like we could go and hack every, this system could go in and hack everything right now if it wanted to. we're going to have something go off the rails something's going to go off the rails here at

47:42Michael Batnick:some point and unfortunately this is going to become a political issue because it can't not

47:46Ben Carlson:this is going to be government this is going to be the political issue for the next presidential election ai is going to be the issue unless we're going through a big recession does anybody trust government to step in and protect us no way there's no way they understand half of what's going on right now.

48:00Michael Batnick:So we've spoken a lot about what Microsoft's performance in a negative way is a straight up reflection of a public proxy for open AI. Somebody emailed us. I'm sure you are aware of this already. I was not aware. But in case you're not, in 2023, the South Korean firm SK Telecom invested$100 million in Anthropic. Today, that stake is worth over$2 billion in the latest round. And look at this stock. Holy smokes. Going vertical.

48:32Ben Carlson:Okay. Interesting. That's not bad. It's up 75 % year to date.

48:39Michael Batnick:I thought this was notable. I bought Bitcoin on Friday. Haven't bought it in a while. It broke. So in late February, when the SaaS crash really started to happen or mid-February, whenever it was, there was a lot of charts showing, actually, it turns out that Bitcoin showed software all along. Remember, they were like one for one?

49:01Ben Carlson:Yeah.

49:01Michael Batnick:And no longer. So Matt made two charts, one showing like Bitcoin finding support, the other one showing software breaking down. Now, software has since, you know, bounced over the last two days. But look at the bottom chart. Like they were tracking damn closely. And I don't know if Bitcoin is going to lead software higher. Hopefully, I suppose, but.

49:19Ben Carlson:It is kind of crazy how close these charts look though. And that's like the gold versus real estate chart. It looks great for a while, and eventually it'll break somehow. One will go up, and the relationship will change. But for now, it's pretty darn close.

49:31Michael Batnick:Yeah.

49:31Ben Carlson:All right. Bill McBride, my favorite real estate analyst. Sorry, Logan. Logan's over two. At Calculated Risk, has a piece about housing demographics. And he kind of pours some cold water. A couple weeks ago, Nick Majuli was on S-Compound, and he asked, what's going to be worse returns for the rest of the decade, housing market or private investments, like private credit, private? and I think housing would be the easy one there. Obviously, it's hard because both use leverage and calculating returns, whatever. So here's what Bill says. My sense is there will be a pickup in boomers selling their homes in a few years and lasting until 2040 or so.

50:06Ben Carlson:These homes will be older, and most will need updating. You and I have talked about this, but many of these homes will be in prime locations. We should also see a pickup in retirement community construction during that time period, and he shows this chart that says, like, that boomer's selling. So he says that the biggest two cohorts are in their mid-20s and mid-30s, So he's saying the second circle, which is the mid-30s, suggests less home buying demand in the next decade and more existing supply. There are other factors that this likely hold down housing prices. He's saying the fact that boomers are getting older and likely selling and a big cohort of millennials are now kind of through that home buying age in a lot of ways means housing prices for a while, at least, could be just kind of stagnant, which would make sense with the amount of pull forward we had.

50:51Michael Batnick:Yeah. Who's bullish on housing prices? I'm not.

50:56Ben Carlson:That's a good point. I don't think, I haven't heard many bullish cases for housing recently.

51:01Michael Batnick:In terms of returning your investment, I mean, not to open that can of worms, but there is no return on your investment. It's where you live and it's damn expensive.

51:09Ben Carlson:Yes. Keeping up with, if housing prices keep up with inflation for the rest of the decade, I think that'd be a win.

51:14Michael Batnick:I haven't had hot water. My hot water like ebbs and flows. Remember I told you I'm like the type of person that's just like, eh, I'm slow to like fix things. Still having problems with hot water? Well, here's the thing. The kids get the fresh shower and they get the hot water. And it's not like cold, but it's not hot. And I did call Plummer. He didn't respond. I will get this fixed. But I'm probably going to need a new Navion, which is like$8 ,000. For the privilege of having hot water.

51:42Ben Carlson:Got to have a hot shower. My wife runs it really hot. Like she would be extremely mad at me if I was doing what you're doing.

51:50Michael Batnick:one of the one of the things in that World War II book is and this is going to be and I'm very consciously saying the word directionally right here if it's not 100 % accurate 17 ,000 US soldiers lost limbs during the war 100 ,000 100 ,000 Americans lost limbs in factories preparing for the war wow

52:14Ben Carlson:because it's like a big ramp up

52:17Michael Batnick:100 ,000 people factory workers lost limbs So I could take lukewarm water. Know what I mean?

52:22Ben Carlson:Okay. This book has really put things in perspective for you, huh?

52:26Michael Batnick:I have great perspective. I'm always enjoying life. But this is, yeah, this is a big one. Okay. All right. What else on the housing, Ben? Oh, this is a good one. Lance Lambert. The current housing market bifurcation. So we talk about this all the time, that housing is discussed as this monolithic thing. And it obviously isn't. It's very regional. Check this out. So Lance Lambert has a shart.

52:52Michael Batnick:Did that get created on Long Camp Polly? You know what's so funny? I literally was watching it this week. And I thought I had the exact same thought. Because Philip Seymour Hoffman, they're at an art gallery. And he goes, dude, we got to go. I just started.

53:07Ben Carlson:That might have been the first time I've ever heard it.

53:09Michael Batnick:Yeah. I had the same thought, I guess. Did they invent it? So the chart shows the median days to pending in February at the onset of spring across the country. And in California, in New York, in the Midwest, Ben, homes are selling really quick. But in the Sun Belt, they're just not at all. 70 days.

53:36Ben Carlson:I think eventually people are going to, I think it's going to turn. And like they've gone into like the correction phase earlier than the rest of the country. And they're going to be the first ones out of it. Don't you think? The Southeast, Sunbelt, whatever?

53:52Michael Batnick:Could be. I don't know. Okay. All right.

53:56Ben Carlson:You talk about Nike here.

53:57Michael Batnick:Oh, this just blew my face off. So I found this in transcript. For this quarter, revenues were flat on a reported basis and down 3 % on a currency neutral basis. Nike Direct was down 7 % with Nike Digital declining 9 % and Nike Stores declining 5%. Holy shit. Gross margins declined 130 basis points. My God. So, all right. Last five years, Nike is down 66%. The market is up 76%. Last 10 years, Nike is down 16%. The market is up 300 % almost. Down 16 % versus the market up 300. Nike, going back to 1993, has lost its edge compared to the market. Obviously, at one point in time, Nike was, you know, trouncing the market.

54:38Michael Batnick:So, I had a friend over, we were talking recently about, I don't know, the stock market came up. and he was saying that like he you know the things that he bought he's like i knew they were going to bounce they always do and i couldn't help myself i said well not always like listen do the do the great companies usually bounce when they're selling off you know whatever and i was like sometimes like he's like i learned my lesson i said no but you you're learning the lesson for this market environment it doesn't always work this way and and even now like you could have

55:09Ben Carlson:said about nike and there's a lot of stocks disney nike united i mean there's a million of them

55:14Michael Batnick:Yeah, Disney's a great one.

55:15Ben Carlson:I don't view Nike as a brand that has been totally tarnished either. I still feel like I see, I wear a lot of Nike still. My kids, like, maybe this is just anecdotally. It doesn't seem to me like it's a tarnished brand that people don't wear anymore.

55:27Michael Batnick:No, it's such a good point. I feel like it's a shitty investment and the company is legitimately not doing great. Obviously, stores are down 5%, but like, it's still the premier brand in footwear and in athletic retail. But from an investment point of view, it sucks shit. It sounds like they're really... And it did and is losing market share.

55:47Ben Carlson:Yeah, it does sound like their big thing was they said, we're just going to sell direct. We're not going to sell on Amazon. Yeah, horrible mistake. And they did a huge mistake and now it's compounded.

55:55Michael Batnick:Horrible mistake. All right, did I put this in here?

55:59Ben Carlson:I did. Quarter Claude integration? Yeah, I did because I think it's interesting. So Quarter said that they've integrated Claude and they said what it is, you can ask any question about any company, any event, any speaker, any metric and get answered pretty quick. And it's funny, I was going through this the other day. I was asking about like recession comments and it was like, would you like me to break this down by all companies or just companies that are well-known? Like the prompts back to you are so amazing. And it just got me thinking, you and I have read all the Buffett books probably. He had those stories where he would go to the Geico CEOs.

56:31Ben Carlson:He knocked on Geico offices on the weekend and he sat down with the CEO to talk about the company. And he used to have to send away to get quarterly reports from companies. Like they wouldn't just have them out there. You'd have to ask a company. they would send it to you in the mail, this huge thick thing. And now people have the ability to answer any question and parse this data. And it's just there. And it's, it's not like you even have to like go digging for stuff anymore. It's just, you can ask for it and it'll give it to you. It's amazing. It really is kind of amazing. And this just shows also why investing is harder than ever.

57:04Yeah.

57:04Ben Carlson:Like it was, it was kind of fish in a barrel.

57:06Michael Batnick:Everyone, everyone knows everything, but like, that's a great point for knowledge workers. AI is incredible. I mean, obviously. Hot take, it works. But you know what's interesting? I saw on the demise of software, so the playoffs start on Saturday and prices for Knicks tickets went up a ton. And last year, so I split tickets with my friend. We go together to the playoffs. And we were very pleasantly surprised about the prices for last year. Like they were reasonable. And this year they're a lot higher. And we were thinking about like, Hey, should we just like sell one game, one round? Um, because well, certainly for the Raptors, we were very confident that we're going to like, Hawks will be a little bit harder.

57:53Michael Batnick:Who cares? Be that as it may, I went on to Claude and I said, what is the cheapest ticket on StubHub or Ticketmaster in the lower bowl, in the 100 section at Madison Square Garden for round one or Saturday. And it couldn't get in. There's no API allowed to access it. It's like in JavaScript or a different sort of thing. So I think a lot of people are just overestimating like the ease with which these things can integrate and operate.

58:22Ben Carlson:Right, because they don't want the AI to help you parse through that market.

58:25Michael Batnick:Correct. Another great example of that is, so there are people that write like basically blog posts on Twitter. and I was curious to read one, but I didn't really feel like spending the time. So I asked Claude to summarize it for me. This was about what's going on with Mythos, the new Claude thing. And I don't have time for that. And I needed to summarize because I won't understand 90 % of what I'm reading, right? Yeah. Not surprisingly, Twitter blocks Claude, blocks chat. Because you have to use Grock. It doesn't block Grock. So I went on Grock and Grock works.

58:58Ben Carlson:Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. Barriers to entry are going to make it harder in a lot of ways.

59:01Michael Batnick:All right, let's just do some survey stuff real quick. So University of Michigan, consumer sentiment hit an all-time low. And look at COVID. COVID broke everything forever. Forever and ever. It just broke everything. The response rates, it didn't break that. That was in secular decline. But nobody responds to these surveys anymore.

59:26Ben Carlson:Pretty crazy that it used to be 90 % response rate.

59:29Michael Batnick:Yeah. And not long ago, in 2013. Now, on the flip side of consumer sentiment, or consumer survey sentiment, I should say to be precise, Zuccardi shared a chart of Bank of America total credit and debit card spending per household. It rose 4.3 % year over year, marking the strongest growth since early 2023. Now, is some of this gas prices? Yeah, probably not a small amount of this. And maybe, you know, fueling the frustration, but people are still spending.

59:58Ben Carlson:I was thinking about this in terms of the sentiment readings being so bad. and watch what they do, not what they say. So the number is something like 60 % to 65 % of all households own stocks, right? By that metric alone, people have some optimism about the future, regardless of what they say about the economy, what's going to happen going... So that's the disconnect between these surveys. If people still hold stocks, they're optimistic about the future. That's my read. And the sentiment surveys...

1:00:25Michael Batnick:That's a good point. Like, you ask somebody, like, are you optimistic? No. How much stocks do you own? it's like a complete like well then yeah exactly all right uh good email about the millionaire thing um we talked about a million is the worst worst amount of money last week um for those of

1:00:44Ben Carlson:us in decent paying jobs when i elite jobs maybe we have a great year at work but then they throw us an extra three thousand dollar bonus or something but if the market has a great year and someone with a million dollars could see 250 000 gains more than their salary so you don't have enough money to retire but you're still at a point where your investments matter more than in your labor. It's just a different mindset is all. And maybe it's also more common than it used to be. With prior generations, you worked to some specific date and collected a pension. That's a fair point. But I think that also just shows how important the markets are to people.

1:01:14Right?

1:01:15Ben Carlson:Like, if you can make that much money in the markets by compounding and saving and investing, that's why you save and invest. Because the payout is much better. That's like a good thing for it. You don't want to touch that money. All right. One more thing we talked about last week. We talked about, I said, I saw these old people in Florida. They were kind of crouched over and got a lot of response from people about like, you're right. That's a big mindset change is like health is wealth, right? Like you enjoy it while you can. So this guy, Dan Halet, someone sent us, a bunch of people sent us this, this sub stack.

1:01:49Ben Carlson:It says, in the UK, a 60-year-old man can expect to live on average around 84, a 60-year-old woman to around 87. Those are the headline numbers. The ones that make retirement planning calculators that have you prepare for 25 to 30 years. But those numbers don't tell you that most of those later years aren't healthy years. He says the data shows from someone who's 60 today, you're looking at roughly 12 to 15 more years before health limitations start to intrude in meaningful ways. So his number, his baseline is you have 12 good years in retirement if you retire at 60 before your health starts to potentially make it harder for you.

1:02:18Ben Carlson:You don't want to travel anymore. You don't want to sit on a plane. You don't want to go for those walks on a tour or something. And again, these are average numbers, obviously. My parents are both, my dad is turning 80 soon. He looks like he's still like 55. He looks great. He still goes on walks all the time. And like my parents are both in good health. But this, for the averages, this is, I think this is probably not a bad way to look at it. You want to front load your spending in retirement because that's when you can enjoy it.

1:02:42Michael Batnick:The counterpoint is, and I agree with you, the legitimate counterpoint is like senior living facilities that you're going to want are - Ridiculously expensive. A fortune. Yeah.

1:02:55Ben Carlson:Oh, yeah. A fortune. I remember my grandmother, when she moved into one in her 90s, it basically sucked up all of her savings. It was gone.

1:03:02Michael Batnick:Right. And, yeah, so there's like obviously levels. There's tiers. So my grandfather, Sergeant Batnik, rest in peace, died in one of the shitty ones. And it was horrible. It was the most depressing fucking place in the world.

1:03:17Ben Carlson:Yeah, not fun places to go. Alternatively, at that point, the kids can take care of you. right? Um, what do you mean? Sorry, sorry, kids. You're, you're paying for my senior living. I paid for your whole life. You pick up the tab now.

1:03:33Michael Batnick:Uh, assuming that your kids have the money. It's like a, it's, you know, it's like a hundred grand a year.

1:03:39Ben Carlson:By the time we're, by the time we're that age though, we're going to have robots to take care of us. We're not going to have to go in a senior living center. We're going to have two robots taking care of us.

1:03:48Michael Batnick:I want to die with a human by my side.

1:03:51Ben Carlson:Okay. Well, it couldn't like, If you wanted to, could you tell the road to kill you or think there's going to be an off switch? Like, hey, I'm done. Strangle me.

1:03:59Michael Batnick:Ben, box office is up 26 % year over year. Scott Mendelsohn at Puck wrote an article. It's a family-friendly box office revival for real. There are 26 PG-rated movies slated for wide release this year, up from 18 to 2024. This year, we had Hoppers, Mario, Goat, Hail Mary. There's a lot of winners.

1:04:17Ben Carlson:The family stuff is carrying this year.

1:04:19Michael Batnick:A lot of winners. So he said, studios tend to suffer when they default to legacy IP, Tron sequels, Springsteen biopics, the Snow White remake. By the way, I think that shit is done. I hope. I know there's still like a lot of garbage that's like, you know, we're still working our way through. Like there's another Mortal Kombat coming out. By the way, Masters of the Universe, I don't know if I said this last week, the He-Man looks horrendous. Well,

1:04:38Ben Carlson:they're already doing a live action Moana, which looks terrible. And I'm sure it'll make a billion dollars.

1:04:42Michael Batnick:Yeah, but that was like in the hopper. Like they didn't, you know, snap their fingers. They made that two years ago. I think that there's like a, hopefully like a sea change in terms of studios being wise to like giving the audience what they want and they don't want Tron.

1:04:54Ben Carlson:I hope so.

1:04:56Michael Batnick:All right, this made me laugh. Fun rollercoaster though. Great rollercoaster. This made me laugh. In Texas or the South in general, we'll say soda sometimes, but never pop, never. Usually we say Coke as an all-inclusive name, which can lead to conversations that go like this. Me driving. Hey, you want to pull over and get a Coke at the next town? Wife, sure. What do you want? Wife, diet Dr. Pepper.

1:05:16Ben Carlson:That one doesn't make sense to me. That's why I say pop. Yes. The Coke thing, that's a Southern thing, right? They call everything Coke.

1:05:23Michael Batnick:All right, Ben. Some recommendations. I listened to a book about Spielberg, Coppola. So really, Coppola was the guy, and then Spielberg and Lucas. And the book was called...

1:05:37Ben Carlson:Was it like The Three Kings or something like that? Yeah, something like that.

1:05:40Michael Batnick:Was that what it was called? Three Kings? I don't know. That does sound familiar. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Well, actually, it doesn't matter what it's called in case somebody wants to read it. The Last Kings of Hollywood.

1:05:48Ben Carlson:Oh, there you go. And there were some really, you know how I love this stuff, like the could have beens

1:05:55Michael Batnick:for movies?

1:05:56Ben Carlson:Yes.

1:05:57Michael Batnick:So check this out. First of all, Star Wars was a joke at the time to the point where like Harrison Ford was an architect. It was not an architect. That's being very generous. He was like a carpenter. He was like Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Right. You know what I mean? like the handsome guy with the shirt off, like doing like, you know, fixing houses and stuff, building fences and whatever. Harrison Ford and the cast on Star Wars, like the original one, were like laughing and mocking him because he had no idea what he was doing. They didn't, obviously when you're making a movie, you don't know what the final screen is going to look like.

1:06:33Michael Batnick:So it was just a complete debacle of a production. They wanted Han Solo to be played by Al Pacino. Yeah.

1:06:41Ben Carlson:That would have been weird.

1:06:42Michael Batnick:Could you imagine? Here's another very, very weird one. They wanted Christopher Walken from the Mark Hamill role. That would have improved the movie.

1:06:50Ben Carlson:My one Star Wars take is that Mark Hamill was awful. He ruins the movie for me.

1:06:55Michael Batnick:He was terrible. This is widely known. I knew this. Tom Selleck was cast as Indiana Jones, but then he had to do, what was that? what was the Tom Salkwell in the 70s, 80s, I guess?

1:07:10Ben Carlson:Magnum P.I.?

1:07:11Michael Batnick:Yeah, that one. He was in Contra to Magnum P.I. Good poll. Last anecdote I thought was interesting. Harvey Keitel. He played the Martin Sheen character in My Brain Really Is Breaking in Apocalypse Now. They shot him for a month and Coppola was like, this isn't working. I feel like you would read a whole

1:07:32Ben Carlson:book about this. People who could have been cast in a movie and didn't. It's great.

1:07:36Michael Batnick:Well, the movie about, the book about creative artists had a lot of this stuff.

1:07:40Ben Carlson:Yeah, that's what I mean. The craziest one was Belushi and Carvey

1:07:45Michael Batnick:in Bad Boys.

1:07:46Ben Carlson:Yeah, I did listen to that book.

1:07:49Michael Batnick:I don't think that would have worked. All right, DTF St. Louis ended. God, I love that show. That was freaking awesome.

1:07:57Ben Carlson:Okay, I got to pick stuff back up because I essentially unplugged for a whole week. We didn't watch any shows. The only thing I watched was college basketball a little bit, final four. and spring break, we unplugged. I didn't watch any shows. I didn't watch any movies. I only read like beach books. I didn't really, the only thing I watched was that crime one-on-one that you recommended or not recommended, but you said you didn't like it. I was really bummed out when I turned it on. It was two hours and 20 minutes. Like no action crime movie should be that long.

1:08:21Michael Batnick:Did you finish it?

1:08:23Ben Carlson:I'm almost there. It's just, it's trying to be heat. And even heat was probably too long.

1:08:27Michael Batnick:It's just not, it's just not that good, right? Like at all.

1:08:30Ben Carlson:Yeah. I tried to, I don't know. It's just too much. So, so you think, so I'm, I don't know. I'm three episodes into the DTF show. Keep going with it. It ends well.

1:08:36Michael Batnick:It's only seven. I loved it. It's just the quality of HBO that we've all come to know and love.

1:08:42Ben Carlson:Yeah.

1:08:43Michael Batnick:It's unmatched. I will say, though,

1:08:45Ben Carlson:Don't screw this up, Paramount.

1:08:46Michael Batnick:Yeah. Somebody recommended recently to finish or to jump back into Paradise Season 2 because I was sort of like, eh. So I'm halfway through it. And I will say, credit to Hulu. Like, it's not HBO at all, but, like, it's pretty good.

1:09:00Ben Carlson:And it's a totally different show in Season 2. It's completely different.

1:09:03Michael Batnick:Oh, did you finish it?

1:09:04Ben Carlson:No, we watched a few episodes. It's good. It's a different show. Yeah, it is good. I'm surprised. It's better than I thought it'd be.

1:09:10Michael Batnick:All right, I forgot to mention a few weeks back that I watched Bone Temple. Holy shit, was that movie awesome. Okay. Obviously, it's not a U movie, but those movies have no business being as good as they are.

1:09:25Ben Carlson:Better than 28 years later or not? Because the ending of that was just hilariously bad. So, oh, you thought so? you don't remember the ending of that movie it was just very weird like the the the literal last

1:09:37Michael Batnick:scene where those wild boys came on yes so that was the that was how that was how this this one followed those crazy guys so it was just it was just yeah it was it was awesome very gnarly and grisly and extremely violent it was it was great lastly um there's a bummer of a way to end it but attend the episode but i saw a tweet the most dangerous year of a man's life is the one right after he finally gets what he wanted and uh in the book in the spielberg coppola book each of them were like pretty depressed after after uh jaws and star wars and um godfather

1:10:16Ben Carlson:i can see that because it's like i've climbed the mountain now what right i've i've the peak of my professional. Now what do I do?

1:10:24Michael Batnick:So life is, I guess, it's always growth and once you get what you want, there's an obvious chemical letdown.

1:10:33Ben Carlson:Well, in your money and your brain, Jason Zweig says that the anticipation is everything's firing off in your brain. And then when you get it, it's like nothing in your brain, nothing hits anymore. You get it and you go, there's no relief. There's no, it's just, oh, I got what I wanted. Of course I did. Right.

1:10:50Michael Batnick:Same thing with Vacations. I mean, obviously, vacations are great, but it's at least as much fun looking forward to it than getting what you want. That's it. That's one of the tragedies of being a human being, I suppose. Getting what you want is not as good as it should be.

1:11:08Ben Carlson:Yeah, you got to move on to something else.

1:11:09Michael Batnick:Yeah.

1:11:10Ben Carlson:Alright.

1:11:12Michael Batnick:Okay. Nope. No. That's it.

1:11:16Ben Carlson:Give me a stock market check real quick. Stocks are up.

1:11:23Michael Batnick:everybody back in the boat.

1:11:24Ben Carlson:Yeah, NASDAQ's up more than a percent. Gold is up again.

1:11:27Michael Batnick:Everybody back in the boat. All the marines are not far away.

1:11:30Ben Carlson:All right, but let's be honest. Something's going to happen tomorrow and then it'll reverse and then something happens the next day and that'll go reverse again and double reverse and this is our life.

1:11:38Michael Batnick:We're never out of the woods. We're always in the woods. It's fun. The stock market is fun. Okay, animal spirits at the compoundnews.com. Hiring at ritholtzwealth.com. We want to hear from you if you are interested in joining the tax team. Hope everybody is enjoying life. We'll see you next time.