How To Plan For The Present – Episode #666

On this episode of the Dentist Money Show, Matt and Ryan reflect on the key takeaways from the 2025 Dentist Money Summit. They discuss why financial planning should focus on enjoying the present—not just preparing for the future. They talk about the widespread issues of burnout and boredom in dentistry and how small changes like health tracking can lead to meaningful improvements in well-being. Tune in for a recap of highlights and lessons from the summit’s speakers that you can apply to both your practice and personal life.

Related Readings

To Save or to Spend? Plan for your Present

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac: Welcome to the Dentist Money Show. This is where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. I am Ryan, sir. Ryan Isaac as I’ve been affectionately known, and I’m here as always with Matt, the Mountain Mulcock. Hi Matt.

Matt Mulcock: We’re back at it.

Ryan Isaac: funny. I said your name like Matt.

Matt Mulcock: do you wanna try to, wanna redo that?

Ryan Isaac: Matt the Mountain Mulcock. No, I like it.

Matt Mulcock: We would say that’ll be edited, but it won’t be,

Ryan Isaac: It won’t be. It was just kind of like a Mo

Matt Mulcock: Matt

Ryan Isaac: Maatt

Matt Mulcock: To do like a

Ryan Isaac: Matt the mountain. Matt the mountain.

Matt Mulcock: Matt the mountain. So we are, we’re full on. We’re full on and back into the,

Ryan Isaac: We’re back. We, well, look, we, we were just at our summit. We’re gonna talk about that today. But, we saw people there, of course, ’cause there were people there and they saw us.

Matt Mulcock: It was

Ryan Isaac: Uh, we, we saw people and they. They referenced you by your nickname, so I’m like, we just have to Yeah, it is that someone came up to me like, Hey, we don’t know each other, but uh, is that the mountain? Can you introduce me to the mountain? I walked, I walked the guy over. I was like, Hey, mountain, you got a

Matt Mulcock: Yeah. Which is so ridiculous. ’cause again, I said this to him, I said this to him ’cause he, you know, he is super nice and we all chatting and, he’s like, yeah, I just, I heard about the mountain and I needed to see you. And I was like, and then you meet me. And you were like, oh, it’s a pretty normal guy.

Ryan Isaac: No, I was pretty mountainy.

Matt Mulcock: I am not.

Ryan Isaac: You’re pretty mountainy,

Matt Mulcock: No, no.

Ryan Isaac: Although you said you just did increase your, uh, sleep schedule and your step count and now you’re less mountainy, you’re, you’re nine pounds less mountainy.

Matt Mulcock: Michelle’s gonna hate this ’cause, uh, she, I talked about this on 2 cents already we were at team lunch yesterday and she goes, she, she, ’cause she edits, shout out Michelle, we love you. And, uh, she, I brought up my whoop, I brought up my whoop on the, on 2 cents. Me and Robbie, we were nerding out at lunch yesterday about it.

Ryan Isaac: A funny word.

Matt Mulcock: And then, um, she goes, she looked at me at lunch and she goes, Matt, the whoop, like, you’re gonna talk about that again. Like, she’s like, chastising me. She, she’s

Ryan Isaac: Do you mean again? What? What do you mean again? Yeah, I know

Matt Mulcock: So the whole thing with the Fitbit, we talked a lot about the Fitbit for a

Ryan Isaac: Two different worlds.

Matt Mulcock: And then, and then I got on the whoop train

Ryan Isaac: Tomatoes. Tomatoes.

Matt Mulcock: She did not appreciate that I was talking about the whoop. So here you go, Michelle. We’re doing it again. We love you.

Ryan Isaac: Well, I, I mean, to be fair, I brought it up ’cause I was interested. Are you, are you a team? Whoop over team Fitbit. I mean, your Fitbit broke,

Matt Mulcock: Much better. Fitbit broke after like two weeks. This is a whole different topic we’ll talk about later ’cause there is a podcast here for sure. That, but it has been pretty amazing. it has been pretty amazing. Like, I mean, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Like the second order effects that can come like that you’re not even like aware. So, so I’ll just say this. I got the whoop thinking it was gonna be one thing, like it was gonna help me do one thing or track one thing, and then I realized it actually, like the, the impact it had on me was something I didn’t even realize. So the example I’ll give is

Ryan Isaac: Is another podcast for sure.

Matt Mulcock: Whole other podcast. Maybe we’ll just go down this road and just riff. Um. so I got it specifically thinking, okay, I’m gonna start tracking my calories more. It’s gonna track my workouts, my heart rate, it does all those things like, all great. The one thing I didn’t realize it was gonna do that has had the biggest level of second order effects on my life, has been sleep. Like the level of motivation it’s given me to get to sleep and prioritize my sleep.

Ryan Isaac: Just because it’s being tracked.

Matt Mulcock: It’s tracking, it’s giving me a score. It’s sending me like updates. It has a whole, it’s like it has all these like graphs and things. It’s showing you like where your sleep score is, your sleep consistency. It, it breaks down your sleep. Like it’s crazy man. And it’s, it is literally, I mean, I’m gonna be so dramatic here ’cause I’ve had it for all of eight days, Ryan, but it’s crazy. It is crazy. Just in eight days, the impact it’s had. It’s wild and it’s all from sleep. That’s the only thing I’ve really changed is sleep

Ryan Isaac: You control about your sleep? Just the time, like do you go to bed earlier, wake up

Matt Mulcock: Like I’ve, yeah. I’ve never been more, I’ve kind of gotten into a bad habit lately over the

Ryan Isaac: Meals at night or something.

Matt Mulcock: I’ve been gotten into, into a bad habit the last, like, let’s say year and a half, two years of like slowly and slowly becoming a bit more of a night owl. Like get the kids in bed. I’m just like, oh my gosh, my brain’s been on all day. I want to just like chill. And before I know it, it’s like 1230, but like this has gotten me back to my roots of like, I’m in bed by 9, 9 30. I want to get that my sleep score up, dude.

Ryan Isaac: Wait, are you like, are there teams, are there like

Matt Mulcock: You can do communities. I haven’t done that, but you can do, we were actually talking about doing like we should get everyone on the DA team on the whoop and then do a DA community and you can like, you get ranked based on your scores and Oh, yeah,

Ryan Isaac: Can we do this? Okay.

Matt Mulcock: I literally

Ryan Isaac: Another podcast. We, this is a Totally, yeah. ’cause it, that ties in so well to the, I mean, you know, name anything. You start tracking one thing in your finances and then next thing you know, it’s like a secondary, what do you call ’em? Second order

Matt Mulcock: Second

Ryan Isaac: That come

Matt Mulcock: Effects?

Ryan Isaac: What does that,

Matt Mulcock: I don’t know. Something.

Ryan Isaac: You just said it or like,

Matt Mulcock: No. I mean, I stole it from something, but, uh, I don’t know the original. Um,

Ryan Isaac: It’s okay.

Matt Mulcock: So let’s, let’s look it up second.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, it just sound, that sound like a very, like, I don’t know, Daniel Pink or

Matt Mulcock: Yeah, it’s probably someone,

Ryan Isaac: Kahneman or

Matt Mulcock: So it comes from, let’s see, so the consequences of consequences. They represent ripple effects. I don’t know. I read it somewhere. I have no idea. Like

Ryan Isaac: I like it. I like that, that concept, second order effects. It paints the picture,

Matt Mulcock: Yeah. Yeah. So

Ryan Isaac: Yeah.

Matt Mulcock: Yeah, the, again, you don’t, you don’t expect the consequence of the consequences, the consequence of me getting better sleep is I, I. My, my gym routine is so much better. I’m eating better. I’m, I’ve lost weight alre, like pretty drastically in a week. It’s like, had some pretty significant changes and impact. It’s kind of crazy.

Ryan Isaac: Okay, well, we’ll do that. It come now. Everyone got a sneak peek?

Matt Mulcock: Now that we just hit an intro for a podcast that we haven’t even prepared for

Ryan Isaac: And we’re not gonna do it.

Matt Mulcock: We’re not gonna do,

Ryan Isaac: Let’s switch

Matt Mulcock: We’re the worst.

Ryan Isaac: Second order effects, we did have our second annual

Matt Mulcock: Ooh, I see what

Ryan Isaac: Summit Park City. So let’s talk about second order effects, second annual dentist money, and, uh, the theme this year, Matt, was

Matt Mulcock: Plan for the present

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, how did you feel? Oh. Well, first of all, we should probably just thank everyone, not me. I didn’t, I just showed up. So,

Matt Mulcock: I just showed.

Ryan Isaac: Um, yeah, everyone on our team who did such a good job, just man putting on such a huge event, those things are so hard to do. There are so many moving pieces and they, they literally start now, right? Isn’t Chip and the team already starting to work, work on

Matt Mulcock: Becky. Yeah. Yeah. We already have the committee going. Um, you know Becky and Chip and Stuy? Michelle? Landon. Anna. Yeah. They’re, they’re Ama Maddie. Um, they’re amazing. What I will give a quick shout out specifically to Becky. This is like pretty incredible. She created. Just on her own. She decided because of some issues we had last year with av, she thought, we’re not gonna do that again this year. We still had some AV issues, but not because of Becky. Becky literally brought a custom built AV playbook, a full binder AV playbook. She had every detail mapped out and handed it to the AV team. They do events at this place all the time, and they literally were like. We’ve never seen this before. It was crazy. It was crazy. She’s amazing. Becky’s incredible.

Ryan Isaac: So thanks. Yeah, thanks to our team for sure. And then everyone who, uh, you know, sponsors, partnerships, a lot of friends in the industry who showed up to support us and, uh, we really loved, you know, we don’t get a chance to see everyone. All throughout the year, so that’s always really nice. And then all of you who showed up, I, I don’t know what final attendance or registration was. It was around 200 people or close to it or

Matt Mulcock: Something like that.

Ryan Isaac: It was really cool. It was, you know, we, these days with everything Zoom and phone calls, we don’t get a chance to see people in person. And it’s actually kind of funny, it’s a weird thing to know someone for years on the phone and occasional Zoom and then see them in person and still have to see the name tag and be like, are you, oh yeah. Hey buddy.

Matt Mulcock: I know that that’s honestly, so the, such a fun part of it. There’s a, a newish, a newish client who, who I work with and, uh, gotta see her and, and her husband there. And, um, it’s so fun. It’s like so fun to sit there and like just a different vibe when you’re not on Zoom every once in a while, getting to just like, press some laundry, give some high fives, you know.

Ryan Isaac: Press some laundry

Matt Mulcock: That’s from, that’s, yeah, that’s from, uh, the way, way back. One of my favorite movies. She’s like, press my laundry.

Ryan Isaac: Laundry. I love that. All right, I’m gonna start saying that. Well, let’s, let’s, okay, let, what we wanna do today is kind of just talk a little bit about that main theme. Jake and I, Jake, not Taylor, Jake and I just did a webinar around this, uh, subject a little bit, that being planned for the present. By the way, do we, are we telling people what next year’s theme is yet, or no

Matt Mulcock: I think we can, should, should I keep it a secret? We’re gonna, I think we’re gonna make an official announcement here pretty soon.

Ryan Isaac: Okay, well, we’ll just save it then. Anyway. let’s let, let’s just start a little bit. I, I think we’ll end up tying in some of the experiences from the speakers that we had, which are really great this year. But let’s just start a little bit with Matt. What was your, you gave the presentation on plan for, for the present. They always give you the slot after the main. The, the main headlining, speaker, which you always get the second slot. So you have like, uh, an incredible amount of pressure. It’s so great. I bet you you love that every year. You did great. You

Matt Mulcock: Love that.

Ryan Isaac: Did, you did awesome. But, um, how about you kick it off a little bit. You, you gave the presentation on plan for the present. Um, give us a little bit, you know, of an insight to. What, what was the message you wanted to share with clients? Why that theme for clients really, I mean, as financial planners for dentists, why does that theme seem like relevant and helpful? And, uh, walk us through a little bit about what you, what you talked about.

Matt Mulcock: So you’re right. I always have the task of at least the last two years, we’ll see what next year, but have had the task of second position after the lead off hitter of being a profess, you know, the professional speaker keynote

Ryan Isaac: We hired the professional speaker

Matt Mulcock: And then it’s like, Hey, Matt, by the way, why don’t you hop up there? Uh, so yeah, I mean, this goes way back to the last year when last year when we were coming up with a theme for this year. and what basically what we do is we just start kicking, we just throw ideas out of like, kind of like. The spirit of what we want to get across to people. And I, I don’t know, I really don’t recall like who was the original, who like said plan for the present, like how we actually got to that, but the general idea or spirit of it. Um, and then from there, kind of what my prep went into for like sharing these thoughts on the actual topic was just about like everything in our industry, in financial advising and everything that people come to us for is pretty future looking. I, I think it’s like, when can I retire and setting goals. But again, we’re not saying any of that is bad, but I think the main point we were trying to get across in the, with the theme and like kind of the mindset of the whole weekend and hopefully what people took away from it, is let’s not, let’s not risk enjoying what we have, which is really all we have are these moments in front of us, right here, like. Don’t let it go too far, basically like it can go too far thinking too far into the future. Um, and, and the risk of that is forgetting to actually like learn to enjoy the moments.

Ryan Isaac: I was gonna ask, while we’re just on that subject, do you have any, um, off the top of your head, just curious, like client stories where that becomes a problem, where for that reason, um, you know, they just, they’re so focused on like the future that, you start to see the problems developed, you know, in, in now in the present. Can you think of like examples of that with clients, how that shows up?

Matt Mulcock: Countless. I mean, I have, uh, I’ve had so many conversations over the years of people who have. Won the, the spreadsheet game. You know, like they’re there, they’ve won. They’re worth multi, multi seven figures and still making seven figures have on on a spreadsheet. If their past self could have seen where they are, would be like, bro, we’ve won. We’re done. What are you doing? We did it.

Ryan Isaac: We’re spending more than we ever wanted to make in the past and

Matt Mulcock: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. My tax bill is more than like what I even like double what I made before. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I mean, I think this shows up in a lot of ways of people continuing to move the goalpost, continuing to just push. And one of the quotes I use in there from some bro, is. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. And, um, so yeah, I think that shows up in a lot of ways. I think it shows up in, uh, what I’d say is the word that I, that comes to mind for me is like emptiness. I mean, there’s a lot of like asking yourself like, wait, is this whole, what am I doing here? Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: Uhhuh. Yeah. I think that’s a super dangerous and really, really common man. We were just talking about this yesterday in a case study in our mastermind. I think this is one of the root causes of why we see dentists like make. Big financial mistakes. A lot of times kind of midlife, mid-career and maybe it’s not always, they’re too future focused, but something happens where they’re just, they’re not in it today. They’re like, their mind’s not there, they’re not in the work. they’re, they’re not

Matt Mulcock: They’re not enjoying the process.

Ryan Isaac: Enjoying it. Not feeling fulfilled. Um, there’s burnout. There’s boredom. We’ll talk about burnout in a second. Maybe that’s a great segue for the next piece. But, and that’s where the, like, especially around burnout and boredom sounds like a comic book character duo. Like

Matt Mulcock: Burnout. Are we burnout on boredom?

Ryan Isaac: I think we’re burnout and burnout out.

Matt Mulcock: I’m boredom. I’m for

Ryan Isaac: I’m, I’m so burnout dude. I’m so

Matt Mulcock: Burnout.

Ryan Isaac: I’m so burnout. That’s our, that’s our comic book duo is burnout and

Matt Mulcock: And I’m boredom. I’m like, ’cause I’m like literally putting you to sleep. I’m like, here’s another quote for you.

Ryan Isaac: Go to bed at nine o’clock with your

Matt Mulcock: I do. I do.

Ryan Isaac: I’m burned out. Your boredom.

Matt Mulcock: Yep. Here we go.

Ryan Isaac: Those are two thi like, I don’t know, symptoms of the problem. That, uh, start causing dentists to start wandering financially and make, make some big financial mistakes that can, you know, undo 10 to 15 years of progress up to that point. So, yeah, I think that’s, being present because some of that might be like being present to the fact that you’re not fulfilled in the type of dentistry you’re doing, and it’s time to, I don’t know, go out of network change procedures, get an associate to do your job so you can do a different one. But you’re not, when you’re not aware of those things and you can’t acknowledge ’em, you can’t feel them. Yeah, you can just start burnout and boredom. We’re actually, we’re villains. We’re not superheroes. We’re we’re like low level D-list villains

Matt Mulcock: Yes.

Ryan Isaac: Coming into cos mayhem, burnout, and boredom. Oh my gosh, so

Matt Mulcock: You know what I just was thinking about if we burn out on boredom, if we had like costumes or like, uh, would, was, um, pain and on Hercules, uh, the little, the old Gremlin

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. The little grandma ones. I

Matt Mulcock: His name? Uh, dang it, it’s pain and not misery, but, let’s see. Hang

Ryan Isaac: Her Hercules cartoon

Matt Mulcock: Gotta look this up now. Hercules.

Ryan Isaac: Michelle’s like, this is, none of this is going in the

Matt Mulcock: Yeah, I probably will get caught. But pain and, oh, pain and panic.

Ryan Isaac: Pain and panic.

Matt Mulcock: And panic. That’s what we, that’s what I thought of is burnout and boredom is like pain and panic from Hercules Classic movie

Ryan Isaac: Well, let’s talk about burnout for a second. Um, speaking of following the, uh, initial professional Harvard trained speaker that you had to follow,

Matt Mulcock: Dr. Aditi Nerurkar.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about her, what she talked about. I thought that was just so important for the industry.

Matt Mulcock: So good. so I’ll, first, I’ll give a little bit of, uh, another shout out to Lauren on our team. Uh, we were last year thinking about, so we just finished our first summit. Went really, really well and we had some great speakers and we were like, oh man, we gotta find a new like keynote for Matt to follow and. You know, make it really hard on ’em. That’s fun. and so Lauren came up with an incredible idea. So anyway, we, so we were looking at some pretty big speakers. We were like, and we started looking like, so I’ll give you like an example, like, we’re like, oh, James Clear would be perfect. Yeah, no, we can’t afford James Clear. Um.

Ryan Isaac: He charge, by the way?

Matt Mulcock: Oh, like $250,000 just to like have a conversation. Um, yeah, so, so a couple people were like, there’s no way. There’s just, there’s no way. Anyway, so Lauren had the idea, um, she’s like, well, what if another idea we had was Mel Robbins killer Chip on our team, know has, has had Mel come speak at things before, before she got to the level she’s at. And so Lauren said, Hey, if we want Mel Robbins, why don’t we go on her podcast? I. Or go look at her podcast guests and go see who looks interesting and listen to some of their podcasts. And like a lot of these, like big, big, big people bring on people who are up and coming, who are gonna be big, but like, they’re not there yet.

They’re just like early. And so that was Lauren’s idea. And we found through that process a few and then, and then narrowed it down to Aditi, Dr. Aditi. And, uh, she’s great. She’s a burnout specialist, Harvard educated doctor. She again, kicked us off. And like you said, Ryan, it was so pertinent what she had to say. So academic too. Like I loved what she, she brought such practical tips, things that you could take away, that you could like implement right away. Like that’s what I loved about her.

Ryan Isaac: I was just trying to see the, what you maybe know the title of a book.

Matt Mulcock: The five resets.

Ryan Isaac: There you go. The five resets. Okay. we, had copies there for everyone. She, she sat signed. You know what I thought was really cool about her is so intelligent, obviously, so much data and science in the presentation, which I just thought was fascinating. But then as soon as the q and A started, she just, she’s the nicest person ever and it just, she just switched in as people are asking her question, man, she was just so fun to interact with. We could have kept, we probably could have kept the q and a going for quite a while actually.

Matt Mulcock: Oh, we totally could have, and this is saying something about her, like this is saying something. ’cause the best part of her presentation was the q and a

Ryan Isaac: Yep.

Matt Mulcock: And, and not saying something. ’cause she did an incredible job and then the q and A started and she went for another 30 minutes or so just on q and a and it was so insightful. It’s really good.

Ryan Isaac: So you know, your experience as a financial advisor for dentists and then hearing, you know, an actual doctor and scientist basically in the field of burnout. And uh, you know, we talk about a lot this a lot with our team and with Chris now all the background of. Consulting, 20 years of consulting, um, 30 years of dentistry. What do you, do you see, like, um, do you see any solutions to that problem? It’s very, it’s really common. I mean, you probably remember the same thing I, when I got in the industry, I remember thinking how taken back I was at how often dentists said they wanted to get out of dentistry as soon as possible. I think we just had, uh, actually I think we just had, an advisor yesterday in our advisor mastermind, say how they were just talking to a new grad, had just barely graduated and the graduate was saying,

This subject of burnout and how early it, it starts. Like I was saying, I’ve always been really taken back by how I. Soon dentists went out of dentistry. Um, and it took me a long time in the industry too to understand why that was. I mean, just the, the pure um, the pure physical burnout. I mean, the toll that that bodies take by the time, you know, dentists are in their mid to late forties is, it was very surprising to me. I remember being in my late twenties, hearing 45-year-old, 50-year-old dentist talk about how beat up they are. And I’d think like, really, why?

Matt Mulcock: What’s like, what the heck?

Ryan Isaac: Are you in an office all day? Like, what

Matt Mulcock: There all day.

Ryan Isaac: What are you doing? You’re not like laying pavement, you know, like, what’s going on?

Matt Mulcock: Not laying bricks here. Come

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. Yeah. It turns out they, they’re in horrible body positions all day long. under lot, lots of other mental, emotional stress, so.

Matt Mulcock: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: So, we were just in Mastermind yesterday and one of our advisors was saying how they, was it like a brand new graduate they were talking about, had just graduated and is already like, I gotta get out of this industry as soon as I can. How do I make, how do I, how do I make the money as fast as possible? And what I’m getting at is how much that burnout and that need to hurry and exit the industry as quickly as possible ends up resulting in some very like. Poor financial decisions sometimes, like trying to find that, find that home run investment, that magic pill, you know? Anyway, do you remember that conversation? Was it a, like a D four student or a new graduate or

Matt Mulcock: Brand new graduate, and that, so I guess I look at this as two different things. The burnout, to me, I think maybe they’re connected. but I, the burnout to me is a little different than what we’re talking about as far as like the new grad, like we were joking, sort of. But like, it’s also pretty serious. It’s kind of interesting. And, and we’re probably biased ’cause we obviously only work with dentists, so we talk to dentists all day. But it does feel interesting to me that like dentistry feels pretty unique in the way, in the sense of there’s a lot of young people that are like, get me outta this as soon as like can get out. It’s like, you do know you had a choice here, right? Like you didn’t have to do

Ryan Isaac: Well, do you think that’s outside of dentistry too? Do you think that’s like a,

Matt Mulcock: That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know it, it could be a generational thing.

Ryan Isaac: Like, it in social media a lot, right? Like, I’m gonna exit the job, mark. I’m, I’m outta here. I’m

Matt Mulcock: Totally like get outta the corporate, corporate world and all. So yeah, I think it’s probably partly generational thing and I am admitting that like it’s absolutely bias in regards to like we only work a dentists, so like it is, it’s all I see. So, but it does feel, I do remember, I dunno if you remember this, Ryan, when we spoke at UDAA couple years ago and the person helping us in the room. He was a student and he was like a, I think a D three or DD three or whatever, something like that. And he was, he was like, our, our, he was like our host, right?

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. Our room

Matt Mulcock: In there, our room host, and we’re chatting with him and just like, Hey man, how’s school going? And he’s like, oh, what do you, you know, he is like, oh, I saw your title. I’m so excited to, to, to listen to this one.

Ryan Isaac: It was like financial freedom or

Matt Mulcock: It was about, well, it was about retirement. And I was like, wait, retirement? He is like, yeah, man, I wanna get outta here as fast as I possibly can. I was like, aren’t you like 22? Like what are

Ryan Isaac: Still in school? Are you still taking out

Matt Mulcock: About? Dude, it’s so weird. But, so anyway, I

Ryan Isaac: You haven’t even passed biology yet, man. What

Matt Mulcock: It’s like you’re still doing Che bro. Whatcha talking about like, maybe that’s why he wants to quit ’cause he’s in

Ryan Isaac: That’s fair.

Matt Mulcock: That is totally fair. Yeah. Um, but I, so I think there’s two different categories of p or of the situation. I do think there’s the burnout of like, you’re 45, you’ve been grinding. And then there’s the, like the younger generation, probably a lot of factors. I also think, I wonder if, speaking of second order effects, I do, I, I do wonder if like dentistry, because of some of, a lot of the like older generation who’s burned out, like the way they talk about dentistry has almost led to the younger generation. And not only that, DSOs and like the landscape has changed a lot. I do wonder if the younger generations coming up are kind of like, get me outta here.

Ryan Isaac: So that’d be an interesting poll actually, uh, on our, in our group to say like any, anyone here under, let’s say, what would the cutoff be? Like 32 or something and 30 or under what, what’s, yeah, 35 maybe. What’s the impression just generally that you have from dentists, uh, let’s say in their sixties or above that you heard? Like what, what’s the messaging that you took in over the years? Because that’s actually a really good question. I wonder If that had an effect or if that’s like a general consensus,

Matt Mulcock: Yeah, I would be

Ryan Isaac: Out of this thing.

Matt Mulcock: Yeah. Get outta

Ryan Isaac: I did kid. Get outta here kid.

Matt Mulcock: Go be a real estate mogul.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. That’s

Matt Mulcock: did. You did not need dental school for that. I

Ryan Isaac: how often do you like made more money in my building than my practice?

Like probably not A and B, that’s more of a commentary in your practice, not

Matt Mulcock: I was gonna say, if that’s the case, then I’m sorry for your practice. Yeah,

Ryan Isaac: But really common, so, okay. So that, yeah, that, and that was, that was burnout with Anything else you wanna say about her? The book you, you mentioned the book title, right?

Matt Mulcock: Five resets. Yeah, it’s great. That’s a really good book. Uh, I just, again, the, the thing that I took away from her is just the, and I still think about stuff she talked about. I’ll give an example that I took away that I still think about. Um, I love the practical nature of it was the, the rule of two. So she talked about all the data and science around the fact that. Like setting goals or trying to, uh, she was talking about specifically changing habits in your life that we try to, one of the biggest reasons we fail at adopting or implementing a new habit, uh, is because we try to take on too much. And she had this called, she called the Rule of two and she had all the science behind all the studies that show our brains and our, like, we can only really adopt two new behavior changes in our life.

And I, that was super interesting. I also thought it was funny. She, again, very practical. She was talking about sleep and, talking about what Im impedes our sleep. So, our phones obviously huge distraction. Huge, huge difference. We have from different gener, uh, previous generations and she was talking about gray scaling. Your phone and like how practically useful it is to grayscale your phone. And it was so funny when she’s going, she literally gave instructions of how to grayscale your phone and how and the impact it can have. And at a certain period of, or a certain time of night, you should grayscale your phone. And literally the entire audience has their phone out, by the way, including me. I’m like getting my phone out like I put

Ryan Isaac: You ever done that before? Have you ever done that for long periods of time?

Matt Mulcock: Yes, so I’m doing it now. Every time, every night at a certain time, I turn on my phone on Grayscale. And so I’ve been do, trying to set that habit so I don’t sit there on my in, in bed. She talked about how bad it is to like sit in bed before you go to bed and sit there all with your light. And so yeah, I, at night, like right after dinner, I turn my phone on Grayscale.

Ryan Isaac: Man, I did that. It was years ago. I did, I had, I had done that for months at a time. I got rid of, uh, safari all social media, email, anything entertaining except for like music and maps and, you know, texting and it was grayscale. My phone was the most boring thing I. Ever. I hated looking at, it’s really fascinating, like the, I guess it’d be like this neuroscience of that and how our brains, like what color it does to our brains and that there’s zero coincidence in the way our phones and the apps and everything are

Matt Mulcock: Yeah, of course. And also, don’t lie, bro. You didn’t delete Candy Crush. Don’t even lie. Come on. You had that on there.

Ryan Isaac: Know, when I got rid of Candy Crush, you know, when I got rid of, I was convinced and then I went down this like rabbit hole on the internet on how Candy Crush is rigged. To get you to like stay in it like hook, hook you and get you to spend money to get out of things. ’cause you’ll fly through levels and then you’ll get stuck on one level for like four days and then miraculously. You beat the level just out of nowhere after four days. But during those four days, you get little ads and you get like, Hey, would you like to buy some? Would

Matt Mulcock: I believe

Ryan Isaac: Buy your way passes. Scam, dude. I think it’s a full, but it’s so fun. Um, let’s, let’s go Since we’re talking about, um, um, boredom and burnout. Burnout and boredom. The duo, the duo d-list, villains.

Matt Mulcock: The D-list villains.

Ryan Isaac: Let’s go to the other one. Talk about two with two guests in one here. let’s go to the subject of boredom. So, in my mind, one of the, one of the things that gets, and Christine talks about this all the time, is how many decisions get made during boredom, especially around investing in a, in a dentist’s life. We had two guests speak, one from DFA and then. Carl on Saturday if you want to talk. I hear, when I think about boredom and the decisions that get made out of boredom in the investing world, I think about the presentations those two gave. Just the science of investing. That’s it. Just the boring science of invest boredom. That’s where it

Matt Mulcock: Boredom. That’s me.

Ryan Isaac: It’s the boring science of investing and what actually happens when you stick with it versus when you don’t. And I was gonna say really quickly, um, I did, uh, one of those little lunch and learn breakouts, I think on Saturday it was,

Matt Mulcock: Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: And grabbed some slides from the team and one of my favorite slides, um. Ever that the team always has on investment presentations. You know, the one, it’s just the number of days missed over a 20 year period of investing, which is psycho. It’s, you know, how many thousands of actual trading days and you miss 20 of them, 20 of the best days,

Matt Mulcock: Like blows up

Ryan Isaac: Your returns in half, half of what it’s gonna be. You can’t make that up for missing 20 days out of thousands and thousands. And you could have never seen them coming. You would’ve had no idea which ones were the best ones. So I think a lot about that boredom. Uh, you wanna talk a little bit about those two, that came and spoke and maybe touch on what their message was in keeping it going, because that’s just a flaw in our own human design to like, not stay put.

Matt Mulcock: Yeah. I thought they were, it was so perfect to have both of them on two different days. But we had Mary Phillips from DFA, she’s a. Senior portfolio manager there and I think runs like a whole like section of their team. DFA is huge. Uh, so we had Mary Phillips and then we had Carl Richards the next day. And what I loved about having them both at the summit was they kind of showed the two kind of broad sides of investing and really money in general. But if we’re thinking about investing, which is the spreadsheets. Science of it. The hard science of investing is what Mary Phillips touched on a lot and was great. She talked about indexing how indexing works, how it’s a series of active decisions. She integrated it, like how it impacts like, or she kind of used the analogy of like her life and her career. And how, and how what I, the message she had, which I thought was so good, was, um, you’re a better, you are a better investor, or you know more about investing than you think. And she related a lot to just like decisions we make in life. It’s really good. And then the Carl part of it was really the, a lot of the other side of the investing, kind of the, the heart of it, kind of the, the behavior of the, the real life stuff that, uh, the emotion.

Ryan Isaac: Those examples he would

Matt Mulcock: Oh my

Ryan Isaac: So good.

Matt Mulcock: It was so good. I mean, Carl was, Carl is just such an in incred. I mean, he’s been speaking, he’s been telling stories for so long, he’s so good at it. Uh, he blew me away at how good he was. I was like, I’m gonna be like that guy when I grow up.

Ryan Isaac: I know.

Matt Mulcock: Um, he was so

Ryan Isaac: iPad, dude. Just an iPad and just

Matt Mulcock: Dude. He had no slides. He had an iPad and just pulled up sketches. Cause I mean, he’s the, he’s the sketch guy from the new sketch guy from the New York Times, and he would just bring up a sketch. And tell a story and like make it so relatable and it was so, so good. I love, and he had some data too and some science. So he talked about, he had a slide of like The typical kind of emotional journey of a typical investor and how we, we all, you know, the typical kind of foundational knowledge of investing that anyone on the street would say is, you buy low, you sell high. But he had so many examples of how the data showed. We do the exact opposite

Ryan Isaac: Every time.

Matt Mulcock: Every single time. And, uh, yeah, he was, he was super impactful. I thought he was great.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, he’d show the charts of, uh, you know, just picture a chart trending left to right upward, generally in, in direction, but with, you know, spikes and then valleys, you know, some dropoffs and just, different news stories and, uh, his own anecdotes from his years in the banking industry and investment industry. Of, it building up to highs and that’s when everyone wants to buy. Oh, he was, he was using the, wasn’t the.com was it, wasn’t that the example.com bubble and everyone only wanted it as it was getting more expensive? Not when it was cheaper and it’s just, it’s just typically the way we do things. We don’t, as consumers, we don’t do anything else that way. We don’t buy anything else that way. Any other asset. We don’t,

Matt Mulcock: I, I love the example he gave. He was like, I think he said, I think it was a BMW, maybe it was an Audi. He was like, all right, you wanna go buy an Audi? And you show up to the dealership,

Ryan Isaac: You call ahead.

Matt Mulcock: Oh, you call ahead and you said, Hey, uh, I wanna buy an Audi. This is the exact model I ran ready to go. And he said, this salesman goes, Hey, perfect. This is the perfect time to buy it. It’s actually, uh, 40% higher than it was yesterday. And you say, amazing.

Ryan Isaac: I’m May, I’ll be right down there. I

Matt Mulcock: I’ll be right down. It’s like no one would ever,

Ryan Isaac: No, we don’t do that.

Matt Mulcock: But we do that with investing. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. Another one of the slides that I ended up polling, um, was, uh, it was two pieces of data. One was from dalbar, so D-A-L-B-R, if anyone’s interested, organization, that, that studies investor behavior for decades that shows over long periods of time. The average investor inside of just a, a basic, you know, some of the biggest basic, um, index funds, the average investors are earning like half of what the funds actually do over long periods of time, which the whole argument around like passive investing is buy an index fund, sit in it, and then you’ll get, you know, great returns, double digit returns, but the average investor isn’t doing that. There’s also a lot of data that shows. Out of all of the biggest index funds in the whole world, the average holding period is less than two years in those, which is crazy because those things got invented to bypass all the day trading and all the activity, and then we still behave this exact same way. Just back to Carl’s entire point,

Matt Mulcock: We changed the T, but we didn’t.

Ryan Isaac: The same way in these index funds. Yeah, we didn’t change the temperament. All the taxes just changed. So, yeah. And, and so that all, to me, that just goes to show out, out of the boredom and all the changes we end up making, ignoring the science and the data that we heard from DFA and then, you know, doing what Carl says we do, which is we just get extremely emotional and make all these wild decisions. So, anything else you wanna say about the, uh, that was what stood out to me about the boredom piece, by the

Matt Mulcock: Yeah. No, I, I agree. I have nothing else to add. They were both fantastic.

Ryan Isaac: And then we wrapped it up with a, a motivational. You want to give

Matt Mulcock: We skipped one. We skipped one. We gotta give a shout out to, to Dr. Jared Hill and, and Mary Hill. and we actually should connect them. So we con connected Carl and Mary, Phillips. So Carl Richards and Mary Phillips. I think we, we should connect, Dr. Didi and then Dr. Jared Hill from Elevation Association. And then, Marin Hill, his wife, they were so good and what I loved about having, so they came, so it was Dr. Didi, then I went and then, um, Mary Phillips, and then Dr. Jared. And, and Marin closed out the day on day one, and it was such a good bookends with Dr. Didi because Dr. Didi, here she is. This like doctor scientist of burnout had all this data, all these studies to show like, you know, intellectualize and like show the academia that supports all this. And then here’s Dr. Jared Hill and Marion Hill, who shared their story, real life story of burnout and the true impact it had. And like he goes through and was super, like, vulnerable and like on the verge

Ryan Isaac: Wanting to run away. Quit it all. Yeah. Leave it all behind. Yeah.

Matt Mulcock: And it was, it was so cool. I loved, I loved that experience of having the bookends there and having them close us out and be like, oh my gosh. Like this is the real life

Ryan Isaac: Real life example of a dentist and his family. Yeah, yeah. You’re so right. You check them out. Elevation Association. Um, yeah, that, that was really cool. And then, uh, wrapped it up on Saturday with like, just some overall motivation.

Matt Mulcock: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: Where,

Matt Mulcock: Calling some people out. Calling some people out. I was sitting in the back. I was covering my face. I see.

Ryan Isaac: Oh my gosh. Well, give us a recap of that. That was, yeah. I felt the same way. Hymes. We had him on the podcast six months ago or so,

Matt Mulcock: Like that to promote it. Yeah. it is, Chad’s awesome. I met, I got a chance to meet him before he went on and, he’s a perf, he’s a motivational speaker. He talks about how he never wanted to be that, he had a really horrific accident that he talks about, uh, back in the nineties. And, um, he, he’s basically quadriplegic.

He’s like, I think 90 something percent. Um, he had a, li has a little function in one of his arms, but he, he was incredible and just, he, he did such a good job wrapping it all up of like the, truly showing like the risk, real life risk of not planning for the present. it was, he was such a good way to close it out, and again, he was, he was like super engaging.

So the, the difference between him than everyone else is if you weren’t there, he was, he’s always in a wheelchair and he was on the floor.

Ryan Isaac: In the middle of the aisle.

Matt Mulcock: He didn’t want to be on the stage, so he was on the floor going back and forth, eye to eye with people

Ryan Isaac: Asking questions directly, like, Hey, what do you think about

Matt Mulcock: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. It was all, it was really good, man. I like that we kind of talked through this around, burnout and boredom though. and, you know.

Matt Mulcock: New nicknames. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: I know if there’s any cartoonists out there or like, just like Chad, GBT could make it for us. Actually, I’m gonna send that through, I’m gonna, I’m gonna send that through to Chad, GBT. Yeah, I, I mean, we talk about this at a, as a team all the time. I do think that those two themes. End up causing, there’s probably a lot of root causes for why we feel those things. Burnout in boredom, probably a lot of reasons why, but I do think those are two root causes for why dentists make some of the biggest mistakes that they end up doing in their careers and really derailing, you know, years of progress and schooling and so much effort and money and time and energy. Um. You know, my thoughts like, wrap that up though. I think that one of the anecdotes to it is, um, and we say this all the time, but it, it’s always true. It’s like, you know why you’re sleeping better and walking more steps. You know, it’s data, it’s tracking things, and then it’s having accountability to someone to talk to them. To, to talk through these things. You’re, you’re far, we’re all gonna experience those things. We’re gonna go through burnout and boredom, probably multiple times in careers, in life, but we’re far less likely to act on them in ways that’ll be destructive if we’ve got some data and some organization, some tracking going on to, to see where we’ve been, where we’re going, and have someone to talk to about it. So my, my invitation after hearing that, first of all. Sign up next year and come to the 2026 Summit.

Matt Mulcock: For sure.

Ryan Isaac: Not a call to action yet. We don’t, maybe, I don’t know if the website reflexes

Matt Mulcock: It’ll be done soon, I think after the holiday. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: Maybe by the

Matt Mulcock: By the time this comes out, it’ll probably be ready to go.

Ryan Isaac: Somewhere in there. Dentist Money Summit. Just figure it out. You’ll figure it out. You’re, you’re all internet savvy people, but, uh,

Matt Mulcock: Of that, we can announce, we can announce, because by the time this comes out, we’ll already have announced it. So, uh,

Ryan Isaac: Next year’s theme.

Matt Mulcock: The theme is, is practice on your terms.

Ryan Isaac: Oh, I love this one. Yeah.

Matt Mulcock: Little bit more dental specific than the other ones. But we, we, uh, we talked about as a team, we really like this practice on your terms. Yep.

Ryan Isaac: I, I love that for so many different reasons. I’m excited to see what we end up doing. But the second thing I was gonna say is, um. Dentist advisors.com. Click the little button there, have a chat with one of our dental specific advisors, and you can just ask us some questions. We’ll point you in the right direction, on what might be a good next step for you to, you know, avoid some of those big mistakes because that’s really what it’s about. I think from my experience watching dentists make decisions and, um, build wealth and work and live and retire is. All of the pieces to be successful and wealthy are there. It’s kind of a given. It’s whether or not you blow it, you know, like you can do some pretty average stuff as a dentist and make it. But only a handful of big financial mistakes can really like jeopardize that in the future. So if you wanna chat with someone at dentistadvisor.com, have a chat with us anytime. Matt, what would you say to, uh, close this, wifi issue, episode

Matt Mulcock: Not, the people aren’t gonna know when our

Ryan Isaac: They don’t know at any teams. You just mad

Matt Mulcock: We have just been battling through this podcast multiple.

Ryan Isaac: The amount of times, uh, one of our screens has been frozen and the other one just keeps talking ’cause they know it’s coming back around. I just keep nodding.

Matt Mulcock: I know,

Ryan Isaac: Nod and say, yep, yep, yep. I know you’re coming back.

Matt Mulcock: I know. Uh, this is what happens when we decided to podcast when we’re on vacations. Um, that just shows the dedication. The dedication. I would say the thing that I’m. again, something I wasn’t expecting, but in the conversations I had, I guess I left like super proud of what we’re doing at at dentist advisors on multiple levels. So not only like as we started this thinking the whole team, but I think the uniqueness. in our genuine good faith approach to get people to think about living their good. Li like living, living, to shout out last year’s summit, their rich life, and planning for the present. Like, I had so many comments from so many people there, like, wait, you guys are a financial planning firm and you’re sitting here building an entire summit, money summit on. Like the present moment and it just, I think there’s a uniqueness about that because people are like, oh, this is like legit. Like you really do want us to think about, yeah, like not just when can I retire, but am I using my money now in a way that like aligns with my value? So I guess I walked away like super proud of our team and really just like proud to be a part of this, this company and organization that we have such a.

We do have that mindset that’s probably pretty unique to the industry. Um, and then I guess the last thing I’ll say, just on the actual theme, the message I tried to get across that like plan for the present being truly as we called it, as I called it out when I spoke, like an oxymoron, a bit of a contradiction. But the main point there is the practical piece of this is being present in your life does actually require planning. And there is a bit of a, there is like some tension there of

Ryan Isaac: Yeah,

Matt Mulcock: You do have to plan for this, but like you gotta, you gotta look ahead a little bit to make sure

Ryan Isaac: Weird paradox.

Matt Mulcock: Building planning, or sorry, you’re building presence into your life.

Ryan Isaac: I was just thinking after next year, so we’ll have, uh, like live your rich life by planning for the present and practicing on your terms. In the future, maybe we just do like an arrows tour. We have like one dentist money Summit and every 30 minutes it just switches themes, like

Matt Mulcock: And by that time we’ll be, by that time we’ll be so big we’ll have Tswift show up.

Ryan Isaac: Be a hundred thousand people in

Matt Mulcock: Exactly.

Ryan Isaac: City, every night.

Matt Mulcock: Dude, if we could just get Tswift, we could charge whatever we wanted.

Ryan Isaac: If we’ll work on that for next

Matt Mulcock: This actually might work.

Ryan Isaac: Okay.

Matt Mulcock: Okay.

Ryan Isaac: We we’re, we’re struggling to get James Clear, but I’m sure,

Matt Mulcock: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: Know, T Swift is gonna be in,

Matt Mulcock: I’ll text her. We’ll see what she says.

Ryan Isaac: We’ll see. Anyway, thanks everyone for listening. Thanks, Matt. We, we made it, we made it to the end of the episode. Sorry, editing team, we love you. You’re all great. Thanks for being here. Catch you next time.

Keywords: health tracking, burnout, dentist money summit, present planning, second order effects, dentist community, financial mistakes, sleep tracking

Behavioral Finance, Work Life Balance