Animal Spirits Podcast - A Random Walk Down Nowhere (EP.07)

Episode Date: December 6, 2017

On today's show, we talk about how life changes in 2017 have impacted our perspective on our finances, discuss the role technology will play in the future of the labor market, the holy grail of an investment process and more.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Animal Spirits, the podcast that takes a completely different look at markets and investing. I hate the people who talk about it all the time, so I didn't want to be one of those people. From two guys who study the markets as a passion. Can I count on you to talk me off the ledge partner? Yes, and that's what this podcast is for. And trade for all the right reasons. That's my due diligence. I'm in. Dude, if you're in, I'm in.

A line of thinking is the higher the volatility on an asset, the higher the volatility on the opinions. so I feel like you have crazies on both sides. Here's your host of Animal Spirits, Michael Batnik. I can say that I was never driven by money. So you were trading three times leveraged ETFs for the love of the game. Exactly, man. I'm a purist. But anyway, and Ben Carlson.

This is true. I do not drink coffee. I've never been on Facebook. I've never done fantasy football. Oh, one last thing. Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holtz wealth management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritthold's wealth management.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Now, today's show. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. I'm Michael Batnik and with me today is the famous value coin investor Benjamin Graham Carlson. Ben, what are we going to be talking about today? So today we're going to start it off with a rear mirror belly question. We've got enough people giving us feedback, giving us questions, and we've gotten some good stuff from you guys in the email. Just a reminder, you can hit us up at Animal SpiritsPod at gmail.com, but this is a good

one for us to step back and reflect on our year we've had a little. So it says, the question is, how is your perspective on money and investing changed as you went through big changes in your lives, i.e. getting married, having kids, buying a house, etc. And both of us have had new additions to the family this year. So I thought it would be good to go over this and talk about, you know, what's been going on in our lives and how that's changed our, our perspective from a financial area. So you had your first child in February, March. Is that correct? February, yeah. Okay. So from a financial perspective, did anything change it all from you when you had a child? Well, my savings rate is definitely in a bare market. I mean, that's obvious.

Having a child, I don't think it was necessarily that expensive for the first like six months or so, but daycare is the big one. Yes, daycare is huge. So my wife and I had, we had, she had twins this year in May, and we already have a three-and-a-half-year-old. So we now have three children in daycare. It's a massive expense, and I think it's something that a lot of millennials who are now deciding to have kids coming up are going to sort of get hit in the face with, the realization that it's basically an extra mortgage payment and then some. And this totally explains your foray into Bitcoin investing. Yes, right. I'm speculating out of need, not desire. You're looking to supplement the daycare. Yeah. So,

So we have three kids, so we have six-and-a-half-month-old twins, and I think that, you know, I don't think anyone ever really plans for twins unless you're like the Octomomom or whatever, but it was obviously unplanned for us, but it's one of the things that, you know, there's a lot of different financial issues you think about when you have kids. I don't think anyone's ever truly ready for a kid in terms of, you know, your finances goes. But, you know, one of the things to me that it really drove home was the fact that having a large savings rate, which we've, my wife and I have always been pretty big savers, and we, we've always been big on avoiding lifestyle creep.

So I think just having a high savings rate gives you that sort of margin of safety to use a value investing term. So I think having that going in really helps make these transitional periods a little easier to stomach and handle because you can always either dip into your savings if you need to or just not save as much to account for the new expenses. What do you think is the best way to avoid lifestyle creep? The obvious answer is discipline, but are there actual things that you can do to prevent yourself from getting a little bit of a nicer car or going to a few more dinners.

I mean, the philosophical one is to just figure out how to be happy with what you have, but that's obviously not very easy to do. I always like the idea of simply trying to keep things constant in terms of what you do. So anytime you get a raise, take part of that and have fun with it and take the rest and just plow it into savings. And so I think it's just being happy with you are, who you are. And I think that comes a lot with age and maturity, but it's that sort of keeping up with Jones's thing is really tough to figure out, I think, in a lot of ways for people. So the other thing for me, in terms of changes, you know, we had a lot of different changes

from having the kids. So we actually had to move into a new house because we basically outgrow our old house. We had to get a new vehicle. I had to join the minivan club, which was something I never thought would happen. My wife went down to part-time for work. So we had a lot of huge changes that happened. But I think it's one of those things where your perspective changes once you have kids and those financial matters don't really, they're not that important. Obviously, it's, you know, you have to have that stuff buttoned up and taken care of, but it's something. Hold on.

My perspective has not really changed, but when do I get there when he's two years old? Am I a little bit early? What perspective change are you looking for? I don't know. You said it. No, I think, honestly, it was different this time, the second time around, I think. I agree. The first one, it didn't change as much.

And I think even my investing sort of risk profile has changed in a lot of ways. I'm definitely more cognizant of having like higher cash reserves and a bigger emergency savings account. I don't think my idea of risk in terms of the markets has changed very much. But I think just thinking through like fallbacks and emergencies and insurance, that stuff has all become much more important to me. Yeah. And now with with three kids, it's, you know, it's all about them.

And I think I just have so little time to. worry or care about myself. Maybe that's the thing as far as perspective goes. It's just I don't have any time to consider myself anymore if that makes sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so, you know, the kids, they're the focal point, which maybe that's how it should be. And that's, I think that's part of the reason why that's one of the biggest things for me, avoiding lifestyle creep is you just worry less about yourself and worry more about them and realize that caring what other people think about you or what you drive or what your house looks like is not as you know big of a worry anymore it's about more about the kids yeah i'm still able to be pretty selfish with my

time but i'm sure that'll change when we have the next one yeah and that's another part of it is time management like i'm way more readily available to spend money on time if need be so things that i had done in the past that because i'm completely able body to well i can do my own yard work and i can mow the lawn something you don't have to worry about doing in brooklyn i suppose but you know if that takes me an hour and a half on a weekend, that's time I'm not spending with my kids or whatever. So I'm more than willing to pay for that kind of stuff now. We pay for somebody to clean our house. I think of those little things like that, if you can do to pay for time, I think that's worth it. And then, you know, cut back in other areas where it doesn't make as

much of, you know, of an impact. You must be an outlier at our age to have three kids, or not even our age, but just three kids seems to be not the norm these days. Yeah, it is kind of crazy. We talk about this all the time, how, you know, people from my parents' generation and the baby boomers, They, you know, a lot of these families were huge, five, six kids, seven, eight, nine in some cases. And now you don't hear many people, you know, this is anecdotal data of friends. You don't hear many of people in my, in our age group, in our 30s that go beyond one or two kids. So three actually seems crazy to a lot of people. And it's funny, we get looks from people going to daycare or out at the grocery store, like, wow, you guys have your hands full with all those kids.

And it seems very bizarre these days almost. Yeah, I think that one of the reasons for that is not necessarily. that people enjoy having kids less now than they used to, but because it's gotten so expensive to live that households require two incomes, and that doesn't lend itself to having three, four, five, six kids. Yeah, and a lot of younger people, they're putting off having kids earlier because they're going to school. And when you go to school and pay for college, then, yeah, you want to continue that career mindset. So you have kids a little later in life. And I think when you have kids later, you realize it's a lot of work. And maybe you don't have as many as you once did.

There was an article called The Great Baby Bust of 2017, and the gist of it was that, and I'm going to quote this actually, not to give you the gist, we are now in our third most rapid period of fertility decline on record after the 1920s drop and then the post-baby boom decline. What do you make of this? Why are so few people having babies in 2017? I mean, you and I and our colleague Bill Sweet, we're doing our part. Yes. Yeah, we're trying to help this cause. It is crazy. I think, like I said, a lot of it has to do with the fact that I think as education standards improve and more people are going to school and doing more, I think people just realize, you know, it's not as much of a, as a manual labor society. I think back in the day, people had a lot of kids because they needed them help around the house. And now I think, like you said, maybe people are being a little more selfish about their own careers and wanting to, and they realize it's hard to have a large family when you want to be in the working world all the time. It is, it seems like it's very rare these days to have stay-at-home parents, which honestly, after having kids, I now realize how hard.

that job is, like as a stay-at-home parent. I think maybe people in our generation don't want to do that anymore as they once did. Yeah, so I think that one of the reasons why births fell off the cliff is because we are afraid that technology will replace our babies in the future and we don't want to bring them into that kind of a world. Would you say that's fair? You're worried about technology replacing our babies? Well, there was a new study by McKinsey that said massive government intervention will be required to hold societies together against the ravage of labor disruption over the next 13 years, up to 800 million people, including a third of the workforce in the U.S. and Germany, will be made jobless by 2030.

That's pretty scary. That is pretty nuts. I always tell my wife that I think it's possible that our kids could have jobs that don't even exist right now. So I think that obviously this could be one of the huge things going on in our lifetime and their lifetime to figure out. But, you know, my whole take on this thing is that it's, I think technology is just going to continue to increase inequality because the people who understand technology and know how to use it

and interact with it are going to be fine and they'll find ways to work with it. And the people that don't, unfortunately, are probably going to be left behind, which I think is happening in our industry as well. So I just got a question from a friend a couple weeks ago saying, you know, what's the deal with, I'm new to this space to investing, explain why robo advisors won't kill off your practice in the wealth management business. And I told him, listen, everything that can get automated, will get automated in the future. But for people who are able to use technology to their advantage, those are the ones who are going to succeed because the people that fight it, it's, I mean, you're pushing the ball up the hill every single day. And it's, it's just pointless

because it's just going to continue to get better and better. Yeah, soon the NFL will be played by robots. Will they get concussions as well, though? Yeah, but it's sort of interesting. Speaking about technology, there was an article from Think Progress talking about the deflation forces that's going on in solar driven by steadily improving technology and the use of auctions to set prices, the cost of solar and wind dropped 25% in the past year, and this comes on top of an 80% reduction in the previous 10 years. So it's really interesting that technology is coming in and improving everything, and it is a hyper deflationary force. Yeah. Well, there was this chart going around last year, and they took all these different

goods and services and charted them and showed what's happened to them over the past few decade over since 1996 over the past two decades and the basic gist of the chart which we'll post in the show notes is that things that we need are skyrocketing inflation that was college tuition child care health care food and beverage and housing to some degree kind of kept up with inflation but things that we want anything for your house cell phone TVs software computers that's all been in deflation so it's like there's this huge divergence between inflation and things that we need and deflation and things that we want which is kind of crazy and kind of too bad for a huge section of society that doesn't get to

take advantage in some ways. Yeah, it's weird that there's been such massive improvements in healthcare and technology in that space, you know, the costs just keep going up and up and up and up. Yeah, and again, we personally have experienced that hyperinflation in childcare and probably more so you in New York than me in Michigan, but it's kind of crazy. All right, so stick with technology as a theme. There was an article yesterday from TechCrunch talking about the implosion and early stage funding. Here's a quote. Overall, we believe 2012 to 2016 was a bubble in early stage

funding, driven by the fundamental platform shift to mobile. In easy hindsight, too many companies raised concept money and an unprecedented number failed early and failed fast. The VC market for seed and early stage failed with them, falling to half its size in three short years. End quote. So it seems like this is sort of analogous to the late 90s IPO boom, that not that early stage financing, drawing up is necessarily a terrible thing. It's just, that what we've seen in the past few years has been such an outlier, and now the winners are declaring victory, and so there's less opportunity for newer companies to come to come to the space.

Which is also kind of crazy because there haven't been any IPOs from a lot of these companies. They're all staying private. Well, yeah. After the Blue Apron IPO and some others, it's easy to understand why they're making the decision. Yeah, which is surprising because there's been more and more podcasts coming to market, you know, every week. And Blue Apron, maybe that's their problem. They've been sponsoring too many podcasts, which if anyone from Blue Apron is listening to

this we're always listening to available for offers. So Fred Wilson, who's a famous early stage investor, talked about this way down in this chart that was going around yesterday. And here's a quote from him. When I talked to my friends who started seed funds in the past decade, I hear them thinking about moving up market into larger funds in series A rounds. And you can see that in the data, less deals and bigger deals. Here's the thing. Seed is really hard. You lose way more than you win. You wait the longest for liquidity. You lose influence as larger investors come into the cab table and start throwing their weight around, end quote. So I think that that is perfectly summarizing what's going on today. I guess like everything, it's cyclical. And the further

along you get in the cycle, people are forced to take more risk if they want to earn higher returns. But this is a space where you're investing in these companies as their ideas and not very well-formed companies or products yet. So it's sort of the higher risk, higher-reward space. Yeah. So I mean, I guess we're probably of the mind that this drawing up is not necessarily the canary in the blockchain. Not quite yet. So there was a report going around last week from Goldman Sachs that everyone was referencing. And they basically said investors for the next decade or so are screwed. And so they said that the valuations are higher now than they've been since the 1900. And that's on stocks, bonds, and credit, and which would be like riskier bonds. So they

basically said there's seldom been the case that all three of these markets have been so expensive at the same time. And they equated it to the roaring 20s and the golden 50s. You and I've written talked a lot about valuations. You know, I understand what they're trying to do here and show these going back that far because it provides some historical perspective. But my thoughts that I don't think you can compare valuations across cycles like this and come up with all the answers. It's kind of like analogous to trying to compare the Golden State Warriors today to the 60s, 1960s Celtics teams. You can't make comparisons across timeframes like that and come up with a perfect answer for it because back then the rules were different.

the nutrition was different. These guys took care of their body's different. So trying to compare, you could take the 12th man on the Golden State Warriors probably and put him back in the 1960s NBA and he'd probably run circles around them. And so I don't think you, I think from stock valuation perspective, it's kind of the same thing where the companies are different, the industries are different, the economy is different. I don't think you can really make these kind of sweeping generalizations about valuation going back that far.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think in the 60s, Chappelle McGee probably would have dominated the right. Russell. And I don't know about that because I've never actually seen Bill Russell play, but you get the point. And we'll talk about this in a later episode. But it's true that gross returns were higher in previous generations. But the net returns might not change because it used to be so expensive to trade stocks. Spreads were wider. There was much more frictions. And then also to compare companies like Facebook and Amazon to companies like U.S. steel and leather companies and things like that that were so capital intensive. It's hardly apples to apples. You know, it is kind of crazy to think about the fact that every strategist, asset manager, financial advisor for the past five years has been telling people, future expected returns are going to be lower in the future. How many times did I say future in that sentence? Hold on.

Try again. Expected returns in the future are going to be lower, going out. But what about past returns in the present? So everyone is saying this. It seems like everyone, if anyone can agree on anything in the markets, it's that returns are going to be lower from here. Which means... Yeah, but the thing is, what could cause everyone to be wrong?

And I think it's, I'm not one of those people that plays contrarian just for the sake of being a contrarian, but what could be the missing element here where we look back in 15 years and go, ah, I can't believe, you know, it's, we still got 10% a year. I have no idea. I would be very surprised if we had sort of even average returns for the next 10 years. I am certainly in the camp of expecting lower returns now. I've said this before. I don't think that necessarily requires wholesale change to your portfolio.

I think that you should just prepare for less. And if we get more, fantastic. And obviously, as we've talked about, bonds are pretty easy to understand and predict for. It's just take the current interest rate. And if you're growing out five or ten years, that's pretty much going to be your return, plus or minus a few basis points. But with stocks, you know, no one really knows. And I completely agree.

It makes sense of temporary expectations just for the sheer understanding of mean reversion and understanding that above average returns typically to below-off returns. But it's just interesting to see after such a boom that we've had that. everyone is being so level-headed about it in understanding that, yeah, returns should be lower from here. Well, I don't know if people are being level-headed. I think people are all over the place because it's so confusing the lack of volatility that we've seen in the stock market, and we've said this in the past, but it really is a head scratcher. And I saw a good line this weekend, I figure where, to think about how there's no volatility in the stock market, but there's

a political recession. And I thought that was just a good way of framing it. Yeah, so many people are just perplexed by the current environment of the market has been given so many opportunities to have an excuse to fall off cliff and it just hasn't taken it yet. So it is funny to see that divergence between political instability and it seems like every day someone talks about how uncertain things are for the market yet it continues to power higher. And you just wrote about this. It's so, it's, I mean, to stay at the obvious, it's impossible to figure out when the collective mood is going to change. John Maynard Keynes wrote a lot about this. So yeah, I guess to people that are trying to do that, just good luck with that.

Yeah, and for anyone who wants to get a, we've had a few questions about where we came up with the name for our, for our show, and we didn't actually come up with it on our own. We're not that intelligent, but I wrote a piece called Prosperity is a state of mind, and I wrote a little piece from John Maynard Keynes in his book, the general theory of employment, interest, and money. And so if anyone wants to check that out, it's a little selection from his book that talks about when he talks about the term animal spirits and where that came from. So we'll put that in the show notes.

So another good one we read this week, our friend Tom Bracky on active management. And I thought this was pretty interesting. Title of the Post was busy dying, and I thought this was going to be an ode to Shawshanker Redemption, where Morgan Freeman says get busy living or get busy dying. But actually, this was a Bob Dylan quote, I think. But Tom takes a really interesting look at, you know, how active managers should think about the change in cycle

and the fact that things are rapidly changing from them. They're probably going to be left behind. And he talks about the fact that these firms are having a hard time cannibalizing their own business and making change. and in the biggest, you know, one of the most interesting parts in here he talked about was, was this idea of a repeatable process. And he said the idea that a consistent and repeatable process is the holy grail of investing, which you hear that from everyone you talk to. Like any due diligence questionnaire or meeting I've ever been and you ask someone, you know, what's your edge? And they say, we have a consistent and repeatable process. So the question is, what does that mean and why should people care? So Tom brings up a really good point. And he wrote, quote, The market is a complex and adaptive system, eager to chew up anyone that thinks that yesterday's answer will be tomorrow's. Continuous improvement is required, not sticking with what has worked. And the quote, and I think in terms of gathering assets and explaining what you do, it's really hard proposition to explain to somebody that you're going to adapt because people like to put asset managers in one of the nine boxes.

I think one of the biggest things is that people get wrong. And I think the, you know, there's a difference between, you know, systematic asset management and in sort of, put your finger in the air and hope the wind will tell you the direction. But I think the biggest thing is just, you know, having a consistent decision-making process. And so I never was a big fan of this idea of set it and forget it because that's kind of impossible because the markets are constantly changing. There's always new products and different ways of doing things. And circumstances change with your own life or your client's life. So I think it's more about not necessarily having an inflexible investment operation, but having a decision-making

process that can be used in a wide variety of scenarios to make better investment decisions and not sort of lose your head when things change. And to Tom's point, he said that continuous improvement is required. The thing is, how many investors can continuously adapt to new market environments and not get chewed up? Right. So we had a little bit of talk discussion last week about Bitcoin. And we said that it's really hard to explain. My biggest prediction for 2018 is there's going to be a bull market in Bitcoin explainers. And, and we said, and it's, And Goldman Sachs always ahead of the game, got in a little early, and they had this explainer called Blockchain, the New Technology of Trust.

And it's this really cool, interactive, I don't even know what to call it. You scroll through it and it has all these different pictures and in little paragraphs and sentences to tell you what exactly the blockchain is. And it's pretty cool. And I think the easiest example they give is helping you verify fraudulent ticket sales. So if you buy a ticket online to a concert or a game or something, you may not know. if that ticket could be fake. So blockchain technology, this sort of distributed ledger that people verify is a way to have these ticket sales be totally above board. That was kind of a cool

way of showing that example. Yeah. And then they gave another example of transferring titles with cars. They had a really level, nuanced approach to this, that the technology could be game-changing, but it's still very early. So there was a lot of it that I understood, and then some of it that still went 4,000 miles over my head. For example, they said, the hash from one block is added to the data in the next block. So when the next block goes through the hash functions, a trace of it is woven into the hash and so on throughout the chain. And honestly, I can't, the fact that this stuff is a little hard to grab sometimes, I think

is either the best thing or the worst thing that could happen to this because it could be the worst thing because it might make it hard for mass adoption. And it could be the best thing because people just trust smart people a lot of time. think that if someone's intelligent and it's hard to explain that it must be good. But I think you can go through something like this gives you an idea of what the possibilities are for this kind of thing. And I always say if you really want to sound smart to your friends, you just say that the blockchain technology is going to be revolutionary, but I'm not sure which

cryptocurrency is going to be the one that benefits from it. I'll take the other side of that. I'm actually bullish on Bitcoin, but bearish on blockchain. Oh, wow. Okay. You heard it here for a timestamp. How do I short blockchain? It's funny because I think we've said this before, but on the one hand, you have all these super rocket scientists, genius, nerdy people getting rich.

And on the other hand, you have the biggest morons in the world. And I guess to their credit, who put a lot of money in, or not even a lot of money, and now are sitting on a lot of money. So how do you think about, you know, you're 25 years old, you never really had a lot of money, and all of a sudden, you got a windfall like this. Yeah, I wrote about this last week because there was a tweet going around that said there's been at least 10,000 new millionaires, rated in 2017, and my guess is a lot of these were people who were rich already, and thus they could take some risk and put it into something like this. That was, you know, sort of an unknown space at the time. But I'm sure there's a lot of young people out there who made a lot of money on this who were sitting on a fortune at a young age and now thinking, you know, now what

I'm going to do with it. And I think, and I tweeted out the fact that I think this is either the best or worst thing that could happen to you. And a lot of people push back on me saying, how could it be bad to win a bunch of money or make a bunch of money at a young age? And I think the problem is that success can be a terrible teacher for people, especially when it happens really quick because you aren't able to adapt to those changes, you know, when you make a lot of money and I think it can lead to overconfidence. And so the stats that I gave, when you look at professional athletes, the numbers I found were 80% of NFL athletes are broke or bankrupt after being out of the league for two years. It's like 60% of NBA players who are broke after

being out for five years. So I think that there's certain risks that come from making money that fast. Yeah, I totally agree. And I guess one of the potential problems is like, when is it enough? If you made $300,000 in Bitcoin and you sold, you could probably be kicking yourself that you could have made $400,000. You know, you anchor to things like this and it just becomes really hard to satiate yourself. I don't even know if that's English. Did I make that up? That sounded pretty smart to me. I was just thinking, wow, that's a great word. I'm going to Google that after the show and make sure that made sense. But it becomes harder and harder to be happy with with future progress when you've had such a windfall at a young age.

Yeah. And again, I think as the price goes up, you start feeling smarter and better about yourself and you feel like a genius for making that money. And props to those people who did, but I just think you need to be careful when you make that much money and be smart about what to do with it and how to act and how you're going to sort of your attitude about future investments is going to be. You know, it's funny. There's a lot of people, I mean, I would certainly put myself in this camp that have, well, I'm not in this camp, actually, but there's people that are just waiting for this thing to blow up, just so they can point their finger and say, I told you so, which I don't really understand the mentality. But I would just like to say that it costs

nothing to be snarky to send sarcastic tweets of which I do a lot of. But to your point, like, good for these people who actually risk something and were able to make it work. I give those people a lot more credit than I do the people young that this thing is a bubble. Yeah. Sometimes holding on to a big gainer is harder than anything in investing. I mean, you could have sold multiple times before. Yeah, the last thing I did with my 10,000 bagger was uh yeah i've i've never had such a experience okay i think we're really run out of time so let's do some some content of what we've been reading watching listening to lately you got anything today didn't we just do that for 25 minutes hey oh zing yeah so i finished the

punisher and i also watched mind hunter and i did enjoy both of them i thought mind hunter was good but slow and I would put both of them in the empty calorie camp like they were good they were entertaining but I would have been just fine without them okay so just okay they were good but like these things are big commitments like the punisher was 13 episodes mind hunter was 10 episodes so that's like hours and hours and hours of time and I would prefer to watch only things that are great obviously you can't always do that but they were they were fine okay so my movie recommendation for the weekend was allied with Brad Pitt and Marianne Cotillard. She's a French actress

I believe. This was a World War II movie. This was really good actually. I'd heard a little about it, but it was they're both spies trying to infiltrate the Nazis and then you spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out whether one over two of them is a double spy or there's some double crossing going on. So it was really good and the ending was pretty

good too. So that was a good one. And I'm a big sucker for World War II movies and books, so that kind of gets me every time. And let's see, I have a book recommendation as well. So there's this book called Your Move, the Underdog's Guide to Understanding Business, and that's by Ramit Sati. You familiar with him from, I Will Teach You You to Be Rich? Yes, I never read it, but I follow him on Twitter. Okay, he's one of my,

probably the first personal finance blog I ever started reading, like, right out of college in like the mid-2000s. I've been following this guy forever. You can get this, it's a Kindle only, the book is like $2.99, but I've been recommending this to a lot of people lately, and it's basically about how to start your own side hustle. So anyone that wants to start a business on the side and has dreams of and aspirations of getting out of their their current job. This is a great, great book because it deals with the idea of starting a business from a psychological perspective. And he talks about, you know, finding your, you're sort of understanding your customers and understanding the sales process. And it's a really, really good book.

I've been recommended to a lot of people lately. So if you're interested in getting into a side hustle, I highly recommend the book, Your Move. And let's see. All right, sounds good. Did I jump the gut there? No, I was going to say. That's okay. No. What else, Ben? I was just going to remind the listeners that we've had some emails from people asking for stuff that we've talked about and linked to.

And we probably should have mentioned this before since we're seven episodes in now, but we're pretty new to this still. So there's going to be show notes for every one of our podcasts on my website of Wealthofcommoncense.com or Michael's website, IrrelevantantInvestor.com. And please give us a review at iTunes. so that you can help more listeners discover our podcast. The last review that's up there right now, it has one star, and it says, quote, this podcast is a random walk down nowhere, end quote. So we'd certainly like to move that up and get rid of that.

So please leave us a review, and we'll catch you next week. All right, thanks. Oh, we totally have to name this episode a random walk down nowhere. Oh, my gosh. Right? Thank you.