Animal Spirits Podcast - Why Isn't Inflation Falling? (EP.279)

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

On today's show we discuss the trouble with nailing the bottom in a bear market, why money continues flowing into ARK, why the VIX isn't higher, sticky inflation, why the bottom 50% has seen their net worth double since the start of the pandemic, Netflix with ads and much more.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs...  Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense  Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor  Like us on Facebook  And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's really good. If you want to check it out, go to Composer.competre trade and check out their new opus trading strategy. 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 Carlson. 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. Ben, can you see this? Yeah, it sounds like a thick piece of paper. It's fairly thick in size. Seems pretty standard. But what it is, it's a notice to appear. I've got a docket number. The people of the state of New York versus Michael H. Batnik. For what? So the first time I took out my jet ski, the new one this year, I got pulled over, and I didn't have my boating safety certificate with me, which was very foolish.

That's a no-no. So the Bay Constable pulls me over, and he said, all right, send in proof of your certificate and you should be good to go. So I did that, and I don't know, I called, this is my bad for waiting to the last minute, but I called the court, where I'm in Boston right now, which we'll get to in a minute, I called the court, explained the situation, and they said, well, why are you taking legal advice from the bay constable? I said, I don't know, they told me to send in proof and I should be good.

Turns out I'm not good. I'm not good, so I have to call back later and find out what the situation is, and hopefully I'm a fugitive, basically. either going to break your kneecaps or take away your jet ski. I don't get it. What's the problem? I don't know what to do, but I'm on the run from the law. I have a court date tomorrow that I can't make, so.

On the lamb. What does that mean, by the way? On the lamb. It sounds cool. Where did it come from? Wait, where or what come from? On the lamp? On the lamb.

On the lamb? You've never heard that before? If you're on the run, you're on the lamb. Every movie says that about a fugitive. I'm on the lamb. Oh, no. I mean, call me Dr. Richard Kimbell because I am on the run. Ben.

you're coming in hot you are coming in hot so anyway i can't be where i need to be because ben you and i are in boston we're going to be talking to fidelity or we're doing a fidelity event is that the right way to explain the situation we're taking the show on the road animal spirits on the road twice this week actually i'm going to meet you in boston soon i'm still in michigan right now and then we're going to arkansas on friday for another event with acre trader animal spirits is going on road. We'll see if this continues. But I'm going to be seeing a lot of you in the coming days. All right. So what a week in the market's been? What a week, what a month, what a year? A lot of people will say occasionally, there's people out there who don't like us. That's fine.

We're not everyone's cup of tea. But occasionally people will say, well, you guys are long-term investors and you like buy and hold and all these things. Why do you pay so much attention to what's going on in the short term? And the reason for me, besides that, it's just, it's part of our job. What a ludicrous thing to say? It is pretty ludicrous. But the thing for me is, This stuff is fascinating. Watching what happens in the markets and the connection between the economy in the markets and data points in the market and the Fed of the markets, to me, if you just step back and say, yeah, take away the money losing part, it's just, it's interesting.

What goes on if you're paying attention to this stuff day to day and how much it moves and how much things change and people's opinions and I just think that paying attention to the markets is endlessly fascinating because it's just you're peering into like human nature and human emotions constantly. It's the greatest game on earth to that end. on what day was this? This was Thursday. Josh and I were going into the city, and I saw this staff from Sentiment Trader. So after Thursday, CPI came in hotter than hot, which we'll get to, and the market got creamed immediately. So Sentiment Trader tweeted, and this might be a lot,

but stay with me for a second. The S&P 500 was on track to open lower by more than 1% after six consecutive losses and at a 52-week low. Okay. An open lower by more than 11% six consecutive losses at a 52 week low. The only other two times that had happened since they started tracking us in 1982 was one day, October 10th, 2008. We are in, Ben, last week I said step back, maybe take a pause and appreciate or recognize that we're living through history. This is it. We are really, really in it. It does feel like every day is it's the Michael Scott Snipsnap. It's plus two, minus two, plus three, minus three, plus four, that whole thing back and forth, which a little tangent here, Gen X, Seinfeld was the reference for everything that

happened in life. You could take every reference of something that happened in your life and bring it back to Seinfeld because they'd covered it. The office is that now for millennials. How's that? Even though you somehow never saw that show. Do I need to binge the office? Will I like it? Is it possible to binge? Do I need to? You have to watch the first three seasons. The first two seasons alone, at least. You could get through the first three seasons and it's some of the best comedy ever. Yes. Okay. All right. They're like 20-minute episodes because they were on NBC for a half hour with commercials. By the way, all credit to me for persevering through this podcast, because Ben, not only can I

not see you, because I'm at a hotel Wi-Fi, you're sounding like a robot, but we're going to power through. Way to go. We're podcasting with one arm behind her back here. All right. This is from Nick Colo. Hang on, hang on. I can't hit you, but I can still cut you off.

To the point of this being the greatest game on Earth, so the market was down, I don't remember what was down at the open, 3% whatever it was. It was a lot. And the market finished up. It was one of the greatest reversals of all time, no? It was basically a 5% off the lows or something, finished up 3%. Then, of course, the next day it fell 3% again. And now it's up again, 2% that, I don't know.

So this is from Nick Colos, who was on the compounded friends a couple weeks ago. If you didn't listen yet, definitely go give it a listen because he's very sharp. I've seen him give a few speeches over the years. He gave a whole speech for a CFA Institute talk like 10 years ago I saw, and the whole speech was using Google Trends. It was amazing. Such a smart guy. So he said, he's the best.

The SEP is down over 23% year to date, but nine single days make up that entire decline. without them, in fact, the index would be up 9% year-to-date. So take away the nine worst days and stocks would be up 9%. And he said, like, all the worst days have come around basically the Fed talking or inflation data. This is one of those stats where it's useless in terms of anything you can do with it, but it's still very interesting. Again, why?

I don't know. Are you going to miss those nine days miraculously and be up 9%? That's what I'm saying. You can't do anything with it. It just shows how crazy, like, I don't know, we're almost. all the way through the year. So what are there, 252 trading days in a year? We're 200 days into the year or whatever and nine of the trading days make up the entire loss. You want to do something that data? So because this keeps going on longer and longer, it seems harder and harder to

figure out like what is going to be the catalyst for a bottom. And I did some research on this just to kind of show how difficult it can be to actually call a bottom. So I looked at a bunch of different fundamentals, 10-year treasury yields, CAPE ratios for valuations, inflation rate and dividend deal. It's going back to World War II. And also, just side note, every time I do a chart going back to World War II, someone says, why do you include the 30s? And I just didn't want to. How's that? It's way messier going back to the 30s. And I think, I mean, the Great Depression, could that happen again? I don't know. Probably not, but maybe, but still, that period was just such a different period. And I look at like either post-1960 or post-World War II as modern financial history.

Anyway, I'm with you. My whole thing is you can't use fundamentals to pick a bottom. If you look at the fundamentals, it doesn't tell you anything. Sometimes it happens, stocks bottom with higher yields, lower yields, higher valuations, lower valuations. I mean, in 2002, stocks bottomed at a 22-K ratio. It was still pretty high. Same thing in 2020, I guess. High inflation, low inflation, high dividend yields, low-dividend yields.

There's no fundamental. So the thing is, okay, how do you pick a bottom? And the only thing is, it's price. The only thing that can tell you if it's the bottom is price, the problem is, every time price goes up during a bare market, you think it's a bare market rally. So even price could lie to you. So there's nothing. There's no signal I think you could look at that you can say, if you check these 10 boxes,

stocks bottomed. There's definitely no silver bullet, that's for sure. One of these rallies will mark the bottom. That's for sure. We just can't know which one until it's after the fact. The captain obvious thing is price will tell you when stocks have bottomed because when stocks start going up and they get in an up trend, that's when stocks are bottom. But you won't believe price right away.

I mean, listen, was that a short-term bottom? You could easily make the case. We got hotter than expected CPI. You had a monster washout of a day, and then the rally finished at the highs. And so it's just going to be something that's uninspiring and unexciting and not scientific or mathematical. There's just, if you were going to sell, you would have sold. And there's just no more sellers. I went down some sort of financial YouTube rabbit hole last week, and somehow I stumbled across financial media from March 9th, 2009. And it was the day of the bottom. And it was going through like Warren Buffett was on talking about how it's just been a financial calamity and everything fell off a cliff. And everything was negative and negative. And there wasn't anything that day that

led you to think, this is it. The bottom is here. The worst has passed us and the stock market is moving on. That's the thing. There's not going to be like a headline that is going to tell you when this happens. I guess it could be an inflation print or something. You could talk yourself into that this time around, maybe or the Fed actually backing off a little bit, but they don't ring a bell at the top and they don't do the same at the bottom. The reason why, like, listen, if we weren't in the situation we were in with the Fed actively trying to destroy demand and a recession probably looming, then you could have easily said, listen, you could have taken a stab that Thursday was the bottom, just given price action,

sentiment, washout. But I'm still waiting to see the reaction to the data turning, to the data a softening. And is the market going to rally on that? I don't know. We'll say. Right. How long would bad news be good news and then how long does it take to turn into bad news again? Yeah, exactly. So you could see bad news be met with good news. Like, okay, the Fed did enough. They're going to take their foot off the break. And then you get some sort of relief rally. But then investors start to react to the bad news, just being bad news. I mean, who knows. Yes. I still have trouble wrapping my mind around the number of people who are still sort of, it seems like maybe to be an economist, you have to be sort of detached

for emotions. And that's the kind of person who becomes an economist, but just people who are saying, like, we need this bad news to happen to move on. And I just, I can't wrap my mind around having that be your thought process right now, rooting for bad news, bad economic news, and other people lose their job. I can't get to that place ever. Well, there's a difference between rooting for it and thinking that it's an inevitability and that you need that. You need that. that to happen in order for us to get past this? But do we need that to happen to get past this? That's my big question. A lot of people think we have to have the unemployment rate go up to slow demand. And my question is just do we,

do we really? Because what really caused prices to rise? It was government spending in the pandemic, two things that workers had nothing to do with. So I don't know why we all of a sudden have to blame workers for anyway. Wait, I feel like this is a non-sequitur. So, all right, I was going to get into this later, but let's talk about it now. Oh, let's do it. All right, let's go down to pass the inflation stuff. All right, here's the thing. Everyone blames the government and the Fed and now workers for inflation for somehow.

Obviously, I know they're not really blaming workers, but it's like, we need to bring wages down because wages are too high, and if wages are sticky, they'll stay higher. Why aren't businesses getting more blame now that, like, gas prices have come down and commodities have come down? How come no one's going after the corporations? I'm not saying it's the corporation's fault that this happened. No, listen. So, Jeremy Siegel was on CNBC this morning.

I listened to him again, and he said, everyone keeps pointing out wage growth is slower than inflation because you're saying, yes, wages are growing, but it's slower. So how could wages be the main problem if it's growing slower than inflation? Guess who's picking up the slack there? Corporations. Look at the, so Ed Yardinney has the profit margins. Profit margins remain at all-time highs for S&P 500 companies. How is that possible if costs are going up for them?

Because they're the ones who are benefiting from this. Why aren't the corporations taking more blame for inflation staying here longer than it otherwise would have? I think more people are getting blamed. I'm not saying this is a corporation's fault. They're taking advantage of this environment, though. So here's my like MMT, Ben is the economic czar of the world. If we have inflation go higher in the future, instead of raising taxes on people or trying to put people out of work, raise taxes on corporations. Thoughts.

CPI goes above 5% annually. Businesses get taxed more. What would that do? I don't know. I'm just, I'm saying if margins are still at all-time highs and we're everyone's blaming workers for this, doesn't it seem like corporations are the one who are taking the least amount of brunt of all this stuff in terms of- That's fair. Yes. Fair point. That's all I'm saying. It may sound like a straw man. So we had Bob Pisani and Kyla Scanlan on the compound in friends this week and somebody made a comment about us being out of the woods and I said we're never out of

the woods. We're always in the woods. We're always either, it's booming. or bust or somewhere in between. So I was reminded of that. I was watching that movie Vengeance over the weekend, the 100% movie. Thoughts? I didn't finish it. Okay. So I will give you my thoughts.

But they're in Texas talking about it's an oil town. And they're talking about it's always either a boom or bust. So the guy said to him, oh, where are you now? And he goes, we're somewhere in between. Right. I feel like that's the economy. It's either we're in a recession or a recession is coming or we're coming out of a recession. It's always freaking something.

Speaking of busts, I looked at ARC last week again. We were talking about this on Slack. Arc is now, as of last week, it was down 78%. Like, it was a new all-time low. At the peak in February 2021, this is when Arc was doing its best. It was outperforming the S&P by more than 600% in total from inception. So this, it's like the end of 2014. Okay.

I assume it's underperforming? Now it's underperforming since inception by about 30%. Oof, oof. We wrote about Arc at the time as this was happening. This is going to end badly. we've seen this before, star money managers, money piles in. I think this may end up being the biggest retail incinerator in terms of dollars ever. Ben, this is exactly the point that I was making, that you were writing about this.

You weren't rooting for it, but you saw this as an inevitability, not to this extent, but you see what I'm getting at? Yeah, that's fair. This is just adding to the confusion of making this whole period so difficult in terms of, like, the market getting killed, but consumer still is okay, retail sales are still good, earnings are still good, and yet the market is getting killed. But you could say, like, well, the S&P's only down 27%. It's going to get a lot worse, which I hear that.

But like, look at things like this. All of those companies that are down 80 plus percent. Maybe you're looking at the S&P not being down enough, and that's the wrong thing. The NASDAX down 35%. I thought it was going to end badly for it. I did not think it was going to end that badly that fast. The speed of it. Neither did I.

So, but Eric Beltune has tweeted this out. He says, I got a request for the latest arc flows. Brace yourself. 100 million came in over the last month, 870 million over the past six months, 1.2 billion year-to-date, top 3% among all ETFs. Money continues to pile into this fund. They continue to believe in Kathy Wood. This is unlike anything we've ever seen in terms of, usually you hit the peak,

a bunch of money rushes in because of fund did well. It peaks, it falls, money rushes out. The only way that I can explain this is that people are using this responsibly. not everyone, but this has to be a satellite position for most people. No, I mean, if this is too bigger position, you'd blow out of it. This can't be people that have 50% of their money and are doubling down. But top 3% among all ETFs in terms of flows, and this is not one of the biggest funds anymore, nor even close to it. Who's putting money into it? Is it advisors? Is it individuals? Who's putting money in here? A billion dollars year to date, it doesn't sound like a ton of

money. I mean, relative to its performance, it sounds astronomical. But anyway, Yeah, it's not great. I know that there's this trope that all mom and pop investors are idiots, and they always sell at the bottom and buy at the top, which is just not true based on the data. But the thing is, is this good or bad? Because investors who believe in this are showing discipline and they're doubling down and putting more money in when it's down. So would you rather have that or would you rather have people run for the exits?

Ooh. I don't have any answer because that's the thing. The people who kind of want to thumb their noses that retail investors and say retail always does the wrong thing. this time they're going in and they're doubling down on the losses. That is an interesting question. What's the dodge ball? That's a bold strategy cotton? Yeah.

I don't know. I guess we'll see. All right. Stick with Alchernis. He said Treasury ETFs have now taken in $111 billion year to date, which has doubled the old annual record. They now account for 26% of all ETF flows despite making up 5% of the assets. Interesting considering that Treasury ETFs are getting smoked this year. This, to me, sounds like good investor behavior. Do you think some of this could be people finally have some losses in their bond mutual funds and they're doing a swap from mutual funds ETS?

Yes, because we've seen, haven't we seen a lot of outflows out of bond mutual funds, like a lot? That's what I thought that there was a lot of, so this could be a tax thing where people are taking advantage. That's the only silver lining besides young people being able to buy stocks on sale is that this year, if you want to book some losses, you can. If you needed to offset some stuff, you could book some losses. To my point, about a billion dollars in flow not being that much. Now, maybe this is apples and oranges, in fact, I'm sure it is.

But Jason Gempford, who is the man behind sentiment trader, tweeted, I don't think people really appreciate what's happening in the options market right now. Last week, retail traders bought $19.9 billion, with a B, worth of puts to open. They only bought $6.5 billion worth of calls. This is the first time in history that puts were three times calls. Now, this, again, gets to bearish extreme sentiment. And I will go back to Jim Bianco did a tweet thread the other week talking about how sentiment, like extreme bearish sentiment is fairly useless in a bare market.

Like a sentiment's always bad in a bear market. You should expect it. Yeah. I think I mostly agree with that. This isn't a butt. I'm just saying, man, sentiment is pretty washed out. Here's my question as sort of a noob on this. I understand what the VIX is.

So the VIX is at like 31 right now. You didn't do a time stamp yet. That's your new thing. So give us a time stamp. Oh, my bad. What time is it? It's Monday. it's October 17th, I'm 24 hours from being a man on the run. It's 2 o'clock, Eastern.

All right. So the VIX is at 31, and I've heard a lot of people say, we can't have capitulation until the VIX shoots up to, like, 38 or 40. And I'm not a VIX structure guy. Like, I know what the VIX is. It's measuring the next 30 days of variability in the stock market based on puts and calls, that sort of thing. I don't understand the structure enough to know. But if this thing about buying puts is, it's like so big, there's three times as many puts his calls, why is it the VIX higher? shouldn't that make the VIX higher? What am I missing? I don't know. We were speaking about this with Nick Hollis. I really don't know what the answer is.

Oh, and Katie Stockton, I'm perplexed. I really don't have an answer for you because... Here's the other thing. So, if you look at the history of the VIX, it was higher than it is today in 2011. 2011, the stock market only went down like 19% in change. That's when people thought we're going to have a double dip and the Europe stuff was going on in Greece. The Vicks hit 40 back then.

I wonder if, I don't know. I don't even want to speak out of turn and say the VIX measures like surprises. I'm told the measures implied volatility over the next 30 days. Maybe there's been no big shocks right now. In 2011, there was a lot of headline risks coming out of Europe and double-dip stuff. And outside of CPI, there's been no surprises. It's just been a slow bleed. And maybe that's the thing.

Maybe it never gets to that capitulation point because there's been a 10-month bear market. It's just been going on. And it's kind of been the same thing. There hasn't been it. You're right. Maybe that's a good theory. It's been inflation this whole time. So maybe the ability for inflation to surprise on the upside to cause.

to cause a VIX spike. Maybe we don't see it. Maybe it has to be something else. That's a good point. Okay, so I'll put this out. This is from Deutsche Bank. Ten-year UK guilt yields have returned to their average levels after being the most expensive ever two years ago.

So they take this back to 1700, and they show the average is 4.5%. But look at how quickly it went from zero to four. Insane. You wonder why stuff is potentially breaking over there. Because the line on that chart, that looks like one of those, you used to do those fake S&P 500 charts. or like if it goes to zero tomorrow or something, this looks like a fake chart to me.

This doesn't look real. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's such a good point. It looks like you entered a number by accident and like you fast-fingered a number. Yeah, you go to the analysts who created this chart and you go, this can't be right. It should have been 45 basis points, not 4.5%.

If you want to learn more about what's going on in the UK, we had Mark Rubenstein, Josh and I did, on the YouTube channel. And Mark explains it really well because that's obviously a little bit out of our depth over there. Is that what we have to hang our head in right now, though, in the United States as at least we're not Great Britain. No offense, anyone over there. They seem 10 times more screwed up than we are, which sounds hard at the moment. But doesn't it seem,

I feel like they have a new prime minister every like three months. I don't know what happened with Brexit, but I think it went through. I don't know. So bespoke when I did this thing where they showed, they tweeted predictions are hard even for the Fed. And they showed what the Fed funds rate was, what CPI was, and some comments by Powell. And man, these have not aged well. And I think it just goes to show that even the group that is responsible for a lot of the direction of what's going on, like has no idea what they're going to be doing, what the economy's going to be doing in the future. This is one of the reasons that I'm not going to, like, try to make my investment strategy

based on what the Fed does, but a lot of people are saying, listen, the Fed is not going to pivot because you have to trust them now. It's like, look at their history of what they say. It seems like for the last three years, everything they've said about what's going to happen next has been wrong. I honestly don't blame them because it's been a very tough environment, but I think if they're trying to say, like, we're not going to change our minds. It's like, yeah, you are, you're going to change your mind. If the economy does something, it forces your hand, which is kind of what's been happening. They say, this is what we're going to do. Then the economy

does something else. And they say, okay, never mind. We're going to do this now. It's really hard. This is really hard because it does sound like they mean it. And I understand that they've said things in the past that they went back on and were wrong on. And maybe they do, I mean, tough. I honestly think that what they should do for a while is just shut up and stops talking. Every time they talk, if nothing is going to change, then don't say anything. I feel like they're getting way too much joy out of controlling the markets. And I think it's a little too much ego driven at this point. I think joy is a bit strong. I don't think they're getting much joy out of this.

Neil Cash-Cari said he was happy when stocks fell after that one. Remember that? He said he was happy to see stocks fall 3% that one day. Is he on TikTok? He's a cup something of an influencer. Yes. The 10-year yields have risen for 11 consecutive weeks, longest streak since 1978. Unreal. And what is it at? 4% now? Yeah.

Oh, credit to you. Ben, last week were you saying how the bond market might predict a Fed pivot? Were you saying something like that? Yes, I said the bond market is going to predict a Fed pivot. The bonds will fall before the Fed starts lowering rates. That's my call. I think Morgan Stanley, maybe they're listening. Who knows?

They said, if rates fall ahead of a decline in inflation, which we expect, it will give legs to the rally that began last Tuesday. So again, if rates fall ahead of a decline in inflation, oh, that's not what you were saying, is it? Yeah, pretty much. The bond market is going to sniff it out. So if the Fed keeps raising 75 basis points, then 50 base points, they get to like 4.5% or 5%. It wouldn't surprise me if the 10 years down to 3.5 or 3 in the bond market says, we don't

believe you. We're going lower because you already beat inflation and it's peaked. That's my thought process. Okay. I could totally see that happening where the Fed continues to raise too long and overstay their welcome, even though the bond market has already moved past it and sniffs out, inflation is peaked and coming down and the market has moved down while the Fed is still stuck in higher rate territory.

Then they're going to have to reverse course again. Hey, apropos of nothing, how do you feel about Liam Neeson and a naked gun reboot? Because I have strong feelings. I'm pretty anti-remaking classic movies. That's usually my stance. There's one Lieutenant Frank Dreben. It's one of the greatest comedies of all time. I don't know if this is the...

Actually, this is not the first time I belly left. The first time I had belly left was Caddyshack. It was Rodney Dangerfield. I remember being like five years old and crying, laughing at one of his fart jokes. But when Leslie Nielsen goes to the bathroom with his mic still on... Yeah. Which one is that? I mean, there's so many of them.

They all kind of run together for me. I don't know if that's the original, but come on. Who asked for this? Whatever happened to just ripping off a movie? Like, you can rip off and do a comedy that's kind of in the naked gun tone, but don't make it be the naked gun. Yeah, I'm anti. All right. So, inflation, we got the numbers last Thursday, and the core is accelerating.

What the hell is going on? I got nothing, man. If you read the people who go and break down each component of inflation, the thing everyone is talking about now continues to be the rent piece and the housing piece. That's going to continue to stay high for a while. Am I dumb here? The Fed should know all this stuff, like everyone else. The opposite side of that is if that shelter cost is being overstated now, it was being understated last year,

and then inflation was probably higher than we think last year. So maybe inflation really was 12% or something instead of nine at the worst of it. But obviously the Fed knows this, but I guess people are so anchored to the numbers now. It doesn't matter what the component pieces are. They need to see the number come down lower. The rental piece is on a lag because it incorporates, it's using existing rent. So as new rentals come into the data set, it's going to remain elevated. It's a third, I don't know how big rent is, but a shelter is a third of CPI.

So how does it get down to 2%? It was like it to take three years? It could take a little while. What are we looking at? Bill McBride tweeted, the National Average Wage Index increased to 60,000, 575 in 2021, up 9%. This is the largest percentage increase in wages since the early 80s. As we keep saying, it's all about wages. Is it, though?

Yes. It's not, though. Why is it all about wages? Explain this to me. Because, A, those don't come down. It's the stickiest part of inflation. And B, consumer spending is the entire economy. And the more money people make, the more money they demand.

And then things go up in price and they demand more wages. Like, this is the whole game. It's a whole enchilada. Okay, but knowing the economy is where it is right now, how many people have the ability to go and negotiate higher wages from here? They've already negotiated higher wages because of everything that's happened. How easy is it going to negotiate higher wages from here? We don't know.

If prices keep going up, they're going to keep demanding wage increases. Okay. So I talked about this last week, and I made the point that I think that the lower class of income people have now had a very good few years here. And a few people pushed back. And you said, don't read the comments in this one, Ben. Actually, a lot of people agreed to me. Only a few people called me a communist, which was how to take in the old.

over on whatever that number was. So look at this. To people who think that this is the worst on lower class income people, so the Federal Reserve has the ability to look at household wealth, and they look at this on a quarterly basis. So this is their Q2. So it's obviously gotten worse since then, probably. But look at this chart of wealth by the bottom 50%. This is net worth. They have this data going back to 1989. From 1989 to the pre-GFC 2007 peak, the net worth of the bottom 50% went from like 770 billion to 1.4 trillion. So that was in almost two decades. And it crashed 190 billion by 2011, which it kind of tracked the housing market there. People got just their net worth with the bottom 50% just got wrecked. It almost went to zero from the great financial crisis.

By the end of 2019, it slowly worked its way back up to $2 trillion. And from pre-pandemic, that's the end of 2019 to now, it went up to $4.4 trillion. So in the last three years, it's the last three years, is the bottom 50% has gained $2.4 trillion. That was more than the entire wealth they had by the end of 2019. And so I know that inflation is not great for people on the lower end of the income scale because it hurts their budget. But we've just seen the greatest relative increase in wealth for the bottom 50% that we've ever seen. So I don't know. And why?

Because they made more money. Housing prices helped obviously. The government gave them money, that sort of thing. I just think it's, I think we're rushing it a little to say that this hasn't been a good thing in some ways for some people. Can I make a confession that has absolutely nothing to do with what you just said? Stage is yours. No, listen, I hear you on all of that stuff. And yes, in a vacuum, this is a good thing.

It is a good thing. Not even in a vacuum. It is a good thing. Their net worth has exploded higher in the last three years. I'm just saying, okay, but the net worth is up over 100% for the bottom 50%. It took over 20 years to get that high before, to increase by that much. I'm just saying the increase in net worth has far outstripped any inflation. And I know that that net worth is not evenly distributed.

But this is the bottom, this is not the top 1% we're talking about here. This is the bottom 50%. I'm just saying, like, maybe this experiment that we tried worked out better than we anticipated. And I know that that's caused a lot of the inflation. And people seriously don't like that. But I'm saying, like, maybe some of this experiment wasn't all bad. That's what I'm saying. We're still in the experimental phase.

We don't know. Oh, to that point, somebody asked us, how come? you guys don't talk about, everyone talks about the Fed without talking about the fiscal stimulus, why don't you guys mention that enough? And I think that's a fair point. Well, we talked about that for months and months and months, I guess, when it happened. But yeah, it's true. The Fed kept rates at 0% from 2009 to 2015, and we got no inflation. It is true that you can't blame this on the Fed. A take that definitely has aged horribly, and we've got a lot of them, is prior to the inflation rearing its ugly head, we were saying, like, why wouldn't Congress just do this every time?

Yes. Now it's probably never going to happen again or not for a while. I think that will be interesting, though, if we do get a recession and people start feeling it and people start losing jobs and they kind of say, where's my $1,200 check this time? You did it last time. I think that inflation versus that mentality is going to be interesting to see how the politicians react. Because there are going to be a lot of people who want their checks the next time because they got last time. Ben, open up a stock chart, if you would. Okay.

When I say those words, where do you even go? I'm curious. On Y charts. Okay. You got to look at candlesticks to tell this sad story. I bought an individual stock a few weeks ago for the first time. I don't know if it's the first time this year. I can't remember.

But I feel it's been a while since I tried to buy one of these stocks. So I bought Netflix. It was shown relative at performance. It was the best performing of the fan mag. Now, listen, it has its own stories. It got killed. but I do believe in the turn of the round. I do believe that they're going to figure out ways to monetize the ad supported, but...

Did you get stopped out of this stack? Let me finish my story. That being said, this was not an investment. This was a trade. And as such, I had my stop in. I'm not going to let a trade turn into a bad investment. So I was willing to risk, I think, around 10%. I thought it could get up into the gap.

And I got stopped out on Tuesday at the close, which was, I don't know, on 215. The stock is now at 248, and it's going into earnings tonight. So do I hope it goes down 15% after earnings? No, I'm not that much of a monster. But I hope it doesn't go up 15%. Well, you see what it's up today? It's up 8% today. I'm looking.

I'm looking right now. So what do you think about their, they said they're going to do $6.99 a month, I think, for ad. I think it would be really hard to go from no ads to ads. I know a lot of people worried about people trading down to the ad. version, I think that'd be very hard to do. If I've been watching Netflix with... People aren't going to trade down because we've gotten used to no ads and going back to ads stinks. What's going to happen, I suspect... They can get a bunch of new people signing up, though, don't you think? That's where I'm going with this. The people that are getting kicked

out because they're limiting sharing, those people who are on their parents' plan might sign up for the $699 version. And I think that is going to be very successful. Could be wrong. I think it actually might work. I think they're going to get some new subscribers from this. I am bullish on the fundamentals, but this was a trade. I've got to use my discipline. Anyway. Got to take your losses. Yeah, I'll take your losses.

See, I don't know how to do that. All right. Let's talk about housing. All right, we got an email. In October of last year, I had a committed offer from Open Door from my house at 830K. I eventually canceled due to my daughter moving in with me. They now send me offers from time to time, and they've been dropping like a rock. Last week, I received a preliminary offer of five.

90K. This is real world stuff. Now, are you laughing? No, that was like that, ooh, I can't see you. Do you think, I mean, obviously that's to do with the housing market, but is that also to do with Open Door being kind of screwed and low-balling people? That's a good question. I would assume it's more of the housing market than Open Door changing their strategy, but maybe. I want to spend a second here. Colin Roche tweeted, here's my basic reasoning on why the Fed should slow or pause here. We have no idea what

700% mortgage rates will do to housing, and it's going to take a year for that to fully filter through. The Fed could be creating a legitimate housing crisis here, and we won't know it for years. I said that the labor market is everything. I'm going to say that also. You've got to throw in housing there. We talked about this a couple months ago. I think it's estimated if you include everything, construction and the loan side of things and realtors and all this stuff that is part of the housing complex. It's close to 20% of GDP. And I don't think people realize how many jobs are going to be lost in the housing industry

in the coming months. I talked to someone this weekend who was part of a loan department. And it was one of these soccer deals where we had a soccer get together after my daughter's game. And someone said, I worked in a loan department. And I'm just thinking to myself, half of that department is probably going to be gone. Because they've been living off of refinancings for the last two or three years, five years maybe, or new households being formed, that stuff is going to slow so much that people are going

to be losing jobs like crazy in those sectors. So I think Cullen's right. This sort of stuff happens on a lag. And they've been raising interest rates for how many months now? That's been my biggest problem. I don't fault the Fed for raising rates. They obviously needed to. But it's the speed at which they're raising them and how fast they've let things like mortgage rates go from three to seven that is going to eventually probably break stuff. Are we surprised that it's taking this long? In other words, the damage that we've seen is in financial conditions, really stocks, for the most part. Why is it taking longer to impact the economy?

And I think you made a good point. And I think Nicola's talked about it's about warehousing talent. Companies are hesitant. Yeah, they're going to slow hiring, but companies are hesitant to lay off people, even if they're fearful of a recession because it's hard to replace people. It's hard to bring them back. So if you look at the data besides the stock market so far and the housing market rolling over a little bit, things for most businesses continue to go well because people had all this excess

savings because for two years, they didn't spend a lot of money. So I think you're still seeing people spend down that excess savings. And I think that's kind of propped stuff up and probably made inflation worse than it would have been otherwise. It's the rabbit working its way through the snake. I think it's going to be well. We're starting to see. So I saw this in my local Wood TV.

This is the local West Michigan news the other day. and it says plans scrapped for a 24-story tower containing apartments, office space, and parking in downtown Grand Rapids. And they said they were going to do this. They had all the plans. He said it's not possible in this current economic market to move forward to this project of this scale. He said the decision was based on higher construction costs, huge interest rate hikes and supply chain unpredictability, pushing the project out further than you'd think. If you add all those things up, that makes sense for places pulling back on investment right now. So maybe the stuff that's already been going on is fine, but future investment is the thing that would,

would make the most sense to stall out. Places are just going to cut back because that hurdle rate is so much higher now. We also got a follow-up from someone who is a Toronto real estate broker. Last week we asked, like, what's going on in Toronto and Vancouver? Toronto broker here. I think this is a YouTube comment. Entire market is down 25% regardless of what figures they put out. Nothing is moving anymore.

Most sellers just do some price changes, then come off the market. Literally everyone refinance under 3% for a five-year fix in 2020 to 2021. So unless rates come down dramatically by 2025, they were, be an apocalypse over here. Average mortgage is over $600,000. I can't believe more people aren't talking about this. So five-year fixed rates that they do in Canada for most of these loans. I can't imagine staring down the barrel of that gun, just knowing that it's coming. Yeah, the math doesn't work on this. How are people supposed to go from $1,000 a month to $3,100? We talk about this for it really stinks for people who are buying their first home

and coming into this because affordably is so bad. This is people who've already bought a house. So you could have bought a house in a hot real estate market like Toronto and paid an ungodly sum of money for a really tiny place. And now your rate's going to go higher and your payment's going to go up. I don't know what they do. Can you imagine that wall in 2025, 2025, 2026, 2027 of people seeing their rates go to 6 or 7 percent? No. Ben, let's talk about private markets. CB Insights did their state of venture.

I want to run through some charts here. Funding reaches $300, this is global, $330 billion, $320,000. $329 billion in 2012 so far, projected to go to $4.40 or so down from, what is that? 630 in 2021. Oh, wait. Oh, 630. I'm sorry, I couldn't read that. 630.

Okay. So I was like, huh, that's actually... You mentioned that your eyes are going bad. That's a very small number. You notice, I didn't even have to squint and look close like you. That's because I still have my vision. Still there. That is a very small number, though, and what can I say?

You can see that? That is very impressive. So one of the reasons why is year or... over a year for Q3, it looks like the numbers are down fairly significantly, but Q1 and Q2 were still pretty elevated. And a lot of this is still coming from the U.S. I have to say these numbers, I would have projected a way bigger falloff in deals than what it's showing here. So we're going to get to the meet, the Y. So U.S. is responsible for 49% of global Q3 funding. The average global deal size dropped to 18 million down from Ben. What is that number?

Is that 25? 25. So that makes sense. It's less money because the rounds are down this year. Here's the meat. Funding from $100 million plus what they call mega rounds plummets to $29.6 billion down from a peak of what? I can't see that number. Oh. Wait, the number of deals is that when you're looking right here? Yeah.

It was like $420 at the high. Okay. To $144. So there it is. So the smaller round sizes, the early stage stuff is not slowing down. The numbers really aren't coming down that much, but the mega rounds are. drawing up. You said, here's the meat on this one. For the last five days, my oldest daughter and my son have been walking around the house because I heard one Arby's commercial saying Arby's. Isn't it Ving

Rames who does it? I don't know. Arby's we have the meats. Not a roast beef guy. Yeah, it's not bad. Beef and cheddar is pretty good. My son and daughter keep running our house going Arbys, we have the meats, just all day. They think it's the funniest thing ever. I don't know why, because they don't see a lot of commercials maybe. Speaking of children, we had a rough week as Listeners know Kobe broke his tibia last week. So a few rough nights, he's on the mend. But what's really, I don't know if cute is the right word, but he's learned how to use the wheelchair very well.

He's like turning one wheel forward, one wheel backwards. So he's getting around the house in his wheelchair. Okay, that's pretty good. Did you have to put some ramps in anywhere? No ramps. Okay, I guess he's small enough that you can just kind of pick him up and move him down the stairs. He's doing it. All right, so let's get to great quarter, guys.

I'm very happy to see that Corder is starting to tweet some of the best snippets. So last week, if you sign up too, they have a newsletter now that sends some highlights of the best earning reports as well, which is great. All right. So last week we heard from JP Morgan. Oh, no, BlackRock, I think J.P. Morgan, or is that this one? I can't remember. But let's just read some quotes.

This is from the CFO of J.P. Morgan. He said cash buffers remain elevated across all income segments. However, with spending growing faster than income, we are seeing a continued decrease in median deposits year and year, particularly in the lower income segments. You want to know why? Because they're not paying anything in their deposits. They're making way, I'm going to get to this. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

People don't deposit. Oh, you're saying people are spending down stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is not like an investment thing. All right. Jamie Diamond said, I think we're in an environment where it's kind of odd, which is very strong consumer spend. You see it in our numbers.

You see it in other people's numbers, up 10% prior to last year, up 35% pre-COVID. Balance sheets are very good for consumers. Credit card borrowing is normalizing, not getting worse. And that's really good. So you go into a recession, you've got a very strong consumer. See, this is what you're asking, why aren't things getting worse? We've talked about this for months, too. People spent the 10 years following the great financial crisis for paying their balance sheets.

And then two more years, they got way better. This is why inflation is remaining so high because the consumer has never been more ready for this kind of environment. I feel like we said that a long time ago. And I was sort of hesitant to say it out loud, but that the consumer has never been better prepared to go into a recession.

I said a blog post with that exact title. Okay. When was that? Well, you find it. Let me just say... You keep talking, and I'll do some research here. All right, here's Bank of America. Our U.S. consumer clients remain resilient

with strong, all their slower growing, spending levels, and still maintained elevated deposit amounts. That's Brian Moynihan. Across the bank. June 28th. Has the consumer ever been more prepared for a recession? June what if this year? Yeah. That's late.

I feel like we were talking about it earlier. But anyway. Yeah, we were. Across the bank, we grew loans by 12% over the last year. Alex Morris, who has that great substack, the signs of hitting, showed Bank of America's net interest income, which is, I don't know if that's the biggest driver of how they make money. I really don't know. but it's a huge portion of it's basically the spread. It was $13.8 billion, up 24% year over year

and absolutely looking like a record. Okay, this gets into my thing about corporations deserving more blame. So they had a story about this in the FT saying that the largest banks are benefiting from the Fed's campaign to raise interest rates. Of course. And they say, this is from a Barclay's banking analyst. When all of a sudden done, we think for our composite, this will be a record quarter for net interest income for banks. And they show JP Morgan, City Wells, their net interest income is going up. And what that means is the amount they're earning from loans versus the amount they're paying out.

And so this article was saying, they're earning way more money from loans, but they're not paying anything out more on their savings and CDs and stuff. So they're just making a bigger spread. This is my thing about corporations making inflation worse or taking advantage of inflation. The big corporations here, again, they didn't cause this, but they're taking advantage of it, certainly.

And banks are, for how slow they're moving up their interest expenses, I think it's ridiculous for what they charge for credit cards and mortgages, and they're paying out 10 basis points still on savings accounts with 7% mortgages. It's ridiculous. Here, here to that for sure. All right, so we're going to hear from Netflix tomorrow. Who else we have coming up this week? Okay, so you're back in your trading days.

You've got like 10 screens in front of you. You're a trader again. Are you buying puts your calls into Netflix's earnings? Stock looks good. So, I mean, I would be a buyer of... of weekly calls. I'm not, but he asked me what I would be doing if I was still trading.

Who else do we have this week? Why can I find this? Oh, here we go. Sorry. All right, so tomorrow we've got... You squinting into the camera is like me having a FaceTime with my mother. She gets her faces close to the camera's pop.

That's what you look like. All right, so by the time this comes out, we will have heard from Netflix and Goldman and Intuitive Surgical and Johnson and Johnson. Once we've got Tesla, we've got Snap on Thursday, which you know I love Snap earnings, even though it means nothing.

Netflix tanks, we should probably cut that part out. Which part? No. I'm kidding. Friday, we've got Verizon. That'll be interesting because Verizon is obviously super, super exposed to the consumer, and we've got American Express. But are you ready for earnings season? It's the biggest earning season since last earning season.

I know that for sure. I resent that. Actually, speaking of it's earnings season, I watched that remind me of wedding season. Wait. This is the thing that has been going on, though, for the past year. We get bad inflation number, the stock market crashes. Then earnings come out, and the stock market does better because companies are still doing fine. Then we get bad inflation again. Stock market crashes. Then earnings come out again and it's better

than expected. Don't you think that's like this is why we have all these bare market rallies because earnings have still been fine. It's inflation that's been bad. I was watching wedding crashes. It's on Netflix. Netflix. Okay. People complain Netflix is bad. If you pull up the main thing that I saw like, this is 40 wedding crash. I saw like six good movies and I'm like, they still got great movies on there. Maybe it's light on original content right now. Yes. but the first like hour of wedding crashes is so good before it starts to like get like the sad music and starts to get serious-ish yes it's good until they walk away from the house

exactly where Vince Vaughn says the painting was a gift Todd gets me every time all right did you read this story about the bird scooter founder I did not I think the first time we ever heard of bird scooters was a bunch of people sent us yeah we were in Texas riding him around Austin so bird scooter I think it was a SPAC that went public, and it was like, I got the chart in here. When it went public, it got to a high of $2.5 billion market cap.

This is in late 2021. It's now at a market cap of $100 million. And the Bird Scooter founder, this guy, he bought a mansion in Miami for $22 million. And his stake in Bird is now worth less than he paid for that mansion. So he's selling the mansion. So he had a 13% stake in the company. His stake is now worth $12 million. It was, yeah.

So there's the old saying that's like, it's better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. I think when it comes to making money, so it burns down 96%. I think this guy probably, I think he sold another company before, so he probably got money, but he's selling this mansion now and people are speculating. He's selling it because he probably thought he was going to be worth whatever, $100 million, $200 million. I mean, listen, I know you don't cry for like people that lost billions, whatever.

I'm sure this guy's fine, but this, I really feel for this person. You would have rather never made that money in the first place? If you're worth $10 million, but you were worth $100, you feel way worse than the person who is worth seven now is worth 10. Totally. This has got to be devastating. Man, it's, I can't even imagine. All right.

Here's someone who never loses, though. Boomers, this is from CNBC. Social Security beneficiaries can expect an 8.7% boost to benefits in 2023. Social Security Administration announced the increase tops the 5.9% cost of living adjustment for 2022, which was at the time the highest in four decades. So they got a 6% boosted Social Security last year. In 2020, they're going to get a 9% boost. Average Social Security retiree benefit will increase 150 bucks a month to almost a little

over $1,800 a month, 2023, up from 16 change in 2022. Boomers win again. They're not going to leave anything for us. They've got an inflation hedge deduity here. And I know people think that Social Security is like going to go out of business and not make any money and it's going to be gone. Without Social Security, so many. people would be screwed in this country when it comes to retirement. I think Social Security is one of

the most underrated programs we have in this country for keeping people afloat when they stop working. I'm not really into generation shaming. It's just not my thing. I know. I can't help it sometimes, though. Why? I don't know. I mean, it's a luck of the draw when you're born. I do think the boomers deserve a little bit of derision for what they've, I feel like they're kind of burning the bridge down behind them in some ways. I can see why people feel that way. Well, they'll be saying that about us someday. This is crazy. The funny thing is, though, they could be saying in 20 or 30 years, can you believe the millennials who got to buy a house at those prices with 3% mortgages? People are going to be mad at the millennials who did that in 20 or 30 years. They're coming for us to,

don't throw stones. And one of the craziest charts of the pandemic was Exxon mobile being smaller than Zoom, market cap-wise for a second. I think at $150 billion, Zoom was larger than Exxon. That was at the end of 2020. The end of 2020. So it's two years later. and Exxon is now almost 20 times larger than Zoom. Can you believe that? That is pretty hard to believe. So Zoom at their peak was... 150, no?

For market cap, is that what it was? $150 billion? $160 billion. It's 22 now. Honestly, 22 still feels high. Isn't it funny how things work in bear markets? In bull markets, you think 160, that they could be a $300 billion company.

Then they get to $22 in a bare market and you go, Yeah, this should be a $10 million company. It should be 10. Yeah. So right now, Ben and I are doing a podcast, we have to pull an audible. I've got my AirPods in. I'm talking to Ben on the phone, and I can't see him. So if this podcast has sounded a little bit disjointed, and not to mention, like, I said before

this, it was a little bit difficult seeing Ben and not having like two screens because I've got my Google Doc. I've got to see Ben. I got to see Ben. I got to see Ben. So I was going through Packy's Twitter feed the other day. He tweeted two things that blew my face. right off. One of them was this guy, Marquez Brownlee, tweeted a video of this VR headset. Ben,

did you watch this? No. Pause and watch this. Oh, okay. So you put the headset on and it makes it look like you have. Describe what you were just looking at. He put a headset on and then it looks like he has four huge monitors now that he never had before. Oh, you're not describing this properly. There are windows from his laptop that now are bigger through the VR headset. There's a person who is sitting down with a laptop computer in front of them, just a single laptop, puts on the headset and vroom, he's got like three screens behind him. That's pretty cool. But I feel like if you don't have the four monitors, the Bloomberg monitors at your desk, that's not as much of a flex. That's all about the flex, but I get it. If you're traveling and had this, I said before,

I mean, that's pretty sweet. It would be cool if you could just have a monitor waiting for in a hotel room if you needed it to plug into? Okay, that's pretty cool. I'm still, I'm very hesitant. to think people are going to wear stuff on their head. I think it's going to have to be like a monocle or something. It's going to have to be small. People wearing anything on their head How dumb did AirPods look at first? I never thought AirPods looked that dumb. You think so? I did. I did. Okay. Packy also tweeted this thing called podcast.com. Did you listen to this? I didn't listen. I got to be honest here. This one didn't really blow my mind and it doesn't impress me that much. Is that wrong of me? You said you didn't listen, but you have an opinion without

listening. I'm not going to listen because it's fake. Why would I listen? It's Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs, but it's from an AI. That's a terrible take. I don't like that attitude. I got to be honest. All right. So here's the thing. Why would you listen because it's fake? All right. So, Ben, you don't get to talk. You don't get to talk. The AI generated art stuff is, I think awesome. Like if you said, make me a picture of this or make me a song of this or make me a video of this, I think that is really cool. Listening to fake Joe Rogan interview, fake Steve Jobs, I don't know. It just doesn't do it for me. Call it crazy. I'm not saying. I'm not saying that I want to listen to fake podcasts. My point is, if you listen to this for two minutes,

it's scary. This is Joe Rogan, but not actually Joe Rogan. It's a computer. The computer is playing Joe Rogan. I don't even know what you call it. Interviewing Steve Jobs. And it is really incredible that this technology exists. And it seems inevitable with all of the money pouring into this. I know money's been pointing into AI for a long, long time. But something's going to come out of this. Yeah, you can already listen to a fake podcast with Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs. All right. Don't like your attitude. I think the art stuff is even cooler, though. Listen, again, it's not about the podcast. It's about the technology. All right, a listener emailed us because I was talking about Burger King last week. When you go to Burger King, always order your

burger, quote, off the grill. They will grill fresh your pad for you upon order. You won't get one that's been sitting in one of those trees really elevates the experience. That's a pro tip right there. So that's why the drive-thews takes so long, because everyone's ordering them off the grill. Is that the problem? All right, we got a bunch of feedback on the long John versus Eclare. It's Eclare. What's the feedback? No one calls it Eclare.

I've never heard that before. I've never heard that before. Eclare. Okay, here's a thing. The C, it's like a G. It's called it an egg lair. No, that's not that I was said. It's Eclare. It's an Eklare. This is another instance of you being a coastal elitis. And Eclare is a pastry. It's not a donut. They look

like a Long John, but it's not a Long John. That's true. I mean, Ed Clare is a pastry. That's right. Yeah, it's a pastry, not a donut. So this was just another instance of you being a, I'm a flyover guy here. You're a coastal elitist. Okay, whatever.

Ben, I can't believe I'm about to give you some more credit after you spoke to me that way. I keep seeing this tweet, this promoted tweet from Amazon. Prime early access sale is here. You've been bullish on Black Friday on just waiting for the deals. I keep seeing this tweet over and over and over and over. So they're just going to have Black Friday deals from now until Christmas, probably. And then after Christmas sales, Yeah, there's going to be a lot of inventory available.

You didn't need to buy your presence earlier this year. I saw this on the flight over here. The LA Clippers are launching a streaming service. This is from Fund Office Sports tweeted this. A first for the NBA. It's called Clipper Vision. Will feature... Steve Ballmer was on CNBC today talking about this, actually.

I saw that. Oh, really? Okay. It's called Clipper Vision. It will feature six live viewing options and cost $200 for 74 games this season. Why only 74? Wait, do they cut the schedule to 74 games? be that as a May

or that's 82 games I don't think they cut this Anyway They showed what it's going to be It could be like Old Clippers players Watching the games Or old coaches

Talking about the games As they're going on That's what it's going to be like What about like different angles I didn't get the whole thing But that's the part of it that I saw So it could be like

This is coming back To talk about a Court Vision stream I guess that makes sense That as streaming evolves A lot of more of it It's going to be personalized To you, the fan

I would take to something Like this Potentially for the next Okay I definitely wouldn't pay for it for the lions, but it's kind of a cool idea. All right, recommendations, Ben. What do you got? All right, finished Bad Sisters on Apple. It was, okay.

Okay. Oh, it's on Apple, okay. I told you about it here. It's Sharon from Catastrophe. She wrote, directed it. It's kind of like White Lotus in that it's a dark comedy. In the very first episode, someone dies, and they spend the rest of the season getting to the point where how this person died.

I think I'm coming to the point that most streaming shows should be eight episodes instead of 10, so it's probably too long, but it was a really well-done show. It had some dark humor, and the bad guy in the show is like one of the most hated characters that I've ever hated in my life. How about this, Ben? Most seasons should be six episodes. I think they should too, but yeah. I don't know if Mary Vestown was six episodes, but the one with Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman. I can't remember the name of it. It's like a miniseries. I want six episodes. Yeah, and this one was a miniseries, too. I really liked it. It was too long. The same thing would be offer. I finally finished the offer on Paramount Plus. It was 10 episodes. It should have been

five maybe. Probably could have been a movie. I also rewatched this weekend. I caught on HBO Max, the firm. I haven't watched it in forever, yes. Who also is in pretty well? Danny DeVito? Gene Hackman, a ton of that guys. Nick Nolte, Holly Hunter, really good movie. It's good. It is kind of funny. I guess it's just because of John Grisham, but I feel like they don't make lawyer thrillers anymore. Is that just because John Grisham wrote them all in the 90s? Yeah, the firm was a good one. But here's the thing. At the beginning of the movie, Tom Cruise is like top five in his class at Harvard for law school. So he's being courted by all these huge law firms.

And the law firm that gets him from Memphis is they offer to give him a low interest mortgage rate and pay off his student loans. I feel like if you offer that to a Gen Z or millennial person today, and the catch is they kill people there and they work for the mob, you'd probably take that job. Right? If they're going to offer you a low interest rate mortgage and pay off your student loans, it seems like it's worth the risk to work for the mob. I think of the early 90s Christian movies.

There was the Rainmaker with Matt Damon. What was the one with Chris O'Donnell? Yeah, I don't know what you were talking about. Then the Matthew McConaughey won with Samuel Jackson. Yeah, what was that? Oh, it's time to kill. Time to kill. Yeah.

That was great. Chris O'Donnell, John Grisham. What was this called? The chamber? Yeah, yeah, that was okay. He created a genre of movies all by himself. John Grisham. Yeah.

The other thing is, I kind of forgot how good Gene Hackman is. That guy was a one-of-one. There's no one like that anymore. No, no. That's all I got. Which one am I looking for? Not the chamber. Was it the chamber?

Maybe it was. I think it is. Hang on a sec. I don't think it is. Maybe I'm wrong. Oh, the Polly can brief. That was a good book. All right, Ben.

So my kids are obsessed with Halloween. I'm sorry, I meant the nightmare before Christmas. They love that movie. Is it on Disney? I don't think my kids ever watched that one. They love that movie. That movie scared the bejes out of me when I saw it. It's unsettling.

So there's a song in there that they love and they love to sing. It's called This is Halloween. These are the lyrics. Now, again, Logan's three, and he's singing the song, Kobe's five. This is Halloween, this is Halloween, pumpkin screaming the dead of night. This is Halloween. Everybody make a scene, trick or treat till the neighbor's going to die of fright.

I am the one hiding under your bed, teeth ground sharp and eyes glowing red. I am the one hiding under your stairs, fingers like snake and spiders in my hair. They're going to like horror movies just like their dad. Is that it? Yeah, well, this is horror movie season, is it not? Somebody emailed us. Speaking of horror, Michael, if you see you see it, 2003's hot

tension. I think you have, but if you haven't, you're welcome. So no, I haven't, but I Googled it, and this is the description of the movie. Best Friends, Marie, and Alexia decide to spend a quiet weekend at Alexia's parents secluded farmhouse. Boom, I'm in. That's all I need. Okay, can I just, because I feel

like you see a new horror movie every week. How did it get so the only new movies anymore are horror movies? Because they make money. I guess I'm just surprised that was the genre that stuck around. They don't do rom-coms anymore. They don't do... Because they're doing all the remakes.

So they did Candyman last year, which I liked. They did It, which I loved, and they just did Hellraiser. So those three movies were too scared for me as a child. Candyman and Hellraiser were way too scared for me as a child. Hellraiser was like... Remember the cover of that movie of the box when you went to Blockbuster? It was just Pinhead. Yeah.

I was afraid to walk down the aisle with that. So I've never seen the original Hellraiser. I tried watching the remake, not my scene. Don't love it. I think that's on Hulu, maybe. which is too dark for me. I watched the last Halloween. So they started doing the most recent Halloween in 2018, which I really liked. There's been like 32 of these movies. So Danny McBride is one of the writers. David Gordon Green, I believe, was the director. So the 2018 one was very good. Then they did

Halloween kills, which I remember talking about on this podcast. It was very bad. And Halloween ends was awful. And listen, I wasn't expecting much, but it's kind of shocking how bad it was. You're the audience for this movie. I am the audience. Well, Stephen King apparently liked it. He said, I enjoyed Halloween ends. It doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it's gasp, surprisingly character-driven. It's stunk. I hated it. Hated, hated, hated.

Does it ever change your mind about someone when they really like what you think is a bad movie? I mean, it's just surprising. I've seen some takes from Quintan Tiena before, where I'm like, oh, man, I don't agree with that at all. I guess it's just like objectively terrible. I guess it's not objective, right? Because it's just my opinion. But it was really bad.

Disappointing. all right we're going to wrap it up you got to call the courthouse and make sure that I am okay a little bit nervous you can come back with me and if you want to be on the lamb in my in Michigan I'll take you to a place that has a really good long job all right

animals thanks for listening you got it you can wrap it up animal spirits pod at gmail.com we'll talk you next time Thank you.