The Derivative - Don’t Buy the Narrative (and It’s All Narrative) with Epsilon Theory’s Ben Hunt

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Our guest today is somewhat of a modern philosopher, mapping out how the investing world sees the real world, while at the same time questioning his own place in that world and how he can change it for the better. Ben Hunt, Co-Founder of Second Foundation Partners and creator of the Epsilon Theory blog, joins us on The Derivative, offering up his fresh perspective and novel insights into market dynamics. Today, Ben is sharing his knowledge on identifying narrative patterns, how to be authentic in the hedge fund world, new trading strategies, living on the “farm” (depending on whose definition), starting a software company, Tom King comic books, models based on narrative research, the market being a bonfire,  returning investor $$, the beginning of Epsilon Theory, narrative maps, AI vs AP, the investing industrial complex, being authentic, FANG diminishing the narrative approach, aggregating N-95 masks & raising a million dollars for COVID, Ben’s affinity for goats, and the “game” of markets. Take a look at a few examples of Ben’s narrative maps of all articles published on CNBC website, Central Bank Omnipotence, and building the narrative machine. Chapters: 00:00-02:16 = Intro 02:17-27:55 = From a farm in Connecticut, Philosophy, to Figuring out “The Patterns” 27:56-51:40 = The Investing Industrial Complex, is the Market a Bonfire? Narrative Structure not Sentiment 51:41-1:03:28 = Dealer Gamma Hedging and Creating a Story 1:03:29-1:09:53 = N95 Masks - Let us feel Good about the world 1:09:54-1:15:39 =Favorites Follow along with Ben Hunt on Twitter (@EpsilonTheory), the Epsilon Theory & Second Foundation Partners website, and connect with him Twitter on LinkedIn. And last but not least, don't forget to subscribe to The Derivative, and follow us on Twitter, or LinkedIn, and Facebook, and sign-up for our blog digest. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. For more information, visit www.rcmalternatives.com/disclaimer dedicated to the improvement of both the investment industry and human-kind through the lens of authenticity and morality – and for that, we tip our hats.

Thanks for listening to The Derivative. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations nor reference past or potential profits, and listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk

of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. Welcome to The Derivative by RCM Alternatives, where we dive into what makes alternative investments go, analyze the strategies of unique hedge fund managers, and chat with interesting guests from across the investment world. It's massive, simple calculations. It is literally, in our case, and this is what all of what we call natural language processing is, you're just comparing words. That's all you're doing.

You're just comparing words and grammatical structures. Now, as it happens, right, if you've got 1,000 articles and each article's got 1,000 words, that's 1,000 factorial to compare every word to every other word. That's half a trillion calculations you've got. Yeah, you need a lot of AWS. Right, but now that you've got this massive computing processing power, you can do that in a second.

It's crazy. But that's what's driving all this, all the advances, at least in what we're seeing. It's not, like I say, some people are inventing some super brain or inventing cold fusion. It's taking these old ideas, these old principles, and applying massive computing processing power to it and marrying that with people who understand markets. Hello all, we've got one of my favorite modern philosophers on the pod today.

Now, he doesn't quite call himself a philosopher or write philosophy books or teach philosophy, but there's no doubt in my mind he is a philosopher. He makes his readers think, he makes them uncomfortable, he makes us see the game and not just the players or the score. And I'm talking, of course, about Dr. Ben Hunt, who founded Second Foundation Partners and writes for the incredibly insightful Epsilon Theory. So welcome, Ben. Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be here.

Thanks for the introduction. I really appreciate that. No worries. I'm a philosophy major, so it... Right on, brother. Very good. Some of your stuff hits me from time to time more as philosophy than market musing. I'm a little under the weather today. So I apologize for the

listeners for my voice being a little scratchy. But we're going to dig deep and get through it with Ben. How are you feeling? You're out in Connecticut? Yeah, I live out in the woods, man. So it's a little easier for me to stay isolated, let's say. And, you know, we've got, I've got, I've got four daughters. We've got three of them at home right now. And one of them will be coming back for the long Thanksgiving and Christmas break pretty soon from law school. So yeah, it's pretty dark out there. They're all age names, right? Yeah, it's such a conceit. I mean, yeah, we started off with Harper Hunt and then went to Hannah Hunt.

And then once you got two, you know, we were stuck with it. Yeah, then you had to do it. No Helen Hines, though. No, no, no. Haven and Hallie. You remind me of being out on the farm. We tell my dad, we're like, he's 76 or something out in Arizona. And we're like, he's been practicing social distancing for 30 years.

He'll be just fine. You got it. You got it. My wife's from Texas originally. I'm from Alabama. You know, we moved out here. As my wife said, I don't want to see our neighbors. And how big is the farm?

Oh, I mean, I call it a farm. My grandfather was a real farmer and he would laugh, you know, for me to call this a farm, right. Cause it's a, it's a, you know, a money pit and a hobby is what it is. It's about 44 acres, which is, you know, pretty, pretty big, you know, in, you know, Fairfield County, Connecticut. But it's that's about 43.8 more acres than I have here in Chicago. There you go. I mean, it's it's chickens, it's sheep, it's goats, it's, you know, bees and horses and dogs. It's, they're movable works of art more than they are, you know, far more than a working farm, for sure.

I get it. Although if society all falls apart, you're in the lead versus the rest of us. I'm ready, man. I mean, I think, you know, all of us have a, you know, guys of a certain age, we start, you know, having these kind of anti fantasies about defending the homestead from the roving motorcycle gangs. And what I'm ready, I'm ready. What's with the bees? I never read about that anymore. But remember the bees were all dying because of cell phones or something? Is that still? Yeah. Actually, bees in general are making a comeback of sorts. You know, the colony collapse disorder or disease, whatever was causing it, is still around. But the absolute numbers of the bee populations are ticking up again after some

period. So it wasn't the cell phones? It was, not that we know, not that we know. Because we got way more now. 5G, 5G. We got to worry about 5G, of course. That's true. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. So give us a quick personal background, if you could, of where you've been and how you got to creating Epsilon Theory.

Yeah, it's been a long path. My wife says it's hard for me to keep a job, and that seems to be the case. Look, I started off as an academic. I mean, I wasn't in philosophy per se, but I was in the oxymoron of political science, which is, you know, this weird bastard child of history and economics with a fair amount of philosophy thrown into it. You know, when I was in academia, I got my Ph.D. and I was a professor for 10 years. I was much more on the I call it the science side of political science. And the older I get, though, the more I've gone over to the, I'll call it the history, or as you said, the philosophy side of political science, because it is quite the oxymoron. I think pretty much all of social science is pretty silly when it comes to the science part of it.

Although I certainly understand that the impetus and that the impetus is just trying to figure out the world, trying to figure out what are the patterns that exist in our human worlds, whether that's the human world of voting, whether that's the human world of markets and investing. And I think that's something that certainly your audience has in common with me and so many other people in this world of investing is we're trying to figure out the patterns, right? You know, you're there, you say, what are the rules that we're operating in here? And that's what we mean by edge, that we've got some insight into the patterns that exist around, like I say, either the human interaction of investing and money. Or, you know, as we've seen a lot about recently around voting and elections. So, you know, that's always been kind of the driving force for me. And I say I did it in academia for, through graduate school and then a professor for 10 years.

Where were you a professor? NYU at first and then tenured down at SMU. SMU, the country club down there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dallas is, I love Dallas. Academia, of course, is a church. And it's, for someone, and again, I. It's a bug. I mean, if you've got that entrepreneurial bug, you can't help yourself to try to start companies or start new things. And that was certainly the case for me in academia. Started a software company, ended up leaving academia, you know, being... Which seems like a weird thing for a political science history person

to start a software company. Well, that was always my thing, right? I mean, you know, trying to, it was a self-taught programmer and trying to figure shit out. I mean, that's, I think that's what most academics have in common. For me, it was, again, kind of more on that science programming side of things. And, look, we did well with the company. I left academia. You know, the company's still kicking around. You know, started another company. What was it, software?

Very boring stuff, which was wonderful, right? Because we started the software company right at, well, we started the company in March of 2000. So I think on the very day that the NASDAQ broke, you know, we started our software company. But it was such boring stuff. It was trying to do novel things with parts catalogs and schematics for construction equipment rental companies. I mean, I can't imagine something more boring, right? But because it was boring, it had a real need and niche. And the actual guts of the software were what I always worked in for academia and actually now have driven my investment career in Epsilon theory. And that's simply this, trying to turn what we'll call unstructured data, the words that we read, the conversations that we hear. In this case, the drawings that

exist on paper for, you know, a cat, you know, backhoe loader, right? And turn that into something that we can actually extract meaning from, where we can see those rules and those patterns. So that was the software to do it. And we did well with the company, but I just couldn't imagine spending the rest of my life looking at schematics of construction equipment. Caterpillar parts. Exactly, exactly.

So sold my stake in the company and left to do some venture capital investing, some private equity work. A buddy of mine was working at a long-only asset manager, money manager here in Connecticut. He said, look, we're always talking about companies and about patterns and trying to figure out how things work, how games work. Why don't you come work with me? We're going to start up a long, short equity fund, employee money inside this fund, which it'd be like $10 million, which is like, are you crazy?

That's what the employees put in. It's like nuts. Only in Connecticut. Yeah, exactly, right? And say, well, you know, this is the biggest game there is. It's the game of markets. And so that was very intriguing to me to try to figure out this game, to try to figure out how do, again, we take unstructured data, unstructured information,

the stuff you hear, the stuff you read, the stuff you talk about, and what are the patterns in the way that that influences and impacts us as investors? So, you know, it was a baptism by fire for me in 2005, you know, starting this little hedge fund fire for me in 2005, starting this little hedge fund. And we did really well. I mean, look, there are certain periods in the world where I think an outsider's perspective can be really useful. And this was definitely an outsider's perspective, right? I didn't come out of Wall Street. I didn't come out of that flow of information of buy, buy, buy.

And, you know, we did really well in 05. We did really well in 06. We did really well in 07. And then we did great in 08. And that really made us, made the fund. So we, you know, the money came, you know, really flowing in after that. I mean, I think the fund got, we got close to a billion dollars in the fund. But, and I think this will be an experience

that's been shared by a lot of your listeners and a lot of people we've had on the show. March of 09, it's like you went to the wall and you just flipped a switch on our returns. It just flatlined, right? I mean, we never lost money for our clients. And that's something I'm really, to this day, really proud of. But from March of 09 on, it's single digit returns, charging, you know, one and a half and 20, which is just right. While the market's

turning out 20 to 30. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, our clients stuck with us because we had, like I said, we saved them in 2008. And we never lost the money. And so in 08? Oh, yeah. 08, we were up like 25%, you know, net. For a long short. That's impressive. A lot of long shorts got taken to the woodshed.

Yeah, yeah. Because we did have a different perspective, but even that perspective stopped working for really making money in March of 2009. So by 2011, we made the very difficult decision. And again, I'm sure my wife has still forgiven me for this, but, you know, we gave all the money back. We gave all the money back to our clients. And in retrospect, as hard as that was at the time, it was from a business perspective is probably the smartest thing I ever did because, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, for two respects, right? We never lost the the money but i feel certain if we just kept on going we would have it wasn't yeah you know our approach i'll call it kind of a value-oriented catalyst-oriented approach didn't work you just say you know yeah our shorts got killed and our

longs went up but just stopped with the rest of the market. And it was. But it's like the ultimate trust builder, right? Of like an honesty approach. Like I'm giving you your money back where every other hedge fund manager is calling him asking him for more of their money. Absolutely. And that's if there's one piece of advice I've got for anyone in this business. It's that. Give the money back.

Well, basically, yes. I mean, the idea is this. This business we have chosen, you know, to use a godfather term, right? It can create a wonderful life for you and your family and your children and maybe your children's children. Really can. You are in this for the long haul. And the one thing you can't recreate in this business is your reputation. You never want to go all in and you never want to do anything that's going to break your reputation. If you just do that, you know, this business over a lifetime is just incredibly personally rewarding, not just monetarily, but every other way. You work with the smartest people in the world. You're always trying to figure out problems.

It's a great business to be in, but you've got to have that trust and that reputation. That's everything. We've been talking a lot on here of whether managers should change their stripes or go out of business. From an investor standpoint, I'd love for you to just give me that one thing

I want you for in the portfolio. But if that goes 10 years without making money, what's the management firm supposed to do? It's hard for them to make that long stretch and kind of risk their whole careers in their business just to provide that one piece to you. But then that's kind of a weird problem overall in the market. If everyone's changing their stripes, they're kind of converging to the same point and nobody's just providing this, these sole risk premiums, so to speak. No, look, Jeff, that's exactly right. And my strong advice is, you know, be authentic, right. And do your thing. Yeah.

And so look, we gave the money back because I wanted to try to figure out how do you make money? How do you make alpha in this environment that our old way of doing things, a catalyst oriented, a fundamentals oriented approach, it does not work. Just, I mean, it is, you know, it's funny, I go around talking to people, you know, people whose names you know, right, that say, you know, I don't know, Dan Struckenmiller, right, you know, talking to him in like 2012. And I say, look, you know, look, it's Fed-driven. It's, you know, the fundamentals don't work. You know, another guy, let's say his last name is, you know, Luperman. You know, same thing. So Luperman and Strzok and Miller, I'm having these conversations in 2012

and they're going, no, no, no, no, no, you know what I'm saying? This is an organic, you know, economic recovery, you know, it's fundamentals, you know, we're going to be great. And now, fast forward to, you know, the last year to these two guys, you know, they're at the front on CNBC, banging their own, you know, fundamentals don't work, it's all the Fed. Please give it to us. So it's so important, I think, to when you feel it in your bones that the world has changed and what you do well isn't working for your clients. Give the money back before they require it back of you. Right. It's the thing to do. I swear to God, it's hard at the time, but it preserves your career in this business and your ability to maintain that authenticity because that's everything in this business.

So, sorry, I derailed the whole bio there. But then you ended up at Salient. Yeah, well, I mean, I was in a position where we wound down the hedge fund. And I was trying to figure it out. And that's when I started writing Epsilon Theory. So I wrote the first note. I called it a manifesto. I mean, how grandiose and self-absorbed is that?

I mean, how ridiculous is that? You just watched Jerry Maguire, probably. That's right. So anyway, I wrote this note and I sent it out to like 100 people, clients, friends. It's like that old police song, right? Where you throw the message in a bottle

and the next morning you come back and there are 100 bottles washed up on your shore. Yeah. And that was really the reaction to this, to say, look, what we're doing doesn't work. I think I've got an idea for, you know, what might work, which is to pay attention again to unstructured data, to narratives, to the stories that we're told and try to figure out, well, let's not just kind of wave our hands at and say, oh, it affects us. Let's actually try to measure it and try to figure out, well, what are the rules of that? You know, what are the rules of when, you know, Bernanke says, oh, green shoots and the market goes way up? Or, you know, Draghi says, you know, we will do whatever it takes.

And we go from, you know, limit down to limit up just on the basis of these words, which never translated into actual policy or things. How does that work? Let's try to figure that out. over the last, whatever, seven years, that 100 people has become 100,000 people to read my stuff and talk with them and try to figure this out. But yeah, I needed, I wanted to try to find a perch where I could still be involved in markets, right? Not just sitting in my farmhouse involved in markets, right? Not just sitting in my, you know,

farmhouse here in Connecticut, right? So, you know, I found out- That's the farm equivalent of an ivory tower. Exactly, exactly. A pay bail tower or something. Exactly. So yeah, Salient, you know, an asset manager based out of Houston.

They were a client of mine in the hedge. They were an investor in my hedge fund. So that's how I knew them. And so I joined them as their chief risk officer and chief investment strategist and the like. And it was a great perch for me where I didn't have to sell, you know, but I could be useful to them to open doors

for what they had, which were, you know, it was 40 act mutual funds, separately managed accounts, mostly around the MLP space, which was, you know, hot then in 2015, but it's a very different story today. We had some good memes around that of like, but the yield, but the yield. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And weren't they doing some trend following stuff too, is how we got. They were, they were absolutely.

So they had a risk parity strategy, which, you know, still, I'm still a big believer in that on, you know, and I live just down the street from the whole Bridgewater crew. So we were, you know, only like, you know, one one thousandth the size of the Bridgewater, you know, all weather fun. But yeah, we did that. We did some trend following. It was a wonderful place. Wonderful place.

But my partners there at Salient, we left, we spun out in summer of 2018, so two years ago, to start Second Foundation Partners, where, again, this is something that I think a lot of your listeners and probably you too have some experience with this. If you're going to try to do something new, and we really are trying to do something new with second foundation partners, both with what we publish, both with our research, it's very hard to do that from inside the belly of the beast. It's very hard to do that from inside a mainstream structured asset manager.

So, you know, we had a very, you know, extremely amicable spin out took all the intellectual property that I had around Epsilon theory and our research came, you know, my partner from Houston came up and joined me up here in Connecticut. And that's what we do full time now. It's research around narrative, and it's publishing within Epsilon Theory. That's what we do. And so from outside looking in, it seemed to me you were talking too much about Trump being a lunatic and some of this stuff. And then the split happens. But you're

saying that wasn't the case? It looked like they were like, dude, you can't be saying all this stuff on our- Not at all. Look, I've only good things to say, even about the compliance officers at Salient. No way. I don't believe that. Nobody has good stuff to say about compliance. Well, okay. Okay. Not the compliance officers. Not the VPs. No. Well, I can't say nice things about them. Right. The anti-creativity officers or another name for them. Exactly.

But yeah, to me, it seems just looking, you know, what you do now, the shackles are kind of off. Now you're able to say anything you want. You're not worried about stepping on toes. Is this going against what we're trying to sell to the advisors with the left hand while we're saying this with the right hand? Jeff, the coin of our realm today is authenticity. And if you're not authentic, if you're waffling or you're saying something because it supports some other aspect of your company people sniff that yeah out you know from a mile away hundred miles from a hundred miles yeah so again in the kind of

i didn't mean that this podcast turned into kind of like you know career advice but but but yeah no i like it that's an important part of one of one, right? So don't compromise with your voice. Don't. Because you can't walk that back. It's a little bit of a weird side effect of the digital economy, that authenticity has become more important, right? You'd think it actually would be less important in a digital economy. You could kind of just trade digital assets with each other,

but it seems it's become more important it has and what i find jeff is that so many people in this business they confuse they confuse themselves for their seat right, or they're the, you know, you know, managing partner, blah, blah, blah. And they have a seat. And that seat commands respect, that seat commands people saying, oh, that's very interesting what you have to say. It's very interesting what you have to say. And it's human nature, it's what we do, right? But we start to confuse our seat with ourselves and we start to think, oh, what I have to say, no matter how banal and self-serving and corporate serving it is, people find that very interesting. And if you ever find yourself outside of that seat, so many people learn so quickly.

Now you need to say something real. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And if you haven't been saying something real the whole time through, eh, come on, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to people say, Oh yeah, now, now you've got something interesting and truthful to say. Now you gotta, you gotta keep that authenticity and keep that integrity throughout. And so, and you're CIO of Second Foundation, but you guys aren't actually investing or allocating. You're just... Well, look, I mean, we are,

we're a registered investment advisor. And we have, part of our research is to design systematic models, investment models based on our narrative research. And then I'll say license those models to large asset owners, pension funds, large investment managers and the like. We're not taking custody of anyone's funds. You're exactly right in that respect. I'm never going to run a hedge. I'll say never. I'm never going to run a 40-act mutual fund again. I'll say that. I'll say that. And I can't

imagine that I would ever run a hedge fund again. I mean, you age in dog years when you have custody of someone else's money. And it's also, I do want to write about whatever I want to write about. And that's politics. I want to write about politics. That's philosophy. Right. Not worry about if you pissed off your big investor number seven or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not just pissing off big investor number seven. You're right. There's that. I think we should draw a little cartoon character of big investor number seven. I have a picture in my mind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We all have that big investor number seven.

But it's not just about pissing them off. It's that if you are a trader, if you're a discretionary PM, and your responsibility is OPM, other people's money, then by God, they deserve to be authentic. You better be managing that OPM all the time, right? That needs to be your focus. And I'm not prepared to give up on all the other things I want to do in my life to have that monomaniacal focus on managing someone else's money. Because that's what it takes if you're going to take that role. And so are these other firms are using it as like just as one input out of many, and then they may use it as a trade, they may not use it as a trade?

Well, it can work that way. What we've done, we've partnered actually with UBS to bring this as an investable index. instead of doing your monthly rebalancing on some fundamental or other factor, we think we've identified a narrative factor. It's purely behavioral, right? It has zero to do with fundamentals on anything. But what I think we can now measure and put into a strategy where you can really see it working is what I'll describe it as the business of Wall Street. And the business of Wall Street is to sell you a story. That's what Wall Street does. That's what a multiple is. A multiple is a story,

right? And that's what the street does. Everything about the sell side is to sell. I call it the investing industrial complex. Like the military industrial complex is the, right? Think about what's going on right now. What do you see? Everyone's banging the table right now. Oh, cyclicals.

Let's buy cyclicals. Or they got to buy the XLI in a week, you know, or a month ago, it's, you know, it's got to be tech, right? So it works well with the sector rotation strategy because most of the narratives you get on a daily basis from, you know, CNBC and, you know, all your sell side analysts are focused on sectors. Buy financials, buy financials. Oh, it's really time to buy financials now. We've got a steepening yield curve.

And that story will last. Typically, these narratives, these sector-based narratives, they've got a life cycle of about three months. So you've got about a month where they start beating the drum. You've got a month of high energy drum beating, and then it tails off and you've got another narrative that takes place. So it's like this sine wave of sector narratives that are, this is what you see when you start looking at the world through this lens of narrative.

And we'll put, we'll put a link to some of your, those narrative clouds, because those are super cool that you have. Yeah. Yeah. And those are, those are visualizations,

but what we think we found, and then again, this is my academic research 30 freaking years ago. So it's not like we've invented cold fusion or something, but the real difference today is that we've got, it's not like we've invented cold fusion or something, but the real difference today is that we've got, it's big data. So everything that everyone writes or says or speaks, I can have access to immediately. And more importantly, it's called big compute.

You know, my ability to just tap into AWS or Azure or what have you and get infinite computer processing power. The rare Azure reference. Yeah, right, right, right. You're our first guest to ever mention Azure. To ever mention that, yeah. Well, it's amazing, right? They're utilities.

You just plug in the wall and you can have infinite computing processing power. On demand. Yeah, because that's the other secret about all this stuff is that everyone talks about AI and other secret about all this stuff is that, you know, everyone talks about AI and machine learning and all that stuff.

Yes, all that exists, right? All that exists. But so much of that is marketing alpha. So much of, for example, what we do in our research, it's not AI, right? It's not machine learning. AP, like automation processes, automating processes.

It's massive, simple calculations, right? It is literally, in our case, and this is what all of what we call natural language processing is, you're just comparing words. That's all you're doing. You're just comparing words and grammatical structures. Now, as it happens, right, if you've got a thousand articles, and each article's got a thousand words, that's a thousand factorial to compare every word to every other word. That's half a trillion calculations you got to make. And that would be a small... Right. But now that you've got this massive computing processing power, you can do that in a second. It's crazy. But that's what's driving all this, all the advances, at least in what we're seeing. It's not, like I say, some people massive computing process and power to it,

and marrying that with people who understand markets. So I got a few questions on that. One, you wrote a great piece, the market is a bonfire. Yeah. Right? Not a clockwork machine, but it sounds like you're kind of saying like, no, we can model certain things and do... No, no, no, no. I is what this is what a bonfire so let's go back a little second i'll step back and use another example so the biggest computers in the world today the the i guess the certainly the top two u.s supercomputers essentially have one

job so they do all their flops on trying to do one thing, and that is to simulate nuclear bomb explosions. That's what's driven really all of supercomputer research in this country, at least, the last 20 years. That's right. Can you simulate, instead of actually testing a hydrogen bomb underground, can we test it by simulating it on a supercomputer? But here's the thing. That's a simulation. It's not a model.

It's not a predict. What these simulations do, and the reason you need such massive computing processing power is it really is exactly like simulating a bonfire. You're not saying, oh, I have the algorithm for how the market works, or I have the algorithm for how a bonfire works. No, you say, I have the rules for how a molecule combusts, right? I have the micro rule for how a word is spoken and then other words are spoken. I can observe, but I'm not going to pretend that I have a model that can just predict for me. Because look, a model, you don't need a lot of computing processing power. For a simulation, though, you need massive computing processing power. And this is what I like to say. We're not predicting. We're observing. And with enough

computing processing power, you can observe both in closer and smaller and smaller time increments and time increments a little bit farther out, a little bit farther out, a little bit farther out. It's not, again, it's a totally different approach than trying to say, oh, I'm going to predict this because I'm some super genius and I come up with this super brain and this super algorithm. It's, no, I've got some pretty basic ideas about how the world works, but I've got this amazing now computer technology at my fingertips to collect all that information and process it so I can see the world in a totally different way, in a different wavelength than I was able to see it. And what some of these quote unquote AI hedge funds are kind of building what they would consider a simulation.

And their simulation says the market's going to do X tomorrow. So where do you square that? Like, is that a prediction or is that, right? They're kind of basing tomorrow's trade off the simulation of what? Well, see, no, what I think you see most often with like, you know, say, let's say a two sigma approach, right? And how they're looking at some sort of stat R. So what they're looking at, though, are these microscopically small,

I'll call it anomalies, that they know that these anomalies are going to be mean reverting. And so if you can apply that computing process and power to both see them, see these events and this information at tinier and tinier scale and at faster and faster speeds, you can find these, call it a spark in the bonfire

that you can capture and try to make a little bit of money out of. But that's the whole notion of stat arb, right? bonfire that you can capture and try to make a little bit of money out of. But that's the whole notion of stat art, right? Is that you're looking at what I'd like to call this kind of fast twitch simulations. What I'm looking at, and this is. So in that example, you don't need to know the whole bonfire. You're just trying to find one spark. Correct. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So, you know,

it really is a very different perspective to the way you're looking at the markets, very different from the machine analogy, right, that Ray Dalio uses, the clockwork analogy, where, you know, you don't need a supercomputer to figure out or to predict what is going to happen in your clockwork an hour from now or 10 hours from now. But you can't do that with a bonfire. So either you look at very small events in great detail and try to capitalize on the stat arb, fast twitch stat arb or if what you're looking at are i'll call it slower twitch movements and that's how narrative moves narrative

doesn't move you know like that it takes time this is the the social dynamic of what we call the common knowledge game for narratives to permeate like a virus, you know, like a meme through a, through a population. But you know, those rules, you analyze it in a lot of detail and you can try to get ahead of it. That's what we're trying to do. And I think you just hit on it with what you were saying there. But when you first talked about it, my brain went to these hedge funds that were in the news of scraping Twitter and getting sentiment scores and that kind of thing. So it differs from that in that you're not necessarily grabbing individual names sentiment, but instead, what basically what's the common knowledge? I'm so glad you brought that up, Jeff, because if, you know, getting kind of these kind

of one-liners on this, sentiment doesn't work, right? If you're talking to someone and say, oh, we've got a great, you know, market beating approach because we measure the sentiment of people saying about this. I mean, I've been doing this for, let's say, for 30 years. I'm going to run away from that. I'm going to absolutely run away from that. Look, where sentiment can be useful, I'll say, is in extremely fast-twitch stat art, right? So if you want to do a sentiment analysis, and look, there are research firms that do wonderful work on sentiment. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not calling into question the quality of the work.

Yeah, yeah. What I'm saying is that linking that to something that you can invest in, actual behaviors of markets, that's where it falls apart. Yeah, and all those funds that were in the news, you don't hear about them anymore. You don't, because I'm telling you, it doesn't work. The only place that I found that sentiment really works, and again, some of the bigger hedge funds do this and they do it really well,

is on the little fast twitch stat arm stuff, right? So an announcement comes out, and if you can react in 10 milliseconds to both analyze, did this announcement, this bad speech say something weird and different? And how does that work? And is there an orb opportunity here? And I can hit that, then you can do it. Beyond that, for us, I'll call it mere mortals who are kind of investing on a time frame of days or weeks or months, sentiment ain't it. What is it, I believe, very strongly, is what I would describe as the structure of narrative.

It's not, oh, is this word a good word or is that word a bad word? No, it's what are the patterns of language that are emerging here? What are the shared language, the same linguistic terms that it really is like a virus. I mean, you can see it like spread in, you know, among, you know, everyone who writes on the cell side or on CLBC or the like, that's what you're trying to pick up, right? You're trying to pick up the structural changes, not the sentiment of the word.

And the word could even mean different things at different times, right? Like that's when you see the unemployment report of like, are we hoping for more or less this month? I can't remember. Like, what's the game this month? I can't remember. Like, what's the what's the game this month? Exactly right, Jeff. That confuses a lot of people. Like, hold on.

There was bad news and the market went up. I thought that news was bad. Yep. Yep. Yep. It all depends on what that link is with the structure of the narrative. And that that's what we're that's what we're focused on is trying to understand structure, not sentiment.

And do you think it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy that that structure is there? Are there actual players that are making it, right? So if unemployment number comes out bad and the market goes up, are the players already know that in advance or is it, you know, are they linked players or are they unlinked i guess

i'm saying so it's it's not a grand conspiracy thing right um i'll distinguish between what i like to call macro narratives and micro narratives so a micro narrative is going to be a narrative around a specific company a sector right uh it's like and it's not that every sell-side firm gets together and say, hey, you know, let's start pushing, you know, financials. Let's start making the table. We've got to buy financials. We've got to buy financials. No, what happens is you have, as with anything else,

you've got narrative entrepreneurs, right? You've got a sell-side analyst. He's got an idea. He says, I'll write this note about, you know, financials. And I'm trying to say something interesting or new, but basically I'm saying buy financials. And maybe he'll use a turn of phrase. He'll use a word where, oh, that kind of clicked with people.

You know, his desk says, oh, we've got some flows on this, you know, this report you wrote. And then some other zero agile picking up says, oh, this report's really kind of making a deal, right? And then other people, that's how this spreads. And then the language spreads. It's a very different business model on the street today than it was, you can call it, certainly in the 2000s right um where you had an axe on a on a on a stock or a sector and so you know whatever you know henry blodgett said about tech stocks right that that would move markets it doesn't work that way right because anymore both because what Blodgett was doing was illegal.

There's that, right? But then when, you know, when the street had to separate its investment banking from its research functions, what, you're going to pay, you know, Henry Blodgett $3 million a year? Oh, no, there's no more star system where your research guys can drive banking business. So what you have now in sell side is they're basically sweatshops, right? Where you're paid a fraction of what Blodgett was making because there are no more stars on sell side research. Instead, the idea is you just got to crank it out. You just got to crank out the stories. But I can see where you had the IPO, right?

And you want to get the IPO bid up. But once the stock's public, why are they in the game of trying to make that stock go up? Oh, trading volume. Well, it's a story. It's a story that generates volume, right? Because that's now how the research side gets paid. They can't get paid on the banking business directly. They get get paid on flow on volume so if you're if you're a sell side analyst that's your job but so they have inventory of that stock that they want

to turn over well no no it's not that it's not that they've got the inventory that they're like some prop desk right that they're creating a story to you, make their inventory worth more is that, you know, this is what supports the sell side today or the research side. It's selling. It's trading volume. That's what does it. Right. But to me, it's like, why go to every sector?

You could just be like, just have one research analyst on Apple or something, right? But see, that's exactly what's happened, Jeff. So on the research side, why are we going to have an industrials analyst when these industrial stocks trade like death? They're a large cap industrial and we do like, I don't know, you know, 10,000 shares a day, right? We're going to pay this guy to cover the industrials? No, no, no, no, no. What we're going to do is we're going to have five guys cover story stocks. We're going to have them cover consumer discretionary. We're going to have them cover tech. We'll have them cover media, TMT, right? The old TMT stocks plus, you stocks plus some consumer discretionary like Tesla.

Yeah. Do that. And so that's what you've had. There's no more sell side coverage on industrials and material stocks. Yeah, and like paints or something. Yeah, it doesn't exist. And so that was another question of has the whole move, right? What's the fang is like 25% of the S&P now or something.

Like, does that lessen your value or your research of sector to sector in that sine wave, right? If it's all in one, if the narrative is all about FANG just goes up by FANG, right? It seems like that would lessen the narrative approach. No, because everybody needs a better mousetrap when it comes to s&p 500 right our business is one of relative returns so it's it's you know and you're right i mean if if you can outperform s&p 500 by an iota by any sort sort of incremental amount, all the money comes to you. Yeah, you'll buy an island someday. Exactly. And so that's what we're, what everyone's trying to do. You're trying to say, okay, do you have that idea, that factor, that special sauce, right, that can allow you to do a little bit better

than the broader overall market. And, you know, it's taken us a long time. That's why I shut down the hedge fund, right? It's trying to figure out, well, how can you make money? You know, what is a source of alpha in this world? And I think it really is narrative. It really is understanding behaviorally how we respond to these stories that are the core business of Wall Street. I'll say one other thing, because, you know, we tried some emails around this and there was another story out in the journal today about SoftBank and trading, you know, the tech stocks and the things stocks. Yeah. I was going to ask that next of like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's your question about do people, can you,

can you start a snowball going downhill? And, and the, the answer is absolutely. And so my, my belief, and I think there are a lot of, I'll call them discretionary, traders who do this today, they've figured out that this is a market. It doesn't run on fundamentals. It runs on narrative. It runs on a story you can tell.

And one way to create a story, one incredibly powerful way to create a story is to try to hit a stock, an option, right? So, you know, to try to create some movement, to start a snowball rolling down the hill and try to get that snowball to pick up its own inertia, right? To become a really big snowball down at the bottom of the hill where you've been waiting, right? So I absolutely think that there are these firms,

I think SoftBank's one of them, right? That intentionally is trying to roll, you know, a dozen snowballs down the hill every day in the trading. Or even up the hill, right? Or even up the hill every day in the trading or even up the hill right so i think the big market narrative right now every time you see a big move up and down is dealer hedging dealer gamma right and the the it was like a the market moved to that level like a moth to a flame because that's where all the gamma was. So just to me, it seems a little too cute.

Facile. And it is. And it is, Jeff. And it's a narrative couched in actual data, right? Of like, well, that's where the options are. So it's very intriguing. It's very alluring. But, yeah, what are your thoughts on besides what we just said of like the data portion of that so look there is a well first of all let me preface this i'm not an options trader right

jeff you have forgotten more about options than i know right and you know and and you know guys like you know you've had them all like squeeze metrics right and uh you know, Ben Eifert or something like that. You're at a – let me put it this way. They see the game differently. They do, right? And it's like, you know, my partner, Rusty Gwinn, is from Texas, and he cooks an amazing barbecue. He's a great barbecue chef. All right.

I can cook a barbecue, right? I mean, I know the recipe for a barbecue. I know I know the definition of Vanna. But I've I've never been in the kitchen. Right. I don't I don't really know what it is or how does one experience Vanna or any of these kind of second level. You don't have a you don't have a barbecuer with a hitch. Right. Right. And Rusty does. Right.

So. Anytime I'm going to be talking about kind of options markets. Right. Please. I mean, I'm I'm not at. The level of a barbecue. You know, I think my point is it's always been there, but it was in the background,

but now it's in the press. Now it's front page. Now it's the story. And that's what I do understand. That's what I can't understand, right? Because look, the truth is, there is such a thing as gamma and gamma squeezes and delta hedging.

That's a real thing. And there is a real mechanistic impact to market prices from that. But your point's exactly right, Jeff. That alone, just I'll call it the mechanistic impact of delta hedging and gamma hedging and the like, that's nowhere near the driver of this, right? The driver of this is, in large part, I think, the story, the mythology, the legend that comes up around that. It's very similar, you know, I was poking fun at, you know,

Stan Druckenmiller and Lee Cooperman earlier for Friday's conversation in 2012. But it's very similar to what the Fed, the impact of QE in the Fed. There's a mechanistic impact of the Fed's purchases, right? There is. There is. What the Fed buys drives up the price and down the yield of the fixed income securities

that they're buying, the treasuries or the NBS or whatever they are. There's that mechanistic impact. And the math is it's become a lesser and lesser effect. Exactly. And yet the story that the Fed's got your back, that the feds actions and their liquidity are responsible for everything that happens in market world. That story has everyone's a believer. Right. Right. As strong as it's ever been. Exactly. Exactly. And that is what has the impact. It's the story and the acceptance of the story. So what I think- And I'm guilty of that personally, back in 9, 10, and I didn't want to get back in the market, all this debt, all this yada, yada, yada. But the common knowledge was the Fed has your back.

Borrow as much as possible, plow it into stocks. Levered long, baby, levered long, right and that that is what worked right and so it it's what george soros used to call about reflexivity right that price is itself a narrative and a story so you know what soros was writing about was that the and and it's it's at the core of you, call it of momentum of the behavioral aspect of momentum or aspect of momentum training, right? Is that price itself becomes a story and a narrative. And so higher prices begin higher prices. Yeah.

What I'm talking about is that notion of reflexivity and the impact of story, but beyond just the story that price tells, but the stories that CNBC tells and the story that every sell-side analyst tells and the stories that we tell ourselves, right? When we're talking about the stories that are- The most dangerous of all. The most dangerous of all. So one last kind of story to kind of pull this together. You know, I think most of us who are involved in markets

have a rough sense of how, you know, Vegas odds work, right? So what we know is, okay, the line on a game, it's trying to balance out the people who are betting on one side versus the other, right? So if, you know, a lot of money, if the Pats are favored by, you know, three and a half points and a lot of money comes in on the Patriots, then that line will go down to three points or two and a half points. That that's how these betting lines work, that they're just evening out the amount of money that's being bet on both sides of the line. In truth, though, that's not exactly right.

So with one of these, you know, a big Vegas bookmaker, a hundred dollars that comes in from a guy who's a consistent 60% winner, that's going to move the line a hell of a lot more than $1,000 coming in from Joe Blow. It's not just this mechanistic, oh, we have to balance the money on one side versus another. If you're on a desk and you're basically setting the line with your prices that you're asking and know, asking and taking, right? You know, big order comes in from smart money. You know, what's his name, who was the head of prop trades at Deutsche Bank, who then

goes over and runs, you know, SoftBank's new, you know, trading edifice, right. That money that comes in from him, it's going to move the market. Even in this mechanistic sense, more than, you know, Oh, here are the flows from Robin hood. Right. Right. Both are impactful, but. How Robin hood blew up in your maps. I'm sure it became a. It's enormous. Right. And it right? Again, it's this kind of gamification of level up and start trading options. That's literally something you get on Robinhood. You get the options badge now. Yeah. You get a new badge. You get badging.

So that's a whole nother conversation about the way we use story and narratives, story arcs to advance our commercial purposes. But all I'm saying right now is that if you're the guy running SoftBank's massive day trading operation, you know a couple of things. You know that you can move the line through your peppering with bets, particularly in the options market. You have outsized impact beyond just the mechanistic impact that you have. But more importantly, you have the ability to create a story.

You don't keep it a secret from the trading desk that you're BSD at SoftBank and you're making this bet. You want them to know who you are because they're going to tell their other guy who tells someone else who tells someone else. That's how you get these snowballs rolling downhill. That is absolutely a successful trading strategy these days. And it's absolutely what I think the most successful traders do. And I'm always like,

how many E-minis does the China sell before they say the trade talks are off, right? Like a hundred million worth, a billion worth? For sure that kind of thing's good. For sure. Let me, so we covered a lot there, but so what are the narratives right now that you're saying and maybe we could focus you mentioned the fed to me that's the mother of all narrative switches as soon as that narrative switches from the feds always got your back if it ever will right that's that's a sea change yeah look look that's that's the the only that's the only narrative break that I can ever see resulting in a real, meaning lasting more than two weeks, bear market in the S&P 500. I mean, yes, if a plague hits, we can a a bear market for for two weeks and then you know

and two weeks later it's gone but but but if if that fed narrative breaks then that's the story that is that changes everything so you have to think what could possibly break that narrative the only thing i can see that breaks that narrative is if you get the long end of the curve moving up because you've got real persistent inflation. Even then, I think the Fed's going to say, oh, we're going to pull a Japan, and we're going to try to do yield curve control, and we're going to go out and we're going to buy all the debt that the Treasury's put out there. This has been the big thing I've written about from there. Our capital markets have been transformed into a political utility.

They're a political utility. They're a political utility. And if that breaks, if the notion that the capital markets are a political utility breaks, it will be because the Fed cannot control some aspect of this. It's like trying to push a beach ball underwater under your pool right it always pops up somewhere except this time if you can put a lid on the entire pool you can keep that beach ball underwater and if you got everyone around the pool to agree that they'll never see it popping up that's what it takes right that's to me like it not only has to have some actual thing happen but everyone has to switch and everyone no one in the game wants it to, you know, they don't want the music to stop. No one ever wants the music to stop. and Stan Druckenmiller when, you know, at the end of what it is, you know, 2019, right?

On Christmas Day, you know, Druckenmiller says, oh, save us, save us, Stan. How can you possibly be, you know, loosening rates, you know, you have to tighten your eight. You know, you've got to save us here. And it's just like, come on, guys. I mean, have you no shame? But now everyone just go beg at the Fed and they'll give it to you. They'll give it to you because that's what our political stability rests on. I hear you. so we'll wrap up soon but i wanted to give you some props for all the work you've done and sent out all the n95 masks thank you tell us a little bit uh what you've done there and how many have

gone out all the uh so so let us feel good about the world for a second. Well, exactly right. I mean, we started this in March when it was clear that the N95 masks were not getting to the people, the heroes on the front lines, the doctors, the nurses, the EMTs who needed this sort of armor. And, you know, I won't go through the whole litany of why the equipment wasn't getting trickled down from federal stockpiles and the like. Read the Grifters Part 1 or 2. The Grifters. Which one was it? Kodak was Part 1. Grifters Part 1 was Kodak. All right.

Grifters Part 2 was the N95 masks. But so we started, we like to call it an underground railroad of N95 masks supply where, you know, we had people in China. They were their, their employees at Intel. And they just, they just wanted to help. So we were buying them. They're like American citizens or Chinese citizens? Chinese citizens for American company. That wanted to help. Yeah. We want to citizens. We're for an American company. That wanted to help. Yeah, we want to help.

We really want to help out. It really will make you feel better about the whole world. Yeah. And so they'd like go. There were limits on, you know, how many they could buy as a person and how many they could ship out. So we're getting like dozens of little packages every day with, you know, 50 masks inside. Like there to the farm or where were they coming from? There to the farm. Yeah.

We cleaned out our garage and set it all up to be this kind of repackaging facility. And now we get, we've gotten some good orders. We get like 50,000 masks at a time. So we've got a good supplier. We test the masks, you know, with a, a big university hospital just down the road and to make sure it's good quality. And then we've, we've connected with now over 1,400 clinics and hospitals, fire departments, police departments, shelters, prisons, and we send them a hundred or 200 masks at a time. Cause we're not sending it to their corporate warehouse. We're sending it straight to the docs and the nurses and the EMTs.

They then share it with their team. We've distributed over 160,000 N95 masks to 1400 clinics and hospitals and shelters and prisons, I say emergency departments in 49 states. We send out about 4,000 a week. Who's the missing state? It was actually Alaska. Alaska was the missing state. The Dakotas got picked up this last week, but now I'm sure we'll have some to Alaska pretty soon. That's great. And so and you've been you were early, from my opinion, from what I was reading on Twitter and whatnot, you were early to the COVID. You were pointing out the stats and it would brought into stark relief to me. There's people in my life and world of people who get geometric versus arithmetic

right that was the whole game to me of like what do you mean there's only four cases we don't need to worry about it i'm like well four becomes eight eight becomes 16. Jeff you're exactly right i mean people who live with geometric uh progressions in their lives like traders do, you know, you kind of got a sense of the math or how this works. They got it. They really did get it. And so I'm really grateful to the support. Cause we, we raised a little over a million dollars back in April to, to fund all this. And it was, it was, it was, it was, there was a wide range of, of, of giving, but you know, 90% of it was from this was, there was a wide range of, of, of giving, but you know, 90% of it was from

this financial investment community, which I'm incredibly grateful. And how, how have you been handling all the haters? I see you retweet some of those, right? It's unbelievable. The people are just unbelievable. It's unbelievable. I don't get it, right? You're just doing, trying to do good in the world and they're coming at you. It's hard, right? I mean, I like trying to do good in the world and they're coming at you. It's hard, right? I mean, I like to say I've got a thick skin and it doesn't bother me, but it does. It does. I mean, I'll get, you know, a dozen nasty emails or tweets every day.

You know, I'll block them all. We need two more, two more come up. It's frustrating. You know, it's become politicized as everything else has in our world, which is so terribly unfortunate. That'll be our next pilot. It's been politicized by the Dems, too. But, man,

yeah, it's okay. There are enough you know, like I said, when we raise that money and there's the the just the immediate out points that the only time it's ever been easy to raise money my you know my my entire life it's never easy to raise money right this was easy this was easy and you're still doing it you're still getting the mask oh yeah yeah yeah like so we that's crazy to me that it's there there's still a need for that, right?

Well, here's what's different, Jeff, the, the really big Metro hospital systems, they're good. They're good. So like, you know, Columbia Presbyterian in New York city, they don't need our, they did in, in, in, in, in March, they needed our masks. Absolutely. They did, but they don't need our, they did in March, they needed our masks. Absolutely, they did. But they don't need our masks anymore. So if you're in a big metro area, so yeah, Chicago, right? So, you know, Cook or whatever, you know, the big hospital systems in Chicago, they're good. What's not good is any hospital or any clinic outside of a big metro area, right? If you're in a, if you're, if you're a rural clinic, you're a, you're an EMT and department in, you know, some decent sized

town, they're the ones we're sending all our stuff to because they're still not getting it. Which is crazy. Well, kudos to you for putting all that together and helping all those people out. All right, we'll go into our favorites. I got a million other things to ask you, but we'll save it. We'll have you back on another time and talk through statistical predictions and raccoons and coyotes and all that good stuff. You got it, brother. Anytime. But we end with some rapid fire favorites on our pod. So I'll ask you some favorite animal on your farm.

Oh, definitely the goats. No question about it. The goat. Do you have like the ramps and all that stuff for them? We have some, but they don't need it goats are the most fun-loving generous kind creatures you can imagine they are they are the opposite of chickens and sheep who i can't stand because they're incredibly selfish i actually went to a goat cheese place last thanksgiving um in w Wisconsin near my wife's aunt's house. We went there and you see the goats getting milked and have some goat cheese appetizers and whatnot. Nice. We've never done the goat milking stuff because, of course, you have to get the goat has to be pregnant and has to have a baby to do that.

And to get pregnant, you've got to bring in a billy goat. And those male goats, they are got to bring in a billy goat. And those male goats, they are the worst creatures in the world. Okay. And I noticed that this facility, they're milking bearded. So there's bearded female goats. Absolutely. Yeah. They have horns too. Yeah. And horns. Favorite Bama football team, favorite year? 1972, because I was eight years old. And, you know, whatever your football team is when you're eight years old is your favorite. All right. Johnny Musso.

Who was on that team? Johnny Musso. I'm sure you know. Well, of course you know yeah i don't know who that is um i thought you're gonna go with like uh derrick henry and one of these oh yeah every every era's got got got some faves and you know but it's but it's hard at at least publicly, to root for Alabama today. It's like, maybe not this year, but it's like rooting for the Patriots. I mean, they're like the Death Star. It's like rooting for the Death Star.

My grandfather played there. My uncle played there. I grew up in the church of Bear Bryant, so I come by it honestly. I'm not a Bama fan come lately the uh uh favorite favorite comic book comic book uh so so currently i like anything that tom king does so he wrote the series the the the vision series. He did a series of a miracle man. He's got a new thing coming out.

I like anything by Tom King kind of recently, you know, of course, I grew up with the Sandman and Neil Gaiman, you know, you know, that, that whole genre, but, and how do you, and I just love comics. I just, I, I, I get, I've never been really a comic. Every Wednesday, every Wednesday, go to your local comic store. And how do you get all your pop culture into your writings?

That just pops in your head? Or you research it or what? Well, the older pop culture, you know, you've got IMDB now to get all your quotes and you've got Goodreads to get all your quotes from books. So that's my dirty little secret on the older pop culture.

And pop culture today, you know, I've got four daughters between the ages of 16 and 23. So I'm pretty well covered there. All right. And then lastly, we end with everyone's favorite Star Wars character. Well, that's a good one. That's a good one that's a good one i mean can we do the mandalorian i mean is that okay now do i have to go from the camera you can come modern you can go classic i mean i mean how can you how can you not like the mandalorian as your favorite character these days i mean it's uh

it's it's this it's i was gonna say it's the single best thing to happen in a long time but I'm kind of thinking the Mandalorian may be the best thing that ever happened. It is like a spaghetti western with the right on. I'm wondering if that actor is like dude you're paying me all this money but can I take my helmet off once or twice? I think he's pretty happy. I'm sure he's pretty happy. Definitely. All right, Ben, well, this has been fun. We'll put in the show notes how to get ahold of you and where to sign up for all your good stuff and donate for the masks if people want.

Fantastic. Thanks very much. Thank you. episode will be in the episode description of this channel. Follow us on Twitter at RCM Alt and visit our website to read our blog or subscribe to our newsletter at rcmalt.com. If you liked our show, introduce a friend and show them how to subscribe. And be sure to leave comments. We'd love to hear from you.