Animal Spirits Podcast - No Soft Landing (EP.282)

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

On today's episode we discuss the Fed sending us into a recession, our only chance for a soft landing, why predicting inflation is so difficult, why there is no such thing as a normal market, the biggest risk in crypto, why Chevy Chase was a one of one and much more.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. ​​ (Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, received compensation from the sponsor of this advertisement. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by our friends at YCharts. Whitecharts sent us this Q3-2020 Fund Flows recap. We'll have a link in the show notes for it. Interesting, though. So they go through the broad category for mutual funds and ETFs, and they show inflows and outflows, money markets, alternatives, stocks, bonds, commodities. Here's an interesting one to me. Money markets by far took in the most money.

Looks like $22 billion in change. Bonds had outflows of more than $34 billion. Stocks, too? Stocks had some outflows too, yes, of more than $28 billion. But do you think the majority of that money market fund is just people saying, I'm done with bonds, I'm losing money, I'm just going to cash. Yes. That has to be a lot of it.

People are reassessing and going from bonds to money, because money markets finally pay something now. Yeah, I think they're up to almost 3%. Yeah, 3% in a lot of it. So I think a lot of people are saying, if interest rates keep rising, I'm done with bonds for a while, I'm going into money markets. It will be interesting to see, though, if those people ever decided go back to bonds, if bonds are yielding five or six percent in the future,

which is we're getting there for a lot of this stuff. Then I have good news for our listeners. So Y-Charts was kind enough to offer 100, 100 of our listeners, free access to their professional platform until December 16th. We're going to have a link in the show notes. If you want to kick the tires and use Y-Charts like we do, you have the option to check it out.

Just in time for the holidays. Perfect gift. Take a look. It'll be on our show notes. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions

and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt Holt's Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. clients of Rittholds wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirious with Michael and Ben. Michael, I am not a Fed watcher. It's never been my style. I don't really pay attention that much, but I've become kind of fascinated with it. Is this a joke?

What? You're not a Fed Watcher? No, you're just on the committee. I don't read them. If you're on the inside, you don't need to watch because you're there. They fired me like six months ago because I dissented. I've never been one who like reads the minutes or, you know, I see the headlines. I pay attention, kind of. But I listened to Powell's press conference

the other day. After the meeting, they put out the letter. He gives this press conference. And I didn't walk away feeling great. It seems to me like they don't even want to try for a soft landing. Now, maybe he's just saying this because the labor market is so strong, but let me give you a few of his quotes. Some of his answers were interesting to me. So someone asked him, what's the probability for a soft landing? And he said, has it narrowed? Yes. Is it possible yes? I think we've always said it was going to be difficult, but I think to the extent that rates have to go higher and stay higher for longer, it becomes harder to see the path. It's narrowed. I would say the path is narrowed over the course of the last year. Translation, it's probably not going to

happen. Well, the good news is they can't predict the economy any better than we can. True. I guess the biggest shock to me of this whole thing is not that the Fed is tightening because obviously they need to tighten somewhat to bring inflation under control. That's not a surprise. It's a surprise to me that they're basically saying, we're going to tighten until we break something. And that's our only option. to try for a soft landing. That surprises me. I think that they just need to keep reiterating how seriously they are. As I've said over and over, I think to them, the risk of doing too much is not as bad as the risk of doing too little. That's exactly what he said. If he softens his language and all of these conditions start to ease, then what was the point of doing this in the

first place? Here's my problem, though, with this. I think you keep saying that thinking about the stock market, but I don't think the stock market matters in all this. Has the stock market What do you mean? I don't say anything about the stock market. Well, you said if he says something and this stuff eases, what's going to ease? Are you saying bond yields to go down? What are you worried about easing if they fed pivots or whatever? Mortgage rates, stocks, yield curve, everything that they measure to determine financial conditions. Yeah, but I think the stock market has shown it doesn't matter for financial conditions. People are still spending money when the stock market is in a bare market. But Nicole's was saying that they don't care about the stock market to the extent that it's a grind lower. What they would react to is a panic, a crash.

But absent that, the market could just bleed 40%. And if there's no panic, they would not respond to the stock market. So here's the thing that worries me about the Fed's current line of thinking. He basically said, listen, we're not worrying about overt tightening because we have the ability, like we did in the pandemic, to turn this around and then stimulate on the other side. So we're going to go hard. We're going to probably break something. But then we know we have the tools to turn it around.

And that, to me, is just getting back and of the boom-bust framework that got us into this mess. You're going to break something, then you're going to cause another boom, they're going to have to break it. So going back and forth like that, to me, is the problem. Why not just, like, chill out? And let's not try to break something. And let's not try to stimulate it.

So let's pull back from that. And I guess it is what it is at this point. I think that's just going to be the way markets work for a while. The Fed's going to have our time getting out. But that's my problem is they're just going to put us back into this boom-bust cycle where we have these mini-booms and busts happening so quickly. And that makes it so much harder for consumers and businesses to plan ahead and invest. in the future and all this stuff. That's my biggest worry about, like, the danger of this line

of thinking. I don't think anybody at this point is expecting a Fed pivot to, well, let me just say this. Do you think that they're going to cut rates in 2023? If they break something. If something breaks. I think they're trying to project higher for longer. And maybe this is a steady state. So what if the pivot is not necessarily 75 to 50, although maybe that's on the table. There was some language that alluded to that. What if the pivot is them raising their acceptable inflation rate from 2% to 3%. Is that a good first step? Probably. I still don't understand why 2% is this magical number. The historical average for 100 years has been 3%. I kind of feel like they pulled 2% out of their butt, but I think this is going to get political. And here's my call for right now,

timestamp this. Powell is gone if we go into recession before the 2024 election. He's out of a job. So you put in here that someone sent a letter to them saying like, who is this from again? So Maxine Waters is the chair of what committee is she the chair of? Committee of Financial Services. Just send a letter to Powell saying, you need to chill out. This is going to hurt people losing their jobs. She said, I implore the Fed to heed these dynamics and warnings before moving forward with the additional rate hikes.

And she said a lot. But she's basically echoing what a lot of people are saying. It's like, what are you doing? Why not give a time to breathe and see what the ramifications of all of these interests rates. Politically, obviously, inflation was a huge problem, and politicians jumped on that. But I think if you then send the economy into a recession and inflation stays a little elevated, so people are losing jobs, inflation still stays a little higher than normal, and we go into recession, I think this is going to be a huge political issue. And I would not be shocked if Powell gets booted.

Don't you think, if they're going to keep pressing the break as hard as they can? Would you trade Jerome Powell for Russell Westbrook? How many first Trump picks? Look at this Fed funds rate chart. It's straight up. Yes, that's the surprising thing, is how quickly it's happened and how obviously they wish they would have gone sooner. Here's the other thing. So someone asked him, are you worried about housing supply from all of this? The mortgage rate's going from 3 to 7%.

And he kind of brushed it off and said, well, we had mortgage rates of 7% before the financial crisis back in 2006 or 2007. Erroneous. Exactly. It's context free. Of course, yeah, we've had rates this high before, but not in a situation like this that's going to just completely do real. And I think the housing supply thing is a big problem. But I honestly think we saw another strong jobs report. I think that's the only thing they can hang their head on

is that the labor market is still so strong that them leaning into this, they have a little bit of a cushion here. I wonder if, not I wonder, my thinking is that not only are stocks potentially looking forward to a recession, but they're just repricing to the new interest rate environment. The arithmetic, the vibes, the everything is fundamentally different with the Fed funds rate at 4% than it is at zero, obviously. Yes. And that's another thing where you go back to the past and the stock market has done just fine with rates at this level or higher, but it's never seen a readjustment like this before. So I think if this pace of rate hikes would have started nine months earlier and gone a lot slower, it probably wouldn't have done nearly as much damage.

I think it's just the fast readjustment period that we've had that's taken, all the rates have gone up just skyrocketed in such a short amount of time. I think that's why you're seeing this massive price readjustment. They're getting what they want in the tech sector in terms of layoffs. Sam wrote tweeted, in terms of the overall workforce, tech and the information sector is about 2%. So there's a lot of job cuts, but it's a very small portion of the population. So Stripe cut 14%. And in the letter that they put to employees, they said, we think that that's a lot of the

that 2022 represents the beginning of a different economic climate. I want to go to some of the bullet points that they are giving to their employee severance pay. 14 weeks of severance for all departing employees. They will pay their 2022 annual bonus. We will pay for all unused pay time off. We'll pay the cash equivalent of six months of existing health care. We'll accelerate everyone who has already reached their one-year vesting cliff for RSUs. In terms of like layoffs, which are never a good thing, this is a nice little package.

Isn't it kind of crazy how quickly we went from the pandemic is pulling forward? all of this technology stuff and technology is the future to, okay, we overhired, technology is screwed. That all happened. If you would have told us gone back 18 months and said the tech sector is getting demolished, stocks are down 80 to 90% in certain cases. We're having huge layoffs. I mean, if you think about it, the labor market remains strong. The only stuff you see in the headlines is tech layoffs, tech layoffs, but the labor market itself besides that is strong. It's only tech, really, that this is happening. Maybe some loan officers or something, but this is the biggest problem right now.

And if you just read those tech headlines, you'd think the unemployment is screaming higher, but it's not. Facebook is laying off thousands of employees. Twitter, cleaned house. I think they cut half of their employees. Lyft just announced that they're firing. Coinbase is pulling. I mean, everyone's pulling back.

Goldman Sachs put out a note. They actually see a very plausible path to avoid a U.S. recession. And I didn't read the note, but 35% probability. Where do they come up with these numbers? Is this a model? I think it's always between 30 and 60%. I think you always have to say in that sweet spot, you can't leave there. But they basically said it's the strong labor market.

The labor market is staying strong. I think if you bring the number of job openings down and the number of quits down, and I think that's probably our only hope here. The strong labor market buys us some time and the Fed finally just decides to pause and see what happens. I think that's the soft landing scenario. It didn't seem like Powell was even considering that. Maybe he can't say he's considering that yet, but it seemed to me like they don't even want to try for a soft landing.

They want a hard landing now to get this over with. Cart dealership guy on Twitter had a great tweet showing that people are buying more luxury vehicles than ever before. The market share of luxury vehicles was 12.2% 10 years ago. It's now 17.3%. And he also broke it down by state. The percent of state residents paying over $1,000 a month in Q3. And what is this?

What state is that? Is that Idaho? No, Idaho is the other one. It's above Colorado. Oh, man, I'm in the bad. Oh, Wyoming. Montana? Is that Montana?

No, you're right. That's Wyoming. I said Wyoming. Okay. It's good thing around geography class anymore. Montana's to the upper right, I believe. 25.7% of people in Montana pay over $1,000 a month for their car. This is a map that shows the percentage of people in a state that pay $1,000 a month or more for their car payment.

And it's rising all over the place. You know what I pay for my Jeep Grand Cherokee? I think I got this at the perfect time. When I went to buy, I needed a car, this is 20, was it 2020? Ben, I think I got my car in 2019. I can't remember. This makes a difference. But no, it wasn't been 2020.

No, it was 2020 because the car prices were going up. I wanted a Jeep, I wanted a Wrangler, but they wanted like 40% more than normal. My Jeep Grand Cherokee, $450 a month. That's not bad. But you know, so the highest dates here, it's Wyoming. it's Montana, it's Texas. It's because trucks. It's pickup trucks.

It's pickup trucks. They're so expensive. In California must be luxury vehicles because they're like... Who is the most frugal state of the nation? Oh, it's Maine. Okay. Oh, wait, oh, wait. Damn it, I can't see, Ben.

My eyes are bad. It's Minnesota. People in Minnesota should be driving trucks and SUVs, and they're the ones who, there's the least amount of people who pay $1,000 a month for a car. Michigan, too. I'm guessing a lot of this, I mean, a lot of this increase is because car prices have gotten so expensive, but it's also really expensive trucks and SUVs.

Bet, if my eyes don't deceive me, I believe this, that's 7.2% for West Virginia? Yeah, but it's 6.6 in Minnesota. Oh, is it? That's 6.6? I thought it was an 8. All right. I've got to read to you something, a quote, and then I'd like to take the other side and I want to see what you think. This is from Apollo Global Management CEO, Mike Rowan. We have an entire generation of investors and investment analysts who have really grown up just seeing the market going one direction. And now we all know it goes both ways. investors have now discovered that everything is correlated to the Fed, and they're also discovering that most, if not all of last decades, investment acumen was really nothing other than market beta. And in some cases, nothing other than levered market beta over the past decade. Investors kind of got a free ride. I feel like if you're a hedge fund person or a smart person, this is the kind of thing you say. Everything has been so easy for everyone for the best decade. And this is the comeuppance. This is normal. I think it's fair. I think it's more or less true. Here's why it's not entirely true. It's not like markets have gone straight up. But in terms of

of wind at the backs, valuations expanding. Come on, you can't argue that. Yes, I can't argue that. Here's what I can argue with, though. It's not like this is normal right now. People on the Fed are literally cheering for the stock market to fall. It's not like you can say this environment is normal either. The Fed is tightening. This isn't like a normal in-between market where the Fed is just kind of chilling out. They're not stimulating and they're not tightening. Like, they're tightening to a degree that they've never done before and they're cheering for the stock market to go down and they raise rates faster than they ever have in history, basically.

So it's not like you can say this market is normal either, right? You can't say, like, okay, this is the normal. Actually, this is the way it should be. This is abnormal as well. Everything we've gone through in the last 36 months is abnormal. The pandemic, the boom after the pandemic, everything has been ab-this. This is not normal. I think if you just read his quote in a vacuum, he's not talking about now.

He's talking about the last decade. But here's the thing. Everyone says everything is correlated to Fed. That is not true because the Fed kept rates low for seven years. Okay? And then the pandemic happened and all the government spending. That's what really kicked off all this stuff. Like the mortgage rates were low already.

Interest rates were low already. It took the pandemic and a fiscal stimulus to get this huge groundswell of people speculating. That wasn't the Fed. You can't blame it all in the Fed. I'm sorry. Are you trying to get your job back? As much as I blame this. You're right.

Interest rates were 0% from 2008 to 2015. Mortgage rates were below 4% for the majority of the 2010s. The housing market didn't go crazy. It took the pandemic to do that. Very true. That was not the Fed. Obviously, the Fed has made to mistakes, but you can't blame everything on them for what's happened in the last three years of all the speculation, and that was not all the Fed's fault.

That I'm outraged. I don't often get outraged at politics, but I guess everyone's outraged on this. How can you not be? By the way, it's Election Day. It's Tuesday, November 8th. It's 9.39 in the morning. There was a big expose in the Wall Street Journal. Federal officials trade stock and companies or agencies oversee.

Now, I'm sure a lot of this is fairly. harmless in terms of people using financial advisors. I'm sure that is part of this, but there's also some stuff that is, in my opinion, probably just criminal. So what they said was more than 2600 officials at agencies from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department during both Republican and Democratic administrations disclose stock investments in companies while those same companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies. That amounts to more than one in five senior federal officials across 50 federal agencies. What has happened? here. A top official, the Environmental Protection Agency reported purchases of oil and gas

stocks. The Food and Drug Administration improperly led an official owned dozens of food and drug stocks on a snow buy list. A Defense Department official bought stock in a defense company five times before one new business from the Pentagon. This is outrageous. It is. They give you these really nice visuals of different agencies and the amount of trading, and this is just not good. While the government was ramping up scrutiny of big technology companies, more than 1,800 federal officials reported owning or trading at least one of four major tech stocks. What the hell is this bullshit? I think politicians just don't care anymore. The optics of it you'd think would be enough to be like, all right, I think I'll back up. You know what the problem is if you're a

politician, you already know 30% of the elector is going to hate your guts and 30% is going to love you no matter what. And I think that they know that that's always going to be the case and it doesn't matter what they do most of the time. I think that's kind of really shaking out. Gosh darn it. I know. It's disgusting. I agree. I don't get it. All right, JP, Morgan had something. This is, to my point, this is the other side of interest rates rising so fast. They compared yields at the beginning of the year, year-in 2021 to October 31st, across 10-year treasuries, three-month T-bills, corporate bonds, munis, U.S. preferred stocks, high yield, everything has gone up at a drastic pace. So three-month T-bills are now over 4%. Corporate bonds

over 6%. Tax equivalent yield for muni bonds is 7%. High yield is 9. These have basically all doubled or more since the beginning of the year. This is obviously why bonds got crushed, but this is getting back to our stuff about the fun flows from beginning of the episode. I can't imagine that some money won't come pouring into bonds eventually. Depends on the shape of the curve. Well, yeah, so most of it right now is, I'm sure, going into the short end of the curve. But I don't know, if you have 6% in corporate bonds, now corporate bonds, we've seen in the past during a downfall in a recession, corporate bonds can and will fall out like 15, 20% in some cases, but that's what bonds have fallen this year already. If you have a 6% hurdle for stocks versus corporate bonds, I do think that

there's a real challenge to stocks after a while where people start thinking, why would I have more money in stocks so I can get 6% in corporate bonds and get rid of a lot of the daily volatility? Or close to 5% in one year. I mean, I don't think that this is going to become a problem. I think it is the problem. This is the number one issue facing investors right now. But money's flowing out of bonds. Stocks are simultaneously much more attractive and much less compelling, which is an interesting place to be. Oh, and by the way, this isn't a good reminder. For people that have told themselves, every time stocks fall 30% or going forward, I'm going to be greedy, again, the problem is they fall 30% for good reason. Like, even though I am very long-term greedy right now, I am very

excited about buying stocks right now, there is, of course, doubt in my head. Is this going to be a 40% there? Like, how much? People look back at the 1980s, like the bottom of the 1980s, the early 1980s, as this generational buying opportunity. It was because for the next 18 years or something from 1981 or 1982, you got like 18% a year in the SP 500. But bond yields were 15% back then. That was way more of extreme case. But you had the same thing.

This is what happens. In a case like this where inflation is high, bond yields are going to be way higher. And that's going to make stocks look worse when stocks are probably still a better long-term buy. Yes. You want the safety of bonds because you see that guaranteed income. But stocks are probably still a better long-term bet. I know we've said this before, but it bears repeating because it's probably counterintuitive to a lot of the audience.

Stocks will bottom way before the news gets better. And so if you're waiting for the news to turn before you reenter or whatever, it's not how it works. All right. Inflation, okay, call Kentonita tweeted the average U.S. price paid for a new vehicle in July at the high was 46,173. In October, it's 45,600. So not a huge decline.

that's a new vehicle, the Mannheim for used cars, that is crashing. This seems like the easiest transitory one to us the whole time, right? That car prices eventually, once they get more supply, have to come down. So they're down 15% from their highs. I think I saw somebody tweet that it's down five straight months for the first time since 20, I don't know, 20 something. It's been a while. Eric Finnegan tweeted that market prices for used cars are around 15% since February. Due to lags in sampling, the CPI used car and truck category was done just 3% through September,

So this is like the opposite of rents where CPI is going to have a catch-up on the other side for this. So eventually it's going to hit inflation figures finally. Here's the Goldman figure that I want to talk about. Forget about the 35%. But Ben, answer me this. They said, we forecast you over-year core CPI inflation of 6.2% in December 2020, 3.3% in December 20203, and 2.7% in December 2024. Now, this must be a model where they're like putting in all the inputs for various prices, right?

Okay. So if their assumptions are right, again, they're forecasting 6.2% in December, 3.3% in December 2023. If that happens, if year-over-year inflation is 3.3% in December 2020, how bullish is that for the stock market? That's got to be a good thing. Or not, or not because it's a recession. That thinks you're coming down. What do you think pundits and economists are worse at forecasting? Inflation or interest rates? Because they're bad at both of them. It's the same thing, basically. Yeah, so I don't know. Do we agree that for now? For now, Now, the only thing the market cares about is inflation and we'll worry about the slowdown

later or maybe the slowdown's already baked in. It could be a weird thing where what if inflation does drop from 8% to 6% by the end of the year, but then it's dropping and the stock market rallies, but then months later we go into recession and the stock, I don't know. Yeah, that's the tricky part. That could happen where we get a balance because inflation is falling and then earnings start to come down and we're like, oh boy, not good. Speaking of not good, gold suffers worst losing streak since 1816.

Gold Monthly Performance is down one, two, three, four, five, I don't know, seven straight months. I love the picture of the Alaska Gold Rush guys here in this story. See that? I was in Alaska one time, and I saw them filming. Remember those shows on Discovery or HD or Travel or whatever? The Gold Rush Show. Yeah, I can't remember whoists. I think it was those guys.

But anyway, I think this is not super complicated. You would think that gold does well in inflationary environment to all else equal. Of course, all else is not equal. And the dollar is ripping or, I mean, the dollar isn't pulled back. in gold's bounds, but it's the dollar. So gold is down, what seven months in a row? Is that what they're saying? That's the bad streak?

Well, the strong dollar crushed gold, despite inflation. Just like everyone predicted. All right, we spoke about earlier in the show, Y charts for Q3, the money market funds are people piling into cash. Data from EPFR shows that cash funds saw inflows of $62 billion in the latest week reflecting investor demand for dollars, which in turn saw the 19th straight week of outflows from gold funds, the longest string of outflow since 2004. I'm surprised that another country hasn't decided to say, you know what, screw it.

We're cutting rates. We can't compete with the Fed. We're going to have to just keep. I don't know. Maybe that makes things 10 times worse, but why don't they just say the Fed is raising rates and they're tightening global conditions? We're going to loosen. Screw you, Jerome Powell.

We're going to go the other way. Yeah. I don't know. It's a bold strategy cotton. All right. I mentioned my worries about the housing market many times on this show. I already did it today. Derek Thompson said the share of first-time homebuyers hit just 26%, the lowest level in 40 years,

which is kind of crazy when you consider that the millennials are the biggest generation. Now, we could have had some pull forward. Do young people always get screwed? Not just millennials. Young people in general are always got the short end of the stick. It feels that way. Probably. And then when they get older, they screw over the other young people.

And it's just... It's a circle of life. This is really lousy. Yes. I mean, maybe there was some pull forward from the pandemic of people buying. And obviously, it's probably just low for everyone right now. but the New York Times had a story about how the housing market is worse than you think. This was interesting to me. So not only inventory down.

Worse than you think? We think it's pretty bad. It's worse than that. Okay. Here's the thing about the supply, though. So they said fewer single family homes are listed for sale than in previous decades, which makes sense. But the problem is, if you're comparing now versus the 1980s, the U.S. population is up 40% since 1982. So not only are the inventory numbers lower than they were then, but there's more people that live here. That's the problem. Inventory numbers are low. If you adjust it for population, they're like falling off the charts low. I looked at this on Y charts and I pulled up U.S. population and they have the numbers going back to the late 90s and then existing home inventory. Look at the beginning of that chart. You can see existing

home inventory going up with population through the 2000s and then crashing. You should have adjusted this. And population continuing to rise. You should do this for a block post. You should divide one by the other. I think I've done that before. So if you adjust by inflation and population, supply is just, it really is brutal. So look at the housing start. number. So this is the U.S. housing starts, which is just new homes being constructed. The average since 1960 is like $1.4 million. We barely got above that in this cycle after crashing way below it, following the crash, and now we're going down below that number again. So usually what you get is you get a huge number over the average and then below, but we never barely got above it this time

and now it's going to crash again. I think housing supply is going to be bad for years to come, unfortunately, for people that want or need to get a house. And Zillow's earnings reports pivoting to existing homes, the turnover is crashing. I think we've said over and over again that the housing market is just going to freeze up because the gap between where sellers are listing and where buyers can not want to buy, can afford to buy, you can still drive a truck through it. I think the fact that there is going to be not many bids in the market. So the St. Louis Fed said median sales price, the new house sold in September was up to $470,000, up 8% from the prior month. So you can see how it's gone up, down, up down.

It's probably, it's going to go down a little bit. But I think if there aren't that many transactions, I think you could see some screwy volatility in the price of housing because it's not going to be a real market for housing prices. It's going to be such a few number of houses that sell. It's not really going to be, I don't think it's going to really tell a whole story. It's going to be hard to show what the actual price is. Do you see what I see in this median sales price chart?

Is that a right shoulder? Are you doing some technical analysis here? Is that a right shoulder for me? What does the right shoulder mean? What does the right shoulder mean? I don't know how to do the head and shoulders. Does that mean it goes down afterwards because you follow the arm down? It's the neckline, Ben.

Okay, I'm following the shoulder to the head, shoulder then down. Is that what it works? The knee bows connected to the thigh bone. All right, this was an interesting one from the Wall Street Journal. Homebuyers are moving further away than ever before. So they show the median distance between your purchased home, your new home, and your previous resident. And for every year from 2005 to 2020, pretty much, it is like a little over 10 miles. It went up a little bit.

Why is this chart bullshit? Because I saw Jake. he's not a fan of media. Why? What's wrong with this? All of a sudden, it went up to 50 miles from like 10 or 12. You don't think you're trying to debunk this one? No, economic is saying that this is nonsense, or at least it's misleading.

I don't see why this is misleading because people are moving to different places for remote work purposes. It makes sense to me. You're saying if a bunch of people moved far away, I don't know. It makes total sense to me. You can debunk it if you want, I guess. Well, I don't know. This sort of, yeah, makes sense to me as well. So it also said that 40% of homebuyers were in small towns or rural areas, a record

going back to 2003 and up from 32% of year earlier. So I think people are moving from big cities and they're moving to smaller towns, which makes sense because it's cheaper, more affordable, and there's remote work. I got an anecdote for you. Let's do it. I was with people over the weekend, and somebody was saying how one of their employees moved to the burbs in anticipation of remote work staying as is. And they were told very explicitly, no promises.

I can't tell you that we're not going to have you back three days a week. now this person was being asked to be back three days a week, and he's not cooperating and might be out of a job. What happens? Are people to move closer to work? Or do they get new jobs? That'll be interesting to see who blinks first. Like right now, I bet workers still have the upper hand, but in 12 months, do the employers have the upper hand again? I think that's right. I think it's exactly right. There's going to be a transition from employee back to employer. Depends of the industry, too, whether you can find another job right now. All right. The journal had an article about venture, which raised $151 billion.

in the first three quarters of this year, exceeding any prior full year fundraising. Interesting. I guess they said that some of this was skewed by larger funds, but surprising, no? In this economy? I'm guessing a lot of this was already committed that people had gone out and said, you know, the thing is, once you get the ball rolling, if you're in a big fund, like this talks about Sequoia's huge fund, and if you're an institutional investor, you have to re-up in these funds or you don't get in the next one.

So you'd think they would start balking eventually if the return start coming in lower, but this year, I guess you still had a little bit of catch-up period still. Taylor Shaw tweeted the average time between a series A and series B fundraises that 2.4 years, which is the highest that it's been in a little bit of time, which is probably going to continue to creep up. We are seeing cases where this is happening in like 2.4 months. It would be like C series B. I'm saying in 2021, it was so crazy.

It was happening just like light speed, basically. All right. So we spoke about layoffs, some good charts on the intranet, layoffs. That's kind of weird because they talk about startups. and then they include like Twitter. So I don't know if this is just tech companies or whatnot, but employees laid off, they show companies with layoffs, and it is rising.

Makes sense. Obviously. Necker value tweeted publicly reported job cuts. So in Q2, we had Coinbase, Netflix, PayPal, Redfin, StockX, Unity. So far this quarter, we've got DocuSigned, Facebook, Instacart, Clarnah, Robin, and Shopify, Snap. Again, these might be potentially misleading only because these are big, sexy companies, but they're less than 2% of the workforce.

The fact that technology is such a bigger part of the stock market these days, if this was some steel company, you wouldn't hear about it as much. No, because it's a tech company that we know. Takes up a lot of mental real estate. All right, let's talk about decent quarter guys. Maybe good to not great. Oh, quarter app is launching something that I'm very excited for. A lot of engineer and brainpower has gone into this.

I don't know if it's ready yet, but it's going to be very soon. Live earnings. So previously it had been like on a, I don't know, 15 minute delay, something like that. Now you could do it live. Or you would have had to go to the company's website to do it. So you're going to be able to listen to yes, live earnings calls on quarter. And they're going to do a bunch of other stuff for this in the future, I think, where you can potentially interact and leave comments.

We're not there yet. But this is a pretty big breakthrough. All right. Link of the show notes if you want. If you're an analyst, yes, you need to be doing this. Yeah. Okay. So Roku Ben was in an 89% drawdown when it reported earnings, which is not good.

and then it fell 20 plus percent in the after hours. Did this stock go negative? Is that what we're saying here? 89 plus 20. The stock fell 110%. I remain a fan. I don't know why Netflix or someone doesn't buy them. That's my call.

I remain a fan of the interface. I have some Roku TVs. I like it. This is a busy week of earnings. Let's get right to it. I'm going to move fast. Ben interrupt me with any comments. Let's talk about Robin Hood first.

Total net revenues increased 14%. Not bad sequentially to $3601 million. That's a good thing. Transaction-based revenues increased $3. percent. Options increased 10 percent. So people are not slowing down. Cryptocurrencies decrease 12 percent. These are all quote over quarter. Equities are up operating expenses. This is a big one. Decreased 12 percent. All of these companies are like aggressively cutting their expenses. Robin Hood's down 11 percent again today. I think that's because of Coinbase and FTX,

and we'll get that in a little bit. So my thing is, do you think for Coinbase and Robin Hood that these stocks are just going to follow crypto wherever it goes? If crypto crashes, these stocks are going to crash, If crypto comes back, these stocks are going to come back. Coinbase is very correlated to crypto, it seems. I don't know about Robin Hood. I think Robin Hood will be now, too. I think that's going to happen. Monthly active users basically cut in half from the highs.

It was $21.3 million at the highs. It's now $12.2. Average revenue per user cut in half. So those are the not good. Wow. Their monthly active users have basically round-tripped to pre-speculation levels in mid-2020. Net income, credit to them. It's shrinking.

Their losses are shrinking for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 quarters. their share count and share base so their share base comp is down quite a bit which is a good thing but their share count keeps rising same thing with coinbase investors getting diluted as generally not what you want to say all right i listened to the Airbnb earnings call this week i like their CEO brian chesky and i feel like i've owned it since the IPO actually so i'm not doing great and i bought more along the way but they had a blowout quarter like they blew everything out of the water their expectations estimates and the stock was still down 10% which i think people were worried that we're just going to go under recession.

So here's some numbers, though. I still think this is going to be a great company. Maybe it's never a great stock, but it's a great company. In Q3, 2022, longer-term stays of 28 days or more, accounted for 20% of gross nights booked, and then approximately 45% of gross nights booked were for stays at least seven nights. They think the whole remote work thing,

people being able to travel more is a huge thing. They also said, someone asked them, how do you prepare for a recession? What happens? They didn't really say they were recession resistant, but they kind of implied it. And they said, well, if we go into a recession, people are going to need more income

and they're going to put their house up for Airbnb more, and that's going to increase our supply. I'm not sure I buy that, but I thought it was interesting. Good spin. I don't buy it either. Because you'd think that even if supply raise, demand would fall. Yeah. So the thing about Airbnb is I think maybe they're getting punished

because people are seeing through it to the fact that remote work has peaked or probably Oh, you think so? I think that trend is only going to go up in the future. You think it's peaked? Remote work? Well, I'm not saying that it's going back to five days a week. I don't think it's ever going to happen. but the freedom that employees have had over the last year and a half, I think that peat.

Yes, I do. Okay, interesting. Employees are never going to have more freedom than they did in Q121. That's possible. I think that's probably why the stock is getting punished. But I think there are people in certain positions, I don't know what percentage of the population it is, that they've gone to remote work and they can get stuff done from anywhere and work from anywhere.

And I don't think a lot of those people who have the upper hand are going back. I did not listen to the Caesar's earnings call, but Connoissell tweeted. they said the October, the October, just October, was the strongest month in the history of Las Vegas for Caesars. Oh, I'm going to Vegas. Did I tell you this? I think you did. For a football game, right?

Oh, it's this weekend? I need a vacation, so I'm going. You deserve it, Michael. Thank you. Although, yeah, I don't want to get to my personal vacations. That's one of the greatest places on the planet to people watch, Las Vegas. It's such a mishmash of... First personal vacation in a long time from May.

I'm excited. Oh, you mean, just you, not family? Not a family trip, but a vacation. Not a family trip. Okay, Uber Eats. I didn't listen to the Uber call either, but look at this. Uber eats quarterly revenue, and this is strong to quite strong. So Lyft is down today, I think 20% or so. They reported. Lyft is down 17%. I think Uber is basically flat on the day. Uber's up a little bit. Do you think Uber has basically just destroyed Lyft and they're the one that's going to remain standing after all this? Could be. I still don't know how the math works on these deliveries. And I do think that if we go into a session,

is like probably one of the first things to go. So here's an interesting one I heard. I still listened to the Craig Kilbourne podcast, and he was interviewing the owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Mark Lorry is this guy's name. Never heard of him before, but I think he started that Jets.com, that Walmart bought, the online retailer.

And he said his new company is called like Wheeler or something. And instead of doing food delivery, it's going to be basically a food truck that comes to your house and prepares the food in your driveway. So you have hot meals that are served to you. That's a 0% interest. rate company? I don't know. And he was saying, Kilbourne asked him, he's like, that doesn't make any sense. Won't that be more expensive? And he said, actually, if you don't have

to drive all the way to the restaurant to pick it up and then come back because you're just going from house to house, it's actually cheaper. How do they scale this? I don't even understand. How long does it take to cook a meal? That's a good question. But I like the idea of having like a hot meal just ready so you don't have to put it in the air fryer. Your fries aren't to be soggy anymore. I listen to PayPal and obviously I don't cover the stock, but I'm not quite sure why it was down. The report was, seemed pretty decent to me. Again, I'm not a PayPal analyst, but all right, let's get in something. You saying I listen to the PayPal call, but I don't call out of the stock is like me saying I watch an NFL game, but I don't play in the games. Sorry.

All right, Venmo. They have almost 90 million Venmo accounts. 57 million monthly active. It's a lot, no? 57 million active? I would love for hotels to start using Venmo more because I never carry cash on me. So if I want to tip someone, the guy who's taking my bag in and I don't have cash, I feel like an idiot. I want to tip app. Yeah, but that's on you. That's on you. Why? I never carry cash. If you're going to a place where you need cash, carry some cash. No excuses. You know you're going to a hotel. When I walk into the door, I want the hotel to have a thing that I can scan, one of those barcode, a QR thing, scan this and give us a tip. I agree. That doesn't make sense, but shame on you. This year, we will process nearly $1.4 trillion dollars in payment

volume, an increase from $1.25 trillion last year and a 25% compound annual growth rate for $280 billion in 2015. What? The other bad thing about Venmo? How when you give someone money, you have to write a reason for why you paid them money. Well, they're trying to try criminals. That's so dumb. I always do it privately. You know that it's like a social feed. You can like see what people are doing? Yes, I don't like that. All right, 25% compound annual growth rate and payment volume since 2015. That's impressive. And what's the stock down? Stock's killed. So they should spin out Venmo maybe.

Could Venmo be its own company? I don't know if this was it. Overall, we saw U.S. e-commerce growing in the low single digits in Q3 with deceleration into the close of the quarter. This trend persists in October. I think the market did not like that. They also said, given a challenging macro environment, slowing e-commerce trends in an unpredictable holiday shopping season, we are being appropriately prudent in our Q4 revenue guide.

They lowered their revenue guide, but they took their EPS outlook up. So that's why I'm not sure the stock reacted so poorly. They said with our most important weeks in the holiday season ahead of us, as well as ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty. We believe it is too early to provide a detailed outlook for 2023 on this call. A lot of companies are doing this. Carvana did this. I listened to their call.

A lot of companies are saying like we just, there's no clarity, can't give you anything. Wasn't that just we've been burned so badly the last 24 months that we're out of here? So PayPal went from $362 billion to $91 billion in market cap in less than two years. Yeah, killed. Here's a quote that's relevant. The low end income levels and middle income levels are beginning to cut. back on their discretionary spend. They're spending so much more on food, on energy, on gas, on rent, and we're beginning to see that impact those segments of the market. The high end of the

market, by the way, is still spending quite freely, and we're seeing that also in our results. So, again, mixed messages from some companies are saying that they're seeing no slowdown, other companies are. Cheesecake Factory, for example, cheesecake factory is not like a high-end restaurant. It's like nice enough. It's like whatever. They said we continue to see very- biggest menu on the planet. They have literally anything you could ask for. It's Mexican, it's Italian, it's American. They have everything you could want. They say we continue to see very strong attachment across the desert, across alcohol. Oh, I'm guessing that's a dessert. There's missing ass. No, there's a missing ass. There's a missing ass. Across alcohol between

entrees and appetizers. So that would also tell me that when guests are coming in, they're not managing their check or they don't have any sticker shock because they actually continue to order a little bit more than they used to. I'm sure that circle, Ben. Well, they probably raise prices too. And people are still drinking it up. Okay, Coinbase. Q3 transaction revenue was down 44% compared to Q2.

That's not good. Net revenue was down 28% compared to Q2. You kind of called it going to earnings. You said, I'm looking at the chart of Coinbase. This thing's going to crash to, you gave me a number. You said 45 or something. I said 45. Yeah, but I was wrong.

I was wrong. Because... It's down 11% again today. It's close to that. Yeah, I thought it was going to react on earnings. it's reacting on the crypto stuff, which will get to. So I was wrong. Oh, the chart does look like crap and it continues to. But this is good. Total operating expenses were down 38%. So they're serious about this. Honestly, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to cut you off. None of this stuff matters. If the price goes

up, Coinbase is going up. None of these numbers matter. True. If Bitcoin goes up, Coinbase is going up. It doesn't matter what their fundamentals are. What they're expected for Q4 in terms of volume. But look at this training volume. It was $547 billion at the peak. It's now $159 billion in Q2. and what they said was. So, trading volume is down 70% from the highs. Retail trading volume is down 85%. Revenue is down 76%. And they made a note about competition, like that they're just getting smoked by international companies that have more products, less regulation. So it's not great. Cheaper fees? That's the thing. It's not a regulation. It's cheaper fees. Let's call it. That's not great. That's the problem. So at the end of the quarter, they had $6.6 billion of

customer Fiat on the platform. Here's a new source of revenue. Look at their interest income. Their interest income in Q3 was $8.4 million. In Q3, that was $102 million. Wait, what is that, what do you mean? What's that from? Money that they could earn in short-term in money markets. Oh, oh. So they're actually using the Fiat system still, I see. They don't mind it when there's some interest to be paid. I forgot about, mentioned about it. Then we'll use your dollars. Robina too. Robin had made a substantial amount of money on non-net interest. Look at this chart of shares outstanding. As an investor, you want to see share accounts going the other way. All right, so that's the review. It was a busy week. We've got Disney tomorrow. I'm excited for that. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. You know what I bought? No, what stock I bought?

Okay, go ahead. I bought Netflix. Okay. You're going back to the well. It filled the gap. So no harm, no foul. Remember a couple of weeks ago, I was very upset where it popped 15% after earnings. But it came back in?

It filled the gap. All of those gains were taken back by the market. I got in. This is not a trade. This is not a trade. I am buying Netflix and I am holding Netflix. Put it in my back pocket. If we take away some price action, what would go wrong in the company to make you sell it?

If they're advertising efforts don't pan out. And by the way, if the advertising efforts don't pan out, I'm losing 60%. So it's going to be too late. But I think that they're going to do it. So I'm hanging my hat on that. Okay, this was interesting from the Wall Street Journal. It says inflation widens married couples' money lead over their single friends. The median net worth of married couples, 25 to 34, was nearly nine times as much as

as a median net worth of single households. In 2010, it was four times as much. And after inflation, it's only getting worse. So this is people 25 to 34. If you're married, you have a nine times. is higher net worth than someone, one of your friends who's single in that same age bracket. Do you think this is all, obviously double income help here, but is this all just because you get married, you buy a house?

I thought it was like, sort of like self-selection type thing where the more successful you are, the more likely you are to find a partner that finds you attract from what's getting married. If you're not very successful, maybe it's harder to find a spouse. I guess that makes sense. Number nine times as much was surprising me. They also said that single people are more likely to carry more debt, is well, which is surprising.

As I've learned from watching, love is blind, love is not blind, people don't want other people's debts. Okay. They talk about finances on that show? They do. Okay. I didn't read the paper because it's super long, and I don't know if I'm going to, but John Paul Koenig tweeted, 46.4% of Americans rely on non-banked online payment providers,

such as PayPal, cash app, and Venmo, according to FDIC's new survey of the unbanked. But this is the part that really surprised me. usage of non actually no this doesn't surprise me I take that back I misread this usage of non-bank payment providers is concentrated among the wealthier

and more educated okay what's my takeaway here so the people who don't have a bank account basically have fallen back on technology as a savior I don't think it's saying that they don't have a bank account

I think it's just saying that they do use non-bank online payments like PayPal and cash app oh okay 46.4% of Americans I feel like this is only going to go higher this is just a one way up I'll put it to the right.

I mean, if they allow me to do tips at hotels, it'll go even higher. I'll be a user. Again, shame on you. Carry cash. Tip app. Come on. Let's talk about crypto for a minute. You got to explain to me, what's the crypto feud?

I just see tweets about it, and it's Binance versus FTX. Explain it to me. I can't because I haven't had time to catch up. But my understanding is there's some sort of relationship between the CEO of Binance and FTX slash Alameda. And he owned a piece of the company and is now tweeted that they're going to dump their stake. But he also said that they're going to try and do it in a way that doesn't impact the market, which seems weird. It's almost like saying, like, I hate you. No offense. So FTX's

coin, FTT, is crashing. Let's say, where is it right now? Oh, my God. It's down 30%. This is not what you want to see as a crypto enthusiast, which I'm a believer in crypto, but this is... I've cemented my opinion on this. The biggest risk for crypto is not the technology. It's the people. The biggest risk to crypto failing is the people involved. I strongly believe that. If it gets messed up, it's the people in the human nature that messes it up. Yeah, this seems counterproductive, at least in the short term. Listen, I obviously don't know what's going on. But the institutions aren't stopping. We talked about Fidelity last week. They announced that they're going to let retail investors trade crypto products commission free. So not yet, but that will be coming.

Goldman is building a data service with MSCI and coin metrics to classify and categorize all the different hundreds or thousands of coins or whatever. Anyway, but yeah, this FTCN news is definitely spooking the market for sure. All right. Let's talk about Twitter real quick in Elon Musk. I know there's a lot of people who on Twitter want Elon Musk to fail because they just don't like him or his politics or his personality or whatever. I am not one of these people. I want him to succeed. I don't have an addictive personality. I don't get addicted to a lot of stuff. I'm addicted to Twitter and I don't want it to go away. So I'm personally hoping that he just leaves it alone and doesn't mess it up. I thought about this yesterday. Is there like a non-zero percent chance that

Twitter is because what if he can't figure out the monetization and it has to, I mean, it'll be safe. Even if he bungles it, somebody will come in and buy it for him. The thing is, the conspiracy theory is he wants to screw it up, go into bankruptcy, discharge the debt, and then come away with a free and clear company and be fine. I know. As long as they keep the lights on, it's fine, but I'll become worried if Twitter starts having some outages. That's when I'll become worried. So the New York Times wrote a post about this and said last year, Twitter's interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal that will balloon to about $1 billion a year,

yet the company's operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligation. So obviously there's a gap there. And then Ben Thompson corrected that. By the way, I don't know what took me so long. I just started paying for a statutory. Totally worth it. He said these numbers are deceiving.

In December 2021, Twitter made an $809 million payment to settle a shareholder class action lawsuit. Without that payment, Twitter's 21 cash flow from operations would have been $1.4 billion, which is, needless to say, enough to cover its debt burden. I spoke about this with Josh. I went to look at Twitter on Y charts. It's gone. Not there anymore.

Yeah. It's gone. So Ben Thompson also said, he was talking about the $8 chart thing. He said, Twitter is probably the place that a subscription makes the most sense. So I think if you have over 10,000 followers or something that you want to tweet, you got to pay. It honestly makes sense to me because it doesn't seem like any new users are coming on to the platform. Like, if I was 10 years older or 10 years younger, I'd probably be on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or something, but I'm not.

Twitter is my demographic, more or less, and I'm stuck there because that's when I started with. So what is the risk to not paying? Is that somebody's going to impersonate you and steal your account? I honestly don't think that there's much of a risk. But I mean, if, I don't know, if it decreases the ads or decreases the bots, I'm guessing if you don't pay, you're going to get a lot of bots or something. They're going to make it where you want to pay.

They're going to have to make it so you want to pay. Sure probably should be your subscription services. I'll probably pay. The complaint about it, I'll probably pay too. If it's going to be like marginally better, I'll pay. I don't care. So now there's reports that they accidentally fired people that they weren't supposed to fire.

This is like the opposite of Larry David, quitting Saturday Night Live and coming back on Monday. This is the opposite of that. Sorry, can you come back, actually? We need you. Oh, what a shit show. The thing is, do we really think Elon Musk cares at this point? Everyone on Twitter is talking about Twitter nonstop, and they're talking about Elon Musk. Isn't that kind of why he did this?

This is like a psychic income thing. Does he care if he makes money? Don't you think, yes, he has $240 billion. If he went down to $2 billion, he'd be fine. I don't think he cares. I think he has to regret this. I'm sure he regrets it. But now that he's in it, he's tweeting all the time.

People are talking about him nonstop. So here's the thing. So the all-in podcast guys are now basically running Twitter. It's like Jason Calcanus and David Sacks, are the guys running it now? What company could we come in as Animal Spirits off the street and just run? Like, sight and scene. Like, hey, you guys are running the company now. Twitter?

Twitter. Okay. You got nothing? I wish you would give me a heads up. What company can we run? I don't know. Duncan says Chipotle. Michael would say no Bulls over $10 ever.

I would put a hard cap on the price of the balls and the stock would crash 80%. Modus proposal tweeted, reality labs, which is meta, has 15,000 employees. Well, not anymore. I'm sure they're cutting. Alexa had 10,000 employees three years ago. Apple has 3,000 currently work on AR. Google Assistant has 2K. Wow.

They went a little too hard, huh? Just a wee bit. All right, Ben, last week I spoke about, I bought tickets to Jerry Seinfeld, and I was like, huh, it's kind of weird that they're showing how many people bought ticket insurance. Like, why would they show that number? Well, I saw it again. So I'm sitting in a middle seat, which I'm none too pleased about on my flight on Friday, but they asked if I wanted to add travel protection, and I don't.

So I chose no, but they show 34 customers protected their trip in the last 15 minutes. This is just classic social proof. Can I tell you why you don't want to protect? your trip ever. Please. Because your credit card does this for you. If you have a Chase

Reserve or whatever one of those, you have travel protection already. You also don't want to pay for car insurance for a rental car because your credit card

does this for you. Is it time for a threat? Oh, about it. These are all the credit card benefits you never knew you had. I think I did a blog post about that a long time ago.

All right, recommendations, shall we? I watched Confess Fletch this weekend, which is a John Hay movie. You know the movie Fletch, Chevy Chase, from the 80s? Never saw it.

Never seen Fletch. Okay, it's a classic 80s movie. They made a sequel that wasn't as good. No such thing. No such thing. Fletch is actually a classic. You've never heard of Fletch before? No, I have.

I'm saying it's also a classic 80s movie. Oh gosh. There's so many of them. I kid with the 80s. I kid. I know. So it's actually based on a book series. So this was an updated one of a book series.

I'd never heard of this movie coming out. It went straight to Showtime, I guess. I think you could rent it, but I found that on Showtime. It was actually, it felt like an 80s or 90 movie. It was like kind of breezy. He's kind of like a smart-ass guy who's got a lot of good one-liners. It's a mystery one, but you don't really feel like there's ever a lot of weight behind it. It's just a, it's a 90-minute comedy, and I feel like we don't get those anymore.

It wasn't a great movie, but it was entertaining. But John Hamm playing that character, he's like 80% of the way there, but he's John Hamm, you know, he's not Chevy Chase. Chevy Chase was like a one-of-one in terms of being an asshole and being like an aloof guy. I looked, his 1980s, let me run through the IMDB. Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation. These are just the good ones. Fletch, European vacation, Spies like us, which is a great one.

Three Amigos. Funny Farm, which I still think holds up, kind of, actually. We won't mention Caddyshack, too, or Fletch lives. The National Ampun's Christmas vacation. His 80s, and he's a one-of-one, like no one could have played those characters as well as he did. This, like, a loof kind of idiot, but also could be cocky and overconfident.

He was great. All right, one more. White Lotus came back, two episodes in, and sign me up for, like, five more seasons of this show. Yeah, I did a see episode too, how was it? Great. It's good. Like, just the dialogue and the writing is so good. The character, the way that they plant these characters, it's so good. Sign me up for, like, going to a new location every year and I'm in. But there's so much good TV coming out this month. So I got White Lotus. The Crown is coming back tomorrow. Yellowstone. Tulsone is the new Slice Stallone one. Wait, Yellowstone's coming back on Sunday. Last season of Yellowstone stunk to high health.

Yeah, it wasn't good. I'm hoping we have a comeback year. They need to come back. There's a new Emily Bluntstone. Prime this month. We also have Mosquito Coast, which is my good one on Apple that no one watched that I really like. Never heard of it. I only mentioned it like three times on the show. There's a ton of a good TV coming back to streaming. And I'm excited for it. Ben, Tesla's down another 5% today. The stock is down 54% from its highs. Are people selling Tesla because they're worried that Elon's going to have to sell more Tesla to fund some of these operations? Stock looks awful. All kidding aside, this looks like a head and shoulders. Top. Okay. Right shoulder or left shoulder. This is the right shoulder. It broke the neckline. This looks bad. Warner Brothers mentioned

on the earnings call, this is what doesn't work for us based on everything that we've seen and we've looked at it hard. One is direct to streaming movies. So spending a billion dollars or collapsing a motion picture window into the streaming service, the movies that we launch in the theater do significantly better and launching a two hour or an hour and 40 minute movie direct to streaming has done almost nothing for HBO Max in terms of viewership, retention, or love of the service. How about that? That's interesting. Interesting. Yeah.

Theaters are back. Shh. I guess it makes sense. Like, even if you release it in theaters for like two weeks and then give a two week break and then put it on HBO Max, at least you get some more buzz going. That makes sense to me. Oh, I've got a recommendation. So I didn't watch any movies this week. What did I do this week?

It's because you listen to like 40 earnings calls. There's a lot of earnings calls. There's a lot of nights. That was fun. Oh, the Copeland and Friends with Scott Chryseloff. So I just want to tell a story quick. Josh and I met Scott Chryseloff in 2015 or 14. And he was running an asset management company at the time.

And he told us he was embarking on a project where he was going to read every issue of Time magazine, which these are monthly issues. So there's like 4,000 or something. And we're like, that really never left me. I was like blown away. Like, holy moly. And so he was on our show. He was incredible. And he actually did it.

He stopped in the year 2000 because he had a baby. But he documented them on a website every single month, overlaid with a Dow Jones Industrial Average. Well, he summarized the Time magazine. So I am going to, on my five-hour flight, I don't know if that's enough time to get through it, but I am going to read his entire 70-year history of the United States. His summary? Okay.

His summary. You can tell me what happened next week. I can't wait until you get to World War II. There was a monster in the basement. I can't believe he's spoiled barbarian. It's a horror movie. Of course there's going to be a monster or a zombie or something. A bunch of people hit me up on Twitter saying I ruined it.

Come on, people. It's a horror movie. What do you expect? Seriously? You expect as a host of a podcast going on five years now that you would say, Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Statute of limitations on spoilers.

Nah, Bruce Willis was dead on the sixth sense. He was dead. Sorry. I had a friend in high school who did that at a party. He said Bruce Willis was dead in the sixth sense. Ruined it for everyone. I hadn't seen it yet.

That's me. I'm sorry. You can't spoil a horror movie. I'm sorry. They're not spoilable. Is that a word? I just made it up. Mostly true.

Mostly true. All right. Well, thank you for listening. Five years. Market is ripping. That's good. We'll take it. Gold, bouncing very hard, very hard as the dollar pulls in.

It's all about the dollar, Ben. It's all about the dollar. The dollar is at a multi-week low. So risk assets like a falling dollar. Okay. Animal Spiritspot at gmail.com. We'll talk to you next week. We're going to talk about our five-year anniversary of this show.

See you then. Thank you.