Jim Cramer on the Retail Trading Revolution

In recent years, retail trading of stocks has absolutely exploded. This is happening despite the fact that investors are subject to a constant stream of propaganda that individuals can't beat the market, and that the proper way to invest is through low-cost index funds that you don't pay regular attention to. More than anyone else, one man has been banging the drum (literally) for years that individuals can beat the market and are smart enough to select individual securities. That, of course, is Jim Cramer, the host of the popular TV show Mad Money on CNBC. He is also the author of the new book, How to Make Money in Any Market. We discuss his philosophy of investing, his career, his time as a young college-age radical, the time he lead a wildcat strike and got fired, his thoughts on memestock mania, and much more. Read more:US Stocks Advance to Records to Close Out Risk-On FOMC WeekIntel Soars After Nvidia Makes $5 Billion Investment Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

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• 3:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 3:17Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 3:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, something I think about the market these days is that in the media, there is this incredible drumbeat of experts and ads that support the media, et cetera. All these experts that they say, don't try to beat the market.

• 3:32Tracy Alloway?

  That's right.

• 3:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Index, index, index. And actually indexing is great because like it's cheap and indexes have performed incredible returns. And now though, for the last several years, it's like the public is becoming unshackled and doing the exact opposite of everything. And we see the most extreme form of, you know, day trading and trading on Robinhood, individual names, zero day, meme stocks, options. It's like the public has revolted against this message that it's been inundated with for years.

• 4:01Tracy Alloway?

  Well, you know what I think is really interesting is not only is retail sort of going out on its own, but Wall Street and the institutional investors are kind of copying what retail does, right? Because retail was the first into something like zero day or one day options. And then it became institutionalized and you saw that big professional volume follow on. So it feels like retail is a really important part of the market now. And rather than retail trying to do what the Experts do, it's kind of the experts trying to

• 4:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Catch up.

• 4:29Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, catch up with retail.

• 4:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Understand what retail is doing. And again, like, I love an index fund and I don't like having

• 4:35Tracy Alloway?

  You're an EMH guy. I'm just gonna remind you.

• 4:38Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm like an EMH guy. Yeah, I love it. But like, I do feel like there's this huge tension and it only feels like it's accelerating because now there's more and more things to bet on and there's crypto and pretty soon on your Robin Hood app, you're going to be able to like bet on a prediction market on what the Fed is going to do. So we live in this world of trading

• 4:56Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Against what all of the ninis, like myself sometimes on CNBC.

• 4:59Tracy Alloway?

  Close the four pros.

• 5:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Well, anyway, we really do have the perfect guest, someone I've wanted to speak to literally for years, someone who has long been preaching in public that the individual can pick stocks, that picking stocks is a good thing, that you don't have to accept the idea of just being boring and being average and getting the average return. We are going to be speaking with Jim Cramer. He is the host of Mad Money on some network called CNBC.

• 5:27Tracy Alloway?

  Never heard of it.

• 5:28Joe Weisenthal?

  And he is the author of a new book, How to Make Money in Any Market. So Jim, thrilled to have you on the Odd Lots Podcast.

• 5:34Speaker 06

  First of all, that intro of what you're talking about, Justice, is the fundament of what I'm talking about. But I want to spend a second talking about the person to my left, Joe, Joey.

• 5:44Joe Weisenthal?

  No, no.

• 5:45Speaker 06

  No, my wife, my wife was looking at the book drawer. She was in the book drawer and she goes, okay, you got today's show and you got Joe. And Joe is someone who's gonna get it going for you and wake up and he's gonna probably know the book and he's gonna know your stuff. And Tracy, I tell you, when you do these things, they're pretty soulless. So when you get something like you guys, I mean, I just laugh. I mean, my dad sold corrugated. That was his job.

• 6:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh.

• 6:09Speaker 06

  When I was a hedge fund manager, I just went exclusively with him. I mean, a reference to last week's show, but I do want to talk totally much clearly about what you're talking about. I wrote this book.

• 6:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, I just want to say, the first line of the book is, congratulations, you've just bought the most radical book about investing ever written. Classic Kramer model.

• 6:28Speaker 06

  Sure, be quick.

• 6:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Classic Kramer understanding.

• 6:30Speaker 06

  I love that. But it's true that everyone's been taught these days, you can't pick stocks, and you just have to be in index funds. Thank you Warren Buffett for that too, although his stock was the one you should have picked. And what bothers me is, people are going to do it. And you talked about zero day and things like that. They're gonna do it. If they're gonna do it, why not help them? I mean, one of the premises of the book is, is that I know that people want to speculate. So, look, I say own an index fund for half your money. You've gotta be saving constantly. And then take five slots. Try to find four really good stocks and a speculative one. You want to go do nuclear power? You want to go do Bloom Energy for hydrogen fuel cells? I'm not gonna stop you. Provided that you try to find the next Fang. And I'm fortunate enough to create a Fang, because it was just

• 7:15Speaker 06

  something that seemed funny. But, you know, I do that too. But what I'm trying to do is, accept the fact people want to do this. Do it right. And if they do it right, maybe they do it long-term, own stocks. Like, I use the term compounding. How do you compound if you're a day trader?

• 7:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 06

  You can't. You can't. So, I mean, I look at this show, and this show is about trends, and about long-term trends. Like, I find that most things that I read about are about trading. And you can't beat the machines trading. But you can beat them if you compound long-term in really good stocks. And I mentioned, it's crazy, but I went over 100 years, there was a study about over 100 years. And if you held Vulcan Materials, rocks, you made a fortune. I don't really emphasize it, but if you held Philip Morris, you made the most money. And he's stuck. Philip Morris. Oh, yeah. We have a whole episode on that. Denny DeVitry broke that company up. It was one of the greatest breakups ever. But I don't like to talk about, I lost my father-in-law to cancer from smoking. Wanted the cigarette

• 8:12Speaker 06

  on his death. But, you know, that kind of nonsense. So, I feel like that long-term is good, provided you do it right. And I let people pick stocks because they want to. And by the way, there have been 600,000 millionaires created by individual stocks in the last year. And I want the people who read it to be the next ones.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  I think it's fair to say, whatever you think about overall performance and the efficient market hypothesis, just putting your money in the S and P 500 is kind of boring, right?

• 8:39Speaker 06

  Well, that's it. You see, people, they want some, they're jonesing. I have to keep them from jonesing on the wrong thing because I don't even want jonesing. I actually want investing. I was on a show the other day and the guy said, why do you encourage day traders? I was a hedge fund manager for many, many years. And when I quit, I said, you know what? I have got to change this because people keep thinking they can come in standing start and buy Micron. And you don't know anything about Micron to a standing start. Why not pick a great stock that's down because, and it's got a good yield and you can own it for a long time. You see the big secular trend. And if I can do that and get people to stop day trading, that's the win. They can't, do you guys think that they can win day trading at home?

• 9:22Joe Weisenthal?

  No.

• 9:23Speaker 06

  No is the correct, they can't.

• 9:27Joe Weisenthal?

  So your argument, they can't win day trading, but they can win picking stocks and holding them.

• 9:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I think that things have changed from when I got in the business. I used to go to the New York Commercial Library and read microfiche that was a couple of months old, couldn't get any reports, it wasn't available. Now everything's available and I do recommend, look, Chat GPT, perplexity, you can find out more than you can, I mean, I was watching, within five minutes, they have everything.

• 9:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 06

  And I just think that if someone wants to do it right, they can do it right. They got four slots away from the speculative. I show that one or two, if they hit, can make up for all the losses. I accept the fact that they're going to have losses because nobody's that good. But in every kind of schematic I did, the index fund didn't do as well. And yet we, we revere the index fund, good, but yet one really good one, you have seven good ones and 493 bad. Well, that's, well, that's not my style.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  It is true. I am kind of partial to the argument that because so much of the debate and the story is online now, that the guy who's like day trading from his basement probably has a very good like finger on the pulse of the market and possibly better than some of the professionals nowadays.

• 10:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Then you're more, you're more revolutionary than I am.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think you saw.

• 10:39Tracy Alloway?

  During the meme stock era.

• 10:41Speaker 06

  Gamestop.

• 10:42Tracy Alloway?

  Exactly. Is it weird to go from a professional hedge fund guy, a legit hedge fund guy, to the sort of poster boy for retail day traders?

• 10:51Speaker 06

  Yes, but I was a hedge fund manager. Everything was to try to figure out the patterns that now the machines do because that was pre-machine. And now I'm kind of a spokesman for the individual investor who is completely not the professional. And that's because the show Mad Money has been for 20 years. It's a six o'clock show and what happens, it's all about what the individual is trying to do. And what I'm trying to explain, let's give you an example tonight, give you a little preview. I'm going to talk about the multiple. And why I want to talk about the multiple because that's the secret sauce. And yet people don't understand, and I invoke my mom in the book. My mom is a person who you met, we were talking earlier about Injunewee.

• 11:34Speaker 06

  My mom is someone who says Pepsi's was at 140 right now. Coca-Cola is 67. I've got to buy Coke. It should never be as cheap as Pepsi. Coke should be double. And like, I would say, Mom, no, that is artifice. It's a price thing. And she's, Jimmy, listen to me. It's ridiculous that Pepsi's at 140, period, end of story. And she didn't know that it was a ratio. And she would call in at 9:30 when I was at Goldman and buy, I want to buy three shares of Giant Food. And that was not the, while I was at Goldman. That was not to do the three shares. But I am incredibly cognizant in the book that people don't know how to read a balance sheet. So I actually take the risk of 20 pages about how to read a balance sheet. I take it.

• 12:18Speaker 06

  Now, when I did the book, they were like, whoa, hey. And I said, no, no, I gotta go there. If I'm telling people to own individual stocks, I have to help them with ChatGPT and how to analyze balance sheet and how to actually go line by line. Because I don't want to be irresponsible and say, what you ought to do is say, you know what? Coca-Cola is pretty good here. You've got to understand why. And that's a big part of the book.

• 12:41Joe Weisenthal?

  You mentioned meme stocks. As someone who has spent a career advocating for this idea that the individual can trade.

• 12:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Like now in 2025, like, what do you think about that specific time? I mean, arguably, it's like multiplied since then.

• 12:56Speaker 06

  Well, we haven't today.

• 12:57Joe Weisenthal?

  But have you ever, do you ever stop and think like, do you ever think this has gotten out of hand? Do you ever think this is a monster that has gone beyond where it should? Like, do you ever have misgivings about the degree of public participation in the market?

• 13:10Speaker 06

  Absolutely. I had a moment where I had had some serious back surgery. So I was out heavily medicated for three days. And when I started.

• 13:18Joe Weisenthal?

  This was during GameStop mania.

• 13:20Speaker 06

  Well, GameStop was about 100 when I started. And when I came to basically and stopped using the whatever kind of heroin that they give you these days. It was a Thursday and GameStop had quadrupled. I had a catheter in me.

• 13:33Tracy Alloway?

  Did you think you were hallucinating?

• 13:35Speaker 06

  Well, I had, yes, yes. I thought that maybe they slipped me something in the midnight. I slipped me something, but I had a catheter in me and I couldn't reach the TV. It was driving me crazy. I finally just pulled the catheter out, which is really not a good experience. You really like to be more of a pro. And I called into Carl and David, Carl Contini and David Faber, and said, this is ridiculous. Everybody has to sell. After that, it was 24/7 Bodyguard because I destroyed the chain letter. GameStop shouldn't have been at 400. We all know that. Now, isn't it true that GameStop is still fighting and they've got, you know, they've raised a lot of money by doing that at the money sale?

• 14:12Joe Weisenthal?

  So you got death threats and stuff like that for.

• 14:14Speaker 06

  Oh, I've had a lot of death.

• 14:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Right, I'm sure.

• 14:15Speaker 06

  I'm not supposed to talk about it.

• 14:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Maybe we'll talk, maybe we'll talk a little bit about, both of us need to learn a little bit more about how to handle public. But yeah, keep going.

• 14:24Speaker 06

  You've always been, you've been straight and we know that you're fearless. And fearless means when you're with your guards, they say, listen, you gotta stop being fearless. Oh, I own a restaurant.

• 14:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 06

  And one of the guards said, look, here's what we're gonna do first. You're never going to your own restaurant. That's the most. I said, look, I own the restaurant. I like to go in Tuesdays and Wednesdays. He said, okay, you gotta vary the day and you gotta go no, no time after, after seven. I said, well, it doesn't open until seven. We have to be a little more cognizant. Especially in this era, this horrible era that we're seeing.

• 14:56Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, do you still dream of owning a restaurant? Didn't you talk about doing this, like a diner?

• 15:00Joe Weisenthal?

  I still might one day.

• 15:01Speaker 06

  Okay, I gotta tell you, if you can have a mixture of alcohol.

• 15:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  You know, you can make money.

• 15:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah?

• 15:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, we made money.

• 15:09Tracy Alloway?

  Just on the alcohol?

• 15:09Joe Weisenthal?

  You also own a mezcal business, which we should talk to at some point.

• 15:12Speaker 06

  That's why we had to switch to that because we saw the people buying mezcal like mad. So we pivoted. Wow, you really, well, I, of course, you.

• 15:20Joe Weisenthal?

  A little prep.

• 15:21Tracy Alloway?

  We did some research.

• 15:22Speaker 06

  But you're knowledgeable, Trace. I've not worked with you. I've listened to you and you're completely enjoyable and terrific. And this is a show, I was telling Joe beforehand, what a cool thing. We haven't taken seven commercials yet. Do you realize that?

• 15:36Tracy Alloway?

  We might have once this has been published.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Grease, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 16:11Speaker 07

  We're seeing a lot of insocial players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service insocial clients.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reece Merrick of Ripple says.

• 16:28Speaker 06

  A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume, so writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 17:39Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 18:20Speaker 02

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• 18:50Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, okay, serious question.

• 18:52Speaker 06

  We've been serious the whole way, haven't we?

• 18:54Tracy Alloway?

  Sure. You touched on the information, the plethora of information sort of leveling the field for professionals and retail. And then earlier this week, we had Trump suggesting that public companies should report every six months instead of quarterly. What would that do for the retail investor? And there is also this trend towards more private markets, more companies that are not IPO-ing, less information available.

• 19:19Speaker 06

  Well, this has been a great soul-searching moment because having run a public company, The Street, the quarterly filings cost us a fortune. We didn't have that much. It was like our whole profit was, went to the auditors and they were a real pain in the butt because we didn't know really how to do it and CFO had to huddle. We lose that person for 20 days. But as an investor, I want all the information possible. So I kind of feel like, look, you can give us two reports, but you've got to give us a report that would make us, in the non-SEC, make us understand why we should be paying X for you. Again, the price turn is mobile because that's, that's what people need to be able to make decisions. This was a harder one than I thought because the president really does speak to a lot of CEOs and this is what they talk about.

• 20:04Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I'm sure they complained about it.

• 20:05Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, because, look, one of the things that I hated about being a public company is the conference call. What are we going to say? Do we do well? What are we going to predict? Are the margins going up? I mean, and I just, we can't give a forecast. No, if you don't do forecasts, then they won't like us. But if we do the forecast, we'll miss the forecast. And these kind of silly discussions, they're really silly. And I think that they, I think they're ashamed because they sure take a lot of time and they're very, very misleading.

• 20:33Joe Weisenthal?

  You said something in your book, speaking of-

• 20:35Speaker 06

  You actually read the damn book.

• 20:36Joe Weisenthal?

  I read, I read a good amount of it.

• 20:38Speaker 06

  You are something. This is one reason my wife, my wife said, I bet she read it, I bet she read it.

• 20:43Joe Weisenthal?

  This is something I wondered about in April when the stock market plunged after-

• 20:47Speaker 06

  Liberation Day?

• 20:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Liberation Day. And they came back. But you talk about the fact that like politicians, by and large, actually, Trump is a little different than most politicians, but they don't typically run on the stock market and they also like don't- Ron about like the shareholder as a class of society that deserves to be represented. Right. As you mentioned in your book, like Joe Biden was sort of proud of the fact that he didn't have much money. You never really hear, well, what about the shareholder class?

• 21:13Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 21:14Joe Weisenthal?

  As an individual. And I'm curious why you think that, especially now that so many people are into stocks. It's so much part of pop culture, et cetera. Why don't people talk about the shareholder class?

• 21:24Speaker 06

  I saw Dick Grass on the floor yesterday, and you know, I used to go around the country with him talking about the shareholder class and ownership. We just talked about ownership. That was kind of pre the idea that everything had to be traded. When I was at Goldman, we talked about ownership and ownership means compounding. And compounding is a very boring word, but it is what makes you the biggest money. And I think we have to encourage ownership. Now, in terms of President Trump, I was a judge in The Apprentice for a very long time. And before that, he had been on Mad Money multiple times. And he always said, look, I don't do stocks. Give me some stocks. I want to own some stocks. And that's a totally fraught situation. You don't want to offer him, you know, Alcoa. So I always just said, listen, utilities. And he said, good, good. This is what I want.

• 22:07Speaker 06

  You know, because utilities, frankly, you're not blowing your head off with A with American Electric Power. But he didn't pride himself in not knowing stocks. He wished he had more time to learn stocks. I think that he, this time around, when I spoke to him, he's not really into the stock market as a barometer of his success anymore. In the old days, when I spoke to him as president, first go around, he thought that the Dow, he liked the Dow more than yesterday. The Dow determined it was the great, if he didn't be, if the Dow didn't go up, then he wasn't a good president. So it was the great determinant. And I always tell him, please, don't do that. It's too hard. You're not really one for one with it.

• 22:46Tracy Alloway?

  Also, it's the Dow.

• 22:47Speaker 06

  Well, he liked, yes, he liked that. It was like the Nielsen's. And I have to tell you, the doing the apprentices is quite enjoyable.

• 22:54Joe Weisenthal?

  I bet.

• 22:54Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, tell us stories. I want to hear the behind the scenes gossip.

• 22:57Speaker 06

  Well, I mean. What would happen is that you had to monitor tasks. I'm not going to mention, they would have a task. I'm not going to mention individual names because I have a nondisclosure. But I will tell you, there's some people who do the task and some people who want you to do the task, like me. I was like, no, I'm just a judge. But we would go through it and I would have to out the person who did nothing or out the person who said they were doing something. And maybe the two people were doing it and one was doing nothing or didn't show. There were some of those instances. But in the end, they used my verdict, I'd say maybe half the time. And I wish they'd used it more because I spent a huge amount of time looking at it.

• 23:40Speaker 06

  But the president had a, he had views. He had strong views and they did conflict with mine quite often.

• 23:48Tracy Alloway?

  Here's a question. It's sort of a media navel gazing question, but also a serious one. So you've been doing the show for 20 years, which is phenomenal.

• 23:58Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 23:59Tracy Alloway?

  I heard also that you get up at 3 a.m. every day to go to the gym and then do the show, which-

• 24:03Speaker 06

  Well, 3:15.

• 24:04Tracy Alloway?

  3:15. The extra 15 minutes is important.

• 24:07Speaker 06

  I always, because I'm a competitive guy, I always said, I get up earliest so that I beat everybody else. But that's losing its charm, frankly.

• 24:13Tracy Alloway?

  How do you benchmark your own performance?

• 24:16Speaker 06

  I thought you were going to say, how do I bench? Because I, you know, I was doing 250 initially. I'm sorry. How do I benchmark my own performance?

• 24:23Tracy Alloway?

  Your own performance when it comes to stock picking. Because frankly, like 20 years of content, multiple stock picks, I don't even know how you keep track of all of them. Like, I can't remember the episodes we did two weeks ago.

• 24:35Speaker 06

  Well, okay, I mean, I have a travel show so you can look at it. You can't really compound. If you sell, you have to give the profits away and the dividends have to be given away. But it's all pretty public. But I would gauge me by what I talk about endlessly. And now, this is not, people think that's anecdotal. For 20 years, it's empirical. If you talk about Apple 32 times a week and you talk about Nucor one time a week and you're graded equally, Apple and Nucor, that's farcical. I was with Tim Cook last Friday in Harrisburg, Kentucky, and he introduced me to some- Jim owned, don't trade Apple Kramer. And that's how I feel. And the best one I've ever had was Jensen, Jensen Wong. When the stock was two, I said, we're done trading it. Please stop trading it. And then I renamed my dog.

• 25:21Speaker 06

  He was Everest and I named him Nvidia. And I go all over the country and I see.

• 25:26Tracy Alloway?

  How confused was the dog?

• 25:28Speaker 06

  The dog was an idiot. I always had that stake in your hand with that idiot. He was a half pit bull, half who knows what. But I do think that when you look at the number of Nvidia millionaires.

• 25:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 25:40Speaker 06

  That also is empirical, not anecdotal. Now, there are people who want to say, Jim, I really do want to measure what you said about Bloom Energy last night and diverse what you say about Apple. And you know what I say? Knock yourself out. I mean, if it was really wrong, I would have been canceled. I mean, I'm like 20 years means either that I fooled the whole damn world every night. Or maybe people like it and then they learn. Maybe they learn.

• 26:06Joe Weisenthal?

  You mentioned you get up at 3:15.

• 26:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:09Joe Weisenthal?

  I used to get up at 4 a.m. every day and people still think I do. So they think I have this crazy work. I think I've been sleeping in a long time.

• 26:15Speaker 06

  No, but you.

• 26:15Joe Weisenthal?

  But you, you know, a lot. And the only way to know a lot is to read a lot and to work a lot. Can you give us like a day like, okay, you wake up at 3:15.

• 26:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Like you read and work like crazy. Give us a little.

• 26:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Prep that goes into your show.

• 26:31Speaker 06

  Here's a wild one. I start with the FT.

• 26:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 26:33Speaker 06

  Because the FT has one breaking news story every day, just one. But it's great. And today was the.

• 26:38Joe Weisenthal?

  And what time do you read it? You're up at 3:15.

• 26:41Speaker 06

  I do have to, I mean, I have a four o'clock workout.

• 26:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 26:44Speaker 06

  That's an hour and a half. So I have a tight schedule for the first 45. I look at the future, CNBC.com, Bloomberg, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. I spend a little more time on the Wall Street Journal this day because I feel like that they're a little more in tune with what the market's doing. And then I go and I start looking at my email and the email is just a series of PDFs.

• 27:03Tracy Alloway?

  How many emails do you get a day?

• 27:05Speaker 06

  Seven hundred. I look through the PDF.

• 27:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 06

  And I look.

• 27:10Joe Weisenthal?

  You read all the sell-side research?

• 27:11Speaker 06

  I read everything I think is relevant. And I'm looking for something to say. I have a memo that comes out, 10 things I'm looking at. I have to have that in 7:30. So that's my overlord. And then after that, I have to do Squawk on the Street. And then I start again and I start writing the show. And I've been writing the show with my sister's kid since he was in high school. He's now with me for 20 years, Cliff Mason. He's a genius and he's, I mean, the guy can just, I think he has two PCs going all at once and he's remarkable. And we have a really good time doing Mad Money.

• 27:46Joe Weisenthal?

  And wait, what time is this hour that you're working on the show?

• 27:48Speaker 06

  This is beginning, this is beginning at 10:05.

• 27:50Joe Weisenthal?

  And when are you reading like all the conference calls and earnings? Because you really, one of the things is you know details of the calls and earnings.

• 27:58Speaker 06

  During the day, I spend a huge amount of time. I mean, for instance, I'm in the Halcyon moment here because the only thing I had to read this morning was General Mills.

• 28:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 28:05Speaker 06

  And I'll read more of that because they talked about how the consumer is hurting. And I mean, if you're hurting, maybe because Blue Buffalo, it actually was plus six. But if you look at some of their brands, proprietary brands, they can be knocked off. It's not like when Costco couldn't knock off Coca-Cola. There's stuff more fungible, there's more elastic. But I, I spend, you know, I'm a couple of hours a day on the book.

• 28:28Joe Weisenthal?

  And then finally, and then after-hours earnings. So then like Apple reports earnings and then you do the work, talk to, yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 06

  I have a great marriage. I put that out first because I wreck it every day. I finish the show at quarter of six, it's taped, live taped. I come home, I have a bite to eat. I mean, I had to go out to dinner this night, I hate that. And then I say goodnight to my wife.

• 28:51Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, what time do you go to bed?

• 28:52Speaker 06

  I go to bed at 11:00. She goes to bed at like a normal time. So that's when I really. Wreck the marriage. That's not the plan. I don't set out to do that. Did that previously. Bad strategy. But I just find that I have to do that. And that's like during, when you have that rush, now earnings season no longer is a season because companies.

• 29:13Tracy Alloway?

  It feels like it goes on forever.

• 29:15Speaker 06

  Doesn't it? It's kind of perma. But when we have that week where JP Morgan starts and Wells does it, that weekend is just miserable. Fortunately, during the summer, I garden. My weekends are just filled with this.

• 29:25Tracy Alloway?

  I love gardening. We should talk gardening sometime.

• 29:28Speaker 06

  Are you vegetable or are you?

• 29:29Tracy Alloway?

  Big gardener, decorative flower gardening.

• 29:31Speaker 06

  Hey, you should join. I need one.

• 29:33Tracy Alloway?

  I used to have a vegetable patch, actually, but then I moved to a new place. I need to restart one. How do you choose your sound effects?

• 29:40Speaker 06

  Oh, OK. Hey, I had a radio show. This, this show, and you know where that radio show, pure?

• 29:47Tracy Alloway?

  Bloomberg?

• 29:47Speaker 06

  Only greatest radio network in the world.

• 29:50Speaker 06

  Bloomberg. And the mayor ran it twice a day because he thought it was, it was, a lot of it was educational.

• 29:56Tracy Alloway?

  Mike loves radio.

• 29:57Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 29:57Tracy Alloway?

  He really does.

• 29:58Speaker 06

  He was my big, you know, I, look, I think if I say he was my biggest backer, that sounds like a joker. But he loved what I did. And the sound effects got people going. And it was drive time. And he was so supportive. And I love him. I mean, look, once you leave, he's not as supportive. But what can I say? I mean, this is Bloomberg.

• 30:19Tracy Alloway?

  We should try to reintroduce sound effects on radio.

• 30:22Speaker 06

  The mayor loved it.

• 30:23Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 06

  Because he wanted people to listen. You know, bull bear, those easy sounds. Imagine incorrect, a buzzer. But a guillotine for they, they had to cut the numbers and that kind of thing.

• 30:35Tracy Alloway?

  We only have one, which is the monopsony klaxon, which isn't exactly that catchy.

• 30:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Do we even use it? Or do we just say we're going to?

• 30:42Tracy Alloway?

  Producers, insert the monopsony klaxon.

• 30:47Speaker 06

  Very proud.

• 30:48Joe Weisenthal?

  A proud fellow alum. Well, you know, one of the alums.

• 30:51Speaker 06

  It's just great to be substantive and great to be able to explain and educate. And no one said education doesn't work for the numbers.

• 30:57Tracy Alloway?

  Do you actually, do you think of yourself more as an educator versus a stock picker?

• 31:02Speaker 06

  Yes, this is really like, let's say last night's show. I tried to explain that what matters today with the Fed is what way will the curve change? Will interest rates start going up on the long end or down? Long and down is the big win. Long and up is what happened last year. We had the stutter step and then we had the December crash when Powell just said, listen, we're done. That's going to be the judge, but I had to use all sorts of analogies because the curve, you can't ever mention the curve. Like, did you ever read Sidney Homer?

• 31:35Joe Weisenthal?

  We can mention the curve.

• 31:36Speaker 06

  You can, but did you ever read Inside the Yield Curve by Sidney Homer?

• 31:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy's read a lot of Homer.

• 31:40Speaker 06

  It's 500.

• 31:41Tracy Alloway?

  I have, actually.

• 31:42Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I knew you were talking about Sidney Homer. Tracy's read Sidney Homer.

• 31:46Tracy Alloway?

  I have. I love that book. Also, most of it-

• 31:48Speaker 06

  It's a 550-page book about Inside the Yield Curve.

• 31:50Tracy Alloway?

  But most of it is charts. That's what people don't understand. It goes by really fast. It's all charts.

• 31:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Hey, she's a hitter. Yeah, yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 06

  But I listened, you're kind of, you know, you're a hitter. The show's a hitter. What can I say? I like the show. It's okay to say I like the show.

• 32:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, no, we are going to use this on sizzle reels and promotional reels for years to come.

• 32:09Speaker 06

  Well, I see these people that I've worked with here. I did, Phil Don, I just, and these are the cream of the crop. I mean, I was at the street, everybody who was good. I actually encouraged them to come here because they start, start the street and the idea is to move up. And you want to go to a place where people can be thoughtful. And look, I'm not saying this to suck up. I'm saying I worked here.

• 32:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Speaker 06

  And that's what the essence was.

• 32:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Many, many great street alum have come through. Okay, I was going to like say, you know, when we were going over what we wanted to talk about, and I was going to bring this up, and then you're like, nah, don't bring up what we're going to talk about. It's a complete surprise. Were you a college-age Spartacist or Trotskyite? Like, tell us about- You mentioned it once, I think, in a video, but then the video, I can't find it online. You've also tweeted about your Uncle Vlad about 100 times, with whom you do bear a passing resemblance. Give us, what's the real story here?

• 33:05Speaker 06

  I used to be stopped by as Uncle Vlad all the time.

• 33:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I know.

• 33:09Speaker 06

  Okay, mine was Spartacist because I believe that the workers...

• 33:12Joe Weisenthal?

  And who were they? Were they Trotskyites or what?

• 33:13Speaker 06

  Yes, yes. The workers united should never be defeated because we're about the workers owning the means of production, so therefore we should own the company.

• 33:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 06

  And now Trotsky, obviously gravely misunderstood, including the ice pick. The ice pick, very bad.

• 33:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that was, he missed out the ice pick.

• 33:32Speaker 06

  Very bad. It's a suboptimal day, the ice pick. But I just think that that made a lot of sense. And I went that way.

• 33:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Just when you were at Harvard?

• 33:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 33:40Speaker 06

  We had pretty, pretty big following. There were not that many Leninists. I mean, you know, Trotsky was a pretty good writer.

• 33:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 06

  And Lenin was, he wrote What Is To Be Done, his version. There were two What Is To Be Dones. And that's a good read. But Trotsky really was a very thoughtful guy and also a great army general. And people forget that.

• 33:57Joe Weisenthal?

  His train must have been so sad.

• 33:58Speaker 06

  The train, the train, man. Only the money train, the Armenian money train in Schild, and that train really worked.

• 34:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Speaker 06

  Well, I guess the fugitive train crash was a good train crash.

• 34:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Anyway, keep going.

• 34:09Speaker 06

  I like Union Pacific here.

• 34:12Joe Weisenthal?

  I like you were like talking about Trotsky. Seamless, seamless.

• 34:16Speaker 06

  Well, I just was...

• 34:17Joe Weisenthal?

  You can't help it.

• 34:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was a labor.

• 34:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Talk to us about, because you've also talked about you once did a Wildcat strike.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  I ran a Wildcat strike at the Phillies where I felt that we should have, I said, "Look, we're doing all the work here." I talked these guys out. "We're doing all the work here." And yet everyone else, the overlords, we, by the way, can I just tell you, you had to do a kickback. When you're selling ice cream, hey, ice cream, vanilla and chocolate, 1/3 of your money went back to the guy, so you didn't get strawberry ice cream because you can't sell strawberry. Nobody wants strawberry. That was the big threat. "Hey, listen, shut up, Kramer, you're gonna get strawberry." But I had a, I had a seventh level concession that I paid everybody, I paid everybody not to come up to the seventh level, so I owned it. But we had Steve Carlton then, a long time ago, probably, no, but he, he used to pitch games in an hour and a half. I was always long a huge amount of ice cream in July. It was just dreadful. But, so I led the Wildcat

• 35:06Speaker 06

  strike. And it was very good. They called me in and they said, "You're fired." I said, well, you can't do that. Well, you're not going to get any ice cream tonight. You can come all you want to this, but you're not getting ice cream. And that was it. And that was bad.

• 35:20Joe Weisenthal?

  So when did you see the light, though, from?

• 35:22Speaker 06

  OK, actually, really great question. The light was when I helped. I helped strike J.P. Stevens. Now, J.P. Stevens was a terrific towel company, linen company. With J.P. Stevens being his great Princeton alum, and we knew where he lived, and we targeted the management, really thought we had it going, and we were crushing it. And I was like coming up from the south to help work on it. And then they closed the company rather than deal with us. They closed it. And that was when I had a change of heart, because I said, wait a second. I just helped take away the livelihood, the healthcare, the dinner for thousands of workers by trying to get them more money.

• 36:06Speaker 06

  And I really had to rethink it. And I just said, well, maybe the Spartacus thing, more focused on the matter at hand, which is covering homicide. But I really felt awful about what we did. We closed the company. That was not the intent.

• 36:22Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, there is this tension, though, between, like, workers having jobs and shares actually going up, right? Like, you have companies that, the easy way to boost your share price is to cut costs, which means laying off workers. How do you square that?

• 36:37Speaker 06

  Well, I think that you guys did a piece, I think it was you, Joe, about how that you've been thinking a lot about the billionaires, thinking a lot about this. And I think that the way I square that is, is that if I go back to President Reagan, he was disgusted by how much the CEOs made and the difference, and how the CEOs did never had to pay the price and the workers had to pay the price. And this is what you're talking about Reagan. And Funny that Elizabeth Warren reminded me about this when I saw her. I just think that it's a travesty. I met with President Clinton over a plan which said, look, I think that workers should get shares if they're laid off because typically a stock goes up if they're laid off. And what he did was he gave me a can of Coke, Diet Coke, said this is the greatest idea in

• 37:22Speaker 06

  the world, we're going to run with it, and nothing ever happened.

• 37:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Which president was that?

• 37:26Speaker 06

  President Clinton.

• 37:27Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, Clinton.

• 37:27Speaker 06

  Well, they all said, it didn't matter which president, nobody ever did what I said. President Biden was hilarious, we meet him on that train. He said, honestly, I am the poorest of the 100. Why do I need your information? And I said, you don't need it at all. I mean, I'm not going to take him to minus five. I do think that President Clinton was very smart about the market. Understood that laid off workers were the tinder to get a stock higher. He was really smart about the market. President Bush, number two, not that smart.

• 37:58Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, will you rank presidential knowledge of markets?

• 38:00Speaker 06

  Okay, well, first, I would take Andrew Johnson because he just was the insider trade. No, I don't know. I mean, did you read any of his books about Jay Gould?

• 38:08Tracy Alloway?

  No, I don't think so.

• 38:09Speaker 06

  And what he did with Grant? Oh, my God. He found out that gold, you know, where they were on the gold standard and he comp. There were many, many stories about presidents, I think, helping by mistake. So I would have to give those guys.

• 38:24Joe Weisenthal?

  So, as a, what do you think about, you know, there is this sort of, particularly in New York City, this very energetic, nascent leftism that wouldn't characterize themselves as communists. I don't think Zorron is going around calling himself a trotscat. I don't think he is.

• 38:42Speaker 06

  No, he's not. I wish he were.

• 38:44Joe Weisenthal?

  What do you make of, like, what do you make of this? Are we in a, like, are we at a revolutionary moment? Are the conditions of past revolutions present here in the United States?

• 38:53Speaker 06

  No, they're not because we have great job growth and the revolutions have typically been preceded by famine.

• 39:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay, well, then how serious, like, when you, you know, what do you, what do you think about the DSA and so forth? Like, Because I think you've said, you know, like, do you consider them to be dangerous radicals? Or are they like a sort of different shade of liberal Democrat?

• 39:15Speaker 06

  I think different shade of liberal Democrat. I mean, I remember Occupy Wall Street. Now, you used to go to whatever, you know, and see what's going on, interview people. And they didn't know that where they were politically because they were so confused. And we all in the media kind of felt that they were communist or leftist, wanted to tear down Wall Street. They just, I mean, they were just sleeping on a cold stone and trying to say, listen, we're unhappy. And their ethos was zero. I think that the mayoral race, I mean, look, I care about defunding police versus police because I care about public safety.

• 39:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure.

• 39:49Speaker 06

  And I saw what happened in San Francisco.

• 39:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Zoran has changed, I mean, he has changed his mind about that.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 39:55Joe Weisenthal?

  He has re-.

• 39:56Speaker 06

  That's why I don't think that we're going to be San Francisco. I also think, by the way, we went to change on time, we went public safety. I don't think that that's, I don't think they're in play. I just really don't. Now, I'm a New Jersey citizen. I happen to love the governor of New Jersey, who's my boss at Goldman Sachs. But, look, I just want everyone to be able to recognize that the town has made a great comeback. And there's just so many great places. And I hate to see anything devolved in San Francisco, which is getting better, but was a nightmare, to the point where I stopped going. I used to do four times a year my show. But it was, I saw a guy pull a knife, I was in front, I was behind him at Walgreens, get all the money, and then the cops arrested him outside and they released him. And I said, what are you doing? And he says, well, we, are you a hunter?

• 40:41Speaker 06

  I said, I'm a fisherman. He said, well, if we do the same thing, we catch and release.

• 40:44Speaker 01

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• 43:46Tracy Alloway?

  Additional restrictions may apply. Please speak with a business banker for more information. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Jim, I gotta tell you, we just got a message saying Mike Bloomberg wants to say hi to you after we record the show.

• 43:59Speaker 06

  I don't believe that.

• 44:00Tracy Alloway?

  No, seriously.

• 44:01Speaker 06

  I, you know.

• 44:02Tracy Alloway?

  We're gonna bring you down.

• 44:03Speaker 06

  Oh, my God, I want a selfie. It's never digus.

• 44:05Tracy Alloway?

  Even though you left the company, he wants to see you.

• 44:07Speaker 06

  I left the company, but it wasn't my idea. I didn't want to leave the company to be very specific, but he became mayor. And, look, I always worshipped him. What can I say? And I won't even talk about the myriad charities that he really did fund, because that's not why I did it, and I always admired that more than anything. He never wanted anyone to know. In New York, it's so, it's so predominant. You go into a building and the guy's got his name on it. Well, there's no, you know, that is not Mayor Bloomberg. Mayor Bloomberg was, I remember giving an award for what we did at the Brooklyn Bridge. I don't know if you guys have been to Brooklyn Bridge Park, but.

• 44:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 44:44Speaker 06

  This city's been redone, and a lot of it is that Mr. Mayor. He's Mr. Mayor.

• 44:49Tracy Alloway?

  Back to finance for a second. Were you ever tempted to recommend the inverse Kramer ETF?

• 44:56Speaker 06

  Okay, so that guy got crushed.

• 44:57Tracy Alloway?

  It did. It did.

• 44:58Speaker 06

  It was just annihilated.

• 44:59Tracy Alloway?

  But had you recommended it, they would have had to short themselves, right?

• 45:03Speaker 06

  Oh, my God.

• 45:04Tracy Alloway?

  Right?

• 45:04Speaker 06

  What a cool idea. Yeah. I didn't want to, it was one of those things. This is, you know, you go through and your wife says, I don't want you to acknowledge him. I said, well, the guy's a total joker. She says, I don't want you to acknowledge him. And a lot of times what happens is you do go back to your home and you ask your wife what can do, or your partner what's right, because everyone has got an agenda at work. But my wife's agenda is me. And so I always knew that she was, just like a good lawyer, there's, you know, attorney-client privilege. There's, there's wife's spousal privilege.

• 45:33Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 45:34Joe Weisenthal?

  That must be feel so good. I'm looking at the ticker now.

• 45:37Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, they closed it.

• 45:37Joe Weisenthal?

  It did terrible, and then they liquidated it in February 2020.

• 45:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:41Joe Weisenthal?

  But how do you look, you know, I don't, we don't get a fraction of it, but we get a little bit. Have you ever, like, for your mental health, like, public abuse or publics? Like, what do you, how, do you ever, like, do you have any tips?

• 45:52Speaker 06

  Okay, sure. I mean, there was.

• 45:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Sometimes people make fun of my voice in the Apple Notes comment.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  The NBC told me to be on Jon Stewart and I didn't know the show and I didn't know that he would. I didn't know he would be unfair and I didn't expect, they were telling me basically that he would, it would be convivial. So I didn't come with my A game. I came with my F game and it was mortifying and terrible. And every time I looked out, I mean, I always saw people look at me as I was. Now there's a whole generation of people.

• 46:19Tracy Alloway?

  He apologized for it later, right?

• 46:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, he did. 16 years now and I meet younger people and they've never heard of it. But those people never realized that the New York Giants were a good football team. Kind of happens like that.

• 46:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 06

  My most important tip is to say they're not thinking of it when they talk to you. In other words, you're thinking of it, but give yourself a break. Most of them are not, I mean, I would say like, I would have to, she goes, she, the whole time she was thinking about Jon Stewart. I know she was thinking about, no, you're not a mind reader. Take people face value. He was a very mean person and that's a word that my daughter used in fifth grade. But I don't know how else to define someone who wants to take your livelihood away. And he wanted my livelihood taken away and I didn't want it taken away. And to take away someone's livelihood, as I mentioned with JP Stevens, is a terrible thing. And I didn't deserve it, but that's, it's like, it's like the movie Unforgiven. It deserves, got nothing to do with it.

• 47:11Tracy Alloway?

  Speaking of the financial crisis though, you, you did have a series of like meme-able moments, let's just say, in 2007, 2008, including the rant about Bear Stearns.

• 47:21Joe Weisenthal?

  It's the most incredible.

• 47:22Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, it's famous.

• 47:24Joe Weisenthal?

  It stands up so well, yeah.

• 47:24Speaker 06

  Well, there's a nice article in the FT about it when the actual, not the minutes, but the actual transcript came out about how they laughed at me.

• 47:32Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 06

  And they actually mentioned, they said, yeah, we laughed at him. He said, oh Kramer, he's really funny. It was about speaking to a lot of people who were saying, you gotta get on the case here. You guys are just oblivious. You're acting as if it's a regular market. And my friend Erin Burnett was going on about a regular thing and I just had to interrupt. And I said, look, they know nothing. They know nothing. And that was speaking about Ben Bernanke, which, who really I think did know nothing during that period. And I was widely cascaded. I had to go on the Today Show the next day where Matt Lauer, whatever, said you were off. You were off your meds. I want to hear more about this. Now, see, when you say that someone's off their meds, that presumes that you were on your meds. And again, I mean, like, look, I, I, am I used to being demeaned? Does it bother me?

• 48:18Speaker 06

  It doesn't bother me like it used to. But I do say that that rant holds up. And I'm proud of it.

• 48:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 48:26Speaker 06

  And then I did that other thing where I went, if you have any on the Today Show, if you need your money anytime in the next five years, and the market just fell 40% after this, you should take it out now, because I didn't want people, by the way, it took five years to get the market back to where it was. I was worried about people on a fixed income, fixed on meaning they own General Mills and they own Chevron. And I just felt like that it was just really the wrong time. And then the next day, they had me back. And Curry asked me, look, you said this thing on the show. Do you want to take it back? And I said, no, I mean, sometimes when you yell fire in a crowded theater, there's a fire. I want to get out as many people as I can. And these were moments that, at the time, you'll, you'll really appreciate this, Joe.

• 49:09Speaker 06

  When I did these, subsequently, I was so ridiculed that I, that I would say to myself, why the hell did I ever do it?

• 49:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 06

  And, and, you know, I knew it was right, but no, I had such angst. Even though I was right, I was attacked by so many people. But now, of course, it's, it's a dish best taste.

• 49:28Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a vision. How long do you do this for? Like, it's 3:15, like, I don't, again, I don't work nearly as much hard. No, but I like, feel like my health, it's, I have, the, even the years where I got up super early all the time, like, they took their toll.

• 49:41Speaker 06

  I remember, because you talk about it all the time.

• 49:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 06

  God, I love it so much. I do. And I was doing something last night at dinner, and I really wanted to get home, because I wanted to formulate a thesis on DRAMs. Well, there you go. But I am so fixated on this. And I find the puzzle so difficult and fabulous. The Nvidia puzzle, the puzzle this morning, we have about what's going to happen. I have to, I'll write my top right after the Fed. And this is such an exciting day, you get 12 of these. So I don't know. And look, it's a great question, because I don't know how long you can do it. And I do want to see the world. I don't take as much vacation, I mean, I'm off for six weeks, I take four. But it's because I love it. It is because I love it. It's not a sickness.

• 50:28Speaker 06

  It really isn't.

• 50:29Tracy Alloway?

  So how has your research process changed over the years? Because again, you've been in the game for decades, right?

• 50:35Speaker 06

  So I go out to dinner with Jensen Huang, and he says, I know you spend all your time reading these reports. I just urge you to chat GPTV advanced and get the concise version and then see if it's one you want to do. And that has changed my life because there'll be 10. And it turns out that Paul DeHomo was important, not because of Bill Pulte, he's not involved. And Stanley Black and Decker was important and Best Buy was that important. And then the others, I read the concise version and I could move on with my life. And that was a great break for me because it allowed me during the real earnings season to have 15 reports and just say, okay, I'm only going to do cat and Procter.

• 51:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. I think Tracy and I have both found like there are a lot of things that chat GPT still isn't good for. But there is no question in my mind that for a research process, whether it's finding the right document, whether it's just, it's very.

• 51:24Tracy Alloway?

  Have you tried perplexity finance?

• 51:26Speaker 06

  I used perplexity maybe 10 times this morning. It's shorter, quicker. George Kurt's from you on.

• 51:31Tracy Alloway?

  I think it's impressive.

• 51:32Speaker 06

  Yeah. It is very impressive. I wanted Apple to buy him. I was pushing that drum forever. I mean, I was talking about that with, with Tim Cook on Friday. I really think that they need something, but because of the, of the Google decision, the judge meta decision, it's possible that someone could pay them.

• 51:46Joe Weisenthal?

  We talk about China a lot on the show. Are they, are they stikhanovite?

• 51:50Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 51:51Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I got there. I was reading through your old tweets. I had never heard that term.

• 51:55Speaker 06

  Well, the Eighth Army is, the Eighth Army is famously.

• 51:58Joe Weisenthal?

  What's your, yeah. What is this? I only saw that because I was reading through all your old tweets. What is the stikhanovite movement and what does it have to do with contemporary China?

• 52:06Speaker 06

  Was the guy who won the award for, for shoveling the most coal for steel and Stalin loved him.

• 52:12Tracy Alloway?

  Communist obsessed with steel. I always wondered why that is.

• 52:15Speaker 06

  Yes, they always were. Every plan, the five year for China was, was the same. They're long a lot of steel there. China's wrecked the steel market. President's dead right on the trans shipments. My old buddy, Peter Navarro is dead right on the trans shipments. It's wild that, that he's my old buddy, but he's my old buddy. And he went to jail. Bad. Not Yale, jail because he went to Tufts. But I, I do think that when you look at China. Sometimes I'm very harsh about them.

• 52:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 52:41Speaker 06

  And that's because my father worked for Saint Regis and Climax, Union Camp. He worked for Champion. He worked for Paper Company. He sold gift wrap and corrugated. And every single time he did well at one of these, they closed it. And they closed it because the Chinese targeted the gift wrap industry. If you go to Costco, all you have is Chinese gift wrap. So my father, at the age of 73, realized, that's it. They wiped us out. He called a company that does, from China, who had American wrap and said, listen, I want to work for the Chinese. And what he did was he would sketch logos, restaurants, and suggest that they use doggie bags that have their own name. And he had a drawstring doggie bag that the Chinese made for $2. He sold it for.

• 53:26Speaker 06

  And he then had the run of his lifetime from 73 to 92. He worked until the month he died. He actually had a good last month. And what's incredible is the Chinese treated him like kings. And when he died, they gave me the proceeds for three straight years. And they were the best bosses in the world. And they had no idea.

• 53:42Joe Weisenthal?

  You've called China the greatest capitalist nation of all time.

• 53:45Speaker 06

  It is. They just crush it. God, you read me close.

• 53:49Tracy Alloway?

  Is the headline of this episode going to be Jim Cramer on communism?

• 53:52Speaker 06

  No, it is very funny because I do think they're the biggest threat. I mean, what they're doing in Nvidia. Well, I do want Nvidia to be the platform. But I haven't been to China, so I'm secondarily. My son went to China to camel surf. And he broke his, well, he hurt his shoulder. And they were going to operate immediately. And I said, look, I got to speak to the head of the hospital. No, no, no, no. My wife flew him over for Zhang. I came back. But the Chinese are a conundrum for us because they work harder than we do. But we may have them here. I know the exports are really, the export numbers are really good for them away from us. But I think we had to take some action because there's too many fentanyl towns. I got a fentanyl town right next to me. And I can tell you, it was a great town when I was growing up. And now it's a town where I can't believe it. I can't believe what happened. But the mills closed.

• 54:37Speaker 06

  You know, the mills, the mills, the mills. I mean, now, you can't bring back the Pyrex mill. There was good peeps by George Packer in The Atlantic about that. But I know we're really rambling here. I shouldn't ramble anymore.

• 54:47Tracy Alloway?

  Let me ask one cliche question. Lots of talk.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  I like the show.

• 54:50Tracy Alloway?

  Lots of talk about market valuations at the moment froth in the market. We're recording this, I should have said, on Fed Day, September 17. Do you see froth? Do you see a bubble brewing?

• 55:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's two markets, and that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book. Because there's this market where that is a musical chair market. I make fun of it. It's a palantir market, and I accept the fact that if you want to speculate, go do palantir because Karp is, you know, Karp is one of the greatest. His ontology work is incredible. It's better than Scientology, ontology. But I want people to stop. I can let it be one of your holdings, but don't do all because it will be crushed. And when it happens, I do believe it. And when it happens, you'll lose everything. And then I would, anything I tried to do would be wrong. It's like when I was at college, I used to go to the racetrack. And then there was a guy, Andy Byer, who was a professor, he was teaching a course. He said, "Listen, if you're going to go speculate at the racetrack, at least know how to do it."

• 55:46Speaker 06

  And I never forgot that. And if you're going to speculate, I will show you how to do it. But I really want compounding. And I want compounding because, well, we know that that really is, Einstein did not call it the eighth one of the world, but we know that that is a much better way to make money. Much better.

• 56:02Joe Weisenthal?

  I have one last question that's very closely related to this, but one of these things-

• 56:05Speaker 06

  Why are you wearing a button down? Why aren't you wearing a French collar?

• 56:08Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't know.

• 56:08Speaker 06

  That's my kind of question.

• 56:09Joe Weisenthal?

  It was not wrinkly. It was not wrinkly.

• 56:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:12Joe Weisenthal?

  We're gonna have Kramer on today, so at least I gotta wear it.

• 56:14Speaker 06

  No, I like that. You don't have to press that because it has some sort of weird-

• 56:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's a uniqlo.

• 56:17Speaker 06

  Did you buy that in Temu?

• 56:18Joe Weisenthal?

  No, no, I got a uniqlo, so.

• 56:20Speaker 06

  All right.

• 56:20Tracy Alloway?

  I'm pretty sure that was an insult, Joe.

• 56:22Joe Weisenthal?

  I know.

• 56:22Speaker 06

  No, no, no, because I, no, I would never do that.

• 56:26Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm very messy with my clothes.

• 56:27Speaker 06

  Because I would have said Shein if I went in, so I bought my wife some lingerie on Shein. And thank God, we use, you know, Matchlight. Don't have to put gasoline on the-

• 56:36Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, one last question. It occurs to me that, like, one thing I've thought many, I got interested in the market in the late 90s. At any given moment in a boom or a bubble, there are moments that feel like the top. And then a year later, you're like, oh, that was nothing. That was just the, like, oh, you know, it's like a few, a couple of years ago, they were like, some C3 AI is like booming.

• 56:56Speaker 06

  Oh, my God, that chubby question, because I knew Tom.

• 56:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Right. And so like random things like that, or like, you know, this meme stock went up, Dogecoin is railing, we must be in a bubble.

• 57:06Speaker 06

  Okay, great question.

• 57:06Joe Weisenthal?

  But all these things feel like a top in the moment, and then you realize they were just little hills on the way to a much bigger mountain.

• 57:12Speaker 06

  So you've got to, there's a simple solution? You take out over time your cost basis and then you play with the house's money. And then I'm okay because I'm a first you know harm guy, a Hippocratic oath. And I can tell people, listen, if you want to do that for your one slot, be my guest. But as it goes up, you gotta take your cost out. And then I don't care where it goes. It's fantastic, but you are so right. That's what happens. Look, some people feel that Google was at Nvidia. I mean, I worked enough for Nvidia to know that they're gonna have earnings.

• 57:43Joe Weisenthal?

  People were calling Google a bubble in 2005, 2006.

• 57:46Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, look, I recommended Google at 88 and I was investigated by the CNBC General Counsel for why I used 88. It's so, it's so big. And I said, because I didn't use 300. 300 was way low.

• 57:59Tracy Alloway?

  Didn't you get out of the dot com bubble early as well?

• 58:01Speaker 06

  Yes, I did. I was short. I went, I went 100% short of dot com.

• 58:06Tracy Alloway?

  What are your tips for spotting the bubble?

• 58:09Speaker 06

  Because I owned, I owned the big, I was the biggest shareholder in the street dot com. And we had gone from 63 to 2. So I had kind of a premonition. I mean, when it was in 63, the New York Observer said that I was 300 and drew a picture of me as a pig. And said, the 360 million dollar man, by the time it came out, I was 260. And then a year later, I was 2.6.

• 58:29Tracy Alloway?

  As a Trotsky, the, the pig cartoon must have hurt.

• 58:33Speaker 06

  I was overweight then. Yeah.

• 58:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Jim, we could, we could talk for a long time. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Wanted to have you for a very long time. And we had a lot of fun.

• 58:43Speaker 06

  Yes, and I know that I got the exception because of my book, To Be On.

• 58:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:46Speaker 06

  I told you that I was writing the book and I would man my word and come back because I always want to be on your show. Because you're just a thoughtful guy. And when I, when you were the stalwart, you were the first guy I read.

• 58:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you.

• 58:57Speaker 06

  Do you know that?

• 58:57Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I did not know that.

• 58:58Speaker 06

  I would get up and read the stalwart. Because you would heat me up.

• 59:01Tracy Alloway?

  High praise.

• 59:02Speaker 06

  No, because it was the best.

• 59:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 59:05Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Thank you, guys. I really appreciate it.

• 59:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, one thing I will say about Jim, and I've always felt this. I've only met him a handful of times before, but one thing I'll say is like, that public persona is not an act.

• 59:27Tracy Alloway?

  No.

• 59:28Joe Weisenthal?

  The Mad Money vibe is, that is Jim.

• 59:31Tracy Alloway?

  No, I can believe it. He has a lot of energy.

• 59:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 59:34Tracy Alloway?

  I feel like he's chaotic neutral, maybe, in D and D parlance.

• 59:40Joe Weisenthal?

  I just can't, like, I couldn't sustain getting up at 4:00, and that was just for a few years. And the fact that he's still up at 3:15?

• 59:48Tracy Alloway?

  Well, the fact that he goes to sleep at 11:00. Yeah, that's four hours of sleep every night.

• 59:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 59:54Tracy Alloway?

  And that was a fascinating discussion, and I think one thing you can say is that, in some respects, Jim's been vindicated by, you know, the rise of retail trading.

• 1:00:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Totally.

• 1:00:04Tracy Alloway?

  Everyone takes it more seriously now. That wasn't the case

• 1:00:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Tracy Alloway?

  in like, the 90s or the early 2000s. It's really changed.

• 1:00:11Joe Weisenthal?

  No, it really is, uh, striking. I mean, it does seem like, you know, he talked about needing to get a bodyguard during GameStop. So it's clear that, to some element, there is a part of the retail investor world which has metastasized into something sinister when people are making threats because you don't like the stock. It's really interesting how people are just like, any sort of negativity is so fought back against online when it comes to stocks these days. It's, um, really striking. So, but also, you know, obviously, when, and then other things such as, um, the They Know Nothing rant, or the liquidation, which I hadn't even realized until you mentioned it, of the S-Gym ETF.

• 1:00:53Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Some good wins under his belt.

• 1:00:55Tracy Alloway?

  Man, I really wish he had recommended that.

• 1:00:57Joe Weisenthal?

  I know, that would have been very-

• 1:00:58Tracy Alloway?

  Just to see what would happen.

• 1:00:59Joe Weisenthal?

  The inception of, okay, well, how do you, how do you then handle this?

• 1:01:02Tracy Alloway?

  I don't even know if an ETF can short itself, but I guess we would find out.

• 1:01:06Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't know how you'd go about that, but no, I'm glad we finally, uh, made that happen. And I read about half of his book, and it's a very fun read.

• 1:01:12Tracy Alloway?

  I'm looking forward to it.

• 1:01:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Tracy Alloway?

  Shall we leave it there?

• 1:01:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 1:01:15Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alockway. You can follow me at Tracy Alockway.

• 1:01:21Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me- At the Stallwart. Follow our guest Jim Cramer. He's at Jim Cramer. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashil Bennett at Dashbot and Kale Brooks at KaleBrooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots. We have a daily newsletter on all of our episodes and you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 1:01:45Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we have Jim Cramer on, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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