The Dumbest Trade War (EP.398)

24:45Yeah. Just because they know they're going to have to match? Yeah. Jack Bogle really is a saint. Like, because if Vanguard didn't do this, BlackRock wouldn't have done this either. Is that fair to say? It would have happened. Somebody would have done it. It would have taken a lot longer. Not taken anything away from Bogle. All credit to him, but somebody would have done this. Vanguard is quite possibly the best thing that's ever happened to individual investors. Is that fair to say? No, that and triple levered ETFs. Speaking of which, all the way on the other side. Okay, so Bloomberg had an article about levered ETFs.

25:20And they say traders have been diving into leveraged exchange trading funds. Someone asked us, is it levered or leveraged? Which one is it? Either way. Either way. Dealers choice. Okay. I feel like— I say both. Okay. Yeah, I probably do too. Yeah. Traders have been diving into leveraged exchange traded products, funds, excuse me, a subset of a derivative is enhanced products offering to amp up. All right. Why am I reading this? They netted around$940 million in revenue in 2024. That's a record 37 % jump. $940 million in revenue. So like, that's the headline, right? Like, holy shit. And my credit to me, my initial thought is, well, I need to know more.

25:58Like, all right. But what value were they providing? And again, we've spoken a bazillion times about these products because we get emails all the time. And we get another email from a very sophisticated listener who's like, listen, if you are using these levered or leveraged ETFs inside of a portfolio, it can actually have diversification benefits. You can get intelligent leverage. I'm like, listen, dude, I'm not talking to you. You know exactly what you're doing. And there are absolutely ways to use this responsibly, even though they're not meant to be held to the long term, whatever. Like there are ways inside of a portfolio.

26:32I'm talking to the kids that are just getting started that email us like, hey, why wouldn't I just put all my money into a triple lever ETF? Like that's who I'm talking to. But anyway, be that as it may, Jeffrey Patek did Yeoman's work. I don't know what that means, but I know it's something people say. To like look further beyond just the fees, like what sort of value did they provide to investors? And look at this chart. It shows the fees versus the income and the gains. And the fees as noted are a billion, but the income and the gains are like, $16 billion. So Jeffrey said, if you're like me, and Jeffrey is an analyst at Morningstar, if you're like me, you look at this and say, sure, they paid a lot in fees, but they also made real money, $16.5 billion in income gains.

27:12To put those numbers in context, the ETFs held$38 billion in average net assets that year in all. So it means investors paid 0.65 % of average net in asset and management fees and earned a 43 % return on those assets. Not bad. Not bad at all. The funny thing is, is that no one has ever invested in a levered ETF before and gone, I wonder what the fee is on this thing. Yeah, nobody cares. It's besides the point. But what really stands out is the extent to which investors' dollar gains in these ETFs lagged the ETF's reported total returns. So that's like the behavior gap stuff. We know that. That has nothing to do with the product issuer.

27:49And then Jeffrey goes further to say that the actual gains lagged what the issuer said they might expect to gain. But either way, credit to Jeffrey, great analysis. Yes. But every time we talk about these products, we do get an email from someone who has an intelligent way of thinking about these. And I agree. If you have a highly volatile strategy within your portfolio and you use it to rebalance, it actually can provide benefits in your portfolio. But a lot of people that ask us these questions are not doing that. Well, listen, also, there are gazillions of dollars in these things. It's not all people that have no idea what they're doing, right?

28:22Like, there's obviously a lot of institutional investors and hedge funds that are using this. We're offering a PSA here. Just keep your eyes open. Yes, the fees are completely besides the point because they're getting access to an area of the market that's liquidated and quick and whatever, whatever. Okay, AI Ben. This was good. Somebody uploaded a bunch of Ben Carlson posts into one of the LLMs. I don't know which one. And they said, like, let's see what Ben Carlson would say about DeepSeek, okay? Pretty good. It's pretty good. Okay. Here we go. It's hard to keep up with the AI arm. You know what?

29:00Why don't you read this? I mean, this is your writing. I looked at this. Read it. Really? I'd say, no, I just want to get my - I'll read it. No, no, no. I'll read it and then you can respond if you don't feel comfortable reading your computer voice. It's hard to keep up with the AI arms race these days. One day, everyone's talking about OpenAI and NVIDIA. The next, a Chinese startup comes out of nowhere and wipes out half a trillion dollars in market value for the biggest AI players in the world. Welcome to the stock market in 2025. And then it goes on. I don't know, man. This sounds pretty good.

29:26It sounds like you. So they did like the takeaways at the end. And then at the end, it says, if you're investing in AI. Read the takeaways, because that's bad. Okay. Disruptions happen fast. The AI race is still in its early innings. Diversification is your friend. Market reactions are often overblown. Okay, that's, but the ending here. The takeaway, go ahead. If you're investing in AI, buckle up. It's going to be a wild ride. I'd say it's like 60 % there. No, this is you, dude. The takeaway isn't that. This is you. The takeaway isn't that NVIDIA is doomed or that DeepSeek is the future. It's that innovation is unpredictable and markets will always struggle to price it correctly.

30:02That's the Ben Carlson Grand Rapids hedge. I'm sorry, dude. They got you pegged. You will be obsolete. I don't think I'm ready to lose my job yet. But it's not bad. So I was playing around with – my kids ask questions all the time. And I finally put JetGPT on their iPad and said, why don't you play around with this a little bit? And it's funny. The one thing my daughter wanted to do, she's like, well, what do I ask it? And she asked us some questions and she was kind of bored immediately. And I said, why don't we do a Taylor Swift thing? So she said, all right, because she's big into basketball right now.

30:31I want to write me a song about Taylor Swift and basketball. And ChatGPT did a Taylor Swift song about basketball that, honestly, my daughter and her friend were singing it. And they were like, it was actually pretty good. The way that they were rhyming stuff, I was actually kind of impressed. All right, let's talk about crypto. You know what's funny about the crypto stuff? I think that people say that one of the good things, and they usually say it sarcastically about crypto, is that it's a risk gauge for sentiment over the weekend. Yeah. And I think that if crypto wasn't behaving the way it was behaving, people would probably have been a little bit less freaked out.

31:07Right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. ETH nuked like 20%. It was down 30 % at one point over the weekend. It was down 20 % in a day. So my first take is crypto is not a tariff hedge. I think we can rule that out. Take that off of the hedge list of crypto. But I do think that it does serve a purpose on the weekend. I think one of the reasons that the stock market didn't freak out so much is because crypto did it for them. Maybe. Crypto already did it. What, Bitcoin was down 15 % or whatever? By the way, nobody's saying crypto is a tariff hedge. I know. I know no one said that. But I feel like the crypto people are secretly hoping it's going to hedge one of these things eventually and not just be completely risk on, risk off.

31:47But that's what it is. It's a risk asset. Why would it not behave this way? Exactly. It's a risk asset on steroids. And with leverage. There was$2 billion of leverage wiped out. It was the biggest wipeout ever. But don't you remember the whole narrative of Bitcoin when it first came out was this thing's going to be an inflation hedge? The narrative changed. It's not. Someone plotted TQQQ, which is the two or three times leveraged Nasdaq on Bitcoin. And it basically follows it exactly. Yeah. Right? So yes, it is risk on, risk off. I did want to plug our talker book with Calmos this week. We talked to Matt Kaufman from Calamos.

32:19And when these downside protection ETFs from Calamos came out, there was a story on Bloomberg and a story on CNBC. And I saw people on social media dunking on them and saying like, why would you ever want to protect Bitcoin? And there's one where you can have zero losses, but your upside is capped to like 11%. There's one, they come out today actually, like downside is capped at 10%, but upside is 30%. I thought it was zero and 9%. Is it 11? Either way. And then there's another one that you're capped at 20 % downside, but your upside is 55. And all these people are going, Bitcoin is this huge volatile asset.

32:51Why would you want this? Yeah, the volatility is the point. And our, you and I both, we talked about this before we talked to Matt and we said like, I don't understand this. Let's push him kind of hard on this. And his explanation - You folded like a cheap suit. His explanation, like, so I just, if you've heard of these products, listen to our podcast with him because I think your mind will be changed or at least will give you a different perspective about the reason for strategies like this. And it made way more sense to me than it did just from reading the headlines. Yeah. So it's worth a listen.

33:21All right. There was an article over the weekend or last week that got a little bit of attention. It was the headline is parents ditch 529 plans and embrace Bitcoin for college savings. And of course, you see this and you're like, what the fuck? Come on. No, don't stop. Like, no, college savings, Bitcoin. No. And some quotes from the article. Take Jim Crider, a 35-year-old father of four from San Antonio, Texas, who wants each of his kids to have one whole Bitcoin saved by the time they turn 18. As a certified financial planner, he knows some consider putting all his children's savings in Bitcoin that's risky, but he believes the asset will reach$1 million in a decade.

33:56The opportunity is too good to pass up, he says. And then he said, I think it's incredibly risky to have 0 % exposure to Bitcoin. And I think people see this and understandably their knee-jerk reaction is top. Oh my God, blah, blah, blah. This makes no sense. It's outrage. But like, I still think that Bitcoin is still so, I don't want to say under-owned, like it should be owned by everyone, but it's still like, it's still a fringe asset despite the tens of billions of dollars in Bitcoin ETFs. Most people still don't own Bitcoin. And I think if you're looking at stories like this that are like, you know, admittedly sound like poppy and stuff, I just think it's like, it's not, that's not it.

34:37This also happened, I had a friend's parent from college tell me that saving for college in the 90s was easy because we didn't even bother with 529 plans. We put it in the stock market in our brokerage account, and the stock market went up 20 % every year or whatever. And so I think that's also why these stories happen, because people see the huge gains that you've gotten, and then they think, okay, sure. Do you think this guy is a financial advisor? do you think that does that? I don't know. As a financial advisor, that seems a little risky to me. And a five is in issuing the 529 plan to put your kids college fund into Bitcoin, putting all his children's savings in Bitcoin.

35:14Yeah, it's risky. I'd say I understand like I want to I want my kids doing Bitcoin forever. And I'm gonna start them early. That I can see. But for college savings, to me, I think that that is a leap to do all of it. Yeah, what I would say is not what I would recommend, but to each their own. This is a... I would not have expected that coming from a financial advisor. I guess a young financial advisor, that makes sense, but that's all I'm saying. Okay, Lawrence Hamptill, friend of the program, wrote a great story at Fortune Financial about the implications of an aging household stock. And he looks at the...

35:47Census data provides this. When were the houses in the U.S. built that people live in? And more than 60 % of houses in the U.S. are at least 35 years old. So 1989 or earlier, which is crazy. And look at the number of houses that are still 1939 or earlier. It's almost 12 % of houses were built that long ago. Obviously, there's been remodeling, all this stuff. I do think this is going to be a massive story because I just don't think young people are going to put up with an aging housing stock. Okay, so Ben, I am a shareholder in Home Depot and Sherwin-Williams. It sounds like you want to jump in while the water's warm.

36:24I've been talking about home renovations forever, and I don't know why I don't own these stocks. I'm an idiot. I don't follow my own advice. Guess what? The market's open right now. It's not too late. So I mentioned before, my daughter has been watching Full House lately. She's on like season four. The original? She started with Fuller House, then she's going back and watching the original. So every once in a while, I'll watch an episode with her before she goes to bed. And one of the things I can't believe, well, funny enough, I'm thinking about the fashion at the time, like Uncle Jesse and Uncle Joey have mullets, which are apparently back in style today.

36:52They're back. Yeah, the hairstyle is back. But the, remember when Uncle Jesse starts dating Becky, who, she's the mom who went to jail. I think Becky was everybody's first crush. Yeah, she's the mom who went to jail because of the college scandal a few years ago. Yeah. But she has her own apartment before they get married. And they try to dress it up as like this stylish, because she's like a news reporter, you know, on like the San Francisco Today show or whatever. Oh, and she worked with Danny. Yeah, she was Danny's co-host. But her apartment is just so, They try to make it look like in the 90s it's chic, but it's like pink carpet and green furniture and gold, whatever.

37:29It's just that kind of stuff just would never fly today. And I just think the tastes of young people these days, blame it on HGTV or whatever, are so much – there's going to be a massive remodeling boom if they're buying these older homes. That's my point. Ben, that bobblehead behind you, is that you? It looks like Jack Bogle. It is me. It looks like a young Jack Bogle. The Motley Fool did something and used one of my articles for something and sent me a, I'm even holding my own little book here. Yeah, that's me. Yeah, Full House, what a show. What else are we doing with houses? So I looked at like the equity.

38:09It's just, it keeps going up. It was, I looked at an old piece I did in like 2021 and I was saying like, gosh, home equity is at like$20 trillion. This is crazy. It's at$35 trillion now, home equity. And it's just, look at this. This is the higher, this is like a chart of Nvidia, home equity in the United States. So I wanted to talk about my strategy for renovations because the Axios did this piece where they looked at the median price of home renovations and it's gone from$15 ,000 to almost$25 ,000 pre-pandemic to now. So obviously wages have gone up, materials have gone up and the demand for this stuff has gone up.

38:45So I feel like these people can do it now. So they say the high-end kitchen remodel can run up to$200 ,000, which is just insane, obviously. I have a friend of mine who's doing something like that, and it's wild. But he's like, dude, my mortgage is under 3%. Where am I going? So here's my strategy. So we have some stuff we want to do. I'm thinking about maybe adding an office space for myself at home. Extra mudroom, extra mudroom. We need a bigger mudroom, we do. That's maybe something eventually. My wife is talking about how she wants more storage in the kitchen. Actually, she said, you know what?

39:15I don't need the kitchen stuff yet because I just want to keep taking vacations. That's where I want the budget to go. So kudos to her for not wanting it to have her cake and eat it too. But I think my strategy for renovations is I think the cost of this stuff is just going to keep going up. And if I'm just borrowing from my home equity line of credit to do it, I think I would rather do it sooner than later. Because I think every year you wait, the cost is just going to rise. And yeah, you pay - Did Ben just discover inflation? No, but I think the cost is going to rise more than the rate of inflation is what I'm saying.

39:45I think the increase in this stuff, because I think that the home renovators are going to have so much leverage because they're going to be so busy that they can offer you obscene estimates. And it's going to be like, I don't care. I've got so much work. It doesn't matter. Supply and demand. Is that fair, though? You've done some renovations in recent years. What's your strategy? My strategy is to invest in the home renovation stocks, use the gains. How do you source these things? Because that's something I've never known for. No, but I haven't done any large projects that require like a big chunk of money.

40:26Okay, but you added stairs and like a play space for your kids or whatever in the attic. Like that's a pretty decent sized project. Like we bought our house brand new. And so we've never had to do any full scale renovations. Like how do you even go about finding a person to do these things? I sound like such a noob, but that's where I'm at these days. I guess you ask around. But do you have a contract broker that you use for a general contractor? There should be a contract broker. I know that's how it is. You ask people, like, who do you use? But just specifically, if you're asking me, like, what would I do if I needed to do my kitchen or something?

40:58Yeah. I would take it, I would do a HELOC, no? Yeah, no, I'm not saying how would you pay for it. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do too. I'm saying, like, how do you find the right place to do it? Okay, this is crazy. I would call a friend and say, hey, who did your kitchen? Were you happy with the work that he did? Yeah. The way that I'm going to do it is I'm going to get three or four bids and see where they come in. I'm going to shop around. Yeah, obviously. Yeah. Okay. Well, come on. No offense, but I can see you just taking the first one and be like, eh, fine. That's good enough. You got me pegged.

41:34What, you did your shop around? No, no, no, no, no. The first Mudroom. Didn't we talk about this? I went nuts on the show. The first Mudroom quote tried to give me$40 ,000. Oh no, was it the Mudroom? It couldn't have been$40 ,000. That's insane. It was a quote that pissed me off so much because I'm like, and then I spent 10 grand on the Mudroom, I think. And even that pissed me off when I saw what the actual scope of the project was. Beams, this, that, come on. So I feel like it's like a car relationship. So I'm having a guy do a quote for us from an office. And he said, think about what you want to spend for your budget, but I don't want to give them a number.

42:10I want them to give me a number first. Well, no, I think you have the number in your head. Yeah, so that's the thing. I want to tell them what I want. I want to tell them what I, I don't want to give them a number because I feel like whatever number I have, they'll anchor to it and add 20 % or something. Yeah. Right? So I don't want to, the guys are like, just give us what budget you want. I'm like, no, no, no, no. You tell me what it's going to cost. What's your budget? You tell me how much does it cost. Yes, exactly. Listen, as somebody who climbed out of the passenger door, I think that you're going to get steamrolled.

42:38Okay. No offense. Hey, I'm good at negotiating for my cable bill. And how's it? You know, I ran into somebody recently. This week, actually. Where was it? I was talking to somebody, maybe on the phone. I can't remember. And they're like, was Ben kidding? Or did he really climb out the passenger door? Sadly to say, I actually did climb out the passenger because my kids got in a car and said, why is your door? Why is your seat all dirty? in hindsight i did it make the wrong move yeah yeah okay everyone agrees live and learn i got a good survey for the week okay this is from the national bureau of economic research how much do employees value remote work did you look at this already if not don't look i didn't i didn't okay okay on average what arm this is a big giant survey they did where they said they kind of they had these numbers before they they wanted to look at it in a deeper way what pay cut would Would employees be willing to accept for partly or fully remote roles?

43:34Like versus going into the office all the time. What kind of pay cut would people be willing to accept? 8 % to 12%. 25%. All right, that's not true. I believe that's what the survey answered, but no, that's not actually. When the rubber meets the road, no way. They also said 11.8 % of full-time workers work fully remote. 29 % are partly remote. Does the 12 % number surprise you? Is it higher or lower than you would have thought? That seems pretty high for all full-time employees. That's not just saying white-collar work. I don't know. It feels right-ish. I do think people that have lived through the remote work, I think part of it is if you are already working remotely and you said you have to go back full-time, I think that's when the pay cut thing comes in because if you already tasted that sweet, sweet, sweet remote work, right?

44:26I think it'd be really hard to give it up. And I think you could say like, yeah, I'd take a lower wage to do it. Yeah. Anyway. All right. The Bonaparte's, Doug and Heather, have this subset called the joint account where they talk about money and relationship issues. And they did this thing a couple weeks ago, said, no, we will not ski with you. And they were saying that they've got a lot of peer pressure from friends every ski season. And they said they're not big skiers and it's expensive and it's time consuming. And there's kids have all their stuff going on and they just, they feel the pressure, but they just don't want to be pushed into the skiing thing.

45:00And I DMed with Doug a little bit and I said, I've felt this exact same thing. We have friends who ski. I've never asked you, but are you a skier? Have you ever skied? What do you think? I bet you've tried it before. There's got to be some mountains in upstate New York, right? I've tried it. but I feel like you either grow up skiing and then you're a skier or you're not. So here's the thing. I, I actually Grand Rapids hedge this in the middle. So we moved up to Northern Michigan when I was in fifth grade and there was three ski hills within five or 10 miles of us. And so just for something to do, because we got so much more snow up there, we kind of taught ourselves how to ski, but I was not a skier.

45:35Like if you saw me on the ski hill, you wouldn't go, Oh, that guy's a skier. Like, you know, people have the look that was not me. You know, the, the, the, I did not have the ski jacket and I didn't look like I I had the used skis. They were probably gray, right? They weren't the nice brand. So I skied because it was something to do, but I still remember that, so I started in fifth grade. I retired from skiing in college, and I still remember exactly why it happened. Freshman year of college and Christmas break, four or five friends said, hey, let's drive up to Canada and go skiing for the weekend.

46:05And so we all piled into my friend's suburban and went up to Canada, and we got there and we realized that, oh, the drinking age here is 19. and two of the friends who are huge skiers and had been skiing all the way. They went from ski families, went skiing and the rest of us stayed in the ski lodge and drank beer. And I didn't go skiing all weekend. We just stayed in the lodge and drank beer. And that's the last time I went skiing. I retired then. That was anticlimactic. Sorry. I just, it ran its course, okay? That's all I'm saying. And I just, I didn't, I didn't miss skiing. Like I had a fun time doing it because there's something to do, but I didn't, I wasn't a skier.

46:38So now - So when you say you're getting pressure to ski, like literal or people just asking yourself, saying no. Or they're like, come on, ski. Have some. You know you want it. I want to tell you what… So we just have friends who like go on trips and yeah, why don't you guys ski? It's so much fun. And so my twins are seven going on eight and they got invited to a ski party for someone's birthday and they've never skied before. A ski party? Yeah, like the girl was having… How rich is it where you live? They have a really cheapo ski mountain here. uh so they've never gone and my wife's like what do we do i'm like i don't know tell them they don't ski of course we don't they don't ski we got other stuff going on and so she said no no we're gonna try it so she got them lessons they did an hour lesson and she said oh i guess they're good to go so they tried it and they went last night and so they did the lesson for an hour then they went skiing with a friend and now they love it all right long story short you're you're gonna be ski dad so my wife said why don't we get into skiing again i said i don't want to get into skiing again.

47:36You're going to get skiing. But now that my kids want to do it, I feel like I'm going to be, I'm going to have to, but am I the crank for saying like, eh, I've already, I've, that's already kind of passed me by. I don't need to. No, I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to learn skiing in my mid forties either. Okay. Thank you. I, I stand with Ben. If my kids want me to do it, I'm sure I probably will, but I, I didn't, I didn't have the desire to do it again. I feel like I've, that's part of my life that I've moved on from and not caring. Okay. Anyway. Okay, read this one from The Private Chef. Because we got, I think one of the most proud things I am of this podcast is the fact that we have such a diverse listening audience.

48:14Like every time we write about an obscure topic or a different profession or something, we get an email from someone that says, hey, that's me, or I know about this. Well, it is funny because last week, guys, after concluding the email, I was like, I don't think we've ever read an email that had so little connection with our audience. And we got a bunch of emails from people in the private chef world. So here's one. I would agree with your assessment that this playing field is generally for the 1 % of the 1%. However, I have noticed that my field has grown in demand. I have colleagues that have generally not gravitated towards being a mercenary for hire and have become jet chefs or travel with these clients and their families, including travel with them for extended periods of time to different parts of the country where they have homes.

48:54Having a private chef is more of a flex for new money and a basic normality for people who have had existing wealth. Generally, the old money knows how to work with us, while newer money is often more demanding or particular and treats us almost as any regular service worker. Shout out, Michael. What does that mean? Are they saying that I respect workers or that I would treat them poorly? No, I think that you respect service workers. I absolutely respect service workers. So this is interesting. So it's like the old money probably treats the private chef as more of like a member of the family or friend, whereas the new money is like maybe not as nice or not as accommodating is what they're saying.

49:35Okay. I would assume that old money is just like – they don't even like look at them. They just sort of – they're just like invisible. No, I don't think that's what – they're saying the opposite though. They might be just wrong. Okay. Anyway, they conclude none of us will ever go back to work in restaurants or starting a business with a physical location. And owning a brick and mortar mom and pop shop or even a restaurant or something only 1 % of us even consider doing. And that's because they are either, whatever. So yeah, I guess for chefs, this is like a new line of business because being an entrepreneur is not for most of them.

50:06I think this is the new normal as the wealth gap intensifies. And I agree with that. The other thing is I can totally see being a private chef and not having to worry about the overhead of running a restaurant. Your profit margins are through the roof. I'm sure the, who's on the hook for buying the food, do you think? The chef or the family? Who knows? I don't know. So what's your strategy for getting a private chef? Is this a HELOC too or asset back loan or what? I can't imagine bringing a private chef on a trip with you. That is a serious flex. But those are the families that probably have a nanny and a private chef and a live-in person who cleans the house.

50:45I don't know. that's a world that we'll never be part of, I guess. Oh, okay. Let's do some random thoughts here real quick. So I thought about this because I was reading Howard Marks last week and he calls his updates to clients, he calls them memos, okay? So I thought, oh, that's such a boomer thing to say, memo. I like memo. For millennials, it's called a blog. For Gen X, it's called an update. And for Gen Z, it's called a newsletter. They're all the same thing, but they call them different things. Right? Howard Marks would never say, this is my blog or this is my newsletter. For him, it's a memo.

51:23It depends what generation you're in. Okay, well, this is a good one. On your podcast, you said that we still don't know what to call the aughts. The Brits are calling them the naughties. We got a few people who said this. I don't like it. Yeah, but it sounds way cooler with a British accent. They can pull it off, we can't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, this one tickled my funny bone. Our friend group has been debating this all day. Would you rather hiccup every minute for the rest of your life or sneeze every minute for the rest of your life. Thanks, guys. Love the show. I'd rather die than have either of these, but I think it's an easy answer.

51:51What do you think? Sneeze. Hiccuping is the most annoying thing ever. Okay, I was going to go the other way. You'd rather sneeze? I think hiccuping is just so uncomfortable. Again, both of these are bad. Okay. All right, Ben, you tweeted. Actually, you skyed. How do you differentiate between what you're going to sky and what you're going to tweet? I feel like, you know how comedians sometimes go into the comedy cellar and work out 10 minutes of their show? Oh, I got you. Blue Sky is where I'm working out my new material. Okay. Did this make it to Twitter? I don't think so. Okay. I think the true sign of middle-aged wisdom is realizing how useless all the self-help quote books were in your 20s and 30s, but understanding there will always be a market for that crap.

52:33Spot on, and I want to talk about middle-aged for a moment, specifically mental middle-aged, because I think I'm getting into mental middle-aged, Ben. We got an email. Hey, Michael and Ben. Your brief conversation about filling tires with air caught my attention. And I have a recommendation not long ago. I bought a compact air compressor on Amazon. And it is so convenient. Plug it into your car, set this PSI, and boom. And I said to myself, oh, my god. I have this. I bought this. I forgot I had it. It's only$30? That's a great deal. It's a great machine. Why have I been going to the gas station for two years?

53:09I have this. So I'm like, oh, my god. All right, so. Have you ever used it before? Yes, it's great. I use it all the time in the basketballs. It's wonderful. So I stopped working out with my trainer because my schedule was too busy and blah, blah, blah. This is probably four or five months ago, and I haven't touched the weight since. All right? Still got your Peloton back there? Still got my Peloton. All right, so that's the backstory for this. So last week, I said, you know what? Let me touch those weights. did some, some presses, did a few squats. And the next day I was really sore. And I'm like, wow, you're a real pathetic loser.

53:48Like I didn't do a lot and I really was sore. So I tell that story because I was walking and I felt soreness. And I wanted to call our friend Dan La Rosa, who also uses his trainer and say, hey, I finally worked out, right? So anyway, I call Dan, put the phone back in my pocket. He goes, yo, what's up, dude? And I had to take my phone out of my pocket because I forgot who I called. And I told Dan that and he's like, oh my God, dude. He's like, anyway, what's up? And then I go, oh no, I don't know why I called you. And so for like two hours, I was driving myself nuts. Like, why did I call him? Like, what were we talking about?

54:41Why did I call you? And then later during the podcast with Dan Ives, I like, I stretched, I felt sore. Boom. Remember why I called Dan La Rosa. But it's, that's pretty bad. Okay. So once you finally do lose it and go down the Alzheimer's dementia route, like what we're gonna have to do is record this podcast every week and pretend like it's still happening, but it's not going to be released into the world. because you're going to be so forgetful that we're just going to like me and you have a one-on-one session, like a podcast. Yeah, this was, this was like, uh, I did not feel good about this at all.

55:11It happens. All right. Recommendations. Uh, I mentioned Saturday night. This was a recommendation from Barry. So this was again, a bunch of early Saturday night live stories that they all condense into one. And the reason that I listened to this is because Neil Brennan has a podcast called blocks. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. And he, he, he, he's a big like therapy guy, like, like realized he made a bunch of money and success and he wasn't happy. So he's trying to like work on himself. And so he talks to celebrities about like their biggest blocks. And like, it's so funny because they're all just as messed up as we are more so.

55:43Yeah. More so. And there's a good one with like Ed Helms and Chris O'Donnell, not Chris O'Donnell, Jerry O 'Connell close enough. And so he had one with Jason Reitman, who's Ivan Reitman's son. Ivan Reitman did like some of the best comedies of the eighties. He did ghostbusters. And he talked about doing Saturday night, which is the Saturday night live movie. and the guy who's in Snack Shack plays Lauren Michaels on the show. And then again, they have all the, you know, Belushi and Aykroyd and Chevy Chase. And I don't think you would like it, but like the intensity of the show, like made you feel like how Saturday Night Live probably really does feel.

56:16And it was the very first episode and like how no one thought it was going to work. And I thought it was just very well done. One of the better movies I've seen in a while. People keep emailing us about Snack Shack. I got to watch it. Wait till the summer. Don't watch it now. Wait until it's summertime. time wait till you're going back to your pool then watch it it's a you got to be in the right state of mind to watch it all right that movie here with tom hanks and robin wright is on netflix as well who directed that it was a big director nekis okay that's right i give them credit for taking a swing it was ambitious you know the whole story of the movie is i forget i listened to a podcast but i forget what it was it's literally one camera angle it doesn't move and then it's one room of a house and all the things that happen in this one room of a house over time and it's different people living in this house.

56:59And so it goes back and forth between years, but it also does the de-aging thing on Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. Cause they're, they start out in like they're in high school and I appreciate the ambition of this movie. It wasn't very good. Okay. It, and I think the de-aging thing, it throws me off. It feels like I'm looking at some, it doesn't, it's like Tom Hanks, but they, he looks like a young Tom Hanks, but he looks like an AI version of a young Tom Hanks. It's, it takes you out of it. And so I think this was a cool idea. Not a very good movie. All right. Hard pass for me, right? Definitely.

57:31It just, I'm sure some people might like it. It just, yeah, didn't like it. Okay. I watched a Ben movie and I really enjoyed it. Okay. It's called Good Rich. It's on Max. Michael Keaton plays an older father of twins. He had Mila Kunis in his first marriage. And the premise of the movie is he wakes up, gets a phone call from his younger wife, who checked herself into rehab. And so he is scrambling to become a father of two nine-year-old twins and also repair the relationship with his daughter. It's like a very You movie. And I very much enjoyed it. I might have even cried. Oh, because it's almost like a coming-of-age movie.

58:16Yeah, it's like a coming-of-age movie for like a 70-year-old dad, I guess. It's very good. Don't you think that millennials are going to have more coming-of-age moments as they're older too? I feel like that's just going to be a thing. I don't know. It just seems like a thing that our generation is much more deep and introspective. Okay. I'm going to watch it. I love Michael Keaton. Yeah. Somebody emailed us. We spoke about American Pride and Evil a couple weeks ago. The first battle scene took like a year to film, which is not surprising considering how wild it was. Yes. It was epic. Yeah. Someone said their brother or something, her brother-in-law worked on the scene.

58:53It took forever. and that's a very gory show. Oh my God. I don't know. I have a weird feeling about the show. Maybe this was the intent. I didn't love watching it. It was a lot. I have one episode left. You almost feel bad watching it, even though you know it's probably pretty relatively accurate for how long it was. It was good, just not really a lot of fun. In fact, it was the opposite of fun. It was tough. No, really well done. But yes, you're right. You don't get great feelings coming out of it. All right, good. I'm going to add it to my list. Maybe you should watch Saturday Night then. Nah.

59:30Okay. All right. Animal Spirits at the Compound News. Could we get through one week without nutso stuff happening? Probably not. I think this is just life these days. The 2020s, this is what this whole decade has been. But think about all the crises that we've lived through. Remember the Silicon Valley Bank thing. Like, I feel like our crises these days now all last a weekend. AI is going to be over. Silicon Valley Bank tariffs. Eventually, we're going to have an actual crisis that stays. But most of the things people freak out about now, we move on in two days. It's like, I remember that thing.

1:00:08It didn't matter. Yeah, we freaked out about that. We moved on. Okay, that's depressing. All right. It is, but I think that's just where we are. Okay. Everybody enjoy the week. It's almost getting sun. It's sunny out here. Sunny today. 45 degrees. We turning in corner? Probably not. No, it's still early February. It's freezing in Michigan. This is why you have to come to Miami with us next month. Okay, that's right. All right. We'll see you next week. Thank you for listening.