Trump Coin (EP.396)

25:01I totally agree. So, yeah. So, I think the declines and the recessions have more than been offset by the noise. That's true. Yes. And if we had a recession 40 % of the time for a decade, it was 20-some percent in the 2000s because we had two recessions in that first decade of the century. But I don't think society could go on. We would all just lay in the fetal position to not do anything with our lives. Can't go on. Must go on. Do you remember that episode of Curb? Not really. Okay. All right. What's going on here? You're the money market guy. This is from BarChart. Bank of America via BarChart.

25:38Money market funds just sell their weekly inflow of $143 billion, the largest since April 2020. What is going on here? You don't remember the Beloved Ant episode? I don't think so. Larry put Larry put in the newspaper they misspelled beloved Ant to beloved and I can't say what the word is. Oh okay yes I do good one. So what's going on here why is there so much money we're having all this speculation all this crazy and it's stock market's going nuts. I don't know man this is a this is a head scratcher. I don't have a good answer because rates are falling. Is it just because yields are rising on bonds so people are going, no way, I'm sitting out of bonds for a while.

26:16Is that potentially it? I don't know. There are just some things that don't have answers. So last week saw the largest spike in bearish sentiment from the American Association of Individual Investors. So did people get scared? But it's just so much money. It doesn't add up. No. Yeah. And this to me means more than people getting all bearish on a survey. This is actual dollars. Yeah. I don't have a good answer. Okay, so I have a bunch of weird relationships on email with people who have read the blog or followed our podcast over the years. Okay, what do you mean by weird? There's one guy on my blog who I will occasionally hand up.

26:55I have a typo word here. A pen pal? No, and there's this one guy who the only time he ever emails me is saying, hey, I think you used the wrong word here, or you misspelled this, and all he does is give me advice on my typos. Do you engage? And I was just saying thank you. And I think one time I wrote him back like, hey, man, I really appreciate you giving me this because I can read it 10 times and not see the typo, but you read it once and you see it. And he's very kind about it. He's not a jerk. And he's probably emailed me 100 times over the years. Anyway, there's another one where this guy tried to like, he's a foreign investor from France.

27:28And he emailed me saying that like, I bet that if I just invest in the MSCI All World Index, I'll beat whatever portfolio you could put together or something. And I don't know. I'm like, oh, yeah, whatever, sure. And so every year he sends me an update on this bet that I never really made, but it's kind of funny. You're holding your feet to the fire. Gotcha, asshole. So every year I get this email in January, and he said, this year in the MSCI All World, I was up 29%. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. I said, that's, no, you're not. Oh, he's using his currency? Yeah, so I said the MSCI All World was up 17 % or something last year.

27:59And he said, I'm in France. So I never, I never, I don't know why this didn't come to me. The strong dollar is so good for foreign investors. This is why all the foreign money is pouring in here. A strong dollar. So he was up more than the S &P because the dollar was so strong. For a foreign investor, because the strength of the dollar is bad for U.S. investors investing internationally. Right? That's been a headwind. And we've said that that's actually a potential catalyst for international outperforming is the dollar finally rolls over. But he's saying, no, no, no. The strong dollar has been great for us.

28:31It supercharged my returns because of the currency. I don't really think about that. foreign investors have got to be loving this. Yeah, there's always another side to the coin. There we go. All right. Another one I had ChartKid make for me. So Don't Quit Your Day Job is this website that pulls together all the net worth and income data. And I've used it a lot over the years. It's like different percentiles of net worth by age and by demographic and generation, and all these things. And he has one that looks at the median top 10 % and top 5 % of income going back to like the 1960s. And I plotted this out.

29:12And this does not look like it's inflation adjusted. This is not inflation adjusted. This is but he if you look at my blog post, I did inflation adjusted in there too, or he does at least. But this is crazy to me. We went from$100 ,000 being the top 10 % in 2014 to 150k in 2024. Top 5 % went from 132 ,000 to 200 ,000. And it's not like this is like a shrinking pool of people, it's still the top 10 % and top 5%. That just shows how these goalposts are constantly moving and that yes, these prices went much higher, but in a lot of cases for people, the incomes went even higher than that, right? Top 10 % is up 50 % income-wise.

29:49Well, after the meme coins, it's going to be even higher. I guess so. Obviously, yeah. And if you do look at the inflation-adjusted dollars of these, it's not just inflation. the money has gone further over time. Like the inflation adjusted 1994 level for the top 10 % is like right around 100 grand. And so it's actually 150 now. Think about the composition of individual incomes and the people in that top cohort today versus 30 years ago. That's the thing, it changes, right? It's not the same exact people. The ability for you to make more money today is dramatically higher than it was a couple of decades ago.

30:33Right. People don't stay in that media. Some people do, obviously, but you usually don't stay in the same income cohort your whole career. Because it really used to be doctors, lawyers. Oh, yeah. There's many other ways to become rich these days. Bankers. There's just so many other avenues these days. I think I've mentioned this before. I feel like the 90s, being a doctor was like, that was the thing. That was very prestigious. Right? I mean, obviously, if you go to a dinner party or some sort of cocktail function and there's a doctor there, people still will pepper the doctor with questions. There still is.

31:07There still is. Yeah, oh, your doctor, what kind? Oh, really? And then, yeah, there's some prestige. But it's not like it was in the past. Remember in Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise was a doctor, which is kind of hilarious to think of Tom Cruise as a doctor. But that was the prestigious big job back then. Where do you stand in that movie as a TC guy? uh i it's not watchable it's like watch it one time and that's it i really enjoyed it i only saw it one time but i i quite liked it i've seen it a couple times and i i tried but not one of my favorite tc movies just a little little too out there for me all right a lot of people were sharing this last week the mba is in the job market from the wall street journal the share of job-seeking mba graduates about without a job three months after graduation so for harvard and MIT and Stanford, Duke, Michigan, Chicago.

31:56This is all risen from, it was 15 % or so in 2020. It got as low as like 5 % or 10 % from these. Now it's going back up and it's like, eh, 20 %-ish is the average. And this is three months after graduation. A lot of people were saying, oh, this is a bad sign for the job market. The people who are getting MBAs are idiots, obviously. What are they thinking? This has nothing to do with the job market. I think it's more of a reflection on people not wanting to hire these people. This is more of a reflection from the current environment, I think. And I don't mean the job market. And that's my thinking was, I don't think this, I don't take this as like a terribly bad sign.

32:30And I don't know, if 80 % of your classmates get a job within three months of graduation, that sounds pretty high to me. I don't - I would also like to see this chart zoomed out a little bit, or a lot of it. And they also say that at Columbia, MBAs who land jobs tend to get sizable and play with median base salaries starting of 175 ,000. So to your point, maybe, yeah, maybe companies are just cutting back on hurting those types of roles, but it's still, I don't know, 80 % of the people in these MBA programs are getting a job within three months. That's still seems pretty decent to me. I don't think that's a terrible sign of things.

33:04Yeah. Neither do I. Okay. All right. So Matthew Klein, what a piece for the overshoot where he spoke about a potential inflation boogeyman that nobody's talking about. And it's China. Like, what if China, What if there's a recovery in China? So he shows a chart. The pandemic has forced down Chinese consumer spending relative to prior trends, especially for services such as education, recreation, and healthcare. So this chart is showing Chinese per capita consumption expenditures, especially their spending. And one of the lines is housing, clothing, food, alcohol, and tobacco. So things that are more or less sticky.

33:46And that's been trending a little bit lower. But then he compares it with all the other items. And it looks like it crashed. So discretionary items have just down 20%. Yeah, so the Chinese consumer is in bad shape. So he says, it is entirely possible that the Chinese economy will remain in its current funk and continue to be a net source of supply for the rest of the world, suppressing both demand for physical goods and inflation in the US. But if Chinese policymakers arrest the downturn, much less find a way to get consumer spending and bad business investment back on track, the Fed and other central banks might find themselves having to deal with a new inflationary impulse from abroad.

34:23Definitely not in anybody's parlay. That is interesting. It also is interesting that the U.S. is literally like the only country that took off and spent way more money probably in the pandemic. People cut back in Europe. They cut back in China. We don't stop. We don't stop. Ben, I was at the Dairy Barn yesterday. Do you have Dairy Barns in your town? No. Explain me the Dairy Barn. All right. So you probably do, but maybe Dairy Barn is just the name of the one in my town. It's a little food stand on the corner. At least it's on the corner of one of my roads. And it's like a drive-thru. It's like a mini 7-Eleven drive-thru.

34:57Okay. No, we don't have them. Do you have those? No. Okay. What do you get there? Just groceries? Yeah. They have condiments, eggs, milk, juice, cookies. Stuff that you forgot. Yeah, that's exactly right. Stuff that you forgot. So I forgot to get eggs. So I went to the dairy barn, got eggs and a stick of butter. And he said,$15. And I said, how much? And he said, 15. I'm like, whoa. How many eggs are we talking here? A dozen. he said uh he said eggs cost me seven dollars i sell them for eight he's i'm like they cost you 70 goes i've never this never happened before never paid you know it's usually never above five but it's he said and i'm only taking eight because how much can i charge you guys for uh for a dozen eggs wild right he definitely fudged those numbers a little bit let's be no no no no no, no, no, no, no.

35:55You've maybe been sleeping on the eggs numbers. Eggs are rocketing again. I still think on a per meal basis, eggs are a good deal. If you count two eggs as a meal and you're paying$7 for them,$8, that's a pretty good. No, it is, but eggs should not cost$8 and two eggs is not a meal. Come on. It's funny though, how eggs became the thing. Obviously the price of eggs are very volatile. We've seen this happen. They spike and then they go back down. I think the current one is the bird flu is having a big impact. So it'll pass. But it's just funny how eggs have become the one thing people have lashed onto.

36:28Like, why wasn't it milk or something else like that? Well, because everyone, not everyone, eggs are consumed by a lot of people. But I think the reason people pay so much attention to it is because the price is volatile. Are you a milk drinker? No, I'm not seven. Yeah, okay. There's people that drink milk. Yeah. Yeah, they're seven-year-olds. It's weird. My son, he drinks milk. Yeah. Okay, good news of the week. I filled this one in this week. This is from the Wall Street Journal. I've often wondered how are self-driving cars going to work on the snow? I don't, like, it's really snowy and cold here.

36:59You can't see the lines on the road. How are those sensors going to work? Goodyear says it is rolling out new tech that uses information about the type and make of the tires plus weather information pulled off of vehicle cameras to predict exactly how long it would take to brake in certain conditions. They also said using the front and rear cameras and third-party weather information to determine road conditions, They can take into account the model and age of the tire to create an accurate prediction for how soon a car should start breaking at any given moment. They also said they could create even more accurate prediction if the tires in question were embedded with Goodyear sensors to gauge road friction.

37:31How much are tires going to cost in the future? I just had to get one. They're already expensive. I just had to get one. I drove over a nail and had to get a tire repaired, and it was like, I don't know,$350 for one tire. And they didn't even put it on for me. Bell Tire, thanks a lot. Goodyear, the worst. What's that from? I don't know. They can come. Okay. Somehow our movie references are never on the same. Yeah. We're two ships passing in tonight. I still think that the sensors and stuff are not, like my wife's car, her cruise control will only work if the weather is perfect. If the weather's not perfect, all her sensors lock up and she can't put cruise control on, which is very annoying.

38:10But sometimes the weather looks worse than it is and the roads are fine. I just think that we're going to get a situation at some point. You see this in the South now with whenever it snows, we have people who live in Charlotte and Nashville and stuff that work for us and they talk about how if it snows like an inch, the whole city shuts down. People are going to be reliant on these Waymo self-driving cars in the future and there's going to be bad weather and the whole fleet is going to shut down. Okay. So people that live in areas of snow sort of scoff like, oh, you got an inch of snow and the city shuts down.

38:44However, yesterday – I don't scoff. I get it because they don't have the infrastructure. Exactly. So yesterday, for whatever reason, my town didn't put salt on my main roads and it was a sheet of ice. And like the side streets getting to the main road were a sheet of ice. And so I was slipping all over the place. Like I saw one car almost like do a 360. And it wasn't a big snowstorm. But the roads weren't salted, which is bizarre. But in these southern cities, they probably don't have trucks. They don't have the snow plows. They don't have the dirt. Yeah, they don't have those giant piles of salt to salt the road.

39:20So yeah, the city shut down when you can't drive. Yes. As a northern guy who lives in the north, I'm not going to make fun of the southern people for being wimps when it snows. But it's not that being wimps. I'm kidding. I know. No, trust me. The first time it snows here every year, people will tense up and they drive so slow and then you have to get used to it. All right. I did not realize this. Do you have Sonos in your house at all? Sonos speakers? Mm-mm. So I have a Sonos. You didn't really hear about Sonos so much these days. It was very hot. So listen to this. I didn't realize this. This is from the Wall Street Journal.

39:50Sonos, the company that makes premium audio equipment, rolled out a redesigned app last year that was supposed to improve the user experience and accelerate the company's pace of innovation until one of the most disastrous software updates in recent history of consumer technology. Now, I have Sonos. I just have one of the little speakers. I got it, I don't know, five years ago. And then I have one of the little portable ones. So I don't have a huge Sonos system in my house, right? I put it on in the background when I'm reading or something. But I did notice six months ago, all of a sudden my app was very glitchy.

40:16It was slow. It would like reset on its own. It would not connect. And I felt like, oh, it must be my internet or something. Or maybe the piece, the Sonos one that I have is five years old. So it doesn't work as well anymore. And I didn't think anything of it. But apparently the app was so bad that they said like the, for whatever reason, the software wasn't keeping up with the technology and they had to update the app. and they said people couldn't use basic features. They couldn't access their audio system. And the CEO went out. $500 million market cap is gone. Look at this graph here from when the new app was released and how the company just crashed.

40:49Yeah, not nice. Look at the product. I think it's down 70 % from the highs. And it looked like a meme stock in some ways, but I didn't realize this. So I feel like an idiot for never checking a Reddit board or something to understand why my Sonos app wasn't working. But how is that even possible? This is literally your whole company. Right. And you fumble this badly? I can't even imagine. That's odd. Okay. It was a good product too, but yeah, it feels like a chore when I'm using it now because it takes forever to work. It's a pain in the butt, and it still is. So I'm looking at Apple's stock chart.

41:28It's weird. It went straight up and now straight down. I think you just need to short it and get it over with. No, no, no. Well, no, I'm not. Come on. We're never. One of the great American companies. But I feel like you've been on Apple's corner for a long time. Besmirching the company. I think it's time for you. No, no, no, no, no. Well, yeah, a little bit, but more besmirching the stock price. But speaking of, and besmirching in the sense that. Well, what are you looking at? What are you looking at with the chart? I don't understand why I was up 30 % last year. Nothing happened. So it's down 15 % drawdown right now.

41:59But it's like straight down, which is kind of interesting. But the reason why I even bring up Apple is because, speaking of like software updates, people on the internet have been all over this, but I found it yesterday for the first time. The photo app update, what in the world? It used to be so easy to find pictures. It was month, day, month, year, whatever. Yeah. And I looked at it yesterday. I wanted to show my friends. I was like, what? Where am I? What? This is a blanket statement, but it does seem like that is one of the things that is lacking with a lot of tech companies is just where's the common sense?

42:30Where's the ingenuity, Ben? They have the ingenuity. They're smart. They innovate. The common sense is often lacking. Somebody sent us an email recommending or maybe just shining light on the fact that your knockoff AirPods, Ben, they're garbage. They're garbage. Oh, why? Look at this chart under random. It's called, there's a Reddit engineering porn. Okay. And it shows inside fake AirPods. And it shows Apple AirPods and two counterfeits scrutinized with x-ray vision. I have no idea what we're looking at, but look at it, Ben. Look at it. But the thing is that they last longer than my AirPods. The quality is probably worse, but they still last longer.

43:11Yeah. Okay. Getting back to our income thing. So Lance Lambert interviewed a mortgage broker from Washington, D.C. in Fast Company. And this was interesting because they were talking about how do people, like how they change their threshold for monthly payments. And this guy's saying, my average first-time home buyer now says$3 ,500 comfortable compared to$2 ,000 to$2 ,500 previously. And he's saying like before housing prices rose and rates went up. So this is four or five years ago probably. But wait, hold on, hold on. Do you think that's a function of, I think it's more of a function of how much houses cost versus how much people are making.

43:44Like you just moved the goalposts. All right, that's what they cost now. Listen, so those looking for a family house now say$6 ,500 to$7 ,500. Previously it was$4 ,500. funded. I'm also seeing more people comfortable with$8 ,000 to$10 ,000 mortgage payments than ever. Honestly, in the first 20 years of my career, I don't believe I ever had a mortgage payment offered over$10 ,000. Now I have a few of those each quarter. That's wild. That's so much money. And so you see these numbers and you go, how is this possible? And obviously it is because prices are, but you go, well, who can afford this? And he says, keep in mind in my region, incomes have exploded higher.

44:17I can't seem to meet anyone who makes less than 130K per year. those who used to be considered high income 250 to 300 now make 450 it's just a different world now like that's the only explanation right people are making more money to afford these yeah otherwise how does the economy keep chugging along do you think there's anybody who thinks like when we go back to normal is coming there's a lot of people who think that and it's never there's never happening no no there's no normal this is it there's a new normal shout out to muhammad interesting one from the wall street journal on investors versus homeowners So they say Wall Street thinks U.S.

44:52home prices are overpriced. Housing could be overvalued anywhere from 10 % to 35 % based on how investors are acting. So they say shares of single-family landlords' invitation homes are trading at 35 % and 20 % discounts to their net asset values, according to analytics firm Greenstreet. So you kind of... I dabbled with these back in the day. Oh, man, good thing I got out. These stocks look like trash. American Homes Front is the other one. Yeah, so it's saying the gap of their NAV, like what they own versus what it's worth in the market is widening. It says it's widened by 10 percentage points in the last year.

45:24So there's a big discount. They're saying if you use that to value home prices, home prices are way overvalued. So they're saying - Hold on, but that's a stretch. So these are the rent-to-own companies. Yes. Right? Instead of buying a house, you just rent it from whoever the institutional landlord is. And they're saying like the cap rate is now 4%, which is way too low when you're borrowing 5 % or 6 % or 7%. So it doesn't make sense. All right. So, Benny, are you a buyer? Are you a buyer? No, no. No, but this is the reason why there's a difference between being an investor in homes and being an owner in homes.

45:54Right? Like, you don't have to worry about cap rates when you buy a house for yourself. Right. Right? Where the investors really do have to. So, I don't think this says anything about the valuation of home prices in the United States. It just says it's not a very good time to be an investor in residential homes. I love it. You're spot on. Buying versus investing. Yeah, spot on. Walter Bloomberg. Real person? We'll never know. Tweeted, in December, Redfin said - If he's not a real person, then he is the biggest person at risk of AI replacing his job. Right? Home prices posted their biggest gain in nearly a year, jumping 6.3 % to a median of$428 ,000.

46:40Wouldn't it be funny if lower mortgage rates actually cause housing prices to fall too, for some reason? It seems like the higher rates are only making housing prices stubbornly higher. I don't think that's impossible. It's probably too cute for that. It is. I don't know. I just don't know what stops this train for housing prices. It seems like high rates are good for housing prices because no one wants to move. Low rates should be good for housing prices because it should spur demand. I don't see what the. There's no negative catalyst. Doesn't feel like it. All right. From Eric Finnegan, this kind of ties into our original talk about Gen Z.

47:11Gen Z is the most money centric generation we've ever seen. So they talk about how they ask 12th graders, how important is money and wealth to you? And 36 % say extremely important, where for probably 25 years, it was 25, 26 % and lower. So you had this whole generation of, I guess, younger people coming up that money was kind of important. Now it's all of a sudden taken off and money is extremely important to people. And this actually makes sense to me with the internet and social media and that sort of thing. Yeah. making it mean more to people. I kind of get it. Why this is happening. To your point, no looking back.

47:55No looking back. All right, Ben. Let's speak of... Actually, let's look back. Let's look back. The Wayback Machine. There we go. So Ben, remind people because I think we only do this once. We should do this more often. Yeah, we had a listener of the show who created a randomized chart from any of our past podcasts. And I clicked it this morning, and this one, I believe, from the New York Times popped up. And it was the cumulative monthly job change. We gained 22 million jobs from October 2010 to February 2020, right before the pandemic. And then we lost 22 million jobs in the blink of an eye between March and April.

48:36What a chart. Unbelievable. I think if you ran the historical simulation of that pandemic happening at any point in time historically, I think we are in like the top 99th percentile of outcomes of how good it actually went versus how badly it could have gone in so many different ways. I would say for the economy, yes. I would say the lockdowns in hindsight were not so great. No, but I'm just saying that the whole, how everything worked out. For the economy, yeah. For everything. thing for it could have gone so much worse it could have been it could have turned out to be like the spanish flu and it targeted 30 year olds or something that died but you know i'm just saying that i think it went as well as it possibly could have considering the circumstances all right a lot of dollars to donuts feedback a lot of dollars craig on blue sky says donuts used to be around 10 or 15 cents in the 40s 50s and 60s so it's like saying 10 to 1 makes perfect sense.

49:39That's all we needed to hear. You know what? I might incorporate that into my language from now on. Yes. That's whenever you bet, right? I'm doing a Michael's dollars to donuts parlay. I do feel like I'm not going to say how I feel. But I do feel like this is a Bill's ear. I hope so. That's a fan base. I'm rooting for them. We're all done with Kansas City. Everyone outside of Kansas City, no offense. We're all done with it. It's enough. Yes, I agree. A lot of more people liked my game show idea than you did. You poo-pooed it right away. A lot of people, a lot of people had comments. Listen, I am a market guy, okay?

50:14If the market tells you you're wrong, hand up I was wrong, I guess, because a lot of people were like in support of your idea. And someone said, the game show you mentioned about people being chased through a city does exist. In the UK, it's called Hunted. Drop someone off with cash and told to evade capture for 30 days. They do celebrity versions, which are funny as they go in luxury yachts. Okay, so I guess it does exist. Um, alright. A couple story things. So my kids all are in basketball now. My twins do basketball at the YMCA. So there, it's like a first and second grade team. My daughter is on one team, my son's on another.

50:46So we're there a lot. And so this past Saturday we went there and I don't think that sports venues and sports infrastructure was prepared for millennial parents and the amount of millennial kids that would be born because there are not enough courts. There's not enough fields. There's not enough parking. There's not enough stands. But we go to the YMCA and, you know, there's grandparents there and there's cousins or there's brothers and sisters running around and there's not enough place to sit. And there's just people surrounding the courts. And it's just mayhem. And my wife and I are just like, this is awful.

51:20Great observation. I thought the same thing this weekend, literally. Because the infrastructure is from the 60s. Yes, they didn't build enough parking spot. Like in the past, not as many people came to watch these young kids play sports. like we'd be lucky in the past to get one of our parents to show maybe right now everyone goes the grandparents go there's not enough parking spots there's not enough courts so we end up paying more money for like we sometimes for my daughter's basketball tournaments we pay like 20 a person to go because how does that work good question i don't literally who what is what do you mean you pay when you get there or something how does that work so so they have a tournament at this Fieldhouse or something.

51:57And there's 20 games going on. And each person to get in costs$20. It's unbelievable. Just to watch? Yes. Isn't that insane? She's 10 years old. And we're paying like$90 a weekend. Hey, don't complain. It's going to be$30 next year. Probably. Okay. Recommendations? I got some. Fairly light week for me. Go ahead. What do you got? I got a lot. A Real Pain. this is the Kieran Culkin Jesse Eisenberg movie okay I saw a little bit of this is you and all over it okay totally a Ben movie and at first when I watched it I was going to say Michael don't watch this I think you have to watch this movie say no more I'll watch it tonight okay this is one of the why do you say that alright well it's about two cousins so first of all Jesse Eisenberg wrote and directed this it's like one of the most it's one of the realest movies I've felt in a while like the conversations and it's not over the top at all but it's about two cousins Their grandma dies.

52:55She's from Poland. She was a Jew living in Poland who then immigrated to the United States from Poland. And they go, after she died, she left them money in her will saying, I want you to visit where I was from. Love it. And it's 90 minutes, which is a huge premium for me. Kieran Culkin plays essentially a more sensitive version of Roman Roy, but he was fantastic in this movie. And it was just, I don't know, the whole thing, it was just a very well done movie. It's like really good piano music throughout. It was just like a very beautiful movie. I really, really enjoyed it. You ever see The Squid and the Whale?

53:32Yes. One of my favorites. Very good. Jesse Eisenberg is great. And he's very, in this movie, he's good too. The funny part to me was at first he's driving to the airport and he's talking to, or he's talking about his son, how he loves skyscrapers. And he knows all the floors of the skyscrapers. And this just must be a thing with boys because that's all my son is doing now. all day every day. All he ever wants to talk about since we brought him to the Hancock and I went to the Empire State Building, all he wants to talk about is skyscrapers. The Burj Khalifa is his favorite thing in the world. That's all he wants to go to Dubai for spring break so he can go see the Burj Khalifa.

54:05That's hilarious. Yes. All right. Did you watch Severance yet? Yes. I'm in a holding pattern. I'm going to wait until a few episodes get backlogged. I wish it was a bingeable show. I told my wife, God, I wish I could just binge this show. We watched the finale again. I forgot how good it was because it's been a while. since it's been out. By the way, A Real Pain is on Hulu. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, so you don't have to rent it. Speaking of finales, the finale of Landman, they landed the planet on Excited for Season 2. Jacked up. Okay, good. We're halfway through. I will pick up. Conclave is on Peacock.

54:37You heard of this one? I have to finish it. Okay. I love Ray Fiennes. One of the best. My wife and I commented on this. He is one of the most believable actors of his generation. One of the best. Every role he plays, you believe him as this cardinal. Right? Yes, I guess it's one of those. It's a film. It's probably too long, but it's just extremely well done. Yeah, good stuff. Finally, American Primeval on Netflix. Have you heard of this one? Oh, I forgot. Yeah, actually, I watched the first episode last night. Super violent. Super violent, very gritty. Pete Berg did it. He's the guy who did Friday Night Lights, and he has Taylor Kish in it, who is Tim Riggins.

55:17Which character is that? Taylor Kish? Yeah, the guy with the long hair.

55:24who should have been a bigger movie star for some reason and just wasn't. I think it's because... Oh, you know why? It was John Carter. Yeah. Another one. My son loves that movie. But yeah, it has a field of revenant to it. But when you watch a show like this, because I guess it's kind of historical fiction, because it is about the Mormons coming and Brigham Young. But do you get the sense that like, man, I know we've talked about this in the past, but how awful would it have been to live during that time? I just think about how bad everyone smelled. Yes. Everything is so dirty and smelly and like, oh, this guy says something I don't like.

55:56Dead. I'm going to kill him. Right? Just no like, there's no like squaring up like in a fight video on the internet now. It's just like, no, I'm going to shoot you in the head. That's it. I don't agree with you. You're dead. But the fact that people still, because this is the Howard Linsen point earlier about people were getting killed in the past, but they still went west anyway. that they still had this hope to go west despite the conditions being so awful and taking God knows how many weeks to ride a horse and carriage through the rough terrain to get there. Yeah, there's no stopping progress, even though at times, like, there's some dark stuff out there.

56:32Yes. This is a wild one, Ben. Really, really, really. Really and truly. A wild what? Weekend with the Trump coin stuff. And then Melania coin. Oh, we didn't even talk about Melania coin. The thing is, you said this is the craziest thing you've ever seen, but I don't know. for some reason this stuff doesn't it doesn't like there's no shock value anymore. Like I guess I'm not surprised by this stuff at all. They launched Melania coin on Sunday to nuke Trump coin. Boy that's got to be a weird like bedtime conversation. Like let's check the market caps to see which like between husband and wife. Which one of their meme coins is worth more these days.

57:05But don't you think that every influencer on the internet is going to want their own meme coin now? Just for like cash A and Yeah. All right Ben.

57:17stay warm, I guess. I hear it's cold out there. It was negative eight wind chill. The thing is, getting back to being wimps like on American Primeval, like I hit the automatic starter on my car and I get in the car and my heated steering wheel is on and my seat has got a heater on it too. And I don't drive a luxury vehicle. I drive a Ford Explorer. And we are so much more spoiled than people were in the past. So it's much easier to handle than it was. If you're an advisor, check out the Unlock. advisorunlock.com we'll have more of that coming in the weeks and months ahead anything else to plug nope Naples etc alright animal spirits at the compound news.com thank you for listening stay sober have fun but not too much fun we'll see you next time it's gonna get crazier it's gonna get crazier

58:14Bye.