Animal Spirits Podcast - The Happiness Smile (EP.10)

Episode Date: December 27, 2017

On today's show we talk about how the new tax reform will impact your paycheck next year, why happiness declines for most people until they hit their 50s, our favorite books, movies & TV shows of 2017, and more. Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritholds wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Now, today's show. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. This week, we're going to bring in our first guest. We have my friend and colleague, Bill Sweet.

He is a financial planner here at Ritholds wealth management, and he's a tax expert. So we thought it would be a good idea to bring him in and talk about the new tax. bill. Bill is pushed through the House and the Senate. Is that going to help me in any way? First time, long time. I'm very excited to be here. But yeah, just about everybody is going to see a tax decrease on their income taxes paid in 2018, including Michael, for reasons that I'll explain in just a minute or two. So just across the board, we're seeing a tax bracket decrease, and so you're seeing roughly about 3%, 15% bracket goes to 12, 25 goes to 22, etc. And what that, in addition to the other things we'll talk about today, I think in general, just about every

you're going to see a boost in their after-tax income, somewhere between 2% and 5% more than you possibly had for 2017 or before. Are there less brackets now than there were previously? No, and that was one of the things that was promised that this would get simple, but what they ended up just doing was taking them. They might have lost one bracket, come to think of it, but no, they're still six or seven, which is just almost identical what there was before. But just to kind of go over it, just in dollar terms, like somebody making $50,000 is going to see their taxes go down by an average of about $1,000, somebody making $100,000, about $2,500, and somebody making $250, about $9,000 less in income taxes on average. So a couple of just caveats there, state and local tax deductions are limited to the first $10,000. So if you're me or Michael, I mean, my state income tax last year is $18,000 by itself, and this year I'm only going to be able to deduct the first $10,000.

And so I do think that disproportionately, quote unquote, hurts folks that in New York, but what's nice is we do make up for that with a couple of other goodies. So just the first one to mention all three of us welcome new babies this year and have kids. The child tax credit, which is a basically it was $1,000 that anybody making less than $110,000 received as a credit against their federal taxes paid. That number is doubling $2,000, which definitely benefits Ben, I think, more than anybody else here. Yes, so I get $6,000 with my three kids. Basically, yeah. And then the flip side of that is the AGI limit used to be 110, like I mentioned before, anybody under $400,000 benefits from this. So if you're thinking about boost to families, that's something that Senator Rubio was arguing for pretty hard. I think to last minute he was holding out his vote. And that's something personally I'm going to benefit from as well as the podcast hosts here, which is pretty cool. What are some of the biggest things that are being misreported on, if anything? What are you seeing out there that's just total bullshit? it? Well, I don't know if it's bullshit, but I think generally what's sort of being reported a lot is the fact that all these goodies expire, particularly in the individual side, in the next couple of years. And so as an example, like the medical deduction goes from the limit goes from 10% to 7.5% which helps anybody that's paying for health insurance out of pocket, but only for the tax year 2018. And there's this expectation that the Congress will get together and extend some of these provisions, particularly for families, particularly individuals. But obviously, if you're

coming from a different political light, and I'm not advocating for either side, but I'd be really surprised if they ended up letting these tax cuts expire, particularly for individuals making, let's say, less than $200,000 a year. And then again, particularly for families, just because politically that tends to be a suicidal thing to do. Who are the biggest winners from this? So biggest winners are bluntly. They're folks making over a half million dollars a year, and particularly if you're receiving a lot of your income through pass-through entities, so such as rental real estate is a really good example. The other provision I was going to go into detail today is that any passer entities are

eligible potentially for a 20% deduction. And so if your net rents are $100,000 in prior years, you're only going to pay tax on $80,000 of that going forward. A couple of caveats there. First is that that's unlimited basically for anybody making under $315,000 a year. So that is 98% of the country. It fits into that range. But then the individual or a couple?

So that's married couples. Good call, Michael. So for a single filer, that's about 157. But then the rules that are above that, so if you're lucky enough to receive a half million dollars or a million dollars from a passive entity, for like service-based businesses like financial planning, investment management, unfortunately, we're barred from prohibiting above that income limit. And so in that respect, back to the things that are being misreported, I think if you're making

less than $300,000 a year and you own a business, at a minimum, you're going to be paying probably 20% less than you did the prior year. And if you believe that that's a good idea for the economy, I think you can make that argument, then I think that does potentially benefit things. So, we'll see. Why did we see companies come out yesterday and announce like a special one-time accelerated payment? I guess it's a bonus or whatever to employees, particularly I think Fifth Third Bank did that on AT&T?

Why are they doing that? Yeah, so I think mostly politically motivated, but in general the reason is they're probably they're expecting their tax rate at the corporate side to go down by probably, you know, 30%. So the maximum corporate rate going forward is capped at 21%, whereas before it was 35. Effective rates up to this point, so what corporations actually pay on average have been closer, I believe, just north of 20%. And so if you take the high-end bracket from 35 to 21, you can imagine how many millions and billions really of dollars are not going to be paid by corporations going forward.

And so all of the things I've been talking about up front affect individuals. That corporate rate cut is a big, big deal for what we study, which is the finances of most public companies. Most public companies are organized as C corporations, and they're seeing a massive tax cut. And so they're basically announcing that they're going to pay some of that out to employees. I think it's a political move. What a lot of CEOs have announced in conference calls and CFOs is that they're going to accelerate share buybacks. They're going to do some other things with their capital. I mean, my kind of view is the economy doesn't really see.

seem to be capital constrained at the moment. And so a big corporate tax cut, I think is just going to end up going back to shareholders in some way or form. But I don't think it's necessarily bad to see a one-time shot go out to employees either. So bottom line with all this is everyone should expect to be making a little more money or paying a little less in taxes next year. Correct. And so one of the things that I got hired here at the firm to do was to talk about after tax income, particularly from an investment standpoint. And so if you think on those terms, then yes. And this is a pretty big gift. It affects most people. It affects the three of us a lot. I ran my numbers. I'm going to pay about $9,000 less in federal tax in 2018. So I was an early

critic, particularly of the state and local limitations. I'm in a high tax state. So clearly, I'm super biased. I'm not familiar with the state taxes up there in Michigan. So I don't know how exactly that's going to affect a lot of the rest of the country. But I do know that state income tax is a big deal for me. But it looks like the rest of the bill was constructed in such a way that even if you, quote, unquote, lose those, the lowering of the brackets, the increase of the child tax credit, I think in general, it'll benefit investors, if you look at it just from an economic standpoint. All right, that's Bill Sweet, making taxes just about as fun as you can do.

Great job, Bill. Ben, you have any more questions for Bill? Nope. Thank you, Bill. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Ben, I've got some good news and I've got some bad news for you. Okay.

The bad news is that I have a cold, but the good news is that according to a chart in front of my face, your happiness should be bottoming out in about 10 years and then improving for the rest of your life. I'm a long-term investor. I can wait that long. So you're probably talking about this is from our friend Tadasa Scontad Abnormal Returns and he put out a graph. I think the graph was actually from Scott Galloway. And it's happiness relative to age in the U.S. And it kind of looks like a smile. So it's pretty high in your teens. And then it slowly drops until what, you're 50 or so. and then it goes up from there. There's a pretty interesting data on this to show why people are unhappy.

So what did Galloway have to say about this? So Scott Galloway, NYU professor and author of The Four Horseman, or I think it's just called The Four, great book, but Scott Galloway said, The Curve of Happiness is the Shape of a Smile. Youth is replete with beer, college, and making out. We then graduate to job stress, trying to forge our career, and someone we love gets sick and dies. In our 30s and 40s, we realize we won't be a senator or have a fragrance named after us, and then something happens. Our satisfaction and happiness turns upward as we age and realize we have so much to be grateful for, end quote. Makes sense.

I think this is pretty interesting to me because I consider myself to be relatively happy, but I think a lot of it has to do with your family and friend's situation and also your job. And I think the fact that I actually do enjoy my job and the people I work with. But how many people do you know that absolutely hate their jobs? And I think it makes them, because you spend so much time and effort on your career, that I think it really makes you unhappy in a lot of ways. Yeah, and it's probably hating their job relative to where they thought they would be when they were younger. Yes. Yeah, especially when you're a teenager and you come out of college, you think you are going to, you know, you have the world just everything's ahead of you. And you think, you know, think you're what you're going to do and you're going to do a really cool job.

And then you realize it's just monotony for a lot of people. And then your hair falls out and you get fat and... yeah it's yeah that hasn't that hasn't happened to you it will it will been that's that's true hey i got plenty of time until my happiness bottom so yeah i think it really it's just a more matter of expectations than anything else so i think people's expectations are higher early in life and once they they realize they're not going to attain all their dreams it finally bottoms and later in life and you can like like he said i think it's a good thing to be to be grateful for what you have i think that's that's part of it and unfortunately it probably takes people a long time to realize that

I think before this bottoms, and obviously this is different for everybody, but I think this does a pretty good job generalizing what the path of happiness looks like. You care, and I say you, meaning not you, but just everybody, cares so much about how they're perceived and what other people think about them. And as you get a little bit older and a little bit wiser, you realize that people's opinions of you, it doesn't matter at all. And also, I would take that a step further is that as you get older, you probably lose frivolous relationships that really don't mean a damn thing. And so you have less people that you're trying to impress. And then you just all of a sudden, and become happy for your family, your health, and everything else like that. Yeah, I think for my kids, when I think about what I want to, like, instill in them in terms of values and stuff, that's one of the things I'll really harp on a lot is just being okay with yourself and not worrying as much about other people think. Obviously, that's really hard to do when you're young and when you're going through school and stuff because, you know, everyone, everyone does it. But that's one of the things that I'm going to really harp on with them is just being okay

with yourself and not worrying what other people think. Yeah, I totally agree. I wonder how much of that is something. that we can control his parents and how much of that is just, you know, how you're born, unfortunately. And I read a book about this called Stumbling Unhappiness by Dan Gilbert. Are you familiar with that one? No.

So Dan Gilbert made the point that nobody wakes up looking forward to being miserable. Like depression is not necessarily a choice. And I think for myself, I was very lucky to be born with sort of a, you know, just a general, happy disposition. So, yeah, I'm not trying to be too bleep. but I just, I hope that that's something that we can control, but I'm a little bit skeptical that you could teach somebody how to be happy and how to be confident in themselves. Yeah, that makes sense to me.

And speaking of absolutely nothing, there was a really good article, I forget how I came across this, but there is this idea that in the next bare market, everybody is going to dump their index funds, and maybe that is the case in non-qualified accounts, just regular brokerage accounts that aren't IRAs, especially 401Ks in particular, and 401Ks that are on autopilot, that the money is coming out every two weeks, most people aren't logging on, they're just, it's just a set it and forget a type of thing. So I saw this really great stat, and I was actually very surprised by this, how did 401K participants fare through the financial crisis and economic recession?

And here is the data point, quote, an examination of account records of more than 22 million DC plan participants, and DC is defined contribution, which is a 401K, found that in 2008, only 3.7% of participants stopped contributing to their accounts. In addition, most participants maintain their asset allocations with 14% changing the asset allocation of their account balances, blah, blah, blah. So that's the meat of it, is that really, in 2008, people stayed the course in their retirement accounts. So obviously, the selling was coming from other places, but it wasn't in the 401K space.

I think the good thing about the 401K is that a lot of the problem with people making changes is just inertia. So in a 401k, you're kind of trapped in there. You know, you make your allocations and you make your changes and you make your contribution. And then it is sort of a set it and forget it. So it makes it easy. So I think, yeah, you're right. I think the devil's advocate here is sort of the taxable accounts and other accounts outside of a 401k that are easier for people to access and move around. Those are probably the ones that they mess with more.

But I think it's actually pretty encouraging when you see these kind of stats that people didn't really freak out and sell out and do something crazy with their money. Yeah, I also think the fact that you can't touch it to your 59.5 is a big thing. People seem to be able to stay the course that way. But it makes total sense behaviorally why you would make changes in your IRA or your broker account, but not to your 401K, which you're constantly making contributions over two weeks. Which is kind of sad because a lot of people don't have access to 401Ks. It would be nice if everyone, you know, had more access to these because it is such a huge part of it. And so there was a stat from the Federal Reserve a few years ago that showed, you know, the combination of defined benefits, defined contribution and IRAs for retirement accounts. And defined contribution is still a smaller piece than the IRAs and the defined benefits.

I'll put the graph in the show notes. But it's definitely getting bigger because obviously the pension plan, which is defined benefits, is coming down. But it would be nice to see if we could get everyone access to these kind of retirement systems to make it easier. people to save. So I know everybody is getting sick and tired of the blockchain jokes and the Bitcoin stuff, but it really is hard to escape. And unfortunately, with this type of activity, the charlatans and the hucksters, it's just like a moth to a flame. And you're seeing some crazy stuff going on. So today I saw a headline that there is a crypto fund of funds that's going to be available to retail investors. And you just have to shake your head when you see something

like this. I think my big trade for the 2018 to 2020 period is going to be anyone who is a crypto lawyer because I think there's just going to be huge amounts of scams. And if the regulators ever do decide to step in, people are going to be losing a lot of money in this space, I think, because like you said, any time that there's, I mean, that's like a bat signal for hucksters and charlatans when you see a huge price rise and it's a lot of retail investors that are involved. So unfortunately, there's probably going to be a lot of people who get taken advantage of from from this stuff. And not that this, not that this would necessarily stop them, but there's no laws in place right now. It's, I mean, as far as I know. Right. It's, it's, it's kind of the wild west.

Yeah. It is the wild west. And yeah, it's, it's pretty crazy. I, everything that's going on, obviously there's some of it is people have the right intentions and the right ideas behind the technology, but people always take things too far. That's just our human nature. Okay, that's enough with recent information. Let's, let's, let's, let's, let's get into, our 2017 favorites. This is our sort of wrap-up show for the year, even though we've only been doing this for two months. So we just wanted to give some of our favorite things from 2017 books, blog posts, movies, podcasts. So what are we going to start with today? All right. I guess we'll do a I go-you-go type format. Sure. Do you want to start with,

let's start with your favorite books from this year. My favorite author of the year, and I don't know that any of these books came out this year, but Candice Millard, I read three, I think she wrote three books. I read all of them. The first one that I read that I absolutely loved was Destiny of the Republic. It was about President James Garfield. And I think people know very little about him. He was president after, I think it was Grant, then Rutherford B. Hayes, and then him.

And President Grant actually tried to come back and be the Republican nominee. But James Garfield was a last minute sort of kind of nobody, dark horse that came in. and he was shot and killed I don't even think he was in office for a year but the story about what happened and what type of guy he was and how he died and all of the mistakes that the doctors made because this is pre-modern medicine

just a really excellent story it is obviously non-fiction but it reads like fiction and then the other one that I really loved was the River of Doubt this is by Teddy Roosevelt not by Teddy Roosevelt God this is by Kenneth Millett

it was about Teddy Roosevelt after his presidency he went to the Amazon So loved that one. And then the last one that I read that she wrote was Hero of the Empire, the Boer War. I don't know if that's Boer or Boer. I think Boer War.

It's about Winston Churchill was really a fascinating book. So she is my favorite author of the year. Oh, cool. Any other ones? Yeah, most of the books on this list come from either our friend Patrick O'Shaughnessy has a great book list or recommendations from people on Twitter. This one I actually found when I was just walking about Barnes & Noble.

I read a book called The True Flag. Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire. I forget who wrote it, but it's a lot about the Spanish-American War and just some really fantastic stories in there. Another book called The Last Days of Night, which was about Edison and Westinghouse and Tesla, and I think that's actually a movie that's coming out next year. Two more. One of them, you ever read the Michael Lewis book called Home Game and Accidental Guide to Fatherhood?

Yes, I love that, actually. the part where his daughter swears in the car at the end I don't know I don't know if we spoke about this but it was so it was so so good yeah it was my friend on Twitter Dynamic Hedge recommended this and I read it out loud to my wife or we read it together while she was feeding Kobe for the first few weeks of his life it was just so funny I don't think anyone he doesn't get a lot of credit for that even though he's such a big name author but it was a really good

yeah like it was especially for a new parent yeah it was it was laugh out loud funny and I just he just really struck a chord with me and then uh so in this list that we compiled we tried to stay away from like the super obvious ones so I actually didn't read Shudah but like we're trying to avoid things like that that everybody read this is certainly not a new book and again somebody on Twitter must have recommended it because I didn't find it on my own but skunk works a personal memoir of my years at Lockheed I forget what this guy's name was but fascinating story about Lockheed's beginnings a lot of great business lessons life lessons, just a really, really fun, entertaining read.

I got a few, too. So actually, one is a recommendation from you. I read Deep Survival by Lawrence Gonzalez, which was amazing. This was the best book I've read in a number of years probably. And it's basically a look at how humans respond to stress in crazy situations. So it's like how people get themselves into trouble, like people that wander off in the woods and get lost, or people that get stuck out at sea for like months at a time, you know, and how, and the end is, like, how people get themselves out of trouble.

And he basically says that there's only like 10 or 20% of people that actually have the mental fortitude to make it out of something like this. And my favorite part was there was this guy who went to see and he got stuck, his sailboat broke down. He was stuck in an inflatable raft like 60 days. And he figured out how to ration his water and his food and he got super sunburnt. And he finally figured out a way to like make it to land. And he got to land.

He got to like some Caribbean islands and a bunch of fishermen saw him and like rushed up to him. said, oh my God, you know, are you okay? Can we help you? And the guy's like, no, I'm fine. Keep fishing. I've got enough water to last me a couple hours. And the guy was so calm and collected after being at sea, stuck at sea for 60 days that he didn't even care and didn't want help when he finally made it to land. This was just such a good book. Couldn't recommend it enough. The other one really good one I read this year. Hold on before you move on, I feel like out of all of the books that I've read, I felt like every story in that book had so many parallels to investing, right? Oh yeah, it was perfect. It was all about human nature and psychology and how we reacted under

stress. It was perfect, yes. Yeah. As a matter of fact, the guy who wrote that Lawrence Gonzalez co-wrote the success equation with Michael Mobison. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Wow. I'm 98% sure. He said he's from the Santa Fe Institute, which is where Mobison does a lot of his work. So that makes sense to me. This was really good. I just purchased a few of his other books and I'm going to try him out. One of my other favorite nonfiction ones was how we got to now, six innovations that made the modern world by Stephen Johnson. And a lot of these are really counterintuitive. So the six innovations he talked about were glass, cold, like refrigeration and air conditioning,

sound, cleanliness, time, and light. And it's really, really fascinating how something like glass can really change the world because when the printing press was made, the problem was a lot of people couldn't read. And one of the reasons they couldn't read is because they couldn't see. And so the printing press actually made people realize they needed glasses. and people figuring out they needed glasses led scientists to experiment with lenses, which led to microscopes, which led to all the scientific development on the body and biology. And so it's really, really cool.

That was probably one of the better books I've read in a while, too. The other cool one from there was, like, how air conditioning changed the way that people vote. So before we had air conditioning, no one wanted to live in the South because it's way too hot, and once they had air conditioning down there, there was a huge mass migration to places like Florida and Alabama and Georgia, and it completely changed. the way people voted because there was more people down there now. So that was a good one. Finally, the other one, it was kind of academic, but I thought it was really good for finance nerds. It's called the Rise and Fall of American Growth. Did you read this one?

I thought you were going to say something else. I thought you were going to say Andrew Lowe's book. Oh, yeah, I didn't. I actually didn't read that one. But the Rise and Fall of American Growth is just, it's by an economist named Robert Gordon, who basically said we've had so much growth from the period of like 1870 to 1970 and so much innovation. and changes that there's not much left to do, so growth is going to be much less in the future. And going into it, I actually thought this was all hogwash, to use a term from you. But he actually made some pretty good points, and I'm a pretty optimistic person, but reading this actually made me kind of stop and think, like, is it possible our best days are behind us in terms of innovation?

And I don't believe it, but it made me think about it. So that was a really, really good book. It's a little long, but the stats in there, it's really, really well researched. And it's, for anyone who's like an economics nerd, this was a really good book. Yeah, I didn't finish that. I probably read half of it, but I would like to at some point. It was fascinating. And I totally agree with the part that you only can invent the refrigerator wants, the light bulb wants, things like that.

But a lot of the innovation happening, we just don't see. And as if, for instance, did you read the Jim Simon's art? article in the New Yorker. Yeah, it was great. And all the things that they're doing at the Flatiron Institute, I believe is the name of the scientific organization. Yep. But shit like that where they're like bending waves and future and medicine and all that

sort of stuff. Like it's so far beyond our comprehension. Yeah. But really, who knows what sort of breakthroughs we're going to see in our lifetime or that our children will see in their lifetime. So obviously we can't imagine it. And I don't know that they're necessarily going to be as revolutionary as the wheel. But who's to say? Like, how can we, how can we be close-minded to the fact that there

might not be something like the telephone? Yeah. The biggest thing for me out of that was just how terrible life was before the early 1900s. Like, there was no air conditioning, there was no refrigerators. There was no indoor bathroom, no plumbing, no electricity. There was no major league sports teams. Yeah, before 2013, life was pretty rough. Yeah, it was, yeah, really, before the iPhone, basically. So I'll do a lightning round of some other ones. So I like tipmakers by Derek Thompson was really good about why things become popular. You mentioned in Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. That's probably the best biography I've read in a number of years. Masters of the Word by William Bernstein was really excellent about how language has evolved over

thousands of years and communication. Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith was a good one for anyone who's in sales, which is pretty much everyone. Bull, a history of the boom and bust, which was by Maggie Mayhar on the 1982 to 2004, you know, huge bull market. Scale was interesting by Jeffrey West. You read that one, right? I didn't finish it. Okay. It probably could have been like a long magazine article. Like the idea was really interesting. but it didn't need to be a book, I think. So my experience with that book looked like the opposite of the happiness to age scale. I thought the first two chapters were like, holy shit good.

And then I sort of got bored. I think I got sidetracked or something else. Maybe I'll revisit it one day, but I didn't finish that one. I think if you get the general concept, it's enough. But it's just how everything scales, you know, from small, tiny organisms to large ones and how there's this really crazy mathematical relationship between, like, the organism and the insides of a mouse versus the insides of an elephant. Yeah, his, he did a podcast with Sam Harris, and it was brilliant.

If you don't want to read the book, listen to that. Yeah, the book could have been a podcast. Then one more, the other one I read was streaming, sharing, stealing, big dad in the future of entertainment, and Patrick O'Shaughness, he recommended this one to me. And this was about, like, how the music business has been disrupted and how Netflix and these types of streaming services are taking over the entertainment industry and how basically the old way of doing things is finally like these old ways of doing things are finally going to be like totally disrupted it's really interesting uh and i do have a few fiction since i mentioned

on the last episode i'm much of a big fiction reader i am uh the orphan master's son was a book about a guy in north korea and i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily say it's like a very uplifting book but it's just fascinating to read i don't know how how true it is but the stuff that goes on in north korea and one of my favorite authors now is called c j box and he writes a book about a game warden out in Wyoming that is that is pretty interesting so those are some of my my favorite fictions my biggest disappointment of the year was homo deus which was a follow-up to sapiens i thought it was awful i don't know if you read it yeah i'll take the other side of that i i liked i i loved sapiens and i thought homo deus was awful what if you never read sapiens uh maybe

that was an expect i don't know it just it didn't do it for me i don't know i feel like sapiens had a lot of, I don't know, it just, it just didn't do it for me. Maybe that's just personal. You were not the only one to say that. Yeah, it's, I think it's kind of the topic because Sapiens looked back and Homo Deus is looking forward, so maybe that's the reason. He was kind of painting a grim version of the future, I think, and maybe that's why I didn't like it. But, okay, how about TV shows? What are your favorite TV shows for the year? I don't watch a ton of TV this year. I love Dark. I mentioned that in a previous podcast, and I I loved Westworld, nothing too revolutionary.

That's pretty much it for me. Did you watch anything good this year? Yeah, I liked Westworld, too. Big Little Lies on HBO was really good. I loved the second season of Master of Nunn, which is Aziz's show. It kind of had a dip in the middle, but I thought that one finished strong. Oh, that reminds me. I really liked Love a lot.

Yeah, love is a good show. I watched that. Second season was good. The third season of Fargo was great, I thought, with Ewan McGregor. I missed that. The Handmaid's Tale, I thought, was probably the best show I saw this year that was on Hulu. I like This Is Us because that's like the one that makes my wife cry every week and because they have like triplets on the show and we had twins.

So I feel like a bond with that show. I think Insecure is a good show on HBO. That's kind of like girls but with less annoying characters. And the other one on Amazon is Sneaky Pete. It was a really, really good. It's a show by Brian Cranston. And that's a pretty good one. Is he in it or did he just produce it?

He produced it, but he also played the bad guy. and that was like a con man show and Cranston was the bad guy which was really good and my favorite doc of the year was the Defiant Ones on HBO was excellent just because it gave me nostalgia for 1990s music Okay

My least favorite thing on TV this year was This season of the NFL sucked Just because you're a Giants fan Yes Yeah that was rough It has been a bad NFL year though You know it was a terribly I think the movies industry has been terrible

in general but I had a few favorite movies. I liked Arrival, which what I just thought was an amazing concept for how they explained how to communicate with these aliens. It sort of blew my mind the way that they, the way that it worked. And I liked to get out. I thought that was awesome. Yeah, that was my favorite movie of the year. That was great. I thought the way that, I just saw that a few weeks ago. That was really good. And I was happy. I had no expectations going into that movie. I think I saw it on iTunes. And I was just like, oh, what's this? And so I was like, hold. Holy shit, that was so good.

Yeah, it was really good, and it made a ton of money. The other one I liked was the founder about Ray Kroc, the McDonald's guy. That was a great business movie, actually. That's about all I got for movies. My surprise of the year was Wonder Woman. Oh, really? Did you see it? I did not see it, but I heard it was good.

It was really good. Okay, I'll take a look at that. Okay, any good. And then what else? We have podcasts. Any good podcasts this year that are memorable to you? Yeah, so the two podcasts that stuck out to me was the conversation that Patrick had with Boyd Vardy, the guy in South Africa, whose family

has been there for a few, I don't know how centuries if I made that up, a few generations. And he tells a story about how he was tracking lions, and then he came across elephants, and just blew my mind. And then the other one that I really loved was Michael Rappaport with Matt Barnes. I think that's one of the things that we didn't really see too much of growing up. I was a huge NBA fan, getting to hear straight from these players about what they think about playing with other players and the business side of it and all of that sort of stuff. I mean, so many great stories in that one.

I really enjoyed that one. I liked the Jeff Bridges when he was on WTF with Mark Marin, just because he seems to have taken over the persona of the dude from Bigelowski. He's like 70% of the way there, I think. And he, like, played his guitar and sang a song. And he just seems like a really cool laid-back guy. I like any time Chuck Klosterman is on with Bill Simmons. He's probably on four or five times a year.

And the new one for me was Origins with James Andrew Miller. He does a lot of books that are interview-based, and he did an origins on Curbier Enthusiasm, which was another one that had a strong comeback this year. Oh, wow, I never heard of that one. Yeah, it's really good. And he's got a new one out on ESPN right now, too. Anyway, I think that's about it. So thanks everyone for listening.

Hold on. Hold on. What's your favorite tweet of the year? Favorite tweet of the year? I don't know. I like the one that the guy said that blew my mind that if you, when you snap your fingers, it's really the palm of your hand that's making the noise and not your thumb. Okay, you have to link to that because when I heard that, I was like, well, what are you talking about? Yes, it blew my mind. So I will link to that. Thanks for listening, everyone. Yeah, we'll see you guys at 2018.