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Episode #611 - Simple Isn’t Easy: Carl Richards on Life and Retirement

The ultimate goal in building a retirement plan of record is elegant simplicity.

Roger: Welcome to the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence to lean in and rock it, because you understand it and it makes sense to you. That's important with your retirement plan of record. My name is Roger Whitney and today we're going to have a special episode where Carl Richards and I have a conversation with each other and club members. We decided to do this in the club just to bring in other voices about elegant simplicity, about decision making, about deciding what you want, which is extremely difficult in life when we're setting goals. Carl is one of the good guys. He was a financial advisor. He became an artist and did sketches that simplified very complex issues or problems and had a column in the New York Times for a while. He coaches and collaborates with advisors that are working on the art of advice. Definitely beating the drum for making our profession better. And so Carl has this new book coming out called “Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in Simple Sketches.” You can learn more about that at behaviorgap.com and the book comes out on October 21st. I suggest you get it. These sketches are awesome. I purchased many of them and we're going to have a discussion about these topics. How do you make decisions? How do you decide what you want? How do you get to elegant simplicity? And it's not just going to be Carl and I talking. It's going to be people like you, in this case club members sharing their stories and tips as well. So let's get this party started. It's about an hour long conversation. Hopefully you find some wisdom in it. Let's get this going.

CARL RICHARDS IS WELL KNOWN IN THE BUSINESS OF FINANCIAL ADVICE

Hey everybody. Welcome to hanging out with me and Carl Richards. I'll introduce him in a moment. Just a reminder, this is actually just the audio, not the video. This is going to appear on the podcast, so it’s on you if you overshare a little bit. But we're just going to have a conversation about money. Carl Richards is well known in the business of financial advice. I'm going to give a very brief summary of who he is. You were an advisor and a CFP. You have coached and mentored countless people, many of them I know like Taylor Schulte and others. And then in a Seth Godin style became an artist and created these sketches to help simplify the playing field of what our industry can generally make a very complicated thing. In addition, Mr. Richards has, a community of sorts, four advisors on the art of advice, which is very different than what you see in our industry, our industry is generally about growth and scale and sales. His expertise, to my understanding, you can correct me, Carl, is on the art of advice. So he is one pounding the drumbeat to improve our industry and serving people like you and everybody. How was that for an intro, Carl? Did I miss anything?

Carl Richards: No. That's amazing. Thank you. Yeah, I'm just excited to have this conversation.

CARL STARTED SKETCHING TO HELP EXPLAIN COMPLEX FINANCIAL CONCEPTS

Yeah.

Roger: And so Carl, you have a number of books, the one page financial plan. You have a number of sketches which I own. I pulled some of them up here I thought we might use as fodder to give people an understanding of how you approach this. But let's start with the sketches because that's where your new book is coming in. What got you doing sketches and I'll just share a few while you maybe give us some origin story.

Carl Richards: Yeah, I mean I would imagine that most of the people listening to this have had this experience where you're meeting with somebody from the finance industry and they're trying to explain something that, and they're using language that, you know, despite no matter how, like unless it's been your full time job. Right. Like you, most normal people don't walk around using the term volatility regularly or, and they don't try to make it better. When somebody says I don't know what that means, and they say, oh, you know, standard deviation, you know, like we use a language that is often sort of completely indecipherable for most humans. And I remember being in a meeting early on in my career with some super successful clients, very smart, very successful people. And I was trying to explain a concept to them that I thought was really important for them to understand, to make the decision they were thinking about. And I was just getting blank stares back. And that had happened before, but this time it, I felt a slight bit of panic because I realized like, they're really smart and so if I'm just getting blank stares from two really smart people, it must be me, you know, like I'm not doing a good job of explaining this concept. And out of an act of really desperation, I had never done this before, I wasn't a doodler in college or high school, I have no art background. As will be obvious as Roger shows you some of the sketches, I just stood up for the first time in a shared conference room. There was a whiteboard and I made an attempt to try and diagram what we were talking about. And it doesn't really matter what it was. I believe I remember what it was, but it doesn't really matter. The clients were like, oh, I get it now. And I remember thinking, like that moment, I remember sort of almost getting addicted to that moment of, like, how can I take something that's a little bit abstract, maybe a little bit complex, and reduce it down to its simplest form? And so then I started doing them for the Internet, you know, back during blog days, and my mom and my sister were reading it. I. I found out later my sister was lying. Right. It was just my mom.

Roger: Yeah, she signed up just to be nice.

Carl Richards: Totally. And then one thing led to another, and again, I had no journalism background. One thing led to another, and the New York Times found them, asked me to do them for them, and that led to a weekly column for a decade. and then sort of that led to books and et cetera. So that's where the sketches came from. Just this attempt to take something that feels complex and obscure and abstract and make it more concrete.

Roger: That's such an important story, and that's a lot of what this club is. So we're hanging out right now live with 75 club members out of about 1500, and everyone here is working towards having the confidence to rock retirement in some way, and by simplifying the playing field in terms of creating a retirement plan that they understand so that they can have confidence. So we work a lot in trying to simplify things in an industry which you and I grew up in, where we, for whatever motives, we just love all this geeky stuff, and we want to play with all these geeky toys that are sort of beside the point of helping people create great lives.

NEW BOOK COMING OUT OCTOBER 21ST

So the book that you're coming out with on, I think it's October 21st. Your money. What is your intent with that book? Talk about that book.

Carl Richards: Yeah, so my last book came out 11 years ago, so the first two books were two years apart. And then it's been 11 years, and I kind of gave up on books. I was like, look, I'm enjoying conversations so much. And then it was about the same time where it turns out you could have a career having conversations, and you just call it podcasts. So I'd sort of, like, I really fell in love with having conversations with people. And I started getting these emails, though. and these emails were like, people had screenshot one of the sketches, and they taped it to the fridge, or they put it in the break room, or they pinned it to a bulletin board. And, and to my great dismay, none of those emails said, this is so visually striking, or this is so this is a beautiful piece of art. None of them said that. They all said things like, I had this on the wall and my friend walked by and it started this conversation. Or I had this on the fridge at home and my daughter asked me about it. And I started noticing this pattern of like, the images starting conversations. And I started thinking of them as conversation grenades. Like you, you toss them in a room and conversations break out everywhere. So. And then I noticed there's something unique about the physical book, right? Like, like handing this to somebody. And so I, I, I. For a couple of years, I thought about the idea of creating an unpretentious coffee table book. You know, a book that could feel like it could be passed from friend to friend or sit on the coffee table and you could flip to any page. And so that's what the book is. It's a collection of 101. Many of them are like greatest hits. most, not, not most, but actually, I would be surprised if more. I bet 80% of them appeared in the column in the New York Times. I updated the writing. I thought really carefully about it. I wanted it to be 101 sketches with 101 essays. But I want the essays to be as short as possible. So some of them are two sentences long. None of them will take you more than three minutes to read. And so that's what the book is. I was so happy to find a publisher that would remove everything that got in the way of that. So, like, to give you a crazy example, you know, the first three or four pages of a book that are like all the kind of legal stuff, I was like, what is this doing here and why is it at the beginning? And so I asked the publisher, I'm like, could we move it? Like, that certainly doesn't serve the reader. I want the reader to get right in. And they were like, we've never been asked, we've never thought of it. And yes, and so we moved all the front matter to the back. So that's the kind of thought that we went into. Like, I wanted this to feel more like it's not poetry, but I wanted it to feel more like you'd picked up a book of poetry, then you'd picked up a personal finance book. So that was the goal.

Roger: Well, when you emailed me about the book and I replied and said, could we do this with the club? You said, I just want to have conversations about money and these concepts. So I want to kick it off, and then we can invite members of the club just to have conversations around the concepts of some of your sketches. And let's just have a conversation about money.

Carl Richards: Yeah, that sounds great.

CARL TALKS ABOUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SIMPLISTIC AND ELEGANT SIMPLICITY IN RETIREMENT PLANNING

Roger: So I'm going to start off, I'm going to share my screen with one that I talk a lot about, which is the difference between simplistic and elegant simplicity. A friend of mine, Michael Easter, highlights a bunch of research that shows we're biologically designed to be attracted to complexity and accumulation of different things. And it's something that we have to battle. So when you're thinking of what gets in the way of creating a great life, we call it Rocking Retirement. How does this express that?

Carl Richards: Yeah, this might be the sort of logo of my work. Right. Like, what I'm trying to do with each of these images is not simplistic. Right? Like, simplistic is what you are when you don't know what you're talking about. Like, in our industry, those of you run into, like, kind of fake financial advisors. Simplistic is the financial advisor that should be selling shoes instead of helping you with your financial advice. And unfortunately, speaking broadly, there's a, there's a lot of those. Right. But what's really, really important, and this was, this was, ah, originally this idea was a, ah, Oliver Wendell Holmes quote. So you said, I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I'd give my life for the simplicity on the other side. And I think as it applies to retirement, I would be thinking, after I've considered all the edge cases and nuance, like, where do I want to live, what do I want to be doing? What gives my life meaning? You know, the normal way of making a decision like that would be that you would ask friends, you would do research, you know, you would make pros and cons lists. All of that stuff's really important, and that all lives in complexity. Right. You thought you were making a really simple decision. I mean, have you ever, have you ever tried buying shoes by reading reviews on Amazon about shoes? right. Do you leave feeling more or less confused about which pair of shoes you're going to buy after reading the reviews? Right. At least if your experience is like mine, I leave feeling more confused. Well, that's all the stuff going on inside the complexity piece, which is, again, an important part of the process. I used to feel like I was doing something wrong when I would feel a bit more confused. And now I've realized, like, that's, that's called the messy middle or in some of the literature we call it the grown zone. You know, where you're, you're engaging in emergent thinking, like considering new possibilities, edge cases, nuances. But then at a certain point you get like, I've got all the information I need. I gotta move from my head to my heart. Probably my wife calls it like, do my son salutations. Right? Like take a deep breath and say, what's the thing that matters most to me, you know, of all this stuff, you know, think about like just a credit card. Go ahead, Roger.

Roger: Let me, let me, I have an observation about this that I just want to check is in my experience and as you, you know, you that have gone through the masterclass and have been in the club and have been working on your plan of record, I'm interested in your perception of it. You can't go from simplistic to elegant. Simply, you can't shortcut having to get through all of this. In my, you know, in my experience, it is part of the process. And the key is, would you agree, Carl, not to get stuck in here because it's easy to way over optimize the money part of it and miss your life. You want to try to come out of that. Would you agree with that in terms of you can't really shortcut the process?

Carl Richards: Yeah, I think, depending on the decision and depending on your decision making framework that sort of, you've developed. Like, for instance, my wife likes to spend much more time considering every option. Right. If I were to graph this another way I would hear. In fact, Roger, let me, since you made me a co host, let me, let me fire up the old iPad here and see if we can do this real quick on the fly.

Roger: You send it as a one off. Carl original that I have for my own.

Carl Richards: Whatever, whatever you want. So here, let's see if we do this share. I think getting to the other side of complexity, in other words, trying to make a decision. Let's use a practical example. We need a new credit card. Well, you think that's just a simple decision, right? Like we just need a new credit card. Like it's not that, but as soon as you dig in a bit, you're like, okay, well do rewards matter? Do I, what kind of rewards do I use? A delta card? Should I get cash back? Suddenly you can find yourself in that middle zone, right? And I think there's another graph here that's kind of important and it would be quantity of, quantity of info. And, sorry, I don't. My handwriting doesn't look great when I'm doing it on the iPad. Quality of the decision, right? And I think we would. This is really hard for me to do and not make it perfect. It drives me crazy.

Roger: No, we're just. Yeah, we're.

Carl Richards: We're all just crazy. I know. So we're just playing with the quantity of info, quality of decision. And I think we would all agree that that slope goes up, but there's a spot at which the marginal utility of every new piece of information starts to decline. Right? Like, okay, sure, I'm going to make a little bit better decision, but the marginal benefit of each piece, I actually would argue there's a place at which I think any new information actually makes the decision worse. Now, my wife, for most decisions, loves to be. Loves to optimize as much as she can. Like, I'm out here. I mean, like, I like to make the decision and spend all my energy making it right. And that means I end up making wrong decisions a lot. My wife would like to optimize as much as she can. So she. She's an interior designer, and we just remodeled our kitchen. So you can imagine if you combine those two things. Interior designer, remodel our kitchen. I think you probably know how many conversations we had about appliances, right? I think I stopped counting at, like, 87. And, I was like, corey, her name's Corey. It was like, you know, when we'll have exactly all the information we need to make the best decision about appliances? 12 to 18 months after we've installed them, right? And it's true, there are some things we have found. Now, we couldn't have found that no matter how much information, no matter how much we tried to maximize this curve, we couldn't have found it until we put it in and realized, darn, I wish that had the griddle instead of the grill or whatever, Right? So I think depending on what kind of decision you're making, is it reversible?

HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHEN YOU HAVE ENOUGH INFORMATION TO MAKE A DECISION

How big are the consequences? Regret, minimization. All of those frameworks you can use for making decisions will drive where you sit on that curve. But the short answer to your question is, yeah, there's almost no way to jump over it. Right? You can't go from simplistic to elegantly simple without a lot of hard work.

Roger: So if someone will raise their hand and tell Carl my favorite quote, I'll send you…

Carl Richards: You'll send what?

Roger: I'll send them your book.

Carl Richards: Okay

Roger: Because I have a favorite quote. I repeat it often. Bueller. Bueller. Okay. It's, it's by Phil Stutts, who I respect a lot. He says, “you will never be exonerated from three things: Pain, uncertainty, or the need to do work.” And usually we get ourselves into trouble trying to get exonerated from the uncertainty of a decision. And I think that applies to what you're talking about. We're all going to have a different curve of how much information and how much we want to try to optimize versus just making a decision and making it right. I definitely lean towards your end, Carl. But, when it comes to retirement planning, and I think this applies to this simple to elegant simplicity is none of these. There is no right answer. Right. Like whether it's a dishwasher or your retirement plan. Since there is no right answer, it's really important. And you've mentioned the phrase a few times. There has to be a really thought out decision making framework to get to a judgment you can be comfortable with because you'll never get to perfect. Yeah.

Carl Richards: I'm actually quite curious about how people in this group. How do you decide when you have enough information to make a decision? There's a spot where. And I kind of have learned what I feel physically, almost like. In fact, I'm not going to describe it because I don't want to prime anybody's answer. But there's a spot at which you've narrowed it down to two or three things. And I love this idea. Is it Dana? Dana. Like when it feels right. But isn't that weird? Like that's weird. We're going to use who let the feelings in. Right. Like we're making a really important decision about something. How do you decide when it's time to say, okay, I've just got to feel my way into it. Right. I've narrowed it down to two. They're both great. How, anybody have any tricks for how they make that decision?

Roger: For you to raise your hand or just mute and say your name?

Club Member: I would say that, it's one thing that is also another favorite quote of Rogers. It's about baby steps, getting practice. Making lots of little decisions seems to help. My wife is not an interior designer, but we learned so much about bathtubs. But we were redoing our bathrooms. I had no idea. There's so many details about the depth of the water and the where, how it drains and all that. But there's it's. The baby steps really work by having lots of practice, especially as a couple, but, you know, just dealing with whoever you're dealing with, learning how to. Okay, that's a small risk mistake. That's a big risk mistake. But let's start with the little ones and you get practice doing that. Then I think for us anyway, it helps us then kind of know where to feel that. And I can't locate it in my body, but it is somewhere in there that we either through exasperation or insight, we say, that's it.

Carl Richards: Yeah, that's really good. Yeah, it's really interesting because this is like, it's not a head or a heart issue. It's a head and the heart. Like, I love the idea of like, I'm going to do all the work, I'm going to pay the price. I'm going to do the research, I'm going to gather all the data and then at a certain point I'm going to be. I sort of feel like it's like, ahhhhh. And then I'm going to. My wife again, she refers to it as sun salutations. I like to go out into the mountains and then I just. It feels like it's right and then I make a decision and I move forward. And so that's. That's really helpful. I see Jim has his hand out.

Roger: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: Can you hear me?

Roger: Okay, you got your buddy.

Jim: Awesome. So, Carl, thanks for doing this.

THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT TYPES OF DECISIONS THAT NEED TO BE MADE- DECISIONS WHERE YOU NEED A LOT OF RESEARCH VERSUS DECISIONS WHERE YOU ALREADY HAVE ALL OF THE INFORMATION.

Jim: There are, I mean, there's many different types of decisions that need to be made. And a lot of them you do have to do the research and information gathering, like some that you've talked about for sure. But we also have to make a lot of decisions that we potentially already know everything about. And you've had the life experience, now it's just a decision one way or the other and how you're going to react to it. And one of the things I've done over the last 25 years probably is to just sort of step away from the thought process. Just leave it behind a little bit. And out of the blue, often the answer comes to me. I have no idea how that happens, but I've literally just stopped pondering on it, for lack of a better term, and let it just work its way out and through normal daily activities. My brain is seeming to still work on it and at some point in the future, I'm not even thinking about it. I'm like, that's the answer right there. I'm done. Any feedback on that and the difference in decisions where you do need a lot of research versus decisions where you have that information already. And how do you, how, how can you simplify some of those types of things?

Roger: I think you hit on one Carl, about optionality. Decisions that you have are reversible easily. You can move faster on verse. Bigger just.

Carl Richards: Yeah, I think you can. You. One quick thing you can do is, consequences high or low reversible, yes or no. Like both of those are vectors that help you decide. Like if it's reversible and the consequences are low, I'm going to make a decision really fast because I'm going to get new information and if I'm a little bit wrong, I can reverse a bit. Right? And the consequences of being wrong weren't that big of a deal. So I'm going to make decisions really quick in an environment where the consequences are low and the decisions are reversible. I'm going to slow down a bit if the consequences are high, even if it's reversible. But I'm certainly gonna slow down a lot. At least I should. I actually don't but I should. I'm gonna slow down a lot in the re. When the consequences are high and it's an irreversible decision. But I also wanna point really quickly. It was Jim, right?

Jim: Yes sir.

>> Roger Whitney: To like Jim, there's good research behind what you're talking about, right? Like all you're doing is allowing. So often we get stuck in binary thinking like it's either this or this, it's yes or no. And when you step away from the problem it's that, you know, like the age old cliche about, you know, the answer came to me in the shower. Right. I think you can get really. I've got a process for this where I intentionally build in some time in the mountains or some time on a bike when I know I can't. Like I climb in the mountains quite a bit. I know I can't be thinking about the decision because if I don't, if I do, I'll die. You know what I mean? So. So like it's some, some activity where you get completely out of that thinking brain. What you're doing there is resetting the default. And what, what that? What? Because the default was this or this. Yes or no. And what you do when you reset the default is you allow what's called emergent, right? Like emergent ideas. Ideas you haven't thought of before because you're not stuck. There's all sorts of issues around endowment effect and legacy impact where you Status quo bias, right. All of that stuff, like you tend to be stuck in an idea. If you can clear the deck a little bit, new ideas will come, and they often feel right. And by feel right, I think the closest thing to me is a puzzle piece, the last piece of the puzzle. You know, like, just. It's not that there's lightning from the sky. I mean, although some of you may experience that, I. For me, it's more just like, oh, that feels right. And then, last thing that gets us all the way back to what Dan said that Roger talks a lot about, is that gives you permission to take the next smallest micro action. And what will happen when you take that new action? New information will show up that was unavailable. No matter how many spreadsheets you build. You couldn't get that information from the location you're at one step forward. New information shows up, and then you can course correct again. And that we, if Roger, if we get time, we can talk about navigating complex adaptive environments because, like, you know, there's only one way to do it.

Roger: Okay, okay, okay. Maurice has his hand up. So let's go to Maurice. Maybe we dive into that.

WRITING MAKES DECISIONS TANGIBLE VERSUS REHASHING THEM IN YOUR BRAIN

Maurice: Yeah, well, so. And you hit on it, Carl. But I think in my mind, it, it's getting intangible, especially since I have to make a lot of decisions on my own or in a work environment. I have to make decisions in large groups. And the same thing holds true. Like, as soon as you get to the point where you make a decision, you say, yeah, but what about. And so making it tangible and putting it down on paper. So option 1, 2, 3, what are the pros and cons? And, and I can't tell you how many times that you just start writing it out. And then by the time you write it out, you're like, oh, it's option two. All of a sudden it just becomes clear to you because you've let the decision become tangible versus rehashing it in your brain.

Carl Richards: So I love that I often, you know, one thing I missed during the decade of kind of not writing and focusing on conversations was I really missed learning things I did not know through the act of writing. You know, like by writing something down, I would come up with things I did not know. now I can do that a little bit in. I can process verbally with friends, but there's something precise, more precise about the writing process. So I think that's really smart, like just writing out a decision as if you'd have to defend it or something like, here's why I've made this decision. So I love that I have. Roger, I don't want to hijack this, but I have.

Roger: No, you go, man.

CARL TALKS ABOUT MIMETIC DESIRE AND FIGURING OUT WHAT IT IS THAT YOU REALLY WANT

Carl Richards: I have a couple things I'm so curious about with this group. One, it'd be really fun to talk about navigating uncertainty in a minute, but I'm really curious about mimetic, the. The problem of mimetic desire with this group. So mimetic desire, really, Rene Girard was the philosopher that really kind of made mimetic desire a household name. Luke Burgess's book “Wanting" is a really good sort of popular, you know, approach to it. But here's the question I have for you. It turns out it's really hard to figure out what we want, right? Like, I thought that was going to be the easy part of, like, really good financial planning was, oh, you just align people's use of capital with what's important to them. Well, the what's important thing is going to be really easy. They'll just tell you, well, it turns out it's really hard. And it's hard because of this mimetic desire problem. Mimetic desire really is like, we. From the earliest ages, we don't know. We don't know what we desire, and we look to other people to see what they want, and we mimic that. So, you know, early on, that's a mom or a dad, typically a mom. Oh, she seems to think that's important. It must be important. Now, when kids do that, we sometimes call that peer pressure. When we do it, we like to call it research. But it's still. It's still the same problem. And it's gotten harder, right? Because when I was growing up, and I can tell some of you can relate to this, like, like, I. All I had is a comparison set were my buddies, you know, like, we all had the same BMX bikes. I might have wanted a slightly better one. I wanted a mongoose instead of a whatever, red line or whatever. But I didn't know that I was supposed to want a private jet, right? Like, I didn't know that. It's only recently that I've been taught that by Instagram, right? I didn't know I was supposed to want a chateau in Norway or in France or a cabin in Norway, chateau in France. I didn't know that. So how have you all gotten clear? Because this is a big problem with retirement. Like, what matters to you? Like, how did you get clear about. Because we have people come in all the time. $5 million in a sailboat. You're like, okay, well, that's. That's uniquely precise. Like, where did we. Have you ever been sailing? Right, well, clearly that was an Instagram goal. How have you gotten clear? What's been the process for you to figure out what it is you really want?

Club Member: Hey, there. Thanks, Roger. I guess, Carl, one of the things I would say is community in the sense of understanding others, to reflect back and understand myself. You know, I have my own preferences as I work with others, spend time with others, vacation with others. I'm like, oh, that was kind of fun, but this is kind of what I want to do. So it's almost like a compare and contrast in a sense of, you know, how I'm deepening relationships and then using that as a reflection or a mirror to help me refine my own thinking.

Carl Richards: I love that. Let me just tell you a quick story that that brings up, and then we'll get to everybody else but Gretchen Rubin. The Happiness Project. Gretchen Rubin. I was having a conversation with her, and she said she was at this dinner party. She was at, like, a cocktail party, and they were. I think they were just leaving. She and her husband and their fan and the family were going to leave in a couple of days for the mountains during winter, right? So they're going to a mountain resort town during winter. And she tells this lady, I think they're going to Vail or something. And this lady she's talking to, she tells that, and she says, oh, my gosh, do you ski? And Grace was like, no, we don't ski. My husband doesn't ski. I don't ski. We don't ski. You've got to ski. Skiing. So fun. Like, she goes on this, like, 15 minutes, trying to commit. You got to ski. Like, here's how you do it. You get the instructors you like, tell her all about how to do it. And Gretchen's like, we don't ski. Right now, I live in Park City, Utah, so I don't really understand Gretchen's answers.

But I applaud Gretchen. Like, she's like, we don't ski. The lady leaves. She comes back, like, 20 minutes later. And this is so, you know, in their late 40s, early 50s, comes back and says, you know what? I don't like skiing either. She's like, it's just what we've always done. I thought you were supposed to love skiing. I don't like it either. It's cold. I'm, miserable. It costs Too much. Like, the food's terrible. Like, all of those sorts of things. And I was like, isn't that so interesting? You know, that we.

Roger: Interesting, but it's also a little sad.

Carl Richards: I love that.But, But I know I see some of that in myself, like, oh, totally.

Roger: I love that.Yeah.

Carl Richards: I love that.But it is, it is. It is sad when we've been living somebody else's life or somebody else's goals. So I think this idea of this continual refinement, that you're never going to quite get it right, like, until you're done. Until you're done, you're going to keep refining. And guess what? It's going to change too. So, okay, back to the question. How have you. If it's okay.

Roger: I love that.Yeah, Marlene. And then cave. And then.

Marlene: I love that.First of all, I want to say I apologize for not turning on my camera. I'm flat on my back after a total knee replacement a couple of weeks ago, so nobody wants to see that.

But, what occurred to me with your question about mimetic desire, especially in this group, what I found is it's really interesting, and I think about some of the different choices that I need to make about when to retire. What are the financial benchmarks? What do I want to do when I retire? Especially on the do part. a lot of people in this group, we do talk about travel quite a bit. A lot. And that's what a lot of people think about doing once they retire. And for me, I lived a job for 25 years that I was hardly ever off of a plane. And, all I can think of, and it's even in my bio in the club, that I just want to be in one zip code for a while. You know, I don't want to get on a plane even when I have to. My daughter is a flight attendant, and I get to fly for free. I've never flown since she's been a flight attendant because I just don't want to fly anymore. and so I think the peer pressure, though, does seem to kind of get to you a little bit. And I think, am I wrong for not wanting to, you know, to do more of these things? But I think for me, though, in this group, the biggest benefit is some of the other things about, you know, some kind of financial benchmarks that I think I need to hit. and when I need to retire, so. And there is competition there, even with my friends, you know, around. Some of them are retired and some of them aren't, and you go out to have a drink and they all go, oh, you need to retire. It's the best thing ever. So it's. It's still a. It's still a conundrum for me, but I think. I know I'm probably just rambling, but that's what made me what I thought of when you asked that question.

Carl Richards: Thank you.

Roger: Sounds like some of this is like, you know, sort of like we tell our kids in terms, be careful who you follow, I guess, nowadays, or who your friends are. Right. Choosing your. Your social network is really important because you're going to. That's like the current that you're going to fall into, right?

Carl Richards: That's right. Yeah. I call it, like, cultivate your comparison set. Like, be very careful about your comparison set.

Roger: That's a good analytical.

Darlene: Love that. Love that.

Roger: Hey, Dave.

Dave: Oh, so thanks for being here, Carl. Yeah, the thing that I've always done with decisions is I generally make lists of things that I think I would enjoy, and then I do short experiments. So, for example, when I retired about two years ago, before retirement, I thought I liked going to theme parks, amusement parks, riding coasters, things like that. I said, when I retire, I'm going to get a season pass. I'm going to do that all the time. It'll be so enjoyable. I'll go probably every other weekend. Well, I retired, I got the season pass. I ended up going two or three times, three or four times a year. And so I had to rethink then. Well, you know, what's the difference? And so, you know, eventually what I determined was that, you know, now that I can do anything, you know, this is something that's not so much. It's not as high a priority. Right. And so other things like travel and other things that are more interesting to me, you know, are other experiments that I'm, you know, phasing into. So I think that sort of experiment, try something out a little bit, and then, you know, either fail fast and move on to something else or. Or adopt it, is the way I approach it.

Carl Richards: Love that. That's really, really valuable.

Roger: Mike. You had your hand up and you put it down. I want to make sure that you were not, trying to be polite.

Mike: I was going to say something similar to what Cave just said, which is, especially as you. As you enter retirement, you know, you have the opportunity to explore and try new things and have the mindset that says, hey, it's okay if you try something and you decide you don't like it. Right. It's not a lifelong commitment. And, you know, when. As it relates to this club, you know, the. The whole concept of the club is being agile, right?

Carl Richards: Yeah. I love that.

Mike: That's a whole concept, Roger. So I don't want to say that, but. But being agile is. Is an important aspect of this, whether it's financially or, you know, finding your purpose in retirement and things like that. So I think that's a. It's a key to, trying to make those decisions, explore and decide what works and what doesn't work for you.

Carl Richards: Love that. can I comment real quick, Roger?

Roger: Whatever you want, man.

Carl Richards: I love all these things that sometimes we stumble upon just sort of naturally or intuitively. I love putting framework around them and getting very intentional about it. And that idea of experimentation. Super smart. And, Morgan Housel, who wrote a book that nobody read. I'm just joking about that. I don't think he'd mind me telling you the story. He told me this story about how he thinks he should be a car guy, because everybody kind of tells him that he should be a car guy. He was a valet in Los Angeles when he was in college, right? Like, he's made some money. He should be a car guy. And so every couple of years, he forgets that he's not a car guy, and he's like, I should try this. And he just. On a business, trip, when he goes to the Hertz counter, he says, you know, it's an extra $150 for the day, give me the Porsche. And he says, it doesn't take. So there we are, like, 150 bucks, right? He says it doesn't take. He doesn't even get off the lot before he's like, okay, I admire this. It's beautiful. I can see how people would love it, but it just doesn't do it for me. And I think that's, like, if we were very intentional about that. Like, Cave pointed to and Mikey pointed to, like, this idea of, like, okay, well, what's a really small experiment I could run, you know, back to the sailboat, right? Like, could I go out for an hour before I buy one and decide to sail around the world? Can I go out for an hour? Oh, that went well. Can I go out for a day? Oh, that went well. Could I go out for a week? Like, second home? Hey, can we go spend a week there? Can we spend a month there? Can we spend the summer there? So anyway, I love those ideas. Getting very intentional about. I call it experiment design. Like, how can I design experiments we've.

Roger: Had that play out a lot in the club. And whether it's an rv, which sort of the stereotypical retiree.

Carl Richards: Good one. Good one.

Roger: Or the lake house, et cetera. And, one exercise that we've done in the past is. Well, it's usually not the thing. It's the thing about the thing. You know, the thing that it enables and then you can poke around of. Well, how can I get that? Other ways. Right?

Carl Richards: Love that. Yeah. Well, yeah. And the framework for that, Right? Like, it's the thing. What's the value I'm trying to express from that thing? Right, Like. Like travel, adventure, family. Like, what is the. Okay. And then I love the idea of, like, okay, that's the value. It turns out that thing was just a means to that value. And then I also love what you both pointed to. Cave and Mike. Like, it's okay to fail. Like, in fact, you should actively be looking for disconfirming evidence. You know, rather than looking for confirmation bias, you should act. This is my actively looking for disconfirming evidence. I've got the binoculars on. Like, you know what? It turns out that RV thing is stupid. You know, like, if that's how you feel, like, I'm sure people love it, but, like, if the bed's cramped, I don't. I can't take a shower. And then other people are like, this is the greatest thing ever. So both answers are okay? Yeah.

Roger: Similar to our. You know, if anybody's had a teenager or a young child, they're in gymnastics, and that's their life. And then they're into soccer. It's experimentation.

Carl Richards: Totally. Totally. And what a rich way. I mean, I think that's like, a very good way to live a rich life, is like, what value could you put on? New experiences. Do you know what I mean? So that's another way to look at these experiments. It's just a new experience.

Roger: I have a couple ideas of where to go, but what's on your mind or heart, Carl?

CARL TALKS ABOUT LIVING A LIFE OF MEANING.

Carl Richards: I mean, I, like, technically, I kind of want to talk about navigating uncertainty, but what I actually really want to talk about is this idea of living a life of meaning. Like, getting to this. I love, I'm meeting more and more people. I started when I turned 50. I started celebrating Project Half Life and the way I celebrate it every year. So when I would turn 50, that means I had 50 more years. But when I turned 51, that means I have 51 more years. When I turn 52, I, have 52 more years because it's project half life every year. And I'm, I'm sort of curious about everybody's experience in not shutting it down. You know, like, like, like making, not shutting it down.

Roger: What do you mean?

Carl Richards: I run into some people who are 72 and it's over, you know, like, maybe hurt the shoulder, can't ski ever again. And then I run other people who maybe hurt the shoulder and they get it rehabbed and they ski again or.

Roger: They're doing something totally different that they never met.

Carl Richards: Sure. Like, I can't ski, but I can do this. But I've seen people where it starts to get smaller, Life starts to get smaller. I'm going to shut things down. There's nothing wrong with slowing down, by the way. But I love, like, I just met a guy who's 92 and just started his first venture capital firm. Fund, first venture capital fund and he's only making 25 year investments. Like, I really like hanging out with that guy, you know. So how do you approach this phase of life in an attitude of like, I'm gonna, I'm not, I'm gonna make it expansive. I, I, I'm gonna find ways to have my impact, could grow. Like you've got all this experience now, right? How, how do we approach it that way? I'm super curious about your thoughts, your experience on that and not feel overwhelmed by it either. Like, oh, I gotta do all these things and start a venture capital firm and like, like, how do we, how do we approach that?

Roger: So we're going to go to Dan. And then many of you have some thoughts, but you're not raising your.

Carl Richards: Yeah, for sure, Dan.

Dan: Well, I, put this on video podcast. Can't see it. This is a, split because I did a new experiment. I don't want to be Debbie Downer for the roundup, but this came from my first pickleball moments.

Carl Richards: Okay, so be, be careful with pickleball. That's all I have to tell you.

Dan: Even the friends who encouraged me told me that, you know, I've had so many things break. I remember one time I was walking in my neighborhood and I ran into a neighbor, and she told me that she could, she was having to move because she lived, she was living in a house with stairs and she was going to be turning 50 and she knew that people that would turn 50 couldn't go upstairs anymore. I'm like, oh really? And I didn't want to tell her that the next day I was going to be doing a triathlon with some of my contemporaries who are, we were about 60 something at that time. You know, there's. I've wondered about the same question, Carl, because I, I think it's partly a decision and a mindset and a belief, but it also could be foolhardiness or imperviousness to pain and denial, I don't really know. But I think that, you know, as I was coming off the court, the pickleball court, there was a woman in front of me leaving with a pickleball, champion shirt. And I asked her about it and she says, oh yeah, that was, that was 15 years ago. She says, I'm 81, I've been playing pickleball since the 60s. I've never fallen down. I think, well, good for you. You know, I mean there are people who just have the spirit, but also experiment and have the know how. And yeah, maybe they fall. But it, as they say, it's about the getting up, at least from my perspective, it's not about the falling.

Roger: And I think it's a, And Dan, it's about the getting up. Right? And two things come to mind that many of you that have been in the club for a while remember is we had a meetup during COVID right when it was happening in May, June, after the lockdowns really impacted. And we had, in fact, you can find the replay for those of you, which might be a lot of you that weren't here. And we had an entire hour trying to answer one question. And before I tell you what that question was, someone that exemplifies or is an exemplar, Carl, of what you're talking about is a good friend of mine, Dan Miller, who has since passed of a very aggressive cancer. But he was lit until the end. But his question was, and we explored this during COVID was what does this make possible? Whatever happens to you, what does it make possible? Usually you can always find something. Anybody else have anything they want to share on this question? I think it's a really important question because we're all facing it.

Carl Richards: Maybe what people are thinking, let me frame it a different way. There's undoubtedly a deep sense of identity and purpose and meaning that comes from work. Even if that meaning is like, I hate my job. Like even if it's that right, there's a piece of identity and purpose that comes from work. When you remove that, what do you replace it with?

Roger: Dave.

Dave: So I guess for me, and I've only been retired now for about a year and a half, but for me, the thing that I took away from work was there's the work, what you do, but then there's the sense of how you approach it. And my approach was always like an altruistic thing. I think that if we're all headed in the same direction, then we're all going to win eventually. And, I've just carried that into retirement. And, you know, I'm not doing the same type of work. I'm doing a little bit of work now and again, but that gives me my sense of purpose at least. At least now.

Roger: Love that. Don.

Don: Yeah, for me, it's curiosity. If I'm not curious about something, then, I know there's a problem. So, for instance, when I was working, there was always times when you were doing things you really didn't want to do, and so your mind would wander and get distracted, and it was always about something you really wanted to do. well, in retirement I try to stay curious about everything. And I, I can, I can get online and, and answer questions that I just randomly pop up in my head, and I just start going deeper and deeper into, into something and I, I always learn something. It's in another way. It, it's every day when I'm going someplace, or if I'm on a trip and I've been someplace 10 times, if there's a, if there's a different way of going to that same location, I'll take it. Why? Because I just don't know what I'm going to find. And, and I'm curious.

Carl Richards: I love that. One thing that's been really helpful for me, and it's a conversation I find myself a lot in, is if I have a change I want to make. For example, I have a good friend who built a tech company, sold it. When he's 49, he realized his attention was shattered. He couldn't pay attention to anything for very long. It was just pure scrolling Instagram dopamine hits. And he wanted to be the type of person who could think deeply about a single problem for a long time. That's what he wanted to be. So he, it's back to these ideas of, like, experiments, like design a forcing function. Is what I call it design a forcing function. So he thought, like, where would I find the kind of person who are the kind of people that can think deeply about a single problem? For a long time, he's like, you know, PhD. A PhD academic, professor is the kind of person who can think about a single problem for a long time. So he enrolled to get his PhD. Now he doesn't really care about having his PhD. He cares about what he had to become to get it. And like, I having a similar experience, like, I typically move from project to project to project really fast and sometimes have a hard time finishing things. And I recently got a really, really good hunting dog. Now, I'm not a hunter, but I got this dog thinking I was getting an adventure dog to trail run with me. I had to talk the guy into giving in to me. We live on a bunch of open space behind the house and trails right out the backyard. He was like, I won't give you a dog. I only give the dog to hunting families. I kept sending him pictures of our neighbor, our yard. I was like, look, I promise you he's going to have a, the best life ever. He sent, sent this beautiful dog to me. And on like, day two, I saw this dog point, a butterfly, you know, like, you know, 13 weeks. And I was like, oh, my gosh. So I decided, here's my PhD. Like, I'm going to train this dog to compete in field trials because it's going to require me to stick with something for two to three years that involves being out quite a bit, walking in fields, learning new skills, being around new people. Do I really care about having a dog that competes in field trials? No. I care about what it's going to require of, me to pull that off. So I love the idea of designing forcing functions that will require me to be the kind of person you could say, Dawn, I'm going to write a book every year. Nobody's going to read it. I'm not going to show anybody the book. But it's the result of my curiosity. Right? It's going to continue to force me to be curious. So anyway, I love that idea of forcing functions. Hopefully it's helpful to you.

Roger: I think this brings it back around, Carl, to what do I want? And the fallacy that you actually know or can figure it out in advance, which is a lot of the ways that retirement planning is framed. Tell me what you want and we'll solve for it.

Carl Richards: What are your goals?

Roger: Ah, is it's much more about following threads and discovering, life is a process. And so having it, holding these things loosely and giving yourself the ability to make adjustments, as you discover more, you can adjust. Your plan is really critical.

Carl Richards: I love that. Yeah, I love that. I love that idea of just sort of. It feels to me like as we become adults, were required to hold competing truths at the same time. Right? And, I love that tension of, like, I love stability. Whoever was saying that they traveled a lot, I feel the same way. I love stability. Oh, my gosh. I also love adventure, right? Like, and instead of being at war, there's an essay in the book, actually, this is my, this, this is my, my favorite line in the entire book. And Roger, I'm sure many of you know this feeling where, like, you know, you work on something for, like there's stuff in this book that I've been working on for two decades. And this line, it's in the essay called, When Values Collide. Or maybe it's called Values Collision. I think it's When Values Collide is what the name of the essay is. There was a line that I worked on and worked on and worked on around this idea of, like, competing values. Because we all know, like, retirement planning, the financial. All of it is just a giant trade off. And sometimes those competing values cause a war, right? Like a fight with a spouse, A, partner within yourself. And I worked on this one line where it was like, your values are not at war, they're in conversation. And I love that idea of like, oh, interesting. You want to travel more. My wife is an insufferable nomad, right? That's how we ended up in New Zealand for four years, in London for a year. I kind of just want to plant a tree at the house. That used to be a war. Now it's a conversation. Right? And tell me more about that. What's important about it. Like, to your point, Roger, what's the value you're trying to express? Are there other ways we could do that? Do we have to go together? Why don't we set aside time every year for you to go and I'll go walk in the. Go take the dog bird hunting for a couple of days out in the middle of the mountains, right? So I love that idea. Like, can we stay in conversation with competing values? Can we hold the tent? Tension is what keeps bridges up, right? Can we hold the tension, not have to resolve it too fast? Right. Experiment with it. I think that's what we've all pointed to. So thank you for that, Roger. Thanks for allowing me to talk about it.

Roger: Carl has a wonderful spirit when it comes to these topics.

Two things I want to share. One is, you'll hear about this if you're going to the roundup next week. I'm still excited, man. The energy there is. But one thing we're going to announce at the roundup that I'll tell you now is it will go live at the roundup is we're launching what we call the Retirement Life lap, which is we have four non financial pillars, Carl in the club, which is you have to have energy to show up for your life. You need to have relationships, strong relationships. You need to have foster a good mindset and you need to have passion. Happy people have projects. So the Retirement Life lab is going to be a literal laboratory where if you're thinking of if you're struggling or interested in your identity and shedding that, there's going to be a didactic with exercise. If it's overcoming frugality in sleep, in energy, it's going to be about. If you're, you're worried about energy. Well, sleep is an area didactic with work worksheets so we can experiment because this is a journey, it's not a, it's not a solution. So I wanted to share that for those of you that won't be there and it really ties into what we've been talking. second is behaviorgap.com is Carl's home on the Internet and this book comes out on October 21st. And we'll share this on the podcast and we'll put a link in our noodle when it, when the book launches. But his sketches, Troy on our team ddawg, he wanted to be here because he has one or two year sketches right behind him all the time and he's big fanboy. Carl has a great spirit and he does help simplify things so we can get out of our own way to go. Well, rock Retirement. Thank you so much for the time, Carl.

Carl Richards: Amazing, Roger. Thanks for the work you do. It's really, really cool to see all of this. Like this level of intentionality and thought is super, super rare. So thanks, Roger.

SMART SPRINT

In the next seven days I want you to look at your retirement plan

All right, in the next seven days I want you to look at your retirement plan of record. It could be how you structured your goals, your investment portfolio, what you have included there, how you're getting your income and examine it from the eyes of complexity. How could you make this simpler so it's more easily managed and understood? Always a good exercise.

Roger: During that conversation with Carl, one thing that was highlighted for me that I'm going to pull as a thread and likely do a podcast, if not a series on this is the idea of establishing your goals in retirement. He states something that is so obvious, which is how do we know what we want? Most of us struggle with that when we think about the future. In this case maybe 10, 20, 30 years. How do we know what we want, even next year in our life? That is much more difficult than we give it credit for. But in the retirement planning process, because it's at the starting point, we can just co opt somebody else's goals or just throw something up because we have to do it and that ends up starting to define or limit future decision making. And that can be dangerous because then you start living a life that's not congruent to who you really are. It, may be it's best to take a little bit more time in teasing that out early, even if it slows down moving assets and all those other things. We're going to pull on that thread more. But that was the one highlight that I pulled out of it. I'd love to hear yours. You can hit reply in the Noodle email where we'll share a link to Carl's book. We'll share a link to this conversation and if you hit reply it goes right to me. And I would love to hear your thoughts too.

The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and, not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance reference is historical and does not guarantee future results. All indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. Make sure you consult your legal, tax or financial advisor before making any decisions.