Dr. Daniel Crosby: Human Behavior’s Influence on Investing – Episode #489

On this Dentist Money Show, Ryan and Matt welcome Dr. Daniel Crosby, renowned psychologist, best-selling author, and expert in behavioral finance. Dr. Crosby explains why our brains are wired for survival and not for the complexities of investing—and what you can do to navigate that limitation. Plus he explores the influence of the media on our financial decisions and the pitfalls that come from overconfidence.

 

 

 

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Podcast Transcript

Matt Mulcock:
I’m going to start with this. I, this was, we had already planned this out. The first question that we have for you, Daniel, you need to talk to us about the minor league baseball team in Alabama. Your favorite, your favorite team, your favorite team.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s my favorite phrase. Dude, you just set him off. Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Incredible. So I’m from a town called Huntsville, Alabama, which is known as Rocket City because of its involvement in the space and aerospace and defense. The name of the minor league team there, double A affiliate of the angels is the Rocket City trash pandas.

Matt Mulcock:
It’s incredible.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s, are they, okay. Hold on, I’m looking at uniforms.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
They led minor league baseball in merch sales last year for the most obvious reason that the name

Ryan Isaac:
Rocket City trash pandas. I’m hitting it right now. I’m gonna see what we got going on.

Matt Mulcock:
Trash pandas.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, grab a hat. Because for those who don’t know, a trash panda is a raccoon. That is what we call them. And so I took my daughter, who is now seven, when she was two or three, we took her to Cape Cod. No, incredible.

Ryan Isaac:
My kids would think it’s hilarious. It’s a raccoon. Oh.

Matt Mulcock:
Oh, there it is. That’s amazing. It’s riding a rocket.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s like, it’s a rocket ship trash can panda, like I’ll mean. Wow.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Oh yeah, so, so tough. So I took my daughter when she was two or three, I took her to this fancy resort in Cape Cod, where I was speaking, and she had a little raccoon stuffy that she took everywhere, and everywhere she went, she’s quite adorable, so everywhere she went, people would say, oh, how cute, you have a raccoon, and she would snarl at them, it’s not a raccoon, it’s a trash panda, and they definitely wondered why they let the folks from Alabama stay at this fancy.

Matt Mulcock:
Did the people there know that a raccoon was a trash panda or no? No one knew.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
No one that’s ever paid a nightly rate for a place in Cape Cod knows what a ****ing damage.

Ryan Isaac:
No one knows.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, knows what a trash pan is.

Ryan Isaac:
I love the signal that you’re a girl dead by calling it a stuffy. That just was like the dead giveaway. So yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
Yes. Tell me you’re a girl, dad, without telling me you’re a girl, dad. Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
I learned that in Canada, we always called them stuffed animals and then we spent a summer in Canada and they called them stuffies and I said this is a vast improvement. This is a big improvement over stuff.

Ryan Isaac:
Hehehe, his stuffies are so good. Yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
This is way better. It’s way better. I think I learned it from Bluey, the show Bluey. Are your kids too old for that? I mean, Ryan, yours are for sure, but Daniel, are you a Bluey fan?

Ryan Isaac:
Mm, it’s a pretty old friend. Yeah, I’m honored. Can you first, Matt, if it’s okay with you, maybe just talk, Daniel, about where, like maybe just intro who you are and what you do right now currently. You have a pretty unique position and title and work that you do in the industry that just is a very unique thing and we just kind of wanted to start there.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. And I mean, I’m excited about this summer out in the Beehive state. Operation Beehive Blitz is on this June. So I am the chief behavioral officer at Orion Advisor Solutions. We are of course sort of a most in one tech platform for financial advisors have this really cool role. My part has, they say I have sort of three hats I wear. It’s training tools and technology. So I’ll start with the training. We have something called the Orion Advisor Academy, which is our free online CE courses for advisors where, you know, any advisor can come in and at no cost get their entire two years worth of CFP coursework met, including an ethics course as of just recently and yeah, we don’t charge for that. And about three quarters of that content is around behavioral finance. So.

Ryan Isaac:
Wait, hold up. I am the, I’m the guy who, I do all 30 hours in the last two weeks of every two year period of time. And I would actually love to have it be meaningful. I had no idea. That’s amazing.

Matt Mulcock:
You just blew our minds.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Well, let me, we can now, Ryan, we can now spend those 30 hours together.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m a hundred but that makes me actually really happy. That’s very cool. How yeah Yeah, that’s what I needed to know. That’s really cool

Matt Mulcock:
Done. We can just end this actually here. We just got what we needed. We just got what we needed out of this. Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, so there’s the training piece. In terms of tools, we’re always looking to develop new assessments and things like that. So notably one we rolled out late last year was something called the B-Fi 20, where we interviewed hundreds of couples about what they fight about when they fight about money. And we found that there were this handful of things that people consistently have conflict around, which are basically their values, right? It’s values coming into contact with each other. So we developed like a two and a half minute, 20 question assessment of you and someone you love, be it a partner, a grandkid, whatever, your financial values and how they coincide with your loved one and give advisors tools for having deep conversations about that. That’s just one. And then the technology piece you know, behavioral finance, I’ve been doing this for a hot minute, as we say, and for many years, like for like the first decade of my professional career, I would write books, go places, speak, people would clap, they would be psyched about behavioral finance, and then they would go home and do nothing about it. Yeah, and so one of the things that Orion has allowed me to do is sort of bake.

Matt Mulcock:
Go right back to their life, yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
behavioral processes into the tech itself. So we have a behaviorally informed risk tolerance questionnaire, goals-based investing platform, soon a wellness app that’s coming out. So we have all this cool stuff and you know, you can take the courses, you can learn all this good stuff, but we know that you forget 90% of what you learn in the first three days if you don’t implement it. And so that’s what we’re trying to do. So I get to do a little education, a little tool development, and a little bit of baking psych into FinTech. And it’s a fun gig.

Matt Mulcock:
Hey, Dan, can just on what you just said, I think is interesting, kind of a interesting, uh, as they say, string to pull on a little bit. You said that, uh, and this is, I think pretty well known. The numbers may change, but somewhere in the range of 90% of knowledge, right. Lost in a short period of time. You said something key there, unless it’s implemented, just curious from your perspective, being a PhD, obviously, you know, loads of studies and data in your book. Books. Uh, to from your standpoint, when you say implement it, what does that mean? What are ways people can implement knowledge as they’re gaining it over, whether it be a book or whatever it is.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, so two things and they’re related. It needs to be implemented. Basically, it needs to be practiced and it needs to be made personally salient. So, you know, what happens a lot of times with financial education, one of the reasons why it’s so weak is if we teach people about financial literacy at all, it’s someone my daughter’s age, you know, my daughter’s 14. So it’s someone my daughter’s age who’s taking a financial literacy course. And she’s learning about interest rates and stuff, but she’s not gonna buy a house for a decade. And so it’s like, it’s kind of, you know, in one ear long enough to take the test and then out the other because it doesn’t, it’s not personalized and it’s not pertinent to her. So then she’s gotta kind of go relearn that. So one of the most powerful things we can do with tech is provide just-in-time education, right? So it’s like sort of at the point of decision, bang, here’s what an interest rate is, and here’s what it means for your mortgage. So yeah, if it’s not made personal and if it’s not practiced, you know, our brains have limited storage capacity. We’re gonna hang on to the stuff that’s most germane to our daily lives and interest rates aren’t super pertinent to the life of a high school kid. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Not yet. Matt, I know your brain is probably still here. We need to get to the book, but I’m really curious now about these couple studies and the surveys of what… Is that even a topic we can broach at all? I’m just so curious now. Just for two minutes, I’m just curious.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
We can completely go there.

Ryan Isaac:
Anything surprising or maybe not surprising, but that’s just very relevant. What you found from couples who argue about money and what stands out as so fascinating.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, yeah, a couple of things that stand out. So first, you know, David Foster Wallace famously talked about, you know, a fish not knowing that it’s wet. That’s what we found out about couples and money because, you know, I grow up in one sort of financial ecosystem and that’s my normal. You know, my wife grows up in another financial ecosystem, that’s her normal. Then we come together to create a new third financial ecosystem. And I go, hey, I wanna go to a movie. And she goes, that’s 30 bucks. That’s a waste of money. And I go, no, that’s what life is for, is buttery popcorn and movies, right? And so, you know, this is the fight we had early in our marriage, we made it, low these 18 years, but you know, that’s one of the things that we found, you know, Jung has this great quote that he says, see if I can get it until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And so we saw a lot of that with couples is just sort of unarticulated values, unarticulated preferences around money that were sort of driving stuff behind the scenes and it’s only once you bring that out and shine a light on it that you’re even able to do anything with it. So that’s kind of like the broadest possible point. Ryan, I think you’ll like this. The number one thing that couples fight about, this was fantastic to me, is whether money is best used to enjoy today or to secure tomorrow.

And the thing that I love about that is that they’re both critical. You know, we need both of those things. You need to spend some portion of your funds securing against an uncertain future. And then you also need to YOLO with some percentage of those funds, right? And so like finding that balance is really tricky. And a lot of times people are heavily decamped way far right or way far left where There’s sort of no moderation and either they get to you know They get to old age and they have more money than they’ll ever need and they give it to their you know crappy kids to squander or else you know or else they they Squand they they lived it up so hard that they arrive at that that financial finish line and they’re wholly unprepared. So across all of these dimensions, we’re working for synthesis and in moderation. The other thing we found, there was only one where there was sort of a cultural or a gender component. And this was around individualistic versus collectivistic use of money. So non-white, non-Western folks, tended to endorse more collectivistic uses of money, and women were more likely to endorse sort of a collectivistic use of money. So like if grandma needs her light bill paid, like my cousin needs a $5,000 loan because she’s starting her business.

Cool, that’s my job, right? Like it’s my job to support her versus you know, again, speaking of groups and not any individual in particular, but speaking as a collective, men, white men in particular and Western white men, were more likely to say, you know, put your own airbag on, you know, put your own mask on first, take care of yourself and then maybe some leftover help other people out. So again, they’re both because if you’re not being slightly collectivistic with your money, you’re missing out on chances to be charitable, which is one of the few ways that money consistently buys happiness. But then on the other hand, if you don’t put on your mask first a little bit, you got nothing to give and you’re not prepared yourself. So it was super interesting to do this study and just help people try and articulate those differences, know that and understand the water they’re swimming in and try and meet in the middle.

Matt Mulcock:
Man, there’s so much good stuff here. Like Ryan and I, Ryan and I were actually joking about this, Daniel, before you came on that we, as we were prepping for this, we were like, man, this could easily be a three hour discussion. Um, like I’m going to just throw this out there now. If you’re, if you’re willing to do multiple parts of this at some point, like multiple, you know, series with Daniel Crosby, we would, we would absolutely love it because I’m riveted by everything that you just went through. I think the key point there, what you said at the beginning is just, and we talk about this all the time.

Ryan Isaac:
Thanks. As he’d go for so long.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Let’s go!

Ryan Isaac:
Come back.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Easy.

Ryan Isaac:
Amazing. Yeah, thank you.

Matt Mulcock:
And tell me if this is a fair summary, but the first piece of that just being the power of awareness, like the, the articulating of your values as you’re putting it and the creating of awareness of not only around values, but around spending around, you know, we talk about this all the time, just creating that awareness that seems so simple but not, not easy all the time. So that was a, that was a fantastic summary. The other thing I’ll say to this really quick, uh, and Ryan, you probably have follow up on this, but you’re you’re talking about this balance Ryan and I have talked about this over the years of doing this for quite a while now with dentists One of the most underrated heart like hardest parts of our job is getting people to actually spend money Is getting people to actually enjoy and live and kind of align their money with their values as opposed to just stocking it away or thinking about I think one of the biggest problems with a traditional financial advisor approach is it’s too focused on this one day. So it’s good to know that you’re highlighting this, like this push and pull there.

Ryan Isaac:
so much there. And I also just wanted to say the nature that you’re describing of the differences between different groups of people, different parts of the world, different genders, cultures, and personality types of the YOLO spend, and then we got to have something later when we can’t work anymore. It’s just such a dynamic that is, it creates constant tension, but opportunities working couples and partnerships, and it’s just a constant balancing act. But that’s very nuanced, it’s a very nuanced thing to like dive into with every individual and man, we could just keep doing this, I have like a million questions, but thanks for sharing all of that part, we should dig into this some other time. Is there a place while we’re on the subject to find any of this research or data or interact with any of these tools, like what’s the best spots for the general public if that’s a thing, or just advisors who I know listen to this podcast.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
The general public, it’ll be a little tougher. For advisors, it’ll be orion.com slash B-F-I, B-E-F. I mean, the general public can go there too, but advisors are really who we serve.

Matt Mulcock:
Won’t be as… They won’t nerd out. They won’t nerd out like we will. Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
There’s some nerds who listen. There’s a few, there’s a few. Yeah. Okay, Matt, you wanna jump, let’s go into the book. Can you tell a little bit on how we arrived at this book? Most of us had read it like years ago before anyway, and we’re excited to dive back in and tell a little bit about the book.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. So just to kind of give a highlight or, you know, a high level, we talked about this a little bit last time, but we started kind of this informal, formal book club, Daniel. So we, as an advisor team, we wanted to really make 2024 emphasis, put an emphasis in 2024 on education and really just upskilling our knowledge across the board, across our advisor team. And share that with, with clients and dentists in the community. One of our kind of main core values is education and so we decided to make this again, I call it formal informal. We don’t want to put too much pressure on it, but the first book we did in January was Morgan Housel’s new book. Um, and then, uh, you’re, and we kind of floated out some other ones for, for February and you were on the short list. And the second year this book came up, we, we all were like, yes, we’re doing this one. Um, we, all of us, I think have read laws of, um, laws of wealth. And I said this before, that is one of my, if not my favorite money book.

And this one is right there with me. It’s just so good. So, um, I think how we arrived at this is pretty straightforward. You’re so good at combining stories with data, maybe better than anyone I’ve ever read any, any money author. And so, and the, the behavioral aspect, I mean, we believe this so much as financial advisors, uh, this idea that success is not about tactics. It’s about temperament, right? It’s about, it’s about these behaviors and you just highlight it so well with this data and these stories. So that’s kind of the preamble to all this of why we selected this book. And the last thing I will say, Ryan and I were talking about this, the behavioral investor, yep, by our guy, I probably should have started with that one, right? Yeah. The, this book, the book is the behavioral investor by Daniel Crosby. Um, but the other thing I will say really quick, Daniel, uh, just giving props to you, the organization of your book is so easy to follow.

Ryan Isaac:
Book title? What’s the book title? There we go, okay, yeah. Yeah. I’m realizing we haven’t said it once. We just keep saying this book, yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
I love your, I’m kind of throwing this out there for anyone out there that hasn’t read this book or any of your books. The organization, the way you break it down into parts, the way you end every chapter, you kind of are like, so what? Okay, what’s the so what? And you summarize, it’s just, it’s so good.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
So I appreciate a quick digression. I love that you read Morgan’s book in January. It’s a fantastic book. He did the foreword for the newest edition of the laws of wealth. I work out with a buddy from church in the morning and he’s been reading the psychology of money for like the last month. So every morning he comes in and tells me what a great writer Morgan House is. It’s true.

Matt Mulcock:
Morgan is fantastic. He’s so good.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Which is true, but I’ve also had to point out to him that like, hey man, maybe you could read some of my books as well. I mean, I’m pretty sure. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
So funny. Wait, hold on, wait, does he not know? Is this like a gym buddy who actually doesn’t know? Okay, all right, all right, all right. Yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
You’re like, have you heard of laws of wealth? You should check that one.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
No, no, he knows. He knows. That’s why it’s that much more brutal. It’s that much more brutal. No, no, he just, he only loves Morgan that much. And I don’t think it’s a very good book.

Matt Mulcock:
Is he trolling you? Okay. Yes, that’s pretty funny. So do you want me to jump into this, Ryan? Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, that’s amazing. Yeah, yeah, we kind of just highlighted, like you said, Matt, the book has broken up into four different parts. We’re going to kind of just high level talk about a few of these.

Matt Mulcock:
Yes. Yeah. So this will go in a lot of different directions, but just for everyone out there. So there’s four parts. Number one being the behavioral investor. And so we’ll just start with this one. Um, and we wanted to take kind of just pieces, uh, from each section. Uh, and, and so the thing, the thing that’s kind of jumped out the theme of that, of this first part is just, and I’d love to have you comment on this, Daniel, just how our brains are not wired for investing. And I thought it was so interesting. You talk about  how in 1997, they found the skull in Ethiopia as the example that was 150,000 years old, and they found that the size of the brain of this homo sapien from 150,000 years ago was about the same size as our brains today, but the financial markets being only 400 years old. So just the mismatch, I guess, let’s start with that. Just, can you speak to just generally around the mismatch of like the complexity of the markets and the, how are really our brains, the hardware we have is not set up for that.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? So yeah, Brain, you know, we haven’t had an upgrade to our sort of primary operating system here in creeping on 200,000 years. And in a second I’ll get to like, even the upgrades we’ve gotten aren’t very good. So, you know, it’s been 200,000 years we’re working with the iPhone 1 of Brains and living in an iPhone, whatever, 14, 15, wherever we’re at these days, world. And so we were wired for survival, right? I mean, the brain we have is wired for survival. And even if you go back further, right? The size of the brain, the size of the human brain over the last two million years, it’s gotten dramatically bigger. And the biggest addition to that has been the frontal lobe and the prefrontal cortex in particular. But what the prefrontal cortex does very well is it anticipates physical danger, right? Like, so, Dan Gilbert, who writes about these things, says, you know, nobody at Ben and Jerry’s has ever whipped up liver and onion ice cream because we know that it’s nasty, right? Like, just, you can hear that and go, nope, pass. Because like, we’re very good at forecasting what’s going to hurt us or be gross physically. But when it comes to what impacts us emotionally, which is sort of the core of what investing is all about, we’re awful. You know, we’re just not good at anticipating what will make us happy. We’re not good at anticipating risk. We’re not good at anticipating the things that lead to human flourishing. So we really are being asked to do these deeply emotional, higher order types of things in order to survive with a brain that is just there to keep us from dying, not dying, you know, long enough to pass on our genes. That’s kind of what our brain is good for. And now we’re living to be a hundred years old and we’re asking a lot more of it than it was wired to do.

Ryan Isaac:
I just want to say the thing I ended up really being happy that we did read Morgan’s book last month was one of the big takeaways I took from that was just the concept of survival and how much success can be found in merely surviving, but how hard it is to just survive when we’re talking about money and financial decisions and investing. So I love hearing this again from the from this data perspective and the history of humans and how we interact with our world now, because yeah, we’re wired for survival, but in the financial sense, it’s kind of amazing how often we just self-sabotage that survival. And I’m curious, like, that’s how we’re wired, and that’s like really what our brain is driving us to do, but, and maybe we’ll get to this in another section, I’m just, why do we harm ourselves so much with our poor financial decision-making? If we’re really wired to just survive and be okay and stay out of harm’s way, but we’re just so poor at sticking with like some basic good financial decisions for long periods of time.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, so even as recently as the founding of the US, right? So I mean, in the lifetime of our very young country, the average life expectancy was like mid 30s. So we are wired for short-termism. And when I say we’re wired to stay alive, it’s like you’re wired to stay alive today. That’s sort of what accounts for loss aversion, right? That’s why we’re two and a half times as upset about a loss as we are happy about a comparably sized gain. It’s because from an evolutionary perspective, you get one bad day, one, right? One bad day is all you get and then you’re dead. But if you have infinity minus one good days, it doesn’t much matter, just from an evolutionary perspective. So we’re wired for short-termism. I talk in the laws of wealth about Wall Street, bizarro world, like how the rules of investing are sort of inverted from the rules of everyday life. In everyday life, we’re far more certain about what’s gonna happen five seconds from now than we are about what’s gonna happen 50 years from now. But in markets, it’s the opposite. Five seconds from now, I know exactly what I’m gonna be doing, right? Five seconds from now, I couldn’t tell you with any degree of certainty what would be going on in the financial markets. Zero degree of certainty, right? And yet 50 years from now, if you said, hey, what’s the S&P gonna look like 50 years from now? I could give you an excellent approximation of that. And so we really are wired for short-term survival, whereas investing is a long game.

Ryan Isaac:
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, thank you.

Matt Mulcock:
It makes so much sense. We talk about this too all the time in regards to like stocks aren’t risky. They’re just to your point, they’re uncertain in the short term, but you just highlighted it perfectly. Dan, I’m curious what you think as far as you talk about this mismatch again of how complex markets are versus what our hardware is designed to do. How much worse is it now today would you say, even over the last 10 years when it, or maybe 20 years? I guess I’ll phrase this. Is it getting worse? Meaning financial media, um, social media, tick-tock, like it almost feels like we’re getting more wired for short-termism or the ecosystem is kind of like almost doubling down on that. Can you comment on that of like it, the, just the environment we’re in today with this short-termism?

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, it’s certainly getting harder. So I mean, I don’t even know where to start here because it’s so bad. So we’ll start with the apps, right? So now you can check your brokerage app, your stocks app on your phone, if you’re like me, 70 zillion times a day, right? I know I’m outing myself here, right? We know that the more people look at their accounts, the worse they do. And if you think about relatively recent history people got four updates a year About how their investment performance was was fairing right? I get four updates a day on on how my investment performance is fairing So yes, the more you look the worse it does Because again the shorter the timeline the worse the potential outcomes and the less the more uncertainty you have right the markets up whatever it is, 55% of days down, 45% of days. But if you think that the down days feel twice as bad as the up days feel good, like do that math, you know? What’s 45 times two? It feels like the market is always down if you’re checking every day versus, you know, you go out to a year, it’s gonna be like, more like 65, 35. If you go out to 10 years, you have a hard time finding, I think there’s only one period in US history where you had a loss.

So the more you look, the worse you do, and it’s never been easier to look, right? Then you’ve got the sort of the fire hose of information coming in. One of the things that we know about information like this is that it increases confidence without increasing performance. And so we’ve seen this in everything. My favorite study on this was actually done with, I’m a big college football fan being from Alabama. And it was done on sports betting with college football. And they found they could give them like three data points, you know, average points per game, you know, yards per carry, whatever it was, like three data points versus, you know, 300 data points and say, hey, make your, you know, make your wagers accordingly.

And the people in the 300 data points set are vastly more confident. So they tend to make much bigger bets because they’ve got this wealth of information, but they do not outperform those who have three data points. And you see the same thing in markets, right? There’s really only a couple of things that matter. And yet the constant flow of quote unquote news gives us this sort of illusory form of security that we know what’s going on, when in fact really we’re just being sort of primed to freak out. So yeah, there’s, oh, and then the final piece I’ll talk about is that a lot of the new trading apps are gamified to work against you. Like the way that you get compensated, excuse me, the way that they get compensated is, you know 180 degrees from the behavior that is predictive of investment success, right? They get compensated on order flow, on churn, on you making lots of choices, short holding periods, lots of activity. And so they’re incentivizing you to do stuff like trade more and see what other people are doing and be more active. And all of that is bad. And yet the way that they get compensated and the way that you get compensated are directly at odds with each other. And this is like, you know, these are the most popular, uh, investing platforms around have, have a perverse incentive to screw you over. And so that is a, that is a tricky thing. So this combination, you know, the ease of access, the pervasiveness of news, you know, the gamification of trading platforms in ways that are coversely aligned with the incentives of everyday investors. All of these things are bad news for the average investor

Matt Mulcock:
It’s like the late great Charlie Munger said, show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome, right? I mean, they want eyeballs on the screen, they want you to click, they want you involved, they’re gonna get that, that’s their incentive. Yeah, that’s so, it’s so interesting.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Quick, quick aside here because understanding incentives is like rule number one for behavior. California passed a law today where every restaurant in California has to pay a $20 minimum wage unless you make certain types of bread because the number one donor to the governor of California owns 24 Panera Bread franchises. There you go. I mean, this is just it all over. Like, why in the world would you have a carve out for focaccia bread? Well, that’s where the incentives are. So understanding of incentives is so critical. And, you know, even I tell a story, I don’t remember which book it is. I went on to promote one of my books. And you have a little earpiece in when you’re on the cable financial news and the the the

Matt Mulcock:
You talk about this in this book. Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, the producer is getting ready to send me on and she’s counting me down five, four, three, two, one. And right before she lets me go, she says something to the effect of, don’t be a nerd, cause I was wearing, I was wearing, you know, tortoise, like round tortoise glasses and like a bow tie and some tweed as I’m want to do. She’s like, don’t be a nerd, give me something good.

Ryan Isaac:
Such a nerd!

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
She didn’t say.

Matt Mulcock:
Didn’t she say something like, we’re selling news here?

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, exactly. It’s like, I’m not, she didn’t say, hey, give me something that is academically rigorous that will work for the benefit of this. I mean, it was like, we’re selling news, right? Like, give me something I can work with. That’s the incentive when you watch the news. That’s where that illusion of information comes from.

Matt Mulcock:
Okay, so this is why we could go for hours on this, but I do have one other thing on this. There’s so much good stuff here, Daniel. By the way, I loved that story. That is in this book. I was dying laughing when you, I could just imagine you sitting there and her saying, don’t be a nerd. And you’re like, okay, we’re live now? Cool. Yeah. I am a nerd though. So.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
It’s all I know.

Matt Mulcock:
I am so fascinated by this idea. We talk about this all the time, the incentives of the media, being careful with media. You actually mentioned in the book, I think, yeah, you do. And I don’t have it off the top of my head right now, but like the steps to navigate financial media. But I’m curious your thoughts on this, of this is gonna sound maybe weird, but like whose fault is this? Meaning, is the media creating the demand or are they just giving the people what they want? Like chicken or the egg type thing, I guess.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, both, right? Because, you know, famously, we used to have the Walter Cronkites of the world, whose whole job was to be impartial. And everyone watched the same, you know, everyone watched Walter Cronkite, everyone got the same news, and there was a much higher degree of shared belief with respect to our system, right? Somewhere along the line, folks figured out that it’s a wonderful business to stoke people’s priors and to inflame their biases, right? And so people live in this state of sort of being perpetually aggrieved now that the other folks are being idiots and that their people are the righteous, virtuous, right ones. So you can find every flavor of opinion you want, whether it be politically, financially, I mean, on any given day on Twitter.

Ryan smartly backed out years ago. On any given day on Twitter, I can find something to make me very bearish or very bullish. And it’s really, it is a bit of a chicken and an egg thing, because I mean, it’s enormously profitable, but it is also what people want. I mean, they are, people want their ego stroked, people don’t want to have to think very hard, and it’s cognitively dissonant for me to have an opinion and to be presented with opinions that don’t support that, right? There’s a whole, we could talk about the backfire effect. That’s amazing research, but people hate that. So it is a chicken and an egg thing. It’s what we want, it’s what they’re giving us, and we just keep coming back for more.

Ryan Isaac:
such a good business. Yeah, I was just gonna say it. It actually just reminds, you tell me a nerd in your tweet, it just reminds me of the TV show Succession and they’re dying stodgy, really?

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, go ahead, Ryan. This is amazing. I could, we could, don’t be a nerd, Ryan. Don’t be a nerd. I was just going to say that they made a whole show about this. Isn’t that about the Murdoch family? Isn’t that what it’s based on?

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Good spoilers, good spoilers.

Ryan Isaac:
Dying stodgy news.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Oh yeah, only a year and a half in, or a season and a half in, so no spoilers. But yeah, that’s the Merlin family, right?

Ryan Isaac:
Oh. Oh geez, yeah we won’t keep going on that.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, I think that whole show is based on the Murdoch family. Yep.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, but it’s, yeah, someone figured out along the way of probably like dying profits in like a boring news cycle of like, let’s just get people super worked up constantly and that’s just profitable and then it’s a big cycle that we just feed each other on. Scary. Yeah, scary.

Matt Mulcock:
Very scary. Well, sorry, Ryan, did you have another question? So Daniel, just on this, you talked about in this book, I know this book was written a few years ago, right? From what I recall, but you talk about this very thing about you have a lot of data, stats in there about data and the growth of data and how exponential, and I don’t remember all the exact stats, but it was kind of mind blowing. And then you pair that with the, you just alluded to this about the brain wanting to take the easy way out basically. You mentioned in there that, and I guess I’ll let you go here. You talk about the stats around the consumption, the energy consumption of the brain, like from a caloric standpoint, compared to the weight of the body or how it compares to the body.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, I loved this part, yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, I actually, if I do say so, I actually really thought that was an interesting stat too. So the brain accounts for like two to two to 3% of your body weight ish, but it accounts for somewhere between 20 to 25% of your caloric consumption. And so there’s this there’s this massive mismatch between you know, how big it is and how hungry it is. And so the body is always trying to go into energy saver mode. The body the body is always trying to be efficient and so there’s a couple of ways that we can do that, right? We can kind of coast off the opinions of other people. So one of the things that we, that I, one of the studies that I cited in the book hooked people up to FMRI machines. So like brain scan machines and showed them cable financial news. And you know, think about the average cable, I’m trying not to name names, but like think of the average cable financial news personality. They’re hitting buttons, they’re yelling, they’re screaming, they’re smoke coming out of their ears.

Ryan Isaac:
I don’t know who that is, but yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m lost.

Matt Mulcock:
We all know who you’re talking about, yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Fill in the blanks there. So, their brains, the brains of the participants, the brains of people watching this highly animated TV personality, the parts of their brains associated with critical thinking and decision making actually went to sleep, which is such sort of a paradoxical response to that sort of intense presentation on TV. But basically it’s like, it’s the nine out of 10 dentists choose crest. Like, Oh, you know, this personality says, buy XYZ ETF or XYZ stock. Love it. I don’t have to think about it. Right. Just the same way, like crest is good. Perfect. Whatever. Like one less thing, you know? Um, so we coast off the opinions of others. We don’t question our own judgment. Right. Um, these things will lead us to move through the world in a less effortful way which is always what the brain is looking for, which is sort of disappointing but inevitable.

Ryan Isaac:
That we were having this conversation earlier today about why our industry, why it works so well in our industry to sell by talking over people’s heads and confusing them to the point of making decisions and buying decisions. And I think that’s probably the science of it. I’ve never correlated the two between that study in the news channel and then the average advisor purposely trying to sell something by way of confusion and jargon and talking over people’s heads and almost scaring them into just being like, I don’t know, I’m not even going to think anymore. I’ll just do, I’ll buy whatever you say. It sounds good, but that tracks, it trickles all the way down into one-on-one interactions from a sales standpoint in our industry, which is pretty scary and disappointing. Like you said, our brain just shuts off.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
No, that’s a big part of it. And also, a second part of it is our conflation of complexity and goodness, right? So we assume, I think I talk about this in the laws of wealth, it’s all running together at this point, but we assume that because markets are complex dynamic systems and they are, we assume they have to be met with a great deal of complexity for them to be solved but sort of the weird paradoxes that actually the inverse is true, the more complicated and dynamic the system, the more simple our approach needs to be to avoid sort of overfitting or finding spurious data that’s actually not there. So Morgan talks about this in his book, right? Why is it that some janitor in Dubuque can beat a hedge fund manager? Well, it’s because markets are so complex and dynamic. If you try and meet them with an equal measure of complexity, you’re just as likely to get blown up as you are to outperform.

Ryan Isaac:
Um, unfortunately, yeah, thank you for that. Unfortunately, Matt and I do this way too much, but it reminds me of like the exercise health fitness industry and world. It’s just like the body’s so complex, but it’s the same thing. The more you try to meet the complexity of the body with just like insane, hard, unsustainable diets and supplement routines and exercise routines. Like the more you fail at it and more catastrophic it can actually be. You know, just delivering the exact opposite from what you’re hoping all the complexity will deliver. But that simplicity, it’s so hard to wrap your head around interacting in a complex system with like simple implementation and then just doing it for a long time. It’s just such a hard concept for us to grasp and stick with.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, Ryan, on that, share the arm workout, bro. You’ve gotta share the arm workout. It’s incredible.

Matt Mulcock:
Hey, Daniel, I’ve been wanting him to share that with me forever, and apparently it’s surf every day.

Ryan Isaac:
Actually no, the guy me and Matt both follow is like the nerdiest of fitness guy. He’s like the nerdiest, most data driven, like experimentation, but simple kind of. You, I will share it later. Marcus Philly, his name is Marcus Philly. He’s like such a genius guy. It has nothing to do with anything, but thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks for sharing that story.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, Marcus Philly. He’s incredible. Well, I think part of it too on this issue with simple is usually the answer, right? It’s like the James Clear quote, 90% of success is the simple and obvious for an uncommon amount of time. Like I think people know that rationally or logically, but I feel like, and Daniel, I’m sure you have a ton of either data behind this or just stories behind this, but I feel like coming back to this idea of incentives, I feel like a lot of times people pretend like they’re playing the wealth game, but really they’re playing the status game and they’re chasing complexity because it’s, it’s kind of fulfills this like need for status. Like, so we, we always joke around or just talk about how it’s not sexy for a dentist to be talking to their other dentists at their study groups or whatever they’re doing with their friends. It’s not sexy to talk about a globally diversified portfolio in their brokerage account. Exactly.

Ryan Isaac:
With like six positions. Yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
So it’s almost like they’re trying to fulfill, they think they’re building or wanting to build wealth, but really they’re chasing status. Do you have thoughts on that?

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
So there’s a guy who’s written about this. He wrote a whole book on it. I think, I don’t know if you have your browser there, I think his name is Will Storr and the name of the book is The Status Game or something like that. But he’s written this whole book, the cover’s brilliant because his name is like 90% of the cover.

Matt Mulcock:
Let’s look at it.

Ryan Isaac:
The Status Game on Human Life and How to Play It by Will Storr.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Boom, go read that book. Basically, his thesis is it’s all status. Everything we’re about is status. Status is sort of the bottom most turtle, if you will. Like it’s status all the way down. And I mean, I think that’s absolutely the case, especially for people who are upper middle class, the dentists of the world, right? I mean, it’s like at some point, you’ve got all you need and everything on top of that is just gravy and status, but that’s huge, that’s huge. And if you think about, it’s always fun to go back to the roots of human development. When modern theorists look at why we communicate the way we do, they say that it goes back to gossip that basically the way that humans developed language at all was that we needed to learn to gossip about each other, like, hey, you can trust Ryan, you can’t trust Matt, you know, like if, yeah. So it’s like if our greatest strength, right? Like we don’t have sharp teeth, we’re not fast, we don’t have claws, you know, all we have going for each other is working together.

Matt Mulcock:
That’s true. That’s actually true.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
And so if you’re gonna work together, you really, really need to know who you can rely on and who’s worth having as part of the tribe and who’s not. I mean, if that’s the genesis of human language, that’s how central it is for us to want to be trusted and loved, it’s understandable that you’re not gonna wanna tell people about your three ETF portfolio of Vanguard funds, you’re gonna wanna tell them. We’re gonna wanna tell them about this big sexy thing you’re doing and why it makes you, you know, the head of the tribe sort of thing.

Matt Mulcock:
It totally makes sense. It satisfies a whole other need there. We’re almost to an hour and we’re in section one. We want to be respectful of Daniel’s time. I do want to jump a little bit ahead in the book. If we may, I was so fascinated by in part three, you talk about overconfidence and you talk about, you quote Daniel Kahneman where he talks about overconfidence, basically being the one who that leads like the main culprit that leads to like all the other kind of issues of human bias. Uh, can you talk about this? Just the, the power or the, I guess the, the problems that come from overconfidence.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, so let me back up a little bit because, you know, we’re on a big evolutionary psychology event today, apparently, or I am. But so, let me talk about, let me talk about all of these biases exist. Like we in finance, we talk about all the reasons they’re problematic, right? All the reasons why they’re maladaptive, but they all exist for a good reason. Like the, you know the human mind, the human body doesn’t hold on to stuff that doesn’t serve it through eons of evolution. And so there’s a huge upside to overconfidence, right? People who are overconfident are happier. They’re more likely to be leaders. They’re more likely to get elected, as we well know. All these things are true. And if you look at many parts of your life overconfidence has served you well. And we have this, like if I could call my wife down right now and just like bring her in and you looked at her and you looked at me, you’d be like, that was a massively overconfident move when you talked to her for the first time. I’m glad, but I’m glad I did it. And so overconfidence is this sort of insulation for our egos, right? It helps us feel good about ourselves and the fact that we think that we’re smarter, better, faster, stronger, luckier than the next person, helps us move through a world that can sometimes be pretty rotten.

And so we hang on to overconfidence as a species because it serves us well in some regards. Now when you apply it to investing, it’s super, super problematic. And it is sort of like the one, you know, ring to rule them all. Because if you don’t understand that there’s a problem, you’ll never work on it. And so overconfidence is the thing that says, no, you’re good as you are. So it leads us to not even look at or understand any of the other sort of shadowy parts of our behavior. You know, the coolest learning for me when putting together the book was that overconfidence is multifaceted. Because most of the time when we talk about it, we think, you know, multi-confidence says, you know, Matt’s better than Ryan at N. Yeah, which I’ve observed today.

But really it’s multifaceted. It’s thinking that we’re better than people, yes, at whatever endeavor, but it’s also thinking that we’re luckier than people. So when you look at the data you ask people how likely they are to get divorced, right? So 50% of people get divorced, like 5% of people think they will get divorced. You know, a fraction of a percent of people win the lottery, 50% of people think they can win the lottery. So we really tend to like own things that are optimistic and delegate things that are dangerous, which is deeply problematic when thinking about managing money or you know sort of working with your own money when you have no risk controls and you you assume that everything’s gonna go better than it will for the next person and the last facet of overconfidence is thinking we’re more prescient about the future than we actually are so We’ve got people who think they’re luckier than they are who think they know the future and who think they’re more skilled than the next person and that three-parter that three-part combo is just super deadly when it comes to managing money. So hey, if you wanna go talk to the good looking person at the bar and be overconfident that way, go nuts. But you know, when it comes to your money, you really gotta rein it in.

Ryan Isaac:
I feel like, yeah, we are on these evolutionary behavioral rants today, but I feel like the theme sticking out to me is just how counterintuitive and counter to all of our evolutionary biology or physiology or whatever is how to succeed in making financial decisions. We have to fight against so much of our natures. We have to fight against so many things that actually serve us very well in other parts of our lives. Keep us safe going, but in financial decision and investing, it just stands out to me how much we have to fight against our natures, which is where accountability and help and third parties and surviving, just like surviving our own dumb decisions for long enough to actually reap the rewards. Like, how simple but almost impossible that feels.

Matt Mulcock:
Well, to that point, Ryan, it just says Daniel’s pointing out perfectly that, and you talk about this in the book, like without overconfidence, there would be no one out there starting businesses, innovating, getting up in the morning. You probably wouldn’t. If, if we really probably grasp how uncertain the world actually is, they’re, they’re probably right. We, there probably wouldn’t be any, any innovation or anything getting done, but it’s so interesting. And I love that you’re so good at this. You highlight kind of this, again, this paradoxical approach of like, you need it, but it also is like probably the, maybe the number one killer of investment returns over time. Is it overconfidence?

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, for sure. I look back at my own life and I think probably everyone can do this in some facet or another. When I was 23 years old, when I was 23 years old, I was a psychotherapist. People were coming to me at 23 saying, how should I live my life? And the idea of that is shocking to me today. And yet at the time it seemed like, yeah, I got this.

Matt Mulcock:
Is that a good idea? I’m sure we have some, I mean, we have similar stories of, me being an advisor 10 years ago, being like, why are you listening to me? Like, okay, let’s do this. I’m sure Ryan, you’re the same way.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, I’ll do this.

Ryan Isaac:
Whoa, that just made me laugh just thinking about 23 year old Ryan. Yeah. Well, well done. Well done. I’m glad you did take that path though, Daniel.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, giving anyone any level of advice on anything. Yeah. The last thing on this too, on the overconfidence, I’d say the theme here, or one of the themes here, and the gas on the flame to this is also the incentives. So for example, you talk about an MIT study of analysts they took that were analyzing, I think it was somewhere in the range of like a thousand companies. And you talk about how much they’re missing the mark. And you referenced something, and by the way, you had mentioned that it was on average 31% that they missed the mark on these analyst projections. Um, you, you mentioned, um, something in there that the true answer is that you don’t know, you don’t like the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen to your point earlier, but you said something along the lines of like, but that doesn’t pay for lobster dinners. So again, it’s the incentives, right?

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. You know, one of the, I suggest that some of the most powerful words in investing are I don’t know, and that a concept like diversification is sort of concretized humility. You know, diversification is saying, look, I don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen or which asset class will do well, but I’ll just own them all and kind of take the ride and then, yeah, we’ll be fine you know, whatever, some of these will do well, some will do poorly this year, it’ll probably flip the next year, so like, yeah, I don’t know, you know? But that’s very hard for people to say. I mean, saying I don’t know, and I know you all have had this experience too when you talk to clients, when people routinely come to me and like ask me for advice and I kind of break it down for them and it’s super simple, and they’re almost incredulous that almost like look at me like I’m dumb because I made it too simple.

There’s a great, sorry, I can’t help. I have to share this. There’s something called the Ikea effect where complicating things makes them seem more valuable. So people will pay way more for a piece of Ikea furniture that they put together than one that was put together by an expert. The sort of quintessential example of this was back in the day Betty Crocker rolled out cake and brownie mix that was just that water. So just that water, cake and brownie mix, amazing, right? Didn’t sell because it didn’t feel homemade. They had to actually make it worse. They had to make the pro the the the thing worse. So yeah, they had to complicate the process, right? Oil, water, eggs, butter, whatever you got to put in it now, right? To make it feel like you were doing the work of something that felt like it was homemade. So there’s this human tendency, right? To want things complicated and to be suspicious of things that are too simple. So weirdly, one of our jobs as professionals is to make things simple enough that they’re understandable, but complex enough that they seem plausible to the people that we’re selling to, so they’ll stick with it. Because if you…

Ryan Isaac:
I feel so defeated by how hard this all is, man.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Right? Because if you say, hey, look, buy US, ex-US and bond in whatever, you know, thing, let it rock for 50 years, they go, what? This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Yeah. I was talking. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Come to my private equity seminar.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, exactly. Yep. Now we’re talking.

Ryan Isaac:
Now, how much money do you want? I’ll just give you everything, no questions asked. Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Right, take the money, yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
I’m just sitting here this whole time and the only thing that I’m thinking is humans, man. Freaking humans. We’re so, we’re so… It is.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s so hard, it’s so hard. It’s so hard to be us.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Can’t live with them, can’t kill them, you know?

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, exactly. Um, so I want to round out the book discussion and then there’s a couple of other things we want to just hit. If that’s okay, Daniel, um, we’ll, we’ll wrap this up. I can want to be respectful of your time. We appreciate this so much. Um, I guess we’ll just end with this and we’d truly love to do a part too. Cause there’s so much more we could be hitting here, but I guess we’ll finish on the book discussion around like the, so what, right? Kind of what you do at the end of your chapters, end of your books. Uh, I’ve just like, okay. Cool. We’ve sat here, we’ve told everyone how we’re not wired to invest. The ecosystem is really working against us, our own kind of like surface level desires for status and everything’s working against us. So to Ryan’s point, sometimes it’s like defeating, I’m sure. How do, what do we do? Like what’s, what are some key things that we can do about this? The, the so what to all of this.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, so, you know, I’ll go back to my comment on how these, any time, rewind, there’s a concept in martial arts called the circular theory of self-defense, right? So if someone throws a punch at me rather than trying to block the force of that attack head on, I’m gonna roll with that resistance and let them use their own force and their own inertia against themselves, right? And try and throw them the same thing is true of financial behaviors. Wherever there’s something that we’re already doing, that we can make use to our own betterment, then we do it, okay? So here’s an example, automation. We know that people are lazy, forgetful, and status quo prone, right? Like I got a Showtime subscription that I have not watched in years. They got me, but it’s like, I gotta go in now and like, I gotta go into my cable bill and like undo a thing. And it’s only 10 bucks a month, so like, who cares? And I mean, how many hundreds of dollars have they made off of me because of laziness, status quo proneness, and inertia? I’m canceling it after this show, assume.

Ryan Isaac:
I’ll hold you accountable.

Matt Mulcock:
We’re changing lives right here, yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
But if you can make that work for you though, right? So the process of, you know, that’s called save more tomorrow, right? You automate withdrawals and you automate escalations of those savings over time as you get raises. That simple process, you’re making this quirk of human behavior work for you, right? If you look at something like relationships, we’re so relationally wired. If you look at any model of human flourishing number one predictor, like if you could only have one nice thing to make your life good, it would be strong relationships. And so get a relationship with an advisor who you have a genuine affinity for, because that is the best predictor of whether or not you’re going to take their advice, do the hard work, stick with the program, right? That’s an under, that’s an under considered, underrepresented factor of choosing an advisor is do you think they’re cool because if you don’t think they’re cool, you’re not gonna listen to them, you’re not gonna stick with their advice.

So take that human tendency to be relational, seek out a relationship with an advisor for whom you have genuine respect and affinity, and let that work because again, across about five different studies, I talk about this in chapter two of the laws of wealth, across about five different studies, people who work with advisors outperform those who don’t dramatically. And it’s not because advisors have all the answers, it’s because advisors keep people from doing a handful of catastrophically dumb things over an investment lifetime and that is massively predictive of success. So that’s just two examples of like, take something you’re already prone to and instead of white knuckling it and battling it in some puritanical way, just rock with it, just rock with it. Rock with your laziness, rock with your desire to be, you know, to be around people and let it serve you instead of work against you.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s so cool, man. I’m wondering, wondering what you’re going to. I’m just like, I was thinking like, how can I be cooler to more people? I’m like, I’m going to get a Harley, but also wear more Taylor Swift gear at the same time.

Matt Mulcock:
So good. By the way, Ryan, this is why you’re my advisor, because I think you’re cool. Just so you know. You know, I think there was a when Daniel said that you could find an advisor that you think is cool. Both Ryan and I just was like, oh, crap. Well, we’re done. We’re done.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m out, I’m out, see you guys, thank you. That’s so, thank you for that. That’s very practical and I’ve always heard that people say that in business, that you choose to do business with people you just like to be around and that you, you know, you just trust and like, versus maybe the smartest person you can find or more successful person you can find. So that’s really practical, helpful advice. Thank you very much, man.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, that was awesome. Be aware, systematize and find a cool advisor like, like Ryan. Um, honestly, so helpful and practical. Um, okay. So we want to kind of round this all out with the event coming up in June, the Dennis Money Summit. Uh, again, if this does not get you excited, uh, then maybe you’re not nerds like Ryan and I, cause I sit here. I sit here and listen to Daniel and talk to Daniel and I’m like, man, I could keep going for literally two hours and just listen to you.

Ryan Isaac:
Find a cool advisor. I’m like so excited now, man. I’m like really stoked about this.

Matt Mulcock:
And listen to your stories and your data and, and your incredible knowledge. But, uh, want to just touch on the summit coming up. You’re one of our main stage speakers or kind of our keynote speakers. Maybe could you share like, I’m not saying you have all the details figured out, but just what can people expect from, from your, from your talk at the summit coming up?

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Well, it’ll be a white knuckle thrill ride. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. So I’ve written a new book called, yeah, yeah, so I’ve written a new book called The Soul of Wealth. And it was inspired by Jay-Z. So I read Rick Rubin’s book. You know, Rick Rubin was the producer that worked with the Beastie Boys and Jay-Z.

Matt Mulcock:
Oh yeah, let’s promote this, yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
And then let’s talk about this, yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
I had been working on this book, The Soul of Wealth, about sort of meaningful money for some time and it just sucked. Like I was trying to write it in a traditional format. I was about 75 or 80 pages in and it was just, like I didn’t like it. I didn’t like what I had created. And then I read Rick Rubin’s book, which is this treatise on creativity. And it’s a good book. All, you know, the content is very good. He has a fascinating life story but the format really spoke to me. It was like 70 something chapters and each of them were three-ish pages a piece. So the soul of wealth is 50 chapters, 50 chapters long. And each of the chapters has a historical anecdote, research, and then a so what. So you take a concept like generosity, right? And we’ll talk about like generosity through history you know, some generous act in history, then it’ll talk about the science by generosity. And they’re like, okay, what’s one thing you can do today? So in June, you’re gonna see a lot of these stories from the soul of wealth, a lot of this research, a lot of these stories around money, mind, and meaning. I’ll be bringing those to Zion in June.

Ryan Isaac:
When does that book come out by the way? When will that be finished? Okay, cool. Man, I’m so excited for that.

Matt Mulcock:
I love this.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
In October.

Matt Mulcock:
So it’s done just in publishing right now.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, it’s available for pre-order now, but the way that these things, yeah, get on that. They’ve got to work up a marketing plan and talk to the book stores and do the whole thing.

Matt Mulcock:
I’m getting on that. When I hear, I mean, there’s obviously no surprise why, how perfect this fits with our theme. As you know, Daniel, our theme being for this event being learned to live your, your rich life and it’s so perfect. What you just said. Um, I heard you talking about this book on a podcast recent. I don’t remember what it was, but, uh, so excited for this. So, um, Ryan, what are your final thoughts, questions for Daniel?

Ryan Isaac:
So good. I mean, I just want to say, like, you’re, this has been really fun and we really appreciate it. And you’re a really funny dude. You’re a really funny guy, man. So this has been like so highly entertaining to me. This has been like such a treat. Thank you very much.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Thank you.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, I’m not going to lie. I was pretty, I was pretty giddy as Ryan can attest. I was pretty geeked up for this one. Uh, cause I’ve read a bunch of your stuff. I’ve heard you so many times on podcasts. I was pretty excited to have you on. Uh, and it did not disappoint, uh, Daniel, this was so great. I guess we’ll give you, I want to give you the last word, Daniel, just any final thoughts you want to share as we wrap this up.

Ryan Isaac:
Geeked up man. Yeah. So cool.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
No, I just, I appreciate the format and you know, it’s, I’m only as good or as funny as the hosts are engaging. So thank you both for creating an atmosphere where we can have a good conversation.

Ryan Isaac:
Thanks, man. So great. Hey, real fast, any websites of your own, personal book websites, where’s a good spot for people to just chase down your work?

Matt Mulcock:
Look at that, and he’s speaking of generosity.  Yeah, how do people find you?

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Yeah, I have a podcast called Standard Deviations. The best thing you could do is, thank you. The best thing you could do is go order the Soul of Wealth on Amazon and just lock that in. Do the pre-commitment. Then mid-October you’ve got a little treat coming.

Matt Mulcock:
Fantastic, by the way.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m gonna go do it right now.

Matt Mulcock:
I honestly am. That’s my birthday, Daniel, so I’m going to treat myself to a book. My birthday is October 22nd.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
It’s your birthday. I’m October 16th, let’s go.

Ryan Isaac:
That’ll be our book for that month.

Matt Mulcock:
Okay, let’s go October birthdays. We’re both Libras and I’m going to treat myself to the soul of wealth. Uh, for my birthday, I’m literally getting on there to order it right now. Can we pre-order on Amazon, Daniel? Yeah. Okay. I’m going to do it.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m gonna go sleep real quick.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
Thank you.

Ryan Isaac:
50 reflections. Let’s go, here it is. Let’s go. It’s too bright. Dude, so excited for you. I’m happy to contribute to the soul of your wealth and the wealth of your soul. Thank you, man. Thanks for being here, Matt. Thanks for all this and thanks everyone for tuning in. Yep, we’ll catch you next time on another episode of the Dennis Money Show. Thanks everybody.

Dr. Daniel Crosby:
I just got, you know what that is? That’s the sound of me getting $3 richer, Mike.

Matt Mulcock:
There it goes. There it goes. I love it. I love it. Yeah, thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Daniel.

Behavioral Finance