Episode 354 - Jason Pereira: Expert Financial Planning

21:31The hedonistic adaptation, you just keep on moving up. So oftentimes, like what's more important than a client saying, how much money can I make? Or how much money, what I flip on clients all the time is I say, listen, if I get you to live the life you want to live, leave behind the legacy you want to leave behind, does it matter what the return number was as long as it was fair? They all stop and they're just like, you're right, it doesn't. So taking the focus away from the product, from the noise, and specifically getting the focus on what matters to them first and foremost, and guiding them through the actions that will basically help them succeed.

22:02That is what planning is at its best. And that basically, when you take that attitude of you're there to help them succeed in life. The zone for what you're going to involve yourself with, the things you're going to concern yourself with, increases. The value that you provide starts to exponentially increase because you're not focused on the next sale. You're focused on improving people's lives. So you keep on asking yourself that question and your service offering spans to meet that need. So that is the best version. It's one who basically is going to expand their service to be as many things to a few people in a deep and powerful way to help them self-actualize the best version of their lives.

22:34And what is the most common misconception you see about what a financial planner actually does? I think it's twofold. A, I mean, the general populace thinks it's just about product sales. I'm going to invest your money. Very few people understand what a financial plan is. And if you look at some of the surveys that come out, they're hilarious. There was one, I think BMO did years ago. They said that 50 % of Canadians have financial plans. And I'm sitting there going, all right, sure. Yeah, right. And then when you dug into the numbers, a full 25 % of them said it was in their head. Like, okay, sure.

23:02I've got a unicorn in my head. It doesn't mean I got a unicorn. And then you dug even deeper and it was, but I actually investigated some of them were quote unquote investment plans, written or unwritten. And I think the only data I've ever seen on, I think J.B. Power and Associates does a survey on this. I think they pegged the number at like 7 % of the Canadian population has a financial plan. I'm willing to bet it's half of that. Now that being said, the U.S. number is closer to 15, I think. It was more than double. So we got a long way to go educating people on what planning is. It's not about product.

23:31It's about life planning. It's about basically enabling what it is you want out of life. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, is this concept that the plan is a plan. It's a product. It's a noun, a document. Yeah, it is. The document's a snapshot, but that's just a snapshot. It doesn't mean anything unless you implement. You know, there is a saying that the honest ones around of us say it all the time. It's like, look, it's stale the day where it's written. And absolutely, because your life is going to change. Now, it's close enough to reality the day it's written and printed that we can move forward with that.

24:01But then over time, it needs to be constantly updated. It needs to be constantly updated as your life changes, as the situations change around you. It's all this information is going to change. It's not a noun. It's a verb. I like to use the verb financial planning because that is exactly what we're doing. We are doing actions. We are not simply creating something. Yeah, more of a process than a document. It's a journey, not an end state. You've got a podcast dedicated to fintech. What do you think are the most impactful ways that technology is changing financial planning? Well, I mean, you're asking me this a couple of years after Gen AI come out.

24:33So artificial intelligence is changing financial planning and it's changing every aspect of it. Now, the thing is, is that for the most part, most of the actual work that it's going to do is largely centered around productivity. It's going to be more geared towards how do I reduce the administrative burden or expedite the administrative burden and make things move faster? That's going to benefit the entire community because the less overhead we have, the lower the entry level for clients, right? Because our costs, if they diminish, then we can offer the same level of service to an ever larger number of people or a lower price point.

25:05That's great. Now, the other aspect of this is happening is that it's also helping with things like financial planning. Our friends over at Conquest Planning applied artificial intelligence in multiple forms pre-gen AI to financial planning. and they created a tool that can produce a financial plan as good as any basic financial planner ever could very, very quickly. Testing more variables than a human being has the time to. So I say that coyly because it lets basic financial plans get done quickly, but it lets really great financial planners accelerate their ability to a way they never could before.

25:33One of the guys there refers to as caddy for planning. It tells what club to use next. It helps you make the decision, but that's a quantitative output. You still got to bring the human aspects into it. But overall, it's allowing me to be more productive and more accurate and get more research done. I mean, just look at chat GPT's research capabilities alone. The ability to geek out over something that Ben freaking posted on Common Sense Investing and say, is that right? Look at the papers, look at the counterpoints and just do a deep research dive that we're in 15 minutes. I get 10 pages dedicated to the thing.

26:02My ability for learning, my ability for challenging more questions, my ability for research has increased substantially. My ability to produce the end takeaways, reports, whatever else it is, is doing that. My reduction of administration has done that. And the great thing about all this is it's taking away all the heavy lifting, all the heavy work that is involved with this. And really going to let me focus more on the actual client and the human being and focus more on what is it beyond the numbers that's not letting this person succeed? How is it I can provide more value to this person and expand that offering?

26:33And what do you think are the wrong uses of AI in our world? Putting private information into a public LLM with no good use case. I mean, like no security. So security is the thing people will have to be cognizant of. Like I don't put any client's information in these things. I go so far as to, I need to extract something from a document. Fine. I'm going to redact all of the personal information, but I'll extract whatever else I need. Really it's too early right now, but there's already, I think Australia last I looked was already saying that, look, using chat GPT with client information could be a violation of our privacy laws.

27:03We're going to hear a lot more about this. I think if anything, there's a lot of privacy law movement around the world, and it's going to continue on that trend, and AI is going to accelerate that. Also, I mean, reinforcing your own biases. As we know, the way you prompt an AI can deeply result in, it can change the answer, right? So I can go in and say, please tell me why dividend investing is the single greatest way to invest, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it will reinforce that behavior as opposed to prompting it to say, I would like to see the academic literature regarding dividend investing and its validity.

27:35So it can be a tool in the hands of a craftsman can build something beautiful. A tool in the hands of someone who doesn't know what they're doing can build something dangerous. And that, unfortunately, because it's seen as validity, can reinforce false beliefs. And then, of course, we get into the entire fake news issues that are a big problem. I was thinking about the same thing as you were talking about JGPT and AI. I use it daily for research, but I find that if I didn't have a baseline level of knowledge and expertise on a lot of different topics, on the topics that I'm asking you about. There are a lot of cases where it'll tell me something that I know is wrong, but that comes across very authoritatively.

28:11It sounds so right. Which is scary, right? Just sitting in the quadrant of confidence and accuracy, but it could be the confidence inaccuracy quadrant too. It's funny because my first reaction when sitting down and playing with Chachabee for the first time, I was like, I was blown away. I took a deep breath and thought to myself, okay, this is interesting. I'm not too threatened by this because what this has done is it's made the value of the person who can call BS on the AI significantly higher. Because at the end of the day, if the basic stuff can be done, if anything can be researched, the most important person in the room is the person who knows if it's true or not.

28:44So it doesn't eliminate my need for knowledge. It basically validates it's more important now because everybody's going to be thinking these things, but they're not careful. I'll tell you one of the other cool things I've been with AI lately too, in terms of research capabilities, is that your ability to build programs with this stuff. is unprecedented. I may host a podcast on FinTech, but I can't code to save my life. And I'm currently working on a case right now for my expert witness cases where I have to stress test with volatility, a specific type of universal life policy. So I was trying to figure out how to build this in Excel document.

29:13And I wrote out a page and a half of formulas. And I thought to myself, wait a sec, I can do a spreadsheet. Wrote a two paragraph explanation of what I wanted to build, took the formulas and the experimentation, put it into something called Replit. 10 minutes later, it had a version one and it looks pretty accurate. I got to finish stress testing it. But when you start thinking about all the things that like, and Ben will get this too, when we're researching things, we say, okay, it'd be really cool if I could stress test this to the nth degree, if I can build something that does that. I mean, you guys got Brayden, you're lucky enough to have him be able to do that stuff.

29:43But for those of us who don't have a rocket scientist in their office, the reality is, is that now we're actually able to potentially even test our theories and our research in a way we never could before. The coding aspect of it is really cool. Brayden has tried using Replit specifically. And like you said, it's not a super fair comparison because Brayden is literally a rocket scientist. He did not love using Replit. It didn't write code that he would write. A good friend of mine, he's a data engineer, currently works for big tech companies, worked for a bunch of them. We talk about this a lot as well.

30:13He says something similar to what we were just talking about, where it gives us occasionally information that we know with our domain expertise is not perfect, but it comes across really authoritatively, it does that with code too, where it'll write code that for you who otherwise couldn't code, it's still super useful. But for someone who's an expert in coding, it'll spit out code that an expert would never write. 100%. It's sloppy code. I've had friends of mine review it and they're like, this is trash, but it's doing the job. But the most important thing, and this is where people got to be careful.

30:40This is why one of the things I built into the screen was the most important thing is that you have to audit to make sure it's right. I can't take it at face value that it's right. So I've literally programmed auditing screens where I can see like every entry of every Monte Carlo to basically say, okay, like how did you arrive at this and work backwards in ballet? So if I can test that, I don't have to test every Monte Carlo instance over a thousand, but if I can do a couple of cases and then test a few of them and make sure it's all working right, pretty solid probability it's nailed it. If not, I can take correcting steps.

31:06Yeah, but you have to be able to audit it. That's the interesting thing about it is it's super useful and it can help scale your time, but you still have to have knowledge and expertise to use it. And there's the moral hazard, just like taking the answer straight from chat GPT is if you take a stir from there and you don't know enough to call BS, if you just assume that the software you built is 100 % accurate, you're in trouble. Also, I would say be smart about it. What's the mission critical thing you're trying to build? Am I going to try to replace Salesforce with it? Absolutely not. A portfolio management software with it?

31:32Not even close, but testing Monte Carlo on a universal life policy? Sure. Yeah. And you can audit the results. Exactly. Relatively easily. Exactly. On the topic of technology, we have a ton of our client relationships that are 100 % remote at this point where we never meet the client or rarely meet the client in person, what should advisors do to maintain strong personal relationships with clients in a primarily digital relationship? So this is something I've been talking about quite a lot. It's a concept of digital intimacy. It was a term that sounds weird, but I coined with my friends, Adam Holt and Derek Nottman on their podcast.

32:03And I was basically saying, look, digital experience and client intimacy are not things that are separate. You can use one to augment the other. And what you really need is to think about digital intimacy. How do we create client intimacy over digital means? So most of my meetings, the vast majority of them are over Zoom. Now, the great thing about it is that that's a new medium. It's a new medium that when I'm facing you face-to-face, I can't put something up the same way between us that I would in person. And unfortunately for most of us, we failed to listen to Marshall McEwen, the medium being the message, and we've tried to apply the old medium to the new message.

32:34What I mean by that is, great, we've got to talk to a client. Let me pull up a PDF of their statement. I'm taking digital representations of paper and sharing that. You know what's better than that? A lot of these softwares that we are using day to day now, whether they be portfolio management softwares, financial planning softwares, some of the insurance illustration softwares out there, they are built almost with a consumer mindset in terms of how they're designed. And because of that, there's plenty of times now where I don't even open up the statement. What I'll do is I'll actually open up their portfolio in my portfolio management system, and I'll kind of walk them through a narrative through some screens, and I'll be able to have an interactive conversation with them.

33:09Another one of my favorite ways to use my financial planning software is Conquest, where I'll turn off all the recommendations. And then one by one, I'll turn them on. And they'll see the animation of all the red bars turning to green. And they can stop and ask questions. Well, wait a sec. Why would I start CPP at age 70? Why wouldn't I start it now? Because I can take it now. Great question. Let me show you what happens. Slide. Boom. They see it immediately. So they basically are not only being able to challenge you, but we are able to respond and get validation and understanding around the recommendation.

33:39And the great thing is, that they can, again, what they're doing is they're taking over part of the journey. Whereas before with the slide deck, I have 10 slides. I'm going to go through 10 slides on this journey. You want me to deviate? I don't have an extra slide here, but you want me to deviate and talk about, okay, I'll stop talking about your retirement and I'll focus on that big trip you have coming up and you want to finance for a year off. Okay, great. Let's go over there. This is how we're going to fund it. It allows them to be a participant in the journey. So what I'm saying is that when I'm talking about this, I say, look, look at your softwares that are out there.

34:08Look at how they can be used in engagement. Many of them can already. When you're looking at onboarding new things or finding tools that are valuable, can they actually produce something that can be put in front of a client? And more importantly, when I actually consult with technology companies regarding what they're building, I'm telling them to start thinking this way. It's like, don't make me open up a PDF. Give me something dynamic, interactive that I can even send to the client. They can have a dynamic and interactive experience with. Let's embrace the medium more. And we're still very early in our thinking around this.

34:35I mean, I'm thinking about it. I'm not sure many people are really, but it makes for so much more of a entertaining experience. But also, and I showed this once to Megan Lurse, I'm not sure she's been on your podcast before, but well-known behavioral finance expert. And she basically said that I kind of stumbled into the trans-theoretical model of change. I had basically, through doing this kind of validation, showing explanation thing, and basically letting them challenge it, I was hitting two or three steps of this model that allows people to accept change and accept what they're being told versus is being given a checklist and saying, here it is, this is the end result.

35:08Trust me. They're actually going to be able to see it. We were doing, we call it just interactive planning, but same kind of idea in office before things went super remote. We still do it now, but yeah, people are blown away by going through the whole financial planning process. And like you said, seeing how the outputs change as you change different inputs. I think it's the only way to do it in my opinion. Well, I think that having a plan is empowering to a client, a plan that can understand. But I think that that sort of interactive understanding that helps them understand what it is and why and where the variations are is an education.

35:38And it's incredibly empowering. I've had people who felt overwhelmed by the initial presentation saying, well, not really getting how this works. I said, okay, let me try it this way. I show them in the Neuron Actway like, oh my God, I get exactly where you're coming from. And they feel so empowered and excited and happy about it. And really, how are they going to listen to us unless they actually buy in? Anything that helps build that understanding is powerful and can really move the needle for them. I think it was Eilat Fischbach, who is a past guest who studies motivation, hopefully not misquoting, but I'm pretty sure she talked about how when someone participates in arriving at something like the amount that they need to save, they'll be much more motivated to actually stick to it.

36:16So that makes a lot of sense from that perspective too. Absolutely. And the thing is, is that we can literally modify on the fly with so many softwares now. We've had times where clients are like, wait a minute, I told you at 1 ,500 per month. Okay. Maybe it's more like 1 ,200. No problem. Let me modify this now. Let's see where this ends up and see if that's material or not. And then lo and behold, you're creating so many different points of buy-in and communication, or they can turn around and say like, listen, what if I spent more every year? Because maybe I'm not comfortable. And my question becomes, well, do you feel like you should be spending more of the things you're not doing?

36:46I'm like, yeah, I'd like to go and do whatever. Okay, great. Let's do that. And show them the net impact and let them make an informed decision. So you're talking about planning, Jason. Let's go back to basics. And can you talk about what a high quality financial plan covers? I'm a big believer in keeping this simple. I do a lot of complex planning, but at the end of the day, I like to say it's a process of distillation. All the super brainy, nerdy things we do up here with numbers get distilled down to a financial plan that gets distilled down to a 10-page or 10-slide presentation is the way I look at it.

37:16I want people to take in the keystrokes in 10 minutes because their attention starts to drop off pretty heavily after 10 minutes to listen to someone. You want to be clear. Then you want to have the validation piece, which is the actual plan itself besides the presentation. And that really, I have never been a fan of this concept of this hundred page plan that used to go around for so long, where it was just like, here's everything. And I'm showing you why you pay me to do this. And it's like, to me, there's something so insecure about not being able to speak simply. So what goes into it to me?

37:43I'm like, keep this simple. Who am I doing this for? Who's the profile page of the people involved? What are the goals and objectives in life? What's their balance sheet? That's their starting point. What's their income statement? Like, where's the money coming from and going to? How's that changing? What's their asset allocation return assumptions that we're making here? Because that's what's going to go forward. What does the projection look like? Where's the bar graph that shows them how they're going to do? Where's the stress test that shows them that they're going to be okay, even if something goes wrong?

38:07And then what are the recommendations on how they achieve it? And then an appendix. And frankly, what I just mentioned there should be less than 10 pages before you get to the appendix. You want to hand someone a big 30-page plan, that's fine. But I've done that. Our plans were basically kept down to about 20-ish. I would say, look, don't be overwhelmed by this. It's between these five leaves of paper that everything is explained. Now, the appendix, of course, there's some people who want to go deeper. So I would keep it down to cash flow sheets and asset projections and leave it at that. And I always jokingly, at the end of our presentation, have a picture of a stack of files and say, okay, this is my coy way of saying that.

38:39If you want the 200-page plan, I'll give it to you, but you're going to regret it. And I'll tell you, maybe five times in my career, people are like, I'm not understanding standing this fully? Give me everything. And then they turn around and say, okay, I now know what you're saying. Can we go over the spreadsheet in the back? Yes, we can. So I think sometimes people just want to feel like they're getting value for money, but anyone who's been to a buffet trying to get value for money knows they leave feeling not so good. What is the nerdiest piece of financial planning knowledge you can think of that's broadly applicable though?

39:05I don't want to hear about insurance shares, for example, broadly applicable to listeners in the audience. Nerdiest piece of financial. Is it one of the things that drives me nuts? Uh, no, we have questions about that too. Nerdiest piece. Nerdiest piece of financial. Hypothetically speaking. Oh man, there's so many. I don't know which one. Like to me, it's just everything. Can we come back to this? Let's practice. I'm going to try to come back to this later. Okay, okay. We'll come back to that one later. Okay, here's one for you then. What's your favorite, again, hypothetically speaking, what's your favorite financial planning related argument to get into on the internet?

39:40Think outside the box here, Jason. I mean, just imagine you get into arguments. outside the box. Look, Tabasco is not the best hot sauce. I'm going to call it out right now. McGrath, you know I'm right. You just won't admit it, first and foremost, okay? Now, that is semi-related to financial planning. But as for the rest of it, I mean, take your pick, the 4 % rule, as if God shizzled on stone that thou shall take 4 % and you'll be perfectly fine, never mind the fact people can't quote it right and think it's 4 % per year. Dividends are a way to alpha. Like, give me a break. Whole life is immune from market volatility.

40:10Don't get me started on that one. Alts have low risk. I have very little hair left in my head. And Cliff Asens got there first. And part of it was probably because he's raving about volatility laundering and how that's just not the case. The fact that people think they can read a newspaper or stuff online, and that's how I pick my stocks. I don't get to outperform managers. And it's just like, have you not read enough Michael Lewis books? Have you not seen? Patrick O'Shaughnessy said early on in his podcast, it was like 50, 60 episodes that he's like, I realized I should to call this podcast, this is who you're up against.

40:39This is a guy talking to the most sophisticated hedge fund managers in the world and the resources they bring to bear. And when you realize that this is like, you're either beating gold or the killer in the market really, or you're taking the average, you're either that, you're either the prey or the predator. There's no way reading yesterday's stale news has anything to do with actually succeeding. And you know what? The reality is, is that if you want to argue with me about that, usually you're just arguing vibes and feelings because I'm throwing stuff at you that proves it is what it is. I have definitely seen you get into all of those arguments on the internet.

41:12Yes. It's a wonderful place. What role should mortality pooling theoretically play in financial planning? Okay. So to define that for those who aren't going to know, like mortality risk pooling is what you get when you're in a member of a pension or an annuity and you benefit the longer you live because people who died before you basically left behind either return or their money, whatever else it is. But that's basically it. So the classic, classic financial advisor and plan or answer? It depends. Look, for some people, it doesn't matter at all. We are privileged enough to deal with clients who are so wealthy that they've earned 0 % rate of return for the rest of their lives, they're going to be perfectly fine.

41:46But even for them, maybe they want to simply lock in an annuity, for example, guarantee themselves an income stream for life, take greater risk in the rest of their portfolio and leave a larger estate. That's possible if that's what they want to do. For others where it's not the case, look, there's kind of a middle ground. There's those who have so little that they're not going to be able to hit their goals and no amount of mortality risk point is going to do anything. But there's a middle ground in between where we do a financial plan, we test the Monte Carlo test or whatever test we're going to test.

42:12And we find that, look, the probability is not great. Is there a way to enhance this? And the answer, if we throw an annuity in, sometime can increase something that was in the 60s to the 90s. So what role does it play? It's case specific. Can it help people? Absolutely. And especially, I mean, selection bias here, especially if you are someone with longevity and health in your family and all this other stuff, you're basically going to win this bet. I mean, I like to joke, my wife is the teacher's pension plan's worst nightmare. Her grandmother died six months before her 101st birthday. I'm sitting there going like, she's going to retire like 56.

42:46This is a no brainer to me. She's going to win this thing. You know, God touch wood, God bless. So the answer is, again, it depends. So it depends on the personal financial situation, but also are you the person with three heart attacks and the stroke and everything else? Like you're not long for this world. Are you the person with longevity in the family? You are, right? So there's a middle ground, But there's also, again, I think, frankly, when I get to the age where maybe I look at an annuity or whatever products exist in the market, do I consider locking in some of my spending in such a manner?

43:11Yeah, I probably would. Because, again, I think I'm a longer tail, probably based on health and history. And if that's the case, then, hey, why not take some of that stress out of the marketplace? Why not basically benefit from the mortality risk pooling and make my situation more secure? Totally sensible. So why is mortality pooling such a hard sell to clients? Different theories on this. I think first off, it comes down to when it comes to buying annuities, it's the endowment effect. You're asking people to part with a check, which might be the second biggest check to buy something that they've done short of buying a house.

43:40We're talking usually five, six, seven figure numbers, right? There's a lot of fright there. And it's something that they're not going to be able to undo the next day. There's a cooling off period, but next month, they're not going to be able to do it next month. So the point is, is that that endowment effect I think is incredibly powerful. There's also, I think, a lack of understanding of the upside, the upside of mortality risk pooling. Everybody's like, well, interest rates could be higher in six months. I can do better. That's beside the point because that's six months from now. But the reality is that if you're beyond average life expectancy, the mortality credits are so much bigger than you would ever earn in that delta in an interest.

44:12It's an issue. You're going to basically make a lot more. And then the other idea is that the entire idea of not keeping, again, down in effect, the entire idea of not getting back what you put into it, you can get refund annuities, but they pay less. I think that bothers people. And then there is an entire morbid aspect of this. It's like, wait a minute, I'm benefiting from people dying? Yeah, you are. You want to be part of the teacher's pension plan or hoop? Most people do. You take that. But the reality is when you're making a decision on a personal level, you learn about that, that's how it works.

44:39Some people think it's pretty morbid. So one last thing. We don't have a lot of good options in Canada. We don't have a variable annuity market like the US does where it comes with additional tax deferral benefits. I think that tax deferral benefit really does basically lead to more sales in that marketplace as well. whereas because we just don't have that benefit, it's purely a play on longevity, which is not as compelling. Canada had these products launched, I don't know, the last five or so years. We called them tontines, which they weren't technically, but it's like a blend of an annuity and an investment product.

45:10They seem really interesting. You and I, Jason, chatted about them a ton when they first came out and we were like, this is pretty cool, but they have not been successful. Why do you think they've failed? I was actually looking back here for Malevsky's book on tontines somewhere around there. Look, these are products which are investment products with a mortality risk point. So no insurance company, but you are basically putting money into a pool. And if you live longer, you win. And if you don't, you basically are giving something up, whether that be the entire amount or just your return. So it's a way of getting an annuity or a variable payout on the annuity, because it depends on what happens to the pool, that is far more affordable than an annuity.

45:46And the reason why, I mean, like, why did it not take off in Canada? Look, first and foremost, advisor education, lack of understanding. I just know even online, the conversations or arguments or debates I get into with advisors regarding longevity planning is orders of magnitude more sophisticated with American advisors than it is in Canada. We just don't talk about it here. Retirement planning, retirement income planning is like, let's shift them to dividend paying stock and put a cash wedge in, which by the way, is a term that only exists in Canada. So that tells you something's wrong. So it's a complete and total lack of appreciation for the challenges of mortality of mortality in Canada.

46:19I even wrote a series in the Globe and Mail on this, on looking at different products, but also explaining mortality planning in general. So that I think first and foremost is if you don't understand how the problem really works or how the problem actually exists, then you don't understand the need to solve it. Then you have the second piece, which is on the product side. Again, there's some complexity to this. I mean, I reverse engineered the math on some of this stuff and it's not easy, but the reality is I looked at this and said like, hey, I'll call out purpose is the only one that's still got one left and I'll call them out on it.

46:48The assumptions they used on that thing were very conservative, very conservative. And I was like, okay, great. You set yourself up for future distributions increasing at a faster rate than what otherwise. Whether that happens or not, that's entirely up to chance in the market. But the reality is I'm looking at this and I've spoken about marketing it. And I said, listen, what you really need to do, lay to greed. Show them charts on what the projection payouts are later on in life and how much of that's made up of mortality credits. Because right now, the distributions are largely returned. You know, tiny little bit of mortality credit, if that at all.

47:16But over time, roll the camera forward 20 years and mortality credits start to far exceed the interest payment. So when you start to, you actually, people understood the upside of mortality credits. I think there would be far more demand for it. And the last part is, and I'll say this much, there unfortunately is no model framework that's fully accepted in academia for a calculator on, okay, I've got conventional investments, annuities, and tontines. How do I allocate between the three to get the optimal scenario? It's not there. It doesn't exist yet. There used to be one of these for older products called guaranteed minimum draw benefits, which again, I'll credit Mielewski.

47:51He created that, which you hit a button and boom, it was like, here's the product allocation between the three that gives you the optimal outcome. It doesn't exist for Tontine. So not knowing exactly how much of this you should even expose people to is a challenge. When does permanent life insurance make sense? Okay. Let's look at life insurance in general. There's three different needs it services. First is indemnity. I die today. I'm taking care of the people I left behind because I haven't amassed enough wealth to make sure my kids and my wife are going to be fine. That's the first piece. The second piece of the internet spectrum is I have a permanent need or a semi-permanent need.

48:25I own a business. I have no plans on selling it anytime soon. I'm going to eventually die. I'm going to pass it on to my kids or whatever else it is. I have a tax bill associated with that business or a cottage, which is far more common. Maybe I even take steps to freeze that. So I know with certainty what the amount is going to be. I have a need that is 100 % conducive to my death, whether it happens today or 50 years in the future. I have effectively a permanent need, 100%. Where things get muddy is when we start using it for the third reason, which is for an investment vehicle. So what does it make sense?

48:56It makes sense when first and foremost, there is a permanent need. Now, on the investment vehicle piece, that's debatable. And of course, Ben and I have been doing some early work on use of whole life as an investment vehicle. And I will say right now that it should not be the first investment vehicle. RSPs, TFSAs, FHSAs, everything else, they have benefits. When you start getting into a taxable environment, is there a benefit to this stuff? The answer is it depends, as always, but it depends first and foremost on risk tolerance. The more conservative an investor you are, the more likely it is to be a positive outcome with that.

49:27So compare it to being a GIC owner or in the U.S. CDs, right, where you're taking no risk. So in that type of investment, when you compare it to a whole life policy, it starts to look a little similar. The value can't drop. You get returns every year and then you reinvest those and they can't drop. Now, the return or the dividends will change over time or the projected schedule will change over time depending on age and market performance. but it can actually be a reasonable substitute for really conservative investments. And especially because that par pool is invested in diversified investments, you're getting the benefit of returns that are conducive to those higher investments that you normally would invest yourself.

50:04So there is potentially a place here, but we also remember that even though people tout the fact that you can borrow against it and it's flexible as other stuff, there is an inherent inflexibility to it as well. You know, you cash it out, you get to pay tax. Number of things you got to be aware of when it comes to the handcuffs. So not as a first option, but as an option for the people who wear what works. Yeah, it's reliable. There's a place for it. It's often talked about or sold as if everybody should have a lot of it. Yes. To a man with a hammer, everything's a nail. And this is the problem.

50:31Is it appropriately sold? I would say that it's oversold. Have you had Cole on the podcast? No. We've seen his work before and he talked about incentives in various studies and found that yes, it tends to be sold. But when you change compensation models, suddenly other stuff that's expensive starts to be sold. So lo and behold. Okay, nerdiest piece of financial trivia, I'll give it for you. I think they got it. You thought of it. Is that, and I get into arguments about this, dividends are not tax effective. Oh. Everybody always points and says, oh, look, I pay less tax on dividend. Now, for anyone who works with small business owners in Canada, we know how things work.

51:03There's something called integration. And that means that by the time you add the corporate tax bill and the personal tax bill, it's the same thing as you earning it personally. So when people say, well, dividends are a way to tax effectively, for companies to tax effectively return money to investors. No, they paid tax, you pay tax, total equals the same. It's like basically you ordered up for fries and the delivery guy ate 15, 20 % of your fries before they arrived. And then you imagine it didn't happen. Exactly. You have less. And then when you look at foreign dividends, it's even worse because they're not tax efficient at all.

51:34In fact, in a corporation, they're even worse off. So there in no way a tax efficient means of returning to investor or money to investors, except for in TFSAs and tax shelter vehicles. But that just puts them on par with capital gains and other forms too. So it's not a big deal. But when you think about it and you realize that interest gets deducted from an income statement on a corporation and paid out and then it's taxed fully at an individual's hands, you're literally paying the same tax bill on dividends and interest, whether you own the bond of the stock. Capital gains are the only thing that actually have a tax preference.

52:03In particular, and I'll never understand people who think buybacks are a bad thing. I think Ken French said they separate the people who understand corporate finance from those who don't. I love that line because at the end of the day, I don't have to participate in the capital. I don't have to realize tax. I don't want to, but I can participate when I choose to. And then I get the preferential rate. It's just the same amount of money leaving a corporation. So what's the point? So that's the nerdiest piece is that what you think is tax efficient. Sorry to break it to you. It ain't. That's a good one.

52:29People look at the amount of tax that you pay on dividends at low tax brackets in Canada, and they think that it's tax-free, that you're not paying any personal income tax. But the reason you're not is because because the corporation paid your personal tax bill for you, effectively. The tax was still paid. Yeah. And people will say to me, I don't care what the corporation paid. It's like, wait a minute, then you think that they wouldn't pay you more if they didn't have this tax bill? Oh, well, they're just going to pay themselves more. I'm like, then why do they pay dividends at all? There's this never ending, this is the online arguments, these never ending trail of nonsense arguments.

52:58If they're paying dividends, it's because they have excess capital and they have a retention ratio. If they pay less tax, that retention ratio stays the same, more money comes out. So like, end of story. Like your capital goes down by the amount of tax that the corporation paid. So like there's no free money. There is no free money. Like dividends are free money. Okay. Let's walk away from that one. That was good though. That's a good, broadly applicable and very nerdy piece of financial planning knowledge. Nailed it. You had some good articles in the Globe Mail recently on this. How should financial planners approach estimating a client's life expectancy?

53:29Yeah, it's a tricky one. So I will say first and foremost, you start with the FB Canada guidelines. So FB Canada is, of course, the certifying by the CFP board. Ben, you serve on the committee for guidelines. Thank you very much for your service. But they include at the back of that, in that report, the CPM 2000 tables. This is for Canadian pensioners. Now, here's the thing. People don't understand that there's more than one type of mortality table. There's gender based mortality tables. There's smoking, non-smoking based, but CPM is for pensioners. Now, there's a phenomenon where people who collect pensions live longer than people who don't.

53:59Maybe it's due to income security. We can speculate. I'm not going to get into that. But the point is, is that inherently by using the longer lived mortality tables, FB Canada is saying, use the more conservative assumption. That's a great starting point. So you start with that and they will tell you that you should start there. Now, the thing you got to remember about mortality is that life expectancy is a 50 % interval, which means your odds of living beyond are 50 % exactly. So you can't just use the 50 % interval. I think FB Canada's guidelines are to use the 25 % interval and then potentially add another couple of years.

54:27I think that's a great conservative thing. Now, people hate the conservative thing because it means theoretically, if you're trying to bounce the last check, you spend less money. Frankly, I always make the bad joke that if you're bouncing the last check, it better be for the thing that kills you because there's no way to guarantee that. But you start with that and then you have to take personal situation into consideration. Again, are they super healthy, like member of another clinic, jog all the time, long-lived parents? Those all things all point towards you're probably going to win this bet.

54:54And then on this other side of it, are you the guy who's had three heart attacks and is massively overweight and doesn't work out at all, adjust it. But the other thing is that doesn't get mentioned, and this was mentioned in an article by an advisor who services the indigenous community in Canada, basically said First Nations average life expectancy is lower in general because of various issues and social issues. So when you tell them that you're planning for age 90, it's almost insulting to them. So I think we have to be as planners aware of who the individual is across from us, from health-wise and maybe other issues to inform that decision, to inform that talk, as opposed to just applying a simple rule all the time.

55:31Now, that being said, if you want to start with that simple rule and the client says, look, I'm not going to live that long. It's like, okay, great. Let's have that conversation. Why is it you think that? Well, none of my parents lived that long. Okay. Well, lifespans have gone on. How did they pass away? Well, natural. Okay, fine. You can have this back and forth and educate them to say like, oftentimes people say, why are you doing that? Life expectancy is only 84. And I'm like, okay, here's how life expectancy works. 50 % chance you'll be on it. You have a, believe it or not, you and your spouse have a one in 10 chance of one of you living past that age.

55:58Really? Yeah. That's real. That's something we got to plan for. The data on income and both life expectancy and health span, I find those data to be super uncomfortable. There's big gaps between the lowest income and highest income, life expectancy and health span in Canada, which is a pretty ugly fact. Look, it is ugly. But at the end of the day, there's a correlation between wealth and health. That's just it. Some of it's job determination because again, higher paying jobs with some exceptions tend to be more white collar and less brutal. And then of course, yeah, health spend. It's a big delta.

56:31I mean, some of us have the option of going to the US or elsewhere if we feel like the lines are too long here. It's a thing. Not everyone's got that option. Yeah. So here's a subject, Jason, you know a little bit about. What financial designations should clients be looking for when they hire a financial advisor? Good question. You said advisor, right? Let's just establish something. Financial planner is a term that's well-defined and has an ISO code and has an international standards body and has regional standards councils that put in place regional designations. Financial advisors, two words put together that even though some provinces license it, I was not in favor of that because there's no clear definition as to what that means.

57:08So let's talk about planners. We'll talk about designations and go back to that. So first off, you can't take titles at face value. At least there's been some work done in Canada to stop making everyone in a bank a vice president, which was just absurd. but it's still a thing to some lesser degree. There are some provinces that prevent you from using the term financial planner unless you actually have certain designations, all positive steps. So first and foremost, the CFP, the certified financial planner, except no imitations, there is an imitator out there, but it's the only one that can acronym CFP.

57:37That is the global standard. That is the first thing you should be looking for when dealing with the planner. And they've done a lot of work to bring that standard up. And I'm very happy and confident with the level of testing and the level of what is expected to be known for someone in there. Then from there, there's the other financial planning. Again, I'm biased here. I must sit on the board, but the RFP designation, the registered financial planning designation is a secondary designation beyond the CFP. That is a smaller group of financial planners who are actually actively engaged in the business of producing actual financial plans.

58:05So you can get a CFP and never produce a financial plan, but an RFP, it can't be that. Not to say the CFP isn't great. It's great, but it's a different level of specialization to me. Of course, on the investing side, CFA, Ben and I both survived PTSD with that one. It was brutal. It's not fully necessary, but it is something that does say that that person has committed themselves to a level of understanding of the markets. Sure does. Sorry? Sure does. I agree. I agree. It really does. You're committing yourself to pain and possibly breaking up your relationships when you take that. I saw it happen to other people.

58:34The TEP, trust in the state practitioners, basically a very grown one in Canada, right? Not as recognized in the US, there's other ones in the US, but actually Canada has the highest number of TEPs in the world. So this is one where it's an estate planning and tax planning designation specifically around estates. So if you're doing that, you've got a certain level of proficiency around trusts and estates that, frankly, no other designation can touch. Of course, one of the things that the industry does lack is a tax designation other than someone having a CPA or whatever. CPA is not necessary for financial planning, but I would love to see someone come up with a highly credential, a highly credible tax and accounting designation that advisors could flock to that would teach us about specifically, and I would also say, I'd love to see that happen around corporate planning because there's a separate level there.

59:18So unfortunately, there's a lot, way too many designations out there. I myself dropped all my CSI designations because I felt they weren't valid or weren't living up to a standard that I held myself to. Too bad CSI, live with it. But the ones I named are all stellar. What I would love to see is a lot of the lower bar designations that are out there that exist to get certifications and get someone three letters behind their name. I want to see them disappear. I want to see them replaced with high caliber things that focus on areas that truly matter. Things like cross-border planning, things like, oh geez, what is the one in the US?

59:47The Financial Therapy Association, can't remember if they have a designation or not, but the reality is actually being able to deal with the human side of advice. These are the things that we need to basically hold ourselves up to, is to a professional level designation, not something that checks a box. So those ones, CFP, RFP, CFA, TEP, CPA, good luck finding all of those in one person. If you do, you found someone who actually cares about learning. RFP is specific to Canada, right? It is. One other one to mention, I mean, CLU needs an overhaul. It used to be better, I would say that much. It also is not connected to the actual CLU in the US.

1:00:17It's just its own Canadian version. Hopefully they will overhaul that. I know people who've been lobbying for that, but we'll see what happens. But that's a specific life insurance one. So CLU in Canada, maybe not so interesting. CLU in the US different though? Absolutely it is. I know people who've taught it at the American college and I know people at the American college and they hold themselves to a very high standard around responsibility and best duty of care to the clients. So it's a different bar in different countries. Well, I mean, sorry, the American college controls the CLU in many countries, not Canada, no alignment.

1:00:46Financial designations don't always tell the whole story. They show dedication. They show a baseline level of knowledge. How else do you think people should approach evaluating a potential advisor before hiring them? Look, I wish it was easier. I wish that there was a level of professional standard that basically made you feel like you can go to anyone and at least get a base level of knowledge. A doctor, you walk into a doctor's office and you believe, and you should, because they're an MD, have a base level of knowledge. CPAs, there's a base level of knowledge established. And so they should hopefully be able to file their taxes without major errors.

1:01:14But we don't have the same kind of criteria yet in Canada. We're starting to get there around planning and everything else. So look, there's lots of checklists online around this. And I think that that's something you should always consider. And a former guest of yours, Harold Geller, and I have done a couple of podcasts on what to look for and red flags or whatever. And I'll tell you some of the key takeaways. First off, you don't want someone who's coming out selling product. I've literally had cases where we sat down with prospects and we've gone through, they've asked us like, well, what'd you invest me?

1:01:43I'm like, we have no idea. Like, we have no idea. We just met you. We got to do the financial plan, the profiling, all this other stuff. And they're like, wow, that's a really different answer than the other people I went to go see. I'm like, what did they say to you? It's like, oh, they said, well, this is how I work. And then they pull out a sheet and say, this is the portfolio I put you in, but don't worry if you want to change anything, we can. I'm just like, they had the solutions magic box that somehow met your needs exactly without ever speaking to you? What a magic box that was. I would love to have this magic box.

1:02:08I can pull things that are just answers to questions that haven't been asked yet. So if they're coming out trying to lead with how they're going to outperform, how they're going to protect you, how they're going to give you all this walk away, you've run into a product salesperson. Second piece, is there a process? Is there a process that basically that you can hold them to account? I'm going to do this, that, and the other thing. Everybody promises everything in this business. How much of it gets delivered? So basically this, that, and the other thing. Okay, great. How is it going to check all the boxes that need to matter to me in my life?

1:02:36In that conversation, it should be very planning centric. What are the objectives you're trying to do? Is there an inherent amount of, when you're onboarding, inherent amount of financial literacy happening that we're basically there helping you understand why you're making these decisions? Are they focused on your objectives? Our conversations are all about, okay, well, that's nice. We'll get to that. Tell us about you. Tell us about your kids. Tell us about what you want out of life. Is that what you want? We're fishing for understanding what's making them tick. Are they doing that? Or are they too busy talking about markets?

1:03:04And then when it comes time to talk about markets, are they properly risk profiling you? Are they taking that consideration? Are they talking more about the downside potential than the upside? Because look, we're all going to get upside over time, but we all got to live with the downside. Are they coaching you and getting you ready for that? Are they basically, if they're going to sell you an insurance product, have they actually quantified the why? Have they done a needs analysis to show you all that? Not to say that, again, I don't want to denigrate sales because sales is a necessary component of what we do.

1:03:32But when it's the thing that is the reason why you're doing it, it's wrong. It should be following the actual line of logic that fits the person's situation. So it's all of those things. And I will say, unfortunately, people will often go to the people they know and say, oh, do you like your financial advisor? Great, make an introduction. It's the blind leading the blind. They don't know. They don't know if the person's doing a good job or not. Speaking of a good job, you do a fair amount of expert witness work. What are the biggest red flags you look for when you review a case? Usually, they're pretty easy to find.

1:04:00So first off, show your work. Okay, great. You made recommendations. Like, how did you even arrive at this? Was a risk tolerance assessment of any shape or form done? You know, did you even take the time to even fill out the KYC documents properly? Where are your notes? Like, you made a recommendation. What led to this recommendation? Is this actually valid? For context for listeners, so you'll be pulled in as an expert witness to a case where an advisor has apparently done something wrong to harm a client. Yes. And you're brought in as the third-party expert to evaluate whether they have, in fact, done something wrong.

1:04:28Yep. I'll evaluate the work that was done. I'll evaluate it both from a quantitative standpoint, where they're basically doing that, and a regulatory standpoint that they live up to their duty of care, and potentially any other standards that that person's held up to. And oftentimes, I'll have to assess damages. And I'll talk about that at the end. But you made a bunch of recommendations. What was it based on? Did it come out of thin air? Here's the reality. if you have them in a portfolio and nothing leading up to that, then my response is, I have no idea how they arrived at this. Do your KYC entries even make any sense?

1:04:55I've literally seen, because we had in our Know Your Client documents, we have to say, okay, the goals of this account are this much income, this much growth, this much security, high medium risk, low risk. And then I've seen these ones where it's like, oh, they want 80 % income, 20 % capital preservation, yet somehow you have them in 95 % high risk and speculative. Explain to me how they're like, so you're either demonstrating to me that you had a line of logic and reasoning that led to a conclusion that basically did the best thing for the client. Or if you haven't done that, there's deficiencies all the way that I'm looking for.

1:05:22So that's the first thing. Then did you even understand what it was you were recommending with the things you said that they betrayed the fact that you do not have a knowledge of what the heck you're talking about? Because I will see that. I got a case right now where some insurance statements from just like, that's empirically invalid. That's not true. That's absolutely not true. You don't even understand the technical things you're talking about. So back to designations, you know, licensing, unfortunately, is not really a bar. It's a line on the floor that's easy to step over in some places.

1:05:46The reality is, is that if you're not trying to uplift your knowledge and understand these things, odds are you're going to make these mistakes. So you have to really understand what it is you're saying. Complete and total lack of process. What was the journey you were taking the client through? What did you promise them versus what they actually did? Lack of continuous update and communication. Lack of records. I got one right now with a five-year gap in records. There was changes made in the portfolio. Explain to me how this happened. You're not discretionary manager, but the changes happened.

1:06:11Or the same solution for every case. Hey, everybody should be 100 % equity. That's an opinion. That ain't fact, and that ain't the law, and that ain't regulation. So guess what? The second that client complains about you and files a suit, they've got grounds. Now, how do I assess damages? Any number of ways. But the simplest way is to basically say, you gave them a bunch of money over time. What does that line look like? Now, I'm going to properly risk profile them. I'm going to maybe do a bit of a financial plan for them. I'm going to do the proper job along the way. Again, depends on how long it was and if the person's still around any number of issues and say, okay, based on reasonable assumptions, by the way, your assumptions, projection assumptions are one of the things people are constantly screwing up.

1:06:50They're like, oh, you're going to grow conservatively at 7.5 % to 12%, excuse me, 12%, 12 % conservatively. You look at the projection guidelines recently. Anyway, and then basically say this portfolio, your portfolio ended up here. If you had done the right job and put them in a diversified portfolio, they ended up here. But here's the thing. Let's say they're 100 % equity and they end up down here. at like, I had a case very similar to this where they lost$1.2 million. If they had basically been in a conservative portfolio, look, it was a hard time. It wasn't great. They would have lost like $200 ,000.

1:07:20So a million dollars in damages. But here's the problem. You expose them to 100 % equity risk. They should have been rewarded for that. Nevermind what I say the portfolio should have been. What did the global diversified market portfolio do at the time? Oh, look, it's up here. 100 % equity. What did the 100 % equity index do at the time for US? Guess what? Now I have three data points. And I can argue that if you've done it right, you'd be here. They should be there. Great. You've done this right, it would be here. But what actually happened, what you should have done based on your decisions, because you were too busy stock picking and thinking you could beat the market, if you would just put it in that market, you would be up here.

1:07:50So suddenly, a$1.2 million loss was$2.5 million in damages. It's an issue because the client probably didn't realize that they were taking not only equity risk, but they were taking speculative risk from individual security selection. And neither of those probably matched with the appropriate amount of risk for their case. And let's look at this from an advisor's business perspective. You are going to be held to what the benchmark did. You're going to be held to an appropriate portfolio of benchmarks, and you're also going to be held to the benchmark of your underlying decisions. And both of those are going to be taken into consideration.

1:08:17And the higher of the two is probably going to be argued. So the reality is, is that if you're out there thinking you're going to read your analyst research report and make a bunch of stock picks on the top 30 things and do YOLO on video or whatever else you're doing, if you had just done the empirically valid thing that is supported by evidence, you wouldn't have that risk exposure. We agree on most things, but we often disagree on the extent to which we should engage online with trolls basically, or with people that we don't agree with. And we've talked about this. Yes. I actually do appreciate your logic on it, even though I don't agree with it.

1:08:50Can you explain why you fight trolls on the internet who are spreading financial BS? If this was like at a conference and one of these people want to argue with me, I'd probably just walk away in a lot of cases. Sometimes I don't. It also depends on their footprint. This is a dividend blogger who thinks that like, here's the reality. I'll go back to Edmund Burke, who said something to the effect of the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. So I'm not going to assume that it's evil. I'll assume Hanlon's razor, which says that, you know, you got to assume ignorance over malice and they're committed to their ignorance.

1:09:18That's fine. But here's the reality. These people may have an audience. These people may be getting an audience. There's people who are watching. And one thing I learned about social media a long time ago was when I found out how many of my friends were following me would comment to me. Oh yeah, that was a really good conversation. I'm like, dude, you never comment. I don't even know you're on Twitter. Like what's going on? So there's far more lurkers, people watching than there are people talking. And these people are taking things in. So if we're not out there calling BS, if we're not out there fighting the good fight, I mean, like there's a certain point you walk away and say enough's enough.

1:09:48If we're not basically throwing up evidence against unaccountable nonsense, who's going to do it? And people are going to start, more people will fall into the trap of thinking this is the case. There was a case about two years ago with the insurance guy of the US were like all of FinTwit united against him because he was so crazy. And he's like, oh, this is great. It's feeding me more business. I'm like, you don't understand. You don't understand all the people who aren't coming your way now because of all of us doing this. You think you're winning. You're only seeing this. Your selection bias is tiny.

1:10:14But the point is, is that it's simple. You can beat this baseless stuff with logic, math, and academic papers because most of it's completely baseless. It's based on total misconceptions of the universe. And you give people enough rope to show exactly who they are. Once they finally give up, they start attacking you and they start name calling and they start doing whatever. Great. Do you think you just won anybody over by name calling me? You're so right about your argument. You went with a denigration. And yeah, maybe you're in a non, whatever, which means you have no courage in your convictions.

1:10:38But nevertheless, like, look, I've joked, it's a public service. And there's times where like, I'm not going to involve myself. Ben's got this. Or like, they usually walk away from Syria or like someone else will walk away. So yeah, there'll be times where, Ben, you got it. I mean, you're going to go only so far or someone else will go and McGrath was pretty good at that for a while or some other friends we have online will go or Cliff Asness will just really blow someone up and I'll just watch and eat popcorn along the way. Look, the reality is, is that on some level, it is a public service. We are basically educating.

1:11:06Now, it's not the funnest form of education. I'll say that. My wife will often give me grief for it. But at the end of the day, other people are watching and other people are learning. Why was it important for you to start the Financial Planning Association of Canada? The origin story is interesting. So I was down at the FPA conference in the US several years ago and I made a friend and I wandered into the NextGen group, which is like their young advisors group. And this new president was taking over and he was talking with such passion about the opportunity they had to transform the industry and create something so beneficial to humanity that he was almost in tears.

1:11:34And I was just like, this place is incredible. And then people started like challenging stuff. I'm like, I stand up. I'm like, guys, really respectfully, I'm from Canada. We got none of your stuff up north. I wish I could take you all with me because we got none of this. And frankly, like, please do everything you're talking about, because you're going to shame the rest of the world into doing the right thing. Like, just do it. And he always says to me, why can't you fix it? Look, it's complicated. Banks, blah, blah, blah. He's like, no, but seriously, why can't you fix it? Like, I sit down like, jerk.

1:12:00All right. He threw a gauntlet. So I go up and talk to him afterwards. And he's like, you listen to me for about two minutes. Like, so you're not the guy. I'm like, oh, man, come on. So I came home. And this has started to happen several times where I come home from American conferences, a little bit depressed about what I was coming back to in terms of an industry. You know, I was having these engaging conversations about fiduciary responsibility and elevating the industry and all this other stuff. And I couldn't find, with hundreds of people, I couldn't find a dozen people I have that conversation with in Canada.

1:12:24And it drove me insane. So I started talking to friends and colleagues about what the heck we're going to do. I can't do nothing anymore. I don't think we can do nothing. This was in the early, this was when title protection was starting to come about in Ontario. We were worried that it was going to go the wrong direction. And it kind of did, but trying to fix it. None of us wanted to start an association, but we felt that there was going to be no other way to move the needle because we weren't happy with the representation planners had in this country. So we said, okay, great. Let's build an association, but how are we going to make sure it's different and how are we going to prevent it from being co-opted by those who don't have the same belief structure?

1:12:51So we came up with an end state. We created a charter and said, this is the world we are trying to create. Fiducia responsibility, evidence-based, basically best interest of the clients with pure transparency, all of it. So we basically said, look, there's no other way. There's no other way we need to create an association and the charter will serve as a filtering mechanism. And I'll tell you, man, that I get a bunch of hate mail about that charter. And I basically said, look, man, respectfully. As far as I'm concerned, fiduciary responsibility, transparency, all this stuff, that's me saying I stand for unicorns, puppies, and rainbows, man.

1:13:19If you don't believe in what we're talking about, congratulations, you don't have to join. You don't have to join, but the rest of us are going to. A bunch of people early on before we even launched, I've been over 100 advisors or planners took the leap of faith and let a bunch of us put this together. Now we stand over 300 members strong and we have an incredible community, an incredible engaged community that I'm touched by all the time. I was meeting with a young guy today who basically is leaving his career because he wants to be a planner. And he thinks it's only possible because he managed to get involved in that pack and basically learn from our forums and get exposed to our education.

1:13:50And I'm sitting there going like, this is someone who basically like legitimately wants to build a better industry and do good for people. And he wouldn't have made a career change if we hadn't enabled and empowered. We've had president's list winners for the CFP's top like three placements in the CFP exam who credit the forums and the education to get with us to this. And more importantly, it's created a community. It's created a community of people who basically were no longer on an island. That's something I found with a lot of the right intentioned planners that have been around for a long time.

1:14:19The older ones was that they were on an island for so long, they didn't have a tribe and we created that tribe. So that's why it was so important. So the only way we're going to win this is a ground game over time, which is why like reaching out to the students, younger planners and right-minded people, that's what's going to win in the long run. It is a great community and it's a great association. I'm a member. Mark McGrath's a member. Dan Bortolotti is also a member. He's got a great forum. Cameron, I think Cameron's a member. It is a great group. And it's a great resource for people, like you said, Jason, that are coming into the industry where there's a group of people with broadly shared beliefs about what the industry should look like.

1:14:53It's a great thing to have. All right. Second to last question. Did Mark McGrath's soul actually leave his body in a hot sauce eating contest? We have photographic evidence and video that it did, like legitimately. At one point for the record he was looking down at his hands hyperventilating afraid he wasn't going to go on and despite the fact that he had been trash talking and even when we sent them a cameo from alton brown telling him he was wrong he would not digress he would not digress and his hubris got the best of him and it was an admission he was glad that there was a hospital not far from the hotel luckily he didn't need it but if he had tried to go any further he might have yeah i was there.

1:15:30That was, it was actually kind of scary. He was cooking. He was cooking. Erevin and I were perfectly fine. I heard Erevin was a machine with it. Erevin was beyond fine. Erevin was enjoying himself. I was sweaty and I was like, okay, man, like I'm feeling it. I'm going to lie down after this, but I feel it, but I'm not hyperventilating and worried about death. That's all I can say that much. All right, Jason, you know, the final question. Oh boy. How do you define success in your life? Let me give you the, it depends answer. It depends what we're talking about. I thought about this in three levels.

1:16:00First, personally, nothing matters more to me than my children growing up and living happy lives and my wife being happy with our family. That's it. That's the most important thing in my life. It's my cornerstone. In terms of my business, I am living the most important thing, which is I get to sit across from people and help them succeed in life. And I take what I discovered years ago about myself was that I take immense pleasure in aiding everybody else's success. And I get to do that on a daily basis. And unfortunately, life will throw curveballs and negative things, and you will have some of the most horrific things happen to clients and people in your life you care about, and you'll be there to, this is the test.

1:16:34You'll be there to support them. This is the truly profound and transformational industry that can do so incredible if we just do it right. And the last piece is the industry. I just want it to be better than when I've left, when I leave them, when I found it. Everything we wrote in that charter was written out of pure love for what is possible and helping humanity. And frankly, if we can actually be a real profession by the time I finally say, I'm out, nothing will make me happier. Great answer. Great to see you, Jason. Always a pleasure. So great to have you on finally. Some people denied my existence.

1:17:04I don't know. Yeah. All right, Jason. That was great. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure.