Ep. 68 | Is Wealthy a Number or a Mindset?

What if wealth wasn’t a race for more, but a plan for enough? We sit down with Brian Portnoy, author of The Geometry of Wealth and founder of Shaping Wealth, to explore funded contentment—the idea that real wealth is the ability to underwrite a life that feels meaningful on your terms. Brian shares how years with elite investors led him to a simple truth: markets reward behaviour more than brilliance. That shift reframes money from a spreadsheet problem to a human one.

We unpack why a low‑cost, globally diversified portfolio often solves most investing needs and how home bias quietly limits growth. We dig into the tension between surviving and thriving. We discuss the two questions behind every plan—am I going to be okay? and how much is enough? —and the role of safeguards like insurance, cash buffers, and estate basics in quieting fear. 

Brian also explains the paradox of prosperity: despite unprecedented comfort, constant comparison and social media can erode joy. The antidote is clarity on values, language to express them, and a funding plan that aligns money with relationships, health, craft, and generosity.

We also tackle the nuanced link between money and happiness. Income meaningfully lifts well‑being up to a threshold by reducing insecurity and buying time and choice. Beyond that, reflective happiness grows when spending serves purpose, not status. Expect practical insights for investors and advisors alike: focus on behaviour, diversify globally, cut the noise, and design cash flows that support the life you actually want. If you’re ready to trade the chase for more for a confident sense of enough, this conversation is your blueprint. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review to help others find the show—then tell us: what does enough look like for you?

The Purposeful Investor Podcast is a public service provided for Australian investors wanting to make smart decisions with their money, avoid costly mistakes, look after the people they care about, and, have a great life!

We draw on over 30 years of experience from David Andrew and the Capital Partners team.

For more information on Capital Partners' award winning team, visit capital-partners.com.au.

Have a question? Email us ask@capital-partners.com.au.

This episode provides general advice only. We do not consider your personal circumstances when we share this information. Always refer to your financial adviser for advice about your personal circumstances. 

Capital Partners Consulting Pty Ltd AFSL 227148 trading as Capital Partners Private Wealth Advisers ABN 27 086 670 788.

Transcript

New Season And Guest Introduction

Aden 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Purposeful Investor Podcast. I'm your host, Aiden Wilkins. Join us as we delve into what it takes to make smart financial decisions, provide for the people you care about, and uncover what it means to be living your best life. Follow and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Welcome back to another episode of the Purposeful Investor Podcast. We're here in 2026 and we're excited to launch the new season of the Purposeful Investor. Without using these exact words, many of our clients come to us with the expressed goal of shaping a life of money and meaning. And this is the subtitle of the book we'll be discussing today, The Geometry of Wealth with Brian Portnoy. So to give you a little bit of context, Brian is one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of money. He's written multiple best-selling books, including The Geometry of Wealth and has 20 plus years of experience as an investor and educator in the hedge fund and mutual fund industries. He's a CFA charter holder and earned a PhD at the University of Chicago. So welcome to the podcast, Brian. Great to see you, Aidan. And I'm also joined by our founder, David Andrew. David, welcome to the podcast.

David 1:08

Thanks a lot, Aiden. Nice to be back in 2026 and a PhD from the University of Chicago, Brian. I like for our listeners, the University of Chicago is the top school in the United States for business and finance, pretty much, right? It's it's just crazy good. So well done, you. That's an amazing achievement.

Brian 1:30

I appreciate that, but let's make this uh curvy and non-linear. My PhD is in the social sciences, it's not in business and finance. I studied politics and law and sociology and themes that we'll probably explore today in terms of the human condition and the ups and downs of uh individuals and society. So um the the business and finance types were across the quad. I knew some of them. I know some of them. But uh yeah, yeah, it was uh politics, law, and sociology that uh filled uh filled my brain for uh 10 plus years down in uh on the south side of Chicago.

David 2:12

Well, I've I I almost don't say it, but um with what's going on in your country right now, your head must be spinning. With a PhD in politics and sociology, you're you must be working overtime. Anyway, we won't we won't go too far into that.

Brian 2:26

Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, because I do spend most of my time hiding under my desk. You guys, I'm above my desk and looking at the weekend.

Wins Of The Week And Family

Aden 2:33

No rabbit holes today. Um so as as our listeners know, we like to start off the podcast with a little win of the week. So that is anything that's happened in the last week. It can be a personal win or a professional win. And seeing as you're our guest today, Brian, why don't you start off with your little win of the week?

Brian 2:48

Yeah. Um, you know, my life is my family. I've got three kids, 23, 21, 19, and all three have been home from university for the last couple weeks. And so we've had a full house, and that is the blessing. So uh it's more than a win. It's a blessing.

David 3:08

Yeah. Love it. What about you, Dave? Yeah, a very similar theme. Um, we've had comings and goings. We're we're down at our little weekender. Our listeners know that Rob Robin and I have a little weekend uh uh in the bush. And um we've had Lockie and his partner, Tim and his partner and Jeremy come and go, and also some friends of Tim's from Sydney, which has been fabulous. And um, I just love it when your kids get in, your adult kids get in their mind that they're gonna get something done. I've got a little chook pen out the back, and I've been looking at this chook pen saying, Oh, I've got to take that down, we're never having chooks again. Anyway, the Ryan, our guest, and Tim said, Oh no, we can we can fix that, that's fine. So they demolished the run part of the chook shed. So I now have a tractor shed. So I'm really happy guy. It's awesome.

Aden 4:01

Love it. Um so mine's probably on a similar theme, and I guess given it's um this time of year, so we're in January 26th, and you're sort of reflecting um over the over that sort of festive season period. I had lots of friends that were back in town who either overseas or live on the east coast or live up north, so it's always good to catch up with them. But similarly, on another note, it's also the time of year when some people depart for other parts of the world. It's had a few friends move across to London and and other areas, so it was it was just nice to catch up with the returning folk and also um bid farewell to those who are heading off. So that was nice.

Brian 4:34

Right. That's great. Yeah, I mean, look, uh so much of life is just about connection with others. So uh it's not a surprise, especially at the turn of the year, that uh we're all reflecting on, you know, sort of re-reconnecting with loved ones and uh, you know, uh it's it's the good stuff.

Brian’s Nonlinear Career Path

Aden 4:53

Absolutely. Sure is. So so Brian, why don't we why don't we dive into the topic today, the the geometry of wealth, but I I'd really like to start with a little bit of your background. So we briefly touched on it before. But so where where did this all start and what's what's your career journey been so far?

Investing As Psychology Not Engineering

Brian 5:09

Yeah, I always describe it as nonlinear. Um and you know, we we veered uh in this direction earlier in terms of getting a doctorate in political science and social sciences 30 plus years ago. My original passion growing up as a uh as a boy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was politics and history. That was always my thing. Um so that's what I studied at university, uh, and I worked in Washington, D.C. in politics, uh, and then ended up at University of Chicago to uh you know study that that field broad broadly defined, not American electoral politics, but politics as a way of thinking of organizing society. Um, you know, had some success in the academic pursuits, but ultimately decided that it wasn't the right career for me, just as a very practical matter, uh at least in the American Academy. It's very hard to find a good job, it's very hard to grow your wealth, it's very hard to have a stable life because you're always moving around looking for the next, the, the, the next teaching opportunity. Um, so uh for a bunch of reasons, I decided to leave academia and somewhat randomly got a job at a firm that I've you know is uh started here in Chicago, big in the US, but also big in Australia, which is called Morningstar, which is an investment research firm. Now it does many things. When I was there, there were 400 employees. Now there's what, 10,000 employees all over the world. And um it was just a great experience. And that started uh kind of a I call it about a 15-year stretch where I was really consumed by investments and markets. And I was never interested in sort of the hot dot, like what's the big stock that people are investing in. But I loved sort of observing how people made decisions and how they uh built portfolios. And and so that became my passion for um for a long period of time. I moved from Morningstar after a few years to the fund of hedge funds industry, which um, you know, I could, I I wrote a I was saying I could write a book on it. I actually did. The first book called The Investors Paradox was very much kind of uh a long uh overview of sort of what I observed in the hedge fund space through a behavioral lens. Um, you know, suffice it to say, and you know, let's focus on current issues with geometry of wealth and and other financial planning considerations, suffice it to say, after 12, 15 years swimming in the deepest end of the investment pool, I pretty firmly concluded that investing is more of a psychology problem than an engineering problem. And as that came into focus over the course of years, it wasn't a flash of insight, it wasn't uh something that happened in a week. Just over time I realized being able to hang out with the very best hedge fund managers in the world, in New York, London, Hong Kong, all over the world, uh, that success was really based on what was happening here between our ears and less so in the spreadsheets. Yes, you needed the mechanical or the engineering and the quantitative stuff to be just so, but the decisions that drove true riches over the years were very much about temperament, about emotion, about uh organizational psychology. Uh and that's when I kind of pivoted. Uh as I mentioned, I wrote this book called The Investor's Paradox. Um, there's a concept in social psychology known as the paradox of choice. It basically basically says we're hardwired to love choice because choice is a sense of agency and power we have over an uncertain world. But modern psychology has sort of discovered and articulated that at a certain point when you get too much choice, you feel overwhelmed. And as we go to the supermarket or turn on Netflix or look at our smartphones, we have thousands or tens of thousands or millions of choices. And it's one of the reasons why humans are generally on tilt. So I wrote about that phenomenon through an investment lens. Um uh I got to the end of that book and basically thought, you know what, who cares? I was kind of tired of uh focusing on um investment problems, and especially as you know, whatever it was, uh 12 years ago, my kids were 12 years younger, and I was thinking about the world that they were growing up in. And I wanted to write a bigger meditation on where money fits into a meaningful life, and that was the geometry of wealth that has led to wonderful things, friends and relationships uh all over the world, a business uh called Shaping Wealth, uh that's a coaching and content platform. Uh, you know, the geometry of wealth has led to many amazing things. And it was on the back of close to 20 years just thinking about how do we navigate financial markets, but how does money fit into a meaningful life? And you know, fast forward to now, I'm running, shaping wealth, and having a fair bit of fun.

David 10:14

You travel the world, Brian. Um, and um I just wonder from a societal context whether um you see differences, let's say, between you know the uh United States and the United Kingdom and Australia, and I know you have a strong familiarity with each of those and other countries perhaps, in terms of where money fits into those countries culturally. Do you see many differences?

Global Culture Of Money And Institutions

Brian 10:46

Yeah, I I I I do well, I I I've thought about this a lot, and and there's a lot of observations to share, and I'll share and maybe the way to frame it is to say two things. The first is that humans are human, and so if I'm in Mumbai or Tokyo or London or Calgary or Los Angeles, you know, people humans are wired on the back of thousands and thousands of years of evolution to be the way that we are. Doesn't mean that we're the same, it just means that the that the dynamic of surviving and thriving is roughly the same across all humans, and that has implications for how we um navigate uncertainty. And one version of uncertainty is financial uncertainty. So there's a kind of similarity there that transcends time and culture. But then the second point is that, you know, um, you know, with my business, for example, uh the U.S. is the bulk of our clients, but we have a lot of clients in Canada, uh, a lot of clients in the UK, some clients in Australia, and you see kind of nuances in terms of disposition toward wealth accumulation. You also see just different institutions and organizations, the way this phenomenon known as retirement is structured politically and sociologically by those particular societies. And uh those structures drive certain types of decision making. So, you know, for example, in the US, we're just sort of, you know, kind of on a tightrope without a net in terms of healthcare insurance, in terms of university, in terms of a lot of social services that I think other societies benefit from. And on the flip side, you know, there's implications for tax regimes and things like that. As boring as that might be, and we're not going to probably go there, you know, the culture of money shifts based on kind of these institutional arrangements, but those institutional arrangements reflect the underlying country, uh culture of the place to begin with. So I've stayed pretty high level, but to summarize, some things are identical because humans are human, and other things are wildly different because of cultural nuances.

David 13:07

Okay, so this is fascinating. So you say in the United States you're on a tight, tight rope without a safety net, and I see that when I I I I get that. I just wonder how much does that feed into a sense of I've got to be successful here, I cannot afford to screw this up. And and therefore the work ethic is enormous, the entrepreneurial, um, inventive psychology is huge. Whereas in Australia, I'm and I'm not bagging Australia, and I'm I'm certainly not I have no value judgment over either of these models. But in Australia, we have a an institutionalized retirement system, we have a subsidized education system, we you can take a loan from the government at a relatively low rate to fund your education. Yes, you can still come out of university with a $100,000 loan to the government, but it's not a two, three, four, five hundred thousand dollar student loan. And um and I just wonder how much that plays into our laid-back, cruisy kind of cultural approach to life.

Brian 14:19

It it well, it does to some extent. Um I don't know how to measure that off the top of my head. But you know, for example, you know, when I talk to close friends in the Canadian and British financial planning markets, probably their top observation of the US is just how entrepreneurial we are. The willingness to take risk, um, the sort of almost going back 150, 200 years, the kind of a frontier mentality. Um, you know, I've done things kind of, well, I don't know if I've done things backwards, upside down, right ways. I I don't know, but you know, I'm in my mid-50s and taking very significant entrepreneurial risk. Um, not the most normal thing, but I feel, from a personal disposition point of view, very comfortable doing that. I've had enough financial success in prior versions of my career to be able to afford that. But generally speaking, that entrepreneurial spirit is all over the U.S. Lots of people taking lots of risks. And I doubt the explicit mindset is, well, tightrope without a net, I may as well go for broke. I don't think that's it. But there is some sort of entrepreneurial zeitgeist here that people are quite comfortable with. And if you fail, you fail. And then you probably try to do it um all over again. I don't see that in a ton of other places, and it's probably one reason why in aggregate the US is so wealthy, although then you go below the surface and you see massive income and wealth disparity. So there's sort of a lot of money floating around, but it's increasingly kind of tilted toward one, you know, one side of the one side of the the distribution.

Home Bias And Global Diversification

David 16:16

There's a very interesting um little insight here for our listeners, though, and that is that it it's very common. There's a thing in investing called home bias. And it's very, very common for Australian investors to say, oh, well, you know, I want to have most of my money in Australia because I know the Commonwealth Bank and I know the National Australia Bank and I know, I don't know, Woodside Energy and CSL and all of these places. By not investing essentially in the SP 500 index, the top 500 companies in the United States, you are missing out on all of that entrepreneurial flair and uh energy and wealth creation. You've got to investors have to be there, right?

Brian 17:06

Yeah, I mean I'll share, why not? I'm not gonna give numbers, but I can share line items. I have a plurality of uh Tracy and my liquid assets in an ETF, you know, here in the US uh from Vanguard called with the ticker VT. Um VT is the global, VTI is the US market, VT is global. I think it's 19,000 underlying stocks. It's I don't know what the balance between US and non-US securities are, but it's effective. I effectively for a fraction of a penny purchased exposure to the global stock market. And so what comes, comes. And if it's up, great. And if it's down, I'm not alone. And it is what it is, but you know, for me at least, um, it's comfortable knowing that um I've got exposure to everything, including you know, the U.S. darlings, like we see right now with kind of these AI and and intense tech type uh things. But when that falters, there's going to be other things that fall in its place. And, you know, I I don't know how much we want this to be an investing-oriented conversation, but you know, as the dollar weakens and and and returns to me on non-US securities go up, that balance, that tilt toward non-US economies and markets has benefited me. It hurt me for like eight or 10 straight years. I'm not one to care much. I don't like nickel and diming. I it's not how I want to spend my days. Uh, but for me, that global diversified low-cost exposure is more or less everything, and then I can get on with my life because, you know, to you know, point we were talking about earlier, I got to the end of the investors' paradox. At that point, it was 15 plus years in the market. And I was like, to some extent, for most people, investing is a solved problem. I'm not saying that there aren't important decisions to make. I'm not saying that there aren't risks that won't bite you if you don't think about them in the right way. But, you know, 80-90% of the problem of getting exposure to capital markets and owning a low-cost, diversified liquid portfolio, that's been solved. And it's probably the right thing for most people. One of the challenges is the market is always selling the hot dot. Hey, we're going to give you exposure to crypto, we're going to give you exposure to private companies, we're going to give you exposure to fill in the blank. I mean, I saw this in the year 2000, 26 years ago, when I started at Morningstar as a junior analyst there. Um, if you can maybe either not uh pay attention to the hot dot or have your advisor give you permission to have a very tiny cowboy account so you could play around with that stuff. Either way, you can um uh uh have the general exposure that most People need most of the time with very, very little effort.

The Iceberg: Noise Versus Depth

David 20:04

Yeah. And this this goes this is a lovely segue, I think, Aiden, into you know the idea of the geometry of wealth and and shaping wealth. We talk to our clients, Brian, about the iceberg. And the tip of the shiny tip of the iceberg that you can see is all of the shiny dots that the marketers and the fund managers would have you believe is the next thing. You need to have exposure to crypto, you need to have exposure. When in fact the reality of investing is, as you say, quite eloquently, very eloquently, the problem has been solved. Don't be worried about that. So we all know that with an iceberg there's millions of tons of ice under the waterline, and that's the deeper conversation.

Brian 20:52

Mm-hmm.

David 20:53

So let's let's go there. Um you came up with this idea of funded contentment, which I love, but I just want to read a couple of bit extracts from your introduction from the book The Geometry of Wealth. Money Bewilders How to Earn It, Spend It, Save It, Invest It. These are practical, often complicated puzzles we attempt to solve just about every day. Another passage which I loved it's a Lord Voldemort of topics, feared by most, mentioned by few. It's uncomfortable to discuss money socially, and rarely even with our partners, parents, or our children. The reasons are many, but boil down to the fact that money is both analytically complex and emotionally fraught. Brilliant. I love it.

Brian 21:50

Page one. Yeah, yeah, that's page one. With more to come. Yeah.

Defining Funded Contentment

Aden 21:55

So can you tell us a bit about this um this idea of funded contentment, Brian, and and what it essentially talks to and what it really means?

Social Comparison And Mental Health

Brian 22:03

Yeah, so I think it's on page two. Uh this isn't a book club, so we're gonna probably not read the whole I'm not gonna, you know, uh read read more passages, but um, I think it is on page two. I make a distinction between being rich and being wealthy. And I think that um a lot of where financial services frames the issue in terms of selling securities, building portfolios, and so forth is about being rich. What is rich? Number go up. You have a million dollars, you want two. You have two million dollars, you want three. There's nothing, you know, sort of uh in principle that's wrong with that, but it's probably not the deeper problem that most of us are trying to solve in the grander context of our life, where financial well-being um uh is part of a larger consideration of a life that we want to live. So rich versus wealthy, rich is sort of uh a numerical and quantitative uh wealthy to me is the ability to underwrite, to afford um a life that's meaningful to you, however you um however you choose to define that, and however you choose or are compelled to update that through life's ups and downs. And so, you know, there's a field of psychology that's relatively new called positive psychology. It's a fancy term for the science of happiness. And so I very deliberately chose the word contentment as opposed to happiness. Um, happiness is a little bit uh ephemeral in terms of good mood, bad mood, cheerful, you know, sad, comes and goes. Contentment I chose as the word, um, the actionable word, because it connects to a deeper sense of um of a life well-lived, what Aristotle 2,400 years ago called eudaimonia. And so, you know, this idea of contentment is the epicenter of my work. And then funded contentment, well, that's the ability to underwrite contentment. It's the ability to afford the things that truly drive the life that you want to live. Um, and there's no prejudgment over what that means for you. But what I am trying to do is create a space for people to just think about it. So funded contentment is just not a concept, it's also a tool. It's a two-blade Swiss Army knife to be used in a very specific way. Contentment first, funded second. We spend a lot of time trying to get rich. We want to be funded. We want more effectively, and we want more for good reasons, and we can get into that. More is virtuous in its own bounded way. But at the same time, we want to think about contentment, which is more of a sense of presence and stillness and different forms of joy fit into there. So, what drives contentment for us? I put forth a whole model in the book of that there are four sources of contentment, and you know, based on not just my research, but just living in the world and reading philosophy and theology and sociology, and maybe this is where my old weird PhD comes in handy. But these are the drivers of contentment. So the first blade that we pull out of the tool, the first thing we cut is like this issue of what is contentment to me. That involves a process of self-awareness and self-examination that is important, it's not always comfortable, and it feels very far away from finance and the markets, but to me, it's what's most important. Once we have an answer to that question, even if the answer is going to change tomorrow, we have an answer today. We can then say, well, what do those things cost? And can I afford them? You get these aha moments from folks, normal people. I think we're kind of normal, but I'm talking about the clients of your firm, the clients of the advisors that I serve, the you know, people who have written me letters from all over the world, strangers I've never met before, saying that funded contentment really impacted the way they see things. And so once you've defined what contentment is, and you say, Well, can I afford those things? You realize, aha, some things, like my kids coming home from university and us sitting on the couch watching Netflix and ordering in a pizza, that's not free, but it's not very expensive at all. Okay, we didn't go to a ski chalet, we didn't do anything wildly expensive, we were just together. And so that connection with my family is effectively free. But then there are other things that we want to do in our life that are um uh unaffordable and always will be, to have that perfect vacation cottage, you know, uh outside of town or up in the mountains or on the beach, to be able to give millions of dollars to charities that matter to you. Most of us can't afford to do that. Um, to be able to just walk away from any job and just sort of roam the earth with pure independence. Things that might sound kind of appealing to us, hey, can't afford them. So the funded contentment process, not just the concept, contentment first, process uh funded second, opens up a whole dialogue in our own minds with our partners, with our families, and with our our financial advisors.

David 27:46

Do you do a little bit of um sorry, Gayden, you go?

Language Of Money And Advisor’s Role

Aden 27:49

I was gonna say, do you think it's been more difficult for society to, I guess, have that sense of funded contentment with social media and everything that's in your face and this idea of keeping up with the Joneses? And you see, like for example, recently I was in the US and I was in Fort Lauderdale or four places and did one of those cruises there and they show you all the the big houses. But essentially what you'd see is you'd go on this boat trip and there'd be a bigger house and a bigger boat. And from from my perspective, you could tell all these people were just competing against each other. And so you could, it was almost like they're in this rat race of, well, if they've got that, I've got to do this. And do you think that's become more difficult over time to have this idea of funded contentment if you're always competing against others?

Brian 28:33

Yeah, and I I I've thought about this. I I actually think the answer is yes, or you know, tending trending toward yes. So there's an old line from JP Morgan, like the JP Morgan, who said that nothing corrupts your financial judgment more than the sight of your neighbor getting rich. When he wrote that line, call it a hundred years ago, you literally were talking about your neighbors. I mean, I'm guessing he lived in a very big house, so maybe his neighbor was off to the distance, off in the distance. Um but fast forward to 2026, the whole world is our neighbor because we see everybody, everywhere, all day, every day. And it's a reason, one of the reasons why there's a global mental health crisis with anxiety and stress and depression and things like that. Um, because we're in a relatively unprecedented and I would argue unnatural state where we are seeing each other all of the time. And, you know, I don't remember who said this, but it's it's important, you know, that comparison is the thief of joy. And we are positioned to compare ourselves to everybody else every day. And almost no one, including me, and I do this for a living, can resist the tractor beam of being pulled into that comparative place where you see the bigger houses on the shore, or I see the friend go on the nicer vacation, or I see X, Y, Z, whatever, you know, fit fill in the blank for what might drive you a little bit crazy, might make you a little bit envious. So um there are elements to our humanity that are evergreen, they've been this way for a hundred thousand years, and then there's a context within which that humanity is being expressed. And I do think of late that it's as hard as ever. And I I I and Aiden, I don't know if you saw this in any of the kind of shaping wealth content, but I call this the paradox of prosperity. Yeah, the crude definition of which is that we've never been richer and we've never been more miserable. Yeah, it's wild. It's wild because we live better than the kings and queens of France and England not that long ago in terms of material comfort.

Aden 30:55

Yeah. And that's crazy, isn't it? Yeah, how have you seen that play out of your advising career, Dave, in terms of have you found sort of when looking back to when you first started 25, 30 years ago, have you found that it's become a little bit more difficult to help people get to that point of what's important to them?

Am I Going To Be Okay And Enough

Brian 31:12

No, I I I haven't. I mean, I I I well I've built a business around this, so it's a little hard to say. I I don't think it's it's easy. But people want answers, but maybe more fundamentally, people want words. If you have a vague pain in your body physically, but you can't define it and you can't describe it and you can't point to it, then your physician is going to have a hard time healing you. If you know precisely where the pain is and what to call it and why it's happening, it might not be easy to fix at that moment, but at least you can work on it. And the same thing that's true of physical well-being is true of financial well-being. And when we have the words to describe the things that are important to us in this vague, broad thing called money life, things get a little bit better. There's an old, you know, uh sociolinguist named uh Ludwig Buttgenstein who said the limits of my language define the limits of my world. In some ways, what we're doing at shaping wealth, and it's probably my deepest source of pride in what my team and I have put out there, is that we're teaching the language of money. And I contend that no one speaks it fluently. David here, who's a friend for many years now, and I think of as one of the most thoughtful life planners on the globe, I would boldly say he's not fluent in the language of money. He's still coming up with the vocabulary, the syntax, the grammar of all of these moving dimensions of money life, because some of them are evergreen and others are changing. We've got new types of investments, we've got new types of markets, we've got generational differences uh afoot that perceive the world in different ways. So all of us, all of the time, are students of the language of money, and when we have the right words, things are a little bit better, but it's hard.

Does Money Buy Happiness

David 33:16

Yeah. And I would add to that, Aiden, that I think the thing that I've learned over a very long career as a financial advisor is that there's a lot, and this is probably true of so much of life, but but but the social media uh angle that you raised does challenge it. And that is that being a financial, a good financial advisor, a useful financial advisor, is actually you are a reality-based leader. And it's the same when you're running a business, you are a reality-based leader. Now, if you've got someone in your team who says, Well, I don't like that this is going on, you say, Well, I'm sorry, I'm the that is the world and I can't fix it. And it's the same with dealing with clients, is we we have to be really honest with our clients. Do you using your analogy of a doctor, Brian? Do you want to go to a doctor and say, Look, doctor, I'm feeling really poorly, and um you know, and the doctor tells you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. And it's the same with financial advice and working with clients. We we need to help clients through a gently take them on a journey of of building out this idea of contentment, a sense of purpose, a sense of what a great life would be within a framework of reality. You know, you we are we are doing people a great disservice if we promise the world. But you know, this idea of giving a client what they need versus what they want. I see advisors all around the world giving clients what they want all the time. I want I want a portfolio of stocks that is gonna, you know, beat the index. Yes, I can give you that. I want a portfolio of XYZ that can do this. I want a financial plan that's gonna deliver me retirement at the age of 50. Yes, I can do that for you. Well, the reality base leader in me says, no, you can't. So tell the truth. And it's it's a it I think for a lot of financial advisors around the world, Brian, this is a really, really hard thing for them to do.

Human‑First Advice And Closing

Brian 35:27

Well, of course it is, because we want to please others. I mean, I've worked with many, many, many thousands of advisors over the years, and 99% of them are just good people trying to provide a good service to others. Um, and it's not always easy to say, I can't do that, or I don't know. That's just not the natural way for us to be generally, and certainly not the way for us to be as professionals and deep experts in all of this uh financial financial stuff. Um the nice one of the nice things about this concept of funded contentment is that you rarely have to convince anyone that that's that's kind of what they want. They want to be able to afford the life that's most meaningful to them. You know, you're gonna have some hard-boiled quant types engineers, you know. My advisor friends always joke about the engineers. There's always an engineer on the on the client roster who you know wants the answer to the third decimal place, but realize doesn't ever realize he's asked the wrong question. And it's always a he. Let me be biased here. Um so so that's fine. So one in a hundred or one in eighty might not get it. But for the most part, you know, if the advisor can put forth in their own voice, um you don't even have to use the term funded contentment, but can put forth in their own voice, like, I'm here to help you underwrite and afford the life that you envision for you and your loved ones. And then you can both emotionally and psychologically kind of navigate those conversations and at the same time, technically or mechanically, sort of um engineer the portfolio, the insurance plan, the estate plan, the tax optimization, uh, all of those things, then you can't help but be successful in this space. I do think financial advice, uh I'm biased because it's what I do, but I also happen to believe it's true. I think it's really one of the most unsung virtuous careers on the planet because we don't really have any strong shared conceptualization of financial well-being, but everybody's desperate for it. And so the good financial advisors can sort of lead people toward some version of financial well-being. My version's called fund and contentment, but we can broaden the concept and help them get there.

David 37:59

Yeah. And if I if I come back to our analogy of uh the iceberg, you know, there's the the tip of the iceberg where there's all the noise, the voices, the choices. There's so much going on in the world of you know, financial planning and insurance. There's so many competing voices for what we ought to be doing. Go below the waterline. What we find, Brian, is there are three critical questions that just about every client is asking, if not out loud, certainly in their heads. And they are Am I making the smartest decisions I can around my money? Am I making dumb mistakes I don't even know about? The second one is, are the people I care about gonna be okay no matter what? And the third is, am I gonna have a good life? And it and it really struck me as I was rereading your book the other day over the break that there's this this this this raw human question that we all ask ourselves that sits right at the core of everything we've been talking about. And that's am I gonna be okay? Yeah. Are Brian and Tracy gonna be okay? Are the kids gonna be okay? Are they gonna make it through uni? Are they going to are they are they gonna be able to have the life that we think is gonna be a great life? And and to be able to help people navigate that little set of questions is is just incredibly rewarding.

Brian 39:35

Well, let's put little in inverted commas because it's not it is little, it's all slash the biggest of them all. Um I I think the if not the sole, by far the most important question we're all asking in the context of uh our money life is Am I going to be okay? Um am I safe? Are my loved ones safe? And And um, you know, you can have a client, you can be someone with $10 million, $100 million, you know, $493 million, go all the way up the scale. They are still asking every day, am I going to be okay? Why? Because human beings are wired to, with utmost precision, observe and hedge danger in their world. And there's really no difference between red claw and red line. You could be out in wilderness and in physical danger, or you could be at your desk watching the market go down. And the difference between the bloody claw and the red line on the chart are identical in terms of the physiological trigger that we feel we feel unsafe, but we need to feel safe. The ultimate human dynamic is survive and thrive. It's what we think about every day subconsciously. Um, you know, and the game, it's not simple, but it's straightforward. We have to survive every day. That's imperative. So if you want to play the game tomorrow, you gotta get through the day. We don't have to thrive every day. And so a lot of what financial advisors are doing a lot of the time, regardless of the client's circumstances, are giving comfort that things are gonna be okay at the level of boy, it's a lot of paperwork. We got this organized. Don't worry, nothing's gonna fall through the crack. Hey, we've thought about long-term insurance and and and sort of left tail events that we don't want to think about. But if they do, they'll be a little less painful because of the plans that we made. More straightforward stuff about retirement. Hey, when I get to age 60, 62, 65, am I gonna be able to transform my assets into cash flows in a way that make me feel comfortable and frankly dignified after a long career of working? So those are all safety issues. Those are all am I gonna be okay issues? And then once you basically exhale, then you say, Well, where's the good stuff? That's when you can begin to really, you know, life's to be enjoyed, not just hedged. And so, you know, that's where the thriving comes in. And so I in the book, I I think it's on we're going page by page, so we'll be done in what, like 19 hours here. Uh uh, but I think we're on page three. There's two questions. One is, am I gonna be okay? And the second question is, how much is enough? Yeah. Because when we get into the question of enough, which I think is a wildly interesting and complicated and historically specific uh concept, uh you've answered yes, I'm gonna be okay. I I feel safe in all important regards. Okay, so now I want to grow. Now I want to accumulate, now I want more, and I want to thrive. How much do I need to do that? How much risk do I need to get to that place of enough? And here's the thing: enough's not a number, it's a mindset. Um, and that's not always easy for people to wrap their brains around. I don't think it's easy for many financial advisors to wrap their brains around the fact that more is a number, but enough is a mindset. And when you accept that, then the advisor's job is to manage the mindset around enough, which you didn't learn in MBA school, or getting a PhD in economics, or having some fancy kind of finance background. No, the questions around enough get you back to philosophy and theology and bigger questions about a life well-lived.

Aden 43:35

So brilliant. I wouldn't mind exploring another concept that you touched on in the book, and it's it's probably something that our listeners, I know I held it a lot growing up, and it's the idea of money and happiness. And there was the there's that quote that money doesn't equal happiness or money doesn't buy you happiness, but it can certainly um, I guess, deal with a lot of problems or deal with comfort. But what um what angle have you looked at it from in your book?

Brian 43:58

Yeah, um I don't like people flippantly saying money doesn't buy happiness. Um, you know, the trend in global poverty, trend in global poverty is really something to behold. It was only 200 years ago that 90% of the planet lived on less than $2 a day. We lived in filth. Um fast forward to now, that's inverted. Maybe 7 or 8% of the world's population, a very big number in terms of number of people, but as a percentage of the world, hey, we're gonna call this progress. We're gonna, we're we're we're gonna take the win. And that has correlated uh directly to the accumulation of wealth. And you know, there's just an enormous amount of reliable research that shows that you know money buys you the things in life that make you happy up into a certain point where you've achieved what I'd call, at least in an American context, a middle class income. There's so many different numbers that get floated around. And Manhattan, New York, and Manhattan, Kansas are two very different places and the cost of living. But um, you know, so the the the one short answer is that up until a certain point, money does buy happiness, but then beyond that income threshold, can't uh does it? It there's more and more research on this, it's a little bit controversial, it's a bit of a moving target, but you know, I'll I'll sort of anchor on the fact that, you know, or anchor on the idea that the answer becomes sort of no beyond that beyond that income threshold. However, and this is where I think it gets even more interesting, it depends on what we define by happiness. And um the um the um uh uh the literature distinguishes between two types of happiness, sort of experienced happiness and reflective happiness. Experienced happiness, I referred to it briefly earlier, is sort of the day-to-day good mood, bad mood. Um, money has no real relationship to that. You could be a billionaire and be miserable in your day-to-day mostly because of your own disposition. Um, or you could be poor and very cheerful because that's who you are. Um, but interestingly, there does seem to be some relationship between money and reflective happiness. Reflective happiness is that step back of you every now and then saying, huh, is this the life that I want to lead? Are things going really well? When you attach more money to that, you then begin that two-step process of thinking through funded contentment. And you can begin to think about, okay, there are different ways for me to live more meaningfully if I spend wisely, if I allocate wisely. Yeah, that's fascinating. So I left you with a complicated answer because it's complicated. And um, I have it in front of me, David has it in front of him. The chapter on money buys happiness, chapter five, is called Yes, not really, it depends.

unknown 47:01

Yeah.

Brian 47:02

So that's the answer.

David 47:03

Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And that's certainly my experience as an advisor is that the idea of having the best life you possibly can with your money you have is incredibly empowering. And you know, some of our some of our relatively small clients uh have wonderful, wonderful lives, and some of our wealthiest uh clients, seriously wealthy clients, have very, very complicated, um, challenging relationship with money. So it it it it's probably a really good spot to wrap up. Um there's a lot to think about. It's it's um it's been incredible, Brian. It's just always good chatting with you and always love it. And uh unpacking these issues. I think our listeners will love this. Yeah, definitely.

Brian 47:56

And I'll if I hope so, and you know, you guys have been you know great friends and partners for for many years. You get it, uh, which is wonderful. Um and um, you know, one thing that's very uh I think positive is that there is a trend in money world, in financial services, to take these issues seriously. That, you know, it's a movement of sorts, human-first, human-centric, behavioral advice, whatever you want to label it, but people like the three of us and the firms we work for and the social networks that we operate in, who are willing and able to ask harder, but I think much more interesting questions of where does money fit into a meaningful life and and the how do I drive those, drive those great outcomes. If at the end of the day your thing is I want to find the next hot stock or the next big sector, that that's fine. That's great. You know, it's like saying I like cheeseburgers versus pizza. Like, you know, there's no you know, people should do whatever they want. But I do think that folks like us who can provide the framework and the vocabulary for thinking about issues that many people are scared to talk about, Lord Voldemort, you know, feared by many, you know, discussed by few, you know, we can make Lord Voldemort actually um visible and not scary.

Aden 49:22

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I I really like David, you've been able to reflect on your lived experience through the hedge fund space and really being really close to Marcus, but actually getting to a point where you found that the biggest problem or the biggest thing that people need to come to terms with is behavioral. Because that's certainly been my lived experience um over the last 10 years. And if we're actually chatting before the podcast, saying the exact same thing. So I think it's it's really useful to be able to share that message with our listeners. Um, and I'm sure they'll take great comfort from it.

Brian 49:50

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, guys.

Aden 49:52

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