Animal Spirits Podcast - Millennials Will Buy All the Stocks (EP.305)

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

On today's show we discuss what happens to stocks after a bad year, why foreign stocks are outperforming, why any recession should be mild, how millennials will impact stock market valuations, generational homeownership rates and much more. This episode is sponsored by our friends at YCharts. Get 20% off your first subscription at: https://go.ycharts.com/animal-spirits-referral.  Find 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 Animal Spirits is brought to you by our friends at Y Charts. One of the things Y Charts does besides give you the ability to search out different graphs and charts and data and information is they actually provide a bunch of visuals for you, for advisors especially. So they have this 2023 Q1 econ deck and they run this quarterly economic update every quarter, which would make sense. It would be weird if they're in it quarterly and it was called quarterly and they did it monthly. A bunch of good charts in here. I want to talk about some. First one, they have mortgage, they have all these different charts on one page. Mortgage rates and originations.

So it shows 30-year mortgage and then mortgage originations, and then refinancing as a share of this. And as you can see, as rates have gone up, mortgage originations have just gone in the toilet. We're going to talk about this today for real estate today. Here's another good one. It's the S&P 500 versus the 10-2 treasury yield spread. So this is just the difference between the 10-year treasury and the two-year treasury. And you can see here, any time in the past, I don't know, 30 years when the yield curve is inverted, it's done so like a minuscule amount. This is a big one.

It hasn't been this big since 1980. 1980, 1981. I don't know how much. The two year is yielding 100 basis points more than 10 year, or was? Yes. Which is pretty wild. It's pretty close. It's come back in a little bit.

But it's a huge, huge spread. Anyway, there's a bunch of other good charts like this. If you want to check it out, go to our show notes. There will be a link in there where you can download it. Just give me your email. And if you want to sign up for Y charts, tell them Animal Spirit sent you. You can get 20% off that initial subscription. 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. do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben.

There's a new jingle in you here. We've got new, new show tunes. It's a new and improved Animal Spirits. We started this show in late 2017, and we might have, have told a little bit of this about this before, but it's good to go back. We thought we were going to edit this show ourselves. There was podcasts around, but it was not, the tools weren't as much as we have today. And we didn't know what we were doing. Finally, we asked for some help

from some other podcast and said, what are we doing? We're wasting our time. We're spinning our wheels. And a bunch of people, I think Meb Faber and Patrick O'Shaughnessy put us in touch with Matthew Passy, who was a podcast producer for a few finance programs. And he basically laid out everything we need to do. Here's the equipment you need to get. Here's a software. you need to get. Here's the mics, everything. Here's what you need to sign up for. Here's how you upload it. I'm going to do this for you. And he's been our producer for the past five plus years. And we never would have got the podcast off the ground about him. I remember the first time we did a talk your book, he had to come to New York from New Jersey to help us. We've had countless

emails and phone calls with him to help. And he's brought us along this journey. And again, without him, we could have never done it. He's helped us with equipment and producing. And we had a mutual breakup recently. Matthew built a successful business. We have a production team in-house that we're now using. Duncan and John and Nicole are helping out with this. And it just kind of made sense. And so that means for us, we have a new reed beginning. We have new music. And I don't think I've ever heard you talk about music once in your life. If someone said, like, what's Michael's favorite kind of music? I wouldn't know what to say. I don't think you'd listen to music maybe. But when Josh played us some, I don't know. I probably.

I'm probably a similar, though. Music is not like my big thing anymore. But Josh played us some music in the office the other day, and I couldn't tell if it was serious or a joke. You were immediately out, but I think we're happy. No, no, no, that was, that song was literally a joke. So I grew up, my dad was playing classic rock for me. So Zeppelin, Jethro, those sort of bands.

Okay. My first concert was, my first, yes, my first concert was Meatloaf, bad out of hell. 1999, 1994 at MSJ. Okay. anyway yeah we cannot thank matthew enough he's been tremendous if anybody is starting a podcast they're still up and running he's uh just been an incredible partner for us so matthew thank you for everything that you've done for us and we're excited about having the capabilities with with duncan and the team to be able to control our own destiny so very exciting times for us all right one more

housekeeping item before we get started with the show ben and i are going to be speaking doing a live animal spirits on monday may 22nd at the wealth stack conference in hollywood florida which uh I guess it's like sort of by Fort Lauderdale. Between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, maybe. It's in that vicinity. It's on the east coast of Miami. I'm Florida. Excuse me.

It's in Florida. That's all I care about. Actually, I'm kind of freaking out a little bit because I said yes to this sort of not really thinking about the fact that the Knicks actually are playing in May, which is something that was never, never on my radar. So I might, depending on when the games are, I might have to change my flight to fly in and fly out. We'll see. Either way, I'm very excited about going. Yes.

And anytime you can have a conference in Florida, you have to go. Right? That's why they do these nice places. Well, that'd be, oh, we were saying we will be drinking Miami Vi. I think Miami Vi is the plural of Miami Vice. Yep. And Tropical Bros and Bird Dogs, we have to. We'll be nice and comfy. All right.

From Ryan Dietrich, this is the Barron's online big money poll. Out of 130 managers polled, only 6% of their clients were bullish. 63% are neutral 31% are bearish So I guess You can't even release

I have questions about this This is like They're asking Money managers To tell them how bullish or bearish Their clients are This doesn't really sound

Like a scientific survey No not Do you think your clients Are bullish or bearish Let's go bearish Yeah So I guess that's why Neutral is kind of

The hedge there But that is interesting You would Maybe want to know Whether the managers are more bullish Or bearish But this is, these are more professional money managers as opposed to wealth management.

But I don't know if we would ever even think about our clients being bullish or bearish, right? Hopefully they're bullish on the long term. Otherwise, what's the point of investing? But in the short term, you know, I guess it doesn't matter. Isn't everyone bearish in the short term just like by the way human nature is? Who's like, yeah, I'm bearish long term, but I'm actually bullish in the short term? It does feel like we're in some sort of middle ground, though, where people are really, this whole year of kind of just waiting.

I know stocks are up, and we'll get into the NASDAQ being up a lot in a minute. But it seems like people are just kind of in the middle ground. Like, okay, the world didn't completely fall apart. But it doesn't mean that like everything is totally out of the woods. And so I think people being in the middle is kind of makes sense. But can I just say one more thing here? So to this point about, about 31% of their clients being bearish, then there's another question that says, describe your current asset allocation.

And it's 62% stocks, 21% bonds, 9% cash, 8% other. Doesn't sound like their position too bearish. So watch what they do, not what they say kind of thing. Always. That makes sense. Yeah. So I looked for a blog post at some of the worst years in the stock market history to figure out, like, what happened next year? Because we have had, it doesn't always work like this, but we've had 2022 seems like a completely separate time from 2023.

And it's not like it all of a sudden happened after December 31st, things changed. Things were already kind of in motion in the fourth. quarter of the year, I guess. But the NASDA composite was down more than 32% last year. And it's up through, this was through Friday. It was up 16% or so through the year. This is the composite, not the 100, because the composite I have data going back to the 70s. So I looked at all the double-digit down years, and I think there were seven of them. And you can look at what happens the next year. Five out of seven years is a huge up year, right? Like 45, 50, 60, 30% gains. But then there's those other two years where you're down 20 or 30%. The S&P is actually pretty

similar. There isn't much middle ground. It's usually after a really bad year, stocks go crazy or they continue to get slaughtered. So I guess the one thing would be like if we're through the inflation crisis, then it would make sense that 2023 would continue to be a good year. If some sort of crisis or recession hits, then it would make sense for this to be another bad year. So I guess the range is so wide, but this data actually makes sense. like a couple of bank runs leading to pullback in consumer credit like that?

Don't you think it would have to be a recession at this point? I still can't tell if... I'm saying that's what leads to the recession. Right, but I still can't tell if a very mild recession would end up being bullish for stocks or if things would just fall in line and a stock market would have to fall because of recession. You could talk me into either scenario.

Yeah. So I was doing some research on this, and I know the last three years or whatever seems pretty nudge. and you shared this morning on Slack how you're just going through everything we've been through in the last like three years, and it's a lot of stuff. But just from the stock market perspective, I looked at 1995 to 2003 for the NASDAQ. Look at these returns. Up 40, up 23, up 22, up 40, up 86, down 39, down 20, down 31, up 51. This is all in consecutive years. There wasn't a single year where you didn't have a plus or minus 20% gain or loss. That's hard. It's,

I guess the point is, like, it seems like the current situation is, is, like, unprecedented in some ways it is. In other ways, like, markets have been just as crazy or crazier than this. We've been speaking about international markets, and in Canvas's quarterly review, they broke down some of the fundamentals of U.S. developed and emerging markets. This is in local currency, inflation adjusted, from December 2021 through the present. and wouldn't you know it? U.S. is underperforming in a fairly significant way. These are just fundamentals from the past 15 months or whatever it is, 16 months. Sales growth in the U.S. up 8%.

Developed markets at 16, emerging, that's 10. Earnings, U.S. down 5%. Developed markets up 15, emerging up 4, and profit margins, similar story there. Pretty interesting. I never would have guessed this for the sales and earnings. of because this is local currency, too. This is not like, so this isn't like a dollar story. And inflation adjusted.

Yeah. Well, but to that point, I don't know who posted this chart, but it's from Bank of America. It's a chart. The U.S. dollar has begun fourth bear market over the past 50 years. That's what there's, you know, that's where they're saying this is going. We'll see. But in previous regimes of dollar weakness, these, this is big potential macro implications. Like, if there were to be a dollar bare market.

market. This is a big deal. The funny thing, and that would probably mean more international performance. The funny thing about it, if you look at it over the long term, over 40, 50 years or so, the dollar moves around a lot, but then kind of gets back to where it started. Like, there's a huge peaks and valleys along the way, but then it just kind of goes nowhere over the long term, right? It's, it kind of comes back to that center line there. All right. Connorsen had a good, we've been talking a lot about demographics lately. We're getting questions on it, a lot of stuff with boomers and millennials. Everyone kind of just glosses over Gen X because, I don't know, no one cares about Gen X, and I think Gen X actually kind of

likes that, right? They like to be the forgotten generation, right? So Conner Sen says, we felt the vibes when millennials were fighting to get jobs in apartments in the 2010s. We see it now how it feels when millennials are fighting to buy houses. They're urged to buy stocks is still five to ten years away, but when that happens, you won't be able to buy the S&P sub-20 times EPS. My initial inclination is to say that he's probably right that the demographic wave of millennials when they start hitting those stock market years in, you know, 40s and 50s probably in really buying. The boomers didn't completely cause the 80s and 90s bull market, but they had, they were a big part of it, right? Now, the other hand, the other side of this

would be, well, wait, wait, we have, we have boomers kind of canceling them out, right? The boomers will be selling as the millennials become buying, so it's not going to push things up as much. but remember my, what was it, 2018 or 2019, I went out of the limb and said, we're going to have a housing shortage in the 2020s. Remember my call there? I do kind of think that the millennials could have that same impact on the stock market. And you'll see just a continued upward trajectory and valuations and people will say, I don't get it, this makes no sense.

I think there's a good chance that happens. I wouldn't pound the table on it. I like the idea. Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't really have strong feelings on this. It's definitely an interesting take. I wish I, like, had more here, but I just don't have strong opinions. I guess I would ask, Connor, is this the automatic deposit, automatic purchases, like through

the 401K or, because I don't really see, like, a whole generation of people having this sort of like rush for the stock market. I think that's a big part of it. But that could, but that, but that, what I just said could be a huge part of it. Like, what is the purchasing power for the millennial generation? I don't know if there's 70 million of us as we come into our peak earning years. Yeah, my whole thing is that...

This might sound like an obvious question or a question with an obvious answer. And this may be an existential question, but like, does the relentless bid put a floor in stocks? I just don't know that I'm there yet. I don't know that that can be... I don't know if that can be proven and disproven. It can be disproven with the lost decade,

but I don't know how you like prove that you know what I mean I do understand why so many people are thinking through this demographic stuff though like we I've written about this we've we've just we've never seen a generation as large and wealthy as the boomers live as long as they're going to and then you have the millennials kind of coming up behind them and gen X is just as wealthy too we we saw last last week that in the generational uh comparable so it it does matter robert schiller in one of his books talked about this and he kind of said like listen And demographics is one of the easiest things to map out. You're not exactly right.

So if everyone knows the demographic stuff is coming, don't you think the stock market would price that in already? So I kind of... I do have strong feelings about this. I have strong feelings that any argument that the boomers are going to dump their stocks on the market is very misguided because will there be some boomers that need to... I don't even like them boomers. It sounds very pejorative.

I don't like that. Will our parents need to sell stocks to... to pay for their living expenses. It is funny how just saying boomer sounds like it's a bad thing, but that's literally their nickname. No, I know. I just, I don't like it. Yes, of course, a lot of parents will sell stocks to fund their living expenses.

But guess who owns the stock market? Like, who really owns the stock market? It's people with a ton of wealth. You think Jeff Bezos or maybe not Bezos, maybe you think Bill Gates is going to be selling down his Microsoft stock to pay for his golf club or his golf country club? No. So I don't buy that argument at all. I don't either. It's because the 10% owns 90% of the stocks.

Right. And that's either going to be passed down. Yeah, it's not all going to be spent at one. Those stocks are never getting sold. Another good chart from Apollo. I do think that even if things slow down and like we, things have to cool off a little bit, households are in so much better shape. We've talked about this a little bit. There's a couple charts in here I want to look at. So one of them is U.S. household balance sheets. This is household leverage ratio. you have liabilities to net worth, it's coming up a little bit, but look at how, look at how much higher it got in the last crisis and how it's just been in a straight line down ever since then as people have repaired their balance sheets. Obviously, a lot of this is housing market and stock

market related. Here's another one, mortgage debt as a percentage of potential GDP. It peaked in, you know, 2008 and it's come down ever since. I think this is the thing that people don't get is that the net worth stuff has gone up so much for so many people that the liabilities have not kept pace at all with the assets. And that puts people in a really good place to weather any storm, even if we do get a mild recession. And I think that's why, like, if you're calling for a recession, that has to be your baseline, unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong. So how do we get a horrible recession? The fact that the housing market didn't really do it or hasn't done it yet, that would have been my inclination is mortgage rates go to 7%.

The housing market falls off a cliff. That's how you get a pretty nasty recession. The fact that that hasn't happened, it would have to be something complete, I don't know, something completely out of left field that I couldn't even think of right now. Think about how much has been thrown at us. So you mentioned that thing that I'm writing. Let me just read it to you. This was sort of like, holy shit when I wrote this.

Not that we didn't know it, but just to write all this down. The economy has been through it. reading myself. The economy has been through a lot over the past couple of years. We turned it off and turned it back on again like we were restarting a video game. A combination of fiscal stimulus and supply chain disruptions led to an inflationary spike, not seen in over four decades. All the portons stuck in Los Angeles wreaked havoc on many consumer-facing companies. Semiconductors were in short supply. Use car prices went through the roof. By the way, remember 2022, how much time do we spend on the earnings cause of Walmart and Target worrying about

their inventory, was that going to cause a recession? I might have written a post called recession during the inventory stuff. Do you remember that? I was going to say that in our Google doc, we always add categories every once in a while. Supply chain is one of them. I think we'd get rid of it now. Do you think? It's time to get rid of it? Oh, I thought we did. It's still there? It's still there. I think we got to get rid of it. All right. Amidst all of the chaos, Russia invaded Ukraine, which sent energy and commodity prices vertical. To slow all of this down, the Federal Reserve undertook a historic increase in interest rates basically straight up for the last year and counting. That caused the housing market, at least the existing one,

to all but freeze over. It also caused several financial institutions to mismanage their interest risk and let some of the biggest bank runs this country has ever seen. Rising interest rates destroyed any appetite for risk-taking, with tech being at the epicenter of the enthusiasm unwind, venture funding dried up, IPO's ground to a halt, and even mega-cap tech companies were forced to do mass layoffs. Along the way, the S&P 500 fell 25%. And the NASDAQ 100,000, and the NASDAQ 100 lost more than a third of its value. The $3 trillion office real estate market is going to experience some pain over the next few years with occupancies down and borrowing costs up.

And the cherry on top of this disgusting Sunday is the looming contraction and credit. It's wild that we've experienced all of this and still we're not in a recession. It's pretty insane. Yes, it is. And some people would say, of course, because the government printed trillions of dollars. That's why we didn't. But still, I remember when the Fed had the Fed had that. the government was sending checks out and the Fed went to zero and the Fed did everything it did

in the pandemic and everyone said good luck that it's going to do nothing you're pushing on a string and we did it yes it's this could have been way way worse and that that's again why it wouldn't surprise me if we go the rest of this year no recession and maybe into 2024 it takes it still takes a while for all that stuff to work out um so oh so this I'm trying to think of a segue here because I got nothing sorry coming a blank uh there's a chart from Vanda research showing equity and an ETF purchase from individual investors. Now, the key to this chart is it excludes 4-1Ks and other

retirement accounts. So it's just brokerage money after-tax dollars in custodial accounts. So this is really how much people are moving on the margins, which makes sense because, to you're right, to your relentless bid thing, the 401K stuff is going to happen regardless. And that doesn't matter. Although, although maybe countering what I said earlier that those stocks are never getting sold, it really is the marginal buyer and seller of stocks.

I mean, I don't know that I totally will disagree with what I just said 10 minutes ago about the boomers not doing anything, but it is the marginal buyer. Anyway, or seller, look at, look at this. They came in 2020 and they haven't left. They haven't left, which is nuts. They're still buying a ton. So there's like a small bars and then it spikes and the spike has stayed elevated. How do we explain the fact that we've seen.

a really nasty bear market, a lot of the stocks that these individual investors loaded up on got killed. And yet they haven't backed off. That is surprising. Can I maybe explain some of this away by after finally seeing some losses, people went from mutual funds to ETF since this is just ETS? I may explain some of it. But no, that's, that's, that's, I don't know. No, but you're right. This, this is fairly surprising. People came in and have not. left yet. I haven't seen a new Gallup poll that shows that because you remember in the 80s, it was like 20% of all households on stocks. And it didn't take to the 90s, took out the 50%. And it's basically stayed at 50% since the late 90s, early 2000s. I wonder if we've gotten any more bump

up since then. And these past three to five years, whether there are now more households in the stock market or not. I want to talk about this real quick. So I started my career. Every time I say that I laugh, but the first job I had in the financial services industry was at a life insurance company. And so I saw, so I've always been interested in the articles or the stories about tech companies replacing insurance agents. So this is in the journal over the weekend. A decade ago, technology startups were planning to steamroll the stodgy life insurance industry. They thought the glad handling or the glad handling life insurance agent who cornered customers at little league games and closed deals at the kitchen table was a relic, snazzy

websites and sophisticated analytics would replace the one-on-one sales pitches and tedious application process that often involved a medical exam. The agents won the battle, and now the tech firms are courting them. Of seven startups that together raise more than $1.2 billion to sell life insurance directed to consumers, at least five now promote services to help agents sell policies. The co-founder of a company called Sprout said, our vision was, let's modernize the industry. He assumed they could sell policies without agents, as it turned out. Many customers had health issues that disqualified them from the available policies and only 30 to 40 percent of applicants made a purchase.

Many of the tech firms now better appreciate an old industry adage. Life insurance is sold, not bought. They got a quote from somebody in the industry who was like, I'm not surprised that this didn't work out given what we know about the need for people to really go in there and sell. And this is a simple but powerful idea. it's hard to disrupt any industry, let alone gigantic entrenched industries with technology from people who don't really know the industry.

Outsiders that come in and say, well, there's got to be a better way. We could fix this. We could replace this. We could speed this up. If you have no domain expertise, I might be completely wrong here. Maybe some of the biggest disruptions have come from outsiders. But I don't believe that to be the norm. I think if you don't know the intricacies of an industry, it's very hard to come in there with technology and just uproot everything that's been built.

I do think we've learned that technology has a really hard time disrupting the world of finance. Consumers, for sure, technology has helped. But the whole fintech revolution has not really unseated any of the big players, JP Morgan and Jackson. Insurance did seem so disruptible from if you just were like, why wouldn't you just be able to click, click, click, get your. exam, boom, boom, boom. But it's not that easy, apparently. Yeah, I think the financial, like banking and housing, the tech, tech industry, the technology sector tried to come in and revolutionize it, and it just hasn't happened. Back to our other thing, I did find the Gallup poll. This is from May 22. It's gone from about 52% in 2016 to 58% now. So there has been uptake. Wait, what has? What has? Stock ownership.

It's, it hits 60% in 1998. And it kind of went. down after 2008, and now it's back up to 58%. So it did dip after 2008, now it's come back, like the percentage of people who actually own stock in some form, individual shares, mutual fund, ETF. So the last few years, it has seen an uptick in households owning stock, which it's a good thing. So we've spoken about the transcript before. They put together, they like do amazing compilations of earnings, which we're going to

get into today. We've got a busy, busy week for earnings. We've got Google and Microsoft tonight. And Chipotle is always in there. We had Spotify this morning. We had GM. We had McDonald's. Did you still give up on Chipotle for lunch?

I... I mean, you can't because there's one literally next door to our office in New York. Well, it's funny you should ask me. I haven't had Chipotle in probably four months. But on Sunday, after the game, I had to go back to the office. And I had a burrito. Well, credit to you for going to the office on a Sunday. No, I left my bag there.

I wasn't working. Okay. All right. All right. This is from Manpower Group, which is I, you know what? I don't even want to speak out of turn. I feel like it's a temp agency. I say employment agency. Okay.

After months of a remarkably strong U.S. labor market, we are now seeing more companies across various industries, recalibrating their workforces after a period of bullish hiring. Is there such a thing as bearish hiring? I guess it would be bearish firing. Shifting their focus towards more intentional hiring for specialist skills, delaying hiring decisions and reducing their demand. Okay.

Um, all right. A little more selective. A little more selective. But I was out, Robin and I went out to dinner on Saturday night. We went back to Park Slope, which is where we lived for a few years. I haven't been there in, I don't know, five years maybe. Who stole the name first? Brooklyn or isn't Park Slope in Utah?

Maybe. Who had it first? Okay. That's probably, I don't know. Can't tell you. You sent me a text the other night saying you were in Park Slope and I thought you were skiing in Utah or something. So I said, So I said, so we went to an excellent restaurant.

We had, what do we have for, for apps? I'm an idiot. It's Park City. I'm an idiot. Okay. Disregard. Forgivable. We had an incredible barata and then like fried like zucchini flowers or something with like

prosciutto in the middle. I don't know. It was out of this world. And I said based on these appetizes, I'm super bullish on my chicken farm. And she was like bullish, bullish. I don't, I don't know what bullish means. I don't understand that references. Yeah.

I was like, wow, you really, really don't listen to my podcast. Okay. So I was in New York last week for a couple days. And remember last week on the pod, I just said, I just can't understand how people can pay so much money to live in New York. And then we went out and walked around on Friday in like a sunny day. The night before, we went to like an amazing dinner. And then on Friday, we walked around and we went to the West Village and we went to one of our favorite restaurants there. And then I thought, okay, now I get it. we walk through the parks and it's like sometimes from the outside in you can think like

why would anyone ever pay this much to live in a place it's ridiculous you have a small place and it's it's crowded and all these things and it's not easy to get around and get stuff and then you go experience all the good stuff about it and you go okay now I now I see why people do this it totally makes sense it was pretty it was a pretty special afternoon just the vibes of all the young people doing their thing it was yeah that was fun uh this is interesting. Portsy Capital tweeted narrative violation. Google gained search engine market share in Q1. How about that? I mean, do you know anyone who actually uses Bing or uses, I mean, people use chat GPT to search, they're not searching like they would on Google. I feel

it's two separate things. They may use it as a tool to help them do stuff or learn, but they're not using it in the same way as Google. No, come on. Yeah. All right. Real estate. This to me is one of the, we're talking demographics again because that's our MO lately, I guess. Apartment List has this real estate update. It's called the Millennial Homeownership Report by Rob Warnock. Let me use some of this stuff before. This chart is amazing. Generational homeownership rates, 1985 to 2022, it shows Silent Generation Baby Boomers, Gen X. And you can see they all go up into the rate over time. Silent was already higher, obviously. So baby boomers are at a little less than 78%. Gen X is at like close to 7%. Gen X is at like close to

70, millennials are at 51.5%. And I think if you don't assume that the millennial one is going to continue to go up and reach those other levels, then you're nuts. 70, 75 percent, something like that. It might take some people a little bit longer. And the crux of this article was saying how why some people don't own a house as millennials, it's obviously unaffordable in some places and hard to buy and all these things that we've talked about. But this, you talked about a floor under stock market, I would be much more apt to put a floor under real estate prices because of this. I think millennial household formation is just going to continue to happen, and this is going to move up.

And in 20 years, it's going to be at 70, 75%. And I do think that the increase we've seen in the last three years is going to be looked at back as like this giant leap higher in housing prices. And unfortunately, that's like the new permanent plateau for housing prices. even if we continue to have a little bit of a crush in here. Yeah, I agree. That was one of my predictions of 2023 was that housing prices would not crash. And so far, so good there.

One of the things that we forgot to mention last week that... Oh, that was one of your top ten predictions, no housing price crash? Yes. We didn't talk about last week the housing stocks, Lenar, Pulte, D.R. Horton, and shame on us. Right after we actually, right after we stopped for corner, I was like, damn it, I can't believe we forgot to make it. mention that. They're all back at all-time highs almost, right? Or 52 guys at least? Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. So it makes sense. This is not, people buying home building stocks are not dumb. They're reporting earnings and they're crushing it. I think if you just thought, if you just knew that mortgage rates would go up to 7% and that the housing market would essentially freeze, except for home building new construction, you would think that home building stocks would get crushed, right? They're pretty heavily correlated to mortgage rates. But, But, and I'm sure some people nail this trade, but given that so many people were locked into their home with, I don't know if it's 60% of all mortgages under four and a half percent, whatever the numbers is, that the only house is available is new construction. And these companies are on fire and their stocks are reflecting that. With supply being so low, it's the only game in town.

Yeah. Yeah. I think homebiller ETF is up like 17% this year. So it's kind of in line with the NASDAQ. Here's another good one. I just had to mention this because it mentions my hometown. So they looked at millennial home ownership rate by metropolitan area. The highest one on this list, Grand Rapids of Michigan, nearly 70%.

And then you contrast that with Los Angeles and San Jose and San Francisco, which are all around 30, less than 30%. Look at all these Midwestern cities on here. Grand Rapids, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Detroit. It's all Midwestern places that have much higher millennial home ownership rates. Why? because houses are actually affordable. Come to the flyover states, people.

But yeah, that generation homeowner chart is great. Here's another one from Redfin. And Redfin kind of shows this at the same time. This is like the net worth one we looked at last year. So it shows actually Gen Z is right on track. Millennials are a little low compared to Gen X and boomers. But everyone kind of follows the same path in your 20s. And I think millennials, it makes sense that they're a little behind

because of the 2008 crisis and people just going to school longer. But again, we're kind of right on the same path. And this is another good one. What age cohort, and they break them down by 10-year cohorts, buys the biggest chunk of houses per year, and it goes back to 2018. And you can see it's younger millennials. People 25 to 34 are the biggest buyers. The next one is 35 to 44.

And they make up eyeballing at 50% of all purchases, maybe a little bit more? Well, I'm an older millennial, and as such, I have to take a bath and break. I'll be back in two minutes. All right, I'm back. I am cursed with a small bladder. It is what it is.

Can't, you know, can't fix it. I am too. Did you pass that down to your son? Because I did, too. I also have a small bladder. I pass it on to my son. He pees all the time. It's awful.

Before we move on to Great Quarter guys, Hang. I got one more housing thing. Okay. All right. I do feel like these headlines are right, but maybe not. It's like a correlation causation thing. So why it pays to buy a house, homeowners became 40 times wealthy of the renters in the past decade. This is from the USA Today.

It showed that over the past decade, the median price home in the U.S. gained $190,000 in value, making the typical homeowner 40 times wealthy than if they had remained a renter according to a new report. And they're showing these different areas where how much you made. And a lot of these studies will show that if you own a home, you're much wealthier than someone who rents. And I do think that just because, I think there's a disconnect there that, like, if you don't buy a house, you can't become wealthy. I think it's just because for most people that is their biggest financial asset, and it's gone up a lot, so that helps. But I don't think it necessarily means, like, if you rent, you're not going to build a high net worth. I don't really subscribe to that.

That, like, you have to buy a house if you want to be rich, right? Like, that's the next step you have to take. Yeah, I think the thing is, though, if you live in the suburbs, you just, there's not, you got to buy a house, right? Yeah, that's the thing. So in Grand Rapids, it's had 70% of millennials-owned homes. There's not a big rental market here. If you wanted a house, there's nowhere to rent. But here's the thing.

So this is different than having a portfolio of stocks or having a bunch of money in your savings account. Like, how do people use this wealth, right? Like a lot of people say, like, great, your housing price went up. But now if you want to move into a new house, then you have to pay a higher price. I mean, obviously, you could trade down or whatever. and you can borrow against it. I do think owning a house and having wealth in your home gives you greater flexibility.

Like, you and I have used our home equity line of credit occasionally to do stuff, and I think it gives the financial flexibility, but besides using it as a new down payment on a new home or potentially having it paid off someday, I don't think the wealth in your home, it's just not as easy to access or do something with as other forms of wealth.

It's a little more restrictive. So I do think having this is great for people, but then how do you actually tap it and how do you use it to your advantage? I think that's a problem for a lot of people. I'm doubling down on my take that I made a couple of weeks ago about a mansion not necessarily

just being about the square feet of a house or square footage. When we were in Hershey Park, there's a road there called Mansion Road. And those were mansions. Those houses have to be 5,000 square feet or more? Well, I'm sure they, I mean, they looked at. They were big, big houses, but they all had very, very nice plots of land.

Yeah, that is part of it. If you have an outdoor space that you can use, that's like additional square footage in your house. I agree. All right. So I was looking at, we're going to start with American Express. And also, wait, I just want to put this out there for you. You told me last week that your grass just gets eaten alive by what, your dog or your kids or something, and you were thinking about putting AstroTurf in. And I think I would love to do that someday, but I don't, I don't ever see it happening.

Why? I mean, it's not cheap. I'm getting a quote. I got a quote, which is, it's too much. I'm probably not going to do it, but I'm going to have somebody come to the backyard just to see. I don't have, like, a fenced off area like you do. My yard is open and it's a much bigger, not to brag. Not to brag.

I have a way bigger yard than you. But wouldn't, I mean, don't think it would be kind of funny if, like, your neighbors had grass, then you just have like right up to the grass. You have astroturf going in? Yes, yes, yes. It would look weird. But, but my, my backyard grass got destroyed in the hurricane. So it's just, it's, it's, it's like, uh, it just, it's blotchy. It's like a, it's like a, it's like a man's beer that has like gaps in it.

You know what I mean? It just, I had the very minimum need to re-sought because it just looks awful. But anyway, um, maybe I'll put that on my credit card. Speaking of American Express, see what I did there, Ben? That's a, that's a pro move right there. Uh, all right. Um, this is interesting. The year over year.

in consumer services build business. Boomers are up 8%. The Gen Xers are up 14%. Millennials and Gen Z up 28%. On Amex. Those are earners. I swear you had this chart in here last week. No, I didn't.

They just reported. No, it was back. Who was the last week? We had a lot of banks last week. It was Bank of America. Keep up. Oh, but I feel like the numbers were similar, though, right? Okay.

Well, maybe I'm just noticing trends here. I'm spotting trends left and right. And you look at, there's another chart showing card member loans and card member receivables credits metrics. So 30 days past due and corporate net write-offs. And yes, they are climbing, but well below pre-pendemic levels. How about that? In pre-pandemic, 2.2% were either 30 days past due or write-offs.

That was 1.2% last quarter in the fourth quarter. 1.6% in the first quarter starts rising, but again, 1.6% versus 2.2%. The consumer's all right. Yeah, still doing better than we were. And honestly, pre-pandemic, things were just fine, too. Not like the economy is falling off a cliff in 2019. Hardly. Hardly. So it's not a bullshit comp. You got Amec stuff pull up here. I did trade in my Chase Sapphire Reserve. I wasn't getting enough out of it for an American Express gold, silver, platinum, something, whatever the American Express one is. I like it so far I get Uber point

Or I get Picks up Uber for me I did the clear That you mentioned to me In New York Are they scanning your eyes It's pretty clear's great Yeah it's great

Until you realize That the TSA precheck line Is way shorter than the clear But I had to do anyway Just because I went out To scan my eyes for me Uh How's Ben how's this for elitist

I have both So do I Because I don't I don't have clear in Grand Rapids Right It's only at bigger airports Uh Although the T I mean

I don't know how much clear is I don't know, but you probably get a promotional deal for, what, 100 bucks? They pick up your whole clear through the MX, $189 a year. It's pretty good. Pre-check is nothing. It's just a mild pain in the belt. You had to go to Staples to get, but whatever, well worth it. All right, this blew my face.

So if you look at their expenses, the card member rewards $3.8 billion expense for the first quarter. Wow. I would love to know how much of that never gets used. Like, kind of like, you know, they always say, like, at the holidays, a certain, like, millions or billions of dollars and gift cards never get spent, whatever the number is. I wonder what that is for credit cards. No, I think, but I'm not positive. I think that's a direct expense. I think that that's actually what was hit and used.

You know what I mean? Like, if you used Amex points to buy a plane ticket, I think that's what it's talking about. I could be wrong. they also have another chart showing travel and entertainment build businesses year over year restaurants up 28% logic 31% airline 60% people are still doing the damn thing still doing it have you seen airline tickets come down at I've at least seen air tickets level out a little bit they're not going up anymore actually yeah my flight

to Hollywood to Fort Lauderdale was 350 bucks that's not bad which is very reasonable all right First Republic reported last night. This is, this is not great. The stock is down another 27% this morning. I just want to read from what Bloomberg posted from, I guess, the bank's earnings. The recent industry events beginning in March 2023 have impacted the bank's funding sources. As of March 9th, it's down almost 30% out.

Is that, have they, like, cleaned house at all at that bank or not really? I'm not going to say that I just said it was down 30%, because we don't do that here. We don't call each other after not listening. That's not the thing that we do. They are doing layoffs. So as of March 9th, total deposits were $173 billion, down 1.7% from year in 2022. Then on March 10th, followed the highly public closer of the large regional bank. First Republic began experiencing unprecedented outflows.

On March 16th, First Republic received uninsured deposits totaling $30 billion from a group of America's largest banks. But, blah, blah, blah. All right. They say deposit activity began to stabilize beginning the week of March 27th and has remained stable, through Friday, April 21st. Total deposits were down only 1.7% from March 31st to April 21st. So, all right. And that also reflects, like, seasonal tax stuff.

So as far as this report lays out, the rush has subsided. This stock hit its all-time high in November of 2021. It's down 95% since then. It's a lot. But I think total deposits are down 40%. So, yeah, not good. Not good at all. All right, General Motors on Tuesday,

raised key guidance for 2023 after reporting first quarter results at topped Wall Street's top and bottom line. It's that good? A bead and raise? Yeah, that's pretty good. Look at this chart end of their EV sales. They went from a 0.3% market share in the first quarter of 2022

to 8.4% four quarters later. That's wild. I assumed I would be getting an EV from an ex car, which is like 2024-ish. We talked about this, So the car dealership guy, I think it might be the next one now. I'm going to wait it out until they're a little cheaper. I think I'm going to wait until all these places get more online and they become closer

to the gas powered cars. So I love my new Jeep Wrangler. I got the hybrid. I think I spoke about this on the show. But it's got, so it's a hybrid, but it only has a 30 miles. You only get 30 miles on the charge, 30 miles, which is not great. And it takes 14 hours to get to a full charge, which is absurd. So I bought like the Jeep Charger, which is not super cheap, but it cuts it down to like three or four hours.

So the cost of the charger is basically the amount of money you saved on gas? A year, probably. Probably. Probably. All right, Pepsi reported earnings. At Bucco Capital, which is a good follow on Twitter. He said, wow, Pepsi just threw up 40% revenue growth on zero volume growth. Then Carl Kintania tweeted, Pepsi co-exec on pricing says, quote,

with the pricing that we have taken already in most of our businesses around the world, that should be sufficient, end quote. I hope so. I'm paying like $7.99 for a 12 pack of Diet Pepsi now. Come on. So, Ben, you said that earlier that the corporations were absolutely

putting their hand in the cookie jar or the honeypot. I don't know. They're doing something. I don't like it. Yeah. So hopefully it sounds like it's relaxing a little bit and they're slowing down,

but they definitely took advantage. of this. All right. So we've got, as I said, we've got another busy rest of the week, but bespoke tweeted, does this look like an earnings apocalypse of roughly 60 earnings results this morning? EPS beat rate 77%, sales beat rate 73%. Companies raising guidance five, companies lowering guidance too. I think S&P earnings are tracking for a 6% decline quarter year over year or something like that. So nobody's super optimistic about this quarter, but so far not bad at all. All right. Probabilities. Recession in 2023, 2024, 2025. What would your breakdown be? Mine would be like 10, 50, 40. I'm not aligned with you at all. So for 2020, three, I would say 30. I'd say 35 for 2020.

I'd say 55 for 2024 and 10 for 2025. I think there's a very minimal chance that we push it out to 2025. Maybe I would say 40, 40 555, final answer, 40 555. All right. I'm becoming more and more open to the idea of this thing just continuing to chug along. Maybe I'm wrong. Until 2025? Duncan, maybe a poll.

Maybe a poll. When will the recession start? All right. Here's the survey of the week that I do not believe. All right. This is from Ernst & Young, wealth management unit. Nearly half of millennials turned to cash amidst market volatility last year. By comparison, just 34% of Gen X and 24% of baby boomer sought safety in cash. There's no way.

They're kind of saying everyone went to cash last year, and then they missed the run-up in the S-SP, which is up almost 20% since the October lows. There's just no way that many people went to cash. What was the number? Half of all millennials in this survey. this is put up the cartoon of like who answers surveys people or 95% of people answer surveys whatever that cartoon is this is just there's no way no no that would if that would have if if this many people went to cash that would have caused a more severe crash yeah come on all right good one from friend of the show ramp capital he in his newsletter last week wrote about how got reached out to on lincoln someone a recruiter uh talked about the job and said it could be an extra 50 to 60% in compensation if he takes the new job. Sounds great, right?

But he said if he did it, he would have to go in four to five days a week to the job. In his current role, he has way more flexibility. He has young kids at home. And so he's weighing the options of, I could make way more money. I just bought a new house. I want to provide for my family versus, or I could say it's other job. It's way more flexible. It pays less.

But I get to work at home and I get to see the kids more and I get to do all this other stuff. And he was saying his conclusion was kind of like, well, to me, it seems like the flexibility matters way more. And I think a lot of young people who went through this period in the pandemic, I think a lot of mindsets have changed in that direction. Can I say, but, but, and flexibility is a luxury, because you have to be at the point where your bills are good before you can get to that point. And I think most people that get to the point to financial freedom

at that point once they get to wherever they need to get to say, you know what, I'm good. $30,000, whatever it is, God bless, doesn't change my life. I'm just going to do what is best for me and my family. I do feel like that no matter how much you make, though, if you said add 50% onto it,

anyone would go, oh yeah, I could handle making them. Like, the answer for how much do you need to make, it's always more, right, for most people. But I'm just saying that I think this, it would be a different scenario. If work from home and pandemic stuff never happened and someone offered you, here's two jobs, here's one with 50% more pay, but you got it in the office. And here's another when you can work at home. If you've never had that experience, I think you'd say, I got to take the pay for sure. And I think just the fact that we were forced into this. Depends where you're on your life. Yes, yes, I agree. The family thing is a big, big part of that, having the flexibility,

with a family is after after spending time so like putting my kids on the bus like I wouldn't trade that for anything but also I'm again like I've I've reached a relative comfort zone with whatever whatever the money would be it's not as important as the things that are actually important yes I agree there there's a certain level you have to get to to be able to make that decision but I think the decision would have been a lot easier in the past to go okay you always take the money By the way, I could hear younger people saying, like, oh, must be nice. And then older people saying, like, yes, Michael and Ben are making sense. Yeah, that's right. It is. It's completely different depending on your stage in life.

Oh, you know what, Ben, you're right. Let's get rid of the supply chain. It's over. I can't believe we were still there. Take it out. All right. So Jason Gay had this really good piece of the Wall Street Journal about participation trophies and youth sports crisis. And you've seen the blog post for people that say, like, these are the 10 books that changed my life or people will have a story about this professor in high school or college or teacher totally changed my life. I don't have any of those stories. I, look, I've never really read a book that totally changed my life. Maybe I wish I had. You know, I'm so glad you mentioned that every time I see those tweets, I'm like, oh, like I don't, but now I feel better. If it happened to you, great. I've never had it. I had pretty mediocre teachers my whole life. I never had a teacher

I look back on and I go, that teacher changed my life. And I'm happy for people who had it. But I can look back and say that, like, I have many coaches in sports that changed my life. And I probably learned more playing sports than I ever did in the classroom. Like, time management and performing under pressure and things like discipline and all this, right, I learned more, it sounds like cliche, but it's true. So Jason Gay at the Wall Street Journal said that, like, the new move to more travel sports and stuff for kids is causing fewer kids to play sports. So it says, The percentage of children six to 12 who regularly played a team sport dropped from 45% in 2008 to 37% in 2021. And that drop was well underway before COVID.

Participation fell to 38% in 2019. And he's saying, listen, there are a lot of good things. So my wife and I really want our kids to play sports. We got them in doing a bunch of stuff. And it's not because we want to like live vicariously through them. I already had my moment, whatever. I'm fine. Not to brag.

And not to brag. But it's the stuff that you get from it. It's not like we're trying to have them like play. professionally and playing college someday, it's just that, like, all the good things you get from teamwork and practice and, like, I think it helps you stay out of trouble a lot, too, because you're so busy with it. But I think, so the point of his article was this move to travel sports, which I have seen firsthand, my daughter's already in some travel soccer league at age nine, and it's not cheap, right? Before, it's not like a rec, a Y rec league. Like, you have to

pay money, you have to buy uniforms, you have to travel. It's, and I think his point was that it's boxing people out from and it's turning into like sports are turning into like a haves versus have not's thing and I'm not a huge fan of that the fact that we're it's making we're making it harder for kids to play sports yeah yeah how much is it we talk like like a thousand dollars for for a team probably something like that for a season uh I was I went to Kobe's parent teacher conferences last week and he he he does speech because he like can't really say his R's or L's like great So I'm sitting in the, and this is the elementary school that I grew up going to.

And Kobe's got a little bit of Spilkes, which is like ants in his pants, which I suffer from, suffered and continued to. And we're sitting in, you were in trouble all eighth grade, like you said last week. We're sitting in, punished the entire, the entire year. We're sitting in the little classroom, in the little chairs. And like, I just felt such a flashback to like, oh my God. I don't know what I got like anxiety being in a classroom setting I just get like deeply uncomfortable and like the the uh his like speech yet said like uh like apple doesn't fall far from Detroit I guess it is weird going back for those things she was like I can't keep Kobe in his chair he's always like you know running around the you know the table yeah and back to my sports thing real quick I didn't I don't say like we're having so much phone with my daughter doing this her soccer league I just wish more kids had the opportunity like I wish that it was more inclusive it wasn't so hard for people. people. It's a big time thing, and it's a big cost for a lot of people. But it is, it's so much fun. Like we had a tournament all weekend and, you know, I have a question, though, because Josh

travels, Josh takes Justin all over Long Island for basketball. Why does it, why do they need to go so far? This is my question that I at. Yeah, this is the question I have. There's so many kids in a city, why can't help us play each other? And I haven't got a good answer. Most of our, our games are in Grand Rapids, but we'll have some games like 45 minutes an hour away. So it's not terrible. But I agree. That's how it used to be. You'd play in a rec league and all the kids in one city would play each other. And it's just, whatever, for whatever reason, that, that hasn't kept up. We got Chinese food on last week when you were in the city. And I'm, I'm already taking the L here. I'm already taking the L. So relax. But the general TSO is a TSOS?

I think it's just TSO. TSO. So how do you follow it? TSO? So how do you How do you pronounce that? It's T.S. O. Aposvius. General Sous chicken. General Sous. Some people call it General Sos. What do I? I say General Chow? Yeah, you said. I think some people in the East Coast call it General Chows. And everyone in the office goes, what? No, no one says that. You're like, no, come on. In New York, people call it General Chow's. And everyone shot you down immediately and said, no. I think you've just been saying that wrong your whole life. In Roosevelt Field, there used to be a Chinese restaurant at the food court. I think it was called Monshuai. Unless I'm thinking of a different Chinese restaurant. And I would always order the general chow chicken.

And apparently I've been saying it around my whole life. But I do feel like I can't put the only one. I have to have heard that from somewhere. Yeah. Actually, speak of getting roasted for food, somebody emailed me. And listen, I'll issue a correction here. Somebody issued email those. Brisket has got to be done in a crock pot, which I guess is what I said last week.

Something only a Yankee would say. When he says Yankee, I hear something else. But okay, I'll let it go. Thanks for correcting him, Ben. Listen, my bad. You're right. obviously brisket is a, I mean, that's like a staple of the barbecue world. I'm guessing he's from the South.

I feel like people in the South take their brisket very seriously. Well, yeah. Some apologies, hand up. However, when I cook a brisket, I don't have a smoker, okay? So for me, it goes in the crock pot. But point taken, there are many ways to skin a brisket. You're almost there for a midlife crisis. Then you can buy a smoker for your front lawn.

That's a millennial midlife crisis thing. Yes. yes but i'm i'm never smoking that's not that's not happening all right just one more on stubb i'm sorry i just can't let it go so there were tickets that were 345 to get into the next game uh on friday night and on stubbub that goes from 345 to 446 it's so bad those seats are awful seats but again the the they take the entire bit as spread and it's so wide because if it's 345. Again, the buyer pays 446. So the sticker price is 345. Oh, no. Actually, you pay 446. The seller's not getting 345. They're getting what? 280 or whatever it is. It's insane.

Why can't the sports leagues themselves just cut out the middleman and sell directly? Why doesn't the NBA do this? Maybe it's too much of a pain in the butt or the NFL. Why don't they have their own ticket system that they do? Obviously, it's too much of a pain. You preach it to the choir. I don't get it. We also got clarity on a button up versus a button down. and now I know. So thank you to the multiple people that sent this to us. Here's the deal. A button down shirt

is a shirt that buttons at the front and has a button down collar where you've got like the collar buttons. A dress shirt with buttons on the front and no buttons on the collar

can be called a button front or button up shirt but shouldn't be called a button down. I know I was thinking about this. I feel like we got 10 different answers in this one just so you know.

No, no. This is consistent. Okay. This is consistent. All right. Recommendations, what do you got? All right.

Ramit Sati from I Will Teach You Be Rich fame has a new show on Netflix called How to Be Rich. It reminded me, I watched the first two episodes or so. It's kind of like his podcast, but just better produced. And it reminds me of, and I think it's cool that Netflix is doing a show like this about personal finance. It's him helping people get their finances in order. It reminds me of, what's the HGTV show? Bar Rescue. House hunters.

It's like that. Your Honor, you have house. It's like that's the kind of like way the show is set up. It reminds you of like a Househunter's episode. But in a good way, which means you can kind of put it on the background. I really like it. They had Alien on The Rewatchables last week, so I went down an alien rabbit hole. They have them all on stars or Hulu. One of those. I watched the first alien and the second one, and then I put on Prometheus, which I forgot was kind of the prequel. Prometheus is such a good movie. I feel kind of underrated in this last decade or so. That's a great sci-fi flick. Love Prometheus. Aliens is my favorite franchise of all time.

The scene where the robot is like stapling her shut, Robin's like, you've seen this a hundred times. It's pretty gross. I was never a huge alien guy, but I like, okay, I like those movies, but it was never my thing, but I really like them. I think my dad showed me aliens when I was seven years old. Like I definitely grew up. So that's how you got hooked on horror.

And I saw the Fincher one. I saw that in theaters. I don't know what year that was. 94. David Fincher made an aliens movie? Oh, is that Aliens 3? Aliens 3. Okay.

And it was a debacle. But every aliens movie since Alien 3, I've seen in the theater. We'll never miss. Keep him coming. Love what you got. I was watching Beef on Saturday night when Rob and I were going to the train, we're going to the city on the train. I was watching Beef.

And I don't know how this happened, but I said to Robin, like, you're a idiot for not watching this. I told you to watch with me. You're going to like it. I get mad at her for not watching stuff with me that I know she's going to like. And she will never watch something that I recommend unless she hears like

two of her friends recommend it. And I'm like, but I'm six episodes in. Anyway, I'm trying to convince her. I'm like, this is like really HBO quality. And I was probably on like the third episode or fourth episode. And I don't know how I didn't realize it until I said that.

You know why it feels like HBO quality and not Netflix? Even, you know, is because it was produced by A24. Oh, interesting. Okay. I've heard good things. I still haven't got into it. I haven't watched much to be lately. Okay. I don't know. I thought you watched it. I really, really enjoyed it. A borderline pounding the table on it. I thought it was excellent. Definitely not what I thought. It was very bullish on beef. Super bullish. All right. Thank you for listening. Again, thank you to Matthew for taking us on this journey. Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com. We'll see you next time. Okay