Jim Cramer Absolutely UNLOADS On Stage, Make Popcorn Now

Today's show is sponsored by Calamos. All right, let's talk about what Calamos is doing because this is actually pretty wild. We've talked about several of their ETFs on our podcasts, but they just did something incredible with their new auto callable income ETF, ticker CAIE. This thing seeks high tax-efficient monthly income, 14.47% last month, a majority of which is estimated to be treated as return of capital, game-changing income and tax treatment.

Auto callables are a $100 billion market that banks have been selling to wealthy clients for years. Calamos just hit the easy button for everyone and democratized the whole thing in an ETF wrapper. CAIE just passed $300 million in assets and is climbing fast. While everyone's chasing yield with covered calls, Calamos opened up an entirely different playbook. Check out CAIE at calamos.com. Your income-hungry clients will thank you.

Welcome to The Compound and Friends. All opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael Batnick, and their castmates are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholds Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

All right, so that was the warm-up. Let's go! Whoo! All right. Michael Babcock, ladies and gentlemen! All right, you guys, we are on a Friday night in South Street Seaport. We are here to talk about stocks. Give yourselves a round of applause. Let's hear it. This is a vacation for me.

This is what I want to do on my vacation. You want to talk stock? I have to tell you, this is, without a doubt, the number one career highlight for me. We're about to spend six and a half hours talking with Jim Cramer. I didn't even write an introduction because I don't think you need it anywhere in the world. In my estimation, you are, when people think of the stock market, if they could think of one person.

It might be Warren Buffett, but also it might be you. And that's it. I don't know of a third. I don't know of a third person. that the global population associates more with the stock market. Well, I want them to know you because I have felt from the day I met you that you are the democratizer and you understand how to demystify, which I love. I'll tell you a story. A buddy of mine, Sembalist, you saw him on this.

thing. I go fishing with him. I'm just going to put the mic down. Yeah, I go fishing with Semblis. He's terrific. Went home from Panama. Right where they had Survivor. One year they had Survivor there. And when he did this really unbelievable piece.

And it was just, it was a piece about the, it was about how big AIs would be, whatever. I said, you got to come on my show. And he goes, oh, what, what, your eight minutes? I said, well, I'll try to, I'll give you 10 minutes. He goes, no, I'll go with Josh. I said, well, Josh Brown. Yeah. He said he'll give me as long as I want, and I don't need to be on TV anymore. Oh, man.

Think about that. Number one analyst in the country. He doesn't want to be on TV with eight minutes, not really able to get the job done. He wants to come see you because he said, I can get my points across in an atmosphere where people care. And are fired up. And I know his family and everything. And it is just great testament that he said, I have to go where people care. And that's what you've done. I really appreciate that, Jim. And to all the fans of the compound.

You guys are the reason that we do it and I just want to express how much it means to me to see you guys here tonight. One more round of applause for yourselves. And also... Before I... And furthermore... Yeah, and that being said, before I turn the nickname on, because I'm definitely not going to get a word in, with these two world-class maniacs for the rest of the show, I just want to say it is such...

To echo what Josh said, what an honor. All-time highs for the S&P 500 and every other index. And if this is the top, there's nobody I'd rather celebrate it with than you. Thank you. Yeah, right. I mean, oh, and we breached 47,000 and closed. And the 34th time, my producer, Heather Gaines, is here. I said, we got to work all that stuff in. All the other shows are working that stuff in. Let's work that stuff in. So, Jim, outside, outside of, and maybe.

even not outside of Jack Bogle, you really have done as much for the individual investor, for the people in the audience, for the 300 million people around this country, or the 150 that own stocks, whatever it is.

Thank you for everything. Well, I'm honored that you say that. I mean, it's kind of what I did want to accomplish. It's loftier than I ever – that I think I am, and I'm really honored that you say that. If I could get through – I knew Jack, and – I had this debate about Jack and index fund performance. And I showed him my performance. I said, listen, I've been up 24% after all fees versus 8% for the S&P. And he goes, OK, so let me ask you something.

When you have a good year, how much money do you take in? I said none. He said, well, that's why you beat the market. Everybody who has a good year, they go marketing. And how many times have you been open? I said, I've been open like three times in the last 10 years. And he said, well, look, you're not a marketer. And I said, I tell you the truth, I hate the marketing. And he said, well, if you marketed, you would have so much money come in at once, you'd be ruined.

because you had that hot year. And I've always respected that. Jack was a guy who said, yes, you can beat the market. You never want to say it out loud. You can beat the market, but under circumstances that aren't what the Masters of the Universe want. Because if you have the best year in your career... That's also going to be the high point of your money raising. And then you're forced to buy things that you wouldn't otherwise buy.

probably toward a top, if not at the top. He said to me, how many great ideas do you have a year? Real ideas that you want to own, say, 4% or 5% of the company. I said, those probably come three or four times a year. He goes, you'd have to have... you'd have to own 10% of 10 kinds of companies like that. And I was really mindful because it means that there are great, and think about how great Will Danoff is.

at Contra, that he's able to handle it. But most of the guys are not able to handle the big rush and the money. And so I knew I had to get out. We can talk a lot about the business. But the business was, Jack was very humbling because he did make it clear. that most people should be in an index fund. I believe that you can have both. I think that somehow this only index fund at all time thing is a big mistake because there's a lot of people who have eyes and ears and see things.

and don't take advantage of their own knowledge because they're told they're too stupid. And then when I say that, I mean it. They're told, listen, you don't know, we do, give it to us. And I think everybody has eyes and ears, they can do things, but they're talked out of believing that they could have owned Facebook, no meta. They just got talked out of it.

And most people in 2012, when Meta came public, when Facebook came public, they understood this is going to be a big company. Absolutely. They could have bought it, but they said, ah. It's in the index. I don't need to. Exactly. And then in 10X. Hang on. Revisionist history. I remember you on TV. Both of you, actually. Yeah. What a shit show that IPO was. It was. 42-43. Happened to be the day that I was doing a...

I was doing this junior prom after party for my daughter, and I had just laid down red carpet and it rained. And she said, Dad, it was like the night before, she said, Dad, I want a slate patio. I said, well, what do you like? I got guys. Well, it'll have to be at night, because it's against the zoning. But we got it down, and just in time, it opened, and Melissa Lee asked me, what do you think? I said, 47? No! But then it got clobbered, if you remember, because he didn't have the...

Mobile. He didn't have the mobile. How do they monetize mobile? 17, 18, and then bingo. I became friends with him. It's kind of a weird thing. With Mark? Yeah, he's a different kind of guy, but he's not a bad guy. He's not a bad guy. Hey, you like my book. I don't think he's a bad guy, but he does live like a supervillain. He lives in a volcano in Hawaii.

And he is surrounded by his own food source. Sharks with laser pattles. I took a chopper to look at his place. Okay. Because my friend Rick killed. So he's living like a literal super villain. No, it is. Bond villain. And he's like, someone told my, one of my lawyers was saying, I, um.

I like MMA. And I said to my wife, what's MMA? And she goes, that's that stuff that Zuckerberg does. I said, you like this stuff? He goes, yeah, that's what MMA is. He's a little crazy. But I was sitting on Rogan, and I think that he... Look, he's off the reservation right now, but I like the product. So we're going to get to the modern market, but in order for this discussion to achieve what I wanted to achieve for all of you.

And for those listening from home or from their cars, I want to go back because I think people need to understand if you're a fan of the compound, you're a fan of what Michael and I do. how influential you've been on us, but also on, I think, the American investing public. 25 years ago, literally to the month, I told my wife, Shari, aka Sprinkles, who's here tonight.

I said, I'm going to the YMCA, 92nd Street Y, and I'm going to spend the whole day there. I don't know how long this event's going to be, but that's what I'm doing today. She says, what are you doing? I said, Jim Cramer is going to give a talk at the Y. And I have a copy of Confessions of a Street Addict in my hand. And I'm going to go. And at this point, I think I'm 23 years old. I'm a retail stockbroker.

Literally nobody. Still nobody, but much more nobody back then. So I go and I sit in the audience and it's literally six months after the market topped. And we don't know. Right. But so it's tickers and it's a little mini lightning round. This is five years before you have your own show on CNBC. You're letting like random people ask you tickers. And I've never seen anything like it. You did an hour.

on every stock under the sun. And you actually had things to say about every company. And I sat in the back of the room and I waited for my chance to get you to sign my book. And you did. But I remember saying to myself, Oh, my God. This is like the greatest communicator about stocks I've ever seen in my entire life. It's literally 25 years to the month of where we're sitting right now. That's funny. Did you have any idea?

in those days that your career would take you from hedge fund manager to columnist at the street.com. to where you are now? No. Was this a blueprint? It's very interesting to say that. Remember what you said about how if you took all that money at once? That would be the top. That was my best book. And it was the only one that's really personal. I sold 2 million copies of it. It was a big book. I mean, that's a huge amount now. And the book was…

It was actually very loved by the critics. I couldn't believe I didn't care about the critics. But my lawyer didn't want me to write it. My then wife didn't want me to write it. My kids didn't want me to write it. Everyone was afraid. that I would tell everything and then I did tell everything.

And it was very embarrassing for me. Remember all this horrible stuff I said about myself? Well, there was stuff about the SEC calling you. Oh, yeah. And you're drinking. You're laying on the linoleum floor. Sleeping in your car. Sleeping in the car.

My 40th birthday, the SEC called me. I had written an article. We were talking earlier about what you write an article now and no one really cares about it. But I moved a bunch of stocks in a piece I wrote for smart money, which I had helped start a few years earlier. And it was the day that there was an article about me. It was a big party for all my friends that my wife was throwing, and them wife, Jesus. And it was a...

The SEC was looking into my manipulation of four stocks. And what had happened is that – and this is how life really – now I can talk about it because I don't give a damn. But there was – there were four stocks that I wrote about that I said were orphan stocks.

And I thought they'd be good stocks. And I said, one, I'm probably going to be a bomb. Two are going to be OK. And one's going to be a killer. That's pretty much the ratio. And what happened is they left the disclosure box off that I own them. And the SEC went after him with everything they had, and the journal did not reveal that they dropped the box. So then we had to go and say, listen, we're going to sue you guys. And there happened to be a memo.

that said, do you think Kramer would mind if we drop the four stocks? We don't have enough room for the article and the disclosure box. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and very embarrassing for me. And at the end, my lawyer was saying, listen, Jim Cramer wants to be the CEO of Dow Jones. He can be it.

Because we have the memo. And they apologized and they did an investigation about how they could have been so wrong. But all these things happened and I wrote about them. That's what's crazy. You put that in a book. At that time. People writing investment books were writing them to burnish their careers. They were writing them to say, look how smart I am. And your book...

First of all, you call yourself a street addict. Right. In the title. Right. That was supposed to be like confessions of, you know, this is the book that Andrew just wrote. Yeah. You know, about Jesse Livermore. But yeah, because I was a street addict. I was possessed by the ticker, just like this guy. But I think that was like paradigm shifting. And I think that the next wave of commentary that came after that, people were much more comfortable being themselves.

being authentic yes I'm a market participant no I'm not a genius yes I make mistakes I think that you were the first person to do that in in not just book form, but on thestreet.com and eventually on television. We had to admit it. And we take it for granted now that people are able to be themselves. Prior to that, everybody was very stage-managed. What'd you say, like, I watch you when you're on Oma Scott, or do your own stuff, and you're like, do this.

And this is like fantasy land back then. I mean, it'd be like, what are you kidding me? And yet this is how it really should be. I mean, it was about rich people making money.

And then poor people not making money. And that's all changed. And I like that. But I knew I had to get out of the hedge fund business. And it's in the book where there's this guy, Berkowitz, that I had hired. There's a really good manager by the name of Dan Benton. He said, listen, I got this kid. You ought to hire him as your assistant. And I had become.

aggressively really possessed with beating the numbers. And I had to do $430,000 a day by the time I'd done it just to be able to maintain my average. And I was becoming meaner and more horrible and wrecking everybody's life. I was trading when our kid was born. Bought a lot of Alcoa, killed it on the South Coa trade. It was like a real accomplishment. That was the wrong way to look at it. And at the end, right at the end, his daughter was probably nine and she was in a play.

And it was the same day that Intel reported. And I said to him when he was leaving, I said, wait a second. What play is it? I said, let me tell you something. Your kid's going to be in a million plays, but Intel only reports four times a year. And he said, can you listen to yourself? I said, yeah. Intel imports four times. Go to your play. Go see it. Yeah, she'll be terrific. Let me do the damn Intel, okay? I'll get it right. And that's...

That's not good. There are stories of, you've told these stories of breaking keyboards and throwing. I had an anger problem. Okay, so I don't think it's crazy to say that you made the right decision. I think for most people, they would look at.

the level of success that you've achieved as a market commentator, a teacher, a mentor to investors. You've gone way beyond what you could have accomplished had you continued running a hedge fund. I think about a lot. I was at this Goldman dinner. I started Goldman, you know, sales and trading, then went towards sales and toward, you know, wealth management, they call it. And I was with a bunch of guys from.

class and they're all doing really well and their life is based on how well they did on money and that's okay because that's the thing and they all like the fact that I did not Everybody wants to have money and there's nothing wrong with being wealthy. But they love the fact that I went for something else because they said that was right for you.

We always knew that was right for you, and you knew it was right for us. And it was right in a sense that I wanted to do something really different. And I started the street because what had happened, I had gone to Dow Jones and said, listen, there's going to be this thing, and we can do Dow Jones.

We can do a Wall Street Journal like all day. You show them the internet. Yeah, and they say, well, no, but then what would happen? People wouldn't want to read it in the morning. I said, well, no, but that's history. That's history. What's going to happen is you're going to read all day. We're updating a million times. Well, we can't update. We can't keep throwing the paper on people's lawns and stuff.

I said, no, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to update it on our PCs. Well, but no, I mean, who will read that? Who will pay for that? I said, well, that's another story. Then they got in this fight that I just mentioned. I said, listen, I'm keeping it myself. They offered me $400,000 for my idea. And I said, good job. I don't want your $400,000. I wanted to try it. Jim, when you started your road down the media, which was obviously.

A complete 180 from running a hedge fund. Sure. Did you think that you were going to eventually come back to running money? No, because I was 225 pounds. I had really bad blood pressure. My life was, I just, I was possessed and I didn't, I wanted to live. And that's what I felt was about living or dying. Because that's, you know, I'm 160 pounds and my blood pressure is okay.

There was just no way to make it. I knew that I would not make it. Where do you think that pressure on a day-to-day basis came from? Is it just your internal... You know, it's funny. I know that...

I love my late dad, and he was sensational, but he always thought David was smarter than I am, and Barbara was really smart, and Laura was so incredible, and she's going to here, and Shelly's smart. Hey, Shelly, I bet you she was always somebody who was smarter. And it just broke my heart that there was always somebody.

who was more accomplished and better. And my dad was a salesman. He sold boxes and bags to retailers, and he sold doggy bags in Philadelphia to restaurants in the later part of his career. But I just never, ever felt secure. You felt that you had to prove yourself to yourself or to him or some combination? I always wanted his approval. Let me tell you what I got his approval.

I was desperate. My whole life I've been desperate to try to get Pop's approval. But I had this buddy, Tom McGrath. He's a great friend of mine. He was in my hedge fund. He goes, look, we were equal season. Tickets are together. He goes, look, the Philadelphia Inquirer.

It's going out of business. I got a guy in the courtroom. We can get that box. I said, where's the box? She's just on the 50. I said, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You got to get it. Yeah, in the 50-yard line. I said, no. She says, why? Why do you have that? I said, you'll see. You'll see. Just be there. Be there on opening day. So we go on first day. And my father says, Jimmy, I think you've done okay. But I'm on the 47. I said, Pop, move five feet over. You're on the 50.

Unbelievable. He said, hey, Jimmy, you're okay. Jimmy's okay. So I very much relate to that. Tell me, tell me. Don't drop it like that. I got to know because it's so hard. Okay. So it never goes away would be my comment. Even after you get to a place where obviously you can pay your bills. Obviously your family's doing well.

Obviously, you can drive whatever car you want. You can pick your own hours. You can sign contracts and decide how hard you want to work, who you want to work with. Even when you get to that point, that need for... other people to see you as somebody who's accomplished something, it like never goes away. I know. At least from my perspective. Well, I think that you take a guy like Semblis who was here.

Yeah. Like, Semblis is, I don't know who, is that, did anyone- Michael Semblis fans in the audience? Yes? Legend. Like, you know, like Semblis will, like I first meet Semblis and I say, damn, this guy's like the smartest guy ever. And then he turns out to be the smartest guy ever.

And I'm incredibly intimidated by him. But I realized, wait a second. He likes to fish. I like to fish. We go fishing. And the next thing I know, it's like, you know, he's a regular guy. He's worried that people don't like his stuff.

That's what he's worried about. Right. He said, did you like that? I said, yeah. He said, no, no, tell me. Did you really like it? The head of research at J.P. Morgan is worried. No one's waiting. He is. He's like, hey, what do they, like the piece will come out like at 7.59 on Monday and he'll say, what'd you think? And I'm like.

I said, I haven't had a chance to read it yet. Are you going to read it before you go on? Of course I'm going to read it. Are you going to mention it? Maybe I'll mention it. I don't know if I like it. If I like it, I'll mention it. Oh, no, even if you don't like it, can you mention it?

I said, Michael, relax. You're like a brilliant guy. No, he's worried that I won't like it. So I think that's universal. I want to go to the dot-com era because of all the comparisons that are being made from then to today. Sure.

I started reading you. This is a true story. I started reading you in 1997. Jesus, that would have been my... Six months in. You're doing thestreet.com. You're also doing a column for New York Magazine. My first job at a brokerage firm in Garden City, Long Island, a firm called Lou Lieberbaum. It's a true story. Before I had my Series 7, I can't talk on the phone to clients. I can cold call. That's it. But my other job is take...

There's one computer in the office. It's in the computer room. This is true. Print out Jim Cramer's column in the morning. It was you, maybe Herb Greenberg. Yeah, sure. I forget who. There was a third guy, Dan. Adam Wyshynski we had. Okay. Okay. So print these columns out and make sure all the brokers get a copy on their desk. And I did that for six months, every single day. And they ate it up. They would grab it out of my hand as I'm walking through the aisle. Yes.

100%. And so I remember that era is the first time I started reading your stuff. I think it's the first time you're writing. And I was curious if you think the comparisons between that era and now. are apropos or if they're different if these periods are different how are they different well i think that they're very different and one of the reasons they're very different until open ai which is something we can

talk about is that these companies are remarkable. They're like nation state companies. They're tremendous balance sheets led by really great people. Whereas like when you were back in those days, you'll see a guy from Infospace.

And it'll come in to see and it'll say, hey, listen, street.com kind of struggling. I'm kind of struggling. But I've said that I'm going to be the first trillion dollar company. So what I could do is here's $10 million. And he writes it as a check. And I'll give it to you. And then what you do is you buy $10 million worth of ads in mind. It's called a Lazy Susan deal. And we all work out. I said, that sounds illegal. And he goes, well, no, you understand. No one's in the room.

And I said, well, that doesn't make it less. So that's double click and like all those early internet advertising business models. And that's the way it was back then. It was not Wild West so much as like the authorities are stupid. We can do what we want. There's Jack Grubman. I met Jack. Grubbin through my ex-wife when he was just beginning at Payne Weber. And he was doing stuff I couldn't believe to build up his name. It was all insider trading stuff. But it was not.

Illegal, it's hard to describe what illegal and illegal meant. But put it this way. The companies are so well capitalized and involved now, again, with the exception of OpenAI. I want to talk about that. But the businesses are real. And by that point, almost all those businesses were about lighting fiber and having product to be sold over the fiber.

And what we didn't realize is kind of like Walmart. Walmart destroyed all retail. Amazon destroyed all of online retail. And you just didn't think that either could happen. Look, if you're Target right now and the new guy comes in, believe me, he's thinking about whether his...

company can make it. Kohl's, can they make it? They probably can't make it because Walmart's going to wipe everybody out except for Costco. What it was like then was we had all these different retailers, different companies, and we somehow thought they were all going to work. And we had all these companies that were light and fiber.

that they were going to work. And I mentioned Jack Grubman because Jack Grubman was WorldCom. He was the banker behind WorldCom. He was the banker behind all these. And you always had this next deal, next deal, next deal. And it was always the same, which is that you could jam, you could...

get the E-Trade guys, the retail people to pay up. You could then offer them stock. You go short and then you hold it till it goes to two. It was all crooked. It was crooked. You had a series of columns back then, probably 98 or 99. You had these two fictional characters who you pretended, Buzz and Batch. So Buzz and Batch were two guys who were, I guess, institutional sales traders. And they would call you up and you would write these dialogues that...

Never took place, but probably took place, right? An amalgamation of all the people calling you with stock ideas. Well, yeah, I'm surprised it was a long time ago. I go deep. So Buzz and Batch today would be trading Oklo. and they would be involved in all these stuff. Yeah, so this is the problem. I mean, look, and I know, yesterday I'd get up. I'd get up real early.

And it's like, son of a bitch, there's someone from the administration has told someone that they're going to put $10 million in each of the big four quads of companies. $10 million, that would make a difference, right? These are all like $10 billion companies and $20 billion companies.

And I've been trying to tell people, listen, trim, trim, trim. I don't want you to blow it out. I just don't want you to lose it all. Trim. I never say, you know, get out now. I did that once October 8th, and that's, you know, 1998 in the book, 1206.

And what happened, it's really interesting, was that I said, oh shit, everyone's going to hate me because I said, be trimming the quantums. And suddenly they're going to take the quantums up again. Now, I've met with two of the four quantums. The other two don't want to come on the show. It doesn't mean anything. D-Wave. Yeah. Let's tell the people what stock's talking about. What's a rigatoni?

We like that one. Yeah, like someone sold $2.5 million worth of rigatoni last week. And I'm like, look at it. And it's like, you know, the stock was like a penny stock a year ago. Michael said it's Ziti now. Ziti, a downgrader. Carbone, they work for Carbone. But you look at this stuff and you just say, okay, I'm not going to get people out.

But I got to get people to take some off. So you look at OCLO, okay? And that's because OCLO, did you see the guy who said, is it OCLO or OCLO, the analyst? And the analyst said, doesn't matter. That's very 98. That's very 99. It goes up. It doesn't matter what it's called. Yeah, it goes up. That's Batch. So Buzz and Batch would be in the quantum stocks. Right, they would be doing the Oclo, and they'd be doing the IONQs, and they would be doing the Bloom Energy, which is never-

made any money, but suddenly does have a real product. And you go to like a Michael Entrader, Cor Weave, who's actually a Jersey guy, and he's really easy to talk to. And you say, how about the Bloom? And he goes, I don't know. I mean, it doesn't scale. But that doesn't matter. It doesn't scale. It's got a couple of things that are making so a couple of data centers have backup power. But then what happens is then you have Tesla. And Tesla makes you look like an idiot.

Because Tesla is like, you know, I always say, anyone, you can say, hey, Jim, you know, you knocked that Oculus. That's the next Tesla. Really hard to refute the next Tesla. Tesla crushed some of the smartest people I've ever met in this business. It steamrolled people that I would say are probably geniuses. Yeah, but there's one Elon. It was Elon. It wasn't – that's it. It's Elon. But, you know, take – look, the other day I had Scotty, who was my co-host, and –

Tesla was down 30. And I said, look, he was talking about car sales. Now, if you read the conference call, he has a pretty good conference call. There wasn't anything about cars. It was all about robots. It was all about self-drive.

It was all about battery storage to be able to make it so that the terawatt that's produced in the country goes and you don't need to build any new places, new power plants. And it was really fabulous. So I said to Scott, I'll take the other side of the trade. And he goes, why? I said, because he's changed.

a narrative. The narrative's not about cars anymore. Cars are passe with him. He's talking about robot surgery on the conference call this week. I don't think anybody even asked a question about cars. No. It wasn't, and I heard this, Rick Smith, who's the son of the late Fred Smith, who was the greatest guy, started FedEx. He was saying, look, the big problem, this was when I was at Dreamforce last week. He said, the big problem with the robots is the hand.

Because, you know, it can only handle, it only knows a certain size box. And then it goes along and it hits the box. It doesn't know what it's doing. And there it is a week later, Elon Musk says, you know what, I'm developing the hand.

The hand is the hardest thing, but we're going to work out the hand. And you realize he's solving the real world question of AI and robots. And we're all sitting here thinking about how are the sales in Germany? Give me a break. Right. How many cars did he sell? How many cars did he sell in Germany?

One of the, so I think we all understand the big differences between those companies in the late 90s and these companies, the amount of money these companies are able to produce, the moats. Our friend Kai Wu wrote a paper about the CapEx spending and the hyperscalers. These companies are doing the Mag7. 22% return on invested capital. versus 6% for the S&P 493. So we all understand that these are not fly-by, they're not going anywhere. The difference is the size of these companies.

Nvidia and Apple are both $4 trillion. Maybe Nvidia is on its way to 10. Who knows? The size is a huge difference. Microsoft right behind. Alphabet right behind. What Jensen would tell you is... So what? Maybe my company should be worth 10. He said you can't. He urged me not to look at that. And he urged me not to look at it when it crossed a trillion.

Don't look at the market cap. Yeah, you said you can. It just doesn't help. Well, how could you not look? Okay. So, I mean, I agree with you. It's absolutely right. I mean, but this is what he's trying to say is don't limit what he's been saying is.

If you take a 20-year view, which is what he does, and you work backwards, it's entirely possible that he will develop things that no one's ever thought about. And it might be worth far more than you think. Remember, Elon uses 50 trillion. But they better. Well, they better. Absolutely. He'll tell you they better. He runs scared. Jensen runs very scared. What happened to Cisco and all of the other companies, they did it. All of those companies, they did 10x their sales from 1999 to 2010.

But the stocks fell 85% because investors were way ahead of expectations. So whatever Jensen is saying to you, they better do all of that to justify these valuations. So here's what Jensen would say if we were here. He'd say, you know what? We better do all of that or we're dead.

See, he'd say just what you said, and that's why you'd like him. He's not going to come up with the, no, let me tell you this, that. He goes, no, you're dead right. I mean, if we don't beat Lisa Su and AMD and we don't stay one ahead, we're dead. because he runs more scared than anybody I've seen. And it's really impressive that he runs scared because I think we'd all like that. Look, are these companies-

Here's the way that Sarah Fryer, the CFO of OpenAI, and I really like her because she helped me when I thought that Square was going to go bust. She didn't do so well at the local thing, the newspaper stuff. She was a good partner at Goldman. She's saying, look, if we can take over every vertical, if we can take over the Facebook vertical, the meta vertical, and if we can take over the Microsoft vertical, and we can take over what they're doing at NVIDIA, whatever.

then we win. But we have to win in every vertical. So you listen to that and you're Zuckerberg and you say, listen, I got to spend like hell. I cannot have open AI come in. I have to own my vertical. And that's the fight out there. That's what people are saying. It's like.

Open AI is going to destroy us unless we up our game. It's an existential spend. 100%. They're all saying that. Same thing. But the verticals are really great. Look at Zuckerberg. He's really good. So let's do Open AI while we're on the topic. This is the strangest thing about the modern market. Open AI is like this character that exists off screen. It's not public. It's the most important character in the movie.

So we're all watching a movie, and the main character is Kaiser Soze. Yes, it is. Okay. Everything Kaiser Soze does behind the scenes that then becomes news, we don't see the resulting... share price move because OpenAI doesn't trade. We can only see that interpreted through the share prices of all of the other characters in the movie. It's a phenomenally fascinating thing.

And the main character has not yet appeared. Is this the first trillion dollar market cap IPO? So you told me don't, Sarah said, please don't use the trill. He said, don't go. He said, we don't think it's going to be worth a second. I feel like this show is not in Sarah's heavy rotation. So you can.

I'm just saying that I wanted to use Trill. I'll tell you, let me tell you why it's so hard. Well, it's $500 billion. I'm not saying anything crazy. Let me tell you why it's so hard. So I got Mark Kasper on. He's a real smart guy. He runs Thermo Fisher. And I've had Mark for many, many years. I've known him for a long time. And I say to him, why aren't companies trying to really solve cancer with AI? And he goes, okay, the drug companies, they don't believe us.

They don't think that we're important. There's only one guy who took our call, Sam. I said, Sam? Because Sam's the only guy who's interested. He knows that we working together can be able to figure out gene sequencing that's going to be able to take on ALS, going to take on Parkinson's, going to take on all the diseases that these drug companies are afraid they're going to lose billions.

They're going to lose billions. And he is a great guy. And I said, well, I don't know. I don't know enough about him other than the fact he's really good at taking down money. He goes, no, Sam takes your call. And he goes, what are the hardest diseases to cure? I want to go after those. And he said. You should respect Sam for that because the drug companies only want to go after the.

Easy ones. Because these other ones, ALS, cost too much money. And so there you got, again, you know, he's off on the sidelines, but he wants to solve that disease. And when you go and you talk to someone in cars, he's trying to figure out.

Is there a car that could develop? One of the things that Jobs wanted to do before he died, a car that can run on water because that would solve the internal combustion problem. That would be something that Sam wants to go after. So I don't know him personally. I met him when I shook his hand. His partner.

Greg has been on my show a couple of times, but he's trying to do big things. Yeah. And you got to hand him, got to hand it to him. He's trying to be, but do I like the fact that they're, that they're borrowing money? Look, when, when South for cats.

is a really good business person. And when she told me- CEO of Oracle. When she told me she was going to do this, I said, why are you getting, you can't do that stuff. You can't borrow that kind of money to be able to build what you're saying. She goes, we have no choice. We have to. Our business is growing.

2%, 3%. This could be the greatest business ever. Larry loves it. Larry's the richest man in the world. Larry Ellison, his son, has got the Paramount thing. And what's interesting is that she's serious. She's a serious person. I have Hawk Tan on last week. Now, Hawk Tan is-

Broadcom, which is by a trillion dollar company. He's one of the, he's ruthless, Hawk. I happen to love Hawk, but he's ruthless. And everyone knows. And I said, Hawk, are you sure that this thing's going to work? And he goes, Jim, it is going to work. What thing? The data centers? Oh, the OpenAI. Okay. Because OpenAI is borrowing far more money than it should.

And I don't know, they have to win something. Google's deathly afraid of OpenAI. Jim, are you worried about the credit part of this? Because obviously that is the biggest part. Until OpenAI came along.

I was thinking this is a really responsible group of people who are figuring out how to keep their turf and continue to reinvent. Then OpenAI comes along and they have a dream. And they're back with the Microsoft. And they get Oracle to do the data centers. And next thing you know, it's gospel. And remember, the dream starts. I mean, I talk about Jensen. Remember, Jensen brought them the first. the first platform. And that's what ChatGPT was based on, was what Jensen brought it over.

And so he, Sam, Sam, like I fucking know Sam. He's in, he's everybody on everybody's lips. And yet he is not there. He's not there. He's not doing quarterly conference calls. No, he doesn't have to. You know what? If you're over a sort of market cap, I feel like you need to do public market earnings calls. Well, I guess – look, they do it. It's a tough question because –

But there are people who actually trade the stock all the time. The government doesn't seem to care. There's people who buy it and sell it. The government is going toward having two conference calls a year instead of four. How that helps people, I don't know.

As a regular investor, you want as much information as possible. But that's what this new justice... What we've heard from people on that topic is that it'll actually increase transparency because a lot of times companies don't talk.

as a result of a quiet period surrounding earnings. If earnings were only twice a year, then theoretically they might be able to speak more frequently, not less. Okay, here's what I hear about it, which is that when they have news, they should say it. That should be the rule.

News, they should say it. And I would like that because I think a lot of them feel like I can't give the news until the quarter. So this opens that up theoretically. Right, and then some people get it and others don't. We just want it so that everybody gets it. Jim, so the companies are huge.

We've never seen this before. The valuations are not stupid. They're just not. These companies... That's why I f***ed up on the alphabet. Okay? Because the goddamn Justice Department guy is in my face telling me, I pull away some of my lawyer. He said, listen, we're going to destroy Google. Okay? You think Google is so powerful? Let me tell you something. We're going to split it up and we're not going to let them have any money. You think it's going to be like Exxon with Standard Oil?

and everybody did well. We're going to wipe it out. So I went and sold it for the club, okay? And I listened to the guy. They got this judge who called it monopolist. Then the judge immediately goes back on everything. And I looked at it and I said, I sold Google at 16 times earnings. What about the idiot?

I mean, I'm an idiot. 16 times earnings. I sold it through American electric powers multiple. I'm an idiot. So you are the face of the American investor. Is there, would there be a point in time at which... I think you look fab. I think you look fantastic. What do you guys think? Let's go. Let's hear it for Jim. Jim, is there a point out there on the horizon to which you would say, time out?

This is silly season. Forget about Akhlo and the IREN. That gets a distraction. But where the integrity of the capital market system is under, not assault, under, it's where, all right, time out. Everybody, no more new money. What would have to happen for you to get there? Okay, well, look, in March, in the third week of March of 2000, I very publicly wrote a piece in real money and in the street which says I'm getting out.

It's too silly. It's too stupid. I'm going to go into bonds. I've never bought bonds other than for trade, for treasuries. And I'm going to go short most of the NASDAQ. And I did it. And everyone just thought it was a stunt. But I did. I just, you know, when I had a good year, I sold everything. And I wrote from the short side mostly for the rest of the year because it was phony.

And I had seen it to be too phony. But it had been phony for years. Okay, that's a really good point. I waited until it was phony. But I wanted to make money. And someone, a very nice woman. I remember very distinctly when MicroStrategy blew up the first time. And it was an accounting fraud. And you said, this is now going to be open season.

on every stock trading at 500 times eyeballs. No one's going to believe any of these guys again. I read what he wrote and it ended up being that way. But I got lucky because I had the street. So I knew how phony it was. And I saw the street's numbers go down really big. And I was very public about it. I said, listen, the numbers are bad. All the IPOs are phony.

Everyone's trying to do a secondary. Everyone's trying to get out. Count me out. There isn't a soul I know that doesn't want to sell. They're begging Morgan Stanley to put together a project so they can get out of their stock in a synthetic way. If I felt that all these companies, let's say I felt that there were five open AIs, that there were five different companies that could pull this off.

That would be hard for me because I struggle with open AI. I mean, literally, I pull up with these people when I was at this, and it's one of the reasons why I was so glad to go to Dreamforce. All I asked everybody the same thing was, am I nuts? A, open AI seems crazy. Am I nuts? And I didn't meet anyone who felt that OpenAI was a joke.

I just met people who said it can work because Larry Ellison is serious and Sam is serious. And I said, but what happens if they come up with a source of power that makes it so all this spend on power is not needed? What happens if it turns out that D-Wave quantum is faster, and everything they're doing, all the fast compute at NVIDIA is not fast enough. And remember when Jensen said, look, I didn't believe in quantum, and then he came back and he said, well, look, quantum's very close.

And these guys all say the same thing. Well, look, we'll be ready when that happens. And they won't be when it happens. So I think you have to, look, I hope you live long enough to see that it makes it. But I know that, but I've got to tell you that if I told you that I'm not worried about it. After my wife, I come back and tell my wife, I said, look, I got to tell you something. I'm afraid of screwing up here on this open AI. And I describe it and she says, what does Mark say?

She says, Mark's okay with it. She says, well, what does Jansen say? Jansen's okay with it. She says, well, everybody's okay with it. So maybe you have to make your peace with it until you can figure out something. But there are a bunch. I mean, there's what Elon's doing. There's anthropic. It's not just them. I actually want to ask you about that. I believe in Elon Musk. I really do. I think he's very surreal. So you and I invested through the first dot-com wave.

We're left with zero of those companies with the exception of Amazon. But none of the search players. So to me, the LLMs remind me of search. And there are none left. Google came public in 2004 after. There were 10 of them at one point. That's the LLM thing. It doesn't feel like there are going to be 10. It feels like there are going to be two. I don't know for sure. It's ChatGPT probably.

And perplexity? Or Chad Chippity and Claude? Well, you've got to look at this lawsuit between the New York Times and OpenAI. Because New York Times isn't, you know, OpenAI is constantly cribbing the Times, but they have two million instances of plagiarism, two million instances in a lawsuit. Two million. So I remember the lawyers in this thing, and I said, wait a second, are you telling me that they won't?

pay you because you're going to win this lawsuit and then everybody who runs these sites is going to have to pay every single site. That might cost more than energy. Well, the fact is that they get a free ride. And they're not going to get a free ride. And a lot of these sites won't be able to afford it. And that lawsuit, which I think the Times wins, is going to make it so all these companies have to start. They have to train.

Well, Reddit sued perplexity on the same grounds. They said, you're training your LLM on our proprietary data and you owe us money. And perplexity said, hey. You're fighting against the open internet. And Reddit's probably like, yeah, go f*** it. yourself. That's our data. Pay us. It's not open internet. Yeah, and they used Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, that stock went from 70 to 200 because they perplexedly used them and now everyone's going to have to fall in line.

These LLMs can't survive a scenario where they have to actually pay for all the data they're being trained on. And that's what's like $2,000. So that's what makes me nervous. That's what's like $2,000. All right, the second part, you wrote.

I've stolen this idea from you. I've given you credit. But you wrote in a moment like this, you wrote about being at the diner by the Holland Tunnel where the guy drops the eggs on the griddle. and it's just too hot. If you're not ready with the spatula, the minute you drop it, the eggs are gonna burn. Why are your eggs so perfect? He goes, nine seconds. Nine seconds. If I leave them on for 10 seconds, it'll burn till crisp. Is this market not a hot griddle?

Holland Tunnel diner market environment? No, I don't think so. I think there's sections that are. At that point, everything was. I think there's lots of stuff. I mean, OK, now I know Procter & Gamble is not what this room might be about or maybe that I don't know. But Procter opens up for today. And it's John Moeller. He's like the most boring man on earth, but he's a nice guy. He's a CFO. He comes out. He sells toilet paper.

He sells toilet paper. He got that wavy toilet paper. First innovation in 40 years, you know. But they told a good story and the stock's up to five. And I'm like thinking, shit, that doesn't work. That doesn't work for me. It's not going to fit my thesis. My thesis is that that group is safety last. That's my big rap. And then by the time the market opens, the stock's only up a buck. And so that's working for me because that –

Every day you seek validation of your thesis, okay? So, I mean, it's not like I am saying to him, no, let me tell you, it's fine. Every minute you're seeking, if you're any good. If you're any good at this business and everybody wants to be good at picking stocks, you have to constantly validate your thesis. And if you see something that says that your thesis is wrong and you ignore it, you're jackass. So, I mean, Procter been a big today.

Literally, I'm thinking this. I'm watching the guy on 704, and they're talking, of course, about the reds, the Cincinnati Reds and the Bengals. I don't know, because the Cincinnati thing. And I'm listening. I'm saying, shit, this stock's going up too much. This is wrong. This is not my thesis. This is not my thesis. What am I going to say?

all talks to me. What are we going to say? Like the proctor, it's got to come down. It's got to come down. It doesn't work. And it goes down. I go on 8.59. I'm like, hey, proctor, that was a little bit. That's nothing. You don't want to be a nut. So, I mean, you can never make it seem like you're, if you are secure.

In this business, you're just such a joker. I mean, you have got to be like, I watch you on TV. And it's such a, look, and I'm friends with everyone. Stephanie worked with me for years. But, you know, Josh will come out and will say, look, toast was toast. I didn't know, you know. And I'm like thinking.

Oh, there's another guy that's made a mistake in this business besides me. I know two people, him and me. And the ones who don't say it, they're like, are you kidding? There was a guy, part of the original cast of Fast Money. We won't say his name.

But if the stocks he picked on Monday didn't do well on Tuesday, he would call in sick to the show. I can't be honest. Say his name. Say it. Say it. I won't do it. See that shit? And it bothers me so much. Jim, do you think the audience, I mean, I'm curious to hear your take on stocks.

Do you think that the software stocks are a value or a trap? Let's talk about, are people too worried about AI? Disintermediating Adobe and Salesforce. I'm going to give a micro answer and a macro answer. The macro is the ServiceNow report this week, and I think it'll be a really good quarter. People say, ah, shit, I should have done that when that's got AI.

But there's a company called Encino, not the town, but Encino, it's a spinoff of a bank called Live Oak. And Live Oak is an actual non-deposit. It's more of a – it's an internet bank, but it's based in Wilmington, North Carolina. So, you know, we're like, oh, what do they know down there? Hey, this guy is a real smart guy who runs it. And what he did was develop software that made it so that you could do software as a service for a bank. And he did it in conjunction with Salesforce.

And that company is now worth $3.2 billion and his bank is worth $1.5 billion. He just ripped out the Encino Salesforce product. And I said, this is in front of the Federal Reserve. It was a panel I ran. He said, I had some kid. Write the stuff that was better than what Salesforce has got. Using AI. Using AI. So I think that-

It is going to be existential. Adobe, similar story. Adobe's really in trouble. What if anybody can make any graphic they want just by speaking it into existence? It's really in trouble. My daughter went to Parsons and she was in Adobe. They train on Adobe.

She said, Dad, there's this, I bought her this for her present for graduation. I bought her the $600 suite for Adobe. And she stopped it. I said, why? She goes, I got this Canva for free. I said, are you telling me the free product's better than Adobe? She goes, I'm telling you they're equal.

Yeah. And that's his stock peaked when Canva came out with free. So these guys are all going to be really challenged. And now Mark has got, I've worked with Mark Benioff's new product in Salesforce, and I see what it's doing. Agent Force? Yeah, Agent Force. Okay. But the problem with Asian force is, one, it can be impersonated, so you have to do a lot of cybersecurity. But two, I mean, do you really want to give, like when you call Walgreens, well, I guess they're almost calling me, call CBS.

And you have like, dial one for this, dial two for that. You don't want to, if they're able to get your information, like UnitedHealth was a real bad hack. And I got hit by the hack because I had back surgery five years ago. And like every five days, someone calls me and says, you know, this is, you know, how's your back surgery? I understand because I'm from the National Back Guys and we are checking up on your medical.

And I said, oh, my God, it's UnitedHealth. It never stops. They got my, they know everything about me. And it was a Chinese hack. And I don't want my, I hope agent force is never hacked because they know too much. Right. If you set something loose inside of your email, for example, then all of a sudden it's got every detail it needs for somebody to steal.

And impersonate. And that's why I like CrowdStrike and Nick Cash Palo Alto so much, because they're the two that are most soup to nuts. You and I are both. CrowdStrike Bulls. Yeah. George was on yesterday with Wapner in the morning. Yeah, he came on my show the day before. I said, George, you're overexposed, man. Is cybersecurity... the most obvious secular bull market between now and the end of the decade

Other than AI and robotics. That's why I own two of them for the trust. I would never do that. Which you own? I own Cyber and Palo Alto. I'll tell you why Scott had them on. It's kind of interesting. When he was getting up. And we had him one pretty early on in the hour because it was me and Scott because David was off and Carl was off. And I said to Scott, Scott's a good sports fan like I am. I said, you know, Georgia won Le Mans. And he goes, yeah. I said, no, he won Le Mans.

Not as a sponsor. He drives the F1 car. Yeah, and he finished second in Sebring last year. And Scott was like, give me a break. I said, George, tell him. Tell him. He goes, yeah, I won Le Mans. George has a sleeping problem. Now, you can only go eight hours. I'll go all 24 with one guy. But he can't sleep, so he's like watching all 24 hours, and he's great. And Scott was like, You got to be kidding me. But George is, yeah, he is. He's the sponsor, but he's also the chief driver. I love him.

Who's your favorite CEO? Not because of what the stock performance was, but you've interviewed every important CEO probably over the last 20 years that's ever been. Who's your favorite? Was it Jack Welch? I have a very oddball pick, a very odd guess that I want to make. I think you genuinely liked Aubrey McClendon from Chesapeake. Okay, I mentioned Aubrey last week.

Oh, you did? Someone, yeah, because. I think you liked the guy. No, I loved Aubrey. And it was a really, it was a tragic end, but. Yeah, and you know, Aubrey, Aubrey violated the Sherman Act. Now, if you take a look, there's. When you look at Article 2 of the Sherman Act. Wait, he burned down Atlanta? How do you violate the Sherman Act? He rigged, he bid rigged. There was a nice piece of land that he knew had a lot of nat gas on it.

And he wanted to be sure he got it. So he went to everybody who was bidding and said, listen, this is mine. I'll give you some. I wanted it. And it was all recorded. Someone recorded it. And he. Is this Chauncey Billups? No. Aubrey McCoy, Chesapeake Energy. Chesapeake Energy was the NVIDIA of the 2000s. Yes, it was. Aubrey was larger than life, and he owned the Thunder.

and he was a big giver to Duke. He was actually more of a finance guy than he was an oil guy. But he explained a lot in life to me, and I went to a bunch of schools with him, and I really just enjoyed it, just really enjoyed him. And he – When I went to my – he said, listen, Jimmy, I'm in trouble. And I say, let me check on this. Let me check on this. So I called my guy, Paul Weiss, who does the antitrust. And my friend said, he's done. He's done. It's 10 years. He's done.

And I said, well, I got to call him back. And he said, what do I tell him? What do I tell him? He goes, it's 10 years. And I left the message and it was – and that's what he killed himself. He killed himself about an hour. And he didn't get my message, but he was a tragic figure whom I loved. I'll tell you, we went to Ohio together. I wasn't going to say that. We went to Ohio together. Jim, I think you did it. It was your fault. Yeah, it was my fault. I did it.

We went to Ohio together. Was Heather in the Ohio trip? Exactly. My producer. Yeah. So he goes, Jimmy, listen to me. My mom and dad called me Jimmy, so I like it. He goes, Jimmy, we're going to go to Utica because there's the largest oil patch in the world. Bigger than the Permian. And what we're gonna do- Utica, New York. Yeah, we're gonna do Utica, Ohio. Oh, Utica, Ohio. We're gonna go-

And you're going to be there the moment it, oh, we're going to spud. We're going to spud. And it's going to be amazing. So he said, but you got to put all this stuff on. You got to be ready. And he goes, all right, hit it. And nothing. comes up and he goes no hit it it's nothing and the guy comes over to me because i'm with him he goes hey boss listen uh it's natural gas

No, no, it's oil. No, it's natural gas. He goes, no, there's oil in there. And I'm thinking, oh my God, there'll be blood. I mean, could the guy, but you know, he lost everything on the Utica. He lost everything.

That was a true gambler, for sure. How was he ever a gambler? Oh, I loved him. Jim, this is your eighth book. Why are you doing this to yourself? What are we trying to do here? Who is this book for? Oh, this one I f***ed up one. I really did. No, I mean, because I worked really, really hard on it. And I really kind of did a lot of damage. I certainly, I'm a gardener.

And I know this sounds stupid, but you only get so many gardens in life. This is my 38th. And I let this one go fallow because I had to read the book. into the into the microphone as Josh knows and what happened is is that it can only be your voice and the only time I my voice would not be able to hold up after the show so I had to work on the weekends

And it took me two years to write. I was really out of commission. I wrote 500 pages. And then they said, listen, pick your best 250, basically. They wanted it to be 250. So then, like, I had this great section. about how if you're going to go do a GameStop, let it be a Palantir or a Celsius. So they cut out the Celsius and they cut the Palantir, and the Palantir makes it seem like that.

carp messianic guy. But what I was trying to say was like, look, at least have some companies that have numbers. You know, have it to have real growth. Oh, so if you want to have this group movement where everyone buys the same stock.

The underlying should not necessarily be a video game retailer. Exactly. Don't buy bullshit. Yeah, and then I also said, let me tell you, good balance sheet first. I said, I'm going to take, I remember telling my wife, I'm going to take on the balance sheet. She said, you have to, because if you're going to say people should pick stocks, you have to.

to at least show them a balance sheet. So I had this big, like 40 page section about AMC's balance sheet and income statement versus Apple's. You know, Apple's is perfect and AMC's was the worst. And they said, okay, Jim, we only have room for one. I said, what do you mean one? No, it's a contrast. He said, no, we only have room. We're going to use Apple. I said, no, but Apple's boring. It's a companion. They said, well, you know, we're not going to do AMC because that's bad. And I said.

But the whole point is to be able to show people what a bad balance sheet is. And they said, well, Jim, you know, we got to worry about people getting through it. So the exigencies of having to write a mass book. that I wanted to be read, contrasted versus trying to be a serious practitioner of the game. So you have to make too many. I made so many compromises. It drove me crazy. But the good stuff.

Most of the good stuff made it in. Yeah, and that's what they said. You know we're trying to sell the book, right? No, no. Oh, no, no. Don't get me wrong. What a piece of shit this book was. Oh, my God. Thank you. Thank you for that. I just give you the behind-the-scenes stuff. In the end, I actually like it. I like the book.

I like the book that you wrote. Hey, did you like the thing with my dad and Mr. Paul? It was actually called Mr. Hank. These are the stories that help people better understand the investor. The mentality behind the investments and connection. This is why people need to read the book. We are bombarded. I've been talking a lot about this. We are bombarded with why this is going to end badly. And maybe it does. Fine.

But what you are trying to do with the book is to tell people, stiff arm the headlines. and focus on the opportunities. And it's not easy, but you can do it. Right, and I keep saying, look, I was in 1982, dollars of 1,000, walking down the street. And I'm going to Goldman Sachs at 55 Broad. And everyone's telling me it's a terrible time. Interest rates are real high. And the company's not come back. And Reagan's a doofus and all this stuff. And even then.

It was a great time to buy. And I think that, yes, it is absolutely true. In the book, I had wrestled with 2007, 2009. You were back even again, not until 2013. So that was a big, long stretch. But the idea is that if you... believe if you observe and you have some curiosity and you use the chat GPT and you do the current homework, you might have three or four stocks in your life that are really great. And I know I use the NVIDIA and you can say,

I had an unfair advantage. But the fact is that Jensen asked me to come out because no one would listen to him. That's how I came out. He said, look, I'm going to show you things. No one's listening to me. There was a moment with Jensen where he said, do you think you'd get me in front of like a Wendy's or McDonald's? Because this thing understands 28 languages. And I called McDonald's. I called Wendy's.

That doesn't work for us. Of course, now McDonald's is trying it. But what is amazing is it doesn't take a lot of great ideas to make a million dollars. Just eat like three or four. But if they talk you out of it. then you'll never ever make anything in your life. And Larry Fink, whom I really respect, he and I worked, he worked on me very hard. He said, look, you got to get people to invest. These younger people don't believe in anything. And I said, well, look, I'll match index funds.

very valid with let them be able to see Facebook. I mean, I found Facebook because my daughter was a suicide counselor. And she said, I can't get the kids to not to get off this thing. This thing is like coke. You got to see if you can't get this guy Zuckerberg to stop doing this because all the people are trying to commit suicide. It's because their friends are telling them that they're ugly. And it's like.

You know, on the one hand, I'm like thinking, well, that's terrible. The other thing, I'm thinking, shit, Coke. This is Coke. Legal Coke. All right, Jimmy, we got five minutes. No, we don't. That's bullshit. Where the vote? Where are we going? What are we going to do? Yeah, we got to go watch some. It's the Knicks. Put them on. There's no football right now, right? So Michael had this adorable idea where...

We do. What an asshole. No, I don't mean it facetiously. I mean, people have a lot to do. I'm having more fun than I've had on this damn book tour. We're absolutely having a blast. Michael had this really adorable idea where it would be very...

Fitting very on brand to end with a little mini lightning round What I don't want to do is like just throw the mic out there and have people tell them tell you how much they love you and because that could eat up too much time So I thought we would throw some

tickers slash themes slash whatever at you. And you can keep these as brief for as long as you want. It's totally up to you. I'll start. So there are, there's this misconception. How about Michael start? Shut up. It's my turn now. I have the mic. Every stock is going up. It's a bubble. It's just not true. There are a lot. There's 170 stocks in the S&P that are down 20%. Absolutely. There's a lot of opportunity. So a couple of weeks ago, Josh and I did.

Value or value trap? So let's start here. Lululemon. Okay, I love Calvin McDonald, but he has to adopt. He has to understand that when I go to Costco and they got the exact same thing for $17, he's got to reprogram. Is that the problem there? Yes. Okay. Not aloe, but the low end. The low end. Look, Richard Glantz, he's a good friend of mine. the CFO at Costco 38 years ago, and he told me that Lululemon, when they sued them because their stuff was exactly the same.

That was the end of Lululemon. The stock was about 350. So I think management hasn't been able to reinvent. How did they keep him? I mean, think about that. How did they keep him? Josh, what else? I would love to get your take. Amazon is flat on the year? Isn't that something?

What the hell is going on there? It's Amazon Web Services, and they better do a better, they got to show you 22% growth this week. What's keeping that stock from participating with the rest of the NASDAQ? The last five years, what a magnificent underperformer. Right, it is amazing, and I don't want to blame Jack.

I think that what's happened is that Amazon Web Services was doing really great, and then Google Cloud, Thomas Curran came in, and obviously Azure, and Nadella is a very tough guy. But I think the main thing is I take the... from my son who does software, okay? He does venture capital software. And he says, look, I would never write

on Amazon Web Services because it's retail product. You're right on OpenEd. You're right on Azure. You're right on OpenEd. Like developing software. And when you hear like the cutting edge people don't want to write on it, what that really means is. that that's the beginning of the end. It means that it's just a product that's meant for retailers. And then, you know, they have the outage this weekend. The stock should not have gone off. The outage was terrible. But I do believe that they-

are in a scrum against Walmart and Costco on retail. This Amazon Web Services is losing customers. Behind on AI. Yeah, they're behind on AI. And when I had this... discussion with Andy Jassy. I said, look, Andy, you're doing, you don't want to pay Jensen's price. And I get that. And you're doing your tranium and you got your really interesting chips.

But the fact is, is that no one wants to write on you because they can go to OpenAI and they can write on NVIDIA. Does Bezos pull a Bob Iger? I'm sorry? Does Bezos pull a Bob Iger? Or Howard Schultz or anyone else who's had to come back. He respects Jassy and that guy Doug who does retail is really fabulous. I just think that if you're going to, that he's decided to be cheap.

He's cheap. He won't pay Jensen. And the fact is that Musk, if you go over Musk's conference call, there's this moment in the call where he goes, and you know what? NVIDIA is the best, and I have to use NVIDIA. Now think about that. There isn't anything that he's ever said that he isn't the best. He's always the best. And he goes, you know what? NVIDIA is the best. And I was like...

Yes, I knew that. And Jassy should read that and he should recognize that this whole trading bullshit, no one wants to use this stuff because it's not fancy. Did you notice that they're not in that carousel of companies that are announcing open AI partnerships? It seems like there's a cool club that Oracle is in and Sam Altman is in and Amazon is not in any of these announcements. How about that Anthropic? They have more money in Anthropic. Anthropic went to Google.

All right, a few other ones. We spoke about- But I'm on this one, by the way. I'm like spending- Wait, I got one before I forget it. No, no, I'm spending a lot of time with Amazon to see if it can't be great because I love Amazon, the company. I'm not giving up on Amazon. I'm not. Palantir, are you as-

with Alex Karp as he is with himself. All right, so. I find him to be really interesting. I'm not long the stock. I'm curious what you think. I'm one of the new books that come out. Axios has some stuff about it. I don't like him. Isn't he a Philly? He's a Philly guy too? Yeah. Oh, I told him that. I said, listen, like you're like a more repulsive Philly guy than I am. I gave him a note once. I said, I'm not your enemy. And he goes, yeah. I said, no, that's a peace offering. Yeah.

It was like horrible. He's like a horrible guy. But I think he's real. And I say that because like all the companies that have hired him, the big ones, I've called them and I said, how is it? And they all... To a person say, listen, it's pretty good. I mean, he's on fire. That business is on fire. It's on fire. But is it too expensive even given how on fire they are? It seems crazy to me. It is rule of 80. I think I'm going to end up.

It's going to go to- They're killing Willamette. They're killing it. And look, Boeing just went with them, and Ortberg was a very serious guy. When I say they're serious guys, it's like the scene in Succession. Right? Yeah, right. Brian Cox. You're not serious people. You are not serious people. Well, it's a great line because I'm talking about people who are serious. Like, Orpah would not be going to him. I know a kid who went there from Wharton, and I know his mom.

And his mom was saying, you know, they work 24-7. They're all, Karp to them is a hero because he's really not imperious at all to them. And that's what makes me like him. Now, I sent that guy Shyam, the number two guy. He had a really good piece about the military last week. I sent him an email, and I knew he wasn't going to return, but I just said, look, I know you guys despise me, whatever. But then I meet this woman.

Wendy, who's in charge of defense. She's head of defense. She's a department of defense at Palantir, which is like a real legitimate Palantir. And she says she came up to me. And Heather was there. She goes, hey. Alex likes you. I said, what? What? Alex likes you. I said, yeah, yeah, sure. He thinks he's a good guy. I said, if he thinks he's a good guy, what does he think about the guys that he really dislikes? Jimmy, a few other iconic American brands. Take any one you want. Chipotle.

Nike, Starbucks, Airbnb. Chipotle, that guy. I mean, I love Scott. He's not pulling it off. I mean, I check all these different Chipotles. The last one I went to on Sunday night, dirty, ridiculous, used to be nice. I think Elliott Hill is going to turn Nike. It's going to be two quarters.

There's too much inventory. I spent a lot. I went to a Dallas Eagles game with him. I really wanted to find out if the guy's real. I think the guy is very, very real. But New Balance is the one he's worried about because they're better performance. He's not worried about Hoka. Obviously, everybody else isn't either after today's number. But I think he's going to.

be able to pull it off. I really do. That's a nice... Hoka is Deckers. That's Deckers, yeah. That was a bad... The numbers were mid-single. Chipotle, no? Chipotle, no. Airbnb? You have to change management. Airbnb? ABME? Airbnb. Airbnb. I'm sorry. No, no. Chesky's an interesting figure because I like him, but he has to bring in someone else to have a bigger vision than he does.

Because he's like, you got like Dara has a big vision. And he has to bring a guy like Tony Hsu from DoorDash. Really big vision. His vision isn't big enough. Now. When I've mentioned that to him, he's like, I don't have the vision either. So when you say something like that to a guy who's insecure. They say, well, what's your vision? But you say to a secure guy, I say, yeah, I got to get somebody else in. I think Brian Nichols is going to turn Starbucks big because he was about execution.

It was about execution at Chipotle. That stock has been $85 for six years. I think it's going to be. This is the year? I want to buy it. No, it's going to be – look, this quarter is still going to be tough. And I know that people are going to get discouraged, go back down to 79. But I think – You know what the problem is? China. You know what the problem is? China's got – it's worth 10 million. North of 10 bill now. Before it was south of 10 bill. I know it's –

splitting hairs, but it's not bad. I want to pull the trigger on these names. Every name Michael just mentioned. Chipotle, Nike, Starbucks. Don't say Chipotle because they got a real lot. They don't think anything's wrong. But they're all... 35 to 40 times earnings. They're expensive. We're in a market where even the worst performers, the stocks don't get cheap enough. No, they have to have an earnings breakout. And I do think that you have to believe in Brian.

who I do, and it's tough to just believe in a guy and also have to deal with the fact that everybody else must or else you wouldn't have that high PE. But Elliott is a Donahoe wreck that did really, really did a major damage to that company.

And two CEOs did major damage at Starbucks. That's a long – you're talking about five, six years of just terrible damage. Most brands cannot handle five, six years of damage. They just can't. And so those two, you're betting that the brand is strong enough to have dealt with how – How horrendous the CEOs were. When I say horrendous, like everyone in this room would have been better than anyone. You killed the last CEO of Starbucks.

Yeah, that was bad. That was rough. I had a decision tree for that piece. I had a decision tree. I had gotten a number. I pulled every stop out to get the numbers for Tim Hortons, which were not gettable, and get the numbers for Duncan, which... were not gettable, but I did. I really worked hard knowing about that interview. So I had them. So I said, if he is humble, go with, you know, I understand. It's fine. If he's not humble, just give him everything. I think you got him fired.

I really do. No, I know. All right, last one. Last one. What is, and this is not a recommendation to the audience. What is your favorite stock right now? Give us a 10-bagger now. Oh, my God. No, no. I have two.

I have two stocks that I love right now. Guys, will we take two? I have two stocks. We'll take two? All right, we'll take two. All right, first of all. We're not like your publisher. We'll take two. First of all, I actually love the stock of Boeing. Really? Yeah, I do. Okay. Because they've solved the construction problems.

Okay. And the demand is incredible. They got their act together. They got their act together. And Kelly's real serious. And they actually won. The fact that they won that fighter plane told you that the government's not going to give them a hard time. Where does that stock trade today? It's at 219. I think you can go to 600. Yeah, I think you can go to 300 pretty quickly. Okay. Once they get the cash flow and the cash flow is really down. They're in the good graces of the White House again.

They're in great, yeah. See, that really mattered. Airplane demand around the world is as strong as it's ever been. If Airbus could meet the demand, then it would be... It wouldn't be so good. But this is they also have the Y body and they don't have the non-union Y body is doing very well. But the other one is one that people are not thinking about and they got to think about, which is Capital One. Really? Yeah. Capital One.

I like the chart, COF. Oh, my God. How about that chart? They bought this company called Discover. And Discover has a network like MasterCard and Visa. Discover is a credit card company for people who have no money. Exactly right. Exactly right. And if you look at their numbers from this last quarter, they had a huge decline in defaults. Because this guy, Richard Fairbank, I've met Richard Fairbank. I was saying in 2007 that Capital One was going to go under.

And I get this phone call. I don't know how he got my phone number. I said, listen, I'm here. I'm like my proctologist, man. I got like a problem. I'm trying to figure it out. He goes, do you have 10 minutes? I go, half a minute later. The proctologist says, yeah, are you coming in here? He's a guy up in Columbia Presbyterian. I said, no, I got it. I'm talking to this guy from Capital One.

He said, well, what does that mean? And I got off the phone. I said, this guy's the smartest guy I have ever seen. And he won't come on the show. He's a very humble guy. But this Capital One is a rocket ship. Buffett's a big shareholder.

Which one? Berkshire is a big shareholder of Capital One. I didn't know that he's in that. Yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Ever since I don't think he's picking them, you know? So I've been checking what he's in. But the conference call was just magnificent. It was a magnificent conference call. And that's about the American consumer. So what a great way to end. Well, I mean, look, Capital One is the way they're going upscale and downscale.

And I urge people not to buy it, but to do everything you can to learn to stop. Do your research. Because this one is a monster. Jim, I want to close by just reiterating how appreciative Michael and I are for... decades of of your commentary and educating all of us i know the audience feels the same way you're an icon you're a legend this conversation lived up to it and uh

We love you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Round of applause, Jim Kramer. Oh. All right. Guys, I want to let everybody know we're going to be, we're going to run off the stage so we can get in place. We're going to do, we'll sign some books. We'll take some pictures. And we'll try to get to everybody. So let us make our egress. Nicole's going to walk us. Are you walking us off? Or what are we doing, music? All right.

We want to meet everybody. We'll be out there if you're interested. Thank you guys so much for being here. We appreciate it. Thank you.