Animal Spirits Podcast - Evidence-Based Investing Conference Post-Mortem (EP.04)

Episode Date: November 17, 2017

We reflect on a fun day at the Evidence-Based Investing Conference in New York City with some of our favorite talks, anecdotes, statistics, and quotes. Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Now, today's show. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Ben, what are we going to be talking about today? So last week we had our evidence-based investing conference in New York City, and we were supposed to do a post-mortem immediately following.

the conference, but you were deathly ill and had to leave at lunch of the conference. Is that correct? Such a bummer, yeah. Yeah, I felt so bad for you. You were in really rough shape. I woke up on Monday morning, and I was like, fuck! Like, what a big week for us. And it just got progressively worse and worse and worse.

I think it started with a virus. It ended with a black eye. In between, I had a fever and a bacterial infection. and at this point I might be dead by next Tuesday. Yeah, it was pretty bad. I can't believe you actually even made it for half of the conference. It looked like someone punched you in the face. Yeah, so it turns out that I broke a really thin bone in my eye from vomiting the morning of the conference.

Seriously? Seriously. Wow. Okay, that's bizarre. Yeah, it was just brutal. So now, like, I'm walking around the New York City Subways with sunglasses on. you're that guy and everyone's kind of like he's kind of shifty looking yeah okay so we wanted to talk about the conference it was it was loaded with people speakers friends and i took a bunch of notes

usually i just go to conferences and mingle and socialize but actually this time i was sitting in the front row the whole time you're not much of a socializer no no no i'm a non-social drinker wouldn't really wouldn't really describe you as a mingular uh i'm not one who will have elevator talk that's for sure. I hate small talk. This is true. So you were there for half of the day, so we can fill each other in and riff off each other that way. And then I'm going to fill you in on the second half of the day, which you missed. Okay. So the first guy talking was Scott Galloway, which we've talked about in the past, but I'm just really jealous of how good that guy is. It's public speaking. He was pretty good. He spoke like Obama. There was not a single hesitation or paused or

um he was funny he was articulate he was perfect and it's a reminder for us who are doing this speaking thing for the first time really in our lives like holy shit this is a skill that we do not yet possess and that guy has obviously crafted the shit out of his skill i'm sure he's been a professor for probably a decade and a half at this point and wow that was a real treat to say yeah he was good and the information was good too i mean people were talking about that one all day i thought a lot of it has been covered that we've talked about in the past i thought the craziest stat he gave was the fact that Amazon can borrow for more cheaply than China can. I'd never heard that one before. So the 10-year yield on Amazon's bonds is 3.2% and in China it's 3.6%.

Yeah, no what? That didn't really surprise me. Okay. I mean, we're talking about like the second largest economy in the world. I guess maybe Amazon is that great of a force of nature. So yeah, he was amazing. He was funny. Yeah, he was really good. He had a few jokes. I don't remember. Do you remember one of them where he's like, so I'm definitely not going to say... Yes, well, he said, yeah, he finished it with it. He said that when I came into NYU, they told me not to swear, and they told me not to do a couple of other things, and then he dropped a huge F-bomb and walked off the stage. Yeah, it was great.

Yeah, it was pretty good. I thought the second one of the day was with Miles Udland from Yahoo Finance, and Lizanne Saunders was on the panel, who is, I think, is really great from Charles Schwartz. Yeah, she's terrific. And you were there for that one still. The one interesting fact to which she gave that I had never heard before, she said there's now more wealth controlled in the country by women than men. And I guess that threshold got crossed this year.

I had never heard that before. And it makes sense because women live longer than men. And so, you know, by sheer attrition, women are gaining all the assets. She also said that there's, she has a lot of anecdotes about women being better investors. And obviously Schwab has access to all of that information. I would love to see the breakdown of individual investors' accounts between men and women, and I would bet that women are, like, not just a little ahead, but, like, far ahead. There's some studies that have been done.

Actually, one of them was in the common book, Thinking Fast and Slow, where that was an older one that they showed women are better investors, and the reason is because, I guess, men are bigger gamblers and take more risks, and women are much less emotional and the more long-term in nature. And men probably tend to revenge trade. I was notorious for that. Like, if you lost money on Amazon, like, that, that was it. Like, you, Amazon is in your crosshairs forever and ever.

I've never heard revenge trading before. That's pretty good, actually. Oh, I did that for like two years. So it's not really anchoring. It's revenge trading when you're holding out to something like this. Give me my money back. Yeah, she was really good. And that was a good panel.

You know who else was good? The Ukrainian guy from State Street. Yes. Vladimir, and I can't pronounce his last name. Zadarov. Yeah, he was very sharp. He was a good guy. He was, yeah, his line that I thought, like, he said you have to, like, balance the false positives

with false negatives when you're talking about back testing. That was kind of an interesting way to think about it. The fact that there's so many BS back tests out there. No. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, that was really good. And he was a really smart dude. And it's funny.

Someone called him the Russian gentleman, and he said, no, I don't drink that much. I'm from Ukraine. That's pretty good. I thought one of my favorite ones of the day was, when Barry talked to Cliff. You were still around for this, yes? Yeah, that was so, so good. Yeah, he's good.

I mean, he's, again, a great speaker. I've seen him give presentations before, like, PowerPoints, and he has, you know, complete control of the crowd. He's good, he's funny. He's talking about stuff that is often boring to people like us, but he does it in a good way that can get people engaged and, you know, keep them paying attention. Yeah, and he and Barry had really good chemistry.

I think the line that stood out for me was when he said that, something like the 12% of me that my wife hates is 100% of who Larry David is. Yes, and Kerb. My other funny one of his was he talked about, he launched his firm right at the height of the tech bubble in the late 90s in their value investing shop, so their strategies got crushed. And he said that his partner said that he looked like Abraham Lincoln before and after the Civil War. That was pretty good. But he also said that his

writing style changed because he said after a while, he just gave up and said, F it, I'm just going to write whatever I want and be myself, because before then, he wrote like an academic. And so I thought that was an interesting writing tip there about he said, just be himself and he writes jokes and pox fun at himself and other people. Hey, speaking of that time period where anything other than growth, you look like an idiot? Yes. So since 2009, in eight of nine years, the NASDAQ 100 has outperforming the S&P 500. And since 2009, the cumulative returns for the NASDAQ 100 is 465% versus 242% for the S&P 500.

Wow. Where'd you pull that one out of? I just grabbed it from somewhere. That's great. Yeah. So, again, that means we're in a bull market for is value investing dead pieces. I think everyone's written one at this point, right? Yeah.

But again, it just shows that that gets back to this whole thing about diversification for me. Like, if you're in one strategy or one type of fund, I mean, there's no way you're going to be able to handle that thing, you know, especially in something that tick quote-unquote works. Because even Asniz said, Barry asked him, what's your favorite factor? And he said value. Yep. And it still goes through these bone crushing periods of relative underperformance. Yep.

Yeah. He was good. So after Barry and Cliff, was that followed by Buckley or was it emerging markets next? I might have missed the emerging markets. Well, it might have been mine, actually. The quant panel? Or was there another one after that? I don't know, but you let off with a joke that fell really flat and it was very funny too much.

Yes. It was, well, Asness brought up the fact that within four minutes of a meeting with anyone these days, they ask about AI and machine learning. And I saw this tweet that got retweeted like 10,000 times. And I'm like, oh, I'll start off with that. And it fell flat. And Patrick O'Shaunas, he was sitting next to me. he goes, good one, Ben.

Under his breath. I feel like that's kind of your thing, like leading off with a really bad joke. But it wasn't a good joke. I just think that maybe people didn't hear it. Yeah, and I think people were still calming down and yeah, I didn't really get into it. But then they laughed when I said,

well, this is a tough crowd. So, okay, what was your takeaway from that one since I was up on the panel? And it's impossible to pay attention when you're running a panel to what the people are saying because you're just worrying about the next question. Yeah, it's also tough to pay.

attention when you have a black guy in a 102 degree fever. Okay. No, I thought that the panel was, so that was you, you were the moderator, Lee Drogan, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Corey Hofstein, and the fourth guy, I don't know his name, but he was the guy who just launched the reverse market cap weighted ETF. Yeah, Kevin Quig, I think, if I'm pronouncing it right, yeah. Everyone was really sharp, but that was a good panel, I thought. Yeah, I'm not sure what, like, the salient points were, but it was definitely informative.

It was a good discussion. Yeah, I think the big thing is, that I took away from it is that, you know, quant is going to continue to be a huge force of nature in the investing world, but you need people who aren't quants to be able to manage it and manage the people and manage the decisions of how it's going to be allocated or used correctly. That's kind of my takeaway. Yeah, managing the machines.

I think my next, yeah, my next big notes here that I took was the Jason Zweig one with Josh, which was great. So that was one that I was like super bummed to miss. So Jason Zweig just had his 10-year anniversary of his book, Your Money and Your Brain, which is probably... By the way, we're just skipping over the CEO of Vanguard. No big deal. Oh, yes. I didn't take notes on him. Okay. Okay, that was a good one, actually. I think it's because it was just right after mine, and I didn't take notes on him. But, okay, so the CEO of Vanguard, you were still there for that one? I was. I was. I thought his funniest story was when he said, I became CEO of Vanguard. I have two young kids. And his son asked him, so, Dad, you have almost $5 trillion in assets. And he said, yeah. And he said, what happens if you get hacked?

And he's like, get out of here. Get out of the car or something. That was pretty good. But he was great. He was like, I mean, these guys at Vanguard that lead it. I mean, they're like politicians, right? Didn't you get that feeling? He totally looks apart, full head of hair, polished.

Like, he was Vanguard. The thing that I liked is that he went after a lot of the criticisms of Vanguard, too, and he backed it all up with logic. Well, in terms of like indexes and ETFs that you're interfering with price discovery. Yes. And we've heard the stat before, but indexing, even though it's 30% of the market, represents only 5% of all trading. Right. Yeah, the fact that who's going to do price discovery now if everyone's indexing and passive. And yeah, he took all that stuff head on. He talked about corporate governance and how that's such a big part of what Vanguard does. And yeah, he said, you know, being a price taker, he said he doesn't go to the grocery store and haggle over every price that he pays for bananas or something, which is what people are worried about in the investing world.

and yeah, he was good. His other good joke, which I tweeted out, was Barry asked him, so what's your favorite stock? And he said all of them, which was pretty good after not skipping a beat. Yeah, he was great. And I think that Vanguard is in good hands because they better be with all the money they have, right? So Vanguard is, I think, 50% of all index assets at this point. You think in five years, that's greater or less than 50%.

The Vanguard number? Yeah. So if they're at 50% today, do you think it's higher or lower in five years? Definitely higher. Huh. You don't think so? I'm not as convinced. I think it's becoming a huge barbell type of industry where you have Ishares and Vanguard on one side and St.

And everybody else. And then everybody else who's more niche because the products that they make scale and the products that a lot of other people make don't really scale as well. So the stuff that they get into is huge, you know, plain vanilla stuff and they do it for the low cost and they do it better than anyone else. So why even try to compete with them? in that space. Yeah, it's tough. Which is kind of crazy, because if you look at the stats, I don't have them in front of me, but the majority of the money is going into plain vanilla stuff.

It's not going into all the smart beta products. I think 90% of it is going into stuff that costs less than 10 basis points. Yeah, which is kind of crazy. So that lends you to think that it's the big money. This is not being driven by retail investors. It's big money that are like, all right, I'm taking billion dollars out of closet indexers and I'm putting it into actual indexers. Yeah, which makes sense. It's rational until it isn't. But yeah, and Lizzie Ann Sunder's talk about this, too. Someone asked her like, well, is the shift of passive, cyclical or secular? And she said, well, it's both. It's obviously secular, but it's cyclical that there are cyclical flows going into this that won't stay there. Which makes sense.

I also, I also think that, yes, when indexes and when markets are down 40%, that's not what's going to cause people to sell. I think it's the opposite. Markets fall 40% because people, are selling. Right. But previously, I guess people would sell their active mutual funds and then whatever, when the dust settled, they would jump back in. Now, I think people will potentially sell index funds, misbehave, and then go back into an index fund. They're not going, they're not going to be like, oh, my index fund was down 38%, but that

active fund was down 36, so now I want to get back into that thing. Yeah, I agree. It's like an all-or-nothing decision. I'm going from stocks to bonds or stocks to cash, and then back to stocks. It doesn't, yeah, it doesn't mean they're changing around the way that they invest in stocks. I agree. Yeah. I do wonder, though, if somebody is in, say, a 70, 30 portfolio and markets are getting crushed,

would they go to something like 50-50, or is it just get me out? Yeah. Maybe being in an index fund allows you to behave a little bit better from that respect. I doubt it, but maybe. Because, yeah, you know exactly what you're getting. You're not being promised the holy grail of, we'll sidestep it, and you'll be fine. You'll be fine. Right.

Which never happens. Okay, so back to the Zawag thing after I skipped over the CEO of Vanguard, which was really cool. I guess it was his first public appearance that he's made since that announcement. So that was fun. So Jason Zweig went up with Josh Brown to do a fireside chat right after a technical analysis panel, which was kind of funny because Josh said, all right, now we're going to go through some charts with Jason Zweig, who is notoriously not a huge chart guy. But it was a great talk. So he talked about, you know, how he was kind of ahead of the curve from a behavioral perspective.

And I think it's definitely probably my favorite book on the human psychology, especially from a money perspective, your money and your brain. I went over it again recently too, and there's just so much good stuff in there. And Josh asked him, like, how did you get to this stuff and make it make people like Conneman and Thaler, you know, more mainstream than they had to be? And he talked about how it was kind of his own personal thing. And I guess he said what got him. It was like the mid-90s and his wife saw him reading like a journal of Port

portfolio management or something, and she asked him, like, are you getting anything out of this? Is it really entertaining? And he said, no, I'm bored out of my effing mind. Like, maybe I should try to read something else. And that's, like, what got him into discovering, like, scientific journals and psychology magazines. And that's what got him into this idea of human behavior, got it before anyone else in the money game. Did he talk about his own experience trading stocks? Because in the book, he shares a story that he was, like, picking stocks and stuff. He didn't get into that. He talked more. It was more about the reading stuff. He just, he was bored because he felt like he had reached the ceiling of, you know, I've read all the academic stuff. There's not much more to read here. It's, it's more human. And so he, he, once he got that out, he's like, oh my gosh, it opened up so many different worlds for me to explore, which, which makes sense. And the craziest one to me was, I didn't realize, I knew he had helped Conneman write thinking fast and slow. He was basically like an editor and a guy to bounce ideas off of, but he said he, he, quit his job for two years to work on that with him, which is crazy. And so someone asked

him, you know, what's your biggest takeaway from that? You know, what's the biggest bias? And there was a few questions throughout the day of this, like, what's the biggest, the single biggest mistake investors make, which it's impossible to narrow that down. So, so I said, you know, the biggest mistake is not understanding your own bias. So everyone has their own blind spot or whatever it is. And so the biggest bias for everyone is not understanding what it is in yourself. I wonder if he thinks that is not fixable, but if it's something that we could guard against. Yeah, well, he said that he thinks the way that we study behavioral finance is wrong,

that people try to use it as a weapon, and the way that he described it as people are trying to look at the stupidity of others through a window instead of a mirror. And so we're looking at what, which was great, I'd never heard it like that. You know, we're looking at how stupid everyone else is, like all these idiots, I'm going to take advantage of them instead of the point of it is not identifying the stupidity of us. others it's identifying the stupidity in yourself well i hedged my wedding so i think i've done a pretty good job looking in the mirror yes nailed it uh so yeah so that was great it was awesome i loved the uh i love that talk that was fun let's see what else there was a good private equity

panel so our friend morgan halzo was on it brent be sure and then this girl named daphne who's from a private equity firm which the name escapes me but she was really sharp too and the idea was how do you tie evidence to private equity investing and are things getting kind of crazy because there's been so much money rushing into that space. And it sounds to me like at least from a paying perspective, if there was a CAPE ratio for the private equity space, it would be in line with where we're at in stocks. So that makes sense. Yeah. So they were talking and yeah, because they base the prices and valuations of those off the public markets. That's how they value these things because there's no tradable market. So they were talking about how in the past you

could get things for six times EBITDA, which is just a price multiple. And now they're paying, you know, then it got up to seven or eight and then nine or ten. And now they're in like the 10, 11, 12. And these people, yeah, so like the valuations even there have doubled from what they were in the past. Isn't the whole idea of the illiquidity premium such that these companies fetch a lower multiple because you can't just get out? So when multiples start drifting higher and higher and higher, I'm sure that becomes problematic at some point. Yes, that was one of the points that Morgan made, which is a good point because, yeah, it's like for better or worse, you're stuck with that, which is a good thing in some ways because you can't just trade in and out of it,

but if you make a bunch of investments at the wrong point in the cycle, you're screwed. Right. Which is one of the reasons that these funds are always rolling out new funds every two to three years because they know, like the ones that were released in 2006, 2007, ended up doing horrible for the most part because that was the top of the cycle. Yeah, I wonder if their investors sort of dollar cost average across funds, probably. Yeah, so back in my endowment days, that's what everyone did is you diversified by vintage year. So you'd have to have, instead of just going all on at once, that's the way to make a lot of money. But yeah, so you're not screwed and pick up a fund at the wrong point in the cycle. You have to keep

investing over and over again, like pretty much every year, pick up a couple new funds. So if public markets are in the top of the 10th, private markets? I'd say that whatever illiquidity premium was there in the past has narrowed substantially. I'm sure it's still there a little bit. So bottom of the 12th. Yes. In a 20-inning game or something. Yeah, but that was a good panel.

Okay. So the other one, I guess the only other one that at the end of the day that I liked was Jim Ross from State Street who was there when the SPY ETF was first created and Barry recently had him on the podcast but he was really good

he showed up on stage in the dorky investment joke Josh made because he had a huge cast on his arm and Josh said I just want to tell everyone that Jim was injured in the Fee Wars yeah so want want want

yeah but that was a good one and he he had some good stuff about you know how these ETF providers are probably getting themselves into some hot water, and he was kind of talking his own book. But I guess a lot of these ETF providers, if you think about someone like Vanguard who offered the personal investor services, they're sort of robo. He thinks that- State Street has one? No, Vanguard has one. So State Street doesn't. So he was talking about the

fact that a lot of these firms are doing this now, and he thinks they're going to basically piss off their biggest clients who are like advisors. So he thinks that that's going to be a huge story in the years to come and they've so far stayed out of it state street has they just want to be the product and research provider and again he said he was talking his own book but he thinks that's going to be a point of contention in the years ahead as these advisors realize you know we're not going to use your products if you're just going to try to take over our market yeah interesting so yeah that was a pretty good one other than that overall I think it's this is our third conference we've had I'd say content wise it was the best one we've had I think every speaker and panel was great

It was pretty loaded. Like I said, I was sitting in the front row all the whole time, paying attention. So I got a lot out of it. Plus, it's always fun to see friends and, you know, talk to people in the business from all walks of life. You know what I was most proud of for this conference in terms of content? There was not a single smart beta labeled panel. Yes. First time I've seen that.

Like smart beta free, which was good. Yes. People are sick of hearing and talking about that stuff. We, yeah, we had a bunch of other stuff. We had a commodities panel, too. We didn't mention emerging markets. There was a bunch of good stuff up there. Technical analysis.

So we have to start planning the one in California soon. One thing that I think that we should do to spice it up a little bit to keep it fresh is to have a panel on cryptocurrencies. Yes. Okay. So I think I should probably be on that one because I'm an expert with my fractional Bitcoin shirt. No.

I think so too. I think people are really in honestly, every single panel of the day probably got a Bitcoin question at this conference. it was kind of like oh thanks you guys did great so what do you think about bitcoin as an and i think that people when they ask that question are really asking like should i buy here or should i wait like that's what they want to know but there's a question for every person on you know do you think it's an asset class so i think there's a lot of questions in there and yeah could be an interesting discussion and you know the thing that i was most impressed about with this conference

was the happy hour the night before we must have had 100 or 150 people in this tiny bar by the World Trade Center Memorial. Yeah, that was cool. That was fun. And then there was a good cocktail hour afterwards and dinners, and it was fun to see everyone. So this was a fun event. If you've never been to one of these,

I'd definitely recommend it, especially since the one in California, is at such a sweet venue. Well, I'm glad I missed it. They didn't mean to rub the salt in the wound there. Yeah, very much looking forward to California. So I spent 100 hours in bed the last week and watched a bunch of movies.

and some new and some that I've seen before. So I just wanted to go over some of this with you and see if you've seen these movies. And if not, we'll just move on. Okay. I've got a few recommendations and de-recommendations as well. Okay. So I've been meaning to watch this for a long time, but my wife doesn't like these type of movies. I want to say these type of movies, I just mean, I guess, quality films.

So I watched a lion. You ever see that? Yes. That's the one where the guy in India was, he got lost on the train. Oh, so good. I cried like five times, probably when I wasn't even supposed to, but what a great movie. Yeah, and it was cool how, at the end, he used Google to map out where he was from. That was amazing.

And it was a true story. Yeah, awesome movie. Yeah, that's always one of those where it's cooler because it's a true story, probably. Yeah. Okay, I watched Spider-Man Homecoming. I don't know if you liked the comic book movies. Holy shit. It was awesome.

Oh, you liked it? Okay. Because it's like the... Did you? I haven't seen it yet. It's like the 12th Spider-Man of the last three years. It was, like, if you liked the Avengers or anything like that, it was totally worth watching. Okay, I'm, I was sold on the comic book movies. I'm kind of, they're starting to run their course for me, but I'll give this one a try if you're, if you say you liked it.

It was really, really good. I haven't watched many of those lately because they're all in their third or fourth incarnation, but. Okay, so those, so those were the two new movies I watched. And then here are some of the, some old movies that I've rewatched. I haven't seen Zoolander in probably 10 years. Yes. Every time that's on, I have to stop. the movie channels it was so it's still so good yes i couldn't even bring myself to watch the sequel because i heard it was terrible so i'm just gonna i'm pretending it never happened i'm with you i will never watch that movie okay okay this one i have never seen so it was new to me but this is a very

old movie and you're gonna laugh what women want is uh yes it is mel gipson and uh helen hunt okay it's like the you know they don't make 90s rom-coms anymore really right it was a great movie. I didn't, I didn't, like, scan the DVR or anything like that or on demand. So, you watched it? You watched what women want on your own? The entire thing. Wow. That's impressive. But wait, have you seen it? I have not seen that one. All right. Let's press pause. Go wash it. All right. You know, seriously, it was good. All right. Um, all right, relatively good.

Right. I rewatched John Wick. You ever see that? Yeah, that's a pretty good action one. Not awesome. Over the top. Yeah. Totally. mindless killing Keanu. Yes, revenge. Okay, I watched The Incredible Hulk with Ed Norton, which is not a great movie, but I've watched

it a lot. You know, I didn't mind that one, because I'm a big Ed Norton fan. I thought that one was pretty good, but... Yeah, like, it's good, but I've watched it like six times at this point. It's not that good. Okay, true. That's fair. And then lastly, I rewatched Bruno, and that still

holds up. Oh, no? No? Tough to watch at certain points, though, right? Uh, yeah, the scene where he's like, wait for this exclusive interview with Harrison Ford. Oh, my God. And it's Harrison Ford just be like, get the fuck away from me. Yeah, there's, it's, it's cringe-worthy, but yeah, it's funny. Uh, okay, so I watched. Oh, wait, hold on.

I'm sorry. I'm almost done, but not, not quite. So the last two episodes of Curb were fucking incredible, like the kerbiest curb episodes. Okay. I'm one behind, but last night we just watched the one where he said, he told the guy that the, he kicked out of the golf club. That was a good, right? Yes.

And what he asked the waiter to describe the face the chef made? It's been getting better. I think every episode has gotten better. So I still have to catch up on the last I deviard for a while because we were finishing up Stranger Things too. Okay. How was it? Which, it was started off good.

The middle was kind of eh. and then the ending was the last one was pretty good. They definitely probably didn't need to make another season, but I'm sure they're making a ton of money, and it was entertaining. I'll wait for the third. I loved the first season. The second one was just entertaining. Got it.

All right. So what are you watching? Favorite movie of the past few months is Baby Driver. Have you seen this? Uh-uh. Yeah, I thought it was really good. It's like a car chase, bank heist kind of movie. Oh, I know which one that is, yeah.

But it was very unique in the way that they did it. And anytime that there's like a couple kind of movies that drag me in every time. Was that Jamie Fox? Jamie Fox was in it. John Hamm was in it as a bad guy, Don Draper. I think Barry liked that movie. It was really good. It was very unique.

I'm a sucker for any type of like bank heist or con man movie. So that one, and the way they did it was very unique. I liked it. And the other one that I didn't like, this is my, is D recommendation a word? Unrecommendation. Have you seen this movie Live By Night with Ben Affleck? No, but I promise. I want. Okay. Not worth it. It was boring. It sounded good on paper. It was a Prohibition

era like gangster movie with Ben Affleck and Sienna Miller and a few other pretty big name actors and it was just boring and not good. So don't see that one. I have one to add to the the recommendation list. Okay. So there's a movie on Netflix called 1922. It's a Stephen King novel that I've never heard of. The movie sucked. Do not see it. Okay. Good to know. Yeah. This is the what to avoid. This is my new thing. As I get older, I want to know recommendations of what not to watch more than what to watch. I tweeted that out the other day anyway. Okay, so I think we probably run out of time for today. Send us your emails. Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com. Any questions, feedback, ways we can make the show better. You can sub-tweet us on Twitter. And anything else

from you today? That's all. All right. Thank you. You know,