Can You Keep Your Cool When Things Ain’t Cool? – Episode 228

Humans have an innate desire to control their surroundings. Here’s what happens when we lose that control.

On this episode of The Dentist Money™ Show, Reese and Ryan take a look at the real reasons people end up hoarding during panics. Or more to their point, when markets are diving and your net worth is shrinking, how can you stifle the impulse to push your own panic button? 

We all have irrationally strong preferences for things we can control with certainty. Reese and Ryan have some ideas on how to keep your cool when the heat is on.

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to the Dentist Money Show. Today on the show, Reese and I talk about some of the crazy things happening. We’re April, 2020, still in the middle of the COVID-19 shutdown. Still a lot of unknowns and things going on. Today we talk about what investor behavior has to do with toilet paper shortages, and why humans tend to respond the way we do, reaching out for control during times of uncertainty. Thanks for joining us. Really appreciate the support. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions for us, go to dentistadvisors.com, click on the book free consultation button, and let’s have a chat. Or go to the Facebook group, dentistadvisor.com/group we will talk to you soon. Thanks for tuning in. Enjoy the show.

Announcer:
Consultant an advisor or conduct your own due diligence when making financial decisions. General principles discussed during this program do not constitute personal advice. This program is furnished by Dentist Advisors, a registered investment advisor. This is Dentist Money. Now, here’s your host, Reese Harper.

Reese Harper:
Welcome to the Dentist Money show where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. This is a special edition. I’m your host, Reese Harper, here with my trusty old co-host Sir Ryan Issac COVID style special edition 2020.

Ryan Isaac:
Man.

Reese Harper:
Crazy week.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s been a long year already. I always hope these are special anyway, but these are special edition. We are in April, is it April?

Reese Harper:
Yes.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s April 2020.

Reese Harper:
I don’t know what day it is, because they all feel the same-

Ryan Isaac:
I don’t know either, it’s like the 7-

Reese Harper:
Every day is the same-

Ryan Isaac:
… 16th. So if you were listening a few years ago, you probably remember all this. But yeah, it’s a very weird different time. Let’s start here, because this is a little bit on topic for today. What are you most worried about right now? What keeps you up about all this stuff right now?

Reese Harper:
Probably right now what keeps me up is that-

Ryan Isaac:
And has it changed too since it all began?

Reese Harper:
Yeah, yeah. Now, I’m more informed about the… A virus is a difficult thing to squash out. There’s not always a “vaccine” for every virus that you can just create and then it never…

Ryan Isaac:
Then it’s gone.

Reese Harper:
It’s gone forever. I mean, the flu is a good example of that. The annual flu vaccine doesn’t…

Ryan Isaac:
The flu shot people will still get sick.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. Certain years it’s better than others. I don’t know. It just kind of is like an eye-opening thing to me, about how the world really could change if we don’t have a good and robust deep medical preventative infrastructure in place going forward. I just want to be able to go to the store. I want to be able to go outside. I want to be able to spend time doing things I used to do. Go to the pool. Go to the beach.

Ryan Isaac:
What’s one thing you miss right now? What are you missing most? If you just go do something normal right now, what do you miss most?

Reese Harper:
I just want to go out and sit in a restaurant and eat in a restaurant. And maybe the second thing would be like I want to ski. I want to ski.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, they shut you down early, huh?

Reese Harper:
Real early.

Ryan Isaac:
Way early. And you’re still getting snow, oh yeah.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. Could have been skiing today, easily. I mean, my favorite thing is I love to be able to go skiing and then go to Moab and mountain bike the same day. I like to go skiing in the morning in Salt Lake, drive down to Moab, get on my mountain bike-

Ryan Isaac:
So killer-

Reese Harper:
… and then get a pizza on main street…

Ryan Isaac:
And sit there.

Reese Harper:
… And then zip line and then the next morning wake up and go on a whitewater rafting tour through the Canyon. And then come back the next day and go ski powder in Salt Lake at 10,000 feet. You can go from 10,000 feet to freaking…

Ryan Isaac:
Nothing, yeah-

Reese Harper:
… nothing below sea level.

Ryan Isaac:
The canyons.

Reese Harper:
Death rim.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s crazy.

Reese Harper:
I just miss that because you can’t go anywhere right now. And my life is more…

Ryan Isaac:
And you literally can’t leave your desk either.

Reese Harper:
I just live in my office. How about you?

Ryan Isaac:
I want to go to the beach so bad.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, dude, you’re a lake life beach guy now.

Ryan Isaac:
Luckily, it’s warm in Phoenix this time of year. And so the paddle boards, everything’s closed, so all the parking is closed. There’s some legal street parking and you got to walk your boards to the river. So that’s kind of so far been some sanity and at least there’s some trail hiking and stuff. But I just want to get in my car and go to the beach in San Diego, so bad. That was a long intro, but these are just weird times and I don’t know, man.

Ryan Isaac:
The topic today is going to be about, we talked a little bit about risk and things we control and don’t control. Human beings innate need to grasp for control when we’re feeling like we’re out of control, and we’ve seen some interesting things. So I didn’t-

Reese Harper:
So how would you cue this up? How would you cue this up? Today’s about… You’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff happen in the last month.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I just want to say this first. I don’t want to make light of anything. Because we’re going to talk about toilet paper shortages right now, okay? And-

Reese Harper:
that’s a real thing for some people-

Ryan Isaac:
… Isolated, it’s kind of crazy and a little silly and funny that that was like the first thing to happen, was the toilet paper ran out in the country. You know, the first thing before we shut down anything, Disneyland still open, you can eat at restaurants, but we ran out of toilet paper first. And so we’re going to just talk a little bit about why psychologists say happens. Which is pretty simple, you can guess why. Did you go through that? Were you guys like struggling to find toilet paper, out of all things? We still got chicken and we got milk and eggs and produce, but I couldn’t buy toilet paper until yesterday. My wife went to Costco.

Ryan Isaac:
There’s a lot of pretty interesting articles from psychologists on this, and it’s a kind of an intuitive answer. When we as humans feel like we’re out of control, or we’re just like really anxious about something, we grasp for any possible way that we can control things. Even if it’s silly and stupid. But when I was reading about this, I found there’s this bias, I’d never heard of this before, but it’s kind of fascinating. There’s this bias called zero risk bias. And it’s this thing that gets studied. This bias describes irrationally strong preferences for situations with total certainty.

Ryan Isaac:
So in this case, a zero risk bias would be human beings. Like we’re scared about business and health and we don’t know what’s going to happen with this virus and shutdowns. So we just go grasp for… We eliminate risk even in a silly area of our life. The risk of running out of toilet paper was probably not a risk. It might’ve been a 2% risk, compared to losing my income’s a 60% risk, but I can’t control that. So I’m going to go eliminate that. And there’s some studies on this, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, you’ve heard of… A lot of the books I read. So they did a study on this and he found that people in their studies on zero risk bias, they found that people preferred risk reduction from 5% to 0%. So a 5% risk, they preferred to take that from 5 to 0, than they did to take a 55% risk down to 50.

Ryan Isaac:
Two separate risky items in their life in these studies. They’d prefer to take the 5% risk that was like a meaningless, like not consequential risk, probably not going to happen, to take that one to zero. Rather than take the more probable risk from 55% down to 50% and reduce the more probable risk. And that’s what zero risk bias is, just kind of our human tendency to just want to eliminate risks even if it’s silly. And so anyway, I found some of those articles from a psychologist talking about that, on the toilet paper thing and that’s kind of just what, it’s what we did. I don’t know, for better for worse, we just bought toilet paper in giant quantities for a good month.

Ryan Isaac:
We wanted to take a break for just a second and remind you how easy it is to book a free consultation with one of our dental specific advisors. What you do is you go to dentistadvisors.com and you’ll see a big green button that says, book free consultation.

Reese Harper:
Can’t miss it.

Ryan Isaac:
Click that button and book a time that works for you. Or you could just call us, at 8-3-3 DDS Plan. Let’s start a conversation about how we can help you with your finances.

Ryan Isaac:
Let’s first talk about what are some like zero risk bias behaviors going on right now that might be harmful to people? What are some people doing financially trying to reduce their risks that might not be smart reductions of risk, or smart actions in hopes of reducing risk? You’ve seen some of these, have you given some thought to it?

Reese Harper:
Yeah. Well in the last few days, I’ve seen like, specifically as it relates to investing, I think people are trying to create the best case scenario. They’re trying to eliminate the risk of re-entering the market. So I’ve seen people purchase securities in one week, the market will move down a little bit lower and they’ll want to get out and wait. Like this morning I actually had several interactions with clients who requested to leave a position that they had just purchased a week prior, and just say, “I just don’t feel good about things right now.” And these are people with very pretty long histories of like being quite rational. And we had a back and forth a little bit about it, and that you’re never going to be able to eliminate the risk of reentering the market completely.

Reese Harper:
Like there’s going to be like uncertainty about how this will rebound, whether it’s going to decline slightly more or… But you’re purchasing this because you don’t need the money for five years. By trying to time when the bottom is, you’re going to increase your anxiety and increase your stress and potentially just not invest at all. That’s my worry is that, people just wont-

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:10:52] completely.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, and I feel like at times like this when there’s a lot of uncertainty, people want to eliminate their risk down to as low as it possibly can go. And I’ve seen that in another example with the PPP loans right now-

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, it’s going to bring that up.

Reese Harper:
… It’s like, we’ve got Dennis getting these loans for their payroll and all their payroll-related expenses. It’s a real gift from the government. As of today, I still don’t have a PPP loan after having applied for it two weeks earlier. I may not get one, and it might just be luck of the draw for a lot of people listening that haven’t gotten one yet. And when you look at that, the people that are getting it, a lot of them are trying to time the exact perfect time when to get the loan. Because they want to minimize the risk to zero, that they don’t have all of the money forgiven, all the debt forgiven. Instead of just saying, well I’m going to apply for this, it is the cheapest loan I could ever get. Some of it’s going to be forgiven and if the rest isn’t forgiven, I’ll just give it back… that lot of people waited and waited and waited because they were trying to time the exact perfect moment-

Ryan Isaac:
Then the risk-

Reese Harper:
… when to get the loan, to minimize the risk of not having the money forgiven. Because the risk went from, the risk prior was I’m going to run out of money and not have it. Then when the loan comes around, now the risk is a different risk. They just want to minimize the risk again. You’re minimizing the risk number one because you want to put people on unemployment, and that was a rational thing to do. The next risk should be… I want to minimize the risk of getting my business back up and running and I should apply for this loan and try to get it. Hopefully the government will issue another round of this and those listening to this podcast, they’ll have more news than I have today about whether that’s going to happen.

Reese Harper:
I just wonder, right now, what you’ll end up seeing is, when everyone feels like someone else is getting a deal that they didn’t get. And that’s what happens when governments intervene. Whether it’s PPP loans, some cities have extending moratoriums on evictions, where it’s an unequal treatment between people, then everyone wants to go to the lowest common denominator no matter what their financial situation is. That’s the risk. We’re not all irrational toilet paper people, until we don’t see any toilet paper on the shelves and then all of a sudden like we are raving, we’re rabid paper seekers-

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, or buying paper towels and [inaudible 00:13:42] down.

Reese Harper:
Yes. The things that cause this though the most are when liquidity is at its all time low. And when you have pushed yourself to the point to where you just don’t have any kind of cushion to think rationally during a difficult time, you start doing some crazy things. And I guess that’s the thing that I’m worried about, that I see continuing to be a problem. And over the next six to nine months, depending on how many people get back to work and how many people continue to pay rent and pay their mortgages, that’s a big factor. And banks have deep pockets, but a lot of these servicers don’t. And the government’s going to have to back up a lot of these mortgages. That could be a really big problem, if people don’t get back into employment.

Ryan Isaac:
And what that even looks like when businesses open-

Reese Harper:
I think the government, for that reason, I can see the government wanting to potentially extend some of their small business stimulus for all these companies that applied, but maybe didn’t get alone. Because if they don’t, it’s going to result in a big systemic shift. I mean, you’re going to have a lot of… The mortgage industries, the example I’m just giving that’s going to be hit pretty hard by that. And not just residential owners, but commercial buildings and all these mom and pop landlords that have 100 tenants in their facility. That could be a big issue that we’re not seeing quite yet happen, but I hope it doesn’t. As far as advice to people, I think it’s hard when you’re already in this situation to remember that, like for a future market cycle. But I think maintaining high levels of liquidity is definitely something that keeps people a little bit more balanced.

Ryan Isaac:
During these times, you always hear people spending so much energy trying to avoid temporary declines in their portfolio values, but they are some of the same people who will go the next 30 years overspending by 30 grand a year. Or not, I don’t know, not having a loan with the most competitive interest rate on it for the next 20 years. Or they won’t implement the right retirement plan in the practice, and they’ll miss out on a tax savings for the next 20 years.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. And that’s just a behavioral psychology bias of mental accounting. Like the same person that is fine having a really, really expensive, let’s say lifestyle purchase, will sometimes obsess over the PPP loan to the last dollar. To try to get that last dollar of loan forgiveness. But they won’t think twice about the car that they want to purchase.

Ryan Isaac:
Or that they haven’t tracked their own spending forever, and they overspend by tens of thousands of dollars and their savings rate is too low. It’s not like [crosstalk 00:16:58] it’s just have humans act.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, but every time we’ll go out to a restaurant, they’re looking for a Groupon. You don’t know, like, I haven’t been able to figure out what it is that makes some people be frugal in some areas of their life and really-

Ryan Isaac:
And then wasteful in another-

Reese Harper:
… wasteful in another.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, because we all do that.

Reese Harper:
But investing in the market, you don’t win because you’re perfectly timed. You don’t win because you’re perfectly, you’re entering at the perfect time, or you have the perfect foresight. You just win based on the consistency of time that you expose your money to the market. And the diversification that you choose to have or lack thereof. For example, if you choose right now to buy the energy sector and avoid the whole market, but you want to buy the energy sector. The energy sector might have significantly more upside than the whole market, but it also might be stagnant for a long time.

Reese Harper:
It might take a decade to recover from a combination of multiple viruses that stop travel for an extended period of time. Plus advances that come in technology that make fuel consumption even more irrelevant. And so that’s a possibility, there’s just more risk in the trade of purchasing energy at the expense of not investing. The whole market that you invest in wouldn’t have as much risk as one sector. And a lot of people will, I just think sometimes people try to optimize their portfolio to the nth degree, rather than just-

Ryan Isaac:
While ignoring something else, yeah.

Reese Harper:
Just ignoring things in their life that are more critical. Like you didn’t need to put in a pool last year in the fall. Or you didn’t need to get a second home. you didn’t need to continue to… I’m not being like, I am being critical, there’s probably 50 people listening right here. I put a pool in in the fall, I’m sorry, like I want to put a pool in and I just, I don’t have a comfort level yet with my amount of liquidity to feel like I could go through a crisis and then be happy that I still had that pool.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. You just can’t spend 200 grand on a backyard project, and then be mad that your portfolio is down 20, and then obsess about trying to like avoid another 10 or $20,000 loss.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, this is a much more holistic thing-

Ryan Isaac:
You just have to accept, you just got to look at the whole thing. You’d be like, if I’m obsessing about the 20 grand in my portfolio fluctuation, or maybe it’s a 100, then you need to also obsess about the 100 grand you’re going to waste in personal spending over the next few years too. I mean, you’ve got to balance it out a little bit or at least recognize it. And it’s just a weird human thing, where we all do it. We’re just a weird species. We all behave this way-

Reese Harper:
Yeah, and it’s like I don’t know why some people are more… maybe some people are really frugal with their cars, but they’re not with their vacations. Or some people are not frugal with the food they consume, but they really are with the clothing they purchase. It doesn’t mean just because you’re bad or imbalanced, we all have our imbalance.

Ryan Isaac:
Your waste, is it worse than someone else’s waste?

Reese Harper:
Yeah, everyone’s wasting some place. I feel like investment portfolios for some people right now tend to get…

Ryan Isaac:
Just get all the focus-

Reese Harper:
… all the focus because they’re moving very fast right now-

Ryan Isaac:
… but it’s understandable. And it’s the topic. I mean it’s just, it’s the forefront. I mean…

Reese Harper:
But I’m telling you. So like I have people who started investing like three weeks ago, is their first time investing. And they’re up a lot. So it’s just luck of the draw now. Now those people-

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, in short periods of time, it’s total luck-

Reese Harper:
… those people’s portfolios will look very similar in returns to the person that started three months ago.

Ryan Isaac:
And lost a chunk.

Reese Harper:
At the 10-year mark from now, 10 years from today, they’re both going to have negligible differences in their portfolios. It’s not the way it works-

Ryan Isaac:
Yes, it’s not going be that different.

Reese Harper:
It’s just short term, everything feels so accentuated. It’s like, oh I bought this stock and it’s down. Like, oh I got in at the wrong time. And it’s really just like if you espouse a short term investing philosophy in public markets, that is just not how Ryan and I feel. We don’t feel like investing in public markets is a short term thing at all.

Ryan Isaac:
Man, you just feel bad for people just because there’s just enough history and evidence to show that it’s just a really tough game to play in the short term. It’s just a hard thing to manipulate in short term chunks of time-

Reese Harper:
Yeah, put your effort and energy in a different place-

Ryan Isaac:
In your business or somewhere. It’s frustrating, because you just don’t want someone to get hosed by it.

Ryan Isaac:
And it feels so clearly demonstrated that that’s what happens to people over time. Even if they get lucky once or twice, you got to do this for decades, and it’s just such a hard thing to do. Anyway, yeah.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, this is not the only decline you’re going to experience in your lifetime-

Ryan Isaac:
No way.

Reese Harper:
And use this opportunity to just be at peace with what you invest in, when it comes to like investing in a stock, investing in the stock market. Use this time to just be at peace with the fact that this is the cost. And I just don’t think that you shouldn’t be investing in the stock market until you have adequate amounts of personal reserves and business reserves. And any client that we work with, we’re constantly like…

Ryan Isaac:
Those are the first steps-

Reese Harper:
… building those steps, before we ever started investing in markets. And so-

Ryan Isaac:
Isn’t it a weird asset class though? I mean, think about if all this stuff, which it totally might, impacts real estate values over the next couple of years. I mean stocks are such a funny, emotional asset class, because anyone that bought a house or a piece of property that declines over the next couple of years, like let’s just say you just bought it at a peak like two months ago. And then 12 months from now it’s like worth… you have negative equity in your property and it floods and you need a new dishwasher. We just treat things different, we’re like, eh, whatever. I’m going to hold this for a long time anyway. So I’ll put in a new dishwasher and we’ll get new carpet in the basement. Who cares?

Reese Harper:
There’s something about stocks. I think it’s just the speed at which they change price.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s speed and it’s liquidity, which is a blessing and a curse too because it’s one of the coolest things about the stock market. Is how your money is liquid at all times, but it’s also a total curse man, because it just plays with your emotions so bad.

Reese Harper:
Well I just think the stock market is just more honest about values in the assets that you own. Like you were saying earlier, why do some people… when we were talking about scarcity and fear, that’s one of the reasons that banks are set up the way they are. Banks are set up in a way where, they take your money, you say, I deposit it. And the government allows them to say back to you that the amount you deposited is the amount that you have. And the truth about it is, the truth about the way this works is let’s say you deposit $10,000 at the bank. If you deposit $10,000 at the bank, immediately that money would start going up and down in value.

Reese Harper:
It wouldn’t be crazy because the banks invest a lot in bonds, but what it would say is the $10,000 that you have here, thank you for letting us have it-

Ryan Isaac:
And use it-

Reese Harper:
… and use it. If you need it back, technically we across the whole bank only have access to give you like 10% of it back, if everyone wanted all their money at the same time. But 9,000 of your 10,000, we don’t even really have. And it’s kind of a big, global Ponzi scheme that keeps the whole world floating. That’s basically the truth about a bank. It’s like we take from one person, we give it to another, we take it from one person, we give it to another. I’m just inciting a little bit of fear in your mind around what a bank actually is. like if you really want to be protected from the financial system, like banks-

Ryan Isaac:
This is the scene in, It’s A Wonderful Life, George Bailey on his honeymoon, and he’s explaining this to-

Reese Harper:
It’s like, how much [crosstalk 00:25:47]?

Ryan Isaac:
… yeah, and he’s explaining, “Well I don’t have your money, your money’s in Tom’s house and it’s his Bertha’s new farm. And you lended her and she’ll pay back what she can.” And that’s the scene, that’s the savings and loan, old George Bailey.

Reese Harper:
And banks are allowed to pretend like they have all your money and it’s all sitting there, and it’s the same amount as you put in the day before. Really, it’s moving up and down. And some banks it’s scarier than others. Because they’re maybe reaching their lending limit, or they don’t have as much liquidity or they haven’t lend out that much. And so they’re not as favorably rated by a rating agency as another bank might be. And so the stock market, the difference between that and a bank is it’s just ruthlessly honest with you.

Reese Harper:
The stock market is literally millions of people every day that are looking at what they own, and deciding if they think it’s worth it, given the new-

Ryan Isaac:
Continuing to own it or not-

Reese Harper:
… given the new information about all the stuff that…

Ryan Isaac:
That minute-

Reese Harper:
… they can see in the future of what’s going to happen. It’s not like today’s news that affects the stock market. It’s anticipation of the future that affects company values. Like why is Delta right now holding strong low $20 a share? Well, it’s because the whole market knows that come, closer to the fall, all the government stimulus money that Delta has been allotted is going to run out. But they anticipate that business travel by the end of the year will probably pick up. Therefore, if Delta has the last say four to five months of the year to run flights and get things rolling again, they’ll probably generate enough revenue to justify their 22 to $23 an hour a share price.

Reese Harper:
If anything happens different in that picture, meaning there are business travel changes, or people even guess that business travel might change. Or if we start hearing-

Ryan Isaac:
They assume it’s going to change-

Reese Harper:
Yeah, we start hearing wind of how, maybe take another example. Maybe after all of this working at home stuff goes down, commercial real estate buildings, all the CEOs start saying, you know what, this whole like don’t pay a lease thing. I kind of like it. I’m just going to let everybody work from their houses-

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, everyone already has a place to work, it’s called their house.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, they can work from their houses. They seem fine. We’re making the same quantity of phone calls we used to make and we’re servicing people. And you know what, we have this lunch room facility and we were giving people like exercise classes. I’m not going to do that anymore, this is fine. And then the whole commercial real estate industry just totally changes its landscape. I’m even thinking, I’m a small business, we’re a less than 50-employee company, and we have one office that we all work out of-

Ryan Isaac:
That holds like 12…

Reese Harper:
Yeah, like our office right now could fit like maybe 30 people, max. and some of us are already working from home and using it as flex space. And now when you see how it feels, like, well, I don’t know, I’m kind of comfortable with people working from home and they seem to be doing okay. What is the office for? I mean look, for me it’s a small expense on our balance sheet, so it’s not really something that like for me, I feel like would really-

Ryan Isaac:
Stress about too much-

Reese Harper:
… be a stress. But if you think about a big company, it’s like $10 million a year in rent. And they’re like, well, we could cut that to four, if people would just work from their houses and we invested in a Zoom account.

Ryan Isaac:
Hey everybody, here’s a few reasons why you should listen to our next webinar. First of all, the webinar format allows us to teach financial principles in a more interactive way. You get to see live graphics on your screen. Sometimes I draw pretty pictures and we have a live discussion that helps explain financial concepts in more detail. You can even send in questions live during the webinar and get an answer. And then we always do a Q and A after. So join us next time. Go to dentistadvisors.com/events and sign up for the next webinar.

Reese Harper:
I mean, so the market can see that, it can anticipate it, it prices things like that in, and when it starts to rise or improve like it did over the last few weeks, it moved from its lows to increased almost… almost got half of the games back that it had lost. It did that because it anticipates. It anticipates how the stimulus package may affect companies-

Ryan Isaac:
It’s going to help companies, yeah.

Reese Harper:
It can see that some of the curve flattening was potentially working in Germany and it was potentially working in China and it was having an effect in Italy. And that the way they handled it wasn’t as proactive as the way other countries handled it, and the more proactive countries seem to be handling it better.

Ryan Isaac:
Through it faster, yeah.

Reese Harper:
So it’s like, it’s such a honest mechanism of value. It just changes so often that I think people just don’t like the… people get scared and they don’t like things to change very quickly. And-

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, especially when everything changes [crosstalk 00:31:38].

Reese Harper:
And I blame it on the banking system, though. Like lying to people to begin with. From the day they’re born, you put money into a bank account and it tells you that it’s not changing in price and that it’s there for you.

Ryan Isaac:
Is your 10 grand still there?

Reese Harper:
That’s the biggest lie that starts this whole thing. It’s like, well, if you just put it in a CD, then it’s safe and stable. I don’t know why the government allows banks to lie that way. It’s not true-

Ryan Isaac:
I mean they insure the first 250…

Reese Harper:
It’s not true to say that you have your money there and it’s the same thing, and it never changes in price. And everyone who wants it can get it.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
I mean that’s not the same. If I liquidate a stock, like the entire stock of a company, I can get my liquidity out of that. It can’t lie to me. It tells me what it’s worth, and if I wanted all out, and everyone wanted all their money out from Apple… Like if Apple could sell to another company and cash out and pay off all its investors and go private, like-

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, they just get a trillion dollars sitting in their bank account-

Reese Harper:
Everyone can get a trillion dollars. If everyone with their money sitting inside of a bank, wanted all their money out immediately, it’s like it can’t really happen.

Ryan Isaac:
George Bailey would be trying to teach you a lesson in black and white.

Reese Harper:
Just don’t get lured into this whole, the bank is the place where… I worry that from age eight to age 25…

Ryan Isaac:
Some false of security-

Reese Harper:
… people have got this false sense of security about the way the financial system goes.

Ryan Isaac:
Well again, it just goes back to low, especially during these times. This is such an unprecedented, crazy, crazy time. It just goes back to our human nature of grasping it. What’s the lowest common denominator of risk that we can eliminate from our lives? I can just sell my stocks before they fluctuate more. I can cancel the subscription to the place that I normally go to. I can, I don’t know, buy more toilet paper. I’ve got six months here, but maybe I should, you know, I pull in and everyone’s got their carts full coming out of the store. Maybe I should just get some more. Maybe it’s not going to be here anymore.

Reese Harper:
I’m going to close out all the frozen pizzas, I’m going to find every last Totino’s that’s at…

Ryan Isaac:
Telling you-

Reese Harper:
… if you like Totino’s, you know, that’s the thing.

Ryan Isaac:
You know what, I did panic buy though. I went and bought four giant or maybe it was five huge things of protein, of whey protein.

Reese Harper:
Oh yeah, of course.

Ryan Isaac:
So that was my… I did panic buy-

Reese Harper:
I did that with ice cream-

Ryan Isaac:
… Anyway, this took a little bit of a different turn than what I anticipated though, but I think this is like a timely, I guess the point of all this is, this is how humans react. Some of it’s not rational, some of it’s actually harmful to your future self when this stuff is done. And there are certain things that are smart and rational that you have control over in times like now, and in normal times. I guess if you’re listening to this and you’re questioning, man, when we get out of this, or even right now, what kind of stuff should I be paying attention to? Or what should I try to get in control that I don’t have in control before? Where am I unorganized or not making good decisions? Then that’s the whole system that we run. If you go to dentistadvisor.com and check out the elements.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s the whole way that we are making sure in a broad picture, controls being measured, in all these subjects. So you can go to the website and check it out. If you want to have a chat with us, go to the website, dentistadvisors.com, click on the book consultation button, or join the mighty Facebook group, dentistadvisors.com/group-post-a-question, and we’ll get in there and answer. But any parting words, Reese, during these crazy times for the people?

Reese Harper:
I would, maybe one more thing to look out, if you’re young students, for people, you’re really early in your career, maybe people trying to figure this out the first time. Join our student learning course. Ryan and I are hosting another event. We do these on Thursday nights right now, at 6:30. And you can go to dentistadvisors.com. Right now if you go to dentistadvisors.com/beta we’re testing our first student learning course. And we’re trying to get people also to learn about how to track their finances and organize it through some technology that we’ve been working on for a long time.

Reese Harper:
So you can go check that out too, and maybe-

Ryan Isaac:
Shout out-

Reese Harper:
… if you’re not ready for Sir Ryan Issac to personally handle your stuff and help you through this, we can get you started on a lite version.

Ryan Isaac:
Can we name the app, Sir Ryan Lite?

Reese Harper:
I like it.

Ryan Isaac:
Can that be the name of the app?

Reese Harper:
I don’t know if people will, how they’ll fall in love with that-

Ryan Isaac:
They won’t like it-

Reese Harper:
I’d like to see-

Ryan Isaac:
… people don’t like lite-

Reese Harper:
… I think they want you to be the podcast guy.

Ryan Isaac:
They want the premium paid version.

Reese Harper:
Right, you’re premium.

Ryan Isaac:
Well, thanks everyone for tuning in. Appreciate it. If you have any questions for us, go to the website, book a consultation. Happy to chat with you. Wish everyone the best of luck, best wishes, and if we can help at all, just let us know. We’ll do what we can, and thanks for tuning in.

Reese Harper:
Carry on.

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