Animal Spirits Podcast - When Money Becomes a Liability (EP.296)

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

On today's show, we discuss if inflation is behind us, the AI bubble, popular strategies during a bear market, Fleishman in real life, parking spaces, 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 Kelly ETFs. Michael, a while ago, we had Kevin Kelly, who helps run the Kelly CRISPR and Gene Editing Technology ETF. Pretty interesting stuff. So what this ETF does, it's ticker XDNY. Wait, XDNA, that makes more sense. Yeah, XDNY. XDNA, get it.

They're looking for the next industrial revolution, which is healthcare predicated on CRISPR and gene editing technology. I wonder if this has the potential to become the third horseman. When I think of like biotech ETFs, I know this is not necessarily biotech, or is biotech? Is CRISPR biotech? I guess so. I think of XBI and IBBA. I wonder if this could be the third horseman.

Wait, that makes no sense. There's four horsemen, my bad. The third leg of the stool. They said that CIA just invested in CRISPR company that is looking to bring back the woolly mammoth. This is like, remember, we saw a gold-plated woolly mammoth in Miami at some bar we went to? They're looking to bring this back, Jurassic Park style. I mean, I'm a huge dinosaur fan, but do we need woolly mammoth? If I could channel my inner Jeff Goldblum, they had their chance.

All right, here's another one. Another Chris prefers new treatment, wipes out teens cancer. So they're using this technology, this gene editing to basically wipe out cancer in a teenage girls. It's pretty interesting. Well, I haven't asked, if we're doing this. Can they fix my back? That's a teaser for later.

Okay. If you're interested in learning more, go to kellyetfs.com. We have an announcement to make. You've probably heard on other channels, but now you're going to hear on hours. myself, Ben, and some of the team, Josh, my partner, Chris, and others, we're coming to Chicago. What are we doing at Chicago? We're doing a few things. Ben, why do you tell the audience? What are we doing there? Well, we're going to visit with our team there. We have a team. People are working in Chicago.

It's also one of my favorite cities in the entire country. I love Chicago. So we're going there. So we're going there. Ben, explain what are we doing there? Well, we're going to meet, see each other. That's always nice. But we're also going to be seeing clients and prospects, too. So if you're in the Chicago area, want to see us, meet with us. learned about our practice at Riddle's wealth management, reach out. We'll whatever send people. We're also seeing advisors. So if you're a gruntled member, we don't like disgruntled advisors, but if you're an advisor that is perhaps looking for a change, wants to learn about how we work with clients, please reach out to info at ridholt'swealth.com. We're really excited to see you.

I can't wait. 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 Batnik 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 Ritt Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritthold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, today, I feel like we've been bordering on this for the last couple of readings, but

It feels like the crisis stage of... Wait, what's today? What's today? Oh, sorry, today's Tuesday, February 14th. Happy Valentine's Day to you. Happy Valentine's today, to you too. I love you. We're about 10th, 30 a.m., give or take. Actually, speaking of love, let's just, before we get into the inflation, so Ben and I stayed in Miami and I'll tell them together, Ben stayed on the pullout couch.

Thanks for that. Miami is a party town, great nightlife. Ben and I went to dinner. Great dinner, I might have. dad, and what do we do after dinner? We looked at the bar, we looked at the clubs, and we, let's go back to the hotel. I'm at 9.45 p.m. Sleep me by 10.30.

Couple old dads. I like Miami. God, I love our audience. I got at least half a dozen, how's your mudroom? Matter of fact, that was about the only inside joke comment that I got was, how's your mudroom? Thank you for asking everybody. Lots of people at the conference were wondering how your mudroom's coming along.

That was pretty good. I think we were teetering on the edge. It's kind of like pushing the pop machine. over that was the old Jerry Seinfeldry Reference, like it takes a few pushes to get the thing to fall over. I feel like the crisis stage of inflation is behind us. It's no longer the most important number. It's still a important number.

It's not the most important number. Wait, I must guess. I must guess. I don't entirely disagree with you. But if inflation is not the most important number going forward, then what is? I think it's going to shift. I think it could be deep growth, labor market. Housing, I think they could all be vying.

It's like The Bachelorette where each of them is going to get a rose and we're going to whittle it down over time to see which one is the most important now. But if we had a pie chart of what's the most important thing to the market right now, I think I'm just still saying inflation is the biggest slice of the pie, but it's down, at least cut in half. It's dwindling, right? The market just hasn't been moving as much. So the market was kind of unchanged on the inflation reading today.

It went down a little, now it's up a little. We had so many days there where inflation was moving the market 2, 3, 4%. And it was happening in the days leading up, the days after. So this is the seventh month in a row of lower inflation, but it barely fell. It fell like you had to go two decimal places out to see it fall, I think. So it was 6.45 to 6.41. It's falling but not as fast as the federal like. So what are we calling this?

Knowing for longer, confusing for longer. Higher for longer. It sure seems like the higher for longer. Sorry, I'm doing a lot of interrupt. I apologize. The stock market hasn't moved that much today, but you know, it is. The reason why I say higher for longer is because the two year is now at 4-6. It was at 4-1, two weeks ago.

So maybe the bad market is saying, actually, this is the steady state for the rest of the year. The Fed is not going to cut. If you wanted to look at the takeaway here, and I think the case for inflation remaining at 4% or so somewhere around there for a little bit of time is starting to settle in and making more sense. And the reason is because unemployment rate remains low, the economy is to remain strong. So I think that's one of the reasons that inflation is going to remain strong is because the economy, I don't think anyone thought the economy is going to remain strong, which is going to keep inflation higher. I think that's what happened.

I wonder if today's reading was a bit of a win in the sense that, well, here's the loss. And you could find people that know more BPI to talk about this than us, but services has not slowed down. So that is still increasing, and that is a huge component. Look at this chart from Michael McDonough from Bloomberg. He put this US CPI contribution to the year of year change. And look at that blue line from services, slowly going up as energy is coming down. Food has remained pretty steady recently.

Goods X energy has fallen a lot. So it is services that's leading the charge here. So it does seem like the main takeaway for me here, to your point on, short-term bonds. Short-term rates are probably going to remain elevated for a while. Look at this. Six-month T-bills hit 5% today. So I have the new 60-40 portfolio for everyone. 60-10-t bills, six-month T-bills, 40% whatever the new bubble is. Well, because it seems like we get a new bubble every three months, so just invest in whatever the new bubble is. And that's your new 60-40. So after the jobs report, a few Fridays ago, I think people were maybe saying, oh, shit,

is inflation about to re-accelerner coming hotter than expected, give even how strong the labor market still is. And it was slightly higher than expected this print, but all in all, I think it's okay. I don't think it's great? This is speaking, looking for wins here. Wouldn't you rather have 4% inflation in a 3.5% unemployment rate rather than a 5% unemployment rate in 2% inflation? Yeah, it's winning. They're doing it. I think this is in like the economy reaccelerating and avoiding a recession for the time being. But that's the funny thing is the fact that the Fed raised rates so fast, they're probably just going to have to hold If they do another 25 basis points, because inflation is eventually going to come down to their rate, it sounds like.

Well, also, the economy is in too good a shape to cut it. It would make no sense here. You're wearing a bright red shirt underneath your, what's that, J. Crew, long sleeve? My new place is Marine Layer. Okay. Instagram got me on this place. Oh, I think I have one of those. It's kind of expensive, no?

It's a little. You got, I look for the deals, but it's very good fabrics. I like it. You're wearing a bright red shirt underneath. Actually, I have a Marine Layer hoodie. It was expensive, but very nice hoodie. So that bright red shirt underneath? Is that Valentine's Day?

Is there a heart underneath? What do we got there? My five-year-old Kate was upset that I didn't have any red on today. And so in solidarity for Valentine's Day, I needed to put a red shirt on. Is it a plain tea? Just a plain red tea, yes. All right. Is that okay with you?

That's okay. We just wanted to get a better picture of what we're working with. If we're doing fashion talk here, a lot of people on Instagram when you posted the picture wanted to know what you were wearing. It was me and you sitting on beach chairs, sipping on Miami vices. And you were the dad wearing socks on a lounge chair at the pool. Robin asked me why I was wearing socks. Well, the reason why I was wearing socks are black socks.

Well, I'm a black sock guy, but everybody was in suits, more or less, except for us. We rocked the tropical bros. We stuck out a little bit. How did you not have socks on? Because I didn't wear sandals. Did you just take your socks off? Yeah, we're in 80-degree weather, and we're in shoes, no socks. That's the look.

Ugh. Shoes no socks. Have to do it. Or, yeah, you have the ankle ones. You can take them off. Okay. No, I'm a sweater. I can't do that.

My sneakers would turn to mush. Back to inflation. Here's from Tom Lake. You do the threat. The best proof is 34% of CPI basket by weight is an outright deflation. So that doesn't mean increasing at a smaller pace. That means that they're actually going down. The 50 year average is 30%. So again, 34% of the CPI basket by weight, not component by weight, is coming down. It's a good number. It seems like we're in a position where inflation is falling, but maybe not as fast as some people would like. And it's also not remaining as elevated as other people would like. It's kind of kind of a weird middle

position where you can't call it Goldilocks because it still remains too high, but it's not like it's going to extremes. It's not immediately falling, but it's also not remaining above 7% like some people were predicting. I think airline prices are finally coming down. I hope so. The April flights are out of control. I'm not going anywhere in April. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Message alert. Message alert. Damn, I think we're to take next week off. Now, I'm going to be in Disney. So I don't even want to pretend to Jamishowen. Is that okay with you? We've never missed one before, but I did it from Disney. I'm just saying Duncan did it from Disney. If you're going to be the one to end of the streak, that's on you. No, that's not true. We did miss one show. And I think you weren't Disney when we missed

it. We had just started the pod, three months in or something. Yeah. If you want to miss it, that's fine. I'm just saying, I did it from Disney. I'm a big, the show must go on guy. I understand how frustrating it is to go for your podcast regular, and it's not there. But listen, we've been doing this is November 2017. This is my first one. You know, the best part about actually having the excuse to do the show is I got to leave Disney early and let my wife and in-laws handle the kids for the rest of the day while I came into the podcast. It was actually a nice break. See, there you go. I've got no in-laws. We're flying solo, and I don't want to do this my wife. I love her too much. Disney is a jam-packed thing. But car prices, used car

prices increased 2.5% in January. This is an ad-car dealership guy or at guy dealership who has become a favorite of the show. I guess a darling on Twitter, guy posts great stuff. What's going on? This is the largest month-for-month percentage increase since the end of 2021. Why is this happening? I don't get it. This is one that you'd think would just fall back in a straight line. Maybe the takeaway is you're just not going to get a straight back down. I looked at this before in the past.

When inflation fell in the 40s and when it fell in the 80s, it didn't just go down in a straight line. It could have some hiccups along the way. And that's probably what we're seeing. So this is why I still think inflation is going to be the dominant story for the year. Assuming it doesn't just go straight down, which I don't think it's going to. There will probably be some spooks along the way, if I had to guess. You know what else is a bad news for inflation? If we actually get an alien invasion, I think that's inflationary

because there's going to have to be a huge infrastructure spend once they decimate all of our cities. All right, so you're going to bring myths of speed? I've pretty much avoided this. What's happening? No, I kind of can't get into it. Okay. Welcome to Earth.

The funny thing is, is if aliens really did come, it would be like a big story for a while, and I feel like people would probably just get over it, assuming they didn't turn us into like... No, that's a bad thing. It would be the biggest story of the century. Walmart. Bigger than LeBron going to Miami?

All right. This is from Calcutinia via Reuters. Walmart is warning major package goods makers that it can no longer stomach their price hikes, pitching its own private label products to shoppers as less expensive all terms to suppliers name brand goods. Hey, wait a minute. Is Walmart going to break inflation? Unbelievable. I did not see that coming.

So does that mean they take the no name stuff from the floor or the ceiling and put it in the middle and put the name brand stuff down there? Yeah, I guess so. Hey, let me ask you this. You know, we're so dependent on the markets for narratives. What happens if the S&B 500 is down 2% today? It just rolled up. Well, what if it was up 2%? Because it seemed like economically the number was bad at first.

And people were like, why isn't the market falling more? I don't know. Kathy Jones said the NFIB survey. I feel like we should know what that is. National Federation of Individual Businesses. What do you think? Survey says. National Federation of Independent businesses.

Ah. All right. Close enough. The number of firms raising prices in January fell to 14. 42%. That's the lowest since May 2021. Plans to raise prices in the next three months is 29%. Inflation is still a concern, but less so than the past six months. I'm having a hard time believing any economic surveys these days. I feel like for the past 15 months or so, it's just a watch what they do, not what they say, kind of economy.

I don't think we can believe what anyone says. I hate to say this, but I think in the case of inflationary surveys, it matters because it's inflation is very much a psychological mindset. Don't you think a lot of these businesses, though, are just waiting to see what their competitors do? It's kind of like all lower prices if you do. And someone has to be the first one to just kind of go and do it. I guess it depends on the business.

All right, I kind of laughed at this one from Sam Rowe. This is from Wells Fargo. The bear market is over. We see neither a bull nor a bear market, just a market. And it is kind of funny, and it seems like that's a punt. But it also could be kind of true, where we're not going to see the market. just take off again and go crazy, or we're not going to see it crash. And those markets exist too. I respect this. This is a good call, no call. Yes. It's within the realm of possibilities.

Plus, I just feel like the narrative overdrive from the economy is just changing on a week-to-week basis. The economy is just playing head games with us in terms of the switching that it's done on us. Every month to three months, we're getting a new narrative about what exactly is happening. So Google just filled the, there's a gap that got filled. It's not from earnings. What was this from? From Microsoft, right? No, no, no, no, no.

There's a big gap on the chart from January 19th to January 20th, a big gap up that got filled. I'm not sure why the gap up happened. But as they do, this gap got filled. Bank of America said, I don't recall a flurry like this of big tech companies racing to one-up each other in a topic ever. In late November, chat GBT gained mainstream buzz. In December, Sundar declares the code red. February 6, Microsoft announces it's hosting an event.

We've gone to Plaid in this AI search real fast. I would not want to be the one to try to pick the winners here, but if I was just using like a baseline set of expectations, if I was trying to get into this whole AI thing, I would have a hard time betting against Google just for the sheer fact that there's inertia involved there. and people are used to going to Google. And I feel like even if Google's AI was 10% worse than Microsoft or whoever is the competitor, I think most people would just stick with Google.

It's like your dentist. You don't want to change who your dentist is because you've got to change all your records and move all your appointments and go to a different place. It's just easier to stick with who you're with. Yeah, not knowing literally anything about this, this movie Google seems like a big overreaction. That's what I'm thinking. Okay, this is a good listener question.

Hey, guys, so I work in tech at a company whose name ends in a dot AI. How many are there, though? Are we doing a lot of those, like Long Island icedee. That stuff, is that happening? We should change it to Animal Spirits. That's got to expand the audience. And there is all this talk of an AI bubble and how VCs have quickly moved from crypto to AI, not to mention all the buzzer on chat GPT.

Question is, can you have a bubble in a high rate, rising rate environment, or do we need low rates easing fed as a precursor any bubble? I think a lot of people assumed because of the 2010s and because of the pandemic was low rates, that that was the only way you can get a bubble. That is not true at all. There's been plenty. Look at, I put this on here, 10-year Treasury, average 6% from 1995 to 1999. It was falling a little bit there, but it was rising in 96 and 97 as well.

And rising all through 99, the bubble didn't really prick until March of 2000. You can certainly have. I looked at the 1925 to 1929 bull market, 10-year average 3.5% and really didn't deviate at all from that number. one of my favorites. In short-term interest rates, right now I said they're 5% on six month treasury bills, that's what short-term interest rates were when Charles Ponzi ran his scheme. But he was promising 40% a month. So yes, you can certainly get a bubble with rates being elevated and not at zero. It's easier to get a bubble probably when rates are lower, but that's not necessary as a precursor to a bubble. I've got two observations on this AI stuff.

number one, I was searching my phone. Chris and I, I think we're on the train, searching my phone for pictures that we've taken in Chicago to see if we had been to this one place. As we mentioned, we're coming to Chicago. And what it is able to do is insane. So when you search on your iPhone, and this is a new feature as far as I can tell. So when you search Chicago, it does two things. Number one, it pulls up photos that were taken in Chicago. Number two, it pulls up the word Chicago in any of your photos. That's pretty freaking rad. Wait, what is this for?

On your iPhone. Oh, on the phone, okay. So when you search for Chicago, again, it doesn't just pick up photos that were taken in Chicago. If you have a picture that says the word Chicago. So, for example, there was a picture I took, I don't know why. I took a picture of a TV in 2015, and it had the picture. evaluations of NBA teams, and the Chicago Bulls was on there.

That's pretty cool. So that's a feature from Apple. Here's an idea for a new AI feature. Somebody who we're going to be meeting in Chicago proposed a bunch of meetings using CST. What if in the new version of Gmail, whenever somebody gives a time zone, it automatically switches to your time zone. Boom. Or you can just do it in your head and add an hour.

No, I'm not. For some reason, the time zone things always trip me out. I'm like, wait a minute. You said where you mentioned we going to Chicago, we never actually said it on the show here. Well, I just assumed that you would understand that we were going to record it before. Oh, is that we're going to do? Yeah, we're recorded after. Okay. Is it possible, though, that for AI to be as big as some people think it can be and not become a bubble? That's probably impossible, correct? Impossible.

Yes. No, I think it has to be a bubble. There will be a bubble. Is it a bubble right now? No, it's tiny. It's way too early, no? I think it's way too early, yes. This is not a bubble. So Goldman has all these bass. They have like a non-profitable tech basket. They've got a soft landing basket. I don't know what's in here, but if you look at the chart, it's on fire.

Do you think a soft landing basket is just like home builders and industrials? It would have to be economically sensitive stocks. Yeah, cyclical. Yeah, cyclical, basically. Interest rates are... Instead of calling it a cyclical index, they just called it a soft landing index. It's good marketing. So the 10 years at 376 highest level in over a month.

So rates are moving. two years ripping, four or six highest levels since November. So that's the story after the CPI print. We'll see where things shake out. And still not even close to inflation. Bond yields are still well below inflation. It seems like bond yields are moving way higher, but they also moved a lot lower, and they're still well below the inflation rate.

Well, finally, people are coming back. Bond ETFs from Eric Balchunis. Sorry for your loss, Eric. Not sorry. Hell of a Super Bowl. What loss? Oh, because he's a Philly guy. Yeah.

Credit to me for putting a bunch of money on the Chiefs, because I never bet against Patrick Mahomes. Patrick Mahomes won me a lot of money. I bet a lot of the Eagles because I thought they were a better team. Their defense did not show up. Their defensive line, zero pressure, zero, zero pressure. The only thing that saved me was I bet on the Eagles to win the first half and the chiefs to win the game.

Pretty good bet. That saved me. All right, anyhow, Bond ETFs, having best start to a year and flows, taking in $20 billion in January. High rates, low rates don't matter. They're taking cash and are now this close to doubling their AUM since the black eye, some worry days of March 2020. money. And he's taking a victory lap, as he should. A call we made and got right. That's him and

Tom Sera Vegas. So anyway, again, Bond ETFs having their best start to a year in flows. This is not surprising. They were saying that money is going to pour in because rates are higher. I think what Eric is alluding to is people were saying that Bond ETFs broke in March 2020 and people wouldn't use them. And I think he took the other side of that. Okay. Good one. Ben, you like this. You like to like anecdotally say like, oh, it's a junk rally with no evidence. Well, I'm here for you. Be spoke, tweeted. You're putting words in my mouth on this, though. I'm not.

All I say is that... These are the facts, sir. No, every time a bare market bottoms, the junkiest stocks go first, and everyone calls it a junk stock rally until it turns into an actual rally. That's just what happens. No, but I feel like you say that with a poo-po-po face. I don't, no, because I think the people who don't believe in the rally are poo-pooing

it. I'm saying every bare market that ends begins with a junk stock rally for the next bull market. And now rates are really accelerating, stocks are really going lower. Be that as it may, Ben. Bespoke described this year's equity market performance as, quote, a dash for trash. In a client note, they report that the top 10% of the most heavily shorted stocks were up an average of 36% this year, while those in the lowest 10th of returns had risen, that part doesn't matter. What do you make of that? Just in time for everyone who went to like high quality stocks in December, because it was a bad year in 2022 and those stocks are good,

that makes sense. So at dinner on whatever night that was in my, Miami, Jim Bianca was talking to us about, what are they called? Zero day options. Zero day options. I'd never heard of this before. He was basically saying how it's screwing up volatility in the markets, it's screwing up the VIX, that you have these options that they come out one day and they expire that same day, which is just gambling.

I felt my gamma sense is tingling. I mean, we're not big options, guys. I'd never even heard of it before. I guess the Financial Times had a story on it, and Barron's had a story on it, and it sounds like it's really screwing with the market's volatility. making it harder to understand what's going on there. Oh, all right. We're out of order here.

My bad. But Ben, look at this next chart from, I don't know who this is. This is prime book Global Equiduiz. The short covering was the highest since 2016. So, again, these are just facts. You say what you want. But moving back to what Jim said, he's talking about what might be driving the vial. He has a chart showing the 20 most trading options today, highlighted in the name column

is the expiration date. All 20 expire today. These are called zero DTE. Unbelievable. Who is trading these? got to be institutional investors, and I'm sure retail to a lesser extent. It can't all be retails. Is it like some sort of short-term hedging to rebalance, or I'd like to hear a good explanation? There's got to be some sort of hedging mechanism in place that these would make sense for,

because I don't really get it. Yeah, I wonder if it's less outright speculation and more hedging. Who knows? More to come on that. Jason is why I got a piece in the Wall Street Journal about why investors are piling into funds that promise to not beat the stock market. This is interesting. Covered call options. So covered call funds. And we've gotten, admittedly, a bazillion questions on this. And most likely the JP Morgan Equity Premium income fund, it's JEPI. Well, first, it was the NASDA one. It was QILD. Yes, but lately it's so because JEPI had a good year last year. So Zweig explains covered call funds provide limited protection against losses of stops. Drop in exchange, they preclude you from

capturing all the stock market's gains. Basically, it's a case where you're selling options, so you're getting some income. And that means that you're going to cap your upside, but also limit some of your downside. And the JP Morgan Fund also trades in lower volatility stocks. So last year, it lost three and a half percent. The S&P fell 18 percent. I think they said the NASDAQ 1 lost 19 percent compared to the 32 percent loss for the NASDAQ 100. How much of that loss was due to stock selection as much as taking call premium? It was probably mostly stock selection, if I had to guess. The call premium is not going to be, yeah. But, but I'm saying like people that are buying this are probably doing it because they look at the 2022 performance

and say, oh my God, this is like a panacea. You fight the last war. You want to buy a black swan fund in 2009. So I like to call this fighting the last war. And this happens every time that there's a huge move in the markets. After the huge bull market in 2020, in 2021, everyone wanted a pile into arc. After the 2008 crash, everyone wanted a black swan fund or a big short fund, when it should have been the opposite. Zweig says, JPMorgan Fund took in almost $13 billion last year. The biggest annual haul for any actively managed ETF ever.

Wow. Three covered call funds from Global X. ETFs attracted a combined 5.2 billion in 2022. So far in 2023, three billion more is coming into these funds alone. I'm not going to offer an opinion on these types of strategies. I think this is the type of strategy that can work. My problem with people is investing in something they wish they would have invested in because it would have looked good in the past. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. It sounds like you're stepping all over my strategy. Trust me, I've been there before, too. But if you're constantly looking for, oh, I wish I would

invest it to this because of the bull market, I wish I would invest in this because of the bear market. If you're going to pick a strategy like this that you know is going to underperform in a rip-roaring bull market and outperform during a bear market, you have to stick with it the whole time. You can't just jump in and jump out. It's not going to work. Speaking of jumping in and jumping out.

Yes. This is from Itoro. Good data here. They look at the average U.S. equity holding period in years going back to 1975. In the 1970s, it was five years dropping precipitously to the 80s, jumped a little bit, and then now it's 10 months. But can I just say one thing? It's a good chart.

There's a lot to take away. There's not a chart crime. I will say, however, though, that the average holding period has been under a year for a long time. It was under a year in 1987. It was under a year for the entire 2000s decade. It's not a new phenomenon. Now, I think if you took this back to the 50s and 60s, it would be even longer. It would probably be more like 10 years or 8 years.

But it also says the average U.S. mutual fund holding period is two and a half year, measured by his turnover ratio. That's probably more representative of most normal investors because I think a lot of people have stock trading strategies that do turn over a little more. Well, let me put it back to you this way. Are stocks meant to be married? I don't think so. I don't think that you should buy and hold individual stocks forever. A basket of stocks, sure.

But I have no problem with turning over individual securities. I'd think that lowering the barriers to entry in making trading free has actually probably been worse for investors. I think most investors would be better off they bought and held. Unless people learn early. on that trading is very difficult and then switch to a longer-term horizon, which we'll say. We just talked about the fact that if you jump from strategy to strategy, you and I have both looked at the data. If you extend your holding period in the stock market, your probability for a gain

goes up. Incontradable. The more you trade in the short term. Of course. Obviously, you're right, that individual stocks can and will underperform the market, and most of them do, the data is also shown that. But I think most people would be better off if they bought some stocks and held them. I don't know how big a component jobs are to the city economic surprise index.

I'm sure they're a pretty decent size. But Lizanne Saunders tweeted Friday's job stunner. So we should have used this last year. Last week, it's a bit stale. But Friday's job stunner, which the job reporters, which is referring to, helped propel city economic surprise index for U.S. Hired by a significant degree. The daily change was the largest since June 2020. That's good.

Okay. Moving along. No, it is. No, it is. Well, I feel like the data comes out all the time and stuff from last week is already stale. It's, again, changing narrative thing. Everything feels good for a couple days and bad for a couple days. I think that's just where Benix Evans is a venture capitalist who does this annual presentation

where he puts together like 200 charts. I pulled a couple of good ones. You looked at this too, right? Hold these shirts and pants. This is a good chart. I went to them all the other day. We had a daddy daughter dance on Friday. Wow, lovely.

Wanted to have my fit look nice on my. daughters got all dressed up. They had the corsages. I think it tops off like fifth or six raids. Is the corsage a flower? Yeah, the little thing you put in your wrist for like a dance. Did you ever go to like homecoming or prom? I dabbled. Okay. And I went to the mall and I just couldn't believe how dead things were. Like stores closed when they should. So he shows the department store as a share of U.S. addressable retail revenue. It went from basically average between 20 and 30 percent between 1930 and 1990. And it's just fallen off a cliff since then, down to less than five. There's no bottom here, by the way.

No, I don't. Well, bottom might be close to zero because it's just so much easier to buy stuff online now. All the places that you can buy online offer free returns and free shipping. And most, if you go to an actual store, good luck finding the size that you need. Well, let me ask you this. Is free shipping a bad thing? I'll get to this later, but I feel like I'm always going to UPS to return stuff because my wife just orders four different sizes in three different colors and just returns whatever she doesn't like. I do a lot of that, too, returning, but it's free, though. For us, it is.

Okay. This is an excellent report. We'll link to this in the show notes. One more. It says, how much retail space do you need? It's retail square feet per capita, and it shows the U.S. versus the UK, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and Japan, and it shows standalone retailer shopping malls. And our per capita retail space is three to four times higher than all these other countries.

I don't know what we're going to do with those real estate when these department stores and malls, when most of them, I mean, like the high-end malls and stuff will probably be fine. Bad Bath and Beyond, we talked about going under. What are they going to do with all that space now? You can't put apartments there, can you? I don't know. They should be converted until laser tag. WeWorks, maybe.

Okay. This was a good one. I think you put this on here, but someone shared this of a person who was laid off from meta in November after three months, seven offers on the table accepted an all-cash-offer from a startup for $315,000 which is $70,000 above what META used to pay them. this is why I obviously always feel bad for anyone getting laid off, and that's a terrible position to be in. But if we're seeing all the headlines of people in the tech industry getting laid off, on a relative basis, that's probably better than the alternative of people

in other sorts of jobs getting laid off, because these tech people are probably because they're so highly educated and have good experience and there's so many other tech companies out there, they're probably going to have an easier time finding new jobs than most other people would. Brad Gersner wrote an open letter to Facebook. a couple of months ago, asking them to reduce their headcount. And one of the points that he made eloquently was, listen, I'm not trying to be insensitive to anybody's livelihood. But think about how strong the labor market is.

These people will be able to replace their incomes. And I'm sure it's not true for everyone. And this is obviously just one example. But I think there's probably something to that, that tech people are much better positioned to get another job than, say, blue-collar workers would if there's an economic recession. I have a strategy for you. The next time that you want to complain about your steak being overcooked or your drink. It was one time.

Or your drink being wrong. You should write an open letter to the waiter or waitress. Because an open letter sounds way better than complaining to the manager. Listen. Just write an open letter on your phone and like send them a note from your iPhone. It was a one time thing. An open letter from Michael Badnick. Okay.

Daniel Zhao tweeted, well, this is quite the juxtaposition. It's a headline. Boeing to hire 10,000 workers in 2020. is a ramps up production. That's one headline. The other headline is Boeing says it will cut about 2,000 white-collar jobs in finance and HR. So I wonder if there's just a bloat of middle management in a lot of these giant companies. This remains the rich session where people who are higher up are having a harder time in labor market than people who are lower down the totem pole. Yes. So there were more layoffs announced. They're not slowing down, really. Yahoo announced

20% staff or 1600 people, 20% is an aggressive cut. Twilio did 70% of the workforce, LinkedIn, which is interesting because that's in the job market, LinkedIn, laid off staff in its recruiting department, but they should have the easiest time of anyone finding a new job. You would think. Sam has a chart from Goldman showing roughly 15% of companies in the S&P 500 have seen headcount increases of 40% or more since the start of the pandemic. and only one-fifth of them have announced layoffs so far.

I think what we perhaps missed, if we saw all the headline hiring sprees the way that we're seeing all the layoffs, I think that would help with context. But again, you need context to you. These companies added so much. So 15%, 15% increased by 40%, and only one-fifth, only 20% announced layoffs. Had any layoffs. Well, this is from the Wall Street Journal. Listen to this.

Employers in Healthcare, Education, Leisure, and Hospitality, and other services, such as dry cleaning automotive repair account for 36% of all private sector payrolls. Together, those service industries added 1.2 million jobs over the past six months, accounting for 63% of all private sector job gains during that time, up from 47% for the preceding year and a half. By comparison, the tech-heavy information sector, which shed jobs for two straight months, makes up 2% of all private jobs. Bars and restaurants added 99,000 jobs in January alone.

Healthcare industry grew by 58,000. Retailers added 30,000 jobs. Have you ever seen this movie The Company Men, before? Never heard of it. It's a 2010 movie. It's got a great cast. Costner, Cooper, Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Affleck.

It's got a really great cast. And remember in the aftermath of the 2008 crash? You had all these movies and TV shows coming out about people who are down to their luck. This is a story about Affleck loses his job and has a really hard time. He was a middle management, higher management at like a GE kind of place and lost his job and couldn't find a job. The movie has some cheesy, corny parts to it. It really does a good job of nailing the sentiment that people at the dinner table were talking about, hey, did you know the CEO, the company makes 700 times as much as the average employee.

These are the conversations people were having back then. It's funny because at the time, it felt like that environment was never going to end. And it feels like right now, this current environment is never going to end. Every cycle that you're in, it feels like it's going to last forever. And you know that at some point, things are going to be different. But it would be hard to tell someone back then, in the 2020s, you're going to have the most robust labor market you've ever seen in your life. And back then, people would have said, I don't believe you. The whole thing was about him, it was impossible to find a job.

He had to go lay sheetrock with Kevin Costner's construction crew. It was interesting to watch that. Back then, in 2010, I couldn't find a job. And we already know that I had a sterling resume. It's true. Ben, you just mentioned Affleck and Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones. How come, it just sounds weird coming off the tongue, but anybody who has a two-part last name, you never refer to them by their last name.

It's always first name, middle name, middle last name, and last name. Yeah. Does anyone call Tommy Lee Jones just Jones? No, but it's Lee Jones, but you would never call him Lee Jones. If somebody said to you, oh, man, Lee Jones was great in the fugitive, you'd be like, huh? Is Lee a part of his last name or his middle name? It's the last name, like Brian Austin Green. It's not a middle name. It's not a middle name. No, no, no. Austin Green is, that's the middle name. Mark Paul Gossler, Paul is the middle name. Tiffany, Amber's the middle name.

Mark Paul is his first name. Gossler is his last name. Brian Austin Green, I think Austin Green is his last name. I could be around. on that. Or most of these people make them up because in Hollywood, people change their names all the time. And their real names are not what they actually screen names. Could be. Let's talk about crypto for one second. So Tom Dunleavy shared a chart weekly crypto asset flows. And they weren't deeply negative. It's just completely flatlined. For a long time, yes. Flatlined. And they, three consecutive weeks of inflow. There's data.bitcoinity.org. We're looking at Bitcoin trading volume at Coinbase only.

It's picking up, but not like dramatically. People are not chasing price just yet. Doesn't it feel like in terms of sentiment that AI has already completely surpass Bitcoin or crypto? People are completely over crypto. But there was a big announcement this week. I want to read this from Hester Pierce. She works. What is her exact title? Hester Pierce is an American lawyer who serves as a commissioner on the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Okay. Well, anyway, I just want to read this from her. She said, today the SEC shut down Cracken staking program and counted it as a win for investors. I disagree and therefore dissent. Cracken operated a service through which its customers could offer their tokens up for staking, the customers earned returns, and the company earned a fee. The commission argues that the staking program should have been registered with the SEC as a securities offering.

Whether one agrees with that analysis or not, a more fundamental question is whether SEC registration would have been possible. In the current climate, crypto-related offerings are not making it through the SEC's registration pipeline. using enforcement actions to tell people what the law is in an emerging industry is not an efficient or fair way of regulating. And then this guy Jason Gottlieb, who is ostensibly a lawyer who works in crypto, did a threat and said, I find the SEC's, quote, all crypto projects have to do is come in and register,

and quote, line unbelievably insulting. It assumes there's this vast quantity of sophisticated security lawyers and advising clients, quote, nah, man, screw the SEC, Yolo baby, do whatever you want. quote, tons of projects in their lawyers desperately want to come in and register, but when they do, they're just told no or worse, they draw a well's notice. There is simply no path to registration for many crypto products. The SEC says, just register. We say cool, but it's what, because the regs just don't fit.

In response, we get blank stares, apologies, and mumbles that they're not going to give us legal advice. So I obviously can't speak to what's going on exactly, but it seems like the SEC is hell bent on not making the lives of these companies easy at all. Remember when people thought it was going to be a positive that Gary Gensler took over the SEC because he taught like a crypto class at MIT or whatever? Yeah. That didn't quite come to fruition now.

No, that's what's going on there. All right, moving on to physical real estate. What's happening in the housing market? Steve Eisenman, who maybe is one of the people who didn't completely have their brains broken by being a member of the big short team, he was talking about housing with Joe and Tracy on odd lots. He did the calculation that shows the affordability from going with 3% mortgage. He said, as long as people are employed, they're not going to sell their home down 40%,

which is what you'd have to do to get the affordability level from a 3% mortgage versus 7%. They'll just live in their home. So housing prices have come down some, but it's still the case that I think the housing market is locked. You and I've been talking on this for a while. Mike Simonson, one of my favorite weekly updates, pretty much the only thread on Twitter that I like. He does a thread every week. And Lance Lambert. Yeah, okay.

Mike Simonson does the same thread every week. Oh, that's true. That's true. And so he's showing that homebuyers are defying expectations or sellers are not eager to sell. Available inventory of a single-family homes dropped by 3% this week. You can see it shot up. That made sense that it would shoot up because mortgage rates went up. Now it's crashing again, inventory levels. Just no one wants to sell.

They had a story in the New York Times about people who own homes and they're just renting them out because they have 2.8% mortgages. This one woman actually in Los Angeles owns a home and rents it out but is renting her own place to live and basically wants to buy. but doesn't want to get out of the rental because the rental income is so good for such a low mortgage rate that she's willing to live in a rental not buy her own home to live in so she can run out the other one. I think maybe we almost underestimated the 3% mortgage. As much as we talked about it, I think that you're going to have ripple effects from that for a long, long time. Inventory is going to be suppressed for a while, I feel like, in terms of even if you have demand for people wanting to buy, the number of people willing to

sell is going to remain low. I think we had this chart. What percentage of home are locked into a mortgage under three and a half percent, those people are stuck. So I think if you can afford it, and we talked last week about how there's not very many affordable new homes to buy anymore, and I wrote a blog post on this, got a lot of people who had some strong opinions on it. I said the reason for that not having a lot of starter home available is because of prices are higher, inflation, people wanting bigger houses, and then builders not being incentivized to build smaller homes. And so people want to trade up. This is from one of our local builders. They're giving a new build bonus up to 15,

grand that covers closing costs or you could take it off of your final price or you could buy it it on your rate or you could extend your rate lock all these different things for 15 grand I think builders are going to be the ones to come in and incentivize people and that's going to be the where you can find your deals if you're having trouble in the existing home market I think builders are going to incentivize people to get off the sidelines I just did a quick check on my neighbor this has been in the market for 211 days I don't know this is right this is probably just a glitch but it says that he did a price cut January 31st for $290 I'm going to go ahead and assume that that's not real.

Helps with the closing costs. But I think that this is probably fairly emblematic or demonstrative of what's happening. Sellers just are not meeting buyers where buyers want to be. So Lance Lambert did say among 150 major housing markets, 24 have seen local home prices fall by more than 5%. It's honestly the ones that you would assume. San Francisco, Austin, San Jose, Phoenix, Seattle, Las Vegas, Boise. It's the places that had the huge upswings in price.

It makes sense. I think the case Schiller is still only, it's on a couple months lag, because it takes a while to update that date. It's still only down to 3% from the highs or something. Here's another one from Lance Lambert. San Francisco has already given up 42% of its pandemic housing boom. But Chicago has given up just 4% of its pandemic housing boom. So there's this great chart showing these are the cities in which the home gains are barely falling. Turning my head.

That's Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit. Oh, Midwest. Atlanta, New York, D.C. the houses are still basically near all-time highs. This is kind of the same thing that happened during the housing bubble the first time, though. There was a lot of other places that went bananas, and the ones in the Midwest didn't quite do that. So the ones that are falling the most, maybe not surprising given the rich session, rich session. It doesn't well off the tongue.

Is San Francisco and Seattle? Makes sense. Okay. Survey of the week. This is from Gallup. Reflecting on their personal financial situation, 35% of Americans say they are better off now than they were a year ago, a 50% are worse off. Since Gallup first asked this question in 1976, it's rare that half or more of Americans say they're worse off. Only other times this has occurred was in 2008 and 2009 for the Great Recession.

What do you make of this? I don't know. This is pretty noisy. I think it could be. No takeaway. Well, the takeaway is, again, people hate inflation. How's that? Well, that's true.

Inflation makes people uncomfortable. All right, Ben, I want to tell you in the audience about my Saturday. So on Saturday, I had one of the most dad Saturdays I've ever had. And I say this, not to complain at all. There's no complaining here. This is just a glimpse, and every dad listening and every mom listening can nod their head at the commitment that it is to raise a child. All right, not complaining, just mentioning.

Like, if you told me 20 years ago, this would be my Saturday. This is like the Bedbeth Beyond, I don't know if there'd be enough timeline from old school. This is an open letter to your past self to understand what's happening. Pretty much. Also, I rewatched old school last week. Still holds up. Well, yeah, timeless. All right. So I woke up and I went to the dump. This is after getting the kids situated and breakfast, whatever. I'm a huge dump guy. I love taking. I don't know. I love going to the dump and taking my equipment and my garbage bags and my cardboard boxes. And I don't know why. I enjoy it. I just enjoy it. There I said it. Because when you have a family, you produce so much trash. Yeah. Like, why don't you just wait for the garbage man? Because it's overflown. That's why. So you get rid of this. You get rid of that. All right. So I went to the dump. Then.

I came home to get like six boxes and packages to go to the UPS for the drop-off, which, by the way, I got there at 9 o'clock, which is when it opens, and I was second on the line. There was like six people behind me, and I had like six things, and I started to get nervous. I was sweating, anxieties. I felt people like looking at me, like, come on, move it along. You know what I mean? Oh, great. I'm behind this guy.

Yeah, yeah, this guy. Oh, Starbucks. Then I did a target pickup. Then I went to a card store to get Pokemon cards for a birthday party. Then I picked up an aside bowl for my wife and Logan. I took Kobe to basketball. Then after that, we went to Chocolate Works to get Valentine's Day, chocolates for teachers and grandma.

Then I took Kobe to a birthday party. These are great birthday parties. You know movie birthday parties? I did one of those when I was probably six, Teenage Mutant 2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2. Secret of the U.S. Remember that one? I did that for one of my birthday parties.

So the kids saw Puss and Boots. You know what I did? You take a nap? I saw a movie of my own. brought AirPods, and I watched a horror movie. What do you brought AirPods? I sat in the back row, and I watched it. Oh, on your phone.

Oh, on your phone? Okay. So, although the Pousin'Booch movie, the music was a little bit getting to my ears, but whatever. I watched a movie, which I'll talk about later. All right, so here's the thing, Ben. At 140, just as they were about to serve cake, Kobe and I had to leave, we couldn't stay for the cape because we had a party at 2 o'clock that we had to get to. We get to the party, and there's like a bunch of video games.

And so Kobe's asked to play the videos. I'm like, just wait for the party. So you're going to play, you're going to play. I hear one of the people who works to say, party starts at 2.30. So I'm like, no, it doesn't. It starts at 2.30. So I look at my watch. It's 210.

I'm like, wait, what the heck is going on? This person called for the party at 2 that didn't start until 2.30 as if it was a wedding. Who does that? Is that chutzpah? What do you mean? The invitation for the party said 2 o'clock. Okay. The party did not actually start until 2.30.

Okay, that's bizarre. That is nerve. That is huge nerve. Especially with kids. So next year for this person, we're going a half hour later. Unbelievable chutzpah. I was not too thrilled with that. All right.

So then Robin met me at the party, swapped cope with Logan, took Logan home, went to the park, got home at 4 o'clock. That's a lot, right? I mean, right? Lovely Saturday. However, there's no lounging on the couch anymore when you have kids. Here's another quick story that I forgot to tell you. When I got out of the airport on Sunday night or whatever we got home, I'm walking to the taxi stand and I take out my phone to look at the Uber and it was $75.

So a guy comes up to me and says, I'll take you home for $80. I said, where's your car? He goes, my car's right here. So I said, sure, done. His car was not right there. It was across the street, across the street, in the parking lot. It wasn't that far, but whatever. So we get to his car.

He's pulled over. His blinkers are on. and there's somebody in the front seat who's lying all the way down. So I'm like, this is a little bit strange. He goes, oh, it's just my wife. So I'm like, all right. So I get in the car. I start to get a little bit nervous because this was not an Uber.

This was just a dude. And he's telling me that he's taking his wife to the casino on Long Island. I'm like, casino on Long Island. Where's that? So anyway, it was a bit dicey. This is not an Uber. It was just a guy. All of a sudden, the locks go down.

Yeah. What was that movie with Angelina Jolie? The bone collector. The bone collector. That's exactly what I thought. I thought I wasn't going to be able to get out. All right. And then lastly, Ben, so my back has been acting up again.

I haven't been to the chiropractor since 2021. And now that I've been taking care of my body a little bit, exercising, building muscle, lean muscle, I might add, just kidding. My back has been pretty good. However, over the past few days, I've started to feel just a little ache, just a little wear and tear. So I figured, since I'm going to Disney, I should probably just get adjusted, right? Just go to the chiropractor, just get adjusted. So I'm lying down.

Have you ever been to a chiropractor before? No. All right. So I'm lying down, and there's like a hinge. And I'm lying down and they dropped my feet. So your legs are light down and you're flat in your stomach. And he's pushing around, pressing around, showing me where it hurts. And he goes to, like, crack my back in the middle of my upper back.

And that's my lower back that hurts. And as soon as he did that, I go, I'm like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, it hurts so bad. And I'm like, oh, my God, this motherfucker just destroyed, destroyed my bag. I'm going to have to be in a wheelchair for Disney. At that point, do you say I'm not paying? You hurt me? It was a $15 copay.

Okay. Yeah, I should have said, let me speak to your manager, so I want to send this back. Here's an open letter. It hurt so bad. So for the rest of the day, I've got my heat pack, I've got my icy hot, and I went back this morning. Now, when I went back, I said, listen, am I really dumb for coming back? The guy goes, no, why? I said, well, not to be a jerk, but I came here yesterday with moderate discomfort, and I left with a limp.

And he was like, we're going to be conservative. I've seen this 100 times. Obviously, it's more serious than we had thought. So anyway, thank God I went back this morning, and I think I'm on the mend. I think I'll be okay for Disney. But it was unbelievable how much pain I was in when this guy pushed. The moral of the story is you're an old man. So basically, yeah, yeah.

So anyway, I'm an old man. Okay. So that's a great little segue into this article that you shared with me about Fleischman is in trouble. So we talked about this for us. So wait, hold on, in conclusion, and I hate to be preaching. I'm not being preaching. It's just like a, hey, if you're 26 years old and you're listening to this,

just take a second and be like, yeah, this is awesome, to like have zero responsibilities. And again, I'm not complaining. I love it. Very happy. but that's all. Michael's the ghost dad from the future coming to tell you what's coming. Exactly. The dad from future past.

We talked about Fleischman in trouble before, and I liked it so much because it dealt with money, and they did a real life. We're going to talk to these people who live in Manhattan and feel like this, and they quoted this one. People were dunking on this left and right on social media, but I thought she said,

it's so crazy how rich you have to be to live in New York, comfortably, just comfortably. There's a very subtle heartbreak that perhaps people have made better life choices than you, and their houses are bigger and they're happier. And she says the crazy thing is that this friend at 45 has not only an apartment in the city, but a weekend house outside of it, one that she bought with earnings from her successful career and enjoys with her partners and kids. You and I were having

a drink at the Soho House in Miami. You made the comment to me. We were talking about this article and you said, you're lucky you live in the Midwest because it is way, way worse, this kind of stuff, this keeping up with the Joneses because there's such a concentration of wealth around a big city like New York. For me, one of the takeaways here, of course, social media's got to dunk on this, but I think this is real life. There's a million takeaways. One is then, money can very quickly turn from an asset to a liability. Yes. And I'm not saying, like, be careful what you wish for, like, oh, being rich, having money

is so hard. I'm not saying that. But I am saying is that... It can mess with your head in big ways. The level of where money becomes to own you, it might not be as high as you think. Yes. You're right. The asset to liability thing is...

Yeah, so nobody wants to hear about these people's problems, but they're people too. I think especially when you have a concentration of... Like, you felt that in Miami. I just felt like there's a ton of money in Miami, and I can see how living there that environment would drive you crazy if you're not careful. If you're surrounded by Porsches and it's only human to want and to feel like you don't have enough and anyway, great article or interesting article I should say, great show. I really enjoy that show. All right, one in three U.S. consumers say they have cut down on food delivery.

47% of those cited the high cost of delivery. Yeah, no shit. A meal delivered can be as much as 100% more than dining in. I spoke about DoorDash last week. Obscene. Truly. borderline offensive, how much this thing costs. It is probably just as cheap to just eat at the restaurant. I mean, you have drinks and stuff there, too, and maybe a bigger tip. Last year's national average babysitting rate was $2.60 an hour for one child, a staggering 21% increase in just two years. That's about what I pay.

It's a lot. Ours is probably 20. Do you think you need to pay more for multiple kids, or is it the same? Because we have three kids. Oh, you got to pay more for that. I mean, I think it also depends on the behavior of the kids. True. I'm sure you have great kids, but you've got three of them.

It's a lot. also you have to vary it so for example when i have my babysitter come over in the morning if i'm traveling robin leaves at like 615 so we need somebody to come at 615 in the morning that's a big ask until the kids so that's a huge server that we pay 30 that makes sense that's a monstrous ask okay a bunch of people sent me this article from vice saying american cars are getting too big for parking spaces someone has been saying this for a while take a bow ben take a bow they talk about how there's regulations on the size you need to make for parking lots and the cars are just too big for them now and they only leave, like, a finite amount of space on the sides.

And it's so much more expensive. They said for a surface lot, it costs $7,7,500 to just build one parking space. Wait, say that again? What does that mean for a surface lot? So, like, if you're building a parking lot, it costs $7,500 per space. But if you're building, like, an underground garage in the city, it can be like $200,000 per space. So the people who are building the parking lots don't want to make the space is bigger because they want to fit more parking spots because it costs that they're looking to recoup their costs.

I noticed at a birthday party this weekend that there was a Yukon that was the spots were not built. This is an old parker, I guess. Spots were literally not built for cars that big. In 1985, 300 every four vehicles in the U.S. were sedans or wagons today that is flipped. Three out of every four are SUVs or trucks and larger vehicles. I still ask, and I know we showed the Volvo Station wagon a couple weeks ago, but how did our parents deal with us? Where did everything go? They shoved us all in the same seat three in a row.

Yeah, but what about all this stuff? Maybe we just didn't have stuff. I didn't have anything. I had nothing when I was a kid. That's so true. I had no possessions. I had one pair of sneakers. Do you know your kid always has a water bottle with them?

Yes. I never got water when I was a kid. It was a drinking fountain. I never had a water bottle. Yeah, kids are soft these days had a water bottle. We used to just pass that from dehydration. Yes. That was a joke.

Okay. Not a bad one. All right, so Showtime is effectively dead. Did you listen to the podcast with Matt Bellany and Lucas Shaw? No. They're going to fold it in a Paramount Plus, right? I think what they're doing is they're just going to lean it the sequels. Like, they're not going to do any more original content. Remember when they lost,

well, they're still doing Your Honor, but they lost Ray Donovan and another show I can't remember. What was the show? Shameless. All of their hit shows just went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, done. So Showtime, as we know, the channel will still be there, but it is not going to be the showtime that we remember. So Warner Brothers was going to combine Discovery Plus with HBO Max, like a super app. And it sounds like they're now not doing that. They're probably just going to have to bundle all of these together. They're not going to want to put them all together, so they're just going to have to do a bundle. You get this one and this one and this one and that one.

You get four or five or something. Who's going to do the bundle, though? Good question. Verizon. I don't know. Apple. The companies would have to say, yeah? Who knows?

All right. Are we done? Let's do some recommendations. Okay. Oh, wait. Before you get, just last thing. So Josh and I were cleaning at our office. We're doing some redecorating.

And I found my journal. And I know we've spoken about my journal probably in like one of the first couple episodes. to spend years. One of the things that I did early on in my trading career, LOL, was I wrote down everything that I did. And as you're about to find out, it was ludicrous. And this was integral for me in terms of discovering that I'm an idiot because I actually, these are my own thoughts. So, for example, in, holy shit, Ben, on this day, 11 years ago, see the date? 214, 2012. That's right. What are the odds? How about that? So on this day, 11 years ago, I shorted Amazon, shorted 100 shares at 18840. I'm sure the price is that

$5,000 split of justice. So this is my logic. News broke that their prime service added fewer than half of analysts estimates. Stock had been up 11% year to date. Can't bring my own handwriting. What does that say? Does that say based on meltup? Based on meltup we've seen, not a lot going on, not a lot of intellectual firepower. I just like how you wrote wrong. on the bottom here. I wrote wrong. Yes. Well, no, because two days later, I shorted.

Oh, credit to me. Look at this. Two days later, I shorted into weakness. I pressed my bet. Then it looks like I got stopped out of the way up. But anyway, good trip down in memory lane. Way to go. All right.

Recommendations, I'll go quick. We're into shrinking on Apple with Harrison Ford and Jason Segal. How many episodes have you seen? A couple. It's also by the guy who did scrubs, which I love scrubs back in the day. I loved that show. I rewatched prisoners. Wait, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. You can't do that. I mean, you said, I watched shrinking. You're going to give zero context. Come on, give us something. Do you like it? Do you not like it?

I like it. It's like a half hour, 45 minute show. Jason Siegel is a psychiatrist, whose wife died. I kind of like having a lighter fair show that's not like super serious. And there's our serious tones of it, but I like have any comedy that you can just kind of like shut your mind off a little bit. It's a good him and her show, right? Yes, it is. I reached prisoners on Netflix recently. Deni. Denis. I did not realize this was your boy, Deni. Put some respect on his name. I had watched this movie when it came out in, like, 2012 or whenever it came out, and I remember really liking it.

And I had not seen it since then. I saw it on Netflix, so I watched it. And this movie was awesome. This movie rocks ass. And what's his name? Hugh Jackman was amazing in this movie. Amazing. That scene where he's, like, hitting the sink.

And he's not like a hard old guy like that, usually. He's usually a little like a softer big smile on his face. He was great. That movie is awesome. Skeleton Twins with Kristen Weig. And... Whig? Chris and Whig?

Is it pronounced weak? I don't know. It's two eyes, W-I-I-G, and Bill Hader. Is that true? I didn't know those two eyes. All right. So it's a 2014 movie maybe, and I think comedians should win more Oscars is my takeaway from this.

I'm not saying, like, this is like an Oscar-worthy movie, but the fact that they can go from, like, being hilarious and being, like, serious actors in the same movie, it was kind of like a good precursor to understanding how Bill Hater is going to be awesome in his new show. What was this, his HBO show? Oh, bad. That's a great point. That's a good observation. That's all I got.

But they're very good at switching between like having a hilarious scene and having like a really dramatic scene in this movie. Are you up to date on Last of Us? Was there an episode this week? Yes. There was episode six? They put it on HBO Max early because of the Super Bowl so I could watch it on Friday night. It was a good one.

Which episode was that? The one where the zombies come off from around. Oh, you know what's funny? I saw that. I was out of sorts because of our tribe from Miami. I thought I was a week behind. Oh, that was great. Yeah, it was good.

What a show. All right. So when I was in the theater with kids, I watched a sadistic movie called Pearl. it's an 824 horror movie. It's the prequel to X, which talked to all three of you who saw that movie. Pro was very effective.

Very effective. I feel like all of these horror movies are just one word names, and I've never heard of any of them. Yeah, probably not for you, but for those of you who ride with me on those movies, it was a good one.

It was a good one. Gentleman approaching his 40s got kicked out of a child's birthday party for watching a movie that was too over the top this weekend. All right. So no show next week. you're putting your foot down.

I'm going to do one for me. I'm going to enjoy time with the family. I'm going to take one off. You do it. It's been five years. Do it. I'm just glad it's not me breaking the streak. It's you.

Everyone send your hate mail to Michael. Write an open letter to Michael if you'd like. Guess what? I'm going to send it back. All right. With peace and love, peace and love, please do not send me any letters. Are you going for a whole week? I don't even know what we're doing.

I had zero to do with this planning. I don't even know where we're going. Take out a home equity long before you go. You're going to need it. Okay. That's great. Animal Spiritspot at gmail.com. Thank you for listening.

We'll see you in two weeks.