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Listen to ModCast, March of Dimes' research podcast, today. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My guest today is Matt Hall.

Matt is a financial advisor and author of the book, Odds On, The Making of an Evidence-Based Investor. Matt Hall, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Matt Hall, Radical Personal Finance, Founder & Executive Director, ModCast. Glad to be here. Thank you. I've got in my hands here your brand new book called Odds On, The Making of an Evidence-Based Investor.

You come highly recommended to me as a guest for the show, based upon the input of previous guests. So, I'm looking forward to our conversation. I'd love to start, though, with a little bit of your background and your story. What's been your journey through the world of finance that has resulted in your writing this book here?

Oh, my gosh. So, there's so much that I want to tell you. I may meander and go down a path and rely on you to bring us back, but I'll start by saying I feel like I'm sort of accidentally in this industry. My parents are both educators, and when I was growing up, they talked about students.

They didn't necessarily talk about clients or markets and that kind of stuff. And much of this is detailed in the book. I attempted to write a book that I thought needed to exist. I hadn't found anything like this where you buried all the wonky technical stuff inside of real-life stories.

That's essentially what Odds On, the making of an evidence-based investor, is. It's the wonky buried into life stories to make it readable and sort of disguise the pain of learning a little bit about how I think markets work. But I'll tell you, I went to law school, and I had an advisor in law school who said to me, "You know, I'm tired of so many kids coming in here with the wrong idea of what being a lawyer is all about.

I want you to go read this book, and this book will tell you what being a lawyer is all about." The book he gave me was later made into a movie called A Civil Action. And it's not necessarily an inspirational story. So I came back to him and I said, "Man, this makes me nervous.

It makes me think I'm going to be $70,000 in debt." And we just had a guy come into the law school class and say, "If you're not in the top 10% of the class, you're going to be desperate for a job, and there aren't that many jobs." And so I just sort of started rethinking my plan.

I had an important lunch with my dad, and I said, "Dad, I don't know what I'm going to do. What do you think I should do?" And he was like, "Well, I know you planned on going to law school, but you've always been interested in how financial markets work.

And we don't have anyone in our family who's in that business, but I think you should get in that world and just kind of find your way. Get around smart people. You're an intellectually curious person. You'll find your way." And so after that lunch, I left law school and I got a job at a brokerage firm.

And that's where I learned what not to do. At the time, I didn't know that I was going to learn. I was going to sort of see the nasty underbelly of the industry. But in many ways, it was a good experience because I saw all the kinds of traits, behaviors, and characters that I knew I did not want to emulate or become myself.

What calendar year was that? This is 1999, and I'm in my 20s at the time. And so the whole first section of the book is about that experience, is about sort of a coming-of-age story and trying to figure out how this business works. How do other people help serious investors become wealthy, successful, have financial freedom?

How do they do that? And I kept thinking there was a system, there was a process, there were like these servants who wanted to really help others. And what I found was just pure salesmanship and selfishness. And so the first section of the book is about what I would say, like, what's the problem?

The middle section of the book is what I think is part of the solution. And then the last part is about sort of what I chose to do about it in my own life. So I'm deeply proud of this book and my own journey in this industry. But it took me about two years to write this book.

And my desire was to make it highly readable, super relatable. And the feedback I've had from people is that we've accomplished that. So after the brokerage firm – and we'll talk about what's the problem, what's the solution, and what you do. But you stayed and you've worked at the brokerage firm for the last 17 years?

Or where did you go from there? No, I didn't last very long actually. I lasted longer than many of my comrades. As you might know, the fail rate when they fill a class of like financial advisors in training, you've got about – they think two in 10 will survive.

So I made it quite some time I'd say. I made it past the series seven, did all that stuff. And then just couldn't take it anymore. And there are lots of good stories around sort of what pushed me over the edge that are in the book. But about that time, I got super lucky.

And this is probably – this is like one of my favorite stories from the book. She's now my wife, but my girlfriend at the time said, "Hey, let's take a trip to Las Vegas during March Madness." We go to Las Vegas and she goes, "Oh, I forgot to tell you.

There are some people here who are from St. Louis that I want you to meet. We're going to have lunch with them." And their names are the Goldbergs. And they were like, I don't know, 25, 30 years older than us. And I said, "Man, it's March Madness. We're here with some family.

We're betting on these basketball games. We're having a great time. Why do we want to go have lunch with some people that we could have lunch with in St. Louis?" And she said, "You know, these are just awesome folks and they're here and they have time and we have time.

Let's meet them. Plus, Ed Goldberg works in financial services and you may find something interesting to talk about with him." Okay. We go to lunch. Ed is a very sort of mild-mannered person, not a salesman at all, opposite of what I had experienced at the brokerage firm. And at the end of our lunch, he sort of casually says, "Hey, a partner of mine just wrote a book and it's done okay and you might have an interest in reading about it if you love this industry." I said, "Well, I'm not sure I love the industry, but I'd love to read the book your partner wrote." He said, "Well, when I get back, I'll give you my copy." So when we got back to St.

Louis after that trip, I didn't realize this, but the first 100 pages of that book, which is a book by a guy named Larry Swedro, it's called The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need. The first 100 pages of that book changed my life. I said, "I have to go work at this firm because here's a firm that uses logic, data, and evidence to help real people.

It's not all the salesmanship stuff. This is the good stuff. There's a system and a process here that is robust and repeatable and reliable. I love it. I got to get there." So I called this firm. It was just getting started. It was a tiny little firm at the time.

Now it's much larger, but it's called Buckingham Asset Management. They're based here in St. Louis and the guy who wrote the book was here in town. I just beat on their door and pounded and pounded and pounded until they were willing to kind of let me in. They had no jobs.

You kind of had to make a job. You had to convince them that you were so passionate about this approach that they would let you in. That's what I did. I fell in love with sort of an indexy, passive approach. I think there are additional layers to it. I've sort of evolved even beyond just like a simple index fund myself over the years, but I love the approach.

I love the story. I love what the academic evidence said. It was such a contrast to what I had experienced in the brokerage firm. So let's talk through as a structure for our show the three parts. And first, what's the problem with the world of – I mean is it safe to call it mainstream?

It's hard for me to know what's mainstream now and what's not mainstream in terms of actual practice because there's been such a change in the last decade. But what's the problem with traditional financial services? I would say – so the root of the problem from my perspective is just the model.

There are good people trapped in a bad model, meaning the firm is on top and the client is on bottom. Obviously, there's been this huge shift of people becoming independent investment advisors and fiduciaries and all that stuff. And I would just say the nice thing about the model that I'm in and so many people seem to be transitioning to is you really can put the client on top and you're not sort of beholden to a mothership that uses words like production.

Even though ultimately every business needs revenue to succeed, the culture and the focus is so very different. I mean I detail this story in the book, but there's one – my job every day while I was in training at this firm, the original brokerage firm, the place where I learned what not to do.

One of my jobs was every day to create this – they called it the blotter. And I was supposed to cut out stories from all the big newspapers. But really no one read any of the top stories that you would put together. It was all about what was in the lower right-hand section of the paper, which was the day prior's production numbers.

And that production mentality, that sort of self-orientation or selfishness that was like I am going to make money. If I happen to help the client along the way, that's a nice thing. That's a peripheral benefit. But that wasn't the focal point. And to me that is at the root of the problem.

Not all regular people understand the term fiduciary. But from my point of view, it's a very important distinction. And culturally, I just have found that in the independent investment advisor world, no matter what your investment philosophy is, the aim is to help serve clients, not necessarily to sell products.

Every day when I was at the brokerage firm at lunchtime, we had a mutual fund wholesaler who would come in, tell us how his fund was the best in the world, show us his three-year performance numbers, buy our lunch, and then leave. That was every day. And in my world now, that doesn't exist.

No one tries to sell anyone else the flavor of the day or the fund of the month. That just doesn't exist. What's more, people in my world I feel like are talking about how they can really serve clients, what they can do to add value to their lives, what they can do to simplify and provide transparency.

Man, in the old world, there was no transparency. In fact, opaque was the best way to be because no one could tell how much money you were making from people who sold bonds. And I think still to this day, one of the most opaque markets is the fixed income market.

If you ask somebody, I meet people every day who say, "My broker does my bond trades for free." And nothing could be further from the truth. You just don't have the technology to know what they're charging you. You don't understand markups. And it's not the investor's fault. There's just no transparency.

So I mean, beyond just selfishness, the transparency piece and the simplicity piece is really, I think it's getting better. This is the negative part of the discussion. I'd say I'm an optimist, so I think things are getting better. I think transparency and just this age of information is allowing people to become better informed, reducing the odds that someone could be taken advantage of.

But I had heard someone say that there's a thing called, and I forget the guy's name who wrote this book, but the trust equation was basically credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, but all divided by self-orientation. So if you are credible, reliable, and could build intimacy, that's all good. But if you're a selfish pig, you can ruin everything on top.

And from my perspective, that is at the root of what was wrong. The model didn't help people be anything other than selfish. And of course, there are exceptions. There are people doing great work inside of a yucky framework. But I think the migration to the independent space and to have a more sound investment approach for clients, I think that migration is just going to continue to happen.

Okay. So let me categorize so I understand. Your book jacket says you're the co-founder and president of Hill Investment Group, an investment management firm. So is this an independent RIA that you founded? Yes. So 10 years ago, myself and one other person that worked at this firm called Buckingham Asset Management, we left and started our own firm in June of 2005.

Okay. So as an RIA, you're a fee-only financial planning firm. Yes. And what type of clients are you working with? Well, we have 130 clients. Half are from somewhere outside of St. Louis, Missouri. We have an office in Houston, Texas. I would say most of the clients are corporate executives or entrepreneurs, people who have been successful.

And then some are new professionals, an orthodontist, a lawyer, a professional who is really a serious investor, meaning that they're saving a significant portion of money that they don't need to live off of. So we have a good broad mix, but we have a small number of clients. We have about, I don't know, 500 million under management.

And we're very careful about how many clients we add because we care deeply about our service levels and volume, in my opinion, is the enemy of service. If you have a bazillion clients, you can't know them. And knowing them, I think, is central to actually adding some value. And do you charge fees purely based upon AU assets under management or do you charge fees for planning?

Do you charge hourly fees? How are your fees structured? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, we charge a simple fee schedule, like a flat fee schedule, 75 basis points on assets we manage. I don't necessarily even think that's perfect. Like I do think we should probably modify it.

But in the spirit of true simplicity to the extreme, it's the easiest thing I have found. So like we say, we want our clients to know fees, returns, and allocation. Like if you know those three things, irrespective of your investment philosophy, they're like your vital signs. You'll feel a greater sense of understanding and you'll be sort of liberated in some ways from worrying.

So I always want you to know what your fees, returns, and allocation are. Then I need to keep those things very simple. If you have to get a calculator out to figure out what your fees are, to me, that's bad. So we've opted for a pretty simple, I think, schedule.

So no grading or just minimal grading? Well, we only change our fees once people get really big. So like if you're over, we participate in this thing called the Schwab Benchmarking Survey, and it reveals that over like, say, $8 to $10 million, we would negotiate down. So none of our biggest clients are paying 75 basis points.

And the hard part is we want to have our own version of a betterment or wealth front or a smaller portfolio solution. We haven't figured that out yet. So I would say we're pretty boutique-y. Most of the people we work with have been successful and have significant wealth or on their way to that point.

But I would love to figure out a solution that works perfectly for our firm that allows us to work with more people. Okay. So I've got an understanding, and I love what you're talking about. I love the little bit of your story. And well, before I ask you a hard question, so you defined the problem.

You defined it as the problem is the model. The firms are on the top, and the people are on the bottom. And so in the context that you're describing, a smaller in terms of measured in terms of number of people, small independent firm, you just have you and a couple of advisors and some support staff is what it sounds like, and you're serving these 135 families, very intimate relationships.

A lot of hands-on, very clear, simple, and transparent. So that's been your solution to the problem. Is that the solution for the industry? Is that the solution for the industry? We all have to make our own choices and have our own experiences. I would just say for me, what I realized is that I care deeply about having an investment philosophy that allows me to sleep well at night and feel like I have the best mathematical chance for success.

So at my core, that's something that when I read this book that I mentioned earlier, this Larry Swedrow's only guide to a winning investment strategy you'll ever need, which by the way is an unfortunate title if you're going to go on to write 14 more books, if you call it the only guide.

Indeed. But I would say when I read the first 100 pages of his book, I was like, this is what I'm meant to do. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. This process and this approach based on academic evidence makes me feel good about what I could do for other people.

And I think part of the reason I mentioned my parents being in education is because I think at the core, one of the things I feel is my unique ability is taking a complex subject and distilling it down in such a fashion that a regular human could understand. Now obviously there are super technical people who want all they can get.

They want to know how to do this themselves and they may come to work in our industry and make similar choices to what I've made or different. But for me, I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I wasn't a kid when I was a kid who had a lemonade stand or who had a newspaper route.

I didn't know I was going to become a business owner. I love the firm where I worked. It was independent. It had its aim right at serving clients. But myself and one other guy who's 30 years old, by the way, there are seven of us who work in our firm today and we've just slowly grown over time.

But from my perspective, becoming an independent firm was a phenomenal choice because now the technology is so good that I can compete with anyone from JP Morgan to Goldman Sachs to Northern Trust to the headquarters of Edward Jones is based here in St. Louis. We have everything I could want.

If I want to choose the best resources available, I can go get them. They're affordable for my firm. We take the fiduciary mindset not just with respect to the products or investment philosophy, but with respect to tools and resources. Now an independent small firm like mine can have access to really powerful technology tools that make people's financial lives better.

That one piece to me is like, I don't know why someone wouldn't choose this. Even the choice between working at a huge firm where you basically have to accept whatever resources they provide versus being able to choose yourself. I like the idea of having the control. On this other area too, it's so much fun to work with people you want to work with.

When you have control over what your filter is like, when I go home at night, I generally feel energized because I work with people who give me energy. I don't work with people who bog me down. We're able to filter. We were lucky enough to get off to a great start when we started our firm and be able to choose the kind of people you work with.

We don't have any jerks. We say the kind of people we want to work with are people who either understand our approach or have the ability to understand the approach. They want to delegate, meaning they don't want to do this themselves. They're fun to be with. I know that sounds squishy and soft, but we take that seriously.

We care about the kind of folks we spend quality time serving. It's awesome. That's a long answer, but the answer is yes. I think this is a phenomenal solution. I think it's a great direction. I think it's great for clients. It's great for us. I don't know what I would change.

I'm pretty introspective and constantly thinking about things that we could do better. I just feel like right now, it's an embarrassment of riches for independent firms. We have so many tools and resources. When I go to conferences, it just feels like if you could dream up something you want to provide to your clients, somebody could make it.

What was the – I've not read Swedro's book, nor am I familiar with what he is teaching. What was he presenting in the first hundred pages that was so impactful for you? For me, it was really – so if you go back and you think about what I've been hearing, it was like all these guys who were picking stocks or timing the market were all gurus and they all had – everybody outperformed the market.

Then I read his book and it was like, look, all the academic research basically says, hey, it's hard to beat the market. The people who try to do it, some do, but we can't predict in advance who will do it and the ones who did it last year aren't the ones who are going to do it next year.

Your best option if you believe all that stuff is to own the market. Get low-cost diversified exposure to global capitalism and just go to sleep. Don't even pay attention to it. That rocked my world because I had just come out of a place that was completely the opposite. It was, hey, pay people high fees because they can outperform.

If you want to get rock star returns, you got to hire the rock star. Here I was reading about basically the data. If you chose to hold people accountable to what they said they could do over long periods of time, it's very difficult to outperform or to pick the people who outperformed and that just blew my hair back.

I couldn't believe that was true. I couldn't believe that there were so many people in the world who did something very different. I was like, this is the thing, Joshua, I would say that I could not get out of my head. I was like, if people know what I know, they will change their behavior.

They will do things differently because if everybody read the first 100 pages of this book, they would make different decisions. For a long time, that's just what I said to people like prospective clients or people I wanted to hire. I was like, if you know what I know, you'll make different decisions because you're a smart person.

>>It is funny. I am 30 years old. I started in the financial services business in 2008. I was 23 at the time. For me, I never participated in that brokerage, promote our mutual funds as being better than everyone else culture. First, I had spent years of reading and studying it from a personal finance level before I ever got into the professional level.

I was pretty thoroughly convinced that it's pretty tough to outperform the market. Then when I got into it, I just assumed, well, I don't have any skill in outperforming the market. I never even tried to differentiate myself from the perspective of investment outperformance. That's a losing game from the beginning.

I was always shocked when I ran across people who didn't have that perspective. People would ask me, what makes you better? I was like, nothing. I'm no better from the investment perspective. Why on earth would you think that anybody who's sitting here in a suit and tie actually taking the time to meet with you as an individual person is superior to any other financial advisor with a suit and tie?

The guys and gals who are better, they're not meeting with clients. There's no time. There's no ability for them to meet with clients. It always has been surprising to me given the preponderance of the evidence that anybody could believe that my guy from this brokerage firm can call me on the phone and give me better stock tips than this other person.

But I recognize that that is largely due to the massive transformation that's happened in the last 20 years in the world. I realize that it takes time for that to filter down to two people. Go ahead. - Can I ask you, so I love what you just said. I love that you didn't have to get burned to understand this yourself because so many people I meet, they come to this after having had a really bad experience.

In fact, when I lost some money with stocks that I had purchased, this is in the book too, Larry Suedro says to me, I thought you read my book. I said, I did. He's like, why didn't you get rid of those individual stocks? I said, I don't know. I just couldn't pull the trigger.

He was like, well, chalk it up to tuition. The money you lost is just a tuition payment. You learned a valuable lesson. So good for you for not having to go through some of that pain and getting to a good end quickly. I was just going to share one story.

Do you like Michael Lewis? - Yes. - Okay, so I do too. I love Michael Lewis. I've read a lot of his stuff. I wouldn't say I don't love every ounce of what he's done, but I love the fact that he likes to choose people who make brave choices and write these big stories about them.

- And let me put it in the context for the audience. Michael Lewis, the author of the big short, Flash, what was the most recent one, Flash Boys. - Yep, Blindside. - Right, so these very, I mean, they're beautifully well-written, but these very impactful investment books. - And Moneyball too, which Moneyball was basically the story of how data and the analysis of data was being used in baseball to help poorer teams compete with richer teams, which I love.

I think that story has many parallels with the story that I wrote. But one of the things I was going to share with you is I saw Michael speak a couple times, but once I saw him speak at a conference and someone said, "How have you," I mean, here's a smart guy.

He had a phenomenal job on Wall Street, wrote about it in Liar's Poker. "How do you invest your own money, Michael?" And he said, "You know, I'm from Louisiana, and in the Lewis household, we did just whatever our dad did and our dad did what our granddad did. So you went down to the Merrill Lynch office and you signed up and you made an account and you listened to whatever this broker that their family had used for years said to do and you did it." He said, "That's what I did until two of his best ideas went belly up." And he's like, one was like Lehman Brothers, Bonds, and the other, I can't remember, but he was like, "I just, I didn't even think about it.

You just did, you did what your parents did." And also, I mean, I think about it, you know, especially in certain parts of our country, your parents don't talk about money. They talk about money less than they talk about politics and sex. So in terms of like how our world is evolving, for a lot of people, if they weren't, if you didn't have like sort of like transparency and open communication about money, what it does for your family, what you value about it, how your family makes important financial decisions.

I mean, we really are starting from sort of like a very low baseline. If for years and years or generations and generations, people just sort of did whatever their parents did or whatever their grandparents did. And that thing, that decision wasn't even really discussed. It was just sort of like, you just did it and you just did it because that's what Louis's do.

I mean, he shared that story and then said, you know, "Then I made a big change and now I work with an independent advisor and now I have a plan and now I feel so much better." I mean, I think here you have a very sophisticated, smart person, went to Princeton, arguably one of the best storytellers of our time saying, "Even I made decisions without sort of like a really thoughtful process.

I just did what we Louis's did." I mean, that tells you to me that a lot of people are, it's going to take a long time for a lot of people to make big changes because this is just a topic that for years and years and years, people just taboo.

You know, either people don't think they have enough money or they think they have too much and they don't want others to know about it or whatever. People don't talk about money, what it means to them, what it does for them. And so I think there's just, there's a lot of work to be done.

And I love doing that work. I love, I mean, if we worked with computers and robots, this would be a really easy story. Hey, active managers have a hard time winning. You can put the odds in your favor. Here's how you do it. Oh, great. That makes a lot of sense.

Let's do it. But that's not how it always works because we're dealing with humans who have history and legacy and their own money stories and their own issues and their own fears. And it's that the psychological complexity is the part that fascinates me probably the most because the indexy versus, you know, active kind of stuff.

Like that's, that story to me now is a little bit less interesting. It's how do you connect with a real human to get them to make better financial decisions that matters the most and is the hardest. Subtitle on your book is "The Making of an Evidence-Based Investor." This evidence-based thing is kind of a popular term these days, evidence-based medicine or evidence-based blah, blah, blah.

What do you mean by that subtitle? So first I would say I like words, but we've never, no one's ever found a good word to describe I think an investment approach that is something more than index funds, something more than passive. It's what is it that we can learn from academic research or from science that will help us make more money?

What is, what's there that is repeatable and reliable and robust in the way of scientific research that will allow a person to feel like they have the right kind of investment approach? So evidence-based to me is the best name that is available for that kind of thinking. And really what I tell you, for the last 16 years, I've been, I'm 42 years old, for the last 16 years, I've been giving away books to friends, family, prospective clients, anybody I could find and said, "Hey, look, check this stuff out.

I get really turned on by this. Let me know what you think." And after I would give them the book, I would check in with them and I would say, "What do you think?" And they'd be like, "Well, I stopped reading it. I didn't make it very far." "Why didn't you make it very far?" "Because I got bored." And what I realized was, you know, most people reading about finance, it's boring.

And it took, not everybody was turned on by the same stuff. Like if you say evidence-based investing, that's a snooze fest for most people. So the reason I chose to write this book and do it by, you know, framing it all in my own stories was because I thought I could get people to pay attention long enough if I use my own experience and am vulnerable and share with people like some moments in my life that weren't all that great where I didn't have it all figured out, where I was struggling.

I thought I might get people to stay tuned and actually get injected with a little bit of the stuff that I'm obsessed with that I wanted them to take hold of in those other, you know, books that I gave away for 16 years that they didn't make it through.

So I really tried hard to bury the stuff that I want people to know, some of the investment basics I think. I tried hard to throw that into stories from my own experience. As I mentioned before, so far the thing that has made me the happiest is that people that wouldn't read the prior books I would give them made it through this.

And when I asked them a few questions to see if they retained some of the stuff I wanted them to retain, the answer has been very positive. Ted Grennan: With regard to investment philosophy and evidence-based investing, let me tell you just briefly where I came to as far as the ideal approach for a financial advisor.

And you can let me know if or where you think I'm wrong in terms of where I came to. I'm not a financial advisor anymore. I have no firm, no affiliation, no connection to any financial advisory firm. But I started with a company called Northwestern Mutual, a big insurance company.

And I started in the first few years by primarily working in life insurance. And I transitioned over to investments as I built my skill and expertise in my marketplace. I didn't have anybody to work with and I didn't have any knowledge. So about three years in I started working and I chose to focus on the type of client that you outlined as far as the mass affluent.

I didn't have any ability to work with somebody with $20 million. I had nothing special to bring to them. But I could serve effectively either high-income earners who were young or wealthy retirees, people who had anywhere from half a million to a few million bucks, that type of scenario, which is exactly the same type of client that everybody else is targeting as well, it seems like sometimes.

But I came to the conclusion that the only major impact that I as a financial advisor could have was number one, to give people a confidence with their actual financial plan. People don't want investments. They want money. They want income. They want to know that their life and their goals are going to be realized.

The reason we invest, the only reason we invest is simply because we value something that we're going to get in the future more than we value what we could spend the money on today. Without that, there's no rational reason to invest. So we have to make that very clear and spend our time focusing on that.

So I came to the conclusion that I could offer really great financial planning and really good financial planning from the perspective of here are your goals. Here is the elegant and appropriate way to reach them. I could offer a lot of great service with good technical financial planning, the CFP stuff.

Here's how you just make sure you're not making any big mistakes, overspending, etc. And then from the investment management perspective, the person who was the most influential in my life was Nick Murray and Nick Murray soundly convinced me that I could provide a tremendous service with helping people manage their own behavior and that as an advisor, the thing that we as individuals are the worst at, it's not knowing what to do.

It's actually doing it in the same way that many times the biggest benefit that a personal trainer brings, sometimes it's the knowledge of which exercise to do and how many repetitions to perform of the exercise. But a lot of times it's the accountability and having somebody there to simply say, "Okay, do this.

Now do this," and so that you don't have to worry about it. So I came to the conclusion that we as financial advisors, our biggest value proposition was helping our clients manage their behavior and that through good financial planning and good coaching, I could position them such that they would be comfortable in times of market downturn and also I could coach them in advance so that they would be aware of it and they wouldn't be caught and blindsided by their behavior.

After a few years, I wanted to start this podcast and so that was when I left Northwestern Mutual and I had gone through the process even of establishing the paperwork for an RIA and if I were going to do it over again, I would probably go back and build a similar registered investment advisory firm, similar to what you've done and hold out those things that I just described because those were the conclusions that I reached of the biggest value that we reached in the industry and that was where I said, "This is where a financial advisor is worth their money and ignore most of the other things where they're not." Now whether you want to use Vanguard funds or DFA or whatever, it doesn't matter to me.

There's a lot of good options there that can be done, but that was what I came to. So I'm curious. In everything I described, are there any of those points that you disagree with? First of all, if you ever decide to become an advisor again, let's talk. I love everything you just said and I think we have a lot in common.

What city are you based in? West Palm Beach, Florida. Oh yeah. Nice place to visit. Okay. So that is awesome. I think we – I mean let's first say this. We agree on a lot. We deviate only in probably tiny places that is like trivial pursuit, but would you like for me to maybe – I would love, please.

Yes. So first I would say I love Nick Murray. My firm, we're subscribers. I love his voice and I fear the day when he is not around because there is no voice who will replace him that I know of. But to say that one needs to manage client behavior is – that's an excellent objective.

But where is there training for any financial advisory firm or wealth management firm as to how one gets to a level of emotional or psychological intelligence where you really can make a deep impact on another person? I found myself really longing for someone to train both me and my team.

So basically what I'm saying is I agree that a lot of this is human behavior and the management of that behavior and holding people accountable to what they say they're going to do. Huge part of it. And from a financial planning perspective, I'll tell you, we don't say – we don't broadcast financial planning to prospective clients but we do financial planning.

And I would say we agree on most things. But the thing where I think, at least from my point of view, I learned so much from two things, one experience and another person. So this is in the book. I don't want to give too much away if people are going to check it out or read it.

But there's a really meaningful section for me that I included in the book that is about shortly after we started our firm, I was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer, a type of leukemia that 10 years prior killed basically everybody who got it. And science had revealed a drug that was considered like a miracle drug.

There's actually a book written about it called The Magic Cancer Bullet. And unlike if you've met anybody who has had cancer, normal chemotherapy, it goes in, it's like a bomb and it explodes and they kill the bad stuff but they kill lots of good stuff. This was considered like a designer chemotherapy drug.

It went in and it nipped the exact genetic malfunction right in the bud and with very few side effects, it could reduce and in some cases, people have said that it could even eliminate or shrink it down to a level that is unrecognizable, the cancer or the leukemia. Well, I share this experience in the book because the doctors who cared for me, they had massive like scientific knowledge.

They both went to Stanford Medical School. They're both brilliant people. But they handled me in such a way that I felt, and this is the way in my firm we describe it but this may not mean that much to other people, I felt well-held. I felt completely understood. I mean, I would do anything that these people told me to do because I felt like they got me at a level that few people really did.

I couldn't, if you told me how did they do it, how did it happen? I detail some of this in the book but it's hard to explain. So after this experience, I came back to my partner and I said, "Listen, I just learned from people how to help others, how they helped me in a traumatic situation feel a strong sense of calm and direction." When people we serve have traumatic things happen in their lives, either through the markets or other things in relationships or their own health, we have to be better at serving them.

We got to go beyond the spreadsheet. We're very comfortable in like the quantitative places but we've got to get more comfortable and get to a place where we can make people feel the way I felt, to make people feel well-held or understood. So this may sound kind of kooky to some but we hired a psychotherapist and she's mentioned in the acknowledgments of my book and she was just at the launch party.

She's a phenomenal resource, probably one of the top five people I've ever met in my life who comes to my firm once a quarter and helps us have deeper and more meaningful relationships with clients. I can't tell you how much further I think we've gone than just saying, "Hey, we need to be better at managing human behavior." We've gone to a whole other level where I'm so grateful and I love it.

I'm obsessed with that piece of the puzzle because as you said, whether you use Vanguard or DFA or some other combination of stuff or AQR, Bridgeway or whatever, whatever fun choices you're making, from my point of view, as long as you feel like you have a process and a belief system because I do think some of the investment philosophy stuff, even though Nick Murray wouldn't necessarily agree with this, I do think some of the investment philosophy stuff helps people remain calm when the apocalypse du jour is underway.

So if you have a scientific approach or an approach that feels like a rock, it makes them feel sturdy, then when everything else is chaotic, I think they have soft knees, meaning they sway a little bit. They don't break. They don't fall apart. So I would say that's one area where I think we've really gone beyond what I believe Nick has encouraged people, advisors to do because ultimately, the clients, even the smartest clients we work with, I don't know that they care.

Oh, I do know that most of them don't care about the underlying investment, the funds and the strategy as much as they do the plan and their ability to reach their own goals and feeling understood and well-held and cared for. But that's been part of my own evolution. In the past, what I used to do was beat people over the head with what I consider to be the data and evidence that they should fall in love with.

And what I found was people either fell asleep or were confused or frustrated, and I got tired of doing that. So then I started becoming a better listener and understanding what was important to them. And what was amazing was when their light was on and they were talking about themselves, I could tell they felt really great and they wanted to reciprocate and hear what was important to us, but most people just don't care that much.

We have a few people who are sort of super nerds who love the same stuff we love and we send them special communications and let them backstage a little bit more. But for most people, they just want to live their lives and feel like they've made a smart money decision.

And I feel like the approach we have and almost all of what you just said is spot on. Really thinking while I set this question up about what it was that the – two things that the psychotherapist taught you that were instrumental, but let me set the question up with my response.

What you described just now was my experience and one of my frustrations – well, what I learned was first, I needed to listen better. And how I was trained was to do a few minutes of listening about goals and then to gather data and facts and then present plans and ideas and options.

I learned that the longer I spent listening and the longer I spent asking and finding out what people wanted, then the less data and facts and things I needed to present because people didn't care. They didn't remember anything about what I actually presented. People don't understand how investments work.

They don't understand how insurance policies work. They just don't understand how taxes work. And so ultimately – but they do understand how you made them feel. So I learned to spend a lot more time listening and really understanding what – how somebody feels and then – and that helped immensely.

And back to your concept of the production culture, I was convinced that it allowed me to go much deeper with clients, but it kept me from seeing more clients. And if you're purely measured based upon numbers, then that doesn't work so well. You have to be in a culture that can permit you to go deep with fewer clients and then you have to be working with a client base where it's a worthy – it's a profitable investment of your time to go deep with those clients.

With regards to like the technical proficiency, the other thing I learned was I learned to – in the beginning, maybe you were trained in the same way. I put together this data book, the – what was it called? The book with all the illustrations and the charts and the graphs and the things like that and I'd carry this thing around with me and then it went digital and people would put it on their iPads.

Later, I quit all that stuff and I just go out with a legal pad and I draw pictures. And the guy who introduced us here was Carl Richards. I told Carl Richards – I can't remember if I told him on the show or told him privately but I said, "I'm a little jealous of you because I used to just draw pictures for my clients and it worked for me and you've made a whole career out of your stupid pictures and I should have done what you did." But if you could just simply draw a picture and make it clear, like you can communicate more with a little sketch drawing than you can with data and charts and pictures because I still would have people remember and they'd say, "Oh, that picture that you drew, I still remember that.

I used that with other people," but they don't remember the numbers. So those are some of the – and with regard to Nick Murray, I wholeheartedly agree with you that he doesn't offer a lot of texture on how to actually implement it. The mistake I made and I learned it quickly that it was the wrong way.

He based upon perhaps his experience, his age, his platform, he conveys in his writing the idea of taking almost a strong arm position. You will do this because I am the advisor and you pay me to tell you what to do and therefore you shall do what I tell you to do.

So I picked a little bit of that up and I tried to do that a little bit. I tried to be kind of the strong arm. I am the advisor and you will do what I tell you or we're just going to terminate our relationship. It didn't work for me and I realized it was later that my managing director told me, he's like, "Joshua, what would you do if somebody came and interacted with you that way?" I said, "Well, you're right.

That's not me. I would not respond well to that." So I canceled that concept of strong arm tactics. Not that – that wasn't being coercive but just simply holding my ground from almost a position of positional superiority. I'm the advisor. You need to do what I said and I realized that doesn't work for me.

It's not working for my clients and I had to adjust. So that was a long setup to give you a little background to my question of saying what were two of the things that the psychotherapist taught you that were so instrumental of how to work with individual clients? Well, let me jump back even before her and tell you one of the things that upon reflection I realized.

So back in 2001, one of the jobs I had when I went to my first independent RA and I worked under this guy Larry Swebdro. I got to go with him. He would go and give talks for firms around the country and I got to go with him to the offices that were within a drive of St.

Louis. So he needed someone to drive him and he needed somebody to fast forward his slides. So that was me. I was the guy who would drive this guy to give this talk. So let's – I'll give you a real one. We went to Cape Girardeau, Missouri on like a Tuesday night and there were – there was a large crowd that an advisor there had put together in a gymnasium and it was definitely a weeknight and I'd say there were 75 to 100 people in the room.

We get there. Larry signed some books and he's going to give this talk and his slides violate every PowerPoint rule that we know today. Tiny fonts. No one could read them. But people could tell this guy was passionate about what he was talking about. He's basically talking about active funds, lose, indexy stuff, wins, be patient, take the long view, you'll win over long periods of time.

But all throughout the presentation I would watch people's body language and they were bored. When he would get to the very end he would tell this story, the big rocks story, which is basically about sort of putting the most important things in your life first, putting the big rocks in.

It's really the old story like if you have a pitcher and there's a business professor in front of his class and he puts these rocks in the pitcher and he says, "Is the pitcher full?" A bunch of the students say, "Yeah, it's full." Then he takes out some gravel and he pours the gravel in the bucket and the gravel goes in between the big rocks and it seeps down and he goes, "Now is it full?" The students catch on and they say, "No, it's not full." He gets some sand out and he pours some sand in there and the sand falls down.

"Is it full?" "No, it's still not full." He gets the water out and he pours the water in. Now it's all the way up to the top and they say, "Is it full?" "Yes, it's full." They say, "What's the moral of the story?" One business student says, "No matter how jammed your schedule is you can always fit more in." He says, "No, no, that's not it.

That's not it." The moral of the story is if you don't put the big rocks in first you'll never get them in. When Larry would tell this story that's when people would sit up straight and pay attention. What he just did was he took the boring investment stuff and he created an intersection where it hit their real lives.

Your life will be better if you are freed up from worrying about whether you've picked the right guru. Your life will be better if you have simplicity and transparency. It will allow you to focus on the important things first. That lesson never left me. I just hadn't really figured out how to apply it in our own practice.

Why did people look like they were about to fall asleep for 20 slides but then on the last story why did they wake up? Because it had something to do with how this approach was going to make a difference in their lives. The biggest thing that Marilyn Wechter, our psychotherapist friend I would say, did for us was remind us that all of this is connected to how we make real people's lives better.

In order to understand how we might help make another person's life better, let's understand what their life looks like. Let's understand how they make decisions, how they've made decisions in the past, what stories they've told themselves about money. For example, one of the most powerful moments that's depicted in the book that I had not long ago.

We have an awesome client, CPA by background, so fairly technical person. One day she was sitting in our office and I said, and things have gone really well and she's feeling good, and I said, "What are you going to do? You haven't spent as much money this year as we have detailed in the plan.

Are you going to give more? Are you going to do this thing or that thing?" She says, "You know what I think I'm going to do? I think I'm going to pay off my sister's mortgage." I said, "Wow, that's awesome." Then all of a sudden I noticed she got really quiet and her eyes started getting a little red and she started crying.

Of course, because we've worked with a psychotherapist, we didn't have this before, but we have tissue in our office. I got tissue, gave it to her, I said, "Tell me what you're thinking about now." She said, "I'm thinking about how proud my mom would be if she were alive to know that I could do this for my sister." For me, that's the kind of stuff that is so exciting and is so much fun to be a part of.

If you can make a difference in another person's life where you, you know, I didn't know that this was going to trigger that reaction, but being fully present, seeking to understand another human being, and caring about where that intersection is, where the intersection is between great financial planning, a sound approach, really super people who want to do great things in the world for the people they care about.

I love that. That's what makes, you know, that Simon Sinek guy who says, "Start with why." That's the kind of thing that is my why. That's why I love doing what I do and I'm never going to stop doing it. I know things will change and evolve over time, but I love where I am in this business and being able to help people in that way.

That's the big payoff. Those are the moments that just energize my whole office. Tom: Love the story. It's an awesome example of the power of what we can do when we actually realize and dig in a little deeper and realize that we all have goals that probably don't fit so well into the financial planning software, but once you get clear on what's possible, then you can indulge some of those goals.

I'm going to give you… Go ahead. Ryan: I did actually want to answer one other thing you said or asked me about another tip or idea that Marilyn has helped us with. One I alluded to earlier, which is she says the buildings that fall after an earthquake are the buildings that don't bend.

If you're too rigid, you break. One of the big questions is do you have soft knees? Do you sway or are you too rigid? How do you deal with adversity or trauma? One of the things that is interesting to figure out is in the people's past when they've had a tough time, whether it's dealing with market volatility or losing money or losing meaningful relationships in their lives, how do they deal with those things?

Knowing and understanding how people have dealt with whatever trauma they've had in the past helps you understand how they may deal with it in the future. For example, people who are super sensitive to market gyrations, we want to help them not be so sensitive to those things, but we know it's going to take time.

We have in the family profile or the mind map that we have for clients, if you are super sensitive to how markets move at this stage of your relationship with our firm, we have a section where we label you as high attachment or low attachment or moderate attachment. How attached are you to market volatility?

Then we make sure we talk with those people who are highly attached to those kinds of movements in a way that makes them feel understood. That in turn builds the kind of emotional resilience and strength because then they say, "Hey, these people have me. They've got me. They understand me.

They're with me. They're here to protect and help me." That kind of thing, as I said before, if you have too much volume, you can't do that. If you love that juicy part, if you love having that kind of relationship with people, if you have a million clients, you just can't do it.

That's why we're pretty selective and have an awesome practice because the people who work with me all share in this sort of idea that providing that kind of service is really powerful and it's rare because most people who are out there who hire some financial advisor, typically they think it's just about the investment management piece.

They don't know that much maybe about financial planning. They certainly don't think or know a lot about how someone else could affect their behavior. When you get to that stage of evolution, it's really fun. Love what you're doing, Matt. I'm now going to put you on the spot and give you my biggest rebuttals to everything that you've described, my biggest criticism of the financial advice industry.

I'd love to hear your straightforward response. We obviously, as I described earlier, we came to similar perceptions and similar conclusions with regard to how to structure a practice. If I were not doing radical personal finance, I would either be a partner or I would have a practice similar to the one that you've described because it's a very, very pleasing, enjoyable business model where you can have a high degree of satisfaction that you're making a massive positive impact in the lives of your clients.

Your clients love you. Your business becomes more like a family versus a transactional customer relationship which is what many advisors have created is a bunch of customers that buy from them but aren't very happy with them. However, the problem that I perceive and the reason why I do not run that type of firm now is the vast majority of people will never be able to benefit from the services of an advisor like that simply because they're not rich.

What I came to the conclusion as a financial advisor is that we as financial advisors are very good at giving excellent advice to people who have money and to people who are rich but we have no clue or concept of how to actually help people get rich because all of the things that we teach, they might possibly be applicable, maybe, but they generally don't work unless somebody is already rich.

That's where I set you up with that when I asked who do you work with and you said we work with people who are wealthy and have some wealth or people who are high income earners. That's who all financial advisors work with. They work with people who are wealthy or have high incomes.

My major premise of radical personal finance is that financial advisors are good at helping people who are already rich and the way that you get rich is by having a high income or by building a big business and saving a lot of money. So the biggest problem with everything that you described is that it only works for people who are already rich and there's no way for us as financial advisors in the system you described.

You said, "Okay, the problem is the people on the bottom and the firm on top and there's this beautiful RIA model and there's awesome tools and technology. That's great but that's only ever going to serve probably 4% of the population and the 4%, I'm just making that up simply because the top 20% are the top 20%.

Maybe we're going to serve 20% of the population but the bottom 80% or 96% of the population is never going to be able to make use of these types of services. So what do we as financial advisors do to help the vast majority of people who you will never profitably be able to sit down with and create a mind map and create this investor profile questionnaire that talks about are they high attachment, moderate attachment or low attachment?

What do we do to help the majority of people? Awesome question. I'll tell you the present answer and my aspirational answer. The present answer is I have sent so many people to Vanguard, it is annoying. Someone comes to me and I care about them and they say, "Hey, we want to work with your firm.

Here's our situation. Here's what we're doing." And I say, "You shouldn't pay us our minimum fee. You should go to Vanguard. Here's a proxy for the kind of allocation I like but you do whatever you want to do." But this is the best solution today. Hold on. I want you to finish but I'm going to interrupt you.

Even Vanguard doesn't solve the problem because out of your 135 clients – and here's the challenge – out of your 135 clients, tell me just a guess how many of them worked at a mainstream middle class job and saved a half a million or a million dollars by investing 15% of their income into a mutual fund plan over 40 years.

What percentage of them did that as compared to how many of your 135 rich clients got there because they're making multiple six figures per year, living in St. Louis, Missouri or other low-cost of living places or built an independent business as an entrepreneur and sold it or developed a high percentage?

So I would say I agree with you. It's a small percentage. I would say it's probably more than 10% but less than 20%. What I'm telling you, Joshua, is what is my present reality. My present reality is I agree that we don't do a good job of teaching people how to create wealth.

For myself, as I mentioned earlier, I feel like I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I'm just an intellectually curious, hungry little bugger who kept rubbing up against people who I thought were smart and then gradually got lucky and became friends with someone who said he wanted to start a business and was tired of being a W-2 employee and said, "Let's do something together." The best decisions I ever made from a wealth creation standpoint were starting my own firm and then I had a consulting project with a mutual fund company about five or six years ago that was a really great project and a smart decision and worked out well for everybody who was involved.

Those things, I didn't go to school. No one taught me how to do those things. I would say most of the people that we work with, they either inherited wealth, they worked for a phenomenal company that had an unbelievable run and they had stock options and they participated in the unbelievable run of the corporation and were very lucky to have worked at a company that had that experience.

Or they owned a business and the business did well and they sold it and had a liquidity event. Our largest client we work with was a beer distributor in St. Louis. We have a lot of old beer money. So I have a lot of clients who became wealthy because they worked for Anheuser-Busch at a time when Anheuser-Busch became dominant.

I agree with you. There is no one teaching how one becomes independently wealthy. I would tell you though that I do have some people, and as I said, I think it's more than 10%, less than 20%, who were just steady, patient savers. They deprived themselves of luxury items and they plotted along and they've created for themselves basically their own pension.

I do have some people like that. But the answer for me presently is I don't have a business solution that scales well, that can help real people who make a modest income, who want to save a little bit of money. You're right. I can't provide the same level of service for that person as I can for the person who already has significant wealth.

That frustrates me. Here is one of the things that we do in our office that I personally like. We don't have a huge retirement plan business, but I do like that when we do retirement plans, and they're typically for small businesses. So an orthodontist who has 20, we have an orthodontist that's like 200 miles from where we are, has 20 people who works for him.

Good friend of mine, young guy, and started out as, will be a phenomenal client, but started out with like a retirement plan and a modest savings account. He and his staff will benefit from our time together. He will benefit in bigger service ways. The staff will benefit because they'll get what I consider to be an awesome investment approach at a very low cost.

We have a different fee schedule, by the way, for retirement plans. It's 50 basis points instead of 75 basis points. That's the best thing I can do at the moment is tell people, "Here's what I know about if you're looking to invest your money in a smart approach, you can go to Vanguard or Betterment or Wealthfront." By the way, Betterment, Wealthfront, that kind of stuff, I love it because to me, that's a much better experience than people were getting at Edward Jones.

So if somebody can have a good investment experience there and not pay high fees to underperform and not understand what they're doing, good. By the time you're ready to come to someone like us, you'll have had a better experience and have more money and not be so sour on how this industry works.

So I don't feel threatened or weird about any of that stuff. I like it and wish I had my own version that we could offer people. But it is frustrating. I do agree with you that there's a huge hole in the sense that no one teaches anyone how to be entrepreneurially successful or how to create real wealth or how to even analyze what their unique ability is and what the most valuable piece of their offering is.

So there is a huge hole there and I don't have a great solution for that. But in the interim, I think retirement plans are a great solution. And Vanguard is a good firm, Betterment, Wealthfront, those are good firms. And I think the thing that inspires me is that there are better choices now than there have ever been for real people.

That still doesn't solve the problem that you're highlighting, but that's my answer. Trey Lockerbie (00:10:00): Yeah. And I know I'm putting you on the spot. I appreciate the answer. Part of it is just I like to ask financial advisors this question and part of it is a lot of financial advisors listen to the show and I want us as financial advisors to listen.

Because as far as I'm concerned, it's very difficult for me to imagine a better solution than what you've described as your firm. And there are thousands of other guys and gals all around the country doing exactly what you've done. And so I see maybe there are still problems. I'm sure you guys have some business problems that you're working on.

But as far as the model, everything you described as the technology and things like that, that didn't exist a decade ago. But today, I think we've effectively solved a lot of those problems. Now there are still problems of how does a new advisor start? You or I couldn't have started in the type of firm you were at if we hadn't had a little bit of experience.

There's still an on-ramp problem. There's still a training problem. There's still some prohibitive challenges. But we've solved the 80% of the problem. There's just some minor tweaks. How do we create a training culture? Blah, blah, blah, et cetera. And frankly, you said, "Hey, why didn't you start a firm?" This is why I started Radical Personal Finance and it's my best attempt to try to figure out how do we build some sort of educational platform that will teach people how to become the type of investors that good financial advisors want to work with.

And I don't have a solution. But I'm working to build the solutions and figure them out where – we can talk later. I can tell you some of the models that I've built. But this is I think where I'd love to see you and – I mean this is where I'm focused and I'd love to see you and smart people like you start to focus and figure out how to do it because that's one of the biggest areas of opportunity that we have to work in the general population.

My final question to you, Matt, before I give you an opportunity to tell us about your firm because there may be people listening who would care to work with you and who want to read your book. But my final question to you is back to just something tactics and this one is a little bit time-based.

As we record this here on April 19, 2016, there's a lot of changes with pending legislation coming out from the regulators about changes to the fiduciary status. It's quite the news these days. And you've described in your initial conversation here today, you described the problem which a lot of people have experienced and have seen and you described your solution.

And I'd be curious, what do you see as the current state of the market and where is the market going with regard to this transparency and client service orientation? And please include in your comments your own perspective on the pending fiduciary regulation from the regulators. Matt Roberts - Okay.

So on the fiduciary issue, my personal perspective is I don't think they went far enough. I don't think it's a political issue, although it was politicized. I think it's just right and wrong. It seems silly to me to have like a fiduciary standard on retirement accounts. So it's like, oh, you have to have this standard on this type of account, but not on other, you know, on taxable accounts.

It's just silly. Everybody I think should be a fiduciary. It's just why and what sense does it make to be able to say, yeah, I, you know, I have a suitability standard instead of a fiduciary standard. It just seems silly to me. You should represent the best interest of the client no matter what.

But I don't, you know, my personal view is I don't wait for the government to like tell me how to behave. You can't legislate, you know, in my opinion, proper behavior always. I mean, they can change like the baseline, but the best firms that I know are operating at a much higher level anyway.

So this is a blip on most firms' radar. But for firms that derive a lot of revenue from sources that this rule will affect, I can see where it's disruptive. But in many ways, I think it didn't go far enough and was watered down and softened by the power of, you know, big firms and their lobbying efforts.

And I know like here in St. Louis, there's a very vocal politician who is like, I think, backed by one of the bigger firms who's based here. And it's just it's too bad because if you're really out to help others, then this is a no brainer. So to me, the fiduciary standard is an easy one.

And I think it was watered down a little bit. Our industry at times is inspiring and it's also humiliating. And that's the humiliating part of it. It's like, why would anybody resist that change? I don't get it. So that's my perspective on the legislative piece. And then just from sort of where things are going and where this, you know, the industry and I guess just, you know, kind of how the market feels, how this little world feels.

I feel highly optimistic, but it's also slow. I mean, in many ways, I think like racism, like other things that just take time and people, you know, there are people who are going to retire out of this industry and there are people that are coming into it. And as people come into it, everybody I meet at, I used to be very down when I would attend like a continuing ed conference or something, I'd be like, you know, is this really the best of our industry right here?

Are these the kind of people that are going to provide inspiration to me? Because it seemed like there wasn't a lot that was changing. But now I feel like there is just so much new energy. There's so much more sort of collaboration. Think about like what we're doing right now.

The two of us talking and, you know, sharing ideas and someone else will hear our ideas and tags or put something on it that's better than what we thought of. And that sort of like notion, I heard a TED talk one time called crowd accelerated innovation. And it's like technology is allowing us to share ideas and improve upon each other's ideas so much faster than ever before that I just, I can't help but feel optimistic and inspired about what's coming in this space.

When I meet young people like people that are going to work at my firm, this story is in my book Odds On. There's a young guy who came to interview with me and he said, Matt, I will work for free for you for two years. Now think about that.

Why would a normal person want to work for free for someone else for two years? That's how hungry this person was to be out of the model he was in. And he worked in financial services at EverJones to be out of that world and be in this world. I mean, it's just, I see that happening, that kind of attitude, that kind of hunger for the kind of practice we've built more and more.

So while some firms talk about they have a problem with talents and finding good people, we don't have that problem. We have lots of good people. If I had a big enough budget, I would just keep hiring rockstar people, man, because I love being around great people who want to do good work.

And then just how things feel in the world to me. I'm just a perpetual believer in global capitalism and I have no crystal ball, but I just love what's happening. I love that firms like Dimensional and AQR and Vanguard just keep innovating and keep creating things that allow us, I think, to put the odds on the side of the investor.

And the analogy that to me is the best I've come up with is like when you saw, I saw Steve Wynn, the Vegas casino owner on 60 Minutes one time, and they asked him, they said, hey, Steve, does any gambler ever really beat you? Does anyone ever really beat the house?

And he said, over the long run, I'm the only winner. The math is figured out. And that's exactly the kind of attitude and approach that I like to give to the kind of people we work with. So that's my answer. Matt, this has been a great interview. Tell us about the book, the book website, your firm website, and feel free to plug any additional resources that you'd like to provide for my audience.

Okay, cool. So I worked for two years on this book. I'm deeply proud of it. It has done well by the standards that I held myself to. It's called Odds on the Making of an Evidence-Based Investor. You can learn more about that at matthallbook.com. It's for sale on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and everywhere else where you would normally find books.

My firm is called Hill Investment Group. My last name is Hall, but my partner's last name is Hill. He's a very unselfish guy. The only thing he ever asked for was to name the firm after him. So we did. It's called Hill Investment Group. It was started in June of 2005.

We have an office in St. Louis, an office in Houston, and clients all over the country. And yeah, that's about it. We're barely on social media, but you can find us on LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram and that kind of stuff. But I don't know. I'm so bad, I don't even know all our names and IDs on those things.

But hillinvestmentgroup.com or our firm's motto is takethelongview.com. So you can find or take the long view, you can find us at takethelongview2 or ignorewallstreet.com. We bought all those URLs. Good. Nicely done. Matt, thanks for coming on. Hey, I loved it, man. Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance.

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