Money Buys Happiness (EP.381)

22:32More good news that people might get mad at. The obesity rate fell in 2023. Well, that has - For the first time in a long time. Yeah, I mean, that has been up and to the right. Just go to Six Flags Great Adventure or Walmart and you'll see we are a heavy nation. It's the one thing that really stood out to me being in Europe and coming home was that in Europe, there aren't that many obese people. And then you come back to the States and it's a problem. So I have a hot take here. There's definitely been a proliferation of people that are more mindful of health. At least anecdotally, it feels that way.

23:08So I put this obesity chart in our artificial intelligence under the document notice. So I have a hot take. This is in the oven preheating. I preheat the oven to 425. It's not quite there. It's at 250. So I don't totally believe this, but it's there. Is it possible 20 years from now, we'll look back and say, Ozempic and these other drugs like this were a much bigger deal to humanity than artificial intelligence. They have a bigger impact on humanity as a whole than AI. I think that's a possibility. Yeah, I think so too. That like everyone's paying attention to AI, but these drugs maybe might not be getting nearly enough.

23:48Well, how many tens of billions of dollars are spent on obesity in terms of like healthcare? Doctors should be handing these things out like candy when people come to visit them that have heart disease or are overweight or have diabetes. These things should be, the government should make this stuff free. No. No, because we don't know. The government should make this stuff free. Think about how many benefits this would have. We don't know anything about the long-term potentially impacts of these drugs. We do know the long-term impact of diabetes and heart disease, though. True. I think that for people who need this, this stuff should be free.

24:19I think the government should subsidize this and give it out to people. Once again, Benzalib. wanted to get but I think I think this is a massive massive deal potentially so I'm one for two on hot takes with you today what was the first hot take oh yeah that was terrible Twitter was making yeah I saw a picture I don't know I was just thinking about like self image or whatever I saw a picture of we took a family photo at Temple last week and I looked terrible and usually I don't see a picture of myself in cringe like I don't have like self body images or whatever or problems like uncomfortable with how I look.

24:57Listen, I'm a bald middle-aged man. You know, it is what it is. But I looked at myself and said, holy fucking shit. I looked really old. Like it was the first time that I saw a picture of myself and I said - Like wrinkles and such? Yeah, I just, I looked old. Like I don't know if it was the angle of the sun or whatever. I looked like, I look horrible. I think that's Vince Vaughn coming back to haunt you. That's karma. That's karma. I had to open my mouth. So what are you going to do about it? Don't get Botox, please. What do you mean, what am I going to do about it? I'm kidding. I don't really have that many wrinkles.

25:29I just looked horrible in this angle. I'll share it with you. It is, when you see pictures of yourself when you're younger, it definitely stands out a little bit. But so the AI thing, there was a tweet going around Twitter. There was an AI image that was made to look like a young girl in a boat with rain coming down, being rescued, holding a dog in the hurricane, right? And it was a fake image. I think you can kind of tell, but the whole point was this thing was screaming around Facebook and all the baby boomers were saying like, I can't believe this happened. Oh my gosh. And just totally got by the AI.

26:04I just, I keep coming back to the fact that AI is going to take so much money from people. Yeah. I wonder if there's going to be like some sort of like AI prevention software. And speaking of which, I got a, I got, I woke up this morning to a chase fraud alert. somebody took my card and got Bonchon which I'm a huge fan of and Lyft and was this you? No boom new card which is annoying but how cool is it that fraud is so easily detected by the credit card systems it doesn't take nearly as much time as it used to yeah another thing remember how big of a pain in the ass it used to be to get a new cell phone like oh how am I going to get all the data from this phone to that phone.

26:48You have to plug it. All right, because it's all in the cloud now. Yeah, you used to have to plug your phone into one computer, download everything, plug the new phone in, upload it to that, and it took forever. So I dropped my phone in the water, and it wasn't charging. So long story short, I go to Verizon, and I'm like, all right, how much is a new phone? They said, do you have insurance? I said, no. He goes, all right, let me punch up your account. He's like, dude, you have insurance. I'm like, oh, wonderful. So I do have insurance. And so I got a new phone a day later, which is great. It's a 15, but I don't care.

27:24And you tap the phones, transfer, transfer. I had my new phone up and running in, I don't know, four minutes. And it looks exactly like it. Your apps are all the same. It's wonderful. It is unbelievable. It's one of a million billion things that is so good that we take for granted. And you don't even think about it anymore, right? Yeah, I agree. All right. So last week we talked a lot about climate and how it's impacting people. This Milton hurricane sounds like it could be even worse than Helene in certain ways, at least for people in Florida. Don't pretend to be a weather person. Read this tweet from the meteorologist.

28:02Okay. This is nothing short of astronomical. I'm at a loss for words to meteorologically? Meteorologically. It's a tough word. Describe to you the storm's small ion intensity. 897 MB pressure with 180 mile max sustained winds and gusts of 200 miles per hour. This is now the fourth strongest hurricane ever recorded by pressure on this side of the world. This eye is tiny at nearly 3.8 miles wide. This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean can produce. Holy cow. Okay. And it sounds like it's strengthened really fast from a Category 1 to a Category 5 potentially.

28:35Did you see this video from Corey Hofstein, our friend, driving through his neighborhood in Tampa? No. Okay. So he did a video driving through Tampa and it just, it's all, it's from the damage from the last couple of weeks and it's all just the whole, the road is packed with trash and furniture as far as the eye can see. And now we potentially have another storm coming in. Oh my God. You see this video? Devastating. I feel. It's kind of hard to watch. I feel so bad. Cute. It's, I can't, I can't, I can't imagine what these people are going through. Like you just have to take, you have to take some of your prized possessions and everything else gets left behind.

29:15Like, how do you, how do you, where do you, how do you recover from this psychologically? It's so awful. I was talking to Duncan before we were recording and Duncan went back to North Carolina where he's from last week to look at some of the damage and, and visit family. And, and that's, I said the same thing. How do you, if you're a business owner or a homeowner, how do you rebuild or restart? Or I can't even imagine. And we got, we talked about this last week about how it's impacting the housing market, which almost seems insensitive, but it's going to be a topic. But we had a lot of people who said, oh, you know, climate change is not real, which fine.

29:46You want to believe climate change is not real? More power to you. The point is, these storms are gaining in intensity and where people have now put their houses and now houses are more expensive, it's making the damage bigger, which makes the insurance more expensive. That's the whole point. If you want to believe climate change, fine. The numbers say there's more damage, the damage costs more, It's costing insurers more. So look at all these. I put together a bunch of headlines from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. In a Florida town ravaged by storms, homeowners all want to sell. The people fleeing climate disasters are going to transform the American South.

30:19And that luxury home comes with an ocean view and a surging insurance cost. And they have all these examples of people who are in some of these areas who are not, like there was all these people who flooded Florida, right? In the past couple of years. And now a lot of them I think are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't know that I didn't realize this is what I signed up for. what if I try to sell? And here's one. This guy paid$550 ,000 for his five-bedroom home, and that's in Tampa. Spent another 50 grand on improvements. When he had to move back to Virginia for work, he expected to sell his house quickly, but since the listing in February, he had no luck.

30:50He dropped the price five times and would be happy to simply break even. He said, I can't unload the thing. In eight months, I've had zero offers. No one even showed up to the open houses. Nobody. And I'm not saying there's going to be this mass migration of people leaving, but there's going to be a lot of people leaving. I mean, people who have money will rebuild probably on the ocean. They'll be fine. But there's going to be a lot of people who won't be able to afford that or won't be able to afford the insurance. And it's really going to change migration patterns. I truly believe this. Yeah, I agree.

31:15So here's a study saying, one study by First Street Foundation, a research firm that studies climate threats to housing, found that roughly 3.2 million Americans have already migrated many over short distances out of flood zones, such as low-lying parts of Staten Island, Miami, and Galveston, Texas. Over the next 30 years, 7.5 million more are projected to leave those perennially flooded zones, according to study. And they're also talking about these people going from paying like$800 a year in insurance, paying$3 ,000 or$4 ,000 or$5 ,000. And this one person says, like, I love living on the water.

31:45Like, I can't do it anymore. Yeah, these people are going through hell. It's really, really sad. But yeah, the fact that, like, there was already a big storm. Now there's another one coming for people. Think about the, they can't clean the debris up fast enough. So that debris is, it's like shrapnel from a bomb or something. Like, I don't know what, how much worse that makes it that all that debris is still sitting on the streets and then the storm's just going to throw it around again. We've had some people in Florida for our firm who've already said evacuation notices have happened. Yeah, just an awful situation.

32:16I can't even imagine. Mike Sicardi sent this to us or tagged us on Twitter. Goldman Sachs, from Goldman Sachs, rates volatility has kept primary, secondary spreads high despite relatively low gain on sale for originators. We're talking about the 30-year mortgage. So a lot of dynamics going on. I'm not exactly 100 % sure what this means. Okay, so I got it. There's another one that someone sent us. So I said, what do we have to do to get the spreads to compress? Because John Burns has this thing where they ask people, what's the mortgage rate you'd take on to buy a house? And they said the magic rate is in the 5 % to 5.5 % range.

32:48That'll get people to move. So how do we get the spread to compress to get to that level even if rates don't fall that much? And so this TK Financial guy sent it to me. He said, open market purchases would help, but generally the spread should fall on its own as the market prices in less interest rate volatility. So he shows this move index, which is like the volatility of interest rates. And you can see, so scroll down a little bit from the Zaccardi one. He shows that the spread follows the move index pretty closely. And so if the volatility of interest rates declines, hopefully that should help the spread decline.

33:18I hope he's right. But I guess that would make sense with the Fed not having to change things around so much and rate volatility. So hopefully that'd be one good thing to hang your hat on as a homeowner, I guess. All right. Survey of the week from Kevin Gordon at Schwab. NFIB Small Business Uncertainty Index. So Small Business Uncertainty Index spiked to an all-time high in September. I bet it was a lot higher in, although I'm an uncertainty truther who says that uncertainty is always at all-time highs. But it seemed to me like in March 2020, it would probably feel a lot higher than it is today.

33:51So according to the survey data, there's more uncertainty now among small business owners than there was during the dot-com bust, during Enron, and 9-11, and Madoff, and 08, and 2020. Sorry, don't buy it. No, not at all. And if you're a small business owner, don't you think that the micro economy matters so much more to you than the macro in a lot of ways? Sure, the macro borrowing costs and such, but... You would think. Yeah. All right. another one from Mike Zaccardi. He sent us this chart of truck and car inventories from manufacturers. So in 1990, we're talking 60 % of all inventory that was produced was cars, sedans, and the other 40 % was trucks and SUVs.

34:41Today, that is closer to eyeballing it, I'd say 85-15, maybe 90-10 in favor of trucks and SUVs. This is an insane fall. And the funny thing is, we've talked about this in the past. Both of my parents came from five children family. They did not have a minivan or an SUV. My grandparents weren't driving a Yukon. Do you think that they just didn't take all their kids everywhere at the same time? No, I'll tell you what it is. They didn't have seats. They just had the long couch. That's true. Everyone just, everyone just right. There wasn't three seats. There was a couch. There was no seatbelt, right?

35:17There's There's no car seats. All right, everybody, squish. It is funny. Family sizes are smaller today than they were in the past, but car sizes are bigger. So here's what I want to say. Is this a form of forced inflation that's self-imposed on people? Yes. Because worse gas mileage than sedans, if you're driving a huge truck or SUV, higher insurance premiums, higher monthly payments. So again, smaller families with bigger vehicles. And I think this is a form of self-imposed inflation on a lot of people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right? I got an update. I can't wait until I'm in Emmett and Estrin. I'm driving a Honda Accord again.

35:53Listen, I'm a hypocrite. We're a two SUV family. Even though I drive an Explorer, so it fits a little better, right? But I want to drive a sedan. I got an update on my Audi. How long have you been without it for? I dropped it off on August 23rd. They finally gave me a loaner on August 23rd. I didn't hear back from them. So the problem is I think I've got a busted engine because the check engine oil light keeps coming on. I didn't hear back from Audi until yesterday from August 23rd. So it's been like six or seven weeks. Yeah. Robin's like, should we call? I'm like, I don't care. They could keep the car.

36:32I've got a loaner. Like I'm not putting miles on my car that I own. They could keep it. So what do you say? Six weeks, great customer service, right? So anyway, they called me yesterday and said that there's metal in the engine. Okay. I don't know what that means, but it's going to cost. They said the engine made out of metal. They said, uh, it's a$30 ,000 replacement, which is more than the car is worth. So they're, they have to like take it apart to make sure that insurance is under warranty or no. Yeah. Okay. So they have to, but, but they have to prove a lot right to the insurance company that this needs to be replaced.

37:09The funniest part. Imagine if they take it apart and say, sorry, it's just not covered. Are you Magneto? How do you get metal in an engine? Dude, I have no idea. All I know is - One of the funniest comments we got, I can't remember who sent this to us, but someone said, we were talking a couple weeks ago about the fact that new cars are so much nicer and better, but the funny thing is is that your new car is always in the shop. My car's not new. It's from 2019. That's still pretty new. So I will never, I love the cars, but I will never, ever get another Audi. the customer service has been just a joke okay if that was you i'd go back to calling an audi because oh we're sorry that you can't have a loaner yet that you had to pay for a rental car call out of america they'll take care of you ring ring out of america oh i'm so sorry you have to deal with that please submit a bill for reimbursement submit a bill for reimbursement denied so how did you finally get one it took seven weeks it took seven weeks for me to get a loaner.

38:07You should have put your car broker on it. He would have handled it in three days. Joke. I'm so annoyed. All right. Ben, did you know that apparently money does buy happiness? This seems to be one of the biggest changes in behavioral psychology in recent years, that all the studies are coming around to this now. So there was a study that people had been referencing for years, probably us included, that there was a certain level, I think, where at$75 ,000 was the threshold beyond which earning more money didn't make people happier. And this never really made sense just intuitively. So now there's new studies that show that a big raise provides significant boost in happiness, even in household incomes of$500 ,000.

38:50The bonuses and leaps and income high earners reap are so large that the, okay, whatever. A few things here. Number one, of course, more money makes you happier because it's a sign of progress, even if it's like not the money itself, even if you make more money than you could spend and you're comfortable and you're saving, you've got everything you want. If you're not making more money, then you're not progressing. And so it's just a function of growth if nothing else. It's not necessarily money for money's sake or greed or anything. It's just, hey, progress. I want to know that every year I'm doing better than the year prior.

39:20That's number one. Number two, you can't measure happiness. There's so many things that go into being happy. Health, family, relationships, friends. Like, you cannot measure happiness. And also, I think one of the studies, so the original$75 ,000 study was done by Daniel Kahneman. And then this Killingsworth guy who they mentioned in the story, I think he worked with Kahneman to create a new version of it. And it was like, when you ask people how they feel. And to your point, when you ask someone, are you happy right now? Could totally be long-term, yes, I'm very happy. Short-term, no, my family's a mess or my kids are screaming.

39:55And so, like, to your point, the measurement of happiness, it changes all the time. Your perception of happiness changes depending on what's going on in your short-term life or your long-term life. And how many stories have we seen over the years about rich people that are miserable, right? Like that's a very common theme. So of course money is not the cure for unhappiness, but generally speaking, yeah, money can make things a hell of a lot easier and cure some of the misery in people's lives, but money is not going to make an unhappy person happy. I just think it's hard to measure, Right. But yeah, but of course, it's$75 ,000 line in the sand of above that.

40:32It's all gravy was, you know, just was bunk. All right. Sticking with this theme. There was an article in the journal, another one that said, meet the Henry's, the six figure earners who don't feel rich. So they found they found somebody April Little. And they said 15 years ago, if you asked her, if you told her she'd make$300 ,000 a year, she would have pictured a life of five. free of financial stress. The white picket fence, I have the whole visual in my head. I don't want to sound ungrateful, but when I got to that proverbial mounted top, I realized there was a lot of expenses and I still don't own a home.

41:09So I think making money is obviously great, but a lot of things come along with that. More money, more expenses. It doesn't buy the financial freedom that you might think. And listen, nobody's asking people to feel bad for people that are making money. But I think this article was just shining a light on a reality, which is that raising a family is expensive. Having money, paradoxically, is expensive because the more money - Luxuries become necessities. Yeah, exactly. All that sort of stuff. I mean, so that income of$300 ,000 probably puts in their top, I don't know, 8 % of households in the US, I would guess.

41:46And a lot of people would say like, you have no right to complain. But I do think this is why the goalposts are moving. And this is why we have progress in the world. Yeah. Because people are never happy with what they have. I don't view this as complaining as much as this is the reality of people in this situation. And yeah, nobody's asked you to cry for them, but these are the facts. So this surprised me. What percentage of households bring in$200 ,000 or more? Probably 15. Wow, nailed it. Is it? Yeah, it's 14.4. Not to brag, but I've studied this data before. That's higher than I would have guessed.

42:23Okay. But yeah, inverted in 85 % of people don't bring in that much money. But here's the thing, though. If I look back at when I was young, I didn't need any, I didn't need a lot. I lived in a crappy apartment. I had crappy furniture from Walmart or Ikea. I, you know, I didn't really care about going to nice restaurants. I didn't care about nice clothes. I still don't care about nice restaurants. But those things that, yeah, you're right. Your tastes and stuff change. So if you would have said, yes, me at 25 earning$300 ,000 a year, I would have been set. But it's a different lifestyle. It's a different – 100 % right.

42:57Yeah, at 25, you have very little expenses. But when you've got two kids, a mortgage, vacations, schools, whatever you want, it's expensive. It is. A brand new Yukon, suburban, whatever, that's 80 grand. Yes. Everything is more expensive when you're – yes. All right. This email made me chuckle. The worst place for small talk is not the dentist's chair. It's the perfect place for small talk because you have undeniable grounds to not respond. The worst place for small talk is a public restroom urinal. Guys that make small talk at public urinals are the worst and need to be stopped. Please help get the message out.

43:32That's true. That's like Alec Baldwin in Long Game Polly. You know, it's so beyond egregious that I don't even know that anybody's ever spoken to me in a urinal. If I had to guess if there's been ever anybody that has spoken to me in a urinal, it would be Barry, obviously. but I don't think, yeah, it's, it's so egregious. I don't think it's ever happened. That's fair. That's true. All right. One of the big stories going around this week was the fact that kids aren't reading anymore and they're saying kids, waste the time. Kids who come into college don't read anymore. So they look at books are losing attention.

44:03So they show like once or twice a week, you read a book and this is 13 year olds. Um, and it's gone down and people who have never hardly ever read went from 8 % in 1984 to 31%. Now people who used to read was 35 % to 14 % or 22%, it's all falling. And there's, I guess one of the colleges was complaining that people coming into school don't have the ability to read books anymore. Here's the thing though, I would venture to guess people now read more than anyone ever has in all of human history. It's just not books. It's just not books. Yeah, totally. And you have podcasts now. I think honestly, listening to two or three podcasts from an author who has a new book out is a huge time saver from spending 15 hours reading that book.

44:45Totally. You get the best stories. You get the best anecdotes, the best data. Not every book needs to be read anymore. Honestly, there's a lot of fluffing books. I'm a big book reader, but there's a lot of books that don't need to be read all the way. And a lot of books that are 300 pages that could have been done in 100 pages. So I love Ron Chernow's biographies. I guess in Hamilton's case, you didn't need to read about his childhood, but George Washington, do I care what his uncle said to him when he was six years old? And there's like 70 pages on that. I always say that the biographies are way too long.

45:16Just give me the best. And so actually I'm happy with this. So my kid's school, my daughter has never had any homework. Her only homework is you have to read at least 20 minutes a night. And then this year she's in fifth grade. And they said her only goal is you read 25 books by the end of the year. We don't care how long they are, but they have to be some in this category, some science fiction, some fiction, some historical, whatever. And so that's all her homework is reading. And it's great. It turned her into a reader way sooner than, I never read a book until after college, never. I don't think I finished one book in all of college.

45:54Like an actual, sat down and read a book. And now I love reading, but it wasn't a thing for me either. Yeah. All right, we've got a lot of feedback on hard-boiled eggs. Here's a tip for Michael. If you want to be able to peel hard-boiled eggs cleanly, try a different technique. Instead of boiling them, bring an inch of water to a boil in a pot with a steamer basket. and then add the eggs and steam them for 13 minutes. Remove the eggs and cool them off under cold water. I don't know why it works. Okay, turns out, obviously, I've got a hard-boiled egg steamer. There's a thing on Amazon that you could probably buy for$6 where it's a round thing.

46:28You are such a sucker for these kitchen things. Dude, it works. Although, I guess maybe it doesn't work. Do you have just a huge junk drawer of this stuff that you use like once a year? No, I use this twice a week. I'm always steaming, boiling eggs for my kids. But it's got six holes. You poke a hole in the bottom of the egg. You place them in the tray. You pour the water in. So I am steaming the eggs. And then I give it an ice bath. For whatever reason, it still doesn't peel as cleanly as I would like. Somebody said to me, put the egg in a jar with water and shake it violently. And that will peel it right off.

47:01It does seem like the worst part is you try to peel it off and you get like a million little tiny pieces of egg. Yeah, it's annoying. We got some over easy egg hacks too. So this is from Jordan on Twitter. over easy egg hack. Tent the pan with a lid. Easiest with small pan. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Tent the pan? Yeah, like put it over top of it. So you put the lid on the pan as it's cooking. That way you don't actually need to flip it and it's the easiest way to cook eggs because it keeps, it traps the heat in there, I guess. You don't need to flip it because the flipping is the hardest part, I said.

47:27He says source every morning. This is a guy who does it every morning. But wait, I thought hard, I thought over easy eggs don't get flipped. Well, some people were saying, I guess you do need to flip but apparently you don't. I was asking. Is an over easy egg it's when the yolk is like runny, right? Yeah, the yolk and it played around it, yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, I don't flip it. You just turn the heat down. Yeah, that's what a lot of people said. Cook it slower. Yeah. Put a top on. That's what I was trying to figure it out. All right, this was interesting. And I think this applies to a lot of things.

47:57I don't know that I have a great analogy, but here we go. It's the curse of the Michelin star.

48:05Somebody tracked the restaurants that opened in New York from 2000 to 2014. and he tracked restaurants that got a Michelin star versus those that did not. All told, 40 % of restaurants awarded Michelin stars in 2005 to 2014 had closed by the end of 2019. So here's the deal. A Michelin star boosts publicity. The study found that Google search intensity rose by over a third, but that fame comes at a price. Being in the limelight raises diners' expectations. It brings in tourism farther away, meaning guests greater demands, piles on new costs. The award puts a star-shaped target on the restaurant's back.

48:41Businesses they deal with, such as ingredients, suppliers, and landlords, use the opportunity to charge more. Chefs, too, want their salaries to reflect the accolade and are more likely to be poached by competitors. Food is not the only industry where awards are a mixed blessing. Like Michelin-starred chefs, superstar CEOs demand fatter pay packets that are more easily distracted, spending more time writing books and joining boards. In publishing, too, awards bring peril. Prize-winning books are reviewed more harshly. So anyway, sort of heavy lies the crown. Be careful what you wish for. Like success is not always a good thing.

49:11That's very interesting. I never would have thought that. I would have thought you get the Michelin star and now you're rolling in the money. Yeah. You know why else these restaurants fail? Portion sizes are way too small. You get like one little circle thing and then like a couple of drizzles of the fancy stuff around it and then like one piece of garnish. That's it. That French restaurant that you and I went to, was that a Michelin star? Even if it wasn't. Oh, yeah. Was it? Yeah. What did we do? Ben and I went to... You asked for ketchup. No, I didn't. You were joking. Okay. Horrendous. Just so...

49:43Just little portions, all fan... Not for us. I don't get it. Nope. Actually, we went to the Nick game and said, let's get a hot dog. It's more our speed. All right. So, story time. Ben, weekend activities are something I wasn't prepared for as a parent to two young boys. It wasn't like this when we were growing up. I'm pretty sure in terms of like sports and what we had to do. I think we had like, I had a sport, a sport, and perhaps a birthday party here and there. Now I've got Kobe's flag football at 8 a.m. Logan's - Those are brutal on a Saturday. That early, right? Yeah. Logan's, which by the way, I'm an assistant coach, an assistant to the assistant.

50:28I harang the kids on the sideline. I've got a - Which is totally necessary. Little boys that flag football are the worst. You need them. They just pull each other's flags. They're jumping on each other. They walk all over me. Let's be honest. They're not listening. Yeah. So then we've got like Logan's soccer at nine, then Kobe's soccer at 10, then Logan's flag football at 11, then Kobe's baseball at two. It's all, it's the entirety of the day. Now, the good news is I think for the most part, we have Sunday freeze except for birthday parties here and there. And it sounds like I'm complaining. I'm not.

50:57I'm just, if you are pre-kids, just get ready. I was talking about this with one of our coworkers yesterday. Because your Saturday is about to be hijacked. You go through different cycles as a parent. So like the baby to toddler phase is just, you know, it's almost like trying to, you're trying, especially when they're a baby, like you're like, oh my gosh, it's only 10 a.m. What are we going to do to fill the time? And now you graduated the phase where the time is all filled. Like we're - And you have three kids, so I can't imagine. We don't have Sundays open anymore. We have soccer games on Sundays.

51:29We are in travel soccer now. So we're traveling all the way across the state to play teams in Detroit. And yeah, so we're driving far places now. So yeah, we're, my weekends, yes, we're go, go, go. Same thing. I love it though. It's fun, but you're right. There's no relaxing. There's no sitting down. All right, I have a gym story. Go ahead. I know you're not a gym guy because you pay for a trainer over Zoom and you don't, you never go to a gym? Not anymore. In fact, I don't know if you could tell, but I did some tricep extensions yesterday. I'm feeling a bit sore. And you're filling out your Daniel Jones jersey pretty good.

52:00Have you ever been a gym member before? I've gone to gyms my whole life, pretty much. I have never once in my entire existence paid for a gym membership, no. So I had a Gen Z run-in yesterday. And so I go to Planet Fitness, which I still don't understand. It's$10 a month. It's right by my office. Nice and easy. I go at lunchtime. And I walk in there, and it's kind of the cable crossbars and the squat racks are always hardest to get because there's not as many of them. What's a cable crossbar? Well, you have the cable things that come down and you put handles on it. Yeah, so I'm doing, so I walk in and it's open and I do the cable and I start doing my thing and I've got my AirPods in.

52:33I'm listening to a podcast. I'm doing them. And this Gen Z kid, this girl, young girl walks up to me and goes, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. And I stop and I'm in the middle of it. And I said, yes. And she said, I was using this. And I said, oh, I walked up and no one is here. And she goes, well, I walked over to get some water in between sets and the water is at the far side of the gym. And I wanted to teach this girl a lesson and be like, listen, you can't leave a machine. You can't jump between machines. You're at a machine, you do your stuff, and then you go get water. I didn't say this.

53:02I just, and she looked at me. It gave me the biggest eye roll I've ever seen in my life. The James Harden gif. She gave me one of those. And I kind of just said, okay, here, you can have it. I was going to teach her a lesson, but I just said to be the bigger person and walk away. But she was not happy with me. Did she say thank you? No, just she gave me an eye roll. And I could have said - I thought people in Midwest were nice. I thought so. I could have said, you know what? No, you weren't on it. It's my machine now. It was open when I walked over here. No one was here. You're a pacifist. Yes.

53:32I let her have it. But yes, these are the gym run-ins. And then I walked into the locker room to get changed. And there's seven-year-old dudes walking around, no towel around their waist, just on their shoulder. You know, it's so wild that old men are just comfortable walking around. One time, my uncle took me to a pool swimming. This is kind of a weird story. I don't know why I agreed to go with him. But sure, I'll swim a few laps. So this is probably 20 years ago. So we're in the dressing room and he just got naked. I'm like, dude, why not put on a towel? That's the point of the towel. You wrap it around you.

54:05I don't get it. You know how we always turn into our parents? Like I'm eating cottage cheese like my dad with fruit. Well, first of all, I don't go to the gym, but I'm pretty sure I'll never just be cool with just walking around naked in front of the dudes. No, no, no. I guess more power to them that they don't care. But, ugh, no thanks. All right, recommendations. We've talked a little about Nobody Wants This, a new show on Netflix with Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. It's also got Jonah from Veep, which I'm not sure you ever watched. And it's got Willa from Succession, who's actually very good in it.

54:33She's great. I like her. So I like it. It's great because it's, I don't know, 25-minute episodes. You can fly through the season. That's a winning formula. It's a rom-com show. We were talking briefly about this yesterday. Of course you're an Adam Brody guy. Oh, I love it. So in college, I had appendicitis. and I almost, my appendix almost burst. But the night before I went to the hospital, I was just in agony, laying on my bed. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't move. And I turned the TV on and this is pre-streaming days. And the only thing that was on was an OC reunion or an OC marathon. So I caught all the way up on OC from the summer and I was in and I can't believe he never became a bigger star from that show.

55:08He should have been like the funny, sarcastic buddy in like 11 different Matthew Gonaughey rom-coms. Yeah, I wonder what the story is behind that. Did he get - And he's great in this. Um, it's so funny though. I looked them up. Both Kristen Bell and Adam Brody are in their mid forties. They're probably paying people in their thirties in the show. It's just easier than ever for people to just look younger now. Yeah. And play younger. Here's the other thing. So this is the first time I've, I've had where the people's job is a podcast in the show. And they talk about, they're talking about things.

55:37And one of the sisters, there's two sisters who have like a call her daddy kind of show talking about dating and sex. And, and they say, wait, wait, save it for the show. And I thought, Hey, that's what we do. You and I will be having a conversation. It's usually you. I start telling a story or a joke. And you say, no, no, no, save it for the show. Save it for the show. Don't tell me now. Yeah. I thought that was pretty good. Wait, wait, wait. So what did you think of the show? I really liked it. It's very good. It's funny. Cute. It's good. Probably would have been a rom-com movie in the past, but I thought it was good.

56:01My only nitpick if I had one is, is there really a guy that smooth with the ladies who's a rabbi? No. Is that? Okay. No. I figure that's a stretch. No. So I watched, I think I watched like three episodes and then I said to Robin, and you're free to move on without me. Like, I enjoyed it, but she flew through it. I like it. So, Wolves, not Wolves, Wolves is the new Clooney-Brad Pitt movie on Apple. I wanted to bring this up. Nobody's talking about it. Was it horrendous? I saw some lukewarm reviews. I liked it. I don't know. I saw a lot of people say, eh, it's not good. Is it necessary? Like, these guys have the best chemistry.

56:36Like, the first half hour of the movie is awesome. They're fixers who come in and, if someone gets murdered or someone gets hurt, they come in and clean it up. like the wolf on Pulp Fiction. I'm guessing that's the title. And they just have the best, their little banter and little witty, like back and forth. I loved it. The movie kind of goes off the rails a little bit at the end, but I really enjoyed it. It was entertaining. It's not a great movie. It's a good movie. It sounds like an airplane movie. Yeah, make you laugh a little bit. All right. I thought about last week. My favorite horror movie.

57:08Since you had your list, I had to think about this. And it was easy for me. This was a totally easy one. and it's based on, I always give you crap for having the premium experience for going to the theater for this. Wait, wait, give me a clue. What year did you go? This is late 90s. Oh, Blair Witch. Yes. So, and the only reason is because of the experience I had at the theater. Holy shit, what a movie. I went with 12 friends. There was probably six girls, six guys. We were going into our senior year of high school, 1999. And we were so dumb. We lived in a small town. We would sneak beers into the movie theater.

57:40So the only thing I remember about, the biggest thing I remember about this movie is one of my friends brought bottles of Bud Light into the movie theater. We'd put them in coats and pants and he put it on the ground and it fell. And we were in the very back row. It was packed theater. The whole theater was full. And we could hear it rolling because it was a very quiet movie. And it rolled all the way to the front, didn't hit anyone's legs and it broke at the front. And we kind of, ugh, who did that? You know what's so funny? Go ahead, finish your story. So they talked about this on the rewatchables for Blair Witch and this was totally my experience.

58:06I didn't read, there was no blogs, there was no social media. All we saw was a preview. So going into it, we watched it. and it's a found footage thing. And it felt, it was the kind of movie where everyone in the theater had their jaw open. And we walked out of the movie and everyone is, it was the experience afterwards was amazing. And everyone we were with was sitting there talking and everyone's kind of didn't like, was that real? No, it couldn't have been real. We don't, no one wanted to believe it, but people kind of wanted to believe like, what if that was real? That's how naive we were back then because we didn't know any better.

58:35They marketed it as if it were real. I was in summer camp, sleepaway camp, when I saw that movie. And coming back to the bunk, We were scared shitless. It's funny. I was talking with a couple of our colleagues last night about this movie. It was, have you rewatched it recently? So I had never rewatched it from the first time. I didn't want to see it again because I saw it in a theater and it was such a great experience. So I rewatched it. It's only an hour and 20 minutes. I rewatched it this past week. It's really scary. Yeah, the last 20 minutes of the movie are ridiculous. But honestly, it wasn't that good of a rewatch.

59:08It's not something I'd go out of my way to rewatch again. It was that one experience was it for me. So I, yeah, I saw it also in the last couple of years and I think I'm good. Um, very, very scary movie. Okay. Um, somebody emailed us. Michael seems to go to the movie theater a lot. What are the actual logistics of his trips? That's a good question. I'm a married father of two young kids myself and I have no idea how he swings it. I'm assuming it's not a date night babysitter setup since a lot of the movies seem like indie horror flicks, correct? So how does he go solo after bedtime? Does Robin get her own solo nights also?

59:40are there in-laws nearby? How does it work? Okay. Good question. Valid question. My wife is a saint is the short answer. So usually I go at between 7.30 and 8.30. That's the answer. I don't know. That's it. There's no magic. That's what I go. 7.30 and 8.30. So it's a dereliction of your fatherhood duties. Yeah. Robbins, give me the bath, put the kids to bed, and you're going to have a movie. You know what? It's so easy putting the kids to bed. I say it all the time. Go out. I don't care. I can put the kids – I never put the kids to bed. I do it all the time. Easy peasy. True. It gets easier the older they get.

1:00:15I mean because Robin has a lot of solo activity. She goes – She's going to dinner with the girls tomorrow. She has PTA. I love putting the kids to bed. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. We have a very good division of duties. We don't bust each other's chops about – You want – Like if we're – We're both very good with – I mean I do a lot more than she does. But if you want to do this, go. Go ahead. Okay. Two recommendations. But before I get there, The Joker 2. My friend said – I assume you want to see the Joker. I said, no, I don't want to see the Joker. First of all, I didn't love the first one. No.

1:00:43I thought it was – That's a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah. I thought it was like a – like, yeah, I get why people liked it, but it was so miserable and just depressing. So I had no interest in Joker too. And then when I found out that it was like borderline a musical, I was like, what the f***? No, I'm so out. So Scott Mendelsohn wrote, Joker cost$63 million and was sold as a model of against-the-grain comic book storytelling and budgeting. It was the most rate of return profitable big deal Marvel DC movie ever. That's the Joker. Right. Joker 2 cost a report of$190 million. So this massive decline qualifies as an enormous problem.

1:01:19So the movie bombed. DC just has - You don't know why it bombed? The Joker's a perma bear. We're in a bull market. There's no way this movie would have done well in a bull market. Bear market, this movie would have done okay. We're in a bull market.

1:01:35But anyway, but DC, what a - just a decade of shit. I mean, there's been a few, like a few movies at work, but for the most part, how much money went in and how much money came out? I bet they're way upside down. Anyhow, okay. I've got two recommendations. One is a movie called Humane. I don't know where I saw it or, where did I say? Maybe a tweet. I can't remember. It's a, what's her name? Humane director. It's a Cronenberg. Oh, Jay Baruchel's in it. I like that guy. You would like this movie, Ben. Caitlin Cronenberg, daughter of the famous director. David Cronenberg? David Cronenberg, and brother of Brandon Cronenberg, who did a few demented movies that I love.

1:02:23So Humane is a movie. But speaking of OC, what was the dad's name? Oh, Peter Gallagher? Peter Gallagher. So Peter Gallagher plays... Sandy from the OC. He was good. Sandy. plays a very wealthy news anchor in a sort of like post-apocalyptic world where there's a natural disaster and people have to volunteer to euthanize themselves for the betterment of the world. So it takes place in his house and the four kids have to figure some shit out. And it was fun, fun movie. Do they do like rock, paper, scissor to see who goes, who gets killed first? More or less. But I think you would enjoy it. I enjoyed it.

1:03:02Two thumbs up from Michael. The next one, this is a borderline table pounder for me. This is how much I like this movie. It's called It's What's Inside. And It's What's Inside felt to me like a mix of bodies, bodies, bodies, and talk to me. So it's not a horror movie. It's sort of like a genre sci-fi, I guess. Eight friends are in a very large house the night before in one of their weddings. and there's some backstory drama as there always is. And then the plot of the movie is they start to switch bodies. There's a piece of technology that allows them to switch bodies and things go off the rails.

1:03:41And it was quite good. I feel like body swapping is a idea that will never get old. It's called It's What's Inside. And it was very good, not a horror movie. So I think this will appeal to the broader audience. It's not a Michael movie type of thing, although it certainly is a Michael movie. So very much enjoyed. Very, very much enjoyed. You know what the funniest body switch movie ever is? Freaky Friday. No, Change It Up with Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds. Totally underrated movie. Oh, yeah, that is good. Love that one. That was pretty good. All right. Send your hate mail about politics to Michael.

1:04:17I hope you enjoy Twitter for the rest of the week. If you're ever feeling down, I always say check Twitter.

1:04:27they don't know they can't all be winners all right animal spirits at the compound news.com thanks to the production team as always see you next time