80 Years of Financial Knowledge in 53 Minutes | #422 (Bill Bernstein)

**William Bernstein** (0:00)
The reason why the word guru is so popular is because Charlton is too hard to spell.

**Benjamin Felix** (0:04)
If I go to a fancy restaurant, I'm going out for dinner afterwards to feed myself.

**William Bernstein** (0:09)
I remember him laughing and saying, he never realized what a great marketing tool a terminal diagnosis was. And someone who can laugh about that is someone who has lived their life well.

**Benjamin Felix** (0:26)
This is The Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making from Two Canadians. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, Chief Investment Officer and Cameron Passmore, Chief Executive Officer at PWL Capital.

**Cameron Passmore** (0:39)
Welcome to episode 422 and Ben, this is a very special episode where we welcomed a past guest, William Bernstein, Bill Bernstein. Many listeners know of his work, but he joined us to talk about a book that another guest wrote, just before he recently passed away, and that's Jonathan Clements' book called Money and Me.
There's a neat story there where early on in the podcast, this is eight years ago, pretty much now, Ben, we were coming up with the idea of having guests on, and we both knew about Jonathan, so we reached out to him. He was in the New York City area, and we asked if he would be willing to join us. I think we talked about this on a recent plug. We logged our equipment to New York City, well, of course, with the interview with Barry Ritholtz, and went to New York City with our equipment, and interviewed Barry, and Jonathan said, well, if you want to Barry's office, I'll meet you there. Love to have an interview with you guys, so he met us after we saw Barry. We interviewed Jonathan Clements in the Ritholtz office in Midtown Manhattan, and he was very kind, very gracious, so happy to see us, and it was a fabulous interview, we were very early on in the podcast.

**Benjamin Felix** (1:53)
That was episode 55 that Jonathan was on.

**Cameron Passmore** (1:55)
55
Yes, he has to make it seven years ago. Regardless, it was a great interview, and it's a real treat to have Bill join us to talk about the memory and the legacy of Jonathan, which is highlighted in this book Money and Me, how to make your finance work harder for you and your family.

**Benjamin Felix** (2:14)
Jonathan spent his whole professional life as a financial writer. He was at the Wall Street Journal for 20 years, spent six years at Citigroup, where he was the Director of Financial Education for their wealth management arm. Then he ran his own blog website called Humble Dollar from 2016 until a few months before he passed away. He wrote about his diagnosis, his terminal diagnosis on the blog and reflected on life and dying, and it's pretty powerful stuff.

**Cameron Passmore** (2:43)
He was so open about it as well and shared. He was on many interviews that I would listen to up to his death where he was just so frank about it and wanted to have an impact right to his end.

**Benjamin Felix** (2:56)
Yeah, which he did. He published his book, Post-Humously, and Bill Bernstein, who knew Jonathan for years, he tells some stories about their relationship. Bill stepped in to do interviews like this on Jonathan's behalf because he was so familiar with his writing and Bill is such a good speaker. Bill, so he was on in episode 108, again, pretty early on in the podcast. If people don't know who he is, and listeners likely do, but for anyone who doesn't, he's a neurologist, but also the co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors, which is an investment management firm that approaches investments, I would say, very similar to PWL using low-cost index funds and stuff like that to build portfolios. He's also written a ton of books on finance, financial decision-making, economic history, and other topics. He's got some good peer-reviewed papers out there as well. He's a brilliant, brilliant guy. Some of the best practical writing on how do you take what we know from academic finance and make it useful to individuals making household financial decisions come from Bill's writing. He's one of the pioneers in taking academic literature and making it practically useful in a way that's not too dumbed down, but is still accessible.

**Cameron Passmore** (4:11)
It comes from the scientific medical background. That's this foundation.
His books were a big part to convince me to make this shift that I did 30 plus years or so ago. Yeah.

**Benjamin Felix** (4:22)
The scientific background for sure, but his ability to communicate and make things practically relevant as opposed to abstract is unusual. It's special.