Episode 301 - Optimal Government Pension Claiming

22:38That's important. And there's really interesting empirical work on this one as well. Empirical work is on social security, but I think it's conceptually the same thing. In that paper, Americans presented with breakeven analysis for their social security decision are more likely to claim social security as early as possible. People think about it as, oh, I have to live to be this age in order to break even, and they think that age is not likely to be attained. It's the combination of those two things. It's that it frames it as a gamble where you have to live long enough to make it worthwhile. So that's a gamble on its own.

23:06And then compound that with the fact that people underestimate their own longevity and you can see why it's a problem. And if I make it that long, I'll be happy to be here even though I may have less income. Yeah, you hear that one all the time too. Doing that type of analysis, break-even analysis, I think it ignores or doesn't put enough emphasis on the benefits of CPP. And we talked with this in a past podcast episode that CBP is a guaranteed inflation index annuity, which is pretty great. It protects against adverse scenarios. It's a hedge against bad market returns throughout your retirement, high inflation throughout your retirement, and a longer lifespan than you expected in retirement.

23:42It protects against all those things. So breakeven analysis really doesn't give it any credit for those things. That FP Canada paper, they suggest a different measure, which they call the lifetime loss. So they basically say, take the present value of expected payments from your CPP life expectancy and compare those numbers. That's probably an oversimplification, but it's roughly that. And so this actually, because you're looking at life expectancy in that case, statistical life expectancy, it flips the framing to early claiming being a loss because you do expect to lose on average from claiming early.

24:12And it also, because it looks out to life expectancy, it also captures more of the benefits of CPP. I remember, I think it was Jason Watts' CE Drive podcast. I was listening to it a few years ago. And with apologies to the guest, I don't remember the guest that he had on. But this particular guest said that people should frame it as the default is 70. And taking it at any age earlier than 70 is a penalty. And that was the first time I'd heard that. It made a ton of sense to me at the time. I think that probably is a really good framing. Okay, so we talked about why do people take it early? They don't know any better.

24:41Break-even analysis pushes them to take it earlier than they probably should. Another one, that FP Canada paper that I keep mentioning, it mentioned this as a possibility, but didn't have any empirical evidence to back that up. And so I know this was a little bit contentious in the financial planning community when it came out, because this paper is making a claim that financial advisors aren't doing a good job, but didn't have any evidence to back it up. Unfortunately for us financial planners, there is a recent paper from David Blanchett, who's a three-time Rational Reminder guest. He's got a paper in the Retirement Management Journal using social security, not CPP, but close enough.

25:12He finds that households with financial advisors who are paid on commission tend to take social security earlier than those with hourly or fee based advisors. So the suggestion is that commissions are driving them to tell them to take it earlier so they can buy a product or keep their money invested. Maybe, I don't know. Interestingly though, this paper also finds that financial advisors in general, so they also look at fee based advisors and hourly advisors slash accountants. I think they put them in the same bucket. If I remember correctly, the paper finds that they don't help at all. No advisor helps, but commission advisors make it worse.

25:42It's not like if you look at advised versus unadvised households, advised households are doing better on average. That's not what they find. They just find that in the case of commission advisors making it worse. Anyway, interesting, but it does support the idea that at least in some cases, financial advisor compensation models are affecting the scope and quality of advice that the clients are getting. Something that we do have to cover is that it doesn't always make sense to defer the benefit. That'd be too easy. There are a few exceptions, lower life expectancies, you have a lower life expectancy.

26:10And that's not putting your finger in the air and saying, I think I have a lower life expectancy. It's if you have a real reason to believe that you have a shortened life expectancy, claiming really makes sense or can make sense. Don't run the numbers. Another one is, oh, if you don't have bridging funds, if you have no money to fund the gap from 60 to 70, then of course you take it when you need it. Another one is guaranteed income supplement eligibility. So Canadians with very low incomes in retirement may be eligible for the guaranteed income supplement. that has pretty aggressive clawbacks as your income starts to increase.

26:39And it's possible that deferring the CPP benefit could result in GIS clawbacks, which is effectively a very high tax rate, well over 50 % in some cases. It would help you qualify in the earlier years, but after age 70, it would impact it, right? Yeah. Taking it early would be better is what you're saying, right? Yeah. I'm saying if you delay it from 65 to 70, if you delay the CPP, because CPP income qualifies against the test for GIS, right? Yeah, I get it. And then similar to that old age security is another income tested benefit where if deferring CPP pushes you up into the clawback of old age security, that may be less than ideal overall.

27:16So that's another one to be careful with. Another one that I don't have in my notes, came up in the YouTube comments and is worth mentioning is survivor benefits. If you have a spouse who's passed away that you have a survivor benefit from, the calculation for survivor benefits is for total benefits is fairly complex, but basically there's a limit on how much total survivor and regular CPP benefits you can get. And so it's possible that someone who defers and gets a higher CPP benefit will not be able to get all of that benefit anyway because of survivor benefits being part of the picture. So that's another case where careful consideration would have to be made on optimal timing.

27:51You wouldn't want to defer five years and then realize that you get nothing from the deferral because of the total benefit calculation. Any other ones you guys can think of why somebody would take it early? I guess outside of the case where you retire early and you have no contributory years, because of the way that CPP is calculated, your contributory years are, I think it goes until age 65 as a default, right? Or when you start taking it. So if you retire at say 58 and you delay it, those years where you have no income and you're not contributing count as zero contribution years for calculating the total CPP benefit.

28:23And I haven't looked at the specific math and it really depends, but I can see a case where a very early retiree might be incentivized to take CPP early so that they're not counting additional zero contribution years by delaying it past 60. So I mentioned that on Twitter, and I think Rob Engen chimed in and said that what you lose from the additional low income years is more than offset by, but don't quote me or Rob Engen on that. I don't know. I just saw it in passing. Yeah, I haven't looked at it either, but it's something that has come up just casually in conversations before. You can go and look at that, Ben.

28:52Get back to me. You're good at this time. Yeah, that is another one worth looking at. I should look at that. We talked about the percentage of MPA that you can get as the maximum benefit. We didn't talk about how to get to the percentage that you actually get because not everybody gets the maximum. We're not going to go there right now. That's a whole episode in itself. It is so much more complicated than the average person thinks. Totally. Very confusing, especially with the enhancements and multiple different layers of indexation based on different calculations for inflation. There's a few experts.

29:20I think Doug Runchey, I think he's largely retired now, but he is, as far as I know, like the authority on this stuff. And just reading some of his content on this, I'm like, hey, you could spend a lifetime just trying to figure this out and figure out how to optimize it. It's a discipline all on its own. As Doug has, like I think Doug worked for the government in the CPP department. He did spend his life there. And that's one of the reasons he's so sharp at it. Not many people like that though, I don't think. Jason Yee, actually, Jason Yee, He's a field of finance planner. He's also very good on CPP.

29:50He helped me out just reviewing the notes on this before I recorded a YouTube video. He's got some great videos on it too. Two right now. He's got one more coming, but yeah, nice animated videos. Okay. There's one funky thing that happened in 2022. And I think we had Jordan Tarasov on Rash Reminder to talk about this at the time. In 2022, it would have actually been better to take CPP before age 70 for someone who was 69 in that year. CPP, remember the benefits calculated based on the MPEA, which changes based on wage growth and is then indexed to CPI once the benefit starts. So the benefit of deferring has the two pieces that we talked about, the statutory increase and the wage growth, the real wage growth indexing piece.

30:29In 2022, weird times, as people remember, we had high inflation and low wage growth because of followed from the pandemic. So in that year, someone who was 69 would have actually been better off claiming in 2022, getting a year of CPP benefits, getting the CPI indexing as opposed to the wage indexing. And yeah, they would have been better off doing that than waiting until age 70 to claim. So that's just one example that shows that rules of thumb, even if we say people should generally claim at 70, which is probably true, even then there are always these funny exceptions. Jordan was on episode 225, November of 22.

31:04Yeah, that was an interesting discussion, I remember. All right. So the CPP uptake decision, it is one of the most consequential financial planning decisions that most Canadian retirees will make. The difference between optimal and suboptimal claiming can measure in the hundreds of thousands of expected lifetime dollars. Someone challenged me on that in a YouTube comment, but it's true. If you look at someone claiming at 60 and at 70, you look at the present value of future payments at a normal life expectancy, it is easily in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So generally deferring to age 70 is going to be the wisest move, but there are many exceptions that we talked about.

31:40Objective exceptions. There are also subjective exceptions, like some of the people in the YouTube comments, and Mark, you probably get it on Twitter too. Some people think that there's a bunch of people saying, don't defer until 70. That's what the government wants you to do. And it's like, how is that an argument against deferring to 70? Well, and people confuse CPP and the government. They think that when you pay into CPP, it's going into like general tax revenue or something. It's not, but people just have this overarching distaste for big government. And sure, I can understand that, but it's not nefarious.

32:12There is an incentive to delay to 70 and it's in your own best interest most likely. And the government's because potentially that's going to alleviate their need to help you with other social programs and stuff. So there are situations where what's good for you and what's good for the government can be the same thing. And the CPP, it operates at arm's length from the government. It's legislated. It's allowed to exist by legislation from the government, but CPP itself operates at arm's length and CPP Investments, similarly, Crown Corporation, arm's length. It's not the government. We model this.

32:43We have a couple of different financial planning softwares that we use. We use NaviPlan and Conquest Planning, and we plug the numbers into that software and it lets us play with different start dates while taking into account taxes, variable investment returns, government benefits, all that kind of stuff. And in that software, there are exceptions just like we've talked about, but we pretty clearly see usually the benefits of deferring in terms of ending net worth after tax for someone who has normal life expectancy. Also, probability of success in retirement spending also tends to go up when we defer CPP.

33:17Now, just thinking about that, actually, our modeling is probably biased toward taking CPP because we do tend to stress test plans out to a longer life expectancy than normal, which I think is the sensible thing to do. So we often but not always recommend people deferring. If you think about it as a tail risk hedge, the things that you mentioned that it protects against, which are inflation, which is potentially the biggest risk that you face in retirement, and you've talked about this in your videos, and we talked about it, I think, a little bit when I did my segment on CPP, which was obviously much more brief and less detailed than what you just went through.

33:47But if you think about those risks, they can be the most impactful risk. And CPP is, as far as I know, the only thing that you can buy. Yes, it's compulsory, but it's the only thing you can get that's really going to protect against inflation. As you mentioned, it's basically the risk-free asset from that perspective. I think about it like insurance in a lot of ways. If you do live a long life, those risks get really serious. The sequence of returns risk, yes, that's impactful at the beginning of retirement as well, but it's going to be felt at the end. Your portfolio is likely to deplete sooner.

34:16And so it's those last, let's call it 10 years, where all those risks can conspire against you. And it's the most dangerous zone, I think, for running out of money. And CPP is the only thing that can really help set an income floor for people. So if I think about it as insurance, to me, it makes a lot more sense. It's like my car insurance. I hope I'm never going to need it. I'm glad that I have it because if those risks do materialize, it could save me, right? Or it could save my partner or whoever. So I think if people just stop thinking about it as I could invest the money and do better myself, like maybe you can, maybe you can't.

34:42It's protecting against risks that you can't protect against yourself. I think people should be a lot happier with the product. I agree. Even in a normal scenario with normal inflation, normal life expectancy, CBP is pretty good. It's pretty good. We've looked at the IRRs on it and they're all right. It's not like investing in small cap value stocks, but it's not terrible. It's not lighting your money on fire by any means. And then if you live long, or if you have high inflation, or if you have bad stock market returns, then it's incredibly valuable. And you don't have to do anything. It just shows up.

35:11I was thinking about this. I don't know if it was last night, but it is essentially risk-free. But if you think about your risky assets, like your portfolio, and people think about the reserve amount in CPP, which is I think close to 600 billion, I want to say, like 543 billion. And people conflate the returns that the CPP board gets on those assets with CPP. But in reality, there's a person on Twitter named Investor's Friend, and he and I were talking about this. If you look at the actuarial reports, if I've understood it correctly, money goes into CPP, money then immediately goes out to pay retirees.

35:39So contributors are paying retirees in a large way immediately. And people are going to say that's a Ponzi scheme. There's a lot of differences between Ponzi schemes, which are not transparent and are full of lies, and CPP, which is very transparent and you know what you're going to get. But the reality is it's a unique form of risk as far as I'm concerned. You've got your risky assets, you've got stocks, you've got bonds, you've got real estate, you've got commodities. This is something you can't buy. It's a stream of income payments coming from the contributors directly. It's not correlated to anything else except for people contributing to the CPP.

36:06You can't get it anywhere else. There are a couple of different things in there. It's partially funded. So some of the payments that go out do come from investment returns. A lot of them for base CPP do come from other contributions. So in terms of an inflation hedge, that's powerful. The question for sustainability then is will Canadian wages continue to be strong enough to support those payments because we need to have wages to fund those payments. But they are, I can't remember when the date is. I saw it in the actuarial report. They are moving toward being fully funded at some point in the future.

36:35One and two are designed to be fully funded. So the contributions for those ones, when the payments are coming out, they're coming from investment returns, not from contributions. So it's pretty well designed and it's on a path to perpetual sustainability from investments. Right now, it's not fully funded. The most recent actuarial assessment though said that it's in good shape for the next 75 years. It's funded on a steady state basis for the next 75 years, pretty good shape. The other one that comes up related to that market, people often say people who contributed early to CPP got a way better deal because they started out with low contributions and then there was a reform in the 90s, I think, of the contribution amounts and benefits were also adjusted and we've had the recent enhancements.

37:23Anyway, contributions went up. And so people who contributed early got the full benefits as if they'd contributed the same as everybody else, but they contributed much less. And so a lot of people say, well, CPP is a bad deal because those guys who contributed earlier got a way better return on their contributions. My response is, that's true. They realized they had to change the contribution rates to make it sustainable. And therefore people who contributed early did get a really good deal, but that doesn't make it a bad deal for people who are contributing today. Relatively. And maybe you feel sad about that.

37:51And I'm sorry. You're not sorry. I'm not. Yeah, it's true though. Like why are you comparing it to that? It's completely irrelevant to your decision to take it yourself, right? I think so. There's one other point I want to make. And this actually happened to me once with the client is we had intended to delay and then the market corrected heavily. The intention was to delay till 70, but the market corrected significantly and their portfolio was down a lot. And so we decided to take CPP at that point in order to stave off additional portfolio returns. And in hindsight, it wasn't as big of a deal, but that sequence of return risk basically materialized.

38:23And by delaying, they had accumulated a couple years of increases, but then had the option to take CPP then to stave off those portfolio withdrawals. I think it gives you a little bit more flexibility in very niche circumstances to be able to do things like that. And I believe if you're taking CPP, I always confuse CPP and OAS how far back you can go. I think CPP, if you take CPP, you can undo it and repay it within the first 12 months. If you've elected to take CPP, you've got, I think, 12 months to undo it and pay it back. And with OAS, it's six months. I may have those backwards. Listeners, I apologize.

38:53But in the case where it's like a COVID crash, where things go down, you panic, you decide to take CPP, and then the market recovers really swiftly. I think in theory, you could go back and say, actually, you know what, I am going to continue to delay it. I'm going to repay those CPP payments and then delay it to 70. That's pretty cool. Good conversation and great to see Mer again. And last week, I thought Abby was great. Had a lot of good feedback on Abby's episode too. Yeah, we did. Killer month this month so far on content from you guys and a lot of pickup on it. The video did been on bank advice and CPP and let alone the content on money scope, which is unreal.

39:27But these topics that are really hitting many people, like these are topics that so many people care about. I'm just trying to keep up with Mark. I'll spend a month putting this crazy detailed content together. And Mark puts out a tweet in like five minutes and gets way more views than me. Your RESP one, Mark, like you had 275 ,000 views. It's funny too, because I banged that tweet out while I was putting my son to bed. So my son and I have to snuggle to sleep every night. He's six, but we never sleep trained him. I sleep with him until he falls asleep. I checked my RESP balance the day before because I forgot if I'd contributed this year.

40:01I was like, oh yeah. And I noticed it had crossed$70 ,000. This would make a great tweet. How did it get so big so fast? And so as he was falling asleep, I just banged it on my phone and it did some serious numbers. And to your point, Ben, you can spend a month curating what you think is the perfect piece of content. You put tons of thought into it and crickets, but you bang something out in five minutes and it gets a ton of views and a ton of engagement. And it was a good little thread, tons of great comments, tons of questions, sparked a bunch of conversations. My DMs with people had advisors reaching out to me that actually weren't aware of that strategy too, which is interesting.

40:32I had a bunch of people reach out to me with our advisors as well, which is nice. It had some feedback, Ben, I think it's safe to say on the kind of content people want to hear us talk about. Just in general terms, I think we're going to have more investment, probably a bit more technical stuff in general, a bit more Canadian, a bit more planning, a bit fewer books, fewer non-financial guests. Kicking around the idea, and I would welcome any feedback, kicking around the idea of having probably another, I was talking to Angelica this week about that, a separate podcast just on the business of financial advice, which is something I'm interested in, perhaps targeting financial advisory community.

41:06So if anyone has feedback or ideas, let me know. Probably from obviously a Canadian perspective, that's something that really interests me. So some of those guests that are management, leadership type content that we've done lately, those kinds of conversations would go in that podcast. I love it. I think it's great. You've got such a vast experience in this industry, I think. And I know this stuff is of import to you. I think it's a great idea. You've learned so much, Cameron, in the last, I don't know, five years from the people you've been talking to and just the circles you've been networking in and learning from, the knowledge you have right now is you're in the top 0.1 % probably of people in our business in terms of practice management knowledge.

41:44So many cool people on practice management that I know would love to come on and have those kinds of conversations. You, I'm saying. Yeah, no, I get that. I appreciate that feedback, but that kind of stuff is not congruent with this podcast at all. I'm just scratching the service with Randall Stubman, for example, these kinds of people, it's not congruent with what this podcast has been about. So that's why I would package it up in that. And I love nerding out on this stuff. And there's so many fascinating people that we know that we've met over the years that I've met over the years that would be so much fun to get that into its own feed.

42:17So noodling that. Mark, you're doing a piece on seg funds. What's going on with that? Oh, man. So I talked about segregated funds on a segment on the Rational Reminder. And I was just looking for something to write about. And so I just went back. I was like, oh, I've got some notes on segregated funds. I should put that into like a blog post thinking a thousand words. So I started writing it. And as I started writing it, I started teasing out more questions and more questions. And it just became this beast. And I just found all these rabbit holes to go down that I hadn't really stumbled upon when we did the segment on the rational reminder.

42:46I've got the first draft more or less done. And I think I clocked it at 5 ,000 words. And even in there. There's still some stuff that I didn't really cover. It's so complex. The information is not easily accessible. I had to talk to Jason Watt, who's a friend of ours, and he teaches the LLQP, which is the sort of entry-level insurance course for people who want an insurance license. And I had to pick his brain on some of this stuff because I literally could not find the information anywhere on the internet, not through insurance company websites, not in the information folders for segregated funds, which is like 60 to 70 page regulatory documents for segregated funds.

43:22And I'm still confused about a few things. I sent my first draft to Ben and a couple other people, and I'm waiting for feedback to see what direction we go with it. But it's a beast. And I learned a lot about segregated funds, more than I would ever want to know about segregated funds is in that paper. So what will the output be? I don't know. I've been talking to Ben about whether we turn it into maybe a white paper. I'm not as technical as Ben, so I'm sure if he reads it, he's going to come up with a lot of great questions that I haven't answered. And the trouble is, there's just not a ton of data that I was able to find specifically about segregated funds outside of the size of the industry.

43:53Again, Jason Watts put together some really interesting data on the probability of the guarantees paying out and that type of thing. So I think he could get involved if he's got the time and energy to do it. But because of its length, it's too long for a blog post. I think some kind of white paper or long form media piece makes sense. Maybe we do a longer video on it. I don't know. It just became this Frankenstein thing that I started working on and took on a life of its own and them open to feedback on what to do with it. Speaking of life of its own, just got a note from Angelica that the money scope, Ben, just crossed 100 ,000 downloads.

44:22On audio? I presume so. I say it every week. I'm sorry. I think it's fantastic. It's like the definitive, clearly spoken, straightforward, but technical on all things for anybody, frankly, but especially corporations. Now that we're into episode 12 this week, 11, 12, you're getting into the deep weeds of investing inside corporations. Yep. It's getting pretty heavy. We recorded earlier today of the day that we're recording the episode on optimal compensation planning for people with corporations. That was a heavy, I don't even know a month of prep that Mark and I did. Mark's oath, because we keep finding things that it's like, we haven't looked at this yet.

45:00We better model it, but modeling it takes a week. You have to understand the output of the modeling. This stuff is complicated though. You think CPP is complicated. Try optimizing your compensation from a corporation where CPP is just an afterthought of that decision. I could see the fatigue on your face when we started recording The Rational Reminder because you had already recorded Money Scope today. And I was like, your brain is just going to melt out your ears at this point. Yeah, it was a two-hour recording with Mark. Mark going to take away this first review. Recent reviews. Guy Giddy from the US.

45:31Brilliant. This is a great and thought-provoking podcast on topics critical to living a productive, stable and happy life. Ben and Cameron are phenomenal hosts who ask great questions. Ben's intelligence is shocking. He explained topics in such a clear and concise way that one often wonders why he doesn't have a PhD in economics and finance. Good question, Ben. Tempted. Any ideas for that? I don't know, man. That'd be yes, Mark. You could get an honorary degree. Going on, he said he'd be a phenomenal professor slash educator. I appreciate all the varied guests. Most importantly, it is great that guests are invited that discuss their topics and we as listeners can then decide whether or not we agree with said information.

46:10All in all, this is a great podcast and if there was a no bell for podcasts, this would get it. Cheers to all the great work that you guys and your support staff do. Next one, JLS3249 from Canada says, so good, such a good podcast, the best I found on investments and finance in general. Thank you so much. I want to be gracious and take the comment from Guy Giddy, but when people say that my intelligence is shocking, I just read stuff that other people have done and then say it back on the podcast. That's what everybody does. Take the victory lap, Ben. Like the people that we have on as guests who do the research, those are brilliant people that think of the questions to answer and then do the, anyway, I'll leave it there.

46:47It's funny, before I joined PWL, Ben, you had said to me, why don't you just come and join my team and do research? And I was like, I don't know how to do research. And I'll never forget your response. I was like, dude, I don't know how to do research. And I was like, Ben doesn't know how I do research. Like you don't want me on the team, Ben. Come on. I'll never forget that. Had a good laugh. I don't know what I'm doing, man. Just doing my best here. Aaron from Germany says, I bought an iPhone just to rate the show. It is that good. Ben, Cameron, and now Mark as well. Hey, first review that we get to read, but includes Mark, I think.

47:19Yes, I've arrived. Do a fabulous job. This is the podcast. If you want to nerd out and have a constant companion on your investing journey, the level of coverage through a variety of topics is breathtaking. They always stay rational, hence the name, and are based on facts, studies, etc. The particular style of Ben portraying the topic with easy-to-understand concepts and messages is captivating. Afterwards, the proof with academia, modeling, and bootstrap... Oh, boot, because we're Canadian. Boot, bootstrap simulation. Like six O's in the word boot. Yeah. Convinces and retains listeners such as myself, who are predominantly male with technical and or academic background.

47:56Deservedly, the RR team is getting high profile guests and don't stop on the technical side of investing. A lot is about behavior, how to tie living the good life together with investing as well. Been following the show since the early days when YouTube episodes were audio only as well. That is a while ago. Now it is mainly following the video versions, but I wanted to leverage this platform here for a review. This podcast will just keep on giving thanks from Germany. Very nice. Last one, Moleg from Canada. New listener. Great content, but sometimes a combination of my AirPods and the sound editing recording makes most S and some T sounds extremely loud and piercing.

48:31Slap some EQ on. So we've passed this message on to both the audio production company that we work with in the background and also to Matt, our in-house video producer. So we'll be looking at that. I know a couple of episodes, we had one particular individual on YouTube commented twice on my audio specifically. so I don't know if it's my audio that's causing people problems. I have no idea how to fix it, so I welcome feedback from anyone who knows what's going on. And I'm just curious if anybody else has that problem or if it's just a couple of individuals. On LinkedIn, I heard from Carolina last week from Monte Carlo saying that I often listen to your Rational Minder podcast, amazing work.

49:09Very nice to hear from her. Speaking of AirPods, I told you guys this before we started recording. I ordered some AirPods. I figured I'd get them by Costco. And I gave an option to have DoorDash. They don't obviously pay for any advertising. This is just my experience today. The delivery was here at the office in less than 45 minutes. That's crazy. I've never even tried a service like that. I realize I'm late to the party, but pretty cool. This fall, it's going to be an exciting time. Mark, you've got the book coming out, the Canadian edition of Dan Solon's book, Wealthier. This fall, we're planning on a series of some sort of meetups, I don't know, book launch party or something, because Dan is going to be in town this fall and then you're going to come to town as well.

49:47So we're not exactly sure the date set's going to depend on publishing, et cetera, but we have that in our sites for the fall. Yeah. I have a deadline now for the book writing, which is good because without a deadline, I'll just hum and haw. I'm going to Europe into May for three weeks and just based on the publishing calendar, as I know it, I think it means I've got to finish before I go. So I've basically got seven weeks to finish this up. Now we've gone public, I guess that's more pressure, right? Challenge accepted, but we'll get it done. And you got to queue up next week's conversation with Mike Green.

50:15That was a great conversation. Mike Green has been one of the primary people arguing that index funds are breaking financial markets. And I admittedly had largely ignored him. I hadn't really dug into any of his arguments and just dismissed it as whatever. And had actually done some content on how index funds are not affecting market efficiency, which is true. But it's also not Mike's point, which I now understand after having actually gone through his arguments to prepare for his episode. We invited him on because he wrote a scathing review of me as a person on his sub stack. And so someone sent me that and I read it.

50:51I was like, wow, I really annoyed this guy. Maybe I should see what he's so annoyed about. And so I invited him on Rash Reminder. I just said, listen, you clearly have something that's important that you want to share. Why don't you just come on our podcast to talk about it? And he agreed. And before we had him on, I really went and listened to him on all the other podcasts. On all, he's done a lot, a bunch of other podcasts that he's done. I read his substack posts and I get it now. I get what his point is. So I think by getting what his point is, we were able to ask some pretty good questions to really have a good conversation.

51:19And I think it was a great episode. One of the reasons that I've always been skeptical of Mike is because a lot of the other shows that he's appeared on are a little bit more sensationalist. And that always was just a turnoff. It's not the kind of content we want to do, but he was great. He is not a sensationalist. Not even the slightest bit. He comes at this argument with deep care and compassion for his kids. It's almost like climate change type issue in his world. He was so insightful and really good, nice guy. Yeah. Enjoyed that. We'll see what listeners think, but I think it's a really good episode that gives you a different perspective.

51:52I'm not sure it's one you'll play at 2x speed. Just throw that out there, but you might want to slow it down. He's quite bright. And then in two weeks, Scott Galloway will be here. He has a new book coming out later this month, The Algebra of Wealth. That was also a good conversation with Prof G guy. Good to get him on. Thanks to our friend Barry Ridholtz for making the introduction, which is pretty cool. Anything else on your minds, guys? I'll mention this. One of our Rational Reminder fans, he's a physician out of Ontario, and I believe you've met him, Dr. Hassan Morale. He just published a book.

52:25I've got it actually right here on my desk. I don't know if people can see that. It's called Sleep Well, Take Risks, and Squish the Peas. I haven't read it yet because he just sent me a copy of it. I've known Dr. Morale for a while. He's in pediatric emergency medicine. He's a researcher as well. But he sent me a copy. I'm really excited to read it because the whole premise of the book is what we can learn from toddlers. And so as a dad who has a one and a six year old, a book written on this topic by an expert in the field, I think is really interesting. And it's just a cool coincidence that he happens to be a fan of the show and he's shown up at our meetups and stuff.

52:52So I'm going to try and get through that book in the next few weeks and maybe I can talk about it on a future episode. Yep. I've got a copy of the book too. I'm going to try and read it also because I'm similarly interested for the same reasons as you. Maybe it would help you get those Twitter numbers up like Mark from his snuggle time. Ben has surpassed me on Twitter. I don't know what he's talking. He's got like 20 ,000 something followers. I'm playing catch up with Ben now and he's putting out what, two videos a week. Come on, you're a machine. You're always playing catch up, but the rate of growth of your Twitter account was very concerning to me.

53:22I had to start tweeting more, but you're just too good at it. You just got a knack for... And it's just a pinch competitive. I'm not as competitive, but I did point out a thread to my wife that Ben wrote a little while ago and it got like 500 and something likes and 180 ,000 views. When my R.E.S.P. thread surpassed yours, Ben, the first thing I did was took two screenshots and I was about to do something with them. And I was like, you know what? I'm just not going to go there. So I've got the screenshots if I need them. I've got receipts in case. That's pretty funny. All right. To the two listeners who stuck around this long to listen, thanks for listening and we'll see everybody next week.

53:58Thanks.

54:01Thank you.