Bank Runs (plus Jonathan Clements on "My Money Journey") (EP.247)

27:03Yep. And I think a lot of people didn't appreciate that before. Yeah. And you're high up in the list of creditors. Yeah. But if there's nothing left. You're still a creditor. You're still a creditor. All right, let's jump to a bunch of stuff about Jonathan Clements. So I'm going to do a quick review of his episode and then we'll do a very quick review of his book and then we're going to jump to a conversation with Jonathan. So as you remember, Ben, back in the early days of the podcast and we started kicking around the idea of having guests, you and I took a trip to New York City, which was super fun and kind of funny to look back and to think that we actually did interviews that way, lugging equipment to New York City.

27:43We even got stuck. Remember we got stuck overnight because our flight was canceled or something. Oh yeah. Oh, I remember. That was miserable. That was the Raptors game and we ended up in this pretty sketchy hotel. That's terrible. It was horrifying. Luckily, you're bigger than I am. Anyways, so I had a chance to meet Barry Ritholtz, which we've talked about. David Blitzer, we also did a review. And then Jonathan Clements was the third person we had to meet that day, which was pretty cool. And Jonathan was great to meet and great to interview and Barry lent us his office, an office in his office to do the interview.

28:15And yeah, so anyways, I wanted to review that episode. And then out of the blue, Jonathan dropped me an email and said, I've got a new book coming. I said, oh, cool. We'll do a book review and then we'll have you on to talk about kind of the lessons from the book. So Jonathan was a longtime personal finance writer for the Wall Street Journal and also founded the Humble Dollar blog and has written a bunch of great books on personal finance. So with that, let's start a very quick review of episode 55 with Jonathan Clements. So the interview started by him telling us, as you recall, Ben, the story of his great grandfather, who was the richest man in Britain when he passed away.

28:51However, Jonathan's grandfather's generation completely blew it. And this impacted the family forever. They learned to appreciate thrift and the value of hard work. So some of the lessons that Jonathan shared with us in the episode is get your savings set up so you don't have to worry about it. embrace simplicity, keep decisions in your portfolio to a minimum. It's a dream now that you can build low cost, globally diversified portfolios for basically pennies. Money gives you time as you get older. So make sure you do the things you're passionate about and spend your savings on special times with family and friends.

29:23Lastly, he talked about his job at the Wall Street Journal where he wrote over 1000 articles. However, he said it felt like the same 20 articles being written 50 times over as there are only so many key things that you must do that are worth writing about. So that was my quick review of Jonathan Clements episode 55. So this takes us to the book review. So the book is called My Money Journey, How 30 People Found Financial Freedom and You Can Too, which is going to be released April 25th. So Jonathan sent us both an advanced PDF of the book. And it's a collection of 30 people, including Jonathan's money journeys.

29:59I found it super interesting to read. And while you might expect a lot of the paths to financial freedom to be similar, the paths are remarkably different. Incredible for me to read these. And the details of what people went through and how they decided to make a change and how they made the decisions they did is really fascinating. And one thing, and we asked Jonathan about this, one thing I took away is so much of our lives and our financial decisions comes around luck and quite often the luck is bad luck like a death in the family or cognition issues or a divorce or something happens and that causes people to say oh man I got to do something I'm retiring in 15 years I'm not ready what do I do where do I go so it's really interesting to see where people reach out to get information in places like reddit and reading books and podcast many of the guests were DIYers and there's very little reference to any financial advisors in the book.

30:58At the end of each journey, this I thought was really well done. At the end of each of the 30 journeys, there's three key takeaways that the writer of that journey had. So it's really nice, clean written book. And then Jonathan, after the book was assembled, he kind of took a step back and identified eight key themes that were persistent and striking to him. So here's the eight. Number one, our parents mold our financial beliefs. Number two, the key to financial freedom is good savings habits. Number three, complexity is unnecessary. Number four, we don't need to be great investors. Number five, success is apparent only in retrospect.

31:37Number six, don't discount the role of luck. Number seven, we infuse money with meeting. and number eight, at some point, we need to declare enough. Great. So good. And this is a guy who's been writing about this for decades, right? So he's like the perfect person to assemble all this stuff. So with that, Ben, let's go to our conversation with Jonathan Clements. Jonathan Clements, it's so great to welcome you back to the Rational Reminder podcast. Hey, I really appreciate you having me on. So thanks for joining us to talk about your upcoming book, which we actually just reviewed, of course, and it's called My Money Journey, How 30 People Found Financial Freedom and You Can Too, which is coming out, I believe, on April 25th.

32:20And I must also add that you included your own story in the book, which for me was a great example of how real this book is and how real the stories are. So you've had a very long and successful career in writing about personal finance. I'm curious, was there something left undone that caused you to create this book? It was less about something being left undone and really more about the website that I built over the past six plus years. I launched this website at year-end 2016 as a sort of hobby, and it's grown into something much more. And what it has become is really a place where a host of amateur investors who have an intense interest in personal finance tell their financial stories.

33:10So when it came time to do a book, what I thought was to take these people who contributed to the site and have them tell their financial stories at greater length. One of the things I tell the contributors to the website is that you may not be an expert on personal finance, but you are an expert on your own financial life. And as a consequence, you can talk about what you've done financially, whether it succeeded, whether it didn't, what the pitfalls are that people should look out for. You can talk about it with far greater authority than if you talk about the markets in general, or talk about estate planning in general.

33:51How did you choose the other contributors to your book? So there are 30 contributors. One of them is me. A couple of them are well-known, Charlie Ellis and Bill Bernstein, but most of them are just everyday investors who do indeed write for the website. In fact, everybody who's contributed to the book has written for the website at least a couple of times. And so I essentially just sent out an email to everybody and said, hey, I'm putting this book together. I want essays of sort of 2 ,000 to 4 ,000 words. Who's interested? And in addition to myself, 29 other people put their hands up. So that's how we ended up with 30 contributors.

34:31How would you articulate for our listeners, what is the most important reason people should read this book? I think the book is about the value of stories. We all know that we should pay more attention to statistics than anecdotal evidence. Nonetheless, we do respond much more to stories than numbers. And the value of this book is in the stories, the stories of how people achieve financial freedom. For a lot of people, managing money seems like an overwhelming task and massing enough for retirement seems next to impossible. Yet here you have 30 people, many of them of relatively ordinary means, who have managed to achieve financial freedom.

35:15So I hope for the readers of this book that the essays within it are inspiring, that it shows that you really can get your finances under control and reach retirement. show that it's doable, that there is no single path up the mountain. There are countless ways to succeed financially. And even if there are bumps along the way, it's still possible to reach that point where you do have financial independence. What impact do you think our parents play in our financial beliefs? When you look at the 30 essays, in almost every one of them, the contributors talk about the influence of their parents. And as a parent myself, I have two kids.

35:58It is scary to realize how much influence you have on your kids, not just financially and otherwise. I mean, so many of the contributors to the site talk about either adopting the financial attitudes of their parents or fighting against them. So when you're a parent and you talk to your kids, not just about money, but about life in general, you should realize that you are talking to them with a megaphone. And you may want to pick your words with great care because if you don't, you may be a little bit surprised by how things turned out. And I'll just give you a small example of this. So virtually everybody who contributes to the book, I am extremely careful with money.

36:40I've been thrifting my entire life, and this has affected my kids. Both my kids are super careful about money. My son is just wrapping up his PhD. He's spent the last seven years earning his PhD with a scholarship of$30 ,000 a year. Over the course of those seven years, my son has managed to amass more than$100 ,000 in savings out of his$30 ,000 a year stipend. I feel like saying, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have told you to be so careful about money. You should enjoy it more. The other thing I noticed in the book is that many of the contributors went through financial shock like divorce or death of someone close before they were inspired to hit some sort of financial reset.

37:27You talk about the meaning behind that. What's the impact of that? We are all wired to focus heavily on today, what we're going to buy today, what we're going to eat today, what the financial markets are doing today. And it does often take some sort of jolt to get us to think about the future. And that jolt might be the loss of a job. It might be the death of somebody we know. One of the things that we know about big life events, like a death in the family, like buying a house, like changing jobs, is that it tends to cause us to rethink not just our finances related to that one particular event, but our entire finances.

38:13I would imagine that one of the biggest reasons that people end up heading into a financial advisor's office is because they've had one of these big life events and suddenly they realize, hey, I need to get my act together. I'm not quite sure whether I'm doing the right things financially. You mentioned the current story of your son saving up quite a bit. How important do you think early habits are? Early habits are huge. I mean, we know that there are a whole bunch of things that you can do to improve your financial standing. You can be careful about investment costs. You can avoid trying to outguess the financial markets and instead buy and hold securities for the long term.

38:56We know you can improve your financial standing by owning stocks for the long haul. But the number one habit that leads to financial success is being a good saver. And if you're a good saver from the get-go, from the time you enter the workforce, you'll very quickly get yourself on the path to financial freedom. In fact, I wrote about this separately from the book in an article a number of years ago talking about the tipping point. If you save 12 % to 15 % of your salary for 12 % to 15 years, you very quickly get to this point where the amount of money that you earn each year in the financial market starts to exceed the amount of money that you're actually saving.

39:41You reach this tipping point, and suddenly from that point forward, your portfolio explodes. You start doubling and tripling with great speed. But to get to that tipping point, you have to go through that initial 12 to 15 years of saving money and not seeing a whole lot of financial progress. But for those who do that and stick with it and do it early in their adult life, they can set themselves up for a very comfortable financial future. They might have the option to retire early. They'll certainly suffer less financial stress as a result of those early financial habits. So those early habits are hugely important.

40:18So much of the financial services industry thrives on complexity, which you have said leads to possibly higher fees and is largely unnecessary. Can you talk about this and perhaps with some insights from both your book, but also your career in writing about personal finance? People tend to associate complexity with sophistication, and Wall Street is more than happy to feed this association. Wall Street is constantly coming out with these hugely complicated financial products. But complexity on Wall Street is usually an excuse to charge super high fees. For most investors, and certainly it's true for me, the best way to get ahead financially when it comes to investing is to stick with simple financial products, with broad market index funds, with low annual expenses.

41:09This isn't going to make your neighborhood stockbroker rich, but it will make you rich. If you want to succeed financially, focus on simple financial products that you understand that have low expenses. And because you understand them and because they have low expenses, not only will they help you succeed financially, but also you're more likely to stick with them at times of market turmoil because you actually understand what you own. By contrast, with many of these more sophisticated financial products, the people who end up owning them have no clue what they own. And when the rough times arrive, often the first thing they want to do is bail out.

41:48Related to that, there's a quote from Bill Bernstein's section in the book, a suboptimal portfolio you can execute is better than an optimal one that you can't. How important do you think it is to just get invested as opposed to find that optimal portfolio? Yeah, getting started is hugely important. But even as you get started, one of the things that you really need to think about is what is your risk tolerance? I mean, that's what Bill's quote there goes to. And discovering your risk tolerance is not an easy thing to do. There is no simple quiz that you can take that will tell you you have this risk tolerance or you have that risk tolerance.

42:26The fact that you're risk-taking in other parts of your life doesn't mean that you will be happy taking risk in the financial markets. Moreover, risk tolerance isn't stable. people find it easy to be aggressive when the market's going up, but it's when markets descend, when people start losing money, that's when they discover what their real risk tolerance is. And that's when people who thought that they were big and brave suddenly discover that they're really actually quite meek and they'd rather be in bonds than in stocks. And moreover, risk tolerance changes over time. People who are nervous investors when they first start out may grow used to the financial markets and all the turmoil over time and become much braver investors as they get into their 40s and 50s and 60s.

43:13But all of this is a process of discovery. And for the people who don't see it as a process of discovery, who aren't cognizant of what their risk tolerance is, there is a grave risk that we get a market like we have today that they'll end up bailing out at just the wrong time. So there's little mention of financial advisors, but in the story I saw many examples where a great advisor could help. Can you speak to the profile of the group and the role of advisors in general? Folks who contribute to this site, while some of them are actually financial advisors themselves, most of them are everyday investors.

43:47They're do-it-yourself investors who have come by their financial knowledge the hard way, generally by making some bad mistakes and losing money. So yeah, in many cases they would have benefited, especially early on from having some financial guidance. But I guess fortunately for me, they learned themselves. They had these rough times and the result may not have been great for their financial wealth, but it certainly makes for good reading. Regrets in the book were a common reflection. How do you feel about regrets in general? And do you think that they can or should be avoided? I think it's almost impossible to avoid financial regrets.

44:26The fact is when we make financial decisions, we're making them facing an uncertain future. We don't know whether stocks are going to go up or down. We don't know whether we're going to end up getting a new job two years after we bought the house and we'll have to move. We don't know whether our spouse is going to leave us. There is a huge amount of uncertainty. And so we make these decisions with the best knowledge that we have at the time and the best information. We hope it's right, but oftentimes it's not, and then we end up regretting those decisions. But we shouldn't. If we make the best decisions we can with the knowledge that is available at that time, it's well thought out.

45:09And if it doesn't turn out well, well, that's life. We shouldn't beat ourselves up simply because we made a financial decision that didn't go well. On the other hand, we are talking about well thought out financial decisions. So if you're making crazy financial decisions, taking a huge amount of risk, and those blow up in your face, yes, you should regret those. But if it's a well-informed, well-justified decision, I don't think financial regret should be a way of life, and I don't think it's particularly useful. At the end of the book, you ask for others to send you their money story. How important is the exercise in writing one's money story?

45:47I think it's very important for a number of reasons. First of all, when we sit back and reflect on our financial lives. It helps us to figure out what we did wrong, what our values are, how we want to go forward. It helps us to think more clearly, not just about our financial life, but also about our life more generally. And an added point I would make here is your family, the generations to come, will probably be really interested to read not just your financial story, but your life story. And when you write your financial story, you are essentially writing your life story. I mean, money touches every aspect of our life.

46:29I know almost nothing about my great grandparents. I would love to know more. I would love to read the story that they had to tell, but it's just, that's gone. That's lost now. But perhaps for the people who are listening to this podcast and want to make sure that the generations to come appreciate what their life is all about, sitting down, writing a couple thousand words, talking about your life, I think that would be hugely valuable. What I say to people all the time is, you know, there is no immortality on this earth except for the memory of others. One of the things that you want to do before you depart this earth is to make sure that those memories are good.

47:13And that means not only doing your best to help the people around you, but also writing down your life story, your financial story, what you did right, what you did wrong, and passing along that wisdom. What a great message. Jonathan, great to see you again. Thanks for joining us again, and congratulations on your truly wonderful book. Hey, well, thank you so much. I really appreciate coming on. Thanks, Jonathan. All right. That was great to have Jonathan on. Yeah. Really cool conversation. All right. So, we've had a couple of meetups, Ben. You and I were at the Ottawa one and then Angelica and Sandrine, of course, then in Montreal.

47:49Unfortunately, you couldn't make it, but I was there with a lot of people on our team, which is really fun. We probably had, I don't know, 15 people in Ottawa, maybe 20, 25 in Montreal. I assumed you enjoy your night out. In Ottawa? Yeah. It was very, very nice to meet people. But I mean, as you know, I find social interaction exhausting. Not that I don't know. I enjoyed very much all of the points that you're going to talk about, about what's been awesome about the meetups. I completely agree with, but still exhausting. And Montreal, I planned not to go because the logistics just ended up being really challenging with pickups after school and stuff like that, because we have one car, but that's also ended up being the peak of my cold that I'm now getting over.

48:28So it would have been a disaster anyway. It's funny. So many people mentioned how much they liked the after show. So many said that they're one of the three people that keep on listening. Wait, there are more than three, more than the three people said that? There's more than three, believe it or not. Oh no. Anyways, here's some of the comments that I heard quite a bit. So ask people how they found the show. More often than not, your YouTube common sense investing was the gateway. The heart of the show is clearly your deep dives and people love it. And many people said they love the deep dives better than the guest episodes.

49:00And they kind of view the guests as a supplement to your perpetual learning journey and your deep dives, which is kind of cool. And they love the fact that you have a no opinions kind of approach. Follow the facts, avoid hyperbole and just, this is the way it is. This is the way it is to the best that I can do some research. So good feedback. They're very happy that we moved the deep dive up to the top of the show and shrank the intro by and large. They appreciate the reviews of past episodes because a lot of people who have started lately like the guidance of where to go back and listen to. So that helps.

49:31While many of the people that were there might not need our services right now, they're often called upon for advice, which is interesting. So they become known in their centers of influence as kind of the financial person. So they're often called upon as to where to refer people to, which I thought was interesting. And they also said, you know, if their portfolios get large enough where their comfort level is not quite where it should be, they may end up working with us or someone like us. And I can tell you a lot of people listen to this while they're walking their dogs on Thursday morning. I had one example too, talking about book reviews.

50:05So, a lot of people like the book reviews, which I was quite surprised by. And some people have even used some of the book reviews as a resource for proposals at work. In one case was someone was asked to do a proposal around work from home strategy. So, I actually went through and checked out the books we talked about like Deep Work and Running Remote, the Priya Parker book on meetings. And that helped them formulate their company strategy and debate at work, which I thought was kind of cool. That's very cool. Anyway, it's super fun. Got some recent content. So, Your Honor, the finale was fantastic.

50:38We also watched Navalny and The Whale. I'm not a big movie guy, but we watched those two. They're fantastic. We also watched Waco, another really interesting story 30 years after the fact. Cool. I have not watched anything recently. I've been reading William Getzman and John Campbell's papers last night, actually, in the time that I would sometimes use to watch something with my wife. My wife had gone to bed early and I ended up having a call with a friend of mine that I did my MBA with, who's now doing his PhD in finance. And he started listening to our podcast. He didn't know about it. And so we got back in touch for a reason.

51:18It was like, man, your podcast, like you've interviewed all these crazy people. And so I actually sent him a draft of my questions for John Campbell because he's like super into this stuff. So we talked for an hour last night about that. That was fun. Yeah. And not many people can say they did that. On the ratings and reviews, we did get over 1 ,000 finally, up to 1 ,030 ratings, which is pretty cool. Yeah. Big jump. It was sitting at 999 for a while and then It popped up by 31, just like the ratings overall. We were ranked number one briefly in the investment category in Apple in Canada. I'm fairly certain at this point that the rankings are at least largely based on incoming new reviews and ratings.

52:02Because every time there's a big influx of new reviews and ratings, we jump way up in the iTunes or the whatever Apple podcast rankings. Could be. Anyways, got a nice review from Gary Tokyo Paris from Japan. Best listener of the week. Been listening from Tokyo for multiple years. It's the only podcast I listen to weekly. Great information density, great selection of topics and guests, and great applicable advice on wealth and happiness management. Already recommended many episodes to friends and family, and will continue doing so. That was the other comment I heard at the meetups. And thanks, Gary Tokyo, for the comment.

52:35A lot of people said they really liked the fact that we've broadened over the past couple of years into happiness and goal setting and the like. So that's really appreciated. Also, they love going back to basics. Love it. So kind of that foundational stuff. Interesting. We skipped that this week and last week or last non-guest episode. We'll get back to it. PVG 96 in Australia. Lucky to have such high quality information. I've been listening to this podcast over the last couple of years and it's introduced me to some novel topics such as factor investing. Love Ben and Cameron's work and appreciate what immense work and expertise it must take to put these together.

53:13Thank you. Spaceman Spiff from the States said a weekly must listen. It's the only podcast I've religiously listened to over the last four years. Topics they discuss are timely, well-researched and evidence-based. Our interview questions are well-crafted. They give guests space to answer without using interviews as a long way to brag about themselves as so many other podcast hosts do? It should be required listening for anyone looking to increase their financial literacy. I got to say, I'm not trying to brag about our interview style, but I don't listen to a ton of podcasts. But when we're preparing to interview a guest, I'll go and search for typically because the type of guests we have on, they typically haven't done a ton of podcast interviews.

53:51So I'll go and try and find kind of all the podcast interviews that they've done. I'll listen to them. And the point that this reviewer makes is valid. A lot of podcast interview questions are long, and the posts interrupt the guests and it drives me nuts. Mike from Estonia, great to develop financial thinking. The podcast is really great in terms of developing how you think about investment and why one does it. Great stuff, though listening to it from Estonia still can find a lot of relevance. BDSFGFL, whatever from the States, fantastic content. I recommend this podcast to everyone I meet if they're interested in personal finance and investing.

54:29There's content for all levels of knowledge. Thanks for spreading the word. Jay in the US says that it's a master's degree in personal finance. He was referred to the podcast by his stepson, and this has quickly become his number one listen. His introductory episode was the controversial episode 229. When I read this review, I was not expecting 229 to be the controversial episode he was referring to. Then more controversial ones. He was hooked after that. He says, thank you for giving Mark McGrath the platform to tell his story in episode 245 at hit home. It sure did. Last one here, BC Mike from Canada, five-star.

55:07Look forward to a new podcast weekly. Enjoy the nerdy science-based financial explanations. But the real gem of this podcast is the linking of financial knowledge to goal-setting and living a more examined and fulfilling life. They have interviewed very high-quality guests over the years. Thank you. It's interesting how much appreciation there is for that stuff because there was a time when that wasn't really even on our radar. And then we started talking to Brian Portnoy, who had written his book, Geometry of Wealth. And he's since launched his service called Shaping Wealth. And he was the one that planted the seed for us, where it was like, this whole thing of financial advice needs to consider all of these non-financial things about what is the actual objective.

55:50If it's living a good life, we need to know a little bit about that so that it can be incorporated into financial advice. But then we had to make a commitment to learning about it. And then we'd make the conscious decision to start talking about it in the podcast. But that was like, I don't know, it was a risk at the time. Such a great body of information there though. You can't ignore it. Like in hindsight, it's incredible stuff. Yeah. It's incredible to look back and think that someone had to push us to learn about that. Like, what were we doing? I was thinking about that recently. I look back at myself in the past and think like, man, that guy didn't know anything, which I kind of view as a positive thing because it means that I learned a lot since then.

56:32But it's also kind of scary because I know that my future self will look at my current self here now talking to the microphone and be like, oh man, that guy was an idiot. So I know my future self is going to think my current self is an idiot, which is both a good thing because it means I'm going to learn a lot between now and then, ideally, but it's also scary. Also, someone asked me in Montreal, I said, how did you meet Ben? So I told a bit of the story. He said, what was he like? I said, the Ben you see today is not the Ben that I met 10, 11 years ago. We'll leave it at that. So yeah, we've all come a long way.

57:05I got a nice email to the team actually. So to you, me and the RR team, but we need to send a message over the last few months. One of my mini goals for 2023 has been to more open and vocal with my expressions of gratitude. So I wanted to take a moment to thank you for the positive effect you've had on me, the enjoyment and entertainment I continue to get from the show every week and the indirect positive effects for all of my friends, family and colleagues I referred to the show. I found myself in a position to begin to make financial plans that extended beyond more mere survival as a student.

57:36As a physician now with some understanding of finance and also as a clinician scientist focused on the development and best use of clinical evidence, I was struck by how much of the personal finance industry was based around sales and biased sources or compromised methodology and how the evidence would often be difficult or near impossible to find and in many cases obfuscated or misrepresented. In my search for sources of intelligent discussion around these important topics, I was very pleased to find the podcast pretty soon after you started and I have been a dedicated listener ever since. I've also felt that you guys have also been developing and growing into topics around the same time I have and I've so enjoyed the journey into topics around happiness, productivity, personal growth and choice and a deep dive into the multi-faceted elements and potential future of crypto and blockchain.

58:27I listen to a fair number of podcasts but I find that I look forward to my weekly RR Dose more than any other podcast. Thanks for what you do and the impact that you have on so many of us listening. Please keep it up. Very nice. Thank Thank you. You're in the community more than I am. Any chatter going on there after Mark was on with his incredible story two weeks ago? Yeah. Yeah. So a few people, not a ton of people, but there were a few people who put a lot of effort into sharing stories that were not the same as Mark's and it wasn't the same type of event, but similar overall feeling of the story where there was a lack of purpose led to problems basically.

59:06Some pretty heavy stories. also some about not acting on purpose soon enough and kind of letting life happen and then realizing it was too late stuff like that so i mean if the mark story resonated if you want more in the community there were some pretty powerful stories shared we haven't mentioned this in a while so i'll bring it up but we rolled out a while ago the ability to subscribe to a monthly support package or something in the community you can do like three dollars a month up to ten dollars a month. And so we're up to, I think, I think there's like 10 people now that are kind of funny.

59:41Cause I think there are like 50 ,000 people that listen to the podcast approximately, but anyway, and 9 ,000 in the community, but the 10 people supporting us, we appreciate very much. And if people who are listening are enjoying and getting value to the community, it is helpful if people support it because it's the technology that we use to run that thing is expensive. I think that the platform is awesome. And in conjunction with our moderation team, I think it creates a really, really nice space to have the type of conversations that the community has, but it's not cheap. So if people enjoy it, you can kick in a couple of bucks.

1:00:15It helps. The 23 and 23 reading challenge is, of course, continuing and it's never too late to join. You can see the tab on the rationalreminder.ca website. The Beanstack app that we use is easy and fun and the instructions on how to sign up are all on the website. so far this year, Ben, we have 404 people in the challenge, 1133 books read so far this year. Five people are already done. They're 23 books and there's 83 book reviews in there. So if you're looking for ideas of what to read, hop in there, you see all kinds of reviews, which is kind of cool. In the store, don't forget if you're a teacher, reach out.

1:00:55We'd love to send you a free deck of the talking sense cards to use in your class, every order. So we have hoodies, t-shirts, There's all kinds of stuff in there. Every order gets free pair of socks and a beverage koozie. Both of which we gave out to people who came to the meetups. They loved it. All kinds of people posting their socks on. Is koozie like the official name of that thing? That's what it's called, the koozie. It's actually on. It's a koozie brand koozie. Oh, okay. It's a funny word. I always find it funny when you say koozie. Other things coming up. So I'm going to be at the Investment and Wealth Institute's Ace Academy in San Diego at the end of this month.

1:01:30If anybody listening is going, drop me a note. Maybe we meet up. Also, I think we said this before. We're going to be recording a live episode of the podcast at the Future Proof Conference in Huntington Beach this fall. We are also considering hosting a Canadian's breakfast. So if you're a Canadian advisor and you're heading to the conference, drop us a note. Info at rationalreminder.ca. We also might be hosting, because we've been asked to, a meetup in the Los Angeles area on Saturday night, the 9th of September. So you can email us and we'll see if anyone's interested. And we will be in Toronto for a meetup on Wednesday, September 20th.

1:02:10Location to be chosen sometime soon. Lots of travel. In case you haven't noticed, Ben is active on Twitter. Ben's up to his Twitter game lately. Well, I did for, there was a week where I was really active, but then this last week or so, I mean, it's really reading John Campbell's paper that, I mean, go try that if you're listening and see how much mental energy it takes. Yeah. I'm still plowing through William Getsman's book. So just let me piece with that. But we have a lot of like these finance authors that are coming up. I'm trying to get ahead of the curve in these books and get prepared for that.

1:02:42So I think we have three or four lined up, which is nice. But yeah, we're both getting more active. A few more people on our team are active on Twitter and LinkedIn and yeah. Oh yeah. You know, so I used to be a little bit more active on Twitter and I told you this story Cameron there's not really a story kind of but I used to have my dms open on twitter and it was around the time when my youtube channel was growing like a lot and over the course of like January to March I think 2020 I received like hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of dms of like people asking questions and people wanting to chat about find like whatever all kinds of things I don't know what's in them all because I haven't read them all because there are so many.

1:03:28And so I, I shut off my DMs. I was like, this is, I can't keep up with this and I feel bad for ignoring people. So I just turned them off. And then I didn't really go on Twitter for quite a while. But then since I've been back on there recently, I started poking around in there and I've turned my DMs back on and it's been now almost a month that I've been back on Twitter and I haven't received a single DM. So I don't know. I don't know what happened. Now just wait, people are going to reach out and give you their sympathy DMs. that's not what I want yeah I get hardly any dms on twitter a lot of people reach out on linkedin which I love so awesome anything else this week you mentioned this I think in the intro we both put calendar links in our twitter profiles happy to chat to people that are want to learn more about pwl that's another thing no one's clicked on my calendar link either poor Ben's lonely I'll be okay I like being alone yeah alright as always thanks everybody for listening and I wish you a good Thursday