The Dollar Dump (EP.408)
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Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick 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 Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Ben, welcome back. How was your vacation? You don't sound like you care. That was one of those, how are you doing? I don't care. That's true. No time for that. The dock is loaded. I can't tell if being on vacation during a bout of market turmoil was a good thing or a bad thing. I'm going to say it was a good thing. I would have been in agony. It was tough. It was so, the day that we had the big 10%

thrust high or however you want to call it. I was on a dolphin cruise with my family. So we went on the little canals of Marco Island and these dolphins are swimming in like two feet of water. It was majestic. They would come right up to the boat, dolphins all around us. We saw manatees and stingrays. It was very cool. And at one point my phone is just blowing up and I'm getting alerts and I'm getting slacks and I'm getting text messages like, oh my gosh, are you looking at this?

And it was like the stock market is up 9% or 10% or something. And I looked and I thought, oh, cool. And I put it back down and I kept watching the Dolphins. Good for you. I saw my iPhone screen time. I think I get it every Sunday morning. So earlier last week, I apologized to Kobe. I felt bad. I was in his bed putting him to sleep and I was on my phone like the entire time just scrolling.

Usually on vacation, at night, I'm reading and sitting on a beer or something, and I definitely was on my computer once everyone else was in bed more. But it was also good to be just away from it and seeing all the people that just aren't really paying attention, don't know what's going on.

So a lot of records were made last week, including we've got 50 pages in the Google Docs. Got to be close to a record, including my screen time. I think I was on my phone for seven and a half hours a day, which is way off the charts for me. 2020s is the decade of things that have never happened before, right? We just keep getting them. So I told Kobe, I apologize that I've been on my phone so much. And I tried to tell him, like, it's for work. There's a lot of things going on in daddy's world. So I was showing him stock charts.

And I said, are these lines going up or are they going down? And so I was trying to explain to him, like, this is Nike. This is Disney. What other companies do you want to see? And he goes, what about Hollywood? Oh, no, you're turning your son into a technical analyst already? So he asked me to show him a chart of Hollywood because the day prior to that, he was asking about why Minecraft, which he's seen twice now.

He was asking why Minecraft isn't at home. Why can't you watch it on the couch? What do you show him, Netflix or Warner Brothers or what? So I told him, well, when he asked about Hollywood, I was just like, how did, why do you think that Hollywood is a business? Because the day prior he asked, why isn't Minecraft on the couch? And I said, because the business of movies is Hollywood and Hollywood needs to make money by putting them into the movie theaters. And so he asked me to see a chart of Hollywood.

Interesting. But what would your choice be to show Hollywood? That's a good question. Maybe Warner Brothers, Disney, Paramount? Yeah, Warner Brothers, Louise ETF. Not Paramount, I guess. But anyway, interesting week in the market. This hit me hard. Our friend Michael Antonelli tweeted, hearing everyone's thoughts 24-7 is the worst thing to happen to society since it's a mosquito. Now, chill out.

Um, the actual is I'm sure, you know, it's hyperbole, but it's a good point. And I think especially we're going to talk a lot about some of the survey data that's coming out. And while there is a lot of uncertainty.

I think the charts, as crazy as it is, the charts are not commensurate with the action and the damage. Like there's no way that this is more uncertain than in October 2008 when the future of the financial system was legitimately in question. Like there's no f***ing way. I want to talk about the sentiment stuff too, how quickly that shifted. I do think though that social media and Twitter especially has been a...

For me, following this, a net positive. Following along on Twitter, I think this has been the best Twitter has been in a long time.

I think it's been, obviously there's always the bad stuff and the bad actors and the people that are just out there to troll or put out disinformation. That is always going to exist. But to try to understand what's going on, I think Twitter has been very helpful. Yeah. I would say that for people though, that are not target date fund investors like yourself, for people that might be on edge, I think Twitter is the worst place in the world because I wrote about this last week in a post called, who are you listening to?

And the reason why I wrote it was because fighting the markets are hard enough without social media. When you're seeing your account go down and all you have is just the actual traditional media, it's really scary. When you have people, professional investors, calling for a collapse or 3,800 on the S&P 500, the more you see that, the more likely you are to push a button that you're going to regret. And I felt that.

Two Sundays ago, I can't even, yeah, I think it was two Sundays ago. Or was it last? I have no idea. Two Sundays ago, when Bitcoin was down to 77,000, somebody that I respect was calling for Bitcoin like 10K. And I was like, oh shit. And I really had the feeling of maybe I should just take my profits and go home. But the point is replace Bitcoin with anything. Like if you're on edge and you're seeing everybody's thoughts to Michael's point, that's not healthy.

I agree. This is, to me, the—I think I tweeted about this and put it on Blue Sky or something. I've never had a period like this where more people that I trust and respect are worried. It doesn't feel like there is even a contrarian voice out there. There's the partisan people who always say, yeah, I'll do whatever you want. But there's no one I trust and respect who's going, yeah, this is actually a pretty good thing. There isn't one person I know who's saying, yeah, this is fine.

That's the hard part is like you can't even find – usually in any of the last 15 years, even during COVID, people immediately – there were certain people who said like in April, okay, the worst of it is over. We're – economically, we've – so –

I do that part scared. This is the one that got me from the Wall Street Journal because they were all these stories about how Trump blinked and said Trump played his cards close to the vest. He told advisors that he was willing to take pain. A person who spoke to him Monday said he privately acknowledged that his trade policy could trigger a recession, but he said he wanted to make sure it didn't cause a depression, according to people familiar with the conversation. So what do you worry about? He doesn't want to cause a depression.

The fact that that conversation even came up, and obviously people who are putting this stuff out want to get this out there to make sure that he doesn't do something like this, I guess. But I don't know. That kind of thing is one of the reasons that I think it was okay that people were freaking out. If you hear stuff like that, I think it's okay to say, like, this could—

And some path this could have gotten really bad or could get really bad if he keeps pressing that button. We'll talk about the stock market later. Do you agree that the worst of the tariff-induced panic is over?

I would say unequivocally, yes. I'm not saying that the stock market bottom, the bottom is in, but I don't think we're going to get another VIX spike to how high, I don't know how high it got. Oh, like a two-day period of 10% down? No, that was just like, oh my gosh, the shock and awe. Right. So the good news is the ability for tariffs to shock us is probably behind us. Now, the potential bad news is like, all right, well, what does this do to earnings?

Ultimately, again, we'll get some of the confidence stuff, but it's bad. We could have a double dip correction because the worst of this correction could be over. But if we actually do go into recession, then it's going to probably roll over again. So that's the hard part. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could easily foresee a scenario where the lows from last week or the week before don't hold ultimately. But I'm just saying like the panic –

from tariffs, I think is behind this. Yeah. The floor has been set very low in terms of like, whoa, this is, it could be that bad. I think, yeah, you're right. Colin tweeted, China tariff changes in the last 10 days, April 2nd, 54% to April 8th, 104% to April 9th, 145% to April 12th. Exempts electronics, bringing average rate back to 104%. My head is spinning. And then of course, Trump was tweeting Sunday night. I never made any exemptions, but they were, were they not executive orders that came out on Friday that said that

Or I don't know. I'm losing track of time. But the messaging gets sloppy at best. Nico Harrison thinks this is very well done in terms of planning. Okay. So let's talk about what's going on inside the market and what has markets people like us paying attention. Mike Bird tweeted, the drop in the value of the dollar during an S&P 500 sell-off of this magnitude is really astonishing.

There have been 16 sell-offs of this scale or larger over five days over the last 45 years. During 13, the dollar rose. This is the sharpest US dollar decline during similar conditions. And the dollar is traditionally a safe haven.

as our dollar-denominated bonds, our bonds, you had the worst two-week plunge for the dollar since 2009. You could say, listen, currencies are cyclical. This could be a head fake or whatever. The reason this is concerning to people is that this next one from the New York Times shows that

The 10-year treasury versus crude oil versus the dollar. And you have the thing happening at the same time is the dollar is falling while yields are rising. That's the thing that's kind of scary. And while the stock market was crashing. Yes. So those two things should not be – usually it should be if yields are rising, that tends to portend a stronger dollar. So the fact that you have them diverging like this, that – because we've had yield spikes for the past –

three or four years that it's like yield spike again, then back down, then a spike, then down. Like that stuff, the narratives are always changing. It's the dollar divergence and the flight out of U.S. assets that is particularly concerning. Jim Bianco tweeted the dollar index and U.S. 10-year yields. And of course, these two lines track each other very, very closely until last week they diverged hard. The dollar crashed, the dollar plunged, yield spiked. Here's a great chart from Cameron Dawson and her colleague at New Edge.

showing the 10-year treasury yield and economic surprises. And again, they tend to follow each other, not quite one for one, but they tend to go the same direction. You saw a sharp divergence, which is the city US economic surprise index falling, so downside surprises and yields going up. Traditionally, when there is a flight for safety, people buy bonds, people buy dollars. And the opposite has happened this go around.

The most nervous I was was on Tuesday night when it was, I was watching and I was on Twitter until like midnight and people kept posting charts of the 10 years going up, the 30 years going up. That's when I, and obviously that's what it sounds like made Trump blink too, is the bond market and the bond market

kind of really scared, but that was the thing that I was going, oh no, this, this is not, this is not good in a, in a crisis where tenure that, that was the most nervous. I probably was 30 year yields rose 48 basis points. According to Jimmy, that Deutsche bank that's largest since the 1980s, uh, the 10 year had the, uh, the chart from Bianco largest gain weekly gain since the early two thousands. Um, here's another good one. This is from Yens Nordvig.

It's a bit wonky, but I think it's important. If you are interested in understanding what's going on in markets right now, this simple chart is illustrative. It shows the Euro dollar that used to trade very closely with the rate differential, CFA stuff, right? Okay. But now the Euro US dollar is moving for entirely different reasons. The rate differential is moving sharply against the Euro, but the Euro dollar is exploding higher.

This is the simplest way to illustrate how the ongoing asset allocation shift away from US assets is leading to the correlation breakdown. And we've got a lot of stuff later than that, but it's the flight out of US assets. Ultimately, listen, I don't think I meet personally. I'm not terrified of a bear market.

right? Like this is, this is what we do. We happen, right? We help people that into your plan. We help people through bear markets. But when you have something like this and ultimately like the fear is the big fear is the move away from us assets. Our greatest strength is our ability to export the dollar and import so much cap, so much capital going into our markets. And if that is breaking down,

then the entire world is going to look very different. I don't know that I'm there yet,

You're not doing a very good job of getting out of the scare stuff. Getting out of the scared stuff? No, you're talking about how if you follow on social media, it's all scare stuff. Let me allow some... No, but I'm saying I don't know that I buy that. I think that people are being a little hysterical, even though the data clearly shows, yes, there are assets moving out of the US right now. I have... It's hard to not have the cognitive dissonance. I have the one part of my brain is saying, yes, getting hysterical makes sense here. This could be bad. And then the other part of me is saying, hey, chill out a second.

Okay? I'm sorry, getting hysterical never makes sense. There was a story from The Atlantic that says there's no coming back from Trump's tariff disaster. America was the world's economic anchor. Thanks to the president, it may never have that role again. Yeah, see, I will fade that all day. Sorry. Okay, so I pulled this up, the top 25 holdings in the Vanguard World Stock Market Index. 22 of them are U.S. companies. Here's the thing that I will say.

Coming into January 2025 was probably the biggest lead the US has ever had over the rest of the world economy. I'm not saying this is the best economy we've ever had. Obviously, it wasn't. No, it's not. But we were lapping the field. So I think you could say that we probably had the biggest lead then, and the lead is going to shrink from this. I think you could say that, like, listen, whatever we're doing here...

It's probably going to make the rest of the world step up and they're going to play catch up a little bit. But we have a huge margin of safety. We have the biggest, best corporations. Here's the thing. If you are really worried that Trump is going to crash the economy and he's going to keep pushing these buttons,

I don't know, we're two and a half years away from people who are going to be trying to become the next president campaigning, right? How long has Apple been a publicly traded company for? How many years? That's like my North Star. I have a lot of faith in the American corporation and the American consumer. I have way more faith in the corporations figuring this out. And I mean, right or wrong, Tim Cook went to the White House and asked for a reprieve and he got it. What do you mean right or wrong? Right. Well, is that- He did what he had to do.

Yes, but my point is that small businesses can't do that. You can't be a small business and go to the White House and get a reprieve on your products from tariffs. So there's going to be people who are going, the rich just get richer and the small businesses guy is screwed. That's the right or wrong thing. But you're right. They have enough money in their war chests to manage this, and they will figure it out, even if there's a period of disruption. Like, these are the biggest, best corporations in the world, right?

Eventually, whatever the situation is, they're going to navigate it somehow, even if there's some pain in the meantime. So I think that I am probably most worried. The probability of a recession, if I were to guess, is as high as I felt it's been in a long time. Yes, that's a good transition. But wait, but wait, but wait.

What if we only, and I would say this is my base case. I'm not expecting a catastrophic recession. What if we get a moderate recession and we get through this, even with tariffs? What do we look back on this period and say? We really are unbreakable.

Another reason for people not to panic. Like what would be the takeaway if we really don't get, if the worst doesn't come to pass? And it usually doesn't. I do think that a moderate recession would be my baseline just because consumer balance sheets are so strong. Right. And we, we've already proven we handled 40 year, 40 year high inflation in 2022. And we brushed it off like it was nothing. Like, so I, I, I think higher prices from tariffs and stuff, I think we can handle it.

Do you, so you mentioned the probability of it. So this is Cal, she has it and I'm sure it's different. Now I pulled this up a couple of days ago. They were saying it's a 52% chance of recession. It got as high as 65. And then when there was some deals in place, it went down. Do you think we can trust these betting markets to get the recession calls right in advance? I think directionally. Like what, what percentage would it have to be where you say, all right, I mean, would it be 80% or something? What percentage would it have to hit for you to go? Okay. Yeah. I guess that sounds about right. Okay. So here's some Neil Dutta.

Uh, he was on odd bots last week. I don't know if you listened to that one. I did Joe, by the way, speaking of like, I wrote this in the post, but who do you listen to? Joe and Tracy are killing it.

Yeah, they're doing an odd-outs like every day. It's great. People keep... We've gotten a lot of requests to do more emergency animal spirits. I don't think that's... Our thing is like, let's wait and see when everything comes and then put it all together. Also, if our emergencies are just respond to the headlines, they're stale in six hours. Yes. We had a few people comment too, like, hey guys, this stuff is already old news. It's like, everything's old news. Right. What do you expect? Everything's changing so fast. I was thinking about...

Like it's, it's, it's funny how resilient humans are, how quickly we adjust to the current landscape, whatever the landscape may be. And I was really like yearning for the days. And it was only five months ago when there was no major headlines in the markets. Just like, Oh, Apple was up half a percent today. Just because it was, can we go back to worrying about the AI bubble as our biggest concern in the market? Remember that was like, that was the biggest concern. Like, will there be an AI bubble? Yeah. That's, that's what everyone's worried about.

So anyway, so Dutta, he commented on that podcast, and he said, Fair.

This is the most worried I've seen him in years, obviously. He's saying even if it doesn't really become a recession, it's going to feel like one. But to your point about the sentiment, so this is from Bob Elliott. CEO confidence has fallen to its weakest since the GFC, which is crazy that it's lower now than it was during the pandemic, which was one of the most uncertain periods we'll probably ever live through. To your point about the sentiment, if the market—

and the economy match the sentiment, then yes, we are coming for a very, very hard landing. But I do agree with you that the sentiment changes so fast that you can't even compare it to the past anymore. Yeah, if the sentiment ends up, if the economy ends up reflecting the sentiment as of today, then game over. Right. I just, you know, I still remain a bit skeptical in terms of taking the sentiment too literally. Yes. All right, let's talk about the

Factory stuff and the because I feel like this has brought up a huge debate about the manufacturing sector

So this is from Frank Lanz. He said – this is from the FT. There was a survey asking, America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing. 80% of Americans agreed. Yes, if more people worked in manufacturing, we'd be better off. Then it said, I would be better off – That's a shockingly high number. Wow. It is very high, right? You wonder if that's – but it's a throwaway because then the next question is, I would be better off if I worked in a factory. And 73% of Americans disagreed. And only 2% of people actually do work in a factory now. And that number is probably going to – so I –

So they put this in a chart. This is our problem with surveys usually. It's like, yeah, sure, great. Everyone else can work in a factory, but I don't want to. But look at this chart here. I shared this on Slack before. It's all employees in service-providing sectors and all employees in manufacturing sectors. And you can see manufacturing has stagnated pretty much since the 1950s. It hasn't really gone anywhere. It's slowly but surely drifted lower. But look at how many more people work in service industries now. This is just our economy. We're a service industry.

economy, whether you like that or not. And I don't know how tariffs aren't going to change that.

The Wall Street Journal did a really good post about this called How the U.S. Lost Its Place as the World's Manufacturing Powerhouse. And they said, after the 1950s, manufacturing's role in the U.S. economy began to slip. Some of this came about merely because Americans were becoming more affluent and devoted more of their spending to services such as travel, restaurants, and medical care. Quote, you get richer, you can only buy so many cars, and you start buying services. So objectively, this is a good thing. Now, I don't want to dismiss the...

NAFTA, particularly the world, let's say the WTO concerns about like the opening up of China and how that really detonated a lot of middle America. Cause it did. They said in 1999, the value of Chinese goods exports came to only about a 10th of the U S less than Sweden's. So in 1999, trying to exported less than what Sweden exported. And then the world trade organization happened in 2001.

And then by 2008, Chinese exports surpassed the US in just nine years. Pretty remarkable. Look at this chart. Total goods exports to the world, US versus China. So it definitely was an inflection point. It poured gasoline on a fire. I think one thing we've learned is that our country is not very good at helping industries that are

The pivot. The pivot is the hard point, which is a great point of conversation for now. Like, are we going to be able to help people who are disrupted by AI? No, we leave people. Probably not. That's the problem. Like capitalism leaves people in industries behind. It just does. It lifts people out of poverty on the whole, but there are certainly people that get left behind. I mean, if this thing that happened over the course of a few decades gets people this mad, how mad are people going to get at AI? Right. Just imagine.

One of the things that we don't really capture, though, is services. And if you look at services exports, we're over a trillion dollars. China is, I don't know, 400 million, 400 billion, excuse me. Yeah, that's what we're good at, right? So-

I see a lot of people who are putting out posts, it's economists and pundits and analysts putting out posts of, "Here's what the impact of tariffs are going to be on the economy, on GDP, on spending." And while I appreciate the people that are putting in that time and effort, and it's kind of funny because you can throw it out the window two days later when the tariffs change, but I don't see how you can possibly try to quantify what's going to happen here. Because there are going to be so many unintended consequences and behavioral changes

that it's almost useless to try to say, like, if the world remains exactly the same in a vacuum, this will be the impact. Because the world is not going to remain the same. Companies are going to change. Consumer behavior is going to change. And one of them we've seen so far is that already Europeans are canceling their travel plans to the U.S. Huge. It's cratering. This is just one segment, right? Yep. Visitors from Western Europe who stayed at least one night in the U.S. fell by 17%.

Last year, international visitors spent more than $253 billion on US travel and tourism related goods and services. So yeah, some of these charts are wild. The FT did this post, Austria, Denmark, Germany, and it's just, it's crashing. Not surprisingly, travel and leisure stocks are getting hit really hard.

Las Vegas Sands is down 18% just since Liberation Day, down 30% year-to-date. A lot of that's China. But the airlines are getting murdered, the hotels. But you wonder if the dollar keeps dropping, though, travel, because for years now, it's been cheaper to go to Europe for Americans. Eventually, it's going to be, if the dollar keeps dropping, it's going to be cheaper for Europeans to come to America. Yeah. Yeah.

We got an email from a listener who has friends in Europe and they've traveled the world together. And they got an email, these people from Germany. They wanted us to share. Hey, we've taken the decision not to travel to the US this summer. The latest developments by the US government worry us and disappoint us too much. The tariffs will seriously endanger the world's wealth. We all know that production of neither bikes, nor phones, nor toasters, nor anything else. We'll move back from Asia to the States. The hourly rate of the average American simply makes it too expensive.

Instead, the tariffs will hurt the world tremendously. The US inflation will grow very strong as many companies need to raise prices to cope with tariffs. Like us, if we don't do that, we will go out of business. Additionally, we read about situations in the German press where German tourists and visitors are being detained in the US despite having a valid reason of being the country and holding ESTA. All that together does not make us feel welcome as Germans, as Europeans, or basically as not Americans.

I'm truly sorry. I wish we were not in this situation. I hope something happens in the US. Anyway, it goes on, but they're not coming. And they are, this is not an outlier. It's in the data. No, I think there's a lot of people outside of the US who are looking at us and not happy. So here's my question, though. So Torsten Slack posted this chart of total foreign holdings by instruments. So he says, foreigners own 20% of our stock market, 30% of treasuries, and 30% of corporate bonds.

Could the big outflow, a decent outflow, just sort of cause a further sell-off in these things? Could this be a structural thing going forward where we've had a huge growth in foreign investors? Does it matter? I don't know. Sure. That's one of the unintended consequences questions, I guess. Hard to dismiss it. I think also it would be impossible to say, like, yes, this will happen.

Right. But one of the reasons that international stocks have been doing so poorly is because people in their own countries have been selling them. So I do think this is the perfect encapsulation of why you diversify internationally, right? This is all people were asking for the past five years. Why would I ever own international stocks? A situation like this, this is why. This data point just hit the tape. Tell me if this inspires confidence or not, Ben. Weisenthal tweeted, the outlook for new orders from the New York Fed regional manufacturers literally hit the lowest level in the history of the survey.

So it's hard to, again, we'll see if actions match sentiment. That's the thing. It's hard to imagine this not impacting earnings. I just don't see any way around it. Now the degree and the magnitude is up for debate, obviously. Yeah. Margin. I keep saying companies are going to protect margins over workers. So I think the next thing down is, is corporations and companies are going to be protecting costs. And that probably means layoffs are coming. Here's another thing. Ryan Peterson tweeted this.

met another U.S. manufacturer who's decided to produce their product overseas where they won't have to pay duties on component imports. We're going to see stuff like this, where you're going to see stories of

of companies just completely making everything overseas. And it's going to be the opposite. Again, these corporations, the plans are so haphazard that corporations are going to be able to figure out loopholes. They're going to figure out, they're going to be able to figure this out, even if it's going to be a painful transition period. I worry more about the workers than I do about the corporations in this point. Same. The news is, the news flow is dizzy. It's really, really hard to predict or make sense. You know, it's a, you know, it's a weird phenomenon that we're going to see.

The data, by definition, backward looking, doesn't matter. Like Bank of America reported, I think consumer spending was up 2% year over year in March, something like that. It's like, oh, great. The consumer is still spending, but it doesn't matter what they did in March. Right. So the next earnings season is not going to matter. The forward stuff is going to matter more than the past stuff. I would imagine that stocks will not move on

what they did in the previous quarter. Now earnings won't matter. It's almost always forward looking data or forward guidance, but now more than ever. So Conor sent tweeted, no way of really knowing when we're on the outside. Oh, I forgot to mention this. I'm like, there was a report that the Fed would step in into the treasury market if they had to. No way of really knowing when we're on the outside, but I think it's hard to disentangle. Quote, Besant seems to have a little more influence and the VIX is around 40 and the bond market was disorderly last week.

Then he said, since April 2nd, there's been a shock to consumer business confidence. 10-year yields and mortgage rates are up about 30 basis points. Investment grade and high-yield credit spreads are wider. The aggregate tariff burden is up a lot. All Volbeck's pauses are welcome, but getting back to 4-2 conditions would be hard.

So Nick Tamareos responded, the question about who has influence is misframed. Trump is acting off of his instincts and his instincts may be guided or reinforced by different advisors at different times. When his instincts are hawkish, it said that his hawkish advisors are influential, Navarro. When market concerns override, then Besson will appear to be influential. And so it's just, it's difficult to predict what he's going to do because he acts off of instinct.

I was reading Mark Rubenstein's sub stack, Net Interest, which is easily one of my favorites. And he was talking about, the post was about the bond market and the James Carville quote that went around, right? Right, from Bill Clinton and yeah. So it's a really, really good post. So he grabbed the quote from The Art of the Deal.

where Trump said about the way that he behaves. Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it very loose. I don't carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can't be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you've got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops. And it's difficult to run the country that way. Well, especially a trade policy where businesses are literally hanging on all the way. Yeah. So Ben, you mentioned earlier like

There's not... All right, so there's obviously parts of conversations that are political. How could it not be? But there's a big difference between conversations where the politics bleed in versus like a partisan conversation. And I think what you were talking about is there's not really...

a pro-tariff economist or a legitimate pro-tariff economist. This has nothing to do with red or blue. Ronald Reagan was against tariffs. George W. Bush was against tariffs. Milton Friedman is like the father of Republican economics. This is not a Democrat or Republican thing. This is a Donald Trump thing. There's a big difference there. Right, right. Yeah. So Nassim Taleb tweeted, give credit where credit is due.

True, economists know little about TAL risk and finance, but they understand trade, and I've been studying it for the past 400 years. So Matt Darling retweeted and said, you know it's bad when TAL starts saying economists have a point. It is kind of funny that during the election, people said economists are part of the problem, and now economists are part of the solution. It all comes full circle, I guess. Another part of this is like, what does the Fed do?

Because we got an inflation print that went negative last month, no? So here's the thing. I was going to talk about this later. If you look at the inflation data coming down,

If they would have just not done any of this other tariff stuff, the Fed would be cutting and interest rates would be falling right now. So they say that I totally believe that because no one cared about the inflation print because, again, it's past. People don't remember about the future. But inflation data keeps coming in much, much softer than expected. That would have been very good for the Fed to say, all right, we're going to keep cutting. And I'm guessing bond yields and mortgage rates would be much lower than they are now. Yeah. Problem is, though, we've got the consumers expected change in inflation rates.

uh, the highest reading since 1981. It's it's ups. Uh, they expect 6.7%. Now, again, I, you know, I don't know if this is going to be accurate, but people certainly believe it is. And it's funny, like what, what are the, what are the, some of the orders going to look like from the month of, of April and March people front running the tabs, the data. They already said retail, retail sales were higher because people are, the data is going to look very weird. Um, all right. So a lot of consumer sentiment stuff.

Tim Morales tweeted, consumer sentiment amongst self-identified independents is now lower than it was at the low point of Biden's presidency when gas prices and inflation were soaring. Toys and Slack had a bunch of sentiment data.

Consumer sentiment, families with income greater than $100,000 or less, both dropping like a stone. 12-month economic expectations in terms of what are they expecting for unemployment is spiking. Hey, listen, people usually don't admit when they're wrong. I think my one prediction after the election was consumer sentiment would fly. I think that's wrong. Okay, hand up. Well, it was right at the time. I know. People were very excited. Record high share of consumers think business conditions are worsening.

Significant decline in household income expectations. So months and months ago, we were like, what could change consumer behavior? Because ultimately, we drive the economy. 70% of GDP is consumers. And I said, it has to be a loss of jobs. So I still think that this stuff is super concerning because people's expectations can change their habits. But I think if they don't lose their job, they're going to continue to spend

albeit at a lower level. I did not witness people reining in their spending on my spring break last week. There was places were full, people were spending, but you're right. If we start to see a bunch of layoff announcements and I don't, if the tariffs remain this high, I don't see how we don't see that where companies just say, no, no, no, no. We're not going to take a hit to margins. We're going to cut costs mercilessly to survive this new reality. But the question is how, all right. So how much, how much margins are they, how much margin impact are they going to take?

How much are they going to pass on to consumers? And how many people are they going to lay off? A lot of unknowns. Known unknowns. I'm guessing the latter two are the things that are going to be the most impacted. They're not going to want to take much of a hit to margin.

But there's going to be certain companies, obviously, who say, I can't increase costs as much to my product. People will stop buying. Everybody's preference in the real world should be, let's let the companies eat it. But unfortunately, we know that's not how it goes. That won't happen. Margins increased during 9% inflation in 2022. Let's talk about the stock market. Let's do it. I looked at the best days ever. I have a list for a keep of the best days and the worst days in a folder. And-

Yeah, I do this. You collect bad days and good days. I've been having a lot of bad days lately. So the best days ever, this was the 10th best day since 1928, as far as I could see. That was April 9th, 2025. Yeah, up 9.5%. By the way, for the NASDAQ, the NASDAQ was the second best day ever. Okay, that makes sense, which goes back to what, 1970? So the other days in this list, though, are 1929, 1930. It's all 1930s and 2008.

which I thought we had one of them in 2020, but I guess it was just 9% or so. So take it for what it's worth. These weren't, I guess the 1933 ones were close to a bottom. Obviously, the other ones weren't. We've talked about this before, volatility clusters during a down market. So that update didn't signal like, this is it, it's over.

But this other one is crazy too. So, Sherwood, I think this is Luke Cowell, looked at the range of sessions from like the low to the high. Like, what was the lowest point of the day and what was the highest point of the day? And this one is up there. And most of them are now on this list. I think this goes back to the 80s, 2008-ish. And that was a crazy... So, we actually down 70 basis points at one point to start the day and finished up 10%. These ranges are crazy.

And to your point about the panic, we're not going to see, I would assume, unless the bond market completely eats it, this kind of panic again. We should have mentioned this chart earlier. This is from Bank of America Global Fund Manager Survey. It's a record number of global investors intending to cut U.S. equities. Record. So-

Will we see it though? Yeah. This is, this is, this is again, this is saying what they think they're going to do, not what they are going to do. Because what if, what if a stock stage, a great rally and they just missed their opportunity. Cause look at how far people stayed underweight in 2022 through 2023. Yeah. Honestly, this chart, not poopooing it, but it looks very noisy. That's my, yes. Again, I think this is people telling you have to watch what they say now they are, what they do now, what they say. All right. So let's, let's, let's do some data.

Now, when you're looking at like technical damage, there's a million different stats that you could cite to defend whatever point you're trying to make. Okay. So I don't want to say like, take this as gospel, the end all be all, but because it's just one data point, but I think it's important. So chart kids showed that on Trump tariff pause day, 98.2% of the S and P 500 stocks advanced on the day. Uh, he looked back since 1990. It's only happening happened 15 other times.

If you go out six months, the win rate is 100%. And what that means is basically you can only get a day like that after a washout. So intuitively, it makes sense. The word everyone likes to use is capitulation. I'm looking for capitulation, and maybe we had it before then. You know the movie industry was survive until 25? That was the mantra during the pandemic.

the writer's strike. My new mantra for the stock market this year is get fixed by 26. Okay. Because there is probably going to be a lot more volatility in the days, weeks, and months ahead. Ryan Dietrich tweeted a chart, a table, excuse me, that shows that big gains tend to lead to much higher prices. So he's looking at days where the S&P 500 gains 5%.

And what happens next? One month, three months, six months, 12 months. And 12 months later, it's higher 91% of the time. Problem is between now and then, at least historically, and this is mostly 2008. So again, take it with a grain of salt, but there can be a lot of red between now and 12 months. So you got to survive. All right. Let's look a little further out. I did this yesterday with ChartKid and I said, so I looked at this and there's, for some reason, there's been a lot of historical 19% drawdowns.

Oh yeah, I went to ask you this. Near bear markets. I was mildly annoyed because I was saving this for the show and then Michael Santoli said it on TV. 19% drawdown. So was my call for avoiding a bear market right?

I'm joking. This is, this, this was a bear market. Yeah. And the funny thing. So the one in 2018 was 19.8%. And you and I at the time said, no, no, no, this is a bear market. Of course it was. And so there's other ones in 2011. There was one in 1988, 1990, and then 1976 to 1978. So this has happened a lot of times. And I don't know why. Yeah. Does a 21% downturn feel worse than a 19? Of course not. Give me a break. It's a bear market. So I looked at, okay. And I wanted to keep this simple. Um,

Let's say at the end of a month, you go back, I went back to 1950, you look and you're down 15%, which is kind of in the range we're at. You know, we were down 19 at the worst. Now we're down 12 or something. So I said, if you look at the end of the month since 1950, and you were down 15%, what happens if you buy?

Okay? I wanted to use the end of the month because I wanted to use total returns. I'm not a price return guy. So I looked at the average returns. One year later, you're up on average 15% and you're positive 83% of the time. Three years later, you're up over 40% and you're positive 96% of the time. Five years, it's a 66% of the game and you're positive 92% of the time. Over a 10-year period, if you bought when the stocks were down 15%, and a lot of times they went down way worse than that, of course, right?

100% of the time they were positive and you were up almost 200% in total on average. Ben, I see this data and I'm, I'm real, this is, we're role playing. Okay. I'm a nervous investor. Ben, don't show me this. Do you not see what's happening? Do you not see that the global order is the guts are being ripped out. We're hurting our friends and

making deals with our enemies or whatever, whatever a nervous person would say. What would you say to the person that says it is really and truly, I know, I know you can't say this, but it is different this time. Hey, listen, I got a lot of comments from people saying people felt betrayed by me because I actually put out some negative sentiment in the past couple of weeks. People saying, wait, when did Ben turn into a perma bear? And the thing is,

Wait, somebody called you a permanent bear or did he just make that up? No, yes. I'm sure they were being tongue-in-cheek. But there was people who were saying, when did Ben turn so bearish? I think we've been trying to be realistic about this whole thing and tell it like it is. And if you look at the history of all markets, hubris has often brought down markets before. There's been many instances of this where hubris and overconfidence in people's positioning have – I've studied this. My whole Don't Fall For It book was about the people who have –

brought down industry because they took their ideas too far. So this kind of thing can and will happen, but that doesn't mean that you give up on the stock market for the long term. That's two different ideas in your head competing with one another. And cognitive dissonance says you get rid of one of those ideas, but I still can hold on to both of them. All right, that didn't inspire confidence. Ben, the stock market has fallen and risk off assets aren't working. Stocks are falling, interest rates are going up. It's different this time. It's going to get much worse. What are you talking about?

How is it not different this time? I don't think about all the stuff that the stock market has been through over the past 100 years. World wars, high inflation, low inflation, stagflation, disgraced presidents. It's still up 10% a year. How's that? Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. I mean, this is why it's called the risk premium. Yeah. Right? Stocks return more than bonds and cash because they're risky. You have to eat it sometimes. And again, I have more faith in corporations than I do in any other institution in this country right now.

that they'll, they'll figure out eventually, even if there's some pain in the meantime. And guess what you're to your point. It there's been a lot of really nice returns and sometimes you have to eat it on the other side of it. How about this? If you were to, if somebody were to ask you this question, all right, you want to get out of the market. I understand you're scared. I'm scared. We're all scared. What would be your plan for getting back in? Okay. Well, let's wait, hold on, hold on. I'm not done. Okay. So the person would, would answer something

Nonsensical. No offense to anyone, myself included, because what would be your plan for getting back in? I'm going to get back in when the dust settles. That's not how it works. I'm going to get back in when we fall 10%. What if we don't? So if we can accept that getting back in is probably a fool's errand, that you're probably not going to be able to time the market, getting out and getting back in at the right time, what is a better strategy? Or what is more realistic? That you can survive and endure some of the pain? Well, how about this? Or that you're going to nail the re-entry.

And when you frame it that way, it's like, come on. How about this? Like to people that want to do something, how about a change in allocation? So Christine Benz did this thing and she said, like, maybe you should sell some of your stocks. And her point was, especially if you are either nervous or you're just older and don't have as much time,

She's saying, put aside the young people. You should be on your hands and knees praying for this because you can buy at lower prices. But she says, if you haven't built up enough short-term reserves because you've been focusing on your risk tolerance instead of your risk capacity, your retirement plan is that much more vulnerable to sequence of return risk. That means if you encounter a lousy equity market early on in retirement and need to spend from that declining equity portfolio, that much less of your investments will be left to recover when stocks finally do. So she's saying, listen,

Even with this current downturn, the stock market in the U S still up 15% per year for the last five years. If you don't have enough liquid reserves, like take your allocation down. If you're that nervous, I am going from 90, 10 to a 70, 30 or a 60, 40 or a 50, 50. I'm a, I'm 1 million percent on board with that. If this is really and truly too much for you, that means that if we do roll over, you're probably going to panic. And so if you have to get yourself right to do what you got to do, absolutely.

Yeah. But yeah, you're talking, we're having different conversations. You're talking about going from all stocks to all cash and then trying to get back in. Correct.

If you don't have rules in place to guide your actions there, you're toast. Correct. It's never going to work. Okay. I love this tweet from Balchunas. He said, market timing will never die because humans, but man, it took one on the chin today. And he was talking about the day when the market rallied 10%. Yeah. I have to imagine a lot more people just joined Vanguard's not changing course, regardless of what I see or hear camp. COVID rallied to the same thing, which could be why the inflows seem to get stronger with each new crisis.

I think we would honestly going on your intuition. I'm scared. I'm out. I'm, I'm, oh my God, I'm, I'm missing a back. It doesn't work. I think we would need like a seriously, a five year bear market to get people to change their behavior. And even then it would, it would only be on the fringes. I don't think people are going to change their behavior because so much of it is automated today. I just don't see this big shift where everyone just decides to get out and you know, I'm done. I don't see that happening. No, I mean, here's, here's how it happens.

We have like a five-year 60%. Yeah, it would have to be really, because that's what happened after 2008. That was a, whatever, two and a half, three-year thing. And there was a lot, there was a decent amount of people who gave up on stocks for a long time and regretted it, obviously. Let's move on to crypto. Okay. We haven't talked about crypto much. So one of the soccer dads,

I've heard him. He was a late comer to being a crypto evangelist. And he went down the podcast hole and now he's all in. I hear him talking to the other dads all the time about Bitcoin. He's a big Bitcoin guy. And I kind of stay in the shadows on that. I don't want to get into these conversations. My only thing I wanted to say was, aren't you a little late to be? I feel like the evangelists, like you either were one and have stayed or it's a little late for that. But crypto people would say you're never too late.

So one of the other dads said, listen, this guy's been talking to me forever about Bitcoin. Like, I think he kind of talked me into it. And he says, I think I'm more on your line, Ben, of being more reasonable, boring, long-term investor. What do you think? What would you tell a friend in that situation who just now is getting into Bitcoin and crypto? In terms of buying it? Yeah. Like. I would say it's super volatile. I still think that it has the potential to

for asymmetric risk reward. I don't think that the stock market is going to gain 3X over the next 36 months. I'm not saying that crypto is or will, but it can. And so if somebody wanted to have exposure to crypto today and they're starting from zero, I would explain to them that it is super volatile, make you puke assets, or probably dollar cost average if you want to get in.

That makes sense. The one thing I wanted to say is that the life-changing money is probably already made for most people. Yeah, it's not going to go from zero to 85,000 again or wherever it is. Even if crypto does 10% a year over the next five years, that takes it to 220,000 or something. I know the expectations are way, way higher than people think, but even if the crypto industry did the stock market over the next five or 10 years, I think that's a win.

I know people in crypto would not think so, but I would think so. So I think Hogan tweeted this, that crypto has outperformed the S&P for the last like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Anyway. But it's been a brutally volatile asset. So if you are just coming into it, like you got to expect some pain. Thinking about the volatility, I think after watching the crazy back and forth in the stock market, I would never do this, but I understand real estate investing more and more each year.

Just the fact that the volatility is completely laundered out of the system. And there's obviously other risks there. And I'm speaking mostly of residential real estate investing, not commercial, because obviously there's parts of that that get hit. You can't overstate how brutal it is seeing prices on the screen every day, like for your mental health. And I know you can see the Zestimates and stuff, but I understand that side. It's just not for me, but I understand it more. And there's obviously other risks. Yeah, but wait, hold on. Who's checking the Zestimate every day?

Well, true. And there's other risks. I had a friend who said, listen, I was trying to build out a portfolio of rental properties. And I bought one in 2021. And the plan was to then refinance it and then buy another one and then refinance that and buy another one. And then when rates shot up, my whole plan got, now what? I can't do that anymore. And so there's other risks to investing in that space. But I do get it. So mortgage rates are back above 7% now, which is crazy. So that

Is housing just going to be stuck for a very long time? I don't know. I mean, if the economy softens, you would expect interest rates to come down. I don't know. I do think so. We were in Marco Island for a spring break, and there was houses for sale everywhere. For sale signs all over the place. And I looked up on Zillow and tons of price cuts. I do think in certain areas, it's going to be kind of a buyer's market. And if you could stomach the 7% mortgage rates for now and say, listen, they're going to come down.

If you really think the economy is going to crash, guess what? Mortgages are coming down. I do think you could probably be in a very good negotiating position with people this spring. I think it's probably not a bad time. Are your wheels turning? No. I did see myself more retiring in Florida, though. The older I get, the more times I go there. It's also funny because you see the – it makes sense why the houses are more expensive there.

They're building a bunch of houses around there because they're knocking down these old houses and building new ones. And they're building them with cinder blocks as opposed to framing them because of the tornadoes, you know? So of course the houses are more expensive. All right. This is kind of nonsensical. The University of Michigan respondents making unsolicited comments on government economic policy news. The percent of respondents making negative comments is... We've never seen a chart like this. We've never seen a spike in this data set, I should say. I think it's funny that they actually track this for this long.

Unsolicited negative comments on government economic policy news. I guess they track everything. But it goes back to 1995. Alright, this one was floating around. I thought it was interesting.

This is from Unusual Whale. 60% of general admission ticket buyers at Coachella use Buy Now, Pay Later to finance their tickets per billboard. And people love to dunk on the Buy Now, Pay Later stuff. It's a better financing option. It's better than a credit card. I get it. But let's say, yeah, let's say if you change this to 60% of people used credit cards to buy their tickets. I use my credit card for everything. What if young people are just using these as credit cards? They probably are, right? Yeah.

So it, this is kind of a non issue to me. I know people love to dunk on it and say, oh my gosh, people are borrowing money to know they're, they're using the system to not pay it right away. Right. Um, I think so. Um, are you still a Howard Stern listener? I can't remember. I know you've always been a big fan. Do you have time to listen to him anymore? So, yeah. So Howard Stern is, it was a very, very important person to me. Like I grew up

watching on E back when my mother told me to turn them off in the early 90s. That's how I got to know Howard Stern. I would watch the replays on E at night. And I was a daily listener. Well, I listened when he was on the fan, not the fan, on K-Rock. But I got serious when he went over, what year was that? 07? I don't remember exactly. That was huge news. And I listened every day until probably 2019. And...

I let my subscription lapse, which I have very mixed feelings about. Like, I feel bad that I don't listen anymore, but like I listened for almost 20 years. He's, he's, he's, uh, he's out of stories. Yeah. So, but I do love Howard. I asked that because there was, he had Mike White, the creator of White Lotus on and, and White went to town on a lot of people and his, and the Hollywood reporter did this piece that kind of pulled out the best quotes. And it was funny cause he was, he was mad at people for nitpicking the show season three and,

which I get why people nitpick. There was a lot of stuff to nitpick. I've never been a big fan of nitpicking TV shows and movies. Like I understand that these things aren't real and I'm okay to suspend reality. Hang on. Didn't you nitpick last week? Or was I thinking about somebody else? I'm sure I did. What did I nitpick? Weren't you nitpicking how unrealistic it was? The ending? White Lotus? No, I never did that. You didn't?

I'm going to check the tape. I enjoyed it. Okay. I think I said there's stuff you could nitpick, but I liked it. I still enjoyed season three, even though it wasn't as good as the others. I'm so tired of complainers. You're so right. Like, I think that White Lotus became so big that people are like, yeah, it wasn't as good. Well, there's a lot of people these days who their whole personality is, I hate the thing that's popular. So I get that. That's an inact personality. I would agree with the overall sentiment that this was easily the weakest of the three seasons.

I enjoyed the hell out of it, even if there are plenty of nits to pick. But I was thinking about this because-

It was just great characters. That's the thing I like about it. At Passover, somebody in my family... So there's a couple. So what do you do in this situation? You know when a couple is so united on the show that you disagree with? Obviously, you're not going to fight who gives a shit. You know what I mean? You just have to bite your tongue. My wife and I run into this all the time. Yeah, so the two of them were just piling on White Lotus. It was so predictable. This never could have happened. Right. And I'm just like, what?

It's just, it's an, it's an awkward situation. I want to be like, I liked it, but I'm not going to like go back and forth. I don't care. Fine. I didn't like it. So anyway, the reason I put this in here is because Stern asked him like, how much money are you going to make? Cause he's renegotiating. And this is interesting. He said, we are renegotiating right now. I'm definitely curious to find out what the amount is. Cause he obviously it's a huge show. He could ask for a lot of money. He said, I feel like I have financial security for sure. At a certain point of money, you wonder, is this going to make me worse? Is having more money just going to make me more dysfunctional?

I feel like if you're thinking that way, you're probably going to be okay. Yeah, agreed. Right? The people who don't think that way that are going to probably be in for problems. I was listening to the Midnight Boys yesterday talk about the premiere of The Last of Us. And this blew my face. Which show do you think is more popular, White Lotus or Last of Us? Last of Us.

Why would you say that? Because I set it up that way? No, because zombie thing. People love zombies. Okay. Well, in your personal life. Oh yeah. White Lotus is more meaningful in my personal life, but I could see last because it was a big video game phenomenon. So Last of Us has twice as many viewers as White Lotus. Okay. I would have expected that. Twice as many.

It was like not a lot of people watch succession either. All right. I have some, I have some further travel thoughts to get off my chest here. Um, I've, I taught my kids how to play shuffleboard. They had this little park right down the street from us community center. You could get the shuffleboard stuff and my kids loved it. Good fun. And there was a bocce ball court next to it in retirement. That's going to be my thing. I'm going to be a shuffleboard player and bocce ball. Those are my two drinking, like a drinking game has to be where you can hold the drink in one hand and still play the game in the other. I don't know from bocce ball. Is that shuffle ball?

No, no, no. Bocce ball is where you throw the little ball, and then you have the other big ones that you throw to try to get closest to it. It's an Italian game. Okay. Great. You never played it before? I don't think so. I'm still on the—I think I've mentioned this before, but having the Airbnb VRBO thing with kids is so much easier because one of the nights, too much ice cream. In the middle of the night, I'm sitting there. I'm about ready to go to bed. I think I'm watching the markets on my phone, and my daughter Kate comes out and says, I threw up. I walk into her bedroom, and it's literally chocolate ice cream.

And she's in the bed with my other daughter because they had to share a big king bed together. And luckily, you know, our house had extra sheets. I threw in the wash, put the new sheets on, back to bed in 15 minutes. No problem. If that would have happened at a hotel,

Like, how long would the process have taken, right? And the whole room would have stunk forever. Yeah. One other thing. So, the new big thing these days, I guess it's not new, new, but it's just very low-calorie beer oils. And Miklob Ultra was the one that really set this in motion. So, I got a 12-pack of Corona Premium, which is their— they have Corona Light and Corona Premium, which are basically the same thing, but Corona Premium is their Miklob Ultra. And it just got me thinking, like, where did they come up with the name Premium? And I'm sure it was just someone in the marketing team said—

Like they put it in a chat GPT, like what's a word that's kind of similar to ultra, but not ultra, right? They just, Corona Premium is just someone give us a word that's kind of like ultra, but not really ultra. And that's what gave it. It's an okay beer. One more thing. I think I lost a step. I'm sure you did. Remember me and you did a race a couple of years ago? My daughter. I was faster than you thought.

You were, but I think I've lost this step because my daughter plays soccer and she's kind of like me where I never had breakaway speed. I was always quick, right? I'd probably do better at the shuttle run than a 40-yard dash.

My daughter's the same way in soccer. She's quick, but she's not like breakaway speed fast. So she wanted to go for a jog to stay in shape. And at the end, I always tell her the last block, we got to go all out until we're done, until we get to the mailbox, right? You sprint until the end. And she took me off the line. I had to like try hard to come get, I was like ready to go. And she beat me off the line. And I thought, oh my gosh, I'm losing a step. I can't believe it. I don't feel like I am, but I obviously am. I mean, you're basically mid-40s.

I am mid-40s. I'm going to be 44 this year. So. All right. You had a good run. Recommendations. What do you got? I am like all in on Apple TV all of a sudden. High quality. I binge watched Sufferance, which was a massive, massive mistake. That show is the least bingeable, most meant to be watched week-to-week show on TV. Oh, that makes sense, actually. You want to like think about it a little bit and let it set in.

Dude, I had no idea what was going on. Not a f***ing clue. Honestly. Did you like the finale though? Yeah, I love the finale. I listened to podcast recaps and I still didn't know what was going on. Yeah, it was... That is a week-to-week show. I royally bungled that one. The finale where the Innie and the Audi are talking to themselves through video was so... Really good. Yes, very good. All right. Did you watch Your Friends and Neighbors with Jon Hamm? I didn't start it yet, but it's on my list. So the premise of the show is he's a rich guy.

hedge fund something, something. Jeez, rich guys are having a moment, aren't they? But things go south. He loses his job and he's got to keep up and he starts robbing his neighbors. Okay. All right. I did see the preview. Good premise. I'm a Jon Hamm fan, so I've stuck with him since Mad Men. Dope Thief continues to be great. The main actor is phenomenal, phenomenal.

Forget his name, but it's a lot of fun also on Apple. And then lastly, I know you're not as into it as I am. I don't care that it's predictable and it's Curb in Hollywood. I mean, what could be better than Curb in Hollywood? I f***ing love the studio. I'm really, really enjoying it. You're all in. I'm surprised you like that one as much as you do, but I guess... Well, I love Hollywood. True.

So is it a blatant knockoff of Curb? Yeah, I don't care. I'm in. I don't know if we spoke about The Pit. How phenomenal was The Pit? All right. I was going to talk about this. Two finales. The Pit was great. I thought the finale landed the plane and still left some, like, I want to see season two. It's such a high-quality show, and it's not like these new shows where the whole point of it is you're waiting for this big thing to happen at the end.

It was not so much the... It was the middle of the show, the meat of it, that, like, the stuff with the shooter at the concert was so well done, and you think about it from some completely different angle.

And like, I never thought about like the hospital having to deal with this. And it was, it was so good. You know what? Just know Wiley doesn't win an Emmy. Then they're going to win all the awards. Uh, we mentioned earlier in the show survived till 25. I'm thinking like, man, I am just loaded with TV shows. This is, this is it. Yeah. Like it wasn't, it wasn't the movies. Cause the movies have been, have been asses. You're right. They all came out. But I'm wondering like, cause I, my friends are like, Hey, what are you watching? I'm like, I'm watching a million things. I don't think I've ever been this busy with TV, but it is, it is because of the writer's strike. It was all,

Oh, yeah. So we also finished 1923, and I told you I really liked the season. The finale stunk. It was just...

Me and my wife were both like, wait, that's how it was like, because it was a series finale. Oh, serious. But you know what? Those are like those Taylor Shedden shows are like very low stakes. You know what I mean? Like they're not serious. I just couldn't believe the ending. It was kind of like, wait, that's how they ended it. OK. Oh, so I didn't love it. OK. I haven't done any movie recommendations. So I got two with my new scoring system. So I watched a complete unknown on my plane on one of my plane rides. That's a Bob Dylan one of Timothee Chalamet.

I thought it was really boring. His performance was good, but not nearly as good as Joaquin Phoenix and Johnny Cash. I think that's like the all-timer. There's the Johnny Cash movie, the Ray Charles one with Jamie Foxx, and then this. And I think this one is easily in third from those movies. Like,

It was just kind of a boring movie, and people said his performance was, like, transcendent. I thought, like, he sounded like Bob Dylan. I'm not a huge Bob Dylan fan. I'm kind of a take it or leave it with him. Same. Like, hey, he's got some good songs. Yeah. I know people love him. So that's, like, a 5.9 for me. Okay. Okay? My wife and I watched Civil War on Apple, or on HBO. I know you watched that a long time ago. We finally watched it. That's, like, a 6.4 to me. Mm-hmm. Okay? But wait.

That is the one of like the ultimate examples of meant to be seen in the theater because hearing the bullets whizzing and seeing that on the big screen was an experience. If I saw that on the couch, huge step down. I mean, I've heard people complain about the movie. I heard people that liked it. People hated it. Like the fact that they didn't really explain what was going on. They didn't give us any like even breadcrumb of why is this happening? Yeah, it wasn't. I enjoyed the shit out of it. Do you, did you like it?

I liked it. It was kind of one of those, like, oh, that's pretty good. Not great, not bad. So 6.4. Okay. That's all I got. All right. What a week. What a week. We're going to make it. There's going to be some bumps and bruises. Economy was softening coming into the liberation day. It's going to soften further. But we have faith. We have faith in the American people. Do we not? Sometimes to be a long-term investor, you have to survive the short term. That's my talking point. Okay. Yeah.

AnimalSpirits at TheCompoundNews.com. Personal emails, always personal responses. Thank you very much for listening, for sticking with us. We'll see you next time.