Animal Spirits Podcast - The Market Cap of Taylor Swift (EP.324)

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

On episode 324 of Animal Spirits, Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson discuss: one of the best years ever for the Nasdaq 100, people who want to see the financial system burn, getting back on trend with economic data, what if housing prices were just undervalued before the pandemic, Canada vs. Miami housing prices, why married people are happier, and much more! Find complete show notes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by the Compound Network. That's us. You're listening to us right here right now. I don't know if you know this, but we've got five shows a week. It's almost too much, but we're just getting started. Monday, Animal Spirits Talk Your Book. Tuesday night, live on YouTube with a podcast the next morning or maybe even the next night. That's what are your thoughts?

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We're doing the thing. Josh wrote a post about it. I think we're up to like 900,000 downloads a month or thereabouts on a $10 million, I was about to say dollar, annual run rate download. So thank you to the audience for making this possible for tuning in to one or several of your favorite shows here. It means a lot to us. We're so lucky that we get to do this for you every week.

And more to come. And we love doing it too. And the feedback from people who watch and listen is half the fun too. So we always love to hear from people. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions.

Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Speaking of loving to hear from people, actually put a pin in the podcast. that is this not the best time of the year how so football season well just back to school back to life back to reality as much as i love the summer i'm done it's enough i'm ready for the kids to be back at school although i still got logan for another week which is annoying don't get me started uh we've got football around in the corner pretty excited about that it's just this is this is my type of year the the the 90 degrees is fading i'm not into that i love it i won't give you best time

of the year because I do love the summer. But I was taught, like, we had our Labor Day fill from like Friday to Monday being outside all the time, being on the water. And we kind of said, all right, we've squeezed this drive for the summer. We need, like, I hate winter with, I just hate it. Besides Christmas, I just hate winter. But I think sometimes you need the seasons to give yourself a break. And then something to look forward to. So I love seasons. I'm a big season guy. I just like that there's something, there's always something to look forward to, right? I look forward to the fall for football. I look forward to the winter for various reasons. And then once you done with the winter. Oh, we got spring, thonged out, and then boom, you're into summer.

And then you started all over again. All right. And then when you reach middle age, you talk about the seasons more. And can you believe how fast summer went? But I really feel like that's an obligatory thing at this time of the year. But has this not been the fastest summer? How do we, how do we quantify that? Was this literally the shortest summer? Now they're all the same amount of days. I don't get it. Seems to be speeding up. All right. Last week, Mia Coppa here, hand up. Last week, I was talking about an order that went that, went awry that I was none too pleased with. This is one of my favorite stories of the year when you, when you sent the follow up to this. Can I just kind of set the picture here and then you can

give the. Sure, go ahead. You complained because your hex-clad pot pants got sent to some Brian guy in California. And you were saying, hey, just back up. Just setting the stage. So I am, I'm still rolling with the pants from my wedding, which coming up on 10 years. And then I decided to like cheap out and go, uh, the Amazon basics route. And sometimes you get what you pay for. So I said, you know what? Time to step up, put my big boy pants on and get some some real pans. Back to you, Ben. And then you were like, what's going on here? They sent it to the wrong address. I don't know. I don't know what I'm talking to customer service. No one. And then you send an email after the show last week and fill us in on what the emails. I, I, this, it's kind of unbelievable.

Well, that the person who got the pans is a listener of the show. Yeah, well, it's not just a coincidence. So the person, Brian, who got the pans, I'm thinking like, how did this happen? So Brian got the pans, guys have managed, told me to send the return label, he'll take care of it, he'll mail it back. Then, on Friday, I get a call from... No, no, wait. Say why Brian got the pans? I'm going to.

Okay. on Friday, I get a call from Hexclad customer service. And I said, did you happen to hear about us on the podcast? And he said, yes, our CEO did actually catch wind of that. So I said, let me ask you a question. What merchant do you use to send this out? Is it like, like, I don't know, Plaid or Square? Who processes this payment?

Shopify. And immediately, ah, light bulb. So, Brian, two, in December, 2021, I sent Brian something from the store. I don't know if it's a mug, a shirt, whatever, yeah, okay, whatever we gave Brian. So I guess that was the last time that I used something on Shopify, maybe last and only. So Brian's address was, I guess, like, stored as the default. And so that explains how Brian has my pants. Now, the fine people at Hexclad were such menches, which I don't know if you could use the plural.

I feel like you can't pluralize mensch. But anyhow, they said, you know what? Tell Brian to keep the pans and we're going to send you new ones. So all's well that ends well. Hexclad, hand up. I'm sorry. I was not hacked. There's no nefarious activity.

Although I do think, maybe this is, I do think that if you, if you. your billing address does not match your shipping address, there should be a pop-up. Not on HexClan. I'm like Google or whoever. There should be a pop-up. Are you sure? Maybe AI can help here. But that is pretty funny that that was your default address from that long ago.

So not only does Brian get, you know, a free t-shirt, he gets a free set, free a couple of Hexclad pans. So I'll be back with the proper review. Because I'm excited to use, I'm excited to get some new. pans up in here. Yeah. I just think it's hilarious, the people that reached out to you for this. All right. I want to talk about the year-to-date returns in the NASDAQ 100. All right. So tech has been on fire, obviously, since like, I don't know, 20, like early to mid-2010s. Technology has been the thing, right? The NASDAQ 100 has been like the best way to, I think, have that idea of tech. What was the, maybe it was you who gave this stat that like there were zero growth managers that beat the NASDAQ over the whatever period.

I think that was Jeffrey Patak. Okay. Whatever. The NASDAQ 100 has been hard to beat because it's market cap waiting on steroids. This year through, this is through, I guess, Friday or Monday. We're taping this Tuesday morning, September 5th. Market just open. Great to be back.

Great to be back. The NASDAQ is up 42.2% coming into the day today. Geez, and rice. I look back on Y charts at the pre, they show the previous 10 years returns, right? So this goes back to 2013. This is the second best calendar year, if the year to stop now.

And the best one was actually 2020, which is hilarious because the NASDAQ felt like 35% that year. It was up almost 50%. Were the returns from 2019? But all those great years. So 2019, it was up 39%. 2020 was up 49%. 2021 was up 27%.

Last year down to 33%. And then now up 149%. then now up 42. And obviously, part of the reason it's up so much this show is because it's down so much last year. But it's for as good as the returns have been in the NASDAQ 100 or the last decade or so, this is the second best year. And it's a year. I keep kind of harping on this point. But it's a year when the Fed has continued to raise rates. Rates are above 5%. Inflation is high, falling, but high. And I just don't think anyone had this like pegged as like, oh, this is going to happen. The NASDAX is going to go bonkers again.

in a year with such high rates. Can this continue? I mean, are we going to be talking about this for the next five years? Oh, at 2024, the NASDAQ was up 30%. And then down 10 and then up 25. Yeah, anyway, just kind of a crazy one. Good one from the Carson Group here. We talked about this a little bit about how things are looking up for bond investors

and diversified 60, 40 investors, more because of the bond side of the portfolio than the stock side, right? And we've talked about this in the past, but I like this chart that they use. They use the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index, which I think is now called the Barclays one. Did they go back and forth? Which one is it? Bloomberg Barclays? It's the Bloomberg Barclays.

I don't know. Is it? I don't know. So they show the eight-year rolling returns, and then they yield to worst at the start of the period. And you can see the correlation here is about as close as you can get for basically the starting yield is your best predictor of eight-year returns going out. And so I think, obviously, the yields are not as high. as they were in the 70s and 80s or even 90s. But starting at, you're looking at, I think,

almost like 5% now for the ag or something. It's not bad. Check this out. I'm dropping this in the dock. Look at the scatter plot. Starting yield on bonds. I think this is a 10-year. And forward 10-year returns.

It's not quite one-for-one, but it's, you know, it's about as close as a mathematical relationship in the entire, like, investing in universe than you get, as you get. We've been talking in recent weeks about how, Like a simple diversified portfolio, 6040 is in a much better place today, not so much because of the stock side of things, but because of bonds and bond yields being much higher. I think I looked last week, the yield to the average yield of maturity on the Barclay's ag is like

5% now, which is higher than it's been in a long, long time. And Carson Group has a really good chart here showing eight-year rolling returns with the starting yield to worst at the start of the period, so starting eight years prior. And you see the correlation here. I've done this historically. It's like 0.9.95, something like that. It's really, really close. Basically, your starting yield will give you,

if we're talking, I don't know, 7 to 10 years in the future, 95% of the return. It's the starting yield is the thing that matters most. Corey Hoffstein did this a while ago. I wrote a piece about it saying, how do you do the return attribution from the bonds in the 1980s? You remember this one? He wrote it like 2017.

And like 75% of the return came from the starting yield. 25% was from lower, like a lot of people assume, bonds did so well because rates fell. And that did help a lot. But it was mostly because the starting yields were so high. I made a scatter plot showing the starting yield on 10-year bonds and the forward 10-year return. And this is about as tight a relationship as you get in all of investing is bonds and the starting yield tells you more than all that you need to know.

So that's the point for a diversified investor. you don't need stocks to carry the day anymore. You can have much lower returns on stocks if you have a diversified portfolio if bonds are bringing up the rear and helping out with a much higher yield. This is a good thing for investors. That's a great thing.

Right? It should be. Ryan Dietrich tweeted, it really is amazing how this works. N-A-I-M official exposure index. What does that stand for? North America Association of Investment managers That's pretty good, actually. You put it up right at your rear end.

I think you might be right. Sounds good. Was above 100 in late July the highest level since the late 22. Now after a 5% minor pullback, it is at the lowest level this year. And I guess what this is showing is just how quickly the pendulum of sentiment swings. The vibes change faster than the allocations, though, is always the case. Yeah. Right?

Vibes move way before anything else. I'm sure if you looked at. a sentiment indicator versus actual asset allocations, that relationship is way, way worse than what bonds would show, right? People become more bearish or bullish than their portfolios would show. Totally. Most portfolios don't change all that much for most investors. Yeah. So we had that garden variety correction. We had a nice little rally. I don't know. Someone did tell us what garden variety means. It was basically like, in a a garden, there are certain things that you, okay, when a gardener plants a garden, there

are basic plants that always get planted, tomatoes, peppers, beans, et cetera. That's why it's called garden variety. Right? Isn't that what you have in your garden? Simple stuff like that? Keep it simple. My tomatoes have bloom, not to brag. Okay. Last week on the show, we spoke about September, and here we are. It's been historically the worst month of the year for the stock market. And in fact, it's like a big outlier. So Bespoke has this chart showing the average monthly change for the Dow going back 100 years. It's the only month that's been down on average over the last 100 years. And it's been down on average over the last 100 years, over the last 50 years, and over the last 20 years.

Now, Ben, you just mentioned like people's emotions, maybe changing facts on their portfolio. I would say that this should be a data point that has no correlation. please do not do anything with your portfolio based on this. And in fact, in fact, why is it selling May and go away and not sell in August end? Because it doesn't rhyme. Yeah, I mean, you only only investing, I only invest in things that rhyme.

This is a true story. It happened right here in my town. One night, 17 kids woke up, got out of bed, walked into the dark, and they never came back. I'm the director of Barbarian. A lot of people die in a lot of weird ways. You're not going to find it in the news because the police covered everything all up.

On August days. This is where the story really starts. Weapons. Workday knows there are two kinds of people in business. Backward thinkers and forward thinkers. And when you're a forward thinker, you need an AI platform that thinks like you do. Built to evolve with your organization, Workday reimagines how you manage your people.

people, money, and agents for long-term success, bringing all your most valuable resources onto one powerful platform so you can add value even faster. Workday, moving business forever forward. So Ed Clissold from Ned Davis Research has a great, like, all-contrere type of thing going on. All right, so the S&P 500 fell in August, as we know, 1.8% garden variety. After surging 19.5% year-to-day through July. The 13 previous times that the S&P 500 was up 10% through July and then down in August,

it rose every time September through December. So every time through the rest of the year by an average of 9.9%. Now, Ben, I see you smirking. And I love these sort of stats because it's repeatable and it's not complete nonsense. Like there's data here. And all that it's saying is, listen, when the stock market is up more than 10% January through July and falls in August, 13 times the market's been higher. through the rest of the year, every time.

I'm smirking because this is the kind of stuff where every rule of thumb, like, can be disproven. I feel like everything in the markets can be disproven if you want to find something. That's like, that's like one of the best and worst parts about the markets is you can torture the data any way you want. And I'm not saying this is data torturing, but I'm saying if you look hard enough and, like, have enough rules, you can, you can, like, you can change the way that these data points look.

And I think it's, that's one of the maddening things about the markets for something. people. Totally. So maybe don't take everything. People want there to be ironclad rules that like, if this happens, then this happens. Don't take everything at face value, take everything with the grain of. Sand. No, but this is, but this data point is not like when the S&P is up this and the sky is green and there's wildfires in Canada, like, no, this is basic shit. When the market's up a lot in the first half of the year falls, it continues to to rise to the end of the year historically. That's just, those are just the facts. I'm sticking with my 20% gain is way more likely than finishing the year down, which I did a while

ago, just because 20% gains happen a lot. Yeah, good call. All right, here's a faceblower for you. Retail, this chart comes courtesy of daily chart book, which again, worth subscribing to if you're a chart lover. Okay, retail investor flows have reached new record highs over the last month. So this chart shows retail investor flows like a three-week average. And then there There was a huge breakout during the pandemic. The pandemic changed investor behavior, maybe not forever, but maybe forever. And then there was a huge jump. Then it went sideways for a couple of years.

And now it's re-accelerating. So you would think, wait, didn't all the people, all the Robinna type people, all the Reddit type people, didn't they all get washed out in the bare mark from 21 to 22? Actually, no. So can we say that the speculative access and behavior that happened in late 2020 and early 2021 was a good thing for the markets because a lot of people stuck around and continued to pour money into the markets. Is that fair? Is it a good thing? I think it's complicated. What I said at the time was people don't get unaddicted to gambling. Now, I'm not saying

that all of these people are like junkies. I don't mean to say it like that. But the market can be an addictive substance. But you're right that all of these crypto fell 80% and a lot of these speculative stocks fell 80 or 90% in some cases. And if that stuff didn't get people completely out of the market and people are still putting money in and I think it's a net positive. All right. I'm going to quote myself on a tweet here and I got a bunch of feedback on this one. I said in 2010s, people who wanted this system to fail, right, the financial system should fail. They blame the Fed.

If it wasn't for the Fed, the financial system would have failed. Now in the 2020s, people are saying, well, I blame fiscal policy for not allowing the system to fail. The system would have failed. It wasn't for fiscal policy. And I said, call me crazy, but most elected officials and Fed people and Treasury people, like, they don't want the financial system to fail. So if you keep looking for reasons for this whole system to fail, I'm sorry, most of the time it's probably not going to happen.

That someone's just going to, oh, systems going down, let's let it happen. Right? You would think that's fairly intuitive. And of course, I got a lot of the crazies in my mentions about this, but I got a few people who are like not all the way perma bear, but close, close enough. And some people said, well, listen, I just want to. to see lower housing prices and starting valuations like they were in the 80s for my kids. I want my kids to have better access to lower stock prices and lower housing prices,

which sounds great in theory, right? That sounds amazing. But guess what you have to have for really lower housing prices and really lower valuations? Like an awful economic period where your kid probably doesn't have a job and people are out of work and their wages aren't rising. And that's unfortunately the rub here is that like the, the thing you want to bring things back in balance, and I think that there's more to the housing price thing than the stock.

Like, you can't just create more stocks. Like, we could, there's stuff we could do policy-wise to make it housing more affordable. We could make it way easier to build houses. And I don't think that would necessarily have to mean housing prices crash, but they just don't go up as much anymore. You can't do that for the stock market, obviously, right? You need 20% interest rates to see eight times price earnings ratios. And I don't know what situation makes it happen, but anyway,

I just think that that whole mindset of the financial system collapsing is, I don't know, good luck. And then this, there's a piece. Wait, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. That mindset that you're describing is a pretty fringe group. Like, that's not, that's not, I mean, those people are loud maybe on Twitter, but the people that want to see the world burn is such a small group of people that it's probably not even worth giving them the time of day. Maybe it is just like the Twitter thing, but the number of people who are fed haters and

financial system haters that are constantly just spamming my messages on Twitter. Anytime I have something that goes a little bit, you know, outside of my usual fin-tuit group. This is definitely a case of Twitter. It's not the real world. But you also saw, like, they're definitely over-indexed on Twitter. The tweets in the last couple weeks about people saying that, like, if you indexed for inflation, things were better in the Great Depression than they are now. Do you say, and I know a lot of this is just outrage bait and stuff like that, but I think

there's enough it's enough of a non-fringe that people believe this kind of stuff and think like if the financial system just fails everything would better that I mean that's true right it's not it's that's true but that yeah so this this Ethan Mollock tweeted this this cynical genius illusion we talked to this in the past how like pessimism just seems more just more intelligent than optimism and it's a worldwide survey of 200,000 people finds it cynical people are thought of as smarter, but that in reality, cynics test lower on cognitive and competency tests. Stephen Colbert said, cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the furthest thing from it. I totally, if you, like, want to sound smart, you can by being pessimistic and cynical.

If you're, if you're bullish, you just sound naive. It's like, well, you don't see the risks? What are you an idiot? Don't you see how things can go wrong? But this is the whole thing about like, listen, I would have been right if not for A, B, and C. True. It's the same thing. By the way, Michael Burry's, how much are you spending his puts?

$1.6 trillion? I can't remember. His puts are under one. What's that? Oh, so it's not working? I mean, are you looking at the market? I don't know when they expire, but they're taking a bath. Does Michael Burry count as retail inflows or just still have a hedge fund?

Maybe he's propping up retail inflows. It's all Michael Burry. All right. U.S. personal consumption expenditures. Look at this. Right back on trend, this is real. Consumption race is higher, even with higher inflation. I think the higher inflation piece is impressive,

but I think even more impressive is just the drop in the pandemic and then just the reacceleration to trend. Again, this is consumption adjusted for inflation. It's still on trend, basically since, like, look at, if you did your R2 on that one or whatever, R2D2 thing, R squared. I'm taking away your CFM. designation. By the way, I got an email this morning. Hi, CFA. You know those dumb-ass emails that

just, it's like high first name and that it's just sometimes just not even trying. All right. Joy Politano, rapidly rising interest rates have sent direct costs to service the national debt up dramatically. Look at this chart here. Federal interest payments are soaring. And this is one of the reasons that I thought that rates just couldn't get too high because I thought politically someone eventually is going to jump on this and go, hey, listen, the Fed is jacking up the national debt because we're having to pay so much for interest costs. I'm waiting for a politician to jump on this and make this a political issue. Don't you think?

That's coming. If rates are to say higher and say, Jerome Powell is adding to the national debt. Yeah, I'm surprised we have. Well, the election's coming up, so just wait. So there's a chart from, where did I grab this? I think this is Apollo. U.S. net interest payments as a percentage of the federal government receipts. When does this, and obviously it's breaking out.

when does this start to matter and if so what are the implications for this i mean it depends who's in leadership role of the government obviously but is it possible that 2020 just kind of broke the it's like the stephanie kelton thing of the debt doesn't really matter if some people think that and then it doesn't matter until you say it does i guess i don't know that it's like we'll just keep spending money we'll be fine has anything bad happened from us spending so much money yet no okay i know i'm i'm not as rhetorically i've not idea. I'm not, I'm not, but I'm saying if that's, but I'm saying if that's, it's, I think it's, it's, it's all political will until there's a really big crisis. And obviously the,

the, the inflation was like a, our first dealing with this. So I don't know, maybe if we have this soft landing from such high inflation, it's a bad thing because people just kind of go, no, we made it through that, not, not too bad. It was pretty quick. Let's just keep spending. Yeah, I don't look at this chart and think we're all going to die, but I don't know, doesn't this, can't this lead to a really bad outcome? Like the end of the financial system? No, I don't know. Just like, I don't know, something bad.

I know the government is not a household and it should be treated as such, but I don't know. But don't you think that the only, I mean, the bad thing would be if, if higher debt costs just push, like, if it's a pie that's not growing and higher debt costs make it so other stuff is not being spent on, right? that's a bad thing. Other government services are being left by the wayside. But it's just, isn't inflation the biggest risk always from something like this? What do you mean? It's just like substantially higher, like government spending being so high just means that the, I think the biggest risk is always going to be higher than average inflation. But I don't think this is government spending. It's, it's just like what it costs to borrow, what it costs to service all of our debt, government debt. That's what I mean. But then we just

print more money to pay off the debt. It's like, Like a, some people would call it a Ponzi scheme. It's not, but that's what. All right, something else back to trend. Jason Furman was tweeting about how real average hourly earnings are kind of coming back down. And he did the trend through like 2018 and it was below trend. But then he said, well, let's look at 20, go through 2007. So you have more cycles.

You have a couple recessions. And it's 0.6% below trend. This is real average hourly earnings. But basically kind of back on trend. We had a huge spike. Then we had the below and now we're back. And so the whole people following behind thing has happened for the last 18 months or whatever, but it was short-lived and we're just kind of back on trend.

And if you look here, this is kind of the way things go. Above trend, below trend, this is all cycles happen. It's not bad. Like, look at this next one. I did inflation rate, U.S. quits, and U.S. job openings. Okay? So they all kind of follow the same track. And I did it on different, you can do it on different panes here in Y charts, you know?

I didn't want to be accused of doing an access chart crime, right? I'm very aware of the chart crime. So inflation's coming down. So they all kind of rose at the same time. They're all falling at the same. So is it possible for things to just go back to normal? Like Matthew Bowesler tweeted that. Well, the quits thing was insane during the pandemic.

Right? That was the fastest way to get a raise was to quit your job and get a new one. Yes. But I guess the hard. I guess the hard part is, like, how do you distinguish between things getting back to normal and things overshooting and leading to bad outcomes? You just, I mean, obviously, you just don't know. Well, you just wait and see.

Yes. All right, let's talk about crypto a little bit. So, Grayscale won their case against the SEC. Now the ball is in the SEC's court. They still did delay the decisions on the ETFs for another. I think it was 45 days, more days kicking the can. The gray scale, the GBT discount shrank rapidly. Last reading was, it was at a 19% discount to NAV.

And this is like the whole crux of the issue is that the GBTC closed and fund does not have the arbitrage mechanism that ETFs do. So it could trade at a wide premium as it did. in the first couple of years of its life, which led to a lot of the nonsense. Now it's had a severe discount, and if and when they're able to convert to an ETF, that will shrink ostensibly overnight. And so, GBTC is up 123% in the year as this discount has narrowed, more than twice as much as the 55% year-to-day return on Bitcoin. It's still way underperforming over the last five years.

Bitcoin is up 285% in the last five years. Gray scale is up 94%. Oof, big oof. But even with the, I don't want to steal a take here, but I think it was yours. But you basically, was it you who said, like, I don't think Grayscale wants this to convert to an ETF because they're just earning 2% per year on this or something. They're not going to be able to charge the same amount of fees on this as they would if it didn't convert to an ETF.

So I think when they were doing all the handwringing a couple of years ago that I have no evidence of this. I'm just speculating that it was sort of a charade. Like, let us convert. You know, but I think now they need to. Well, yeah, there's no other choice because I need to have us coming one way or another. Right. When this thing converts, how much money is just immediately going to leave?

That was just waiting for this discount premium to, or this discount to close. You mean people that came in late and are just waiting for people that were using it as like an arbitrage opportunity. So, well, I don't know. You think people are going to pay taxes just to get out, just get into a cheaper vehicle? Or money that's just been stuck there for years, people saying, why, would I sell this asset that is trading at a discount? And then if it, once that discount closes, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I just, I don't think so. I think so, because there's going to be a price war. All right. So let's say there's $16 billion in the thing. I mean,

how much leaves? A billion? I think like a third of it could leave. No way. I would hardcore take the under and I'll, I'll, I'll bet you a sushi dinner. I don't need sushi. But you know what I'm talking about. Either do I. All right. So they get an ETF. Within six months, they're down a third in assets. No way. Time stamp it. Okay. That money's going to I-shares or something else that has a lower fee.

Nah. No. So anyway, the pop, poof, evaporated. There was a big fat pop. And they had Bitcoin traded from like 25 to 28 or something. Now it's back down to wherever it was pre-announcement. So even despite the 55% year-to-date return on Bitcoin, it just seems nobody cares, nobody's interested.

Tom Dunleavy tweeted almost $300 million in digital asset outflows over the past seven weeks. Centralized exchange volumes at 2020 levels, reaching peak bearishness apathy slash apathy. Of course, we don't know where the peak is, but or peak in apathy, bottom in price. But yeah, nobody cares. It's hard to see the ETF being this savior to the industry. Why? I'm saying it's not like the, not like the ETF has raised interest in it so far. You think the ETF is going to be a savior to the crypto industry?

No, probably not. I mean, remember when they launched Future's going to be traded at the CMA? Matter of fact, I think that was the top in 20, whatever it was. 19? I don't remember. This morning, though, so we always talked about like the use case, the use case. Where's the use case? This morning, somebody from Visa, actually, the head of crypto had Visa tweeted,

Visa expands stable coin settlement capabilities to merchant inquires. Now, I read the tweet that I'm going to be honest. I don't understand most of this, but I mean, I mean, Visa, blockchain? Say no more. Hello, Visa, blockchain. So, I don't know. Maybe, maybe, I mean, this has been a speculation all along with that.

Tradfai uses blockchains to bring efficiencies to their, to their ways of doing business. It's behind the scenes for the financial system. We spoke to Fidelity last week. When's a podcast dropping on that? Next Monday. Next Monday. Okay. Right.

All about Fidelity Digital Assets and what they're doing over there. So that's coming on Monday. All right. I want to talk about idiosyncratic risk in real estate, which, man, that's just a word I love saying idiosyncratic. It is good word. That's a word that makes you, in the finance world, that makes you sound a lot smarter, right? Yeah, I like it. It's a good call.

Yeah. Okay. So I got an email last week on, I think Wednesday morning. I'm in kind of an old school we work building where my office is. It's just a bunch of a little small businesses, doctors office. and insurance companies, and I just have a single office for me. It's just, just me here. I'm holding down Ritthold's wealth, Grand Rapids, by myself. I have an office. I've had it for seven or eight years. I get an email from the building manager, and they just bought this building like 18 months

ago probably. And so whoever sold made a good, good timing on getting out of commercial real estate, but said, hey, a pipe burst on the third floor, there's three floors, and water is rushing down, and it happened at four in the morning. So the fire... I don't know how they got alerted to it. Fire stations, the fire trucks came over at like 6 or 7 a.m. shut it off. And so water was running for three hours for a burst pipe. And so I come to the office to check to make sure all my computer podcast gear is okay. And I was, there's three inches of water in the hallway.

I had to take my shoes off to walk through the hallway. Just broken stuff everywhere. And office on the left side of me, office on the right side of me are flooded. just total flood again three inches of water my office is completely fine i don't know how it happened i got lucky but they had to have like this crew come in this restoration crew it was like seven trucks and they're ripping stuff up and they're putting these huge industrial fans down and they're turning stuff off and they're spraying for mold and it just got me thinking about like that's like the the thing you don't hear about in investing in real estate is like the the one-off thing

that can just screw you. Obviously, I'm sure there's some insurance or they'll probably be okay. But I can't imagine owning a building like that and have something like this happen and having to deal with the ramifications. Your index fund is not going to call you in the middle of the night and say a pipe burst.

Right? I'm not saying like, don't invest in real estate, but it just made me think of that, right? That it's, there's a lot of, there's a lot more stuff that can go wrong if you're not diversified. More stuff can, you know, can go right too.

But the range of outcomes is just wider. I was at the dinner with a friend of mine the other night, and he had a phone call, and it was probably 10 o'clock. And now he's not a real estate investor. He's a general contractor. And one of his clients had three inches of water in their apartment because, I don't know, whatever, something pipe or whatever, whatever. But yeah, this should have happens.

And not phone calls you want to get, but it's phone calls that you will get. right that's a problem uh all right is this a chart crime all right i want to talk about this a bunch of people tag me on this someone posted on twitter i mean it certainly is believe it or not housing affordability hasn't changed in last 40 years the median new house today is almost a thousand square foot bigger than 40 years ago price per square foot inflation adjusted basically is unchanged since the late 1970s could we rewind to the believe it or not part because i'm going to go with the or not so here's the here's the problem with this so i i looked at the actual source

with this article. My first problem with it is it stops in 2020, right? So I think you could have made the argument through 2019, 2020 that, and I did, like adjusted for inflation and interest rates. You wrote a post on that. Yeah. And it was like basically unchanged. Two years ago, that, that, that held water. But it said in 2017, in 2017, the price per square foot of a new home was only 4% more than 1979. This is adjusted for inflation. But it stops in 2020. Luckily, a resident actually guy on Twitter, Jake, Economic, took the data through 2023. Now you can see it just, right, it just takes off. Come on.

Don't tell me that buying a house is not expensive. Adjusted for anything. Affordability is right now is the worst, I'd say, that it's ever been. And that's, especially when you mix in the fact that the supply is so low. But the thing, that's the crazy thing is through the 2010s, housing was still very affordable. And then in the blink of an eye, it became unaffordable. That's the hard part. Here's one for you.

Good luck buying a house in Miami. Median home sales in Miami rose 17% from a year earlier. In the four weeks ending August 27th, the biggest increase of the metro area seen since October 2022. Biggest increase of all 50 most populous U.S. metro areas. They said the funny thing is, unlike most big places that had a huge influx of housing, Miami never saw housing prices drop. So housing prices never dropped,

and then now they're increasing almost 20% again, which is just kind of crazy. They also said two out of every five buyers in Miami are paying all cash. So it's just rich people coming in and buying up Miami. Median home sale price was up to $380,000, up 4.8% from a year earlier. That's the biggest increase since October. I'm still waiting for these monetary policy lags

to hit the housing market, because that should be the one that gets hit right away, right? I know people keep saying, just wait, the lags are happening. They're coming. You know, credit to Goldman, I was reading one of their notes this morning, and apparently they've been saying that they don't buy the notion that the lags will, that the policy impact lag thing. That doesn't make sense.

That's not in English. But you know what I'm saying. They don't buy it. They're not buying it. They say not only is the impact not going to show up on a lag, it's not going to show up at all. My retort would be things happen so much faster now that you'd think that that policy would get priced in, that the financial system moves way quicker than it did before.

The other thing would be it would just, if rates stayed at this level, then eventually there has to be something that happens. Like, it can't. But if inflation is falling and the Fed cuts rates over the next 18 months or so, then I don't know. How can you call it lags at that point? I don't know. It does seem unsustainable, but, you know, the hell do we know.

So they had, they also had the housing payments are up 17, 28% year over year. You know, we've shown this chart before, but it's at an all-time high again, almost $2,700. There was a story unfortunate about this couple that asked on their registry put for a down payment fund. So they said, give us money for a down payment as a wedding gift, which I actually applaud them for. It's kind of sad. It has to be that way. So then it says they couldn't find anything, couldn't find anything. They found, I think they were in Florida.

They found a 900 square foot one-bedroom condo listed for 300K, also 600 extra of HOA fees. They had a 7% mortgage, $2,300. I don't know. That seems expensive to me. It's just crazy to me how much that 7% mortgage just kills you. Also, our HOA fee is the biggest scam in the world. Like, you hear about some of the condo fees people have to pay.

I don't know what that stands for. Homeowners Association? Yeah. But, like, if you, like, I mean, New York is the most egregious example, but some of the fees you have to pay to live in a condo building. There's no way it costs that much for upkeep for these places. So where does it go? Just to the coffer? I don't know.

That's what I'm wondering. You know, we spoke earlier on the podcast about Brian, who happened to be listening to the podcast last week and got my pants. The craziest story. And I'm sure I told this at the time. This was years ago. You know, we've been doing this podcast for a long time. We have over five years. years right coming up we started in november 2017 i believe that's right so i bought an apartment

a co-op in park slope in 2015 and there was never not sound like a ski city to me why brooklyn is called park slope i don't get it it sounds like it should be a ski city in utah uh well there's a park prospect park and uh you know the the the the city slopes downward, I guess. Anywho, there was no money in the bank for this building. There's only like five or six units. And in the bylaws, there's a flip tax because it's a very small building. They don't want anybody buying and selling. And the flip tax was in place for four years, which is a long time, right? Four years is not a flip. And so I sold my unit with like three years six months, three years, eight months, whatever it was. And these jerks in my building

wouldn't let it go. I had to pay like a two percent tax or whatever it was, two percent of the purchase price. Why do they care if people buy and sell? Well, because it's a family, it's, you know, it's families there and they don't want a lot of turnover. Okay. But four years, that's excessive. So anyway, so they said no. They hit me with the flip tax. And then, so I probably complained about it on the podcast. And some, I got an, email. The person who sold me the apartment. So the person that I bought from, the person that they bought from is a listener. So basically my grandparents, my grandpa of the apartment. He was the one who put the flip tax in place. So he apologized for me, but what a small world.

What if you get someone who buys into the building that you don't want to be there? You want them to get out. That's a great point. Now you're holding him in there. That's a great point. All right. We've looked at this before. This is from The Economist. Real housing prices since 2000.

It shows Canada, Britain, Italy, U.S., France, Germany, Japan. Canada is just off the charts. I wrote a piece in, I think, 2017. I wrote a piece in 2017 saying the Canadian housing market is a crazy, crazy bubble. It didn't really matter. Yeah, should have, should have. That's the Stanley Drucker Miller or George Sill. You see a bubble forming, you go in to write a blog post.

Britain is way higher. France is way higher. The U.S. still doesn't look. Italy is falling. I guess if you want a place on Lake Como with George Clooney, that's a place to buy. I keep coming back to the idea of, I don't know, just what if U.S. housing prices are, if we don't ever, if we don't like have some government policy that forces builders or incentivizes builders to build more homes, I think U.S. housing prices are still going to be undervalued for like a long, long term.

Hey, maybe the guy who did that tweet was right. Maybe it's not a chart card. Maybe U.S. home prices are cheap? Certainly not cheap. But I mean, are we really going to look back in 30 years and see like housing prices not go up most of the time a little, even if it's not as, I don't know. We got an email. Hi, guys. As you know, housing account is bonkers. Now three of the big five banks have disclosed that 20% of their mortgages are negative amortization, which means, the monthly payments aren't enough to pay the interest. What? And the remaining interest is getting added back to the principal.

Oh, boy. Okay, I just learned about this. Do you know how Canadian mortgages work? I know they're like very short term, right? Let me explain this to you real quick before the rest. I learned about this. Someone sent a story about this. So they're fixed payments, but the interest rates are variable.

So all it does is if rates go from 3% to 7%, it extends the life of your mortgage. or less money goes to your principal and more goes to interest. So the payment stays the same. It's not like they're jacking up payments, but the amortization thing they're talking about here, basically instead of whatever, 60% of your payment going to principal,

now 20% is or something. Wait, let me ask you a dumb question. Is that a better system than what we have? No, because eventually if you're underwater like they're saying, they're going to have to either extend the loan, you're paying more, or... It's certainly not a better system. It's not a good thing.

We're lucky that we have things the way they are. Well, actually, you know what? Because, yeah, because how many people are actually impacted by rising interest rates? What is it? Two-thirds of people? How many people have a fixed-rate mortgage below 5%, like 90% under six? Anyway. The other thing is, people in Canada, they benefited when rates were falling.

They did amazing when rates are falling, having a variable rate mortgage. So everyone benefited on the way down and everyone's getting hurt on the way out. So better for inequality maybe. All right, anyway, this is possible because in Canada, okay, we already discussed this. Yeah, pretty wild. But wait, it says, and their new amortizations get reset to a maximum of 25 years. What if you've got like five years left and then all of a sudden rates go up and then you get, you're like, sorry, you've got another seven years. So that's what I don't know.

Maybe people can, in Canada, can let us know. I don't know if that means you have to make, like, a big principal paydown to get it more in line. Like, if that's the 25-year thing, like, they can't give you a 50-year loan. The banks aren't going to do that. Do you have to, like, just do a principal paydown? All right. Another email. Random Bank of Dallas.

Bought my mortgage. 3.07% with 17 years left. How is this a good move on their part? What am I missing? I couldn't care less, but for them, isn't that, like, buying a 17-year bond at 3.07%? Maybe they'll package it with other mortgage and sell, blah, okay. No, this is not like buying a 17-year bond at 3.07%. Because even though that's your mortgage rate, the prices on these bonds have adjusted

so that instead of them, they're not getting a 3% coupon. They're probably getting closer to, I don't know, whatever, 6, 7, 8%. Well, no, yeah, they're buying the bond at a discount. Yeah, they're buying the bond at a discount. Which raises is a good point. It's trading for 80 cents in the dollar or whatever it is because of the change. We were asking about, we were wondering why are spreads so wide on mortgage rates versus the 10 year?

And I think we got, actually, we got a long email about this. It's because prepayment risk. Right. Bond buyers are like, no, sorry. I know that as soon as rates go down, all of these bonds are going to get refinanced. And so I'm buying them at 8%, but they're not really going to give me 8% to maturity. So whatever the number actually ends up being. Obviously, nobody knows the path of interest rates, but that's a big reason why the spread

between mortgage rates and the tenure is where it is, because everybody knows that there's a ton of refinance risk. And it's also prepayment has been extended now, too, because a lot of the bonds that are at 3% are not getting prepaid. And so they know the duration is even longer. In the past, you would assume a mortgage bond is going to pay off in, like, I don't know, an average of seven or eight years. if that duration gets extended to 12 to 15 years,

that's a whole different kind of bond. Yeah. Ben, you got a new car lease. Okay, I want to talk about this here, but we're talking to car dealership guy later today, actually, for a podcast that's going to run, I don't know, next week. Saturday. We said we're running five days a week.

We're giving you an extra one for free on Saturday. And so I got a new lease, and I was just shocked at how I thought my car payment was going to go up to the moon. because auto rates are like 9% now. To the health. And I was pleasantly surprised. I might have got lucky, but I'm going to talk about a car dealership guy, and I'm save it for that.

Also, new car smell, just on my kids. The best. My kids are like run out of the house and go into the garage and open the door and smell my car and come back. And I'm like, hey, hey, hey, quit open the door. You're going to use it all. My new car smell and my Jeep is just about gone. So enjoy it while it lasts.

Yeah, because you have the top coming down. All right. We talked about this before. I think a couple weeks ago, we talked about, how, like, if you're married, it's the same as having 100K added to your salary. If your divorce is, like, taking, subtracting 90K, something like that, to which a bunch of people replied, if you just get married and divorced a bunch of times, that's like an arbitrage for 10K. You're just flipping the coupon.

But the Atlantic had a piece, and they looked at America's happiness rating from 19702 to 2018, and there's this huge drop off in 2000. Now, my initial thought would have been, oh, Internet. that's got to be it. It's internet. Social media. Internet is making people more unhappy. This researcher, after slicing the demographic data every which way, income, education, level, race, location, and gender, Peltzman found that this happiness dip is mainly attributable to one thing. Married people are happier and Americans aren't getting married as much. This number shocked me. In 1986, 6% of 40-year-olds had never been married today. It's 25% of 40-year-olds. And so he's saying, and they even said in this article,

Listen, we haven't, like, verified and dug through the data yet, but his whole thing is it's just fewer people getting married means more people are unhappy. And he didn't really come away with a reason, though. Like, why are married people happier than people who aren't married? Because you only have to do half the chores, boom. Dual income households. I don't know. I couldn't. They didn't give a good answer.

Maybe it's just that we need companionship. Is that the simple answer? Yeah, it's lonely being lonely. I was going to talk about this in recommendations. I watched National Lampoon's vacation. It was on rewatchables recently. I think it's one of my favorite rewatchables of all time. It was Van Lathen and Bill Simmons and Chris Ryan,

and they were just dying the whole time. You could tell that these guys had seen this movie like 20 or 30 times. And I told you, if you watch it once, you're probably not going to laugh that much. I do need to rewatch it. I did chuckle the first time a few times. But it's the kind of movie where you kind of go,

oh, that's funny. But then if you watched that, I watched it, I watched half of it about myself and my wife the next and I'm like, hey, why don't you watch the rest with me? And it's the kind of thing you go, oh, here comes the part with this. And it's like, it's just better to watch it with someone else and it is to watch it by yourself. All right. Last week, we talked about disaster insurance and how my, my hedge for climate change is living in the Midwest. This is from the Washington Post. At least five large U.S. property insurers, all state, American family, nationwide, eerie insurance group, Berkshire, Halfway.

Warren Buffett's getting on this early. I've told regulators that extreme weather patterns caused by climate change and led them to stop rating coverages in some reasons, they say they will cut out damage caused by hurricanes, wind and hail from policies underwriting along the coastlines and in wildfire country. It's like people are just going to be kind of on their own for this kind of stuff or they're just going to pay like exorbitant rates in the future, but people are still moving to Miami. It's a- Remember last week we were talking about homeowners insurance? Now, we did get to me on that. A bank does require you. when you're getting a mortgage to have homeowners insurance.

That's what I thought. Was it, is it two-thirds of people that own, that own a home don't have a mortgage? What's the number? Is it one-third? I can't remember. It's close to 40% of people do not have a mortgage anymore. House is completely paid off. Okay.

So those people, they're, they're playing with fire. Yes. I guess you, you roll the dice. Although I do, that's a good, that's a good point. So not only are they not raising prices, these, some of these, there's, just backing out. They're just like, we just can't underwrite this. Speaking of that, underwrite, that's hilarious when people say instead of investing, they say underwriting, it's like, bro, you bought four shares. What are you talking about? You're not underwriting anything.

You're buying four shares that you're going to probably sell them three weeks. By the way, I'm talking about myself. Okay. It does make you sound smarter. That's an idiosyncratic risk kind of thing. You say it, it sounds smarter. All right. Okay, so RIP to Jimmy Buffett. I don't I can't imagine you're a big Jimmy Buffett fan. Maybe you are. Well, I like what he's about. He used to come to Long Beach, not Long Beach, Jones Beach. Every summer?

Most summers? I went to a Jimmy Buffett concert outside of Chicago right after I graduated college. And it was one of the best pregame concerts ever been to my life. It was a huge open field. But it was all baby boomers in Hawaiian shirts. There were ice loosges and tiki bars. And it was an amazing time. And my dad got me into Jimmy Bowman.

Bobby Buffett way back in the day. For me, it's the kind of music in the summer or like in the Caribbean, wherever you are in Mexico with like a Corona. That and Bob Marley, to me, that kind of music in a certain... It's yacht rock. At a certain time, it's never going to go out of style. It doesn't get better. I listen to it.

So there was a story in the New York Times a few years ago, like three or four years ago, how like Jimmy Buffett does not live the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle. And it talked about how like he doesn't really drink margarite is anymore because he doesn't have sugar and he doesn't really eat cheeseburgers because he has no carbs. And he doesn't really smoke pot. anymore. And it's like, and it says how he worked all the time. And he was working on like a Margaritaville Broadway show or something. And it was like, he did have like this laid back, I read his, his biography. He wrote a book at like age 50. And it was really good. He really lived

that lifestyle. He'd like sleep on the beach. He'd live on a boat. He'd drink until the sun came up, listening to music and learning how to play guitar. He really did like live that lifestyle. But then in his older years, he became like this entrepreneur and he's worth like half a billion and he's just working all the time. So the whole point of the article was like, he's not really Jimmy Buffett anymore. He's like this businessman and he runs the show. And he said, well, I'm more like a sale captain.

I want to have my hands and everything. And at first I thought like it was like a practice what you preach thing. Like, is this like false advertising that he doesn't live that anymore? But then the more I thought about it, more I thought like, well, of course he couldn't keep that lifestyle up his whole life. Like he wouldn't have made it, right? And I think my whole takeaway was like your priorities change over time. And you can't just live like you did in your young forever, right?

Like you, what, you go to bed at like 10 o'clock now, right? And we're staying out late for you, pretty much? That kind of thing? Yeah, more or less. I'm still hanging on to my youth. Okay, well, kind of. Anyway, it's just, it was like a, it made me just, the whole story pulled me in different directions.

Like, wait a minute, he does not practice when he preaches, but it's like, well, so what, your priorities change over time. But anyway, RIP to a legend. Still love his music. All right, Peter, the Legend. All right, I'm excited to read this email. Michael, I've gotten so much insight and entertainment out of listening to the pod for the last two years. This week's episode was enough to push me over the edge and realize that I need to give something back.

Unlike Ben, I simply couldn't listen to the story of a hungry bald who just wants some spicy noodles, sans fees, and not do something about it. I know you're an Amazon Prime member, so I went ahead and launched an offer with Grubhub to give you and any other hungry animal spirits listeners, a year of free Grubhub Plus. You'll get free delivery fees on orders over $12, exclusive deals and promotions, and for folks like Ben who are swimming in so much time luxury

that they can leave the house for food, 5% back on pickup orders. Head to the link for the offer and maybe give our Amazon Basics pan another shot while you're out there. Sorry, I'm not going to do that, but thank you for the offer. Who is this from? Someone at Amazon?

Yeah. Can't be ordering Grubup every day, every night in this economy. Well, this is a great email. What? Okay, what? Oh, with one of my credit cards gives me free DoorDash Plus or whatever it is. It's the, it's the, it's a Sapphire Reserve. That's it. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So I have that. So we are going to link to this in the show notes. Again, free Grubhubh for a year. Grubhub Plus for a year. So thank you to the gentleman at Amazon. for the lovely email.

All right, Ben, what do you think the market... No more complaints for you then about it, right? Oh, I'll still complain. What do you think the market cap of Taylor Swift is? I mean, if she was a stock, she'd be outperforming in video this year. Like, if somebody had the opportunity to buy all of Taylor Swift's future earnings potential at today's value. I don't know.

The amount of... Discounted all back. My oldest dog. is nine years old and is a self-described Swifty, went to the concert this with my wife, we had to listen to it all summer long. And like, God bless her, Taylor Swift has a great catalog of music. I can't take it anymore. I just, I can't.

It's too much. I need a break. But here's a thing. Her tour is making $1.5 billion or something. Maybe it'll be two by the time. What's her price to sales ratio if she's making $2 billion on her concert? So the smallest stock in the S&P 500 is a company that I've never heard of. Shame on me.

It's called Fortria, although you know what? Not shame in me. I don't know every stock in the S&P 500. Fortria Holdings. Fortria is a global contract research organization. Okay. That provides services with the goal of advancing health. All right, whatever.

That's $2.35 billion. If Taylor Swift would publicly trade, would she be in the S&P 500? Yes. I think so, too. Right. She can't produce $2 billion every year. she is, because she's going to die eventually if she has this many tours. But, uh, yes.

Got to be. How many stocks in the S&P 500 would you buy instead of buying Taylor Swift from here? Not that many for me. I'd rather put my money in Taylor Swift than I would in most companies in the S&P right now. Yeah, for sure. All right, Ben, recommendations. What do you got? All right, I already mentioned National and Poon's vacation.

Uh, justified city primeval I finished, which I never realized. What is that? It's the justified reboot on FX. Justified, it was a show. I mentioned it a few weeks ago. I was Timothy Aldefant? Yes. I never saw it.

Worth watching? The second season is amazing. I mean, it's five seasons, so it's probably too much for you to catch up now. But they had an amazing payoff from the original show in the last 10 minutes. So if you're an original justified person, you have to watch this new one. And the ending was just amazing. They may be doing another one, I think.

But I didn't realize this is, City Prime Evil is an Elmore Leonard novel from the with a different character, and Quentin Tarantino and Timothy Oliphant on Once Upon a Time at Hollywood said, what if we took Rayling Givens from Justified and put him into this novel and updated it? And so it was Tarantino's idea to do this, which is kind of cool. I watched Lockstock and two smoking barrels last night. I think I found it on Stars. Now, this is the one where back in the day, Guy Ritchie became really famous besides marrying Madonna when Snatch came out, right? Brad Pitt was in it. It was a bunch of, but But if you were a real Guy Ritchie Stan, you would say, no, no, no, no, lockstock

and two smoking barrels is actually better than Snatch. If you were a real, Guy Ritchie Stan, I believe you just refer to as Lockstock. Sorry. It's a great name, and I hadn't watched it in probably 15 years, and it holds, it's just the best word I could think of when I was finished was, it's just a satisfying movie. It's like heists and all these storylines coming together at once, and when it all comes together, it's a little over the top, obviously, but it's just such a satisfying movie. I love movies like that.

It was so good. Did you see Guy Ritchie's The Covenant? I did not yet. It's a very on Guy Ritchie film, but very good. Okay. That's all I got. On to me. All right, I watched Friday the 13th.

It's on HBO Max, or now, I'm sorry, it's called Max. So I remember watching Friday the 13th, the only time I ever saw it, I was 13 years old at a sleepover on Halloween, and I was the only one. Me and my friends were sleeping in my friend's basement. and I was the only one awake and I was in my sleeping bag and I couldn't look over the sleeping bag because I was so petrified.

Well, I got to say, this movie is not even borderline unwatchable. It's awful. Didn't age well? It was horrendous. Just, just horrendous. You've probably seen too many horror movies in the meantime that built on that.

Yeah, but so first of all, Jason's not even in the movie. His mom is a killer, which if you've seen Scream, you know that from Scream, trivia but but uh just just terrible in friday thirteenth is like you know it's in like the pantheon it's it's awful i never watched any of them awful awful awful okay uh so i'm in a bit of a show drought which i don't mind at all not even a little i dialed up uh the season one episode one of

curb and it's from october 2000 so robin comes by and she's like why does this look so old Like, Cheryl especially looks like she's from a different era. Like, Larry's still, you know, he's still bald and everything. And I said to her, it's, she's like, it's from 2000. I'm like, yeah, guess what? That's 23 years ago. That is kind of crazy. The show's been going on for that long.

And the first episode is hilarious. It's exactly like it is today. Do you remember the pants tent? No. If you, if you. Oh, yes. Okay, I do. Yes.

He couldn't get the part on his pants to go down. It's just, it's just classic L.D. And it's. he's still doing it, 23 years later. You sent me a curb clip this weekend. I forgot to respond, but I didn't know the context. Did you never redo that? Oh, that was hilarious.

You texted me a curb clip. Yes, it was pretty good. You were just kind of thinking of curb? Yes. Okay, that's it for us. We want to thank Big John Grayson for producing this episode. Stepping in for Duncan. If you are at Future Proof next week, right?

Yes, next week. We take off Sunday. We will be doing live Animal Spirits on Monday, or maybe Miami Vice is available. We'll see. It's going to be fun. Come say hi to us. Okay. Indeed.

Thank you for listening. As always, we appreciate the support. Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com. We'll see you next time.