Dan Egan – Designing Better Decisions

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:59)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:21)
My guest today is Dan Egan, who is the Managing Director of Behavioral Finance and Investing at Betterment. If that job title sounds wide-ranging, it's because it is. Dan has his hands in most of the ways that Betterment interacts with its clients and how it invests their money. This is one very interested and smart guy who is clearly passionate about helping investors make better decisions. We talk about science fiction, automation, investor behavior, and how Betterment tries to solve problems beyond the automated asset allocation engine that is their bread and butter. You can find show notes at investorfieldguide.com forward slash Egan, E-G-A-N. Now please enjoy my conversation with Dan Egan.
Thank you very much for doing this with me. We're gonna start somewhere, I try to start somewhere interesting every week so it's not just about business.
We'll start with sci-fi. Excellent. We met just in person for the first time, maybe a month ago or so, both of us were speaking at the Evidence-Based Investing Conference.
And we got talking about sci-fi. And so I'd love for you to share maybe your own origin story for how you developed a passion for reading sci-fi novels. And then we'll get into some favorites and some more specific questions from there.

**Dan Egan** (2:32)
Definitely. I was trying to think back on this. I think the first thing I ever read, which might have been considered sci-fi, was actually a Kurt Vonnegut short story called Harrison Bergeron, I believe.
And it's actually just sort of this social fiction thing about what if we got into a world where everybody was fundamentally equal? And there's this person called the Handicapper General, where if you're unusually beautiful, you have to wear a mask. Or if you're unusually strong, you have to carry around these weights. So it's this sort of pursuit of everybody actually being completely equal to each other and a sort of dystopia that comes along with that, the lack of vibrancy and diversity that you get from a society that allows people to be different and really enjoy each other. So I think that was probably the first one. And that very simple what if kind of way of thinking, you know, like, what if we changed this? What if we, how can we think about what's really going on that are unspoken assumptions about how we work or how society works was kept, what kept pulling me down into it? I think there's a lot of stuff that's considered sci-fi, but when you look at, one of the core things for good sci-fi for me is that we're gonna either talk about real science or we're gonna change something about the way thing works, the way things work, that's gonna tell us about ourselves.
And a lot of sci-fi is just sort of about space operas and various things which are really entertaining and really easy to read, but don't play that what if game quite so much.
And I think Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a beautiful introduction to one of her books. It says, the job of this is to really think about if we change that there are two genders, what if there's only one, or what if you can be both genders, or what if you can be immortal? All of these what if questions about how it would change society, those really make you think, and I love that.