Animal Spirits Podcast - Redefining a Recession (EP.267)

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

On today's show we discuss why the middle class is getting squeezed, why it's so hard to define what a recession is, boring stocks are outperforming, the size of the housing market, why negotiating will be making a comeback, spending time alone 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.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by Composer. Michael and I have been talking to the founders of Composer for a number of months now to kind of better learn how their website works. And this is a cool thing. So I pulled up two different, what do you call it, symphonies? Well, what is Composer? Just back out. What's Composer?

So Composer is basically a place where you can do quantitative rules-based frameworks for asset allocation, trading strategies, and you can go really deep on here. You're basically creating your own algorithms using their tools. It's like a portfolio visualizer, like one a step further, and you could actually implement all of those back tests. Yes. So just to give you a better idea of the various strategies you can do on Composer, some of them can be very detailed and more trade oriented. Some of them can be more longer term. So they have one that's called the Stoic Finance Presents inflation spiral hedge.

Obviously, this is a strategy that is looking to take advantage of inflation. And this has commodities gold, short 20-plus-year treasuries, and consumer staples. So, four ETFs. This portfolio was up 40% in 19-19 Germany. Like, damn it, I can't remember what those years were. But just go with it. This year, it's up a little more than 8% versus a 17% downturn for the S&P year-to-date basis. But you can also add other rules in here in terms of some of the technical analysis stuff

that you've looked at before. RSIs and uptrends and downtrends and a lot of different rules. But then they also have simple asset allocations that are from some of the legend. So they have a Ray Dalio one. They have a Warren Buffett one. But then they also have the David Swenson. What's a Warren Buffett one? It's actually just, I think, 9% S&P and 10% cash.

Remember he put that one out a few years ago? Oh, okay. Pretty simple. So they have a David Swenson one who was the former CIO at Yale, someone who I looked up to in the institutional world. So he has tips, treasuries, reits, U.S. stocks. emerging markets and international stocks. It's a very diversified global portfolio. So you can do something like that where you have just a set it and forget it, sort of buy and hold and

rebalance portfolio, or you could do these tactical trading strategies using algorithms that are pretty intense if you really want to get into them. So go to composer.trade to learn more and play around to these things. 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 Ritt Holt's

wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Ben, did you get your ticket to Future Proof? I hope so because we're speaking there, so I think don't we automatically get a ticket? It's September 11th to the 14th. And if you're on the fence, get off that fence and come join us. And we've been talking on the show about how our day job, we're talking to a lot of financial advisors who, not that they're disgruntable, but if they're looking for more for greener pastures and they want to come join us, that would be a good spot to come talk to us. By the way, I read every email that said that I'm a gruntled financial advisor.

We said we don't necessarily have to be disgruntled. It could be gruntled. And a lot of people said, hi, I'm gruntled, but I'd like to talk to you. By the way, we're doing a live animal spirits there. And I think we might even try to get some beers with fans of the show, potentially. Don't hold us to that, but it's possible. A few Miami vise. There you go.

All right. As the Wall Street Journal is want to do, I just love the interviews that they do with people. I honestly don't know how to get them, but they say that, rich Americans keep spending, rich people keep spending money. So I'm going to start with this, and then I want to go into some of their interviews. So they said, wealthy people actually ramped up borrowing the first half the year despite rising rates in a stock market route. So they said wealth management units at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America posted double digit loan growth in the second quarter. Morgan Stanley said mortgages rose 30% while securities backed loans and other loans grew

23%. And instead the current rates on those securities back loans are still like 3.75 to 5.75, but if people have a ton of money, they can get lower rates because they can up their collateral. want to talk about, because obviously, I think rich people are going to be fine in all this. If anyone's crying for the same case for rich people, yeah. So now they also had this article saying that the upper middle class is getting squeezed. And they define the upper middle class as anyone with an income between 75,000 and 127,000. That's basically more than 60% of the household. Probably like percentiles. Yes, that's how they break it out, I think. So I want to read you the start of this article here. Mark Yu had a profitable pandemic.

Like many Americans, he added to his savings and pulled in big gains from the stock market rally. He purchased a house in his new hometown of McAllen, Texas, then a duplex, then an eight-unit apartment complex in Cleveland. But 2022 hasn't been so kind. His expenses have grown because of higher costs for gas, groceries, and the dog food for his four German shepherds. The value of a stock holdings is shrinking. Four German shepherds. That's a lot of dog food. It's a lot of meat. A 33-year-old who's lived in the U.S. since 2014 is now taking on credit card debt and typically working seven days a week. Previously, he was stocking away. as much as $3,000 a month into a brokerage account. This year, a couple hundred is the most

he's been able to muster and hasn't been able to put in anything for the past three months. Now, I don't want to poo-poo anyone's financial problems because obviously inflation can be a killer to a lot of people's budgets. But look at this first thing. Mark is probably spending $500 a month on dog food. Well, it says he purchased a home, a duplex, and then an eight-unit apartment complex. I'm sorry, gas is not your biggest budget item right here. You literally bought a state empire. I'm just saying, sometimes I think people can blame... Takes money to make money. I don't want to like poke fun at people, but I want to say sometimes I think people spend too

much time blaming the government instead of looking in the mirror for their problems. It's the government's fault because inflation is high. My gas bill is up. How much money are you spending in gas versus that eight unit apartment complex you bought? Now, here's another one. Ken Barrow retired in 2018 as a physician assistant. Last month he returned to work, part-time driving vehicles for a car rental company three days a week so we could stop making from his declining retirement accounts. During the pandemic, I saved a lot and I was able to bank a substantial amount of money, he said.

Now I'm drawing on that savings this year. 69 years old. Don't do it. Just asking you. Don't do it. It says he cut back on driving. He cut back on restaurants. He cut back on being generous for his granddaughters.

And he traded in his Dodge Challenger for a hybrid to save money on gas. Now, again, I'm not trying to say that inflation isn't causing issues for people's budgets when you're retired. But I think also, part of the thing is you have to build into your retirement plan that you're going to spend down some of your assets and sometimes those assets are going to be down. If you're going to be retired for two, three decades, you're going to have four or five different bare markets, maybe more. Obviously, we've experienced two in the last three years, but I don't know. I'm not saying that inflation isn't bad. I'm just saying that sometimes people's,

the way that they plan out their finances can make it worse. Am I being too harsh here? No, not at all. In fact, you're being too unharsh. I think some people deserve responsibility. we could say that people should take personal responsibility for their own financial situation. And also we could say that inflation sucks and is hurting a lot of people, especially people that were irresponsible and people who were responsible that are just getting crushed by inflation through no fault of their own. So there's all different shades of black and white and gray here. I will say the upper middle class.

Are we sure this is a bear market? Because I think the White House might quibble. The White House might say, a bare market is when stocks fall 140%. By the way, the animal spirit's got a head. head of this one. We said two or three weeks ago that this is going to be the biggest argument, that GDP could decal, and I think it comes out Thursday, the GDP number. And we're going to get back to that. We're going to get to that later. People are going to flip out. By the way, I will say the upper middle class thing. I don't know what you have. It's your third time. We're not even

10 minutes in. Yellow card. Yellow card. Jeez. Okay. All right. You go. Listen, we're professionals. Hey, on podcasting, sometimes you have a crutch. Like, if you ask someone a question on a podcast, they have to say great questions so they can think about what to say. Or there's a lot to unpack here. This is how you transition, Michael. Maybe I need to get a new transition. So I think that the upper middle class thing, I don't know what I would have thought the range would have been. But I will say, I think a lot of those people probably are getting squeezed a little bit because you'll get this excess savings chart here from the Wall Street Journal. And it shows people who make 188,000 and above had the biggest excess savings over this

period. But I think a lot of people on lower income scale have been seeing massive raises in a lot of ways, especially in the service industry. And they got a lot of help from the government. And the people who are on the higher end, they did fine because their assets all went up. I think people in that middle, upper middle class, whatever you want to call it, probably did get squeezed the most because they didn't get a lot of help from the government. And they also probably didn't have the financial assets enough to make it through. So it's kind of like the middle class getting squeezed again. And real wage growth has been negative for a while, a few months in a row. Well over a year now.

All right. So let's get to this White House thing. You know, I got to say, I understand why Twitter did what it did because that's Twitter. But I found this to be not controversial, really in the slightest. What did Twitter do? I must have missed this. Twitter was hemming and hawing because of this post that we're about to share. That the White House is trying to say, disregard the-

For misinformation? Hold on. Let me finish. Disregard the GDP data release on Thursday. Because even though we might be in a recession, we're not actually in a recession. I'm kidding, but here's what they really said. The White House is for sure tipping us off that GDP is going to be negative on Thursday. Yeah, so that's material public information that I actually, you know what I did?

It's been a while since I placed a bet on Calci. I place a bet on Calci. Interesting how the betting brain works, Ben. On Thursday, as we just said, I'm telling you, on Thursday, GDP, will it be over 0%? Will it be greater than 0%, meaning will it be positive? I bet no, and it cost me 78 cents. So then I said, man, I'm going to bet a hundred bucks to win 20 bucks. That's like the juice isn't even worth the squeeze or whatever it is.

But if you get a 20% return on a 20% percent, exactly, exactly. It's not bad. All right. So here's what the White House said. They did a blog post. What is their recession? So people on Twitter were freaking out because they think that the White House is moving the goalposts. The White House said, what is a recession?

By the way, was this on Substack? Where's their blog? Did they steal this from a wealth of common sense? I wrote the same article two weeks ago. What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.

Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economist assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data. data, including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production and incomes. Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year, even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter, indicates a recession. I spot no lies. I spot no lies either. So not entirely controversial to me, but I understand exactly why people were up in arms about this. We talk about this. People are going to freak out if this happens and say the White House is making up their own definition? Because here's the thing,

this hasn't really happened much and it probably won't happen again where we get this type of situation because of the pandemic. Joe Wisenthal wrote this morning, every recession since the end of World War II, the U.S. unemployment was either climbing prior to the declared recession or it rose during the period where recession was declared. That's not the case in the first half of 2022. Since the beginning of the year, unemployment has fallen from 3.9 to 3.6. You can say the economy is bad, real wage growth has been negative. Shortages are persisting. Inflation is high. But this measure in how different it is from the run-up to previous economic. Some suggest the term recession may not be a good way to describe what we experienced over

the past several months. Basically, again, it's not a good situation. The economy is bad in a lot of ways. That doesn't mean it's a recession. Could not agree more. And I would also say that the first half of the year, even if we get these two quarters of negative GDP growth, was not a recession. However, I still think that we are going into a recession.

Or I would hint, I don't know what the odds I would put, I don't know, 62%. I think there is a greater. than even odds that we will see the unemployment rate tick up. I think we're seeing a lot of evidence that a storm is brewing. It doesn't have to be a tsunami, but we are getting evidence from Walmart, AT&T, Verizon, Shopify, go on down the list, and we'll get to all of that soon. So in review, not a recession, but could be going into one. Economy and political people are going to be arguing about this for weeks if this happens. And they're going to lose their mind. Quarters, months. Yes. So if we do get a recession, that is going to bring inflation.

down. Like, inflation probably is already coming down now based on commodities and gas and all this stuff. Do you remember how following 2008 crisis, I witnessed this personally from a lot of people. People could not get out of the doom and gloom mindset following that crisis. Yes. That's going to happen with inflation too, but in a difference. So I think Zero Hedge and Michael Lewis for writing the big short are personally responsible for like breaking the brains of millions of investors. Michael Lewis did it unintentionally. Zero Hedge did it on purpose. But I think millions of investors had their brains broken by that and they decided to buy gold and I'm never buying stocks again and all this stuff. I think that's going to happen with inflation. So inflation is

going to be the next big short in terms of when the inflation numbers come down, people aren't going to believe it or they're going to use different numbers or they're going to say the government is making them up. And they're going to be fighting this inflation fight for the next decade, no matter what happens with the numbers from here. People are not going to believe if and when the inflation numbers come down, even if it's caused by a recession. I think they're still not going be able to get out of that mindset. So I think inflation is going to be breaking some brains in the next coming years. That's what I'm saying. So what evidence are we seeing that inflation has peaked? Well, we're seeing interest rates come down pretty materially in anticipation potentially

of a soft economy. You're seeing all of the soft commodities roll over cotton, cocoa, sugar, lumber is down almost 60% from its highs. Wait, how is lumber a soft commodity? Lumber should be a hard quantity. I don't know. It should not. It's not. It's not. It's not. soft metals what's not coming down are meat meat is not coming down and what else yeah you're right it's so expensive butcher box raised my prices by 20 bucks a month a natural gas is not going to feed my family with fillets now natural gas is not coming down oh gas prices 36 days in a row and this is a bit stale so 36 days in a row gas prices continue to fall the national average is down 3 cents whatever it's down a lot i think i saw by the way this patrick de hang guy gas buddy

he's from Grand Rapids. Oh, really? I think I saw under 420 recently. All right, Walmart, this is their CEO, Doug McPillan, said, the increasing levels of food and fuel inflation are affecting how consumers spend, and that was Walmart giving their profits going to be lower than we think. I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist. This sounds like a cop-out to me because every single retailer we've been seeing

for the last three months has been saying, our inventory levels are too high, we bought too much stuff, now we're going to have to do markdowns. I think that they're blaming inflation on this. And I think sure, food and fuel inflation, like I don't know, are they asking all their people who come in why they aren't spending more money? I think it's just the fact that these retailers had way too much inventory

and now they're going to have to mark it down and they're using inflation as an excuse for their profits being lower. Is that fair? Partly fair. That's 100% true that they overordered because they were too behind, which no fault of their own on the being behind part. But also people spend 18 months just buying too much stuff. Then they overcorrected.

But are you trying to say right here on this podcast, sir, that inflation is not affecting Walmart customers? Do you think that people are buying less food because isn't it just like a substitute maybe? No, instead of buying Cheerios or buying the O's from the bottom shelf or something? No, but Walmart is not just a grocery store. I think that they're cutting back on everything else, all the discretionary stuff. Right, but that's the thing. People spend 18 months buying stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff. We need more stuff and consuming.

And now they're doing experiences, so they're leaving the stuff behind. Sure, inflation can be part of it. I think there's more to going on to it than that, though. I think you can't just blame it on inflation. I disagree with you because I think that a lot of the people in the middle to lower income don't have the means to spend on experiences. Have you been to Disney before? I think inflation is hurting them.

I'm sorry. Have you been to Disney? There's no way everyone there is high income. I'm sorry. If you go to people watch at Disney, I'm just throwing it out there. Not judging. I'm just saying. Have you ever been to a water park before?

Every millennial parent house is tatted. head to toe. I'm just saying. All right, this is interesting. I was looking at this the other day in terms of sectors for the market. So here's the sectors that are outperforming the market. So the S&P is down 16 or 17% this year. Here's the sectors that are outperforming. It's more sectors than I would have thought. Utilities is basically flat. This is as of the close on Monday. Consumer Staples is down 3%. Energy is up 35% still. Industrials are down 13. Financials are down 15 and materials are down 16. And health care is down 7. Health care is a winner. It's more sectors than I would have thought are outperforming this year. All we hear about is tech stocks. But so let's bring

the market down. More than half the sectors are outperforming. It's tech and discretionary. Yes. Because we've been over this a million times, the names that are keeping the market up are mega-cap companies that nobody cares about. United Health, for example. But as we talked about last week, it's also surprising that all the big megatech companies besides Apple are down more than the market. And the market is still holding up. Ed Yardine was on Bloomberg yesterday saying, I'm going to throw my head on the ring and I'm going to call a bottom. I don't know how you could call a bottom or a top of anything. But if, like, stocks did bottom, I think we're probably lucky things didn't get worse. I mean, this has not been a very fun year by any measure because stocks and bonds have

both done bad. If the stock market topped out at like a 24% drawdown, I think we looked out. If that was it. For S&P 500 index fund holders, I would agree. The NASDAQ got hit pretty hard. It could have been worse. Yeah. Well, it was worse. Nasdaq was worse. NASDAQ was 30 plus. Individual stocks blowing up. If we have a prolonged recession, then maybe stocks keep going down. I don't know. I wouldn't feel comfortable calling on bottom here, but Ed could be right. I hope he was right. All right. What else? Where are we going next, Ben? Oh, this is interesting. Bespoke had this data point. This is like a week's stale. So forgive me. By the way, it's Tuesday morning. What happened this morning? We found out that Shopify is laying off 10%

of its workforce. Walmart. There's a 10% number. I told you. Yeah. Every company starts with 10% of the workforce. They're not done. Nobody stops at 10%. Some consultants told that, like, just like someone said to economists, you have to use 40% anytime you're guessing something, 10% is the line. McKinsey made that up, and everyone else just went with it. Although, I'd be curious, I guess you don't get 10% left so all that often, but when you do get 10%, does it stop there? Usually feels like the first wave. Typically, right? That's the first wave.

All right, so the NASDAQ closed above its 50-day moving average. For the first time, it's 68 days. Said differently, the NASDAQ was below its 50-day moving average for 68 days. You have to go back to December 2008 to find a longer street. So we've been basically in an uptrend for the last decade plus for tech stocks. It's been relatively smooth sailing. So we finally got a downturn and now we're coming back up a little bit? I guess what I would say is, is that it?

Was that too easy? And I know it wasn't easy. It was the worst first half of a year in a long time. But so stocks peaked earlier in the year. Stocks peaked in January, what, second, third, something like that. And then they make their ultimate bottom. six months later, and that's it, feels like this could be longer lasting.

I want to say it feels, I'm literally making it up. That's how I feel. Counterpoint, the S&P was down 34% in 2020, and then it was down 24% in 2022. What? We've had two bear markets in three years.

We have 2020. Yeah, it does not count. It does not count. Not to me. Does 1987 not count? Nope. Nope, not at all. For what I'm talking about,

2020 is nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Two bare markets in three years. That doesn't happen very often. And yet, we're talking in circles. Oh, we've spoken a lot about how stocks are the best inflation hedge. One of the reasons why are the dividend component, which is very, very steady. The SEP 500 annual indicated dividend rate reaches $550 billion for the first time. This comes from, I believe this is Howard Silverblatt.

Look at this line. I mean, that's pretty darn smooth. That's a pretty good trend. If I'm a technical analyst, I'm buying this chart. That's a buy and hold. Isn't that what you and Josh say? I'm buying this. That's a never sell.

On the other side of nasty charts, the inventory to sales ratio, we're looking at cars, spiked in 2020 during the early parts of the pandemic when obviously everything shut down. Nobody was buying anything. And this reversal and lack of recovery is pretty startling. What is going on with cars? Why is it taking so long? I keep asking this and people keep saying it's just semiconductors that are so far behind. So I actually talked to, I have a friend whose family owns a car dealership.

And I was talking to him this weekend. And I said, this has to be tough for the family business because there's demand and no supply. And he actually said, actually, yes, the volume stuff kind of stinks. But guess what? Our profit margins have never been better because no one has the ability to negotiate. No one can talk down a price because it's basically take what you can get. So he said, and the prices have been rising because there is no supply. So he said, on a profit basis, we've never been more profitable.

obviously it would be nice if it could have more volume to make up for that, but the volume comes and then it's easier to negotiate. But I think here's the thing. When inflation goes down, the ability to negotiate is going to make a comeback. And I think that's something people, because of supply chain stuff and because of inflation, for the last 15 to 18 months, people have not had the ability to negotiate besides me with my cable company. Other than that, though, no one else can negotiate. And I think that's going to be coming back soon. I think that's a good thing for consumers, that especially like the Walmart and Target stuff about Walmart talking about their profit, that people are going to have some deals. And I keep telling people, like, I was looking at TV

prices. I got a TV I need to buy. Maybe you should too, if the line's still on there. But I feel like we haven't really had Black Friday the last two years because of supply stuff. Black Friday this year is going to have some amazing deals. So I'm saying if you can, if you're in the market for something, you wait and you buy stuff on Black Friday. There's going to be some awesome deals in markdowns. It's coming. All right. Real estate. They should have me on the Today Show talking personal finance. That'd be a great Today Show point right there. Which part? Oh, don't buy anything on Black Friday. Yeah.

Come on today. She'll bring me on. Why, this personal finance experts thinks you should wait. Yes. All right, you've got mortgage demand dropping to a 22-year low. What are we looking at here? What are some metrics? Oh, applications for a mortgage to purchase a home drop 7% for the week.

And we're 19% lower than the same week in 2021. A little bit of relief there. Home prices, we just got Kay Schiller data this morning. Home prices in May. We're 19% higher, 19.7% higher. year over year, this marks the second month of slower increases. Oh, whoopty-do. So in April, the annual game was 20.6, now it's 19.7. This can be the inflation thing. Inflation peaked. It's not 9.2. It's only 8.7. Yes. We can build on that, though. I just want to put in context

the home price gains that we've seen. I was looking at this. I'm doing a piece, and I'm going to talk about it on Portfolio Rescue on Thursday as well because it was a question from someone. But I looked at the real home price gains. That's after inflation. Because someone asked, Do home prices do better during inflation than, like, stocks are bonds? So I looked at them all. And I broke it out by decade. So going back to the 1930s, I used data from Schiller. And this is, again, real home price growth by decade.

And then I looked at, I used the 2020s as a decade too. When you say real, you're using government, CPI or Shata? Whatever Robert Schiller uses. So the gain from 2020, his data only goes through like the spring of this year. The gain on a real basis, this is even after counting for high inflation. was like 21% from the beginning of 2020 through the start of 2022 after inflation. That gain in two years and change is a bigger gain than all but two decades since the 1930s. So in the first two years, basically, of this decade, we've seen bigger price gains after

inflation than all but two decades. And one decade was a 2010s coming from a low. And the other decade was the 1940s when people came back from the war and bought houses. So what do we think is responsible for that? COVID, people moving out of the cities? I think it has to be. And I think remote work is going to be a big thing. People look back on in years and go, oh, yeah, all those rich people from California and New York moved to Austin and Nashville or whatever. I don't know any other way to explain it. We're starting to get some confusing data out of the housing market. Redfin has this, I think it's a weekly report that they release on some data in housing. And they're showing. Hopefully, Redfin, hopefully they don't go out of business because

their stocks down like 95 percent, but they have amazing research on the housing market. The content's at an all-time high. So looking at the four-week rolling average of price drops, that is spiking. It's at the highest level since 2015. But on the flip side, you're still seeing some homes come off the market very quickly. So 41% of pending sales are under contract within two weeks. So I'm not quite sure how to square those two circles. I guess that means that the good houses are going quickly, but the people that are listing their house at ludicrous prices are facing a reality check. How about this for a strategy?

You put your house on the market for a high price. You give it a week and you don't get anything and you drop the price, then people swoop in. Is that what's going on right now? Potentially. Did anyone buy the house across the street from you yet? Not yet. I will definitely let you know what it sells. Oh, this is interesting.

We've been talking about a lot about what's priced in. So Connors then tweeted a week ago, probably the worst week for housing market news flows since March 2020. and ITB, which is a homebuilder's index, is up 3.5% of the week. What's it doing now? Well, the funny thing is it was falling as you were getting good data, too. That's a tough one to handicap right now, trying to handicap the home builder sector with rates rising and price cuts coming in and people not buying as much, I don't. But is that the kind of thing where the majority of people who are building,

we talked about this, the rich people doing fine and barring more money these days, do rich people even care and just buy right and keep building right through this kind of thing? No. I think that they're psychologically impacted by inflation just like everybody else. And financially, a lot of their stocks are falling. I think higher rates have more to do with what's going on the housing market than inflation. Inflation, for all intensive purposes, what was your tweet yesterday? Intensive purposes? That was a good one. Thank you. I think inflation is, if anything, a good thing for the housing market because... I think it would have said that home builders down 40% might have been overdone. But now they had a pretty

nice balance. There are no man's land as far as I'm concerned. I have no idea. All right. This one was interesting from John Burns, Real Estate Consulting. They looked at housing as a percentage of GDP and went back to 1959. They look at the housing costs and utilities, furniture repairs and maintenance, and then construction. And it moved around a little bit. It's been relatively stable, but it makes up 20% of GDP if you add all three of those up. Housing is a huge component. I do think that if you want to have a macro shock worry, mortgage rates staying high or going a little higher and really messing with the housing. market, that could be your, like, bigger macro shock than people think right now. Counterpoint to myself, if I may. They're coming in a lot. But counterpoint. Someone asked us a couple weeks ago, well, if housing prices fall and people who bought in in the last couple years see their housing prices fall, aren't they screwed?

And doesn't this whole house of cards fall? And the thing is, as long as people keep their job and can still service the debt, who cares if housing prices fall? Maybe from a psychological perspective that hurts, but that doesn't mean that. that the economy is all of a sudden going to fall. The reason that it happened last time is because people took on loans that they couldn't service and they had to justify the mortgages that went up and they couldn't make the payments. That's not what's happening now. Yeah, I would dismiss those concerns. All right, who's this from? CB Insights did their second quarter FinTech report.

And not surprising at all, late stage deals are down bigly, down 41%. However, midstage, so I don't if that's like maybe B-CD. I'm not sure how they qualify this. It's flat and early stage hasn't budget at all. Can you imagine calculating your drawdown if you were a company that was in the late stage about to go public? And you were counting your stock options. And you say, I'm worth $8 million when we go public. And now my company is marked down 70%. How many people do you think are in that bucket? Is that millions? And the millions, probably. Millions? It's got to know about millions. Millions of employees? I don't know, hundreds of thousands.

I'm not saying tens of millions. Okay. That'd be a lot. You're so out of touch, Michael. You don't think there could be two million employees at private companies that had a seven-figure stock portfolio, private stock portfolio? Two million people? Two million? That's a lot.

I was just throwing it out there. All right. Okay. This is almost as bad as me trying to guess how many gallons fit into a bathtub. I'm still getting wrecked for that one. I really don't think two million is that high. I mean, maybe I take it down to a million. Maybe hundreds of thousands.

Come on. Two million. How many hundreds of thousands are we talking? Two or like seven? All right. Okay. All right. Let's get into bad quarter guys.

Oh, the quarter app that we've been talking about for weeks now, it just keeps getting better. They're doing this thing called segment where they isolate or they break down like the where the revenue is coming from. So for the iPhone, for example, here's what services. Here's the Mac. Here's the phone. Here's the watch. Geography breakdowns. It's phenomenal.

And this week is a busy one. So it's Tuesday morning after the bell. Geez, Louise. We've got Microsoft, Alphabet, Spotify. We had 3M this morning. We've got Visa. We had McDonald's this morning. It's too much.

It's Coca-Cola. On Wednesday, we've got Facebook and Shopify and Ford and Amazon and Apple. Oh, man. We've got some energy companies on Friday. We've got a week. We've got a week. All right.

So let's get right to it. I am very much looking forward to DoorDash and Uber. Last week, I placed an oil. order, and it was $100, it was for me and another couple. It was like $100, 110 bucks, something like that. To get it delivered for DoorDash, it was $170. I said, I'm not doing that. In this economy, what are you nuts? I have more or less given up on using DoorDash. I got on my car and went to go pick it up. Oh, what happened was I went to the Ginos in Seaford. And I gave for them, I said, hi, here for pickup. Name, Michael. Don't have a Michael. What did you get? Tell me what I got. Like, did you call the Ginos in Baldwin? He said, I might have. I called the Genones and Baldwin. It was too far. I wasn't driving. I called Genos and I apologize profusely.

Sorry, called the wrong place. So I say all that to say that... Wait, did they give you a refund? I didn't pay. I would have made you eat that cost. Okay. I didn't pay. I felt a little bad.

I didn't pay. All right, so Nick Fong, who is Nick Fong, you might ask? He's one of us. Nick Fong was the gentleman that was quoted by the Wall Street Journal. He said, I definitely have been cutting back on delivery and other excess spending. My girlfriend has said multiple times, why are we ordering you? DoorDash. Let's just go pick it up. So, Ben, and listeners who can go to our blog and look these charts, look at this chart. Before you get into this, let's say in 10 years there's an

expose that says the Wall Street Journal is literally making up these quotes and making up names for people. 10% chance? I'm kidding. I'm only kidding. But would that surprise you? Nick Fong is a pretty generic name. But yeah, he's 29, lives in Los Angeles. It could be a real person. Multi-food delivery spending and order volume changed from a year earlier. Needless to say, this spiked in the pandemic, and has been going straight down since. And if we do go into the recession, this number is going to collapse and go negative. Nobody's going to be doing this. You're right. It's so expensive. The interesting thing, too, is that you hear these stories of a lot of people who say, I'm just going to be a DoorDash driver to make up some extra money.

That's probably going to go away for a lot of people, potentially, as an option. The stock of DoorDash looks like junk. Uber does not look much better. Does Lyft do food delivery? I don't think so, but they're basically at an all-time low as well. Oh, man. Yucky, yucky stuff here. All right, so we had Netflix report last week, and they lost a million subscribers, which was less terrible than expected. The stock had a big pop. It's held most of that gained sense, but the report was interesting. Reed Hastings said it's definitely the end of linear TV over the next five, ten years. I take umbrage with that quote because I, for one, am never, ever cutting the cord, ever. I'll be the last man on earth with cable. I would say maybe

20 years, but 510 seems ambitious. So in their earnings report, they showed the cumulative volume, they sourced it from Twitter, so they looked at engagement, and they compared Stranger Things Season 4, Obi-Wan, and Top Gun. And these numbers just anecdotally don't jive with my mental framework. They're showing that Stranger Things did, I don't know, five times as much volume on Twitter. I got the explanation here. I got the explanation. As Top Gun Maverick?

Certainly not in my age cohort. This is because young people love Stranger Things, and young people are the ones. Okay. But it actually wasn't a bad season. It was just so long. I feel like they're trying to jack up their numbers of we had a billion hours watched of this show, whatever their metrics are using. It was ridiculously long.

They pulled it off way, way too much. They need to, like, get an editor. I don't know if we ever discuss this. Are you a junkie action guy? I feel like you're not. Okay. Are we talking about the gray man here? Yeah.

Did you watch it? Yeah, I loved it. I loved it. Okay. Here's a thing. If it goes to like Fast and the Furious Nine, it's like too cheesy for me. But I thought the gray man was the perfect. The plot of the gray man was ridiculous.

If you're one of these people that wants to poke holes. Yes. It was so entertaining. Like there's a difference between an entertaining movie and a good movie. This was an entertaining movie. And I thought Ryan Gosling was fantastic. And Chris Evans as a bad guy is very viable. I thought the movie was.

If you just want to turn your brain off, I liked that movie way more than I thought I would. I think Netflix is getting better at making movies. That was the first one to be that felt like a Hollywood movie. It did. Well, they spent $250 million in it. That movie, if you're an action fan, gave you everything you want. If you're going to poke holes in The Grey Man, just maybe chill out. Relax.

If you're going to be one of those people, maybe killing like 150 people in a town square to kill this one guy, probably not the best idea, but he's a hard to kill. It was very satisfying. Very satisfying. This was interesting. They broke down the share of US TV viewing in billions of minutes viewed. I mean, look at this. Netflix is more than CBS and NBC combined.

Wow. Disney Plus and Prime Video and Hulu and Apple are like, I don't know, half of Netflix combined all of those are? Netflix is still the king. What are you looking at? You're going to talk me into buying the stock. I mean, Netflix is still the king. I don't want to pat myself in the back, but they did have less worse.

news after their quarter last week and they popped up. And let's just say I got a few emails St. Ben called it. Nailed it. Just first time ever for a stock pick. I do want to buy the stock. I just think there's no hurry. All right. So Snap reported. And it was a debacle. It was just a straight up debacle. Can I make a comment here? Please. I think one of your blind spots in stocks is that you think Snap is more important than it really is. Me? Yes. You get really excited about on SNAP reports, and I think it's just not an important company at all. I don't think it tells us anything about the broader market or the economy. Well, you might be right. I guess my excitement is because this is just pure advertising, but Eric Jackson tweeted, so meta fell in tandem

with SNAP, but Eric Jackson tweeted a chart of the earnings moves a day after. And I would just think that SNAP and meta, snap and Facebook move directionally the same. They don't even a little. That was pretty surprised to me. It is interesting. So maybe you're right, Ben, that Snap struggles are idiosyncratic to the app, just not being able to monetize their user base, which could definitely very well may be. Alex Morris, who's got the substack, the science of hitting that I've spoken about multiple times recently showed the stock-based comp as a percentage of trailing 12-month revenue for Snap.

And it is pretty steady at 26, 27%. 43% of revenue in Q2 2019. 43%? All right. Well, credit to them, it's come down a lot. They were in growth mode, I guess. I wonder why tech crashed. Jeez.

But Facebook, for example, is only 14%. And we're looking at stock-based conferences as a percent of sales. 14% versus 26. It's quite a... I was about to say, in my head, I thought Delta, I don't like... That's a giant red flag for me. If people say Delta in conversation... Oh, as opposed to change?

In defense of us, I almost said it. I didn't say it, but I almost said it. We're on a podcast. We're on a financial podcast. If people say Delta in conversation... conversation in normal life, I'm out. Back to last week. If you say Delta, you also say per annum.

Oh, yeah, yeah. What else do you say? It's robust. I had an old colleague who used to always say granular, and it always just grinded my gears. Let's get a little more granular with the data here. And I want to be like, you're just trying to sound smart. That's it. You're trying to sound smart.

Let's double click on that. So Morgan Stanley said that Snap's ad business is less developed than previous thought. This increases execution risk. TikTok ad dollar share loss risk. Morgan Stanley agrees with me. But what's interesting is a double downgrade to underweight with an $8 target. I don't know what the stock is that now. What does that mean?

I saw this. What does a double down grade mean? Going from like buy to hold to sell because you're going down two pegs? So Mark Mahaney wrote, we had expected soft snap results, but the magnitude of the weakness still surprised us. When fundamentals change this dramatically, it's hard for us not to change our investment opinion, however belated the call. Credit to him. It's like, listen, we were wrong, we were late, but the facts changed, sir, so he changed

his mind. Double down. Way to go. Okay. Sure. All right. So, as I said, we had Shopify this morning. They report later this week.

They laid off 1,000 workers. What's the stock doing? The stock is down. It's smoked. Ooh, 17% today. It is below the March 2020 low. Is that nuts? Wow.

It is below the pandemic low. It's down 82% from its highs. It's only nuts because of how they came off the low. This might be the round trip of all round trips for Shopify. Well, this is just so emblematic of the pandemic, just pulling forward so much and making things weird. The stock is where it was in June 2019. I know the market is forward looking, blah, blah, blah. The company is so much bigger now than it was then.

And the stock is at the same price. So Toby, what's his last name? Lutki. Amazon should buy them. Yeah. He said the mix reverting to roughly where pre-COVID data would have suggested it should be at this point. Still growing steadily, but it wasn't a meaningful five-year leap ahead.

Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make, and I got this wrong. Now we have to adjust. So they had 1,900 employees in 2016, $10,000 in 2021. And look at this chart. U.S. e-commerce adopted growth rate as a percent of addressable retail. It's spiked and it's come down. You know what else he said? They had 2 million employees who were going to be millionaires with stock options that are

not worthless. Two million. All right. Hang on, Ben. So, all right, never mind. All right, listen, I'll probably take a big owl on that one. They reported annual revenue worth of 86% in 2020, 57% in 2021, but they're warning that 2020 numbers would not benefit from pre-pendemic trends. All right. So you have Shopify saying that. You have AT&T saying that they're warning by customers starting to delay their bills. Verizon, this surprised me. Verizon shares had their biggest drop since 2008. They fell 6.7%. What a stable stock that is. A junkie stock, not a good stock, but it only fell 6.7% making its worst drop since 2008. It's not even a big drop. But isn't that the reason that you buy that stock is for like a 7% dividend and then you just lost it all in a day?

Well, if you don't sell, you don't lose. Hello, earth to bend. Pay to wait. Yes. So they forecast the second straight quarter of cuts added to concerns that consumers are pulling back. Listen, who are you going to believe? All these companies are the White House? I'm also saying, though, like, the companies obviously are saying this stuff, but if you're a CEO, this is when you do the kitchen sink, though. You really lower expectations as much as you can right now. Yeah, I get that, but.

It's not like they're lying. I agree. You think that they're trimming fat just to, now, maybe they're using this as an excuse, but I don't know why a CEO would want to nuke their stock 20% just to, like, lower expectations. Is he lowering the barges so he could raise it? I mean, maybe. I don't know. So this chart is from pragmatic engineer.

It was in an Eric newcomer substack. And it says how the big tech hiring market changed in five months. Amazon. I mean, all the big names. And there's been significant changes. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter. It's just the dominoes are falling. It's one after the other.

And it's not just tech. So Weber, the grill. Ben, are you a Weber guy? What do I have? I do have a Weber grill. Yes. I don't know how to grill. My wife does all the grilling, but we have one.

Yes. That's a revelation. I didn't know that. My wife is an amazing cook and she knows where around the grill, so I just let her handle it. Fantastic. Net sales performance was affected by slower retail traffic, both in store and online in all key markets. So people aren't buying grills. They're buying experiences, right, Ben?

Did you know that Weber has a restaurant? You can go to Weber Grill and they have like amazing cheeseburgers. Not here. We're in Chicago, a Weber Grill restaurant. Interesting. It's not bad. The company now expects adjusted EBITDA to be marginally profitable, which is materially lower than the internal budget related to the previously announced fiscal year.

Okay, what else do we have? Walmart yesterday, they didn't even announce earnings. They're just getting ahead. They put out a press release from the CEO, the increasing levels of food, we spoke about this earlier, but the increasing levels of food and fuel inflation are affecting how customers spend and while we've made good progress, clearing hardline categories, Powell in Walmart, U.S. is requiring more markdown dollars. Is it possible that a lot of the stuff that these companies were taking to margin

and complaining about inflation on the way up that they increase prices to make up her inflation, is it possible we're seeing a lot of that margin just come back to normal levels? Because profit margins for large U.S. corporations have stayed elevated throughout this period of high inflation. And accelerated. Is it possible? Yes. That we're just seeing them give back some of that margin.

that they were getting used to for 18 months. Definitely. I think that's possible. We spoke about Bedbeth and Beyond and the debacle that earnings call was the other day. The Walsh Journal did a big expose. Is that what you call it? Is an expose a deep dive? Sure.

On Bedbeth and Beyond and what changed over the last decade and how they fell. So the part that was interesting to me was their CEO who just got canned came in with a mandate to modernize the home goods chain in November of 2019 from Target. Whereas Chief Mergent, he was in charge of product selection and had successfully launched private brands. We've seen this particular story over and over and over again. Did he also walk away with like $15 million for his trouble? I'm sure.

Where somebody is successful in one company and they're going to pick that up, move to another company and duplicate the success that they had. Business, life, and podcasting, it's a team sport. it's not this guy he didn't make target what it was it was target it was everything that they had credit to me for not using a Warren Buffett quote right now no use it please well what is the quote about I don't know it's something I can't something along the lines of good business bad CEO versus bad business good CEO the bad business went out that kind of thing yeah I don't remember that is a good quote I'd rather have eh you know what we're talking about don't you all right the Wall Street Journal had an

article about the price of Air Jordan flipping is now going down. Now, I'm glad they're sharing this stuff because it says like limited edition reselling of Jordan's is down 30% and every transactions at places like stock hex has fallen. These are the kind of things that you only hear people brag about on the way up. I went on stock X and I flipped this and I flipped this collectible and this. We're not hearing nearly as much about all that stuff anymore. That's the kind of thing that you hear about it when things are going up and then when they go back down, you don't hear a soul talk about that kind of thing. So as a personal finance expert is now the time to scoop up cheap Air Jordans or should we wait?

You're the Jordan connoisseur between us. We need technical analysis on this. That's what we need. All right. I got nothing. Oh, man. We haven't even got the crypto yet. Look at this chart pen that I made.

This is a little bit stale. So forgive me, I made this last week. Look how Bitcoin and S&P 500 are just basically moving in lockstep. That is pretty good. Thank you. How surprised, if you put a truth serum in a lot of, I'm sure they have the truth serum and the gray man that they could put in someone's neck, the true crypto believers, if they were really being honest would say, I'm surprised at how much of a risk-on-risk off asset crypto is.

In their heart of hearts, you know a lot of them thought, this is going to be a diversifying asset. This is going to be something that hedges inflation. And it certainly has not done any of those things. They have to be a little shook by what's transpired, don't you think? Yeah. Well, I am. I mean, the hardcore crypto people. When I first bought Bitcoin in the spring or summer of 2020, one of my primary reasons was because I want something that's going to look a little bit different than the stock market. Well, that turned out to be false. I think the thing that we found out is when the market goes up, crypto goes up way more. When the market goes down, crypto goes down way more. For now. Yes. For now. Indisputable. All right. So the Wall Street Journal to this big article

that was pretty heartbreaking about some of the people that got burned at Celsius and Voyager, they got to quote, Mr. Jachelsky. It's a tough name to pronounce. Mr. Jachelsky grew nervous less It doesn't it remind you of, you know, when you read the articles in the onion and they just, like, show a picture of a guy and they make up a name? Sometimes that's what it feels like. I'm with you. So, Mr. Jocelsky grew nervous last month when Celsius froze withdrawals, but he was reassured by an email from Voyager chief executive, Stephen Erlich, telling customers their dollars were, quote, as safe with us as at a bank. Then on July 1st, Voyager froze withdrawals days later, it filed for bankruptcy protection. Oh, man, he really said that in an email.

It's as safe as a bank. That's really bad. I hope that guy goes to jail. There is a distinction between Voyager, Celsius, BlockFi. We had Zach on the podcast last week, and I thought Zach gave a pretty candid interview. They did not do this. They did not get withdrawals. They never stopped paying interest.

Still to this day. So they're getting lumped in. I think it's an unfair criticism. I think that BlockFi definitely deserves some criticism. So what is the SEC doing? I saw the SEC said they're going to invest in Coinbase for listing some coins that could be securities on their platform. What are they doing?

It seems like they're not doing anything to help any of this with people losing money. It seems like the SEC could make this a lot better if they wanted to. More news on that. The risk management part, this is tough. So Bloomberg did an article with the Three Hours guys. And they said after Lunas implosion, Zew, who's from three hours, said lenders were, quote, comfortable with their financial situation. and that they allowed them to keep trading, quote, as if nothing was wrong.

As court filings have now revealed, many of these loans have required only a very small amount of collateral. Now, we spoke with Zach, and they made a loan to three arrows, I think in June. I don't know if it was after this Luna implosion. I don't know when the dates lined up. But if it was, that's just, I'm sorry, that's tough risk management. How could loans have been made after that with little collateral? That's tough.

Is it business risk where these companies are saying we have to keep? this machine going and we need this. I think that's a big part of it because this, so a lot of the article was pretty cringe, but I thought this part was fair. The three hours guy said that lenders to the firm benefited immensely when we were doing well because as we were doing well, they could say, look, I make $200 million a year from three hours financing business. Give me a 10x multiple on that.

And now my own company is worth $2 billion more. All of these kinds of things. And so like the risk departments were very relaxed about the kind of risks that we were taking. I think that is definitely, definitely true. Yes. Right? The three hours was a huge source of revenue and multiple expansion for a lot of these lenders. There's no doubt about it. They had to do it to keep their business growing. The last thing, we'll move off of this. I just want to say that Ben, on the podcast with Zach, you said that one of the problems with crypto are the people, and there's definitely a lot of that. Obviously, not everybody, but they have fun staying poor

crowd, all of that sort of stuff. One voice, breath of fresh air, voice of reason, whatever you want to call it, has been Matt Hogan. They did an update to the crypto market, and it was incredibly calm, rational, and reasonable. So we'll look to that. If you are curious about learning what's going on outside of the hype, I highly suggest people read that. I'll take a look. Okay, Derek Thompson had this great chart from our world and data, and it shows how people spend their time by age. And this is Americans, who they spend their time with. And so it's time spent alone, time spent with a partner, time spent with family, children, friends, and co-workers. And Derek says, your time spent with family peaks at 15 years old, which makes sense. People become teenagers and

they go off to high school and college. With friends at peaks at 18, which makes sense. Co-workers at 30. Children peaks at 40, which is just a brutal loss for us, like especially for me. That's going to be tough. Your partner peaks at 70 and alone peaks at the end, of course. This may be feel feelings. This may be a little bit of motion. Honestly, yes, because it's pretty darn close to my own life. It's within a plus or minus a few years. I think this nails my situation on probably most listeners. But the fact that I've got only three more years until my peak's time with my children, that makes me sad. I can already feel my daughter's eight. She's already starting to do more camps and sports. And I will say, though, the time spent alone goes up and up and up

over time, I am way more comfortable spending time alone. Maybe it was a pandemic than I would have thought when I was younger. I kind of find that refreshing at times to spend time alone. Do you get that or no? Do I? Yeah. Hello, I'm the king of being alone. I love it. Okay. Yeah. I enjoy my own company. It's not bad. Yes, but you're right. This chart does bring a lot of, it's just really well done. So let's move on to recommendations. So recipe's Paul Sorvino. So we lost Paul Sorvino recently, Jimmy Khan, Ray the Yoda. I feel like there's one other. Oh, Polly Walnuts.

A lot of mobsters, huh? Man, Joe Pesci better not be next. So I think that Paul Sorvino in his role in Goodfellas was underappreciated. Like, imagine Pauli in a lesser man's hands. Yeah, there could have been a new movie about that character, too. That's on Netflix, by the way, right now, just so you know. I think just so you know, I think I told you this. Three weeks ago, I rewatch Goodfellas in fall for the first time in a long time.

Start to finish. Phenomenal. Actually, I skipped the last 10 minutes. Oh, and one last thing. Last week, I made a mention of the fact that all of these food hacks on Instagram never, ever, ever work. Have you ever used a razor to cut garlic like poly system? And then it would just evaporate in the frying pan? I don't cook, so no.

Okay. This is a revelation. I didn't know you don't cook. No, I haven't. I'm not a person who cooks at all. I grew up making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Okay. Garlic makes your hands smell for a week.

So to be that intimate with clove of garlic is tough. All right, so I saw a nope on the release night, made $44 million highest opening weekend for an original film since his last film, Us. All right, so here's my thing. Like most people, Jordan Peel's Get Out was absolutely incredible. One of the best movies of the last 10 years. And then I saw us by myself. And I left the movie like, did I like that? What just happened?

I'm not sure. I wasn't sure how to feel. And you know what? here's where I am. If you have to think about whether or not you like a movie, you're working too hard. I don't want to work hard, which is why I like The Grey Man. So I did not like us. And unfortunately, unfortunately, I did not like nope, really even a little. There was parts of it. Isn't it an alien movie? Yeah. Or is that it's too hard to say. Okay. No. So there was parts of it that I enjoyed. It wasn't all bad. I didn't like have a bad time at the movies. It didn't like suck. But it wasn't good. And it makes me sad because. I left and I texted my friend, oh no, my friend who's in the movie industry, I texted him, oh no, is Jordan Peel, the new M-night, meaning the sixth sense was like one of the best movies ever. And then he's just been coasting off of that movie. And it makes me say, because I really wanted to like this movie. I had huge high hopes for- I agree with you that Get Out was

easily one of the best movies of the last 10 years. And I didn't watch us because it seemed like it was more like Get Out was a subtle horror movie. That one seemed like more of a horror horror movie, so I just said, eh, not for me. I didn't watch it. Yeah, again, things about us that I enjoy, but overall, I'm never going to rewatch that movie, and I'm definitely never going to rewatch Nope. And the critics will like this because it's like beautifully shot or whatever. It's well done. Some of the acting was- The Rottenmato, the critics are going to do higher than the audience. Some of the acting was phenomenal, but just disappointed. All right, last week we spoke about how box office has done very, very well this year, like very well,

and will it continue for the rest of the year? We were pessimistic. I think we were wrong. because on the back half, we got some big hits here. We've got, what's coming out? Bullet train is going to do well, I think. Black Adam, the Rock is going to be huge. Black Panther is going to be massive. And Creed 3 is going to be big. And Avatar.

They need another Creed movie, really? Yeah, I don't need it. I'm going to go see it. Come on. Avatar. I watched it too. Avatar is going to do a billion dollars easily, maybe two. I freaking love Avatar.

I do too. When's that come out? It's been 10 years since the last one. That's coming out in December. So actually, I'm optimistic that 2022 is going to be a banger of a year for the box office. Oh, and another Indiana Jones, too. Can he a break? With Harrison Ford.

Did you finish the old man? I did. All right. I assumed it was going to be a one-season show. I read the book. The book starts off amazing. The first 30% of the book is great, and then it tails off. I felt like the show kind of did that too.

It should have been a one-season show. I feel like they spread it out to make it. But I liked it, but I don't want a second season. It was good, but it shouldn't have been a two-season show. I feel like they stretched it out. The first two episodes were awesome. And I felt like it didn't get bad, but it just slowed down and lost. I'm not looking forward to the second one. One more. I mentioned the gray man. I rewatched the Mexican this weekend. So that's Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, James Gandalfini, J.K. Simmons. Not a good movie, but very entertaining. And also like a movie that was made in the early 2000s that they would never make today. Why? Violent? Not violent, just kind of like a fun, I felt like a guy. Richie kind of movie, but just a bunch of different stories going on and they all kind of come together. This is pretty easy, right? Julia Roberts' greatest smile in history.

Oh, yeah. Right? Nottie Hill is my favorite rom-com. Actually, when Harry met Sally, but that's number two. Close. All right. That's what I got. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. We went long on this one. Why? It was a busy week. Subscribe for watching on YouTube. NASDAXX down 1.4%. Review. Yeah. Subscribe, rate review. All those things. All that stuff. All that stuff. All right. Animal SpiritsPod at gmail.com and we will see you next week.