Animal Spirits Podcast - Is a Soft Landing Inflationary? (EP.292)

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

On today's show we discuss why people still invest in stocks even when bond rates are high, international stocks are on a tear, the 60/40 argument that never dies, the Fed vs. the bond market, record high dividends in the stock market, why it's so hard to predict bottoms, Michael's NY Giants playoff game experience & much more.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   (Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, received compensation from the sponsor of this advertisement. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by American Century Investments. They launched a new ETF. SDSI is the ticker. It is a short duration of strategic income ETF, which has been wholly unexciting for the last decade. We're going to start the show today by talking about bonds. There was an article that just dropped in the Wall Street Journal. Bonds over stocks.

Bonds over stocks. How about that? The new 6040 portfolio. Well, this is the kind of space where in the past, You didn't really have to think about it. Now I feel like people have to be a little more considered about their exposures to the bond market because rates are moving so fast in both directions. So I'm looking at the portfolio here of this ETF.

Waded average coupon around 4%. Duration, less than two years. I mean, this is unthinkable. And so even though bonds got killed last year and it was really uncomfortable transition from no rates to rates, finally, we've got some fixed income in the fixed income side of the portfolio. It's a beautiful thing. In shorter duration, too. So if you want to learn more, go to AmericanCentury.com to learn more.

Allow myself to introduce myself. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holtz Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of 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 with Michael and Ben. Michael, the last few weeks, we've discussed the fact that you can get much higher yields in short-term bond instruments now. You can get four and a half percent or something in T-bills. I don't know why. The word instrument with bonds, I know that's what it's called. It's just it's funny. Okay. Sorry. I was thinking about the word you used, the one we laughed really hard the one time. Which, which time? When we were at Barry's house.

Anyway, so T-bills, short-term T-bills, yield like 4.5%. And part of our argument has kind of been, well, this is finally some sort of competition for stock. So why wouldn't a bunch of investors just move a bunch of their money into cash, like especially retirees, people who are risk-averse? Now we have through Friday,

these are the returns for different various parts of the stock market. S&P 500 is up more than 4%. The cues are up more than 5%. Russell 2000's up over 7% this year. International stocks are doing better. I am playing short-term bonds like a violin, Ben. Okay. What do you mean? Jumping in and out? It's a joke on instruments. Oh, okay. So in two weeks, stocks are up four or five percent, and that's what you get in a year in T-bills now, potentially as long as rates don't move that much. This is why people still invest in stocks even when yields are much higher because you have that ability to earn money really fast and people aren't patient enough. I always go back to this. Look at the next chart here. This is

10-year treasury rates in the 1980s. Going into the Black Monday crash in 1987, the 10-year treasury yielded 9.9%. Now, some people might say that part of the reason that crash happened is because rates went from 6% to 10% in a very short period of time. But can you imagine seeing stocks drop more than 20% in a single day and not moving your entire portfolio into 10-year treasuries yielding almost 10%? The question is, back then with 10% treasury rates, why wouldn't everyone have all of their money in 10-year treasuries? I guess because you're coming off 15 years of inflation that destroyed bonds. But that's my point is that you look at the rates in a vacuum and you go, oh, this makes all the sense in the world, just take some risk off the table.

But I don't think that we humans, we like to gamble. We like to see, I think we like a little with the action and the juice. And so even though bonds now provide a little competition, I don't think that our brains will allow us to just say, okay, I'm going to take the boring path now. I don't think a lot of investors are going to be able to do that. You're so right. At such a good point. And I was actually thinking about this this week. So when I saw this in the dock, I was puzzling this price because I had a very similar thought. Now, here's another component. The value of future cash flows, which obviously stocks are not valued on future cash flows every single day, but ostensibly, that's the idea. And so,

So, when interest rates rise, the value of these future cash flows goes down. In theory. In theory. So you have those two things. It's like, well, I could either literally invest in bonds versus stocks and combine that with the fact that higher interest rates make stocks relatively less attractive, not even on the bond side of it, not even on like the should, I shouldn't die. But you're right.

When you see stocks go up 7% in a week, you get that phoma. It doesn't matter really. Bonds can be yielding 2%, 4%, or 8%. I think you're 100% right of that. This is a weird. environment for this too? Because in the past, if stocks and bonds have zigged and zagged at different time periods, you now have stocks that were in a bare market and bonds that were in a bare market too at the same time. So usually you'd be able to switch from one to the other thinking,

well, bonds just did good because stocks got crushed. Now maybe I can switch. But now it's they both just got crushed. And so I think they both look attractive. This is why for diversified investors, this is not the time to just throw your hands up and give up. This is the time where it's like, oh, these two things at the same time are finally relatively attractive compared to where they were 18, 24 months ago. Could not agree more. We've been speaking about international stocks. I saw on the TV screen.

So when I work out, not to brag on Tuesday mornings, I've got CNBC on, on mute, obviously, because I'm talking to the guy on the screen. And there was a Bank of America, like they did their fund manager survey. And best idea was overweight international or something like that. I forget how they word it. And a contrarian idea, the contrarian idea was buy U.S. stocks. How crazy is that? Because they've underperform for one quarter.

Listen, it's been a rough 10-day period for U.S. stocks, so I'm going to go out on a limb. I'm going to be a contrarian, and I'm going to buy U.S. So you have this tweet here that says, what, MSCAI ruled XUS is outperforming by 14 percentage points on a ruling 50-day trading basis. The widest margins is 2009, which makes sense because international stocks have gotten crushed since. This has all happened in pretty much the last quarter. So this is since, I think the market bottom did, like,

like mid-October. So I found that MSCI-I-EFA versus the S&P since it's like October 12th, I think, was the bottom. And international stocks are up more than 27 percent. S&P's up 12 percent in that time. So international is crushed. And part of it is because the dollar has rolled over. But this is also the counterintuitive nature of investing because we've talked last week. Everything was left for dead internationally.

Europe's a mess. China's still shut down, all this stuff. That was the easy one. Well, they were called Uninvestable. Yes. I definitely won't pretend to know anything about really the nuances of the European economy or many economies, I should say. You want to know what?

When you need to know about European economy, they don't allow for free refills and they don't put ice in your drinks. That's all you need to know. It's great into. This is what I remember about traveling from Europe. Ben spent a year in Vienna. A summer. Those are the two things I remember the most.

They don't have ice and they don't have free refills. There's a concert hall in Vienna. You know who said that? Lenin Bernstein. Okay. I think he said that, something like that. So Jeffrey Kleintop tweeted, while economists are still predicting that GDP was negative in Germany in Q4 and will be again in Q1, this real-time indicator from the OECD is pointed to continued growth. So what's going on? Is Europe in shambles or is it not? The most surprising thing probably is the energy prices there, that people thought the energy prices were going to be this death knell, and it just hasn't been the case for whatever reason. I still have yet to hear a good reason for why energy prices crashed in Europe. People say, well, weather's mildly warmer. But doesn't it seem like every winter weather is mildly warmer?

Isn't that every year for the past 15 years? How's the weather in Grand Rapids? It's mildly warmer than usual. Same. It's like 40s or something. We've had record months of snow, but every time it snows, three days later, it all melts. So we've got no snow on the ground right now, which is pretty surprising for Michigan. The ski hills don't like that.

All right. Another Wall Street Journal 1. Black Rock versus Goldman in the battle for 6040, which I feel like this is the new passive investing argument that we all had for five years and put to bed. Passive versus active. 6040. Black Rock actually saying 6040 is kind of dead. They like commodities, private debt and equity infrastructure tips, all these things.

And then Goldman says, no, 6040 is still fine. This is a good one. Goldman calculates that U.S. stocks and bonds, both lost money over 12-month rolling periods just 2% of the time since 1926 to show how out of the ordinary last year really was. And the times that they did lose money over a rolling 12th period, the 6040 was probably down less than 5% if I had to guess. Not as much as last year. My whole contention that I've always stated is if you really think the 60-40 portfolio was dead,

then you're saying diversification is dead, especially over the long term. And the other thing is no one actually holds a 60-40 portfolio of just U.S. stocks and just U.S. bonds. Maybe Jack Bogle, he might have been the only person alive when he was who actually had a portfolio was probably similar to that. No one actually holds that portfolio. So yeah, people like bonds, Black Rock, which will get into the quarter, had record flows into bonds. Here's a chart, highest bond inflows on a weekly basis in 18 months. And it makes sense.

I would love to see the breakdown between short and long-term bonds there because it's got to be all short-term, unless you're really predicting a recession. But if you predict recession these days, you want to the new recession call is, it's not just 40%. Baseline is mild recession. I mean, unless you're a zero hedge tinfoil hat person, then you predict the world is going to crash around us and everything's going to mean shambles. But other than that, if you're a Wall Street strategist, you say mild recession. base case scenario. It has to be. That's the new 40%. Gunlock. He must be an animal peers listener. He says on his webcast last week, this is from Jennifer Ablon. It is obvious the bond market is control and the Fed usually follows a two-year treasury note. We talked last week about the market arguing with

the Fed. Two years rolling over. I put the effective Fed of funds right here. It's potentially still going to go up. I'm trying to figure out what the bond market is right or wrong about because is the bond market falling because it thinks the Fed is going to cut rates? Or is the bond market? They're flying because it thinks inflation is falling. I don't understand. My Do Not Disturb is on. I see it. It's on.

How are messages getting through? Come on, Apple. Don't make me short your stock. Mine's always on, do not disturb. Never happens anymore. This is my first time I've had that issue. Usually they're pretty good about that. So some people say the bond market is wrong and the Fed's going to be right this time

because the Fed's not actually going to cut if we have a soft landing. But are bond rates falling because it thinks the Fed's going to cut or because it thinks inflation is rolling over. We don't know, obviously. Sounds like we need to do a survey. There you go. All right. Please tell me you put this next chart in here because it's a chart crime.

Oh, I did. Okay. Thank you. It's been a minute. What are we looking at, Ben? This is from said Mr. Gunlock, who I disagreed with and I'm going to disagree with. He's Global Central Bank balance sheets and the Fang plus index. And honestly, any time I see two different pieces of data on the same chart with two separate

y-axis, I immediately throw that chart out the window because it's so easy to manipulate these things by changing the range of the outcomes and access. Xs, exes. Well, listen, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. There are only two directions, I guess three directions that a line can go, up down or sideways. So if you want to find lines that go are the same way, it's very easy. That's why I just hate the charts that say this looks like 2008 or 2009 or 1929 because you can make any lines do that. That's not actually analysis.

It's a chart that wants to go viral for people don't know to read charts. All right, this is a good one from dividend growth investor. 2022 was a record year. S&P 500 price declined by almost 20% last year. Dividends went up by 11%. So dividends went from a little over $60 to almost $67 per share in 2022. That increase was higher than inflation. So dividend payments for the S&P have increased 13 years in a row,

and they set a record for 11 consecutive years, which I guess makes it a dividend achiever. I think if you're a stock and you've increased your dividends for 10 years in a row, your dividend achiever. I don't know. Is that a millennial participant? trophy award for the stock market, but that's pretty great, though, that dividends still increased over and above the rate of inflation last year in a really high inflationary year when the

stock market was down. It's good. They're undefeated. Unless they're cut, in which case they are defeated. Real quick. Lawrence Hamtel tweeted this. I've never heard of this place before that did this piece, but Linzell Train Fund, I don't know. They said in 2011, remember Mark Andreessen wrote his famous software as eating the world, which, is one of the prescient pieces of this century in terms of what's going to happen next for technology. It's interesting because on a trend basis, that was maybe one of the most right macro trend pieces of this century. But they said that in the piece, he talked about specific companies. They said he discussed 17 then or since listed digital disruptors, more than a third

of which have subsequently declined market value since 2011, some calamitously so, Groupon being one of them, which is down 98%. And then in contrast, he talked about 10 old economy laggards, like these are the companies that are going to be displaced, and they say all of which have delivered positive real returns. This is one of the reasons technology is so hard to invest in because you could nail the macro trend and completely whiff on the companies that are going to benefit. I thought that was interesting. I agree. Speaking of technology being difficult to invest in, there was an article, I think last weekend, in Barron's, Kathy Wood said, Quote, investors are running for the hills, away from our strategy.

They're running to their benchmark. Guess where there is more risk? It is in the benchmarks because the traditional world order is going to be disrupted and disintermediated here. I have two comments. One, it is a little bit weird that it sounds like she's almost taunting. Is that a 15-year penalty for taunting? A little bit.

Well, I mean, the biggest red card was when they did that index fund commercial right at the peak. It sounds weird to taunt in this manner. But in addition, if she's right, which maybe. she will be. If she's right about all of these disruptors, they'll show up in the index. They already do. And they'll get bigger. Maybe these are the next winners. That's why it's true. Owning the S&P or total stock market index is the ultimate way to invest in innovation because the winners are eventually going to rise to the top. Guess what? All the huge tech companies, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Tesla, Nvidia, none of those companies were in the top 10 in 2000.

And now they are. So you had a winning innovation strategy. It just took a while to get up there. That's a great point. All right. Speaking of, one of Arc's biggest holdings. It's the second biggest holding, like a 9% waiting, is Zoom. And there's a chart that we're going to include for the YouTubers. You're already looking at it. It's showing the price of Zoom versus the revenue.

And it made sense when you have a 4x increase in revenue for the stock to go bananas. But like every other time, it took it way, way, way too far, probably tens of billions of dollars in market cap too far. And of course, you could have predicted that. guess what? They're not growing anymore at all. The revenue is not growing. So it's not a surprise of this company lost 85% of that froth or 90% or whatever it is. And there's companies that are eating its lunch. So for example, how great is this feature that we discovered? Probably late to it, but for people that use Slack, I was not a fan of the huddle feature, which a huddle is a

button that you click and it's just, it's audio. And it was a little bit choppy at first. It's improved over time. Now there's a FaceTime feature on huddle, which is like essentially Slack. I guess it's not a schedule, but it's impromptu slack. And Google meets is another one. Obviously, that's doing very well. And I do have a bone to pick. Or not a bone to pick. I have an idea. An idea for Google meets and for Zoom. What I'm about to say sounds bad. I hate being late. I hate people that are late. I've been tardy to too many meetings lately. And that's on me. My bad. I think an easy fix for this is instead of having my calendar notification, notify me 15 minutes before, I probably need like a 30 second notification or two minute notification? Or can you double up? Can you do like, hey, in 15 minutes

you have a meeting and then two minutes prior? Because here's what it happens. I just keep missing meetings. I don't know how you do it. How about this? Here's what they should do. No, how about it? It just pops up. Well, excuse me. Don't see them. I'm not your idea. I don't steal your ideas. I've never stole any ideas. I've never stolen any ideas. Not one time. I've got a great new idea for Zoom. Call me. But that's a great idea. So we're on the same page. So the idea is that if it's on your calendar, it should just pop up automatically. However, not to catch you off guard, maybe eating food doing something you don't want to be doing, do you want to enter the chat? Done, do it.

Hello? That's easy. But you're right. I still think Zoom is my favorite one, but is it really that much better than Teams or Google Meets or Slack? Everything's better than Teams. Yeah, Teams is the worst. It's now a commodity product.

And unfortunately, they were the one who brought this. By them starting this, they created competition for themselves, and now it's a commodity. It's kind of unbelievable. I don't know if you've ever seen competition come in so fast. So if you look at their annual price returns, so in 2020, they're up 400%. Speaking of Teams, whatever happened to Skype. Hoof, Microsoft dropped the ball on that one. That's why they called it Teams, because the term Skype was just a red-headed stepchild.

Oh, wait a minute. Teams is Skype? Well, I think they basically used the Skype technology and changed name. Oh, but anyway, they dropped the ball. They had a 10-year-head start, 20-year-head start. We had Skype in college. We used to use Skype for this podcast, remember? It was awful. We did?

That was like our very first year of the podcast. Remember we had some janky software we used and we used Skype? It was a really bad setup. The stuff we have now was much better. Okay, Adlots last week, they had Neil Dutta from Renaissance macro and Conner Senn, who's a Bloomberg opinion columnist and a good tweeter as well. They talked about where we are with the economy and talking about the potential for a soft landing. And I thought this was one of the most important things they brought up.

I think because everyone assumed that a recession was just going to happen and that was going to cause the Fed to cut rates. and people were making their baseline assumption that and then figuring out what the branches are off of that path. What are the paths from that outcome? Now that the soft landing is on the table, if a soft landing does happen, they were saying basically if households and businesses hunkered down for 12 months, assuming a recession was coming, I guess you could say households haven't really hunkered down yet because they've still been spending, but businesses probably have. If a recession doesn't happen, is a soft landing inflationary? Because it could mean people think, all right, well, it's not happening anymore. Let's ramp up investment.

and research and development, all these things in spending. I'm going to say no, because I think the ship has already turned, the battleship has already turned in terms of retreating, retrenchment, number one. Number two, a lot of the inflation in the first place obviously was driven by supply change disruptions and demand, and demand, I don't want to minimize demand, but you have that side of it fixed. People are already retrenching. They're not all this time going to be like, oh, we just soft landed.

You know what I mean? Like there's no ding dong, ding dong, soft landing. we just did it. But even a normalization versus a recession, I think, is a different case. And I think what this really does, this is probably the scenario where you'd see rates actually be able to stay higher for longer because if there's no recession, the Fed doesn't really need to cut unless inflation went to like 1%. And the Fed's going, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're way out of the ball here.

Maybe then they would cut a little bit or stop. But this is that scenario where if we get us off landing, that's when the Fed could keep rates at 4.5%. Well, how about this? Let me ask you a question. If you don't mind passing this long to Jerome, if inflation comes down to their target at 2% without a recession. Would they, should they cut rates? It's possible. The other thing is, wait, that's it. It's possible. You have an opinion? Looking for an opinion.

No, I have an opinion. Going off of this. So the Fed's whole thing was, and all these economists said, to bring inflation down, we need the unemployment rate to rise, we need to go into recession. That's basically what they thought we needed to do. If they now have this scenario where we have a soft landing and the unemployment rate is still falling, maybe what the Fed's doing is not actually helping at all. It's not doing anything. And maybe this is, stuff was going to come in anyway. Oh, that's a good take. Could be, could be. If you look at the inflation rate coming down in the future, from inflation going from zero to nine, and now it's back to six, and it goes to two, it's going to look transitory in the rearview mirror. Now, we lived through

this. It definitely went a lot longer than people thought it would, but maybe the Fed's whole prescription for this was wrong, and they thinking they had to jack up the unemployment rate. If it doesn't happen, and inflation still falls, are they going to look themselves in the mirror and go, wait a minute, maybe what we thought we had to do was totally wrong to begin with and maybe not trying to throw millions of people out of their job. Maybe we should take that off the table for the future. Well, I will not be part of the litigants that debate, was it transitory? Was it not transitory? Let's just move on. It happened. I'm just saying in 20 years if you look back and that was the peak and it goes right back to two, people are going to look back and go, oh yeah, it was an

inflationary blip. Yes. We lived through it. So it definitely went longer than people who were saying as transitory thought it was going to do. But it's going to look transitory in the future. So ConnerSent also tweeted, Umish consumer sentiment current conditions rose to its highest level since April. Gas prices down unemployment at 50 year low, three-month inflation very low, blah, blah, blah. It's all good. So we just spoke about the consumer survey. Nick Timoreos tweeted about Fed Wallach, the Philadelphia Fed president, Pack Harker, who said it's time to put more weight on surveys and other soft data. And as an anti-survey podcast, I don't know how feel about this. He said, quote, candidly, an over-emphasis and hard data can lead to policy

errors. I like this outside of the box thinking. I like it. I need time to digest, but my nitric reactions, I like this. However, there was a survey today that was really ugly. Maybe I don't like this. New York factory. The New York Empire State Manufacturing Survey fell to its lowest level since May 2020. New orders and shipments declined substantially, delivery time held steady and inventories edged higher. Employment growth stalled and the average work week shortened. Input prices increases slowed considerably. Blah, blah, blah.

All right, whatever. Anyway, it plummeted. That's not good. What happened? I don't know. Everyone was getting drunk watching the Giants game this weekend. Let me tell my quick Minnesota story. Are you just going to be wearing Giants gear for the rest of the playoffs now every day?

Well, if we continue to win. All right. So, Minnesota was not cold by Minnesota standards, but it was still freezing. Like, it was 30, but it felt like. 10. It was very much an indoor city. Look pretty desolate. Not a lot of people on the streets. That's called. It's a cold great city. However, don't they have some sort of like tunnel system or something? They did. Well, a lot of the buildings are like connected. Great people, great fans, great stadium. Great seats. Thank you again, Luke. So the stadium is incredible. It's the best

stadium I've ever been to. Really? And the loudest by far. So in the first quarter, I could not hear what I was saying to my friend who was sitting directly next to me. Could not hear. So the fans were very welcoming, got a lot of beat, kick Phillies butt next week. So when we sit down and Luke gave us incredible seats, 20 yards, behind the 40-yard line behind the Giants bench. So everybody in the stadium is in gear of some sort. You're either Giants gear or Vikings skier. The gentleman who sat down next to me was a big husking guy, hulking guy, big hulking man, probably 6-6-2-80, you know, and he sits down. And these are big white seats. But still, like his arm went over. I'm like, ugh, that's kind of annoying. And him and the guy next to him were

not in Giants gear. So the guy, not directly to me, but one seat over, I said, oh, are you guys Giants fans? Because I'm, like, screaming my face off. Just every time Danny took off him screaming, like run Danny, run, just screaming. So the guy, two seats down from me, said, I'm here for work. I've been here for work for a year. We're Giants fans. The guy next person said, oh, where are you from, North Carolina?

Oh, cool, whatever. I probably high-fied them a few times. I can't even remember. At halftime, the big guy directly next to me went to the row behind me, which, of course, I didn't pay much attention to, until the guy two seats down from me, when the game ended, goes, do you know who you sat next to for the first half? Daniel's father. Oh, really?

How crazy. Danny Dimes, that's a quarterback, this little goat right over here. Danny Dimes's father, I sat next to it for the entire first half. And can you imagine what a great experience I gave him? Screaming, go Danny, go Danny, go Danny. I can't imagine watching your child play professional sports in a game with that much on it. Just watching my eight-year-old play sports right now gives me butterflies. Well, now I know where Danny gets his temperament from, because I was going way more nuts than his dad was.

His dad was incredibly cool comment. And at the end of the game, Mr. Jones, what a match. I said, that was an Eli-S performance from Daniel. And he said, quote, but Daniel's a little bit faster than Eli. So he goes, what are we doing after this? And my friend goes, I don't know, what are we doing? Anyway, there was no party with Mr. Jones, but what a trip. And I'm sure dry January held up fine for you at the game.

So here's another thing, how you know you're not. not in New York. I didn't pay for a drink the entire time in the stadium. We had several beer vouchers. Put it this way. Enough to not pay for one. Really? Came with the seats? Came with the seats. They were just giving them way. Wow. So, anyway, what an experience. Great people, very hospitable fans. We were Giants fans for the weekends, just for you. Me and my kids, root on the Giants. What a win. We spoke about the state of the economy and the slowdown and not slowdown or whatever. Tweet from the transcript. Roles Roy's CEO, quote, We haven't seen any slowdown our downturn.

We haven't seen any negative impact. I'm not saying we're immune from recessionary tendencies. We have seen years when our business was affected. I'm cautiously optimistic about us delivering another strong year in 2023. Now, there is a very specific clientele that shops at Rolls Royce, of course, but you would expect them to see if there was a big slowdown. I think rich people have probably seen, this is generalizing, the worst of this as a recession. Tech people who are relatively rich, stock market down, bond market down. The top

1% hasn't seen their income keep up with the bottom 25%. Rich people have probably seen the worst of this slowdown so far if there is anyone. They're still buying Rolls Royces. One more anecdote piece for you. On Christmas Eve, we were trying to go bowling. It was a huge blizzard here, and the bowling alley was closed. So we went to the only restaurant that was open right next to the bowling alley kind of. There's a cheesecake factory. My kids loved the cheesecake factory. It's relatively new here. Touristic kind of place, but my kids loved it. It's kind of a cool indoor-looking place. So yesterday there was Martin Luther King Day, and the kids wanted to go out to eat after my wife took them to see Puss and Boots, which all through my kids gave high scores

to. They liked Puss and boots. So went to Cheesecake Factory again for lunch. And the waitress brought waters for the kids. They usually bring a water with a top on for the kids so they don't spill them because of course, they didn't give us tops. And of course, my daughter spilled hers everywhere because that happens every time. Naturally. She said, sorry, we're all out of tops. We don't have any. We sold out this weekend. And we're like, what? Okay, she said, this weekend was the busiest weekend we've ever had here. We broke all kinds of sales records at the Cheesecake Factory. Just a random weekend.

I don't know if they had some sort of deal going on, but she said it was the most sales that they've ever had at that restaurant before. People are still spending money. I have some anecdot. And by the way, I just Googled Desolate. It means what I think it means, and I shouldn't have said it because it sounds very bad. Here's a definition of desolate, which I used to describe Minneapolis. Deserted of people and in a state of bleak and dismal emptiness.

That was a bit harsh. What I meant was, it was called that those people were indoors, that's all. So I take it back. That's what happens in the Midwest and the winter, though. You don't see a lot of people outside unless they're doing outdoor stuff. But when we went to, like, the sports bars, they were packed. So JFK, I flew out Sunday morning, and the line to get through security was 50 minutes, 5-0.

Not for me. I have TSA pre-check, but 50 minutes. It felt like a Christmas travel day or something, or Thanksgiving, whatever the busy travel days are. It was insane. Maybe MLK is a big travel week. but it was Sunday. I know it wasn't. It was Saturday. Be that as it may. Airports are still booming. All right, let's get into inflation real quick. Bill McBride tweeted, so we had inflation data. That was last week. Yeah, last Thursday. The most important inflation number currently is core CPI X shelter.

This was negative month to month for the third consecutive month and is now up only 4.4% on the year. We talked earlier how the stock market is up this year. We had a few people ask us, well, we had a great inflation report in December, we had a great inflation report in January. Why aren't stocks ripping? They did. Well, they did a little bit. I think people are now accustomed to because last year everything was so volatile. People want to see like a three or four percent up day in one day. Maybe that not happening. And this year being a little more boring than last year in terms of huge updates and huge down days. Maybe that's a win for the stock market if that happens. Even if we don't see 20 percent gains this year, maybe if we just see muted gains, but we don't

see all the volatility, that's actually a good thing because it's kind of a normalization of the stock market. I'd certainly take it. Michael McDonough's chart from Bloomberg showing he breaks down the inflation components. Energy rolled over very hard. Goods rolled over very hard, but you know what has not yet peaked services, ex-food and energy. So to your point, cheesecake factory, airports, flights are really expensive. They are. Yes, from what you expected before this, they're definitely taking advantage. So a lot of people have been talking about eggs. There's been a lot of egg content on Twitter too. Every time something goes up in price, people tweet, take me somewhere expensive and show a man and a woman eating a candlelight dinner. And first it was lumber. Then it was, what was

after lumber? Use car a lot. Now it's eggs. Egg prices are up a lot because... Because eggs are delicious and they're great value? No, it's because of the flu thing. The Avion flu is a lot of the birds are dying and I think so it's hard to get eggs. It's a supply thing. I did see the 11 million hens have died recently or 15. Someone quoted me saying that there's like a billion chickens in there with some ridiculous number. Somebody also tweeted to you. So you were defending somebody goes, let that and go and see what this take. I was trolling a little bit, but also half serious. I said, everyone keeps

complaining about eggs being too expensive, but I'm going to zag. National average for eggs is $3.60 for a dozen. And I said, that's basically like three to four high quality protein meals for less than $4. I think eggs have always been relatively underpriced, relative to other forms of protein, and they still remain relatively cheap.

And I had all these people when I mentioned, I got roasted for this one for me. Elitist. Well, you're an elitist. You're an egg leadist. The funniest thing is that people don't understand how averages work, because all these people from California and New York go, I'm paying $7 for a dozen eggs. And I wanted to tell them, that's how average is work, because the high end, you people are paying high prices and people are paying lower. That's what makes an average. I think I saw $4.50 at our grocery store yesterday. That was kind of the higher-end grocery store. Anyway, I still think eggs are a really

great. If I was a broke college student again and I was lifting weights like a maniac like I used to do when I played football, I would buy tons of eggs. That would be my main source of food and protein. Because for a cheap college student, they're cheap, and it's a lot of good protein. Here. Eggs are great. Big fan. You should eat some more eggs maybe for your workout because you're trying to build muscle. My kids love hard-boiled eggs. Hard boil. Okay. I'm not a yoke guy. Never was. I don't eat the yellow. Yeah, get the egg weights. No, I eat scrambled eggs. I'm just saying like when I hard-boiled them. I give my yolk to Bianca, my dog. All right. Use car prices just dropped 14% year-over-year, 14.9% year-over-year. Thoughts? This is good. This is the one that we've been saying all along.

This has to be transitory. Use car prices can't keep going up like this, and it was ridiculous. Did you see Tesla cut their prices? Pretty good-sized price. The Model 3, they dropped it by $5,000, I think. It's down to 10 basis points. What is? That was a bad price cut joke. They did almost like a 10% cut across the board for Tesla.

I can't tell if this just means a lot of people have just jacked up their car prices in the last year and they're trying to normalize them or if this is a bad thing for Tesla. But this actually made me look at Tesla. I'm getting close to the point of when my next lease runs up, I want to get an electric vehicle probably. And I looked at the Model Y, because you can get it. a third row seat in there. It's probably still too small for having three kids and a bunch of stuff. Is that like the minivan? Yeah, it's like their minivan SUV, probably still not big enough, but them showing that price cut, I actually did look at it. How much is this car? 50.

It's not bad. That's too expensive for my taste, because the other ones are coming way up. How much are other electric vehicles of this elk? I don't know if I used to elk there, but you know what I'm saying. Well, that's the problem. They don't have a lot of good electric vehicles for SUVs with a lot a room. They don't have that yet. I'm waiting for my Ford Explorer electric vehicle. Make this happen for it. Yeah, but that's going to be like way expensive. Probably. That you'll splitch for? I'm saying it made me want to look at a Tesla. I think I would consider it potentially. All right. Well, it took a while and I don't know if it's anything to celebrate just yet, but it's a step in the right direction. GBTC, the discount has shrunk from an unholy level.

What was it at the worst? Did it get down to 50? It went from A negative 49% premium to a negative 36% premium. I mean, it's still not great, but that's a huge move. It's up another 9% today, the fund itself. Someone was saying that this is the kind of thing where it was such a huge discount and there was not much volume being traded that if you put, I don't know, tens of millions or maybe $100 million into this, you could potentially move that discount on your own. Unless someone knows something behind the scenes, they're not saying something.

What else would explain this? there are efforts to get DCG out of there. I don't know the mechanics of this. You texted me this weekend and was it Friday night, you said Bitcoin's back above 20,000. And this is the reason that picking a bottom in the markets is so, so difficult because I would have bet my life on the fact that Bitcoin was going to $10,000. With everything that happened, it never went below 15.

Was that as low as it got? That was very surprising. I mean, you could have been one of these people that said, you know what, I'm a Bitcoin bull, but I'm waiting until Bitcoin hits 10K or $9,000. K, and then I'm going all in. Because that seemed like with all the stuff going on, it seemed obvious that was going to happen. And it never happened. It could obviously still crash again, but the fact that with all that stuff going on and then FTX happened and that it didn't completely fall on and crash is really surprising me. And that's why if you're one of these people

that's trying to just nail the bottom, I think I've told the story before, but I followed a guy in my old life in like July 2008. He says, I'm going to cash. I financial crisis stuff. He basically predicted what was going to happen. And then in February of 2009, he lays out his time frame and he says, when the S&P 500 hit 600, I'm putting 25% of my work to there. When it hits 575, I'm putting 25, and all the way down to 500. When S&P 500 hits 500, then I'm going to go all in. And the S&P never got to those levels. I think the bottom at what, 666 and took off. And he sat in cash for four years after that. So that's why picking bottoms is so hard. It's like just get close enough. Don't try to nail it perfectly. If something's down a lot and you want to own it,

Just own it. Carl continued a tweet of this from Bank of America on Coinbase. Volume in December were just $34 billion, less than half of coins, first quarter to third quarter of the monthly average of $76 billion. We think consensus revenues for 23 could be way too high, lower price P.O. What's P.O.? Price opinion? No.

Price objective? There you go. To 35 bucks. Isn't this the kind of thing where their earnings don't matter if Bitcoin's going up, Coinbase is going to go up? If Bitcoin's going down, Coinbase is going to go down. You're 100% right. And guess what?

I'm sure once we get their Q4 earnings, the volume is going to be down bad, really bad. But we're going to talk about some activity returning to the housing market. How quickly do you think trading will come back to Bitcoin if it goes to $25,000 or $30,000? If it goes to $30,000 and it effectively doubles, people will get interested again. Yeah, I think you're right. Analyst who predicted Bitcoin would hit $30,000 this year, now thinks Giants can win the Super Bowl. That I won't say. Although I will say, if you're asking for my opinion,

I think the line is too high. What is the line right now? It opened at seven and a half. And I would have told you the Eagles, they killed us the first game. The second game doesn't matter because nobody played. But we're healthy. I think we have a chance. I do think strange things can happen if you play a team for the third time in the same season.

I expect us to lose, but I also expect it to be a good game. I don't think we're going to get blown out. It's all gravy. We're playing with house money, so I'm good either way. So something is dead here. Is shame dead? Pride. Something is dead.

What I mean is, the guys, three hours capital, who were the ones that really took down the whole system. Maybe that's an overstatement. Are they on the run? Are they on the lamb? I think so. I don't know where that stands with them. They were huge investors in the Terra Luna situation. That collapsed. They collapsed. GBT collapsed. I mean, the whole thing. The cards fell very quickly. And they were maybe the first domino. So anyway, these guys, Suu and Kyle Davies are trying to fund or raise money for a centralized exchange? What? What? And guess what? There's two other guys on the deck on the investment deck. Could you imagine those two guys going into business with these two guys?

I feel like that's the kind of thing where if your venture capital firm invests in this, you say, give me my money back immediately. You're done. That's enough. I've seen enough. Larry Fink said on CNBC, I look forward to the day when all stocks and bonds are tokenized so we know every beneficial owner of every stock and bond. Yeah, of course, I bet he does wish that. I was thinking about this as I used my Apple wallet for every ticket that I hold. And just I use Apple Pay all the time. What if that's an application that we don't even think about that? That stuff runs on the blockchain and it's just seamless.

And people get more comfortable with the idea of digital wallets. Counterpoint, I got a giant's NFT from the ticket, which I was super psyched to get because that's my idea. I want to be able to remember this. Not that I wouldn't remember it. But anyway, it didn't work. The delivery did not work. The funny thing is, though, if Larry Fink says this when Bitcoin is at 70,000,

People are going nuts over this all day. And then he says it now and when... Nobody cares. That's true. No one cares at all. I mentioned that activity in Coinbase or training activity could pick up real quick if it hasn't already. Lance Lambert tweeted, and I've been on this,

Lance Lambert tweeted a Seattle real estate agent tells me, quote, for what it is worth, the first two weeks of the year have been busier with buyer activity than the last three months combined were, end quote. There's a lot of pent-up demand there. Haven't we been saying? People who felt like they missed the boat. If mortgage rates come back down, there's going to be a flurry. of activity in the housing market. Fed Woj tweeted this study saying home price gains over the last

two years could have been produced a wealth effect for homeowners that drove one third of the increase of CPI, non-shelter prices. I don't agree with that. And he put a counterpoint here to saying strategists at BC research note that home price gains were so swift that consumers probably did not fully adjust their spending patterns and incorporate their new fund wealth. So I agree with this. So I think the wealth effect is probably stronger from low rates and low payments than from higher prices. I don't think people see my house price going up. I borrowed a little bit more against it for my home economic line of credit, but I didn't spend more because of that. You know what I spend more if my monthly payment goes down after I refinance? So I think the fact that people going to lower

payments, so Conner said tweeted about how the mortgage debt service ratio is still near record lows, and this is something we've pointed out. I don't think we've fully comprehend it how much of a long-term boost that gives for people who locked in these low payments. That's not just a one-time deal, that's a long term, you've locked in a low payment and you now have more spending power that you would have been putting towards your shelter costs. Yes. It's a huge, huge boost. And I think maybe one of the reasons that people kind of underestimated things remaining

stronger for longer as they have. And so there was activity. Remember early on or during the housing boom, there was no, what's the word I'm looking for? Buyers couldn't put anything into the contract. There was no, what's the word? Tip of my tongue. You couldn't negotiate at all.

There's no contingencies. There you go. Thank you, Ben. Your vocabulary is very desolate right there for a sec. We're mind-melding. There was no contingencies on many of these deals, which is insane for the biggest purchase of your entire life. Well, now, this is Ryan Lundquist on Twitter. He said, buyers are getting more from sellers.

Last month, 51.5% of all sales in Sacramento County had some form of a concession. And we've got this chart over time, present of sales with concessions in Sacramento County. And this is what you expect. So activities picking up, but now the balance of power has shifted from sellers to buyers. I'm going to put new carpet in, so I want you to take another 3% off of the sales price or whatever it is. By the way, I know people are probably sick of me talking about my mudroom. I'm just flabbergasted at the quotes that I got, given what I just saw. You know what I did then?

I put a wall in my garage. I cut my garage and a half. That's it. They put it in a wall and they put it in a floor. And this guy was quoting me $30,000. What? I feel like what I spent, which was a third of that, is still too high. Does seem high.

It's a wall. and a floor. Yeah, but you've got lockers to put in? That's a separate cost. We have to buy that yourself. How does it come with it? For that money, you're not getting built-ins for those? That's separate.

The GCI paid him for high hats, a floor and a wall, and some paint and sheetrock, whatever. All right, Mike Simonson tweeted, a single percentage point decline in rates has the same impact on affordability as an 11% decline in house prices. So that's rates going from 7 to 6 to 5. But when it happens the other way. Well, no, it's the same thing. That's the counter is that's why affordability got so bad because it's the same thing on the way up, rates going up. So that's why affordability got so bad.

We've talked about this before. US, who in the world is refinancing their mortgage? Mike Zucardi tweeted this at me. Almost 90% of mortgage refinance volume in Q3, 2020, came from cash out transactions. So that's that. People who have some equity, who need it for some reason or want it, are taking money out. Even at higher rates, that makes sense. We get a lot of questions for people in other.

countries about their mortgage and what to do. This is from friend of the show, Logomotashami, did this tweet. It compares household debt as a percentage of gross disposable income to share of adjustable rate mortgages for new issuance. And the United States is at the bottom left of this. Look at some of these other places. Norway, Australia, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, way, way more consumer debt. I'd love to have some color on this. Why is it so prevalent that they do that? My guess is just it's always been that way, but they have 70, 80, 90 percent of mortgages are vulnerable to rising rates because they're adjustable rate mortgages. Oh, Ben, you know what else is interesting?

Is it correlated with, on the other axis, they've hassled debt as a percentage of gross disposable income? But if this was the case in the United States, we're looking down the barrel of 6% mortgages when you had a three because it's adjustable rate, we would be riding at the steps of the Federal Reserve building. They would not allow the Fed to keep rates this eye if that was happening. Doesn't this look like the more indebted, the more likely they are to have adjustable rate mortgages?

Yes. So obviously that was a good thing when rates were falling. It's not a great thing when rates are rising now. Interesting. Want to shout out to the quarter wrap because it's earning season. This is in BlackRock. I shares did $123 billion in inflows. Six of the top 10 asset gathering bond ETFs were I shares. Did you know that? No, that's interesting. Six of the top 10. They spoke about short duration, having massive inflows. Again, we've been discussing that, not surprisingly. They talked about where rates are. All right, some good stuff here. Since our IPO in 1999, BlackRock has delivered a 7,700% total return to our shareholders, which is wild, the strongest return of any financial services company, the S&P 500 over that period.

I guess that makes sense, no? Well, yeah, a lot of other banks and stuff got killed, and they probably didn't in 2008. How does the stock look? The stock looks good. It's hanging in there. Here's a stat that was on the conference call, I think. In the U.S., yeah, it's from the conference call. ETFs only represent 2.3% of the bond market.

How about that? Yeah, that's surprising. So since inception, that's almost a 22% of, an annual return for that stock. And think about, obviously, that business has a lot more stuff in it, but now they're dominated by low-cost index funds. They have a chart showing the net flows. And the only thing that's really negative is retail long-term.

I wonder what this means exactly in how they parse this out. People who buy and hold index funds? I guess. I don't know how they would identify that. Good question. All right, JPMorgan, record revenue. How about that? Despite investment banking revenue being down by 57%, and banking fees were down 58%.

What is in this chart that I wanted to highlight? Oh, home lending. Ben, look at this. Also, Jamie Diamond predicted his seventh procession out of the last zero on this call. So home lending got cut in half from a peak in the fourth quarter of 2021. That makes sense. Do you think there'd be nothing coming on that route? All right, check this out.

Look at the financial results. And that interest income, $20 billion up from $2 billion in the previous quarter. They're still not paying anything out to people who have a savings account there. What does the savings account yield? I bet it's 20 basis points are lower. It wouldn't shock me. They're probably paying money market funds now, but savings account, they're probably still paying nothing.

So look at this. They've got their card services, 30 plus day delinquency rate. Does this look scary to you? I mean, yes, it is going out, but that's only because it was so low. That's why, honestly, the Kyla Scanlan last year, vibe session thing was the perfect explanation. People just felt like things were going to get bad or it's going to get worse, and the results never showed it besides inflation.

What do we have on the docket for this week? I think Netflix is this week. We had Goldman this morning getting killed, I guess, because they're just all investment banking. Morgan Stanley's doing much better, I guess, because it's wealth management, if I had to guess. We've got United Airlines on Wednesday, Netflix on Thursday, hashtag long, not selling, Costco. So your long-term retail investor now. A minute's for the long term. The New York Times had this story about how much income you make, and they asked people on the street, how much money do you make.

Because New York has this new thing where the law went into effect that if you have at least four employees, you have to disclose a salary range for each job. listing. This step blew my mind. In 2021, the median household income from New York City was, what do you think? Median household income in New York City. Ninety-seven thousand? 70,000, roughly the same as the rest of the country. I don't know how people with the median income of the rest of the country can afford to live in New York City. I think they live in the outer bars. There's no other explanation. It's just crazy to me that. So a few quotes kind of stuck out to me. They said, a stockbroker dressed in a plaid suit with floral pocket square was happy to talk. At first,

He eagerly told us that he made $300K a year, but as we continue to speak, he became embarrassed that he didn't make more. In the end, he withdrew his quotes. That's great. Which is totally a New York thing. Anyway, a bunch of good quotes in this. I thought it was interesting. One more thing from the Atlantic. They talk about dual-income families or non-dual income families where one person works, the other person stays in with the kids.

The average pay for people who have both spouses working is a little over $100 grand a year. This is from a Pew study of two-parent households. Families in which one works and one stays at home made about half that time. 55,000. But they said those families that have both parents working, report feeling pressed for time, 40% of moms working full time, say they always feel rushed. Half of dads who work full time so they don't get enough time with their kids. This is the trade-off we always talk about with daycare where you can either both work and make more money or you can have one person not work, make less money, but then you have the

trade-off of time and feeling rushed and busy all the time. And there is no easy answer. Yeah, I feel bad for my wife that, well, this sounds ludicrous. I don't feel bad that she works, But I feel bad that I have time with the kids in the morning because it's like the best time. She's gone before they leave. So I feel like she's missing some of the joy that I get to experience. I'm with them for an hour. It's terrific.

It's wonderful. It's the best. There really is no good answer for anyone who says that there is. Where do you want to sacrifice? Because you will be sacrificing something. Bet and Bath? How is this possible, Ben? What happened?

I know we spoke about this company many times, but did they just get killed by e-commerce? I think Amazon just put them out of business. The stuff that we used to go to Bed Bath & Beyond for? That's true. Now we just get it at Amazon. I think Amazon was a bed-bathom beyond killer. I mean, everyone went there, right when you got out of college and get your first place, you go there.

But now it's so easy. My favorite Bedbeth and Beyond store, we had one that was probably a half mile from our house. The first house we moved into, we got some outdoor furniture. And my wife and I both drove sedans. I drove like a Nissan Ultima. She drove a Honda Accord. And we couldn't fit the outdoor furniture into either of our cars. And I had to borrow the huge cart from Bedbeth and Beyond and walk it down the street to our house a half mile away.

And then bring the cart back because it wouldn't fit. Remember? Now you get that delivered. Yeah, that's exactly right. I said last year that it was the, by far, by far the worst. I've never heard of earnings called that bad. It's so alarming where the analyst just went like best of luck. Right.

They just knew right now. Look at this. I put this chart in here. Since inception, which is like a 1993 IPO, the stock is up 50% in total. It's 1.4% per year. At one point, they were up over almost 8,000%. So at one point it was probably compounding at 30% of year. I definitely owned this stock in the early,

and tens. I'm positive I did. And it was a really good stock then, it looks like, and it's just completely crashed. They could turn it all into Jake's fireworks and Halloween, whatever, depots when it goes out of business. There's so many bedbath meons in every suburban place, every suburban mall or... They just get leveled. It's like Toys R Us, I guess. There's too much space. Somebody tweeted, not a good sign for Mastodon. The past two months represented one of the best environments for the service to get new users. Data shows few joined and a large portion of those who did join are now losing interest. You can't replace Twitter.

I don't think so either. I don't think so either. I don't know this is that hard to predict. A lot of the people who left Twitter and said, I'm gone, sorry, they're slowly come back. It happens. Sorry, it happens to the best of us. I've made the point that the best inflation hedge, for me, at least a good one, was the Starbucks rewards cards. And here's what I mean. For a hot coffee, and I guess the jig is up, for a hot coffee, I could put in as many

shots as I want. It could be the largest size. It could be a $9 hot coffee if I really go nuts. And guess how much it cost, Ben? 50 stars. 50 stars. And it never went above 50 stars. Although, I don't understand because the cold coffee is 150 stars, even if it's like a third of the price.

You could get a cold coffee for $3 and a hot coffee for $9. And still, 50 stars for the hot, 150 for the cold. Anyway, somebody either emailed or Twitter or whatever said, it was an overcrowded trade, and now it's going against us. It's going up to 100 stars instead of 50 in February. It's tough. Inflation. That's tough.

All right, so we lost another babysitter. We just go through them like water. I think this is our fifth one. It is really tough to find. After school, kids get off the bus. It's a tough spot to fill. Kids get off the bus at 3.15. We have a babysitter here until around 5.30.

And these are generally young women who are in college. It's not a full-time job by definition. They're going to move on into the workforce. So Robin said, it happened again. I said, what happened? She had an externship. So I said, what the hell is an externship? Yeah, that just mean you get paid?

Robin said it's an internship, but the opposite. And I went, what does that mean? What's the opposite of an internship? I've never heard that before. You know what you need, though? You need a door dash for babysit. Put in your door dash, on Friday nights there's going to be way more expensive, but on during the afternoon, you call up and say, I need two hours, babysitter dash.

They come for two hours. I don't know if people would be comfortable with that unless there was a review system. There would need to be. People became comfortable with Uber, though, right? That's true. All the kids in the house? Anyway, first of all, problems for sure. All right, Ben, you were talking about like chat, GBT, and what you needed to do, well,

guess what, I could do it. Somebody emailed this stuff. List of the last 10 recessions and the performance of the S&B500 during those recessions. So what we really need to do is go a step further and put this in a spreadsheet for us. There we go. Now we're talking. Yeah, give me the data. I'll start using it when I can help move me with blog posts.

How's that sound? Do you think this is real? Dan Ravel tweeted, so the charges were up 27-0 and they lost 31 to 30. Somebody bet $1.4 million. No way. For the opportunity to win $11,200? I don't think so. They said to confirm the bet was indeed made.

I don't buy it. This is the worst trade of all time? Yes. There's no way this happened. I can't imagine. All right, let's move on the recommendations. since we went long. Put your money in a bank account. All right. I think the Golden Globes got me into this because it won a Golden Globe for something. I watched everything everywhere all at once.

It's now on Showtime. Did you watch the Golden Globes? No, but I saw like the list of who won. Did you see Jennifer Coolidge's acceptance speech? I did not. I didn't really watch much of it. Okay. She tore the House down. She was very funny. Did you see what Eddie Murphy did? Okay, I saw the Eddie Murphy thing about Will Smith. I saw that on Twitter. So everything everywhere all at once was an ambitious movie and I felt like the first hour was awesome. I really liked it because it was creative, it was different. I don't know if it was based on something. I didn't know much about it going in. It's based on a true story. I did not realize that the guy from Indiana Jones and Goonies was in it. Holy cow. Goonies is like one of my all-time favorite 80s movies. Did you like it?

I thought it was really great. They took a huge swing. I thought if I had to nitpick, it was way too long. Way too long. I felt like the very first hour, the very first fight scene at the IRS agency was amazing. I thought the first hour was great. I thought the second half of the movie dragged a little bit. It was such a big swing. I give them credit for taking a big swing. That's a movie that should have seen in the theater. I was on my phone a little bit because it got long. Like, if I saw it in the theater, I would have been blown away. It dragged a little bit, but I thought it was so creative and different and mind-blowing. It was good. First episode of Last of Us, did you see this on HBO yet? No, no, yeah, I can't wait. I'm all in. The first 30 seconds of the show, it's like foreshad

what's going to happen. You're like, okay, sign me up. I'm in. I'm all in. Ben, here's the thing. It's HBO. Yes. You just know. One episode, yeah. You knew it was going to be good. Everyone said it was and it was good. And the funny thing is that I'm so much more willing to believe a virus spread throughout the earth now that we've gone through the pandemic. It just seems so much more real to me that something like that could happen all on on this show. When I finished, Your Honor, I said that was a lot of fun on Showtime, Brian Cranston.

I had a good time. I was in for one season. I don't need the second. Guess what? They pulled me back in. I saw the trailer for the second season, and it looks like Brian Cranston went off the rails a la Walter White. I'm excited.

Should have been a one-season show. I don't know if I'm going to watch this. I'm going to let you do it first. I'll do it for you. The first one was a little out there, but I still liked it, and the ending was good, and I thought it should have stayed there. You have my word. I'll do it.

Airplane movies. On the way out there, the outlets had no power. There was no internet and no TV, so I didn't really do much on the way there. It was terrible. But on the way back, it was why I need to bring a Kindle with you to read. Yeah. I had some work to do, so I said, I did back from a movie. So I threw an Anchorman, and it's been a long time since I just pressed play from the beginning.

God, what a movie. What a movie. The hardest movies I've ever laughed in in a movie theater, Anchorman, and Hangover. Anchorman, I was losing it, the entire movie. It blew me away how funny that movie was the first time you watched it. That's really something. Really is an all-timer. Anything else?

Nope. All right. Should we, Yagerb to Soft Landing again next week? Let's do it. Same time next week. Same time, same place. Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com, and we will see you then. Thank you.