Joey 0:02

All right, welcome back to another episode of Wealth Unplugged. This is Market Chatter, My name is Joey Loss.

Adam Van Wie 0:06

And I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey 0:10

Adam is the chief investment officer of what we do here at Strivus Wealth Partners. And every couple weeks I just kind of pick his mind and we talk about what's going on in the markets. And, you know, this podcast is originally intended to have a whole bunch of evergreen content where we dig into tax planning strategies and education planning strategies and things like that. And for the last three months, it feels like the market activity has just been so hot that that's really all that feels worth talking about at the moment. We did do an episode right after the tax law changed in July of last year. So if you didn't check that out, I recommend you go look at it. It's a couple episodes back, but it just talked about tax changes that you can expect as you file for 2025 and looking forward to. But anyway, getting into today,

Joey 0:58

the last time we talked, Adam, we were talking about SaaS apocalypse. Do you remember that? It felt a lot longer ago than nine market days. That's how many days ago it was.

Adam Van Wie 1:03

I do.

Adam Van Wie 1:09

Well, we had a little something happen in between then and now that kind of took over the headlines.

Joey 1:14

We sure did. Saturday morning we all woke up and opened our feeds or news or whatever you look at, and we, we were having armed conflict with Iran and markets didn't respond right away, but they did. By Tuesday. They were kind of reacting.

Joey 1:33

Anyway, we've got a lot of headlines to go through. We've got the armed conflict with Iran, with the Iranian regime more specifically, not the people of Iran. We've got US Markets down a bit since that started. International markets seem to be taking it the worst. They're down pretty significantly from their year to date highs thus far in 2026. Certain company countries like South Korea are down 20% in a matter of days, which is pretty significant. Oil is soaring, not really a surprise given Iran's role in the market. And the Oil Trade Bank. Crude is up over 20% in five days. I think near 25%. Gas prices are rising. We've got mortgage and business loan rates temporarily rearing up again after we were glad to say that they were falling in the last meeting. And China is signaling an era of slower economic growth. So I thought, I'm just going to lay some context. I'm going to run through just where the tickers are, where the indices are. I'll lay that out. I'll talk about oil and Then we can kind of just pick things apart from there. The s and P5 day return is down about 2% as of the time of this recording. The Dow is down about 3.3%. The Nasdaq has suffered the least of the three. I think that's mostly because it had already been kind of suffering relative to the other indices up to this point in the year. The MAG7 is actually up 2%. Developed international is down bigger at 7.5%. Emerging markets are down 8.5%. Again, international is definitely feeling it more than the US. Gold is down about 3.5% which is a little surprising. Silver's down about 7% and bank crude is kicking butt up 25%. Not a shocker. Year to date things are kind of okay. It feels worse than it is if you're just looking at the five day.

Joey 3:23

The year to date is S and P is down about 1.5%, the Dow is down 1.6, Nasdaq down 2%, MAG7 is down 6%, small caps are still up 2%, developed international is up just under 2% and emerging markets are up just under 5%. Gold is up 20% for the year, silver's up 16% and bank crude's up 50% for the year. I think before this five day period started where we're actually in conflict, the market kind of knew oil was going to be hit somehow whether there was actually a conflict or not. So yeah, we've got some motion. But I think in a way things feel worse than they really are. I mean the storyline based on performance still seems like it's small Cap International value is still doing okay.

Adam Van Wie 4:14

I mean not in the last seven days but in the overall picture. Absolutely. The chart of International since last April is really, really strong outside of the last week. And even that, I don't think it's done that much technical damage to it. I think could easily rebound with lower oil prices. And I think a lot of this, a lot of the reaction in the markets has been to oil prices rather than the actual war. And that makes sense. High oil prices cause all sorts of damage

Adam Van Wie 4:47

from inflation to. Well actually there's even bigger problems in the oil market right now. Kuwait just said that they were going to stop producing because they can't ship it out. And that's a huge problem. The, the shipping lanes are closed off right now, are very dangerous and these companies don't want to navigate their very expensive boats through them to deliver oil around the world. And so the supply chain is disrupted.

Adam Van Wie 5:15

That's the most recent problem we've seen in the oil market.

Joey 5:19

Yeah, I think that's like the core driver, as you said, because over 80% of the crude and liquefied natural gas passing through the Strait is intended for Asian markets in South Korea, China, both of these. You know, it's interesting to see China not enter the conflict and you can't help but wonder, do they not know which way it's going to go? And do they feel like we need that oil so bad we can't be on the wrong side of this.

Adam Van Wie 5:46

Yeah, it's. It is, it is very interesting that they've not done anything. They're so dependent on foreign oil. Korea, the reason that their market drops so much 20% is that they're 100% dependent on foreign imported energy. And that's just a function of. They don't. Their natural land mass doesn't sit on top of any reserves. So. So that's the situation that they're in. And also that market had been the hottest in the entire world for the first part of this year. And so pulling back 20% on a 50 rise really isn't that bad. But still,

Adam Van Wie 6:24

it is interesting to see the different markets react. And most of that is just to where is this energy going to come from? Where is the oil going to come from if they can't get it out of the Middle East? And then also Venezuela. I don't know exactly how damaging

Adam Van Wie 6:42

the recent events in Venezuela have been to their exports, but that is something to consider for sure.

Joey 6:48

Yeah.

Joey 6:51

It's a moment to be grateful that America has so many. We have so many positive elements just to where we are that have nothing to do with what we've done and how we've built the country. Just the natural resources we have, the amount of access we have to rivers within the country, the amount of water access we have. I mean, we're just. It doesn't make us immune to the oil impacts, but you realize what these other countries have to contend with. And as you said, for Korea to have no real meaningful natural resources and no matter what is going on in the world, they need a trade partner that will give it to them. That is something we don't have to deal with in quite the same way.

Adam Van Wie 7:22

That's.

Adam Van Wie 7:26

No. And being energy independent, this is a really good illustration of why it's so important and why the President put so much importance on that. It's times like these that show the reasons. Because if we were in the Korean situation, things would look a lot different right now. And definitely not as positive for our own country.

Joey 7:51

Yeah. So so far, I mean it seems like the market is a little bit, it's kind of trying to figure out what is the scope of this conflict. I mean, is this a normal initial reaction to a sudden international event like this?

Adam Van Wie 8:09

In my experience it's normal to a little bit, maybe even lighter. I mean we didn't, we haven't seen any panic selling really. Um, and sometimes that happens, although that, that usually happens with more domestic events than, than things that are happening halfway across the world. Although the scope of this conflict is, has the potential to, I mean if China did get involved, then you're really going to see some panic selling, I think. But yeah, so far I feel like it's been pretty tame and we're still sitting just a few percentage off of all time highs. So while some damage has been done, it's pret pretty minimal. So I would say the, the reaction is normal to maybe slightly less than normal.

Joey 8:54

Yeah, I mean if you're in a diversified portfolio right now, you probably, it just feels like a flat quarter for the most part.

Adam Van Wie 9:01

Yeah, that's probably pretty accurate.

Joey 9:06

How much? So there's, you know, headlines are flying around talking about how oil prices directly and indirectly can influence inflation.

Joey 9:17

What do you think the Fed's position is going to be over the next month as this conflict kind of unfolds?

Adam Van Wie 9:22

Well, we got a new data point this morning that kind of changed my outlook a bit. The jobs number was pretty negative. I think it was down 90,000 on a forecast of plus 50,000. That's a pretty big disappointment.

Adam Van Wie 9:39

So I think they have competing data points to look at right now. I, I don't think the current Fed will do anything. I think the new Fed chair is going to be inclined to cut pretty early on. I don't know what the ongoing nature of that will look like though. That's my prediction is nothing until the Fed chair changes over and then at least one cut, maybe more. It really depends on the employment situation, but there's a lot going on. I don't envy the, the new Fed chair. That's a tough job.

Joey 10:15

Yeah. You've got some, some cause for monetary pausing or tightening and then also loosening if the jobs issues. How much of the jobs issue do you think is fairly attributed to AI

Adam Van Wie 10:31

at this point? Not much. I, I mean maybe a little, but really I would say it's a very small amount. AI is a technology that I think is going to be huge, but I don't think it's there yet to the point that it's causing tons of layoffs. I mean it's just hard to believe that it's, that it's been deployed efficiently and accurately and it works in enough places for it to cause that many layoffs. I, I might be wildly wrong on that, but that my feel is that it hasn't really started yet.

Joey 11:05

Yeah, I mean the data I've seen so far and I'm kind of cherry picking just what I remember suggests that what you're saying is right. I think certain pockets seem to be getting hit harder. So like entry level coders, you're having a bad time compared to prior markets. But the opposite is true for like senior level coders. They now have the output of two or three of their prior versions of themselves. And so they're actually, there's more job openings for them and higher pay.

Adam Van Wie 11:32

I did see a chart that showed that senior level coding jobs have openings have increased since the onset of AI

Joey 11:40

materially, like not a small percentage, not like 1 or 2%. Yeah, so that's interesting. And you know, there was the whole Citrini research article that came out and shocked the market. I think that was last week. It's really hard to keep time in my head at this point.

Adam Van Wie 11:55

I think you're correct.

Joey 11:57

I think that was early last week. And that article went, made its rounds and basically painted kind of a doomsday feature where it said we've got this version of an economy that's producing 5 to 10% GDP growth every year, but it's really ghost GDP because which is a term it made up and saying that what that means is it's not like it's GDP that results in most of that money going into the pockets of American people. It goes into the pockets of a few American companies. And it was, it was just too perfect a narrative to really seem like that could possibly be what's going to happen.

Adam Van Wie 12:33

Yeah, it really follows too many narratives that you see on Twitter for my liking.

Adam Van Wie 12:42

The fact is money going into the pocket, quote unquote of a corporation generally gets redeployed into hiring workers to then create more money going into their pockets. That's, that's how that works. It doesn't just go there and disappear forever.

Adam Van Wie 12:59

So I, I don't think that I, I, I don't buy that argument. I, I just think that is a bit far fetched and probably had ulterior motives.

Joey 13:09

Yeah. And I think it, I think it aligns with, you know, I don't think you can perfectly compare the introduction of AI technology and AI agents to the release of computers in the first place. But people had similar fears. And I, part of me wants to go back and look at what were some of the articles then like? Were they saying, you know, Procter and Gamble with computers would only need 20 people on staff, because whatever, you know, and then for that reason you end up with 5 and 10% GDP growth goes GDP. You know, the same argument. Because I think what all of these narratives do is they fail to, they fail to have any creativity about what new job opportunities will come in place. I mean, you're focusing on current lines of business and how they might be executed in the Future. Google has five or 10 more lines of business than it did 10 years ago. And it was a monolith then. So like these companies, everybody's going to be trying to find new lines of business and people are going to have to be involved for those things to manifest. We're just really bad at being creative about what that's going to look like and when it's going to happen. People can't even agree on when AGI is going to arrive or if it's already here in some fashion.

Adam Van Wie 14:23

Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of like the budgeting argument in Congress. And so they have to use static scoring, which means that if you cut taxes, then you decrease revenue by this much. But what it never takes into account is increased economic activity, which then generates more taxes. So it's like we can't see that. We see this first step, but we can't see the 10 next steps. And humans, I think, are just inherently bad at that. Outside of a few people who have a real gift to, to be able to think in that kind of dimensions. It, I mean, I, I think I'm okay at it, but there are people who are much better than I am. And it is, it is a, it is a true gift to be able to, to come up with, see four steps ahead when, when most people just aren't wired to do that.

Joey 15:18

Yeah, well, and I think, and for investors right now,

Joey 15:23

it's important to decide. I was listening to something about this recently. It's more important now to decide, are you an investor or a trader? Because

Joey 15:34

then really it has been in many years you could kind of trade around and screw around for the last several years and probably make some money on the assumption that you're trading the same 10 stocks everybody else was. Like, you could probably have made money doing that at this point in time. It's, it's seriously been the case that every Week, some article comes out and takes an industry's market cap down 10% like overnight. Or more. Yeah. Software got hit for what, 20 plus. A couple weeks ago. And the challenge is like, I don't like, like you, I don't have that skill to like a great degree to forecast. But then when it happened within our industry for one of our custodians, Altruist came out with a new tax planning technology that shook the other custodian stock prices by over 10% in many cases. And as an insider, I was like, well, yeah, totally. I'm excited that one of our platforms has better technology, but it did not destroy tens of billions of dollars of wealth in these companies. I just don't believe that.

Adam Van Wie 15:58

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 16:01

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 16:36

Yeah, schwab didn't lose 10% of their customers overnight,

Adam Van Wie 16:41

nor will that technology cause them to lose 10% of their customers over the next or four. I, I just don't. It. It's some of these reactions and this is not atypical. The market always overreacts in my opinion, because people just want to get ahead of, of any panic selling that they. And, and what that does, it actually creates panic selling because they are, they're kind of panicking to get out before the panicking selling happens. And therefore you get these overreactions. It's, it's very typical. But to, to think that a tax planning tool at a relatively unknown custodian is going to cause a 10% change in Schwab's business is a bit far fetched. And at the end of the day, Schwab could buy this little custodian and integrate their tax planning tool and that, that would solve the whole issue. So I, I just don't, I think it's just way overdone.

Joey 17:42

Yeah, well, they can just develop one, which I assume most of these will do. And yeah, so it's just an over. So the reason these stock prices are changing to Adam's point is they're not, it's not like revenues are changing overnight. The thing that's changing in the formula for the stock price kind of implicitly in the minds of the market is the expectations of future growth. So before the tax tool, it's saying Schwab is going to grow at this rate and then the tax tool has some impact on that coefficient. And so therefore it says that we can justify a lower multiple of the profits as the price of the stock. But that's happening all over the market and there's no way people are getting it right or the market's necessarily Right. At any given time in an unknown future. And so I think that back to the original point I was trying to make, it's kind of lofty to make, but you have to decide, I think now more than ever, are you a trader or are you an investor? Because if you're an investor, you have to just understand, like, if you believe in a company and you think they're going to make good decisions through a period of disruption, you're going to see it go all over the place in the short term, potentially. But if you think in five or ten years you just have faith that they're going to be a winner, then you're an investor, you need to hold on to the stock and just kind of ignore whatever the headlines are saying, because if you're trying to trade on headlines, you're going to have a bad time. That's true all the time, but I think it's going to be especially true through this period. And if you look at what's happening beneath the index performance, I'm saying year to date, the s and P500 is down only 1.5%. But we've been talking almost daily about how the actual stocks within the index are moving 10, 20%.

Joey 19:21

It's just, they're moving in perfect opposition to one another to create what seems like a relatively smooth ride at the surface level.

Adam Van Wie 19:29

And another argument to own the index. Really.

Joey 19:32

Yeah, yeah. And if you don't. If you don't want to bet on a single company, which, you know, no secrets there, that's probably. That's our position.

Adam Van Wie 19:34

Yeah.

Joey 19:42

That's owning the index. You're going to appreciate when the water rises for whoever it rises for.

Adam Van Wie 19:47

Yeah. Stock pickers normally are. Have a tough job. Right now you have an impossible job. It's not something you can figure out. The collective wisdom of the market is going to. It's seemingly random right now. And one day, one day defensive stocks are on fire and they're selling off anything that has the potential to get hurt by. By AI and then the next day it reverses. So how, how do you, how do you figure out what's going to happen next? It's impossible. Yeah.

Joey 20:23

Yeah. I don't know. Unless you're just staring all the time. And even if I had the information the second it was available, like, I just would not have the faith that I'm going to make whatever the right call is over and over and over to profit off of that. Seems difficult. And the other, the other problem is

Adam Van Wie 20:35

Yeah, absolutely.

Joey 20:43

the surge of algorithmic trading that's in place now. It's almost like whatever the reaction should be fundamentally from a. From some headline or some big disruption that happens, there's all this. The second it starts to go down, there's all this money that immediately buys in, you know, with like a limit order or something like that, that just pulls it back up. And so you may not even seize the opportunity that you thought you were going to be able to get or that fundamentally it feels like you should be able to get from whatever the news is.

Adam Van Wie 21:15

Yeah, look at the Nvidia results last week. I mean, I. If there's a company that said a better quarter than Nvidia just had, I'm not aware of it. And the stock dropped like a rock as soon as the announcement came out.

Joey 21:30

It's a strange time in the market.

Joey 21:36

All right, let's see if I've got some other data points here on the AI narrative. Oh, I did actually prepare some. So the bottom rung of hiring is the one that's most vulnerable. In 2019, new graduates made up 32% of big tech hires. In 26, that's down to just 7%. So that's a pretty big shift.

Adam Van Wie 21:55

That is.

Joey 21:58

It wasn't 19, though. It was kind of like if you had a pulse, you could get a job. Like, it was just like a hot market compared to.

Adam Van Wie 22:03

It was. Okay, I. That the real, real frenzy didn't come till 21, 22.

Joey 22:10

Okay.

Adam Van Wie 22:15

That's when people. Companies just couldn't find people to fill jobs. The. Everyone was flush with COVID cash. No one was looking for work. It was. You could pretty much, if you had a pulse, you could get hired at that point. And. And if you were a qualified person, you could get a huge raise by skipping to another company.

Joey 22:41

One of my notes here is just that business spending on Software is up 11% year over year, which is inconsistent with the market's reaction.

Adam Van Wie 22:51

Yeah, definitely. That is ironic.

Joey 22:56

And then the last note in that section, we were talking about ghost GDP and kind of the fantastical idea that somehow all the money would stay in the companies and we could have a huge booming economy, but people themselves would be suffering disproportionately to the current situation. Right now, 70% of GDP comes from consumer spending. So you'd have to change a lot fundamentally about how society, the socioeconomic system of America, works for this fantasy to become true. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it just seems so unlikely compared to the tone with which it was written and the way that it was Received by the market.

Adam Van Wie 23:38

Honestly, it sounds more like a dystopian sci fi novel than a real scenario that's going to play out. Yeah. Besides, who are these companies selling to if no one has a job and no one has any money, who's buying the product? I mean it just doesn't make any sense.

Joey 23:57

Yeah. I mean, because even if they have a, some like an, an extremely elevated B2B spending, like where are the businesses getting the money to buy with in the first place? Like somebody's paying for it. Unless governments become all the customers, which would also be bad.

Adam Van Wie 24:12

Yeah, terrible.

Adam Van Wie 24:14

It just doesn't make any sen sense. I, I can't see that shift happening. I mean again, I'm not the most clairvoyant, you know, predictor of things that are going to happen, but this just seems like a really far fetched scenario.

Joey 24:28

Yeah,

Joey 24:31

well, what about so with Korea? Is there more to this story in that? So like last year you said they were up over 40%, down 20 this week.

Joey 24:42

China doesn't seem to be having a great time either. Is there more to the story?

Adam Van Wie 24:49

There's more to the China story for sure. I mean I thought that was the most shocking news of the week. Honestly. Way more shocking than US bombing Iran, China lowering their growth target to 5% from, I mean they've been 7 to 9 for as long as I can remember. And people have always doubted that that 7% number, if they're admitting to 5, how bad is it really? I mean they might be in some serious trouble. They have all sorts of demographic issues. They're, they're an old country. That one child policy is really hurting them now, even though they've gotten rid of it and are actually gone the other way. It was in place for so long that it's, it's, they have an aging population, not enough young workers to support it. They're no longer pulling people in from the fields to move into cities. And, and when that happens, they go from really people who don't consume to people who consume and then spend money, create other economic activity. So if they're admitting that their growth rate went down 2%, I think it's probably worse off than that.

Joey 25:59

That's probably fair. And I would assume that their GDP is more like,

Joey 26:06

like 20% domestic consumer spending or less and like, you know, almost all international money coming in. If you think about there's not a thing in your house that you don't flip over and it's made in China, you know, I mean, you gave them money to get it and yeah, I just wonder with the tariffs and everything else like we, it seems like things have changed quite a bit for them.

Adam Van Wie 26:27

I mean you just follow the headlines. Companies are if they, they might still manufacture in China, but they're also looking at having a redundant plant in Korea or Vietnam or Thailand or India and, or they're opening domestic manufacturing plants in some cases. I mean not, not probably as many as are. Are opening in India and other, other international locations. But that, that China cannot be growing at the rate that they were if everyone is building plants in other countries besides China. That the whole reason they got to be the second largest economy in the world is because so many companies opened manufacturing plants in China.

Joey 27:10

Yeah.

Joey 27:12

And they just, you know, China is really good at something we're not. And that is the way that they operate is like one big cohesive colony in many ways. I mean the government's relationships with businesses are different there. They take 20, 30 year timelines, move money around, make things happen in a way that a individualist capitalist society like America does not do. But one of the consequences of that is you have a lot of people that don't have money. So domestic spending is not something you can count on. Whereas in America it's a very powerful force for all parties. The individual spending decisions that all of us make. So yeah, they've ended up by focusing so hard on being independent and taking these long timelines, they've created a situation where they're actually somewhat ironically dependent on international trade to survive that.

Adam Van Wie 28:07

Yeah. And I also didn't buy the headline that as soon as we started our trade with them started declining, that they just magically were able to shift that to other foreign countries like overnight. Like really. I don't know about that. That it just seems like something that would take some time to develop relationships and, and I don't know, it just seemed very, very convenient that overnight they were able to replace all this business that they did with the U.S. yeah.

Joey 28:40

The one market I think they're, they're very powerful in is

Joey 28:46

cars. They have very good affordable electric cars. Europe loves them. They don't sell in America yet. I don't know that they will. But that is a very, they've eaten up a lot of Tesla's share over the last several years and consumers are happy with the product. So I think that's a very legitimate situation and market shift there. I can't speak to the others.

Adam Van Wie 29:09

Yeah. If what I've. The reviews I've seen online of their cars are pretty outstanding. They're Electric cars in particular,

Adam Van Wie 29:17

and that you might be right about that. But that's just one. I don't want to say it's small, but that's just one piece of the pie. You know that you think about all the things that are made in China that we use here in the US and you take away 20% of that, it's got to be way larger than the international automobile market.

Joey 29:27

Yeah.

Joey 29:42

Yeah, I think that's right.

Joey 29:45

All right. Mortgage rates and bond rates. Bond markets don't love war, but bond markets as a principle seem to depend on some level of stability. And obviously war presents a tremendous, potentially a tremendous amount of instability. And so while last time we got together and recorded a podcast, we were excited to see the 30 year mortgage rate fall below 6% for the first time, we're now back above it, just a little over 6.1.

Joey 30:16

And bond yields

Joey 30:19

have seen a little bit of a shift as well. If we look forward,

Joey 30:26

what kind of are the paths for rates for bond markets?

Joey 30:33

Is the war kind of the centerpiece at this point or can we overcome it and still have a war continue for the next several months?

Adam Van Wie 30:41

I believe the war is the reason that you're seeing a spike in yields right now. You've seen just this week the, the 10 year go from 3.9 to 4.1 or a little bit above that. It's definitely, if you, if you own some bond funds, you're probably down a percent a point or two in the last week. And I think that's 100% attributable to the war. And I think it could very easily reverse if, if every, if this doesn't look like it's going to carry on forever. But there's some fear driving those markets right now. I agree that they like stability and right now we're not, we don't have a whole lot of that.

Joey 31:23

Yeah,

Joey 31:27

yeah. And it's just worth remembering like it, it's so hard. It's so interesting to look at the market and say it feels like we should be suffering more in equities than we are. We've had three amazing years where it really, aside from a moment in 2024 or 2025 last year for the tariffs, everything has just been kind of moving the right direction. And we've had from AI headlines and technologies and some minor layoffs of big companies and then

Joey 32:00

instability in various areas. Now we've got war. It's like what's going to take the market down in a material way at this point?

Adam Van Wie 32:08

Yeah, it's a Good question. I mean, when you see profit growth of over 10% in a year on your average company,

Adam Van Wie 32:18

I mean, that tends to drive the market up. We've been in a really good period of really, companies are doing innovating, they're using AI to increase their profitability. I think that is been the real story around AI, much more so than the layoffs that it's caused so far. But I think you're just seeing a period where companies are, the consumer is strong, at least on the upper part of the K, maybe not as much on the lower part of the K shaped economy, but you're seeing people out spending money and I think it's showing up in bottom lines and that's what's driving the market higher outside of short term political geopolitical events like we're in right now. But if, if this Iran thing wraps up quickly, I could make a case for going right back to that.

Joey 33:14

Yeah, I think so too.

Joey 33:18

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's interesting to be in a world where warfare, warfare has changed so much and

Adam Van Wie 33:30

companies

Joey 33:30

are doing so well that all this can be going on and it's just like, okay, but is it really going to hurt Apple or is it really. I mean, it's just like for the market to see through that in this way compared to like when I looked at market performance short and long for previous conflicts. It's just amazing to see what kind of an era we're in and try to make sense of it.

Adam Van Wie 33:52

Yeah. And the nature of war has really changed too. The drone technology has completely altered what the landscape of a war looks like and the amount of people that are on the front lines. I mean, you. There wasn't a scenario 20 years ago where you attacked a country and didn't have a plan to put boots on the ground. It just. What is it even, Was it even feasible? I don't think so. You had to do that and now it kind of looks like we're going to wrap this thing up without doing it.

Joey 34:25

Yeah, that's amazing. All right, well, I think we've probably exhausted what we can possibly make any sense of so far in this next chapter. We'll touch base in a couple weeks. Hopefully this conflict wraps up and we've got kind of a positive outlook we can share, but we'll see how things go.

Adam Van Wie 34:46

Yeah, I hope you're right. That would be a fun podcast to do.

Joey 34:50

Yeah. All right, thanks, Adam. Appreciate your time.

Adam Van Wie 34:52

Thank you, Joey.