Animal Spirits Podcast - Getting Rich Quick (EP.285)

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

On today's show we discuss the round trip in oil prices, why predicting the future is so difficult, how we define a bubble, why interest rates didn't go higher, active outflows are speeding up, Black Friday deals we found, crypto prices got out of hand, the downside of technology and more.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs...  Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense  Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor  Like us on Facebook  And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.      (Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, received compensation from the sponsor of this advertisement. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information.)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's show is brought to you by NASDAQ. You might have heard of them. NASDAQ are pioneers of ETF innovation and expertise. They're a leading exchange for ETFs. They've got more than $1 trillion raised in AUM over the past 20 years. That's trillion with a T. NASDAQ partners with issuers to deliver state-of-the-art ETFs and in turn exciting new benefits to investors. For more information on NASDAQ and what they're up to, go to NASDAQ. Go to Back.com. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching.

Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritthold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits of Michael and Ben. Michael, I want to talk oil prices today. Just a quick side note before we get into this here, finding the price of oil is actually harder than it sounds. There's like crude oil, there's Oklahoma oil, there's Texas.

Not easy. What do you hit into the Google machine when you're trying to find that crude sprat price? Yeah, they have it on Yahoo, actually. But if you search another place, it's harder to find. So I pulled a bunch of headlines here. Scroll down a little bit on the second page of our Google Doc. This is from March 22. This is like 10 days after the war started in Ukraine. You know how long hour Google Doc is? Just a little behind the scenes.

Like the page? It's a lot of stuff. Credit us because we make the charts so big, though. That's why, no. So I pulled a bunch of headlines from early March 22. I think Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. Going into the war, crude was trading at like $90 a barrel. and it immediately shot up to like 120 within 10, 15 days, something like that.

And there was a ton of chatter from experts saying $200 a barrel this year is not off the table. Some people said this month in March, it was going to happen because we're already facing this thing where we did invest enough in energy in the 2010s because prices were low. And then people stopped after oil went negative. Then there was demand coming back. and then the war in Russia was just going to make it even worse. And honestly, I'm not showing these headlines to like dunk on anyone because at the time, these arguments all sounded really intelligent and they made sense. And so this is from Reuters yesterday. They said U.S. crude is now trading below where it was at beginning of the year. We've basically round

trip. It went from $70 something dollars a barrel to 120 plus back to 70 something. And oil prices have now more or less gone nowhere. They're way lower than they were, even before the war started. But from the high in the war, they're much lower. Why is that the case? Did supply respond to the high price? I've read a lot of the pieces, and I haven't heard a good explanation yet. Who gets credit for this? Because a lot of them are saying, well, China's locked down because of COVID. China's been locked down because of COVID, basically the whole year. Remember when they did the strategic release of the oil reserves and people said, this isn't going to work? Do you give a little credit there to the White House? Do you give credit to the Fed? Is this the thing where

People assume there's going to be a slowdown in the future. So prices are front-running it. So you give the Fed some credit because they're throwing us into a recession. I have not heard a good explanation. But this is another one of those cases where just knowing the headlines in advance, I remember there was an Oddlots podcast where this guy was like, listen, $200 a barrel in oil this year is my baseline case now. And his case for it, at the time, I thought, geez, this is scary and it makes sense.

So it's one of those things where even if you get the macro stuff directionally, I mean, let's say you thought, okay, there's going to be some sort of geopolitical conflict this year. It's going to impact the energy markets. I'm going to go along oil. And there's not really an explanation for why the other side is happening. This is what makes the market stuff so difficult, I think. There really isn't a good explanation. No, there must be.

People that know energy. I've not heard. And the other thing is, so here's the other part of it. Energy stocks are still doing well. Look at this. Energy stocks are still up 68% this year. They've had a little bit of a drawdown, but it's still far and away the best performing sector. and Sean, our analyst, pulled this up.

And this is from Warren Pyes, who was on the compounded friends a few weeks ago. And he wrote this in April. And at the time, the energy sector was only up 40%. And the S&P was still down 5%. Someone asked, why energy stock's still rallying, even with oil coming back in? Because this is after oil had fallen a little bit. He said, energy security re-rating. Basically, people are realizing that energy is a very important sector.

Now, if everyone's going to just hoard their own energy, he said portfolio diversification energy is obviously maybe people see it as a way to own commodities now so they see it as this correlation so correlation diversification thing people jumped in and then the other one is momentum rotation so you might have had hedge funds and momentum funds go in there that all kind of make sense to me but again if you would have said oil is flat on the year would you've expected energy stocks to be up 70% almost no I don't know what the correlation there between oil prices and energy stocks is but when oil is done pretty poorly or gone nowhere in the 2010s, that's kind of when energy did bad as well. So that's another thing

where the historical correlations, you can probably throw them out the window, which my conclusion here is just that, I don't know, this stuff is hard, volume 476. Seeing the headline yesterday, it's like, geez, it's very surprising to me. If someone was to say, oh, this is obvious because A, B, and C happened, there's no way you could have thought how this played out was obvious. The war is still going on, and this is all happening, and oil prices are crashing. It is funny how we get example after example, I don't know, six dozen a year, you would never have guessed what happened. And yet, we sweep that under the rug and act as if we can predict things going forward.

Then in our next breath, we're probably going to predict something that we'll be wrong about. But it is funny, there are times when people will throw stuff that we've said in the past in our faces, which, you know what, that's fine. That's part of the job here. I'm happy to take that. But if you're putting stuff out there in making educated guesses about what's going to happen in the markets, everyone is wrong about this.

stuff. There's no one who bats 1,000 here. It's impossible because this stuff is so unpredictable. That's just my main takeaway. All right. Speaking of predictable, GMO published their seven-year forecast, real returns. We haven't talked about this one in a while. Is that 18 for emerging markets? No, it's 10. Gosh, my eyes. Damn it. You need to get glasses, sir. You're just going to have to get a really big screen. My grandma, when she moved into the old folks home towards the end of her life, had the remote control on the phone with a huge buttons on it. I think we're getting there for you. You're going to have to get just an enormous computer screen. People have big text on their iPhone. I'm getting there. Everyone's

going to be able to read them over your shoulder. Okay, so they have U.S. large cap stocks at negative 0.1% basically over the next seven years annually. These are real? Real returns. Small caps are negative to emerging market value at 10% per year. Emerging markets are at 7% per year. Again, this is after inflation. International stocks are a little better at 3 to 6%. Wait a minute. Even U.S. bonds with interest rates at 4% or so, they're saying real at 0.3. They're basically saying that inflation is going to be 3 to 4%, I guess. Here's my question, though. I haven't done any research to answer this. Have we ever seen negative returns seven years out from a bare market for U.S. stocks? I'm sure that's happened to like the Great Depression. It's probably pretty

close depending on the timing of the 2000 crash because the 2008 crash was not that. But I guess to predict negative returns from here from a bare market, there's no way that's happened very often. No, it's a bold strategy. Cotton. We talked about this a little last week, so I put this in here. I ran some numbers on, this is why predicting the market based on fundamentals is so hard. If you just look at the fundamentals and you say that the real GDP or the economy grows at a certain pace, the stock market can't completely outpace it forever. It's got to grow a little bit in tandem with it. I looked at the real GDP growth by decade and then real stock returns by decade. And there's basically no relationship here. If you look at the 70s, 80s, and 90s all

had identical real GDP growth basically, 3.2% in the 70s, 3.1% in the 80s and 90s. And the stock market sucked in the 1970s. The stock market was awesome in the 1980s and 1990s. If you had to throw one column in here that's missing, that would explain or help to bridge the gap, would you say interest rates? or starting valuations. I was going to say valuations, but even then, I don't know, I guess valuations would probably be a little helpful, but even in like the 2008 crash before then, it's not like the stock market was ridiculously overvalued.

I guess that's the other thing is that anytime you use a single variable analysis, you're bound to be wrong because there's always a million other variables. People always dunk on single variable analysis and rightfully so, but do you think there's anybody that actually uses a single variable to explain how the world works? Does the Fed count? I don't know. Yes, it's true. I guess maybe beginning investors.

I remember when I first started investing, I read the intelligent investor and I thought, oh, P.E ratios. That's what I'm going to use. Yeah, I did that too. This stock is trading at a lower P.E. ratio than that stock, it's got to be a better buy. And that doesn't always grow. Okay. Speaking of valuations, this is from Bloomberg.

Headline reads, NASDAQ 100 peaked a year ago. Now we know it was a bubble. They show that basically the NASDAQ multiples over the last 10 years or so went way above average and now have come back to average. And here's a line. Of the companies in the index, 22% had 4 PEs above 50, 26% were trading greater than 10 times their next 12 months sales. My problem, this is splitting hairs here. The NASDAQ at its worst point is down 35%. It's down 30% now from the highs. It could obviously go much lower. I don't think you can call like an average bear market a bubble. I think to be a bubble, you almost have to fall 50 or 60% from the highs. And we could still get there. Things could still get worse. The forward PE at its peak was like over 30 times, which is historically very high. Would you call that a bubble?

Certainly, some areas didn't make sense. Tesla over a trillion dollar market cap trading at 30 times sales and what was the PE on that? bad boy. I guess you could say one-fifth of tech stocks were in a massive bubble, but the index itself was probably just massively overvalued. Yeah, and it was trading over 100 times earnings. Yeah, certain areas of the market were probably in a bubble. Was all of giant tech, and I know the NASDAQ 100 is not only giant tech, but was all of that in a bubble? I don't think you could say that like Apple and Microsoft and Google were in a bubble, and those are the ones that make. So my point is just, I feel like to get a bubble, you have to fall like 50 or 60 percent from the

highs. That's my starting definition. Is that fair? I would start with valuations rather than the unwind. They were expensive. If we're doing single variable analysis again, the unwind, a lot of people can point to the interest rates rising. I looked at the 10-year treasury, and it peaked at the highest level like a month ago at 4.25%. You'd say four and a quarter. I like to use decimal points. It's now back to like 3.4.7%. Inflation could stay higher for a while and these rates could obviously go up. Let's just say inflation has peak just rolling over, and interest rates have reached their high for the cycle. I don't know if that's true, but let's just say that has. Would it be surprising to you that rates didn't go higher when inflation was 8 to 9 percent?

Depends how transitory it was. I guess my point is, you never know what's going to happen in the future. But if rates weren't going to go to 6 or 7 percent now, when will they ever? Because with inflation that high, so look at this next chart I put in here, 1975 to 1999. I looked at the 10 year, the lowest it ever got from that 25-year period was 4.2%. Basically, the high of this period is the low of that period. Obviously, that was a higher starting level, but I don't know, maybe we are just in this period of secular interest rates being lower

because of demographics and technology and all this stuff. I feel like everyone is predicting the opposite of that going forward, but wouldn't rates have to go much higher if that prolonged period of inflation is going to be here? You would think. Maybe the bond market is wrong again. I don't know. Again, we got some Fed talk this week.

the way, Tuesday, 9.26 a.m. Yesterday, Bullard came out and was talking pretty hawkish about terminal rates and what the market might be misinterpreting and the market responded. You know where the hawkish, dubbish stuff comes from? Why is that? I've never heard a good explanation. Oh, I thought you're about to drop some knowledge. I don't know it. But again, you had asked the question, will the market call the Fed's bluff? Will the market look past it for two weeks in a row now? I think it was brainer the week before Fed officials come out, talk hawkish, market falls. So your question has now been answered. I don't know if it's been answered. No, it's been answered. Could change. I'm going to need something more than a 1% down day,

though, for that answer. Listen, it could change going forward, but two weeks in a row, we had Fed official come out, talk tough, and the market fell, so that's it. Scoreboard. Speaking of scoreboard, that's true. I've changed my ways as better. I touched on this last week, but I said, how could I take the lines? Of course the bill's going to kill him. Guess what? I did take the lines with the points. How many points did they have? I think, well, was it nine and a half? Whatever it was. It took the lines and one, not to brag. Here's the deal. Every better has had multiple bad beats. For example, earlier in the year, I money-lined the chiefs in a parlay with a bunch of other teams and they lost to the Colts. How? I don't know. They lost.

Bad beat. Bad beats by definition only happen when you pick a favorite and they don't cover. I'm done with bad beats. I'm done with bad beats. So the over and the favorite are like call options. They're overpriced because everybody wants to pick the winner and the over. Who's taking the dog? You feel like a sucker taking the Steelers on the road against a Colts? Another winner, not to brag. You take the points. This is single variable analysis for sports gambling. No, it's not. The winners and the points are overpriced. That's fair. If you just do it enough and you have enough diversification, it probably works. You have to be diversified.

Of course. You're going to get beat on that one too. But for some reason, I was really into the sports betting thing for a while right when it came out and I was all over it and I was betting multiple games every week. And I've just stopped now. I don't know why. For some reason, it ran its course for me. It ebbs and flows.

If I have like a few rough weeks, I shut it down. Take several weeks off. You're doing your weekly call options. I'm trading leaps because I just pick like the Super Bowl and NBA champions before the year. Yeah, I do that too. That's good fun. Those are the only ones I do anymore. By the way, congrats on the Michigan.

win. That was a big one. He was. He was. He was. Best game ever? I think that might have been the most impressive win of my lifetime. As far as I'm concerned, college football is the ultimate. And that was a totally unexpected win. I did not expect it to happen. Our best player was hurt. And we still won. So yes, it was pretty amazing. Okay, from Nick Colas at Datatrek. He says, two-year treasuries now yield 0.7 points more than the 10 year. We must go back to the early 1980s to find a wider spread for this closely watched indicator of future recession risk. I guess if the Fed's going to continue to talk tough, we're going to get to record levels of an inversion. We have to if they're going to stay on the course. I wonder, I'm not throwing out the yield curve as an indicator by any means, but given how

involved the Fed is, has it lost some of its, I don't want to say predictive power, but some of its meaning? It's just interesting that the long end of the curve is obviously arguing with the Fed. The Fed continuing to raise rates and short rates continue to go up. But the 10, 20, 30 year bonds continue to say, we don't care. We're staying where we are. We're staying put or we're not going up much. That's an interesting dynamic to me. And eventually, doesn't that make the Fed blink potentially if they keep raising short-term rates and longer-term rates stay low? That's a good question. I really would love to be a fly in the wall how they think about the yield curve. Don't know. Maybe the market's getting wrong. Ben, we got a million people

emailing us that the Merriam-Webster's word of the year. You know what it is? Did you see that in our inbox? Gaslighting. Yes. I feel like it's definitely the word of the year. Very cliche. I still don't know what it means, but I kind of got it. I'm never going to use it. Sorry. I might remove it from the vocab. Oh, we had minutes. We had the minutes last week.

They said, this is from Kathy Jones. FOMC minutes. It seems like a growing consensus that it's time to wait for data to reflect lagged impact of rapid tightening to date. That's good. They're reflecting. Terminal rate debate is going on among the various, in quotes. What does that mean? The various?

Various people, I guess. I don't know. She said reality is Fed won't know the terminal rate. until it's behind them. It makes sense to me. You know what I thought was behind us? COVID. Turns out it's not. A bunch of people are getting it. There's sniffles all over the place. I've got the sniffles. Robin tested yesterday and Kobe walked downstairs and saw the test. It goes, COVID. She's negative. Okay. I think everyone's just getting sick with everything. I still blame the little kids. They're just germ receptacles. I feel like everyone in our house has had three different colds

already this year. Yeah, I've had a sniffle for for three weeks. Jeffrey Clintop tweeted. What is this? Germany PPI, overlay with global supply chain pressures. He said the chart strongly suggests inflation in Germany was supply train driven, not the result of monetary policy. So can ECB pause now with eye towards continued improvement in supply chains? And I think the Fed has to wrestle with the same dynamics, because inflation is rolling over. But shouldn't the supply chain stuff be getting better now, too? Aren't we getting to that point? All the... No, it is. Containership stuff is getting better. Supply chain pressures are easing. So I guess if that happens, the supply chain stuff, pressure eases, and if inflation doesn't ease,

then we have our answer, I suppose. But they're both easing at the same time, right? Correct. So it's not the Fed and ECB's fault for inflation, is that we're saying? No, no, no, no, nobody's saying that. It's not all their fault. There's no single variable analysis in, all right, I'm going to let that one go from now. I'm looking for a tweet because we have a chart in the dock from the FT that NACA

tweeted, active versus passive fund flows since 2000, and we know the story here. This is an amazing chart. Oh, here it is, here it is. Ben Johnson tweeted, trailing 12-month flows for active, passive mutual funds and ETFs. And Ben, I'm putting this on Doc now. Check this out. Active mutual funds in particular has collapsed.

Whoa. Is that wild? So I think Eric Balchunis can take the victory lap of victory laps on this. Because people have been saying over the years, wait for a stock picker's market, a bear market, for active to shine, and investors will come back. No, no, no, no. As Eric Bautrinus has been saying, that's when the bloodbeth really begins in earnest, because people leave, whether it's, they're scared, underperformance, tax loss harvesting, going into indexes. Well, 2020 is the ultimate portfolio reset, because stocks and bonds are both down double digits. And so people can look at,

take their losses and start from a clean slate and be like, this is what I want my portfolio to be. Like, I'm going to get out of active bond funds and active stock funds and start over because I don't have to worry about the tax implications. I don't know if this is ironic, but I think this is probably stock active mutual funds best year in a long time, just with value outperforming and energy outperforming, don't you think? I honestly think if it wasn't for 401K plans, active mutual funds would be doing even worse in terms of flows. I'm guessing the majority of their fund flows come from 401K plans that people just have set on autopilot. And without that, they would be even in worse shape.

Now, there's a lot of people that have made their bones on the fact that these flows are distorting markets, and I don't know what the evidence says. I'm sure there's evidence to support and evidence to debunk that theory. But just common sense, how is it not impacting the markets in some way? It has to be. How many marginal traders do you really need to set prices? I guess would be my question. That's a fair argument.

That being said, all of these flows into passive, I think it has to be. doing. Well, okay, but look at this next chart. Ownership of the U.S. equity market. This is from Golden Sacks. I think it comes around quarterly, pretty much, and it shows household percentage of ownership, ETFs, passive mutual funds, active mutual funds, pensions, foreign investors, hedge funds, all this stuff. If you just look at the fund industry, it looks like index funds are swallowing it whole. But the stock market itself, like, so the household thing, I would imagine that's because someone like Jeff Bezos owns billions of dollars of Amazon and CEOs and they own all these individual shares. So household.

themselves dwarf that. My other counterpoint to the index fund thing, messing with the market, back in the day, people used to literally buy and hold stocks. In the 50s and 60s, 40s, people used to buy and hold stocks and never trade them. Individuals rarely ever traded stocks. There wasn't nearly as much of an institutional underpinning to the stock market as there was. There's so much more trading that goes on now. I definitely buy the argument that you just made how many buys and sellers do you really need to make an efficient market? And I think for the most part we have that. You know the William Bernstein thing? His answer to that question was two dentists in Lubbock, Texas. That's all you need. Two people. I think that might not quite work, but you get the point.

We asked the question, just to ask, not that we thought it was going to happen, but would it be possible for the bear market to end? Is the bear market ending and bottoming the same thing? Does the bottom mark the end? I think the bottom marks the end, yes. That's an interesting little question. Everyone assumes the bear market in 2009 ended March 6th or 9th or whatever that day was. That was the end of the bear market when it bottomed. Okay. I don't know what the answer to that question is. You could debate that until the cows come home.

Am I right? It's another saying I don't understand. Why do the cows come home? They're fenced in. What are they coming home for? I don't know who this chart is from some. I apologize. We stole from somebody.

No bear market has ever ended before the associated recession has begun. It might be a fool's errand to think that this time is different, but there's a lot of funky dynamics in this current environment. To your point about maybe the yield curve not matter as much because the Fed is involved, this is the weirdest economic market environment ever, where everyone knows a recession is coming. Everyone thinks they know a recession is coming. And it wouldn't shock me if this is the time that it happened.

I'm going to talk about this with Josh tonight, but does the idea that everyone, quote, knows a recession is coming? Does that make a recession more likely because they pull in? or does it perhaps stave it off because they get out in front of it? I think the former. How about this? Let's say the market is priced in a minor recession. I think maybe the magnitude of the recession would be the thing that matters. What if the recession is worse than people are thinking? That could be the another leg down for the market. Oh, that will be. That's what I think. It's like what is priced in and obviously no one knows. That's the hard part.

The Fed is saying, sorry, I miss this. We talked on the minutes. They're saying that this is from the Wall Street Journal. Central Bank staff saw U.S. recession next year is almost as likely as their baseline prediction of weak growth than it showed. So they're basically putting a recession on the same wavelength as weak growth for their baseline. So recession has moved to more or less a baseline for the Fed next year. I think it makes sense. Ryan Dietrich out with some supportive debunking of that credit card chart. So last week we showed, what did we show, Ben? It was credit card debt outstanding versus personal savings rate. Credit card is exploding higher, personal savings rate going lower. there it was. So Ryan said credit card debt is near pre-pandemic levels, and this is the latest worry.

What they don't tell you is consumers are using only 21% of their total credit well beneath the 24% average pre-pandemic. To me, that's a good stat. That's meaningful. I've never heard that one before. How much of a credit you're actually using? Yeah, denominator. Also, household debt payments relative to income is near historically low levels. People aren't overextended. My worry is, I guess if inflation stayed higher, we're going to recession, that these numbers are just going to get way worse because people are going to want to continue to spend. Ben, last night I played basketball. Okay, any injuries?

No. Also, wait, before you get into your story, a lot of people said that I was a jerk because I said that you should complain of chest pains when going to the ER. I was being a little facetious because, listen, I sat at the ER with my son and stomach pains for like three hours waiting to see someone. I should have used a chest pain thing. I should have said his stomach pains are moving up. Doubling down. People said, you know, Ben, you shouldn't tell people to say that. they have chest pains going into the ER.

It's like, yeah, I was kidding. I felt my left knee getting a little rickety. I felt a little looseness. So, you know what I think I'm going to do? This is how you know you're like totally over the hill. I'm going to get a knee brace. Knee brace. Okay.

Thoughts? Just a little extra support. You're almost 40, so it's about time. You should get some rec specs so you can see the ball coming at you too since your eyes are so bad. Wait, what? Oh, goggles? Yeah, the Rexxx.

Horace Grant, yeah. You know, one of the best movie basketball scenes, like the most underrated ones in history is Cable Guy. Along came Polly. That's a well-known one. Cable guy when Jim Carrey does like the suicide sprints to warm up. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

You know, it's another best scene. What's the movie with Brendan Frazier where he gets like all of these wishes? Oh, yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about. Oh, bedazzled. Oh, that's right. He's like seven feet tall. Yeah, that's not bad. What's this guy?

At guy dealership. This is a car guy sticking with inflation coming down. I don't know who this is. He's always got really good stats, though. Great stats. Exotic car market is getting decent. decimated right now. 2,021 Mercedes G-Wagon with under 4,000 miles just sold for 187K at auction,

which still sounds ludicrously high for a car, but maybe not that car. That's nearly an 80,000 or 30% drop in under 12 months. So it goes regular car, luxury car, exotic car? I don't know exotic cars were a thing. Makes sense. That's just a tad. I don't know how much this factors into inflation, but too high for your taste? Just a tad.

Moving to crypto. My God. It won't stop. What do you got? Crypto. This is Howard Linson. I think he quote tweeted himself. This is from last year in 2021 before crypto crashed. He posted a one-year chart of Solana. He said the one-year price chart of Solana has stretched my imagination, maybe rethink everything I thought I knew about investing in markets and venture capital, exciting and humbling. And it's showing the price going from a dollar to

$250. And this is basically he tweeted this at the peak. I think he kind of made a comment last week saying hindsight all this. I think it's back to what 13 or 14? Look at the chart of Solana going from nothing, this is the bubble chart right here. We talked about the NASDAQ- 17,000 percent. But no, that was driven by fundamentals. Not knowing how these protocols work. Is this the crypto thing that dies,

Solana because it was so tied to Sandbank-Mand-Fried? I don't know. What I do know is that more news keeps coming out. Lucas Newsie, Nuzzi, I'm not sure how you pronounce the last name. We spoke about him a few weeks ago, uncovering a lot of the stuff that was happening on chain with Alameda. and it looks like Silvergate is getting involved or implicated. There's allegations that they might not have done all of their banking duties.

And we asked a question, was Alameda scam the whole time? In other words, all of these profits that they were arbitraging from U.S. to Japan. And was that all a sham too? Maybe, maybe not. But he said, as you can see, the majority of outflows happened in Q4, 2021. Things noticeably cooled down after that. To us, this is a sign that they took a huge. huge hit as markets contracted in Q4. As mind-blowing as this might be, it's possible by the time

terror happened, they were broke. So we thought the Terra Luna, GBTC, three hours unwind, brought them down. It's possible the hedge fund blew up before that. And they were papering over it with client deposits, and that's how they stayed aflover so long. He also says, it's clear looking at FTT markets on Binance that a large investor was allocating a considerable amount of USDT into protecting key price levels. Our hypothesis is that Alameda was propping up that market potentially with FTX user funds. Oof. This evidence adds a whole new dimension to the question of where did the user fund go. It's possible that funds were also used to prop up FTT's price starting in early 2022. Which I guess shows how easy it is to manipulate these markets if they're not that freely tradable.

Doug Colquitt tweeted the same thing. Alameda's massive loss in 2021 indicates that the insolpice didn't just originate in the Luna blowup. Still waiting for this guy to show up in handcuffs somewhere. It is disturbing to say the least. Oh, what are your thoughts on the New York Times? Aaron Sorkin was getting dragged because they're having him on stage virtually. I'm guessing he's not leaving, but I was not at all surprised. I'm not surprised that the New York Times is taking heat, given some of the headlines

and alleged puff pieces that have been written about this whole debacle. Duncan, what did he say? Oh, you said Aaron Sorkin. It's Andrew Ross Sorkin. I said Aaron Sorkin. My bad. us. Now you could say journalist's integrity. They're also a capitalist enterprise. I hesitate to say because I don't want to get killed, but I'm not saying I don't see anything wrong with it, but I'm just

not surprised at all that they would interview him. Why wouldn't they? I'm watching the newest season of the Crown, and it was like the late 80s, early 90s, and there was like a tape that came out that implicated Prince Charles was cheating on Princess Diana. And a newspaper got a hold of the tape. And they decided to sit on that tape for two years and didn't want to play it because they didn't want to go against the monarchy and, like, cause a problem. And it just seemed to me how innocent, like, if that came out today, that would be immediately release everywhere, and they'd be cashing in on it. I wrote a piece about this this weekend, about how I think it's kind of gross that we're putting all these cheaters and fraudsters on a pedestal. And Sam Begman-Fried's going

to get his own movie. There's going to be books. There's going to be documentaries. We do this for all of them now. Elizabeth Holmes, I think the worst one, I still can't really watch Wolf of Wall Street, because I think Jordan Belford's just such a scumbag. And I feel like they prop him up, and he'd never even felt bad about what he did all those people. And I think it's kind of gross how we do this. I think this is just the way the world works now. It's a good story. I'm not blaming anyone for doing it because a quirky sociopath makes for a really compelling story. I can't blame reporters in Hollywood for propping them up, but I think it's kind of gross that these anti-heroes are like our people we look up to now for some reason that we put on a pedestal.

I wonder if the narrative will switch. What if Andrew Ross just destroys him and asks the questions that he should? And I'm going to be given benefit of that. I think he will. However, if he doesn't, then he will rightfully get dragged to hell. So we'll say. There's a lot of pressure. All right, Miami nightclubs. But hey, if Sam would make for free, it said, I'll come on animal spirits. We would probably talk to him, wouldn't we? I don't know. Okay. None of this point. So there's a club called it's 11 and the L's are ones. 11 started accepting payment and cryptocurrency in April 2021. The club processed more than $6 million worth of transactions last year. But in the past three months, the club has processed less than $10,000 a year.

One of the club guys, the bartender owners, I don't know, I said bartender owners. Sorry about that brain break. He said, you wouldn't normally show your bank account, but people do show their crypto wallets. I've seen more crypto wallets in a year than I've seen bank accounts in a lifetime. What does that mean? People bragging and showing it off? Yeah, probably on their phone. I think that this is a obvious, but getting rich quick is just a disaster. You can't maintain any sense of normalcy if you go from a normal person to a millionaire, 10 millionaire in under a year. It just breaks your brain. I don't care who you are. That was always the thing that was weirdest to me about

everything going on is that so many people were getting rich way too fast and way too easy. It's not normal for that to happen. I agree. And you're right. There's going to be a lot of people who psychologically money is going to be a weird, bizarre topic for them. Because how many thousands of people probably already saw the high watermark of their wealth in their entire lifetime. There's a lot of people who saw more money than they're ever going to see again, probably. James Safeord had a really, really good tweet threat. So the known unknown right now is what's going on with DCG, which we discussed last week, and GBTC. So James had a really great thread showing that DCG owns a ton of GBTC, the parent company, owns a ton of the underlying.

James said vast majority of that massive jump in shares actually happened in one fell swoop when three hours capital defaulted on a loan from Genesis because GBTC was used as collateral. GBTC really was at the epicenter of a lot of this. I guess so. Obviously so was all the leverage, though. I feel like GBTC was like the starting point, and then it morphed from there. And then once that broke, then people had to go elsewhere to get free money. Is that your thinking? Yes. Crypto companies currently in bankruptcy proceeding. Somebody tweeted this. Three hours capital,

Voyager, Celsius, FTX, BlockFi. This is a really dumb question. That they're like 45 or 50% discount to NAV. How can someone not swoop in and say, I'm going to buy all of your Bitcoin for 60 cents? I think there is something in the legalese preventing that from happening. Okay. I mean, obviously. Like an activist investor can't come in because, yeah, you would think, why, not shake it up. BlockFi's fourth largest creditor is the SEC. They were fined $100 million and I guess only paid $70 because they owe them 30. And everyone is rightfully saying, I hope the SEC does not collect that $30 million. And whatever money is left goes to people that are stuck.

That's one of the stranger parts about the BlockFi thing is that they paid a huge fine to the SEC, obviously not all of it. And they were like in the process of being regulated. I would love to hear better explanation for me. I feel like the SEC's not saying much about any of this. I'd love to hear about what they knew, what they didn't know, and their whole thoughts on all this stuff, because it seems like they just don't see anything. Also, people are dunking in the BlockFi stuff or going out of business. Is it really a surprise that they filed for bankruptcy when the person that bailed them out was running a Ponzi scheme? I mean, isn't that kind of obvious they're going to go out of business at that point? Once FTX went down? Yeah, wasn't that obvious? All the places

that FTC took over were going to go out of business. Yes. Once your backstopper goes under, yes. You're no longer backstopped. All right, so Bitcoin and Ethereum, we're both down 65-ish percent. year-to-date, anything tied to crypto equities. Coinbase is down 83, Silvergate is down 82. I know that Coinbase, people can trade crypto other than Bitcoin, but it is kind of crazy that Coinbase is done so much more than Bitcoin this year. And from the top, that Coinbase is underperforming Bitcoin. When Coinbase went public, we kind of said, well, they be okay because they'll still get trading fees because they're a broker if when Bitcoin crashes. I thought they would. I guess I didn't anticipate the magnitude of the crash and the fact that

people don't trade. This is a trust thing, too. They're done more than Bitcoin because people don't trust any of the exchanges right now, nor should they at this point, probably. Moving on to real estate, we got some data this morning. Case Schiller, month over month down 1.24%, a little bit worse than expected. That's only worse than expected if you go two decimal places out. If it's one decimal point, it's right on expectations.

The year for year up 10%. But look at this. The pace of increases, obviously, is rolling dramatically. Michael McDonough broke this out by all of the cities. What's rolling over the hardest? What is that orange line been? Is that Tampa? Yeah, looks like Tampa.

Hard to say. But is this a chart crime? I don't know if it's a crime. It's not a crime because it's just showing data. But what this is showing is the fastest housing slowdown on record. It's a cumulative change in existing single family home sales during Fed hiking cycles. And existing homesales are down 24%. We're now seven months after the first Fed hike.

The reason why I say this is a chart crime, but it's not. This data is from Apollo is because of where we were coming from. We're coming off extreme growth. If you would assume this out like 12 months prior, it wouldn't look as bad. I mean, of course, with rates going up as high as they did, it makes sense that you're not seeing as many houses sold. To me, this chart makes sense. Yes. They'd see a massive drop off.

Then last week, you were debunking, so Derek Thompson did a post on like the interest rate explaining everything and you took the other side, which I'm not really sure why. I think it's fairly odd. I got some more ammo. Okay. Go. The floor is yours. Why was there not a bubble in Japan or Europe? Rates were negative in Europe. Okay. No, not okay. Do you want to know what the short-term rate not okay? We're talking about- Let me lay out my course here. Do you know what the short-term interest rates were in China and Europe? Why? It's true. There were negative interest rates in Japan and Europe. Why was there no bubble there? I'm talking about what happens when interest rates go from 0 to 5%. Well, of course, most every bubble in history has been pricked by interest rates going

higher, but you can't say every bubble in history has been caused by interest rates going lower. How's that? I did not say that. I said that now that we are on the other side of this, it is obvious that a lot of what was happening was only happening because of low interest rates. That is not controversial. Human nature is a way bigger factor to me than interest. rates. I'm sorry. Single variable guy. Single variable. Mortgage rates were 4% before the pandemic happened. The pandemic happened. Rates went to 3% and the housing market goes bananas. Was that because rates or because human nature? It's human nature. I'm sorry, it's people. These are erroneous arguments. Brett Winton tweeted. You want to know what the short-term interest rate was when Charles Ponzi ran his scheme

or short-term rates back then? Five percent. You could earn five percent. Do people say, and Charles Ponzi's given me 40 percent per month, but I could do five percent. It's human nature. All right. Listen. People are always the problem. Two things can be true. People can do dumb shit when interest rates are not at zero percent. However, free money makes people do more dumb things. But not in Europe for some reason. Honestly, I think there's a cultural thing here. In America, we are more prone to bubbles in doing dumb things. How about that? That's also true. Because interest rates have been near zero for 35 years in Japan. Do you let me get to it? Brett Wenton. You keep saying I'm unequivocally wrong and I'm disproving your point. Check by check here. This is bad evidence. It's faulty. This is why I'm glad you're not a judge or something, because you can't see the evidence

in front of your face. I'm presenting the evidence to. By the way, my cousin Vinnie's been on, that's got to be top 10 most rewatchable movies of all time. I can't go buy it when it's on. Yes. Every time I have to stop. You keep using the word evidence.

Finally, let me quote Brett Winton, who said, direct evidence of the decline in VC investment volumes. The unicorn birth rate has collapsed. So we're looking at daily unicorn birth rate, 90-day rolling average, and a unicorn is when a private company becomes worth a billion dollars. This went vertical in 2020, 2020, 2021, and it has since collapsed. And that, according to Ben, has nothing to do with interest rates going from zero to five percent. Total coincidence.

You're doing two different arguments, you know, you're saying low interest rates cause it. I'm saying every time a bubble pops, interest rates are going higher. Look at your numbers from 2009 to 2015. Interest rates were 0% at the Fed from that whole period. Where's all the unicorns? Over that time, interest rates were at zero. That's exactly right. I'm saying when interest rates go from zero to five, the equation changes radically.

We're splitting hairs here. But saying low interest rates caused everything is different than saying higher interest rates can cause things to slow down. It's almost always higher interest rates that causes a bubble to slow down. I'm not saying low interest rates caused everything. I'm just saying when interest rates go from free to not, it unravels. Yeah, we're having different arguments here. That's fair. We're arguing past each other.

I think we're on the other side of the road. Okay. Quarter tweeted, here are six public companies that are now valued way below their total funding since inception. ACAST. So we're looking at enterprise value today as a percentage of total funding. ACAS, bird, deliveroo. I don't know what this next one is. This is VC funding.

I don't know what the next three are. I can't read two of them and the other one's just a symbol. I don't recognize. But the point is... It's like a hieroglyphic. The point is, these companies don't get funded with 5% interest rates. Can we agree on that? Yeah, probably.

Okay. And I do think this time, the speed at which went from 0 to 5, we've never seen that before. That happened that quickly. I think that that's a big part of it. But don't you think that now that rates are at 5% and people will digest them and get used to them and stuff will start getting funded again. But I think that initial shock of going through 0 to 5, yes, had a huge impact.

Okay. I've never known if these. Reddit posts are for real or not. Someone posts a Reddit post of something crazy and people dunk on it or they make weird comments. And I'm always a little dubious that people are probably just making it up. But this is an interesting way. So this person says they're mid-30s, director at a fang company, makes a good salary and has

a net worth of $2.5 million dollars. But a bunch of their friends buy $10 million houses in the Bay Area. And at the end, the kicker is just feeling down and wondering if I'm on the wrong path here. Obviously, a lot of people dunked on this saying, come on, $10 million houses, and I don't know. Do you think that it really got that bad in technology for some people where they thought that all that stuff was just normal? That being mid-30s, buying $10 million. It does get normal if that's all you say.

Here's my take on this. I completely understand the dunking, but I also completely understand how this person feels. They feel how they feel. These are first world problems. I think this is the sort of thing that you probably just keep to yourself. and there's nothing wrong with feeling this way. When you stop talking for a little bit, Rick. This is the type of thing that you talk to your therapist about.

You don't talk to the world about. You don't solve this, though? Remote work. Remote work solves this. If you work for a tech company, you can work from anywhere else, and you move to Denver or something. You're out of the Bay Area. I don't think you see this stuff as much.

And remote work probably makes that keeping up with the Jones is much easier to stomach for people if that's something they have a problem with. Did you buy anything for Black Friday? Oh, I did. What did you get? I told you that I need some new pots and pans. So I went on, and you're right, they're not cheap. I was prepared to buy a set for $600 from, I think, William Sonoma.

And Robin said, what are you nuts? We're not doing that. So I said, okay, I don't know. I thought that's what they cost. Actually, I bought a set from Amazon basics for $140 bucks. However, I think they suck. They look like stainless steel. Well, here's the thing.

If you get the lower priced ones, you buy a new one in five years and throw the other one out. Yeah. What did you buy? I waited and waited. I got a TV. I got one of those Samsung frame ones, and it was whatever, 1999 retail, and I got it for $1,200. I got a pretty good deal. I can't remember who did it, but someone gave me a family and friends discount for Samsung,

some listener of the show, so thank you to whoever did that. But I don't know how this is possible. They offered 0% financing for 36 months, and I'm thinking, why would I not do that? It's like $30 a month to pay off the TV or something, 0% financing for 36 months. How are places still able to offer that? Is that just because I have pristine credit? So you take the money, you put it into short-term treasure rates, and then you're actually earning money to buy this TV.

In a higher inflation environment, higher rates, higher inflation. I don't know how places are still a bit off for this. Don't know. What I do know is that Amazon plans to invest $1 billion a year in movies for theaters. It's great news. Remember a couple years ago I said Disney should buy movie theaters? You did. Great idea.

So Amazon is going to try to do 12 movies a year. I don't really get what Netflix is doing here. And as a shareholder, I'm thinking about writing a letter. Letter to the editor here. No, to management. The streaming giant releases sequel to Knives Ad in Theaters on Wednesday, which I do want to see it in theaters because I do like that movie quite a bit. The first one, I think, is one of the better movies of the last five or seven years. A lot of fun.

I liked it. So the first one did $313 million in theaters. They're going to release this in theaters just for a week. What's the thought process there? I don't get it. Trying to get some buzz, I guess. It's going to be released right before Christmas, right? Why just a week?

I understand they want to drive people to Netflix, but is there anybody who's going to sign up for Netflix just to watch Knives Out? If you were that big of a fan of Knives Out, you're probably a TV watcher. You probably already have a Netflix subscription. Michael, Michael, as a crypto guy, you should realize this is scarcity. They're creating scarcity. I'm guessing it's kind of a marketing ploy where they're trying to get people to talk about it. And then if it's only out for a week and you missed it, then you go, oh, you have to get

Netflix if you want to see this now. I'm guessing that's the thought process. You're right. It doesn't seem particularly well. out. So Disney's under the microscope as Iger comes in. I got his first town hall meeting. He said that Disney priorities are profitability and taking hard look at cost structure. So one of the things that Cheapack was getting ridiculed for was what he did at the parks, nickel and dimming people, the genie pass, all that sort of stuff. But apparently, I didn't realize this. It made for an awful

time at the park. You're on your phone constantly trying to figure out rides and lunch, and it's like a homework assignment to be there. Yeah, I'm so excited to go to Disney. But I'm also kind of dreading the work involved. But apparently the parks are in trouble. To my credit, my wife did it all, so I didn't have to do any of it. Margins are down. They're doing sales. You remember that Star Wars thing where you could say in a Star Wars hotel? I think there's 100 rooms, five grand in the nights, something like that. Shocker, people don't want to pay that. So they're doing sales there. This is in trouble, huh? Stock price would say so. This could be a massive. So his whole thing for coming in as a white knight is, I'm going to do a massive turnaround and then right off into the

sunset. The thing is, I guess expectations are so low and the stock price is so low. he doesn't have to do all that much turn it around, correct? He came into a pretty opportune time, I would say. He is a good market timer. Okay, have you seen this chart going around from Washington Post? Americans who spend their time with, they talk about Americans 15 and older, and it talks about do you spend time alone with friends or with companions? And since 2013...

How do they track this? Survey? It's got to be. This is going to be a tough one. So time alone is skyrocketed. Time with friends and companions has fallen, which obviously makes sense for the pandemic. It crashed. Now it's coming back a little bit. And I don't know, I guess being anti-survey, I wonder about this kind of stuff, but I guess this is the one downside with technology is that technology makes it so much easier to just stay in and play video games or watch streaming or play on your phone or be on social media. And this is probably a case where technology, even though it's done so many amazing things, is probably making us worse off in the aggregate. Well, it's definitely not good for our mental health.

Even though as someone who's now in his 40s and gotten older, I can say that I'm so much more comfortable spending time alone. But if I was doing this in my 20s, then you'd be worrying about me because that's the time when you should be out with spending time with friends and not by yourself. And I think it's just for young people, the attachment to the phone, I am so happy that I went through high school and college without social media. I didn't get a cell phone until my senior year of college.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that's how old I am. I use calling cards to call home from my college. dorm room. And honestly, looking back on it now without having, I'm so glad that I did not have camera phones and social media. What was a calling card? Remember, you'd have like a 300 minute calling card and you'd enter the number. And once that 300 minutes was up, it was gone. That's how old I am. One more before we get to some recommendation. Phil Perlman has this stuff set called Prime Cuts. And he talks a lot about health and wellness. I love this take he had. And he said, there's always

these stats that show if you miss the best five worst days in the stock market or the worst days, you'd do much better or worse, whatever. He's saying that same level of extremity exists in weight gain. So he said, the average adult gains one to two pounds per year. But the majority of it comes between November, December, January. It's all seasonally. You get it around the holidays. So he's saying the majority of that one to two pounds comes during the winter months when people are inside. They're not as active in Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's. Well, I do it to stay warm. That's how you're doing. It's interesting, though. I never thought about this way, but it totally makes a lot of sense that you gain all of your weight in the winter,

and then you have your New Year's resolution, and you maybe lose it a little summer game. I think I look exactly like this. My weight yo-yo's fluctuates. All the time? All the time. I will say it's got to be harder for someone in New York with the amount of food options you guys have. Well, I like to keep my body on my toes. So you and I were in Arkansas last month or whatever, and you were so excited because you

saw Jimmy Johns. I feel like we have a Jimmy Johns every two miles here in Grand Rapids, and you were excited because they don't have a lot of chains like that in New York. You were, like, thrilled to see Jimmy Johns. Well, we've got, like, Subway, but I like Jimmy Jones. That's a good product. They have good mail there. You know what it is?

Because I get the Italian hero. I think it's the, they put oregano on it. I don't know, something about it. Jimmy Jones is good. All right, one more. I wanted to give a shout out to, I used to live, when I first moved out after college, I lived in Detroit suburbs for a couple years. And every once in a while, we'd go downtown for a Tigers game,

or go to casino or sometimes my wife, and I would go to see a comedy show down there. Before he got canceled, we saw Luis K. And he basically described downtown Detroit as this looks like Bosnia and Sarajevo during the war there. That's how he described it. And that's kind of how bad it was. We went to Detroit this weekend.

We took our kids because our local high school team made it to the finals. And they play the final high school championship game at Ford Field, where the Lions play. And we went down there. We got a hotel, stay overnight so the kids could swim at the pool after the game. And we were walking around, and downtown Detroit is, like, fantastic now. It's got all these little shops and restaurants There are Christmas lights and decorations hung everywhere They had an ice skating rink

There was people everywhere in the past Detroit got so decimated when people left Because of all the auto jobs leaving That downtown was basically like a wasteland And you'd not want to go down there It looks kind of like a little mini Chicago now Because the buildings are also cool I'm just fascinated at how they were able to turn that city around

And how great it looks now Shout to the Detroit You got it. Any recommendations? I do. I do have a few, Ben. Thank you for the nudge on a simple plan because it's been on my list forever, and that was a great movie. Not a good movie, a great movie, and a timeless movie. You could watch that movie today when it was made in 1993, in 10 years, and 20 and 40 years. It is just a timeless tale, and I cannot recommend it enough. Bill Paxton and

Billy Bob are perfectly cast. By the way, is Bill Paxton one of the most underrated actors of our generation? He's pretty great. His role in aliens for a long time. As Hudson was one of my favorites. Plus as chat in weird science and the older brother. Yes. Gone too soon. So anyway, a simple plan is on HBO Max. The Sam Ramey film cannot recommend it enough. There is a new show on Hulu, maybe FX. I watch on Hulu. Fleischman is in trouble. I recommended this, and I'll get into this in a second, but I recommended this. I was out to dinner with friends. And she said, I trust you. And I said, oh yeah, you should watch Bon Tomahawk then. Obviously, she's not So Fleishman is in trouble is with Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes as the stars.

How many episodes are you in? Three. I watched the first episode and I'm in. I would say it's probably not for everyone. It is a very New York show. True. It's Upper East Side or whatever side and they get divorced and he's a newly single, 40-year-old neurotic guy, doctor dating.

It feels like a No-Bomback kind of movie. Very much. It feels like a movie, but it's a show. Very much. And I cannot be more all the way in. I love it. It's great. All right. Here's one that I love. Because there's no good movies coming out these days, it's all TV shows. I've been going through the classics too on HBO. And I've, for some reason, never seen The Big Chill. That's one of my holes in the 80s repertoire. Have you ever seen

that? Nope. Not a movie for you. But the star just died. What's his name? Kevin Klein, Glenn, Glenn Close. William Hurt. William Hurt. Tom Barringer, Jeff Goldblum. It's like an early 80s. It's an 80s movie without the cheesiness. It's a group of people who were really good friends in college and 10 years later they come back because one of their friends has killed themselves and they come back to his funeral and they all stay in the same house over the weekend and it's honestly one of the better written movies I've ever seen it's just like the dialogue and the back and forth of them this was not a Michael movie at all this is totally a Ben movie but I really really liked it and great like 1960s soundtrack totally enjoyed it 60s soundtrack what does it even mean what do you mean

great 1960s movie heard it through the grapevine oritha franklin every song is just like a classic I also rewatch Jaws for the first time in probably 30 years. Why? I saw it and I thought, I have not seen this movie in so long. I can't remember what I came across that reminded me of Jaws. That movie still holds up to this day from, what was it, 1975? 75. I got to get to the Fableman's.

My calendar is crushed this week. I have to see that movie. I couldn't believe how well Jaws held up. That's still, I think, probably one of the best blockbuster movies ever made, maybe the best summer blockbuster. They did a top 35. I think Spielberg made 35 or 36 movies. they did that on the ringer. And his top ten is hilarious. It's like Jaws,

saving Private Ryan, Raiders, Jurassic Park, E.T. That's ridiculous. It's absurd. Jaws held up. Are you going to see the famed movements? Once last time you've been to a theater? Support the industry. What's wrong with you? I went to a movie this weekend. We took the kids to see Strange World, Disney one. Any good? And that could have been a straight to streaming one for sure. Tell me, Disney has lost its way. Oh. It could have been straight to streaming. It was not very good. I did watch two episodes of Andor. It's a unanimous, like, home run. I'm going to stick with it because

The first two episodes are sort of... I've heard a lot of people say to you, like, you have to watch that. I don't know. I'll let you be the judge for me if I need to spend some time on that. I'm already conceding that it's great because it's got a 100% approval rating. We go to the crowd on this one. There's no butt. Don't say egg.

No, but anyone who leaves a review for Star Wars and Marvel, it's got like a 20% premium. I feel like the people are lying to themselves. I take 20% off of my rating for Star Wars and Marvel because it's all the nerds who score it. They're the ones who watch it. Sorry. You know what I want to say? Apropos of nothing, I don't know why I just thought of this. So we hosted Thanksgiving this year, maybe last year too.

And I was kind of excited for, we got some frozen horses from Trader Joe's, and I'm a Trader Joe's fan. But they were all kind of terrible. And in particular, there was a pig in a blanket with like a parmesan crust. I'm a flavor mixing type of guy. That's my thing. This is disgusting. Jeez, okay. You're going to write a letter to them too?

I'm a fan. I'm a fan, but not for the first. Rose and Odurves Thanksgiving edition. Okay. You heard it here first. Lesson learned. All right. That's it for us.

Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com. We will see you next week.