Animal Spirits Podcast - The Rich Man's IRA (EP.68)

Episode Date: February 13, 2019

On this week's show we discuss how index funds can differentiate themselves in a crowded field, how to wreck a pension fund, how does Renaissance Technologies make money, how much your time and vacation days are worth in terms of happiness, re-rating Boiler Room, how often to rebalance a 401k, mortgage debt vs. retirement savings 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought you by Y Charts. Welcome to Animal Spirits, the podcast that takes a completely different look at markets and investing, hosted by Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson, two guys who study the markets as a passion and invest for all the right reasons. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's wealth management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes. only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritthold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. So Tom Sarah Fagas alerted me to this. This tweet is from January 24th. And he showed a really great chart of SPY's market share of the S&P 500, which has gone from almost as much as 80% back in the fall of 2010. And it looks like today it's below 50%, which is pretty wild.

So obviously there's been a lot of diversifying amongst funds. And part of it probably has to do with the fact that a lot of the bigger players have decided it makes sense to get into this space. I think it's, I mean, I think it's just an expense ratio story. So at 9.45 basis points, I guess, I think that's what it is. SPY is no longer, it still is dirt cheap. Let's not be ridiculous. but it's not as cheap as it could possibly get. So the other more interesting line on this chart shows that even though the percentage

of total assets in the S&P 500 is down to about 50%, it's still nearly like, looks like around 95% of turnover. So it is definitely the vehicle of choice for traders and not just pajama traders, but like big money traders. Right, because of the average holding period, I think Morningstar did this last year. It was like 22 days for something ridiculous. list. That actually seems high. Yeah, it actually does. So I'm sure there's some, there's got to be some long-term holders in this that you would hope. But I put out a piece last

night and I talked about like what would seem crazy in a couple decades in the asset management industry. I think I asked you for to help me with this one and you gave me, you drew a blank. But thanks a lot. Sorry. Hold on, hold on. What I think happened, and maybe I'm misremembering in the story, I think you gave me a list of five things. And then I, you took all the low-hanging fruit and I had nothing else. I took the good ones. So anyway, one of my things was, I think in a few decades, people look back and say it's crazy that anyone ever paid anything for an index fund like this. And maybe in the

future, someone pays you, a la like a credit card rewards program. And someone sent me a tweet. And I think this person is from Japan. And they said actually Japan's two biggest brokerages offer points, like a point system. I don't know if it's depending on. how often you trade or how much money you have or what. And then you can use those points to buy more shares in stocks. So it's almost like these brokerages are paying them a dividend or kickback to then buy more shares, which I think couldn't you totally see Vanguard and Isher's doing that in a few years if something like SPY is having trouble attracting investors some of these bigger places. Don't you think that's like the next obvious step for them? I could see like Robin Hood doing

something like that. Yeah, for the millennial types. I could see that too. So there's an article that picked up on this from the Walshiel Journal. Investors yanked a record $25 billion from U.S. Stock Exchange traded funds in January, even as a market sword. The two biggest losers, two ETFs accounted for $19 billion of the $25 billion, even as the S&P gained 7%. Let's see. So it was IVV, which lost more than $7 billion, and SPY, which lost more than $12 billion. So now, some perspective, this is just 1.4%. of assets in U.S. equity ETF, so it's not quite as bad as the headline makes it out to be.

But I guess the question is, a lot of this could be explained from like maybe taxless harvesting, but if the money, if all this money came out of these two products, where are they going? Is it possible investors are diversifying more and going into other types of products or are we just building up cash on the sidelines? Well, okay, so a few things. And we're going to put this in the show notes from Y charts. And oh, by the way, again, if you sign up for a new subscription with Y, shorts and mental animals spirits, you get 20% off. So they have a table showing fund flows for different S&P 500 products. This is wild. Over the last year, $42 billion has come out of SPI.

Out of a base of... I think it was a high of, hold on just see right here. I think the high was like 280 maybe. Wow. Okay. So it's a lot. And over the same time, VOO, which is Vanguard's ETF has gotten 13 and a half billion dollars. IVV has gotten $5 billion and vanguard mutual funds obviously have taken in money as well. And the collective on this chart shows for the three of these funds, it's what looks like it about $500 billion, which is fairly insane. And obviously the biggest gains have come from Vanguard and I share. So the first mover advantage that spiders had in this thing, which I think was the first year 93 that this came out. Yeah. They actually had that first mover advantage for a long, long time.

time. And obviously, there's no way to change this unless they lower the fees and they haven't really done that. Over the last three years, assets under management from IVV and VLO looks pretty neck and neck. And I think they both charge four basis points. They both gained 161% in terms of their assets. Over the same time, SPI is up just 50%. So I think I think that this is definitely a trend that continues. And again, we're arguing, I mean, it's five basis points. But I guess when you're managing tens of billions of dollars. That's real money. Right. And especially all these firms, that's their whole thing, is scale and figuring out the scale. So, yeah, I'm sure how much of that growth in SPY has come just from market growth, too. Or I'm sure a lot of it isn't even

just assets. So moving along, did you see this article from friend of the show, Tara Siegel, Bernard, in the New York Times? Yes. So there's a really good stat in here. The growth of your portfolio is largely determined by when you started investing and when you retire, which obviously we know, but this is some good data right here. Let's say a person saved 15 percent of the earnings during a 30-year career. If that person retired in 1982, they would have accumulated just over five times their final salary. If they retired in 2000, however, they would have amassed 17 times their salary. So we talk about this a lot of time, all the time, but a lot of this is just out of our hands. And this gets back to our discussion a couple weeks ago about

star managers. Like, the best thing you could do to become a star manager is start your career in the early 80s, right? Yeah. William Bernstein wrote about this one of his books. I can't remember which one, one of his short e-books, where he showed kind of a similar thing, either 10% or 15% of your savings, how could you get to the point where you could use the 4% rule and flipping that around? How could you get to the point where you had 25 times your needed money saved? And it wasn't a contest. It was like 19 years to get there, starting in the 80s and 90s, wherever else you needed 30, 40 years or whatever. Yeah, that sounds like a lot to amass 25 times. Yes, that's a, and obviously that doesn't include things like social security. That's just

your portfolio. But that's kind of, if you want to use a 4% rule, that's kind of the idea that you need 25 times, which, yeah, how many people can actually get to that point? So she wrote, traditionally, investors reduce their exposure to stocks as they approach retirement, but one novel approach is to cut exposure even further, then get back into the market as you age. And I guess she spoke to Wade Fow. Did I say that right? The P has to be silent, right? Sounds right to me. And Michael Kitsis. So, for example, portfolios that started with about 20 to 40% in stocks at retirement and then gradually increased to about 50% or 60% lasted longer than those with static mixes or those that shed stocks. What do you think of? I thought this is kind of interesting. I never thought about it this way. So the obvious idea here is that a huge bear market at the outset of retirement could potentially set you back. And so the idea is, and I've heard of this before where you lower your stocks at retirement, I guess a lot of it comes. down to that stuff we talk about, the sequence of return risk and a lot of that is obviously

out of your hands. I guess it's trying to combat that. And especially if, I guess part of it comes down to are you actually taking money out of your stocks or not. So there's so many different questions that you could raise here in terms of the withdrawal strategy. I think it's hard to say. I think that this would be behaviorally very difficult. Let's say that you retire and for the next seven years, you're taking money out. And let's say that the market is, you know, doing what the market does up and down, and maybe there's an 18% correction or whatever, but nothing that terrible. And then let's say that you're 73 years old and the market really gets killed. The market goes down 40% or whatever. Is it realistic that at that point in your life, you're going to

increase your stock exposure from a behavioral point of view? Yeah. And looking at it from the other side, let's say you retired in 2009 when the markets are low and you pat yourself in the back because you reduce your stock exposure and then 10 years later, stocks are up 3 or 400 percent. and you realize how much you miss. And I guess the good thing about this type of strategy is it doesn't say go to zero. It doesn't say go all bonds. It's saying to step back a little bit. But obviously it's so path dependent that it's kind of hard to say.

All right. What's this article you got in here? Last week we talked a little bit about institutional investors and their huge move into Alts and got some good feedback. And one of the pieces of feedback we got came from a paper in Omaha. and they looked at this $770 million pension in Omaha, and they kind of tied it to buff it a little bit. But it's pretty crazy. So this pension plan made huge, huge moves in their portfolio in 2007. And my biggest thing with Alts is not that Alts per se are horrible

in every situation. I don't think that's the case, but I think the way that these funds use them is. And so this strategy shows that this fund made enormous changes. And so there's a chart in here that shows their asset allocation from 2007 to 2017. And it's kind of interesting because it shows it changing over the years. So they went from 60% in stocks in 2007 to 30% in 2017. And they took alts from 25% to 53% or 54%. And bonds kind of have actually remained static, even though they changed along the way. So your point is probably that people want alternatives to stocks and bonds after traditional assets don't do well. Yeah, of course. And so this fund, they said that they bailed on the stock.

market in 2008 and put most of the assets into alternatives, including real estate funds in Mumbai, India, international shipping companies, Ukrainian agriculture, oil companies in Kazakhstan and Brazil, Timberland and Tennessee, distressed housing in Florida, New Jersey, and Nevada, and more. What's a problem? It's diversification, right? And so it said it turned one of the nation's best performing pension funds into one of the worst, and their shortfall went from like, they went from like 138 million.

million shortfall to seven hundred and seventy one million dollar shortfall in 10 years and actually last year they had to slash their budget by 30 million dollars and 19 of 19 million of which went right to the pension so they actually had to cut money for taxpayers in kids that would have gone to like help the community that would have and so that's my biggest thing with with these alts it's not necessarily just having an allocation to them it's when did you do it and why and that was the biggest problem I saw with a lot of these institutions is just the fact that they went to these alts at the wrong time and they went in heavily because of what happened in 2008.

It's hard to feel bad for really rich people that are losing money or not doing as well and whatever. But obviously when it's like affecting people on this sort of level, it's like... Yes, this is or actually like people forget sometimes these biggest institutional funds like the beneficiaries of these funds are actually real people and the money is actually being used for something, not just for changing asset locations and making interesting moves with your investment committee.

So kind of piggybacking off the alt thing, AQR put out a paper last week called demystifying illiquid assets, expected returns for private equity. And they went through a whole host of things to come to this. And it's always kind of hard to do these expectations, obviously. But they found, and this is kind of crazy. So they figure that over the coming years, what? Did I mess? that up? No, he did it. Oh, what do you laugh? But you said they, they a few times and it reminded me of the scene in, uh, stepbrothers where he's like, they, they give you the tools that you need to succeed or something like that. We start about his new job. Do you know what I'm talking about?

I think I, I haven't seen it enough to know the question that one. I'm sorry. I know that's one of your all-time favorites. I, maybe I need to re-watch it again. Yeah, absolutely do. Okay. Anyway, Sorry, where were you? They said, they're essentially. They said, they're a estimating a expected return for private equity of 9.6% gross, which sounds pretty good, but on a net of fee basis, that comes out to 3.9%. And their comparison, and this is on a real basis. They said public equities return estimate would be 3.1%. So they- I was about to say, are 3.1% real returns that bad if we got that? Yeah. So it's interesting. But the other part is they said they think private equity will have an 80 basis point premium over public equities going forward. And but they don't think that this is some sort of illiquidity. premium. This is just a premium because it's higher risk, almost like you're investing in small caps or microcaps. So if you look at this chart they put in here and they went back to 1998, they put valuations between public and private companies. And back in the late 90s and early 2000s, you had this enormous gap between the, so they did the EBIT dot at enterprise value,

which is just a simple way of doing like a price to, price to book or whatever for private companies. It's just a different value method. And it was a huge gap in the valuations going until about 2007 and it's completely closed. And I think this is another way of like thinking about the way that these things exist, these opportunities and they're gone because everyone piles into them like these pension funds. And now the valuations for public and private institutions are basically the same. Yeah, that's a good chart. So I don't know what, trying to come up with expected returns for these things are, it's, I think it probably helps set your expectations correctly, but I think if you were to tell the institutions that are investing in these

private equity funds, that that would be their expectation. They would laugh at you because they're expecting to get 15 to 20% IRAs in these things. Yeah. So there was an article from Bloomberg. Hedge fund rent tech created the ultimate tax fee IRA account for employees. Did you see this? Yeah. It's really, it's really great that all those billionaires that run the world's greatest hedge fund are also getting unbelievable tax breaks, you know? Well, another great thing is that Roth IRAs do not require workers to take distributions in retirement and can be passed along to their errors, which is just tremendous. I mean, it's great to see these guys finally catch a break. So the firm terminated its 401k plan in 2010, and then they rolled it into traditional IRAs and then did the conversion and then paid all the taxes up front.

So now, as of late 2017, IRA assets exceeded $660 million. Representing an eightfold jump in five years. Not a bad gig if you can get it, I guess, huh? And this is the one that they can invest in there. So they have the medallion fund, which is like... Yeah, the good one. Right, which is, what does it do, like 80% a year or something? And that's the one that no one outside of rent tech can invest in.

Yes. And they still, I think because they have to limit its size, so they like do distributions every year and get back the money. When this guy dies, Simons, can we do like a ready player one for him where like he puts the secret sauce in a backpack somewhere and hides it? And then all the quant fund managers have to, like, solve puzzles and riddles to go find it. So he can actually tell us how they're doing it. So it says the fund has historically averaged annualized returns approaching 80%. And when you're doing 80%, you can charge 5% and 44%. But do they even need to charge fees because it's just internally now?

I mean, that's what the fees were, I guess. But wouldn't it be great? Yeah, I would love to. Do you think I would, yeah, it would just be, I wonder if it's like just even, let's just say that they said this is. our formula or multiple formulas. I'm sure they're doing a bazillion things. Is it like, would it be English? Would you be able to understand what they're doing? Do you think? Well, you remember they, in that more than God book, which is probably the best book ever written on hedge funds, they tried to kind of explain it. And a roundabout way of doing it,

they said, we use signals that wouldn't make sense intuitively. So they just, but they also come in and out and they change the signals constantly. So I'm guessing it's some sort of machine learning driven thing that is constantly changing. I don't know. There was a great video with Simons a few years ago to MIT. I don't think it's on YouTube anymore. I think it was taken down. But he said he was talking about how like when trend following stopped working or it worked amazingly well and then obviously worked less well than it used to. Interestingly enough, as good as they've been in that fund, they've tried some other funds like a managed futures or trend filing thing and some long only equities and they haven't done nearly as well. So whatever

they're doing that one fund, it just kind of goes to show you that. Yes, there is like that unicorn somewhere, but you're not going to be able to access it, and they won't tell you how they're doing it anyway, so it doesn't really matter. What if it's just like the Super Bowl indicator? They're just doing stupid shit like that. That's what they mentioned in the fund where they would use stuff like that that shouldn't matter, but I'm sure it's a little more, you know, than that. Maybe they use that. Remember the one about Nicholas Cage and like people dying in pools or whatever, that how they're correlated with each other? Oh, yes. All right. So there was an article. in Bairns over the weekend talking about a star stock picker who is a tiger cub named Steve Mandel that I've never heard of. Have you heard of him? Yes. So apparently he's a big deal.

Yeah, I mean, he's one of the well-known guys who, and his track record has actually like made it through the last decade or whatever. And he's, I think he's one of the, these hedge fund guys who has kept more of a lower profile. His name is kind of in the discussion usually with some of the best stock pickers, but he keeps a lower profile, which has probably helped him. So he has a long short fund that ran a net exposure of just 50%, about 50%. And since its inception in 1998, it's done 14.4% net of fees compared to the S&P 500, 6.6% return of the same period, which is superhuman. Like, oh my God, those are ridiculous numbers.

Yeah, that's impressive. So that means he actually made money on his short positions more than likely, which is saying more than you can for a lot of hedge fund managers, especially recently. I thought this was kind of interesting, given his track record. So last year, the fund declined 5%, which is in line with the overall market and doesn't seem that bad at all. The firm received net year end redemptions of 15%. Wow. So it didn't give him a very long leash, huh?

Isn't that insane? Like, this guy's track record is probably running with a 50% net long exposure and able to return these numbers is just like crazy good. And still. I keep harping on it, but this is why the manager of managers approach is so hard for these institutions, because they don't have the patience to stick with anyone or anything. They just, they change and flip-flop these things so often that it just ends up, if they would just keep their portfolios the way they are, even if they're in these underperforming funds, they'd probably do better than what they, the alternative is for what they actually do, which is switch out at the bottom and get into another one at the top. What's this accounting for time article? So researchers at Harvard did this study where they tried to put a price tag on time. And I wanted to run some of these by you because it's interesting.

They said that spending more time with others, like having a meal with friends or family, is the happiness equivalent of getting a $3,600 bump in your annual salary. Yeah, I buy that. And the other thing is outsourcing to have people do stuff for you like chores gives you an annual income boost to about $18,000. Wait, hold on. Let me cut you off right there. Okay. Well, who are they asking? I mean, the answer is going to be very different for a 25-year-old making $45,000 versus a $42,000.

That's good. What do you mean that's good? I don't know. I don't know what the survey data is. You know how well we're into surveys, but that's why I'm just, I don't know exactly what the, what they, what's the baseline here. All right, so carry on. So what was the $18,000 thing? Okay. If you outsource your chores, like cleaning, maybe cooking, that sort of thing, it gives you an 18,000. thousand dollar boost in income. They also found, here's an interesting one. Well, let me ask you one last question. Okay. So outsourcing chores your dislike is equivalent to an annual income boost of $18,000. Yes, in happiness. Let's just say that that's true. Yes. Do you think anybody would give up $18,000 in order to do that sort of stuff?

Like, I feel like if God said to you, hey, Ben, now you have to mow your law, now you have to do this, now you have to do that, and I'm going to give you $18,000. Don't you think you would take the $18,000? Potentially. That's a pretty big bump. Yes. Yes. I can see how the happiness quotient fits in there because I think paying for time is definitely worth it in a lot of cases. And that's something that I do. But I don't think it's worth that much. You know what, Ben, this podcast is like an annual income bump of $75,000. That's true. That's true.

And so they also found that vacation is the most egregious misuse of time. And so their survey, they found 75% of employers who got eight vacation days a year did not take them all. and 40% used fewer than eight days, and 31% took fewer than four days. And they found that taking eight days of vacation or more a year is equivalent to 4,400 increase in annual income in terms of happiness. I think you lost me. I'm confused. Okay. The happiness bump is even more significant for someone who makes over $100,000.

Basically, this is just saying time and experiences are worth way more to you in terms of happiness than you realize. Okay. That I am fully on board with. I think trying to quantify happiness is just a weird sort of premise. Wait, what's this? You say boiler room is not underrated. Oh, explain yourself. I will explain myself. So I very much enjoy... Wait, before we get into this, I will say I wrote a piece about Hollywood and how it, what it taught me about investing. And I said, boiler room is an underrated movie. I'm not saying boiler room is underrated in terms of a finance movie. Boulder Room is underrated in terms of All movies in the 2000

That's what I'm saying But anyway, continue Okay, so I very much enjoyed your piece Even though I was unable to contribute it Because you took all the low hanging fruit Okay But my, not that I think that Boilover Room Is not a good movie

I think it's a great movie And I think it is properly rated Okay, but my contention is that Because of the internet these days Nothing is properly related So I can't stick with that one I think you're just polling yourself And making it up

Okay, this is a survey of one I'm the blog writer Right. But you can't just decide that boiler room's underrated. Okay. I feel like it's a movie that only finance people appreciate. That, okay, that might be true. Okay, how's that sound?

Fair. Yep. Okay, let's move on to, oh, before we go on to some listener questions, I just have a credit card story because last week we kind of harped on the banks a little bit for not paying people money. And I'm not a huge fan of big banks. Obviously, that's not really going out on a limb and giving a hot take there. But I think big banks are good for something.

And so last week, I think it was on Wednesday morning. got up and I had a text and an email from my bank saying someone is trying to use your credit card in Dallas. It's suspicious activity. They're trying to buy a Coca-Cola for $2. And did you make this yes or no? So reply, no. And immediately someone calls me and says, hey, there's suspicious activity on your fund. Did you make these purchases? Again, I say no. They say, all right, your card is being canceled right now. You'll have a new one to you tomorrow morning overnighted. Perfect. So that's like one of the good things about big banks is that they can actually They actually spend money on this type of fraud prevention.

Like, do you remember in the past how crazy it would be if your credit card information got stolen, how, like, nerve-wracking you would be? Counterpoint. What would you say, what would you say to short the bankers long, long, what is it, long what? Am I butchering this? I don't know. I don't know what's saying you're trying to get out of here. That's pomp saying. Short the bankers, or long the spreadsheets?

Long the spreadsheets. Because along the algorithm, Bitcoin. Yeah. Right? Either way, you're right. That is a fantastic service. That happened to me a few times. Speaking of the Bitcoin thing.

So we saw this, I don't know if we mentioned this or not. The story about the guy who had the Bitcoin exchange worth a couple hundred million dollars and he died and he had the only password for all this cryptocurrency money. Conspiracy theory. He's not really dead. He stole everyone's money. Right? Did you see this? Like this guy, there's no.

Oh, I. I'm dead and the password is gone. Like, are we sure this guy's dead? We're not sure. I haven't found this body. Did we get a verification? Did they do the bin Laden thing where they dumped him in the middle of the ocean? Very good.

I'm just saying, that's my conspiracy theory of the week. Listener questions. Just curious, what are your thoughts on frequency of rebalancing in a 401k or other retirement accounts? Does the lack of tax implications impact your analysis? I don't know that it really matters. We've done a lot of pieces on this over the years where it's kind of like horseshoes and handag grenades. whatever you do, it honestly doesn't really matter. Some people make the argument that you could wait two or three years to allow momentum

to work. Some people make the argument you could do it over six months or quarterly or some annually or annually. Honestly, it doesn't really matter. I don't think that much unless you, as long as you stick with a certain plan. But the other good thing about 401k, sorry, keep cutting you off. No, you're on a roll. Go.

With a 401K, when you're putting in new contributions, you're kind of rebalancing in some ways already. Sort of. Not really. Not all the way. Okay. What do you think? Okay. So I think that it doesn't matter in terms of it's not going to make a difference on your life. So I agree with you there. Right. But it definitely will matter to terminal wealth. However, you're not going to know ahead of time. What's the optimal rebalancing schedule. So I think that less is better than more. But I don't know that once a year or once every other year, once every three years, you know, nobody can tell you ahead of time what's going to work best. The good thing about most of the fun firms that I've worked with over the years is that you can set a frequency on your own to do it automatically. And I think that's the biggest thing is just

have it be automatically so you don't have to think about it and try to remember to do it. You know, set it for your birthday, set it for January 1st, whatever. I would just set it automatically and then leave it alone. All right, do I put more money towards paying off the mortgage or should I put more money into retirement savings? A little background info. This guy and his wife are both in their late 50s or early 60s. They currently contribute 24% of their income to retirement plans, which is very commendable. They have six years left on their mortgage. It's a 15-year mortgage with a 4.5% interest rate. I've heard enough. Okay. Sorry. But they're saying, should we dial back the 24% we're saving to pay off the mortgage to get it done sooner and then add more to the 401k?

Yes. So I think that they should because 4.5% is a pretty decent rate, but it's, you know, how confident are you that that stocks and bonds for the next 5, 10 years are going to do better than that? I'm not that confident. And I think that there is a huge, Huge, is psychic income the right phrase here? I think you use it right there, yes. Okay. A huge psychic income to like being done with your mortgage. I think that that's a huge, just pressure off.

And also, like if you're, if they're contributing 24%, I would think that their retirement plan is probably in decent shape. So then that they could afford to scale back a little bit. I think is long, my whole rule of thumb would be have your mortgage paid off before you retire for sure because I don't think you can put a price on that, like how comfortable that could make you feel just having that debt out of the way. It just gives you so much more flexibility and a margin of safety. What if you're in the fire movement and you retire at 30? Then what? If you're in the fire movement and you retire at 30, that means you're living in a van

down by the river and not owning a home probably? I don't know. Could you do a reverse mortgage from a van? By the way, we're only joking. Please do not send the same thing. They usually address to you, so I'm fine with that. All right. What recommendations do you got? Okay. So I started reading Grant by Ron Chernow last week. I'm not, I don't have enough patience to read the whole thing like you. You read cover to cover, right? Yes. 960 pages. I'm kind of bouncing around and I was looking for some specific stories for something I'm writing about. And so I read a lot about, it's, it's at the end. Yes. I tried to get some specifics about like, didn't you write about that already? His background. I did, but I'm writing something else. And then I read all about his

Ponzi scheme and, but here's the thing I'm like, hold, hold on, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. He was a victim. Yeah, right. He was part of it. I mean, are you accusing the ex-president United States of a proxy scheme? The funny, the thing I really liked about turnout is the fact that he really, like, defended Grant. He almost sounded upset that the way that he's been portrayed over the years as someone who had all these things go wrong in his account. Well, like the alcoholism seemed to, like, come up over and over.

And I feel like he had it under control, I think. but his enemies used that against him, like over and over and over. Yes, it was very good. But here's anything I thought about this as someone who's written a book before, and I looked at all of the different sources he used. How big of a research staff does he have helping him prepare for a book like this? I don't know. That's a great question.

I know that Washington took him literally six years to write. Wow. It's really impressive. It's really good. But don't you think, I know the book is ridiculously long, but he's an excellent writer. Oh, it's very good. But I think it's interesting, like, you can see how much he, like, respected Grant after writing this because he was sticking up for him.

But also when he talked about the stuff with the Ferdinand Ward guy about the Ponzi scheme, he also said, like, listen, Grant was extremely naive in this stuff. And it was interesting that he was kind of giving, it was almost like he treated him like a family member, which is, maybe you feel like you know someone that much after you put so much research in him. But it is, it is really good. And he's, that's the first book of his I've ever read. So it's, it's pretty amazing. By the way, the cover of that book looks like, just like Robin Williams. Yeah, I could see. Yes, it does.

It looks like a running of him. I really enjoyed the Ray Romano special on Netflix. He actually, he does it at the comedy seller. But halfway through, he goes, he has a camera crew follow him. He does half a set at the comedy seller and half a set at the other comedy seller around the street, which you never told me that there was another one before. Okay. Anyway, there's another one, and he took it. And I would say the second half is better than the first.

So if you don't like the first, like, 10 minutes, it takes them a while to get warmed up. But by the end, the last half hour is just, he is really good. And I may have mentioned this story before, but the first time my wife and I came to New York, actually, it was for my quote-unquote interview with Ritthold's wealth management. I don't know if you really counted it as an interview, but we were there for a few days, and you told us you have to go to the comedy seller for your comedy fans, and Ray Romano came in and did a set there. And this was, I guess, And the rest is history.

And I found love with that place. And some of the stuff he did that night, he said he was kind of working out, was actually on the Netflix special, which is kind of interesting. So, yeah, it was really funny. He's a better stand-up than I would have anticipated. I didn't really realize he started in stand-up.

So it's very good. So I like that one, too. And I think that's all I got. All right. So I read The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. I really, really liked this book. Nobody wants to read your shit. this was a very quick read and I'd say that 70 I don't know a lot of it I didn't really care

for but there was like five or six things that I really like actually stopped and thought about and I'll read you just one passage the subtitle is break through the blocks and when your your inner creative battles and it's basically just talking about like procrastinating and overcoming all that shit and so here we go if you find yourself criticizing other people you're probably doing it out of resistance when we see others beginning to live their authentic selves It drives us crazy if we have not lived at our own. Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. If they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement.

Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well. So I don't really love like the sort of philosophical self-help stuff. Certainly not on Twitter. It's pretty offensive on Twitter. I was going to say this would be a good book for LinkedIn and Twitter people. Yeah, no, but reading it in the book.

is a little bit different and he just he has some really i love i love press field he's really good yeah he has some really good ideas that uh applied so again a lot of the book i could i could do without but there's some there's some stuff worth worth reading and it's it's very quick it's only it's only like 150 pages when i reached out to another author before i was going to write my first book the first thing he told me is read the war of art and that's like his thing he goes to when he when he's writing the book to like have perseverance and keep going and don't stop and so yeah i read that one a while ago i liked it so he's He quoted somebody like, do you write every day or whatever?

And the guy said something along the lines of, oh, here it is. He said, I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at 9 o'clock sharp. Not bad. That's pretty good. Okay. So I know we mentioned this last week, but somebody on Twitter told us to watch the five. I finished it and I very much enjoyed it.

Where are you? I'm three or four episodes in. I like it. Okay. Yeah, it's definitely got a good story. The very first episode hooks you in. Okay. Yeah.

So I finished it. Thank you for recommendation. It was very good. All right. So, I have a high threshold for shit movies. I really do. However, so I like aliens and sci-fi and that sort of stuff. So I was going to go see The Predator in the theaters when it came out.

But thank God I didn't because the reviews were that bad. Is it technically a remake or a sequel? No, it's no. It's no. So sometimes when you see when a movie gets really bad ratings, are you almost like, at least sometimes I am? I'm like, let me see just how bad it really was. Let me be the judge of that. You know what I mean?

Definitely. This was so fucking bad. Oh, my God. I watched it on the airplane, and I was, like, falling asleep while I was watching it. It's an action movie. It was so bad, the writing, the acting, the everything. It was offensively bad. And, again, I could tolerate the crap, but this is just God awful.

So do yourself a favor. Do not challenge me and see if yourself. It was really that bad. All right, I think that's all I got. You good? Yep, I'm all good. All right, email us at Animal Spiritspot. At gmail.com.

Thank you very much for listening, and we'll be back next week.