Animal Spirits Podcast - Are You on Track For Retirement? (EP.323)

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

On episode 323 of Animal Spirits, Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson discuss: the outlook for a 60/40 portfolio, dollar cost averaging into a bear market, the evolution of retirement, the best age for making good financial decisions, the Fed cannot fix the housing market, how HGTV ruined housing prices, hedging climate change risk, and more! Today's episode is sponsored by AdvisorShares. Learn more about the AdvisorShares Dorsey Wright Short ETF (ticker: DWSH) at: https://advisorshares.com/etfs/dwsh/ Find complete show notes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by advisor shares. Ben, do you know historically, without looking, what is the weakest month of the year for the stock market? I would have guessed October just because that was a 1987 crash, but that's just like the guess. That's what I would have guessed, right? That's a great guess, because October 1987, I think there's a, well, October 2008. There's a few others that were bad. It's September. Actually, I guess September, oh, it was a bad one, too. Yeah, I guess September 1929. that was the peak for the Great Depression crash. So we're approaching seasonally one of the weakest times in the year.

August is not so great either, but September's bad. The average monthly performance for the S&P 500 in September is negative 1.1%. The second weakest month is February, just down 0.13%. So this is an average. So you have to take this with a grain of salt. So did it there, Ben? Got it. Nailed it.

But there's some seasonal weakness coming. Anyhow, with that said, advisor shares have been working with Dorsey Wright, the legendary, I guess I know him as a tactical manager. And there's a Dorsey Wright short ETF. The ETF shorts, individual stocks. So it's not like tail risk where if the market's down, this is going to be like up magnified. It's, I guess it's a hedge for lack of better word, right? It's short individual names. Yeah, DWSH is the ticker.

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You can use this for your paper short that you're using for your tactical bearish call. I took that off. Oh, you took your tactical short off? Okay. Yeah. You would use this fund, I guess. All right. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing.

Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may be. maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Housekeeping, real quick, real quick. We've got future proof coming up in two weeks.

I am excited. Ben, are you excited? I'm very excited. I can't wait. If you're an advisor there, coming to see the content, maybe coming to see us. interested in learning how we work with advisors at Ridholt's Wealth Management, reach out to us. We'd love to see you and set up time to chat. Email hiring at ridholt's wealth.com.

But if you want to meet with us, you have to wear a tropical broil shirt. That's the rules. That's the rules. We don't make him, but in this case we do. Okay. I want to start the show with an email that came in last week. Good morning, guys. On this week's podcast, you were wondering who is still traveling for business.

Then, of course, laughed at how often you both were traveling. Yep, guilty. I recently worked in acquisitions for whatever, whatever. We had a very lenient work from home policy as in employees lived in almost 30 states. For our group, every two weeks, people would be required to come to the office for a couple of days. Every month, the company required all employees

to be on site for team bonding them, and every month the company flew half the employees to New York City and put them up for a few days. Very few people travel for conferences and most of our deals were done via Zoom, but these office visits were expenses, business travel. caveat. This is a personal anecdote. But if this is replicated more broadly, it could explain some of the high numbers. That makes sense. So it's almost like more people could be

traveling. So work from home paradoxically is causing more business travel. That's weird. Yeah. But that actually makes sense. I kind of get it. So yeah, interesting. P.S., the phrase to the hilt has a gruesome backstory. A few people email that's on this one. This idiom alludes to the handle of a or also known as the hilt of a sword. The only portion that remains out when the weapon is plunged all the way in. The figurative use of the term was first recorded in 1687. I like it. So that's like you got to make sure it's all the way in there. There we go. All right. So Ben, this is a garden variety correction in the stock market. And I wanted to ask you, speaking of idioms and sorts, where does that phrase come from? Garden variety. I saw somebody

call something else a garden variety, not correction. When I hear the term of garden variety, the next word that comes into my head is correction. But I heard somebody say a garden variety. I can't remember what they were talking about. Where does that one come from? Garden variety. Someone's going to have to email us on this. I've never looked that one up before. I just figure everything comes from Shakespeare. Haven't you seen those blog post that say like the 25 sayings we use today that come from Shakespeare? So I'm guessing it comes from Shakespeare. Good guess. Doesn't it seem like I was filling up the dock the morning because uh you've abdicated your responsibilities again and left it all to me

dude that is two out of three weeks that is that is that is fake news are you are you kidding me 90% 90% at least is me that is so not true all right 90% what are you nuts 90 i'm gonna have sean do an audit of this one word time 90% dude at i that's crazy talk okay that's crazy talk i won't even i won't even uh relent uh i won't even give you 55 i i would maybe stretch to 53 Okay. Okay. It's at least 70. It's like 70, 30. But who's counting? Who's counting? Who's counting? Not, not close. But doesn't it seem like markets are just more boring to talk about when things are up? I feel like you have to look harder to find topics of things to talk about. Because the stock market is still up. S&P's up 16% this year, still NASDAX is up 36 or 37. Still? Still, right? I know you talk about garden variety correction, but it hasn't been that much of a correction. Here's something.

I was challenged to a bit of a duel on Twitter a couple weeks, last week. I said something about bonds. And Rob Isbitts, who writes for ETF.com, said, I'm going to write like a bearish piece on bonds in the 6040, because my point was, listen, bonds were a awful bet when interest rates were 1% or below or below. Can I just ask, what's the deal with the Rubik's Cube there? You practicing?

No, you know, I've got it here. I don't know where it came from, and I just spin it. know how it works. I'm not clever enough to, do you know how this works? My kids have one. And if you Google it, there's a way to, there's a certain way of turning it that, that, that, like, there's a, there's some sort of pattern that you do. Oh, yeah. No, I know that there, I know that there are ways. Yeah, people know how to do it. I just don't. Yeah. But I think turning it makes me feel like I'm doing a brain exercise,

even though I'm not even looking at it. It's like, it's like your Tom Cruise batten, if you could Ben. You just carry it for like, good luck. Anyway, so Rob is best wrote this piece. And I think there's a lot of stuff out there that the idea that like when rates and inflation are higher, correlations for stocks and bonds go up. And that makes the any diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds not worth as much. So he said for nearly two decades, investment advisors and self-directed investors came to understand and appreciate asset allocation as a complementary combination of stocks and bonds. When rates were falling, bond prices were rising in stock market was driving higher in those easier credit conditions, that combination worked very

well. Powell's latest message promised advisors and investors to focus their attention on what to do about their portfolios with a possibility of a quick Fed cut likely off the table unless it's in response to a financial crisis. With so much money and sentiment having rallied around 60-40 concept until both stocks and bonds fell in tandem in 2022, the potential for a profitable restart just took a hit. It's up to advisors to adjust to that. Now, I think there is something to the fact that correlations increase in an inflation environment. I get that. But I think what happened in 2022 was maybe one of the biggest one-offs in history, going from 0 to 5%. That's just not going to happen again.

And I think a lot of people misinterpret the idea of stocks and bonds as like, when stocks go up, bonds go down, and when stocks go down, bonds go up. But it hasn't always been like that. I did this a while enough to update it, but I looked at from like the 1930s to the, I think I did it in 2013. So this is in a way that machine for Ben's blog. It was like 60% of the time stocks and bonds rise together in the same year, which makes sense because bonds haven't fallen all that much historically.

So, like, most of the time, stocks and bonds are moving up in tandem. It's not like they're going in opposite directions. And I think the idea that you need rates to fall for bonds to work is also a misnomer because now that yields are higher, you just need the yields to say where they are and you'll do fine. Yeah. You don't need the yields to fall for the reason bonds did so well, sure, falling rates helped, but the reason bonds did so well from the 80s forward was because the higher yields were so. The yields were so high.

The starting years are so high. Higher for longer is not a bad thing. In fact, I would rather rates stay at 5%. And you just clip the 5% than rates go from 5% to 3%. And then, oh, cool, you've got 12% price appreciation or whatever it is. And then you're only back to clipping 3%. I'd rather rates stay where they are. That'd be great.

Yes, if you're a bond investor, this would be, if rates just stay still, you're fine. Obviously, if rates rise, you're not doing as well. But you still have a much bigger margin of safety when the starting rates are 4% than you did when they're 50 basis points or 1%. So I don't think that the idea that the 60-40 is screwed makes any sense. All right. Nick Majuli, he knows how to do like computer stuff. Like you know what's the program called R or something, which I still don't know what that is.

Like, oh, I program on R. I don't know what that is. I'm more of a Python guy. Okay. I don't really know what that is either. So Nick created first he created an S&P 500 total return calculation using Robert Schiller's data going way back. and now he did one for dollar cost averaging.

And it's just a simple DCA calculator. You can do it by month. You can do an initial investment and then a monthly investment. So I wanted to see, well, how is dollar cost averaging worked in this bear market? Right. You start putting 500 bucks a month in January 2020, which is right when the market peaked. It was like the second or third day of trading, I think. Last year the market peaked.

You put $500 a month in every month. How have you done up till the end of July? Because this is a monthly calculator. Not bad. Your total contributions, $9,000. you walked away with almost $10,000. Your IR on a nominal basis was over 13%. So IRR takes the cash flows and, you know, the timing of the cash flows into account. Even with inflation, you're up almost 9%. You know why dollar cost averaging works? Because it's a reverse Ponzi scheme.

You're just, you're paying yourself every month, right? So even if you go through a lost decade, a lost four years or whatever it is, your accounts, I mean, you know, depending on how bad the drawdown is. Of course, you could lose money. That goes without saying. But you're paying yourself. It works better when it works better in a bear market than it does in a bull market. Yeah, given enough time, sure. But it's just, it's a forced way to save money. I don't know of any other better way to do it. We often talk about like, here are the returns from the low of the bear market. Here are the returns from the peak. And we look at things on like a very point in time. But most people's lives are, they're periodically investing because that's when they have savings.

come in. They invest from their income. So you have like a million different points over the course of your investing life cycle where you're investing every two weeks or every week, every month, or whatever, every quarter, whatever it is, however often you save, it doesn't always make sense to look at things from a one, because people will often say like, well, look at back historically, the S&P 500 went nowhere for 15 years or whatever. And it had this period where inflation adjusted from 1966 to 1982, whatever it is. And it's like that's, that is true, but most people's experience is not one point to another point. It usually doesn't work like that. People are putting money in or they're taking money out or they're, you know, there's something,

they're rebalancing. Something's going on. It's not always just a static one-to-one, this A to B kind of thing. Yeah, most people's experience in the market is not, all right, I've got a million dollars and I dropped it all in. And now I'm just, now I'm just one-for-one with the market. Exactly. It doesn't, it doesn't work like that. It's not, not as static as that. Also, over that since January 2020, the S&P's down four and a half percent now. So if we, last year, one of the worst years ever combined it with this year and we're back to a garden variety correction, right? Duncan gave us the meaning. The expression alludes to a plant likely to be cultivated in a typical garden

and expected produce a respectable harvest or attractive blooms. That doesn't help very much. It's like a garden variety definition of garden variety. It really is. Didn't help us for it. Okay. Michael Antonelli, this is a good one for the haters. Remember when people said the SVB thing was a brand new QE?

the Fed would never reduce their balance sheet. He says, wrong again, domer. This is from Stratigas, and it shows the Fed's balance sheet. It had that little increase there from the banking crisis, but now it continues to fall. And so I think a lot of people have been trying to hang their hat on, well, actually, the Fed is still manipulating markets. That's the only reason they're up this year. I don't think many people would have thought Fed balance sheet is falling, interest rates are

rising. There's no way the stock market can rise. I think a lot of people have been waiting for this scenario. the rates are going to rise, Fed's going to pull out, and the stock market is going down 80%. That's been like the Dumer's dream for well over a decade, not happening. No. Nothing? All right, let's look at something else that I put in the doc that you haven't put in.

I don't think we had one Michael contribution. I'm just saying, if we're keeping, if we're scoring here. Excuse me. We started the show with something that I put in. All right, you know what? Fine. If you're going to be petty, fine. We're keeping a score.

All right, let's go. Duncan will keep track on the video. All right. From the Washington Post, this is investor behavior here. Share of non-retired Americans who feel their retirement saving plan is on track. This is good because this is the, I feel, time out. Time out. Did somebody just make this chart by hand?

Where did this come from? It's from the Washington Post. So the Federal Reserve does these surveys every year, like the Consumer or something survey. So it asks people like, how do you feel about your retirement? and hang on i'm sorry this this survey goes back to 1850 oh wait you're looking at the wrong one look at the one above it okay oh i'm sorry i'm gonna show you then i got the hand up yeah so it's it's really it's really not that high of a it's like 36% 37% got the 40% in 2021 things are feeling good and then it immediately drops to 31% in 2022 because stocks and bonds fell and people thought

were going to recession i guess i guess this is just the ultimate sentiment indicator of things get worse. I feel worse about myself. But like the whole point of saving for retirement is you're going to be having to say for decades and decades into the future. And if one bear market is going to make you feel like you're off track, like you should expect, I don't know, 10 to 12 bare markets over the course of your lifetime, probably, maybe three or four market crash scenarios in there. My whole point is that like that should be in your retirement plan. Your retirement plan shouldn't feel worse just because there's a bear market. That should be part of it.

I wonder what the actual question is. Do you think the question is simply, do you feel you're on track for retirement? That is fair. This is where we're anti-survey, because a lot of it is how you feel and how, yeah, how it's worded. Also, how many people know whether or not they're on track?

What does it even mean? You think most people have a plan? Okay. So how many percent, what percent of the population has a retirement plan in place? It might be like a third. Like, it might be like... I'd say less.

Really? But also, yeah. But also, do you think people are likely to overestimate or underestimate how well they're doing financially? I would say generally it would be, you'd be underestimate. There's no benefit to say, I'm great. I'll be fine. Yeah, that's true. So this other chart that I put in here, I'm reading this, I can't remember how I got in this book. It's one of those, I'm reading a nonfiction book and then I read a study in the source and I go, oh, that's kind interesting. And so I'm reading this book called the Evolution of Retirement, because this stuff, I don't know, kind of fascinates me. And it's, it goes back to the 1800s how basically there was no such thing as retirement before. Life was just awful back then. And this shows the people who were gainfully employed at age 55 to 64 and 65 plus. So in 1850, 95% of people who were age 55 to 64 were still working. And this only goes to 1990 because this book was actually written in the 90s. 65 plus, it was almost 80%. And so the whole idea, the concept of retirement is still relatively new. I think it was.

was more or less invented, people started really retiring and having a life of leisure in like the 50s and 60s. Before then, like leisure didn't exist for retired people. Like 50% of people lived with their kids still. And their kids took care of them. And that was their retirement plan. I wonder what retirement is going to look like in the future. Because when people retired, maybe not our parents, but if people retired like in, I don't know, 2000 or whatever, what did you do? What do you mean without like? Well, there's a, There's a lot more to stimulate people these days than there was in the past. There's a lot more things to...

I think people actually could relax. I don't think it's easy to relax these days because you can always check your phone or email. A lot more stimulants, a lot more recreational activities. Pickle ball. There's no pickleball back in the day. That's true. I could see you getting into pickleball. No.

No interest. Okay. I would do it. I'm not a big fan of the people who hate on pickleball. I don't think it's like a sport. Like it shouldn't be televised in ESPN. But I could see having, I can see having fun with it. I'm going against the grain on this one.

All right, from the Wall Street Journal, the best age to make good financial decisions. Did you read this one or no? I did. Okay, so you already know the answer. This is one of the reasons that, like, having a good, your whole idea of having a retirement plan is like the amount of people, because it says the optimal age to make your best decisions is, what, 53 or 54? I buy that. That's, you know, when you're middle-aged.

but that's middle age plus but they talk about they went through all these things like auto loans and credit cards and home equity lines of credit and all these things like when do you when are you at your best time to make the decisions and it has to do with experience and expertise in these areas and this is to your point why there's probably not many people with retirement plan because if you wait this long to be able to make good decisions on it

like that's it's almost too late you can still play ketchup at this age but for most people they kind of figured out in their I don't know late 40s, early 50s, and by then, like, the good stuff that you could have done when you're younger, that time has passed you. So it's like you have all the time in the world for compounding when you're young, but you don't have any money or expertise. And then when you're older, you have more money and income, but you don't have the time for compounding. It's kind of a cruel irony if you think about it. Yeah. I'm thinking about this study. How much time and money was spent on this? Probably a lot.

right probably a lot but they got a lot of publicity probably audit don't you think and what's what's like the what's the actionable takeaway i don't know most people are screwed when it comes to their finances i guess yeah good good point so you're saying academics are are useless no but i'm saying this is this is very academic all right another one of our favorite academic uh what's the jp morgan study called agony and ecstasy so it's like 40% of all companies in Russell 3,000 had a 70% decline in price from peaks, and they never returned. So I pulled, I was looking at AMC the other day because that was, remember people were putting signs on their garage doors and putting signs in their cars, being like AMC to the

moon. And this was like, I'm going to take down the man using AMC stock, which is still beyond me, how a movie theater stock ever got to that point. Well, it's down 98% now from the highs. And I think it's below where it started before the pandemic. Pelotons still down 97%, Teledox down 93%, Zoom is down 88%, Robin Hood is down 85%, all these game stops even down to 80%. These are those stocks of that study, right? Like, we've talked in recent months about like Netflix and Facebook and some of these other companies coming back, but these are the companies that are probably never going to see those 2021 peaks again. Oh, never. And not even close, right? No, no, no. Right? Like you could buy these stocks for a trade and, I don't know,

make 40 or 50, but if you're, you know, anchoring to 2021 peaks, that, that's just, it's never going to happen. Well, this is, this is the flaw in the best in been their study, in my opinion, is that, yeah, these stocks, all the ones on this list and a lot of stocks will have negative lifetime returns, right? But I don't know. I'm not, I'm not saying buy Zoom now, but there's, there's trades in here, right? Like, there's opportunities to double a triple your money. That's true. Like, GE is probably not going back to their relative size of 2000 or 2005, but it could be a good investment for a certain period of time. Yeah, exactly. Like Citigroup or something. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, most stocks are not worth buying and holding forever. We know this. But, you know, they fluctuate. All right. What's this margin debt? I think this is the first thing you put in the dock all day. You know what it is. Listen, I've been, I've been sick for three weeks. I won't go into the details, but I was telling Ben and Duncan before the show, I've been just like general, general malaise and, but now it's like accelerating. I don't know what's going on. I'm like getting sicker.

Middle age. What the hell's happening? I don't know. It's kids or middle age? Kids going back to school, maybe? I don't know. So my kids, my kids are off this week. There's a, there's a week off between camp and school.

We're not quite sure what's, what's doing. My kids are already on week two of school. I don't know what's happening in Michigan here, but we're going back to school way too early. Are we two? They cut off two weeks in my summer. Oh, do you know about this? Here's an activity that the kids have been doing. Killing spotted lantern flies.

Do you hear about this? No, what's that? I just found out about this. Apparently, there's like a giant infestation. And these are like, I didn't have read any articles yet, but these are, apparently these bugs are bad for the environment and they're multiplying. And so. I've never seen these before.

Again, I'm hearing this from my wife's second hand. So take this with a gigantic reign of whatever you're going to do. take it with. Sand. That you're supposed to kill these bugs. And so, like, Kobe and the kids at the beach were, like, stomping in them. They're everywhere. And, like, getting really excited.

It reminds me of the movie Starship Troopers, which is obviously one of my favorites. Of course. So we, after last week when you said that you really liked the whale, Duncan said, like, we should have a Kalshi betting market for Michael, for movies Michael likes. Because Duncan and I said, we would have bet our life savings that you would have hated the whale. And somehow you liked it. And, of course, you like Starcept Troopers.

I mean, that, that, that was, I don't, I don't, I don't like that movie. I love that movie. It was one of my favorite, favorite movies as a child. Starship Troopers. Yes. I don't know if I ever, that's always one that I might have caught bits and pieces of on TBS here and there. I don't think I ever watched the whole thing start to finish. Isn't that Tim Allen?

No, no, no, no. You're thinking of, uh, what am I thinking of? What am I thinking of Galaxy Quest? Okay. I think, right? Yeah. Starship Troopers is Casper Van Dean, or Dean, Dean? Denise Richards

Neil Patrick Harris NPRS, NPRS, as I call him. And the guy who looked like Rob Lowe, but not Roblo, less handsome Roblo, who was Kelly Kapaski's boyfriend at the max. I mean, it sounds like a TV movie to me. And Gary Busey's son.

Okay. Jake? You're not selling it very much to me. Great movie. Well, I didn't even tell you what it's about. They kill big giant bugs or something, right? phenomenal. I think that's where you're going with this. Yeah. Anyway.

All right, margin debt as a percent of S&P 500 market cap. This is a good chart because usually you just see the number. This is the denominator blindness thing. It's been going down for a while, actually. Because the market's so much bigger now, right? Yeah, I guess. But what's more interesting is money market funds, $5.5 trillion in money market funds.

all the way up. But again, thanks to Liz Zanz Anders, you got to adjust it. Money market funds has a percentage of S&P 500 market cap. I'm shocked at how low it is.

That is pretty good. Are you? It's like, what is that? 14 and a half percent of market cap. I guess if you just assume that money was flowing out of money market funds

for what, 12 years probably as the S&P 500 was going up. But yeah, that is it. So is this is this future money on the sideline though if rates fall fall back down? I don't know. I feel like cash is cash. Maybe. You know what I mean? Like people, people that earmarked their money for their checking, whatever. That's not money that's coming to the stock market. I know you're kidding with the money on the sidelines,

but no, but where did this money come from though? That's, that's the thing we don't know. That's what I would love to see that you can't ever tell with flows. Like where, what was this money in? Was it in bonds and it's coming out of there? Is it, was it in stocks? It's, it's, no, I don't think it's, I think it's more checking account. Yeah, it could be. Checking in savings. That's fair. The whole interest rate thing, I mean, this is like the most noncommittal thing you could say

about the markets and trying to make a prediction. But I really can see really good arguments for, like, rates are going to go back down to 2%, or rates are going to stay at, like, settle in at 3 to 4, or rates are going to stay higher for another 2. Like, I could make a pretty good argument at all those and not be surprised either way at this point. Here's what I think is going to happen. If I had to make a prediction on what's going to happen with the economy, I think it's possible we avoid a recession, but we're going to see rolling recessions for the next couple of years in specific industries.

We already saw it in tech, right? We saw that in tech in 2022, a lot of layoffs. The housing market is kind of in a recession or it was? We saw it in startups. The housing market is certainly in a recession. retail stores, department stores, are not doing great. I don't know what else is going to, what else is going to happen. Well, commercial real estate, certainly.

But I think it's possibly to see a series of recessions that hit this industry, that sector, that sector, without dragging the economy down. Or the economy just plunges. That's possible to. The weird thing is the economy plunging scenario is kind of predicated on the economy accelerating now first to have more, like more excess. Like that's what most people don't realize is that most recessions come from excess. And we got excess in speculation and stuff, but it never was really excess in the economy. And that's what like a blow off top in growth would be like an excess. And that would actually lead to probably a bigger downturn in the

economy. Was there excess spending? Yeah, but there was also excess saving. So it kind of, it kind of balances out. Like here, look at this inflation chart that I put in here. And so this is real real average hourly earnings year over year. And so this is, again, a kind of income adjusted for inflation. And we had that period in 2021 and most of 2022, and it's finally gone positive where it was below trend, meaning people were falling behind on their incomes. This is something people talk about. But look at, no one ever talks about the above average period of growth we had from 2020 in that first, like look at that almost a year-long period where we had way above trend and way above inflation.

And so what we've seen in terms of the people falling behind is really just balancing out of that huge spike in income growth that we saw before. Right? If you, again, if kind of like 2022 returns in the market in 2023, if you mash them together, it kind of evens out and balances out. That's kind of the same thing we do with incomes. But no one talks about that period of way above average income growth. They only focus on the below average income growth.

Fair? Like everyone is falling behind. No one talked about everyone getting ahead first. So, like, that's the excess saving stuff being run off with more spending. It's balancing it out. But obviously, the only thing that matters is what happens from here. Do we go back to trend or do we – I don't know. But that's the point here.

Right? We're balancing out a lot of things in terms of the pandemic surge. And some of it is going to look like the economy slowing, whereas most of it is just getting back on trend. Good point. All right. Never seen this one before. Let's move on to real estate. We've got a lot of real estate stuff.

Bob Burgess, my former editor at Bloomberg. I used to write there once upon a time. Whatever the section was, it was some new section. We're going to have all these new writers on something, and then it got thrown into the wood chipper. I was... Bloomberg. I can't remember.

It was like Bloomberg View, and then Bloomberg's something else. And something else did make it. So I... Anyway. I've never seen this before. He said this is a mind-blowing graph showing the average rate on U.S. mortgage is outstanding. The effective rate that borrowers are paying on their home loans

is 3.6%. I've never seen this. I mean, you probably could have backed into this answer somehow, but this is the collective mortgages, I guess, in their amounts, and then divide that by the number of people, the mortgages, and the rates, and this gets you 3.6%. Which is, I guess, about what I would expect it to be. Scroll your eyeballs down to the chart from Liz Ann Saunders. It's the same chart. It shows the U.S. effective rate of interest, but it also contrasts it with the current 30-year. And look at that spread. Right. Wild. Yes. Yeah, but yeah, I've never seen this like the effective rate before, but it, it makes sense. And this explains a lot of going on the housing market. You saw the Zillow thing, right? 1% down payment program. Yes. I don't think this is as big of a deal as most of some people do. I know some people are saying this is ridiculous. This is like 2008 subprime stuff all over again. Uh-uh, uh-uh. Set the record straight. Okay. Well, I just, first of all, I don't think that many people are probably going to apply. I think this is more good marketing PR by Zillow. than anything else, because I don't know how many people are even going to be eligible.

Glad we got you a gate rate. You need some electrolytes. Well, it's only for people that are trying to qualify. It's for first-time homebuyers. They're starting in Arizona to spread to other states, but it's for people that need the assistance that are trying to qualify for the FHA loan, which I think you need to put down, I think it's state by state, minimum of 3% or 5% in some states. Well, yeah, and it says Zillow is going to contribute an additional 2% at closing, which

I don't know how it all shakes out there with Zillow making a contribution to, but a lot of people were, like, worried about this and, like, okay, here we go. This is, this is not like, oh, 99% leverage for everyone. That's not what this is. Right. I don't see this. And the thing is, obviously, down payments have gone up, but the mortgage payments themselves, the monthly payments have gone up way more on a percentage basis than the down payments.

Like, obviously, it's way more, it's harder if people come up with down payments with higher housing prices, but it's the monthly payments that's the problem for most people. So this is just increasing a monthly payment even more. True. So I don't think this is going to be a lot. My other question is, how many jobs? are even left in the mortgage financing departments right now. There can't be any, I mean, it has to be just tumbleweeds, right? Because no one's going to refinance.

No one's refinancing right now. Speaking about rolling corrections or rolling recessions, yeah, the mortgage industry, decimated, right? Mortgage applications are down to the lowest level in over 20 years. Right. Yeah, there's no activity. There's no inventory. There's no refinancing going on. Yeah. If, getting to a seven and a half percent mortgage loans and maybe get up to eight percent possibly, like, I think this is going to finally start having an impact. what that's going to be, but I think people are just going to, it's just going to keep, like, slowing, like, grinding the gears slower and slower. Wild chart from Mike Saccardi, showing high yield rates versus mortgage rates.

Want to know why he looked at this chart? You asked him to? I asked him. Well, he said, he said mortgages are almost close to high yield rates, and I said, has that ever happened before? And he pulled up the chart, and it hasn't. Kind of wild. Yes.

In fact, very wild. It's like, wait a minute. Mortgage rates are the same as rates on junk bond, on junk? So after we talked about this last week, I wrote a blog post about why are mortgage rates so high? And I looked at the spreads by decade, like the 30 year minus the 10 year. And the average is less than 2%. But even in the set, someone was saying, well, when there's more volatile times and the rates are rising and inflation is rising, it must mean that spreads are wider.

But in the 1970s, that's the lowest average spread we've ever had. because I only have mortgage data going back to the 70s. 1.3% was the spread. So even if we went back to like the 2010 spread of 1.7%, we'd be talking more like 6% mortgages right now. Big difference. I think the Fed really screwed up the mortgage market when they bought and sold all those mortgage bonds.

I think like they're going to be the have to be the ones that come in and narrow this spread at some point. And maybe they're never going to want to. You know what? How about this? That's a good, that's a good, let's plant that flag. The Fed will start buying mortgage bonds before they lower interest rates, true or false? If they really wanted to, like, make things function better than the housing market,

maybe they're not going to, but that... Because I think the Fed is obviously trying to slow the economy, bring prices down, but are they trying to really crash the housing market? I doubt it. Well, I'm sure that they thought in their minds, raising rates so high would slow the housing market or would bring prices down. don't you think I wouldn't be surprised if they

I'm sure they wanted like a 10 or 20% correction they haven't gotten it I just I don't think they thought through the ramifications of going so fast from where they were to where they are with the combination of them stopping the purchases yeah all right

the rise of the four bedroom house so this is from 1973 to today four bedroom household this is percentage of new single family houses by bedroom number it went from 20 some percent in 1973 three to 48% now. Three-bedroom houses went from 65% to 43%. This is another reason that houses them are more expensive these days. They're bigger. There's more amenities. I grew up in a

three-bedroom house. Well, there was one bedroom downstairs, but I don't know if that really counts. I guess it's four-bedroom. The first house we lived in was three bedrooms. My brother and I had to share a bunk bed. I guess we moved in, it was four-bedrooms. So we got our own better. My parents are still in that same house. You know, the layout, we've spoken about old houses in the past. The layout of the house that I grew up in was terrible. It was, I guess, a split level.

So you walk up the steps to the door and you open the door and there's like a little, is it a foyer? That's my parents still have that. My parents are a split level. Yeah. So there's a downstairs with that one little bedroom and like a living room and a bathroom down there and then the laundry room.

But then upstairs, you've got the living room to the left, dining room behind it, kitchen next to it. You're describing my parents' house right now. Yeah, I grew up in the same house. One bathroom, and then one bedroom, bedroom next to it, and then the master bedroom. So I slept like five feet from my mom. Yes.

Which is right next, and 10 feet from the kitchen. Yes, that's true. Everything did feel right on top of each other. Not great. I sent you the TikTok of the 1990s HDTV thing. Did you watch that one? Uh-uh. It was, I slapped.

Where did you send it? Oh, I slacked it to our Animal Spirits channel. Oh, I missed it. Okay. It's pretty fun. But it's funny because they're talking about all these things in the 90s that houses were like. And when you think about the lady goes, oh, this is way too open. Close it off.

Let's close it off. And like, it's pretty funny. So yeah, I think the house that I just described is like what a lot of people grew up in, right? Yes. Back to my point that like back in the day, no one really thought about this stuff. And that's why I blame HGTV for what, wait, what, you're blaming? them for a good thing? Well, no, I blame HGTV for jacking up the price of houses.

It's a good thing and a bad thing. Houses would be way cheaper. It wasn't for HGTV. How about this? Here's a take. Home prices were way undervalued for like several decades because the quality wasn't great. Yeah, I think we- Now you're paying up for quality.

That's part of it. I think, yeah, we, that's part of it. And the demographic thing obviously happened to. But yeah, you're right. people didn't pay, and the renovations people do now, and it wasn't like that back in the day. Well, Ben, look at the median sale price from Redfin. It's been rising since 2001, granted home prices took a bit of a haircut after the GFC. But median sales price pulled back a tiny bit approaching new all-time highs, and active listings destroyed.

So this is the thing that the Fed probably didn't anticipate was that raising rates was going to kill demand. that part they probably understood. But I don't think they might not have realized that it was going to kill supply as well. I don't think they thought that at all. You would have thought that supply would have risen because it would be harder to sell, but the demand still outweighed it to supply.

So it didn't really destroy demand. It more destroyed supply, unfortunately. They killed the wrong side of it. Yes. Right. Which, and I don't know what they could have done because I do think that if rates, if mortgage rates go back down to, even from here, if they go back to six

or even five percent, the demand is going to come back in. Well, that's the thing. If they did what I suggested and they step into, to tighten rates down to six, six and a half, whatever it is, and then you get like more, more all-time highs and home prices. Well, it's hard to have a slowing economy, at least traditionally, if the housing market is on fire. This is like the 2010s. The Fed wanted to raise inflation and they couldn't. The Fed cannot fix the housing market.

The only thing that can fix the housing market is if we build more houses. and the Fed can't do that. Unless the Fed starts giving out construction loans to builders, they're not going to be able to fix the housing market regardless of what they do. Lance Lamber tweeted U.S. home prices as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index at a new all-time high in July, but when you dig deeper, you'll find there's still a lot of red. The home price correction has packed a bigger punch at the top end of the market. So San Francisco upper tier down 13.5%.

Seattle upper tier down 10.5%. Austin down 11 at the upper tier. And, you know, at the lower price tier, it's basically almost all-time highs across the board. Middle, a little bit less, but still you know, I saw, there's a house in my neighborhood that seemingly has been like not abandoned because it's, you know, it's a big house in good condition, a decent condition. And I walk past it and I'm like, oh, you know, let me, let me check it on Zilla. And it's pending for sale. And I think it's being sold. It's a really big house. I think it's being sold for like $1.8 million, $1.9 million. The mortgage payment on that. I can't even imagine. $14,000 a month. What would have been a year ago at that price? Eight grand. Is it a fair analogy or my stretching here? The upper end of the

housing market was like Series E, private companies, where they were closer to the public market and eventually it filtered its way down to series D&C. Is this going to eventually bleed into the middle market? I look at it at the other way. I think that there's just always going to be more demand for the lower middle tier of housing prices. And the upper tier, there's just fewer buyers there. So it's going to be harder to ever have that same demand

for multimillion dollar houses. Yeah, I buy that. It's just a smaller pool of buyers. I buy that. All right, this is interesting from the Wall Street Journal. I've never thought about this before, but they're talking about how Americans are bailing on their home insurance. I never, I thought that home insurance was like car insurance, like you had to have it.

They say 12% of all homeowners don't purchase homeowners insurance. I didn't know you. I thought the banks, well, maybe this is people who own their houses out, right? I don't think you could do that. I think at origination, I'm making this up. Think at origination, you have to have insurance. Right, and then you just let it lap. So they, they, you're allowed to cancel.

That, that's, that's, that's crazy. I can't imagine not having insurance in my house. I can't either. I need this to say, it's, it's like almost everybody. his largest asset. And they're talking about how it's becoming really bad in places like Florida and California because of hurricanes and wildfires. They interview this guy, Larry Ferenholt, hasn't had home insurance more than 25 years. He estimates he'd save more than $50,000 on his 1,100 square foot Los Angeles home. It would probably be financially devastating if I lost

my house, but I have enough money and savings to move into a condo in that event. I just can't see the tradeoff there. But the point is in places like Florida where it's becoming just ridiculously expensive to do this. A lot of people are almost having to, like they can't afford it. So this is why my biggest climate hedge is living in the Midwest by the Great Lakes. In like 30 years, we're going to get a reverse migration of these people who all move south. People have been moving south for like the last 20 years. And all you hear all summer is people in the south complaining it's 115 degrees or whatever. That's not going to get better in the coming years. We're going to have a reverse migration and people are going to want to be by water and

they're going to want more, they want a better climate and come to the Midwest. The Midwest in like the 2040s and 2050s is going to be the biggest real estate market in the country. Time stamp. Until you get the dust, the dust thing for like from Interstellar and all the crops are killed. By the way, I mentioned that because I rewatched Interstellar first time in a long time. I don't want, when did that movie come out? 2010?

I have no idea. I didn't love it on the first watch. It actually, I think it ages better on a. re-watch. Re-watched a couple years ago, too. 2014. So I think I like the first... So that movie pulls out your heartstrings, right? Yes.

With the kid's stuff. I love the first third. I think it's, you know, it's, it got, it got wacky. It was hard to land a plane. Yeah, and so Robin was, Robin jumped in halfway through with me. She's like, this is so dumb, but she wouldn't stop watching. And then at the end, like, with the bookshelf, she's like, okay, all right, this is but I'm not sure if I love that movie,

but I definitely enjoyed the shit out of it. Like I said, the first time I watched it, I think because of the ending, I didn't like it that much, but then I watched it again and I liked it more of the second watch. Yeah, good movie. McConaughey has a great crying scene in that movie.

So good in that. He wrote about it in his book, how he gets himself psyched up and he told, who's the director of that one? Is it a Fincher movie? No, it's Christopher Nolan. Or Nolan, sorry. Yeah, the kid stuff is tough, really tough.

He said he got it for the crying scene. He said he got himself all psyched up, and he didn't want to do more than one take. And he said, he walked into the room and he said, no, let's go. Start filming now. I'm ready. He looked, whatever he does, like, get himself ready to cry. That was a good one. All right.

Amazon has talked with Disney and a new ESPN streaming service. Maybe more notable is that ESPN is considering charging between $20 and $35 for the new service. That seems high to me. So what is this for? This is for people that cut the cord but still want to watch sports? Yes. Or people that want to cut the core, but aren't doing it because of sports. Yeah, but the problem.

The problem is, all right, so you get, you get ABC and you get ESPN, although ABC is on basic cable, right? So on basic cable, you get ABC, you get NBC, you get CBS. So you've got all like the local games. But you need ESPN for, is that Sunday night football? Whatever it is. You need ESPN for that. You need ESPN for basketball.

But what about T&T? Right. That's the thing. The sports are going to keep going wider. And maybe just the hope is that Amazon and Apple start buying them all up and you can get them all through there, through a bundle. But I think their hope is like, that's, that's the direction this is going, right? I think they're thinking, like, we used to have, I don't know what is,

a hundred million people who subscribed to cable and they had ESPN. But if we can get, I think the number they said was like 12 million to sign up for this, since it's going to be so expensive. It's going to be the same economics. That's their hope. That just seems really high to me. I'm sure there are so many diehard people who watch sports, but that's a tough ask. I mean, cut of the court has become very expensive.

So, I mean, I'm sure what Disney's going to do eventually is it's going to be, are you able to pay for Prime plus Disney Plus plus Hulu plus ESPN, whatever they're calling it, and get them all in one bundle. And that's kind of a bundle again. Well, Disney does it already. You get ESPN, Disney Plus, and Hulu. Yeah. So maybe Amazon's part of that and ESP is part of that too. I'm paying for and every, the only thing I don't pay for is Paramount. Okay, I pay for that. We're watching a new series on that one. I'll talk about recommendations. Yeah, I don't know. This is why I'm keeping the bundle for as long as I can, though, because... Yeah, but I'm saying now it's, it's, it's double the cost,

because I'm, I'm paying for the bundle and for everything else. Yes. You're screwed either way. Whatever you do, you're screwed. But that's one of the reasons that I like keeping the cable bundle is because I get all the sports channels. If I want, like March, I love March Madness. It's on True TV and TNT and TBS and CBS, right?

It's on all four of those channels. I need to have cable to get that. Right? I think. All right. Survey of the, we haven't done with these in a while. from yougov.com. Six and ten regard unemployment as a very or somewhat serious national problem. There's 24% say the jobless rate dropped in the last month, and only 34% say drop numbers increasing.

Though that has been the case on the official government numbers every month since the economy began recovering from COVID-19. This is back to your point about how many people understand their actual financial picture, how many people understand the economy itself. Americans are nearly twice as likely to say the economy is shrinking than growing, 38% versus 21%. 44% of say it's curling in a recession and 22% of recession is likely in the next year. All right. So I have two thoughts on this. Number one, there's no information. There's no, there's no takeaway.

There's no actionable information in these surveys. They're meaningless. They don't mean anything. As far as if you're thinking about this through the investor lens, there's no actionable insights here. Yes. You can't, you can't, I don't think you can't engage sentiment through surveys anymore. No, you really can't.

Unless it's, you know, completely extreme, fine. But the other thing is, so it doesn't matter at all from, um, There's no actionable takeaway. However, I do think it matters how when you ask people how things are going, people are generally saying it's bad. And we've spoken about this a billion times. There's a million reasons why they're saying that, even though, you know, they might not. But what if people are always just going to say it's bad from now on?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the camp on man. People just say things are bad. One of the luxuries we have today is we have time. Like I mentioned that book I was reading about how in like the 1800s, no one had time to retire. People were working like 60 hour weeks in the farms. In the past, people didn't have time to worry about stuff.

like they didn't have time to watch cable news all the time. They didn't have time to scroll their phone anytime and look at all the bad news all the time because people were too busy working and then doing nothing else. And today we have the luxury of being comfortable and seeing all the bad news. And so I think people just are always going to be on the pessimistic side going forward because we have the ability to see it all now and hear about it. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Permanent. All right. So speaking of cutting the cord, every day, about 25,000 Americans canceled their cable cord. Do you think those people are doing that after talking to the retention department about getting a better deal like I do? That's back to the same level as it was in 1992. That's kind of wild.

Do you remember when we used to cancel the cord and you'd have to literally bring your cable box in, like your Comcast box back to Comcast? I bet you still do. No, you can send it through the mail now. They send you a box and you send it through the mail. That's a pain of the box. You used to do it in college, right? Yeah, you'd have to like wait in line and give them your box back.

There was a podcast on the town with Matt Bellany and Julie Alexander. They estimate that Apple Plus has 15 million subscribers in the United States, which is very, very low. I'm surprised Apple just doesn't give it away with an iPhone these days, just to get people on there. That's a good point. Why even charge? Right? Just give it away. How much is it a month?

It's not that much. $9.99. Is it $10? So $15. So, 15 million, 120 a year. It's $1.8 billion in revenue. Certainly ain't nothing. Although to limit's basically nothing.

Yeah, give away a three-month thing and then have to give your credit card information to do it on Apple Pay. I think they probably do. How many people would keep it? Yeah. All right, Ben, I've got a bone to pick, a major bone to pick.

Okay. It's a big bone. Okay. I ordered... For the man who has no pet peeves? I ordered... This is not a pet peeve. Okay.

I ordered two hex coexecs. clad pans. You ever hear of the brand Hexclad? No, but I guess your other pans didn't work out very well, huh? Well, I ordered the nonstick Amazon set for like 80 bucks and just terrible. So it's time to grow up and get grown up pans. So I got two. They were not cheap at all. And I'm like, hey, wait a minute, where are my pans? So I logged on and it says your order has been delivered. So I'm like, no, it hasn't. What? So I see the shipping address went to, I won't say his last name, but his first name is Brian. The last name is a name that I've never heard before.

The address is an address that I've never seen before. It went to Torrance, California. What the hell is going on? Was my shipment hacked or something? So I emailed them and they said, like, well, this is the address we have in file. You're welcome to take it up with UPS. And I'm like, no, you take it up with UPS. Wait, Amazon said this or you brought us to someone else?

No, Hexclad said this. Okay. So I'm like, why should I? What? No, I got hacked or it got hacked on the back and I didn't, I didn't enter the shipping address. I don't know where this is. Now, maybe from their point of view, like, they're like, well, how do they know that I didn't, that I'm not just stealing, right? That I didn't send this to a friend.

Yeah. But, so what do I do? That's where you left it? Well, I emailed them again. I'm like, no, please do the right thing. I think I got hacked. I don't know how this happened. Do you have the tracking number?

I would call UPS. and say, hey, you dropped this off at the wrong place somehow. I could be a UPS problem. I'm going to call my, I think I'm going to call my credit card and see if they'll take this up. But isn't this nuts? How does this happen? You with credit cards and deliveries, not having a good summer. Although I did get scammed on Instagram, the downside of Instagram, knows me too well.

So I got another giant shirt on. This is homage, I think it's called. There's a knockoff and they got me. So, I see the commercial, I see the advertised my phone. I'm like, oh, wow, these prices are, these are great prices. So I bought like a bunch of gear. I'm like, wait a minute. This doesn't look like homage.

It looks, it was like an homage knockoff. So I went to the website to compare and contrasty, I was a knockoff. So the quality's not as good? I don't know. I haven't received, I haven't received yet. I assume it's knockoffs. Okay. So now, yeah, so Instagram, you know, as listeners know, that's where I get most of my

clothes these days. I've been targeted, Ben. I'm not sure how I feel about this. You know, like, this has traditionally been for women, is Spanx the brand where you like, it's like a, it's like a... Form fitting, it holds your stuff in. So there's, so I saw an ad for something called Shapeslim. And I have to say, looks very good.

For men? For men. It's like spanks for men. It takes, it takes the belly and it's just like, I don't know what it does with it, but just like makes it totally flat. How uncomfortable would that be, though? Well, you got two things going against you. Number one, it doesn't look.

I'm sure it's not the most comfortable thing in the world. But then what happens? Some people look at you're like, oh, wow, he looks pretty good. And you go to the beach. Then you go to the beach and you're a slob. Get it or a swim shirt, I guess. But. So I don't think I care enough.

Okay. In fact, in fact, I don't care enough. I will never buy that. All right. One last thing. This really grinds my gears. I know we spoke about this in the past many times. DoorDash.

So Robin went out. with her friends. I haven't used it in a long time. I got I'm kind of was over it. I'm not going to pay up for it anymore. Robin went out with her friends over the weekend. So I was left to eat dinner by myself. I had ramen. Love ramen. Spicing ramen. Very good. All right. So my ramen bowl was $17. The delivery fee was $249. The fees and taxes were $4.47. And the tip was $4. So I paid $28 for a ramen bowl that cost $17. Should have gone to pick it up. Well, I put it up, I mean, yeah, but I was with the kids and it was like, I didn't feel like it.

You're paying up for convenience. That's on you now. You can't complain about DoorDash anymore. It's on you. It's just crazy. It is. So much money. So go get it.

I'm not feeling sorry for you anymore for paying up for DoorDash. You've been complaining about this for three years. Kids were in jammies. No, but I don't use Derek. This is why I don't use it that much. I would, but I was reminded. Yeah, but that's why you, for this business to work, you have to pay up for it, unfortunately.

All right, recommendations. I got a couple. Small ears. Fly on the wall, the Dana Carvey, David Spade podcast had Steve Martin and Martin Shorton. And I just love those guys. Why don't I listen to that podcast more? They're great. It's so good.

I need to get back in my rotation. And I just love the interaction that those guys have. And the thing is, like, they rip on each other incessantly, but they're like, they're just very positive guys. Like, you know, a lot of comedians are, like, it seems like they have a lot of, like, interior pain and, like, suffering and then they become comedians. These guys are the opposite. I love both of their books, born standing up with Steve Martins, and I must say, it was Martin Shorts. And Steve Martin's almost 80 years old, I think Martin Shorts in his 70s.

I watched, I still watch that show, only murders in the building. It's on season three. Now, Paul Rudd's on, and Merrill Streep is on. And it's, it's kind of a cheesy show in some ways still, like, kind of like Ted Lassel, like, there's a bit of cheasiness that you're willing to let go because it has, because they're, like, seems so positive. So I'm still watching that. I actually... Wait, can I just say what thing? I think, I'm pretty sure that Danny Carvey had a rough childhood. He did. Yes. Yeah. He did. But those, yeah, those guys, I just love the fact

that they're so positive. The older I get, the more I want just to have more positive people in my life and not people complaining all the time. Speaking of comedy, did you see that, I don't know why this was going around on the interwebs this week. Did you see Will Ferrell's audition for SNL? I did. Pretty good. Yeah. I think I've seen that before. He pretends to be a cat He's in his work office And he picks up the phone and says Hold on a meeting lunch or whatever

Whatever he says And then he just pretends to be a cat Like hitting the yarn ball or something It's very funny In college we had one of our friends Owned the greatest S&L Will Ferrell years And we would watch it like

Probably once a month at least There was no bigger phenom In my lifetime than him on SNL Yeah The Farley one is pretty close for me I actually watched the new Adam Sandler movie on Netflix, the Bot Mitzvah one, and his two daughters are in it. I think you should watch it. I, my wife and I were just looking for something to watch on Sunday night, and we put it on,

and it was like a more toned down Sandler than I'm used to. Like, one of the reasons his comedies haven't worked for me for the past 20 years, because they're just so over the top and, like, not funny. But this one was more toned down, and his daughter's having a bot mitzvah, which I've been to one bat mitzv in my life. I'm sure you've been to many. And it really did, like, boggle my mind that it was kind of like a wedding for this 13-year-old girl. It was like my wife's cousin's daughter or something and they've really nailed that whole thing but Sandler's two daughters

were in it and I'm like oh boy this could go wrong and they're actually pretty good and he I looked at it he is like the dad of these teen girls and I feel like I'm going to blink and my two daughters and be teenagers and so I'm watching the movie from the dad perspective as Adam Sandler as the dad and it was like a 6.0 but like it was way defied expectations I thought it was going to be awful

and it was actually pretty good. Is his wife in it too but she's not she doesn't play his wife she plays like a friend's So it's a family affair, but it's actually pretty funny. I will watch it. I mentioned Paramount Plus. We're watching the Joe Pickett series on Paramount Plus. Who's that?

My all-time favorite novel about a Wyoming Game Warden, they turned it into a TV show. And there's no way they could top the books. It's a CJ Box books of Joe Pickett. I read one every year. I'm on like the 23rd and 24th one. And it's about a Wyoming Game Warden who is investigating murders, and the TV. It has a little bit of like a CBS show to it, like the vibes of the acting. It's like the actors aren't like amazing, but the story is so good.

And they picked the best book to do it on from the series. So I'm watching it in three episodes in where we like it. It's good. Yeah, it's good. It's not like, it's not like, again, the acting is not like, you have to look past the acting a little bit, but it's, the story is good. And you get to see Wyoming. I watched River Wild last night, not the River Wild, but River Wild.

The Netflix one. And I'm, I'm probably two-thirds of the way through. I'm very surprised at the Rotten Tomatoes rating. So the audience gives it a 35. The critics give it a 77. It stinks. I mean, I'm going to finish it, but it's not good. That's what I felt.

I watched half of it, and I'm like, I've got to finish it now, but it's not good. It's not good at all. I'm sure the ending is not better. Like, it's just not great. If you haven't seen Interstellar, I mean, it's absolutely worth watching, even though it gets, goes a little bit off the rails.

But, all right, I watch, where did I find this? Maybe Prime. I don't know how I miss this movie. I really, really don't. It's called fanboys. Ben, have you ever heard of this? Is this like the Star Wars one? Yeah.

They go to Star Wars convention? Yeah. I must have watched it a while ago. I cannot remember it, though. So this is directly in my wheelhouse. It's like a silly stoner movie with all the people, Seth Rogan, J. Barichel? Bruchel.

Okay, Baruchel, Kristen Bell, Chris Marquette, Sam Hunt, in a total, I mean, you know their faces if you don't know the name. And then a million cameos. Shrewda McAvin. Carrie Fisher, Kevin Smith, Bill Shatner. Geez, Will Forte, Craig Robinson? Danny Trejo. I forgot how this one.

And it's not great. There was a few really big laughs for me. I just, 2009, I don't know how I missed this one. Is it a Kevin Smith movie? No. He's just in it? He's just in it. Who directed it?

I was looking at that. Kyle Newman. What else did this guy do? Okay. I don't think anything. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how this one escaped me. Anyway, it's not certainly not a great movie.

But if you're looking for like a dumb comedy with laughs from the crew that you love that you never saw, you could do worse. All right. You came on strong in the end. I think you, you know, still like two thirds of me, one third of you, but you came on strong. Thank you. Listen, I've got this weird, I don't know what it is, just under the weather, three weeks running. Keep drinking, uh, keep drinking Gatorade. Animal spiritspod at gmail.com and we'll see you next time.