Animal Spirits Podcast - How to Crush a Job Interview (EP.219)

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

On today's show we discuss the pros and cons of the CFA, tales of Michael's old job interviews, seeing both sides of the NFT boom, why moving money in crypto is still so complex, people working two jobs remotely, why we're taking money out of our homes 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

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Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's wealth management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast. 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. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben.

We're going to start up with an email that we got about some career advice. This student is at their senior year at Cal Poly. They're majoring in financial management. They're planning to take the CFA level one. Curriculum requires us to fulfill a senior project. and the CFA qualifies as his project for my major. That's part of the reason I want to take the test. I also am driven to tie everything together that I've learned in college, especially after COVID, had a negative impact on how much I was learning this last year. I would like to start up my career in corporate finance valuations with the long-term goal

of finding some combination of sustainability and environmental work. With finance, I've done a fair amount of research and asking around to see if the CFA is worth it for my career. And I believe it is, I would just like to get as much input on the test as possible and was seeking your opinion. Before we get into this, I'm constantly amazed at how much more prepared college students are. I knew nothing. I still remember going to my internship program, my senior year, and looking at investment banking jobs. And I did not know what investment banking was. I just heard you could make a lot of money there. And I literally had no idea what it was until a guy in my class explained. Like, here's what investment banking is and what you do. And I'm like, oh, I don't want to do that. we're going to get into my career and my job search in a second.

Here's a little tease. I remember I was sitting down with a guy. We were eating lunch outside. He said, so do you want to be on the sell side or the buy side? And I said, the what side or the what side? Okay. So Jared Dillion kicked the hordets nest this week as he is prone to do from time to time. With the post at Bloomberg, the CFA is a colossal waste of time.

And I would just like to highlight some of the things that he said that I actually very much agree with. And then we'll get to the part that we might take umbrage with. All right, Jared said, in reality, the CFA is just one of many factors that an employer might take into consideration in the hiring process. True. Ben, stop me if you disagree with any of this. The biggest cost associated with the decision to become a CFA as time, it takes up an enormous amount of time consisting of many hundreds and even thousands of hours of studying for each level. and that's if they pass all three exams on the first try, which I did not. I failed level two.

I was not going to pass that test. I was studying in the hospital. My mom died like 10 days later. It was not a good time for me to be taking that test. But I don't know about you, but I knew I was not in the financial services industry when I took level two. I was probably the only person in that room who did not have a job. I was unemployed and I had no experience in the financial services industry.

So yes, I gave up all of my weekends. It was the first time in my life that I actually committed to. something. What was your experience like in terms of time preparation? I think they said average is probably 300 hours per test. Okay. And I, like you, past level one in December. And then this is back in the days when they only offered a level one in December. The other ones are only every May. So it was either take level two six months later or take it a year and a half later. And I'm like, I take it six months later. I don't have as good an excuse as you being in the hospital, but my brother did have his wedding and bachelor party two weeks before the CFA, so I'll blame him for

feeling. Level two was hard. I think that was the hardest one by far. I did not go out for a few years. And I'm not really exaggerating. I did things when I had to, but I was very much off the grid. I was studying for the test, taking it seriously. All right, here's back to Jagger. With pass rates dropping, it's more critical than ever to conduct a thorough cost-benefit

analysis when deciding whether to take the CFA exams. Completely agree. We spoke a few weeks ago that the pass rate, for whatever reason, dropped to like 26% or something gross. So yeah, it's a time commitment, then you should thoroughly consider the cost-benefit analysis. But that's the cost of it, though. The thing is, if you're comparing a CFA to an MBA, the cost of an MBA is vastly higher than a CFA. So if you're someone who's going into portfolio management, a CFA from an investment perspective, an ROI, it's just the time. The money is actually negligible in most cases. It's not that big. Correct. And oftentimes, if you actually have an employer, which I didn't, but if you did, you can get your employer to pay for it. There are some professions within finance that for all

intensive purposes require a CFA. Asset management is one of them. And so is investment research on to a lesser extent investment banking. In those cases, not getting a CFA might be a career limiting move. I had many jobs that I applied for that you had to at least be taking the CFA, have passed a certain level, or had it just to get an interview. They wouldn't look at you if you didn't have that. So that's the biggest part of it, I think, for a lot of people. All right. So far, we're all nodding. We're all in agreement with what Jared is saying. I realized when I was studying for the exams that I wasn't really learning the material. I was just learning how to pass a test. I honestly don't remember a single thing I learned from the CFA program. For me, it was an education

because I had zero baseline. I knew nothing. I remember there was like six equations, free cash flow to the firm, free cash flow to the equity. I mean, I don't remember any of that stuff. I remember the concept barely, but I couldn't apply it today. It's not even the depth of it. It's the whole thing where it's a mile wide and inch deep, that kind of thing. It wasn't deep information. It was just a lot of it. But I found going through my career, 20% of it was stuff that I found helpful at the time that I was using in my career at least. There was a little bit. It wasn't everything obviously because it's very all-encompassing. Okay. His last point, my biggest criticism of the CFA program is that it doesn't necessarily make you a better investor. If there were concrete evidence that

funds managed by CFA charter holders outperform those of non-CFAs, that would be a compelling reason to take the test. But there is none. It's all theater. Can't argue. you. In fact, I vehemently agree. There is no evidence that having the CFA makes you a better investor. Didn't the CFA teach you how to buy Amazon calls on earnings calls? Yeah, I took the CFA and then I bought Zinga puts that were expiring 48 hours later. Okay, now here's what I disagree with. Jared said, the CFA is a colossal waste of time. Three years would be better spent on just about any other pursuit. That is a bold statement. cotton. Here's the thing. It's really easy to say this stuff when you have a career and you're

past that point. But when you're a young person, you're looking at it's hard to get a job and it's hard to get your foot in the door, especially if you're someone who doesn't have a great college on your resume to get into one of those investment banking jobs. Here's what to see if they can offer. It can show an employer that you care about this stuff and want to learn. It shows that you're intelligent enough to do this and put in the hard work. And again, it shows that you care about this stuff and actually want to get better. Here's what I've said about passing the CFA test. You don't need to be a genius, right?

You can put in the time and get there. However, you have to have some level of intelligence. You can't be a dummy. If you are a low intelligent person, not to be mean, but if you don't have intelligence, you could study forever and not pass it. I heard stories of people getting to level three and failing it five times. And at that point, it's like your company should just say, you know, we get it. You're close enough.

By the way, I still have my CFA thing that says I'm a charter holder in the brown poster thing rolled up. I've never taken it out of the thing before. What is with you? What is with you? I was not going to be one of those people that's going to spend $300 to have it framed and hang it above my shoulder to show everyone. I spent years of my life. I'm not embarrassed to admit. I was very proud when I passed it.

Dude, from my background, I was very proud. It was the first thing I ever accomplished in my life. I did this right after I got it for the first couple years. We have a local West Michigan CFA society. I would go to the lunches once a month and they would have speakers come in and a lot of people to come to the area and say, hey, how do I get a job here? And wealth management is not a huge industry in the area. Go to the CFA and talk to people. That's a good way to network, which you never did probably. I'm sure the New York one is probably enormous. He never went to one.

I was way too self-conscious to put myself out there like that. We got another listener email. I think this is a good segue to stick with the CFA and what it could do for you, what it can't do for you. We had a listener email asking us for interview tips. And I was thinking about this. knee-jerk reaction was, listen, I can't tell you how to interview. I was never a good interview. I never got a job because I interviewed well, but I'm on the other side of the table now, and I've conducted many interviews. Maybe interview is a little too formal, but I've had many conversations with people that wanted to work for us. And what I always look for more than anything else, really more than anything else, is personality. Not that I want them to

be funny or anything like that, but do I want to work with this person? Are they motivated? Do they have like enthusiasm. Are they not pretending? I just assume that everybody that we're talking to is intelligent and that they can do the job. But I want to know, like, do I want to work with you? If you slack me and I look down and I see your name, will I be annoyed? That's it. One of the really minor things that helped me interview through the year. And I got this question two or three times in different interviews and jobs that I got was basically, what are some of your favorite books about investing or what are some of your favorite books about finance? And being someone who started reading right after college and just threw myself into reading and

trying to learn, they actually found it helpful because I think it showed people that I cared and I was reading this stuff. I read this book and this book and this book. And that changed so I looked at this. And it shows that you're interested, especially if you're someone like me who just was not a natural salesman, because that's what you're doing in an interview. You're selling yourself, right? You're selling a narrative about yourself that you can translate these skills and help them. But I think just showing that you care about the subject, not that you're just trying to like quote everything you memorized about yourself to them. No one cares about that. Right. So my advice was be yourself, show that you're enthusiastic and eager to learn and work

there, and don't pretend to have the answers to everything because they're going to teach you their way of doing it anyway. Here's the other mistake I made back then is sending out 100 resumes in cover letters that are exactly the same thing to different firms instead of actually doing a little research, getting to understand that firm or that position more and tailoring my resume to that actual position, to understand it better, instead of just hoping someone finds me through this pile of resumes, which, of course, never works, right? Never. So this motivated me to go back through my inbox and relive the horror show that was my

interviewing experience, circa 2010. So just by a little bit of way of background, I think I left the insurance agency in early 2010. And at that point, I mean, I had spent a year there just going and reading and learning. And I wasn't selling. I wasn't cold calling. I was like my library. I just basically went there because I needed a place to go. I was checked out already.

And so for the next 18 months, I lived in the library. I studied for the CFA. I was on Twitter, following, trading, whatever, whatever, and sending out resumes. And so in 2010, pretty much shortly after I left the insurance company, I was thrilled to get an interview at Morgan Stanley. I went into the manager's office. I saw that he had the intelligent investor book on a shelf. I said, oh, I just read that. This is great.

So we were talking, talking, talking about the job, what it is. Then he says, all right, now take out a pen and paper and write down 50 friends of family. I was like, no, I just did that. So you're telling me that this is the same exact role that I was just doing at insurance, except now I'm selling brokerage services. I'm selling stock picking instead of insurance. Nope, no, thank you. So I left there.

I had an interview with Alianz and Pipico in 2010. I've told the story before, so I'll be very brief. I hit it off with one of the people. He brought me into the managing director. So this is for an internal wholesaler. Told him that I was studying for the CFA. He's like, time out. Why are you studying for the CFA?

This is not the role for you. Thank you. Kindly leave. So in that instance, the CFA prevented me from getting a job. Then I had the interview with the Texas when I pitched five stocks. One of them was Rio Tinto because they were making the gold medals at the Olympics. So Rio Tinto, I think is down 80% since I pitched that, bad pitch. But it turns out, Ben, that I just, I googled that person because I was going through my inbox.

I was like, I wonder what he's up to. Turns out, he follows me on Twitter. How about that? Nice. The guy's now in fintech, which is interesting. That comes full circle. I went into Fidelity because I knew somebody that worked there. And this was the email that I sent to the person who I think told me to go to Fidelity.

I wrote, it was a good dialogue, but she said the position wouldn't stimulate me enough and that she is looking to build a team and somebody who was focused on being a client representative. Ironic that I pursued the CFA thinking it would help, in this case, it hurt. How about that? I wrote that, Ben, in 2010. Then I went to E-Trade. And actually, I was hired. I never told you the story.

This is a good one. I was hired by E-Trade. The guy said he would take a chance on me. They were going to put you in the commercial with the babies, right? Dude, I was doing backflips. I was so, so, so happy. And then they did a credit check. on me, and there was one dig in my credit report, because when I got kicked out of Indiana,

one of my old roommates, unbeknownst to me, stopped paying his rent. So I had a ding on my credit report. How crazy is that? So they didn't hire me because they were trying to figure out what my, they deal with my credit situation. In the interim, the guy that hired me left, and I couldn't get an interview with the new hiring manager. I was crushed.

I was absolutely devastated. Turns out, the guy that hired me at E-Trade, who then subsequently left, left to go to Goldman Sachs. In 2013, he emailed me. I said, wait a minute, I know this name. It was a guy that hired me. He came in to pitch Josh and I, and I said, remember me, asshole? Remember me? You know what you did to me? He did not remember me. Then I went into J.P. Morgan, Ben. I went into a branch to be like a teller. This is the email that I sent to the guy. Vinny, I want to thank you for the opportunity you gave me today to share a little bit about myself with you. I was impressed with your staff, and I liked what I saw from the body language of your employees.

An opportunity to be part of a strong team is very exciting. Have a great rest of your week, and thank you again for your time. A body language doctor. Borderline creepy. He did not hire me. Okay. At this point, I'm absolutely flailing. I took an interview with some mutual fund company in San Antonio. I told him I was willing to move to San Antonio to sell mutual funds. And lastly, this is the Kudegra, the Bermuda Monetary Authority. Doing what? I wanted to be a central banker. I was like, I don't know.

I might as well go sell place warm. All right. For real, for real, this is the last one. I don't remember where this was. This one is embarrassing. It says, I am applying for an entry-level position. I am passionate about the market. Ben, you might have to read this.

Okay. I'm passionate about the market, and I am seeking an opportunity to be part of it. of a strong, cohesive team. I'm an independent thinker and very confident in my assertion. That being said, I'm not too proud that I can't admit when I am wrong. Recently, I told my friend that the Atlanta Hawks would match up better against a Cleveland Cavaliers than the Orlando Magic would. After the magic took a 25-point lead in the first half of game one, I called him to attract

my statement. I think this information about me is very relevant when it comes to being a player in the market. I'm open-minded. See, I can change my mind. That's what I was going for. I am perfect for this field. Very coachable. I know what it means to pay your dues.

Yeah, we got to be. Do you think this person saw this email I was like to his colleagues? How you got to read what this idiot just sent me? This is the Michael Scott. Tell me your biggest weaknesses. I care too much and I try too hard. So anyway, as you can see, I had a rough time.

I had no guidance. I had no idea what I was doing. I had nobody to lean on. This is why when they asked you, though, where do you see yourself in five years? you didn't know what to say hosting a podcast and writing a blog. That's why that's the worst interview question. Yeah, that was not on my radar. All right. So we've talked about you wondering why Coinbase is so tied to crypto. They just gave the green light to purchase more than

$500 million worth of crypto on its balance sheet. And they said going forward, they're going to invest 10% of all future profits in crypto. And their CEO, Brian Armstrong said he expects this percentage to grow over time. So this is where we get the correlation with crypto and Coinbase. Right? No? You're still not buying. this. Come on, you just talked about in your interview, you're willing to be proven wrong and admit it. This is like the hawks. No, dude, I already said I was wrong about Coinbase being tied to crypto. I didn't think it was going to happen. Clearly, it has. I don't think it'll hold forever, but it has. But the reason why it's tied to crypto, we just found this out that

they're buying crypto. So that was after the fact. But I'm saying it's going to be even more strongly correlated now because they're going to continue buying it on their balance sheet. We'll say. Listen, I wish that I had the conviction of Michael Sailing. In Q3, they purchased 3,907 Bitcoins, $177 million in cash, an average price of $45,000 of Bitcoin. Unreal. It is impressive. Speaking of Coinbase, this is why I was making the Robin Hood Coinbase comparisons that Robin Hood is going to get paid into crypto. That was the whole reason I was bullish on them in the first place.

Came public at 38, now they're back at 48, so they've dropped a little bit. They're doing okay. 60% of Robin Hood funded accounts traded crypto in the first quarter. It was 51% of revenue. Unreal. There's $23 billion on the platform in crypto, which out of, what, $80 billion? $60% of funded accounts to trade crypto. My first thought was like, wow, that's crazy, but is it crazy?

Wouldn't you think that like all of their accounts are trading crypto at this point? This is a pivot that they've made. It started out with just stock trading. John Street Capital did a whole threat about them. They made $147 million from Doge. It was 62% of their overall crypto revenue and 26% of total revenue. That's wild. Fintech Frank, follow Fintech Frank.

That guy's great. He tweeted that Rob Hood is trying to build out a wallet. Please, I would love to move my crypto off of Robin Hood. That's the problem, that they've made it hard to move it off of there. Well, you can't. It's not hard, you can't. All right, so let's talk about NFT mania and where to even begin. Here's a good place, the title of your post from yesterday, right?

I don't get it, basically. Here's the thing. I want to do both sides on this, okay, because I feel like, if you're a normal person or your person in finance, you go, this is ridiculous. This doesn't make sense. And if you're a person in tech, you have to say, no, no, no, I've read Sapiens. I understand status symbols. So I would like to play both sides of this because I understand both lines of thinking here. I'm 100% with you. I understand the status symbol thing. And part of the reason for that is there's so much money. Well, can you just double click on the status symbol? Like,

what's the flex here? The weird thing is, is like, I would almost prefer if you're going to do a status symbol thing, buy a Lambo or a Ferrari. Because at least in that, instance, instead of buying a rock, you are helping people are manufacturing that and fixing it. And something comes out of that. And I know you know this, but that is exactly the flex. Right. I don't even need that, right? That there's zero utility, right? You can't do anything with it. It's a picture of a rock and it's a picture of a fake rock. And if it goes to zero, who cares? What's a difference? That's the flex. This is the Joker, Heath Ledger, lighting the money on fire. Right. He gets this pile of money and he lights on fire just to show that he can. He doesn't care.

See, I don't even want to get into the art angle because the art stuff is kind of cool that you can put a smart contract in here and make 10% it. Like, that stuff is cool. So it's really hard to block out all of the speculation, right, and focus on the technology. But Patrick O'Shaunice tweeted that digital art studio. Come on, that is super cool. You basically enter an art studio. You walk around, you click on it.

There's art of the wall and it's the NFTR. That stuff is pretty neat. I'm sorry, but just like I never got a Facebook account, I'm out on the Metaverse. That does nothing for me. I get if people want to pretend that they like what. through a digital gallery. Dude, you don't have to be in. It doesn't care if you're in or not.

Oh, stop the Metaverse. Ben Carlson's not in. Stop it. I'm just putting it out. I'm out in the Metaverse. It's never going to make sense to me. Like, I stopped playing video games after Nintendo 64. So that's why I'm just not of that mentality.

Not against anyone who does. So the internet has totally changed this. And here's why, because we all know everything now. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago, the Mona Lisa, how it was painted by DaVinci in 1507. And it didn't become the most famous painting in the world until the early 1900s when it was stolen by a guy who worked at the local. Louvre, so it had to have a story attached to it. Now that we understand this whole storytelling

thing, the tech industry is so smart and things move so fast, they know this. So I'm just saying they're trying to force this to happen. And if you have enough money and enough people that believe, it can happen because everything spread so fast on social media. So it takes 400 years for the Mona Lisa to become famous. And now they're trying to pretend like they're creating the Mona Lisa overnight and you sell the Mona Lisa seven hours later after you buy it. And the Mona Lisa didn't have social media, is my point. So the fact that this stuff happens so fast, These rocks can go from being worth nothing to $600,000 three weeks later. The people who are trying to poo-poo this don't understand how much the internet has changed

the game like forever. Everything is going to be so much faster. But the flip side, so much of this stuff is going to go out of favor even faster, too, because there's always going to be something new, right? Because we go from penguins to crypto punks to Pokemon, whatever. The cycles are so much faster. And obviously, isn't one of the best investment theses of the next two to three decades is just rich people have way too much money. And don't bet against rich people with a lot of money.

This was interesting. Jared Dicker was on CNBC yesterday, actually, talking about what's going on. He tweeted crypto wallets will change how brands think about targeting customers online. Fully public purchase history. Users willingness to spend money online. Connect physical and digital purchases seamlessly. It makes cookie targeting seem ancient. So I guess some people are saying so much for a decentralization. But good point. Paki wrote a piece on Salana this week. And people say, like, well, what's the use case? Where's the beef? Well, the financial system is like, what, 25% of the economy? It's huge. And I'm not saying that all of this stuff is going to replace it, but certainly that's what they're trying to do. So as an example, Cryptopunks, 10,000 characters. You see everybody's avatar is now one of these. The lowest price possible, the lowest asking price,

is $240,000. And on Monday morning, Visa tweeted, that they bought a crypto punk. Okay, so Visa stepping into buy one of these is the meme. How do you do, fellow kids? Do you think that these bigger companies getting into this stuff is a sign that they're scared? Do you think Visa is nervous? I know that's a huge company. You don't think Visa is getting a little nervous at all about this defy stuff at all,

just thinking like if this stuff really does catch on, we could be out of luck. I don't know their motivations. I would suspect that they think that there's an opportunity. I'm sorry. I think that was a thirsty move on Visa's part. That's where I land on this. Well, some people are saying that's cheap advertising. What do they spend on that crypto punk, 150 grand, whatever it was? All right. So I got involved. I bought, I didn't want to say what it is because I don't want people to follow me and do something stupid. I bought a rock as a joke. It's not even the rock. The fake ones. It was a knockoff of them. If I would have done this, I would have felt like punching myself in the face. Come on. Did you feel that a little bit? Not at all. Because I wanted to see what the process of buying it was like. So I can't remember how much I explained last week, but I was able to get back into my Coinbase account, transfer money into a meta mask.

gas fees. You explaining this process to me, it's ridiculous. It's comedy. Like how difficult it. Listen, not that I'm like so tech savvy, but I'm not a ludite. Like I should be able to do this. And I had a lot of difficulty transferring and swapping and this and that and moving. And anyway, the point is gas fees are still so expensive. So this fake rock, it's a copy of a copy. This fake rock was 0.05 ether, which was about 150 bucks. How much were the gas fees? $100. You're kidding me. a 95% fee. What in the world is going on? So I know that there's times where the gas fee fluctuates.

Like, I don't know when the gas fees are low. Do I have to wake up at 3 a.m. to buy this stupid thing? This is why inequality in crypto is going to be 10 times worse than anywhere else in the economy because you need to actually already have a lot of crypto wealth to be able to navigate this stuff and understand it and pay the fees and get ahead of this stuff. So this is why the people at the top are just going to keep compounding wealth at an insanely high rate when stuff works. because the people who don't have any yet in there are not going to be able to get involved at all.

So the crypto wealth inequality is just going to be massive, probably get worse from here. I know we're spending a lot of time on here, but sorry, I can't not talk about this stuff. I forget who tweeted this. Somebody from Fidelity, I'm drawing a blank on his name, tweeted two excellent charts showing Bitcoin tourists who got wiped out in the correction. And what he means by that is, if you held Bitcoin for under three months, because now you could look through and see this on the chain, it was as high as 29% in March when prices were approaching their peak at $60,000. Complete washout. Now, only 17% of crypto is held by Cryptotaurus.

Conversely, hodlers, and this is real holders, people that have held for 10 years. So people that held since 2011, that has just steadily gone up over time. And these are never sellers, these people in this chart. Yeah, but that shows why the washout happen, though. The people that got in late. It's like last in first out. Every time. And they probably leveraged.

And yeah, that's a good chart. I can't believe you bought one of these things. You bought a fake rock on the internet. I forgot about this. The reason why I did this in the first place was because I wanted to buy a crypto punk with Paki. And I did not get it in time. They collectively bought it. So now there's fractionalized cryptopunks because, of course, there is.

So last week I created a Gemini account. That takes four days for the funds to settle, all right? Because I couldn't get into my Coinbase account because I did have my Google Authenticator. So in the meantime, I was working on getting access to my Coinbase account. So that index coop thing, remember the Defy Index? So I bought money in that. And that's called Rapt Ethereum. So I tried swapping my Rapt Ethereum that I have an index coop for Ethereum. But you need Ethereum in your wallet to pay the gas fees. Okay. So then I tried buying Ethereum in Metamask in my Metamask wallet directly. You can't do that in New York State. Then there's an

Apple Pay option. I hit that. It says doesn't work. So they're making it really difficult. Maybe I'm an idiot, and I'm sure I am in many ways, but they're not making it easy. That's why the company that figures out how to make it easy is going to be a trillion-dollar company. The company that says, just push a button and we make this happen for you and the fees are low, that's a huge company. The difficulty almost makes me bullish that there's so much activity going on despite how difficult it is because it's such a small number of people that are playing around

in this space. It's tiny. But anyway, yes, listen, the NFT mania, the bored apes and the gutter cats and the penguins and art and the top shot, who knows where this is going. I'm sure there will be washouts all over the place. People will lose money, but for right now, it's, man, it's hard to look away. So trillions of dollars is a lot of money that oftentimes, most times needs context to put that into perspective.

John Street Capital again tweeted the U.S. government is spending $875 million an hour in 2021. You know, if you stacked that in one dollar bills, it'd reach the moon in, is that this kind of stat? That could go into the metaverse and back. Yeah, but that's a numerator thing, though. The denominator is we have a $22 trillion economy. How's that? Okay, fair. That's a denominator blindness stat. 875 million dollars an hour. It's a lot of cake. Every year we're producing $22 trillion in goods and services. Okay. Economic activity. Point taken. Percentive retailers who are seeing vendors raise prices. 93. Okay. So people are guessing at this, though. No, this is the percentage of retailers. There's not a consumer survey. Oh, oh, stores. Okay. I got to

Okay. That's not a consumer survey. I was just going to say, like, how many people actually know that the prices they're paying are rising? Depends on what? Everyone feels gas prices rising. Yeah, gas and grocery, maybe. Ben, are you about to try and X everything? No, no, no, no. No, I'm just saying I don't think enough people pay attention to the money that they spend to know that it's putting a dent in their pocketbook. Like, what percentage of Americans actually have a budget? 15% if you had to guess. Probably lessen that. This is a fake story. An interesting story, but a fake story. And when I say fake, I mean, like, it's real, but it's greatly exaggerated. So there was an article in the journal that people are working multiple jobs. There's a site called overemployed.com.

It's totally nuts. People are literally at home working two jobs and they're signing into a Zoom and they're getting confused. They think they're talking to one employer. They're talking to a different employer. How is this any different though than like you hear the stories of a single mom working a shift at the diner and then working two jobs? How is that any different? I see people trying to like poo-poo this like, oh, this is crap. These people working two jobs. If they can do it, who cares? No, I think that's fair. You know why? Because when you're physically at a diner, you don't bring that work home with you. But if you're working a job that might require, not might, it probably requires your undivided attention. Certain jobs do. Well, but if you're

able to get the stuff done and you're productive, who cares? That's all I'm saying. I don't care. Listen, if Jack could run square and Twitter, then whatever. You mean, if Jack can run square and Twitter kind of happens. There's 2,300 people on their Discord server. That's like one out of every 55,000 workers. I mean, it's a good story, but there's nothing really there. By the way, the people who are working two tech jobs right now probably own an NFT. Probably a lot of overlap there. And they know how to transfer their MetaMask wallet, and you don't. Let me ask you this. Would you try coffee in the Metaverse?

I was being shamed again this weekend by some friends asking why. I won't do it. It's just not going to happen. I don't like hot beverages. Oh, okay. Why didn't you ever say that? That makes perfect sense. Yeah, I just don't like hot beverages. Even like hot chocolate. It's good, but it's not like hot beverages. Makes sense. Well, there's only two hot beverages. There's coffee and there's hot chocolate. But then people will say, why don't you drink ice coffee? And then, well, I just don't like coffee. So it's both. All right, we spoke about this a few weeks ago, but now we have data. The TLDR is unemployment benefits are not to blame for the labor shortage. I know this sounds hard to believe because certainly in some cases, there's no

doubt. There is no doubt that in some cases it is causing a worker shortage. But they studied the data. What they found was looking at 18,000 anonymized banking records from low income workers who were receiving unemployment benefits in late April. Okay. So this is not a survey. So they studied states that ended the unemployment benefits. And what they found was that in states that cut off benefits, about 26% of people in the study were working in early August compared with about 22% of people in states that continue the benefits. So the researchers had data for 19 states that ended the programs. They found that about 1.1 million people lost benefits because of the cutoff and that only about 145,000 of them found jobs. This is surprising to me. I would not

believe this. So the people who are having their unemployment insurance bump come off are not rushing out to find jobs right afterwards. Yeah. So I don't know if that's because they're good right now that they were able to squar all the way the cash and that they will turn to the labor market, or that they want jobs and can't find them. It has to be the former, because there are jobs. If they want jobs, there's plenty of jobs. There's actually a record amount that jobs open. All right. Survey of the week that I don't believe, 74% of homeowners haven't refinanced. There's no way that's true. That means one and four refinanced. It's got to be way higher than that. Seriously? You think? I don't know. Maybe because enough new people have bought

homes that it doesn't make sense in recent years. I would think it would be higher than that. How is this for a survey? Fifty nine percent of Gen Z investors have traded money while inebriated. Do we believe that? Are they including like caffeine and being inebriated? There's no way. Okay. You wrote a piece about why you took money out of your house and you went from a 15-year mortgage to a 30-year.

And I'm in the process doing the same. By the way, they told me because of the backlog on applications, it's going to be a 45 to 60-day process to get to close. You were probably, what, 120-day? Yeah, dude, it's a 450-day process. So I wrote about this. You can read it. The thinking was it just gives me more flexibility.

My house went up in value. I have all this equity just sitting there. Why not take some of it? I didn't take all of it. I took some of it. It reduces my minimum payment by 30%. So it gives me flexibility. I'm going to continue to pay what I'm paying now because if I reduce my payment by 30%

to my minimum, that's going to cost me an extra like $250,000 in interest and principles, something like that. So by continuing to pay the same thing that I am now, it's going to cost me an extra, I forget what the exact numbers are, $70,000 in interest if I pay this over the course of the remaining years of my mortgage. But I might move. I don't know. And there's no right answer for everyone.

This is obviously a risky strategy, right? I understand people... Well, it's not necessarily risky, but... No, it is risky. If you keep doing this and you keep blowing the money and you never build any equity in your house and that's your biggest asset, that's the risk. Yeah, well, it depends how financially sound you.

But my way of thinking of this, when is that money going to matter to you more? If you're a financially sound person, now when you're young and you have kids in daycare and you have a lot more costs on your plate or at 65 when you're retiring, When is that money going to matter to you more? When is it going to be more impactful to your budget?

Now, for sure. Well, now I'm trying to buy JPEGs. I need the money. Yes, you've got to buy more pet rocks. So you're doing the same. Yeah, and I'm going to go from 50 to 30. I'll probably save well over $1,000 a month. And I'm going to actually not keep paying that amount.

I'm going to do something else with the money. Other places I can put it. Okay, fine. But just to be very clear, your monthly payment is going to go down. Yes. You're not actually saving money. You will end up paying more interest because of that. Yeah, I'm saving money now on the payment.

Right. But to your earlier point, the money now is more important to us. Listen, we just changed our minds on this in 15 months or something. So we could change your minds again, like you on the Hawks. You know, you changed your mind in the Atlanta Hawks, being able to stay with the Cavaliers. Incredibly open-minded. Yeah. Who would have thought the Orlando Magic could have beat the Cavs? But credit to you, you changed your mind. I think I may never pay my mortgage off. I think that too. I'm going to be at 50% equity right now. That's like where my loan to value is, 50%. Wait, that's incredibly high. Good for you. Yeah. Like you, a lot of it is because the house went up in value so much. Right. Right. And because when I paid down my first house so much, I use it as a big down payment for the second house. So I may just keep it there. Somebody tweets me, I'm getting big 2000 and 2007 vibes. Right. Except the differences this time people are doing it who have way better finances and credit scores and like they're doing it and they're paying cash for these houses. And yeah, so this is not the same thing. This is this is totally different. I guess the question that, a lot of people have is, okay, well, what are you doing with the money? Well, I still have two kids in daycare. So, like, I'm using this as a cushion. And then when they drop off, then I'm going to invest. I save an investment. My savings rate went up this year. I'm going to save more money. I'm going to put it in the market. How's that? Well, if the market would just pull back 5%, just

give me that fat much. I'm just waiting for an 85% depression. That's all. And then I'll put it to work. Right. Same. Oh, this is interesting. Why is Spotify buying back stock? I didn't even know this until you put this story here. I don't even pay attention. I'm a shareholder. I had no idea. I don't pay attention to this stuff. There you go. Your piece of the pie is getting bigger. They authorized to buy back a billion dollars worth of shares. That is surprising when you'd think they'd be using that to just keep buying different podcasts. Let me tell you this. Quick story. A week or two ago, I was with somebody, I'll tell you exactly when it was. This was in early August. And they were asking about my job. And so we're talking. And they're like really pressing me on stocks. I'm like,

listen, man, I really don't give stock advice. I play and I trade sometimes, whatever. I'm like, because listen, I could tell you a stock right now and then if the market falls apart, I don't want you to be mad at me. He's like, well, what's one stock that looks good? Also, like, are you, if a stock falls, you're going to put more money in or are you going to sell? Like that, that's why it's impossible to give individual stock advice. Yeah, it's just, I hate doing this. So anyway, it was early August and I said, all right, fine. You know what looks good right now? Assuming the market doesn't fall apart, Zoom. Zoom looks pretty good right now. What do you think happened since? Got crushed. The market did not fall apart, but Zoom did.

In my defense, look at Zoom on August 4th, okay? August 4th was a Wednesday. On August 7th, I saw this person, and I said, Zoom looks good. It's 15% since then. That's a beautiful looking chart, and then it just gets a straight. It was. It was textbook. Listen, this is why you don't talk about stocks.

By the way, that's my favorite thing that CMTs say, textbook. Then it goes the other way and you go, yeah, but it was textbook. I mean, come on. Now, Ben, let me ask you this. Do you think this person remembered all the hedging and all the, no, no, no, I don't do this? Of course not. He didn't remember that I don't like talking about stocks. He remembered this idiot. The one stock he told me is down 15%. And the market just hit its 50th all-time high of the year. All right, listen, we're going to skip listener questions because for your listening pleasure. On Monday, we've got a whole episode about it. We hit a lot of them. So, yeah, keep sending them, but we hit a lot of listener questions. We'll try to do those more.

All right. Let's do some recommendations. I'm done with nonfiction books for a while. I can't do it. I think the pandemic stopped me of this. So think about this. In the past year, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, and Daniel Kahneman all wrote a book. I didn't read any of them, and I don't think I will. And if you'd have told me that 10 years ago, I would have said, you're crazy. Of course, I'll read these. I'm going to write a blog post about all of them. I got noise, the common book, I read 50 pages, and I was like, this is good, but I don't feel like reading it anymore. I listened to the Malcolm Gladwell podcast, his newest one, which kind of quality felt. He did like a three-part on The Little Mermaid that was just, yeah, it was not his best work.

A book? No, a podcast, his new podcast season. I finally caught up on it. I love the Little Mermaid. Love it. He's trying to cancel The Little Mermaid, basically. It was very bizarre. Wait a minute.

Yes, you got to listen. His podcast, this season was not very much. very good, and I still listen to it. But I'm just saying, so a nonfiction book, I cannot get into them. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's podcasts, and I heard all these guys on interviews. I can't do it. So I've been on a big sci-fi kick. So I finished recursion, which is a good role into reminiscence that new Hugh Jackman movie. Did you watch it? Okay, so. If you tell me it's any good, I'm in. No, you have to watch. You're going to like it. It's the kind of movie that, it felt like an action movie from the 90s where the idea was cool, the graphics were

cool. Hugh Jackman way overacted. There was a, One fight scene went on like seven minutes too long. The story was like jumping all over the place and I still think you will be entertained. It sounds to me like you're describing the perfect movie. Yeah. I think it felt like a 90s movie in that if you want to nitpick it to death, you could. And if you're a nitpicky person, don't watch it. But if you just want to turn your brain off for a couple hours for an action movie, it's okay.

It's like a 6.0, 5-9. I might watch it tonight. You should watch it. So it was all about memories and it stole some, I thought some ideas from this recursion book by Blake Crouch and I went right from his book Recursion, which really kind of melted my brain at the end of it. And I went into his new book, Dark Matter. And this guy is really good. So I've been on a big sci-fi kick lately. Okay. Should I follow you into recursion? Yeah, I think it felt like a Christopher Nolan book. It was good. So nine perfect strangers on Hulu. Have you heard of this?

No. It has some elements of White Lotus in that it's a felt like a COVID-related story that they put together because they put these 10 people in a wellness center in the middle of nowhere. It's got a Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Bobby Cannavale, all these actors that you know. What happened to him, Bobby Say? Yeah, I kind of like him. So it's that kind of show where it's not nearly as funny or as well done as the White Lotus, but they released the first three episodes and I'm intrigued enough to keep watching. Like there's some other element going on, but it's more these people working on themselves than it is dark comedy like White Lotus. But here's the thing. there's some jogging in the show.

What does that mean? Physical jogging? Yes, they show people jogging. Is it Michael Shannon? No, it's Nicole Kidman. Because you saw Michael Shannon jogging in the park. Did you not? Central Park?

I saw them, yeah. Had to turn around and do a double take. Why are actors and actresses so bad at jogging? Is it because they're all like drama dorks and they don't have any athletic ability? Yes. Or is it because they're trying to act like joggers? Because someone jogging in a movie or TV show never looks natural. They always look like robots.

Why do these people not know how to jog correctly? Have you noticed this? Take a look. Next time you see people jogging and that's all I got. You know, I got to be honest, like my first reaction when I saw that Patrick O'Shaughnessy had DOMA on the podcast to talk about title insurance, I felt mad is not the right word, but I'm a little disappointed. I was like, hey, what the hell? That's my lane. Why aren't you on my podcast? Anyway, be that as it may. It was excellent. I love Patrick and I love his podcast, and you should definitely listen to it. Still can't believe I paid title insurance three times in the same house in under two and a half years. It's unbelievable. If you're trying to learn and get up to speed on what the heck is going on with Ethereum and all this sort of stuff that seems really far out there, Acquire, did a podcast, all on Ethereum.

Our friend Packy made a guest appearance. Recommend that. Here was my soapbox thing for smart contracts. I said the other day. If you're going to spend six figures on an NFT of a rock, I would like you to give an equal amount to charity. The virtue signal is strong. Yes.

I'm only kidding. No, it was very much virtue signaling. But that's where I'm just saying. And there actually were a number of replies to me that a lot of places are doing that where they're either donating the money. And so I thought that was nice. Or they're building it in where a certain percentage of the proceeds do go to a charity. I forgot to mention one more thing. So I tried to list that NFT just to see what the selling process is like. And this is a good business. Man, Opency is crushing it. Opency takes 2.5%. I mean. And this is after your $100 gas fees? Did they do $100 billion in volume? Is that possible last month or in August? August, 100 billion, is that possible? Obviously, if something goes up 300 X, no one cares about 2.5% in fees. Right. The person that created this dumb rock takes a 5% cut, and then you have to pay the gas fees, I think, even to list it. I mean, the whole thing is just, there's a lot.

Okay. Sticking with sci-fi and the Metaverse, it's been a long time since I watched Blade Runner, like a long time. I've actually never seen it. I probably saw it when I was like 10. And for those of you who haven't seen it, I'm not going to tell you to go watch it. Apparently, I was talking to Jeffrey Patak about this. Apparently, there's like several versions. And I had no idea. It bombed in the box office. Really Scott. It bombed. And it became a cult classic. I had no idea that it was a cult classic. I tried to watch the sequel and I couldn't make it through all the way through. I made it halfway through. Okay. I'll get to that in a minute. So the version that I saw had Harrison Ford narrating it, which totally killed the vibe. But apparently they did that after

the fact because it was too confusing for the audience. So it's sort of like ex machina. I guess it's in the same genre of ex machina, but this is like the original, in this sense that it's like a question of humanity and robots and who's a robot and who's not and where the line is. So it definitely felt dated. And listen, it was because in 1982, it takes place in 2019. Right. So some of it clearly I struggled with. So it was okay. I didn't hate it, but... Would I like it or not? No, I'm not going to tell you to watch it. Bladewater 2049. Oh, I almost forgot. That was a Denisville movie. Nailed it. That was a good movie. I can't believe it was like two hours and 40 minutes. It did not feel that long. I felt like it dragged to me. That's why I shrewed it off. Okay, fair enough. But that I

very much enjoyed. If you're a sci-fi person, you probably already saw it. Like, I'm not kind of recommend it if you're not into that sort of thing. But I really like that movie. By the way, I don't want any hate me on reminiscence because it's probably approaching tomorrow warland. What was that one? Tomorrow? Dude, come on. Don't apologize. You hedged. You said it was a six. Yeah. You don't need to apologize. It's probably a bad movie that I will love, and I'm okay with that. Actually, I'm great with that. What do we learn?

I'm incredibly open-minded, not to brag. Yes, you are. The hawk. I can't believe you said that. The funny thing is, that was a three-paragraph cover letter, and you somehow managed to talk about the hawks and the calves and the magic. The hawks, calves, and the magic. And this is to someone in Bermuda, they don't know what the NBA is, probably? No, I don't think that was Bermuda.

Okay. Whatever. Let's just say it didn't go well for me. All right. Check us out on Monday. We have listener questions that if we missed last Monday, we had Rocket Dollar on self-directed IRAs. AnimalSpherespot at gmail.com.