Americans Love Borrowing Money (EP.326)

Today's show is brought to you by FM investments. Ben, you know it's been hot this year? Okay, bonds. Good guess. Bond funds have taken mutual funds and ETFs have taken in $9 trillion a year to date. Today we're talking about FM's opportunistic income ETF, the ticker is X-Fix. We talk all the time about how difficult it is to outperform the S&P 500, right? Just a cap with an index. I'm not saying it's easy to outperform a bond fund because it's not, I couldn't do it. But there are some levers that you can pull that aren't nearly as complicated as the S&P 500 or a stockpicking. For example, taking a little bit more credit risk, generally works out over long periods of time. What increases your yield potentially increases your long term return. So X-Fix is a concentrated portfolio. They say they hold 22 positions right now. They expect it to be 20 to 50. They're looking for higher yield. So they say they're portfolio yield to worse, which is kind of a conservative estimate of yield based on call options and all this stuff. 6.8% versus the US Ag, which is 5.17. So it's more credit risk, but a higher yield and they're looking for X-Fix as a fixed income-sleeping portfolio. To learn more and of course, please do your own dediligencies or not recommendations to buy or sell, but for more, visit FMETFs.com. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Redholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Redholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. We're working through some noise in the background, so forgive us as we get through this Ben, what's going on in your office? My whole office flooded like two weeks ago and I'm like an island here and they're fixing every office and section around me. So there's a, if you look at it in a construction zone, but we make do. How did you get no off, no water in your office? Did you use like the Instagram sticky pad guy? I don't know if it's an Instagram thing, but I honestly have no idea. Ever use one of those things? Do they really work? No, I've never tried it. I mean, it's only 1999 and we'll give you another one for free. I was talking, I think over Rochdenner about how all of these things that you see on the internet, they never work as advertised. When you see something and you're like, oh my god, like for example, I once saw somebody on Instagram like, oh, you're eating a pineapple the wrong way. The way that you're supposed to eat is you're supposed to like pluck the pieces out. Do you know I'm talking about? Like those little patterns, you're supposed to just pluck them out. I tried to pluck, you can't pluck it out. Yeah, there's a trash bag one too where you like, you do something the trash bag and it's supposed to go in easy. I tried it. It doesn't work. Nothing works as advertised except future proof. And you know what? I want to stick my hand up and apologize. I don't, I think we under-promoted it. And now I know we spoke, I shouldn't say that because we did talk about a lot. I don't think I under-hyped it and I'm not quite sure why. I was an absolutely pounding the table on what I knew but what the listeners couldn't. So again, forgive me, would be the absolute best conference of all time. And it lived up to my internal expectations. We had a blast last year. I thought last year went really well. But this year was the way I analogized it is having your second child, there's just way less stress going into it. You know what to expect. But it's also like you know the good of the bad. And I think this one was way less stressful. And I think that actually made it better and plus people knew what to expect. And there was, first of all, more people. I think a thousand more people or something. There was 50% more space outside. And last year was amazing. This year was like five times better. It was, it was hard to, hard to overstate how much positive feedback we got from people on it. And it, it just was the best. It was so much fun. Let's talk about the good and the bad. And now that it was fun, it was value-add. I said to a bunch of people, if you can't derive economic value, not just fun. If you can't derive economic value out of future proof, you need to change industries. So Ben, you mentioned the good and the bad. The good, for me, seeing all the people that, that are fans of ours, whether it be in the new well shirt, come up to us is really a thrill. Not something that we take for granted, seeing all those people. The live animal spirit show was so much fun. When I said that was, that was a blast. I said, what was, what was the trigger to get you out here? And they looked me like, you, what do you mean? Like we're here, we're here because you and Ben. And so that was amazing. I had a bunch of people on our team like, is this too much for you? Like I know you're not the most, you're not exactly a social butterfly. How have you all these people come up to you and talk to you? And I love it. We had to do a lot of small talk. I love it. But here's, here's what I don't love. And I'm not talking about you if you're listening. This is about somebody else. But the universal signal for thank you, great talk, who do the conversation is over is when somebody goes to shake your hand, right? All right. Thank you. Great meeting you. Hey, you do the nice to meet your shake hand. Then you go, hey, great meeting. You'll see you later shake hand. Yeah. No, it's this is the great, great to meet you see you later. When, when people don't respect the universal language of this conversation is over, it could be a bit frustrating. But I'll take it all to the long. Another bad thing that I, that this is just, this happened to me twice. And it's supremely awkward. At least to me, it is. I don't know if the other person buys it awkward. You know when you hug somebody and you touch ears, but one time, one time I, my ear, we touched ears so hard that it was like a suction cup. I don't know that I've ever touched anyone's ears before in a hug. I don't hug them and touch the ear at the same time physically. I'm just saying ear to ear when you're ears touch. Okay. I did have a few. I mentioned I had a few high five to fist fist. That's okay. But I mean, I had a number of people say, hey, is it weird that it feels like we know everything about you guys because you talk about yourselves and the podcast and you're right about stuff. And the funny thing is that sometimes I think we forget that there's other people on the other line of this. So like seeing so many people who watch our show or listen to our show, I thought was, was really, really fun. I, I thought it was cool. Well, I don't, that's, that's, that's not lost on me or the right way to phrase it. That's not, I'm not surprised. Because, and I've said this before, I grew up listening to Howard Stern like my entire life. And one of the brilliant things about that show and there are lots of them is that you developed a relationship, not just with Howard and Robin, but with all the characters, whether they be whack-packers or staff members like. And even though you don't know these people, you, you, you do know them in a sense. Another thing that was great about Future Proof, breakthrough. Now, people don't like to flirt with strangers at a conference. Oh, what do you do? I mean, some people are better than others. But what breakthrough did was it facilitated flirting for lack of a better word. 15-minute meetings. Someone said it should, it's finance for Tinder. It's Finder. Exactly. It's opt-in. And if you sit down and you're already, you're not vibing with somebody. Guess what? It's almost over. It's only 15 minutes. So that was, that was just universally loved. And the fact that we were able to do it economically where people got like travel vouchers in order to participate, what a win-win-win. Yeah, it was not only advisors meeting with vendors and FinTech providers, but it was, I talked a few people who were like, I'm a college student trying to break into this business. And I took 10 meetings with people to learn about how they got into the job. And again, it's a 15-minute meeting. And they found value out of that. So that was, yeah, that was the one unknown we didn't do it last year, which was, which is really cool. The best part about it is, too, we're doing this again next year. I think they've already got the dates locked down in mid-September again. You even said this time around. It seemed too short, almost, because we were having, we were, it was such a good time. We were having so much fun. And you're right, just amazing conversations, great food, drinks, the content, the speakers, all this stuff. I sat and watched Bill Gross in a pool towel as he went at Jeff Gunmark. And it's just, it's such a laid-back event. And the thing is, everyone is in a good mood. There's no one like, there's no turd in the punch bowl there. There's no, no, no one trying to ruin it. No one trying to speak bad of other people or anything. It's all just, everyone was collectively in a good mood. I think that helps being on the beach. People were willing to talk. And it was such a huge, diverse crowd. And yes, just, you're right, we might have under hyped how great of an event it is. And I think it blew away expectations again. All right, on the show, on the live podcast last week, I told the story, and I'll rehash it very quickly for those that missed it, about, about an email exchange that I had. And here's how it went. I was introduced to buy an investor to a company that they're considering investing in. And I messed up, hand up, I forgot to respond. So seven or eight days later, which I didn't feel good about. I said, Hey, I'm so sorry I dropped the ball. I can meet Tuesday at this time, front at that time. The response that I got was a nine days later. Hi, Michael. Now it's my turn to drop the ball, dot, dot, dot, apologies, dot, dot, dot. And I pulled the audience. Now, maybe I'm a jerk, I'm a New Yorker, which I guess I'm repeating myself, what? I think you're, you're a scorned lover. Like you got burned once on a bad email or two. And now you assume it's like you got broken, you had a terrible breakup. And now you assume that like every, every relationship is going to end like that. You think all email exchanges are bad. Now you're not giving people the benefit of your scorned email lover. So I tried to be mature. At first, whenever the email, my blood pressure, I felt my blood, you know, warming heating up because I got very angry. I said, how, how passive aggressive, aggressive, just obnoxious. And so when I, when I asked the audience, show my hands, how many people are, you know, have my reaction. I'd say it was about, I don't know, a third. Most people thought, most people thought that, you know, she was just joking or whatever. And it's funny. I, I, it's very sort of polarizing because I told one, I told the story again at the Russian on a dinner table. And some people were coiled like, oh, how obnoxious. And other people are like, I don't get it. She's trying to be funny. All right. So I took the meeting. And I'm about to, I'm about to reveal. But I think that dot, dot, dot, there's a lot of meaning there. It can mean all sorts of different things, but it's never, it's never unintentional. So Breeze Hall. Some people are just bad at, at, at even sir. That's what it is. So Breeze Hall of the New York Jets is a great player. He's a running back. And he touched the ball. He got four carries on Sunday afternoon as he got their butts with by the Dallas Cowboys. And so Breeze Hall after the game tweeted four footballs, dot, dot, dot, which I'm told is an ellipsis. That's what the dot dots are called. So there's meaning behind the dot, dots, dots. She said, now it's my turn to drop the ball, dot, dot, apologies, dot, dot, dot. So anyway, I have the call. You're not like holding that and you're willing to move forward. Definitely not. Well, listen, I gave the benefit of the doubt because I swallowed my, my anger. And I sent the email, happy to meet. And these are Jersey people, not only the New Jersey, they could be New Yorkers. Given how the conversation went, which was fine, it was intentional, positive, final verdict, 100%. It was not a joke. It was 100%. You're going to, you're going to respond late to me. I'm going to respond late to you and use the exact same language that you used. It was not funny. All right. It's a good thing. People in the East Coast aren't petty or anything. That's at least we've learned that. All right. No, we definitely let things go. All right. I've got a question for you here. This is from Montevator posted a, an excerpt from Felix Salmon's new book, The Phoenix Economy. You've had, I think you've had Felix on compound friends before once or twice. I want to get your take on this because I think I could see people going either way. So he said, you might think everything is weirder and more unexpected than it used to be and you are right. It turns out with hindsight, there was this very unusual period of calm for about 70 years from 1945 to 2015 and 2016 happened. Wait. Can there, I'm sorry. Can there be unusual period for 70 years? Doesn't that just turn into usual after, I don't know, 40 years? Go ahead. True. So his whole thing, and he says, for most of the 20th century, we lived in a world where someone like Warren Buff could come along and with one big idea and say, I'm going to make a big bet in America being great. And that one big bet will always be true. It's going to make me the richest man in the world. This is not the world we live in anymore. The world living is more unpredictable, much fatter tails, much higher up sides and lower downsides. We need to be numbered and navigated. Do you agree with this at all that we did have this period of calm and that now things are different? Yes. Well, yes and no. I think, I think there was, the world was always chaotic, but it was more regional and the internet and social media especially has sped up the spread of news of fake news of, so things travel faster, people are quick to react. So yeah, I mostly agree with this, even though there's always been chaos in the world. I don't know, from 1945 to 2015, we had the Korean War, JFK was assessed in A to Vietnam, 70s inflation, cold war, Cuban Missile Crisis, 87 crash, 9-11 dot com bubble, great financial crisis, European debt crisis. I don't know. I still tend to agree with Buffett's line of thinking that I'm going to make a big bet on whether it's America or the global economy. I'm still willing to make that long-term bet, and I don't think you're going to be feel bad if you make that bet. Well, I don't think those two things are contradictory. I think both things can be true. So during those events that you had described, I remember 11 minutes to midnight, I think it was about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and there was some sort of event that happened three days later and the country still didn't know about it because the way that news traveled. And maybe during Vietnam and the 70s inflation, people came home and learned about what was happening on the news. And it wasn't real time, and there wasn't people shouting and screaming. But that doesn't mean that the world is necessarily more unpredictable. It just means that people know about the bad stuff more than they did in the past. People could live in a bubble in the past and go along with their day and not realize. I remember I got an email from I wrote about the 1987 crash a long time ago and someone wrote me saying, listen, I lived through 87 crash. I learned about it on the radio on my way home from work. That's my point. It was much easier to tune out the noise 40 years ago because there wasn't as much noise. Here's like the positive side of this. So someone sent me this tweet. To your point about markets moving faster, there was this Keralan fishermen. It's like these remote islands in India or in the Indian Sea or something. Indian Ocean, one of those. Is it still an ocean? Are they still is it like is Indian Ocean like is it like Pluto where they decided it's not an ocean anymore? That's an ocean. Okay. So there's this research paper done and they show before and after mobile phones and it shows the prices of fish. So look at these look at this graph here. And there's three different regions like three different islands and they show the volatility of prices before phones are added. And this is just regular cell phones, I think, which gave them access to more information. And then the prices after the phones were added. And there's this huge decrease in price dispersion and volatility in the prices of fish and they're saying just the introduction of information completely made this market ten times more efficient, which I thought was just a really interesting way of thinking about markets. If you look at the 30-day volatility of the S&P 500, over time, you would see no difference between today, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. However, and I can't prove this, but maybe somebody can. If you were to look at like intraday volatility, I bet you that things moved quicker today than they did 40 years ago. I would feel pretty good about that. That makes sense. I agree with that. I just I thought, is it like the speed of information, how it changes stuff? You're right. It probably makes things more uneven in the short term because things happen immediately and they get immediately priced in and sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad. Well, so is this Felix's quote or which one? So the text that you have there, is that directly from his book or is that somebody writing about it? Yes, that's from his book. All right, so when he says we need to be nimbler to navigate it, the world which has fatter tails, higher upsides and lower downsides, I don't think investors need to be nimbler. No. I think in fact, probably the opposite view is right here. Just because the world is moving faster doesn't mean you need to run to keep up with that. And there's only more competition at a short end. Like if you're, this is a member that when the high frequency traders were a big story for a while and there was the Michael Lewis and and people thought, this is unfair. I'm getting screwed. Like the the solution there is not to try to compete with high frequency traders. It's to go the opposite way and be more long-term thinking and get away from that as much as you can because you're not going to be looking to compete with them. Josh had a great take on this. He said the way to be at a high frequency trader is to be a low frequency trader. Yes. Is Michael Lewis in a bear market? That book was not very good and it sounds like Sam Bankman freed. I can't fault him for that. I'm just throwing it out there. I'm not. And Michael Orr's stuff. I'm just asking. I'm asking questions. Is he in a bear market? It's a fair question. It's a correction at least. I love Michael Lewis. He's in a correction. He was overbought. All right. This golden sex chart here. Hey, can you tell him to drill a little bit louder? They literally started as I was about to start this podcast. Hey, we work through the elements here. It sounds like this is, but this is what it sounds like outside my hotel room every time I come to New York City. It's like a camera outside of the window. Play the field as a wise. Yes. How do you go? Where did it? So you see this? What did you want to do? Which Adam Sandler would you say was no good last week? Just Billy Madison? You didn't make any happy Gilmore slander, did you? No, I don't know. Okay. Just making sure. So JP or a golden sex has this chart. I think I found this from the chart book, which you recommended to me. It has like 30 charts every day. Daily chart book is gold. So this from golden sex and its household allocations to stock bonds and cash. And you can see the equity one in the late 60s, early 70s and 80s just completely drop. There was a higher allocation to cash for basically the entire 1980s and all the way through 1991. So there was a higher allocation to cash from 1970 to 1991. 20 years or something more cash. Now a lot of people would say, well, of course, CD rates were higher. Money market rates were higher. Inflation was higher. Stocks went a bit of market. Stocks went nowhere. I also think there's something to the fact that and people look at these numbers as a valuation tool sometimes. Jesse Livermore had the piece like the greatest single predictor of US value or outcomes was like these allocations. Like the allocation to equities is higher. Future returns are going to be lower. I think that relationship has broken. That's my whole point here. So I said, I think in the past, people just A didn't know is much about long-term stock investing in B. You didn't have things like 401Ks and IRAs and zero commission brokerage accounts. Now some people look at this and say, hey, wait a minute. What about the 50s and 60s when allocations to equities are higher? Yeah, what about the 50s and 60s? I mean, come on. So here's my trivia question for you. In 1953, what percentage of the country owned stocks in some form? 12. 4%. Yeah. It wasn't really until the 60s it took off a little bit from mutual funds and the nifty 50 stocks. But it really wasn't until the early 80s when we had 401Ks and IRAs and a lot of it is baby boomer demographics kind of lined up with that perfectly. People just didn't, the stock market was this thing that was kind of over to the side, especially for the middle class. It just wasn't something that most people had their money in or spend as much time thinking about as we do today. I think that this equity allocation should probably say higher for a lot longer. I think it just will. Yeah, I don't see a famous elsewhere. I don't see any scenario where equity allocation just plummets. Like are people really going to be like, you know what? I'm swinging my 401K to cash. Yes, yes, exactly. You know what? I'm sorry. We had, we had the I would say, I would say immediate would have to strike earth. Guess what? It did. We had COVID. Yes. Now, I know it was short lived in more money went into the stock market in that period, which yeah, people learned now will that drove valuations higher probably future returns will be lower. But I don't really find much signal here. Yes. I don't think so anymore. So this chart was making the rounds a little bit from John author at Bloomberg. And it shows that US small caps have had a 22 year low relative to large caps. And it's saying small caps have kind of taken out of the chin. For some reason, this goes back to 911, which I don't know, I guess there must have been something happened then in terms of the market, obviously, but I think that's what I mean, small caps. Anyway, small caps took off from there, I think, in the value, but I looked at this. So this is this is a ruffle 1000 or Russell 2000 going back to 2009 11 of 2001. Annual returns in that time. Violet, this is, I think this is an inception of the IWM ETF maybe. Oh, that could be it. That makes sense. Oh, wait, but it started on 911. That's odd. Okay. So annual returns since 2001 for Russell 1000, which is large caps, 8.9% for Russell 2000, 8.2%. That's actually way closer than I would have assumed if you think about what's happened. So 8.9% to 8.2% annual returns is 2001. If you think about how dominant the large caps stocks have been, and especially the tech space, the fact that over the last 20 plus years, small caps have more or less kept up is kind of a surprising because large caps have dominated for 15 years now. How do we square that circle of your chart versus that's what I was trying to figure out because what this is showing is relative value. And it shows that small caps for the 2000s outperformed pretty heavily. And then now they've underperformed. So if you mash those two together, outperformance and underperformance, you get basically the same return. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. All right. So yeah, you're right. So what this is showing is that all of the relative outperformance from 2000 to the relative outperformance peaked in 2011. So small caps beat the crap out of large stocks from 2001 in the decade 2011. And then the next decade, large caps beat the crap out of small stocks. But over the entire period of time, they're not so far apart. And I actually think it's impressive to me that I would have thought small caps got beat by a much wider margin than this because large caps have done so well in recent years. So I this actually kind of surprised me. But I that's what I was trying to do is square this other chart. Okay. Ray Dalio at some milk and institute summit said he doesn't like bonds. I don't want to own debt, you know, bonds and those kinds of things temporarily right now. I think cash is good. And I think this is this is the problem with listening to hedge fund managers for investment advice. He's he's making like a short term call. And I think this is the the edge you have as a long term investor getting back to our our first point here. You can have the ability to invest in bonds that have 5% rates and and maybe rates go a little higher here and you can you can sit on those short term losses and be fine with the knowledge that you're locking in higher long term rates. But a hedge fund manager might not be able to sit through that in well for three to six months. Maybe that's can underperform. So I think that's that's like the edge you have as a smaller investor is the ability to not have to think like a hedge fund manager. Totally great. All right. So this seems to me to be rational behavior. Draw from Bank of America money market funds on course for a record 1.5 trillion dollar inflow in 2023. So it shows inflows outflows from 2007 to today. And then it may recreate the same chart with treasuries and 2022 and 2023 for treasuries. People are rightfully piling into those higher yields even as the principal at least from 2022 is probably still in the water. It is kind of wild though how big the inflows of treasuries were in 2022 right. Treasuries got crushed last year and there was a ton of money that went into them. I guess people trying to catch up on them there. Good color coding in this chart too. Yeah. Yeah. Looks good. All right. Franklin one of our advisors to this on our channel had a great chart. So a lot of people are rushing into money market funds as I don't know if as they should is right way to phrase it. It's rational right. It's rational. The SB 500 is up what year to date. 15-16 percent. Something like that. As money piled into money market funds. So Franklin's making the case that whether it's money market funds or CDs they're using CDs. So the peak CD rate where people have the mentality of why would I take risk him just going to buy. I'm just going to lock it up lock up the guarantee return. They show 1984 in 1989 95-2006 in 2019. And then they show one year forward return after the CD rate peaked. They show the following returns of short term bonds, municipal bonds, core bonds and investment grade corporate bonds. And this shouldn't be surprising. I mean it's almost by definition. Once rates peak they do what? They either go sideways or come down. So it's not totally surprising that bonds would outperform. But I think more people are inclined at this point to buy CDs or money market funds over bonds because there's no volatility in the former. However, the Fed is probably done? It depends. Maybe. Here's my take with this chart though. I would say if you're going to every allocation decision is timing the market. So the whole like never time the market thing is is a little too much here. But if you're going to time the market based on rates, obviously you you don't know when the rates are going to peak. So good luck trying to figure out when that happens. But it's better to time the market within an asset class than between asset classes. So if you're trying to time the market by taking all your money out of stocks and then putting it into CDs or treasuries or tables, that could be a risky proposition because then you're you're trying to catch a bottom in stocks. You're trying to catch a correction. And if rates have peaked and they fall and the stock market takes off, you're screwed. But if you're trying to time within fixed income, it's not going to be as much of a problem for you. I don't think because you can you you understand the yield better and the dynamics there. And if you miss out on some gains in fixed income because yields fall, I don't think that's as big as a deal is missing out on a massive stock market rally. Yeah, I agree with that. All right. So on the one hand, you've got money market funds taken in seven trillion dollars here to date. This is ETFs and mutual funds. Bonds have taken a nine trillion dollars. The US equity outflows of 14 trillion dollars. Hey, wait a minute, Ben. I thought that, hey, wait, actually, I'm confused here. It says mutual fund and ETF inflows and outflows. Oh, no, I'm sorry. This is the size of the market. I apologize, right? So the US equity market is 14 trillion. No, it's bigger than that. Oh, maybe the US fund and ETF market is 14 trillion dollars. Okay. That makes sense. And there's been 17 billion dollars of outflows. Excuse me. That's right way to read this. There's been 17 billion dollars worth of outflows. So the S&P is up. Yeah, 17% this year. All right. So money's becoming out and piling into the safety. So you've got that dynamic planning out rational behavior. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you've got gambling. I don't know what else to call it. The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece. I continue to believe that the flow situation is going to be screwed up if we're talking, especially individual retail investors by the boomers, because they have so much of the money that it makes so much more sense for them to put money, take money out of stocks and put it in and have that glide path and go more into money markets and bonds and CDs and those sorts of things as they're retiring. I agree with you. I think if you broke this down by age cohort, it would tell its story. So that's a good point. All right. Amateurs pile into 24 hour, 24 hour options. It's just gambling. Ben and I spoke about the zero-day expiration phenomenon. Last week on the show and the fact that it's actually. Amateurs doesn't, is amateur just sounds mean, doesn't it? When you call us meant an amateur. Yeah. I prefer, I prefer civilians. Okay. Individual investors made up 27% of all activity and options as of June up from 23% at the start of 2020. I wonder what this was a decade ago. I'm going to guess it was under 10%. So average daily volume of options is through the roof and the share of all options, volume that expires in five or fewer days. Also, it's almost 50% of all options, which is wild. Some questions. I think there's a bigger loss rate. Trading short-term options or parlays for Fandall. Because I had an asset compound last week, someone asked us, should I take money out of my retirement account and put it into my sports book and because I think I can beat the system. I have to imagine it's you're probably better off on options than you're on parlays. Well, I bet my butt off. By the way, can I just give a shout for Sunday ticket on YouTube? It is over stimulation at its finest between that and betting. It's that's my that's my idea of fun. So you know what? I got for the first time. I'm way, way past the the fact that the expiration didn't have said I haven't done this before. I'm probably the last person on earth, but AT&T, my cable provider, which I negotiate with every year and get a lower deal. You know what they said? You know, they said to me this year. I think they're trying to keep people around for some reason. Hey, listen, just because you're you're a valued customer, here's NFL red zone and for free this year. We didn't have the NFL red zone. So I had it for the first time. It's amazing because there are so many damn commercials when you watch a football game. I feel like it's getting worse. Scott Hansen is a national treasure. Anyway, getting back to the point of parlays versus options, I bet they have a similar loss rate. Although not to brag, I hit a few over the weekend. No big deal. Oh, I did take it on the chin week one. Freakin Vikings, unbelievable. Okay, a study by finance experts at the London Business School estimated that most individual traders options in excuse me, most individual options trader lose money. Yeah, no shit. Between November 2019 and June 2021, such investors nashed losses of some $2.1 billion with the hits concentrated shorter data trades. They got quotes from this guy, an organ entrepreneur. He said, quote, I've been addicted to this option stuff for quite some time. You get hooked. But however, he does most of his options trading on Robin Hood and what he considers his quote gambling account. You now have the power to gamble in your pocket, but he said his long term investments are with another brokerage. Sorry, I'm okay with this. Yeah, as long as you look at it as a form of entertainment and gambling, that's then sure you've got your head on the right, right path there. Yeah, I think that's absolutely fine. If you want to have fun and gamble and spend the wheel and lose some money and it's such a thing. Hopefully that's most people. I really think it is. I think most people are not yolowing their life savings. I've never traded an option in my life. You haven't lived. Are there people that are trying to get rich and be irresponsible? Yeah, of course are. But is that the majority of these like drunken fools? I just don't think that's. I guess what the drunken fools lose their money pretty quickly and they're gone. Yeah. Yeah, all right. Defiance ETFs is launching a fund on Thursday that sells ultra short data to options of the Nasdaq 100. How about that? The product will be the first in the market to utilize zero days to expiration contracts. The fund will write puts to generate income. The ticker is QQQY. What's the point here? Will they get a decent amount of income because there's so much volatility? I think they're trying to generate more income because they're selling more contracts. I don't know. Okay, but the income has to be lower on these though, then longer-dated options because of volatility, right? I hand up options new here, but that makes sense intuitively, right? The income would have a little lower. Yeah, there's more juice. I would think this is like the T bill of. You know, I mean, why do we take the CFA exam? It's been a while. Give us a break. But this is the T bill of call option selling if that's a thing. Sure. Someone can explain this to us. Okay. The three-month 10-year treasury curve has been inverted for a record, 212 days. That was from Bloomberg. This chart's from Callie at Itoro. Who we saw at future proof? Callie Cox. Callie Bost. Callie Cox. That's her handle. No, her. Although, I'm confusing it. Her name says Callie Cox, but her at. No, her at is Callie Cox, but her name is Callie Bost. She got married and now it's Cox. We cracked the code. All right. Well, she puts out great stuff for her. This is what her actual name is. The spread between the two-year and 10-year yield, the classic for session indicator, has been negative for 313 straight-training days. All right. Here's what I want. Here's what I'd like to see. I'd like to see credit spreads mixed with inverted yield curves. I don't know if I'm sure someone has done this because credit spreads are still very tight, right? They've not blown out. I want to see, because people always say, well, this stuff acts with the lag because it's when a yield curve inverts 15 months later, that's when the recession hits. That is like the average, like 15 to 18 months. But I want to see when does the credit spread stuff start blowing out? I feel like that's your key here, right? You know what? This is the opposite of transitory, right? Inflation was transitory. Well, no, it wasn't. Well, now this is the opposite. It's like, well, this acts on a lag. It's coming. It's coming. Oh, yeah, one. Maybe it is. Maybe it's here, but this is the biggest goalposts move that the dooms have made in recent years is, listen, we're already in a recession. This is like 2022. We're already in recession. People just don't know yet. Then 2023, it's like, listen, the recession is coming any day now. Now it's like, of course, we don't have a recession. Monetary policy acts on a lag. That's that's the goalpost move, right? Yes, I just got an email then with the subject. Everyone has a plan until they're punched in the face, quote, Mike Tyson. Wow. That just blew my mind. It's been a while, right? Yeah, I thought people, I thought we gave up on that. All right. This is so first of all, I put the US personal savings rate in here. It averages since, like, the 1940s, almost 9%. It's now 4.5%. Obviously, that average was skewed because people used to save way more, but this is via, this is Neil Dutta via Sam Row and his another person we saw at future proof. You know, when I asked Sam, I said, Sam, how's the flooding your apartment? Because he shares, he had videos flooding in his apartment. So I could, I could relate to that because I have a flood in my office. He said it wasn't fun. From the 1980s to the 2000s, there was a pretty neat and clean relationship as net worth rose relative to income, household savings rate declined. This made sense as households saw rising asset values as a low risk form of wealth creation. When you were loaded, you have less reason to save. And he's got this pretty chart here that kind of shows it. If my stock portfolios rising and home prices are climbing, I don't feel like I need to save as much. He's saying that that relationship broke down a little bit in 2008 where people kind of started saving a little more, but this is unfortunately, this is like the, the, it should be counter cyclical where you should keep, I think you should keep saving the same percentage of your income regardless. I don't think you should save less just because you're doing better. Like I think that's, that's the way you, you defeat lifestyle creep is you keep the similar percentage. So if you make more money, great, you're spending more, but you're also saving that same percentage, which is a higher actual nominal amount. That's how you defeat lifestyle creep is you, if you, if you say 15% of your income and your income doubles because you got a sweet new job, keep saving 15% of your income. Do you think more less than 50% of people spend more money as they make more money as a percentage of their overall income? Oh, definitely more people spend more money as they make more. Oh, yes, for sure. But percentage, not just dollars. Right. Your savings, your, your percentage savings rate, I would guess, goes down as you make more money. Yes, I guess that, that I agree with, because in that's the saying, that's kind of the same thing he's showing here, just for economic cycles. All right. I kind of miss this one. Quantian on Twitter, we've talked a lot about why the vibes are so off and why people are miserable and inflation and all these other things. So he did this aggression model, which looks at consumer sentiment with inflation and interest rates. And his takeaway was like, listen, this model I built, which I don't know if I could poke a hole in or not, because I'm not smart enough. He did the R squared here, right? The answer is that the three major things change. Consumers care a lot less about unemployment than they did, which is what's a big thing in, you know, following the great financial crisis. They prefer housing prices to fall rather than rise and more than anything, they hate higher interest rates. This may surprise you, but it really shouldn't. Americans love borrowing money and hate being told they can't. So his whole thing also is, if you look at these things, I kind of like it that that if you're raising interest rates and not long me to borrow to finance my lifestyle or whatever, that's the thing that's making people so angry these days, which I I could get. I can see how that could be. I think here's another one from Matt Darling on Twitter. And someone tweeted, you used to be able to rely, be pull off on any highway in America and get yourself a hotel room at 2 a.m. Now with no one working, I have to stop long drives by 9 p.m. at the latest to make sure someone is at the desk. Little things like this keep adding up and getting worse. So this person is complaining. And Matt Darling says, again, one reason the vibes are off is that a lot of people prefer a world where people are desperate enough for jobs and willing to take anything they can get. And he's saying, listen, the unemployment rate being lower, most people prefer jobs that they don't have to work a hotel desk at 2 a.m. And they don't have to take a job just because it's the only thing available to them. You know the Frederick Lewis Allen guy, he's like one of my favorite financial historians. He wrote that book called The Big Change. And it was everything that happened from 1900 to 1950, which is probably for consumers, the most innovation consumers have ever experienced in their lives. Washing machines and refrigerators, and new financial products and radios and tell all these things like the consumer had like probably the biggest leap forward they've ever gotten. And he was doing a consumer sentiment thing about people looking back from 1950 to 1900. And they were all complaining because they said, in 1900, we could afford to have a huge house and have a bunch of servants. And now no one wants to be a servant anymore. And so it was like people got so happy, but then they had this like they looked back fondly on this period where they could have servants because they couldn't have anymore, even though they had all this leap forward. I think people are going to look back at this time, especially our lifetime of going going for having, you know, no internet, no nothing. And then the smartphone comes along. People are going to look back at this time and go, that that 40 year period or whatever, those people had some of the greatest technological change in history. And look at all these a holes. They're all they're still all just they hated themselves. Why? That's what's going to happen in the future. They're going to look back and go, look at the leaps forward, these people experienced. And they all were still miserable. Fair. Is this just the human condition? No, it's deep, it's deep, and I don't know. I pause, Naka. I'm not, I'm not something to censor them. I'm not sure I'm processing. I think it's, it's part of the human condition. And maybe that's why we, this is why I'm continuing to make the bet on Warren Buffett going forward, that Warren Buffett long term bet, because no one is ever happy. So people are constantly striving to get better and do more stuff, because no one is ever happy. That's why I don't buy that, I don't buy that. Nobody's a catalyst for the future. No one's ever happy. No one's ever content. How's that not happy? No, that's the right word. Nobody's ever satisfied. That's my, that's definitely different than nobody's ever happy. That's the biggest reason for having long term happens. I wrote about this once. I said it's, it's sort of tragic for all of us, tragic is too strong of a word, but it's that people don't find comfort even as they're, not comfort. People aren't satisfied even as they're, even as they progress through life, but it's great for everyone, because that's, that's what drives, that's what makes things better, is people, people's obsession of improving their circumstances, even if they've already have 10 million dollars, people want more. Yes. All right, so on layoffs, Salesforce and Meta? Well, I wasn't, so Salesforce is bringing people back, but I don't think Meta's bringing people back as much as they are. They're bringing back like, I saw some headline, they're bringing back like La Croix and maybe Ironing, I don't know why I thought of Ironing, I don't know if that's, they don't provide ironing services, but speaking of ironing services, it's on my mind. I have to hand up, Ben, you were right, I was wrong. Steamers? Is there, is there we going here? Steamers suck? Yep, I was steaming one of my button ups, and it was just too much work, my arm was getting tired, and since Robin, I'm by, I can't take this anymore, buy an iron, I bought an iron. You're a cabin iron? I don't have an iron. No dresser, no iron. You're living in the 90s, you're living in the 1920s still. Mind you, I am not, I don't, I don't wear things that require an iron very often, but when you, you're a giant shirt, but when you, when you, exactly, but when you want an iron, when you need an iron, you're going to want an iron. Speaking of that, what Ben's referring to dressers, I gave a take in front of the audience and said, listen, I was fairly sure how that was going to go. I was, I was trying to entertain and mission accomplished. I made, I made a joke about houses getting bigger over time, and when I was watching an old episode of curb your enthusiasm, they had a dresser. Now, I, I don't have a dresser. Now, my kids have dressers obviously, but I don't have a dresser in my bedroom, because I have a big closet. So I said, show of hands, how many of you have a dresser? And I thought that probably like two thirds of hands would go, every single hand in the audience went up. Every credit to me. Good joke. But I saw a tweet over the weekend, never seen a piece of furniture more obsolete than the wood entertainment center. Can we all agree? Can we all agree that maybe dresses aren't obsolete, but the wood entertainment center is. Yes, remember they would come with a built-in like CD rack, you put your CDs on it, and you'd be able to spin it and oh yeah. You know what I collected back there? They were huge. That's my surprise. I actually think I still have it. I had a gigantic dresser, not a dresser, shelf full of DVDs. I probably have like 500. And then, and then one day, I transferred all of my DVDs to a gigantic CD book. I haven't watched a DVD in 15 years, but I can't get rid of them. It's like a family heirloom. I bet out of your 500 DVDs, I would have liked 15% of them. I've got all the classics. Listen, people say I have bad takes in movies. I happen to enjoy bad movies, but it's not as if I'm delusional and say like I was watching a deep lucid the other day. I know it's not a great movie, but I like it. So leave me alone. Yeah, it's like food. I also like good movies. I didn't like one time in Hollywood, but I like good movies. That's fair. You like the whale? Love the whale. Great film. Boy did we get sidetracked. All right. So Rechfinn has these charts that show the mortgage payment on average for the median home asking price. And they show it by year from 2020. One. I love the weekly redfinn updates. They have great charts. So 2023, home buyer payments are up 14% year over year. It's just wild. 2600 bucks. The median payment, the median mortgage payment on a median asking price. And 2020, it was 1500. I was like, it's just doesn't compute. Doesn't this matter? So I was thinking about this. So there's a little bungalow house right down the block or two over from my house. It's tiny house and it's set for sale. So I looked it up. It's 1100 square feet. It's got three bedrooms, one bath. Looks like they did some nice work to it. They like totally refinish the kitchen. It looks nice. And it's going for $270,000, which is pretty rare. It's like you can't find anything for less than $300,000 anywhere. And so I looked at it, assuming 10% down 7.25% mortgage. That's $1,660. With 3% mortgage rates, this $270,000 payment would have got you a $440,000 house a couple years ago. So if you were buying right now, would you go upstream to that $440,000 house and just pray to God that mortgage rates fall and you can refinance? Or would you settle for the smaller starter house and just try to go cheaper? That's like the the caucus you have to plan out. And sometimes you don't have either option, I guess, but like what would you do in that situation? Would you lock in the cheaper one now and just hope that the housing market supply gets better in a few years? Or would you just move up? And it's just a matter of numbers. Can you afford it or can't you? If you can afford it, I would, you know, I would buy a bigger, I think starter houses are very expensive. I do too. My whole thesis for a while has been don't get a starter house, move up and get in a house you're going to stay in for 10 years as opposed to trading up in three or four years. But I don't know if the numbers make sense anymore for that. I saw a house in my neighborhood that sold for $500,000 in 2013. So 10 years ago, sold for $500,000. And it's, it's sort of like the house that I grew up and that I described, a standard, like, I guess split level or high rent, I don't know what it is, probably 22, 2300 square feet, maybe 2400. All right, so sold for 500 grand a year a decade ago, they listed it for sale for 869. Not nice. Way too high. Three weeks later, they do you think this is like no work to it either since then? Oh, no, the house needs work. Okay. The house needs a lot of work. So they listed it for 869. Three weeks later, they cut it to 829. Three weeks after that, they cut it to 789. And it'll probably sell for around that I'm guessing. But it's just wild. It's wild. $800,000 house at 7 and a quarter percent. What does that cost you? It's a lot of money. And the house needs a lot of work. You're still a, you're still a fraction guy from orbit rates. What did I say? 7 and a quarter. You're all happy to die hard. All right, Barry sent me this one from the Atlantic about my, my whole thesis. Hang on, hang on, hang on, sorry, before you go, there's one more chart. This is awesome. Redfin 60,000 home purchase agreements were canceled in August. That's the highest percentage since October, 2022. I want 16% of homes at one of their contract. I get it. I can, I can see having cold feet and being like, you know what, screw this. Or if you like mistime the mortgage rate market and you thought you're getting 675 or wait, six and three quarters and you got seven and a half, I can, I can see backing out. All right, so Barry sent me this. This is from the Atlantic. Beaches did not always hold the allure they do today. Two centuries ago, they could be used as sites of trade, not leisure or clogged by vendors, shoppers and fishermen. Real estate agents saw little value in them until 1898 in Connecticut. They're included for free with the purchase of any property nearby. Then all of a sudden they they sort of took off. So getting back to my point of people in the past did not think of real estate the same way as we do today. We play through. You want to do this loan assumption thing or is it not worth talking about? No. Okay. Yeah. I don't think it's going to happen. Go to private markets. All right. So Instacart, their IPO is today. There's a great chart from the information showing various stages of their life cycle at the seed. Then their series A. They started to really take off in seed. They were founded in 2012, by the way. And then they had their series I, which is effectively, which, who has participated in that fidelity, Tiro, A16 Z Sequoia. And I guess that was just like, I don't know if that was looked at as a bridge, just, you know, get in before the IPO pop. I mean, a series I. So do you think there's? Go ahead. There's not been enough time where the anchoring feelings have been reduced a little bit where people were looking at those 2021 early days of these valuations or nuts. Look what we could have gotten has enough time passed where they're like, you know what? Just rip the band it up to the IPO for whatever we can get and get out of here. Well, yes and no. I mean, the IPO market is opening up because they're back below their series F valuation. What's it take? I'm trying to see if it's trading at cart. I mean, the arm holding CTF, the arm holding IPO went decent. I mean, it's actually at the lowest since the IPO, but not certainly not a disaster by any stretch. Let's see if Cart is trading CIRT. Why is this taking it? It's not working. Either way, either way, I wonder if like these, I mean, a lot of these work crossover investors, a lot of this not just not Instagram specifically, but in 21 and 22, a lot of it was hedge funds coming into coming into venture the crossover funds. And if you're a crossover fund, your public equity's got killed too. So you could kind of say, listen, the private stuff got killed long with the public stuff, especially if you're in the tech space. So it made sense. What's the IPO ETF doing here? Let's take a look. It is 30%. Now, it's still very depressed, obviously, but the FT had a very interesting article about private equity. It doesn't sound great. Private equity firms have started to borrow against their funds to bet. Look at how I know the FT is in. Look at how they spell maneuvers. I know that that threw me for a loop hold. It's every vol. Like six to menel over years. It's very British. It's M-A-N-O-E-U-V-R-E-S. It's like or or or or derves, but maneuvers. So private equity funds have started to borrow against their funds to backstop overly indebted portfolio companies. A new financial engineering tactic meant to cope with higher interest rates and a slowdown in deal making. The maneuvers, which London's have dubbed, quote, defending the portfolio, have cropped up as many older private equity funds run along on cash, just as the companies they own struggle with their own debt loads. Hey, what happened to all the dry powder? Well, it doesn't make sense that they would invest in their old companies instead of taking on new debt to invest in new companies. It does. Buy out firm for this for this catch. Buy out firms have turned to so-called net asset value loans, which use of funds investments as collateral. They are deploying the proceeds to help pay down the debts of individual companies, held by the fund. But they carry rates of five to seven percentage points over short-term rates. So like 10 to 12 and a half percent, which is that's a lot. Here's a quote. Everyone is talking about it. Instead of senior banker who advises large US private equity firms, it is easier to borrow at the fund level with all the NAV financing available than it is at the portfolio company level for certain companies facing distress. Now that makes sense, a lot of sense, but I don't know, probably, I don't know if alarm bells should go off, but, you know, a spidey sense that should tangle a little bit here. Private equity funds should not be outraising new funds right now, probably. That's going to be a hard sell in the current environment. They, I mean, private equity funds, if you think about it, they started in the 80s, basically, with LBOs. They've never been in a rising rate environment like this before. Well, that's the point. They rely on cheap debt, and when debt's not cheap, things become difficult. Kelly Evans had a good piece. She wrote, the characteristics of many private equity portfolios are similar to only small cap US stocks. The average deal size for a target company last year was $964 million according to Bane, almost identical to the median market cap of a company in the rest of 2000, of $922 million. So, you know, you should probably ask yourself, private equity is a very popular category of investing, what you're getting yourself into. And is it worth, you know, is it liquidity worth it? Right. Okay. New one for me. Have you heard of this houses law before? Did you say new one from me? This is a new one for me. I've never heard of it before. Before you. Okay. So, houses laws, this idea of houses law, since World War II, tax revenues have been roughly equal to like 19% in change of GDP, regardless of the marginal tax rate. So, this person tweeted, I think about this chart at least every few weeks, which is, I guess, like the Roman Empire or something, which I've literally. What's happening with the Roman Empire? My wife asked me, I've never thought about the Roman Empire, I don't care about it. No, but why is it bubbling up? I see it, people tweeting about what's going on. It just became a meme and it took on a life of its own. I honestly don't get it. All right. Since 1946, even though the top individual income tax rate has been anywhere from 28% to 92%, total tax collections have averaged 16.8% of GDP with a standard deviation of 1.2%. So, look at the bottom there. Tax collections as a percentage of it. So, basically, the government's going to get their money one way or another, whether it's... So, the tax rates change all the time. One way or another, as a percentage of GDP, the government is going to get its money, which is kind of fascinating. They can pull these levers and change these dials for certain individuals or groups, but somehow some way they're getting their money. That's a really good chart. That's houses law, folks. Then, what would you do if you won $997 million? T-bills, probably. Money market funds, maybe? I don't know. So, everyone cashed with a guy who won the power ball. So, that was $2 billion. He took a lump sum of $997 million. So, he got a billion. So, but he had to pay taxes on that. Yeah. It means he's not even worth it at that point. I mean, what are you going to do with $400 million? So, he's having a good time. He bought... So, all right, from the New York Post, a lucky lot of player has already purchased at least two other California mansions since coming to the money last year, and now he has splurged yet again. This time on a $47 million compound in Belair. The first property he purchased was $25 million. My thought process from seeing these... I can understand why people buy luxury real estate, buying a cool house is... Even if it's not a good investment, it's like putting a money in an index fund or whatever. It's just like the psychic income is so big. But can you imagine the upkeep on a $30 million house? How much you'd have to spend every year? They also said he paid for $24.7 security to follow him around. Imagine being his neighbor. Like, these are all, you know, probably later they're at the capitol of the next store. A new neighbor coming in. Who is it? Is that Avalongoria? No, it's the guy that won the Powerball. So, my favorite stat on this, and this is written a few years ago, some of it's still true. I'm guessing it is, every year Americans spend more money on the lottery than they do on movie tickets, music, professional sporting events, video games, and books combined. Wow. If that says anything about our mentality. All right, this is a good one. But I can understand buying luxury real estate. I totally get it. Like, if you had that much money, he's probably going to blow through it all. Let's be honest, but I get it. Where would you buy? Yeah, I guess I don't know. Not on a coast, because it's going to fall into the ocean. I think I would buy, you got to go to the Midwest, right? No, I mean, you could buy a place in the coast and afford it, I suppose. Between 1975 and 2022, the number of products in the average US supermarket has increased more than threefold from 8,900 to a whopping 31,500, much of it due to globalization. We have so much choice in our lives, right? I'd love going to the grocery store and seeing every couple of months, there's a new flavor of Oreos. I feel like Oreos just, there's just a whole shelf of them, cookie dough and pistachio and pumpkin and whatever. Tapioca. Just doesn't end. I love it. Big Oreo guy. Love Oreos. I'm not eating Oreos these days. I don't know if you can tell, but I'm trying to listen to these. All right. But I'm going out. I have dinner plans once I throw it in Friday. So you can go out to dinner and sleep healthy, you know? Oh, it's very hard to do. You can't eat it. It's not possible. You cannot eat healthy, but you can avoid, I don't need to eat bread. I'm not going to eat the rolls. I'm not going to eat carbs. Protein and veggies. I get a, you know, exactly. I'm not quite cooking butter, but all right. So we had our first broken bone in the Carlson household for my kids, my daughter Libby, freak accident. She was running to a card or my other daughter's soccer game. Didn't see a step on the curb trip to fell, came back, holding her arm all weird. She goes, I broke something and she's crying and I broke in. But your immediate reaction as a parent is always to think like, it's not that kids are liars, but kids exaggerate about everything. If they get hurt, you know, like sometimes it's very hard to tell. Kids are the big, like you mentioned that I think was it you or Robin didn't believe Kobe when he broke his leg. Robin didn't. I feel like I've, I've, I've heard that story from so many parents. Like, yeah, they said they broke their bone. I didn't believe them because kids exaggerate. It's the boy that cried wolf all the time. And I heard that story from so many people and she, she like was insisting like, no, I broke something I can tell. She broke a wrist. She's got a little cast on. Did you believe it? I, I kept on, well, it wasn't swallowing or anything. It was just weird. And so I said just move it. Let me see a move around and she couldn't and she was in pain for like 20 minutes. Like, I had something's wrong, obviously. So took her and she's, but kids are kids are, kids are liars for lack of a better word. When Kobe broke his leg, he had probably just turned five. He was like really little. And he said, I broke my leg. I'm like, how do you even know what that means? Like, he was screaming crying, I broke my leg and sure enough, uh, that sucks. Yeah. Four weeks in a cast. I'm not too bad. It could have been worse. So she's, she was bummed for a day and now we're moving on. But I saw something this week that you don't see every day. In fact, I don't know the last of my saw this. Rob and I were at Trader Joe's and I'm in the car with the boys in the back, which is a detail you didn't need. And I see two 70 year old, 75 year old identical twins walk by. Now that is true. You don't see that a lot. You know what, right? And I mean, they looked exactly like it was really, it was really, it caught my attention in a meaningful way. And when Rob became the car, she said, did you see those two guys? I said, yeah, that was, that was really something. My wife has uncle's or identical twins. So you see it. So you do see it every day or not, every, not literally every day. I've got a $10 billion idea. Okay. I'd like to hear you came with estimate for the tan, but let's hear it. I want to, you know what? That sounds light. This is the tan is way bigger than 10 billion. Let's be conservative here because the IPO market while open is a little shaky. You ever going to, you ever open, and I know the answer is yes. You know when you open your refrigerator door and you smell something, you never know what it is. There should be some sort of a, I don't know if it's a wand or some way to identify, maybe AI could salt this. Boom. It's the cucumber that's in the bottom drawer that's rotting. I mean, fridges aren't that big. So finding what the source of the smell is is typically not that hard. So is that a, is that a, is that a no from you? If we're on Shark Tank, I'm going to say that's a no for me. Okay. But I appreciate it. All right. Let me try one more time. I'll, I'll, I'll look at you to sell you 20% of the company for $15. Okay. Sold. Thank you. All right. Recommendations. I broke my bear market. I don't know if this is a bottom. Well, it's, it's a bottom. I don't know if it's the bottom in my reading. I read this book on the airplane number go up by Zeke Fox. Now, I knew a lot of the stories. It's a crypto history or what we thought we followed the cryptos are pretty closely. It was just all about like, it was a main character and then it was all about like the shady characters in crypto and it was a fun read. Zeke's a great. I'm not going to lie. I still don't know what tether is. No clue. It's a stable coin. It's the, it's the biggest stable coin in the world. Did you listen to Peter Brown was in on interview with the Goldman Sachs podcast? I didn't know Goldman had a podcast. Now, you know, he said I'd be a vampire squid. Take this from the source, but he said I'd like to see that Peter Brown is a CEO of Renaissance technologies. He said I'd like to see around the clock trading and all types of instruments. I'd like to see more securitization tokenization, more digital contracts. Although I think FTX set that back a while. I'm still bullish on digitalization token rails like I am. Man. Sorry, I'm out. I've never been. You wrote here your favorite TC movie ever. Take a guess. Jerry McGuire nailed it. Did we talk about this? No, I saw this in here and I just, I came up with the list on my head and I said, it's got a Jerry McGuire. It's not a peacock right now. I rewatched it like two weeks ago. So I haven't seen your best performance ever. Better than a few good men. Probably. Ah, that's true. It's his most time cruise performance ever. I rewatched it on the airplane. And what can I say? Just what a what an incredible movie. You know, my problem with that movie is I set it to my wife. I didn't buy him in René's L. We're together. I just didn't buy it. Never did it for me. You know, I called somebody this week to explain something and he said, Michael, you have me at hello. It's an iconic, it's an iconic line and iconic scene. I didn't buy those two together. I'm looking for my wife. All right, listen, if you're fine. If you're a young person and jam McGuire is before your time, make time for it. It's an amazing movie. An incredible movie. All right. I just want to say Aquaman 2 might be the worst trailer. I've literally ever seen. Did you see it on Thursday night football? They put a trailer out. Is CGI getting worse? It was better for the James Cameron stuff, Avatar, but it's getting worse for everything else I swear. My kids were watching Little Mermaid and I couldn't believe how bad the CGI was. It was awful. I still liked it. I agree with you. It's funny. You mentioned that I was seeing the same thing, but I still liked it. Great soundtrack. Not bad. All right. I saw an incredible movie. Now here, this is a recommendation. It's not just a bad movie that Michael likes. This is a recommendation. It's a genre movie that not everybody enjoys a genre. The genre's horror, kind of. It's not a slash movie, but it's called Talk to Me. A24 distributed it. It was so good and so original and pretty frightening and just great. It's sort of like Monkey's Paw type of deal where these kids find like a plastic hand or a ceramic hand or whatever it is. They shake the hand. They say Talk to me and they see a spirit. Now that the problem is that if you go over 90 seconds, you know, shake us off the rails, then the spirit stays with you. It sounds like a movie idea. You come up with it three in the morning or high. Fine. Be that as a may. It was an incredible movie. And so it was scary and I turned the movie off. Pretty frightened. And at about three a.m., Robyn said Kobe's awake. Let's go see what's happening. He's sitting up in his bed. So I go into Kobe's room and he's like shaking. And he says, I see something. I see something. And he's like pointing right, he's like, it's right there. It's right there. And I was like, ah! So I just I grabbed him and ran into my bedroom. And I couldn't sleep. I was terrified. From a movie. From a movie. Okay. So I... Well, I watched a ghost movie and Kobe saw ghost in my house. All right. This is why these movies work on you. I watched the movie Us, the Jordan peel one. This is, remember I was complaining about a switching back and forth between Peacock and I was watching football on Peacock. And I'm like, you know, I don't know. I feel like switching back. So I just went from Peacock and us was with a new movie that was on there. It's not a new movie. No, it's no. It's a new yourself. It's new to Peacock. And I had never seen it. And I wasn't going to buy it until it was on summer for free. And hasn't been on any of the streaming platforms. So I watched it. And it's... There's three Jordan peel movies. It's definitely third for me. I didn't like it at all. Didn't do it for me. It just... I thought the ending was kind of in not bad, but it just... It didn't do anything for me. I didn't... I didn't feel anything. You know, it's so funny you mentioned that. I felt the exact same way. So I saw it on the theaters and I very vividly remember being confused after I left as to how I felt about the movie. And I kind of had your reaction. I was like, I'm like, did I like it? Did I hate it? I don't... I didn't really feel much of anything. I thought it was okay. I was like, I was like entertained enough, but I oddly had no... I oddly had like very little reaction. And for all of my detective novel people, I know you're out there, people at... The last kiss... The last good kiss by James Cromley. This was a Andy Greenwald recommendation on what's their podcast called? The Watch? The Watch. Yeah. It's about... It's like a 90... It's almost like a Raymond Chandler one, but it was written by someone in the 2010s. And it's like about these two drunks that go on an expedition to find a lost girl. And it's just great, great dialogue, great story. Here's my thought though. They should have an IMDB trivia section for books and authors. Like on movies, they always have the IMDB trivia, I always go to, like for ideas and how they came up with stuff and how they... They should have that for books too. Like I don't know how this guy came up with a story about a 1960s veteran who is a drunk who's also a detective. I'd like to learn more about that. That's what I'm saying. Why do you need trivia associated with that? Am I missing something? I just want to... I want to hear about how they came up with the characters and stuff. Like how do you just... The whole fiction genre kind of boggles my mind that people can just creatively come up with characters and such. Agreed. I always wondered like how the hell of George Lucas come up with the whole story of Star Wars? Exactly. All right. AnimalSpiritsPod at Gmail.com. Thanks again to everyone who showed up at Future Proof. We love meeting everyone. We love to all the tropical brothers shirts. And we'll see you next time.