How Not To Invest - Avoiding Big Money Mistakes with Barry Ritholtz

Welcome to Bolden youn Money, where we dive into the decisions shaping our financial lives. I'm your host, Steve Chen, and today we've got Barry Ritholtz joining us from New York. And he's the co, founder, chairman and CIO of Ritholtz Wealth Management. And he also recently wrote a book, how not to Invest. And he also hosts a popular podcast, Masters in Business. So he is pretty well known. We're going to dive into his book and talk about some of the mistakes that we want to help people avoid. So with that, Barry, welcome to our show.

Hey, Steve, thanks for having me.

No, I appreciate you making the time. And just, you know, before we get going, I wanted to share a quick anecdote. So I was texting my brother this morning. He shared your blog the big picture with me like, like 20 years ago. Plus, nothing used to be on GeoCities.

That's right, 98. It launched on GeoCities back in the day when you had to code the HTML by hand. And once WYSIWYG came along with software like SixApart, it went from a half hour of writing and two hours of coding to a half hour writing and two minutes of coding. Like, technology has made us all more efficient and more productive.

100%. And for people who don't know what WYSIWYG is, it's what you see is what you get.

That's. By the way, that's the only technical jargon I'm going to use today.

It's okay. It's impressive. So anyway, it was the first kind of finance oriented blog ever shared with me. And I just. And so I was checking, I was like, hey, guess what? I'm gonna have Barry Holtz on this on our podcast. And he's still reading it. So he's like the daily read.

It's just part of my process. What's. I started on a trading desk and if you can see the rest of my office with books and crap piled up, everything is a mess. And, you know, it's really quite a disaster. But in order to compensate for that, I would just put together my list every day. And I learned don't read crap on the way into the office because it'll get in your head when you're trying to make good trading decisions. And so I would make my list every day. Here are the earnings that are coming out. Here's consensus, here's the range, here's the economic lists that are coming out, economic releases. Here are the 10 things I skim through New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal that I want to read on the way home. And that eventually became something that got xeroxed and shared around the office in the 1990s. And then that eventually became something that got fat. Once I found people were faxing it, it was like, hey, I could just email it to them, get an email address. So that became an email list. And then in 98 that became GeoCities, which I really regret that when GeoCities went belly up, they didn't at least archive the stuff. I grabbed three or four of my favorite posts and when they said they were going out, I didn't know they were like, we're really going out. Yahoo did the same thing with their video. And like any of the appearances anyone did in the 90s or 2000s on Yahoo was this rich mine of behavioral data showing how just, just how biased individual investors are and all that stuff disappear. I remember. Well, we can, we'll get into it a little later. But that's like one of those things, like, what a shame. How much. There's a great story about Monty python on the BBC and somebody lent them like $40,000 to buy the videotape masters from the BBC because they were gonna just reuse them like, oh, the content isn't anything. The 40 cent tape is what mattered. And Yahoo. Geocities is the same thing. They just wipe those servers and it's gone.

That's too bad. Yeah. It's pretty interesting hearing your story that you were kind of doing this like faxing it around, emailing it around, early geocities, Internet. So you appreciate kind of probably what's happening with AI and everything now, right? Like another evolution of tech that is going to amplify people's influence significantly.

I think I have a slightly different perspective on AI than a lot of people. Technology is a tool. Anything that makes me more productive, more efficient, means either I can crank out the same work in less time or in the same time crank out more work. So I used to have these debates with my economist friends about the famous Robert Solow quote, Nobel LAUREATE I think MIT ROBERT SOLOW Technological progress is everywhere except for the productivity data. And I always laugh because it's like, so what you're saying is your measurement is imperfect or just outright wrong. Or maybe that might be true for heavy industry, but any information service or service business, I just don't believe that there's no productivity gains. It's just, I just know what we do today with 75 people would have taken 320 years ago 100%.

Oh, yeah, right. I've seen that data, too, where they're like, oh, it doesn't look like we're getting more productive. You're like, I find that hard to believe given, like, what we're doing. Right.

In the book, there's a quote I rely on frequently, which is george Box, all models are wrong, but some are useful. And so as long as you recognize economic models, portfolio models, all of these are a. I don't want to say false, but an imperfect reproduction of reality. Take them with a big grain of salt, you'll be in much better shape.

Yeah. Awesome. All right, well, look, before we jump into the book, I would love if you can give us just a couple minutes on your career. So I saw that, like, one highlight. You're on the equestrian team at Stony Brook. So you're the first Westerner I've met who has been on the equestrian team. And then I'd love to kind of, you know, for you to kind of zip through that.

So. Spent my summers as a kid, upstate New York. Play baseball, swim. Oh, wait, there's a horse farm here. Hey, what can I do to ride horses? Well, it's $40 for an hour. Well, I'm 12 and don't have $40, but what can I do? You could muck out the stalls, water down the horses, groom them, this, that. I don't know how to do any of that. We'll show you. So I had been riding horses, like, Western. You sit in the saddle. It's a big, comfy couch. You and you go for a ride. And for the most part, I'm the one who gives the horses carrots and apples. So they like me. They let me. They do what I ask. Once you. So I undergraduate applied mathematics and physics at Stony Brook. And eventually, which I was really good at in high school and in college, it's like, I'm pretty good at this, but those guys are great. So eventually switched the political science and philosophy. And when I do that, suddenly my calendar was a lot freer. So I read in this campus paper that Stony Brook has a nationally competitive equestrian team. And I'm like, wait, what? So Smoke Run Farms was like a 15 minute walk from campus, from my dorm. So one Saturday morning, I walk over, I meet the head coach, and I'm like, hey, I've been riding Western horses. I'm interested in learning how to really ride. And he's like, well, you have to sign up for a class. It's two or three gym credits a semester, and it's $5 a week, $5 a week. It was like $50 for an hour. And it's instructed, not just on a trail. Okay, let's do that. And the ironic, funny thing about that is when I went to apply to graduate, it turned out that I had been doing that for, I don't know, two and a half, three and a half years. I had so many gym credits that I was short graduation. I had like 138 gym total credits, 118 of which applied to graduation. I had to find two credits in order to graduate too many horseback riding class. So that was, that was really fun. Didn't know what I want to do with my life. And I live on Long island. And the rule is, hey, you're a Jewish kid from went to college, don't know what you do yourself, go to law school. So that's what I did. Loved law school. Wasn't a big fan of being a lawyer, you know, graduated cum laude, law review, all that nonsense. The teaching of legal studies is fascinating. The practice of law is really tedious and detail oriented. And the guy who named his blog the Big Picture, probably not the guy you want doing all the little detail legal work on your behalf. And I, when the opportunity came to go work for a friend at not E Trade, I just read somebody said he worked at E Trade. No, the firm that was the predecessor firm to what eventually became E Trade. That, that's where I started on a trading desk.

Okay, got it. And how did you pick? Like how'd you get into trading? Like what motivated that misery?

I was miserable as a lawyer and I had done some work for somebody who later goes on to be Bill Porter at E Trade's right hand man. And he's the co founder of ise. Wildly successful. I'm still in touch with Marty, we chat all the time. But he said if you're miserable as. And he's also an MBA jd He said if you're miserable as an attorney, you got a good head for numbers, you're good with computers, why don't you join the trading desk? What do I do? You'll figure it out. And that was essentially the training. They push everybody into the deep end of the pool. And whoever doesn't drown, congrats, you're a trader.

When you're a trader though, at that point in the like what years was this?

Right around the Netscape IPO, so long before the dot com implosion, but pretty much 97.

97.

Right up to it. 96. 97, yeah.

Okay, but are you Dealing with like retail people and like making trades for them or are you like taking institutional?

So you are executing order flow on behalf of the company. And as you demonstrate the ability to do this and have a P and L, you get a capital line and your capital grows as you show, you know, P and L responsibility. No. Cock ups. No. And you know, there were some guys who were wildly profitable and then would blow up and there were guys who were really steady and I was somewhere in between. I decided to. My wife once said to me, like, I don't understand, you're up 50 grand, you're down 50 grand. Like, can't you. She's a teacher. Ready, steady, stable. So I had enough self awareness to know I was always looking for that vein. Like the dopamine hit was really a thing. And so I figured out maybe I can make a living doing this, but what I really should do is go to a shop that has research and analytics and take everything I've learned and bring it there. In fact, I was really fortunate because I had spoken to a bunch of guys I knew from Merrill and elsewhere that were on trading desks and said, hey, give me something. You know, you come out of law school, it's like, give me something to read. What can I learn? And one guy suggested reminiscences of a stock operator. Okay, classic. Probably the best recommendation someone gave me as a newbie trader was Drac Schwager's Market Wizards, which is all about risk management and discipline. But I was kind of fascinated by that, the up and downs and why does this guy killing it and why is that guy getting crushed? And then next month that switches. And so I found a book, I don't know how I found it, called how we Know what Isn't so by Thomas Gilovich, a professor at Cornell. Really the first mainstream behavioral economics book, I think it was published in 93 or 91. So by 96 or 97 I stumble onto that. And that just opened a whole new world for me, figuring out how and why we make decisions and even more importantly, how and why these decisions go awry. Not because we picked the wrong stock, but because of the way we go about that decision making process. That was fascinating.

So it sounds like you're, you know, you go through school, you try law. Didn't love law. A lot of lawyers, this happens to a lot of folks.

I think that seven years after graduation is the stat. 50% of all lawyers who pass the bar are not practice.

Yeah, it's good stuff for people who are thinking about going to law school right now.

Plus, but I will tell you, I believe it's better intellectual training than an mba. If you're going into wealth management, if you're going into investment banking, you know, save a year, go get the mba.

Got it. Okay. And then you're kind of writing behind the scenes the whole time. So. So you go from law, become a trader, you're kind of continuing to write. And then. And then like fast forward, you know, you start your firm right in 2013. Right.

So let me give you a little background to that. So I spent most of my career turning down money because I didn't want, you know, nervous clients in my ear. Every 2% move down. I got a little bit of pushback. A month and a half ago, I did a post, tune out the Noise. And no, you can't do that. This is. This is, you know, existential. And here it is six weeks later, and we're, you know, 3% above April 2nd.

Yeah.

And so the funny thing is, we'll talk about the book, but there are like four or six chapters in here on how to manage the noise and navigate it. And I sometimes forget people haven't read everything I've written. So when I say that, it's within the context of here's 500 words. If you want to read 5,000 words on that topic, it's a couple of chapters in the book. So, you know, Howard Marks likes to say smart and hardworking is good. Smart, hard working, and lucky is better. I'm paraphrasing. My mom was a real estate agent. And for someone who worked on the investment side in Wall Street, I spent a lot more time watching real estate than the average Wall street guy. And so in 040506, it was pretty obvious that if you looked at the proper data, it was obvious that something was terribly amiss. So the three data points I love to point out, if you look at 100 years of median income to median home price, it was like this. And then in 3, 4, 5, 6, it did this. And then cost of owning versus renting, it's the same hockey stick chart. And then value of US GDP to the total value of real estate. Like, how much is all the residential real estate as a percentage of gdp? Same thing, it's really steady for decades. And then so, because I was fortunate to read, to be looking at that, and I also read and wrote a piece about Reinhart and Rogoff, who eventually turned this into a book, but they write a paper on what happens to a country when A credit crisis unfolds and I'll save you 50 pages. Real estate falls 30%. And they use five recent examples. It was like Japan, Helsinki, Mexico, the US Great Depression. I always forget whatever the fifth one is. Maybe it was Sweden, Norway, but it doesn't matter. So as an exercise, I said, let's see if we can. I'm making a long story short or long story medium. Let's see if we can figure out what happens to the Dow at 13,000 and change if real estate falls 30%. And this is why I say you got to be a little lucky. The number. And I did the Dow only because I didn't have the patience to do all 500 stocks in the S and P. I come up with a number about 9,800. But then the behavioral finance comes in. I'm like, hey, if we break 10, we're going to 6,800.

We're going to overcorrect. Yeah, totally.

And I thought the number was irrelevant. It's made up. It's just. And nobody wants to talk about the analysis. Like, that was 68. That's down 50%. So for all of 2007, I was the idiot on Wall Street. And then in 08, you're a genius. Shit. Well, it took a while in the beginning. Stuff started to go south. And I had a conversation with a buddy, hey, don't let me be that a hole hit where if we get anywhere near 6,800, I double down and say 3,400. So you're empowered to kick my ass if I, if I do that? And again, dumb luck. My wife's a teacher. We travel on the school calendar. It has nothing to do with me. We're on vacation. We come back, there's March 2009. There's a message on the voicemail. Hey, we're at 7000. Call me back. Hey, we're at 6900. Call me back. Hey, 6800, I'm coming over to kick your ass. And I get home, I'm like, I was on vacation when we just got back. What are you doing? I'm going to go through all my numbers, put out a piece right now. And I literally said, cover your shirt, go longs. Every data point I look at, from market internals to economics to sentiment, there is pinned as far to the edge as possible. And I send it out. And immediately, Sunday night, Henry Blodgett responds. And I had been on when the piece first came out and everybody thought I was an idiot. And then when we broke 10,000. He had me back on and he's like, come on the show tomorrow. I'm like, I just got back from vacation. I got to know, come tomorrow. So he talked me into coming on Yahoo Finance. And I just said, hey, you know, we're down 50 something percent. Yeah, every indicator is negative. When is that? Not a great entry. And so by the dumbest of dumb luck, the next day, bottom and the market's up 1000 points within like 48 hours of my interview. I think the interview was Monday. They released it Tuesday, and the market bottomed. And like Tuesday, 8am and I wasn't sure if it was Tuesday or Wednesday when the market screamed higher. But it was just dumb luck. It was a total coincidence. But people started throwing so much money at me, and a number of colleagues said, dude, it's so hard to raise money. You got to stop turning it down. Okay, I'll be the cio, you run the back office. Crap, I don't patience for that. And that was, I don't know, almost $6 billion ago.

So that's how you got started. But that like the firm. When did the firm start? I thought it started in 2013.

So the firm launched September 2013. I had hired Josh from the sell side. I want to say late 2010, 2011, somewhere in that. So. So, you know, this all kind of came together slowly. And then we hired Chris Van, and then we hired Mike Batnick. And when we decided we were gonna tap out and launch our own, it was a pretty. I was pretty comfortable that we would be fine. I did not know when the fire hose would turn off. And over the next decade, Josh became a rock star. Mike Batnik became a rock star. Ben Carlson became a rock star. Nick Magi became On and On, Blair and Call. And we just keep adding pieces to the board, so it's no longer just me bringing the money in. And if anything, I'm a minority rainmaker compared to how much talent is out there.

Yeah, I remember I was at one of your conferences, like several years ago, and I think Josh described it as we're building the boy band of bloggers as a media company. Yeah, we'll talk about the whole media side of things. So I just want to actually, actually, so for our audience. Yeah, definitely having some, you know, insight and like, awareness of, like, the history makes. It makes a ton of sense, I will say. Like, back in 2005, I was in escrow buying our first house, and I was like, this makes no sense. I've saved my whole life. I'm in Northern California to buy a house. And anyone who can fog a mirror can get like a million dollars of credit. I'm like, this is crazy. And I actually. That was so. Real estate is a way to build wealth, especially out here. And I was like, all right, I bailed out of the house. I bailed out of escrow. And I was like, we're gonna keep renting. This doesn't make any sense. And then I actually did the same thing you did, but, like, not as technical. I was like, drawing a line of like, the appreciation of California real estate. And it was like, now it's this. But like, long term, it's like this. So I'm like, I'm willing to pay. I bought our house in 2009. I'm gonna pay this price here, not up here. We bought it for like 30% off the peak, right? And I had.

And that's the Reinhart and Rogoff number. Financial credit crises lead to real estate falling 30%. And then if you go through history, you'll see down 50% in equities along with a down 30%. Real estate is not all that unusual. It happens within credit crises more frequently than not. My favorite part, part, My favorite line in bailout nation was you said, they'll give a mortgage to anyone who could fog a mirror. There were two. I don't know if it's a husband and wife, but two people who bought a house together, they were strawberry pickers. And if they would have taken 100% of their pre tax income and gave it to the bank, they still wouldn't have been able to make the mortgage payment. And so when people blame the borrowers, it's like, hey, you know, you're the bank. You're the professionals. This is on you. You screwed this up. Our mistake was not sending all the banks to the, you know, the nice building downtown with the Roman columns, the bankruptcy court, that's where they all should have gone.

I know that was. That was a giant mess. I mean, it was ridiculous. But yeah, if you kind of see what's going on, you know, it's like Warren Buffett, like, buy when there's blood in the streets. I mean, the other thing I did get right is I nailed, like, I remember buying Google at 350 and then I was like. And then it doubled quickly. And I was like, in was like, oh, don't get greedy. And I sold. And that was a huge mistake. It's like, you do have to put your money to work when people are freaking out, but then you have to keep it, stay in the market.

Right.

Anyway.

And I believe that's Rothschild, who said, buy when there's blood in the streets. And he was correct.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, just to wrap up this section. So did you kind of envision this for your life? It just sounds like no.

No plan, no idea. It was just. I never planned on being an ria, but it was like we were at a hybrid RIA software company. So they had a technology that I was running that division, trying to figure out how to use technology to make better investment sector stock selections. And we had a BD and an ria. And you, you know, as all this money was coming in, a big part of me was like, I don't want money to go here because I don't like their models, their methodology. There's not a true fiduciary part of this. So we set up the fiduciary part of the RIA inside. But you really. And I was doing a ton of cnbc in the 2000s and Bloomberg and Fox, and it was kind of funny to go on TV one afternoon, hey, come for the talk about hedge funds, come for the high fees, stay for the underperformance and go back to the office. And as an email, here are the new six hedge funds on our platform. So this was kind of inevitable that we would have had to leave. It wasn't a good cultural fit after a while, but eventually it was like, hey, we should really figure out how to do this ourselves. And we continually just tack into whatever's working right. You know, when the wind is coming from the south, well, you're going to the north and vice versa. So whatever worked. We did more of it. We try a lot of stuff. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. When we first were thinking, and I had been hosting the Big picture conference since 09, so we had done that for like a decade. When the idea came from Matt Middleton to we had done Wealth Stack with him in 2019, when the idea from him is, hey, let's get the band back together after Covid and put on another show. Great. How do we make this not be a super spreader event? We'll host the whole thing outside. It'll be a festival. There was a ton of pushback. There were a lot of people like, this is going to flop. You're going to land on your face. And my attitude is, if I crash and burn, I get up, I brush myself off. We try something else. You know, if you're not failing, you're not Trying hard enough, you're not occasionally striking out, you're not swinging enough pitches. So that, you know, that was the whole backdrop of if it works, do more of it. If it doesn't work, do less of it. Probably pretty good philosophy in life also, 100%.

And also, if it sounds like it's interesting, like, I met Matt Middleton. I didn't know you knew him, like way back in the day, but clearly you've.

He was an informa and we had done a few conferences with them. I want to say I don't remember if it was 2018. I vividly remember 2019 doing well. Stack was our conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Matt Middleton and his team ran it. And when they wanted to extract themselves from Informa during the pandemic, we were like, we're in. What do we have to do? So we're, we have a small piece of them. We're colleagues and collaborators and we're thrilled to be working with him.

Yeah, no, it's been a really good synergy. I went, I went to the first.

Future Proof and that was the little one. The last year was, I think this year it's going to be close to 5,000. We're full capacity.

I've been going to California one. I didn't go to the Miami one, but it's definitely been, it's been cool and useful. Fun makes it very real, right? Like, I think it's hard. Like, you know, you're out here running this media company and you're like, like, okay, you know, there's lots of people out there in cyber world or whatever, right? And then you're like, oh, you bring 5,000 people. You're like, holy smokes, there's a lot of people here. And, you know, it's real.

So the fun thing about writing, doing podcasts and writing blog posts and other things is, you know, you don't really know where it lands and what's been so gratifying. Future Proof and other events are the number of people who are like, hey, man, really? You've helped me develop my asset management, my investment philosophy. The whole world is trying to get me to panic out of stocks in 10, 11, 12. And, you know, thanks for doing what you do. Reading you has kept me level and steady. I mean, that is just so gratifying to know that the work, you, you never know who reads your stuff. You don't, you know, it doesn't always show up, but sometimes to see that you have a. Or having a positive impact, it's fabulous.

Well, I think Good things happen to good people. It's clear you're like, you know, a good person and also attracting good people. Like, I've met, you know, I met Josh. He's a. Obviously he's a nice guy, and the.

Whole team is just one rock star after another. Like, and there are people you want to hang out with, have a beer with, just spend some time with the amount of upside. Surprise. Like, we hired Michael as a research monkey. Who knew he was gonna become, like, you know, first of all, he's an old man. He's wise beyond his years, far, far beyond his age. But then second, he turns out to have this. Develop the skill set. It's phenomenal. We hired Kali Cox when Etoro was going through some craziness, and it was just one of those things where. What am I getting wrong here? She's spectacular. How on earth would they dare, like, not do everything they can to keep her and everybody in between Nick Magiulli and just go down the list of people?

Yeah, yeah. No, it's awesome. Well, we'll dive in. I do want to come back to this bit, but let's get into your book a tiny bit. So what inspired you to write this book? And in the preamble, you were telling me you're writing a book every 15 years.

So like clockwork, the sequel will be in 2040. Well, so bailout nation comes out in 09. Really well reviewed. Wall Street Journal, New York Times sells pretty well for, you know, dry financial history book. And so the firm launches a few years later and I'm busy, so the publisher wants me to do another one. Friends like, guys, we just launched with $70 million. I got stuff to do. And as is, I'm still. I'm still doing the blog, and that's just part of my process. And. And Morgan Housel is a friend, and he's kind of nagging me. Dude, it's so easy. You have no idea. Just take a bunch of blog posts, string them together, no one will know. Morgan, you write stories. Everything I write. There's a market data point, there's a stock. Just updating. That is a giant lift. And then the pandemic hits, and I find myself having a little time to think about this because I'm not commuting and, you know, for. So I. This is not on the board anymore. But what I started doing was just writing down ideas on, you know, three by five cards. They're color coded the topics and subtopics and, you know, that kind of festered for a while and Then we come home from again. Vacation plays into this. We come home from vacation in December 2023, and you have that dead couple of days before Everybody goes back January 2nd. And I just started sifting through. I do a quarterly call for clients four times a year. I start looking at those notes, I look at market commentaries, I look at research. I was personal finance column for six years at the Washington Post and then, you know, for another seven or eight years at Bloomberg. And as I start sifting through this, I kind of discover I spent a lot of time debunking investment bullshit.

Yeah.

And so I. So Morgan had introduced me to his publisher and hey, how do you guys feel about, you know, that as a title and a focus? And you know, they're British and very proper, and they're like, it's been done. You know, what's his name, Harry Frankfurter did a book called On Bullshit. He was a professor. It sold really well. Every other book after that Bullshit became just a shocking title and they all did poorly. Well, let me play with this. I'm thinking about it. And so I normally like to work on software, but the board is just a little different. And so I'm moving things around and I'm like, this is going here. And now I'm here, right? It looks like the murder board for figuring out who's the killer. And I, I start to, you know, it's like a. A wordle where suddenly, wait a sec, all these are all numbers related. Wait, all this is all idea and, and media be related. Oh, wait, here's all behavior related. And I don't want to say the book self organized, but once I kind of fell into that and then I reached back out to. And by coincidence, as I'm having this epiphany, Morgan, you know, and I chat and he's nagging me again and he doesn't know all the work I've been doing for the past few years. So I say to him, I'll make you a deal. You write the forward and I'll write the rest of the book. And he's like, done. How hard can it be to write a forward? So how hard can it be to write a book? So that, that was the genesis of it. Whereas Bailout Nation was kind of a slog. It was cathartic. But, you know, every week a different company would blow up, and then I have to rewrite a chapter, and then Lehman Brothers blows up and I'm like, fuck, I don't have an ending. I gotta write a whole new ending. This was a pleasure. So it was. So just as a perfect example, like, I think the financial crisis is how people learned who I was. Like, I had been doing CNBC and Fox and CNN since, and Bloomberg since like oh two. But you know, there's a million people, who is this guy? Nobody knows who he was. I had a GeoCities post in. So we. I was working for a firm client comes in from out of town, chic from the Middle east, and he owns a bazillion shares of Cisco. And I had been watching Cisco, which is going to be the first trillion dollar company, and really kind of thinking I was by January 2000, like the cracks on the facade were starting to show, even though we've learned all bull markets go further, higher and longer than anybody expects. And this guy comes in and hey, will you come in and talk to my client next week? He's flying in from wherever and he owns a button of Cisco. And I. Oh, funny you mentioned Cisco. I was just reading Paul Sagawa at Alliance Bernstein who if he wasn't the axe on Cisco, he should have been. And he had turned negative and everybody hated him. Which by the way, fast forward to 07 and I got to relive his experience. So I reached out to him and said, hey, I have a client. We're not a client of yours. Do you have five minutes to talk? And he's like, sure. So we have a client coming in with a lot of Cisco. I'm not comfortable with the stock fundamentally or technically. You've been covering it for forever. And he proceeds to regale me for a half hour with a tale of when Cisco launched, all their clients would buy their goods or finance their goods themselves. Cisco was just a seller of product they had nothing to do with.

Sort of like the car dealer where you can.

Right. What was the GM one that blew up? Or Ford, Ford Credit or between like 1988 and 1999, they went from 0% percent vendor financed to like 92% vendor financed.

In other words, a lot of exposure.

8% of their clients were buying product and 92% of their clients financing it were taking product and leaving them a piece of paper which as we later found out, was worthless.

Okay?

A promise to pay when your client is bankrupt is worthless. So when I, you know, say this to the client and you know, oh, no, Cisco's going to be a trillion. All right, so it's going to be a trillion. It's 500 billion now you've made 100x. Why are you hanging around for the last Leave a little for the next guy is what they used to say on the trading desk, hey, you don't have to capture it all. So I found out that they sold half, which I, which I was unaware of till months later. And then, then, so March 2000, the market peaks, May 2000, Fortune magazine has this big piece, Cisco, the one stock you have to own. And so I write this up and crickets. Nobody says a word. This is terror. This is ridiculous. The vendor finding all this stuff. By the way, another annoying thing I forgot to say from GeoCities in the ensuing 25 years since that May 2000 fortune covers out GO proceeds to fall 95%. The other stock that they said, yeah, you don't want to own Microsoft, they have legal problems. And I think the other one they looked at was ge, which didn't do as well as Microsoft, but did much better than Cisco.

Yeah.

Not only did it fall 95%, here we are today. I haven't looked at its price recently, but as I was writing the book, it was still 20 something percent below when that article came out.

Yeah.

So I got to revisit all these things that nobody paid attention to. And now we know how the movie ended so we can discuss it in a different context.

Like, so I have a question. So just, just to go, go for a second, like on this today. When you're helping clients though, do many of them walk in with that kind of position concentration or is it much more like indexing and kind of taking a broader approach?

It depends on the client. It's a little bit of everything. We've had the chapter on regret minimization in the book. We've had people walk in, hey, I have a portfolio of $11 million, $10 million is, fill in the blank, Amazon, Apple and whatever. So here's your choice. You can ride the, you know, the Bronco, or you can, you could say, I've already won and I'm going to exchange potential upside in a super hot stock for less volatility and more predictable returns.

And what are people, what are people saying when you have that? How do people typically end up when you have that kind of conversation?

Well, 90% of the answers are that's going to generate an incredible capital gains tax bill. And so we set up a tax practice. We also in conjunction started using Canvas as our direct indexing platform. And so the answer usually at that point is, well, look, you know, better to take $100 and pay $20 in capital gains than to not get the 80 net. So you have three choices we can try and sell a little bit over the next. You tell us how much capital gains tax you want or how many years you want to this to go for. And we could do that. You could ride the Bronco and hey, maybe it works. You know, ask shareholders in GE or Lehman Brothers how that approach works or Enron or Sears or I got a giant list for you. And if we set up a portfolio with direct indexing, we could save you a decent amount of tax loss harvesting. You know, if you just own 10 mutual funds, hey, maybe it's 20, 25 bips a year. Direct indexing is 75, 80 or better a year. And so maybe we could take that seven year and cut it down to 6, 5, 4. Depends on what happens.

Oh, so interesting. So you're setting up a direct indexing portfolio over here, capturing a bunch of tax losses and then using those tax losses to rebalance people out of their concentrated position.

Someone says I've really lost low cost basis in XYZ and it's I'm willing to sell a million dollars a year and sell and pay $200,000 in taxes a year. So the next question is, well, if we can sell more and cap your cap gains at 200,000, is that something you would like or do you want to sell a million and pay as little taxes as we black letter law legally with IRS approval can. And so depending on their answer determines what the the strategy looks like. And clients, we have a lot of clients who are in the tech industry. We have a lot of clients who work in, on Wall street or work in finance. So anyone with capital gains or employee stock or whatever. And let me tell you something, when, when you, and then when we do their taxes, when, when you find they overpaid 40 grand last year, no one cares if you're 10 basis points ahead or behind the S and P, but you get a $40,000 refund that they weren't expecting. Oh my God, why am I wasting my time picking stocks is always the answer 100%.

I think as people get like this is our users too, right? As people get wealthier, they start thinking much more about taxes and hopefully and not losing money right then trying to continue to build once they get to.

A certain level of wealth. And you would be shocked how many people don't. And when you lay it out, it's like, oh my God, what have I been doing the past 10 years? It's always fun to see those sort of responses.

Okay, so back to the book a bit. So like, you know how not to invest is the big takeaway. Like, basically, make fewer mistakes.

I dedicate the book to two Charlie's, and they both explain the idea of make fewer mistakes. Well, Charlie Munger famously was asked, hey, are you and Warren just smarter than everybody else? And like, the most Munger thing Munger could say was, we're not smarter than everybody else. We're just less stupid. And I've always loved that because it's such an inversion of the way we typically think. And then Charlie Ellis, who's well known for Greenwich Associates, on the board of Vanguard, chairman of the Yale Endowment, like legendary investor in finance, he used to liken investing. This was a paper in 1975, which became a book in 1990, something he would liken tennis to investing and say, both of these activities are a winners and a losers game. What does that mean? Well, in tennis, winners win by hitting with power, accuracy, serving aces, hitting the ball where their opponent isn't kissing the line. Drop shots like, that's how 0.01% of the world plays tennis. The professionals win that way. The rest of the amateurs, like myself, that's not how we win. We actually lose through unforced errors. We play outside of our skill set. We hit the ball long, we double fault on the serve, we hit it into the net, we, we hit it right into our opponent's sweet spot. Just dumb mistake after dumb mistake. And to mix metaphors, I'm a car guy. I've taken a lot of high performance driving classes, which, you know, I'll let the secret out. They're really very, very sophisticated defensive driving classes. But the takeaway from that is you have to stay within your capabilities and the capabilities of the vehicle. If you set the course record on the straightaway, but you're going too fast and can't make the turn and crash and burn into the wall, the record doesn't count. You have to make the turn. And so learning how to just operate within yourself is such a huge advantage. So make less mistakes was the philosophical idea I began with. By the time I finished the book, I couldn't help but notice that two other themes emerged. And one is, hey, everybody in finance needs to have a little more humility. We all need to be a little more humble and stop pretending we know what comes next. There's a whole section in the book on nobody knows anything. It's the William Goldman quote all the studios passed on Star Wars, Raiders of the Last Ark. Oh, we have another alien film coming out. We're going to pass on E.T. there's a chapter on John Wick. There's a chapter on all the reviews on the Beatles first appearance on Ed Sullivan. And it's hilarious how dumb and terrible these things are. So applying that to markets, the economy, stock picking, investing, hey, you don't want to make a bet or a guess as to what comes next. You want a portfolio that's robust enough to withstand anything and that requires us to just admit we don't know what comes next. So that was a theme that just kind of emerged and having some humility and then having done 500 masters in business, you know, the first time a billionaire says, well, I just got lucky, you think they're blowing smoke up your ass. But you know, when you hear it 5, 10, 20 times, I'll never forget. The guy who really put this into sharpest relief from me was Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital. He once said, you know, you also have to get lucky. You have to be in the right place, right time. And I'm like, Howard, not for nothing, but you're smart and hardworking. Don't tell me you're this successful. Cush, you're lucky. I think, I think he went to Columbia and the guys he used to carpool, it was like him, Lee Cooperman. It was like four future billionaires. And I'm trying to remember who the other guy was. But anyway, he said, I went to school with 200. I said, it's, it's smarts and hard work. And I said, everybody at Columbia School of Business that I went to school with were super smart. Many smarter than me. He said, super hard working. I wasn't the hardest working person there. Not all of them, he didn't say became billionaires, but not all of them achieved his level of success. And he goes, you could be smart and hardworking, smart, hard working and lucky is better.

I'm picking the right markets, picking the right business models. Yeah, all that stuff.

I mean, I've met so many people in so many different markets, businesses, strategies, styles that it's not, hey, it helps to like we launched in 2013. Like I just did a piece last week, a spectacularly underappreciated 15 year period. Like when you look at rolling 15 year periods, I'll make this really short. The best 15 year period in the past century has been the 15 years after World War II, right up to 1957. 18% a year, you go to 99, the 15 years average, 17% a year. This market, which everybody has hated, right? I mean, I wrote a piece in October, oh, nine the most hated bull market in Wall street history. And it was this is the third best percent a year. So that there's a little bit of luck in, hey, we're going to launch now as opposed to 2000. If we would have launched in 2000, I think it might have been a little rougher sledding.

Yeah. Interesting. And what do you think about the next 15 years? It feels like from my perspective, I'm like, you have been around for a while and seeing these ups, ups and downs and it feels like things are accelerating. Tech is coming quicker and quicker and the cycles are coming quicker and quicker. I mean, do you think the next 15 years could be equally good or better?

So I don't know what the next 15 years are like, but I'll give you two interesting observations about it. First, such a small data set, if you look at 1957, well, the next decade was pretty damn good right up until 1966. Then you had a 16 year bear market, but you still got 10 more good years. Fast forward to 1999. Not for nothing, but really from 2000 to 2013, lots of ups and downs, but essentially you ended where you started. So with a data set of two, it's kind of hard to forecast historically. So. So that's data point one. Data point two is simply this. Every time President Trump makes a decision, if you can tell me who the last person had his ear was and I'll make it really simple. If it's Pinot Navarro. Well, if it's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen, then I'm really optimistic because he's the guy who came up with a 90 day pause. He's the guy who's driving the deal with China. Bessant is a Wall Streeter.

Yeah.

He understands what Mr. Market wants. He understands how consumers have a finite amount of cash. And if you pass a massive VAT tax, call it a tariff, call it whatever you want, even if manufacturers and exporters, importers, eat some of it, it's.

Going to go to the consumer.

Yeah. People have a finite amount of cash, you will have a worse gdp, worse consumer spending, lower corporate revenue, lower profits. This is not a prediction, that's simply math. So if Besson is the last person, I don't mean 100% of the time.

And you're like, it's going to be good, market's going to go up.

Right. If you say Besson is the last person speaking to him 75% of the time, I'm bullish as all hell. If you take Peter Navarro, who's A fourth tier economist from a third tier school and he's the last person. Well, then, bad news. I'm hiding under my desk because this whole craziness, you know, the rumor was that when Trump asked Jared Kushner to find him a economist who supported tariffs, Kushner goes to Google and out of the bajillion economists in the world, there's one schmuck who thinks Smoot Hawley and the 1930s tariff was a great idea. So if it's 75, 25 will be great. If it's 50, 50, they'll be of upward trend, but with a lot of volatility. And if it's 75% Navarro, 25% Besson. Hold on to your hat, kids. It's going to get bad.

Well, do, do you think that there. It feels like Trump and the administration is definitely getting the message right there. They, they started like, hey, let's do Liberation Day. Market goes crazy. I think Trump's like, I don't like when everyone's pissed off. I was actually talking about this with a friend of mine on the hike this morning who knows you guys. And you know, it's like, okay, let's come back to, let's, let's, let's be more, a little bit more rational. And then the markets come back, it feels like, hey, maybe we're going to, we're going to a nine day pause. We're going to get some quote unquote deals. We're going to get the tariffs back down effectively to where they're closer, where.

They started by the time this airs. A post that I have coming out this coming Monday or whenever this comes out, maybe it was last Monday, is titled the Market Remains Undefeated. And what that means is I give three references and it doesn't matter what's driving it could be the bond market. Doesn't make any difference. In October oh8, after Lehman Brothers had blown up, Ben Bernanke went to Congress and said, hey, our charter is low inflation, full employment. Now there's this structural credit crisis and things are frozen. We don't have the authority to do this. We want you guys to give us the authority. I don't know if you remember this week in like October 9th or October 11th, that was a Monday. And Ron Paul got up, gave a fiery speech, and the market went right into the shitter for the next five days. Friday, everybody, they voted it down. Friday they call Bernanke back and he says, hey, listen, this is going to keep going until you guys figure out, you know, when the President gets a phone call from the CEO of Ford. My bank is telling me they don't have any capital. I'm not going to make payroll Monday. Like Bernanke told the story of calling his wife and saying, go to the ATM and take out as much cash as you can. Like, so what was the market down? I don't even think it was 20%. I think it was like 11, 12, 14%, something like that. And they pass, you know, whatever you need. And that, that was enough to start the process of stabilizing. There still was a lot of the market was still priced too high and there was a lot of crap that had to be resolved. But that's what set up the next quarter. March 09's bottom. Fast forward to 2020. I love this story. I don't remember if it was a Monday or Tuesday, but one day in the week, Congress is debating renaming a library in D.C. like is there anything that matters less than whose name is on some local D.C. library? And they're just arguing they can't pass anything. And then the next day the NBA cancels the season and suddenly all sorts of dominoes start to fall and really the market begins to accelerate. It had been dribbling down mid February, there were a lot of store shelves that were wiped out. You couldn't get alcohol, you couldn't get sanitizer, you couldn't get bleach, you couldn't get toilet paper. People began freaking out. Within a matter of a few weeks as the market plunged 34% in 17 trading days. The US Congress that could not agree on renaming a library passed the single biggest fiscal stimulus at 10% of GDP since World War II. So CARES Act 1 was giant under President Trump first, first term CARES Act 2 was Trump, CARES Act 3 was Biden. And then you had the infrastructure bill, the inflation reduction bill, the semiconductor. Those are 10 year things, you know. And then fast forward to 2025. So my takeaway is fuck around and find out let shit get really bad. And the market will say, and to be fair, this time, the market simply said, oh, we were expecting 10% tariffs, right? 100% tariffs on 182 country means our year ahead. Expectations for corporate revenue and profits. We're way too high. We're make up a number. 10, 20% too high on revenue, 30, 40% too high on profits. We have to adjust to reflect the math. This is just math, right? And down 15%. Besson and Lutnick are in the Oval Office saying, hey, your legacy is going to be worse than hoover.

Right.

And Mr. Market remains undefeated.

No, that's great. It's interesting side story. I was. I had a guest on recently. We were talking about Social Security and, like, just in terms of, like, Congress being able to act. So the last, you know. You know, everyone's worried about Social Security running out in 2034.

Social Security will never run out. Whoever says that, please pass along the message. Hey, Ritholtz says you're an enumerate idiot. You don't know how sovereign countries operate. And we can never run out of money. Now, there are issues with that. But when people say Social Security is running out of money, What. What is FICA capped at? 160 grand. 150. All right. Make it a half a million. You're good for another century.

100%. Well, the story is, is that basically the last time I think, was 1983. We got within two months of, like, running out of money in the Social Security trust fund, and then, bang, Congress fixed it all with making some adjustments, and then here we are. And so the prediction is probably the same thing is going to happen. We're going to run right up to the wall and it'll get fixed, but people don't have to worry about it.

You know, every time I hear somebody say, you know, the government is like, household budget. Let me stop you right there. Do you like sports or movies? Because we can't talk about this because you clearly have no idea what you're saying. I don't have a standing army in my house, and I don't have a printing press where I can run off or a central bank where I could create as much money as I want. And, eg, look at 0809. Oh, my God, we're out of money.

No.

No, we're not. Now, the risk is you become Venezuela, but so far, we've avoided that fate.

Yeah, well, we can. And luckily for us, all our debts are denominated in our own currency. So, yeah, in the Ritholtz household.

In the Ritholtz household, there are no Ritholtz bucks or Ritholtz coins. I have to trade with dollars. And so my family household budget can't say, oh, no, there's a financial crisis. Let me just print up another billion dollars. I cringe every time I hear that, but I no longer get angry. I just say, so, Knicks game seven. What do you think? Because we're not going to talk about this.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, well, look, I know we're. I want to make sure we. I want to Cover a couple more quick things, but I know we're running against the clock real quick, but just to recap. So in terms of your buck, kind of like you, you dive into like, be careful of the media, be careful of your own behavior, be careful of bad data. Like, like if you had to kind of summarize kind of the, the biggest risks people face and the, the things that they should not do, what, like, what would that be in, in like a couple minutes or like.

So, so when you talk about media, one of the things I, I tell people is don't take candy from strangers. You remember your mom used to tell you that there's a bajillion websites, a million podcasts. Now I have 500 channels on, on cable. And to say nothing of endless YouTubers and Instagram and TikTokers. The one advantage of the old days were there was three channels on TV. There was the New York Times, the Washington Post. Everybody had a look. The, like the plethora of outlets out putting out commentary. Opinion nonsense is so large, I think it's lazy just to say all media is garbage. Although I quote Ted Sturgeon in the book, who was famous or not so famous, science fiction writer in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, people always used to bust on him about how terrible science fiction was. And his answer was, you're reading the wrong stuff. Science fiction is no different than anything else. 90% of everything is crap. And if you take, and that's been called, you know, Sturgeon's law, Sturgeon's theorem. If you take that philosophy and apply it to finance and financial media, hey, you know what? Look below the top decile of ETFs, most ETFs ain't worth it. Mutual funds, maybe you don't even have to look at the bottom. 95% hedge funds, venture capital alternatives, SPACs, wherever you look, and stocks wherever you look in the world of finance, 90% bad, right? And then I'm, I'm not, you know, I'm not looking to harp on Fortune or Forbes or Bloomberg or CNBC or CNN or, you know, all the magazines. All the advice I give in the book is because I am both a giant consumer and producer of content and media. So my advice to people is simply this. If you're going to pay attention to somebody who you don't know, well, then maybe you're risking. Cisco is the one stock you have to own. There's a chapter in the book about the Apple Ice, the Apple stores that were launched, and the businessweek headline. And this was Before Bloomberg owned them. But the business league headline was sorry Steve, here's why the Apple stores will never work. Fast forward. Apple was something like $5,700 per square foot. I don't remember. It was per day. Most by far. Tiffany's was number two. Half of that. Like before you take investment advice from someone who doesn't know you, doesn't know your risk tolerance, doesn't know your financial circumstances or even your tax bracket, maybe you should be aware of who they are, what their process is like and what their track record is like. So my advice is always build your own all star team of people that you've been following for a while. They have a process that's defendable. They didn't just throw a dart once and get lucky. And they're living on that. And there's so many examples of that. They're level headed, they've seen a few cycles and that you can trust that they're not just gonna freak out and lose you money. So I never say ignore all this. I say don't take candy from strangers. If you can't answer those five questions, what's their process like? What's their track record like? Are they cool under fire? How long have they been doing this for? Give us some examples of where they were with the crowd right up until the point of the crowd becoming an ugly mobile. Like if you don't know those answers like why on earth are you listening to these people? It's just astonishing to me. Don't take candy from strangers.

Okay, I appreciate that. Hey look, I know we're getting to time here so you know, kind of last thing is as you look forward, you know, obviously it's been great learning about your career and the book and what you're doing here. Like how do you think the world changes and you know, with AI and with wealth and advice over the next five to 10 years, given what you're seeing, is it going to be kind of the same or, you know, and, and I'm also curious, just for your own firm, like with red holes, obviously it's pretty. I think one differentiator is you guys started 70 million, now you've got 6 billion, largely organic. Right? You're not buying companies.

We did, we did one acquisition kind of as a favor, jokingly say BlackRock had bought a robo advisor in 2015 and it's not their core competency, it's not what they wanted to do. And we worked out a purchase that was a win, win, win was they wanted it off their hands. We negotiated a fair deal, we got a slug of assets and the clients got someone who would actually return their calls and emails and be very proactive with them. So everybody was happy with the out that that's the only acquisition we've done so far. Although, you know, never say never, I don't know what the future holds. The AI question is really fascinating because I got enough gray hair that I remember when people were talking about Internet companies and that was not just Cisco But Yahoo and Pets.com and Global Crossing and Metromedia Fiber. And there were all these Internet related companies. And the ironic thing is every company is an Internet company. We all have a website, we all live on email, we all have digital uses of our services. And I really try and think about AI in the same way. The media focus, again, don't take candy from Strangers has been on the Magnificent seven. But to me the more interesting play is the let's call it not Magnificent 493. Because those are the companies that are going to deploy AI. They're going to become more productive, more efficient, more profitable. They're either going to offer more services at the same price or the same services at a higher degree of profit. I don't see how the rest of forget. If you want to own Nvidia, own Nvidia. Yeah, I mean, I think Nvidia is the first US company to lose a trillion dollars in market cap. So a lot of people made a ton of money on the way up. The example in the book is Ark. And I don't think Cathie woods did anything wrong. I think the media fetted her after she was up 163% and everybody piled in just before the mean reversion kicked in. That's not her fault. That's people who took candy from strangers.

Well, she was leaning into, I think the narrative of like some of these stocks are just going to keep going to the moon, right? And I don't know, like, so same.

Question, what's her long term track record? How many cycles has she been through? You know, does she keep cool under fire? Is her process defendable? I'll let you in on a little secret. My favorite joke is, hey, if you ever want to confess a murder, do it in the last 10 minutes of a podcast because no, here no one's listening. But I never had her on Masters in Business because I sat down with her in like 2015, 2016 in Iceland of all places. And I mean she's very intelligent. She's been really successful in a lot of ways. I could not figure out what the hell her process was.

Right.

Like, we had an hour conversation. I'm like, but how do you do this? And I walked away thinking, she seems to be smart, but I can't defend this.

Right.

And so, you know, I missed the run up, but I also missed the subsequent collapse. There's a section in the book where I discuss the guy who tracked all her investors. Some crazy amount, like 90% of them are underwater.

Yeah.

For, for a fund that did as well as that did in 2020. It's kind of crazy.

They piled in late. So, yeah, when you look forward, I mean, that resonates a lot. Like every company will be an AI company.

But like, by the way, are you a telephone company? Yes, we all use the telephone. It's whether it's a cell phone or a landline. We're all, we're all telephone companies, we're all Internet companies. We will all eventually be AI companies.

Right. Like, so does it, I mean, does it affect your strategy? Like, where do you think? Like, where do you think? It feels like you're really in your moment right now in terms of, I mean, obviously you've had a great career and you've been doing all this stuff. A lot of things are coming together. Great team, you know, the kind of content media thing has come together. Like, what do you think it looks like in five years, in 10 years?

I would love to be able to say that I'm a mad evil genius and this is all working out according to my plan, but let's be honest, the reality is you throw a lot of stuff up against the wall, you see what sticks and you do more of it. And I mean, it's not quite that crude and blunt. So when, when Alexa first came out, we rolled out this voice powered Alexa content and we read all our blog posts and we created all these things. Nobody cared, nobody paid attention. So, you know, since you start as a stock trader, everything you do is how do I measure success? How do I determine failure? What are the metrics I'm tracking? What's my stop loss? Where do I say this isn't working? Fold up tents, move on to something else. If you approach the same, the same thing with future proof. Do. Do a whole event outdoors. What are you guys crazy? Either it works or it doesn't. And if it doesn't work, well, you pick yourself up, you try something else. So I honestly don't know what the next five years will look like for us or the industry. I assume one thing is constant. I could Quote Heraclitus, we could talk about. No man steps into the same river twice, for he is not the same man, and the river is not the same river. But change is ever present. That is the nature of what we do. And so I think we're going to continue growing the way we've been growing, attracting clients who like our philosophy, find us through our footprint, attracting advisors who want to work in a place where they don't have to smile and dial, where not only are the is the guy whose name is on the door and his co founders are equity shareholders, but everybody who's here for a long enough period of time, who's in either a CFP or an advisor or a tax, everybody will get eventually to participate in the equity side of it. And we just want to keep doing what works, keep growing the way we've been growing. Me personally, I'm thrilled with how our tax practice has built out. We brought in somebody to run our family office that's expanding nicely. Very happy with Direct Indexing and Canvas. On a related note, we're investors in a direct indexing muni bond platform run by a smart guy out of Fidelity, Eric golden, called Canopy. So we want to keep looking at the technologies that let us be more efficient, more productive, provide more services, provide a higher quality level of services to our clients, and just more of the same.

That's good. Sounds good. Yeah. Any big. Last question. Any big bets? Because I know, like, it feels like maybe Future Proof wasn't a big bet.

But, oh, no, it was a giant bet at the time. And I have vivid recollections of having conversations with people and thinking, I think these guys are rooting for us to fall on our face here. And, you know, God bless. Like, you know, Vanguard and BlackRock, I had interviewed enough of their senior people. Like, guys, have I ever steered you wrong? I'm not telling you to buy a million dollar booth. Just give it a shot. Worst case scenario, you will have wasted one conference out of the hundred conferences you either sponsor or attend. But if it works out, you're an anchor tenant.

Right?

And thank goodness it was Morningstar, blackrock, Schwab. Vanguard was the first big one. And, you know, but that was a. That was a big swing. A lot of people, a lot of people were like, hey, man, you could be really embarrassed. I'm sorry, but if you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough.

100%. That's awesome. Okay, cool. Well, Barry, appreciate you coming on the show. And we'll definitely link to how not to invest for our audience and hold it up.

I'm not terribly self promotional, but with this book, I've. I've just been constantly. LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue sky, the blog, like every couple of days, there's something out about it. And I'm. This is. This book was such a joy to write versus the slog that was Bailout Nation. I'm really having fun.

Was it quicker? I mean, so I saw Morgan Housel also ripped out another book and it felt like, boom, that was faster. Is it. Was it quicker for you to write this with technology and everything?

I don't think it was. The problem with Bailout Nation, it was originally McGraw Hill, and I did a version of that that took like a year. And there was a chapter that was highly critical of the bond rating agencies of which McGraw Hill owned one, called S and P. But I was fortunate enough to have negotiated, you know, final cut, full edit. So when they said, no, we're not going to publish this with that chapter, let me try to rewrite it and make it a little less hair on fire. And it turned out that the more data and the more third parties I quote and the less histrionic I made it, the more devastating it was to S and P. So they're like, nope. And I'm like, okay, well, I'll go publish it elsewhere. Wait, what? No, no, you can't do that. We own it. Yeah, you should go read the contract. You don't know shit. And so Wiley published it, and that was another. So that was like a long ordeal. This. I love the folks I work with at Harriman House, and I. I don't know if it comes across in the tone of the book, but it's a little. I tried to bring in a lot more stuff from outside of the world of finance, music, tv, film, sports, all these different things. And I just wanted it to be kind of a light, fun read with really short chapters. Like, the book is deceptive because it's, you know, it's got some heft. But the chapters are one and a half, two, two and a half pages. It goes by pretty quickly, and it was really a lot of fun to write.

That's awesome. All right, well, Barry, thanks again for coming on, and for our listeners, thanks for taking the time to learn with us, and all feedback is welcome. Hopefully you check out Barry's book, How not to Invest, go check out his firm, Rick Holtz, and come visit us at Bolden. All reviews and feedback on this podcast are welcome. So thanks again.

Thank you so much, Stephen for having me.