Animal Spirits Podcast - The Pandemic Broke the Economy (EP.264)

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

On today's show we talk about why the first 6 months of the year were one of the worst ever for financial markets, why it's so difficult to gauge the economy right now, what's priced into the stock ma...rket, the worst earnings call ever, the psychology behind inflation 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 animalspiritspod@gmail.com with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by our friends at Y Charts. Michael, one of the things that I've been watching lately on Y Charts, five-year tips treasury break-even rate. You see this thing? It's crashing. Hit a high of about 3.6% in the spring right after the war started. What this is, this is the difference between the yield on nominal treasuries, so five-year treasuries, and the tips yield. And if it's rising, that means people think inflation expectations are going up.
Starting point is 00:00:26 If it's falling, it means expected inflation. is potentially going down. Do you think it matters what the market thinks about inflation expectations? Always or now? Now I think it matters. That's true. Especially because it's coinciding with other breadcrumbs, not breadcrumbs, signs that inflation might be peaking. We're seeing commodities come in pretty big. But I do remember that we spoke about this a couple of years ago. I think George Perks did a threat on this. I think it was him showing that the inflation expectations on a go-forward basis are rarely. I don't think they're very accurate. You know what I mean? I don't know how good of a predictor it actually is. Because the market didn't get ahead of it the first time, right? Going up.
Starting point is 00:01:03 Generally speaking, not like specific. Yeah, right. But I do think that it matters. Right now it matters. All right. If you want to check out this chart, it's pretty interesting one. Go to whycharts. Tell them Animal Spirit sent you and get 20% off that initial subscription. And tell him Ben's wearing a flower shirt. Maybe they give you 21, 22% off, just because. I think we need our own line of Animal Spirit shirts now. We're going to bypass Tropical Brothers and send it right to you from Y charts. Wait, is that a tropical bro shirt? This is a J-Crew one, I think. Knock off.
Starting point is 00:01:30 A knock-off. Actually, I wonder if we're going to be getting some Tropical Brothers sales. Inventory. Everything is going to be on sale. All right, you want to start the show? Let's go. 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.
Starting point is 00:01:49 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 opinion. and do not reflect the opinion of Ritthold's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, I did a little work this weekend this past week. I was sharing some with you. I think we just had potentially one of the worst six months ever for financial markets,
Starting point is 00:02:21 talking about stocks and bonds. That's not an opinion. It's objective. We did. So I looked at this. No, Ben, say with some oomph. You got the data. All right, let's back this up here. I got charts. I got data. First, the stock market.
Starting point is 00:02:35 This ranked, see, I never know how the percentile things worked. Is the low percentile good or the high percentile good? This period for stocks over six months going back to 1926, I did rolling six month returns using month-end returns, total returns. Hang on, zero is weakest, hundred or strongest, no? Okay, so is this the worst? So this was worse than 97 percent of all other periods. So does that mean it's in the third percentile or 97th percentile?
Starting point is 00:03:00 97th. For worst. It's like a reverse of a reverse. Yeah, I'm using reverse psychology here. So the only periods that were worse than the stock market were basically... You could say it's in the bottom 3% of all periods ever. That also works. That's kind of what I want to say. The only times are worse for the stock market for six months were Great Depression, 1937 crash, World War II, 70s bear market.com bubble 2008 crash. So who's who of just like awful no good returns? And when you add bonds, this is kind of crazy. Again, I got five-year treasury returns. Let's call it.
Starting point is 00:03:28 That's intermediate term bonds. I would have used the ag, but it only goes back to 1976, and I want to extend that time horizon. So I have five-year treasury data from DFA going back to 1926. Can we make a formal petition to somebody to just give us a damn bond, aggregate bond replicate going back to the 1950s, somebody. Exactly. I guess the problem is they probably didn't have a lot of mortgage bonds and that sort of stuff back.
Starting point is 00:03:49 So what? Okay. So through June, five-year treasures are down 6.4%. But I also looked at it through May because they did ruling six months. The six-month return in May 31st was negative 7.4% for five-year treasuries. That's the second worst six-month return ever since 1926. The only time it was worse, they were down like 8% in early 1980, when rates went from like 10 to 20 in like a month.
Starting point is 00:04:11 So obviously add these together, a 60-40 portfolio of intermediate term bonds, the new stocks was in the worst 2% of all rolling six months periods of all time. And the only reason the other times were worse is because the stock market fell way more than 20% or whatever it fell in the U.S. Here's another one. Fourth time in the last 100 years that stocks and bonds were both down two quarters in a row at the same time. It's only happened one time in history where they were down three quarters in a row.
Starting point is 00:04:37 And that was in the Great Depression, 1931. Listen, we're in it. We are in it. And what's interesting is that people think that the worst is yet to come. Hello, sure, maybe, fine. Wouldn't you say it's more likely that the worst is probably, behind this. I'm not saying that we're at the bottom. I'm not saying it can't get worse, but that the worst is yet to come. It'd be hard to get much worse than what we just lived through.
Starting point is 00:05:03 That's the point. Like, that period we just lived through was just awful. I mean, it's kind of crazy that it makes sense if we're doing a yin and yang thing, that we just lived through like one of the best 15 month periods in the stock market ever, 12 months, whatever it was coming out of the corona crash. And now we have one of the worst ever. Let me contradict myself or not contradict, But the other part of this is that even if the next six months are not as bad as this six-month period, the back half of a bad movie can be much more painful than the first half. So even though the numbers on a go-forward basis are unlikely to be as bad as the last six months, because we already lived through a shitty period, it could feel worse, even if it's not mathematically worse.
Starting point is 00:05:44 So to your point about people saying, so this is just a headline from New York Times, I didn't even read the story, after stock markets were starting 50 years, Some see more pain ahead. That's the kind of thing that pundits will say. And again, maybe they are right, but that's the kind of thing where you get in that attitude of it's never going to get better. It's only going to get worse. There's no possible way.
Starting point is 00:06:02 I'm always Mr. Positive Spin guy. I see more pain ahead. I mean, there's more pain. We're taping this on Tuesday morning. There's more pain right now. Good point. I forgot to mention. We should be specific.
Starting point is 00:06:11 We should timestamp these episodes because people don't know when we record it. It's Tuesday. We try, yes. 1019 Eastern Standard Time. I mean, listen, we're taping this after the fourth. Everyone else is probably still in bed hung over, maybe having a Bloody Mary. Not us. We're in here.
Starting point is 00:06:24 We're working. I'm always Mr. Positive Spin, and I talk about how buying opportunities, this sort of thing. I want to talk about a personal situation of what I'm doing in this because I, not to brag, got a little bit of a lump sum selling an investment property. I can go into the details some later, but just closed on Friday, got a pretty good check, and I have to do a few things with this money. But I also have money sitting over there where it's basically cash. What am I going to do with it?
Starting point is 00:06:46 It's investing. It's the old lump something. I have a lump sum sitting there. It's not like life-changing money, but it's enough money where I have to think about it. And I'm of the mindset. Remember the song Lump? Who was that? Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:58 Presidents of the United States of America. I was a total 90s thing. And then weird out did a Gump spin off? The Gump, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, weird out back of the day. He missed YouTube by about 10 years or 15 years, didn't he? His videos would have just blown up on YouTube had he come a long later.
Starting point is 00:07:14 He's still one of the best-selling artists of all time. His music videos rocked. Okay. We're going on a little bit of tangent here. Best selling artists of the, I will learn this from the Chuck Close from a 90s book. Who is the best selling artist of the 1990s? There's not even a close second. Really? Is it, well, Insink came on late. Hang on. Of the 90s? Yeah. This surprised me, and it shouldn't have. Michael Jackson? Country. Country artist. Oh, I don't know country. Garth Brooks is by far the biggest selling artist of the 1990s and there wasn't even a close second.
Starting point is 00:07:45 That really shocked me when I was reading that book. I don't remember. That's a good question. Green Day? Who knows? No, I mean, Celine Dion or something like that, probably. Anyway, a little bit of tangent. Anyhow. Back to me. Back to me. I was talking about myself.
Starting point is 00:07:56 So I have a lump sum sitting here, and I like to keep these things simple. Some people like to, okay, I want to regret, minimize this thing and a dollar cost average. My way of looking at this, I have a lump sum. Stocks are down 20 to 30%. I'm putting all of my money to work right now. I'm putting this money in my Vanguard account for my SEP IRA. It's going right into the market. I have four funds at Vanguard.
Starting point is 00:08:17 That I use, all low-cost indexes. funds. I don't want to overthink this. And the stock market could fall 15% from here. And I wouldn't regret this decision because I don't think in five, 10, 20, 30 years when I'm going to touch this money, I'm going to regret putting in money into a low cost index fund when it's down 20 or 30%. That's my way of viewing this thing. And I can see breaking it up into four chunks or six chunks and slowly putting it to work. But I don't see doing that like mental brain gymnastics of trying to overthink this and, well, what if I just wait for this trigger to hit or this trigger to hit? I like simplicity. I'm putting up money work today. Thoughts. Like it. I'll share a little,
Starting point is 00:09:00 what am I doing? I am also like you contributing to my SEP IRA. What I'm doing is so every month I put money into our liftoff account. So I've been doing that for, I don't know, a couple a year. And at this point, I am break-even. That's a taxable robo account. Taxable, yeah. So I'm basically break-even. I've got no profits. But I've got that big lump sum of money. I'm taking it out of my taxable account. I've got no gains. I've got no taxes pay. Woop, right into the SEP IRA. Let's do it, right? Thoughts? Tax-aware. Yes. It makes sense. You're not paying taxes and you're also getting a tax break by going into a SEP IRA. Now I will continue to refill the coffer of the left-off account, which will be zero. That's my thing.
Starting point is 00:09:45 thing. I mean, no one wants to hear this right now, but my point is from the start of the year, six months ago, you can now buy stocks at 20 to 30 percent cheaper levels. That's the market for other stocks. Obviously, it's way lower. But if you're someone contributing to your 401k and your IRA, this is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. If you're a net saver, and I know a lot of people will come back and say, listen, there's a lot of people who aren't net savers and they have their whole portfolio fully invested. Yes. Nothing is always good for everyone. Nothing is always good for everyone. We know. But if you had your portfolio fully invested for the last five, seven, 10, 12 years, then the gains that you've made have more than made up for the losses that you just experienced.
Starting point is 00:10:23 How about that? That's the key point. Okay, fine. If you've been invested, nobody told you to go all in at the top into high momentum stocks, right? Nobody told you to do that. If you've been fully invested in various ways over the last five, ten years, you've done phenomenally well. All right, yeah, you're off the high. So is everybody. I also think there is something to the fact that we don't have to listen to people brag about how much money they're making now. That feels nice, doesn't it? Obviously, you don't want to ever cheer for someone to lose money, but the fact that you don't have to listen to people brag every day about how much money they're making and how rich they got because they invested in this thing and three weeks later, look at how much money you have. I think that's a good thing.
Starting point is 00:11:00 I think we needed this as a society. Can I give a live alert 1024 Tuesday, July 5th? The shittiest names are bouncing. So while everything else is selling, first out, first in, first out, first in alert, the old first out, first in. Do you have a screen of this, the shittiest things? Is that what it's called on your screen? Well, I'm just saying, I'm looking at white charts.
Starting point is 00:11:21 NASDAQ 100, Datadog up 6%. Moderna, Zoom, doc, you sign all up 4%. Meanwhile, the S&P's down 2%. A little divergence. All right, looking for signs of a bottom because sentiment trader's got another one for us. Market volatility over the last five weeks is at its highest point since 1920. causing a lot of negative sentiment over the past 80 years, similar instability coincides with the end of bear markets. Jason Gepford writes. There he goes. I'm going to put a positive
Starting point is 00:11:44 spin here. We're looking for it. I love the historical stuff, but I also, the worst thing about markets is stuff that has never happened before happens all the time. All the time. And it's like it just happens to happen once to be the new marker. So I value these sentiment indicators, the just market behavior price. I value that much more than when interest rates were doing this and inflation was here and jobless. Like, those analogs were totally lost on me. Because human nature is the one constant. Everything else is different.
Starting point is 00:12:13 All right. Largest outflows ever from resources. So what is that? We're looking at Bank of America. It's energy and materials. Are these stocks? Are these futures? I don't really know exactly.
Starting point is 00:12:25 But as quickly as they came in, they are flooding out. I was looking at DBC this morning, a commodity ETF. We said last week that the energy stocks are in a bare market. So I'm guessing that's part of it. Yeah, I don't know if this is stocks or commodities or what. But DBC, I don't know if this is the biggest commodity ETF, but it's up there. I think it is. A quick 15% off the highs. All right. So we asked last week, we said, hey, we're putting on the bat signal or ETF people. How much money has come into commodities? Is it missed timed? Ben Johnson for Morningstar hooked us up here, got a nice
Starting point is 00:12:55 little chart. He shows the inflows in commodities. And you can see starting in February and really ramping up in March, huge flood of commodities. So, Basically, around the time the war kicked off, everyone jumped into commodities. And now commodities are rolling over. Most of that money, if I'm just eyeballing this coming into that storage, most of that money is now underwater. I think so. There was a ton of money that came in March and April of 2022, right when the war kicked off. And I guess this is another one of those things where chasing performance is hurting because commodities are now coming back in. So we talked in the past weeks. Bad news is good news. Good news is bad news. Maybe if people see bad news,
Starting point is 00:13:35 bad news in the economy, that equates to good news because that means inflation's coming down. What if we just have bad news? Interest rates coming in pretty hard too. Yeah, you could have mortgage rates coming back down to 5% maybe, who knows? Is it possible we get a bad news to bad news handoff where bad news from inflation goes to bad news for the economy and the market just says, we're just going to stick with bad news for a while. Yes. Yes. We're not going to do the reverse psychology thing. We're going to do the just strict. It is possible that bad news is bad news and we've fallen another like 7% on a really bad print. That is highly, highly possible.
Starting point is 00:14:09 Why not? Just throwing that out there. Listen, maybe the bad news is good. Maybe I got a little bit too cute there, but we'll see. We'll see. This is interesting. Ben, you wrote a post what's priced in. And let me just quote you.
Starting point is 00:14:22 You said the stock market didn't hit the technical definition of a bare market until July of 2008, which is pretty nuts because we were already in a recession then. Yes. That was four months after JP Morgan bailed out. Bear Stearns and eight months into the recession. Think about how much quicker this market moves today. It's almost unfathomable. When JP Morgan bailed out Bear Stearns, and that happened today, the market would be down 11% intraday. Yes. I remember at the time, that was in March. Everyone thought like, okay, great, J.P. Morgan just bought Bear Stearns for $2 a share. Everything is fine and not like,
Starting point is 00:14:57 oh, wait, there's way more worse stuff that's going to be coming out of this. You also want this. I think this part's fair. So we're all talking about the market is pricing. in an aggressive recession, at least certain areas of the market are, like home builder stocks, right, for example. You said the stock market doesn't necessarily have to be pricing in a recession. It could simply be pricing in an era of higher interest rates and inflation and something of an adjustment period in valuations. Could be. If you look historically, higher inflation and higher interest rates have coincided with lower than average valuations. So maybe we're just overcorrecting the absurdity that we saw over the last few years. Although it is kind of
Starting point is 00:15:35 funny to think, historically 3% treasury yields are still very, very, very low. On the 10-year, obviously, it's much higher than it was at 0.5% or whatever it bottomed at. But if you're looking back historically, 3% treasury yields, you would have told someone that in the 80s, 90s, even 2000s, they would say, that's ridiculously low. But it's all relative. Historically, there were no podcasts. Okay. That's true. So last week we said, are we sure there's a recession? Bill McBride, calculated risk. Probably one of my two or three go-to econ people. He puts a timestamp now. He said, the recession callers are back. Some like Arks, Kathy Wood, and Home Depot's Kang Langone,
Starting point is 00:16:09 claim the U.S. is already in a recession. I disagree. We did see negative real GDP growth in Q1, and we might see negative real GDP growth in Q2, but this doesn't mean the U.S. economy is in a recession. Put a pin in this. If that happens, can you imagine if we have a negative two quarters in a row, but the National Bureau of Economic Research says, but we didn't really reach a recession because it's a technicality of imports, exports, whatever, the anti-fed people, even though this is not the Fed, are going to lose their minds. Oh, that's a great call. Can you imagine?
Starting point is 00:16:39 People are going to lose their minds. So he said, PCE growth was solid in Q1 at 3.1% annualized and also solid in April and May. Over 1.6 million jobs added in Q1, not a recession. Over 800,000 jobs added in the first months of Q2, not a recession. He said he's not even on a recession watch right now. Then he did a follow up and he said, okay, fine. People say, well, what is a recession?
Starting point is 00:16:59 He says, employment in real personal income. He puts these graphs in and he says, basically the data does not back it up, and these measures are still doing just fine. So remember a couple weeks ago I said trying to define a recession to my wife? And you kind of said, well, it's unemployment. That's it. It's employment and income. And employment and income are still strong right now.
Starting point is 00:17:21 So you're right. So we could see like on a real basis GDP declined two quarters in a row. Well, we're going to because the Atlanta Fed has a GDP now real tracker, which is an aggregate. I tried to dig into the data here and it's way too econ for me, but they track data in real time and they say that GDP is already going to come in negative. So they do break it down into the subcomponents. And Ben, to your point, a lot of this is change in inventory. Basically, Target, Walmart, they're not buying any new shit. They're trying to like unload everything. So the inventory build is massively contributing negatively. If you look at this chart, you see
Starting point is 00:17:58 consumer spending slowing down. You see residential investment is not. negative, which I guess makes sense. And to dovetail with this, who are, oh, John Hilsenrath, remember him? He was Nick Tee before Nick Tee. He was like the Fed Whisperer. He was original Fin twit woege. Yeah, during the Bernanke days. All right, I'm going to do some quoting. He said, the U.S. economy has experienced 12 recessions since World War II, and each one of those included two features. Economic output contracted and unemployment rose. Today, something highly unusual is happening. Economic output fell in the first quarter and signs suggest it did so again in the second, yet the job market showed little signs of faltering during the first half of the year.
Starting point is 00:18:36 So we spoke about this. And I know this is like who really cares, but people talk about what is a recession, what is it? And the NBR defines it as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. By the way, that's not even true. It says something different on the website. He says one popular rule of thumb. So the NBER, its eight-member business cycle data committee looks at a range of monthly and
Starting point is 00:18:57 quarterly indicators, including output, income, manufacturing activity. business sales, and perhaps most important employment levels. Then it makes a judgment call. Quote, a recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, normally visible in production, employment, and other indicators. I think I might have known this, but I forgot about this. In 2001, output didn't decline much and GDP didn't contract for two consecutive quarters, but the NBER called it a recession anyway. Oh, I didn't realize that the two-quarter thing didn't happen then. I didn't know that. In 1960, inflation-adjusted household income rose, and that too was a recession. So things are weird, things are going to get
Starting point is 00:19:42 weird, but the one thing that we've seen in every recession, and I can't, I don't want to say I can't imagine, it would be very odd, although in sync with how weird everything has been over the last 24 months. It would be very odd to see a recession without unemployment picking up. How is that even impossible. I keep going back to the fact that the pandemic broke the economy. All historical analogs, they've been completely broken by the pandemic. Everything is so out of whack. You're right. So if the unemployment rate bumped up a little to like four, four and a half percent and didn't go much higher than that and incomes didn't fall that much, you're right, is that really a recession? Technically, maybe. The anti-government, anti-fed people are going to
Starting point is 00:20:23 lose their minds if Enber says, sorry, this wasn't a recession. You got to go nuts. I mean, the thing is, it's kind of like a technical definition of a, like, does the stock market fall 19.6% or 20.6%. It doesn't matter if it's a bare market. But some people care about this stuff. The new Bimo, V.I. Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights.
Starting point is 00:20:50 More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new Bimo V.I. Porter Mastercard. and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bemo.com slash V-Iporter to learn more. Did you know the Bank of International Settlements wrote a paper and said that they looked at 35 countries from 1985 to 2018 that went through monetary policy tightening cycles.
Starting point is 00:21:24 Half of them ended in soft landings. Interesting. So this is a bunch of other developed countries. I would have thought it was way lower than that. But this guy, Adam Tuse, has a great substack where he wrote about how weird things are. And he's quoted in the BIS. The combination of inflationary and recessionary forces that we are currently facing, along with financial stability risk, is quote historically unprecedented.
Starting point is 00:21:45 And he said, it is worth saying that when the BIS says this, it is not merely an impressionistic remark intended to convey the drama of the moment or an overused journalistic cliche. It is a precise statement based on the comparison of the current conjuncture with all relevant data in its database, judging back to 1945. In the last 18 months, we have seen the fastest global growth in 50 years, followed by the most rapid slowdown, creating what is in the BIS's view, a global economic configuration unprecedented in history.
Starting point is 00:22:19 If you aren't puzzled, you don't get it. This isn't your common or garden slowdown admitting to disorientation. is a sign of honesty and realism. The disorientation economy is a pretty good way to look at this. I completely agree. It's everything is screwed. But by the way, am I going to have to issue a mea culpa if the Fed puts in a soft landing here? Am I going to have to issue an apology?
Starting point is 00:22:43 Well, listen, it is a bad look that they underreacted to inflation. I think Colin tweeted something like this. They underreacted to inflation the whole way and might have literally, I don't want to say capitulated. But I don't know what other they were. to use. They might have overreacted at the top. I guess part of it is, did they also help cause the top by signaling we're going to do whatever we can to fight inflation and raise interest rates? I think it was part that they overreacted and part that they caused it a little bit. Okay, fair point. So in other words, if they had stuck with 50 and still said that the inflation
Starting point is 00:23:15 was going to naturally slow down, would interest rates be coming in, would break-evens be coming and would commodities be coming in? I think the financial market aspect of it, I think the Fed had a lot to do with all that stuff. So inventory levels are building. Companies are trying to just get rid of all the extra shit that they ordered. Could this cause inflation to come down? Probably. So here's the thing.
Starting point is 00:23:37 So this is from Axios had this whole thing about inventory levels jumping up. Carl continued tweeted about Bedbath and Beyond. So they're working on aggressively clearing out excess inventory, which means tons of price cuts and Amazon Prime days coming up. Here's the thing. Psychologically, inflation is the idea that how it gets ahead of itself is I'm going to buy more stuff now. because I think in the future prices are going to be higher. That's the psychology of inflation, snowballing, and really getting out of control.
Starting point is 00:24:03 Right now, if I'm buying stuff, so we're in the market for like some furniture and I need a new TV. There's like, fourth of July stuff going on. My wife's like, oh, let's look at the deals now. And I said, no, no, no, no. We're waiting. We're being patient. And I'm waiting until Black Friday because you're getting paid to wait. I think prices are going to be lower by that.
Starting point is 00:24:19 So this is the opposite of that because all the inventory levels got built up so high because people wanted to buy stuff and now they don't want to buy stuff. I think prices that a lot of these places are coming down, I'm going to be patient. I'm going to wait. If it was a new car, I wouldn't. But if it's, well, maybe I guess it depends what your time frame is there. But for buying stuff right now, I think the psychology has nothing new to inflation and probably deflation in that side of things. I think you're right. All right.
Starting point is 00:24:43 We're going to come back to Beth and Beyond because it was one of the worst conference calls I've ever listened to. For real, we're to come back to that in a second. By the way, credit to us for not making a 20% off joke. Well, I was about that. Those are way overdone. Okay, you thought about it. Gasoline. Gasoline alert. Gasoline prices coming down.
Starting point is 00:25:02 I saw 461 in Michigan this week. Yeah, I was saying 460s as well. Isn't it funny how we anchored to everything because that seemed low, whereas four months ago, we just said, are you kidding me, 460? This is ridiculous. I'll take 460. This is a good one. Sam Rowe, who is like...
Starting point is 00:25:19 By the way, wait. How great is Sam Rowe? How much to fill up your jet ski? They're not that big of tanks, right? Isn't that fuel more expensive? Like the boat fuel? It's more expensive on the water. I have no idea.
Starting point is 00:25:29 But the tank's not that big. I took Robert on the jet ski on Friday. She has never been on with me. She said, am I going to get wet? I said, nah. We got colossally. Colossily soaked. It was almost comical.
Starting point is 00:25:39 Well, if I said, yeah, you're going to get soaked. You wouldn't have come on. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. Of course, on a jet ski, you get wet. So, all right, Sam Rowe. Yes, you're right.
Starting point is 00:25:48 Sam Rowe is awesome. His substack is great, by the way. His substack is great. His substack is great. His Twitter is great. TK.er. He explained to you guys that it's TKR, and there was like some media reason for that. I thought TKR was a short for ticker, like ticker symbol.
Starting point is 00:26:01 I honestly can't remember his explanation. I know he did tell us. I can't remember. It had something to do with financial media. Okay. We've got a chart. He's got a chart from Ed Yardinney. And this is showing delivery times, which, as we know, were everything was taking forever.
Starting point is 00:26:17 I think I ordered furniture, bedroom furniture in 2021. It took like seven, like everybody else. And that is coming down big time. Okay. That's crashed. Crashed. That's good. You want stuff you can get it.
Starting point is 00:26:29 Unfortunately, your stuff's just going to cost more money. All right. So it seems like this tweet was piled on by everybody. The president tweeted, my message to the company's running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple. This is a time of war and global peril. Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you're paying for the product.
Starting point is 00:26:51 and do it now. That was a big oof one. Big oof. Big oof. So we spoke about this. Barron's did a whole cover story on actually rising prices is killing gas stations. It cannot be farther from reality what he was tweeting. And Jeff Bezos quoted him and said,
Starting point is 00:27:09 Ouch, inflation is far too important to the problem for the White House to keep making statements like this. It's either straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics. Either way, it's not good. Do you think it's possible in the world that we live in to ever have a politician who's seen as a hero again? Back in the day, a lot of the politicians, I mean, FDR and Eisenhower, Lincoln, obviously, some of these presidents in the past were looked as like superheroes. I don't think we can have a person like that anymore because if that person existed, they would not want to be president. They would go make money in some other field. I think the way that things are right now with social media.
Starting point is 00:27:46 That you have to pander to one side. I don't think that we can honestly have. any politician anymore who's going to be like that. That's like this hero figure. I think it's impossible, unfortunately. I'm hardly like an energy policy expert, but they weren't too friendly for putting supply in the market. No. So whatever. Anyway, not great. Okay. Wall Street Journal. From the start of the, we talked about this before, started the pandemic to the end of 2021. U.S. households built up $2.7 trillion in extra savings. That's excess over what would have happened. This is according to Moody's personal savings rate got to 34%. Now,
Starting point is 00:28:20 back down to 5.4, which is below the average of the last decade. It's gone way down. Families have tapped about $114 billion of their pandemic savings so far. This is saying that people are finally starting to spend their savings. This is from Moody's. That's still kind of a drop in the bucket for $2.7 trillion. I think that there's still way more savings that can and will be tapped, whether it's inflation or recession or whatever. This is interesting. I know a lot of people, especially like rich people have said, inflation is worst for the poor. This is Mark Zandi from Moody's. The bottom 20% of earners was the only income group that didn't draw on their pandemic savings in the first quarter of the year. And basically, they said these are folks working in leisure, hospitality, retail,
Starting point is 00:28:59 and health care. Strong wage growth has allowed many of these workers to continue to save. Maybe like the tradeoff, I know everyone says, oh, inflation is the worst on the lowest income levels. And obviously there's a lot of people who are hurting from inflation. But maybe the fact that we've seen this one-time boost in income for these folks, maybe the trade-off. Maybe the that boost in income was better than totally offset the inflation for them. And raising people's wages, especially in the lower end, has made their finances way better than they would have been otherwise. I don't think that's an outcome people would have predicted that wages would rise this high for people in the service sector. I'm looking. I feel like I just put this in the doc for what are
Starting point is 00:29:31 your thoughts tonight. I was going to make the exact same point that where is this? Oh, here it is. Here it is. Oh, sorry. I'm quoting the same quote. Okay. I'm looking for the, this is from Zandi, the bottom 20% of earners? Yeah, it's crazy, right? The fact that that group has seen one of the biggest relative benefits of anyone, I think, in the past 18 to 24 months because their incomes have gone up. I listened to, I think I was on a podcast this morning. It was a advertisement for plumbing services.
Starting point is 00:30:00 It was like, we need plumbers. And it gave a website, it said, apply here. No resume necessary. We're not going to make you work overtime. We're not going to put you on call anymore. It was like, just put your name in here. We don't even care about a resume. We just need people.
Starting point is 00:30:13 It's just crazy how much negotiating power people still have with this stuff. All right. Bad quarter, guys. I just want to give a plug for quarter, Q-U-A-R-T-R. They've got a desktop version now of the app, which is so freaking good. Kudos to them. They've got like searchable things. There's also product enhancement in the app where when you're listening to the call,
Starting point is 00:30:36 the text like gets highlighted. You could follow along more easily. You could fast forward. That's cool. The product upgrades have been phenomenal. All right. We started the restoration hardware. This was not a quarter. It was just, they didn't report. It was just an update. I remember their CEO, Gary Friedman, who I think was at a bunch of the Warriors games, no? I don't know. Maybe. Whatever. That's not important. What is important is that this guy speaks to the truth. And the truth is that things are not great right now. He said with mortgage rates double last year's levels, luxury home sales down 18% in the first quarter. Our expectation is that demand will continue to slow throughout the year. The deteriorating macroeconomic environment has resulted in. lower than expected demand since our prior forecast, and we are updating our outlook, particularly for the second half of the year. So they're lowering their guidance.
Starting point is 00:31:19 I would guess most of the people that were buying high-end homes in the pandemic did so and already bought other stuff from restoration hardware. So that, to me, seems like a pull-forward kind of thing. By the way, the fact that their ticker is R-H, that seems to me like Robin Hood should have that one. Sean asked us if you wanted us to listen to R-H, and I said, yes, definitely. I thought he meant Robin Hood. Okay, all right. Wait, wait, hang on. Hang on, hang on. The stock is down 70%. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:31:45 They did not report earnings, but you saw Mark Zuckerberg's comment. If I had to bet, I'd say this might be one of the worst downtones that we've seen in recent history. And the thing that I think is like scaring some people, I would say myself included, is that we haven't even really seen the economic data softening yet. He also said some people probably need to leave Facebook. Do you think a lot of these tech CEOs just realize, Oh, wait a minute. We hired enough people for like things of the past 10 years happening in the
Starting point is 00:32:16 next 10 years. The last 10 years is not happening again. We overstaffed way too much. Now it's time to come back. Do you think a lot of these tech CEOs are just using this as an excuse to say the macroeconomy is deteriorating. We need to get rid of people. I think there's a lot of that going on too. Could be, but it doesn't mean it's not true. I think, again, for tech, it's worse than a lot of other places right now because they went way overboard hiring people. People have been saying about the Facebook thing or the meta, whatever, that the stock is down so bad because they lean into the Metaverse and nobody's buying what they're selling, which is probably part of it, but don't you think maybe it's their front-running the fact that the economy is going to slow down
Starting point is 00:32:49 and ad sales are very sensitive? I guess counterpoint would be, well, Google's still doing very well, relatively speaking to Facebook. So maybe that's not the truth. Could it also be that people are slowing their use of Facebook? That is true. Their user growth is so it's still almost 60% drawdown for that stock. It hasn't come back very much. You asked earlier what's priced in. I'm getting to the place where like nothing is priced in ever. Because, Target and Walmart, when they reported and the inventory backlog became like a big thing, they each had their worst day since the 1980s. Remember that? Yeah. And then Bed Bath and Beyond reports, similar story, but way worse, like out of business
Starting point is 00:33:27 worse, maybe. And the stock falls 25% in a day. Shouldn't that not have been priced in? There's salvo ports all over the, estimates don't need to come down. Nobody's bullish on the stock. Everybody's super bearish. So this company had at its peak an 18. almost $18 billion market cap? You know what it is today? No. 380 million. The peak was in 2013.
Starting point is 00:33:49 It's down 94% from those highs. So they're going out of business then. I think so. Pretty much. The revenue is like, I don't know, 60% off its highs. It's just terrible. Here's the thing. When we bought our first house, we went to bedbath and beyond.
Starting point is 00:34:01 We had one right by our house. We went all the time. When you went to college, that was like the thing, right? You stocked up at, you went to bed bath? Yeah, there's a thing. And now we buy all that stuff on Amazon. You don't have to go to the store. Hey, the line in old school, was that bad, Beth and Beyond?
Starting point is 00:34:13 Or we're going to go to Home Depot? Or did he say Bedbeth and Beyond? No, he said Home Depot. He said Home Depot, maybe a little bit of Bethanyon. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe Bethameth. Yeah. By the way, it's on Netflix.
Starting point is 00:34:21 I got really excited when I saw it on Netflix. So it was a thing. It was a real thing. So anyway, the call was terrible. The CEO left. There's an interim CEO right now. They said that their net sales declined 25% year over year. Same store sales down 24%.
Starting point is 00:34:40 digital sales down 21%. I don't know if I've ever heard of same store sales falling 24%. They're screwed. There was one comment, like for real. How many bed bath beyonds are going to be turned into Jake's fireworks or the Halloween Depot in the coming years? Fireworks are illegal in New York. Oh, you don't have like all the old circuit cities got turned into Jake's fireworks in Michigan.
Starting point is 00:35:02 What does Jake's fireworks sell besides for fireworks? Literally that's it. That's it? Fireworks. Yes. Okay. I didn't know fireworks could sustain itself as a. store. Anyhow, so there was an analyst who after his question said, he basically said,
Starting point is 00:35:18 best of luck. He didn't do the part. But after the answer, he said best of luck. Best of luck. That's like you're breaking up with someone. Like, I'm not going to be covering you anymore. It's not you. It's me. Not what you want to hear. I can't imagine that this store is long for the world, which is kind of nuts because Beth and Beyond was a real thing. Obviously, mall real estate is not what it once was, but they have a lot of prime real estate, like retail real estate in a lot of places, everywhere you go, if there's a target, there's a bedbath and be on there, whatever, there's a little strip mall, there's always a bed bath in me on there. What are they going to do with those? Do they own the real estate?
Starting point is 00:35:53 I don't know. Because that's got to be worth more than $380 million. You'd think. By the way, it costs money to keep this business alive because they're hemorrhaging money too, so not great. 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. We're not going to find it in the news because the police covered everything well up. On August days.
Starting point is 00:36:26 This is where the story really starts. Weapons. All right, crypto. The one guy who's from Pantera, I didn't know this was a thing. I thought Pantara was a death metal ban on from the 90s, basically blaming the Fed for what's going on in crypto. Wait, hang on, hang on. I saw the tweets.
Starting point is 00:36:46 I saw the headline. I didn't see the quote. Did he really blame the Fed? No, I'm asking you, did he really blame the Fed? I almost find that hard to believe. He talked about how the Fed doesn't understand certain things. I don't think it was as bad as the headlines. But my whole thing on crypto right now is the people made it way worse than the technology.
Starting point is 00:37:05 The people who were stringing together these. narratives about what it is and what it isn't. I don't think you can really say the technology hasn't come through with what it was supposed to do. The technology is still, people haven't hacked Bitcoin. The technology is still sound. It's the people who were talking about the technology that have messed everything up. You sent me this piece on the three AC, what's it called, the Three Arrow's Capital. Oh, that was a great piece. This to me, is this not long-term capital management for crypto? I was reading this, and I'd never heard of this place before. It seems like this is their long-term capital management kind of thing, isn't it? It sounds. It sounds like,
Starting point is 00:37:37 like that when you read this. How they were taking these small arbs and then putting a ton and ton of leverage on them. I don't think I realized the extent to which GBT played a role in the undoing of crypto. I didn't realize that either. I guess that's why there's so many billions in there still because people were using that as like a vehicle for this stuff. Crypto is learning every old lesson in finance right now. It's like counterparty risk, leverage, bank runs, all this stuff is happening in crypto. And it's like they're relearning the lessons of the old financial system and how the fact that human nature can really cause your undoing. GBTC, which is the gray scale trust, was treating it a premium to its net asset value for a long, long time. So these companies, like three arrows and
Starting point is 00:38:15 others, would borrow Bitcoin, deposit it. If it was at a 35% premium, they had a six-month lockup, it was free money. So they would leverage the hell out of that. But then they would take, I think, the GBT shares that they were getting, loaning those out, getting more margin. So it really truly sounded like it was just a house of cards. Okay. So this GBT thing, at the height, it had $44 billion in assets. They're earning 2% a year on that. So now it's down to $12 billion. But here's the thing. Yeah, you're right. I'm from a 30% premium to now it's at a 30% discount. Here's the return over the last three years. This is through Friday. Bitcoin was up 60% over the last three years. GBT is down 12%. They've been earning 2% a year on tens of billions
Starting point is 00:38:55 of dollars to underperform the asset by over 70%. I'm not blaming them. I almost blame the SEC more because they're screwing people with high fees and awful performance. I know Grayscale is suing the SEC, which I don't know what they think is going to come out of that. But I blame the SEC for putting people in a product like this that can trade at a 30% discount to the actual asset that's supposed to follow. And if you've been in this, you've not only paid 2% in fees, it's gotten crushed. And you have to wait for the premium to come back up. Well, for the premium to collapse, it's going to have to take an ETF conversion, which that's what Grayscale is suing for because the SEC denied it. Duneberg had a good threat on why there is a futures-based product and not a spot one.
Starting point is 00:39:33 with the futures contract, no money is leaving fiat and going into crypto. You put up cash collateral and then you settle it. So there's no money that is going into crypto. If you have a spot Bitcoin ETF, then money would literally go into buying Bitcoin directly. And I guess that's the rub. I still don't get why you would want people to invest in suboptimal products. I feel like that's hurting the investment consumer. more than letting them be in a spot Bitcoin ETF. I just, I don't understand why they're dragging
Starting point is 00:40:08 the feet on this. So three hours was at the center of this. It was the Terra Luna blow up that they were hugely exposed to. And then their counterparties were tapping them on the shoulder, like, yo, it's muddy. And so when that happened, so I guess we're supposed to talk to Zach, he cannot come on this week. We were supposed to have him on. But I really want to ask him, are these lender businesses that obviously aren't FDIC insured? Are they just not viable products or viable businesses? Because when the market gets spooked and there's rumors that are either true or false or whatever, but if enough customers just decide to leave, that's it.
Starting point is 00:40:47 The bank run. That's it. So how do you prevent that? Now, credit to BlockFi, they never stop people from taking their funds out. Voyager. Yeah, you're right. Celsius did. They never stopped that.
Starting point is 00:40:58 Is it a viable business model? if the asset falls 70% in value and the customers say, I don't have FDIC insurance, so I'm out of here. I'm moving it somewhere else. I'm getting it out of it. That's the thing. How can you stop bank runs? I don't know. They're going to have to have lower rates and have some sort of their own insurance or something.
Starting point is 00:41:14 I don't know. Did you see the celebrity grifter stuff that's going on getting out of it? This Gary Vee thing. I am a fan of the concept of NFTs. I think there's some really cool shit that's going to happen. And believe me, I am sympathetic to the outside. viewer that so much of it is nonsense. The prices are outrageous. I totally am on board with that, 100% on board of that. But I do think there will be some cool stuff that comes out of it.
Starting point is 00:41:40 Not what Gary V said. Let me read what he said, because I read that, I said, ha, ha, huh. Are we sure this is real? This isn't a fake. I'm kidding. This is an actual quote from Gary Vaynerchuk. Everybody uses a QR code because if you want to eat at a restaurant, you need to use it to get the menu. All right, I'm following. or when you're traveling, it's your airline ticket. You're not getting anywhere on any airline without using a QR code. Still with him. Soon that QR code will be an NFT.
Starting point is 00:42:13 Okay. It will be a better technology for companies like British Airways and everybody else because it will become a digital asset after you use it. Today, all of our airline tickets sit in our Apple wallets. In a decade, they will become micro collectibles because they will have an artist attached to it. Hmm? And somebody may offer you $280 for a flight that you took from Bucharest to Mekanos because they follow that artist. No, they won't.
Starting point is 00:42:45 No, they will not. They will not be a secondary market for old plane ticket QR stubs. Lassie, he says, and companies will be incentivized to do that because they make royalty on the transaction. All right. Come on. We were cleaning out our storage stuff a couple months ago and reorganizing, and I found an old box stuff I had from college. And I saved a lot of stuff on trips that I went to, little ticket stubs and postcards.
Starting point is 00:43:08 And I looked at all this stuff and I go, didn't need to say that. And I just threw it all away because it was like, back then I was like, oh, I'll look at this someday. But it's like, I don't need my own collectibles. I certainly don't need someone else's collectibles. Hey, Ben, Ben, can I get that sweet layover from Detroit to Chicago to New York? Remember the one that you got delayed at? It had like graffiti on it. That was super cool. I like that one.
Starting point is 00:43:29 This is from some art network. It was only January on Twitter first roll at a feature that allowed NFT owners to make their own digital artwork of their choice, their profile picture, with its own in-house verification system. Many followed suit. However, several months later, many celebrities have abandoned their non-fungible avatars, including Serena Williams, Reese Witherspoon, Shonda Rhymes, Little Dirk, don't know who that is, Travis Barker and Meek Mill. Basically, all these people had board apes, and they've just kind of quietly taken their board ape off of their avatar. as they've crashed. Do you think it's possible?
Starting point is 00:43:58 I'm just going to throw this out there that these celebrities were paid to push these NFTs and not actually part of the community. I'm asking the question. I think it's possible. They didn't actually join because of the community.
Starting point is 00:44:10 Maybe Jimmy Fallon really wasn't a part of the board ape community despite what he said. Micro collectibles. I guess you shouldn't be surprised. But, okay. What we got here for survey? Oh, this is from that article
Starting point is 00:44:24 that the economy is going to get weird article, about two and five economists surveyed by the journal in June said they saw at least a 50-50 chance at the U.S. I'm just a recession. By the way, do you know what percentage two and five is? 40%. There you go. 40% of economists see a 50. That's just perfect. 40% see a 50-50 chance. We were talking. I was on the phone with you last week. I was making eggs. We were on the phone and I've sprinkled some bacon bits on my eggs. Which sounds like a great idea, actually. It was a great idea. It was a great idea.
Starting point is 00:44:54 eggs are, we were discussing eggs are the cheapest way to go. Eggs are one of the cheapest forms of protein. I mean, someone said the price of eggs is up 40% of last year, whatever it is. You can get a dozen eggs for like $2.50, $3 maybe.
Starting point is 00:45:08 I eat eggs every morning because that's my protein. I eat eggs with a little bit of turkey sausage in there. That's my protein that ate for breakfast. Wait, you do, legs are ridiculously cheap. Links. Okay, I don't know slices or a thing. That was too specific. Oh, you're talking about the little patties maybe.
Starting point is 00:45:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get a big huge pre-cooked bag from Costco in the last me two months. Eggs are ridiculously cheap. If you're someone who's hurting for money at the grocery store, not only are they cheap, there's variety. What do you like? Sunny side up. There's a lot you can do with it.
Starting point is 00:45:40 Omlet, scrambled, hard-boiled. You can probably have a different variety of egg every day for a week and not get sick of them. What are you doing for a non-stick pan? Because that's the other key. You have to have a good non-stick pan. You buy one of those copper ones. and then the minute it sticks, you throw it away, get a new one. The minute you get something stuck on there, you buy one for like $20 on Amazon.
Starting point is 00:46:00 You would have a heart attack if you saw my dishes situation. Uh-oh. Okay. I've got dishes from our wedding. They're all stick. They're not all sticking. I mean, your pants. They're not great.
Starting point is 00:46:12 What I say, dishes, my pants, my pants. You can get yourself a copper non-stick pan in Amazon for like 1999, and I use it for like four or five months and toss it. Okay. Get a new one. My best egg pan is just like the hard steel. Is it steel? What's like the skillet that you cook a steak on? Like the big black.
Starting point is 00:46:29 Oh, yeah. Okay. That's what I use for my eggs. Okay. You got to get a non-stick. Okay. Because I use mine all the time. All right.
Starting point is 00:46:35 Real quick. Netflix is in big, big trouble. Relatively speaking. Wait, listen, the stock's in 70%. I'm not breaking news here. By the way, you mentioned earlier about sell recommendations on some of these stocks. It is funny how these stocks will be down 80 or 90% and analysts will be like, we're changing from neutral to sell.
Starting point is 00:46:50 It's like, oh, thanks. Appreciate that. Very helpful. Let me take a look at the analyst coverage. They've got 11 buys, three outperforms, 24 holds, three underperforms and three cells. What's the difference between the underperformment of sell? I don't know. Either way, you've got 11 to 3 buy to sell. I've mentioned this before, but my first internship was for a sell side analyst. And there would be like Monday morning meetings of all the analysts and kind of sharing with their sales team about what stocks and research to push. And I remember the manager one time being like, all right, people, we have 386 stocks rated as buys, 400 as neutrals in three cells. He's like, can someone
Starting point is 00:47:27 please put a sell in a company? Please. They're like, we can't. We need the management teams to like us. That's why you can't really trust those sometimes. Okay, so Netflix, check out this nifty chart from Vox. Netflix subscribers are more likely to quit in the first month than any other streaming service. Interesting. And look at the chart. I guess that makes sense. They used to be in the him. Nobody canceled Netflix in the first month. You pay for Netflix for a month. You binge the show you want to watch. Then you cancel. I guess that's the model. I've done that with Peacock before. Maybe that's why they did the thing with Stranger Things, where they released like the first 80% of it. That's why they need to space them out more. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Starting point is 00:48:08 Listen, as much as I love a good binge, there's something to be said about waiting a week between shows, letting it marinate a little bit. I agree. I just did a binge. Let's do recommendations. I did. This one's been on my list for a while. It's an old one. I think it came out like 2019. Russian doll on Netflix. It's another one of those Groundhog Day ones where you're reliving the same day over and over. Russian doll? Yeah. I think it just came out with season two. I finished season one. The great thing about it is episodes are 20 to 25 minutes. And if I see that and it's only eight episodes, I mean, it was weird. It was kind of mind bending. I didn't care for the finale. But the show itself was like kind of enough to make you think. And I, for whatever reason, the reliving the same day
Starting point is 00:48:45 thing, it just pulled me in every time. This show. You like that? I don't know. What was the Palm Springs. Palm Springs. Yeah, I did like that one. This one, it was a 6.8. Decent. Almost nice. Yeah. Okay. Movie, Apple TV, Chacha Real Smooth. This is my guy. I think it's Cooper Rafe is his name. He wrote and directed shit house is the one I told you I liked. So he also wrote directed and starred in this. You wouldn't like it. It's a coming of age, kind of sentimental, but also kind of funny. I think this guy is so talented. He wrote directed and starred in the movie and he plays a completely different character. than he did in his first movie. And this guy is like, he feels like a real person in the movie. You know, like sometimes movie stars, you watch them and you look at them and you go, that's not a real person. That's a movie star. This guy feels like a real person. Very good. I don't think I like coming of age movies. I think you might be right. You don't need to watch
Starting point is 00:49:35 this. It's a coming of age, but it's not for you. Kid got out of college, trying to figure himself out. He is a party starter for bar mitzvahs. I never came of age. It was too close to home. He's too close to home. He's too close to home. It's too close. Okay. But by the way, the movie takes place at bar mitzviz. So maybe you would like it. He's like a party starter at bar mitzvah. Okay. Okay. I watch Parenthood with Steve Martin on HBO, not the show. The show, I loved the show actually, but the movie from like
Starting point is 00:49:57 1989. And it's like Keanu Reeves' first movie. Parenthood. So Rick Moranis, Steve Martin, a bunch of people you know. From the 1980s, they nail everything about like the different relationships that parents have with their kids. There's the dad, his son is a total fuck up, and he keeps always having these
Starting point is 00:50:13 get rich quick schemes, and the dad still believes everything he says and is like just backs them no matter what, but then doesn't really back the other kid and then there's like the mom and the daughter that are why did you watch us at odds with each other I've seen it before and I hadn't seen it in a while I was clicking through it's crazy that Steve Martin has looked like Steve Martin for 40 years yes since back yeah for some reason I've always liked that I remember that movie I hadn't seen in a while Keanu Reeves is like first movie but they nail the relationships like the parent who tries to get their kid to do too
Starting point is 00:50:40 much at a young age or the parent who doesn't believe anything bad about their chill like they really nail all of the different relationships with parents that you see these days anyway And finally, one more. I got caught up in talented Mr. Realplay on Netflix yesterday. Like, it was on my home screen. I think if you wanted to go, like, live in a time in a movie, like, in switch places with that character, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow living in Italy in the 1960s, it's a pretty awesome place to me. That's kind of a transport you to that kind of place movie.
Starting point is 00:51:07 Just the first, like, hour of that movie is fantastic. So good. I also rewatched Independence Day, just because of the fourth this week. Still holds up. It's a little cheesy at spots from the 90s, but I remember going to see that in, like, Like seventh grade when it came out on the fourth, and that was a big deal when that came out. That was a huge blockbuster. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:51:24 Speaking of blockbusters, I took the boys to see minions this weekend. First time that I've taken them to the theater. And I have to say, it was great. Did they love it? The entire time, towards like the last half hour, 20 minutes, Logan kept saying it's too dark, it's too dark. He was like sort of getting antsy. I feel like with kids that age, you have to bring them like even after the previews almost. You have to like get them right when the movie starts.
Starting point is 00:51:46 So this movie did $100 million. 125 million. I'm sorry. My son loves the minions. Did you take him? No, we didn't go see all the other ones he's seen. He loves the fart jokes. Okay.
Starting point is 00:51:57 This is the first animated film in three years to post a $100 million plus opening. The last time a movie did this well during July 4th weekend was Transformers Dark of the Moon, which was 2011. Wow. Okay. That one's on our list. We're going to go see that for sure, too. Here's what I watched this week. Deepwater, I saw, I think, on Hulu.
Starting point is 00:52:15 It's the Anna to Armis Ben Affleck movie. Have you seen it? How screwed up is that movie? Isn't that so messed up? The first three quarters or two-thirds, I was like, all right. It was very entertaining, but definitely, nothing even remotely resembling a good movie. No, it was totally off the rails. I didn't get it.
Starting point is 00:52:35 It made no sense. Yeah, made no sense. Speaking of making no sense, I watched Ambulance, the Michael Bay movie. Is that the Jake Gyllenhawn one? I thought that kind of looked good, no? It was very meta. There's a character Willie Sharp, Willie Sharp. I'm like, Willie Sharp, really sharp.
Starting point is 00:52:47 Isn't that from Armageddon? From Armageddon. They did some bad boys references. It was very self-referential. Okay. Not good? Insane. 80% of the movie was shot via drone and just bullets flying, a crazy Jake Gyllenhaal performance that only could have been, like, I'm trying to think, did Michael Bay make Jake Gyllenhaal bad in the movie?
Starting point is 00:53:08 Because you're not really sure what his character is, and then you learn a little bit about it later on. The movie was so disjointed, completely made. Also, made negative sense. I was entertained, but then it just dragged. It was like probably 30 minutes too long. I see 6.1 on IMDB. For me, that's probably a no. How's this?
Starting point is 00:53:26 You know what? You go to a theater with this movie, and you're giving high-fives to your friends. But at home, it's just not quite the same. It's a big screen movie. I got you. What is that on Netflix? I don't know. Maybe I rented it.
Starting point is 00:53:36 I can't remember. Either way, not great. In fact, bad. Okay. All right, let's check out on the market, Ben. Shall we? Before we say goodbye? It is still July 5th.
Starting point is 00:53:45 But now it's 1115. Stocks are down 2%. We're going to do some sort of record this year for 2% down days, aren't we? NASDAQ is bouncing pretty healthily. This actually is kind of interesting. NASDAQ is bouncing pretty strongly and the S&P's hitting new lows. Oh, no, the Dow is hitting new lows. I'm sorry.
Starting point is 00:54:00 Oh, you poor Dow. What's going on with the Dow? Nothing good. By the way, Disney, just randomly. Disney's about to take out its March 2020 lows. Did you know that? Oh, really? I still hold the stock.
Starting point is 00:54:10 I bought it for my kids. Sorry, kids can't go to college anymore. All right. All right. on YouTube, hit subscribe button, leave us a comment. If you're listening to the podcast, yeah. Get us a review. I haven't read the reviews in a while. We had some funny ones back in the day. Leave us a review. We'll take a look at those. Maybe read some. Get us an email, Animal Spearspot at gmail.com, and we will see you next week.
Starting point is 00:54:45 Thank you.

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