Episode 327 - Building Better Portfolios with Don Calcagni

25:03I mean, these are all quants, right? These are folks you guys know, right? So there's this tug of war between our over-precision biases, where we want to carry things out 10 decimal points, right? And what's practical. And you can see that even among the asset managers, this tug of war between, gee, we have an investment thesis and there's data that strongly supports both in-sample and out-of-sample certain factor exposures. You have some firms that are very purist in wanting to pursue those. You have other organizations where they'll look at that and say, yeah, that's great. And we think it's fine to tilt towards those, but you should still really diversify as broadly as possible, right?

25:45Because you're managing money for humans, not robots. So I think that's always interesting. There's a lot of disagreement there around how precise or how aggressive to get when implementing an investment thesis in a portfolio. At a more tangible level, we see lots of disagreement around how many factors to include in portfolios, even disagreement around what are legitimate factors and what are not, Lots of debate, as you would imagine, then around the momentum factor. Does it exist? Does it not exist? I think we all agree to exist. Whether or not it's capturable or not is where we all have lots of debate.

26:22Minimum volatility. Is that some sort of derivative of the value factor or is it something different that's providing some legitimate diversification exposure? So lots of debate there. But then even within something as widely acceptable as value, how to measure it, right? Bontis has one view on goodwill. Other organizations have a different view on whether or not to add or exclude goodwill from book equity, whether to look at the cash flow statement, whether to look at the income statement or the balance sheet, lots of debate. And I don't know that at the end of the day, whether that advances or changes how we think about portfolio design.

27:02But I mean, these are fun debates. I certainly am excited to engage those. But I think you see a lot of debate around things like that and tons of debate here in the United States around how heavy should our home country bias be. One of the things that surprised me is we're just slightly north of ACWI in terms of our U.S. home country bias. just a tad, right? Maybe 300 to 400 basis points, which I found out was very low. Yeah, that's not easy, I'm sure, either. It was not easy. Compared to our peer group, 80%, 90%. And there's many firms in our peer group that are 100 % US that don't invest outside the United States.

27:41So back to your earlier question, that was a huge shocker for me. Can you talk about the topics that all the participants did agree on? I think there's definitely agreement on methodology, taking a very systematic approach to how we think about analyzing the data. And I think that's very different from many, for example, traditional active managers. So just by virtue of taking a very systematic approach, looking at large sets of data, analyzing the data in sample and out of sample. So I think methodologically, there's a lot of agreement. I think they all agree that you want to build broadly diversified portfolios.

28:21You want to diversify within and across major global asset classes. So I think there's lots of debate there. I also think that among our asset managers, there's a humility that they recognize that they don't do what you do. They don't do what Mercer Advisors does, right? They understand that we're working with humans and that by definition, that requires us to think through how best to go about implementing portfolios. And so they're often asking us, they would be asking you, Cam, Ben, what do we need to do to help you have the products, the tools you need to build real investment solutions that clients can hold on to?

28:58So I think there's an agreement that what we do is similar, but different. We play very different roles in this broader supply chain that involves providing fiduciary financial advice to end consumers. How do the takeaways from the summit actually make it into client portfolios? So we have a process. So it always begins first with follow-up research, right? Just because a manager has made a recommendation or shared some research with us, naturally, we're going to take that information, share it with others, get their input, do our own research. We then discuss and debate sometimes quite fiercely as an investment policy committee, what we call our investment policy subcommittee.

29:45And if an idea has merit, then we will make a motion and we will take a vote. And so if the investment policy committee, for example, were to say, hey, we want to invest in XYZ factor exposure and add that to our asset allocation strategies. If the investment policy committee approves that, then it then subsequently goes to our manager selection subcommittee. It's a totally separate group of individuals. At that point, then the mandate is let's source and identify and then approve whomever we think the best manager is to harvest that specific asset class or factor mandate. Once that happens, it gets handed off to the investment team, which is separate from the investment committee.

30:25Investment team then will actually map out the operational implementation, all the block trading across the different custodians. We negotiate with the manager. If there's a negotiation to be had, we'll negotiate with the manager. We typically work with the capital markets desks at the managers. They'll direct us to the authorized participants where they're seeing the most activity. And then we'll typically go directly to the APs and either bust or manufacture shares. Wow. That's incredible. Quite a process. It's pretty involved, but it is a process and you have to have that process, right? I mean, you guys know in this business, you got to be careful.

31:00If you don't know what you stand for, you're going to fall for anything. So I think having a process, a lot of checks and balances in the process, I like to think ensures that we make the best decisions possible for our clients. Speaking of decisions, Mercer Advisors recently launched an alternatives program. How was that decision made? Yeah, I think you have to go back to our investment philosophy. And it's kind of interesting. Lots of debate around this one, right? Because it's private markets. And I've listened to your guys' podcasts on private markets as well as many others. And I've had no lack of advice from our public markets managers on private markets.

31:37But I think for us, it goes back to really Markowitz's 1952 paper on portfolio choice, right? That we believe that there is value in diversifying across asset classes. Private markets, we believe are legitimately their own asset classes. So intuitively, we look at private markets as adding value from a diversification perspective. And so I think there's always been this desire. When I first started in this business in the late 90s, I was with a multifamily office in Philadelphia that specialized in private equity. So that was really my first exposure to the asset class. And I think empirically, when you look at the Prequin data or the Burgess data, I think objectively, we know that the median returns on private investment funds generally are a lot higher than what we observe in public markets.

32:32Now, there's lots of debate around identifying systematically what are the different drivers of persistence and manager returns. Are manager returns even persistent. Steve Kaplan in Chicago has written on this quite extensively. And so I know there's lots of debate around that. What I would say is in private markets, though, by definition, trying to analyze returns on private market funds using the same quality of data that we use in public markets is never going to happen, right? We have massive survivorship bias in private markets, and it's not even transparent. Some of the very best private equity managers I know are extremely secretive about their returns, their investors are secretive.

33:16And so I think trying to meet the same standards of quantitative evidence that we use in public markets, I just don't think is achievable. So what do you do with that as an allocator like us? I think you have to rely on theory. I think you have to rely on the anecdotes that populate your lived experience, I think you have to rely on your network. I am a huge believer in Fama's efficient markets hypotheses, right? And all the different forms. And if you think about the different forms that separate weak from semi-strong and strong, it's really the ubiquity of information. And if you think about private markets, what really is driving value, creating value in private markets, it's that information is very hard to come by.

34:07It's not widely available. And so I think ironically, if you embrace the efficient markets hypothesis, it logically follows that there's value in private markets. Having worked with high net worth and ultra high net worth investors for the past nearly 30 years of my career, there is absolutely absolutely very attractive opportunities in private markets. And so from there, you combine that with we, over the past 10 years, have been receiving lots of requests from our clients around doing more in private markets, whether it be real estate, whether it be credit, certainly post-GFC, we've seen the rise of private credit, but private equity and venture.

34:51So it's a combination of investment philosophy and client demand, and then combining that, I think, with a very obvious observation, and that is our clients don't require full intraday liquidity. And so if you believe that there's a liquidity or an illiquidity premium, then it would logically follow that it would make some sense to pursue higher expected returns and broader diversification through allocating to private investments. So, Cam, I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I think about it. I always go back to, well, what's the theoretical rationale for why we would do this?

35:31And do all clients get an allocation to alternatives? They certainly do not. I mean, certainly just at a very high level in the United States, we have very strict regulatory requirements that even governs who's permitted to invest in private investments, right? Qualified purchaser, what we call a qualified purchaser in the United States for a natural person is$5 million or more in investable assets, $25 million or more for a non-natural person. And so certainly, no, it's not something that we even make available to all of our investors, but it is always available to our ultra high net worth and high net worth investors.

36:09It's really a function of liquidity. It's a function of risk tolerance. It's a function of how comfortable is the client with investing in fundamentally less liquid investments, right? I mean, these are very long-term investments, at least 10 years for private equity. Oftentimes it's 12 to 15. So these aren't investments for the faint of heart. These are very long-lived investments for balance sheets, for families that can really forego the liquidity. But we do believe, and we've seen it empirically, that there are higher expected returns available there. And then, Cam, back to your question, how did we arrive at the decision?

36:50Well, for the longest time, actually accessing the asset class has been virtually impossible. Fees remain high. Minimums are high for the best managers. It's a very complex asset class, with subscription documents and dealing with capital calls, and then manager selection. The dispersion in manager returns is so wide that if you don't know what you're doing, you really should not invest in the asset class. So fast forward to how we made this decision. We actually acquired a firm from the San Francisco Bay Area that had a nearly 30-year track record investing in private investments. In fact, the firm was set up as the multifamily office for two very successful venture capitalists in the Bay Area.

37:33And so this was a team that when we did our due diligence, it was clear that these folks have actually identified very systematically what are the drivers of persistent outperformance within private investments, within private investment funds. And so by bringing that team in-house, our view was, okay, now we can actually help clients select the very best managers. We then subsequently set up our own fund-to-funds structures. Now, why is that important? It's important because it gave us control, gave us the ability to negotiate significantly lower fees for our clients. So with our fund-to-fund structures, for example, we don't charge a management fee on those, Right.

38:19There's no carry. There's no performance fee. And then we actually capped the internal operating expenses on the fund to fund structures at 19 basis points. So we drove down because now what we're doing, rather than having 100 investors with small checks going to Carlyle or KKK, it's one investor showing up with a$25 million check. And so that allows us to negotiate our own side letters, our own fee arrangements, and to push down expenses. And because we're not charging a management fee on top of our advisory fee, it really allows those savings now to fall to the bottom line for the client. So we get better diversification, better manager selection.

39:02We can bring down the fees and we can bring down the minimums. At the end of the day, this creates a better investment experience for the client. And at least in our view, the alpha that exists there in those private investments should then now naturally go entirely to the investor. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I really like the way that you guys have built that out with a fund-to-fund structure that doesn't have the kind of typical sort of egregious fees that you might get in a fund of funds. So your clients are getting the benefit of the fund of funds, which is scale and lower costs at the manager level, but they're not paying ridiculously high fund fees.

39:38I mean, that's just seems like the way to do it. If you have the scale to do it, like you guys do. I'm pretty cynical coming from Philadelphia. I'm pretty cynical. And so most fund to fund schemes are just compensation schemes for GPs, our view was, hey, if we can completely remove that layer of lard that's in the middle, now we're just delivering a great service to our clients, right? Okay. We want to invest in this asset class. How do we do it in a cost-efficient way? And how do we do it in a diversified way that makes it simple, that makes the asset class accessible for our clients? Yeah. Makes a ton of sense.

40:13All right, Don, what parting advice do you have for the average investor who doesn't have direct access to the type of people who attend building better portfolios? This is my favorite question, because this is how you change people's lives, right? To be fair, not everybody can afford Ben or Cam or Don or Mercer advisors. And so I think it comes back to three things, Ben, three things that I believe very passionately. Number one is you have to have a plan. There's lots of great tools online. Build a plan. The financial plan that you build for yourself should inform what your asset allocation needs to look like.

40:50And that is the most important step in the investment process is determining what is that right mix of investments between stocks and bonds and real estate and perhaps other asset classes. So I would definitely start with the plan. Second is I would learn to manage the biggest risk in your portfolio. And that's us. That's the humans, right? The biggest risk in any portfolio is none of the investments. It's the investor. And so managing our emotions by focusing on what we can control and really ignoring the rest, ignoring politics. Here we are in the United States amidst a very tight presidential election.

41:32Ignore all that. Keep that out of your portfolio. And then the final parting words of advice would be to invest in as much of the market as possible using very low cost index funds or factor based funds. Try to avoid picking individual stocks. Try to avoid sector ETFs. Own the market and stay as broadly diversified as possible. If you do those three things, 99 % of us are going to be just fine. Yep. I would say that is rock solid advice. Well, thank you. Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, Don. We really appreciate you coming on the podcast. This was a great conversation. Ben, Cam, thank you so much.

42:14It's been great to be here. Great to see you. Thanks, Don. Thanks, gentlemen.

42:23All right. So I hope you found that conversation with Don interesting. I know I definitely enjoyed it. So now we're in the after show. For the three people who are listening. Three people. That's right. People love that joke. And then they always joke like, oh, we're up to like eight people now. Yeah. Cameron really likes telling that joke, I think. Yeah. Mark, you wanted to talk about the RBC options trading incident, which is just incredible. Yeah. So this news came out. Was it, what are we, we're recording this on what, Thursday the 10th. So this would have been maybe a week ago, like sometime in the past week.

42:54But there's an investor who is an RBC client of some kind. So I think he was a self-directed investor at a certain point, but then he was working with an advisor at some point as well. But he turned, I think something like$88 ,000 into$415 million, allegedly, and is now suing the bank for losing it all. Can we just pause for a second? $88 ,000 to$415 million. Yeah, yeah. And it was over the course of a couple of years. Yeah, a couple of years, but I mean, annualized, I don't know. It's lottery tickets, right? And the way he did it was with short, I assume. So he was trading options on Tesla stock.

43:27I assume he was trading very short dated call options, which is making a bet that by a certain date, the stock price is going to go up. And implied there is that there's a lot of leverage in those financial instruments. So you have to get the direction right. And if you do, you are amplifying your gains by, in his case, thousands and thousands of times. And he was able to pull this off, I guess, repeatedly for a couple of years and turned it into, like you said. It says he was using put and call options. So I don't know if he's making bets in both directions, but he crushed it. It's absolutely incredible.

43:59The numbers are, it's staggering, really. Half a billion. He was on his way to being a billionaire. How many billionaires are there in Canada? Just not that many. He was supposed to be - He's a carpenter. He's a carpenter in Suc, British Columbia. Yeah. Unbelievable that he was able to do it. Then he lost it all. $415 million. Poof. Presumably using the same strategies and they just moved against him. right? And I tell people this, I tell clients this, I've written about this a little bit, but the behaviors that lead you to gaining$415 million on an$88 ,000 position are the exact same behaviors that are very likely to lead you to blow up your entire account.

44:37Like this person, I've got a friend who did this with NFTs. Remember NFTs? That was the thing. Monkey JPEGs. He was doing it with like basketball cards or something like that. Digital basketball cards. NBA Top Shot. That's right. Top Shot. Yeah. And he went from effectively zero to nearly 10 million. And this is a guy who had never, never had money. And last I heard, he is filing for bankruptcy. And so literally the exact same thing, like went to 10 million, took nothing off the table, went for another home run and lost it all. Yeah. So this guy's suing RBC saying that the RBC advisors failed to understand and support his evolving wishes to essentially retire by liquidating his Tesla options and moving the wealth into secure investments that would generate passive income.

45:24I mean, this case as the details come out or if they come out is going to be absolutely fascinating to see like what conversations were actually had and what advice was provided. I mean, it's impossible for us to know the details, of course. I mean, maybe they will be made public during this hearing, but I mean, this is really what it always comes down to is, is this a question of an investor whose greed got the best of him and now he's looking for someone to blame? Or is it truly terrible advice that he received, right? I mean, I think it's very easy for someone to say when they're engaged in speculative investing, I don't even want to call it investing, let's just call it speculation, and to see returns like that and then say, well, I was going to stop once I got to X number of dollars.

46:14Like if you didn't stop at 415 million or whatever it was, what would you have considered enough? So we never really know. I feel like that. And again, I don't want to comment on this specific case because I don't know any of the details of this gentleman or what went on, but there is a tendency, I think for investors in general to keep pushing as long as it's working. And then when it turns around, blame somebody else for not telling you that you should have got out when you did. So it's just that, right? I mean, you take credit for taking it from$88 ,000 to$400 ,000. So it's your fault that you got there, but it's their fault that you went back to zero.

46:51So if you're suing them, in my opinion, it should be for the original$88 ,000. Then the whole thing was their fault, right? The gains were their responsibility as well. Now, I don't know when the ad advisor actually entered the relationship. So in this case, it's impossible to say, but to your point, people like to take credit for their wins and blame others for their losses. The attribution error, as they call it, right? All the good luck is, well, there's no good luck. That was skill, but that was bad luck. It was bad luck, right? And I think it was Warren Buffett that said, don't try to get rich twice.

47:18I don't know if it was Buffett. I think it was. All good investing quotes are usually Buffett. So I'm just going to attribute it to him. The first billion is the hardest. Something like that, right? Yeah, he was almost there too. 415 million, just a couple more days at those compound returns and he would have been there. That's right. Wild stuff. So we'll see what happens. But yeah, this is not the type of investment strategy that it's not repeatable. This is pure lottery ticket, pure luck based. But Ben, I think you read some papers that show that when people see these types of returns, they tend to increase risk in their own portfolios.

47:47So I'm sure that people reading this going, oh, I can do this. It is possible. Let me try. Right. So please don't. Yeah. There's an experimental paper where they take people, they let them have two trading sessions. And after the first trading session, they expose some people to the results of the top people from the previous session. And then the other group does not get exposed to that. And they find that people that get exposed to the results of the most successful traders in the next trading session take way more risk and are less satisfied with their own results in the second session. But we live in social media, like we literally do.

48:18And you see the stuff like this. I mean, this story is a little bit different because he lost it all, but you see stuff like roaring kitty, or, I mean, I'm sure there are other people on Twitter who are posting big wins all the time that I'm not paying attention to, but people see that. And I think it does have that effect on people. And if you look at options specifically, you look at the retail options market, people are not making money. There's a ton of studies on this. They're losing money a lot. But they're not sharing their stories. Yeah. And yeah, that's right, Dan. Those people are not the ones sharing their stories.

48:47Right. I mean, I think crypto is another great example of that, right? And we all know of stories of people who made astronomical returns doing it, but there's got to be a whole lot of people who lost, and it doesn't have to be enormous sums, right? Just a lot of people who entered the market and lost whatever they invested in, even if it was just a small amount, right? But the sheer number of losers must exceed the number of winners by some order of magnitude. Well, it usually does with these types of things, right? Like if you look at all the really, really successful funds, the average investor loses money because they pile in after the stellar performance.

49:21It becomes famous after the performance happens and gets publicized. and that's when the average person jumps in. So you look at Cathie Wood's funds and very famous portfolio managers, but there was a Bitcoin article from, I don't remember what magazine, and it was a couple of years old now, but it said something like 78 or 80 % of people who have ever purchased Bitcoin had actually lost money at the time for that exact reason. I don't know what the stat is now. It's probably a bit different because that was, Bitcoin was down quite a bit at that point and it's come back up, but it just further sort of elucidates your point then.

49:49Yeah. Well, people have the tendency to buy after something's gone up in price and sell after it's gone down. I mean, that behavior does not go away in any asset class. I did also want to mention that episode 325, where Mark was sick and Dan, you and I just talked through a bunch of comments that we got on episode 323 and some stuff from the Globe Mail too. It was like, it was a hit. People loved it. People, they were like, we asked for feedback on the format and feedback was universally positive and the download numbers were great. So one of the suggestions from the Roush Reminder community was that we should do a comment episode like that once every five weeks or something like that.

50:24And one comment was really interesting. Somebody said that the RationalMinder community is full of like really good discussion, but most people, like most listeners are not in the RationalMinder community. And so those discussions just don't get seen or heard. So it's a good way for us to surface some of the thoughtful stuff that comes out of the community and other places that people comment on our stuff online. Yeah. It was such an approachable topic too. Like it's something that virtually everybody has some kind of, well, anybody who lives anywhere has firsthand experience with one of those two things.

50:54And maybe a little bit, even though your analysis, Ben, was very thorough and a little academic, the decision that each of us makes is much more personal. And so everybody had something to say about it. And some of the comments were very wise, I thought, and quite diverse. You had people saying that their personal experiences were the exact opposite of other listeners. So it was a really nice way, I think, of getting a cross-section of opinion. Yeah. So definitely want to do more of those in the future. I like that. And like we mentioned in that episode, it was way less prep time than a typical episode.

51:28Reviews, Mark, you want to take one? Sure. The Swagly in the US says, great, keep it up. Found on YouTube first with just Ben, but really love the show. I learned a lot and new perspectives gained from listening to the show. Liked the recent episode responding to comments. There you go. Nice. I'll read the next one. And then maybe Dan, you can do the listener mail. So HP fan MD in Canada says best podcast. I found this podcast in 2023 and have gone back to listen to most episodes since it started. This has truly revolutionized my financial knowledge. And I'm often being consulted by friends and family for what I know about different financial topics.

52:05Cameron and Ben are truly spectacular. They must not have listened to the more recent episodes. They didn't mention you guys. Cameron and Ben are truly spectacular speakers. I have so many positive things to say, and I'm constantly recommending the podcast to my friends, but I can never stop laughing when Cameron says, have you seen this show or read this book? And Ben's answer almost every time, nope. Makes me laugh every time. Keep up the spectacular work. Pretty much a comedy podcast at this point, Evan. I guess so. Yeah. So let's share an email, like speaking on that same theme about episode 325.

52:37This is a email that we received from a listener. It says, my partner and I have accumulated a portfolio of$4.2 million in 25 years. Very early in our careers, we contemplated trying to save for a down payment, but the housing market made that impractical. We quickly realized that we liked the ease and the freedom of renting and very much disliked the costs and labor of home maintenance. We also value financial independence and the freedom to change jobs or take breaks in between. While we have never moved cities for a job, it was always an option due to the mobility of being renters. We were also able to take the career risk of changing jobs frequently for ever increasing salaries.

53:18As renters, we could keep fixed costs low and invest the savings difference instead of throwing money away on things. So this was one of the things that we asked people to reach out on about, because we talked about this idea of labor mobility and how it can be facilitated by renting rather than purchasing. And here's a great example of somebody who took advantage of that. Also not specifically uprooting in order to move. This idea was always having that flexibility available to you and just leading to not only financial success, but also just a more contented lifestyle. Yep. I got to read the end too.

53:58So they sent that renting story, renting success story, and they also say at the end, finally, thank you for the great podcast. I've been a listener from the beginning and really appreciate how Rash Reminder and PWO Capital team take the time to listen, educate, and inform. I was happy to see Dan join as a co-host recently. Along with Rash Reminder, the Canadian Couch Potato podcast was one of the best sources of Canadian financial content early on in my personal financial education. The team is changing people's lives for the better, mine included. If I hadn't learned about evidence-based investing in 2018, our portfolio and financial lives would look very different today.

54:29Very nice. Yeah. Kind words. Thank you. Yep. All right. So then last thing is the meetup. We did have the Ottawa rash reminder meetup. Mark did not come. Why not Ben? You canceled me. That's why let's be clear about that. I started calling Ben business class Ben because on the way back from future proof, I think he had a business class. And for those who don't know, Ben, how tall are you? 6 '10". 6 '10". So like flying economy for Ben must be just the worst. Yeah. So it's very obvious to me that if he can get an upgraded ticket of some kind in some more space, then that's the humane thing to do.

55:04But he flew back from future-proof business class. I started calling him business class, Ben. And then I was supposed to fly out to Ottawa for the meetup. And at the last minute, Ben was kind of like, you don't need to go. I was like, oh, cool. So you get to fly business class. And then you get to tell me that I'm not even allowed to take an economy. How do you think you can afford to fly business class? Precisely. So, okay. I did that because that specific ticket, it was like an extra$50 to upgrade a business class. And I was like, okay, that's worth it to be able to not suffer. And yes, but I don't usually fly business class.

55:32And anyway, I did not cancel you, Mark. Mark said, I'm really sick. I don't think that I should come. And I said, okay, Mark, if you're sick, you probably shouldn't come. That's a good idea. And then that turned into me canceling you. I don't know how. I don't think that's how it happened. I'm just trying to be nice. And anyway, the meetup was very successful. I estimate there are probably around 70 people. We were at Beyond the Pale, which is a brewery in Ottawa. Probably around 70 people came through throughout the course of the evening. There were a ton of listeners, just normal people, if we can call them normal.

56:05They're all pretty nerdy in a good way. Then there were a bunch of financial advisors that came because there's actually a conference that overlapped, a financial planning conference that overlapped with the meetup. A bunch of people that I know from there came. Then a bunch of PWL people came. My parents came. It was wild, real party. That's great. Some people who never listen to the podcast, but just figured it was a brewery. So why not? Actually, there was one person that didn't know we had the meetup, but was a podcast listener. Oh, that's really odd coincidence. What's going on? Like, is this, yeah, that was interesting.

56:35One guy came from Seattle, which is like incredible for the meetup. Specifically for the meetup from Seattle. Yeah. I guess he's had some family who's going to visit in Boston on the trip too, but yeah, he came primarily for the meetup. Amazing. Dan Solon was there. He traveled from afar too. So they're always fun. We'll have to do another one in Toronto, Dan. Yeah, that would be great. Need a West Coast one at some point too. Yeah, that's true. Some people did say we got to do one in Vancouver, which is probably true. Maybe next year. Sure. World tour next year. Yeah. I don't know. Only if we can do a business class, I guess.

57:09That's good to say. I can. At least bulkhead seating. I'll be hitchhiking. Then I'll be first class. That's what I usually do, bulkhead seating. It's a little bit more expensive, but not business class expensive. Have you ever flown, well, I'm sure you have, like regular economy class with your 610 frame, your knees must be under your nose. This summer, I decided at the last minute that I was going to go to BC. My parents and sister were going for a big anniversary event at my high school that both my sister and I and my dad all went to. And I wasn't going to go, but then I got last minute FOMO and decided to go.

57:46So, I booked the ticket like three days before I was flying and it wasn't crazy expensive, but I couldn't get a ball kid seat or even a business class seat. And so I was in just like regular economy in a middle seat and my knees are like jammed into the food tray in front of me. And yeah, no, it's, it's not fun. It was like a four hour flight or whatever. Yeah. I feel bad for the people next to me. Like my shoulders are spilling over. My knees are spilling over. It's like, I'm sorry, guys. There's nothing I can do. The laboratories on the airplanes must just be like you must avoid that yeah you can't doesn't work just plan ahead to not have to do that amazing yeah all right i think that's all we got for the episode so hopefully people enjoyed it and we'll be back next week see you then great thanks see you