Animal Spirits Podcast - May Day (EP.08)

Episode Date: December 13, 2017

On today's show, we discuss Jack Bogle's dire warnings for pension funds, why women make better investors than men, how financial advisors can give good advice when their clients ask about Bitcoin 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

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 Batnick. 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. I'm Michael Batnik, joined by Ben Carlson. On today's show, we're going to talk about Jack Bogle's dire warning for pensions,

gross versus net returns. Is Warren Buffett Barish? and where will Bitcoin futures be trading by the time this episode comes out on Wednesday? So in a recent Bloomberg article, it says that Jack Bogle isn't optimistic about the state of U.S. pensions over the next decade, and he foresees 3% for bonds and 4% from U.S. stocks over the next decade. So if St. Jack is correct, then let's say that a pension is allocating 40% to stocks and 40% to bonds, and the remaining 20% is. in alternatives. In order to get that 8% return that so many pensions are projecting, then the alts will need to provide 26% a year for the next decade to hit that bogey. And in a environment that is kicking off 3% in bonds and 4% for stocks, that's going to be pretty difficult.

What say you? Well, these pensions are obviously really smart and they'll just pick the best private equity managers, venture capital managers. Well, this is, I've written a lot about this because they've made a huge push into these types of funds lately. And it's not just hedge funds, but it's mainly private equity and venture capital. And the reason is because they are, not only are the returns probably going to be lower, but these pensions are so screwed in terms of their funded status. So there was a couple of studies that I wrote about a few years ago, and one of them says that the average funded status of the 50 state pension plans is like 40 to 60%,

meaning that's how many assets they have that would reliably cover their liabilities right now. And the number could be $3 to $5 trillion, basically, that they're underfunded, depending on what sort of discount rates you use and interest rates. So basically these pensions have to take more risk to make up for it because the alternative is, A, they cut government services, B, we pay more taxes, or C, the – where was I going with this? Who cares about to say? Just to take a step back, who are the people mostly in these pension funds? Who is relying on these projections? Well, it's government workers. So if we're talking municipal pension plans, it's government workers who are relying on this for their retirement. And that's what C is, is that they're going to have their pension money cut, so they're not going to be paid as much. So basically to make up for it, instead of lowering their expected returns, which would mean that these municipalities would have to put more money in, they instead invest in higher octane assets, hoping they can somehow get it because it's much harder to put those expectations out there. So they're making a huge push into private equity and venture capital. I'm hoping that that will somehow save the day, which, as Bogle shows, it's, the math doesn't really work

out there for them to do that. So what happens when the rubber meets the road? And like, when is this all, when does this blow up that people anticipate going to take place? Is this a can that can be perpetually kicked down the road? But yeah, it seems like this is more of a process than an event. It's, it's not like a crisis that can happen overnight. So it just means slowly but surely there's going to be cut somewhere. Taxes are going to have to go up. They're going to have to put more money in. And again, And I think it's kind of a screw the grandkids type of situation where someone's going to have to, it's probably going to be a combination of the three things. The pension, you know, retirement income is going to have to cut eventually. They're going to have to put more money in or they're going to raise taxes. And it's not the kind of thing that'll happen overnight. If they would just allocate a few percent to light coin, this problem could be solved tomorrow.

Yes, that's the obvious solution there, cryptocurrencies. But yeah, it's basically kind of the push into private equity is the Hail Mary for them, which they're hoping can solve a problem, which it's just not going to happen. And I mean, in many ways, it's the same thing for retirees that are way lower than they need to be for their retirement savings. You know, what do you do? You need to save more money or you can take more risk. And for a lot of people, I think it's easier for them to take more risk than to save more money. But, you know, we know how that will end usually for people who don't really know what they're doing. So last week we talked about this idea of low returns and how it's kind of crazy that everyone is on the same page in terms of returns in the future are going to be lower. And we did find one write-up that had a little bit more of an optimistic view on the world. And that was from our friend Jeremy Schwartz, who was the director of research at Wisdom Tree. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with Jeremy, listen to his podcast with Barry Red Holtz on, master's in business, which was, what, two weeks ago, was really good and kind of gives you an idea of the background of Wisdom Tree and Jeremy and what he does. But Jeremy works with

Wharton Professor Jeremy Siegel, who has written a lot on the long-term nature of stocks and why they're so important. And they put out a piece on Wisdom Tree blog last week. And they basically said, you know, we're not quite as pessimistic as everyone else. They said, we think, you know, with the price to earnings ratio in the market of 20, do the inverse of that. That gives you, you know, what your yield is going to be on the market. And they said, we think 5% is a pretty good long-term after-inflation return, which I think is much higher than anyone else. That's much lower than historical, which has been six to seven. But they kind of say, you know, it's not quite as bad as people think, and that they think if you have 2% inflation, that gets you

to a 7% nominal yield return, which is lower than the 9% to 10% people are used to, but not quite as dire as some have predicted. Do they give a time horizon on this? Is this next 10 years, or is this like just long-term returns. Yeah, they just, I think they just said long-term return. So I think they're looking over the next decade, you know, two decades. And so they just said, yeah, adjust your expectations, but maybe not as low as people think. And even Bogle said in his piece last week that, you know, returns outside of the U.S. will hopefully be higher. But this kind of brought up a point for both of us that, you know, I think people look at historical returns from any market data provider and they see 9 to 10 percent going back, let's say, 100 years. But the

The problem with those numbers is most people in the market weren't getting 9 to 10% a year because it was basically impossible to invest cheaply back then. It was just cost prohibitive and also something like an index fund or an ETF didn't exist for much of that time period. So even though the data shows that you could get 9% or 10% a year historically, I don't think that actual investors were getting that. And so I wrote a piece a long time ago on gross and net returns just showing that the cost used to be much, much higher in the past. And part of it was you had these huge bid-esque spreads in stocks, and there was a research paper I looked at that where you're paying a couple percent potentially to trade one stock because

the bid-ask spread on your trading is so high in the market. And the same thing with mutual funds where you're paying 10 or 12 percent for a mutual fund load in what was the 50s and 60s. Is that sound about right? Yeah, and not to mention these historical returns from 1999 until those highs were taken out in 1955, nobody was investing. Right, yeah, that's the problem. And people were probably trading individual stocks of their brokers, but it was much harder to be diversified.

And so actually Lawrence Hamtel, who was a friend of the podcast for Fortune Financial, he put a piece up earlier this year. And this was from 1988 from Charles Schwab. And it was Charles Schwab Commission Schedule. And this is even in the late 80s, he calculated that for a $300,000 equal weight portfolio of all 30 stocks in the Dow would have cost you $3,000 in transaction costs, which is basically 1% of the portfolio. And we'll post that schedule on the show notes, but even back then, it was much, much higher

to trade. And so even though gross returns may have been higher in the past on a net basis, they may not be as juicy as they sound. And so I think going forward for investors that can keep their costs low and their behavior costs low, you know, maybe the gross returns won't be as high about on a net basis. I don't think it'll be quite as bad as people think in terms of historically because people just really weren't getting those high returns in the past. So you had a piece, a year ago, trading costs of the newer market averages.

and we'll share this in the show notes, but there's two amazing charts. One is the historical bid-ass spread over time, and you see that basically crashing to zero, and the other is the commission rate, and you'll see an even more pronounced cliff dive to zero. Yeah, and the thing there that did it with the commissions, I guess it was in 1975, and they call it May Day, which is kind of funny, which was on the regulators abolished fixed-rate commissions, and before then, it would cost one or two percent of your portfolio to trade, and basically there was no economies of scale. So if you were trading 10,000 shares or 100,000 shares, it didn't matter.

You were paying a per share price and you were paying a ton. So even for institutional investors that had a lot of money, they weren't getting much of a break. So since the mid-70s, that's when those costs have really sort of come down. And it's funny, it kind of coincides with the rise of Vanguard too, which has done the same thing on mutual funds and ETFs. Yeah, so now you can get access to the 750 largest stocks from a Charles Schwab ETF for three basis points and in some cases that trades commission free. Right. Yeah, which is crazy. So I'm sure people would have killed for that back in the 70s, 80s and even early 90s.

So, yeah, even though the returns may have been higher then, you know, it's on a net basis. People might be okay these days, even though it's not the same and it might not feel the same. Yeah, and to take a glass half empty approach, unfortunately, we do agree with the statement that future returns, at least over the next decade, are not going to be as large as they were over the last couple of decades, at least certainly on a gross basis. a 6040 portfolio, just U.S. only, going back to 1976, the inception of the Barclays aggregate bond index, a 6040 portfolio has averaged 10.7% a year. And amazingly, that 6040 portfolio is up almost 14% this year, which is pretty wild when you think about where we were at the beginning of the year. But anyway, let's assume that bonds do two and a half percent a year over the next decade, which seems reasonable given current yields. In order to hit that bogey of 10.7%

U.S. stocks would need to do over 16% a year. And to put that in perspective, at that rate, the DA would be over $100,000, not dollars, that's just over $100,000 in 10 years, which is pretty remarkable. Okay, so I should buy my Dow $100,000, is that you're telling me? Yep. To get ready. Okay. Now, and the funny thing is, back to our original point, there's two things going on here. If a 6040 portfolio has returned 10.7% a year since the mid-70s, that means, you know, for one, why is their retirement crisis? And part of that is because, first of all, people didn't save enough. And second all, people didn't really earn those types of returns because if they did, they'd all be a ton of millionaires, obviously. Right. And third of all, they didn't know

that it would do 10.7%. Nobody told them that. Right. Yes. Yeah. It seems easy now, which, yeah, but it never is that easy. Okay. So I had, moving on a little bit, I was probably asked five or six different times, of course, about everyone's favorite asset these days in Bitcoin this weekend. But, you know, I'm never, I'm not one of these big people on anecdotal sentiment data to drive what's going on in the markets. But it was funny to me because people aren't really asking yet, you know, how do I invest in this space? Again, this is just, just for me, family members and friends and such. I think people just still don't understand it. And so I just keep having people asking me, you know, what's going on and what is this and should I pay attention? And it is just

kind of crazy. And of course, it continues to be in the news. And the one piece that I saw that was interesting was that the top, you know, this is on Bloomberg, the top 1,000 people who own Bitcoin own 40% of the entire asset, which is pretty crazy. And it also kind of ironic that these people think that it's this big decentralized tool, but yet it's still centralized in terms of just a handful of holdings. Yeah, the onion had a joke about that, that Bitcoin is just like every other currency that's owned by the 1%. Yeah, it's yeah. Right, they nailed it. That was pretty funny. So we spoke about this a few episodes ago. I wondered what a pie chart would look like of Bitcoin owners saying that the zealots will never sell. And this is

just one piece of data, but the Winkovai are out over the weekend and allegedly they're the first Bitcoin billionaires. But they think that prices are going to go up 20 fold from here. So that's the port of my point saying that these zealots, why would they sell at Bitcoin 10 or 15,000 when they legitimately think it's worth 100, 200, 300,000 and beyond? So the top 100 Bitcoin owners control 17% on the market. So prices are really. really being pushed at the margin by the marginal buyer, which is apparently everyone. And if what would happen if the Winkofi went to sell their coins? What price were they able to get out at?

Would they crash the entire market? Yeah, I think that's the thing. The market is still in its infancy and people don't really know. And I think that sort of all hold forever. It sounds great if human nature has been completely eradicated. But I mean, if you have tens of millions of dollars or you've made even a few million dollars and at some point you don't get the edge to take some of that off the table, then I think you're crazy.

Some people will do that, and that'll be interesting to see what will happen or how they will do that. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the reasons why this is so, so interesting is because this, if this is a bubble, this is a little bit different because I made a joke over the weekend when Bitcoin was going down a little bit, that thousands of new Bitcoin investors are losing tens of dollars. And what I meant was that people are not, it's not as if people are putting in hundreds of

thousands of dollars. There's people that are literally putting in $50, $200 into this thing just to have some fun. And there was an article that said, I think this is from the New York Times, only 3% of Coinbase's customers are purchasing $20,000 worth of Bitcoin. So again, you know, for this thing to crash, I mean, obviously it crash is entirely possible. But if somebody puts in, you know, $5,000 and this thing gets cut in half, is that person going to run for the exits? Yeah. I almost equate this to going to the casino. in bringing $500 with you. And what I think really depends on where it goes is when people do lose money, and of course

they will eventually, these things can't keep going up forever, do they go to the ATM again and do they keep putting more money in or do they let it ride and play with house money? So, you know, I have a coin-based account and I feel like once a week they email me and say, oh, by the way, we just raised your credit card limit that you can buy Bitcoin with, which this is one of those bubbles that they say doesn't have any leverage. in it, but I think it's interesting that people can buy it with their credit card. Maybe that's just just ease of access more than anything. But it's, yeah, I, it is fascinating. I wrote about it last week how, you know, I think we have the front row seat to what could be one of the greatest manias

of our time. And it's, I'm just, yes, I'm still enjoying the hell out of it. It's pretty interesting. So it certainly is a mania. In that New York Times article, they said that Coinbase is one of the top 10 downloaded apps in the iTunes store. So it seems like everybody is getting in, but it also, and this is, I'm literally making this up, but it feels like people are being sort of responsible and not putting like their life savings into this. Do you get that sense? Yeah, no, I agree. It does seem like it's, it's probably people that are just playing around and interested in it. And because people just really don't know at this point anymore. It's not, yeah, it's still so early in the game that, that I think the FOMO is there.

But again, it's like you said, a small dollar amount. It's not a huge, it's not a huge deal. Obviously, there's people that are acting like irresponsible maniacs, which they're always, you know, that will always exist. But for the most part, it seems like people are more like, how do I buy, not how much can I buy? Yeah, and of course, as it continues to get more mind share, you know, people are paying attention more. So I got a good one from the reader mailbag, and this is from a financial advisor. He just said, you know, people are continuing to call and ask me about this, you know, as an investment advisor, what do you say when a client calls to ask you about Bitcoin and should I invest? So how do you answer that question? I don't think it's a financial advisor's job to tell somebody what not to do or what to do in this situation.

I think it's their job to guide them responsibly and talk rationally about what their expectations should be going into it. Certainly to be responsible is the most important thing. I would say something like risk no more than 1% of your portfolio. In other words, if you have $100, put $1 in and prepare to see that completely wiped out. Yeah. And I think it really, yeah, I think as an advisor, what you're really doing is trying to help people make better decisions. And so when people come to you and say, listen, I don't understand this, but everyone's talking about it, should I get in? Yeah, your first thing is not to, yes, dive in head first or no, don't.

It's kind of like, how do we make a good decision with this that you can live with? And I think it gets to the point, too, of not offering necessarily a buyer-sell recommendation, but I think you have to always, as a financial advisor, pay attention to what's going on. And so instead of just telling someone, I think it was easier to do this in the past when there wasn't as much access to information. you could just say just ignore the noise trust me I got this do whatever I say so either buy or sell but I mean these days it's easy for people to just it's impossible to ignore the noise

you know we have these little pocket computers in our in our that we can put in our hands and look at this information a hundred times a day if we want and it's just it's just beating us in the face so so I think it's more you have to stay informed about this stuff even if it's not something that you're an expert on you just have to you have to pay attention to it

and have a well thought out you know reasonable answer for why you should or shouldn't do something or how you should approach it, basically. Yeah, we think that if you have an it, it's best that you scratch it. So if you absolutely need to trade stocks because that's just something that you love doing, then do it, but just do it responsibly. Do it with 2% of your portfolio. Don't ask us for any more money.

But imagine telling somebody, no, don't buy Bitcoin at $2,000, you know, a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving and now they wanted to and you talk them out of it, and now it's at $16,000. Right, why should listen to you at 16 if they, right? you were wrong at two, right? Right. Yeah. So, yeah, you just have to, yeah, you tell people, do this, but do it in a responsible way and take 5% of your portfolio and be willing to let it on fire if need be,

or if you make a bunch of money, you know, be responsible with that and rebalance away from it or something, you know, just make good decisions. So it's, there's no easy answer, but I think you do have to be well versed enough to be able to talk about it and not just say, ignore it, don't worry about it. Yep. So there was an older Michael Mobinson piece going around called animating Mr. Market, and basically talked about the wisdom of the crowds and the herd mentality, and he's one of the favorites for both of us. And this is from a couple years ago from 2015, but I shared this with you

because it seems to so well encapsulate what's going on with Bitcoin. And so he had some very good stuff about, you know, how to think about the markets and how to think about the way that crowds interact with them and what it all means. And one of his points that I thought was interesting that we talk about a lot. You know, he talked about this idea of Eugene Fama and potentially efficient markets versus Robert Schiller and markets that are wildly irrational. And these are two guys that had won a Nobel Prize in the same year and people thought it was crazy. But Mobeson said, you know, we have to sort of, you know, take into account both of these guys' teachings and understand both of them that they both have to be right for there

to be any opportunity to the market. So in the long term, markets have to be kind of sort of efficient, but in the short term, they can be wildly inefficient. It's just how do you, what do you do with that. Why don't you just read the quote, Ben? What quote? The very factor that causes market inefficiency, correlated beliefs, makes exploiting that inefficiency difficult. Yes, that's it.

That's the one I shared with you. Maybe I just couldn't find it at the time. Yeah, and then there was one other that is just spot on in terms of what's going on with Bitcoin. Mobeson said, quote, when nearly everyone adopts a point of view, whether it's bullish or bearish, the psychological pull to conform is powerful. This is the main lesson from the Ash experiment, and when that psychological political pull is led by stock prices. Mr. Market is no longer informing you. He is influencing

you. You have come under his sway. End quote. So that Ash experiment he was talking about I actually wrote about in my organizational alpha book. And it's from the 50s. And basically what Ash did, he was a psychology guy. And he brought people into a room and he'd show them three different lines. And two of them were the same. And one of them was a different size. And he'd say, match this one lineup with these other ones. And it was obvious which one matched. But he'd have some people in the room that he planted in there to tell people say the wrong answer. And something like 30% of the time when people would say the wrong answer, the person who was in the room as a test subject would go along with them just because they thought, well, if these people all

think it's that one, it must be that one, even though my own eyes are deceiving me. And it's kind of this thing that you go along to get along with people just because it feels more comfortable to go in the herd, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, when you see things like this, I always think, like, where would I, where would I be? Would I be the independent person who said, wait a minute, you guys are all nuts? Right. Or would I just go along with the crowd? I'm not necessarily sure.

I mean, obviously, we all like to think that we would stand out and say, wait a minute, this is absurd. But when everybody else around you is like, dude, what are you talking about? The lines are exactly the same. Yeah. That plants a seat of doubt. That is very, very powerful. Yeah, and which is the main point of his paper here is that it's, you make money by being a contrarian, but being a contrarian is very, very hard to do. Yep. Some of the things that we've seen over the past few weeks, this is a few weeks back. Brooklyn investor wrote a piece is Buffett Barish. And there is charts going around on Buffett's cash pile growing larger and larger over time. And I felt for this was blind to denominator bias. I'm not thinking about Buffett is not necessarily bearish, but the cash pile that he's got, which is, I don't know, 20 billion. It's a huge number has just kept pace with the float and the liability matching. So,

I thought that was really interesting. It was a, huh, moment for me, and I sort of felt like an idiot after I read it. Right. This is one of those scary things people put up there, like George Soros is buying puts on the market. It's one of those things that, without context, it doesn't really say much. And this is just the way Buffett has built his business, that cash is always going to continue to grow. And, yeah, whatever he's doing is not really representative of what you're doing anyway. But, yeah, that was an interesting one.

Yeah, so the real takeaway is that Buffett is neutral and Munger is bearish. Yes. All right. So we're long war and short Charlie. Is that the deal? Okay. So something we talked about, you know, in one of the earlier shows, we talked about the fact that we've thought women were better investors for a number of reasons. And we'd read research on this before, but we never really, you know, gave to any good backup data for it. And our friend Dan Egan at Betterman actually sent us a piece from their data that actually shows that women are better investors and not just better investors, but better, more behaved as a investors. So why don't you go through some of the stats on this one for me? All right. Quote, female betterment customers changed allocations 20% less frequently and monitored their accounts 45% less frequently than their male counterparts. That is extremely telling, just for that reason alone, you would expect that women outperform men. And then there was another interesting data point in the study, which we will link to in the show notes. Quote, male customers also tended to crank the dial to 100% of stocks at least

twice as often as women. They are also nearly six times. more likely to make massive allocation changes, switching from 100% stocks to 100% bonds or vice versa, end quote. Again, what else needs to be said? Yeah, there was a good one that showed like the average logins per week. And Betterment is really good about taking this data from their website and using it to inform better decisions. And they showed that males logged into their account five times a week, while females did it like two times a week. And as we all know, that checking your account more often can hurt results, which didn't you say in the first episode that you check your account every single day.

So you're probably skewing the average here. Yeah, but now I'm down to just once a morning. Do you really still? Sh, every morning? Okay, that's like your dopamine hit, checking your account value. Keep that between us. Okay, but we'll link to this one, but they have some really good visuals in this just to show that female investors

are just much well better behaved in terms of the things that you would want to be as an investor. and that was interesting to back that thought up with some more data for us. Yeah, and lastly, this is not necessarily brand new, but there was a really interesting takeaway that I hadn't considered. A few weeks ago, I forget who wrote this, I'm sorry, but again, we'll look to this in the show notes. There's an article more indexes than stocks, but what was really interesting was that it spoke

about what countries get into which indexes and what are the implications, both for investors and for those countries. And there's a quote from Howard Marks in there that said, quote, somebody is making very active decisions about which stocks will be in each index or passive product, end quote. And that is worth reading some really interesting takeaways. Ben, what have you been reading watching lately? Oh, sorry. Just to go back to your piece on the fact that there was more indexes and stocks. My favorite takeaway in this was from Michael Santoli at CNBC. He tweeted this a while ago, and he said, worrying that there are more indexes and stocks is a bit like

worrying that there are more books than words, which was, I thought, a very eloquent way of saying that, right? Yep. Okay. Very good. That was a good one. So I was reading recently the book Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmule.

I don't know to say his name. Anyway, he's the guy who started Pixar. And it's a really interesting book because it goes from the beginning when people were just learning about how computer graphic design worked and he was kind of been in the business the whole time and how it sort of came up to now where it is now. And one of the interesting parts of it was the fact that Steve Jobs was actually president and CEO of Pixar for a while. And he had a passage about how it was tough working with jobs. And so I'll read the passage. He said, Pixar could not have survived without Steve,

but more than once in those years, I wasn't sure if we'd survive with him. Steve could be brilliant and inspirational, capable of diving deeply and intelligently into any problem we faced, but he could also be impossible, dismissive, condescending, threatening, even bullying. And so basically, and he also said perhaps of most concern from a management standpoint was the fact that he exhibited so little empathy. So I'm putting my like deep philosophical head on here for a second. And I've read the Steve Jobs biography. I've read the Elon Musk biography. I just got done recently with the book on Amazon. And it's obvious that people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have done so much for innovation and making billions of dollars and in making our lives more convenient in a lot of

ways. But for the most part, as people and as managers, these guys are a-holes. I mean, there's no way to sugarcoat it. And I wonder if these people don't get too much credit for the fact that their business accomplishments kind of overshadow the fact that they don't really treat people all that well. Hold on. Warren, cover yours. Go on, Ben. Okay. Yes. So anyway, that's just my point is that I think people look too closely and try to emulate these people. and instead of looking at, you know, by their accomplishments, instead of looking at the fact that they're kind of bad people in some ways. And without knowing them personally, maybe I can't say that.

But by all accounts, they're kind of jerks in a lot of ways. And I don't think you want to work with these people. Yeah, it sounds like they're terrible to work with and for, and did not necessarily strike the right work-life balance. Yes, and maybe we need people like that. But, again, I don't think it's something that you necessarily have to look up to just because they've made a lot of money. So anyway, I'm taking my philosophical head off now and getting off of my shoebox real quick.

Okay, go read eight books before the day is over. Yes. So I binge watched a show this weekend. I haven't done that in quite some time. I watched Dark, which is thematically very similar to Stranger Things, but I like Dark much better, not to just be a contrarian, but I think the problem with Stranger Things for me is I had the expectations were set just way too high. So Dark is about supernatural things that go on. It's sort of interesting because it's in German, but there's English voiceover.

So the first like two minutes are very confusing. But it starts out a little bit slow, but it's definitely worth sticking with. I give it my highest endorsement. And I finally finished Grant by Turnow and Holy Cow, that is an incredible, incredible author. Highly, highly, highly recommend it. Okay. My only other one, I rewatched the movie Appaloosa, which is from the mid to late 2000s, I think. And it's a western with Ed Harris.

It's called Appaloosa, and it was based on a book by my favorite fiction writer of all time, Robert Parker, and he wrote a detective series called Spencer, which was like 30 or 40 books, written over like four decades, and he passed away a few years ago, but that's by far my favorite fiction author, and the book was turned into a movie a few years ago, and it was with Ed Harris and Vigo Mortensen, and it's just this Western, and these two guys come over into a town and become sheriffs, and the dialogue between them is just great. It's really funny. and good old school Western, so take a look at that one if you are looking for a rewatch. I did not know you were a Western fan. Yeah, I guess I don't know if I'm a Western fan or not, but I like this Western, so I'll put it that way. Sounds good. All right. Catch us. Catch us. Finish us off, Ben. Okay. All right, everyone, thanks for listening.

If you want to email us with a question, feedback, review, Animal SpiritsPod at gmail.com. You can find show notes on my website at a wealth of common sense.com or Michael's website, the irrelevant investor.com. Thanks a lot, and we'll talk to you guys next week.