Animal Spirits Podcast - Money Buys Happiness (EP.381)

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

On episode 381 of Animal Spirits, Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson discuss: calling a top in the stock market, why people don't trust data, the economy is still fine, why yields are rising in a rate cutting environment, a bigger innovation than AI, the impact of climate change on the housing market, a nation of trucks, how money actually does buy happiness, and much more! This episode is sponsored by Global X and CME Group. To learn more about Global X’s entire suite of ETFs from covered calls, fixed income, emerging markets, and more, visit https://www.globalxetfs.com/. Access CME Group's valuable educational materials and trading tools and learn more about what adding futures can do for you at: cmegroup.com/animalspirits Sign up for The Compound newsletter and never miss out: thecompoundnews.com/subscribe Find complete show notes on our blogs: Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com Feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   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. The Compound Media, Incorporated, 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

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specific investment or service. 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 Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirist with Michael and Ben. Michael was looking through some old blog posts.

I have like a photographic memory for prior blog posts that I've done. Like advisors at our firm will ask me, hey, Ben, have you written about this before I have a client asking a question? It's all up here. I don't know why. I can't, sometimes I forget my own children's birthdays,

but I can remember a blog post I wrote in like 2014. You know, it's funny you mentioned that because this morning I was thinking, I had a very specific thought, and then I thought, did I write about this? I can't remember. I have no idea what I wrote about. Yesterday, Jonathan asked me,

hey, did you ever write about this piece, this topic? That topic I did know, but most of the times, I don't remember. Here's the thing, though, if you can't remember, just write about it again because most people forget, too. There's so much content consumed these days. Okay, so I wrote this in May of 2015, and I wrote, is this the top? 2015.

And I wrote, it seemed reasonable at the time. And so I did this whole chart about, like, the news and kind of what you've done. And I talked about how PIMCO details their new normal thesis. Remember that was, like, 2010? I remember Milakunis? Yeah, Milakunis. By the way, it's a typo, but you called her Milus Kunis? Oh, that is a typo.

I've never noticed that, only from 2015. One of my favorites is Henry Blodgett said U.S. stocks surged back towards bubble territory. That's 2010. Did Henry Blodgett start, is he reinvesting his dividends now? I don't know. Do you remember that? Do you remember that? My point.

Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. So for the audience, who doesn't remember that, Henry Blodgett was Uber, super duper bearish on the back of John Hussman. And he was just passing along the message. And he said, expect a 50% crash, I'm not going to pull my money yet. I'm going to stop reinvesting my dividends. Wow, what a hero. How much money do you think has been lost from people that read that article?

He was cautiously optimistic. And our favorite one personally is when a- I'm sorry, that one really grinded in my gears. That was, whatever a Grand Rapids hedges take this like a thousand miles more. This is the, this is the, I want to use the word, I'm not going to be. the word. But this is, wow. Our favorite one was there was a well-known perma bear on Twitter who people used to follow. And I don't know, I muted him 10 years ago. But in 2013, he said this market reeks of euphoria. My whole point is I remember having these discussions almost, you know,

a decade ago about how the stock market was running too hot. And I just think it's kind of hard to believe this is where we are. If you would have told us back then, not many people would have believed it. I wouldn't have believed it. And it's not to say that in 2015, we knew it was that we were in the midst of one of the greatest bull markets of all time. We didn't know. In fact, I was writing in 2015 that you should probably expect low returns or hand up. However, however, the people that were talking about that were bearish in 2013 have been literally saying the same shit for a decade plus. It's unbelievable. Yes, that's the. They're saying the same thing as if we forgot. Bro, you've been saying this since 2013. Yes. The funniest one to me is always the market

is manipulated by the Fed and government data is fake to make things look better. Fine, good, get long. Yes. But you've been embarrassed the whole time? Wait, what? I don't get it. So look at these returns for the NASDAQ 100 for the past like six, seven years. So this year, the NASDAX is up almost 20% again. Last year was up 55%. 2020 was down 33%. But then we have up 27% in 2021, up 49% in 2020. up 39% in 2019, barely down in 2018, and up 33% in 2017. I mean, these numbers look like the dot-com run in some way. I mean, you have the down years mixed in there, but they do in a lot of ways. And you bring this up all to say what?

Are we, is this the top? No, I just think you could keep asking this question and just never know how long things are going to run. That's the whole point is that mean reverend seems like it should be kicking in, but it seemed like it should have kicked in 10 years ago to some people as well. Yeah. we couldn't know that earnings per share would grow whatever and that margins would remain elevated and that we just, we couldn't know.

That's the whole point. Is asking, is this the top is the wrong question to ask? You're never going to know. So what's the right question? Do I have an asset allocation in place that I can follow come hell or high water regardless of what the stock market does? Amen. Fair?

Yes. Okay. So, Ben, recent economic data, especially the jobs report last week, to use. the words of Ben Stiller and meet the parents talking about his portfolio, right? The recent economic data has been strong to quite strong. So I ask you. I still can't believe we had like the two-day recession back when Japan stuff hit and people were worried.

My point or my thought here is, are we way too quick every time to say, oh, this is it, rolling over. I think that's the problem people have these days is people just want to believe things are getting markedly worse when they're just, it's slow. It's the pop machine. All right, so let me ask you this, Bill Simmons' voice. Are we sure 50 was the right move? Yes.

Yes. Still with the right move. Okay. And the Fed should go 25 again the next meeting and 25 the next meeting. If they want to keep this thing going, look at where inflation is and look at where bond yields are. The short-term yields are still above long-term yields. Well, we had a hell of a reversal higher in yields last week. I think it was the highest weekly change in the two-year in a long time.

So, Ben, last week, we were bemoaning the fact that politics is just has infected the brains of everyone and it's made the current climate just a lot nastier. And Josh Brown was on Ryan Rusillo last week. Josh did great. I loved it. Josh did great. Somebody responded to Ryan. I only saw this because Ryan quote tweeted it.

So here's the response to Ryan tweeting that Josh was on a show. since you had a left-wing financial air quote journalist on weeks before an election claiming how great the economy is, can we expect the other case to be made? Please bring on Peter Schiff. He'll come on and educate you in the audience rather than gaslight. And I feel my blood pressure rising just reading this tweet. So one of the comments last week was Ben is the most political guy on the compound, which made me laugh. I'm probably the least political person that there is. I said this in a video we sent

out to clients. The stock market is my only political. That's my political class. I'm a stock market person. Yeah. That's it. I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. I found the stock market is my party. Somebody emailed in talking about three of the things that I said recently, like policy-wise, that were all contradictory. Good. Right. Yes. Yes. That's okay. I'm inconsistent. So anyway. But no, the thing is, it's bizarre to me that just because you say the data says that economy is good, that you must be leaning this way politically. Like, when Trump was president, I was saying don't listen to the people that say you

should sell your stocks because it probably doesn't matter if Trump's president. And the same thing I would say when Biden became president. Yeah, when the market was going up in 2017, were we saying it was fake and Trump was going to crash your economy? No. No. You don't have to be leaning one way politically, left or right to look at the data. We call it as it is.

We call it as it is, by the way. So anyway, this dumbass calling Josh a journalist. At a left wing at that, I don't think Josh is... Also, Peter Schiff is one of the people we were just talking about earlier. The irony of this tweet, just put your head in a toilet paper. Bring on someone who will lie to me and tell me exactly what I want to hear is what this person is saying. Good God. Anyway, here's another one from Marker Rubio.

So sorry if this is political, but I don't know, it doesn't feel political to me to call it morons. Sorry. No, making dumb comments is not political. That's personal. So another fake jobs report out from Biden-Harris government today. Who even cares what he says? All the fake numbers in the world aren't going to fool people dealing with the Biden-Harris economic disaster every day. Shut the fuck up.

So there was a big downward revision in the jobs data, as if this was some grants conspiracy that there aren't always revisions to the economic data. Have you been here for more than a minute? This is how it works. And in fact, Josh, the left-wing journalist, pointed this out on Ryan's podcast that when Trump was in office, they did the same thing where they revised jobs down

in 2019, $500,000, $500,000 jobs. I don't even remember that being a thing, do you? I completely forgot about that. No, we didn't really talk about it or it happened and people weren't caring about it at the time. The funny thing to me is that we're swimming in a world of information. And even though the data is out there for people to see, people still choose to believe whatever they want to believe.

And I don't think if you would have told someone the pre-non-era, guess what? In 20 years, people are going to literally have all the world's information at their fingertips any time they want. How much better informed is the public going to be? And I think you would have said that it's the picture. picture that people always tweet on Twitter, like it's Utopia. Am I wrong? No, the data's wrong. I mean, what are we doing here? I guess cognitive dissonance is one of the greatest forces in the

world. And it's easy to see, especially around an election of, I choose to be mad about this, but not about this. And I choose to care about this, but not about this. And I think that's just human nature. And obviously, there's no changing it. And it's only getting worse, unfortunately. Did you see the dumbass from Sequoia who tweeted about the election fraud and a the fake ballots going to a house that he heard third hand in California. Yeah, they're trying to turn California blue because that's what they would do if they were.

I mean, what? So can I make a case for why Twitter is actually the best social media platform for your mental health? No, you cannot. I will dismiss this out of hand. Listen. In fact, it's getting so toxic.

But listen, for normal people, people who aren't, don't have brainworms. Yeah, and you know what the funny thing is, like 99% of people, 99. I don't know what the numbers. Most people, most people are reasonable people and would say, yeah, all of this is crazy town. Yes.

But the people who amplify it and have a microphone. All right. So please humor me. Okay. Why is Twitter good for your mental health? So Instagram is bad for mental health because you go on there and you see fake lives. People are putting the best of themselves. They're putting vacations.

Nah, nah, nah. Instagram's great. You see what you want to see. You know what's on my algorithm? there's beautiful women. Listen, I'm just being honest. There's wrestling. There's African animals.

There's puppies. There's NBA highlights. And that's what I choose to watch to look at. And there's egg crackers. No, I'm just saying the bad parts about Facebook and Instagram. Instagram is very good for your mental health. Is that you see people that you, to be and you feel bad about yourself.

Those are the bad parts about, like, especially for teens. Okay. But I'm saying Twitter, Twitter is the opposite. You see the worst of the world and it makes you feel better about yourself because at least I'm not as dumb as that guy. Okay. I mean, this is, that is some mental gymnastics of obviously. I'm halfway serious.

No, no, no. It's a health scape. It's so bad. And God forbid you go to the For You tab. And it's just murder and horrendous accidents and flames all. all over the globe. Well, you know how the, you click on a Twitter video now and it doesn't just replay, it gives you another one afterwards?

For me, it's always like, click on a football video and the next video is just a fight. And I'm like, and I don't know if this has got me the algorithm that I like fights for some reason. Yeah, we all do. This is a, we spoke about this years ago, like, why are we attracted to violence? Dan Carlin had a whole, like, four-hour episode of the history of public squares and hangings. And this is why we're like, oh, it was, I was talking about why do I love horror movies? because I'm a human being. All right.

So I feel like you're kind of all not bared up this week, but you're beaten down by the negativity. Is that fair to say? Oh, my God. It's, uh, yeah. It's too much sometimes. It is too much sometimes. I try to filter it out and mute and block.

For the first time in a long time, I am just, I'm doing a lot of muting and a follow-in. And a lot less like looking at my phone because it's, it's toxic. It is really, really bad. It's hard to do. Okay, email, do the inbox this week.

I did want to share a recent Wall Street Journal article that weighs against the things have never been better narrative. Prime age men have the lowest labor force participation rates following college attendance rates, higher suicide rates, and lower rates of marriage having children. I would chalk this up to the difference between wealth and prosperity. Wealth reflects access to luxuries, whereas prosperity is about well-being. America is wealthy than ever, but it is not as prosperous as it used to be. I still don't necessarily believe that.

I do believe that some of those, the pushbacks about men in their prime age having issues, is probably a real problem. Maybe one of the reasons for all the negativity or they've fallen into the negativity trap, but yes, that's fair. I thought this was a good email. And I think that when we're talking about the economy and the market doing well, it's making a lot of assumptions, of course, like the economy is great if you want assets, right? As it always is.

But there's literally never been a time in history where everyone has been on board and everyone is doing great. I know, I know. I think that, though, when people like us talk about the economy doing so well and the stock market doing so well. I mean, again, every single time we talk about the economy doing well, do we have to give the caveat that not every single person is doing well? I mean, we get tired after a while. But of course, that's the reality. Of course, there are people that are doing better than others. And of course, there are people being left behind and being

hurt by the current economy, as is always the case. But when you look at the data as a whole, things are... So I actually had to pull this up because... So I looked at the labor force participation rate for prime age, and prime age is 25 to 54. Like, you're in your working years. for men and women. And Whitecharts has this going back to the 1940s. And the high for prime age men working was in like 1958 or something. And it was 98%. Today it's 90%. So it has come down. But in that same year, the women labor force participation rate used to be 35% back then. And now it is closer to 80%. So you've seen this mass influx of women into the labor force. And you've seen a slow minor decline in men, I think on a net basis, that's a huge win. And it's funny. Some

people say, well, the narrative is, well, we need to have dual-income families now because it's so much harder to, but the data shows that the reason there are so many more women in the labor force now is because wages are actually higher. Higher wages have brought women into the labor force. It's a good thing. They're coming in because they make more money. Oh, that's such a good point. It's not because that people need, some people obviously do. I think, I think you say that both things are true. Those are not contradictory

statements that you most people require two incomes and also women are being attracted to the labor force because incomes are higher. Yes, which is kind of not what you'd think. Okay, getting back to the idea that we're looking for bad news too quickly. So this

is from Kevin Drum, who writes this jabber walking. It's like a wonky econ. blog. He looked at the rolling three-year average of the unemployment rate going back to 1974. And it's as low as it's, so it's 3.8% as the rolling three-year average. Dude, have you, don't, this is fake. You believe this? You believe this? So it's the best we've seen since 1974, by far, better than the dot-com boom. And one other thing, when we talk about the economy, once in the last time you were I mentioned

Biden or Kamala Harris? Exactly. Because guess what? The president does not control the economy. They get too much credit when things are going good, and they get too much blame when things are going bad. Republican or Democrat. It's true. They're the manager of a baseball team. Stock markets go up during Republican and Democrat regimes.

They go down to, for both of them. They don't have a lever they can pull in the White House. There's no red phone that says, hey, make the stock market go up today. I want it. I need it. Yeah. That doesn't exist. All right.

You mentioned bond yields. So yesterday, the 10-year treasury bond hit 4%. I think it got as low as 3-6 maybe, 3-5. Yeah. Back at 4%. Worst rate-cutting cycle ever. Interest rates just keep going up. Mortgage rates yesterday.

6.6% after being down, I think, 6.2, 6.1 maybe was the lowest. I think this is going to have a big psychological impact on people thinking, wait a minute, you told me we're cutting rates. All I'm getting is lower yields on my savings accounts. I'm not getting lower borrowing yields. What's going on here? I think the psychology of this could be really... It could mess with some people, with consumers.

I think the real estate market could be all, like, people are going to throw their hands and go, well, when? So if we get lower yields in our savings accounts and not lower yields or not lower borrowing costs. So mortgage rates shot up last week, no? I just said, it's back to 6.6%. Yeah. So I think the psychology of this is going to be, people are going to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? What?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop the clock. And I don't know if Powell's going to have to say, listen, if you want lower yields, we're going to have to have a recession. and people are going to have to lose jobs. Is that what you want? And some people are going to say, yes, do it. But I don't know. And again, this is a, this is a net positive because the reason this is happening is because the economy is stronger than people think. But I think it's going to also make people mad. It's kind of a double-edged sword. All right. The long Sherman strike last week lasted for, I don't know, five days or something, not very long. But the big thing that I think made a lot of people mad. And there's a lot of people who are pro-union who are mad about this, too, saying,

you cannot fight automation. This is coming whether you want it or not. Right? And the whole idea that you can fight, sure, you want higher wages. We'll give you higher wages now. Bank some of them in the future because your jobs might not be there. I don't think anyone, people were really mad that they were trying to fight automation. But I think there has to be some, obviously, a little bit of, there have to be some sort of safety net here. If we're going to say, all right, you thousands of people are going to lose your jobs because of this. So you've read once in Golconda by John Brooks. phenomenal book. It's a great book about the 1920s buildup, and then I think it's the 20s and the 30s. And he talked about how the booming 20s, and this gets back to our point, about how even during a boom time, not everyone is taking part.

So he said, he's talking about the roaring 20s. And he said, of course, prosperity was not for everyone. The farmer, and farmers were 80% of the labor force in like the 1800s. He said the farmer largely deprived of his huge wartime export trade, ill-equipped by temperament and technology. to protect himself against suicide through overproductiveness and virtually unassisted in those days by government was in the direst of straits. The average price of all farm products was cut in half from 1920 to 21 and was to regain only a fraction of that loss by 1927. Per capita income for persons on all farms fell 62% between 1919 and 2021. These catastrophic declines unprecedented in the country's agriculture history meant defaulted mortgages and the failure of the rural banks that held them. In the great years of prosperity from 1923 to 1929, banks in the United States,

United States were failing steadily at a rate of nearly two per day. As for wage earners, through the 1920s, almost one-third of them took home less than $2,000 a year, a fifth of them less than $1,000, but poverty programs and even federal farm price support programs were not in order of the day. Like, there was no safety net back then. So, like, technology came through, totally changed the agriculture industry. Even in the roaring 20s, these people were all basically put out of jobs at a lost income because they weren't needed like they were in the past. And so I think that's the whole point of this. Like, we have to have automation,

but there has to be some sort of safety net to fall back for these people as they try to find new. Because the U.S. economy is dynamic. There will be new jobs made, but some people are going to have to hurt in the meantime. Just getting back to the complaining. Sorry, Mom.

Hang on. Does this make me a lib because I want to help people? I just wanted to check. Just joking. Don't think a lot of this complaining is a sign of, like, progress. Back in the day, people didn't have time to sit on the internet and, of course, it wasn't what to her, and just complain about how bad things are. That's how decent things are. You sat on your porch and complained to your wife or your children or your friends, right?

That's the only people who would listen to your complaints. Yeah. And most of them probably got sick of it. All right. More good news that people might get mad at. The obesity rate fell in 2023. Well, that has... For the first time in a long time.

Yeah, I mean, that has been up until the right. Just go to Six Flanks Great Adventure or Walmart, and you'll say, We are a heavy nation. It's the one thing that really stood out to me being in Europe and coming home was that in Europe, there aren't that many obese people. And then you come back to the States, and it's a problem. So I have a hot take here. There's definitely been a proliferation of people that are more mindful of health.

At least anecdotally, it feels that way. So I put this obesity chart in our artificial intelligence under the Doc in Lotus. So I have a hot take. This is in the oven preheating. I preheat the oven to 425. It's not quite there. It's at 250. So I don't totally believe this, but it's there.

Is it possible? 20 years from now, we'll look back and say, OZempic and these other drugs like this were a much bigger deal to humanity than artificial intelligence. They have a bigger impact on humanity as a whole than AI. I think that's a possibility. Yeah, I think so too. That, like, everyone's paying attention to AI,

but these drugs maybe might not be getting nearly enough Well, how many tens of billions of dollars are spent on obesity in terms of, like, health care? Doctors should be handing these things out like candy when people come to visit them that have heart disease or overweight or have diabetes. These things should be, the government should make this stuff free. We don't know. No, because we don't know. We don't make this stuff free. Think about how many benefits this would have.

We don't know anything about the long-term potentially impacts of these drugs. We do know the long-term impact of diabetes and heart disease, though. True. I think that for people who need this This stuff should be free I think the government should subsidize this And give it out to people Once again, Ben's a lib

Wanted to give But I think I think this is a massive, massive deal potentially So I'm one for two on hot takes with you today What was the first hot take? Oh yeah, that was terrible Twitter was making, yeah I saw a picture

I don't know what I was something about like self-image or whatever I saw a picture of We took a family photo at Temple last week And I look terrible. And usually I don't see a picture of myself and cringe. Like, I don't have, like, self-body images or whatever or problems. Like, I'm comfortable with how I look.

Listen, I'm a bald, I'm a bald middle-aged man. You know, it is what it is. But I looked at myself. I said, holy fucking shit. I liked really old. Like, it was the first time that I saw a picture of myself. Like, wrinkles and such? I just, I looked old.

Like, I don't know if it was the angle or the sun or whatever. I looked like, I look horrible. I think that's Vince Vaughn coming back to haunt you. That's karma. That's karma. I had to open my mouth. So what are you going to do about it? Don't get Botox, please.

What do you mean what am I going to do about it? I don't really have that many wrinkles. I just looked horrible in this angle. I'll share it with you. You see pictures of yourself when you're younger. It definitely stands out a little bit. So the AI thing, there was a tweet going around on Twitter. There was an AI image that was made to look like

a young girl in a boat with rain coming down, being rescued, holding a dog in the hurricane, right? And it was a fake image. I think you can kind of tell. But the whole point was this thing was screaming around Facebook and all the baby boomers were saying, like, I can't believe this happened.

Oh my gosh. And just totally got by the AI. I just, I keep coming back to the fact that AI is going to take so much money from people. Yeah. I wonder if there's going to be like some sort of like AI prevention software. And speaking of which, I woke up this morning to a chase fraud alert.

Somebody took my card and got Banchon, which I'm a huge fan of, and Lyft. And was this you? No, boom, new card. Which is annoying. But how cool is it that fraud is so easily detected by the credit card systems? Yeah, you don't have to,

it doesn't take nearly as much time as you used to. Yeah. Another thing, remember how big of a pain in the ass it used to be to get a new cell phone? Like, oh, how am I going to get all the data from this phone to that phone? You have to plug your phone into one computer, download everything, plug the new phone in, upload it to that, and it took forever. So I dropped my phone in the water, and it wasn't charging.

So, long story short, I go to Verizon and I'm like, all right, how much is a new phone? They said, do you have insurance? I said, no. He goes, all right, let me punch up your account. He's like, dude, you have insurance. I'm like, oh, wonderful. So I do have insurance. And so I got a new phone a day later, which is great.

It's a 15, but I don't care. And you tap the phones, transfer, transfer. I was, my new phone up and running in, I don't know, four minutes. And it looks exactly like it. Your apps are all the same. It's wonderful. It is unbelievable. It's like, it is.

It's one of a million, billion things that is so good that we take for granted. And you don't even think about it anymore, right? Yeah, I agree. All right, so last week we talked a lot about climate and how this impacting people. This Milton hurricane sounds like it could be even worse than Helene in certain ways, at least for people in Florida. Don't pretend to be a weather person, but... Read this tweet from the meteorologist.

Okay. This is nothing short of astronomical. I'm at a loss for words to meteorologically? Meteorologically. Okay. Describe to you the storm's small eye and intensity. 897 Mb pressure with 180 mile max sustained winds and gusts of 200 miles per hour. This is now the fourth strongest hurricane ever recorded by pressure on this side of the world.

This eye is tiny at nearly 3.8 miles wide. This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean can produce. Holy cow. Okay. And it sounds like its strength and really fast, like a category one to category five potentially. Did you see this video from Corey Hofstein, our friend, driving through his neighborhood in Tampa? No. Okay.

So he did a video driving through Tampa. and it just it's all it's from the damage from the last couple weeks and it's all just the whole the road is packed with trash and furniture as far as the eye can see and now we potentially have another storm coming in oh my god you see this video devastating i feel it's kind of hard to walk i feel so big you it's i can't um i can't i can't i can't imagine what these people are going through like you just have to take you have to take some of your prized possessions and and everything else gets left behind? Like, how do you, how do you, where do you recover from this?

Psychologically, it's so awful. I was talking to Duncan before we were recording, and Duncan went back to North Carolina where he's from last week to look at some of the damage and visit family. And that's, I said the same thing. How do you, if you're a business owner or a homeowner, how do you rebuild or restart or I can't even imagine? And we got, we talked about this last week about how it's impacting the housing market,

which almost seems like insensitive, even, but it's going to be a topic. But we had a lot of people who said, oh, you know, climate change is not real, which fine. You want to believe climate change is not real? More power to you? The point is these storms are gaining in intensity and where people have now put their houses and now houses are more expensive. It's making the damage bigger, which makes the insurance more expensive.

That's the whole point. You want to believe climate change, fine. The numbers say there's more damage. The damage costs more. It's costing insurers more. So look at all these. I put together a bunch of headlines from the Wall Street Journal. and New York Times.

In a Florida town ravaged by storms, homeowners all want to sell. The people fleeing climate disasters are going to transform the American South. And that luxury home comes with an ocean view and a surging insurance cost. And they have all these examples of people who are in some of these areas

who are not, like there was all these people who flooded Florida, right, in the past couple of years. And now a lot of them, I think, are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't know, I didn't realize this is what I signed up for. What if I try to sell? And here's one. This guy paid $550,000 for his five-bedroom.

and that's in Tampa. Spend another $50 grand on improvements. When he had to move back to Virginia for work, he expected to sell his house quickly, but since the listing in February, he had no luck. He dropped the price five times it would be happy to simply break even. He said, I can't unload the thing.

In eight months, I've had zero offers. No one even showed up to the open houses. Nobody. And I'm not saying there's going to be this mass migration of people leaving, but there's going to be a lot of people leaving. I mean, people who have money will rebuild probably on the ocean. They'll be fine. But there's going to be a lot of people who won't be able to afford that

or won't be able to afford the insurance. and it's really going to change migration patterns. I truly believe this. Yeah, I agree. So here's a study saying one study by First Street Foundation, a research firm that studies climate threats to housing found that roughly 3.2 million Americans have already migrated, many over short distances out of flood zones

such as low-laying parts of Staten Island, Miami, and Galveston, Texas. Over the next 30 years, 7.5 million more are protected to leave those perennally flooded zones, according to study. And they're also talking about these people going from paying like $800 a year in insurance paying $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000, or 5,000, and this one person says, like, I love living on the water. Like, I can't do it anymore.

Yeah, these people are going through hell. It's really, really sad. But, yeah, the fact that, like, there was already a big storm, now there's another one coming for people. Think about the, they can't clean the debris up fast enough. So that debris is, it's like shrapnel from a bomb or something. Like, I don't know how much worse that makes it, that all that debris is still sitting on the streets,

and then the storm's just going to throw it around again. We've had some people in Florida for our firm. We've already said evacuation notices have happened. Yeah, just an awful situation. I can't even imagine. Mike Sicardi sent this to us or tagged us on Twitter. Goldman Sachs, from Goldman Sachs, rates volatility has kept primary secondary spreads high

despite relatively low gain on sale for originators. We're talking about the 30-year mortgage. Okay. So a lot of dynamics going on. I'm not exactly 100% sure what this means. Okay, so I got it. There's another one that someone sent us. I said, what do we have to do to get the spreads to compress?

Because John Burns has this thing where they ask people, like, what's the mortgage rate you'd take on to buy a house? And they said the magic rate is like in the five to five and a half percent range. Like, that'll get people to move. Okay. So how do we get the spread to compress to get to that level, even if rates don't fall that much? And so this TK financial guy sent it to me. He said, open market purchases would help, but generally this spread should fall on its own

as the market prices in less interest rate volatility. So he shows this move index, which is like the volatility of interest rates. And you can see, so scrolled on a little bit. from the Zachardi one. He shows the spread follows the move index pretty closely. And so if the volatility of interest rates declines, hopefully that should help the spread decline. I hope he's right. But I guess that would make sense with the Fed not having to change things around so much and rate volatility. So hopefully that would be one good thing to hang your hat on as a homeowner, I guess. All right. So every other week from Kevin Gordon at Schwab, NFIB Small Business Uncertainty

Index. So small business uncertainty index spiked to an all-time high in September. I bet it was a lot higher although I'm a uncertainty truther who says that uncertainty is always at all-time highs but it seemed to me like in March 2020 it would probably feel a lot higher than it is today.

So according to the survey data there's more uncertainty now among small business owners than there was during the dot-com bust during Enron and 9-11 and Madoff and 08 and 2020 sorry, don't buy it. No, not at all.

Well, if you're a small business owner, don't you think that the micro economy matters so much more to you than the macro in a lot of ways? Sure, the macro borrowing costs and such, but... You would think. Yeah. All right. Another one from Mike Zucardi. He sent us this chart of truck and car inventories from manufacturers. So in 1990, we're talking 60% of all inventory that was produced was cars, sedans.

and the other 40% was trucks and SUVs. Today, that is closer to eyeballing it. I'd say 85, 15, maybe 90-10 in favor of trucks and SUVs. This is an insane fall. The funny thing is, we've talked about this in the past. Both of my parents came from five children family. They did not have a minivan or an SUV.

My grandparents weren't driving a Yukon. Do you think that they just didn't take all their kids everywhere at the same time? I'll tell you what it is. They didn't have seats. they just had the long couch. That's true. Everyone just, everyone just squeeze in. There wasn't three seats.

There was a couch. There was no seatbelt, right? There was no car seats. All right, everybody, squish. It is funny. Family sizes are smaller today than they were in the past. But car sizes are bigger. So here's what I want to say.

Is this a form of forced inflation on that self-imposed on people? Yes. Because worse gas mileage than sedans, if you're driving a huge truck or SUV, higher insurance premiums, higher monthly payments. So again, smaller families with bigger vehicles. And I think this is a form of self-imposed inflation out of a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right? I can't wait until I'm an emmating estuarine. I'm driving a Honda cord again. Listen, I'm a hypocrite. We're a two-suvie family, even though I drive an explorer, so it fits a little better, right? But I want to drive a sedan. I got an update on my Audi. How long have you been an audit for?

I dropped it off. on August 23rd. They finally gave me a loaner on August 23rd. I didn't hear back from them. So the problem is, I think I've got a busted engine because the check engine oil light keeps coming on. I didn't hear back from Audi until yesterday. From August 23rd.

So it's been like six or seven weeks. Yeah, Rob, it's like, should we call? I'm like, I don't care. They could keep the car. I've got a loner. Like, I'm not putting miles on my car that I own. They could keep it. So what do you say?

six weeks, right customer service, right? So anyway, they called me yesterday and said that there's metal in the engine. Okay, I don't know what that means. But it's going to cost, they said, Is it the engine made out of metal? They said it's a $30,000 replacement, which is more than the car is worth. So they have to like take it apart to make sure that insurance is under warranty or no? Yeah. Okay. So they have to, but they have to prove a lot, right, to the insurance company. that this needs to be replaced. The funniest part, what do you? Imagine if they take it apart and say,

sorry, it's this not covered. Are you magneto? How do you get metal in an engine? Dude, I have no idea. All I know is. One of the funniest comments we got, I can't remember who sent this to us, but someone said,

we were talking a couple weeks ago about the fact that new cars are so much nicer and better, but the funny thing is is that your new car is always in the shop. My car's not new. It's from 2019. That's still pretty new.

So I will never. I love the cars, but I will never, ever get another Audi. The customer service has been just a joke. Okay. If that was you, I'd go back to calling an Audi. Because they don't deserve... We're sorry that you can't have a loaner that you had to pay for a rental car.

Call Audi of America. They'll take care of you. Ring, ring, Audi of America. Oh, I'm so sorry you had to deal with that. Please submit a bill for reimbursement. Submit a bill for reimbursement. Denied. So how did you finally get one?

It took seven weeks. It took seven weeks for me to get a loan. loaner. You should have put your car broker on it. He would have handled it in three days. Joke. I'm so annoyed. All right. Ben, did you know that apparently money does buy happiness? This seems to be one of the biggest changes in behavioral psychology in recent years that all the studies are coming around to this now. So there was a study that people had been referencing for years, probably us included, that there was a certain level, I think, at $75,000 was a threshold beyond which earning more money

didn't make people happier. And this never really made sense, just intuitively. So now there's new studies that show that a big raise provides significant boost in happiness, even in household incomes, of $500,000. The bonuses and leaps and income high earners reap are so large. Okay, whatever. A few things here.

Number one, of course more money makes you happier because it's a sign of progress, even if it's like not the money itself, even if you make more money than you could spend and you're comfortable and you're saving, you've got everything you want. If you're not making more money, then you're not progressing. And so it's just a function of growth of nothing else. It's not necessarily money for money's sake or greed or anything.

It's just, hey, progress, I want to know that every year I'm doing better than the year prior. That's number one. Number two, you can't measure happiness. There's so many things that go into being happy. Health, family, relationships, friends. Like, you cannot measure happiness. And also, I think one of the studies, so the original $75,000 study was done by Daniel Kahneman. And then this Killingsworth guy who they mentioned in this story, I think he worked with Kahneman

to create a new version of it. And it was like when you ask people how they feel. And to your point, when you ask someone, are you happy right now? Could totally be long term. Yes, I'm very happy. Short term. No, my family's a mess or my kids are screaming. And so like you're, to your point, the measurement of happiness, it changes all the time. Your perception of happiness, changes, depending on what's going on in your short-term life or your long-term life. And how many stories have we seen over the years about rich people that are miserable, right? Like, that's a very common theme. So, of course, money is not the cure for unhappiness.

But generally speaking, yeah, money can make things a hell of a lot easier and cure some of the misery in people's lives. But money is not going to make an unhappy person happy. I just think it's just, it's hard to measure, right? But of course, it's $75,000 line in the sand of above that. it's all gravy, it was, you know, just was bunk. All right. Sticking with this theme, there was an article in the journal, another one, that said,

Meet the Henrys, the six-figure earners who don't feel rich. So they found somebody, April Little, and they said 15 years ago, if you asked her, if you told her she'd make $300,000 a year, she would have pictured a life of free of financial stress. The white picket fence, I have the whole visual in my head. I don't want to sound ungrateful, but when I got to that proverbial mounted top, I realized that there's a lot of expenses and I still don't own a home. So I think making money is obviously great, but a lot of things come along with that.

More money, more expenses. It doesn't buy the financial freedom that you might think. Listen, nobody's asking people to feel bad for people that are making money, but I think this article was just shining a light on a reality, which is that, raising a family is expensive. Having money, paradoxically, is expensive because the luxuries become necessities. Exactly. All that sort of stuff. I mean, so that income of 300,000 probably puts in their top, I don't know, 8% of households in the U.S., I would guess. And a lot of people would say, like, you have no right to complain.

But I do think this is why the goalposts are moving. And this is why we have progress in the world. Yeah. Because people are never happy with what they have. I don't view this as complaining as much as this is the reality of people in this situation. And, yeah, nobody's asked you to cry for them, but these are the facts. So this surprised me. What percentage of households bring in $200,000 or more? Probably 15. Wow, nailed it.

Is it? Yeah, it's 14.4. Not to brag, but I've studied this data before. That's higher than I would have guessed. Okay. But, yeah, inverted and 85% of people don't bring in that much money. But here's the thing, though, if I look back at when I was young, I didn't need any, I didn't need a lot.

I lived in a crappy apartment. I had crappy furniture from Walmart or IKEA. I, you know, I didn't really care about going to nice restaurants. I didn't care about nights clothes. I still don't care about nice restaurants. But those things that, yeah, you're right. Your tastes and stuff changed. So if you would have said, yes, me at 25, earning $300,000 a year, I would have been set.

But it's a different lifestyle. It's a different, yes. That 100% right. Yeah, at 25, you have very little expenses. but when you've got two kids, a mortgage, vacations, the schools, whatever you want, it's expensive. It is. A brand new Yukon, suburban, whatever, that's 80 grand.

Yes, it's, everything's more expensive when you're, yes. All right, this is this email made me chuckle. The worst place for small talk is not the dentist chair. It's the perfect place for small talk because you have undeniable grounds to not respond. The worst place for small talk is a public restroom urinal. Guys that make small talk at public urinals are the worst. I need to be stopped. Please help get the message out.

That's true. That's like Alec Baldwin in Alonkampali. You know, it's so beyond egregious that I don't even know that anybody's ever spoken to me in a urinal. If I had to guess, if there's been ever anybody that has spoken to me in a journal, it would be Barry, obviously. But I don't think, yeah, it's so egregious. I don't think it's ever happened.

That's fair. That's true. All right. One of the big stories going around this week was the fact that kids aren't reading anymore. And they're saying kids are going to be. Good. Waste a time. kids who come into college don't read anymore

so they look at books are losing attention so they show like once or twice a week you read a book and this is 13 year olds and it's gone down and people who have never hardly ever read went from 8% in 1984 to 31% now people who used to read was 35% to 14% or 22% it's all falling and there's I guess one of the colleges complaining about people coming into school don't have the ability to read books anymore here's the thing though I would venture to guess

people now read more than anyone ever has in all of human history. It's just not books. It's just not books. Yeah, yeah, totally. And you have podcasts now. I think, honestly, listening to two or three podcasts from an author who has a new book out is a huge time saver from spending 15 hours reading that book. Totally.

You get the best stories, you get the best anecdotes, the best data. Not every book needs to be read anymore. And honestly, there's a lot of fluffing books. I'm a big book reader, but there's a lot of books that don't need to be read. In a lot of books that are 300 pages, that could have been done in 100 pages. So I love Ron Turnow's biographies. I guess in the Hamilton's case, you didn't read about his childhood, but George Washington, do I care what his uncle said to him when he was six years old?

And there's like 70 pages on that. I always say that the biographies are way too long. Just give me the best. And so actually I'm happy with this. So my kid's school, my daughter has never had any homework. Her only homework is you have to read at least 20 minutes a night. And then this year, she's in fifth grade. And they said her only goal is we won't read you to read 25 books by the end of the year.

We don't care how long they are, but they have to be some in this category, some science fiction, some fiction, some historical, whatever. And so that's all her homework is reading. And it's great. It turned her into a reader way sooner than, I never read a book until after college. Never. I don't think I finished one book in all of college. Like an actual sat down and read a book. And now I love reading, but it wasn't a thing for me either.

Yeah. All right, we've got a lot of feedback on hard-boiled eggs. Here's a tip for Michael. If you want to be able to peel hard-boiled eggs cleanly, try a different technique. Instead of boiling them, bring an inch of water to a boil in a pot with a steamer basket and then add the eggs and steam them for 13 minutes. Remove the eggs and cool them off under cold water. I don't know why it works.

Okay. Turns out, obviously, I've got a hard-boiled egg steamer. There's a thing on Amazon that you could probably buy for $6, where it's a round thing. You are such a sucker for these kitchen things. Dude, it works. Although, I guess it, you know, I guess maybe it doesn't work. Do you have just a huge junk drawer of this stuff that you use, like, once a year? No, I use this twice a week.

I'm always steaming egg, boiling eggs for my kids. But it's got six holes. You poke a hole in the bottom of the egg. You place them in the tray. You poured the water in. So I am steaming the eggs, and then I give it a ice bath. For whatever reason, it still doesn't peel as cleanly as I would like. Somebody said to me, put the egg in a jar with water and shake it violently, and that will peel it right off.

It does seem like the worst part is you try to peel it off and you get like a million little tiny pieces of egg. Yeah, it's annoying. We got some over-easy egg hacks too. So this is from Jordan on Twitter. Over-easy egg hack. Tent the pan with a lid. Easiest with small pan. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Tent the pan? Yeah, like put it over top of it. So you put the lid on the pan as it's cooking. That way you don't actually need to flip it. and it's the easiest way to cook eggs because it keeps, it traps the heat in there, I guess. You don't need to flip it. Because the flipping is the hardest part, I said.

He says, source every morning. This is the guy who does it every morning. But wait, I thought hard, I thought over-easy eggs don't get flipped. Well, some people were saying, I guess you do need to flip it, but apparently you don't. I was asking. Is it hard to flip? It's when the yolk is like running, right? Right, right.

Yeah, yeah. No, I don't flip it. You just turn the heat down. Yeah, that's what a lot of people said. Cook it slower. Yeah. Put a top on. That's what I was trying to figure it out.

All right, this was interesting. And I think this applies to a lot of things. I don't know that I have a great analogy, but here we go. It's the curse of the Michelin Star. Somebody tracked the restaurants that opened in New York from 2000 to 2014. And he tracked restaurants that got a Michelin Star versus those that did not. All told, 40% of restaurants awarded Michelin Stars in 2005 to 2014 had closed by the end of 2019. So here's the deal.

A Michelin Star boost publicity. The study found that Google search intensity rose by over a third, but that fame comes at a price. Being in the limelight raises diner's expectations that brings in tourism farther away, being a guest grader demands piles on new costs. The award puts a star-shaped target on the restaurant's back. Businesses they deal with, such as ingredients, suppliers, and landlords use the opportunity to charge more.

Chefs too want their salaries to reflect the accolade and are more likely to be poached by competitors. Food is not the only industry where awards are a mixed blessing. Like Michelin Star Chef, Superstar CEOs demand fatter pay packets that are more easily distracted, spending more time-ready books and joining boards, and publishes to awards bring peril, prize-winning books are reviewed more harshly. So anyway, sort of heavy lies the crown, be careful what you wish for. Like success is not always a good thing. That's very interesting. I never would have thought that. I would have thought you'd get the Michel Star, and now you're rolling in the money.

Yeah. You know why else these restaurants fail? Portion sizes are way too small. You get, like, one little circle thing, and then like a couple drizzles of the fancy stuff around it, and then like one piece of garnish. That French restaurant that you and I went to, was that a Michelin Star? Even if it wasn't. Oh, yeah.

Was it? Yeah. What did we do? Ben and I went to... You asked for ketchup, and... No, I did it. You were joking. Okay.

horrendous. Just so, just little portions, all fan, not for us. I don't get it. Nope. We actually went to the Nick game and said, let's get a hot dog. It's more our speed. Yes. All right. So, story time. Ben, weekend activities are something I wasn't prepared for as a, as a parent to two young boys. It wasn't like this when we were growing up. I'm pretty sure in terms of like sports and what we had to do. I think we had, like, I had a-sport, A-sport, and perhaps a birthday party here and there. Now, I've got Kobe's flag football at 8 a.m. Logans. Those are brutal on a Saturday.

That early, right? Yeah. Logans, which, by the way, I'm an assistant to the assistant. I rank the kids on the sideline. I've got a- Which is totally necessary. Little boys at flag football are the worst. You need them.

They just pull each other's flags. They're jumping on each other. They walk all over me. Let's be honest. They're not listening. So then we've got like Logan's soccer at 9, then Kobe soccer at 10, then Logan's flag football at 11, then Kobe's baseball at 2. It's all, it's the entirety of the day.

Now, the good news is I think for the most part we have Sunday freeze, except for birthday parties here and there. And it sounds like I'm complaining. I'm not. I'm just, if you are pre-kids, just get ready. I was talking about this with one of our calls on the internet. Because your Saturday is about to be hijacked. You go through different cycles as a parent.

So, like, the baby to toddler phase is just, you know, it's almost like trying to, you're trying, especially when they're a baby, like, you're like, oh my gosh, it's only 10 a.m. What, like, what are we going to do to fill the time? And now you graduated the phase where the time is all filled. Like, we're, we have three kids, so I can't, I can't imagine. We don't have Sundays open anymore. We have soccer games on Sundays. This, we're, we're on travel soccer now. So we're traveling all the way across the state to play teams in Detroit. And, yeah, so we're driving far places now. So, yeah, we're, my weekends, yes. We're go, go, go. Same thing.

I love it, though. It's fun, but you're right. There's no relaxing. There's no sitting down. All right, I have a gym story. Go ahead. I know you're not a gym guy because you pay for a trainer over Zoom

and you don't, you ever go to a gym? Not anymore. In fact, I don't know if you could tell, but I did some triceps extensions yesterday. I'm feeling a bit sore. And you're filling out your Daniel Jonesers are pretty good. Have you ever been a gym member before? I've gone to gyms my whole life, pretty much.

I have never once in my entire existence paid for a gym. gym membership now. So I had a Gen Z running yesterday. And so I go to a planet fitness, which I still don't understand. It's $10 a month. It's right by my office, nice and easy. I go at lunchtime. And I walk in there, and it's kind of the cable cross bars and the squat racks are always hardest to get because they're not as many of them. So you know, what's a cable crossbar? Well, you have the cable things that come down and you put handles on it. Yeah. So I'm doing, so I walk in and it's open and I do the cable. I start doing my thing. And I've got my AirPods in. I'm listening to a podcast. I'm doing them. And this Gen Z kid, this girl, young girl,

walks up to me and goes, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. And I stop, and I'm in the middle and I said, yes, and she said, I was using this. And I said, oh, I walked up and no one is here. And she goes, well, I walked over to get some water in between sets and the water is at the far side of the gym. And I wanted to teach this girl a lesson and be like, listen, you can't leave a machine. You can't jump between machines. You're at a machine, you do your stuff, and then you go get water. I didn't say this. I just, and she looked at me, it gave me the biggest eye roll I've ever seen in my life. The James Harden Giff, she gave me one of those. And I kind of just said, okay, here, you can have it. I, you know, I was going to teach her a lesson, but I just decided

to be the bigger person and walk away. But she was, she was not happy with me. Did she say, thank you? Stole her, no, just she gave me an eye roll. And I said, I thought people in Midwest were nice. I thought so. I could have said, you know what? No, you were on it. It's my machine now. It was open when I walked over here. No one was here. You're a pacifist. Yes. I let her have it. But yes, these are the gym run-ins. And then I walked into the locker room to get changed and there's seven-year-old dudes walking around no towel around their waist just on their shoulder. You know, it's so wild that old men are just comfortable walking around. One time my uncle took me to a pool swimming, this is kind of a weird, so I don't know why I agreed

to go with him, but sure, I'll swim a few laps. So, this is probably 20 years ago. So we're in the dressing room and he just got naked. I'm like, dude, I don't get it. Why not put on a towel? That's the point of the towel. You wrap it around you. I don't get it. You know how we always turn into our parents? Like, I'm eating cottage trees like my dad with fruit. Well, first of all, I don't go to the gym.

But I'm pretty sure I'll never just be cool with just walking around naked. No. No, no. I guess more power to them that they don't care. But, ugh, no thanks. All right, recommendations. We've talked a little about nobody wants this. A new show on Netflix with Kristen Bell and Adam Brody.

It's also got Jonah from Veep, which I'm not sure you ever watched. And it's got Willa from Succession, who's actually very good in it. She's great. I like her. So I like it. It's great because it's, I don't know, 25-minute episodes. You can fly through the season. That's a winning formula.

It's a round-com show. We're talking briefly about this yesterday. Of course you're an Adam Brody guy. Oh, so in college, I had appendicitis. And my appendix almost burst. But the night before I went to the hospital, I was just in agony, laying on my bed. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't move.

And I turned the TV on, and this is pre-streaming days. And the only thing that was on was an OC reunion or an OC marathon. So I caught all the way up on OC from the summer. and I was in, and I can't believe he never became a bigger star from that show. He should have been, like, the funny, sarcastic buddy in, like, 11 different Matthew Gonaughey Ron Cohn- Yeah, I wonder what the story is behind that. Did he get... And he's great in this.

It's so funny, though, I looked at him up. Both Kristen Bell and Adam Brody are in their mid-40s. They're probably paying people in the 30s in this show. It's just easier than ever for people to just look younger now. Yeah. And play younger. Here's the other thing. So this is the first time I've had where the people's job is a podcast in the show.

show. And they talk about, they're talking about things. And one of the sisters, there's two sisters who have like a call her daddy kind of show about talking about dating and sex. And they say, wait, wait, wait, save it for the show. And I thought, hey, that's what we do. You and I will be having a conversation. It's usually you, I start telling a story or a joke. And you said, no, no, no, save it for the show. Save it for the show. Don't tell me now. Yeah. I thought that was pretty good. So what did you think of the show? I really liked it. It's very good. It's funny. It's good. Probably would have been a rom-com movie in the past, but I thought it was good. My only nitpick if I had one is, is there

really a guy that smooth with the ladies who is a rabbi? No. Is that? Okay. No. I figure that's a stretch. No. So I watched, I think I watched like three episodes and then I said to Robin, you're free to move on without me.

Like, I enjoyed it, but she wanted to, she was, she flew through it. I like it. So Wolfe's, not Wolves, Wolfs is the new Clooney Brad Pitt movie on Apple. I wanted to bring this up. Nobody's talking about it. Was it horrendous? I saw some lukewarm reviews. I liked it.

I don't know. I saw a lot of people say, eh, it's not good. it was, is it necessary? Like, these guys have the best chemistry. Like, they're, the first half hour of the movie is awesome. They're fixers who come in in, if you, if someone gets murder or someone gets hurt, they come in and clean it up, like the wolf on Puliction. I'm guessing that's the title. And they just have the best, their little banter and little witty, like, back and forth. I loved it. The movie kind of goes off the rails a little bit at the end, but I really enjoy it. It was entertaining. It's not a great movie. It's a good movie.

It sounds like an airplane movie. you laugh a little bit. All right, I thought about last week. My favorite horror movie, since you had your list, I had to think about this, and it was easy for me. This was a totally easy one, and it's based on, I always give you crap for having the premium experience for going to the theater for this. Wait, wait, give me a clue. What year did you go? This is late 90s. Oh, Blair Witch. Yes. So, and the only reason is because of the, the experience I had at the theater. Holy shit, what a movie. I went with 12 of friends. There was probably six girls, six guys. we were going into our senior year of high school, 1999,

and we were so dumb, we lived in a small town. We would sneak beers into the movie theater. So the only thing I remember about, the biggest thing I remember about this movie is one of my friends brought bottles of bud light into the movie theater. We'd put them in coats and pants and he put it on the ground, and it fell, and we were in the very back row. It was packed theater.

The whole theater was full. And we could hear it rolling because it was a very quiet movie. And it rolled all the way to the front, did hit anyone's legs, and it broke at the front. And we kind of, who did that? You know what's so funny? Go ahead, finish your story. So they talked about this on the rewatchables for Blair Witch,

and this was totally my experience. I didn't read, there was no blogs, there was no social media. All we saw was a preview. So going into it, we watched it, and it's a found footage thing, and it felt, it was the kind of movie where everyone in the theater had their jaw open. And we walked out of the movie, and everyone is, it was the experience afterwards was amazing, and everyone we were with was sitting there talking,

and everyone's kind of didn't, like, was that real? No, it couldn't have been real. No one wanted to believe it, but people kind of wanted to believe, like, what if that was real? that's how naive we were back then because we didn't know any better. They marketed it as if it were real. I was in summer camp, sleepaway camp, when I saw that movie. Coming back to the bunk, we were scared shitless.

It's funny, I was talking with a couple of our colleagues last night about this movie. It was, have you rewatched it recently? So I had never rewatched it from the first time I didn't want to see it again because I saw it in a theater and it was such a great experience. So I rewatched it. It's only an hour and 20 minutes. I rewatched it this past week. And it's really scary. Yeah, the last 20 minutes of the movie are ridiculous.

But honestly, it wasn't that good of a rewatch. It's not something I'd go out of my way to rewatch again. It was that one experience was it for me. So, yeah, I saw it also in the last couple of years. And I think I'm good. Very, very scary movie. Okay, somebody emailed us. Michael seems to go to the movie theater a lot.

What are the actual logistics of his trips? That's a good question. I'm a married father of two young kids myself, and I have no idea how he swing. it. I'm assuming it's not a date night babysitter set up since a lot of the movies seem like indie Harfix, correct? So how does he go solo after bedtime? Does Robin get her own solo nights also? Are there in-laws nearby? How does it work? Okay, good question. Valid question. My wife is a saint is the short answer. So usually I go at between 7.30 and 8.30.

That's the answer. I don't know. That's it. But there's no magic. That's what I go. 7.30, 8.30. So it's a dereliction of your fatherhood duties. Yeah. Robbins, give me the bath, put the kids to bed, and you're going to the movie.

It's so easy to put in the kids to bed. I say to all the time. Go out. I don't care. I never put the kids to bed. I do it all the time. Easy, busy. True.

It gets easier the older they get. I mean, because Robin has a lot of solo activity. She goes, she's going to dinner with the girls tomorrow. She has PTA. I love putting the kids to bed. Easy, pizzy, lemon, squeasy. We have a very good division of duties. So we don't bust each other's chops, but you want, like if we're both very good with, I mean, I do a lot more than she does.

But if you want to do this, go, go ahead. Okay. Two recommendations, but before I get there, the Joker 2, my friend said, I assume you want to see the Joker. I said, no, I don't want to see the Joker. First of all, I didn't love the first one. No. It's a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, I thought it was like a, like, yeah, I get why people liked it, but it was so miserable and just depressing.

So I had no interest in Joker 2. And then when I found out that it was like borderline of musical, it's like, what the fuck? No, I'm so out. So Scott Mendelsohn wrote, Joker cost $63 million and was sold as a model of against the grain comic book storytelling and budgeting. It was the most rate of return profitable big deal of Marvel DC movie ever. That's the Joker. Right. Joker 2 costs reported $190 million.

So this massive decline qualifies this enormous problem. So the movie bombed. DC just has... You don't know why it bombed? The Joker's a perma bear. We're in a bull market. There's no way this movie would have done well in a bull market.

Bear market, this movie would have done it okay. We're in a bull market. But anyway, but D.C., what a just a decade of shit. I mean, there's been a few, like, a few movies at work, but for the most part, how much money went in and how much money came out? I bet they're way upside down.

Anyhow, okay, I've got two recommendations. One is a movie called Humane. I don't know where I saw it, Or, what did I say? Maybe a tweet. I can't remember. It's a, what's her name? Humane director.

It's a Kronenberg. Oh, Jay, J. Barrishel's in. I like that guy. You would like this movie, Ben. Caitlin Kronenberg, daughter of the famous director, David Kronerberg? David Kronerberg and brother of Brandon Kronenberg,

who did a few Dementan movies that I love. So Humane is, But speaking of OC, what was the dad's name? Oh, Peter Gallagher? Peter Gallagher. So Peter Gallagher plays a new... Sandy from the OC, he was good. Sandy, plays a very wealthy news anchor in a sort of like post-apocalyptic world where

there's a natural disaster and people have to volunteer to euthanize themselves for the betterment of the world. So it takes place in his house and the four kids have to figure some shit out. And it was fun, fun movie. Do they do like rock, paper, scissors to see who goes, who gets killed first? More or less.

But I think, I think, uh, I think you would enjoy it. I enjoyed it. Two thumbs up from Michael. The next one, I'm a, this is a borderline table pounder for me.

This is how much I like this movie. It's called It's What's Inside. And it's What's Inside was felt to me like a mix of bodies, bodies, bodies, and talk to me. So it's not a horror movie. It's sort of, like a genre,

sci-fi, I guess. Eight friends are in, in a very large house the night before in one of their weddings. And there's some backstory drama, as there always is. And then the plot of the movie is they start to switch bodies. There's a piece of technology that allows them to switch bodies. And things go off the rails. And it was quite good.

I feel like body swapping is a idea that will never go, that will never get old. It's called It's What's Inside, and it was very good. Not a horror movie. So I think this will appeal to the broader audience. It's not a Michael movie type of thing, although it certainly is a Michael movie. So very much enjoyed. Very, very much enjoyed.

You know what the funniest body switch movie ever is? Freaky Friday. No, change it up with Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds. Totally underrated movie. Oh, yeah, that is good. Love that one. That was pretty good. All right.

So, Ben, I hope. Said your hate mail about politics to Michael. I hope you enjoy Twitter for the rest of the week. If you're feeling If you're ever feeling down, I always say, check Twitter. They can all be winners. All right.

Animal spirits at the compound news.com. Thanks to production team, as always. See you next time.