Animal Spirits Podcast - A Shortage of Everything (EP.204)

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

On today's show we discuss Elon Musk's crypto tweets, why bitcoin is falling, some context behind the inflation numbers, the weirdest economy ever, why used car prices spiked, what happened to comedies and much 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

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by AcreTrader. With Acreter, you can invest in U.S. farmland in minutes with an online account. Visit Acretter.com to learn more. On Friday, Ben and I speak with Carter Malloy, the CEO of AcreTrader, and we cover the factors at impact farms, where returns come from, why title insurance is a scam, and much more. So that drops on Friday. 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.

Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's 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 Rit Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritthold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Maito Spires with Michael and Ben. It hasn't been a great month for crypto, especially Bitcoin. I plotted this out. You can top-tick the crypto market and Bitcoin itself on the exact day Coinbase went public. And credit to me,

do I get to cash in my paper short of Coinbase yet that I said a month before they went public? You covered at the highs. You covered at 425 on the IPO. Nice try. I maybe hedged a little bit. Didn't they get to 416 and now they got back to 250? Anyway, so that was Bitcoin at 64. thousand. It's down in the low 40s now. Oh, wow. By the way, Coinbase, new lows, 242. Okay. So those VCs who sold got out at the exact top, tippy top of the market. Good for them. So Bitcoin has fallen 30%. You gave some stats on your blog the other day that this is like the 7th 30% correction since 2017. What was the numbers? How many 30%? 10? Didn't you say 7? 10? I don't know. Okay. Whatever it was. It's a lot. Yes. Either way. It's a lot. People are trying to say this one

feels different because, well, you have the Elon Musk thing, which if we're talking about my paper trading account, me calling him a Charlton last weekend is up 700% easily, easily over the last week. Well, the size of the crypto market and the ubiquity of it is multiples of what it was in previous corrections. Here's the strange part about crypto to me and the Elon Musk thing, which, I mean, it's so weird. He's a billionaire. He's one of the richest men in the world, but he's a grifter. And he doesn't really care about crypto. A lot of people are saying that he's probably positioning himself for a Tesla coin, which wouldn't shock me in the slightest. Like, I mean, that wouldn't shock you, would it if he comes out with his own Tesla coin? Dude, there's something

called scam coin. A Tesla coin would be the least shocking thing of 2021. But I mean, I'm trying to flip this on. Let's say Warren Buffett came out and said something that people have been saying for 10 years because Elon Musk didn't say anything new about crypto. The stuff he's saying about energy consumption and how it's kind of slow and it doesn't do the many transactions. That wasn't like a wait, what? Moment. He said something. Everyone knows. I guess the moral of the story is don't hit your wagon to an emotional billionaire who can move markets with his tweets. But, I mean, let's say Warren Buffett came out and said the same thing that John Husman has been saying for the last 12 years. If he said, the caper ratio is too high, returns are going to be low, the stock market needs to crash. This is stuff that people have been hearing for 10 or 12 years and it hasn't happened. But let's say Warren Buffett said it, and it moved the market and the market fell 10 or 15 percent in an instant like it did with Musk. That's the difference. That's the difference. between crypto and the stock market, that crypto still has this element of it where it can just have these just whoosh lower just because of a tweet from this guy. Isn't it crazy how impactful

Twitter can be on presidential elections, the market, whatever? This stuff can move market, but I'm just saying this is the difference between the stock market and crypto is that if this happened in the stock market, if someone said something like this in a stock market, even a really well-known investor, it probably wouldn't do much. Maybe stocks more 50 basis points. You can't even move individual names the way you used to. I was thinking about Einhorn. Maybe he's lost his ability to move names. But crypto is still relatively small, but it's also kind of big. I mean, Bitcoin alone is a trillion dollar asset class. So the fact that a tweet can move it the way it does. Now, these are not people reading Elon Musk's tweet and saying, oh my God, Elon is bare. Now I have to sell. Bitcoin was already in a downtrend. And these are just algos and levered bets getting unwound. Would you agree? Yeah, maybe that shows crypto is more mature than it is because when stock market falls, that's when you blame the Algo traders too, right? That shows we're making progress here.

Here, which one is more annoying, though? Because you have the extreme people when Bitcoin is rising who are just pounding their chest and putting funny laser eyes on or whatever and making crazy predictions, and that's annoying. But then when Bitcoin falls, you have the other annoying people who go, see, I told you so, this thing is really not a store of value, and they're both annoying. Can we say that? If you're on the extremes, I need the side. The people who come in after it falls and say, I told you so, see, look what happens. It's like, guess what? This. Yeah, it's like, dude, you've been saying that since 2013. Every time it drops. Yeah. Both sides are annoying. I agree. This was a good one. So we spoke a few weeks ago about what are the gains inside of Bitcoin. If it's a trillion dollar asset class, how much money actually went into Bitcoin and all this money that was created from thin air? So John Street Capital this morning, we're recording this on Tuesday, tweeted the real eyes. cap or the theoretical cost basis for Bitcoin, I don't know where you get this data from, is now 20,000, just over 20 grand. So yesterday's close was a 116% premium to that level, which is the lowest

difference since November 2020, which suggests some people may be trying to protect gains as they get closer to break even. Okay. And I'm sure much like the Kathy Wood arc story, which we're going to get to later about investors who piled in at the end being underwater. There's a lot of people who've piled in lately who are technically underwater and a lot of those gains that you're seeing are from early adopters. I guess the thing that I just can't understand is I get the story. It's a lot of fun, the Musk. But like, honestly, just looking at price and price history, Bitcoin looks like shit right now. I would say the path of least resistance is clearly lower. Tell us of the upper hand today. I mean, that's obvious. But a 30% drawdown, yawn,

wake me when this thing crashes 55, 60%. If I was a technical analyst, I would say this chart looks like crap, right? Is that what I would say? It does. It does. Which is fine. It always does, though, when it's falling. That's just the way this thing. This asset is set up to be extremely volatile. And you're seeing that. I guess where I'm going with this is if you bought Bitcoin, now everyone has different motivations, but you're like panic selling after a 30% drop that you bought way too much. Probably. Like you bought way more than you can handle because you had to think that this was coming at some point. The one thing that's different this time we're seeing is like the narrative shift of, okay, Ethereum is showing way more real world uses. and Ethereum is going to overtake Bitcoin someday. But the Bitcoin as digital gold, nothing has changed there. It's still the same exact story. If that was your thesis, now again, a lot of people's, their ideas and narratives for owning this have changed over time, which is fine. It doesn't have to be static. But I think that story is the same. Do you think that institutional investors, and they take a while to turn their ship around? So they're positioning their ship to come to the Bitcoin

harbor. They're backing in. And all of a sudden, Elon Musk sends a tweet. And, the market falls 15%. Do you think that they're like having second thoughts? Like, wait a minute, wait a minute, a tweet could send this thing 15% lower? Or do you think that they're like, oh, cool, we wanted to buy Bitcoin. We've been preparing to buy Bitcoin. Now we get to buy it at $44,000 instead of $64,000. I'm more inclined to say the latter.

They're not going to not buy because of this. They've had months and months of meetings and committees and studies and reasoning for this to shoehorn a small position in this. When the price falls, they're not going to say, okay, now, were gone. I agree with you. They may be more nervous, but... This is interesting. The journal did an article, and they said, although Bitcoin Bulls like to point to widening acceptance among institutional investors as a key driver of the rally, there are signs that institutional demand has flagged in recent months, even as the price

has soared. The number of large Bitcoin transactions, which are typically made by professional money managers drop slightly in the first quarter from the fourth quarter. So no numbers there, so maybe... I want to get back to Musk real quick. Go ahead. If I'm a Tesla shareholder, this guy, his actions are scaring the crap out of me right now. Like, I mean, he's obviously the reason that you're either wildly bullish or wildly bearish on this company, him and him alone. But the fact that he is basically like trying to do a pump and dump, whether he admits it or not. And he actually did buy Bitcoin on behalf of Tesla. And he's saying you can use Bitcoin to buy Tesla.

And then he changes his mind. And he's like doing this weird pump and dump thing with it. And he's... Do you think Tesla sold all their Bitcoin? It kind of seems like he might have in the tweets that he said yesterday that he didn't. They didn't sell any. Oh, really? because he, okay, got it, got it, got it. Interesting. Someone he tweeted. I mean, who knows, maybe he's lying, but the fact that he's doing all this stuff, and he's been erratic in the past. That's not like this is a new thing, but I think he's getting worse. And so Bill Simmons had Andrew McCarthy on his show last week. And Andrew McCarthy is the guy from Weekend at Bernie's. He was like an 80s star actor, a lot of John Hughes movies and such. And he had this theory that when you become ultra famous, you stop aging at that point. Your maturity is done. And you are who you are at that point. Elon Musk became very powerful and

famous at a very young age. Like Buffett didn't get his powers until later in life. He didn't become really well known until he's like, I don't know, 50s maybe. Musk has some of that in him of a celebrity. He's been wildly successful, but who also has this erratic behavior because he has so much money and power that no one's ever going to tell him no. So he just kind of does what he wants. That would scare the crap out of me as a Tesla shareholder. Even though SpaceX is unbelievable, the guy is a genius. Tesla has pulled forward all this demand and production of electric vehicles I think he pulled all these other Ford and all these other big three automakers into electric vehicle like kicking and screaming. He made that happen single-handedly. I think that could also be

his downfall eventually. I think he's very close to doing something very dumb that he doesn't know is like going to sink his company somehow. Tesla also looks like shit. It's 35% off its highs. I'd be curious to see him start flailing if it breaks even lower. But we were talking about the arc and the narrative of Bitcoin what's happening. I think that the store value digital gold thing is still in play. Even though you say, how could a store value lose 20% in the day? All right, believe me, point taken. I get it. The currency thing, I think that's been out the window for a while now. It's too volatile to be a currency. But the digital gold, forget about store value. Again, store value 20% down in a day. But digital gold still makes sense to me. But if somehow

Doge or something grabs the wheel, if it's all about sentiment and it's all just memes and mockery and nonsense, well, the spotlight is on Doge right now. Because the journal also showed the number of tweets by day. And Bitcoin has been dwarfed by Dogecoin, which is mind-blowing. Now, I still think Doge is a joke. I don't think that Bitcoin is in any danger. I still think they have the first mover advantage. The idea that Bitcoin is going to be the AOL, your thoughts there? I think that's kind of, I mean, that's the story people have been saying for a while, like, why can't you just create another one? I think Bitcoin has that lasting brand, whatever that's worth. But I do think the Doge thing is kind of a black eye there

because people are saying, well, what's the difference? They're both in the blockchain. There are whatever technical differences, but it's leading people to question. I think it is kind of a little bit of a black eye, even though I don't think it'll be lasting. But again, this is Elon Musk making this happen again, too. These other grifting billionaires that are pushing the Doge thing, which is so bizarre, I still don't quite understand it. If they want to get into this, why don't they do something that's more legitimate? I guess that's the part that gives crypto kind of a bad look here. And I'm sure that a lot of the maximal's people are freaking out right now that this is turned into something of a joke in a lot of ways. Yeah. This is sort of related. Coinbase is committed to being

remote first. They tweeted. They are no longer having an HQ and they're closing their San Francisco office. That's kind of interesting. Okay. If you're a tech company, you have to do something to this. You can't be like one of these legacy finance companies that has, nope, everyone's got to come back. You have to lean into this. I was in New York City yesterday. And I'm going to guess my train was 15% fall, it was still empty. Midtown was still empty. So the big cities are potentially going to be like the last recovery. If we're thinking through like you had these places in the southwest and Texas and already Miami and Austin and stuff have already pretty much they're back to where they were almost. So it almost makes sense that big cities

are going to be the last ones to fully recover from this probably. That's fair to say. Even if James Altucher is not right that New York is dead. do we have to keep having that argument like of course new york was not going to die anyway but it is to your point it's slowing all right i want to talk about some of the cycles here and what's been going on so dave portnoy who the bar still sports guy basically leaning into the stuff going on in all this pump it dump and scamming and crypto said i'm going to back this ponsie coin whatever it is what it's safe moon what was this etf by the way oh yeah i don't know how that one's doing there's another guy who just doesn't seem to care. But at least he's saying it out loud. I guess he's saying,

I'm doing a pump and dump. Follow me into it. It's called buzz. I haven't really followed it too much. So this is 15 months. His stock, Penn National Gaming, down 84% right now in the March fall. Then it went up 1,200 percent, then down 44 percent, almost band of 15 months. You can pick out a ton of stocks like this. Peloton was down 47 percent, up 600 percent, down 50 percent. The cycles we're seeing in some of these stocks, and it's not just a few, it's a lot of stocks that are like this. And big stocks. Yes, they're relatively big companies. By the way, Buzz has $250 million in assets. That's a lot for a new ETF. You don't hear him talking about it much more either. I don't know how it's done. But I'm just saying these cycles happening this fast. I mean, a lot of it was the

extrapolation from the pandemic was insane in terms of this is going to be here forever and they know it's going to get better. But I don't think this stuff goes away, the fast nature of this. And people, the expectations, especially for technology companies, and that stuff shifting on a dime and changing immediately when something doesn't happen that they think is going to happen. I think this stuff, especially for individual stocks, is here to stay. Livermore tweeted, when did growth stocks equal duration proxy mean become so popular? As rates were making new lows 10 years ago, not a single soul in here was thinking or saying such a thing. And then he quote tweeted himself and said, we sometimes forget about the growth

stock sell off that occurred during the 2013 tapered tantrum, just brutal, and he was being sarcastic. So in 2013, when Bernanke said what he said, at the congressional hearing, I think it was, and interest rates rose and stocks fell. Bands got killed. Growth stocks did not fall. So then Jeremy Schwartz responded to him, could have something to do with this? And basically what Jeremy was saying was at the time, growth stocks were cheap compared to value, or just growth stocks were cheap in general, and certainly now they're not.

And this got me thinking, this is a really good point by Jeremy. Just in general, we make so many comparisons to this time in history, whether it's 2000 or the 70s or whatever. We just make comparisons to history. But there are like so many things to consider when you're making comparisons for obviously valuations or interest rates or economic growth or wages or public sentiment or whatever. When we just make these comparisons, so much gets lost in that. You have to take into account what the gains or losses have been in terms of sometimes when you have huge gains, people are trying to figure out why is Bitcoin falling now or why are these growth stocks getting killed. Sometimes the reason they fall is that investors are looking for an excuse to take a profit. And that sort of just snowballs and becomes a self-reinforcing thing where, yeah, people just latch on to, oh, interest rates are rising. It must be that growth stocks. And the other thing is with these correlations, they change all the time, these relationships. So maybe right now rates and growth stocks have something of a relationship. But that relationship could break any day and just not matter. And it was just a narrative that we placed on it because it felt safe to put it on there. I'm usually of the

mind that narratives are like not bullshit, but a way to make us feel better about what's going on. So we have like a grasp on the situation. I don't think it's a stretch to say that higher interest rates makes expensive growth stocks less attractive. I feel like that's a pretty compelling, obvious, fair story to say. It may be even more compelling of a story when rates get so, so low. So if rates were going from three to four in the past, it wouldn't have mattered as much as going from one to two or zero to one. Right. That changes everything. It changes everything. Anyway, Liz Ann Saunders tweeted fund managers are shedding their tech holdings rather quickly. Is this survey data? It's just amazing. I'm just throwing it out there. It is. Yeah, it's a global

fund manager survey. It's probably pretty accurate though. But this is the right data. And yeah, it's crashing. They are dumping tech stocks. It is just something to watch this take place. Stop. Do you know how fast you were going? I'm going to have to write you a ticket to my new movie, The Naked Gun. Liam Nieson. Buy your tickets now. I get a free Tilly Dog. Chilly Dog, not included.

The Naked Gun. Tickets on sale now. August 1st. Okay, so Barron's had a big inflation cover story. It seems like they're the only cover indicator left. You think so? Are they the only cover indicator that there is anymore? Yeah.

So they had the big eye words on this thing. How is this for a cover indicator? The New York Post yesterday. Nerlin's Noel. who, if you're not a New York Knicks fan, you've never heard of, was on the cover of the New York Post. And on the bottom was like Nets waiting to see if they play the Wizz or the Celtics or something like that. Just my point is the Nets would never take over the Nix,

even if they win the finals, which they probably will. Okay. So you might as well put an emotional hedge bet on the Nets right now. I can't do it. Okay. I'll do it for you. Since I can gamble legally in Michigan, but you can't gamble in New York. So as soon as I thought I was out with the Nix, they pulled me back in.

I bought season tickets for next year. Shared half with the friends. I'm only in for a quarter. But just doing that guarantees me playoff tickets for this year. Do they allow you to buy them with Doge like Mark Cuban does for the Mavericks? Oh, man. No. Missed opportunity. All right. So Jeremy Siegel was on CNBC last week. He said, we could see a cumulative inflation hit of 20% over the next three years, which would be, I don't know, 5% a year or something like that if you compounded it, 6% a year. But they said, okay, that must be bad for stocks. He said, no, I still think stocks are the best bet. because if we see that, bonds are going to get hit big time because inflation is the biggest risk for bonds. And basically, earnings will go up and stocks will continue to get money

because it's flowing into the system and it has to go somewhere. I wrote about this today. There's another survey where they ask business owners, percent of small businesses planning to raise selling prices. And it has spiked to the highest level that it's been in, oh, this doesn't back that far, about a decade. But that's the thing about stocks. Unlike bonds where you have a fixed income, you have a fixed coupon for an individual bond that you buy, stocks, businesses can raise prices. And of course they will raise prices. That's what inflation is. It gets passed on. And so they can protect their purchasing power. And that can be obviously good for earnings. And so, yeah, I think that stocks are probably the place to be. And it got way too high, but you know the

decade that had the best earnings growth in history over the last 90 plus years? Hold on. The best earnings growth, the 90s, 80s, 50s? 1970s, because there was inflation. Oh. So earnings go up, too, but on a real basis. The 70s were the worst real decade for stocks, even though S&P grew about like 5% a year, I think. I think stocks were up 6% a year with dividends, but inflation was up 8%.

So you lost money on a real basis, so it didn't feel so great. I think inflation is one of the hardest economic data points to predict and to understand why it's happening or how it works. It's funny, we've had a lot of people in the comments in our YouTube videos, try to dunk on us saying, obviously, you guys are wrong about inflation to see how it was. And it's like, listen, we don't know where it's going. Our stance has been like, it seems like it's going to be transitory and you're going to have this big glut of inflation for a little while and then it's going to go back to where it was. Well, generally speaking, I agree with you. Inflation is the hardest thing to wrap your head around.

Right now, it seems fairly easy, not to predict, but to explain today. We can explain exactly where the inflation is coming from. It's coming from things that got shut off that we're trying to turn on, but demand turned on much quicker than supply. And so we're having all these sort of issues. By the way, before we get into the inflation stuff in this Matthew Klein piece, which I thought was excellent, let's say you gave all this economic data over the last 12 months or so to a group of economists and investors and strategists and said, here, we have shortages. We have stocks at all time highs. We have rates at near lows. We have a booming housing market. Rents are falling in big cities. It's like a Frankenstein

economy. Explain to us what happened and why there's shortages and it's hard to find workers. You never in a million years would have been able to figure out what caused this to happen. It's such a weird economy right now. People want to blame the Fed because of the stimulus checks. What were we supposed to do, not save the economy? Again, this is the best outcome we could have had. It's like, are there certain issues we're dealing with? Yes, it was never going to be perfect, but this is much better than the alternative of a deflationary spiral and a depression, which was the alternative, if we would have done nothing in. not giving people money and all that stuff.

And the Fed would have just set back. So let's go through some of the stuff. So Michael McDonough shared a chart of where the inflation is coming from. Last Friday, I don't even know if I'm losing track of days. We had the highest core month over month change since like the early 80s. 10% for used cars and trucks. 16% for car and truck rental. 10% for airline fares.

All of these things will come down. The two safe words for last week were transitory and base effects. So you're comparing right now to last year when everything fell off a cliff. So it's much higher. And the used car stuff is interesting too because the reason used car prices are going up so much is because rental cars all sold their fleets during a pandemic because they weren't going to need them and they needed cash to make it like why Hertz was going bankrupt basically. And then when the demand came back, they realized, holy crap, we don't have any cars.

We need to go buy them. So they're buying cars, used cars on the open market. How can you look at that and say this will persist? Here's the other side of that. The way it persists is the psychology of the price rises, gets in people's heads. That's the way it's a psychological thing. That's the danger. Unlike basically any other phenomenon inside of the markets or societies, I feel like inflation can really spiral quickly if people try to get ahead of it. And so I'm definitely not saying, like, don't worry about it. I'm just saying that I think there's a decent chance, a better than decent chance that this is transitory. Where would I start

to become concerned if wages start to increase very quickly? And the good news is that we are starting to see wages increase at the bottom end. McDonald's say they'll be raising their hourly wages for over 36,000 employees by an average of 10%. Amazon is hiring 75,000 employees across fulfillment and transportation with an average starting pay of over $17 an hour. Now, let me ask you this. We're worried about like overheating the economy. What if this is just a good thing that people at the very bottom end are actually making a living wage hopefully and the pie will grow? Couldn't this be like an economic boom? People are like freaking out over inflation. What if this is just like really good for everyone? Is that possible? A lot of people in the finance world will say, well,

inflation is going to hurt the low end of the worst because they're the ones who can't afford it because the rich can actually afford it. Well, guess what? The low end of the people, if their wages are rising greater than inflation rate, they're going to make out better on a real basis. If people are getting paid more, this is a good thing. So I guess the hold that people would poke is, yeah, people might be getting a 15% wage increase, but at the low end in dollar amounts, that won't be enough to offset some of the increases of prices. I don't know if I buy that. I think that's very complicated. We don't need to necessarily get into that right now. I mean, but if you're going from a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to $15 to $17 an hour, that compensates you more than enough for rising

prices and things. That's a doubling of your wages from a lot of people. So the companies like Amazon and McDonald's can swallow this, small business owners necessarily can't. Those might be the people who really get screwed by wage increases. And unfortunately, our system has tradeoffs and there's no equilibrium. It's really hard. When you finally do something right, it's like something else. There's always unintended consequences. I totally agree with that that small businesses could be hurt from this. I also think hopefully it could force businesses to invest in other things and technology to pick up some of the slack here. So I think you could get like this thing where it's a good thing where people are investing and using research and development costs to figure out a way

to make these services more efficient if people don't want these jobs anymore, which is the possibility. You know, it's kind of annoying. Every time we get an inflationary data point, which by the way, I was out in the city last night, and I went to Manetta Tavern. The drinks were 19 bucks. And that place is an expensive place to begin with, but I don't think I've ever spent 19 bucks. I wonder what it was pre-pidemic. Probably 16, 17. It wasn't cheap to begin with, but holy moly. All right, anyway.

If you want to know what inflation looks like, go from Grand Rapids of Michigan to New York City. And that's inflation. But every time we see a data point, people are going to say like, oh, transitory with a lowercase, uppercase, like. Yes. I don't know how long this lasts. What does transitory mean? Is it five months? Is it a year?

I don't know how long this takes to play out. But definitely, I guess. People are going to get hurt along the way. There's no doubt about it. but other people are going to benefit. And the hope is we've gone from a 15-month period of just consuming goods because we weren't consuming services and experiences as much. That fell off a cliff.

Hopefully this summer, as things come back and open up, people are going to be spending way more money on experiences and services and the goods demand will lessen because people actually have something to do now and they don't need to just buy stuff to make them feel good. And that will slow down. And these shortages of everything will slowly ease a bit. something that I want to talk briefly about. I think Sam Roman had shared this chart. Wage growth has increased more for lower income workers who say they would need a much higher wage than before

to accept the job. So somebody tweeted, first trip to JFK since November 2019, and the Uber X at 6.45 a.m. is $95 with a million question marks, exclamation marks. So David Schaul quote tweeted and said, eventually Americans will realize we are not entitled to have people service food, cut the grass, watch our kids, and drive us places. at rock bottom wages. What if this is the theme over the next few years? And if that happens, I'm okay with that. Again, you're right. A lot of people aren't going to be able to afford some of this stuff anymore, but maybe if we're subsidizing low wages for some of these places, maybe that world isn't a good place to live in anyway for a lot of people.

And if you have to pay more Uber to get to the airport, so be it. Or people are going to have to come, it's going to raise the wages enough where people will come in and be Uber drivers in at a certain point. There's tradeoffs. Yes, always tradeoffs. All right, this chart blew my friggin' mind sticking with the inflation thing. Motor vehicle and parts dealers. So the inventory to sales ratio spiked during the shutdown because there was way more inventory than sales, obviously, and crashed to a low. This chart goes back to the early 90s. This is wild. There is no inventory, relatively speaking, at car dealers. And so they're not making new cars right now because of the semiconductor shortage. So they're basically selling what they have. So they're

inventory is just dwindling. There is a shortage everywhere. Bloomberg wrote, copper, iron, ore, and steel. Corn, coffee, wheat, and soybeans. Lumber, semiconductors, plastic, and cardboard for packaging. The world is seemingly low on all of it. Tom Linebarger, CEO of Cummings, said, you name it, and we have a shortage on it. I mean, food costs are climbing too. The world's most consumed edible oil processed from the fruit of oil Palm trees has jumped by more than 135% in the past year to a record. So, soybean's top $16 for a bushel for the first time since 2012. Corn futures in an eight year high. Wheat features high since 2013. So we could say all we want about inflation being transitory.

And I do think that it will eventually pass. But in the meantime, there is going to be pain. This is a case of almost like stock market thinking impacting the real economy. Because in the stock market, especially in the short intermediate term, the fundamentals don't matter nearly as much as the expectations that are built in. And expectations got so far out of whack last year when things got shut down, and then the demand came rushing back so quick, it was a fact of businesses not being able to plan ahead and being fast enough to change their business line based on consumer expectations of how things should be. It got totally out of whack. Now, the counter would be, the interesting part would be the businesses now load

up and then consumers pull back a little bit, again, because they go and then we have this glut of stuff. That's a possibility. Eventually, we have a glut of things, and it goes the other way. So that's the interesting thing about it. And again, like, why, if you're trying to predict inflation right now, and you're positive one way or the other, there's nuance and context you can provide, but if you're sure about this stuff and you're say, like, 100%, it's the 70s again. Or, nope, it's going to be deflation the next time. Like, who knows? Because this is the weirdest economy ever right now. The economic environment is so bizarre right now. All right, here's a good theory from a couple of boomers in our inbox. And I say this as boomers because you have to know where

they're coming from when they say this. And these two people both said the same thing, and I thought it was very interesting. They said maybe one of the reasons it's so hard for first-time home buyers to find a house that they want these days is because their tastes are too high. Did we talk about this offline or on the podcast already? I can't remember. You and I were talking about the houses we grew up in. Yes. Back in the 80s and 90s, no one had nice houses or very, very few, or you didn't think about it. I'm 75% serious here. HDTV ruined this for everyone. Is that possible? I don't know about the HDTV thing. But I do agree that thinking back to growing up,

I really can't remember going into a friend's house and ever thinking like, wow, this is a nice house. Because they weren't very nice. No, no. Houses weren't that great. I don't know if it got started in the 2000s real estate boom or what, but... Honestly, you might be running the HDTV thing. I honestly think that's part of it.

People love having that on the background and open floor plans and courts countertops and the back splats. Splash. There were no islands and kitchens growing up. What are you kidding me? No, if you were in another room, you couldn't see them in the kitchen because there was a row of cabinets blocking you. There was nothing as an open floor plan in the 90s. It was nothing but walls. Every three feet there was a wall in your house for no reason. The young people that I know, my peers, do have nicer tastes. They want stainless steel appliances and they want tile floors and they want the nice countertops. Young people want that stuff. Is there something like that yes? But it's also true

that they're not making as many starter homes as they did before. It's higher-end homes, I think, that are being built that are new. So everything is either a new build or a fixer-upper. There's no in between. Don't you think that this is a sign of progress that every generation has nicer things than the previous generation? Yes. That way, every generation gets to complain about the generation before them. Of course, it's forever. To the point about starter homes, number of new homes constructed below 1,400 square feet fell off a cliff. They don't exist anymore. In the 70s, it was, what are these units? Half a million houses built that were smaller than 14,000 square feet.

Now it's like 90. It looks like, it's nothing. It's 50,000. The funny thing is, back in the 70s, there was more people in the houses. People had more kids back then. So now we have smaller families and we have bigger houses. Square feet per person has exploded. Marble, maybe not marble, granite per person.

Yes. I'd like to see that chart. Think about how many kids did you know growing up that had to share a room with someone? And because we don't have as many kids these days, it's every kid gets their own room. I had to share room with my brother growing up. Yeah, bunk beds were a thing. Yes. How many showerheads in the 90s had multiple, like, faucets?

Zero. So maybe this sounds like a little bit of get up my lawn thing for the boomers, but maybe part of it is right. And to your point, maybe part of it is a good thing that we're showing progress. And then when we're older, and we're in like 60s and 70s, people are going to complaining about the houses that we got and how millennials had it easier. even though now, no one can see it. So people are sitting on a lot of equity in their homes. Yes. And so this is, let's see, where is this from? This is from the Federal Reserve. U.S. households own about $32 trillion in owner-occupied real estate, 11 trillion in debt, meaning

there's $21 trillion in equity. Inflation adjusted terms, homeowners have an average of $257,000 in equity historic high. That's a lot of money people could potentially do something with. If they just like tap their home and bought some Bitcoin, I think that could stop selling. By the way, I wanted to mention that I'm perfectly prepared to ride my Bitcoin to zero. I don't think it's going to zero. I think that is a very small likelihood of happening, but I have zero intention of ever selling my Bitcoin. But I certainly wouldn't sell it in a crash either. I would sell it when it's charging higher, not falling off. I'll sell it on the way. I'm not selling another way down. I will ride this into 10,000 gladly. But that's the thing. Like if you buy

something, you have to have like a mental sort of what am I going to do if? Yes. And when I bought this, this was a thing that I planned. to hold forever. Obviously, prices increased way, way, way quicker than I thought. I thought maybe one day we'd get to $50,000. But I'm not selling just in case anybody cares. There's a difference between buying something and saying I'm holding it forever, whatever forever means, and then buying something for a trade. They require two completely different rule sets and frames of mind. No, it's interesting. Oftentimes, a trade that goes against you will turn into an investment. Yes.

If you say, like, I'm in this for a trade and then it falls 20% immediately, like you start doing like fundamental research. You're like, actually, how's the company doing? On the other hand, sometimes an investment that falls a lot turns into a trade. Like you said, I'm going to hold this forever and then it falls. Nope, I'm out. True. It's very, very, very rare that you buy something with the mindset of I'm going to hold this forever. And then it almost turns into a trade because the gains happen so much faster than you ever would have thought. Typically, it's an investment that turns into a... And how about this? If I held Bitcoin, we're not going to talk about this right now. If I held Bitcoin in a retirement account, I 100% would have sold.

I probably would have sold on the way up at $50,000. I definitely would not have sold at the top. But I 100% would have sold on the way up. But given that, I'm not paying ordinary income on these gains. No way. I'd rather go to zero. Which actually is a theory a lot of people are throwing out there are people selling now because they had gains they took last year in Bitcoin.

Nah, I don't buy that. Not for a second. I don't think people are so tax sensitive with their Bitcoin. Who's even reporting it? be honest. Okay. I think it's possible. You don't think the IRS is going after these people a little bit? They are. But I don't, not even for a second, give any credence to the argument that Bitcoin is under pressure because of tax reasons. Okay. So we mentioned a couple weeks ago, I guess. Favorite new app is called Quarter, which does earnings call releases and you can do it,

listen like a podcast. And I've been using it a little, which. Q-U-A-R, T-R, no E. We actually talked to the founders of this. We had a call with them, which was kind of cool. These younger guys in Sweden and that are doing this and bootstrapping it, and it's a very cool story behind how they did it. But hand up, I'm not like an analyst, a stock analyst, and I'm not going to like listen to a quarterly runny's call. I don't know more about these companies, but I've been using it to listen to companies that I find interesting from like an overall macro perspective of the stuff that I'm interested in. I'm not using it as like to make myself a better stock picker or something, but I listened to the Airbnb one last week. And this one shot out to me, this

stat from them. I always skip right ahead to the Q&A. So there's a button on that's app where you can hit Q&A. I don't want to hear like the people go through their numbers and that's boring to me. I just want to hear the Q&A. So 24% of their bookings in the last year have been 28 days or longer, meaning people are using these places for somewhere to go and do like a work and play sort of thing. They have four million plus hosts worldwide or like almost six million houses, which almost seems low to me in terms of where they could be for Airbnb. The thing that was crazy to me is like they were up 5% year over year Airbnb versus like someone like Expedia that was down 50%. So obviously people realized this Airbnb model felt safer them during the pandemic.

But don't you think that the whole idea for some people that have flexibility and remote working, the whole idea of a summer vacation of taking a week off of work and driving across the country on a road trip with your family is over. And in the future, people will do this where they go two, three, four weeks in an Airbnb and stay there. And then they work a little bit and they have a vacation stuff. And they do a little both because they have that option now. Isn't that like the new summer vacation for people who can work remotely? and Airbnb is the beneficiary of that where people are going to stay at these places longer

and feel better about that. Anyway, definitely worth listening to that one, I thought. All right, so, Arc investors, I feel like this was the probably, and you wrote about this at the time, this was the easiest prediction to make, not when it would turn or how it would turn, just that, and this is not Arc specific.

It's just this happens with every single hot fund manager in the history of markets. It happened with Jerry Sy, going back to the Fidelity, days, and it happened with Peter Lynch, and it happened with Ken Heemner, and it's happening with Kathy Wood, and it will happen to the next fund manager. This is what happens, that investors pile in after the great performance, not before it. Duh, not a big revelation there. So this is from Wall Street Journal. Spenture Jacob wrote this, and he said analysts at

he spoke, calculated that the money-weighted annualized returns of ARCS funds is far less than S&P 500, meaning a ton of money jumped in after their performance was so good, and then they proceeded to fall 30, 35 percent. And so if you just did the return by the money, that says nothing of Arc and Kathy Wood. Yeah, her track record is still amazing. It's just the money that came into that fund came in so late after the performance is already good. People might take issue with Kathy Wood. This is not on her. I mean, stop. But you're right. Just stop. This was predictable. You just didn't know when it was going to happen. Like, you knew if that much money's flowing in, eventually the investors in the fund are going to underperform because they're chasing performance.

I just hope, like my Bitcoin position, that people size this in a reasonable way that they said, I can swallow this 30% droid that. And it looks like they have. There's some data from Vanda track that I did, I don't know, probably two or three weeks ago, well, into this in the show notes. They're not leaving. Retail investors are not leaving. Well, that actually is, you remember that book Bull by Maggie Mayhar? She had the stat there that blew my mind. It was like everyone got into tech in the late 90s and growth. The outflows weren't huge, even during the bear market. For 2002, 2003, 2004, it wasn't huge outflows. People stuck around longer than you'd think holding out.

And I think it's the, what's the common bias of this where you hold on until you hope to break even? I think there's a lot of that that goes on. Oh, the disposition effect. I think there's a lot of that goes on. They're really fast to jump in, but they're slower to get out. And that causes a lot of crazy, weird momentum stuff, I think, in the markets. But that was a very surprising stat to me that people stay in longer than you'd think,

even after something crashes. Love it. So this is a top shot lawsuit, Sportico reported on it. The plaintiff named Carlson, comma, Ben, gave my money back. They say that Moments violates the Federal Securities Act of 1933, a law designed to both safeguarded investors and the purchase of publicly offered securities that deter fraudulent acts and the market of those securities. They're accused of illegally selling unregistered securities.

All right. Some of the stuff in here does not hold water. An owner of an NBA moment, the complaint asserts, does not acquire any intellectual property rights or rights to the underlying NBA highlight, end quote. Did Topshots say that they do? This one is even more ridiculous. Hairs on what an NFT actually is. People are trying to figure out, do I actually own this or not or whatever? Dapper exploits investors by selling digital packs of moments with pricing based on scarcity,

with investors having to wait in a virtual queue to buy. That's what the complete charges. Give me a break. Yeah, that's what you're thrown out. So you're mad because you have to wait. I mean, what is legit is dapper is also accused of preventing investors from withdrawing their funds for months on end, thereby propping up the market for moments as well as the overall valuation of NBA Dasha. Okay, I have some news on mine. I've been trying to get my money out. I bought one Zion moment or something and sold it at a loss of a couple hundred dollars, still some money on there. I think I made some money on a few of them. I can't remember. I sold some, whatever. It was fun and what lasted. Time to get out. I've been trying to get my money out since

February. And it's not the money. It's the principal thing. And I emailed them a few times. And finally they got back to me and said, all right. And I said, listen, I've been trying to get my money out since February. Can you do something here? And I was a Karen complaining to the manager. And they finally were going back and said, all right, we're going to start you on the withdrawal process. But that's probably going to take another six weeks. But The good news is they're starting. The bad news is they're going to let you take out $10. Yeah. Good luck. So Raleigh Road. Congratulations to Raleigh Road. Oh, maybe it's just Rally now, actually.

They're raising $30 million. Here's some stats. Transaction volume was up 450% in the first three months compared to a year ago. The latest big ticket item, one of an estimated 20 privately owned copies of the Declaration of Independence cost a platform $2 million. Stolen by Nicholas Cage. Of course, there's a Nicholas Cage joking. But how were there 20? I didn't know there were 20 copies. Oh, really? I didn't know that either. They had a Xerox machine in 1776. They just had to sign the name a bunch of times. They sell a little bit of everything, though, right?

They started out doing classic cars, and now they do all sorts of weird collectibles. There's like 15 categories, I think. It's still tiny in terms of there's $30 million in the platform, which I don't know if they're the biggest in the category. But relatively speaking, that sounds like very little, doesn't it? Yeah, well, because if you're breaking these things up and selling shares in them, each person is probably only investing a couple hundred dollars or $1,000 or $1,000. So what's the difference? I'm just saying that's why it's smaller money.

You're trying to say that there's not much money. the platform, I'm saying that's why, because these aren't huge items. But they're selling 100% of the items, I think, no? Okay, but I'm saying the reason... Or maybe not. I hear what you're saying. I just don't know how that's relevant. I'm responding to what you said. But if there's a million dollar object and it's broken out into $100 increments, what's the difference? It's still a million dollars worth of investments.

But they're not selling million dollar objects on here. They're selling stuff that's like $100,000 or $50 grand or $30,000 or whatever. Well, the Declaration of Independence was $2 million. Okay. Well, that must be one of the first big ones then. If they have $30 million, I'm doing the math here. I'm backing into it by the map. What do you want from me? Unless this is just a money laundering scheme, I don't know.

You're arguing yourself here. Can't wait for Ozark. When does that come back? Any updates? I don't know. All I know is Mayor of East Town is the best show on TV right now. And the fact that you're not caught up is distressing to me. I'll get there.

Oh, let me just tell a quick story. So my big TV on my wall, I've got an 82-inch TV. I bought it from Samsung, bought it from Best Buy. This is what the boomers complain about. No one had an 82-inch TV when we were growing up. We had like a 24-inch tube that was grainy, a zenith. But I bought it with credit card points. I basically wiped it.

But still, it was $2,700. It's like not nothing. But the first flat-screen TV I bought. Probably get going for half that now. But anyway, okay, so it's two years old, just over two years old. And I'm watching TV the other night, LA Confidential, which I'll get to in a second. and all of a sudden I see a big line across my TV. A big black line.

Now, it's a tiny line, but it's like gravity for my eyes. It's the only thing that I can pay attention to. So I go to Best Buy the next day. They tell me that my warranty expired two months ago. I bought a two-year warranty, I guess. They're like, you could buy a new TV. By the way, warranties are for suckers. You never buy the warranty.

Never. On electronics? It might have came with it. It might have came with a two-year warranty. Honestly, I don't mind. Here's your reference. Do not buy the warranty ever. It's a waste of money.

I feel like, honestly, I'm not 100% positive, but I'm not a warranty guy, so I can't imagine that I did. But wait. Here's your backup plan. Okay. What kind of credit card did you buy it with? You may have a warranty through your credit card on that purchase. If you have a Chase Sapphire or Freedom or whatever, I don't use the point.

If you have a credit card, oftentimes a credit card will give you a warranty on your purchase. You have to look at the fine card. So here's the deal. I bought $200 Best Buy credit cards. I got $200 Best Buy gift cards, and I got like 15 of them. damn it. All right. But anyway, so I'm at the store. I asked to speak to the manager, and she tells me that I can buy a new TV. I want to be like, yeah, I know. I'm at Best Buy. I know I can buy a new TV. I don't want to buy a new TV. I just bought this TV. I bought it two years ago. I've got this old Sony on my wall in my office. I've had this thing for 12 years. You're not supposed to replace your TV every two years. So what do I do now? What do I'm sorry. There's no way you can watch TV with a line across it. You have to buy a new one. You have no other choice. I can't. You have to buy a new one. I'm going to hold. out at least a few months. I just can't do it. Unless it gets way worse. So, Samsung, I contacted them. They want $1,000 just to come to the house to potentially repair it. I'm sorry, it's trash. You have to

throw it away. You have to get a new TV. So the manager said, well, this TV is $2,700, but I could give it to you on sale for $1,900. And I want to be like, but that's $1,900. It's full $1,900. I don't care where the starting price is. I don't want to buy a new TV. I just bought this TV. I just bought it. You have no recourse. You have to get rid of it. You can't watch a movie with a line across it. It's impossible. Sorry. You're out of luck. All right. Really quick, this tweet kind of made me a guy yelling at the cloud. And this is from a sitcom writer, I guess. In 1997, my second year is a sitcom writer, NBC had 18 half hour comedies in their fall schedule. NBC just announced next year's fall schedule. It contains zero comedies. I think I'd have a

more marketable skill in 2021 if I was a blacksmith or a telegraph operator. Don't you think this gets back to our thing about tradeoffs? Like, I feel sorry for comedy writers, but now comedies, well, they don't comedy. I'm not saying comedies are way better on Netflix than Hulu. Who's watching a comedy on NBC anyway? But the thing is, there really aren't... There's no comedies. I hate the people who say, like, you can't do comedy anymore in 2021, but... You can't.

I tried to rack my brain. I mean, NBC had some of the... I'm not saying you can't do comedy, but there are no comedies anymore. So, I mean, NBC, it's legendary that they had cheers and friends and Seinfeld in the office and Parks and Recism. Frazier. Yeah, so many good ones. So I tried to rack my brain, like, what are some of the best comedies on TV

over the last 10 years? that are still good. So modern family was great. It overstated its welcome by five years. South Park, I stopped watching in college. It's always sunny. I probably watched for eight seasons, but that's been on too long, too.

Curb, I think, is the only one that still stands up and it's been on for too long. Oh, Kerb. Shits Creek is probably one of the best. Wait, hold on. Curb has not been on for too long. I'm saying... Last season's Kerb was incredible.

That's what I'm saying. Usually, if you've been on for 10 to 12 seasons, eventually as a comedy, you become a parody of yourself. Curb has managed to not do that. The show that I watch that makes me laugh and it's not a comedy. It's not a comedy. a succession. Okay.

Definitely not a comedy. So Schrieve is probably the best comedy of the last five years or so, and that none of the American stations picked it up when it came out. So it was on a Canadian station, and then you could finally get a Netflix. Dave was the only one I could think of that recently they came out. Oh, great call. Oh, Dave killed me. Oh, wait, crashing.

Oh, yeah, crashing was good. So HBO I got, but there really aren't any good sitcoms anymore. A lot of them are more dromedies than comedies. And I looked and I thought. Not to be mean. Sitcoms are for boomers. Oh, yeah, for sure. What's the big one on CBS, Big Bang Theory?

Those shows. But back in the day, sitcoms were not that bad. Got to be thinking, though. So I watched Waiting This Weekend. Remember the one of the Ryan Reynolds? That movie would never be made today. But they nailed, if you said you worked at a, didn't bring a waiter you said last week? I was.

If you worked at a restaurant, they nailed the personalities of the waiters and waitresses and the clients perfectly in that movie. I looked, the last good comedy movie. What's the last, like, good belly laugh comedy movie you've seen? It's been a long time. The one I could find was like Neighbors was 2014 and Bridesmaids in 2011. Oh, I know what it is. Like, there hasn't been a good comedy movie in years even. Bad kids?

That killed me. I made it like five minutes in that movie. I'm just... Hold on. That was a very funny movie. I'm not saying it was for everyone. It was... No, no, no.

You can't hear me. If you lasted five minutes, you have no frame of reference, Donnie. I could get the theme of the movie in five minutes, and I said this is not for me. No offense. It just wasn't for me. I'm just saying, the whole comedy thing, it's weird because comedy specials on Netflix, they're getting 20 million to do it. Maybe that's a thing.

They don't want to do sitcoms then where this one to get paid by Netflix. to do comedy social. It's weird that the comedy basically doesn't exist anymore. It's all in podcasts or stand-up comedy. All right. One listener question. I wrote about this. I don't hear your take. My wife and I are 27 have accumulated 300 grand in savings, which is great for 27-year-olds. That's amazing. In passive investing over the last few years, what is your opinion of liquidating all of our assets of buying home and cash? We live in New York, but are looking to leave the state due to how expensive and fast-paced it is. Some areas we have looked at have houses in the price range we can afford. Do you think buying a house in cash? Good idea or bad idea.

I put this one out to Twitter. Bad idea. Why would you lock up your money? Like just take out a mortgage gives you way more options. Optionality. Not offended to the word optionality, but why would you lock yourself in? Doesn't make sense. You'd pay taxes on the money that you made. I understand there's like a big burden, like an emotional relief of like not having a big monthly payment. So I get that. This is something that I've changed my mind on a lot in the last few years for young people, especially with rates being so low. I think it's almost irresponsible to not take out debt right now. Some people may say, Ben, that makes no sense. People can go overboard with it. If you're a young person and you're taking out debt and inflation is even a little higher than it's been, you're borrowing at a 30-year mortgage for free, basically, when you take out tax deductions and inflation. And the worst thing you could do is if you kept some of your money in investments, in five years down the line, you go, you know what, I would much rather have this paid off. You can still pay it off. But if you take it all out and you buy the house in cash, can't take it back. I mean, you get the money out. It's much easier. It's like Topshot.

It's much easier to get your money into a house and out of a house. Opshod is like investing in a private equity fund that locks your money up for 15 years. All right. So I rewatched. I forgot how good this movie was. I rewatch Casino Royale. The Bond one? I'm not a huge Bond guy.

I watched them, but I'm not like, I am looking forward to the new one. But the Daniel Craig Bond film was good. Was that his very first one? It was 2006. I can't believe it's that old. Whatever second one he did I thought was just okay. You're right. Two were good, two are not so good.

But this was like a really good. Like high seven's good. Really, really, really good action movie. Okay. What's your final rating? Remember you said every week you're going to do it. Rating. I did.

Well, I said high sevens. It's in that ballpark. I'm going to say seven, eight. Like really good. It's a little high, but this is your scoring system. So I can't believe I missed this movie. I mean, I can. I was young when this came out.

Do you remember what a blockbuster movie, LA Confidential was? Yeah, the cast in that movie is amazing. Ridiculous. So, 1997, so I was 12. That was like the Russell Crow coming out movie. I wouldn't have liked this as a 12-year-old, I don't think. It was probably a little bit too slow for me as a 12-year-old. But this book was written by that guy, James Elroy, who wrote that incredible

book on The Kennedys, I can't remember, that fiction book that I absolutely loved. And I was thinking, like, it's incredible that this movie was turned from a book into a movie, because I could imagine that the book was so complicated with all these characters. So to your point, Ben, about the cast, yeah, if Kevin Spacey, I'm just reading an order, by the way, it's definitely always weird seeing Kevin Spacey on screen given what's happened. You had Russell Crow, Guy Pearce. I feel like you're a big Guy Pearce. By the way, Guy Pearce.

He's in Mayor of East Town. Oh, interesting. Are you a big guy peer to sky? I peg you as one. I mean, I like Momento. Time Machine's not a bad movie. movie. Time machine. James Cromwell. You know that face. He's the old bad guy. Dude, it's like 6-7. Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito, David Strathen, just a monster, monster cast. Okay. So this movie was just excellent. 8-2? Yeah, probably. Actually, that's exactly the rating at IMDB has at 8-2. Okay. Like a blew me away, excellent movie. My reading is in a brutal bear market and it has been for the, I just, I got out of reading for a while and I can't get back into it. I just, I've had an L-bottom. So, like,

Like, my reading isn't a bare market, but it's not going down anymore. It's plateaued. I am reading every week, just obviously not the way I used to. I just read a little bit here and there. So two new books. The one on Amazon by Brad Stone is called Amazon Unbound. And it's kind of a follow up to his book, The Everything Store, which I thought was excellent. So everything's.

I'm 100 pages in. The Everything store is how Amazon got started. Amazon Unbound is like what's happened since 23rd. That whole chapter about how they got Alexa off the ground and how all these voice people are basically like, every voice expert in the world told Bezos, like, what you want to do, we can't do. He's like, I don't care, do it. And they did it. You might not be up to this part yet, but this blew me away.

Just a good lesson to, like, think big. And maybe this is like cliche. It only comes from a book like this. A lot of survivorship bias, of course. But they were talking about AWS. And one of the people inside said, I think this could be a billion dollar business. And his partner said, there's no way this is going to be a billion dollar business. Last year, they did $45 billion in sales.

If you spun that out right now, that's one of the biggest companies in the world on its own. And by the way, this was not 30 years ago. this was like in 2015 maybe no no no before that i'm sorry it was probably 2013 i'm very excited about finishing this book set rogan wrote a book called your book this is your type of book yes hollywood stories and stories about him when he was a kid he's a very good story like he's a writer too you think of him just as an actor but he's a writer and a producer did you read the tom cruise story i didn't get there but you sent it to me from howard stern and i definitely laughed that was very good sometimes it's hard you talk about translating a book into a movie there's

this movie on netflix called the woman in the window with amy adams and like gary oldman and Julianne Moore, Anthony Mackey's in it, and then Paperboy from Atlanta. Like, good cast. Was it terrible? It got bad reviews. It's just, there's always something about Netflix movies that doesn't feel right. Even with good actors, it's like, there's just something awful. Because I actually read this book.

It was like, my wife got it in a book club and didn't want to read it, so I read it. Of course. My wife read it too. Wait, you read this book? My wife loved this book. Yeah, it's actually a very good book, but sometimes like the suspense from a book, it's impossible to translate it into a movie, like, the big reveal. It's harder in a movie, and the movie just didn't work.

They almost always feel like TV movies. That's what it felt like. It felt like a 90s TV movie that was like missing something. So it just, and it's really popular on Netflix now, but it just, it didn't work. And finally, I talked about this a while ago. I watched the first episode of Beartown then forgot about it. It's on HBO Max. It's at the hockey show.

It starts out and you think it's going to be something that it's not. Like the first two episodes are not at all what the last three are. It takes this weird turn. And it's a heavy show at times, but it's very, very good. It's only five episodes. I really, really liked it. It was very heavy at times. it was good.

Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com. We've got Acre Trade on Friday. That was a really fun episode. Yes, you can learn why Bill Gates is the largest farmland owner in the United States. Private farmland owner. Yes. Right? Anyway, Animal Spiritspot at gmail.com.

Thank you for listening. We will see you next time. Thank you.