Funding Your Contentment in Tumultuous Times with Brian Portnoy

[applause] So for those of you who have been at this conference for the past few years, we you know that we try to close with a speaker who can kind of broaden the aperture for us a little bit beyond money in our portfolios and more into the realm of what's it all about? What's it all for? And I'm happy to say that my friend Brian Portoi is the perfect person to do that for us today. Um Brian and I met what 25 years ago at Morning Star. Um and Brian had his PhD from the University of Chicago. He earned his undergrad at at Michigan. He's uh now a CFA charter holder and he's gone on to do many amazing things in his career. He's worked in the mutual fund industry and the hedge fund industry. He wrote a phenomenal book called the geometry of wealth um that I would urge you all to check out. It still is uh really relevant today. And um Brian has started his own firm in since 2020. Right Brian? Um he launched shaping wealth which is a learning and engagement platform for human first financial guidance and he has been working very hard on building shaping wealth for the past several years um and has has built a great team there. So um Brian is going to talk to us today about a concept that he writes about in the geometry of wealth which is called funding your contentment. and uh he'll talk about funding our contentment in tumultuous times. Brian uh is uh really uh a great person to talk to us about this topic and I'm excited for all of you to hear from from him. Please join me in welcoming. [applause] This is great. How's everyone doing? I know. I I'm I'm the barrier between you and the airport or your car, so I'll be done in like five minutes. >> Um, a a a couple quick notes. First of all, uh, Christine was modest. Christine was my first boss at Morning Star. She hired me 26 years ago. Uh, and she's been an amazing friend. She blurbed at least one of my books, if not two. Uh, and then, uh, I want to flag a really a career highlight for me, which is that in 2003, uh, when investment cruises were still a thing, in retrospect, it's kind of absurd, but they were a thing where people would go onto a boat because they wanted to talk about mutual funds. I think it's tough enough in a in a hotel ballroom, but still, people wanted to go on the boat. And the three speakers were me, Christine, and Jack Bogle. I got to spend four days with Jack eating meals, talking to him. He's always been a hero, quarter century of his influence then and now. And so in this sense, it's such a privilege to be here with with with all of you. So um let me share a few thoughts um about this notion of funded contentment. Um but before I do, I want to um uh share a little bit of a story which I'm told is not apocryphal, that this actually happened. And it's a story about a conversation between two of the most famous men of letters from the uh 20th century uh Joe Joseph Heler and Kurt Vonagget. And as the story goes, the two of them were at the uh in the Hamptons at the mansion of a billionaire and um it was a big party and and Joe and Kurt were like hanging out and talking and and and and Kurt says to Joe Hiller, "Uh, how does it make you feel to know that your host just yesterday probably made more money than you've made with Catch 22 uh in its entire in its entire history?" And Joe retorts. He's like, "Well, I've got something he can never have." Um, and and Kurt Vonagood goes like, "What what are you talking about? What what could that possibly be?" And Joe Heler says, "The knowledge that I've got enough." Um, by the way, I see a lot of people taking pictures. By all means, um, this talk, I can send share the PDF or however that goes. Christine, like get you the talk so everybody could have all the slides. Um, this question of enough is foundational to the human condition. We're wired to survive and to thrive. And that evolutionary dynamic is very much relevant to the day-to-day of managing our investment portfolios and really all elements of of of financial planning. This question of how much is enough, what is enough? It's something in one way or another that's probably on our minds almost every day. And what we're going to sort of lay down for conversation today is that enough really isn't a number because we know the statistics. When you have $1 million, people say they want two. When you have $2 million, people say they want four. And on and on. And so that's a difficult dynamic. So with enough, enough is a story. I like to say that more is a number but enough is a story. And let's try we're going to spend some time today figuring out what is the story of enough. In that survive and thrive dynamic, there's actually two questions that motivate us every day. What is enough is actually the second question. The first question is simply this. Am I going to be okay? Are my loved ones going to be okay? So what I do for a living is I coach financial adviserss on the human side of advice, behavioral finance, positive psychology, emotional intelligence, th those sorts of fields. And so I'm intimately familiar with involved with the process of financial planning. And there's lots and lots of technical questions that go into the building of portfolios and purchasing the right insurance and planning your estate in the proper way. But what sort of lays foundationally below a lot of it, rarely articulated but always present is this question of am I going to be okay? From an evolutionary point of view, we are fine-tuned to sense danger. If you walk into any room and something seems off, you know it immediately. Okay, that's just who we are. And it's just not a physical threat. It's a psychological threat. So these are the two questions that sort of define that survive and thrive dynamic of the human condition. Am I going to be okay? And how much is enough? So, let's walk down a path and we're going to look at this next fork in the road. And this is the fork between being rich and being wealthy. Rich is the quest for more. And that's not a bad thing. More is part of who we are. If we didn't want more, then we wouldn't be sitting here. The the genes that we have coursing through us wouldn't have p been passed on from our ancestors. that sense of competition, that sense of fight, that sense of wanting more, that is virtuous in its own way, but it also does raise some challenges. Uh, one of my favorite, well, I was going to say one of my favorite shows uh, of all time is um, Madmen and Don Draper, the protagonist, the hero, the anti-hero, depending on how you want to cast it, he said that happiness is the feeling right before you want more happiness. Such is the case with being rich. I I want I want more and then when I get more, I'm going to want more. Psychologists call this uh hedonic adaptation and sometimes refer to this term the hedonic treadmill. The thing is if you've ever sprinted on a treadmill, no matter how fast you sprint, you don't get any further. You're just there. Doesn't mean that we don't try. Doesn't mean that we don't push. But rich, not a bad thing, has its limitations. not just you know uh in in the physical world but from a psychological point of view wealthy is different wealthy is um what I define as funded contentment this idea that defines the talk has defined a lot of the work the company that I've built and funded contentment is this idea that true wealth is the ability to underwrite a meaningful life wealth is the ability to underwrite a life that's meaningful to you no matter how Do you define that now and uh choose to or are compelled to redefine that over the course of life's ups and downs? How do we underwrite and afford the things that are truly meaningful to us? And what we're going to do today a little bit is invert the thinking about money and happiness. What is enough? How am I going to be okay? Because this notion of funded contentment compels us to actually start with what's truly important to us. What's truly important in our lives? And then only secondly, even though I'm surrounded by a bunch of investment nerds, which I am also, we get to the the money stuff second, contentment first, funded second. And so wealth or being truly wealthy, unlike rich, which you're on that treadmill, it's a sense of stillness. It's a sense of presence. And it's having a sense that your story about enough, at least for this moment in time, is a story that makes sense to you. um money problems and and so I spent the first 15 years of my career on the investment side working with Christine and many others at um at Morning Star doing fund analysis. I then moved to the hedge fund industry where I managed portfolios of relative relatively complex investments. I mean it was exhilarating. Uh it it was really really interesting. I I I learned a ton and I think what the way I thought about it for a long period of time was that there was a right answer to these questions that if I could just analyze the data that uh I could get to the right answer and the more precise the better. If I could get um three digits after the decimal place that's better than two because there's a right answer. I know it was asked before and it's it comes up all the time. you know, when you have that sort of engineering mindset, that construction mindset, there is a right answer. Um, well, we're going to go in a different direction and say that's not necessarily true because of this thing, because of our brains. Arguably the most fascinating, powerful, important machine that's ever been discovered in the universe. Let's talk about our brains. Let's talk about what money does to or interacts with our brain. First, we're going to start out from a historical point of view and a neurological point of view about what um we might call the mismatch. So, um the human species goes back, depending on how you me measure it, a few million years, but the brain between our ears, if you think of it in software terms, has mo most recently been updated about a 100,000 to 130,000 years ago. Okay? So the brain uh is is quite old, very very old, but you know, sort of the the wetwware we have working with us right now is call it 100,000 plus years old. Money is less than 3,000 years old. Okay, this here is the Lydian coin. It was the first coin ever discovered on the planet in what is now modern Turkey, what was then the Empire of Lydia. And this was the first coin that we know of. Yes, there was barter and exchange of course, but money changed many things and we can think now about the evolution of money and how it intersects with our minds. This is the field that I've been operating in for uh quite some time now for 12 13 years, behavioral finance. And it's effectively the psychology of money. Behavioral finance is the study of how we figure out the world of money, our decisions, the habits we form, the emotions we feel, the values we bring to the table and yes, even the question of happiness. Does money buy happiness? Behavioral finance is the psychology of money and it is the gateway to answering the question of what is enough and am I going to be okay? There aren't numerical responses to those questions. There's only story and that's okay. The human species is not particularly numerate. All right. So, what's two plus two? >> No one. Uh, thank you for the hand gesture, dude. Love that. Didn't even You guys didn't even think about that. What's 17 + 47? Did you feel your brain slow down a little bit? What's 723 + 918? Don't worry about it. You're stumped. You're going to have to pick up a a a pen and a piece of paper. You're going to have to rely on your phone. And and that's okay. We are not numerate. Uh we we we are not numerate as a species, but we live in this world of numbers and pretend like we know what it all means. To the contrary, what we are is storytellers. The neuroscience of narrative is kind of fascinating. There's a bull market in it right now. There's a lot of really interesting books on that topic that have been published in the last 10 plus years or so. We are hardwired for story. Our brains create narratives through which we collect certain types of information that make the world make sense. There's a great line from one of the books in this space that says, "The brain is the decoder ring for a complex reality." Okay? We show up every day telling stories, sharing stories, listening to stories, not as calculators. So let's talk about the psychology of money and let's get into two different types of problems that I think will be a gateway to some really interesting conversation about what is enough money and happiness and so forth. So in the psychology of money in behavioral finance, we have two types of problems. We've got timely problems and we have timeless problems. All right. Um, Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. This is a very arudite crowd. What's the first line of this book? >> There was never a question that it was going to be the highest correct percentage response. Knowing what I know about this group, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Charles Dickens, 1859, London, uh, going through change and disarray. fascinating book. Uh, and it's a it's it's an opening line that is in some ways the opening line for all of us every day as we get out of bed, look at our phones, and figure out what in the heck is going on. This is the modern condition. It is the best of times and it is the worst of times. Four different phenomena, kind of connected but distinct. The first is that we've never been more connected before at any point in recorded human history, right? via social media, via telecommunication technologies, we're just in front of everyone all of the time. As a side note, there's a great line from JP Morgan, the original JP Morgan, who said that um nothing corrupts your financial judgment more than the sight of your neighbor getting rich. >> John Luskin here from the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy. We're able to provide these videos from the Bogles Conference for free thanks to generous donors like you. Consider making a taxdeductible donation at bogalcenter.net/donate. Your contribution helps us continue our mission building a world of well-informed, capable, and empowered investors. And now back to the conference. >> The problem now, and I think it is a problem, is that we're all each other's neighbors. We can't get away from each other. All right. We see each other every day. We are connected in ways that we have never been connected before. And guess what? Last year, the US Surgeon General published a very long and detailed report about the epidemic of loneliness in America. We are not connected. And we have all-time high rates globally of anxiety, depression, stress, burnout, as well as loneliness. What's going on? We're tribal creatures who love to be connected, who love that sense of belonging. We have that in some sense. And we also do not. We've never been more informed, but we've never been more overwhelmed. On our phones, we have all recorded human history. Kind of cool. It's also a bit much. I think it's fair to say that now that we're using chatbt and Perplexity and Claude and Gemini and Grock and all of these AI services that we have more and more and more information. And so I think all else equal, we say, "Hey, it's great to know. It's great to have the facts at hand. It's great to be informed, but the brain isn't really wired to enjoy that." There's something in psychology known as the paradox of choice, which says that choice is good up until a point and then it tips over and you become overwhelmed. It's known as choice overload or decision fatigue. Third of four, we're incredibly productive. We're now just so efficient in everything we do, whether it be at work or with our families or making plans to do anything. We have so many tools at hand. And lo and behold, the better we get at saving time, we fill that time with other things. And I think we're all all old enough to remember, Calgone, take me away. [laughter] The last one is what I call the paradox of prosperity. We've never been richer and we've never been more miserable. There's just a lot of data on this. There's a lot of evidence to say that, you know, um uh and and we could look at wealth in real terms and I think make some reasonable claims about how rich we truly are. And I'm not talking about this poetic sense of being wealthy. I'm talking about just being rich. Let's look at our balance sheets. Let's look at our investment portfolios. But that hasn't necessarily translated into a fulfilled life. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. All right, that's the timely stuff. Here's the timeless. The wetw wear in our noggin, the engine between our ears. It's an unbelievable machine and it's causing some problems. It's causing some problems because of that mismatch that I talked about. You've got an old piece of software and you've got a new technology and it's really hard to make progress. There's a reason why we're here. It's so that we can learn from each other to make hard dis good decisions in very hard uh uh uh circumstances. Most people aren't doing this. We know the data on financial literacy. We know the data on poor financial outcomes. Kudos to all of us for leaning in, not only helping ourselves, but helping our families and our communities. But let's face it, this isn't normal. This is good, but this isn't normal. All right. So, um, when we think about the brain and we think about making hard money decisions, one thing I want to do is throw out the word irrational. Irrational is an economist fancy word for stupid. Um, we we we are not stupid. What we are is normal. We have a number of adaptations in ourselves, in our bodies, and in our minds that have allowed us to get to today. So when we think about making a quote unquote bad decision, and we do make mistakes all the time. I'm not saying we don't make mistakes. I what I am saying is that the brain is wired to have in it a number of adaptations that were built or that I shouldn't say built that emerged over time, many many years, tens or hundreds of thousands of years to keep us safe. Back to that initial foundational idea of survive and thrive. That's all we do all day. We survive and we thrive. And as a result, some of the very basic principles that I'm guessing some of you even have tattooed uh uh somewhere in terms of like smart basic investing. The um I don't know if Roger's still here. He's got an equation uh uh uh of uh of something on his arm related to smart investing and happiness. Um but you know, think about the basic rules of what we ought to do or the principles. Buy low, sell high. Own a diversified portfolio. Do your research. Make smart choices. Save more, spend less. Invest for the long run. We don't do many of these things most of the time. None of you is intellectually challenged by these principles. Many of us are psychologically slowed down in order to pursue them, to achieve them. So we're hardwired to make um we're hardwired to struggle with money decisions. All right, this is part of the timeless challenge. So we have in behavioral finance and I'm sure many of you are familiar with with uh the these features or these factors. Um we have many things that are adaptations. Information processing, hurting, loss aversion, probability neglect, temporal discounting, hedonic adaptation. Okay, mostly academic jargon. But in plain language, these are things that we all recognize. And by the way, these help us survive and thrive. This is the why. This is why we're w why we're wired the way we are. So with information processing, misper misperception is rampant. But as I mentioned earlier, the brain is hardwired for story and narrative. And we get very uncomfortable, physically uncomfortable when someone presents us a reality or a story that doesn't comport with the way that we see the world. So, what happens, and it's sometimes known as confirmation bias, is that we seek information that confirms or verifies what we already believe and what we already think that we know. We're physically uncomfortable when we're challenged by alternative facts. With hurting, we go with the crowd. This isn't a bad thing because again, from a long-term point of view, if you were if you left the group, if you left the tribe, it's unlikely that you were going to survive. So if everyone's going this way, good chance that you're going to go this way as well. Loss aversion really, really important. This is the idea that um pain is more impactful than pleasurable that than than pleasure is is good. Anyone here ever been to a casino? No hands, but lots of laughs. One wait, no one. No, two dude guy. Two guys with hands up. Thank you. Brief moments of honesty. So, you go to a casino and you >> What's that? >> You didn't ask which casinos. >> I No, I did not ask which. >> Give you answer. NYC and NASDAQ. >> Okay. Thank you. This is a crowd. Uh I love it. I love it. Um when you go to the casino and you make a few bucks, you make maybe a few hundred, you're like, "That's really cool. Okay, I'm going to go buy something." or well you guys are going to go do some lander ladder muni strategy or something weird but like you're going to use the money for you know for for something or you're just going to save it and like that's cool. If you would lose the exact same amount of money you would be disproportionately upset. This is loss aversion that bad is stronger is good. The base rate psychological studies show that a $100 loss is twice as psychologically painful as a $100 gain feels good. So, it's about that 2:1, 2 to uh 2 and a half to one ratio. I'm like 8:1. If I make, you know, $100, I'm like, I don't care. If I lose $100, I'm like, gh I absolutely absolutely [snorts] hate that. We're all wired a little bit differently. Probability neglect. Um, certainty just feels good. Uh, the right way to make decisions. If you think about wonderful uh books like Annie Duke's thinking in bets and some other elements of decision science, it really makes sense to try to assign probabilities of things. Even at the level of more likely less likely, we tend not to do that because certainty feels good. Temporal discounting. This is simply the idea that today is more important than tomorrow. Well, of course it is. Survive and thrive. You got to survive today. If you don't survive today, then what happens tomorrow isn't at all relevant. And we talked about hedonic adaptation. Happiness is the feeling right before you want more happiness. We're not irrational. We are normal. So let's come back to funded contentment um and and dig in a little bit kind of the home stretch of the talk and think about for each of us sitting here how we might bring that into our day-to-day thinking about our portfolios, our financial plans and beyond. Remember true wealth is the ability to underwrite a meaningful life. The way I've thought about it is that there are four sources of deep contentment in our life and these have transcended history and culture. There's an old old line uh from uh from this from science uh by a guy named George Box middle of last uh last century who said that all models are wrong but some are useful. Um this is a model that I have found useful. Um, it's a model that I created just as a reflection, not just in the work that I've done, but as being a father and a husband and a citizen, a lot of other things. Uh, just reading and thinking about it. It's a four-part model of contentment, but if you Google models of contentment, you'll have a three-part model, a five-part model, a seven-part model. You might come up with this four four-part model. It doesn't matter. If it's useful to help think about funded contentment, then it's a good model. And these are what I call the four C's. Connection, control, competence, and context. A sense of belonging, autonomy, or freedom or independence, mastery over something that's important to you, and a broader sense of purpose. Belonging, autonomy, mastery, purpose. But instead of BMP, I like the four C's. I think it's a little easier to remember. And what I want to do now is walk through these in a little bit of detail and go through a little bit of a an exercise if you will in posing some questions to all of you to stimulate some thought in your mind maybe for the trip home this afternoon because these are the questions that begin to move us down the path toward being truly wealthy. These are the questions that help begin to help us think about well what is contentment? And then secondly, remember it's only second once I have some sense of where I'm sourcing that contentment. Well, what's the funded part? Where's what where how can I afford these things? So contentment uh I'm sorry connection um community provides safety, identity and meaning. Uh at our very core, we are tribal creatures. Um there is a famous study I'm guessing many of you are familiar with that was done at Harvard University over 90 years nearly a hundred years where they tracked thousands and thousands of people through their lives and um sort of tracked everything they did the decisions they make the happiness they felt and after nearly a century of data they wrote a book called the good I think it's called the good life by Robert Waldringer I think I have that right and the conclusion based on a on a century worth of data was two words relationships matter. Okay, we are tribal creatures. We have that sense of belonging or that sense of belonging is very important to us. So let's let me just pose these four questions and again the slides are yours um in in one way or another. So you can dig in. Um we we do this with financial adviserss because I coach the coaches I train financial adviserss to have these types of conversations with their clients. So we have libraries of these questions happy to share over time. All right, four questions about connection. Who do you turn to when you need help? What relationship do you want to improve intentionally right now? Who cares enough to challenge you? And who do you most look forward to having fun with? Believe it or not, before we get to our portfolios, before we get to those target date structures and all the things that I used to work on for 15, 20 years that I think are very very important, these soft questions without right answers are what pushes us toward true wealth. The second factor, the second C is control. We want to belong to a group, but we also want that sense of autonomy, independence, liberty. Right? Okay. You ask people, "What do you want to do?" Well, I want to do whatever I want to do. That is autonomy. That is control. What does that term mean to you though when you sort of scratch the surface? What does autonomy or independence mean to you? When was the time in your life that you felt most free? This is a question that really gets people going. What goal most motivates you at this moment uh in your life? And do you like taking risks or do you like playing it safe? Do you like that sense of being in control or are you okay with that uh broader sense of not being in control? The third C is competence or mastery. When you go to uh a party or a conference, especially in the US, it's a little less so the case outside of the US, but you meet somebody first time, what's the most common question you get asked? >> What do you do? Spoiler alert, no one cares what you do. >> [laughter] >> I can say with confidence, my wife doesn't even know what I do. It's a coded question for who are you? Share with me something important about your identity because work does define a lot of our day-to-day identity and motivated effort brings effort to life. So, what do you love to do? What are you really good at? And are those the same things? If you wanted to teach a class, what would it be on? What would you want to share with others that you're already really good at and passionate for? When in your life did you feel the most creative? Often in our industry, creativity isn't a word that gets thrown around a lot, but it's really a great word to anchor on. When do you feel when have you felt the most creative? And when was the last time you had a flow state and what were you doing? There's some really fascinating research by a guy impossibly named Mihi Chickixmenti who worked with Marty Seligman many many years ago in the invention of the science of happiness known as positive psychology. And what Chickixmenti discovered I shouldn't say he discovered what he articulated was the flow states that everyone here has been in where you're just so focused on something time has disappeared. It could be when you're playing a sport. It could be when you're writing. It could be when you're playing an instrument. It could be just something with your day job. You're so in the moment you forgot to look up. You forgot to go to the bathroom. You forgot to eat. Those flow states are not only physically pleasurable, they're deeply important to our well-being. When we lack any flow states, we are less than. The fourth C is really important. It's really big. That same book called The Good Life by Robert Waldinger. And there's a co-author, so I apologize I forgot his name. But in addition to relationships matter, the second finding was that those who have an attachment to someone uh to something bigger than themselves tend to uh report a life that is more meaningful, a more purposeful life. We want to live for something bigger than ourselves. Over history, it's faith and place that have been central to humanity's search for purpose. So faith, religion, spirituality, however you whatever word you want to anchor on, but some sense of your attachment to the broader cosmos, a story that makes sense to it all. That element of faith that is associated with a more meaningful life. And then place, your hometown pride, your patriotism, things like that. Those are very, very important. When you're from somewhere and you're proudly from that place, it's important. It's actually really important. So questions. What idea or belief systems help the world make the most sense to you? Okay. If you had 10 grand to donate, what would you do with it? The previous panel had some wonderful comments about charitable giving. Not your money, but your time. If you were volunteering your time, what would you do with it? How would you spend your time? And do you feel your daily activities align with your sense of purpose? That's an uncomfortable one for me. That's a pebble in my shoe because I'm just running around crazy. I'm an entrepreneur. I run my business. I've got three young adult children who, you know, I care for that I I work with on different things um involved in the community with Tracy. There's so much going on. When when do I step back and say, geez, is this just mapping up or am I running around like like a madman? And it's usually the latter, to be honest. So, I've given you 16 questions. I've given you 16 questions and hopefully one or two of the 16 landed with you. It's just an opportunity to reflect about true wealth. These questions are the entry point to understanding where we might want to go in with our financial plans. So again, the four C's, connection, control, competence, context, a sense of belonging, a sense of independence, a sense of mastery over something important to us, and then that broader connection to something bigger, a sense of purpose. All right, so now we have this sort of tineered question. What does any of that cost? What do the things that matter to us actually cost in dollar figures? And I think what you know your answers will be whatever they'll be. But I think when you click in and go through these sorts of thought exercises, you realize that some of the things that are most meaningful to you are free. They've always been free. They're always buil and they will always be free. And other things that you have listed as important to you, well, they you can't afford them. you don't have enough money now and it's highly unlikely that you'll ever have enough money for whatever that thing is or that experience is or that relationship that is that you that that you want. And so what does all of this cost? But that question about funding contentment is the second question. And just being in the world of financial planning and working with financial planners all over the world, US, Canada, UK, Australia, South America, Hong Kong, Singapore, these questions are happening everywhere. The human side of advice is flourishing because we realize that building a good financial plan isn't just about getting the numbers right. It's about having your story straight. Because when you have your story straight, you can better understand and be comfortable in your own skin and in your own soul with what is enough. It's not easy. It's not e easy. This is probably the less comfortable part of figuring out how to be rich and wealthy. On the rich part, like you can come up with a number. I'd rather have $2 million than $1 million. So, let me try to get there. But that doesn't in any way necessarily mean that I'm going to be wealthier when I get there. So, by way of wrapping up, just to revisit, I mean, back in the, you know, time machine 25 years ago, day one, I think May of 2000, I was like, what's a mutual fund? And, and Christine rolled her eyes. She's like, here, read a book. Um, so I think I I I I think I figured it out. Um and um uh we are just swimming in the financial supermarket. I remember I mean the the ETF industry was just beginning to take off. There was already many many thousands of mutual funds. But think about the supermarket that we now shop in that we see others shopping in. The number of funds, the number of ETFs, let alone direct purchases of stocks and bonds. the advent and proliferation of alternatives, cryptocurrencies. The financial services industry is a consumer products industry that is constantly churning out new product because products have a price and you buy them and those firms make money. And it's up to us to navigate. That's why communities like this are so special because it allows you to kind of see through and and kind of get to maybe what's really important and to get uh to to to simplify. So there's many many pieces that we are trying to sort out and navigate and that paradox of choice that I referred earlier to. My first book was called the investors paradox. So I wrote a lot about I've written a lot about sort of what are investors supposed to do when they're overwhelmed by so much stuff. So how do we kind of wrap our brains around this and begin to ask the right questions as we sort of exit, you know, for the day and for for for the conference. So let's get organized and ask what I think are the three big questions about our portfolios, about our financial plans, but funded contentment more generally. So, we talked about the pieces, but I think it's really important to recognize that no matter how interesting a new innovative fund might be, that fund exists or that um that investment product exists in service to the portfolio because it's ultimately the portfolio overall with our asset allocation that is going to drive the results that we want financially. Okay, the question there is what what do I own? But there's a prior question which is the financial plan. To me, purchasing investment securities or any sort of investment products absent a financial plan is a form of gamb gambling and speculation. I'm not even saying that's a bad thing, but if you're just willy-nilly buying stuff because it looks interesting, because you can make a lot of money, but it's not attached to a plan, I would say that that's a suboptimal framework to to to to put forth. And so it's very much one of my principled views is that the portfolio should be in service to the plan. The portfolio should exist in service to the plan. And getting the plan right is absolutely critically important because the plan is when we talk about our goals and our values. Not just what we want to do, not just what we want to own, but who it is that we want to be. Yes, identity is implicated in all of this. And so when we talk about the financial plan, it's like how how do we get there? And then lastly, purpose. The plan should exist in service to your purpose, the why. And we talked about the why. We talked about the four C's. We talked about funded contentment. And so all three questions are relevant deep in the weeds on choosing the right fund or structure all the way through the financial plan. And then most deeply, what does this matter? Why is this important? What am I trying to achieve here in terms of contentment or joy or purpose or living out my values? And so what I would ask you with just one slide to go, what questions are you exploring? And are you exploring all three? When and how often, with whom? How much is this in your mind? How much is this with a loved one, with a financial planner? How much are you interacting with financial media to uh effectively get answers or have that sort of virtual dialogue about what might be important to you? The pieces serve the portfolio. The portfolio serves the plan and ultimately the plans that we build serve our purpose. My last slide um a quote that's become really important to me. There's a guy named Eio Wilson. He passed a few years ago. uh he invented the field of sociology at Harvard half a century ago. He was the world's foremost expert in ants. There are four uber social species, ants, termites, bees, and humans. And so he built this entire field of sociobiology looking at those four species and how they get along with each other with an extra extra focus on ants. I don't know why, but that was his focus. Along the way, as he explored the how truly cooperative and tribal um uh species get along, he delved into much bigger issues. So, you can read lots of technical stuff about how, you know, bees build colonies and humans build tribes and in-groups and outroups, right? But he also began to delve into larger questions about the meaning of life. I think he actually has a book called the meaning of life and it's quite good. One of the things that Professor Wilson um observed that always lands, it lands with me, it's going to land with you. You'll share this quote with others, which is that we're drowning in information but starved for wisdom. Now, in my day job, I'm talking to financial planners and I'm asking, well, what is the wisdom that you want to deliver? Because really, everybody has a lot of information. If what you're doing as a financial advisor is creating just more information, they got that. Okay. But this here is an incredibly like areriodite and sophisticated crowd. You're not financial planners per se, although I think I know there are some some in the audience, but I would ask you wherever you sit, what is some of the wisdom that you've earned over the course of your life that can influence how you think about true wealth? We're drowning in information, but we're starving for wisdom. How can we retrieve and articulate that wisdom not only for ourselves and our portfolios, but for our loved ones, for our families, for our neighbors, for our communities, because I firmly believe when I look at the world as it is right now, wisdom, we're in a wisdom deficit. And everybody here, given what you've brought to the table, can make a very big difference. Thank you. [applause] >> So, Brian, thank you so much. That was that was wonderful. Um, we only have time for a couple of questions um because we have to uh get a few announcements in before we let everyone >> go catch their planes. Um but a question came in about your personal biography which is what prompted you to go from hedge funds to money psychology. How did you make that pivot or decide to make that pivot? >> Yeah. No, it was a pretty clear moment in my life in my career path where I recognized that there was not a premium for complexity um and that I was enshed in uh an industry relatively lucrative one but still where um people were going out of their way to make things incredibly complicated and that good investment decisions and ultimately good life outcomes were driven by the psychology of money. The things some of the things that I talked about today. So, I wanted to pivot my career and um I began to read um in social psychology and behavioral finance. You guys remember Forest Gump when he just had a lot on his mind and he started running coast to coast for a few years. That was like the first five years of my writing career. I just got I had things I wanted to sort out personally and professionally and um delving into how the mind works and how we make decisions and specifically financial decisions just became uh all-consuming. >> Um another question is about something that has come up in several sessions. It's for people who are retired um and a lot of the folks here have amassed really nice size port nicely sized portfolios. They have trouble transitioning. They've been in savings mode for their whole careers where they are sacking money into their investment accounts and watching them grow and they have trouble actually giving themselves license to >> to spend. >> Yeah. So, do you have any tips on that front for um confronting that problem to to spend appropriately or gift appropriately as the case might be? >> Yeah. And I I don't know if it's going to be different than what's been expressed already at the conference, but this is maybe the number one problem we see with financial planners. They express to us that we've got clients with sizable portfolios who are quite rich and they won't spend. And the reason is straightforward. You've spent 40 years building a savings habit, a habit of discipline. And then there comes some magic date where you or somebody says, "Oh, now I have to um start doing something with it." Um, I think, and I don't think you guys will be surprised at what I'm going to say, I think when we lean into our values and we lean into the things that we suspect truly drive contentment and that we can invest in those things, if not for ourselves, on behalf of others, then it's going to be more meaningful that we can sort of take that tight grip on the money and loosen it up a little bit because we know the things that are truly important to us and it's seen as a worthwhile trade-off. It's that you give up the actual balance in your portfolio in exchange for something that is deeply meaningful to you. And it could be helping your family. It could be giving to the community. It could be taking that trip you've always wanted to. But when you can articulate the values at stake, those four C's, those sources of contentment, I it doesn't become easy, but I think it becomes a little bit easier. >> Okay. >> Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Brian. Thanks [applause and cheering] for being here. >> If you enjoyed this video, we have dozens more on personal finance and investing available on this channel. Hit that subscribe button to get notified when we release new content, including our monthly podcast, Bogleheads on Investing, and more conference sessions like this one. To watch more right now, click the video card on your screen.