Animal Spirits Podcast - An Affordability Crisis (EP.196)

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

On today's show we discuss rising real estate prices, how the work from home trend could impact housing, working at Goldman Sachs, the income required to be considered rich, benchmarking your retirement savings to your peers 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

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by Masterworks. The Fed has committed to printing $120 billion every month and $2.9 trillion in the next two years. Kind of sounds like a lot. Add in $1.9 trillion of fiscal stimulus spending and a potential for $2 to $3 trillion of infrastructure spending and many investors are looking to protect their portfolio from inflation by investing in real tangible assets. Presuming your net worth is as hard as it's ever been. Just look at how low interest rates are. But that's where Masterworks.io comes in. Masterworks.com.com.com. Let's you invest in physical blue chip artworks by artists like Baskiat, Cause and Monet. Art is a $1.7 trillion dollar asset class that has outperformed the S&P 500 by 172%

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All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt 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 Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. I want to start the show talking about an affordability crisis, at least that's what's coming, according to an analyst at RBC Capital. He said, it appears almost inevitable that will hit an affordability induced in digestion period, whether that happens next month, six months from now, or 2022 is more of a

debate. So what they did was, to calculate this, they looked at the median income needed to make a monthly mortgage payment in 40 local markets, and they concluded that I think in 32 of the 40, the number was at or above its long-term average. So these are where the cities where it's most elevated compared to their long-term averages. Boise City, Idaho, Charlotte, Fort Myers, Denver, Orlando. though. What looks cheap, or at least relative to its history, is New York, Oklahoma City, Cincinnati, Virginia Beach, St. Louis. So some of these names that we're seeing, like you don't really hear too much about Boise City being unaffordable. But I wonder if this is, not I wonder, of course, this is a result of people being able to potentially not go back to work the same way they did prior to COVID. Did you ever think that New York would be on an affordable list of anything in your lifetime? No. So, Ben, this. is a softball for you because actually you wrote a piece last week saying that, although now that I think about it, so you wrote a piece saying that what if housing prices aren't as high as

we think, but you went a little bit deeper. So your post doesn't necessarily negate what this person was saying, but why don't we talk about what you wrote? Yeah, maybe the board should have been, maybe they aren't as expensive as we think. So I looked back at housing prices in the median single family home since 1989, which is how far I got the data going back on Y charts. It's up 240. percent since 1989. Basically, a little under 100 grand to over three, about 308 now. So it's up a lot. It's up 56% since 2013 alone. That's a big jump if you're buying a home. I also looked at, okay, well, that's one side of the coin. The prices are way up. What about interest rates? In 1989, when this data series started, the 30-year mortgage was at 10%. Now it's at 3. That's a big

change. So if you just take, I'm looking at the monthly payment for a median single-fine home, This is using sales prices, so it's actually been transacted, and you take a 20% down payment off, which a lot of people don't realize, like, you don't have to have a 20% down payment. That's a big fallacy. Some people think you have to, I mean, maybe some banks will force you if you don't have the greatest credit score. The closer you got to 20% to lower your interest rates, correct? Yeah, and then you don't have to pay the PMI.

I mean, my first home, since I couldn't afford a 20%, I think I mentioned this before, we had a 5% down payment or something. But if you take the interest rates into account, the monthly payment on a median basis is only 50% higher than 1989, not 240%. And actually, because rates have fallen so much since then, your monthly payment now on the single median home, even though it's up a lot since then, is lower than it was in 2006 or 2007, because rates have come down since then. Rates were six and now, the three.

Also, one more thing, if you inflation adjust it, I took the CPI, and I looked at based on 2020 or 2021 dollars, inflation adjusting and interest rate adjusting, monthly mortgage payments are down 30% since 1989, 30% lower than you have been paying inflation adjusted and interest rate adjusted to 1989. Now, but you did an account for wages, though, because what they were looking at is median wages to home price. That was the one thing people came back with. Since 1989, nominal median family income is up 151%. On a real basis is up 26%. So again, the problem with this type of data. Meaning what? Home prices have grown faster than wages. Yeah, well, but on a real basis, wages are higher than inflation. Monthly payments are lower.

but no one lives a median lifestyle. Who is actually in the median? Not very many people, right? So I got so many emails saying, hey, great data. You're an idiot. Great data. You're wrong. I live in here and here's how, and I understand like the down payment thing is crazy. Taxes for a lot of people, especially like you tell me what your taxes are in New York versus mine in Michigan. And it's crazy how much higher yours are. Same thing with people in California. Their taxes are so much higher. Yeah, but at least we got bagels. Yeah, and you put like fish on them or something, salmon or whatever it. What's it called? No, I don't do that. I'm not a locks guy.

It's a weirdest thing ever. Sorry, New York people, it is. But on the other hand, in California, New York, if you've been a homeowner, you've seen huge appreciation, probably higher than I've seen in Michigan, of course. So there's always this tradeoff. You just destroyed the entire Jewish faith with one dunk of locks. How dare you? I didn't realize that was a, okay. So here's the other thing.

So I also looked at the census has this data going back to the 1970s saying this is a house in 1973 versus today. 49% of homes in 1973 had no air conditioning. My parents were in this group until like two years ago in northern Michigan. But so this is a key point. Most houses back then had like one and a half bathrooms or fewer. Those 40% of homes in 1973. Today it's 4%. And in 1973, you had an average of three people living in them. Now two and a half. So you have, well, the other one, 2,500 square foot home for homes today versus 1,500 in 1973. So homes are better, interest rates are lower. Now, if you live in a place that has seen skyrocketing prices, this doesn't

help you at all. I was just trying to put this into context to say, let's try to look at this on a relative basis. It's not as bad as some people think. We haven't even mentioned air friars yet. No homes had an air fryer in 1973. If you have an air fire, there's no way you haven't mentioned it to someone because that's what you do if you have an air friar. You tell everyone about it. Actually, you're the one that put me on to air friars. Works pretty good. So yeah, we just solved DoorDash. They should give every home an air friar because if you get French fries from a delivery service, they're soggy by the time they hit your door. You need an air friar. Sorry. Obviously, I got all. all these anecdotal things from people saying, no, you're wrong because look where I live

this. And I understand that. But I think that the remote work can maybe help this. If you live in an unaffordable area, and maybe right now, it doesn't matter where you live because demand is so high and supply is so low that no matter where you are, you're getting an all cash offer and you're missing out on housing prices. But if you have the ability to live anywhere you want, that's probably why we're seeing this Boise City thing that you talked about. I'm going to go live where there's nature and mountains and where it's nice and there's this up-and-coming city versus this really expensive one. Yeah, that sounds great unless you live in an expensive city

where your family is and you can't leave. Listen, there's a give and take. I live in Michigan. The weather here sucks seven months out of the year. Every time in the middle of winter when we have three feet of snow in February, I'm punching myself in the face going, why do I live here? Because you have these things that keep you in places, right? And then you trade off where the summers are good.

But you put this chart in here that shows office utilization rates by metro area. It shows Dallas and Austin, Houston, L.A., Philly. and it shows how many people are back at work. And of course, it went from 100 to down to 20 or 30 for most of these from the pandemic. Still pretty low. No, it's interesting. Sharp rebound in Dallas, Austin, Houston, zero rebound in San Francisco, San Jose.

Yeah, New York's still pretty low, too. So this is the thing where I think people have been given a get-out-of-jail-free card. If you live in an expensive area and you have ever thought about leaving, but you didn't because of a job, it's on the table now. What sort of levels, retracement levels, do you think we get to?

Fit retracement, obviously. No, for real. You think we get to 61.8 or higher than that? I don't think we ever get back above like 80, 85%. I was going to say 70 would probably be a good line in the sand. So Ford, this is an old school company. Do you think we're going to start to do technical analysis on this chart?

Someone will, I'm sure. So Ford, that's an old school company that you'd think they have this old school mentality. They're going to let 30,000 employees remain home post-pandemic. And they're even going to have this, like, It's a flexible work model from non-factory. Microsoft said today that they had this survey of people, they asked more than 30,000 people, full-time and self-employed workers. Seventy-three percent said they want more flexible remote work options to continue. Forty-six percent said they're planning

to move this year now that they knew they could work remotely. Because I'm guessing if you live in Seattle, that's a really high-priced area to live. And maybe you wanted to live somewhere else because of those costs or just for another reason, because you can now. You'd think there's going to be more of this. Maybe there has been people who haven't even started to think about moving yet because of this because they're still limbo saying, well, when we open back up, they're still going to make us come back. But maybe a lot of places won't. And even if it is that 30%, like I'd say it gets 30 or 20% if it gets back to 70 or 80, that's a huge number of people. That just changes a lot of the dynamics of this industry, right? Yes. Somebody tweeted, Las Vegas Casinos broke records

last night. How is that possible? March Madness. I don't know. Are they wide open, though? I don't know. It seems like places are starting to open up. But I'll tell you, what, this was the first weekend where I got big-time FOMO about the vaccine. I haven't got it yet, obviously. They're opening it up in Michigan on April 5th to anyone, 16 and older, no matter medical, whatever. We're hearing stories left and right. Hey, did you hear this person got it at a Walgreens late at night because they're giving away? Or this person got a call that they're getting there. So it's starting to happen for more for people my age. I'm getting big-time FOMO now because I've heard a lot of people who have gotten it. I had a friend who had a hangnail as a pre-existing

condition. So now they got the vaccine, of course, right? No, I don't care. Anyone gets it, can get it, but I'm big time getting FOMO. Last year or sometime in the past, there was more ETFs than stocks or more indexes than stocks or something like that. Well, now there are more real estate agents than homes for sale in the U.S. This was the craziest stat I've heard in a while. Which one? Oh, that one? Yes, it's funny where our minds go because I thought the same thing about that more indexes than stocks, same as you. So this is from the Wall Street Journal. In January, there were more real estate agents than home sales in the U.S. Basically, a million homes for sale, which is down 26% from a year earlier, almost 1.5 million members in the real estate

community, which is up a little. This almost gets back to the flexible work thing because I'm sure a lot of people think being a realtor is one of the more flexible jobs there is. Even though you might have to work nights and weekends and stuff for showings, it does allow you to be more flexible. We've talked about this before how maybe this job isn't as glamorous as it might seem for people. Here's one. Realters with two years of experience or less earned a median gross income of $8,900 in 2019. Let's see, people with more than two years on the job have the median income of $49,000 up from 41 in 2018.

So as much as it seems lucrative, and we complain about like the 6% commission fee on this stuff, it's so much harder because there's so many people. And I'm sure there's a lot of people. You must have had friends from college or high school who couldn't find a job after school or didn't know what they wanted to do. I had a few who then just tried to get licensed as a realtor

and give it a try just because, well, you have to take a test and then you can hang your shingle somewhere. I've had multiple friends who've done some like that. Didn't really work out for them, but I think that's something people think as a fallback plan, oh, just sell houses. Well, here's a good quote from the article. There are very low barriers to entry in terms of the ease of getting a real estate license, but the barriers to success are very high.

So I would imagine that you got the parade-up principle on steroids in the real estate market. There's obviously realtors who are just knocking out of the park right now, but I guess do you think in this type of environment, it's easier to just hit the for sale by owner and do it yourself or go to a place like Redfin or Zillow and do it for cheaper. You did the for sale by owner. Yeah, but that was an apartment. I feel like selling a home is still a pain in the ass. Oh, yes, for sure. Permits, this, that. By the way, one thing that I keep hearing about, I don't know why I just thought it's. I guess we're talking about houses. Blockchain solves

the title insurance problem. Did you even know what title insurance was? I feel like I was like, wait, what is this? So somebody is like, oh, it's like proof that you like own. So it's like, wait a minute, you have to, like, pay a company to provide proof that you own it so that it's not like liens or some weird shit. Honestly, no joke, that should be recorded on the blockchain. It is one of those things that, wait, why do we do this again? Oh, because it's always been done that way. That's what it seems like to me. I'm sure that maybe there's a lawyer can set a straight on that one. Not knowing anything, like, I feel like that's going away. That's got five to ten years. I don't know. It would be nice if it was. I agree.

It seems like a racket. Okay, so here's a place that is not going to do the remote work. I'm just going to go out on a limb and say Goldman. So CNBC had this story about junior bankers at Goldman who are complaining about their crushing workload amid its backfield boom and Wall Street deals. Some of these metrics that they're showing are just crazy. So they did this study on first-year analysts. They talked about like their mental health before starting the job and after. And before it goes from an 8.8 to a 2.8, I'm guessing this is out of 10. Physical health goes from a 9 to a 2.3. Some of these stories are just crazy. It's like to show the industry. kind of nailed it perfectly, right? But I've got a lot of feelings on this. Because on the one hand,

don't you think Goldman almost, this is like good publicity for them. They don't even care. Do you think they really care about these first-year analysts at all? They don't care about this. For them, this is like marketing. In their eyes, this is probably a good thing. Because they want these type A personality people. They don't want people who are complaining. On the other hand, don't you think these young people should have known they're getting themselves into? Why are you blaming them? Why am I blaming them? Because this is what the investment banking industry is. If you're a first or second year analyst, you get crapped on all day. I mean, will young people continue to put up with this? Yes. But here's the thing. How much are they getting paid?

$300,000? Not that much. Probably the one to two, depending on their bonus, I guess. But maybe the problem is I never would have been able to get into this program anyway. I didn't have a good enough grades or resume or whatever. My parents weren't investment bankers, whatever you want to say. I would never be one of these people. And I had a friend in college who interned at an investment banker senior year. And he told me what it was about. And I'm like, okay, no way. I'm not working 95 hours a week. I would never even try, let alone get in. But if you were a type A personality like this and you went to one of these nice schools, if you're choosing between work your ass off environment and investment bank or work your ass off at a tech place,

why would you not 10 times out of 10 go to work in tech? You're probably going to have paid similar amount of money. You probably have way more upside on your equity that you could get in the firm. I don't know why smart type A personality people continue to go to these finance firms if this is going to happen. I wonder if there's like when you go to like warden to Harvard, if there's like family pressure, like, oh, this is what you're doing type stuff. I'm surprised it doesn't shift. If I'm going to work a lot anyway, I would rather do it in a place that probably treats you a little bit better and has better amenities. And I don't know, it pretends to care about you. Well, how about this? It's like getting hazed out like a fraternity.

Like you know what you signed up for. That's what this seems like. They do this because they've always done it. But I feel like today's young people are so much more informed than ever. In the past, no one would ask this question. Why are we doing this? Why are you hazing us, making us redo these 300-page decks? And they would just do it because that's what everyone else did. Now, today's young people say, why am I doing this just because you had to do it? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, that's a good point. So can you imagine, on average, they go to sleep at 3 a. What times do they wake up? Wait, is this the Mark Wahlberg routine? It's honestly, it just sounds awful to me. You couldn't pay me enough to do this. But some people,

I think some people look at it as a badge of honor, and then they get their private equity job or their hedge fund job, and they say, hey, it was all worth it. Well, yeah, don't you think there's personal preference? Like, you and I say there's not enough money in the world for this, but other people are like, I'll do anything. What are you kidding me? So I have to eat shit for a few years to set myself up for a million dollar career, big deal. Yeah, I'm sure it's fine, but obviously these young people... They don't seem fine. No, they don't seem fine at all. My body physically hurts all the time and mentally I'm in a really dark place. Well, actually, let's back up. Here's where it doesn't really add up. Because you said, don't you think they knew what they signed up for? And the answer would be, this is not a secret.

But then so many of them said if things don't change, they're leaving in six months. That's the circle I'm having trouble squaring. The sleep deprivation, the treatment by senior bankers, the mental and physical stress. I've been through foster care, and this is arguably worse, said one Goldman analyst. But again, they're not going to change. change, Goldman's not going to change because of this. They're not going to care. They're probably going to say, fine, this will weed out the weak people who don't want to do it anymore. I just don't see, unless you had the family pressures or the prestige of it, there's so many

other ways to make money these days. And again, if I'm in that position, I'm going into tech, busting my ass more to go to tech than I would be in finance at this point because of this. I wouldn't put up with this crap if I was this person who had such a great resume to get a job at a place like this. Speaking of money and wealth and personal finance, there was an article. we haven't spoken about five very much, actually. It's been a while. And there was an article where somebody shared their journey and some of the things that went wrong. And I don't, like, I didn't come away thinking that things went wrong. It's just life happens and things change. But one of the big takeaways for me was the grass is always greener on the other side and everything. A few

quotes from this article. This is a person who had a blog. They stopped writing and then they basically updated people. They retired in 2015 and they went through every year about how life has changed since retiring at a very young age and have enough money to do whatever they want. So maybe let's start with this end quote and then we'll come back. He said, if you are working on becoming financially independent and you have any specific takeaway from this post, let it be this. You are making future plans based on what your current life looks like. I think that's like so well said. So he said he made plans and the initial plan was fine. It's not like the plan that he laid out failed, but life happened. He said,

this is a good quote. My life decided it didn't want to conform to the plan. So what happened was he and a spouse who were in this together, they had been together for 20 years, they saw the world differently. Like she changed her mind. Things changed. Didn't this post almost read you like a montage in a romantic comedy that goes wrong? It was like 2017, everything's great. 2018. Hey, this is awesome. Then things started to change and our priorities changed. And wait, this person wants to spend more. This person still wants to not spend as much. And it's weird that so much of the fire stuff comes down to like the psychology behind. it and how it mentally wears on people. Obviously, this isn't everyone, but you're seeing

more and more of these posts where these people who retired at age 30, they talked about how like they had meaning in their life before because they're saving towards a goal. Then they got to that goal. And now what? Now what do I do? This also made me think about like you change, right? Like a lot of times people look back and say, oh, I wish I didn't do this or it's that. But it's like, yeah, but you're as a 45 year old talking to your 30 year old, at 30 you thought this. At 45, you felt that. At 55, you're going to feel something else. Our opinions of what means something to us are always changing. The idea that we're going to have regret one day, oh, I wish I didn't spend so much time on my phone. I wish I did that. You're talking to a

different person. So here was a quote. He said, she revealed that she felt like she wasn't going anywhere. He's talking about his partner. And when we were both working and getting richer, she felt like we were secretly getting ahead, making pro pro progress of sorts, even though nobody else could see it because we weren't broadcasting our early retirement goals and corresponding asset sheet. The sharp yearly increases in account balances we experienced during our working years gave her life some sense of momentum that had been since lost since we stopped receiving paychecks. She also said that she now felt her friends' lives were better than ours. This was her phrasing. I disagreed. They're working. We are not. I said that I personally love the hell out

of this, that we've stopped performing activities which so frequently made us miserable. I see our current lives is better. There's appear to be a constant struggle most of the time. Yeah. I applaud a lot of these people for doing what they do financially. I think it's almost like you can't just stop when you think that's a finish line because your life hasn't finished at that point. Maybe this is just a case of two people growing apart and this was going to happen anyway. It's also like alienating yourself from your friends who are striving towards something. Yeah. You just have left to talk about. Yeah. This is worth the read, whether you're into the fire stuff or not. I think it's interesting to see how like sometimes getting everything you want still doesn't make you happy if you don't know. what the next step is. I just think that for some people it works phenomenally well. I just think that like there's the other side of it. Yeah, I agree. Okay. So we've gotten some questions about the new child tax credit. I think we've got a lot of hear from all the time from people who have

kids and are wondering about this. So Yahoo Finance broke this down. I think even I didn't really understand what this was. So it was talking about a person's adjusted gross income must fall below the following thresholds to receive the full child tax credit. So if you had $200,000 for single filers or $400,000 for those married filing jointly. That's like the max. You receive the normal $2,000 tax credit, which a lot of people don't realize. This was administered under the Trump administration. So this was started earlier. This isn't like a Democrat versus Republican thing with a lot of people think. This was started under the previous administration. The new one taps out at 75,000. So this is on top of the 2000. Seventy-five thousand for single filers and 150 for married filing

jointly. You get an additional $1,000 for kids age 6 to 17, $1,600 for children. than six, then it phased out with those incomes above that amount. So let's say you're a married couple, you make 175 or whatever. You see your credit decline $50 for each thousand dollars of income above that threshold. This is a big amount. But again, it was already started before. And so for a lot of people that's not going to change if they already had those thresholds, this is more for lower income households. This is a lot of money for people with kids, especially in the lower income threshold level. I know this is going to make a lot of people angry and they're going to say, we shouldn't be supporting you and your kids. But for people who are

mad about income inequality and stuff, like, this is a good step in the right direction, I think, even if you're one of the people who's not going to be benefiting from it. Imagine being the person that just misses the cutoff. I know you have to draw the line somewhere. I agree. The people who are kind of in the middle, and you're not like the top of the 1% or the body, you're just stuck in the middle. That is a tough, I agree. There's a lot of people who aren't getting anything from any of the stimulus, and that you've got to feel. like, I'm getting screwed here. I certainly can see that. I guess they just had to do it somewhere. And it sounds like Biden is making that point, $400,000 is the, this is rich, $400,000 and up.

What say you? Well, I wish there was a way to adjust it for, for geography. Okay. So this is from CNBC. Wait, hold on. I'm just going to lay out. So $400,000 in income represents the top 1.8% of taxpayers. That's about 25% of the income. Okay. I don't think we need to put context and perspective about that. If you make 400 grand a year or more, you're making a lot of money. You're wealthy.

I don't disagree. I don't see how you could change it for living standards and all that stuff. I know that you... Now, here's what I'm saying. You're just the coastal elitist. If you make $150,000 in Boise, I want you to pay more taxes, damn it. Okay. Well, yeah, I get it.

Because, yeah, in New York, you're paying way more taxes than I am in Michigan or whatever, but... I don't disagree. That's a shitload of money. So I think most people know this, but this is a marginal tax increase, meaning you're only going to see a slight increase on income above $400,000. So Seth Handland, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress said people make it between $400,000 and $700,000 are going to have a tax increase of only about 1% or less. This tax plan is really aimed at the very top, the top 1%, or 0.1%. And this hasn't happened yet. This is just still in the planning stages. So you know that chart from Financial Samurai, who's like, if you make $400,000 and you spend all of it, oh, you have no money left.

Yes. That's basically what that chart is. This is the chart that just, you've seen this before, but every time it pisses people off, myself included, based on the expenses, a $400,000 household income provides for a relatively middle class lifestyle. A middle class lifestyle is to find his owning a home, having two kids, save him of retirement, saving for college, going on modest vacations, several. weeks a year. Give me a fucking break. Vacation several weeks a year. Who does that? Honestly. Right. That's a pretty good lifestyle. Who does that? They're also talking about a two million dollar house. Yeah, that's middle class. Where? And I had some people like, actually, he's not so far off, which is like, I make a lot of money without saying I make a lot of money. Give me a break.

Yes. I don't care where you live. That's a lot of money. And guess what? Back to the remote work stuff. If you make that much money, move somewhere else if you're living in that expensive of an area. This is so great. They only have about $34 left at the end of the year. It's extra cash flow once their household expenses are paid. Here's where I agree with them. I do think you should look at your savings like a bill. I've said that before. But come on, that's not a bill. That's savings. Yeah, you should have zero left over after your savings and spending. I completely agree. All right, I want to talk about Stephanie Kelton. She wrote the book, The Deficit myth, which Ben and I read, and I am sympathetic to a lot of that stuff. She was on the Oblots podcast with

Wisenthal and Tracy Allaway. And I wonder if the people that are really angry have ever even, like, listened to her or read her stuff, because she's very reasonable. She's not saying spend and keep spending and nothing matters. But she said, we have asked central banks for too long to do too much. And don't you think everybody would agree with that? She's basically saying that fiscal policy needs to come to the forefront. And her biggest point is that budgets are not the constraint inflation is. So why do we need tax as well? Because if there was no tax, There would be rampant inflation. There would be way too much money in the system.

It's a way to regulate inflation. So I think looking at the political choices through this framework, through this lens, will lead to much healthier debates about what we can and can't spend money on. I've got a surprising number of emails from people who have said, you know what? I was never a fan of the MMT stuff, but I read her book. It actually makes more sense than I thought. I've received that same email multiple times. She's not saying spending doesn't matter.

She's just saying the framework that we've talked about in the past. It's just bullshit. It is. The biggest drum and argument for this is, okay, we're going to give $2,000. Why not give them $100,000? That's the- Because inflation. Because inflation. And she says, listen, every one of these spending bills should be looked at in terms of what is this going to help? I think the people who are the angriest at the Fed for propping up asset prices and punishing savers and all this stuff, they should be happy that we're spending more fiscal policy because you can see. We're taking power away from the Fed. And it does flows through to more household, more middle-income households that need the help and lower-income households that need the help

as opposed to the Fed, basically having one hand type behind their back, and the only tools they can use are bailouts and helping the credit system function more fluently and lowering interest rates, which doesn't do anything for most Americans. Here was another thing she spoke about. If we're going to do like an infrastructure project, well, we shouldn't just like do it and forget about it. We should prod if we're talking to Caterpillar about building machinery. We should see what their inventory is like, what their supply.

is like, can they handle this? Will this amount of spending and orders lead to inflation and pricing pressure? Right. Will there be enough construction workers that can help make this project a thing? Yeah, she's more thoughtful than people give credit for in terms of just, oh, just spend and then it doesn't matter. That's not the idea. So the people dunking, I mean, come on. Like, I hate, oh, read a book. Read her book. Like, before you get angry, just read her book. I think that a lot of what people think she says is misrepresenting what she's actually saying. You know what she's not saying. She's not saying that there's a 30% chance of inflation or 30% chance of deflation and a 40% chance of I don't know. What did Larry Summers say? I don't know. Isn't it just perfect though that him and the

Winklevoss twins in the social network movie, don't they just deserve each other? Larry Summers of the Winklevoss twins at this point. If you started inflation, you would have started inflation. I wish he would have just said 40% chance of everything. There's a 40% chance of hyper deflation and hyperinflation. I think he's really angry. He didn't get a job of the Fed. And now he just trolls people. I think that's the only thing I can come up with. Wild chart from Ben Johnson. Ben, you see this? With just over a week left in Q1,

ETF flows are on pace to double their prior Q1 record set in 2017. This is, wow. So where did this money come from? I think I have an answer, but where do you think came from? What's your answer? The Fed. No, I'm just kidding. Where it always comes from, actively managed mutual funds.

Yeah. So is this another case of the pandemic pushing people out? And obviously in 2020, it fell a little bit where people said, all right, we've got this regime change. Let's just do it. Hit the switch. Isn't it kind of crazy that for individual investors, 2020 was probably the easiest environment you could possibly come up with to outperform and actively managed funds still underperformed? Like, do you think that's the point where people go, oh, wait, my Robin Hood account crushed my 401K actively managed fund? Why don't I have money in this anymore? Do you think some of that were like, you see

individuals outperforming from these stock picks that seem so obvious in hindsight? And then you look at the Wall Street actively managed firms and they can't outperform. Balchion has really nailed this, right? He said, like, every time there's a bare market, the flows are going to get worse. Yeah, it's not going to get better. We're from active, passive. All right, this is, David Schaul tweeted this. I don't know where this chart came from.

I'm trying not to over exaggerate. This is truly one of the most visually stunning charts I've seen in a long time. It's showing fixed income issuance. You're going to buy this as an NFT, aren't you? That's a great idea. If this was an NFT, you would buy it. Yeah. I would. I want this. I want this in my wallet. You can't see it now, but we'll link to this in

the show notes. It's a nice segue. Let's talk about Ray Dalio. You didn't explain what this chart is. Oh, I thought I did. I'm sorry. It's just, it's showing an explosion of fixed income issuance in 2020. I mean, an explosion everywhere. Corporate bronze, mortgage back securities, treasuries, everything. I think this is the piece that people miss when they talk about government debt. Sometimes people don't realize that that government debt on the one side is an asset for someone else. If the government is issuing debt, they're creating assets for investors. And obviously, it's not just the Fed buying these. Investors are buying these insurance companies and pensions and sovereign wealth funds and individuals are buying these bonds, even though

the yields are so low. People are holding these bonds still. Yeah. Here's a quote from Ray Dalio's blog. There is now over $75 trillion of U.S. debt assets of varying maturities, which absolutely contextless, that sounds staggering, $75 trillion. but to your point, that's an asset for somebody. Oh, he's basically saying, like, what happens when everybody goes to sell type of thing? I know this all sounds crazy to you. It sounds pretty crazy to me, too. Who would play Ray Dalio in a movie?

I don't know. Kevin Spacey? Oh, he's canceled, but all right, let me just finish this quote. He said, I can see Liam Neeson as Ray Dalio. Oh, that's a good call. Tall. Yeah. I know this all sounds crazy to you.

It sounds pretty crazy to me, too. However, last thing, the movie would obviously be called 1937. I know this all sounds crazy to you. It sounds pretty crazy to me too. However, I have seen this confluence of circumstances leading to the sort of dynamic many times in my study of markets and economies over the last several hundred years. And I experienced this dynamic myself. There's a chart from the Wall Street Journal showing ownership share of U.S. Treasury securities for the two largest holders. Foreign investors and the Fed, foreign investors have been not dumping, but their percentage of ownership went from, and maybe this is because of all the bond

issuance that the Fed is buying, but it went from 40%, over 40% down to below 30%. The bond market has not gone cabooy just yet. Remember when everyone's worried that what if China sells all their treasuries? What's going to happen? They have, literally. I saw that chart a few months ago. Not all their treasuries, but they're selling. Someone's going to buy them.

That's what will happen, even at low yields. Someone is going to own bond. That's just the way it is. So that's it. Somebody else will buy them. I guess you're right. No, what happens when they go to sell? They'll be buyers.

That's what's going to happen. Next. I think in such a low-rate world, it's not going to make any sense, but people are going to see, well, wait, Japan has a negative 1% yield, and other places in Europe have a 0% yield, and the U.S. is yielding two. I'm buying U.S. and two. It's going to be a relative thing, and that an absolute thing for a lot of people. You wrote a post about Dahlio. I didn't get to, but this is the lens through which he sees the world. Was that basically the gist of it?

Someone asked me, like, Dahlio seems very pessimistic about the future. I looked at all these instances where he said, he's written about this. In 1981 and 181, He was pounding the table that we were going to go into a depression. And he said that when the Mexico defaulted on his debt in 82, he was like pounding the table and telling all these TV shows and newspapers that were going into a depression. Obviously, that was a start of one of the biggest booms in history. And then in 1990s, he was interviewed. And it's kind of funny, it was in 92. And that's before the 90s really took off. People think that the 90s were just this, you knew that was going to happen because of the internet and stuff. It wasn't. At the time,

he was saying, this is the reverse of the 50s and bonds are going to crush stocks over the rest of the decade. And from that point on, over the rest of the decade, stocks were up like 300%. 2015, he warned about this 1937 thing. He's done it again every year since then. Maybe he's just predisposed to have these worries because he runs a hedge fund. Maybe that's good marketing. Maybe it's his personality. It's his personality. He's been very candid about his. On a Pikes of the Barrier a few years ago, he was very open and honest, a bad cause in his head in the past, which is why they do quantitative stuff. He told us to Ackman at a conference at 2015, I found. He said 99% of the time he agrees with his quantitative.

strategy, and the 1% of the time he disagrees, he realizes in retrospect, the machine was right two-thirds of the time. There you go. So that's the thing. But how is it marketing? What is he marketing? They're the biggest hedge fund in the world. There's always more people to bring it.

I don't know. Why does he have a blog at LinkedIn? Because you can never have enough power. I don't know. I don't think it's that because he loves the markets the same way that we do. And he likes to share his opinions. I don't think it's like marketing. He's right.

Yeah, I guess you're right. He just likes the game, especially when he had that much money, and I totally get it. Okay. So this is from Mark Holbert at MarketWatch. He goes through line by line, why market valuations are higher. This is stuff we've talked about for a while now. Interest rates are low. You have these high intangible assets and it's harder to calculate book value. There's more buybacks than ever. This shifting definition of profits, like accounting changes that they made and then you have globalization. We've talked about all these for years. In a lot of ways, it makes sense that valuations are high. He says, regardless of the individual merits of these

theoretical arguments, for why evaluations should be higher now than a century ago, you can't use those arguments to conclude that the current market is not overvalued. So even though he makes these arguments, he's still pretty sure markets have to be overvalued. Here's what I want to say. Is the term fair value one of the worst terms in all finance? I hate it. I hate it. And is there a difference between this is certainly overvalued and this is very pricey? When something gets to fair value, does it stop trading? That's, yeah. Ah, I've arrived. Yes. I'm at fair value. I look at it as there's been so many changes in the way that we do things that I think it's become harder than ever to come up with any reasonable estimate of what that could ever be.

Okay, real quick, I'm going to throw out a new theory for you. So people were getting their stimulus checks, and oh, by the way, Robin Hood decided to offer bonuses for new deposits right as those stimulus checks were hitting. Great coincidence. Here's what I want to say. Not everyone has access to a 401k. What if Robin Hood or some of these other brokerages know how. lucrative it can be to trade off to sell your order flow. And they start matching like a 401k.

If you do a thousand dollar deposit every month, we'll give you two percent. If you do five hundred dollars a month, we'll give you one percent, whatever it is. Couldn't you see that heating up where you have these places that are fighting for money so bad from these new traders and retail people that they effectively become the 401ks as a way to induce people to come in? Couldn't that happen? Yeah. All right. Putting that down. Time stamp it. All right. Survey of the week. What do you got? All right, there's a book I'm reading. I saw Wes or Meb tweet about this. This guy, Herman Ponser, was on a podcast I listened to, and then I bought his book. The book is called Burn. New Research blows the lid off how we really burn calories, lose weight, and stay healthy. And Ben, I don't know if you could tell, but I'm trying to do all those things. Are you becoming a fitness influencer? Is that what happening to you in the pandemic? You're watching my transition in real time. All right. All right. Get this. Where does 2,000 calories a day come from? A survey.

I kid you not. It turns out people are shockingly bad at keeping track of what they eat. When you give someone a dietary recall survey and ask them about their diet, the answers aren't reliable. Oh, who would have thought? It's like asking people how many times they've had impure thoughts about Brad Pitt, everyone underreports. In a recent stuff, that was, okay. Guilty. You are a big legend to the fall guy.

In a recent study of 324 men and women across five countries, adults underreported actual food intake by 29% on average. That's the equivalent of forgetting an entire meal every day. Reported energy intake didn't track expenditure whatsoever. Diet surveys are just random number generators and the data they provide on daily caloric consumption are so useless. The only way to make them worse than useless is to treat them like real data and base a nutritional program on them. So in 1990, the U.S. FDA based the nation's public nutrition program on diet surveys. New regulations were being implemented that would require nutritional labels on food packaging, and the FDA wanted some benchmark for daily energy intake to include on the labels. Using surveys

from massive national health and nutrition examination survey, they found that women reported food intakes of about 1,600 to 2,200 calories per day, while men reported 2,000 to 3,000. That would leave a rough average for all adults of somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500. To discourage overconsumption and to have a nice round number to work with, they rounded down to 2000, and that's the number that stuck. Ben, I rest my case. Anti-survey. That's a good one. If I ever had to have a diet where I had to count calories, I'd be out day one. That's too much of a pain. That's like penny-pinching to save money every month. I couldn't do it. I tried once or twice. No way. It didn't take. All right, I want to talk about electric

vehicles for a second. Vaub or not, and many others, I'm not pointing fingers. I probably nodded my head when I was reading his pieces, has been in the Tesla is a bubble camp for Not that long, but a lot of percent, given how fast Tesla's rise has been. So they wrote a post in 2018. Yes, it's a bubble. So what? Do you remember reading this? Yeah, at the time. So the price then was $50 a share split adjusted. Today, it's $6.75. It was as high as high as 9.10. So if they thought it was a bubble at 50, then what do they think fair value was? I don't know, 15. To get back to 15 when they first called it a bubble, it would need to fall 95%. That's why isn't it weird to think that in a lot of ways, Tesla was a contrarian play.

Even though it was this high-flying momentum growth stock, so many people did not believe in this stock and were calling it a bubble a long, long time ago that it almost was a contrarian play at one point. So they're out with a new one, big market delusions, electric vehicles. They wrote, like airlines, the auto industry has historically been a competitive capital-intensive business. For this reason, despite the global demand for their products, the traditional major auto manufacturers have tended on average to trade at book-to-market ratios near or below one. From an industry perspective, we have little reason to believe that a change in the propulsion

system from internal combustion engines to electric motors should have a pronounced impact on market competition or on the total industry valuation of the company. So I guess that's a big question. Are these companies going to be able to be that much more efficient that they will deserve premium multiples and the jury is out. It's too early to know. Right. Right now, we're in an environment where investors are willing to give these companies a benefit. I do take issue with the fact that they say it's not that much different. Like, from what I understand, it seems pretty different, right? Tesla has a huge iPad in the car and if they have an update, they do a software update overnight or something. That's a huge difference. Are people still going to pay that much more for in the future?

I don't know, but does it kind of make sense? It's different. All right. Over the weekend, Kathy, would and the arc team put out their projections for Tesla going out to 2025. They gave a bear case, a bull case, and a base case. Do I think they gave like a bull case and then a double bowl case? And I think stuff like this is why people scoff and don't take them as serious research analysts because their bear case is $1.4 trillion. And I think the ball is three, the base is three, the ball case is $4 trillion. I mean, this isn't serious.

Come on, this is not serious. Unless literally they're the visionaries and we're morons, which very might well be the case, that the electric vehicle industry completely changes the dynamics of competition and the dynamics of everything. But you see something like this and you just shake around and say, this isn't serious. This is not serious. To their credit, they put their models for everyone to see. You can see exactly what their inputs are, what their outputs are. They said they use 34 inputs and they have all these forecasts. So you can go through. And if you really knew this space, you could say, no, this doesn't make sense. What are they using this for? But so what? That pisses people off. How about a little humility? How about saying, hey, we could be

wrong. How is their bare case $1.4 trillion? There's no sense of humility. Okay, back to the Dalio thing. This is marketing. This is marketing. How many people talk about this? This is part marketing. And the other thing, back to like Kathy Wood versus Rob or not in terms of. But don't you see why I report like this pisses people off? I can see. The other part of it is, will people still be willing to put a premium on their price in the future? That's what's so hard about these things. And obviously, it's all garbage and garbage out.

To be fair, people said the same thing last time. So what? I'm not trying to give her the benefit. Okay, all right. So what? I agree. You're right. It's weird to have a bare case that's higher than the prices today.

And this is why people are mad about the Tesla thing. It's like Tesla Bulls have been bailed out by price, but the fundamental story hasn't changed. I don't know the fundamental story, I guess. I can't believe that it hasn't changed it a little bit. I mean, they're obviously doing something's right. But a bare case of $1.4 trillion dollars. Ben, there's only three companies in the world with a $1.4 trillion market cap. I mean, come on. That's not serious. By 2025, there'll be like a trillion dollar company on every tree corner, right? Yeah. I get it. They've had some great calls in the past. And so the problem is, it's like, okay, do we give them benefit of the doubt here?

or are they just overconfident now and they're really going for it and they're way out over their skis? So that's like what you're trying to figure out as an investor. I think the whole, well, they were right last time. Things should have no relevance or maybe not that much relevance in their views going forward. All right, we are getting very long in the tooth, as I say, in this show. There's a bunch of topics that we haven't gotten into. So again, we're going to reiterate. What we're going to do now is if we have a long show like we did this week where we don't get to some of the stuff, we're going to roll this over to one more thing on Wednesday. I'm sorry, Wednesday at 4 on Spaces. So Spaces is an app on Twitter.

You have to be on your phone to listen to it. But what we're going to do is we're also going to send a link so that it will be easier for people to listen to it. Yeah, follow one of us on Twitter and you'll be able to find it hopefully. It's pretty easy. I listened to one with Darylmore the other day. I'm bullish on Spaces. I think maybe just because I'm a Twitter user, I'm Spaces over Clubhouse. Me too. All right. So listen to questions. I want to talk about this one. I'm not an arc hater, but that paper was, I get the outrage. All right. Somebody asked us, isn't ARC just a high beta ETF, like the exact opposite of a low-val fund? How do you benchmark such a thing to find that if there's skill or just an implied leverage through the beta bet,

something can look diversified, but hide a huge factor exposure? So the answer is no. At least if you compare ARC to the S&P 500 high beta fund, SPHB, I mean, she has beaten the pants off with that, like over 600% since inception versus 170 or something. So, no, she deserves a lot more respect than that. She is not just a high beta ETF. She is not just a bet on Tesla. I think Tesla's 10% of the fund. I think they're like, on one hand, you have concentrated deep value. They're like the opposite of that. Whatever the opposite of that is concentrated, high, it's not even beta. It's disruption or innovation, whatever it is. They're almost in their own category, even though there's other funds trying to do the same thing now. All right, you want to do one more?

Sure. Oh, here you go. What's the best tool to benchmark my 401k balance and savings rate to peers in my age group? I always wanted to know how I'm doing compared to others though I'd actually asking people. Maybe it's just a weird way to convince myself that maybe I will be okay. There's a fidelity study that shows their balances, right? That one angers people just as much as your $400,000 income one, I think. Yeah, it does.

We've talked about that one before, but here's my answer without looking at the numbers. Don't? I don't think you compare yourself to people in your age group or your peer group because that's just, comparing yourself to how much money someone makes or how many toys they have or how big their houses or it's all circumstantial. I think it's impossible to do that. I'm putting this in the doc. I found it here. Average 401k balance for millennials is 137 grand. I tweeted this in January 2020. I'm calling malarkey. It was in fact malarkey because this represented millennials who had been in their plan for 10 years straight. Right. So I mean, I guess it would be nice to know that you're not too

far behind, but what are your financial goals? How much money do you want to have saved one day? When do you want to retire? So much of this depends on your inputs and goals and dreams and desires that I think trying to compare yourself to your peers is tough to do. My savings rate default that I talk about and I put in my retirement book is I want everyone to be double digit savings rate. If you get there, I'm happy. That's your goal. That's what I'd say. And if not, you're in big trouble. Big time. All right. Recommendations. I'll start. I want to give two plugs for our friend Ted Sides. He did a crypto series with Eric Peters, Michael Sondashin, Seth Gins, and Ari Paul. And Seth Gins is the only one I haven't listened to. And very good. I listened to most of these, too.

I thought it was very well done. Very good series. The other plug is Ted has a book. Capital allocators, I guess is he turning lessons from his podcast, lessons from people that he spoke into a book? Based on his conversations with institutions mostly. And yeah, Ted's good guy. He's really knowledgeable in the field. I knew and invested in Ted's fund. before I came to work for Ritholt. My old firm invested with his protege partners hedge fund back in the day. You never told me that. So I've known of him for a long, long time.

Huh. All right. I did it, Ben. I watched Days and Confused. All right. I don't want to hear a review yet. You got to watch it like six more times before it sinks in. So, all right, here's the deal.

I get it. The most important thing for how you feel about a movie is obviously quality. If you're going to trash days and confused, just stop right now. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Hold on. Obviously, quality of the movie, but when you saw it is probably, like, not far behind

as far as how you're going to feel about something, right? Yeah. So I enjoy Dazin Confused. By the way, kind of bombed. Seven million dollar budget, eight million dollars at the box office. Yeah, it became more of a cult classic afterwards. If I didn't know anything about it, if you just said, here, watch this movie, and I saw it, my reaction, like, as a 36-year-old person would be like, yeah, that was a good movie. I thought the star of the movie was the soundtrack. Yeah, it was a great soundtrack. But let me rewind. If I saw this when I was 15, this would have been one of my favorite movies ever. I didn't, though. I missed. My bad. I wish I saw 20 years ago. So I get it. But as a 36-year-old, it did not have the same effect as it would

have if I saw it 20 years ago. Is that fair? Yeah, my friends and I watched this in college religiously. We watched it all the time. This was like our pregame movie. I don't know how I miss this given what I was like in high school. Like, this is, you know, I was. We get it. But what a cast. So you had McConaug and Affleck, Greg from Boiler Room, what's her name from Chasing Amy? I'm drawing a blank. Cole Houser from Yellowstone. Adam Goldberg, who's been in Saving Private Ryan and other things.

There's a familiar group of people that you saw. Anyway, this reminded me, I was like, oh, what else did I say in 1993? I know we've done 90s movie stuff before, but this doesn't happen anymore. Listen to this run of movies from 1993. True Romance, Jurassic Park, Judgment Night. I don't know why judgment nights on here. Not a great movie. That's a good soundtrack, too. Falling Down, Groundhog Day, the fugitive, sleepless in Seattle, Wayne's World 2, coneheads, cliffhanger, the sandlot, demolition man, free willie. I definitely saw that in the theaters. A Bronx Tale, Book of the Year, saw that in theaters. Robert had met in Tights, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Last Action Hero, Mrs. Datfire, Alive, Tombstone, Dave, Carlito's Way, Schindler's List, Philadelphia, Rudy, so I met an axe murderer, grumpy old men, The Good Sun, In Decent Proposal, The Pelican Brief, and The Firm. You could put in 1993 against the last decades' worth of movies, and it would blow it out of the water.

I mean, unbelievable. Oh, so I parlayed this, Ben. I parlayed Days and Confused into another Richard Linklater movie. Because I've heard that name before, but I wasn't really familiar with his work. I watched Before Sunrise, 1995, so I was 10. It's definitely too young for it then. Here's another example. If I saw it before Sunrise when I was 15, I would have walked out in 10 minutes.

Matter of fact, my wife did. After 10 minutes, she goes, what the hell? This is so boring. If there's not a murder, a grisly murder in the first 10 minutes of a movie, my wife is out. She's God. I love this. I love romance. There, I said it. Okay, now you have to watch Before Sunset Next, which is the follow-up. I don't know if it's better. It's different, but I like it just as much. So if you like romance, and let's be honest, who doesn't, before Sun Marys was great. All right. Lastly, man, this was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. So Barry tweeted this to me, Cosmic Sin by Breed. Willis, Cosmic Sin got a four out of Onond Tomatoes from the critics and an 81 by the audience.

And that's Bade. I had to call Challenge and see that movie. It was so bad. I love bad movies, but it was like past bad. None of it worked. And it reminded me of a scene from Wayne's World where Wayne, they go to a concert and he goes to Meatloaf, who's the doored man. He goes, the shitty Beatles, are they any good? And Meatloaf says, they suck.

and then Wayne says, so it's not just a clever name. That's exactly how I felt about cosmic sin. It was absolutely a cosmic sin. It was horrible. So did Bruce Willis just pay a bunch of people to give him a good rating on Rotten Tomatoes? That would happen? I don't get it. But you shared with me this article from the Times of what happened to Bruce Willis movies. And in that article, he's basically an on-demand actor now. In the article, they wrote, he averages 15 minutes of screen time. And yeah, that's about right. He was on screen for 15 minutes. It was colossally bad. Does he owe someone taxes or something? Is that what happened to his career? I don't get it.

I mean, how much money? All right. Operation Varsity Blues on Netflix is the documentary about the college scandal with Aunt Becky and Felicity Huffman and such. Is it a movie? I'll watch a movie. I don't know if I'm going to watch a series. No, it's just a one-time documentary. Okay, okay, right.

It's kind of weird because they have actors, act out certain scenes because they have all these phone transcripts. That's kind of bizarre for a documentary, but they also have interviews. If you're one of these people that think that the system is rigged, maybe you shouldn't watch this because this is one of those. This system is absolutely rigged. This is one of those. those movies where you go, oh gosh, I made some jokes on Twitter and read some of the headlines about

this before. I didn't get into the whole nitty-gritty of the story. It's bad. Well, the system is rigged in many ways. It's shocking how much it is. And you're the man. You are the man. I guess so. So Chmoth has this podcast called All In. You love the besties. You're a bestie, Stan. I have a love-hate relationship with him because some of the stuff he does is so annoying, the gaslighting and stuff on social media. I just can't stand. But some of the stuff he's really smart about. And they did this podcast this past weekend on like present and future of venture capital even created like a slide deck that goes with it. I thought it was very well done. And they talk about the rise of solo capitalists, how a lot of these venture people now, there's so much

competition to fund something because they want to be in the next big thing. And they're choosing these partners, not just based on what company they work with or what venture capital firm, but the individuals they want to work with. And I think that's an interesting way of betting in individuals is bigger than it's ever been. I might have mentioned this before on the show. I don't remember, but we were watched Game Night. Have you ever seen that one? I like that movie. They don't make comedies anymore. That's probably one of the last good ones.

And it's one of those where if you go in and you know, the people in the movie are almost in on the fact that this isn't like a serious plot. You know, the plot's ridiculous. If you can just turn that side of your brain off and not have to worry about like how ridiculous the plot is, it's really funny. It's got a bunch of good funny scenes. One more. So I started my new.

Wait, why are you hedging? Don't hedge. Game Night was a funny movie. Yeah, no. I'm saying some people like probably can't get over the fact that like they want to nitpick the plot. I love it. Oh, get out of here. Okay.

So my annual CJ Box is about the Wyoming Game Warden, Joe Pickett. I'm rolling my eyes. It's called Dark Sky. He starts the book out by telling a story, and then they talk about the fact that he makes some sort of proclamation about how this is after the pandemic. And I understand why people after the 1918 pandemic didn't talk about it or write about it. I want to move on. I don't want this to be in my fiction.

It kind of made me mad that it was in there. I don't want to see movies about it or TV shows about it when this is done. I want to clean slate, move on. I don't need it in my fiction. If I'm going to, like, get away from the pandemic, I'm getting away from it. I don't want it to be part of it going forward. I know some shows, like the medical ones probably had to do it, but I don't want it to be in anything going forward for fiction stuff. I just want to move past it.

When's Yellowstone coming back? Pretty soon, I think. All right. Can't wait. I do like that one. I'm tired. That was a long one. Yeah, we did it.

You read like every movie from the 1990s to start to finish an alphabetical order. So, uh, all right. Yeah. Spaces Wednesday at 4. That's going to be a new thing. We'll be back Friday as well to talk about the game. gig economy, so don't miss that. Animal Spiritspot at gmail.com.