Motley Fool Money - The China Hustle

Episode Date: March 30, 2018

In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, hundreds of China-based companies merged with American shell companies. Many of those companies reported assets and revenues out of line with their actual value. And investors were left holding the bag. That’s the subject of a new documentary, The China Hustle. On this week’s show, Chris talks with director Jed Rothstein. And best-selling author Daniel Levitin shares some thoughts from his book, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Thanks to LegalZoom for supporting The Motley Fool.  Get special savings by going to www.legalzoom.com and use the promo code “Fool” at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Whether you want to take your business to the next level or take control of your family's future with an estate plan, LegalZoom is where to start. They're not a law firm, but their network of independent attorneys can help keep you on track. For special savings, go to legalzoom.com and enter the promo code Fool at checkout. That's legalzoom.com. Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money. From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. It's the Motley Full Money radio show. I'm Chris Hill, and this week it's our spring break Later in the show, bestselling author Dan Levitin will share some thoughts on how we can keep our minds organized in this increasingly busy world of ours.

But up first, we're going to the movies. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a slew of China-based companies merged with American shell companies. Many of them reported assets and revenues that were way out of line with their actual value. And a lot of mom-and-pop investors were left holding the bag. This story is the subject of a new documentary entitled The China Hustle. Last week I spoke with the film's director, Jed Rothstein, and I started the conversation by asking him about reverse mergers and how they were used to hustle investors.

Well, it's a way for a company, and it could be a company from anywhere. It could be an American company. It could be, as it was often in this case, Chinese companies, to merge with the shell of a defunct company. and take over that company's corporate existence and that company's listing in U.S. exchanges. And so it provides a way for a lower cost and at least initially lower inspection way for companies to get into the market. And people who do these things will say, well, yeah, there's plenty of reverse mergers that are totally legitimate. And at any rate, at some point, these companies do have to do all this.

fileings after a time, but it is a way initially for companies to move through the process of becoming a public company a little faster and a little more easily. The companies merge with a defunct but still extant shell of an already, of a company that already has or had a listing on a U.S. Exchange, and it's a quicker way for them to get to markets here. One of the companies that you do profile in the film is Roth Capital, which is really one of the first Wall Street firms to find a way to list Chinese companies in the U.S. markets. They're based in California. And one of my observations of your movie is that that was an asset for Roth, that they were

away from Wall Street. They were sort of out of the limelight a little bit. But it really did seem like China changed Roth's business? Well, you know, I don't want to, I let them speak about their larger business because they do have a larger business. But I think what we, as we say in the film, Roth and Rodman and Wrenshaw were among the leading investment banks that raised money for Chinese companies that were listed or became listed in U.S. markets. They would take these companies and bring them through the process.

Actually, the reverse mergers are done. by somebody else, they're done by a shellbroker in most cases. But the important function that the banks provide is raising capital, because ultimately that's the reason that these Chinese companies want to come to the U.S. It's harder for them, or at least it was back then harder for them to raise capital. There were more restrictions on it, and there was less of it in China. And we had over here, as we show in the film, people eager to invest in something that was growing. So a company like Roth had investment conferences where they could showcase these Chinese companies and provide an opportunity for their pool of investors who were mostly

institutional investors to come in and get involved in these companies early. Rodman Renshaw had a similar type of business, and of course there were some other banks as well involved, but those are two that we focus on because they were important players in this field. For a period of time, certainly it was a huge chunk of business for them. And of course, as we talk about in the film, all this stuff, cooled off around 2011, 2012 in the wake of the shorts exposing a lot of the problems with the accounting and with the compliance and with just the truth in terms of a lot of these

Chinese companies that had come to the U.S. Your film very much reminds me of Michael Lewis's book and the subsequent film that was done, The Big Short, because when I talked with Michael Lewis, he said the thing about the financial crisis that was the most interesting to him was the few people who saw it coming and were able to take advantage of it financially. And that's one of the things that gets played out in your film. And one of those people is Carson Block, who starts out doing business in China and then slowly begins to figure out. I think the company is, the company is, orient paper that he, you know, a paper company based in China that he goes to checkout and starts to do

some research and realizes this thing might be a fraud. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Carson was working over in China as a young American businessman. He had a self-storage company that he was doing well with. He had some funny stories about that. But his father was a stock broker or stock analyst. I can't remember up the top of my head. His father was a, a man working in finance in the U.S., and he asked Carson to go check out this company-orient paper that he thought would be a great investment. And when Carson went down with a friend and checked it out, he saw a lot of things that he didn't expect to see,

and he felt that the company was not doing what it claimed. And as he poked around their factory and their storage yards, and then later their filings, he discovered and he felt like they were really exaggeration. what they had going on and actually told his father that this was not something to invest and it was something to short. It was something to run away from. That started him in what became his career with Muddy Waters, which is the company that he, under which he does his investing and publishing of these short diligence reports. The reason we focus on Orient Paper is because it was the first one

that really the first short of a U.S. listed Chinese company that really had a big public impact. And that caused a lot of people and, of course, a lot of the other folks that we profile in our film to take a closer look at a number of these other companies. And what they discovered was that it wasn't just a problem in one place. There was a real, a real systemic problem or that many of these companies had problems of exaggeration.

and flat-out fraud in many cases and material misrepresentation and all sorts of problems with their books that meant that a lot of these places were not doing anything close to the kind of business they said they were and therefore were not nearly as valuable as they claimed to be

or as the markets assumed they were. And so, you know, for us, Orient Paper is sort of the err short in this story of exposing these problematic companies. Carson, of course, has gone on and done bigger and broader and more daring short campaigns against other companies. But that's how he comes into our story. One of the things I was surprised to learn in your film is that in China, it is not against

the law to steal from foreign investors. Here in the U.S. markets are regulated. There are regulatory bodies like the SEC. There are audits. There are public vetting lawyers, bankers. one of the things I thought halfway through this film was, where are the gatekeepers in all this? Yeah, you know, a big question for me and a big takeaway from the film for me is less to look at individual people or even the individual banks and really to look at the system. Because one of the important things that we point out in the film is that while there certainly was clear fraud on the case of the management of some of these Chinese companies,

most of what was done on the U.S. side, the gatekeepers, the lawyers, the bankers, the stock promoters, most of that, or maybe even all of it, all of it that we have talked about in our film anyhow, was legal. And I think to me that shows a wider problem and a more pernicious and troubling problem, which is that our system is not equipped to deal with the global economy as it exists today. We have capital that moves around at a 21st century pace. We have 21st century globalized capital markets, but we have 20th century regulations and 20th century laws about transparency and accountability across these borders. And in that gap between the 21st century speed of the market and the 20th century capabilities

and limits on the regulations. come something like the China Hustle. And you know, you can have that even when the activity of the gatekeepers is legal, or at least all of it that I knew about. I'm sure you could, you know, it's a big, it was a big system, and there are a lot of people involved. I'm sure you could find some problems. But for the most part, people are able to sort of do the work that they're supposed to do

and even if that work ultimately proves inadequate to ferreting out these frauds, the system is set up in a way that, you know, the U.S. regulators don't have the ability to hold the Chinese management accountable. And it just allows the sort of worst instincts of humanity to come out, in a sense, especially on the Chinese side, where, you know, there's always going to be fraud in any system. there's always going to be corruption in any system. So it's not a question of saying, you know, how do we prevent that from ever happening? To me, it's more of a question of can you set up systems that adequately police it and disincentivize it? And as you were saying, if you do some of these things that these Chinese company managers did here in the U.S., it's not that people don't do them. They do, of course.

We're all familiar with some of these terrible scandals. But the consequences are more direct. and more severe and enforceable. Coming up, where do tech giants like Baidu and Alibaba fit into the China hustle? Stay right here. This is Motley Fool Money. Hey, if you're looking to get a mortgage, here are a couple of tips. First, boost your credit score before applying. The better your credit score, the less your loan is going to cost you.

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lender licensed in all 50 states, NMLS Consumer Access.org, number 3030. Welcome back to Motley Full Money. I'm Chris Hill. Let's get back to my conversation with Chad Rothstein, director of the new documentary, The China Hustle. You mentioned policing, and it reminds me of one of the quotes from your film. And I forget who says this, but someone makes the comment that the best place to be a criminal is a place where there are no cops. And obviously, when it comes to U.S. investors, there are no cops on the beat in China. But when you look here in America at the SEC, what needs to change at the SEC?

to systemically to ensure that this type of thing doesn't happen again or that it is far less likely to happen. Is it simply a matter of funding? Well, you know, that's that's a tricky and multi-part question. I think the SEC is one part of it. They don't have the ability to enforce subpoenas in China with any real efficacy. The PCAOB, which is another regulatory agency, was working with its counterpart in China for some time to obtain the audit work papers of Chinese companies doing business over here and of some of the auditors who work over there and over here and came to some agreement to get those papers, which would be key in uncovering some of these problems, but then it was kind of slow rolled and, to my knowledge,

didn't really take effect in the way that they needed it to. So how do you give the regulators over here the power to, work effectively with regulators over there. I mean, one thing in China, you don't really have free speech. So to me, that's a sort of key problem in having any kind of fairness in a financial system is you have to have the ability for people to speak freely and criticize things that they feel are worthy of criticism. In the absence of that, it's real easy for corruption and bad actors to sort of hide what they're doing on the Chinese side. And how you get the regulators to cooperate across borders, that's a tough question.

I'm sure it's only going to be tougher now, given that we're the road that we seem to be heading down in terms of our relations with our financial relations and our diplomatic relations with China. On the U.S. side, I feel like there have been some measures put in place, and there were some put in place in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to increase transparency, accountability, the fiduciary obligations of financial advisors, and a lot of these things, as we show in the film, are being rolled back. The administration wants to reduce or eliminate a number of these. So, in my opinion, I don't think we should weigh ourselves down with endless regulations, but I do think that we want to have enough regulation to ensure transparency and to ensure a basically fair playing field where if you're given information, you have some reason to

believe that it's accurate, and if it's not accurate, there's got to be some explanation or reason for that. I think we're kind of moving away. in my opinion, we're kind of moving backwards on that front. A lot of the companies that are profiled in your film are small Chinese companies that are understandably attractive for investors for a number of reasons, but ultimately they turn out to be frauds. There are much bigger Chinese companies, and I'm thinking about Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent. Are bigger companies like those three subject to more scrutiny

And if so, can we trust their numbers more? Well, the guys in the film, a number of the guys in the film talk about the opacity and complexity of Alibaba's accounting. And they suggest that there's a lot to dig into there, and it's too hard to understand what's going on and how they report their earnings and how they report their revenue. and they also point to the problem of the company being held in a VIE structure, which means the shares are, you don't, if you own a share of, say, Alibaba or any company in that structure, the VIE structure here in the U.S., you don't actually own a share that you could redeem in the same way as you would if you owned a share of, say, General Electric. You own a contract that entitles you to revenue based on something,

that resembles a share in the company in China. And this has to do with a lot of the complex laws in China about limiting foreign ownership of communications firms, of Internet firms. You know, there are, I think the complexity of these larger companies is far greater than, say, the coal companies or the forestry companies that were busted in some of these frauds in the China hustle.

And I think, that the size of them is greater and the increasing integration of our economies, which is probably, in my view, a good thing overall, but it binds us together even more, and it makes any problems that come up as a result of whatever may be going on behind some of the more opaque businesses, it makes them potentially much bigger problems. But that said, you know, I think no one,

in the film is calling those bigger companies fraud. They're just saying they can't really understand their books, and it's important that we do understand them. What would it take for you to invest in a Chinese company listed in the United States? I guess I would want to be sure that someone in a gatekeeper role, because I'm not a financial advisor, and I'm not a banker, and I'm not a securities lawyer, that someone had been able to really vet on the ground and channel check and understand the audit work papers and really gone and done the sort of diligence that at the end of the day, the shorts did on these companies. Obviously, you know, China is a huge and growing economy. It's an increasingly important part of the world, and there's a lot of money to be made there, and there are probably a lot of great companies there.

But I think we, until we can set up mechanisms to ensure accountability and transparency, I would look very, very carefully myself. Again, just speaking for myself, I'm not a financial advisor to anybody else. But I would make sure that I had some way to ensure that someone had done the sort of diligence on whatever company it was that the shorts were able to do in the end and that they used to bring down some of these frauds and problematic companies. Well, it's a great film, and it's one of those things that every investor should watch. Thanks so much for your time, Jed. Thank you so much for watching it and for having me on, Chris. I really appreciate it.

The China Hustle opens nationwide this weekend in theaters on demand, iTunes, and Amazon video. Up next, we'll talk to Dan Levitin. Stay right here. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Dan Leviton is a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University. He's also a New York Times bestselling author, and his newest book is The Organized Mind, thinking straight in the age of information overload. Dan, thanks so much for being here. Oh, it's my pleasure, Chris. There are a lot of books out there about how we can all get better organized, but your book really gets into the science behind how our brains work. How does, I guess my first question is, how does understanding neuroscience help us get better organized?

Well, as you say, there are a lot of books out there that purport to tell us how to get better organized, how to be more focused, how to be more productive, but the vast majority of them aren't based on scientific principles at all. They're just somebody's own idea. And many of those ideas aren't even tested before they write about them. Where I'm coming from, as a cognitive neuroscientist, my occupation is studying thinking for a living, how the brain works and in some cases how it doesn't work. And people in my field have learned a lot about why the brain pays attention to some things and forgets others. And that became the foundation for writing a book

about how we could use the science of attention and memory to help us all in our daily lives. You mentioned attention and memory, and one of the things your book gets into is new research into those areas. So let's start with attention. What do we know now about attention that we did in a few years ago? Well, one of the big things is that we all experience decision fatigue. And this is a biological constraint in the brain.

Every time you make a decision, you use up a little bit of the brain's fuel, which is glucose. And unfortunately, the biology of the brain doesn't distinguish between unimportant decisions and important ones. So if you make a bunch of unimportant decisions, like whether you use a green pen or a red pen or whether to eat honeynut Cheerios or multi-grained Cheerios. After a sequence of such trivial decisions, we find that people exhibit poor impulse control and exercise poorer judgments in really important decisions, such as whether to put your retirement money into stocks or bonds. Well, I mean, that's a no-brainer.

I mean, who would choose multi-grained Cheerios over Honeynut Cheerios? I thought you were going to go off about the stocks and the bonds. No, I think people have heard me do that before. You know, is that why, I mean, there's the story about Albert Einstein where he had seven different copies of the exact same wardrobe. Is that why he did that? Was Einstein sort of early to the table on this one that he didn't want to waste one second thinking about what clothes he was going to wear? I'm guessing that that was it, although he didn't have the neuroscience behind it. You know, my colleague Oliver Sachs adopts a kind of similar rubble.

which is that he has the same thing for lunch every day. If you don't have to make these trivial decisions, it lightens the neural burden so that you can really focus on the important ones. Now, I wouldn't advocate necessarily that you wear the same kinds of clothes all the time or eat the same thing every day. That's a very personal choice. But what the science does suggest is that if you have important decisions to make, make them early in the day.

What do we know now about memory that we did in a few years ago? Well, we know that memory is more limited than we previously thought. That is the short-term working memory, the number of objects you can consciously deal with at any one time. And this is where memory and attention intersect. It turns out that we can't multitask. We can't really do a bunch of different things all at the same time. We can keep track of three or four things, and beyond that, something starts to fall out. So a number of experiments in the workplace show that

people who were multitasking actually get less done at the end of the day than people who use a dedicated focus to one task, finish it, and then go on to the next. Multitasking, though, seems like one of those things that, I don't know, it seems like people have a hard time not doing it. I'm just wondering why that is. If it, you know, if it is something where we're really not being more productive and, in fact, we're being less productive, why do you think it is that we keep doing multitasking? Two reasons, Chris. One is that we're under the illusion that it's working.

And so if your brain is telling you I'm good at something, you keep on doing it. But as a neuroscientist, I can tell you that one thing the brain's very good at is self-delusion. So just because we think that it's so doesn't make it so. And the experiments bear that out, both from brain scans and from workplace experiments. The second reason we do it is that it makes us feel. feel productive and it feels good to us to be doing all these things. There's a neurochemistry behind this. Every time we can tick off a little task on our internal to-do list, we get a little shot of dopamine. And every time we pay attention to something new, we get another shot of dopamine.

Dopamine is the chemical in the brain that makes us feel good. It's what mediates pleasure. And we set up what is a physiological dopamine addiction loop where we crave more dopamine, even though the dopamine is being produced for things that aren't productive. You're listening to Motley Full Money talking with Dan Levitin. His new book is the organized mind, Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. One of the things your book gets into is sort of how we can be better at organizing, not necessarily learning new mental tricks. And I wanted to get into some of the tips from your book. And the first, this seems to in some ways, go against the rise of the information age.

One of your tips is use a paper to-do list. Yeah, so I do want to point out that in the book, I'm not prescribing or suggesting or recommending a bunch of high-tech solutions to increase productivity. You don't have to go out and buy a new computer or go to the stationary store and get a new filing cabinet and a bunch of color-coded folders and tabs. I'm not talking about that.

In general, I'm talking about very low-tech things that any of us can put together in an afternoon. And index cards or notepads is one such suggestion because we now understand that the neuroscience of writing things down by hand allows for deeper encoding because it requires a lot more, well, what we call deep processing, a lot more neural circuitry to write something by hand than to type it. and so you're apt to remember it better.

And the other thing about writing it on paper is it's easier if you use index cards to resort them, put them in different piles, and put them in different stacks, and to have them in front of you when you're working at your computer. The problem with making computer lists, although that's better than nothing, is that it's a little bit more cumbersome

to cut and paste the items if you want to reorder them, and they're often hiding in a window behind the one you're working on. One of your other tips is music to my ears, which is take breaks. Just so I don't get in trouble with my boss, how many breaks are we talking about? Well, this again gets back to the science of attention and the physiology of the brain. The brain didn't really evolve to stay focused for long periods of time like we sometimes ask it to do. We push ourselves these days. I think all of us feel like if we stop work for even just five minutes,

we're going to fall irretrievably behind. And the fact is, if you stop and take a break of about 15 minutes every two hours, it allows you to hit a kind of neural reset button in your brain so that when you come back to your work, you'll find that you're more creative, you're refreshed, you've replenished some of the depleted neurochemicals. And a number of studies show that at the end of the... the day, people who took these 15-minute breaks every couple of hours not only got more done than people who plowed through, but their work was of a higher quality and more creative.

This is even more so true with naps. A single 15-minute nap in the afternoon gives you an effective IQ increase at 10 points. I don't know about you, but I would really like to have 10 points extra IQ. I think all of us would like an extra 10 points on the IQ. I mean, in my line of work, that's a difference between getting tenure and not. You mentioned the end of the day. I think a lot of people have trouble leaving their job at the end of the day when they go home, whether it's to their own place or to their family or friends or whatever. How big a challenge is that right now?

Because it really does seem like, particularly with technology, and you can get your email on your smartphone, that we're here. so connected that it's made me harder than ever before to leave work at work. You're absolutely right. So we're all being asked to do more than ever before, both at work and at home. And I think a lot of us feel when we are at home that we can't be fully there. We've got these nagging thoughts in our head about things at work we didn't finish, calls or emails we didn't return, worries that maybe we didn't solve a problem. that we could have. And then when we're at work, we're thinking about all the things we didn't get to do at home.

And so as a result, you end up being really in neither place fully. And when I'm talking about trying to get better organized, I want to be clear that I'm not talking about creating a bunch of mindless automatons who were rigidly strapped to a schedule all the time. I'm talking about a few simple changes we can make in how we structure and organize our time so that when we're at work, productive and efficient, which allows us to really close the door on work at the end of the day and be present with our loved ones, in our hobbies, and in our leisure activities. Paradoxically, I think, you know, be more efficient and productive allows for more time to be spontaneous and creative.

I can't believe I'm the only person who struggles with email, and I'm curious how you organize your own email? What's something that we could all do to sort of keep our email better organized? Well, after talking, I interviewed a lot of CEOs and government leaders, military leaders, generals and admirals, some cabinet members in the U.S. government. And these are highly effective, very, very busy people. And I'm adopting two of the tips that they seem, many of them seem to be using. I've started doing this in the last couple of years. One is, Like you, Chris, I think I get a lot of emails that are not really urgent. I mean, things for something that's going to happen a month from now,

or just something that's informational that I don't really need to interrupt my work to look at. And then a bunch of stuff that's nonsense, like videos of cats playing the piano. Do you get those two? Keyboard cat. Who doesn't love keyboard cat? Exactly. So I opened up a separate email account under, a private address. And I gave that to only about eight or ten people who I want to be able to reach me urgently. So that includes my loved ones, my boss, co-workers. And I further instructed

them, only use this account if you need to reach me right away. Use the old account that you had the address for for everything else. And so that's the first stage. The second is that the other account, the big one, where I get hundreds of emails a day, I turn it off most of the day. And I have a partitioned period of time where I deal with emails, an hour in the morning and an hour in the late afternoon. And then I just plow through all of those emails and I prioritize them and I either reply or file them. But what it means is that I'm not interrupted every few seconds during the day as I'm trying to work or, for that matter, trying to interpret it. enjoy some leisure time. Coming up, more with Daniel Levitin. This is Motley Fool Money.

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the pricing is given up front. Imagine that. Imagine that kind of transparency. So write your 2018 story now at LegalZoom.com and use the promo code full to get special savings. That's LegalZoom.com, use the promo code full. LegalZoom, where life meets legal. You're listening to Motley Fool Money talking about Dan Levittan. His new book, already in New York Times bestseller, is the organized mind, thinking straight in the age of information overlord. I know what Area 51 is. What is Area 47? We're not supposed to talk about that one either. Oh, we're not? Are aliens involved in that one, too? Area 47 is the not very poetic name for a part of the brain that I've been studying for the

last 15 years just behind your temples. It's a little sliver of tissue that tries to predict what's going to happen next in the world. And you can imagine the evolutionary advantage of this. It helps you to figure out if that lion running is running towards you and about to attack or running in another direction. And it's looking basically for structural. and patterns in the environment. The interesting thing about this is that it helps to modulate dopamine, that so-called field-gled hormone

we were talking about earlier. When we are listening to music or when we're reading a novel, watching a film, that structure is trying to figure out what's going to happen next. If the piece of music, for example, doesn't hold any surprises,

area 47 shuts down because it's bored. If the music is completely surprising and you have no idea what's ever happening, Area 47 shuts down because it's frustrated. It has to hit just the right balance of familiarity and surprise or of predictability and unpredictability to keep it happy. And this has really big implications for the workplace. What we now know, again through neuroscience research,

is that the happiest workers in general are those who work in a job that's somewhat predictable, but also has a few well-structured surprises that allows them to exercise some ingenuity and some initiative. Workers generally don't like to feel that their work is exactly the same day in and day out. They and their brains savor the opportunity to exhibit some judgment and expertise. day job is as a professor. I'm curious, how organized are your students? And if they're like a lot of college students and maybe not quite as organized as they could be, is that a point of frustration for you? No, not at all. I mean, I recognize if they're in a university program, they're trying to learn things and trying to get better at organizing their lives. So they're eager and they're

dedicated to learning. I do recognize that there are different systems and different styles that people have. So broadly speaking, some people are filers. They file everything. And other people are pilers. They put everything in stacks or piles. And both systems are perfectly fine, depending on what you are comfortable with. With one exception, if you're dealing with paperwork or computer files, for that matter, that are shared in an office or educational setting, piling is usually not a good system because only you know where the piles are. So I try to train the students for that portion of their work that they're going to have to share with others like me. They need to have a perfectly transparent system that anybody can navigate.

Now, you're a neuroscientist, you're a best-selling author. You're also quite an accomplished musician. Do I have this right that in addition to playing the guitar, the bass, the tenor saxophone, that you've been a session musician with, I don't know, little independent, small, struggling groups like The Grateful Dead and Santana and Sting and David Byrne. What kind of double life are you leading here? Well, I've always had a passion for music, and I don't want to overstate my qualifications there. I was a sound engineer and consultant for the Grateful Dead and Santana and Steely Dan. It's only in my later life as a neuroscientist that I've had the opportunity to perform live with Sting and with David Byrne. But it's true.

I worked as a session musician in the 80s on a bunch of recordings. maybe one of the more well-known ones was the soundtrack to the film Repo Man. Before we wrap up, give me one music recommendation. It could be an album you're listening to. It could be a song you just learned about and it's in heavy rotation on your iPod. What's one music recommendation you can make? Well, you know, I'm sorry, I can't make just one. There's so many good things out there now.

One of my favorite new bands is called Claire and the Reasons from Brooklyn. I'm loving a new album by Phil Claypool called The Strong One. He's an artist out of Nashville. And Rodney Crowell has put out three stellar albums in the last couple of years, and he has a duet album with Emmylou Harris on the way. And these are all just as good as music gets, as far as I'm concerned. The book is The Organized Mind, Thinking Straight, the age of information overload. It is the latest in New York Times bestseller from Dan Levitin.

So check it out. Dan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Chris. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy yourself stocks based solely on what you hear. Hey, before we go, have you checked out the Motley Fool podcast shop yet? If you need a new ball cap to get ready for baseball season, we've got you covered. We've got Motley Fool T-shirts. Poodies, travel mugs, and more.

You can find it all at shop.com. And while you're there, check out our number one best-selling item. It's the Motley Fool Money coffee mug. Again, you can find it at shop.org. That's going to do it for this week's edition of Motleyfool Money. We'll be back with our usual show next week. Our engineer is Steve Roydo. Our producer is Mac Greer.

I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.