Sketching Wealth Strategy: Masters in Business with Carl Richards

Barry sits down with Carl Richards author of "Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in Simple Sketches ". They discuss Carl's unlikely start in finance and building his own firm. Carl also breaks down how one sketch helped him translate wealth management and become a New York Times columnist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At Brookfield, we invest in the thing behind the thing behind the next big thing. Our focus across infrastructure, energy, real estate, private equity and credit is helping to build the backbone of the global economy. We combine deep operational expertise with disciplined long-term investing, uncovering value and partnering alongside clients to shape tomorrow's economy today. Learn how you can own what's next at Brookfield.com/own. This is not an offer to sell or investment advice. Investing involves risks, including loss of capital.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Running a business means keeping pace with the latest tech. You put a lot into building your enterprise software stack and scrapping it to integrate AI is out of the question. That's why IBM Technology works with all the apps, data and models you need. It's another way IBM helps you build on the technology you rely on. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Visit IBM.com to learn more.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

• 1:11Barry Ritholtz?

  This week on the podcast, old friend Carl Richards joins me to talk about his new book, Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches. If the name sounds familiar, he created the Sketch Guy column in the New York Times that ran there for a decade. He's probably done more than anyone to expand usage of the phrase "the behavior gap," the difference between people's portfolios and what their results are. I thought our conversation was charming and I think you will also. With no further ado, here's me and Carl Richards talking about money.

• 2:00Barry Ritholtz?

  Carl, welcome to Bloomberg.

• 2:02Speaker 04

  Very so fun. Been looking forward to this for years.

• 2:04Barry Ritholtz?

  Same, same. Long overdue. We've had you on at the money, but we haven't had you for the long sit down. Let's start out talking about your backgrounds. University of Utah, School of Business, Bachelor's of Science in Finance. That implies finance, investing, money. Was that the original career plan?

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, not even close.

• 2:27Barry Ritholtz?

  Really?

• 2:27Speaker 04

  Right, yeah. So I was, I've told this story occasionally. I was an undeclared major, which means back then it meant you had no idea what you wanted to do with your life, right? I was the newest hired at a landscaping company, so I was literally digging ditches for a living. I come home one day, my wife, we'd recently been married, this was 95, recently been married, and she has the help wanted ads open. She's got a job, degree in finance, a job as the CFO of a small real estate company, got the help wanted ads open. So I was like, hey Cora, her name's Cora, Cora, what are you looking, what are you doing? She said, I'm looking for a job. I said, well, what are you finding? She said, no, I said, but you have one. And she said, I know, I'm looking for you. I was like, what are you finding? And she found what we both thought was a security guard job.

• 3:11Barry Ritholtz?

  At a little shop called Fidelity?

• 3:13Speaker 04

  A security guard. I was like, you know, I could work as a mall cop at night. This would be great. And so I can still go to school full time. This would be great. I went to apply. Nothing about Kung Fu, nothing about self-defense. You know, they were asking about things I didn't know what they were.

• 3:29Barry Ritholtz?

  Securities.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Exactly. I didn't know the difference and I got through.

• 3:32Barry Ritholtz?

  I was gonna call BS on this because it sounds like, wait, how are you a finance major? But that happened afterwards.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly right. So I get through the interview, which tells you a lot about the applicant pool, right? And they narrowed it down to two of us.

• 3:44Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 04

  They offered to the other guy and the other guy said, I don't want it, you take it. So that's how I ended up at Fidelity's National Call Center just before Netscape's IPO.

• 3:54Barry Ritholtz?

  That's unbelievable. I started on a trading desk and I was told, hey rookie, no trading Netscape IPO. So you and I started just about around the same time.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  You know what was crazy about that was like after I got clear that I wasn't a security guard, I was like, what's this job? And I was sort of looking around and everybody was using calculators, right? And math. I was like, okay, this must be, right? This must be a math job. And then, you know, a couple of weeks into training, they called us out onto the trading floor to answer phones. Because back then, you couldn't get a quote, you couldn't place a trade unless you called. And it was the day of the Netscape IPO. And I remember thinking, this isn't math. You know what I mean? And that was like my first introduction to this idea of like, so I like to say that I got in by accident, but I've stayed because of that moment. Like this, like, what is this crazy thing that we call money? Because nobody was doing math in there. They were excited, mad, angry, upset, right?

• 4:49Speaker 04

  So it was, that was, because I always thought it was a mistake getting into finance. I always thought I would go off and do, I was going to do the Stephen Covey organizational behavior thing at BYU.

• 4:59Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  That's what I always thought. Because work is where people go to do things that matter. And then this, some of these early experiences opened the door to like, money is the ultimate portal.

• 5:10Barry Ritholtz?

  Hey, this funny thing is...

• 5:12Speaker 04

  It's the ultimate portal to somebody's soul. Do you know what I mean? Like, what do you really care about? I can find out pretty quickly, how you spend your money and how you spend your time. So that's how I stayed. So yes, that, afterwards, I was like, maybe I should get a degree in this.

• 5:24Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so then you switch, you get your degree in finance from the David Eckley School of Business. When do you go for CFP? When do you become a Certified Financial Planner?

• 5:35Speaker 04

  I was looking at that the other day.

• 5:37Barry Ritholtz?

  You don't remember, do you?

• 5:38Speaker 04

  No, all I remember is I got made fun of.

• 5:41Barry Ritholtz?

  For taking?

• 5:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, remember, back in the day, right? Like, I left.

• 5:45Barry Ritholtz?

  I don't remember.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  Fidelity, and I went to work for a big brokerage firm, which we'll go unnamed, but has a bull's at symbols owned by a bank, right? And about that, and I got my CIMA designation, because that's what like cool kids did, you know, the sort of institutional consulting stuff. Because I thought, I gotta, I gotta figure this thing out, this whole money thing. And then I started to get my CFP, so it was in the day when people in that side of the business were like, what are you wasting your time on that for? It's pretty early on.

• 6:10Barry Ritholtz?

  This whole fiduciary thing, I mean, really.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Seriously.

• 6:13Barry Ritholtz?

  Waste of time.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Goals.

• 6:14Barry Ritholtz?

  What are you gonna, not charge people commission? What are you thinking, Paul?

• 6:18Speaker 04

  That's right, that's right. So fun.

• 6:20Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so what I find fascinating about your career, and I'm now learning all the parallels between our career. You kind of reinvent yourself as a communicator, as an author, as a speaker. Is that something that helped you when you set up your own investment firm? Um, like which came first, the chicken or the egg?

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I can remember who was in the room and, and where I was when I first sketched something out, because I didn't, I wasn't a doodler in school. It's obvious that I didn't take any art classes, right?

• 6:55Barry Ritholtz?

  I don't know if I would say it's obvious because these are really kind of interesting. Like Charles Schultz very famously drew peanuts and said he didn't have, um, skill.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Super generous comparison, thank you.

• 7:07Barry Ritholtz?

  But I, oh, I'm not making that comparison. I'm just saying someone else.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Somebody else said something similar, good. But I just remember I sitting across the table from some really smart clients.

• 7:18Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  And they were, he was an ER doctor, she was a technology sales rep like at EMC or something back in the day, right? Super smart. And I was trying to explain some concept and I was just getting blank stares, you know, the feeling. I, that had happened before, but it, this is the first time it dawned on me like, wait, they're really smart. This must be my problem. So I, out of an act of desperation in the shared conference room, there was a whiteboard, nobody used it. And I stood up one day and was like, no, like this, and just like some boxes and arrows, like an estate planner would do, you know? And they were like, oh, and I, and at that moment, I was like, I didn't make a grand conclusion. I just remember thinking, huh? That was really interesting. So that started this idea of like how, so I started thinking like anytime I got asked a question more than once.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  So the second time I got asked it, I was like, what if I just wrote down the answer? And sent it to everybody who asked. And I don't know if you remember, but there was these things called blogs back in the day.

• 8:14Barry Ritholtz?

  Not only do I remember.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  You were one of the OGs.

• 8:17Barry Ritholtz?

  I still, I still am doing it. I, I have no interest in Beehive or Substack. I'd like, I, I kind of learned early on, I don't want to give my content to another company. I want to control it.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. So started putting those things up on the internet, a, a, an answer to a question with some sort of diagram. And, and by the way, the hand drawn sketches were just a fatal, were a flaw at the beginning. I mean, I went to download Adobe Illustrator and the download thing said three hours. And I was like, anything that takes three hours to download, I should not be using.

• 8:49Barry Ritholtz?

  Illustrator would ruin this. The whole beauty of, and I know you, most of you are listening to this and not watching me thumb through a book. But the whole beauty of your sketches is just how simple and informative they are with just a few lines, a few circles, a few squiggles. It's not a giant, you know, organizational chart. It's, oh, he did that in 90 seconds and look how much information is in that.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Well, thank you, but that, early on, it was like, I was only doing that because I couldn't download Adobe Illustrator. I saw it as a flaw. And so every couple of years, early on, I would, I would get them designed by somebody and I'd post those. And people would be like, where are the hand drawings? So I finally learned, I'm only telling you these stories because it's so tempting of us to look back and create these like beautiful narratives of the experience, but it turns out there was just a lot of random experimentation and playing. Because it turns out the thing I thought was a flaw ended up being the feature.

• 9:50Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, that's really interesting. So, I, I'm, I'm surprised you think of it as a flaw.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Not anymore.

• 9:57Barry Ritholtz?

  Um, how long did it take you to get to that point? Because to me, the beauty of your drawings are, first of all, it's obviously not AI slop. It's, uh, you predate AI by 20 years or so, but more importantly, they just look and feel human and personal. And, oh, someone has really put some time into figuring out, how do I communicate a complicated idea in the least amount of, of letters, words, images?

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:32Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so at what point did you think, hey, I could do something with these drawings? Maybe publish them in the New York Times every week?

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Never. What happened was, I was putting these up on this website. I tried to stop.

• 10:46Barry Ritholtz?

  Right, I love that.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  It's like a compulsion.

• 10:48Barry Ritholtz?

  Can't, can't help it.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, and I even had people around me who were like, "Just focus on building your business. What are you doing?" And I was like, and they were right. Do you know what I mean? Like, all the evidence.

• 10:56Barry Ritholtz?

  No, no, I don't.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, but like, at the time, and I kept putting it up there, and there's a guy named Kent, who I did not know.

• 11:03Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Kent sent them to a guy named Ron, who I did not know. Ron Lieber at the Times.

• 11:09Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, sure, I know Ron Lieber. I know of Ron Lieber.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  Kent didn't know Ron. And Ron just sent a note like, "Hey, I think you might like these." And Ron sent me a note, and I have that email still, because nobody believes me. The email was, "Hey, we love these, could we try something?" And I knew enough from my, like, security guard background, right? To be a kid in the hills of Utah, to say, I mean, I would have never thought. I was like, "Yeah, of course, what do you have in mind?" And that's kind of how, and I've talked to Ron since, like, why did you open that email? Because you know, like, he gets, like, stacks of books, stacks of things that he would love to reply to and read, because that's the kind of human he is, but he just doesn't have time.

• 11:45Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  So why open that one that day? I don't know, I should still be sending Kent a gift every, every year. So, I never thought, maybe this could appear in the Times.

• 11:54Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so, from the late 90s, when do you launch the firm that you ultimately build up and sell in 2012?

• 12:01Speaker 04

  So, I, I'm really, really bad with dates, but I, we were in, um...

• 12:07Barry Ritholtz?

  Early 2000s?

• 12:09Speaker 04

  No, 2008 or 9.

• 12:10Barry Ritholtz?

  So, after the financial crisis?

• 12:11Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 12:12Barry Ritholtz?

  So, four years, you build this up, why, why sell it? You're just like, "Hey, I'm going to focus on my security guard business?"

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, the first thing I should tell you is, why, like, why I left and started my own firm. I remember, the thing that, the impetus for that was two, two things. One...

• 12:27Barry Ritholtz?

  This is that fidelity.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  No, I was now working at the big brokerage firm.

• 12:31Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, okay.

• 12:32Speaker 04

  And I left to start my own RIA firm.

• 12:33Barry Ritholtz?

  Got it.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  And I remember when the, do you remember that cover? I can't remember if it was Fortune or Forbes that had the cover with, um, Rex and David at DFA, and it said, "How the Really Smart Money Invests."

• 12:44Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  Do you remember? I had that, I had that in the top drawer of my desk, every time I opened my drawer. Because I still had this, like, I'm just a kid from the hills in Utah, like, imposter syndrome thing. Like, I, I, I'm supposed to be in jail, do you know what I mean? Like, and I'm helping people make really important decisions with money. I need to figure out, like, am I a security guard? Is this math? Like, what is this thing? And I, so this idea of, like, how the really smart money invests? I called, and I was like, "How do I get access to this?" And they're like, "Well, you can't do it where you're at." So I left for that reason and then the second reason was ended up being one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I left because I thought it was really important to be able to tell everybody that I was a fiduciary and that everybody would care.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  And I and I left and one of the greatest disappointments of my career was nobody seemed to care. I mean, of course, you and I both both know it's incredibly important, but the most people don't know. I just remember people looking at me like fiduciary, what like what, what, what, what do you, of course you put my interests first. So that's why I left to start the firm.

• 13:42Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, uh, uh, that's fascinating.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:45Barry Ritholtz?

  So you sell it in 2012. When did the sketch guy columns for the New York Times start?

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Um, before that, is that, is that right? No, oh, yeah, way before I started, I sold the firm. Part of the reason I sold, so I think 2000.

• 13:58Barry Ritholtz?

  You sold the firm to concentrate on your doodles.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  That's right. So I, the book came out in 2012 and I sold the firm about the same time. And I remember specifically having this conversation with my wife. I was like, oh, we'll never sell this thing. I was thought of it as a security blanket, like I'd never sell it.

• 14:15Barry Ritholtz?

  It, it, it's an annuity. It generates income every year and, and typically you have a 10% wind that you're back just due to market appreciation.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  Such a great business, right?

• 14:25Barry Ritholtz?

  It is a good business.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 14:27Barry Ritholtz?

  And especially if you're a fiduciary and doing the right thing by your client.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 14:32Barry Ritholtz?

  You, you not only make a decent living, you get to sleep at night.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. All the things. So I never thought I'd sell it. There was just this increasing demand. The book was coming out. I was getting asked to speak all over the world. It was clear that I really, really liked that stuff. I had to make a choice.

• 14:47Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Speaker 04

  And in the end I was like, this is security. Well, I said, hey, maybe it's an anchor. And I was like.

• 14:52Barry Ritholtz?

  You guys speak the same love language. It's kind of fascinating.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  Really?

• 14:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah, because just think about, that's a very insightful observation from your wife.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:00Barry Ritholtz?

  She's the one who tried to get you a hat, a shield and have you parade around the mall like Paul Blart. I mean, that.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Exactly right.

• 15:10Barry Ritholtz?

  You guys are very much on the same.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. It's been super, I mean, she's been amazing. 31 years and amazing. But yeah, anyway. Really? Amazing. Yeah.

• 15:18Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  And it's, and I, it's the best it's ever been and I hope it's better tomorrow. Do you know what I mean? Like the one of those like. Two competing truths at the same time. Like, I could have never dreamed of it.

• 15:29Barry Ritholtz?

  And I just wanted to get.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  A little bit better tomorrow. And I hope I never stopped thinking that way. But anyway, left, sold the firm. Full-time into the speaking, writing thing for a little while. Was at a big firm, sort of the firm that bought my company.

• 15:41Barry Ritholtz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  Was there for a while.

• 15:42Barry Ritholtz?

  Mm-hmm. Um. Another nameless firm?

• 15:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was, back then, it was Buckingham, so bam.

• 15:47Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, okay. I kind of remember that.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Went, went and.

• 15:49Barry Ritholtz?

  You, oh.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  And loved it.

• 15:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Who else did you work with there? There were some people I really liked.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  Larry Swedro, Tim Mauer.

• 15:55Barry Ritholtz?

  Tremendous Larry Swedro, right?

• 15:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, that whole crew, Adam, their mom, the whole, the whole crew there. It was really, really good.

• 16:01Barry Ritholtz?

  Um, really, really interesting. So, so we're gonna spend a little bit of time talking about behavior, but, you know, you came from a big shop. You came from several big shops. Fidelity, Merrill, um, a- as well as Buckingham. They all have PhDs in Monte Carlo simulations and they run factor model tests. And yet, people still buy high and sell low. What is it about the human condition that is a permanent drag on performance?

• 16:32Speaker 04

  It's such, like, that feels to me like the question that I've been exploring for 20 years.

• 16:36Barry Ritholtz?

  That's why I asked it.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there, to me, I thought at first, I remember, I almost left the business because I, I couldn't solve this problem. Like, after I got my CIMA designation and I came back.

• 16:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Explain for laypeople what that happened to you.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Certified Investment Management Analyst. So, it was sort of like for people who are doing institutional consulting work. So, I thought it was like.

• 16:58Barry Ritholtz?

  So, not a CFA, but more than a CFP?

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, and sort of like, CFA light that can talk to people.

• 17:05Barry Ritholtz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  You know, and, and it was, back then, it was taught i- in conjunction with Wharton. So, I went to Wharton for two, like, that was the whole reason I, I, I'm always looking for external validation back then.

• 17:14Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh-huh.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  Right, so.

• 17:16Barry Ritholtz?

  Goes hand in hand with the imposter syndrome.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 17:18Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. So, and I'm not afraid to admit it, um. But I came back from that, working with clients and realized like, okay, now I've got this great system, the best training in the world, honestly, some of the best training at the firm, right? And yet, I still had this repeated experience where we would create really detailed spreadsheets of how to hire and fire managers. And then, we'd have this experience over and over where the manager that showed up on our buy screen, we would commit clients' money to it, it would become the, I thought that was our job, the search for the best investment. We'd find the best investment, we'd commit clients' money to it, and then it would go through a normal cyclical period of underperformance, and it would show up on our fire screen.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  And I, you know, I repeated that like two or three times over maybe a three or four year period and was like, I don't know what's going on. Like, maybe it's just me. And then I, and then I ran across some of that industry research around investor returns versus investment returns, where you see that the average investment, right, average investor underperforms the average investment. Now, whether it's anything close to-

• 18:26Barry Ritholtz?

  Not, not only does the average investor underperform the average investment, but the average investor underperforms their own investment.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  So, it's like, I just remember, I remember like, being so excited that it wasn't just me. Do you know what I mean? Like, wait, this is a, this is an industry-wide huge problem? So, that's when I was like, wow, how do we, I mean, what that research said to me was that I could own a mediocre investment. If I behaved correctly, I would outperform 99% of my neighbors, and that's all we care about in the first place, right, is outperforming our neighbors. That's the whole goal.

• 18:59Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  Right?

• 19:01Barry Ritholtz?

  So, how is that idiot down the block getting rich and I'm not?

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, as if that's the thing that matters, but that's what we-

• 19:06Barry Ritholtz?

  But, that's how people roll.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. So, I just remember, so, digging into that a bit, I, I really think, like Buffett's statement that if you were to design a poor investor, you would design a human-

• 19:16Barry Ritholtz?

  Right, right.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Is as close as we get. Like, the hardwiring, we are hardwired, and it was, I think it was in one of Zweig's books, where they hooked up scanners and had people open their brokerage statements, right? Like, talk about a masochistic experiment. And if the broker statement was down- You process that in the same part of your brain as you do mortal danger.

• 19:35Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  Like where I'm doing for like a bear breaking through the room.

• 19:37Barry Ritholtz?

  Fight or flight, right there.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:39Barry Ritholtz?

  The, my favorite Bill Bernstein quote is, uh, it's all about your amygdala if you don't get, if you don't get your limbic system under control, you will die poor. And it's that exact same system.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  That's right. And then, right, yeah, like, and if it's, if the statement's up, same part of your brain as you do security and pleasure.

• 20:00Barry Ritholtz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  And I think it was in the book that for women, that's chocolate. And for men, that's sex. And I didn't quite understand the difference in the book.

• 20:08Barry Ritholtz?

  Between sex and chocolate?

• 20:09Speaker 04

  No, just wow. Anyway.

• 20:10Barry Ritholtz?

  Must be a fun day.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  So, so if that's what's going on, it's a little bit like the interaction we have with our phones now.

• 20:18Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh-huh.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  You know, like on the other side of that interaction are 300 PhDs, trying to get us to pay attention to what's going on on Instagram, right? And I just think we finally have to recognize unless we put some serious guardrails in between us and the big mistake, we're gonna make the big mistake because it feels like, I don't care what you tell me, Barry, my hands on a stove, I'm taking it off. Do you know what I mean?

• 20:41Barry Ritholtz?

  A hundred percent.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  So I think that, that to me is the work of worrying about like, what does it mean to be a real investor, a successful investor versus what it means to find good investments?

• 20:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Let's talk a little bit about the behavior gap. I don't know if you created that phrase, but you've done more than anybody else I know to popularize that phrase. Tell us what the behavior gap actually is.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, so it started out as a very narrow thing, which we already pointed to. This difference between, and like the technical term would be the difference between time-weighted rates of return and dollar-weighted. And because I've had to explain this so many times, maybe I'll, I'll go through the explanation.

• 21:23Barry Ritholtz?

  Sure.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Imagine you open a newspaper. There's an ad for a mutual fund. It says the fund has returned 10% a year for the last 10 years. Right? That's the investment return. And just for a minute, forget taxes, you know, any sort of fees or whatever. That's the investment return. That's the return you would have gotten if you'd invested money at the beginning of the 10-year period and not added or taken any way and left it there for the 10-year period. But nobody invests that way, except your clients, right? Like, no, nobody invests that way. They, we are always chasing. Right?

• 21:57Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  Whatever we hear in the news, the Financial Pornography Network waves their hands and we've got a list of 10 funds to buy or whatever. And the old days, smart money, you know, like this smart way. So, we end up running around and that's, the average investment return is 10%, but the average investor return is always different from that.

• 22:16Barry Ritholtz?

  Who does the annual report that everybody criticizes?

• 22:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 22:21Barry Ritholtz?

  That shows this differential?

• 22:23Speaker 04

  So, that, that was one of the early reports I ran across was Dalbar. And, and I, I have not spent the, well, I spent the time years ago to understand. I don't really know anything about that number. I know Morningstar does a, a number and it seems to be 80, 80 to 100 basis points, not 6%.

• 22:41Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  You know, like.

• 22:42Barry Ritholtz?

  And then what about the Spiva numbers on manager performance?

• 22:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 22:46Barry Ritholtz?

  So, you're, you're running across these behavioral errors on pretty much both sides. The manager.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:55Barry Ritholtz?

  Who's running their funds.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Frequently underperforming.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:58Barry Ritholtz?

  And the longer that timeline is, the greater percentage of managers are underperforming. And on the other side, the buyers of those funds.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:06Barry Ritholtz?

  Tend to not only underperform the benchmark, they're underperforming their own funds. So, so, if only there was an alternative way to invest.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Let me tell you a quick story. So, this is back during my institutional consulting days. We had this client, we do a manager search and selection, we find the best large cap value manager for this client. And hire that large cap value manager. And a, a, as I recall, it was Davis New York Venture.

• 23:32Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Back in the day, right?

• 23:34Barry Ritholtz?

  Chris Davis.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  Yep. We go two or three years, Davis has one of those cyclical underperforming moments as they're going to do.

• 23:41Barry Ritholtz?

  Right, especially value, which runs in and out of favor.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it was, it was even in comparison to other value managers, right?

• 23:47Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, really?

• 23:48Speaker 04

  As they're gonna do, right? So, we fire Davis, not knowing any better. We hire another, and I can't remember, we'll just call him XYZ, right? Like, we hire this new, and the client's like, "Yeah, yeah, I understand." It's two and a half, two and a half years in. We make this change, we go to XYZ, two and a half years later. Three years later, XYZ does the same thing. Cyclical, he underperforms. We go through our manager's screening. They're up on our fire list. And guess who pops into our buy list?

• 24:14Barry Ritholtz?

  Good status.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, call the client, thinking I'm so smart. Hey, we need to fire XYZ and hire this manager. It's called Davis. And they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Didn't we, this client's name was Jeremy. Didn't we just fire them two and a half years ago? And I was like, yeah. And he said, you know what I'd like? I would like the return of Davis for, from the day we first hired them till now. I'd like the return of XYZ from the day you first hired Davis to now. And I'd like that compared to my account. And I was, of course, like, that's how it works. And he said, yeah, that's what I'd like to see. And we all know the story, right? He underperformed either of the, both of those. Like, he would have been fine in either one of those.

• 24:55Barry Ritholtz?

  Just leave it alone.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  Just leave, and that was my first moment of like, I gotta get out of this business. I gotta go to law school or something. And that's when I discovered this idea, or for myself, discovered this idea that maybe the investment process only matters to the degree that I can behave.

• 25:12Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so let's talk about what you call the financial pornography networks. They talk all day long about 10-year yield and the Fed and credit spreads and geopolitics and earnings and news. And you spend most of your books, plural, talking about fear, regret, envy. What, what moves markets and what, more importantly, moves investors' portfolios?

• 25:42Speaker 04

  Gosh, that's such a good question. And I want to be like careful about.

• 25:45Barry Ritholtz?

  You know, I do this for a living.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  I know. It's a really good question. I want to be careful about the term financial pornography network. I think that was originally a Jane Bryant Quinn term.

• 25:55Barry Ritholtz?

  That's right. That's exactly right.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  Which I love. I love the term, but I think it applies just really broadly.

• 26:01Barry Ritholtz?

  I call it the fire hose of financial noise.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's fine. I think like sometimes media circus, like it's a, it's a media business. And there's nothing, I, I want to be clear, like, I live in the hills in Utah. I ride my mountain bike every day. The trail's out in my backyard. I have a different hobby. Just because that's my hobby, doesn't mean my hobbies are better than anybody else's hobbies.

• 26:21Barry Ritholtz?

  They're healthier.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  I, well, I, but I walk, walk in this building and I see. Happy human after happy human walking through the halls. This is like shiny, happy people everywhere. Who am I?

• 26:32Barry Ritholtz?

  Recapacino.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  Who am I to say, right? So, but I think what's important is if we start to recognize, like, what are we doing it for? What's the goal? Because if it's something to talk about, there's nothing wrong with that. If it's entertainment, there's nothing wrong with that. But basing your financial decisions, your actual investment decisions, on something you heard, even if it was secret underneath the subway and it was labeled... Isn't The Economist the one that all the really smart people read, anyway? Right? Like, you're not the only one that's heard that. So I think we have to be careful with sort of making big investment decisions based on every wind of news or entertainment, right? Versus linking...

• 27:15Speaker 04

  And again, this is back to like, how do we solve this behavior problem? I think it's gotta be, it has to be. The portfolio has to be designed to give me the greatest likelihood of reaching my goals. And my goals have to be carefully clarified, and they're gonna change over time. So it's this constant process of saying, is this... Are these investment decisions aligned with what I want out of my life? Both of those sides of that equation are really challenging. Getting clear about what you want out of your life, super hard. Making sure you have a portfolio built on data and evidence and that will get you the closest to that, also really hard.

• 27:54Speaker 00

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• 28:33Speaker 02

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• 29:15Speaker 02

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 29:55Barry Ritholtz?

  So let's break that into two pieces. Yeah. Because I kind of feel like there are two distinct conversations. Yeah. We'll get to the goal portion in a moment. Sure. I want to stay with the media circus. Yeah. Isn't there really a very simple problem? Yeah. And that is the mismatch in time horizons when you're putting money away to save for retirement or even to save for 529 for college or saving to buy a house or a second house or whatever. Yeah. Like, you're thinking five, 10, 50 years. Yeah. But all of the financial noise that firehose, that's about, that's the church of what's happening right now. Right, right.

• 30:39Barry Ritholtz?

  If we can simply readjust our media consumption into some context with the longevity of our portfolio goals, doesn't that solve a lot of these?

• 30:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Why do, if I'm putting this money away for 20, 30 years, what do I care what happened on a random Thursday?

• 30:59Speaker 04

  But, yeah, and, and I, gosh, what if we had kept, what if we actually kept track of every single change of opinion, right? And how sure somebody was, right? Remember that, what's that old statement that, uh, even a broken clock is right twice a day?

• 31:14Barry Ritholtz?

  Right. I was gonna say, um, often wrong, never in doubt.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  That's exactly. And that's, like, again, entertaining, and there's nothing wrong with entertainment. We go to the movies, we go see plays, we ride our mountain bikes, like, there's nothing wrong with entertainment. I just think we have to understand what it is. And you're, what you're saying is, yeah, that, that's day-to-day entertainment. I like it, because I can talk about it. It's important. Don't base my 20, my 10, my 5, my 10, my 20-year decisions on it.

• 31:42Barry Ritholtz?

  Right. And yet, and yet, we continue to see people, um, have that problem. So, let, let me re-ask this question in a different way. How do you bridge the gap between what clients ask for, what, what they think they want, and what you know they actually need?

• 32:00Speaker 04

  Yes, another Barry, you're super good at this whole job.

• 32:03Barry Ritholtz?

  It's all AI. It's all I didn't write into this.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  No, I just, because that, now you've layered another problem in here, is because clients, the humans that we call clients, show up, having been trained by us, as an industry speaking really broadly, that what matters is this day-to-day stuff, right? They think the job of an investor is to find the best investment, because we, we taught them that on the, on the television, waving our hands. So it's no surprise, like, we, we did this to ourselves, it's no surprise that clients come in expecting, and that's why I think clients who work with real financial advisors often go through a period of finance, the financial pornography detox program, right? Where they maybe wake up 18, 24 months into the relationship and go, hey, you know what?

• 32:49Speaker 04

  I'm not really paying that much attention anymore to that. Like, all the stuff I used to think mattered, was critical, has lost its urgency, its tenor, right? So we've got this problem of like... It feels like, and again, back to the, the wiring in our bodies, like it feels like we should be doing something. The news is saying we should be doing something. The guy at the club is saying we should be doing something. And I call Barry and Barry says, hey, let's, let's hold on for a second. Let's review the, are these goals still the goals? Is this still what's important to you? Turns out if that's true, we're okay here. And almost always we end up at the same place, which is diversified, low-cost portfolio, hold on to it for a long time.

• 33:30Barry Ritholtz?

  There's this inherent bias towards action.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 33:33Barry Ritholtz?

  Which is the nature of that fight or flight response.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, one or the other, right?

• 33:38Barry Ritholtz?

  Don't just sit there, do something. And really, the right way to do it is don't just do something, sit there. But that causes a great deal of uncomfortableness amongst people. Let, let's take this to the next phase. So, Jack Bogle and Vanguard gave us low cost. Everything we've learned from Richard Thaler and the behavioral finance folks is about the importance of humility. What does the next generation of investors learn once they figure out diversified, low cost, and a little bit of humility? Where do you go next?

• 34:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, you know what's so hard about that is this like, everyone's a gambler thing that's sort of slipped in.

• 34:21Barry Ritholtz?

  Actually, today.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's sort of slipped in. Like it's, it's, I don't envy growing up as a, you know, 25, 30-year-old person trying to sort this out right now because it, it just feels like everything's a bet. Right? And I-

• 34:36Barry Ritholtz?

  It is.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it is. I think to me,

• 34:40Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm careful with advice, but the observation that I've noticed most frequently is that if I can, when I'm younger, focus on human capital. And then realize that the money over here does the job of compounding.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Right, my main job should be to earn a bit more, raise my human capital. My ability to earn and save when I'm young will far outstrip getting an extra 25 basis points by paying attention to, you know, some newsletter on the internet.

• 35:08Barry Ritholtz?

  You know, it's funny, you mention gambling being everywhere. We were talking before the podcast about Nine Finger Howie, and he wrote a post and created an index called the Degeneracy Index, where he puts in all of the various prediction markets and gambling apps, and it's been outperforming the NASDAQ, which has been on fire, like two to one, and it just is a kind of a warning.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  What do we do with that?

• 35:40Barry Ritholtz?

  It's a warning that, all right, I understand the Supreme Court decision that says gambling can't just be legal in one state, but maybe the decision isn't to make it legal everywhere. Maybe the decision is to say, an entire industry based on human foibles, cognitive errors, and innumeracy is kind of an evil industry.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  It's just, the problem we need to realize that we're just not wired for it. It's not that we're dumb, it's not that we're this bad, like, we can have any discussion we want about the morality, the whole thing, but underneath it all sits this idea that we're not wired to handle it. Like, we're not, and I think this is another piece that's interesting right now, is I don't think we're really sort of wired to handle the level of uncertainty that we're dealing with right now, like the sort of change fatigue.

• 36:29Barry Ritholtz?

  And it seems like a lot of what Wall Street sells is this illusion of certainty.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, this false sense of precision. Like, certainty's so easy to sell, it's impossible to deliver, but it's super easy to sell because everybody wants to buy it. So I think those are the two, like, human capital and learning how to come to grips with the reality that the world is uncertain.

• 36:54Barry Ritholtz?

  So the quote of yours that always stays with me is, money is less about math and more about emotion. That was your insight, watching the Netscape IPO. Why is that so challenging for?

• 37:10Barry Ritholtz?

  This industry for finance to accept.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  It it seems to me, and I've been in a lot of the rooms where this discussion takes place, that we just, we have a deep sense of physics envy.

• 37:25Barry Ritholtz?

  For sure.

• 37:25Speaker 04

  Like, we just want the law of gravity for money. And and when we understand that the systems that handle money, markets, economies, politics, and then and then humans, those are a mix of complex adaptive systems. They're not simple systems. And they're not even complicated. They're complex adaptive, almost chaotic. And when you understand a complex adaptive system, you start to understand that like, there is no, even with the benefit of hindsight, and you see this all the time, I'm sure, like, even with the benefit of hindsight, we look back and like, here are seven steps to having. It turns out that that only works for that period of time, right? You replicate those seven steps, it doesn't work again.

• 38:09Barry Ritholtz?

  All models assume the future looks like the past, and very often, the future looks nothing like the past.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  Like, all models are wrong, let's make ours useful, is like, much more helpful. This idea of saying like, okay, if that's the reality I live in, then how do I navigate a complex adaptive system? And then that gets us to this point where it's more about, like, the problem is you, the problem is me, the problem is, like, it's us. And so it's, I think that's why it's so hard, is we have to say, oh, man, we don't know exactly what we're dealing with here, because it's so cute, after a big crisis, to see all the people who have very specific plans about how to avoid that exact same, we're still taking our shoes off in airports.

• 38:48Barry Ritholtz?

  You don't have TSA Pre yet?

• 38:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I do. That's true. I haven't taken my shoes off in a long time.

• 38:53Barry Ritholtz?

  I'm gonna share one of my favorite random data points. I don't know if this made it into the last book.

• 39:00Barry Ritholtz?

  But earthquake insurance, earthquake insurance sales go up tremendously right after an earthquake.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 39:07Barry Ritholtz?

  And if you think about how the plate techniques work about these two. Pieces of

• 39:13Speaker 04

  I'm still excited for you to tell me.

• 39:15Barry Ritholtz?

  Terra firma, sliding. The odds of an earthquake happening after that 10, 20, 30 years of pressure is released, plummets immediately. The worst time to buy earthquake insurance

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Over and over again.

• 39:30Barry Ritholtz?

  Is right after the earthquake. The best time is, hey, this is an earthquake zone and we haven't had an earthquake in 20, 25 years. Now's the time. I remember getting offered structured notes with downside protection in like October 02. And I'm like, why do I need this? The Nasdaq is down 83%. Where were you in late 99 when this might have been useful? Down 83%, I'm a buyer. I don't need, I want all the upside. Why do I want to give any of this? Like, I had that conversation in a room for the salespeople pitching this. And I got called into the chairman's office. What are you doing? We're trying to set up a relationship with these people. I'm like, this is crap. Nobody should own this product. And I'm like, I know you want a relationship.

• 40:13Barry Ritholtz?

  Tell them not to not bring us junk that we don't need. I mean, look, I like dessert as much as the next guy.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  This is what I came for, right here.

• 40:22Barry Ritholtz?

  But I just, I remember, there were several times when

• 40:26Speaker 04

  So good.

• 40:26Barry Ritholtz?

  I would get called, as the market strategist,

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 40:29Barry Ritholtz?

  Called into the vice chair, who was general counsel or the chair. It's like, what are you doing? By the way, the firm, Lehman Brothers.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:38Barry Ritholtz?

  So not only was I right,

• 40:40Speaker 04

  Over and over.

• 40:40Barry Ritholtz?

  But the counterparty risk was, you would have gotten nothing anyway.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, and we will go to, the lengths we will go to make up stories about that after the fact. Do you remember, I can't, I, look, I'm going to deeply paraphrase and I'm sure I'm ruining the story. But after long-term capital management went under.

• 40:54Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh, 98.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  Do you remember, and I, again, there was some quote where one of those PhD Nobel Prize winners

• 41:03Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  Said. Our models weren't wrong. Reality just refused to conform to it.

• 41:09Barry Ritholtz?

  So, I don't remember who it was, but

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Broad thing, yeah.

• 41:12Barry Ritholtz?

  When genius failed, that quote is somewhere in that book.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. And I only point that out to point out that I certainly will go to great lengths to make a cute story that will protect me from dealing with uncertainty because our nervous system takes uncertainty as a threat. And it turns out, like, we're in a period of uncertainty, and I don't think we're going back, to be honest.

• 41:35Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, let me, let me, I'm, I'm, this is supposed to be about you, the guest, but you pushed my

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Please, this is what I'm here for.

• 41:42Barry Ritholtz?

  My uncertainty button. So, whenever you hear people saying, "Markets hate uncertainty," my knee-jerk response is always, "Markets thrive on certainty."

• 41:53Speaker 04

  That's the whole point.

• 41:54Barry Ritholtz?

  The only time there's certainty is when everybody is on the same side of the boat. In late 99, everybody was certain, trees grew to the sky. And in March 09, everybody was certain markets were going to zero.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 42:08Barry Ritholtz?

  Except for the handful of people who stepped up and bought. The future is inherently unknown and unknowable.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 42:16Barry Ritholtz?

  When people say, "Things are uncertain," I always feel like what they're saying is, "Normally, I could lie to myself enough that I could BS you people, that I have some idea what's going to happen, but goddamn, whatever's going on is so crazy, I can't maintain that fiction anymore, so I default to uncertainty."

• 42:36Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 42:37Barry Ritholtz?

  In reality, most of the time, everything is inherently uncertain.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Can I, let me just, just real quickly, I'm super interested in what you think about this. I feel like you and I came up, the financial planning industry, the financial advice industry, really grew up during a period that was an aberration. There was some, for a certain group of people, there was a predictable path of progress.

• 43:03Barry Ritholtz?

  What, give me some years, cause-

• 43:05Speaker 04

  My grandpa, I'm saying post-war, my grandpa-

• 43:07Barry Ritholtz?

  Okay.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  My grandpa got a, got a degree, could afford a first-time home with that salary, stayed there for thirty years, retired with a pension. There was this window-

• 43:17Barry Ritholtz?

  That was the aberration, the entire post-war period.

• 43:20Speaker 04

  Is the aberration, yes, that's exactly right.

• 43:22Barry Ritholtz?

  Like the roaring twenties, the uber-rich and the rest of us plebes?

• 43:25Speaker 04

  Things weren't like that-

• 43:26Barry Ritholtz?

  That's normal.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  That, things weren't like that before.

• 43:29Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  And they aren't like that now.

• 43:30Barry Ritholtz?

  That's right.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  And I think, the problem is-

• 43:32Barry Ritholtz?

  And we falsely believed that, oh, this is the new era.

• 43:35Speaker 04

  The problem is that was when we built all of our tools, our language, our planning tools, our Monte Carlo simulations-

• 43:41Barry Ritholtz?

  All around that aberration.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  During that aberration period, I think much more, more likely, is like, if you think it's uncertain, feels like uncertain now, like, we're not getting more. Like, we're not going back there.

• 43:50Barry Ritholtz?

  No, no, it'll all settle down, this will all go away.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Ain't gonna happen.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  So, I think, to me, that leads to this really interesting discussion, at least, around like, how do I learn? It, it's a posture shift, instead of confer, like, trying to defend an outdated map, like, confirmation by, don't you know ten best days? Like, it just, instead of trying to defend an outdated map-

• 44:11Barry Ritholtz?

  Explain ten best days, cause it's a great, and ten worst days, it's a great concept.

• 44:15Speaker 04

  Always, right, like, anytime anybody scared of anything in the markets, we, we just parade out, you saw this on Twitter back when it was useful, right? Like, if anybody said anything bad, like, I'm scared, or this market scares me, a bunch of financial advisors would jump in the room and say, "Don't you know, if, if you sell and miss the ten best days, you may as well be in CDs over the twenty-year period," or whatever, "Or you miss the ten, ten worst days," and, and I think-

• 44:36Barry Ritholtz?

  And they all are clumped close together.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. And, and I also think that that was an effort to say, um, don't worry, right? When, when I think, and to spray people with facts and figures.

• 44:49Barry Ritholtz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  When they're feeling irrational-

• 44:51Barry Ritholtz?

  I, I like the gun you hold.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, spray, spray people with facts and figures, cause when you're feeling, a hose, when you're feeling irrational, the last thing you want is somebody to try and reason with you.

• 45:00Barry Ritholtz?

  Wait, you're telling me that pure logic doesn't satisfy emotional-

• 45:04Speaker 04

  Teenage, teenager, right, like, like, the last thing you want is, what you want is metaphorically a hug first, right? Like, we'll get to the facts later, and let's never get to the lecture. And so I think if we shift that posture a bit where we're like, turns out uncertainty is reality, I don't know what the, I mean, add in sequencing risk. Right? Like, are we gonna have a great market for the first five years of your life or the last five years of your life? Like, who knows? You add all this in.

• 45:31Barry Ritholtz?

  Not that useful in the last five years.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. Like, we're, it turns out that we're, we're dealing with a very complex adaptive system and the ability to navigate, make really important decisions in the face of irreducible uncertainty is the primary skill. Like, if I was younger, what I, I would be studying complexity theory. I'd be studying being resilient. I'd be studying, understanding how to make really important decisions. Mountain guide, you know, how do I make really important decisions when I don't know? How, how do I get comfortable not knowing?

• 46:02Barry Ritholtz?

  But they're life and death decisions.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  And how, yeah, like, I, my, some of my favorite people are like, really thoughtful,

• 46:10Speaker 04

  really thoughtful, like, people who worked in, in distressed, because if they're on the ground with the company, they're having to make mission-critical decisions and they do not know. They don't know how they're gonna work out. I've got a really good friend that way and he's just like, yeah, I have every day. Some of these decisions are thousands of jobs.

• 46:28Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 46:28Speaker 04

  And I don't know.

• 46:29Barry Ritholtz?

  And you're, you're making these decisions under intense uncertainty.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  With incomplete information and no amount of spreadsheeting will get you more information. The only way to get the more information is taking action. Fascinating, right? Like, to me, that's the skill. That's what this market is calling for in terms of leadership, is the ability to create containers for collective interpretation rather than scream at people.

• 46:53Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so, let's talk about this book.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 46:56Barry Ritholtz?

  You, you describe it as a conversation grenade.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:59Barry Ritholtz?

  Explain.

• 47:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, first of all, I think I first heard that term from Hugh MacLeod, the gaping void. I remember Hugh MacLeod.

• 47:05Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah. I have his, some of his stuff on my wall.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:11Barry Ritholtz?

  And on the opposite wall, some of your stuff.

• 47:13Speaker 04

  Well, that's cool. Thank you.

• 47:14Barry Ritholtz?

  In fact, buy high, sell low, repeat until broke.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  Number one.

• 47:19Barry Ritholtz?

  Number one.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right.

• 47:20Barry Ritholtz?

  Is on my wall. That's right. So, full disclosure.

• 47:23Speaker 04

  Well, thank you. Yeah, I have some of Hugh's stuff in my office, too. So, conversation grenade is this idea that like, it's the only reason I wrote the book. I swore off writing.

• 47:31Barry Ritholtz?

  Why?

• 47:31Speaker 04

  Well, because I love audio so much. Right, I actually had.

• 47:35Barry Ritholtz?

  Again, not mutually exclusive.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  This is exactly right, but I, I, you know, after I wrote the second book, I thought, I'm just gonna speak, and then podcasting came around, and I was like, this is amazing.

• 47:46Barry Ritholtz?

  I, I had, between Bailout Nation and How Not to Invest, solid fifteen years.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, you did.

• 47:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Like, there's, like, I, I needed to recover, that was my refractory period.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  That's right, that's right.

• 47:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Like, I need, I need a decade and a half.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  That's right, and I.

• 47:59Barry Ritholtz?

  I really needed a, a decade, and it just took me, the pandemic, to make me start thinking about it.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  I kept noticing that people like physical artifacts.

• 48:11Barry Ritholtz?

  I agree. I don't love a Kindle, I, I like a book.

• 48:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, and especially that, so the, working with, with Harriman really allowed me to, everything about the book is designed to think of it.

• 48:24Barry Ritholtz?

  We have the same publisher, I didn't even notice.

• 48:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I'm sure Craig helps you, yeah, for sure. So, everything about that book is designed to feel like you toss it in a room and conversations break out. That's the conversation grenade analogy, right, you set it on the coffee table, unpretentious coffee table book. Like, I'm gonna pick it up, I'm gonna mess with, I wanna, we talked about hardback, I wanted it to be that soft cover. We moved the, um, you know, the, the front matter, the legal stuff, go to page one, there's none of it in there.

• 48:52Barry Ritholtz?

  You moved it to the back.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  They let me move it to the back, and they said, nobody's ever asked.

• 48:57Barry Ritholtz?

  Dude, I love that idea.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  Nobody's ever asked, but yes, I was amazed they let me to do it, but there's this stuff's in the back, cuz what reader has ever said, please give me that. There it is in the back, right there.

• 49:07Barry Ritholtz?

  I always assumed it was a legal requirement, it had to be upfront.

• 49:10Speaker 04

  They said, nobody's asked, so they let me do all sorts of things that allowed us to be like, no, this is in service of the reader, we want you just to have the sitter, and the number of stories I've heard, like, I had it on my table, my son asked me a question, or, I sent it out to clients and this, that's, it's really meant to be a conversation grenade.

• 49:27Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so we started out talking about your deceptively simple sketches. Uh, is this simplicity, a, a conscious act of rebellion? There's so much complexity and arcane language, we know every profession uses arcane language to hold laypeople at arm's distance, but was this simplicity in your sketches, is that purposeful, or am I reading too much?

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Deeply, deeply, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I, I, I think it's maybe just the way my brain works. I only have enough RAM for like one problem at a time.

• 50:00Barry Ritholtz?

  Okay.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  And so I like to get into it, understand nuance, edge cases. You know, it, it gets like a giant ball. There was actually a sketch in there about this, like it gets like a big giant, like it's a simple question. You know, simple, simple, simple, boom. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about that? What about that? Edge cases, reading it all. And then, there it was. And then, uh, um. Yeah. And then, once I get in there, I'm like, okay, now, and you actually shared a quote one time.

• 50:29Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh-oh.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  About there are a lot of simple.

• 50:32Barry Ritholtz?

  Investing is simple but hard.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  No, there's a lot of simple, there are a lot of answers that are simple, elegant and wrong.

• 50:38Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh.

• 50:38Speaker 04

  Remember this?

• 50:39Barry Ritholtz?

  I don't know where I stole that. That could actually be me.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I remember you shared somebody else's quote.

• 50:44Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Speaker 04

  And I was like, ah, cause.

• 50:45Barry Ritholtz?

  Simple, elegant and wrong.

• 50:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I really worry about that.

• 50:49Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh-huh.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  Because when you're in that ball of yarn complex and you decide to distill or edit, you have to make some conscious decisions about what to leave out.

• 50:58Barry Ritholtz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  And I often get that wrong. And when I do, I hear about it and, and, and it, it makes the work a little bit better. There are words and lines in those, some of those sketches I've been thinking about for over a decade.

• 51:10Barry Ritholtz?

  That you want to change?

• 51:11Speaker 04

  I removed a word that had been in there 15 years.

• 51:13Barry Ritholtz?

  Which sketch?

• 51:14Speaker 04

  Um, it's, uh, it's, uh, the word was, um.

• 51:20Barry Ritholtz?

  People you love experiences, spend the money.

• 51:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, that one's one of my favorite ones.

• 51:24Barry Ritholtz?

  That is one of my favorite. You do like a good Venn diagram.

• 51:28Speaker 04

  Well, by the way, the Venn diagram police have come after me, so I'm always, I just call them circle sketches. Oh dude, I used to get two-page emails from the Times readers.

• 51:36Barry Ritholtz?

  I call these people picture shaper, picture straighteners.

• 51:39Speaker 04

  And I used, I used to send equal rebuttals.

• 51:42Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  And then finally I just developed a template email that said, you're right. It's, I call them circle sketches. So yeah, the Venn diagram piece is pretty loser.

• 51:50Barry Ritholtz?

  These are legitimate Venn diagrams.

• 51:52Speaker 04

  They can make an argument, of course.

• 51:54Barry Ritholtz?

  No, if, if it's this over here, this over here, and the overlap that you want to focus on.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 52:00Barry Ritholtz?

  Things that matter, things that you can control is another one of yours.

• 52:04Speaker 04

  What we should focus on.

• 52:05Barry Ritholtz?

  And then, and then the overlap, how is that not a Venn diagram?

• 52:09Speaker 04

  I don't know. I, I, I don't know, but somebody will find. But my, my, my point really is that, that when you distill and leave things out. You get things wrong sometimes and you asked which one like I

• 52:21Barry Ritholtz?

  For a point, though, you're trying to communicate cleanly and simply.

• 52:26Speaker 04

  It's true. But I'm saying some of that feedback's amazing. Like the Venn diagram police weren't particularly helpful, but some of the feedback is amazing. Like, hey, have you ever thought of this? And it makes me reconsider and adjust. And there have been changes that I've made. Like, there's one sketch that says what's important. What you I used to say, what's important to you? It was an alignment sketch. It was like your use of capital aligned with what you say is important to you. And that word say.

• 52:52Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, it's implying that it's not important, but you're claiming it's important.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  It bothered that word say bothered me for a decade before I was like, no, no, no. It's we want to get to what's important to you, not what you say.

• 53:03Barry Ritholtz?

  You were hinting at another problem with people not speaking.

• 53:07Speaker 04

  That's right. Revealed stated versus revealed preferences. I'm more interested in the revealed preferences, what's actually important to you.

• 53:13Barry Ritholtz?

  That's really, that's really interesting.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 53:59Speaker 02

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 54:39Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so let's, let's stay with the concept of spending money.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:45Barry Ritholtz?

  Right? Since I just flipped to whatever that was. Every advisor that manages money for people can tell you story after story after story. My favorite one, I'll share here. "Hey, Barry's a car guy. He has a boat. You wanna buy a boat and a car, why don't you talk to Barry?" So I speak to the client. "So I'm thinking about buying a 60-foot, 50-foot, whatever sailboat, and I'm thinking about buying a Ferrari." I go, "That's really easy." "What's your boating experience?" "Zero." "You don't start with a 50, 60-foot sailboat that requires a crew. It's $2.5 million. You'll take it out twice. You'll sell it for a 30% loss." "On the other hand, go..."

• 55:30Barry Ritholtz?

  By the way, this guy could buy a Ferrari a month for the rest of Ytarnini, it's fine. "Go buy the Ferrari, take the whole family down to the Ferrari High Performance Driving School, which I'll let you in on a little secret, all of these advanced driving schools, they're really defensive driving classes in disguise."

• 55:47Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 55:47Barry Ritholtz?

  "And you will learn not only the limits of the car that you'll get nowhere near, but you'll learn the limits of your own driving ability."

• 55:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:55Barry Ritholtz?

  "And more importantly, learn how to operate within your own skillset."

• 55:59Speaker 04

  And so will your kids if you bring them.

• 56:00Barry Ritholtz?

  That's right. So everybody becomes a better, safer driver.

• 56:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:04Barry Ritholtz?

  So, he goes out and buys a Ferrari, they do the class, they love it!

• 56:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:10Barry Ritholtz?

  He also buys the boat. A year later, he sells it for 30% loss.

• 56:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:14Barry Ritholtz?

  Anytime Barry gets on the phone with a client, the advisor always says, "Do not mention the boat." So the only thing worse than being right is being wrong. And I could say this at the back of a podcast, because you can confess to murder at the end of a podcast and no one will know.

• 56:30Speaker 04

  No one knows.

• 56:31Barry Ritholtz?

  No one will hear. So I'm very comfortable saying this here. But, so with that Barry digression here, let's talk about how do you help people focus on what's important, what matters, and what the purpose of money really is? What should they be doing

• 56:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:51Barry Ritholtz?

  with their money?

• 56:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Especially later in life, they've accumulated a nice pile.

• 56:58Barry Ritholtz?

  Can't take it with you.

• 56:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, running experiment, like, practice. Like, like, often, one of the things we see is the very things that got you to that spot are working against you going forward, right? Like, you're being frugal, saving aggressively, being very disciplined, and now you're saying, "Hey, I've been putting off..." This delayed gratification thing was really important, maybe. Like, but it definitely got you to the spot. It's, you get to a point at which you should no longer delay. There's not gonna be time to delay.

• 57:27Barry Ritholtz?

  It's so tough for some people to make that switch.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  Super, so you practice. You just, like, like, your boat example is great. Yeah, like, I, I mean, I've literally have had people who can't spend any money, and, like you're saying, have enough money that they could spend it for the rest of their lives.

• 57:39Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  Go, like, go get a coffee with a friend, pay for theirs. And just under, go on the trip and enjoy the trip, right? Just, one of my favorite stories is from Alan Smith in the UK. Had a client, he's a great financial planner. Had a client that, um, had rela, and he's told this story publicly. Had a client that had relatives that had moved. There was a bunch of people from Wales that moved to Argentina.

• 58:06Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  For mining, way back, way back in the day.

• 58:09Barry Ritholtz?

  I know exactly where you're gonna go with this.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  A bunch of his relatives moved, a bunch of her relatives moved. She'd always wanted to go see the Welsh National Rugby Team play the Argentinian, the Pumas.

• 58:20Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  In Argentina.

• 58:22Barry Ritholtz?

  How hard is that?

• 58:23Speaker 04

  And she was like, "I just can't, I can't." And he's like, "You could do this every year for, you could do this every month for the rest of your life." It's like, "Well, I can't sit that long." You could have a lay-flat bed.

• 58:32Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 58:33Speaker 04

  And, and so he finally-

• 58:34Barry Ritholtz?

  Or you could go from Wales to New York, go from New York to Brazil, go from Brazil to Argentina. You could, you don't have to do it in one trip.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  So he finally, just over time, like, got her used to the idea. She went and she says it was the best, like, we're never gonna regret those things. We're never gonna, we're never gonna-

• 58:50Barry Ritholtz?

  AI is not gonna replace that.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  No, and so, to me, it's like, dude, I think, I would, I don't know if I'd rather err on being irresponsible, but I know I should, we should spend the money. Spend the money.

• 59:01Barry Ritholtz?

  But, you know, when you, irresponsibility never comes into it. You're looking at someone's portfolio.

• 59:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 59:07Barry Ritholtz?

  "Hey, you have 10 million-" Million dollars, you live on three fifty a year. You wanna bust out another fifty? So you can take the whole family to the old country and

• 59:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:17Barry Ritholtz?

  Show them where your grandparents came from? Why not?

• 59:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:21Barry Ritholtz?

  I mean, it's not even a hundred thousand dollars.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so I think to me it's

• 59:24Barry Ritholtz?

  These, by the way, are very first world problems.

• 59:26Speaker 04

  Of course, but but they're problems. I like I've decided Brene Brown got really clear about like comparative suffering does us no good.

• 59:32Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 59:33Speaker 04

  So I always like like whenever I hear first world problems, I'm always like, well, yeah, but it this is a challenge and it happens to be the challenge that many of your clients and the people I'm talking to are facing. So why not just practice? Like, can we pick something small? Right, something you've always wanted to do. Right, and it might be simple, like take the grandkids to to the art museum this weekend.

• 59:53Barry Ritholtz?

  I'm gonna share another line with you.

• 59:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Not comparative suffering. Often falsely attributed to Teddy Roosevelt. It hadn't been around till like the late nineteen eighties. Comparison is the thief of joy.

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:00:08Barry Ritholtz?

  What a great phrase that is.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  It's so good.

• 1:00:10Barry Ritholtz?

  And it's really, there's always someone with a bigger boat. Or a a larger house or a faster car, whatever it whatever you're envious of.

• 1:00:20Barry Ritholtz?

  You have this car, you really happy with it, then who cares what the guy down the block has? That's pointless.

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  I just real quickly, that's one thing that I think makes this even harder is we're never exactly sure. Do we really want the boat? Do you know what I mean?

• 1:00:34Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, if you're not sure, then that's easy, don't get the boat.

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, go out on, but but you could go out for a day.

• 1:00:40Barry Ritholtz?

  You could rent a boat.

• 1:00:41Speaker 04

  Try little experiments, try little experiments, cuz I just remember growing up, I always wanted. I grew up in the hills in Utah, right? We all had BMX bikes.

• 1:00:49Barry Ritholtz?

  I love this BMX story of yours.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  I always always want a slightly better BMX bike.

• 1:00:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, no, you wanted a really nice bike, and what did you end up doing?

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  Which one are you talking about? Are you talking about the road bike? The moots that I end up spending moots?

• 1:01:02Barry Ritholtz?

  Yes.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  Titanium bike out of steam. Different, different story, but yeah, that's one of those moments where I, are you kidding? Those things where I could not like, I think those are six or seven thousand. That's nothing today in terms of.

• 1:01:13Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, no, you could drop 10 grand on a bike.

• 1:01:15Speaker 04

  But still, it was like, and that bike, like per unit of dollar, per unit of fun. I've never made a better investment, right?

• 1:01:23Barry Ritholtz?

  But what's the BMX story?

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  When I was little, when I was like eight, we all had like, I had slightly better BMX bike than some of my buddies. And my buddies, some of my buddies had slightly better, that's all I knew.

• 1:01:32Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  I didn't know at the time that I was supposed to want a private jet.

• 1:01:36Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  And now I do, like now Instagram has taught me. So I think we have this problem of like cultivating our comparison set. So now we're talking, even getting clear about your, the word goal is hard. Cause you don't know if it's your mom's goal, if it's society's goal, if it's Instagram's goal. Five million dollars in a sailboat, like when did you?

• 1:01:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Insane.

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  Where did that come from?

• 1:01:57Barry Ritholtz?

  Let me share a fun private jet story with you.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  I love private jet stories.

• 1:02:02Barry Ritholtz?

  So whenever anybody used to ask me, hey, you're going to sell the firm? What's your F you money? Questions like that.

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:02:09Barry Ritholtz?

  My answer has always been the same. Whatever it takes to never step foot into a commercial airport ever again. And then I, I made the mistake of saying this in public somewhere and I started getting marquee jet, net jet. All these guys started sending me pictures. So out of curiosity, one day I said, run the numbers for me. What does this really look like? So it turns out, East Coast, 6,000, 6,500 an hour. Cross country to California, 8,000. You want to go to Europe, it's 12,000 per hour of travel. So do the math. So I start, I'm a, deep down inside, I'm a numbers guy. I'm like, oh, this is quarter million, half million a year.

• 1:02:52Barry Ritholtz?

  For that to be rational, you have to be not have 10 million dollars. You have to be earning 10 million dollars gross to spend a mere 5% of your annual income and, and cap gains. Uh, on, on. A PJ at half a million per.

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:03:10Barry Ritholtz?

  Um PJ right from succession. I never heard that phrase before that show. And so all of a sudden, I'm like, oh, I have no interest in that. I don't ever expect to be make pulling down 10 million a year.

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:21Barry Ritholtz?

  And while it's attractive bypassing all of.

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:03:25Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh airports, I kinda learn, all right, so I'm not gonna go on high traffic days. We travel for Thanksgiving weekend. I'm the first flight out Thursday morning.

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Barry Ritholtz?

  Wit blow through security in five minutes.

• 1:03:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Barry Ritholtz?

  Two hours later, it's a zoo.

• 1:03:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:03:39Barry Ritholtz?

  So, all right, I'm not gonna spend a half a million dollars a year. I could spend a little bit of brain power trying to navigate around the worst. Worst I I won't arrive at the airport at five o'clock, cause I don't wanna get get stuck in traffic.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Barry Ritholtz?

  And I won't take a nine o'clock flight in the morning that require, so like, all right, I'm not flying private.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Barry Ritholtz?

  I'm trying to fly a little smarter commercial, even if you're in the front of the plane.

• 1:04:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that to me is a really good example of uh like thinking that something might be important. Running a little bit of an experiment, just actually running the numbers, deciding, so we're just constantly narrowing in for our whole lives on, and those things change.

• 1:04:17Barry Ritholtz?

  It would still, it would still be delightful to be able to just show up at the airport.

• 1:04:21Speaker 04

  And you made a trade off decision and yeah.

• 1:04:23Barry Ritholtz?

  And, you know, save a day of travel on each side.

• 1:04:26Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 1:04:27Barry Ritholtz?

  But is that worth a half a million dollars a year?

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, to you, it's not.

• 1:04:33Barry Ritholtz?

  In order to make it, I had, I'm I'm I'm oversharing, but I'm gonna overshare one more thing. So, uh I'm, uh friends of my wife get a pied-à-terre in the city. They're empty nesters, they downsize, they have a house, and then they have the city apartment. And I started thinking about a pied-à-terre. We we loved it when we lived down at Gramercy Park, and I start looking at this. And I, again, I start running the numbers, and I'm like, wait a second, just the monthly co-op fees are like three or four grands. A month to say nothing of the insurance, the taxes, and the one, two, three, four, five million dollar purchase price, whatever the hell it is.

• 1:05:15Barry Ritholtz?

  And I'm doing the math and I'm like, gee, this is really like five grand a month. It's 60,000 a year. I can't spend, and we take weekends in the city. I can't spend sixty thousand dollars a year on hotels, restaurants. Like, I can't get it, I can't spend that much if I tried.

• 1:05:32Speaker 04

  Right, right, right.

• 1:05:32Barry Ritholtz?

  Like, we do a few weekends in the city. It's a couple hundred, a couple thousand bucks.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Barry Ritholtz?

  But it's certainly not sixty grand.

• 1:05:38Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:05:38Barry Ritholtz?

  Pierre de Terre makes no sense to me. And I'm explaining, I'm having this conversation with a very wealthy client. And I see this look on her face and I go, "Oh, you're saying if sixty thousand dollars is too much in co-op fees, you really can't afford this Pierre de Terre."

• 1:05:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Barry Ritholtz?

  And she says, "Well, I, I, I wasn't exactly thinking it, but you're not wrong."

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:06:02Barry Ritholtz?

  And, and what I was about to defend myself with was, "Well, the sixty thousand dollars just isn't worth it to me." But before I said that, it was like, "Yeah, but if you had fifty or a hundred million dollars, who cares? I just want a place that I'm comfortable in the bed, my clothes are in the closet."

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:06:20Barry Ritholtz?

  And I'm not dealing with checking into a hotel. That's worth sixty grand to me if you have X dollars.

• 1:06:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Barry Ritholtz?

  And, um, she never said that, but I immediately,

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  Saw the whole calculating.

• 1:06:31Barry Ritholtz?

  I immediately, like,

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

  I have a question for you.

• 1:06:32Barry Ritholtz?

  I can't afford this.

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  On the heels of that, I have a question for you. What's the last thing you decide, you decided I'm gonna buy that? And you didn't, you were just like, "I don't care, I'm just buying it." Doesn't matter how much it costs. That you didn't actually, because both those examples, you're like, "I wanted a thing. I went around the numbers, decided not to do a thing." Is there a time when you're like, "To hell with the..."

• 1:06:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Why did not to do it?

• 1:06:52Speaker 04

  No, you decided to do it. You're like, "I, and I just threw, I didn't even care what the number said. I didn't even look, I just wanted to do that thing so bad, I was just like, "I'm doing it."

• 1:06:59Barry Ritholtz?

  There's two answers. There's the Barry before he turns sixty and the Barry after he turns sixty.

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:07:05Barry Ritholtz?

  When Barry turns sixty, so I, I think this is a function of immaturity. I never had a midlife crisis. Probably because when I should have, I was still an idiot child.

• 1:07:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Barry Ritholtz?

  I still was ten, twenty years maturity level below where I should have been.

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Barry Ritholtz?

  And I turned sixty and I very much woke up with the sensation, "All right, fourth quarter, down by seven. If you want to win this game, you gotta get busy." Like, literally, that was what I thought.

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:07:33Barry Ritholtz?

  And, um, I've told, I don't know if I ever told this story on, uh, the podcast. And I, I, the spouse still survives, so I can't really go into details. But person about to sell a business for a ton of money. Hundreds of millions of dollars gets a diagnosis, six months to live. And when, you know, you know this, if you're managing money for enough families, the actuarial tables are such that people will begin to die. I mean, that's just the normal human finite lifespan. And so it's easy to start to pick up that pattern of life is short. What are you waiting for?

• 1:08:16Barry Ritholtz?

  So the combination of turning 60 soon after the pandemic ended, and a lot of people, a lot of people lost a lot of people during that. I kinda said money should never prevent anyone from experiencing joy. And so what I, what I started doing is not saying no, and gifting a lot of stuff. Like my favorite thing in the world around Christmas is to pick a book and send it to 10, 20, 30 friends. The same book. And I'm like, 20 bucks is 30 bucks. This year was The Uncool by Cameron Crowe.

• 1:08:59Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:08:59Barry Ritholtz?

  And I was just talking about this with somebody and I, I said, oh, I gave that book to a few people for Christmas and I went through Amazon. Oh, I gave 26 of these various people.

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  So good.

• 1:09:12Barry Ritholtz?

  It's $300. Anybody who's making

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I love that idea, by the way.

• 1:09:18Barry Ritholtz?

  A reasonable income. By the way, you don't have to wait until Christmas.

• 1:09:23Speaker 04

  I know, I know, I was just thinking about that Carl's book, Carl's Secret Book Club.

• 1:09:27Barry Ritholtz?

  It's, um,

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  Like launching that.

• 1:09:29Barry Ritholtz?

  It's really fun. Now, there's a little bit of a puzzle figuring out what's the right book for the right person. And not everybody gets the same book because they're different people.

• 1:09:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Barry Ritholtz?

  But all this comes back to

• 1:09:42Speaker 04

  Spend the money.

• 1:09:44Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so I

• 1:09:47Barry Ritholtz?

  Again, it's the end of the podcast, so I can, I can say stuff.

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  Alexis, no cutting any of this out.

• 1:09:52Barry Ritholtz?

  So nineteen eighty seven, uh, nineteen eighty eight nine eleven Cabrio I purchased three or four years ago for like sixty grand. It was an old ratty car that needed to be restored and the plan was to convert it to an EV. This car wasn't right for that, so I ended up doing it with an eighty seven coupe with three hundred thousand kilometers on it. But the eighty eight turned out to be this rare matching numbers M four ninety one nine eleven that was worth a ton more than I paid for it.

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:10:24Barry Ritholtz?

  So I put a bunch of money into it. My wife was complaining. She, my wife was complaining. She doesn't get to drive a stick anymore. So, hey, honey, here's your weekend car. I bought it for this reason. We're just parking cash in it. It's worth double what I paid. Drive it. And she's like, it's loud, it smells, it doesn't have ABS, it doesn't, she goes, nice, nice clutch, but no airbags, no ABS. And I'm like, so what are you saying? You, uh, by the way, this is my cross to bear. My wife is very unhappy that I got her a old nine eleven and she is forcing me to buy a newer Porsche. Like, these are problems that most married men do not have. That's

• 1:11:08Barry Ritholtz?

  how you know you married the right woman.

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  If your wife says, nice clutch, you're on to something.

• 1:11:14Barry Ritholtz?

  I taught her to drive a stick when we were dating. She drives a stick better than, so her daily is an unusual color. By the way, another great purchase during the pandemic when everybody was freaked out, I got her a, um, Panamera four S hybrid in Amethyst Metallic, super rare color, substantially less than it should have. And some of the, one of the guys from my Um, car group says to me one day, you know, you have the only Amethyst Metallic Panamera on the island. I saw your wife driving it. I tried to catch her.

• 1:11:57Barry Ritholtz?

  She's got a crazy lead foot. I couldn't catch her. I was beeping. I was waving. So I'm like, oh, I'll ask her. So I go home that night and I said, I said, hey, how was your day? She goes, crazy thing. This guy in a green nine eleven was haranguing me, was chasing me. And I just put the hammer down and this guy couldn't catch me. And I said, you know, that was Joe, that green. It was green, right? She's like, yeah, yeah, that was Joe. He was just swinging, trying to catch up to say hi. I like weren't, he said, he couldn't catch you. It's a GT three. It's like the fastest street legal. You know, just below the Turbo S. There's only one other car. Um, that's the fastest street legal Porsche with a stick shift.

• 1:12:39Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so.

• 1:12:41Speaker 04

  That's what I'm talking about.

• 1:12:42Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so I, I am in the process of swapping the eighty eight for a twenty twenty four. I, I know exactly what I'm going to replace it with. I found a little bit of a unicorn. Um, the only problem is the color is wrong, but it turns out it, you, you know, a new car, a relatively new car. You put a PPF wrap around it to protect the paint. Now they make those wraps in colors. So you could get, I really like this paint to sample purple violet. That's like a twenty thousand dollar upgrade when you order the car new. No, just put plastic on it. It's six grand and now you have the car, whatever color you want. So she picked that color. This is, she's gonna be.

• 1:13:24Barry Ritholtz?

  The purple. I found this, it, it's a GTS. It's a Cabrio. It's a stick. It's a chalk interior, which is even rarer. And rare still ceramic brakes.

• 1:13:35Barry Ritholtz?

  It's just the wrong color. It's like, I'm gonna fix this. Don't worry about it.

• 1:13:39Speaker 04

  So good.

• 1:13:39Barry Ritholtz?

  So that was the, this is an obscene amount of money and I don't care.

• 1:13:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. You tell me that twenty years from now.

• 1:13:47Barry Ritholtz?

  Nobody looks back and says, oh, why did I buy that?

• 1:13:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:50Barry Ritholtz?

  We look back in regret on the things we didn't do.

• 1:13:53Speaker 04

  Right. That's exactly.

• 1:13:54Barry Ritholtz?

  Not the things we did.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  I mean, my version of that is two months ago, I did not know that my twenty four, twenty four, twenty four, twenty five year old son.

• 1:14:04Speaker 04

  Twenty-three year, anyway, twenty-four year old son was gonna ask me to go spend some time adventure on adventure motorcycles this summer.

• 1:14:11Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:12Speaker 04

  It wasn't in my financial plan.

• 1:14:13Barry Ritholtz?

  Do you have a license for that?

• 1:14:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I actually do, cuz ten years ago, five years ago, I was on a, uh, you know, the nine hundred GS.

• 1:14:20Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, that's a big bike.

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so we just got Yamaha, uh, T7s. So the Teneray, Teneray seven hundred, which is a great bike, but my son is the one, I didn't know that, it's costing me more money than I'd planned on spending. And I'm not gonna regret a second of it.

• 1:14:36Barry Ritholtz?

  Isn't that what else?

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  That's the whole point.

• 1:14:38Barry Ritholtz?

  First of all, you have to stop, and I know you have gratitude drawings in here. The fact that it's a realistic option for your eye to indulge in these ridiculous spending things, and a part of me knows how utterly ridiculous.

• 1:14:52Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:14:52Barry Ritholtz?

  This is, so first, you have to have some gratitude for that. But second, if not for that, what are you gonna do with the money?

• 1:14:59Speaker 04

  And, and the fact that my twenty-something son asked me to do it.

• 1:15:03Barry Ritholtz?

  He's enthusiastic about it.

• 1:15:04Speaker 04

  The answer is yes, right? I called, yeah, the answer is yes, you know, and, and so, what, am I gonna look back five years from now, ten years from now, thirty years from now, and regret that? There's no, we spent more money than we really should have on our four years living in New Zealand.

• 1:15:19Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  And I would do it.

• 1:15:20Barry Ritholtz?

  What years were you in New Zealand?

• 1:15:22Speaker 04

  Sixteen to twenty. We didn't mean to do it, it wasn't political. We went sixteen for a year, we ended up just staying for four. Yeah, twenty, sixteen.

• 1:15:30Barry Ritholtz?

  I assume it was fantastic.

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  Unbelievable. We spent way more, it was.

• 1:15:34Barry Ritholtz?

  The whole thing.

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  More like irresponsible, in this case even. But it was a requirement. My wife was essentially like, after the financial crisis and everything, I was just a broken human, and.

• 1:15:45Barry Ritholtz?

  Really?

• 1:15:45Speaker 04

  Oh, just.

• 1:15:46Barry Ritholtz?

  I never thought of you that way.

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  Well, that's nice of you, but yeah, I did, that was part of the problem, is I was a superhuman out here.

• 1:15:53Barry Ritholtz?

  You did a good job masturbating.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  But not, not inside, not in the house. And it was just a lack of patience and not deep presence, and she was like, we're going, would you like to come? And I was like, yes. We ended up staying four years, and it was hard, money-wise, like, it was a bad decision financially.

• 1:16:08Barry Ritholtz?

  Were you working there?

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you know, like, you're in New Zealand, you're not doing the same thing, like.

• 1:16:13Barry Ritholtz?

  You're not that far from China, did you do anything in Asia at all?

• 1:16:17Speaker 04

  Very little, no.

• 1:16:18Barry Ritholtz?

  Really?

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  But, but, but my point really is, it probably wasn't the best from a spreadsheet financial decision, but I would, I would do it again all over. So, for sure, same thing with the car, spend to the degree that you can. Find the things that align with your use of capital and your family and your experiences with the people you love. We know that we will not regret. We will not regret spending time and money on experiences with people we love.

• 1:16:45Barry Ritholtz?

  So, we've been, we've been at this for a solid 90 minutes. Let me jump to my favorite questions I ask all my guests, otherwise I'm gonna keep you here through dinner.

• 1:16:54Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:16:55Barry Ritholtz?

  Starting with, who were your early mentors who helped shape your career?

• 1:17:01Speaker 04

  I, I, I know you asked that question and I thought really carefully about it and the one that actually probably had the biggest shaping on me was a little far. Ron had a huge impact. So between Ron and Seth Godin.

• 1:17:13Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, really? Seth Godin's stuff is really interesting.

• 1:17:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and Seth, I always saw Seth as somebody who was doing something here that applied here.

• 1:17:21Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 1:17:22Speaker 04

  And that, that was really like-

• 1:17:23Barry Ritholtz?

  So, doing something in a narrow little space with broad application.

• 1:17:26Speaker 04

  Marketing guy, marketing, marketing, marketing. But, you know, it had broad application and doing it consistently over a long period of time. I mean, Behavior Up Radio was started because of Seth's daily blog.

• 1:17:35Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 1:17:36Speaker 04

  He said to me, "Why aren't you doing a daily blog?" I said, "I don't like to write." He said, "You like to talk." And so I started. We're episode 1500 now.

• 1:17:43Barry Ritholtz?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Seth Godin, Ron Lieber had the biggest impact on me.

• 1:17:47Barry Ritholtz?

  Let, let's talk about books. What are you reading right now? What are some of your favorites?

• 1:17:51Speaker 04

  My favorite-

• 1:17:52Barry Ritholtz?

  And I, and I know when you're writing a book, it's really hard to read.

• 1:17:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. No, my, my, one of the most, two really impactful books, Fooled by Randomness-

• 1:18:01Barry Ritholtz?

  Nassim Taleb.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  Come on.

• 1:18:03Barry Ritholtz?

  I wanted to have him on the podcast. He told me to go F myself.

• 1:18:06Speaker 04

  He probably said that exactly.

• 1:18:08Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh, I'm, I'm giving you the polite word.

• 1:18:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. So that book and then Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart.

• 1:18:15Barry Ritholtz?

  That's a really interesting topic.

• 1:18:17Speaker 04

  Pema Chodron, when things, yeah, well, they're both, if you understand-

• 1:18:20Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  They're both related to this idea, this false sense of certainty that we talked about. So Pema's work has had a massive impact on me. Reading right now, I just finished, um, literally last night, I just finished, uh- Homesick Nomad. About, and I can't remember her name, Brianna.

• 1:18:37Barry Ritholtz?

  Fiction or nonfiction?

• 1:18:38Speaker 04

  No, it's a memoir. A short little memoir about a lady who drives her van around the southern, the desert of southern Utah. So it was like a home. She has a Utah connection, Salt Lake connection. So that was really good. And Bison for the Broken Heart, or Buffalo for the Broken Heart, Dan O'Brien's book.

• 1:18:55Barry Ritholtz?

  Someone else mentioned that.

• 1:18:56Speaker 04

  I think, I think you, oh, I told Mev about it in his book Roundup.

• 1:19:01Barry Ritholtz?

  Okay.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Barry Ritholtz?

  Really interesting.

• 1:19:03Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:19:03Barry Ritholtz?

  Um, what are you streaming these days? Tell us what you're either listening to or watching.

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  Mike Birbiglia.

• 1:19:11Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh. So hilarious.

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  Working it out.

• 1:19:13Barry Ritholtz?

  You know, he has a podcast also.

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  Working it out. That's his podcast.

• 1:19:16Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, I thought that was the name of his standup on Netflix.

• 1:19:19Speaker 04

  I listen to it religiously. I'm trying to get, Mike, if you're listening, I've been trying to get ahold of Mike for a long time.

• 1:19:23Barry Ritholtz?

  So there's a handful of comedians with their own podcasts now that, not just, um, Seth, Seth Rogen. Not, not just Joe Rogan.

• 1:19:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:19:35Barry Ritholtz?

  Tom Papa has a podcast.

• 1:19:37Speaker 04

  Mark Maron, the original.

• 1:19:38Barry Ritholtz?

  Mark is the OG in the space. Um, who's the guy? Who's the guy who was the co-writer Blocks with, uh, Dave Chappelle?

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:19:47Barry Ritholtz?

  Jordan Blank on his name. His pod is occasionally interesting.

• 1:19:50Speaker 04

  Pete Holmes is actually really great, too.

• 1:19:52Barry Ritholtz?

  Why do I know the name Pete Holmes?

• 1:19:53Speaker 04

  Pete, he's another one of these Netflix comedians. It's amazing.

• 1:19:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Um, Good Hang with Amy Poehler. I was just watching her with Billie Eilish. That was really kind of fun.

• 1:20:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Barry Ritholtz?

  Um, there's a ton of them.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, really. I mean, his, the reason I really like Birbiglia is it's really about like the process. Right? And I think about a lot of my work, especially the public speaking, about like testing bits. You know, seeing how they land, paying attention. That didn't work quite the way I wanted to. And Mike does a really good job of explaining that. And then I just finished The Dark Wizard. Dean Potter's, the story of Dean Potter, who was an LCAP climber long before LCAP climbing was, you know, this mainstream thing. And about his untimely passing through base jumping or something is an amazing story.

• 1:20:38Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah, so there, there are a lot of these hobbies, like I, I don't mind going fast on the track. There are a lot of these hobbies where you, my brain does the risk reward analysis and say, oh, there's just way too much random risk in this.

• 1:20:51Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:20:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Like base jumping.

• 1:20:53Speaker 04

  He's a wingsuiter.

• 1:20:54Barry Ritholtz?

  Yep.

• 1:20:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he he was driven by the fact that the only thing that made him feel alive was the the death consequence.

• 1:21:01Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 1:21:02Speaker 04

  It's a whole nother thing. It's it's called the Dark Wizard.

• 1:21:04Barry Ritholtz?

  Psychological issue.

• 1:21:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. But it was super interesting.

• 1:21:08Barry Ritholtz?

  We'll skip that. Final two questions. What sort of advice would you give a recent college grad interested in a career in either uh being a financial planner, being an author, being an artist? And I know you sometimes don't think of yourself as an artist, but you clearly are.

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, um. Just take the next step, right? Like, I just, I think, like, getting too caught up in how is this gonna work and what's the narrative?

• 1:21:39Barry Ritholtz?

  A thousand steps.

• 1:21:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and

• 1:21:40Barry Ritholtz?

  A thousand miles starts with the first step.

• 1:21:42Speaker 04

  Like, there's a Lao Tzu quote, be who you really are and go the whole way.

• 1:21:45Barry Ritholtz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:46Speaker 04

  And I think I wish I would have started that a little earlier. Like, what does it even mean? Okay, take one small step, one take one small step. And if I was preparing in finance, I'd get more comfortable, especially in the advice side, get more comfortable with learning to be deeply present with people. Curiosity, questions.

• 1:22:00Barry Ritholtz?

  Present.

• 1:22:01Speaker 04

  I think financial advisors aren't gonna be paid for solutions. If they are right now, they're not gonna be paid. They're gonna be paid for presence, like, opening up the ability to have these, because the solutions are table stakes at this point, right?

• 1:22:12Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  But the, it's like self-driving cars. It was in the Waymo, right?

• 1:22:16Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  It was safer than the Uber driver right before.

• 1:22:19Barry Ritholtz?

  Did it feel very weird?

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  But here's the thing, I still have to tell it where to go.

• 1:22:22Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  And even more importantly, on the journey, if I saw something like, oh, wait, what's that perk? Right? I think that requires

• 1:22:31Barry Ritholtz?

  Could you do that in a Waymo? Could you ask it to stop?

• 1:22:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can tell it to stop. Yeah, I don't know how you do it, but I you can tell it to stop. So I'm a big fan of self-driving money. I can't wait. And there's still gonna be somebody there that needs to say, hey, is this really, is the boat really important to you? Go try the fur, go try the racetrack thing, you know, like, and I, that, to me, is curiosity and presence. Still, you gotta be a technical rock star, but curiosity and presence is where the value will be.

• 1:22:57Barry Ritholtz?

  Final question, what is it that you know about the world of investing or psychology today? Might have been useful back in the 1990s when you were first looking at that Netscape IPO?

• 1:23:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, that that it compounding does all the work, right? Like that if like stop spending time trying to find the best investment and just own stuff. If it can't, if it compounds, I don't know who said this, if it compounds, let it compound.

• 1:23:26Barry Ritholtz?

  The line I use is your job is to prevent yourself from interfering with your portfolio's ability to compound.

• 1:23:34Speaker 04

  That time is the thing that matters.

• 1:23:37Barry Ritholtz?

  Absolutely. Carl, this has been absolutely a delight. Normally, I want to make this about the guest, but there's something about you that just encourages me.

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  My whole goal.

• 1:23:46Barry Ritholtz?

  Um, it's your, it's your, uh, it's your aura. You bring it out in people, which is probably why you're a good advisor. You get people to open up to you.

• 1:23:57Speaker 04

  That's a really high compliment. Thank you.

• 1:24:00Barry Ritholtz?

  It is. It absolutely is.

• 1:24:02Speaker 04

  Cheers.

• 1:24:03Barry Ritholtz?

  We have been speaking with Carl Richards. He is the author of the book, Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the 639 we've done over the past 12 years. You can find those at YouTube, Bloomberg, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn't thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my very patient video producer, producer, New Yorker, drop in the R. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. I'm Barry Ritholtz.

• 1:24:48Barry Ritholtz?

  You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

• 1:25:28Speaker 05

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