The Only Game in Town (EP.308)

Today's show is brought to you by GlobalX. GlobalX ETFs just founded in 2008. Remember that book that we almost wrote about things that were founded during the crisis? Oh yeah, things that rose from the ashes, right? Something like that. Well, anyway, GlobalX is one of them. Founded in a recession and a bad one at that. If the events of the last few years have taught us anything, it's that we live in a world of accelerating change and from AI to clean energy, GlobalX, known for their thematics, offers a range of more than 30 forward-leaning thematic strategies. To learn more about their research-driven approach to thematic investing, go to globalxetfs.com slash insights. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Bagnick 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 Redholz wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Redholz wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Tis the season, Ben. It is, thank you. It is 80 degrees in New York City. And I was telling you before the show started, this is probably a stretch, but I'm tropical bros from here on out. It's summer. Pretty much. Speaking of which, a nice old teaser, next week with a big announcement coming. Yes, we do. Big announcement. And we have another announcement this week. So future proof is around the corner. September 10th through the 13th, we announced the first run of speakers. It's a heck of a list, hell of a list, I'd say. And the musical act, Ben, are you down with the Wooten clan? Yes, I mean, I'm not an East Coast person like you, but yeah, I'm from the Midwest Coast, right? Method, oh, oosh. Ooh, almost knocked my coffee off. I saw Red Man. I saw it was Method Man and Red Man. And I saw Red Man in high school. I went to a concert when my brother was in college. And it was Red Man and ever clear. Oh, interesting. OK. Yes, quite a mashup. But I'm going to just show you. He is one of the best cribs episodes of all time. I'm her MTV cribs that show. I love it. I mean, that was a great show. One of the first reality shows. I mean, cops is really the first reality show, but one of the early ones. So if you were there last year, you know what to expect. If you weren't last year, let me tell you what to expect. Fun in the sun. You're going to see us in clothes like this. This is an outdoor conference. So there's, I mean, there's some people wearing suits, but you don't have to be in a suit. Anyway, it's an incredible event. I am so, so excited. Check out the speakers, the roster. Link in the shout out to the whole deal. So a lot of people are asking, why isn't there more volatility around the debt ceiling talks? Everything coming out of Washington, DC is we can't come to a deal. People are worried about there being a default or a government shutdown or whatever. If you look at the S&P 500, it's basically been in a very tight trading range for the past, I don't know, one, two, three months, whatever you want. Can I allow myself one early interruption? Not only, thank you. Not only is the S&P 500 going sideways, but so are interest rates. The 10 year and the two year are at the upper end of the range that they've been in since early March. So that's about, it's like two months of sideways trading for both interest rates and stocks. Is this a fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me kind of thing where every three years or however often these things happen, we have these things and it looks like it's going to go down to the wire. And yeah, maybe there's a couple days or things look a little hairy, but then things get sorted out and the market's just saying, yeah, we know that's going to happen. And if we have to inflict a little pain, if they don't come to an agreement, then they'll just come to an agreement and the markets will be fine. Doesn't that kind of seem to be, isn't the market playing this right? Well, yeah, I just, I don't think this is a market moving to an event because I think everybody assumes that they'll figure it out. And so why should it move the market? And it could be the kind of thing where if we come down to the last minute and there isn't a deal, the market will have some volatility and force their hand. That's kind of what will happen, right? Okay, Gallup poll, the best investment right now and they Americans say 34% of Americans choose real estate this year as their best investment, that's down from 45%. Meanwhile, gold has nearly doubled from 15% in 2022 to 26% today. Gold is higher than stocks now. Stocks have gone from 24% a couple of years ago to 18% now. So the rank order is real estate, gold, stocks, savings accounts and bonds at the bottom for what's interesting to me is since 2014, real estate has always ranked number one. And for the most part, stocks have been number two over the exception of this year. It is not, I'm not surprised that most Americans think that real estate is a better investment than stocks. Does that surprise you? I mean, we know empirically it's not, but does that surprise you? No, because more people own real estate than own stocks as well. So if we're doing a sample thing from a survey, then that would make sense. Remember this one I've talked with this before. In August 2011, Americans chose gold as a best long-term investment. That's the question. What's the best long-term investment right now? And that was the top in gold. I don't know how much you can really put into these surveys anymore, but it is kind of funny that gold is higher than stocks now. I guess that's because people worry, is that just because boomers of the owns and their phones for these surveys? What do you think? It's probably a combination of both, but gold is consistently number three behind above savings accounts, cities and bonds, which also doesn't surprise me. In fact, I think this is roughly, yeah, this feels right to me. So most Americans think real estate generally speak. Most Americans think real estate, then stocks, then gold, then cash, then bonds. Sounds about right. I mean, I guess if you look over the last five years, gold isn't that far behind the SP500. It's, so again, five years that's, S&P's up 66% gold's up 53%. It actually has kept pace for the past five years or so, which is surprising. If you go back 10 years, then the stock market crushes it, obviously. Anyway, last week we talked about doing some scenario analysis, and what if you put $5,000 in the S&P in the 90s, then you put $500 in. I did a little accompanying blog post about that, because sometimes what I do with the podcast, I use the podcast as a sort of breeding ground for my ideas, and then I put it on the blog and shape those ideas. So I did this in my tweet about it yesterday, went to little viral if there is such thing in the finance world. And so I got all the crazies out. All I showed was, what if you did this, and then what if you did this, here's what your results would have been. And you would have turned whatever a couple hundred thousand dollars into almost a million dollars by just consistently investing in the stock market. Well, yeah, fine, but that's what about the Fed and all the money printing they did, and what about Japan, and what about the government printing trillions of dollars, and what about disinflation and falling rates, and all these things. And it's just, maybe this is just a social media thing, but the number of people who just want to always, yeah, but, or poke holes, when it's just, I'm not making a proclamation, this is the data, this is what it was, yeah, but what about the future, and what are you supposed to do if you don't invest? Right, like if you're gonna poke holes in literally everything, what do you do then? Just not invest in anything? I mean, is that what these people want me to say? Fine, don't invest in anything. I don't know what you want when you try to poke holes in everything, and again, these are commenters on what it's like to make it worse. I'm not coming to the press because it is beyond irritating. However, I think that numbers require context, right? Yes, fair, which is what I wanted to reply, read the blog post, because there's the context, but I also want to, I want to, because a lot of people say, listen, since the 1980s, it's all been disinflation and falling rates. That's been the whole thing for financial markets, and that has helped. Yeah, no earnings per share. Earnings haven't grown at all. Yeah, it's all make, it's all make, believe. So I did the S&P from 1940 to 1979, and then 1980 to 2019, to show like 40 years, leading up to that, and then 40 years since then, right? So 40 years of rising rates, and then 40 years of falling rates. Yeah, 40 years of rising rates and rising inflation, and then 40 years of falling rates and falling inflation. All right, hit me. The annual returns from 1940 to 1979, 10.4% per year. Not a real basis, they're probably lower, because inflation was higher than, but the 1980 to 2019 is 11.8%. So better, but not like markedly better. The stock market still did pretty darn well in World War II and Vietnam and JFK getting assassinated and high inflation and all these things, and inflation and rates were rising for that entire period. Yeah, this isn't some conspiracy theory, or some conspiracy. We spoke about this last week. The quote from BFA said it all, American companies are really, really good at increasing their earnings year over year over year. Not every year, obviously, but over the long term, they're really good at it, and guess what drives the price of stocks? Earnings. Yes. And manipulation, of course. It's just like, yes, I'm willing to admit the Fed and all these other things had an impact. Like, you can't say that these things didn't have an impact, but if there was a lever that you could pull that, like this will make the stock market go up way more, every single politician would do it, right? To make people happier. Like, it's just, it doesn't work like that. It's not that easy. All right, I put this one in here just for you. Thank you. This next piece about flows. One for me, one for you. Institutions pulled a net 333.9 billion dollars in stocks over the past 12 months. Individuals have pulled another 28 billion. Most of that money went into cash or money markets, which are money markets that are record $5.3 trillion. So you can see the... Okay. You're doing some on the... On the run analysis here. I'm just trying to digest. Try to catch up. Here's the money, look at the, scroll down to the money market one. So money market assets spiked in 2008 and got it down with $4 trillion, and then have fallen ever since, and basically went nowhere from 2012 to 2019 call it. Now they've spiked since then. This is a good chart, but not nearly as good as the chart. I can't remember who did it, where you adjust total money market fund assets divided by the stock market or something like that. You normalize it, and the amount of money in money market funds in 2008 relative to the stock market was way higher than it is today. That's good. But my point is with rates being on the floor for so long, that's why you have these assets go way back down, is some of the money coming back into money markets just money that was in risk of your assets because we're at 0% for so long. I don't think so. And there's money moving. You don't think a lot of money came out of money markets, not just because of the oh eight thing, but. You may came out of money, wait, I'm sorry, repeat that again, maybe I missed miss miss miss miss. Well, you see how the money market assets fell following 2008. Now a lot of them went in there because there were worries, but rates were at 0%, so it made sense that no money went into money markets for almost a decade. Right. So a lot of the money getting back in there was money that maybe would have been in cash equivalents anyway, but it went into something else that was riskier because people were yield chasing. No, no, no, okay, so you're saying no, so I think I disagree with you. If you're saying that money came out of high risk stuff and that went into money market funds, I don't see it that way, I'm sure there's a piece of it, but I think I'm, you know, call it 80 plus percent of the money in money market funds, maybe even 90, is coming from money that was sitting in cash that people moved into a money market fund. Okay, well, I guess I'm trying to say there's been a ton of outflows from stocks, hasn't a lot of those out, haven't a lot of those outflows going into money markets? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's a little bit of... I think it's mostly cash. All right, the Financial Times did a cool chart here that shows what happens when the Fed has done raising rates. What happens to the stock market six months later, 12 months later, and then let's see, how long does it take from the end of the Fed hiking to when they find the cut rates? And this is one of those charts that kind of doesn't tell you anything. It's interesting, but it's kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes six and 12 months later, the stock market is up a decent amount. Sometimes it's down a decent amount. There really isn't a good pattern here. Well, I think the data pre-1980 should be throwing out a little bit because the way that the Fed functioned was completely, completely different than they do today. Probably even pre-2000. Like maybe like the 80s they didn't even tell a graph it as much. That's fair. But I would say, yeah, it's all over the place because the Fed raises rates until they break something. And usually the market breaks before they, wait, does the market break before they stop raising rates? I think the market breaks after. I don't even know. Well, look at the next one. This next one makes sense. This is from JP Morgan. After the Fed's policy hike is done, this is what happens to bonds. And bonds go crazy. Mewies, Indescent Grade, even tea bills, three month tea bills are up. This is, they show like 24 months later what happens from the final hike and bonds go nuts. This makes more sense. Yeah. This is the more one to one where because, like you said, the Fed breaks stuff. I wanted to look at, so the Fed first raised rates in March 16th, 2022. Okay. So it's been, you know, a little over, almost 15 months or whatever. Since this, obviously the stock market front runs a little bit. Since this happened, the S&P is down 3.3% from the first rate hike, which is kind of hard to believe. Obviously that it was down before then. The 10 year went from 2.2 to 3.5. The three, three month tea bill went from 0.4% to 5%. 30 year mortgage was at 4.2% when they started hiking. Unemployment rate is down from 3.8 to 3.4. This is the one that surprised me. I didn't remember this. The inflation rate was 7.9% when they started raising rates from zero. I forgot it was that high. So the inflation rate is going from 7.9 to 4.9 from the date of their first hike. I forgot that it was that high when they first started raising rates. That seems a little irresponsible in hindsight, or at the time. I think the CPI was over 5% for like, I don't know, six months before they started racing. We can forget this out pretty easily, but it was not great. Yeah. Anyway, obviously again, the stock market sort of front runs these things. But I just thought it was interesting to look at what happened. I just think. Let me just fact check myself because we have a computer here. We have an internet, the whole thing. All right, so, yeah. Okay, so, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. So inflation first got above 5% in June 2021. So June, July, August, September, October, November, December, I mean, many, many, many months. It was transitory. Could be. I kind of forgot that it had goodness that long. No, this is not hindsight bias. I'm pretty sure everybody, everybody was screaming, what are they doing? So the last reading, the last reading, yeah, Ben, the last reading was 7.95%. And then in March, it was 8.5, and it got us high, it peaked in June at 8.9%. It is surprising thinking back that they didn't do like an emergency hike or something. That there wasn't more. No, it was a last year Nielsen, nothing to see here. Yeah. Rest in peace. Last week, we asked if the corporate bond yield curve is inverted. We didn't know. Mike Zakardi fact-shocked for us. He looked at the short-term corporate bond ETF and compared it to the intermediate term, short-term, it's slightly inverted. Short-term corporate bond ETF was yielding 5.15%, intermediate term 5.05%. So not nearly as inverted as the treasure yield curve, but pretty darn close. Interesting. All right, we've been talking about catching falling knife slightly, right? You've given your not-to-brag, you caught Facebook at the bottom, you bought Netflix, you did pretty well on those. Yeah, I was thinking about this. Like, because there is a ton of nuance here of when to be irresponsible and try and catch a fallen knife and what not to. And in shitty companies, like the ones on this chart, I don't know enough, I don't know enough, I've got paid about to call it shitty company or not. Like, in companies that are effectively deflating from the bubble high, like Robinhood, like Peloton, those are knives you don't catch, right? Market leaders, like Netflix, like Facebook, it doesn't mean that the wind is not in your face and that the odds are not against you, because they are, but those are different knives. A regional bank, an ETF, a diversified ETF, falling 40% in 10 days or whatever it did. That's a different knife. So back to you, Ben. Well, so also, also, also, I'm doing this like, you know, this is not- Back to me, no, back to you. I'm gambling, right? I'm gambling, like this is not, I'm not claiming to be a war buffity, I'm gambling. Right, but I look- Responsible. I may add. I saw last week PayPal had another leg down and PayPal is, they're down 80% from the high and they haven't bounced at all. They hit a new all-time lows last week. So this is one that you would think, that's a pretty good brand, PayPal. And they've still fallen, if you try to do it with other ones, like Peloton is still down 96%, Robinhood is still down 87% or something. So a lot of these haven't really, they may have bounced a little bit, but they still haven't come back much at all. So that's the point is that, we talk about the ones that have done well, but there's a lot of them that just haven't bounced back and might not ever. Well, we've spoke about the study a million times. We know what the odds are. The agony and the ecstasy, this is a long post from J. Morgan. They updated every two or three years or so and it's about how difficult stock picking is. Then the stat that blew my face is that 40% of all stocks, and they're also 3,000, I believe, have a 70% drawdown from which they never recover. So we already know most stocks are not worth investing in, and so if you're gonna try and catch a fall in a knife, do so with an appropriate size and know that it's probably not gonna work out. It's just very tempting. Do you think this Robinhood 24-hour trading thing matters at all? They announced their new 24-hour trading. I think it's only in certain stocks, like Apple and Tesla and Amazon. I mean, so Josh is super anti this and I get it. I just don't think that this is that big of a deal in the sense that it's not gonna turn us all into gambling maniacs. You know what I mean? Like how many people are gonna be trading on a Sunday at 3 a.m.? I don't really like it either, but I'm kinda- I don't like it. I don't think anybody's gonna come out ahead other than the market makers of Robinhood. I don't like it, but I just, there's other things that I have that I see. Yeah, and you're probably gonna be paying bigger spreads and, but the people who do it are, they'd be, they're the people who be gambling on something else anyway. Although I do wonder, I do wonder, correct. I do wonder if in 10 years or so, or 20 or whoever knows, if markets will trade 24-7. I think that's- I hope not. I hope not to. I think that's really special about having the set hours. I like it. Oh, I love it. I totally agree. I love the closing bell. I love that you get weekends off. I am, if that, I mean that I, so are they opening the cookie jar to that? I hope not, but I don't think this is- I don't know, I don't know. Until like the 1950s or 1960s, they used to have half day on Saturday of trading. I think it was probably a half day where they got caught up because they were using all these tickets and they would play catch up on paperwork, but it was like, I don't know, eight to noon or something like that, that they'd still trade it on. All right. I know everyone seems to be unhappy these days, but not workers. So you saw this one from the Wall Street Journal. Workers are happier than they've been in decades. A lot of people sent us this. Last year 62.3% of US workers said they were satisfied of their jobs according to new data from conference board, up from 60% in 2021 and 57% in 2020. This thing crashed, obviously going into 2008. And since the start of them tracking this in 1987, it looks like it's never been higher. And they said- How does this square with everybody's miserable? I think the- I think that's bullshit. Everybody's not miserable. I think the idea that is we think everyone else is miserable, but we're happy. Like I'm in a great place, but everyone else should be miserable. And so look at the among the happiest workers, people who voluntarily switched jobs during the pandemic and individuals working in hybrid roles with a mix of in-person and remote work. So remote work thing has made workers way happier, but this trend was moving in the right direction even before that happened. But I do agree, like all the sentiment readings are really negative, but then if you ask people, how are you doing personally? People say, I'm doing fine. I'm doing great. That's phenomenon is permanent, where you ask people how are the prospects for the country or for the stock or not for the stock market, how are prospects for like other people's lives and people think terrible, but they think they feel okay about their own lives? And I think the pandemic made this even worse. I mean, obviously internet and social media started it. I think the pandemic just made the sentiment stuff even worse. I think people are just more angry these days. Like that- I think from the beef, I finished beef finally last week and the whole just getting really mad at a stranger for just like a little thing. That whole thing really resonated with me. And I think that's a newer thing that's happening. I like beef a lot, but I liked even more the idea of it. Like I love what they did. I liked the show, but I love that it was like pretty audacious, you know, it was like very different. It was, I didn't love the finale. I meant tough plane to land, but I was scrolling on my phone last night and I'm looking at Twitter. And I just got bummed out. Like it's just a bummer. Yes, I agree. There's that that's the problem. And I think the other thing is in the past, people only heard like in the 1500s, if you're a peasant living in a village, you heard about bad news for people in a half miles radius of you. Now you can learn every bad thing that's ever happened to anyone at all times of the day. This person got bit by a shark. This person got shot. This person, whatever happened to, you hear about so much more bad news than I don't think our brains are hardwired to hear as much bad news as we do. Yeah, that's too much. All right, last week we spoke about this study from the San Francisco Fed about how much money is still left out there versus, you know, in terms of the stimulus. So they have a chart that shows the fiscal spending growth following on sets of recession as a percentage of GDP, I believe. And 2020 is way off the charts. 2021 was 15%. This was close to 35. There's nothing even close to it. And then there's a chart shows the accumulated excess savings in the drawdown and excess savings. So 2.1 trillion in excess. We've drawn down 1.6 trillion. And then this next chart shows the aggregate excess savings following the onset of recession. So these are all sort of the same thing, which is that 2020 was nothing like nothing we've ever seen before. It's not even, nothing even close. Because it happened so fast. And the other ones, you had people build up their balance sheets, but it took a long, long time. I feel like the excess savings piece is really hard to calculate it must be because I've seen numbers ranging from 2 trillion to 5 trillion. So I'm guessing how people calculate that is not easy. But I guess when you're in the trillions that we just know it's a lot. Right, so based on this. If there was like a cliff notes version in 300 years about what happened during this period of time, it would be that all of this fiscal stimulus caused people's balance sheets to be incredibly healthy when the economy reopened. And the fact that people didn't spend for however long on stuff they used to spend on. When the economy reopened, supply couldn't catch up with demand, inflation skyrocketed, and then a recession didn't come because there was so much stimulus still in people's pockets. Technically, a recession did come though. It was the shortest recession in history. True, true. But it was like a month. Man, what a time, what a time. But there's still half a trillion dollars in excess savings it looks like though, based on this. So they say? All right, my pal, Tal Smith over at the New York Times. Friend of the show, he listens to the show, wrote an awesome piece called The Greatest Wealth Transfered History is here with familiar rich winners. I was emailing him back and forth in this yesterday. And he talked about how some of these stats just to steal Michael Batnik line blew my face. 1989, total family wealth in ASAs was 38 trillion adjusted for inflation. By 2022, wealth had more than tripled, with more than 140 trillion. Of the 84 trillion projected to be passed down from older Americans to millennial and gen X errors through 2045, 16 trillion to be transferred the next decade. We've heard about this forever, like the great wealth transfer. And his whole point were high net individuals that make up 1.5% of the households, people with at least 5 million or 20 million, that sort of thing, they're gonna contribute 42% of the transfers through 2045. And basically, the majority of the money is going to be coming from rich people to the rich kids. And this, we've talked a lot about demographic stuff lately here, and this is one of the reasons why I don't think boomers are going to crash the housing of the stock markets, because they're gonna pass their houses down to their, the rich people are gonna pass their houses down to the kids, and their stocks down to their kids. They're not gonna spend most of it, unfortunately. And there's a lot of weird stuff with this in terms of making inequality worse, but we've talked in the past about people in the past, like the Vanderbilt family, like squandered all their fortune. They didn't have like tax ninjas and accountants and consultants that could help them pass it along to their heirs or take care of it as well as they do today. And I just think that inequality stuff is just going to continue to get worse from this. It's kind of depressing when you think about it, right? Why does it have to worsen? Why can't it just stay the same? I mean, what about a rich person dying and giving it to their rich kids? How does that make things worse? I'm trying to be like a little bit optimistic here, or at least not downright pessimistic. Because what did those rich kids do to deserve that money? They loaned the genetic lottery? No, but that's not the question. How does this make it worse? Because you're just keeping the money in the hands of few and it's not being spread out to other people. Right, so it's Santa Claus. It's the same people. But the money's gonna continue to grow and the gap is gonna continue to get wider. As that money has passed down from generation to generation, the gap's gonna get wider. As we've seen by the growth and wealth. Well, what about this probably is like, what would it make a dent? But what about like the giving pledge? A lot of the billionaires are doing that. So it's dropping the bucket, but. I think that, yeah, that's nice. It is nice that people are, that's one thing as a country where we have this crazy inequality, there's no other countries that are as philanthropic as we are. Yeah, so maybe that's the other side. Like, yeah, listen, inequality sucks. I mean, it's just, it's the worst. But there is, there are people doing a lot of great philanthropic work. Look at the, look at this one about annual wealth projected to be in hair-to-base generation. Look at millennials. Millennials are gonna get, people talk about millennials not, they're gonna be fine. Some of them are gonna be fine because they're just gonna get, but the thing is, if people are living longer, it's not like you're gonna get the money in your 30s or 40s when you probably need it or 20s. You're gonna get the money in your 60s, right? You're 50? Yeah, so at that point, come on, die already. Just go. Yeah. But this is something that I've been hearing at like financial conferences for 15 years now. And I think it is, feel like it's finally kind of here. But I think people who think that, well, the stock market is gonna crash and the housing market's gonna crash, I think they're gonna be sorely mistaken. The boomers are not going to do that. It's just gonna get passed down to the next generation. Yeah. And that's right. All right, you saw this Wendy's thing? No, I didn't. Okay, Wendy's is testing. Now, I used to love Wendy's. And that would be like my hack as a child. My mother was pretty strict, especially about like junk food. Like she would bring like devil food or some shit, not devil food. There was like fake, what the hell was the name of it? It was green. It was like a green brand of cookies that was green. Sounds great. Yeah, it was terrible. It's like chemical, like low fat. Anyway, so I didn't, I wasn't allowed to get McDonald's growing up, but I was allowed to get the Wendy's grilled chicken sandwich. So I've always had a soft spot on my heart for Wendy's. Just the grills? Oh man. Right? It made no sense. But the spicy fried chicken sandwich is the best sandwich in the world. Okay, you know what else they have? That's the best at Wendy's is the frosty. The frosty's amazing. I love a good frosty. So they're testing an AI drive-through chatbot. Wendy's fresh AI will be first tested in Columbus, Ohio. This makes sense to me. But I hope they put some guidelines on it because these people who go to the drive-through and wanna be like, take this off and add this and take forever to order. I hope the chatbot tells them to hurry up. Oh, I remember what it is. I'm pretty sure it was this. Snackwells, do you remember those? Oh yeah, oh, gross. Gross. Yeah. It's so bad. So I just went to the website, Dear Loyal Snackwells customer, after 30 years of variety, your favorite snacks, the snackwells brand has been retired. Good, we sucked. It was snackwells, those were the worst. That should have been your office-based- Oh man. And your whole box of them just smashed. Do you remember the devil's food cookie cakes? These things sucked and they had like the fake Vienna wafers. Oh yeah. Google the images. These were terrible. Thanks, I miss you, Mom, but this shit sucked. Oh, that's right. I wanted to think you're reading healthy, but I think you're reading good stuff, but it was really hell, yeah. Corundus. Really bad. All right, good chart from the Wall Street Journal about nobody selling, we've talked about this, but I love this distribution chart of mortgage rates with people of what level they have and the majority of them are like 4% or under. They talked about how this lack of supply is causing people to- Well, we're the lead, we're the lead. Oh, many Americans who want to move are trapped in their homes locked in by low interest rates. They can't afford to give up. Again, I still think it's gonna happen eventually, but they say Clifton, New Jersey, a New York City suburb, two family house that listed for $449 in April, obviously to 120 offers in six days, went for 150 over asking price. This is the crazy thing. The more rising. The Fed thought that they were gonna be fixing the real estate market by raising rates and raising mortgage rates and they've only kind of made it worse, I think, because it's bad enough to have a bunch of offers on a house when rates are at 3% and things are a little more affordable, but if you're having lines out the door for rates at 6% or 7%, that's tough. So Wall Street Journal says four to six months of supply is typically that's normal or healthy if there is such a thing. We hit 1.6 months supply in January, it's at 2.6 months now. US homeowners had 270,000 more equity on average in the fourth quarter of 2022 than they did to the start of the pandemic. That's more, this is excess home equity as opposed to what they already had. It's, I don't know, this is the thing that again, makes me a little hopeful, at least that people have so much equity in their home. Eventually they'll be the ones who will be able to trade up, but this is another inequality thing where if you're out of the housing market now, the gap has increased a lot in terms of affordability. So this article is a perfect example of the Wall Street Journal finding people and quoting them. We had Dionne and Reboein on the Comp and they go around with the quarters. Okay. Old school. That makes sense, okay. So this is a crazy stat. So newly built up, newly built homes, and we've been talking about this on the show. So people are locked in, so it's only like new construction. Newly built homes made up about one third of total single family homes for sale in March, up from a historical norm of 10 to 20%. Here's this chart from Ensemble of, I'm calculated where I was via Ensemble Capital. Look at this chart, new home percent of total inventory. Wow. Because the home builders have to build, right? They have the inventory, they have the land. They can't sit on a like a three percent mortgage like someone in their house. Like they have to. It's the only game in town. Yeah. Maybe we'll use that for a title. The only game in town. Not bad. All right, let's talk about quarter, about the quarter. I gotta say, earning season is a lot. How many calls do you listen to a day? Well, not a day, it's just a lot. I mean, they're each an hour. Well, actually not such a try. I speed them up. I go two times and I hit the Q&A button. I don't listen to any of the prepared remarks. I think those are useless. I hit the Q&A and go right to the questions and answers. You don't want to say the word with the Q&A though. As someone who's never like a big listener to these things, every time the announcer comes on and says, please limit to one question and every single time they ask two questions. It's never. Two part question. Please remember to me ask one question. And maybe, and maybe, and maybe, write this a lot of, and maybe, and a lot of sort ofs. Last week I hit Airbnb in Disney. I think that was it. I listened to Airbnb as well. Thoughts? So, I continue to be impressed by their CEO. I think he's really good. They seem to really listen to people and make changes based on feedback. I did think the interesting one to me was the, they asked about AI, of course. And he said, think about AI in terms of, with Airbnb there's no front desk. So he was thinking like, we could have AI be our front desk or people ask questions or have an AI travel agent. So like, we're trying, we're thinking about doing like an all-inclusive Mexico trip with the kids next year. And we have three kids. And that's economy? Seriously. We have three kids and finding a room that can hold five people is very difficult. So all these hotels are like quoting us two rooms and they're like, I'm not paying for two. That's ridiculous. And so having, if I had a AI travel agent that could go look for all this stuff for me and find them, because finding them on the search engines is not quite as easy. I love the idea of an AI travel agent. That sounds great. All right. So here's how they started the shareholder letter with. We had a strong start to 2023 and Q1 nights and experiences booked had a record high with over 120 million. Revenue of 1.8 billion was up 20% year over year. And that income was 117 million at our first profit Q1 on a gap basis. Adjusted EBITDA was 262 million while free cash flows, 1.6 billion dollars, growing 32% year over year. Here's the coup de gras. We are now twice the size as we were before the pandemic on both the GBV, which is gross booking value and revenue basis and with considerably higher profitability and cash flow. So charts of quarterly free cash flow up until the right, quarterly revenue up until the right. Ben and I both own this stock. This is the type of stock where I would be happy to see it fall more on a guy more. In fact, it did fall a lot. Why? So they beat top and bottom line, but they guided to allow a pretty lousy Q2. So the stock got hit, which is wonderful. If it goes lower, I will buy more. I believe in this company long-term. This is a stock that's still it's still down since the IPO. Well, as it should be, it appeared in a ludicrous valuation. It's still not cheap and it probably never will be, but they're buying back stock. Yeah, that's pretty, right. As it's pretty young company to do that, right? Okay, this makes a lot of sense to me. They said, finally, we also introduced Airbnb Rooms. An all new take on the original Airbnb private room. Airbnb gets us back to the idea that started it all back to our founding ethos of sharing and they're also one of the most affordable ways of travel with an average price of only $67 a night. Over 80% of Airbnb Rooms are under $100 a night. So this, I think this is really freaking awesome. So imagine you're a young person. Let's use Jack Brains as an example. I was on his travel blog the other day, which is so freaking awesome. That kid is like living his best life and I love to see it. Do you ever see what he's like his doing? Yes, the young money guy, right? So he's a separate travel blog. It's unbelievable. He is doing his 20s, right? He's literally traveling the world. And for somebody like that, to stay in a room for 70 bucks, what a no-brainer that is. Right now, I'm sure like they've met the host and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, looking at it as a middle-aged man, thinking about the saying in a room or someone saying in my room, that seems awkward to me. But I can see how certain. Well, you're not 26. I know. I did the youth hostel thing when I was in my 20s. I... Yeah, no-brainer. So, okay, this is interesting on average daily rates. The CFO said it's been interesting how persistently higher average daily rates have remained. And that has been consistent kind of across the globe. The ADR rates that we saw in North America have been persistently high. Okay, so this is the thing with inflation, right? Prices rise and of course the pace of rises goes down. That's, you know, I'm using air quotes, that's inflation. But the prices don't come back down to what they were before inflation came. No. Which is should be a big inflation. It would take a really nasty recession about that. That's the thing I think people don't realize though. Inflation is almost always going up, right? We don't offset inflation with deflation to get back to where we were. That's not how it worked because if that happened, then your wage is gonna rise and fall as well. It doesn't work like that for most things. I mean cars and stuff it probably will. All right, so another stock that we both are. Ben, let me ask you this before we get into this. Is Disney a value trap? I don't know. I listened to Matt Bellany has the town and he's talking to Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg. And they did like a, okay, Bob Iger's been back for I don't know how long, a year or something. Six months? Six months and they're doing kind of a however things are going. They were both very bearish on Disney. And I feel like kind of everyone is, it is hard to believe with the amount of people traveling and going to Disney. And then the streaming stuff that you would have thought would have helped them out during the pandemic has only hurt them that they are not in a better place now. No, I mean, I don't know if they're a mess and it makes me slightly more confident in my position that nobody seems to like it. But maybe it's just dead money. I don't know, we'll see. But the bottom line is that the stream business is tough. In fact, it sucks, they've lost subs in North America. I think Apple should just buy Disney. I think that's the solution here. Spin out the parks, I don't know. Okay, all right, let's get into some of the numbers. Iger said the cost cutting initiatives I announced last quarter are well underway. And we're on track to meet or exceed our target of $5.5 billion in cost cutting. Finally, there will be an option to combine Disney plus in Hulu by the end of the year, which I am very happy with. What am I watching on Hulu? Not a ton, but my God, Dave is so good. It is so good. Holy shit. Yeah. I thought the horror episode was a little bit of a smirder miss, but at least he's trying. Oh, the one in Mississippi? Yeah, that was pretty good. Did you see the most recent one with Chuck? No, okay, he's back. Chuck is back. I'm one back. It is so, so, so good. All right, lower, oh, this is so, I mean, this is not great and this is secular. Lower broadcasting results reflected decreases in advertising revenue across the ABC network and our own and our television stations. Second quarter domestic linear network affiliate revenue decreased by 2%. So it's cable, it's advertising, it's not great. ESPN ad revenue is up 2%, which is good. But second quarter. It does seem like all of these entertainment companies are screwed besides Netflix. It's, I don't like with, is they win it as streaming? I don't know what they do. I mean, I think Disney has a shot. I mean, obviously, I'm a shareholder. The decline in operating income versus prior year was primarily driven by decrease. This is for the network. Who cares about this? This is just the timing of when they sign the sports contracts. Yeah, that's not relevant. The prices of sports contracts are always going up. All right, so they decrease their direct to consumer losses to $200 million. So all right, losses peaked or troughs on which whites, how do you say that actually? Did losses bottomed? There you go. But losses are bad. So anyway, so going in the right direction, who knows when that will get to profitability? But yeah, dude, they're not adding subscribers. And that's, that's no bueno. In good news, Guardians of the Galaxy, volume three, this is from Eric Davis. They have $60.5 million for the weekend. That's only a 49% drop from opening weekend, which is their strongest since Black Panther and fourth best for all time. So I think, so I think, I don't know what Guardians has done. I think I'm pretty sure it's over half a billion already globally. Some of the most, some of the recent movies that did really badly, like I think Ant-Man, for example, there was like an 80% drop after opening weekend. So this is nice to say. I gave the first Guardians of the Galaxy 15 minutes for a shut up, I think. Oh, I love those movies. No, don't credit to you. Those are great movies. What do you mean, you watched 20 minutes? It's a talking raccoon. I mean, come on. It's no, no, no, no. I couldn't do it. What? Sorry. This is some, it's one of the biggest franchises in the world. You could just say it's not for you. It's definitely not for me. Definitely not for you. All right, Home Depot, biggest business in 20 years. The CEO said after a three-year period of unprecedented growth for our sector, during which we grew sales by over $47 billion, we expected that fiscal 2023 would be a year of moderation for home improvement. Our sales for the quarter were below our expectations, primarily driven by lumber deflation and unfavorable weather. Ah, get out of here with the weather. What's the stock doing? This is surprising. Home Depot was underperforming the S&P 500 over the last three years, with the boom that we've had in, in, What was that possible? Right, so over the last three years, the S&P's up 50, Home Depot's up. Well, but what happens if you, so what happens if you go back to like January 2020? Well, I don't think so. Okay. So that this is going through May 2020. I mean, I don't know, that's just surprising to me that with the boom in remodeling that we've seen, Home Depot hasn't just been crushing it. It was up for what, right? That's surprising. So I'm going back to January and even still, so there was a huge, so from, from, from March from the bottom through the end of 2021, there was massive outperformance. It was like 95 versus 50, but I guess it's coming off a trigger high. It's how to, that is just surprising nevertheless. Yes. Okay, remember last week I joked about, about evil Tim Cook. From Jurassic Park? Yeah, I wasn't, I mean, I was, listen, I love Apple, but Dave Lauer tweeted, sorry to all the Apple fans, but quote, Apple is a Chinese company and quote, unquote, if you haven't, you should read this, it's disturbing, will the SEC treat them as such. So here's from the FT. Almost a fifth of its revenue comes from sales in China and operating profits in greater China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and the mainland. Top $31 billion in 2022. Holy moly. Okay, Apple has banned HK map.live, a maps app, protesters in Hong Kong used to track police movements, days after approving it. So if we have a Cold War with China, Apple is the big loser there. Potentially. I don't know. Apple's new privacy feature to sign to obscure users, web browsing from internet service providers and advertisers won't be available in China. Tens of thousands of apps disappeared from Apple's Chinese app store. They also blocked tools for organizing pro-democracy protests. There was something about like blocking gay stuff. Just some, you know, some things that just aren't great. I think the all tech companies that go global like this are, I don't know what they do when it comes to this kind of stuff. I get it, I get it, but I don't get it because I know this is supremely complicated, but I don't know. I think we don't know. I think, I think just think we've learned if there's a decision to be made between ethics and profits, the tech companies. I mean, the NBA bet they need to Apple. I mean to China. Yeah, they have a billion people. I think a lot, these companies care more about profits than they do about ethics. All right, from Bloomberg, survey of the week, Gen X is worried about social security. More than half of people classified as Gen X say they won't be financially prepared for retirement. Only 45% of them said they were very or somewhat confident social security will be there to support them when they need it. I've planned the flag on this before. I think if you're Gen X, I don't think you have to worry about social security. I think unless Jared Menken is president and gets rid of social security altogether, I think, I don't think you have to worry about that ever. That is such an important program. I mean, maybe they say, listen, if you're at the age of 40, you're gonna have to wait longer to get it or your benefits. But I agree, but there will need to be some modifications. Just mathematically, they're gonna have to do something. But the modifications are so easy. It's not gonna take much. It's just will a politician do it now or when their hand is forced, but it's not that hard. And I'm willing to plan the flag that it will be there. Also- By the way, I just want to correct myself. I don't look at that a refer to the Apple doing stuff. I don't like that I said gay stuff. The thing that they're doing is they are blocking gay dating services and encrypted messenger gaps. So, correct them myself. Okay. All right. I got great advice from Eric Z. He was listening to us talk about rear-view mirror stuff. And he said, horrible idea, don't get it. You can't see the kids. And- Oh, that is a great idea. Yeah, I was like, that makes sense. Immediately, I was like, good enough for me. All right, done. You know who are heroes? The drivers who don't pull in front of you as you're coming to a red light. So, I was in the middle lane of a three lane, something nice highway. Not quite a highway, but it's called a highway. So, I was in the middle lane and there's a car, so I'm like, say a hundred yards from the red light. There's a car that stopped in the left lane already at the light and a car behind him. 90% of the time that car will pull in front of you for no reason whatsoever. Right. And this person didn't, and I want it to get out of my car and shake their hand. I love the opinion that, 72% of all drivers on the road are bad. Bad drivers with that kind of stuff. 70% Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'd say higher than that. You know what everyone thinks are, you know what everyone thinks are an above average driver? I will say that I might make a bold statement here, but I really believe it. I am a way above average grocery shopper. I might be the best. Grocery shopper. Okay. We got a lot of feedback last week on our grocery store. Oh yeah, a lot of people said Kroger. Kroger. You're talking about the worst people in the highway. You know what the worst person that grocery store is? The person that walks, the person that walks next to their cart. Instead of pushing it from behind, they walk on the side and hold it, and they're taking up two spots. That's awful. You've seen these people, right? They walk on this, like what's the point of that? So I didn't do a huge food shop. I spent the $156, but believe me when I tell you, I was in and out in eight minutes or less. For $156 of stuff? How's that? So what do you got? Two salads? I just, I am in and I am out. Boom, boom, boom, God. Yeah, I'm pretty quick too. We got to know the grocery store. It can't be a new place. That's true. You go somewhere new and you don't know where stuff is. I just feel like I really know my way around the aisles. All right, I've got a billion dollar idea that I want to pitch you. Okay. I was at the car wash. Got Robin a car wash from Mother's Day amongst other things. Basic? Basic? All right, that's a lie. So Robin, we don't, yeah, of course, basic. But the basic is $30. That's ridiculous. I paid $19.99 a month for unlimited car washes. It'd be $30 for one. I think so. Come to the Midwest, sir. It's way cheaper here. By the way, so we don't, Robin and I don't exchange, we don't get gifts to each other. I don't think we ever have. I don't think we ever have. I'd like to say now, I don't think adults should give each other gifts. There should be no adult birthday parties, no gift giving. I think that should be done after you're like 18 or 21. Well, I feel like if you want to get, if you want to get somebody a gift, now I understand like there's a reason to do it sometimes, right, for a big anniversary or whatever. But if you want to get somebody a gift, get somebody a gift. But this idea of getting somebody a gift on a date. Yes, that's what I'm saying. If you want to do an impromptu something fine, but just because it's their birthday, I think after a certain point, your birthday shouldn't matter anymore. Like, I don't care about my birthday, any, I love birthdays when I was younger. I don't care anymore. Okay, so anyway, here's my idea. I saw, so I'm sitting down waiting for them to clean Robin's car, and I saw a Land Rover Defender. You ever see one of those? I don't know. I don't know cars that much. Okay, great looking car. I know Land Rover. Great looking car. And I thought, and I know this is probably completely not feasible, there should be like a run way for cars. Like, there should be a service where you could have a different car every month or every other month. Now maybe it's super complicated with registration and conditions, all that sort of stuff, but there should be different tiers. So the premium tier is $1,200 a month, and you get top car or whatever the price is, because how much fun would that be? To be able to just shuffle around cars, so you don't have to be locked into a car for three years. What in that? So your billion dollar idea is a car rental agency? Yes. Oh, wait, is that a thing? So you're saying a subscription so you could try different cars? Yeah, subscription model. I would love to drive six different cars a year. I like driving cars. I like cars. I like cars. I'm a car guy. I don't know anything about this. I'm sure we're gonna get like a million responses of people saying this already exists. How about this? I'm definitely not a car guy, because that is a car guy. I like cars, I'm not a car guy. So I've seen it. But I would love to drive different cars. They have memberships here where you can get in a boat club, where you pay like. Yes, yes, yes. My neighbor stood there. And you get like four boats, you have access to and you have to schedule them and yeah. So why can't we do that for cars? I would love to drive a Porsche convertible, but I can't buy that car. It's ridiculous. You could drive a Porsche. A Porsche with the tropical brothers though, that would work. No, you would look like a gigantic douche knuckle. Now, I guess you would look like a douche weather if you're driving a temporary or not. But anyway, the point remains that I would like, I like variety, varieties of spice of life. Somebody once said, okay, I wanna drive multiple cars. So speaking of Porsches, did you watch Air over the weekend? Oh my God, did I watch Air? Okay, so here's, I've got a lot of thoughts on this one. It had so many things I love all in one place. First of all, I love the fact, my wife and I once went and saw it two weeks ago in the theater and it's already on Amazon. I love the fact that these movies are in the theater for like three weeks now and then you just get them in your house. It's the best. That's great. Okay, first of all, this movie was kind of made for people like you and I who like sports. We enjoy Damon Naflak, right? I love those guys. Enjoy the joy. I love those guys. I loved Shoot Dog in a story of Nike. So this was, I felt like this was almost like a sequel to Shoot Dog in a little, in the ways because that was like the early days of Nike. I just, and it had great 80s music. There was such a like an astol just piece of it. It's a great soundtrack, great soundtrack. I've been complaining for a while that there haven't been any good movies. This is what I've been waiting for. I loved this movie. It was so good. Guess what? Yeah, I could, yeah, one of the exact same page, this movie was borderline perfect. How, and I checked out the runtime after I was done watching it because I felt like it was like 20 minutes. How fast did it move? There was no fat whatsoever. Amazing cast in the movie. Just. Ah, what a movie. More of this. It's so good. More of this, please. So I was, wait, did they direct it, or did Affleck direct it? They direct, I think he directed it and they produced it. So if these guys keep making movies like this, I thought Damon was fantastic in this. I mean, and I thought. He's always fantastic. He was so good. You were so good. Affleck as Phil Knight was actually pretty believable. I thought he was good with the Buddhist stuff and the poorish and. But do you agree? The movie just flew by. Oh yeah, it was, yeah, I loved it. It we, yeah. I was looking for another movie this weekend and I was searching through all my 11 different streaming services and I was looking on Peacock because everyone's from all the other new movie. And I go on the main page and I get an ad that pops up you know where they start showing a preview of the show. And there's a show called Bupkiss on Peacock with Pete Davidson. I've never heard of this. It just came out and I see in the show is Joe Pesci. What? And I was like, whoa, what? I've never heard of this. Pete Davidson has a show where it's basically like a meta version of his life. Like he plays Pete Davidson and I'm like, oh, I'm not going to like this. But Joe Pesci's in it. So I have to watch it. I watched the whole series already because Joe Pesci's in it. It's the rest of the cat. Pete Davidson to me is taken her to leave him. I'm not a big fan. I don't hate him. I'm just like, he's kind of funny sometimes. But I thought he already did this with his Staten Island movie. I kind of liked it actually. So Pete Davidson is like the worst part about the show. Everything. So Eddie Falco plays his mom. Joe Pesci plays his grandpa. The older brother from everywhere, everybody loves Raymond plays his uncle. They have amazing cameos from like John Stewart and Charlie Day and Keenan Thompson and all these people. And so like Bobby Cannaval plays his uncle in a great episode. It starts off. Wow, what a cast. Yeah, so the rest of the cast is awesome. Pete Davidson is like the worst part of the show. And it starts off really strong the first two or three episodes. It kind of goes off the rails a little bit. But Joe Pesci. Joe Pesci is on my list with like basically him and John Candy of guys who are amazing character actors who can also carry a movie or show by themselves. I just couldn't believe he didn't do anything for like 20 years and now he's on a Pete Davidson show. And he's great in it. He did the Irishman. But yeah, he doesn't do anything. I wonder what it does. I couldn't believe that he did a Pete Davidson show. Could he need money? I guess I don't want to need money. But he's thinking he still got it. Bobby did another kid. I'm sorry. I don't like to judge. But this is really messed up. That's a lot of kids. I don't know. It's just not nice to the child. All right. Have you been watching Barry? Keeping up with Barry? You know, I haven't. I'm out until unless you tell me to jump back in. I think you have to watch it. But it's reached this point where it's just a completely different show than it was the first two seasons. It's almost like he figured it out the first two seasons. It's kind of like Atlanta. I watched Atlanta in the first two seasons. We're like this hilarious show. And these guys who are trying to come up for the ranks, they come rappers. And then the last season, Atlanta just went off the rails and was like this completely different, weird artsy film thing. And Barry's kind of there. But I'm still with it. And I still like it. But it's just he, I feel like he's just taking chances. And I'm still in it. I'm still watching it. I want to see how it ends. But it's a different show. All right. You know what? I'm not going to watch it. I'm not going to watch it unless you, I'm going to let you finish. I'll take your recommendation then. All right. I started watching Citadel, which is basically the born identity. And it's fun. It's certainly not great. Is that a different show? Is that a movie called The Citadel with Kiefer Sutherland? Did you ever watch the show The Bodyguard? No. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's that guy. What's it on? It's on Amazon. So it's very, I mean, it's Jason Bourne. It's a born identity. Very some, I mean, almost the exact same thing. In fact, I make a reference to it. But if you like that type of thing, just mind this action, fun. Yeah, it's fun. What else? Oh, so Kobe, all of a sudden, is obsessed with Venom and Carnage. Not exactly sure how, but like he just, it just, you know, he latched on. And I rewatched Spider-Man 3. And I fast-forwarded to Venom, which is only like in the last third of the movie. But I remember watching Spider-Man 3 in the theater and thinking, what the hell happened? This is, what year was this? This is 2007. OK. It was so bad. And Sam Rady did it. He did it. It was so bad. Remember the scene where like, uh, Tony's re-dancing? Yeah, I mean, I start to sweat because I was nervous. I was so anxious because it was so bad. And I haven't thought about the movie since, but I rewatched most of it with Kobe. And it was just, it was as bad if not worse than I remember. It was just, got off. I don't know what happened there. Yeah, my son loves the Spider-Man. So we've rewatched all of them. And there's a million. So that was by far the worst one. Yeah. OK. All right. We've got a surprise. Next week, we've got a surprise. Yeah. But anyway, future proof. Check it out. Show notes, et cetera. Animalspiratespod at gmail.com. Thank you for listening. And we will see you next week. Bye. Bye. Okay.