Is the Bear Market Over? (EP.311)

23:57And why does the Fed think this is such a bad thing that we have to like put people out of a job so the atlantic had a piece about this i thought that was interesting by oran cass and saying that like why does the government think this is a problem even people who are like free market absolutists like let the market decide like why do the why do even those people think like this is a bad thing that that people are earning more money and because of inflation uh basically my dog is staring right at me. I'm not quite sure why. What's wrong? All right. So this is the kicker for me that I thought was interesting.

24:30Like the idea that tight labor markets necessarily have to mean higher inflation. So in the late 70s, as inflation was surging, unemployment rate was five to six percent, like too high from what we'd think today, right? Through both the 90s and late 2010s, an unemployment rate of below 4 % coincided with low inflation. And over the past year, inflation fell from 9 % to 5%, and the unemployment rate fell with it. I think the idea that a really tight labor market has to mean high inflation has not been proven out historically, even if that's the way it is in economic textbooks. I still don't understand why people want to damage the labor market so badly, why that is the default assumption for policymakers right now.

25:12I guess I think it's the only way to slow price increases, which seem to be happening, even though the labor market remains tight. You know how you have a conversation with anyone and you think about a really good comeback like three days later or something to say? You asked me last week, what is the thing that now could give us high inflation going forward? And I thought about it more and I thought, oh, the easiest answer is just government spending. Like government spending is going to have to remain high to like keep this stuff going. And that's the piece. Like just keep the party going, keep the economy going.

25:47I don't think the government is all of a sudden going to be able to slow spending down. So I think that's the piece that could potentially keep inflation higher. If we are spending a ton of money on, I don't know, rebuilding all the roads and construction and climate change and all this stuff, that's how we get 3 % to 4 % inflation instead of 2 % inflation going forward. But can they just stop? Keep spending money. That's what I mean. Can they? I don't know. You know who can't stop and won't stop? The consumer. This is from the transcript. On MasterCard's earnest calls. Here's a quote. The headline, as we shared with you as part of our Q1 earnings call, was we continue to see a consumer which is just remarkably resilient, and consumer spending continues to be remarkably resilient.

26:25Obviously, we're all tracking exactly what you're tracking from a macroeconomic environment standpoint. And as I look at our drivers and the performance drivers, which drive our top line, what we're seeing effectively is that through the first two weeks of the month of May, our drivers are generally in line with our expectations. That guy said drivers like six times right there. That's a lot of drivers. I'm sorry. I'm just reading it. So, Lindsay Bell did a quote. did a tweet thread, excuse me, on the consumer. She said, Target, Walmart, TJ Maxx, and a bunch of others either reaffirmed their outlooks or raised.

26:56Dollar Tree raised sales guidance and Gap raised margin outlook. The most important takeaway, those retailers cross various target shoppers with varying income levels. Retailers are exhibiting weakness, on the other hand, operating areas that benefited more greatly in the past two years as demand was pulled forward, like Home Depot and Lowe's and furniture retailers. All told, the consumer is hanging in there. They are resilient, their resiliency is likely to remain at U.N. This all comes back to the labor market. And if people have jobs, they're going to spend money. And so maybe maybe that's why the labor market is such a point of emphasis, because people obviously aren't going to stop spending until they lose their job like that.

27:30That's like what else is going to stop people from spending? If if 9 % inflation didn't slow people down, what is going to? Yeah, maybe that's the point. I do wonder if so. Dollar General had a had a double miss and and guide it down. I wonder if they are, if consumers at the lower end are starting to change their behavior. So they said the macro environment is more challenging than the company had previously anticipated, which a company believes is having a significant impact on customer spending levels and behaviors. Now, who knows if this is a dollar general story or a dollar general customer story, hard to tell, but it seems like by and large a consumer is hanging in there.

28:04CFO of Costco had an interesting quote. Historically, we've always seen when there's a recession, whether it was 99 or 2000 or 0908, we would see some sales penetration shift from beef to poultry and pork. We have seen some of that now. Wait, what? So they're predicting a recession based on people buying chicken and pork instead of beef? What if people are just being more heart conscious and healthy with their eating habits? Seems unlikely. But who knows? Maybe these would be potentially leading economic indicators, right? It's like obviously people's spending habits. I know. I've never heard of a beef recession indicator.

28:43Yeah. Well, now you have. Where's the beef? I feel like someone has to say that every time, right? Oh, last night. Let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question. Remember I told you one time that I left my barbecue on overnight? Okay. I told you this, right? And turned a piece of chicken into like dust. And somehow your house didn't burn down? Well, the shingles on the back of my house like melted a little bit. So last night I was cooking a steak. How does that even happen that you forget a whole chicken on the grill? I'm very absent-minded. In the airport, which has happened to me multiple times, I was sitting down and I realized, like, you know, the Kevin thing from Home Alone, I don't have my luggage.

29:29I left my suitcase in the store. That happens to me all the time. I just will walk away without my stuff. Very absent-minded. What was I saying? Oh, that was funny. You're telling a story about being absent-minded while you got absent-minded. I was cooking a steak last night. Now, are you not supposed to leave the top down on the barbecue when you're cooking a steak? I'm not a grill master, So you're asking the wrong guy. I look like a grill master with this shirt, but I'm not. So this was the, I don't know why, maybe I was just lazy, but nine times out of 10, before I cook on the barbecue, I like, you know, brush the stuff off from the previous cook session.

30:10I didn't do that this time. I just, I spray and I said, eh, whatever. I'm sure it's fine. Maybe it gives me more flavor. Who knows? And so I had the top down and I opened the barbecue and flames, like not, not just flames that came out of the barbecue, but like the barbecue was on fire, on fire. And so I immediately turned the barbecue off. But no, there's a fire. And it wasn't being fueled by gas. It was being fueled by, I don't even know what. Whatever you left on there. Whatever I left on there. So anyway, Robert's like, what the hell is happening? Because I ran back in and I filled up like a pot of water.

30:49Anyway, all's well that ends well. But I wonder, I don't know if the fire was caused. I'm sure we'll, please, if you're a grill master, let me know. did I do the wrong thing by closing the grill or did I do the wrong thing by leaving the remnants on from the prior time or were they both wrong? Getting like a Traeger grill is the new midlife crisis too. Getting a what? One of the Traeger egg thing grills and like cooking brisket for like 18 hours every weekend. That's a 40s dad thing for sure. I never got into it yet, but I know a lot of dads who did. See, that's for middle-aged guys, so I'm not quite there yet.

31:21Okay. Keep counting down the days. All right, remember when egg prices were the big talking point. We had a couple, all right, egg prices are going on sale just months after hitting record prices. This is from Wall Street Journal. Look at this chart. Huge spike come back because the avian flu. This is the kind of thing where people get all up in arms when something goes up in price and complain the world's coming to an end. Price comes back down, no one cares. Correct. Right? This is why, like, bad news is the headline, good news is process, and people just kind of move on to their lives. I do think, like, these past few years have given a good reminder to us of, like, sometimes it's kind of crazy to think about how the world just continues to run at all.

32:00With all the products and services and stuff that we produce, the fact that we had an interruption and people realized like, oh, that's right. There's a process to all this stuff. This stuff gets made here and it gets shipped here and it gets moved here and the price, like, the fact that we don't have more problems with this stuff is actually more surprising to me than the fact that we do. Fair? Yeah. World keeps humming along. Alright, ZipRecruiter, I don't care about this stuff, right? Is eggs falling to demographics for you? Listen, I don't care. I'm not a demographics guy. It's just not my jam.

32:35It's not my beat. You're never going to go on Harry Dent's podcast now. You think that guy has a podcast? Oh, yeah. So layoffs, I think we spoke a couple weeks ago that it's been pretty quiet. Well, ZipRecruiter, which is a recruiting company, of course, is cutting 20 % of their staff. Jokes right themselves. Signal or noise? You don't hear money. You don't hear as many ZipRecruiter ads on podcasts anymore. Nah, I feel like that's a big ringer thing. Well, just because now it's so easy to get a job, though, right? Isn't that the idea? Like, you don't need a recruiter to get a job for you? Oh, so maybe, oh, are you going the other way?

33:07The economy is too strong for ZipRecruiter? Yes. ZipRecruiter works better if there's high unemployment, correct? What do I need ZipRecruiter for? They're throwing jobs out the window to people. Very, very... We did that simultaneously. That was nice. That was good. For the listeners, Ben and I just did the guy pointing to his head. GIF. All right. All right. So I think both right and wrong, VCs are the biggest momentum investors on the planet. This is from Fortune. Global VC capital raised for crypto firms. And it just slowly but steadily rising in 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022 was just massive.

33:49So almost$22 billion in global VC capital raised for crypto firms last year. This year, it's half a billion dollars. This chart almost doesn't look real even. Yeah, this is wild. I mean, again, they are truly momentum investors. And maybe you would say, well, they invested so much in these preceding years that they're just, it's been invested, you know, let's see what happens. But has venture capital completely left crypto for AI at this point? The answer is yes. Because that was honestly one of the, I thought one of the better bull cases for crypto is just there's so much money going into there.

34:30It has to lead to something. It has to lead to something. Too early to tell. What if they just completely turn the spigot off and they just let a lot of these companies die and say, look, look at this shiny new AI stuff we're investing in. Don't look over there at this stuff. Look at this. Well, here's a chart from Michael McDonough. Artificial intelligence versus metaverse-related mentions on publicly traded company transcripts and earnings calls. And the metaverse was never really, really a thing. I know, well, I know Facebook changed their name to meta. But compared to, I guess just compared to AI, it's, look at this recent spike.

35:05It's pretty comical. But this is the thing, I think this is why you can see both sides of the tech debate about these people are idiots that got lucky or they're geniuses. is that sometimes they do just throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks. Well, they have to. I feel like, especially for AI, and I feel like for these guys, like they can't miss this, right? It's not about what you get wrong. It's about what you get right. And this is like one of the big drivers of the engines of our economy is venture capitalists that are willing to put money on the line to create prosperity for the rest of us.

35:42I'm not saying that like they're like, Mother Teresa or Heroes or anything like that. But look what we got over the last 10 years that was funded by Venture Capital. But this is also why I just don't like the narrative that all Venture Capitals say, I'm a contrarian. I was investing when no one wanted to invest. They're not contrarians. They are momentum players through and through. It's just chasing the dot, right? Well, that's, I mean, in our little corner of the world, I speak to a decent amount of venture guys that invest in our industry and everyone's pulling back. Nobody's like, you know what?

36:19I'm going to be a contrarian. Now that everybody's pulled back, I'm going to go in. I haven't heard one person say that. Right. But I think that's just, that's the way that this industry works though. Yeah. I think it's also, it's a small industry where people are more likely to follow the herd and stand out. The problem is, unless you have a huge checkbook, you can't be the only investor. Right? You need other investors to come with you. That's true too. That's exactly true too. So maybe they have to be momentum investors. Did you know that there are 13 AI unicorns already? Sounds high to me.

36:50Because the only one that I really know of, in fact, the only one that I know of is OpenAI, which is set to try to raise$100 billion. I know I've mentioned this before, but the only one I want is, I want my AI assistant in my ear on her. Very good movie. I saw that and I thought, if this is where technology is going someday, like sign me up, like, hey, go through all 10 ,000 of my emails, pull this, add these charts. I just hope someone creates that. That's all I want. I was watching, so Kobe. I don't want to date my AI, but yes. Kobe and Logan are on a Spider-Man kick. So I was watching Spider-Man 2, the one with Dr.

37:27Octopus. My son George loved that one too. That's a pretty good one. And they were asking, as he's like doing the thing, when he puts the suit on, they're worried about like, well, what if these artificial intelligence arms become too smart? And he's like, ah, that's why I've got the chips. So Spider-Man 2 ahead of its time. And then something broke the chip. And isn't it funny when all those superhero movies, it's like there's this one little thing in your body that's controlling it. Like Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man had the fake heart thing. It's always just one little thing that's holding everything together.

37:59That's a great scene when Dr. Octopus, when they're trying to saw the arms off of him. And he's just like face down on the operating table. And the arms are doing their thing. Remember that scene? Yeah, the origin stories are always the best ones for those. I kind of give up half to the origin stories. All right, you mentioned the housing market in your neighborhood being frozen. I think one of the reasons, so I talked to a realtor friend of mine this week, and she said, I've never worked harder to try to get people houses, but people tell me what they want, and there's nothing. They can't find anything.

38:29And when a house does come on the market, it's way overpriced for how much work needs to be done to it, and there's 30 people who are willing to bid on it because there's so many people looking to buy. And so Alex Thomas from John Burns tweeted this out. Even at 7 % interest rates, 78 % of all real estate agents tell us that buyers outnumber sellers in their market. And the buyer number is going up. This is a demographic story that I'm interested in because it's not 10 years from now, it's today or 50 years from now, it's today. True. Yes. And I think that's the whole thing of it is just household formation for young people.

39:02Redfin has the housing payments up 15 % or year over year to a high that we talked about about before, there was this fortune story about a couple who has a$600 ,000 budget. They have a child on the way and they just can't find a house. So they said in the two years that they've been house hunting, they've put down countless offers, raised their budget substantially and compromised on location from central to north to south Jersey. When they first started looking, their budget was 500K. That quickly changed after seeing disasters in that price range. After years of searching, they pushed their budget to 600 and they still haven't closed on a home.

39:36This is just so depressing. Their initial strategy was to wait for prices to drop, then enter the housing market and start their life as a family. The guy said they're not dropping and now we're shit out of luck. I got a baby coming in a month. Like we're out of luck. I can't imagine being in that position where they talked about like countless times they offered 50 grand over and they're like compromising everything they want in a house and they've moved down and all this stuff. It's, it's gotta be the worst. Affordability is terrible and there's no houses on the market. I think the best option for people that are in this unfortunate situation is to rent.

40:10The counter to that would be rent is going up too. Yeah. I think that's actually slowing though. Rent is slowing. Being stuck between a rock and a hard place. This chart from Redfin of home buyer housing payment, look at 2020. It was like less than$1 ,500 a month for the average mortgage payment. $1 ,500 a month. In May of 2023, it just hit$2 ,650. That's absurd. That is absurd. That's one of the things that makes this so difficult. It's not just the increase. It's that people didn't get a chance to acclimate to the increase. It happened so fast. And you can look back and say, I missed it in 2021 and 2020.

40:53It would have been so much more affordable. And I was right there. How come this dynamic hasn't curbed consumer spending? I think the answer is because people that are trying to get into a house is still a very small part of the overall population. It is. Very small. It's a smaller part. So there's this personal finance rule of thumb that I've heard that you want to spend like 28 % to 30 % of your gross income all in on housing. and I think the thing Ramit said to us a few weeks ago is like when you rent, your payment ends, right? Whatever you pay for rent, that's it. But when you own a house, your mortgage, like there's still more on top of it.

41:32So add all that in insurance and property taxes and all that, it should be like around 30 % of your income. I mean that obviously like every personal finance rule of thumb is very circumstantial. But look at this chart that I created, mortgage payments using median existing home prices, so not new home prices, as a percentage of median household income going back to 1989. And it dropped. But look at the drop that it, I mean, even the 80s and 90s was much higher because mortgage rates were higher, I think. And incomes have actually, on a real basis, incomes are up over that time. And look at the increase.

42:06But look at, I mean, it's easy to say this now. In the 2009 to 2016 or 17 range, just, I mean, a generational buying opportunity for housing prices. And if you bought back then, you should consider yourself very, very, very lucky. That's why I bought six.

42:27Would have been a good. All right. New study on money and happiness from University of Pennsylvania. You've heard like the Daniel Kahneman one that up to 75 ,000, your happiness increases and then it plateaus or whatever. The number is not right, but it's definitely directionally right. Like 100%. So there's a new study that decided to like, let's look at this a little bit. And that they said, happiness rises with income until 100 grand, then shows no further increase as income grows. But for those in the, this is for people in the least happy. So they segmented people out into happiness, least happy, median happy, like very happy.

43:04And then they said people in the middle range of emotional well being happiness increases linearly with income. And for the happiness, happiest group, the association actually accelerates above 100 ,000. So they broke it up into like, what's your emotional makeup? And I think that actually makes more sense that for some people, the money is never going to be enough because of the way that they're hardwired. Right. Right. It's just, and for other people, they're going to be happy with what they have. I think a lot of it is, I think a big piece for me is like seeing, like I talked about the gradual increase.

43:33I can look back and see in my twenties, pretty much to my mid thirties. I did, I did not make a lot of money. Like my very first job out of college, I was making like 30 K a year. like I was making, and I had friends who were making way more than me. At least you had a job. That's what people were saying back then. Like you should be lucky in, you know, but I think having that ability to see it slowly rise instead of like being 25 and making like$300 ,000 or whatever it is, like some people do. And I think that screws your perception of reality way, way more. And I think the ability to look back and have some sort of like gratitude for, you know, and the funny thing is in high school and college growing up, I had no, in high school and college, I had zero money.

44:14My net worth was negative. And those were some of the happiest days of my life. So I think it is all relative in terms of your relative disposition on life as opposed to some number. Also, in high school and college, you didn't need a lot of money. If you're a 40-year-old person with no money, you're probably pretty miserable. Fair. All right. So I got the ping that's my annual insurance premium for my house coming up. and it was like$2 ,000 higher than what I paid. I've been a client with them for, I've had them for my auto insurance. I use them for my, I use them for like boat insurance, for home insurance, and I get all these bundled.

44:54And they're like, it's gone. Tell them you're switching to Verizon. So I said, what's going on here? Why is it, is it because like housing prices are up? Like, I don't understand why. And it was, it was like triple the price, the annual price. Cause I always pay it, you know, I pay the whole thing. So you save like a couple hundred bucks. And they basically said, I don't have a good answer for you. It just rose. And I'm like, well, I've been a customer for how many years? For 15 years. Anything you can do for me? They said no. And so I got a quote from somewhere else that actually was$200 less.

45:23You know what he used? Thank you, Mr. Buffett. I used Geico. There you go. But it was easy enough to just find a thing online. Just shopping for insurance is so easy. It took me 10 minutes to fill out an online form. Someone called me. I answered three questions, and that was it. I actually have an insurance broker that I use for everything. Like, I feel like in New York you use a broker for everything. Well, you have like a broker for your car for, you probably have a broker for your grill you bought. Like that's a, it's not a New Yorker thing to have a broker for everything. The insurance broker thing is great.

45:52Cause he deals with everything. Like, God forbid I need to put in a claim, but besides that, like when I, when you get a new car, do you have insurance coverage? You could have put a, you could put a claim in for your siding when you almost burn your house down. Call my broker. Uh, Ben, I've got an email pet peeve. You know, I am not a pet peeve person. I don't, if somebody said like, what are some of your biggest pet peeves? I don't know that I would be able to come up with one. Well, I don't know. What's my biggest weakness? I care too much. You know, I'm just, like I said, I'm not that observant, I guess.

46:25I don't really have a lot of pet peeves. There's not, but here's one of them. I would say that my email response, not for like cold, but, you know, warm intros. my response, my hit rate is like, I think I'm like 96 % good. I'm making that up. Here and there, I will forget to respond to somebody. But what I'm saying is for the most part, I do get back to somebody via email. I'm just laying the groundwork for what I'm about to say. Yeah, not to brag, but I get back to everyone emails me. No, because I'm about to shine myself in a bad light. So I just want to say that this is atypical. When you get an email intro from somebody, and then they respond to you, and you don't respond back, and then they follow up with you, and they continue to CC the other person who made the intro, I feel like they're tattletailing on you, and it makes me want to respond less.

47:17I see that. Just follow up one-on-one, person-to-person, and I will say, hey, my bad. I apologize. Whatever, it didn't get to this. We're moving the third party to BCC. Yeah, I feel like that person's treating me like a child. It feels like childish behavior. You know what I mean? You want to know what gets me sometimes? I can't stand people who abbreviate thanks to THX. Josh does that. Like the only response is THX. Yeah, how hard is just writing thanks? Yeah, how much time did that really save you? Yeah. That's all I'm saying. So anyway, the person I, you know, I kept an open mind. The person that did that happened to be perfectly pleasant.

47:56I wasn't like totally judging the person. But it's just annoying. They really wanted to talk to you. I just feel like the proper email etiquette is to not do that. All right. I thought that travelers were going to get it out of their system, right? When the economy reopened, everyone did the Disney, the this, the that. They're still going. USA TSA checkpoint number on a five-day average is breaking out again. I don't understand how people – Think of how much we've been – Duncan, before we got on the podcast, asked, he said, is this normal for you guys to be traveling this much? Or is this back to pre-pandemic?

48:33And I feel like people are packing it in again these days. We've been on the road way more lately. Way more. And so I have a quick airplane story about a hero. This is the opposite of a pet peeve. You know, understandably so, when you're walking down the aisle, somebody will like pull on your seat as they're walking by. Yes. Which is not an egregious thing to do. It happens. But one guy did it to me and he said, sorry. That's all you need, right? That's all I want. Just, sorry about that. Yeah. Because it is quite jarring. You know what I mean? It's like someone cutting you off the road. If they like acknowledge it and say, my bad.

49:10I love that person. That like makes my day. Yeah. Ben, we spoke about like with the gratuity stuff, just going too far. So in the hotel, I got just a Chobani because I needed something quick for the go. A Chobani is just a Greek yogurt. It was like$2.50. And sure enough, they gave me a receipt. with the gratuity that I need to sign. And guess what I did? I'm sorry. I had to draw a line. Literally, I drew a line across the tip. The tip spot. I did not tip it on Chobani. Well, you know what you do? I always just sign my name and don't total it out. I'm not even going to acknowledge that there's a tip on there.

49:47Imagine. Yeah, that does a lot. I feel like if they open the yogurt for you, give you a spoon, put it in there, yeah, maybe you deserve a tip. So Josh and I were talking about Succession and what's next on HBO? And I guess he was saying like The Last of Us season two is going to come back, which I'm not super interested in, to be honest. I feel like, I mean, I'll watch it, but you know, what's the next big show? So somebody tweeted, HBO's run of House of the Dragon into The White Lotus season two into The Last of Us into Succession season four might never be topped. What a heater they've been on.

50:21Boy, that is true. I mean, we also had that period of Mad Men with Breaking Bad with, there was a lot of good shows on it once and we felt like, okay, that's never coming back again. I still think these streamers, even if this stuff dies down a little bit because we're on the writer's strike or whatever, they're going to have to continue to try pumping out stuff. I mean, we are entering a major TV lull, like major, which is fine because it's the summer, but after the finals are done, I've got pretty much nothing. Yeah, that's true. So someone emailed us. We talked about LG TVs and why all hotels have them.

50:54Someone actually emailed us and said - Oh yeah, let's hear it. As a previous hotel, wait, corporate hotelier. Is that a name? Hotelier? Is that a thing? I've actually met with LG's B2B hotel team. Can you explain why? Hotel TVs are not like regular TVs. They have dedicated modules built into them and allow interfacing with the hotel's operating system. That must be how we get Mario Lopez. Pay-per-view, all this stuff. And LG TV, I guess, has that. And that's why there's LG TVs in all hotels. They make them specifically for hotels. That's why it takes six seconds to change every channel. All right, not to beat this dead horse, but I've just got a bone to pick with the whole ticket industry.

51:32Wait, to the man who has no pet peeves. Let's talk about ticketing again. That's not a pet peeve, but fair enough. So I am done with that site that we keep mentioning. And so I went to an alternative because Ben and I wanted to get Sean, who works for us, an early Christmas present. He's in Denver. And so I thought, wouldn't it be nice to send them to the Nuggets game? How much fun would that be? So we got them a ticket, a ticket. And I just don't get it. It was a 25%. So I'm looking at the price. I'm like, oh, that's expensive, but whatever. It's NBA finals. And then boom, service fee, 25%, 30%.

52:13But they're doing it on both sides. I just don't understand. The margins of this business obviously are not – there's more than meets the eye, right? Because if they're taking 50 % gross, what are they paying to the arenas? Somebody sent us a whole article about Taylor Swift and Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen and people getting pissed off just for years with Ticketmaster and just the unfair practices. I guess it just is what it is. I don't really know what the solution is. Obviously, yeah. It must be too complicated to make a good solution. Somebody emailed me saying that they took a three-hour drive and went straight to the arena just because they were so fed up with Ticketmaster.

52:51Oh, to buy it from the ticket box? Yeah, yeah. Jeez. Okay, recommendations. I thought the season finale of Dave was one of the best episodes of television all year. There was probably two or three episodes on this season, but I couldn't believe. So Rachel McAdams was on the last two or three episodes. It was just a delight. And all of a sudden, he's doing a Rachel McAdams rap, and Brad Pitt sticks his head in. And I thought maybe Brad Pitt sticking his head in was going to be it. I didn't read any stories about this. I didn't know. I didn't realize Brad Pitt was going to be on. I texted you. I said, holy crap, Brad Pitt.

53:20and he was on the whole episode. He was, I mean, it's kind of, seems like it's the obvious thing to say. Brad Pitt was amazing on this show. So no spoilers, but the scene where they're like mouthing what to do in that scene to each other. Yes. I rewound it because I was laughing so hard. I thought, so when he made an appearance early on in the episode, I just thought that was it. I thought he was going to pop his head in. I thought that was it. He was the star. I mean, him and Dave, how did Dave do it? There was a Rolling Stone piece on it saying that they had production company people that knew each other, and Brad Pitt had said, like, I like this show.

53:55And they worked for back channels to get him on. He got Drake? I thought Brad Pitt was just hilarious. The whole setup was just, oh, man. I thought season two was like a little plateau for Dave. I thought season three went up a level. Was the Drake thing a dream? Oh, that's a good question. I don't think so. He said in the interview that it wasn't, I don't think. I think he's working on himself. Yeah, man, what a show. So I've been doing a lot of finales lately. I stuck with Ted Lasso. Season two was just not good at all, I thought. Season three, it was very up and down and uneven, but it was the last season.

54:30I didn't realize it. The finale, my wife and I were looking like, wait, wait, is this the actual finale? It's the kind of show where you want them to tie everything up in a neat bow, and they kind of did. And I actually appreciated the finale, and I liked it. The show was very up and down in the last two seasons, but I'm glad I stuck with it. Oh, how's the silo? Ramp keeps telling me to watch it. The first episode was amazing. it's in the middle has kind of gotten a little boring for me I'm sticking with it but it's people keep telling me to read the books that it's definitely stalled a little I need some more coming but yeah and also one more I watched a good person Zach Braff wrote and directed this just so depressing I've never heard of it like I don't mind like a little bit depressing but it was like the whole movie was just dealing with death and unexpected death and substance abuse and all this stuff and it was a good acting performance but way too depressing for me alright The Super Mario Brothers movie has grossed 1.3 globally.

55:24It's the second highest grossing animated film ever passing Frozen, which is insane. Can we talk about how you say the name there? Mario. Mario? It's Mario. I know it's Mario, but I'm sorry. You always, I just had to throw it out there. Fair. I let it slide a few times. Fair. So they're going to beat this into the ground. And you know what, my prediction for the, because I mean, nothing feeds on success. like success or I don't know. You know what I'm talking about. Copycat. Zelda. They're going to make a Zelda movie. Oh, yeah. So they're going to make one for every Nintendo. You know what would be a great one?

55:56Contra. I'd watch a Contra movie. Oh, yeah. Yeah, with Chris Homsworth. Yeah. So not only are they going to make – so Zelda's a Nintendo one, but they're going to – I don't mean just Nintendo. They're going to make every video game movie. Yeah. That makes sense. My kids, we rented Mario or bought it on streaming or whatever on Amazon and watched it six times already. Yeah, same. All right. Great airplane movie, Missing. You ever hear that one? Wait, which one is that? It sounds familiar. I'm very big into the person disappearing mystery. Is this a new movie? I've never seen that. Yeah, it's new.

56:30A girl's mom disappears and she uses the internet to try and track her down. And it's pretty convoluted and incredibly nonsensical. But for an airplane movie, it's a good one. Real good one. I also needed – so I had like 25 minutes left in the flight that I needed time to kill. and I needed a movie that I could pass out to. So I put on Remember the Titans, which I saw probably a hundred times. Well, it's been a long time. And it made me feel very old. The movie is from 2000. Wow. Almost 25 years old. What? It's like Ryan Gosling's intro into Our Lives. Remember the Titans is almost 25 years old.

57:05Unbelievable. All right, lastly, this is also airplane material. FUBAR is a ton of fun. It's the new Arnold show on Netflix. it's got some True Lies-ish stuff does he like play himself? no it's like True Lies he plays a CIA agent and it's light and silly and I just love hanging with Arnold could hang with that guy all day okay alright animalspiritspod at gmail.com I think we're still waiting on some more Tropical Brothers shirts to be reloaded but we will let you know when they're back because we're all out of small, medium, and large double X or an X XL or double XL I think we still got those okay you know here's your strategy if you really want one get a double XL and wash it and dry it a hundred times to shrink it alright see you next time