Financial Expert: The MOST CONTROVERSIAL Investing Myths That Cost You Money! | Ben Felix

21:35Ben Felix:But yeah, it's all in a single fund. How often do you check your portfolio? Almost never. I couldn't even tell you what it's worth right now. And do you have then someone that's managing your portfolio? Yeah. Yeah. So I have an advisor through my firm. Now, it's in one fund, so most of their advising is on, you know, how much should I be contributing to my registered accounts this year or right now or whatever? Or should I do this for tax purposes or whatever? And so in practice, then what you do is you get paid out from YouTube from your job and then your advisor will just take that money and throw it in this account and you don't even check it.

22:09Yeah. What's the strongest argument against a one fund portfolio?

22:14Ben Felix:You could make some tax arguments that maybe there are fewer tax loss harvesting opportunities with a single fund. I don't love that argument. ETFs are so tax efficient, like you mentioned VT, the funds that I'm talking about in Canada are extremely tax efficient. So the idea that maybe you're missing some tax loss harvesting opportunities, I think you're probably making up for that by how tax efficient the single fund is in the first place. people love complexity. As you said, people have a bias for wanting to do stuff, having components in their portfolio. Maybe that makes some people feel more engaged, but I don't know, man, not having to rebalance, not having to worry about anything.

22:47Ben Felix:It's, it's really nice. What would you consider to be the perfect portfolio? No. Does that include real estate, cash, treasuries, gold? There is no universally perfect portfolio. So let's start there. There's a really interesting book actually where a whole bunch of Nobel laureates were interviewed by another professor at MIT about what their definition of the perfect portfolio is. I think this would make a great video. I just haven't made it yet. And everybody has a different definition. And I think that's really telling just about investing and portfolio management in general, that you can take all these brilliant people who have literally shaped the field of finance and they don't agree on what the perfect portfolio looks like.

23:28Ben Felix:And so how should, you know, what does my opinion matter on what the perfect portfolio is. So I don't have a universal answer. My portfolio is global equities with a Canadian home country bias. So that's relevant for Canadians. For Americans, it's a little bit different. You could still argue for a bit of a home country bias, but US is such a big part of the market anyway. Anyway, so Canadian home country bias, the rest global market capitalization weighted. My portfolio is very similar to an index fund, but it does tilt a little bit more towards small cap and value stocks, which is like, I don't know, it's a small optimization that I like, but for all intents and purposes, it's very similar to an index fund.

24:08Ben Felix:I own a house. I don't own gold. I don't own any other real estate assets. I have some cash, probably more cash than I would tell most people to have, but it's kind of nice having cash. What percent do you have in cash? In percentage terms, it's not a huge amount. In dollar terms, it feels kind of big, but it's... Is it like 5 % cash? Below 5%. Oh, that's not... It's like 2%, 1 %? It's probably close to 4%. You know what? It's probably... If I can include everything, it's below 3%. Why is that... It feels like a big dollar amount. I don't know. I look at it, I'm like, I should really... Oh, so we got money back to McGee over here.

24:48Okay, Mr. Deep Pockets. I mean, 3 % has got millions of dollars, Jeff. I mean, he is managing$8 billion.

24:55Ben Felix:That's not my$8 billion. Are you not a billionaire yet? Okay, got it. To me, that sounds really reasonable. Yeah. Why do you feel like it's too much? It's basically like global index fund portfolio, a house, some cash. Why do I feel like the cash is too much? I don't know, man, because I know that cash has a low expected return. I know that in real terms, it's probably losing money over the long term. And I don't have any concrete reason to have it right now. But it's like, I don't know. We have to do something in the house. It's just nice to have cash there. So speaking of savings, do you think the S &P 500 is a reasonable savings account?

25:31Ben Felix:It depends how big your spending liabilities are relative to your portfolio. If you might need$1 ,000 next year or sometime in the next six months and you have$10 million invested in stocks, I'm not worried about it. But if you need$1 million next year and you have $2 million invested in the market, I'd maybe think about taking some of that out of the market. So it really depends on the proportion that you need liquidity on. So how much should people be saving? It's another tough one. It really depends on each individual situation and the person's goals and all that kind of stuff. But there's been some research on this.

26:05Ben Felix:Somewhere between 10 % at the low end and maybe a little bit higher than that if you want to be more aggressive is reasonable if you start saving at a normal point in your life. It can be higher than that if you want to have a really aggressive retirement goal. But I don't like any, everyone's got to save 10%. Everyone's got to save 20 % of their income. I don't like that. I think everybody needs to sit down, look at what their specific goals are, and map out how much they should be saving. It sounds like you put a strong emphasis on making goals, coming up with a plan, knowing what you want, and then making sure all of your decisions, beliefs, behaviors all serve that one goal.

26:42Where do people go wrong when they set goals? Because if everything hinges on your ability to set good goals for yourself, how does someone know if they're setting good goals? And what would be a failure of setting goals?

26:52Ben Felix:Failure setting goals will be looking back and realizing that you set the wrong goals after you've spent 20 years trying to achieve whatever the thing you set out to achieve was. There is pretty interesting research suggesting that people are quite bad at identifying the goals that are actually important to them. But there's also some pretty interesting research showing how you can overcome that to an extent. A big one is using what's called categorical prompts. So it's really just giving people the categories that important goals might fall into. and that helps them ideate goals that are actually meaningful to them.

27:23Ben Felix:So that's a big one. And then another one, and we have this research up on our website, is presenting people with a master list of goals, which is a pretty cool idea. It's basically take a whole bunch of goals that other people have generated and put them all into one big list. It's not actually all goals you could possibly have, but it's an approximation of all goals you could possibly have. And then people can go through that list and pick off goals that might be important to them. So those two exercises produce goals that people will later reflect on as being more meaningful to them. Let's say we're providing the average viewer for direction, for advice on setting correct goals.

27:57What would, if you were to distill it down to like one decision or thing that they should do, actionable thing, what would you say that is?

28:04Ben Felix:Yeah, so the process that we use, and we have an app on our website that people can use if they want to do this. We ask people to write down their goals. We then ask them to double the list of goals. Just gets you to think a little bit harder. then we present them with the categories so we for categories we use the items in the perma model which is a model of of well-being that comes from positive psychology but it basically suggests that the the ingredients to a good life are positive emotion which is feeling good right now like we're having a good time talking that's positive emotion i'm enjoying a coffee later whatever that's a positive emotion uh engagement so being engaged in tasks uh that are uh that meet your skill level I would say like this now recording a podcast is engaging.

28:49Ben Felix:Relationships is having meaningful relationships. Meaning is doing things that are larger than yourself and accomplishment, which is accomplishing hard things like getting to a million subscribers on a YouTube channel, for example. So you give people those prompts. These are the categories that important goals might fall into. And then they fill out a few more goals. And then the final step is they review the master list of goals that other people have prevented. And you get, in the end, you get a list of goals that have gone through this iterative process and people tend to find the exercise really helpful.

29:17What are the best goals that people should be writing down that you've noticed lead to the highest amount of happiness? Now, I got to say, I don't care how much money you have because everyone loves finding a deal. There's just something about paying less than you should that just never gets old. And that's exactly why I love today's sponsor, Whatnot. For me, it's the same feeling live on your phone and we are giving away$500 and whatnot credit later. so you better stick around. Whatnot is the number one live stream shopping app. You can score Pokemon cards, sports cards, toys, Legos, Funko Pops, electronics, tools, coins, even snacks, candy, meat, and seafood.

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30:41That's whatnot.com slash invite slash iced coffee hour or just scan the QR code on the screen. And if you follow us on WhatNot, you're automatically entered to win$500 in WhatNot credit. Winner is picked one month from today. Once again, that is whatnot.com slash invite slash iced coffee hour or you could just click the link down below in the description. I absolutely love running the podcast, like filming with guests, YouTube strategy, traveling. It's all so fun. But there is one thing that I genuinely despise, and that is back-end paperwork. No joke, if I have to do anything with payroll, taxes, or benefits, it'd be the ****.

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32:26Once again, that is gusto.com slash I-C-E-D with the link down below in the description. What are the best goals that people should be writing down that you've noticed lead to the highest amount of happiness?

32:39Ben Felix:Yeah, it's an interesting question. The most common goal when we did our goals survey, which is what we used to generate our master list, was financial independence. It wasn't early financial independence. It was just financial independence at some point. So that is definitely a goal. And I mean, it's a goal that everybody should have because at some point we're, as humans who age, not going to be able to earn income. So I think that is a very good goal. I think you have to be careful with how aggressively you pursue it. We can talk more about that if you guys want. And then there are lots of other interesting ones about relationships and time with family.

33:10Ben Felix:Time comes up a lot, just freedom of time, which is related to financial independence, but not necessarily the same thing. But if you just think through the PERMA model, positive motion engagement relationships, meaning an accomplishment, there are tons of good goals that stem from that that will contribute to people living lives that they enjoy more. Now, in terms of maximizing returns, going back to investing, what are your thoughts on margin for people who are young? Because I have a note here that your argument is that young people should potentially borrow to invest. And I would love for you to explain the rationale behind this.

33:43The economic models on lifetime saving and asset allocation suggest is that you want to reach your lifetime exposure to stocks as early as possible.

33:53Ben Felix:Now, if you have$10 ,000 in your investment account, but you have$3 million of future earnings that you will eventually save, but you don't yet have access to, and your lifetime allocation to stock should be whatever, 70 % or something, then the amount you should have in stocks today, based on economic models, is much higher than your available savings. And therefore you should borrow to invest, to get closer to your optimal lifetime exposure to stocks. Now, should people use margin? The downside of margin is that you can lose everything. You can have a total blowup. I think that's very unpleasant and can deter people from investing afterwards.

34:34Ben Felix:So I don't tell people to use margin. I think conceptually leverage for young people does make sense. There are lots of other ways that people can get leveraged. People use leverage to an extent when they take out a mortgage to buy a house. Some people use leveraged ETFs. I don't have a super strong opinion on those. But yeah, so it's a good idea in theory. But should people actually go out and borrow on margin to invest when they're 22 years old, I'd be pretty hesitant. It was interesting. Chris Camillo was making the argument that people who are young should be buying a 2 to 3x leveraged S &P 500 index and said that even at 2x leverage, if you're just going to be dollar cost averaging.

35:12You might see an 80 % decline if the market collapses like 2008. But if you keep buying in long term, it should outperform. What are your thoughts on something like that, which is really aggressive, but as long as you could stay the path, assuming you're not going to panic sell or go to zero? Honestly, I don't hate it.

35:32Ben Felix:I'm a little hesitant to say, yes, S &P 500 only because that's not really a diversified portfolio. The U.S. market has gone through very long periods where it delivered no returns. The general idea of using leverage for young people and using leverage ETFs to get it is not terrible. I'd be very careful about who should actually go and implement that. I think behavioral could be very, very difficult for a lot of people, but I don't hate it. I don't hate his comment. So who should? I'm curious because I think about it logically and it does sort of make sense. Obviously, there's going to be a little bit of decay because you are paying that margin fee or you're paying the expense ratio on a leveraged ETF that's usually going to be a little bit higher than the base form of the ETF.

36:15Ben Felix:But you know what? So we had a professor on from Arizona who's done a study on, his was looking at single stock leverage products. He's actually less concerned about this stuff. We had another Yale professor too that talked about the same thing. I brought up the leverage decay. It's the volatility decay that people worry about. And both those guys said, that's not really the right way to think about it. Like that's just part of the cost of leverage, but you look at going, go and take out a margin loan or go and take out a, whatever, a bank loan and the leveraged ETFs overall with the total cost of implementing leverage through that, that medium is going to be pretty competitive.

36:48Ben Felix:I don't worry about that stuff. I think the behavioral issues are, are much larger. So if you are to do leveraged ETFs, then what would make the most sense is something similar to what you practice, which is you kind of just buy it and then let it sit. And you don't even check your portfolio probably oh yeah i wouldn't be trying to go in and out of the market using leveraged etfs to but it is if you're holding 10 15 20 years there you don't really see a problem in buying you know vt leveraged so again i would be like recommending recommending leverage uh in my profession is like super super dangerous uh so i'm not saying everybody should use leverage i don't want listeners to think that that's what i'm what i'm saying i think for people who can psychologically handle it, who really understand the implications of what they're doing, the ups and downs that can come, the costs of doing it, all that kind of stuff.

37:36Here's where I'm getting at this. You are talking about this from a very academic standpoint of research and history. And then I think there's also a behavior component to this. For sure. Probably I'd say behavior is more important than what's academically correct. Would you agree with this?

37:54Ben Felix:Yeah. In the paper that I mentioned that argues for this approach, they do kind of acknowledge that the behavior is a big issue. The argument that they make in the paper is that if people understood the long-term benefits, the behavioral aspects would be a lot more palatable. People don't realize how big the potential benefits are and that's why it's so behaviorally difficult. So they do talk about that. But talking to actual investors, as I do, I would be really worried about most people successfully implementing this type of strategy over a long period of time. How important is behavior when it comes to investing like this?

38:30Ben Felix:Not just like this. I would say investing, period. Behavior is kind of everything. Investing is simple but not easy. I didn't come up with that. Lots of people said that before, but it's, you know, you buy index funds. Very simple. But how many people actually do that and hold on for the long run? Not a ton. So should people be more afraid about losing money in the markets or more afraid about losing purchasing power of cash? without question, cash. Without question. Over a 30-year horizon, cash is much riskier than the stock market. And from your perspective, if someone wants to save more money to invest, is it better for them to cut back or try to make more money?

39:13Ben Felix:Make more money is my opinion. People get pretty upset when I say that. When I make the point that I made earlier that maybe not everybody should be trying to save as much as they possibly can as early as possible. People get really upset when I say that, when I say people should maybe just earn more money, they get really upset about that too. But I think there are lots of ways people can earn more money. I don't think you guys would disagree. You guys are both doing stuff. You're using your time in ways that allow you to earn more money than you could at, I don't know, working at, I'm not going to call anything out, but a job that makes less money.

39:46Ben Felix:There are things that you can do. Not everything is in your control, and I completely acknowledge that. but there are things that people can do to improve their situation. But that being said, it still does make sense for a lot of people to probably save more than their spending. Because I do think that the US and probably just North America in general has a spending issue. I agree. And so if someone is dissatisfied with where they're at financially, for 99 % of the people within that population, it's probably they're spending too much. What sort of spending strategies or expenses do you think people waste their money on or strategies they should implement in order to improve their financial performance?

40:24Ben Felix:I'm not a fan of budgeting personally. Never clicked with me. But I think that what you can do is define the amount that you need to save in order to reach whatever your goal is and work backwards from there. And sometimes you might realize that the amount of saving you have to do to achieve the goal is way too aggressive. You want to retire at 35, so you have to save 60 % of your income, which means you're living on whatever, $1 ,200 a month or something. that probably doesn't sound palatable to a lot of people so you adjust your goals but i much prefer and this is what i do personally i know how much i need to save each year i save that and i don't really worry too much about the rest of the spending um but i i'm also you know i'm not going to restaurants and just ordering water but i think i'm naturally pretty pretty frugal so i think if someone has a spending problem that probably requires deeper reflection.

41:14I'm curious for you, Graham, because like you said, back in the day, you would do a lot of these like frugal life hacks and stuff like that. Realistically, those actual decisions did not probably amount to a very large change in your overall net worth now. If we fully remove that from the behavioral stacking that you probably did, like the habits that you formed, the habits are valuable, but the decisions themselves were probably not very productive to your current financial portfolio. Maybe. Maybe they were. And the reason I say that is because back then I was dumping everything into real estate.

41:51And I would basically be at zero dollars in my bank account at the end of the year because my goal was to have 100 % invested. And so by December 31st, I'd be spending money on renovations. It would go to a down payment. I would be zero. And then I'd have commissions coming in like January to basically bump me back up. And so I invested everything. So I don't know. I think in the big picture, no. But if that prevented me from buying one property back in 2012, let's just say, then that would be pretty significant today.

42:23Ben Felix:I think you're in a unique situation because if you weren't that guy, it would have changed your content and the appeal of your content. But also I want to push back because I got the same experience like we're talking about going to a restaurant and ordering water my experience at the restaurant was not the food that i got and ate my experience was going to the restaurant with friends i got the same experience as everyone else minus a 30 entree because i ate at home same with going to the bar like i would go to the bar with friends would never get a drink but we can go to a liquor store down the street and all by one bottle yeah one bottle pour it in a thing like this, drink it outside of the bar, have fun, and then we walk in the bar.

43:10Now you already got your drinks, but for a fraction of the price, and then we just get waters. No one knows. You get, you know, just a water and a glass, and oh, you know what I used to? Bad day to be a restaurant owner. You know what's crazy? Bad day. This unlocked a memory. Great day to be a liquor store owner. This unlocked a memory, by the way. I'd ask for water with ice in it, and they said, oh, by the way, could I get a lime? I'd throw the lime in there. No one has any idea. it's just water. I just remembered that. I don't know how small businesses would survive if people, if everyone did that.

43:39I am curious if you could go back and give yourself now, let's just say you gave yourself$10 ,000 from what you own right now and you had to spend it and you couldn't invest it to your 18 year old self. And so you had$10 ,000 to spend over the next 10 years and extra$1 ,000 a year just on dinners or whatever it is. Would you do that? Yes. You would do that. Yeah. Even though you could not invest the$10 ,000. Yeah,$10 ,000 today. If I could give it to myself back then, I 100 % would.

44:10Ben Felix:But it's probably not$10 ,000 today, though. It's$10 ,000. Oh, exactly. Giving it back to him back then, it would be like losing$10 ,000 today, but receiving$2 ,000 back then. Let's just say that$10 ,000 back then is just now through real estate and this and that worth$60 ,000. Would I take$60 ,000 today to give it? Probably not. But if it's$10 ,000, I would. what's the number i mean i have no idea i would have i would have no clue how to how to compound what went to which property and then to what index fund what number would you do it not 60 but you would do it at 10 uh maybe like 30 30 to 10 30 to 10 yeah and giggles but at the same time i got 3x over i mean it's 18 to 35 so 17 years so 3x over 17 years.

44:56That's probably about... Yeah, that sounds about on track with the S &P. It's probably enough. Close enough. But like I said, I didn't miss out on experiences at all. I got the same experience. I just found a way to do it cheaper. I think a lot of people could put into practice the things that you did when you were younger, for sure. Because I 100 % admit for most people, it is a spending issue.

45:18Ben Felix:Yeah, I agree with that. I think spending is a huge problem. A lot of people don't know what they spend. They don't realize the impulses that they have to spend. And then all of a sudden they have no money. And the problem with this whole issue is that because of compounding, 20, 30 years down the road, when you realize you had a spending problem, there's not a whole lot you can do about it. You can't undo the saving that you didn't do because you can't catch up with the compounding that you missed. So those that do end up saving money, you argue, of course, ETFs all the way. But I am curious within ETFs, I know that it is the objective of these ETFs to get as much money into the ETF as possible so then they can collect their expense ratio fee.

46:01It's easier to sell a product, the product being the ETF, if it's not as volatile, if it appeals to the investor's emotion because it's easier to digest as an investor, less volatility. But because of that, do you think that they could be compromising returns over time, risk-adjusted returns, because they're trying to sell something a little bit more conservative?

46:25Ben Felix:I don't know about the conservative angle, but I think that this issue of ETFs being created to be marketable is a massive issue. I did a video earlier this year that I called the rise of ETF slop, where I basically said that we're in this age now where there are hundreds of ETFs, maybe even more now, being created every year for all kinds of wacky investment strategies that appeal to the biases that investors have. So I talk in that video, I think it was about covered call ETFs. I talked about thematic ETFs, like you got your semiconductors, you got your whatever, AI ETFs, all that kind of stuff.

46:59Ben Felix:There were a couple of other ones too. Single stock ETFs, you can buy a covered call leveraged single stock ETF, which is like, it's wild, but they're attracting a ton of assets. And the crazy thing about them is that they have high fees. And so an issuer can come out and create whatever, 15 new ETFs that cover individual stocks. If one of them attracts a bunch of assets because it does well over the short term, because that stock gets a bunch of media coverage or whatever, it makes it worthwhile for them to have issued all of those ETFs. And so we're in an environment now where there are all of these financial products that are behaviorally very appealing because whatever, they pay a 10 % yield or a buffer ETFs.

47:35Ben Felix:That was the other one that I had in that video. So they're capped on the upside and the downside. And again, to your point, that's very behaviorally attractive. If you listen to the story, oh, I don't have to lose money and I can invest in stocks, that sounds amazing. People don't realize how much upside they're giving up in the long run. And all those products tend to have higher fees. And so you get in the situation where the ETF issuers want it to be profitable as they should be. And so they create products that are appealing to people, that are very marketable, that have higher fees. And those are the ones that get advertised to investors and people buy them.

48:04Ben Felix:What do you think about covered call ETFs? I mean I've done I did I think three videos on this topic last year and I I don't know who should actually invest I think a lot of people do because they pay high income yields and that feels really good but who should actually invest in that strategy I I'm at a loss like I really don't I agree I would well I would argue that the people who should invest in that are the people who mentally want to see that income coming in and they they like to see that I think it's like 8 % a year that's a consistent dividend without a ton of volatility and just psychologically just makes them feel better to know, hey, if the market goes up or down, I'm making my 8%.

48:46Ben Felix:But you're not, right? Because if the portfolio crashes 30%, you don't get 8 % on your initial investment. There's volatility in that too. But I think that people don't understand, the thing people don't understand with covered call funds, covered calls in general, just as a strategy is that it introduces asymmetry into the distribution of outcomes. It's basically like it reduces volatility. So if you look at a covered call ETF or whatever, you look at its sharp ratio, that looks really good. It's a good sharp ratio. It's got less volatility than the market, but most of that volatility reduction is coming on the upside.

49:18Ben Felix:You're keeping most of the downside. You get a little bit of premium buffer, but you're keeping most of the downside risk and you're completely capped in your upside. What does that mean for Jack's option strategy? Okay. So I want to just think through, like you talk about getting whatever 3 % a week or 1 % a week, whatever. Well, a lot of that, every, I hope every time I've said that it's more of like tongue in cheek. It's kind of like, yeah, you know, I get 3 % a week. Obviously you do not average 3 % a week. That makes zero sense as an investor. You can't do that. That being said, I'm glad to hear you say that.

49:52Yeah. That being said, but I do think that it's not a bad strategy to play around with, with a little bit of money on the side. And I've been doing it. And so far, it's tended to work pretty well.

50:05Ben Felix:Have you benchmarked your covered call returns relative to the underlying stock? Well, as of late, yes. And relative to the underlying stock, I have underperformed. Which is kind of what you'd expect. I mean, listen, I've heard you guys talk about this stuff. I know it's a small part of your portfolio and I know you enjoy doing it. And it's like, that's fine. But as a strategy, what people have to understand about covered calls is that the expectation is that you're going to underperform the underlying structurally. That is what is going to happen. And if you want that and you understand that you're giving up upside volatility, but not downside volatility, which basically means if it goes down, you still capture most of that.

50:42Ben Felix:But if it bounces back, you don't capture that. That's just, that's mechanically the way a covered call works. If people get that and they have fun doing it, like who am I to say they shouldn't do it? I just think people have to understand what the expectation is when they go into that type of strategy. What do you think about the opposite strategy of buying call options or buying put options then? Well, two very different strategies. Obviously, buying call options is a way to get leverage. So I don't think people should, I'm not going to say everybody should be buying calls, but we talked earlier, but there can be some benefits to leverage in a long-term portfolio.

51:15Ben Felix:when we had Robert Merton on our podcast, who's a Nobel laureate, and he's done a ton of the original research on life cycle asset allocation, how should people invest over their lifetimes. He's an advocate for using a bit of leverage as well. And he talked about on our podcast that he would actually rather people use call options than margin because you can't completely blow yourself up with a call option, whereas with margin you can. But the other comment that he made that was really interesting is that he would not advocate for people buying call options themselves, he would like to see it embedded in a financial product.

51:47Ben Felix:So you buy an ETF that gives you exposure to the S &P 500 plus calls to give you some leverage, and then you just buy the ETF, and it's very simple. But Merton's point was people shouldn't be trying to buy calls themselves because people are error prone, and there's a lot of risk that you screw something up. So given all these strategies, who should buy individual stocks, and when is that the right move to make? I think you guys are great examples where I think you have a lot of fun doing it, uh it gives you something to talk about it's entertaining to listen to you talk about it but those are all reasons that people do buy individual stocks it's pretty boring to show up to a dinner party uh especially if you're not ordering food and and say that you know you just buy index funds but you guys have you guys have great stories to tell uh so you can not order food and talk about i can't remember the name of the stock that you guys were talking about recently but the you have stocks to talk about you have stories and that's that's true because my robin hood loss ended up becoming one of our most viewed clips it's been reposted so many times i think cumulatively we probably get 50 million views in that robin just me losing money on robin hood so i made some of the money i've lost so much more than that clip generated but it helps helps offset some of the losses on that there are other niche scenarios too like some people who are directors of companies are required to hold stock um some people who are insiders at companies that have gone public and hold a huge amount of stock with a low cost basis.

53:12Ben Felix:In many cases, they want to continue holding the stock, not just for tax reasons, but because there's a huge sentimental value. And it's like, if that person has diversified enough for them to be set for the rest of their life and they want to continue holding the stock of the company they helped to start, I'm not going to tell them that's a bad thing to do. So there are reasons like that, but who should like commit to picking individual stock as part of their long-term investment strategy for reasons, like for objectively objective reasons, like it's going to improve their long-term outcome? I honestly don't think anybody.

53:40Is it possible, though, that we can continue to see these 10 to 15 % returns every single year? Because my concern is that we've all gotten very spoiled that for the last 15 plus years, we're seeing 12 % annualized returns. What do you think are the returns that we're probably going to see over the next 10 years?

53:57Ben Felix:We, as a firm, produce capital market expectations, similar to what Vanguard does, I guess. I think ours are a bit higher, though. But I think we're just below 7 % a year as our long-term expected return for, that's a globally diversified portfolio with a Canadian home country bias, whatever. It's probably roughly similar for just a global market portfolio, maybe a little bit lower because the US is a bigger weight, but whatever, call it between six and 7%, I think is a reasonable long-term expectation. That's a nominal return. So before inflation, I don't think the returns we've seen in the US market in recent history are normal.

54:31Ben Felix:I did a video on that. I felt like it was a bit of a throwaway video, maybe a couple of years ago, where I just talked about what have the actual returns been of global stock markets throughout history, of the US market throughout periods other than this one that we're in right now. And it's pretty clear that this current period is an anomaly. It's not a period that we should expect to repeat forever. And I think there's a danger there where people look at 10 % is such a common number. I think that was the title of my video, do stocks return 10 % a year? And the thumbnail says, no, they do not.

55:01Ben Felix:But I think that 10 % number is dangerous because it leads people to think through long-term financial decisions on the assumption of 10 % returns. And that can lead to mistakes. How much international equities should people own? The easiest starting point. I love that there's a quote from Eugene Fama, who is a Nobel Prize winning economist. He's the guy that kind of created the idea of market efficiency, which is the idea that the market prices contain all available information. in an efficient market, you shouldn't try and pig stock. So like this whole concept of index investing really sits on top of Fama's research.

55:35Ben Felix:His comment about answering your question is, you've got to talk yourself out of the market portfolio. So you look at market capitalization weights, the market has priced in the optimal asset allocation approximately. So look at that as a starting point and you've got to talk yourself out of it. Now, you can talk yourself out of it to an extent. If you're an American, maybe you do have a bit of a home country bias. If you're Canadian, as I am and as we reflect on our portfolios, again, maybe you have a bit of a home country bias. But market capitalization weight should be the starting point. So that's whatever, 60 to 65 % U.S.

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57:36Ben Felix:I don't know if you can know that. We have a tool on our website that, in my opinion is the best, it's called a psychometric risk tolerance assessment tool. So it's basically like a, it's a bunch of survey questions that you go through and it spits out a range of asset allocations that make sense for you. I think doing something like that so you have an idea of what you're comfortable with makes a lot of sense. And if you're more conservative than that, then that'll help to tell you. I think a lot of people probably are more conservative than they should be. I think tools like target date funds, there is research on this out of Boston College, I believe, showing that target date funds do help people increase their equity exposure when they're younger relative to what they would do if they were on their own.

58:21Ben Felix:I think financial advisors can have the same effect. The reason in that research is that people tend to have pessimistic expectations, more pessimistic than they probably should be, which leads them to have more conservative portfolios. So it's a tough question to answer, but it's definitely something worth interrogating for each person. When does it make sense to have a financial advisor? If what your firm mostly invests in is just a single ETF, one fund portfolio, then why would it make sense for your clients to be putting their money with you, paying fees, when they could basically be doing the same thing?

58:56Ben Felix:We're huge advocates of DIY investing. I mean, my YouTube channel and our content in general is, like at least in Canada, one of the top resources for do-it-yourself investors to figure out how to do it themselves. So I'm a big advocate for doing that for people who can. There are a couple of reasons I think that people do hand it off. One is implementation. So we can say you just buy a fund, but you still have to figure out which accounts you're buying it in. You still have to figure out when you should sell it, if you should, how to fund your spending, where to put new savings, which fund it should be, what asset allocation it should be.

59:27Ben Felix:So there's lots of decisions leading up to that final step of just buying a fund. Just buying the fund is the easy part. And there's a lot of complexity. So people could spend hours and hours doing research and listening to podcasts like this to arrive at those decisions, or if they want to hand it off, they can contact a financial advisor and be told basically based on your situation, this is what we would recommend. So reducing complexity is one and implementation. And then the other one is comfort. We have a ton of people who find us through our podcasts And they'll be like dedicated listeners for years.

59:59Ben Felix:And then they'll become clients at some point. And they'll tell us that they stopped listening to the podcast because they didn't have to worry about this stuff anymore. And it's a huge weight off their shoulders. And it's a really interesting phenomenon, but I think it speaks to one of the reasons that people outsource this stuff, which is mental overhead. It just goes away. It's one less thing to think about. So you're at$8 billion in assets under management right now. Canadian dollars, yeah. Canadian dollars. Oh, that's like$2 million American. It's not that low. Did you notice a stark increase in the amount of clients that you had before and after you went on Diary of a CEO?

1:00:32Ben Felix:No, not a stark increase. Like there was definitely a period of, of heightened interest where we, we fielded a whole bunch of calls. Uh, but no, not a huge difference. Would you say, would you be able to distill it down to a number? Like going on a podcast that gets 2 million views, like Diary of a CEO, how much money in deposits did you get? Honestly, it would be a rounding error. Like it's - Really? It was not a huge deal. But a lot of interest, a lot of phone calls, a lot of new subscribers to my channel and our podcasts and stuff like that. But I mean, we're already a big enough firm that I don't think something like that is going to move the needle that much.

1:01:06I have a feeling for something like that, it's going to take repeated - Yeah, exposure. They subscribe, they become a follower. It's going to start with that and then they're going to go down the rabbit hole. And then like three years later, then it'll be like - That's true. See some dude on a podcast, gives him my life savings. That's probably not. I saw you on Diary of the CEO. Here's all my money. Yeah. Now, if you're fielding a lot of these calls, I'm curious, what's the worst call and financial situation that you've seen?

1:01:32Ben Felix:I don't take the calls. So it's tough for me to say, but I think probably the most common situation where I look at it and it's like, yeah, like this, this person really needed our help is people who are just sitting in cash. They've got a successful business or they've got a high income job or whatever. and they've just been shoveling money into a savings account and it's literally sitting in cash because they don't know what to do. What's the most amount of cash you've seen? I don't know. Millions of dollars. I don't know. So it was a small business owner or something that just saved up everything through millions of dollars of cash.

1:02:00Ben Felix:Or someone who sold a business and they stuck in a savings account because they didn't know what to do and it's just, it sits there. So that's one of those, it's a situation where you look at it and it's like, yeah, okay. So our fee relative to the opportunity cost of sitting in cash is negligible for that person. And what about the strangest story? Weird ones would probably be people who've started businesses in legal gray areas and come to us. We've had to be like, we can't touch this. There's been some interesting ones there. Other ones with crypto where people just made it huge on some random token.

1:02:34Ben Felix:And it's like it becomes real money and it's life changing. And you look at it and it's like, wow, that's. What's the biggest amount you've seen? From that type of scenario? Tens of millions. Tens of millions of dollars. Wait, we're talking after tax? They sold it, went to cash, and they were like, hey, I need help. Yeah. So, I mean, those are crazy stories. But it's like, we can say wow, and it's like, wow, that's a crazy outcome. Wait, guys, you're saying if you put$10 ,000 into crypto, you could turn it into tens of millions? Yeah, which coin to invest in. I saw on your channel there were some comments about an ICO that we should be buying.

1:03:07Ben Felix:Those comments are the worst. But seriously, though, we also get people who have actually literally won the lottery by buying lottery tickets. And so it's like people get windfalls from all sorts of different weird lotteries, not as weird. I think crypto ones are stranger. But yeah, people end up with piles of money for all kinds of weird reasons. The one thing I found very interesting is that you recently said that the more you look at your portfolio, the worse you're likely to do. And then I thought of myself where I look at my portfolio probably. I've checked five times a day. It's actually strange for me not to have checked it before we filmed.

1:03:42I check it constantly. Are you okay after not checking it? Do you feel okay? I'm curious what it's doing because there's 10 minutes left of the market and I like to throw in some buys at the end of the day if it's down.

1:03:54Ben Felix:Yeah, that's a real smile. So what does it say about me that I check so often? Honestly, it's probably leading you to take less risk than you otherwise would if you were like me and just didn't look at it. That's what that research suggests. It suggests that people who check their portfolios more frequently are more worried about risk because they see the volatility day to day or minute to minute throughout the trading day. And it makes them more averse to risk. So what we're going to do for the channel members is that at the very end, I'm going to show you my portfolio and you'll be able to rate it and you'll be able to be brutally honest with what you think of my allocation, because I have a feeling I know what you're going to call out.

1:04:33And there's there's something in my portfolio that the channel members will see that you're probably not going to like.

1:04:39Ben Felix:Okay. But moving beyond that, in terms of the general economy, do you think it's easier or more difficult for people to get wealthy in 2026, 2027? I'm not an economist. I don't study the macro economy. I can tell you what we see with our very biased sample of people who are becoming wealthy. There's still a lot of people starting businesses. There's still a lot of people raising capital. There's still a lot of people participating in the equity of companies like some of these AI companies that are still private or maybe going public soon. There's still a lot of wealth being created. Now, again, I'm not an economist.

1:05:17Ben Felix:I don't study the lives of everyday Canadians or Americans. Is it easier or harder for them to get wealthy? I don't know. But I can tell you from our, again, acknowledged as a very biased perspective, as a firm that deals with people who are getting wealthy or who are wealthy, it does not seem like that has decreased. Do you see any risks to our economy that you think people are overlooking? Tons of risks. I think it's very easy to get bogged down worrying about questions like that. And I think a lot of people do. Like when I posted my video recently on the biggest myths in personal finance, and I mentioned that savings myth, that you should save as much as possible, a ton of the replies were that, well, in this economy, it's different.

1:05:56Ben Felix:You need to save as much as you can because the future is going to be awful. It's like, maybe it is. I think being an investor inherently requires optimism. I think if you're not optimistic, you're not going to be good investor. It ties back to the checking your portfolio too much. If you just invest in stocks, don't look at your portfolio, save what you need to save, and don't worry about it, you're going to be a better long-term investor than if you worry about whatever thing. The funny thing is, you could have 10 brilliant economists on your podcast who would all give you some crazy niche reason about why everything's about to collapse.

1:06:32Ben Felix:Maybe they're right to an extent. Maybe they're not. Maybe it's already priced in. I don't know. And those things are interesting to hear about, but are they actionable or useful for investors? I don't really think so. I don't worry about that stuff too much. What do you think about Pokemon cards as an investment? I saw that episode, but I have not listened to it. I don't know, man. Lego. Lego is another one that apparently has had great returns. I did listen to your episode with Ben. That was a cool one. Uh, but yeah, there's all kinds of weird stuff that you can show. Like, look how well this person did investing in this weird thing.

1:07:06Ben Felix:I think collectibles as a general, uh, as a general asset class, wine is another one that comes up, uh, cars, another one. There's all kinds of weird stuff. It's whatever. I think a lot of those asset classes are pretty thinly traded. I really like advice that works in equilibrium. Like you can kind of tell everyone to invest in index funds and that, that works. They're participating in the market portfolio. You can't tell everyone that they should have a 10 % allocation to Pokemon cards. The market will explode. Now, speaking of being well diversified, I think a lot of people also look at their house as an investment.

1:07:42What are your thoughts on the current conditions of the housing market?

1:07:45Ben Felix:I do know the Canadian market better than the U.S. market. I know housing costs are high everywhere, and they've been going up, and that's a challenge. That's true for both renters and owners. But beyond that, I mean, I think that the housing decision, how much housing you should buy and whether you should rent or own it, I think the assessment of that is still the same as it would be under any market conditions. Even though now the monthly payments are so much higher, the prices are so much higher. What's surprising to me is that when you look at the income ratio needed to buy a house, it's the highest it's ever been in history.

1:08:18And so I tend to argue that maybe conditions today are not as they were five years ago, 10 years ago.

1:08:26Ben Felix:Because housing costs have gone up or because the rent versus own tradeoff has changed? Purely because prices and the carrying costs are so high relative to what the average income is. Yeah. I mean, I agree that is a challenge, but I mean, people still have to pay for housing. So I don't know how it changes the decision other than maybe you have to live in a smaller place than you would have 10 years ago. Do you consider a house to be an investment? Not an investment. I would say it's a consumption good. It's a mix, I guess. When you buy a house, you're consuming part of it, but you're also investing some of your money in a real estate asset.

1:09:04Ben Felix:So it's a combination. I think the big benefit of buying a home is that it provides a hedge to the cost of living in that specific home. It's saving you to live in a very specific area that you want to stay in. If the cost of living in that area go up, rents are going to go up a whole bunch. But the other thing that's going to happen is that real estate prices are probably going to go up. And so if you own a house, you're hedged. Housing costs went up in that area, but so did the price of your assets. so you're protected. Whereas a renter might get priced out of their home. That to me is the best argument for owning.

1:09:38It's like insurance almost. Yeah.

1:09:40Ben Felix:It's kind of like insurance. There's a really cool paper that asks that question, why do people invest so much of their net worth in their home? And they come to the answer that it's because it behaves like a long-term bond that's perfectly indexed to the costs of living in that specific home, which is a pretty cool way to frame it. Now, I think that the other side of that argument is that just like a long-term bond, well, it might produce coupon payments that meet your cashflow needs or whatever. In the interim, in the short term, it's going to be very volatile in price. Long-term bonds are super volatile.

1:10:14Ben Felix:Individual home prices are also super volatile. And I think that leads into how long you want to stay in a place. If you want to stay in a place hypothetically forever, and you want to make sure that you're not going to get priced out of that house, the only option is to buy. But if you might leave in three years between transaction costs and price risk, I think renting starts to become pretty appealing. You have a very interesting equation. I've never heard this before that determines if you should rent or buy. Explain what this is and who should be using it. I called it the 5 % rule. That's what you're talking about.

1:10:44Ben Felix:And it's not always 5%. Some people got mad about me about that. It's like, well, it should have been 6 % or 4 % or whatever, but I'll explain the premise and people can figure out what number makes sense for them. It's basically the idea that there are unrecoverable costs of owning a home. Just like rent is an unrecoverable cost. You rent a place for$3 ,000 a month, you pay the rent, you get a place to live, you have nothing left over. There's no residual value. When you own a home, people imagine that you buy this asset and it goes up in price and they don't account for all the costs that you incur to live there.

1:11:17Ben Felix:And so I think you have to account for those to make the rent versus own comparison. And so I just thought about, okay, if we take the property taxes, which are an unrecoverable cost. You pay taxes to the municipality or whatever, and you get whatever, a nice city or whatever, but there's nothing, there's no residual value. You pay maintenance costs, which are just the costs of keeping the place running. Your video on your real estate returns and your kind of misadventures, if we can call them that in real estate. Maintenance cost was a huge part of that. It was. Where people just, they don't account for it.

1:11:46Ben Felix:And it's all little things. I thought you did such a good job in that video. Thanks. Because all those little things that add up to like, holy crap, I paid X number of dollars and spent X number of hours maintaining my house. So maintenance costs. And then the other big one that I think really gets ignored, and you talked about this implicitly in your videogram, is the opportunity cost of capital. If you have$100 ,000 of equity in a home, that's$100 ,000 that you could have had invested in the stock market. And that difference in expected returns between home equity and stock market appreciation is an opportunity cost.

1:12:16Ben Felix:And then if you're using leverage, you also have the cost of interest. So you end up with a weighted average cost of capital, but whatever. And so you add all that up and based on the numbers that I used in that video back then, I came up with 5 % as a number. And all you do is you take that and you look at the amount of rent that you would be paying and you compare that 5 % of the value of a home that you would otherwise buy to the amount of rent. And if they're equal, you're financially indifferent, roughly, approximately. But it also shows you if owning is much more expensive, maybe 5 % of the property is whatever, five grand a month, but you could rent a similar place for$4 ,000 a month.

1:12:57Ben Felix:And it's okay. Renting is actually pretty cheap relative to buying this house. And it can tell you the other thing too, that maybe renting is more expensive. So it's rough. It's not perfect. But I mean, in analysis that I've done since then, it's actually pretty good. So again, I think we're going back to the math versus behavior. And I think there are also intangible benefits of owning a house that even for myself, I try to account for. Because I put myself in the position where mathematically, I think it's better to rent right now. But then I think realistically, could I be happy renting a house?

1:13:34And I think for a home that you intend on keeping or staying in 10, 15 years, I don't know if you would be happy, or at least for myself, renting a home for that long and not being in control of that house and like what you do with it and the fixes and the, you know, move in a, you know, changing a bathroom. So where do you build in the intangible benefits?

1:13:55Ben Felix:I think a lot of what you just described is actually a trap that people don't account for. The perception that you have control and can do whatever you want, it seems really compelling. Listen, I've lived like I'm in the middle of living this right now where we bought a house six years ago. And ever since we moved in, we've been doing stuff like a bathroom. Like, I mean, we had one wall in the house that was never finished when the house was built. It's in a room with a really, really high ceiling. And so we finished the wall. And on that wall, I put a full glass backboard basketball hoop. Cause I was like, that'd be super cool.

1:14:28Ben Felix:Like we're doing this anyway. It's an extra, whatever, a few thousand dollars to put that, I'm going to do it. And stuff like that's very fun. I would never be able to do that in a rental. And I love, I can, I can literally make myself breakfast and then go shoot hoops like right beside the kitchen, which is awesome. But every one of those little things is thousands of dollars of costs that I would not have incurred as a renter. So you can view that as awesome or you can think about are renters, are people who rent their homes any less happy than owners when you look at the broad data? Again, I rented with my family with a wife and kids for six years.

1:15:02Ben Felix:We've now owned a home for six years. I don't think we're any happier as homeowners. Honestly, I think the added stress of home maintenance and managing all the renovation stuff we've been doing is probably a net negative relative to when we were renting. Landscaping, you know real estate better than I do. It's brutal. Then when you look at the data on this, and there have been studies in Canada and a few other countries that ask whether homeowners are happier than renters. There is one American study too that it was a sample of 600 women, I believe, specifically. but asking that question are homeowners happier than renters and the answer is generally no when you look at a broad sample of data i mean that that lines up with with my experience so i i believe it's good good confirmation bias for me so it's like i that should be an intangible it seems like that's a great argument you can do whatever you want whatever you want with your house but i really think it's a license to spend just ungodly amounts of money doing stuff that's not actually going to improve your life and i say that as someone who's doing it right now Another thing that I'm curious about is I posted on Twitter and I got a lot of attention.

1:16:08I got 4 million views. I said, for those that have paid off their mortgage and own a home free and clear, do you have any regrets? Almost no one posted that they had regrets. There's a few people who had regrets that were very specific to paying off a mortgage that was sub 3%. But every single other person said that the freedom and the feeling they got by owning a home free and clear, superseded anything else. And they said it was the best feeling in the world. What are your thoughts on that?

1:16:39Ben Felix:I've got a couple of great anecdotes that speak to this. So in Canada, we have to get Canadian for a second here for me to explain this. In Canada, when you take out a mortgage to buy a home, the interest is not tax deductible. But when you borrow money to invest in an asset that's expected to produce income, like stocks that pay dividends, the interest becomes deductible. And so sometimes we'll see a client who comes to us and they have whatever, a million dollars in their portfolio and they have a whatever, a$500 ,000 mortgage that's just borrowed to purchase the house, non-tax deductible. And we'll say, hey, you know, we could use some of your portfolio to pay off your mortgage.

1:17:15Ben Felix:And then if you want to keep the mortgage, you can re-borrow, reinvest back in the portfolio. You end up in the exact same place, but your interest is now tax deductible. It's just smart financial planning if someone's in that situation. and I would say 95 % of the time, there's one case where the person really did go through with it, but 95 % of the time, they do step one. We sell some of the portfolio, we pay off the mortgage and then we're like, okay, now we're going to go back to lender. We're going to reborrow and invest back in the stock market. 95 % of the time, the person is like, you know what?

1:17:48Ben Felix:I actually feel really good having the house paid off. We're just not going to reinvest in the market, which is fine. That's great. That was the right decision for them. But going through the actual process, at first it's, oh, this is a great idea. We're going to do it. And then they have a paid off house and they have to make the decision to reborrow to invest and they don't do it. So I think that speaks volumes to your question. I wrestle with the exact same thing because I know at some point I want a house with more space. We have family to visit, you know, with a bigger yard, things like this.

1:18:21And then I wonder, for that exact same purpose is that the primary home deduction really is capped at$750 ,000, everything else after that. There are ways of borrowing, but it seems like the best thing to do is if you have something relatively liquid, use that to buy the house and then pull a margin and then buy back the position that you had sold to buy the house. And I wrestled with the exact same thing is, would I do that regardless? Why am I not doing that now? Why didn't I do that five years ago. I think that lends itself to just the peace of mind that I've never really controlled for peace of mind until recently.

1:19:00Just something clicked after dealing with all those rental properties, where now I place a premium for just easy.

1:19:07Ben Felix:Yeah, I think there's a lot of psychological benefit to having a paid-off house. I also don't think people, on the other side of the argument, I don't think people fully understand the costs of having a paid for house. Almost every video that I make on renting versus owning, people will say, well, the math changes dramatically in favor of owning once your house is paid for, as if it's better to have a paid off house. It's actually way worse. Yes. When you look at the total cost of owning, including the opportunity cost of equity with a house that's been bought in cash or is fully owned otherwise, and you compare that to a renter, the fully paid for home is almost always going to look worse than renting and investing in the stock market.

1:19:45Ben Felix:mortgages bring owners onto the same level as renters. But if you haven't paid for a house, it's costing you far more, which is the cost of peace of mind. And there's nothing wrong with that. At what point does optimization just become not worth it? And I'll give you an example, a personal example. I was looking at doing a box spread, but I had some tax-free muni bonds too. And so I was thinking if I do the box spread, I can get a capital loss. And then I look at my after-tax return compared to what I'm earning from tax-free munis. And I'm doing all these like mental calculations. And then I determined through Claude, analyzing every single aspect that I would be saving 0.02 % by doing all of these like things.

1:20:34And I think like the net amount was like, it was a negligible amount. I mean, it's the difference of, you know, a few hours in the market up or down. that's really what it was. When can people take it too far?

1:20:47Ben Felix:So I think it's subjective. I think in that case, you've got to look at the amount of time that you spent doing it. You've also got to look at how much you enjoyed spending that time. I think it's an interesting example because you might have really loved saying that you did a box spread. Maybe that's something you could talk about in content or whatever. And maybe that's a reason that it doesn't matter so much. But if you count for the cost of your time in that scenario, you're maybe a net negative even. So I think people have to account for time. But it's also highly subjective just based on an individual's preferences.

1:21:14Ben Felix:We've brought really good tax planning to some folks that work with us and shown you could save over your lifetime, whatever, hundreds of thousands of dollars in net present value of tax by doing this thing. And some people say, that's great. I want to implement it. And some people say, you know what? For a few hundred thousand dollars, it's just not worth the complexity in my life. So I think it's highly subjective. But I think in general, people do get bogged down in the details and try to optimize things when they should just be, as we talked about earlier, buying index funds and not worrying too much about it.

1:21:50I have to say, though, for the few people who this applies to, this will save five people. Could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you're buying a primary residence and you have a few million dollars minimum in a brokerage that supports options, you buy a house, primary residence with a box spread and take a capital loss on it. It's not financial advice, but look into it. The few people this applies to, it is mind blowing. No one knows about it. It's very complicated to explain. It took me days to wrap my mind around how this thing works. It is incredible. It's a superpower to be able to do that.

1:22:30You get borrowing right now, net after tax, high 3%. It's crazy. Fixed. Interest only. It's incredible. But it applies to like five people watching, so I'll end it there. What does money mean to you?

1:22:44Ben Felix:Money is a tool that lets you buy time, I think is really its fundamental purpose in our lives. That's really it. It's a tool. You work or start a business or create an asset or whatever to create money, but what's the money actually for? It's to give you ownership of your time. And so how do you use money to produce more time in your life? What are the main things that you spend money on that you've noticed improve your happiness the most? There's a whole bunch of things, really. I mean, we had one vehicle for years. I have four kids. We had one vehicle up until two years ago. We finally got a second vehicle because there'd be cases where whatever, you had to wait for the other person to be done with the car.

1:23:32Ben Felix:So that was a big expense, but it's been really useful just for time use and not having to wait for wait for the vehicle another big one is meal prep meal delivery we get uh prepared meals delivered to our house every week so that we don't have to worry about cooking and that's something that we did that years ago and then we moved to a more rural area we couldn't get it delivered out there anymore and just a few weeks ago i found a service that does deliver to our address and so we've been doing that again personally i don't know if you guys do that but i find that to be cook unity i love it oh i just got it i actually brought it to the warehouse today i find it so it just takes such a mental load off not having to plan your grocery shop not having to actually cook and clean up and all that stuff so that that for me is a is a big one uh and but then also so there's time saving and then there's also how you use your time uh and money is a tool for that as well uh we went on a family trip to the west coast of canada this summer it was the first big trip we've taken with all four of our kids on an on an airplane and all that stuff and that was incredible trips are cool because the anticipation leading up to them brings a lot of joy the actual trip hopefully it goes well ours did brings a lot of joy and then the memories give you lasting joy so i think stuff like that is is great and then i spend money on uh on equipment like i've got a kayak and a mountain bike and all that kind of stuff so those are the really the big ones you have a really interesting video that i've probably watched at this point three or four times, which is how money relates to happiness.

1:25:05What were the findings of this? Because a lot of it was backed in science. And so it's nearly, you know, undisputable. I mean, there's evidence and data that suggests that certain things actually do produce happiness and certain things negatively affect your happiness. What did you find out in the making of that video?

1:25:22Ben Felix:Yeah, I think a big one that people often don't know until they see the research is that the relationship between money and happiness, if you just look at income levels and happiness, there's a very weak relationship. Some older research suggests that there was a plateau where above certain levels of income, you don't get any happier. More recent research has found that it does continue to increase, but the relationship is very weak. I think that's the part that gets missed even with more updated research. The new research shows, okay, if your income goes up, whatever, from 100 ,000 to 500 ,000, there is a bit of a happiness increase.

1:25:59Ben Felix:but it's not meaningful. For a big jump in income, it was like five points on a hundred point scale of happiness. Like we're talking about nothing crazy. There's another stat from one of those papers that talked about how a big income increase was about equivalent to a headache in terms of effect on happiness. So I think that really messy relationship between happiness and money is really important. The other stuff I talked about in that video that I think is meaningful is time versus money preference. People who prefer money over time tend to be less happy. So if you're given the choice between having a little bit more money or a little bit more time, people who choose time will tend to be happier people.

1:26:40Ben Felix:They also tend to have better relationships with their spouses. And there's a few other data points in there like that. The data on social comparison, I think is so important. If you have people around you who are wealthier, who have a nicer house or a nicer car, that tends to really decrease your happiness. So interesting implications of that, like who you spend time with. I think this happens as people get wealthier, they start hanging out with other wealthy people and there's always someone wealthier. And so you end up feeling bad about your level of wealth and your position in life. I think that's really important.

1:27:13Ben Felix:It has implications for where you live too, like buying a not so nice house in a really nice neighborhood might not be the best idea. Yeah. I think those are some of the biggest takeaways. I'm curious what you've watched three times now. What are your biggest takeaways? I mean, I always heard about the commute, you know, and that was kind of interesting to hear about. And then I thought the time and the money thing was the most interesting out of everything that you covered in the video. What in the research of finding the happiness and money relationship, what have you practiced in your own life that has made the most meaningful impact?

1:27:47Ben Felix:Definitely having a preference for time over money. So what does that mean in application? If there was something that I was offered that would give me money or save me money, or I could choose to have more time with my kids and my wife, as a rule, usually I'll take more time with my kids. Being here with you guys is a bit of an exception. We're on it. We appreciate it. Not that I'm getting paid to be here, but it's, you know, it's a business trip. So that was, but that's a case where you look, look at the, the permanent model that I mentioned earlier, positive emotion, um, uh, engagement relationships, meaning an accomplishment relationships.

1:28:25Ben Felix:My family are super important, but so is, so is accomplishment. So is engagement and trying to continue to build my, my, my YouTube channel and, and, uh, my ability to create content is important to me. So anyway, I had to make that trade off. Am I going to take a few days away from my family to come out here, which I did, but generally speaking. If an opportunity comes up, we're like, hey, do you want to come do this? Do you want to come do this speaking engagement? Do you want to come to this conference? Usually, I'm going to turn that down. One of your top comments on that video I thought was really interesting.

1:28:54It's always remember that money is just a means to an end. It's not an end in and of itself. So what does this mean to you?

1:29:02Ben Felix:It's like I said earlier, money is a tool. It's a tool that lets you do stuff. But I think you have to understand what it can do. And you've got to understand what the research says about the best ways to use money for it to be a useful tool. I think a lot of people end up amassing huge amounts of wealth, but are unhappy. I think it's a very common story for lots of different reasons. But yeah, there's an old paper that I based portions of that video on called, If Money Doesn't Make You Happier, You're Not Spending It Right. And the premise is just that you can have a ton of money and engage in activities that don't make you happier.

1:29:38Ben Felix:But that's not because money doesn't improve happiness. It's because you just don't know how to use money to make yourself happier. So I think being in tune with what you want out of life, what your priorities are, and what the evidence says about the type of spending that is most beneficial is really important. At what point does increased wealth start to see diminishing returns? I've heard you guys talk about this question with other guests. I've thought about it a lot. I've seen a lot. I've worked with and know a lot of very wealthy people, and I really think it depends on the person. There are people who have, and I'm not just talking about the people that I know, but there are people who have tremendous amounts of wealth and are still wondering if they can spend a little bit more and still be okay.

1:30:21Ben Felix:And then there are people who have whatever, 5 million, 10 million, who are just perfectly content. So I really think it does depend on the person and what their objectives are and what their perspectives are. But I don't know if there's a single rule on that. Was there a moment for you? I don't think I'm there yet, really. Like, I don't think if I stopped working right now, I'd probably have to make some changes to my lifestyle that I wouldn't want to make to be okay for the rest of my life. And I, yeah, so I'm not there yet. What's interesting to me in doing the research on you for this podcast is that while finance may be the thing that you're a professional in, it seems like the thing that you're really passionate about is philosophy and the psychology of money, at least based off the content that I've watched of you.

1:31:08What has been your single greatest finding in that whole adventure you've gone on researching that?

1:31:15Ben Felix:Oh man, I don't know if there is a single greatest finding. Maybe the single greatest finding is how important that side of finance is to people's actual decisions. We can find all the research on why index funds are good and covered calls are bad or whatever, but none of that matters if it isn't connected to the psychology of the person making a decision. So that's a good question. And I think really when I think about it, the answer is that those two things are connected. They're intimately connected. I set up my video, the using your money to be happier video by saying like, hey, this might seem like a weird topic for a chief investment officer and like a quantitative finance person to be talking about.

1:32:00Ben Felix:But all of these important financial decisions that I'm always talking about are there, like you said earlier, there means a means to an end to achieve the life that you want to live. And so for all of the quanti finance research stuff to be useful, it has to be anchored in people knowing what they're trying to achieve. It is a means to an end to achieve the life that you want to live. But then you also talk about the life cycle model, which is trying to even the curve of happiness and then using money to kind of flatten that. Can you explain a little bit more on that? Yeah. So the life cycle model is just the idea that people want to smooth their consumption through their lifetimes.

1:32:38Ben Felix:And if you think about your lifetime earnings, typically people are going to have lower incomes when they're younger and their incomes are going to increase as they get older and get into the peak of their careers. And then it's going to decrease a little bit as they stop working and then it's going to stop. And so the idea of the life cycle model is that people want to smooth their consumption throughout their lives, which means saving less and maybe even borrowing early on in life, which is super common. People take mortgages, they take student loans and all that kind of stuff. I think it describes reality fairly well.

1:33:06Ben Felix:And then as you start earning more throughout your career, that's when you start saving. And then as you get into retirement, that's when you start dis-saving or spending your savings. The real world implications are one of the things that we talked about earlier, which is that maybe young people shouldn't save that much and should be comfortable borrowing, which I think, again, I think people do that. They take student loans, they take business loans. I don't think it's controversial to say. But then the tricky part is you do have to start saving eventually throughout your peak earning years and you've got to save enough to be able to retire.

1:33:36Ben Felix:But that's the concept. What do you think is an appropriate safe withdrawal rate given today's valuations? I've made so many videos bashing the 4 % rule. So people are probably going to be like pulling their hair when I say this. 4 % is probably fine, but it really depends how you're using it. however i i don't think it's safe to actually literally spend four percent of your starting portfolio value adjusted for inflation for whatever 40 or 50 years but i also don't think that's what people will actually do i think people who who are actually retired and living off of their portfolios and i see this we see this with our clients if the financial markets are not doing well people will scale back they'll go on a less nice cruise maybe they'll skip the cruise all together that year.

1:34:20Ben Felix:They'll give their kids a smaller down payment, whatever. People will make sacrifices, they'll cut back. The whole premise of the 4 % rule and the way that Bill Bengen did that analysis and the way that all of the analysis replicating it since then has done is spending the exact same amount adjusted for inflation every year. And there's all kinds of other stuff in there too. Even if people don't cut back spending when markets are bad, I don't know if it's true that people are always going to perfectly index their spending to inflation. Anyway, but I think as a guideline, if you're trying to figure out how much can I actually spend for my portfolio or how much roughly do I need to have saved to fund my retirement safely, 4 % is probably fine, but I only say that on the basis that people are not actually going to follow the 4 % rule, that they're going to follow some more flexible spending path.

1:35:07Ben Felix:If it has to be fixed, if someone says I want a number that I can spend that dollar amount adjusted for inflation for the rest of my life, I'm probably closer to 3%. That's how I've modeled the two. It seems like the 4 % rule, he actually came out and said it was actually more like 5.5%. Well, he changed stuff, right? He went at it in small cap stocks. He's modeled different scenarios like in this inflation environment, in this valuation environment. He's done tons of stuff since then. I think that the most useful research that followed Bengen's was the research that looked at international stocks.

1:35:42Ben Felix:The U.S. market, like we know looking backward that it is the best performing stock market in history. And so to look at the history of the U.S. market, even, yes, they had the Great Depression, which interestingly, that's not the year that breaks the 4 % rule. Do you guys know that? It was the 1970s, correct? 1968. Yeah. That's the worst period to retire. Anyway, that's because inflation was super high, not because returns were low. I love that point. Anyway, even with the Great Depression, you look around the world, returns have just been lower than they have in the US. And when you run the exact same analysis that Bill Bengen did on other markets, you get a lower number universally.

1:36:20Ben Felix:I think Canada is the closest. Maybe New Zealand was up there too. I don't remember. But most countries and the world index, which includes the US market and its market capitalization weight, do not support the 4 % rule. So that to me is like, yes, Bill Bengen did research that is practically so useful because it gives people quick napkin math to figure out how much they need to save for retirement. But it was based on U.S. history, which we know after the fact to be exceptional. So I was modeling it, 70 % U.S. equities, 30 % international for someone retiring in their 30s. And it seems like, by the way, what's interesting is that after about 40 years, there's no downside of modeling longer.

1:37:06Like if you live to 150, after about 40 something years, it doesn't matter if you live to 80, 100, 200 years because your expected return over time is going to be so positive that it doesn't matter beyond that. But when I was modeling that scenario through also world markets, it came out to 2.75 % would have a 99.9 % success ratio. Success ratio, I can't say that.

1:37:34Ben Felix:Yeah, that sounds reasonable. There's a paper that came out recently that uses a simulation technique called block bootstrap, but basically they take actual historical returns for a whole bunch of stock markets around the world. I think they have 39 stock markets in there and bond markets, and they use that to create a million simulated possible outcomes. So anyway, it's a good, without getting into the details, it's a good simulation technique that gives you a realistic distribution of outcomes based on actual history. And they found that the 4 % rule, I believe for a normal American retiree, the 4 % rule had a failure rate around 7%.

1:38:11Ben Felix:So it's probably similar-ish to your numbers if you did the same type of analysis. But you think broad-based, average person, spend-fix amount 3 % for a long retirement for someone who wants to retire early on average? I think that's reasonable. I did one video where a paper by those same authors, but a different paper, they looked at just domestic stocks. They didn't include international stocks. Now, domestic stocks in their setup is not American stocks. It's the stocks of any domestic country from the perspective of any investor in one of the countries in their sample. So the way they do their sampling method is they'll pull on average a 10-year block from maybe it's the US, and then they pull another block from another country.

1:38:54Ben Felix:So maybe it's 10 years of the US, and then maybe 12 years of Canada, and then maybe four years of Italy, and they keep running this until they have a run of returns and using only domestic data. So that means returns of the stocks of a country measured in their own currency. They found a 2.7%, I believe, save withdrawal rate. But when you introduce international stocks, at least in their historical data, it's had a big benefit. I feel like a lot of what's discussed in this podcast is still not necessarily actionable and applies to so few people. So if someone's made it this far and they still haven't walked away with one single decision or habit or behavior that they should have, a decision they need to make about their own finances, what would you say is the safest overall advice or thing that you would do if you were them?

1:39:43Ben Felix:If I'm a random person listening to this podcast, I would probably stop checking my portfolio five times a day.

1:39:53Ben Felix:i would probably invest in a globally diversified portfolio of of index funds and not worry about it so i would stop dabbling in individual stocks and covered calls and use that time to invest in my human capital and jack oh yeah honestly those are probably the big ones that for most people that's such a huge portion of it pay off high interest debt we haven't talked about that at all but if people are overspending and ending up in credit card debt or or unsecured consumer financing that's costing them whatever, six or 7 % a year, paying stuff like that off is an easy win. But for what we've talked about, I think not checking your portfolio too often, being optimistic, maybe that's the easiest takeaway, being optimistic and not worrying about a lot of this stuff because, and I know we can't predict the future and maybe it's possible that the apocalypse is coming.

1:40:40Ben Felix:I don't know. But I think investing is predicated on optimism. which is more true that happy people make more money or that money makes people happy oh yeah that's a great question i don't know i don't know if we have research that that uh untangles that that question i don't know i think there's probably a relationship i think happier people probably do make more money that that that later paper that i mentioned that found that there is no plateau on income did find that there is no plateau for happy people so for happy people people who are generally happy, their happiness set point is higher.

1:41:19Ben Felix:Their happiness tends to increase log linearly with more income, with no end. Unhappy people do have a plateau where their happiness increases up to a point and then it stops increasing. So maybe that does answer your question. Is there anything that you wish we asked you that we didn't? And do you have any questions for us? No, I think your questions were great. Covered a lot of the stuff that I've talked about on on my channel uh a question for you guys would be is there anything that i have not covered on in any of my content that you'd like to see me cover i always find so these are the videos that are doing really well right now is these videos is two to three million dollars enough they're blowing up i'm seeing everyone making these videos and they all do well i'd like to get your perspective on the ideal amount of money to have and aim for and what that means in terms of spending the other concepts are levels of wealth they always do well right now and it seems to be a trend of like hey what is a million dollars by what is five million dollars but what's ten million dollars in retirement look like and you cap it at like 10 to 20 million like what is a 20 million retirement actually look like in practice and what does that get you and how does that differ from five i think that would be interesting i would love for you to pull some of the people that have their wealth with you.

1:42:42And you could then have your own data about happiness as it relates to different amounts of wealth. That would be really interesting because I know that Dave Ramsey pulls a lot of the people that listen to him and he says, oh, we've made this amount of millionaires. You could do something similar with happiness and wealth. I'd also like to see you do investment breakdowns. Like Humphrey Yang has recently been doing subscriber portfolio reviews. I think the money guys have also done portfolio reviews, I'd like to see you take someone's portfolio and break it down and say, this is what you're doing right.

1:43:17This is what you're doing wrong. Here's the age. Here's what I'd be improving on. I think that could do quite well. I'd like to see those videos from you. Those are good ideas. And then more flames in the thumbnail, preferably. And more hate videos about Graham Stephan. All of those things. That makes - Yeah, I've yet to see flames in your thumbnail. And that does increase CTR substantially. You know, it's funny. back in the day yeah this is back like santa monica time period when i was living in graham's guest house and we would meet up every single day and discuss titles thumbnails strategy what's good what's working on youtube what's not working and the term that we used for thumbnails was armageddon is what we would call and if you look back in like 2020 2021 at graham's thumbnails like there was a very popular image we would use and we would use it as a background and it'd be like red flames and blue flames.

1:44:08Colliding. Colliding. Oh my God. And it was just like the battle of good versus evil. And it's like why I'm cutting up my credit card. It's like, you know, why I'm canceling my Chase Sapphire Reserve. Yes. And then in the background is just like some atomic bomb going off. But you know what? At the time, no one was doing that at the time. And I remember we did this and we're like, holy crap. We found it. We found it. We're onto something. We found the unlock, the cheat code of YouTube. And I remember what we would do is we'd post it and then I'd sit there and I'd scroll on YouTube until my video comes up and it would just, you would see it.

1:44:41It was like this nuclear radioactive, bright blue and red in your eyes. It is blinding, but I'm like, oh yeah, people are going to click on that and they would. I love that. I didn't know you guys joke about that.

1:44:51Ben Felix:So something you guys didn't ask me about, I don't know if you guys want to talk about this or not. You can obviously edit out if you don't, but, uh, my hesitation to come on this podcast. Uh, yeah, we, we, we said we might talk about that, but we haven't. So I don't know. Yeah, because we're open. You know, I had commented on a podcast before that I watched your video about money and happiness and that I loved it. And then I don't know if that was you or a member of your team that had commented back. Oh, this is great. Sort of got into contact from there, got into a group chat and then everything was good.

1:45:22But then you had messaged us, hey, I think my team has some reservations about me coming on the podcast. We'd love to know why. Hey, by the way, really quick, if you want extra content, just like this, as well as early access and a bonus post show posted every single week. Feel free to join as a channel member to get immediate access to all of that, as well as early access to everything else that we post, along with priority responses to all of your comments. So if that sounds cool, feel free to join. Would love to have you on board. Thanks so much. We'll get back to the podcast now. Everything was good, but then you had messaged us, hey, I think my team has some reservations about me coming on the podcast.

1:45:57We'd love to know why.

1:45:58Ben Felix:Yeah, so like you, like I've known you, your videos at least for as long as I've been making content. Cause that, like we talked about earlier, we start around the same time. And I, I always thought you were fine. Like the clickbait title, the flame titles for sure. That was, that was a thing. I'm thrilled about that either. But my, my, my team at, at PWL, when I said, Hey, I think I need to go on this podcast. There was a lot of like, Whoa, like, wait, wait a second. And a lot of it was the clickbaity stuff is a little bit of the issue. I agree with you all. A hundred percent. You think I like, Like, I hate it.

1:46:32I absolutely hate it. And I've been upfront about this. I do not like my titles and thumbnails at all. But I look at it also from a perspective of what are people watching? What are they clicking on? What's getting reach? And I have to do it. I have tested at this point, probably across three channels, maybe four channels, three to four or 5 ,000 videos over nine years. and I constantly A, B test. And if I see something perform better, I go with that. Like by default, I just want the video that has the highest CTR possible. And so I've consistently found, unfortunately, the flames in the thumbnail, sensational title, gets the highest CTR.

1:47:15And I hope I balance that out in the video content itself where I'm really balanced. Like if you actually watch the video to the end, it's never, okay guys, we're going to sell here and we're going to buy here. It's always, here's the pros, here's the cons. and my thought is just and people joke about it just dollar cost average into an S &P 500 index fund with international diversification save as much money as possible do a number like every video ends with that but the packaging is so much to be able to get people to watch the video to get to that point that's how I justify it

1:47:46Ben Felix:so my experience is the same I don't maybe go as far as you do but I do get comments from my audience as well they're like I can't believe you're doing this clickbait stuff and I'm just like listen I A-B tested two thumbnails. Yes. And this one, I hated two, but this is the one that got clicks. Like, I'm sorry. Like, don't hate the player, hate the game, basically. That is what it is. So with a lot of that, you know, I see certain comments and I take some into consideration, but I constantly A-B test. I test three thumbnails and then usually I'll test like five different titles and I find the package that works.

1:48:16Ben Felix:That all makes sense, man. Obviously I came. So like I'm comfortable with all that even before hearing you guys explain it. What I ended up doing was going to my, we have a community it's free i mean we're not very good monetizing we don't monetize at all really it's it's all the financial benefit of our content channels is that it raises awareness about our business we occasionally get clients from it we've never taken sponsorship money anyway so we have a community around our podcast it's got maybe 20 000 people in there super active it's uh it's on a discourse like the forum platform uh but it's a very like tight-knit community of people who are like you mentioned long-time viewers like a lot of those so i posted in there like hey guys i'm thinking about going on this podcast what do you guys think there's a whole debate and everyone had their opinion but i think the consensus was like listen regardless of what you think about the podcast even if we say even if we agreed unless they didn't but even if we agreed that it's a bad podcast if you go on and spread good information it's a net good thing and i was like you know what man that's and i don't think this is a bad podcast i've listened to it yeah that's fair um but i was like that's that's enough like i'm so i went back to the team and I was like, all right, guys, we're doing it.

1:49:23I appreciate it. We try to be as balanced as possible. And I worry even that some of the guests we have on paints us in a certain light because just like you coming on here as a representation of you, the guests that we have on are a representation of us. So like we'll bring you on and then we'll bring Togi on. The way I see it is it's the same thing as like a journalist having a conversation with someone. I like to think that the people that we bring on the show, it doesn't mean that we endorse what they have to say. It just means that we're curious and we think that it could be entertaining some and some we think it could be beneficial.

1:49:59I think this one is a nice hybrid of both entertaining and beneficial. But a lot of the ones that we bring on are just straight up entertaining. I mean, we have clavicular on. Do I think that people should be following claviculars? No. You know what I mean? And we're upfront about that. Like we'll respectfully challenge our guests when we think it makes sense. And sometimes we don't when we kind of agree, but you know, no one, neither, no one here is proclaiming to be some sort of a guru. Like I, you know, just a random 27 year old guy, you know, random 45 year old guy. Uh, so 70 year old guy.

1:50:30Yeah. So I, I wouldn't take anything that we say for the gospel, but if you can tune in every Sunday and be entertained or sometimes educated when someone says something smart, then I think that that's good.

1:50:38Ben Felix:I'll tell you guys, I, I, I had not heard of your podcast. Uh, someone sent it to me. It was an email exchange, not a comment that, uh, that I ended up here from someone sends it to me a friend of mine hey you're on iced coffee hour i was like cool i know i knew who you were but i'd never heard of the podcast and since starting that conversation i've listened to i don't know maybe 12 episodes which is a serious time commitment because they're long episodes uh and i think you guys do a great job some of your guests are like i'm like man this the stuff this person is saying is crazy yeah but like you said i think you guys do a pretty good job of being balanced and asking good questions we try to go on so neutral but there's also only so you know so much that we could also account for too like we've had a lot of people on uh politically that are on the right but we've really tried to balance it out with the left it's just the ratio of the type of person to go on a podcast tends to lean right and so like we try to balance it out but at a certain point it's like are we not gonna have this guest on because we can't get the equivalent on the other side no yeah would we like the other side absolutely so for me it's not about it's not about i don't want to be on a right-leaning podcast or left-leaning podcast for me it's more like I don't know if I want to be associated at all with people who are that divisive on either side.

1:51:50I see your perspective, but the difference is that like, how are you to learn if you don't put yourself up against adversity? Which is why we bring on people that have different opinions. If we had every single Sunday, we rotated between you and the money guys and Jordan Hamill, then it's like, what do we really learn? Like, I'm not learning anything at that point and neither is the viewer. And so I think what's great is for this podcast, not just trying to pat ourselves on the back, but like a viewer can tune in and be enjoy the very few of them. Enjoy Graham and my, our presence. Meanwhile, we introduce them to a wide range of opinions.

1:52:23And this is great because a lot of the people, if you tune into a conservative podcast or a liberal podcast, or you tune into just Grant Cardone, who tells you to leverage everything and spend everything on, you know, you're increasing your education, or you tune into George Camel, who says you shouldn't, you know, borrow money to buy an investment or whatever it is. Like if you pigeonhole yourself with a certain ideology, then you, you never actually grow. You need to challenge your beliefs. And that's what I think is great about this podcast is that we don't proclaim to have like any super, super strong beliefs.

1:52:54I mean, I do, but I generally don't show it because I think it's more about the guest and understanding a diverse range of opinion. And so that's why I think it's, it's really interesting to have, to be kind of like at the core of letting people hear out a bunch of different opinions to decide which ones they align with and which ones they don't.

1:53:11Ben Felix:Yeah. It's an interesting perspective. I think I view, I view my role in running our podcast as being more of a curator of what people should listen to, which is a different perspective, but I respect everything you said. Yeah. And we, like I said, we always try to balance it for a while. We had fun because we were so far ahead. We would post Grant Cardone and then Dave Ramsey right back to back. We did, we did peter schiff and michael saylor back to back so a mess so we got opposites and then i remember we also had someone from the daily wire i think it was like ben shapiro and then destiny right after was destiny and so it's like back to back but what what happens we find it funny we pissed off everyone like the people who didn't like ben uh would comment on that one and then the people that didn't like destiny would comment on that one and so you'd always like every but But you know what?

1:54:03At that point, it's like, come on. We just try to show everything and we're not there to like debate or push anything. We just want to talk to the people who we think would be an interesting conversation.

1:54:13Ben Felix:I think you guys do a good job. I guess I'm like, I view myself as so far away from all of those people that you just named. I'm like, do I even want to be? Anyway, I'm here. I appreciate it, man. I appreciate you coming. And also, thanks for like expressing the concerns with coming on the show. Like, I wish at the end of the day, if anything, that people would just be more honest with the ways that they felt. So then we can learn from it and we could try to grow. Yeah, and we're always open to feedback is the other thing. There's nothing I'll take personally. And all of these things are concerns that we should be made aware of because it impacts guests in the future and our ability to really deliver the best show possible.

1:54:50Except if the feedback is to tell me to stop doing covered calls. In that case, cut. I do not agree. But I think now is the time, by the way, you to review our portfolios. Okay. And I'd like your honest thoughts. And this is for the channel members. So I really hope you appreciate it for everyone else. Thank you so much for coming. I'll link to all of your information down below in the description. This has been such a joy because like I said, I've watched you now for probably, it'll almost be 10 years. At the end of this year, I think it'll be almost 10 years. Crazy. So that's nuts. I really appreciate everything that you do.

1:55:21I highly recommend for everyone to subscribe as well. Thanks so much. Thank you to all of Ben's fans that are tuning into this episode. We hope that you enjoyed. thank you to everyone that watches us every Sunday and sometimes on a Wednesday really appreciate it would not be here without you till next time the bulk of my wealth is Robinhood shares do you keep your Robinhood shares in Robinhood uh no um we're building a financial super app are you setting them up in a situation where the odds are stacked against

1:55:49Ben Felix:them to actually make money a lot of people criticize us because they think we incentivize active trading and prediction markets, that's when you can kind of get into trouble. Get this, the richest 1 % controls more wealth now than at any time in more than a half century. Alarm bells have started ringing. There's a small circle of wealthy insiders that's benefiting from all the growth. How much has AI changed the game? Humans overseeing agents, seeing how many agents you can actually employ, including when you're sleeping. So do you think, though, with Robinhood, eventually you could have just a few people running the entire company?

1:56:24Um, it's... That's just dangling the carrot, huh?