Animal Spirits Podcast - Money Makes Money (EP.76)

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

On this week's show we discuss the retirement crisis or lack thereof, average savings rates by generation, the biggest expense super savers cut back on, the Barron's cover curse, how much longer the bull market can last, why dividends aren't as important to the stock market anymore, the cost of borrowing heavily shorted stocks, what happened to the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, retirement accounts 50 years from now and much more. Follow Animal Spirits on Instagram @AnimalSpiritsPod Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Animal Spirits, the podcast that takes a completely different look at markets and investing, hosted by Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson, two guys who study the markets as a passion and invest for all the right reasons. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's wealth management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritthold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities

discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. There were two articles about retirement this weekend taking the exact opposite views. One was some married childs over at Barron's. The title was Americans. No, they're not ready for retirement, but it's worse than they think. And over in the Wall Street Journal, somebody wrote the phony retirement crisis. Contrary to the alarms, household savings are growing, but government plans are underfunded. Who to believe, Ben? The Wall Street Journal one was an opinion piece, and it had sort of a political bent to it, so I'm going to say that is probably one not to believe, because typically when you put politics into these things, that, I mean, he used some stats. There were some stats in

here. Hold on. Some survey stats. Yes, there were surveys. That's the problem. And there were really no balances. It was more talking about the savings rate. So his whole point was actually just that people who are retired and older are doing far better off than people who are younger, which I don't know if that really makes a great case here. But there were some points here to kind of what we talked about a couple weeks ago about, the expectations gap that things for retirees aren't nearly as bad as people make them out to be. But I didn't really buy the whole argument that there aren't any people out there that are going to be suffering in retirement. The whole point of this article was that, well, if you think that there's a retirement crisis, well, then

ostensibly you believe the solution is that government should get involved. But look at the government's retirement solutions because all pension government pensions are underfunded. So look how that's worked out. Yes, this is a public versus private thing. And going back to the non-solution we find every time with these things, I really don't know what the solution would be other than forcing, literally forcing people to save for retirement in the Australia plan way. I just, otherwise, I don't see it. So in the other one from Barron's, she took a little more of a dower look, and that's probably closer.

Again, this was a survey of 1,000 people, so take it for what it's worth. But they said two-thirds of baby boomers, gen X, and millennial people don't have enough to live comfortably in retirement unless they have to remain frugal, which is kind of going to be the point. People are going to have to really ratchet down their lifestyle, I think. Yeah, I forget where I was reading somewhere like one and eight Americans have nothing saved for retirement, people in their 50s and 60s. It does show how much these stats are always based on surveys because the numbers are always different every time, aren't they? Yes. Between the percentages vary every time. But I think regardless, there is some percentage

of people and it's probably fairly high that are going to be relying almost exclusively on social security. I was going to save this for the end, actually, but we'll kind of leap progress if you think's here. So the Vox had a piece. The Vox? Is it the Vox or just Vox? I guess the Vox. That kind of sounds like a rapper's name or something. But they said, what will we be doing now that in 50 years will be unthinkable? And they asked a professor, I don't know really who is who he's from or what is his little friend was. Sorry to interrupt, but I think that drinking light beer is going to be unthinkable in 50 years. It'll just be IPA lights, an IPA So he said 4-1Ks will be considered, I don't think of 150 years, because, and his solution

actually was having a social security system that takes care of more people and is more short-up. I don't see how that really happens, considering the current one most people think has some problems. So, again, I think regardless of what your political views are, I think either way, you're on your own for the most part. So what is this chart that you threw in here about these super savers? So this kind of gets to the other end of the topic. So there was another survey, and Marka Watch had this. The survey was from TD Ameritrade, and they looked at people who saved 20% or more of their incomes,

and they tried to compare them to everyone else in terms of what they spend their money on. And they said the single biggest difference between super savers, which is these people who save 20% or more versus everyone else is that super savers spend just 14% of their incomes on housing, while everyone else spends almost 25%. And this makes sense in the idea that housing is probably the biggest expense for those people, I think maybe the problem with it is I think these super savers probably just make a lot more money and that means housing is just a smaller percentage of their income, but I guess I could see it being both ways. I would guess that these super savers live outside of the big cities.

Yeah, that would make sense. I guess if this is the millionaire next door types, that would make sense. But it just kind of speaks to the point that housing is going to be your biggest expense. So take that for what is worth and do it what you will. But that's the huge as part of your budget. So make good decisions when it comes to your housing. So one thing that can derail the phony retirement crisis is what if the bull market ends? Well, it won't because Barron's told us it won't. So they have to know. They do these covers on purpose, right? Like they want to get people talking about it. Yes, of course. Like this is, I mean, the content machine thing. Like it's their latest cover set is the bull unstoppable. And

of course, everyone rushes out to say, this is the top. Barron's called it again. Honestly, I was one of those people that didn't really look beyond the cover story and just didn't read the article. So if you did, you can feel free to enlighten me. I did. I got some stuff. Well, first of all, there can't be a magazine indicator on a publication that covers the markets, right? And to that point, sentiment trader on Twitter, and we'll throw this on the show notes, posted about 10 Barron's covers. And they all could have rung the top in hindsight. None of them did. One of them will, obviously. So if you you if you see is this bull unstoppable on the cover of, say, good housekeeping or Sports

Illustrated magazine for kids, then I would say, okay, time to. Does that still exist? Sports Illustrated for kids? Yes. I don't know. I used to get that. Me too. I'm going to say it does. So two points in the article that I thought are worth talking about. Quote from this guy, Peter Anderson over at Anderson Capital Management. People are superstitious. Wait, superstitious. Why would people be superstitious. It doesn't make sense. I thought it said suspicious, but people are superstitious because the bull market has been running so long. I don't get that. What was the line from the office? I'm not superstitious. I'm just a little stitious. Something like that. He says their intuition says it doesn't seem like it can last much longer. I think that's a reasonable intuition. Like the idea.

That bar markets don't die of old age? No, the opposite. I'm saying I understand why people are suspicious or are afraid to invest because it's been such a long bull market. Like, don't you get that? Don't you understand where that's coming from? I do. And I'm trying to, this one has been going on for a while. I'm trying to think of people having that same reaction in the 80s and 90s when it went on for 20 years. I mean, with fits and starts along the way, but no huge end of the world scenario. I guess you could call 1987 that, but even that, things just kind of kept going from there. Same with the 50s.

I think that there was maybe one small pullback, but in 1954, when the Dow got above its 1929 peak, Benjamin Graham was called in for a hearing because they were like, weren't sure what to make of this and if this meant that another market crash was coming. It's kind of funny because I feel like we've been talking ourselves in circles on this topic for eight years now it feels like. So everyone says, well, the U.S. is overvalued and it's been running too far too fast. And so someone says, okay, invest overseas in international foreign markets. And everyone says, well, no, those markets are cheap for a reason. We can't invest there. Okay. So now what then? Well, invest in bonds. Well,

we can't invest in bonds because the interest rates are too low. So I feel like whatever you say you're going to invest in today, there's a reason to tap the brakes. And it's just there's no easy place to put money these days, unfortunately, which there never really is. Would you be surprised if we're having this conversation in seven years? Seven years from now. Okay, what's our threshold? Let's say, what's our reset threshold? But we just had a reset. That's the thing. True. But could we have some of those? We just haven't had a prolonged reset. I think that's the problem. That's what people want. And it just hasn't happened. Would I be surprised if we're 50% higher in seven years and still haven't had a 50% correction? I would not be surprised. Okay. Neither would I. Another point that I thought was

interesting. I think this is from Tom Lee. The large generation of millennials, those born from 1981 to 1996, are set to boost their spending and investing as they enter their prime earning years of 26 to 50. Can that be what keeps this bull market going? I'm dubious. But on the other hand, we're told that boomers are going to sell all of their stocks. Yes. That's why I'm always dubious of the demographic stuff because some people say boomers are going to wreck the markets when they have to sell. Other people say millennials are going to come in their prime working years and pick up the slack, I just think it's way too hard to sort of through any of that stuff and really, I do think that probably flows into and out of the market are probably one of the

more misunderstood forces that are keeping things where they are or kind of keeping the market chugging along. I don't know. What do you mean by that? Just the fact that the retirement system is so much more professionalized these days and people are putting money in every paycheck every week or every two weeks or every month or whatever it is. And it's just set on an autopilot like it never really was in the past. And I think that that has to play a role in some way in what goes on in the markets. Yeah, I think that's fair.

So the big IPO of the past month or so was Lyft. And one of the interesting stories is every time one of these IPOs comes out in the last few years, it seems like besides Facebook or a few other handful of winners, it comes out and people see terrible financials so they want to short the stock. and Lyft came out and it immediately fell and I guess it kind of came back a little bit but the day after it came out investors were actually able to borrow the shares to sell them short which is how the short selling process works

the cost of funding that short was 100% or it rose 100%. So it became the most expensive stock to borrow and one of the things that I thought when I saw this and I sent it to you I said this is one of the reasons that long short back tests are so bunk because it doesn't take into account the short sales. And so I worked for a quantitative portfolio manager a number of years ago in one of my career, and early in my career. And he

created a typical sort of value momentum, quantitative strategy that went to go along the cheap stocks that had some price momentum, shortly expensive stocks that had some price momentum in the other way. And when we tried to actually implement the strategy, we went to both of our prime brokers and would try to get borrowers on these expensive stocks, and they were always astronomically high. And we actually ended up taking the short piece completely out of the portfolio and just hedging with the S&P 500 because it's so hard to do. And we try to get the data on, and I'm sure some of these big hedge ones might have some data. There really isn't good historical data on borrow rates because they change so often. And so the more people that want to short a stock, the higher the hurdle

rate it is to actually short it. So it's one of those, what's the favorite West Gray research piece that he was talks about how there's frictions to market efficiency. The limits of arbitrage? Yeah, there's a limit to arbitrage because there are frictions involved in the markets. And that's why we get these crazy things that happen like this, that yes, maybe some of these shares seem overly expensive. But if you wanted to short it, it wouldn't make sense economically to do so. I forgot to mention in that Barron's piece, somebody from J.P. Morgan, and I won't even

attempt to pronounce the name. Actually, you know what? I will attempt to pronounce the name. Debrafco, Lachos, Bujas. I think the Jay is silent. I think he did it. He said the reality is that maybe the word cycle is no longer even relevant, given that we have so much unconventional central bank involvement. That sounds a little out there. I think what he meant to say is the Fed is manipulating the market.

I think that's exactly what he meant to say. I think you could almost say that the Fed has made the Fed. cycles a little tamer over time. I think I would actually buy that argument, but I think the other part is the U.S. markets are just way more mature than they have been, and that's why these cycles are lasting a little longer than they did in the past. But then the counterpoint is we had two 50 percent crashes within a 10-year period. Okay. Maybe they're blowing bubbles and also prolonging cycles. Is that a fair trade? I like, I do like the idea that we're getting more microefficient, macro inefficient. How's that in the markets? Wait, isn't it the opposite?

it? No, meaning there will be these boom-bust periods for the overall market, but it's harder to win just picking stocks. Okay. How's that for an argument? It sounded good when it came out. Okay, so Bloomberg reported last week that Amazon is going to roll out some Alexa earbuds in the future to compete with AirPods. Will you be buying them? When I lose my AirPods and Amazon's are one-third of the price, yes, I will. Yes, I will. You know they. I'm thinking I'm And I knew this was coming because it makes sense to have the Alexa in your ear and just take it right out of the house. We were actually watching the sidebar here. We were watching a show last week, which I'll get to my reviews.

And one of the characters' names is Alexis. And every time they say her name, the Alexa says, I can't hear you or something. It's kind of funny. But I think, like you said, if they're cheaper, I will probably buy a pair as a backup because I've had my AirPods. I don't know for at least a year now and I haven't lost them yet. Surprise me, knock on wood. I think I'm also on bar at time. So I think I'm going to probably look at these as a backup.

But I will say that the AirPods are, they're amazing, right? I mean. They are amazing. But I'm still not fully convinced that voice is like the thing of the future. Like Josh and I have this argument and he is on the side that it is going to be everything and everywhere and enormous. And I understand that it's early and that it's just the technology is not there yet. but I gave the example a few weeks ago when I was trying to call somebody and it just doesn't

even pick up your voice. And then also, and maybe this is just me, but I just feel weird talking to my device. I feel like somebody's, I feel like self-conscious. Like somebody's like, somebody's in the room with me like laughing, even though. Yes. It does, it does feel weird. Well, some of the new TV remotes, you can press a button and say the channel into it. But how hard is it to just press a button? Right. It doesn't really save you that much time at all. It just more seems like it's cool technology. Like, we got a new microwave. We got one of those Alexa microwaves. The microwave is literally hooked up to Alexa.

And so you just tap a button and say, Alexa, microwave popcorn. But like, I don't know, does it really save you that much time? It saves, the worst button on the planet is the time cook button on a microwave. So it saves you having to hit time cook and then the time. So I guess, I mean, it's going to save me like 15 seconds over the course of my life. Did you read this dinosaur article? it was amazing in The New Yorker So I didn't realize

Actually we did speak about this That this guy And I read one of his books The City of the Monkey God I think it was called I didn't realize that he was the author Of one of your detective series I read it

I've only read a couple of his books But he's good And this This piece was Kind of amazing If I mean This kind of felt like It could have been

A book in some ways Or like a precursor to a book Like you know Michael Lewis Sometimes writes A really long article And that ends up being a book Very good point It said that

So I talked about when the asteroid hit. It said giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rocks, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into the deep water. Actually, I just selected the worst part of that. Well, here's the crazy part to me. More than, so this is all kind of, I guess, some sort of speculation based on the blast site and what happened and what they've been able to dig up.

But they say more than 99.999% of all living organizations. on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt, which do you think the Fed had something to do with halting that carbon cycle? I'm certainly not going to rule that out. This was the quote that I was looking for. But no, hang it. So, but it's crazy. I mean, this was 66 million years ago.

Basically all life forms on the planet were dead. And somehow the Earth went on and more life organisms are now here. It's, it's pretty mind-boggling when you think about it. Yeah. The perma bear came along 150 years ago. Yes. It's substance mingling with vaporized earth rock formed a fiery plume which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. I don't know if you could fact check that.

I'm just going to take his word for it. That's pretty nuts. I was like obsessed with dinosaurs when I was younger, but like when I was really younger, like four or five, I guess like a lot of children are. And I sort of thought I wanted to be a paleontologist after I sat Jurassic Park. And this article confirmed that I would be the worst paleontologist of all time because one of the quotes was, paleontology is maddening work. It's progress typically measured in millimeters. Are we going to have to arm wrestle over who gets to use that line in a blog post?

What, the one that I just read? Yes, that seems like the perfect line that someone to steal for a blog post. Like, who's going to be the first one to use that? That's yours. All right, I got it. All right. You can check me out on Thursday when I write with that. No, this is an amazing article.

So it's called The Day the Dinosaurs died. Definitely worth reading. And I think one of the funniest things, I don't know if there was. mentioned this article or not, but no one really knows what the outside of a dinosaur looked like because all we have is the remains. So dinosaurs could have had feathers. So there's this book called The Half Life of Facts, why everything we know has an expiration date. And he talked about that too about the dinosaurs coming and how no one knows what they sounded like or what they looked like outside. So they probably could have had feathers, which would make Jurassic Park a little

less scary, I think. Right. So there was an article, I forget where this was, Nick would really link to it. And it was an interview with Abigail Disney, who is Roy's granddaughter. And the whole thing is definitely worth reading. But one thing in particular stood out. They did a study at the Chronicle of Philanthropy years ago where they asked people who inherited money, what amount of money would you need to feel totally secure? And every single one of them, no matter what they had, named a number that was roughly twice what they inherited. Okay, I don't mean to be cynical about this article. I read it. It was very fascinating to hear this side of things, but she was lying when she said she took private planes for

whole life and then immediately stopped, right? That was, she was, it was total lie, right? I mean, maybe I'm a sucker, but I believed her. She talked about the fact that the worst thing about being rich is flying private because you don't really deal with the rest of humanity and you don't see and experience all the things that they feel and they ask her, well, when's the last time you flew private, I'm just throwing it out there. If you flew private and then you like had that luxury, there's no way you could go back to flying commercial. No way. That's all I'm saying. I believe her. Okay. But what did you think about that thing about having twice, feeling like you need twice and

much money to be fully content or totally secure? Totally makes sense. It seems like that's what all the studies show that it doesn't matter how much you make or how much you save. No one ever feels like they have enough because there's always someone who's going to be richer than them. So unfortunately, that's kind of the way we're wired, I think. And that is why 66 million years later, humanity is walking the earth. That's how we survived the asteroid because no one is content. Moving along, there's an article in Bloomberg that large-cat managers, if they underperform the S&P 500 this year, it will be the 12th straight year that they lost to their

benchmarks. Is that, I mean, that is really hard to believe. Is it not? That's like the Ron Burgundy one. Like, I'm not even angry. I'm impressed. Like, how does that even possible? It's, I guess in some ways, it's amazing that the index ETF complex hasn't taken more assets in this period.

Don't you think? The fact that it's gone on this long? Yeah. So there was a, I figure where I found this, but it shows the, oh, one of the things that Abigail Disney said was if you have money, it's easy to make money, something like that. And these people that are born into money, that continue, I think they're so smart, but really they're just born on third base. So there was an chart from TPC. I don't know who that is. But it showed the income from capital gains based on your gross income.

And people over $10 million, 46% of their income is from capital gains. Wow. So the solution to the retirement crisis is to have everyone be a shareholder in publicly traded companies. Is that it? Or private businesses. Can we make this happen? I think that would help. All right, let's move on to listen to questions.

Well, before we get into that, I'm going to cut you off like you always cut me off before. Okay, fair enough. We wanted to plug our new Animal Spirits Instagram account, so we're actually diversifying our social media. As the podcast audience has grown, Michael and I get a ton of questions, and we try to respond to all of them through email. We thought it would be helpful to actually respond in a different way, and we don't have time to get to every question in the show. So we're going to start responding to questions on Instagram, and our handle is Animal Spirits Pod. So go over to Instagram, follow us there. We're going to try to be doing a bunch of different things there.

Will we link to that in the show notes? We will because that's the thing that podcast hosts say. Oh, hold on. Sticking with Instagram for a second. So one of the ads that I saw, a sponsored ad, last week I spoke about life insurance. This week, I saw Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street, is ready to teach you how to be a world-class closer at all caps, anything you do. Sign up for a free trial today and get 50% off.

So I clicked on the video. And it was, there was an enormous audience in the room. Okay. It doesn't surprise me. This is why the guy from Fire Festival is going to be running a hedge fund someday. Mark my words, or venture capital fund. Someone will give him money when he gets out of jail. So again, follow us on Instagram, Animal Spirits Pod.

We're going to try to do some fun stuff over there. And don't give us crap if we're not good at the memes yet. We're still working on it. So, all right, listen to our questions. Based on our conomin discussion from a couple weeks ago, obviously human nature and decision making in general is flawed, but isn't the fact that we are depending more and more on computers to make decisions a reason to be somewhat optimistic regarding the future. What do you think?

I mean, no, I don't think that because it's very easy to override a computer. And the way that I look at it is humans are the ones putting in the programs with a computer. This is why I think the Terminator situation of the robots taking over the world is never going to happen. There's another one coming out. Oh, that's a shocker. Are you team Terminator or no? I mean, they're okay.

They're okay. They're not bad. I like them. Yeah, I like Terminator. I probably watch them all. Actually, yeah, but so on Thursday, so I was supposed to close to my house on Friday, taking a quick detour for a second. I was supposed to close my house on Friday, but I didn't.

And on Thursday night, I was just pretty anxious waiting to hear what was going to happen. And I wanted to take my mind off of the item at hand, so I went to the movie theater. Okay. and I saw Pet Cemetery. The original? No, there's a new one. I didn't know that. So I read the book.

I saw the movie when I was much younger. I don't remember it at all. And this was sort of strange because the movie was kind of scary, but it wasn't very good. Gotcha. It seems like that's the horror movie playbook these days, right? They're going to scare people, but it's not going to get good. Well, but I think it's like kind of hard to scare people if the movie's kind of lousy. You know? Anyway, so no, I am not optimistic because a lot of people don't make, just because like there's quantitative investing doesn't mean that life is all the sudden driven by quantitative thinking or programs. So no, I don't buy that at all. And it may be, it may be in the future where our phone tells us everything we should do based on our heart rate or something, but I still don't think people will be able to follow the directions if it comes to them. Okay. When looking at historical data or building a back test for a strategy, how far back is the appropriate time horizon to look at? This is a pretty good question.

I would say you should go back to the earliest point that you have reliable data. I think that's fair. With the understanding that what markets did 30, 40, 50, even 20 years ago might not necessarily hold in the future. So I would just be very, very skeptical on any and all back tests. And I think the point of a back test is not to show you what your experience is going to be the future. It's to give you a range of outcomes to consider, even though that range may include outliers in the future. Okay, here's a good one. Someone writes in who works for a pension fund and they have had an aggressive asset allocation, but they want to make a more aggressive allocation because they

think they've been too defensive in the past. So having made a mistake is changing a genuinely suboptimal asset allocation in a value-aware way, prudent risk management, or is it just timing the market in disguise? I think this is tomato tomato, but I would say more the former, I guess depending on what exactly you're doing. The question is, I think, like, does the label matter if you're making the right decision? And should you wait to make a change in asset allocation because of the market environment? And I think a lot of institutions are frankly stuck in this position for, and that's why I think a lot of them are still in hedge funds because they don't want to be the institution that dumps all their

hedge funds and then the market takes a dump itself. And so they hold on to them because they think they're going to wait until the next spare market to sell and then maybe change. But I still don't think a lot of people will be able to time it perfectly. So I think make the right decision for your risk parameters. And I think in a lot of ways, the market stuff should almost be secondary in some ways. Yeah, I understand. But this is a very good question because it's really hard to, even though you might think you're being prudent. And I guess it depends what you're doing. If you're going from 30% stock, 70% bonds to 80, 20, then, yeah, you're probably, that's probably market timing of disguise.

But if you're going from like 50, 50 to 60, 40, I think that's okay. Yeah, and there are ways to do this intelligently where you don't do it all at once and just jump off the cliff. Okay, any recommendations for you besides Pet Cemetery? That's not a recommendation. It's just something that I did. That should be the disclaimer for all of your movie recommendations, I think. Well, I probably would not have seen this in the theater, but I really wanted to go just, like, kill two hours and stop thinking about my not closing on this house. that I've been out of for seven weeks. Anyhow, recommendations. Oh, I am almost done with a book

called The Age of Gold. And I saw this guy on Twitter, Kyle Russell, tweeting about it. And I thought that this was going to be more about really the gold rush. And it was, but it used the gold rush as like a jumping off point. So it was a lot about, it was very detail oriented. It was what was going on in the country at the time and after. How did people get there? What went on once they did get there. So it was very detail-oriented. I learned a lot. One of the things that really stood out to me was when people were going there, like this one guy didn't even know where they were, and it turns out that they were in the Grand Canyon. Wow. And another group of travelers got stuck in a desert that they ended up calling Death Valley for obvious reasons. Yep. And in a way, the gold rush of the 1850s was like

the beginning of the end of the union, because a lot of really big decisions. needed to be made on their admission into the union and what that was going to do for the North-South Divide. So it was good, but again, it was not light reading. Okay, anything else? That's it. All right. So I read one of your recommendations. It was a very... Actually, I'm sorry. Every time. Ben just gave a heavy eye roll, which was deserved. I watched the Kevin Hart special on Netflix. Who? How'd that go? You're not a fan? I've seen Kevin Hart before, and it was actually one of the funnier shows I've seen. This is before he blew up. and I think his comedy is unwatchable now that he's gotten famous.

I think he was hilarious when he first came out. Oh, Adam Sandler Theory? Yes, definitely. He was so funny when he first came out and now, yeah. I don't know that I've ever seen his stand-up before, so I had really nothing to base it off of. What was impressive to me was that he, this was like in a giant arena, and he was in the center on a circular stage. And there had to have been at least 20,000 people there. At Madison Square Garden or something like that?

No, I think it was in London. There were parts of it that were really funny and parts of it that were painfully not funny. But I think that it's probably worth watching. Okay, sticking with a stand-up comedy, we went to see Sebastian Manascalco again. I know you watched his Netflix special and we're not impressed. And I recommended it. And a lot of people said it wasn't that great. And I agree, I think he got bad advice on the bits he did in a special because we saw him last year in Chicago.

We just saw him this past weekend in Grand Rapids. And he's by far the best live act I've ever been to. Like, you know how, if you see someone go for more than an hour, usually 50 to 60% of the way through, there's going to be a lull and there's going to be some stories that don't hit. This guy had people rolling the entire time. So my recommendation to you is next time he comes to New York, I'm going to go see him live with you because he's the kind of guy you have to see live. Okay. And so I thought he was just, he killed it. I read it was a very good year by Martin Fridson recently based on your recommendation.

I loved it. It is a great history book. My favorite chapter is one on 1915, which ended up. up being the biggest year ever for the Dow, and it was during World War I, and it was after a year in which the market closed for three months because of World War I. There's a lot of really good history in that one, market history for market dorks like us. We got into Schitt's Creek on Netflix, so Schitz is spelled S-C-H-I-T-T, that's the name of like the town. I guess it's got four seasons. It's actually a pretty funny show about it's, the story has kind of been played out

at this point, but it's a rich family that lost it all and had to go live in the country. And it's one of those shows that kind of grows on you. It's not one of those drop everything and go see it now shows. But the more I watch, the funnier it becomes. And we're almost through season one. They're like 20-minute episodes. I think it was on some other station. So I think there's four seasons. So if anyone's watched it, let me know if it's worth finishing. But I kind of like it so far. There's some really funny characters. And finally, my go-to CJ Box every year puts out a book in March. And I've just read his book, Wolfpack. I started. It's a Joe Pickett novel. I know I say this about every fiction book I read, but this one for sure is my favorite series. I have a question for you. Okay. How do you find time to read and to write and to do all of these things? I want, I have a life hack coach. He tells me what to do and when to get up.

So this one, it's about the guy's storytelling is so good that it's like I feel like I miss these characters and I want to know what happened to them since the last time I heard from them. And it's about a guy who's a game warden in my own. homing. And he seems to always find trouble. And he's not like your typical hero in one of these books. And it's, if I was going to recommend any series to someone to start from the beginning, it would be the Joe Pickett series by C.J. Box. So that's my recommendation for the week. Is it C.J. The Vox? You know, I've never heard you mentioned that book before.

CJ Box. Yeah. It's, yeah, really good. I would highly recommend starting at the beginning and going through them all. Anyway, thanks for listening. Again, follows on Instagram. Animal Spiritspot at gmail.com. and we'll talk you next week.