(audience applauding) - Well, before I get started on introducing Scott, I just wanna add my note of thanks to Alex. Just out of curiosity, raise your hand, how many people here fairly regularly visit the forum? So, looks like a roughly, I would say, half, maybe a little less. You know, we like to think we do good work at the Bogle Center and at this conference, but the forum is really where the bulk of the work gets done, it's where people come with their questions, some of them very easy, simple, basic questions, some of them more advanced questions, and it's where an enormous, an enormous amount of education gets done, thousands of posts a week, you know, tens of thousands of threads, most of which, or almost all of which, convey extremely useful information to ordinary investors like all of us, all of us here.

So, again, a round of applause for Larry for, please, for making the forum the place that it is, because without him, it would be overrun with trolls. (audience applauding) 'Cause that's the natural history of forums, you have to be constantly battling that entropy, and that's what Larry and Alex and Sue and their associates are doing.

Well, all right. 30 years ago, I was a modestly bored neurologist scribbling about finance, not knowing that I would be spending the last half of my adult life doing it and writing about it, until I heard from Scott, who looked at a few of the things that I had written and said, you know, Bill, you write tolerably well, and you seem to be able to do the math, and that is a very useful combination.

You actually have a future ahead of you in financial writing, so keep at it, Bill. And so I did, and it's largely thanks to Scott that I'm here talking to you tonight. Scott graduated MIT half a century ago, more than half a century ago. Used to, he tells me, amble over to Harvard to take lessons in writing from Archibald MacLeish, if you can remember who Archibald MacLeish was, very famous poet who fought in the First World War, among other things.

And he, I believe, started out at the Boston Herald and then wound up at the Dallas Morning News, where he ran a syndicated columnist, hundreds of newspapers read by millions and millions of people, a well-beloved financial writer. But more importantly than that, he did important stuff. He wrote a very influential book called The Coming Generational Storm with economist Larry Kotlikoff, and even more important than that, he wrote a white paper for, I believe, it's the National Center for Policy Analysis, Reinventing Retirement Income in America, which is one of the major reasons why so many millions of Americans now have default options in their 401(k) plans of target-gate funds.

And if that's not a major accomplishment, I don't know what is. But even more famously than that, he's the inventor of the couch potato portfolio. And there's a very famous story about the financial theorist, Harry Markowitz, who knew about more assembling efficient portfolios than anybody else on the planet.

And when Jason Zweig asked him for The Wall Street Journal, how he designed his portfolio, he said, "Well, something like, you know, "I want to minimize regret. "I'm going to split things 50/50, "so I own half stocks and half bonds." And it fell to Scott to define what that portfolio was for millions of people.

A very successful portfolio, indeed it is. So without further ado, I'd like to ask Scott to come up and address you all. (audience applauding) - You only need to read one of Bill's things to know that this guy is a wonderful writer, and I like wonderful writers. And you also realize that he's a guy who is blissfully unaware of just how smart he is.

And that's very rare. And when you combine it with actual humility, that's totally rare. So I hope I won't disappoint you after that introduction. 'Cause I'll just tell you a story to assure you that I am a callow, ink-stained wretch. Okay? Just before we go any further. Last weekend, I was in Boston with my wife.

We'd been on a St. Lawrence Seaway cruise that ended in Boston. My friend on the cruise was eager to go to Harvard Square and see it. And of course, decided that I was the appropriate guide. So I took him and his wife, and my wife, and we took the MTA, best way to see Boston is to go over the salt and pepper shakers into MIT and then on to Harvard.

But it was a really unnerving experience because it had changed so much. I would like to have shown him, for instance, the little bar where Matt Damon got Minnie Driver's phone number, even though he was a Southie from Boston. But it's not there anymore. The Club 47 on Mount Auburn Street, which is where Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Tom Rush got their starts, it is not, there's nothing there anymore.

There's a plaque on the wall, and next to it, there's a window that's filled with restaurant, you know, disposable supplies. And I have fond memories of that place, including one where I was walking with a friend and wanted to go in, and was about to go in, my friend, who was an aspirant poet, grabbed me and said, "Hey, Scott, I can't go in there." I said, "Well, why, Roger?" And he said, "Well, I'm a known dealer." (audience laughing) There were a lot of times in Harvard Square that were very interesting.

But I also have wonderful memories of Jack Bogle. One of them was, he appeared at a Cebu meeting, and that's the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, I can't remember what city it was in, but he opened his talk by saying, "Well, since we last met, I've had a change of heart." And you knew immediately that that was a very prepared line, and he was really, really grateful that he had a new heart that worked.

But he made a wonderful presentation, including the discussion of the three factors that determine the future rates of return on stocks. And he was dour about the possibilities, which was proof that anticipating the future is very difficult, because he actually turned out to be wrong, even though the equation was wonderful.

I also remember interviewing him, and there's just a peculiar thing. He had a mild scent of whiskey. This is usually a scent that I don't find attractive. But he wore it like a gentleman's aftershave that you could get from Penhaligon. There was just something wonderful about it. And I don't know, I just found him to be a very magnetic guy, I think for all the reasons that he is so admired.

He really was very serious about being the investor's friend, and he was a titan. But if we're being grateful for Jack Bogle, there are other reasons to be grateful here as well. One of them is for the existence of Morningstar. And I'll give you some very specifics for me in a moment.

But he made a, in retrospect, simple decision that the consumer was the ultimate customer. Earlier, I was having a senior moment trying to remember the original company that gave all the facts and figures on mutual funds. And I couldn't remember it. Christine couldn't remember it. Bill Bernstein could. It was Lipper.

But does anyone remember Lipper? Okay, a few, but they sold their information strictly to mutual funds who could use it for benchmarking. Mensuedo, with that simple decision, moved things in a direction toward consumers and started the ball rolling for us being do-it-yourself investors. He also made the wonderful decision to hire people who actually wrote in English and thought in English as opposed to numbers, which was a great benefit.

For me, the real start as a journalist was the time when Morningstar's database and screening software was put on floppy disks. And they were such a small company at that time that they had it distributed through Business Week. But you could pay for that. And all of a sudden, I had a tool that I could use that others could use.

So I could do research on mutual funds and write about it, and knowing that my readers could verify it. And that was a sea change. It meant that I was no longer like a reporter at a press conference where you are led by the nose by people who are on message all the time and who control all the information.

I had information that I could use, sort, and make different queries about. It changed my ability to address an audience. So I would like to just go on with some other sometimes impolite observations. We're now in a position where the towers of Babel out there, and we've become a gigantic tower of Babel.

They all have a lot of messages. They're all loud distractions. They agree on nothing. They just have a common theme. And that theme is that it's important now to do something. And everything depends on this hour, this minute. And you should buy, you should sell, you should do something.

But I've gathered some information on the unimportance of elections. This is from an investment manager named David Bainson, and he noted these findings recently. One, energy was the best performing sector under Obama. Despite his constant attacks on energy. Technology was the best performing sector under Trump. Also, despite his constant attacks on technology.

The equity market rose in all eight years under Obama, in spite of his being a pinky como, you know what. And the equity market rose 70% under Trump despite COVID. Markets, in fact, generally, but not always, rise under both parties. Of course, that doesn't mean they're both good things.

It just means they're things. There's another fact that isn't discussed, and that's that under both parties, the government debt rises, and they have a great agreement that they won't talk about that topic in this content-free election period. So we can't do much about that. I've been a student of Social Security for a long time.

I researched my first book in the late '60s. It was published by Doubleday in 1972, which is a year before the first CFP degree was given out, and it was based on Modigliani's Life Cycle Hypothesis, and I was really interested in biology and human creatures, and still am. It was well-received, never became a paperback, which is my notion of how a book should be.

If you're successful with a book, it goes beyond hardcover and gets to have a paperback, but as a journalist, I had different opportunities for writing papers, and my first paper on Social Security appeared in a very well-known journal called Playboy, and the story for how this happened is that Esquire magazine solicited me to write an article about personal bankruptcy, 'cause they really had in mind an article that was even happening to executives, God forbid, and I researched the article and wrote it, but I decided that the data didn't show that.

It was all wrong, and so I wrote an article on bankruptcy as a political act, and tons of people going and declaring personal bankruptcy deliberately just before the then-coming presidential race. Well, Esquire didn't like that, wasn't their idea, so they sent a kill fee, and I redirected the article to my column in Boston magazine, and then Playboy called Boston and wanted an article on bankruptcy, so I wrote the article, researched it, and it appeared in Playboy, and that's, you know, you would think that an idea like let's do nothing and let's be slothful would be really popular.

You know, people would immediately grasp it, but it's not, it's a slow idea, and I'll give you some ideas about it. Earlier this year, I think it was in January or February, John Reckenthaler, who was writing I also love, he noted that index funds now account for half of all fund assets.

That means they've removed hundreds of billions, I guess at this point trillions, from active asset management. Now, that can't happen overnight, but it's taken half a century, so I want to give you some kind of relative measures. Scholars tend to choose Charles Ellison's The Loser's Game in 1973 as the kind of bellwether thing on how professional managers can't beat the market because they were the market.

I had a different vehicle of recognition. It was two double pages in The Wall Street Journal under the title Portfolios Without Managers, in which a data freak at a newspaper company called Media General used computers to effectively create the millions of monkeys that would eventually write Shakespeare or manage a decent portfolio.

You just had to pick the right monkey. Though that exercise routinely showed that the S&P 500 was at about the 70th percentile from the top and that most of the funds, managed funds, were under the 50th percentile. So that was a kind of constant message that humiliated active managers.

It didn't last long, and neither did the media general effort. So let's get some idea of just how slow this slow idea is. I think you're all aware that you can't use the word index investing and viral in the same sentence 'cause it definitely wasn't. But here are some halftimes on some popular consumer products.

Homes with TV sets rose from nearly nothing in 1946 to half of all homes by 1955. That's less than a decade. Homes with electricity rose from 8% in 1907 to 50% in 1925, a period of 18 years. About 8.4% of households owned a home computer in 1984. The figure rose to 53.6% by 2001, that's 17 years, and 69.7% by 2003, 19 years.

You notice that index investing isn't anywhere in that ballpark. Henry Ford started producing the Model T in 1918. By 1920, 20% of households owned cars. By 1929, 60%. So you might be asking, was anything slower than index investing? And yes, there was. I can proudly announce that it was the Insinkerator Manufacturing Company.

It was the first kitchen disposal maker established in 1938. The household ownership reached 50% in 2007, a period of 69 years. And that, I think, everyone who lives without city septic sewer service knows that the reason that was so slow was the septic pushback, which I think also applies to the septic pushback that has come from the financial services industry against funds.

And they do it in different ways. Again, they are masters of content-free discussion. They say, it's a stock picker's market. What does that mean? They say, it's not a buy and hold market. There's danger ahead. There's always danger ahead. Life is dangerous. Do you really wanna be just average?

Well, if it beats everyone else, you bet. (audience laughing) So I'd like to share a few things that I've never written about because, well, they're just so outrageous. They might make me appear to be a very biased, anti-professional person, but here are a few of them. A PI guy, PR guy, who worked for a very large insurance company that had been formed by an American revolutionary.

We won't name the company, just, it's in Boston. (audience laughing) I was recently in a pub in Boston where I could drink his beer cold and look across to the cemetery where his cold corpse was, and they advertise that fact. The PR guy said, but you know, Scott, really one of my jobs is to make sure some of our people never see the media because they were not people that should be seen.

They weren't proud of them. PI guy, PR guy at another large institution, the Boston Safe Department and Trust, looked at me one day and said, Scott, the best thing that could happen to this building is that the top two floors could be blown away. And I kind of looked at that, and he was right.

Two guys named Monk and Christian later made a takeover offer and the top two floors were, in effect, blown away, but unfortunately, they were not impoverished. Another guy who is the head of a trust operation for the largest bank in Boston. I had this experience 'cause a guy had negotiated to write a newsletter for their advisory group and the many vice presidents kept shooting down everything that he did, and he thought I had enough credibility that I would be able to get by this army of vice presidents.

And I had written a thing suggesting, okay, CD rates aren't very good now, but treasury bills are much higher because of the way the return on treasury bills is calculated compared to CDs. And because they're from the treasury, you know, it didn't go on much further than that. And he looked at me and said, well, we really can't write that.

That money that stays in the bank, all that goes straight to our bottom line. And I was biting my tongue, I wanted to say, can you spell fiduciary? And I didn't 'cause I knew that was hopeless. And to give you another idea of just how tone deaf this trust operation was, they were called the first advisory, first, I can't remember, having a senior moment.

But if you turn it into an acronym, it was Fiasco. (audience laughing) Early on, Ned Johnson, and I'll talk about him a little later in spite of the excoriations he received from Jack Bogle, asked me to help write the original discussions of the Fidelity Equity Income Fund, which is one of the first funds that sought a higher dividend yield than the S&P 500, but also growth.

So I wrote that, and then years later, I go to interview the anointed prince who managed that fund very successfully, Bruce Johnston. I meet him at the Four Seasons in Irving, Texas. I always feel lucky when I'm in a Four Seasons, which isn't very often. So I was having breakfast with him, and his breakfast arrives, and he sends it back.

How many of you have ever sent a breakfast back from anywhere, let alone a Four Seasons? So I asked him, what is this all about? And he said, "Well, they didn't meet my requirements." I said, "Do you have a lot of requirements?" (audience laughing) And he said, "Yes, I do." And I said, "Could I see them?" And he gave me two pages of typewritten requirements for his princely presence.

And so, you know, that kind of made me think about, you know, that maybe egos get a little bit big in financial services if they don't start big. Another is an experience with Peter Lynch, revered figure. He published an article in Worth Magazine in which he declared, much like Dave Ramsey, that you could take 7% from your investments in stocks and never run out of money, because stocks return 10%, and you reserve 3% for inflation and 7%.

So at that time, which is around 1995, there wasn't the kinds of software we have now that you can get online. So I went and visited with a broker friend who had the American Funds software called Hypo, and we ran a number of examinations about, okay, how many people would survive at different rates?

And, well, it turned out to be a disappointing number at 7%. I can't remember what it is, but the column is on my website. So then I called Lynch, and he was kind of flustered. And he said, "I checked it with our quant." I'll give you a message about quants in a moment.

And it turned out, actually, that he hadn't written the article. It had been ghostwritten. And, you know, I don't know what Lynch did to check it, but there it was, making declarations that are impossible. So he was the first Dave Ramsey. (audience laughs) Then, I'll tell you, I had a contact over at Mass Financial Services, a major rival of Fidelity, and Roger asked, "Scott, would you write our shareholder report?" And I said, "Roger, you know, you got a whole staff here.

"Why would you want me to write your annual report?" And he said, "Scott, if anyone on staff does it, "they'll just be torn apart by all the egos here. "They'll behave if they have an outsider." So I wrote their annual report for quite a number of years. Now, I learned a lot of things during that, and one of them was about the Massachusetts Financial Services quant.

They, like all firms, they had a guy who did all the numbers. But I had a Russian friend who took care of their computer equipment. His name was Yuri. He was a physicist who worked in programming for Russian weapons. He wanted to take the opportunity to leave Russia and said so, and they said, "Fine, Yuri, "but you'll have to stay here "until your knowledge is out of date." So he worked for six years as a masseur before his knowledge was out of date, then came right over and got a job working with Otto Eckstein, one of the first big data providers.

Then he went on to consulting things, and he was taking care of the digital equipment that Mass Financial Services had. And what he found was that the quant at Mass Financial, his major use of the digital equipment computer was for all the calculations he was making for doing the Bermuda race in his sailboat.

While I was in Boston, we were there on a Sunday, and it was sad, 'cause we were just around the corner from the Cafe Marleya, and some of you may remember that was a scene in the Thomas Crown Affair. Well, my memorable time from that is I had lunch with Ned Johnson there.

We were both downtown on a Saturday. I think we were both bachelor boys. My wife was on the Cape. His wife was probably in Nahant. And so there we were, and Ned said, "All right, let's go have lunch." So we did, and I took the opportunity to ask, "You know, Ned, you got, most of your funds "have their annual meetings here in Boston, "but the others, like the older funds, "Trend and so forth, they have their meetings in Miami.

"What's, why?" He said, "Well, Scott, funds have a life cycle, "and as funds age, their shareholders age, "and that's where the shareholders are." And he said that, "You know, that's a problem, "'cause that money eventually will leave." And Ned was one of these kind of perverse thinkers who is always looking for a contrary thing, and I think it was 10 years later, I'm going to a meeting at the Dallas Country Club where Fidelity announced the introduction of the first charitable gift fund.

Johnson had finally found the solution to the problem of asset runoff. "You can die, but leave your money behind, "and everything will be fine, at least for Fidelity. "You might be dead, but, you know, that happens." And you may wonder, I am a lowly journalist, how would I have contact with Ned Johnson?

Well, it turns out, you know, this is a small, really weird world. We had two acquaintances in common. One was a manic-depressive sculptor whose grandfather was head of the New York Stock Exchange, and the other was a Buddhist, head of the San Francisco Zen Center, named Richard Baker, both of whom had gone to Harvard, and Harvard has a lot of strange people.

So when our mutual friend was in a manic state, he would call, create a foundation, and he would call Ned and a fellow named Jim Storey at one of the larger law firms that ran money, and me. The only reason he would have called me is that I figured out an equitable divorce formula for him and his wife, who were both friends.

But I would watch him try to get some money from them to support his manic idea, of which he had many, and the other connection, Baker. Baker, some of you may know, he's the Roshi who was kicked out of the San Francisco Zen Center after he failed to recognize where his wife ended and Paul Hawkins' wife began.

So I am quite accustomed to the weirdness of we humans, and one of the things that I think is wonderful about this group, and I really wish I'd been here participating in it earlier, longer, is I think everyone here has a sense that money just has a place. It is not everything, and I think everyone here is wise enough to know that if a problem can be solved with money, it's not a real problem.

The problems that get us are the ones that tear our hearts out, and they have nothing to do with money, so anyway, that's a, sorry. Let's go a little further into why the media and financial services are a problem. Transactions are the lifeblood of financial services. Without transactions, they don't got no money.

They can't pay their Mercedes payments. That's why they need shifts in strategy, they need reasons to change, et cetera. There's an unholy alliance with media because media, any media, needs change to justify tomorrow's edition. That includes newspapers, it includes magazines, et cetera, and if you look at the movement of communications over the last 30 years, it's a declining spiral.

You compare books to newspapers and magazines, then compare newspapers and magazines to articles on the web, then compare the web to Instagram and other more transient forms, and it's this decreasing spiral of content. Just getting worse and worse. So the business responds to a threat. The threat is how can they respond to index funds, and they have this wonderful idea, well, mutual funds, index funds are popular.

Let them have lots of them, and that's what they've done. They've done what law firms do when they want to bury small firms. They bury them in discovery. So we are buried as consumers in a surfeit of indexes, most of which, many of them are entirely useless. I think we've had statistics like this earlier today, but between the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, there are 5,700 traded stocks, but they've been used to create 3,300 ETFs and over 7,000 mutual funds, and that, of course, includes some bond funds, so it's an exaggeration, but they've made kind of more funds than the church has saints.

They've also gone on to create a whole bunch of other diversions that keep us from the main message, lifecycle funds. All the research on lifecycle funds shows that their only benefit, which is a major one, is that they keep people from making a lot of transactions, so they're good in that sense, but every bit of research shows that A, there's no agreed way to invest.

All the formulas are different. You can go down, you can go up, you can stay constant, but it really doesn't have much effect. WRAP accounts, another way of disguising taking fees. Equity index funds from insurance companies. That's a formula for playing three-card monte with an actuary, you're just not gonna win.

Alternative asset classes in pension funds. The Texas Teachers' Pension now has about 40% of its assets in alternative assets, all of which extracts higher fees, and they're doing this from people who report themselves to be quite smart, so why are they doing it? It doesn't make sense. We now are getting alternative asset classes in 401(k) funds.

Then there's direct investing, I mean, excuse me, direct indexing, which has been discussed today, and of course, we have this movement toward getting life annuities in 401(k) and 403(b) plans, and that's without going to the fact that if you go to a fidelity advisor, he will sell you an annuity product of some kind, whether you need it or not.

Friend of mine's a recently retired Delta pilot, has a military pension, he has social security, he has a ton of cash, he owns his house free and clear, and he goes to this fidelity representative, and he wants him to buy an annuity. You know, like, this guy is very conservative, except he still flies.

He has a low-wing experimental plane, and we're gonna fly to Lajitas outside of Big Bend, where I want to interview the goat that is the mayor of Lajitas, and then interview the statue of Robert E. Lee that was taken out of Dallas and moved to Lajitas, so I want to start, see if I can start a movement toward gathering all the forbidden statues in one place so we can visit them.

Not sure how that column will be received. (audience laughing) The other major problem we have is that, you know, we are wired to want a yes or no answer, and there's any number of sociopaths who will be delighted to give us our yes or no answer with great confidence.

Yes, I can do that for you, yes, and you will have a superior performance. We have the smartest people. Convinced? The trouble is that all the answers that we look for, and that was made evident in the discussion of portfolio survivor rates today, are mushy, they're probabilistic. That was the great thing that Bill Bengen introduced.

You know, he brought people up to date with data that actually showed how things performed. And there, there's a story I like to tell. I call it the missing bullets problem. This is how things get misrepresented. During World War II, they were concerned during the war about the number of planes that were not coming back, so they gathered the military people and a bunch of mathematicians in a room, a hangar filled with airplanes, and they examined them, and counted the bullet holes, and looked at the areas where they found the most bullet holes, and they started discussing, well, we could add some armor here, and we could add some armor there.

It might protect those places where the bullet holes are. Then a number of theorists, Abraham Wald came in, and he said, well, no, that's really not the answer. And they asked him why. He said, well, we need to know where the missing bullet holes are. And they looked at him, didn't quite understand.

He said, well, if you assume that the bullets, holes are distributed randomly, the missing bullet holes are the ones on the planes that didn't come back, and that actually is an example put into money management of survivor bias. If you're only counting a limited sample, you're not getting the real number, and that's another way that the mutual fund industry misleads people, because return, the relative performance is significantly higher if you account for all the mutual funds and ETFs that are quietly interred when no one's looking, so that you don't really find out how many funds were just quietly taken out and shot.

Here's some examples. For the year ending 2023, large cap managed funds trailed the S&P index 59.68% of the time. Over three and five year periods, the percentage rose to 80%. By 20 years, the fail rate rose to 93%. How much more does the industry need to know before they accept index funds and stop pushing back?

Well, there's a wonderful quote about that, which is from Upton Sinclair, I'm trying to find it here. But it's to the effect that you can't make a man change his mind if his salary depends on something else. It's often quoted and absolutely true. These figures go on, and the SPIVA report has been coming out for, I think it's 23 years now, and every issue shows the same thing.

The longer the time period, the lower the possibility that managed funds will beat their appointed index. It goes still further, and this we can thank Alan Roth for. He did an exercise showing the increased failure rate when you started selecting more funds. If you had a portfolio of two funds, or three funds, or four funds.

The more funds you have, the greater your chances of failure if they're managed funds. So I think the number there is that at 10 years, only 6% of managed fund portfolios with 10 funds beat comparable index fund portfolios, 6%. And yet, what do the people on Wall Street try to do?

They give us portfolios with 13 funds in them, some with totally irrelevant percentages of investment, and we get confused. Because who wants to manage 13 funds and know about 13 funds? I know. So it all comes down, for me, to one question. Do you want your retirement to be a low probability event?

(audience laughing) And I don't, and I didn't. And I can happily say that in spite of being an ink-stained wretch, the Burns family is doing quite nicely, and far better than we expected, because I've been a cheap investor, looking for index funds, and following that. Now, I would like to bring up another problem, and that's the last of my comments.

Bogle cited a conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller at a meeting, where Vonnegut said that the guy throwing the party had made more money in one day than Heller had made on the entire sales of his book. Heller answered back, yes, but I have something he will never have, enough.

And Bogle quoted that, but I think it tells us of another problem, which I find myself more and more interested in, which is that what we really suffer from, in addition to what I call wealth porn, which is in most financial publications, is wealth addiction. And there's a story, there's a book by that title, by Philip Slater.

Slater wrote The Pursuit of Loneliness, American Culture at the Breaking Point of the Mid '60s, very well-known book. And wealth addiction, he wrote in 1983. It's a sign of the times. That book is out of print. But it's something we should study. Thank you for listening. (audience applauds) - Thank you.

Thanks a bunch for that, Scott. I want to amplify just one quickly quick point you made, which is to thank Morningstar, like 30 years ago, for the floppy disk sets that they would put out. Like you, it gave me a lot to write about. It was $99 a year, Christine.

And my favorite, the favorite use I had for it was I would hear some money manager being interviewed by some gullible journalist, and I would immediately fire up my computer, throw in the disk, and see that this money manager was a moron. It was a constant source of joy.

So, couple of questions here. Which column of yours is the one that you're most proud of? - I don't know. I don't know. The only thing I can say is that when I look back, I think, "Gee, I was so much smarter then." (audience laughs) I think the one, I'm really proud of the one about Peter Lynch because it, I got to work with a broker, with the tools he had, and prove something wasn't true.

I'm kind of an, you know, an autodidact, and I don't learn things in the way normal people do. And so, I just gather things from everywhere, and I was really glad that I had a friend who was a broker, who was also interested in, he's one of the few brokers I know who really wanted to help people.

- And then one final question, which is, you know, you wrote this very well-known piece about reinventing retirement income in America. If they made you retirement czar of the United States, and you had to build the system from the ground up, how would you, what would you design? - Oh, well, since violence is getting to be more and more popular, I'd probably have a few ritual executions.

(audience laughs) Just, you know, I would like it if the people who got away with creating the crash of 2008 and 2009 actually paid a price. They didn't, and they still go on. The worst that happened is they lost their jobs, but not their wealth. - Okay, yeah. - I know that's a harsh answer, but I mean, I've heard so much BS, and, you know, that's why I told the anecdotes that I did the, there, you know, the people in financial services, they, so many of them, particularly portfolio managers, they think they're so smart, and, you know, if you have any doubt, they'll tell you how smart they are, you know?

And it just bothers me that there could be that much arrogance and so little humility in the face of all the uncertainties of human life that they could, yeah. So I would like to mete out punishments. Maybe something less harm, less violent than shootings, but some form of public humiliation.

Let's bring the stocks back. - Yeah. - Not the common stocks, the lockup stocks. - Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, as long as we're into Old Testament wrath, I would like, I would reserve capital punishment for the designers and sellers of inverse and leveraged funds. Okay, well, with that, let's give Scott a round of applause.

(audience applauding) you