SKEPTIC’S GUIDE TO INVESTING
Straight Talk for All, Nonsense for None
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Your Hosts - Meet Steve Davenport, CFA and Clem Miller, CFA as they discus the latest in news, markets and investments. They each bring over 25 years in the investment industry to their discussions. Steve brings a domestic stock and quantitative emphasis, Clem has a more fundamental and international perspective. They hope to bring experience, honesty and humility to these podcasts. There are a lot of acronyms and financial terms which confuse more than they help. There are many entertainers versus analysts promoting get rich quick ideas. Let’s cut through the nonsense with straight talk!
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SKEPTIC’S GUIDE TO INVESTING
Traditional Meets Modern: Japan's Unique Blend
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What happens when a seasoned business traveler trades in short visits for a month-long immersion in Japan? Join us as Clem Miller unravels his captivating journey through the Land of the Rising Sun, offering a rich blend of personal anecdotes and cultural insights. From Tokyo's bustling streets to Kyoto's serene temples, Clem paints a vivid picture of Japan's unique juxtaposition of modernity and timeless tradition. Discover how a society renowned for technological prowess still thrives on a predominantly cash-based economy and why its retail scene remains vibrant despite the global shift towards online shopping.
We take you on a spiritual exploration of Japan, where Shintoism and Buddhism coexist harmoniously, creating a cultural landscape of openness and mutual respect. Clem shares touching stories of Japanese society's honesty and kindness—from unlocked bicycles to a cab driver who returned overpaid fare—offering a glimpse into the heart of a nation anchored in spirituality. And if you're a sports enthusiast, you won't want to miss Clem's lively recount of Japanese baseball games, a testament to the country's dynamic cultural tapestry.
Transportation and trust go hand in hand in Japan, and Clem sheds light on the efficient Shinkansen bullet trains and the intriguing economic insularity of this fascinating country. Take a stroll through the allure of Japanese gardens and learn about "forest bathing," a practice woven into the fabric of Japanese life. With our listener demographics shifting, we're excited to see Singapore take the lead in downloads, and we extend heartfelt gratitude to our global audience for their ongoing support. Join us as we continue to share stories and explore the art of living life to the fullest.
Straight Talk for All - Nonsense for None
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Welcome listeners. Today, on Skeptic's Guide to Investing, we're going to discuss Japan the country, the tourist location, the economy. We're fortunate enough to have Clem Miller who his sushi, his bonsai trees and how he is finding Zen Buddhism now, late in life. So, clem, if you were to look at your trip to Japan, was it what you expected? Was it more than you expected? Was it what you expected? Was it more than you expected? Was it? How did the culture and the experience compare to other travels you've been on?
Speaker 2:So let me say first that you know, I've had a couple of previous trips to Japan, but they were both short business trips. But they were both short business trips and it gave me only the very slightest taste of what Japan is about in terms of an on-the-ground experience. Of course, I've long been familiar with Japan from a distance, but those two trips gave me sort of a taste of what was on the ground, although not much I could really comment on, but enough to suggest that I should go back and experience it more. And so we went back to japan, we went to japan, spent a month there, we spent two weeks in tokyo, two weeks in kyoto, and I'm not going to give you a travelogue, because that's not the purpose of this show, but I do want to give some impressions about the society, about the economy, about how we should look at Japan and the world, and hopefully that will be helpful to our, to our listeners.
Speaker 1:What do you think is? I mean, I like to think about spectrums and if we think about the creative side and we think about the engineering side and we think about in general, how we describe economies, I've always thought about Japan as being an economy in the electronics. You know, creatively, you know, with all the things they've done in terms of producing some interesting games and other strategies. How does Japan compare in terms of what you expected, for you know our culture and our society today? Are they the most modern, semi-modern? Where would you put them in terms of their use of technology and how they do things?
Speaker 2:So Japan is a curious mix of modernity and absence of modernity. So, basically, if you look around, while there are some more modern, just architecturally, while there are some more modern structures, there are a lot of structures that were built in the 70s and 80s and sort of as as japan was being rebuilt after world war ii. So you know, architecturally, uh, there is a a mix. Uh, I would say that, in terms of technology, uh, I think japan is extremely technologically advanced. I would say it's more technologically advanced than the US is, except in some of the Silicon Valley type arenas.
Speaker 2:I would say that, in terms of everyday use of technology, they apply it basically across the board, with a few interesting, curious exceptions, one of which might be familiar to some of our listeners, which is that the economy is still largely based on cash. So, yeah, it's based on cash. So you have to carry a lot of cash around or make sure that you're within walking distance of an ATM that can access your foreign bank account, and fortunately they have those at 7-Elevens which, by the way, 7-eleven being a Japanese company, seven and I Holdings they have these ATMs that you can access. But in terms of dealing with retailers, I would say, 75% of the time you actually have to use cash rather than a debit or a credit card. That's interesting.
Speaker 1:Are you an Apple person?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm an Apple person. And did you have any trouble operating? No, I think the phone worked perfectly, um, all the time, uh, while I was over there. So there's no problem with, uh, with telecommunication connecting to networks or anything like that. Nope, I, I think you know the cash thing is not so much a technological issue, uh, it's more of a uh of a social, cultural issue, I think, where they prefer to have cash rather than the convenience of even phones in terms of paying phone apps. Yeah, no taps, it's largely cash-based. So I thought that was kind of interesting.
Speaker 1:I would also say Do you get some distrust of the credit?
Speaker 2:I, you know, kind of hard to say. I didn't ask anybody about that, but I think it's a very curious thing. You don't see use of credit and debit cards like you would in Europe, for example, or China for that matter. There's more of this cash basis. I would say that it's a very retail-oriented society, that it's a very retail oriented society. I would say that in. I would say that Japan, especially in you know well both Tokyo and Kyoto, I think is a very retail oriented society, much more retail oriented than I would say the U? S is. I think there's a lot of, there's an awful lot of money sloshing around in Japan in terms of buying things and and and retail, and it just you know physical retail like here.
Speaker 1:I think we're transferring from physical retail to online retail.
Speaker 2:Correct, and they do have. They do have online, but this is an economy, this is a country that has relatively tight geography and people live largely in cities, right, so there's greater access to shops and retail establishments, malls and whatnot, which are really ubiquitous in Japan uh Ginza, uh Akihabara, which are all areas where you have, you know, intense retail experiences. Let's say uh and uh, and a lot of money is sloshing around those areas and and so it's a, so it's a very retail-oriented economy.
Speaker 1:Is it kind of a show-me kind of capitalism where people like to show you that they have Gucci?
Speaker 2:bags or things. Yes, I mean, I think that's certainly a part of it. I think there is a, you know, everybody talks about, at least in terms of the numbers, about how Japan is an aging society. But if you walk around, you see lots of young people on the streets, in the malls, and these young people are spending money. No question about it. They're spending a lot of money, and that may be a factor of a lot of singles in japan, and the singles, uh, they, they do have a lot of money. So I think that's that's certainly a part of the, you know, a part of it. Um, how does japan.
Speaker 1:Compare like average income wise, like if the us is at 60 000 average income, what would japan be?
Speaker 2:so well. I don't have the, I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but it's uh, it's certainly less uh than uh, than us. And you know, if you, if you look, you know, if you, you know, when you're outside of the, you know real urban cores. Even in Tokyo, when you're in sort of outskirts of Tokyo, it doesn't quite look like wealthy areas that you would have say in, you know, like wealthy suburbs like you might have in in Atlanta or uh, or Washington DC or even Baltimore, where I am Right, um, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like that.
Speaker 2:It feels much more of an urban core basis with, uh, you know, with less wealth on the uh, uh, on the periphery, um, I, I even noticed uh, when, um, you know, if you look out the window from a, you know, from a tall building, uh, you still see lots of uh tv aerials. You know you don't see that much anymore. So, uh, you know that's that's kind of an interesting thing. I'm sure they have cable in the wealthier areas but you still have a lot of TV aerials out and about.
Speaker 1:How about the size of?
Speaker 2:their space. I heard everything's very tight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which, by the way, Japanese television, even the Japanese themselves make fun of their uh television options. So, um, there's, there's not a great deal of uh, of love for uh, for japanese television by uh, by locals, uh, which you know before you know, which reminds me uh to talk about you politics. Uh, I would make two observations there. Uh, the ruling party, the liberal Democrats, just came out with a new uh president of their party who's going to stand or or lead that party into uh upcoming elections and uh, his, his name is shigeru ishida and you know he's um sort of an old guard type. Uh, ldp that's the party uh initials and he's not well liked among some of the people that uh yeah, it seems like a strange leader to pick at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's not well liked among some of the people, some of the people that I met and talked to. The other thing I would say, and there's even some thought that maybe they would lose to the opposition right, the Democratic Party of Japan, but we'll see about that. The other thing that I that managed to pick up, you know, as many of you know, I'm sure, japan, but we'll see about that. Uh, the other thing that I that managed to pick up, you know, as many of you know, I'm sure, japan still has an emperor uh, although an emperor uh without much in the way of uh, of any power and um and uh, you know, maybe even less power than the uh, than the British monarchy, but there's widespread at least from what I gathered, there's widespread dislike of the idea of even having an empire, an emperor, in Japan. So there's some thought that maybe they should, that they should dispose of that. So we'll see what.
Speaker 1:Don't you feel like that's already kind of happening around the world, as the people are devaluing the royalty? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, there's royalty and there's royalty In some of the smaller European countries.
Speaker 2:The royalty is basically just like you and me, right, you know, they ride their bikes around, they go into shops, they don't have much in the way of security, uh, and then you've got, you know, the real royalty, like you know, in the UK and like, uh, in Japan, and um, you know, you know this, uh, this real royalty, as I would put it, uh, you know, it has been devalued, to be sure, but it's still, it's still very symbolic of of the culture, and so it might take a lot to um to change that.
Speaker 2:Now, the emperor, um, the whole idea of the emperor and the empire, goes back to, basically, you know, thousands of years ago, right, uh, where basically the emperor was like a god, king, uh, within the shinto religion, uh, which brings me to another interesting point, which is that japan, uh, I'm sure many of you know that japan has uh, its uh native religion, which is shintoism, and there are plenty of shinto shrines around um, you know, which, uh, you know, definitely worth visiting if you go there, uh and uh.
Speaker 2:And then there was an there's an overlay of buddhism, uh, which was imported from china a long time ago, obviously, and so now what you have in Japan is that many people are both a birth Shinto and Buddhist, and there are certain similarities between at least the way the shrines and the temples operate, but many people worship at both Shinto shrines and temples, and this seems to be Japan seems to have. I wouldn't necessarily call it, you know, religion, uh, in the sense of like monotheism. Um, you know, buddhism is much more of a at least from what I understand much more of a philosophy than a religion as we would practice really.
Speaker 1:I mean it's a practice on how to live your life, isn't it?
Speaker 2:yeah, and you know, I would say that, that, uh, you know, when you, and then, and then, shinto has a lot of nature worship elements to it, right? So if you, uh, you know, so, those two are not necessarily uh, uh, inconsistent, you know, so you could uh have shinto beliefs and you could have Buddhist beliefs.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that in most countries, if we have two different religions, they fight for superiority. But Japan is such a community based that if there's another religion, they start to say well, what are? They doing that we're not doing, and maybe I can incorporate it. I mean, it's a very philosophically open um right and also it accepts ideas.
Speaker 2:also, it's not like, you know, when you go to europe and you go to the catholic cathedrals, um, you know, attendance at catholic cathedrals in europe is not, is not, especially in northern europe is not as great as it, uh, as it had been um centuries ago. And I, you in in japan, while I can't speak about centuries ago, I think that in japan, uh, you see, you still see a lot of spirituality. You see a lot of spirituality. You see a lot of folks praying at the shrines and the temples, and it's, you know, it's, it's certainly more of a of a spiritual society, which takes me to another point, which is and I don't know if it's the spirituality that that provides this, but you know, the Japanese are very, um, you know, they're very respectful, uh, they're very um, they're very kind, uh, they um, you know, I don't want to, you know, paint everybody with the same brush, but it's a society that is very well, is very respectful of each other.
Speaker 2:If you walk down the street or an alley or what have you, and you see bicycles and a lot of people ride bicycles in Japan. You won't see any of them locked up. Really, yeah, nobody steals bicycles there.
Speaker 1:Is there no market for the bikes, or is?
Speaker 2:it. People don't steal them. We took a cab to our hotel from another location and we accidentally overpaid the driver. And we were about to get into the elevator in the hotel and the driver runs in to give us our extra few yen that we overpaid him.
Speaker 1:Wow, try doing that in New York City, right? I don't know If you saw your driver chasing you in New York. You'd run.
Speaker 2:We went to a baseball game, which, by the way, I would highly recommend anybody going to Japan to go to a baseball game. It was absolutely crazy way. I would highly recommend anybody going to japan to go to a baseball game. It was absolutely crazy. Um, you know when, uh, you know when, women or men uh get up from their seats to go to the restroom or or go get, uh you know, hot dogs, which they also eat there? Uh, they will leave their bags under their seats.
Speaker 1:No, without fear of any of it being stolen. That seems hard to believe. I looked up while you were talking. The average income in Japan right now is about $45,000 compared to about 60 in the US, so I mean it's going to be one of the higher. I mean I think Germany would probably be higher, but that's a pretty significant income per capita.
Speaker 2:It is, and I suspect that you've got maybe I'm wrong about this, but I suspect that there's a lot that there is some income inequality. You know, based on seeing what folks can afford in Tokyo, I think it's likely to be a Tokyo versus the rest of the country kind of economy.
Speaker 1:Is Kyoto. I know I should know this kyoto, the capital tokyo is the capital.
Speaker 2:Tokyo is the capital. It's the uh, it's the. Everything it's the. It's the? Uh governmental capital. Uh, it's the uh economic capital, financial capital. Kyoto is the old imperial capital. Yeah, that's what I was, uh, and it's um. It's also uh, the home of a lot of buddhism, um including, uh, many of the zen buddhist um sects uh grew out of um, and Kyoto is the seventh largest city. It feels like a smaller city. It's very comfortable, it's not as absolutely crazy as Tokyo is, and it's got a lot of shrines and temples, including a lot of these Zen Buddhist temples, which are very interesting and very relaxing, the way they've just been designed, especially with their tea rooms, and I would, I would strongly suggest going to going to Kyoto.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so if you only had a week or two in Japan, you'd do less Tokyo and more Kyoto.
Speaker 2:I think. So, looking back, I would do more Kyoto and maybe a little bit less Tokyo. I'm glad we did two and two this time, but next time maybe one Tokyo and maybe two Kyoto and one somewhere else. Did you go to Mount Fuji? Well, we had a tour set up to go to Mount Fuji, but that day it was raining and cloudy and there was no way we'd be able to see it even on the tour. So we decided to bag the tour. So we decided to bag the tour.
Speaker 1:Yeah, did you feel like there was parochial kind of everybody loves Japanese products or do you think that as a country they have accepted that there are? You know how do they view Korean goods or US goods or US companies? Korean goods or US goods or US companies? Do you ever get a feeling for how the people protect or react to their own companies versus other companies from outside, like China?
Speaker 2:I had the feeling that they're economically insular in the respect that you're saying. I don't think that. I'm not, I don't think it's you know a hundred percent by any means, but I think that that there's a degree of of economic insularity.
Speaker 1:How, how about getting like you? How did? How about getting around on the train system? What? Why do you think they? I mean, is it necessity that they just realize cars are ineffective and they have to use trains, or is it culturally they'll? I mean, I heard they really press them in hard in some of those trains. Did you get did?
Speaker 2:you get sandwiched much. No, because it's smart to not go during rush hour, so you should be, unless you really want to have that experience. I would say that it's important to sort of work around rush hour in Tokyo is that when you walk around the streets they're interestingly, for a city that may be the largest or near the largest city in the world there aren't that many cars. There aren't as many cars as I thought there would be. Yeah, when you go to some countries now I'm thinking more like developing countries, like Egypt and India it's absolutely crazy the amount of cars that are around and honking this kind of thing. But but in japan there are relatively few cars.
Speaker 1:everybody, everybody takes mass transit and they have these zones like london where those cars, you know, have to pay a surcharge to get into the main zone, or I believe so, not a hundred percent, I believe so, I believe so.
Speaker 2:So that would explain why the shoe, or cars, and there are um tunnels and things of that nature that have electronic pricing, um, that sort of go from one area of the city to another area of the city, um, but there's, um, but the the there's a metro system, uh, actually a couple metro systems, with many, many, many lines. Uh, there is something called the jr, japan railways, which is sort of a commuter train, um, and I believe the jr also operates what's called the shinkansen, and the shinkansen is the bullet train. Oh yeah, and I always thought the bullet train simply went from, you know, tokyo to osaka, uh, but no, the shinkansen goes. There's shinkansen that go all over the place, um, you know, to the north, to the west, to the south, um, you know it's, it's, there are a lot of shinkansen and they go very fast and um, so they are on a different rail bed, different design, or are they just like a souped up version of the existing train?
Speaker 2:uh, whatever it is, it goes super fast and, um, you, you can barely follow, uh, the landscape. I mean you have to, you know you can follow the landscape. I mean you have to, you know you can follow a landscape that's like a half mile away, but anything closer it's like a blur. I tried taking video and it's a blur. It is so fast and you can go from using the Shinkansen, you can go from Tokyo tooto in a little over two hours. Wow, and that's uh, you know that's fast, that's really fast. There's like three or four stops on the way as well. Okay, so, yeah, everybody, everybody uses, uh, everybody uses mass transit. It's fast. Oftentimes you have to walk a lot between stations underground and that gives you a nice hefty amount of steps if you want to count your steps.
Speaker 1:All right. I mean I heard the lifestyle and the reason why so many people age. Well, there is you know what I mean that they just have such a great attitude about community.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Community about the you know and and really the train system is.
Speaker 1:You could look at that as community, right, I mean, I don't think it's a I don't think it's an accident that the trains and the gardens and things are all things that are enjoyed by many, not one.
Speaker 2:Now, another interesting thing this is my previous business, between the time of my previous business trip 2018, and this trip is they've pretty much gotten rid of most smoking. Really, yeah, interestingly, it used to be the case that you could smoke. Now this is going to sound really strange you could smoke inside, but you couldn't smoke outside in public. Really Right, you couldn't smoke outside in public, and I think part of that had to do with litter. You know they didn't want to have cigarette butts, you know, all over the place, and part of that was the secondhand smoke issue. Inside you could smoke, like, for example, in restaurants and bars, you know, unless, of course, you know, the establishments had the right to prohibit smoking. For example, business offices could say no smoking if they wanted to, but that was the rule. Now you can't smoke inside either, and the only exception to that is that you've got some of these, like you know, smoking zones where you have everybody's behind glass. Nice.
Speaker 2:And I'll tell you one more thing. It's kind of interesting. I'm sure everybody has seen these. You know these Japanese toilets with the bidets and the electronics and all that you have. Even in the public toilets. You have this button you can push and it says music and you push a button and what it really is is static, and the static is so that nobody can hear you doing your business. Oh, that's interesting. Think of how, um so think of how sophisticated that is.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean this is not the right time to mention this, but I mean I was going to ask you about Japanese gardens because I've tried my own with Japanese maples and akuba and different things. I mean, did you appreciate or do you have any insights in terms of what to do with your own garden now that you've seen some of the gardens there? What to do with your own?
Speaker 2:garden, now that you've seen some of the gardens there, well, I, I I'll tell you, I like this, this Zen garden concept, and the beauty of that is that it uses a lot of stones.
Speaker 2:So you don't really have to, you don't really have to be that much of a green thumb in order to in order to be strong, um, but you know, I like the um, I like the, the use of little little pagodas, you know little concrete pagodas and and lanterns and this kind of thing, um, and I can easily see myself, uh, putting something like that up in the backyard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I've just kind of. There's a custom called I forget what the Japanese words are, but it's called forest bathing where they've done studies in Japan about people who sit in the forest and just relax and they found that if you're in the trees relaxing, it's the equivalent for 30 minutes. It's the equivalent of exercise for 20 minutes.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, personally, I definitely believe in that. I love, love, going, hiking and so on in japan. The options for that are um, you know, there are some big uh garden areas, uh, big, uh, yeah, big garden areas in japan. So, for example, in the in the shinjuku neighborhood, there's a garden, a gyoan they call it. Uh, very, very, very big um garden. Um, I wouldn't say there are a lot of. I mean there are trees, but I wouldn't say there are a lot of trees. There's wide open grassy spaces, like huge wide open grassy spaces where people sit out and do picnics, and there's creeks and little bridges and tea houses and just, you know, it is very relaxing even if there aren't, you know, 10,000 trees around Nice.
Speaker 1:And how do you, you know, how can you like characterize, do you think that the economy is good, bad, average? Like would you say that they're prosper? Like, did you feel like there was any kind of you know, sales on this or sales on that, or things that seem to be you know companies going out of business, like, is there any economic observations you have?
Speaker 2:for. So, if so, you, you mentioned sales. Okay, I didn't see anything that was on sale per se, right, you know, any clearance sales or anything like that. I didn't see any shops that were closed. Didn't see any of that or didn't see any shops that were closed. So I think that, you know, I think there's a lot of vitality in the, at least in the retail economy, which is sort of the visible thing you see at the malls and on the street there, you know it's, I'd say it's incredibly, you know, incredibly vital.
Speaker 1:How about the market? Do they have like CNBC or the? Is the market on like the TDs? When you go by the stores, Do you think that people are worried about what their stocks are doing?
Speaker 2:I don't think so. No, you don't have this visibility into the market as, as you would say it, in Times Square, where you have the rolling ticker. Yeah, I didn't see anything like that and you know, I was in, you know, the main areas of Shibuya, shinjuku, roppongi, and I didn't see anything like that.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I think it's when you talk about giving up cigarettes. I remember someone once told me that you know that their church everybody didn't drink and then all of a sudden, um, everybody stopped drinking. Uh, stopped. They were smoking all the time at their breaks, at the you know church and and now, um, nobody smokes and everybody drinks. How much of a party or slash you know culturally, where does wine sake alcohol?
Speaker 2:where does that fit in your experience of Japan? Well, they have a lot of favorite drinks, drinks you know. Obviously, sake is a drink that they favor. They love whiskey, uh. They love plum wine, oh, uh. But especially, above everything else, they like beer.
Speaker 1:Really yep, all right, yeah, they have, uh, some some american, american homebrews or micro-brews?
Speaker 2:No, japan's got enough of its own brews. Okay, and supposedly Asahi is the best brand. Okay, you know I can't tell between brands, but I've been told by Japanese that Asahi is the best one.
Speaker 1:All right, okay, so how would you summarize your trip in terms of what you learned as an investor and what you learned as a person, and what you learned about what you want to do in the future?
Speaker 2:the future. Well, you know, taking that in reverse. You know what I want to do in the future. Well, I like the idea of taking one long trip per year and ever since retiring I basically had done three of those. Well, four, technically, um, I took the entire summer, uh, after retiring, and went out west on two trips, one to the southwest and one to the. You know, went to the one to the rocky mountain west, um, big, long driving trips, uh, and then the, the.
Speaker 2:A year later spent five weeks in France, in Paris, which I know quite well, but it was good to experience it more as a tourist, almost as like a quasi-resident, sort of living in an Airbnb on the outskirts, you know, sort of living in an Airbnb on the outskirts. And then this year, four weeks, two weeks in Tokyo and Kyoto, I don't know what. What we're going to do next. You know, before the pandemic, we went to Spain, which is another one of my favorite countries. In the past I've been to Mexico, morocco and, and you know, through work experiences, I've been to a lot of other countries and I got to say that there are a lot of countries out there that I would not want to voluntarily revisit, mainly developing countries, especially voluntarily revisit on a protracted basis. But you know, especially voluntarily revisit on a protracted basis, yeah, but you know, you know, redoing France would be an option. Redoing I mean London I very much like as well. I've been up to Scotland. These are all places that I really, I really very much enjoy.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, let's leave it on a list note. Okay, what are the top three places to travel to? What are the top three places?
Speaker 2:to avoid, based on my experiences.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, or somebody else in the room there, nobody else is here I would say the top three places, in no particular order, are Japan, france and Spain, followed closely by the UK, and then Morocco and Turkey. Well, morocco and Turkey is exotic. Fourth and fifth I actually really like Turkey, so maybe that would be ahead of Morocco, sort of on the same level as Spain. So let's say Japan, france, turkey, morocco, uk, morocco, uk. And then, in terms of countries that I don't really like, you know, in the past I used to travel to um, some, um, some really exotic countries and I would say that among them, um, I really uh dislike, uh, venezuela. Uh, I dislike Brazil. Uh, I dislike Dominican Republic. I dislike Brazil, I dislike Dominican Republic, I dislike.
Speaker 1:Trinidad and Tobago. All right, all right, you hit your three.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean no disrespect to anybody listening to this who may be from those countries, but I suspect some of you who do, who may be in these countries, would know what the heck I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:No, but I want to announce that Atlanta was our number one city of listeners and Singapore has now usurped Atlanta. So all of the Atlanta listeners got to get your friends going, because somehow in Singapore we're, we're the hot download.
Speaker 2:Well, I I've been to Singapore a few times and I definitely really like Singapore. The problem with Singapore is that it's not really a great tourist destination because it's so small. There's not a lot to see there. It's so dense right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, All right. Well, thanks people. I appreciate it, listeners and we especially appreciate our downloads in Singapore. So thanks again for listening to Skeptic's Guide and we look forward to capturing you with more ideas about investing and living life to the best of your ability, Thank you.
