So our first session this morning is a fireside chat with Dr. Bill Bernstein and Jason Zweig. Dr. Bernstein is a neurologist. He's also the co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors and the author of several books on finance and economic history. Those books include The Intelligent Asset Allocator, The Four Pillars of Investing, and several other e-books, plus four volumes of economic history, The Birth of Plenty, A Splendid Exchange, Masters of the Word, and The Delusions of Crowds.

Bill has written for several national publications, including Money Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and has authored and co-authored several peer-reviewed financial journal articles, which led to winning the 2017 James R. Verton Award from the CFA Institute. He is speaking with Jason Zweig. Jason is an investing and personal finance columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

He is the author of several books, including my favorite, Your Money and Your Brain, The Devil's Financial Dictionary, The Little Book of Safe Money. He has edited and revised Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor and co-edited Benjamin Graham's Building a Profession, an Anthology of Graham's Essays. From 1995 to 2008, Jason was the senior writer for Money Magazine.

Before joining Money, he was a mutual funds editor for Forbes. He also serves as the trustee of the Museum of American Finance in New York City and sits on the editorial boards of the Financial History Magazine and the Journal of Behavioral Finance. So, please welcome Dr. Bill Bernstein and Jason Zweig.

>> All right, well, it is a distinct pleasure. I can't really embellish too much on Rich's introduction of Jason, except to say that it's a distinct honor. I know very few people who know more about neuropsychology, theory, and practice of investing, and especially financial history, than Jason. But I know of no one who commands all three areas as-- >> I do.

>> -- as I do. Well, you're very kind. So, the way it's going to work is I will lead off, and then it's going to be a two-way street. We're going to fire questions at each other, probably interrupt each other. So, my first question to Jason is, many of you may not know that he majored in art history.

So, the question is how one segues from art history to the pinnacles of modern finance. >> Well, so, yeah, thanks, Bill, and thanks to the Bogle Head Center for having us here. And it's great to see all of you. Some of you I've-- I think I've known for 20 years.

It was great to see Tim Dempsey and Gail Cox, and a bunch of other Bogle Heads from way back. So, I always wanted to be a writer from the time I was about 13, and maybe someday I will be one. I grew up in the art business. My parents were art and antique dealers after they got out of the newspaper business.

But I just fell into journalism by accident, and through a series of other accidents, I ended up a business journalist. And when I became the Forbes Mutual Funds Editor in 1992, I thought it was the worst job in the place. And then on day one, I started doing a little research and found out that back then there was a trillion and a half dollars invested in mutual funds.

And I said, if there's a trillion and a half dollars, there's got to be a story in there somewhere. And in fact, there were. And I just followed my curiosity where it led me. But I think a much better question is how does a neurologist with a PhD in chemistry end up so interested in investing finance and economic history?

>> Well, the ugly answer is that I enjoy money. But, you know, the prettier answer is that I live in a country that doesn't have a functioning social welfare system. So I realized as a practicing physician I was going to have to invest on my own. And with, you know, the scientific training that I had acquired, it was obvious to me that the way to do it was the way you would approach any other scientific problem, which was to review the peer-reviewed literature, look at the data, consult the basic texts, collect data, build models.

And when I had done all that by the mid-1990s, I realized that I had put together something that might be useful to small investors. So I logged on to this fancy new technology that was just coming to Coos Bay, Oregon in the mid-'90s called the internet. And I started putting my stuff out there.

And soon enough, journalists started calling me and, you know, began writing books. And I discovered that in the process of writing about finance, that, you know, writing about the history of finance is so very important. If you don't know the history of finance, you're dead in the water when you're as an investor.

And I segued into writing about history as well, because I found actually I enjoyed writing history more than I enjoyed writing about finance. So that's how I got there. So I'm going to turn the question around again and ask Jason, what are the one or two or three biggest epiphanies you've had in the, you know, 30 years, 35 years you've been doing this?

>> Yeah, so I guess I'll -- I think the biggest epiphany I had was probably around 2000 -- actually, I think it was -- it might have been in the year 2000. I was sitting at home, and my wife was doing her homework. And I was reading the Journal of Financial Economics, I think.

Sort of by candlelight. And my wife looked up from what she was doing, and she was like, "Is that interesting?" And I sort of, you know, put it down and looked up at her, and I was like, "Now that you mention it, not really." And so I had a business trip the next day, and I -- when I got to the airport, and in those days, airport bookstores were still pretty good, I said, "I'm going to buy something to read on the plane that I wouldn't normally read, because I shouldn't be reading all this finance stuff, because I do that all day long.

I shouldn't be doing it at night, and I shouldn't be doing it when I'm traveling." So I grabbed a copy of Scientific American, which then was a very good magazine. It's maybe deteriorated a little since, but -- and I opened it, and of course, being an art history major, I turned to the article that had the nicest pictures, which just so happened to be an article on split brains.

And Bill knows exactly what I'm referring to. There are people who suffer from intractable epilepsy, and ultimately, the most effective treatment for them is to surgically sever the corpus callosum, which is a thin bridge of tissue that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. And it turns out that when you do that to people, they calculate probability completely differently.

And to this day, I still remember grabbing my red pen that I always carry with me out of my pocket and circling this in huge loops on the page. And the article was written by Mike Gazzaniga, who you know of. He was a great neurologist. And when I got back to the office, the first thing I did was call his research partner, who was working on this project.

And one thing led to another, and ultimately, I became fascinated with neuroscience and the developing field of neuroeconomics. But it all really came from that epiphany of saying, why am I spending my free time reading the same stuff that I read when I'm working? Yeah, I mean, the wonderful thing about finance, as Jason discovered all those many years ago, is that to be a good lawyer or a good doctor, you have to read thousands and thousands of case studies and peer-reviewed articles.

But the list of essential finance articles that you have to read is extremely short. What would be at the top of your list? Oh, of course, the Fama-French study and Fama's early work on market efficiency, the work on the limits of arbitrage that explains why you can be the world's best arbitrageur, the world's best hedge fund manager, and you're still going to be screwed in a bad state of the world because all your clients will leave you just at the time when the expected returns are the highest, Draymond's work on the value effect, and Barry, I'm trying to remember the name of the other co-author, who basically demonstrated that growth stocks, growth peters out far more rapidly than you would imagine.

And they wind up being grossly overpriced for that reason. Those would be the top, the ones that come right off the top of my head. So what was your epiphany? My epiphany was much more mundane. There's this controversy. It's almost a parlor game that academic finance people play, which is do stocks become more risky with time or don't they become more risky with time?

And the extremely simple and wrong answer is they become less risky with time because as you look at their annualized returns, they convert 30 and 40 and 50 years. Even the worst one is plus 4%. The best one may be plus 13% or 14%. But of course, compounded over-- the fallacy there is compounded over 30 or 50 years is that 8% difference is just absolutely enormous.

So that's the first wrong answer. The next answer is, yes, they become riskier with time for that reason but also because the longer dated an option is, the more expensive it becomes, which certainly would not be true if stocks became less risky with time. But of course, that answer is wrong, too, because the options are probably mispriced.

But I realize that my epiphany was that's completely the wrong question to ask. It's not that there's a right or a wrong answer. But you're asking the question the wrong way, which is you have to add another qualifier, which is how old is the investor? So if you are an accumulator, stocks are really not that risky.

And in fact, as awful as the stock market is right now, this is a wonderful market for accumulators. I mean, if I were an accumulator, I'd be drooling with all the bargains that are out there and laying my savings into them. On the other hand, if you are a decumulator, stocks are not just risky.

They're Three Mile Island, Chernobyl toxic. You get the wrong sequence right off the bat, and you're in a sling. So the question is-- so the answer to that question is you've asked the wrong question. The real question is, how old are you? All right, well, I'll turn it around and ask Jason.

You've written God knows how many pieces. Maybe not as many as Jonathan Clements. I don't know. Yeah, but he burned out before he did so, so you still might catch up. So what are the pieces that you're most proud of, and what are the ones that you're the least proud of?

Well, yeah, so Jonathan wrote, I think, 1,004 columns for the Wall Street Journal. I just wrote my 690th, but who's counting? I can assure you that every single week, I can tell you exactly how many columns I've written. Well, let's start with the stinkers, right? I've written-- well, actually, I should clarify something, which is that I tend to say that between 5% and 10% of everything I write is garbage, and maybe 80% of it is just like nothing, and maybe 5% to 10% of it is OK.

So with that caveat, what I would say is the columns that I look back on and cringe the most about are here's an opportunity for investors now columns, because I perceived something in the markets that seemed like a dislocation. And with rare exceptions, like 2008 and probably early 2020, it's you're usually wrong when you think markets are wrong.

And every time I've thought markets were wrong, I was right that somebody was wrong, but it wasn't the markets. I've made those kinds of calls, which I guess in journalistic terms are kind of like market timing, and the vast majority of them turned out to be wrong. And they were pretty stupid, and somebody should have stopped me.

But the columns I'm proudest of are often the things that don't resonate as much with readers, but it depends. I wrote a column back before I came to the journal in May of 1999 that was called baloney.com that was about the overvaluation of internet stocks. And in that case, the market was wrong, and I turned out to be right.

But I think the lead, the beginning of it was something like for the next year or two, this may seem like the stupidest thing you've ever read in your life, and it might turn out to be, but I don't think so. And I once got a letter from a reader saying that he had carried it around in his wallet for two years to keep him from jumping into the dot-com frenzy, which was one of the nicest things a reader has ever said to me.

And in fact, he enclosed the original article in his handwritten letter. So that was one. And then I did a story about a portfolio manager at BlackRock who was doing some very peculiar private investing in his personal portfolio that involved companies that he also held in his fund. He was obviously an active manager at BlackRock, and ultimately, the SEC took action in that case.

And I think there was like a $12 million fine involved. So I was pretty happy that that worked out the way it did, because it's important to have that kind of spotlight shining on the industry. Yeah, I mean, as I've watched your evolution over the decades, you started-- I started reading you, at least, at Money magazine.

And you didn't do a lot of investigative work there. And some of your columns, not a huge number of them, are investigative. What do you look for? I mean, how do you-- not just how do you look for, but I mean, how do you get tipped off? Is it readers that say, hey, you need to look at this?

Well, so yeah, I mean, I wish I could do more investigative work than I do, because it's enormously satisfying and frustrating, by the way, because it's very difficult. Those ideas come from everywhere, the same way my regular column ideas come from everywhere. But the classic investigative instinct is oddball detection.

You know what the normal pattern is in a particular field. The numbers always look like this, or the general results should sound like that. And you just see something that doesn't make sense, a footnote, a particular detail. And that is just like out of sync. I mean, one of my big investigative projects literally came out of an asterisk.

There was an asterisk in a federal filing where everybody else would have a number. And I was like, what's that asterisk doing there? And then I went to the bottom of the page where the asterisk was explained, and the explanation said absolutely nothing. And that was the tip off that something was potentially amiss, which it turned out it was.

So I think a lot of people in this room, given what you do for a living, you're very familiar with the normal patterns of behavior and reporting and how results are framed in your field. And expertise is simply pattern recognition. And when you detect that something is out of sync, that's a pretty good sign that there's something there.

One pattern in finance that we all observe is that it's a field that is rife with psychopaths and con men. And I mean, people don't go into finance for the same reason they go into elementary education or social work. Let's face it. And so the question I have for you, Jason, is you've picked out some pretty impressive rogues in your investigative work.

And I'm wondering, how do you pick out the really notable psychopaths from simply the everyday ones in finance? I know what you're trying to do with that question, Bill. And yes, there is one particular person I did interview many, many years ago. And I am not naming names. But that person went on to fame and power and many other things.

One sign is that finance sociopaths, at least in my experience, tend to be very honest about their dishonesty. They're kind of disarming. They're very upfront about what they're doing for the most part. They don't really see why anybody would think there's anything wrong with it. And they're kind of amused by what they're doing.

And people who deny that they're doing something wrong are a lot less interesting than the ones who just sort of laugh and say, well, yeah, I guess you got me. Yeah, the one from a historical perspective that comes most prominently to mind was Charlie Mitchell, who was the chairman of National City Bank back in the late 1920s and was just one of the most dishonest operators, worst operators in finance even at that time.

And the way he was brought to justice was by Ferdinand Pecora, who was the counsel for the Senate Banking Committee. And Pecora was a very skilled prosecutor. And he understood what Jason just said, that the best way to get a criminal to hang himself was to just ask him what his normal operations were.

And Charlie Mitchell, just very forthrightly said, well, yeah, I pay myself a million dollars a year. Why shouldn't I? Yeah, I engage in these duplicitous transactions with my wife to avoid taxes. Of course, who wouldn't do that? I do this sort of stuff because I'm smart. And that's how we got the panoply of securities laws that govern our securities markets to this day.

So and it was remarkable. And Pecora, the people who-- there were a couple of other counsels that came before him who didn't understand that the easiest way to incriminate a criminal was to have the criminal basically indict himself, which may become relevant in the not-too-distant future, I suppose. So the next question is, what are the biggest mistakes that you see your readers making?

I'm sure you see them make lots of mistakes. What are the two or three biggest ones? Well, I think the biggest mistake of all is the mistake that is most human, that we all commit, every one of us, including you and me, at least including me and probably you, Bill.

We'll find out in a minute. Which is the inability to admit you made a mistake. And I mean, I don't know. How many people in this room own cryptocurrency and are willing to put their hands up? We got Jim. But most of them I got by 10. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. And by the way, I'm going to say officially, I'm agnostic on whether that's a good or bad idea. But I do know that a lot of people bought crypto as an inflation hedge. A lot of people. And that doesn't seem to be working out too well. Crypto was down 4% this morning on the news that inflation went up.

And that's a kind of hedge, but it's probably not a very effective hedge. Now, crypto might still work out, and that'd be great. But if you bought it because you thought it was an inflation hedge, then I would submit to you you've got a problem. And what percentage of people who bought crypto as an inflation hedge have admitted their rationale was wrong and have reconsidered their position?

I would say single digits based on anecdotal evidence anyway. And that's true, of course, not just for crypto. It's true for across the board. No matter what you own, we all own something. We all invest in something that we shouldn't have bought in the first place. We should get rid of.

Rick is nodding. Sorry. And if we were honest with ourselves, we would get it the heck out of our portfolio, and we just can't. So I mean, to me, that's the mother of all mistakes is the inability to admit mistakes. And there are some techniques that can help with that.

And if we have more time at the end, maybe we can talk about it. But what about you, Bill? What do you think? And what's your biggest mistake? Oh, golly. Well, that's an easy one, which is I didn't understand what I explained earlier. It took me a while to get to that epiphany, which is that I should have invested more aggressively when I was younger, when I was streaming.

I was always trying to look for the market bottom. And I found them, but it didn't do me a lot of good because I'd have been better off investing for the long term. And that's easily, easily the most expensive mistake that I've made. I've made many, many others. I'm in good grief.

I bought Palladian Futures around 1990 on the Ponds and Fleischman Cold Fusion work. Talk about stupid. So I mean, the biggest mistake that I see investors make everywhere I go is they see their portfolio as their net worth. And that's really a fatal mistake to make when you're older because you've got risky assets, and you've got riskless assets.

And the risky assets really may not pay off for a decade or two or three. And so if you think that this is my net worth, and you just saw it go down by 20% this year, and you translate that into that is imperiling your retirement, you've made a mistake of not understanding that paying for your retirement is all about your safe assets and not about your risky ones.

And Christine likes to talk about all the different buckets that she likes, and I think it's a good way to do it. I'm happy with two buckets, risky and non-risky. But if you want to take the riskless one and parse it out for different purposes, that's fine, too. That's the biggest mistake I see people make.

And probably equal to that, everybody talks about overconfidence, if you're familiar with even the basics of neuropsychology, you understand that human beings are a very, very overconfident species. But the most fatal overconfidence is overconfidence about your risk tolerance. It's to be able to look at the Ibbotson graph, which is this horribly deceptive graph that is on a semi-log scale, and it makes it look like there's hardly any fluctuation in the market.

It's just this straight slope that goes up, until you realize that 1987 didn't even show up in that. The growth financial crisis on a semi-log scale is a barely visible blip, and you just don't understand how awful you feel when the market really does go down. There's this wonderful quote, which I can almost do from memory, and maybe Jason can correct the grammar, but there's this wonderful book called Where Are the Customer's Yachts by a wonderfully funny man named Fred Schwedt.

And the quote goes something like, "There are some things that cannot be explained to a virgin either by words or pictures." Nor can any words that I could write in this book now describe to you what it feels like to lose a real chunk of money that you used to own.

Yeah, that's correct, and it's illustrated with a cartoon by Peter Arno, who was a cartoonist for The New Yorker, of Adam and Eve standing naked under the tree of knowledge. Yeah, yeah. All right, well, I think what we'll do now is Jason and I wanted to save some time for Jack anecdotes, and then I think we'll probably open it up for some questions.

So Jack, I'll ask you, what is your favorite Jack Bogle story? Well, so I've got a bunch of favorite Jack Bogle stories, but I guess the one I'll tell is one that was about a direct interaction that he and I had. So in 1995, I was still-- I was the mutual funds editor at Forbes, and I got an offer to go work at Money magazine, where I was before I came to the journal.

And I was torn. I didn't know whether I should go. Money magazine then was kind of promissory. They used to have all these cover stories, 10 hot funds to buy now and stuff like that, which I found kind of creepy, to be honest. But it was a very attractive design your own job kind of offer.

And so I did something that I'm not sure I've ever done before or since, which was I called a source to ask for personal advice. I mean, it's not the kind of thing journalists generally do. But I called Jack, and I said, can I ask you a personal question?

And he said, of course. So I explained the situation, and then he said to me, and I, well, what are you afraid of? Which was, of course, cut to the heart of the matter. Because I hadn't been thinking about it in those terms, right? And I realized, actually, he's right.

I am afraid. And what am I afraid of? And I said, I just blurted out, I said, I'm afraid they'll take my integrity away from me. And he said, if they can take your integrity away from you, you never had it in the first place. And I was like, I guess I'll take the job.

Yeah, I have two fast ones. I don't have the depth of experience with Jack that you did. But 13 years ago, I was cleaning out our house for the inevitable downsizing we all have to inevitably do, or at least some of us do. And I came across a two-page, single-spaced letter from Jack that was in response to a letter that I had written him sometime in the 1980s when I had no presence in finance at all.

And I was grousing about something stupid, about why they didn't have an unhedged international bond fund. And he wrote me about 1,000 words explaining why Vanguard didn't have it. And I was just one of many hundreds of thousands of Vanguard customers. That, to me, epitomized Jack. My favorite story, though, is I did go out to dinner with him on occasion.

And this was early 2000. And I waited until he had had his second martini. And I said, so, Jack, have you altered your asset allocation at all in this FACACTA market? And he just sort of conspiratorially looked over his shoulders and said, I sold off 5%. So that's my Jack anecdote.

That's really interesting. All right. So I think what we'll do is we'll have people come up and ask questions. And I think what we'll do is I will give up my microphone to anyone who wants to ask a question. And then you and I will share a microphone. Yeah.

Put your hand up. Don't be shy. We have one in the way back, Jim, on the left. Hello. Thank you. Bill, you mentioned that people are overconfident. And I thought, does increasing technology increase our overconfidence or decrease? Like, we're hunter-gatherers more or less confident-- overconfident than we are now.

Well, I'm a big believer in the immutability of human nature. I mean, it's a process which has evolved over tens of thousands of years. So I don't think that human nature has made us-- that part of it has changed. But it certainly has given us access to information that feeds our overconfidence.

There's always-- it's very easy to find a bubble you can slip into. And in fact, that's something that's increasingly happening in this country. We're all selecting where we want to live and who we want to live around. And so we wind up living around people who are like us.

So there aren't a lot of evangelicals who moved to Portland, OK? There aren't a lot of political liberals who moved to Lubbock, Texas, all right? And that's what's happening here. And the same thing happens in finance, OK? You're able to find the bubble, the person you want to listen to.

So I suspect that feeds your overconfidence. I don't know if that was a very good answer. Maybe you can do better. Well, I mean, just sort of as a follow-on note, I mean, you don't have to look far. I mean, just look at Wall Street bets. You know, to me, that's-- I mean, I was a teenage boy once.

At least half the room was teenage boys once. Investing should not be a game of chicken. But Wall Street bets is like an electronic game of chicken where a bunch of teenage boys are trying to drive their cars as fast as possible down an unlit highway at 2 in the morning.

So they can get bragging rights and maybe get killed. So I think technology, in general, has given investors more tools and capabilities than they've ever had. And it's arguably the best time in human history to be an investor because the playing field has been so radically leveled by technology.

But technology is a tool. And you can use nuclear energy to cure cancer. And you can use it to cause cancer. You know, you can pick up a hammer and build a house. Or you can knock a house down with a hammer. And you know, the internet and social media work the same way.

If you have good instincts and good judgment, you can use them to your advantage. And if you don't, you can destroy yourself. So maybe that helps. Hi, good morning. Bill, you had mentioned in terms of retirement to be dependent on your secure assets versus the insecure assets. So in essence, you can talk about secure assets for those who haven't followed for a while.

But the real issue here is how do you invest in which secure assets in order to minimize your taxes and the implication of Irma at the end of the day here? And so I'd like to really understand because I think at the end of the day, no matter what model you're trying to go through, you're still being hit with either Irma or taxes.

And even before retirement, doing Roth conversions to be able to minimize the taxes on your social security and so forth, it's still an unending trying to keep as much money as you can when you retire. Thank you. I'm philosophical. And this may sound like a-- I hope this doesn't come across as insensitive.

But if your biggest problem in retirement is your Irmas, you don't have that big of a problem. You're in the upper 2% or 3%. Every rare now and then, I'll hear someone complain that their required minimum distributions put them in the top Irma bracket. Well, think about that. That means that you're getting $300,000 or $400,000 a year in RMDs, which means you've got close to an eight-figure portfolio.

I mean, I don't mean to be vicious or sound mean, but let's get out the world's smallest violin, all right? I mean, I didn't-- and again, this maybe sounds cruel, but I didn't serve in the military or serve in combat. I didn't even serve in the Peace Corps. So I figure that the most patriotic thing I can do for this marvelous country is pay my taxes and not complain about it.

But the question is-- it's a more serious question, which is, how do you invest your risky assets and how do you invest your riskless assets? And I have to-- I was going to try not to talk about this and maybe leave this for the next panel. But it's hard not to observe that I can-- that all of us who are retiring right now and don't have a lot of income, salary coming in, can defease our future living expenses, our real living expenses, 30 years into the future by buying a TIPS ladder that will yield close to 2%.

And that's the first time that's been true for a long while. So we have a stock market which is still very highly priced, even at current levels. And you can convert that into a stream of real, very safe assets that will let you sleep at night and let you laugh when the rest of your portfolio goes down 25%.

Hi. Aaron Harris, very good to meet you both. Jason, I really enjoy reading your column every week. I look forward to it on Saturday mornings. And I always wonder, I think, well, this is such a wonderful column. It's so balanced. It has such a great perspective. How can-- and then you turn the page and you see ads for mutual funds and for these large hedge funds.

And maybe this goes back to the question about the integrity. I'm glad you answered that because you write with such integrity. Has there ever been a situation where maybe the Wall Street Journal has said, maybe don't talk about this topic, or can you give a little bit more exposure to this topic?

And how do you balance what you know is important to write with maybe what the editors of the Wall Street Journal want you to convey? Thank you. You need to get out more, but thank you. So I can report truthfully that I don't face those kinds of pressures. I mean, nobody tells me what to write.

Frankly, I wish they did a little more because coming up with 50 ideas every year is no trivial task. I just-- I mean, I've been at the journal for 14 years. And I've never written anything that they wouldn't publish, and I've never written anything that I was like ordered to write against my wishes.

You know, a few times a year, I do get suggestions from the editors, but they tend to be pretty good. And when they're not, I usually find a diplomatic way of saying maybe somebody else could write about that. So the ownership may tell our editorial page what to say, but nobody tells us in the newsroom what to say.

We have complete independence. I and all my colleagues, actually, so. Yesterday afternoon, one of the speakers mentioned that it is extremely difficult to buy stocks during a market that is going down like at present. Perhaps my neurons are wired the wrong way, but that's a market that attracts me very keenly.

So I'm somebody roughly about five years, seven years out from retirement. And on January 1 this year, I had probably a 60/40 stocks to bonds ratios. And right now, it has changed to around 68/32. And my plan is to go down up to 30/70 by the end of the year if the stock market continues to go down.

Now, is that a reasonable option, bad option, for which I should get a rap on my knuckles? Or would I be expelled from this place here? Well, there's a parameter that doesn't get talked about enough when that question gets asked, which is, what is your burn rate going to be in retirement?

And the answer to that-- so the way you would answer the question is, if your burn rate in retirement is 2% or 3%, it really doesn't matter what your portfolio looks like. You're fine, short of some sort of cataclysm. If your burn rate is going to be 4% or 5% or 6%, then how many more years are you working?

You better work more years if it's going to be that high. And if your burn rate in retirement is going to be higher than 6% or 7%, you better hope that a couple of your kids are fairly well-situated. And by the way, I mean, people are wired differently. There are people who-- I mean, I've met men who've flown aircraft in combat who threw up when their portfolios lost 5%.

And on the other hand, I know people who can bear the kinds of 2008, 2009 losses with equanimity, and they sleep very well. So it takes all types. I think the median beta tolerance-- that is the median, the maximum, the typical stock exposure of the median person is somewhere around 50-50.

I mean, there's a reason why that's roughly what the market portfolio looks like. Thanks, as always, for sharing your insights. Given the vast amount that you've studied and written about, what still surprises you? Oh, boy. Jason, I'll let you answer that, and then I'll think about it. I was going to say the same thing to you, Bill.

Well, what still surprises me? I guess what surprises me is the riddle that I've been trying to answer for most of my career, which is why are smart people so stupid about money? And we see it at every level. We see it among individual investors, none of those in this room, of course.

We see it among professional investors. We see professional investors do absolutely idiotic, ridiculous, moronic, cretinous, well, very foolish things all the time, constantly. And I don't think that'll ever stop surprising me, because there seems to be an endless number of ways that smart people can be stupid with money.

I used to think there were only a couple dozen ways, and I'm up to a few hundred, and there may be thousands. Yeah, I mean, almost nothing surprises me, because-- like Jason-- and that's why we both had such a hard time answering this, is we both know enough financial history to know that the wellspring of human stupidity and gullibility is bottomless.

And so I'm really not surprised by anything. If I'm surprised by anything, it's because I haven't learned enough financial history, or at least I forgot the parts I should have remembered. And the one thing that did surprise me, and very unpleasantly, was during the '08-'09 crisis. I knew that stocks could lose 50%, sometimes even 90% of their value, or occasionally in the course of history, 100% of their value if you're in the wrong country at the wrong time.

But what surprised me, and shouldn't have surprised me, was-- and shocked me-- was how badly non-treasury fixed income securities did. Even TIPS got hammered because of liquidity problems. But corporates, municipals got hammered as well. And I was surprised and shocked by that. And the only reason I was surprised and shocked by that is I hadn't internalized enough historical data.

I should have known better. And I may be shocked and surprised by something in the future as well. There may be a failure mode I hadn't considered. But I'll be surprised when that happens too. I have a simple question. What would be your definition of financial wellness beyond the absence of poverty?

Jason, I'm going to let you Well, I guess I have to invoke a line from Benjamin Graham. In his autobiography, he said he thought that happiness meant living well within your means. And I love that line because the word "well" is ambiguous. Did he mean living well within your means?

Or did he mean living well within your means? And unfortunately, we can't ask him. He died in 1976. My hunch, because Graham was an incredibly sophisticated writer, I think he meant both. And I think that's a pretty good definition, actually. And on the fly, that's the best I can do.

Here, Bill. No, you did very well. I mean, that phrase reminds you of the famous Wintruss book, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. And it, of course, gets to another title of one of Jack's more famous books, which was named in the story of Joe Heller and Slaughterhouse Five. Who am I thinking of?

Yeah, Kurt Vonnegut. And Vonnegut-- they're at a fancy Long Island party. And Vonnegut looks at Heller and says, that guy over there who's giving the party, he makes more money in one month than we'll make in our entire lives. And Heller looks at him and says, yeah, Kurt, you know, he's got one thing-- we've got one thing he will never have.

And that is enough. So with-- Yeah. --enough, yeah, exactly. So I think-- we might have time for just one more question. I don't know how quick it'll be, but you both mentioned the importance of identifying your mistakes. And you both gave examples of things that were obvious mistakes because they turned out poorly.

How do you identify mistakes that have turned out extremely well and get yourself out of them? Or do you have advice on that? Because I think all of us also probably have an investment or two that has done absurdly well and shouldn't have and is incredibly painful to get rid of.

Yeah. I mean, how do you know when you've played Russian roulette without knowing it and you got the empty chamber? And I guess you-- I'm trying to remember who-- I think it was Bismarck who said that I never learn from my mistakes. I learn from other people's mistakes. And that's probably the best way to do it.

Yeah, I mean, I think-- I mean, the best way to frame a decision like that is if I were making the decision whether or not to buy this investment today, would I buy it? And if the answer is no, then you should probably sell it. Wall Street has the famous continuum in recommendations like buy, sell, or buy, hold, or sell, right?

And they use all kinds of lingo for it, like accumulate and all that stuff. But the thing is, it's bogus. I mean, because every investment is either a buy or a sell. It's not a hold. I mean, if you wouldn't want to buy more, then you shouldn't be holding it, right?

So that's the way I would frame the question. And maybe that would help you make an exit. So I think that's-- we're done. And I thank all of you for your questions.