Animal Spirits Podcast - Wave Pools and Market Inefficiencies (EP.05)

Episode Date: November 22, 2017

On today's show, we speak about how career risk creates inefficiencies in the market, signs of froth, the Vanguard of alternatives, and ETF price wars.  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 Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Now, today's show. Okay, welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. On today's show, we have a very special guest. We have the CEO of Bitcoin. Yeah, we're pushing for an act of a stake in the fund, actually.

So the first thing that we're going to talk about is Morningstar, had a piece this morning on AQR, and he called them the vanguard of alternatives. This was John Reck and Thaler, by the way. Yeah, and you and I have actually said that to each other for a long time now. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, this was a good piece, and there was some numbers in here that I really wasn't aware of, so this was kind of interesting. First of all, I didn't realize, I kind of thought AQR had more.

So for those of you don't know, AQR is a quantitative research firm based in Chicago, founded by Cliff Asnes, who we've talked about before. But they have $29 billion in alternative assets, which I thought was on the low end because they have almost $200 billion in total. Wait, so how many? I'm upset. Sorry, I already tuned out. Yeah, that was quick. It's what says Vanguard, BlackRock Fidelity, Capital Research, and TROP price

have a grand total of $7 billion in alternative mutual funds. But AQR has $29 billion, which I assumed AQR had more in alternatives because they have almost $200 billion in total, so they must have a lot of long-only products as well. Yeah, I guess so. That's interesting. But wait, so say that one more time. That's a crazy number.

Yeah, they have, so those five or six other firms combined, only have $7 billion, and AQR is 29. And Reck and Thaler made the point that they're probably the Vanguard of the alternative business, which, again, is much smaller than your typical long-only ETFs or mutual funds, but that's still pretty impressive. Yeah, so Reckenthaler said that staying cheap is not hard, alluding to Vanguard, staying number one most certainly is referring to AQR's performance. And I didn't realize this, but he said that AQR won the old-fashioned way. Its funds beat everybody else's. The long short

equity finished first in its category. The market neutral was first in its category. And the style premium alternative, and I don't know what that is, but it sounds very alpha-e. That's basically all their different factors, value, momentum, quality, low-val, and a market-neutral form. In one? Yeah. They take all their factors in its market-neutral, and they they wait them, they have a certain way that they wait them. It's kind of an interesting fun. The funny thing is, I think a lot of these funds are actually closed. So that's great that they've had outperformance, but if you haven't been in before, you probably can't get in them anymore anyway. So one of the things that Reck and Thaler didn't touch on, just because

at some point you got to end the article was, I think one of the reasons why AQR has been so successful is because what they do is systematic. So it's not Cliff or any of his co-founder scratching their chin and reading the tea leaves or anything like that. Everything that they do is probably humming on Auditune at this point. Yeah, I went to a talk in Detroit last week to watch Josh Brown give a speech to the CFA Society, and he made the good point that people debate about this passive versus active, but really it's not passive versus active. It's faith-based versus systematic. And systematic is winning. And that's why you see AQR get all these assets, which makes sense. So in 2014, I think Josh and I had a wholesaler come in, which we don't do that often for

the following reason. This was a, I think it was an ETF company where they packaged ETFs, but it was a tactical company. And this guy told us that they have 19 variables or 19 inputs into their model, but if something happens, they'll take care of it. Of course. And Josh and I looked at each other like, wait, say that one more time? And the guy goes, yeah, we have 19 inputs, but if something happens, we'll do what we got to do. Yeah. Right. Which is, yeah, defeats the purpose of quantitative investing when the person overrides the system that they build. And speaking of Cliff, there was another article about him this morning from Bloomberg. And he said that active, not passive, is too big. And here's a quote from

Cliff. We're not one of the people who are worried that the world is about to end because we have gone from around 20% to 40% passive. I think there are too many of us being active to begin with. So I thought that was pretty interesting. Yeah, it kind of gets back to your point. of the reason why this bull market is just not any fun for anyone because the asset managers really aren't taking part. And I think he says at the end, history is on the side of passive and that will continue for those people who think that this is just a fad and it's going to run its course. I just don't see how that happens. And sticking with the product side, there was an article on etf.com last week, ETF price war heats up. Did you see this one? Nope. I did not.

So same sort of story that we've been hearing about for the last few years. Here's a few quotes. This is just sort of wild. It tells you a lot about the environment that we're in. An expense ratio of 0.20%. I'm sticking with my not saying basis points. So an expense ratio of 0.2% is now expensive in the U.S. ETF landscape. Can you imagine?

That's pretty crazy. And the crazy thing is, so I tweeted out this story about Vanguard last week, too, about how they just continue to pile up the money. I think the biggest risk here is that people assume that low-cost products and index funds are safer than other alternatives when, you know, in terms of losses and things going against them, I think that's probably the biggest risk here. Like, I honestly don't know what's going to happen if we have another downturn. Some people think that these firms are going to get crushed and a lot of money is going to flow

out, and that's possible. Do you think people are under the illusion that an index fund doesn't give them 100% on the downside? Hopefully not many, but I think there could be some people who think that index funds equal safety, which doesn't make any sense. You're getting the market term. But on the other side of that, yeah, you get, I think that's one of the big benefits of them as they're transparent. You know exactly what you're getting or you should know what you're getting. Yeah. So in this article, here's a quote, as of October 31st, 137 ETFs listed on U.S. exchanges carried annual expense ratios of 0.1% or less. These funds hold $1.34 trillion.

or 41% of all U.S. ETF assets. And 28 of these funds are priced at 0.05% or less. Yeah, which again, I think this is another case of investors winning because costs are so low and at some point it becomes, you know, costs don't matter as much anymore. And behavior is the true key of, you know, are these people actually going to stick with these products or not. And speaking of behavior, our friend Corey Hofstein from Newfound Research has a terrific blog that is often way above my head. But he said something really interesting last week. He was

talking about a case overweeting international equities. And I think he was against it for there's a lot of nuance in there. But one of the things that he said that was really interesting was we would wager that few other arguments have the power to turn off the critical thinking elements of our brain like valuation. Yeah, that's that was interesting. I read that whole piece. You're right. Corey's a very sharp guy. And sometimes it's probably over my head too. But this idea of of like turning off the critical thinking from valuation. It's something that people seem to think in extremes on. So if valuations are high, they think you need to get all out. If valuations are low, you need to get all in. But as you say, there's way more nuance required than that. It's not so simple. There are no

formulas when investing that work all the time. Right. So people will look at either lower, high valuation and just make a really extreme statement. So that gets to the behavior part where stocks are expensive. You shouldn't own any or stocks are cheap. Then they're going to get a lot cheaper. Thinking in the middle is a lot better than just pounding the table on stocks are expensive and therefore they're going to crash. Right, which is why his whole point is saying, here's a caveat to saying that higher dividend yields and lower valuations in international equities means you should overweight them. The funny thing is, there's always a caveat to these arguments. There's never an all clear signal that's saying, well, you should definitely

invest in this lower quality asset because it's going to give you higher returns or vice versa. You should stick with the more higher quality asset. There's always a reason to not invest in something. It's never going to be that easy. I like high quality at a lower price when nobody wants them and it's not too expensive. And the Wall Street Journal is talking about him. Well, yes. Well, buy when there's blood in the streets, but never fight the trend. Right. Obviously. Yes. I mean, it's that simple. So you wrote a post a week ago talking about career risk. How does career risk cause market inefficiencies? Well, my personal experience with it has been just looking at the allocation decisions of large institutional investors and nonprofits.

It's, there's no way that you can say that markets are completely efficient when you see the way that some of these people allocate their portfolios, whether it's certain products or, you know, the way that they define asset classes or the managers they invest in. And a lot of the times, you know, these people are making decisions that they don't want to do. They're being forced into them because they want to keep their job or because they're getting pressure from above from, if it's, let's say it's a college endowment and they have someone on their board who works for private. equity or hedge fund manager. The person on that board is probably going to get pressured into investing a certain way. And a lot of times they're not going to have, you know, much say in it because they kind of have to go along to get along. And so my theory is that this idea of career risk plays a huge role in the way that markets are run because of, you know, we're kind of run by incentives. So speaking of inefficiencies in the market, particularly with respect to career

risk. So GE got absolutely annihilated last week when they announced that they were cutting their dividend. But this was long anticipated. This was in the news every single day for the last few weeks. And GE has done really lousy lately. It was down 32% in the year leading up to the dividend cut. And then on that day that they announced the long anticipated dividend cut, it fell 7%. And over the next six days, it's down 10% since the time that they announced that. So I guess one of the ways that, and then this leads people to obviously, you know, oh, markets are efficient, everybody, and this is coming in, still this happens. But one of the ways that career risk or incentives can drive inefficiencies in the market is to think about all the dividend funds or pensions or institutional money that have it in their mandate that if a company cuts their dividend, then they are for sellers. Yeah.

And that is a direct way that can cause inefficiencies in the market. Yeah, and I think the other one is like headline risk. Like, you know, like you said, this was kind of telegraphed and people knew what was happening. But once it hits the headlines and people start making calls and getting worried and seeing stuff, then people overreact and then they get rid of it even when, like you said, it was kind of, yeah, a forced situation. I mean, so you would think that, and this is certainly not a stockhold because we don't do that sort of thing, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, buy GE and hold it and you will be just fine, believe me. Well, the funny thing, I remember during the crisis, I had a friend, this is in like, you know, early 2009, late 2008 saying, You know, I think at the time GE was like 10, and the high was, I don't know, 40 maybe or 50. And he said, if I buy it here and it just gets back to its previous high, I'm going to be a genius.

But it's like, hey, guess what, genius? Stocks don't always have to go back to their current. And what is it now? 17 bucks. So obviously, if you would have bought it back then, he would have done okay. But just thinking in that terms of buying a company just because it's down, that's not the same as buying an asset class that's down. It doesn't work that way. Okay, so there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal last week by a guy named James McIntosh about how IPOs are dying and the fact that the companies in the stock market are shrinking.

So I think since what, you know, 1997, the number of publicly traded stocks has got cut in half, which is kind of interesting. A lot of people have been talking about it lately, but he looked at it from a different angle. So what did you think about this one? Yeah, so I think that what he spoke about was the pressure for being public. and here's a quote from the article. Takeovers aren't the full story, though. In the past two decades, money has flooded into venture capital and private equity, with buyout funds now sitting on a record $954 billion available for deals,

which is, oh my God, it's a lot of money. He goes out to say that the small company CEO can choose between an IPO and selling to private funds and private monies more easily available than ever before. Why bother to list? Yeah. So the idea is that the reason that there's fewer companies is because these smaller ones are not coming public. And so there was actually a follow-up piece, well, maybe it wasn't a follow-up, but an institutional investor by Julie Siegel.

And she talked to a guy who's ahead of the portfolio research at Vanguard, and he basically said, you know, we took a long look at this, and the falloff and the number of public companies, it's exclusively limited to microcaps. So they look back and he says that the number of large, mid, and small caps is basically consistent to 1979. But in 1979, there was 2,000 microcap companies. Then in 1997, there was over 4,000. and now through 2014, which is as far as their research goes, it's back down to like 1,500.

So basically we had all these microcrap companies go public in the 90s that probably never should have anyway because there was a huge IPO boom. Ah. Yeah. So the number of public companies is dropped, but it's all microcaps, which make up like 1% of the total market. So it's really not that big of a deal as people are making it out to be. Okay. That's interesting. That's sort of analogous to the really, really long-term chart of,

interest rates, and you see the spike in the late 70s, and that is the anomaly. Lower rates are actually more common. Right. So, yeah, so the idea that public companies have been cut in half since the late 90s, the anomaly is not now. The anomaly was then. There was probably too many companies that went public back then, and, you know, microcrops is an area we've been looking at a lot. Maybe this is something we can talk about in the future, but it's kind of an interesting space, but it really, it's not a big deal as people are making it out to be. Yeah, and there's a ton of pressure on public companies. So if there is financing available on the private markets and liquidity there, why would you list? That's a good point. Right. Yeah. If you have enough backing from

other people, you know, most companies don't like the owners, you know, regulations and things they have to go through and reporting quarterly earnings and all that stuff. So one of my favorite pieces that I read in the Wall Street Journal recently came from a friend of the show, West Gray, at Elf Architect. And he looked back at a piece of research done by an academic named Luzang, who basically looked at all the different anomalies in the market. These are the things that we study, things like smart beta, value, quality, momentum, but there's a million of them. And this paper actually found that there was 447 market anomalies that are identified

by academic literature, which is crazy because that's, you know, and speaking of microcaps, what they found was that the majority of these are not really anomalies. They don't really work in the real world because he said 54% of them, cannot be replicated. And if you minimize the effect that small caps have on them and more so microcaps, 85% of them can't be replicated. So it's all this academic research that looks at these things that could have done well

in the past, basically back tests, and found that trying to run real money with them is impossible. Wait, 447 anomalies? Yeah, from academic literature. So these are professors that are putting this out there saying, hey, if you would have done this, you would have outperformed the market. But, oh, by the way, it would have been impossible to do in real life. scale because of microcaps and small caps, and it really just didn't work. Wait, how do they know that there's 447?

Is there like a Google Doc that these academics share to list the 447? Like, who? Well, no, they went, they went through all these papers. These are actually research papers that were written, and they decided to test them, and they found out that only 15% of them could be replicated, which this is kind of interesting, because you and I are huge on back tests. Like, we do a lot of back testing strategies. So I thought this is a good way to introduce, like, what's the good and bad of back testing?

Like, when you go through a back test, what are you looking for as far as turning it into real life? Yeah, I think for you and I, and we're doing very, very simple sort of things. And even when there's even like one or two or three rules, it gets very complicated quickly. So we have grown incredibly skeptical of back tested results. Right, which I think is the point of this paper, too, that I think this is something that novice investors get probably hung up on. They back test something and they look at it going back 10 or 20 years and they say, oh my God, this thing would have crushed the market. Now, if I just do that, I'm going to crush the market. It's never that easy. So speaking of back tests, did you see that the, who was it

a Da Vinci painting that sold for $450 million? Yes. So if you just put $10,000 into that painting, it was hideous, by the way. It was not a good looking painting. Okay. Not that I'm an art critic, but I thought my, my art critique would be it's hideous. Go on. So I was just making a bad I joke that the back test of that painting looks fantastic. Okay. So that was one of many signs of froth in the market, that there's too much money out there and we need to cleanse the system. So Jared Dillian tweeted this.

He shared a Vanity Fair article about WeWork and some of the things that they're getting into. So here's the quote. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company, which has seen its valuation, swall to $20 billion, purchased a large stake in Wavegarden, a wave pool startup, though it remains unclear how WaveGarden's technology, which produces up to 8 foot high waves for surfing at water facilities, fits with WeWork's comet space routes. Now, that is certainly a head scratcher. Did you listen to the podcast with the WeWork founder on how I built this?

Oh, that was great. I did. Yeah, it was really good. But yeah, this is kind of bizarre. Now, I'm a huge proponent of water parks and wave pools, but I don't see the, uh, I don't see the, I don't see the fit here. That's kind of bizarre. Yeah, no natural synergies for my eyes. But another quote from the article was, investors have certainly taken the bait, showering the company with $9.8 billion in funding,

including a recent infusion from Japanese Tech Giant SoftBank and contributing to WeWorks' outsized valuation, which is eight times that of a traditional leasing company with a similar business model. So there are always signs. I think the Mike Tyson asset management thing from March was certainly the sign of the times, but that didn't mark the top,

so I see no reason why this will, but what was that Mike Tyson thing exactly? I forget that, but that was pretty epic. He was trying to roll out a trading strategy, wasn't he? Okay, I would love to. Was that it? I don't know, but he was wearing a three-piece suit. We'll track it down and put it in the show notes, but that was pretty funny. But yes, your point to the fact that anytime you want, you could find a magazine indicator or a headline that fits your narrative with the market, you know, you can find that every week probably these days because there's just so much information out there. Yeah, to be fair, though, this is a pretty good one. I mean, eight-foot-high waves.

Well, yes. And because there's a coming tidal wave in terms of a market crash, so it plays well. Yes, and millennials need to surf during lunch hour. Yes, exactly. What else we got today? Okay, I want to go to the reader mailbag because I got two or three different questions on this and wanted to hear your thoughts as well. One of them was on Twitter.

One of them just asked, you know, since you guys write so much, what is your editing process like? Do you use an editor? How many revisions do you make? Someone else emailed me. how do you recommend finding and focusing on a niche topic or sticking to broad financial topics? You know, how do you come up with content to write about? And we both get a lot of questions from, especially from advisors who want to get into the blogging world.

How do you think about writing in terms of incorporating into your business? So I just wanted to hear if you have any thoughts on these before I give my thoughts from the reader questions. So I think this was a phrase, although my mother used to say it, but I haven't seen it anywhere else. So maybe she made it up. You could see an ant and somebody else, but not an elephant on yourself. So I'm really good at spotting typos and grammatical errors in other people's posts, but for the life of me, I cannot edit my own posts. Yeah, I'm the same way.

I probably get more grammar emails from people than anything else, but I think it really depends on what it is. If it's a blog post, I don't care if I have a grammatical error. I read it a few times, but again, it's a blog post. I don't really care. If it's something you're sending out to clients, you know, we have an editor on our team, D&I Sola actually has had a history of working. on the editorial side of financial publications in the past and show look at stuff that we sent

out to clients or books or white papers or whatever. But I think it's just a blog post. It's not a big deal. In terms of figuring out stuff to write, we get this question out, like, how do you come up with stuff to write? How do you figure out what you want to go on? I think it really just comes down to having an interest in the topic and writing about stuff that you would find interesting yourself and just hoping that the readers will come around to it too. Because if you're writing about something and you're not interested in it and you're just going through emotions, you know, the readers are going to know that as well. Yeah, I think it's really hard to step in to the blogging world and develop an audience

really quickly, especially in terms of like developing an audience to the point where people are going to give you money because they like your writing. But I guess you've got to start somewhere if you're interested in blogging. But I would also say that it's probably really effective for client communication. So if you have a bunch of clients asking you the same question, instead of having that conversation individually one-on-one with, you know, 10 different clients, it could be very effective to communicate with words. So I think that's probably a really good place for advisors to start is to write to their clients. Yeah, yeah, figure out the biggest questions you get and

try to answer them. And then, oh, by the way, you're building up a library to use in the future because guess what? These questions come up over and over again. They're not unique. They're fairly similar. They just come up at different points in the cycle that you can reuse and show people, hey, I'm an expert in this field. I know what I'm talking about. That's the biggest thing I agree with that. That's a good way to put it. So last week, you tweeted something about Elon Musk being one of the most polarizing figures in the world right now. And my friend John Borman tweeted, if you hate Musk slash Tesla, then you hate America and all it stands for. Take a good look at yourself. Is it really just a stock you're railing

against? Your view of Musk probably says more about you than it does him. Hashtag confess your unpopular opinion. And this is post-140 characters that would not have been possible in in the old world. So thank you, Jack. And this was probably the most sub-tweeted thing I've seen in a long time. Yeah, it's my comment was I'm trying to figure out a way, a bigger gap in opinions between the tech crowd who just loves Elon Musk and the finance crowd, who seems to hate him or more importantly hate his stock.

So, yeah, it seems like there's this general level of pessimism from the finance people about Tesla and Elon Musk that he's going to save the world. But the tech people think that that's exactly what is. going to do. But yes, I did see a lot of sub-tweeting for John Borman on this one. I don't really know where I fall on this one. Have you read the Elon Musk biography? No. Ashley Vance. I did. I honestly came away, like I wanted to buy a Tesla after I read it. And I came away completely blown away by him, but I also see why people are skeptical. So I'm kind of Switzerland on this one. I don't know where I stand. Yeah, it's funny because maybe this is a ridiculous comparison, but he has garnered a

shareholder base that are really zealots that will probably never sell the stock, even if it comes out that, not that this company is a fraudulent, but whatever, but the financials are terrible, they don't care. They're willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because he is the modern-day Edison. So fundamental short sellers like Jim Chanos hate the stock, but the shareholder base seems not to care. And that got me thinking about short sellers in general. Would you rather invest with a short seller who was fundamentally driven, who looked at the store, and the balance sheet, the income statement, all this sort of things, and said that this, you know, and determined that this company is worth 80% less than it's selling at, or would you rather

give your money to a technical analyst who just looks at a chart and says this company, this line is going down and I'm going to short the stock and when it stops going down, I'll get out. That's tough because I think short selling is got to be the hardest form of money management there is, right? The deck is totally stacked against you. So honestly, I think if I had to pick a short selling. short only fund, I'd probably go for the more concentrated fundamental catalyst-driven ones.

Just for the fact that I think the trend stuff in terms of technical analysis is probably better for risk management and taking small losses as opposed to finding huge losers, if that makes sense. And you can correct me if I'm wrong there. But there's not an easy way to do this, I think. And that's why it's just so hard to... There was an interview with David Swenson last week that I pointed out on Twitter where he said that they used a hedge fund benchmark of shortsellers, and it was a composite of different managers, and they had to change the benchmark because there aren't any short-selling-only managers left anymore in the universe. So it's just such a tough ballgame to play in if you're a short-only manager.

How about you? Yeah, I guess there's a lot of nuance here. So it depends what type of market environment you're in. If you're in a bull market or a bear market, I probably in a bull market would rather give my money to a short-seller who's using charts only. Yeah, that makes sense. And then it also depends, like, is this 100% of your money? I mean, obviously not, but if it was, say, 10 to 20 percent of your money, I would probably

rather give it to a fundamental short-seller, assuming that the tactical analysts and the fundamental analysts were on even footing in terms of skill. Yeah, but I think we can agree that short-selling is really, really difficult. And I think one of the greatest things you can say about Chanos is the fact that he's been able to do it so long and stay in business. Yeah, I think he started his fund in like 1985, and the S&P is up something like 2,000 or 3,000 percent since he started. So remarkable, hats off to that man.

an unbelievable accomplishment. Okay, let's wrap some things up with something we've been watching, reading, listening to lately. So I saw a comedy special by a new guy, and I wanted to point it out to you because he makes fun of New Yorkers in it. And it's pretty funny. So this guy's name is Ryan Hamilton, and his special is called Happy Face. I'd never heard of this guy.

I've never seen him before. Someone recommended it to me. And he's like a guy from a town in Idaho that has like a thousand people, and now he lives in New York. So he says that he thinks everyone who lives in New York lives by the Frank Sinatra song. Like, if you can make it here, you can make it here. you can make it anywhere. And so he said that he pictures New Yorkers going to like small towns in the Midwest and saying like, hey, I'm from New York. I'm your mayor. And they're like,

and they're like, why? And they're like, he's like, because if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere. So I'm from New York City. So I'm your mayor. And the other one was he said that if you live in New York, your idea of geography is New York is the East Coast, L.A. is the West Coast and everything else is the Midwest, which I thought was kind of funny. Yeah, that's good. Anyway, check that out. I thought that was pretty funny. Okay. So I, um, a few things for me in terms of content that I'm consuming. I love the Netflix Marvel characters, although maybe that's not entirely true. I really like Daredevil. I did not love Jessica Jones or Jessica James, one of those. And I did not really care for Luke Cage. But I started Punisher on five episodes

in and I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far. Do you like their shows? Okay. Yeah, I don't really get into him. You're obviously a big comic book guy because that's a few episodes in a row that you've mentioned your love of comic books. I wasn't a Spider-Man Home. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't read, I didn't read comic books as a kid because I didn't have enough patience to sit still and read those, read those things, but I did like watching Spider-Man and X-Men when I was a youngian. The other show that I started that I'm only two episodes into is Mind Hunters. Okay, yeah, I still haven't gotten into it. That's next to my cue. Okay. Two more things. So Meb's podcast with Claude Erb.

who I've never heard of was definitely one of the better podcasts I've listened to recently. Did you get around to that? I just started it. Okay. Really good. And then finally, I got the new Ron Chernow book on Ulysses S. Grant, and I didn't think that I would start reading it because it's like, I think it's literally a thousand pages. But I did start it, and he is just such an incredible author that when I go home, like,

I want to pick this book up and read. So highly, highly recommend that book. So do you think you'll read all 1,000? pages? Yeah, I'm six-something into it. Wow, that's impressive. I'll let you give me the clip notes version. Does he die at the end? I will not get that away. Okay. All right, I think that's it for today's show. If you want to comment down us, give us some feedback, send us a question. Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com.