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Today on Something You Should Know, why days of the week somehow seem different from each other.
Then a new type of medicine that fights the health effects of gravity.
Lower back pain is a form of gravity intolerance, dizziness, heart failure, ankle swelling.
We realize that almost every chronic illness in a way can be tracked back to a form of gravity intolerance.
Also, when you lose weight, where does the fat go?
And CNBC's Jim Cramer addresses whether you're better off just investing in mutual funds and not individual stocks.
I think the idea that people are too stupid to own stocks, except for rich people, is really the attitude.
I worked at Goldman.
I ran a hedge fund.
I know what the attitude is.
And I think I want to blast the attitude and take the curtain and show you what's behind it.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Something you should know.
Fascinating intel.
The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life.
Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Have you ever had a moment where you forgot what day it was?
Or you thought it was another day than it really is?
Well, it happens to everybody.
And I'll tell you why.
Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers and welcome to Something You Should Know.
Even though we're all familiar with the seven days of the week, we attribute different meanings to each of those days, and some of those meanings are stronger than others.
Psychologists asked a group of people to associate words with different days of the week.
They found that Monday and Friday had the most meaning to people, but the days in the middle of the week were a bit of a blur.
Participants mainly associated Monday with words like boring, hectic and tired, while Fridays were linked with more positive words, including party and freedom.
Almost 40 of the participants confused the current day of the week with the preceding or the following day, and most of those mistakes occurred during the middle of the week.
And 50 of people got the current day wrong when they were asked during a week that had a holiday in it.
It also turns out that there are more songs about Mondays and Fridays than any other days of the week, which may also contribute to a stronger association with those two days.
And that is something you should know.
There is a powerful force acting on you right now.
It never lets up.
It shapes your body, your mind, even your mood.
And yet you almost never think about it.
That force is gravity.
And scientists are now discovering its surprising effects on our health, both physical and mental.
Things like back pain and knee pain, often the result, at least in part, from gravity.
Ever notice how we describe sadness as feeling down?
Gravity literally pulls us down.
And it may be influencing much more than we realize.
Leading this fascinating research is Dr. Brennan Spiegel.
He is Director of Health Services Research at Cedars-Sinai, a professor at UCLA and co-hosts the Gravity Doctors podcast.
He's author of a book called How Gravity Shapes Your Body, Steadies the Mind, and Guides Our Health.
Hi, doctor.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Well, thanks for having me.
So when I think about the effects of gravity on the body, I think more in terms of what visually, you can see.
You know, gravity pulls us down so it makes your skin sag over time.
It has those kinds of effects.
But you're talking about something much bigger than that.
Yeah, well, the exterior is where you might see it with skin sagging, but that's just the beginning.
On the inside as well, we're sagging.
Even as we're speaking right now, right?
In order for you to stay awake and talk to me, we need to have our brains perfused with oxygen, which means you've got all these pumps and tubes in your body right now, pumping blood against the force of gravity and keeping you alive and well, and that's just another example.
Lower back pain is a form of gravity intolerance.
Dizziness, heart failure, ankle swelling, venous insufficiency, the list goes on and on, and as we start to look at medicine and I'm a doctor we realize that almost every chronic illness, in a way, can be tracked back to a form of gravity intolerance.
So gravity may affect all these parts of the body, But we can't escape gravity.
Gravity is going to affect those parts of the body no matter what.
So what's the big so what here?
I mean other than to note that gravity is having an effect.
So what?
The so what is that?
We can do something about it.
We can change our relationship to gravity to strengthen our body and even our minds.
It turns out, even our mental health is dependent upon our relationship to gravity.
So we can talk about that.
Many different directions.
The so what goes in lots of directions.
Whether it's ensuring that you drink enough fluid so that you can stand up and stay up to the force of gravity, or strengthening your back muscles so that you can hoist up this sack of potatoes you've got in your belly, which is the gastrointestinal system.
Whether it's monitoring your inner ear to see if your relationship to gravity is thrown off.
The list is extensive.
Even astronauts know about this because they get issues without gravity, too.
So our relationship to gravity goes very, very deep.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you about that real quick.
Since we have people who have experienced life with no gravity in space.
What have we learned from that?
Yeah, we've learned a lot.
It turns out, we have these astronauts who are among the strongest of mind and body of our species, who go up into microgravity or low Earth orbit, and they get issues up there.
The blood in their body starts to redistribute.
They get headaches, eye problems, kidney stones.
They get stomach issues quite frequently.
Even the microbiome, which is the trillions of organisms that live inside of our body, get thrown off when there's no gravity.
Serotonin biology, which we think of as this happy chemical, is really a gravity management substance, and it gets thrown off too in microgravity orbit.
So we're learning a lot about what happens to the immune system and the cardiovascular system when people don't have a lot of gravity.
And we can bring those messages back and those lessons back to those of us living on Earth, especially in high altitudes and on airplanes, where people get lots of issues.
It's really quite an extensive story to tell.
So the way you describe though, the problems, for example, that astronauts have, those are problems because there's no gravity.
So it seems like gravity is the cure, not the problem.
Yeah, there's sort of a gravity Goldilocks zone where too little gravity can cause a number of problems, as we're learning from astronauts, because we were born on this planet, we emerged from this planet and are evolved for it.
But at the same time, gravity doesn't change, but our relationship to gravity changes.
As we get older, we get weaker in some cases.
Our spine and muscles become weaker.
We might gain weight.
Our microbiome changes.
And what happens is our relationship to gravity changes.
And so too much gravity relative to what we can handle leads in many cases to a downward trend in health.
So the gravity Goldilocks zone is finding that sweet spot where you are in tune, essentially with the forces of this planet, both physically and, in fact, mentally.
And there's something called mental gravity, which has to do with how our brain itself is managing the force of gravity.
Well, you would think, I would think that, since we are from this planet and we evolved, that evolution would have taken care of some of these problems, so that and I guess it has, that's why we have adapted as we have.
But things like back pain, you would think well, why do we still have that?
Shouldn't we have gotten rid of that?
That's a great question.
And if we look at our evolutionary history, you know, for most of our history we were four-legged creatures running around with all of our viscera, our organs dangling from the spine, almost like ornaments off of a Christmas tree.
But then, as we stood up in really the last part of our evolutionary history, we massively changed our relationship to the pole of Earth.
And all of our systems started to hang down, which meant we needed to evolve suspension systems both within the body and in the musculoskeletal system, and pumps and tubes to make sure we can overcome that force.
I mean, think about a giraffe's neck, for example.
A lot of gravity management there.
And so it's still a work in progress.
And so, given that, given what you've said about gravity and the toll it is taking, so what do you do?
I mean, you can't come home and turn off gravity in the house.
So what kinds of things are you talking about in terms of combating the effects?
Well, I'm a gastroenterologist, so I study the stomach and I take care of patients with conditions like irritable bowel syndrome or IBS.
So I might just start there for it as one example.
And a couple years ago I wrote a paper about gravity in the gut and how the gut itself is like a sack of potatoes that's hanging down.
And some people are better at porting that sack of potatoes around than others.
And what I came to realize is one way to help your gut health is literally to strengthen your back, which GI doctors don't talk about a lot.
We talk about the gut and the diet and all that.
But if you can strengthen your back and strengthen your core and literally stand up better...
It opens up your abdominal cavity.
It opens up your diaphragm, and it allows your intestines to work more effectively.
And this has been demonstrated repeatedly in research studies that our physical body, body and its ability to carry around that sack of potatoes will determine your gut health.
And that's just one example where we will recommend something called hypopressive exercises, where you work out your abs by sucking in your belly and sit-ups and back exercises and planks to help the gut, not just to help be stronger.
And then we can get into lots of other examples in terms of hanging bars, flotation therapy, tilt table therapy.
There's a long list of exercises and approaches and even diet to help you manage gravity better.
Well, knowing nothing about this, when I first heard that we were going to talk about medical problems as the result of gravity, I immediately thought well, just hang upside down.
You'll be fine.
You'll be fine.
Yeah.
Inverted yoga positions, tilt table therapy.
So you're right.
Some patients get very lightheaded when they stand up, some people.
It's quite common, and that is gravity intolerance.
That means you don't have enough fluid and salt in your body.
And some people get that a lot.
They have something called postural tachycardia syndrome or POTS, and it's underdiagnosed.
And many of those people also have stomach issues.
And it turns out they've learned in many cases to flip themselves upside down.
They feel better.
They'll do it for 20 minutes at a time and it kind of reshuffles their innards in a way to release some of the pressure and allow the system to recalibrate.
And this is something that people have discovered on their own.
Inverted yoga positions, there's several of those, like the shoulder stand and plow position.
And then people will do this flotation therapy.
It's like being in the Dead Sea, just floating there.
It turns out that has a very dramatic effect on the body and its physiology.
Just removing gravity for a period of time.
It can even help with anxiety and depression, too.
We're talking about the negative effects of gravity on your body and how to fight them.
My guest is Dr. Brennan Spiegel.
He's author of the book, How Gravity Shapes Your Body, Steadies the Mind, and Guides Our Health.
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So doctor, as much sense as it makes that the way you fight the effects of gravity is you hang upside down.
It seems like you couldn't do it enough right.
If you're basically on your feet or you are certainly being subjected to gravity 23 and a half hours a day, that one half hour doesn't seem like that would be enough to counter the effects right.
Well, it's all a matter of ratios.
So, of course, we're not on our feet 23 hours a day.
We're sleeping.
And sleep itself probably evolved in part to reperfuse the brain at night.
And so all day long, your brain is the last part of the body to get blood.
It's way up at the top.
And so when we sleep at night, part of what we're doing is recalibrating that system, too.
So you're right.
We still need other ways to manage gravity when we're not, let's say, flipped upside down or just lying flat on our back.
And that's where adequate hydration comes in for some people using compression socks at work to stay upright and standing and moving.
I use a weighted vest at work and ankle weights and a balance board to constantly engage my body, to maintain and prime the pumps and tubes in my body to help circulate the blood, even if I'm not flipped upside down.
So you're right.
That alone may not be enough.
But when partnered with other processes and other behaviors, it can actually help engage gravity in a more effective way.
Well, wait a minute. ankle weights, it seems like you would be helping gravity be more gravity.
Mm-hmm.
Well, that's part of the goal, is to almost simulate life on a larger planet with more pull.
And what the body does is it responds.
And there's been really interesting research on this.
There's something called the Gravitastat.
And what that is is when you weight down your body all at once, not progressively over months by gaining weight, but quickly.
The bones feel as if there's too much pressure and will increase metabolic rate by essentially talking back to the brain.
And this will lead to weight loss in some people improved cardiovascular circulation and, of course, improved strength.
So when you take off all those weights then the regular 1G pull of the earth doesn't feel quite as strong as it does.
And as I mentioned, there's been some research to show this, both in animals and in humans.
So I want to get into this idea that gravity has an effect on your mental and emotional health, because it doesn't seem like that would be the case.
So make the case.
Yeah.
Well, just start by thinking about when you're on a roller coaster.
So if you've ever been on a roller coaster and you go down that fall, you probably get butterflies in your stomach.
And I know I do.
Most people do.
And so to start there, why do we get this ignition in our belly when we're falling?
We get the same feeling, by the way, when we're falling in love, which is a metaphorical fall.
And people with irritable bowel syndrome and anxiety and fibromyalgia often feel those gut feelings all day long, even when they're not literally falling on a roller coaster.
So I've spent some time writing about this and thinking about this and it's almost as if we have this G-force accelerometer in our gut that tells us that we're being threatened.
The reason we ride roller coasters is for fun, but in essence we're practicing our demise in a way, even knowing that we're safe.
And some people absolutely cannot ride a roller coaster because they feel those feelings all the time.
Anxiety is almost like a neurovisceral fear of falling.
It's like you're metaphorically falling and you feel these butterflies that are telling you you're falling down.
And poignantly, in some traditions we literally end up In a gravity box.
A grave is a term derived from the word gravity.
Our goal in life is to stand up and stay up as long as we can and as well as we can until inevitably, at least physically, we're pulled back down into the ground.
And gut feelings are one way of telling you that things aren't going well.
And if you even think about our language up is good, down is bad, and depression has been described as a feeling like there's too much gravity.
You can't get out of bed, you're exhausted, you're slumped over.
And the end of all this is that the brain itself has a process called gravisception, where your brain, in an area called the anterior insula, is actually monitoring gravity, And it's theorized that some people with depression are misinterpreting the amount of pull on their body and they have a secondary mental consequence as a result of that.
I don't ride roller coasters because it makes me nauseous, but I don't know if that's connected to what you're talking.
I just feel sick.
It is connected, because that's the inner ear.
And so we haven't talked much about that yet.
But the inner ear is a gyroscope that's keeping track of the pull of this planet.
So we're on this planet.
We're like a fish in water.
A fish survives and thrives by moving through water, and it's designed to manage water.
Hardly knows that it's in water.
I doubt fish have any idea.
We're designed to survive and thrive by moving through the force of gravity.
And our relationship to it will determine our health.
And so when you're getting nauseous on a roller coaster, it means your inner ear is very sensitive and is detecting abnormal relationships to the pull of the planet that go beyond what your body is willing to manage, and so you get noxious symptoms.
You feel dizzy, you feel nauseous, and then you have an aversion to what are essentially gravitational challenges beyond what your body evolved to manage.
And so if you're depressed because of gravity, do you hang upside down and your depression goes away?
This is where it gets quite interesting.
There's a few ways that we approach depression.
Hanging upside down isn't going to be a panacea for people who feel really low, but the idea of elevation physical and mental is fundamental to how we manage depression.
Firstly, we want to boost serotonin levels in the body.
Now, this can be done through medications, which is often used.
But in many cases, the best way to manage serotonin is through diet and exercise and sun exposure.
And 95% of the serotonin in your body comes from the gut.
It comes from those trillions of microorganisms teeming inside your body producing serotonin.
I've written other papers about this, but serotonin is a gravity management substance.
Without it, you would be a flaccid sack on the ground, unable to talk to me right now, and so would I.
Babies can barely move because they have virtually no serotonin in their body until they populate their gut with microbiome, with bugs.
What serotonin does is it primes all your pumps and tubes to contract and your muscles to contract to fight gravity.
And so exercise, sun exposure, high tryptophan diet.
There's several foods we could talk about to boost that and increasing serotonin in the brain.
And also anti-gravity meditations and virtual reality.
So we use virtual reality or VR not for gaming and entertainment.
We use it in our hospital here at Cedars-Sinai to provide anti-gravity meditations, experiences where you literally feel like you're floating up into the sky, into the heavens, into the clouds, and you spend time, while you're in your hospital room, for example, floating around in this otherworldly form of physics that defies your everyday life.
And evidence shows that virtual reality can also help lift mood quite profoundly and change the way the body is experiencing gravity.
So how come...
I've never heard of this.
I mean, I've never heard of a gravity-centric approach to health.
I've never heard of this.
Well, that's a great question.
It's very interesting because it turns out there's many people who have been thinking about this and they just really haven't been brought together into a singular narrative.
So when I wrote this paper, before I even submitted it for peer review, I sent it to some of the top experts in the world in my field to see if I had maybe lost my marbles.
And they all read it, and they said, hey, you know what?
This actually makes sense.
When I read your paper, there's nothing here terribly controversial.
It all seems quite straightforward to me.
Then, when I submitted this paper, it was accepted within two weeks, which is very fast for the peer-reviewed literature.
Then it ended up getting this sort of worldwide media attention, which was surprising to me.
But then when I started doing lectures with doctors, as I did just this weekend, I had 400 doctors in a room.
They said boy, that makes so much sense.
Boy, why have I never heard this before?
And it's not as if I've invented some new form of medicine.
All I'm doing is going down to the basics.
Physics came first and biology came second.
And psychology came third.
And what we're seeing is a through line from literally our origins on this planet to how we interact with it right now as sense-making machines that keep us upright on this planet.
And so that story makes sense to people.
And it's been really gratifying to hear very positive feedback from my peers.
Well, I would imagine one of the reasons people haven't really talked about this much or done much with it is that gravity is such a constant force and you can't fight gravity, so why try?
And so people look at other ways for improving health, but not this way.
But clearly you've shown that you can fight gravity, that you can work against it or reduce the effects of it.
I've been speaking with Dr. Brennan Spiegel.
He is Director of Health Services Research for Cedars-Sinai and a Professor of Medicine and Public Health at UCLA.
He has a podcast called The Gravity Doctors and his book is called How Gravity Shapes Your Body, Steadies the Mind and Guides Our Health.
And there's a link to his book and to his podcast in the show notes.
Doctor, thank you so much.
Hey, I appreciate you having me on and thanks for what you do.
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Conventional wisdom says, don't pick individual stocks.
It's too risky.
Stick with mutual funds and ETFs.
But what if that's not the whole story?
For decades now, Jim Cramer has been challenging that advice and making a case for why stocks matter.
You know him as the host of CNBC's Mad Money.
He is founder of The Street, former hedge fund manager and author of several best-selling books, including How to Make Money in Any Market.
Today, he joins me to break down what every investor, new or experienced, needs to know.
Hi, Jim.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Well, thank you, Mike.
Thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure.
So I want to start with to get your response to this, because there has been for some time this conventional wisdom that the average person shouldn't buy individual stocks, that you're better off buying mutual funds, index funds.
Put your money there, leave it alone and leave the stock market to the professionals to which you say what.
Well, that was the old way.
I do think that it's a very paternalistic way.
I would also tell you that rich people buy stocks and sell stocks all the time because they recognize that it's a tremendous way to make a lot of money.
600,000 millionaires were created last year alone in the U.S. from stocks.
But I want to actually refer to a previous guest you had.
A woman by the name of Professor Wong, Laura Wong. from Northeastern.
And she talked about, and you already know, the notion of instinct.
And I spent a lot of time talking about curiosity and the notion that you should be taking action on your curiosity because you have the ability to see things and know things.
And I don't like the way you're denigrated by the brokerage industry.
Which is how?
How does the brokerage industry denigrate me? think that you don't know what you're doing they think that you couldn't pick apple that you couldn't pick meta which is facebook uh that you're not smart enough to spot google uh and they this their view is overridden by the way by the uh by chat gpt by perplexity by gemini uh these sites that have sprung up in the last year and a half that have really kind of made it so that any individual who wants to operate on one of their hunches, their instincts, can find out anything they want.
It didn't used to be like this.
The brokerage industry used to help everybody.
I remember when my wife was cut off by a bank because she only had $150,000.
She wasn't good enough.
It wasn't big enough.
It was quite insulting.
She had worked really hard to save that amount, which is a lot of money in America.
But she was basically told, listen, You're good enough to be in index funds.
And she had a really nice portfolio that she had built of things that she had observed her kids doing.
And I just think that we are in a society where I absolutely know, because I'm from the business, I know what goes on.
And I know how much the, let's say, Wall Street thinks that you don't know what you're doing.
And I think that's insulting.
And I think it should change.
So when you, or people who are good at this like you, find a stock and run with it well, where did that come from?
There's a million zillion stocks.
Where do you even begin?
Well, I think you start with what you like.
What do you see?
Do you think that, do you like Nike?
And you think it could turn around as a stock this way down.
Do you go to Chipotle?
What do you think of McDonald's?
Just to use just classic names.
Or if you stick with technology, which is I want because of growth stocks.
What do you think about Dell?
That may be your computer company or Apple.
The idea that you should just be in the next funds is a new idea.
The industry was predicated upon individuals picking good stocks and buying them and holding them.
We used to talk about buying and holding, and that's how you made big money.
It's always ironic that Warren Buffett says that you should be in index funds, but if you bought and held his stock, You were pretty much assured of becoming a millionaire if you started in the 1980s 1990s.
So I find the idea that you individuals don't know how to look at a stock, given the fact that there's so much technology that can help you and how many millions of people are making, over a few years, millions of dollars.
You certainly didn't make that an index fund.
It's really indicative of a two-class society, like a society where there's good medicine and there's a society where there's just nothing but ready clinics or even no clinics at all.
And look, I recognize that index funds are good.
My program is that 50% of your money should be in index funds.
I am saying that you should take 50% of your money and actually really operate on your instincts.
And take them to the bank, because I think you see much and you do much and you know much, but the industry tells you that you're a fool.
And I don't like that.
Especially the fools are people who have less than $200,000.
The people who have more than that or people who have $500,000, they're not fools.
They're gods.
That's the way industry works.
And it offends me and it should offend you.
So one of the things that happens.
I remember that I used to years ago I used to subscribe to Money Magazine.
And to some extent, watching you as well, that, okay, here are the five stocks to buy this month.
Well, next month when the new issue came out, there were the new five stocks.
Well, what about the other five?
That's disgraceful.
That was just the old way.
No, that's the old way.
I recommended Fang, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google in 2013.
That's why it was called Fang.
Now it's Meta and now it's Alphabet for Google.
And said, don't ever sell them.
And I have told people that's still the case.
I believe in long term, not short term.
It doesn't work short term.
Trading doesn't work.
Investing does.
Compounding does.
And I may be old fashioned at that, but I am convinced that if you hold your stocks, do your homework because I do tell you how to do the homework very extensively that that's how you become rich.
You won't become rich from your index funds, and your index funds are default.
A brokerage house will say, hey, listen, the market went down.
There's nothing I can do.
But I helped rich people.
I helped people become millionaires when I was at Goldman Sachs and my hedge fund.
And it was very clear that there's two classes.
And I think that the people who, who are kind of, let's say, persuaded to trade by publications, by programs are, I think, overmatched by the machines.
But if you put 50% of your money in an index fund Good mutual fund.
And then you buy five stocks that follow your own instincts or that you see or you hear for long term.
I just think you'll do.
Now, the numbers say you'll do better.
It's not Jim Cramer says that.
I've got ample data which shows that the numbers say.
But how come?
You say you know people have access to lots of information, but how come there are these superstars of investing right?
Warren Buffett is a superstar.
And I remember Peter Lynch when he had his mutual fund.
He was just like this golden boy that he could pick stocks like nobody else.
So what do they have that I don't have?
In Peter Lynch's first book, One Up on Wall Street, he spends a huge amount of time teaching regular people how to be able to act on their instincts.
It's only gotten easier since the technology has gotten easier.
He was a huge believer that people should be curious and then follow up on their curiosity by doing work.
His book got me involved in stocks.
I am forever grateful for him, both for Magellan, which was his fund at that point, but also really excellent book about how to pick stocks for regular people.
Uh, and i felt so uh strongly about that that i went to his editor and he was the editor of my first book.
So you're a disciple of peter lynch 100.
But one of the arguments that you hear and then and then i want to get into some of the homework that you just mentioned, but some one of the arguments you hear is Here's the proof that picking your own stocks doesn't work because mutual fund managers of managed funds tend to not beat the index.
So if these guys can't beat the index, what makes you think you can?
Well, let me be really clear about this.
I think the idea that people are too stupid to own stocks, except for rich people, is really the attitude.
I worked at Goldman.
I ran a hedge fund.
I know what the attitude is.
And I think I want to blast the attitude and take the curtain and show you what's behind it.
And it's deeply involved with a class structure and a belief that the people who don't have a lot of money let them have index funds.
But the people who do have a lot of money, let them buy stocks.
And I wish it weren't that way.
But having been steeped in it, might as well tell people.
And so if I was going to buy some stock in a company and you said, you know, go with your instincts.
What companies do you know?
And, you know, I might know because I eat at McDonald's once in a while.
That doesn't make it a well-run company.
It just means I go there.
So, okay, that's a starting point.
But then what do you do and where's the information?
And isn't it true that some of the information you really need, it's hard to get?
Well, I think I describe how it used to be versus now.
Everything in a quarterly report that's filed with the government is accessible within seconds.
A conference call and I spend a substantial amount of time talking about how to read a conference call and listen to one.
It's readily available, the machines that whether people you want to call them whatever they want but chat gpt gemini perplexity, anthropic and grok are incredible at giving you the information you need and it's done.
Uh, if you look at more than one, i think you'll find that get the right answer.
I haven't found really a wrong answer on any of those.
Uh look, if you don't have the time or the inclination, then you're not going to do it, but if you do have the time and inclination, i show you how to do the homework.
Probably Half of my work is devoted to how to do the homework in my regular life, in my TV shows, in the book.
And again, I want to come back to a fundamental premise.
People are smarter than they think when it comes to this.
They can read a conference call.
They can do the work.
I will not look down the vast majority of people in this country because i think that my way gives them a chance to become millionaires.
I think that you won't become the millionaire uh, otherwise you've got five stocks that i that you can actually, and then look, i give people, i think, some really fabulous ideas for those who do not want to go through the process, and why.
I think that you can own these stocks for the next 10 15, 20 years uh, and make money.
But what i'm really trying to do is get people to learn themselves how to act on their instincts and curiosity and avail themselves of the current huge crop of information that, if you want to, you can find out about a McDonald's.
You can find out about a Chipotle.
And I think it's worth doing.
You couldn't do it before because you didn't have all this access.
Now you do.
If you choose to want to be with just an index fund, that's fine.
But I think that the data show you that that's highly unlikely that you will become a millionaire unless you have one or two individual stocks that really go far.
And it so happens that the stocks that have gone the far, the furthest are all well-known.
They're well-known companies.
And I think you can look them up and see how well they really are doing, which is pretty amazing.
So here's a real world example that I'd like you to comment on.
So my instincts tell me For example, I eat at the Cheesecake Factory.
It's always packed.
It's always packed.
But the restaurant business when I read things about the restaurant business is struggling because people are staying away in droves.
So there I have an instinct.
I have some information.
What do I do with that?
You can very easily look up Cheesecake, look at the annual.
You can look at the quarterly.
You can read their quarterly statements.
You can read their conference calls.
You can put it into ChatGPT, which does an amazing job.
Cheesecake is doing far better than most restaurants.
It adapted its menu.
It's worked very well.
That particular niche of casual dining is doing extraordinarily well.
It's doing better than...
Better than Darden, which is Olive Garden, not as well as Chili's.
Where do I get that information?
You can just prompt it, prompt any one of these systems and say is this doing?
Is cheesecake doing better than the top 10 other restaurants?
And you'll find that out probably within 90 seconds.
Isn't it true though, that a lot of possible opportunities are not things I'll ever have an instinct for.
There are a lot of businesses that make things that I don't even know about.
They sell them to other businesses.
They're not public for public consumption.
So I wouldn't even know about them.
I think people see things all the time.
They have an instinct that something's good.
Now they can follow up to their instincts.
Previously, they couldn't.
I do recommend growth stocks.
The growth stocks that I recommend, the only one that was hard to find was NVIDIA.
And I point out that I named my dog NVIDIA and did everything I could, and I happen to have a most watched show and you would have gotten NVIDIA if you watch.
There's a great celebration of people who became millionaires from watching the show, made money.
But I would really want to emphasize that.
I think that If you do have eyes and ears and nose, you might just say you know what?
How about the Starbucks?
And then you look up the CEO and you see Brian Nickel and you see he turned around Chipotle.
And you might want to be able to make that one of your five.
What I point out is that, look, they're not all going to work.
And I think that it's very easy to say that you can never do it yourself.
That's the prevailing view.
But it wasn't the prevailing view for much of my life.
But it was for only rich people.
And now the people who are common.
I call them home gamers.
They have the same access that rich people have, but they've been told that they can't do it.
And I know there's been professors who claim that they've absolutely shown, without a doubt, that there's no way you can beat the market.
Well, how did so many people I know become millionaires?
Well, it was through individual stocks and they were able to access because the old days.
And still, if you are with the brokerage house, where you deal with people who have means, they can help you get the information, but you don't need them anymore.
All the information is available.
One of the things that people say and I'd love to hear your comments is well yeah, there's Starbucks and there's Google and there's Meta and all that, but by the time I figured it out, it was way too late.
I missed the train.
Some people may have gotten in early, but it's too late now.
Well, that's unfortunate that they feel that way.
Anyone could have said those things at any given time in the last 20 years.
They are wrong because these are great companies and they keep reinventing themselves.
Tesla was a car company, then it became a robot company and it became obviously autonomous driving and autonomous driving for all sorts of vehicles.
And I just think that that's something that be accessible.
I think people have been brainwashed into thinking that they can't do it.
The brainwashing has been very effective.
The millionaires that have been created by index funds are few and far between.
I think that the way inflation is going in this country and the amount of debt we have, you have to at least try to have a shot at being a millionaire, recognizing that the The index side can be a nice diversification backstop.
But I do think that it's pretty palpable that if you were in one of those stocks and nothing had changed, the management was still there and they're still doing a great job, then the idea that you missed it is counterintuitive.
What are some of the changes that have happened in this whole universe that have made it better or worse?
I mean, I'm thinking of, like, it used to be you had to have a stockbroker.
You'd have to call him up.
He'd have to, like, okay, and then he'd put in your order.
And, you know, now you go to Robin Hood or one of these things.
It's all instant, and the fees are much less.
So that seems like a good thing.
But I imagine there have been a lot of changes in the way the system works And, if you agree with that, some highlights would be interesting to hear.
Sure.
If you are able to have access to the Internet, everything that I've talked about on this show is available at your fingertips.
And I talk about when I got started, I had to go to a library and a second library and a third.
And the information was usually three to six months old.
I had no access to any research reports.
I had no access to any conference calls.
And it was monumentally difficult.
And now everything that I just said is too hard is at your fingertips.
Again, I do want to point out I'm not trying to get people who hate stocks and never think they could ever own a stock to buy a stock.
I'm not trying to convert people into thinking that, well, I hated it, now I love it.
What I'm saying is if you have the instinct and you want to do it, here's how you do it.
And what I have found in my...
In my 20 years of my show is there's just a huge number of people who want to at least try it, because they've seen fortunes been made and they think they can have a shot at it.
To tell them that they don't really have a shot at it would be like telling them you know what?
You don't know how to read a book.
You can't possibly drive a car.
No, I mean, these are things that you can learn and you can do.
Well, I have to say, I enjoy listening to your message.
And you've been touting this message for many years on your TV show.
But I'm somebody who grew up believing that you're better off in mutual funds and ETFs.
You buy an index fund and you match the market and you're safer and all that.
So your message is very different than that and certainly one to consider.
Jim Cramer has been my guest.
He is the host of CNBC's Mad Money, founder of The Street, former hedge fund manager and author of several best-selling books.
His latest is called How to Make Money in Any Market, and there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.
Jim, it was a pleasure.
Thanks for coming on today.
Absolutely.
Have you ever wondered, when people lose weight, where does the fat go?
There are ads for diets and pills and exercise equipment, and those ads often promise that you can burn fat away.
But the truth is, your body doesn't burn fat.
We don't convert fat into energy.
That would break the law of conservation of mass.
When you lose weight, you're really just losing atoms, and you can't turn those atoms into energy.
Several years ago, Australian physicist Ruben Meerman was attempting to lose weight and he wanted to know how it worked.
Meerman did the math and found out that for every 10 pounds of fat you lose...
84 pounds are exhaled as CO2 and the remaining 16 pounds becomes water, which is lost through urine, sweat and exhaling.
So when you burn fat, you're not really burning fat, you're just exhaling it and it disappears into thin air.
And that is something you should know.
It would be of immense help if you would tell your friends about this podcast.
We're always looking to grow our audience and attract new listeners.
And the best way to do that is to get existing listeners to recruit new listeners.
And that's you.
So please tell someone you know.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
I'm often asked, as you might imagine, what podcast do I listen to?
And I actually have an eclectic taste, and I jump around, try different ones.
But I will say that I have a couple I'm very consistent about, and one of them is The Jordan Harbinger Show.
It's kind of a little like something you should know, but Jordan goes in interestingly different directions.
I do know that we share a lot of listeners, a lot of listeners who like this podcast, like The Jordan Harbinger Show.
Jordan is really good at getting his guests to open up and share great insights.
Recently, he discussed modern romance scam tactics.
I mean, that's the lowest of the low.
But you've got to know about them so you can fight back against them.
And another episode he did was about how society has engineered a generation of lonely men.
The show covers a lot of great topics which well, like I said, if you like this show, you're gonna like his show.
There's so much here.
Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Hi there Fred Greenhalgh here, director of audio dramas like DC high-volume, Batman and Star Trek Khan.
However, my one true love remains.
All things spooky and I'm excited to say there's a new season of my horror podcast Undertow.
This season is called Familiar Haunts standalone horror tales that reveal how the past is never truly gone and humanity may be the most ruthless monster of them all.
Here's a sample from the first episode about a man who returns to the house he grew up in after receiving a creepy voicemail from his mother.
Let's hear it, shall we?
Mike, help me.
I'm not alone in here.
I'm not alone.
She's walking.
She's walking toward me.
Hear the rest by listening to Familiar Haunts, available on Undertow.
Subscribe to Undertow wherever you get your podcasts, such as the app.
You're listening to me right now.
In addition to the weekly releases of Familiar Haunts, we have 11 previous seasons with everything from werewolf tales to underwater monsters and creepy reincarnated twins.
So get your spooky fix by subscribing to Undertow.
