Animal Spirits Podcast - Despite All Logic (EP.41)

Episode Date: August 8, 2018

The unraveling at Movie Pass, why Disney's streaming product will be a success, Fidelity's zero fee index funds, our biggest worry about the future, a troubling trend in personal bankruptcies, an ETF idea born out of Twitter, the lure of venture capital, credit spreads 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

Welcome to Animal Spirits, the podcast that takes a completely different look at markets and investing, hosted by Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson, two guys who study the markets as a passion and invest for all the right reasons. 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 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. We're going to start off the show today talking about stock that's been in the news lately by the name. Well, the company is called MoviePass, but the stock is Helios and Matheson Analytics, which sounds... It really rolls off a tongue, doesn't it? Yeah, that sounds like a biotech company or something. This is one of those companies that is, if we're in the midst of a bubble, which everyone seems to believe we are, at least if you follow Twitter as quote-unquote everyone. This is, this stock is definitely going to make one of the stories in the Michael Lewis book. It, wait, hold on. Yeah, no, agree, but counterpoint at its high, its market cap is only $330 million. Okay, but this just

seems like anecdotally one of those companies that people point to like Pets.com. So the idea here was movie pass. And it seems like the kind of idea that got shot down by everyone on the internet right when it happened. But they, their idea was 9.95 a month. and you can see as many movies as you want at the movie theater, which how much does it cost for a movie in New York now? There's no way that movies are even that cheap for one in New York, I think a movie is like $15. Why wouldn't they charge like $29.95 to start off? Because it sounds like they lost money immediately when this started. Well, there was an article over the weekend, and there's been many, but one good one that describes what's going on here from the Washington Post.

And a quote from the article is, in early interviews, movie past CEO Mitch Lowe insisted his company would be profitable, despite all logic. It really does defy, like, I understand, like, network effects is the big buzzword in Silicon Valley and tech companies these days. And they probably wanted to just get as many people as they could have signed up and then maybe increase the prices. But so the idea for this one is they were going to charge whatever it was, $14.95 a month and allow you to see movies, but they were going to pay for each movie that you saw. So it was sort of like the gym model where they would hold that people sign up and just don't use it. But if you see five movies in a month and it costs movie

past $75 and they're only taking $15, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this has some troubling business models. So we looked at the stock a little bit. It got up to $300 million in market cap. Is that the high? And now it's at $150,000, which is kind of funny to look at. No, $150,000. Yes, right. Sorry, $150,000. We looked it up on Yao finance. And, I kind of had to do a double take. I don't think I've ever seen a stock listed with that small of a market cap before. It's trading for nine cents. This is sort of wild. So the stock's trading for nine cents today. There have been 240 million shares bought and sold. So the volume is 240 million, which means that around $20 million in stock has been traded today. Again, the stock is only worth $150,000. There's your price discovery, right? Yeah. Yeah. My favorite part about the Washington Post article was the founder guy said, it may seem like it's too good to be true, but that's what they said about us at Netflix. Like, pick any successful tech company and compare yourself to them and you can make it sound

like your dream is going to come true. So they just made an announcement today that they're going to be limiting customers to three movies a month. It used to be that you could watch one a day. And they did a press release last week. And these are two quotes that I pulled out. one, exhibitors know that without movie pass, they will be able to continue to charge exorbitant prices for theater tickets and gouged customers with overpriced concessions.

This is exactly the attitude that taxi cab industry took when Uber entered the market, which is a bit hubristic comparing what they're doing to Uber. And then the other one is any crowing about the uptick and box office receipts the summer season should include the fact that a significant percentage of their total is directly attributable to movie pass subscribers. I think my favorite part of the story is you told me that they did. They did a 250 to one reverse stock split in July, and I thought you were kidding, but they seriously did a 250 to one reverse stock split, and the stock is still only worth $0.8 a share.

So the people who, the, how many people are trading this today? There's 250 million shares being traded or something. I mean, the bid ask spread alone would eat up your entire, your entire trade, would it not? I can't. This story is, obviously, this is just a drop in the bucket in terms of the stock market, but this is, uh, this is quite a story. Yeah. So I do think that this is probably an idea that's going to stick. Maybe they're not going to be the ones that are doing it. But this is a good idea. Yeah, on Netflix for movie theaters, it would seem to make sense. But yeah, this was not the way to do it, I think. Yeah. So sticking with media, there's an article in the New York Times today about Disney's upcoming venture into streaming. And you have little kids that are probably big Disney fans. What do you? I will pay anything they charge. charge for this.

Okay. Like stuff on demand for little kids, like the Disney movies, my kids are basically transfixed whenever we put them on. They couldn't charge a high enough price for this thing for me. Okay. I think this thing is going to be a massive success. I'll put it out there now. Like, hmm.

For families, I mean, if they have the whole Disney catalog on here, it's, I mean, you have little kids, you have to, you will have to buy this. Yeah, that makes sense. So there was an interesting stat in the article. Adults who have canceled cable or satellite hookups and continue without it will hit $33 million this year, a 33% increase from 2017. That's pretty wild. How close are you or will you ever come close to getting rid of it? So I would be one of these cord cutters if my wife would let me.

My problem is I have a hard time remembering all the passwords, so I'm just going to keep for efficiency's sake. Well, the other thing that would be tough actually. Another thing about is watching sports would be. Yeah, so you couldn't do it. So that's, if ESPN has to come out with their own streaming or something similar to get them all, I agree. I wouldn't be able to. Yeah, but there's not going to be a complete unbundling because then I would need to sign up for TNT. Right.

I will be the last man on earth to cut the cord. I will never, I love cable. So I'm anti-cord cutters. That's just me. I'll stand by that one. All right. So last week we talked about the race to zero in fund fees and five days later or so, Fidelity. announced that they were offering two mutual funds with 0% expense ratios.

So what was your initial thought? Big deal or not so big a deal? I wrote about this on Friday and I wrote that in the grand scheme of things, not a huge deal because if you're going from paying three basis points at Charles Schwab to paying nothing at Fidelity, that really doesn't really matter. But I think in the grand scheme of things, I pointed out the fact that the original index fund had an 8.5% sales load charge to buy it in the mid-70s. And when you look at it in those terms, the fact that this stuff is so cheap now for people, I think it's hard to say it's a watershed moment, but I think it's going to continue to put pressure on other people. And I think the biggest thing, people were looking at it

from the standpoint of Fidelity, that Eric Beltunas from Bloomberg had some great stats, the fact that he said Fidelity makes $18 billion a year, which is double or more than double the entire ETF industry and four times as big as vanguard. So Fidelity has enough money to, you know, use this kind of loss leader status to bring people in. By the way, that's revenue, not income. Oh, what did I say? You said makes. Oh, yeah, makes and revenue.

Isn't that the same thing? Nope, not the same thing. By the way, movie pass just announced that they're going to buy back a large amount. That was a joke. Sorry, I was packed myself up. Okay. The buyback thing? Okay.

Movie pass is being manipulated higher by three. Yeah. But so this chart from Eric, which we will link to in the show notes, shows that Fidelity's revenue at $18 billion is more than double the entire ETF industry and I guess almost quadruple what Vanguard's revenue is, which is pretty wild. So I think somebody sent us that these two funds will save shareholders about $47 million in fees, which is great. But it is truly a drop in the bucket for them. So I thought this was a brilliant move by Fidelity. And I agree with you in the sense that it doesn't affect the individual investor that much, because the difference between three and zero is effectively zero. Right. But I do wonder what the conversations were like at BlackRock and at Vanguard after seeing this news. Yes. I mean, I think there for sure will be funds that will say, we'll pay you five basis points

to be here and we'll give you all the securities lending revenue. That would not shock me at all. And I mean, the thing with Fidelity, they kind of missed the boat initially on index funds in ETF. So I think they have nothing to lose here. in terms of trying to gain market share. And like, I mean, if you're a 401k provider and Fidelity has a huge 401k market, why wouldn't you want to use the feet, you know, as a sort of a, you know, attention grabber?

You know, we have two funds in our 401k plan that don't charge you anything. That could be a really big selling point. According to Jeffrey Battack, the contra fund alone at Fidelity does like $680 million in revenue. So Fidelity is not hurting. They can afford to do this. And I guess the idea being that once. you get on the platform, they will make money off you in other ways. Exactly.

You just wonder how many of those active funds that they have that are charging 60, 80, 100 basis points if the money ever migraised from there to the index funds, that's when they start seeing some problems. But if it's just going from low fee to low fee, someone asked us, someone emailed us and said, hey, I pay nine basis points for SPY ETF, whatever makes sense for me to change to this, what's the break even? And with that few basis points, I mean, it's not even worth it to do the math on that because you could lose that in the tracking area between the two indexes.

So, I mean, I think when you get... Or what about between the time you buy it, between the time you sell one and buy another? Right. Yeah. You could, yeah, could all be eaten up by just poor timing. So I think trying to switch from that low fee to low fee is, doesn't make a ton of sense. And by the way, speaking of something that we heard from a reader or listener, somebody also emailed us and said that suggested that Vanguard was a Ponzi scheme. Yes, which was the hottest take of the year.

Yeah, stay what if, I don't know. If Vanguard's, I don't know, I don't mean, I can't even give a comment on that one. You know what? Hold on. Let's just stick with ridiculousness for a second. So a few days ago, you tweeted, you would have been laughed out of any room in the country if you predicted in 2008 that we now have nine years of row of stock market gains, sub 4% unemployment, low inflation for years, and one of the largest econ expansions in history, and somebody actually did you, and according to you, this was a frequent common response, somebody said, and you would be laughed out of any intelligent investing conversation today if you believe unemployment is 4%. Inflation is low, parentheses, fake numbers, health care,

and the stock market is not a huge free money bubble. Your tweet is the bell ringing at the top exclamation mark. I bet I got easily 100 replies to this tweet saying, Fed manipulation, QE, negative interest rates, just wait to a see the other side. There really are a lot of people out there who have no faith in the system anymore and believe it's all rigged against them. Well, if you've been in cash since 2007, you probably think it's rigged against you two to. The funny thing to me is the people who have been sitting in cash since 2008 are the ones who look back and say, oh, it was obvious. The Fed was going to manipulate the market higher and things would go well for 10 years in a row. And they didn't invest. If you know the Fed's going to quote unquote manipulate the market

higher, then why wouldn't you be in the market? It's so bad. Obviously, these people are just mad that they didn't make any money. And I'm sure they'll be waiting to pick up bargains when the market falls 95%. Yeah. All right. So where were we? So there was a good article in Quartz this week. And it said it was from Alishin Schrager, who I believe you had on your YouTube channel before. And it's titled, how screwed are you when it's time to retire. And she kind of did some myth busting on retirement savings and retirement accounts. And this was a really good one I thought. And she says, it's tempting to idealize the past, whether it's lost manufacturing jobs or supposed norms of civility. But the past is

really as good as you remember. Defined benefit plans only covered at their peak 45% of workers in the U.S. Today, more than 60% of workers have some form of workplace retirement plan. So I think there's a lot of people out there who believe in the past 50s, 60s and 70s, everyone had a pension and retirement was taken care of you, taken care of for you by your employer, but the stats don't really bear that one out. No comment there? Nope.

All right. And so not only did a few people have pensions in the past, the pensions of today, in a lot of ways, are probably screwed. So there was also an article in the Wall Street Journal, and it goes through a number of pensions. And these are, they're looking at retired police and firemen, and this one was in some city in Rhode Island, and they're talking about how they're cutting their checks in half more or less. So the pensions that people thought would be there really aren't

going to be there because a lot of these municipalities are running into problems, and basically they're so underfunded they can't afford the benefits. Yeah, so I'm working on a long piece about all of these issues that are seemingly tied together. This is probably the biggest worry of mine and not to be hysterical, but what are these people going to do? I don't, in terms, you mean the people, the beneficiaries or the municipalities? No, yes. The beneficiary, people that have done what they were told to do, spent an entire career preparing, being told one thing. And now that thing that they were being promised is not there. And you have people going bankrupt. Left and right. There was an article in the New York Times

yesterday, I believe, showing that bankruptcies are up, have tripled since 1991 and people at age of 65 and older, something like that. So do these people, I mean, what happens? I mean, honestly, I agree. I think this is one of the more worrying trends we're seeing where I think there's just going to be a lot of angry old people. And I think a lot of this manifests itself politically, where you're going to see this dichotomy between what politicians promise younger voters and what they promise older voters, because a lot of these older voters are going to think, you know, I'm getting screwed here. And obviously, if they cut the benefits in a lot of ways they are. But the Wall Street Journal article had this graph of the deficits, and it's just

gone slowly downhill each year from being slightly positive by the year 2000 to, I don't know, 1.5 trillion in the whole now or something. And if they can't make up these deficits during 10 straight years of stock market gains, when are they ever going to do it? I mean, it's just going to continue to get worse. To your point, so the deficit has compounded at a rate of 14% a year since 2008. In other words, the deficit has increased, gotten worse by 14% a year. over that same time, the market has gained coincidentally 14% a year. So to your point, even with a healthy backdrop of asset prices, these things can't get their act together.

And in that New York Times article that we'll throw in the show notes, so like I said, the rate of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy is three times what it was in 1991. I think that's what I said before. And the question as to what's going on here, a three and five people said unmanageable medical expenses played a role. a little more than a third of the filers who answered the question, said that helping others like children or other parents had contributed to their seeking bankruptcy of protection. It's crazy.

Yeah, they break out bankruptcy by each age group, 18 to 24, 25 to 34, and the only one where it's increasing is 55 to 64 and 65 to 74. So older people, they say, have more student loans. There are more of them are heading to retirement with mortgages. I don't, I mean, I think it's just going to manifest itself through a lot of angry, old people. And I don't know what that means, but I think it means kind of politically things are going to be very generational in the years ahead. And it's not going to be pretty. Yeah. So getting back to sign of the times, whether movie pass is emblematic of today,

Meb Faber shared a chart from the Lutehold group, which shows the price of sales ratio of the S&P 500. And it also shows the median price of sales ratio of the median S&P 500 stock. and that is at an all-time high by quite a bit. Yeah. Looks like we're, can you do some technical analysis in this one for me? I think we're seeing some fib retracement, something. You know what's funny to me at our conference in California in June,

Ken Fisher talked to Barry. And Fisher's not that old and a guy. What do you think? 60s maybe? 70s at the most. He talked about how he was credited with creating the price to sales ratio. And isn't that kind of funny that the quote, unquote price to sales ratio was only invented by a guy who's 70-ish. Like, how hard is it to take the

price of something and divide it by the revenue? Like, I mean. And he said he used to pay a lot of money to get that data. Yeah. Like, that's how, that's kind of how far we've come that the price to sales ratio has been invented that not that long ago. I think one of the stories here is that companies have just become so much more efficient in terms of generating revenue. So Facebook is what, like $2 million in revenue? per employee. And I saw a stat, I think this weekend, forget who shared it. Maybe it's from research affiliates. I'll try to dig it up. But it showed that stocks used to have a fairly high correlation in terms of returns to a company's like price to book value or price

of tangible book. And that has completely since fallen off because companies are so much less capital intensive than they used to be. And a lot of the assets are not necessarily held on the balance sheet. Yeah. Makes sense that companies are continued. And you've written a about this too. And we think this is one of the reasons why it's really hard to compare valuations of today versus valuations in the 1880s or whenever Professor Schiller started the Cape ratio. It's just completely different market now. I also think that that explains how we've gotten here. I don't think that you and I are making the case that stocks are cheap by any means. I mean, I think when Apple hit a trillion, it was bigger than the following S&P industry groups

like materials, real estate telecom utilities, something like that? Yes, which are relatively small, but still, it's kind of mind-boggling. Yeah. So there was kind of a cool thing that happened on financial Twitter last week. So Wisdomtree debuted a new ETF, and they call it a balance fund. I think it's just called the Wisem Tree 9060 U.S. balance fund. And the genesis of this ETF actually came from Twitter. So, and not just Twitter, but two pseudonymous, anonymous tweet.

at Economic and at Non-Related Sense who are constantly arguing about funds and fund structures on Twitter. And they said a while ago they put an idea that they wanted to see a 90-60 fund, which is more or less the equivalent of a 60-40 if you just put 66% of an allocation and they're using leverage. So more or less, this fund takes 90% of its money and puts it in something like the S&P 500 and 10% into treasury bonds and then borrow. the rest to get to the other 60% in fixed income.

Yeah, this is, this is, this is very, very cool to see. Like, Jake literally, or Economic literally tweeted that in November 2017. So this is a very neat idea. What are, like, what are the risks of investing in something like this? Well, I mean, there's obviously leverage involved. And the idea here is that I guess you could call it like portable alpha is the term they use in institutional circles where you, you don't have to put as much money in to get the exposure of a 6040 portfolio.

and then you can try to go hunt for your alpha elsewhere. By the way, that sounds, portable alpha, that sounds ridiculous. Yes, it does. But that's a term that sells with like consultants and allocators in the institutional world. So Jake wrote a whole post about this and we can link to that if you want to dig into it a little more. But the big thing here is the fact that I think they tagged Jeremy Schwartz on this from Wisdomtree and said, hey, look into this type of product we think it would be cool. And Wisdomtree did the work and decided to go. ahead and do it, which is pretty cool. Well, I would think, we haven't really seen innovation in the

ETF space, right? We've just seen a lot of sort of different rappers and, but this is, this to me seems like a new category. This is, this is pretty cool. And this, I mean, this one is, it's pretty straightforward. There's leverage involved, which some people may not be comfortable with, but it's kind of like a risk parity approach where you can then take some other bets elsewhere and you have your 6040 kind of where it is. And so I think it's kind of an interesting thing for people that actually understand how this works. Okay, let's move on to some surveys of the week. This one was kind of flying around a little bit last week.

We found this one, C&BC and elsewhere, but the headline is, one in eight divorces is caused by student loans. And this was from a survey, of course, and I immediately sent this to you and said, no effing way, right? Yeah. There's no way that people are getting divorced

because of student loans. And it's kind of funny to me because I thought that millennials were, like, killing marriage. and they were never getting married anymore, but now I'm learning that they are getting married, but student loans are causing them to break up. I just, there's no way this is true, right? No, I'm going to call baloney on this one.

Yeah, anyway. I mean, I suppose anything's possible, but I'm going to call them no. All right, so sticking with divorce. No, just kidding. All right, so Dan Russ Muson wrote a really good post the other week talking about the lure of venture capital in which he says that in 1997, venture to capital firm benchmark, then managing about $85 million, invested $6.7 million in a small online auction company named eBay. And by the spring of 1999, that small stake was worth

$5 billion. So if you invested just $6.7 million. Anyway, so Union Square Ventures first fund, which was raised in 2004, returned 13.9 times cash on cash return off investments in startups like Twitter and Zinga. And obviously, this is how many of these funds positioned themselves, or at least position themselves to their investors, that they are lottery tickets for rich people. The crazy thing to me about learning about the venture world is the fact that in a lot of ways, it is historically at least, the best funds continue to have the best returns because it's very much a relationship type business where you need to get in front of these startup founders. And how do you do that? You can show them how you've worked with startup

founders in the past. And so most of these, we talked about this last week about how a lot of hedge funds that are really successful don't want your money. most of these large, well-established venture funds don't want your money even if you're an institutional investor and you're not in their funds yet. So it's really hard to get into them. And the other interesting thing here is that Ress Newsom pointed out, if you look at the past three, five, ten, and fifteen-year periods, the venture industry as a whole has underperformed the S&P, the Russell 2000, and the NASDAQ over all four of those timeframes. So even though a lot of people are worried about the fact that a lot of these companies aren't coming

public anymore and maybe small investors are losing out, the venture industry as a whole hasn't done very well. And that's because most of the returns go to the best funds. And the rest of them on aggregate don't do very well. Because if you don't hit those few home runs, you're screwed. We spoke about the Pareto effect in the public market, but it seems that it's even more pronounced in the private markets. So one study conducted by a fund of funds investment manager revealed that from 1986 to 1999, a mere 29 funds raised 14% of the capital in the industry, but generated an astonishing 51% of total distributions. Yeah. And if you're not, so if you're not in these funds, you're out of luck because the spread between the best performers and the worst

performers is enormously wide. And of course, everyone thinks that their top quartile and wants to pretend that they're going to be, but very few are. And so if you're not with these best ones, you're pretty much out of luck. But if you can get into the top quartile, it, He showed a table that shows that there is no better place to be than with the big winners in venture capital. Yes. And if you're an institutional allocator of capital, you think to yourself that you are only going to pick top quartile managers, which is, of course, impossible.

And so that's where they all want to be, but it's very hard to get there. And then, so sticking with this point, David Haber replied to him and said that eight of the top 20 VC funds are in repeat names. So Sequoia, benchmark, et cetera. And I remember in my institutional days, what you'd do to get a little piece of one of these funds is invest in a venture fund of funds, which is about as bad as it sounds because you're paying fees on top of fees and you'd get like a 5% allocation in that fund to one of these really good ones and hope that it works in your favor. But that's even, that's just, that doesn't work either. So Lisa Abramowicz tweeted that yields on the lowest rated U.S. junk bonds fell by the most since 2008 yesterday, falling to the lowest since 2004. 14. And I'm not sure why, and I'm not pointing to her at all, but I'm not sure why people use credit spreads to either signal that we are in a recession or we are about to be in a recession.

Well, in a way, it's a way to gauge risk sentiment in the market. And so when people are willing to accept lower yields for junky credit quality, and that assumes, yeah, well, that not just euphoria, but people are feeling pretty good about the state of business overall. Actually, maybe it's not euphoria. Maybe it's complacency. Yeah, that could be a better way to say it's complacency and the fact that, I mean, if you look at it, it's so mind-boggling to me that it got to like 20% high-yield spreads in the crisis. Like, I mean, that was pricing in almost little or almost anything beyond, you know, below Armageddon. So the fact that it got that high, it just shows that these things can blow out much further in either direction than most people

assume, but it's, I mean, it's all relative in the fact of what are other things yielding as well. Right, but my point was that people use these spreads to suggest that either spreads are too tight and people are sheep or spreads are wide and they're only about to blow out. Yeah, and if you look historically, a lot of these lower quality ones have outperformed in the past. So maybe the spreads don't ever get as wide as they once were because people are. better at pricing them now or people are better at realizing where the returns come from. So I think

it's hard to take a level and draw it as a line in the sand about what it does or doesn't mean. Another tweet that we saw was from David Shawl. This is really, really good. For all the talk about Fang valuations, here's an interesting stat via Poland capital. Today, the percentage of U.S. total market capitalization held by the five biggest economic profit generators is at a historically low percentage of the U.S. market. So in other words, we've spoken at nauseam about this, so sorry to keep repeating it. But the top five stocks represent 16% of the market capitalization of the S&P 500. But according to this chart, the top five wealth creators market cap percentage of total is only 10%. So this sort of makes sense that the biggest

companies are generating the, I'm sorry, the lowest amount of profits, like a normal amount of profit suggesting that it is not just the five names leading everything higher. Right. It's, yeah, it's not just five names and things that are spread out. How about you clean up what I just said? Because that was, that was nonsense. Well, we can look at the, just looking at the chart, you can see back in the day, this thing was much more concentrated. I mean, it got up to almost 50% and now it's at 10. And so back in the day, things really probably were worries. And I'm guessing at the time, no one really even knew it. And it's actually been relatively stable for, a number of decades now. So I think this is just another, like people see that Apple is worth

a trillion dollars and assume that the stock market is rigged and they're controlling everything and it's just really not the case. Yeah. So did you see this post from research affiliates? Corey Hofstein linked to it last week. And they showed the asset quilt that we often see with asset classes, but they broke it down in terms of value strategies. So they used sales to price, book to price, cash photo price and things like this. And it shows, what they all show, which is basically that from one year to the next, there is no rhyme or reason or way to predict which one is going to outperform. A quant investor's dream here. Yes. I guess, yeah, I got nothing on this one. Okay.

Let's go to some recommendations. What do you got this week? All right. So, Josh was absolutely right on Succession. It was really, really good. Definitely the show of the summer for me. Actually, the only show I watched the summer, but really, really good. And then I finished the meat racket, and that was worth reading. Just in terms of, of what happened with, I know I spoke about this last week, but I won't repeat myself. Just, it's worth reading. It's very good book. Okay. I read the crash of 1929, finally, by John Kenneth Galbraith. I'd never read that one before. I don't know how many books I've read about the Great Depression, but I can't seem

to get enough on that one. And the way that he explains it, he's kind of like, to me, I think he's about as good of a writer as the Adam Smith guy that you always talk about that wrote the money game. So he talks about this. He says, such is the genius of capitalism that where a real demand exists, it does not go long, unfulfilled. which is, I think, really interesting just the fact that how the psychology of these things works. And he was kind of explaining the run-up of the bull market in the 1920s that led to the crash. A couple other recommendations. My wife and I watched the movie Tully this week. What is that?

Charlie's Theron was in it. And it was actually, it was about postpartum depression, which was kind of odd. It was by the creators of Juno. So it's a tad depressing. And if you don't have kids, you probably don't want to watch it. But it was actually really well done. And it was kind of interesting it was it was kind of yeah it's hard to explain without giving it away but it was uh i would say you know seven stars out of ten it was pretty good uh and my underrated show of the year i'm going to recommend here is called casual on hulu it just had finished its fourth fourth season does any does anybody have hulu except for you i know i mean i'm always pushing hulu and no one ever has it you can if you sign up you can get a free

month and binge this, but it was a four-season show. It was kind of like catastrophe on Amazon Prime that we talked about before. Each episode's like a half hour. It was only eight episodes a season. And it was one of the lead character, Alex, is probably one of my most underrated favorite characters of the last couple years in TV. So I will get, I really, it's a show I've never heard anyone talk about that I really liked. And they actually did like a flash forward in the last season where they went ahead like four years. And they, kind of did some interesting things with how technology and how things are going to be in four years. And so it was really well done, kind of like a dromedy. And so I'm putting

that one out there since no one ever talks about it. All right. Send us an email, Animal Spiritspot at gmail.com. If you have any other good hot takes about how Vanguard is a Ponzi scheme, we're always, we're as up for those. Thanks for listening.