Good morning John! Last week I said some really mean things about books, and books actually saw the video and left a really nasty comment. As an apology, let's talk about the best entertainment investments you can make.

There are lots of different kinds and levels of quality of entertainments, and also different amounts of money you can spend being entertained. Worst investments are usually live events. Of course hopefully that means that the quality of the entertainment is higher. 

The Super Bowl, for example, this year a very bad game not interesting. People pay upwards of two thousand dollars to get a ticket to the Super Bowl for less than four hours of entertainment! That's, that's more than five hundred dollars per hour of entertainment. That's about as bad as you can get.

VidCon- also a live event but it goes for a long time. It's two days, and like, all the way around almost, it's like 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. If you're spending all of that time being entertained, and I hope you are, and you pay the current 150 dollar per ticket price then it's five dollars for an hour of entertainment. That's pretty good!

It's the same as if you pay ten dollars for a two-hour movie, as long as you don't buy the tremendously overpriced snack foods. Also as long as you're not seeing a 3D movie. Or in the special theater, or it's a special edition movie, or you live in a place where it's more than $10.  

Video games are one of the most popular forms of entertainment these days, usually debuting about $60 and taking about 40 hours to beat. Not bad at all! Comics, though I love them and they're beautiful little pieces of art and sometimes they do hold on to their value- bad investment. Takes like 20 minutes to read and is 3 bucks, so that's bad. 

Board games and card games are generally a fantastic investment, so long as you play them. So once you accept the cost, every time you play it you are getting a better value. Now let's bring it on back to my friend books. 

The Fault in Our Stars is currently on sale at Amazon for seven dollars. This book, it took me about 20 hours to finish. I'm admittedly a slow reader so let's shave some time off of that. 46 cents per hour! This- now we're talking! At the same time though all of our other entertainments are much more expensive than this, so really it's probably OK to pay full price for that book. I'm only paying like 67 cents more per hour!

Really to me that's the amount of money I am paying to the local bookstore when I buy it there rather than on Amazon. 67 cents per hour of enjoyment that I am trading in exchange for a place where I can go and look at books! Nice people who will help me find things, shelves and shelves of opportunity!

Of course, we haven't even mentioned America's main source of
entertainment, that being television. Average cost of cable television package is a hundred and twenty eight dollars per month. Now that's a lot of money but since the average American spends -and I cannot believe this is true- 34 hours per week watching television, it's actually a really good deal!

However, no one's pretending that the amount of time you' spend watching TV is comparable to the amount of time you spend enjoying VidCon. Hopefully, 20 hours is more than 10 times more entertaining than 20 hours of television. And yeah, I think 20 hours of reading a book is probably more enriching than 20 hours of playing Grand Theft Auto.

Doesn't seem like there's a huge amount of correlation between the amount of dollars delivered and the amount of value delivered, which is why I guess it makes sense that a lot of the best things in life are free.

(Starts playing on guitar and singing Money (That's What I Want) by The Beatles)

But you can keep 'em for the bats and bees
I want money
That's what I want
That's what I want
That's what I want

(Stops playing and singing)

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.