First Trust ROI Podcast
On the ROI podcast, we discuss some of the most important questions facing investment professionals today, ranging from macroeconomic views, to perspectives on the equity and fixed income markets, to insights on practice management. We aim to cut through the noise, examine the data, and provide fresh insights to investment professionals as they help their clients find better ways to invest…seeking to generate attractive returns on their investments.
First Trust ROI Podcast
ROI Podcast | Episode 21 | A Recession is Still Likely…But Here’s Why We Could Be Wrong | May 20, 2024
Brian Wesbury joins the ROI Podcast for a wide ranging discussion about the state of the US economy, why government spending suppresses growth, and what factors could ultimately prevent an economic recession.
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Hi, welcome to this episode of the First Trust ROI podcast. I'm Ryan Isakainen, etf strategist at First Trust. Well, the economy has been a bit of a riddle recently. The looming recession that we expect to happen hasn't quite happened yet. We're wondering what the Fed is going to do. Are they going to lower rates by the end of the year? Maybe they're going to hike rates? What's going to happen with inflation? Are we going to see a revisiting of the surge of inflation that we saw a couple of years ago, or are things going to continue to trend lower? These are questions that are in the future that we don't know the answer to, but I have a wonderful guest to discuss them with.
Speaker 1:Today. I'm joined by Brian Westbury, chief Economist at First Trust. We're going to talk about all these issues and more on this episode of the First Trust ROI Podcast. Brian Westbury, thank you for joining us on the ROI Podcast again your second appearance. I don't know how we convinced you to do it, but I'm glad we did. Hopefully we can get more Westbury going forward. This is a really unusual and really somewhat confusing environment for markets and for the economy. In fact, I heard you recently say that you have less conviction than typical and you're a very high conviction guy when it comes to your forecasting what might happen going forward, and that makes sense to me. But why is that? Why is it hard to I don't know figure out what is likely to happen, at least in the near term?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great to be with you Ryan. I will tell you, I will sound convicted. But I'm just honest with people that inside the debates we're having within our economics department, within my own brain, about what might happen, it's all generated out of the fact that in the last three years three and a half years we've done things we've never done before Lockdown for COVID, print $6 trillion, borrow five and a half years. We've done things we've never done before Locked down for COVID, print $6 trillion, borrow five and a half, run $2 trillion deficits, pay people not to work.
Speaker 2:The uncertainty that comes from all that because we've never done these things before like this. We've done some things that are somewhat like it, but we've never locked down the economy before. So you can't look back and go 1962, this happened and this is the way it ended. And that's why no one knows exactly. And one of the perfect examples of this is if you look at futures markets, they kind of predict what they think the Fed is going to do. Predict what they think the Fed is going to do, and I think you said earlier this year it was six rate cuts were expected and now none are expected, or maybe one.
Speaker 2:But the point is, the markets are having a hard time figuring everything out and when you go from six rate cuts to none or one, that is a massive change and, as a result, anybody that claims to have perfect conviction I mean, well, clearly the mark. They were wrong. They had conviction there was going to be six and now they're convicted there's not going to be any, or maybe one rate cut. So it is a really difficult time because the cross currents of all the things that we did during COVID are coming to a head, if you will. I still believe we're going to have a recession because we never paid a price for that lockdown. I don't know how you can turn the switch off on a $25 trillion economy and sort of not feel the price, and I get it. There's inflation and things like that, but people that are invested in the stock market feel like we got away with it or everything's fine, and I just don't believe that. I still think we're gonna pay a price for it.
Speaker 1:So do you think and we're all trying to figure out what the Fed is going to do is it going to be six rate cuts? Is it going to be one rate cut, zero rate? Are they going to hike rates? No one really knows what the Fed is going to do. Do you think the Fed knows what the Fed is going to do?
Speaker 2:No, Okay, I don't, and part of this and we talked about this last time and I probably talk about it almost too much, because I think it bears repeating, though is that the Fed has completely changed the way they manage monetary policy. This happened back in the 08, 09 financial crisis, the banking crisis, subprime crisis, whatever you want to call it the panic. Ben Bernanke changed us with the introduction of quantitative easing and then also getting the ability to pay interest to banks on their reserves, changed us from a scarce reserve model to an abundant reserve model, and, rather than going into all the boring details of that, basically what it means is that, rather than having banks trading federal funds they used to do that Banks had federal funds trading desks. Every day, they traded federal funds, and that's what set the federal funds rate. Today, banks are overwhelmed. They have 40% reserves. Nobody needs to borrow any. Banks no longer trade Fed funds because they don't need to, and so, when you think about that, where does the federal funds rate come from? And I believe it's a simple answer it's a price fixed market.
Speaker 2:The Federal Reserve sets interest rates where they want to, and they can do that because there is no market mechanism. Banks no longer trade Fed funds. I've repeated myself. But so what the Fed does is just set rates, and over the last 15 years they held interest rates 80 percent of the time below inflation, which is crazy.
Speaker 2:And the reason I think one of the reasons they did it is to keep the borrowing costs for government expenditures lower than they would have been. We can leave that aside, but there's a lot of implications of that. But having interest rates at zero for nine out of the last 15 years, that's crazy. That's why all these like people are sitting on mortgages at two and a half percent, two and two and three quarters percent, and those mortgages to the banks that made them are now worth about 75 to 80 cents on the dollar and that's why we have all these losses in the banking system. But so, to come back to this, if the Fed is just setting rates wherever they want to, then no one knows what they're going to do. I know their inclination right now is to cut interest rates, but they can't because inflation is persistently high.
Speaker 1:If the Fed held rates below inflation, why didn't it cause more inflation during that long stretch of that decade where they held rates artificially low? Shouldn't that have caused more inflation during that long stretch of that decade where they held rates artificially?
Speaker 2:low. Shouldn't that have caused more inflation? Yeah, when we move from a.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, ryan, this, this I could teach a 15 week class you know well some three, three hours every Wednesday night and it would take us that long to get through the what's really going on here. I'm not exaggerating, because they completely changed how they manage money, so that, moving from the scarce reserve to the abundant reserve, one of the things that it did is it separated the money supply growth from the level of interest rates. They used to be connected. So when the Fed slowed the money supply down, it increased interest rates. When they raised money supply growth, it lowered interest rates, and now they've completely separated it.
Speaker 2:So back in that period that you were talking about, ben Bernanke held the federal funds rate at zero for seven consecutive years, did all that QE and pushed reserves into the banking system, but then, at the same time, held capital requirements on banks higher than normal and instituted liquidity rules on banks. So even though we were doing all that QE, the money supply didn't accelerate and so rates were zero. Qe was happening, but the money supply didn't go up, it didn't accelerate, and that's why we didn't get inflation. In fact, that Bernanke period, we had one and a half percent inflation during that seven years.
Speaker 2:It was so low that Jerome Powell, when he took over the Fed, started saying it's too low, dangerously low, so we need to get inflation higher. Well, he held interest rates at zero for two years, but this was during the pandemic, and so the federal government was buying treasury debt directly from the treasury and the treasury was injecting that money into the economy. And the including Jerome Powell and the Fed ignore money. M2 is what I think they ought to watch, and if you look at M2, it didn't grow during Bernanke. It did grow during the pandemic and Jerome Powell, and that's why we have inflation now and we didn't have it back when Ben Bernanke was the chairman of the Fed and we didn't have it back when Ben Bernanke was the chairman of the Fed.
Speaker 1:So, as the Fed is ostensibly fighting against inflation, there is still a lot of fiscal spending. That was these big packages that were passed over the last several years that are still impacting things now. Aren't those sort of cross currents that are, I don't know, causing maybe one of these eddies in the river? I mean, it seems like it's hard to slow down the velocity of money or slow down the economy if you're pouring money in and then you're also trying to keep things tight Right. So what gives there?
Speaker 2:There's a little bit of depth to this and some nuance. If the federal government decides to increase spending by $100 billion on semiconductor plants, the CHIPS bill and I'm not trying to mention the exact bill because I think it was over 200 billion, but let's say they decide they're gonna spend a hundred billion dollars on building CHIPS plants, and the way they do that is they go out and borrow money from Peter to give a hundred billion, from Peter to give a hundred billion to Paul to build CHIPS plants. Well, all that does is take100 billion from Peter to give $100 billion to Paul to build chips plants. Well, all that does is take money away from Peter and give money to Paul. It doesn't increase the money supply, and so government spending itself doesn't cause inflation. There's a lot of people that think it's an injection of money, but it's not, because all you're doing is taking it from Peter to give to Paul.
Speaker 2:Where the Fed comes in is when they're the ones that are Peter, when they buy the bonds, and so they print new money, give it to the treasury, the treasury then gives it to Paul, and now you've injected money. So we call that monetizing the debt, and that's what they did during the pandemic. So government spending itself doesn't cause inflation if the Fed doesn't monetize it. And so over this past 18 months or so, the Fed's been doing quantitative tightening. They've actually been selling off their treasury bond portfolio. At the same time, the treasury is borrowing more money from one part of the world. It could be foreign investors, it could be anybody that buys those bonds and then giving it to politically favored parts like semiconductor plants or EV purchasers or solar or wind or all kinds of other things that the government decides, or using it to forgive student debt. But only if the Fed monetizes the debt does that turn into inflation?
Speaker 1:So all of those fiscal spending plans? My theory and we'll see how it plays out is that the incentives are that the government, that the party in power has this big pot of money that they've had passed into law the last several years, they're going to want to concentrate as much of that fiscal spending in an election year as possible. Yep, because a better economy means that you know you're more likely to get reelected.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Is that happening?
Speaker 2:Yes, okay, okay, yes. Now, one thing that's interesting is like so John Maynard Keynes is the one that said deficit spending is good.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he's actually spinning in his grave right now because he said it's good when the economy needs it, like when the private sector blows it. He believed in market failure, like we had speculation or businesses build inventories up too much, they got too optimistic, and then you have a recession. And when the recession happens, the government comes in and can fix it. All right. But then he said when things get good which, by the way, in the last two years unemployment's been below 4% and like that's good, you're supposed to run a surplus or at least a balanced budget, not run those deficits anymore. Well, in 2022, we had a trillion-dollar deficit.
Speaker 2:In 2023, and this is why Keynes is spinning in his grave with, the economy grew 3%, unemployment's under 4%, jobs are growing 200, 250,000 a month, and we had a $2 trillion deficit. So we went from one to two. That extra trillion actually led to more growth last year. The problem is it grows the size of the government and it can help in the short term. I believe in the long term it actually hurts, but we can leave that aside. So they have to in order to be stimulative to the economy. This year, the election year, 2024, they're gonna have to raise the deficit again above two trillion, because if you stay at two it's a zero impact. I mean you had two more last year, two more this year doesn't make any difference. You have to actually find a way to increase it.
Speaker 1:It's the change, the rate of change, more so than the absolute level. Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So even though it's a $2 trillion deficit, it doesn't mean you'll get more growth, but they're trying to find ways. It doesn't mean you'll get more growth, but they're trying to find ways Like, for example, the foreign aid bill with Ukraine and Israel and, I guess, taiwan and who knows what else is in there. That's above and beyond the budget, like they broke the budget to add that spending and a lot of that will go to military production companies here in the US that make munitions or fighting instruments, and that will help, but they're only going to get $100 billion or $150 billion extra into the economy this year. So, yes, they want.
Speaker 2:The governments throughout history and the US is no different always want to try to do anything they can like that to boost growth in an election year, and the people in those in power have the ability sometimes to get that done. By the way, there are a lot of people that believe the Fed will cut rates at least once before the election rates, at least once before the election, and there's an argument to be made that that would be a political rate cut that, oh yeah, we're going to do it just because we can, and it'll make things a little bit better, just before the November rolls around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so you'd agree that we're not in a recession now, right, yep, so why are we not? Why has this recession that is on the horizon, seems like it's coming? Why hasn't it come? Is it some of the things that we've been talking about, some of the government spending, or what's, or is it just innovation? Is it AI? What's what's? Why has the recession not come?
Speaker 2:yet you just hit on it. This is a great question and and I, I, I want to separate things into a couple of different categories. So so the, the. The first thing is that I I view the lot, the, the lockdowns, the, the, the, the economic shutdown from COVID as a car wreck. And then all the money we printed, all the money we borrowed to pay people not to work, that's morphine. So you're in a car wreck, you're in pain, they give you morphine. You don't feel the pain, and once that morphine wears off, you feel the pain. So I keep waiting for that morphine to wear off. The money supply is now down negative in the last 18 months, so that's no longer in the system. I think it stayed in the system longer than I thought it would, but we've now burned through all the money that we printed.
Speaker 2:Last year, I think half of our economic growth we had about 3% real GDP growth half of that came from government spending, and you can look at government employment growth versus private sector employment growth. So government jobs last year were up 3% and, by the way, the government payroll was up 8.5% last year, and so not only did we hire 3% more government workers, but we paid 5% more to all those government workers as well. Everybody's on a COLA. They get adjusted for inflation. Private sector jobs only grew 1.8%. So I think the evidence is pretty clear. Government has been pushing economic growth and that's kept us away from a recession, but they can't keep doing that forever, because the government is funded from the private sector. The government doesn't make money, never has, never will, and so it can only take us so far. And the bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger the government gets, the less ability we have to grow in the future. And so I think the morphine's almost worn out, but it hasn't completely worn out. They're looking, as we just talked about, for ways to find more money to spend this year to keep things going, and they found a little, but it's not going to be as strong as last year.
Speaker 2:And then there's a line I would draw. So that's what the government has done and, by the way, let me just make a quick statement this really government has done. And, by the way, let me just make a quick statement, this really America to me and this is kind of more of a philosophical statement, I just want to say it the secret of America was our constitution. I get all that, but really was that it led to innovation, entrepreneurship and invention, and that's what created all of this growth. And what I have seen especially since 2008, but it started a long time ago is that the government now is bigger in America than it has ever been, and the fact that we are sitting here talking about, well, is the Fed going to stimulate the economy or is government spending going to stimulate the economy? That's not what America is about. America is about entrepreneurship, and I believe it's a dangerous place we are in, because when you count on government for all this growth, eventually it will fail. When you count on government for all this growth, eventually it will fail. Every single society that has ever tried to grow itself by getting a bigger and bigger and bigger government has eventually failed, and that's what worries me and it worries a lot of other people too, and so I wish we need to cut the size of government. We need to get the Fed less important. We need to like. If every conversation is about whether they're going to cut rates two times or raise them one time or three. If that's all our conversations, we are not talking about the right things, like that's not where growth comes from. But let me leave that aside and that. So we talked about that.
Speaker 2:You mentioned AI and technology. I could be wrong about this recession and profit growth slowing down because of technology. You know, it's fascinating to me because if you, our government federal government in the US was 2.5% of GDP back in 1930. So 2.5 cents out of every dollar Today. The federal government, this doesn't even count state and local, and all of that is 25% of GDP. And if you sort of listen to the free market people and the libertarians and the freedmen and the Austrians, they would say the bigger, this bigger, bigger, bigger government means we're going to grow slower, slower, slower. And. But what's always amazing to me is how ingenious people are. So government keeps getting in the way and causing more problems, but we figure out how to grow anyway. It's kind of amazing. America still leads the world in growth and new technology and I would argue it's just our. We're ingenious, all right, we find a way to make growth happen, regardless of how many mistakes Washington DC makes. And we this is where I, you know, I always have believed that, but I think government is so big today that we're going to pay a price. But I could be wrong, and AI is a an extremely powerful thing. Now I can see some upsides to it, some downsides to it, but in the end it'll be positive.
Speaker 2:There are other things going on. You know these new weight loss I guess they're diabetic drugs that people take and they work really well for weight loss Ozempic, and I can't even remember all the other names, but there's a bunch of them. I've seen studies where people say people are going to get so much healthier because the obesity is going to go down, we're going to use less health care, people are going to be more productive in their labor and it could raise growth. I think they're wrong. But 2% a year, which would be astounding because the entire economy has only grown 2% a year for the last 20 years. So I think that's overstated, but it's certainly a positive number to have people lose weight and be in better health.
Speaker 2:Starlink, putting all these low earth satellites in orbit. Our cell phones are going to be satellite phones Anywhere in the world. You don't need a cell tower, and so those are just three big ones AI, you know these weight loss drugs and, and Starlink. You put these three things together and and then add the other 200 cool things going on that are going to, you know, power generation, battery technology, all these things that could lift our growth and keep our inflation down, because it means higher productivity all at the same time. So if I'm wrong, it's because I've underestimated that.
Speaker 1:Is there anything besides the size? The US far and away has the best technology sector. We're the envy of the rest of the world when it comes to innovation, when it comes to technology, and there's got to be certain conditions that have allowed for that to take place. And you pointed out that the government getting too big is one of the things that suppresses that. But what are the conditions that have allowed us to thrive, in your opinion?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's really four pillars to prosperity, and I've actually divided it into five now, because one is government spending, and I've actually divided it into five now, because one is government spending, and I've now divided into spending and regulation, but free trade is number one, or I'm not listing this in order of importance, but free trade would be number one, but free trade would be number one. A stable monetary policy. You have to have a stable unit of account to transact business, lower taxes, less spending and regulation, and so you put those things on the table and those are the things that lead to growth. And deeper than that, if you will, would be our constitution, respect for property rights, democracy, the ability of an inventor to own the invention. That gives the fire of invention to an economy, and all that comes from the Constitution.
Speaker 2:So that's why the US has always been such a great leader in technology, and there will be people out there that say, oh no, it's government. And the space program and defense program, and they invented the Internet and all these things. None of these things would have come to fruition If government could invent all these things. Russia or China or Venezuela would be in the lead, and they're not, because you need the private sector and the incentives that come along with it, and in order for that to flourish, you need free trade. You need, you know, free trade, low taxes, less spending, less regulation and a stable monetary policy.
Speaker 1:You know scale of one to 10, or however you want to describe it. Are we doing better or worse? I would suspect that, based on your earlier comments, the government spending part we're not doing very well in Regulation.
Speaker 2:So how are we Not good, yeah, when you have 3% government job growth and 1.8% private sector growth. That's not a good sign for a free market. So this is why I'm worried and, like I said, the one thing that could make me wrong is I'm completely underestimating the power of these new technologies, that AI is going to make profits go up, no matter what the Fed does. And my biggest worry about that is there are people that say that I read a headline in the Wall Street Journal not long ago AI versus the Fed and it was kind of amazing to me. It's not wrong to kind of think that way, but I'm like wow, is it really that powerful and it can overwhelm even? I mean, the Fed can do Great Depression monetary policy and it doesn't matter because AI is here and it might be. I don't know how to judge it. I know it's a really powerful technology. It's going to be cool. I mean, we're all going to have AI bots. You're going to have an AI bot. This is what they call them Like a robot.
Speaker 2:No, it'll be on your iPad or your phone or whatever. You're going to have an AI bot for home and an AI bot for work and let's say you're a financial advisor and you're going to say remind me, you know, our Mrs Smith needs to take her to withdraw from her IRA. You know, this year and we have to pay the tax, can you please?
Speaker 2:you know get all the paperwork ready to do that, and it'll do it. Or at home, you're gonna be like it's Wednesday, I need milk, and so remind me, or order my new prescription, or, hey, could you pay the plumber? We're gonna all become more productive because of this, Now. At the same time, it's gonna. I think there's some negatives too.
Speaker 2:Ai could never write the US Constitution. Like the founding fathers, they read Marcus Aurelius and Aristotle, and and I mean the amount of Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that that's what they had access to and that's where the Constitution came from. The Magna Carta thing, Well, now AI would read that. I'm not saying it won't, but it'll also read the New York Times, and I mean it all depends on who programs AI. But if you give equal weight to the New York Times and equal weight to Aristotle, you will not write the US Constitution as it's written, and that scares me. So you got these positives that could make our lives better, but you have these negatives where you'd never come up with the greatest document written in human governance history.
Speaker 2:I mean other than the Bible. So it's kind of interesting to me. But that's what worries me is that government has gone so far that even these things can't bail us out, and so right now, I have the market overvalued by about 20%. I still think there's a recession coming, told you, I was convicted about my forecast, but I will tell you there's a lot of questions underneath it.
Speaker 1:So, as you think about what makes you optimistic, it sounds like the potential. For you know, maybe some said if you're wrong it's because of some of these technologies and things, overwhelming maybe the negatives Right. Is there anything else that makes you optimistic, as you kind of look at your crystal ball?
Speaker 2:I would argue. So the pendulum swings all the time. The problem is it swung back and forth but the government keeps getting bigger, so so, but the pendulum does swing and we had a massive pendulum swing in the 80s and 90s after the stagflation of the 70s. Now we're not as bad as we were in the 70s in terms of stagflation. You know, 10% unemployment, 10% inflation, that kind of stuff. People are not happy. 70% of Americans are not happy with the economy. Today Joe Biden's approval rating is worse than Jimmy Carter's. But what happened is we elected Ronald Reagan and the pendulum swung. We went to lower taxes, less spending, more free trade. You know it was a better monetary policy. All those pillars of growth moved in the right direction. I believe the pendulum is swinging today that it's gone too far.
Speaker 2:I just in the past, you know few, 72 hours to a week campuses have been under, you know, strife because of these heavy protests and, contrary to what we did in the summer of 2020, the police have now gone in and cleared out all these places, I mean, and that's a huge, huge change, and we didn't just let them rage like we have done, and I think people are kind of fed up with this kind of protest, if you will. We lived through burning of cities and all this and really didn't stop it. Now these things have not been let to go on very long, and I think that's a sign. If you look at Argentina, they elected Javier Millet, who quotes Milton Friedman, and he's now the new president.
Speaker 2:In Canada, there's a I can't ever say his name right Poulier is 17 points ahead of Trudeau. The election's not until next year I think early next year, but it's a ways off but he's 17 points up and he quotes Milton Friedman as well, and that's a pendulum. So did Ronald Reagan, and so the point I would get to is that makes me optimistic about the future too. So, even though we might have this kind of stagflationary environment here and possibly a recession, I do see the pendulum swinging back the other way. It may not be everybody's favorite candidate, but I think policies are going to shift.
Speaker 1:You've mentioned Milton Friedman a few different times. What is your favorite Milton Friedman books that people listening or viewing the podcast should make sure that they read as they think? About the library of books that Milton Friedman has written.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I'm telling you, the favorite book is "'There's no Such Thing as a Free Lunch'. You can't get it". I used to talk about this from the podium in my speeches and they're all used and they're all collector's items and they haven't reprinted it. But he wrote a book on the Great Depression oh my gosh. And he also wrote Capitalism and Socialism. You can get his video series and actually an idea for you. In the 70s he went around speaking on campuses and it's called Free to Choose, and I think there's 10 or 11 or 12 videos. I took my family on a driving vacation and, for the kids to get spending money, I paid them $20 for every one of those they watched, and so they made 200 bucks and that's what they got to spend on vacation.
Speaker 2:But it and, by the the way, you have to listen to it because it's uh well if they have their ear pods or whatever is that that's a series with phil donahue right uh, no, uh, but, but there you can find a series with phil donahue as well yeah, he did, he did, and you can find those on youtube okay, but this would be, uh, free to choose.
Speaker 1:There's a free to book.
Speaker 2:The free to choose was yeah, free to choose, is also a book. But he also did lectures. He went to campuses around the country. Is the book based on the lectures? Um, yeah, pretty much okay. Yeah, and he also wrote for newsweek and so there's compilations of those kinds of things. But yeah, anything you can get your hands on that milton friedman wrote.
Speaker 1:Uh, it's worth reading okay all right, my final question for you. I already asked you a little bit about your favorite Milton Friedman book, but what else is Brian Westbury reading these days?
Speaker 2:There are so many books to read, but one of the things that I have just recently re-tapped into is the Stoics, and that would be, you know, the Roman and Greek. You know this goes back to Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, and there is a reader, a daily reader, called the Daily Stoic. I forget the author or the kind of the editor, but it's a daily quote from one of those Stoics, and one of the reasons I like it today is that one of the key ideas of the Stoics is that your life is in your control, and if you let all this outside stuff influence you your envy, your jealousy, your anger you've been mistreated by somebody, and boy is that easy to do when they've locked down your business. But you have control over your only one thing, and that is yourself. And so they constantly focused on the internal, and I like it these days because it lets you tune down.
Speaker 2:It actually encourages you to tune down the noise coming from the rest of the world, and boy do we live in a noisy time. You know all the social media and the TV 24-7. One of the things that's happened to me is I hardly watch TV anymore, and I can remember the day when I would have CNBC on 24-7. I would leave the office and it would still be on the TV. I'd come back in and it'd be on, and then I changed to Fox Business and then for a while I went to Bloomberg, and now I don't watch any of it.
Speaker 2:And I'm going to hand that to the Stoics.
Speaker 1:They've kind of let me, they're the antidote to some of the noise. I'm in the middle of a book called the Anxious Generation by. Jonathan Haidt. I don't know if you've heard of that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have heard of it.
Speaker 1:It's kind of analyzing the current generation of kids coming up that's filled with anxiety because they spend too much time on social media, not enough time outside, you know, playing with their friends. Really, exactly, maybe. Maybe my kids need to read a little stoicism too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I think it is the only, the only. Uh, I just always caution everybody. When you read anne rand, she's not a stoic, but when you eat ran ran, she's an atheist. So if, like I, I always caution, I always caution people ignore that side and the Stoics, they're really complementary with religion, but they weren't very religious people. So when you read it, if you're a religious person, it won't destroy that side of you. But just realize that there was a little bit of tension between those two groups, sure sure. All right.
Speaker 1:Well, brian, it's been great to have you on the podcast again. We'll have to do it again soon, yeah, and thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of the ROI Podcast. We'll see you next time, thank you.
