Neil Dutta & Skanda on Why the Recession Signals Are All Wrong

Summary

The Compound and Friends – Episode Summary

Episode Title: Neil Dutta & Skanda on Why the Recession Signals Are All Wrong
Date: June 5, 2026
Hosts: Josh Brown (& Michael Batnick, mentioned)
Guests: Neil Dutta (Head of Economics at Renaissance Macro Research), Skanda Amarnath (Co-founder & Executive Director, Employ America)

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Overview:

This episode brings together two accomplished economists, Neil Dutta and first-time guest Skanda Amarnath, for a lively, detail-rich exploration of the contradictory signals in the U.S. economy. Central themes include the misunderstood signals of a potential recession, the outsized—and complex—impact of the AI and technology boom, the disconnect between labor and profit, inflation drivers, and the evolving Federal Reserve policy debate. The conversation is energetic, data-driven, and uncompromisingly candid.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Consumer Spending, Ticket Prices, and Wealth Effects

• The show begins with amusing anecdotes about Knicks playoff ticket prices and the small-world effect of friends buying each other's seats.
• $7,000 Knicks Tickets: Josh and Neil discuss the astonishing prices for Knicks finals tickets, drawing parallels to wealth effects in the broader economy, especially for upper-income brackets.
  • "Is there any economic justification? ... Stock market people are rich and they're buying tickets at any price." – Josh Brown [05:13]
• Skanda highlights that, while the upper end is driving discretionary spending, the labor market and job growth are not as robust as consumer behavior suggests.
• The broader implication: high-end consumerism is not representative of general economic health.

2. The State of the U.S. Economy

• Skanda: The narrative has shifted from past worries of a labor market slowdown to current inflation surprises and a still-solid, but not overheating, job market.
  • "The labor market is not signaling red right now. It's signaling something that's at least solid. Maybe there's been some pickup actually in some sectors that have been soggy for a long time." – Skanda Amarnath [11:21]
• Neil: Less optimistic; points to stagnant income growth and the probability of consumer stress due to rising prices and soft wage growth.
  • "Income growth continues to slide...there are stresses building for the household sector and...there’s a limit to how much people can spend by drawing down savings." – Neil Dutta [13:10]

3. The ‘AI Boom’ vs. Traditional Economic Signals

• Skanda and Neil dig into how massive AI-driven capital expenditure is distorting historical signals usually used to anticipate recessions.
  • "We're clearly seeing we've ripped past 7%. So we've ripped past the peak for housing investment in the 2000s...this is this very investment-intensive part of the expansion." – Skanda Amarnath [18:44]
  • "There’s a decent contingent...that think this is having a fairly modest effect...a lot of the growth from AI leaks abroad in the form of imports." – Neil Dutta [20:11]
• The confusing role of GDP accounting: much AI investment benefits foreign manufacturers; thus, U.S. GDP doesn’t capture the full scope of the boom.
  • "It’s about the spending. The spending is sitting on some company’s balance sheet…business cycles are risk cycles." – Skanda Amarnath [23:02]
• Key argument: It’s the magnitude of ongoing investment (and willingness to invest) that should be watched, not laggy or misleading macro indicators.

4. Traditional Recession Signals Don’t Apply

• Construction/housing is in a “deep freeze,” yet the economy and markets remain resilient—contrary to classic business cycle theory (“housing is the business cycle”).
• AI and tech CapEx have replaced residential investment as the primary cyclical driver.
  • "It’s investment, not the consumer, that drives the business cycle. Right now it's risk on." – Skanda Amarnath [30:14]

5. Spending vs. Income: When Will the Music Stop?

• Spending is currently outpacing income, and personal savings rates are low, but that hasn’t yet translated to a pronounced economic slowdown.
• The panelists admit: traditional timing tools (like the savings rate) for predicting recession are weak right now.
  • "Looking at the savings rate...is not a good timing mechanism..." – Neil Dutta [15:15]
• Two ways spending could slow: mass layoffs (not observed yet outside of tech) or a market correction.

6. The Investment Boom & Market Breadth

• The present cycle’s investment-led nature is reflected in everything from industrial and utility stocks to the "Mag 7."
• Surprise: S&P 493 (excluding Mag 7) outperformed the top tech names year to date. Exposure to the AI CapEx boom is broader than most realize.
  • "These are not tech stocks. They trade like semis because their order books have become AI CapEx order books..." – Neil Dutta [38:00]
• Is this true “breadth,” or just a different kind of concentration?
  • "Is it really like a sign of breadth or just a sign that things are really concentrated into one area of the economy?" – Neil Dutta [40:58]

7. Inflation, Living Standards & Productivity

• Despite “productivity boom” talk, household living standards are not clearly improving—most gains are flowing to corporate margins.
  • "This is a very unusual productivity boom. The point of investment is to raise household living standards. Can we say that's happening with AI?" – Neil Dutta [35:23]
  • Skanda: AI has not been widely adopted in the real economy, and we are not seeing broad-based productivity gains yet.
  • "If it's a genuine productivity boom...it's not yet raising household living standards, and I don't know how long that can continue." – Neil Dutta [35:23]

8. Labor vs. Profits: Political and Economic Ramifications

• The labor share of income is at its lowest since 1947, while the profit share hits records. The result: wide societal and political divides.
  • "Labor share of gross domestic income sank to 51%, the lowest since records began in 1947...profit share climbed to 12.1%, the highest since 1950." – Greg Ip via Josh Brown [46:10]
• Potential explanations: superstar firms, tax policy, shift in labor market dynamics (especially poor wage growth for blue-collar jobs).

9. The Fed, Policy, and Macro Forecasting

• In-depth, real talk on the limits of Federal Reserve power, especially in the face of supply shocks (e.g., energy, AI components).
• Disagreement over how monetary policy should react:
  • Skanda: The Fed shouldn’t overreact to supply-driven inflation, but expects they will.
    • "Don't underestimate their scale and duration...these things can last a lot longer than you think in real time." – Skanda Amarnath [56:05]
  • Neil: If future wage and labor income growth reaccelerates, rate hikes may be necessary; otherwise, risk of overtightening.
    • "If labor income isn’t there, where else is it?" – Neil Dutta [51:41]

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Timestamped Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Knicks Tickets and the Wealth Effect

• "My brother-in-law bought your tickets!" – Matt Middleton, relayed by Josh Brown [04:34]
• "Do you think this is like the stock market people are rich and they're buying tickets at any price?" – Josh Brown [05:13]

On the Economy’s Confusing Signals

• "I've never heard the economy described as soggy. I like that. It's an ugly word, but maybe the right word." – Josh Brown [12:20]
• "Labor market's not at the left tail and the inflation stuff's closer to the right tail. That's a little bit different macro picture." – Skanda Amarnath [11:21]

On AI Investment Supplanting Housing in the Economic Cycle

• "AI is about to surpass the peak spending on housing at its 2015–6 peak spend...we've ripped past the 2000s boom." – Skanda Amarnath [18:44]

On Traditional Recession Signals

• "It's unusual—equipment investment that's driving things—usually it’s residential." – Neil Dutta [31:42]

On Productivity and Living Standards

• "What is the point of investment? Ultimately…to raise household living standards. Can we say that's what's happening with AI?" – Neil Dutta [35:23]

On Margins and Stock Market Breadth

• "15 non-tech S&P 500 companies collectively worth $2 trillion now move with semis at correlations of 0.5 or higher." – Neil Dutta [38:00]

On Inflation’s Roots

• "Inflation is a lot more of a problem this time than in 1999 or 2000...tied to tariffs, the AI boom itself, closure of Strait of Hormuz." – Skanda Amarnath [26:51]

On Labor Share vs. Profits

• "Labor share...sank to 51%, the lowest since 1947; profit share climbed to 12.1%, the highest since 1950." – Josh Brown [46:10]

On the Fed’s Role

• "It's as likely that the Fed captures [Kevin Warsh] than he captures the Fed. If I were a betting man..." – Neil Dutta [52:37]
• *"Business cycles are risk cycles...it's the risk and willingness to actually spend" – Skanda Amarnath [67:10]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |---------------|-------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–06:00 | Knicks ticket prices & defining the wealth effect | | 11:00–14:00 | High-level U.S. economy & labor market review | | 17:30–20:50 | The AI boom: investment cycle, “import leakage” | | 23:00–24:30 | Risk cycles: what drives business cycles today? | | 29:00–32:00 | Consumer spending vs investment boom | | 38:00–40:00 | Market breadth, SMH correlations, and the “AI effect” | | 46:00–49:00 | Wages vs profits, societal/political effects | | 54:10–58:20 | Fed policy debate: hikes, supply shocks, Warsh | | 60:00–64:59 | Labor market, jobs data, AI and employment | | 66:29–68:50 | What could turn the cycle? Signals to watch |

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Recap: What to Watch in This Unique Cycle

• Watch investment appetite and CapEx plans, especially among non-tech companies: When does willingness to spend falter?
• Credit spreads: A classic market indicator; their widening would signal a turn in risk appetite [67:27].
• Labor market layoffs / wage growth: Weak nominal compensation alongside Fed tightening could tip the balance.
• Nontraditional signals: Traditional macro indicators lag behind; the current cycle is investment- and sentiment-led, not consumer-dragged or housing-driven.

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Final Thoughts and Tone

The hosts and guests maintain an energetic, candid, and data-driven conversation, punctuated by humor and down-to-earth banter. The overall message: traditional recession playbooks don’t fit this cycle—a result of global supply shocks, the AI capex revolution, and new forms of wealth effect. Real-time market and credit indicators matter more than old-school leading signals. Policymakers, investors, and the average observer must adapt to a new, less easily forecastable, and highly dynamic environment.

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Further Reading/Contacts:

• Skanda Amarnath – employamerica.org; also active on Twitter/X
• Neil Dutta – Renaissance Macro Research; NY Knicks Instagram (jokingly); LinkedIn

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Episode Theme in a Sentence

“The old recession signals are all wrong, and everything—from spending behavior to market leadership to policy risk—is being rewritten by the relentless AI investment boom.”

Transcript

[Josh Brown]

How the hell did you get on that flight? Like, what was the deal?

[Neil Dutta]

So I called my broker and I

[Josh Brown]

said, is your broker's name Jason?

[Neil Dutta]

No, his name is John. I'm not going to tell the firm out of respect. But anyway, I go to him. I'm like, I want tickets to game three, so make that happen. I know you guys can do it, so hook me up. And he goes, there's no way we can do that. And he's like, give me a minute. So he comes back with this opportunity, which is, like. They call it the NYX Flyaway Experience, basically. So my wife and I were able to go. They put us in a chartered plane, like a commercial Delta plane. They flew us to San Antonio. They fed us.

[Josh Brown]

Was it all. It was all Knicks fans.

[Neil Dutta]

All Knicks fans. Unbelievable Meet and greet. I met Clyde, John Starks, King Henrik was there.

[Josh Brown]

Amazing. On your flight.

[Neil Dutta]

Yeah. And, you know, they all spoke. Then we went to the game.

[Josh Brown]

And the Knicks put you on their Instagram.

[Neil Dutta]

That was. That was a. Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

That was the main moment for you and your wife. Look at. Look at this handsome devil. Look at this cute couple. What a. What a freaking photo.

[Neil Dutta]

Yeah, that was great. No, I mean, did you show your kids yet? Oh, yeah, they saw. I mean, they were. They were. We were all. I was. This is, like, better than going on Bloomberg or cnbc.

[Josh Brown]

Hell, yeah.

[Neil Dutta]

Not as fun as going on this podcast, though.

[Skanda Amarnath]

That's right.

[Neil Dutta]

But, yeah. No, and then, you know, we watched the hope and joy and dreams just evaporate out of that building.

[Josh Brown]

How'd that feel?

[Neil Dutta]

Wonderful. Like, it was just, you know, the. The best is when they know they've lost, and then they all just start leaving early. That is the best feeling.

[Josh Brown]

I had that feeling in Philly for Game three. And I don't take Jaylen for granted, but watching him every day, he. He's special. Obviously, seeing the frustration through the eyes of the opposing fans. This one guy threw his hat and said he doesn't miss. And it just, like, melted my heart to see. No, it's great to see that. All right, so here's my story. I have season tickets. I share it with a friend of mine. And 109, row 20, that's where I sit. He sent me a picture, and I said. With a ticket sale. I said, what is this? He goes, that's a $3,000 profit for game four. Like, we spoke about. Like, dude, I. I don't remember speaking about this. I. I would not have been cool with selling game four to the finals. At least I don't think I. I don't think, I don't think I said that. All right, so the situation that we're in now, the tickets, they get in tickets for the New York City based games are higher than super bowl prices. The last time I checked for game four, it's like $7,000. All right, so here's, here's my tickets. Round one was 380. Then it went to like 550. 7.50. 1350 for the finals for each ticket. So 1350, we sold them for $4,500. You can't get into the building for less than $7,000. The Super bowl get in price was like 35, so it's double. Now prices will probably come down a little bit, but the cheapest ticket in my section was listed. I just checked for $17,000. Now I don't know that anybody's paying $17,000, but that's literally. Could I get $15,000 for the tickets perhaps? So where we are now is we're using, we're working with my ticket broker to basically like have games three and four and break even. So basically whatever. Our tickets would have cost 13.50 a piece to have like worse seats. So I'm still going to games three and four, but in worse seats than my original seats. So we did like all of this. Now it's not my friend's fault. Like we couldn't have possibly known. But here's the thing that really hurts. Last night I was having drinks with Matt Middleton and Chris Cherry from Future Proof. They went to the Watch party with me. So even the Watch. So the Watch party was a phenomenal experience. Unbelievable. 18,000 people in the Garden. It was like basically like a home game, but it was so freaking loud. You know why? There was like no corporate seats. It was only die hard fans. It was so loud. So they released the tickets and in two minutes they're gone. Like I was number 330,000.

[Neil Dutta]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Josh Brown]

So $10 tickets. I bought it on Ticketmaster or Tick pick for like 60 bucks. Whatever. Well worth it to get in. There was such a great experience. So we're at dinner having drinks and Matt was like, oh, I didn't know you had season tickets. I said, yeah, where do you sit? 109. He goes, what row? Like row 20. He goes, dude, my brother in law bought your tickets. And I'm like, you mother, give it back. I want it back. I'm canceling the transaction. How crazy is that? Out of all the.

[Neil Dutta]

What a Small world.

[Josh Brown]

Matt Middleton bought my tickets for well below what I could have sold them for, man.

[Neil Dutta]

Well, at least you're still going.

[Josh Brown]

At least I'm still going. So what do you guys. Do you guys think there's any like, economic justification? Do you think this is like, this is like the whole story? It's like, yeah, the stock market people are rich and they're buying tickets at any price.

[Skanda Amarnath]

I think that's basically the story, right? We got World cup tickets that are obviously selling for. I mean, not as much as me of Eva wants, but like, we just have like so much discretionary spending is actually a pretty solid. Maybe it's for the upper income part of the distribution, but it's still like, it's a go go time in terms of consumer spending that may not be backed up by all of the sort of job market itself. But it's good enough at the higher end for Knicks tickets, right?

[Josh Brown]

I think that. But the higher end or the bigger shape of the K is like a very big. It's big. Because if. How is the get in price $7,000? I don't understand, like, literally where is. Are people just throwing on their credit cards and saying like, whatever, Like New

[Neil Dutta]

York City is in real life? I mean, it's so I think it's

[Josh Brown]

7,000 to get in.

[Skanda Amarnath]

It does feel kind of ironic that you have to say Texas versus New York, Obviously the story of Texas is like, it's the booming state. It's the state where everything's growing. But like, New York City's got the wealth. That's. That's still what's overwhelming. Why you have New York Knicks tape fans taking over San Antonio, but you probably won't have spurs fans.

[Neil Dutta]

There's this research about like, you know, like economists talk about the wealth accumulation puzzle, right? Like why. Why is it that like super wealthy people, they don't like, actually spend down their wealth over time, even though everyone's, you know, expects them to, like, now that you've finally gotten that opportunity to spend some of it down, right? Especially because a lot of the wealth is in places like New York. So I just think it's interesting. I will say something about the World Cup. I am taking my boys to the World cup and we're going down to Atlanta to do it.

[Josh Brown]

Wait, where is it? I thought it was in Philly.

[Neil Dutta]

No, there's games in Atlanta as well.

[Josh Brown]

Wait a minute.

[Skanda Amarnath]

There's games in New York too. Well, not New York, New Jersey, obviously.

[Josh Brown]

I don't follow soccer. It travels.

[Skanda Amarnath]

It's in a bunch of sites, the World Cup's everywhere.

[Neil Dutta]

It's like North America is hosting Toronto,

[Josh Brown]

Boston, Foxborough, but even, even tickets in San Antonio. So I just bought tickets for Game five and they're not cheap. Like the get in price Right now is 1700 for game five.

[Neil Dutta]

For game two, it's sinking like stone. It's like 700 now 600. It was like a thousand a couple days ago.

[Josh Brown]

Unbelievable. All right, well, excited to have you guys. You know, Skanda, I asked Neil who should be in the third seat because Josh is away this week and you were the first person. I said fantastic. Ben wanted to get you in here. So we're excited.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Appreciate you having me. It's the Compound and friends episode 245 Whoa, whoa, whoa.

[Josh Brown]

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[Neil Dutta]

Welcome to the Compound and friends.

[Skanda Amarnath]

All opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael

[Josh Brown]

Batnik and their castmates are solely their

[Skanda Amarnath]

own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management.

[Josh Brown]

This podcast is for informational purposes only

[Skanda Amarnath]

and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions.

[Neil Dutta]

Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain

[Josh Brown]

positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. All right, all right, all right. I am feeling elated, boys. I am feeling really good. It has been a long time. We won a finals game. The first finals game. Unbelievable. And I'm So excited to have you guys here today. So fan of the show, friend of the show, fan favorite of the show. That's what I meant to say. I'm not, I, I hope you're a fan of the show, but you're a fan favorite.

[Neil Dutta]

I'm definitely a fan.

[Josh Brown]

All right, Neil Dud, everybody. Neil is the head of economics at Renaissance Macro Research. Neil leads macroeconomic research efforts with an emphasis on analyzing the U.S. economy, Federal Reserve global trends, and cross market investment themes. Neil is considered a stock market economist. Stock market economist, market economist, business economist.

[Neil Dutta]

Okay.

[Josh Brown]

Neil looks at the economic data and tries to see and highlight the risks to the consensus as he sees them. And first time guest, Skanda Amarnath. Skanda is the co founder and executive director of Employee America, leading the firm's economic policy advocacy. Employee America runs regular analyses of price and jobs data, interprets and forecasts market conditions, and develops new frameworks for Federal Reserve policy strategy and communications. Previously, he served as an analyst within the capital markets function of the research group at the Federal Reserve bank of New York. Welcome.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Thanks for having me.

[Josh Brown]

All right, we are going to talk about how AI is impacting the economy. But before we get into that and other topics, let's just start here. Take a step back. Zoom out, as they say. How do you guys think the economy's doing? What's your read? Scanlan, go ahead.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Yeah, so the distribution of risks has shifted from where it was, call it six, nine, 12 months ago. You had a lot of people talking about, well, there's a slowdown in the job market, inflation's coming down. Yes, there's an AI boom, but everything else might be kind of soggy. What have we learned since then? Inflation is picking up. It's not just about oil prices, although it's obviously a big part of it in terms of the closure of straight from ooze. And yet we've also seen the labor market is not signaling red right now. It's signaling something that's at least solid. Maybe there's been some pickup actually in some sectors that have been soggy for a long time. So the labor market's not at the left tail and the inflation stuff's at closer to the right tail. That's a little bit different macro picture. The one constant has been the AI boom is continuing to boom. And that kind of tells you, look, financial conditions pretty supportive, growth better than expected, inflation higher than we want. That's a different picture than the one we were telling ourselves maybe 12 months ago.

[Josh Brown]

I've never heard the economy described as soggy. I like that. It's an ugly word, but maybe the right word to describe it. Neil, you're feeling a little soggy these days. I get the truth that you're not as optimistic as you are.

[Neil Dutta]

Yeah, I'm not as optimistic. I mean, I haven't been optimistic now for. It feels like what, almost a year and a half. So that's been a shift for me. I would tend to agree with most of what Skanda said. I mean, look, I mean, I will point out though that right before all this Iran stuff started, 10 year yields were at 3.93%. I mean, we were kind of right there for additional cuts for this year. So, you know, I think since then a couple things have changed. Obviously, to Skanda's point, the distribution of risks around inflation have changed, but the labor markets aren't as. The labor markets aren't as bad as they were at the end of last year. Right. I mean, they're not nearly as strong as they were a few years ago, but it's not nearly as bad as it was last year. And that's obviously important. The one thing I would say that has continued is income growth continues to slide. So at least the growth in total wages and salaries remains pretty sluggish. And in the context of an overnight fed funds rate where it is and price inflation where it is, I mean, I do think there are stresses building for the household sector and I do think there's probably a limit to how much people can spend by drawing down savings and so forth. So that to me is my concern. It's really around the outlook for consumer spending, which I don't think is particularly good.

[Josh Brown]

Are you guys surprised that the economy has stayed as strong, the sogginess notwithstanding, with the housing sector in an absolute ice age?

[Skanda Amarnath]

Yeah, I'm very surprised that the consumer has been as strong as it has despite a housing market that's been pretty frozen for a while. I mean, we're seeing maybe some relief on inventories finally. Inventory is starting to come down and maybe you'll start to see some home price appreciation. But the labor market has been soggy for a while, as you said, in terms of job growth, in terms of wage growth, those are generally slowing throughout 2024 and 2025, and some of that's obviously supply side immigration, but it's still less money earned through your paycheck, and that tends to matter for consumer spending over time. So where are you funding this consumer spending? If you look at the personal saving rate right now, it's kind of collapsed. So it tells you that on some level, consumer spending growth is just outperforming what you're earning through your paycheck.

[Josh Brown]

But don't. I was talking about this with Ben on Animal Spirits. People pull in their savings when they're feeling optimistic.

[Neil Dutta]

That is true.

[Skanda Amarnath]

That's right.

[Josh Brown]

Right. So it's not necessarily like, oh, no, personal savings is collapsed. What's going on?

[Neil Dutta]

Yeah. So I mean, I think that there's. Right, like, so to me, it's like, let's try to link like, the economic data to, like, markets. Right. Looking at the savings rate is an actual, like a. It's not a good timing mechanism. Right. It's. It's hard. I remember back in like 2005, the savings rate was actually printing negative at the time and there was like a chorus of like, bears telling you, like, oh my God, there's no more cushion. Like, it's about to fall over. We kept going, growing for another two before. I mean, it didn't matter in the end, but you had to wait a while. And I think the other thing, of course, is that incomes tend to get revised up over time. So the government always, like, magically finds income and the savings rate doesn't look as low as people think. I mean, it's just one of the things that happens in the data. But, you know, it's like anything at economics, right. You have like two different. We have multiple ways of looking at the same concept. Right. There's household employment and payroll employment. There's CPI and pce. And that's also true for the savings rate. Right. Like, there's a. The savings rate that SCANDA is talking about, which is really just, I think you would agree, like an income statement residual. And then, you know, all they're doing is taking income. Less spending over income.

[Josh Brown]

What about like something that is a. Maybe like a. A better timing signal, Construction permits. Like Warren Pius has showed a lot of that data on our show that when that starts to roll, it as typically like a recession wasn't that far behind.

[Neil Dutta]

I mean, I don't know. Like, the Ed Lemur thing is, like, was something that people were talking, had been talking about for years. Right. Like Ed Lemur was the guy that wrote the paper. Like, housing is the business cycle.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Right.

[Neil Dutta]

Like, normally I would agree with him was. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's sort of. It's competing for resources with the AI thing. Right. Like, so they're competing with land, with AI data centers and. Yeah, housing. I mean, the resale market Might be getting a little better. Like, I don't think there's much improvement in new home sales. I mean, if you look at new home sales so far this year, they're down about 6, 7% against the same period last year. Builder margins are still under pressure. There's not a whole lot going on with respect to residential construction, and I don't think that's going to happen this year. But you just have. I mean, I think we're probably going to talk about this, but the AI boom is quite spectacular in how much it's, I think, helping lift growth.

[Josh Brown]

All right, enough clearing of the throat setting at the table. Scanned in preparation for this. I was looking. I think I googled scan. I think I Googled your name, LinkedIn, which is a weird thing to Google. But I don't know how else I got to.

[Neil Dutta]

This is only one.

[Josh Brown]

I don't know how else I got to this result. There she is. So the first result, somebody tweeted expenditures on AI is about to surpass the peak spending on housing at its 20155 peak spend. And then they quote you at close to 7% of the economy at the end of 2025. It's plausible that the AI boom would be on par with the share of the US economy. Housing investment represented its 2005 peak. So I clicked on the link and it said, first heard on the compound.

[Neil Dutta]

That's right.

[Josh Brown]

So I'm like, holy shit. So we were talking about this piece that you wrote back in January 2025, and you wrote at the time, I think you went with Joe and Tracy, you either wrote or said, we are now at the stage where the tech cycle and the business cycle are poised to blur from recession dynamics to the Federal Reserve's debate about potential growth and the neutral rate of interest known as R Star AI will leave its mark on the next few years of macro discussion.

[Skanda Amarnath]

So there you go.

[Josh Brown]

Voila.

[Neil Dutta]

Boom.

[Skanda Amarnath]

That's one thing that's aged quite well, I'd say. I think we're clearly seeing we've ripped past 7%. So we've ripped past the peak for housing investment in the 2000s. So the housing bubble and the residential investment that's happening there as a shared gdp, I think you can look at the relevant components now for this AI boom. So I'm talking about tech equipment, software, industrial equipment that powers all the data centers. That's all past the peak of the 2000s boom. It's past the peak of the. Very well, past the peak of the 90s tech boom. The dot com boom. The telecom structures boom. So we're at a point where this is this very investment intensive part of the expansion that is to your point about also the saving rate going down. You see this stuff at the peak. It's also a way of saying if this turns, obviously it's going to leave a mark. Also on the downside, I can't tell you that that's going to happen right now. Right. I don't think that's like anything that suggests that oh my God, all the spending is about to stop or all the spending is about to slow down. If anything we're just seeing more and more financing, expenditure, issuance, all tied to this boom. And that just tells you this is the go go time and everything that is. We're all wrapping every single part of markets, the economy around this big technological and investment boom.

[Josh Brown]

Neil, it sounds like you have a bone to pick with economists trying to properly account for the impact of AI on the economy. And you're rubbing your face so preaching.

[Neil Dutta]

You know, I, well, I mean there's, I mean there are, there's a, I think a decent contingent of people on the street that think that this is having like a fairly modest effect on the economy. Right. Like so it's.

[Josh Brown]

Why? Because they're looking at the wrong things, they have no common sense.

[Neil Dutta]

Well, well no, I mean it's sort of like GDP accounting. Right. So one of the reasons why, I mean it's true that information processing and software is what, 6, 7% of GDP? It's also true that a lot of the growth from AI leaks abroad in the form of imports. So that actually counts against gdp.

[Josh Brown]

Hold on. All right, so I was going to say like what the hell is leakage? What do you call it?

[Skanda Amarnath]

Import leakage?

[Neil Dutta]

Import leakage, okay.

[Josh Brown]

Is that a, is that a. It's new to me. Is that a thing that's been in the economist lexicon or.

[Neil Dutta]

Go ahead, you want to take it?

[Skanda Amarnath]

Yeah. So it's basically so there's all this spending happening domestically, but that spending could be for products that are produced outside of the US and so you think about like what SK Hynix produces or what like all sorts of Japanese and Korean manufacturers are producing for all your tech hardware or, or the energy systems behind it. That's all stuff that's coming. That's value add, that's gdp. That's really not showing like it's not US gdp, but it is US spending.

[Josh Brown]

So why not just look at global gdp? Surely it must show up there.

[Neil Dutta]

Well, I just think that there's a little bit. It does. I mean, in a sense. I mean, just because the dollars don't show up in GDP doesn't mean that it's not like it's vanished or something. You know what I mean? So I think what economists miss about this is that there are lots of kind of linkages to other areas of the economy that are not neatly captured, I would say, by GDP. Like simple GDP accounting.

[Josh Brown]

Like NICs tickets.

[Neil Dutta]

Like NICS tickets. Like consumer spending, like municipal government finances. Right. Like the California Legislative office talks about how over half the growth in income tax withholding is a function of all the RSUs that are vesting. Right. Like it's like that's your meal ticket. Right. If you're a worker in one of those big companies, it's juicing, obviously global growth, but more importantly, it's helping corporate earnings. And that matters because it finances a wealth effect through consumer spending. And again, that's not something that is neatly captured by a simple accounting identity. So it's almost like saying, yeah, I mean, residential investment, 6 or 7% of US GDP, but not really because we import all the drywall and lumber from Canada. Like it's a bit, it's a bit. I don't know, I think it's like one of these arguments.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Neil, you're being too kind. I think, I think, I think actually like this whole, like it's not really counting to GDP because it's imports totally misses the point of what a boom is all about. It's about the spending. The spending is sitting on some company's balance sheet. It's affecting their risk, it's showing their risk appetite currently and it might affect their risk appetite in the future. Right. So like business cycles are risk cycles. They're about the willingness to spend, to spend on labor, spend on capital. And when the spending stops, that's when you get the recession. And we talk recession, we're not really talking about gdp. We're talking about where the stock market goes down a bunch and whether you lose your job. Like that's really what we're talking about. So all of this like GDP accounting stuff can really miss the point. You have a huge volume of spending relative to the size of the economy. It's going to sit on a bunch of balance sheets. They might be able to handle it. We're talking about some of the best balance sheets historically in terms of a lot of the big mega cap tech. But it's still quite remarkable that like we've had the scale of spending, it's growing so Fast and with that comes risks and also obviously just growth in the present.

[Josh Brown]

So it's all about spending, which are driven by the labor market and of course the equity market dub. But if people have their job, they're going to spend their money. Do you think that there's anything that the average investor can look at, whether it's on the economic side? Like, I kind of feel like the traditional playbook is like not really useful here in terms of like what leading indicators used to say. Is it going to be like a concurrent slowdown where it's like stocks get killed, spending pulls back and it's just going to happen when it's going to happen. There will be very little warning. So people have been looking for warning signs just for the last 15 years.

[Skanda Amarnath]

It's true. I mean you always have to look behind your shoulder for something. But I think if you look back to the dot com boom, right. Was there like a macro signal that told you this was over or was it that earnings started to miss around April 2000 intel. You had a lot of these sort of events through 2000.

[Neil Dutta]

That's how you ask a lot of vibes too, right?

[Skanda Amarnath]

Yeah, there's a lot of vibes. But it's like, I don't think I could point to. Aha. Was housing starts to turned in 1999 or 2000 and that caused the cyclical slowdown. I was like, I don't. I think it's really about the stock market. It is about, it's about tech.

[Josh Brown]

Some people will point to Like, I think there was a Barron's article that came out over one weekend and the next week the stock market killed and then it just started to unravel. Like was it the article that caused this selling? I mean it was obviously going to burst either way, but it was a

[Skanda Amarnath]

bunch of spending that got pulled forward in terms of IT systems, Y2K, a lot of that stuff. And then you keep spending, you keep spending and it's like every financial curve is always underestimated in real time and at some point there isn't.

[Neil Dutta]

I mean the other thing of course is that the Fed was hiking. And that's true. And the, and the. But the stock market was still going up concurrently as the Fed was hiking. So it wasn't, I mean this whole notion that like, oh, the Fed should step in and like hike to blow this whole thing up. I mean, I'm not, first of all, I'm not sure that they really can, but all you'd be doing at that point is exacerbating the stresses in the areas of the economy that you were just talking about, like housing, like some of these credit sensitive areas. And the key distinction between now and then is that the labor markets were genuinely overheating back then. There's really no evidence that, I mean, we could talk about things getting more stable relative to where they were six months ago, but it's not like you're seeing broad based wage pressure.

[Josh Brown]

Are you guys worried about credit card delinquency? That's been a topic that's come up recently.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Not yet. I would say there's probably some signs that the household sector will eventually face stresses if the job market isn't good. Right now we're seeing signs that the opposite. But this is still not yet at a point to me where the household sector is pretty flush in terms of liquidity. It may be just disproportionate in terms of distribution.

[Josh Brown]

So a lot of, a lot of the spending is.

[Neil Dutta]

It's getting worse at the margin. I mean, I agree. I mean, it is getting worse. I mean, even the Beige Book talked about it yesterday, right? They talked about we're seeing uptick in mortgage delinquencies and credit card delinquencies and agricultural delinquencies. I mean, these are, I mean, I guess, you know, the thing is like, do you think it's a body in motion that stays in motion? And if you do, then

[Skanda Amarnath]

you better

[Neil Dutta]

pray that the labor markets start to accelerate because if they don't and wages continue to slow, then those problems are going to just get worse. And so, yeah, I mean, I agree that it's very low, but if you're a bank, I would probably want to provision for more loan losses over the next year.

[Skanda Amarnath]

If you think about the 90s comp or the late 90s comp, labor market's definitely not as strong as it was then. And so there's clearly a sense of if this labor market does not show any sort of real pickup over the next six months, we will be talking about sort of all the left tail stuff again.

[Josh Brown]

But can that be good that it's not a strong. Because it's not causing wage pressure?

[Skanda Amarnath]

It could be the other side of it is inflation is a lot more of a problem this time than it is than it was in 1999 or 2000. And so we have inflation that's tied to tariffs, inflation that's tied to the AI boom itself. There's inflation that's tied to obviously the closure of straightforward moves. So if you think about airfares are a Lot higher now. And a big part of that is jet fuel. If you think about AI Boom. Its impact on. Basically, if you want to go buy a laptop now, you can see the price. Right. It's not what it used to be. And there's all sorts of computer hardware memory, memory shortage having its impact. And so this is all a lot of sectoral stuff. It stinks kind of like the 2000s in a lot of ways, if you remember, like, there's a lot of random inflation that kind of creeped up around then. So that's not great for the consumer. Right. Consumer's got to pay the. Pay the bill on that. It means they're either enjoying not as much of a standard of living improvement or in some cases, standard of living production. So that's the downside here. So we have not as good on the labor market. Harsher error on the inflation side this time around relative to what was the 90s, which was kind of nirvana in terms of labor market being pretty strong, but inflation not really rearing its head.

[Josh Brown]

Josh and I talk a lot on the show about the wealth effect and what drives people to spend more money. And I've mostly rejected the idea that people spend money based on how much they think their house is worth. Because you don't see it on the screen. Yeah, no, it feels good, sure, I suppose. But your investment account, it leads to overconfidence. I mean, it just does. You can take money out of your investment account, pay for a home renovation or a toy or whatever, and in 10 days, the bucket is full again because the semiconductors just keep giving you free monopoly money. So that, like, I think there's no. There's no doubt about it. That is driving a huge amount of the spending today. In 2022, the stock market did go in reverse. It was a bear market and it didn't last five years. But all of the names that everybody loved got cut in half for the most part, like Amazon, Facebook, Nvidia fell 2/3 legitimately, lost a lot of money, and people didn't stop spending, at least as far as I know.

[Skanda Amarnath]

No.

[Neil Dutta]

Because we had income growth.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Yeah.

[Neil Dutta]

That's the key difference between now and then.

[Josh Brown]

So if. So if we.

[Neil Dutta]

And we had a lot of pandemic savings.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah. So I know it's not apples to apples at all, but. So you're saying that if. What would. What would it take for the spending to slow down? Would it be the stock market or the labor market or. Or both or who knows?

[Neil Dutta]

Well, I think so. There's a Couple of things. I mean, I think right now we're sort of for us, I think for economists it's like, is it linear or nonlinear?

[Josh Brown]

Which part?

[Neil Dutta]

The slowdown in consumption. Right now you're basically in a linear, I think a linear slowdown in consumer spending. Consumer spending is growing about 2%, a little below, a little above, it depends. But more or less that's where we are. If you start to see layoffs in any meaningful extent, not that we have outside of technology, that'll probably hurt consumer spending pretty quickly. That's one option. The other way would be you get a market correction of some kind of if you just assume like savings are stable, like consumption will probably naturally slow a little bit anyway because income growth is so sluggish.

[Josh Brown]

But doesn't matter.

[Neil Dutta]

That doesn't mean it's going to fall off of a cliff. You know what I mean? It's just okay, instead of growing two, we'll grow one to one and a half.

[Josh Brown]

In a world where these hyperscalers and others joining the party are spending $700 billion of CapEx, does it matter if the consumer pulls back a little bit?

[Skanda Amarnath]

A little bit is not enough. Right. Consumption is generally pretty smooth anyway. So really when you think about people say, oh, the US consumer is the economy, but investment's the business cycle. Investment is the thing that's volatile, that moves with the business cycle. And right now it's risk on, right. There's clearly a lot of capital commitments that are tied to this. There's all sorts of planned spending, planned additions of energy, of data centers that haven't happened yet. And as long as there's the belief that this is going to keep continuing, which is the case right now, that's going to happen and that's what's going to drive sort of where the market goes and market sentiment. And I think that's just what's so

[Neil Dutta]

unusual about this is that it's like equipment investment and like non residential business fixed investment that's driving it. And that's what's interesting. I mean, if you're talking about business cycle economics, right. Like typically the investment piece that cracks is residential investment. Right. So what's interesting about this is that because typically, if you look at it, I mean equipment, like non residential business investment, capex, that actually follows growth, it doesn't, it's not a leading indicator historically. Right. I mean basically the way it works is companies think growth, it's the accelerator effect is what we call it. Right. Like companies think growth is going to pick up and so they start investing more. What's unusual about this cycle is that it's not like growth expectations are really taking off in any material extent, but you have this sort of spectacular capital spending boom nonetheless. So that to me is like to your point, why are all these traditional things not working?

[Skanda Amarnath]

We don't think of tech as a cyclical sector. We think of as housing, manufacturing, maybe some segments of consumer spending. But tech is the cyclical thing. It is the thing that matters for it's driving all the volume in terms of gdp, in terms of why we're getting the outcomes we're getting in stock market too. We don't have a leading indicator for the tech outside of if you're really locked in on some particular names and maybe certain orders for this tech supply chain, maybe then you can have a read into the leading indicators of this dynamic. But it's really just about like business fixed investment that's all tied to AI boom.

[Josh Brown]

So tech AI, it's sucking everything in. We're going to get to some of the work that you've done on everything looking like a semiconductor stock. The framework that I'm, that I'm working with today. And by the way, things change so fast and people act like what's happening today has been in place forever. Like Nobody wanted the Max 7 stocks in the fall. These things were getting destroyed. Oracle got, Oracle fell by 60% because people were like, there's no way that Sam Altman is able to pay that five year, $300 billion contract. There's no way. And all of a sudden it's hot again and people like, oh, bubble. So the way, the way that I see the world today is that everything is being driven by the investment boom, by the, by the build out. And I don't know when the handoff happens, but how much of the world is even using these tools, the agentic AI stuff like what's, what's interesting about where the tenure was before the war and today is that you got the closure and the inflation picking up concurrently with the crazy boom in anthropics. Revenue going from like 9 to 45. And it happened at the same time. And the point is nobody's even using these things and all we're hearing about is a shortage of compute. So to suggest or to think or to use the framework that like it's late or getting long in the tooth, I kind of think it's just starting.

[Skanda Amarnath]

It's really hard to know in real time and it does seem like impossible. The best approximation is what we can see in the present. What I can see in the present is risk on.

[Neil Dutta]

Right.

[Skanda Amarnath]

I can see just that there is a lot of appetite. The capacity on compute is clearly very much tight as far as anthropic is concerned. And at the same time they are seeing revenue growth. So that's all reasons to keep investing. Right. Reasons to keep being optimistic. At some point there are, I'm sure there is a point where exponential curves become S curves, but that point is not right now.

[Josh Brown]

I love that you said that because all we could observe is, is that

[Neil Dutta]

the line's going up.

[Josh Brown]

What's happening today?

[Neil Dutta]

Who knows? I guess one thing I was thinking about and I really enjoyed your conversation with Denise last week. You know, she's great. This whole notion of like it's early, it's not a bubble because the earnings are so strong. But I also would say at some level, like the earnings are tied to some kind of temporary phenomenon with this, at some point the data center build out will stop and the earnings won't be there. So what are we really talking? I mean, just because it's not. Just because the PE multiple isn't like ridiculously high doesn't necessarily mean.

[Josh Brown]

I agree. That tells you nothing.

[Neil Dutta]

Yeah, so I think that there's a little bit of that going on on the street. The other thing I would say is this is like a really. I mean, people talk about productivity. I mean, I go to client meetings. It's like, oh, productivity boom. Like, you know, this is a very unusual productivity boom. Like, what is the point of investment? Ultimately the point of investment is to raise household living standards. Can we say that that's what's happening with AI? Like, if anything, it's a really weird productivity boom. When the prices for information technology, commodities, like Skanda was talking about, software, laptops,

[Skanda Amarnath]

it's actually going up.

[Neil Dutta]

Like you pull up those charts in the 90s or 2000s, it was deflating month after month after month, sometimes at accelerating rates. You go back to that period too. Again, very strong productivity growth. You know, we also had very strong growth in real income. Right. Like, there should be some relationship between stronger productivity and stronger real compensation. We just had negative real compensation growth this year. So right now all the growth is flowing to margins, I guess. And I don't, I mean that to me is like, this is like, this is why I say, like, is it really a productivity boom? Like, it's not yet raising household living standards and I don't know how long that can continue.

[Skanda Amarnath]

I honestly think for productivity, a lot of what people are talking about are things that happened in the previous call it one to three years. Like you look at Q1 data on productivity, not great. If we think about the supply shocks that are hitting because of hey prices. Price of gasoline is much higher than it was in Q1. Price of all sorts of energy airfares, you have a lot of other shortages and other shocks that are materializing to cattle prices. Yeah, right. Cattle and beef, all that stuff is going to feed through as well. If that's happening, that's probably going to also weigh in productivity too. And so productivity growth is not actually as rosy now as it probably was in 23, 24, 25.

[Josh Brown]

But doesn't. Doesn't the who's productivity?

[Skanda Amarnath]

That's right. The macro data stats that the Fed might look at their productivity. I do think it's like even in terms of diffusion, you're right that we actually haven't seen mass adoption of AI in terms of. In the real economy, nobody's using it.

[Josh Brown]

I mean I know our listeners probably are like you guys are. But in the real world, yeah, there's limits.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Even in terms of large.

[Neil Dutta]

I mean we use it.

[Josh Brown]

Of course you do.

[Skanda Amarnath]

If you're a smaller company or a smaller organization, you probably can adopt these tools. You don't have to worry as much about security risks and that stuff. If you're a larger company, there's all sorts of walls you can only use copilot, you can only use these types of tools, but you can't use those because they might ultimately present security risks. And so actually adoption may not. I think it's.

[Neil Dutta]

There's also a measurement thing with this where I mean like everyone's like looking at the ramp index and like how like I mean I like the rabbit decks. Like what is that even telling me? Right? It's like oh look, OpenAI is going down and everyone's using Claude now. Like okay, I mean I don't even know what to do with that. So I would just say that if it's a genuine productivity boom, I mean people, it feels like everyone assumes that like everyone's margins will expand because of this.

[Josh Brown]

But they are. Margins are at an alternate. Ultimately rates are going up.

[Neil Dutta]

Ultimately costs need to come down to households.

[Josh Brown]

All right, so we'll talk about in a second. I just want to end the topic with this. So Neil, you said we ran a one year daily return correlation between every S&P 500 name and the Semiconductor ETF SMH 15 non tech S&P 500 companies collectively worth $2 trillion in market cap. Now move with semis at correlations of 0.5 or higher. Twelve of these 15 are industrials. Names like Vertiv, Eden, Caterpillar, Cummins, Hubell, Hubell, Hubell, Hubble Comfort Systems. I don't even know. I don't know a lot of these companies. Whatever you go on, you say these are not tech stocks. They trade like semis because their order books have become AI CapEx order books. Caterpillar sells backup generator sets and engines into hyperscaler data centers. Vertiv sells cooling and power management. Enan sells electrical components and GE Vernova sells gas turbines for data center power. This is kind of interesting. The gig sector classification has not caught up with the economic exposure.

[Neil Dutta]

It sounds so good when you sound like when you read it back to

[Josh Brown]

me, yeah, it's good stuff.

[Neil Dutta]

Buy that guy's research.

[Josh Brown]

But inside the stock market I was looking, I was talking to Char kid and Sean today. So healthcare is breaking out. It's been stuck in the mud for a while. Industrials look awesome. That's 20% of the S and P. So for as much like people talk about, oh, it's just the max 7. Daniel, chart, throw a chart. 12 on this surprised me and I look at the market pretty damn closely and I don't think I knew this probably because they diverged like very recently. But the Mag 7 are up 7.3% year to date, 7.3% year to day for the Max 7. Not bad. But the 493 are up 12.6%. Huh? Did you guys know that?

[Neil Dutta]

Well, I knew about it because you mentioned it I think last week.

[Josh Brown]

Right, I forgot about it. I have other things on my money.

[Neil Dutta]

I do. Listen, listen. But I think what that analysis is showing is that this is going to support a lot of the equal weighted indexes because it's such a profound effect on the broader economy. Right. Like Caterpillar is probably part of that S&P493. Right. Like I think I was reading that Generac is doing better now because of the data center build out to build backup, you know, power for these facilities. So that's why I say like just because I mean is the equal weight, like historically we look at that as a sign of like market broadening. But if the AI tech capex boom is touching lots of industrial names as an example and lots of freight, right. Like that stuff needs to move around the country, that's, you know that's also probably helped by all this. So is it really like a sign of breath or is it Just a sign that things are really concentrated into one area of the economy. Like what is, like how much is like traditional non residential structures doing.

[Josh Brown]

So when you say what area of the economy, you mean corporate profits?

[Neil Dutta]

No, I mean like the tech sector. The tech boom.

[Josh Brown]

Damn it. Eli was trying to do a segue. I met corporate profits. So go ahead.

[Skanda Amarnath]

I mean, it just seems like the breadth and the boom go together too, right? It's just that there is, you see companies like what Ford is kind of trying to sell batteries now.

[Josh Brown]

Ford's an AI.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Ford's trying to provide batteries to support this sort of power boom. Right? So we have, it's just become, it sort of touches so many other sectors and even beyond whatever rational, logical connection between like, oh, this affects power, which affects like transportation. It's more like it's a risk on environment. And so this is one which transactions happen. And correlations do go to one in both directions. So you actually, if it's an environment where investment appetite is particularly solid, that's one in which other, other companies, other sectors have a chance to participate as well.

[Neil Dutta]

The other thing I was thinking, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Michael, is that, you know, when people, when clients ask me like, do you think the market's pricing in a slowdown? See, like you're looking at it like. But I don't know. I mean, discretionary stocks don't look great, right? I mean like that's what my. That's what Jeff has been telling me. Like discretionary underperforming consumer staples, which discretionary stocks equal weight. Like he's been pointing that out. I mean, restaurants don't look good. I mean, you can say that's all because of like people taking the fat shot. I will say that unironically, I think that it's. I mean, it's not like their same store sales are doing particularly well. Or you know, you mentioned healthcare. I mean that's not necessarily a cyclical sector, but. Or I mean, what about what's going on with like financials, right? I mean, so when people's like, I mean maybe the market is like it's, you know, is the market pricing in some slowdown?

[Josh Brown]

No.

[Neil Dutta]

So tell me why.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, so I'm looking at the equal weight discretionary over Staples. And it's still in an uptrend, but flattening looks fine. Whatever. It's sort of neither here nor there. But I think some of the story is it's really hard to separate. I don't think consumer discretionary stocks are Necessarily always a reflection of the consumer. And restaurants are a great example of this. A lot of these names, CAVA is like the poster child list. A lot of these names came public sort of recently, were in vogue, the valuations were stupid. The slowdown happened. Consumer preference change, Shake Shack. Nobody wants to eat a burger for lunch anymore. The stock is getting destroyed. Is that a reflection of a slowing macro environment? I don't know. I don't even know what the dollar stores tell you anymore about the state

[Neil Dutta]

of the, like how many needles we're buying.

[Josh Brown]

Well, yeah, but seriously, you look at Dollar Tree and Dollar General when they're going up, is that because that particular consumer is doing better? Is it because the middle income consumer is trading down? I have no idea. Now obviously you can listen to the conference calls and they'll give you a little bit more information, but I think it's really tricky. So I don't think the market is pricing in a slowdown. I think it's sort of hard to, hard to say that maybe the PE is coming in a little bit, which is probably healthy. Like there's a little bit of a governor on the stock market. But I don't, I don't know. What do you think?

[Skanda Amarnath]

I mean, I think the consumer is spending in total at a reasonable pace. But I think one thing that's going to be changing is they're facing more inflationary pressures. And again, there's obviously energy, but also like food prices. If you think about a lot of what is being guided on the Staples side, right. Suggests they're going to pass through a lot of costs. So you think about all the pet chem prices that are in all your household cleaning products and your household paper products. It's basically there is assuming, okay, we're going to be able to preserve our margin and that means we're going to pass it through to the retailer, to the consumer. So someone's going to hit the squeeze. It might be the consumer in that case. And that's really like a real consumption squeeze. So the money can keep flowing even though we may not necessarily be getting richer.

[Josh Brown]

Let me ask you guys this. I think a lot of this is investor preference. For example, Clorox. I don't know anything about the business. I don't follow the stock. But guess what? The stock looks terrible. Is Clorox undergoing some stress? Is there a competitive, like, competitive landscape that I don't. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure there is. But if you look at a stock like Hyatt, which is at an all time high today and Delta, which is at an all time high today. I don't care what Domino's Pizza stock is doing. That's a completely idiosyncratic story that has nothing to do with the broader consumer. Now if I'm Domino's Pizza CEO and Chipotle CEO and I'm telling the analyst that it's a consumer macro pressure story, of course you're going to say that, but I could show you a million other examples that completely refute that story.

[Skanda Amarnath]

If anything, what you're pointing out is actually very real in the data of goods to services. So we see in goods, obviously consumer spending is kind of not as great. We're not seeing the spending in terms of food and staples and even what you kind of whatever else you get in the grocery store. But if you see it in terms of services, in terms of air travel, even though airfares are going up quite considerably, the actual volumes of air travel are quite robust. Right. This is not something.

[Neil Dutta]

Restaurant sales haven't been that great.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Restaurants have not been as great. I think restaurants is also facing a big like food squeeze. So everything, your costs on the food side have gone up, especially for Shake Shack.

[Josh Brown]

So and I really think I completely underestimated the GLP1 story and it is having a material impact on areas of the economy. It really is.

[Skanda Amarnath]

So in that sense you also get the rotation there too. If you're not going to spend as much at the grocery store, you're not going to spend as much in certain types of like food services experiences. But you might spend it on other kinds of recreation services, you might spend it on accommodations, resorts. And I do think we see that story play out as well.

[Josh Brown]

All right, shifting gears a little bit, Greg IP wrote a story the record divide between corporate profits and worker pay. And Denise was on this. Denise Chisholm was on last week talking about falling unit labor costs being a tailwind for the stock market. Great for the stock market, pretty shitty for society. So Greg said to understand why people are so miserable about the economy, look no further than Thursday's report on gross domestic product. Not how much GDP grew, but how it was divvied up. Worker compensation, wages and benefits grew 0.8% in the first quarter while domestic corporates profits jumped 2.7%. Daniel, charts on please. As a result, labor share of gross domestic income sank to 51%, the lowest since records began in 1947. And profit share climbed to 12.1%, the highest since 1950. So just go back and forth between these Charts. So this is corporate profits basically hitting all time highs. And the flip side of this is wages just not getting their fair share. And this is ripping the country apart. Is this not being accounted for properly or do you think this really is the story?

[Skanda Amarnath]

I think it's probably two things I can think of. One is the labor market has been underperforming. So when we say, hey, given what we're seeing in the labor market being so sluggish, the consumer looks pretty good. And given these facts like, oh, okay, it's happening despite the labor market not being as good, this is quite impressive. But the lab market is sluggish in a lot of ways, benchmark to what we saw in the 2010s, even this is slower than that. And yet we're also seeing the structural trend. A lot of results by the tax system. The tax code has sort of created a lot of biases in a way that makes it just. You're going to be more inclined to try and stay at the margin, steer away from W2 income towards either trying to own your own business. There's obviously a lot of stuff with capital versus labor and I can get too much into that. But these are all ways in which there's going to create some bias. And some of that might be real and some of that just might be classification. So it's not just like some big political thing.

[Neil Dutta]

Superstar firms is probably another. That's right.

[Josh Brown]

What's that?

[Neil Dutta]

Just like firms that have really high margins, we have more of them in our economy. Therefore, naturally, as a result, profit share goes up.

[Josh Brown]

But this is, this is very much impacting the political landscape and how people vote. And this is like a huge part of the story.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the. If you aren't owning your own business, right. And you're basically relying on a W2, then what exactly is like, what is that? What does that labor market look like? I'd actually argue right now we're seeing a pickup in white collar employment. We're seeing a pickup there, which is kind of defying all the odds and prognostications on the AI replacing white collar. But for blue collar, it's not necessarily all great. Right. It's actually, if you look at a lot of different types of employment there, job growth has not been as fantastic. There's a lot of construction jobs tied to building data centers. Outside of that, not so great. And even manufacturing, if you're maybe working for Boeing, obviously jobs are being created because they're ramping up production. After all, their Snafus. Outside of that, not as impressive, I'd say.

[Josh Brown]

Neil, do you think that those lines forget about converging? Do you think they stop diverging? Is there a breaking point?

[Neil Dutta]

So I think I sent you this chart, but basically, if you pull up a chart of nominal GDP.

[Josh Brown]

Chart 10, Daniel.

[Neil Dutta]

And sort of nominal compensation growth, like, I think it kind of speaks for itself, right? Like, nominal GDP is growing about 6%, and nominal compensation, like wages and salaries mostly, is running below 4%.

[Josh Brown]

Has this ever happened?

[Neil Dutta]

I mean, I'm sure it's like, it's rare. Like, the disconnect is quite unusual. Now, there's a number. I mean, and I've said this to our clients, and I'll say it to your audience, how you feel about how this thing reconciles should dictate how you feel about the trajectory of policy going forward.

[Josh Brown]

Go on.

[Neil Dutta]

Well, I mean, if you think that all this spending is going to lead to a meaningful inflection higher in labor income and tight job market and people seeing stronger wage growth, then you should be very hawkish. I mean, you should expect. So if the gray line converges towards the red line, then it's not like, I think Skanda has a forecast for like one hike at some point in the next year. Forget that. I mean, they're gonna. 75 to 100. They'll take away all the insurance cuts from last year. Okay, so that's at least 75. The Fed never, I don't think really just goes once. I mean, but if you think that we'll see that, that slowing in nominal wages and salaries will punt, pull down to some extent consumer spending from like, maybe 2% to 1%, one and a half. You continue to see this sluggish growth in residential investment. You continue to see sluggish growth in structures investment. So if that red line converges onto the gray line, well, then maybe the Fed can wait it out. Maybe the Fed can wait it out. And so I think that, to me, is the kind of conversation. So I think Skanda's a little bit more on the hawkish side of things right now than I am. It's unusual for us to be that unaligned, but that's kind of where the debate is right now. So for me, in my career, I've always put more weight on labor and housing. And so that's why I probably sit more on the dovish side of things at the moment. How can you. As an example, apparel prices have been rising very, very rapidly over the last year. But what's happening to the real volume of clothing that's being sold, it's actually contracting. Like, how can firms make that stick? Right. It's very difficult to make the price increases stick. If labor income isn't there, where else is it?

[Josh Brown]

So, so areas. All right. Kevin Warsh.

[Neil Dutta]

Oh, God.

[Josh Brown]

Well, not your favorite. I think last time you were on here, you were, you were not so happy about the prospects.

[Neil Dutta]

I mean, someone has to do the, the, the dirty work. I mean, you can't get half the people on the street to actually say what they really think about them. So I guess if one person has to do it, I guess I will. You know, that's sort of how I think about it. I mean, that's one of the benefits of working at a smaller place. You don't have to be like a diplomat, but. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, what's the upside?

[Josh Brown]

What's the upside of what?

[Neil Dutta]

Him?

[Josh Brown]

Well, he's in charge now. He's the boss.

[Neil Dutta]

Well, I mean, I think it's as likely that the Fed captures him than he captures the Fed. Right. He's going in there talking about regime change. I think if I were a betting man, I would say that the Fed is more likely to influence him than the other way around.

[Skanda Amarnath]

I think actually it's a bit of a Chinese finger trap, right? It's the harder you try to pull away, try to. The harder you try to push for a dovish case, the, the more you're likely to kind of stoke a reaction from the rest of the. His colleagues. Well, yeah, if you, if you make bad arguments. Well, if you make bad arguments, don't be surprised when like the staff or your colleagues just smack you down.

[Neil Dutta]

Right.

[Skanda Amarnath]

And I think that's, that's a big issue with like, he's kind of trying to throw in, trimmed me and I'm actually a data guy now for like.

[Neil Dutta]

Yeah, look, in his career, Michael, if you've ever seen him, you know, when, when he first got, when he was governor, he never gave actually speeches on the economic outlook. Like, you know, it's like, oh, here's governor, or Lori Logan, like, talking about the economic and policy outlook. He never gave those speeches. Really. If you go through his, like, record, like, most of his speeches are like, sort of like very kind of like high level, like philosophical. He's like freaking going around talking about Immanuel Kant and like these like people that you've like, heard in like literature, like class, like in your freshman year, college or something. I mean, it's very bizarre to be talking in those terms for, like, a central banker, can't people change? I think the change is very curious, considering it happened during a period where he was actively campaigning for a job. And so to me, that's like the knock on him.

[Josh Brown]

I saw somebody.

[Neil Dutta]

But trim, mean, it's just not gonna work. Do you know what I mean?

[Josh Brown]

Which part?

[Neil Dutta]

Like, going in there and being like, oh, look at this trim mean measure. It's lower than everything else. Like, if his job is to go in there and try to convince the people around that table that we're about. We're on the precipice of a golden age. I mean, you hear them talk about this all the time. Like, pull a Greenspan. As if Greenspan didn't hike aggressively in the late 1990s anyway. So he's going in there to sell this golden age thesis. Basically, what that means that we're on the front edge of a productivity boom. That means we have a lot of spare capacity.

[Josh Brown]

So don't do anything.

[Neil Dutta]

Yeah, we have a lot of spare capacity in our economy. That means we actually have more room to cut rates. That's what he's going in there. That's the pretense under which he was brought in.

[Josh Brown]

So, Skanda. Oh, were you done?

[Neil Dutta]

I can keep. I could keep going. Skanda knows that.

[Josh Brown]

So, Skanda, my question to you is, how much power does he have to influence policy? Can he just say, we're doing, we're cutting, we're raising?

[Skanda Amarnath]

I think he can't just snap his fingers. He's got some bully pulpit power. He's got some ability to set the agenda at a meeting. Those are for a really shrewd operator. There are ways to leverage that well, but it's certainly not something so unitary. You vote at a committee, you vote among a set of people that each got one person, one vote, and there's a set of members. Some of them are part of the board of governors, and some of them are regional Fed presidents. And you already saw, what, four dissents at the last Fed meeting. One of them was on the more dovish side, but three were on the hawkish side. That's a lot of dissents. And they're probably gonna dissent again because they're gonna say, ah, yeah, we should get dropped this easing bias, but we really need to be moving towards a tightening bias. We already got something.

[Neil Dutta]

That'll be the next battle.

[Skanda Amarnath]

That'll be the next battle, and we're headed in that direction. I would separate what I think the Fed should do from what the Fed will do.

[Josh Brown]

So what do you think they should do? What do you think they will do?

[Skanda Amarnath]

I think they should steel themselves. In fact, there are a lot of supply shocks in the economy and there are a lot of supply shocks that are really hard to look through. The first thing you do is don't underestimate their scale and duration, which is I think, a big part of what got in trouble in 20, 21 and 22, which is that it's just these things can last a lot longer than they, than you think because they take a long time to travel through the value chain. Different people, different companies are moving their margins. The scale of this stuff can be a lot larger than you think in real time. So don't go in basically under baking these forecasts.

[Josh Brown]

So, dumb question. How much, how much do you think the overnight rate impacts? What does that do with supply shocks?

[Skanda Amarnath]

It doesn't really. But the biggest issue is that the Fed has been underbaking where inflation's supposed to be by this point. And when you keep making the same error, you're liable to say, oh, I must be missing something really big. I must need to raise interest rates to keep inflation expectations anchor. And I think we're headed down this path. I mean, I'm basically being bearish about the Fed because of the reasons Neil pointed out, which is that they are gonna confuse this stuff. They're gonna look at the inflation data, they're gonna say, oh, it's hot, it's hot for so long, it's in too many different components because it's so broad, because it's lasted so long, it therefore must be something we have to do something about.

[Josh Brown]

So you think they should look through it, but they won't.

[Neil Dutta]

So he thinks they should do what my call is. His call is that they won't. That's why he's negative. So I think that's, it's an interesting framing. I mean, we'll see.

[Josh Brown]

I mean, but the market is pricing at a rate hike. Show chart 13, please. So this is the implied fed funds rate we're looking at through the end of September 2027. What is this line telling us?

[Skanda Amarnath]

It's kind of the cowardly compromise of saying that there is either going to be a set of hikes, right? If Fed's going to hike once, they're going to hike multiple times, or they're just going to stand pat. I think it's going to be hard for them to steel themselves through what might be some more inflation and a broader pickup. And at a time when financial conditions At a first cut, pretty supportive. The interest rate currently is roughly around neutral, modestly restrictive. And at the same, the labor market's not showing the same downside risk. We're moving away from the left tail. Inflation has got some right tail properties. I do think it's largely supply, but that's a hard. When you have all these things moving in the same direction of the hawkish,

[Neil Dutta]

dovish debate, they're not going to go once. They're going to go 75 to 100.

[Skanda Amarnath]

If they start to go, don't be surprised if it's three, three hikes in a row.

[Josh Brown]

So, Neil, you're a market economist. If you knew that they were going to go, what, three times 25, if

[Neil Dutta]

they're doing it for the reasons he's talking about, it would be very bad for the economy and the capital markets because it's basically, you're hiking rates, not because demand is like, we're trained to think rate hikes are okay because it means that the economy is strong because demand is there and that means earnings are there.

[Josh Brown]

But the economy's not that strong.

[Neil Dutta]

Well, that's. Yeah, the economy is not horrible. It's fine. It's okay. It's okay.

[Josh Brown]

It's not overheating to the point that

[Neil Dutta]

it is very uneven. I mean, I thought the beige book this week was very interesting. It's a. I haven't seen a beige book like that in a while. It's a very uneven economy, I think is a fair kind of characterization of it. But if the Fed's hiking and it's because, like, we have this sort of, like, broad, like, growth and labor markets are fine, like, I think the markets are going to be fine with that. But if they're hiking for the reasons that Skanda is talking about, like, that is not a good outcome. Like hiking. It's like, remember what, Remember what Josh was talking about last week?

[Josh Brown]

I have no idea.

[Neil Dutta]

Well, he was talking about how, like, it makes no sense to hike because of oil prices going up. Now it's like, okay, now you're going to hike because cattle prices are up. Now you're going to hike because, you know, I mean, can the Fed control the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz? Absolutely not. Can it? Does it have any power over the El Nino? Like, no, it does not. The one thing I wanted to come back to on Warsh was I did find it fascinating, like in the last week that Bernanke, what did he say about his views on the balance sheet? He called it a meaningless statement. I thought that was really fascinating because obviously Warsh worked for Bernanke and the balance sheet for whatever reason is like Kevin Warsh's hobby horse and Bernanke just took a big massive crap all over that. So I think it's kind of emblematic of how he actually feels about him without saying it.

[Josh Brown]

But I want to get your guys take on this. A listener emailed us about the labor market. He said many of the distractors of this bull market I think about detractors often say the lack of jobs and the lack of good high paying jobs and knowledge services are reasons for doubt and concern. The latest report from the Bureau of Labor shared that the number of job openings is now at a two year high with 7.6 million open jobs. More interesting is that the largest jump in openings was in professional and business services adding 668,000 positions combined with the past two months of higher than expected non farm payroll data. Do we think sentiment is ready to turn and finally embrace that AI is not going to eat all the jobs and is in fact helping to grow and create opportunities for workers?

[Neil Dutta]

Well, first, I mean I sort of reject the premise that AI will actually eat all the jobs. I mean, you know, that's kind of like the lump of labor fallacy. I never really bought into it. It's really hard to talk about like AI taking away all the employment with, you know, the unemployment rate at 4.3%, I mean or on a prime age employment is still fairly good. I mean so I don't, I don't really buy into that. I mean I will say that you don't want to get too much into the indicator macro. I don't really believe that professional and business services openings went up by $700,000 in a month.

[Josh Brown]

Fake postings.

[Neil Dutta]

I mean the data are real, the news is fake. I mean, you know, to borrow from, from Trump. I, you know, I mean it's like anything else. You could find a different indicator like the. Indeed job postings numbers are weaker on net over the last few weeks. So I don't think the signal from that report really comes from openings, frankly. I mean it's like openings are like the fakest thing.

[Josh Brown]

Oh well here's, here's a more tangible.

[Neil Dutta]

It's hires and quits that matter a lot more.

[Josh Brown]

Here's more tangible reading initial jobless games. Was it last summer when they started to go up and people were getting. I'm sure I know Josh said this. Yeah, these don't usually slow down. Like this is the ultimate object in motion states in motion depth thing. And they did slow down, they peaked and then they normalized. Are you guys surprised at the low level of initial claims just how like, okay, the labor market has been?

[Skanda Amarnath]

I am surprised that we saw such a big slowdown in job growth in 2025 and it kind of stabilized on its own. Right. So that's something that is one of those like object motion status in motion. I think there's a lot of good reasons to take that seriously. Like, there's a lot of information in the present just disrespect. But it did start to show stabilization. And so we started to see that probably around what was the jobs report in December, you started to see signs of like, okay, things post shutdown were starting to like, just show the kind of stability that job growth was not going to keep falling off a cliff. And I think it's actually most interesting on we talk about white collar. So if you think about there's a subset of professional business services that really matters because it also includes things like temp help, jobs and a lot of other things that are not exactly high wage there you are seeing a pickup, you are seeing a pickup in job growth. And so hiring is picking up there. And if you're really trying to put it together, is this because, like, what is the macro fact that's driving this is not like completely obvious, but I think when we take one step back, it's, look, it's been a soggy labor market for that segment for about three years. Basically, you had the sort of tech session of 2022. You had basically, okay, the Fed is hiking. So therefore we need to be on watch for recession. We overhired during the pandemic. We need to slow down. Then it became, well, this AI stuff is so risky. Should we really be increasing headcount? But the actual cost of capital signal has long been signaling it's okay to spend well.

[Josh Brown]

Also, don't you think it's. It's just so it would be so deeply unpopular for JP Morgan, for example, to start doing massive layoffs? Like, do you think that companies, And I know J.P. morgan's, you know, an extreme example, but do you think companies in the aggregate have any sort of hesitation to do that for fear of some sort of retaliation by either their own workforce or larger forces that play political forces or the such?

[Skanda Amarnath]

I think there's actually a lot of risk that you lose a lot of knowledge to be able to orchestrate future solutions. Right. So you end up like letting go of someone who is responsible for A key system, you let it go of someone who's able to build the next set of things that kind of actually we leverage the technology. I mean, it's not obvious to me that, like, who's most exposed to AI? We don't really know.

[Neil Dutta]

Right?

[Skanda Amarnath]

Like, we don't know which kind of jobs are actually most exposed. Oh, aha. These jobs are going to be the ones that are easily automated. It may very well be the case that the white collar people who need to be actually executing a lot of the sort of how to take advantage of the technology itself.

[Neil Dutta]

I mean, you do see specific areas in the job market that are booming right now because of AI. But I would just say that layoffs are usually like the last thing to go. I mean, by the time layoffs are showing you something in terms of a signal, like, it's over, buddy.

[Josh Brown]

So let's leave the audience with this. And you guys are great. Skanda, how could people find your work?

[Skanda Amarnath]

So employamerica.org is a great place to go. You can access our research. We have some public research if you want to subscribe to. We have a few different distributions there. If you want to follow me on Twitter right now I'm probably posting mostly about the Knicks, but I promise after the series ends and hopefully, well, we back at it. And we're usually breaking down a lot of data related to jobs and CPI and PCE and everything the Fed's tracking.

[Josh Brown]

All right, Neil, we've got a QR code. If people are watching this, they could.

[Neil Dutta]

Yeah, you can also find me on the New York Knicks Instagram account.

[Josh Brown]

Hell, yeah. Where else are you posting?

[Neil Dutta]

I post on LinkedIn. I like the longer form content. We obviously post charts on Twitter as well. X. Excuse me.

[Josh Brown]

Okay. Speaking about an area where they cut to the bone. And you know what? I'm actually glad that more tech people didn't follow his lead. Like, there was a lot of fear about that. Like, they cut everybody at Twitter and it still works. And I know to the degree that it works, but. But it did. You know, it's still. Still doing its thing. All right, I want to leave people with this. Everybody wants to know when it's going to end. I get it. Right? It's just, it's. It's just how we're wired, for better or for worse. And maybe, maybe it's tomorrow. Maybe it's in 2032. Like, and when I say it ends, I mean, like, the cycle turns. Okay, so what is like one or two things? Pieces of actual evidence or actual data? That you guys would look to for this particular cycle because we know this is a unique one. So what are you going to be keeping an eye on?

[Neil Dutta]

You want me to go first?

[Josh Brown]

Sure.

[Neil Dutta]

Well, I would say at the end of the year, I think into next year maybe the conditions are not as favorable as they are at the moment, so we probably don't get as much of a fiscal push. The one big beautiful bill tailwind is going away by the end of the year. That transitions to more of a headwind if the Fed is on hold even as nominal compensation growth remains weak. Everyone's talking about a passive easing of policy because of inflation, but for the labor market that's a passive tightening of policy. So those two things are kind of on my mind.

[Josh Brown]

That was way too smart. I don't know what you just said. Scan the money down.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Yeah. Business cycles are risk cycles and so the risk and the willingness to actually spend is what we should all be caring about if we're trying to think about the big macro risk, the big drawdown you want to avoid or the biggest risk to your job.

[Josh Brown]

It sounds like you're saying credit spreads.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Maybe Credit spreads, that would be my answer. Yeah. So credit spreads are a very good

[Neil Dutta]

proxy, especially if it's episodic though by the time it turns out.

[Josh Brown]

I know, but I feel like it's like the easy. Okay, here's the thing. I think it was Liberation day. The thing that kept me moderately comfortable with the direction of the economy is the credit market really wasn't freaking out. It just wasn't. And so you're right, by the time it really shows, it'll probably be too late. At least that's kept me on the right side of the positive trend.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Yeah. To me the thing when you think about where's the balance sheet constraint that's going to cause this. Right. And so it could show up in corporate credit spreads. It may be something that's. The things to me that are most likely are something where it's the willingness to spend part of the non tech companies on AI expenditure. That's really what we should actually be focused on because for them it's an expense and they need to see payoff on that expense at some point. Whereas if it's just spending by the hyperscalers there, it's all part of their moat. It's part of how they're trying to make sure that they stay competitive. But for the non tech companies, like are they seeing a return on their investment? I'm sure they are seeing something. But like you're obviously hearing about like token expenditures and all that stuff. So when that gets stretched, which is kind of the scenario we think about with 2000, where it was a lot of front loading of expenditure around Y2K at some point. Just got tired of it. Right. It's like, I don't need to keep spending more and more and more. I'll just spend the same amount. And that's itself important.

[Josh Brown]

What's nice is that Nvidia is now breaking out their revenue by hyperscaler and everybody else to give us maybe a better sense of like, no, we're actually. We're not just reliant on these, you know, these behemoths. All right, boys, how are we feeling for the rest of the series?

[Skanda Amarnath]

Better than I did 24 hours ago, I'd say.

[Neil Dutta]

We took their heart out yesterday.

[Josh Brown]

I think they're a resilient bunch. They're not like, they're not the Cavs. Like, Castle's a dog. He's not going to give up. And so is Wemby.

[Neil Dutta]

No, it's not going to come easy. But I also, I felt like the Knicks, I still do. The Knicks are the more mature team. They'll handle it. And I think they needed that. The spurs needed that game more than we did.

[Skanda Amarnath]

I think they're pretty exhausted from the previous series.

[Neil Dutta]

Good.

[Josh Brown]

Wemby ran out of steam.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Yeah, he ran out of steam the last few minutes.

[Josh Brown]

It still doesn't feel. I still can't believe this is happening. It's been. It's been so long.

[Neil Dutta]

I mean, it's funny you mentioned PJ Brown. I mean, I remember I was an 11 year old kid when, when hated that guy when, when the Knicks, you know, in 94. I still remember that series. A series we should have won.

[Josh Brown]

That one's a little bit foggy. I was like. I was. I was nine, so I don't remember.

[Neil Dutta]

We were up three, two in the Garden and we should have won that game.

[Skanda Amarnath]

To me, I'm just more cynical after two decades of Dolan and it's like, how is this gonna get out?

[Josh Brown]

There's no time for Citizen.

[Skanda Amarnath]

Sorry, no time for Citizen.

[Josh Brown]

We're done with that. All right, thank you everybody, for listening, for reaching out. You guys are awesome. This is so much fun. Skanda would love to have you back. This is really great. Thanks, guys. We'll see you next time. Appreciate you watching. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.

[Skanda Amarnath]

I don't know if you knew this,

[Josh Brown]

but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month. Plan that I've been enjoying.

[Neil Dutta]

It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you

[Josh Brown]

to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to [e-mail]

[Skanda Amarnath]

Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3

[Neil Dutta]

month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only,

[Josh Brown]

then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile. Com.