Animal Spirits Podcast - Do Valuations Matter? (EP.320)

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

On episode 320 of Animal Spirits, Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson discuss: bull market corrections, why valuations don't matter all that much, why people were so wrong about the stock market, why we haven't gotten a recession yet, $1 trillion in credit card debt, Robinhood's results, tipping at a hotel, and much more! Today's episode is sponsored by our friends at YCharts. Re-imagine your portfolio research with the latest addition to your YCharts toolkit: Portfolio Optimizer. Start your free trial and get 20% off your first subscription at: https://go.ycharts.com/animal-spirits-referral. Find complete show notes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by our friends at Y Charts. Why Charts just launched an enhancement to this scenario tool called future dates, which allows users to build hypothetical scenarios that include a future end date. So let's say you want to look out what's going to happen if I have this portfolio, and I put in these expected returns, what's going to happen 10 years from now, five years from now, seven years from now, how it will look? Which is kind of an interesting thing from a financial planning perspective, especially, if people are trying to think of specific scenarios, best case, worst case, median case kind of deal, right?

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Actually, I don't miss those days. They ended pretty dramatically. But imagine the scenario analysis where you could see what I would look like with the head of hair. Did you ask your barber or stylist, like what you should do once you started going? No, but it just got progressively worse and worse because he wouldn't say anything. He would just hold the mirror up to the back of my head. I'm like, I know. I know.

Oh, yeah, that's true. If you're balding and you get it because they show at the end. You know what? I was thinking I asked for Africa on my haircut yesterday. The thing that I always say is they cut all the hair off the top and then they go, how's that length? There's nothing you can do at that point. If I say you went too short. Yeah, put it back. See, that's why you have scenario analysis tools because you want to have a range of outcomes to set expectations ahead of time.

You can't do that with a haircut. It's a one-time deal. Luckily, mine's pretty easy and it grows back quick. Check out the link in the show notes if you want to learn more for our referral. Remember 20% off if you sign up for wide charts and mention animal spirits in your initial subscription. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. I was doing a lot of heavy looking at a dot this week. I'm just pointed out. Thank you. I don't see a lot of Michael stuff in here. All right. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael S&P 500.

I guess we had a minor dip last week. Still up 18% or so on the year. Not bad. My contention is that even if we finish the year up 20% or so, which I say is always a better possibility historically than going down in the year, which is one of my favorite long-term stats. the possibility of seeing a correction along the way is still pretty high. So I looked at this.

Do we have a Grand Rapids Hedge coming? No. We put that into the lexicon. People in the chat are using that a lot, which is, that's a good one. Let's define the Grand Rapids Hedge. It's when you say something with no conviction, and then also caveat that lukewarm prediction. That's what a Graham and Rapids Hedges. Yeah.

Well, no, it was conviction with a hedge, right? A weak hedge. I pounded the table and I hedged. All right, since 1928, the S&P 500 has finished up 10% or more 55 times. So 55 out of 95 years, we're going through 2022. It's been a double-digit up year. In 23 of those 55 years, there's been a correction of piquotra from 10% or worse in that same year. So up double digits, but along the way down, this one is crazy, though.

34 times we've had a gain of 20% or more. Out of those 34 years, 16 years have seen a correction of 10% or worse. So almost half of all years that have seen a 20% up year have seen a 10% correction along the way you can see some of the years. That's the Grand Rapids Hedge. There's a 50-50 shot of a correction in a very big up year, of a 10% correction. 1933 is the biggest, I mean, we were close in 2020 when we were down 34% and finished up 18. So if I wanted to round up, I could put it on this list. But in 1933, there was a 30% correction and the year ended up 50% on the year.

Wow. How about 2020? You know, we had a podcast we recorded yesterday where I said something and you were doing something else. And I said, this is what Michael does. I literally just said that. You said 2020? All right. Well, listen, I'm getting distracted. My slack's blowing up. Okay. I'm not, I'm not a solo tasker. Sorry. That's true. You're a multi-ta. Anyway, the whole, like, there are going to be losses along the way. Like, I think people think about that in terms of, like, there's going to be bare markets and markets

are going to get crushed. But even in bull markets, if this is one or continues to be one, there's going to be corrections along the way. I think that's what I'm trying to get at here. You know, I'm catching shrapnel early on in this episode. And even before the episode started, Ben said that he filled in most of the dock this week. Okay, it happens. I'm just telling the truth. You were surprised that I like Field of Dreams, which is... I was looking at your t-shirt and I was wondering. What is the same? That's a personal insult. Who else have a filled Iowa? Well, you've had some pretty contrarian takes on movies and TV shows. like that are generally beloved

that you don't like. The bear once upon the time on Hollywood there will be blood. Top gun. I'm just saying I can see. You don't like a lot of... Feel the Dreams is beloved. Come on.

You don't like a lot of 80s and 80s movies and I'm a huge 80s movie fan and I thought maybe... Is The Dream's 89 or 91? I feel like, was that 80s? It was the 80s. Like 86, 87 maybe? I don't know. I saw...

No, no way. I saw this in the theater. I think it was 90s. Andy. Let's say. Field of Dreams. Oh, 89. I was four? Yeah, you did not see this in the theater. No, I did. Your parents took you to see Field of Dreams when you were four years old. I'm 50% positive. Okay. Well, nice shirt, though. Instagram? Of course.

Okay. I don't know where this came from, what I was thinking about, but do you remember the Pimco, Bill Gross, Mohamed Eliarian, put out the new normal thing? following the Great Recession. And the idea was lower interest rates are going to lead to lower economic growth and therefore lower financial market returns. And they got part of it right. Like we had lower economic growth in the 2010s. They kind of nailed it. I think they wrote this in like 2009.

And we did get lower economic growth, but we had really high returns. And it feels like everyone, everyone was coming out of the 2008, 2009 saying expect lower terms, valuations are higher. You've kind of done this before, but I looked at, since 1990, there's been over 400 monthly readings of the CAPE ratio. Robert Schiller publishes it monthly. You know how many times it's been under average? I do. Average is now like 17.4 times since 1871.

So how many times has been... Is it like less than 5% of the time? Yeah. So like 22 months around 5% of the time. Here's another one since... 22 months out of 400. Can we please... Can we please...

It's enough. Yeah. Not that it's just been like a, like, that's not like screaming buy levels. That's like just below average. Even an 09 at the bottom, it was barely below the long-term average. Come on. Okay, since the end of 2009, how many times has the CAPE ratio finished below average? So this is after, so 2010 on.

Zero. It has not been under, below average. It's been 19. It's the lowest it went. And in that time, the stock market is up 13% per year. So since 2010, the stock market is up. So we had 13.6% annual gains in the 2010s. So far, this decade in the 2020s were close to 12%.

So, I mean, every smart academic portfolio manager person I listened to in the early 2010s was saying, set your expectations lower, valuations are higher. Are valuations worthless 97% of the time for the majority of investors? Because I think if you pay attention to valuations... Yes, I know. Yes and no. I mean, there's nuance here, right? It's not yes or no. It's yes, I know.

over long periods of time, at the index level, usually valuations matter. They didn't, this time around, why? I wouldn't say usually, though. Sometimes. The 90s, they didn't really matter until they, I think, why I said 97% of time, I think it only matters at extremes. Like, obviously, they mattered in 1999 when they got to nosebleed levels. But they've been on the height, we talked about this with Meb Fabre on a recent

podcasts, actually, on his check it out, which was pretty good. I think the best one favorite part of that was Meb wanted to do a drone show for future proof, which I'd be into. I just think, and unless you're at the wild extremes, I don't think that valuations are very helpful. Oh, at extremes. I would agree with you. I did some data analysis, if you will. I might write about this. I looked at the earnings yield, which is the inverse of the price. earnings ratio. And I compared that with real 10-year yields. Because right now, based on that spread, stocks are unattractive. And I looked at what a relative basis to bonds, right? Yeah. So I looked at what happens one year later, three years later, and 10 years later for stocks. And one year and

three-year, there's the correlation is like 0.22 or something like that is nothing for one year and three-year. In other words, just that metric alone tells you nothing about forward stock market returns. Over a 10-year period, it jumps up to like 0.67. So more meaningful. But it's still, it's, you know, it doesn't, it's not the be-all end-all. One of the things we discussed with Mab that I think investors could have never anticipated this time around, meaning, say, 2010 to today. And I don't, I don't think it's that much more complicated than what I'm about to say. mega cap tech i think the earnings that apple google microsoft you know the names were able to deliver to the index level just completely shattered whatever relationship there might be between valuation

forward returns and you can't account for that how could you i thought i thought that lowering your return expectations in 2015 16 made a lot of sense and luckily didn't matter so i always say like when thinking about these sort of things, when you're not at extreme extremes, it's much more reasonable for people to change their expectations, not saying it's easy, than it is to like invest or trade around that, right, to position yourself for a scenario that you think might occur. Right. To your tech point, Josh sent us a story from a Wall Street Journal a couple last week saying Amazon and Apple are doing a combined 920 billion in annual revenue, which is just I don't even know how to put that number into context.

The other thing is a lot of people... But if you had that information in 2011, you probably would say, well, that's going to change things, right? If you looked at what, like, the index, what the SEP 500 was earning in 2011, and you were able to get numbers from the future on what they would be, you would say, okay, forget about valuations because fundamentals have well exceeded whatever was baked into the market.

I think the other thing a lot of people would say is, well, of course, the 2010s were fine. The Fed kept rates at zero, and it's all the Fed. That's a part of it, for sure. But the funny thing to me is that when the Fed started monetary policy in QE, everyone said, no one said this is going to lead to a wonderful stock market return. Everyone said this is going to lead to hyperinflation. Like, no one was predicting that, okay, these Fed actions are actually going to do something. Most people were saying whatever the Fed is doing is not going to have any impact at all because

the Fed can't single-handedly turn around the economy. Anyway, I think it's, with all the stuff we've lived through in the last 15 years, the fact that we're talking about like 13% annual returns is kind of mind-boggling with high valuations and inflation rising and all this other stuff going on, it's, it just point like, I don't know, maybe it's just trying to predict the future of the markets is almost meaningless. Well, of course. One more caveat that I think is important.

Valuation matters in my estimation a lot more in individual securities than it does. at the index level. That's fair. Like if you, if you buy a basket of high priced stocks on any valuation metric, even if you address for growth, eventually that will lead to subpart returns. Now, again, valuation for individual stocks could not matter at all for multiple years. But as a strategy, if you were to just screen for even something as simple as high PE stocks, generally speaking, you're going to do not great relative to the market. I think part of it with the overall market is, yeah, because people have to put their money somewhere, and people now know, we have the knowledge that the stock market has been pretty

good to people over the long term. And if people want to continue putting their money in the overall stock market, you're right. That, that's the time when maybe valuations, if they're not at the extreme tails, aren't going to matter that much. I still think of returns for, and this is can't prove this and maybe we'll check back in 50 years. I think the next 50 years will have lower returns than the last 100 years. It's not like a gigantic market call, but if the average return was, you know, 10% or whatever it is, 9%, I think like 7% would be fully reasonable given that the knowledge of risk changes everything, right? The fact that people are more comfortable with equities, like, yeah, you're probably going to get paid less. I hadn't, I started reading

this book a while ago and put it down. I started reading in 2020. It's from like the 90s. I don't know Sarah wrote this book called A Piece of the Action, How the Middle Class joined the Money Class. Oh, great book. It's an awesome book about... It's basically like the origin of credit cards and money market funds, right? Credit cards, money market funds. Also, how people got interested in, because his point was the stock market, like in the

1950s and early 60s of this huge bull market, and no one really cared because regular people weren't really involved in the stock market at all. It was like 10% of the country even owned stocks. And he had this chapter about how the introduction of the IRA, where people finally had access to it in their fidelity accounts and Charles Schwab accounts in the early 80s. And people went crazy to put money in an IRA. Having that tax deferral, people went nuts for it. So I think stuff like that that's sort of made it easier for people to invest.

I don't think that people take into account that stuff from looking at historical averages. I totally agree. All right, switching gears, Ben. I don't know if it was, I don't know if we spoke about this last week. I know I spoke about it with Dan and Guy and Josh about getting a little cautious on the market. And I'm not trying to take a victory lap. I'm just trying to show because, you know, markets have had a small pullback. You know, it's due. But this is from Daily Chartbook, I mentioned last week. The two-month return spread between hedge fund VIP stocks and most shorted

stocks has reached some of the worst levels in the last five years. That's wild. This is the type of stuff. You talk about extremes. This happens, again, in the later stages, of a rally than at the beginning, obviously. So the VIP stocks would be like you'd assume higher quality stocks. Apple, you know, like things that everybody owns versus things that everybody's short. That blew up badly. Okay. So people were caught off sides.

We had some short covering. So you're saying this is a, you're making a Michael Battenick short-term bear's call on this. No, no, no, no. I already did. I did it last week. Oh, okay. So you're covering your short now. I'm not covering it.

I don't, come on. Your paper short. I'm not saying, I'm not, no, I don't know. I have no opinion on where stocks are to go in the next week. All I'm saying is that there was a confluence of factors to suggest even see, and you know, I'm not like a huge seasonality guy, but August tends to be a pretty weak month. And things were great, right? Market was on fire.

Applic did get killed, actually, after earnings. We'll talk about it later in the show. That's just my point is that. Like, even when the trend is going in your direction, like, you have to always be prepared for counter trend rally. I think that's one of the hard parts about investing. It's so hard because even in a year. So what's the S&P up right now year to date, even after this pullback? Whatever it is. It's 18% almost, yeah. What is it? It's almost 18% on a total return basis. Wow. So even if you were to look at a chart, just objectively, you would say, okay, clearly the trend is higher, right? I mean,

this little pullback has done nothing to suggest that this is the top. However, as emotional as we are. You get a couple of bad days together. And then like, then we make up reasons why the market is down. Oh, now everybody thinks the soft landing is coming. Maybe it's not. Maybe higher for longer. Whatever, whatever. Apple is slowing. Blah, blah, blah. And it's, I mean, this is not news to anybody. Every correction feels like it's going to be over. Right. Yeah. Even though this is, even though this is like as about as normal as it gets. All right. I have one more thing on my long term stuff here. This is from Fortune, Fortune had a article about Ray Dalio, talking about the great wealth transfer coming from baby boomers to millennials, like $73

trillion, but this little anecdote here got me, like how good people have had it over the past 40 years or so. Since 1983, the average price of a U.S. home has risen nearly 500%. The stock market, S&P 500, have risen over 2,800% since the beginning of 1983. Any sort of financial asset you had in the last 40 years, and you've just been golden. If we're putting expectations here for trying to look at lower returns, like the housing market would be the easy one as opposed to the stock market, right? I know I'd just talk about how hard it is to predict this stuff. But that would be much easier to put a...

It would be hard to match that over the next 40 years, correct? Much harder to match the housing price gains than the stock market gains or not? I was watching, I love you, man, again. And Rob and Hermie cracking up, she's like, haven't you seen this movie like a thousand times? Like, what are you laughing at? Very watchable. Yeah, definitely one of my favorites.

So that movie came out at the bottom of the stock market. March 2009. Did it really that long ago? Yeah, we're old, dude. I mean, you're older than me, but we're old. You know how much... I'm older than you. You're more middle age than me.

Fair. Okay. You know how much Lufrognos estate was selling for? Oh, how much was it? So now, mind you, this is like somewhere in Beverly Hills or whatever. Take a guess. What, five million? 4.2.

Okay. Like a beautiful, huge home in the Hollywood Hills, right? I mean, I don't know how much that house is today. What is it? What would you think? 20 million? I don't know. Yes.

All right. I'm planting my flag on the next new big scare tactic about how the economy is rolling over. Things are getting worse from Yahoo Finance. Credit card debt hit $1 trillion for the first time on record. A troubling development is interest rates and delinquencies are on the rise. That's the highest level on record. And $193 billion more than the start of the year and $264 billion above. the 70, 136 billion, it was in April 2021.

Credit card debt has risen a lot. It's like 25% higher since April 2021. This is from, someone tweeted this, a bunch of people tagged me on this, said, hey, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. This Kobayasi letter is not the name of the guy unusual suspects, Kobayashi? Yes. I don't know.

Do you think I don't like that movie, too? I hope you liked that movie. Love that movie. I haven't seen it with the usual suspects t-shirt on, though. Maybe you can't do that because Kevin Spacey got canceled. Sort of, and sort it up. Maybe just the lineup. Oh, yeah, true.

Oh, Kaiser Soze. No, Kobayashi was his... No, Kobayashi was on the mug. No? What was Kobayashi from? Kobayashi was the guy, he's the right-hand man. Okay, this is, I don't know, I don't know this Twitter account,

but a bunch of people tag me on this, so I don't know. The guy who played Kobayashi is a great, that guy. Yeah, he's in the town as well. He's a flower. Oh, the flower cutter guy. I think that guy died, unfortunately. The average American credit

card balance is at a record $7,300. Meanwhile, the median household has just $500, $5,300 in savings. Delinquency rates are up six quarters straight on track for the longest streak from 2008. We are fighting with, quote, inflation with credit cards. Then they go on this thread to say, the only reason that the consumer is strong is because everything is credit card debt. I call BS. A trillion dollars in credit card debt sounds like a lot of money. But as we know, denominator blindness. You have to put this in context of everything else. No, I'm not defending people with credit card debt. I think it's the worst form of debt you can have.

If you carry a balance from month to month, you're compounding against yourself. And that's Ben's number one rule of personal finance. Do not carry a credit card balance from month to month. Get that out of the way first. You should do a blog post. I don't know you had a list of personal finance rules. 20. You're 20?

Yeah, they're in a book. All right. So I mentioned how credit card debt was up like $200 billion since April 2021. But that's only because it fell $200 billion from the start of the pandemic. So this is from Q4 2019. Credit card debt was $927 billion. GDP was a little less than $22 trillion. Total net worth of everyone in the United States was $110 trillion.

Okay? Credit card debt has gone since the Q4 of 2019 before the pandemic from $927 billion to $1 trillion. It's barely budged. GDP is up $6 trillion, $5 trillion. It's gone from little less than $22 trillion to $27 trillion. total household net worth has gone from 110 trillion to 141 trillion so all these other asset like the debt has not kept up even close with the assets and people will say well sure the 1% has gained a lot of wealth but what about people on the low end those are the ones who are using credit cards those are the people in trouble i've used this before but the net worth of the bottom 50% in 2019 was two trillion dollars in 2011 was 400 billion so it was just like the depth of now in 2023 q2 it's 3.4 trillion dollars Okay, look at the next chart here. This, I feel like I'm like a lawyer that is cross-examining a witness who's not in the stand right now.

Percentage of balance, 90-plus days delinquent on credit cards. No, just the, this, this straw man argument. I thought there was another swipe at me, not paying attention. Oh, no. I mean, you probably aren't, but. So this is 90-plus days delinquent by loan type. You can see credit card. Yeah, it's up a little bit, but it's basically average from below average from where it's been since 2003.

right? So I guess the point is, people are way wealthy. Are there some people who are taking out credit card debt to keep up with inflation? Sure. Is it like a big macro thing that's going to take down the economy? I don't think so. The economy is in such a better place. People that are inclined to see those numbers that that person tweeted and be like, yeah, they would even, they would do some mental gymnastics if you were to present them with this data, why this is. Oh yeah, there'd be arguments against like, well, did you think about this? And there's always something, but... I saw a chart of net interest expense of the U.S. government, which, guess what, has

only gone one direction, right? And now we're not going to be able to service debt with rising interest rates, which I'm not throwing the whole thing in the garbage out of hand. And there's obviously, there's obviously truths in that chart. But if you don't adjust it for GDP, come on. Right. Or something. Yeah. I actually do think it'll be a bigger deal politically and economically in the coming years, that if we say, like, X percent of the budget is going to serve as debt, I think that could keep a cap on interest rates more than anything. Another one that we've talked about before, Alison Schrager, myth-busting the most Americans can't come up with a $400 emergency thing, right?

We've talked about this, but I feel like we have to beat this into people because they keep seeing it. Oh, it's never going away. The figures derive from the Fed's survey of household well-being, which adds. asks household if they would cover a $400 emergency using cash or anything else available. 63% said yes in 2022, down from 68%. So people say, well, that's almost 40% of people could not come up with $400 for an emergency. She says that's not great, but as far from the average American falling into bankruptcy over a car repair,

the bottom line is if faced with a $400 expense, 87% of households could still pay their bills. They would just use some other form of money. Wait, Ben, but you missed the part of the middle. The survey asked the cash poor. Oh, sorry. So they asked the cash poor, 37%. What would they do if they needed the money? Only 13% of all households said they could not come up with $4,000 at all. So that doesn't mean they... Yeah, it's total nonsense. Come on. I think it's the way the question is phrased and the way people think about it. It's like, do you have $400 in cash right now? No, I don't. Okay. That doesn't mean you can't cover it in some way. You know, the goalposts on these numbers, I can't wait until maybe 10 years from now. The average American can't come up with $10,000.

Right. Yeah, adjust it for inflation. Yeah, it's just like, of course, there are households that are struggling and there always will be, and there are households in credit card debt, and there always will be, unfortunately. But it's not like it's a big enough thing that is going to bring down the economy. Urban Carmel tweeted this as a follow-up. This is from March 22, Jim Bianco, I think we talked about it at the time. It's a not every recession is led by a 50% rising crude, but every 50% rising crude has led to a recession. You can see on the chart there. I think a lot of people are now trying to backfill the narrative of like, why was everyone so wrong? And Derek Thompson had a podcast on that today with Jason Furman talking about, what did everyone miss about the recession call? Why was everyone so wrong? And I feel like we're trying to backfill the narratives to figure out. And I think we're going to – economists are going to update their models and think about it through. Isn't it just true that we just don't have a big enough sample size for this stuff? I mean, you look at a chart like this and it's like, oh, the last seven times this happened.

We went to a recession every time. And I just think that's, it's, the modern economy in the current form is, I don't know, 100 years old, maybe. It's maybe 60 years worth of like really good data. I think a lot of the time we just didn't even have the data. I just think the sample size is too small to say like always and never when it comes to these models. Totally. Here's my two explanations for why the Fed aggressively raising rates did not lead to a recession. number one, we underestimated the impact of fiscal stimulus and how much people actually had in

their pocketbooks, excess savings. Number two, and probably more important, what percentage of Americans are actually impacted by higher interest rates? Is it like 80% of homeowners have a mortgage under 4% or 5% directionally right? Yes. Number two, I'm going to talk about this with Josh and what are your thoughts tonight. The effective yield on corporate debt, Sam Rowe had a chart that he posted, is like 3.1%. So there are areas of the economy, people with credit card debt, people that are buying cars,

people that are buying homes that are obviously impacted by higher rates. But a lot of the economy has already locked in debt. Yeah. I think those are the two big ones. Yeah, I saw that chart from Samarrow. I can't, we don't have it in the dock, but it was basically, corporations took out more debt than they needed when rates were low, which was a smart thing to do. And now that they've locked it in for longer term, I don't know how the finances of the U.S.

government work, but the yield curve is inverted right now. In long-term rates, I know the 30-year Treasury rate has been going up, but it's still what? It's still relatively low. 4%. 30-year, 4.2%, 10 years at back below 4% this morning. Shouldn't we just be interesting issuing long-term debt at this point if we want to keep the interest expense down? Is that too simple? I don't know.

All right, here's my other thing. So I don't often disagree with Derek Thompson that I mentioned, but he said he thinks like the vibe thing is what kept us out of a recession and that like the Federal Reserve talked us off a cliff. And I just don't know that I feel like people get their information for so many different places now. And we talked about this like a month ago, how many people actually know who Jerome Powell is. I don't think the Fed has the capability to talk down the, I mean, maybe they can talk down CEOs and such, but But I'm more inclined to agree with that James McIntosh thing. We talked ourselves out of a boom more than we talked ourselves out of a recession.

I think we could have gone, the boom could have gotten way bigger, and that could have caused a recession. And so I think we talked ourselves out of a boom more than anything else. And I also think people just hated inflation. That was the biggest part of it. I think that was what angered enough people to pull back a little bit to stop, to lower inflation. And I think the pandemic stuff just worked its way out.

There's also circular logic, but the labor market, you can't have a recession if people are still, they're still full employment. All right. Good transition. If the economy weakened, there would have been. This is from less, more unemployment gone. From the Wall Street Journal, or from Washington Post, more than 3.1 million workers joined the labor force in the past year, meaning people started looking for jobs and largely

getting hired. Almost no one expected this. It's a nearly 2%, it's a nearly 2% expansion to the labor force. course, something that has not occurred outside, or not occurred since the tech craze of July 1999 to July 2000, which is kind of crazy. That was, I mean, people look back at the 90s as like, that was, that was it for the economy. Women are driving this labor force boom, with a rising pain and more flexibility to work from home or adjust their hours, they're surging into the workforce. Labor force participation of women ages 25 to 54, which is, they call prime age workforce,

hit an all-time high this summer, far surpassing pre-pandemic levels. The result is women now make up half of all U.S. employees. That miles tone was reached only twice in modern U.S. history just before the pandemic and in 2009 after the Great Recession destroyed so many jobs that men work at. You're right. No one could have predicted what happened to the labor force from the pandemic. I think that's a really big piece of it. Okay. Let's stick with a theme of things no one predicted. Mike Simonson. He has his weekly update on the real estate market. There's absolutely no sign of any surgeon sellers. 61 to 62,000 new single family home listings each week. No panic.

investors, no distressed homeowners a year ago is when this trend started, basically saying, like, mortgage rates have been high for a year now, at least. At some point, sellers will return to the market will see this in the data. And he says, right, like with a question mark, this is a, this one has to be one of the more surprising ones to people who are expecting calamity. It's just, it's just not happening. Not good. And oldie, but a goody.

And I do think it'll fall eventually, but, like, it's possible the normal housing market is a thing of the past for, like, a long time. Like, I don't know, for a decade maybe, it's hard to. Why would there, but why would there be a surge in sellers? It would have to be, I think just affordability has to get better. I think that's part of it is just, why would I'm, it's not only like the mortgage rate lockdown. Like, I'm staying in my house because I have a 3% mortgage, but it's also like, it would be so much. more expensive for me to move, I need it to be cheaper to be able to afford it. And if that affordability piece is not getting better, what is going to cause people to,

because this is an obvious statement, total captain obvious, but if someone sells their house, they become a buyer. So it's like a double, it's like both sides of the equation, and that creates more, yeah, right? That, yeah. But it's true. So if people aren't putting their houses up for sale, but taking away buyers as well, and that it's just like the whole cycle of it is thrown out of whack.

and if the prices aren't going to come down, I think it's going to be hard to get people, you know, on the margin, people are, this is going to thaw on people are going to move for jobs and family and whatnot, but it's not going to be like it was in the past, I think, unless affordability gets better. So as middle-aged men, we, you know, we're both Zillow checkers, are we not?

Yes, this is what happens when you get to middle age. You go to a new city or somewhere else or a new neighborhood, and you check Zillow. There's nothing in my neighborhood. So I just clicked a random house. Okay. This is, oh, my God, you got to be kidding me. This house is listed for $9.59.

And, oh, my God. Okay, I'll include one picture in the dock for the show notes. This house was built in the 50s and not updated since. So, I mean, the estimated payment on this thing is $6,000. $900. Ben, I'm slacking you a picture of this house right now. I mean, the housing market is just totally whacked. I think that's part of the affordability thing. It's not just that it's become unaffordable. Whoa. You see it? It looks like a house from Goodfellas, like where the women have their parties. Here's another one coming. That's a great point. You know why? Because this,

I mean, this house, yeah, it's a Long Island house that was built in the 60s and not updated since. Yes, it looks like the 60s. The chutzpah. Now, you can listen for whatever you want. 9.59? What? That's the other thing is that, like, let's say you bought a house in 2017, 2018, you were anchoring to that price. And you see a house that's 50 to 75 percent more than what you paid and you go, wait a minute, the price is this much higher and the quality is this much lower and rates are this much higher. I think that it's psychologically that's holding people back. What changes this? It's just, it's interest rates? Rates and demand. So Eric Finnegan says,

census says 2.1 new households formed over the last year. I think it's just millennials plugging their... 2.1? Ignoring 2020 to 2021, this is the highest rate of household formation since early 2019. Remember, household formations are not just people buying houses. It's also going to an apartment on their own or whatever. And he said it's remarkable given the direction of rents and mortgage payments.

I think it's just the demographics overwhelming it. And millennials finally saying, you know what, enough is enough. I'm going to buy something. I don't care. I'm going to plug my nose and hope rates fall so I can refinance. going to buy something now. I think that's it, is the demographic wave taking over. And then I think it's going to be like the 2030s until the boomer house supply heats up, and that all comes to market, right? I do think if we're looking like long-term demographic stuff,

I know you don't like to pay attention to demographics, I'll feel free to check out of this one. Like, you'd assume at some point baby boomers are going to sell their house and in downsize or move to Florida or whatever or Arizona, or they're going to die in their house and the people that take the house room are going to want the money as their inheritance and sell it. And there's going to be more supply. But I think you're going to wait until like 2030s for that. It's going to be a while. Time stamp this one for my 2030s housing supply.

You're right. I tuned out. All right. There was an article in institutional investor. The headline was alternatives have been kryptonite to alpha, at least for public pensions. And before I read this, my first thought was, well, two things. Alternatives is a very wide category, right? There's a million different types of alternative investments.

My second thought was this has to be hedge funds, right? And so I read the article, and here it is. Alpha appears to respond to the presence of alts as if the latter were kryptonite. The greater the exposure, the harsh of the effects on Alpha, wrote Richard Ennis, a former editor of the Financial Analyst Journal and co-founder of whatever. According to the study, public pension funds in the U.S. have generated negative alpha of approximately 1.2% annually since the GFC. He found that private equity didn't help or hurt excess returns,

both real estate and hedge fund exposure detracted significantly from performance. So there you have it. It was mostly hedge funds and real estate, which is a little bit curious. They looked at 59 public pension funds for the study. You have any thoughts? The funny thing is that I feel like hedge funds for a while there in the early to mid-2010s got a ton of publicity, like bad publicity, saying, why are people paying $2.20 for these funds that just underperform and they stink? And I was part of it piling on this because

I worked in the endowment world and I saw how crappy hedge ones were and all the bad parts of them that you only heard about the really good ones that were hitting grand slams. You never heard about all the other 80% of them that just were awful. And I feel like they don't get as much bad publicity anymore because so much other stuff has happened. Spacks and crypto and private equity and venture capital and all these other things that people pay attention to now, no one pays attention to the hedge funds anymore. And I think the average fees have come down a little bit, but it's, I, yeah, it's not, it's still not great.

I looked at the returns again recently. J.L. Collins has a blog, and he asked me to write something about hedge funds, and I looked at the returns inclusive of 2008 to 2022. So starting with a bare market, ending with a bare market, and a composite hedge fund index got just throttled by a 60-40 portfolio, not even close. And I know that not all hedge funds are created the same. But for as high as the fees are,

I just don't see. Ray Dalio had his quote a while ago, like something like there's 8,000 pilots in the air and 800,000 planes in the air and 100 good pilots. That was his analogy for hedge funds. And I think, like, if you can get in the top echelon, you're going to be fine, but the majority of them are just going to,

because the fees are so high and the competition is so high, they're not going to do well. All right, let's do some great quarter guy stuff. Robin Hood. I always like to see Robin Hood's numbers. I'm not quite sure why I have a fascination with them. But, well, it's exciting now. Did that company ever come back at all stock price-wise?

Not really. A little bit. It's not going down. Let's see. It's still got a $10 billion market cap. Oh, I was looking at this briefly. It has like $6 billion of cash on hand or something like that. Okay.

You're going to make the point that it's cheap? I mean, it should be. Not a lot of expectations in this company. So their monthly active users continues to shrink. It was $21 billion at the peak in Q2 of 21. It's now cut in half. And I want to marry this report with an article from the journal, talking about like meme investors are back or something.

Individual investors, daily net purchases of yellow, which is the trucking company that filed for bankruptcy, totaled nearly $5 million in Tuesday, according to Vanda Research, had a previously never cracked $1 million. This surprised me. Individual investors trading in options recently made up 27% of all activity, up from 23% in early 2020. Is that wild? Is the bankruptcy thing, because I know this started with Hertz and some of those other bankrupt companies where people would buy in. Is it just everyone looking to get ahead of potentially other people buying this for whatever reason because it worked once or twice?

Yeah, I guess that's reasonable. Dan Loeb said fundamental analysis is increasingly taking a backseat to monitoring daily options expiry and Reddit message boards. I think there's probably a lot of truth in this. You know what's surprised? I looked at this. Duncan and I talked about this a couple weeks ago and asked the compound since 2019, the start of 2019, GameStop is still up like 1,400%.

So it's crash and it's down. It's off like 75% from the highs of the meme stock craze. But it's still up a ton since before the pandemic. Like, that's one that actually kind of worked depending on when you bought in. This chart is so freaking volatile, the long-term chart of GMA. Yes. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

All right, so transaction-based revenue at Robin Hood was $193 million, down 7% year for year. Do you know what the margin rate is on Robin Hood if you wanted to borrow right now? 6%. It's like 8.5%. They sent me out, don't quote me, it's 8 in change. But it's over 8%. Net interest, this is crazy. Net interest revenue, $234 million.

Oh, there you go. Transaction-based revenue, which I guess is their payment for order flow stuff. $193 million. Net interest revenue, $234 million. This is one of the things that, one of my rules for personal finance, this should be your 21st. Okay. Actually, there's not a rule.

I take it back. It's just an observation. people generally have so much cash in their portfolio at all times. I'm going to say like, I think I've seen numbers in the past from brokerages. It's like 20% of portfolios are in cash or something like that. It's a ludicrously high number. It is funny.

It's usually only true for brokerage accounts too. It's like it's an IRA or a 401K. There's not going to be abundant cash in there. It's mostly just for brokerage account. Yeah, you know why? Because brokerage accounts are more real. That's your money. It's today guy.

Whereas the 401k is tomorrow guy. That's true. People are, I, yeah, I believe, dude, I behave, I behave way differently in my brokerage account that I do in my, in my retirement account. Yeah, it's like the little Michael Angel and Devil on the shoulder. Yeah. The devil is your brokerage account. The angel is your 401K.

So there's a huge behavior gap between your retirement money and your today money. Yes. I would bet that the amount of market timing that happens in a brokerage account is like five times higher than the amount of market timing happened in a 401K. Totally. Oh, yeah, here it is. We have over $6 billion of corporate cash and investments today. And again, the market cap of the company is $10 billion.

And I don't think they have any debt. This is basically a Ben Graham net net play. They're trying to tell me? Kind of. All kidding aside. Okay. Although, no, the bank players, they were trading like with negative, like below cash. Like below.

All right, they achieved gap profitability for the first time as a public company. So that's credit to them, right? it was negative basically forever? Well, not basically. It was negative forever. So credit for Robin Hood. So higher rates have actually made a good thing for Robin Hood. Yeah. The company, maybe not the traders. Who to thunk? All right, I want to talk about Apple for a second. Ben, click on this link, six colors. So they do a great job breaking down what's happened inside Apple, the company. So the year-over-year total revenue change. Now, did Apple cross three trillion? I think it did.

Did it? It did for a while, please. Okay. So the revenue, this might surprise some people, given that Apple hit all-time highs just a few weeks ago. The revenue has been down year over year now for three consecutive quarters. If you break it down by category, here's the last three quarters for the Mac.

Negative 7%, negative 31%, negative 29%. That's year-over-year revenue. If you look at iPad, negative 20%, negative 13%, If you look at the iPhone, which is, you know, the big one, it's almost 50% of the revenue. Down 2%, up 2%, down 8%. So they're not their crown jewel, but the one that's, that's, that, that, that, the category that had been in serious, serious growth mode is services, which is now more than a quarter of their revenue.

But even services, up 8%, up 5%, up 6%, up 5%. Up 5%. If you just looked at the numbers, does this look like a growth company? Not at the moment. Do you think it's possible that their stuff is so good now that people are just hanging on to it longer? No.

No? No, I mean, the revenue is still ludicrous. Yes. No, but I'm saying like, I understand. I think people are still replacing it at the same clip. How often do you get a new iPhone?

Every three years. Okay, I'm probably, yeah, every two, I suppose. Now, and then the wearables. Up two, down one, down eight. I mean, it's not, now, I guess the question, is like... Are you making a short-term short-against Apple in your paper count?

A little bit. A little bit. Okay. Now, the thing is, it's hard to bet against Apple. I'm not suggesting anybody should short Apple, obviously. Because they always create these decadillion-dollar categories out of thin air, maybe the goggles in the next one. Or the headset or whatever. The ski goggles.

We talk about this a lot. Like, should the best company in the world trade at a premium to the market? Yes. should the best company that has reached a market cap that no company in history ever has, that's not growing really anymore, not that they're not growing. Well, I guess they're not growing. They would down through, should that trade at a premium to the market? Now, you can also make the argument, well, this isn't the first time. This is not even close to the first time that Apple has taken a hiccup. It did this in 2019. It is this in 2016 in terms of revenue not growing,

but it is interesting. And then when you think about the potential implications of the biggest company in the world not growing anymore. I always like to look at the performance numbers annually for individual stocks, because I feel like we do it a lot for the stock market and bond market, but not for stocks themselves. This is Apple since 2017, up 50%, down 5%, up, and I'm rounding here, up 90%, up 90%, yes. In 2019, they're up 80, yes, and then 2021, they're up 90, 30, 35, down 26 last year and up 38% again this year. The stock has just been unbelievable. And that's what, that was what, I mean, people were saying the law of large numbers for this company, which doesn't really mean that. But that's what people said. You know, the law of large numbers is more about averages than

people are saying. The war of large numbers does not apply to a market market. That was a Michael Santoli thing. He would always say that. But people would always say the law, law of large numbers are going to catch up to him, even though it didn't mean what they said. And that was like 2015. And it's still been, all right. Savings bonds. I bonds we were talking about. Investors, this is from Bloomberg. Investors are saying $800 million from eye bonds as inflation slows down. Since May, because yields have dropped, eye bond yield fell to 4.3% in May. It's going to be way lower than that the next time it comes around, I think, probably closer to 2 or 3%. And net sales plunged to 40 million this year. 99% decline when compared to the $4 billion purchases

in January. Here's the thing. People looked at those juicy yields in iBonds and then pulled all their money. And if you don't hold your money in there for a long time, you don't get that yield. You get dinged with a penalty. So I think, iBonds probably weren't worth it when you consider the amount of money you could put into them and the hassle going through Treasury Direct, it probably weren't worth it at all. Interesting. Ben, I got an alert from Rocket Money. Okay.

So it says large transactions detected. So I click on it. And it was a $1,700 charge for, yeah, exactly, for a company called Revolve. You're a clothes guy, you're a fashion guy. You ever hear of Revolve? No. Okay. Same.

So I called Robin because it's like clothing. I said, did you spend $1,700 at a place called Revolve? Because I was like, oh, great, I have to cancel another credit card. This is outrageous. And she said, yes, I did. But I'm returning almost all of it. Does your wife do this? Yes.

Byes like eight different sizes of the same outfit. Yes. Uh-oh, I hear her coming up the stairs. She heard you talking about her. Yes. wife does this all the time. Oh, she's on the phone. I think women love returning clothes. I think part of it is like getting it on and returning it. Yeah, I don't get it. I buy one size. I know my size. I'm a large. She just stared at me. I'm a large. Yeah, but you told me you gained

five pounds recently. Somebody you have to bump up a little bit. I'm still large. That's true. That's true. So we were driving home in the car on Saturday with the boys. And I thought Kobe was sleeping, and so I was telling Robin about the, that I spoke about bad parenting, which by the way, so long story short, I gave Kobe $100, which was extremely dumb. I don't know why I did it. Actually, I know I did it. You know why? I got hoodwink. He's smart. He asked for a trillion dollars. I gave him a hundred. He's at the baseline too high. If he asked for a hundred, I would have given him five. So credit to him, I'm an idiot. We tried to resolve it and said what we said to him.

Anyway, so I'm playing it for Robin, that clip from last week, and she's laughing, and we hear Kobe, like, die. So we thought he was sleepy. He started cracking up. He's like, it was you. So we basically ruined every surprise. Yeah, that's a guy. Okay.

He thought it was very funny. That's good. Chris Hutchins spoke about this, but I haven't checked it out. Somebody sent this to us. Point. comme, a better way to book with points. I like it. I haven't used this yet, but I'm very excited.

I have a lot of people. So I have an Amex. I have the Sapphire Reserve. And so when I book stuff, I just manually, oh, is it a better deal here, how much points are I have here? I'm excited to use this. It's a pain, right? Point. That me.

Thinking through your credit card stuff, how about this as a service? You lose your credit card or someone gives it to another person at a bar. You need to change all of your accounts. Why can't AI do that for you someday? Hey, update my credit card account information across all these accounts. I love it. I love it. Do we put this in the dock, the tipping stuff?

Oh, here it is. Do you typically leave a tip for housekeeping at a hotel? This surprised me. Only one in five said always. 28% said sometimes. A third said never. And 18% said didn't even know this was a thing. I'm kind of in this camp where I had not heard of this until a few years.

years ago probably that you tip. Well, same. Because until if you, I mean, growing up, I didn't stay in hotels. But I think the reason why people don't tip housekeeping, because if you think about this way, you always tip waiters, right? You never don't tip a waiter. Who provides more service? A waiter who's bringing your food or a housekeeper. Now, the reason why people don't tip housekeepers, I think, is because they don't see them when they live. You don't have the interaction with them, right? You don't have the interaction. But my whole thing for like being generous with starting tipping. Now, I'm not, I'm not like an overtipper when it's like like normal stuff. But when you're on a vacation, doing okay, spending money, and the person

who's cleaning your room is generally speaking, well, not generally speaking, of much lower income status, I feel like, you know, not to play, I'm not playing the high ground, but you have take care of those people now. When you're on vacation, too, you talk about this. You, I said, like, how expensive is a place you're saying in the Bahamas? And you're like, I spent this on this drink and it's like, you're like, it's ridiculous expensive. When you're on vacation, that was monopoly money. That's future. That's future. That's future. you have to worry about that. When you're on vacation, like, I see the credit card statement. Yeah, you don't, you don't think about it until later.

Okay. Car dealership guy, this, this blew my face right off. Toyota Sequoia Price has gone parabolic. This is like the giant one. Yeah, this is a big one. Up by 20% to $80,000. $80,000 for an SUV. From 66,000, from 67,000 in 2022. What in the world? Here's the craziest part. Consumers don't give, don't give an F. They saw more sales growth, more sales growth in the Q2 than any other Toyota out there, we deserve an asteroid. I don't get it. I don't get it. I really don't get it.

I don't either. I don't know if it's a supply thing or what, but that's... So, let's pair that with another car dealership guy chart, showing percentage of residents paying over $1,000 a month for their cars, and Texas and Wyoming stick out like a sore thumb. More than 25% pay over $1,000 a month. This is probably just because they drive loaded trucks. Trucks. Yeah, F-150.

Ruinning the retirement in America. One household at a time. All right. Recommendations. I'm going to start. I got to do a random real quick before we get into this. Last Friday, I took my oldest daughter Libby to a amusement park here called Michigan Adventure. It's like half roller coasters and half water park, right?

Pretty cool place. My other kids were at camp. I don't do the sendaway camp like you. I was curious. What age did you start sending your kids? kids away to camp for the summer? Third grade. Okay.

So, okay. Okay, so that would be my daughter, Libby now. The other kids were at a day camp, so she had nothing to do. I said, it's Friday, I'm going to take you to the adventure place. We went to the water park, and water parks are so much fun. I've been to a few indoor ones recently, but now I've- fun. It's great take.

Yeah, I haven't been to, like, a good outdoor one in a while, and it's, water parks are great. And we went, she wanted to go in the wave pool. And I'm like, I don't want to go in the wave pool. What is the wave pool? Oh, I know what the wave pool is. They make the fake one. waves and so you know all the memes and stuff that show how playgrounds are so much more

safer now than they were in the past like they show all these people playing on these huge things that could fall and in the past people just didn't think about safety as much as they do today with as much safety and parenting like helicopter parenting as we have these days I'm surprised wave pools are a thing it's basically like a mosh pit for kids in the water I don't know how that like they had like three huge wave pools at this place and it was fun but it's like kids just ramming into each other from the waves I don't know how that they actually allow it from a safety perspective. Didn't anybody get hurt?

No, but there was about a month ago, a guy was feeling up children in the wave pool and got arrested, so that was nice. I just don't know how wave pools are a thing. Anyway. Speaking of Mosh Pit, I went to Metallic on Friday night, which was incredible. I saw a lot of air musicians.

Okay, of course. A lot of air musicians. And I saw Mosh Pit. And it was very exciting, being an observer. You just watched? That's the herd mentality. and play right there. I'm not moshing.

Come on. I would get hurt. Fair. You'd probably pull a hammy. All right. Recommendation. All right, Ben, check this out. So there's a great account on Twitter.

All the Right Movies. At AT Right Movies. And this really shocked me. How the Predator looked and John Claude Van Dam in the suit before he was fired. He was the original predator. Did you know that? No.

That's pretty funny that he got funny. Are you shushing your dog? I mean, she's such a baby. She just walks around crying all the time. I don't know why. Well, because Robbins is outside. She gets very upset when Robin's outside. All right.

Loki Season 2, budget, is reportedly $141 million, with a total of six episodes. It's an average of $23.5 million per episode. As a Disney shareholder, this does not please me too much. And also, I'm like, I'm out on all of this. I loved Avengers. I loved all the Marvel stuff. I do love Star Wars, but...

Welcome to the Dark Side. I've been here for a long time. Yeah, I know. It's just, I don't care. I don't care about this. I don't care about the Samuel L. One, whatever it is. I don't care about the Mandalorian

Part 90. It's just... It's time. It's too much of a good thing. Unfortunately. Yeah, they need to start making some actual stuff that's not IP. Just, like, make some new stuff.

New stuff? Yeah. The funny thing to me is that, that people are celebrating this year that the two biggest movies of the year are Super Mario Bros. and Barbie and saying out like, it's nice to have, it's like, those things have been around forever.

That's just gonna be the same thing. Wait till they beat those to death. Oh, it's gonna happen. So I saw this, this is not a movie you would ever like to watch, but I watched this movie a long time when it came out called Greenberg with Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig.

You saw it? I know it is. No, I know it. Okay. It's a quirky movie. And he plays an erotic guy who has like no. Deming qualities. Ben Stiller does. But it's directed by Noel Bomback, and Greta Gerwig, who's his

wife, is in it. She's the one who wrote and directed Barbie, and she was on Smartlist last week. So I decided to rewatch it because it's on Netflix. It's got some funny parts. It does have some funny parts. It's not like a great movie. But it's just funny to me that you would never look at that movie and watch her performance and go, this is the first female director who's ever going to direct and write a $1 billion movie franchise for Barbie. And she did. And I guess it was just kind of cool to think. You think about people who these huge directors like Spielberg and Christopher Nolan are like larger than life personalities

and you watch her and she seems like this just sort of, at its hard, she's just kind of a quirky, she plays like a side character in a lot of the movies she's been in. And I guess what I'm trying to get it is it's kind of cool to see someone who is just not who you'd expect to be like this power broker I guess

in like the biggest movie of the year. Whatever she does that from her. It's going to be huge. Yeah. All right. One more. Finished hijack. I love... Didn't we talk about this last week? No, me and you talked about it on the phone. You said you didn't like it.

I loved it because it felt like a 1990s action movie to me, and I feel like we don't get enough of those anymore. All the action movies these days are so... Always bet on black. Yes, they're all so over the top. By the way, I bet on black when I was at the casino. It didn't work. Okay.

Leslie Snipes failed you. But I loved hijack. I know you said the ending was... It wasn't just okay. It was like a 90s movie ending, but the... Wait, that's what? I'll sign up for that all day, every day. Oh, I love it.

If 80% of the show is great entertainment and I don't like the last episode, fine. The second to last episode is great. I'd love this show. They're probably going to make another one, but I thought it was great, and I love Idias Elba. So that's all that. I am, did you see Oppenheimer yet? No.

Okay. I'm waiting until it comes out in my house. I am really in the minority. Everyone loved it. Most everyone. See, that's why I thought you wouldn't like Field of Dreams. Stop it. That is 100%.

That is a 100% approval rating. It sounds like Oppenheimer does too. The bear is the highest rated TV show all year, and you didn't like it. I'm just saying. All right. Animal Spirspot at gmail.com. We will see you. And I'll be in New York to see you later this week.

Get your guest bedroom ready. It's ready. You didn't get rid of the bed yet? No, we're waiting. We're waiting. You're the last person who's going to sleep in that bed. I can't wait to see your mudroom. That's going to be the highlight of my trip.

Animal Spearspot at g-med.com. We'll see you next time.