Winners and Losers From the Stock Market Rally (EP.412)
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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, I live in the Northeast and I've got four seasons. It's, the weather's not great for about, depending on the year, seven months out of the year. Let's call it like October to March-ish. Five months, seven months, depending. You're in the same boat, maybe even worse than I am. Oh yeah, we get four good months a year. Ooh, that's it? Pretty much.

No, I don't know. Some people like the fall. It's really just there's three bad months. The worst months are January through March because I can handle December because of Christmas. But once we get to January, February, March, then I'm over it. So I love the seasons. Like there's something about the cadence of, oh, we're here in the year. I think having shitty weather makes me appreciate the great weather that much more or, or,

Is that a lie that we tell ourselves to make us feel better about living with horrific weather? I don't think so. Is that a lie? Are we lying to ourselves? I appreciate the summer way, way more because we don't, and we make sure we pack it all in in the summer and we don't take it for granted. All right. Well, anyway, why are we talking about the weather? Because it's the best time of the year, at least as far as I'm concerned. We've got the entire summer ahead of us.

The skies are blue and we're coming to Chicago to enjoy the sun in the Midwest. The first week of June, there's going to be a lot of us. A lot of us at Red Bull 12th Management are coming. We are opening an office at the Salt Shed on Goose Island, which is spectacular. I cannot wait to see it. It's been a long time coming. So we started in 2018.

with just four employees there, Brian, Jonathan, Anna, and Colleen. And now there's 11, maybe 12 or 13 on the way. There's a lot of room for aggressive expansion, as Heath Ledger said in The Dark Knight. And we're super excited. So if you're an advisor or a prospective client and you want to talk to us, find out what it's like to be at Ritholtz Wealth Management, email us

at info at ridholtzwealth.com. Put Chicago in the headline and we're excited to see you there. So when I joined Ridholtz Wealth, I was the seventh employee, I believe. So we now have more people in Chicago than we had in the whole firm when I joined. Wild. Aggressive growth. Where was the S&P when you joined? Do you remember? I mean, you can check. This is 2015, so. Oh my God. Was it 1900? I'm making that up. Where was it?

I can look it up right now because it was 10 years ago. So, I mean, we're talking in the 2000, like 2000, probably maybe a little less than that. Wait, did we, did your 10 year anniversary with us pass and we, and we missed it? No, it's in September. Okay. I got it marked on my calendar. It actually is right when we're in future proof. So that's a good timing. All right. So what did we learn about the, do we, what do we call the, what happened with the tariff deals in the last couple of weeks?

Backtrack, caving, I don't know. The Wall Street Journal had a story where they said, like, listen, the market made everyone realize this was just not a good idea. And I think I actually give Trump credit for backing off because a lot of the stories and quotes made it sound like he was going to dig his heels in and say, no, I'm going to do this. I don't care what anyone says. And so...

I don't give him credit for putting out bad policies in the first place. I do give him credit for backtracking. Yeah, I think there was a lot of debate. Rewind, I don't know, six weeks ago, there was a lot of debate. And I said on the show, whatever happens, it wasn't obvious at the time to anyone. It wasn't obvious what he was going to do. And with the benefit of hindsight, it would have appeared to be obvious. But there was very much an open question of he's not going to relent.

There was a lot of people, a lot of people who genuinely thought, LOL, that he didn't care about the market. His own cabinet members were saying this. His own spokesmen for the White House were literally saying this. So, yeah, all right. I don't know if he changed his mind or whatever, but thank God he didn't. I honestly think the big CEOs got to him. I think Jamie Dimon and the Walmart CEO. The retailers. Yeah.

I think those people who are constantly, Tim Cook, I think all of them coming in and saying, listen, this is going to be a catastrophe. If you keep these tariffs as high, it's not good. So Joe Weisenthal said the two big losers today, this is yesterday, this is right after the deal was announced, people hoping for a Trump-led economic catastrophe, which I believe that there was a decent contingent. And this is pro-Trump and anti-Trump people. I think certain people wanted to see the system burn.

which obviously is something I never want. I do not want to see a recession or anything bad happen. Then he says, members of the big chess party who thought the tariff announcement was some brilliant strategic plan that would reshape the global economy in a way that was beneficial for the U.S. Because we kind of got the muddle through a situation where, yes, there's still tariffs. They're higher than they were before. It's not nearly as bad as it looked on Liberation Day. And it's not going to reshape the global order. It's going to cause...

It's going to cost slower growth and a little higher prices, but it's not going to be the awful left tail situation some people might have thought. Not to put too much emphasis on one day, but it was a big day, Fokker. The S&P was up 3% on Monday. 3% days are not that common. No, they're not. And I would have...

I don't think anybody would have been surprised to have seen a sell the news type of event, given that we had a V-shaped recovery. The S&P is flat on the air. Holy shit. Yeah, it's less than 5% from the highs. Can we say definitively retail investors were right again and the Wall Street was wrong? Retail was right. Walter Bloomberg, if he's a real person, I guess we'll never know, tweeted on April 4th, retail investors bought $4.7 billion in stocks on Thursday, largest level over the past decade.

And I remember writing blog posts. Well, I remember way back to, I don't know, four weeks ago, retail's not going to capitulate. Like if you're looking for the flush or the gigantic volume crash, like that's not what they do. Um, and I guess it could have gone differently, but anybody that's been dunking on retail or waiting for capitulation, change the plate. You got to change your mental model. Did I just say mental model? I did. You got to change it. These, the, the, the rules of yesteryear it's out. Retail doesn't do what you think it's going to do. So retail one again,

Yeah. So I did this tweet yesterday that said the S&P at the start of the year was 58.81. Yesterday, it was 58.11. The 10-year started at 4.6%, and now it's 4.5%. Nothing ever happens, I guess. Was that officially the most... You know which part of retail wasn't right? And maybe we just throw this in the trash can forever. The American Association of Individual Investors. They got all bared up? Dead wrong. Okay. How about this? The younger...

of retail has been right. The older version, because that's mostly baby boomers, right? Uh-huh. So I think it's the younger retail crowd now. They've... I'm the captain now, right? Yeah. That's them. So was this officially the most unnecessary bear market of all time? Necessary? I'm not going to do the line. I'm not going to do the line. Why did we do this? This is my question. Why did we go through all this? I guess just to debate the fact that this is bad policy and now we know? Okay. Yeah. Well...

I don't think anybody would argue that this was well-conceived or, you know… He wanted to try to touch the stove. He touched it and he said, all right, all right, okay, okay. That's hot. Getting back to Wall Street being big losers, our friend Michael Antonelli tweeted out… This is from May 2nd in Barron's. Stock market bulls have gone into hiding why our money pros are the most bearish in nearly 30 years. Oh, boy. Yeah, we just talked about this last week, didn't we? It's…

But was it all sentiment though? That's the thing was sentiment bearish, but positioning wasn't that's, that's my thinking because the money flow, I don't know, institutions were selling, I guess. Dude, there's so many different money flow data points that you can look at from CTs to global fund managers, to retail, to hedge funds, to this, to that. It's hard to know for sure, but we know market went up. Guess what people bought? Um, I saw this headline from

This is from CNBC last week, and I kind of caught the piece on CNBC as it was happening. So Paul Tudor Jones says the stock market will hit new lows even if Trump cuts China tariffs 50%. And I feel like every time we've had a correction and it bounces back, the hedge fund managers come out and say, we're going to retest the lows. Or Jeff Dunlop. Look at these headlines. They say it every single time. And one of these times are going to be right, but they say this every single correction. Because nobody looks like an idiot for saying we're going to retest the lows.

Nobody gets in trouble for that. Yeah, but that's what they all, the headlines are always the same. We're going to retest the lows. You just wait and it never happens. The risks are asymmetric. If I'm in the headline, I'm not saying that was the low. Yeah, we might retest them. All right, if you're wrong, who cares?

If we get a mild recession, will we still? Because again, a bad recession has been taken off the table, it would seem. That I think is, we can all agree on. If we get a minor hiccup and slowdown, do we count that as the, we already priced that in and we're moving on. All right, listen, here's another winner. It's changing by the day, of course. Investor psychology for the win.

And we hammered this at the time, as I always do. I love these data points from Ryan Dietrich and Sentiment Trader that shows what happens when you've got an extreme move in the market, because that's not sentiment. That's not positioning. That's not this opinion or that opinion. It's what is the market actually doing? And we called this out at the time. And we actually got an email. It'd be really nice if you could go back

and look at all of these data points that you cite on a go forward basis. Well, we can't do that. But, but Ryan did do this. Uh, Ryan tweeted for on April 9th, what happens one month, three months, six months, 12 months later. And it had a perfect track record when you've got that amount of buying power, especially coming off like a washout. That is really, really powerful stuff. Don't fight the price. Right. And the price is less emotional than the sentiment. That's right.

Um, here's a wild data point. Uh, fat tail capital tweeted this via city. You've only needed to own the SMP for 60 minutes in the last month to capture the full 17% of the recovery. So that that's because you got the initial 10% bump on the one day. And then the other ones were just overnight immediately. So we've gone from like, if you miss the best 10 days to, if you miss the best 10 minutes,

So I had chart can make for, for our platform for advisors exhibit a, we're doing a chart of the week and he had a great idea.

You know, there's a chart, like what happens if you miss the 25 best days and 25 worst days. And like advisors love that. And I understand why they love it. But it's kind of bullshit because like nobody's actually missing the 25 best days. It's a good thought exercise. It proves a point that we're trying to convey. Time in the market is better than timing the market, et cetera, et cetera. However. Boy, advisors love that phrase. Oh, they love it. Oh, they love it. Yeah. Time in the market is better. Timing the market. Yes. You have to...

Anyhow, so what if you sold at the lows of this year when we were down 19% on April 8th and you just said, I'm out. This is too, it's too much. It's, we're going to go way lower. And guess what? Somebody did that, right? Obviously. So let's say that you sold on April 19th, on April 8th.

And then the next day we had the 90 day pause, right? That was the 10% up day. And let's just say that by some miracle, you said, woo, that was a huge mistake. I'm going to get all the way back in. And let's just assume that, I don't know, four people did that on the planet earth, right? That had like the mental flexibility to go out on April 8th. Whoops, I made a mistake and got back in just the next day. Okay.

So had you just done that and had you only missed that one day, look what your returns are. You would be flat if you held, or you would be down 9% if you only missed that one day. And of course, if you sold and never got back in, you're down 19% from the highs. It really is unbelievable how much of an impact missing just one good day is.

Not to mention the psychological impact of that, of going, oh, no. So when we, every week for Ask the Compound, we get all these emails in from people asking us questions. And we take them from the Animal Spirits inbox. We take them from the, we have all these different inboxes and we put them all together. And Sean sends me an update of these questions. And

And after a week after liberation day, we got the questions and it was the big, I sent some of them to you and Josh and I said, oh my gosh, this is the worst sentiment I've ever seen. And we read them all. And I, it kind of felt like I was being a financial therapist. And I said at the time, like, listen, I understand the bearishness, but a lot of people said, listen, I knew this was going to happen. This is why I sold when he became president. Cause I knew it was going to happen.

Yeah. What do you say now? And not to be a dick. I said, all right, okay, fine. And that's, I'm not trying to rub it in, but this is what do you, what do you do? And this is not to say like the market is not over. The market keeps going. Like there's never a winner and a loser. Yeah. It never ends. It keeps going. The market could stay volatile. It could go down. It could go up. Who knows? But the, the impact of yourself right now is how do you feel and what do you do and how paralyzed you become? If you made, if you pulled that trigger and said, okay,

I'm out. I'm pulling the ripcord. I'm going to cash. Now what? That's why we always say like, have the feelings, whatever feelings you want. Don't always act on them, especially if it comes to taking extremes in the market and making a huge move one way or the other. Like if you were down 10% and you said, I'm going to go leveraged long all in. I don't think that's a good decision either because the market continued to fall, right? Like that, I think the extremes in both directions, you be careful. Um,

Mentioned before, this is from the New York Times. The tariffs are still here. And they did this chart that shows what the tariffs were from February 1st on. It went from 10% to 20% to 54% to 104% to 145%, now back down to 30%. And China's kind of took a same, their retaliatory tariffs took a similar path. These are still much higher than they were before, right? And I think a lot of people probably assume that

There's room to come down further. I don't know why 90 days is always the deal here. But I think a lot of people also think that the headline numbers

are not going to be the final numbers because there's going to be carve-outs all over the place. Yes, right. So 30% looks like the baseline, but okay, Apple and then chips and semiconductors and maybe it's lower than that. But again, I think what this does is just the small businesses are kind of going to be the ones that get screwed. So this is probably why the stock market has been willing to look past all this. And the stock market assumed this would happen or I don't know how all-knowing and all-seeing it is. But the Wall Street Journal has… Wait, hold on. Pause, pause, pause, pause, pause.

Another winner is the stock market. Not always right, but always more right than we are as individuals. Two weeks ago, maybe three weeks ago, what show were we on? Two weeks ago, maybe with Neil Dutta. I was like, tell me how this makes sense, how this stock market rally makes sense. And I've been bullish, but tell me how this makes sense. It doesn't make sense to me. You're telling me that earnings won't be impacted. You're telling me that confidence isn't being impacted, that multiples shouldn't be lower than where they were before this happened. And-

Again, it's not over, but the market called bullshit and the market was right. And it does still seem to be like there will be a more, there'll be, it is more muted than people would have thought a month ago when the liberation day stuff came out. Cause that was again, the catastrophic, this is going to be a huge impact, but now it's like growth is going to be a little slower than it would have been otherwise. And earnings will probably be a little lower. Isn't that still fair to say? I think so. Yeah. So the wall street journal had this piece and about a guy who, who builds tiki torches in North Carolina and,

and how he's already down to five employees from 12. And they had one order that went from $5,600 to $8,700. And these people are already trying, like they said, they're paralyzed. And like, what do I do? So do they get immediate relief now? These people, is it still...

Unknown because I don't know. So Ryan Peterson says the, our ocean freight bookings from China to us increased 35% the first day since the trade deal, a big backlog is looming soon. The ships will be sold out. So we went from worrying about empty shelves and is to now, all right, everyone back in the pool and hurry up and get it back over here. And so I guess that Christmas is saved. I thought this was a good take to the shipping point from Spencer. Hi, Kimmy. And

Sorry if I'm not pronouncing his last name right. He said, shipping rates are about to explode. The second that the pause on Chinese tariffs was announced, every single company is going to rush to have their inventory sent out of China. There isn't enough access to capacity to handle all this shipping at once. Here comes the second part of the completely unnecessary and unavoidable disaster to the supply chain that we will experience. So to the point of, was this an unnecessary bear market? Well, it certainly wasn't unnecessary bear.

I can imagine if you were to supply chains. Right. Yeah. But I mean, don't you think as far as the big corporations go, they pulled forward a lot of stuff and now, yes, they're going to rush in it. If things, I don't know, it seems to me like things will probably be the worst case scenario was this lasting another three to six months. And that is a really bad scenario. The fact that we kind of nipped it in the bud after a month.

There will probably, I'm sure there will be disruptions in certain places, not nearly as bad as it would have been if he kept the tariff so high. I guess the people that are in favor of the way that this was handled would say that if Trump didn't go so hard,

in the paint that the threats would not have been taken seriously. And he had to do this in order for deals to have been made. Now, okay, maybe. Let's see what the deals are. We don't know yet, right? Like, let's see what the ultimate outcome of this is. Right. It doesn't seem like a lot of concessions have been made. And it seems like we were negotiating with ourselves in a lot of ways, but

Who knows? I saw this from Meb Faber last week, and it just it seems like corporations didn't really seem to be planning on these tariffs being high just because of their plan. So he said companies listed on the blue chip S&P 500 said last week they expect to repurchase one hundred ninety two billion dollars of their own stock over the coming months. The highest figure in weekly data going back to 1995.

It's also the biggest three-month tally on record of stock buybacks, 518 billion. So that doesn't sound to me like corporations were planning for some terrible event to happen and pulling back. They were continuing to charge. And maybe these plans had been announced, but corporations did not seem to care in all of this thing. All right, so corporations- They were the ones who seemed to assume they're going to be fine. They're obviously buying their own stock. Dave Nadeg did some analysis looking at the top 10 ETFs by flow.

And probably not surprisingly, VOO, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, brought in nearly $15 billion. Vanguard total stock market brought in nearly $4 billion. So yeah, they bought the dip in size. This was a gift to retail investors who were able to keep calm. It's interesting, though, that the short-term bond funds are on here, too. So it was not only stocks, but it was T-bills.

That was number two, which makes sense too. Why not? But, but also getting decent Vanguard short-term bond fund. So I guess it's, uh, so those were the people that sold though, probably right. That moved to T-bills. So there was people buying and also people selling. Yeah. Which, which is what makes the market.

Is this the first time that we could say it's possible the market stopped a recession from occurring? And it's still possible we get a minor slowdown and it's technically a recession. I don't know. But the Kelsey odds went from 75% last week, we talked about the 41% now. The odds of a recession? Yes. Do you think that the market potentially stopped a recession from happening by reacting as it did to these announcements?

Because, again, I think if this stuff would have gone on, dragged out for another three months or so, then a recession was almost all but guaranteed. The fact that we stopped it after a month, I think there's – even if, again, growth is slower for a few months, it seems like we should be able to have the muddle through scenario. Bucco Capital had a good tweet. Rest in peace, Main Street over Wall Street lasted like six days. That was fun.

This surprised me from Jason Furman. I never would have believed it. I think you sent me this chart. So he looked at wage growth in the last quarter century compared to the quarter century before. So this is 2000 to 2024 and 1976 to 2000. And he looked at the real hourly wage growth by percentile. So top decile all the way to bottom decile. And the period this century knocks it out of the park and totally destroyed that other period. Would anyone have ever guessed this in a million years? No.

I wouldn't have. I would have assumed, oh, in the 80s and 90s, wages grew way higher. And I looked at this. The inflation rate was almost 5% in the first 25 years. And it's been about 3% in the ensuing 25. So I was about to say people don't like to hear this, that things are pretty good. But I don't like that line. People don't like to hear this because who doesn't like to hear that? I mean, some dipshits on the internet don't like to hear that. Yeah. People on social media. Right. I think people on social media hate good news. But other than that.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that surprising stat. All right. A bunch of people sent us this chart or this story and wanted to hear our take on it. You got a lot of emails on this too, I assume, right? DMs and emails. Okay. This 30 year old startup is bringing leverage to 401k savers. Basic Capital has a new product. Here's their pitch. They will offer savers on 401ks and IRAs, $4 in leverage for every $1 saved at current rates, the cost of that extra money,

will be about 6.25%. The start thinking goes, they will find private credit investments that yield more like 9%, meaning they will throw off enough cash to cover the borrowing costs and then some. Mix in some traditional stock market exposure and assuming those private credit yields persist and that equities gain in line with historical averages, the startup said savers can expect low double digit returns. So four to one leverage. Thoughts? All right. So you're paying six and a quarter percent and you're getting 9%. Smells like free money.

The rub is obviously the borrowing rates seem... Like, this is the kind of thing that if rates were still at 3%, you'd go, this makes a lot of sense. And I think the traditional economic theory would state, listen, if you're a young person in your 20s or 30s and you have three or four decades to save, you should be using leverage. Like, that's economic theory is why wouldn't you take advantage of human capital, your biggest asset, time, compounding? Yes, this makes sense. That obviously doesn't always...

mesh well with reality. But we've heard enough people who say, listen, I've heard everything you guys have said on Leverage ETS. I don't care. I'm investing in these things. So there's people who probably would be willing to pony up and do this. I have to say that my comment about free money, I think obviously that was sarcasm. I was joking. Please don't take that literally, especially when the 9% on the other side of the 6.25% is, and God knows what, sort of private credit instruments. But yeah, Ben, you're 100% right. If you could borrow

money at 3% and invest market over long periods of time. I can get on board with that, but that's not this. And so I don't know, I haven't, I haven't done enough research, but certainly the, uh, the, this caught the internet's attention and then some.

I would love to talk to these guys and learn more about it. But the thing that worries me the most is the four to one leverage. And I'm guessing the reason they did that is because that gives you enough juice to get these high returns. I want to learn more about like the, the margin and the collateral and all that sort of stuff. And what happens if this goes wrong? And I want to learn, I want to learn more about the downside. Yes. What happens if the private credit yields compress and okay. But it's, or what happens if the 9% ends up being 4% or worse? Yeah. I have questions.

Yes. All right. New York Magazine had this story about how everyone is using AI to cheat in college. Did you read this one? Okay. A lot of internet people talking about this. So they interviewed all these college kids and they said, I just jumped the prompt from my class into chat GPT and handed whatever it spat out. This person said they wrote, you know, they interviewed all these college kids anonymously and they said, AI wrote 80% of every essay he turned in. He said at the end, I'd put my own finishing touches on it, put my 20% of humanity, my voice on it.

And that's it. They asked this other girl. She said she rarely sit in class when she didn't see other students' laptops open to chat GPT. Toward the end of the semester, she began to think she might be too dependent on the website. She already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit.

And she said, I spend so much time on TikTok hours and hours until my eyes started hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my homework. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12. So she's saying, ChatGPT helped me do homework faster so I could rot my eyes out on TikTok. Nice. So I really don't blame these kids for doing this. Like, I don't get mad about this. Do you think that there was—and this is going to sound like I'm poo-pooing college—

But was there ever really an essay that you wrote that you thought like that really helped me become better at my job someday? No. Well, me? No, I didn't. I don't know if I wrote a single essay in college. Did you cheat in college? Dude, I didn't even show up for the tests. That's true. I didn't. I mean, we didn't. It was it would have been harder to cheat for us back in the day. The only time I I did a homework assignment once where a friend said, hey, can I look at your homework assignment to make sure I did it right?

And he copied my whole assignment. And so we got called into the professor's office. And he said, guys, have anything to tell me? And I'm thinking, what are we talking about here? And my friend knew immediately. And he goes, obviously, one of you copied off the other one because your answers are exactly the same. What a dumbass. Yeah, friend really screwed me on that one. But I think if you have the ability to do a paper on ChatGPT and you do it and your professor gives you a decent grade, that's on the professor, not the student.

I think it's the colleges have to keep up and give different types of tests. And also, I guess the student is harming themselves in some way, like using a chat GPT created something in your, in your own work life is probably not going to go. It can help you in certain aspects, but most of the stuff, the work people are going to see right through it. So I've spent zero time thinking about this, so I don't want to really comment, but

I think the one thing I would say is if you cheated at everything, if you just take shortcuts, you're just going to cheat yourself. You're not going to develop the skills and the whatever. Now, I mean, a counterpoint is like, wow, that was very inspirational. No, the counterpoint is like, no, you're right. You're right. 12 hours on an essay. How is that like a good use of anyone's time?

Yes, that's the thing. You have to be creative. But I think my whole thinking on AI is just that anyone who has a little bit of creativity, that's what's going to shine. Because if this stuff is all just going to be regurgitated, I can't say the word, and easy to do, that stuff is going to be meaningless. I told you I got a demo from a fintech firm a couple weeks ago.

And they showed me how they're pulling stuff from the internet to create custom blog posts for financial advisors. And they sent me a couple of them and they were so bland and useless. I thought, well, this is not helpful to anyone. It's helpful to summarize if you don't understand the topic. But if you're actually trying to educate someone and show them and get their attention, like no one's ever going to read this. So I think people who are creative...

Those are the ones that are still going to stand out. But if you're just doing bullet points on everything, yeah, you're right. You're cheating yourself. That sounded like a parent to a kid talk. Right? You better save that one for your children someday. Yes, I'm very responsible. All right, speaking of AI, I've been talking about the quarter app a lot.

because they've built a LLM processor into the app. And we're investors in quote. I've said that before. Just full disclosure there. But it is just so, so freaking cool. So I asked the chat, what did I say? So wait, the important thing is, is that the only thing that it's pulling from is not the whole web. It's just company earnings reports and presentations. Right. And then it's like directing you to it.

I asked, did they mention anything about Bitcoin in the call? And this is for Schwab. And it gave me like the answers or the quotes. And then it like directed me right to it. And this is just such a small example of what's to come with AI. And it's exciting. Put a pin in this one because I use it more. So I'm going to talk about it for some other thing. But yeah, go ahead. So last week, there was an announcement that Coinbase, which is entering the S&P 500,

Kind of amazing. That's kind of a big deal, isn't it? It is a big deal. Coinbase has agreed to acquire Deribit, the world's biggest trading platform for Bitcoin and Ether options for roughly $2.9 billion this morning. There was news that Robinhood is acquiring, I think, a similar company in Canada for $250 million. So Bitcoin and ETH have gone absolutely nuclear over the last- ETH is up like 65% in a month.

Yeah, it's unbelievable. So I was looking at the chart of Bitcoin and Coinbase, and Ben, take a look at this. This is three years. Bitcoin and Coinbase were tracking each other pretty damn closely, and it's been a nasty decoupling. When did this happen? I guess in December, early January? Massive underperformance from Coinbase. I'm not exactly sure what's going on. Huh, that's interesting. That is surprising.

So you'd have been, cause you'd have thought Coinbase would be like a leveraged way to play Bitcoin, but Bitcoin has been a way better option. I would have thought. All right. So I was, uh, I'm scratching my head. Like why is the price going up? Since, since it went public and when did Coinbase go public?

I'm guessing 2021, I guess that's right. Cause it went public right at like a peak. So Coinbase, since it went public is down 4.8% in total, which is probably surprising to some people. So it's basically gone nowhere, but it had a huge drawdown. It had like a 85% drawdown or something. Wow. Um, all right. So anyway, so why, why are the coins mooning? Um,

Chris Berniski is a real person in crypto Twitter. And he tweeted, who has the best data-driven explanation for ETH's recent massive move? Narratives are a dime a dozen. I can make that too.

I can make them too. Show me the data. And I was like, oh, awesome. This is, you know, I'll find something in here. There's nothing. You should have seen the responses. It was one joke after another. I'm like, you know, a serious person should have serious, maybe some serious responses in the replies. Nothing. Nothing. Nobody knows. Sometimes nobody knows anything. Yeah. People just make shit up. Oh, because whatever. I don't know. You can make something up. So can I. But.

I was very much looking forward to seeing some data. And I don't know, they're going up because they're going up. Now, I'm sure there's reasons and whatever, but like an actual, what was the catalyst for the 65% move in the last week or whatever it was for ETH? And it turns out your guess is as good as anybody else's. Nobody knows. More buyers than sellers. There we go. You nailed it, Ben. All right, let's talk about real estate. So Bespoke tweeted a chart, the active listings by region.

And the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast are all tracking each other pretty closely. Mostly down to the right, a little bit of a pickup. But the South, holy gazoli, the South is skyrocketing. So I went to Fred and I looked at- This is my Florida take, right? Yeah.

housing inventory in Florida. So Florida is at, I don't know if it's an all-time high, but for the last 10 years, Florida is at a high. It is skyrocketing. If you compare that- So it's one of the few places that's higher than pre-pandemic. Yes. And if you compare that to New York, for example, New York is down to the right because there's a freaking housing recession, right? There's no turnover. And so the story in Florida is what?

Just the over... Well, there's a lot of people that came there. Yeah. People moved too much. A ton of people moved there. The prices went up a ton. And now demand was saturated, I guess. And people are trying to sell and it's much harder to do because there's not as many people coming. Like all the people who are going to go to Florida, for the most part, a lot of them already came.

They pulled, I think they pulled forward demand. That's kind of my take, but yeah, it's, it's crazy to see that the supply, that's actually a place where supply is. So we should start seeing more price drops there. So I listed my house, uh, in long beach on April 1st. I would have thought that it would have sold like in two seconds. Now the house is a little bit interesting in the sense that there's not a driveway that

And it's like a bungalow and it's two blocks from the beach and it's renovated. It's a very desirable location, but it's called a walk. So there's a slab of concrete that goes through the block and there's houses on both sides of it. So it's a bit of a pain in the ass. It's not like for a conventional family, it's a little bit tricky. So where do you park? Is there an alley or something? On the street. You park on the street. Okay. So I got an offer last week, which I mentioned on the show. So somebody emailed us with a subject title, Michael's Real Estate Green Thumb.

He said, Michael, when you talk about your real estate adventure, sell your place in Brooklyn without an agent, buying your house on Long Island moments before price houses exploded or the stupid luck of buying this rental in Long Beach, you always talk about it as mindless good fortune, but clearly it's a trend. At what point has it become real estate business savvy? Maybe you have a green thumb or whatnot for real estate. It's a curse to be great at something you hate doing, but you have a knack for real estate investing. Maybe you should go into real estate consulting. And I said to the person, oh yeah, just wait until this podcast. So

Earlier in the week, I haven't had a lot of offers. I had one crappy offer and one offer that was accepted. And it turns out that like the tiles were sagging in the bathroom, which is, I don't know, I guess not too unusual. But it turns out that they were worried about damage to the foundation and the buyers were getting skittish. And maybe we had open permits from Sandy that weren't closed out. And I said, all right, okay.

Okay. You know what? I said, at least it'll be good content for the show. At least it'll be good content for the show. So did they back out? So they did another survey or inspection or whatever. And I think we're okay. I do have to go to the town and close out permits and all this sort of nonsense. But anyway, I thought it was hilarious that this guy's saying that I'm good at real estate. It's like, dude, literally dumb luck. And not only am I not good, this might be terrible. This might be catastrophic.

This is the total case of the easy money has already been made and you have to be a really good investor and understand locations and rental dynamics and all this stuff to make money going from forward from here, right? Like, yeah, you and I, so I have a friend who's like, dude, why are you, why are you dumping your, your mortgages at 2.9%? Like, why are you selling? And I'm like, because I pulled forward 20 years of returns and I don't want the headache. And this is a headache. If there are foundational issues,

Like an end, like what if like the there's roof issues? Like, I don't know. I don't want this nonsense in my life. I don't need it. I did great. And you said, I'm moving on. You go six months without a person who's renting. Yeah. All right. Uh, New York times had a stir. Oh wait, one more on the, on the rental thing. So Noah Kagan talked about this and you, you gave a good thing. Like I pulled forward all these years. He said he bought a property in 2017 to Airbnb it. He bought it for three 15, put 63 down. He sold it for three 77.

But he said he also, not only appreciation, he paid the mortgage down, but he paid taxes. He paid a bunch of ownership costs. So his total profit, he said, was only $11,000 after he actually accounted for all the costs of having. So he basically said, you know, he would have been better putting it in the S&P. So a lot of it is just, I guess, location and luck. And you just never know on these things. There's another side of it. It's a lot harder than it sounds. All right. New York Times.

They looked at where young people actually are becoming homeowners. And the overall housing homeownership rate in the U.S. is 62%. The highest one for people under 35 is in Minnesota, and that's 51%. Michigan's right around 49% as well. The lowest ones are Hawaii, New York, and California. That's not a surprise. I guess Hawaii is the worst. And they said, what's the deal? And it's basically just price to income. That's the thing.

West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Minnesota, they all have very good income to average sales price ratios. But the prices are, average price in Minnesota is like $300,000, right? And in Kentucky, it's $225,000 or something. So there are still places. Do you see this, the Pope's Childhood Home in Chicago? So someone found the Pope's Childhood Home is for sale

It's $199,000. I think it's in the south side of Chicago. Three bed, three bath, 1,200 square feet. Look at this thing. Unbelievable. Yeah, houses were affordable in the 60s. Yeah, okay. No offense, but go over there. This is the 1960s house. And it's still affordable today. It's just how many young people would be willing to buy it. And some people will, but most people probably won't. All right, I have some housing renovation anecdotes. Go ahead. I feel like I'm seeing housing renovations everywhere.

I'm seeing, you know when you see the big dumpsters in the garage or the driveway? - Yeah, yeah. - And you see a big addition going on, or I feel like I'm seeing, and maybe it's just the time of year, and people decide to do these projects in the spring in Michigan and not have to do them in the winter.

But I feel like people have finally said enough's enough. I have my 3% mortgage. I don't care if the HELOC rate is seven. I'm doing something because I'm going to end up being in this house for 10 more years or whatever it is. So I'm seeing renovations everywhere. I think people have finally said, I'm not going to move. I'm going to fix my house up. I don't care. I don't have any data to back this up. It's all anecdotes. Okay. That works, I guess. That's going to be you with your rental house. So you mentioned the quarter stuff.

I use this because I talked to Michael Sidgemore last week on Ask the Compound, and he talked about how all the private equity calls these days for KKR and Apollo are talking about putting private equity into target date funds. And so I looked this up, and I typed it in, private equity managers mentioning target date funds. And it pulled up, as you mentioned, it pulled up the actual presentation. And the co-CEO at Apollo, Mark Rowan from Apollo, and

Scott Nuttall from KKR all talking about how, like, listen, there is a huge opportunity. There's $15 trillion in 401ks. We want to put these into target date funds. And I just, I can't help but think that retail is the bag holder here. I'm not saying that the, the results are going to be completely awful, but Bloomberg had this story saying, wait, hang on. Harvard is selling. So you're, you're not, you're, you're not a skeptic. You're a cynic on this.

I don't think it's going to be like, oh, it's a private equity is a bubble and it's going to burst. But listen to this. Matt Levine wrote about this. This is from so this is Matt Levine via Financial Times. Financial Times says big private equity investors are taking advantage of a flood of capital from wealthy individuals to cash out their buyout fund holdings at higher prices despite the industry's yearlong downturn.

Some of the largest evergreen funds, and they're saying these evergreen funds, they put all the money in, and instead of waiting for a capital call when there's a deal to be made, they have to put that money to work right away. So these interval funds and evergreen funds have bought large swaths of private equity funds from institutional investors who are seeking liquidity after a dearth of distributions. That extra demand has helped prop up prices for stakes in private equity funds in the secondary market, even as institutional investors have cooled investing in new funds because buyout firms have had trouble exiting their investments.

One advisor said there's a lot of money flowing into these evergreen vehicles and they're under pressure to employ it quickly. So I just think that the returns in these funds are going to be far lower than people assume. Yeah. Because they have to put the money to work right away. But they are also the bag holders for the institutions. Don't you think? In some cases. I think it's going to be a lot of cases. They have to put that money to work right away if it's an evergreen interval fund.

It's not like you wait because the institutions, they have a capital call when the deal is ready to be made and they don't know when the deals are going to happen. And they invest the money when the deal happens. These funds, they have to put the money to work. It's like an ETF or mutual fund. Yeah. I'd be happy if someone wanted to poke holes in this, but I feel like retail is going to be the bag holder. Yeah, for the record, I'm not taking the other side. I'm just...

I'd be happy if someone could point me to it and say, Ben, no, you're wrong. This is, it's going to be fine. And maybe if so much money is pouring in to the RA channel and the wealth manager channel, and they do get target date funds, maybe there's going to be so much money pouring in that it's not going to matter that much for a while. I just think the results are going to be, it's going to be lower than people have. It depends. What are we talking about? Infrastructure, private credit, real estate, private equity, secondaries, like buyouts. What are we talking about?

All of it. If trillions of dollars is flowing in, all of it's going to have lower returns, you would think, right? Yeah. Or they're going to be forced to use higher leverage to make those returns. But I'm saying the idea that retail is going to be the bag holder for institutions, I think, yes, in some cases, no doubt. There's no doubt about that. And I think that there are, so not to get bogged down in that comment, because there are a host of issues with private investments in

401ks, but I think it's inevitable. I mean, it is coming. That's the thing. You might not like it, but it's coming regardless. Yeah. All right. We've talked about Jonathan Clements before. About a year ago, he received the news that he had life-threatening cancer. He doesn't have a long time to live. I think they gave him a year. And

He decided to start a program, and Jason Zweig wrote about this, and Mike Piper wrote about this at the Oblivious Investor. And he's going to try to help young people age 18 to 24 start their own Roth IRA. And they have to go through like a personal finance class to do it. And they're going to help assistants opening a Roth IRA and a $1,000 grant to fund the account, which I think is just a fantastic program.

And I guess the Bogle Center is helping. We'll put a link in the show notes, but there's a way that you can give money. So I gave some money to this. I'm not asking anyone else to do it if they want, but I think it's an awesome, awesome legacy that he's putting through. Yeah, that's what I was going to use. What a wonderful legacy for Jonathan Clements, who has done a lot for tens of thousands of individual investors over the years. And I love that Jason has helped me spread the good word here. So I also will be making a contribution.

And he has a new book out called The Best of Jonathan Clements, Timeless Wisdom. And it's all this old Wall Street Journal articles that I grew up reading. And so William Bernstein and Jason Zweig helped put this off the ground. I actually did a blurb for the book, which I was happy to do. But check that out too, especially for personal finance people out there. So Ben, I traveled yesterday. I'm at Future Proof Colorado. And I'll see you later in the week, actually, on the West Coast.

San Diego, which means what's translated roughly to whale's vagina. Of course. It was, all right, so the real ID, I was a bit nervous because, of course, my passport is also expired. I don't have a real ID. It's an overnight birth certificate. So the good news is that if you have a passport that is, at least in New York, I don't want to speak for the rest of the country. I don't know what it is. Wait a minute. Am I going to be stuck in California? Anyhow, if your passport is not more than a year old, TSA will let you through.

Clear would not let me through. And I only mentioned that to say that the line for clear was by far, by far, by far, by far the shortest I've seen it in years. Clear wouldn't let you through, huh? Interesting. No.

You'd think the scan of the eyes would be better than would be more would trump the ID. Yeah. But we already know that. I think clear is a scam. I'm of the opinion clear is a scam. It always takes way longer than TSA pre-check. It never works for me. This time it would have worked phenomenally because there was like three people in front of me. I only mentioned that just as an anecdote for travel because we know travel is soft. Actually, this surprised the shit out of me. I was listening to the Disney call and they're talking about the theme park. All right.

Hugh Johnson, the CFO said bookings right now for Walt Disney World for the third quarter are up 4%. And that's with about what we would say is 80% in. And then for the fourth quarter, bookings are up 7%. That really surprised me. That it's still rising? Bookings are up 7% in the fourth quarter. Yeah. I would have thought Disney would be falling off by now. Right? Then I saw...

Remember a few weeks ago, I made the grand proclamation that Cops is my favorite show ever. I think I have to walk that one back. But I will say that without a doubt, Cops is in my top 10 for most hours viewed of any show of all time. Might be top five. Because it was on forever. I watched so many episodes of that show. So you were watching Cops when you shouldn't be watching Seinfeld.

True. Uh, anyway, there's a new show on max all access PD in grand Rapids. It's basically cops in grand Rapids on max. Oh really? Okay. I hadn't heard of this, right? You should check it out. All right. This is a, this is a wow. Um, NBA and NBC announced this is Peacock. Uh, Michael Jordan will be a special contributor to the NBA and NBC.

And I saw a table from Sportico, top 10 highest paid athletes of all time. Jordan's earned $4.1 billion inflation adjusted. They've got to be paying him a fortune to get him out of bed for this. Yeah, because that's all from Nike, obviously. Right. Can I share a secret? He's not going to be any good at it. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. Remember how bad he was on SNL? I don't remember that. Can't be good at everything. There's a new movie coming out.

Godzilla-Kong Supernova. You excited for that one, Ben? 2027? My son will eat that one up. He's seen every Godzilla-King Kong movie. All right. I appreciate a good take, so I don't want to do a take down here, but The Atlantic had a story saying, is this the worst era ever for pop culture? And I appreciate the take, so he says, according to a YouGov poll, Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. Not TV. They also...

So, I got a pushback here. So they said, "In music, new releases accounted for a little more than a quarter of the albums consumed in the U.S. Every year, a greater and greater percentage of the albums streamed online is cataloged music, meaning it is at least 18 months old." Now, here's my pushback on this. Imagine going back to someone in the 1990s and telling them, "You can get any song you want to play for $14.99 a month. You can play it across any device you want. We didn't have access to old music like this in the past."

The reason we listen to new music is because it was the only thing on the radio or TRL on MTV. If I had access to old music in the past that I didn't have to spend $15 on a CD for, I would have listened to it. So, I mean, you could make the case music was better because music was better in the 90s. Let's be honest. But I don't think it's just the fact that we have less new releases out and people aren't listening. People are listening to old music because...

You already know it's good. Like, I used to buy CDs for one song. There'd be a good single, you'd buy the whole CD, and you'd go, this whole CD sucks. But I bought it for one song. Plus, I mean, we have one of the biggest musicians in history right now, Taylor Swift. So I will say movies are way, way worse. And so he made the point that all the movies are sequels. And I agree with that. Movies are worse. But TV shows are so much better. Think about it.

We have movie stars in new TV shows all the time. They drop and no one's ever even heard of these shows. All of a sudden, Netflix, I'm going to talk about this in my reviews, had a show with Tina Fey and Steve Carell and Will Forte. Nicole Kidman's in TV shows all the time.

TV, you could argue TV has never been better. Never been better. Remember in the past, it was a huge leap for someone to go from TV to movies. In the 1990s, no, no movie star in their right mind would ever do a TV show. No. That was like the end of the line for you. You can follow your favorite sports teams unlike any time ever before. You don't have to wait for SportsCenter to watch highlights. My wife used to buy Us Weekly to watch like, hey, look, this celebrity is buying a coffee. Now celebrities literally post their own stuff on social media. You can follow every intricate detail of their life.

Podcasts have celebrities on them. Celebrities have their own podcast. So I'd say pop culture has actually never been better in many ways. Yeah. It's a good take. It's a good take. That's my take. Remember the Gateway 2000? We spoke about that the other day. Wasn't a cow the mascot for that? Everyone had a Gateway computer. In the late 90s, early 2000s, everyone had a Gateway computer. And yeah, singles were a thing, right? Like you would literally buy a single song on a CD.

Yeah, it might have like three songs on it or something for like $5.99. Yeah, things are not so bad. Somebody said that we should, that the opposite of Canary in the coal mine is Canary in the gold mine. Don't hate it. Pretty clever. That's not bad. I like it. Yep. Somebody does. Isn't Uber mail just DHL slash FedEx? Someone should invent an Uber mail. They just pick up and drop off your mail. This is how you know Ben is a man of the people. You know, I didn't know that DHL and FedEx would come to your house either. Is that a thing? That's awesome.

I just, I want, I hate going to the post office to do so. I want someone to put in the envelope for me, put the sticker on, everything. That's what I want. Apparently that's DHL. All right, awesome. All right, I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had a run-in with a goose. The geese were coming after me, and I said I wouldn't mind stepping on one of their necks. These things are jerks. They poop everywhere. They're mean. This is from my office complex. Dear tenants, we are aware that the geese on the property have become a persistent issue.

It comes to the point where we can no longer realistic to keep up with the mess and disruption they cause. To address the problem, we have contracted a professional company that will implement a method known as goose hazing that will involve the use of trained herding dogs that will be brought on the site, unleashed to chase off the geese and discourage them from returning. This is a humane and effective method, Duncan. The dogs and their handlers will be on site at random time, 20 times per month through mid-December. Do not interact with the dogs.

So, these dogs are going to scare the geese away, which I've never heard of goose hazing, but I would have thought it would have been meaner than it actually sounds. Okay. All right, what do you got for recommendations? All right, I've got a bunch of stuff. Ben, where are you with the studio?

I'm probably six episodes in, and I think it's a very hit or miss show for me. Some of the episodes I'm like, eh, and some of them I think are great. Like the one I told you where he goes to a gala with a doctor girlfriend, and he's debating all night how the entertainment industry is just as important as being a doctor. And I thought that episode was great.

I thought they totally nailed it. Some of the other episodes I can take it or leave it, but it's a, so it's a hit or miss show for me, but I still am enjoying it. All right. So I, I love the show. Even if I don't love every episode, I like that it's contained, but I agree with you. Um, some episodes are better than others, but like, I just, you're right. Every episode stands on its own. You don't, you don't have to watch the other episodes to know what's going on. So at the end of the most recent episode, they do an award show and, um,

At the end of the show, there's no spoilers. At the end of the show, Seth Rogen gets in the car and I just love, and there's like just Hollywood trumpet music playing. And I just love being, I love being in Hollywood with him. I really, I'm really enjoying it. And matter of fact, the most recent episode at the award show, they got Ted Sarandos to be in the cast. Like he had a pretty sizable role in the show. And I thought like, huh, okay.

Every episode has one or two really good cameos. But the guy who was Netflix is on Apple is on a show on Apple. That's interesting. Yeah, but he's kind of a celebrity himself. Couldn't you see him leaving Netflix someday and running one of these other studios? Sarandos was courtside last night sitting next to David Zaslav at Madison Square Garden. How mad were you that you had to miss the game and not be there for that last night? Um, it's the best game in the garden. Um,

I'm trying to think of the last best game in the game. Because were you there on Saturday when they got smoked? Yeah, it was not fun. Okay, so are you allowing... Now that the Knicks have won, and they would have won it regardless if Tatum got hurt, but Tatum's hurt. I don't know if he's coming back. Are you allowing yourself to think about... Wait, you don't know if he's coming back. We know he's not coming back. He ruptured his Achilles. We're not ESPN. We're allowed to say it. Okay. Are you allowing yourself to envision going to the finals now? Are you not even...

Okay. No, I am. I am. Like, you could be thinking, like, I could be going to a Knicks game in the finals. Yeah. So I am a very emotional Knicks fan. Yeah, you told me your wife made you take a walk after last week's game. Yeah.

My texts are insane. I'm not like, don't worry, guys, we got this. That's not where I stand. I thought this Knicks team underperformed all season. In fact, not I thought, this Knicks team underperformed all season. Our defense was alarmingly bad. I did not think that Mitchell Robinson coming back was going to change the defense as much as it had. But there was just something missing. There was something not clicking about this team all season and

including throughout the playoffs. We were down 20 points in the first three games against the Celtics. Pistons gave you guys a good game every game. Yeah. So the Celtics are obviously the better team. Like I'm not an idiot. Right.

so, so yeah, so going into the series, I thought that we were eight to one and I was not, I'm like, that's not attractive. I'm not doing that. I'm not betting that Josh bet that credit to him. Um, so yeah, I thought we were gonna get smoked even after, like, I thought we were gonna get killed in game three or I'm sorry, game four. So now that we are up game, uh, three games to one, the series is over whether or not we win it in, in, in five or six, whatever the series is over. Obviously I feel bad for Jason Tatum, et cetera. I gotta say that, but I really do. Uh,

But yeah, no, I'm there. I think that we can beat the Pacers for sure. And it's wild. Pacers-Mix would have been like a, even before these series, would have been like a 30-1 probably, right? 20-1? Yeah. Yeah, who'd have thunk it? I'm very happy. I'm very, very happy.

Yeah, it's been a long time. It's been a long time. My daughter's been staying up with me watching NBA playoffs and she has to usually it's her bedtime and there'll be a game on at the end in the fourth quarter. But can I just stay up? And I let her stay up. And it's been an amazing second round. I don't mind the bandwagon fans. I love it. But I never stopped.

In the lost decade, in the Tracy McGrady, Penny Hardaway, Michael Doliak, Othello Harrington, I can name 150 players that were absolute dog shit. I never stopped. I can tell based on your wardrobe. You have more Knicks gear than any person alive. So to be on the other side of the mountain. I mean, I'm going to cry if we go to the finals. I'm going to cry if we go to the Eastern Conference finals. Yeah, it's very special for me. So I'm enjoying the shit out of it. All right. What else we got for recommendations?

I listened to two episodes of the Blocks podcast with Neil Brennan that I've mentioned in the past that were both phenomenal. Neil deserves to give us some...

some tips or something because we keep sending people to his podcast. It's so good. I listened to Johnny Knoxville and Jim Norton, uh, and Jim Norton is a, is an absolute filthy maniac. And I, I mean that in the best way possible. Um, he's a standup comedian and he's, uh, he's something else. All right. Um, credit to the last of us. Are you, did you bail Ben? Are you still watching?

I'm still watching. Give me your take and I'll give you mine. Okay. So I'm not a diehard. Like I very much enjoy the show, but I'm not, I don't, I'm not like on Reddit. When I, when I finished the show, I'm not thinking about what's going to happen next week. I enjoy it. And after Joel died, I was like, wow, they really did. And actually, hold on. Let's rewind. Actually, no, no, we don't need to rewind. It's episode four. Sorry. We're keeping, we're keeping going. So after they killed off one of the main characters in episode two, I was like, all right, let's see how they do it. And I faith in the writers and the faith I think was rightly placed because they

I thought episode three and four did not skip a beat at all. Okay. I have a totally different take. I think it's one of the dumbest TV decisions that's ever been made. Well, they're following the video game. Great. Piss off the video game people. He was one of the only reasons I liked the show. I'm still going to watch. I think it's okay. I do not think that the young girl, she was a sidekick. She's not a main star. I know they're going to bring other people in. They brought Jeffrey Rush in and Catherine O'Hara. I think it's...

Or why not wait to kill him at the end of the season? I think it's, he was the best part of the show. Why, who cares what happened in the video game? I think it was inexplicable. I think it's one of the stupidest TV decisions I've ever seen. And I'm still going to watch it, but it totally makes the show not as good for me. All right, well, let's see. That's a premature take. There's six more episodes. All right. The first two back, it's like, they're okay, but it's not the same. That's where I'm at.

All right. Two more. I was listening to Nicolas Cage on The Big Picture with Sean Fennessey. He has a new movie called The Surfer, which I have not seen. And he said, he told Sean Fennessey that he almost, oh, Sean Fennessey said, which one of your movies do you think is underappreciated?

And he said Matchstick Men, which is one of, which is, I think my favorite Nick Cage movie ever. Maybe I would have to think about that. Phenomenal movie. Absolutely. That rocked my world when I saw it. Come on, man. Nick Cage was in The Rock. The Rock, Con Air, and Snake Eyes, and Face Off. That was a run. Anyway, but he took that role instead of Tim Robbins in Mystic River. That would have been weird.

Oh, yeah. That wouldn't have worked. Him trying to do a Boston accent? No. I don't think so. Anyway, finally, on the airplane, I had a lot of work to do on the airplane, not to brag. So I watched in the background a perfect airplane movie. Two hours and 15 minutes. Not great action. You could look up whatever. You're not really missing much. Den of Thieves, Pantera. I just watched the first one recently, so should I watch it? Okay. On an airplane. Okay.

Like it's not, you know, it's not like I wouldn't say fired up. I do like to do that. So I have a long flight to San Diego later this week. So I do like to put on a movie in the background, even if I'm doing answering emails. And yeah, this is this is like this is perfect for that. So we talked about how TV is better than movies now. And so I think a lot of the shows you said your friends and neighbors could have been a movie. I still like it. I think the one where they went to Princeton recently, I thought that was a great episode of TV. Did you watch that where they took their daughter to Princeton? Yeah.

I think Jon Hamm and Amanda Peete have great chemistry. I think your Dope Thief show could have been a movie too. I thought that one kind of went off the rails a little bit. Oh, did you watch it?

I'm still watching. I'm not done yet, but I feel like at the middle of it, it kind of lagged. Like, that could have been a movie. Here's one. Four seasons on Netflix. It just showed up. It's Steve Carell, Tina Fey, and Will Forte. And it's three married couples who go on, like, four vacations together. And every two episodes is them going on another vacation. I'm only three episodes in. And...

It's just, it's a half hour show. It feels like a movie. And Steve Carell is great. Tina Fey. I'm a huge Will Forte fan. I feel like The Last Man on Earth, which was on Fox, is one of the most underrated TV shows of the last 10 years. It was hilarious. Wait, do you enjoy the show? And I'm into Four Seasons. You know, it's so funny. So we're watching it too. Although, watching it, that's a stretch. Is the house in upstate New York? It looks like an upstate New York house. I haven't, I don't think I've got there. I think I watched the first episode and a half.

And we were watching it. That's what it is. They're at the house on the lake. Okay. I was like falling asleep. But we were saying to each other like, who is this show for? It's like, it's just...

I don't understand the audience. I'm thinking like, is it like, it's for my dad, I think. And no, it's for Ben apparently. Oh, my wife and I love this show. It's like the fact that the husband gets mad at the wife for playing video games on her iPad all the time. I don't know. Maybe it's just a lot of quirky things that we noticed that are realistic to us, but I think it's great. Okay. Maybe I'll just, it's, it's just a, it's light. It's very, it's very light. It's a light.

It's not too deep. I don't know. Sometimes I don't want deep shows. I want just light and happy and fun. Yeah, no. So for me, it's a perfect sleeping show. And I guess it's a Ben show. That's who it's for. You know, I have a feeling that you don't pay attention to a lot of shows because I mentioned Johnny Knoxville being on the studio that and you said, when was he on the studio? And then literally the whole first two episodes of the four seasons are at a house on the lake. And you're like, oh, I must not got there yet. I've been watching these shows.

I think I was following the third or fourth season. But wait, hold on, hand up. I admitted last week, I am a very bad watcher. Apparently. You're probably just, you're a phone guy. I always get mad at my wife for not paying attention to a show when she's on her phone because she misses stuff and she asks me what happens. And I said, get off your phone and pay attention. This is a no phone show. This is why airplanes movies get a 30% premium for me because it's the only time where I'm like locked in. You actually pay attention. And that's why I go to the movie theater.

It's a hack. It gets my attention span. All right. Any closers here? Are we good? Is the volatility completely gone for the year? I don't think I'd be willing to say that quite yet. Market's up again today. Is the tariff-related volatility gone? Okay. That's a good question. That's a fair question. And I would say maybe. Okay. Personal emails, personal responses, animal spirits at thecompoundnews.com. Thanks to our production team as always. Remember...

We got video on Spotify, video on YouTube at The Compound. What else? I don't know. That's it. See you next week.