People Love to Complain (EP.334)

23:49And there was an article this week about what actually caused inflation and the differences between the US and Europe. And a lot of people thought that, and this is definitely part of it, the supply chain stuff was not an insignificant cause of price increases. Demand turned back on and it took supply months to catch up. But all of that pressure has been erased. The supply chain is totally fixed. which is part of the reason i think for the the soft landing ish thing that we've had things ready ready themselves out and the other thing is like no one wants to think this way but europe is in a way worse situation than we are like the ft did a piece on that saying that like the u.s growth is accelerating the eu had even worse inflation like it it could have been worse people complain like the u.s fiscal response is way too big i think it's the probably the most successful one of any country in the developed markets.

24:45It could have been way worse. Inflation could have been higher and growth could have been lower. That's a double whammy of, that would have made things even worse. There were stagflation calls, were there not? Oh yeah. Larry Summers was all over that one. Stagflation is here. Nailed it. All right. So you might think the economy is unhealthy due to personal anecdotes or whatever, but here, these are the facts, Jack, from S &P. A total of 50 companies filed for bankruptcy in October, down from 61 in September, according to the latest S &P Global Market Intelligence data. This was the second lowest monthly total for the year so far.

25:23And they've got this going back, well, just to the, just to 20, is that 2020, 2020? These aren't rising. Well, that was another doomer thing is that low rates are just making for a zombie economy where all these zombie corporations are staying afloat because of low rates? Well, that was true. No, but I'm saying, wouldn't you expect more companies to be failing now that rates are higher? Or would that take more time? That's a good question. Well, I mean, look at the stock prices. You would assume just based on that, that it is happening. Market cleaned that up real quick. Or it's, yeah, or those companies are just underperforming.

26:00So Bank of America has this long-term stock market chart going back to 1824, which looks amazing. I mean, this is like, this is my investment philosophy in one chart. What are your thoughts on log charts, though? Okay, for going back this far. If you put it on just a regular chart, it would look weird because it would look like a... No, it would be at... If you put it on a regular chart, it would be at one for the first 150 years. And then it would just go... Right, and then it would shoot up. And then it would just go vertical. So you need to log this. The only problem... And by the way, this is my philosophy, too.

26:30Right? Stocks usually go up. The... That's not a problem, but like this makes it look a little bit too easy. Yes, it makes the like even like the Great Depression is a blip. I mean, that's what I'm saying. It makes the downturns not look as big as they were. One of my favorite one of my favorite quotes, I think. Oh, man, who is this from? Maybe the money game. I can't remember. Statistics tell a rather bloodless tale. Yes. Good one. Right. Like you look at this. You're like, oh, well, it's easy. Yeah, I think you have to pair this with a drawdown chart. Yeah. Just to show. Okay. I mentioned that the NASDAQ is up, what, 42 % this year?

27:12The S &P is up 17. That's hard to believe. What's the QQEW? I bet you even the equal weight is having a great year. I'm going to guess that the QQEW is up 30%. Probably at least 25%. Let's see. Let's see. So the equal weight NASDAQ 100 for this year, year 2023, is up 21 % year to date. Ain't so bad. Not so bad. The other thing with the equal weight, like people keep saying, like the S &P is just being driven by these stocks. And I don't care. Right. I really don't care because most people own index funds. You're like Tommy Lee Jones and the Fugitive. I didn't kill my wife. I don't care. who actually owns an equal weighted index?

27:57How many more people own a regular index fund versus like, no one actually owns an equal weighted index fund. Like a handful of investment nerds. Sure. People own mid caps and small caps, but remember when we were speaking about all of the actors with three names, like Tommy Lee Jones, his name is just probably Tommy Jones or Tom Jones. Yeah. Mark Paul Gosler. Somebody, somebody set it straight. When you get to Hollywood, there's probably, there's probably 400 young Tommy Lee Joneses. Anyway, that, that, that's that for, actors names, but I saw a tweet the other day. And yes, it's true. The mega cap are carrying the index, but this is directionally right.

28:30Not a hundred percent accurate. Like 80 stocks in the S and P were up 50 % this year. Right. You know, it's a decent amount. So the NASDAQ 100 on a total return basis is actually closer to all time highs in the S and P. Now the NASDAQ is less than 5 % from all time highs. The NASDAQ 100, the S and P is about 6 % away. Can we talk about all time highs? Sure. So the S &P 500 has gone 467, this one bespoke, 467 training days without making a new all-time high, which is It's a pretty long time. The longest streak since the GFC. But don't you think being within spitting distance of it makes it feel a little better, even though we haven't technically hit one?

29:10Yeah, we're right there. We're right there. Here's a great chart, a great data point from Ryan Dietrich. Remember Last week, I think I was talking about sentiment trader had a chart similar to this. And I was like, listen. Small caps, yeah. No, no, no. Not small caps. I like the studies that show what happens because there are behavioral patterns in the stock market. When you get a washout and then this happens, to me, that's much more explainable. That's like structural human behavior than say biotech does well in February, right? Yeah. Where it could just be like noise. So this is from a week ago or two weeks ago.

29:53I'm sorry. Yeah, this is from November 4th. I think he tweeted this. So Ryan said, we officially saw a super rare Zweig breadth thrust today. The rare signal is simply stocks moving from very oversold to very overbought in less than two weeks. That's all you need to know. Went from very oversold to very overbought. That's a quantitative analysis done on that. All you need to know is since World War II, the S &P 500 is higher a year later every single time. And it looks like that's happened, I don't know, 15 times or so. Again, when there's a washout, when things go from very oversold to holy shit, everybody get back in the pool.

30:29That's usually a durable bottom. Doesn't mean it's going to hold forever and ever. I don't know. We were in a correction. Like we had like a double correction there for like two days and then stocks just rocketed higher. Yeah. Right. We were correcting territory. That's right. Two weeks ago, we're down 10%. All right. This is an amazing stat from Quantin on Twitter. Wrestle 3 ,000 names by cumulative short P &L over the past decade. Shorts made about$80 billion of profits on about 30 % of names and lost$900 billion across all names over 10 years. Just, that's amazing. This idea during the pandemic that short sellers were evil, I mean, it's truly hilarious.

31:07It is not supported by data. Short sellers don't put good companies out of business. Exhibit 1046. It is real. I can't imagine being like, not only the mindset you have to be in and like, if you're like a fundamental person who's like looking through the accounting data and stuff, but I mean, people say short sellers are, people say shorts are manipulating the market. It's the opposite. It's the opposite. Everybody is aligned to manipulate the stock market to go higher. And people inside corporate America are incredibly good at doing this. They chop the fat. They pull back. Whatever they have to do to protect their margins, corporate America is very good at doing it.

31:51And even if you have a crappy company, if you're in the midst of a bull market in an industry or whatever, the rising tide lifts all ships. Everybody's incentivized to go to work to make your stock prices go higher, to make more money. That's it. That's the bottom line. So anyway, yeah. Yeah, short seller is not an easy job. So this chart from courtesy of Daily Chartbook via Jeffries shows small caps now represent less than 4 % of total US equity market. Do you think, how much of this is small caps on performing versus just these big stocks have gotten so much bigger than they were in the past?

32:23I mean, it's a little of both, obviously. Both, both. Well, so Jeffries, to compliment that, oh, same thing, I guess, said the Russell 2000 is cheapest our absolute valuation model has been since December 2012. The thing is, again, back to people who have to complain, if you want to look for stuff that's not overpriced right now, if you want to look outside of the Magnificent Seven or NASDAQ 100 or whatever, there's a ton of cheap stuff and there's 5 % money market yields and T-bill yields and bond yields. Like the opportunity set for investors these days is actually pretty good. You know the total return for small caps over the last three years?

33:01Is it negative? It's 5%. And what's the S &P done in that time? Up 40? Up 30. Huge spread there. Speaking of all-time highs, the Russell 2000, this is from Sentiment Trader. In the coming week, the Russell 2000 will have gone 500 trading days, nearly two full years since it last closed at a 52-week high. That's the third longest streak in the index's history. So I know a lot of people want to see this huge washout in the stock market. Like the stock market is going to fall 60 % or whatever. like it's not like things have been amazing. Damn it, we had it. We had the washout. Right, we did it. 2022 was the washout.

33:44It was one of the worst years ever for a diversified portfolio of financial assets. So, I mean, even from an all-time high, so the Russell 2000, forget about, I'm not even talking about the pandemic crash, which it lost over 40%. It made an all-time high in the fall of 2021. And then it fell 35%. Is that not a washout? If you're waiting for a 70 % washout, you know, you'll be waiting a long time. All right. So about the labor market, Ben. All right. I did a tweet. This is, I think it's pretty realistic. This is me going after the financial media again. In 2020, it was no one wants to work, right?

34:20The government is paying people not to work. 2021, they called it the great resignation. Everyone's quitting, getting new jobs. And that made sense because wages were, wage increases were way higher for people changing jobs. The people don't want to work thing. I don't think that was fully fabricated. Well, no, I mean, they were paying people literally to not work. Yeah. 2022 is quiet quitting. People are quietly quitting their job. And then 2023 is now no one wants to work anymore. This is from the Wall Street Journal. The white collar labor market is softening to a point that companies are encountering an issue that would have been unthinkable in the area known as a great resignation.

34:52These days, too few people are voluntarily leaving their job. Turnover has declined so steeply that some large employers at companies now find themselves over budget on certain items, requiring leaders to weigh whether hang on projects too few people are voluntarily living their jobs what's happening here i think the the thing that is the most surprising to me in terms of like financial media and i'm not saying like financial media is all evil but they seem to be taking the side of corporations against like consumers and households and workers in all of this like corporations never get blamed for anything these days anymore they like people the media feels bad for corporations first people were quitting too much.

35:31Now people aren't quitting enough. It's like, this is a good thing for people in jobs. I almost feel like some of these articles are written just to trigger people like us. It must be. I can't think of any other reason. I'm sorry. I didn't read the article, but this just sounds like such horseshit. The new headache for bosses, employees aren't quitting. Like is everything, it's all just for clicks. I'm sorry. I hate to be so cynical. That's what it is. It is. I think you're right. I mean, okay, whatever. Let's talk about crypto for a second. Bitcoin's market demand has outpaced its supply. This is a tweet from Neigen Tropic.

36:12Bitcoin's market demand has outpaced its supply, a clear sign of robust positive momentum. In just one day, a whopping 700 ,000 new Bitcoin addresses joined the network. This expansion is considered one of the most reliable indicators for price predictions. It's interesting that people are piling into crypto now a little bit because the whole idea of a Bitcoin ETF is that it will make it easier to buy crypto. And it's like people are buying it ahead of it. You'd think people would just wait to buy the ETF if it's new people coming in. And so I saw another tweet that I thought was in the doc, but I guess it did have been from Will Clemente, showing something about how money is coming out of stablecoins and going into Bitcoin, which I guess is an interesting analog for what probably won't happen.

36:55We've been talking about how a lot of the money that's parked in money market mutual funds is just going to stay there. So money's coming out of stable coins going into Bitcoin. And so there's a hell of a rally underway. And I don't want to say unfortunately, fortunately, it is what it is. It's just a number go up thing, right? That's the funniest part of it. It's not like it's rallying on some sort of innovation. If anything, crypto is taking a step back by going up because of going into an old legacy financial product that's been around since 1993. But guess what? You know how you said you're talking about you're doing your time in the Jones.

37:30I don't care about that the S &P is driven by only seven stocks. I don't care. People don't care why the price is going up. Bitcoin holders, myself included, I don't care why it's going up. I'm not like a zealot for Bitcoin rehauling the society. I don't care. I own it as a financial asset. and the numbers going up and cool. Why? I don't really don't care. I'm just making the observation. That's fair. I said, yeah, the money gets cashed all the same, right? Yeah. I see. I was holding out for tokenizing the entire world, but I guess that's not going to happen anymore. That's coming. That's coming.

38:05All right. So there was an article who wrote the, the article was this fortune. I can't remember who did this. Your NFTs are actually finally totally worthless. This isn't some, some research company did a whole study on it. Yeah. Okay. New report from industry researchers finds that 95 % of the once-hyped crypto assets have hit rock bottom valuation. I mean, this is not terribly surprising that most of this stuff is worthless. But somebody tweeted, the craziest thing about someone bidding$3 million just now, and this is for a CryptoPunk, the craziest thing about someone bidding$3 million just now for something that's actually finally totally worthless is the owner won't even accept it.

38:43Kind of wild. What am I missing here? So CryptoPunks, there's been a huge rally in NFTs. Okay. CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, they're going nuts. Somebody was offered$3 million for their CryptoPunk and they declined the offer. Oh, okay. I gotcha. I'm sorry. It's still dumb. The CryptoPunk and Bored Ape thing is still stupid. Okay. It is. Well, fine. That's your opinion. It never made any sense and it still doesn't. That's all I'm saying. Okay. Was 2022. 2022. So one of our guys, Nate Jefferson, asked, ChatGPT, was 2022 the seventh or eighth worst year in the S &P 500 history? And ChatGPT said the S &P 500 index had a negative return of negative 10.3 % in 2022, according to an article from A Wealth of Common Sense.

39:32I guess my job's safe. How about that? I knew ChatGPT was a hack, stealing my stuff. How about that? So Ben, we spoke earlier in the show about like... That means like when the AI overlords just have the things in the back of our heads and they're just sucking stuff out of us. Like I'm going to be safe. I'll be like the teacher's pet for the AI machine that's taking over the world. You know what movie came and went? I don't know if we spoke of this that nobody saw. What was the movie with Denzel Son? Was it The Creator? Oh, yeah. Did you go see that? I did. I didn't get great reviews. I wanted to see it.

40:05Okay. I'll see when it comes out on video. It was in and out. We spoke about if the Fed says they're done, would financial conditions loosen to the point of basically reversing all that they've done and risk more inflation? So for this from Bloomberg, the average 30-year mortgage rate plunged last week by the most in more than a year, helping generate the biggest advance in home purchase applications since early June. So it ranges rates went from whatever, 8 % down to 7.6%. People are like, it's a feeding frenzy. So the thing is, housing was already basically in a recession, which is kind of crazy.

40:41We saw that 4.9 % GDP. Activity is in a depression, but prices are still in a bull market. But here's why this is like the automatic stabilizers in the economy or whatever. We're going to have other pieces of the economy probably slowing down when rates are getting cut, and housing could actually help. Housing could pick up the slack if there's more activity. It could be a good... Some people might worry it's going to cause a boom in inflation, but I think there's going to be other parts of the economy that are slowing, and housing activity could actually help a little bit instead of hurt. Right?

41:11Yeah. Okay, this is, so Logan Motoshami wrote a piece for Housing Wire about why home prices won't crash in the next recession, and it was a simple supply-demand thing, right? Just like you said, there's pent-up demand that if mortgage rates fall, people are going to be coming in, and a lot of people I saw talking to Logan were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, why would housing prices ever hold up during a recession? That makes no sense, And I think a lot of people have the recency bias brain of the great financial crisis of, well, every time there's a nasty recession, housing prices have to fall. So I looked at this.

41:41I looked at every recession going back to 1960, and there's been nine of them. In seven of the nine recessions going back to 1960, housing prices have risen. They've only fallen twice. Once in the great financial crisis, of course, and then once in the early 1990s, which was the savings and loans crisis. So basically, the only time housing prices have fallen during a recession have been when there's been a financial calamity. That's happened. Other regular run-of-the-mill recessions, housing prices have risen. This is another reason why the GFC caught so many people by surprise is because housing prices really have never fallen.

42:14There's no precedent for that. That's the other thing. Housing prices don't fall that often to begin with. So that's why they've risen during recessions in the past because it takes a lot for housing prices to fall on a nationwide basis. Now, that doesn't mean housing prices can't fall during the next recession, but it's going to have to be a nasty financial crisis probably to make it happen. We got an email from a listener that is emblematic of the environment that we're discussing. My wife and I fall into the camp of growing family, don't necessarily need to move right this second, but quickly running out of space in our current home.

42:44Like most adults, we were always looking at Zillow just in case something were to catch our eye. Well, out of nowhere, it did. And we went from casually looking to agreeing on a purchase price to realizing crap. Now we need to sell our home ASAP in an 8 % mortgage world. As someone who is in the industry, I'm paying close attention to all the same charts and data that you and Ben I've brought up so many times on the pod. I consider myself typically pretty stoic, but I'm sure you can imagine how anxious I was to get my home sold. What transpired over the past weekend truly blew my mind. We listed late Friday afternoon.

43:10All weekend, we had showings of people coming to our two open houses. And by Sunday evening, barely 48 hours later, we had four offers, all at Asking or above, with many waiving inspections. I think it's worth noting that I think the home we are selling can be described as a good starter home, three beds, two and a half baths. Point being, all these potential buyers were first-time home buyers. Another interesting observation was that all the offers wanted to put down the minimum, 5%. That is something that we don't spend enough time talking about. People aren't putting down 20%. They could still get into a house.

43:40Now, the math doesn't make the math any easier. The payments are still wildly expensive, but people are finding ways to do it. The four offers above asking and waiving inspections is crazy and at 8 % mortgage world. But it makes sense. It's a supply and demand thing. Great chart from the Wall Street Journal. Homeowner improvement and repair activity. It's a four-quarter moving average, and it's at all-time highs. So because people aren't able to move because of the 8 % mortgages, somebody said, we feel like we have all this money and have nothing to do with it. And so people are remodeling or whatever.

44:15And this is another weird thing that you could never have thought of if you were just thinking about textbook economics brain. Wouldn't you do that right now, though, if you had the choice between like adding an addition on your house or fixing up the kitchen, whatever it is, or buying a new house, like you would do the addition in a heartbeat, wouldn't you? Absolutely. So the housing market is broken. And so people are spending their money on other shit, whether it's vacations or home improvement or whatever. It's like, I had all this money earmarked for a home and I guess I'm going to spend it on other stuff now.

44:45Yes. And you have the, even though home equity line of credit is 8 % or whatever, you still would probably pull that money and do it and just pay it off quicker. So this guy's point of first-time homebuyers, first-time homebuyers now make up 32 % of all homebuyers. Right, which is actually down. The historical average since 1981 is 38%. Oh, that's interesting. So it's down a little bit. And the reason is because homebuyers are getting older. So this is repeat buyers. People have bought one in the past. The average age has gone from like 35 in 1980 to 58 now. And the Washington Post and the first-time homebuyers have gone from 30 to 35.

45:19And the Washington Post is saying a lot of this is is boomers that are either downsizing or deciding to move somewhere because they have all the equity and they have probably a paid-off home that they've lived in for 30 years. And so it's saying most of the activity right now in the housing market is actually being driven. It's a barbell. It's all first-time homebuyers and baby boomers, which is interesting. So people, I guess you'd call us in the middle group, older millennials like us, if I'm a millennial, and Gen X are just staying put. What year were you born? 81. Yeah, you're a millennial.

45:51Oldest millennial. All right. This is a good one from Jeremy Horpedal, who always does some good myth busting on Twitter. So one of the things I love about Home Alone is that every year it just comes into the discourse, and it's more and more financial based. I talked about the pizzas. We watched it this week. It's that time of the year. My kids are asking for it. I'm sorry. Call me a Scrooge or whatever. I'm shutting everything Christmas down until after Thanksgiving. My daughter wanted to read a Christmas book last night before bed, and I said, no, not until next week. Did that make me a bad person?

46:20Courtney called me out this morning and said, why would you do that? I really just didn't want to read the book, but I also, you got to have principles. So someone tweeted, the worst part about rewatching Home Alone is you just know Kevin's parents bought this house for like$250. I think people don't realize, like the McAllister's were rich. We don't know what he did, but this Jeremy Herperdahl guy says, actually it sold for - Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do we think Mr. McAllister did in Chicago? Did he like trade cattle futures or something maybe? Yeah, I was gonna say he was a bond trader.

46:47Yeah, something like that. So it actually sold for$875 ,000 in 1989, which is seven times the medium home sold that year. So it was a mansion, right? I looked at it. If you inflation adjusted that price for 1989. That's a mansion. That's a mansion. Look at all those windows. If you inflation adjusted it, it would be$2.2 million. And Zillow estimates right now it's for$2.3 million, which I would have thought he would have got a premium for being the McAllister's home. But this house sold for a lot back then, and it's basically tracked inflation ever since, which is kind of surprising. Huh. I probably need some work.

47:17All right, let's do some quarter stuff. Expedia CEO on the consumer. We haven't seen really anything on the consumer side. We keep looking. You'd have to squint really hard and look by sub-region, sub-sub-region, to try and cut it by price point and a lot of things to really see anything noticeable. Again, people aren't – I found an old – I'm writing a piece on this. I found an old New York Times article from the late 70s that was about how people are changing their habits. And it probably – granted, it probably took a long time for inflation to be that high. And it's talked about people not traveling anymore, not spending money and like wearing old clothes for longer.

47:50And it really changed people's behavior for a while. And that's the thing that I just don't think we're seeing in that many people right now, that many households. Here's another thing. I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago that the ad market is the first thing to go. Like that's the leading indicator to look at. And obviously, I got to talk about that on the Disney call last week. So this is from the transcript. Ad markets picking up from the lows. News Corp's CEO, specifically at Dow Jones, advertising was down 3%, which was a market improvement after a 14 % decline in the prior quarter, both digital and fringe report improvement in trend lines.

48:20So all in all, pretty good. However, I don't want to discount this. The average mention of weak demand for consumer sectors is basically at an all-time high. Now, I wonder if this is company-specific and they're just blaming, they're just casting blame. I don't know. Mentions include lower, softer, moderating, and weaker. What if softer includes softer landing?

48:47I don't know. Okay, here's your survey. You sly dog you. All right. 64 % of Americans would welcome a recession that have met lower mortgage rates per the USA today. This is such bullshit. This is so easily debunkable. First of all, how many people, how many new homebuyers, or how many people are looking to buy a home? What percentage of the population right now is looking to buy a home, but can't. Every year there's like five or six million homes sold out of 160 million. It's like less, you know, it's such a tiny amount. So if we would say, do we think that 5 % of the population is looking for a home right now?

49:21Well, no, there's 70 million millennials. I don't know. Fine. So let's just say aggressively, let's say aggressively, it's 15 % of the population looking for a mortgage. So USA Today is reporting that 64 % of Americans would welcome a recession if it meant lower mortgage rates? No, they wouldn't. Yes. There's no way. Just absolute nonsense. I don't know how the question was asked, but yes, there's no way that's true. I'm sorry. All right. Who's missing their credit card payments? This is from Heather Long. The answer is millennials. So it shows the share of credit card borrowers who are newly delinquent.

49:55And if you look at Gen X, Gen Z, and baby boomers, it looks like they're like, I guess, sort of back to, yeah, they're back to 2019 levels. millennials are slightly higher. So 2.7%. I mean, it's really, there's nothing to report here. Is there? It's paper thin. All right, this is interesting. From BLS, average consumption expenditure by age group in the US. And it shows it goes up from 25, peaks in your 45 to 54 age range, falls and it falls from there. And it also shows like what you spend your money on. I don't think a lot of people think about this kind of thing in terms of retirement. that like you actually spend less money in your older years than you think.

50:37And you probably like the die with zero guy. Did you ever read that book or not? I know I've talked about it before. No, no. He says that not only should your spending peak in your 40s to 50s, your net worth should peak as well because that's when you should start spending the most of it because that's when you like before your health starts to decline a little bit. Well, this is a great segue to Christine Benz did an incredible post about people not spending enough for retirement. Yeah, I read this too. She said, even the retirees who spend in line with our base case, which is take it 3.8 % initially and then inflation adjusted.

51:10So she said, for example, people start retirement with a million dollars, withdrawing$38 ,000 initially and inflation adjusting. The median ending balance was$3 million more for balanced portfolios and even higher for more equity heavy portfolios. people are understandably so too conservative because there's no penalty for dying with too much money. But if you run out, you're f***ed. Yes, that's longevity risk. And I think people always assume the worst case scenario is going to happen to them. Speaking of longevity risk, we just did a very interesting episode with Lifex, which is a stone rich product that, I don't know, it's next week or the week after, but if you're a financial advisor, you're going to want to listen to that one.

51:51It was interesting. All right, here's another scary headline. Americans are pulling money out of their 401k plans at an alarming rate from CNN. Alarming? Really? All right, what's the numbers? Let's hear it. All right. It surged the first three months of the year to 15 ,950, a 36 % increase from the second quarter. That sounds bad. Unfortunately, there's 4 million. Wait, wait, what does that number mean? What does that number mean? That's how many people did these hardship withdrawals out of their 401k. Almost 16 ,000 people. 36 % increase. That sounds like a lot. Until you realize that there are 4 million people in the plans.

52:20I think that's 0.4 % of the people. Okay. It's not great that people are doing this, but it's a tiny, tiny number. All right. So you're not going to believe this. You're not going to believe this, Ben. Have you ever gotten a text message from somebody where they leave, it's a voicemail and a text message? I know you can do that. I don't think I've actually got one of those before. Okay. So I've gotten a few and I don't think I hate it. I don't think I hate it. It's interesting. It's a voicemail in a text message, right? However, however, I got a voicemail DM on LinkedIn. That is over the line.

53:07That's aggressive. But he goes, hey, Michael, blank here. I work in it. What does he say? I operate a boutique life insurance brokerage. Imagine sliding into somebody's DM with a voicemail. Wow. I guess it's like there's a thing now? It stood out at least Alright, let's talk about Netflix Okay Lucas Shaw put this biggest hit, the 10 biggest shows by US consumers in the first half of 2023 and I don't think I watched any of them Nope My People, Murder Mystery 2 The Mother, The Night Agent, just Ginny and Georgia I've not seen a single one of these, not even Extraction 2 which I have to say. I haven't seen a single one.

53:53He says that fewer than 5 % of original programs on Netflix last year would have triggered performance bonuses under the new contract with the Reuters Guild of America. Remember they said like, if a certain amount of people watch it, you're going to get a bonus, which means you have to be seen by at least 20 % of the US users. It's very rare, but I mean, their TV show is just not great, but I guess they just go quantity over quality. Paramount says streaming subscribers will see even more price increases moving forward, a trend that's permeated throughout the entire media industry. So Yahoo has this cool graphic breaking down all the different fees for, what stands out to you here?

54:33Well, here's another inflation thing about the 2010s that probably is warping people's minds. There was way too much stuff that should have cost more in the 2010s, but it was being subsidized. Yes. Uber. Everything. Streaming services should have cost more in the 2010s when they came out. Disney was charging like$6.99 a month. Like, it was way too, all this stuff was way too cheap, and it should have been more expensive for what you get from it. Speaking of streaming, so Disney Plus has lost nearly$11 billion. Sounds like a lot. Let's see. Disney reported that a streaming business is making progress.

55:09They lost$387 million in the most recent quarter, down from$1.47 billion a year earlier. I couldn't tell you the last time we watched something new on Disney that wasn't old. We use it as just a way to watch old shows and movies. You know what we watched this weekend with the boys? Spider-Man Far From Home. Great movie. Okay. My son loves all the Spider-Man movies. Great movie. All right. So I nailed this. I mean, whatever. This is very easy to see coming. Remember I said the Marvels was the absolute worst trailer I've ever seen in my life? It bombed, right? $21 million in opening day. The lowest in MCU history.

55:41I hope they just stappled all the Marvel movies. They're not going to. Here's my take. And I was listening to The Big Picture, and they were talking about this. that they did, they did, what's the, oh, the stinger. They did a stinger and they showed Beast. I think they're going to go hard at X-Men and they're not, they're going to stop making junk. So all like the tear fringe, that's over. That is over. They're going to go after X-Men and that's going to revive, that's going to revive comic book movies. Okay. I'm all in for X-Men stuff. Deadpool is like the only one I like because I'm a big runner-up fan.

56:11So Wolverine's going to be in, and I love X-Men movies. I will be at the theater for every one of those. I can see that. Yeah, love. Warner Brothers.

56:27So this is ad revenue per quarter. Does this just mean because they're getting lower ad revenue from TV? They lost 1.4 million domestic subscribers. That's a lot. What a debacle. The Max, Max Go, HBO Max, HBO Now. Look at this ad revenue per quarter. The lowest level in, I don't know, three years. This is bad. Bad, bad, bad. Netflix broke everything. Everything. It really did. Okay. So we have family photos on Sunday. And Robin said, here. That's fun. Love doing that. Robin said, here, tell me if you like any of these sweaters. So she shows me the bag and it's J.Crew. And I said, what am I, Ben Carlson?

57:12How did you like it? It's a sweater. I'm like, I have four of these. So she's like, yeah, whatever. All right. You know what I have one of? Yeah, but they don't cost$250 at J.Crew. So it was$90. I said, what are you, crazy? You spent$90 for this? And she showed up in her seat. It was half off. Credit to her. $45. You never buy anything from a J.Crew banana place without being 40 % or 50 % off. Never. All right, Ben. I have one vest. Okay. And I wore it last week or two weeks ago. And I think I like how they look. Vests are style over substance. I probably have four vests. I'm a vest guy. I'm not gonna lie.

57:48I'm a finance bro. I don't care. I'll own it. Okay. But whoever has it where their torso is hot or is cold, but their arms are warm. Right. Right. So, so that's where I'm going. It's useless. It's just for looks. Okay. Okay. So I'm glad we're on the same page here because I like how it looks, but like my back was really hot. You know what I mean? Cause it's like, it's not, it's not, vests aren't functional. They just look good. Okay. All right. Cause yeah, my back was, my back was too warm. I was like, I don't, but, and then I couldn't take it off cause I was, the shirt underneath was not like a, anyway, just not sure I feel about that.

58:17So I was in Vegas last week and there are, there's a thing there. I'm sure there was no one there spending money, right? No, no. It was, it looked like a depression in Vegas. I'm sure this is again, functional over, over or no, this is the opposite of that. It's probably function over style. There's clear backpacks. Hmm. I thought you only had to do that if you had a, at a school or something that has a lot of crime. There's got to be a reason why people are walking around in clear backpacks, right? I don't know. It must be a Gen Z thing. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what it is, but I'm guessing somebody will email us.

58:55All right, let's talk about – sorry the show went long today. Lots to talk about. Busy week. Busy couple of weeks. Recommendations, what do you got? All right, David Spade was on the Pete and Sebastian show. I love David Spade. I've been a fan of his forever since like PCU days and Tommy Boy and stuff, obviously. but like the fact that he's, I love his podcast. I think he's like one of the quickest, sharpest guys there is. And he was just telling story after story about SNL and movies and Sandler and Farley. Wait, who's Pete and Sebastian? It's the Sebastian Menescalco podcast. They interviewed him and they just let him go.

59:22They like didn't interrupt him. He just talked the whole time. It was great. I watched The Curse. It's the new Nathan Fielder show on Showtime with Emma Stone. I don't know who this show is for. I think it's only for like 30 and 40 year old dudes who live in Brooklyn who have a TV podcast. it's essentially a satire of a couple who's doing an HGTV show, but everything he does just makes you feel uncomfortable. It's just like, how uncomfortable can we make you feel? And I watch the show, and I'm like, that just made me feel bad. I don't know who it's for. Are you going to stop? I think so. I'm sure there's a lot of people who are like, this guy is a genius.

1:00:04Okay. Doesn't do it for me. All right. The Killer. on Netflix. It's the new Fincher movie on Netflix. I thought it was the best movie Netflix has ever had. I thought it was excellent. I thought it was like a throwback to movies they don't make anymore. I thought they could have landed the plane a little better on the ending. It was a very deliberate movie, so I was not surprised to say you didn't care for it that much. But I thought it was great. First of all, you're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say I didn't care for it. What did you say? I'm pretty sure I said I liked it and loved it. Okay.

1:00:35Alright. I thought it was one of the best movies I've seen in a while. I thought it was really, really good. Okay, so for those who don't know who David Fincher is, this is his filmography. Alien 3, which was a bit of a debacle. Who doesn't know who David Fincher is? Well, I'm just going through his movies. Hold on. Not everybody's a movie guy or girl. All right. Seven, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, I won't mention Mank, but he did Mank, and The Killer. So not bad. Not a bad pedigree.

1:01:08So I wish I saw the killer in the movie theater. I think I would have loved it. It felt like it should have been in a movie theater. Do you agree with this? I preferred the first half to the second half. Yes. The ending wasn't great. It was a great fight scene though. That was a great fight scene. So just for me personally, listen, I liked it. I did like it. I just didn't love it. It was a little bit too cerebral for me. I thought Fassbender was awesome. It was like an even-keeled movie. Like it stayed at this level. It was very deliberate. How about this? If a different director tried to do this movie, it would have been horrifically unwatchable.

1:01:43He's a master. Here's one question. I like it. I did like it. Here's one thing I noticed about movies though. So he, because he got beat up and he took these pills to make himself feel better. How come people in movies never drink water when they take pills? People in the movies take pills and swallow. They like chew the pills. Who actually, what insane person does this? That's a truly funny observation. They've never taken a pill without a sip of water. Yeah, that's a psychotic show. They always do this on movies and TV shows. So I saw Eddie Murphy is coming out with a new movie, which I'm very excited about.

1:02:12Just kidding. It's called Candy Cane Lane. What the hell is this garbage? Is that a Disney one? It looks like it's on, is this Amazon? I don't know. I think it's Amazon. The Rock has a Christmas movie coming out too. Come on. All right, so I've got a few things on my list. I watched Old Dads on the Airplane. I loved it. it's written and directed by Bill Burr. It's a Bill Burr stand-up special inside of a movie. That's what I thought too. Yep. So listen, I loved it for what it was, right? Like it's exactly what you think it is. If you like Bill Burr, you'd like the movie. That's a good airplane movie.

1:02:47It's a great airplane movie. I saw a deeply disturbing movie, disturbing on the lines of Speak No Evil. If you saw that horrific monstrosity of a movie, which was a great movie, this is of the same ilk cut from the same cloth this is not for horror tourists or beginners this shit is grisly and gnarly and holy cow it's called When Evil Lurks I think it's Argentinian and it's on Shudder so if I'm talking to you you know what to do I don't understand anything you just said okay well I wasn't talking to you I was not talking to you Argentinian? Geez. All right, so did you see the new Ghostbuster trailer?

1:03:31There's another one? Looks great. All the originals are in it. Bill Murray's in it. Oh, okay. I actually didn't mind the reboot they did with Paul Rudd. So I don't, I haven't seen Ghostbuster since I was five years old. I have no, I don't, I have zero memory. Oh, I watched it with my kids. They love it. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Okay, maybe I'll do that. All right, let's talk about real quick before we wrap up. The best movies for the rest of the year. There's some good movies coming out. Godzilla minus one looks awesome. and I'm not a big Godzilla guy but it is they make a new one of these like every two years this takes place, no but this is different this takes place right after World War II when Godzilla was born I guess so it's historically accurate this is based on a true story it looks great Ferrari, the Michael Mann movie I saw a preview for that, it looks pretty good Napoleon, the Ridley Scott film I might go see that in a theater The Boys in the Boat, George Clooney I don't know what that one is Remember that book?

1:04:26It was on every... The Boys on the Boat is the book that was in every airport for the last 10 years. Oh, okay. I missed that one. Silent Night, a John Woo movie. And last but not least, A24 is making the Iron Claw. I think that looks good. The Texas Tornado and the Von Erich family. I can't wait for that. So there's a lot of good movies left. I'm excited. Been a really shit year for movies. But looks pretty good. It hasn't been much good to come out at all. So, all right. All right. Remember the compound news. No animal spirits at the compound news.com. The smoke show Wednesday, there will be a replay.

1:05:03We don't know how it's going to be coming to you, but there will be a replay. But if you want to see it live, you can ask questions, be live in the audience on zoom, hit the link in the show notes. You have to be a financial advisor to do it. Uh, and we'll see you there.

1:05:19No more, Mr. Nice guy. I'm sick of people telling us we're out of touch you're out of touch that's the energy i'm bringing today you can start calling us out of touch when we start doing cold plunges until then off

1:05:37this next one's for all you carmack shoppers who just want to buy a car your way want to check some cars out in person uh-huh want to look some more from your house okay Want to pretend you know about engines? Nah, I'll just chat with CarMax online instead. Wanna get pre-qualified from your couch? Woo! Wanna get that car? Hey, that's a beat! You wanna do it your way? Wanna drive? CarMax.