Hi, I'm James and I'm Anthony. And this is the grand return of
words and numbers. And it's been a while since we
how? Long has it been James.
It has been so long, so long that two cabinet members have
been fired. We involved ourselves in a war
in Iran that we've been told we've won at least five times.
JD Vance has released a book about his conversion to
Catholicism which features a Protestant church on the cover.
A high-ranking FEMA official says he was teleported 50 miles
to a Waffle House. The entire Afroman legal saga
has unfolded. JD Vance back to him has
declared that aliens are actually demons, and Christine
Umm's husband has been outed as a particular sort of
crossdresser. Oh, and Donald Trump today in an
Easter message we're recording on Easter Sunday offered praise
to Allah in a profanity. So truth social message to the
Iranian leadership. But on the plus side, Ant on the
plus side, you can now, for the first time in 50 years, eat fish
that were fished out of the Hudson River.
That, my friend, is how long it has been since our last episode.
Wow. And it doesn't look like that.
That feels like 3 years. That feels like 3 years worth of
nonsense. But it's only been 4 weeks.
Yeah. And here we are.
Here, here we are. I I want to hear more about the
guy who claims he was teleported to a Waffle House.
Oh, you, you really don't you, you really don't.
It's as it's as idiotic as it sounds, but but anyway, if.
If aliens are going to teleport you, don't you think they'd
teleport you somewhere more important than waffle?
House. But as Shitty Vance told us, and
aliens are demons, so you know, wouldn't they teleport them
straight to the bowels of hell? I guess, yeah, right.
I just expect like a Ruth's Chris or something.
Yeah, but that would be nice. Strip club maybe whole car right
inside the the club 'cause he was teleported in his car.
Oh, his car as well, OK. So he could get home, you know,
the 50 miles. Anyway, I could tell by the
look. Let's not.
Even go there. By the look on your face, it's
time for me to say what's new and exciting in your world this
weekend. Well.
I ran across this thing on NPR. I wasn't paying attention to
this, but the NPR thing grabbed my attention that the Supreme
Court was hearing the arguments in the birthright citizenship
case, and President Trump was the first sitting president to
attend a Supreme Court. What did you call that?
Case hearings, he. He.
Shouldn't he should never been there?
Yeah, yeah. It seemed, it seemed odd to have
a president, a sitting president.
There is if you're mixing the branches in a way that they
shouldn't be mixed, or I mean. He was clearly there to to apply
pressure. Yeah, well, apparently it wasn't
very successful because even the conservative justices, from what
I've read, seemed not to be buying his argument.
Yeah, it looks like he's got it. Was this one too?
And it got me thinking about this.
So you could probably name some other things, but just off the
top of my head, the big, the big controversial things that
President Trump has been involved with the birthright
citizenship business where he wants to revoke citizenship from
people who were born here of parents who were here illegally
or on long term visas. That the tariffs, the Iran war
and the the natural inclination is to point to him and say, yo,
look at all of this stuff, it's because of him and he shouldn't
be doing this. And I don't want to let him off
the hook. But at the same time, I want to
make sure that that Americans who are concerned about this
sort of thing focus their concern correctly.
And I think we aren't giving nearly enough attention to
Congress. So this question of birthright
citizenship, this should be if it's not a constitutional
question, it's clearly within the purview of Congress.
And if you look at the 14th Amendment right, at the very
end, it says Congress can enforce this with appropriate
legislation. There we go.
OK, so that's clearly in purview of Congress, the tariffs, Yeah,
Congress did give the executive branch the ability to mess with
tariffs under certain conditions.
But again, this is Congress. The authority sits ultimately
with Congress the Iran war granted it's we're still within
whatever it is the 150 day period of quote UN quote police
action, but nonetheless declaring war's congressional
thing. Congress has done nothing and
and when I say nothing, you might say, well, it's a
Republican Congress so you wouldn't expect it to go against
the president. OK, but why has Congress not
passed legislation affirming these things that he's doing?
It's neither affirmed nor denied.
It is sat on its hands and done absolutely nothing.
That that's right now, I think the war powers act specifies in
90 days, but I'm I'm not a war powers act expert, so take that
out for whatever it's worth. I, I think that's exactly right
what you just said, aunt, they Congress has habitually ceded
its authority to the executive branch for the better part of
100 years at this point, and it's time.
I think it should never have done it.
But having said that, it has done it, it's time to take it
back bit by bit, brick by brick, however they want to do it.
And I, you know, I, I think we've got a number of cowards in
the legislative branch and we always have, you know, they're,
they're at the whim of their various electorates.
You know, the House is up for re election every two years.
We're coming up on a, on an even numbered year or and you know,
there's going to be problems for the Republicans in the House
without question. And they're all thinking, how do
I just get through this with my skin intact?
But that's always their first consideration.
And it's about time, I think, God help me for saying such a
crazy thing that they put country above re election.
Yeah, because it should be country above all things if you
are a representative in a federal body.
And it's just not. And I wonder if if part of our
problem is that Congress, particularly the House, has
gotten so large that it's easy to hide.
You know, you're a handful of of Americans.
You can claim you're doing all sorts of things, but what can
they see you're once you're 1 amongst whatever it is 535 total
in the. Congress, I once, I once did the
math on this because if you read the The Federalist and the, the,
the original Constitution there, there's an electoral scheme in
there. And if we stuck with it, with
the numbers that were offered in 1787, we would have a House of
Representatives exceeding 3000 members right now.
You know. And could you imagine the daily
shit show that that would be? I mean, it's, it's so many
people, you'd never get anything done.
Yeah, I well, that's interesting.
You'd, you say you'd never get anything done?
I imagine that it would be easier to get things done even
in that environment if you had multiple parties because you
would have people, you know, different factions getting
together and, and, you know, offering votes in exchange to,
to, to form coalitions. But we don't even have that.
Yeah, you would always still need a majority and the winner
take all system that we have does not yield more than two
parties over time. So, you know, we would end up
with two parties there, just be divided among 3000 people
instead of the 35 we've got. Is it possible that the problem
here is not the people we have elected, but rather that it is
simply not possible to govern a country this size under the
system we currently have? Or perhaps there is no system
that could govern a country this size.
I would be more inclined towards that second answer and I I would
say there is no system other than authoritarianism, right?
Because you can always crush a massive number of people under a
boot. The Soviet Union ran pretty well
for a while, right? Well, which in a sense we're,
we're headed toward maybe a benevolent 1, but at the moment
the, the only entity in the federal government is that seems
to have any ability to rein in the executive branch is the
Supreme Court. Yeah, and you know, we'll see
how long that lasts. We had we had you could have
said a very similar thing under FDR and the the court ultimately
knuckled under. Yeah, I want to.
I want to give us something a little happier to think about.
I want to bring us to my ancestral homeland of Ireland
where there is a Saint of a human being, I mean an absolute
St. named Matt Cortland. Matt, if you're out there and
I'm guessing one of your buddies through you know, hooker by
crook will will get you this little bit.
He has done something for the ages Ant he walked into a pub in
well hell if I know Dublin I guess it was and paid €7.80 for
a pint of Guinness and thought to himself that seems a little
expensive and he said how can I find out if that was a little
expensive. So he created an AI agent that
called every pub in in Dublin, which is a bit much if you've
ever been to Dublin, there's a literally 3 pubs on every block.
And he, he had his AI agent call every single one of them and ask
it was the three 3000 pubs across Ireland let me get it
right. And they, his agent asked
whoever answered the phone, what is the cost of a pint of
Guinness? And he came up with the actual
price of Guinness, which he called the Gindex, which is just
brilliant. And the, and the Gindex
indicates that the average across Ireland is 6 year OO1.
So he overpaid significantly and now he's got the data to back it
up and he's making a bit of a bit of noise with it.
And apparently when his AI agent called a number of the pubs,
they they gave the price but immediately said what?
But we'll give you a discount if you want to come in right now.
So now we wait to see what this St. of a man can accomplish in
lowering the price of Guinness throughout the Emerald Isle.
God bless to you, Mr. Cortland. This is beautiful.
But you had me on. He had his AI agent call.
I didn't know agent AI agents could do that.
Mr. Cortland figured out a way. He even gave it a nice female
voice that was an homage to an Irish actress.
Wow, that's impressive and bad news for those of us who are
plagued by telemarketers. That's that's probably right.
But you know, you raise the price of a beloved product and
maybe you should pay a little bit for that.
Let the people be hurt, aunt. But the people be right.
Which brings us headlong into the foolishness of the week.
And I've missed this. And, you know, we had so many
options upfront as we started the episode of what could be the
Foolishness of the week. And for my money, it was going
to be JD Vance declaring that aliens are demons.
But there's a a race, a congressional race in Texas that
has taken a very, very odd turn. There's this guy named Bobby
Polito, and he's running down there and, and he's a bit of an
entertainer. And his Republican opponent,
whose name I don't even know, which tells you something, said
you'd be you'd be better to performing at parties than you
would be at Congress. And Bobby Polito said hold my
beer and started offering his services to quinceanera parties
across Texas. And every weekend he goes and
performs at multiple quinceanera parties for free.
All he asks is that he be allowed to leave his QR code
somewhere in the in the case. And I got to tell you, man, I
growing up in New England, I, I had no idea what a quinceanera
party even was until I was in my 40s.
And that was back to Utah the second time.
And it turns out our building at Strata, the nonprofit for, for
for which I toiled, we, we shared kind of like a building
space with an Event Center, which, you know, during work
hours was never an issue. But you know, in my, in my
world, work hours are I'm going to stay here until 3:00 in the
morning. And one night about 9:00, the,
the Mexican music just lighted up.
And it was. Loud.
And the crowd was huge. And I'm like, what the, what the
hell? What the hell is going on next
door? And I went over and I, I looked
at all these people. They'd spilled out into the
parking lot. And I said, what the hell are
all you Mexicans doing? And they said it's a
quinceanera. And I said, OK, what the hell is
a quinceanera? And they explained it to me and
everybody was having so much fun.
And then they said, do you want to come?
And I said, well, of course I want to come.
What? What's wrong with it?
Yes. So I, I went to my first
quinceanera and it was just a gas.
I mean, it was, it was fantastic.
And look, the, the Mexican population in Logan, UT, pretty
minimal, but that place was jammed, right?
And if Bobby Polito is going across Texas from one
quinceanera to another, he, he is going to make a dent in that
election. And I look forward to seeing if
it works 'cause he's looking to flip a seat, right?
This is a Republican seat. And you might, you might recall,
but I said Once Upon a time, and I'm going to reiterate this now.
I predicted that the Texas redistricting would end up
costing the Republicans seats because they had based their
redistricting on previous numbers that indicated the the
Mexican vote breaking for Republicans because that it did
break for Trump. But in the in the two years
between then and now, the Republican Party's managed to
lose that group of people in Texas and they're going to turn
out for Democrats this time in a way they turned out for
Republicans last time. So Mr. Polito might have a baked
in advantage in this seat because I think a lot of
Democrats in Texas might have a a baked in advantage.
It remains to be seen what happens, but I don't think it's
going to be nearly as rosy for the Republicans as they thought
when they redistricted. Well, it's interesting that your
people complain about redistricting and is it fair?
And it sounds like from what you're saying, it doesn't matter
the voter is so long as the voters vote their interest as
opposed to mindlessly voting for one party or the other, then
redistricting doesn't matter. But you're always driving
through it through the rearview mirror.
I mean, it matters, right? Let let's stipulate that it
matters. But if it were the be all and
the end all, you would redistrict once and then never
have to do it again, right? And, and we know as a matter of
fact that that just doesn't happen.
So you can get an advantage, but it's probably going to be
temporary. And when the opposing party
figures out a way to beat you, they're going to redistrict, and
then they're going to have an advantage that will probably be
temporary. And on and on and on and on.
So politics works in its own way.
But you wanted to get us back to AI, at least after a fashion,
Isn't that right? Well, well, kind of the the
topic I want to talk talk about today, we could I guess more
generally describe as bubbles. And I should, I should say
right, I should say right off the top that when I was a junior
high school student in Watertown, CT, we had an
assistant, we had a vice principal whose name was
Bubbles. Oh, I bet he got all kinds of
guff from the students for that. Well.
Obviously it was she and obviously that was the name
given to her by her. Oh, excuse me.
OK, OK. She dressed like a like a bit of
a high end call girl. I see.
Well, the, the, I'm we're talking about financial bubbles
here. And what brings us up is
somebody raised the question to me in passing about, you know,
financial bubbles, particularly with, you know, the latest being
AI and you know, looking for some confirmation that bubbles
are a bad thing and maybe we need some regulation to prevent
that sort of thing. And, and I kind of always
ignored them. And, and the reason is
economists, when we look at the economy, we look at what we call
the real economy. The real economy is the
production of goods and services as opposed to the movement of
dollars. So you can move dollars from me
to you, but if we haven't produced anything, then really
nothing's happened. It's just movement of dollars.
And so too, financial bubbles often are simply movement of, of
dollars. So I tend to ignore them.
However, I started thinking about this and I realized that
people who so many people who are concerned about bubbles and
they're dangerous things and so forth, are only looking at the
financial side. They aren't looking at the at
the real economy, the effects on on production of goods and
services. And, and it occurs to me that a
price mechanism in markets is reflects it so long as it's a
free market reflects all of people's expectations and their
abilities and their their constraints.
So when you pick up a bottle of water and it's $2.50 or whatever
it is, you can, in a free market environment, pretty well
understand that that price reflects everything that went
into producing it all the way up the production chain, and
reflects how badly people want water, how easy it is to get it
to them, all that stuff. It's all reflected in the $2.50
price. But here's the thing, how can a
how can a free market price reflect all of that for a
product that isn't well defined? Well, you know a couple of
things. It's, it's interesting, right?
Because first, when I have to go get gas, I don't compare prices.
I understand that there are three gas stations on on the 1st
2 miles out of my house, always the same price or within a
penny. So do I really care about the
$0.16 I could save on a full tank of gas?
No, I, I most certainly do not. So prices work right?
We know this. Am I going to pay a lot more for
my groceries if I go to Fry's or Albertson's or Safeway?
No, it's going to be roughly the same.
And then there's the issue that you bring up right the the great
unknown. When you price the unknown,
you're going to get all kinds of distortions andirememberthe.com
bubble. I remember doing something you
did not do, watching the Super Bowl during the the.com bubble.
Must've been 99 and I didn't understand the single ad that I
saw because every every company that bought 1 was pushing
their.com brand. But they never said what they
did right? Right.
And most of those companies are out of business now.
They could afford a Super Bowl ad.
They're all gone. You know, now go go back to your
example of gas for a moment, because that's a good one.
We all understand what a a gallon of gas is.
And yeah, you know, some are 87 octane, some are something else,
but we understand all this. So when I say the price of gas
is of 87 octane, gas is something that communicates
something to youbutyoumentioned.com, I want
to go back a little bit further. Think about the invention of the
automobile. When it was first invented, it
was unclear what an automobile was.
I mean, we know what an automobile is today, right?
But, but back then it was a new invention.
Does it have three wheels? Does it have 4?
Does it have a retractable roof, A fixed roof?
Do you have the crank on the front or a electronic thing?
Do you have two headlights or one?
How big is it? How many people does it see?
None of those questions had been answered yet because it was a
brand new thing. My favorite example automobile
might become my new favorite example.
It's actually quite compelling if you think about it.
But my favorite example heretofore has been television
networks and or channels, right? In 1955, what is a television
network? Right.
I mean, you can look at a television and know, all right,
this is the future. I'm going to invest in it.
Did you invest in the DuMont Network?
Hope not, right? Kind of like with the AI
business, there are, you know, 8 or 10 different prominent AI
companies right now. Will there be in three years,
I'm guessing half of them will be gone, right?
And they're all worth in fortune right now.
Well, in in that's happening because I guess there are two
things going on here. 1 is the market.
The real economy is trying to figure out what is this thing.
So you know, we start off with the car.
In fact, back in the day, one of the first cars when cars were
first invented had a horse head on the front of it because
people were used to, you know, when you're traveling there's
you're seeing you're seeing behind a horse had a full, you
know, full size horse head not, not a, not a hood ornament the
real thing, right? People didn't know what a car
was and it took, it took entrepreneurs performing trial
and error of this guy produces one thing, this guy produces
another. And the, the consumers figured
out I like this thing better or that thing better.
And over time it settles down. And so we have today the car.
Sure, there's variations, but basically a car is a car, right?
But here's where the bubble bubble comes in.
As the entrepreneurs are doing their thing, trying to figure
out what's a car and we're trying different, different
variations, investors are backing them.
And of course, the investors are hoping that consumers choose the
particular entrepreneur that the investor's backing.
And that's how you get the bubble.
All of a sudden people jumping on board saying, yeah, this is
going to be great. You see it now with, you know,
I'm a huge fan of ChatGPT and you know, as soon as that goes
public, I would invest my money in it.
That's the one I'm backing. And of course, the price of the
stock is probably way above what it should be worth.
But that's reflecting the fact that that we're still figuring
out on the good side, what's AI on the investment side, all the
entrepreneurs doing their thing and investors trying to back
them, while the rest of us are are figuring out, you know,
what, where, where should we put our money, both in terms of
investment, in terms of consumption.
Yeah, meanwhile, just a couple of days ago, one of, and it
happened on April 1st and I thought it was an April Fool's
Day joke. One of the one of the prominent
AIS, I think it was Claude, had its source code put up online.
That really, it was. Serious.
Yeah, that that's going to cause a problem, right?
That yeah, that's proprietary information.
Now it isn't. And you know that that's going
to affect the bottom line. Meanwhile, I'm a, I'm a grok guy
myself. Why?
Because it's free and easily accessible and I can use it as
long as I want without restriction, right?
This kind of thing, is it better than ChatGPT?
No earthly idea. It's more convenient and
convenient equals better in some respects.
So who the hell knows? And I I honestly have no
prediction which a is will still be around in five years.
None whatsoever. Let me, let me help you out with
that prediction. And, and I agree with you.
I don't know which one's going to be around in five years, but
I bet you whatever AI is in five years will be markedly different
from what it is today. I suspect that's right, and I I
hold open the possibility that will it will kill us all.
I'm less sold on that idea as time goes by, but you know,
these things are theoretically possible.
So in all likelihood it will follow the development of every
other man made thing and it will get decidedly better very
quickly. Over time it will become
commonplace, it will become integrated, and then after a bit
we'll move on to the next thing. The same way that we don't think
about right now, the Internet. Great.
I, I, I remember and do you remember?
A lot of our. Listeners are not going to
remember this. In order to get the Internet,
you used to have to go out to your mailbox and get ACD, right?
Yeah. And put it into a machine.
And then all of a sudden magic happened and you had Internet
for X number of hours and then you could sign up for AOL if you
wanted to. The Internet is still around.
It's become so ubiquitous that we don't talk about it anymore.
Remember when Al Gore talked about access to the information
superhighway and how we had to dump all these billions of
dollars into it so rural people could get it?
That turned out to be exactly the problem we both predicted.
Not at all. And you know, here we are.
We don't even think about it anymore.
Of course I have the Internet. What kind of idiot wouldn't have
the Internet? And I think AI will be kind of
like that. And I think the one of the ways,
you know, that we don't think about it that much is imagine
what would happen if it went down.
As you know, you lose connectivity from time to time.
It goes down. So I was working.
Well, now I can't work 'cause the Internet's down.
I'm going to go visit my Aunt Mildred instead.
Oh wait, I don't know how to get there because Google Maps is is
down, so I'll stay here. I'll do my taxes.
Oh wait, I can't. Because TurboTax is online and
you don't realize how much you use it until it goes away and
all of a sudden all these things you can't do.
Yeah, I mean they typically do the the routine maintenance at
1:00 in the morning and I am routinely awake at 1:00 in the.
Morning, right? And the, the epic tirades of
swearing that happened in this house when they do routine
maintenance at 1:00 in the morning, you could probably hear
them in, in Virginia where you live.
But I, you know, look, I, I, I, I don't know where this is going
to end up. And that's the interesting part,
right? And people are taking their best
shot and a lot of people are going to get really, really rich
and a lot of people are going to lose every, every dollar they
put into it. Yes.
But all of that is happening on the financial side of the Ledger
as opposed to the real economy side of the Ledger.
Yeah, people will lose their shirts.
People become very rich. But that, if you look at it, is
really just dollars moving from one person's pocket to another
person's pocket. And it's a result of the bubble
being inflated and then crashing.
But what happened as that bubble inflated, it was attracting
capital and entrepreneurs and investors to try more and more
different things. And the more things they try on
the real economy side, the more options consumer have and the
better consumers are able to say that works and that doesn't.
Well, as as I learned when I became an economist, open
parentheses, honorary close parentheses, prices are
information. You know.
They're information in real time, right?
And OK, sometimes things get way out of whack.
And that's information too. When you look at something and
you say Company X is selling for, you know, $300 a share,
there are X numbers of shares out there.
The market cap is thus this many billions, but they've never once
been in danger of turning a profit and they can't tell me
how they're ever going to. There's a lot of information
there. Wait, yeah.
And, and people will, I've heard people point to that as kind of
the, the, that's the final say. Well, the, the the companies has
no prospects for profit. You can't justify this price,
therefore bubble. But I point back to Amazon
because back in the days of Amazon, people said the exact
same thing. I was describing Amazon and as a
matter of fact the financial chattering class would say on
CNBC all day long. I don't know how this company
expects to sell dollar bills for $0.75 for the rest of its life
and hope to ever turn a profit. Yep, and yet a profit was
turned. A profit was turned, and I was
actually quite surprised because the first time they turned a
profit, I believe the company was at least 10 years old.
It was old enough that it it shocked me that they hadn't been
profitable to that point. But what happened was over those
years, Amazon was doing trial and error figuring out how to
turn a profit. It finally figured it out.
And it's not something that the entrepreneur, Amazon does by
itself You it's a dance that occurs with the consumer.
Entrepreneur tries things, consumers say yes or no.
Entrepreneur tries different things, Consumers say yes or no
by by giving or withholding their dollars.
And Amazon finally figured it out.
And now yes, indeed, it's it's profitable.
It's worth What is stock prices? And there were enough people
along the way who said, I believe in this company, I will
invest in this company. And that kept, that's what kept
it afloat. Yeah, right.
So. There there's plenty of examples
in the. Other direction, for every
Amazon there are hundreds if not thousands of not Amazon.
Yeah. And I think that's that's the
thing People will say, well, look at this is clearly a
failure of markets because, OK, fine, you've got an Amazon, but
then you have on the other side 100 different companies that
tried and failed. And look at all that wasted
money and talent and all of that.
To which I respond, we only know in retrospect that those were
failures. And why were they failures?
Because they tried something and consumers said no, you've got to
try it. And let the consumers tell you.
We had no idea that Amazon's model was the right one at the
beginning. We had to go through that, that
trial and error. Yeah, that that's exactly right.
And the consumer gets the last say every time.
And I my mind always goes to VHS versus Betamax, right.
The Betamax was a superior product in literally every way.
And they made one critical mistake on their way to full
integration into the home, and they disallowed pornography on
their platform. Sony did.
And people were thinking, yeah, I don't think so.
This gets me out of going to these awful Pee Wee Herman style
movie theaters where I have to interact with the public in a
way I don't want to, and this allows me to have privacy and,
you know, the whole bit. And it was just one bad business
decision that maybe couldn't have been foreseen in its
totality at the time it was made.
But the market spoke immediately, and Sony never
caught up again. Never.
So Amazon, right?
Think about what Amazon does now.
This is a bookstore. People seem to forget that now.
It's an everything store, right? Amazon was books.
It was books and books only. The first place I go every time
I need anything is Amazon. And then I ask myself, is this a
reasonable price? If it is, I just pay it and they
bring it over. If I look at it and I say, geez,
I don't know. Then I compare the price to
everybody else. And if there's a significant
difference, I'll rethink it. And they're all kinds of
specialty items you would never buy from Amazon, right?
But for the most part, the stuff you need day-to-day, and then
all of a sudden now they're a pharmacy.
You can have your your medications fulfilled by Amazon.
My, my goodness, that's that's pretty, pretty good for a
bookstore. Yeah, but nobody thinks of
Amazon as a bookstore anymore. And you're, you're, you're
missing. And all of that is correct.
You're missing one of their important products, which most
people aren't aware of. Amazon sells computing services,
compute, online storage, this sort of thing.
In fact, backinthe.com era, I was with a start up and our
business model was we were, we were selling supercomputation
online. So you could log in and you've
got via the Internet a supercomputer sitting in front
of you. If you only need one for 10
minutes, we'll sell it to you for, you know, we'll rent you 10
minutes on this, on the thing and and you can do this.
Amazon basically is one of the companies that put us out of
business, but it put us out of business because it had much
better hardware, more hardware than what we had.
How did it get it? Because it needed it to sell
books. So basically, Amazon's selling
books at a loss to support buying its hardware that that
actually ended up being its its later product.
I, I, I wait for Amazon to get into the light truck business
because they buy all these light trucks for all their deliveries.
Why not just make them ourselves?
Somebody over there will say sooner or later.
And then you, oh, that's buy yourself an Amazon truck.
That's funny. I'm now imagining Amazon Air.
They're flying. Don't don't they have like the
largest? No, it's UPS has the largest
fleet. Yeah.
But you could see something like
that happening. Yeah.
So there are there are all kinds of things that come as secondary
effects when when these sorts of things happen and we don't
really think of how wonderful they all are.
We just look at the one winning company and we say, well, that's
not fair. And you said something really
important a moment ago that the consumer has the final say.
This is something people do not appreciate.
And it it's probably one of the probably the most fundamental
truths of free market economics is the you as an individual
consumer. Maybe the corporation doesn't
care about you because you're going to spend 20 bucks a year
or whatever, but the corporation is terrified of you, plural.
Plural, because if the consumer has the ability to walk away and
take their dollars with them, the corporation dies.
Period. Budweiser still hasn't recovered
from the Bud Light nonsense. That they endured when they
decided that they were going to leave the redneck market and
chase after the LGBTQ market, which, you know, that's just
crazy. It's bud, like, for God's sake,
know your audience, right? Know your audience.
And they, they, they haven't fully recovered from that.
Yeah. Wow.
And people who say that the customer is is unimportant in
the individual instance, they're often correct.
In the aggregate, they're never correct.
Yep, right. I've been mistreated in, in so
many different retail places that I don't even know what to
say about it. And if it's only me and I refuse
to go back to those places, and I often do, no big deal on the
part of the purveyor, But if they treat everybody like that
and everybody stays away, they're out of business real
fast. Right.
And this is where social media becomes so important because
you, you and I do the same thing.
If we have have a bad experience, we have enough
followers, we get online and say something bad and all of a
sudden the company is now bending over backwards to make
it right. Not because they care about us,
they care about all the people who are listening.
That's right. I, I responded to somebody's
tweet not too long ago about pre authorizations in medical care
and I said, yeah, don't I know it.
I'm in the pre authorization limbo with my, my healthcare
provider, LA Blue. It's a Blue Cross Blue Shield
subsidiary. And I didn't give it a second
thought, but I, I tab them in it just to say, you know, what's up
with you guys? And they have an employee whose
job it is to find every negative thing posted on X and she found
it and called me on the phone. She had them dig through their
records to find my phone number so she could call me and say
what can I do to speed this along for you?
Nice, nice. You got to be you got to be
kidding me. It it, it was one of the most
amazing things I've ever experienced.
Was within two days on a throwaway post that I didn't
think twice about, and yet it mattered enough to them to get
me to stop doing that. To, you know, maybe see if I
could be hushed up in some meaningful way.
And turns out I can be. Now let me let me go back in,
offer a criticism, which is people who are listening might
say, OK, I'm following everything you said, the
wondrousness of, you know, the trial and error process and all
of that. But the fact is when a bubble
forms and then it bursts, they're real people who lose
their shirts. To which I reply, but they're,
they're people who were there in the 1st place voluntarily.
No one is required to invest in a bubble.
And if you get caught up in it and say, well, there's only
upside and I'm going to make $1,000,000, you know, and you
end up losing your shirt, that's on you.
I made. A bad call.
Yeah, I had a friend who duringthe.com bubble said I just
bought thousands of shares of this company as CSO or CS Cisco.
Whatever it was, no Cisco. Yeah.
And I said, do you know what that company does?
And he said I can't lose. He lost 3/4 of his investment
within a year of of making it. Yeah.
Absolutely you can lose. You can lose, right?
And regular people tend to lose more as a percentage basis
because they don't have the interior knowledge of the
product in the market that they're investing in.
This is why the S&P 500 beats individual.
The S&P 500 does better than professional fund managers.
You think you can beat it, right?
Probably not. Yeah, it reminds me of something
I ran across recently. It seems to be the case.
This was an article talking about, I believe it was talking
about the AI bubble and the bursting and so forth.
And, and it's the first time I've seen an article that
described, you know, dropping stock prices in a positive tone.
And it was saying there's a great opportunity here for
people to get in at low prices. I'm thinking thank God because
starting back in 1929 with the, the stock market crash, people,
people seem to have this attitude that you should buy in
when the price is high and when the price drops, get out.
That's the exact opposite of what you should be doing.
And now it seems that Americans have had enough.
Americans have had enough experience with stocks that when
the price tanks, they they regard it the same way they
would regard their favorite pair of shoes going on sale.
They say, oh, this is a great time to buy.
Yeah, the best investment I ever made was in the broad markets
couple of days after 911. Yeah, I just watched it, tank
and tank and tank and tank, and I said, well, it's probably
time. Yeah.
You know, and then this is, this is the way buy low, sell high
and, and people's natural inclinations to do the exact
opposite. You know, they buy high on a
wave of good feelings and they sell low as they panic.
But interesting way to maybe leave this one.
And I, I did a little digging not too terribly long ago about
the Tulip bubble in highland the Netherlands.
Turns out it may not have ever happened.
You know, I thought I heard something about that.
And that's that's remarkable because it's like in every
economics principles textbook. It's, it's kind of like the,
the, the cobra problem, right? It's or Isaac.
Newton in the apple falling on his head.
It's in every book. It it leads every story and yet
it probably did not happen. So I, I'm going to get back to
the tulips business one of these days.
Not today, of course. I'm going to watch basketball on
my TV like a normal human being. But one of these days I'm going
to get back to tulips. Because that's the lore, right?
That's the mythology of bubbles. Reality of bubbles might be
very, very different. And I think you and I both think
it is. Anyway, see you next time.
And by next time, I mean next week, because we're back, we're
here, we're something, and we're proud.
And you figure out what we are. And until next time, because I
haven't said it very much in four weeks, Be nice to each
other in these trying times. Everything's going to work out.
It's all right. See you next time, Aunt.
See you next time, James.