Episode 267: The (Expected) Cost of Pessimism (Plus Matthew Dicks on the Value of Storytelling)

25:00So plus the full$12 ,000 in that scenario. So that's how the contribution room is calculated. The benefits of the TFSA, of course, are that any investment income or investment growth that you earn in the TFSA is tax-free forever, whether you withdraw it from the TFSA or leave it in there. So if you've got to just call it a globally diversified portfolio, and it's spitting out interest in Canadian dividends, foreign dividends, some unrealized capital gains, none of that is taxable to you in theory. So over long periods of time, the TFSA is an incredibly powerful tool when used appropriately. Here comes the problem.

25:32So people tend to focus on the upside returns that are possible with the TFSA, rightfully so, generally focus on the benefits of the TFSA. But it's a two-sided coin. And so the issue is that when you lose money in your TFSA, if you make an investment in the TFSA and it drops in value, so take the same example, you invest$10 ,000, but it drops to$7 ,000 and doesn't recover, you're a bit hamstrung because you've lost that$3 ,000 of contribution room now. Even if you withdraw the$7 ,000, again, the following year, you can only you recontribute what you withdrew from the TFSA. So the following year, you only get back$7 ,000 in room.

26:09So you've permanently impaired your TFSA room when that happens. And I've even had accountants tell me TFSAs are for trying to hit home runs and this type of thing, but rarely do we think about the downside implications of using the TFSA in that way. So in this particular case, in this Reddit post, this investor was 31 years old, and he had about$70 ,000 in his tax-free savings account. He put it all into one stock, and this was a pharmaceutical company or a biotech company, I believe it was. It actually wasn't a penny stock at the time. I looked at the chart last night and it's been listed since 2009.

26:39And as recently as 2018, it was trading over $90 per share Canadian. On the surface, it didn't look like a super high risk stock or a penny stock or anything like that. And what this investor did is he continued to buy as the stock dropped. Now, I don't know exactly how much contribution room he used up. He just mentioned that he had $70 ,000 in his TFSA. So I don't know if he put in 50 and it grew to 70, but I think that's besides That's the point because the lesson still stands. And he bought it all the way down. And as of May of this year, the company was delisted from the NASDAQ. Basically, for all intents and purposes, it went to zero.

27:12And so the outcome here is that not only has this investor lost$70 ,000, which obviously is not good, but he's also burned$70 ,000 worth of his tax-free savings account room that he can never recover. The stock is never going to recover. It was delisted. It's gone to zero effectively. So he's now lost all of his contribution room, or at least the$70 ,000 that he had in room. And then lastly, of course, because it's a tax-free savings account and all of the investment income and growth is tax-free, when you have losses in your TFSA, you can't claim a capital loss for tax purposes. If this was in a non-registered investment account, which is just an account that's outside of a TFSA or an RSP, he would have had a$70 ,000 capital loss.

27:52And if he did, he could have carried that loss back up to three years and refiled tax returns, or he could have carried it forward indefinitely to offset future gains. So it's a bit of a triple whammy. He's lost the money. He's burned the TFSA room and he gets no tax benefit for the capital loss. So if you think about it, that 70 ,000, just call it a 3 % real rate of return or something like that. You're looking at 190 ,000 or$200 ,000 of value that he could have accumulated by just investing more rationally. So that's it for today. And that's why you don't make risky bets in your TFSA. I love it.

28:23I looked at this pretty recently because I was actually thinking about, I saw that same Reddit post that you saw and I was thinking about refreshing my video on this because I did that one years ago. I sent it to you and what did you say to me that you mean this in a nice way, but my videos have gotten a lot better since. My old videos were terrible. But yeah, I was looking at the numbers on this and the difference in after-tax growth, if you assume that you just invested in a diversified portfolio at a high tax rate in a taxable account versus a TFSA, that long-term difference over 30 years is massive.

28:55You could have 2X the wealth by being in a TFSA, in a tax-free savings account, than by being in a taxable account. That cost of losing that room is really high. You're not getting the capital loss, which is terrible, but then not having that room as a long-term investor is real bad. Huge opportunity cost. Your point is even more powerful, Mark, if someone has other assets outside of the TFSA, but if someone only has a TFSA and they have a lottery-like personality, I guess that's the only argument to go over something like this. But if you have a diversified portfolio outside, it doesn't make any sense at all.

29:27In this case, the poster, the investor did say that this was virtually all of their savings. They've reset themselves essentially. They rolled the dice and came up short. You got to think that, so in the TFSA, you are taking more risk because in the taxable account, the government sharing in some of your upside, but they're also sharing the downside. But in the TFSA, you're just taking more risk. So like if you really, really want to take a lot of risk. The TFSA is, I guess, arguably a good place to do that. However, if you look at the statistics on individual stock picks, you're much more likely, it's like playing the lottery, literally.

30:02There's this massively skewed distribution. Anyway, I think it's such an important point. I'm glad you brought that to us, Mark. It's a good one. Yeah, no worries. Thanks. That was a great kickoff to Mark's minutes. And again, open to suggestions on the title here. Yeah, we don't profess to be branding experts here. Awesome to have Mark join us like that. It's going to be so great to have him on a regular basis, which is pretty cool. Such a good guy, such a great addition to an already incredible team. Let's dive into another look back at a previous episode that we found interesting. I'm going to jump right into it this week with our good friend.

30:34In episode 45, back in May of 2019, we welcomed Dr. Moira Summers to the podcast. Moira is a psychologist, a family wealth consultant, and the author of the wonderful book, Advice That Sticks, How to Give Financial Advice That People Will Follow. She's been a coach to our team for a long time and has helped many of our clients over the years. In our conversation with Dr. Summers, we discussed how a wealth psychologist can help someone's situation. And this help is as much for advisors as it is for investors they are advising. Advisors need to be as effective as they can be in helping people make financial decisions.

31:09And since all decisions have an emotional component to them, it's important to be as aware as possible of what the client's true motivation is and also the emotional state of what the advisor is in while the decisions are being made. That is the key takeaway in my opinion of that conversation. We discussed what it takes to be a successful DIY investor and the value that a great advisor can bring when they bring their most aware self to helping clients. Make sure you listen to the end where Dr. Summers describes how money, time and energy form an important trifecta and what we have to work with in our lives.

31:43That was episode 45 with Dr. Moira Summers. Very nice. She's fantastic. She's a fantastic person and a great friend of all of ours here. So great episode. Okay, let's jump into the book review this week as we've done recently instead of doing an actual review. I don't think I've done a review in a long time actually without having a guest on recently, but maybe I'm just more attuned to it because I hear about it quite a bit. For example, on the Prof G podcast, Scott Galloway is always talking about storytelling being one of the key skills he wants his two boys to develop through their education.

32:15So in an effort to learn more about storytelling and to develop my own skill at it, I looked for a book that explains why stories are important, what impact can they have, but also how can you get better at practicing storytelling. So someone recommended the book Storyworthy, Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling by Matthew Dix. And with a title like that, you can tell it's probably a pretty important topic. I know, Ben, you've got your own personal reservations are strong about storytelling, but I don't think you can debate the impact that storytelling can have on others.

32:53I don't have enough information to debate it. I I'm reading a book that has a combination of data and stories, I find myself flipping past the stories to look for the data. What they're referring to in the book is these short stories. We're not talking about long. I agree with you. When reading books, that drives me nuts as well. This is using storytelling just in communicating with others, be it at work or at play. Anyways, Matthew Dix is an elementary school teacher, columnist, and internationally best best-selling author including several novels in addition to his non-fiction titles. He's a record 59-time moth story slam and nine-time grand slam champion who has performed for audiences around the world.

33:35So these are much like stand-up comedy clubs except it's people getting up and telling their stories. They also have a podcast which is kind of fun to listen to some crazy stories.

33:51You He's also the founder and artistic director of Speak Up, which is a Hartford-based storytelling organization. He teaches public speaking, storytelling, and marketing strategies to corporations, universities, politicians, advertising agency, the clergy, and many more. In the book he wrote, make it your mission to find, see, remember, and identify stories and begin to see your life in a new and more compelling light. So I thought it'd be cool to have him on. he talks about having a daily practice of try to find a story a day. Like he says, take a few minutes every morning and just try to find a story.

34:26So I did that for, I don't know, a few weeks. I must confess with vacation, it kind of fell off. But it's interesting to look for stories that have impact and it's often not something big that happened in the day. Conversation with a client, for example, something will come out, they'll refer to something just because it's a great story. Can you give me an example? Like you said, you're coming up with a story a day for a while. What kind of stories are we talking about? So one example, I had lunch with a long time, very dear client earlier this summer who had a knee replacement. And I don't remember what's like, I actually wrote the story out.

34:58So had I known you're going to ask me this, I would have been more prepared. But I remember being aware of looking for a story. And he talked about the relationship that we have had for probably, I don't know, 25 plus years of going for lunch every quarter or so. And he says, when I string that relationship through all these years together, I just have so much appreciation. And he says, remember that sketch we drew out? This has to be 20 years ago, what my financial plan was, where we'll have my pension from here, my savings from here, my Canada pension plan, my inheritance from my mother, my business assets.

35:32And you kind of drew my picture of my life. He says, I have that picture. And he didn't have it with me. He said, I've got that blaze in my brain. I said, well, we have it in our hard drive back at the office. and I know exactly what you're talking about. He said, that's been my guiding light for 25 plus years. So he says, combination of that along with our complete trust relationship. I'm like, wow, there's something really interesting. Like I didn't work on it to hone it to go and try to present it at a slam event, for example, but it's something where you notice it and I think it just becomes an interesting story.

36:00I don't know what you do with it, but it's just like a little thing that happens that illustrates the trust we develop, how you might craft a financial plan for someone, just the concept of the plan. And it's been successful for him and he successfully retired. Interesting. Those are all over the place in your daily life. Anyway, so with that, let's welcome Matthew Dix to Rational Reminder Podcast and go to a conversation with Matthew. Matthew Dix, welcome to the Rational Reminder Podcast. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here. Well, it's great to have you and I loved your book, Storytelling.

36:32I thought it was just a wonderful book and tool to learn how to do storytelling. Thank you. Thanks so much. So how important is storytelling? Steve Jobs said storytellers are the ones who rule the world, and I tend to agree with him. It's amazing how you can reshape reality to the way you need it to be if you know how to tell a good story. So I think if you want to communicate with people, especially to be memorable and to be someone who people actually want to listen to, to be entertaining, I think so often people have important and meaningful things to share, but they make no attempt to share those things in a way that capture the attention of an audience.

37:09So when you're a storyteller, you can say those important things and have people hear you, and you can even say unimportant things that sound important because you're able to tell them in an effective way. I think it's huge. I think it's so important. Can you talk about some of the contexts where storytelling is useful, like at work or in your personal life? Well, just about everywhere. All I have to do is look at my client list. Just this week, just an hour ago, I was working with an attorney, and an hour before that, I was working with a priest, I've been telling stories all my life to my children.

37:39It's the way I got my wife, if you ask her how she fell for me. I had hoped she would have said, I took one look at you, but it turned out that was not the case. It was through storytelling that I managed to get my wife. I'm a terrible, terrible golfer, and I play all the time because people know that while we're looking for my ball somewhere in the trees, I'm going to entertain them with a good story. So whether it's business or whether it's personal, I work with scientists, that's really helpful. people who do important research, but sort of don't understand how to communicate that research in a way that convinces people that what they're doing is worthy and important.

38:13I have yet to find a business or an industry or a person for whom storytelling can't help them significantly. Wow. What makes a great story? Well, you have to know what a story is. And that's really the troublesome part for most people. Most people think of storytelling as something happened to me over the course of period of time, and I'm gonna tell you what that thing was. That's often reporting on your life, but not actually a story. And the only people who wanna hear you report on your life is your spouse, maybe, your mother, possibly, and that's about it. Nobody really wants to hear a report on what your day was like.

38:48A story is about fundamentally change over time. It's either realization, which is the most common one. I used to think something and then some stuff happened and now I think a new thing or I see the world in a new way. Or sometimes transformation, which is I used to be one kind of a person and then some stuff happened to me and now I'm a new kind of person. That's every movie you've seen, every book you've read and it should be every story that you tell. That isn't to say that you can't tell a funny anecdote. You can't tell someone the funny thing your kid said or the thing you saw the other day.

39:19All of those are fine but they don't qualify as stories meaning people won't remember them. They're not gonna convince people. They're not gonna change their minds. They're not gonna let you worm your way into their hearts and minds. So when you wanna tell a story, It has to be over the course of a period of time, whether that's one minute or 100 years, I changed in some way, and now I'm going to share that change with you. How big is a great story? Well, that doesn't have to be big at all. I am very famous for taking tiny little moments and making them into stories. I have a friend who says, Matt can pick up a pebble, and somehow he will turn that into a meaningful story that will make you laugh and cry by the time the pebble has sort of ascended to his eye level.

39:59Now, that's not true. That's an exaggeration. But I'm a person who got into storytelling originally because I've had a bunch of big, ridiculous things happen to me. I've died twice and come back to life through CPR. I've been arrested and tried for a crime I didn't commit. I was homeless and in jail, all of those things. But I quickly discovered as I was telling stories that those are not the most interesting stories to tell because it's really hard for people to relate to jail and to homelessness and to your heart stopping beating and you stop breathing. All of those things are difficult to convey.

40:30It's much easier for me to tell a story about a moment I have with my son or a moment with a friend or little tiny things. And so what I've become known for sort of in the storytelling community is stories that where nothing basically happens and yet so much happens over the course of the telling of the story. The mistake people make is they often think that stories are the action that's happening around us. when most of the time, most of the changes that occur in us, they happen in an invisible way. Like if you're watching me at the moment I suddenly see the world in a new way, I'm not gonna have any physical manifestation of that moment.

41:07So most of the time, stories, those significant meaningful moments, they happen in our heads and no one would ever know they're happening. So the storyteller has to convey all of that emotion and all of that reality to the audience in a meaningful way. So stories can be infinitesimally small. naturally they can be big. I have told stories about the times I've died and come back to life. You can't avoid those. Those are little gems that are harder to tell, but when you tell them well, they're great too. But you don't need much to tell a story. How do you find great stories? Well, I have a bunch of strategies.

41:40The one that I use the most is called Homework for Life. I have a TED Talk on it. So if someone wants to go into real great detail, they can go just Google the phrase Homework for Life and they can find it right away. But essentially, what I tell people is that we have stories in our everyday lives that we miss all the time. We ignore them. Or when we see them, we take note of them and then we throw them away like they're trash. The worst game I play with people is I say, take your age, whatever it is. I'm 52. And today we can subtract 12, let's say. So if you subtract 12 from your age, for me, it's 40, whatever your numbers are.

42:16Think about that year of your life and tell me how many stories you can remember from that year of your life. Now, unless you moved or changed jobs, got divorced, got married, had a kid, unless you had one of those big moments, a lot of times people can't tell me a single thing from a year that happened just 12 years ago. I've actually had people cry in workshops when they realize they've lost an entire year. It doesn't mean that nothing happened over the course of that year. It doesn't mean that they don't have a life filled with stories. It really just means they walked through life and left all of those stories behind.

42:51And so Homework for Life is a process where every single day I basically reflect upon my day and look for the stories in that day that I might tell. And not every day contains a story, but more days contain stories than you might expect. And through the process of doing this every single day, sitting down and saying, what is my story worthy moment? And I write it down in a very short way using excel, just a tiny little bit, just enough to hold on to the moment and the memory over the course of time. And it's not just me. Thousands and thousands of people around the world will report to you that over the course of time, if you do this, you'll start to see stories that you're not seeing right now and you'll hold on to the ones that you're lucky enough to see.

43:29So there's lots of ways to find stories, including mining your past. That's very useful too. There's lots of strategies you can use to do that as well. But just by paying attention to the everyday life you're living and those moments where your heart lifts and soars or falls or you see the world differently or someone says something to you that makes you think about yourself or your job or your spouse differently. All of those are the moments that we're trying to tell as storytellers. How do you craft a story that will connect with the audience? The joy is if you're telling a story about change over time, a meaningful and rich story, it's going to connect.

44:07The best example I have just happened to be on a plane yesterday. I was flying home from Washington to Connecticut across the country, and I decided to watch the movie A Few Good Men, which is a movie I've seen a million times. And I had just been reading about it. And I said, well, I'll watch this and analyze it while I do some other things on the plane. And as the movie ended, I found myself crying on the airplane. And I had never cried over this movie, and most people frankly don't, there's not a lot to cry over. But as I watched it this time, it's a movie about a guy named Daniel Caffey. And his father has passed away.

44:43And he's living his entire life trying to impress a father who is no longer on this earth. And at the end, he wins the case. And he finally feels like he has done enough to sort of earn his father's love, even though his father is no longer with us. My father left me when I was seven and never really came back. And somehow, because that story, because Aaron Sorkin was smart enough to not just put a lawyer in the story, but to put a lawyer who is trying to overcome the loss of a father and find a way to sort of live up to what his father expected of him, because that was part of the story. It wasn't just a case.

45:26It wasn't just a courtroom drama. It was real characters who were overcoming change over time. It made me cry because it made me think of my father and how I can't win the respect of my father because he never came home. And so we tell stories that connect with people when we include character change over time, our own personal change. Because if I tell you that there was a day when I didn't understand my autistic daughter, and then there was a day when I finally understood her. You don't have to have an autistic daughter to understand there was once a time in my life where I didn't understand someone and then I did understand someone.

46:03So when we're talking about human emotions and change and the general feelings that people have, the actual context of the moment is not as important. The reality of those moments, as long as we put in the humanity that goes along with it, which is what Aaron Sorkin did really cleverly there. And that's why I found myself crying on a full airplane over somewhere over Nevada. What's the best way to tell a story? There's a lot of ways to do it. I always say that when I'm telling a story, what you have to understand is that you're in a conversation with your audience, which is to say you have to understand what your audience wants and needs.

46:39So if I'm standing on a stage in front of a thousand people, what I know is that my audience has their complete attention upon me, which means I can speak slowly and I can use pausing and I can alter my volume and all of those things because that's a performance situation. And when I tell that story, that's what's expected. I can tell that very same story, though, on a golf course with my buddies. And I understand that they don't want to hear me speak for eight consecutive minutes while they're playing golf. That would make them crazy. So I have a choice then of either abbreviating the story or more likely, I'll tell them a little bit of the story here.

47:17And then when we get to the green, I'll tell them sort of scene two, a whole later, I'll give them another scene from the story. And so I'll spread that story out over time. So what we have to think about is not what the story is, but what our audience wants from us while we're telling the story. The mistake storytellers make is they often tell a story in the way they want to tell it, meaning they see the story as something that they own and they need to pass on to an audience, when really what it is is they have a story, but they have to find the right version of that story depending on the context they're inhabiting.

47:52So if I'm telling a story to my fifth graders, it's going to be entirely different than the story I might tell on a stage versus a story I'll tell to my wife in the car. It's going to be the same story, but the version of it has to change, meaning the length, the pausing, the timing, all of those things, depending on what my audience wants. We have to really think about what does the audience want from the story, not what do I want from the story. Can we try something, Matt? And if it doesn't work, we can cut this. Sure. So this podcast is about sensible investing and financial decision-making.

48:22A big portion of that, something that we talk about often, is using low-cost index funds to invest in the financial markets. How would you use storytelling to get that message across to people, just as an example? So low-cost index funds. So basically what you're telling people is, let's not look for specific stocks. Let's invest in a conglomerate of stocks and and let's make sure we're not paying a lot for that. That's what we're essentially talking about. Perfect, beautiful. So I would be looking for a metaphor where I could describe something like that. So maybe a good metaphor would be something like this.

48:57Actually, this is a true story. True stories are always better than any other story. My wife doesn't trust me to go to the grocery store and pick out fruits and vegetables. I've never picked an avocado to her satisfaction any time in my entire life. Every avocado I pick is either overripe or it will, for some reason, never be ripe. And every berry I pick is the wrong shape. And she once sent me to pick up a mango and I came home with a fruit that we couldn't identify until we put it on the internet and found out it was a papaya. I can't be trusted to go and purchase fruits and vegetables for myself and for my family.

49:38So what we've done instead is we go to a farmer's market and we buy a basket full of fruit picked for us from the farmer. So it's fruits and vegetables and a wooden basket that I bring home every week, which is guaranteed to make my wife and my family happy. So like the stock investor who might go out into the world and say, I'm gonna pick this stock and this stock and this stock, probably not a good idea because unless you're willing to invest enormous amounts of time studying each one of those three companies, time that frankly you'll never have, why not instead invest in a basket, right? a basket that is chosen by experts, a farmer's market, which is a low-cost situation.

50:18Bring that home, and it's probably going to pay off in the long run. Now, that is my first take, but what I did was essentially I tried to create a metaphor, meaning I took what you had, and I applied it to my own life, and I simply asked myself, what's an example of a time in my life when I should not be picking out individual things, but instead should be trusting other people to pick those things for me? Did that work? That was incredible that you just Came up with that on the spot. Yes, that worked. That was great. Well, part of it is homework for life, honestly, because I have those moments in my homework for life, those moments where I've screwed up the avocado a million times because I know it, because I'm noting it every day.

50:56I've got that story in my head. And so for me, this company is actually that I work with that they call me metaphor man, which is Matt. We have a platform on the internet that people use to communicate with other people. It's Slack. I work with Slack. And they say, we're adding a new feature to our platform and we need to come up with a metaphor for it. And you're the one who comes up with our metaphors. Really all it is is I'm just a storyteller that's paying attention to his life. And my metaphors that I offer them are really just my personal stories and we just take me out of the story and we still have the metaphor that can be used.

51:30So you could take the story of my wife and the avocados and all of that out and you could just say, it's like going to a farmer's market. I think it's more interesting if you can actually say something it as personal and meaningful, I think that's even better. But even if you don't, just that metaphor probably works really well in the circumstance too. But I could probably do three more right now for you if you really wanted me to, and they would all probably work just as well. Yeah, that's very, very cool. This was my biggest takeaway from your book is that habit, the daily habit of looking for the story.

52:01And as you pointed out in the book, you build this string of them through time that ends up becoming kind of a story of your life, but it becomes this fertile ground to go and look for metaphors in your daily life because it's so full of these. And it's not the, my son flipped on his bike and went into the ER. It's not these big dramatic moments necessarily. They're just all over the place once you become tuned to this. So I've been trying to build this habit. I work with data companies. I actually work with a company that does nothing but helps other companies monetize their data. And so the argument I make with all of these people I work with is the best data you have is the data that you're collecting every single day over the course of your life, the experiences you're having.

52:41And yet for some reason, business people are likely to throw that data away and seeing it as meaningless. Their most relevant, meaningful, everlasting source of data, which is themselves, they don't see that as important. And instead they gather all of that other data and see that as the value. And I just say, don't throw away what you already have because it's so easy to walk into a business a situation, be asked a question. And for me, respond with a story. And when you respond with a story, you become memorable, you become entertaining, you're able to capture the room. So many people I work with say, I'm at a conference and I can't sort of get everyone to listen to me.

53:20And through a few simple strategies, I teach them how to indicate to people that you're telling a story. And as soon as you indicate that you're telling a story, it's like the lights going down in a movie theater. Everyone shuts the hell up. But unless you actually have that story to tell, then you can't indicate that you're telling a story because you have no content, you have no data. So start gathering your data. And then you'll be able to do what I just did, which is simply come up with a story or a metaphor to apply to almost every circumstance. Incredible. It was so great to have you on, Matthew.

53:49Thanks so much for your contribution. It's incredible. I'm really glad. I hope it's helpful. I think the beauty of it is I just think that I trick people. What I do is I tell people I trick the business people I work or at the corporate America, I tricked them into coming into their offices and teaching them how to tell stories for their business. But my secret goal is to get them to just learn how to tell stories for themselves. Because I think the first and most important audience for every story you ever tell is yourself. And the quicker you become a personal storyteller of your own stories, the more likely you're gonna be an effective storyteller for the business that you're doing.

54:22So don't discard that in any way. Tell personal stories in highly effective ways. And before you know it, you'll be doing the same in the business that you're doing. All right, let's get into the after show for the three dedicated listeners that are remaining. It's great to have Matthew on. I find that stuff so fascinating. No reviews lately, Ben. Yeah, that's a great point. We would love some more. I always like receiving them and it's always fun to read them too. So if you're listening and have not yet left a review for our podcast, we would appreciate it if you did so. Last call for our two upcoming meetups.

54:56If you're going to be at the Future Proof conference in a couple of weeks in California. Angelica, Ben and I will be there. We'll also be hosting a breakfast on Monday morning. If you want to join us, email info at rationalreminder.ca. We actually have some listeners. We were going to host as Canadian advisors, but we said, ah, the more the merrier. So a bunch of different people to come out. We'll also be recording a live episode on Tuesday morning at Future Proof from 9.55 to 9.40 on the social audio experiment stage. We'll be speaking with a special guest and good friend of ours, Professor Hal Hersfield.

55:32It's going to be so cool. I think it'll be cool. It'll be super fun. I've also heard from a number of listeners who said that they'll be there, advisors that have reached out, Colin from Florida, Corey from Wisconsin, and Emily from Charlotte will also be there. And then the week after that, we're in Toronto on September 21st. you and I will be at the CFA Society Toronto's 2023 annual wealth conference. Going to be having an interesting conversation about some of the history of us and how we came together and that'll be fun as well. Live audience, live recording. It's going to be interesting. So it's called Lessons Learned from Five Years of the Rational Reminder Podcast.

56:11And then that night, so the night of the 21st of September, that's a Thursday night, We're hosting a meetup downtown Toronto at five o 'clock. Again, email info at rationalreminder.ca. I think we have 15 people going so far. Cool. Then I'm going to Edmonton after that. That's the 21st. The 22nd is Friday. I'm flying to Edmonton for the IAFP conference, the Institute of Advanced Financial Planners. Braden from our team at PWL is speaking at that conference. I'm going to go and see him speak, but I'm not organizing a meetup because I don't like organizing meetups, but I will be there if anybody is in Edmonton and wants to hang out.

56:52Happy to do that. Awesome. Yeah. I go from there to Salt Lake. I'm going to the Admired Leadership Conference, which will be super interesting with Randall Stuttman's company. People may have heard of him. He's been on with Ted Seides as well as Shane Parrish. In the store, we're almost out of stock of Talking Sense cards. There's only 13 left. And I think we've mentioned this before, but we're almost out of hoodies and the hoodie manufacturer is not available anymore. So Angelica is looking for a new hoodie supplier. Wow. So anyone has a good hoodie supplier of comfortable yet affordable hoodies.

57:27There's lots of nice hoodies, but they get pretty expensive. So today, Ben, it's the first day of us living in the condo while some renovations happen at home. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's why I'm in the office today. Oh. We moved in yesterday. We had to empty here. We're doing some rentals at home. it's time. So that means that all the furniture on the ground floor has got to go out and we got to go out. So we're going to be living the condo life just outside of downtown Ottawa, which is going to be so much fun. I'm going to bike to work, work in the office, lots of restaurants nearby. Okay. So you'll be recording from the office for a bit?

57:59Yeah. Okay. We're saying to Mark before we started recording that he's never seen my wall. He's never been in our office before. So got this hand painted mural here. So maybe I'll put a picture of the wall in the show notes, In case people are interested. The wall's pretty cool. What's up with you lately? Anything exciting? Other than getting excited for all your travel plans? Yeah. Well, I'm not doing that again. I'll tell you that right now. I'm going to take a year off of traveling. I'm going to go back to the COVID lifestyle in 2024. Nothing too crazy. I've been riding my bike a lot, which is great.

58:34I love living in a place that is easily accessible. I can ride out of my house and go onto the trails, which is just incredible. where you live is incredible. So that's been good. Nothing else too exciting. I've been trying to get the Common Sense Investing YouTube channel or whatever. We're going to have to think of a new name for it, but my YouTube channel where I post solo videos, trying to revive that. So I've got two recorded. One of them is on what we covered in the podcast today. And then another one actually on last week's Rational Reminder topic on holding cash. And I've got another one coming on investing in the AI revolution.

59:11Anyway, trying to get rolling back with a regular cadence over there. Terrific. Speaking of incredible, we spent a couple of days out West. Canmore is unbelievable. Had a chance to meet up with our colleague, Travis, and where he lives right by the Three Sisters Mountains. Wow, what a lifestyle. Hiking, biking, fishing, skiing, walking. I've been out West a number of times. For those who haven't been to the Rockies, you got to go. Incredible. All right. You good to go, Ben? I'm good to go. All right. Thanks everybody for listening this week.