Animal Spirits Podcast - New All-Time Highs! (EP.344)

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

On episode 344 of Animal Spirits, Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson discuss: the average length of bull and bear markets, what's up with small cap stocks, $8.8 trillion in cash, no show China, the vibecession is over, the softening labor market, airline credit cards, 0% rate loans, the Bitcoin ETF, and much more! Thanks to YCharts for sponsoring this episode! Get 20% off your initial YCharts Professional subscription at: https://go.ycharts.com/animal-spirits-referral Find complete show notes 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 Y charts. Michael, how many hours a month do you think advisors are saving by using Y charts? I'll tell you. 17. 29 hours. So they did some survey. They found advisors saving 29 hours. Is that the average?

That's the average. Yep. So I'd probably say 46. Aside from those savings, they're also 26 million a new AUM surveyed by advisors who brought in the past year by using Y charts. Not bad. I save a ton of time. using Y charts too. We've talked about this before. Just adding those little gray recession bars, which I think is important for a lot of economic data. The first time I, the first time I figured

out how I did that in Excel, I felt like a, I felt like a world solver. I have to Google it every time, but most of the charts in my blog used to be created personally by hand. It would take forever on Excel, and now you can just do it with a click of a button on Y charts. It saves us a lot of time. You know how they show you, you know, they show you like every week. They show you your screen time on your phone? Mm-hmm. I wonder what my secret time is on Y charts. That's a good question.

I got to pull up all the time. Check it out yourself, 20% off your initial subscription. When you sign up through Animal Spirits, new customers only. Check out the link in the show notes. Whycharts.com. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. 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 Spurts with Michael and Ben. In the open, I said, I called myself a world solver, which is a phrase that is not actually a phrase.

So I just want to clear the air here. What are you going for? I woke up at 4.45. So I'm going to say things that might not make sense. So just cut me some slack. 4.45 West Coast time because you're in, you're in Las Vegas. Yeah, but I went to sleep on West Coast hours, and I woke up on East Coast hours. I'm all discombobulated.

It happens. All right, quick plug. The future proof retreat. Ben, do you know where this is? Somewhere in Colorado. It's in Colorado Springs at the Broadmoor Hotel. Am I getting that right? Broadmoor.

Yeah. How about that? How about that? See, it's not a Crest of Butte, Colorado mispronunciation. I got it right. It's a Broadmoor. We got way more feedback on that than we thought. We must have a lot of skiers in the audience.

Yeah. Again, though it should, if they're going to call it Butte, spell it B.E. A-U-T. Yeah, come on. It's going to be smaller than the festival in California, and it is the week of March 24th, and it is going to be a heck of a time. A lot of breakthrough sessions, a lot of meetings, a lot of outdoor activities, depending on the weather.

There might be skiing, might be hiking, check it out, link in the show notes, et cetera. Do you remember the first time you and I went for a hike together? Oregon? In Portland? I do. Yeah. I tapped out. You tapped out halfway up and sat down.

I mean, I didn't know that you were, I think, I didn't know that you were a peak athlete at the time. What the hell? It was like, half an hour in it. It was just vertical. I'm like, guys, I'll be right here. I'll see on the way back down. I just remember you sitting there on the way down.

Anyway, speaking of peaks, we reached a new one like that. We've been flirting with all-time highs for a while now, pretty much since the end of the year. But we officially hit it on, was it Friday? I guess Friday was the first day. So I've got the updated bear market charts. This one, and I'm not talking trading days here. Let's let's be clear, because you're a trading day guy. I just used the simple Excel formula, like today's date minus previous date, 746 days to

from the peak in early January 2022 to now to hit that new high. Pretty good. The average is like 1,100 days. So it was, it was, you know, 1,200 days. The average what? The average what? So I looked at the average time. takes from a peak to a new, an old peak to a new peak in a bear market. So there's been 11

bear markets since 1950. And the average peak from the old peak to the new peak is around 1,200 days. So this was, and the average loss is 35%. Now, that includes some huge crashes, obviously. So this was really a run-of-the-middle bear market. Hang on, you're not, you're not including the Depression, are you? Because that was like... Nope, this is 1950. That's why I like starting 1950, because it cuts the 30s off. So I also wanted to look, okay, fine. We're back at all-time highs from a bear market. What happens after that, historically?

Right? I don't know if this is going to hold, but I... Before we talk about what happens next, let's just review. I think that was a pretty ordinary bear market as far as how their history books will judge it, right? Yes. 25% historically is not going to stand out. No, it was unique, right?

They're all snowflakes. No two bear markets are exactly alike. but just in terms of the depth and duration, it was run-of-the-mill. Yes, although you had plenty of stocks that got crushed way worse, but that stocks rubbed a lot as well. So I wanted to look at, okay, fine, we went through the peak to the valley and back to a new peak. What happens historically after you hit a new high following a bare market, right?

So these 11 instances. And look at this chart here. I don't know if you can see, the average returns are pretty darn good historically. And there was really only one period where you had new highs following a bear market. And then those new highs were immediately, almost immediately met with another bear market. And that was 2007. We hit the dot-com bust. We hit the peak.

We hit a new high in May of 2007. And by October of 2007, we were back to, you know, getting crushed again. So kicking the pants. I'm glad I was in a, you know, people say like boomers had it so easy. I know stock market returns for boomers have been wonderful, but let's be honest. It was not, it was not an easy ride. The tech bubble bursting, I guess depending on how all they were, I don't know, 30s, maybe 40s in some cases. And then as soon as they get back to even, as soon as they get back to even, the GFC.

So, uh, not, not too easy, not too easy. It was, we talked about this last week about the retirement crisis stuff. Having housing prices fall 25% in stocks fall 55, 60% at the same time, more or less. That was, that was a come to Jesus moment for a lot of people's financial plans. Like, oh, my gosh. Yeah, so the market might have compounded at 12% a year since they've been investing or whatever the number is, but it's not like it was straight up. It was anything but.

But so the average returns, I did one, three, five, and 10 years. and these are total returns following new all-time highs. And I didn't feel like calculating from the exact new all-time high because I wanted to use total returns. So I did the month after. So these are probably actually understated even because I didn't feel like going in and doing like, oh, from the November 3rd to the end of the month.

Because that takes too much time. Well, you see, it just sounds lazy. That's okay. That's what Nick McHulius for. I was being lazy. Total returns, one year, 16%, three years, 27%, five years, 59%, 10 years, 206%. These are from the new all-time highs

following a bear market. So not bad. Again, there was a couple periods where things didn't go so great. The 70s bear markets were pretty close together. You had one in late 1960, early 1970, and then the 73, 74,

but most of the time, new highs are followed by more new highs. Which I think is hard to wrap your mind around. I'm not saying it has to happen this time, but that's typically what happens. And the average time from these new new highs, eyes after bear market to another peak is around 1,200 days. So talking like three plus years.

That's the average. Again, take an average for what it's worth. But the time from the new highs following a bear market to a peak before another bear market is like three and a three and a half years almost. I don't like the way that sounded the way that I just referenced Nick McGilley. That's not what Nick was for, but what I was meaning is that when I give Nick a data assignment, he turns it around two seconds of credit to Nick because his book just keep buying didn't age too well right out of the gate,

much like the Bitcoin ETF, which we're going to get to. Nick's book Just Keep Buying. I think came out right at the peak, right before the peak. But also, so vindication for Nick, which was not surprising. But also, he wrote that blog post in 2017. So if you take that back to its inception, looks even better. All right, this is an interesting one. Jason Gepford posted this.

The S&P 500 closed at an all-time high. 2000 is still in a bear market down more than 20% from his high. That's never happened before. So the Russell only goes back to 1979. So it's not a really long, but it's still, you know, 40 plus years. I looked at this as well, and I looked at the Russell 2000, the S&P 600, which is a little higher quality. That's a small cap index as well, and then the 400, which is the mids. In the, the 600 was only off 13%. Mid caps are only off five or six percent. So is the Russell 2000 just all the junky small cap stocks now, or more junkies small cap stocks? Because if you put some sort of valuation or quality screen on here, small caps don't look nearly as bad as Russell 2000.

What's the percentage of negative earners? Is it higher than the normal in the Russell 2000? I've seen that chart floating around. Yeah, what is it? It's like 30 or 40%, I think. But yeah, there's different ways to look at a small cap universe. and just using, like, the S&P 600, things don't look nearly as bad as the Russell 2000. Well, I feel like the mega cap,

the S&P 100, doing most of the heavy lifting is maybe keeping sentiment a check. What I mean by that is, remember you said a couple of weeks ago, I don't know if it was a Fed day, but there was one massive update where it sort of felt like the market declared victory in terms of the war against inflation is over, and you felt it on social media.

The vibe, anecdotally, at least on Twitter, they don't necessarily feel euphoric, do they? Because it's not like every, it's not like all stocks are going vertical. True. Yeah. And that's what people keep pointing that out, that it's just these handful of stocks and small caps had a nice rally there, but now have rolled over again. Is this also the private equity IPO stuff too, that they're, there just aren't as many high quality companies that are going in this small cap universe? I just think it's, I just, I just think it's their exposure to interest rates. That's all.

Which is kind of interesting. I think if interest rates come down, the Russell could explode higher. So that's another interesting thing about hitting all-time highs. Not like they're going sky high, but rates have risen again this year a little. Two years gone back up, ten years gone back up. And we're still hitting all-time highs, which is not, I'm not sure what people would have expected. Well, not impossible. I mean, nothing is impossible.

What if we have another year like last year where it's the S&P 100 against? specifically in the mag seven. I saw a chart this morning that invidia is almost bigger than the entire energy sector. Yeah, that makes sense. Invidia is kind of the new energy, isn't it? I guess, yeah. All right. We talked about this a little bit with Alex Morris, who's going to be on our upcoming talker book. It's been 15 months since the yield curve inverted, right? And I'm using 10 year and three months now as the inversion. What's the cutoff here on this being, a signal that's useful. Because I know historically it's been like, well, it's been 17 or 18 months. There's a lag. That's a long time when you have a recession once every four or five years.

If you're going to say this signal takes two years to work, I don't know. That's not a signal, is it? I don't think so. Even if it works this time, I don't know if it really worked. Here's another question for you. I was thinking about this. When is the last time the Fed was cutting rates with stock market at or near all-time highs? Okay? Because 2020, when they cut, the world was falling apart. 2018, we were already in a bear market when they remember they raised rates, then cut them immediately again. 2008, we were in a financial crisis. Early 2000s, they were cutting. I guess you'd probably say that the Y2K stuff in the 90s, which did kind of accelerate that. But usually the Fed is cutting when the stock market has already rolled over and getting hammered.

Now the Fed is going to be cutting with the stock market at all-time highs. Does it matter? Or is the market good enough at pulling... I don't know. It's interesting because we're not used to that. It hasn't happened in a long, long time. Could the rate cuts be a seller news event? Could be.

Possibly. Maybe sounds a little too cute. Well, I guess, yeah, Bitcoin, like you said, we'll get to it. 8.8 trillion dollar cash pile from the Wall Street Journal. I've never seen this before where they added it in CDs. We've talked a lot about money markets, but they showed the CDs added to it, too, and there's a huge uptick in CDs. So they said there's $8.8 trillion in money markets and CDs.

And you'd think the money would come out of CDs and go into something else faster than money markets even because those things mature or you can take it out, I guess, take a penalty. But it sounds like, remember we've been trying to figure out, where did this money come from? It sounds like most of it did just come from checking and savings accounts. Hey, there's a lot of money in CDs. Wow. What is that? $3 trillion? It's a lot of money.

It's like $2 something. Almost three. Yeah. It's more money than you think, which it's a very. very boring instrument, but I can see why people use them. But again, that's, but doesn't that doesn't that really count as cash on the sidelines this time? If it came from checking and savings and it's going to go into some other form of investment vehicle after this, or do you think if rates go back down, I'll just go back into checking and savings? That's the question.

I mean, I keep on saying the same thing, that I think it's cash. I think it's going back into people's bank accounts. I don't think it's going to go into Nvidia. Yeah, you might be right. And it's possible with boomers retiring that the money market stuff is just going to slowly but surely keep going up over time. Right?

Because they're going to hold more cash for spending purposes. All right. Nowshow Japan, one of our favorite retorts from people whenever we have a long term. Maybe we have to call it Now Show China. So this is from a friend of the show,

Jake at Economic, saying the stock market is not the economy. The MSCI China Index is about to go negative since its 1992 inception. The Chinese economy is 13 times larger an investment in it has got you the same return if you put your cash under the mattress. So I looked, Colin Roche wrote about this too. The Chinese economy since the early 90s has gone from 500 billion in GDP to 18 trillion. That's roughly 12, 13% per year. And I looked at the returns for the stock market. And this is the MSCI China

with dividends is up 15% in total. That's a 46 basis point annual return. if you were in the U.S. investing in China, actually underperformed Japanese stocks in that same time frame by a lot. Bob Elliott tweeted a chart of the Niki versus the Hengsing. And he said probably no better chart to illustrate the fact that differences in GDP growth have nothing to do with differences in equity returns. From 2003, China's nominal GDP is up 1,000% Japan's is up 12. Yeah, point taken.

One other, but one other glaring take. at least for me is the start date matters a lot. So as soon as the inception of this index in December, 1992, it got more than cut in half, more than cut in half over the next decade. So if you started this, and I'm not suggesting you should start at the bottom either, but how you started this in 10 years later, instead of 10 years earlier, the returns would be massive. Started in 2000, they'd be a little better, but still not a lot better. A lot better. I also think that these are two of the weirdest economy and financial market countries there are for being so huge. Because a lot of people want to compare, like, what if this happened to the U.S.? You never say

never, but I just think that these situations in China, Japan are way more unique to have this cutting thing happen than it would be here. I do think the home country bias thing comes into play here, but I don't think that you can make an apples-to-apples comparison and say, like, what if this happened in the U.S. because it's a different situation. It feels like capitulation on China. It's just, it's nothing, it's headlines every day. But is it possible for them to snap their fingers and say, we want stock market returns to go up and then to make it happen?

I don't know enough about it to say anything intelligent. Yeah, it's just, it's, when you look at the numbers, though, it's, it is pretty shocking. This is also shocking. We've, we've spoken about this before, but the chart from Goldman Sachs showing the tenure and the S&P 500 borrowing cost. And historically, as you would expect, they tracked very, very closely. And then the pandemic happened. The Fed took interest rates to zero.

Companies were, the economy was shut down, and these corporations just swallowed as much debt as they possibly could. And so much like a homeowner without a mortgage, rising interest rates did not impact them at all. At this point, could they also kind of wait it out? A lot of those bigger companies, if the Fed is going to go from five to three and borrowing costs are going to fall a little bit,

couldn't it be possible that a lot of these big corporations will never be impacted by higher rates for this cycle? Not like, not real high, I don't know. It seems like they, a lot of these corporations may have timed this perfectly. Depends on the company. Like someone locking that 3% mortgage. Depends on the company.

I think that, yeah, guess what interest rates do not impact Apple like meaningfully yeah yeah I think you're right all right so the vibe session is officially over I it's January 23rd and I already think I'm going to take a victory lap from one of my 2024 predictions is that fair I said it's early it's a third week of January look at this spike in consumer sentiment it was a great bounce it was up 13% month over month it's up 20% year over year again caveats abound here because a lot of this is political and weird, but it's also gas prices and stock prices. And I've been noticing since all time highs were hit, the regular news programs, the today show that my wife watches,

they're talking about record highs in the stock market. And I think that kind of thing impacts sentiment for Main Street civilian people who weren't paying attention to this stuff like we are. Oh, totally. In fact, the journal wrote, media coverage might be rubbing off on consumers. The mood of economy-related articles has rebounded since November to the highest level since 2018. they've got this daily new sentiment index. So, yeah, that tracks. It's in the data. There's also a data point.

The share of consumers in December who expected to be better off a year later is at the highest level since June 2021. Now, the reason for this is, what is it? It's inflation. I mean, that's it's gas prices. It's everything. I was thinking, can we say

the doom and gloom economic sentiment for most people has been wrong for the past 18? months? Or can we say, no, no, they were right because inflation was high? Well, the fact that sentiment was lower or as low as it was in the bottom in 2009 or 2008 seems ridiculous since this was this was nowhere near as bad as that. So can we say people were, now the sentiment's coming back, can we say people were just wrong? The people who said who felt really negative about the economy were wrong. No, they weren't wrong. They were. No, they weren't. This has been a strong

economy. Unemployment is still below 4%. No, no, no, no, no, no. They weren't wrong. If you're pissed off about higher prices, it doesn't make you wrong. It means you're annoyed about higher prices. But sentiment was lower now, lower in 2022 than it was in 2008. I think it's easy to explain because it's not, it's not stock market sentiment. It's economic sentiment. So even though the recession- The economy almost fell off a cliff in 2008. Yeah, but guess what? what was unemployment 10% 8% 10% in 2008 so for 90% of people

who were still employed that weren't working No, you can't say that people were positive in 2008 That was I'm not That period was the scariest Financial time of my life Bar not I'm not saying that people are positive

I'm saying that everybody Everybody Every single person was impacted by higher prices But I'm willing to blame a lot of it On the media and social media as well I think that was the I think that changed the sentiment a lot We didn't have that as much in 2008.

What does the media have to do with people paying 30% higher for eggs? Because they're beat over the head by it every single day, by the negative media coverage. They were beat over the head with it every time they struck their credit card. Look at the sentiment data. It was lower than 2008. It was lower than 1980, the 1970s. It was the lowest consumer sentiment we've ever seen. There's no way that was the worst economy we've ever seen.

Yes, I'm saying they're wrong. I'm saying that in social media contributed to it. Yeah, but there's a difference between how bad the economy is versus how people feel. I mean, we spent the entire... So I'm saying those feelings were wrong. We spent the entirety of last year talking about this. I know, but I'm saying they were wrong. Can you say that people's feelings are wrong?

Yes. A lot. It happens a lot. Stop. Do you know how fast you were going? I'm going to have to write you a ticket to my new movie, The Naked Gun. Liam Nissan. Buy your tickets now.

and get a free Tilly Dog. Chili Dog, not included. The Naked God. Tickets on sale now. August 1st. No mean reversion in spending. U.S. retail sales hit another new all-time high. This chart is unbelievable.

So, retail sales, if you were to follow the trend line from the 2008 crisis, it had a huge drop, and then it kind of started its own new trend. Yeah, this chart is so wild. But it not only took out those previous, that previous trend from 2007, it went way over and above. And you can say, well, some of it's inflation, and that is true. But there hasn't been any mean reversion in people's spending. Let's just say that you say, yeah, obviously retail sales are higher. Inflation is 20% higher than it wasn't.

Fine. But how about the fact that higher prices hadn't made an impact at all in people's spending behavior? That in and of itself is noteworthy. This chart is, yeah, it's crazy. All right, from New York Times. a lot of people are talking about this headline on social media, the U.S. seems to be dodging recession. What could go wrong? So I think a lot of people are just kind of on pins and needles and not wanting, to your point about getting euphoric, not just thinking, like, there's got to be

something coming along that's going to derail this. So they said, indeed, on the same day that Wells Fargo reversed its recession-caused economists also published a report pointing to signs of weakness in the labor market. Hiring is slowed, they noted, in just a handful of industries account for much of the recent job gains. Layoffs remain low, but workers who do lose their jobs are having a harder time finding a new one. So it does sound like the labor market is slowing. And the Wall Street Journal had a piece on this as well, saying that it's becoming harder to find a job for people who are losing their jobs. If that happens, if the labor market slows, does that mean that the Fed could actually cut even faster this year than people anticipate? Or do you think

that they're going to still be more concerned about inflation? stable prices and full employment. That's their dual mandate. I don't know. I guess the thing is, if the labor market does slow, because it's been ridiculously strong, and it sounds like things are coming in a little bit. That's the one thing that, like,

what if that means the Fed cuts more than people even assume? Don't they, but don't they want the labor market to slow? A little bit. Listen to this. So this is from the Wall Street Journal. Companies are offering new hires less generous pay and flexibility than did a year ago. They're also holding the line on negotiations over perks such as additional vacation time.

On LinkedIn, one job opening is available for every two applicants. A year ago, jobs outnumbered applicants two to one. So it's totally switched. This vice president from LinkedIn, Catherine Fisher, says the pendulum has swung back and the power is in the hands of hiring managers. I mean, it seems like workers had the upper hand for what? 24 months? There was like two years there where workers had the upper hand for once. And now it may be gone again?

And then the Cleveland Fed Traxis, job switchers versus job steers, wage growth. Yes. And the best way to get a raise in 2021 was switch jobs. There's no way to Cleveland Fed, but. Why not? The Kansas City Fed, maybe. No, I think it's like the Atlanta Fed, but. No, I really think it might be the Cleveland Fed.

No way. It's not the Cleveland Fed. Is there a Cleveland Fed? I don't know. Lake Erie Fed. Yeah, it's Atlanta. But yeah, you're right. It's, so if you, yeah, you look at job stayer and job switcher and their job switch.

Of course, there's a free. Come on. Dude, Cleveland Fed wage tracker. It's Atlanta? Okay. So job switcher, the wage growth is still 5.7%. This is as of December 2023. Job stayer is 4.9%.

Still pretty high wage growth, but it's, it's obviously coming way down from the peaks. At the peak, the job switcher was getting 8%. eight and a half percent wage growth in July 2022. Wow. I just think it is kind of sad, though, if workers had the upper hand and now have lost it and it just goes back to the way things were, which kind of might be happening.

Like, you might have missed your opportunity to have really good negotiation power. Obviously, it depends on the industry and stuff. Okay, good piece at the net interest by Mark Rubinstein. He did a piece on the inside of business of Air Miles. Some really interesting stuff here. the largest programs have over 100 members each, the three big ones, American Delta and United generated $15.6 billion of revenue in 2022, equivalent to 11% of their parent company's total

revenue. So this is just from these air mile credit cards, which is crazy to me how high that is. And obviously, people love this stuff. But it feels to me like the inflation here is kind of getting out of hand. No, no, no, no, but it's a good thing. It's bad for the companies. It's good for consumers. No, but don't you think that you're not getting as much for your points anymore? No, no, no. Uh-uh. So, American Express, over the past 12 months, paid out $15.2 billion of rewards, which is pretty wild.

So Mark says the only problem is that competition has been driving up the rate at which card companies pay rewards. Over the last 12 months, American Express has paid out $1.1.4.2. 0.7% of purchase volume of awards up from 0.8% 10 years ago. Also, it is getting better. That surprises me. It's the opposite. There is inflation for the companies because it's so competitive because people like us love our points. Okay. So maybe it is just the airline, because I feel like the other cards,

the Chase Sapphires and Capital Inventure, you're not getting as much on those reward cards anymore. But for it's so for the flight cards, though, it actually is still pretty the airlines. It's still pretty good. this is wild um so amex the delta sky miles they have 7.5 million people holding the card uh according to delta sea i remember this from the conference call last year co-brand spend on the amex card is approaching 1% of total u.sgdp holy shit isn't that wild yeah that is nuts so fortune just had a piece of this on this new wells fargo card that is 0% APR for 21 months.

And I, someone emailed us about this a while ago and said, hey, you can use these 0% card. So I haven't been finding as good rewards. So I started doing this like four months ago. What do you do? I got a 0% credit card. And they gave me, I don't know, a $15,000 limit. I put all of our purchases on there.

I took that money and I put it into T bills. And that's, so I'm getting 5%. And that's way better than any rewards I could get for cash back anywhere. and there's a lot of these cards out there. I get mail stuff for this stuff, these things all the time for like 21 months. It's a 0% loan for 21 months. Interesting.

So you take that $15,000 and you put it in P bills. And then at the end of the period, take the money out and pay off the credit card. And it's a 0% loan. That's a 5% spread for doing nothing. That is pretty good. That's not bad, right? I can't believe that these credit cards do.

Obviously, the hope is you take out a 0%, you run up a huge bill, you don't set the money aside, and then the interest kicks in, and they make it on the back end. I'm guessing that's the hope. They'll make money. Yeah. Or obviously, they make from the merchants. But it's, for me, that's better than any rewards cards I can find right now. Yeah, somebody emailed us because I was talking about how Uber won is a great deal.

I think it was the Capital One card. I think it was a Capital One card. I think it was a Capital One card. It gives you that for free. But yeah, you're right. It seems like J.P. Morgan Chase won that game with the Sapphire Reserve and the whatever else they've got going on. They just flooded the market and they won and now they're taking rates down. Is that basically what happened? Yeah. And I downgraded from the Sapphire to the, what is it?

Saffir Prefer to the regular. Yeah, I don't know. I have both and I don't know why. Yeah. I probably have way too many credit cards. I kind of gain, but I look at like once a year I try to gain these things. you wrote a piece about how big Bitcoin can get and you talked about the crypto ETF launch. You said looking at the volume has been really high

in these things that brought in billions of dollars. So the launch of these ETS was a resounding success. Hard stop. The price of the underlying is more of a mixed bag. I don't agree that it was a resounding success. Okay. Let me tell you why. Maybe I'm splitting hairs here.

This is from Jim Bianco. The spot Bitcoin ETF started on January 11th when the price was $49,000, 10 minutes after ETF traded began. Two weeks later, it's down more than 20%. What was it? Below 39,000 today.

Eric Belchunis says we now have a rolling net flows at a healthy $1 billion. That's flows that have come into the ETFs but out of a GBTC. And I don't know how to wrap my head around the fact that whatever, three or four billion has come out of gray scale,

but then $3 billion or so has come into the other ones, something like that. So it's hard to say, it's hard to say, like, did some of that money from Grayscale go into these new ones or not? I would tend to think a lot of that money came out of Graysco that was getting the ARB and the money is completely out. So a lot of the money in the ATVs is new.

But the reason that... Balchutus estimates that 10% of the money that came out of GBTC, which is what, $4 billion at this point? Yeah. He estimates that only 10% of it went into the ETFs. Yeah, I think a lot of it was arbitrage people waiting to get their money out. So the reason I say it was not a resounding success

is just not be... The volume is huge and they're saying it's like, setting records for volume and assets gathered. The reason I think it was not a zonic success is because the expectations were so high. For what assets? Yeah, so I think, because I heard from numerous people who said, I'm buying a Bitcoin ETF the first day

because I think so much money is going to flood into this thing that the price is going to skyrocket. And I'm not saying the price is the only reason it's not a success. I think people assumed, and I think this is one of the reasons the price is falling, people assume more money would come in than has. And I think the expect, this was the biggest ETF launch in history from a PR perspective. And so I don't think you compare it to other, other ETF launches and say this thing was a resigning success. Because the expectations for itself were so high, I think it came short of its own expectations.

Well, I don't know, I don't know what the expectations were. But what we do know. Do you think they were higher with the fact that Bitcoin is down 20% since ETS launched? What we do know is that digital asset investment products is from Daily Tropics saw a near record, $1.18 billion in flows last week. Balchuna's tweeted the fastest ETFs to get to $1 billion in assets. BitO, which is a Bitcoin Futures, was two days, GLD was three days. And then Ibit and FBT, which is, I shares and failure, respectively, were number three

and four, at four days and five days. And I still think that these things could be a success over the long term, but I think the launch was more tepid than most people assumed it would be. at least me personally. You've got two of them already at over a billion dollars in assets. I'm looking at one of them, and it's down 16 and a half percent if you bought it at the open. So, yeah, obviously, price has been disappointing if you are somebody that bought it on the first day. But I'm just talking about, and listen, I don't know what BlackRock or Fidelity, what their internal expectations were, but $1 billion in, what do we say, 40s for IBIT and five days for FBTC, and now they're both over, I mean, well over a billion.

I think it's pretty good. So the group as a whole, it's been seven days and the nine outside of GBTC is $4.5 billion. I don't know, man, that sounds like a lot of money, $4.5 billion in a week. Yeah, I don't know. Again, I think it with the fact that the price is crashing, that means that this is worse than expected. And I think that over the long term, it's still could be fine. And maybe the people who are legging into a position, this is a good thing for them because prices have fallen. I bought, I was telling you this, I bought Bitcoin this morning for the first time in a long time.

Let me just check. I bought, the last time I bought was, is this right? Okay, okay, okay, June 2022. It's been a while. Okay. You're buying the dip. We bought the dip. We'll say.

Again, I think these things will probably still be very successful in the long term. It's a little, I, I think most people, We're expecting, like, fireworks and this thing to just knock it out of the park with money coming in, and that that didn't happen. Yeah, I would say that, is it shocking that the news was sold? No. If you had asked me, like, the odds thing, I would have said, I would have said more likely that it runs to 50 than back down to 40, or runs to 55, then back down to 40. I think one of us predicted to sell the news moment in our 2024 predictions. One of us predicted to sell the news moment.

It had to be one of them. It had to be either going to run up. No, I think it had to be, there was not going to be a middle ground where it just sort of stayed put. It was either going to take off or it was going to crash. I don't think there was any in between. And the 20% can't even really be considered a crash in Bitcoin with how quickly moves. Also, I mean, so it's still up 15% of the last three months. Granted, it did, you know, it's, what is it 20% off the size you said?

Yeah. So it pulled forward a lot of, it pulled forward a lot of games, obviously. So Ben, actually, actually, the Bitcoin that I bought today, that came out of money market. funds. I took money out of money market funds to buy Bitcoin. I did. Okay. So you just,

you went against your own argument. I did. Yeah. How about that? How about that? Okay. All right. See,

that's what happens. So if just two trillion, if only two trillion comes out of money market funds and goes directly into Bitcoin, what would that do to the price? Okay. That's kind of funny. There's some weird,

not weird shit. Some NFTs are on fire again. Uh, pudgy penguins are going vertical. I'm not exactly sure. In fact, I'm not at all sure what's going on. But I see the stream is more active with that. Punks are going again. Uh, I don't know what to make of it.

Speculation is in the air or was in the air. I guess when crypto prices rise, everything, it lifts all boats, that kind of thing. Everything else goes up to. Don't know. Uh, let's talk about real estate. Oh, you know what? Before we get into this real estate, so I got, it's funny because last week

one of the comments that I made was talking is hard we talk a lot and we say stupid shit all the time and then in that episode I said something stupid which the comment that I made was if you can't afford

the insurance don't buy the house and understandably so I heard it from the listeners listen hand up that was dumb happens somebody in Florida was sharing with us that and the dumb part specifically is you can't

well a few things in there that were dumb. You can't get a mortgage without homeowners insurance. The bank won't give you a mortgage. And so, and in addition, there's people that have lived in Florida for a long time who might not have a mortgage or might have a mortgage. And their homeowners insurance is just going through the roof. So somebody emailed us saying that over the past few years, their homeowners insurance went from $4,200 to $6,200 to $8,400,000 to $11,000. And it's easy for us. to say, like, listen, if you can't afford the insurance, don't buy the house. Right.

But it's hard for people like this. What are they supposed to do? Just, just, just pick up and move their entire life because insurance costs are getting out of hand. I heard from a few people, too. And I heard from some people say, listen, the part of Florida I live in is not this bad. It's not as bad ever. But other people I heard, like, listen, if you live close to the water, which is a lot

of people in Florida, yes, it is really bad. And I don't, I don't know how it gets fixed without government intervention. I was about saying, yeah, right, that's kind of. think I could change. Can the government subsidize this? Shouldn't they? They may have to. Government is not the answer for everything. But in the case like this where private insurers just don't want to bear the tremendous risk, what do we, I mean, is that not one of the primary functions of government? And Florida is having one of the biggest migrations of any state in the country right now in terms of population growth. So people are coming in willing

to pay it. So it's not like you're seeing an exodus from Florida of people saying, all right, out, I can't pay this anymore, people are coming into the state in droves. You ever been to the Panhandle? No. What a great. What is Panama City count? You know what? I'm not even sure exactly what's considered the panhandle.

I just wanted to say that. What a great name. That's a good name. Yeah, I guess, I guess if Panama City counts, I was there for spring break one year in college for a day or so. Really? That was Panama City. I mean, that was like the 1980s spot for, apparently people still went there.

member member spring break on m tv oh yeah dan cortez i don't remember dan cortez okay yeah that was a thing they'd get a house and all right uh we've talked a little bit about this but i think boomers are holding a lot of the cards in the housing market right now so this is another one from tors and slack home buyers are getting older this is first time home buyers versus repeat buyers we've talked about this before how the age just keeps going up and i think a lot of this stuff is just going to keep happening with boomers getting older when you have 70 million people continue to get older like a lot of these charts are just going to keep moving up to the right in terms of average age. This is from Redfin.

Empty nest baby boomers own 28% of the nation's largest homes, while millennials with kids own just 14%. An additional 7.5% of the country's large homes are owned by baby boomers with households of three adults or more. So basically saying, like, all the large homes... And I think they define large homes as like three-bedroom plus. And they're saying almost a third of them are owned by baby boomers who are empty-nesters and don't really need these large houses,

whereas only 14% are owned by millennials, have kids. Wait, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Hold on. Three bedrooms is considered a large home. Three bedrooms plus. Okay. Yes. So they're saying that more of them are owned by empty nest baby boomers who need to like Downsize. Millennials are waiting for them. Yes, to downsize. And maybe it's not going to happen. Because if you think about it, if you're an empty nest baby boomer and you have kids and grandkids, you want those bedrooms still. Right? My parents are still in their four-bedroom house. They're not get a downside,

die size because they have grandkids and us coming to visit and stuff. It's probably not going to happen, is my point. For, in large quantity. Here's another one from Redfin, though. And they put the home home, you know, because I feel like people have been saying young people just cannot buy a house these days.

It's impossible. 26% of adult Gen Zers owned a home in 2023, little change from 2022. Meanwhile, millennials' home ownership rate rose to 55% from 52% 10x rose to 72% from 70. And if you look at these, we looked at these charts before.

Gen Z is right on track. Millennials coming up the rear. Just going vertical. Right? So millennials are basically where Gen X was. Gen X and millennials are just a tiny bit below boomers. And I think a lot of that you can count

for getting an education for longer too. I don't even think that's a home ownership, affordability thing. Gen Z, is right there with millennials in terms of homeownership rate at the same age. So this is wild. It hasn't impacted things yet. Gen Ziers, 26% of them own a home.

And they're 19 to 26. What are they all buying pudgy penguins? How are they affording a house? It's a good question that in their early to mid-20s, people are affording a home. And, I mean, obviously, some people say, well, it's rich parents and buying another place. I don't know, but it's a downtrend still. I was talking with somebody this week, they're trying to buy a home and they really, they're scrambling because they don't want to wait for interest rates to come down because they're afraid of missing it again. There is going to be such an explosion of activity if rates really moved down.

Well, listen to this. Pending home sales rolls 4.1% month for month in December, the biggest increase in September 2021 to the highest level more than a year. So activity just from that decrease going from 8% to 7 or 6.5, already saw a huge explosion activity. And you're right, if it goes to, if mortgage costs go to 5, it's going to explode, isn't it? Is there any way that prices come down because there will unlock more demand than there's supply than there is demand? No way, right? There's just so much demand. I think the demand is too.

I think it's going to be wild for that. So home prices, according to Redfin, year every year, we're up 4% in 2023. It looks so, yeah. Mortgage rates went to 8% and home prices were still up 4% on the year. House prices are not coming down. Who's, who's kidding who? It's going to, it could be until, honestly, the 2030s when boomers finally start dying off and passing on their homes and the millennials don't want them, they want to sell them.

I think that's it. I think that's going to be the next time housing prices fall unless something weird happens. This will make people happy. Blackstone doubles down on the U.S. housing market with acquisition of Tricon and it's nearly 40,000 homes. What's Tricon? Obviously a very small percentage. This is from Lance Lambert, by the way.

How many homes are there in the United States, actually? How many single family homes? I don't know. I think there's like 120 million households or homeowners, but then you have to consider rentals and multifamily and that sort of thing. But yeah, this is a drop of the bucket. 140 million owner occupations. It's a drop in the bucket.

But nevertheless, you know what happens with headlines like this. People wrong with them. How often do you think people assume Blackstone is Black Rock when these kind of headlines hit? 80% of people? A lot of confusion. Understandable confusion. All right.

Survey of the week from Axios. This is the vibes getting better again. 63% of Americans rate their current financial situation as being good, including 19% who say it's very good. 77%. This is interesting from the homeowner thing. Can we, can I, can we do something with these surveys? Instead of saying good or very good, could we make it strong to quite strong? That's true. A la, what was that?

Meet the parents. Ben Stiller? Yeah. Was that about his portfolio? I think it was about his portfolio. Yeah. Owen Wilson's the rich ex-boyfriend and he asked how his portfolio. I'd say strong to quite strong, yeah.

Very, very... What a great movie. A quotable movie, it really is. This is surprising. 77% of Americans are happy with where they're living, including renters who've seen housing costs surge over the last few years. A substantial majority of renters are happy renting with 63% of them saying they're not interested in owning a home and having a mortgage. So a lot of people are saying, oh, the renters are being left behind.

A lot of them are just fine being renters. Maybe it's because costs have run up so high, but that surprised me. All right, we've got some charts from Mike Saccardy, actually from Bank of America via Mike Succardi. Survey. Responses to how would you read the overall health of your business as of Q4, 2023? And to me, the big takeaway is, and there's... And this is small businesses, right? Small businesses.

So, you know, America, not Apple. Very good, somewhat good, about average, somewhat poor, very poor. And very poor is gone. That was about almost, almost 5% in 2020. That's gone. Nobody reads it as very poor. Somewhat poor is unchanged year over year. About average is mostly unchanged.

But somewhat good. Somewhat good took a pretty big jump. That's good. If people say somewhat good, they're just, they're hedging. That really means very good. Remember last week we talked about how you need to be delusional to own a business and two-thirds of all small businesses in the United States go out of like go under over a decade how delusional are these people that everyone says their business is great some of them

have to be delusional right that's a great point like no one says their business is of course yeah maybe they're just so so very good and somewhat good is like 60 percent and if you include average yeah so only 10 percent say it's poor And that's obviously not the case. Love it. Got to love America. All right, this is a shitty chart from another one from Jake at Economic. There's, he looks at the Michigan consumer sentiment, Democrats less Republicans.

The Democrat slash Republican gap in the view of the current economy is the widest in its history. And then he showed another chart. Republicans view current economic conditions as 28 points worse than the their worst view during COVID and roughly the same as March 2009 GFC low. All right, Ben, so when you, I asked you earlier, can feelings be wrong? Yeah, I guess feelings can be wrong. The partisanship, obviously, on every side, holy moly, is it broken. It is just demented.

It's not. This is why you watch what people do and know what they say, especially when it comes to this kind of stuff. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's too bad. All right. Wall Street Journal had this piece. Your new $3,000

couch might be garbage in three years. This is why. And this one stood out to me because we just bought a new couch. How much do you pay for it? I guess ours lasted more than $3,000, which felt like way too much. We got a huge L thing,

but we got one when my twins were born, they're going to be seven this year. And so our other one made it seven years, which is, but the leather is just completely going. Like this year, all this, like, like, flaking off. And whatever, the kids put it through a lot, I'm sure. Instead of once in a decade, purchases, furniture makers and restores say couches are becoming more like fast fashion, produced with cheaper materials prone to trends and headed to the landfill in just a few years. High-quality sofa still exists, they say, but are harder to find.

Mass-market options, even though it's costing over $3,000, are increasingly made with less dirty materials and construction methods. So they just want you to buy a new couch like every three or four years like a TV now. That's a lot. Right? That's what I thought. Yeah, I don't know. Then they had some stuff in there about what you should look for in terms of a higher quality couch. And, I mean, how do you buy a couch?

You sit on it once and you go, yeah, this looks good. Right? You say, you do this, right? Yeah, right. My couch stinks. I hate my couch. It's not comfortable at all. I think you have to make sure the cushions don't come off.

You don't want the cushions attached, right? especially with kids, the back cushions at least. You know, it's such a great point. Like, how come every couch is comfortable in the store? In the same way, I was thinking, maybe this is not a great analogy, but I was in the airport. How great do books look in the airport?

Is there any better site than books in the airport? That's true. You walk by a bookstore, and it's very inviting. I literally walked by, and I came back. There's just something about a book and a book in an airport that is very seductive. that is true good it's all the colors i think and all the books are very edgy with a swear word on the front now right i think i peaked i don't think i saw any curses i think i peaked i hope so

all right uh netflix and wb strike a deal to move monday night raw to the streamer beginning in 2025 500 million dollars a year Netflix is going to be basic cable it's already at advertising NFL and nba are coming to netflix or prime or apple and me with owning every streamer, streaming service there is, you're perfectly hedged. I'm perfectly hedged. I will be fine, but they have to go into sports. How else are they going to grow their subs?

Yeah, that seems like... All of these streamers. This seems like a very big deal. Because you know that wrestling fans are coming on board if they're not already on board. Raw has been on USA since, I think, what was it? 1995, 2005? Back when I used to watch it. I gave up after the Brett the Hitman Hart era and Sean Michaels.

That was the end of it for me pretty much. Sean Michaels, Brett Hart, ladder match. After that, I was kind of over it. Wait, how did you not watch the attitude era? Triple H, DX, NWO? I grew up. I wasn't 12. No, but how old?

That was like, that was, huge pop culture. The Rock, you didn't watch The Rock? That was probably way after your time, I guess. Yeah. All I want is I still want to pay for my 18T Uverse cable, but I want a channel for Netflix and a channel for Amazon Prime and a channel for

all the streamers. Put it all together. Bundle it up. Give me the Ultra Bundle. That's all I want. So you don't even want to, you don't even want to know that you're in Netflix or Prime. You just want to see everything in one place. That's not going to happen. I just want to make it more seamless. make it easier.

I want the toggle back and forth to be easier. Maybe Netflix is going to have to make their own TV to make this happen. Well, here's where it's not easy, but on my, after my Samsung Line TV, which I still have, don't even, don't get me started. I bought a Sony. And on the Sony, on the remote, there's a button. And I think for most TVs, there's a button for Prime Netflix, Disney, and YouTube. So that works, no?

Yeah, that helps. Yeah, that makes it a little easier. By the way, how did you feel about Sports Illustrated going away? I mean, it's so far in the rear of your mirror because it's been an afterthought for a long time. But that was everything, right? I remember, like, you started Sports Illustrator for kids, and then you graduated to sports, to the real deal. I mean, but it's so much better as a sports fan now, though. You'd wait for Sports Illustrated, but now there's blogs and podcasts and,

And it's easy to see what, I mean, I used to read the sports page every day for my local newspaper, but all of my pop culture from when I was young as it's gone. MTV, VH1, Sports Illustrated, all this, you know, all this stuff that- Oh my God, VH-1. So, yeah, so anyway, we're talking about Sports Illustrated. They, they're the private equity company that bought them, let everybody go. Wait, VH1, does that, does that channel still exist? I think they just do replays of God knows what. Someone, so Ryan Moulton posted this.

It's all employees at a newspaper publisher, and he said, every time a publication unfolds, the public and employees have some story to tell about its mismanagement and how if they had just would have done this, they would have survived. But the trend is inescapable and they're all doomed. So it shows the employees from 2010 to now at newspapers. And it's just crashed like the Great Depression. And but this is obvious with podcasts and different blogs and websites and subscription channels and substacks and you know what has not crashed? We were talking about this at dinner last night the chart the stock price of new york times i mean the chart looks great oh really okay yeah people are paying yeah but that's a thing i used to read my local traversity record eagle paper

every day in the sports section and now you can subscribe to the new york times or the washington post or the wall street journal whoever or the athletic or whatever there's so many more options these days and yes it's easy to get nostalgic about it and that was a fun era but today's era is for content is so much better. I mean, let's be honest. There's, it's pretty enjoyable to watch the Chiefs Bills game and, oh, my God, what a brutal loss for Bills fans. Holy shit.

Like, I felt sick to my stomach watching that. But how much, I mean, to watch, to be on social media, to be on Twitter at the end of the game and see what people are saying versus waiting for an article a week later? Social media does make, that is one of the best things Twitter is still good at is watching a sporting event. together. By the way, the lions! Are you like... I'm playing... You're in Vegas right now. I'm playing with house money.

So whatever happened. If I'm at the blackjack table, I'm increasing my bets fivefold right now. I'm lions because I don't even care just for the fact that they're still in it. So, Ben, let me ask you this. I took a flyer, I don't know, two months ago, three months ago, I bet on the Ravens to beat the Lions in the Super Bowl. Oh, wow. What did it pay out? I had to be like 20 to 1? No, no, no, no, no.

Way more than that. Okay. I think it's like 50 to 1 maybe. Yeah, 50 to 1, something like that. So hopefully, I mean, listen, I'm moving from the Lions. I would be running for the Lions anyway. It's, you guys have been through too much. It's America's team.

All right, a bunch of people told us this. We talked about the Mannheim Index for U.S. car prices last week. Manheim is a town in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. and there's an auto auction there, but the same name, it's a huge multi-thousand square foot thing where they auction off 10,000 cars or something. The more you know.

Yep. All right, a few emails that came in that were great. We spoke about spelling last week. Oh, what did Kobe say this week? That was so funny. Oh, you know what my favorite one was? My son George calls them Issa Kills. I'd askles because they can kill you if they fall.

Oh, that's a good one. That's clever. All right, until about 10,000 years ago, there was only spoken no written language. Until 5,000 years ago, there was no alphabet. English is a layer cake language. Its foundation layer is old English. Then when the French invaded England in 1066, they imposed their language, which was a Latin-based language.

Then during the Renaissance, scholars who could read and write went back to Latin to borrow more words, and then the math and sign, blah, blah, blah, blah, went to Greek. So anyway, the point is, the point is that, the point is that. that, yeah, English didn't just happen. It's a lot of bolt-ons, which is why it's so weird. But someone should at some point gone, you know what? Let's stop here. Take a break.

Let's talk over. This is too confusing. This is too confusing. Jack said, Michael, not a big fan of the odds you are placing on your predictions. It actually cheapens the predictions by a significant amount because you aren't really predicting something to happen. You are assigning a probability to it happening, which is different. I don't recall exactly which 20-24 prediction it is,

but you couched it by saying you'd need plus 800 on it. The implied probability is 11%. So a 20-24 prediction ends up being there was an 11% chance that this thing will happen. Just own the hot take, no long island hedges. Listen. That's fair. That's fair. But I feel like I need to, I want to be more precise.

I want to give you more. So next year I will do this. I want to be more precise with how much conviction I have with each prediction. And the funny, actually the funny part about that will be your low conviction ones will probably be the ones that happen and your high conviction ones won't. That'll be the, right? Yeah.

It's actually, yeah, that's a way of holding yourself more accountable, which I think is actually interesting. Okay, recommendations. What do you got? You've been, you're giving me recommendations on your flight to Las Vegas.

Oh, this is funny. So somebody emailed us and recommended the movie Burning, which I had never heard of. It's a South Korean film. Came out in 2018, and it's got killer reviews on Netflix, like 95% or something.

So I'm watching it. You know what? Let's share with the audience what the conversation was, Ben. So I was watching on the plane. Definitely a U movie. Ever see it? Never heard of it. I'd like it.

This is me. I said, yes, South Korean movie on Netflix. I am a sucker for South Korean movies. The guy from beef is in it. In. So then I said, finished. Confirm you would like that. And then Ben says, does that mean you didn't like it?

So I said, no, it was more just of a Ben movie. it was definitely definitely a good movie It's just not for me It's more it's a you movie not for me But I think you're going to enjoy it very much Not to I don't want to set expectations Too high for you Ben but you are going to like it

Okay I watched half of the first episode Of the new Mandy Patinkin movie On a show, excuse me on Hulu What's it called? I saw a preview for it. Any good? Death and Details, might get into that, right? I don't know.

You're turning into your father. I am. I remember if I tell this on the show, my dad said I saw The End of the World. And I'm like, oh, what is that? He was, it's his new movie with Julia Roberts. I'm like, it's called Leave the World Behind. You can't literally just make up names. Like, the end of the world, it's not even close.

I mean, I guess it's close enough. So, yeah, I'm cautious, say optimistic on. that. It's sort of got the maybe white lotus mixed with knives out. Oh, really? Okay. Say no more. I'm in. Yeah. So I hope that's going to be fun. All right, the creator. So it's funny because

Kobe and Logan came into my bed at the end of the creator and they were just in. Like they watched the last 10 minutes of the a lot of it. They saw robots. Like, I don't know what's going on, but I'm in. My son loved it. All right, so here's my take on the creator. It's worth watching because it's interesting and provocative I don't think it was that good unfortunately I think that you agree

yeah it just something about it felt off I'll tell you what felt off the writing the script was horrific if you if you watch that movie with the sound off you would have known it would have been the same experience that's fair yeah you know it was just weird

yeah there was something a little a little odd about and I think it was a script. But that being said, glad I watched it. I had a decently good time, and it was interesting. Just not that great. Because so many people sent, we do these recommendations,

so many people send us their own recommendations for books and movies and TV shows, I have a running list of a note in my iPhone. And I was looking for books the other day, and I found one that's called The Slaw House, and someone said, read this whole series, Ben. And I said, why does it sound so familiar? And it's actually a book series that was turned into a show on Apple called Slow And a bunch of people have been telling me you watch slow horses.

So he said, you know what? Instead of reading the books, I'm going to watch the show. I watched the first episode like three years ago when it first came out and never went back to it. Me too. But now I did. And because the first episode, I'm like, I don't know. I'm kind of tepid.

And by episode two, I'm all in. And I watched the whole first season in this last week or so. And what's my favorite thing about British shows? How many episodes? Six? Six episodes. I'm in. All right.

Say no more. And there's three seasons. And a lot of people. And it's Gary Oldman is just. The best. Fantastic in it. It's really good, like, MI6 or five, whatever they call them in Britain.

Killers of a Flower Moon took us, like, four sittings. It's a high-quality movie. I would never watch it again. It's a bottom quartiles-Corsese movie. Ooh. Right? I mean, it was well done, but here's the thing. I thought, I didn't think DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro were that great in it.

I thought they were just okay. And I thought Lily Gladstone. She thought she was better than them. She was great. I would never in a million years watch that movie again. I just, I don't know. It's more of an interesting story than it is a good movie. Okay.

I'm definitely not going to watch it again. And you might be right about bottom court toss or Sussi, which has more about him in the movie. Yes. I liked it. But it's not even close to being in the same class as Oppenheimer as far as I'm concerned. One more. Andy Greenwald has a new podcast called Stick the Landing on the Prestige TV.

And he goes over. the finale of some of the best shows ever and the very first one was Friday Night Lights which listening back to the show and then talk about Friday Night Lights everyone always puts in like Sopranos and the Warrior and Breaking Bad as like the top three shows you know in some order

Friday Night Lights is in the top five for me and it's probably the most emotionally invested of any show I've ever watched. Wow. I don't think you'd like it. I mean that is that is not nice. That's just not nice. We talked about the burning. No, it's more of a Ben show than a Michael show.

My God. I love that show, and boy, would you hate it? I'm going off of past history here. This is a back test. It's got some of the best characters. Like, it's just, there's something about that show that, and I rewatch the finale again. I love characters.

I love characters. Okay, just watch the first. I'm just kidding. I have no interest. You're right. I have no interest in that. By the way, curb your enthusiasm. It's one of my favorite shows of all time, Friday Night's.

It's in it. Going back to watch it again, it's so, so good. Curb is coming back February 4th. I'm in. Let's do it last season. He's at the last season, like six times, though. There's not the last season. They're all the last season.

Did you watch True Detective? I just one episode, and I'm in. Right? I like it. Yeah. Weird, but I'm in. By the way, I think that maybe, I mean, it's been often discussed on like the town podcast, but maybe, there was a pretty big lull.

Like, the writer's strike really messed shit up. Like, there was a real lack of. Yeah, there haven't been any shows in a while. Yeah. But I think we're going to be. back. All right. Next week, you can tell us how much money

you lost in Vegas. By the way, you told us a couple weeks ago how much money you've bet in one or whatever on Fanduil, and it was like, I don't know, $50,000. You really are a degenerate gambler. Because I looked at mine, and mine is like, I don't know, I've bet $4,000 in total.

I didn't make enough big of a deal at how much degenerate gambler you really are. Listen, I like to bet. At the end of the NFL season, I will shut it down Because I bet on the NBA Not often I bet on the next games

And I just do player props But when Actually that's not true Because I All right Once the NFL season is over I will only bet on Knicks games that I go to

And then I will bet on the playoffs I'll do like futures bets I'm perfectly hedged for the NFL playoffs Because I want the Lions and the Ravens to win Because I feel like the Chiefs win all the time It's enough for the Chiefs But I have I did two pre-season

and Super Bowl bets, and I bet on the 49ers and the Chiefs to win the Super Bowl. So if those two teams win, I could win money. If the Lions and Ravens win, I'll be happy, so I'm perfectly hedged. I will be rooting for you on Sunday, of course, and I will see you on Monday. Yes, I'm coming to New York.

Animal Spirits at the CompoundNews.com, personal emails, personal replies. Personal sponsors. Ah, there it is. See you next time. Okay.