Welcome back to Ask the Compound. I'm your host, Ben Carlson. With me as always is the world's foremost expert in Oatly stock, Duncan Hill. On today's show, we're going to be answering questions about, how safe is it to buy a Peloton, since the company seems to be in trouble?

How to hedge large gains in NVIDIA? This question was asked before they blew out earnings again last night. What happens in the stock market if inflation falls? How to create generational wealth and how to prepare yourself for a finance career coming out of college? We have one of my favorite questions we've ever been asked today.

At least by one of our -- it was one of my favorite people to ask. Remember, if you have a question, email us, askthecompoundshow@gmail.com. Today's show is sponsored by Fabric by Gerber Life. When I got life insurance, my first daughter was born. I figured I had to take that next step.

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Policies are issued by Western Southern Life Insurance Company, not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions. Usual caveats apply. Mike, we got our own landing page there. That's cool. It is very nice. Next week's show, we're going to be talking about insurance. A lot of people ask us, term versus life, or term versus whole life insurance, all this stuff.

We're going to be talking about that. So covering all of that questions. Before we get into the show today, I want to quick shout out to one of our viewers, Mike from South Carolina. Mike is a firefighter. We actually answered a question about his firefighter pension back on the show.

He's going through a little bit of a tough time. He's got a wife, two kids. And just want to give him a shout out, tell him we're thinking of him. I think one of the things that we never take for granted here is how much personal information people are willing to share with us.

It is kind of crazy. Some people just hate talking about money with their friends or family. People share with us so much personal information of the stuff they're going through, how much money they make, how much money they have saved, the goals they're thinking about. So we don't take that responsibility lightly.

We appreciate it. And we appreciate people like Mike following the show. Yeah. Thanks, Mike. So let's do a question. And you're part of a compound family. If you're here, you're family. That's our solution. The people in the live chat that come here every single week, half the time I think they're just here to interact with each other because they've all become friends in the chat.

But it's nice to know that it's like a little safety blanket that these people come here every week to listen to us. Yeah. That's cool. All right. Question one. Okay. I'll first say we have a question from Zane. Thanks for everything you and the Reholes team are doing. I've been a listener for a few years now and I've learned a lot.

Also refreshing to hear from a fellow Michigander, which always sounds like a fancy kind of goose or something to me, you know, Michigander, but I've heard you mentioned before, but you owned a Peloton. The wife and I have been considering a Peloton bike for some time now and seem to be close to a purchase.

But given the recent earnings report and poor guidance, do you think it's still safe to purchase a Peloton? I did purchase the Peloton during the pandemic. I use one of those 0% loans back in the day. It was like four years, 0% loan. I thought, why, why not? Why wouldn't I do this?

So I think I just paid it off like a couple months ago. I was paying, I can't remember how much $60 a month or something. It wasn't even that much. I have to admit, I do share some of the concerns. Look at the stock price. John, give me a chart on here.

This is Peloton stock. It's down 98% from the highs, just gotten slaughtered. I think at the peak it was a $50 billion company, which is just insane, obviously. I always say that any sort of diet or health fitness thing is really just a fad to me. People thought Peloton was going to be like a trillion dollar company.

That just never made much sense. I mean, there was a time during the pandemic when people were on long wait lists to get them and stuff, right? It did have a boom. And I think they just pulled forward. So, John, show the next one. I did a little deep dive on Peloton's financials.

This is their net quarterly operating net income. And you can see, they were basically in the black for two or three quarters. Other than that, every single quarter, they've lost money. They lost a lot of money in 2022. They've cut some costs, made it back a little bit. But they're still losing money every quarter.

John, do the next one for segment data. This is one of the reasons that I'm still okay by them remaining a going concern. I'm not talking about the stock at all, I'm talking about the company. Subscriptions make up almost 40% of their revenue. So, they sell their products and that's 60%.

But subscriptions and recurring revenue is 40% or so of their revenue. That's not bad. And if you, John, fill the next one up. I just pulled this from their latest quarterly report. They have 3 million paid subscribers and it's basically been flat for a while now. They might bring a few in and they lose a few, but it's more or less they have these 3 million customers that are paying subscribers and paying them anywhere from, I don't know, I think you can pay like $15 to $40 or $50 a month, depending on what kind of subscriptions you use.

Because you can actually use a subscription for their fitness classes without having one of their pieces of equipment, because they do all this other stuff like aerobics and weight lifting and all this stuff. So, it's still a $1.5 billion company. So, it's not like it's going away any time soon.

So, I think the biggest worry would be, what if they just stop having new classes? They can't pay some of these teachers who have now become mini-celebrities in the Peloton world. So, the thing I like about this is, they actually have this old library. So, let's say, Duncan, I'm going on my jog and I step off the curb and I get hit by a bus tomorrow.

That'd be kind of sad, but you still have 10 plus years worth of Wealth of Common Sense catalog to go back to. That's the same thing with Peloton. They're digital stuff. They have it on the machine already. So, you can go back and use the old. So, I use the old classes.

I don't always use the new ones. So, I think you still have that old library to use. So, maybe they have to bring the cost in. They don't have as many teachers. They don't have as many new classes. All that stuff. Maybe we'll have some sort of AI-based teachers in the future, where they don't need to have the actual people.

They can just say, "This is the kind of teacher I want. I want them to show me how to do this." And you can create it for yourself on the spot. So, I don't know. I know a lot of people think that, well, Amazon or Nike or Apple should just buy them.

I think that's a terrible investment strategy. But maybe with 3 million recurring subscription payers, that's a pretty good, something to keep them going as a floor for someone who could come along and have some sort of strategic partnership with them. A lot of people just say, "Well, Peloton's just a bike with an iPad on it." And I get that.

But it is a really good product. And the people that use them like them. Unfortunately, I don't think they're getting many new customers. I think whoever was going to buy one, for the most part, has already bought one. Why wouldn't they just open up the Apple App Store and let other companies create classes and things and then just take a cut of their revenue?

Wouldn't that be an easy way to help people that have these fears? That makes sense. Or give these new teachers some exposure. And say, "You're doing this for free, but you're going to get some exposure from us, and you can sell your own." Yeah, that makes sense. But you wonder if they have to scale back substantially on the classes and stuff.

That makes sense first. But it's still a $1.5 billion company, so I don't think it's going out of business anytime soon. But I am a little worried that the experience is going to deteriorate. So, I don't know. I still like it. I'd feel okay buying another one today if I had to.

That's where I stand. If Peloton goes out of business, it's a good coat hanger. Yeah. I was about to say, you always have a really nice place to hang coats and shirts and things. Alright, next question. Up next, we have a question from Sarah. "I have 3% portfolio positions in Nvidia and AMD.

I've already trimmed them some, but don't really want to sell any more at this time, even though I think the semiconductor space is overbought in the short term. I'm not comfortable with buying options, but I was looking at the Sox S ETF." Have you heard of this one before, Duncan?

I have. You know I've heard of this. I had to look it up. It's a three-time semiconductor bear. Yeah, inverse. Yeah, inverse. Three times inverse. So they say, "Is taking a small position in this inverse-leveraged semi-ETF crazy? It feels like an easy way to hedge against the red-hot semiconductor space." But what are your thoughts?

Alright, let's bring in an expert on this. I originally started reading this guy's stuff. I think it was called the Apprentice Investor Series at thestreet.com. Mr. Barry Rittholz. Barry, is that right? Yeah, that was early 2000s. God, you were reading that in grade school. That has to be crazy stuff.

I'm doing book reports. But you wrote about this kind of stuff. Nobody was writing about that then, right? But you wrote about this kind of stuff, and you wrote about the psychology behind it. I'm sure we could give this person some tips about different ways to hedge, but this is really a psychological question more than anything.

Well, it's important. She sounds like an institutional investor whose clients want her hedged against potential short-term -- oh, wait, this is an individual investor? What does she care if semiconductors are overbought or oversold? Why is she talking about hedging? And by the way, the leveraged ETFs, see the long and short?

If you want to hedge, they're a terrible way to hedge because of the time decay of options. It's an expensive way to hedge. It's like a daily hedge. So you have to not only get the direction right, you have to be right on the day that you're hedging. Also, this expense ratio has to be 1% or something, right?

It's crazy because of the cost. So the first question is just simply, why do you own these stocks? Is it for alpha? Is this part of your cowboy account, your fun account? If that's the case, well then, let it run. On the other hand, if you have a concentrated stock-picking portfolio and that's where all your money is in, it seems like that's a lot of work to be stressing about one-thirty-third of your portfolio.

You're right. The whole hedging thing sounds really good in theory. It's really hard to pull off in practice, especially if you're trying to hedge individual positions that have their own idiosyncratic risks. Obviously, NVIDIA is probably a big part of that semiconductor ETF, and so is AMD. It's funny, look, AMD goes back to, I don't know, the 1980s or something?

'90s, '80s, yeah. Listen to some of the drawdowns this stock has had since then. 93%, 90%, 72%, 89%, 95%, and 65%. That's what they've recovered from. NVIDIA's had 92%, 82%, 56%, and 64%. It's funny, NVIDIA was down 64% in 2022. I tweeted about this today, it was down to $280 billion in market cap in October 2022, and now it's close to $2 trillion.

Wow. So, I can see why people are thinking about this. And we've gotten a million questions about NVIDIA. I hold this thing, listen, if it gets too high of your portfolio, you sell it. I think you probably want some rebalancing rules here. If it gets to 5% of my portfolio, I'm going to trim it back to two or three.

I think that's kind of the way you can think about this if you want to not let it get too crazy, where it's going to really hurt you if it falls. To me, if it's in my fun account, I just let it run, and if it goes to zero, so be it.

But you said something a couple of shows ago that is very relevant here, and has to do with the psychological impact. You take out homeowner's fire insurance, not because you're hedging your house, but in case of a catastrophic disaster, you want to be protected and you don't want to worry about it day in, day out.

So if you're thinking about hedging a position that's done well, it means you're stressing about it, and that's kind of revealing. I think there's a bigger issue here than the semis and hedging. It's why do you own this? How does this fit into your portfolio? And what are you doing that's making you so uncomfortable?

This is like the George Soros back pain. She's feeling the back pain. Maybe it's time to sell a little bit and be okay with it. I don't know, hold on to some of its house money, but sell a little bit if you're really that worried about it. And to your other point, if you really believe in this stock for the long term, then you're going to have to hold through some volatile times because it is so crazy.

That's right. In that Apprentice Investor Series, one of the rules for selling was figure out your sell discipline before you own something while you're still objective. Once you own something and it's run up, your objectivity now, is she concerned about a drawdown or is she concerned about this going all the way back down and this big win, this perhaps change of standard of living win is going to be disastrous.

In which case, then you have to think in terms of regret minimization, not portfolio optimization, but why do you own this? How does it fit into your investing and how does it affect your ability to sleep at night? Yeah. And there's no right or wrong answer here because we don't know what's going to happen next.

This stock could keep going up and make people who are saying I should have sold to look like idiots, but you have to think about what you're going to regret more if it falls 50% or the rest of the year if it goes up another 100%. I won't bore you with war stories, but I could give you hundreds of examples of stocks that had run up $5,000 and $10,000 and people wrote them up and wrote them down.

It was terrible. You have to know why you own it and how it fits into the overall investment philosophy. I sold GameStop around like $11 after a double back right before the meme mania. No one ever went broke taking a profit. I got to look at the newfangled iPod in the early 2000s and bought Apple and made fun of the guys at 15 who sold it at 20 because I held it for a triple.

Aren't I a genius? Yeah. All right. Next question. Okay. Up next we have a question from Mike. Is the supposed primary driver of the monster move in stocks since November, if, sorry, if the supposed primary driver of the monster move in stocks since November has been the Fed pivoting, and if inflation stickiness puts off cuts or puts rate hikes back on the table, then why wouldn't the S&P fall back to October and November levels?

Okay. This might be true if the only thing the stock market cared about was the Fed and inflation. I think some people get it twisted in their head that because it seems like the market and the news flow only pays attention to certain things at certain times, that there's this single variable that can control the stock market when there's so many other moving pieces and sometimes the market really does care about whatever economic data piece you're looking at, and sometimes it just completely forgets it.

So we could certainly fall back some if inflation stays sticky and stays high and the Fed puts off cuts or has to hike again. I wouldn't throw that out of the realm of possibilities. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to retest that exact level. Yeah, I don't disagree. And I have to point out if inflation stickiness, we're recording this in February 2024, inflation peaked at 9% year over year in June 2022.

We're coming up on two years. I'm genuinely shocked when people talk about the stickiness of inflation. Not only year over year are we in the threes, but if you just look at the past six months, we're in the twos. Inflation is over. Are we still fighting the last war again?

I'm not focused on the Fed. I'm not focused on inflation. Assume rates are going to be somewhat lower in the next year, but we ain't going back to zero. But what's much more important to me at this stage than the Fed, corporate earnings, which looked to be pretty good, the economy, job creation, consumer spending, all of which to be pretty good, long-term low in unemployment, consumer spending starting to slow, but that's just after the giant post-pandemic surge.

And then investor psychology, which is slowly improving after really getting battered by inflation. But the Fed's one issue. It's one of many. At the lows, in October 2022, when the market bottomed, inflation was still 8%. You're right. People say it's sticky, but it's basically at the long-term average. And I'm sorry, instead of 3%, it's 3.1% or something.

People are worried about a decimal point. That's still way, way better than it was back then. And yeah, maybe the market doesn't like it if the Fed doesn't cut and puts off cuts for a few more months, and maybe there's some short-term volatility. But again, that doesn't necessarily mean that things are now as bad as they were back then, because things seemed pretty bleak back then on the stock market bottom.

Humans have a terrible time conceptualizing, transitory, conceptualizing. The transitory didn't happen in a week. Everybody was upset. You look at a chart from the peak of inflation to now, it's like 18 months, 20 months, something like that. The whole spike in inflation, as Ed Yardini has written about, and crash, they tend to be symmetrical.

So when it goes up really quickly, it tends to come down really quickly. And again, there's a whole collection of economists from the '60s and '70s, folks like Larry Summers, who think this is a '70s era inflation. It's not. If you want to draw historical analogies, look at the post-World War II era, where you had this spike in inflation.

You had unemployment plummet as all these GIs came back to work. The economy did great. And that inflation also was transitory. To me, the COVID lockdown is more akin to a war than we had a decade of inflation, and oil embargoes, and-- And we did have wartime-like spending, too.

Yeah. It was very-- that's right, massive fiscal stimulus. So I'm much-- and I lived-- I remember as a kid going to get gasoline for my lawnmower side hustle. And they would ask me, are you an even license plate number or an odd license plate number? Because there was gasoline rationing.

And I'm like, dude, I'm a 12-year-old kid. I don't have a car. You're like, this is America. I just need a gallon of gas. Give me my gas. One of my favorite stories from my father is he said in the late '70s, to keep up wages, he got a raise twice in the same year.

They gave him a raise, and six months later, gave him another one. And wage growth is still pretty good right now. It's above the rate of inflation, but it's not like it's a crazy high number like it was in the '70s. Right. And it's making up for about three decades of very slow wage growth in the bottom half of the earnings scale.

In fact, one of the things people don't talk about, wages were deflationary up until the pandemic for like 30 years. Now they're playing catch up. We should really tie minimum wage to CPI so it goes up gradually instead of these big steps every 10, 20 years. Yeah, this is a huge step up for the bottom quartile of income.

Yeah, I agree. And you've written too, I think you probably wrote on the Apprentice Investor or on the Big Picture about single variable analysis. And you look at it through the lens of, don't look at just a P/E ratio or whatever for the stock market, but the same thing is true with economic data.

You can't just look at one piece of data and think that's going to be the tell. If P/E was the sole tell of markets and investing, then A, it would be really easy to invest, and B, big, well-equipped firms would figure this out and arbitrage that advantage away. It's always much more complicated than that.

I hate oversimplified solutions to complex questions. It just leads us to the wrong place. Yeah, and the market is a very complex system. For sure. The three-body problem, not only are you predicting what's going to happen, then you have to predict people's first-order reaction to that, then the second-order reaction to the first thing that happens.

You can throw a pebble in a pond and see those rings, but if you throw a handful of pebbles in, you have no idea where the rings are going to pop. Are we in a safe space here? I tried to read the book and I couldn't do it. It's tough.

It's a tough slog. It was a hard read. I know everyone loves it, and I think it's going to make it into a series on Netflix or Apple, but I couldn't make it through it. It's hard. Anytime something's written originally in another language, like Chinese, and then translated into English, it doesn't make for the most flowing of prose.

All right. Don't tell anyone I said that. All right. Next question. All right. Up next, we have a question from Bruce. "I'm 73, and my wife is 58, and I have a 15-year-old son. We own a small farm and house in Iowa. We also own three properties in Spain, where we spend most of the year." Maybe we can get an invite to Spain out of this.

I don't know. "We have no debt and are sitting on $2 million in cash, most of it in short-term bills. I deal in vintage guitars and will keep doing it as long as I can. We have a great life and are careful with our spending. I would like to have a plan to create generational wealth.

Is this possible? Any suggestions?" All right. Bruce might be the most interesting man in the world because he lives on a farm in Iowa. He sells vintage guitars, and he owns three properties in Spain. In his email signature line, you would appreciate this, Perry. He had a link to his guitar website, and we looked at it.

He's got all these old guitars, and it's fantastic. They sell for a lot of money, but he's got guitars from the 1800s, 1950s, 1960s. I saw one there from 1929, which I wouldn't buy just because it would be a bearish omen. He's got a really fantastic set of these guitars that he sells.

Why would it be bearish? Markets are way up since 1929. That's fair. It's true. So I think there's two ways to look at the question of generational wealth. So there's the estate planning, tax planning, investment planning, wills, trust, et cetera. That side of things, that's money stuff. That's actually the easy part of the equation, I think.

You can hire experts at a wealth management firm to help you with that stuff. You can hire lawyers and CPAs and all that stuff. I think the hard part is a psychological hurdle that comes with teaching the next generation about money, and I think the next generation can really screw it up if you're not careful.

My favorite example of this, I wrote about this in one of my books, Cornelius Vanderbilt was the richest man alive when he died, would still be one of the richest people alive if you put it in today's dollars. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars. He even told his kids, "Any fool can make a fortune, but it takes a real man, a wise man, to actually keep it." And then there's this book that talks about how 100 years after his death, all his descendants showed up to the university that bears his name in Tennessee, and not a single one of them was a millionaire, even though he passed on the largest fortune ever at the time.

So I think you've talked about this before, about the first thing is do no harm. I guess the first question is how do you not screw it up? That's the big question, not how do we grow it? How do you not screw it up? So a couple of things leap out of this letter.

The first is, what does he mean by generational wealth? I assume he wants his wife, who's 15 years his junior, to have a comfortable life, and then his son, who's 40-something years younger than her, to have a comfortable life. So let's define that as the generational wealth. And then just ballparking what they're saying, the farm, the house, three houses, properties in Spain, whatever guitars he has, I'm guessing he has three, four, five million to start to work with, maybe more, maybe less.

The first question is, why are you sitting in two million of cash? That kind of leaps out. Especially, at the very least, you should be getting 4% or 5% in bonds or depending on-- That's the barbell portfolio. You've got cash on one side, guitars on the other. And then the other thing is, there's a tendency for 73-year-olds to not think about stocks.

Because hey, my lifespan is I'm going to live to 89, so I only have another 10, 15 years, and I'm nervous about that. But you have to think in terms of a 58-year-old woman and a 15-year-old son. So that means this is now a 30, 40, 50-year portfolio. The generational wealth part of it is your son's time horizon is super duper long.

Is equity. Right, exactly. So he needs a portfolio that is constructed so that he could live comfortably on the income it throws off, that his wife could spend 20, 30 years. And I'm not a big fan of the wealthy families that put the kids' money in trust and don't let them touch it till they're 40 or 50.

I just think about how much easier life would have been if I could have bought that first house at 30, and now it's so difficult for young people to buy houses. Right, help them when they need it. Right. There should be a way that-- it really depends on the specifics of the dollar amount, but plan on helping your kid buy that first house.

I think people are terrified of having a bunch of spoiled brats, you know, that are trying to balance that. But there's a difference. There's a huge difference between having an unlimited amount of cash. You know, I'm always aghast when I see around the corner from me, my backyard neighbor, I'm walking the dogs, there's a lime green Lamborghini Spider out there.

And I ping my neighbor, I'm like, "I didn't know you were a Lambo guy." He's like, "It's my son's friend. He's 16." I'm like, "Get the hell out of here. I would kill myself in that car at 16." You don't want to do that. Yeah, you have to teach them to value the dollar and to work hard and all that.

Earn it. Yeah, but that's true whether they have one or not. Right out here on 40th Street, when I was coming to the office today, I saw a guy that couldn't have been older than 22 driving a Rolls-Royce SUV. That's $300,000, $400,000. But I think the not screwing it up part, especially like you mentioned, sitting in cash, you have to figure out, you got to make sure you don't trust the wrong person or organization to help you manage it because you're going to need someone to manage it.

You can't take on insane amounts of leverage and spend too much. And it sounds like he's already got that figured out. He said they don't spend very much. He's obviously sitting in cash. So I think you just have to kind of give some of those same traits to your children and they'll be fine.

But yeah, I think teaching them to value a dollar is probably the true way that you help them compound, not just giving them the money and saying, "Here, have at it." Right. For that planning, plan to make sure your wife has enough income for the rest of her life.

If you want to pull money aside to help your kid with the down payment, that's something you could do. "Hey, you're going to have to pay for the house. We'll help you with the 10% down." So whether that's $100,000 or whatever, I'm extrapolating out home prices 15 years from now.

Yeah. Well, maybe that's part of it, is just having the conversation early, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's an uncomfortable, for a lot of people find it an uncomfortable conversation, but it's crucial. So everybody is on the same page. Everybody's expectations are the same. You don't want to find out the wife is like, "I don't want income.

I want to go travel." Once you're gone, "I'm hopping on a flight and I'm traveling around the world." You need to have those conversations so you can make the appropriate plans. At what point do you buy a university building? What level of wealth is that? Well, you have to do the Larry David thing where you have it donated by anonymous, though.

Right, right. I'm going to say that's a billion dollars. Oh, okay. Wow. Because it's probably 50 to 100 million. And that has gone up because I think the Booth School in Chicago was like a $300 million gift. And they named the whole school after him. So somewhere around there.

Your first point, though, about defining what is generational wealth, what does that even mean to you? I think some people just think, "Yeah, you have to figure out what you mean by that first." It's not going to keep your great, great, great grandkids going to school for free. It's worry about your wife and kid and generations beyond that.

You need hundreds of millions of dollars to start thinking true, sustainable generational wealth. So Jared in the chat says that 20 years ago as a bank teller, they had an old couple who would drive through one time a week in a Rolls Royce to get $500 and 20s to tip people with.

That's what I like. It's a piece of generosity. 20 years ago. Spread the wealth. Yeah, I like that. I'll never forget. I can't mention the person's name. I'm at lunch. And the check comes and he slips a $100 bill. This is before his company got bought. He was doing well.

Slips a $100 bill into the check that was like $100 in addition to his credit card. So the company paid for lunch, but the tip was on him. And then the co-check person, he gave the woman a $20 tip on an umbrella that could not have cost more than $10.

Spread it around. Generosity. That's a good one to teach. All right, we got one more question. Okay. Last but not least, we have a question from Grant. I'm currently a junior in college working toward my finance degree with a concentration in investments. What are your thoughts on why larger companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley seek out internship applicants two years in advance when most people like myself explore various interests throughout college?

This is a serious disadvantage to those discovering a late-blooming passion. I love the idea of being in college and having a late-blooming passion. Considering the first half of college isn't major specific, what tools can be utilized to jumpstart a finance career straight out of college? I do think the sheer amount of information available these days, at least the people that I interact with coming out of college, they know way more than I ever knew about the stuff that they want to do.

They know the kind of company they want to work for. They know the type of job they want to do. And they want to have that dream job right away. I came out of college completely clueless. And I think the thing you have to realize is you don't have to have it all figured out.

Barry, what was your path? You were law school to trader to macro strategist to blogger and podcaster and then wealth management founder. You couldn't have plotted out that course if you tried. I have a totally ass-backwards career path. We call that atypical career path. But I will tell you, my favorite question that I ask at the end of every Masters in Business is, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in going in your career?

And it doesn't matter what the career is. The advice always seems to be the same. Build a stack of skills. Always be learning. Always generate a network. Assemble a group of people that you trust and trust you so that you can grow together. Be a great asset to whatever your boss needs in whatever field it is, whether it's finance or not.

And develop good habits, meaning we make our habits and then our habits make us. So make sure that—I develop the habit of reading and writing. You should really develop a good diet and exercise habit. You should learn to be on time. You'd be shocked at the little things that can get a boss angry.

Whatever your first job is or even your first internship, doesn't matter to your career, but it's a place to meet people, to learn, to act as a stepping stone, to create a group of either mentors or someone who can be a reference. You also have to learn how to be an adult in some ways and how to act around people.

So I did an internship when I was a senior in college. And for me, it was helpful because I learned what I didn't want to do. I think that's half the battle when you're young, is even if you know, "This is where I want to go," working for one of these big companies, there's so many different places you can go, especially in the finance world.

There's so many different career paths that you can take. So I think checking off the list of, "Okay, I know I don't want to do this one. I know I don't want to do that." I had a friend who did an investment banking internship in college, and he said he wanted to do it because he heard he'd make a ton of money.

But he did it for a semester, and he thought, "I'm not going to work 90 hours a week. Are you kidding me? There's no way I could do this." So you have to learn what you don't want to do first. I did that as a summer associate. You made a ton of money.

You worked crazy hours. And you learn, "Oh, I don't want to do this. This is a terrible job." You're making a little more than minimum wage, but you're working 100 hours a week. What fun is that? But the key takeaway that I just keep coming back to is what you said, is you're learning how to be an adult navigating in the real world.

And they don't teach you those, at least when I went to college or grad school, they never taught us those skills. Stop and think about it. I remember the guy who was the office next to mine in my first job was always late, really smart, really good, super talented, eventually got fired because he just couldn't get to the office on time.

You have to figure out ... Every dog likes to be pet differently is an old expression. Figure out what your boss wants. Figure out how to do the best possible job and be of value to the company, even if it's not what you want to do for the rest of your life, because especially in your 20s, every job is a stepping stone.

You meet people, you learn skills, and then you move on to the next gig. Last week was career advice from Josh. This week from Barry. That's pretty good, right? I hope we're not conflicting with each other. Nope. Two different types of people. Thanks to Barry, as always, for hopping on.

Check out Barry's new podcast, At The Money. Yup. Duncan was ... And it's on the Masters of Business podcast feed, right? Right. It will eventually get its own feed, but since it's just a couple of months old, we wanted to ... Duncan wanted to know who you had to pay off to get the "Who" as your song.

Yeah. How did you get that? The crazy thing, in the first couple of episodes, it was like the usual stress-filled news sort of soundtrack, and I hate it. And I went to somebody and said, "What can I do to change this music?" They're like, "Well, how much do you need?" "I don't know.

10 seconds?" "Hey, as long as it's less than 30 seconds, here's the catalog. Get whatever you want." Last week was Fortunate Son. I've been enthralled with the music I've had access to. Yeah. I was listening to your most recent one with Dunning, and I was like- Right. "Who are you?" "How did you get the 'Who'?" Yeah.

Right. And I handed it out the F-bomb in the middle, which was ... I'm like, "You know, sometimes this gets broadcast, so you've got to be careful." Sure. Okay. Thanks again to everyone in the live chat. We love you showing up every week. Leave us a comment on YouTube.

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Email us, askthecompoundshow@gmail.com, and we will see you next time. Bye. you you