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The transcript from this week’s MiB: Carl Richards on Sketching Wealth Strategy, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

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Carl Richards on the Behavior Gap
A conversation with Barry Ritholtz

Guest: Carl Richards, author of Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches

[00:00]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: This week on the podcast, old friend Carl Richards joins me to talk about his new book, Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches. If the name sounds familiar, he created the Sketch Guy column in the New York Times — it ran there for a decade. He’s probably done more than anyone to expand usage of the phrase “the behavior gap,” the difference between people’s portfolios and what the results actually are. I thought our conversation was charming, and I think you will too. With no further ado, here’s me and Carl Richards talking about money. Carl, welcome to Bloomberg.

[00:00]  CARL RICHARDS: So fun. I’ve been looking forward to this for years.

[00:01]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Same — long overdue. We’ve had you on At the Money, but we haven’t had you for the long sit-down. Let’s start out talking about your background. University of Utah School of Business, bachelor of science in finance. That implies finance, investing, money. Was that the original career plan?

[00:01]  CARL RICHARDS: No, not even close, really. I was an undeclared major, which back then meant you had no idea what you wanted to do with your life. I was the newest hire at a landscaping company, so I was literally digging ditches for a living. I come home one day — my wife and I had recently been married, this was ’95 — and she has the help-wanted ads open. She’s got a degree in finance, a job as the CFO of a small real estate company. So I said, “Hey Corey” — her name’s Corey — “what are you doing?” She said, “I’m looking for a job.” I said, “But you have one.” And she said, “I know, I’m looking for you.” I said, “What are you finding?” And she found what we both thought was a security guard job.

[00:02]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: At a little shop called Fidelity.

[00:02]  CARL RICHARDS: A security guard. I was like, I could work as a mall cop at night — this would be great, and I can still go to school full time. I went to apply. Nothing about kung fu, nothing about self-defense. They were asking about things I didn’t know what they were —

[00:02]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Securities.

[00:02]  CARL RICHARDS: Exactly. I didn’t know the difference. And I got through —

[00:02]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I was gonna call BS on this, because — wait, how are you a finance major? But that happened afterwards.

[00:02]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s exactly right. So I get through the interview, which tells you a lot about the applicant pool. They had narrowed it down to slim —

[00:02]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: To none.

[00:02]  CARL RICHARDS: Two of us. And they offered it to the other guy, and the other guy said, “I don’t want it, you take it.” So that’s how I ended up at Fidelity’s national call center, just before the Netscape IPO.

[00:02]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s unbelievable. I started on a trading desk and I was told, “Hey, rookie — no trading the Netscape IPO.” So you and I started just about around the same time.

[00:03]  CARL RICHARDS: You know what was crazy about that? After I got clear that I wasn’t a security guard, I was like, what’s this job? I was looking around, and everybody was using calculators and math, and I thought, okay, this must be a math job. And then a couple weeks into training, they called us out onto the trading floor to answer phones — because back then you couldn’t get a quote, you couldn’t place a trade, unless you called. And it was the day of the Netscape IPO. And I remember thinking, this isn’t math. That was my first introduction to this idea. I like to say I got in by accident, but I stayed because of that moment — like, what is this crazy thing that we call money? Nobody was doing math in there. They were excited, mad, angry, upset. I always thought it was a mistake getting into finance. I always thought I would go off and do organizational behavior — the Stephen Covey thing at BYU. Because work is where people go to do things that matter. And then some of these early experiences opened the door to this idea: money is the ultimate portal to somebody’s soul. What do you really care about? I can find out pretty quickly by how you spend your money and how you spend your time. So that’s how I stayed. And afterwards I thought, maybe I should get a degree in this.

[00:04]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So then you switch, you get your degree in finance from the David Eccles School of Business. When do you go for the CFP, when do you become a certified financial planner?

[00:04]  CARL RICHARDS: I was looking at that the other day. All I remember is I got made fun of for taking it — remember, back in the day? I left Fidelity and went to work for a big brokerage firm — you know, the one with the bull, owned by a bank. I got my CIMA designation, because that’s what the cool kids did, the institutional consulting stuff. I thought, I gotta figure this thing out, this whole money thing. And then I started to get my CFP. This was back when people on that side of the business were like, “What are you wasting your time on that for?”

[00:05]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: This whole fiduciary thing. I mean, really —

[00:05]  CARL RICHARDS: It’s great. Seriously.

[00:05]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: “Waste of time. What are you gonna do, not charge people commission? What are you thinking, Carl?”

[00:05]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s right. So fun.

[00:05]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So what I find fascinating about your career — and I’m now learning all the parallels between our careers — is you kind of reinvent yourself as a communicator, as an author, as a speaker. Is that something that helped you when you set up your own investment firm? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

[00:05]  CARL RICHARDS: I can remember who was in the room and where I was when I first sketched something out. I wasn’t a doodler in school. It’s obvious I didn’t take any art classes.

[00:05]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I don’t know if I’d say it’s obvious, because these are really kind of interesting. Charles Schulz very famously drew Peanuts and said he didn’t have skill.

[00:06]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s a super generous comparison. Thank you.

[00:06]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Oh, I’m not making that comparison — I’m just saying someone else said something similar.

[00:06]  CARL RICHARDS: Somebody else said something similar. Good. But I just remember sitting across the table from some really smart clients — he was an ER doctor, she was a technology sales rep at EMC or something. I was trying to explain a concept, and I was just getting blank stares. You know the feeling. That had happened before, but this was the first time it dawned on me: wait, they’re really smart — this must be my problem. So out of an act of desperation, in the shared conference room there was a whiteboard nobody used. I stood up one day and was like, “No, like this,” and drew some boxes and arrows, like an estate planner would. And they were like, “Oh, oh.” At that moment I didn’t make a grand conclusion. I just remember thinking, huh, that was really interesting. So that started this idea: anytime I got asked a question more than once — the second time I got asked it — I thought, what if I just wrote down the answer and sent it to everybody who asked? And, I don’t know if you remember, but there were these things called blogs back in the day.

[00:07]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Not only do I remember —

[00:07]  CARL RICHARDS: You were one of the OGs.

[00:07]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I still am doing it. I have no interest in BeeHiiv or Substack. I learned early on, I don’t want to give my content to another company. I want to control it.

[00:07]  CARL RICHARDS: So I started putting those things up on the internet — an answer to a question, with some sort of diagram. And, by the way, the hand-drawn sketches were a flaw at the beginning. I went to download Adobe Illustrator, and the download said three hours. And I thought, anything that takes three hours to download, I should not be using.

[00:07]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Illustrator would ruin this. The whole beauty of your sketches — and I know most of you are listening to this and not watching me thumb through a book — is just how simple and informative they are, with just a few lines, a few circles, a few wiggles. It’s not a giant org chart. It’s, “Oh, he did that in 90 seconds, and look how much information is in it.”

[00:08]  CARL RICHARDS: Well, thank you. But early on it was like — I was only doing that because I couldn’t download Adobe Illustrator. I saw it as a flaw. So every couple of years, early on, I’d get them designed by somebody and post those, and people would be like, “Where are the hand-drawn ones?” So I finally learned — and I’m only telling you these stories because it’s so tempting for us to look back and create these beautiful narratives of the experience. But it turns out there was just a lot of random experimentation and playing, because the thing I thought was a flaw ended up being the feature.

[00:08]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Huh. That’s really interesting. I’m surprised you think of it as a flaw.

[00:08]  CARL RICHARDS: Not anymore.

[00:08]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: But how long did it take you to get to that point? To me, the beauty of your drawings is, first of all, it’s obviously not AI slop — you predate AI by 20 years. But more importantly, they look and feel human and personal. Someone has really put time into figuring out how to communicate a complicated idea in the least amount of letters, words, and images. So at what point did you think, hey, I could do something with these drawings — maybe publish them in the New York Times every week?

[00:09]  CARL RICHARDS: Never. What happened was, I was putting these up on the website. I tried to stop.

[00:09]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I love that.

[00:09]  CARL RICHARDS: It was like a compulsion.

[00:09]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Can’t help it.

[00:09]  CARL RICHARDS: I even had people around me who were like, “Just focus on building your business. What are you doing?” And they were right. But I kept putting it up there. And there’s a guy named Kent, who I did not know, who sent them to a guy named Ron — Ron Lieber — who I did not know at the time.

[00:10]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I know of Ron Lieber.

[00:10]  CARL RICHARDS: Kent didn’t know Ron. And Ron just sent a note: “Hey, I think you might like these.” I still have that email, because nobody believes me. The email was, “Hey, we love these. Could we try something?” And I knew enough from my security-guard background, as a kid in the hills of Utah, to say — I never thought, I was like, “Yeah, of course, what do you have in mind?” I’ve talked to Ron since: “Why did you open that email?” Because he gets stacks of things he’d love to reply to and read — that’s the kind of human he is — but he just doesn’t have time. So why did he open that one that day? I don’t know. I should still be sending Kent a gift every Christmas. I never thought maybe this could appear in the Times.

[00:10]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So from the late nineties — when do you launch the firm that you ultimately build up and sell in 2012?

[00:11]  CARL RICHARDS: I’m really, really bad with dates, but we were in —

[00:11]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Early two-thousands.

[00:11]  CARL RICHARDS: No, 2008 or ’09.

[00:11]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: After the financial crisis. So four years you build this up. Why sell it? You just like, “Hey, I’m gonna focus on the security-guard business”?

[00:11]  CARL RICHARDS: The first thing I should tell you is why I left and started my own firm. The impetus was two things.

[00:11]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: This is at Fidelity?

[00:11]  CARL RICHARDS: Fidelity? No, I was now working at the big brokerage firm, and I left to start my own RIA firm. I remember that cover — I can’t remember if it was Fortune or Forbes — it had Rex and David at DFA, and it said “How the Really Smart Money Invests.” I had that in the top drawer of my desk. Every time I opened the drawer — because I still had this “I’m just a kid from the hills of Utah” imposter-syndrome thing, like I’m supposed to be in jail — and I’m helping people make really important decisions with money. I needed to figure out: am I a security guard? Is this math? So this idea of how the really smart money invests — I called and said, “How do I get access to this?” They said, “Well, you can’t do it where you’re at.” So I left for that reason. And then the second reason ended up being one of the greatest disappointments in my career. I left because I thought it was really important to be able to tell everybody that I was a fiduciary, and that everybody would care. And one of the greatest disappointments was that nobody seemed to care. Of course you and I both know it’s incredibly important, but most people don’t. I just remember people looking at me like, “Fiduciary, what? Of course you put my interest first.” So that’s why I left to start the firm.

[00:12]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s fascinating. So you sell it in 2012. When did the Sketch Guy columns for the New York Times start? Before that?

[00:12]  CARL RICHARDS: Way before I sold the firm. Part of the reason I sold —

[00:12]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: You sold the firm to concentrate on your doodles.

[00:13]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s right. The book came out in 2012, and I sold the firm about the same time. And I remember specifically having this conversation with my wife. I was like, “Oh, we’ll never sell the thing.” I always thought of it as a security blanket, like I’d never sell it.

[00:13]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s an annuity. It generates income every year, and typically you have a 10% year that you’re up, just due to the market.

[00:13]  CARL RICHARDS: It’s such a great business.

[00:13]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It is a good business. And especially if you’re a fiduciary and doing the right thing by your client, you not only make a decent living, you get to sleep at night.

[00:13]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s exactly right, all the things. So I never thought I’d sell it. But there was this increasing demand — the book was coming out, I was getting asked to speak all over the world. It was clear that I really, really liked that stuff. I had to make a choice. And in the end I was like, “This is security.” My wife said, “Hey, maybe it’s an anchor.”

[00:13]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: You guys speak the same love language — it’s kind of fascinating. That’s a very insightful observation from your wife. She’s the one who tried to get you a hat and a shield and have you parade around the mall like Paul Blart. You guys are very much on the same page.

[00:14]  CARL RICHARDS: I know. She’s been amazing — 31 years, 33 really, amazing. And it’s the best it’s ever been, and I hope it’s better tomorrow. One of those two competing truths at the same time. I could have never dreamed of it, and I want it a little better tomorrow. I hope I never stop thinking that way. Anyway — I left, sold the firm, went full-time into this speaking and writing thing. For a little while I was at the firm that bought my company.

[00:14]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Another nameless firm.

[00:14]  CARL RICHARDS: That was Buckingham, back then.

[00:14]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Oh, okay. I kind of remember that.

[00:14]  CARL RICHARDS: Went to work for them in those days and loved it.

[00:14]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Who else did you work with there? There were some people I really liked.

[00:14]  CARL RICHARDS: Larry Swedroe — tremendous. That whole crew. Adam, the whole crew there. It was really, really good.

[00:14]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So we’re gonna spend a little time talking about behavior. But you came from several big shops — Fidelity, Merrill, as well as Buckingham. They all have PhDs and Monte Carlo simulations, and they run factor-model tests. And yet people still buy high and sell low. What is it about the human condition that is a permanent drag on performance?

[00:15]  CARL RICHARDS: That feels to me like the question I’ve been exploring for 20 years.

[00:15]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s why I asked it.

[00:15]  CARL RICHARDS: I almost left the business at first, because I couldn’t solve this problem. After I got my CIMA designation and came back —

[00:15]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Explain for laypeople what that acronym is.

[00:15]  CARL RICHARDS: The Certified Investment Management Analyst. It was for people doing institutional consulting work.

[00:15]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So not a CFA, but more than a CFP.

[00:15]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah — sort of like CFA light, that can talk to people. Back then it was taught in conjunction with Wharton, so I went to Wharton for two weeks. That was the whole reason — I’m always looking for external validation.

[00:16]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Goes hand in hand with the imposter syndrome.

[00:16]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s exactly right, and I’m not afraid to admit it. But I came back working with clients and realized: okay, now I’ve got this great system, the best training in the world — honestly, some of the best training at the firm. And yet I still had this repeated experience where we’d create really detailed spreadsheets of how to hire and fire managers. And then, over and over, the manager that showed up on our buy screen — we’d commit clients’ money to it; I thought that was our job, the search for the best investment — would go through a normal cyclical period of underperformance and show up on our fire screen. I repeated that two or three times over a three- or four-year period and thought, I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe it’s just me. And then I ran across some of that industry research around investor returns versus investment returns, where you see that the average investor underperforms the average investment.

[00:17]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Not only does the average investor underperform the average investment — the average investor underperforms their own investments.

[00:17]  CARL RICHARDS: I just remember being so excited that it wasn’t just me. Wait — this is an industry-wide, huge problem. What that research said to me was that I could own a mediocre investment, and if I behaved correctly, I would outperform 99% of my neighbors. And that’s all we care about in the first place, right? Outperforming our neighbors. That’s the whole goal.

[00:17]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: “How is that idiot down the block getting rich, and I’m not?”

[00:18]  CARL RICHARDS: Exactly — as if that’s the thing that matters. But that’s what we do.

[00:18]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s how people work.

[00:18]  CARL RICHARDS: Exactly right. So digging into that a bit — I really think Buffett’s statement, that if you were to design a poor investor you would design a human, is as close as we get. We are hardwired. I think it was in one of Jason Zweig’s books where they hooked up scanners and had people open their brokerage statements — talk about a masochistic experiment. And if the statement was down, you process that in the same part of your brain as you do mortal danger — as if you’re being chased by a bear.

[00:18]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Breaking through the room — fight or flight, right there. My favorite Bill Bernstein quote is, “It’s all about your amygdala. If you don’t get your limbic system under control, you will die poor.” And it’s that exact same system.

[00:18]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s right. And if the statement’s up, it’s the same part of your brain as security and pleasure. I think it was in the book that for women that’s chocolate and for men that’s sex. I didn’t quite understand the difference in the book, but —

[00:19]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Between sex and chocolate.

[00:19]  CARL RICHARDS: Anyway. So if that’s what’s going on, it’s a little bit like the interaction we have with our phones now. On the other side of that interaction are 300 PhDs trying to get us to pay attention to what’s going on on Instagram. And I think we finally have to recognize: unless we put some serious guardrails between us and the big mistake, we’re gonna make the big mistake — because it feels like… I don’t care what you tell me, Barry; if my hand’s on a stove, I’m taking it off.

[00:19]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: A hundred percent.

[00:19]  CARL RICHARDS: So that, to me, is the work — worrying about what it means to be a real investor, a successful investor, versus what it means to find good investments.

[00:19]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Let’s talk a little bit about the behavior gap. I don’t know if you created that phrase, but you’ve done more than anybody else I know to popularize it. Tell us what the behavior gap actually is.

[00:20]  CARL RICHARDS: It started out as a very narrow thing — the difference between, the technical term would be, time-weighted rates of return and dollar-weighted. Because I’ve had to explain this so many times, maybe I’ll go through the explanation. Imagine you open a newspaper and there’s an ad for a mutual fund. It says the fund has returned 10% a year for the last 10 years. That’s the investment return. And just for a minute, forget taxes and fees — that’s the return you would’ve gotten if you had invested money at the beginning of the 10-year period and not added or taken anything away and left it there. But nobody invests that way, except your clients. We are always chasing whatever we hear in the news — the financial pornography network waves their hands, and we’ve got a list of 10 funds to buy. So we end up running around, and the average investment return is 10%, but the average investor return is always different from that.

[00:21]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Who does the annual report that everybody criticizes — that shows this differential?

[00:21]  CARL RICHARDS: That was one of the early reports I ran across — Dalbar. I spent the time years ago to understand it; I don’t really know that number well. I know Morningstar does a number, and it seems to be comparable — 80 to 100 basis points, not 6%.

[00:21]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And then what about the SPIVA numbers on manager performance?

[00:21]  CARL RICHARDS: For sure.

[00:21]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you’re running across these behavioral errors on pretty much both sides — the manager who’s running their funds and frequently underperforming. And the longer that timeline is, the greater the percentage of managers underperforming. And on the other side, the buyers of those funds tend to not only underperform the benchmark, they’re underperforming their own funds. So if only there were an alternative way to invest.

[00:22]  CARL RICHARDS: Let me tell you a quick story. This is back during my institutional consulting days. We had this client; we do a manager search and selection, and we find the best large-cap value manager for this client and hire them. As I recall, it was Davis New York Venture, back in the day.

[00:22]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Chris Davis. Yep.

[00:22]  CARL RICHARDS: We go two or three years. Davis has one of those cyclical underperforming moments — value, as it’s going to do.

[00:22]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Value especially, which runs in and out of favor so frequently.

[00:22]  CARL RICHARDS: And it was even in comparison to other value managers, as they’re gonna do. So we fire Davis, not knowing any better, and we hire another — we’ll just call them X, Y, Z. And the client’s like, “Yeah, I understand.” Two and a half years in, we make this change. We go to X, Y, Z. Two and a half, three years later, X, Y, Z does the same thing — cyclical underperformance. We go through our manager screening, they’re up on our fire list, and guess who pops onto our buy list? Chris Davis.

[00:23]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Chris Davis.

[00:23]  CARL RICHARDS: I call the client thinking I’m so smart: “Hey, we need to fire X, Y, Z and hire this manager — it’s called Davis.” And he — this client’s name was Jeremy — was like, “Wait, wait, wait. Didn’t we just fire them two and a half years ago?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “You know what I’d like? I’d like the return of Davis from the day we first hired them until now, and I’d like the return of X, Y, Z from the day you first hired Davis until now. And I’d like that compared to my account.” I was, of course, like, “That’s not how it works.” He said, “Yeah, that’s what I’d like to see.” And we all know the story — he underperformed both of those. He would’ve been fine in either one.

[00:23]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Just leave it alone.

[00:23]  CARL RICHARDS: Just leave it. And that was my first moment of, “I gotta get out of this business, I gotta go to law school or something.” And that’s when I discovered, for myself, this idea that maybe the investment process only matters to the degree that I can behave.

[00:24]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk about what you call the financial pornography networks. They talk all day long about the 10-year yield and the Fed and credit spreads and geopolitics and earnings and news. And you spend most of your books talking about fear, regret, envy — what moves markets and, more importantly, what moves investors’ portfolios.

[00:24]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s such a good question. And I want to be careful about the term “financial pornography network.” I think that was originally the Jane Bryant Quinn term.

[00:24]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s right. Which I love.

[00:24]  CARL RICHARDS: Which I love. But I think it applies really broadly.

[00:25]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I call it the fire hose of financial noise. Is that a fair phrase?

[00:25]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah, that’s fine. Sometimes “media circus.” It’s a media business, and there’s nothing — I want to be clear — I live in the hills in Utah, I ride my mountain bike every day, the trails are out my backyard. I have a different hobby. Just because that’s my hobby doesn’t mean my hobbies are better than anybody else’s. I walk in this building and I see happy human after happy human walking through the halls — shiny happy people everywhere. Who am I, on three cappuccinos, to say? But what’s important is if we start to recognize what we’re doing it for. What’s the goal? Because if it’s something to talk about, there’s nothing wrong with that. If it’s entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with that. But basing your actual investment decisions on something you heard — even if it was secret, underneath the subway, and labeled… isn’t the Economist the one all the really smart people read anyway? You’re not the only one who’s heard it. So we have to be careful about making big investment decisions based on every wind of news or entertainment, versus linking — and this is back to how do we solve this behavior problem — the portfolio has to be designed to give me the greatest likelihood of reaching my goals. And my goals have to be carefully clarified, and they’re gonna change over time. So it’s this constant process of saying, are these investment decisions aligned with what I want out of my life? Both sides of that equation are really challenging. Getting clear about what you want out of your life is super hard. Making sure you have a portfolio built on data and evidence that’ll get you closest to that — also really hard.

[00:26]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s break that into two pieces, because I feel like there are two distinct conversations. We’ll get to the goal portion in a moment; I want to stay with the media circus. Isn’t there really a very simple problem — the mismatch in time horizons? When you’re putting money away to save for retirement, or even a 529 for college, or to buy a house or a second house, you’re thinking 5, 10, 50 years. But all of the financial noise, that fire hose, is about the church of what’s happening right now. If we can simply readjust our media consumption into some context with the longevity of our portfolio goals, doesn’t that solve a lot of this? If I’m putting this money away for 20, 30 years, what do I care what happened on a random Thursday?

[00:27]  CARL RICHARDS: And gosh — what if we actually kept track of every single change of opinion, and how sure somebody was? Remember that old statement that even a broken clock is right twice a day?

[00:28]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Often wrong, never in doubt. That’s exactly it.

[00:28]  CARL RICHARDS: And that’s entertaining — and there’s nothing wrong with entertainment. We go to the movies, we go see plays, we ride our mountain bikes. I just think we have to understand what it is. What you’re saying is, that’s day-to-day entertainment. I like it because I can talk about it. Just don’t base my 5-, 10-, 20-year decisions on it.

[00:28]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And yet we continue to see people have that problem. So let me re-ask this question in a different way. How do you bridge the gap between what clients ask for — what they think they want — and what you know they actually need?

[00:28]  CARL RICHARDS: Barry, you’re super good at this whole job.

[00:29]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s all AI. It’s all I didn’t write.

[00:29]  CARL RICHARDS: Now you’ve layered in another problem, because the humans we call clients show up having been trained by us as an industry — speaking really broadly — that what matters is this day-to-day stuff. They think the job of an investor is to find the best investment, because we taught them that on television, waving our hands. So it’s no surprise that clients come in expecting that — we did this to ourselves. And that’s why I think clients who work with real financial advisors often go through a period of financial-pornography detox, where they wake up 18, 24 months into the relationship and go, “Hey, you know what? I’m not really paying that much attention anymore. All the stuff I used to think was critical has lost its urgency.” So we’ve got this problem where — back to the wiring in our bodies — it feels like we should be doing something. The news is saying we should be doing something. The guy at the club is saying we should be doing something. And I call Barry, and Barry says, “Hey, let’s hold on for a second. Let’s take a breath. Are these goals still the goals? Is this still what’s important to you?” Turns out, if that’s true, we’re okay here. And almost always we end up at the same place: diversified, low-cost portfolio, hold onto it for a long time.

[00:30]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: There’s this inherent bias toward action, which is the nature of that fight-or-flight response.

[00:30]  CARL RICHARDS: One or the other. Act.

[00:30]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: “Don’t just sit there, do something.” And really the right way to do it is, “Don’t just do something, sit there.” But that causes a great deal of discomfort among people. Let’s take this to the next phase. Jack Bogle and Vanguard gave us low cost. Everything we’ve learned from Richard Thaler and the behavioral finance folks is about the importance of humility. What does the next generation of investors learn once they figure out diversified, low cost, and a little bit of humility? Where do you go next?

[00:31]  CARL RICHARDS: You know what’s so hard about that? This “everyone’s a gambler” thing that’s sort of slipped in —

[00:31]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Actually, today.

[00:31]  CARL RICHARDS: It’s slipped in. I don’t envy growing up as a 25-, 30-year-old trying to sort this out right now, because it just feels like everything’s a bet.

[00:31]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And it is.

[00:31]  CARL RICHARDS: And it is. To me — I’m careful with advice, but the observation I’ve noticed most frequently is that when I’m younger, if I can focus on human capital and then realize that the money over here does the job of compounding, my main job should be to earn a bit more. Raising my human capital — my ability to earn and save when I’m young — will far outstrip getting an extra 25 basis points by paying attention to some newsletter on the internet.

[00:32]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s funny you mention gambling being everywhere. We were talking before the podcast about Nine-Fingered Howie. He wrote a post and created an index called the Degeneracy Index, where he puts in all the various prediction markets and gambling apps — and it’s been outperforming the Nasdaq, which has been on fire, like two to one. And it’s a kind of warning.

[00:32]  CARL RICHARDS: What do we do with that?

[00:32]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s a warning. I understand the Supreme Court decision that says gambling can’t just be legal in one state — but maybe the decision isn’t to make it legal everywhere. Maybe the decision is to say an entire industry based on human foibles, cognitive errors, and innumeracy is kind of an evil industry.

[00:32]  CARL RICHARDS: I know. We’re the problem; we need to realize that we’re just not wired for it. It’s not that we’re dumb, it’s not that we’re bad. We can have any discussion we want about the morality of the whole thing, but underneath it all sits this idea that we’re not wired to handle it. And another piece that’s interesting right now: I don’t think we’re really wired to handle the level of uncertainty that we’re dealing with — the sort of change fatigue.

[00:33]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And it seems like a lot of what Wall Street sells is this illusion of certainty.

[00:33]  CARL RICHARDS: This false sense of precision. Certainty is so easy to sell — it’s impossible to deliver, but it’s super easy to sell because everybody wants to buy it. So I think those are the two: human capital, and learning how to come to grips with the reality that the world is uncertain.

[00:33]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So the quote of yours that always stays with me is, “Money is less about math and more about emotion.” That was your insight watching the Netscape IPO. Why is that so challenging for this industry, for finance, to accept?

[00:34]  CARL RICHARDS: It seems to me — and I’ve been in a lot of the rooms where this discussion takes place — that we have a deep sense of physics envy.

[00:34]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: For sure.

[00:34]  CARL RICHARDS: We just want the law of gravity for money. And when we understand that the systems that handle money — markets, economies, politics, and then humans — are a mix of complex adaptive systems… they’re not simple, and they’re not even complicated. They’re complex, adaptive, almost chaotic. And when you understand a complex adaptive system, you start to understand that even with the benefit of hindsight — you see this all the time — we look back and say, “Here are the seven steps.” It turns out that only works for that period of time. You replicate those seven steps and it doesn’t work again.

[00:35]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: All models assume the future looks like the past, and very often the future looks nothing like the past.

[00:35]  CARL RICHARDS: Exactly. “All models are wrong; let’s make ours useful” is much more helpful. This idea of saying, okay, if that’s the reality I live in, then how do I navigate a complex adaptive system? And that gets us to the point where it’s more about — the problem is you, the problem is me, the problem is us. So I think that’s why it’s so hard. We have to say, “Oh man, we don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with here.” It’s so cute after a big crisis to see all the people who have very specific plans about how to avoid that exact same thing. We’re still taking our shoes off in airports.

[00:35]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: You don’t have TSA Pre yet?

[00:35]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah, I do. I haven’t taken my shoes off in a while.

[00:35]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I’m gonna share one of my favorite random data points — I don’t know if this made it into the last book. Earthquake insurance sales go up tremendously right after an earthquake. And if you think about how the plate tectonics work — these two pieces sliding — the odds of an earthquake happening after that 10, 20, 30 years of pressure is released plummet immediately. The worst time to buy earthquake insurance is right after the earthquake. The best time is, “Hey, this is an earthquake zone and we haven’t had one in 20, 25 years — now’s the time.” I remember getting offered structured notes with downside protection in, like, October ’02, and I’m like, “Why do I need this? The Nasdaq is down 83%. Where were you in late ’99 when this might have been useful?” Down 83%, I’m a buyer — I want all the upside. Why would I give any of it away? I had that conversation in a room full of the salespeople pitching this, and got called into the chairman’s office: “What are you doing? We’re trying to set up a relationship with these people.” I’m like, “This is crap. Nobody should own this product. I know you want a relationship — tell them not to bring us junk that we don’t need.” I like dessert as much as the next guy —

[00:37]  CARL RICHARDS: This is what I came for, right here.

[00:37]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I remember several times getting called in as the market strategist — called into the vice chair, who was general counsel, or the chair. By the way, the firm was Lehman Brothers. So not only was I right over and over, but the counterparty risk was such that you would’ve gotten nothing anyway.

[00:37]  CARL RICHARDS: And we will go to the lengths we’ll go to make up stories about that after the fact. Do you remember — I’m gonna deeply paraphrase, and I’m sure I’m ruining the story — but after Long-Term Capital Management went under in ’98, there was some quote where one of those PhD Nobel Prize winners said, “Our models weren’t wrong; reality just refused to conform to them.”

[00:38]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I don’t remember who it was, but — When Genius Failed, that quote is somewhere in that book.

[00:38]  CARL RICHARDS: Exactly right. And I only point that out to say that I will certainly go to great lengths to make up a cute story that protects me from dealing with uncertainty — because our nervous system takes uncertainty as a threat. And it turns out we are in a period of uncertainty, and I don’t think we’re going back, to be honest.

[00:38]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Let me — this is supposed to be about you, the guest — but you pushed my buttons. Whenever I hear people saying “markets hate uncertainty,” my knee-jerk response is always, “Markets thrive on uncertainty — it’s the whole point.” The only time there’s certainty is when everybody’s on the same side of the boat. In late ’99, everybody was certain trees grew to the sky. And in March ’09, everybody was certain markets were going to zero — except for the handful of people who stepped up and bought. The future is inherently unknown and unknowable. When people say things are uncertain, I always feel like what they’re saying is, “Normally I could lie to myself enough that I could BS you people that I have some idea what’s gonna happen — but goddamn, whatever’s going on is so crazy I can’t maintain that fiction anymore, so I default to uncertainty.” In reality, most of the time everything is inherently uncertain.

[00:39]  CARL RICHARDS: Can I — real quickly, I’m super interested in what you think about this. I feel like you and I came up in the financial planning industry, the financial advice industry, which really grew up during a period that was an aberration. For a certain group of people, there was a predictable path of progress.

[00:39]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Give me some years.

[00:40]  CARL RICHARDS: I’m seeing postwar. My grandpa got a degree, could afford a first-time home on one salary, stayed there for 30 years, retired with a pension. There was this window —

[00:40]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That was the aberration. The entire postwar period is the aberration.

[00:40]  CARL RICHARDS: Right — like the Roaring Twenties, the uber-rich and the rest of us. Things weren’t like that before, and they aren’t like that now.

[00:40]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And we falsely believed, “Oh, this is the new era.”

[00:40]  CARL RICHARDS: The problem is that was when we built all of our tools, our language, our planning tools, our Monte Carlo simulations — all around that aberration. Much more likely is, if you think it feels uncertain now, we’re not going back there.

[00:40]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: “No, no, it’ll all settle down, this’ll all go away.”

[00:40]  CARL RICHARDS: Exactly. Ain’t gonna happen. So to me, that leads to a really interesting discussion around how I learn — whether it’s a posture shift, instead of trying to defend an outdated map. Like confirmation bias — you know, “10 best days.”

[00:41]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Ten best days — it’s a great concept. And 10 worst days.

[00:41]  CARL RICHARDS: Anytime anybody’s scared of anything in the markets, we just parade it out. You saw this on Twitter back when it was useful — if anybody said anything bad, like “I’m scared” or “this market scares me,” a bunch of financial advisors would jump in and say, “Don’t you know, if you sell and miss the 10 best days, you may as well be in CDs over the 20-year period?” Or you miss the 10 worst days. And I think that was an effort to say “Don’t worry” — to spray people with facts and figures when they’re feeling irrational.

[00:41]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: “I like the gun you hold.”

[00:41]  CARL RICHARDS: Spray people with facts and figures. Because when you’re feeling irrational, the last thing you want is somebody to try and reason with you.

[00:41]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Wait — you’re telling me that pure logic doesn’t satisfy emotion?

[00:42]  CARL RICHARDS: You’re trying it with a teenager, right? The last thing you want… what you want, metaphorically, is a hug first. We’ll get to the facts later — let’s never get to the lecture. So I think if we shift that posture a bit, where we’re like, “Turns out uncertainty is reality”… add in sequencing risk — are we gonna have a great market for the first five years of your retirement or the last five years? Who knows?

[00:42]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Not that useful in the last five years.

[00:42]  CARL RICHARDS: Exactly right. It turns out we’re dealing with a very complex adaptive system, and the ability to make really important decisions in the face of irreducible uncertainty is the primary skill. If I was younger, I would be studying complexity theory. I’d be studying being resilient. I’d be studying how to make really important decisions when I don’t know — how to get comfortable not knowing. Like a mountain guide.

[00:42]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: But those are life-and-death decisions.

[00:43]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah. Some of my favorite people are really thoughtful — people who worked in distressed investing. Because if they’re on the ground with the company, they’re having to make mission-critical decisions, and they do not know how they’re gonna work out. I’ve got a really good friend like that, and he’s like, “Yeah, every day, some of these decisions are thousands of jobs, and I don’t know how it’s gonna work out.”

[00:43]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And you’re making these decisions in zones of intense uncertainty with incomplete information.

[00:43]  CARL RICHARDS: Right. And no amount of spreadsheeting will get you more information. The only way they get more information is to take an action.

[00:43]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Fascinating.

[00:43]  CARL RICHARDS: To me, that’s the skill. That’s what this market is calling for in terms of leadership — the ability to create containers for collective interpretation, rather than scream at people.

[00:43]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk about this book. You describe it as a conversation grenade. Explain.

[00:43]  CARL RICHARDS: First of all, I think I first heard that term from Hugh MacLeod — Gaping Void.

[00:44]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Love his work. I have some of his stuff on my wall. And on the opposite wall, some of your stuff.

[00:44]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s cool. Thank you.

[00:44]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: “Buy high, sell low, repeat until broke.” Number one. It’s on my wall. Full disclosure.

[00:44]  CARL RICHARDS: Well, thank you. I have some of your stuff in my office too. So, conversation grenades — this is the only reason I wrote the book. I’d sworn off writing.

[00:44]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Why?

[00:44]  CARL RICHARDS: Because I love audio so much. After I wrote the second book, I thought, “I’m just gonna speak.” And then podcasting came around and I was like, “This is amazing.”

[00:44]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Not mutually exclusive.

[00:44]  CARL RICHARDS: Exactly right.

[00:44]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Between Bailout Nation and How Not to Invest — a solid 15 years. I needed to recover; that was my refractory period. I needed a decade and a half.

[00:44]  CARL RICHARDS: And it just took the pandemic to make me start thinking about it. I kept noticing that people like physical artifacts.

[00:45]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I agree. I don’t love a Kindle.

[00:45]  CARL RICHARDS: Same — I like other people to have it physically. Working with Harriman really allowed me to make everything about the book designed for that.

[00:45]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Think of it — we have the same publisher. I didn’t even notice.

[00:45]  CARL RICHARDS: I’m sure Craig helps you.

[00:45]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: He’s great, for sure.

[00:45]  CARL RICHARDS: So everything about that book is designed to feel like you toss it in a room and conversations break out. That’s the conversation-grenade analogy. You set it on the coffee table — an unpretentious coffee-table book. I’m gonna pick it up, I’m gonna mess with it. We talked about hardback; I wanted that soft cover. We moved the front matter, the legal stuff — you go to page one, there’s none of it in there.

[00:45]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: You moved it to the back.

[00:45]  CARL RICHARDS: They let me move it to the back. And they said nobody’s ever asked.

[00:45]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Dude, I love that.

[00:45]  CARL RICHARDS: Nobody’s ever asked. I was amazed they let me do it. But that stuff’s in the back. Because what reader has ever said they want to see that crap? There it is, in the back.

[00:46]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I always assumed it was a legal requirement that it had to be up front.

[00:46]  CARL RICHARDS: They said nobody’s asked. So they let me do all sorts of things that allowed us to say, “No, this is in service of the reader.” We just want you to have this sit there. The number of stories I’ve heard — “I had it on my table, my son asked me a question,” or “I sent it out to clients.” It’s really meant to be a conversation grenade.

[00:46]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So we started out talking about your deceptively simple sketches. Is this simplicity a conscious act of rebellion? There’s so much complexity and arcane language — every profession uses arcane language to hold laypeople at arm’s distance. Was the simplicity in your sketches purposeful, or am I reading too much into it?

[00:46]  CARL RICHARDS: Deeply purposeful. Deeply. I think it’s maybe just the way my brain works — I only have enough RAM for one problem at a time. So I like to get into it, understand the nuance, the edge cases — and it gets like a giant ball. There was actually a sketch in there about this. It’s a simple question, and then: what about this? What about that? What about that edge case? And once I get in there, I’m like, okay. And you actually shared a quote one time —

[00:48]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Investing is simple but hard.

[00:48]  CARL RICHARDS: No — “There are a lot of answers that are simple, elegant, and wrong.”

[00:48]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I remember this. I don’t know where I stole that. That could actually be me.

[00:48]  CARL RICHARDS: I remember you shared somebody else’s quote.

[00:48]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: “Simple, elegant, and wrong.”

[00:48]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah. And I really worry about that, because when you’re in that ball of yarn and you decide to distill or edit, you have to make some conscious decisions about what to leave out. And I often get that wrong. And when I do, I hear about it, and it makes the work a little bit better. There are words and lines in some of those sketches I’ve been thinking about for over a decade. I removed a word that had been in there 15 years.

[00:48]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Which sketch?

[00:48]  CARL RICHARDS: It’s the —

[00:48]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: “People you love, experiences — spend the money.”

[00:48]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite ones.

[00:48]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That is one of my favorites. You do like a good Venn diagram.

[00:48]  CARL RICHARDS: By the way, the Venn diagram police have come after me, so I just call them circle sketches.

[00:48]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: What?

[00:48]  CARL RICHARDS: Oh, dude. I used to get two-page emails from the Times readers about —

[00:48]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I call these people Venn diagram police.

[00:48]  CARL RICHARDS: Picture-shapers, picture-straighteners. I used to send equal rebuttals, and then finally I just developed a template email. It said, “You’re right. I call them circle sketches.” So the Venn diagram piece is pretty loosey.

[00:48]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Wait — these are legitimate Venn diagrams.

[00:48]  CARL RICHARDS: They can make an argument, of course.

[00:48]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: No — if it’s this over here and this over here, and the overlap that you want to focus on. “Things that matter, things that you can control” is another one of yours.

[00:49]  CARL RICHARDS: What we should focus on.

[00:49]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And then the overlap. How is that not a Venn diagram?

[00:49]  CARL RICHARDS: I don’t know. Somebody will find — but my point really is that when you distill and leave things out, you get things wrong sometimes. And you asked which one —

[00:49]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: But you’re trying to communicate cleanly and simply.

[00:49]  CARL RICHARDS: It’s true. But some of that feedback’s amazing. The Venn diagram police weren’t particularly helpful, but some of the feedback is — like, “Hey, have you ever thought of this?” — and it makes me reconsider and adjust. There have been changes I’ve made. There’s one sketch that used to say “what’s important to you.” It was an alignment sketch — your use of capital aligned with what you say is important to you. And that word, “say” —

[00:49]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s implying that it’s not important, but you’re claiming it’s important.

[00:49]  CARL RICHARDS: That word “say” bothered me for a decade, before I was like, “No, no — we want to get to what’s important to you, not what you say is important.”

[00:50]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: You were hinting at another problem with people not speaking —

[00:50]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s right. Stated versus revealed preferences. I’m more interested in the revealed preferences. What’s actually important to you?

[00:50]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s really interesting. So let’s stay with the concept of spending money, since I just flipped to whatever that was. Every advisor who manages money for people can tell you story after story. My favorite one I’ll share here. “Hey, Barry’s a car guy, he has a boat. You want to buy a boat and a car? Why don’t you talk to Barry?” So I speak to the client. He says, “I’m thinking about buying a 50-, 60-foot sailboat, and I’m thinking about buying a Ferrari.” I go, “That’s really easy. What’s your boating experience?” “Zero.” You don’t start with a 50-, 60-foot sailboat that requires a crew. It’s two and a half million dollars. You’ll take it out twice, and you’ll sell it for a 30% loss. On the other hand — by the way, this guy could buy a Ferrari a month for the rest of eternity and be fine — go buy the Ferrari. Take the whole family down to the Ferrari high-performance driving school. I’ll let you in on a little secret: all of these advanced driving schools are really defensive driving classes in disguise. You’ll learn the limits of the car, that you’ll get nowhere near, but you’ll also learn the limits of your own driving ability — and, more importantly, how to operate within your own skill set.

[00:51]  CARL RICHARDS: And so will your kids, if you bring them.

[00:51]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s right. So everybody becomes a better, safer driver. So he goes out and buys a Ferrari, they do the class, they love it.

[00:51]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah.

[00:51]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: He also buys the boat. A year later, he sells it for a 30% loss. Anytime Barry gets on the phone with a client, the advisor always says, “Do not mention the boat.” The only thing worse than being right is being wrong. And I can say this at the back of a podcast, because you can confess to murder at the end of a podcast and no one will know.

[00:52]  CARL RICHARDS: No one will hear.

[00:52]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I’m very comfortable saying this here. But with that Barry digression — let’s talk about how you help people focus on what’s important, what matters, and what the purpose of money really is. What should they be doing with their money, especially later in life? They’ve accumulated a nice pile. Can’t take it with you.

[00:52]  CARL RICHARDS: Running experiments, practice. One of the things we see is that the very things that got you to that spot are working against you going forward. You were being frugal, saving aggressively, being very disciplined. And now you’re saying, “Hey, this delayed-gratification thing was really important — but it definitely got me to the spot.” You get to a point where you should no longer delay. There’s not gonna be time to delay.

[00:52]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s so tough for some people to make that switch.

[00:53]  CARL RICHARDS: Super. So you practice. Your boat example is great. I’ve literally had people who can’t spend any money — and, like you’re saying, have enough that they could spend it for the rest of their lives. “Go get a coffee with a friend, pay for theirs. Go on the trip and enjoy the trip.” One of my favorite stories is from Alan Smith in the UK — a great financial planner; he’s told this story publicly. He had a client whose relatives had moved. There was a bunch of people from Wales who moved to Argentina from mining, way back. She’d always wanted to go see the Welsh national rugby team play the Argentinian Pumas, in Argentina.

[00:53]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I know exactly where you’re gonna go with this.

[00:53]  CARL RICHARDS: And she was like, “I just can’t.” And he’s like, “You could do this every month for the rest of your life.” “Well, I can’t sit that long.” “You could have a lay-flat bed.”

[00:54]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Or you could go from Wales to New York, New York to Brazil, Brazil to Argentina. You don’t have to do it in one trip.

[00:54]  CARL RICHARDS: So he finally, over time, got her used to the idea. She went, and she said it was the best. “We’re never gonna get those things back. We’re never going.”

[00:54]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: AI is not gonna replace that.

[00:54]  CARL RICHARDS: No. So to me it’s like — I don’t know if I’d rather err on being irresponsible, but I know we should spend the money. Spend the money.

[00:54]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: But irresponsibility never comes into it. You’re looking at someone’s portfolio: you have $10 million, you live on $350,000 a year, and you want to bust out another $50,000 so you can take the whole family — take the kids on a trip to the old country and show them where your grandparents came from. Why not? It’s not even a hundred thousand.

[00:54]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah. And these are — by the way —

[00:54]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: These are very first-world problems.

[00:54]  CARL RICHARDS: Of course. But they are problems. Brené Brown got really clear that comparative suffering does us no good. So whenever I hear “first-world problems,” I’m always like, “Well, yeah, but this is a challenge” — and it happens to be the challenge that many of your clients and the people I’m talking to are facing. So why not just practice? Can we pick something small — something you’ve always wanted to do? It might be simple, like take the grandkids to the art museum this weekend.

[00:55]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I’m gonna share another line with you — not comparative suffering, but: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Often falsely attributed to Teddy Roosevelt; it hadn’t been around till the late 1980s. What a great phrase. There’s always someone with a bigger boat, or a larger house, or a faster car — whatever you’re envious of. You have this car, you’re really happy with it — then who cares what the guy on the block has? That’s pointless.

[00:55]  CARL RICHARDS: Real quickly — one thing that makes it even harder is we’re never exactly sure: do we really want the boat?

[00:56]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Well, if you’re not sure, then that’s easy. Don’t get the boat.

[00:56]  CARL RICHARDS: But you could go out for a day.

[00:56]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: You could rent a boat.

[00:56]  CARL RICHARDS: You could try little experiments. I just remember growing up — I grew up in the hills in Utah — we all had BMX bikes.

[00:56]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I love this BMX story of yours.

[00:56]  CARL RICHARDS: I always wanted a slightly better BMX bike.

[00:56]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Oh no, you wanted a really nice bike. And what did you end up doing?

[00:56]  CARL RICHARDS: Which one are you talking about — the road bike? The Moots? Yes, the titanium bike. There’s a Steamboat story, but that’s a different story. Are you kidding? Those things were — I think those were six or seven thousand.

[00:56]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s nothing today, in terms of people who ride. You could drop 10 grand on a bike.

[00:56]  CARL RICHARDS: In a hurry. But still, that bike — per dollar, per unit of fun — unbelievable. I never made a better investment.

[00:56]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: What’s the BMX story?

[00:56]  CARL RICHARDS: When I was little, like eight, I had a slightly better BMX bike than some of my buddies, and some of my buddies had slightly better. That’s all I knew. I didn’t know at the time that I was supposed to want a private jet. And now I do — Instagram has taught me. So I think we have this problem of cultivating our comparison set. Now we’re even talking about getting clear about the word “goal,” which is hard — because you don’t know if it’s your mom’s goal, society’s goal, or Instagram’s goal. Five million dollars and a sailboat — when did that come from?

[00:57]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Let me share a fun private jet story with you.

[00:57]  CARL RICHARDS: I love private jet stories.

[00:57]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So whenever anybody used to ask me, “Are you gonna sell the firm? What’s your FU money?” — my answer has always been the same: whatever it takes to never step foot into a commercial airport ever again. And then I made the mistake of saying this in public somewhere, and all these Marquis Jet guys started sending me pitches. So out of curiosity, one day I said, “Run the numbers for me. What does this really look like?” It turns out East Coast is $6,000–$6,500 an hour; cross-country to California, $8,000; you want to go to Europe, it’s $12,000 per hour of travel. So do the math. I’m a numbers guy deep down inside, and I’m like, “Oh, this is a quarter million, half a million a year.” For that to be rational, you’d have to be earning $10 million gross — to spend a mere 5% of your annual income, after cap gains, on a PJ at half a million a pop. “PJ” — that’s from Succession; I never heard that phrase before that show. And all of a sudden I’m like, “Oh, I have no interest in that. I don’t ever expect to be pulling down $10 million a year.” And while it’s attractive — bypassing all the airports — I kind of learned: all right, I’m not gonna go on high-traffic days. We travel for Thanksgiving weekend, I’m the first flight out Thursday morning; we blow through security in five minutes. Two hours later it’s a zoo. So all right, I’m not gonna spend half a million a year. I could spend a little bit of brainpower trying to navigate around the worst. I won’t arrive at the airport at five o’clock, because I don’t want to get stuck in traffic, and I won’t take a nine o’clock morning flight. So I’m not flying private; I’m trying to fly a little smarter commercial. Even if you’re in the front of the plane.

[00:59]  CARL RICHARDS: But that to me is a really good example of thinking that something might be important, running a little bit of an experiment, actually running the numbers, and deciding. We’re just constantly narrowing in, for our whole lives — and those things change.

[00:59]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It would still be delightful to just show up at the airport.

[00:59]  CARL RICHARDS: And you made a trade-off decision about when you want to leave —

[00:59]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And save a day of travel on each side. But is that worth half a million dollars a year?

[01:00]  CARL RICHARDS: To you, it’s not.

[01:00]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I’m gonna overshare one more thing. So some friends of my wife get a pied-à-terre in the city. They’re empty nesters, they downsize, they have a house and then the city apartment. And I started thinking about a pied-à-terre — we loved it when we lived down at Gramercy Park. I start looking at this and running the numbers, and I’m like, “Wait a second.” Just the monthly co-op fees are three or four grand a month, to say nothing of the insurance, the taxes, and the one-, two-, three-, four-, five-million-dollar purchase price. And I’m doing the math: this is like five grand a month, 60,000 a year, that I can’t spend. We take weekends in the city — I can’t spend $60,000 a year on hotels and restaurants. I can’t spend that much if I tried. We do a few weekends in the city; it’s a couple thousand bucks, certainly not 60 grand. Pied-à-terre makes no sense to me. And I’m explaining this to a very wealthy client, and I see this look on her face, and I go, “Oh — you’re saying if $60,000 is too much in co-op fees, you really can’t afford this pied-à-terre.” And she says, “Well, I wasn’t exactly thinking it, but you’re not wrong.” And what I was about to defend myself with was, “Well, the $60,000 just isn’t worth it to me.” But before I said that — yeah, but if you had 50 or a hundred million dollars, who cares? I just want a place I’m comfortable in, where the bed is, my clothes are in the closet, and I’m not dealing with checking into a hotel. That’s worth 60 grand to me if you have X dollars. She never said that, but I immediately saw the whole caveat.

[01:02]  CARL RICHARDS: I have a question for you on the heels of that. What’s the last thing you decided, “I’m gonna buy that,” and you didn’t run the numbers — you were just like, “I don’t care, I’m buying it, it doesn’t matter how much it costs”? Because in both those examples, you wanted a thing, ran the numbers, and decided not to do it. Is there a time when —

[01:02]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: When was the last time I decided not to —

[01:02]  CARL RICHARDS: No — you decided to do it. You didn’t even care what the number said, you didn’t even look — you just wanted to do that thing so bad you were like, “I’m doing it.”

[01:02]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: There are two answers: the Barry before he turned 60, and the Barry after he turned 60. When Barry turned 60… I think this is a function of immaturity. I never had a midlife crisis, probably because when I should have, I was still an idiot child — I was still 10, 20 years maturity level below where I should have been. And I turned 60 and very much woke up with a sensation: all right, fourth quarter, down by seven; if you want to win this game, you gotta get busy. Literally, that’s what I thought. I don’t know if I ever told this story on the podcast — and the spouse still survives, so I can’t really go into details. But a person about to sell a business for a ton of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, gets a diagnosis: six months to live. And you know this, if you’re managing money for enough families — the actuarial tables are such that people will begin to die. That’s just the normal human finite lifespan. So it’s easy to start to pick up that pattern: life is short, what are you waiting for? The combination of turning 60, soon after the pandemic ended — a lot of people lost a lot of people during that — I kind of said, “Money should never prevent anyone from experiencing joy.” So what I started doing is not saying no, and gifting a lot of stuff. My favorite thing in the world around Christmas is to pick a book and send it to 10, 20, 30 friends — the same book.

[01:04]  CARL RICHARDS: Same — good. 20, 30 bucks.

[01:04]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: This year it was The Uncool by Cameron Crowe.

[01:04]  CARL RICHARDS: Wow.

[01:04]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I was talking about this with somebody and I said, “Oh, I gave that book to a few people for Christmas.” And then I went through Amazon — oh, I gave 26 of these to various people.

[01:04]  CARL RICHARDS: So good.

[01:04]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s $300 — for anybody making a reasonable income.

[01:04]  CARL RICHARDS: I love that idea. By the way, you don’t have to wait until Christmas.

[01:04]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I know. I was just thinking about that. Carl’s secret book club.

[01:05]  CARL RICHARDS: Launching that.

[01:05]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s so fun.

[01:05]  CARL RICHARDS: It’s really fun. There’s a little bit of a puzzle figuring out what’s the right book for the right person — not everybody gets the same book, because they’re different people. But this all comes back to —

[01:05]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Spend the money.

[01:05]  CARL RICHARDS: So — again, it’s the end of the podcast, so I can say stuff. Alexis, don’t cut any of this out. A 1987–88 911 Cabriolet I purchased three or four years ago for like 60 grand. It was an old, ratty car that needed to be restored, and the plan was to convert it to an EV. This car wasn’t right for that, so I ended up doing the EV conversion with an ’87 coupe with 300,000 kilometers on it. But the ’88 turned out to be this rare, matching-numbers M491 911, worth a ton more than I paid for it. So I put a bunch of money into it. My wife was complaining she doesn’t get to drive a stick anymore. So — “Hey honey, here’s your weekend car. I bought it for this reason, we’re just parking cash, and it’s worth double what I paid. Drive it.” And she’s like, “It’s loud, it smells, nice clutch, but no airbags, no ABS.” And I’m like, “So what are you saying?” By the way, this is my cross to bear: my wife is very unhappy that I got her an old 911, and she is forcing me to buy a newer Porsche. These are problems that most married men do not have. That’s how you know you married the right woman.

[01:06]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Well, if your wife says “nice clutch,” you’re onto something.

[01:06]  CARL RICHARDS: I taught her to drive a stick when we were dating. She drives a stick better than — so her daily driver is an unusual color, another great purchase during the pandemic. When everybody was freaked out, I got her a Panamera hybrid in amethyst metallic — super rare color, substantially less than it should have been. And one of the guys from my car group says to me one day, “You have the only amethyst-metallic Panamera on the island. I saw your wife driving it. I tried to catch her — she’s got a crazy lead foot. I couldn’t catch her, I was beeping, I was waving.” So I go home that night and I say, “Hey, how was your day?” She goes, “Crazy thing — this guy in a green 911 was haranguing me, chasing me, and I just put the hammer down and this guy couldn’t catch me.” And I said, “You know, that was Joe.” She’s like, “That was Joe? He was just swinging by, trying to catch up to say hi.” I’m like, “He said he couldn’t catch you. It’s a GT3 — the fastest street-legal Porsche, just below the turbos.” There’s only one other car that’s the fastest street-legal Porsche with a stick shift.

[01:08]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So good. So that’s what I’m talking about. So I’m in the process of swapping the ’88 for a 2024. I know exactly what I’m gonna replace it with — I found a bit of a unicorn. The only problem is the color is wrong. But with a relatively new car, you put a PPF wrap around it to protect the paint, and now they make those wraps in colors. I really like this paint-to-sample violet — that’s like a $20,000 upgrade when you order the car new. No — just put the plastic on, it’s six grand, and now you have a car whatever color you want. So she picked that color — she’s gonna be the purple. I found this: it’s a GTS, it’s a Cabrio, it’s a stick, it’s a chalk interior, which is even rarer, and rarer still, ceramic brakes. It’s just the wrong color, and I’m gonna fix that. This is an obscene amount of money, and I don’t care.

[01:09]  CARL RICHARDS: You’ll tell me that 20 years from now —

[01:09]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Nobody looks back and says, “Oh, why did I buy that?” We look back and regret the things we didn’t do.

[01:09]  CARL RICHARDS: Exactly — not the things we did. My version of that is, two months ago, I didn’t know that my 24-year-old son was gonna ask me to go spend some time on adventure motorcycles this summer. It wasn’t in my financial plan.

[01:09]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Do you have a license for that?

[01:09]  CARL RICHARDS: I actually do, because 10 years ago I was on a BMW 900 GS.

[01:09]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s a big bike.

[01:09]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah. And so we just got Yamaha Ténéré 700s — which is a great bike. But my son is the one who asked, and I didn’t know it’s costing me more money than I’d planned on spending. Who cares? I’m not gonna regret a second of it.

[01:09]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Isn’t that —

[01:10]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s the whole point.

[01:10]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: First of all, you have to stop — and I know you have gratitude drawings in here — the fact that it’s a realistic option for you and me to indulge in these ridiculous spending things… part of me knows how utterly ridiculous this is. So first you have to have some gratitude for that. But second, if not for that, what are you gonna do with the money?

[01:10]  CARL RICHARDS: And the fact that my 20-something son asked me to do it — he’s enthusiastic about it — the answer is yes. So what, I’m gonna look back five years from now, 10 years, 30 years from now, and regret it? No. We spent more money than we really should have on our four years living in New Zealand, and I would do it again.

[01:10]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: What years were you in New Zealand?

[01:10]  CARL RICHARDS: ’16 to ’20. We didn’t mean to do it — it wasn’t political. We went in ’16 for a year and ended up staying for four.

[01:11]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: 2016, I assume. It was fantastic?

[01:11]  CARL RICHARDS: Unbelievable. We spent way more — the whole thing was borderline irresponsible, even in this case. But it was a requirement. My wife was essentially like — after the financial crisis and everything that went on, I was just a broken human.

[01:11]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really? I never thought of you that way.

[01:11]  CARL RICHARDS: Well, that’s nice of you. That was part of the problem — I was a superhuman out here, doing the job, master of it, but not inside, not in the house. It was a lack of patience, not deep presence. And she was like, “We’re going. Would you like to come?” And I was like, “Yes.” We ended up staying four years. It was hard money-wise — it was a bad decision financially.

[01:11]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Were you working there?

[01:11]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah. In New Zealand, different time zone, doing the same thing. My point really is, it probably wasn’t the best from a spreadsheet financial decision, but I would do it all over again. Same thing with a car spend. To the degree that you can find the things that align with your use of capital and your family — the experiences with the people you love — we know we will not regret spending time and money on experiences with people we love.

[01:12]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So we’ve been at this for a solid 90 minutes. Let me jump to my favorite questions, which I ask all my guests, otherwise I’m gonna keep you here through dinner. Starting with: who were your early mentors who helped shape your career?

[01:12]  CARL RICHARDS: I thought really carefully about this. The one that probably had the biggest shaping on me was Ron Lieber — Ron had a huge impact. So between Ron and Seth Godin.

[01:12]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Oh, really? Seth Godin’s stuff is really interesting.

[01:12]  CARL RICHARDS: I always saw Seth as somebody doing something in a narrow space that had broad application. He was a marketing guy, but it had broad application, and he did it consistently over a long period of time. Behavior Gap Radio was started because of Seth’s daily blog. He said to me, “Why aren’t you doing a daily blog?” I said, “I don’t like to write.” He said, “You like to talk.” And so I started — we’re at episode 1,500 now.

[01:12]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Unbelievable.

[01:12]  CARL RICHARDS: So Seth Godin and Ron Lieber had the biggest impact on me.

[01:12]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Let’s talk about books. What are you reading right now? What are some of your favorites? And I know when you’re writing a book, it’s really hard to read books.

[01:13]  CARL RICHARDS: Two really impactful books: Fooled by Randomness —

[01:13]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Nassim. Come on. I wanted to have him on the podcast — he told me to go pound sand.

[01:13]  CARL RICHARDS: He probably said that, exactly.

[01:13]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I’m giving you the polite version.

[01:13]  CARL RICHARDS: I’m sure. So that book, and then Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart.

[01:13]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s a really interesting combination.

[01:13]  CARL RICHARDS: They’re both related to this idea of the false sense of certainty that we talked about. So Pema’s work has had a massive impact on me. Reading right now — I just finished, literally last night, Homesick Nomad. I can’t remember her name — Brianna something. It’s a short memoir about a woman who drives her van around the desert of southern Utah. She has a Salt Lake connection, so that was really good. And Buffalo for the Broken Heart, Dan O’Brien’s book.

[01:14]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Someone else mentioned that.

[01:14]  CARL RICHARDS: I think I told Meb about it in his book roundup, maybe.

[01:14]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really interesting. What are you streaming these days? Tell us what you’re listening to or watching.

[01:14]  CARL RICHARDS: Mike Birbiglia.

[01:14]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So hilarious.

[01:14]  CARL RICHARDS: Working It Out.

[01:14]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: You know, he has a podcast also — Working It Out.

[01:14]  CARL RICHARDS: I thought that was the name of his stand-up on Netflix.

[01:14]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I listen to it religiously. Mike, if you’re listening — I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for a long time.

[01:14]  CARL RICHARDS: So there’s a handful of comedians with their own podcasts now. Not just Seth Rogen, not just Joe Rogan. Tom Papa has a podcast.

[01:15]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Marc Maron — the original.

[01:15]  CARL RICHARDS: Marc is the OG in the space.

[01:15]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Who’s the guy — Pete Holmes? And who’s the guy who co-wrote with Dave Chappelle? Drawing a blank on his name. His pod is occasionally interesting.

[01:15]  CARL RICHARDS: Pete Holmes is actually really great too.

[01:15]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Why do I know the name Pete Holmes?

[01:15]  CARL RICHARDS: He’s another one of these Netflix comedians.

[01:15]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Good Hang with Amy Poehler — I was just watching her with Billie Eilish. That was really kind of fun. There’s a ton of them.

[01:15]  CARL RICHARDS: The reason I really like Birbiglia is it’s really about the process — testing bits, seeing how they land, paying attention to “that didn’t work quite the way I wanted.” Mike does a really good job of explaining that. And then I just finished The Dark Wizard — the story of Dean Potter, who was an El Cap climber long before El Cap climbing was this mainstream thing. And about his untimely passing through base jumping — it’s an amazing story.

[01:16]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: There are a lot of these hobbies — I don’t mind going fast on the track — where my brain does the risk-reward analysis and says, “Oh, there’s just way too much random risk in this.” Like base jumping.

[01:16]  CARL RICHARDS: He’s a wingsuiter.

[01:16]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Yeah.

[01:16]  CARL RICHARDS: He was driven by the fact that the only thing that made him feel alive was the death consequence.

[01:16]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s a whole psychological issue.

[01:16]  CARL RICHARDS: It’s a whole other thing — that’s why it’s called The Dark Wizard. But it was super interesting.

[01:16]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: We’ll skip that. Final two questions. What sort of advice would you give a recent college grad interested in a career as a financial planner, an author, or an artist? And I know you sometimes don’t think of yourself as an artist, but you clearly are.

[01:17]  CARL RICHARDS: Just take the next step. I think getting too caught up in “How is this gonna work? What’s the narrative journey?” —

[01:17]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: A thousand-mile journey starts with the first step.

[01:17]  CARL RICHARDS: Try not to compare. There’s a Lao Tzu quote: “Be who you really are and go the whole way.” I wish I would’ve started that a little earlier. Take one small step. And if I was in finance, I’d get more comfortable — especially on the advice side — with learning to be deeply present with people. Curiosity, questions.

[01:17]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Deeply present.

[01:17]  CARL RICHARDS: I think financial advisors aren’t gonna be paid for solutions. They’re gonna be paid for presence — opening up the ability to have these conversations — because the solutions are table stakes at this point. It’s like self-driving cars. I was in the Waymo — it was safer than the Uber driver before.

[01:17]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Did it feel very weird?

[01:17]  CARL RICHARDS: But here’s the thing: I still have to tell it where to go. And even more importantly, on the journey, if I saw something — “Oh wait, what’s that park?” — that requires…

[01:18]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Could you do that in a Waymo? Could you ask it to stop?

[01:18]  CARL RICHARDS: Yeah, you can tell it to stop. I don’t know how you do it — on the app. So I’m a big fan of self-driving money, I can’t wait. And there’s still gonna be somebody there who needs to say, “Hey, is the boat really important to you? Go try the racetrack thing.” That, to me, is curiosity and presence. You’ve still gotta be a technical rockstar, but curiosity and presence is where the value will be.

[01:18]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Final question: what is it that you know about the world of investing or psychology today that might have been useful back in the 1990s, when you were first looking at that Netscape IPO?

[01:18]  CARL RICHARDS: That compounding does all the work. Stop spending time trying to find the best investment, and just own stuff. If it compounds — I don’t know who said this — if it compounds, let it compound.

[01:19]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: The line I use is, your job is to prevent yourself from interfering with your portfolio’s ability to compound.

[01:19]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s exactly right. Time is the thing that matters.

[01:19]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Absolutely. Carl, this has been an absolute delight. Normally I want to make this about the guest, but there’s something about you that just encourages me — that’s my whole goal. It’s your aura. You bring it out in people, which is probably why you were a good advisor — you get people to open up to you.

[01:19]  CARL RICHARDS: That’s a really high compliment. Thank you, Barry. It means a lot.

[01:19]  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Absolutely. Cheers. We have been speaking with Carl Richards, author of Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches. If you enjoyed this conversation, well, check out any of the 639 we’ve done over the past 12 years. You can find those at YouTube, Bloomberg, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my very patient video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher.

 

~~~

 

 

 

The post Transcript: Carl Richards on Sketching Wealth Strategy appeared first on The Big Picture.

My Two-for-Tuesday morning train WFH reads:

• Why Are Investors Holding More Cash? The 2020s (so far) are the worst decade ever for bond investors; Many investors decided to own cash in lieu of bonds for fixed income exposure after a rising rate, higher inflation environment crushed high quality bonds. And, Cash finally has yield. Ben Carlson on the pull of a paying money-market account and what it signals about risk appetite. Sensible as always — and a familiar name around here. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Forget Work. Passive Income Is the New American Dream. Driven by a growing feeling that 9-to-5 jobs are a dead end, people are turning to social media to test out eccentric moneymaking schemes—along with a fair share of scams. The fantasy of earning while you sleep goes mainstream. A knowing look at a dream that usually turns out to be a second job in disguise. (Wall Street Journal) see also These Are the Best Income Investments Now. Where to Find Yields of 5% or More. Dividend stocks looks like the best bets, but some types of bonds are also looking up. With cash still paying, Barron’s maps where the real income lives. A practical survey for anyone tired of clipping money-market coupons. (Barron’s)

• With Mega-IPOs, Index Concentration Can Encourage Shift Toward Active Management: As indexes are increasingly dominated by large companies, managers tout active strategies as a solution. Top-heavy Indexes make the case for active stock-picking. Inside-baseball for the asset-allocation crowd. (Chief Investment Officer)

• China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race: Clampdown on top U.S. artificial intelligence is fueling concern that Washington is handing Beijing a cyberwarfare advantage. The WSJ reports Chinese labs closing the gap on AI-driven cyber capabilities. Read it as one data point in a fast-moving, hard-to-verify race. (Wall Street Journal) see also China Defies US Restrictions and Builds the World’s Fastest Supercomputer:  The Chinese supercomputer LineShine was ranked as the fastest in the world, despite not using any GPUs. Export controls meet workaround. A reminder that constraints often accelerate the thing they’re meant to slow. (Wired)

• When to Fire Yourself as a DIY Investor: A great advisor acts much like a good doctor. They shouldn’t just hand you an off-the-shelf product the minute you walk in. They need a systematic, diagnostic process to get to the root cause of what your life actually requires. A great advisor isn’t a stock-picker. They are a disciplined thinking partner whose job is to pull you out of the weeds of your spreadsheets and bring you to the “balcony of your life.” On perspective, mortality, and knowing when to hand the portfolio to someone else. Grumet writes about money the way a hospice doctor would — which he is. (The Purpose Code)

• He Dared to Buy Senior Housing at Its Lows. Now He Runs a $160 Billion Empire. Welltower’s CEO received an enormous pay package for the company’s turnaround, which has drawn shareholder backlash  The contrarian real-estate bet paid off enormously. The buy-when-others-flee playbook, in profile form. (Wall Street Journal)

• Is the vibecession real — or is the survey broken? A shift to online polling and undersampling of Republicans are skewing America’s most-cited measure of consumer sentiment. But there’s one big problem with the discussion: most of the participants are relying on a broken survey, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey (“Index of Consumer Sentiment” or “ICS”), that is in dire need of being repaired. Failure to correct for these issues has led to plenty of pet theories — but they explain a trend that may not even exist. Nate Silver pokes at the methodology behind the gloom. A useful skeptic’s read alongside the sentiment pieces above. (Silver Bulletin) see also Is Partisanship Driving Consumer Sentiment? 1. The past ~20 years have seen a much greater spillover from partisan beliefs into sentiment; This is especially vivid around changes in White House party control; Members of both major parties do this, but it is more intense among those who identify as “right-leaning;” And the 2022 companion: how your team affiliation colors how you feel about the economy. Still the most underrated variable in the surveys. (The Big Picture)  see also What Else Might be Driving Sentiment? Pulling this one from my own archives — a 2023 take on the sentiment puzzle that holds up amid this week’s vibecession debate. (The Big Picture)

• How to Land a Celebrity Profile: The pressure to accommodate a famous person in exchange for access can encourage compromise. But stars don’t hold nuclear codes. CJR pulls back the curtain on the publicist-wrangling, access-trading craft behind the glossy interview. Less glamorous than the byline suggests. (Columbia Journalism Review)

• The Best Magazine Articles About Fashion Ever Written (According to Me, Isabel Slone). Beginning with Joseph Mitchell’s stories of downtrodden, dirty New Yorkers all the way through to stuff published within the last ten years. I have strong opinions when it comes to the best decades for magazine journalism—the ‘90s by far—and I can spend hours trawling through ancient stories on Vanity Fair’s website, with one leading into the next. I could probably spend the rest of my life in a single room filled with back issues of Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, The New Yorker, and New York magazine and be happy for the rest of my life. A useful annotated list for the next time you want a long-read that’s not about politics. Save it. (Freak Palace)

• Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers: Three thousand years on, Homer still breaks Hollywood. A smart look at why the epic resists the screen — with Nolan now taking his swing. Full of violence, desire, monsters, and magic, Homer’s epic has tempted directors for decades. Can Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation survive the voyage? (New Yorker)

Video of the day: The 3-part habit loop your brain is running 40 percent of the time

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this past weekend with Carl Richards, a financial advisor who is also the creator of the Sketch Guy column, which ran weekly in New York Times for a decade. He hosts Behavior Gap Radio (1,300+ episodes) He co-hosts “Kitces & Carl — Real Talk for Real Financial Advisors” with Michael Kitces.” Richards latest book is Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches.”

 

New Home Sales Decrease to 580,000 Annual Rate in May

Source: Calculated Risk

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

The post 10 Tuesday AM Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

As Affordability Fears Mount, $100,000 Salary Considered Low-Income In 7 California Counties

A six-figure salary is considered low-income in a handful of California counties, according to the 2026 income limits set by the state’s Department of Housing & Community Development.

These new income limits, which took effect June 23, are used to calculate the cost of affordable housing for certain state housing assistance programs.

Most counties saw an increase in the cutoff for what is considered low-income, and seven counties—Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Mateo, Marin, Santa Clara, Orange, and Santa Barbara—had their cutoffs set at six-figure amounts.

As Cynthia Cai details below for The Epoch Times, Santa Cruz County has the highest cutoff, with a limit set at $122,200 for a single-person household. This is a nearly 10 percent increase from the previous year, which set the low-income cutoff at $111,100.

For each additional person added to the household, the income cutoff is adjusted so that “income limits should be higher for larger families and lower for smaller families,” the Department of Housing & Community Development wrote in its memo.

Following Santa Cruz are three more coastal counties: San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin.

These three counties have cutoffs of $117,700 for single-person households, which is also an increase from the previous year’s limit of $109,700.

The low-income limit in Santa Clara is set at $113,700 for single-person households, and in Santa Barbara it is set at $102,000.

Two counties, however, are maintaining their low-income cutoffs from last year. Solano County will continue to use $76,950 as its limit, and Shasta will continue to use $54,500.

These figures come as housing and affordability remain top issues for residents.

“California home prices continue to be much more expensive than the rest of the US,” the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) reported in its 2026 Housing Affordability Tracker.

A mid-tier home, or the average-value middle-market property, costs around $775,000 in California, according to the LAO. That’s nearly double the national average of $398,771 for a mid-tier house, according to Redfin.

The Golden State saw a rapid home price increase of 14 percent per year during the pandemic from 2020 to 2022, the LAO stated. But home price growth has slowed down since then. The average price of a mid-tier home is currently increasing by approximately 1 percent per year.

“While home prices have stabilized, housing has become less affordable for most Californians in recent years” due to incomes failing to keep pace with the increase in housing costs, the LAO added.

As a result, only about 23 percent of households would qualify for mid-tier home mortgages in 2026, down from roughly 31 percent in 2019.

The state’s low homeownership and higher-than-average rental costs and home values were also noted in a recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), which said the state “has a housing problem.”

“Homeownership is the second lowest in the nation, and housing has become a dominant reason people leave the state,” the report states.

“Two of every three Californians say the cost of housing is a ‘big problem’ in their part of California.”

Ownership is particularly low among young adults, with about 31 percent of people between 30 and 34 years old reporting owning their own home. The national average for homeownership among that age group is about 49 percent.

Rental costs in California also exceed the national average by about 40 percent, the PPIC reported. The average cost to rent is about $2,159 in California compared with the national average of $1,526.

The PPIC noted that coastal cities face the highest costs, and large numbers of people are relocating inland, where costs are lower but housing supply struggles to keep up with demand.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/30/2026 - 05:45

"White Time": Dutch Professor Argues That Time Itself Is Racist

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have previously discussed how many professors seem to compete in finding new forms of racism in every facet of society and education. Astrophysics, math, runoffs, science, statistics, and meritocracy have all been denounced as racist. In this academic cottage industry, professors secure publications and speaking opportunities by identifying racism in the expressions, images, or entire fields. It was, therefore, only a matter of time before time itself was declared racist.

Zakia Essanhaji, a professor of “organizational ethnography” at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is the latest to make the case against “white time.”

Her recent paper titled “Academic time theft: stealing time, producing racialized inclusion in Dutch academia” builds on prior work condemning time as racist.

Rutgers Women’s and Gender Studies/Africana Studies Professor Brittney Cooper has also written about how time is racist. Mainstream media has positively cooed at the suggestion, including an interview with NPR. Cooper claimed that “white people own time” after framing the concept of time in “histories of European and Western thought.”

There is also apparently black time: “Time has a history, and so do black people. But we treat time as though it is timeless, as though it has always been this way, as though it doesn’t have a political history bound up with the plunder of indigenous lands, the genocide of indigenous people and the stealing of Africans from their homeland.”

Likewise, in “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time,” Jamaican academic Charles W. Mills described the  “Euro-chronometer” as a Western-centric, linear timeline.

These works are often heavily laden with jargonistic narratives. In one study from Brazil, academics argue that “thinking of time outside and against the Euro-chronometer requires decolonial epistemologies that have the potential to disrupt racist chronologies.”

Professor Essanhaji continues this scholarship by “drawing on critical race theory and decolonial scholarship on chronopolitics and white time.” She applies with earlier work “to academic time theft to theorize how universities extract, fragment and defer the time of academics of colour through racialized institutional processes.”

“White time is not simply the time of the privileged, but the power to define temporality and progress itself. It is the colonization of time, known as the system of modernity/coloniality. As Vazquez […] argues, this system is maintained by erasing cyclical or relational understandings of time, ensuring that time is perceived as racing towards unattainable, more modern futures. In that sense, white time is both prescriptive and pre-emptive, foreclosing alternative futures and experiences of the past by delegitimizing other temporalities.”

Academics have long argued that non-white histories and figures are often “erased’ in scholarship. Such arguments have led to a move away from Western works or classics in favor of non-Western sources in higher education. However, the time scholarship suggests that the very construct of time has been shaped and furthers white domination and privilege.

In Professor Essanhaji’s work, this scholarship is used to challenge the demands placed on minority academics in publishing and other measures of academic achievement. Again, the work is heavily layered with jargonistic language. Here are her findings:

“The analysis identifies three mechanisms of academic time theft. First, prolonged uncertainty operates through racialized precariousness that keeps academics of colour in a condition of academic probation through insecure contracts and housing precarity. Second, ongoing disruption emerges through everyday racism that fragments attention, diverts emotional and intellectual labour, and interrupts academic continuity. Third, recursive evaluation operates through the continual resetting of inclusion and promotion criteria, producing perpetual states of “not yet” recognition and deferred academic futures. Together, these mechanisms sustain racialized temporal regimes in which academics of colour are positioned as perpetually “almost there” while white institutional time remains uninterrupted.”

These authors largely cite each other with little attention to countervailing viewpoints. It becomes a closed, self-perpetuating system as academics invite one another to speak at their universities and feed off one another. Few academics are willing to challenge such scholarship. Indeed, as we have discussed, departments have largely purged their ranks of conservative or contrarian voices.

As shown in this latest scholarship, the work in this area jettisons such “colonial” or “white” forms of analysis in favor of storytelling:

“I depart from a critical race perspective, employing counter-storytelling to construct (counter)narratives grounded in the lived experiences of people of colour. This method recognizes the connections between the historical impacts of colonialism and contemporary exclusions within organizations. By highlighting the experiences of people of colour navigating the university’s racism, I seek to provide rich accounts that reflect on how time is racialized and experienced in Dutch universities.”

There is a faux statistical framing based on “data” that is largely the subjective descriptions of minority academics:

“Initial open coding focused on participants’ descriptions of inequality across social, material and affective dimensions, including social, material and affective inequalities. While time was not predefined as an analytical category, it emerged inductively through participants’ recurring temporal framings of inequality.”

When one tries to drill down on the “data,” it appears entirely anecdotal and subjective, often turning on one or a handful of “narratives.” These stories are used to claim that academic measurements of success, driven by “white time,” are unfair to minority faculty: “these mechanisms position academics of colour perpetually as ‘almost there’ while their academic futures remain deferred.”

The thrust is that minority faculty should not be subject to traditional or accepted pathways for tenure or promotion:

“Academic time theft is not an incidental by-product of exclusion but a structural mechanism through which universities sustain white institutional time. It works by continuously delaying, interrupting and recalibrating what counts as academic legitimacy, ensuring that the labour of academics of colour remains productive for the institution while their progression is indefinitely postponed.

…To ensure that people of colour have academic futures, researchers and policymakers must break with the white temporality of academic work within which progress for some is enabled and for others is ongoingly deferred.”

Academia has already embraced narrative-driven scholarship in many departments as an alternative to traditional academic analysis. The Critical Legal Studies movement, for example, has challenged conventional scholarship as too restrictive and exclusionary. Few academics today dare to challenge such scholarship on the merits. To do so is to risk being labeled as reactionary or, even worse, racist.

This latest scholarship further challenges the time and structure for advancement for minority faculty as inherently racist. The question is whether the appointments and promotion process is at risk of losing objective and consistent measurements of scholarship.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/30/2026 - 05:00

Which Continents Have The Most Drug Users?

North America leads the world in the use of cannabis, opioids and amphetamines. 

According to numbers published today in the UN's World Drug Report, North Americans between the ages of 15 and 64 were 75 percent to 90 percent more likely to have consumed these drugs in 2024 than residents of second-ranked Oceania. The odds of dying of an accidental opioid overdose in the United States was still higher the same year as the risk of losing one's life due to a car crash or suicide. Despite this, overdose deaths in the U.S. have in the last couple of years come down from their peaks.

As Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports, according to the report, broader marijuana legalization in the U.S. drove consumption. Oceania had the highest prevalence of cocaine and ecstasy use, mainly in Australia and New Zealand. South America saw a relatively high use of cocaine and amphetamines, while opioids were more widespread in Asia than in South America or Europe.

You will find more infographics at Statista

In total, 331 million people worldwide consumed drugs in 2024, equivalent to 6.2 percent of the global population.

While marijuana remains the most common drug by far, the UN observed a change in the second-placed market for opioids.

Here, synthetic opioids have been taking on an increasingly larger role in response to the crackdown on opium poppy production in Afghanistan.

Strong synthetic opioids like fentanyl have been a major driver in the American overdose epidemic and as of 2025 were still detected in more than half of all U.S. drug deaths.

Amphetamines – at a global annual use prevalence of 0.6 percent the world's third biggest drug – have meanwhile seen their market globalize.

Myanmar has emerged as a major producer country for amphetamines consumed globally and has also picked up opiate production as Afghanistan's output decreased.

The UN also said it was seeing drug manufacturers using innovation as a tool to "skirt regulations and avoid detection", leading to the type of drugs found in seizures continuously evolving and increasing in variety.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/30/2026 - 04:15

'Muslim Theme Park Experience' Sparks Fierce Backlash In 'Two-Tier' UK

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A theme park in Britain has received intense backlash for marketing exclusive access, halal vendors and Islamic stalls, effectively sidelining non-Muslims.

Gulliver's Land in Milton Keynes is handing its rides and grounds to a day promoted as reserved exclusively for the Muslim community. Organisers described it as a "Muslim Theme Park experience" with unlimited rides, halal food vendors, Islamic stalls, kids' activities and limited tickets sold primarily to that group.

Promotional material from Mubarak Moments, the group behind the event, highlights "a theme park reserved exclusively for the Muslim community" and "exclusive access... for one evening only," effectively confirming the event is a faith-targeted buyout of a family theme park.

Another day in 2026 Britain: Gulliver's Land hosting a 'Muslim Theme Park Experience' with halal only vibes and Islamic stalls.

Faith, fun & family... for some. Where's the English family day?

Imagine the outrage if they had an English only day. pic.twitter.com/27zDtZJsb7

— British Bastard ?? (@BritishBastardX) June 29, 2026

A Milton Keynes local community hub post on Facebook stated "This event has been independently organised by a Muslim community group, so naturally its primary focus is on bringing the Muslim community together, just as any community group would when organising an event for its members."

The post continued, "That said, there is nothing to suggest that people of other faiths or backgrounds are unable to attend and enjoy the event. Everyone is welcome to attend in the spirit of mutual respect and understanding."

It added, "As with any community-led event, it is expected that those attending will be supportive of the organisers, respectful of the event's purpose, and considerate of everyone present."

Some suggested the event was fake, manufactured as rage bait, but the organiser's original post is here:

Note how the image on that post features a Muslim family, where as in the other image that element has been removed.

Responses poured in immediately. One user summed up the widespread frustration: "Two-tier Britain in full effect. While English culture gets sidelined and mocked, we're funding and celebrating parallel societies on our own soil. Gulliver's Land should be for British families, not imported theocracies."

Exactly.

Two-tier Britain in full effect.

While English culture gets sidelined and mocked, we're funding and celebrating parallel societies on our own soil.

Gulliver's Land should be for British families, not imported theocracies.

This nonsense ends when we take back...

— Harry Lines??????? (@HarryLines7) June 29, 2026

Others asked the obvious follow-up questions that never receive answers from officials or venue managers: when is the Christian family day, the English-only evening, or the Jewish community slot? Calls for boycott spread quickly. Several noted the hypocrisy directly: if the same marketing had read "reserved exclusively for the English community," every equality body, media outlet and politician would have descended within hours.

How does this support multiculturism – this is deeply divisive.
When will people be told to sit at the back of the bus for segregation! Wake up to Racism in all its guises!

— MPsFailPeople (@MPsFailPeople) June 29, 2026

When is the Christian, Jewish, Sikh Theme park experience day?

— Ben Graham (@BenGrahamUK) June 29, 2026

not very inclusive

— The Celtic Patriot (@Celticpatriot_) June 29, 2026

While Americans reading this might think it's another example of how far teh UK has fallen, this is also going on over there, in Texas of all places.

Earlier this year a taxpayer-funded indoor waterpark in Grand Prairie, Texas - the $88 million Epic Waters facility built with public sales tax money - advertised its 3rd Annual DFW Epic Eid celebration as a "Muslims only" event. Flyers specified modest dress rules including burkinis for women, halal-slaughtered meat, a private prayer room, and Islamic etiquette such as lowered gaze around the opposite sex.

Backlash forced organisers to edit the language to "modest dress only" and "all are welcome," yet the underlying restrictions remained visible in FAQs. Critics pointed out the obvious double standard: a publicly funded venue effectively closed to regular visitors for a faith-specific gathering.

The outrage was immediate and effective. Texas Governor Greg Abbott threatened to withhold $530,000 in state grants from the city if the discriminatory event proceeded. Grand Prairie officials canceled it.

Perhaps an even more disturbing development in Texas is the East Plano Islamic Community project, rebranded as The Meadow. This planned development of 1,000 homes, a mosque and schools has drawn concerns over potential Sharia enforcement inside what amounts to a parallel community.

NEW: 'Muslim City' in Texas gets legal win after a judge ordered that the state must comply with developers.

The East Plano Islamic Community (EPIC), which has now been rebranded to The Meadow, will feature 1,000 homes, a mosque, schools, and more.

Texas leaders are worried... pic.twitter.com/HoSvNeV307

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 30, 2026

Governor Abbott has been clear that Sharia law, Sharia cities and no-go zones have no place in Texas. Developers still secured a legal win ordering state compliance.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, multiple landlords have advertised rental properties exclusively for Muslims in breach of the Equality Act 2010. Ads on Facebook, Gumtree and Telegram specified "Muslim only," "only for Muslims," or "for 2 Muslim boys or 2 Muslim girls." Some targeted Muslim students only. These are not fringe cases. Investigations found dozens of such listings operating in plain sight while authorities focus enforcement resources elsewhere.

Any native British landlord attempting the reverse - advertising "English only" or "Christian only" - would face immediate investigation, fines and media pile-ons. The asymmetry is the definition of two-tier treatment.

Britain's own institutions have tilted the field further. All members of the government's "anti-Muslim hostility" advisory group have documented links to Islamist organisations. The state effectively handed rule-writing power over "hostility" definitions to the very networks that benefit from reduced scrutiny.

Schools received official guidance urging staff and pupils to report perceived "anti-Muslim hostility," creating an Orwellian atmosphere where questioning Islamic practices or parallel societies risks being treated as thoughtcrime.

The same authorities that move swiftly against native dissent have shown remarkable tolerance for actual criminal networks. Sadiq Khan once claimed there were no grooming gangs in London. Police are currently investigating around 4,000 cases.

None of this is about preventing people from celebrating their faith. It is about whether public venues, taxpayer assets and the legal system treat every community by the same rules. When theme parks, waterparks and housing markets begin carving out faith-exclusive zones while the host population is told any reciprocal preference is bigotry, the social contract fractures.

Texas demonstrated that elected leaders can still draw a line against explicit religious discrimination in public facilities and win. Britain's trajectory has been the opposite: accommodation of separatism, institutional capture by one-sided "hostility" definitions, and native families left wondering why their own cultural continuity receives less protection than imported alternatives.

The Gulliver's Land episode is simply the latest visible symptom. It will not be the last unless the underlying policy of mass low-assimilation immigration and selective multiculturalism is reversed. Equal rights mean equal rules. Anything less is not tolerance - it is managed decline.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/30/2026 - 03:30

Latvia Unveils Joint Drone Plant With Ukraine, PM Touts Site's Closeness To Russian Border

Latvia has announced confirmation its government has inked a new deal for Ukraine to assist in a Ukrainian drone manufacturing plant on Latvian soil, right near the border with Russia, as well as close to the Belarusian border.

Latvian Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs said following an emergency cabinet meeting held in Latgale that his country will "accelerate plans to establish a joint drone manufacturing facility with Ukraine and aims to locate it near the country’s eastern border region," regional media reports.

Shahed-136 drone. Creative Commons

The small Baltic country has been a member of NATO since 2004, and along with other allies like Estonia and Lithuania (both of which also joined NATO during the mid-2000s expansion wave).

These Baltic states have remained outspoken in their anti-Moscow hawkishness, and this latest announced plan of Latvia to produce drones with Ukraine once again reveals that there's no heed being given to Russia's red lines.

The Kremlin has for years warned European states that constant NATO and military infrastructure expansion right up to Russia's borders could trigger major war. Of course, in Ukraine it has, but fears remain that some kind of major provocation could result in direct Russia-NATO conflict.

Regional media is really emphasizing the closeness of the planned facility to Russia:

Kulbergs said the agreement on cooperation in the field of unmanned systems, signed at the beginning of June, includes plans for joint production. In particular, a manufacturing facility is to be built rapidly near Latvia's border with Russia.

The prime minister said the government would do everything necessary to ensure the facility is located close to the border. He added that the region needs economic activity, investment and jobs.

So now these Baltic leaders are just openly prodding and provoking Russia, it seems.

The Latvian leader after saying all of this is still promoting the 'defensive' nature of such a joint drone program: "Kulbergs also said that new counter-drone systems are expected to become operational along Latvia's borders with Belarus and Russia in July and August, allowing the country to respond to aerial threats without deploying aircraft on every occasion."

"If there is a drone threat, we will not have to scramble aircraft every time. It is a very expensive and effective solution, but it is neither the best nor the most efficient one," he said further.

There's been a heightened spillover threat of UAVs from the context of the Russia-Ukraine theater, however, in some cases these have been reported to be errant Ukrainian drones, and not just Russian ones.

Russian media has really seized on this trend...

Latvia and Ukraine to build interceptor drones together — to defend Latvian airspace from drone incursions

Every drone that has breached Latvian airspace has been UKRAINIAN

Kiev now manufacturing drones in Latvia to shoot down drones from Kiev? pic.twitter.com/JJjU9jaaoU

— RT (@RT_com) June 29, 2026

Kulbergs is also saying he hopes to reach Ukraine's level of drone defense by the end of the year. The Zelensky government has over the past year been aggressively marketing its expertise to allied nations, and even in the Middle East in the context of the Iran war.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/30/2026 - 02:45

Philippines Becomes World's Top Solar Panel Buyer

By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

People in the Philippines are flocking to install solar power ​on rooftops and escape the burden of soaring electricity prices, making it the world's biggest spender on solar panels since ‌the war in Iran started. 

Top Philippines power distributor Meralco has raised prices by 10% since the Middle East conflict began in late February. Now, a median household spends around 12% of monthly income on electricity, assuming it consumes 200 kilowatt-hours, approximately the monthly average for three people. 

Amid record-beating electricity prices and a supply crunch in fossil fuels, many Filipinos have opted to install rooftop solar panels over the past three months.

The spending on solar panels in the Southeast Asian country, which has been one of the worst-hit Asian economies in the energy supply crisis triggered by the Middle East conflict, topped $407 million between March 1 and May 31, per China customs data compiled by Reuters.

The Netherlands was the biggest spender with $1.1 billion on solar panels but it is a major transshipment hub for solar equipment imports and re-exports, so it’s not really part of the analysis of which country has spent the most.

After the Philippines comes Pakistan, another Asian economy severely hit by the halt of LNG supply from the Middle East. Pakistan has managed to negotiate with Iran some LNG cargoes form Qatar to exit the Persian Gulf in recent weeks. But the energy crisis in Pakistan has also prompted a rush to solar power installations.

Pakistan’s solar boom was already evident before the Middle East crisis.

Distributed solar drove a 21% increase in Pakistan’s national electricity demand in two years, clean energy think tank Ember said in a report last week.

A total of 27 gigawatts (GW) of distributed solar was deployed in just two years, the same as all the operating coal, gas, and oil plants built in Pakistan ever, Ember said.

In the Philippines, rooftop solar has nearly doubled over the past 12 months, according to a separate Ember analysis from the end of May.

Philergy German Solar, a Manila-based ​installer, received more than 2-1/2 times the number of customer enquiries in the first five months of this year compared to last year. At one point it ‌fielded 3,000 ⁠inquiries a day, according to managing partner Jochen Staudter. Customers are deciding to buy "much faster than before," Staudter said. "Demand will continue to be driven by high electricity prices."

In two years, distributed solar capacity could nearly triple to 3,500 megawatts (MW), matching the current size of the Philippines' utility-scale solar fleet, as loan payback times shrink to 3.1 years from 4 years, said Alnie Demoral, analyst at energy think tank Ember. Solar accounts for under 4% of national ​power consumption, government data shows.

The Philippines is China’s second-largest solar panel export market in 2026, only behind the transshipment hub the Netherlands, suggesting significant rooftop pick-up in the Southeast Asian country. China exported over 3,000 MW of solar panels to the Philippines in March and April alone, according to Ember’s data.

Still, the solar boom in the Philippines faces challenges, including high upfront costs for Filipino households and supply chain issues.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 20:55

John Fetterman Warns Mamdani About Defying SCOTUS Immigration Order

The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a pair of clean immigration wins last week, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani responded by announcing he would ignore them. Now Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is sounding the alarm.

The Court ruled 6-3 Thursday in Mullin v. Doe to allow the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants. This ruling set off predictable outrage from the progressive wing of the party. Mamdani was first out of the gate. In a video statement, he declared the decision "cruel" and invoked the specter of the Haitian Revolution to frame deportation enforcement as a betrayal of universal freedom.

"To have people who frankly taught the world about freedom have their own freedom put into jeopardy by the actions of a Supreme Court and federal administration - it is not only cruel, it's not something we will ever accept," Mamdani said. "The Supreme Court just sparked one of the largest attacks on immigrants in modern American history. In one fell swoop, thousands of Haitians and Syrians now risk losing the right to live and work in the country they call home."

He went on to reassure migrants that New York City would not comply with the ruling.

"To the tens of thousands of New Yorkers with TPS who are watching the news, frightened about what comes next, hear me clearly: New York City is your home. You belong here. We will not turn our backs on you," Mamdani said. "You will not face this cruelty alone. This administration will stand alongside immigrant New Yorkers today, tomorrow, and every day that follows."

These are not ambiguous rulings with room for creative local interpretation. The Supreme Court made its ruling, and Mamdani's position is that he can ignore it just because he doesn't like it.

On Fox News's Saturday in America on June 28, Sen. Fetterman sat down with host Kayleigh McEnany and walked through a glaring inconsistency, one his own party seems unwilling to acknowledge. He has spent years pushing back on Democrats who insisted Donald Trump was dragging the country toward a constitutional crisis. His response at the time was straightforward: the Trump administration had not defied a court order. The standard, as Fetterman understood it, was simple. You follow the courts, or you create a crisis.

Now the mayor of New York City is publicly refusing to follow the courts' rulings, and the party that ran years of constitutional-crisis programming has gone quiet.

"I haven't seen the freak-out now that the mayor of New York is now saying I'm going to defy the Supreme Court ruling," Fetterman told McEnany.

He then called out his fellow Democrats, who are either silent or actively defending Mamdani.

"Many of the members in my party are not calling him out... [or they are] defend[ing] him, or just say[ing] we really actually have to follow the court rulings because... that's a constitutional crisis, when you have the leader of the country's largest city [saying] we're not going to follow or honor what the Supreme Court says," Fetterman said.

Democrat Senator John Fetterman says he has not seen Donald Trump cause a Constitution crisis, but Fetterman says that when he heard Zohran Mamdani say he would defy the Supreme Court on the temporary protected status of Haitians, “That’s a Constitutional crisis”

“That's a… pic.twitter.com/Zq8nfW9SW9

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) June 29, 2026

Fetterman has become a consistent, if lonely, Democratic voice against his party's leftward slide. He has cited progressive figures like Maine Senate candidate Graham Planter, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, Washington, D.C., mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George, and a wave of progressive candidates running across New York City as evidence that the party has lost touch with most Americans.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 20:30

Alaska Judge Overrules Election Officials, Lets 'Fake' Dan Sullivan Stay On Ballot

A retired elementary school teacher from Petersburg just punched his ticket back onto Alaska's Republican U.S. Senate primary ballot after he was accused of being a deliberate spoiler and struck from the ballot.

Dan Sullivan of Petersburg announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate on May 29 to challenge incumbent U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan. (Photo courtesy of Dan Sullivan)

Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews ruled late Friday that the Alaska Division of Elections had no legal right to disqualify Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. The Division had yanked him on June 15, calling his filing a sham designed to confuse voters and tilt the race toward Democrat Mary Peltola in November. Matthews said the state basically invented a "good faith" test that doesn't exist in the U.S. Constitution, Alaska statutes, or the Division's own rules - and that's a problem when you're talking about a federal office.

In the Friday night ruling, the judge determined Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher from Petersburg, is an eligible candidate for U.S. Senate and that the division shall include his name on the August 18 primary ballot. 

The division’s decision to disqualify Sullivan because it determined his candidacy was not filed in “good faith” was unconstitutional, Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews ruled. “The director’s assertion that Mr. Sullivan seeks to confuse or misguide voters is not supported by a preponderance of evidence,” he wrote. -Alaska Beacon

The U.S. Constitution sets only three qualifications for senator: age, citizenship length, and state residency. States can't tack on extra hurdles, especially subjective ones about someone's motives. The judge noted the Division accepted Republican complaints at face value while brushing aside Sullivan's explanations, and he pointed out that practical fixes like printing middle initials (Dan J. versus Dan S.) exist if name similarity is the real worry.

What set this off

Sullivan, a former U.S. Forest Service employee who taught fifth grade in Petersburg, filed May 29 as a Republican. He shares the incumbent senator's first and last name - a coincidence he's called a "matter of fate." Election officials and GOP groups zeroed in on several red flags: he'd recently switched his registration to Republican, having spent decades with the now-defunct Alaskan Independence Party until it dissolved late last year; his campaign materials and website looked similar to the incumbent's; and he'd worked with a political consultant, Amber Lee, whom Republicans flagged as a longtime supporter of Democratic candidates. Officials also seized on the fact that he first emailed the Division asking to appear on the ballot as "Dan S. Sullivan" - the senator's exact name, down to the middle initial - before switching the request to "Dan J." They argued the whole package was meant to siphon votes in a primary that could decide whether Sen. Dan Sullivan faces a tougher general election.

The opposition came from the top: Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom opened an investigation, the Alaska Republican Party filed formal complaints, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee referred Sullivan to the Federal Election Commission, claiming his candidacy broke federal law.

Sullivan's response was straightforward: he's unhappy with the incumbent's record after 12 years and wants to give voters another choice. He says he followed every rule, paid the fees, and met the qualifications - and he flatly rejects the idea that he's a Democratic plant. Asked by the Associated Press whether he'd had any contact with Peltola's campaign, he said "zero, none, zilch." Peltola's camp and state Democrats have denied the spoiler accusation too, and when the Division actually pulled him, it didn't point to any proof of coordination - it rested the call on his supposed lack of "good faith." His small Southeast Alaska hometown has largely rallied behind him.

Matthews didn't buy the Division's claim that it had broad power to police "ballot fairness" by removing candidates it disliked. He ordered Sullivan's name on the August 18 primary ballot. The state immediately moved to appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court, which has until Tuesday to settle the matter - right up against the deadline for printing ballots.

For now, the "other" Dan Sullivan stays in. Alaskan voters might have to do a little extra homework to tell the two apart, but the judge made clear that's not grounds to disqualify someone who otherwise qualifies.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, NOT the retired teacher, at the Alaska State Capitol in February. Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 19:40

Builders Vs. Gatekeepers

Authored by Monty Donohew via American Thinker,

A viral X post by @r0ck3t23 featuring Marc Andreessen hopes to ignite fresh debate in tech and political circles. In the clip, Andreessen articulates a blunt frustration familiar to anyone who has tried to build anything substantial in modern America: "Right now, in many cases in many places, no you can't." The target is regulatory gridlock preventing factories, data centers, and, specifically the colocated nuclear microreactors many believe are needed to power the AI boom.

The post's thesis is provocative. The old left-right divide is "obsolete." The real conflict pits "builders" and "accelerators," those engineering abundance through atoms and computing power, against "gatekeepers" who would freeze progress. The gatekeepers are comprised of environmentalists on one side, armed with environmental regulation that has strangled nuclear power for decades. On the other are the populist skeptics of rapid AI rollout exemplified by Bernie Sanders and Tucker Carlson. They meet, the argument goes, in a horseshoe of fear opposing the physical infrastructure the future demands.

This framing deserves consideration. America's permitting regime is a national liability. Decades of NEPA reviews, endless environmental litigation, and bureaucratic risk aversion have delayed or killed projects that should be straightforward. Nuclear power offers a stark case study. France derives most of its electricity from nuclear, with a far cleaner grid and lower costs in key metrics. America, despite superior resources and early ambition (recall Nixon-era Project Independence targeting a thousand reactors), effectively built zero new plants for forty years after creating the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Recent executive actions under President Trump aim to reform NRC licensing with deadlines and streamlined processes, reform that is both welcome and overdue.

Andreessen is right that colocated microreactors could elegantly solve the power demands of AI data centers, bypassing strained grids and delivering reliable, high-density energy. Tech leaders' interest in advanced nuclear aligns with broader national security goals: reducing dependence on adversarial supply chains, bolstering baseload power, and maintaining a technological edge against China. Regulatory gridlock has real costs in lost opportunity, higher energy prices, and strategic vulnerability.

Yet the post's sweeping narrative, that skeptics of unchecked acceleration are primarily "fighting physics" or the future, itself invites scrutiny. It risks collapsing into a Solvency Trap: a dynamic where solvable governance challenges are recast as permanent existential blockades, sustaining urgency and aligned interests while sidelining trade-offs, evidence of costs, and pragmatic safeguards. Real problems with hyperscale AI data centers exist beyond knee-jerk Luddism. They include grid reliability, massive water consumption (billions of gallons annually), localized electricity price spikes for residents and small businesses, community impacts, and job displacement in traditional sectors. These are not imaginary.

Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act proposes abandoning reason, planning, and problem-solving in favor of a potentially perpetual and unyielding pause on all new construction until broader safeguards address worker effects, privacy, civil rights, and environmental strain. One can reject the hysterical blanket moratorium as overreach while acknowledging that underlying concerns nonetheless merit consideration and debate. Sanders' equity-focused critique of Big Tech concentration, nonetheless, differs in motivation from Carlson's populist emphasis on taxpayer subsidies, rural community burdens, and skepticism of elite-driven disruption benefiting hyperscalers at ordinary Americans' expense. Their convergence on caution is emergent, not a secret "alliance." Presenting it as such adds conspiratorial flair but flattens distinct worldviews. It also unnecessarily sows division and invites dismissal of valid concerns by improperly linking them to those with invalid or meritless ideological axes to grind.

Populist wariness of taxpayer-backed incentives for private data centers, projects that can span tens of thousands of acres and consume city-scale power while delivering limited direct local jobs, echoes longstanding conservative skepticism of corporate welfare. Carlson's clashes with advocates like Kevin O'Leary highlight legitimate questions: Why should working families subsidize infrastructure primarily enriching coastal tech giants? Accelerationists rightly decry regulatory capture by legacy environmental interests. But dismissing all distributional and prudential concerns as mere "fear" risks its own form of capture by venture incentives and hype cycles.

Civilization is indeed atoms arranged by those who show up. But prudent stewardship demands more than velocity. The history of nuclear energy proves regulation can become abolition in disguise, yet safety, waste management, proliferation risks, and public confidence cannot simply be waved away with rhetoric about "deleting limits." Successful deployment requires reformed but serious oversight that is evidence-based, time-bound, and focused on outcomes rather than process theater. Trump's return to regulatory realism is the right step. The same applies to AI governance: rapid progress toward abundance is desirable, but experiments with alignment, security, and societal integration benefit from evidence- based and targeted guardrails rather than pure velocity.

The builders' energy is vital. America must reclaim its capacity to execute at scale, permitting reform, nuclear revival, and domestic manufacturing resurgence. Trump administration moves on NRC and energy dominance point the way. Yet the path forward is not a binary purge of gatekeepers but disciplined solvency: measurable progress on energy abundance, worker transitions, community buy-in, and risk mitigation that delivers broad-based flourishing, not concentrated gains amid diffuse costs.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 18:25

Rate On China's New Overnight Liquidity Tool Comes Below Estimates, Hints At Imminent Easing

Last week we showed four China-linked charts which made it very clear that, laughable flatlined 5% GDP notwithstanding, China's economy appears to be on the verge of yet another collapse (explaining the unprecedented drop in both Chinese oil imports and refining output): between autos, real estate, banks and overall consumption, the economy - as seen by the market - was in freefall.

China is fine pic.twitter.com/PFJzVCz9Ba

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 26, 2026

With sentiment collapsing, and amid growing speculation that Beijing will have no choice but to unleash another firehose of fiscal and monetary stimulus, it came as little surprise overnight when China’s central bank set the interest rate on its new overnight liquidity tool at a level that was below expectations, in what some economists see as a de facto rate cut that could push down market borrowing costs.

As Bloomberg reports, the People’s Bank of China said it conducted 300 billion yuan ($44 billion) of overnight reverse repo agreements in open market operations on Monday, according to a statement that didn’t disclose the rate of interest it charged on its new instrument. To avoid confusion, readers should always remember that a reverse repo in China is a repo in the US. And vice versa. The central bank uses the operation to funnel short-term funds to the market to influence borrowing costs, and it accepts eligible bonds as collateral.

The official rate of the facility - the first such overnight facility unlike the bank's traditional 7-day operations - came in at 1.25%, Reuters reported. Unlike other liquidity instruments, the PBOC did not announce the borrowing cost for the overnight reverse repos. That compared with the median forecast of 1.35% in a Bloomberg survey. 

The PBOC’s benchmark remained at 1.4%, 15bps higher than the facility rate, as it provided 157.5 billion yuan of seven-day reverse repo. 

The decision, which intentionally came in below well telegraphed estimates, now sets the stage for looser monetary policy including a possible cut in loan prime rates — China’s lending benchmarks — as early as next month, according to Citigroup and Standard Chartered.

"Today’s move is not an outright easing, in our view — but it likely opens the door to one,” Citigroup economists led by Xiangrong Yu said in a note. “The asymmetric move likely signals an easing bias, without a formal cut.”

That will come next.

The operation marked the first time that the PBOC deployed the tool to manage liquidity, and many traders said the move is a first step in a gradual shift toward a benchmark overnight rate. Such a transition is likely to bring China closer to the practice of its global peers such as the Federal Reserve, which relies heavily on its overnight target rate to manage the US economy.

“The People’s Bank of China appeared to signal that it wants borrowing costs to fall by setting the rate on its new overnight reverse repo 10 basis points lower than markets had expected. This backs our view that the PBOC will trim its policy rate to reduce financial burdens on businesses and households and support demand”, said Bloomberg's David Qu.

The new facility is expected to give the PBOC better control over short-end borrowing costs and allow it to smooth out any big swings in market liquidity. The cost of overnight borrowing in the interbank market has become more volatile since May, as the central bank sought to ease a glut of money in the financial system, with demand for cash typically rising at the end of each quarter.

The yield on China’s 10-year government bonds slipped one basis point to 1.71% after the announcement, extending its drop into a third session. Both the overnight and seven-day repo rates eased.

Still, despite the strong hint of easing policy, some analysts still believe the PBOC will be looking to maintain the policy status quo, for now, by keeping the seven-day benchmark steady while publicly omitting details about the new overnight rate.

“The overnight reverse repo is primarily a liquidity tool aimed at smoothing seasonal funding stress, rather than a tool to signal a particular policy stance,” said Frances Cheung, head of foreign exchange and rates strategy at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. “The timing of the operations today and tomorrow ahead of the half-year end — and the amount bigger than the seven-day reverse repo — both support this notion.”

Talk of a rate cut in China gained substantial traction as the Chinese economy slowed dramatically in the second quarter, with retail sales and investment falling at a pace unseen since the pandemic.

Still, most economists expect the PBOC to keep its policy rate unchanged throughout 2026, although Huang Yiping, an adviser to the central bank, said a rate cut still remains a possibility.

“The next step is to lower de facto lending rates, including a possible reduction of LPR rates” across both one- and five-year durations “to support a stabilization of credit growth,” said Becky Liu, head of Greater China macro strategy at Standard Chartered.

“We had long argued that China is firmly staying on an easing path, and will likely to take advantage of the interest rate framework reform to lower de facto rates,” she said.

Lynn Song, China economist at ING, said it’s possible the new rate may have been kept undisclosed to avoid “diluting” the significance of the seven-day benchmark.

“Given the overnight rate is still the most liquid and important rate for trading activity, it makes sense this will eventually be the level that policymakers seek to control,” Song said. “However, it probably will take some time. We probably need some track record and maturity for the overnight repo facility and how it affects market overnight rates before this shift is made.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 18:00

The Party Of 'Our Democracy' Has Nothing Left But Chaos

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“. . . there is no saving the Left. Whatever happens to them, it will have to happen without people like you or me trying to get them to return to any place of sanity.”

- Sasha Stone on Substack

A punishing heat-dome creeps over the eastern half of the country just in time for the gala Fourth of July week.

The days are brutal, but anything and everything crawls out of the woodwork when that blazing sun goes down and the moon comes out.

Everyone’s on edge, but the edge of what?

I will tell you.

First, could there be a richer (or more obvious) target for bloody mischief than this year’s national holiday, the 250th birthday of a nation that millions lucky enough to live here have been trained-up to hate on?

Even the sons and daughters (including pretend “daughters”) of millionaires have gone mad-dog on America, the poster-boy being Marxist-jihadi New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Left’s new avatar-general.

Since no one is more hated than the, ahem, Celebrator-in-Chief, you might want to steer clear of conspicuous public celebrations this week. Antifa and even worse gangs are out there right now, making plans and laying traps. Maybe not so much in places like Texas, where eight Antifas were just sentenced collectively to 450 years in the slammer for shooting up the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado. . . but here in the Empire State and other Blue-ish jurisdictions, all bets are off. Be careful ‘out there’ among the smokin’ ribs, the fireworks shows, and big music venues.

You can see how this summer, and the nauseating slide down to the midterm elections, are shaping up. The party of “Our Democracy” is desperate to an extreme now, all disfigured by a communist leprosy eating away at its public face (and a cancer of fraud metastasizing through its innards). It has become such an obvious monster, raging with its hair lit-up, that anyone with half a functioning brain is shying away, stealing off into the gloaming. The party has nothing left but chaos and, in the weeks ahead, anything that might be disrupted probably will be.

The objective is to create so much havoc and distress throughout the country - especially the big cities - that Mr. Trump will have to invoke the Insurrection Act, and by doing so, the Lefty-left hope to create conditions so adverse that an orderly Election Day cannot happen.

The Insurrection Act would be the Left’s cue to declare Mr. Trump the very “king” whose coronation they have busily rehearsed all year, and then, voila, you get a new French-style American Revolution 2.0, complete with guillotine and transgender Jacobins turning the country upside-down.

You might consider the theory that the nation actually needs to suffer a genuine nightmare to wake up from.

The Revolution 1.0 we celebrate this week was, after all, a nightmarish struggle rife with hardship and loss. Nine signers of the Declaration of Independence died from war-related tribulations. Five were imprisoned and tortured. Twelve had homes ransacked and burned. And then, of course, the military action itself, including travails such as the winter at Valley Forge, the disastrous New York Campaign, and the never-ending logistics crisis, no food, no clothing, no munitions.

In the present summer of travail we face, you can expect at least some major wake-up calls issued by the bloc in the country that has not gone insane — which happens to include many in Mr. Trump’s executive branch. I’m serenely confident that real evidence of 2020 election fraud will finally emerge, coincidental with indictments. Do you think that the Fulton County, GA, election records were seized last winter for no reason? Say goodbye to that old “baseless” talking point.

There are, of course, a whole lot of other seditious and treasonous Beltway villains nervously awaiting administration of the law. You know their names. It appears that the new supervising US Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Joseph DiGenova, is reorganizing the so-called “grand conspiracy” case against this large cadre of coupsters into a folio of discrete cases — RussiaGate, Fake Impeachment #1, the Mar-a-Lago raid, etc. — to make them more manageable and move them more speedily forward. Don’t be surprised if one or more of these cases happens to drop before the midterms. (Democratic Party true-blue loyalists could be surprised, even shocked to their socks, since these indictments will refute everything that has become essential to their identities as the good and righteous people of this land.)

Just one more item for now in the wake-up folder, coming a little out of left-field: things are looking eerie in the region of the San Andreas fault that runs through California, and perhaps the Seattle fault as well.

The earth’s geology even seems to be manifesting a degree of chaos.

It’s been shaky along the Pacific Rim “Ring of Fire” for many months.

Significant earthquakes have struck Japan (7.4 offshore Honshu/Miyako area), Indonesia (7.4 near Bitung), the Philippines, Tonga, Vanuatu, Chile, Papua New Guinea.

The Venezuela “doublet” (June 24, Mag 7.2) occurred in a separate tectonic zone, but all zones are essentially connected by the movements of magma deep in the earth, solar activity (flares, etc), gravitational tidal forces, and so on.

On June 24, a Mag 5.6 shook Redwood Valley, in Mendocino California, a Mag 5.8 near Pistol River, Oregon, and a Mag 5.1 struck 40 miles west of Petrolia in Humboldt County, CA.

The east side of the Pacific rim (America’s West Coast) has been unusually quiet for some years now. Be alert. Things seem to be livening-up. Just sayin’.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 17:40

"Thanks For The Mammaries": Hooters Shutters Every Location In Four Blue States

Iconic chicken-wing chain Hooters, famous for buxom waitresses wearing skimpy orange and white uniforms, appears to be throwing in the towel on its 35-year struggle to stay politically incorrect.

As Ben Sellers writes for HeadlineUSA.com, while some restaurants, like Cracker Barrel, have successfully fought off the takeover of corporate wokeness, Hooters recently announced the closure of its last New York location, the New York Post reported.

“Thanks for the mammaries,” the paper wrote in a nod to the voluptuous waitresses who became a prominent marketing gimmick and, ultimately, a business model for the franchise.

In addition to shuttering its holdout location in Colonie, N.Y., just outside Albany, Hooters also recently closed its final three Massachusetts locations in Dedham, Saugus and West Springfield.

And in March it said goodbye to its final locations in Connecticut and Minnesota, the latter of which was located in the Mall of America.

Technically, it was not the prescriptive mandates of virtue-signaling womynists that drove the chain under, but rather a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing last year.

It cited inflation and other issues as the reason for sagging sales.

However, after closing around 40 company-owned restaurants, the final nail in the coffin may have been a “family friendly” rebranding, with the company focused on retaining its beach-bar motif—along with more modest server outfits, the Post reported.

“I don’t think you’re going to see a bunch of butt cheeks hanging out,” said Neil Kiefer, the 73-year-old lawyer who took control of the brand after its default, according to the Wall Street Journal.

For decades, Hooters fought off outside attempts to reign in its “delightfully tacky” image, including a four-year fight with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over its refusal to hire men as servers.

In a 1997 case, the restaurant argued that it was safeguarding women’s rights under Title VII by designating womanhood a Bona Fide Occupational Qualification, meaning it was a necessity to the operation of the business.

(Hooters made no such distinction for its chefs and kitchen staff, who disproportionately were men.)

As the Obama era gave way to #MeToo grievances, the restaurant continued to weather a barrage of complaints including allegations of sexual harassment and objectification of women.

“It is time women spoke up and were not browbeaten into accepting places such as Hooters so they are not seen as prudish,” said former Cardiff University lecturer Gill Boden in a 2010 BBC article.

“Places such as this all contribute to the current climate where men see women’s bodies as available objects.”

In the Biden era, as identity politics blossomed into a giant turd, the restaurant not only fell victim to financial issues like pandemic restrictions, supply-chain shortages and increased poultry costs, but also new threats from cancel culture.

In 2023, Hooters was sued by Taria Daughtridge, a dark-skinned waitress at a North Carolina branch who claimed white and light-toned servers received preferential treatment.

In 2024 came the inevitable lawsuit attempt by a biologically male transgender individual, going by the name “Brandy Livingston,” who was banned from Hooters as a man for making lewd comments but went on to sue the restaurant for discrimination after undergoing a gender transition.

Mourners eulogized the outlet on Reddit, with one fan joking that it "went bust" while another wrote, "I just fell to my knees."

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 17:20

DOJ Sues States Over Alleged Failure To Turn Over Food Stamp Data

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The Trump administration has sued four states, accusing them of withholding crucial data on food stamp applicants.

Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania refused to turn over information to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that would let federal officials identify fraud, Trump administration lawyers said in lawsuits filed on June 26 against the states.

Officials are asking judges to enter injunctions that would force state authorities to hand over the last five years of applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the food stamp program known as SNAP.

The USDA requested the SNAP data in 2025, citing an executive order from President Donald Trump that directed agencies to stop waste, fraud, and abuse, and many states complied with the request.

Data from those states showed that states had enrolled some 186,000 people in SNAP despite those people being deceased, among the discrepancies that added up to $3 billion in wasteful spending, the department said in a report.

The government spends nearly $100 billion a year on SNAP.

Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania are among the states that did not comply with the request, which suggests fraud and abuse are likely going undetected, the filings say.

“The American people deserve a government that is transparent about how it spends their hard-earned tax dollars,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.

“These four states are thwarting USDA’s efforts to ensure that the billions of dollars in SNAP benefits they distribute every year are not lost to fraud. It’s unacceptable, suspicious, and it will not stand under this Administration.”

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said she asked that the lawsuits be filed.

“If a State misguidedly stands between the federal government and the information needed to protect the generosity of the American taxpayer, the Trump Administration will take them to court,” Rollins said.

Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania were among the states that sued the Trump administration over the data demand, alleging in a July 2025 complaint that it violated privacy protection outlined in federal and state law and that federal officials could use the data to target illegal immigrants.

A federal judge in February ruled partially in the states’ favor, preventing the USDA from cutting off funding to the states for failing to comply with data demands. The case is ongoing.

“The Trump Administration tried to force us to turn over the personal, private information of 8 million Pennsylvania voters. We won in court to stop them,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said on X on Sunday.

“No matter what the Trump Administration tries next, we’re going to stand up to protect Pennsylvanians’ right to privacy—and our fundamental right to vote.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 17:00

Johnson Says Reconciliation Is The Only Path For The SAVE Act

Speaker Mike Johnson returned to the Capitol this afternoon after several hours at the White House, telling reporters that the only viable path to enact the SAVE Act is to attach it to a reconciliation bill - and that work is already underway.

"The only way to get the SAVE Act to the president's desk, we've been shown many times, is to put it on a reconciliation bill, so that is in the process," Johnson said, adding that he believes a version of the measure would "clearly" comply with the Senate's Byrd Rule.

Earlier today, Punchbowl News' reported that House Republican leaders are considering a modified version of the bill structured as a $4 billion grant program. The grants would incentivize states to adopt citizenship verification and voter ID requirements for elections. The idea is still in its early stages, with no guarantee it will ultimately work or pass procedural hurdles.

Speaker Mike Johnson just got to the Capitol after “hours” at the White House.

Johnson said “the only way to get”
The SAVE Act to the president’s desk “we’ve been shown, many times, is to put it on a reconciliation bill, so that is in the process.”⁰
He says it would “clearly”…

— Em Luetkemeyer (@em_luetkemeyer) June 29, 2026

This approach aims to frame the policy as a budgetary/spending matter, which is more likely to survive the Senate parliamentarian's review under the Byrd Rule.

NEW — House GOP leaders are planning to vote on NDAA passage Wednesday, if they can pass the rule tomorrow amid a fight over the SAVE America Act, per sources

The House is also poised to vote on the @RepThomasMassie amendment to cut military aid to Israel Wednesday. GOP leaders…

— Meredith Lee Hill (@meredithllee) June 29, 2026

The SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) requires documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and photo identification to cast a ballot. The House has passed versions of the bill multiple times, but it has repeatedly stalled in the Senate due to the 60-vote filibuster threshold.

Republicans argue the measure strengthens election integrity and closes potential loopholes. Critics contend it is unnecessary (federal law already prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections), could create barriers for eligible voters, and amounts to voter suppression.

Reconciliation allows the majority party to pass budget-related legislation with a simple majority in the Senate. However, the Byrd Rule limits what can be included - non-budgetary or "extraneous" provisions are generally prohibited.

Bottom line: House Republican leaders, aligned with the White House, are actively exploring a reconciliation vehicle for a revised SAVE Act. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 16:40

Citizen Vigilante Should Terrify Western Governments

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

This movie is a warning to globalists...

Director Uwe Boll just released a movie that is ticking off all the right people.  Called Citizen Vigilante, it is an unapologetic rejection of globalism, mass migration, Islamic conquest, and “woke” leftism.  The movie bashes politicians, judges, NGOs, and law enforcement agencies that have bent over backwards to excuse inexcusable crimes committed by non-Western immigrants.  It unequivocally demands a return to law and order.  It urges viewers to seek justice.  It threatens the continuing survival of any Western government that continues to allow outsiders to prey on its nation’s citizens.  Boll’s movie is nothing less than a call for Westerners to revolt against the authorities who have refused to keep them safe.

The opening title cards warn Western governments: “All behavior can be traced back to instincts.  When justice is denied, instincts turn to vengeance.”  Think: the British government’s decades-long cover-up of Muslim rape gangs…or the French and Canadian governments’ cover-up of church arson and attacks on Christians…or the German government’s efforts to censor news stories of Muslim immigrants raping children at public pools and shoving young women onto train tracks.  Boll isn’t messing around.  He’s telling Western governments in the clearest terms: Your deliberate choice to sacrifice your citizens to raping, murdering outsiders is about to unleash the primal instincts of millions of Americans and Europeans who refuse to remain victims.  In other words, vengeance is coming.

Just in case his message was not sufficiently clear, Boll leaves the audience with these words before the end credits: “This film is dedicated to the thousands of rape and murder victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system.”  Without antiseptic apology, moral dithering, misplaced empathy, or two-faced whataboutism, Boll indicts Western “elites” for their many crimes against “the people” and suggests…nay, encourages…citizens to redress their grievances by seeking justice against the very public officials who have abused them for so long.

In between the opening and ending cards that acknowledge Western citizens as real victims of their respective governments, there is a vigilante tale about an American taking out the trash in Europe.  Why an American?  Maybe because President Trump is the only Western leader actually taking the threat of mass invasion seriously.  For what it’s worth, the vigilante’s only redeeming quality is that he recognizes European governments as monsters harming their citizens.  He’s a psychopath, but that’s also part of Boll’s message.  The director is telling viewers that they are behaving as “sheep” while their governments slaughter them.  The American vigilante, incapable of being brainwashed by politicians’ “woke” sermonizing and virtue-signaling, is the only one acting rationally.  He sees the whole European system as a threat to “the people” and decides to eliminate the threat.

Where in Europe does the story take place?  It doesn’t matter.  Boll’s movie begins with a depiction of an all-too-common murder of a young mother randomly stabbed in the neck by a young punk.  Boll then weaves in a number of tales of women who have been beaten, gang-raped, and left for dead.  He spares us from having to watch most of the details.  Instead, he shows us how these women have been broken and ignored by the government authorities entrusted to ensure their safety.

In separate scenes, the American vigilante asks two young survivors if the police, prosecutors, and courts had given them “justice.”  

The broken look in their eyes answers the question definitively.  Likewise, a resilient spirit washes over both of their faces once they learn that the vigilante has done what the authorities would never do: execute real justice.

What does real justice mean? 

 It means that Boll’s American vigilante doesn’t execute just the rapists and murderers.  He also executes the families who support those rapists and murderers.  “Are these the values you’re teaching your children?” he asks the father of a rapist.  Because if the “values” from the Quran teach that “women in America and Europe deserve to be raped because of a dress code,” then “I don’t think it was the good ones that got out of your country.  I think it was the bad ones.”

Boll’s vigilante also executes the judges who allow those rapists and murderers to escape punishment by inexcusably painting the evil perpetrators as misunderstood “victims” of “traumatic integration.”  “You really believe that?” the vigilante scoffs at a judge who found a way to blame Western culture and Western citizens for Islamic immigrants’ vile gang-raping of young girls.  “You let a gang of rapists go.  You know what that makes you?  Just as bad as the perpetrators.  Might as well have raped her yourself,” he says before slitting the judge’s wrists.

Boll’s vigilante, in other words, executes judgment on globalism, itself, and all of globalism’s enablers who prey on Western citizens’ empathy and slander anyone who objects to the mass importation of foreign rapists and murderers by calling them “nationalists,” right-wingers,” “fascists,” or “racists.”  Western society “is falling apart and dying,” the vigilante tells a judge.  “And you are the cancer that is killing it.”

This isn’t a Belgian, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, Swedish, or British story.  It’s the story of Europe, generally — and an equally applicable warning to the governments of Canada, Australia, and the United States: Either end this foreign invasion, or you will be punished for your complicity.  Aiding and abetting foreigners who commit horrific crimes will no longer be tolerated.

Lest you think that I am exaggerating Boll’s bluntness, allow me to quote the American vigilante as he speaks directly to two separate audiences: (1) Western governments and (2) Western citizens.

In one scene, he tells an Interpol chief (i.e., one of globalism’s top cops): “The people will not accept a takeover…They never voted for what’s happening.  This is an unfriendly takeover by the Islamist extremists and blindsided woke left.  And if this takeover is successful, it’ll destroy the democracy you say you love.  All the freedom, everything you enjoy and stand for.  There’s only one option.  You end this or we the people will end it ourselves.”  The vigilante then tells the Interpol chief to “take this message” to his government leaders.  Subtle?  Hardly.

The movie ends with an equally compelling video message from the vigilante to “the people.”  This is what he says: “I’m here to help you take that control back.  I’m here to show you that you’re no longer the victims.  I’m here to show you that it’s time to go out and show these fuckers that they aren’t getting away with it anymore.  Remember: I do this for you…until you learn to do it for yourselves.”

Holy moly, no wonder this movie has been banned across Europe.  In ninety minutes, it recognizes Europe’s rape and murder victims in a meaningful way; it excoriates third-world immigrants for having an “archaic value system” and a “commitment to religion over democracy and over anything else, including the rule of law”; and it warns Europe’s governing class that it will be overthrown and judged for crimes against humanity.  Boll tosses explosive truth after explosive truth at the audience, and it is impossible not to see this movie as the beginning…of something.  If European governments’ efforts to censor this movie and prevent citizens from receiving Boll’s message are any indication of how much they fear the public’s wrath, then it is clear that globalism’s “elites” are terrified of losing their heads one day soon.

Citizen Vigilante isn’t just a movie.  It’s a wakeup call for the ignorant, a call to arms for the fed-up, a promise to the victims, and an explicit warning to the West’s parasitic “elites.”  The message for Western governments is simple: Change your policies immediately, or you will be judged ruthlessly.  No justice?  No peace.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 16:20

Hormuz Tanker Traffic Plunges After Fresh US-Iran Strikes

Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz tumbled since late last week, as ship owners and operators froze up amid the renewed hostilities between Iran and the US over the weekend.

The Thursday attack on the container ship Ever Lovely prompted some shipowners to pull back and wait for additional information about how safe transiting the Strait is. The U.S. military on Friday carried out strikes on Iran in response to the attack on the vessel.

Then, on Friday and Saturday, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) forces conducted strikes against multiple targets in Iran, in response to attacks on two vessels near the Strait of Hormuz. On Saturday, an Iranian attack on a Panama-flagged oil tanker, Kiku, while it was transiting the Strait of Hormuz prompted additional strikes by the U.S. forces. Kiku was carrying more than 2 million barrels of crude oil, the U.S. armed forces said.

“After yesterday’s U.S. strikes in response to the Iranian attack on M/V Ever Lovely, Iran was given a chance to honor the ceasefire agreement but elected not to when its forces launched a one-way attack drone that hit M/T Kiku this morning at 4:30 a.m. ET,” CENTCOM said on Saturday.

The attacks on commercial vessels and the U.S. retaliatory attacks on Iran continue to test not only the fragile ceasefire, but also the willingness of shipowners and operators to press on with transits through Hormuz.

Since a weekly peak of vessels transiting Hormuz on June 24, traffic has materially eased, both in the outbound and inbound directions, according to ship-tracking data by Kpler compiled by Bloomberg.

After the flare-up this weekend, the U.S. and Iran have reportedly agreed to cease attacks ahead of tentatively planned new talks this week.

Although traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has resumed and more vessels are openly broadcasting their position, a return to normality is far from certain and far from near amid persistently volatile operating conditions in the Middle East and its key shipping lane.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 15:40

"You're Next!": Democrats Discover The Mob Has A Mind Of Its Own

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

“You’re next!”

This chant, at the victory celebration of the Democratic Socialists this week, was a message not for the oligarchs or the billionaires, but for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and the Democratic establishment. They were threatening that Jeffries would be the next to lose his House seat to a socialist candidate.

It was a scene that has recurred throughout history, as establishment leaders are overtaken by the very mobs they sought to use for their own purposes.

For years, Jeffries has joined other Democrats in fueling the rage on the left in the hopes of becoming the next House Speaker. Whether calling for supporters to “fight in the streets,” denouncing the Supreme Court as “illegitimate” or posting an image of himself brandishing a baseball bat, Jeffries sought to portray himself as a class warrior worthy of the mob’s support.

Other Democratic leaders followed suit — especially Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. It was Schumer who yelled threats at conservative Supreme Court justices in front of the court. A deranged man triggered by such rhetoric in the media later attempted to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Schumer and others portrayed their opponents as Nazis who threaten the very existence of democracy, and they stoked class conflict to inspire resentment for the wealthy.

Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison — now Minnesota’s attorney general — celebrated that Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump and his supporters.

Figures like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) (who is reportedly worth half a billion dollars due to his wife’s inherited fortune) have attempted to ride the rage wave by advocating a billionaire’s tax that is presumptively unconstitutional.

By the time these establishment figures realized their armchair-revolutionary rhetoric would not convince the mob, it was too late.

Jeffries and figures like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had endorsed candidates such as Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), who perhaps more than anyone else personified the problem. He was the attack dog of the establishment, fueling rage and promising a spate of impeachments. But what the left saw was a trust-fund baby who had inherited a fortune, owns three houses, and has publicly pledged to use his inheritance to fund his reelection. He came across as the Democratic Richie Rich, and he lost on Tuesday by more than 30 points.

In my book Rage and the Republic, I discuss how these Democratic leaders are following the same self-destructive pattern of prior establishment figures in history who thought that they could use mobs against their opponents while hoping that they would be overlooked.

The American and French Revolutions were contemporary movements based on Enlightenment principles. But whereas our Revolution went on to become the world’s oldest and most stable republic, the French Revolution became the blood-soaked Terror. The French Revolution was not some spontaneous uprising of the proletariat or underclass. It was led by relatively affluent figures on the left, from aristocrats to journalists to lawyers. Maximilien Robespierre, who would later declare terror a virtue, was a lawyer who helped organize the revolutionary Jacobins.

These educated and affluent figures turned to working-class radicals as their muscle to terrorize their opponents. And not long after executing aristocrats and clergy, the radicals turned on the Jacobins themselves. “Moderates” were sent to the guillotine by Robespierre and his henchmen as they clung to power. But eventually, the mob came for them, too.

After the Terror, French writer Jacques Mallet du Pan wrote, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”

After candidates endorsed by socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani easily swept aside the establishment candidates in Jeffries and Schumer’s backyard, politicians and pundits began to panic. They never imagined the mob would turn on them.

Even liberal media figures such as Ezra Klein and pandering academic figures have become targets of the left. Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who has called for the effective trashing of the U.S. Constitution, had law students staging protests in his own home.

Others have sought to stay at the front of the mob. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) denounced the lengthy sentences handed down to nine violent Antifa figures in Texas for their roles in the ambush and attempted murder of a police officer who had responded to the disturbance they were creating at an ICE facility. The officer, Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross, barely survived a bullet to the neck.

In the meantime, the mob is continuing its rush toward socialism and communism. One of those elected in New York, Democratic Socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, bragged about how she wiped her hands on the American flag as her fellow victors pledged to tear down core institutions, including the Supreme Court.

In Michigan, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is soaring in popularity after campaigning with virulent anti-Semite and extremist Hasan Piker. Piker was on hand to celebrate the recent victories as speeding along the socialist agenda to end capitalism and has promised the mob that “the American empire is going to inevitably fall.”

For some of us who predicted the rise of the American Jacobin movement, there is little joy in seeing Democratic establishment figures consumed by their own mob. They have been feeding a rage addiction in this country. Now they express surprise as protesters celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk and display guillotines at protests for those deemed enemies of the people.

After starting a brush fire, they have found themselves engulfed in the same flames with their targets. With Democratic voters now expressing support for socialism in record numbers and politicians pledging radical changes to our political system, they have proven again to be what Soviet communists called the “useful idiots” of the American left.

If history is any measure, we may soon find ourselves in the same position as Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, who was considered the Thomas Paine of the French Revolution. When asked what he had done during the Revolution, the old abbot pondered the question and answered:  “I survived.”

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.“

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 15:25