Animal Spirits Podcast - Buying a House at the Top of the Market (EP.368)

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

On episode 368 of Animal Spirits, Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson discuss: why the stock market never really changes, why this is the hardest it's ever been to beat the market, the travel boom rolls on, Boomers are having fun in retirement, young people are making money, the economy is slowing, Bitcoin ETFs are like 401k plans, people love guaranteed income, the new season of The Bear, and much more! This episode is sponsored by NEOS Investments and Fabric by Gerber Life. NEOS has set out to enhance investment portfolios with the next evolution of options-based income solutions. Learn more at: https://neosfunds.com/ Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to protect their family. Apply today in just minutes at https://meetfabric.com/spirits. Sign up for The Compound newsletter and never miss out: thecompoundnews.com/subscribe Find complete show notes on our blogs: Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com Feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   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. The Compound Media, Incorporated, 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 show is brought to you by NEO's investments. Ben, know what's so hot right now? What's so hot right now? The weather? It is. Very humid. Monthly income through strategies that use option overlays. We've been talking a lot about these lately. Boomer Candy. We're going to talk later in this show today about a study suggesting that people with guaranteed incomes are much more likely to spend. Not that this product is guaranteed income, but people like income. Yes. It makes them feel safe. So NEO's investments uses option-based overlays to generate income via ETF. So to learn more

about these strategies, check out Nios Funds.com. Today's show is brought to you by Fabric by Gerber Life. They offer the term life insurance. You can get done right here, right now. You can be covered from your couch under 10 minutes with no health exam required. It's pretty good, right? And the time to do the life insurance, especially term, is when you're younger, right? I'm not an actuary. I don't pretend to be one, but the way that the math works is the older you get, the worth your house gets, the close you are to death. So you get life insurance young, right? So what you have? Is life insurance at an early age a good inflation hedge? It is a good inflation hedge. I got it right when we had our first daughter. Maybe should have got it

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Check out meatfabric.com slash 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. All opinions express. 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 maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, I'm starting off the show today with an idea from you. We talked to Eric Crittenden from Standpoint Funds for Talk Your Book that's coming up in the coming weeks. And you made the good point that, listen, if you look back historically at the rolling 30-day volatility on the stock market, which is essentially the VIX, right? Is that a good stand-in for the VIX? Yeah. Rolling 30-day standard deviation.

If you look at this historically, it shows that the stock market really hasn't changed all that much. Liquidity has changed. The number of investors have changed. The number of stocks have changed. The environments have changed. But if you look at this chart, which I had Matt, our chart guy, do for us, it looks pretty similar. when you have big spikes from the nasty times, the Great Depression, 1987 crash, 2008, 2020,

those spikes in volatility all look relatively similar. Yeah, I would say that the market is a lot different today than it used to be, structurally, I mean, for a million reasons, the way that people access investments, but it might not be as, it might be more similar to the past than it is different. For as different as it is, there's probably a lot more similarities. The whole idea of volatility in the way price moves and also the way that you have these periods of low and declining volatility where you have these boring periods for a long, long time, which I don't know how long the one's going to last right now, but volatility is very low right now. You can see it's basically historically.

It's at the lower end of the levels here. But it can stay there for a while. Even though there's a lot less people in the market pressing buttons than there used to be, people are still. people and markets are still markets. Yes. And that's the crazy thing. All these things that have changed over the last 40, 50 years in terms of index funds and ETFs and IRAs and

401Ks and HFTs and hedge funds and all of that different stuff, volatility is still the one constant because human nature is. I think it was on last week's show maybe two weeks ago, we talked about you were saying you feel sorry for active managers because this is maybe the hardest market ever for them to

beat the market. And And I think it would, so Jason Zweig did a story on this. In the first half of 2024, according to Morningstar, 18.2% of actually managed funds and ATFs have beat the S&P, if that's their bogey. It was only 19.8% in 2023. Over the past decade, 27% of actively managed funds benchmarked to the S&P actually beat it. So less than a third, roughly a quarter of funds beat the market. I think you could make the argument that the last five, 10 years is the hardest period ever for active managers? It is. The reason why, or one of the reasons why, I mean, we know that it's all tech, but here's a good data point that we've been talking about. Mobeson wrote about this.

Who used to, but I saw this chart years ago. Was it Ned Davis research or the Lutehold group or somebody had a chart showing $1 invested in the S&P 500 versus $1 invested in the largest market cap weighted stock in the in the U.S. And the latter strategy, if you if you were just investing in the largest stock in the U.S. was a real money loser. I mean, horrifically bad, horrifically bad. I think that was an Ed Davis one, yeah, I were talking about. But for the last 10 years, that broke.

As constant relationships are wanted to do in the market, sometimes they change and they break. And things that used to be are no longer true. So if you had just been investing in the largest stock over the last decade, whether it be Apple, Microsoft, or Nvidia, or whatever else was number one. I think those are the three. it was a phenomenal strategy, beat the crap out of the market. If you are not a growth-oriented investor, it has been impossible to beat the S&P 500. You just couldn't do it.

In fact, sorry, to that point, I don't even know if there's any composition of stocks of a diversified portfolio in any sort of style that one can reasonably invest in that would have beat in the index. No. And modest proposal was on Patrick's podcast last week called Invest Like the Best. And he was talking about how there's no way any active manager right now is happy. And he even made the point, listen, if you look at just the cues over the past decade, how many VC funds have beat that? So if you look at the last 10 years for the NASDAQ 100, it's up close to 19% per year. So if you started those, and he's saying on a dollar by dollar basis, because the way the, so if you started with 100 grand and you say, I'm going to allocate to the best VC manager there is, or the NASDAQ 100, you've probably been better off investing in the NASDAQ 100. Probably.

Right? Yeah, I'm saying, I'm sure there was a handful of VCs that beat the Q's, but probably not too many. You know, it's been brutal. It's been wonderful for index investors. Just an absolute golden of golden years. But for anybody else that's been picking stocks or whatever, it's been really, really difficult. Which I guess is one of the reasons so many people have. warned about index funds over the years because they've been waiting for that mean

reversion to happen it hasn't come yeah all right uh from net days of vista research speaking of them through the first half of the year only 24% of stocks have outperformed the s&p 500 on going back to 1974 it's never been lower really tough The question is, though, what comes next? Is what comes next, all right, these big stocks finally roll over and the market falls? Or is the next thing just that all these other stocks that have been underperforming small caps and value stocks and everything else comes up when these big stocks falter? Well, that's the question. This is also interesting.

Another one from Modif Proposal. He says, I knew market cap weighting was crushing equal weighting, and I knew tech was crushing X10. I did not know that equal-weighted tech was underperforming the equated market. So this is, I think, from Rich Bernstein. They looked at year-to-date returns for tech and the market, and then equal-weighted. So this is the top 1,500 universe of the stock market. And equal-weighted of the overall market is beating equal-weighted for tech. So it's not just, hey, put anything and throw a dart at a stock.

What do you call it? The stock. But remember when they used to have the stock prices printed, the Wall Street Journal. You can't do that anymore with a dart. The dart doesn't stick into the computer screen. They don't print prices anymore? Do that?

I don't know. I've never had a... I don't know if this is true. Well, which universe are they looking at? This is the top 1,500. So that might be the universe. The NASDAQ equal weight is up on a total return basis, 6.69% year to date. Okay.

The equal weight is up 4.39. Okay. So this is a different universe. Regardless, the equal weights are. are pretty close, whereas the, so this, again, points to it's not just tech, it's big tech. So it is, what is today, Ben? It's Tuesday, 10.30 in the morning. NVIDIA is running.

Looks like an all-time high is probably coming. The stock market is close to all-time highs again. We'll find out. But, Nvidia had, what was that correction? Down 13% in a couple of days. Remember, we said the market didn't even blink. And was that the top from Vivida? I don't know.

I have a hard time. Maybe it would have been braver for, I said this two weeks ago, but I have a hard time imagining Nvidia peaking just because, like the peak just because outside of an earnings report that bombs relative to expectations. Like that's more likely to be the top, right? Where it gaps down 20% or whatever versus it just losing its momentum just because it's stalled out. Tesla was always my stock I put in my too hard pile. For years, I said, I don't want to be a person who predicts Tesla either way.

Because there was really smart, fundamental analysts who were trying to short Tesla for years. And then there was other people who were wildly bullish on the stock. And the bulls were more or less right. But I always said, leave me out of Tesla. I want nothing to do with trying to predict what's going to happen. I'd probably put Nvidia. You know, as a target date fund investor, I'm shocked to hear you say that. But I put Nvidia in that one as well.

Do you have a too easy pile? What's in your too easy pile? Target day funds? Index funds. Right? Index funds are too easy. Throw this in my face if stocks blow up. But yeah, index funds. But I've been trying to, I've been trying to tell people for probably too long now that, like, things are cyclical. Look at this chart from Goldman about the different sectors. And this is kind of wild that energy stocks made up 26% of the market in 1980. Now it's 4%. financials got to 22% now. They're down to 12.

I guess you could easily make the case. Listen, technology is part of our lives. This is going to remain big forever. But these things are cyclical. I don't know the pivot's coming. It's cyclical. That's all I got. Yeah, the point that we've been making about tech stocks for years is just they're different

than the previous regimes of large stocks owning an outsized portion of the index. This time really was different. No, never was there an Apple that just dominates our lives. I'm on my Apple computer. I've got my phone and everything else. In my office right now. I got iPads, I Mac, AirPods, AirPods, watch, everything. And we could, you could go on down the list.

Amazon, obviously, Google, and Nvidia would fall way outside, things that are used in our deadly life. But you understand the point. Like, what replaces Apple? What replaces Google and maybe Facebook, you could argue. But like, there's no precedent for things remaining on top for, I'm not to say forever, because obviously, eventually there will be new leaders. But there will be a robot company someday, right? There'll be some new AI company.

There'll be new. It'll happen. But in the past, it was, GE was the biggest company. And how many people even knew what parts of their life GE impacted? Right. an Exxon and IBM and Cisco and whatever, whatever, like. So it's not to say that there won't be cycles or these stocks won't go through periods. I mean, listen, they just underperforming in 2020 dramatically.

First level of investing, though, has won for this cycle. Yeah, I might have told the story. But probably 10 years ago at this point, somebody in my family who was a big Apple Bowl was, you know, laughing about Apple being the next Apple or whatever. or something, you know, that sounded super topy at the time. And I'm just thinking like, oh, and I'll show you. Yeah, no, he showed me. And so I don't know, listen, these companies, they're still growing at, how much is Microsoft still growing at top and bottom line? The hard part, I feel like we've kind of run out of things to say here about these companies.

We've, like reached the end of the road. It's like Truman's show when he gets to the end, he brings a sailboat and he's like touches the screen. Yeah. So listen, so long as these companies. companies continue to grow their businesses the way that they are. They're going to continue to outperform. But it's also like these companies have had massive drawdowns along the way, though. It's not like it's just been a straight line up.

I just said that. 2022, Google and Amazon are cut in half. Facebook lost two thirds of its value. In Video was down 60s, down two thirds or something. So it happens. This is an interesting one from the Wall Street Journal because we ran out of stuff to say with tech stocks. They show the number of mutual funding. No, I'm sorry.

Just last thing. But I guess just the idea of Apple becoming the next. IBM. Like, think about how much better these companies are, management-wise, everything-wise. You know what I mean? Like, not impossible, but if that's what you're hanging your hat on, like, ugh. I fall into the camp of one of these tech stocks is going to falter and be in the future they're going to go. What happened? But, yeah, I wouldn't want to try to pick which one. Yeah. From the Wall Street Journal, the number of mutual funds and ETFs versus the number of stocks. So I wrote about this recently, too. The number of stocks was like 8,000 in the mid-90s. And now it's

down to 4,000 or something. And a lot of that is microcap stocks in the 90s. Companies are going public and cashing in on euphoria. But look at the number of funds. It's gone from 6,000 in the mid-90s to 12,000 now. The point being, like, there's way more funds, ETFs and mutual funds than there are stocks. Why do we have so many funds? What's the point of this? Todd Sown had a great piece about this that I'll remind me, please, to throw in the dock for next week. There's just, there's a lot of ETFs. It's crazy, though. Like, I mean, is it just more the cycle of there's a large cemetery of them, too?

And we're going to try five this year and hope one sticks or whatever, 12 this year and hope two. Is that the thinking behind it? We just keep rolling them out and hope something sticks. Yeah. Okay. It seems unnecessary. Is it necessary that I drink my own urine? What's that from?

I know you're not a dodgeball fan. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Dodgeball never did it for me. Dodgeball's a great movie. I mean... That's Patches of Hulahan.

All right. It was pretty good, but I just have... I have a hard time picturing Vince Vaughn being a world champion dodgeball player. I mean, if that's the standard that we're holding to movies, come on. All right. Marked out...

I threw up a little to my mouth. That one always got me. Okay? I did like that one. Nobody makes me believe my own blood. All right. Walt Blumber tweeted, screened three million air travelers on Sunday, the highest number ever on a single day.

And Mark, quote, tweeted that and said, the economy is so bad, 83% of Americans are living airport to airport. Pretty good. That's good. Torces Locke had record high demand for air traffic. He shows the chart going like to 2020. And, yeah, just keeps, this looks like the stock market almost, doesn't it? This chart. Here's another one people are tweeting this week.

The number of valid passports per person since 1989. So we're talking 160 million passports in the U.S. now. It was 3% in 1990. I saw a few people saying, yeah, maybe it wasn't that low. So we're now at 48% of the population has a passport. And some people also pointed to in 2007, they made it. So if you go to Mexico or Canada, now you have to have a passport. That didn't used to be the case.

But look at this chart of passports. People always talk about, you know, are things really better in the past? Or maybe things were better in the past. This is one of the things that is a concrete thing you can point to saying, Basically, no one traveled internationally in the past. And now lots of people do. Right? Like, we've made this point a million times.

How many people did you know that traveled to Europe when we were young? Zero. Remember the Concord? Oh, yeah. There was, like, rich people used to fly in the Concord. I don't know why they got rid of that thing. Supersonic speed, right? But this is something you can point to of, I've heard a ton of stories about people doing their summer in Europe this year.

Friends are like, yeah, we traveled all over Europe for three weeks or something. That literally never happened in the past. Never. It's not a thing. Hey, why can't we go faster than however fast airplanes go? That's a good question. I'm going to need a physics professor to explain, but you'd think they'd be able to make a faster airplane.

There's one of our listeners, actually from my town, is a pilot. Met him at the beach this weekend. I saw him. I know who he is. We've met before. And we were just talking about his job. And, man, how cool is that? Like, oh, what do you do?

I'm a pilot. Commercial air pilot. I feel like there is still some mystique there. Like my kids still, like, when we get off a plane, they're like, there's the pilot, there's the pilot, right? Yeah, it's like a, it's like a larger than life type of. One of those jobs that will, I mean, doctor has always been like that when you, when someone says they're a doctor. There's a lot of doctors. Okay.

But don't you think that's just like a, I'm a doctor, like a, you know, like, that gets people. You're an eye doctor. Who's kidding? No, I'm a pilot. That's like, that's awesome. That is pretty cool. All right. This one got a lot of people mad at the Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal is better than any one of these kind of stories about the demographics and spending and then putting real people into the story. So they have this story about boomers saying we're not dead yet. Boomers drive good times in the economy. And then the quote that got a lot of people mad was there was this person saying, we have more fun than our daughter. It's showing these boomer cities popping up. And people are going there to do pickleball and socialize and party. in all these things, and I got a few quotes from this thing. They talk about this Sun City, Texas, which is just full...

We're having more fun than I'm doing it. That's hilarious. But shouldn't that be what... Shouldn't that be true, though? So they're saying this person is in their 70s, having more from their daughter. Isn't that supposed to be the case in retirement? Probably, yeah. No, isn't that why you work so hard and do all the things so that you enjoy yourself and the back nine? Speaking of boomers, my father just sent me... I guess this is from his iPad. What he does is he sends me screenshots of articles that he's reading on his, uh, in, in newsday,

which is like the local newspaper. So that's like cutting out newspaper clips. That's his way of cutting them out. Which he still, he still brings me physical newspaper clips. And it's like something to the New York Post about the Knicks. That's like three weeks old. I'm like that. Anyway, this article is the future is now as AI erodes, the boundaries between humans and

machines, the power of computers may soon supersede the power of the mind. Okay. I've got an AI thing later in the doc here. Back to the boomers. So in retirement, like, I'm not, this thing didn't make me mad. You should be having more fun. And think about it. People in middle age with kids and responsibilities and jobs, like, your life isn't as fun

anymore as it was when you're younger. And it should be when you're older when you don't have all those responsibilities. It's a different kind of fun, but it's not fun. Well, Kataya, speaking of fun, no fun. So last weekend, we took Kobe and Logan to see sleepway camps. Kobe next year we'll be going to third grade and that's about the time

that kids start going to sleepaway camps. So we saw... Such a foreign concept of me being in the Midwest. Yeah, it's a New York thing. It's a Northeast thing, I guess. Yeah. So we went last week,

we saw three camps. They're all beautiful. There's no wrong choices, but Robin is not agonizing. She wants to send Cody to be a started camp. He picked a different one. So this next weekend, we're going...

You probably don't get to choose since you shaved his head. this next weekend, we're going back. We're going back for the day. We're going to drive three hours there, drive three hours back. And here I thought I was going to have like a party day. I'm like, oh, who's watching Logan? I think I'm going to do this.

She's like, what are you talking about? You're coming. I was like, wait. I thought, no, I thought I had like an alone day. She's like, no, I'm like, what are you talking about? You think I'm going to drive three hours each way by myself and have the day with Kobe without you? So anyway, listen, last week it was a lot of fun. I had a great time.

It would brought me back to my youth. Is this weekend going to be, is another Saturday at camp going to be fun? Yeah, it's a different type of fun, to your point. Different type of fun. I haven't, the lone day, too. So my parents watched our kids last week for a night. They took them off our hands and had fun of the kids. And it was so, it's so weird when the kids are out of the house, but we binge like five

episodes of the bear, which I'm going to get to it in recommendations. And I feel like part of you as a middle-aged person with kids thinks, man, if I didn't have kids, I would be so productive. Stop saying middle-aged. I'm 39 years old. I got middle-aged stuff coming, too, for you. But I think a lot of our time would just be spent wasting it. We just waste a lot more time if you didn't have kids, right?

You think, I'd be too much productive, I'd do this, I'd do that. You'd just waste more time. You'd watch more shows and movies, and you'd have more downtime. That's it. That's the difference. We were talking about this. Were you here in New York? I'm getting DejaVu talking about what we did before we had kids?

Yeah, like, what did you do with your? your time. Oh, I was thinking about it. No, I read books and I wrote blog posts. True. That's what I did with my dad time. Okay, back to the boomers. Americans 55 and older control nearly 70% of household wealth. That's up from 50% in 1989. And they control 45% of spending up from 29% three decades ago. Isn't this so much better than the retirement crisis everyone was predicting? Yeah, that's a good point. A little bit better, huh? And also, I hope a lot of the boomers spend their money because just the rich baby boomers passing the money down to their kids. And, you know, they're going to get it when their boomers are living longer. So I don't know, when these people are

50 or 60, they're going to get a huge inheritance. And they're going to be the only ones who can afford houses. And I just, I would rather see the boomers spend it and enjoy it. Yeah. I think this is a good thing. It's a great thing. I agree. Remember a couple weeks ago I was lamenting how all these young people could afford Zach Bryan tickets? Like, how, I, how, I, How are they affording the same tickets I am? You know, I'm a little further along than them. I have more money. I should be able to afford a good ticket.

They should not. So I met up with some friends this week that I haven't seen in a while, and they have older children, teenagers. And I was telling them about this, and they said, no, no, no, Ben, you have it all wrong. Kids these days have tons of money. I'm like, what are talking about? And they said because of the labor market,

kids make so much money at, like, menial summer jobs. They said, all our kids are making 20 or 30 bucks an hour babysitting or working at car shops or whatever and they're making in for them that's all consumption that's not they're not they have nothing else to spend it on what age did you stop giving your friends money for gas oh you know what i mean like if like if you're going to atlantic city and somebody's drive you like i'll i'll pay for gas or i used to assume i feel like i was doing that like well into my 20s i mean granted my 20s were full of dread and no income but but nevertheless I feel like, that's done after college, I feel like.

No? For me, it was. But so I looked at the... Anyway, kids can afford gas these days. Okay, how about this? At what age did you go to the gas station and fill up your gas tank? Oh, that was after high school. But gas was so cheap when I was driving.

But even still, you were like, what, I'll give me $20. Yes, I would say do $10. I would never fill it up. I bet kids these days fill up the gas tanks. They just don't know. How good they have it. Yes. It's funny because you'd be like, I'll do $10 at a time or whatever.

and give me uh give me 250 but the wage growth tracker breaks it out by age and by the by this chart that we're looking at where am i missing something where's the where's the where's the oh i forgot to include the ages okay i assume the green line is young people yes green line is so that's 16 to 24 okay i cut the ages off i'll put it in there when i when i update this for the youtube uh 16 to 24 24 24 to 55 and 55 plus then overall so 16 to 24 it got as high as almost 13 percent for that cohort. It's always higher for some reason. But I think this pissed a lot of people off. Imagine like there's a store called Ralph's here.

It's, it's, uh, Isis. And these are small businesses. And now all of a sudden you're paying these kids 15% more than you were a year ago. That really sucks. Right. That's great for the kids. But for that's, you know, not fun. I also did the unemployment rate for 16 to 24.

And it was way higher for most of the 2010s. It's spiking a little bit now. but it's much lower than it was found in the great financial crisis. So anyway, I guess kids do have money these days. And as you know, when you're younger and you make money, now listen, I saved it. I used to save money, but no other teenager does that. You saved money as a teenager?

Of course I did. What do you think? Come on. You know me. All right. So there are some signs that the economy is cooling. Right? We got some data last week.

Unemployment claims, initial claims, continuing claims. It's a trend in animal spirits content lately. ISM. Now, the U.S. economy, this is from David Engelsy, tweeted. Looks like the U.S. economy is cooling quicker than most analysts think. The Bloomberg U.S. economic surprise index has dropped to a nine-year low. Definitely some... Hand up.

No idea what these surprise indexes. Like, what it's measuring? I think it's the difference between... Expectation reality? ...and estimates and what actually happens. Okay. So, science that the economy is cooling for sure. Atlanta Fed, the live GDP tracker is down to, I think, 1.7 percent, something like that.

Yep. So. Just in time for the Fed to cut rates. Yeah. You think these TSA numbers that we're talking about, is this as good as it gets? Oh, that's possible. I'm of the opinion that in 10 years, people are going to look back at the economy in these past few years in the sentiment and go, what was wrong with them? why was everyone so nuts that was a booming economy what and when it goes away people are going to

go no no bring it back you know i feel like that's that's going to be a thing perhaps last week i was at the bar that i go to in my jet ski that i took you to on the water beautiful place so having lunch and overheard some older people in the corner joking laughing complaining that a family of four McDonald's is $80. Did some channel checking. A six-piece happy meal. I think it's $6. Four pieces, five bucks.

We talked with a $5 meal last week. Yeah. So what I think, I think a lot of this is like, people just love to complain. It's sort of like a hobby. It's like a national pastime of hours. It brings people together. It really does. Shared hatred.

shared hatred is a really strong tribal concept that we just love to do and I don't think it's like I don't think they're doing it like um like not even seriously like he's joking you know like obviously it's not $80 I don't think he actually believes that but embellishment another American pastime yeah yeah it's just one of those things that we've been known to embellish a story or two here and there to make it seem a little more lively speaking of like me seeing uh feel the dreams at four years old which I They stand by. Sounded good at a time. Speaking of McDonald's, we had an email. Last week, we had been talking about why food in America is so cheap. Thanks to our glorious lobbying machines, our essentially allowed, were essentially allowed to sell many things in America with cheaper ingredients than they are in Europe. For example, I was a vacation in St. Lucia, which grows lots of bananas.

Half the banana trees are covered in giant plastic bags, the other half or not. I asked our driver why some of the trees were covered, and he said the bananas and bags are for export to Europe. The ones without bags are for America because Europe limits the pesticides they use on the bananas and the bag shield them from those pesticides where in America, they can use whatever they want for export and nobody cares. Wait, isn't the banana already shielded? Why do you have to put the bag over it? The bananas got the case. That's a good point. Spread as many pesticides as you want. That's a good point. I bought 10 bananas yesterday and it was like

296. Still one of the that book The Fish Day of the Whale is amazing. It should have been just called a banana book. Book club on Monday.

Jim on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are.

Visit Spexavers.caver's to book your next eye exam. I exams provided by independent optometrists. All right, there was an article in the journal. J.P. Morgan warns customers, prepare to pay for checking accounts. All right. They're saying that new rules that would cap overdraft and late fees will make everyday banking significantly more expensive for all Americans. I was like, listen, if we can't rip off poor people, you're all going to have to pony up.

So, yeah, I read this story and they said, the people who will be most impact are the ones who can least afford to be, and access to credit will get harder. Those people are the ones paying the overdraft fees and the late fees. If they have to pay, whatever, $2,999 for a checking account every year, it'll be cheaper for them than the late fees they were paying. The late fees you pay are so egregious. Even if people have to pay for a checking account, it'll actually impact the wealthier people. And that's a good thing.

They can pay for it. So how much is spent or charge in overdraft fees? It's billions, right? It's some sort of ludicrous number. ridiculous. Michael Lewis had it in one of his podcast a couple years ago. It's a very high number. So how much of this is posturing? Who knows? But the journal said this isn't the first time banks have said that they would

pass on higher costs in 2010 after the post-financial crisis overall of bank regulations. Lenders warned that they would levy fees on debit cards. Anyway, they didn't do it because people are like, no, we're not. We're just going to move banks. But we'll say. That would suck. That wouldn't be great. Now, it would be good for certainly people that are being railroated. Well, the thing is, it's going to turn into tiers of banks then, well, like the banking

tier, like you have a certain amount of money with this, you don't pay, or there's going to be... Yeah, for sure. It's going to be more inequality in the banking. All right. Did you read this golden piece about AI being overrated? Did you and Josh talk about this? I was completely off the podcast scene last week.

I had nothing to do with podcasts or anything. I didn't consume much content. I was out in the sun all day. Can you see? I got a nice little tan. You notice that? You're looking good. The Sequoia wrote a piece about this that's a, to really, to really, to really.

list, but. Okay, so I looked at, I, I perused this and then, uh, this, uh, Ed Zittron guy wrote a follow up to this. And I guess he's, he's very bearish on AI. So I, I don't know him. I just read the piece. It seems like he's, he's been bearish on AI for a while. And the gist of the piece is that he's saying, like the productivity benefits are, are likely to be limited. The power demands are significant. The generative AI stuff is unprofitable. And it's really just like it's taking probabilities and the answers you get and all this stuff. And he's saying it's not going to be as great as everyone thinks. And I almost give this guy credit for doing the Zag

because not many people are doing the Zag on AI right now. And so I just wanted to game theory this. Let's say this guy is right. AI is not as big as people are setting it up to be. What would that mean if just like, eh, nothing. Not, or not nothing, but it's not as big as everyone says it's going to be. It would mean that, I don't know, $4 trillion in market cap gets wiped out from the Magnificent 7, maybe more. S&P 500 is 25% to 30% lower than it is today.

That's kind of what I was thinking. It's those big stocks that get hammered the most. The funny thing is, everyone who had bearish takes on a crypto industry, like there's no killer apps. That's the one people think people like, there's no killer apps, there's no use case. those people were right and they were still wrong about the price of crypto. True.

Anyway, speaking of crypto, Bitcoin is in a, what, 20 to 30% drawdown at the moment? Depending on what you take, where you take the high from? It's...

High of 70 something and it's down in the 50s? Okay. I think Bitcoin ETFs are kind of like 401K plans. Because you'd think, listen, there's constant buying. You've made the supply and demand thing before. Like, listen, Bitcoin ETFs have already bought how many tens of thousands of Bitcoin or whatever

there are. And there's not enough to, and you think the supply and demand thing is like, why would Bitcoin price ever fall? It's the same thing with 401Ks. Like, it's going to be a constant long-term bid underneath the asset, but that doesn't take away the, again, that inherent volatility in human nature. What do you think? Totally. And how much of it is actually priced in and all that sort of stuff. What's interesting about Bitcoin and the argument that I made is simply the supply and demand thing. How many tens of billions of dollars has come into Bitcoin ETFs?

You would think, now, when did this announcement? So it ran from 40 up to 70. Now it's down to 57. I don't know. I guess probably have to be a little bit disappointed with how the price is performed. Yeah. Or the price already had its performance. And then this is the other side of that.

and expectations, all these stuff. So you made the point a couple of weeks ago that isn't Bitcoin just like high beta tech because it was moving down with NVIDIA? Well, what do you say now? Because the market's at all-time highs. Tech is at all-time highs. That's fair. It's diverged.

So maybe Bitcoin is a non-correlated asset. It is not correlated. The meme coins, maybe all that nonsense is over now. Like, I know you don't pay attention to this stuff, but all of them are just getting annihilated. Oh, good. Yeah. Should be, right?

But even still. I'd love to see them all go away. Yeah, I don't see the utility in these things. I mean, LOL, I don't think anybody does, but maybe that's the whole point. Dogecoin is still a $16 billion market cap. Sheba's still 9.6. Pepe is still 3.8. Bonk is still 1.8.

And listen, I know these market caps are a bit baloney because it's not like if all of them were liquidated, you could actually get that out. But nevertheless, these are still like pretty serious numbers. But people are still buying the ETF, I assume? Yeah, yeah. It's going away. No, so there was some outflows in June and just saw Bloomberg had a post on this highest two-day inflow in a month. So I do think that the concept buying is, you're not a terrible analogy with the 401k.

Yeah, it's more of like an intermediate, longer-term trend, but the shorter term, this thing is still going to get crushed occasionally. Yeah, yeah. All right, Greg, if at the Wall Street Journal had a, here's the headline. You might be buying your house at the top of the market. You don't really even need to go into the meat of the bones of this argument. No offense to Greg, but everyone kind of knows why he's saying it, high rates, high prices. And it kind of makes sense. Check out this chart I had Matt make for me this morning, chart guy.

I did nominal and real housing returns by decade. Excuse me, it's chart kit. Chart kid, sorry. There we go. Nice chart. Okay. How old does he have to be to graduate to chart guy? Tiber day.

Okay. So I did nominal and real because nominal returns in the 70s were insane. If you look at a real basis, it's basically right now. So we've essentially pulled forward a decade's worth of housing market returns in the first, not even half of the decade. There's still, what, five and a half, six years of the decade remaining on a nominal and real basis. We've pulled that forward. So his thing about buying at the top of the market or whatever, you know, could be, housing prices, housing price returns have to be relatively muted from here. You'd think that's a fairly simple argument to make. Aren't people usually buying at the top of the market? X, obviously, like 2010 and 11, all that sort of stuff. Well, top of the market makes it sound like a peak more than, you know, doesn't that makes like things are going to, you're not, his whole point is you're probably not going to make good financial gains from your house in the years ago, which I think is a fair argument. I don't think he's, I don't know if he's going to be right, but it's a fair argument to make. But here's the thing, I was thinking,

Let's say, take out the economic impact of it. You wake up tomorrow, and it's not like a big calamity, but your house is down 50% in value. Now, this is in a vacuum, so assume if that actually happened, there's a huge financial calamity, and things are really bad. But assuming it happens in a vacuum, the value of your house is down 50%, but you still have the same job, the same income, the economy is not falling apart. Does your life change in a meaningful way at all if the price of your house is down? Can we use like a more reasonable number, like 15%. Okay, 15%. Does your life change at all?

You can still afford your mortgage. Yeah, let's say that a lot of the excess goes away from the past couple of years. Do most homeowners' lives change? No, of course not. I mean, maybe the only thing is you can't borrow as much against it. Okay. Right? But, yeah, let's say housing prices fall 15%.

Is it really going to change your life in a meaningful way? And my point is, if you buy a house now, and you can afford the house, you can afford the property taxes, you can afford the insurance, you can afford the upkeep. and it goes nowhere for the rest of the decade. But you get to live in that house. You get to create experiences. You get to have the neighborhood, the school system, the whatever you want to, the reason you buy a house. Is your life really worse off if you don't make any financial gain on that?

But for new buyers, there could be. So just psychologically, it would be a huge bummer. Let's say you buy a house for $600,000 this year. And then two years later, new people moving into the neighborhood are buying the same house at 475, 500. Doesn't feel good. Doesn't feel good to have a mortgage on a house that's higher than, right? That's fair.

If you're going to be, yeah, because I was thinking, well, if- Guess what? I top-tick the jet ski market. I still owe more my jet ski than I can get for a new one. Probably not anymore, but it doesn't feel great. Now, that's-motorized vehicles are not your forte, obviously. And true. And that's who gives a crap. But that's a small monthly payment for your house.

Psychologically, that's got to sting. I guess I was thinking if houses fall 15% and you have to sell your house for a loss, that stinks, but you can also buy another house that's lower in price as well. I think what your point is, you're agreeing that real returns on a go forward basis for new purchases is going to be lower. But also, if you do top-tick the market, it's not really the end of the world. With a caveat that we could still turn into Canada. and who knows

and we look back in five years and go ah housing prices still kept going up I don't know but it would make sense people are still transacting too this is from the truth about mortgage I think I got this one from our guy Bill Sweet so he breaks down the distribution

of mortgage rates by 2022 2023 and 2024 and he says in 2024 now almost a quarter of all mortgages are 5% or higher and this was only 10% in 2022 And so there has been a lot of people who have continued to transact in the housing market. So existing home sales went from, I don't know, 6 million, usually in an average to 4 million,

which is a big drop. But people are still... Yeah, but barely. I mean, yes, there's still activity, but it's... But look at this. There's a lot more high-rated mortgages now because people are still buying houses. It's happening. Yeah.

They're moving. It's going to continue to happen. All right. there's an article in investment news. The headline was retirees spend twice as much when they have guaranteed income research fines. The amount of extra discretionary spending is significant as those with assets in those categories spend about twice as much as those whose savings are in investments. The reason is that people think about guaranteed income sources differently than savings. I would agree with that.

A survey that was part of the research found that nearly 60% of the research found that nearly 60% of respondents said they would feel more comfortable spending on non-essentials if the money came from an extra $10,000 of income rather than a lump sum of $140,000, which is the equivalent cause of an income annuity. Now, caveat, this paper guaranteed income and license spent was published by an annuity industry group, okay? So consider the source. However, I still agree with it. I totally agree with this. Like, I, you know, I can't prove this. I didn't read the paper, but people view income and savings very differently, which is why, as we said at the top of the show, it's a big part of the reason why income strategies are so

attractive, why annuities, even though maybe perhaps mathematically, in some cases, they're not, like, quote, optimal. People love guaranteed income. And I am of the belief that if this improves your spending behavior, improves your peace of mind, even if it's not mathematically optimal, who gives a shit? This is like the best portfolio is the one that you could stick with it. It's the same type of argument. Right. I've heard the argument over the years, and I've probably made it, too, that why do you need to own high dividend paying funds when you could, or stocks, when you could just sell the shares of appreciated assets and create your own dividend?

That argument never landed with me, because I'm very in tune with my fellow American. We love income. We don't want to manufacture our own income. People hate spending principles. So if I could go, remember a number of years ago, you and I became very bullish on defined outcome, that class of funds, and we're proven right, if I could be bullish on one area of the fund universe, it would be funds that are going to provide a regular stream of income to people. Like baby boomers, the boomer candy thing will eat that up. So I think that is something that is going to continue in the years ahead of the funds,

creating ways of massaging income or giving them a regular income stream. They're giving people what they want. Yes. And potentially need. To your point, it's a psychological herder for a lot of people to actually spend the money. If it's paid out in a certain way, they're going to spend it more. All right, it's been a while since we talked about this one. Title insurance.

A lot of people know us, so they tagged us on this one. Did you read this article? No. This huge paper, it's called Bits About Money About Title Insurance. And here's the main takeaway. So they looked at loss ratio by insurance industry. So fire insurance, 65%, workers count 48%, medical professional liability, 56% 56% auto liability, 76% homeowner insurance, 82%, title insurance, 5%.

So they're saying on a $4,000 or so that this person paid in insurance, they're using an example, the underwriter expects to pay out $200 in losses. And they do this whole huge piece about the scam that is title insurance. Counterpoint, if title insurance goes away, does all other insurance go up in price similar to the banks with the overdraft fees? Is title insurance subsidizing the entire insurance industry, and can I invest? Is there a title insurance company? Well, that's what I wanted to know. That's probably traded that I can invest in?

Are all the big insurance? Who is the purveyor of title insurance? Is it the same insurers that we would know, or are they like specific title? Because I don't even know. I really don't know. Okay. All right. Back to middle age stuff.

So someone sent this to us, and it's a user's guide to midlife. How to navigate aches and pains, weight gain, low libido, memory loss, chronic disease, and stress from the New York Times. And someone sent this on our Discord channel. It was addressed to you, not me. Just wanted to point that out, which I thought was funny. But I had a midlife moment last week. This never, I'm a night owl, usually. I'm not a morning person. It takes me a long time to get moving in the morning, but at the night, I can stay up late and I'm fine. I just, I was watching TV, movies, playing on my computer, whatever, had a couple beers, not an excessive amount. And I had the TV on. Next thing I know,

I wake up, it's 2.30 in the morning, TV's still on. All the lights in the kitchen are on, and I'm just passed out on the couch. Like, one of those where am I kind of moments? That never happens to me. I attribute this to middle age. Yeah, are you falling asleep on couches? Yes. I told you last week, I'm falling asleep everywhere.

If I'm lying down, I'm falling asleep. I took my kids to see despicable me for over the weekend. Guess what I did? Fell sleep again? Fell asleep. I'm telling you, those reclining chairs in movie theaters now, it's a perfect nap environment. Kobe's pokerbie. He's like, dad, watch this part.

Okay, I'm really relaxing. The one middle-aged moment that I do have that I've been having more and more lately is, aside from just falling asleep, when I get out of bed, my left foot, when I put that down and I stand up, my left foot, it's hurting a little bit. Not sure what that's about. Let's just assume it's just going to get worse. There are aches and pains when you get older that they kind of come and then they go, but they could be around for a couple months.

Like, God, that's real, my arm is sore. I don't know why it's sore, and then it just goes away. Yeah. Here's my one midlife PSA as a midlife person. Go get your calcium heart screen. I did this because I had some high cholesterol and don't want to get in the negativity of it, but they found some calcium in my heart,

and I had to make some changes, medicine, whatever, which is just boring middle-aged guy stuff. But the insurance doesn't cover it. Some states it does, some it doesn't. It does, like, 150 bucks. And I caught it early because it's because I didn't. my doctor said, why don't you get this? It's, it can't hurt.

That's Ben's PSA for the day. You know what? I'm going to do that. It's like $150. It's a 10-minute scan, and it's like getting ahead of potential heart problems down the line. Good PSA. Downside. I'm a purely plant-based diet now, and it's the worst thing that's ever happened to me.

I'm going to live forever. All right. So remember the Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, movie where technology just completely goes away and like everyone just flips out. What was it called? I can't remember. End of the world? Yeah.

Is that what it's called? I feel like I'm going to have a dad moment. I do feel like that's the kind of thing. If you really wanted to screw with our society, that's what you do. So last week we were out in the lake fishing with the kids and my daughter's holding the phone for my wife. I'm sorry. Let's leave the world behind.

There you go. And my daughter's holding the phone to take a picture of the fish she just caught. My wife's holding the fish up. and the fish jumps and my daughter and loses the phone in the lake. My wife's phone is gone for the day. Huge pain in the neck to get it fixed. Wait, you didn't dive in? My wife tried to dive in after it and very murky, didn't.

And we also had like our smart thermostat, our nest thing, go out and it totally screwed with our air conditioning. And I just, I feel like we're so locked in on these technologies that if that stuff goes out on us, like there are going to be people that will legitimately freak out. even though it doesn't, it shouldn't impact your life. It will and it does because they're so intertwined with everything we do. When I was driving to camps over the weekend, I imagine having a map. Oh my gosh, right? And when Travel Quest, is that what it's called MapQuest?

MapQuest. When MapQuest came out, that was revolutionary. It's like, holy shit, I could print directions. It would tell me where to go. I don't have to physically read a map. Like, that was a big deal. How anybody showed up even remotely on time, boggles of mind. Yeah, now it's like 500 or half a mile, 500 feet, 400 feet,

like tells you exactly when to turn. Yes. Okay. There's an article in the journal. No, Bloomberg, excuse me. Why there's suddenly so many car washes? Are you noticing this in your town? Tons of new car washes.

Okay, not here. Yes. Interesting. Oh, really? Okay. No, we have a local Tommy's place that is popping up everywhere. There's like a little, Mr. Car Wash versus Tommies Express.

They're popping up everywhere. It really is a thing. So what's the story say? It's private equity. A lot of it is like this subscription-based model where you could pay 20, 50 bucks a month, whatever it is for various packages. Okay.

Speaking of, so my Tommies, I pay for the monthly package. My wife and I both do you pay monthly. And I think when you first signed up, it was 1999, unlimited car washes. That's a great deal. They just increased it. from, and of course, I get the basic, right?

They call it super. It's super ultimate and works. Super basic. Yeah. But a single wash now for the basic is $14. Seems high. I think it's like 25 here because I just got my done over the... Okay, the super unlimited is $29.99 now.

It was $19.99 we signed up. So it seems like, but to me, totally worth it. I get my car washed at least once a week, and I'm probably in the past with it on once a month, maybe. And sometimes I'll do it two, three times a week, depending on how my, how beat up my car is getting from kids in weather and such. And it's a great, great perk. And to their point about subscriptions,

I can see where private equities would love this model. You might be surprised to learn this about me. My car is an absolute disaster at all times. Like every couple months, Mom, it's like, you need a car wash. Go get a car wash. Just remind you.

If you get the subscription, you'll use it more. It's totally worth it. I just, I don't care. I'd love to hear how much it costs in New York. I don't care. Sometimes they're imposing bans on too many car washes. Really?

Really? It's a $14 billion industry. There's 60,000 locations. That sounds kind of nuts. Wait, why would they ban car washes? Who gets mad about car wash? I think they're saying they don't really bring anything. They don't bring any commerce.

Like, they're not employing a lot of people. Because it's mostly automated now and, yeah. So they have a, check out this picture. This is a Chicago car wash in 2025. Pretty cool photo. You know what used to be a thing? Looks like a sprinkler. People used to watch their cars manually.

Oh my gosh My parents used to make me do that to their cars But the thing is you'd get the bucket With soapy water With the big sponge But then you'd miss a spot And you'd see this clear streak of dirt And that's such a waste of time

Gigantic waste of time How long do it take to manually do a car? Way longer than it should And it's Yeah Whereas you drive through the car wash And you're done in 30 seconds Okay Ben recommendations

What do you got? It was a good past couple of weeks for the Carlson household for new releases. So we had the new Zach Bryan album came out on the fourth. That guy doesn't miss. The Bear came out and Godzilla King Kong movie. So I'll start with Godzilla King Kong.

Two thumbs up for my son George, he said it's the best Godzilla King Kong movie there is. Did you watch it? He's watched it three times. So I watched it with him. We finished this morning. It's pretty bad, right? The funny thing to me is that these Godzilla King Kong movies, it's the same characters in the, like

all three or four of the movies there have been. And these monsters just literally destroy half of the earth in these movies. And then the next one is like, eh, whatever. Like, we don't even talk about the fact that they destroy every city on earth. But my son loved it. Okay, the bear. I can't remember. Did you ever get into the bear?

It was not for you, right? I don't know why. I'm like the only one who didn't really like it. I watched season one and I stopped in season two. It's just, I don't know. Didn't resonate with me. I would say it's the show my wife and I've binged the fastest out of any. The first season dropped, we binged it.

Second season dropped fast. This one, we binged it fast. And I would say, season one, a revelation, 9.5. Season two, a masterpiece, 10. Perfect, no notes. Season three, 7.6. So, really good season, not as good as the first two. It was a set-up season, I think, for the finale, fourth season.

There was a couple episodes that they could have probably done without, but the ending was great, and it's easily one of the highest quality shows on TV. Like, you know, Succession, just you never felt like there was a bad action. actor on the show and the scenes always looked good. I feel like the bears like that where it's such high, it feels like you're watching a movie. It's such high quality all the way around. So that's why I like it. It wasn't nearly as good, but I'm okay. I knew it wasn't going to top season two because season two is one of the best seasons I've ever seen of television. So there you go. But I'm ready for season four. Shows are hard. That's my profound thought of the day. I'm thinking of like

presumed innocent, which I'm really enjoying. But like the first, I don't know, two, three episodes were like great and there's just like just like a little bit of a lull and I'm like just just finish it just tell me what happens okay I can see that are you watching House of the Dragon and we we the bear has monopolized our TV time so I got to catch up on the House of the Dragon it's it's phenomenal all right a couple of emails I came in in the more recent Candyman movie which I know Ben you didn't see the main character's girlfriend is in an art gallery director is an art gallery director in Chicago ah all right so it really is a thing that's now four examples. And that's, that's a lot. Can't believe I miss Candyman. Candyman was good. On the

recent pod, Michael stated that he had never heard of any of them, talking about the Quad Cities. I'm certain that's untrue, and this will jike his memory. This quote is Michael went it all over it. Here's a quote. That's a map of Illinois, which we're in on the border of Iowa, which is where Davenport is, 22 miles away. You're in the wrong state. Get yourself a new map. Tommy boy. Time boy. Miles away. All right. I, uh, I've got, I've got, I've got a got a bunch of things. Let me close my door. Robin just came home when she's yapping.

They're always on the phone. It's true. I guess usually my wife is texting and what's supposed to talking. Okay. I went to the theater to see a quiet place. The prequel. How was it? Great.

I loved the first two movies, so I'm definitely going to watch this. The second one was one of my favorite movie experiences, dare I say ever. I think it was maybe the first or second movie that I saw coming out of the pandemic. And that's a theater type of movie where it's basically 99% quiet. So this is the first... The first intro of that movie is when the aliens actually show up,

that's awesome. So this worked. It was definitely the least great of the three because the first two were so phenomenal. And it's all new characters? New characters. Some set up characters from previous movies where you see like where they came from,

90 minutes, super tight, and just a lot of fun. Some really, really, really good scenes. All right, I mentioned Despicable me before. A few questions, observations. Do you know, do you know who does the voices in these movies? Like, does that, do you care about who's doing the voices? I don't care, but I usually do IMDB and look it up. Like, who is that?

I recognize that voice. So the main bad guy was Will Ferrell. He was playing a Frenchman. Will Ferrell's sort of been, hasn't really done much, has he? In the past 10 years? Every comedian eventually, it happens. Yeah, it happens.

So speaking of that, I finally saw Anchorman, too. Okay, I literally turned it off 15 minutes in and never went back to it. I couldn't do it. Yeah, I did that, I did that probably 10 years ago, the first time I tried to watch it. It's terrible, but there's a lot, it's worth watching because there's

a lot of laughs. So I would say the highs are pretty good. It's not Anchorman. I mean, obviously. But the highs are pretty good. The lows are really bad. To me, the brick character was never funny. Like, almost made the movie bad for me. I thought it was seriously unfunny. The first one, even worse than the second. But there was a lot of moments where I actually laughed out loud, which is hard to do. I think Anchorman, one, is the hardest have ever laughed in a theater. It might be a tie between that and hangover. But Anchorman is probably the most laughs per minute movie I've ever had. I would encourage you to power through Anchorman, too.

All right, I'll give it a try. Like, there's a few handful of laughs to make it worth it, even though the movie's overall was, I don't know, a six, maybe. I think when the RV started turning over, I was like, all right, I'm out. I laughed at that. Okay. I'm not quite sure why, but it tickled my funny bud. Okay, did you watch Beverly Hills Cop?

No, the funny thing is I watched the original last week. For the first time? No, I've seen it a million. I love that movie. I've seen it so many times, but I wanted to rewatch the first one before I watched the new one. All right. So I never saw, I only recently saw Beverly Hills Cop in the last five years. I never saw two and three.

I know three is supposed to be awful, but is two worth watching? Two is pretty good, too. Yes. But one is, yeah. Anyway, the movie was, it was good, entirely forgettable. So a total nostalgia thing? Yeah, like it was, it was fine. It was fun enough, but very forgettable.

Anyhow, you know who made an appearance? I'm like, what the hell happened? to this guy? Joseph Gordon Levin. I feel like you're a big Joseph of Gordon-Levin guy. I do like him. I re-watched 500 days of summer recently, which is one of the best rom-coms ever probably. You're right. He did a show on Apple that was terrible. I'm a big fan of his. He was good and then he sort of disappeared. What happened to him? There's got to be a

story. He got exiled. He like got into music and he still does his thing, I think, but just not as not a many good projects. But he, like he was, he was he was on track to be to be the guy. All right. So anyway, in the theater, I noticed that there's some, there's some movies coming. There's some movies coming for the rest of the year that.

I think we're going to do okay. But I don't know if movies are back per se, but despicably me for worldwide. These are worldwide numbers. $230 million. The movie just opened up. Kids and movies still play. Inside Out 2.

$1.2 billion. That's the serious number. A Quiet Place, Day 1, $178 million. Bad Boys, which I have not seen and don't plan on seeing $360 million. Even Horizon is not terrible, terrible. Wait, how much did it make? I think it's at $23 million. I thought you were going to go see it.

It's three hours. Okay, that's a long time. I'm not doing that. But movies are rocking and rolling. So here's what's coming. Did you see the coming attraction for Transformers 1? It's an origin story of Transformers, and it's a, it's a cartoon. It's animated.

Okay. It's going to be a monster hit. I'm sure my son want to see it. He loves Transformers. There's a Wicked movie coming out, which... My wife took the kids to see Wicked the Play recently, and they loved it, so they can't wait for the movie. Okay. Twisters, I am jacked up for.

I can't wait to see that. I'm in. Long Legs, I cannot wait to see. I don't know that that's going to do numbers since it's a horror movie, but I cannot freaking wait for that. That's, I'm seeing that a product. That sounds like a Michael Bannock movie.

Dude, no, that's going to be a hit. At least within the community, which you're another part of, sorry. Alien Vomulus, Deadpool, Wolverine. And then you and I were just talking about this. The Gladiator trailer just dropped. When does it come out, though? Is it November?

I absolutely cannot freaking wait. One of my favorite movies of all time. This is November. Yeah, when Gladiator came out, just a global sensation. It's hard to describe for the Youngings how big of a movie this was. That was one of those, you're back in your chair the whole time in the movie theater. I still remember watching that at the theater. Was it 2000?

It came out. Just a perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect movie. And the trailer has me excited. So anyway, there's a lot going on a lot to be excited about. Venom 3. Not a big venom guy, but. We talked about cycles in the stock market. I feel like the movie thing.

It's like, movies are back, no, they're dead. No, they're back, no they're dead. I feel like we keep having this conversation. I think we're back. It's going to be getting, we're approaching backness. It's going to be dead again. We're approaching backness. No, I just told you.

Gladiator's coming. Romulus. Are you not listening? All right. Good emails again. Personal emails, personal responses. Animal spirits at the compound news.com. See you next time.

You know, you sign off like Ron Burgundy. Go f***