Ben Felix: Investing is Simple, So Why Is Everyone Getting it Wrong?

27:33It's super easy to do the math on how much do I have to save for retirement if I can live off of the 4 % rule. It's harder to think about a variable spending plan and how much you can spend over your lifetime doing that. But I don't actually think that the amount you have to have saved is as insurmountable as it would seem if you say, oh, 2.7%, I need to have X amount saved. It's probably a lot lower than that when you factor in a proper variable spending plan. it's january mate do you want to know an interesting little factoid about this month go for it so not only is it the most depressing month of the year but this is where legal inquiries and divorce filings spike happy days get christmas out of the way get him get him gone make sure to see what he bought you for christmas before you suck him off so out your finances january the first see ya yeah yeah talking about speaking about sorting out finances it's also tax filing deadlines this month.

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29:02Prices start from£49. And if you use the code money10, you can get further 10 % off your first tax filing. That code is MONEY10. There's also a QR code on screen for you. We mentioned earlier, you've got a podcast, The Rational Reminder, which I think is an amazing name for a podcast. But why do you think people struggle so hard with being rational in investing? Well, yeah, I don't think that they should be rational necessarily. The genesis of that name was, you know, we don't think people should be perfectly rational all the time, but we think that they should understand what a rational person would do so that they can make informed decisions about the trade-offs.

29:44Investing is hard. Like there's so much uncertainty about future returns. You can never know if what you're doing is actually right. And even if it is, it can feel wrong or seem wrong for a long time. So I think that's really hard. And then so many of the biases that affect decision-making, the cognitive and behavioral biases that affect good decision-making, they just show up so easily and so prominently in financial markets. So I think that it's a playground for biases. And it makes decision-making when it comes to investing really hard. People aren't good at thinking long-term. They're not good at thinking about compounding.

30:30It's like our brains just don't comprehend exponential growth over time. That makes long-term decision-making hard. We are drawn to attention-grabbing stuff. So that might be a stock that's done well recently or a news headline about how bad things are going to get. And that'll be a very prominent thought in our minds when we're trying to make a decision, a long-term decision, even though that information probably shouldn't matter. I mean, those are some of the big ones, but it's tough out there. Do you think it's unique to invest in, this playground that you talk about? Are there any other areas in life or fields where you believe it's as challenging, it's as about the human?

31:13Well, yeah. So I did a podcast episode. I want to do a video on my channel too. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Um, but it was, I called it investing in your health. And I drew a bunch of parallels between investing in financial markets and investing in your, in your physical and mental health. And I think that a lot of the parallels are compounding like health compounds over time, wealth compounds over time. And that's not easy to think about, which makes it, uh, easy to whatever, not, not save in a given month because you want to spend, but you're not thinking about the compounding effects or have a more conservative portfolio rather than a more aggressive one without thinking about the expected return trade-off because you don't understand how impactful that can be in the long run.

32:00And then with health, it's like, whatever, eating the bacon cheeseburger feels like it's not that big of a deal in the moment, but you do that every week or every day for years. And all of a sudden, in both cases, you wake up with less wealth than you had hoped when you're 55 or heart disease in the case of health when you're 55. And by the time you realize, oh, I made a mistake or I shouldn't have done that. I should have done that differently. There's not much you can do. You can't undo compounding because it needs time to work and it would likewise need time to be, well, I don't even know if you can unravel it.

32:33If you wake up and you're 50 years old and don't have any savings, that's going to be tough to recover from. Likewise with health and heart disease and stuff like that. So yeah, I think health is an interesting one where there are a ton of parallels where long-term thinking is beneficial, but not easy to do. Short-term thinking is easy and often pleasurable, but it leads to these incremental degradations that don't show up until they show up all at once slowly. And then all at once. Yeah. And there's no, there's no one single workout or lift that you could point to that you say, that's the reason I became strong and fit, you know, in the same way, it's more about consistency of effort over time with investing i say to my personal trainer all the time you have got everything you need to be a long-term investor because you're in great shape and then i come in the next week and he's like so should i buy tesla and i'm like no mate come on come on like oh no you've not got this yet you know it's funny to see that um yeah disciplined people in fitness should be amazing for investors and probably why you're good at it because you were disciplined within sport right yeah maybe maybe i don't know i i uh i never feel the pull to do weird stuff with my investments i really i don't know i just don't have that in my brain i don't think that is i mean i'm a disciplined uh athlete or like exerciser but i couldn't say i'm i'm getting more disciplined in investing but i don't think there's a correlation i know so many people that they work out every day but they they're terrible with money they're scared to invest that yeah so i think it's there are definitely similarities but i don't think just because you've got the discipline to exercise every day you've got the discipline to you know stay in the stock market have an investment strategy and stick to it and not tinker with it i also think there's an element of like understanding that you can i mean as a as a white guy who grew up in inner city birmingham in the uk i never really thought about the fact that i could play basketball it's like play football go for a swim you know these are the these are the things that were in front of me and if you're a kid and you're born on a basketball court like within your community right you think that's what we do that's a good point so and how many people from from where you're from even think that the market is something that they could do approach and if they were just consistent bought the same thing month in month out and did it like they play basketball then it would work for them so yeah i don't know if it's like a an exposure thing as much as anything else there's a a pretty famous canadian book called the wealthy barber uh it's written for canadian audience in 1989 that sold like a few million copies, but the author, Dave Chilton, a bit of a Canadian celebrity, and he just wrote a new version of the book, which I've got a video coming out, I think this Sunday, kind of reviewing the book.

35:14But one of the first lessons in the book is you can do this. And it's basically just saying like, even if you don't think you have the financial mind or the mathematical mind to manage your investments and to make good financial decisions, you can do it. Like it's basically not that hard, but I think it's a powerful message that the first lesson in this book about long-term decision-making is these words of encouragement. Even if you feel like you didn't come from the right background or don't have the right knowledge to do this, you can do it. It's not that hard. I want to ask about your investment approach because you're saying long-term diversification, but then you manage money for clients, right?

35:50And is that under the pretense that you could beat the market? No, no. So we use funds for a company called Dimensional Fund Advisors, which are really similar to index funds. They tilt a little bit toward smaller and lower priced stocks. So I just call it like an index fund with an evidence-based tilt. They're not technically index funds because they don't track an index, but they look very similar to an index fund. They've got super low fees, they're tax efficient, all that kind of good stuff. But that's not our value proposition. We use those because they're evidence-based and we think that they make sense.

36:24But if someone comes to us and says, I want to invest with you guys so I can access those funds that you use, we would say, no, that's not what we do. You should not pay our fees for that purpose. Our main value proposition is the marriage of portfolio management, tax-aware portfolio management, and financial planning. That covers things like tax and estate planning, retirement planning, and you add that in with portfolio management, integrate them all together. That's generally referred to as wealth management. So that's what we do for clients. And that's kind of the, I don't know, objective service.

37:04Those are the things that we do. But people usually pay us for those services for sure, but they're really paying us, I think, for peace of mind where they have someone that they know and trust, where they can offload this stuff. They know that we're doing good work. They know that we're giving them good advice and they don't have to think about it. And I've always been a huge advocate of do-it-yourself investing, DIY investing. I think that's a great thing for people to learn and for people to do. But man, if I think about myself, I am a good client of my firm. Our clients are like me. I've got a reasonably high income.

37:39I've got some investments. I'm very busy with my work and with my family. I don't have time to think about stuff like, I mean, in my case, it's not a great example because I think about managing portfolios all day. But if there was some other thing that was similarly important. I don't have time to think about learning how to do it, watching content, building spreadsheets, all that kind of stuff, doing analysis for something that's not core to my work or my family. So I think for busy people who have better stuff to do with their time, firms like PWL can be really valuable because they can just say, take this and it's out of their head.

38:22So that's what our clients typically look like. But the value proposition, it's really financial planning, portfolio management on paper, but it's really peace of mind. Therapy and counseling. Yeah. Reassurance. Reassurance is big, but when you look at what actually gets discussed in client meetings, yeah, there's a lot of sort of therapy adjacent stuff. Because a lot of it, it's like what I talked about earlier with the rational reminder idea. It's like giving people the information, Here are the trade-offs. Here are the considerations you should be thinking about in making this decision. But then people want to talk through the social or emotional or familial implications of the thing that they're going to do and who it's going to affect and how and how they might feel after the fact.

39:07So that's a lot of the discussions are stuff like that. So you have to have the skills and the knowledge from a financial planning perspective and a portfolio management perspective to frame the trade-offs for people. But that's really what people are doing. They're making trade-offs that are going to affect non-financial areas of their life. And they want to do that in a way that's informed. And that's what I think a good financial advisor accomplishes. From speaking to your clients and you yourself, do you think there's a point where more money just stops making you happy? Like enough, there's a certain point when you've got enough and it doesn't make a difference if you get an extra a hundred grand, an extra million or two.

39:39Yeah. So I think that the research on this, I mean, I can think about clients. I can wealthy clients who are unhappy. I think that distribution is always going to be there. But if we think about averages, if we think about what the literature says on this, I think it is pretty interesting where there does tend to be increasing wellbeing, increasing happiness with increasing wealth, but that does tend to plateau a little bit. There's a recent paper found that depending on what type of happiness you're measuring, it actually doesn't plateau, but it is increasing with log wealth, which means like, yeah.

40:13So it's like if you're making a million dollars, an extra$10 ,000 is not going to make you much happier, but an extra $100 ,000 might. And then as your income increases, the proportional amount of additional wealth or income that you need to feel happier is increasing at that rate, not linearly. So like$10 ,000 will make someone who makes$10 ,000 very happy, but$10 ,000 isn't going to affect someone with a million dollars. But if you increase it on a log scale, then it does have a lasting impact. But I think that there is still like the money you need to cover your basic needs, that's obviously necessary and people will be miserable without that.

40:56And then there's a point where you have enough to be comfortable. You're probably enjoying yourself. You can go on trips, whatever. You don't have to worry too much about money. I think that that's probably a sweet spot. And then as wealth starts to increase above that. Yeah, I think there's probably diminishing returns to increasing wealth. Now, I think we also have to think about trade-offs. If someone said, Ben, do you want a billion dollars? I would say yes. And I'm sure that I would be happy to have it and I could do whatever I wanted with my billion dollars. But if someone said, you are going to have to grind for the next 20 years and not see your family to get a billion dollars, would I still do it?

41:38Probably not. So I think we have to think about trade-offs when we're thinking about the marginal utility of wealth, like how much happier will you be with more money? I think everybody would be happier with more money if it was dropped in their lap, but that's not what happens. And so when you think about the trade-offs, having to work more hours, having to be maybe more stressed with a job with more responsibility and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think that the trade-off starts to get less attractive once you already have a high amount of wealth or a high amount of income. So how do you, with your clients, build that into retirement planning and kind of how do you shape a good retirement for them holistically, not just a dollar figure?

42:16We talk about that. So I wrote this paper called Finding and Funding a Good Life. I don't know when that was, a few years ago. And I basically just tried to take academic papers, other books, and I tried to just take it all and synthesize it into a relatively short paper that has at the end of each section, it has what I call reflective questions about whatever the topic was. You know what? Let me pull it up. I can tell you some of the questions. And so our advisors now, when they're meeting with clients, they'll factor this type of stuff into the planning process. So it's not just like, dear client, what do you want to retire with?

42:55Okay, here's what you need to do. It's like, let's have a conversation and reflect about what a good life looks for you and how we're going to afford that. So let's see. So there's a section on circumstances and adaptation. So that's like a big part of that literature on diminishing returns to increasing wealth from the perspective of happiness is the idea that we adapt to our circumstances. So you give me the billion dollars that I talked about earlier, I'd be like super pumped at first, but the happiness boost that I get from that would decrease over time as I adapt to my circumstances. Whatever, I'm eating caviar and stuff every day.

43:35I don't even like caviar, but whatever, expensive stuff. And at first I'm like super pumped about it. It's all new and fun, but then you adapt to it and that happiness boost goes away. So I've got this section of the paper on that, just explaining how that works and why it happens. and then the questions to reflect. When contemplating a major purchase, do you have a narrow focus on one aspect of it or do you consider how it will impact your life minute to minute? Which is a big thing. Like people talk about, I want to buy a cottage. And it's like, okay, let's talk about why that's important to you.

44:07And people usually imagine the great memories they're going to have with the kids and the grandkids or whatever it may be at the cottage, but they don't think about the two-hour drive and traffic on the weekend to get there or the kids spilling their drink in the backseat and messing the car up or having to go there in the winter because we have seasons in Canada to go and shut the cottage down before it gets too cold or like having to go there in the middle of the winter because a pipe burst, like all that kind of stuff. So they don't think about how it will affect their life minute to minute.

44:32They just think about the one, the one good aspect of it. And that can lead to questionable decisions. Um, this is another one. This one, man, I use this with my kids too, in a different way. Have you made a major purchase expecting it to increase your happiness? Did it? And people think about that. They reflect back on some major purchase and they think, oh, did that affect my happiness? And a lot of the times the answer is no. I use it with my kids because they'll be like, I want this new toy or whatever. And I'm like, do you remember how hard you worked to get this other toy? And they're like, yeah.

45:08I was like, how'd you feel when you got it like super excited do you ever play with it now it's like no it's like sitting in the box over there okay do you think the same thing's gonna happen with this toy that you want now and they're like yeah you're probably right uh anyway my son's like give me the toy i know honestly i've got about 100 little pool patrol doggies in my house and damien bought a giant tower for my son i said don't buy anything big damien buy something this big for my son he's got a fog on on the top of it it's got a fog on it's got cars it's got everything and i'm just It's like, I just keep stepping on the pieces.

45:38I have a bad role model for kids, unfortunately. But no, no, I get it. I get that. I try and have that conversation with him. And my son, he's 12. And he's just so, he's like, yeah, no, I'll run that risk. I'll take it. Give me the toy. Yeah, my oldest is 11, same. Yeah, they sometimes get it, but sometimes they're pretty persistent. Anyway, answer your question. You got any others on there that are good? so this is we're still on just the one section um oh this is a this is an interesting one have your values and preferences changed in the last decade do you expect them to change in the next decade because people will think they'll focus on some long-term goal i really want to accomplish this thing i'm going to make these sacrifices today to accomplish that but part of the problem with that is it's this thing called the end of history illusion which is like people change over time, but they think at any moment in time that they have become the person that they're going to be forever, which doesn't tend to be the case.

46:38And so someone makes these, like, I'm going to make these big sacrifices. I'm going to do all this stuff to try and achieve this end state, but they don't recognize that they may be a different person five years from now, 10 years from now. And that may materially change what the objectives are making the sacrifices they made to get there in hindsight, a waste. I think a good way to make yourself realize that is to look at your parents and look at how they've changed over your lifetime. You know, my mom was desperate to retire. She retired, she went back to work. That tells me that I might do that.

47:07Or, you know, when you say to people, oh, don't worry about retirement too much. You might want to work longer. I get comments going, why would anyone do that? I can't wait to quit. And I'm like, well, I look at the old people around me and 20, 30 % of them are still working past retirement. So there's a good chance. Yep, totally. And my parents are not working for money right now, but they're probably busier now than they were previously because they've taken up all these different volunteer positions and they're doing a ton of stuff. Yeah, I agree with you on that. Can you give us one more? Can we get a copy of this to share with the audience?

47:42Because I think that people would love to do these questions. Yeah, man, it's on our website. So I wrote this paper. So we had this guy named Brian Portnoy. He wrote a book called The Geometry of Wealth. We had him on our podcast and we did a year long sort of consulting engagement with him where he worked with our team of financial planners to get better at this, at these sort of softer skills. And at first I was like, this makes no sense. Why are we giving people advice that's not specifically related to finances? And it took me a while to get it, but eventually it kind of clicked and I was like, oh man, okay, this is actually really big.

48:15And I needed a way to make it really actionable though. So I went and wrote this paper. I didn't think it was going to be a big deal, but I don't know if it still is, but for years it was the most downloaded paper on our website. Um, so yeah, it, anyway, and it really did transform the way that we interact with our clients because we focus on all this stuff. Uh, it's, it's on our website, but I'll, I'll send you a link. Thanks. Um, so this is still in the same section on circumstances and adaptation, but there's a section, a subsection on income satiation points, which is what we were talking about earlier.

48:47Like when happiness plateaus with increasing income. And so some of the questions there are, how would your life change if you earned an extra$1 ,000 per month? What would you spend it on? In some cases, it's like, you know, I would pay a little bit more in rent so I can have a room for my kid instead of sharing a room. It's like, oh, that's probably pretty impactful. But sometimes it's like, whatever. I don't know. I'd buy a second Lamborghini. Yeah. You know, maybe not the best. but it's also it's also good to remember i it made me remember a time when a thousand pound would have been absolutely life-changing right and like beacon i should be grateful for the fact that now that is not the case and kind of think i'm really bad at looking back at past me and going it was hard back then you know you've done well congratulations to yourself or i think it's really important to like you said remember what you could survive on before because a lot of times you get more money you get a raise and then suddenly you like buy a new house with a bigger garden so you've got more gardening bills or you've got a new car which takes more gas whereas me obviously because i'm a bit late to this whole long-term investing i'm like i just got a raise for a thousand dollars about two months ago and i'm like well i can survive without it so i'll just stick in my pension straight away but i know if i started spending it i'll get used to having a new salary so i think yeah if you know what you can survive on you can you can deploy it a bit more tactically and if that thousand pounds is not going to produce a marked increase in your quality of life today, well, you might as well save it for tomorrow because you're probably going to get a better outcome from that down the line, right?

50:19Yeah. So that's the perpetual trade-off. In economics, it's called the marginal utility of consumption. How much happier will you be from spending money now as opposed to saving it for the future? And there's always a trade-off there because spending money now can make you happier. Like T, if you, I don't know, if there was something that you really needed or really wanted or could improve your life and you spent that money now, maybe that would be a good trade-off as opposed to saving it. I think a lot of people, when they learn about personal finance, they build the reflex to save because that's what a lot of people talk about.

50:51And it's probably a good reflex. People do need to save. But I also think there's the idea, for example, that everybody should save 10 % of their income no matter what always. I think that's problematic because for a lot of people, they probably shouldn't be saving. If someone has a rising income or expects a rising income over their life, and maybe you're there now to you, so saving is the right thing to do. But if someone has a rising income over their life when they're young maybe they shouldn't be saving i wasn't i was just enjoying it so you nailed it i know i definitely nailed it but not my not my pension but i nailed the first part of life yeah we have a we have um uh an organization in the uk like kind of like a think tanker the institute for fiscal studies and they model out retirement savings because we essentially have a linear approach of eight percent your whole life and they basically argue this doesn't accommodate for the fact that your skin in your 20s you have kids in your 30s and you have really high disposable income in your 40s and 50s and they model different paths and you see how lumpy they are and they're optimizing for lifetime spending so that you don't have this like feast and famine which i think most of us kind of relate to at different points and they conclude the same thing of it might not be right to save eight percent you don't want to sit here and put people off and say oh don't save but you also want to say to kind of a family that are struggling because you've got two young kids, it might be okay for you not to save right now and just focus on that until the kids are gone and catch up with high contributions later on.

52:16Totally. Yeah. And in economics, that's called consumption smoothing. So you smooth your consumption over time where you spend when you don't have as much and you save when you have more. But overall, the objective is to have a relatively smooth path of consumption over your lifetime, which definitionally means not having a smooth, if your income is changing over time, it means not having a smooth savings rate. Okay. I've got a couple more. There's a couple more in this section that are, I think are really interesting questions. Would you work an extra? You're doing all the work for us here. It's so good.

52:53No, go on. No, no, honestly, don't take that badly. This is like, this is gold. Okay, good. Would you work an extra three hours per day to earn more money i love that one too i feel like i really do it's almost pitch dark outside so i i i struggle i i think it's like if there was an extra three hours in the day and there was no money i would still work and i think that's my problem that you leave me alone on any time and i just start working this includes like christmas day i find it really hard to pull away from the work and yeah i don't even think it's about the money i think it's about a sense of productivity and purpose that i'm the same way so here's another one that is maybe more meaningful to you uh how much would you need to be paid to give up your favorite leisure leisure activity oh that's tough mine's basketball my favorite leisure activity is working you've got problems work your christmas you're i like going to the gym and stuff and that but and i don't think there's any money because i spend a lot of money on my fitness i never used to in the past but now it's all personal trainers and and and that's because i think it's all it's mind body and soul in that sense so i don't think there's any amount of money that you could really pay me to give up on my health in that sense i imagine you're the same right oh yeah i don't i agree there's no amount of money you could pay me to say you can never play basketball again yeah i have a my right hip is like it's wearing out i can feel it um my dad had to have his hip replaced recently.

54:22He's obviously quite a bit older than me, but I know that's coming at some point. And I think about like, I don't know what the number is, but I have maybe like a hundred competitive basketball games left in my body. And someone came and said, how much do I have to pay you to just give those up now? Like, man, honestly, there's no number. I guess a question for you on this is rather than how much money would I pay you to stop, how much money will you pay to continue playing you know in health care costs take a direct debit mate just take my card details and just yeah i mean a lot like i would pay uh i've looked at in quebec where i live you can do uh like we have public health care in canada so you can go on the wait list or whatever to to get a procedure like that in quebec there's also private clinics where you can pay to do it and i can tell you that that price is uh uh much lower than the maximum that i would be willing to pay to to stay in the game yeah uh so i don't know what's the number i don't know man what what could i afford you're gonna pay you're gonna pay i would pay i would pay it yeah up until i couldn't anymore but there's yeah if it trades off against uh you know i wouldn't sell my house probably to to do it um you wouldn't jeopardize your family's finances but you might jeopardize probably not yeah if i yeah i better take my car take my car yeah take the car i'll take the bus it's fine just take my car i know um i know i hope you don't mind talking about this and if you do we can cut it but i know i know you were diagnosed with uh cancer earlier this year and you went you went through that kind of process yeah how did that kind of how has that shaped your view on your finances your life the things that matter i've always been pretty aware of that type of thing.

56:06My mom had breast cancer when I was young and was given a very, very low probability of survival. She did survive and she's still alive today and she's fine. But ever since then, I was, I think, 11 or 12 when that happened. And that affected me probably more than I realized at the time where I was just like, I was honestly always waiting since that happened to get that news myself. I would always be like just checking my, which is probably why I found it so early, but I would always be super aware of any changes to my body. And I was always worried about that stuff. So when it happened, I was kind of like, all right, I've kind of been expecting this, honestly.

56:45Um, but it's still, it still was, it made it real and it definitely made me think about, uh, well, mortality. Cause I didn't know I ended up being fine. I was caught super early. It was not a type of testicular cancer that spreads generally. And so far I'm, I'm a year in now and I've been doing testing every three months to check for recurrence and it's all been fine. I never had to do so far at least chemo or radiation, which is some of the scary stuff. So all that was like as good as could have possibly been. But at the time that I was initially diagnosed or not even diagnosed, pre-diagnosis, the way that testicular cancer works, I mean, I hope this isn't too much medical stuff, but they tell you that there is a suspicion of testicular cancer, but they can't actually diagnose it until they've removed the testicle.

57:36Because the way that it works is that if they try and biopsy it, it can actually cause the cancer to spread just because of the way the lymphatic system connects to the testicle. So they do not biopsy testicles is my understanding. And so if there's a strong suspicion, they remove it and then they do the pathology afterwards. So all you know as the patient is there's a suspicion of cancer, but you don't know what kind. And so I start obviously reading a ton, figuring it out. Okay, there are two types of testicular cancer. One tends to be more metastatic, tends to spread. The other one doesn't.

58:12Okay, so hopefully it's the one that doesn't spread, which it ended up being. And then there's the stage. Like you don't know, even with either one, if it's been there for a long time, it could have spread to other parts of your body. So I was like, okay, now there's two types of testicular cancer. And depending on the stage for either one, there's different range of treatments. And so it's like, okay, and different survival probabilities. Testicular cancer is generally pretty good, even in the worst cases. But it's still like, I don't remember what the numbers are, but there's material differences in survival rates.

58:41So at the time of like the urologist says, we have to remove the testicle to do pathology because there's a suspicion of cancer. It's like, man, there's a massive range of potential outcomes. And that was hard. For your brain as well, for someone who you're going to go away, you're going to crunch the numbers and you're going to find everything eventually. ignorance is bliss in a way i i kind of i'm really good at parking those things i get terrible news i'm like i'm gonna put it out in a box and i'm putting it back there and it's not good for me but i would just get on with my life and go okay so right so right you know in that sense but i mean i did i kept i had to have surgery which is uh yeah it was still it was still something to go through so i had to deal with that and then as i was recovering from that i'm i did have time to just sit and think about like okay what's what's next and that's the part that was hard where it's like this, it's either going to be maybe not so bad or it's going to be like really harsh treatments and uncertain survival probabilities.

59:36So yeah, I think the biggest way that it affected me is like, I've always been pretty good about trying to trade off the present versus the future, but it definitely brought me a little bit more into the present where it was like simple stuff, man. Like, I don't know, let's, let's go to a restaurant with the kids and just chill out for a night, not make dinner. Like I would be more willing to do that probably now than I was prior to all this stuff happening and little things like that. Like let's go on a, let's go on a weekend trip to whatever, a different city and rent a hotel or an Airbnb and just not worry about that kind of spending as much.

1:00:14So yeah, I think the biggest impact was probably bringing me a little bit more into the future, even though I already tried to be pretty balanced, but it definitely, uh, it may forces you to be like, okay, I might not be here in a year. Did you tell, did you tell the kids at all? If you're honest about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When we still talk about it because I still have to go to like oncology follow-up appointments and stuff like that. So I tell them, got to go to the cancer doctor to make sure I still don't have cancer. And, uh, then the last one I get home, do you have cancer? Uh, but they get it.

1:00:46Like I, my two boys are older. They properly get it. My two girls are younger and they understand the words that we're saying. I don't think they fully grasp like what it actually means. But yeah, my, my boys were very in tune with the situation and aware of what was happening. And they're, man, so like a matter of fact and emotionally stable. They're just like, they process the information, very little emotion, be like okay well you'll do that thing that you have to do and then we'll see what the result is but hopefully it's the good one i mean i can see where they might get that yeah i know i was like why are they so analytical and like rational they seem very rational i've one question i've got for you this is so off piece with the finance but you said a minute ago that your mom's experience with cancer shaped you and changed your behaviors like do you want that same outcome for your kids in terms of do you want them to worry about themselves going forwards is that was that a positive thing for you in that sense i know it led you discovering a tough question man because it's it's not positive like i've worried about that probably every day ever since my mom was sick and that's probably not healthy now on the other hand i probably caught mine so early because i'm so worried about it like t you mentioned you worry about it too but like i used to check my nuts all the time and Yeah, you were like, ignorance is bliss, right?

1:02:12No, because my grandma passed away from breast cancer, but like I went the opposite direction. I was like, I'm just not going to think about it. Like, obviously it was very sad, but like I didn't take it onto myself being like, it might happen to me. But like you said, if I'm in the shower and I'm like, what the frick is that? And then my girl's like, it's an ingrown hair. And I'm like, thank God. But like, I still, every single time, like my heart palpitations, like I'm not good with like surgeries or doctors. When I got my teeth taken out, I made them sedate me. but i was like no i'm you know you're not pulling my teeth out put me to sleep so yeah um but yeah really scary you kind of want your kids to have that paranoia don't you but you don't want it to affect their i don't know man i don't want them to live with that sort of fear that i have always lived with but i would also hope that they catch something like that early like i did so i that's a tough one i think like you approach it in the way that you have and you you say it's no big deal because i found it early it's not something to be worried about but here's how you check you know yeah and uh do that every couple of weeks and that's yeah and that's part like women need to do that don't they and i think men we're meant to yeah men should but we don't have that kind of conversation you know i think it's even controversial whether men should do it because it can lead to yeah i tried to read about that and uh yeah it wasn't super obvious to me that everyone agrees that you should be doing self-examinations i i had always been super in tune with that but yeah i'm not a i'm not a doctor i don't know don't take my advice on whether to check your nuts.

1:03:33For me, it was, uh, I would check periodically. Like it wasn't like I was checking every day, but I actually got hit with a ball in the nuts when I was playing basketball and whatever it hurt. And, but it was a, maybe it was a finger, not a ball. It might've been a finger, like someone coming off a screen or something and it just got smacked in the nut and it hurt, but I was like, whatever. Like I kept playing, but then it, the pain like didn't go away. Uh, and so I told my wife, like, listen, my, my testicle like hurts. It's super sore and it's kind of swollen. It won't go down. Uh, and then actually, you know what, because it was swollen, I, I, then I like poked around and did more of an involved self-examination and I found this little tiny bump.

1:04:17It's like, all right. So I told my wife about that. She booked a doctor's appointment. So you're going to the doctor right now, which is good. Cause I, I don't know if I would have done the same thing. And that doctor didn't do much, but they referred me to a urologist and to get an ultrasound. And that's how, that was two years ago. And initially it was so small that the urologist was like, listen, there is a thing there, but a lot of guys have things on their testicles. And it's so small right now that it's not at a point where we actually worry about it. Like we wouldn't do anything because like I mentioned earlier, they can't do a biopsy.

1:04:49so we tracked it so then it was a year after the initial ultrasound that it came back and it was had grown to a point where the urologist was like yeah okay this is now suspicious of being cancer so we gotta we gotta do the surgery but yeah all started with getting hit in the nuts thank god for that guy like the urologist actually said that the person that hit me in the nuts may well have saved my life oh you go back and tell him do you know it's just a random I can return the favor, be like, there's one for you.

1:05:21But no, thank you for sharing that because you don't have to. And I think like influences many things and like you're a big financial influence, but I think like your ability to talk about that like you do and be comfortable to do it will inspire other people. I know I'm going home tonight and checking my notes. A hundred percent. Yeah, you know, if I find it, I'll thank you. so i i talked about it really openly on on the rational reminder podcast because i just felt like i didn't want i couldn't i couldn't hide it like we do a podcast every week and so i missed one i think i've only missed i've missed two podcast episodes ever one of them was because cameron interviewed somebody in person or maybe twice actually where i wasn't there um and so i wasn't on those episodes but then the other one was i was the day after my my surgery i just wasn't in any kind of shape to do the interview.

1:06:09So I missed that episode and I just felt like I didn't know what the future was going to look like. And so I didn't want to try and hide it and be like weird about not being on episodes randomly and not saying what. So I just decided I was like going to be super upfront with the audience. This is what's happening even pre-diagnosis. And people were, it was received really well. Everyone was like, you know, whatever, offering their words of encouragement, whatever. But the craziest thing is that I heard from, I can't remember if it was one or two people. I've heard from a bunch of people who went and got checked, but I heard from a couple of people who had been worried about something on their nuts, heard me talk about it.

1:06:50That caused them to go and get it checked out and they received a diagnosis and had to have surgery. And they're like, man, you talking about that probably saved my life. So I'm like, it was a little awkward to talk about, but I'm glad that I have been open about it, even if it helped just a couple of people. Well, every conversation you have could have that impact because you're speaking to a whole new audience today that might not listen to your podcast in a similar way. True. So, you know, I don't want to make this about me because the episode's about you, but I got randomly assaulted on a night out by a complete stranger, a sucker punch to the side of the head, and I hit my face off the floor pretty badly and it kind of just exploded my face a bit.

1:07:27Was in hospital, surgery, got home after, I've been up for like 48 hours at this point. And I felt really compelled to just turn the camera on and say to my audience, this has happened. Because it would be very noticeable on camera, let's put it that way. His face was messed up. Yeah, it was a bad way. And I just did it. And I put the video out and I posted it. And then I just got like hundreds of, thousands of exaggeration, hundreds of men saying the exact same happened to me. And I never told anyone. or my brother died because of a random attack, like really common thing, just male random attacks of violence.

1:08:08And all these people just reaching out, just saying, it's so nice that you did that because I felt weak because I got attacked and it's really helped me. I think it's anything, I'm radically honest now with my own audience. I had a hair transplant recently and I just said it, you know, I got no, I don't think anything good comes from kind of sitting on those male issues. And, you know, you are a man that men follow, you know, so you can lead from the front with all points, including your nuts. Yeah, yeah. So there's the two guys that said that they got the diagnosis. That was super impactful for me to learn, but there were probably in the hundreds of people that reached out to say, either that they've been through this before, they're going through it now, or that they have one testicle for some other reason.

1:08:57but a lot of guys that have one one testicle which is kind of funny oh i mean do we end it there is that is that is that where we we finish it do you want to do you want to leave us with any form of financial wisdom please just to pivot it away for people uh is there anything that you think you know is the bit of financial information that are that are already you would like to think like if they watch your content what's the one thing they should take away from it or the one overarching lesson. I think that the big thing, and this is why I did the recent video on investing 101, is that good investing or smart investing is really simple.

1:09:33You need to use low-cost index funds. You need to be globally diversified. You have to figure out your asset allocation. But once you figure those things out, which I don't think are terribly hard, and I talk about some of that stuff in that video, you got to be disciplined. You got to pick a portfolio and a strategies you can stick with and you have to stick with it. You have to save the right amount, but not too much as we talked about. But it's not that hard. And I think a lot of people are intimidated. I think a lot of people who are not intimidated are probably doing the wrong things. They're probably overconfident and doing stuff like, I don't know, trading options or trying to trade stocks and all that kind of stuff.

1:10:11But yeah, if there was one thing that people watching my content would come away with, It's that you should own low cost index funds and stay invested for the long term. But I made that video because I talked to somebody that lives near where I live. And we saw each other at the gym. And they were like, hey, I found your podcast. I've been listening to it. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. Like it's so cool to meet someone locally that's listening to my podcast. And they started talking about their portfolio that they designed based on what they'd understood from the podcast. And it was like not what I would have suggested.

1:10:51And so that's why I went and tried to make a video. Like here's exactly what you should be thinking about and doing. But yeah, even for someone who has watched my content, it's not always super obvious what you should be doing. That's not just you, just to reassure you there. I have people come up to me all the time and go, I watch all your content. I really love it. Can you check my portfolio? I'm like, okay, sure. I'll have a look. and then it's just like NVIDIA and just a lot of tech stocks. And I'm like, this is what you got from watching me? I literally say in every video, I buy a global index inside of a tax efficient account and that's it.

1:11:25And then it's like, you're all in on tech. So I don't take that as like a you problem. That's good. I'm glad it's not just me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, thank you so much for your time, especially for, I mean, all of it. We've gone through the research, actually gone through the emotion and then sharing the story at the end i think is really enjoyed it we were both we filmed six episodes in two days and this is this final one and it's pretty dark here we're both tired but i feel completely energized before this i was knocking on red bull we were both yawning and then yeah i was really excited to talk to you obviously because i love your content but i was i was flagging and now i'm ready i could talk to you for another two hours but but we won't because you you know you've got a life to live hey man i feel the same way i could keep hanging out and chatting with you guys for uh for a long time no thank you so much honestly really appreciate it i think the audience will love it so yeah legend legend thank you awesome thanks guys no worries ben felix what a legend what do you think about that episode i just got that song in my head you know like what a man man yeah i got a bit of a man crush on ben felix a bit it's just a what a guy stand up guy you know like don't meet your heroes i met one and he's a legend yeah he was just a stand-up guy lovely the whole way around like an all-round good human being smart tool nails like the academic rigorous stuff well researched but also the human stuff and you know seems like he's a good dad as well and had a laugh with us some of the questions he asked his clients i thought were really good about like what what makes you happy it's not just about how many what returns do you want but like all these other questions like how much money would it take for you to not work or like how much would you get paid to yeah i was I was worried when I said to him, you're doing Agile Forest, that he thought I meant that this was bad.

1:13:08But I was like, I'm loving this section. I could have just gone through those. Yeah, I wish everyone brought those kind of questions. We'll link that paper, like we said. We'll link his website so you can check it out as well, because obviously there's loads of good work on there. And we mentioned the dispute with Elroy Dimson in that one. So we'll link that episode here so you can check that one out. It's not really a dispute. They're not got beef, but it's more just they disagree on that. They agree on some things, they just disagree on that. They agree on most things. it's just that the home bias point the different points of view so we'll link that episode for you here