Animal Spirits Podcast - The Crypto Blow-Up (EP.283)

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

On today's show we discuss inflation is finally falling, will the stock market wait for the Fed's all-clear, the FTX saga, how SBF fooled everyone, what comes next for crypto, why streaming stocks are struggling, 5 years of Animal Spirits and much more.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs...​ Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense​ Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor​ Like us on Facebook​ And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.​     (Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, received compensation from the sponsor of this advertisement. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information.)​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by Composer. Michael, two interesting features of Composer. One is you can follow trusted sources who have created investment strategies, rules-based. You could latch on to what they've done already, what they've already created, or you could simply create your own strategies. And I think maybe where we are in the markets right now, maybe this is just a recency bias talking,

but maybe there's a little bit of a lack of trust, of authority, of people in higher places. So maybe people would feel better about creating their own strategies right now. And found their own rules. Composer. Yes. So I guess that's one of the beautiful things is you can follow people you want. If you say, I don't trust what other people are doing right now, I want to make my own thing.

You can create your own strategy for long-term asset allocation, trend-following strategies, short-term, long-term, all these different signals. Go to composer. combeau-tray to learn more. 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 Batnik 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. Michael, the inflation data finally came in lower. First time in a long time? Yeah. A year pretty much? We're starting to show with inflation, but I just want to set the table that this was one of the craziest weeks between, obviously, crypto, Elon and Twitter and the firing, not unfiring, and Facebook laying off 11,000 people on the election. I mean, this was the newsiest week, I think, of my career.

Well, I feel like we could have said that a million times, but this has been a crazy year. It's been a crazy three years, really, for the markets for the economy, for the world. This week did feel for the markets like, Gosh, there was a lot going on. Remember when we first started this podcast, I'm not going to name any names. Someone said you guys are going to run out of stuff to talk about. I'm not going to name any names, Josh. Definitely wasn't Josh. But there's more stuff to talk about than before. And I feel like we could go for three hours just on crypto. We're going to get to get in a little bit. When I start with the markets, though, inflation came in lower than expected. The stock market was up 5% in a day. I looked at the times the stock market, this is the SP500, has been up 5% or more in a day this century. So I'm going back to the year 2000. You can see every year on there is 2008, 2020, or 2009. In the early 2000s, 2001, so it's all the big bear markets, the tech bubble busting, and then the 2008 crisis, and then 2020 crash. And the interesting thing here is you could say, of course, at the first glance, you would say, well, this is a bear market rally. This is what happens in bare markets. You see big down days and big up days. But look at a lot of these. They're towards the end of them too. So what I'm saying is this could be a bear market dead cat bounce or this could be

the end of a bare market. How's that? Is that helpful? Not really. But I'm saying sometimes you get these big huge up days when the coast is clear. Well, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven of these days happened in 2008, September through December. We know the bottom was a few months away, but a lot lower. But you're right, Ben, because we have one of these in March on March 9, 2009, which in fact was the bottom. Yeah. And then March 23rd, 2000. and nine, you have March 26th, 2020, which is after the bottom. It can't happen. There's no way to know. But here's, no. What we do know is that these happen in bare markets, because I looked at the same thing, Ben, and showed that the average drawdown on the day

before these 5% pops was negative 36%. So stock's going to only go up 5% in a day when everyone is expecting the worst, and it's not that bad. That's the thing. There were a few people saying, how could the stock market possibly up when inflation is 7.7%? Because when it went, hit there the first time, the stock market certainly wasn't up. It got killed. And that's, of course, because expectations matter more. It's better or worse, not good or bad that matter, right? It's all bad expectations. Listen, Kobe got his cast off. He's in a boot. And I was expecting the worst. Was this a bad experience? No, it's fine. No big deal. How bad did it smell, though? Had to smell pretty bad. Uh-uh. No smell. Really? He's only it for like four weeks.

Okay. I guess he's a little kid, too. Inflation came out at 7.7%, which was lower than expected, and the market absolutely took off. For today's show, I have way more questions than answers, which is typically my MA. I usually have more questions in it. So I have some questions after the market ripped. So my first question is, will the Fed come in and try to slap our wrist again because we had a huge rally?

They already are. If you look at their comments, they're trying. But will the markets try to call the Fed's bluff and continue railing, even as the Fed tries to talk them down if the data keeps coming in good? So I feel like the Fed can continue to talk to talk to. What's the question? What if the market calls the Fed's bluff and says, we don't believe you? You can keep talking tough, but if the inflation data gets better, we're not going to wait

around for you to give us the all clear. We're going to go. So bond yields are going to fall and stocks are going to take off. I'm not saying this is the time that happens. But when inflation is going down for good, that could happen. What if by the time of their next meeting, the market is another 5% to 10% higher, conditions instead of the 50 that everyone is now expecting, they say, we got to go more. We're going to do 75.

That would derail things. Probably. But then what if inflation comes in lower again? And the Fed, then people realize the Fed are behind the eight ball again. and then they're going to have to either stop or cut. I don't know. You've talked before about how the market changes our feelings on this stuff. Like last week, I all but declared a soft landing dead.

But one better inflation print, and I'm kind of going, wait a minute, is it possible again? What if this is the first time in history that inflation falls from a high level without having a hard landing? These are my questions. I don't know, obviously. Do you forget the other thing? I'm sorry. Let me tell the stuff. You think people would be mad at a hard landing?

I think you're getting a little deranged. No, no, no, no. I'm saying, do you think people would be mad if we got a soft landing? Certain people who want to watch the world now. No, no, no. Yeah, one out of 100 idiots will be mad. I don't mean, but so what?

I think society will welcome a soft landing with open arms. And yes, if you're idiots will. I'm saying market people that have been like predicting this. If their prediction came wrong, obviously, I would still lean towards it's going to be hard to thread that needle. But if they could, an inflation starts coming down. Obviously, I think that so Colin Roche, friend of the show said, good inflation, but it's all happening for the wrong reasons.

Demand is falling very fast and the Fed is behind the curve on at all. This is evolving into a credit store and an interest rate risk and it will shift to credit risk, basically saying, yes, inflation is falling, but it's for bad reasons. One month. True. But the thing about the Fed continuing to go hard, are they going to keep pushing this? And then what happens when if inflation starts falling really fast? I'm not saying it's going to.

What happens if it does, is the Fed going to immediately step in and cut? Like, what are they going to do then? Are they going to keep up this tough talk? No, no, no, I don't think they would cut rates unless things got really bad, really bad. Okay, so Jeremy Siegel on his recent wisdom tree weekly, he talked about how basically, if you use the housing market data right now, as opposed to like the lagged OER stuff that we've talked about, the current core inflation would be near zero percent. He's saying if we didn't look at these lags and we just used what's going on today, core inflation is basically zero. He thinks the Fed is behind the curve. Obviously, a lot of people say, well, of course the Fed knows this.

You have to assume that the Fed with other PhDs and stuff. They pay attention to this stuff. They may have read a blog post or two. But he's saying that Core would be effectively zero now. And is it possible? This seems bizarre to even think about it with inflation at almost 8%. Could it get out of hand the other way? And then they lose control in the other direction.

I'm not going there. Okay. I'm asking questions. All right. On Friday, we were talking to Warren Pyes, who was fantastic. on The Compound on Friends. And I made a comment. We were talking about the history of analysts estimates over time.

And they tend to do anything. I guess it's all over the place. But in 2021, they ratcheted it up throughout the year. And I said, like, what were analysts drunk? They were supposed to be the sober ones. And he made a good point. He's like, but they were right. Earnings did commit at all-time highs in 2022, which is kind of crazy.

Amidst all of this, earnings have been strong. Which makes sense because, again, the one One thing we don't inflation adjust is earnings. No one ever reports real earnings after inflation. So if inflation is nine percent, tack that on to whatever growth company has already had. For most of them, obviously some cost could be higher. But this whole chart looks like it's drunk. Like how much of this chart is just basically, it's all over the place, right?

Every single year. There's no pattern here. But one of the things that's in the data, this is in the transcript, growth stocks are seeing all the downgrades. So analysts are finally taking down their estimates and it's all growth. So they have a chart, don't know exactly where they pull this from, but it's showing value, growth, quality, and low risk. And all the downgrades you come from growth, which is interesting.

This is another reason why investing is so much about expectations. Expectations for value stocks were already probably so low, they couldn't really bring the estimates down anymore. And growth expectations got way too high. Two quick data points on the rally last week. Goldman's non-profitable tech basket was up 15%, the biggest one they move on record. So people were obviously off sides there. The two-year treasury yield had...

So wait, this rally is all about short covering then. Is that what happened? That is what happened. I know. Well, you're asking that snobbishly. That's literally what happened. I know, but that's just something people say in a beer market rally. No, it's not.

This was the most shorted area of the market and had its biggest update on record. I know. It's all short covering. That was all short covering. I feel like you're trying to be an anti-conspiracy theorist guy. It's not working. That was all short covering. Okay.

There's no snark in there. The only reason the market went up because of short covering. Goldman's non-profitable tech sector. had its biggest one-day rally ever due to short-covering. That is not controversial. Okay. It's an unprovable tech index the SMB-500. Nobody said the entire market went up for short-covering.

Okay. Stop putting one in the market's mouth. Okay. The dollar had his biggest decline in a long time. That sounds pretty scientific. A long time. I'm just going to... Yeah, a long time.

Listen, all right. One good chart I want to mention before we spend quite a bit of time. on crypto is Balchunis has this chart from Tom SeraFegas showing issuer market share. He breaks it down by assets, by flows, by products, revenue, and trading. So as an example of something that just stands out is, so again, the total market of ETF issuers. Let's look at first trust, for example, they only have 2% of the total assets. they've got 8% of revenue.

They tend to be more active. What's Vanguard on the other hand? So, Vanguard has the majority of flows and the majority of assets, but a very tiny amount of the fees. So 29% of assets for Vanguard, 37% of flows, and only 9% of revenue. God bless John Bogle. Seriously. Also, really quick, with all the shenanigans going on today before we're getting

to crypto, could a John Bogle exist today? Could he, a young John Bogle come up and exist today? The guy is basically a saint. With the way things are working today, I don't think a young John Bogle could exist today. Because we're seeing the way that young people, if they have any bit of success, are just put on this huge pedestal. It took him, I don't know, 30 years to get his due, potentially. Well, also, Bogle was like 45 when he started Vanguard. True. Okay. Let's get into the crypto stuff. This is, for me, the story of the year.

Why don't we start with Monday? Okay, wait, really quick. I want to talk about this. So I wrote my book, Don't Fall For It, about financial scams right before the pandemic. So this was three years ago, whatever. And I feel like I could write a whole new thing now just in the last three years. So I wrote, so I put eight conditions that are present when financial fraud flourishes. And so this is just everything I learned from all these frauds that I looked at. When there is an expert with a good story, when capital becomes blind, there's this Walter

Bagahot guy who wrote for the economist when it first started. He said, like, when capital becomes blind, that's when speculation goes crazy. When the banking industry gets involved, when individuals begin taking. the accused from the crowd, when the markets are rocking, when the opportunity presents itself, when human beings are involved, and when innovation runs rampant. All of those boxes have been checked in the last three or four years. Correct? It is kind of crazy that the 2020s are going to be studied in the future, much like the 1920s was, in terms of one of the biggest wealth creations and destructions and amounts of scams in history. Well, let me ask you a hard

question. Would you say that you fell for it? Fell for FTX or what? I don't know, crypto being the big one? Honestly, crypto was the first asset that I purchased for an emotional reason. Because in 2017, when everyone was talking about the promise of it, I didn't get it. I was beating my head against the wall saying, I don't get this. And I bought it more out of annoyance than anything else. And my whole personal thing for crypto was, I'm going to be so annoyed if this ends up being as big as people say it's going to be, even though I don't understand it. I understand it a little more now. I still don't get it as much as like some people do. And for me, it was always a call option. and I'm going to invest in this as a call option in case it gets as big as people say it is

because there's all these smart people there. So I bought into it. I did purchase crypto, so in that sense, I guess. But I mean, I don't think crypto as a whole is a fraud, but there's a lot of frauds in crypto. So, all right, man, so much to discuss. I guess maybe I'll start with saying that I view crypto the same way as a call option. I'm not selling. I have no plans on selling.

If it goes to zero, I will hold to zero. Anything that has the potential for asymmetric returns. And I think that crypto still has that potential to go up whenever your number is, 3x, 5x, whatever it is, anything that has that potential, has the potential to go to zero. And it's a shame that this is happening for this reason. But I'm actually surprised. I'm very surprised that Bitcoin is not at, pick a number, 9,000. I'm surprised it's not at 5.

I, two weeks ago, before this all happened, I said, why isn't Bitcoin at 10,000? I'm surprised it's not at 5 right now. The fact that it won't die might be the only bullish thing about the sector right now. Because if you ask me now, my personal sentiment towards crypto has literally never been lower than it is right now. Because before, at least you had the promise of stuff happening. And now we've seen all this money rush in, nothing really come of it. And all you really have is a lack of trust. I don't know how you build the trust back up into this asset class.

I'm not saying it's going to die, but I think it could take a long, long time to get like institutional trust and retail trust back into this. Obviously, the prices could still go up and be fine. But I don't know how you rebuild trust in this system that just feels like it's been broken. It's 1145 timestamp. Bitcoin is at 16,900. something. I'm not on the lamb anymore, Ben. My case got thrown out. Okay. Well, I hope that there are some crypto people on the lamb because I think one of the biggest problems with the 2008 crisis

was that none of those crooks went to jail from Lehman Brothers or Country Rider AIG or Merrill Lynch and they all walked away with millions of dollars. And how ironic that this was the promise of crypto to be the anti-bank. So I don't know where to begin with the Sam Bankman feed story. I did. I do. I do. Let's start on Monday. Okay. So CZ from Binance, just to set the stage, I'm sorry if this is repetitive, but for people that aren't familiar exactly with the details of the story, this guy CZ is the founder of Binance. It was an early investor in FTX. And I think one of the things he sold part of his stake and received FTT tokens, which were the magic box that Sam talked about. These were tokens that were issued by FTX. And there were some behind the scenes dealings that Sam was talking crap about Binance, which is the biggest exchange in the world, to Washington. and CZ tweeted that he was going to be selling, I think he had $500 million worth of FTT tokens. So this is where we were last Tuesday when you and I filmed our recorded our podcast, and none of the other stuff had happened yet. We were still at that point where they were having a Twitter feud and FTX was still a solvent company.

And then by Tuesday, so Sam had tweeted that competitors trying to spread lies. It's not true. We're fine. Okay, $5 billion rushed out of FTCs, right? Sell first, ask questions later. five billion dollars with a client assets left FTX, FTT the token dumped, and there was essentially a run on the bank. On Tuesday, Sam said, I don't know if he said well played, but you won or something like that, he conceded, tried to sell it, tried to get rescued.

And this is all happening so quickly and it's mind-bending because Sam was supposed to be the chosen one for this sort of thing. People keep saying this is going to make a great movie and a great book someday, and I'm sure it probably will. But we've been watching this play out on Twitter, which is, to me, the best book or movie you could possibly ask for for this thing. You watch it play out live as it's happening. Can't be at it. And then not surprisingly, I don't know if this was maybe now we're Wednesday, CZ looked at the books and said, sorry, we tried. And so then speculation starts, well, how bad are the books exactly?

And now we know the books are horrible. F.T. did a story on this. They held just $900 million in easily sellable assets against $9 billion of liabilities. The largest portion of those listed liquid assets, not ironically, but just hilariously, was $470 million worth of Robin Hood and Robin Hood stock crash. I think it was down 30% in two days when this news came out.

The company's biggest asset, did you read Matt Levine's piece on this, by the way? Because I read this, I was like, wait, what the hell? Yes, it's a horror show. As of Thursday, was $2.2 billion worth of a cryptocurrency called Serum. Okay, next sentence. Serum's total market value was $88 million on Saturday.

So I'm like, wait a minute. They list $2.2 billion worth of assets something that has a market cap of $88 million. That can't be right. That's a lot bigger than the total market cap. So Matt Levine wrote, FTX's two largest asset balances before this week were $5.9 billion of FTT and $5.4 billion of serum. Something like two-thirds of the money that FTX owed to customers was backed by its own tokens that it had made up. This was weird to me. There were no Bitcoin assets on the balance sheet, despite Bitcoin liabilities of $1.4 billion. And the spreadsheet, there's a screenshot. The spreadsheets looked like Sam just put this in a

spreadsheet and an Excel spreadsheet. It feels like every story that comes out about what their books really looked like is just a, they feel like they're made up almost. Like it feels like you couldn't have been. I mean, maybe the biggest problem with blockchain is that like following all these accounts like blockchain actually could have fixed this and maybe he realized that. So he put it on an Excel spreadsheet and it seems like something a seven year old made up. It really does.

So what happened? And so as the story starts to come out, you're like, this can't, this really can't be right. And the story goes, and this is alleged, but it seems reasonable that Alameda, okay, backing up. Alameda research was a hedge fund that Sam Bankman-Fried started. He was a trade out of a company called Jane Street, which was like a quant HFT shop. Before you get into it, here's my question. Did Alameda ever make any money or was that thing a scam too? Yes, yes, yes. But when did it stop being a scam? Because here's what he always said on his podcast. He would say, I figured out that the exchanges in Korea and Japan had different Bitcoin prices than in America. And I could take that arbitrage and I

could beat that. But did he ever get beyond that? Like, did he ever really make money? Do you make that up, too? I don't know. What if that was never as profitable as he said, too? I don't believe anything at this point from him. Fair, fair. I'm not when I defend that. Who knows? But so the story goes, the alleged story is that when Terra Luna blew up, three hours blew up, and a lot of other places, Voyager, Celsius, BlockFi, and we're definitely getting into BlockFi blew up. And so did Alameda. And that was hidden because, again, allegedly, San Bankman-Fried literally took customer deposits to plug that hole, which is, I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds criminal to me. I don't know what sort of fraud that is, but he was taking assets, customer assets from FTX and backdooring them to

his own hedge fund, Alameda. And now, there was a lot of people saying that there was a clear conflict of interest with FTCS and Alameda. You start this hedge fund. one of the biggest hedge funds at the time trading crypto, you create an exchange, your 50% of the volume to start. Now it fell down to one allegedly. And so people were saying at the time that there was, not that it was a fraud, but that there was a clear conflict there. And Sam got put on a pedestal to be this wonder child, and there's no doubt about it that he is a genius, IQ-wise, the ability to process things. He fooled Sequoia and a lot of other really, really had strong feelings about him personally before. I'd listened to a few podcast interviews. He

seemed smart. I never really went one or the other like this guy's a fraud. All the people coming out now saying it was obvious, I think are full of it. Because no one was saying this ahead of time. Stop. There was a few people on Twitter. Saying like this might be shady, but no one was saying that it was a fraud to this degree. The fact that this happened is so out of left field. Sequoia is one of the most well-renowned venture capital firms in the industry has been around since the beginning, a long history of success. And they did a, I don't know, was it a 40,000 word piece on this guy that was on their blog. Just a glowing profile of him, yeah. And what's crazy is that one of the things that they say is that during this, the guy that was

on the call with Sam and Sequoia, and Sam apparently blew them away with his whatever ability to impress people. One of the guys that was on the call with him at FTX walked over to him and said that he was playing League of Legends the whole time. And I had heard stories like that from other people that have interviewed Sam that said, I've never seen anything like this. The guy was literally talking and typing the entire time or playing video games. So the ability to have that sort of processing machine in your brain blew people away. And I don't want a second guess and say, listen, was there some people that probably didn't do property diligence? Yeah, I'm sure there were. But listen, when you get this sort of profile, when you're doing Super Bowl ads, when you have

Sequoia, when you have the most famous investors in the world, I would have written a check probably sight unseen. Like, who are we kidding? We're all human. This guy was the guy. So But the fall from grace is stunning and sickening. It's still hard to process that all of this happened. He's a great A sociopath. So there was this book called The Wisdom of Psychopaths I read a number of years ago. And it talked about the percentage of CEOs and politicians and people in high-ranking places that are high-functioning psychopaths, meaning they don't have like any empathy, they don't care who they step on to move up. He was obviously one of these people because it seems like even now he doesn't care that he ruined people's lives.

and there's some people who lost all of their money with him, a lot of people. And he doesn't even really seem to care. And he was also doing a lot of the things. He was basically telling you what he was doing at the time, but he was pretending other firms were doing it, talking about moving customer assets. And this guy really is a grade A sociopath. And the problem is sociopath are very intelligent.

And they have the ability to craft a narrative and tell a good story. And this guy. Lack of empathy. I mean, not probably. I mean, obviously a lack of empathy. Let's talk about some of their raises and some of the venture money that came in here. Over the last 18 months, this is from Atenej on Twitter. July 21, raised $900 million at $18 billion.

October 21, so just a few months later, raised $420.69 at $25 billion. Not so funny anymore. In January, they raised $400 million at $32 billion. In July, they bailed up LockFie for $250 million. In September, they bought Voyager for $1.4 billion. So there's all this charted out. You've got the valuation, obviously, as I just said, $32 billion, down to one. Now there's talks about like money moving even still, like wallets are being transferred

as we're trying to figure all of this shit out. I guess maybe the most glaring thing people should have realized is that Coinbase is down 90% or something. Robin Hood's down 90%. Crypto prices are down 70% to 80%. Maybe FTC's valuation shouldn't be going up in that situation. FTX apparently tweeted, per hour Bahamanian HQ's regulation and regulators, we have begun to facilitate withdrawals of Bahamanian funds. They say this.

And then this guy tweeted, this has to be one of the most insane parts of the saga. FTX's faking an order from the Bahama regulators to sneakily withdraw funds while everything was paused, only to have Bahama regulators say that FTX was lying. And then they even said that they were investing customer funds, they were taking money out of customer funds to make venture investments. Listen to these investments that they've made in venture. Going back to March 22, Yuga Labs, which is board apes, 450 million, polygon 450, circle 440, near 350. These are all, I'm sorry, when I say 350, I'm talking $100 million.

Salana, $315 million, blocked wallets, we know what that is, just a laundry list of $100 million investments. And then apparently, Sam tried to sell equity to employees at a 50% discount in the spring when things blew up. I mean, this guy, ugh. This guy is not just like, I went down. a few wrong paths. I made a huge mistake. This guy is a villain. He's a legitimate villain. All under the guise of effective altruism, which is apparently a movement to make as much money

to give away as much money as possible. I don't see how this guy doesn't go to jail. He has to, right? I hope he does. Somebody tweeted the whole damn point of crypto so that you don't have to say, I wonder what the company is actually doing with my money. It's a good point. So the ripple effects that we're going to see. I mean, who knows? What if finance is and what if finance goes, who knows by Binance's books. I think being a public company probably saves Coinbase at this point that it wouldn't allow them to get into some of this stuff. But could we see a run on the bank at Coinbase or Robin Hood? Would that totally shock you? As far as I know, Coinbase is a bank. They're not dealing it like this. I hesitate to say that these companies are fine because

I don't want to have this egg on my face, but Gemini too. Register with New York gets checked all the time. But I think being a publicly traded company is obviously we have to talk about regulation, which we'll get to in a second. Yeah, I think we know crypto can't move forward without regulation. It just can't. So in terms of rebuilding trust, Jim Chano's tweeted, training volume at Coinbase plunged 75% of the hours following FTX's bankruptcy. What brings people back? It's got to be priced, no? And are people saying, fool me once, shame, you know, fool me twice. Can't get fooled again? If Bitcoin wants to 30,000, would people even care? Probably not. I mean, people say just,

if you're an engineer in this space, put your head down and build, but doesn't there have to be a massive outflow of talent from this space, too? They talk about a massive inflow, people's smart people coming into this space, wouldn't you be looking for the exit if you put your whole life on, if you left Apple or Google and said I'm going into crypto? I'd be going back to Apple and Google, I think. And what about institutional allocators? That was part of the bulk case. And certainly that's part of my bulk case for sure in 2021. Is there a career risk now allocating to crypto? If you control hundreds of millions of dollars or billions, like why would you put $50 million into crypto? I think the only way we can get institutional buying again is it's going

to have to come from the finance industry. It's going to have to be Goldman Sachs or Fidelity or JPMorgan, it's not going to be some crypto exchange that people don't trust. It has to be coming from inside the system. And crypto people aren't going to like that, but that's honestly the only way I can see this thing moving forward if fidelity says, all right, get out of the way, you idiots who don't know what you're doing, we're going to handle this, we're going to make it safe for you. Other than that, I don't know how it moves forward. So yeah, regulation. I wouldn't trust Binance. There's two FTXs. There was FTX, which is the international arm. I don't know if that was 95% of the business, but that was like the whole thing. And then

I don't remember when FTX U.S. came into existence, but it was, I don't know, it was 2020. I don't know. But FTX International was not overseen by anybody on the United States soil as far as I know. They can't really. So I got a couple of other questions. By the way, somebody made a good point. I forget who tweeted this, but like Bitcoin, the whole crypto complex would have absolutely ripped after Thursday's data. Yes, it wasn't for this. He could have got away with it, potentially. I don't want to say it's a good thing because there's nothing good about this. No, but eventually, with the way those books look, he eventually this would have crumbled.

He could have got away with it for a little longer, but do you think he could have got away with the long enough? Do you think he duped Michael Lewis initially? It's not like Michael Lewis was going to call him like the Luke Skywalker of Crypto. He got him too, didn't he? A little? How would he have known? I know.

He's not like he's a forensic accountant that's looking at their books. I mean, there's people saying that people should know. How would he know? They did Super Bowl ads. Sam Bankman Free was the second biggest donor to the Democratic causes. But do you think that the celebrity causes? But do you think that the celebrity. and athletes that were involved with FTX,

you don't think they actually put money in, do you? Don't you think they just were given equity? There's no way they actually put money in. I'm sure they feel like shit. How could they not? They got dup too. I'm not saying you cry for Shaq and Steph, but I'm sure they feel like assholes.

I do. We had FTCF, I think. Not I think, yeah. No, we 100% FTCF on TCAF. They were everywhere. They're on the Miami Heat Arena. So people can't get their money out. And David Faber this morning said

$16 billion in FTC's client funds, $5 billion withdrawn before bankruptcy won't be clogged back. Recovery maybe 10 to 20 cents on the dollar for the remainder. This is the worst part. Think about how many, I mean, that's $16 billion. There are employees, there are investment funds, there are individuals who are getting 10 to 20 cents on the dollar, and people are pissed off and I'm pissed off and understandably so.

And listen, we get a lot of really upset listeners in our inbox. part of it is more than fair and understandable. I think I want to defend ourselves a little, but the deal is, and the distinction between BlockFi and FTX is that as far as we know, FTCS was taking money from their customers, like straight up. And BlockFi made some really shitty loans. One of those shitty loans was to three arrows. And they blew up. And so now people can't get their money off of BlockFi either. And we feel sick to our stomachs, obviously. And I'm guessing what happened was when they took over BlockFi, FTCS just took all the BlockFi funds, too, and using plug holes, right? Yeah.

So in defense of ourselves, I would say that why do we have Zach on, I don't know, five times, six times, something like that? He was a sane voice in a sea of maniacs. He really was. We had asked him in terms of like the yield product, what are the risks involved? And I think that we described it as the risk equivalent of a junk bond. Obviously, we didn't take it far enough because this in hindsight turned out to be. Way, way, way, way riskier. Well, because junk bond.

Junk bond compared to the stock market is kind of like crypto is like the stock market on meth. So junk bond times a thousand, basically. That's definitely on me for making that comparison. But in terms of position sizing and allocating, and why did we have just Zach on? Zach said, we asked him like, can you put your savings here? And he said, listen, if you're saving for like a boat, okay, but this is not an emergency fund. He was very explicit about that. Right.

And so we look like assholes. And believe it. I feel like one. Yes, I do too. But we were begging people not to go all in at the extremes. Don't go on on crypto, don't go on in tech stock. Don't go on in anything. So I feel bad.

I feel bad that people even lost 2% of their net worth or whatever it was. But to echo what Ben just said, listen, I think we really were pretty sober about this. Max out your 401K, invest in a brokerage account, invest in index funds. And if you have money to speculate with, I don't think we ever positioned this as anything but speculation. Right. And so I feel like a giant dick. and like seriously sick to my stomach that some of our listeners who trusted us feel like we're responsible for getting them into this. I think it's partially unfair, partially unfair. I'm not asking

anyone to feel bad for us, obviously. This sucks. It sucks. We've honestly just learned that this is still such a new asset class and the risks are way bigger than if you invest in index funds, you can lose some money for sure, but it's not going to go to zero. In a new asset class like this, unfortunately, the risks are so big that it can because people did always say, Don't invest money that you're not completely willing to lose here. And unfortunately, that was like a risk, not of the cryptocurrency itself. Like the technology and stuff is still humming along. It's the industry that was the bad part and the bad actor.

Yeah, I think that we were very sober about the risks involved. We didn't know where they would come from. I probably thought it would be more of like, if I had to say, well, it's a black swan, I probably would have guessed the blockchain breaks or a giant hack or I don't know. I would never ever have thought that it was FTX stealing the customer's money. And it's not just like there was one case of a bad actor this year. It's been building and building and building. My first thought with all this was, how did they not go down to three euros capital?

But obviously the answer is because they plugged all the holes with customer capital. Yeah, they did go down. Yeah, which is crazy that they didn't say, why don't we just shut down the hedge fund? I guess that could have been another run of the bank. And they're thinking, like, let's just move this down the line a little further and hopefully we survive. Oh, and now he's tweeting. He's like shit posting now. What the fuck is wrong with this asshole?

He tweeted, what? And now he's tweeting, like, every six hours, H-A-P-P-E-N-E-D. And I think he told the Times last night that he was improvising because he thinks it's time. What the hell is going on? He's a bad guy. And all of the employees at FTX that were duped. It's not good. I mean, there's certainly going to be more that comes out about this, but it's a crazy, crazy story.

And again, I wouldn't believe people who say, like, I knew this was a coming. They were shady. Like, no one saw this coming. Not at this scale or this bad. You would say it like, well, what's the point of blockchain, if not transparency? Somebody did tweet. I don't follow this person, but somebody, this guy, Lucas Newsie, Nuzzi, I don't if I'm saying his name right, deserves a lot of credit because, oh, I think, okay, I'm sorry.

I thought he tweeted this in real time. But he said, I found evidence that FTX might have provided a massive ballot for Alameda in Q2, which now came back to haunt them. 40 days ago, 173 million FTT tokens worth over $4 billion became active on chain. A rabbit hole appeared, and then he goes into this whole thread. But I don't know where crypto goes from here. I think there needs to be a lot of soul searching, obviously. But again, I think it's regulation will make a lot of people feel better.

I think that people have a short memory. If prices rise. Now, I could easily see the narrative being spun, not maliciously, but if Sam gets out of here and they do what they have to do to him and crypto starts rebuilding and Bitcoin goes to $25,000 to $30,000, you will definitely hear we got rid of the the bad actors onward. The problem is, man, there are a lot of bad actors. The tech industry had Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin and Larry Page and all these really, Larry Ellis and all these really intelligent people running the tech industry. Who's holding the steering wheel

right now for the crypto industry? Vitalik? Pretty much. And not really a very good spokesman, I guess. You know what? This is kind of tongue in cheek, but not really. If I was the person who was Satoshi or the people who were Satoshi who started this, I would come out and say, you know what? We've never made ourselves known before publicly. We're going to put ourselves out there. Everything that's going on in crypto is not the reason that we wrote that white paper in the first place. I'm actually surprised that they don't like come out and make themselves public. Be like, how many billions of dollars does Satoshi actually own in Bitcoin?

We're going to air drop $10 to every person who owns something. There needs to be some sort of goodwill or something here to make people feel better about it. I think the trust is broken for a long time. So many what ifs. What if GBTC was allowed to convert to an ETF is probably the biggest one. It's at like a 45% discount now, I think. Anyway, I don't really know what else to say other than we're sick to our someplace about the whole thing and feel terrible for people that got involved because

of us that otherwise would not have. I'm not really sure what else to say other than this sucks. One other thing that came out was Ontario Teachers' Pension Fund invested in FTX and like wire teacher. Well, it was 0.05% of total net assets. It's not like they were being irresponsible about this. Maybe that's the biggest lesson for investors is that if you're going to invest in something new and exciting, you have to right size your position. It's easy to say after the fact.

We were definitely saying it in real time. I don't want to misrepresenting saying that we were saying Bitcoin fixes this. I mean, that was not us. If my crypto holdings go to zero, at wins and it would hurt, but it wouldn't end me financially. And I think that's the whole point of diversification in the first place is it allows you to live another day. Okay. All right. So we're going to leave it there. If the emails keep coming and we'll respond to deal with them, but that's our thoughts on the matter. All right. On to real estate. state. What do we got? What's going on? Last week, you requested, you said, Ben, why don't we adjust housing market for population? Promises made, promises kept? I came through. This is

U.S. housing starts adjusted for population. The crazy thing is, in the early 70s, we had 200 billion people in the country. We were building like 2 million new homes per year. Now we have 330 million people and we're building about 1.3 million new homes per year. So adjusted for population, not only are we building less homes on an absolute basis, but relative to population, we're building way fewer homes. And I don't see when the builders are going to come back and start all of a sudden building again if the Fed is going to screw the housing market like they have. On that Thursday, I forget who tweeted this, but the 30 from 7-3 to 6-6. Yes. Talk about like easing conditions. That would play a big part in the soft landing.

If they can get mortgage rates under whatever the number is, that makes buyers and sellers come back to the market because Rick Palacios Jr. tweeted in Harrisburg, which is, is that in Pennsylvania? I don't know. It could be anywhere. Sounds right. It could be anywhere. This is from a builder. October was the worst sales month in 12 years. No buyers, no sellers. But this is my point about the Fed, how they should probably be managing and massaging the mortgage rate market. It's not healthy for the mortgage rate to go from 7.3% to 6.7% in a day.

Because what if you're a person who locked in at 7.3 the day before? People can't plan when rates are moving that fast. The Fed should just set some sort of guideposts and be like, If rates get above six, we're going to buy more mortgage bonds. If rates get to five, we're going to sell them. They shouldn't be massaging this market now. They shouldn't be allowing it to go all over the place like it is. That's not helpful for people.

Bill McRyreid tweeted, new home cancellations increased sharply, significant shift in marketing conditions. Obviously, Lance Lambert tweeted an update today. Among the country's 400 biggest housing markets, 219 have seen home values fall off their 2022 peak. The average decline being negative 2%. Another 181 markets remain at their 2022 peak. This is shocking.

I think this housing market, if it continues like this and there's just aren't enough sales going on there and the people just stick with their houses, I think people are going to be really angry if rates went this high and the prices don't fall that much. I think they have to. I think prices have to fall. Well, listen, prices don't have to do anything. But I don't see another scenario. But to your point about the soft landing, if mortgage rates go back to five and a half percent, people are going to say, oh my gosh, they were almost seven and a half percent. now they're five and a half, five and a half is going to start looking attractive because people are going to anchor to that higher level. It is all relative. The earnings continue to roll in. We

at Home Depot and Walmart this morning. I didn't get a chance to dig into them, but from what I understand, they were both positive reports. Connorset had an interesting take. He's like, what if, Ben, you were talking about this at the time. What if the inventory build was just a red herring to deflect, to get some pricing power back over suppliers, they were gaslighting. And now they right size their inventory levels and they're back to the pletory. They just got ahead of themselves, basically. So I think Walmart is actually positive on the year, the stock, which is, let's see, how bad was it? At one point, the stock was down almost 20.

Yep, it's positive on the year. How about that? Disney was not positive on the year? Disney. Want to know how I know? Because I own the stock. I wonder for my kids for a while. This stock is awful.

Just for a big, huge blue chip stock and for how many people are going to the Disney theme parks, This stock is terrible. During the pandemic, we were saying that the streaming is the only thing keeping the stock up. Can you imagine if they didn't have streaming? Now it's like, is streaming holding them down? It is. If people were just looking at the parks revenue and that sort of stuff, they'd be fine. I mean, the Marvel movies are still crushing every time they put a new one out.

Alex Morris tweeted over the past three years, Disney's direct-to-consumer business has generated cumulative operating losses of $8.8 billion. I guess that'll do it, which is kind of surprising because they still really, the majority of stuff, on Disney Plus is their old catalog. They don't have a lot of new stuff. How are they losing so much money? That's a good question. They spent a bunch on some original content,

Star Wars stuff, Disney stuff. Yeah, but I mean, not... I'm sorry, compared to the other places, they do not have as much... They don't have nearly as much new stuff as most of the other places, though. They need to issue their own token. They overtook Netflix and subscriber base

in terms of streamers. All right, some numbers. This surprised me. I did listen to this conference call. ESPN was a number one cable network in total day and primetime viewing amongst audiences aged 18 to 49. That makes sense. That's like one of the only reasons people still have cable for the sports channels.

Yeah, I guess I don't know what else I would think would be number one, but who still watches ESPN? I guess a lot of people. I have it on occasionally. I mean, yeah, I watch SportsCenter occasionally, college game day I watch, and then games. That's about it. What did they say? Oh, they said building a streaming powerhouse has required significant investment.

And now with its scale, incredible content pipeline and global reach Disney Plus is well situate to leverage our position for long-term profitability and success. Our financial results as quarter represent the turning point as we reached peak DTC operating losses. So they're saying that they've already, all the losses are behind us, or peak losses, I should say, and they're moving on. So they've got Disney Plus has secured more than 100 advertisers for their domestic launch window, which is happening, I think, in December.

They're doing ad-supported one, too, just like Netflix. You know what they probably should have done? Instead of charging $6.99 to get as many people as they want to do. at beginning, they probably should have just charged $9.99 and made some more money. Should I could have, would have. I don't follow up for that. They said that their biggest daily loss since 2001. Modest proposal tweeted, Disney's implied outlook for linear business is much more terrifying for the industry than the benign and obvious comments Iger made in 2015. Today, you have a rapid deterioration in subs, weakening,

ad market, and heavy investment in streaming against much more levered balance sheets. Yeah, the market does not like the stock right now. It's kind of bizarre how quickly people turned on streaming to being one of the worst businesses there is from one of the best 18. to 24 months ago. I don't want to brag because I didn't buy this for a trade, and it's early, but after Netflix closed that cap, pretty good. All right, you're holding now? I'm never on the right side of a trade.

Cleanest dirty shirt. Although, no, no, no. I did say, I said this. It's not a trade. I'm investing. Long-term holding. This is four months at least. All right.

The Wall Street Journal had another piece talking about the death of the 6040. Classic 6040 investment strategy falls apart. There's no place to hide. That's all well and good to be heard about. Oh, no. What? sorry what's a problem child stuff all good okay another sick kid oh no it's aggressive go on okay you know the worst part about the kids being back in school and they got the masks off now and

everyone's back together i'm the one who receives the brunt of the germs do you get sick every time your kids get sick because when my kids get sick they get a little sick and i get a lot sick i was sick all weekend i had like the worst cold ever and i was sweating and throat hurts and my kids are fine. They got a little cold. I feel just given my lack of physical shape, diet, all that sort of stuff that I would get sick more than I do, I don't get sick a lot. That's the thing. I'm healthy and I still get my kids. The germs they have, they bring home. I don't know what kind of germs are bringing home. Anyway, the 6040 story, this is the interesting part to me. We've heard about the 6040. It's one of the worst years ever, blah, blah, blah. That's well known. Roughly 51% of retirees are living

on less than half of their pre-retirement annual income according to Goldman Sachs Asset Management, which conducted a survey of retired Americans between 50 and 75. So half of people who retired are living on less than half of their pre-retirement income, meaning translation, people are not very good at saving for retirement. Also, nearly half of respondents retired early because of reasons outside of their control, including poor health, losing their job, or needing to take care of family members. Basically, whenever you think you're going to retire, take a few years off, and whatever you think you're going to spend and retire, cut it in half for most people.

Not exactly, like, great news for people, but that's probably really, realistic for a lot of people, that most people don't plan enough for what they're going to spend or they have to really, really discount their living standards in retirement, unfortunately. We don't have to get into Twitter, but he's selling Tesla shares, or I don't know if he's done or whatever, but is there a non-zero chance that Twitter goes away? I thought that was impossible, but I just mean, so the company was obviously bloated. I don't want to sound incentive, but there was too many people working there, so fine. So they got rid of half the people. But what if he just starts losing top talent because things are just out of control? And I don't

I'm not even talking about financially, although that's possible, too. I'm just talking about what if, like, the employees just like, all right, we're out. This sucks. We just need someone to keep the lights on, don't me? I don't know. I don't know how much it takes to run Twitter. I have no idea. But it's a mess.

The thing is, for me, the experience for Twitter is still exactly the same as it ever was. I haven't noticed any difference in Twitter besides people, like, pretending to be brands. I'm getting some dumb ads, whatever. I've been getting a little bit more bots, but other than that, it's, if they can just keep the lights on, is he just going to have to sell this for a loss at some point and just eat it? The guy literally tweets all day at, like, people with 300 followers. He's supposedly the busiest man in the world, and he's tweeting at, like, random people. Honestly, it's kind of nice to know that the richest man alive is just like you and me.

He can't help himself. Can we just say there is zero correlation between happiness and money? Maybe that sounds extreme. I'm saying, like, and this is obvious and this is not unique. But past a certain point, it doesn't matter. I don't know if that number is 10 million. I don't know. And past a certain point, it starts to get bad again because now you have too much money.

But Casey Newton tweeted according to message shares in Twitter, Slack, Twitter's CISO, Chief Privacy Officer, and Chief Compliance Officer all resigned last night. An employee says it will be up to engineers to, quote, self-certify compliance with FTC requirements and other laws. This killed me. I want to read three tweets, or four tweets maybe. Sarah Fisher tweeted, this was a couple of days ago. She's from Axios, I believe.

Twitter loses two more top executives. Their departure caps off one of the most chaotic days in Twitter's short history under the mask and maybe ever. Somebody replied, ha-ha, of course Twitter employees are saying that. everyone thinks they're the glue and can't be replaced. Twitter, we be fine. Somebody responded to that person with five followers here, you will be a thought leader in a few weeks.

And that person literally has five followers. That's a pretty good burn. Alex Cantoritz tweeted, crazy how a layoff of 11,000 people at Meta is a number three tech story of the week. Amazon will cut 10,000 employees. We don't have time to discuss this. Do you think the Amazon thing matters?

Don't they add and get rid of employees at such a fast clip that doesn't really matter? They do seasonally, but this is not that. This is the largest headcount reduction in the company's history. Okay. One more thing on Twitter. Let's say Tesla, he said, all right, screw it. Tesla's going to buy Twitter.

How big of a drop would we see in Tesla's stock one day if they decided to buy Twitter? Oh, 40. I'm kidding. I don't know. 40%. It would be bad. It would be a big drop, wouldn't it? It would be bad.

10, 15, 20%. Here's another thing that I didn't have time to read. Twitter files paperwork to enter the payments business. I didn't read the story. Justin Overdorf tweeted, these lessons have already been learned with Facebook, Libra, a FinCEN debacle. If you are a social network with absolutely zero regulatory oversight, why in God's name would you YOLO into financial services where you will be heavily regulated? It's a good question. In other layoff news, Redfin lays off 30 percent of their staff.

Well, it was done before. So if you wanted to click on an ad and then buy something on Twitter, is that why you would do that? I don't know, why would they need financial services involved in Twitter? Why are they doing that to provide payment processing to users? I don't know. They want to help content creators monetize their stuff. I thought that was going to be paid in Dogecoin. Wasn't that the plan? I don't know. So Redfin laid off 13% of their staff shuts down the home flipping business. So now it's open doors. The only person left in that business. Lance Lambert tweeted, you got to give it to Zillow. They all floated the bulk of their I buy our homes just as the pandemic housing boom hit its peak. Could you imagine if they didn't get out?

And by the way, I think I spoke about this on TCAP. I bought Zillow. So why am I bringing all these individual stocks? This is time of the year that I contribute to my SEP IRA. So there you go. I guess I got lucky with the timing. But there it is. Sometimes you get lucky. Usually you don't. Oh, I just want to say this real quick. Bernard Malkill, there was an interview in the journal. He said, and Burden Malikil is an efficient market guy, a random walk to Washington, I should say. We've had on the show before. That's true. It was an honor.

He said, I've always like, and this is a nice segue to my stocks. That's why I put this in here. I've always like gambling. It's fun. So, yes, I have my individual stocks. Though I think that I am making a bigger rate of return than through index funds, I've never calculated it, but probably not. Will I continue to do it?

Absolutely. Because it's fun. And I read Barron and I read Barron's applied through the Wall Street Journal every day because I enjoy it. So I just want to say, I'm just like Bernard Malkiel. Listen, I buy stocks. I'm under absolutely zero illusion that I will beat the market over long periods of time. But guess what?

I max at my 401k. I also buy index funds and I'm allowed to have fun. I like gambling. By the way, came out of Vegas unscathed, no harm, no foul. I gave a lot of it back at the last table as one always does. But I feel like a break-even is like a giant win, no? Blackjack all weekend? Blackjack.

I tried to play poker, lunch or too long, and some sports betting. Man, that place is... It was absurd. Oh, not just Vegas. Leaving JFK, I don't want to say about recession. I know it's stupid, but people are still going. It was packed. It was packed.

By the way, speaking of... We spoke about tipping. I felt terrible. I checked my bag, and the guy said, you want to leave a tip? And I said, yeah, I do, but I only have big bills. I had cash, but I only had big bills and you couldn't break it. Big spender. See, I told you we should have had an app.

Someone said they created an app for this, right? Someone emailed us about this instead that they created an app. RadiumPayments.com. I'm afraid to link to anything right now, given what just happened, but they're a patent-pending free cashless tipping app that replaces a cash you might carry. So, assuming they don't take that money and loan it to God knows who, it sounds like an interesting idea. Oh, this is fascinating.

I was in the airplane, and I was not watching movies because there's too much to read and catch up on and work to do. I had to slack somebody. I mean, I had to huddle somebody. So huddle is a feature where it's audio on Slack. So I huddled anna, we were talking about something from 35,000 feet, and it worked perfectly fine. I know we would like bemoan when technology doesn't work. I was talking on huddle via Slack at 35,000 feet, which is pretty incredible.

Don't you think there should be a button, though, on the airplane? If you pay for Wi-Fi and it doesn't work, you just can't get on anything, you should be able to get a refund immediately. I've done that a million times where I've done it and I just can't even get a website to open. That's fine. It doesn't work. I'm sure it's not going to work on all-flight, but give me a refund. Fair. Absolutely. All right. Recommendations.

I did watch, Don't Worry, Darling, which I think you said you watched at the theater before. That was the Harry Stiles one. And what's her name? She's a fantastic actor. Florence Pugh. She was amazing in that movie. Phenomenal. So I went in, a lot of people said this movie was a disaster.

I went into very low expectations. You're welcome. You're welcome. I liked it. Okay. I thought it was halfway decent. Low expectations. It got over the hurdle.

Like the first half hour and the last half hour. If Josh said you're going to love this movie and then you went to see 10 minutes later, you'd say it sucks. Right. They could have got rid of half hour the movie, but the first half hour and the last half hour.

What did you like? I just thought it was an interesting idea. I like ideas like that. But here's a thing. On a recent rewatchables, they talked about how there's no more movies made that are set today. There's no movies set in 2020 or 2021 or the 2020s.

It's all you go to a different... Yeah, everybody wants to get the fuck out of here. I get it. But it's really true. There aren't movies being made about today. It's always movies made about an alternative universe or some other place or some other time. Jurassic World Dominion,

2020. True. But it was on HBO Max. I didn't mind. I liked it more than I thought it would. For a couch movie, it's okay. I just thought that the ending was super clumsy and predictable and whatever. For me, it was like a 5.3.

I didn't think it was like the worst movie I ever saw. Yeah, I liked it more than I thought. Here's another one. This is an old one. This is Robert Downing Jr.'s comeback movie before he got Iron Man. Kiss, Kiss, Kiss, Bang, where he plays a... It's with him and Val Kilmer, and it's an excellent buddy cop, funny movie. It was like his first one back.

It was like, okay, Robert Dun & Jr.'s back. Early 2000s, I caught this this weekend. Finally, one more. Righteous Prey by John Sanford. This is a series of probably 30 books about a detective in Minnesota named Lucas Davenport. I've read all of them. And in the last book, I'm finding that technology is making its way into pop culture for a lot of my books. So this book is about five people who become wildly rich from Bitcoin because I got in

in Bitcoin very early. And in the book, the price is to like 40,000. But these people got so rich and they all became billionaires from Bitcoin that they became so bored of their lives that they decided that they wanted to start killing people. So they started killing the biggest A-holes that they could find. So all these politicians and people with guns and they started killing bad people, basically, and they were Bitcoin billionaires who were doing this. So tech is making its way into pop culture.

It's interesting. That's it. What did I get into? Did you watch any movies on the plane? I didn't. I told you. I was doing work. In the airport on the way home, I tried to get onto Paramount Plus, which reminds me after I cancel that.

I tried to get out to Paramount Plus to watch Yellowstone. I was incredibly disappointed by Yellowstone Season 4, but I like the show. Pock committed. I'm giving it another season. So I wanted to watch it. I started for Paramount Plus, seven-day free trial, no harm the foul. It's not there. It's not there.

I went to Amazon. I had to buy two episodes on Amazon. So I think it's on Peacock. I think so, too. Hello, Paramount Plus. What the hell? This is your show. Do you have the Paramount Station?

I do. Okay, start DVRing it. I am. But anyway, so I did watch the first two episodes, and, eh. Really? At least two, okay. I was hoping that they would turn it up a notch this last season was kind of underwhelming.

Listen, two episodes is nothing. I want them to write the ship. I did watch, I started the movie RRR on Netflix. I don't know if it's like a fantasy or what. Very good, very good. It's an Indian movie. It's super long, but it's high quality. I haven't finished it yet, but high quality.

I have not watched a movie since, I don't know, it's been a few weeks. Okay. One more thing. I think this episode marks our five years of doing animal spirits. it in 2017. I don't know if the S&P is up in that time, but it's still got to be positive, so that's good. This is so much fun that we get to do this every week. We want to thank the audience. We want to thank Matthew Passy, our producer, has been with us since day one. Duncan and John, who handle all the behind the scenes on the YouTube and the videos and everything. Nicole,

who handles our social. So it's been a lot of people who have helped us through this, but we appreciate the audience for stick with us through all this. And five more, right? Oh, five more indeed. I just logged into PowerMount Plus to cancel my subscription. Pro tip. Smile is now available for streaming on Paramount Plus. If you want to check out that movie, do the free... Speaking of horror movies, I caught the preview of Barbarian on YouTube, and my giveaway was in the preview, so I did not spoil it for anyone.

So everyone sent him your message is when you're spoiling. But also, thank you for the sentimentality on five years of animal spirits. You're just playing on your computer, not even paying attention to me. Well, listen, no, I'm going to get to it. I want to thank Patrick O'Shaughnessy, because if it was for him, he literally told this to do that, I wouldn't have done him. He gave me the kick in the ass. And again, just for the audience, we take our responsibility as trusted voices very seriously.

And we are going to try and do better and be more careful. So not to revisit that. But yeah, listen, just a massive thank you seemed like an understatement. But this has been a life-changing experience for Ben and I personally. And so just thank you for staying with us. It means everything. Now, I think five years, we've not had one fight, have we? The only time I got mad at you is when you be smirched top gun.

Other than that, we're good. Right? I don't think we've had any fights. Not even off air. No, never have. Send us this email Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com.