Pod Insights Big Technology Podcast Fear Buying AI & Automation Stocks, Whoops Too Many Winners, Booming Tech Trade — With Josh Brown About this episode Josh Brown is the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, a CNBC contributor, and author of "You Weren't Supposed to See That." Brown joins Big Technology to discuss the intersection of AI, big tech, and the current state of the economy. Tune in to hear how automation fears are driving a potentially fear-based investment bubble in tech giants and the concept of a "relentless bid" shaping today's stock market. We also cover the unexpected consequences of COVID-era stimulus, insights on major tech companies like Amazon, Apple, and NVIDIA, and how the financial industry is adapting to technological shifts. Hit play for a compelling blend of financial expertise and cultural commentary that illuminates the complex relationships between technology, economics, and society in our rapidly evolving world.
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Transcript 13,248 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Let's talk automation, the big tech trade, and the state of the economy with the one and only Downtown Josh Brown. That's coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.
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1:12 Alex Kantrowitz? Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by Josh Brown, the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, the host of one of my favorite shows, The Compound and Friends. He's also a CNBC contributor and the author of a great new book, You Weren't Supposed to See That: Secrets Every Investor Should Know. Josh, great to see you. Welcome to the show. So great to be back. Thank you, Alex. Thank you for being here. I think this is your third time on the show, so we always appreciate having you on. This time, we're going to talk about your book to begin with. And then the second half, we're really going to go through all the big tech companies, including your perspective on companies like Nvidia, Amazon, and Apple. So folks should stay tuned through the entire show
1:56 Alex Kantrowitz? to get Josh's thoughts on what's going on with the big tech trade and these big tech companies in particular. But let's start with the book. So there were so many perspectives in there about the market that I read and was like, okay, now it makes sense taking a step back. And so we're going to talk about COVID in a second, but let's just start with the big tech trade. What you really say is something that stems from automation or fear of being automated. I'm just going to read from this is from a blog post that you include within the book. Do you say we're in an age where we're being told AI is about to start writing its own software, machines are going to be trying legal cases and diagnosing illnesses, writing songs and architecting buildings,
2:39 Alex Kantrowitz? giving financial advice and driving our vehicles. There are no limits. There are no protections. It's bordering on lawlessness. People have never felt more ill at ease about their own reason for existing. And this is manifesting itself in trillions of dollars being thrown at, of course, the companies that are doing all this automation and behind all this AI, Facebook, Google, Uber, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, the list goes on. So let me ask you this to begin with. Do you think that this is really fear of automation? Or just that this is where the economic growth is going in the economy? Because we haven't yet seen a decline in, let's say, employment because of automation?
3:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that there any time that we're going through a wave of disruptive technology, this sort of thing is prevalent. But I think AI is different than all previous waves of technology, because I think everybody immediately grasps how much of their time is spent doing things that if any, any other means of getting those things done were possible, the employer would default to those other means. So this is like not new, but you know, obviously, there were people that were by hand running calculations and then calculator came along. So I'm not breaking any new ground here. But I think in the case of AI, its ability to effectively ape humanity.
4:09 Speaker 01 Is what sets it apart from prior waves of technology. So I think that that kind of like uncertainty that all right, well, what's going to be my place in this world if this this new technology is so good at doing what I do and and doing it faster? This is not about being replaced by a computer. At this point, everyone's very comfortable in the world of computers. This is about having someone's essence at work be distilled down into an equation. And the equation doesn't need healthcare. Um, so like that that's why I think there's that sense of foreboding. And I think like a certain portion of the population is smart enough to understand new jobs will be created as a result of this.
4:51 Speaker 01 We don't know what they will be, or your job at your company is going to morph into a different version of that. And you're going to be empowered to get a lot. So there is a portion of of the population that understands that. But then there's a portion of the population where it's just like, well, uh oh, you know, what what? What does this mean for my future, my ability to earn a living? Uh, maybe I don't want to change the way I do my job, or maybe I don't want to switch industries. Uh, or maybe I'm not comfortable having more and more of my work require me to have a co-pilot riding alongside of me. And for those people, I do think there's some element of like allocating to technology because it's like, well, if this is going to replace me, can't beat them, might as well join them.
5:37 Speaker 01 And so that was what that post was about. Interestingly, I wrote it in twenty seventeen. Um, way before chat G P T or A I were on everyone's lips. So in the book, I I wanted to bring that up to the present and, uh, you know, one of the things that's held up really well is that we might be in the first fear-based investment bubble ever. Normally, when you have an investment bubble, it's greed. In this case, there's an element of I better invest in this. Um, and so that's what I thought was really different about this time around.
6:11 Alex Kantrowitz? I'm gonna push back on your idea here, but first I want you to tell one of my favorite stories in the book, which is that you had a friend who's a grocer.
6:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:19 Alex Kantrowitz? And what happens when they see.
6:21 Speaker 01 Friend of a friend.
6:22 Alex Kantrowitz? And what happened to them when they started to see big tech encroaching on their territory?
6:28 Speaker 01 So somebody relayed this story to me. I think that it's a guy that owned a bunch of grocery stores in suburban New Jersey. And when he saw Amazon getting into delivering food, it was like, oh, okay.
6:42 Speaker 01 Maybe instead of putting all this capex into my supermarkets, I'd be better off just buying Amazon stock. And again, this might be 2014 or 2015, and I think he's okay now. I think.
6:55 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, he did fine.
6:56 Speaker 01 I haven't checked in with the person who told me the story, but I would imagine if he were allocating to Amazon rather than spending money on his own capex to improve his supermarket, he's probably gotten a much higher rate of return on his investment. And I told that story as sort of a metaphor for the way a lot of people were thinking in those days.
7:17 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. Fear-based investment cycle, which is again, talking about how you've been able to sort of take some of these broader themes and put them into terms I wasn't fully thinking about. Like, that's one of them. But now comes the pushback, right? Which is that, yes, you could say that, and maybe this is individual investors have that fear and they are pushing this way in the stock market. But when you think about what's actually happening in the economy, the story that I think the tech giants would tell, and I don't think it's an entirely illegitimate story, is that they are building the platforms that are enabling broader economic growth for everyone, whether that's supplying co-pilots or AI or even cloud computing, right?
7:57 Alex Kantrowitz? Because of what they're building, we have an economy that is growing, and the economy is growing quite nicely. You know, people were talking about the fact that we were going to be in recession now. We're not in recession. And so. Yes, a lot of the growth is going to accrue to the companies building these platforms that sort of are the catalyst for the growth economy, but we still have a growth economy.
8:18 Speaker 01 It's not pushback. We agree. I don't think that what I was trying to convey is that this is the end and AI is going to put everyone out of a job. I was trying to convey the sense of foreboding that people seem to have been feeling at the earlier stages of this rally in 16, 17, 18. This is really the dawn of this magnificent seven idea. Back then, they were calling them the Fang stocks, but it's the same kind of thing. Tesla wasn't yet a part of it, and it wasn't really about AI. It was just more about, you know, you own a business, whatever you do, let's say it's a pharmacy, or, you know, let's say it's like a shipping and logistics company, or whatever it is, and then you've got this
9:01 Speaker 01 company that's got a trillion dollar market cap for the first time ever, and just endless cash flows, hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, tens of billions in cash flow every quarter, and anything that you're doing, if they want to, at the snap of a finger, they can just build it better, faster, and make it so that you no longer have a livelihood. That has not happened to everyone in the economy, but it certainly has happened to people in the economy, and nobody knows when it's their time. And if you look at what Amazon is doing with pharmacy, for example, you understand that the neighborhood pharmacist's
9:41 Speaker 01 livelihood is now probably on the clock, and it's not just the neighborhood pharmacist. All you have to do is look at a chart of CVS, which is in a 60% drawdown from its high, or look at Walgreens Boots Alliance, which is in a 90% drawdown. These companies are going away. As we speak... Walgreens stock is crashing on the market today. They said that one in four stores are unprofitable. That's unbelievable. In 2015, that was a $90 stock. And today, nine years later, it's a $9 stock. And it's not coincidental that we now have a situation where opportunistic companies like
10:23 Speaker 01 Hims and Hers, as an example, or Ro are utilizing the cloud and they're utilizing technology to reach a huge audience of people that are just as happy to get their drugs delivered to them as they were to walk into a CVS and maybe accidentally buy a candy bar on the way out. Like that, that, when, when you look at that as a, as a business owner and you recognize how powerful both Walgreens and CVS were across America not that long ago, 100%, you're, you're nervous. And so it's not that the economy is in trouble, it's that people feel as though their personal livelihoods are potentially in trouble.
11:08 Speaker 01 And it's hard to know where the next disruption is coming from and who's going to be affected. And it's, you know, it's happened before. It's not first time in history, but it's, it's a legitimate concern that people have.
11:19 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. And hence they invest in big tech because that's the sure thing.
11:22 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, I mean, you, you say, you say to yourself, well, I might be out of work, but at least I'm going to make some money investing in this disruption. And it's not crazy.
11:33 Alex Kantrowitz? So on the, on the Walgreens front, I kind of blame Walgreens for this, not the internet. I mean, you
11:39 Speaker 01 Say more.
11:40 Alex Kantrowitz? Open yourself up to a disruption when your experience is bad. And, you know, you think about like a Duane Reade store, which intentionally designs itself as confusing. So you do find those candy bars before you get what you need. And no wonder people would rather shop on the internet. So a lot of these old school industries, I mean, I, obviously it's troubling what's happening to them. But it's like always, there's always two sides of this, which is A, yes, the internet is causing trouble for you, but also B, if you were better at what you did, people would stick with you.
12:13 Speaker 01 I'm curious, I'm curious what you think. Had CVS, so CVS spent like huge amounts of money to buy Aetna and to buy Caremark. So bought it, buy an insurance company, buy a pharmacy, pharmacy benefits manager and basically take, take a vertical approach to what was obviously going to be a consolidating industry. Those deals did not work out well. The synergies never showed up, et cetera, regulatory headaches. Had they instead said, instead of taking $70 billion doing this M and A, we're going to cannibalize ourselves. We're going to close half our stores.
12:57 Speaker 01 We're going to cut our dividend. We are going to suspend our earnings guidance for the next 36 months. And instead, we are going to build the definitive way that people are going to get their drugs. We're going to have drones and we're going to have our own shipping and logistics and we are going to revolutionize this industry. I don't think the stock makes a new all time high on that news. Now, in hindsight, we say, well, they should have invested and they should have, it's really, really hard to cannibalize yourself in the face of a, a, a competitive threat. It, it's obviously in hindsight, sometimes the right thing to do, really hard in the
13:39 Speaker 01 moment to make the decision that that's what you're going to do, especially when you have a shareholder base in the public markets that's counting on, you know, reliability and, and dividends, et cetera. So that's, from my perspective, I don't even know what they could have done differently.
13:55 Alex Kantrowitz? I, I have an idea. So this is one of my favorite Jeff Bezos clips, maybe my favorite Jeff Bezos clips, and I'll try to recite it decently from memory. But basically he's sitting down with a financial reporter who's trying to pin him down on whether they're an internet business or whether they're a brick and mortar business because they have a website, but they were building all these warehouses and the warehouses kept showing up on the balance sheet. And this reporter keeps pressing Bezos on it. He goes, internet or physical company? And Bezos looks at him and literally says, internet, schminternet. We don't care what bucket you put us in. We're going to be the best company serving customers and it doesn't matter what category we're in. That will be our competitive advantage. So I think with the CVS, honestly, or Walgreens, whatever it might be.
14:39 Alex Kantrowitz? If they would have taken the money they invested in that or whatever, whatever they they were doing with their business plan and said, all right, we are gonna pay our cashiers double. We're going to, you know, maybe spend some money to to design our stores better. We're gonna have competitive hiring process because now these people are being well paid, so we're gonna attract better candidates. And we're gonna make the people feel good when they're in our stores as opposed to like, you know, wanting to get out of them as fast as they possibly could like it's no coincidence that Amazon built a store that that technological innovation is you don't talk to a person. You scan in, you take what you want and you walk out and it's sent to a bill like they saw that pain. And that's how Amazon gets ahead. It's like the simple old school business stuff.
15:23 Speaker 01 The guy that developed the touchless technology for Amazon's retail uh was just pushed out of the company and they are closing a lot of those Amazon go stores. Um, because there just didn't seem to be anything magical that made people wanna go to them. So I agree, but I do agree with you. The stores are a horrible experience. Um, I just, I just make the point that it's not obvious in the moment that the right thing to do is to trash your earnings projections and do this radical overhaul and reinvestment. When you are running a company with tens of thousands of employees and you're not, you know, these are not tech savvy people by nature.
16:04 Speaker 01 It's, it's, it's not like, uh, it's not like these chains are being run by former Microsoft engineers. So it's, it's, it's, it's a tough thing. And if it's tough for uh Fortune 500 companies, imagine how a regular business person must feel when they're being told like, oh, you have to compete, not only do you have to compete with, you know, the local store across town. You have to compete with like uh Seattle's best. That's really unsettling.
16:35 Alex Kantrowitz? But this is, this is my point here, which is that I think that these companies cannot compete with tech companies by being more tech. And maybe that limits their growth over time. The only way to to possibly compete with big tech and to compete with AI is to be more human. Right. It's to make people feel good like that's something that technology has a really tough time with.
16:55 Speaker 01 Well, you're right about that. You're right about that, but uh they, that's what they told the independent booksellers uh 20 years ago. They said lean into like how much your customer loves the experience. The problem is twofold. The customer might love bookstores, but only occasionally when they actually want something conveniently. That's never going to be the best option. Uh, and also Americans don't read books anymore, which we can talk about if you want to.
17:22 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, but we definitely, we do drugs.
17:24 Speaker 01 It didn't work.
17:26 Alex Kantrowitz? Exactly. I mean, yeah, I, I think, yeah, some verticals might've been declining. But, um, yeah, it's just really tough to compete with these companies based on technology. And it, it's definitely interesting that Amazon did, uh, you know, is pulling back on this go experiment. Although maybe there'll be some licensing down, down the road. But I think they definitely seized on the pain that the consumer was feeling most, which is that. I mean, I'm, I'm sure you've had it. You're like waiting for, you have to go to a meeting. You need one thing. You're like, all right, I'm going to quickly pop into this Walgreens. Next thing you know, you're like 15 minutes late because that line just moved so slow.
18:03 Speaker 01 I'll, I'll see you Walgreens and I'll, and I'll raise you the self checkout lane at the supermarket.
18:11 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, man.
18:11 Speaker 01 Which is the ninth circle of hell. Nobody knows how to do it. We've had these things now for 15 years. Nobody, it's, it, it's like, it's like watching people land on an alien planet and try to figure out how to start a fire.
18:24 Alex Kantrowitz? No doubt.
18:25 Speaker 01 And they now need two people at my supermarket to help everybody at those self checkout lanes. Those two people could've just been cashiers and we could've called it even.
18:35 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep, I know, it's true. I mean, that's where I get most of my podcast listening done. Some two X speed waiting to check out, stop and shop. So, um, so let me ask you one last part about this, which is that, okay, let's say we do. So let's say we do go from this like era where people end up having their work automated or taken over by these conglomerates or technology. How does that shift the nature of our economy? Does it increase any quality or what exactly does it do to? It seems.
19:06 Speaker 01 I don't know. So, so you know more about this than I do, but like, let's say hypothetically you have a job, you're coding. Um, at Microsoft and then they put this thing on your computer that helps you. And all of a sudden. You're able to code twice as much over the course of 20 business days in a month as you were three months prior because you become really adept at utilizing these AI tools and you become better at your job, the company becomes more efficient and everyone's happy. But then like, what happens after that? Because now, there's a new baseline on how much work you're expected to complete.
19:49 Speaker 01 Like, it's not like you can't go backwards. Right. You can't say, "All right, I'm gonna revert back to..." Okay. So now everyone's doing more, getting paid the same, doing more. And then all of a sudden, that ride-along AI that's watching you work and helping you and offering suggestions, all of a sudden it starts dictating to you because they improved that software. Or the software improves itself because it's generative and it's seen enough and it knows where Alex continues to make mistakes. And before you even get a chance to make that mistake, it's already in front of you, either telling you what to do right or doing it for you before you can mess it up.
20:29 Speaker 01 And that, it reminds me a lot of the road toward full self-driving or self-driving or autonomous vehicles. Every time I lease a car, it's a little bit judgier. It's got a little bit more opinions about how I shift lanes. And I'm, we're used to it and we're getting these haptic little taps and buzzes on our elbows, on our asses, and the steering wheel shakes a little. And we're probably becoming better drivers, but also, we're getting very accustomed to having somebody be in charge of us. And it's not gonna be long before the car is just better than us. Of course it will be. Yeah. Why wouldn't it be? And so, I don't know how long that takes.
21:12 Speaker 01 Do the haptics get like stronger? But, you know what I mean? Or do those noises where you're not braking fast enough and it tells you, "No, no, no, no, really brake, really brake." So again, I'm not painting this as a negative thing. We could all probably be more productive if we're sitting in a car rather than Driving it. Holding the steering wheel for an hour. I totally agree with that. My point is, the expectations...
21:38 Speaker 01 On the part of our employers are just gonna go up as we become more tech-enabled. So we're doing more, not necessarily being paid more. And many of us are going to reach the point where the quote-unquote co-pilot actually should just be the pilot. And again, maybe that's great. Maybe that frees us up. We could all be painters. We could all go to Tahiti and, and, and, and paint, and paint, but like, I'm, I understand the, I understand the part in people's minds where this is not necessarily gonna be great for them personally.
22:13 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, without a doubt. I mean, I wouldn't minimize that for a minute. I mean, one, my thought is that if we do end up having effective co-pilots, it won't necessarily be you're doing twice the work. It's that you're actually doing the work you wanna do. And I mean, that's the bull case.
22:28 Speaker 01 That's a great outcome.
22:29 Alex Kantrowitz? As opposed to like having to clean up code and like, you know, build every, like, it's the same, same thing like right now. With open source, right? A lot of the code is available, but you can just build on that instead of having to build from scratch. And you're actually able to do things. Like, there's no software company who says, um, we have a limited roadmap. Once we build that, we're good. Like, they're always, every software company wants more capacity to do more things. And so therefore, like, if the AI can help code, you can just end up building more, um, in the best-case scenario. Are some people gonna be on the street because of it? Yes. Are they probably gonna be on the street because they're working at the worst companies and not the best ones? Also, yes. In my perspective.
23:11 Speaker 01 Yeah. And it, and it will happen with or without AI eventually. So I, I, I, I definitely see that. And that's a best-case scenario, what you're outlining. It's like, all these people can take the 20 or 30 or 50% of their job that's just rote, kinda like, just like going through the motions because somebody has to do it. And they could throw that out and let some, some other, let that get done via technology. And they can do the other half of their job that they really are appreciated for and the part that makes them creative and unique. The thing is, Not everybody is a creative. Not everybody wants to do something other than rote tasks.
23:51 Alex Kantrowitz? I agree.
23:51 Speaker 01 There are a lot of people who find comfort in that type of work and that's what they want to do. And they're not suited for a world where they get half their time back and they're supposed to come up with creative ways to impress their boss. That's just not, it's not going to be a win for everyone.
24:06 Alex Kantrowitz? I agree. I mean, and you know, I think that there's another great Jeff Bezos scene where he's with Walt Mossberg at the Recode Conference. And he's talking about what it takes, because Amazon's been doing this since the mid 2010s. And I wrote about this in my book, about how they've sort of gone automation before everybody else. It's always been a priority for Bezos. And he's sitting with Mossberg and talking about how you're going to work at a high tech, you're working at a tech company. You have to be prepared for that type of change. And he goes, if you don't, you can find a different job that doesn't value it as much. He's like, go work in insurance. And then he like pauses and he goes, well, insurance now is already becoming tech-enabled. And Mossberg is like, well, you have an iPad, but even more, I think Bezos was thinking
24:49 Alex Kantrowitz? one or two steps down the line, which is that you have, you will have machine learning. That will be assessing damage, that will be doing predictions and here, we're here already. Like what does an actuary do? Right? Does that get taken over by technology? So for me, yeah, I think that like, I'm not celebrating this change. It's going to be, it will be hard in some ways. But I ultimately do think that the, we live in the more optimistic scenario. And I also think that less, less people are interested in the rote work than we might imagine. I think if you think about it, people, people, some people might just not want to work. But I do think if you show up for a job, some people are going to be interested in doing something meaningful.
25:33 Alex Kantrowitz? And like copying data from one Excel sheet to another is not the thing that makes them happy.
25:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, I, so I'm equally hopeful that um we're gonna unlock time for people. And it seems that the amount of work that you have to do will always expand to fill the amount of time that you have. It's just like, people don't, in America, people do not sit around.
25:56 Alex Kantrowitz? No.
25:57 Speaker 01 Uh, so, so I, I agree, but one, one other.
26:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Hold on, let me just say that you could be one of the big tech engineers that take, they have two jobs, right? They, in the work from home era, they were working for like Google and Facebook at the same time, so. The smart ones will be able to figure it out. I was like, can I say, sorry, go ahead for the second.
26:16 Speaker 01 So, so a little bit closer to home, uh, there are now ten different companies. In, and then on top of which, these are startups, but then on top of which. You're getting offerings from Zoom and Salesforce and big existing enterprise software companies, but there are. Ten different companies specifically building AI note taking for financial advisors. So I have twenty seven client facing financial planners at my firm. The most valuable use of their time is talking to clients. Like without a doubt, if the more time that, the more face time that they're giving our clients, the better. And anything that they're doing that takes them away from that is not time well spent for the most part.
27:01 Speaker 01 But the thing is, in order to prepare for a meeting with a ten million dollar family. Um, that you're managing money for and handling their taxes and their insurance. It's like maybe forty five minutes to an hour worth of prep before you go into that meeting. You have to go back and look over everything that's already been done. What's still to be done, what accounts have we opened, what are the returns, what? So you have to prepare, you can't just walk into that meeting like, oh, hey, uh. How, how, how's your golf game this summer? Alright, so there's that. Then you do the meeting, it's an hour, it could be two hours, depends on what's going on. Then you come out of the meeting and there's probably thirty minutes to an hour of post-meeting. Um, kind of debriefing of the rest of the staff.
27:46 Speaker 01 We need to open this type of account, we're doing a wire, we're funding this charity right now. Uh, we need to call this person's attorney about some estate paperwork.
27:57 Speaker 01 The AI chat, the AI chatbot that's gonna be a note taker during the meeting is now capable of prepping my advisor within five minutes, all of the highlights of the last three calls. Here's what you need to know. Then you do the meeting and then you come out of the meeting and that same piece of technology is able to send an email to everyone who was on the meeting. Here's a summary. Here's what was said. Here's who said it. Here are the action items. And not only can it summarize the action items in an email, it can actually send instructions through the CRM to the financial advisor's admin who will then have to take
28:38 Speaker 01 action based on those. This is tremendous. This is an incredible thing that's going to make it so that my advisors probably have an extra two hours a day talking to clients rather than, you know, dictating action items. I love this. But then I had a second thought, which is, right now, we have a junior advisor riding along on some of these calls. That junior advisor is getting reps in these meetings, listening to the discussion and taking notes and following up and executing all these tasks after. When I don't need that person, who's probably a 24-year-old getting, I don't know, 85,000 in their first year, when I
29:20 Speaker 01 don't need that person and none of the other firms need that person, and that goes on for five years, you've kind of hollowed out the way that you've historically trained young advisors and made their salaries worthwhile to the firm. Now what? Where do those people enter our industry from? Who makes use of them? How do you, how do you get money back for the cost of supporting them for the first couple of years? Because as you know, Alex, there's no wealthy family that's gonna be happily assigned a 24-year-old advisor. Right. You know, absent somebody that's a little bit more senior. So, look, it's an existential question for just like, how do we train entry-level people in this country if we're creating
30:03 Speaker 01 endless amounts of software that can do entry-level jobs better than a kid right out of college can do? And I'm sure we'll solve it. I'm sure there will come up with something. Or we'll turn into Japan. For the next thirty years, where young people have absolutely no hope for the future and don't think that they will be able to be as prosperous as their parents or their grandparents. It's, I don't have the answer, but I know it's the big question.
30:27 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, I have two follow up points on that. First, the point that you made about the software that will take the notes for financial advisors, that exists in every single discipline. Not necessarily the software, but the same problem and the technological opportunity. Just think medicine, for example. My father just retired. He was a podiatrist. He spent half his life doing paperwork, right? And this is gonna be a thing of the past. Like him having to sit in the basement, filling out these electronic medical records. No doctor is gonna have to do that again, because this is all gonna be generative AI. The doctors will simply check the output, and the list goes on in every single profession. So I think that this is the benefit from this versus like, maybe there's like that small percentage
31:10 Alex Kantrowitz? of people who enjoy taking the, you know, doing the note review or enjoy doing the paperwork. This is gonna be a huge benefit, and I can't believe I'm being this optimistic about it, but now thinking it through, I think it'll be a huge benefit. Now, for the junior, junior entry level work, it's a, I think it's a real issue. But here's like two thoughts on that. First, for a firm like yours, it's probably gonna be important to have a strong bench of young talent. So even though it might not pay off like right away, there might be some incentive for you to have them in, in the firm, just.
31:41 Speaker 01 What do I do, what do I do, what do I do with them if, if the AI note taker that Salesforce provides me, or Zoom provides me, or Microsoft provides me, is more useful and costs nothing? Like, what do I do, what do I do with that junior person if I don't need them in the meeting? And how are they gonna learn to be an advisor if they're not needed in the meeting?
32:03 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, so there might be just more extended training. But I think the, the second point that I wanted to make here, and by the way, like, maybe that's too sunny. It probably is too sunny, now that I'm saying it out loud. But the second point here is that. You know, we do have declining birth rate in the US and in the developing world, developed world in general, right? And so you're just gonna have much fewer sort of people seeking jobs in those entry level, in those entry level fields than we have now. And, you know, you might need the AI. The reason why Japan has pushed so hard into AI automation, sort of, I think you even talk about this in your book, the factories that are just like lights
32:45 Alex Kantrowitz? out factories, where you don't have anybody is because they needed it. Like, in Japan, they didn't have enough of those young people seeking jobs. And in the US, and in China in particular, that's gonna be a major issue as we look 10, 20 years in the future. Then after that, we'll see what happens.
33:03 Speaker 01 I guess the question is the next five, I guess for me, the next five years.
33:05 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, I mean, they always talk about how like in a technological shift, there's gonna be pain. And that's probably what's gonna happen. But
33:13 Speaker 01 Well, listen, I like to be optimistic too. And I just, I guess, I guess just from my perspective, it's worth, it's worth bringing out both sides of this. Yes, companies are going to become fabulously profitable as they institute all this amazing technology that's coming down the pike. And it's already happening. And of course, we're gonna get rid of a lot of busy work that people should not be doing anymore if they don't need to. 100% I agree. But the second order effect is like, how do you be an entry level employee in the age of AI? We're gonna find out.
33:47 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah. No, I don't, I don't think you're off base at all in bringing that up. It's gonna be a problem, without a doubt. And, you know, you mentioned, okay, maybe if people have their work automated, they'll just have a good life and they'll paint or something like that. But that sort of brings us to the most interesting part of the book, at least from my perspective, where You write about what happened during COVID, when we had all the stimulus and people were empowered. And effectively, people were empowered to do whatever they wanted. Effectively, the economy broke because of it. And you-
34:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, catastro- catastro- paradoxically, it's not great when everybody has all the money they need. It's catastrophic for capitalism.
34:33 Alex Kantrowitz? So I think I should just read this section of the book because it's so good. And I like condensed a little bit, but you write capitalism felt like it offered possibilities for everyone for the first time ever. This is in the COVID times. Everyone had money. Everyone had options. There was a bull market in people forming their own LLCs and starting companies, a bull market in sitting on their asses and doing nothing, a bull market in quitting jobs, a bull market in whatever they felt like doing, indulging their hobbies, accepting flexible hours, moving their residence, taking college classes while being employed, secretly having two full-time employers, quitting without quitting, being paid for waking up in the morning, taking extended periods of time in between gigs, making a big career change.
35:17 Alex Kantrowitz? Whatever people wanted to do, they could do. Freedom on a previously unimaginable scale. And that was the problem. Widespread prosperity, it turns out, is incompatible with the American dream. The one and only way our economy works is when there are winners and losers. That's what we learned at the conclusion of our experiment. You weren't supposed to see that. Now the genie is out of the bottle. For one brief shining moment, everyone had enough money to pay their bills and the financial freedom to choose their own way of life, and it broke the economy in half. So this, this idea that we could end up in utopia, which a lot of people, especially folks like in the, in the sort of extreme areas of AI, like the, the thinking parts of AI talk about.
36:01 Alex Kantrowitz? Basically, your perspective is, we had this already in COVID, when we gave out stimulus. People were empowered in a way they never were before, and it broke the economy. It got out of hand. We had the NFT craze, inflation, and then effectively the government was like, let's restrain this and break it. And then you saw the rise in interest rates and the attempt to spark a recession.
36:28 Speaker 01 You really got to read the, you really got to read the full chapter of that book. I agree. If you, if you, not you. No, no, I'm saying to listeners, yeah, yeah. Because what I lay out is the sheer amount of spending, not just spending stimulus. So that's fiscal policy, monetary policy. It was just, it was so endless. It was like 20 something trillion dollars plus zero percent interest rates, plus a raging stock market that allowed anybody who wanted to, to go public. I mean, it was just like this once in a lifetime situation where we flooded people's bank accounts with cash. We flooded people's 401ks with gains.
37:13 Speaker 01 The value of suburban real estate went through the roof. Like just everything all at once made people feel for the first time ever, everyone, that they could do whatever they wanted. And the result was 9% inflation in the United States. Uh, and that's just headline. If we get into individual components, forget about it. There are things that quadrupled in price that'll never go back again. The UK had 11% inflation. Um, we, we, we, we cannot ever again run this experiment. Because effectively what happened was the people who really hated their jobs, were able to just not show up and do them. So you would check into a hotel and there was nobody to clean the rooms.
37:58 Speaker 01 So they would say to you, all right, we're, the hotel's open, COVID's sort of over, but we don't clean your, your hotel room. You had restaurants begging people, doubling the salary and then doubling again, begging people. You had trucking companies that couldn't find drivers. The ports shut down. You could, literally couldn't move shipping containers. Because people are doing like a, I, I fix bicycles startup in their backyard. And Listen, it's not for me to say who doesn't deserve to get their happy ending. It's not, right? All I'm saying is, the reason capitalism works is you have people at the top of the heap
38:39 Speaker 01 that have already made it, probably because they killed themselves to get there. And then you have people who want to be where they are and are willing to do the jobs that are necessary in order to get there. So you have the super rich and you have the lowest income households, but then you have this group in the middle, the middle class. The middle class has to strive. Otherwise it falls apart. The middle class can't ghost quit. They have to show up to their job. And not only do they have to show up to their job, they have to buy lunch next door to their office. Like, they have to do these things, and if they don't, if enough people don't do these very normal things, everything breaks down. And that's what we went through. We had an 18-month period of just the most bizarre science experiment, and it turns
39:23 Speaker 01 out, the American dream doesn't work if we all get it at the same time. So, and again, it's not for me to be the arbiter of who gets to quit their job and start the company of their dreams and who has to show up for work. I'm not saying that that any one person should determine that. I'm just describing a situation where you can't have everybody be in a place where they feel fine about either working or not.
39:50 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. And it is crazy that the Federal Reserve is basically like, we need to try to force a recession to get people back to work.
39:58 Speaker 01 They never said it, but that was the explicit policy aim.
40:02 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
40:02 Speaker 01 They, we, we need to crash this economy to get people back to their jobs.
40:09 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
40:09 Speaker 01 It's crazy.
40:10 Alex Kantrowitz? But...
40:11 Speaker 01 I mean, it didn't work. They weren't able to do it, thank God. We got inflation down anyway, despite their efforts, but they, you know, listen, if, what's so wild is that... You basically had people become professional baseball card traders. You had people leave New Jersey and move to Montana. Like, not like two people, like millions of people did something completely different for eighteen months. Some people became amateur bakers. Some, some people, myself, became very casual alcoholics. Like, we just, everybody got to, like, live their version of, I do whatever I want now.
40:56 Speaker 01 And one of the craziest things, Alex, even like a year ago, there's an element of this that's still with us. Like, I remember going to, I had to go to the mall to do a return. I was helping my wife with something on like a Wednesday at ten o'clock in the morning. And I look around and the mall is full. What the hell are all these people doing? You know what they're doing? They're walking around with AirPods, taking customer service calls while they
41:18 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
41:19 Speaker 01 shop and do errands. Like, that's, like, that's literally what's going on. It's still going on. So, we're, we're probably permanently changed as a society as a result of the, the COVID period. I don't, I don't see how we get everybody to forget about it.
41:35 Alex Kantrowitz? Let me ask you this, Josh. Do you think this could have worked if we didn't have the inflation? Or is it?
41:41 Speaker 01 But the inflation is caused by it.
41:42 Alex Kantrowitz? But, okay. Let's say that, and maybe this is an impossible hypothetical, and if it is, call me out on it. But let's say that, um, you know, most of the inflation was caused by the fact that the supply chain was broken. And we know it was broken during COVID, that shipping a container went from, from China to the US went from two thousand to twenty thousand dollars. And that was reflected in consumer prices. If we could find a way to do this sort of policy that allows people the flexibility to do what they want and keep inflation in a reasonable rate, do you think it makes sense? Because I'm also speaking as someone who's, you know, one of those peoples that did that career shift. Started the podcast, you know, in August twenty twenty. Quit my job in May twenty twenty.
42:24 Alex Kantrowitz? So, like, that flexibility actually ended up being quite good for me. And I think, you know, Probably added to some economic activity if we could have people find, you know, the true thing they should supposed to be doing.
42:36 Speaker 01 Yes, if you could turn customer service into chatbots and people are satisfied with the outcome of those interactions to a reasonable degree. And then if you can turn every McDonald's and Starbucks into um, a combination kiosk vending machine, which Sweetgreen is doing with salads right now in uh, in Manhattan, go to the, go to the uh, One Penn Plaza outlet of Sweetgreen, I own the stock, full disclosure. It's a vending machine. They have a machine in there that makes between 500 and 800 salads an hour. During the work week, you order from a screen and the machine makes you a salad. And the calibrations of ingredients and dressing and it's perfect. It's a, it's a, it's a machine-made flawless chopped salad.
43:22 Speaker 01 It's, if you think about, how many people do you need to make 500 salads? During 12 to 2pm on a, on a Monday? I don't know, 15 people, 20 people? So if those people don't need to be anywhere there anymore, because the kiosk is taking credit cards, cash isn't changing hands, nobody has to monitor the, the salad assembly line because it's a computer with, with very powerful machinery attached. Like if that's where this is all headed, then absolutely, there's a, there's a universe in which we can um, survive 10 to 15% unemployment and still like have a a fairly good economy. I just think uh, that, that, the people that are not working but want to work
44:07 Speaker 01 are not going to be happy.
44:08 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
44:09 Speaker 01 And, look, in the book, I reference Vonnegut, and if you haven't read Player Piano, I highly recommend this book immediately after you read my book. Um, Kurt wrote this 70 years ago. And it's, it's, it's still relevant because it's about humanity.
44:28 Speaker 01 And so in the in the in the future that Vonnegut envisioned back in the 50s, basically had white collar managers who ran these massive industrial conglomerations, conglomerates, and you had, uh, basically people that used to do something for a living and are no longer needed. And the ultimate result is an uprising, even though those people were being cared for. They weren't discarded in the street. They had homes built for them. They were fed. They, you know, but it's at a certain point, you feel just absolutely useless. You feel suicidal. And that's when the opioid shit starts. Like, it's, it's just not realistic to think that the, the version of American capitalism that you want is a version where a lot of people could just
45:13 Speaker 01 walk around talking to trees all day. It's, it's just, it's not good for the soul. People need to feel needed. They need to actually be needed. And they need to have a purpose. And the purpose can't just be have as much fun as you can today. It's just, it's not, it's not workable. It's, you, you have to be eating mushrooms in San Francisco. Um, you know, in a dorm room conversation at 2:00 in the morning to think that this is where things should be going. It's, it's really not.
45:45 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, I can tell you a lot of the inspiration for that perspective on where things should be coming, should be going, uh, does come from those mushroom sessions.
45:54 Speaker 01 Which is fine. And then, then wake up, sober up, and realize that people need to be wanted. And you know this, and I know this, and, you know, I, look, we, we have 4,000 clients. Okay. So we talk to people that have done every single thing for a living you can imagine. And we talk to people who inherited money. We talk to people who were poor until they were 50 and something finally happened for them. We talk to people that had early success in their 20s and then lost it all and had to get it back. We've heard it every version. There is no version of people who are happy and satisfied with their life.
46:34 Speaker 01 That has anything to do with I wake up and do whatever I want. It's just that's not that's that is not the story that we ever hear. The most satisfied people are maybe not the busiest people, but the people who genuinely feel they are most counted on, even if it's just by relatives. And I just think that's endemic to humanity. It's always going to be that way. So it's a lot of fun to grow your own weed, bake your own bread, drink seven nights a week, whatever people did during that period. But it literally could not have gone on longer. And if it did, it would not have led to anything good societally. And, you know, good point to Jan six, good point to
47:19 Alex Kantrowitz? NFTs.
47:20 Speaker 01 The Black Lives Matter and the responses to that. It just it when people had too much time, it was too much time for us to look around at each other and get into fights. It's just it's not great. So I want I like full employment. I think it's better than, hey, guess what? The software does your job for you and you have $5 million in Apple stocks. You don't have to worry about anything ever again. I don't think that the person you say that to is better off two years later.
47:51 Alex Kantrowitz? We're here with Josh Brown. He's the author of You Weren't Supposed to See That: Secrets Every Investor Should Know. We've been talking a little bit about the book in the first half, second half. We're going to talk about some of the big tech companies he's looking at in the market more broadly. We'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate.
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50:05 Alex Kantrowitz? And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Josh Brown. He's the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management. He also hosts The Compound and Friends, one of my favorite shows, CNBC contributor, and the author of You Weren't Supposed to See That. Josh, let's talk a little bit about the market coming back here for the second half. So we also talked a little bit in the first half about how the Fed tried to force a recession. Oh, I think this was supposed to be the year that that was supposed to happen. The S and P 500 is up 23% year-to-date. We've been hearing about, yeah, recession, hard landing, rates are going down now, inflation is lowering. So, mission accomplished? What do you think?
50:46 Speaker 01 Well, I, so I had, uh, on the compound of friends last week, we had Dr. David Kelly, who's, uh, probably the highest ranking strategist at JP Morgan. Oh, yeah. And his perspect, his perspective is that the Fed really had nothing to do with it. We had these temporary, uh, supply imbalances all over the economy and we had all these labor market issues, again, stemming from how stimulated everyone was financially. And those things like worked their way through the system and reality came back and it turned out that like, you know, the economy kind of healed itself. That, I mean, that's like a stylized version of what he was saying. I'm not as smart as him, so I wouldn't disagree with him.
51:28 Speaker 01 Um, I think the Fed does play a role, but, uh, there are a lot of people who think like demand for capital is ultimately going to get to where it needs to get to. And, uh, you know, the Fed can exacerbate the direction one, one way or the other. But here we are, to your point, uh, Alex, at the end of 2022, the idea that we would have a recession and a hard landing in 2023 was effectively consensus. This is the unanimous opinion, pretty much, of Wall Street strategists, of mainstream economists, of CFO survey that they do at Duke University. Like this was just what people said. It's, it's happening. Like this is it. We're going to have the hangover from the pandemic era stimulus and there's nothing you can do about it. And we didn't.
52:12 Speaker 01 And I think, uh, I think a big part of why we didn't was the consumer ended up being more resilient than we thought. And it turns out, we don't really have an economy that's highly dependent on manufacturing the way that we used to. So it's not like, you know, you have a, a street with 10 people living on it and eight of them go to work at the plant all day. And when the plant lays people off, the economy goes to shit. It's just not, it's just not the version of America we live in right now. So that was helpful. Uh, services driven economy is going to be less susceptible to higher interest rates. It's not part of the manufacturing cycle of booms and busts and inventories and, okay. So is that, the second thing is we had this AI genie come out of the bottle and that nobody could have predicted, predicted that.
52:57 Speaker 01 Maybe you could have, uh, Powell couldn't have. Certainly not, yeah. And so GPT hits in November, on November 30th of 2022. Coincidentally, the stock market had bottomed two weeks prior. Crazy. We're celebrating the two year anniversary of the stock market as we speak. I don't know if you know this. Most people don't. The NASDAQ is up 28% on the year. This year!
53:20 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, it's crazy. It's the growth this year has been out of control.
53:24 Speaker 01 So that's all AI. So, uh, so we have a raging stock market. We have housing activity renewed because mortgage, uh, mortgage rates are, uh, falling finally and people feel less trapped in whatever their situation is. Um, we have inflation moderating. The Fed has done its first interest rate cut and they started off with a, a double cut. And they'll probably do another one, uh, in a couple of weeks and, uh, we have this election that everyone was terrified of and it looks like actually the outcome is going to be still up in the air, but probably lead to a divided government, which is positive for stocks historically, uh, where no one party gets to do a lot of weird shit in either direction.
54:08 Speaker 01 Um, and we'll get through this election, which is a big, bad thing that everyone's worried about. And that'll take place and God forbid, we have an inauguration where one side concedes. That'll be interesting. Uh, but so like a lot of the negative potential catalysts that we've been living in the shadow of are fading. Doesn't mean that something bad can't happen out of nowhere. I'm just describing the things that we were terrified about.
54:31 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
54:31 Speaker 01 Uh, and so that's really, that's really the story of what's happening right now. We've had earnings growth this year. We were already supposed to have been in a recession as of last year. So it seems as though it's like, uh, it's a new bull market and it's two years old.
54:46 Alex Kantrowitz? And in your book, you describe something called this relentless bid. And, you know, basically that's everybody's putting money into their 401ks, traditional retirement is, uh, not what it used to be. That money, 401k money is going into equities. And it's just effectively coming into the stock market month after month, quarter after quarter. And that is relentlessly bidding up the stock prices, um, and effectively has a put in terms of how low it could be. I'm sure I'm butchering this a little bit. Uh, but basically, yes, we, we are seeing earnings growth, but how much does that relentless bid have to do with the fact that like, we have gone through this turbulence and the stock market has grown the way that it has?
55:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I I don't want people to think that that's like my justification for buying stocks today is that 401k money is gonna just keep coming in and levitating the market. Right. I wrote that in 2014 and originally, so it was my way of describing the process by which the actual behavior of the stock market had begun to change because of two things. One, this wave of price insensitive money. By the way, uh, 401k is 11 trillion dollars. Okay, people are adding to that 11 trillion dollars every two weeks when they get paid.
56:07 Speaker 01 They do not consult the PE ratio of Apple. It's an automated decision. The money comes in no matter what's happening in the economy or with politics or the weather or sports, like nothing enters people's thinking. It's just a wave of money and it keeps coming in. Um, the boomers, the wealthy boomers, they don't even have to take money out. They just borrow against it like, like if a wealthy boomer wants to buy a vacation home these days, the guy at Morgan Stanley says, okay, no problem. Well, uh, here, sign this paper. We'll give you a 50% borrow against your treasury bonds. We'll give you a 30% borrow against your stocks.
56:47 Speaker 01 It's a non, it's a not underwritten loan, so it takes five seconds. The only thing you have to do is not buy more securities with it. Take the money out of the brokerage account, go buy the house. Now, you don't have to sell your stocks and you have a second home. Boom, magic. This is the, the securities based lending is like the, is like one of the driving factors of, uh, people said, Harry, this guy, Harry Dent. He's a demography guy and his big thing was in the year 2020, every baby boomer is gonna turn 70 and they're all gonna simultaneously liquidate their portfolios. Now, it's actually not how it played out. Now they borrow against their portfolios. They don't even pay capital gains tax.
57:26 Speaker 01 So you have that, you have this 401k wall of money coming in and then you have a new business model on Wall Street. When I wrote the piece 10 years ago, uh, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, now Bank of America, um,
57:42 Speaker 01 JP Morgan, UBS, all the wealth management units at the big investment banks and brokerages were converting their stockbrokers into financial advisors and changing their comp model. They were trying to push them away from commission-based transactional brokerage business and push them more toward fee-based asset management business, and it worked. And one of the side effects of that is financial advisors like myself are building financial plans for their clients, and the plan doesn't say to sell stocks. In fact, when the market dips, the plan says,
58:23 Alex Kantrowitz? Buy more.
58:23 Speaker 01 Hey, actually, you should be buying more stocks and rebalancing because it's going to make the probabilities for your client go higher. So you've got this automatic bid coming from the wealth management side, these 70-30, 60-40, 50-50 portfolios, where when stocks sell off, bonds get sold, stocks get bought. And the effect of these forces that I'm describing is a dampening of volatility, and it is an acceleration of the correction process. So it's not that we don't have corrections, we do, all the time. They don't last long, because the wealth manager with $50 billion under management
59:07 Speaker 01 pulls the lever, and there's a firm wide rebalance across all of their accounts. And the wall of money from 401ks comes in, and oh, by the way, nobody's actually selling their securities for any reason. They certainly aren't selling it to live on in retirement. So this is like profound shit to me. I don't know how interested your audience is in this.
59:27 Alex Kantrowitz? No, we are, for sure.
59:29 Speaker 01 It's, if I could anthropomorphize the market for a minute, I would just say it's like, it's like a new person. The old Mr. Market where everybody was like on tenterhooks. Every time something would go wrong, everybody would panic. Nobody panics anymore. They panic buy.
59:45 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep.
59:46 Speaker 01 They they've, look at the response to to Israel being invaded. Look at the response to the Ukraine being invaded. Look at the response now, Iran's Iran's, uh, I don't know, within minutes of of obtaining their first uh, nuclear bomb. People panic buy stocks when these things happen. It's it's crazy.
1:00:06 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
1:00:06 Speaker 01 But it's happening.
1:00:07 Alex Kantrowitz? When the there there was that mini crash on in the beginning of August, you'll remember some something went on in Asia, I think, where the market dropped like 10% in a day. Uh, it was the first day of my vacation, my summer. I talked about this on the show. My wife and I, we landed in Ireland, uh, where we were spending a week. And as soon as we got, we like did red eye. So we watched the Asian markets collapse overnight. And then this was in Japan, something happened in Japan. Anyway, uh, a second we get we get on the ground, I'm like, just go buy the S and P 500 and do it as soon as you can. And the market's up like very nicely since then.
1:00:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, what you're describing is the the yen carry trade. So basically,
1:00:47 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, yes.
1:00:48 Speaker 01 United States cut interest rates and Japan, uh, and and Japan raised interest rates. Um, they are terrified of inflation for some reason. So as a result of that action, all of a sudden, there's this thing called the yen carry trade where people are borrowing money in Japanese yen terms. And they are using that money to buy things like stocks and real estate here in the United States. Warren Buffett, uh, is involved in the end carry trade. He sold bonds denominated in yen and used that to fund the purchase of Japanese equities. So Japanese carry trade is something that institutions and hedge funds
1:01:26 Speaker 01 are using as a way of obtaining cheap funding, which leverages, you know, their buying power and and uh, magnifies their returns. So when the Japanese raised rates and um, the United States cut rates, it was like a blip in the carry trade. It was a margin call. Some people had to sell some stuff. And then that had a ripple effect. Japan had a mini 1987. Some of their biggest publicly traded companies like MUFG were down 25% in a flash, which is obviously terrifying. And then here in the United States, we had this crazy wild pre-market. Um, where people thought like, uh, the stocks were going to like open up down 10% and keep going.
1:02:10 Speaker 01 Because the muscle memory of that is still there. Like people remember these panics, these crashes. Um, what ended up happening was it was the best buying opportunity of the year, to your point. And we didn't hear from a single panicked person.
1:02:22 Alex Kantrowitz? Wow.
1:02:23 Speaker 01 Not one. Cause there's no time.
1:02:25 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
1:02:26 Speaker 01 Cause even if you wanted to panic, the market went green like later that day, like what?
1:02:32 Alex Kantrowitz? It was crazy.
1:02:33 Speaker 01 Damn it. Like what?
1:02:36 Speaker 01 So, you know, this, and, and I think it's a great story that you told Alex because it's, um, it's emblematic of just this time that we're in right now. There's a higher proclivity to panic buy than panic sell.
1:02:49 Alex Kantrowitz? Yes. Okay. We have about 10 minutes left. Let's quickly do Amazon, Nvidia and Apple, if you're up for it. So with Amazon.
1:02:57 Speaker 01 I own all three, full disclosure.
1:02:59 Alex Kantrowitz? Yes.
1:03:01 Alex Kantrowitz? I, I would want to ask you.
1:03:01 Speaker 01 So Amazon's.
1:03:02 Alex Kantrowitz? I want to ask you this question about Amazon. So I was on, uh, with you guys on the Compound and Friends in July, I believe, and we had a debate, you and I, about like whether Amazon was looking up or not. And you kind of sold me on your viewpoint, but I had mentioned that there was some weird things going on with Amazon culture. Lo and behold, September 16th, Andy Jassy comes out with the memo. We're going to do five days in the office from now on. And he also points out, this is the most pointed admission of cultural problems in Amazon history from a CEO. He said, "We have added more layers than we had ever before, and it's created artifacts that we like to change. That means pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for decision meetings. A longer line of managers feeling they need to review a topic before it moves forward.
1:03:45 Alex Kantrowitz? Owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere." Truly day two type of culture taking place in Amazon. Um, but obviously the, you know, the company has existing assets that are quite strong. So what's your perspective on the Amazon trade right now?
1:04:05 Speaker 01 Look, I think the expectations for Amazon are very low and the stock is selling at a discount to the multiple it sold at in the before times in 2019. And they'd never, ever gotten their premium valuation back. And you can't say the same for the rest of the mega caps in tech. Meta looks outstanding right now. Nvidia looks outstanding. Amazon and Tesla are probably the furthest away from their 52-week highs of that group of stocks. I think Apple made a new high today. So Amazon is absolutely being treated as though there are issues there.
1:04:46 Speaker 01 Like, I don't think, when they go into this next earnings report, people are expecting any sort of like upside surprise or anything like that. So it's kind of in a weird place, but, you know, from my perspective, that's why there's an opportunity.
1:04:58 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep.
1:04:59 Speaker 01 And, you know, we just went through this cycle with Meta. The stock was in a 75% drawdown. People forget it's since, I think, more than tripled. So when companies have problems and they address them and they admit to them, it's like the first step of like, hey, we have to change something here. So I don't know how long it takes.
1:05:18 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
1:05:19 Speaker 01 For Jassy to get his act together, but I think the stock's gonna work.
1:05:23 Alex Kantrowitz? No, definitely. I mean, maybe this memo that Jassy sent is his year of efficiency memo, saying that the company needs to figure it out from a cultural standpoint.
1:05:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, that's certainly how it could turn out. There's, you know, look, there is some idiosyncrasies with Amazon in terms of like on the retail side, they've been gaining share with the essentials. The problem is with the essentials, it's not a very profitable business.
1:05:48 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
1:05:49 Speaker 01 It almost feels like they're playing defense by pushing that so much just to make sure someone else is not getting those sales. So people don't get excited about that. There's a lot of questions about whatever they're trying to do on the entertainment side. Like, it's not a clean story. Right?
1:06:04 Alex Kantrowitz? Definitely.
1:06:05 Speaker 01 So, but, again... That's reflected in the fact that this is still selling at a discount to its historical, its historic multiple. And, you know, the bears would say, well, it should. And I guess I would agree.
1:06:18 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
1:06:18 Speaker 01 The real question is,
1:06:20 Alex Kantrowitz? Where it goes.
1:06:20 Speaker 01 Will it always?
1:06:21 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
1:06:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:22 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, Apple, as you mentioned, hit a new high. It's closer to four trillion than it is to three trillion, which is to me just nuts, because if you think about the context, Apple Intelligence has been pretty lukewarm, like a true meh release. The Vision Pro has gone nowhere. And they have issues in China, which is 20% of their market. So what do you think explains the sort of, speaking of a clean story and not, the sort of disparity there between Apple's story and its performance?
1:06:53 Speaker 01 You failed to mention that the Vision Pro, probably the thing that people were most excited about for them to launch other than AI has been a flop.
1:07:03 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep.
1:07:04 Speaker 01 Like unmitigated.
1:07:05 Alex Kantrowitz? Did I think I mentioned that? Nobody is saying that was successful. Forgot it was, anyway. But go ahead.
1:07:09 Speaker 01 So here's, so I guess this is the way I would put it. And this is a very real politic answer. In the end, it's cash flows and earnings. And do you have them or do you not have them? And Apple has them. And Apple, basically, it's a $200 billion cash hoard with which they can pursue $300 billion worth of buybacks off the cash flow alone over the next couple of years. So they can buy in a ton of stock. And they are churning out plenty of profits as a result of the services business staying strong. And they can have a flop here, a flop there, an underwhelming iPhone launch, et cetera.
1:07:51 Speaker 01 But in, like, they get the benefit of the doubt from the investor class, that whatever's wrong or half-baked in the case of, in the case of the AI effort, like, they will eventually figure it out and get it right. And all, like, yesterday, they dropped a hint. I don't know who sourced the Wall Street Journal, but like, Apple is considering a lighter weight headset. Yeah, no shit. Because Facebook is, Meta is selling a ton of the Ray-Bans and now they're gonna sell this Orion unit. So obviously, like, that's where the ball is. So Apple's considering it, okay. I'm sure it's like all hands on deck internally. They, they must make sure that the next iteration of the Vision Pro is a little less dorky.
1:08:35 Alex Kantrowitz? Think it's a problem for Apple that Meta is beating them to the future of AI and mixed reality?
1:08:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I watched, um, I watched Zuckerberg on stage with the acquired guys talking about like denigrating the phone as the center of, the center, like, like the, he basically said, "You're all suffering from this huge amount of recency bias just because the iPhone has been the dominant lens through which we view the internet. That doesn't mean it's gonna be the case the next 15 years." And he kept saying, "Listen, if you really wanna look at a piece of glass," like, so he is very clearly, uh, he is very clearly winning the wearable thing right now. And, uh, I guess I just would say, like, Apple rarely gets there first. I think they just get their best.
1:09:23 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep.
1:09:23 Speaker 01 And I think, I think they'll, they'll figure it out.
1:09:26 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, lastly, Nvidia. Um, I think when I was at your office the last time, it was approaching-
1:09:31 Speaker 01 Your all-time high yesterday.
1:09:32 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, right. It was approaching 3 trillion and you're like, "If it hits 3 trillion, I gotta offload some," or, um-
1:09:38 Speaker 01 And I didn't.
1:09:38 Alex Kantrowitz? You didn't. So, so clearly you believe that Nvidia has room to go. Does it, does it eventually tail off, or? I mean, here's the, I'll just give, like, literally 60 seconds on why I think Nvidia might be limited. Uh, or like what the case would be that Nvidia is limited, right? It's that other companies are come, gonna come up with specialized hardware for things like inference, um, that's gonna undercut Nvidia's ability to sell. And also just that, um, you know, that their pricing power might not last for as long as they think it will if people aren't gonna have real return on this technology. What's your perspective?
1:10:13 Speaker 01 I don't know. They just told us they sold out of Blackwell, uh, chips for 12 months.
1:10:17 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, so they're okay.
1:10:18 Speaker 01 Is that what they said?
1:10:19 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that is, that to me, that's not a surprise. Um, they-
1:10:23 Speaker 01 Listen, this has been, this has been, this has been the bear case on Nvidia is that the hyperscalers will at some point stop spending. And I've made this case before, but like, the thing is, nobody knows when.
1:10:39 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
1:10:39 Speaker 01 And, you know-
1:10:43 Speaker 01 There was talk a year ago Nvidia is Cisco. And remember all those slide decks and charts and presentations where they over right. They overlaid Nvidia over Cisco circa 1999. Uh, it's doubled since then.
1:10:58 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
1:10:58 Speaker 01 It's doubled.
1:10:59 Alex Kantrowitz? Yes.
1:11:00 Speaker 01 Can I tell you one last funny thing?
1:11:01 Alex Kantrowitz? Of course, yeah, definitely.
1:11:03 Speaker 01 I just got a dividend from Nvidia paid into my fidelity account. Just see it's just the idea that they're paying a dividend to is really funny.
1:11:12 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, yeah, I know. I mean.
1:11:15 Speaker 01 It's small. Percentage wise, it's nothing.
1:11:17 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
1:11:18 Speaker 01 But it was funny.
1:11:18 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, no, I mean.
1:11:19 Speaker 01 It was funny.
1:11:19 Alex Kantrowitz? It's the it's the gift that keeps on giving. I mean, it's definitely been. You've been early on it and to ride it from where you were to where where it is now must be just a an unbelievable high.
1:11:30 Speaker 01 Uh, yeah, it's look, it's the biggest winner I've ever had in my life and I don't. I think you could live in all the hundred years and not see anything like this ever again.
1:11:39 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
1:11:40 Speaker 01 Um, so I, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm not like, uh, beating my chest like, look, I, I got Nvidia. A lot of people have bought it over the years. I just happen to have gotten into it like really, really early before I was excited about AI. There was no AI. So, uh, I'm, I'm happy about it and I've sold a little bit along the way, but I, I think my position now is maybe a forever position. I don't know. We'll see.
1:12:05 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay.
1:12:06 Speaker 01 We'll see.
1:12:07 Alex Kantrowitz? The book is, You Weren't Supposed to See That: Secrets Every Investor Should Know. It's by Josh Brown. You can get it at all bookstores today. You can also listen to his podcast, The Compound and Friends, on your podcast app of choice and see him on CNBC at the halftime report. And every now and again, Josh and I show up there together and it's always fun to be on with you. Josh, great to see you. Thanks so much for your time.
1:12:27 Speaker 01 Thank you, Alex. You're the best.
1:12:29 Alex Kantrowitz? All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks again to Josh for coming on. Rajan and I will be back on Friday, breaking down the week's news, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
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Previous OpenAI's Financials Revealed, Tesla Robotaxi Debut, Shein's Weird CEO Next OpenAI and Microsoft's Tension, Apple Screens Everywhere, Meta’s Toothpaste Massacre Page updated October 12, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
