Episode 71: Saying goodbye to a tough 2020

BEN: Hello and welcome. This is New Year’s Eve. Oh, and I even took off my top which I don’t think I should have just said on this New Year’s Eve podcast for Money with Mak & G. We have a crazy new guest on here. And that’s going to be the Petro twins. We have Cobi and Tony Petro with us today. Why don’t we just go ahead and welcome them. Let them say a little something then we’ll get back into what’s happening.

COBI: Yeah. Thanks for having us on. I’m excited to be here.

BEN: All right, and what’s your name?

COBI: I’m Jacobi Petrucciani.

BEN: Okay

COBI: Mak and G’s cousin. And I don’t know what…

BEN: And you’re one of the guys over at what company?

COBI: Oh, hacker rank. I’m currently working there as their lead DevOps engineer.

BEN: Awesome. So he’s got a lot of IT background. Mr. Anthony Petrucciani.

TONY: Tony Petrucciani. Uncle Tony, do you too?

GRANT: Yeah.

TONY: I’m an IT guy from 1985 When I graduated college, and that was back before, you know, computers really even existed. But I knew how to work them.

BEN: Yeah. So, Grant, go ahead. Give us a hello. i’m pretty excited after Christmas.

GRANT: Ah, yes. Hello, everyone. I hope you had a great Christmas. This is the New Year’s Eve special and we’re going to be talking about all the stocks and everything about 2020.

BEN: Awesome. Mak, how about you? Go ahead, give us it.

MAK: Hello, everybody. I am really tired today. But I am excited to do this. So yay.

BEN: All right. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. So the thing is, we’re moving into the new year one, take a quick look back to 2020. And before we get started on that, I like to get one word. What’s the one word you can say that describes all of 2020? Cobi?

COBI: Crazy.

MAK: COVID.

BEN: Oh, this double C’s Mak, how about you?

MAK: Sadness?

BEN: Oh, all right. I guess maybe I should do a wild ride. I put that together. Wild ride. Because I’m thinking about the stock market and some crazy stuff that went on. And over the last, you know, over the last 11 months, what do we see that happened? We had, we had the election, we had lots of COVID stuff. We saw lots of face masks and lots and lots of different things. Right. But from a financial perspective, the ride really started to happen at what time of year.

COBI: I mean, right at the beginning, basically like it’s been a roller coaster since then.

BEN: Right?

TONY: April.

BEN: April. Well, when did the stock market tanked guys?

COBI: It was right after March.

BEN: Late March, right?

MAK: Yeah.

BEN: And did you guys know that this is the fastest recovery for a bear market that we’ve ever seen? Do you know what a bear market is?

TONY: Does not wear any clothes?

BEN: No.

MAK: There, bear and bull. The bull is good, right?

BEN: The bull is good. And the bear is bad, right? The barrel PA and…. The bear was 2020 in March, but then it turned around and what happened? The stock market came back. We did a lot of numbers for 2020. When we were looking at the stock markets, overall s&p, the Dow and those other things, but in 2020, there were lots of really interesting things that were happening. What do you guys see about our Google year? Do you guys see any of this? Cobi you and I were talking about just a little bit. We’re talking about the number of Google searches that happened during 2020. For the top five some different categories. What do you see? What are some of the ones that we looked at? We said, well, the one that said where my stimulus check was a really big one, right? There were a lot of people that were looking at my stimulus check.

MAK: Somebody gives me the stimulus Check, please.

BEN: Exactly. What are some of the other ones? You guys don’t have to be too quiet down there.

TONY: Where is Kansas City? Oh, that’s right. There was a little bit of argument. I think. Our el presidente they got that wrong, didn’t he?

BEN: Oh Did he?

TONY: He was talking about was in Kansas? There is a Kansas City in Kansas but the one that they’re talking about is….

BEN: Missouri.

MAK: Kansas City Europe?

BEN: Time to go back to school for geography class.

TONY: Search for it so often. Nobody knows where it is.

BEN: So what’s the number one? What’s the number one the person that has passed away? Who was Googled more this past year?

MAK: Kobe Bryant and….

COBI: The Black Mamba.

BEN: That’s what he’s called. The black Mamba?

COBI: It is one of his nicknames.

MAK: I call him the goat. Goat he’s the goat at basketball.

BEN: Really? That’s good.

TONY: You know what’s GOAT stands for?

COBI: Greatest of all time.

TONY: When a kid somebody what an acronym is?

MAK: Acronym an acronym isn’t it? Like? Is it something like, like FYI is like for your information.

BEN: Or goat is greatest of all time?

GRANT: Yeah like that.

TONY: Gotta get one for your kids. You know what TLA is?

MAK: No.

TONY: It’s a three letter acronym that means three letter acronym.

GRANT: It’s helpful.

BEN: I think our guest stars here, you know they’re highly respected in the fields of finance and technology. Have a sense of humor along the way. So pretty interesting stuff. What was the number one search that was out there of all 2020?

MAK: Election results?

BEN: Election Results. There you go.

GRANT: Watch the news….

BEN: And followed by the C word. What’s the C word? Coronavirus virus and then Cobey Bryant.

BEN: So it’s been pretty crazy….

TONY: Not Cobey Petra Shani….

BEN: Cobi Petrucciani. But one of the interesting things I just saw it in here I saw on babies. So when you search for babies, what is the number one baby search you guys got to…..

GRANT: Elon Musk…

COBI: Elon Musk…

BEN: And what’s so funny about Elon Musk, which ties back into finance. So we’ll get there. Go ahead Cobe.

COBI: Well, he named it a string of weird symbols and then letters and numbers.

BEN: Just go at you.

COBI: Yep. Basically, I mean, what is its x and then the little AE symbol and a dash 12?

GRANT: Like our two d two. It’s like a robot name.

COBI: Liked it. I think that they said how they pronounce it too. They pronounce it X ash a 12x 12.

MAK: Maybe the kids actually likes it. I mean, who knows?…

TONY: So far he responds positively to cries a lot when he hears his name.

BEN: Yeah. It’s okay. Ash is that we’ve said

COBI: X S A 12. Well, I don’t know if they’re calling that.

MAK: Or maybe the nickname will be ash or something.

BEN: It’s like Cash. So what happened? Particularly interesting for Elon Musk this year? Did his wealth go up or down?

GRANT: Oh, we went up by a lot. What’s the lot? I think he’s the second richest man in the world now.

BEN: So what is he worth a billion dollars?

GRANT: Yes, definitely. He’s like 150 billion, I think. And Jeff Bezos is 178.

BEN: That’s right. That’s right. Nailed it. And how much did he go up this year? Mak do you know?

MAK: A lot.

BEN: A lot. That’s right. Well, I had a friend tell me to buy the stock. And I think 300 And I think I was looking at it this morning was 670.

COBI: And that’s after the split two.

BEN: Yes. So he went up $100 billion this year.

GRANT: 100 and 40? Wait….

BEN: No, he went up to like, 140/150 billion.

GRANT: Yeah.

BEN: But he grew 100 billion this year. Absolutely. Crazy. Yeah. Is there anything else on here that you look back? That is interesting.

COBI: The one that I like is where to buy PS five.

GRANT: Obviously, they’re all sold out. So you might as well just go to what Sony?

BEN: Do you have any idea why they’re sold out? Because I don’t know. But Cobe sure does.

GRANT: Here’s the hot new deals.

BEN: Right?

GRANT: Yes.

BEN: Something else has happened. Because we talked about markets all the time. What do we know about markets are two things the S and the D.

MAK: Supply & Demand.

BEN: And what do you think? Was the supply? Like crazy? Like they had tons and tons of them? Or?…

MAK: I don’t know actually sold out? So I don’t know….

COBI: So actually, yeah, they did have a ton of supply. But the problem is, there’s a lot of money to be made in scalping these products, because so many people want them for…. Basically, people are buying up all the stock, and then they go and list it somewhere else for a much higher price. And then they collect that like difference.

BEN: Can you believe that? And what was kind of that normal average, like adjustment upward when they were resell?

COBI: It was like two or 3x, basically. So they were they would go and buy a bunch of X boxes, or PS fives for 500 bucks and then go list them for 1000 to $2,000. And people would buy them on eBay. And it’s kind of like, it’s really silly because they have so much supply they have they had it all planned out for holiday 2020. But all these people were writing bots to go in and buy up all the stock is….

BEN: What’s the bot Cob?

COBI: Basically like an automated like piece of code that can perform some actions for whoever’s running it but it would just go into all the places accepting pre orders, right as soon as they opened up, and it would just purchase all of the pre orders that could Wow And so like the PS five I think ran out of stock on pretty much every site. You could pre order it on every site in like 30 minutes or something like that. I couldn’t get my hands on PS5 preorder.

TONY: So they didn’t have enough supply. Well, there was more demand then supply…

COBI: There’s a lot more demand but also like a lot of these scalpers still can’t get rid of their stock because people aren’t willing to pay two grand for an X Box. It’s going to be $500 retail.

GRANT: So Cobe, I have a question. So how long did it take you to get your Xbox series X? And how much should you buy it for?

COBI: Yeah, so I got it from Microsoft themselves. So I got it for 500 bucks. I basically was sitting there waiting for it to open up on preorder like, like the day that pre orders went live. I got into it. 10 minutes in to pre orders being open, and 30 minutes later sold out everywhere.

GRANT: Oh, wow.

BEN: Isn’t that crazy? And if that’s like the number one thing to ask for is where do I find PS five? What was the number two thing during 2020 that people are looking for? I would have thought this was first.

TONY: Initials are TP .

MAK: Toilet paper?

BEN: Tony Petrucciani Yeah, that’s right. Tony Petro Shani, Tony Petro Shani. But he goes by TP man. just exploded. He’s like, Wait a second. What’s number three Mak?

MAK: Number three’s wait…..

BEN: Were to buy. Rhymes with bass. Starts with F.

MAK: Face.

GRANT: Mask.

BEN: So a whole new market. As of January, as of January, there was no market really for face masks. Then all of a sudden it exploded. Right. But we needed face masks and hospitals. But to have them everywhere. What do you think did to those companies that had to buy produce face masks? They exploded right? If they were doing it?

MAK: Yeah. Like how much supply would they have to have that like?

BEN: Well, like most people wear then in the US now? Like more than half?

GRANT: Is that even a question?

BEN: That’s like 200 million people right there. Plus, you have a lot of throwaways. If you’re more than half. That’s round 65. So I rounded up to 200. What?

MAK: Did they get some of that from the government or something?

BEN: I don’t know. Tony, how do you pay for your colts mask?

TONY: Oh, you pay for it yourself? I mean….

MAK: Well, to make it not to buy it somewhere just like Tim Well,

TONY: Okay, so there’s two things, right. You can buy something. So you go the store, you give them money. Or if you make it you have to go to the store and buy the materials. So then put some labor involved to make it.

BEN: The company make it?

MAK: Like yeah, like….

BEN: Did they want a new product? Just like….

MAK: Okay, no, I thought they like a bunch of like, you know, those like, plus like not those plastic bags, like the throwaway ones. Yeah. Like, were they all one company? Or like….

BEN: It was a relatively small number.

MAK: Okay. I was wondering, because like that probably took a lot of money.

BEN: Yeah. So they to ramp up, they probably had to buy a whole bunch of new materials. And everybody were trying to get those same materials. And it got probably really, really crazy. So when you’re thinking about all these things, and how COVID touched all the different places, what, which stocks were hit the worst we talked about a little bit last week, but I’ve never heard this before. It’s highlighted on your piece page there. Cobe. And Tony, do you guys remember we were talking about?

TONY: The beach.

BEN: The beach?

TONY: The beach got killed.

BEN: The beach got killed right? There are booking stocks, entertainment, airlines cruises and hotels and they also put something else in there for like the E word. It’s entertainment, life events, cruises and casinos, hotels and resorts. So they got smashed. And what’s the Tony? What’s the TLA? What’s the acronym that we use? It’s not a three letter acronym. But what’s the acronym that we use for the stocks the set of stocks that just exploded this year?

TONY: Fang Fang Fang. Mak remember Fang is?

MAK: Yes, it is Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google and Microsoft. Yeah, Microsoft.

BEN: So Fangma.

TONY: Fangm.

BEN: But those guys just crushed it right? They just really did some crazy stuff. And do you guys remember when I was telling you about zoom? And zoom stock?

MAK: Oh yeah, it’s worth more than like a bunch of airlines all combined.

BEN: Yeah, like all the US airlines. I got it right. It’s all the US. I know it was southwest. Can you name another airline? United American delta. And then there was a couple others that were thrown in there too. So Zoom is worth more than all those airlines put together.

MAK: How much is it worth now?

BEN: Why don’t you look it up. Cobe is looking it up. See that’s what you guys are supposed to be doing that you’re supposed to be figuring that out because those are some really interesting statistics so beaches got slammed, the fangs came out.

COBI: Wow zooms worth 102 billion.

BEN: 102 billion.

TONY: Yo I hear some funny about stock market. But sure, well, sometimes you want to do research and understand what you’re buying. But when zoom started getting popular because everybody had to work from home and work over zoom, there was another company out there that had a stock symbol, zoom. That’s not the same company. And people went out and bought that and drove the price way up thinking they were buying into the video conferencing company.

BEN: What was the name of what was that company?

TONY: Zoom.

BEN: What did they do? Do you remember I remember the.com bubble. And companies would actually change their name. Like if their name was white paper, they go out and change it to white paper tech. And overnight, their stock price would jump 15% meaning the next day, they would change their name legally, so that they would get people to buy their stock and they did. Isn’t that crazy?

MAK: Yeah crazy. I mean, I would probably more likely buy white paper text. I don’t know why.

BEN: But that’s absolutely crazy. And when you look at Fang and everything that it’s done, did you figure out what it was Cobe?

COBI: I can’t find it. Oh, here it is. Stock Ticker Zi are you talking about? Oh, you’re talking about a different one. This is another one. It’s called Zoom info technologies. Okay, but it.. You know, I remember that happening where people just googled zoom and then put money into whatever the first stock ticker that came up. Yeah, it caused a huge…..

TONY: Zoom technologies. It was a penny stock.

BEN: And it exploded.

TONY: It exploded because people were buying it thinking that was the Zoom video conferencing software company and it wasn’t.

BEN: Do that’s like….

COBI: Worth $45 right now.

TONY: Do you know what to? Do? We know what a ticker symbol is?

BEN: Yes, you do. You’re shaking your head for what is what’s like apple? What are the Apple symbol when you buy it?

MAK: And oh, it’s APL? Oh, yeah. Okay. I didn’t know that was ticker symbol.

TONY: What’s Starbucks?

BEN: Starbucks, SPX?

COBI: S bucks?

BEN: S bucks? I just haven’t made my portfolio just come right out.

COBI: What about what about Salesforce?

BEN: What is it?

COBI: CRM?

BEN: Customer relation management is a TLA. Hey, TLA three letter acronym bang, Uncle Tony, Tony’s on it. So when we have COVID, all these crazy things are happening. And we’re talking about money. One of the things you know that concerns me is education. Do you guys know what the number one reason that kids succeed with their education is? They have a school?

MAK: They go in person also having parents that support them?

BEN: Oh, Mak nailed it. It is the number one reason kids will succeed is supportive parents. Do you know why? Because you got to stop touching but….

GRANT: Sorry.

BEN: The number one reason is because if your teacher doesn’t teach you, and you come home, and you have supportive parents that will help and encourage that, that will make the difference. So when all of these kids how many kids you think got hit by shutting down schools? Anybody have an idea?

TONY: 600.

MAK: 600?

COBI: Total.

TONY: I’m just guessing.

COBI: At least…..

MAK: I’m gonna say…..

BEN: Worldwide. Let’s do a worldwide.

MAK: A worldwide?

BEN: Yeah.

MAK: I want to say….

TONY: 800.

MAK: 800,000.

BEN: No, that’s much better than Grant.

GRANT: 3 billion I guess?

COBI: I have a guess.

BEN: Okay, Cobe.

COBI: I have a guess around one and a half billion, maybe?

BEN: Exactly. 1.5 billion kids have been affected. And that’s just not kind of like, Hey, we’re going to set you up in another way that’s school is closed, which means they’re not learning because what do you need to learn from a distance? And this is one of the great things with Cobi here. What, go ahead, you can go Mak.

MAK: An electronic.

BEN: You need electronics, but you also need rhymes with tie dye.

TONY: Wi Fi.

BEN: There you go.

GRANT: Oh yeah.

BEN: You need Wi Fi. What if What if you’re in a place that doesn’t have a lot of money and then you can’t get Wi Fi?

GRANT: Oh, no, you would have to be homeschooled then. Oh but also some of your parents like they….

BEN: What if your parents are working all day.

MAK: Yeah, that’s what I mean. That’s hard.

BEN: That’s pretty tough. Right? We take for granted that we have Wi Fi everywhere we go right?

MAK: You don’t have to go to school anyways.

BEN: 1.5 billion. And what do you think the cost of the public schools just in the United States has been? Like, if you shut down, people got sick, they had to redo and go everything online. There’s a cost to go online, and they still had cost have continuing the schools. What Tony? what he’s thinking?

TONY: How many kids?

BEN: No, no, like how much money does the public schools think that they’ve lost due to COVID?

TONY: Over 200 billion?

BEN: 225 billion that’s a quarter trillion dollars.

GRANT: Yeah. It’s more than Jeff Bezos.

TONY: Here’s how many of you know the difference between a million and a billion. So if you’ve tried to, if you could count 1000, zero to a million, and you count a number every second, how long would it take you to count to a million?

MAK: A million?

BEN: Yeah, million seconds.

TONY: Yeah. How long? Is it?

GRANT: A lot of years.

MAK: A lot of time.

TONY: It’s over 11 days.

MAK: Oh, it is?

BEN: You can’t adjust to a million to be 11 days. You couldn’t stop? Couldn’t sleep could pee.

GRANT: A billion is like 51 years.

TONY: It’s like, yeah, so we’re 30 years or something?

MAK: I thought it’s a 51. Like I started.

BEN: So he’ll so when he looks for that. If you have all of these 1.5 billion people that don’t have education anymore. They think there’s going to cause a problem that they’re not going to be learning as fast and they’re going to miss opportunities when they get older. Because they lost out school. Tony, how long does it take to count 2 billion?

TONY: It says if you could do it one number every second, which is really hard to say big long numbers segment take 31.7 years.

GRANT: Oh My!!

TONY: So it’s a difference in how much a different a million and a billion is. I don’t even think about a trillion. How many? How many? How many billions are in a trillion?

GRANT: A 1000?

MAK: A billion. It’s a 1000.

TONY: So 1000 times longer than 31 years to count to a trillion?

MAK: Yeah. 3001…

BEN: So in 2020 we had a lot of stuff that went on a third of the company has had to increase their digital technology right. Cobi, what are some of the things that you guys introduced? Once you guys all went to Home. Working from home?

COBI: Yeah, basically just went everything went remote. First, you know, we used to have four office locations where people would do like in person meetings like obviously we’ve switched to zoom entirely for everything. Pretty much anytime you want to talk to anybody you set up a zoom call. We’ve been using Slack a lot more that’s like our chat app for our company. Like pretty much any communication is either through zoom or slack.

BEN: Did you cut down any real estate?

COBI: Only one office actually because we have like these really long leases but our Indianapolis office actually our lease came up for renewal and we were about to sign a new office space right when COVID hit and so we actually put that off we put everything in storage but so we don’t have a physical location in Indianapolis anymore.

BEN: Gotcha. Well, it’s sure changed a heck of a lot of things the fang stocks. What do you call it really hit it out of the park? Now do you guys you know being 12 and all I thought maybe you could use some non financial things that we’re kind of cool and 2020? You guys know of any cool things that happen in 2020?

MAK: Cool!

BEN: Did you know The whales came back to New York?

MAK: They did?

BEN: For Sunday spotted whales and like a long time. Did you know that?

MAK: No. No, I did not know that.

BEN: Wow, what about the panda bear that reproduced in Hong Kong? Goshen Park Zoo?

GRANT: Oh, yeah.

BEN: You guys need to look that up because that one….

TONY: How about record numbers of puppies getting adopted that normally wouldn’t?

BEN: So if we get back to finance on that point. You guys ever heard of chewy?

MAK: Yes.

BEN: What is chewy?

MAK: It is dog bone.

BEN: It’s a dog bone. That’s really chewy. It’s a company. Right? We talked about companies. Right? And what to do you know what she was doing back in March?

MAK: No.

BEN: She was doing about $23 a share. And you know what it’s selling for? I looked it up this morning.

COBI: 94.

BEN: It was how much?

COBI: 94.

BEN: It was like 104. This morning……

TONY: Oh, no, it’s the cats out of the bag.

BEN: Boop Hey, Tony will not be here all week. But here’s another one. Here’s a crazy one for you. Here’s something makes feel special. All the health care workers. Right. They’re getting hammered. They’re helping out a lot of people. Do you know there’s a Canadian health care worker that won the lotto. How much do you think she won? She got her ticket and she said Hey, I won $6,000 And you know, Uncle Tony was talking about the difference between a million and a billion is what? It was actually…. She lost 1000 times. And so when he added three more zeros she instead of winning 6000 she wants $6 million.

MAK: Oh my.

BEN: Yeah. She thought she goes, Oh, one 6000. And then she showed her friends that or whatever and they looked at and they go, No, you want 6 billion. It’s like she really wants 6 million bucks. So it was a pretty good story, right? Health care worker. Do you hear about the king of math?

MAK: The 10 year old.

BEN: You learned about the 10 year old? Yeah. He’s the king of math. And what did he do? That was pretty, pretty slick.

MAK: He did. 196 multiplication and division facts in one minute.

BEN: Wow. Oh, that means he was doing almost three and a half. He was doing Oh, Dad’s doing three and a half a second. Holy smokes.

COBI: That’s insane.

BEN: Did I do the math, right. 60 times three is 180. Yeah. Holy Spicoli.

MAK: Well, and they probably weren’t like small numbers, too.

BEN: I wouldn’t think so. I heard it’s a new world record.

TONY: I can’t even say I mean, if they’re big numbers. How long does it take the CM 1 million?

COBI: They must have been he was typing.

BEN: He was typing as what I was saying….Computer and that crazy….

COBI: I can type that?

MAK: Yeah?

BEN: That’s crazy.

TONY: I was one finger, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

BEN: Okay, so here’s one of my favorites. Let’s see. Did you guys know about the big tree that’s up in New York and Rockefeller Center? Do you guys ever hear about that?

MAK: No.

BEN: Whenever you see the Christmas tree, usually Rockefeller Center. Which Rockefeller bring it back to finance? Did he have a little bit of money or a lot of money?

MAK: Probably a lot.

BEN: Like a ton. He had a ton of money. And what happened? They always have a huge tree and the tree is what how big do you think the tree was? 10 feet tall.

GRANT: 75 feet?

BEN: How do you guys get that? 75?

MAK: No, it just seems like the right height.

BEN: And they usually bring it where do they bring it from? Cobi can you find it? I think it’s like Washington or Oregon or Oregon. And they bring it all the way to New York. So how long do you think it takes like two hours? Four days? What?

MAK: A lot more than that.

BEN: Thanks. I thought it takes three or four days to get there. And you know, when they unpack that ever everything they found a baby…

MAK: Owl.

BEN: A baby owl in there. And they were concerned because do you think that baby owl was eating if he was stuck in a tree on a trailer across the United States? No. So he didn’t eat they were really concerned about him. They fed him all the mice he wanted and I guess he popped back really well. He’s doing really well.

MAK: It’s maybe owl.

TONY: Nobody was there even to change his diaper.

BEN: He’s just pooping in the tree. And I’ll tell you weren’t riding in a car next to him.

TONY: Hey, this is this. This ties back to a question. A comment that his grandfather always makes to the waiter comes to the table says oh, it’s in the dinner. Is there anything else I can get you? Anything else I can bring you sir and here he says Yeah, bring me a pound to hundreds.

BEN: Good.

TONY: Which made me think about it. You said Rockefeller had a ton of money. So if you had a ton of $100 bills, how much money would that be?

BEN: I don’t know. What is it? 10? I thought we did that one time, right? A ton is 2000 pounds. And how much is each? Bill $100 Bill worth or weigh?

TONY: About one gram?

BEN: One gram. So how many grams is did I? Is it?

TONY: Grams of 28 in a pound.

BEN: 28. Okay.

MAK: I’m tired.

TONY: Or wait…

COBI: I just remember it’s like around what $45,000 for a pound of hundreds.

TONY: So it’s $90 million….90 million. So if somebody gave you 90 million and said, you have to carry it all at once to take it home. If you want to keep it what would happen?

COBI: You get flattened.

TONY: You wouldn’t really carry….

BEN: Here you go.

MAK: You’d have to like get a pickup truckers? Yeah. All right. More than that.

BEN: Not a quarter ton pickup truck. A full time pickup truck.

MAK: Full time. Yeah.

BEN: There you go.

TONY: And then you want to put a cover eyes so they don’t blow away when you drive.

GRANT: Or just put it on a credit card.

TONY: Then how would you be able to get the credit card out from under it?

MAK: Under it, you would put it on top.

BEN: She just said you could do that. And what do you call it? You spend a million a ton of money and then you just pay for it with that eight pick it up on the corner of third man. So what’s the big news? The big news over this weekend? What happened? President Trump….

GRANT: Oh he sign the…..

TONY: You say Christmas?

BEN: I said over the weekend. Christmas was Friday. Right?

TONY: No, it felt like a whole four day weekend.

BEN: Oh, yeah. So what did President Trump sign may I know?

MAK: It was a stimulus check.

BEN: Package and checks. And how much is Uncle Tony gonna get other stimulus checks?

TONY: Nothing.

BEN: You’re just gonna get relieved of your PPP. But how big is this stimulus package? Do you remember we talked about it last week.

MAK: Oh, isn’t it isn’t that like 600.

BEN: 600%. But the actual package included all kinds of crazy stuff. $900 million, or a billion?

TONY: What is the difference between a million and a billion again?

BEN: But first, the first stimulus was how big do you guys remember the first stimulus package? It was bigger than 900 billion.

MAK: It was like 1000. Oh, yeah go ahead.

COBI: like 2.2?

BEN: It’s over 2 billion. Now trillion.

TONY: Trillion.

COBI: 22 trillion.

TONY: What’s the difference between 22 billion and 2 trillion.

BEN: Okay, so we’re going 900 billion and we did 2.2 trillion. If we add those together, we’re over $3 trillion. Right?

MAK: Yeah.

BEN: Do you know what our budget for an entire year is? 4 trillion.

TONY: At this household?

BEN: Yeah. At the US government, that’s $4 trillion, of which 1 trillion we go into debt. And if we add another $3 trillion we have quadrupled the amount of debt that we just went into for one anyone year.

GRANT: Oh gosh.

BEN: That’s a lie.

COBI: So you can just print more money?

BEN: Yeah, we’re gonna have to talk about that. We’re gonna talk about that.

TONY: Can we do an episode on modern monetary theory?

BEN: Do not talk about currency.

TONY: Let’s talk about fiat currency?

BEN: Fiat currency we’ll have to talk about that another time.

TONY: Because our business no Fiat came back. Didn’t he?

BEN: Well, you guys could go all day. Currency what happened to Bitcoin? Do you remember Bitcoin?

GRANT: Started in like 2009. But anyways, like, like 1000s were like, launched and made so that’s crazy.

BEN: Well…

TONY: What cryptocurrency is bitcoin?

BEN: Cryptocurrency and how much was it trading for last week?

GRANT: Like 20 thousand?

BEN: 24,000.

GRANT: Well, I’ll forget.

TONY: Million or billion?

MAK: A million.

BEN: $24000 for one coin.

MAK: One coin and….

BEN: Do you remember how much that pizza costs we talked about last week?

MAK: Isn’t it like 8 million or something?

BEN: It was a couple of years ago. It’s worth like 8 million, but at 24 23,000 they had 10,000 Bitcoin so that those two pizzas cost $230 million.

MAK: Oh, wow.

GRANT: He paid for some of those Bitcoins.

COBI: That guy’s kicking himself.

TONY: And his name is JaCobi.

BEN: Yeah because COVID zone some digital currency right Cobi?

COBI: Yeah, I’ve been in and out of a few coins, but a lot of them seem to be more like scams and actual currency…..

BEN: Get hate mail.

TONY: Get a rig a mining rig that we built several years back to start mining and we decided to mine Aetherium instead of Bitcoin.

COBI: Aetherium and Manero.

BEN: So these guys people listening may not even know what mining is all about. You guys know what Mines out Mak & G?

MAK: Not really.

GRANT: Not really.

BEN: So don’t you get paid for helping to stabilized is that kind of the right way to say it? You…

COBI: I don’t want to I don’t want to go too deep into it…

TONY: There is what it is. You guys are playing Minecraft.

GRANT: Yeah.

TONY: And what do you guys do you go down there and you poking you look at stuff and you see if there’s something in there click sometimes it’s just empty. You’re mining for it just like we do with when you’re looking underground for diamonds and sometimes you dig and there’s nothing there and you dig a lot isn’t there all sudden something’s there, they’ve got something like that where you do you get this program you use and you you keep digging for bitcoins every once awhile you find a piece of a Bitcoin under there.

BEN: And so you earn it by mining it, but when you do that, it helps the whole system. So it’s kind of it’s a little crazy but what they did is they actually put together what’s a mining rig which is a computer that does this searching for the Bitcoin and you earn Bitcoin as you go along. And so didn’t you earn some bitcoin along the way Cobe?

COBI: So not not Bitcoin, but the other currencies that we were mining. Aetherium and Manero.

BEN: And that crazy, so they’re gonna add search versus some of those other ones as well.

MAK: That sounds like high tech diamonds or something.

TONY: It is high tech diamond.

BEN: It is like high tech. What have you found a Bitcoin? That’d be $24,000 It’d be like finding a diamond.

GRANT: Yeah.

TONY: Do you know how much a Bitcoin weighs?

MAK: It’s really light. I don’t know. Wait the computer says doesn’t weigh anything.

TONY: Yeah, I mean, yeah, it could be it’s a couple zeros on one….

TONY: Yeah, it might weigh something.

BEN: It might be something. Yeah, but….

TONY: Negligible. You can hold you can definitely hold $90 million worth of bitcoins without straining.

BEN: Yes, exactly.

COBI: That’s a sec might be after you. You hold that much, IRS.

MAK: Okay.

BEN: So what about like bankruptcies? What kind of bankruptcies that we see this year? Because you know, with the financial news…

TONY: Chapter seven, and chapter 11, and chapter 13.

BEN: How do we see there’s some, but when you guys are younger, you like to jump in the balls and get some pizza at Chuck E Cheese. California Pizza Kitchen.

MAK: Yeah.

BEN: The parent company of Pizza Hut and Wendy’s went belly fitness location. I used to work 24 Hour Fitness…

MAK: Percent increase in bankruptcies. And that’s why.

BEN: Yeah, it looks like it’s about 50% increase in bankruptcy. So it’s getting a little tough. And we’re not really out of the woods. Because Did you know The first person from COVID passed away in beginning of February of this year. He was 60 years old died of COVID in February, and then March things tanked. And we came back. But there’s a lot of companies that are still struggling, right?

MAK: Yeah.

BEN: So we had a number of bankruptcies, we look back at some of the stuff that Google had the highest searches on, which was pretty funny. Right. And the other ones on there that you….

MAK: There’s a BB plot……

BEN: Maybe a lot of us?

MAK: Yeah.

BEN: I didn’t even know that. We’re gonna have to look at that.

TONY: What do you think the top beauty tip search was?

BEN: Yeah, that was that was gonna be when I was going to ask.

MAK: Curtain things. How do….

COBI: No no the top.

MAK: The top one? How to Cut men’s hair.

TONY: How do you think that was happening?

BEN: People weren’t at work.

MAK: Yeah.

COBI: Trying to save money.

TONY: Well, the hairdresser’s were all closed right that barber shops they couldn’t have people in them. So your hair keeps growing even though the shops are closed, right?

MAK: Yeah, the top three things are about hair, like how to color your hair and how to plop your hair.

BEN: What’s a plop? plop your hair that didn’t sound too savory.

TONY: Think somebody might have mistyped that?

BEN: How to wash your hands? That’s good to know. People don’t know how to wash their hands. And that was at a top beauty. That’s a beauty how to how to wash your hands. It’s number four of Google for 2020 Oh my gosh.

TONY: I can’t believe people didn’t know beforehand.

BEN: I did neither.

GRANT: Game this is among us on there.

MAK: Yeah, like literally exploded among us. It just came out of nowhere.

GRANT: Oh, guys. That’s 1x box I think.

BEN: Yeah.

COBI: Ps4 and PC.

MAK: Yeah.

BEN: And did you have to pay for among us?

MAK: No no it’s free.

COBI: So the other funny thing about among us is that it came out in 2018. But it just saw like a resurgence in popularity this year because of everyone being at home and trying to find games where a lot of people can play together.

TONY: Nice, nice. And so what happened with when he caught Minecraft Minecraft. People played and played and played and you really weren’t charged for it and then it got big and we talked about Microsoft buying them for how many billions of dollars it was like some crazy number.

COBI: Yeah, it was pretty crazy.

BEN: Wow.

TONY: How to Drink beer at home.

BEN: So it was purchased by Microsoft for billions billions dollars.

COBI: Two and a half billion.

BEN: I thought was more than that.

COBI: Should have been without making.

TONY: Did you say two and a half million or two and a half billion?

COBI: Billion with a B.

MAK: Yes. I guess it would have been like 100.

BEN: Yeah. Because they turned it in some neat stuff. And I know that is one of the podcasts that we did. So 2020 was an interesting year with COVID. We didn’t talk much about the election. The markets got crazy. We saw some bankruptcies and some other stuff. We saw the beach docks get pummeled, but we talked about a few positive things. Like, what do you call Rockefeller Rockefeller Center’s Christmas tree? They named the owl Rockefeller if you didn’t. And then we have the panda and we’ve got some other really cool stuff.

MAK: Baby Yoda.

BEN: Baby Yoda came out in the what?

COBI: Mandalorian.

BEN: So adorable. Hopefully we didn’t read that for anybody. And we’ll take a deeper dive into the markets definitely next week, because the investment challenge starts next week, guys, you’re all set up on your iPads because what you get for Christmas, iPads,

MAK: iPads.

BEN: When he called earbuds as well as AirPods pro Yep, airpod pro. And so it was all good. But we really want to thank Uncle Tony and cousin Cobe cousin Kobe. Thank toilet paper and cousin Cobi. Right TP?

MAK: That sounds like a cow.

BEN: So we want to thank you guys for being here today. We’re gonna get this up. And don’t forget to like, comment and share it with other people. Thank you very much. We’ll see you next time on money with Mak and G.

TONY: And Tony P.