There Are Too Many Rich People (EP. 421)

24:54That's right. You, you have a, you have a big mudroom. This is the trade-off you've made of the jackass who built my house, built a, built a garage so narrow that you can't fit a car in there. You could probably fit a toy truck in there. Well, definitely not a big truck, right? So my point I'm trying to make is I've seen three-car garages, and people have their garages open where they're doing stuff, in the summer especially, where they have so much stuff that they can literally fit one car into a three-car garage. Yeah. Because their stuff just surrounds it. Yeah. And this is what you're up against if you're betting against the U.S.

25:24economy. People who have three-car garages full of so much stuff that they would rather park their car or truck in the driveway than, like, have less stuff. Right? Alright, last week, this is my first foray into this. I teased it at the beginning. Rich people who don't feel rich. I wrote a blog post about this as well, and I had a guy who reached out and said, alright, I'm going to get a lot of heat for this on Twitter, but I'm going to share anyway. And so he shares all of his stats, and he gives me all of his money. He said he makes a base of$300, and he's got all these different bonuses. I have a quarterly bonus, an annual bonus.

25:57He must be a software salesman or something, because it's all kinds of bonuses. But he says him and his wife make like$600 ,000. and he walks all his expenses. He's got really high student loans. They pay like five grand a month, but he gives me his mortgages, car payments, utilities, gym, apps, food. What stands out in here? All this stuff. Well, he pays$500 a year for a bug guy. He has a dog, but here's the thing. He also has a rental mortgage. He owns a rental house and he pays a property manager for that. So he says, listen, I make 600K a year. I have a rental property and then I put away like 60 grand a year between investment accounts.

26:33You can see how it feels tight even as I approach 600K because of my wife's and my student loans. And we have five kids. Five kids, obviously. Bro, you're saving$62 ,000 a year in investment accounts. That's the thing. So I think. This person's doing great. I understand they might not feel like Donald Trump, but$62 ,000 a year in investment accounts. Yeah. Plus he owns a rental property. So I think that that's the idea that I think people had this. so this is the one that got me. So he said, every year I do my own tree maintenance, chemicals, lawn care, pesticides, mulching, and that's a decent lump sum.

27:09I think maybe there's this idea that like the lifestyles of the rich and famous that like once you hit a certain point, like you just pay somebody to do everything for you. And that's not really realistic. Listen, if you own, I think if you own another house, whether it be a vacation property or rental house, like you're wealthy. If you have the ability to own two properties. Yeah, this person has money. Wait, but he talked about doing his own stuff, and I just wanted to bring this back to myself because that's what I like to do here. Of course. Listen, as a man of the people, I don't have a big mudroom like you, so we realized our mudroom was way too small, and as opposed to trying to reconfigure me to do it, we decided to get a locker set for our— because our kids' sports stuff was just out of control, right?

27:52The shoes and the cleats and the bags and backpacks and coats and everything. So I got some lockers on Wayfair, and I probably could have just paid the Wayfair. I don't know what you pay them to assemble it for you, but it's these huge lockers. You know how they look, right? One for each kid. We have three kids. So my dumb ass is in the garage last night because we're going to put them in our garage because we don't have enough room in our mudroom. And I'm putting it together, you know, with an Allen wrench and a screwdriver for these huge things. And I'm sweating my ass off because it's 90 degrees out and I'm in the garage.

28:25And sometimes there's trade-offs in life where you have to do some stuff yourself. You can't pay somebody to put together a Wayfair. chest. That's beyond the pale. Right? You just have to do it and suck it up. It took me forever to open the box and put everything up. And sometimes you just have to do stuff yourself. And today I feel like I have like a, I don't know what the, you know, carpal tunnel or something from doing turning stuff. But, um, on the, on the, on the rich people stuff. Yeah. It depends where you live. I feel like that's the thing. That's, that's all. That's responsible something out from so many people.

28:58We're always talking past each other. $600 ,000 in one place, you could live like a king and$600 ,000 in another place. You could, it just depends. Yeah. Everything is relative, right? It's a lot of money wherever you live. Okay. Let's be real. It is. But relatively speaking, it might not be. And that's the reality of life. So here's, here's one that I will give people that, um, and sometimes maybe you and I are too harsh on people that make a lot of money, and it is good to see both sides. But I think there is a certain level you reach where you get that level, and it feels like you're getting screwed.

29:32So Bloomberg did this thing. They did an analysis of financial aid data from 50 selective colleges. So they're looking at some really good schools here. And they show that in many cases, middle class families making between 100 and 300 earn too much to qualify for meaningful aid, but too little to afford college out of pocket. They said the squeeze starts at 150K when families are expected to fork over 20 % for tuition. At$270K of income, families are expected to pay about$61 ,000 a year. Most schools cut off financial aid at about$400 ,000 of year of income. And they have this graph here that shows.

30:05And so you can think, if you're whatever, however you want to say upper class or right next to upper class, like if you just hit that level and then you get no help at all, because below those levels, you get a ton of help. Like the average discount for college from the sticker price, Ron Lieber did this, is like 50%. No one pays sticker except for like international students and rich people. And if you are just at that threshold of being rich but not like super rich, I'm sure I can see going, geez, I'm getting hosed here. So I think I'm actually very empathetic to people with money and the realities that having money is expensive.

30:40Right? Like I'm, I don't, I love, I love success. It's a funny way to put it, having money is expensive. It is. It's true. It is. I love success. I celebrate it. I don't begrudge these people. However, I don't want to hear any complaining. Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, like nobody wants to hear that shit. Because this palace, whatever problems these people have, palace and comparison, anybody with$60 ,000 household income would trade their problems for their problems. So I don't want to hear it. That's the thing. You can't act like a victim. Yeah, I totally understand. You can say like, listen, it's not as good as people think it is, but you can't say like - Keep that shit to yourself.

31:09Yes. That's my, yes, that's the point. All right. All right, I just want to shout this out. My jet ski insurance went down by$105. You just must be a good jet ski driver, huh? That's a lot, no? That's not bad. All right. So I threw this - What's the depreciation schedule on a jet ski? I top-ticked the shit out of my jet ski. What does that mean? I bought it at the very peak of the market. I can get - Oh, yeah, that's right. I can get a new jet ski now for what I still owe on my four-year-old jet ski. Oh, because there was like a shortage of supply and - Yeah, happens. Yeah, whatever. Okay. So here's a math problem that I asked ChatGPT to solve for me.

31:51I said, if$4 million represents 5 ,000 % growth of X, what is X? And now I'm thinking it might be like, well, if you could just do this at the ChatGPT, how is anybody going to learn anything? Right? And it spelled out the equation and how you do it in very simple CFA-like terms and magic. This is the stuff I can't wait for my kids. When they have a question, I want to help them through it, but I also want to like put it into this and have them show the steps. But so that's the thing. Like there's a lot of, like remember the show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Right, yeah. There's a lot of stuff where like you might know the answer, but like solving for it and learning and like teaching is really difficult.

32:32It's magic. I really do think AI tutors are going to be like a huge, huge help to young children. Especially people who can't, families who can't afford a tutor or don't have time, the parents don't have time to help their kids, I think it's going to be wonderful for those people. All right, let's talk about the whole pay package thing. You talked a little bit about this, but I feel like the resounding conclusion already from everyone in the tech field is just, listen, Facebook is going to win. They're spending the most on AI engineers. All the good AI engineers are going there. Mark Zuckerberg is cutthroat.

33:07He's going to win at all costs. And Apple is screwed. Do you agree that that's kind of the consensus now? Yes. Yes. and I feel like people are making conclusions way, way too far in advance and way too soon. Listen, are there better odds on this happening? Yes. I'm just thinking through the human nature aspect of this, of what happens to all the other employees at Facebook that go, wait a minute, you're paying these 12 people this much money, and our department's getting a fraction of that? Like, are we sure this is going to go? Like, remember those super teams, the NFL? Remember that one year the Eagles got like 10 Pro Bowlers?

33:48Oh, yeah. The Sean Jackson, Michael Vick team. Those guys. Is there a chance that something like this happens at Facebook where it's like, hey, we assembled the dream team, but everyone has different agendas and they've already made a bunch of money. And is there a human nature component where this just goes wrong? No. That's all I'm trying to consider. You think, no, it's, these people are robots. It's fine. Perhaps. But where are they going to go? They're still getting the best pay package at Meta. But is giving someone the best pay package really the best? I don't know. That's the question I'm asking.

34:19The other thing is, I'm just, no one's giving up the smartphone for your Apple smartphone, right? And the AI has to get to you somehow. Why is Apple still not the best way to do it in some form? Maybe they're not going to extract as much value as they did from the App Store. But even if Apple's behind on AI, I think pouring the dirt on their grave seems a little premature. That's all that I'm saying here. All right. I think that - I think people are jumping to conclusions before anything has happened yet. My naive opinion on the situation from things that I read is that Apple corporate culture is just nothing like these other companies.

34:57They are set in their ways. It's very rigid. They're not innovative. They're not fun. So it's hard to pour dirt on the grave of the greatest company of all time that has a$3.5 trillion market cap. That's all I'm saying. But they're not. I mean, history would tell you this happens all the time. Yeah, but they're not growing. They haven't grown for years, and it doesn't look like they're in the game at all. So the only reason why you would say it's premature to pour dirt on their grave is just to be contrarian, because there's no signal that they're doing anything. Fair, but who has made the best hardware of the last 30 years for everything?

35:35Yeah. The AirPods. Hardware is not the game anymore. But you're going to need to deliver the AI through good hardware. And by the way, their only growth channel is software. But isn't, I mean, maybe that you just say, hey, like the hardware is the commodity. It doesn't matter. But somehow in the transition period, the AI is going to have to be delivered to us somehow. If you're going to have your own AI assistant, you're going to need the hardware for it. Well, if Johnny Ive and Sam Altman unveil something that is as mind-breaking as they might be working on, then it might be time to worry about Apple.

36:08But yeah, no, listen, they're fine. All right, so Visual Capitalist did this thing, like, what are people asking chat GPT? And nearly one-third is software development questions. It's interesting. They said the biggest gainer, though, is economics, finance, and tax, up by more than three times in the past year. And then the second ones are like AI learning and history. And so I'm sure if you compared this to Google, this is a way more highbrow level of what people are looking for from this thing. It's just interesting to think about the stuff that people are asking. It's like, it's not the junky stuff that you ask Google.

36:43But the funny thing is, most people probably ask more junky stuff than they do highbrow stuff. The average person, sure. Yeah, right. All right. Jensen Wang was on MSNBC on Morning Joe. I don't know if you saw any of this interview. Uh-uh. He did this whole thing on AI and just how, listen, the people who use AI are going to be the ones that thrive. He said, it's not likely that you lose a job to AI. You're going to lose a job to somebody who uses AI. And you probably say like, oh, that's what the guy who's developing AI would say. But I just think that, and I think you're on the team like AI is going to steal everyone's job and we're all going to be doing nothing.

37:24What? A little bit. That's kind of your corner. Dude, that's not a little bit. AI is going to steal everyone's job. I don't know. No, I'm not. AI is going to steal your girl. So, but here's the thing. I keep thinking about all this stuff that we've gotten in the past 20 years or whatever, 25, 30 years, that has made us way more productive and way more efficient. Internet, email, Zoom calls, smartphones. All this stuff has made us way more efficient than we ever could have been before. And all it does is make us work more. Right? It hasn't made us work less at all. Exactly, because now there's so much more time to work now.

38:00This is what AI is going to do. There's going to be steps that you take with AI that you never would have taken before. People are going to be checking every single email, every single presentation. Dude, it's great for my ADD. I love it. Give me more. But AI is going to do the same thing. It's going to make us more efficient, and it's also going to make us work more. Good. I love work. That's my conclusion. All right, let's go on to crypto. What do you got here? All right, a few things. Bitcoin is$2 trillion. Does anyone care? I mean, I know some people care deeply, but. I feel like we've kind of moved on from the market cap thing of it.

38:38It's kind of, so you did this chart here. It's kind of crazy that Bitcoin is the same market cap as silver. Right? It's bigger than levered loans. It is probably going to pass U.S. small cap equity. It's$2.4 trillion. Small caps are$3 trillion. I consider it like one of the big tech stocks. Once all those companies started hitting trillion dollars, people stopped worrying and caring about their market caps, right? Yeah, when they hit a big round number and NVIDIA hit 4 trillion, we celebrated or yay, fun. But I feel like people don't care as much as they used to. When Apple hit a trillion dollars, it was enormous news.

39:14Yeah. And then you get used to it. I feel like maybe that's how it's happened to Bitcoin. It's also crazy, though, that CryptoX Bitcoin is 1.4 trillion. I just keep coming back to the idea that so many people, even in crypto, thought, well, Bitcoin's not the thing. It's everything else. But Bitcoin really is the thing. Why can't there just be another Bitcoin? Was like a dumb thing people said. Yeah, I'll just make another one. Yeah. So we talk a lot about, and Balchunas is the good at this and his team, about showing the data with IBID and all of the other crypto ETFs. And I think they're about to hit$100 billion, which is wild.

39:54There's just, there's still a lot of demand for Bitcoin. And it's not just coming from ETFs. Bitwise has a chart showing corporate Bitcoin adoption. Quarterly Bitcoin holdings up and to the right. And of course, most of this is strategy, but there's others. Mara has. But this is the thing that you can, this is the innovation Michael Saylor did. He got other companies to do this. Like him doing it, got other companies to do it. And in turn, increased the demand for Bitcoin. Yeah. Like you and I saw him in Miami speaking at Future Proof. Yeah. And some of the things he said were legitimately insane.

40:28And Bob Pisani was interviewing him. And it's like, it sounds like a person they pulled off the street to talk about crypto. But so the stuff that he says sometimes sounds so insane and crazy. But what he's done, he has pulled forward demand in Bitcoin by getting people to copy him. I don't know. I wrote this a year ago, six months ago. Yes, he sounds crazy. And maybe he is crazy, but he's hardly stupid. He called his shot. This is what I wrote. He called his shot. He leveraged literally the volatility of Bitcoin as a feature to create this escape velocity and this flywheel effect for issuing more shares, more velocity, more options, more demand.

41:14And it worked and it continues to work. And I am definitely not saying that it is going to work forever. I don't own the stock. But there is, there is and continues to be a whole lot more demand than supply for Bitcoin. And that that's been, I don't know. I don't know what changes that. The story of cryptos from its infancy is just that the narrative behind it and what it will be able to do is constantly changing and evolving and never exactly right. But the belief in it is the thing that always stays true. So it's like the narrative and like, it's going to do this and it's going to do that. And we're going to do this with it.

41:52And even if these things don't come true, as long as people keep believing, then the narrative behind it doesn't matter. I'll tell you one thing. We got a lot more emails about Bitcoin when it hit 60 ,000 than when it hit 120 ,000. I don't think we've got to say, in fact, oh no, we got one. We got one email about Bitcoin over the last couple of weeks. You're right. It's just the shock value of it has worn off. and now people are just used to it a little, right? It's crazy. Anyway, sign of the times, Grayscale filed to go public. And you and I, I don't know if it's dropping next week, had a very good call with David LaValle at Grayscale who was very involved in pushing the case to convert to the ETF.

42:35And I don't know that I was super duper excited to have that conversation only because I was like, well, we've spoken about Bitcoin before. Like, all right, guess we're doing it again. And it was very good. He was a very, very good guest. Your backhanded compliment to most of our talker book guests is, I thought this was going to be boring, but it wasn't. Good on you. Let's talk about real estate. Back to there being so many rich people. So I'm not going to lie. I like perusing the real estate section of Wall Street Journal. And they show these like opulent houses. And it's just fun to. So they showed that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward's Manhattan home sold.

43:09And it was a one bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park. Look at the views of this place. it is it is just wild to see how like people with not like not like the millionaire next door live but like people with money live like it is this is money money but it was interesting reading the article it was interesting they're like it wasn't even really that this used to be Paul Newman's place people just wanted you know but it's a so they said 3 ,000 square feet one bedroom it was listed for nine sold for 14 40 % above asking but then they asked the guy like the realtor who did this He said, listen, if you're fine with having a fantastic one bedroom, you're never going to find a better one than this.

43:51What was crazy to us was how deep the market was. The irony, he said, was that the week of the showing took place, the weather in New York was terrible. It was raining every single day like monsoons. It was the worst time ever to launch something like this. It just shows that none of it matters. Dude, there are so many people with money that will never have kids for which a one bedroom like this is highly desirable. And I don't know how many there are, but there's a lot. So, but his, the thing that was interesting to me was he, this is a person that I'm sure deals in only rich people listings like this.

44:22And he was surprised at how many rich people showed up to buy this place. So it feels to me like this rich people cycle will never end. But I don't know. It feels that way. It feels that way. We know it will at some point, but it's for now. It feels, I mean, every cycle feels like this. Like this cycle will never end. I'll just say, well, all right, good one from Business Insider here about baby boomers dominating the housing market. They own roughly$20 trillion worth of real estate or 41 % of the country's total value, despite accounting for a fifth of the population. Millennials, by contrast, make up a slightly larger percentage of the population but own$10 trillion or 20%.

45:00So they're gaining. But then they talk about, like, what's going to happen when boomers eventually die or give up their – and it's saying – remember we got the email from the guy a few weeks ago saying about the basis. Like his parents did not want to sell their$4 million San Diego place because when they die and pass it along, you get up that step up basis. So the kids don't have to eat the capital gains taxes. So they say between 2025 and 2035, the number of boomers are projected to decline by 23 % or almost 16 million people. And then the next 10 years, 2035 to 2045, it drops by another 47 % or 23 million people.

45:35So obviously, Father Time will have its say here. But they also said a lot of the kids who are inheriting these houses are like, oh, God, I don't want this house. It needs all this work or upkeep because the parents have been living in it forever. I just think the next 10, 15, 20 years of this transitional phase is going to be a very interesting time in the real estate market. There's going to be a lot of rehabs for sale, I think, in the coming years. No doubt. or millennials who got boxed out of the housing market will just live in their parents' house. Yeah. Like we've never gone through a transition like this before.

46:12I'm just curious how it's going to play out because I don't know. I mean, I guess my, I think my take is, I haven't thought deeply about this. It's going to happen at a glacial pace. Yeah. Boomers will be dying. It's not going to be all at once. Boomers will be dying for 25 years. Yeah. True. Maybe we need to build, but think about, do you notice all the senior living places that go up all the time? There's a lot. We went to the July 4th parade a few weeks ago. And there were like four senior living places in the 4th of July parade. Like advertising? Yeah. Yeah. All right, survey of the week. We spoke about the drug surveys last week and Ben astutely called out that it was complete BS.

46:52Somebody emailed us. I was in middle school in the early 80s, not to brag, but I'm old. I distinctly remember a survey about drug use that we took every year, I think to support Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign. I mean, my friends and I laughed about how we just said yes. We did every single drug, every single day, and every single question. Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, PCP, crack, uppers, downers, blues, reds, etc. We had no idea what these drugs were, but boy, did we do all of it. That's what you do when you are a 12-year-old boy and a little old lady tells you no. Surveys are bullshit, especially surveys and middle schoolers.

47:17That's what my friends and I used to do. But I feel like kids these days wouldn't do that because they're worried that people are going to – it's online, so someone's going to actually read it and bust them or something. Yeah. Sticking with the people are rich, and this is really not that topic, but it's just people, you know, there's just a lot of money out there. Prime day. U S retailers drove$24.1 billion in online spend from Tuesday through Friday, up 30 % from 2024. And there's some funkiness with like, it was a four day week, but either way, like even if you strip that out, people have spent a lot of money on prime day.

47:44I feel like we have prime day once a month. It happens all the time. We have to, it has to happen multiple times a year. It's not just, did you buy anything on prime day? I did. I can't remember what I bought. Nothing. We buy something on Amazon every day. So probably that's true. Um, all right. Somebody sent this to me. The FedEx guy knows me now. I came out to get my Wayfair stuff yesterday out of the, out of the back of his truck. Hey, what's up, man? Great to see you. Yeah. One of those. Um, I, and being a man of the people, guess what? I helped him with get the heavy boxes off of the truck.

48:13Uh, you said that twice now. Like, are you like saying that I'm not a man of the people? That's what it feels like. No, we've always had this push and pull. I mean, were you ever a cabana boy, a bus boy, a waiter. My first job, I was a bus boy. Were you ever a... I was a bank teller. A valet parker. Bank teller? That's not a man of the people. I worked with my hands, sir, for years. Don't tell me. I had to count the money by hand. Somebody sent this to us. It's a reel on Instagram. Steve is a first-time buyer. Got approved. Zero dollars down, okay? he bought a I think it's a two-year-old BMW I don't know what this is is that a three series or four series I can't tell it's not even new no $986 a month for 84 months that's a screaming deal and it's going to break down could you imagine by month 36 that thing's breaking down and he's going to have like a$7 ,000 maintenance bill the dude who's accounted is is the broker, of course.

49:22And he's like flexing for this kid. Like, no money down. Oh. All right. Well, this poor bastard is going to spend$83 ,000 just on car payments to say nothing of repairs and maintenance. $83 ,000 for a two-year-old mid-sized small BMW. I went to Audi this week, by the way. Needed my first oil change. God, those freaking thieves. unbelievable you're gonna spend more on your audio than this guy did on his bmw like all right it's your first year checkup we've got the oil change the duster the pollen the fluid breaks i'm like all right how much is it a thousand and forty four dollars i'm like uh could you please break that down for me yeah it's 340 for the oil changes i'm like just do the oil change you know as a theme of the man doing his own stuff i went to get my oil change for my wife and there's like an internal filter and they showed me how they took it out and then they took it out hey they show you it's dirty and go, hey, you need one of them?

50:18I'm like, yeah, fine. But then they, oh, we don't have any in stock. Come back in a week. And I just put it in an Amazon and bought the thing myself for$12. And guess what? I installed the filter myself. That is good for you. Good for you. I mean, her car is probably going to blow up because I put it in backwards or something, but I did it. And then they tried to get me out like, oh, your car, your tire. I'm like, you know, don't even tell me how much. I don't want to do it. No, the answer is no. Thank you. All right. Speaking of, let's not speak it up. Speaking of nothing, it's just a lazy transition.

50:46Travel. All right, there we go. We're talking travel, Ben. There was, it's just so funny how fast things change. How decimated Delta and all the airline stocks were in the first quarter as Europeans and foreigners were not coming to the country. So, all right, I guess that's over now. Today, there's so much money out there. That's from the email, not from us. Don't you think that the sentiment stuff is just, people are willing to change their minds on stuff so fast? Like, think about coming out of the presidential election. Everyone said, New York is going way more conservative. And then immediately, they're going to vote in a socialist mayor.

51:25Like, you can't trust people on anything they say anymore. Sure. Right? I don't even trust you. Me neither. I received an alert from the airline. Would I volunteer to take the 230 flight instead of the 1245 flight? I selected a bid of$600, which was the max on the app, and thought, let's see what happens. No problem for me. I can do a little work. when I got to the gate, the agent told me she could offer me$2 ,100. Jeez. I didn't ask any questions and asked to sign immediately. $2 ,100 to take in a flight that's three hours later. Wow. Imagine being a single person. You'd take that every time, wouldn't you?

51:59I'm sure I told the story about when I was in Chicago, how my flight got delayed, we deboard, whatever. It's no big deal. I am not one of these people, credit to me, that hems and haws about these things. I mean, listen, sometimes it can be a huge pain in the ass, especially if you're stuck on the airplane, but having a little delay, assuming that you're not in the, in the airplane, just go to the lounge, do some work. No big deal. Speaking of lounge. Well, I guess you should say, okay, if you're with your kids, it's a big deal. So I will qualify that. Yes. Having a delay with your kids is that's terrifying.

52:24Uh, our very own Nick Majulia today had a piece and I think he pulled this from his new book, the wealth ladder a little bit of, he said the death of the Amex lounge, why the upper middle class isn't special anymore. This is really good stuff. Getting back to our themes. First of all, he calls out your Bahamar place. He says... My Bahamar place. You've sold it to a lot of people. He says, maybe too many people used to. He says, I was told Bahamar was a place to go. It's an expensive resort that has a water park, casino, and lots of dining options. The only problem, there isn't enough space for everyone to enjoy everything.

52:53If you don't book ahead, good luck getting a reservation at one of their prized restaurants. If you don't wake up early, forget about getting a chair by the pool. Picture it. You're one of the nicest resorts and one of the most prized vacation destinations in the world. and there are literal millionaires scrambling to get pool chairs at 8 a.m. What the hell is going on? Nick said, I'll tell you. The upper middle class is getting too big. There are too many people who are millionaires and multimillionaires and there simply isn't enough space to accommodate them. Why do you think the Amex lounge is a zoo?

53:17He's right. There's too many rich people. So he says since 2007, the median net worth of a U.S. household has increased from$173 ,000 to$193 ,000, up 11 % after inflation. But among the top 10%, it went from 1.3 to 1.9 million, a 49 % surge. This is why it doesn't feel special to be wealthy anymore. Because there are more wealthy people. And this is why people who are objectively rich don't feel rich. Well, because, yeah, they live in neighborhoods where everyone's doing everything that they're doing. And it's f***ing expensive to do everything that everyone else is doing. And you go, I have this, sure.

53:52But they have that. I don't have that. And that's the thing that screws with your head. That happens at every level of the income scale. Yes. At every level. That's the thing. It never stops. Yeah. But even people without money, there's people within the people without money group that are the rich people in that group. Yes, you're right. Yes. It never ends. And you can make the case, and I'm not saying that anybody would go down, but just in a vacuum that people there are happier, relatively speaking, than a small fish in a big pond that can't afford to keep up. Oh, definitely. I told this story before.

54:29I think I wrote about it in one of my books. We went on a canoe trip in college, the middle of nowhere in northern Michigan. And the guy who ran the canoe, he lived in a trailer park, or in the little trailer, next to the river with his wife and newborn daughter. And didn't make a lot of money. He drove people with their canoes from one end of the river to the next in his bus. And one of my friends got to talking to him. And I was like, you seem to live a pretty simple life out here. You know? And like I said, yeah, I run a canoe business. I don't make a lot of money. It's basically enough to put food on the table.

55:02But I don't want for much and we're happy out here. And I still remember like my friend was blown away by this. Wanting to go in like investment banking or something. And like, he's like, maybe I should, maybe I'm thinking about this all wrong. And I was too young and naive and stupid to like have it even compartmentalized. But there's probably some truth in it. Like I'm out of the rat race. I'm just out of it. Yeah. All right. All right, sticking with this theme, which you, Ben, were right to point out. Weisenthal tweeted, Shake Shack says it's Dubai chocolate shake is the most expensive milkshake it's ever sold and that it's had lines around the block of people waiting to get it.

55:40Okay. Remember Pulp Fiction? That's a$5 shake. How much is this thing? It's$9. Okay. At Shake Shack too, at a fast food place. We had a listener of the show send me some Dubai chocolate because I mentioned that my son is really into the Burj Khalifa. So he sent us this Burj Khalifa thing and then some Dubai chocolate, which I didn't really know was a thing. But kids tried it. They liked it. Not bad. Did you try it? Yeah, I think it was okay. More wealthy stuff. Youth sports are a$40 billion business. Private equity is taking notice. So they talk about how Josh Harris and David Blitzer. And Harris, I think he's the founder of Apollo.

56:19Is that right? Yeah. So you're not quite there yet, right? But they're talking about, listen, they're buying a baseball camps and flag football fields and youth sports leagues, and they're creating a collection of youth sports properties. And they say that the youth sports industry, again, it's$40 billion. By comparison, movies grossed last year$9 billion. So just saying that this is a huge, and obviously it's kind of apples to oranges. You're not quite there yet. And this is something that I've had many conversations about because I have both daughters in travel soccer. My oldest daughter is also on a travel basketball team.

56:54So I complain about this, but I'm a hypocrite because we do it too. But it's one of those things where if you have your kid in the YMCA Rec League and you go, oh, they're one of the better players on the team, but are they being held back because the other kids aren't very good and the competition's not good? And then, all right, let's go up to the big leagues. And then you go, oh, wait a minute. My kid's not the best player anymore. Now they're on an all-star team. And then it's like, oh, you need to get them trainers. That's why. So then we have people who have individual trainers for their kids because, well, my kid's going to play in college someday.

57:26The Joneses or whatever it is in youth sports is off the charts. Yeah. I can't imagine. It's, and I, I understand because the, there's not enough facilities for them to do this stuff. So buying this stuff, I always say like, I want to buy some farmland and build a big warehouse for volleyball, basketball, soccer, indoor tournaments because parents would pay for it. That's a great business. It is. You're, You're never going to have a lack of people. Yeah. All right, Ben. We were talking. I was talking with John. John was in, big John, our producer was in the Bahamas. And something came up about that time that I applied to be a central banker.

58:08And this is how good my life was going in 2010. So I found the Google chat. I found it. And we're going to read the story. I haven't even read this, okay? I literally copied and pasted it, and I wanted to do a blind with you. So I'm going to be me, and you be my friend, okay? Okay. All right. I heard back from the Bermuda... This is true, by the way. This is a line for line. I heard back from the Bermuda Monetary Authority. They asked me what position specifically I am inquiring about. I looked, and I'm completely unqualified, but who knows? Whatever it is, it's worth a shot. Is that the person you met with the other day?

58:46No, it's in Bermuda. Oh. Oh, do you mean like the central bank of Bermuda? I believe so. Haha, that's awesome. Yeah, pretty funny. Who knows? Worth a shot. I thought for a sec that Michael Batnick... No, man. Oh, I thought for a second that maybe it was a main bank there that has branches here. I saw it in the Financial Times. There was a position for$100K tax-free. So I thought I'd shoot a resume. Never going to happen. But hypothetically, if the job was right, I would go. And I'll visit you on the sandy beaches. LOL. So how did you, how did the quasi-launch interview the other day go? He had some good advice by no means an interview, but he said he might be able to introduce me to a few heads.

59:27Yeah, that didn't happen. None of that happened. Did not introduce me to anybody. So wait, you actually had a meeting with someone from the Bermuda? No, no, no. Okay. No, that was just, I was flailing hard. Can you imagine me? A central banker in Bermuda? What would you have done? First day? We're cutting rates. We're cutting rates. let's get everybody around the Miami vice. We're going to double the Miami vices on the Island. I'm going to fix this Island up real quick. All right. I don't know how this happened, but like my TV downstairs isn't working again. I don't know if it's the wall or what.

1:00:04Remember my line of the TV, which I still use, but I still, I still use the line of the TV. Now there's two lines. I don't care. Not buying any, I'm having my, finishing my coffee. All right. So my TV downstairs, this is a Sony TV and it just won't turn off. And so I unplugged it and plugged it back in. And it turned on. And now I can't get it to turn on or off. It's just, well, it's just off. I bought a new remote. Guess what? TV hasn't been on for four days downstairs. I don't miss it. I think I'm just going to. My son has broken like 12 remotes for us. So I'm. But I don't think it's a remote thing.

1:00:37I don't know what to do. And I think, I mean, at this point, I mean, at some point I'm going to have to do something. You need a new TV. Yeah. TVs are so cheap today. Just buy a new one. I don't want to. I've just decided I'm out of the buying nice TV game because you get a new one every three years anyway, because something like this happens. So I'm just not buying the nice high. I'm buying the lower quality ones now. I don't care. So I did that. I did that for the boys in their playroom. The problem with like the cheap TVs is it's the speed. Like the apps just don't work as quickly and they degrade so fast.

1:01:08So I don't, I think that you're right in terms of like picture quality, you know, whatever. They're all, they're all fine. I think it's like a software issue. Buy a new TV, man. I don't want to. Do it. I mean, I'm sure I'm going to have to, but... Anyway, what do you got this week, Ben? Recommendations. All right, listen to Andy Samberg on Good Hang with Amy Poehler. Continue my streak of listening to just the initial episodes of a new celebrity podcast, because they always get their best guests, their friends, in the first, like, six months. And then it trails off. I'm a huge Andy Samberg guy.

1:01:41He seems like the kind of guy who's always in a good mood. He's done TV for a while, and he has a podcast, and he does a lot of different stuff. But he was talking about how from the point that he was eight years old, he wanted to be on Saturday Night Live. And that was the dream of his, from eight years old. And I think, gosh, my twins are eight years old. They don't know what they want to do tomorrow. And I wonder if that's—because you and I were both late bloomers. Like, we weren't the kind of kids who—we weren't reading the Wall Street Journal in our dorm room in college or something, right?

1:02:09I bloomed when I was approximately 29 years old. yeah we were both late bloomers for sure um and i wonder what's better like deciding from an early age i'm going to do this and then getting it or or like becoming a late bloomer i guess there's probably pros and cons for each right but it just got me thinking like my kids have no my kids are eight they have what are you kids doing they gotta get together no ambition but he talked about he talked about lazy saturday or lazy sunday there it was the first viral youtube video ever pretty much from snl and his and i still remember to this day getting the email from my friend being like you have to watch this and I gotta be honest I didn't get it like it wasn't funny to me I thought his other stuff like that one for whatever reason and it's still probably one of the most biggest most well-known viral videos but I I always liked um dick in a box of course but I'm on a boat and I told you to listen to that on your boat didn't I when you got it um but I still there was a friend in Chicago the week after that came out who rented a boat in Chicago and just played that sung obnoxiously on a loop all day.

1:03:10Like, that's a joke? Yeah, one of those ones, like, you can't tell if it's a joke or not. Have you seen F1 yet? No, I have not. What are you doing? The kids are going to camp the first week of August. Then I'm going to see a bunch of movies. So, I was in the theater last night, and I was with Logan, just the two of us, at a giant screen. I'm just like, this is the best. I love being in the movie theater. That is your safe space, right? It's your happy place. But you got to see F1 in the theater. I think you could skip everything else. I will. I can't. Yeah. Everything else can be seen. Give me your Superman.

1:03:42I forgot more, but give me your Superman. No, you can finish. Okay. Somehow my son got into Forrest Gump, and he watched it like three times in the span of a week. Tough movie. What about, what do you, did you fast forward? We had to fast forward a few scenes, yeah. But I was thinking if Forrest Gump was released today, because when it came out, it was just beloved by everyone. Oh, the best. There were some people that tried to zag on Forrest Gump. Get out of here. but I feel like if it came out today because it's a movie that if you wanted to you could nitpick a lot of it I feel like it would get nitpicked to death if it came out today whereas in the 90s and it came out people were just like oh this is great I haven't seen it in a long time I don't think I need to honestly it's still it still gives you like the goosebumps like it still pulls you in I'm like it probably didn't age well and it still works and my son absolutely loved it finally one more this is a dumb one I thought I got movies mixed up my daughter and I are still seeing all the sports movies, which shout out to our friends at Benchmark Series.

1:04:38I think Alex Morris pulled this up. I mentioned that my daughter and I loved watching Miracle. And one of the guys from the team, OC, works at US Benchmark Series ETFs. Right? FM Investments. And they sent us a signed jersey. I just got out of the mail yesterday. Awesome. Like, made my daughter's year. She thought it was the coolest. I scored some big-time cool points there. So that was a signed USA jersey. We're way. So it recommended Heavyweights to us after all these sports movies we've been watching. I thought it was Little Giants. I got those two mixed up. Oh, I love Little Giants. Heavyweights is a comedy, no?

1:05:12Yeah. Do you know who wrote it? Ben Stiller. So Ben Stiller basically plays himself a little lighter version of himself in Dodgeball in this movie. This was his... Dwight Goodman. Initial foray. He basically played the same character as Dodgeball in this movie. I can't believe you're out on Dodgeball. It makes no sense. But this movie, Ben Stiller was pretty funny. The movie itself was terrible. Not funny at all. My daughter still kind of liked it. Judd Apatow wrote this movie. Oh, get out. It's a movie about a bunch of overweight kids who go to fat camp in the summer, which again, this movie would never be made today.

1:05:43No. Because it'd be body shaming stuff. But I couldn't believe it said written by Judd Apatow. And it was not funny at all. There was a fat camp by me. It was called Camp Shame. Seriously? Seriously. Jeez. And Goldberg from The Mighty Ducks went there. Oh, he was in heavyweights. Oh, of course he was. so he actually went to that camp in real life oh okay so yeah i just i just thought another movie that never would be made today it was terrible are you super dry on shows because i am and i don't mind it super dry yeah yeah pretty much yeah we just finished rex them again i'm still in on that show what are you fixing what did you fix welcome to rex them what's it called welcome to rex them the ryan reynolds soccer one right back on me okay so i watched um i watched Jaws 2 because I listened to the rewatchables and it was so funny.

1:06:33Chris, Ryan, and Simmons were just... Not Ryan. Fantasy. We're having a great time, literally belly laughing, talking about the movie. So I fired it up and I forgot that I saw it. I saw it when I was very young and it completely blacked it out of my brain because it was so bad. But I remember when I got to the end and... Did you see Jaws 2 ever? Long, long time. It's been 30 years. So do you remember the scene at the end where Shrider has the metal electric pole and Jaws bites down on it and blows it up? Yeah. So I remembered that part of it. So I saw it. I don't know if I was nine years old. I had no memory of it.

1:07:11But then I rewatched Jaws. It's the 50th anniversary. Jaws still plays. I watched that last summer again. Okay, so they're actually doing a re-release in IMAX, which I thought about saying, but I'm not going to now that I just saw it this week. and it's amazing how good Jaws is, was and is, considering that it was, you know, the first summer blockbuster in 1975 and how terrible Jaws 2 was. I'm trying to think of a - It's because Spielberg made it. Yeah, of course. I'm trying to think of a parallel like in modern times, like just an iconic movie followed by a sequel that was inexplicably disastrous.

1:07:51Yeah, especially like that. I mean, they had to do the money grab for it, but you're right. I'm sure it exists, but unbelievable. Yeah. Jaws still works. Yeah. Big time. At this day. Big time. Okay. So Superman, I was, I'm not a huge Superman guy. I'm not a big DC guy, to be honest. And I wasn't super duper looking forward to this movie, but it was a ton of fun. Okay. Like it, it, it totally worked. It was, I was glued to the screen. It didn't drag. we saw it at seven o 'clock and Logan stayed up through the whole time. Did he like it? Loved it. So, um, like it's not the dark night by any stretch of the imagination, but it was, it was really good.

1:08:32And there's been a lot of really bad Superman movies. So this rocks. If you have kids, I highly recommend it. When I get to the theater, this is, this is what I do. I get a small popcorn, no butter, watch my weight. And I finish it probably. Well, depending on when I walk in, I finish it in the coming attractions. I start the popcorn and then I finish it. I always tell my kids they can't have any of their stuff till the movie starts. Okay. Don't touch it till the movie starts. So I'm probably, I don't know how long it takes to finish a bag of popcorn. Five minutes, five, six minutes. Boom, gone.

1:09:03I asked Logan if he wanted some. He said no. You like Tom Cruise?

1:09:11And I have like popcorn all over the place. I get up and there's, you know, a bag of popcorn underneath me on the seats. So in the middle of the movie, Logan told me, asked me for popcorn. And I said, it's popcorn. Finished it an hour ago. And he's like, no, I want popcorn. So I'm like, dude, do you really want popcorn? He said, yes. So I left mid movie to get a bag of popcorn and I came back. Now we're at an IMAX. Okay. And I come back and it is one of, it's, it's a light scene. So it's, it's the, the theater is fully lit up. Okay. You could see everybody. And I trip up the stairs, like three steps in front of Logan and the popcorn flies everywhere.

1:09:53and uh i laughed because what else do you do it was funny but ever in the theater laugh i don't think so no no i would laugh didn't play i would have laughed too uh so half the so i i there was half a bag left uh anyway superman good movie smooth move all right cf1 damn it it's the only one i want to see i will trust me thank you you didn't make a hard enough sale when you gave me your review. So we're definitely going to see it. Okay. You can give us an update on your housing situation next week. Okay. Animal Spirits. What our minds would like to know. Oh my God. An hour 13 on only 29 pages. We're getting very chatty, you and I.

1:10:32Getting very chatty. Sorry, Duncan. Animal Spirits at the compound news.com. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you, Duncan and the whole production team. We'll be back next week. Enjoy the weekend.

1:10:50Thank you.