Animal Spirits Podcast - What's the negative catalyst? (EP.291)

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

On today’s show we discuss Michael becoming famous for a Bezos prediction, the case for no recession in 2023, the bullish case for stocks, the bearish case for stocks, false signals from an inverted yield curve, why this is not 1970s-like inflation, 2023 movies and much more.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs...  Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense  Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor  Like us on Facebook  And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.      (Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, received compensation from the sponsor of this advertisement. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information.)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by our friends at Y Charts. Michael, another chart that I've been looking at a lot over the last 18 to 24 months. U.S. unemployment rate. One of my favorite things that Y charts is back in the day, we had to figure out how to add the little gray lines with recessions whenever we made a chart. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. It's hard.

The first time I did that, I felt like a wizard. It's really hard to do it. I have to Google it every time. So Y charts just does it for you. You can add in the recession charts. This is the U.S. unemployment rate going back to the late. 1980s. And we're going to talk a lot about the labor market on today's show. I still contend that spike and then fall back to Earth, basically another round trip in the unemployment rate,

it still defies logic looking at it. Now, I posted this on Twitter last week and said as much after we had a strong job report last week. And the funny thing is that you always get a lot of responses from people saying, well, it's obvious why it happened now. But that hindsight is so easy that no one ever could have predicted that you would have seen something like this in the moment, regardless of how much money the government was going to spend. People in the future are going to look at this

in economic textbooks and go, what? I don't get it. Does this sort of an asterisk? These charts, so you know how when the Lakers won the title in the bubble? I don't know if there is officially an asterisk, but in my mind, there's a little bit of one. Yeah, that sounds like a nix bias to me,

but anyway. LeBrod bias. These lines are never going away. They're going to be on these charts for the rest of the time. It is going to be one of those things where we constantly look back. back of these and go, what was that? Anyway, if you want to check out these charts and more,

go to whitetres.com, tell them Animal Spirit sent you 20% off that initial subscription when you sign up. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holtz Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of 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.

On Monday morning, I think it was Monday morning. One of the mornings, I woke up then to a flurry of media requests from outlets such as CNBC, New York Post, Hollywood Reporter. And I'm like, Wait, what in the world is going on? Not to brag. Not to brag. They all wanted to talk about my prediction that Jeff Bezos would return to Amazon. Now, when I included this in my list, as I've told the audience at this point, this was a Ben Carlson idea, which is hilarious. You gave me a 10% start on this.

So I think what happened was we were talking about Bob Iger coming back and we were trying to brainstorm who else could come back. And you had said Amazon is down 50%. It's in a huge drawdown. And I made the case, okay, stock price down, CEO companies. back, and I said, Bezos is going to come back to, just throwing it out there. And you looked at it. He said, wait a minute, he's only 57. And we both thought, this could be a real thing. Okay, so it's a collaboration. You got the ball rolling, but yeah. But I called you, like, right away. And I was like, dude, this is hilarious because if this does come to pass,

I'm going to be the guy on TV, the man who said Jeff Bezos comes back to Amazon. Here's what he says next. And we always make fun of that because it's like just the dumbest thing ever. Forget about all the times that you were wrong. Just this person said one thing that happened. Here's what. Okay. So anyway, there was a lot of. I'm going to be the Winklevoss twins here, and you're going to be Zuck. You're going to get Facebook. So there was a lot of articles I came out that morning, and the headline to one of them, this is from MarketWatch, the chef's kiss and all this, because this is perfect.

It's perfect. Because we make fun of these headlines. We spend a lot of time laughing about this. So this headline for the article about me, this analyst who forecasts a double-digit drop in stocks for 2022, now says Jeff Baisus may return to Helm Amazon. So in my 2022 prediction list, I did say that the market was going to drop double digits. Again, I said a lot of things that didn't happen, but they said this. And that's even how I was introduced on TV and it's just too much.

The year is young, but this is going to be one of my favorite things of the year. I just love how it says this analyst. And this is why people make so many predictions because... Yeah, I got to dial it up. I think I need 10 a week. If you get one to stick like this, though, you're in it. But this is why people spend so much time predicting the future. even though it's unpredictable.

I mean, this really and truly shows why people do it. You're exactly right. There's so much upside. There's so much upside with the attention and the eyeballs, and there's very little downside. And no one pays attention to any of the predictions you get wrong. I mean, sometimes people throw it in our faces, but for the most part, people immediately forget the predictions you got wrong, but if you've got one right, you are set for a while.

Think about how many people lived off of 2008 for so long, and they basically got lucky. People are still doing it. All right, so visual capitalists at a poll. Well, they quoted me. And then they said, will Basel's return to Amazon in 2023? 45% of people said yes. It's not that far-fetched. And later, I don't know if it was over the weekend, but at some point of time, I'm sharing with you and Josh, some of the coverage, I'm just dying.

So New York Post headline, Amazon workers joke about Jeff Bezos's comeback amid Andy Jassy Layoffs. By the way, this ends with Basis coming back and Jassy suing me for $10 billion. Business Insider did a post that I can't see because it's behind the paywall. Employees reportedly discussed a possibility on an internal message board dedicated to the subject of layoffs on Thursday. The same day that Jassy cited economic uncertainty while detailing plans to submit. Okay, here's a quote for one employee. Apparently, not even Andy is safe. So I had a friend who reached out to me who does work at Amazon and said, dude, you caused a big storm.

I got a lot of people asking me, who is this guy? Do you remember in Oceans 12 when Scott Kahn and Casey Affleck got sent down to like the production company of the Dice in Mexico? And they ended up starting a riot in the warehouse because the workers wanted higher wages? That's like what you're going to cause here with your prediction, I think, is there's going to be like Amazon strikes or something because Bezos is coming back. I watched your CNBC hit, and they're asking you all this stuff about Andy Jassy and the cloud and the operating stuff. You could go through line by line, I'm sure, in the fundamentals and make a good or bad case for it. But the only case really is Amazon stock is down 50%. And when the stock price goes down a lot, there's going to be people who are pushing for a move.

That's the point that I wish if I had a mulligan, I would have said, you know what? It doesn't matter if Jassy is at fault or not. That's not really relevant. What's relevant is the stock is getting killed, even relative to a lot of its competitors. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft had amazing fundamental performance and the stock was terrible, and they eventually got rid of him. Yeah, sometimes people get canned for reasons that are just not fair. That's the way the world works.

Later that week, Amazon did announce that they're doing 18,000 laps. We'll get into that a little bit later. But there was some news that Stitch Fix founder, Katrina Lake, who left the company last year. She's coming back. This might be building momentum. Our other jokes, what will we say? Steve Jobs is going to come back to Apple, Thomas Edison coming back to GE. I might be the only person who still uses Stitch Fix as a product.

I still like it. So I hope Amazon or someone buys them. I actually bought that stock based on her appearance on Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and then I sold the stock when she quit, which I think I basically round-tripped it before it fell like 90%. That stock is down, what, 97% from the highs? It's one of those ones. It's one of those.

But I want to talk about something that we discussed with Derek. Thompson, we did a podcast with him last week, and we were talking about- Check it out. That's plain English. I think that was one of our better ones we've done with him. We've done three or four with him. Credit us. It was basically a review of 2022 and then a look ahead to 2023 for markets in the economy. And so we were doing a lot of, well, I could see this and then I could see that and just going back and forth because there are a lot of conflicting signals. This are always hard, but especially now. And Derek basically said, listen, enough of this. Pick aside. He held your feet to the fire. Yeah. And I said, no recession.

And I can't believe that I said that. And then Ben and Derek also said no recession. Now, listen, this is not a prediction that we want plastered on the headlines if we get it right type of thing. Analysts who predicted Bezos is coming back to Amazon predicts no recession in 2023. Okay. So just think about it this way. If inflation peaked, unemployment remains low and maybe picks up moderately. And the wage inflation is behind us.

I don't know. Doesn't that kind of sound like a soft landing like the definition of now? You could say, well, what about the PMI data, which is a really solid leading indicator, which looks terrible. And what about all of the announced cuts? Here's what I am saying. Just the fact that it's even possible is remarkable considering where general sentiment towards the Fed and the economy was, call it six months ago.

It seemed completely inevitable. Think about March when the war happened and inflation spiked immediately, gas prices went up. If you would have asked me then, could we have a soft landing? I would have said, no way. There's not a chance. And the fact that we are having that, my whole reasoning was I am shocked by the continuing strength of the labor market and the fact that people keep getting raises if they change jobs

and the unemployment rate remains low and there's still a lot of worker shortage, it seems like Eddie Lfenbine said this is the lowest piece I'm in employment in 75 years. This one from Dom White, this is interesting. He counted up the construction sector. Nine months into the housing recession, the construction sector is still adding jobs. That shows how understaffed they were, the fact that they're still adding people. that's my whole thing is that the labor market is so strong unless the Fed puts rates to 7% and just really puts the screws into the economy, it seems like the possibility of a soft landing

is way higher than at any time over the last year or so. So in terms of the strength of the labor market, I really just think people are thrown off by the tech layoffs, which are the biggest companies. We'll get to that later. I think that's like throwing people off a little bit. But housing, where's the 30 you down to? Like 6-1-6-2? I think housing, assuming that rates stay here, which maybe...

but they will, but they won't. But assuming they do, housing activity is going to pick up in a hurry. Prices will be lower, but that's one of the big worries is that, well, housing is already in a depression and that's going to spill over into the real economy. Yeah, probably would have, but not afraid to stay where they are right now. The whole narrative was the reason the Fed can't raise rates is because the economy cannot handle it. There's no way the economy can handle higher rates. That's good point. I'm just as surprised as anyone else. I'm surprised that the slowdown in housing that's been caused and all the stuff that the Fed hasn't broken anything yet. And if you put some truth to them into them, Jack Ryan style, I'm sure they would say the same thing that

they're probably surprised they haven't broken anything yet, with rates going that high, that fast. Let me hold your feet to the fire. If all you know is that we avoided recession this year, do stocks go up a lot, down nowhere? What are your thoughts? If we have no recession this year, I would say probably double-digit increase in stocks. But the other thing is, are we pushing off for recession until next year. Because if 60% of the economists say there's a recession chance this year and we just muddle through what we've been doing, then it's going to be 90% next year or something. And people are just going to keep pushing that back. You'd have to see something where inflation would have to drop a lot. And then the unemployment rate still stay relatively low for me

to think, okay, we're kind of out of the woods here, at least for this crisis. So I would think that just base case, stocks would have a double-digit rally. Given how positioning is and sentiment and all that sort of stuff, and people could play catch-up real fast. You could also convince me that, well, stocks are just getting re-rated to higher rates, right? If there's no recession, why does the Fed need to raise rates? You could also convince me that fears of a recession will not diminish. People will only, like, become more steadfast in the belief that we will have a recession next year. So you might be right. Instead of people saying, okay, we got through it, they might just double down on just wait. It's actually a 2024 story. I wanted to get into the

a little later, but the 10 years back down to 3.5%. Wow. What was it high? Was it? 4.2, I think. 4.3. The bond market does not believe inflation is here to stay. And doesn't it seem like the Fed and the bond market are basically trying to figure out who blinks first? It seems like the market is probably usually right in these things. If you've had to pick one, who's more wrong? The bond market or the Fed right now? The Fed's probably more wrong. And they're going to eventually have to relent and either stop or cut if inflation falls back to 3%, the Fed's probably going to have to cut,

or at least stop doing what they're doing. Yeah, I mean, if inflation falls to three and they're still at four and a quarter or 450, wherever they are. So here's the other thing we've been talking about. Well, if inflation falls, and that means probably earnings have to fall too because prices will come down.

Sorry, I still listen to one on Twitter. I can't remember who posted this, but it's showing earnings downs and stocks up. This is showing a little scatter plot here. This seems like a trip that you would make, potentially. So look at all the times where earnings were, down double digits in some cases, and stocks were still up double digits. 1991, earnings fell 25%, and stocks were up 25%.

2009, that one makes sense, 1975. If you look at this, a lot of these, 2020, a lot of these are times after a bare market where earnings fell and the stock market took off. The stock market already fell. earnings haven't fallen yet. 2023 could be the same thing where earnings fall 10, 15%, because prices are coming in and things are slowing down a little bit and stocks take off still. because they've already discounted it.

Could be. That's probably the thing that some people aren't taking into account. A lot of people think, if A, then B, so if earnings fall, stocks have to fall. It doesn't necessarily work like that. Well, so let me ask you this. So on Friday, we got the jobs data.

Strong labor market most of the time. Well, in this environment, that would mean stocks get killed because the Fed still has to go. However, wage growth, which is the thing that the Fed is focused on, is rolling over material. It came in below expectations,

and the stock market ripped. So what's the bear key? right now like in the immediate term is it we're coming into earnings season and earnings just the bad Q4 earnings possible but what else what else do bears got well i guess it's just the fed the fed saying we don't care we are just going to wait but the market is pricing in what 25 basis point now in February and in March i guess they're not going to surprise the market and go bigger than that i don't think a lot of people have asked us after that last month when we had that really strong inflation print and stocks were ripped remember the day we were filming animal spirits

and then they rolled over and then stocks kind of had a little minor correction from there. A lot of people are asking, like, why did the stock market roll over again there? Nothing else really happened. They were saying that, like, they were talking tough. There was hawkish rhetoric. It just has to be some sort of combination of recession fears, the Fed, making a big mistake and staying too long, and earnings falling. I guess that's your bare case.

All right, let's talk about, where's this chart from Ben? The share of fixed income indices yielding 4% or more. Monovator posted this on Twitter. Good English blogger. Share of fixed income indices yielding 4% or more, 1999 to 2022. And you can see from the 90s to really the 2008, 2009 crisis. There's no yield. Well, no, I'm saying. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Until then there was yield. And then since then, there was no yield. I still could be talked to either way into that 10, 12 year period of no yields being like this aberration versus just going back there or close to maybe not that low, but close to that level. I could be talked into either one. Not impossible. The other question that I have

is fixed income really does compete with bonds. This is not tinfoil hat. This is very obvious. It's basic. When people are allocating money, they think they have two broad buckets, and of course there are others, but it's stocks and bonds. You mean fixed income can compete with stocks? You said fixed income can compete with bonds. I'm sorry. In a world where you can get risk-free returns, it makes going elsewhere relatively less attractive, obviously. The funny thing is that relative of attractiveness, it didn't really stop people in the past. It makes a bigger deal now that rates were so low. Yes, it does. In the 80s and 90s, you could get six, seven, eight, nine percent on treasuries. But you never could have gotten zero, and that's the difference.

So I'm saying back then, people still took risk when now you'd think a lot of people would say, if I can get seven percent in treasuries, I'm taking zero risk. Give me those treasuries. Back then, people still took risk because they were more used to those high rates. If rates stay at four percent for the next decade. You can have another bubble. Of course you can. Because people will get used to 4%. Yes. It's just the baseline. Yeah, the relative attractiveness has a lot to do with it. One of my 10 predictions for 2023 was international stocks outperforming. I can't remember if we covered this. Did I include the chart showing that the S&P 500 was one of the worst performing indices around the world? I don't think so. Well, it was. It really was. Well, I looked at

this for my asset allocation quilt. Small caps outperformed it, midcaps, international stocks. This is the first time in a long time in that value stocks outperformed by a lot that the large cap growth wasn't one of the best performers for stock market in terms of the big, broad parts of the stock market. To supplement this, State Street had a really terrific chart showing U.S. stocks minus the rest of the world, and they looked at rolling 12-month performance. On a rolling 12-month basis, U.S. stocks have outperforming. or had outperformed international stocks for 55 consecutive periods, which is the longest streak going back to this start in 93, this data set. And that ended. That just ended

earlier in the year. Wow. That's a long. It's crazy time. I mean, for 12-month-olding periods, even in a period of U.S. dominance, you'd think international would have some sort of snapback has not happened. All right. Cool chart from Sam Rowe. I never seen this. This is from Goldman shows the net income contribution by sector from 1975 to 2022. And it's interesting. The financial one is crazy because that goes from 25% to zero in the blink of an eye. I wonder how correlated this is to the market cap weights. I'm sure it ebbs and flows.

Well, he says at the peak of the tech bubble, information tech never generated more than 14% of earnings for this in P500. Now it accounts for 21%. Be interesting if tech overcorrects, which it appears that it might be, where it becomes like underrepresented relative to its net income. Yeah, that's true. And energy. Look at energy.

Energy is 11% of net income and it's not even close to 11% of the market cap. In 2022. I mean, look at how much bigger energy was in the 1980s. It was almost 30%. And now it makes up 4% of the total index in terms of weight. Just a cool chart. Now, you ask for bearish potential catalysts. If you were a historian of markets, you would say, look at how inverted the yield curve is.

I put the treasury yields in. This is as of Monday. six-month yield is 4.8 versus a 10-year of 3.5. Three-month T-bills are 4.6 versus 35 for the 10-year. That's a huge, huge inversion. Now, Cam Harvey, who, has he been on the compounded friends before? Yes. We were talking about the inverted yield curve in 2019, and then the pandemic happened.

Yeah, very sharp guy. He basically came up with the yield curve indicator, I think, for his PhD dissertation or something like that. And he says, I don't think that you can trust it this time, which is really crazy because I think he said since he came up with it, it's like nine for nine. Predicting recessions, eight for eight. Huge credit to him. The intellectual discipline or flexibility to say my indicator is not going to work for X, Y, and Z. Good for him.

Analysts whose recession indicator is eight for eight. Critics it does not work. He said his whole thing is the labor market, basically. It's so strong. All the weird stuff that's been going on. He said when he put it all together, it's successfully we could dodge a bullet, avoiding the hard landing and realizing slow growth or minor negative growth if recession arrives it would be mild. He's actually saying, I don't think I can trust it this time, which again,

credit to him. Yeah, that's great. What about Fed intervention? Forward guidance. Fed intervention was a thing back from the day, but not to the extent that it is now. They're such a big player. So I think that, yeah, listen, things change. We've spoke about that a million times. The rules change, the game changes. If you wanted to predict a time when it might not work, this would be the time that, yeah, the Fed has gone so aggressive on their rate hikes. And they were intervening in all of these interest rate markets for so long that maybe they just are really screwed up right now. There's a chart from Bank of America showing that the lower income households are still seeing much faster spending growth than upper income relative to 2019 based on card

spending over holiday shopping season. What do we make of this? Are there any macro implications to this? I think the implications are if you give people some money and give them a taste of what it's like to spend, it's going to be hard to wean them off of that. The low-income people have seen the biggest increase ramp up in their income. And so they also spend a lot. So they're spending more than they did because they had higher incomes. So even if those incomes stagnate or fall or whatever in the coming years, it's going to be hard to get people to stop spending that much money because you raise up to that new level and luxuries become necessities or whatever. What I meant by that is, are there macro implications in the sense that I would guess that the bottom

I don't know, 40%, whatever it is, can they move the needle in terms of spending or is it a relative drop in the bucket? What we've seen is that if you give people a lower on the income scale money, if the government does, they'll spend it. And it can juice the economy. Whereas if you give money to and tax breaks to rich people, they're probably just going to save it. Good point. Yeah, maybe that's it. I was talking with Josh about this on TCAS. Just how much Eat the Rich has bled over into pop culture with White Lotus. Succession. Did you watch the menu? That's exactly what I was going. I watched a movie over the weekend.

And this was not satire in the way that those were, but I watched Nanny, which was a pretty good one on Amazon about a nanny that comes over from Senegal, and she takes care of one daughter, rich parents in a gigantic apartment, and they're not paying her appropriately. They're not paying her overtime. And it's like, what the hell is going? I mean, anyway, that is certainly part of the deal these days. Trouble had a lot to do with that spending culture, and you're right. Again, rich people are just not seen as cool anymore.

There was a time period when they were, now rich people are openly mocked in pop culture. Well, I do wonder how long before people's appetite for that sort of schick is exhausted, because I'm almost there. I don't know. I still like it. It's kind of like how Russia is the go-to bad guy in every CIA spy show, mostly because Hollywood is scared of making fun of China and having China be the enemy. but I feel like Russia is just the perfect setup for the enemy.

Rich people are the perfect one to mock, especially with inequality where it is, and I don't know that that's going to change anytime soon. No, I don't think so. All right. The Wall Street Journal had a piece on beer sales dropping because consumers are balking at higher prices. This is from Constellation Chief Executive Bill Newlands,

told analysts last week, the consumer is overly sensitive to pricing actions. Because I guess beer prices rose 7% from one year to the next, from Christmas to Christmas, and people are saying, we're not going to spend it anymore. This is one of the reasons that we're not in the 70s. In the 70s, the whole idea was it became a reinforcing cycle of, okay, prices are rising. Now we have to keep spending because prices are going to rise in the future.

This time around, people are finally putting their foot down and saying, no, we're not going to spend anymore. Your elephant, whatever, IPA, that's now 1599 for a four-pack, we're not going to spend that anymore. Well, also, there's so much choice within beers and spirits or whatever. That could be part of it, too. I said last week that I was going to have a dry January. What I meant was 2023, or 24, excuse me. We went out to dinner on Thursday. It's very hard to go to dinner and not have a drink. So I had a drink on Thursday. We went out for a birthday party over the weekend. Of course, I indulged. And I'm going to Minnesota on Friday, no Saturday. And, but, but, but,

Believe you may, I'll be drinking at the game. I'm anti-dra-January, because I think this is like Ben preaching influencer guy again. Have more moderation in your life instead of trying to go cold turkey for one month. It's not going to do anything for you. Figure out moderation in your life. My eating has been pristine. I've been eating very clean, not to brag. No junk, no soda, no nonsense.

So wait, go back to the game thing. You're going to the game because an animal spirit's listener. That's not true. Let me set it up to the story. I'm not going to the game because of Animal Spurs listener, but I get to that in a second. I'm going to the game because I love the Giants, and I've been waiting to go to a road game for way too long. The last game that I went to was in 2011 in Green Bay when we won, and that was one of the greatest moments of my life or experiences, I should say. So I decided, my friend and I were talking a couple weeks ago, here's the deal.

I'm not going to San Francisco, which seemed likely at the point. First of all, we're going to lose, and I don't want to fly all the way across the country to lose. It's too long. I just didn't want to do it. And obviously, the only place that we could possibly go to, there's a zero percent chance that I would have gone to Philly for reasons that are obvious to sports fans. Minnesota was the most desirable occasion. And so a lot of things had to break our way for that to happen, and they did.

And on Saturday, flights were 400 bucks, which I used points for. And I said, you know what? I could always change flights. My friends are like, well, what if you play Saturday in the early slot? Well, I'll trade my flight. So I booked it for Saturday, and guess what the flights are now? $700,000 immediately after the Giants to Minnesota was wrapped up. That's the one thing that has not come down yet is airline prices.

Airline prices are so high still. Prices shot up immediately. I also use points for the hotel, so it's not going to be a big expense out of pocket. And then I got an email from Luke in Minnesota yesterday morning, and this is just tremendous. This guy's got great seats that he was putting on stubbub, but as a thank you, for whatever, our podcast. For all of your great predictions over the years. For all of my great, yeah, for all my alpha,

he said that he would be wanting to get them to me for face value. So, Luke, you're an angel. I mean, seriously, this is tremendous. Thank you so, so, so, so much. That's what you call a mensch, right? That is a mensch move right there. That's pretty fun. So I'm quite excited about that.

That's why you start a podcast. You get perks like this. Matthew Klein on the disinflationary labor market. Total weekly wages paid to employees, the number of workers on a payroll times the average work week, times the average hourly pay is rising at a rate of less than 4% a year. This is a dramatic deceleration from when it was close to 8% from March to September. So there it is. That's it. So wages are, you mentioned, they're rolling over. But it's interesting. He said the number of

people quitting rose in November so much so that the proportion of workers quitting their jobs for better prospects elsewhere rolls for the first time since the spring. That started a roll over, people still doing that. That just shows how much legs this labor market has that people are still quitting for better opportunities. I wonder if a lot of it is people trying to get ahead of they assume a recession is coming. And like, I better do this now. Now is the opportunity to either negotiate or find a better job or better wages or whatever it is. Again, it just comes back to people think there's going to be recession because so many people think there's going to be recession. I really do think that there's, I hate these words gas lighting here, but I don't know what else sees. I really think

that people are being swayed by headlines, by Amazon letting people off, by Salesforce letting people off. If you just saw the data, like if you really did ignore the noise and you were just looking at all you had to see was the data, would you be afraid that a recession was coming? The only reason why you would think of recession was coming maybe is because things couldn't possibly be better. We're at the end of a cycle, which again, it's fair. Look how strong the market is. Look how strong the retail spending is. Where is the inflation data today? It's not there. That's like, if you look at my historical thing has been, I think I showed this in my first book, that the annualized return by unemployment rate. If it's below 4%, it's like the lowest returns, which makes sense because that's when things are probably the best. But the stock market has already discounted the fact that that might happen. We're like ahead of that already. Very confusing. By the way, Tuesday, 955, S&P is flat. Did we get a Santa Claus rally? We did. No. What? No, we did. We 100% did. It's the last five days of the year and the first two days of the new year.

And yes, we did. You didn't see Ryan's tweet, Ryan Dietrich? I feel like we're moving the goalpost on the Santa Claus rally thing. It was in the Discord channel. And no, no, no, hold on. I have to set you straight. There are no goalpost that are moving. The Santa Claus rally, by definition, asked Jeff Hirsch, Stock Traders Olmanac,

last five days of the year. I need a judge's ruling on this. I'm telling you. He is the judge jury. The technicians are making this up, though. They're making this up. No, it's not. Stop embarrassing yourself.

It's the last five days of the year and the first two days in the new year. My gut feeling on the Santa Claus rally is we have an awesome December. December was down big time. So I'm saying no Santa Claus rally. You're moving the goalposts because Sanis does not come to December. He comes to the last five days. This is interesting. Goldman predicts no European recession.

I thought that was a foregone conclusion. And I won't even pretend to know what's going on over there. But I thought that everybody thought that. So I think every piece of data or analysis or headline in the markets, there's bound to be a contrary in these days because there's so many opinions, you could find a bullish or bearish contrarian opinion on any piece of data these days. they're showing, this is from Axios, European benchmark national gas prices are down 80% from their August peak. They basically completely round-tripped. There wasn't one person saying,

no, actually natural gas prices in Europe are going to fall. And even we said it's possible the U.S. maybe skirts a recession or just has it be mild recession. Literally everyone said, but Europe is effed with a capital F. They are done. They're going into recession. Goldman can't predict the future any better than anyone else. But if people are even talking, talking about Europe, skirting a recession, there would have been no way anyone would have thought that was possible in the spring or summer, no chance in hell. And the fact that the natural gas prices have become, remember, people were talking about Europeans are going to have to light their houses on fire to stay warm this winter. You could do the hindsight bias thing and say, well,

it's warmer than we thought and this happened and this happened and that happened. But this is one of those things that there was not one person saying this stuff's going to come back in. No way. That's fair. So layoffs, which is now a category in our Google Doc, I think it has been actually, for a while. We haven't made it official. Well, we had another one this morning. Did you put Coinbase in here? Yeah, I did. You told Derek that our rule on Annal Spirits is, if there is a round number, expect another layout to come. And Coinbase has now done three rounds, probably. It's just a rule. We don't make the rules. Alex Cantorot's tweeted Amazon cuts in perspective. So they employ 1.8

million people. A lot of that is warehouse. They have a 300,000 person corporate workforce. So this is around the 6% cut for that. Probably not. Well, I don't want to say probably anything. Who knows what Amazon does. But to Ben's point, sales. Salesforce laid off 10% of their staff and cut office space. Hard and fast rule. You can take this to the bank. Salesforce will do another amount of the layoffs. 10% is only where it starts.

So, Coinbase, it's the details that happened just before we came on the show. But Coinbase announced layoffs and the stock popped bigly on the news and is now giving some of that back. But Carl continued in 2022, tech companies laid off more than 150,000 workers. Technology remains in a recession. Technology didn't really even go into a recession in COVID. They were the first ones to come out of that just fine, and they are the first ones to go into a recession this time around. This is the point that a good rule of thumb that the winners in the last cycle

are not going to be the winners in the next cycle. Maybe tech turns it around and the Fed brings rates back down and everything's fine in a couple of years, but it doesn't seem like tech's just going to go back to the way it was. And I wonder, tech is bound to have another boom in the decade ahead. There's just too much going on there to stop. that. Do you think any of these CEOs learn their lesson and don't overhear next time? Or is this just something that will happen every time? You never forget this. Maybe new ones do, but the current round will never forget this. All right, let's talk about crypto. Mark Rubinstein, who has a great

substack called that Interest, did a little thing about them. I'm talking about Silvergate. I need to explain it to Ben like he's a five-year-old. Explain me Silvergate to me. I see it in the headlines. I honestly don't know what they do. Silvergate is the biggest bank for crypto institutions. That's all. Got it? And there are no crypto institutions left, so they're out of business? Well, yeah, it's not good. So they were one of the biggest winners alongside the crypto boom. I don't know what the stock was up, but it was a ton. So the market cap peaked at around $6 billion, and it's now down to $374 million, which is a 94% decline. So Mark says at the end of September, well, it's definitely worse now. Wow. Crypto deposits were 90% of the bank's

overall deposit base amounts to $11.9 billion. The bank announced this week that they are down to $3.8 billion. And what happened was they needed to sell bonds at a massive loss. So they took a $718 million loss on their bond holdings. And again, they own cash and I guess they put the cash to work and short-term bonds and whatever. And they take a massive, massive hit on that. One analyst said on a call, I want to just say congratulations. I don't think that there are many banks that could say a 70% decline in deposits and come out of it with no operational liquidity issues. Maybe there will be, but this is a big story in crypto. I don't know that it's like the central bank of cryptics.

I know there's no central bank, but it is where all of the institutions bank. I suppose it makes sense that if crypto is in a winter right now, every company that's involved in crypto is going to get hammered to? Yes. Charlie Gasparino tweeted, prosecutors are telling lawyers connected to SBF fraud investigation. The case is so sprawling that it could exhaust resources of the Southern District since it includes potential bribery, campaign contribution violations, market manipulation

on top of theft and fraud. Throw the book at him and send it to jail for life. Wow. Scoop from Ava Morrison, EDNY, and the SEC are investigating digital currency group and subsidiary genesis. There was a lot of smoke around here. I don't know if we spoke about Cameron and Tyler going after Barry Silbert at DCG. It is kind of funny that the open letters now happen on Twitter.

If there's something happening in crypto, it's going to happen on Twitter first. seems like. Genesis was the biggest source of leverage and lending in crypto. So a lot of the earned products, specifically Gemini came from Genesis. You deposited money at Gemini or crypto. Gemini loaned it to Genesis for a spread. Genesis loaned it out to others for a bigger spread. Genesis's counterparties blow up. Genesis blew up the money. There's $900 million in Gemini earned products that are stuck on the platform. And obviously they're going to war over this. And simultaneously, another DCG property, Grayscale, which is really the crown jewel, as far as I know, which was trading at a 50% discount. The discount seems to be bottoming, and there

was a massive rally yesterday. I saw some story. There's some guy that's trying to buy up a lot of it to, I guess, unlock the value, convert it to an ETF or do something to change the bylaws. I don't really know what the story is there, but that's going on to. Did I just say bylaws? I'm pretty sure I made that up, but it's not a good at a time. Maybe the biggest thing with crypto is that the reason that financial markets are so resilient is because you have your debt markets over here and your equity markets over here. And they don't intertwine that often where crypto, everything is intertwined. The whole reason the South Sea bubble happened back in the day is because they tied the debt instruments to the stock price or they did like a stock swap

for the bonds. And I feel like when you intermingle the stocks and bonds together and try to have them be one thing like crypto is done, where you have the earned products be tied to the price of the crypto, which is essentially the equity in some way, that's just probably never going to work. And can I just say, well, two things. Despite all the smoke and the noise and definitely there's fire, it looks pretty good. Just talking technicals. If you don't know anything that's going on, and especially if you know what's going on, it should make you more bullish. You mean what's looking at Bitcoin?

Bitcoin's looking better, but specifically Eith. Bitcoin's still above 17,000 is just, it's hard to believe. Trade on this, but Eith looks like it could break out very quickly. From a technical perspective. It's just price. It's just math. It's just facts, no opinions. Did crypto have a Santa Claus rally?

I guess it did. The venture capital investments in crypto startups at a tier low in the fourth quarter, which is the least surprising thing ever. According to a new report from Galaxy, crypto startups totaled less than $3 billion on fewer than 400 deals in the fourth quarter. The lowest for both measures since the fourth quarter of 2020. Guess what? That sounds like a lot of money. Three billion and 400 deals? Yeah, that is a lot of money. The one thing that people say this happens in a lot of the tech busts is, okay, it's back to building. The prices are off the table. It's back to building. I would love that to be the case in crypto. We're something actually useful is built for once. That'd be nice to come out of this. It's like, okay, back to building. It's time to start real companies. It's like, then actually start one. Hey, they're building. All right.

Be patient. Let's up at real estate. Ben, my neighbor, it's finally, he's coming to his senses. He just dropped the price by $25,000. Prices still doesn't make sense. But let's see, that is a 4% cut. It's probably not going to do it. But it's at $6.50 down from a really stupid price of $7.25.

So, all right, down 10%. That's not even close to enough. Can you sort by price cut on Zillow? I don't know. I think I've tried to do it in the past, and I don't know if it's an option. It certainly should be. My wife and I were looking at Zillow the day, for some reason, scrolling for a house that's by ours.

And I'd say three out of every five houses that was listed had a price cut right below it like this. If you were in the position where you do not have to be in a house for the next six, 12 months ago, you have some time to be patient, I would pick every house with a price cut. I'd lowball them even further, and I'd put 10 bids in because one of those houses is going to be desperate enough to get out of it and say, I can't do this anymore. I can't wait. We need to get out of it for whatever reason. We need to sell. The buyer finally has some upper hand. That's a good strategy. By the way, I'm making the case tonight on what are your thoughts for

Josh? Zillow is my stock, which I do own, and technically... Breaking out? This looks like it's ready to run. Yeah, like got a double upgrade from Bank of America yesterday. You sound like you're becoming more bullish from a technical perspective here. Everything's looking good technically to you. Well, listen, I'm just saying there's a lot of noise out there. So let's just keep it simple. What are buyers and sellers doing? So follow price.

Listen, it's a market of buyers and sellers. And then there's more buyers and sellers. That's all I'm trying to say. All right, John Wake, who is a new follow to me, but does some good stuff on real estate, said based on county sales data, not just MLS sales. I really don't know the distinction is there, but it sounds like it matters. Probably just includes for sale owner and that sort of thing that wouldn't show up on MLS. Real estate expert, Ben Carlson says. Yep. That was good. Resale median sales price was

$420,000 down 3.3% from December 2021. Newly built median sale price was $521,000, up 17% from December 2021. That's crazy. What he's saying is that new home sales now represent over 29% of the market. This is the highest market share since 2008. And this is in Phoenix. I don't know if this is in Phoenix. So the next chart is in Phoenix. Okay. But remember, we talked about this. The biggest case for the housing market to roll over price-wise would be the fact that new home sales represent most of the market clearing prices. That's messing with median sales, existing sales prices, is making them as relatively less attractive.

Because a lot of the new homes are probably higher end and more expensive. That would be interesting. You mentioned Phoenix. There's a great chart. And this is probably directionally what the country looks like. he has prices January through December for 2019 down here, 2020, a little higher, 2021 a lot higher, 22 a lot higher. The jump in home prices, which I know we've discussed in, this is a great visual, though.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. And you can see it finally coming in, too. Yeah, some mortgage rates, here they are. 30 are down to 6.14%. Listen, if we get under 6, or even at 6, that's big. People see the 5 handle on there. I do think that's going to be psychologically important for a lot of people to be like, All right, we've been waiting for a while.

Prices have come in a little bit. I'm sure especially in some places where there's been a lot of activity, you could probably find 10, 15%, and mortgage rates come down. You say, all right, we're getting it at a 5.75% mortgage. We'll be able to refinance that in three years, hopefully. But even if you can, my first mortgage was five and a half, maybe. And I felt pretty good about it. Prices are still much higher, though.

That is definitely true. All right, so chat, GBT, creator. So Open AI is in talks to take a $10 billion investment from Microsoft. And guess what? I didn't know, or maybe I didn't know when I forgot, because I think I read a book about this. I read a book about AI like two years ago, and I think I just forgot. Elon Musk is a co-founder of Open AI with Sam Altman.

Didn't know that. Who was that book? It doesn't matter. I have many leatherbound books. I'm embarrassed that I just did that. But hang on a sec. Whatever. Whatever.

The point is that this is kind of interesting, though, this big news. It's the kind of thing that the valuation for this thing has to be ridiculously high or nothing. There's no middle ground. It has to be a really life-altering company or it's just like die at Google or something. I think the AI stuff that people have shown already, it is pretty amazing. Is it the kind of thing where in 20 years, though, we just look at it like Google or I think my best case would be if I'm taking a movie reference, if I had Scarlett Johansson in my ear as my daily assistant and that's what this is someday. Whereas they take all 400 of my emails

from this person in the last 10 years, sort them and like give tasks to them. Is that the best case scenario for this where you have your own personal assistant in your ear? Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I really do feel like this stuff is inevitable. Especially because guess what? It's here. When you were like poo-pooing a little bit, are you not impressed with what it can already do? It's never going to be worse than this today. I wasn't poopooing it in the sense that it's not going to be something big. I just said, I'm not going to use it until it's useful to me personally. I'm not ready to be like one of the people who signs up day one and says, let's test this baby out and help them. Well, because you're not an earlier adopter and really

neither mind, but it's fine, but that's not relevant for what we're talking about here. My best case would be if I had my little personal assistant in my AirPods, and I would say, take the last 25 recessions going back to 1700, sort them by GDP decline and look for the stock. Like, that's the personal assistant that I want. You don't know what the best case scenario is because we just don't know. Here's what I would be doing. I'm going to be doing minority report. Like, Zew. Well, the worst case scenario, is that they implant chips in our head and we're living in a simulation

and they're controlling everything like puppet masters. So this is going to be another part of the cultural lexicon. I was speaking about rich people earlier. It's going to be like, remember when SkyNet took over the world? That's what's happening now.

It's going to be the attack the robots. I could put this in my recommendations, but James Cameron is on Smartless. And that guy, he probably doesn't get enough credit for how, I mean, obviously he's created some of the biggest movies in history. He sounds to me like a tech CEO more than a movie maker.

He is so brilliant. He had a whole spiel on AI. because he came up with Terminator on his own. He talked about AI. He talked about all of this stuff. I'm not going to be able to summarize what he said, but it's totally worth a listen. And that guy, to me, is as brilliant as any of the big tech CEOs. I've never heard an interview with him, really, besides talking about Titanic or whatever.

Brilliant, brilliant guy. He talked about, like, the R&D budget they have for Avatar, how they create all this stuff and how they basically trademark the different ways that they can create these characters and stuff. They asked him, like an AI question. why couldn't you just using your AI technology or whatever create movie characters you don't need to have actors anymore and he said that's not the way we do it they put the suits on the actors they have the little ping pong balls on them he's like it works better that way if you have the actual actors he's like we could do that but it's still not going to be as good as using an actual

person so the way he explained that as an AI is really good in 2075 Tom Cruise will star in Mission Impossible 37 could be they'll bring him back from the dead he might be alive hopefully they do a Toxail, too, as well. On Friday night, I went to the movies. Robin goes, what are you seeing? I said, Megan, she goes, what's that? I showed up to her. She goes, are you seriously doing this?

Do you ever bring your wife to the movies, or does it always just use solo? Have you ever brought her once? What were we watching? Oh, the other day, I was watching the menu, and she, like, came in late, as she always does, and she sits down, and she's like, hey, why aren't I watching this with you? I said, I beg you to come to the movies with me. That was like five weeks ago, remember? I begged you to come to...

Well, anyway, the answer is no, she doesn't. But I ask almost every single time. Well, that's not sure. You wouldn't sell the menu at the theater? I asked a lot. No, no, no. I wanted to. Oh, okay.

I was watching it. It was on HBO. So to answer your question, the last time we saw a movie together, might have been gone, girl. That's how long it's been. But she won't come. So anyway, so she said, you're seriously doing this? So I said, I heard it was good.

This might have a movie. And the best part, it was only 90 minutes. So Megan is like Chuckie, but the doll's a little girl, and she becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, and Allison Williams is a star, and guess what? Great movie. It's my type of movie, but it was a genuinely good movie. Genuinely good. It was me and three other tweens in the theater. I was home before Robin could even know that I was gone.

So I'm not going to see that one. You might. When it comes out, you might say it. I don't want to spoil it for anyone like I did with was the other horror movie at you maybe you see with Justin Long? I still claim I didn't spoil that one. What was the name of the movie? Barbarian. You totally spoiled Barbarian.

Anything else you want to get into here before we? Yeah, I do. So we're coming into earnings, as I said. So check out quarter, if you're inclined to look at earnings. We've got financials this week, so it's about to get busy to us. We'll save this one for next time. All right. So we got a lot of feedback from people after you said last week, you're going to get in shape,

you're going to diet better, you're going to exercise more. And friend of the show, Phil Permanon, on his sub-sac prime cuts, said it's never too late. and he showed a picture of himself in his 40th birthday. Look at this guy. It's 55th birthday. Look at this beautiful man. It really is never too late to reinvent yourself. My mom did this.

She had three kids growing up. She worked night shift. She was a nurse. She would work like 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. And she'd sleep during the day and be awake when we got home. So she, like, didn't have any time for herself, basically. It was all kids. And when we all went and way to college, I remember my mom finally started going to exercise classes

and working out, and she probably lost like 30 pounds. Wow. In her late 50s, probably. So truly is endeavor too late, and you're not even 40 yet. No. And listen, I don't want to spoil it, but somebody reached out to me who might change my life, we'll say. We had some offers for some workout companies. But I also want to say just while we mentioned Phil, I love Phil.

He is the person that convinced me to start really writing and introduce you and I think. Did he bring us together? Phil's the man. So Phil has changed my life. I love that, man. Okay, so speaking of maybe personal health and whatever, whatever, I've been sleeping a lot later now that I am not going to the city five days a week. And this morning, Robin called me,

because Robin is out of the house at like 5.30. Robin called me, as she does to make sure I'm up. And I look at my phone, I'm like, oh, shit. It was 8.10. Jeez. Can't believe that? It was 8.10. How did the kids miss school?

So I had to drive them because they sleep forever. Actually, that's not true. Kobe gets up at like usually 10 to 7. But Logan will sleep till 9.30 if I don't wait. You can. Wow. It's pretty impressive. Which is incredible. So I drove into school today. So the other day, I went to Kobe's class for Time Capsule Day. You basically put a lot of stuff in the envelope and you give them on their 18th birthday. And it was a flashback of anxiety for me because Kobe goes to the same elementary school that I went to. And I went to the auditorium and there's like a lot of parents in there. And I just don't like being in that social setting where there's just like a lot of people. I don't know. Not my thing. But as we went into the classroom, I was like, holy moly, kindergarten is so much different today than it was, well, I guess 30 plus years ago. We went there. We went there.

It looked like Matilda. Remember Miss Trunchball? Miss Honeypot? I remember her name. It was all just blackboards and very not welcoming and not warm at all. There's 30 iPads plugged in. There's whiteboards. There's colors.

Playstations. And yeah, there's all sorts of stuff. We never had that. We said desks. Just very sterile, not a welcoming environment. But in this thing, there was like, what do you want to be? you when you grow up and Kobe said an artist and Kobe's he's that sort of character i don't think he's necessarily a sports kid he likes to do arts and crafts and stuff like that he's a creative he's a

creative and the kid next to us said i want to be rich and i thought oh this poor kid but he's five that is tough the only explanation for that are his parents Kobe just found out what money was which is not good or bad but like that's kind of rough they wouldn't know what it means to want to be rich. Yeah, if I said, Kobe, what's rich? Not that Kobe's special. Most five-year-olds, what's rich? I don't know how many of them would know.

Is that a New York thing, or is that just the way of the world kind of thing? I don't think so. Ben, last week we spoke about Robbins' mentioning of her getting a Tahoe, which might or might not happen. We'll see. By the way, prices are outrageous. I reached out to my car broker, and come on, it's ludicrous. So I said, well, how the heck did we back?

Like, where did everyone go? And somebody reminded us, the station wagon. And guess what? This picture, that was me. I had one of these station wagons. My mom drove one of these volvos back in the day. I do remember the trunk in all station wagons had the seat that faced backwards. Which was incredibly exciting and also very disorienting.

Yes, it was. But there's no way that's still safe these days. Oh, no. All right, random question. Very random. I don't know why I thought of this. But I was playing rock paper scissors with Kobe. Why does paper beat rock?

That's a good question. My kids love playing rock paper scissors too. They do it every single night to see who goes in the bath first. They play each other. and then they always complain about the results. It doesn't make sense. Probably should be something else. All right.

Somebody tweeted, and some people say the movies are dying? It's the 2023 movie slate. I guess this is the point. It's all sequels. This is a travesty, for the most part. The only one I really care about is the new mission impossible. There's two more that they're doing. What about Oppenheimer?

Oppenheimer and Dune, I'll see. John Wick? Yeah, maybe Indiana Jones. The other ones... Oh, scream. I'm obviously seeing scream at the theater. Creed? E!

You only Creed? I'm not excited about it. of these. I watched Creed 1. I liked it. Creed 2. I didn't do because... I'm very excited for Ant Man. Okay. I'm definitely taking COVID to see Super Mario's. He loves that. And guess what? My kids will see that. I'm going to say right now. Super Mario's will be the first good video game movie that's ever been done. That will probably be huge. All right, so I watched the menu this weekend as well, just like you. I thought for an hour or so it was a great take on foodie culture. It reminded me and you going to that Michelin Star restaurant and being totally

out of place. I was kind of bored by the first 40 minutes. It was just satirical, and then the movie got really twisted and dark at the end, and I thought it went a little too far. I didn't care for the second half of the movie. We're on the exact other side. I only liked the second half. Okay. So I liked the dark comedy aspect.

I thought the rest of it was so twisted and weird, and I didn't really care about any the characters, and it just didn't do it for me. I tried watching TAR. I can't see that being a Michael Bagnick movie. Holy moly. That's like an Oscar movie that's a film, not a movie. I gave it 25 minutes. And yeah, she was great, Kate Blanchett, whatever.

Well, now, I don't want to dismiss it. But, like, come on. That movie was completely made for the academy. It is unwatchable. In my eyes, people have different tastes. But in my eyes, it was just very pretentious. I had no idea. It was nothing about words, and I didn't understand any of it.

People were just talking. I texted my friend, who's in the movie in the street, and I said, hey, does anything happen or am I good to turn this off? He said, turn it off. I don't really care to see that one. We started Jack Ryan's season three, and I couldn't even remember. remember what happened on the first two seasons. It's just kind of an entertaining, shut your mind off kind of show. We watched one episode, and I thought,

am I really going to do this again with CIA stuff? It didn't really, like, draw me in. And then you start watching more, and every single episode gets better. And the thing that Oppenheimer should take most credit for, is creating plots for movies, because if he never created the nuclear bomb, there would be no good plots for movies for people trying to blow up the world. So, of course, there's a nuclear bomb in this movie. They kind of nailed the Russians, ambitions for taking back the USSR or whatever and going back to what things used to be. And the season is really, really good

and it gets better with every episode. I'm still in with Jack Ryan in season three. One more. I watched the change-up because you sent me a clip of Jason Bateman in the boardroom scene there. It's essentially a body swap between Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds, two of my favorite comedy actors.

And it's Jason Bateman playing Ryan Reynolds and Ryan Reynolds playing Jason Bateman. And the movie would never get made today because it's so raunchy and over the top. Also, the one that's on Amazon is the unrated version. And you're right. They would never. They would never get made today, and I love raunchy comedies like that.

Just that movie slays me every time. I love that movie. It's so funny. And it's so dumb, but it's so funny. There's a movie coming out. I saw this tweet. It's called The Plain Movie. It's with Gerard Butler.

That was going to skewered pretty bad online, just for the name. I feel like they're doing this as a joke. It's kind of like snakes on a plane. It's like a very... It's marketing. Is it meta? I don't know. Yeah.

It's very self-aware in this plane movie. Come on. I do love Gerard Butler, but I'm probably out on this. We spoke last week about... what a terrible genre vampire movies are. And there's a new one coming out called Renfield. The guy actually, the guy from the menu, plays Dracula's... Nicholas Holt.

Yeah, I like that. It was another meta movie that was, like, very self-aware. It looked like it. And Dracula is played by none other than Nicholas Cage. I'm not seeing this movie. I love Nicholas Cage. I'm going to watch it. Oh, interesting.

I think I'll actually watch that movie. A few people have asked us about the new Madoff series. I'm out. I feel like I saw De Niro. become Bernie Madoff, which was just such as... I couldn't even make it to the De Niro one. I read a book or two on Madoff and did some research. I really didn't need to see the Hollywood version of it.

Well, actually, I do believe that it's a doc. It's one of those doc with actors. That's like lifetime nonsense. I don't like that. Netflix has this thing now. They did this for the College Admissions scandal one. And I was with my family this weekend, and my dad said, so I'm watching the Madoff series and we were talking about the Madoff stuff back and

forth. And he said, crypto is basically like Bernie Madoff, right? Bullish. If you want to know about the sentiment around crypto right now. And I said, well, FTX is kind of like made off, but not crypto itself. That's sentiment right now for crypto, just in case you were wondering. Any of the final words? No, you didn't change your email address yet, so still Animal Spiritspot at gmail.com.

That's right. Thank you for the emails. Thank you, Luke. I love you. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you.