Animal Spirits Podcast - Benjamin Graham Disciple (EP.294)

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

On today's show we discuss the stock and bond market rallies in 2023, why certain investors are so pessimistic all the time, housing market activity bottoming, the most hated economic expansion of all-time, context around tech layoffs, consumer spending is slowing, Michael's first resume and much more.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs...  Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense  Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor  Like us on Facebook  And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.      (Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, received compensation from the sponsor of this advertisement. 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. 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.)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by Helios. If you're a financial advisor and you want to learn about how Helios works with financial advisors, visit Helios, that's H-E-L-I-O-S, Driven.com slash Animal Spirits. We had Chris Schuba on and I think we had their CIO on. There's a stat that I saw, if you want to check out those episodes to learn more about how they work with us. I saw a stat recently that model portfolios have compounded at like 18% a year for the last decade. What does that mean? A lot of financial advisors, I don't know if it's most, but certainly a lot, do not want to be

responsible for managing portfolios, taxless harvesting, rebalancing, strategies, and all that sort of stuff. So you can work with the company like Helios to really do it for you. And they call themselves an insource CIO because they build custom models. They do it with the funds you own if you want to use them. The idea here is that I think most advisors would rather spend their time focusing on the clients and growing the practice and being more efficient on financial advice. sort of things. And they don't think that they can add value on the investment side of things.

That's really what Helios does. So they say they work with multi-billion dollar teams all the way down to solo practices. So if we want to learn more, they're actually going to give a 10% discount for the first year. So it's Heliosdriven.com slash Animal Spirits. 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. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holtz Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritthold's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should

not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritthold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. We're going to start off talking about the stock market, as we do from time to time. It is 1048, Eastern, Tuesday, January 31st. Tomorrow we've got the Fed. Thursday, we've got the Grand Triumphant. That's Apple, Google, Amazon. Is that right?

All the same day? Oh, wait a minute. I don't know. Anyhow, all right. So we're going to start the show talking about this. The stock market doesn't want to go down. There are many well-known potential risks out on the horizon. Maybe we'll start off with the fact that the stock market is

forward-looking, discounting. As you rewind a little, I said, the fact, it's not always right, right? It doesn't always discount the right things. But there's a chart that we've mentioned in the past, which shows stocks. We have had a number of bear market rallies that have been bullshit. So maybe the market is drunk. Yeah, we don't know. But equities have typically bottomed. This charts as troughed. I can't use the word troughed. It gets to be troughed. Yeah, I've never put an ed on the end of that bottom. Equities, typically bottom six to nine months before earnings in past bare markets. So that's what typically happens. So I guess the question is, are earnings going to hold up? So I guess this is something we've talked about. If you want to sound

smart, you say, okay, the next leg down is earnings. The point of that is, it doesn't work as easy as that, where if you just know earnings are going to fall, you don't know what the stock market is going to do. Maybe we've already discounted that. But the The crazy thing is, is what if the stock market really did discount a recession in 2022? That's not going to happen for two years. Does it do it all over again? Or can we say, like, hey, we got that out of the way? Like, how far does the market look forward?

Yeah. If the market just assumed 2020, we're getting a recession, we're going to have a bare market. Then the recession's off. Do they kind of say, sorry, we're going to do it again in two years whenever it happens? The one person who really does feel like, I feel like, we probably hit on this once every five or six months. Did you read the latest Jeremy Grantham piece? Did not. I did not get to it yet.

He said after a timeout back to the meat grinder, and his whole thing is like, yeah, the easiest part of it's done. The speculative stuff has gone, but now is the hard part. He said, valuations are still nowhere near long-term averages. And he said, beyond the near term, the big picture remains, declining population, raw material shortages, and rising damage from climate change are beginning to bite into growth prospects. He said, the resource and geopolitical shocks that last year will only exacerbate those

issues over the next two years, given the change in the interest rate environment, the possibility of a downturn in global property markets poses frightening risks to the economy. So he's saying all this long-term stuff is going against us. Again, he's been saying this for years, and I think at this point he's quadrupling down, quintupling down, whatever you want to say. One of the biggest bear cases coming to the year was the wealth effect or the downturn that we would see from a real estate downturn. Real estate is, is that a third of the economy? 20%, it's a big number. Again, the stock market isn't always right.

But what I'm looking at today is XHB, the Home Builders ETF. Yeah, I want to talk about Grantham real quick. So this guy's in his 80s, he's never going to change, right? If you get that old, you don't decide to all of a sudden change your mind. Here's what I would love to hear from someone like him who has been perpetually bearish for 12 years now. And probably mostly bearish this whole career. But I would just love to hear, you and I are perpetually more on the bullish. I'm long-term optimist.

I think things are going to get better. But we are realist and that we know that things could get bad and will get bad at times. There's going to be crashes. There's going to be recessions. We admit this. We look at both sides of the aisle. I would love to hear his bull case. Here's where I'm wrong.

Because for 12 years, he's been beating his head against the wall saying, here's the next crash. The next crash is coming. It's going to be the worst crash in history. Just maybe once say, you know what? Here's where I'm wrong. Here's where I can be wrong. And here's what would have to happen to prove me wrong.

instead of just saying the same thing over and over again. I wonder if the market fell 35% would he say. The mother of all bubbles popped and it's just getting started. We have a lot lower to go. He might get bullish for like a week. I just like to see the ability to see both sides. I feel like that's how you have an open mind as an investor. That's all I'm looking for.

So real estate, which we're going to get to later, so I'm putting a pin in. We'll take the pin out in about 25 minutes. But XHB, so XHB is at a 52-week high. Outside of a podcast, do you ever use the word put a pin in it? No, of course not. Actually, my bad, my bad. It's at the highest level it's been since March. So not quite 52 weeks, but well off the lowest. All right. This is back to my whole thing about how investing is hard. Real estate stocks are ripping this year. And this is the year that real estate is supposed to slow. Last year, real estate was still doing fine. And these stocks got annihilated.

Oh, yeah. Redfin, for example, this stock was almost doubled off the lows. Now, again, this stock was down 96%. So whatever. But if you look at Zillow, which I own, you look at Pulting, which reported earnings, the stocks up 9% today. Housing activity is coming back. The 30 years six and changed. Judging purely based on the amount of stocks that you say you own, I think the bare market might be over. Every week, you're sliding a couple socks in there. I own this stock, I own this stock. I think I own seven stocks. Zillow, Netflix, meta, and phase, which is my worst stock, Disney, 10 cent, Airbnb. Those are my stocks. We've got some overlap there. You and I, if we put our portfolios together. We're not very diversified. Well, but I've got a much better entry,

not to brag. This is fair. I've been buying a hold of investor and buying kick in the pants for the last year or so. Let's seriously put the pin in. We'll come back to it. Oh, so Oliver Renick, for example, here's another thing. Oliver Renick tweeted post-earnings rallies in Discover Financial Services and Capital One are an effective giant middle finger to the narrative about consumers buckling under debt loads. So DFS. It does feel like every time, a credit card company reports earnings, the CEO of the credit card company says, we are seeing no problems whatsoever. People are spending money. Delinquencies are fine. Consumers are fine. Yeah. So, listen, are stocks reacting to earnings and what, yes, they are. Are they looking too

far forward? I mean, again, stocks can be 100% wrong. The rally could fizzle. It's entirely within the realm of possibility. But these are questions that we have to ask. I think one bad inflation print. I don't think the market cares about the Fed anymore. Unless the Fed just keeps raising rates and gets to ridiculous levels, then the market's going to happen. I hear you. If inflation re- accelerates, that would catch a lot of people off sides. Yeah, if we did see inflation accelerate. I still think the worst outcome for investors is going to be if inflation does go to like, say, under three or four percent, we do look at victory lap and like, yay, it's over. And then inflation rises back from there. I think that's the point

where people go, wait, whoa, whoa, I thought this was done with. You're going to see a lot of undertaker memes or gifts, him getting up from the coffin. I think that's the one that would get the most people off guard if they said, all right, fine. It's finally over. We had that one-time blip, and then it rises again from there. But it would be nice to get to the point, like, for how many years did we not care about inflation at all? We never looked, on the inflation day, we never looked at the data. We haven't talked about it. CPI day. It wasn't even a day. For the whole 2010s, we never cared about inflation. There wasn't one time where we're like, oh, inflation is the biggest thing or no. It never was. That shows we're over it if we stopped

caring about the releases of the data. Speaking of inflation, I went to Whole Foods this week. I haven't been to a Whole Foods in a long time. I haven't been shopping, like grocery shopping in Whole Foods in a long time. And I have to tell you, it was a magical experience. Oh, really? I thought you're going to tell me how expensive it was. What a delight. Well, the speaking of inflation thing was with the eggs, you can only buy one carton of eggs.

Or maybe two, but they capped it. Do you know how much my wife said we paid for two dozen eggs at Costco the other day? $6. All these people could play about eggs mean. Two dozen? Well, you know what? I was disappointed by the Whole Foods eggs. I have to say because they were kind of small in stature.

I'm a jumbo-like guy. Yeah, but a whole food. All of their chickens are on like these lush pillows with like golden tassels on the end and they get pet every night and put to bed. Like they take care of their chickens really well there. I did go through the receipt because I was curious. It was not astronomically expensive, but truly a delightful place. Really just lifted my spirits.

Actually, listen to this. I didn't tell you this. This was very odd. Very odd. Did you have to talk to the manager about something? No, no, no. There was no complaints. I just want to say, all the people were calling you Karen Batnick in the comments last week.

Very funny. I was laughing. Was it in good fun, and were they being serious? Everyone was joking. Okay. It was in good fun. We did have someone post a picture of you with bangs, K-plus-8 bangs in the hair, and just perfect. Well, listen, I was in the hospitality business my entire growing up life.

I was a Valley Parker. I was a waiter forever. I know what it's like to be on the other side. I take care of those people. And I was a bus boy. My very first job, bus boy. Awful job. Not great.

So I'm in the car, waiting for Robin. She had to run it to get one more thing. And I see somebody pulling in like this. And I'm like, they're not going to keep going, are they? She kept going and she hit my car while I'm parking there. And there's people walking by. It was just a tap. But then she pulled back and pulled in.

So I obviously get right out of the car and I look at my car and there's paint, but I was able to wipe it off entirely. The lady gets out of her car and just starts walking in. And I'm like, excuse me, excuse me. You hit my car. Is this like a grandma? Nah, she was 70. She goes, no, I didn't. I was very confused.

I said, yes, you did. Yes, you did. And there was just a whole, but yes, I didn't know it. It was very strange. And then I'm pulling away and she starts taking pictures of me. And I might have cursed. I might have said, what the heck are you doing? I said, why are you taking pictures of me?

And she said, stop being too sensitive. Wow. She told me that I was, she hit my car and then started taking pictures of me. Wow. She totally turned the tables on you. It was very strange. She kind of posted it to like her seven Twitter followers. Like, look at this maniac yelling at me today.

I wasn't yelling at her. I was very confused. All right, Mike Socardi tweeted, this is interesting. It was the worst three-week stretch for value versus growth in at least 19 years. And the interesting thing about that is the market wasn't down. So actually, I don't even know that I would expect growth to outperform value in a down market. Anyway, did you realize that growth had outperform value as such as a large extent over the past couple of the weeks? what they call that, junk stock rally. Everyone will say that's a junk stock rally, short covering.

We've been through this before, you and I. I don't like you pooh-pooing this because I'm not poop-pooing. I'm saying that's what you call this, is all the stocks got beaten up the most. They're going to have a huge rally at some point, and that's what happens. I feel like you're saying that with air quotes, even though you're not literally using air quotes, but there was an article in the journal. Sir, you're putting air quotes on me. It was literally the 50 most shorted stocks at Goldman has a basket that track had a crazy run. There might have been Sigma's involved. I don't know. It was that sort of run. I'm agreeing with it.

It's a junk stock rally. But the thing is, can it continue? That's the question. Well, that is the question. So, best start to the year. Well, not a best start to the year, but a very good start to the year for bonds and stocks. How about that? 6040.

Back to life. Back to life. How much are bonds up? Look at this chart. So the Bloomberg Ag, which is just the S&P for bonds, has had the best January since this chart. This goes back to like 1985, something like that. And the S&P is up about 6% for the month. So how about that?

Wow. Okay, so the ag is up like 3% this month already. Stocks are up 6%. 6040 back on. We're back. We've gone through six of the nine lives for 6040. Dead alive, dead alive. Valchunis, things you never see.

He used uppercase, and Eric is not, I don't think he's an uppercase guy, but he did. A Europe ETF leading year-to-date flows with $3.6 billion. No doubt, this is J.P. Morgan's own model, but that's a massive number. They must be all in on this trade. Also, only one Vanguard ETF in the top 10. That's interesting. He said that won't last neither will Europe. So a good thing I capture the moment here.

The top one is an European one. The second one, it's BBEU. I'm not familiar with this one. This is JPMorgan beta builders. All right. But IEMG, that's emerging markets too, right? Yeah. How about that?

People are going in on the international trade. This is how it happens, though, is you see a huge spike in performance and then money flows in and that keeps things going. That's how momentum works. The flows matter more than anything else. So Duncan just popped into our Slack to say that the same thing happened to us in our Whole Foods Parkland in Brooklyn. Dude backed into us and just drove away slowly. Is this a thing that they do?

You know, it was not a welcome sign along with the woman hitting my car. I have a prime card. But you typed in your number for the discount. My discount, the bill was $360. And it was a big shop. I got a lot of food. $2.47. Wow.

Thank you, Mr. Bezos. Thank you. I think part of the problem is people rely way too heavily on the cameras. They think that cameras for backing up make them like immune to hitting. someone. You're right. And it should be. However, Ben, this was front. She hit me from the front, just right in the side. So remember how we had the most hated bull market of all time in 2010s. That was designing the wall of worry, most hated bull market, blah, blah, blah. This now feels to me like the most hated economic expansion of all time. So Heather Long had the GDP numbers.

Now that we have the fourth quarter GDP, which came in at like 2.9% annualized or something like bet. If you look at 2020, so we were down 3%, 2.8% GDP, real GDP, 2021, we're up almost 6. 2020, we were up more than 2%. Again, after inflation, it's funny, I saw a few comments on this saying, well, yeah, GDP numbers look good, but what if you adjust for inflation? It's like GDP numbers are always adjusted for inflation. They never give you a nominal ones. We're basically back on track, on trend, for growth in the economy, even after that 2020 blip, which I still think is pretty amazing. Everyone says, well, of course, if you're trillions of dollars at a problem. Look what happens. I still think that economically,

things could have been way, way worse than they were. I think for going through what we did, I'm willing to be thankful that things worked out as well as they did, even though we got inflation that people really hate. All right, Sam Rao. Do you figure out? Can I just say, Ticker versus Ticker? Yes. No, we know it's ticker. All right, so we've been mentioning this guy a bunch lately. He's got great stuff. I appreciate his Twitter account. It's at Guy Dealership. He tweeted the resilience of the American economy is astounding. Financing rates at record highs, monthly payments at record highs, new car prices at record highs, used car prices slightly below record highs, and car dealers are having a very strong month. I can't explain it. You can say that about a lot of

things right now. I didn't get to see Matt Klein's piece yet, but Matt Klein has a piece out today on the overshoot showing that actually the excess savings is gone and American consumer's behavior is starting to change, which is something that we've been talking about a lot. When are they going to start to pull back? Maybe we're there. So the Wall Street Journal has a piece says the U.S. consumer is starting to freak out. And I think that reading the lead of this piece, which is this, retail purchases have fallen in three of the past four months, spending on services, including rent haircuts and the bulk

of bills, was flat in December after adjusting for inflation. The worst monthly reading in nearly year. Sales of existing homes in the U.S. fell last year to their lowest level since 2014 as mortgage rates rose. The auto industry posted its worst sales year. more than a decade. You read that and you go, okay, things are slowing. My whole point is you read the rest of this article, and it still sounds kind of like a vibes session kind of thing. They show the slowdown. Actually, the personal savings rate is jumping back up. But if you look at retail sales,

we've talked about this many times. Look at the retail sales chart here versus inflation and how much higher, that huge sleep higher. I still think, what if things just normalize and it feels like a slowdown, but it's really things just getting back on trend? They had a few anecdotes in here that made it sound like a recession, but really wasn't. They had a guy in a tattoo shop, and he said, in my 15 years of doing this, I've never seen that. And they talked about how people are canceling because his tattoos are too expensive. He said, people calling up and saying they don't have the money to spend right now or can only afford an hour because their current situation is pretty bad. But it also says after that, for now, first class tattoo isn't slashing prices

because the baseline level of demand remains strong. Some 250 clients are still on the wait list. So he's saying people are canceling, but he sells 250 people on the wait list willing to spend money. It's kind of one of those things. People are looking for nitpicking still in the economy. And I do feel like, what if people are just normalizing their spending and they just spent way too much for the last two years? And that normalization is going to look like a slowdown, but it's really just going to be people getting back to trend. That's our minor hiccup in the economy, and then we keep going. Well, we never stop. Economy never stops.

Good slow. Could expand. And the consumer never stops spending unless they start losing their job. And that hasn't happened yet. This one was funny to me. Joe Wisenz-Sall tweeted, a new working paper from the Federal Reserve argues that central bank recent increases. in benchmark interest rates may be exacerbating wealth inequality rather than reducing it. This is one of those, you just can't win, right?

Low rates, we're making inequality worse in the 2010s. Now, high rates are making inequality. I don't know how you can argue this. I didn't read the paper, but if anything, it seems to me like this is a, can I coin a new term here if no one's done it yet? A rich session, does that work? Where you have people on the low end getting paid more than they ever gotten paid before, or minimum wage basically rising because these fast food restaurants are now paying $15 or $20 an hour.

And rich tech people are getting laid off and seeing their asset prices fall. Rich session, what do you think? Taking it for a spin. I don't hate it. That's fair. Maybe the whole point of these papers arguing about inequality, maybe just the system in which we exist in is going to produce inequality. And whatever the Fed does is probably not going to help or hurt it much either way. It's a big question.

All right, moving on. Carl Kentonated this from Apollo. The average hotel room rates in Manhattan, Midtown and Times Square, are now above pre-pandemic levels. They say the consumer is still doing fine. The interest rate-sensitive components of GDP are softer, but the overall picture continues to look like a soft landing. The average size of a New York hotel room is probably like 50 square feet. The smallest hotels of any city in the world probably. Has to be.

It's bad. I got one more quick story. This is a Manhattan one. I don't think I told you this. I was walking the other day, talking to Barry with my AirPods then. Did I tell you this? So I'm on 40th between 6th and Broadway, and about 20 clicks away from me. I have no idea what a click is, but I just felt like saying it.

Let's say some lady gave me like one of these, like a nice wave and a smile, a friendly smile. So I don't know. I just assumed that she was like a podcast listener. I don't know this person. This is not a homeless person. It was a regular looking person. And she comes up to me and she said, who are you talking to? And I said, what?

Did I tell you this? No. Did she think you were crazy? She goes, who are you talking to? And I said, huh? She goes, is that your bitch on the phone? And I said, what? And with that, she lunged at me to grab the AirPods out of my ear.

I was scared. Did you, like, run away? I jumped back. I said, what the fuck are you doing? And I continued to walk, and I turned around that she's just smiling at me. Like that movie smile. It was so bizarre and creepy. Was it like a YouTube prank show, one of those things?

Like, ha, how we got you? No, that would explain it. It was very odd. I don't know how to pivot away from that. Let's just keep it moving. Raoul Powell tweeted, you and the old lady is not having a very good week. Seriously.

Well, this was not an old one. This was, I don't know how old she was, let's say, 43. Remember when Fintwit became geopolitical energy experts and were convinced we are going to run out of Nat Gas and we'd be chipping the frozen bodies off the streets in Europe whilst cheering the bull run in energy, Nat gas is down 73% so far and unlikely to stop until we hit $2. Well, I don't know about that, but maybe that's right, but down 73%. That is one of the things that it felt like the most bearish among us were rooting for really bad things to happen.

I think that's the worst part about, like, there's a difference between being realistic and saying like bad things can happen in rooting for them to happen. There are people, I tweeted about this a few weeks ago, or last week, and a bunch of people responded to me, and I said, it feels like working in the finance industry since 2008. I think that event broke a lot of brains, and it seems like people, are genuinely rooting for bad economic data and are almost upset when good economic data happens.

There's a group of people who are really like that, and there's people in my comments on Twitter saying, you're right, you're describing me. And people were like admitting to it. Just a bizarre way to go through life. Poison. And I do think the internet probably has a lot to do with it. Oh, yeah.

I think 2008 helps, but I think the rise of social media and blogs, I think really pushed that forward. You know what might be a solution to that mindset? I don't know if this might sound ridiculous. but having little kids. If you have little happy, smiley kids, I was watching The Wizard of Oz with Logan. I almost cried. All right, I did cry just from nostalgia. You can't have little kids and just be angry. I guess you could. Yeah, I got a parenting thing in here for later,

but they get excited about the littlest, dumbest stuff, and they get so excited about it. Yeah, it's like, how could you not? I agree, have optimism about the future with that. All right, we're talking about layoffs. There's a great chart from Yahoo Finance. Excellent chart. We've spoken about this, but this brings it to life. It's a good visual. Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Amazon, Facebook, Spotify. And it shows the amount of people that they added during the pandemic versus the amount of people that they let off.

And as you would imagine, the layoffs pale in comparison. The number of people Amazon added, 750,000 people. Yeah, I wonder how many of that is like part-time type stuff. Still, they basically double their head cut. The whole thing is data requires context. If you just put out a piece of data, this debt level, this spending level, this whatever, it means nothing unless you can compare it to something else. You need to have context around them.

Amen, Mr. Carlson. Here's another one. Look at this chart from wide charts I put in here. So it's U.S. layoffs and discharges. It goes back to the year 1999. And you have to take out the big spike from 2020, which I did. So this is monthly layoffs. Since 2000, I'm taking away the spike in 2020 because it went to 14 million.

The average, if you take away that big outlier, is 1.8 million people lose their jobs every single month. The median is 1.7. So even with that outlier. Wait, wait. Say that one more time? So the average number of people who lose their jobs since 2000 on a monthly basis is 1.8 million people. All right. So this is not net. It's just people that lose their jobs. Yes. Okay. 1.8 million people lose their jobs every month since 2000. The latest number was 1.35. So we're actually low compared to the averages over this past century of people being laid off. But I think that if you look at that number, because you see, oh, 10,000 people got laid off here. If you realize that almost 2 million people get laid off

every single month, every year, it wouldn't shock you as much. But people don't have that content. Obviously, that's a bad thing people are getting laid off. That just shows, again, how dynamic the U.S. economy really is, that most of those people are being able to be absorbed back into the workforce. So I guess the question is, is it possible, is it probable that the mass layoffs are reduced to just tech? Can it not spread? That would be your hope for the soft landing, that tech really did just over hire and it's not saying anything about the economy. It just means tech went way too crazy. I think we spoke about this last week, but what's interesting is when these layoffs are announced, the stocks are ripped.

There's a chart from Bloomberg, like Coinbase that says tech shares have rallied following layoff announcements. Oh, just for the session, immediately following layoffs. Okay, so this is in like one month that is right away, way for up 20%, Stitch fix up 9%. Coinbase up 13%. The average was almost 6% for the daily change. So the market is sharing this. Heartless. The market is a son of a bitch. All right, so let's look at the other side. So Sam Rowe had a thread. Yesterday, Chipotle announced it's adding 15,000 jobs. Today, Boeing said it's adding 10,000 jobs. Anyone got a running list of companies hiring. So Sam did God's work and just replied to himself, creating a threat.

Here's the crazy thing about Chipotle. Joe Wisenthel wrote about this this morning. They employ 100,000 people in the U.S. And they're hiring 15,000 extra people. That's a huge number. We always hear that while they're laying off 10% of the workforce, they're adding 15% to their workforce. That's a huge number. In user, we're obviously wrong about the Chipotle trend.

No one else is giving up by you. When's the last time you had one? It's been a couple of weeks. It's been a couple of weeks. Because you said you were giving up on it for good because it's too expensive. All right, you caught me. You caught me. Of course I did.

You're not going to give up that sweet, sweet chicken or steak or whatever. No, but I did draw the line with guack. Well, you know, I don't even love the guac. I'm not like a giant guac fan. I went on a queso kick there for a while. The casso's not bad. I got sick of it, though. I don't mind the guac.

All right. So the United States Posts, what's the USPS? United States Postal Services? Yeah, right? Yeah. It's hiring 2,400 people in California. Alaska Air plans to hire 3,500. Skeeter fishing boats is adding 80 jobs in Texas.

Wait. I don't know. I would just read. 80 jobs, skeeter fishing? That sounds like it's an SNL skit. I'm just reading the tweets. Eli Lilly is adding 100. jobs in North Carolina.

84 lumber is adding 100 jobs in Georgia. That's an optimistic thread. Good job by Sam there. All right. Someone did reply. I talked last week about do these job sites actually work? And someone wrote back and said, I've worked in HR for eight years now. LinkedIn is great for higher level roles.

The others you mentioned are vital for positions below 100K. They're great for both job seekers and hiring managers because of the filtering and organizational tools. I think my point is, I think if you really want to not have as much competition, you go straight to the company. You either get to know someone there and talk to them and take them out for lunch or coffee or whatever or you reply directly at a company as opposed to a job hiring site. That's my advice.

Granted, for someone who hasn't applied for a job in, I don't know, 15 years. This is an unbelievable data point from Greg Zuckerman tweeted this. According to coin shares, there was $117 million of inflows into crypto last week, which was the biggest weekly inflow since July of 2022. 116 of the $117 million went into Bitcoin. Seems unbelievable. I'll take their word for it. But Bitcoin is outperforming Ethereum, for example.

You look at this chart, Ben, that I just threw in there. I'll take their word for it. It got a lot of people in trouble in crypto in the last year or so. That's true. I'm going to trust Greg here. But look at this chart, Ethereum divided by Bitcoin. It's breaking down. Do you think that the last 12 to 15 months in crypto,

relatively speaking was good for Bitcoin. People said all this other stuff that's going to save the world and do all these things. It obviously doesn't do any of that. It was all just for speculative and gambling purposes. It has no use cases whatsoever. Maybe Bitcoin is still the thing. Millennial gold, we're going to latch back onto that and that's the thing. Yeah, I could be. I keep going back. If crypto doesn't come up with something out of all this funding cycle that happened through this leading cycle where these VCs had billion dollar funds, if no consumer product comes out of it now, then maybe Bitcoin really is just the thing. I'm willing to get there.

In the next, whatever, five to seven years, nothing comes out of this. Did you see this? It was one year ago that Paris Hilton went on Jimmy Fallon to talk about board apes and show their pictures of the apes. And I'm sure those things probably still are ridiculously overpriced.

The funny thing is, it's not one of those things where everyone bought in. At the time, people were saying this was ridiculous, that people were paying $3 million for a pet rock or whatever. Obviously, there was people who bought into this stuff and went overboard. But I feel like because of the way the internet works now on social media,

we're never going to have a period where literally everyone buys in anymore. Like the 1990s, obviously there was people who were going against the grain, but most people were kind of all in. Same thing with the early 2000s housing stuff. There was plenty of skeptics about crypto the whole way up. Yeah, that's a good point. There will be a bubble where people go all in. I don't know.

I mean, there will always be skeptics, my definition. Are we going to get an AI? bubble. Is that going to happen? Yeah, maybe. The next bubble is AI. I mean, it kind of has to be. Well, you were poo-pooing open AI stuff just three weeks ago, and then this week we had a demo and you were... No, what did I say? Now we're running the tape on this one. I said, until I find a use case, and you and I had a demo, a fintech demo that used open AI and the light bubbleing off my head and I said, okay, I see it. I see how this can help. And now I totally get it. I've tried three times they log on to chat GBT just to use it. And I went on today and it said,

our system is full comeback later. Yeah, it's been happening. Okay. So I've still never used it before. But I, yes, the AI thing, I got a demo and it kind of blew me away. It certainly did. Housing market? Where are we next? Oh, housing, it's housing. Yeah, go ahead. Lance Lambert from Fortune is a great follow on Twitter. I'm going home price correction won't be like the ones of the past as Goldman Sachs. The hardest punch came right out of the gate. Nominal price declines will slow from here and fizzle out later this year, according to Goldman Sachs. Look at this one from Mike Simonson for Altos Reisters. He posted the inventory level, which rose. You would expect inventory to rise when affordability gets so out of whack. It's rolling

over again and falling pretty fast. He also says price cuts are evaporating down to 34% of the market with a recent price reduction. So it went from roughly 40% and it's falling. Is that it? All right. So here's the Bill McBride take. He says there's two bottoms in residential real estate. One is for activity, so home sales, housing starts, residential investment. The second one is for pricing. Sometimes the pricing bottom could be years after the activity bottom. Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. We've been saying that, right?

That activity is going to pick up, but prices are not going to get to new highs. But the people waiting for a 30% correction in housing. Well, it could have happened. If mortgage rates went to 8%, it would have happened. Possibly. The amount of activity that you've seen pick up from rates going to 7 to 6, I think that there's just way too many young people looking to buy a house right now that people are willing to say, you know what, I'm going to stretch for this.

If you want a house, you want a house, what are you going to do? I'm going to wait for 10 years for the housing market to correct. No, if you want a house, you're going to get a house. Most people, I think they kind of eventually make it happen. Although the inventory level thing falling again is kind of painful because that also means that our whole thing about people of 3% mortgages is proving to be right that people just aren't going to want to list their house. but the houses that are being listed, there's probably going to be more competition for

if mortgage rates continue to fall. Mike Cicardy tweeted, Black Knight estimates that the share of mortgage borrowers that are underwater would increase by only 3% to 2016-2017 levels if home prices declined by 15%. So home prices declined by 15%. This is how much of a margin of safety there is in housing right now. 15% is a huge drop historically. That would only put 3% of homeowners underwater, which back to 10%. 2017 levels is basically nothing.

Yeah, that's crazy. That shows how much of a huge buffer people have in their houses right now. That is wild. There was an article in Bloomberg. The headline is, Wall Street is losing out to the amateur buyers in the housing slump. Here's something that I pulled. Yusuf, who's a guy that they profile.

Yusuf punches into code and swings open the door to his most lucrative 2022 flip, a two-bedroom town home in this development. He unloaded it last spring, just as the market was starting to sing, big institutions from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, We're still on a buying binge. At times, making unbelievable offer site unseen in this case, a company called Open Door paid $265,000, which was $30,000 above the five other bidders, he says. Open Door is now asking $218,000, a $47,000 loss, not including its fees and renovation

expenses. But even at that price, Yusuf says it's too high. After four price cuts, he smells blood. He's eager to buy back the home he once owned. In the light of the Sonoran Desert, the rolls of Vulture and Carry On have seen. suddenly reversed. First-time buyers and small investors have the upper hand on supposedly sophisticated players that badly misjudged the market. It's quite a turnabout from more than a decade ago when Arizona was at the center of foreclosure wave that hit local mortgage borrowers

and private equity from swept in and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, maybe it is a rich session. These people who live in the areas know way more than open door about their local housing market. They sold that a premium to these I buyers and now they're going to buy it back at a discount. If you think about it, for how many people, it's a beautiful thing, people who are in a certain age group that are on Zillow all the time, I still check Zillow, I don't know, once every two weeks, just to kind of get a sense of what things are. Don't you get the alert on your phone? Oh yeah, I guess I don't get a email. I don't go that far, but I look just to kind of get a sense, but I feel like I know my local real estate market pretty good in terms of what's a good value,

what's a good price, in a good area, but I feel like most people who are of a certain age who are looking at houses all the time, probably have a good sense. So is AI going to come in and fix this then? Is AI going to be a better home buyer or not? I'm just trying to figure out where AI is going to, are they going to make open door better? Well, listen, they just did it. I don't know that this is a tech problem. I think that you need boots on the ground. I really think you do. This is one of those things that technology, I don't know if it's ever going to be able to solve. We're going to get into quarter, which by the way, Ben and I took it for a spin today. As listeners know, we're investors, And why do I keep saying that?

It's probably annoying. Well, I just want further disclosure. If you're a new listener, you don't know why are we talking about this company. But Corder did this thing where this morning, I got an alert, actually. I got an alert. Spotify is one of the companies that I follow. Live earnings calls. It was like magic.

It was very, very cool. Now, while they're building this, where you can have, like, the companies that you follow can sync to your Google calendar. So you know when they're coming up, you could search for, if you top of like Spotify, again, for example, you could get the transcript. Obviously, you could search a transcript. But you could see every investor slide deck where Spotify is mentioned. The stuff that they're building is super exciting.

Or if a company is mentioned in another call for another company. So if you're a professional investor, you got to check this out. It's really cool. The most impressive thing, we've been talking to Corder for a long time since they were in their infancy, basically. They had a product, but it was just getting started. The speed in which they're adding new features is the coolest thing to me. It's really cool.

Every time we talk to them, they show new features, which is really sweet. So web.corder.com for professional users, and it's Q-U-A-R. T.R. All right. I'm going to talk about this with Josh tonight, so I don't want to step on this too much, but Tesla reported last week, the stock is, I mean, what a run. Holy moly. I know what the stock is doing today, but it went from like 100 to 170. Look at the market share of Tessa vehicles. They really did it. Say what you will about Elon must, but it went from effectively 0% in just the beginning of 2017 to almost 4% today in the US and Canada. Talking about technology versus the physical world, that's a place where you have

to understand the physical world. Here's a quote from Elon, who is something of a macro investor. Elon said, quote, did you read this? No, he's a macro tourist, which is great because there's a lot of people out there that are macro tourists. So he is the greatest showman alive, or at least he's in the discussion. I think if we see a severe recession this year, which like I said, hopefully we don't, see credit to Elon. He's not rooting for one. He's just putting it out there. In severe recessions, cash is king big time because it's in such short supply. So we want to be cautious about using cash for loans and that sort of thing for cars, I feel we're in a very strong position to get through a recession because we really don't have any debt. And we've got over $20 billion

of cash, which is great. That is impressive. The cash is earning a ridiculous return, not a good return, so it's like non-trivial. And the interest rate actually on the $20 billion is earning quite a good amount. And I've made this point on Twitter a few times, God. I mean, I don't want to say I love this guy, but like some of the things that he does, it's just wildly entertaining. I've made this point on Twitter a few times. I'm sure a lot of people on this call understand the fact the basic value of a security is a function of the risk-free rate or we'll see how risk-free it really is, but the T-bill rate. So if you've got the S&P 500 has a long-term rate of return of roughly 6%, that's a bit

low, but whatever. And so I think the Fed needs to be very cautious about having a Fed rate that potentially exceed 6%. If we see deflation, and I think we are seeing deflation, then you would add the deflation number to the risk-free rate from the Fed, and that starts to exceed 6%. Now you're starting to exceed the long-term return of the S&P 500, and it starts to become questionable as to why you don't just put your money in Tebowls or savings account instead of the S&P 500. This is basically the Fed is at risk of crushing the value of all equities, quite a serious danger. This is why he's a macro tourist.

I feel like you could ask that question to Jerome Powell. Question for the chairman. If you think the Fed is going to keep the rates at 6% when we have deflation, I'm sorry. I have a Tesla truck to send you, cyber truck to sell you. sorry, the Fed is not going to keep rates at 6% if we have deflation. If we have deflation, rates are going right back to 2%, basically, and there goes your savings yield. That's the funny thing.

I know it's funny to look back and say in the 2010s, like, why didn't we use 0% interest rates to spend a bunch of money? We should have been borrowing and spending money. Guess what? If the government would have been spending a lot of money in 2010s at 0% interest rates, they wouldn't have been 0% anymore. They would have gone to 4% or 5% like they are now because we would have got inflation. You can't have it both ways.

Amen. All right, let's get into some of the calls. I did not listen to American Express. What's going on here? I'll listen to the transcript. We aren't receiving recessionary signals. The consumer is very strong. Travel bookings are up over 50% of pre-pandemic.

We're feeling good. Maybe you could say, well, that he's a credit card company, so they're spending more, so that's good for them and not very good for the consumer. But they're again saying everything is just fine. Well, look at this chart. They've got a chart. Card member loans 30-plus days past due.

Pre-pandemic, in Q4, 2019, it was 1.5% of loans worth 30 days past due. In the most recent quarter, it's 1%. This is my thing about normalizing. If this is increasing, people are going to say, this is horrible, it's increasing. But if it's just getting back to pre-pendemic levels, and it's simply normalizing.

All right, I did listen to Visa. Here's a quote. As you can see, business trends have been remarkably stable. Here's another quote. Visa's performance in the first quarter of 2023 reflects stable domestic volumes. Total Q1 payments volume was up 7% year over year or 135% versus three years ago.

If you exclude Russia and China, it's even better. Okay, here's another quote. If you look at 2019, it's kept us honest, so they're comparing to 2019. It's a good view of what's going on. And in total spend, it's remarkable stability. What's happening is as good spending has slowed down, services spending really took up all the slack. And so consumers have just shifted their spending, but they're spending the same amount, and that's why debit has stayed resilient.

We've had a baton handoff. Listen to what they're saying. I think the thing is, everyone is just waiting for this. thing to stop. And it's going to have to, again, slow down at some point. The point we're at is the data is not necessarily showing the slowing down yet, but everyone has just been waiting for it for so long that everyone thinks it just has to happen. Again, we're not dismissing that. Matt Klein thinks we might be going there. I haven't read his piece yet, but I'm going to after this. We'll be back for next week for this. Look at this chart of visa quarterly revenue.

So, of course, it had a pretty sizable dip during the pandemic. I'm just eyeballing. It was like, what, like $5.5 billion pre-pandemic, and now it's 7.4 or 7. I can't read that. they're massively above 2019. It's hard for people to accept that things are not falling apart. All right, I got a survey of the week here. This was in the New York Times. It's from Pew.

Eight and ten parents of children younger than 18 find it to be enjoyable and rewarding most or all the time. Two-thirds say it's harder than they thought it would be, including about one-third of mothers who say it's a lot harder than they expect it to be. Today's parents spend more time and money on their children than previous generations. Working mothers spend as much time with their children as stay-at-home moms did in the 70s and feel more pressure to be hands-on. Research has found today's parents feel intense pressure

to constantly teach and interact with their children whereas previous generations spent more time doing adult activities while their children were around. Nearly half said they were raising their children differently than they had been raised by their own parents, which is interesting. I thought about this. I went to the playground with my kids a couple weeks ago,

and when you take your kids to the playground now, you notice something different. All of the parents are playing on the playground with their kids. They're following around to where they go. Not me. I try to sit every once in a while I'll have to push the kids on my ground or something, But I noticed this, all the young millennial parents are playing with their kids in the playground or chasing them around.

You never saw that back in the day. In the back of the day, our parents would drop us off to the playground and say, I'll pick you up in seven hours. I think that there's probably pros and cons to each approach because now people say, well, we have helicopter parents. They spend much time and money in their kids, and they're so worried about they're putting pressure on them. And back in the day, you'd say, well, the parents probably didn't spend enough time with their kids. And I think that there are good and bad things about each approach. I don't think that you can say one is better than the other. What is entirely different is the fact that I'm home with my kids every morning and I'm

here in the afternoon when they come home. I didn't see my parents when I was growing up all the time. Because they were at work all day. Yes. Is parenting harder today? There's no way. Yeah, come on. So a lot of people say it's harder than expected.

Here's what I will say. A lot of people say, well, I don't get to sleep in as much anymore and I don't get to have nights out as much anymore. All that stuff for me was very easy to give up on. Like, I had my fun, I feel like, and I don't get to like lay around all day on Saturday. but how bored would you get doing that anyway? Yeah, yeah. For me, it's like the emotional stuff is harder.

Thinking through, like, I'm more worried about what's going to happen to my kids in the future now than myself. That's the hard part, I think. Worrying about something going wrong with them. So I feel like right now it's pretty easy, but I have a three-year-old and a six-year-old. Like, I know it's going to get much more challenging. It just depends on where your kids are. Yes, but the joy you get out of seeing them do something little and stupid and you can't

put a price on it. Yesterday I was on the phone with you. And Kobe came home and he just like tumbled over a box. It fell backwards and almost fell to my bushes. They just do little stupid stuff all the time. Yes. There's no way you can say it's harder today. Being a parent is always hard in some way.

There's things that are probably harder, probably easier. Coordinating via text message, much easier. Yes. I think some people make it harder now than it has to be probably. They put too much pressure on themselves to make sure their child is perfect and has a perfect life order. And there's also just a serial complainer. It says everything, ugh.

No time for those people. Yes. I don't mind being the dad taxi. Last weekend, Saturday was soccer game, basketball game, basketball game, birthday party, sleepover, like, and the whole day was driving the kids around. And honestly, it was so much fun. I didn't mind it at all. Many podcasts. All right.

You talked about the car dealership guy. This is interesting. We mentioned last week about how we're still seeing the lots kind of empty. A few people came back in me and said, Ben, you're wrong. Car trends are back on point. The car lots are filling up again. Not so, says the Wall Street Journal. Vehicle inventors are slowly rebuilding.

There was 1.7 million vehicles on dealership lot. or en route to stores at the end of 2022, up 49% from a year earlier. That's good. That's still half of pre-pandemic levels. So we're still at 50%. Wow. For something as important as transportation in cars, I can't believe it's taking them that long to get this supply stuff figured out.

Average lease payment rose to $567 in the third quarter, 25% jump compared to two years ago. Dude, that's so much. The average is 570? Yeah, that's a lot. 25% up from two years ago. I think my lease runs up in early 2024. I'm already nervous about what it's going to jump to.

That's $7,000 a year. So say $10,000 pre-tax. It's a lot of money. Think about how much more insurance costs, gas, all this stuff. It's a ludicrous. All right, I got a few things. I mentioned that. Oh, long in the tooth.

We got a lot of people answering that it was used for horses whose gums were seated. When they were long on the tooth, they were old. I did not know. That's pretty good one. All right. The more you know. Okay. Yesterday, we did a talk.

book episode that was actually, this guy is a character, and I mean in a good way. He was a lot of fun, Darren Scheringa. And he said the word per annum and a light bulb clicked. He was talking about his performance. And I feel like if you have excellent performance, I don't know where the line is. If you are above 15%, you could say per atom. Does that make sense? I thought per annum was something only hedge fund and quants say. Yeah, but you're not going to say we lost 3% per annum. Yeah, right. Okay. That's true. Yes. You would probably say we lost 3% a year. Okay, that's true. Per annum, yeah.

It's like the winning of the poo meme with like the, what are these things called? Monocle. The monocle, yeah. I'm picturing the guy standing up of with his Victorian shirt on like this. That's when you say per annum. You know what that meme? Yeah. This is one thing that I noticed as I'm creeping towards my 40s.

My memory is going to hell real quick. I feel like there's a fine out amount of things you can keep in there. Like just the word monocle, I couldn't recall that. Not important. That's what AI is going to be for. You're going to have the little thing in your ear and you go, what's that called AI? There we go. All right.

There was an article in the journal talking about takeout restaurants. Of all orders placed at U.S. fast food restaurants, 85% were taken to go. Okay, that's not that surprising. But what was surprising is Starbucks plans to add nearly 400 U.S. stores this year. They said 72% of its sales were taken to go. Wait, that's not surprising either. Wasn't there a number about mobile orders? Yeah, I saw that.

But it's kind of funny. Do you think in the future people look back at how we used to go to fast food restaurants? You know, McDonald's used to have the big playgrounds in them. I'm sure some of them still do. going to McDonald's was like an event. Do you think that'll lessen in the future where people go, why did you ever go sit down and eat into McDonald's instead of just getting it to go? Like, why would you go in there and eat?

Yeah. Last week, Robin had a DoorDash gift card. So I said, you know what, let's use a DoorDash. All right, look at this bill. We got like a skirt steak, I guess, with like a side of veggies from a Mexican restaurant. That was very good. It was good. And we got a salad, just like a cabbage, like a slaw salad.

So the food was $48, which I guess is on the high side, but not completely insane. The delivery fee was two bucks. The fees and estimated taxes were $11. And the tip was $12.50. So you take out the $40 and it still cost me $33. Okay, so this meal was $74. To reiterate, I got a-blim the venture capitalists. A skirt steak and a salad delivered to me for $74.

I will never, ever use DoorDash without a gift card. Go pick it up. Well, this place is like 15 minutes away. No, that's a point. Listen, you're right. I'm not doing it. That's insane. $74 for a salad and a little steak?

That's not a porna house, by the way. It's a little steak. We have two really good pizza places around us. And probably the one, the furthest one away is probably a eight-minute drive. And I go pick it up every time. My wife is always like, why don't you just get it delivered? And it's a principal thing for me. I would rather go pick it up than pay the fee.

Yeah, I get it. The venture capitalists are not subsidizing anymore. So we were talking about resume? There's no way this is real. Come on. is real. I actually received this resume today. Work experience. Honestly, not much because I just graduated, but please see below. Game of Thrones expert. Bidge watch entire series. I mean, it could be. I don't know. There's not enough time in the weekend of binge watch entire of Game of Thrones. It's funny.

There's no way it's true. What is this question here? I'm trying to find my resume. I'll read this. Love the show, perfect ratio between banter and info for me. Not a professional investor and advisor and I was wondering how you track and follow up on both long and short term trading ideas. Do you keep a spreadsheet, a calendar? How do you remember your thesis from a month ago, letter on three years ago? Well, you used to have a trading journal. That's your right question. Oh, here's my resume.

I got it. I got it. From how long ago? Oh, God, this is bad. This is 2010, 2011? Oh, my God. So I don't have my Cabana boy years on here, but I just saw something in my profile. It's very cringe.

I'm going to read it. I'm going to do it. Okay. By the way, let me just answer that grass question. I did keep a journal. You're exactly right. How do you remember what you thought a year ago? It's impossible.

You have to write it down. You don't know, I keep track. I don't have short-term trading ideas. There you go. I don't need to keep track. That's going. So here was my professional experience at the insurance company. Here's what I wrote.

Here's what I did. This is my job description, Ben. Assessed clients needs sold appropriate products and maintained contact with these individuals and the word businesses. Yeah, sure you did. What was that for? this is on my resume. This is my experience, my professional experience, so at the insurance company, developed relationships with high net worth individuals through cold calling and

networking, retirement, insurance, and estate planning, proficient in insurance, products, annuities, mutual funds, and other financial instruments. What percentage of business resumes have proficient on it? 99%. My last bullet point was asset management, both qualified and non-qualified. All right, so here's my profile. Here's how I would describe it. myself. By the way, I haven't read this in 10 years, so this is news to me, but we're about to find out together. I am an engaging, driven individual with strong industry experience and insurance and annuity products as well as mutual funds. Polished speaker with the ability to blend strategic and tactical planning in regards to being an efficient worker. That doesn't make any

sense. Good buzzwords, though. Strong aptitude to adapt to my environment. Enjoy leading, while also having the know how to work well with others and defer as necessary. Passionate about the financial markets, which has given me the wherewithal to manage my portfolio, my portfolio, by, oh boy. Did you give some alpha numbers on here? This is the last one. It's the kudegraff. By following the teachings of Ben Graham.

Wow. And study to become a C of a charter holder. I have learned. My biggest weakness. much like Buffett. I have learned how to properly value securities. Oh, boy. I can't believe I didn't get a job.

Benjamin Graham. Listen, I read like 75 pages of the intelligent investor. You should hire me. That's an answer. Oh, that's pretty good. All right. Recommendations. I got a few.

We just talked about before we got on The Last of Us, the third episode I thought was awesome. It reminded me of Station 11 a lot of the way, so I love the fact that they go back and forth there. I saw some people say it's like one of the best television episodes of all time. I think we would have pumped the brakes on that, but it was very good. We started watching Under the Banner of Heaven, which is a Hulu FX show. It's a really good cast. Andrew Garfield. I've heard of it.

What's the guy, Sam Worthington, who's on Avatar? Yeah. Cast is really good. It's a messed up. It's a true story of this Mormon family in the 1980s. that is very screwed up, and they decide to use their religion to say it's okay to kill people. It actually kind of feels like true detective in some ways, but it does this deep dive into the Mormon religion that is, it's a very crazy, creepy show, but it's very well done.

My wife loves sister wives on TLC. Is that a reality one? It's a reality one. I feel like she would be super into this. Okay. I didn't know much about that faith and how it got started. It's kind of a bizarre story. Finally, Yuse mentioned Tar a couple weeks ago.

How long did you make it? 30 minutes. Car, barely, completely unwatchable. I knew this stuff going into it that I wasn't going to like. I knew it was a film and not a movie. I'm usually a movie person, not a film person. I knew it was going to be long and boring, and I knew that it was going to take itself way too seriously.

I had that stuff all out of the way at the beginning. My expectations were as low as they could be. I'm never going to watch it again. I kind of respected it. I watched the whole thing. How? How did you watch the whole thing? Here's the thing.

I at first thought this was a true story. I didn't realize this was just a made-up story in some guy's mind, the director, writer. I respect the fact that you can make up, you can dive into this kind of world and seemingly nail it and I thought the performance like Kate Blanchett was amazing I will never watch this movie again.

Yeah, but who cares? It was so boring. Yeah, she might have been phenomenal but it was just, I don't know, I found it just completely unwatchable. I set my expectations very low. I respected this movie. I didn't like it.

I respected it. That's all I got. I listened to Colossus, which is the Patrick O'Shaughnessy's brand, has a new podcast. I think it's called Making Media, something like that. We'll link to it.

I forget the name of the show. My apologies. And the first interview was with Patrick. Obviously, we respect the heck out of him. I didn't know he had a new podcast. Yeah, it was good. It was worth listening to. So it was all the things about the podcast, their process, how they got to where they are and where they might be going and reflections. It was very good. Okay. I'm in. Yeah, just making media. There we go. All right. That's it for us. I can't believe that I said that I could accurately value securities.

The Benjamin Graham piece is great because that is every person who just gets into investing thinks that, like, I just read Benjamin Graham and I'm going to kill it. So much alpha. Yeah. Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com, and we will see you next time.