Animal Spirits Podcast - Is the Bear Market Over? (EP.311)

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

On today's show Michael and Ben discuss the beginning of a new bull market, increased concentration in the stock market, the worst housing market ever for buyers, a worrying trend in demographics, the biggest momentum investors on the planet, Brad Pitt and much more. Thanks to Birddogs for sponsoring this episode! Enter promo code "SPIRITS" and get a free Yeti style tumbler with every order: http://birddogs.com/spiritsFind complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode of Animal Spirits is brought to you by bird dogs. Ben, I was at Little League yesterday. Name escaped me for a second. That's what they call it. Little boys playing baseball. It's called Little League. And one of the moms, I was wearing pants. And she said, are those bird dogs? They happened to not be bird dogs. I was not wearing bird dogs. But we got into a conversation about bird dogs. And she doesn't know that we're affiliated in any way. She just brought them up. And then we were talking about, how did this come up? She was saying that her, oh, she was asking me, I said, no, but if you love bird dogs and I love the shorts. And so she was asked me what seam, what seam length I get. And I was like, I don't know. She goes, you know. I was like, okay, you got me fine. I get, I get the nine inch ones. Is that the ones that I get the ones that I get. So you go nine. But I was telling her that I get, that I feel uncomfortable. It's a, it's a little bit new to me, this, the shorts above the knees. Because when you sit down, they hike up a little bit and I feel a little bit naked, comfortable, but naked. And so she made a great point.

She said that her husband was on to Bird Dog's early days because actually, if you wear shorts below the knees, it doesn't make your legs look here because like your calf is like the biggest part of your leg. So anatomically, if you have the shorts above your knee, you get like thigh knee calf muscle and it makes your legs look jacked. And I said, it's more sculptor. I got the seven inch and I also don't skip leg day like you. Wait, seven inches is short. Seven and that's, all right. Well, you were running back. You were running back, so.

Well, I have shorter legs as well. And honestly, my most comfortable fit is the bird dogs, but I have it on, because it's like 85 degrees out. Birddogs and with a nice Hawaiian shirt, it just, it pops. And I have the bright blue, neon blue ones with the pink and yellow in the back are just. Party down below, party up top? Yes. Birddogs.com slash spirits put in code spirits and you get a free tumbler. It's a Yeti Tumblr, I think, right?

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Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Bridholz wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael. Ben.

Can we pronounce the bear market as being over? Dead, done. Or do we have to wait for new highs? Because I tweeted this out on Friday. From the lows in October, S&P 500 up 21%. NASDAQ 100 up 36%. I'm rounding up here. Close enough. Well, it became official this morning. What's official? That the bear market is over? No, that we rally 20% from the bottom. No, this was as of last Friday. It was up 21%. No, no, no, no. Officially. It was official today.

We're recording on Monday, by the way. Okay, became official. So does that count in your book that bear market's over? Well, let me say this. Okay. This is from bespoke. This is wild. The S&P 500 is now exactly flat on a total return basis since the close on Powell's first rate hike on March 16th, 2022. Wow. because a lot of the losses front ran those first rate hikes, obviously. Correct. So I am ready to pronounce the bare market from fears, legitimate fears of higher

cost of capital, Fed acting aggressively. That bear market is, in fact, over. I don't think that there's anything at this point that the Fed could do that would shock the market. You know what I mean? However, I think it's too early to declare. that were in a new bull market because I think legitimate fears of a potential slow down the head, even though we're not seeing any evidence of that. So I think, yes, the bear market that was caused by interest rates and inflation, rest in peace and peace. This is semantics here, but sometimes it's fun to argue semantics in finance because what else

we're going to talk about. But I think you could say that does a bare market preceded recession, preceded recession, then, of course, that was wrong. The stock market did not predict a recession. This is one of those, the stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions. This is one of those instances where this is a bare market that occurred outside of a recession. Well, I don't think the market, no, I disagree with that. I don't think the market, I hear what you're saying?

I don't think the market got it wrong because what if it wasn't, what if it wasn't stocks, on certain stocks in particular crashing because fears of recession, just because or simply competition from bonds, higher costs of capital, lower multiples, lower earnings. We were talking about at the time that like the stock market is definitely front running a recession. And that true, true,

obviously that narrative, that particular narrative was wrong. So maybe the, the narrative is the stock market fell because rates went higher. But now the Fed is still raising rates and stocks are going up. So this is, oh, we've already digested it. I'm at a loss for narrative.

Now we're looking past. We're looking past. Okay. Now we're looking to the first cut, which is like next year or something. All right. So a lot of, a lot of the talk lately has been about these big stocks getting even bigger.

Ned Davis had a cool piece. that showed Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Facebook, Tesla, those big seven that we talked about last week, are now bigger than the combined sectors of energy, materials, industrials, and financials. Financials being in there

is kind of just mind-boggling to me. That seems a tad excessive. Doesn't it? I mean, I guess the counterpoint is these tech firms are so big and diversified that there's a good counterpoint. Sectors within sectors. I don't know. So a lot of people are trying to figure out, like, what does this mean?

DFA had this really cool chart that shows the average annualized outperformance, not just performance, outperformance of companies before and after they become in the top 10. So they show 10, 5, and 3, and 3, and 3, and 3, and 10 after. And you can see that outperformance is enormous heading into being in the top 10. And then they get in the top 10. And the funny thing is, they underperform a little bit, but they essentially become the market when they get in the top 10. 10, right? There's, like, very little outperformance or a little underperformance. And so all you have to do to be a successful investor is figure out the companies that are going to enter the top

10 and you're fine. Yeah, simple. That's it. What I would say to this is, though, is like Apple, the recent top tens have been in the top 10 forever. That's like Apple entered in like 2015, I think, by my account, maybe a couple years earlier, but around then. And it's done amazing since that. And they've all, they've all continued. I do wonder if, if the new tech ones are going to kind of bust some of these myths. Well, they already have. They literally already have. We've been talking about this for years.

And they keep creating new categories, AirPods, the watch. We've got the headset release this afternoon. I'm sorry. There's never a headset I'm going to wear for anything. Okay, fine. Happy to back down on that one eventually, but I'm not going to wear anything that's going to make you look like an idiot. I'm sorry.

That's where I stop. I think AirPods made you look like it. I thought that AirPods made people look like idiots early days. Now, I know AirPods and headset, they're not equivalent, but getting back to these giant stocks, what they're able to do with their margins is not like anything we've seen in the past with brick and mortar, industrial, you know, old world. But this gets back to my point from last week about the index is picking the winners for you. Look at this NASDAQ top 100 I did here.

I got, this was kind of cool. Whitecharts now allows you to look at the top 10 or top 25 historically. And this is a new feature they added. How do they do that? Where is that? It's under the fund. So if you have a fund, like the QQQ, you can now change the date when you go to holdings. This is a new thing. I just learned that Rushi showed me last week. I didn't realize that. So I went back to 2015, 2020, and 20203 to look at the top 10.

And the NASDAQ 100 is way more concentrated. It was 50% back in 2015. Now it's 60%. But here's the thing. Even as of 2020, In Video wasn't even the top 10 of the NASDAQ 100. And also kind of surprising that companies like Pepsi and Costco are in there. Comcast was in there in the past. But that's how much this rise in Nvidia has been. This is like the stock of the moment, I guess, for everyone to talk about, which means it's probably going to go up another 100% or it's going to crash with nothing in between, right?

It's got to be one of those two. I do think that the stock is going to have just a mammoth crash at some point. I don't know from what levels. It's kind of like Bitcoin in some ways where you knew the crash was coming. You just didn't know it was going to come from 50 or 75 or 100. But I can't believe it wasn't in there in 2020 to enter the year. And now it's the fourth biggest name. How about Apple hitting a new all-time high today?

Is it going to be the first $3 trillion market cap? I don't think it hit it. I think we essentially had two separate 30% corrections in Apple that you could have bought in the last 18 months. So prices out an all-time high, market cap is not. They were at an high of $2.97 trillion, that's $2.89. That's because of all the shares that they're buying back. Here's another thing that we can pronounce dead,

that this was anywhere in the same ballpark as the tech.com bubble. The dot-com bubble eviscerated. technology stocks for years, sometimes like more than a decade in some. And some of them still haven't come back from it. These big tech names did not have nearly the comeuppance that the dot-com names had back then. The smaller tech, you know, the docu-signs of the world, Zoom. Right. Zoom. Those ones did. But the big stuff, those are, I don't know, they're like the, it's, it feels like I'm throwing out like nifty, 50 comparisons or something here, but it's, those are like the new conglomerates these days almost, right?

uh these stocks i don't know i'm just it's i i just think it's different business lines yeah it's it's just it's i just think it's pretty impressive they had one bad year one bad year and a half and now completely coming back in some ways oh my god it's so wild so pre-pendemic i'm looking at a i'm looking at a you know i'm with those in the dock right now so we could show it to the audience i'm looking at a 10 year chart of apple and ben check this out back the peak pre-pandemic was. We're now like years removed from pre-pendemic, like four years later, which is kind of nuts. Time has sped up and slowed down simultaneously. But look where, look how far back the pre-pandemic peak was. So it was Apple peaked at 1.4 trillion right before

the pandemic hit. Went from 1.4 trillion. Didn't fall that much during the pandemic, actually. to one trillion. And it's more than doubled since then? And now it's close to three. So it's about to triple off the lows from the pandemic. Not bad. And to your point, it was, I think it was 2014 or 2015, it entered the top 10, and it's still just going crazy since then. Ben, when Josh and I were in Tampa last week, talking in front of a bunch of advisors, and one of the things that I spoke about was,

how in the beginning of the year, a lot of people were saying, like, why take market risk when I could get 4%, 5% risk-free? Which was and is a reasonable thing that people say. Here we are May 5th, I'm sorry, June 5th, and the NASDAQ 100 is on pace for the best first half to the year since 1991. you won. We've spoken about this a lot, a book that we both enjoyed called It Was a Very Good Year. And it was a history of the, I think, the 10 best years in the stock market. Yeah. And I don't know about all of them, but most of them came after a very bad year. Yeah, I own that book somewhere. And here we are again. And there were people arguing early, I wrote a blog post about this early in the year, people saying, why would I not just go clip four or

5% and sit out this mess of a stock market. And it honestly sounded like a pretty good idea at the time. And my point was, okay, you timed the market, what happens if the stock market goes up a lot? And I wasn't predicting it at the time, but just putting it out there that this is a good possibility, especially after a bad year. And now what do you do? Let's say you shifted, you know, half of your equity allocation into T-bills because you were earning 5% and you felt more comfortable there. Now what do you do? This is the hard part about market timing is the next part if you're wrong, that's when it becomes really, really difficult to understand. And guess what? What about if you're right? What if stocks did crash this year?

Right. Right? It's not like timing it if you're right is any easier. So anyway, there's been outflows for equities for most of the year, money moving into short-term bond funds. But last week did look like a breakout for equities in terms of fund flows. Now, let's put this together. You get 5% in short-term. term T bills, right? You get 30% in the NASDAQ, 10% in the S&P, the Russell 2000 is not getting anything this year for small cats. That's a pretty darn good year for investors. If you're earning 5% in your short-term safe stuff and double digits in your stock market, and is anyone happy about the market right now? Not really, right? But that's a pretty good setup.

Well, here's why. Look at this tweet from Urban Carmel who has a tweet thread of fund flow stuff an investor sentiment. So he tweeted this in January of 2023. Last year, retail investors sold all of the stocks they bought during the prior three years. That's just for the S&P. For the NASDAQ, they actually sold more than they bought. So coming into this year, investors, understandably, not poking fun at all, investors fled for the hills, ran for the hills.

That's the soccer coach gift. I don't know how they necessarily calculate this. I'm not going to call out Goldman Sachs, but don't we always hear from ETF people that we don't know who won our ETFs? I mean, unless this is just purely Robin Hood data or how do they know this? Because look at this next chart from the ICI

that shows money coming out of actively managed mutual funds and going into index funds and ETS. And it's a mere image. The money coming out of accurately managed funds is going into ETFs and indexed mutual funds. I'm not saying this data is wrong. I'm just saying, how do they know this? Oh, this is the actual stocks themselves, not the ETFs.

Is that right? So I see S&P 500 stocks and NASDAQ 100 stocks. Yeah, there's different charts. Okay. All right, I could see that. But yeah, I don't think anybody was all bowled up coming into the new year. I guess it doesn't surprise me, though, that people are... I think it's easier to pull the rip cord on an individual stock than a fund.

That's kind of seems like a stating the obvious, but if you own an individual stock, it's a little easier to just let that go if it's down 80%. In fact, all through 2022, what we were talking about was, like, historic negative sentiment from retail, from fund managers, from economists, and then we bottom in October, things started to balance, momentum to cold, and then earnings delivered better than expected, and then here we are. I think one of the things people fail to realize when they buy individual stocks, though, like they hold up the apples and Amazon's on a pedestal in Nvidia and

like look at the, look at these massive gains you could get, but they feel to see that it's not out of the ordinary to see an individual stock have a 1987 crash, like all the time during earning season. Stock down 20, 30% in a single day that, like, if that happens in the stock market, it feels like the world's coming to an end. If it happens in a single stock, it's like, oh, this happens. Or a stock down 80% from its highs, which is essentially a great depression. So like, you can have a great depression in 1987 in individual stocks all the time. And if that happened in the market, it would seem like the world is, it's Armageddon.

And so I think people forget about that side of owning individual stocks that, like, that stuff is way, people are always, like, predicting that's going to happen in the market, but it happens in individual stocks all the time. Invidia, from 21 to 22, felt, lost two-thirds of its value. Imagine you invest $100,000 into Nvidia right at the peak, and it turns into $30,000,000. And then you sell and it round trips and comes back up. Yeah. There's probably people who did something like that.

Okay, a bunch of good demographic stuff this week. The Wall Street Journal had a piece on the visual breakdown of America's stagnating number of births, and people are kind of concerned about this. So look at this, U.S. births and deaths going back to 1930. This is a really cool chart. They're kind of coming into, they're meeting each other, and deaths were way lower, births were way higher, births are coming down, deaths are going way up. Yeah, that COVID spike is huge.

the government tallied 65,000 fewer births in 2022, then the 2007 high of $4.32 million reflecting ongoing diseases. This is a lot of COVID stuff, but also look at the U.S. fertility rate. Just look at that massive spike for the baby boom. And then it's come down and it's way lower. And U.S. birth rates by age group is kind of a cool chart as well. I think people should be having fewer babies. I don't know how controversial that is.

But, like, our parents got married at 22, had three kids. And in my case, in a lot of other cases, like, were divorced, like, 10 years later. Both of my parents have four siblings. So they came from five child households. I don't know how you – I know a handful of people who have actually old high school friends who have, like, five or six kids. And I don't know how they function as human beings. I had a kid in my high school who graduated in my high school class who was the oldest of 13 children. I mean, that's, you know, that's otherworldly.

But for the, I don't know what the median family in terms of, like, kids they had, but my mom, too, had three siblings. And then she had three kids. And I feel like I'm speaking for myself personally, two feels very manageable. And also, whatever, anyway. I think, too, if you ask people our age, how many kids do you want to have, it would be one or two would be the most answered number, right? we had three on accident and two was the number we were shooting for so but the reason

people are worried about and I agree I think as as nations become wealthier they have fewer children and obviously back in like the 1800s people had so many kids because they were working on the farm and they were dying before the age of five and so they had to have more kids to give themselves a higher probability of having kids that survived but the reason

people are worried about this is because there's two ways to grow the economy one is productivity and the other is population population growth is a huge part of economic growth. So is this too easy to say that like technology solves this? If we're having fewer people are saying like this is a huge, huge problem. Because look at this next one from the economist. So it shows population growth in United States, Brazil, China, Japan, Italy, South Korea. And this is forecasting out until like 2100. And the U.S. is like the only

continue to grow. And I'm guessing that's because immigration, not fertility. And these other ones are just crashing. China's crashing. Japan's already crashing a little bit. And And that's a big worry that, like, okay, this is going to be a really big impediment to economic growth. Well, we could debate this in 207. I don't know. I don't know if having less humans on the planet is that bad. I mean, obviously, I don't know. But for economic growth purposes, on the face value, you'd think like that, that's not a good thing. If we're just talking growth, but can something like AI make us more efficient and fill in the hole and make us? But isn't there, isn't there a tipping point? If you extrapolate out, let's say, let's just say, that it went the other way, where growth kept going. Wouldn't there be a point where we start fighting over, like, and I know we're doing that

today, but really, really, really fighting over scarce resources? That's, I mean, are you in the Jeremy Grantham camp now of, we're going to run out of stuff? That's the thing. My whole thing, thinking behind this, like, you could really worry about this. I think we figure stuff out. That'd be my default assumption until we don't figure something out, but that's kind of where I fall on this. Yeah.

Me personally, this stuff is not interesting. to me. That's just maybe interesting to you, not interesting to me. Okay. All right. You don't care about the global economy. That's fine. No, because I feel like this is all so theoretical. Maybe it's not theoretical. I don't know. It just doesn't necessarily peak my interest. That's all. Okay. All right. Labor market. If the machines are going to take, maybe the machines are never going to take our jobs if we're not enough kids because they're not going to have people for jobs, but jobs added by month since 2021. I did a nice little chart here from the BLS. We had it over There are 7 million jobs in 2021, which that sounds impressive, but coming off the lows of the number of jobs lost in 2020, probably not that impressive. Last year, I think was impressive. Four point eight million jobs added. This year, one point six million jobs added. And the unemployment rate actually went up a little bit last month. The labor force participation rate for 25 to 54 is still at a 10-year high. So we're, we've blown past the peak pre-pandemic. I don't know. Well, if you listen to the tech bros, they think the government is making up the numbers.

which is a strong possibility. I see no other, I mean, there's no other explanation for them being wrong about calling a recession and the government is making up the numbers. Yeah, yeah. Unemployment rate is actually 12%.

They're just not telling you. All right. U.S. construction job employment, this one is crazy to me. Like, this is the weirdest housing recession ever. 64,000 construction jobs added in May. The biggest monthly increase since December 2021,

pay for construction workers, was annual pay was up 6.7% in May, down from 7.41%. But we're in the midst of, like, I don't know, is it still a housing recession or is that kind of over? But we keep adding construction workers. Depends where you are. I feel like in my neighborhood, the housing market is pretty frozen. For new construction, it's a boom for existing. Yes. But I think it's a freeze. That's the weird part about it, though, is the frozen part of it doesn't necessarily mean like a bust, though. We're just kind of stuck. It's Austin Powers being frozen in 1960.

and getting out in 20 what did he get out in 1997 something like that right i just i just caught that again and maybe i saw the second one i don't know spire shagmer so good yes all right someone sent me this i've been talking for a while about how why do we complain so much when the labor market seems like it's so great and why does the fed think this is such a bad thing that we have to like put people out of a job so the atlantic had a piece about this i thought that was interesting by Orrin Cass and saying that like why does the government think this is a problem? Even people who are like free market absolutist, like let the market decide. Like why do the, why do even those people think like this is a bad thing that that people

are earning more money and because of inflation? Basically, my dog is staring right at me. I'm not quite sure why. What's wrong? All right. So this is the kicker for me that I thought was interesting. Like the idea that tight labor markets necessarily. have to mean higher inflation. So in the late 70s, as inflation was surging, unemployment rate

was 5 to 6 percent, like too high from what we'd think today, right? Through both the 90s and late 2010s, an unemployment rate of below 4 percent coincided with low inflation. And over the past year, inflation fell from 9 percent to 5 percent, and the unemployment rate fell with it. I think the idea that, like, a really tight labor market has to mean high inflation has not been proven out historically, even if that's the way it is in economic textbooks. I still don't understand why people want to damage the labor market so badly, like why that is the default assumption for policymakers right now. I guess I think it's the only way to slow price increases, which seem to be happening even though the labor market remains tight.

You know how you, we have a conversation with anyone, and you think about a really good comeback like three days later or something to say? You asked me last week, what is the, what is the thing that now could give us high inflation going forward? And I thought about it more, and I thought, oh, the easiest answer is just government spending. Like, government spending is going to have to remain high to, like, keep this stuff going, and that's the piece. Like, just keep the party going, keep the economy going. I don't think the government is all of a sudden going to be able to slow spending down.

Right? So I think that's the piece that could potentially keep inflation higher. If we are spending a ton of money on, I don't know, rebuilding all the roads and construction and climate change and all this stuff, that's how. how we get three to four percent inflation instead of two percent inflation going forward. The government keeps spending money. That's what I mean. Can they slow?

I don't know. You know who can't stop, won't stop? The consumer. This is from the transcript on MasterCard's earnings calls. Here's a quote. The headline as we shared with you as part of our Q1 earnings call was we continue to see a consumer, which is just remarkably resilient and consumer spending continues to be remarkably resilient.

Obviously, we're all tracking exactly what your track from a macroeconomic environment standpoint. And as I look at our drivers and the performance drivers, which drive our top line, while we're seeing effectively is that through the first two weeks of the month of May, our drivers are generally in line with our expectations. That guy said drivers like six times right there. That's a lot of drivers. I'm sorry. I'm just reading it. So Lindsay Bell did a quote, did a tweet threat, excuse me. And she said, on the consumer, she said Target, Walmart, T.J. Max, and a bunch of others,

either reaffirmed their outlook or raised, dollar tree, raise sales guidance, and gap raised margin outlook. The most important takeaway, those retailers cross various target shoppers with varying income levels. Retailers exhibit a weakness, on the other hand, operate in areas that benefited more greatly in the past two years. This demand was pulled forward, like Home Depot and Lowe's and furniture retailers. All told, the consumer is hanging in there. They are resilient. Their resiliency is likely to remain at year. And this all comes back to the labor market. And if people have jobs, they're going to spend money.

So maybe that's why the labor market is such a point of emphasis, because people obviously aren't going to stop spending until they lose their job. Like, that's like what else is going to stop people from spending? If, if 9% in full, inflation didn't slow people down, what is going to? Maybe that's the point. I do wonder if, so Dollar General had a double miss and guided down, I wonder if consumers at the lower end, they're starting to change their behavior. So they said the macro environment is more challenging than the company had previously

anticipated, which a company believes is having a significant impact on customer spending levels and behaviors. Now, who knows if this is a Dollar General story or a Dollar General customer story? Hard to tell, but it seems like buying large a consumer is hanging in there. CFO of Costco had an interesting quote. Historically, we've always seen when there's a recession, whether it was 99 or 2009-2,000, or 2009-08, we would see some sales penetration shift from beef to poultry and pork. We have seen some of that now.

Wait, what? So they're predicting a recession based on people buying chicken and pork instead of beef? What if people are just being more heart-conscious and healthy with their eating habits? Seems unlikely. But who knows? Maybe these are, I mean, these would be potentially leading economic indicators, right? It's like, obviously, people spending habits. I know.

That's, that's, that's, I've never heard of like a beef recession indicator. Yeah. Well, no, I have. Where's the beef? I feel like someone has to say that every time, right? Oh, last night. Let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question.

Remember I told you one time that I left my barbecue on overnight? Okay. Did I, I told you this, right? I turned a piece of chicken into, like, into, like, dust. And somehow your house didn't burn down? Well, the shingles on the back of my house, like, melted a little bit. Okay.

So last night, I was cooking a steak. How does that even happen that you forget a whole chicken on the grill? I'm very absent-minded. In the airport, which has happened to me multiple times, I was sitting down, and I realized, like, you know, the Kevin thing from home alone? I didn't have my luggage. I left my suitcase, like, in the store. So that happens to me all the time.

I just will walk away without my stuff. Very absent-minded. What was I saying? Oh, that was funny. You're telling a story about being absent-minded while you got absent-minded. So I was cooking a steak last night. Now, are you not supposed to leave the top down on the barbecue when you're cooking a steak? I'm not a grill master, so you're asking the wrong guy.

I look like a grill master with a shirt, but I'm not. So this was the, I don't know why, maybe I was just lazy, but nine times out of ten, before I cook on the barbecue, I like, you know, brush the stuff off from the previous cook session. I didn't do that this time. I just, I spray and I said, eh, whatever, I'm sure it's fine. Maybe it gives me more flavor. Who knows? And so I had the top dad, and I opened the barbecue and flames. Like, not just flames that came out of the barbecue, but like the barbecue is on fire.

on fire. And so I immediately turned the barbecue off, but no, there's a fire. And it wasn't being fueled by gas. It was being fueled by, I don't even know what, whatever I left on there. So, anyway, Robert's like, what the hell is happening? Because I ran back in and I filled up like a pot of water and I, anyway, all's well that ends well. But I wonder, I don't know if the fire was caused, I'm sure, well, please, if you're a grillmaster,

let me know. Did I do the wrong thing by closing the grill or did I do the wrong thing by leaving the remnants on from the prior time? Or were they both wrong? And shame on me. Getting like a Trigger grill is the new, uh, midlife crisis too. Getting a what? One of the Trigger egg thing grills and like cooking brisket for like 18 hours every weekend. Like that's a, that's a 40s dad thing for sure. I never got into it yet, but I know a lot of dads who did. See, that's for middle-aged guy, so I'm not quite there yet. Okay. Keep counting down the days. All right, remember when egg prices were the big talking point. We had a couple. All right, egg prices are going on sale just months after

hitting record prices. This is a small shoot journal. Look at this chart. Huge spike come back because the avian flu. This is the kind of thing where people get all up in arms when something goes up in price and complain the world's coming to an end. Price comes back down. No one cares. Correct. Right. This is why like bad news is the headline. Good news is a process and people just kind of move on in their lives. I do think like these past few years have given a good reminder to us of like sometimes it's kind of crazy to think about how the world just continues to run at all. With all the products and services and stuff that we produce, the fact that we had an interruption and people realize like, oh, that's right.

Like, there's a process to all this stuff. This stuff gets made here and it gets shipped here and it gets moved here. And the price, like, the fact that we don't have more problems of this stuff is actually more surprising to me than the fact that we do. Fair? Yeah. World keeps humming along. All right.

ZipRecruiter. I don't care about this stuff, right? Is eggs fall into demographics for you? Listen, are you going to, I don't care about the demographics guy. It's just not my, that's just not my jam. It's not my beat. You're never going to go on Harry Dent's podcast now. Do you think that guy has a podcast?

Oh, yeah. So layoffs, I think we spoke a couple weeks ago that it's been pretty quiet. Well, ZipRecruiter, which is a recruiting company, of course, is cutting 20% of their staff. So, is that signal or noise? You don't hear as many ZipRecruiter ads on podcasts anymore. Nah, I feel like that's a big ringer thing. Just, well, just because now it's so easy to get a job, though, right? Isn't that the idea?

Like, you don't need a recruiter to get a job for you? Oh, so maybe, oh, are you going the other way? The economy is too strong for ZipRecruiter? Yes. ZipRecruiter works better if there's high unemployment, correct? What do I need ZipRecruiter for? I can, they're throwing jobs out the window to people. Very, very...

We did that simultaneously. That was nice. That was good. For the listeners, Ben and I just did the guy pointing to his head, GIF. All right. All right. So I think both right and wrong, VCs are the biggest momentum of vendors and the investors on the planet.

This is from Fortune, global VC capital raise for crypto firms. And it just slowly but steadily rising in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2021 and 2022 was just massive. So almost $22 billion in global VC capital raise. crypto firms last year. This year, it's half a billion dollars. This chart almost doesn't look real, even. Yeah, this is, this is wild. I mean, again, this is, they are truly momentum investors. And maybe you would say, well, they invested so much in these preceding years that they, they're just, it's been invested, you know, let's see what happens. But has, has venture capital completely left crypto for AI at this point? The answer is, yes. The answer is,

Because that was honestly one of the, I thought one of the better bull cases for crypto is just there's so much money going into there. It has to lead to something. It has to lead to something. Too early to tell. What if they just completely turn the spigot off and they just let a lot of these companies die and say, look, look at this shiny new AI stuff we're investing in. Don't look over there at this stuff. Look at this. Well, here's a chart from Michael McDonough, artificial intelligence versus metaverse related mentions on publicly traded.

accompanied transcripts and earnest calls. And the Metaverse was never really, really a thing. I know, well, I know Facebook change our name of meta. But compared to, I guess just compared to AI, it's, look at this recent spike. It's pretty comical. But this is the thing, I think this is why you can see both side of like the tech debate about like these people are idiots that got lucky or they're geniuses, is that sometimes they do just throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

Well, they have to. I feel like, especially for AI. And I feel like for these guys, like they can't miss this, right? It's not about what you get wrong. It's about what you get right. And this is like one of the big drivers, the engines of our economy is venture capitalists that are willing to put money on the line to create prosperity for the rest of us. I'm not saying that like they're like, you know, Mother Teresa or Heroes or anything like

that, but look what we got over the last 10 years that was funded by venture capital. capital. But this is also why I just don't like the narrative that all venture capital say, like, I'm a contrarian. I was investing when no one wanted to invest. They're not contrarians. They are momentum players through and through. Like, you, like, it's just chasing the dot, right? So, well, well, that's, I mean, in our little corner of the world, I speak to a decent amount of venture guys that invest in our industry, and everyone's pulling back. Nobody's like, you know what, I'm going to be a contrarian. Now that everybody's pulled back, I'm going to go in. haven't heard one person say that. Right. But I think that's just that that's the way that this

industry works though. Yeah. I think it's also it's a small industry where people are more likely to follow the herd and stand out. The problem is you can't, unless you have a huge checkbook, you can't be the only investor, right? You need other investors to come with you. That's true. That's exactly true. So like maybe they have to be momentum investors. Did you know that there are 13 AI unicorns already? Sounds high to me. Because the only one that I really know of. In fact, the only one that I know of is Open AI, which is set to try to raise $100 billion. I know I've mentioned this before, but the only one, like, the only one I want is I want my AI assistant in my ear, like on her. Like, I saw that and I thought like,

if this is where technology is going someday, like, sign me up, like, hey, go through all 10,000 of my emails, pull this, add these charts. I just hope someone creates that. That's all I want. I was watching. So Kobe. I don't want to date. I don't want to date. I don't want to date. my AI, but yes. Kobe and Logan are on a Spider-Man kick. So I was watching Spider-Man, too, the one with Dr. Octopus. My son and George loved that one, too. That's a pretty good one.

And they were asking, as he's, like, doing the thing, when he puts a suit on, they're worried about, like, well, what if these artificial intelligence arms become too smart? He's like, ah, that's why I've got this. The chips. So, Spider-Man, too, ahead of its time. And then something broke the chip, and it's, isn't it funny when all those superhero movies, it's like there's this one little thing in your body that's controlling it. Like Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man had like the fake heart thing.

It's always just one little thing that's holding everything together. That's a great scene when Dr. Octopus, when they're trying to like saw the arms off of him and he's just like face down on the operating table and the arms are doing their thing. Remember that scene? Yeah, the origin stories are always the best ones for those. I kind of give up half to the origin stories. All right, you mentioned the housing market in your neighborhood being frozen. I think one of the reasons.

So I talked to a realtor friends of mine this week in. And she said, I've never worked harder to try to get people houses, but people tell me what they want, and there's nothing. They can't find anything. And when a house does come on the market, it's way overpriced for how much work needs to be done to it. And there's 30 people who are willing to bid on it because there's so many people looking to buy.

And so Alex Thomas from John Burns tweeted this out, even at 7% interest rates, 78% of all real estate agents tell us that buyers outnumber sellers in their market. And the buyer number is going up. This is a demographic story that I'm interested in because it's not 10 years now, it's today, or 50 years from now, it's today. True. Yes. And it's, I think that's the whole thing of it. It's just household formation for young people. Redfin has the housing payments up 15% or year over year to a high that we talked about before. There was this fortune story about a couple who has a $600,000 budget. They have a child on the way, and they just can't find a house. So they said in the two years that they've been house hunting, they put down count.

offers, raise their budget substantially and compromised on location from central to north to to south Jersey. When they first started looking, their budget was 500K. That quickly changed after seeing disasters in that price range. After years of searching, they pushed their budget to 600, and they still haven't closed on a home. This is just so depressing. Their initial strategy was to wait for prices to drop, then enter the housing market and start their life as a family. The guy said, they're not dropping, and now we're shit out of luck. I got a baby coming in a month, like, we're out of luck. I can't imagine being in that position. where they talked about like countless times

they offered 50 grand over and they're like compromising everything they want in a house and they've moved down and all this stuff it's got to be the worst affordability is terrible and there's no houses on the market. I think the best option

for people that are in this unfortunate situation is to rent. The counter to that would be rent is going up too. Yeah. I think that's actually slowing though. Rent is slowing. Being stuck between a rock on a hard place. This chart from Redfin of home buyer housing payment, like, look at, look at

2020. It was like less than 1,500 a month for the average mortgage payment, $1,500 a month. In May of 2023, it just hit $2650. That's absurd. That's absurd. That's one of the things that makes this so difficult is not just the increase. It's that people didn't get a chance to acclimate to the increase. It happens so fast and you can look back and say, I missed it. In 2021 and 2020, I would have, it would have been so much more affordable. And I was right there. How come, how come this dynamic hasn't curbed consumer spending? I think the answer is because how is, is like, people that are trying to get into a house is still a very small part of the overall population. It is. Very small. It's a smaller part. So there's this personal

finance rule of thumb that I've heard that you want to spend like 28 to 30 percent of your gross income all in on housing. And I think the thing Ramit said to us a few weeks ago is like when you rent your payment ends, right? Whatever you pay for rent, that's it. But when you own a house, your mortgage, like that's, there's still more on top of it. So add all that in insurance and property taxes and all that. It should be like around 30% of your income. I mean, that obviously like every personal finance rule of thumb is very circumstantial. But look at this chart that I created mortgage payments using median existing home prices, so not new home prices, as a percentage of median household income going back to 1989. And it dropped, but look at the drop that it, I mean,

even in the 80s and 90s was much higher because mortgage rates were higher, I think, and incomes have actually, on a real basis, incomes are up over that time. And look at the increase, but look at, I mean, it's easy to say this now. In the 2009 to 2016 or 17 range, Just, I mean, a generational buying opportunity for housing prices. And if you bought back then, you should consider yourself very, very, very lucky. That's why I bought sex. Would have been a good... All right.

New study on money and happiness from University of Pennsylvania. You've heard, like, the Daniel Kahneman one, that up to $75,000, your happiness increases, and then it plateaus or whatever. The number is not right, but it's definitely directionally right. Right, like 100%. So there's a new study that decided to, like, let's look at this a little bit. And that they said, happiness rises with income until 100 grand, then shows no further increase as income grows.

But for those in the, this is for people in the least happy. So they segmented people out into happiness. Least happy, median happy, like very happy. And then they said people in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income. And for the happiness, happiest group, the association actually accelerates above 100,000. So they broke it up into like, what's your emotional makeup? And I think that actually makes more sense that for some people, the money is never going to be enough because of the way that they're hardwired.

Right. Right. It's just, and for other people, they're going to be happy with what they have. I think a lot of it is, I think a big piece for me is like seeing, like, talking about the gradual increase. I can look back and see in my 20s pretty much to my mid-30s. I did not make a lot of money. Like my very first job out of college, I was making like 30K a year. Like, I was making, and I had friends were making way more than me.

At least you had a job. That's what people were saying back then. Like, you should be lucky in, you know, but I think having that ability to see it slowly rise instead of like being 25 and making like $300,000 or whatever it is, like some people do. And I think that screws your perception of reality way, way more. And I think the ability to look back and have some sort of like gratitude for, you know. And the funny thing is in high school and college, growing up, I had no, in high school and college, I had zero money. My net worth was negative. And those were some of the happiest days of my life.

So, like, I think it is all relative in terms of your, like, your relative disposition on life as opposed to some number. Also, in high school, you didn't need a lot of money. If you're a 40-year-old person with no money, you're probably pretty miserable. Fair. All right. So I got a, the ping, that's my annual insurance premium for my house coming up. And it was like $2,000 higher than what I've Why? I call, I've been a client with them for, I've had them for my auto insurance. I use them for my, I use them for like boat insurance for home insurance and I get all these bundle. And they're like, it's, it's going on. So I said, what's going on here? Why is it, is it because like housing prices are up? Like, I don't understand why. And it was, it was like triple the price, the annual price. Because I always pay it, you know, I pay the whole thing. So you save like a couple hundred bucks. And they basically said, I don't have a good answer for you. It just rose. And I'm like, well, I've been a customer for how many of a years, for 15 years. Anything you can do for me? They said, no.

And so I got a quote from somewhere else that actually was $200 less. You know what he used? Thank you, Mr. Buffett. I use Geico. There you go. But it was easy enough to just find a thing online. Just shopping for insurance is so easy. It took me 10 minutes to fill out an online form.

Someone called me. I answered three questions, and that was it. I actually have an insurance broker that I use for everything. I feel like in New York, you use a broker for everything. Well, you have, like, a broker for your car, for, you probably have a broker for your grill you bought. Like, that's a, it's not a New Yorker thing to have a broker for everything. The insurance broker thing is great because he deals with everything. Like, God forbid, I need to put in a claim.

But besides that, like, when I, when you get a new car, do you have insurance coverage? That's right. You could have put a, you could put a claim in for your siding when you almost bring your house down. Call my broker. Ben, I've got an email pet peeve. You know, I am not a pet peeve person. I don't, if somebody said, like, what are some of your biggest pet peeves? I don't know that I would be able to come up with one.

Well, are you, I don't know. That's my biggest weakness. I care too much. You know, I'm not, I'm just, like I said, I'm not that observant, I guess. I don't really have a lot of pet peeves. There's not, but here's one of them. I would say that my email response, not for like cold, but, you know, warm intros. My response, my hit rate is like, I think I'm like 96% good.

I'm making that up. Here and there, I will forget to respond to somebody. But what I'm saying is for the most part, I do get back to somebody via email. I'm just laying the groundwork for what I'm about to say. Not to brag, but I get back to everyone emails me. No, because I'm about to shine myself in a bad light. So I just want to say that this is atypical. When you get an email intro from somebody and then they respond to you and you don't respond back and then they follow up with you.

and they continue to CC the other person who made the intro, I feel like they're tattling, tattletailing on you and it makes me want to respond less. It's like, I see that. Just follow up one-on-one, person to person, and I will say, hey, my bad, I apologize. I'm, you know, whatever, didn't get to this. We're moving the third party to BCC.

Yeah, it's just, it's, I feel like, I feel like that person's treating me like a child. It feels like childish behavior. You know what I mean? You want to know what gets me sometimes? I can't stand people who abbreviate. thanks to THX. Josh does that.

Like the email, like the only response is THX. Yeah, how hard is just writing thanks? Yeah. How much time did that really save you?

Yeah. That's all I'm saying. Uh, so anyway, the person I, you know, I kept an open mind, the person that did that

happened to be perfectly pleasant. I wasn't like totally judging the person. I'm not, but it's just, it's annoying. They really wanted to talk to you. I just feel like

the proper email etiquette is to not do that. All right. Uh, I thought that travelers were going to, like, get it out of their

system. When the economy reopened, everyone did the Disney, the this, the that, they're still going. USA-TSA checkpoint number on a five-day average is breaking out again. I don't understand how people, like... Think of how much we've been, Duncan, before we got on the podcast, asked, he said, is this normal for you guys to be traveling this much, or is this back to pre-pendemic? And I feel like people are packing it in again these days. We've been on the road way more lately. Way more. And so I have a quick airplane story about a hero. This is the opposite of a pet peeve. You know, understandably so, when you're walking down the aisle, somebody will, like, pull on your seat as they're walking by. Yes. Which is not an egregious thing to do. It happens. But one guy did it to me, and he said, sorry. That's all you need, right? That's all I want. Just that, sorry by that. Because it is quite jarring. You know what I mean? It's like someone cutting you off the road.

If they, like, acknowledge it and say, my bad. I love that person. That's all I need. That, like, makes my day. Yeah. Ben, we spoke about, like, with the gratuity stuff, just going too far. So in the hotel, I got just a Chabani, because I needed something quick for the go. A Chabani is just a Greek yogurt.

It was like $2.50. And sure enough, they gave me a receipt with the gratuity that I need to sign. And guess what I did? I'm sorry. I had to draw a line. Literally, I drew a line across the tip. the tip spot. I did not tip it on Chabani. Well, you know what you do? I always just sign my name and don't total about.

I'm not even going to acknowledge that there's a tip on there. Imagine? Yeah, that is a lot. I feel like if they open the yogurt for you, gave you a spoon, put it in there. Yeah, maybe you deserve a tip. So, Josh and I were talking about succession and what's next on HBO? And I guess he was saying, like, The Last of Us Season 2 is going to come back, which I'm not super interested in, to be honest. I feel like, I mean, I'll watch it, but, you know, what's the next big show?

So somebody tweeted, HBO's run of House of the Dragon into the White Lotus Season 2 into The Last of Us into Succession's Season 4 might never be topped. What a heater they've been on. Boy, that is true. But, I mean, we also had that period of Mad Men with Breaking Bad, with, there was a lot of good shows on at once, and we felt like, okay, that's never coming back again. I still think these streamers, even if the stuff dies down a little bit because we're on the Reuters strike or whatever, they're going to have to continue to try pumping out stuff.

I mean, we are entering a major TV lull, like major, which is fine because it's the summer, but after the finals are done, I've got pretty much nothing. Yeah, that's true. So someone emailed us, we talked about LG TVs and why all hotels have them. Someone actually emailed us and said, oh yeah, let's hear. As a previous hotel, wait, corporate hotelier, is that a name? Hotelier, is that a thing? I've actually met with LG's B2B hotel team can explain why.

Hotel TVs are not like regular TVs. They have dedicated modules built into them and allow interfacing with the hotels operating system. That must be how we get Mario Lopez, pay-per-view, all this stuff. And LG TV, I guess, has that. And that's why there's LG TVs in all hotels. They make them specifically for hotels. That's why it takes six seconds to change their channel. All right, not to beat this dead horse, but I've just got a bone to pick with the whole ticket industry.

So, wait, to the man who has no pet peeves, let's talk about ticketing again. But that's not a pet peeve, but fair enough. So I am done with that site that we keep mentioning. And I am, so I went to an alternative because Ben and I wanted to get Sean, who works for us, an early Christmas present. He's in Denver. And so I thought, wouldn't it be nice to send him to the Nuggets game? Like, what a, how much fun would that be?

So we got him a ticket. A ticket. And I just don't get it. It was a 25%. So I'm looking at the price. I'm like, oh, that's expensive, but whatever. You know, it's NBA finals. And then boom, service fee, 25, 30%.

But they're doing it on both sides. I just don't understand the margins of this business obviously are not, there's more than meets the eye, right? Because if they're taking 50% gross, what are they paying to the arenas? And somebody says this whole article about like Taylor Swift and Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen and people getting pissed off just for you. years with Ticketmaster and just the unfair practices. I guess it just is what it is.

Like, I don't really know what, you know. What the solution is. Obviously, yeah. People don't, it must be too complicated to make a good solution. Somebody emailed me saying that they took a three-hour drive and went straight to the arena in order just because like they were so fed up with Ticketmaster. Oh, to buy it from the ticket box? Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Recommendations. I thought the season finale of Dave was one of the best episodes of television all year. There was probably two or three episodes in this season, but I couldn't believe. So Rachel McAdams was on the last two or three episodes, who was just a delight. And all of a sudden, he's doing a Rachel McAdams rap, and Brad Pitt sticks his head in. And I thought maybe Brad Pitt sticking his head in was going to be it.

I didn't read any stories about this. I didn't know. I didn't realize Brad Pitt was going to be on. I texted you. I said, holy crap, Brad Pitt. And he was on the whole episode. He was, I mean, it's kind of seems like it's the obvious thing to say. Brad Pitt was amazing on this show.

So no spoilers, but the scene where they're, like, mouthing what to do in that scene to each other. Yes. I rewound it because I was laughing so hard. I thought, so when he made an appearance early on in the episode, I just thought that was it. I thought he was going to pop his head in. I thought that was it. He was the start.

I mean, him and Dave, how did Dave do it? There was a Rolling Stone piece on it saying that they had production company, people that knew each other, and Brad Pitt had said, like, I like this show. And they worked for back channels to get on. He got Drake? I thought Brad Pitt was just hilarious. The whole setup was just, oh, man, that, I thought season two was like a little plateau for Dave. I thought season three went up a level.

Was the Drake thing a dream? Oh, that's a good question. I don't think so. He said in the interview that it wasn't, I don't think. I think he's working at himself, so. Yeah, man, what a show. So I've been doing a lot of finalies lately. I stuck with Ted Lassow.

Season two was just not good at all, I thought. Season three, it was very up and down and uneven, but they had, it was the last season. I didn't realize that the finale, my wife and I were looking like, wait, is this the actual finale? It's the kind of show where you want them to tie everything up in a neat bow, and they kind of did. And I actually appreciated the finale, and I liked it. The show was very up and down in the last two seasons, but I'm glad I stuck with it. Oh, how's the silo? Ramp keeps telling me to watch it.

The first episode was amazing. It's in the middle has kind of gotten a little boring for me. I'm sticking with it, but it's, it's, people keep telling me to read the books that it's definitely stalled. I need some more coming, but. Yeah. And also one more. I watched a good person, Zach Braff wrote and directed this, just so depressing. I'm never heard of it. Like, I don't mind, like, a little bit of depressing, but it was like the whole movie was just dealing with death and unexpected death and substance abuse and all this stuff. And it was a good acting performance, but way too depressing for me.

All right. The Super Mario Brothers movie has grossed 1.3 globally. It's the second highest grossing animated film ever passing Frozen, which is insane. Can we talk about how you say the name there? Mario. Mario. I know it's Mario, but I'm sorry. You always, I'm just, had to throw it out there. Fair. I let it slide a few times.

Fair. So they're going to beat this into the ground. And you know what? My prediction for the, because, I mean, nothing feeds on success like success or I don't know. You know what I'm talking about. Copycat. Zelda.

They're going to make a Zelda movie. Oh, yeah. So they're going to make one for every Nintendo. You know it'll be a great one. Contra. I'd watch a contra movie. Oh, yeah. Yep, with Chris Holmesworth.

Yeah. So, not only they're going to make, so Zelda's a Nintendo one, but they're going to, I don't mean just Nintendo. They're going to make every video game movie. Yeah, that makes it. My kids, we rented Mario or bought it on streaming or whatever on Amazon and watched it six times already.

Yeah, same. All right. Great airplane movie missing. You ever hear of that one? Wait, which one is that? It sounds familiar. I'm very big into the person disappearing mystery. Is this a new movie?

I've never seen that. Yeah, it's new. A girl's mom disappears and she uses the internet to try and track her down and, you know, it's pretty convoluted and incredibly nonsensical,

but for an airplane movie, it's a good one, real good one. I also needed, so I had like 25 minutes left in the flight that I needed time to kill, and I needed a movie

that I could like pass out to. So I put on Remember the Titans, which I saw probably a hundred times. Well, it's been a long time. And it made me feel very old. The movie is from 2000. Wow. Almost 25 years old.

What? What? It's like Ryan Gosling's intro into our lies. Remember the time it's almost 25 years old, unbelievable. All right, lastly, this is also an airplane material. Fubar is a ton of fun. It's the new Arnold show on Netflix. It's got some true lies-ish stuff.

Does he, like, play himself? No, no, it's like true lies. He plays CIA agent, and it's light and silly and... I just love hanging with Arnold. Good. All right. Hang with that guy all day. Okay.

All right. Animal spiritspod at gmail.com. I think we're still waiting on some more tropical brothershirts to be reloaded, but we'll let you know when they're back because we're all out of small, medium and large. Really? Double X or an X. XL or double XL. I think we still got those.

Okay. You know, here's your strategy. If you really want one, get a double XL and wash it and dry it a hundred times to shrink it. All right. See you next time. Go! Go!