A conversation about behavioral finance with Shaping Wealth's Brian Portnoy

Lynnley Browning (00:09):

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Lynnley Browning, managing editor at Financial Planning magazine, and here with me is Brian Portnoy, the co-founder of Shaping Wealth, a Chicago-based firm that gets independent advisors up to speed on using behavioral finance in their practices. Brian is one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of money. He has written multiple bestsellers, including the Geometry of Wealth, and has more than 20 years of experience as an investor and an educator in the hedge fund and mutual fund industries. He's a CFA charter holder and earned a Ph.D. in International Political Economy at the University of Chicago. So I'm super-excited he's here, because he is in a particularly good place to talk about one of the wealth management industry's biggest and most complex trends — one that intersects economics, investing, psychology and sociology. So Brian, thanks so much for being here. And can you kick us off by telling us what Shaping Wealth does?

Brian Portnoy (01:10):

Absolutely. And Lynnley, thanks so much for inviting me. Happy, very happy to be here. So, Shaping Wealth delivers actionable content and coaching on financial wellbeing to the global wealth management industry. We offer one-off courses that are immersive coaching programs, and we also have a subscription service that drips out behavioral insights that are usable in advisor practices. So we have tried to create a coaching and content platform that speaks to where the modern advice industry is, and where we pretty strongly suspect it's going.

Lynnley Browning (01:56):

Fantastic. Let's dive into what behavioral finance has become and how the field has evolved. So it seems, and tell me if you disagree, that it started initially as a rather stark view of people as irrational idiots and has become a bit more nuanced in seeing people as on a learning curve. What do you see going on there?

Brian Portnoy (02:28):

Yeah, so let me summarize what I think is kind of a half-century arc to where we are right now. So, going back to Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman, Israeli psychologists in the 1970s who looked at U.S. economics — you know, the profession — and who said, basically, you guys have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to the way human beings actually live and exist and make decisions in the world. And so the first revolution, as it were, that those two gentlemen started was introducing behavioral finance, really talking about the psychology of money and challenging the idea that, oh, are these rational or semi-rational utility maximizing agents? And they blew that up. And Nobel Prizes later, a movie starring Brad Pitt and baseball teams later, we have this enormous cottage industry in the world of behavioral finance.

(03:34):

And Michael Lewis's book, "The Undoing Project," is a really, really good kind of historical treatment. I mean, Michael Lewis can make a book of matches seem interesting, so it's not hard to make the study of humans and money interesting. But he takes it next level. Fast forward to the last 10 years or so, really, right after the global financial crisis, and there's been — even though behavioral finance has been around for a while — there's been questions as to, well, how do I use this in my practice as a financial advisor? How is this applicable? So the push toward applicability is front and center, and I think it's only within the last few years that some groups and firms and individuals, including mine, are trying to kind of crack that code and say, okay, it's one thing to understand all of these biases and heuristics that Kahneman and Tversky and Ariely and others have taught us about.

(04:35):

And these are wonderful and powerful insights. It's another to think about this massive global wealth management industry and financial planning in particular, using those insights to better understand clients, to ultimately deliver better client experience, but also lonely to think about what the experience of the advisor is — meaning, okay, who is it that I'm trying to be in this role? And you know, this is a moving target because on this arc of what I call Gordon Gekko to Brené Brown, in only a few decades we've gone from hard charging brokers to thoughtful, empathetic coaches and listeners. And the industry is, you know, all along that spectrum. But to the extent that financial planners are seeing themselves as coaches, it requires deeper insight into the human experience of money than we've had in the past. And, you know, here we are in 2022, trying to figure that out.

Lynnley Browning (05:42):

So what the field calls biases -- bias is really a word for a belief or a thought system or maybe a thought process, but we'll stick with biases because that's what the industry uses .. . and the list of biases seems to just grow overnight. I mean, there are hundreds. Are all of them valid? What are the most common biases that advisors need to understand and work with in order to do well by their clients?

Brian Portnoy (06:17):

Yeah, so there's a couple layers that I'd want to address. The first is that you can't escape the fact that the word "bias" has a negative connotation. And I think some of the transition to what we call behavioral finance 2.0 is to appreciate that the human mind works in the way that it does based on millions of years of evolution. And so the brains that we have between our ears right now are pretty similar to our ancestors more than a hundred thousand years ago. Money was invented about 6,000 years ago. So we have sort of this relatively new technology, money, and this old thing called the human brain. And there's mismatch and conflict and things like that. So bias sounds like a negative and it's usually treated as negative. And part of the challenge with how behavioral finance lands in the wealth management industry is that we enter many of these conversations with the idea that our clients are broken and need to be fixed.

(07:25):

And I think one of the important transitions toward behavioral finance 2.0, what we call, what I call going beyond biases, is to stop pathologizing normal human behavior. We want to expunge the words rational and irrational, and we want to replace them with normal, and what does it mean to be normal now? So that's the top level. The other level that I'll address briefly, because there are, if you go to the Wiki page of 212 biases, if you go to some of these beautiful infographics that are out there, there's 157 or 158 biases that are beautifully arrayed. It is ludicrous that we would ask an advisor to learn what all of these are and put themselves in the position to diagnose, let alone address or fix these biases. However, and I'm not going to name names, there are important certification-granting groups in our industry where when they teach behavioral finance in their programs. It's like, "hey, here's a list of biases…"

(08:32):

And rich people have different biases than poor people.We need to embrace what is it that makes us normal human beings. And how can a financial advisor, a financial wellness coach enter that conversation? Truly being able to listen and understand where somebody is coming from, such that when we talk about the classic biases over confidence, confirmation bias, availability, loss of version — these are all quote unquote real, but they don't mean that we're broken. It just means that we might be processing information in a certain way and making decisions in a certain way that we should, that we should take the time to understand. But it's a very different attitude and pose to say, Well, this is just who we are and let's move forward versus this is the way that we're broken and let's try to fix it.

Lynnley Browning (09:36):

That's really interesting. I mean, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that biases are kind of hard wired into the human brain and the human condition. They're these immutable things that are out there. That said, are there particular economic, personal and social environments that bring particular biases more to the fore?

Brian Portnoy (10:02):

Well, okay, <laugh>, that's a big question. I'd have to think about it …

Lynnley Browning (10:13):

For example, we've got inflation. We've got the prospect of a recession. We're just coming out of the pandemic. Everyone's completely freaked out about divisiveness. Does that collection of variables somehow heighten the workings of any particular bias in an investor?

Brian Portnoy (10:40):

You know, I think when we speak about human nature and all of our features and traits, it's certainly true that some of who we are is going to be triggered more or less depending on what the external stimuli are. I mean, one thing that's really important to understand, and whether it's a bias or heuristic, I don't care what it's called, is this idea of loss aversion — the idea that losses are more painful than gains are pleasurable. You know, this is very much a remnant of our evolutionary path because, you know, the evolutionary two-step, as I call it, is survive and thrive. And that doesn't happen once; that happens through your entire life. You want to, you have to survive. You know, you can only lose the game once.

(11:26):

You don't have to win on any particular day in some grand sense, but you don't get sort of a repeat button, so to speak. So the fact is that we are going to over-emphasize or over-index on any sense of danger in the world, because it makes us feel threatened in a very deep, existential sense. And as a result, whatever is happening in the world that we might perceive as dangerous — it could be physical danger, it could be a line on the savannah, but it could also be red lines on a chart where maybe you have the impression that, Oh my gosh, the market's going to crash and as a result, I'm going to be poor and I'm not going to be able to feed my family and things like that.

(12:15):

The line on the savannah and red lines on the chart trigger the same kind of neurotransmitter response. It's really important to understand that it's out there and that we will make decisions accordingly. So sometimes we will give up the opportunity to maximize gains, whether it be in a market context or elsewhere, when we can instead privilege the opportunity to minimize losses. That's just sort of who we are. And we don't all have the same loss-aversion ratio. Psychologists sometimes set the ratio at two to one or two and a half to one. So a hundred dollar loss feels twice as bad as a hundred dollar gain feels good. But the general idea that that's who we are, and that's how we enter these conversations, and it's not good practice to call someone irrational for fearing the downside that hasn't happened yet. That's just who we are.

Lynnley Browning (13:14):

How do you deal with what I'm seeing is the tension between biases as things that are sort of hardwired into the human mind and biases as these narratives we construct to tell stories about why we do what we do or don't do what we should be doing.

Brian Portnoy (13:37):

You know, I want to introduce this idea of the human experience of money. And, you know, it's a pretty distinct experience, partly due to something I mentioned a few moments ago, which is the fact that our brains are quite old, and this social institution called money is relatively new. So I think where we want to go in our industry is to more deeply understand, well, what is this human experience of money? And yes, we have our list of biases, the 212 or 153 or however many of them there are — there's too many to comment on. They're conflated, they're in conflict with each other. We have all of these lists, but to understand the human experience of money requires us to answer a prior and even deeper question of, well, what does it mean to be human?

(14:32):

And there, things get really interesting. So who are we? I mean, we are risk takers. We are storytellers, we are meaning makers, we are time travelers. The human species is dominant on the planet in no small part because we can think about the past, the present and the future in a way that no other species can. So we engage in mental time travel all day, every day. We're always sort of thinking backwards and forwards. So when we can incorporate those perspectives on being human into then answering the question of, well, how do I navigate my money life, not just in terms of the day-to-day decisions, but where this thing called money fits into a broader quest for a meaningful life? Now we've blown open the doors to much more robust conversations that planners can have with their clients.

Lynnley Browning (15:27):

Yeah, it really gets into the whole question of what is of value? What does a client value at any given point in time, and how do you maximize that value in the most reasonable way possible? Let's talk about how and why behavioral finance, the field, has really started to become part of the DNA of wealth management and financial planning and what's going on there.

Brian Portnoy (16:02):

You know, there's this arc, this 50-year arc from Gordon Gekko to Brené Brown where the industry has shifted from transactional to relational. I mean, that's the narrative that's been going on. There are parts of our industry that totally get that. They've been engaged in proper holistic financial planning for many, many years. But, you know, when you look at the numbers, planning as a widespread practice — make a plan, update a plan — the recurring revenue that's associated with that is relatively new. So is it 10, 15 years when it's become quite common? It's not a hundred years. I mean, 50 years ago, Bud Fox was recommending Anacott Steel to his clients.

(17:03):

He was a financial advisor. There weren't really any goals-based wealth managers out there at any sort of scale. So what's going on is that as the industry has landed in this relationship-driven moment, will we have questions now as to, well, how do you better manage those relationships? And so, not surprisingly, you sort of see this dovetail between this amazing scholarship on the psychology of money with, well, how do I help my clients lead a better life? So everything that we're seeing — and we have clients all over the world, on multiple continents and lots of different groups, one-off advisors, firms with thousands of advisors on their platform and everything in between — advisors are asking very similar questions in terms of, how do I truly understand the individual or couple or family or multi-generational family that I'm working with?

(18:10):

What are the tools? What are the perspectives? What's the vocabulary to truly understand humans and the human experience of money? It's relatively new because as a whole, the industry has really only embraced the relationship side of things in the not too distant past, in the context of the commoditization of many of the things that it has done over the years. And like any industry — it could be steel manufacturing, it could be making cars — it's also providing financial advice. In any capitalist industry, things get done, competition comes in, price comes down, it becomes something that everybody does, and you need to move to the next level of value creation for yourself and for your firm. So some of the things that advisors have done over the years in terms of picking investments, building portfolios, things like that, it's not entirely commoditized, but it's pretty commoditized. And, you know, I spent many, many years in the world of hedge funds and alternative investments and went down that pretty crazy path. But the fact is that most clients, most of the time, have something resembling a 60/40 portfolio. And 20 years ago, that was kind of a big deal, and now it is table stakes, to say the least.

Lynnley Browning (19:40):

Let's talk about how behavioral finance solutions vary according to the type of firm that uses them. So we have the old legacy wirehouses, we have regional brokerages, we have RIAs, we have hybrid RIAs, we have family offices. Are each of those going to need to incorporate behavioral finance solutions in different ways?

Brian Portnoy (20:09):

You know, my higher level perspective in a word is no. Like, there aren't multiple experience human experiences of money. There's one human experience of money, and we should come to terms with, well, what does that mean? And how do we help people get to where they want to go in the context of their money life? And then you map that and look, you can challenge it and we can talk about it, but I think there's one human experience of money, just like I'd say there's one experience of being human. It doesn't mean that people lead the same lives. Quite the opposite. We live in this kaleidoscope of different experiences, but there is a baseline in terms of how we exist in the world. So I'll just stipulate that for now. And then there's a question as to how does that land in this ecosystem that you just accurately detailed.

(21:06):

And it's funny, Lynnley, like I'm thinking about the variety of firms that we work with. One axis is very small to massive. Another axis is independent RIAs to broker-dealer platforms. And there's all these different permutations that you just articulated. I guess I'll point out that to truly work with a client or a family that's a client on helping them figure out where money fits into a meaningful life that often does not involve the sale of a product — we see friction and tension at a number of firms that at some level absolutely get this, but it doesn't map to their current business model. And so they wonder out loud on their own with us in terms of, okay, well, this is important.

(22:18):

We of course want a good experience for our clients, but we make our bones by selling stuff. So how does all of this lead to a product sale? And at that point, my answer is, I'm not really sure. Or the real answer is, I don't know, and it might even be, I don't care. If you're just using insights into humankind in order to sell the next mutual fund, I guess I'll wish you well, but that's not what we do. We coach the coaches in this sort of financial life planning. You know, we have a flagship coaching program called Building the Behavioral Advisor. And nobody coming through there is really focused on how this helps them sell the next product, sell the next insurance policy. It's really, how do I understand my clients and how do I help them fit money into a meaningful life. So to wrap up the very good and specific question you asked, it lands differently because there are so many different business models out there, some of which are more or less compatible with human-centric financial advice.

Lynnley Browning (23:35):

So let's talk about robo advisors, okay? And the ways in which some of those platforms — I hate the word platform, but we'll use the word platform because I don't have a better word right now — some of the ways in which robo platforms use behavioral finance findings. Are they the same ways in which, say, an RIA would use those findings? What is the behavioral financial experience for a client who's using a robo advisor?

Brian Portnoy (24:10):

Yeah, look, there's nuance to this, but let me skip the nuance and just say, robo advisors are a failure, and they are a failure because people do not want advice on their deepest and most important life missions from an algorithm. What they want is advice from another human who can deliver that advice efficiently. And so this idea of a bionic advisor that combines both human and machine — like, that's cool, and there's a lot of different ways to build and deliver that. But, you know, we both remember however many years ago that robo advisors were going totake over the world. It hasn't happened. It hasn't come close to happening.

Lynnley Browning (25:02):

So if it's a fail — if robo advisors are a failure — why do they still exist?

Brian Portnoy (25:08):

Well, because, you know, institutional inertia — like you build something and some people like it and they just want, a place to have their money and they don't really want advice. So, you know, robo advisors aren't really advisors. Robo advisors are automated portfolio management systems. And yeah, there might be some advice that's put on top of it. And maybe that's helpful. But firms and institutions last for decades and centuries longer than we think they should, because that's the way institutions work. They just don't disappear because somebody has an opinion that they shouldn't exist. Clearly, you know they exist. But in the context of the total assets that are managed in our industry, they are just flat- out irrelevant. They're just rounded down to zero in terms of the assets that they manage.

(26:05):

I think it's pretty straightforward why the way we at Shaping Wealth think about overall or holistic wellbeing is through four dimensions: physical, emotional, spiritual and financial. These are the four forms of wellbeing. They are each sui generis, they are each things in and of themselves, and then they are connected to each other in fascinating and complicated ways. In three of the four, we have obvious help, socially legitimate, institutionalized help. We have doctors, we have clergy and we have therapists. And it's a no-brainer to go seek help for the other forms of wellbeing. In financial wellbeing, it's not at all clear who is supposed to help, because only — the last numbers I saw — only 21% of Americans have a financial advisor. And I suspect that a tiny fraction of that relatively small population is having conversations about behavioral advice or the human experience of money in the way that we're talking about now.

(27:09):

And so when it comes to these deeper forms of wellbeing that we seek in order to lead a better life, to lead a good life, well, of course, in our modern, fast information age, we want the app, we want the dashboard. We want things that are slick and comfortable and delivered very, very efficiently. But in the same way that we don't have robo doctors, robo priests and robo therapists, we really don't have robo advisors. We have the efficient delivery of portfolio information. That's not advice.

Lynnley Browning (27:54):

Technology can figure out, it seems, what we want to buy before we even realize what we want to buy. I mean, it's like Google is data mining our dreams. Is it possible as we get accustomed to this, even if we're not comfortable with it, that robo advisors could adopt behavioral finance principles and gain traction with younger investors for whom technology is, as you know, at the heart of everything they do?

Brian Portnoy (28:30):

No, I don't think so. Because those young folks who don't have much money and are focused on finding a mate and building a career at some point will be older and have more money, and they're going to want to figure out how to take care of their aging parents, and they're going to want to figure out how to save for their kids' college education. They're going to want to ask questions like, how much is enough? They're going to ask questions like, am I going to be okay? Are my loved ones going to be okay? There is no world in which you or our kids or grandkids, Lynnley, live in which those questions are going to be answered by an algorithm. Of course, there are AI engines, and I've seen some of them, and they are brilliant and beautiful, and sure they can give a great written answer and maybe put it through a voice matrix and say interesting things.

(29:16):

But, you know, there is no time soon at which a portfolio management portal ... and look, I know these platforms well, I have friends who build behavioral finance overlays for these portfolios. This isn't what they really do. The old school of behavioral finance starts and stops at the idea that when things get volatile, you shouldn't sell your stocks. That's like the cutting edge of behavioral finance 1.0. That's where it was. I'm talking about all of the dimensions of money, life earning, saving, spending, borrowing, protecting, giving, investing. I mean, think about the difference between having a goal and having a purpose.

(30:23):

So a goal is some event in the future that you hope to achieve. And the big one is retirement. And, you know, most financial advice generally, and certainly most robo, is geared toward, you know, in 2037, I want to retire with x number of dollars, so that at a 4% withdrawal rate, it's just an algorithm. It's just a simple equation that can be done in lots of different ways. And so I'm not throwing that out. I'm not saying that's unimportant, but I'm also saying that if we're going to give truly human centric advice, it's not going to be about calculating the proper 4% withdrawal rate in 2037. Proper human centric advice is going to anchor on, be driven by, the deeper questions about the life that you want to live and where money fits into it. So, you know, I make a big distinction between goals-based wealth management and purpose-based wealth management.

(31:25):

I'm not saying that the average advisor on a typical day is going to sit in front of her clients and say, "Tell me your purpose in life. Those questions and those conversations do take place, but that's not the normal pose. But when we think about sort of the relationship between money and happiness, and I wrote a whole book on this called The Geometry of Wealth, when we think about the relationship between money and happiness, it's really not a question of budgeting in the right way or having the exactly correct insurance policy. It's about asking the harder questions in terms of, well, what's truly meaningful to me? And what do those things afford? So, you know, I coined this phrase "funded contentment," which is my code for true wealth or the ability to underwrite a life that's meaningful to you.

(32:17):

However you want to define it, that's what people are trying to get at. That doesn't mean that you don't have to pay the bills. It doesn't mean that you don't have to save for retirement. But if we're talking about the future of wealth management through the lens of behavioral finance, these are the topics that are on offer, not, "hey, how do I nudge you to save more?" That's part of it, but a small part of it. It's not how do I build the ideal portfolio — that's table stakes. There is no perfect portfolio. But it's easy to build something that's in the right ballpark. It's getting into these deeper issues.

Lynnley Browning (32:54):

So does all of this portend a scenario in which, and this is obviously completely hypothetical ... why do brokerages exist if they're transactional, not relational? Wouldn't they just fall by the wayside in X number of decades?

Brian Portnoy (33:15):

Well, I mean, I made the point already earlier that institutions just don't disappear because their purpose has gone away. I mean, are the wirehouses going anywhere? Not in my grandchildren's lifetime. They'll be here. I don't have grandkids, by the way. So that's a very long time here. Young!

(33:37):

So to say that we've moved from transactional to relational isn't to say that we don't need to buy things. We need to buy investments, we need to buy insurance, we need to invest in estate plans and tax planning. So the point isn't that transactions are going away. And if I left that impression, that's on me. It's that that's table stakes and low margin that everybody does. If you're here in 2022 saying, "We build you a better portfolio than the next guy," good luck. If you're saying ,"We can sell you a better mutual fund" — okay, let's see how that lands -- 25 years ago, 15 years ago, maybe that was a thing. And in small corners, it is a thing. There's tons of broker-dealers that, that do this. And they sell good things to good people for the right reason. So it's not that transactions have gone away, it's just that like every industry, the old becomes commoditized and something new has to emerge in order to deliver value above and beyond what everybody else is doing for the same price in the same way. So, a brokerage isn't going anywhere, um, in the same way that, any first-to-market stuff is going to disappear.

Lynnley Browning (35:06):

Right. So on that note, two semi-related questions. One, is there a danger of behavioral finance becoming commodified and commoditized? Two, might you be able to describe, obviously without revealing client information, work you've done with a particular RIA or IBD or whomever, and how they have incorporated behavioral finance into how they work?

Brian Portnoy (35:41):

Right, right. So on the latter, on the confidentiality front, I mean, it's pretty basic and simple. I mean, advisors for multiple reasons — ethical, legal —wouldn't be sharing client details with us. So that's sort of a non-issue. But at another level, they are taking our coaching and our programming and our content, and we know — we've seen it firsthand — that they're using it in their practices to drive better conversations about things that really matter.

Lynnley Browning (36:24):

Granular details of how that plays out?

Brian Portnoy (36:29):

Well, so we have one major course called Building the Behavioral Advisor. We have a subscription service called the Outsourced Chief Behavioral Officer. And in all of these instances, we're providing different content and coaching moments that advisors can use in their practice to drive those conversations. So part of what we're trying to frame and deliver for our clients and for the industry is just this: what we call better conversations about things that matter; the inputs to that, we think, are storytelling and empathy. We think that storytelling and empathy are sort of the twin superpowers of the modern behavioral advisor. And so we do hands-on coaching with stories and storytelling, because we are not born as calculators. We are born as storytellers, but this is completely lost on the wealth management industry that just puts everything into numbers and spreadsheets, gives clients a bunch of numbers and expects them to understand what in the heck that means.

(37:35):

Now that's just not who we are. We are hardwired to embrace and appreciate narrative. And so, you know, we work with financial advisors on not just telling better stories, especially from a marketing point of view, although that's relevant, but from listening to what our clients are telling us about their life, the life they've led, the life that they want to lead. And the power, the superpower to be able to be a better storyteller is empathy, which is, you know, sort of this amazing, somewhat vague, but really important skill. Yes, it's a trait. Some of us are born more empathetic than others, but it's also a skill that everyone from their own authentic lens can be slightly better at. It's somewhere between sympathy, which is really pity from a distance, and emotional contagion, when you effectively drown with your client or your friend or your sibling or your partner by just indulging that.

(38:39):

Now in the middle is this vast ground called empathy, where, contrary to public belief, it's not walking in somebody's shoes. Its being able to listen to somebody in a skill-based way such that you understand the emotions that they are feeling in the situation that they are living, and being able to walk alongside them, not in their shoes but alongside them. And so that allows me to pivot to your first question about behavioral finance being commoditized. So behavioral finance 2.0, or at least the way we sort of approach it ,is to hopefully stop using the phrase behavioral finance. Because at this point, in some ways it does more harm than good. We are coaching the coaches, and the financial advice business is becoming, to some extent, a coaching business. And so when you think about, well, how does coaching become commoditized?

(39:41):

I don't think that it does in its application, because all we're doing is working with a small sliver of clients — financial advisors who really want to embrace that coaching mindset. And I think that we're doing a pretty good job delivering the perspectives and the words and the conversation starters and the tools and all this fun and cool stuff. And then when you're in a proper coaching environment, it requires you to be vulnerable, to do the hard work. You know, if we are at a CrossFit, we'd understand that you have to break muscle to build muscle. Well, it's not dissimilar in a financial coaching perspective. If you want to be better at this, you need to really examine who you are and what practice you're delivering to your clients and how do you want to be better, not just for your clients, but for yourself in terms of what you want your career to be.

Lynnley Browning (40:48):

So this sets up beautifully, what I think, because we're coming up on a time limit,  will be my last question. Obviously, clients and investors have biases. So do advisors — all humans do. So how do you deal in your work with helping advisors confront their own personal biases before they then go out and deal with clients?

Brian Portnoy (41:16):

Explicitly, and somewhat uncomfortably, we have them tell their money story. We've engineered a process, a protocol, for advisors to engage in their own money stories. I'll tell you, it is powerful. So a few years ago, I published a book with Josh Brown called How I Invest My Money. And it was basically 25 brief stories from financial advisors or other financial experts as t, "tell us about your money life." And we called it How I Invest My Money. It really should have been called Why I Invest My Money, Because 25, very senior financial professionals came back to us with 25 completely different stories about where money fits into their life. And what I heard then, as co-editor with Josh, and what we see now over many, many cases with our clients is them saying, "Huh, I've been doing this for a living for 12 years, 17 years, 28 years.

(42:26):

"No one's ever asked me what my relationship with money is. No one. I asked these questions to my clients all the time. You're asking me these questions about, you know, what's my money story? You know, where does money fit into a meaningful life? Am I gonna be okay? How much is enough?" All of the big questions that you can address and a money story. And there's lots of different ways to do that. And the reaction is, "this is so uncomfortable. I can't believe I haven't done this before. I know myself better, thank you. And now I have re-engineered parts of my planning process for my clients because I realize I've been asking them questions either the wrong way or the right way, but in a way that's much harder than I might have imagined before going through this exercise." So we're beyond bias.

(43:19):

I don't care if a financial advisor engages in confirmation bias or anchoring. I do care if she can write herself an essay that's not going to be shared with us. Private psychological safety is actually a very precise principle that's baked into everything we do. But can you tell yourself a story about your money life? We have a protocol, there are prompts, there's different ways to do this. We don't just give them a blank piece of paper and say, go for it. No. There's a multi-hour sort of protocol that goes into doing this in a way that we think is healthy and illuminating. And scalable for their practice in terms of asking better questions.

Lynnley Browning (44:07):

It's very compelling. Very, very interesting. I think we're up on time. Do any of our listeners have any questions? If so, you can pop them into the chat and we'll squeeze one in. Brian, thank you so much. This has been total brain candy and fun, but also just meaty and substantial and actionable. So it's been a real treat to have you do this. Thank you so much.

Brian Portnoy (44:43):

Lynnley, I just want to thank you. I love this conversation and if I could just wrap by saying that we're all trying to figure this out. I spend all of my time figuring this out. Advisors don't have the time to, but it's really cool in part thanks to you and your platform to see people grappling with these deeper questions about how money fits into a meaningful life. So, thank you.

Lynnley Browning (45:05):

Thank you.