The Fat Pitch For Bears (EP. 465)

10:40Michael Batnick:There are too much demand. All you hear is there's not enough compute. So that's a very good question.

10:44Ben Carlson:And I asked Kai this. Like, what is a better, what is a more likely outcome? The baton handoff? And he's like, no, that never happens. And I totally agree. It could happen. I'm just giving, I'm having an open mind that like, what if it does though? I'm with you, dude. I'm doing the Tobias from.

10:59Michael Batnick:The Tobias Harris who couldn't score a point in the final seven court. What a bum that guy is.

11:05Ben Carlson:Tobias Funke from Arrested Development. Didn't work for those people, but it might work for us.

11:12Michael Batnick:I think that's a very likely possible outcome as well. All right. So duality research every week, they show a chart of the price return of the sectors. Then they show the EPS growth and they show the PE multiple growth. And what you'll notice is EPS growth positive in every sector and multiple contraction in every sector besides for staples, industrials, and real estate. That's a good chart. So you can look at this from, you know, this is a Rorschach test. You could say that if you're a bull, you could say this is phenomenal. The market is getting cheaper or we still have room to run. There's no euphoria.

11:53Ben Carlson:Yeah. Fundamentals are not detached from reality.

11:55Michael Batnick:Fundamentals are literally great. And a bear could very easily say, hey, dumbass. Sorry, I did it again. The market's not stupid. These multiples are contracting because the earnings keep going up, but the market knows that they're not sustainable. So they can't possibly get a premium.

12:12Ben Carlson:One time shot in the arm for earnings. Yeah, great. You guys can talk about earnings, but this is not going to last.

12:16Michael Batnick:So we spoke about this last week and we use this on TCAF, but I don't want to assume that everybody watches every single thing that we do. So these charts are too good not to share here. We spoke about NVIDIA just getting bigger and bigger. The number, excuse me, the earnings, the market cap, and yet the forward PE is going down. And I said, that's not cheaper. That's rational. So look at the 12-month forward net income versus the forward PE ratio. Yes, the forward PE ratio is on the lower end of its range that it's been over the last, I don't know, nearly 10 years. It has to be when you consider that the forward 12-month net income has gone from, what even, it's like, I can't even see it.

12:58Michael Batnick:Is that$15 billion in 2023 to$223 billion today? You can't get a premium. It's too big. So Matt showed what the market cap of NVIDIA would be if it were to trade at various forward PEs. And right now at 25 times, it's 8.5 % of the market. If it were to take up to 30 times, it would be 10%. At 35 times forward earnings, that's 12 % of the market. It has a size problem.

13:26Ben Carlson:You would think if a company is growing this fast, why isn't it given a 40 times multiple? It should be, but because then it would be a$10 trillion company. It's already a$5.5 trillion company or whatever.

13:37Michael Batnick:Correct. All right. For anybody that thinks that we are in a stock market bubble, not an AI hyperscale, but just a stock market bubble. All right. Let's put a pin in the eye to trade. The S &P 500 is in a bubble. Oh, really? Duality research. Check this out. The distribution of forward PEs. I've never seen this before, and I love it so much. The distribution of forward PEs by, he shows it both by the percentage of stocks and by the percentage of market cap. So true, the percentage of market cap that is trading between 30 and 35 times earnings, not cheap, is 20%. But look at all of the percentage of stocks that are trading between 10 and 15 times, 15 and 20 times, 20 and 25 times.

14:26Michael Batnick:So 30 % of the index by name is between 10 and 15 times, 30%.

14:32Ben Carlson:So the majority of the market trade is below 20 times earnings.

14:35Michael Batnick:Just, yeah. Not by market cap.

14:38Ben Carlson:Right. But just number of stocks. Isn't that wild? It is. And if the AI trade blows up, it's not going to matter. The market will all go down. True. This is the K-shaped stock market. But this is the kind of thing where you said, if you were really concerned about it, if you were really worried about an AI bubble bursting, there's plenty of other places to go. Totally. Yes. A lot of places. All right. Exhibit A chart of the week. exhibit a for advice.com. You want to try a free trial? Matt and team did one on earnings growth. And we talked about this. It looks like, by the way, exhibit a,

15:10Michael Batnick:we speak about it all the time. It's, it's for advisors only.

15:13Ben Carlson:Yes. Yes. I think we had a few individuals try it. Like, Hey, this isn't for me. Like, yeah, of course it's for financial advisors. But look at the earnings, expected earnings this quarter just shot off, shot up like a rocket ship. It doesn't look like it's real. It looks like a COVID chart. So yeah, a lot of people could be saying to your point, Hey, DAs instead of don't ask. This is a one-time boost, a one-time shot in the arm. Like the market has already priced this in and it's going to move on.

15:40Michael Batnick:How about this? If these earnings come back to where they were, the market will fall 40%.

15:46Ben Carlson:How about this though? Mike Zicardi. Do you agree? Yeah. Yeah, it'd have to. Yeah. It'd go the other way. Mike Zicardi, Russell 2000 is seeing EPS growth 40 % this year, 38 % next year. For the small caps.

16:01Michael Batnick:I need to look inside these numbers. That's wild.

16:03Ben Carlson:Yes, we're going to have to put Charcot on this one because I'd never seen this. That small caps are going to have massive Bernie's growth.

16:08Michael Batnick:This has to be AI productivity. What else could it possibly be?

16:12Ben Carlson:Are we really seeing that much productivity growth for small caps? It could just be because…

16:16Michael Batnick:What could it be?

16:18Ben Carlson:I don't know because growth was so low in 2025. I don't know. I honestly have no idea. All right. I'm putting… You mentioned yields at the start. So yield… The 30-year treasury bond is up to like 5.1, 5.2%. Everyone keeps saying, this is the highest yield since the Great Financial Crisis. And oh boy, this is something. Just wait. Okay? So here's, I can't remember where I pulled this chart from. It shows. Highest since 2007. Okay. So treasury yields are up a lot. Do you know what TLT, so TLT is a 20 plus year government bond ETF. Do you know what the performance is this year for TLT? Inclusive of the yield.

16:56Ben Carlson:What is the performance this year, if you had to guess? because rates are up a lot. Down 3%. Yeah, it's down 2.5 % or so. Do you know what the performance was last year? It was up. With TLT. Yeah, it was up like 4 % or 5%.

17:07Michael Batnick:Yeah. Yeah, but that doesn't mean anything. But I'm saying that so - Nobody is saying the price of your bonds is the risk.

17:14Ben Carlson:But this to me is a boy who cried wolf thing. Show me a real impact of this and I'll believe you. But every time this happens, people freak out and then nothing happens. So I'm saying this is a boy who cried wolf. Sometimes the wolf comes. Do you know what the average long-term treasury yield is going back 50 years in the United States? What's the long-term average for the yield? Six. 6.2%. Today, it's 5.2%. So what? That's what I'm saying. So what? Stop telling me this is a crisis when nothing ever happens. I'm not saying this is a crisis. I'm sick of hearing about government debt and treasury bonds.

17:50Ben Carlson:In Japan, they're saying, Japan bond yields are up so much. Guess what? Stocks are at all-time highs. Where are stocks at all-time highs in the U.S.? Same thing. It doesn't matter if yields are higher. Until it does, show me a crisis then. I'm sick of hearing people complain about it. Show me. I'm sick of the boy who cried wolf stuff. Nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. Give me a crisis. Please.

18:13Michael Batnick:I really, really, really hope this isn't aged poorly. Now, listen, I am with you. Throw it in my face. I'm sick of hearing it. I am with you. I am firmly with you. But we are here to talk about the market. this is a potential risk.

18:26Ben Carlson:Yeah, and I'm saying, no, it's not. Okay, I hope you're right. All right, I want to talk about market timing. So on the Prof G podcast, last November, they had Ass about the Motor or not. And he's one of the smartest, if you listen to him in any interview, he's one of the smartest people alive in the markets probably.

18:42Michael Batnick:Easily.

18:42Ben Carlson:He's ridiculously smart. I remember I read one of his books, his books on valuations, like this four inches thick when I first, and a lot of it was over my head. But anyway, really smart guy. So he was saying, listen, I'm super, super worried about an AI bubble. And I'm raising cash for the first time basically in my life. And Galloway was like, man, because they work together at NMIU. He's like, I've never heard you sound this bearish before. I've never heard you like this. It's crazy. And he said, yeah, I'm telling people they should maybe raise cash because this is, and I've never done this before.

19:12Ben Carlson:So he was on the show again this past week for an update. And he's like, you know what? Did he say just kidding? He was like, you know what? This is why you don't time the market. I was wrong. And he, you know, he He owned up to it. And he said -

19:24Michael Batnick:When did he say that? When did he say raise cash?

19:27Ben Carlson:So this was last November, last Thanksgiving. I remember listening to it when I was down at Disney. And I was like, man, this is a really smart person. He sounds uber bearish. He's like, listen, this whole AI trade, everything is the AI trade. And when it blows up, there's nowhere to hide. I'm raising cash. And he said, I've never done this before. And then he said, you know what? Timing the market's hard. I was wrong. And I just, I want to remind people how hard it is to time this thing and how long this thing's been going on and how no one is going to get it perfectly. And if they do, they're lucky.

19:55Ben Carlson:They're pulling it out of their ass. It's not like a real analysis. You can't time these things.

20:00Michael Batnick:I'm not as susceptible to market opinions from smart people as I was in the past. I used to be very easily influenced, especially if somebody had a British accent that was bearish. Bowtie. Bowtie gets you every time. That was my kryptonite. If I could give investors, general investors, like people listening, one ability, it would be to listen to these smart people and just completely discount it.

20:24Ben Carlson:Yes.

20:24Michael Batnick:Just say, okay, these are intelligent people. They can't see the future. Intelligent people can't see the future. It's so hard. It's so hard because these demotor and whoever you listen to, they know 400 times as much as you do. Yes. And so you think that they're experts and therefore they can predict. It just is not the case.

20:44Ben Carlson:I learned this early too. When I first was in meetings, when I first joined the industry, I would listen to these people talk about the markets and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm never going to be as smart as these people. And then I saw what happened in the great financial crisis in the years afterwards. And I thought, Oh, none of these people knew what was going to happen. They've all been wrong. And that was like a real wake up call for me. Like, you're right. Like, don't take some analysis and tidbits from them, but they cannot predict the future. They can't.

21:07Michael Batnick:Yeah. And I'm also not discounting experts. No. Right. Like, like it's not just like Demona legitimately. These, some of these people that you listen to are brilliant and know so much. Okay. So I was listening to, uh, uh, Dwarkesh. I was listening to a podcast yesterday, the day before it ended on Spotify and it automatically started playing the new one. Right. So it was Dwarkesh Patel and, uh, he had like, um, he had somebody on that studies, uh, how, uh, my God, I can't even, I can't even describe what they were talking about. How, um, your, your genes change over like millennium, right? Like natural selection, how that all works.

21:45Michael Batnick:And these guys were speaking a different language. which that guy, Dwarkesh, could go so wide. It's amazing how many different things that guy can talk about. Anyway, I don't even know why I was listening to it, quite frankly. I didn't understand the single thing they were saying. It was just a sort of background noise. So this guy who was talking about how things change, he can't predict the future either. Right. And did you hear the fertility guy with Derek Thompson? Yes. And that guy can't predict the future. So those are legitimate experts. They know more about their field than anybody on the planet.

22:16Michael Batnick:and yet they're they're tossing they're tossing a coin and the reason is because they're human so

22:21Ben Carlson:michael burry uh there's another headline michael burry warns of stock crash as tech jump echoes 2000 peak he said history tells us that even if the party goes on for their week month three months or a year the resolution will be much lower prices why are you doing this we're getting into rare air so extreme the consequences will be unavoidable no matter where one hides kind of sounding similar uh spencer jacob at the wall street journal did this thing where he he plotted Burry's calls on the line of the market, right? Remember 2019, he was calling for a passive bubble. He said in 2019, he said, this will be ugly.

22:53Ben Carlson:In 2022, he said, this will be worse than 2008. Remember, he had the sell tweet in 2023. I just like to remind people of these, not to like shove it down someone's throat. Like, ha ha, you were wrong. But it's to your point, you can't listen to every one of these predictions.

23:06Michael Batnick:I would love to see what his returns look like. I'm guessing. I bet they've been okay. I'm guessing they've been not even, like if you lined up the things that we see about him in the newspaper versus his performance, you would say something is not tracking here. Because there's no way that he's lost 20 % a year. I mean, obviously, right? But it's like that with all those people. With Druckenmiller and Dalio and PTJ, you hear what they say on CNBC and you go, oh my gosh, these guys are so bearish.

23:33Ben Carlson:They're predicting another crash. And then you look at what they hold and it's not like that at all. They're making macro predictions, but they don't allow that to seep into their portfolio. That's the thing.

23:41Michael Batnick:Right. All right.

23:43Ben Carlson:Speaking of a passive bubble, good one from Goldman Sachs that I love is ownership of the US equity market. So I saw someone post a thing the other day saying passive index funds now make up 60 % of all fund assets. It's like, holy crap. Now look at for the total stock market. Passive mutual funds make up 6%. ETFs make up 10%, which is the same as active mutual funds at 10%. Passive mutual funds and ETFs make up less than foreign investors. So it's a tiny piece of the overall pie.

24:12Michael Batnick:But what if foreign investors are holding ETFs and index funds?

24:17Ben Carlson:I don't think it works like that. It doesn't work like that. They'd be included in that.

24:21Michael Batnick:Your point is taken. It's simultaneously, obviously, a gigantic part of the market. I mean, obviously, right? It's many, many, many, many trillions. But it's also, there's other things going on inside the stock market, aside from index funds. So people keep saying people have no decisions.

24:36Ben Carlson:There's no fundamentals involved with buying this stock. The biggest piece of the pie is direct household ownership. And guess who owns those shares? Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the founders of these companies. Are they ever selling them? And that's 40 % of the market. That's where most of that money is. It's people who work at these companies and own shares in the stock. They're not selling either.

24:56Michael Batnick:Here's, I think one of the things that is very legitimate about the changing structure of how the market is held and traded. back in the day, there was a lot of analysts, a lot more analysts than there are today, covering a bunch of different stocks, like mid cap stocks, small cap stocks used to have a lot of analyst coverage and they just don't anymore. And if nobody discovers these names, it is harder for them to trade on fundamentals, which is why I think a lot of the active managers have had such a hard time. It's like there can be value in these stocks, but they're just dead money because nobody's there to recognize the value.

25:29Ben Carlson:But all of these companies are going to be covered now because of AI. There's not going to be any more stones left unturned. Think about how much easier it'll be for an equity analyst to have a wider, cast a wider net in terms of the companies that they follow. Yeah, good point. Right? There's going to be no more, ah, no one pays attention to these companies anymore. That's a thing of the past. Equity research departments are going to cover every stock they can.

25:51Michael Batnick:All right, so speaking of AI, let's get to this email that we got.

25:53Ben Carlson:Okay. As you discuss your new porterhouse SMA strategy, I wondered to myself, could I ask AI to tell me about their momentum strategy just so I could skip all that pesky having to send Ritholt to my money and just get the expertise free from the machine. And then this guy sent us like whatever AI spit out. And I wanted to talk about this because this is going to be a thing where you'll be able to go to AI. And I'm sure that I think it was already, you know, public has something like this already. I'm going to create my own index and I'm going to hit a button and it's going to say trade it for me.

26:22Ben Carlson:And I'm going to create my own rules and I want this basket of stocks and I want it to do this and I want it to change this. Do it for me. That is definitely going to be a thing.

26:31Michael Batnick:Oh, yeah. But I think what's going to happen is you're going to create one of these systems,

26:36Ben Carlson:and then you're going to tinker. And then you're going to change this, and you're going to change that. Wait, that didn't work. Let's change this. Well, that didn't work. Take that out. And you're never going to be able to stop tinkering because it'll be there. There's no barriers to entry. And sometimes having strategies with relatively simple rules, and our strategy actually is not that simple. It's a lot that goes into it. But the hard part is just sticking with something. That's the thing. and i i think ai is going to just the barest entry being knocked down it's going to be impossible for people to stop tinkering with stuff like this depending on your personality totally for me absolutely i'm a tinkerer you know that so what do you think about these people who want to just all right i'm just going to replicate what you do i'll take i'll i'll get 75 of the way and i'll try to do it myself more power to you yeah sure why not experiment yeah go for it you can outsource trading systems and stock screens and all this stuff.

27:32Ben Carlson:But if you don't understand how a strategy works and why it was built.

27:36Michael Batnick:That's the hard part. It's like the portfolio construction. It's not necessarily, building a screen is not rocket science. I mean, there's, you know, not to discount how much work went into it, but it's the portfolio management and it's the decision-making and the behavior. And can you stick, you know, the stick-to-it-ness.

27:51Ben Carlson:And like understanding, guess what? This strategy is not going to work at some point. No strategy works all the time. There's going to be a good win rate in the stock market is maybe 55 or 60%.

28:02Michael Batnick:Oh, yeah. So we had somebody busting our chops about launching a momentum strategy after like an all-time performance run for momentum. It's just the top. And he was just busting balls. Because I responded, I said, we started building this in the winter. Like, I wish that this didn't happen. Because momentum, like anything else, is seasonal, right? It has its days in the sun, and then it has its periods where it sucks shit. And there's no doubt about it that momentum on wines are really painful. That's the nature of the beast. Yes.

28:29Ben Carlson:And you also have to figure out the position sizing of, well, how much of my portfolio is this going to be? Right? If you put all your portfolio in it, you're going to, it's going to be probably kind of painful. If you put a piece of your portfolio in it and you have compliments to it, that's a different thing. And that's, you're right. It's the portfolio management side of things. Anyone can create any screen they want these days. That's easy. Fair question though.

28:48Michael Batnick:So I want to stick with, I want to stick, we're going to skip this. I want to stick with some of the AI stuff because I think a couple of months ago, like the, the, my personal usage of AI has happened gradually than suddenly. And I was trying to think of a different phrase because it's so cliche, but it is true. So like maybe like a year and a half ago, I was thinking like, how exactly, how are you, how, how exactly are you using AI? And I mean, you Ben Carlos, I just mean like people that are talking about it so much, how are they using it? So I want to give an example of how I used it over the weekend.

29:19Michael Batnick:Howard Lindzen shared an article, AI is the new Netflix. And it was fairly technical. And I am not a technical person, especially when it comes to technology.

29:31Ben Carlson:I'm not going to lie. I read this piece. I still don't quite get the analogy. I did. Keep going. Okay, I don't get it.

29:36Michael Batnick:So if I understand it correctly, the internet was built, and Duncan can jump in here if this is a Duncan thing. The internet was built for download. It was like, and when streaming came along and it really disrupted the broadband availability, like I think things sort of buckled. We didn't have enough infrastructure. So we were built to receive information. AI, we are pushing it out. This is like an upload thing. So I think this article is about like how the system is going to evolve. So anyway, I asked Claude to break it down for me. And here's what Claude said. Back in 2008, video streaming was the thing that made people care about download speed.

30:17Michael Batnick:It ate bandwidth, drove everyone to upgrade their internet, and forced the cable fiber companies to rebuild their networks around it. O'Mallick, he's the author, and also the guy that wrote Broadband. This is how I found that book. O'Mallick's argument is that AI is now playing that same role, except it's flipping the direction. AI is the killer app of the next era, not because of what it downloads, but because of what it uploads. So I had never thought about it that way. And I said, hmm, let me ask Claude how our Porterhouse portfolio is positioned for this potential disruption, this potential theme.

30:51Michael Batnick:Now, obviously, this is not investment advice, okay? Duh. So we have Porterhouse and YCharts as a plugin. And so it pulled it directly. And it said, pulled the live book. Porterhouse is heavily exposed to this theme, but through a specific slice of it and not the slice, not the slice O'Malick actually emphasizes. So I said, hmm, okay. So it showed me the holding, the ticker, the weight, and where it sits in the thesis. So Sienna, Vertiv, and Amphenol, three of the bigger names in the portfolio. And it described what's going on here. And then it said to me, you have essentially zero exposure to the part of Ohm's thesis that's actually differentiated.

31:34Michael Batnick:Claude said his sharpest, least crowded point was the access layer structural split fiber, which is Verizon and AT &T, as well as structurally advantaged cable, Comcast and Charter. Porta House holds none of these. No telecom, no cable. So the portfolio is loaded on the crowded AI infra CapEx reading on the thesis. By the way, yeah. Is Claude taking shots at our portfolio? Momentum, by definition, especially when it's working -

32:02Ben Carlson:Hey, Claude, guess what? I'm glad I don't own AT &T.

32:06Michael Batnick:yeah when momentum works it is crowded by definition okay so that's that's not like

32:09Ben Carlson:because these aren't momentum names yet maybe they will if this thesis plays out

32:12Michael Batnick:okay so but but here's what claude said let me finish uh so the portfolio is loaded on the crowded ai infracapix reading of the thesis and has no position in the genuinely contrarian last mile angle that's not a criticism of the signal telecoms haven't had the momentum to qualify but it tells you the factor is expressing the consensus version of the theme, not the differentiated one. Not that you ask, but it is important, at least for me personally. One of the reasons why I love the strategy so much, not to make it sound too much like a commercial, but I can't ride winners. I've said this to you guys a million times.

32:46Michael Batnick:I don't have the ability to do it. It's not in my personality. I know how many stocks are terrible. And so when I have a winner, I take it. And Peter Lynch famously said, selling a winner and adding to a loser. Now I don't do that. I don't add to losers, but selling a winner and adding to losers, which is like the natural thing to do is like pulling out your flowers and watering the weeds and having a systematic strategy that doesn't do that for me personally is hugely beneficial.

33:16Ben Carlson:I'm the same way. I could not hold a stock for 500%. I sent you the quote yesterday. Howard Marks was like, there's two reasons you sell a stock because they go up and because they go down because they go down. You sell and they're up because you worry that they're going to go back down. And you sell the down because you worry they're going to go down even further. Exactly. Because momentum is it's a totally behavioral strategy. And that's why there's not a lot of money in these strategies to begin with. It's way easier to understand a value strategy. I'm buying a dollar for 50 cents or 60 cents.

33:44Ben Carlson:That's easy to understand. Momentum is not easy to understand like that. I do want to say Claude by far is the best stock market analyst there is for these LLMs. And it's not even close. So I'll take the year-to-date holdings for the S &P 500 and I will upload them to Claude and say, what's going on here? And it'll give me a sector breakdown, a stock breakdown. It's actually pretty unbelievable.

34:04Michael Batnick:So this brings us to what Ken Griffin said over the weekend. Like the work that I just described here that I did over the weekend, which took me all of, I don't know, like I was start to finish between reading the article and getting this in 10 minutes. That's a job. That might be multiple people's jobs. So Ken Griffin was talking about this, how this is going to impact financial services. And I want to play this and get your reaction, Ben. Really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.

34:44Michael Batnick:So these are not mid-tier white-collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high-skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, being automated by agentic AI. And I got to tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. like and and when you witness in your own four walls when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks it's like wow like that's the first time i've seen real impact in our four walls thoughts i did listen to this i agree with him it's it's

35:34Ben Carlson:kind of scary and depressing in ways the biggest question i have is it is ai doing jobs or is it doing tasks. And I think that's a big distinction. Dude, that's a job.

35:47Michael Batnick:What I just did over the weekend and what he is describing, and to his point, that's not like entry-level jobs. I mean, maybe the stuff that I was doing was. So it is certainly part scary and depressing. I mean, it really is. And of course, it's also super exciting.

36:02Ben Carlson:So what will put more analysts out of work, AI or index funds? Did Jack Bogle do it or is AI going to do it? Because you could make the case that index funds had a bigger impact fire and gasoline okay yes i i agree there is a lot of scary stuff with this and yet the unemployment rate is still four and a half percent dude we're so early so so to that point uh hold on what's the time sam 2027 before you can't say that anymore So, um, Gavin Baker did a, I don't know.

36:37Michael Batnick:He was at the Sohn conference talking about this and it's 25 minutes and I highly, highly, highly recommend it.

36:43Ben Carlson:I didn't listen to this yet, but I heard a bunch of people say it's, yeah, worth it.

36:46Michael Batnick:He makes you feel way better about the bubble, about like, he makes, whatever, just, just listen to it. Um, but Gavin said 10 basis points of the population are using these models. and there is a shortage of compute, what happens when it's 5 %?

37:05Ben Carlson:So he was saying like, it can't be a bubble if the demand outstrips the supply. Is that what he's saying?

37:10Michael Batnick:Yeah, he's basically saying like, this was his case for smoother for longer. But dude, it is so early.

37:17Ben Carlson:I was at a party a couple of weeks ago for like a March Madness party. And we were talking about, you know, how much do you actually use AI in your jobs? And I was talking about how I'd switch between Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT, depending on what I'm doing. and this one guy was like, what's Gemini? I've never heard of that before.

37:31Michael Batnick:So don't,

37:32Ben Carlson:that's most people though.

37:33Michael Batnick:Of course. Don't tell me about the unemployment rate today and I'm not predicting 10 % or anything like that but to look at the unemployment rate today and say AI is not disruptive is a joke and you're better than that.

37:43Ben Carlson:Do you, if you looked at the numbers of what's happening and this is still going on after it's been out for three or four years now, wouldn't you be surprised that the unemployment rate is still as low as it is given all the leaps forward that we've had?

37:56Michael Batnick:Yes, but it, it, It was invented three or four years ago. It has only just begun then.

38:04Ben Carlson:Here's the one thing that I think is impossible to predict in all this. So Alec Tantrowitz put this tweet out. This is incredible. AI is getting booed out of the stadium at any commencement address that's mentioned. So Eric Schmidt did a commencement speech at Arizona. And anytime he mentioned AI, the students booed.

38:20Michael Batnick:Oh, I love it.

38:21Ben Carlson:AI is a villain. And so the question is, what are the political ramifications? and like our company is going to get penalized. If they -

38:32Michael Batnick:We have to tax the robots.

38:34Ben Carlson:Yes.

38:34Michael Batnick:If for nothing else to make us feel like we're doing something. Yes. Because I don't know that anything can stop this, can slow this down.

38:41Ben Carlson:Because I think if we, you just look at what happened sentiment-wise after 2008 and none of those bankers went to jail, which is still beyond imagination. I don't know how that, how no one went to jail. You could draw a direct line from that,

38:53Michael Batnick:the lack of ramifications to where we are today.

38:57Ben Carlson:Definitely. So my question is, are politicians actually going to do something about it? Will companies be penalized if they have a mass layoff because of AI? Will there be a pen? And will you say, hey, your company gets a lower tax rate if you keep hiring people and don't lay them off because of AI? Like, you can't see, because some people just like, you know what, there's no use fighting it. It's inevitable. And I get that. But I also think you can't predict what the political ramifications of this are going to be because people hate this so much. Yeah.

39:27Michael Batnick:So that is a clear, you know, I know we keep talking about this. That is a scary part of it. All right. Potentially exciting part of it, although maybe scary too. So Brett Adcock, the founder of a humanoid robots company called, oh my God, what was the name of this company? Gosh, dang it. It doesn't matter.

39:46Ben Carlson:iRobot. So they have been live streaming robots sorting packages.

39:58Michael Batnick:They said our original goal was an eight-hour run. We wanted to run nonstop and fully autonomous. Since then, we made the decision to keep the party going. We're now over 48 hours of nonstop autonomous operation without a failure to perform the use case. This is uncharted territory. so uh the task is small package sorting the robot detects the barcode picks up the package and reorients its barcode face down onto the conveyor humans average around three seconds per package the robot is now around human parity uh i think it's still running um man oh man so this is one

40:30Ben Carlson:of those things that i think this is a double-edged sword of boy this is scary robots taking our jobs but i also think i think we need robots in this country so you talked about derek's podcast about the fertility crisis, right? That we're not, we're not having, we're not replacing enough. If a couple has one child, there's the replacement is not there for humans. So like eventually population is going to decline. We have, we're going to need robots to help take care of people in services. And we're, we, we have to have them.

40:58Michael Batnick:Otherwise this whole thing falls apart. Looks like they're coming.

41:01Ben Carlson:Uh, we were talking about, hang on, is a baby, would a baby boom be the most surprising thing in the next 20 years if we had a baby boom? Would that be the most surprising thing that could possibly happen. Oh my God.

41:10Michael Batnick:Imagine AI and robots make the world like this Nirvana state and everybody just has free time to procreate and replenish the population. Hilarious. Well done, Ben. All right. A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about, there was an article in the journal. Was it Greg Ip, who we liked, but he was making the, I think he was making the contrarian case that an AI slowdown would actually be fine. No, it wouldn't. So Torsten Slock showed AI is penetrating every corner of financial markets. What began as an equity market phenomenon has become a capital markets-wide transformation. AI now accounts for nearly half of all investment-grade issuance, 87 % of VC funding, and a growing share of high yield, underscoring how deeply the AI investment cycle has penetrated every corner of finance.

41:54Michael Batnick:If this stops, the music stops.

41:56Ben Carlson:Can I just say, though, that we have moved the goalposts a lot on this? Because at first it was, no, this is never going to work. And now it's like, oh, now it's working too well.

42:02Michael Batnick:Yeah.

42:03Ben Carlson:So I think we've moved the goalposts in some ways. So this is better than the alternative of we spent all this money and nothing happened.

42:09Michael Batnick:The, the, the top line numbers that are being reported out of Anthropic are like nothing we've ever, ever seen before. And, and in, when was the Max 7 and the Ag trade really in the shitter? It was when Sam Altman went on the podcast. Was that the fall? I can't even remember. It was over the fall. Sounds about right. And all these names got hit and Oracle was at the center because like, wait a minute. I don't think OpenAI's five-year,$300 billion commitment to Oracle is going to come to fruition. And now that has turned dramatically, both Oracle shares and the entire narrative, because the fundamentals are proving every doubt or wrong.

42:49Ben Carlson:So I can't – living in San Francisco in that area has to be so trippy because everyone who talks about this stuff is talking about the world changing at the fastest pace in history. if you hear the tech bros go on podcasts and talk about this stuff, we talk about AI and what it's going to do. They talk about it like it's the, you know, Nirvana is already here. But it's also the wealth piece. So this Didi on Twitter post, he said, the vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is worse than I've ever seen. So he said, over the last five years, a group of, say, 10 ,000 people at Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, have hit retirement wealth of above$20 million based on their shares in the company.

43:29Ben Carlson:Um, everyone outside of that group feels like they can work their well-paying jobs, less than 500 ,000 for their whole life and never get there. Uh, worse yet layoffs are in full swing, but this is funny. He goes to all these different people and why they're miserable because of this wealth. And one of them is like, good luck competing with someone from Anthropic who just cashed out their shares to buy a house. Right. But he said, the rich aren't particularly happy either. Uh, no one is shedding tears for them, but those who have made it experienced profound lack of purpose. Some have gone from less than$150 ,000 to$50 million in a few years with no ramp.

43:59Ben Carlson:It flips your life upside down. He said, some of them escape to New York to live life. Others start companies just because to win status points. They never imagined by age 30 they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the company. And they said, then do what? Right now, everyone wants to talk to me. If I sell, I will only have money. It has to be a dystopian, weird kind of place to live, is what I'm saying.

44:22Michael Batnick:There was a lot of people dunking on this, and rightfully so. I understand the dunks completely. He's totally on point. He's totally right. So from the outside looking in, that whole pocket of life is bizarre world. There is more to life than this, right? Okay. But if you are inside of that life and that is your life, all of the human emotions that he's describing are human. You need like one of the things that I find so incredibly satisfying and lucky about my path is that I hit rock bottom. I was unemployed for a long time and I had no career prospects and things were going incredibly bad for me.

45:07And I had a 15-year ramp to get to the point where I am today, which I never thought I

45:15Michael Batnick:would get to. And it has been, I still cannot believe the journey that I've been on and how lucky I am. And I think about it every second of every day for the most part.

45:25Ben Carlson:I wanted to talk about this later.

45:26Michael Batnick:If that happened to me overnight, like without the struggle and without like the gradual improvements and now I can do this and now I can do that and now I can do this and do this for my family and that, if that just happens overnight, it breaks your brain. And then living in society with your friends and your neighbors, when everything is so public, you become like, oh, that guy.

45:51Ben Carlson:Think about if you joined OpenAI two years later and you're more talented than someone else who joined Tours before you, but they're 10 times richer than you just because they happened to join the company before you. Is it because they -

46:02Michael Batnick:Yeah, that scrambles anybody's emotional compass. Is it because they're smarter than you

46:06Ben Carlson:or they're better than you or they're harder working than you? Maybe not. They might've just got lucky and timed it right. And so Clooney and Jon Hamm have talked about how they are happy that they found fame in their like later 30s and they struggled for a while before to get there because they're like, if I would've got it earlier, I would've been so screwed up. And sometimes waiting is, so I agree, the perspective thing. I just think it's, but I mean, again, imagine trying to compete for a house in that area. When these people who just got all these shares go, I don't care. I'm buying whatever house I can.

46:34Ben Carlson:I don't care if I pay more. I got$10 million.

46:38Michael Batnick:A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about the Three Kings book or not Three Kings, whatever it's called, with Coppola and Spielberg and George Lucas. And they each said when they made their monster, monster hits, they were depressed afterwards because - Yes.

46:50Ben Carlson:That was the thing I pulled out of the Spielberg thing that I was like, oh my gosh.

46:53Michael Batnick:Being on top of the mountain is not fun. It's climbing the mountain. And that's like the whole purpose of life. But he also talked about how Spielberg started working with David Geffen.

47:03Ben Carlson:And David Geffen was a billionaire. And Spielberg at that time was only worth$600 million. And he's like looking up at, this is the guy who's created the best, some of the best movies in history. And he's like, why don't I have a billion dollars? It's a natural human emotion.

47:17Michael Batnick:So you can't, you just, it just, if you, the listener, If anybody was in these shoes, these people are all human beings. This is just what happens.

47:26Ben Carlson:Yes, but I agree with you.

47:27Michael Batnick:And I'm very happy. I think everybody reading this is like, thank fucking God that I'm not, that's not my life. Because that sounds miserable.

47:34Ben Carlson:But you're right. I do think the one thing is the way that you break that cycle is just gratitude. Like I'm better off than I was before. I don't care if I'm not better off than that person. I'm better off than I was, than I ever thought possible.

47:46Michael Batnick:Yeah. And that's hard.

47:47Ben Carlson:Five, seven, 10 years ago. That's hard.

47:48Michael Batnick:But yeah, that is the way.

47:49Ben Carlson:All right, I want to talk about a discussion I had at the post office. What? About inflation. So there's a post office right next to my office, essentially. And I'm sending out books to people. I'm sending out signed copies of my book. And I went there two or three times in one week because I had this big batch of books. And the guy at the post is this really large guy, like muscular, like built, you know, kind of guy. His name is Cletus. Okay, so I get to talking a little bit. He goes, why do you keep sending out so many books, man? Because you have to tell him, what are you sending? Oh, it's a book.

48:18Ben Carlson:He said, are you an author or something? I said, yeah, I am. And I wrote a book. He said, well, what are you writing a book about? I said, well, it's about investing in markets. And he said, let me ask you something. You still like Micron here? He goes, what do you think about everything that's going on right now? And I was like, what do you mean? Go keep going. And he's like, just, he's like, you, are you familiar with Weimar, Germany? Hyperinflation? People carrying wheelbarrows full of cash down the street? He's like, I kind of think that's where we're heading. And I said, okay.

48:51Michael Batnick:You should have given him a signed copy of your book and said, read this.

48:55Ben Carlson:What I told him is, all right, man, listen, I don't want to debate you on this. This is a very articulate guy. I think he went down kind of a crypto rabbit hole on this stuff. And I said, I'll tell you what, next time I come in with the next batch of books, I'm going to give you a copy and I want you to read it and let me know what you think. Here's my thinking on this. I think having sky high inflation this decade was one of the most surprising psychological outcomes, I totally underestimated what it would do to people. And I think for him, it was all about inflation and how he's like, inflation is basically ruining the country.

49:27Ben Carlson:And I think we've all been reading and writing about behavioral psychology for 10 years now or something. I underappreciated the psychological impact of inflation on people. It was a doozy. Yes. And I think that's going to... Remember we talked about what is the long-lasting impact of the COVID pandemic going to be? Because the Great Depression caused all these depression babies who wouldn't save too much and wouldn't spend. They're frugal or whatever. The outcome of the COVID pandemic is however long the sentiment from high inflation lasts. I think it's going to have a longer tail than most people realize.

50:07I agree.

50:09Michael Batnick:This is interesting. Julian Klomoczko tweeted a chart of Bitcoin and software going back to 2021. And some of these charts are hard to eyeball when you squeeze the Y-axis and make them different. So I put them into Y-charts and I stacked the charts. And yeah, they do look directionally the same. Not the same at all points in time, but just eyeballing this. They look like they move together, no?

50:35Ben Carlson:It's pretty wild that it goes that far back. That's a pretty long time for the correlation, right?

50:40Michael Batnick:Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, again, if you zoom in on different periods of time, maybe they diverge a little bit, but zoom out and they sure look like the same chart. All right. Anyway, he said, so it's Bitcoin and software, IGV, digital gold, monetary hedge, decentralization, global liquidity, all with question marks. Censorship resistance, portfolio diversification. Turns out Bitcoin was just a software stock. I wonder what it would look like in the 2017 to 2021 era though.

51:10Ben Carlson:because one of the things that people talk about with bonds and stocks, people are saying now that bonds are broken because they're more correlated with stocks. But I think in a diversified asset, you want something that's going to change its stripes. And sometimes it's correlated with this asset and sometimes it's not. So eventually Bitcoin won't be correlated with software stocks anymore. It'll be correlated with something else.

51:29Michael Batnick:You would think. But in 2017, Bitcoin was not an asset class. Like it was, what was the market cap? It was, you know, it was tiny. Anyway, not so that this will forever and always be the thing, but I just said, is it really? Is it really that simple? Did I really own that much software? All right.

51:43Ben Carlson:I want to talk about the biggest inequality, wealth inequality of this decade, what I think it is. I can't remember where I pulled this from, but it's the Economic Innovation Group. They look at the new homeowner penalty. So it's existing homeowners, the proportion of their income that they spend on housing costs versus people who are now buying new homeowners. And existing homeowners are basically the lowest they've been since 1990. What is it? Housing costs as a percentage of income. Got it. Okay. So if you owned a home, you refinance into a 3 % mortgage, your housing costs as a percent of your income are about as low as they've been over the last, you know, how many years has it been?

52:18Ben Carlson:It's been 12 years since 1990, right? 15 years? Over the last, whatever, 35 years. But new homeowners has just shot up like a rocket and paying way more. This is a big source of wealth inequality. And we keep asking, where's all the money coming from? Where's all the money coming from that's going into all this stuff? Guess who has more disposable income? people who owned a home with a way lower price and a low mortgage rate. Think about how much more disposable income those households have. And that's a big proportion of the country.

52:51Michael Batnick:So this is what we were just talking about earlier with gratitude or whatever. I had a thought, and this is not something that I spent a lot of time thinking about, but I am a new homeowner. And my friend who lives across the street, I probably paid, I don't know, three times for this house what he paid for his house whenever he bought it. And I'm like, that MF-er. All right. This is, you know, but - That's right. You're in the new homeowner thing. Yeah. I'm in no position to complain and I'm not. Right. But it does suck.

53:21Ben Carlson:Yeah. And it is a huge source of like the K-shaped economy.

53:25Michael Batnick:Is the new homeowner versus the existing homeowner. Huge.

53:27Ben Carlson:Yes. You're right. Yes. Yeah. Because there's people now who are moving into neighborhoods who are like five times richer than other people who live there. but their housing costs are way higher.

53:38Michael Batnick:Yeah, it's weird.

53:39Ben Carlson:Right?

53:39Michael Batnick:It's definitely weird.

53:40Ben Carlson:It's a bizarre thing.

53:41Michael Batnick:All right, I want to give a public service announcement. I'm sure we've spoken about this at 7.0 over the course of the show. There was a large demand for these basically publicly traded companies that were privately held. So SpaceX, OpenEye, Anthropic, Anderra, like all these giant names. And the way that investors would access them was with something called a special purpose vehicle. And there were special purpose vehicles inside of special purpose vehicles. It was like a Russian doll where you don't really know who this primary source of liquidity was because the companies have, in some cases, in many cases, no oversight into who's selling what shares to who.

54:24Michael Batnick:So imagine you thought that you were a shareholder in OpenAI or SpaceX, and you're like licking your chops to find out that it goes public and you don't even own the stock. Could you imagine the nightmare fuel? So anyway, for people that are thinking or working with an advisor or asking somebody, hey, can you get me in? Just be very, very, very careful.

54:45Ben Carlson:Well, this story from the Wall Street Journal says people are freaking out. It's like realizing you don't have the title of your home as the market rips higher. Yeah, scary, scary, scary.

54:55Michael Batnick:This is also scary. Blue Owl has seen, and Flo is at this from the FT, Blue Owl has seen inflows at its flagship credit investment fund for retail investors all but dry up. The group's near$20 billion Blue Owl credit income fund reported just$26 million in new investments on May 1st, about a 50 % decline from the prior month and a 95 % decrease from this time a year ago. So at this time last year, the fund attracted nearly$500 million a month. From$500 million a month to, what did it say,$26? Whew.

55:26Ben Carlson:Can you imagine being an advisor trying to talk your clients into Blue Owl right now, though, with all the headlines. Yeah, that's got to be a special group of advisors. All right, I got a personal finance question for you.

55:36Michael Batnick:Go ahead.

55:37Ben Carlson:So I was home in Traverse City this weekend for a soccer tournament. That's where my parents live in Northern Michigan. More on that later. And it gets me every time. I go in the bathroom and I wash my hands and I go to the soap dispenser and it's soapy water that comes out. And my father, when the soap gets to the end and there's a little soap left to keep it going, he fills it with water, okay? my dad did not grow up with a lot. He grew up in a tiny house with four other siblings. I look at the house now and I go, I, how did they have five kids in there? Like he did not come from, uh, not even, you know, I wouldn't even call it like middle-class back.

56:09Ben Carlson:Right. So he, he came from not a lot. He has those few frugal, that frugal mindset still is with him. And some of these things, I'm like, dad, you can afford this stuff. Why don't he, it's for him. It's not like a money thing. It's a principal thing. Yeah. So I was thinking like, what's something in your life that you're still, cause you can't spend some things you just out of principle, you go, no, I'm going to be cheap on this. So what are you still cheap on? Because I was thinking about this. I'm like,

56:32Michael Batnick:what does Robin say I'm cheap on? So I went the other way. I grew up, I'm not even going to pretend that there was poverty because it definitely wasn't. But I had restrictions. Like, I remember my mother saying that I couldn't order like chicken parm at the diner. And that like sort of scrambled my brain a little bit. I was like, why not? Why can't I just get chicken parm? And it was like, because it's$20. For me,

56:50Ben Carlson:when we'd go to Arby's,

56:51Michael Batnick:I'd have to get the junior roast beef, but I wanted a regular roast beef. So I went the other way. Like my limitations in terms of what I could buy as a child or my parents could afford caused me to like overspend. So I am like the opposite of frugal. I don't, I, and it's not because I make good money now. Like even when I made a lot less, I just didn't care about saving. So I was, I was always a natural overspender, but I'm sure there are things that I am cheap about.

57:17Ben Carlson:Like for me, for instance, I'm looking my leases up on my Explorer, I drove Ford Explorer. I'm looking at new SUVs now and I I'm looking at the prices and big time sticker shock me. I, I think I will never be able to buy a luxury vehicle. I can't afford it. I don't think I ever, I will never principally. I will never, because I'm an, I'm an A to B guy. As far as vehicles go, I think I will never be like one of those people that could spend a ton of money on a car. I just, my, my internally won't allow me to do it.

57:46Michael Batnick:Oh yeah. No, I get it. The sticker shock is something. For me, I would say it's probably takeout food. Now, I've gotten over it, but it still pisses me off. I still give Robin a hard time when she gets a salad for$27. I'm like, are you f***ing kidding me? And she'll always say, why is this a thing? I'm like, because it's ridiculous. It's a salad.

58:04Ben Carlson:But I think this is one of the reasons that fire people get so much flack from everyone else because that thing with my dad, growing up, his parents were the Depression era people. It stands out more if you're a fire person now because more people were cheap like that in the past, cheap, frugal, whatever you want to say. And now you stand out if you're that way because not many people are anymore.

58:24Michael Batnick:Yeah.

58:25Ben Carlson:It's not as prevalent as it once was. Anyway.

58:28Michael Batnick:All right, Ben, I got it. I have another bone to pick with Apple, if you could believe it or not. All right. I have a, I have a speakers in my backyard. I have to go into the Sonos app to change the volume. I can't, I can't use the volume on my phone to control the speaker,

58:46Ben Carlson:the speaker volume is that some shit that's a sonos problem not an apple problem don't blame apple for that apple blocks it why wait tell me why because the sonos app is awful i have sonos as well it's terrible that's a sonos problem not an apple problem i'm pretty sure that apple will not allow you to do it i don't know i think this the sonos app is just really they made a change like two years ago and it pissed everyone off because it stopped working all right i'm i'm

59:12Michael Batnick:I'm a new to Soto, so.

59:15Ben Carlson:Okay. I have a love-hate relationship with youth sports. I've talked about it here before. The whole, like, I have some friends who, we have both my daughters in club soccer, and they travel a little bit, and my friends, like, talk about it like I'm an idiot. Like, I can't believe anyone would ever do that. Like, at, like, age seven, these kids have to start doing tryouts, which seems, like, not even fair. Like, why do we have to have kids? And, like, you're on the best team, and you're on the second best team. You're on the third best team, which is actually the worst. Like, and then you have to travel to these places, and there's games all weekends.

59:42Ben Carlson:And like, we went to a tournament in Traverse City this weekend. There was 35 soccer fields all going on at once. 35? 35 fields. There's one road that goes into this place to park. So the parking was an absolute nightmare. We're dealing with lightning delays and rain. And, you know, then it got hot. And it's like, you know, we traveled two and a half hours to get there. It's like, why do we do this? and then my little princess Kate she's 8 years old just turned 9 and the very first game was really close we were down 2 to nothing then we scored and tied 2 to 2 and you know the only people watching these games are of course parents and grandparents so there's 20 people on the sideline and my daughter kicked in the winning goal basically as time expired which doesn't happen in soccer and she's not the star player you know she's not the one that like scores all the goals and I saw the smile on her face and that was like oh this is why we do it this is when it clicks like oh the look on her face like I don't care if they win or lose.

1:00:39Ben Carlson:I don't care if they score or they don't score. I just care that they try hard. But when they're happy, that's why you do it. Because they're so happy. It was like the crate, like she scored and then they blew the list like that's game. And it was like, usually you don't have like a buzzer beater in soccer, you know? And then they went on and won the championship for their thing. And like the smile on her face was like, oh, this is why we do this.

1:00:57Michael Batnick:Amazing.

1:00:57Ben Carlson:Because it makes your kid smile.

1:00:58Michael Batnick:I still wouldn't go. That's great.

1:01:02Ben Carlson:Anyway.

1:01:02Michael Batnick:That's great.

1:01:03Ben Carlson:All right. Recommendation.

1:01:04Michael Batnick:By the way, I got a few emails. The reason, so the reason, I had a few people email me about me leaving the parents, the flag football chat. They said, Michael, just mute your phone. I said, hey, were you not listening? I muted the conversation. Apparently, if there are non-iPhone users in the group chat, they sneak through and ding your phone.

1:01:25Ben Carlson:Darn Andrew people. So did you leave the chat?

1:01:27Michael Batnick:Of course I left the chat.

1:01:28Ben Carlson:Okay. Did Robin give you flack about it? Like, hey, I saw you left the chat.

1:01:34Michael Batnick:No, no, no. Well, people were making fun of me in the chat.

1:01:38Ben Carlson:So Robin was like, I'm so embarrassed. I think you come out looking cool on that, though. Okay, all right. Recommendations. Speaking of the whole gratitude thing, I think I listened to the best podcast of the year this week. And I hear many people talk about it, but Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson have a podcast called Where Everyone... Yes, isn't that crazy? So Woody Harrelson barely comes on, but Ted Danson interviews celebrities. And so there was a podcast this week with Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, and Harrison Ford. Oh, man. Oh, my God. It was awesome. What's the name of the show? Where Everybody Knows Your Name, I think.

1:02:13Ben Carlson:Everybody knows something like that.

1:02:14Michael Batnick:I'm going to find it right now. I don't know that.

1:02:16Ben Carlson:Maybe he's been on it before. I don't think I've ever heard Harrison Ford on a podcast before. And as a guy who's quite possibly the biggest actor of the past, arguably of the past 50 years, maybe one of the most important of the past 50 years, you've seen him on... interviews before. He's very self-deprecating. He hates talking about himself. He hates talking about movies. But he was with two other, you know, really big actors talking about the craft. And I think Harrison Ford might be the coolest guy alive.

1:02:44Michael Batnick:I can't wait to listen to it.

1:02:46Ben Carlson:It is. And like him, he's he drops F-bombs a lot, which is kind of funny. He sounds like a guy that you just love to have a beer with. But his whole thing is he hates talking about himself. He could have the biggest ego in the world, but he talks about how grateful he is for like and how lucky he was. Well, he was lucky.

1:03:00Michael Batnick:He was, he was, he was Brad Pitt in once upon a time in Hollywood.

1:03:03Ben Carlson:Yes. He was a carpenter.

1:03:04Michael Batnick:He was the guy building celebrities houses on the roof, probably smoking a cigarette, looking all cool with his shirt off.

1:03:11Ben Carlson:Yes. Easily one of the coolest

1:03:13Michael Batnick:guys ever.

1:03:14Ben Carlson:Yes. Easily. And he, so he, but he has this, he has this aura of gratitude. It's like, that's how you find happiness with success is you have gratitude. So the other one I'm watching is Marty, Marty life is short on Netflix. So it's a Martin short documentary. So I've now seen the John Candy one recently. Steve Martin had a great documentary. And all these kind of intersect because they knew each other. And the Martin Short one on Netflix, it's not that long. It's like an hour and 40 minutes. And same thing. He is a very grateful guy for what he has and all the success he has. And he seems like well-grounded and it's great.

1:03:43But just the old stories of Eugene Levy

1:03:46Ben Carlson:and Martin Short and Dan Aykroyd and John Candy and Catherine O 'Hara and Gilda Radner, all these people coming together at the same time in their 20s to create comedy. It's, anyway, really like, I've read his book before and I just really like his outlook on life. Very cool. Both of those guys.

1:04:03Michael Batnick:All right. I was hesitant to recommend the show because it is extraordinarily dark. All right? It is not an uplifting show and it's quite graphic. It's called Half Man. It's on HBO. It's a miniseries. But you think I would like it? I'm pretty sure you would like it. Okay. It's by this guy, Richard Gad, who did Baby Reindeer, which was a phenomenon. I didn't see that show. I've never heard of it. Here's a description. When Niles' estranged brother, Ruben, shows up at his wedding, it leads to an explosion of violence that catapults us back through our lives from the 80s to the present day. And it is intense.

1:04:39Michael Batnick:It's something.

1:04:41Ben Carlson:Okay. But it's a miniseries. Six episodes? Six episodes. You can sign me up for that. It's a strong wreck for me. But yeah, it's graphic.

1:04:49Michael Batnick:Very graphic. Okay.

1:04:51Ben Carlson:All right. Stock market check. Stock market's down again. good we could use a correction yeah i always say this we could though

1:05:00Michael Batnick:well i don't say we could use a correction when we're in one that's true um when we're in a correction i say please stop this isn't fun all right animal spirits at the compound news.com thank you for the emails thank you for listening we'll see you next time

1:05:27Michael Batnick:Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.