When You've Won the Game, Stop Playing | What Great Investors Taught Us About Portfolio and Purpose

Summary

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Excess Returns Podcast Summary

Episode: When You've Won the Game, Stop Playing | What Great Investors Taught Us About Portfolio and Purpose

Date: February 23, 2026
Hosts: Matt Ziegler & Bogomil Baranowski
Special Compilation from “Show Us Your Portfolio” and “Two Quants and a Financial Planner”

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Episode Overview

This episode is a reflective deep-dive into what legendary investors and thinkers say about portfolio construction, money’s true purpose, and the transition from wealth accumulation (“getting rich”) to preservation (“staying rich”) and beyond. Through a series of hand-picked guest clips and candid cohost conversation, Matt Ziegler and Bogomil Baranowski emphasize that the end game is not about maximizing returns, but about achieving funded contentment, freedom, and purpose—both for oneself and future generations.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining the Purpose of Investing

• Aswath Damodaran stresses that investing is not about beating the market:

  “The end game, at least for me with investing, is to preserve and grow your wealth. That to me is key. It's not to get rich. It's not to beat the market.” (00:30, 02:42)

• Life phase impacts purpose—young investors have different time horizons and risks than older ones (03:47).
• Larry Swedroe:

  “The strategy to get rich is very different than the strategy to stay rich.” (00:58, 49:33)

• Ben Hunt introduces the idea of “funded contentment”—having enough to live a life well-lived (01:13, 23:09).

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2. Money as Freedom and “Enough”

• Bogomil Baranowski:

  “You want to get to that freedom level where you have freedom and capacity to choose your own path.” (00:43, 11:04)

• The idea of “enough” recurs: past a point, more wealth adds little to happiness—supported by research on happiness curves and the “hedonic treadmill.”
• Daniel Crosby:

  “Freedom is really always my ultimate goal when investing... to just be able to live life on our own terms.” (42:50)

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3. Consumption vs. Gift: Who Are You Investing For?

• Peter Medina’s framework (as recounted by Matt Ziegler):
  Is your money for your lifetime consumption, or is it a gift for others (your family, society)? (06:39)
• Multi-generational thinking emerges—what you accumulate may ultimately serve heirs or philanthropy (07:33, 29:23).

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4. Navigating Life Transitions and Time Horizons

• Life events (marriage, kids, health) shift time horizons and priorities, making liquidity or safety more important (04:35, 23:23).
• Colin Roche and Corey Hoffstein both push for “liability-driven investing”—aligning investments with specific, time-bound needs such as children’s education, retirement, or inheritance (29:23, 34:25).
• Retirement is a journey, not just a “finish line”—the need for capital and security often outlives a single event (32:54).

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5. The Quality of the Journey vs. Destination

• Bogomil uses the “race car vs. family car” metaphor—risk and volatility may lead to the same endpoint, but the journey’s comfort and sustainability matter.

  “You can build a portfolio in a way that will make the journey more comfortable.” (08:34)

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6. Transitioning from Accumulation to Preservation

• “Once you’ve won the game, stop playing.” Multiple guests highlight the danger in continuing to take risk well after financial independence (00:58, 13:07, 49:33).
• The “marginal utility of wealth” flattens—additional millions may not add real value (49:33).

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7. Identity, Work, and Purpose Beyond Wealth

• Financial freedom brings opportunity to work “for love, not money,” but many struggle to separate their identity from their earning years (18:36, 20:28).
• The importance of mapping meaningfully purposeful, fulfilling ways to spend time post-retirement—work can still be part of that, but on one’s terms (22:04, 24:33).

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8. Community, Pack, and Relationships

• Ben Hunt on the importance of finding one’s “pack”:

  “I want to take care of my pack, right, which is my family… and… I want to be able to say [what I want to say].” (23:53)

• Social capital—building community and sustaining meaningful relationships—trumps pure financial accumulation (27:09).

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9. Practical and Emotional Safety Nets

• Wes Gray: Financial goals are about “not having to stress about money,” being able to “fund our business,” provide stability, spend on family wellness, and pay for meaningful life experiences—“having a buffer” (57:54).
• Emphasizes both “big blue arrow” (directional) goals and “tactical” (everyday, modest) comforts like not worrying about an extra flight or being able to host friends and family (57:54–61:23).

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10. Celebration and Self-Recognition

• Many people never realize they have “arrived”—the episode encourages listeners to acknowledge their financial milestones and celebrate progress, no matter their starting point (48:43).

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• Aswath Damodaran:

  “The end game... is to preserve and grow your wealth. It's not to get rich. It's not to beat the market.” (00:30, 02:42)

• Larry Swedroe:

  “Once you've won the game, you should stop playing. So the strategy to get rich is very different than the strategy to stay rich.” (00:58, 49:33, 53:33)

• Ben Hunt:

  “I'm 58 years old. I love what I do... I want enough money to live a life well lived.” (01:13, 23:09) “I want to take care of my pack...” (23:53)

• Meb Faber:

  “That narrative is changing... reframing this concept of money as freedom and wealth as the ability to do kind of what you want, live where you want, make the life decisions you want, and not be beholden…” (15:30)

• Daniel Crosby:

  “Freedom is really always my ultimate goal when investing... to just be able to live life on our own terms.” (42:50)

• Corey Hoffstein:

  “For me, I've always very much taken a liability driven approach... Now the big question for me is, okay, what else do I need money for?... I don't want to have to think about money.” (34:25)

• Wes Gray:

  “Not having to stress about money, right? Like, so I grew up broke. It was on the free lunch program, didn't have shit as a kid... Just not having to stress, peace of mind is a big thing for me.” (57:54) “I just want to have enough capital on the personal side where, to the extent, you know, things get rocky... we don't have to fire people. Like we keep on building and keep on maneuvering.” (58:26)

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Memorable Moments & Analogies

• Family Car vs. Race Car Analogy:
  The most comfortable investing journey is often more desirable than a volatile “all-or-nothing” approach (08:34).
• Consumption vs. Gift Dichotomy:
  Forces a practical review of what saved wealth is for—for yourself now, or for others later (06:39).
• Dr. Manhattan Metaphor:
  Un-sticking from time as an analogy for perspective shift after financial independence (16:46).
• Marginal Utility of Wealth as Elephants Back:
  Wealth’s value flattens at a certain level, as additional capital stops improving lifestyle (49:33).
• Race Car, Snowball, and Mountain Metaphors:
  Different ways to think about saving, compounding, and the real goal of financial stability (08:34, 33:09).

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:30] – Damodaran’s endgame: “preserve and grow wealth”
• [01:13] – Ben Hunt on “funded contentment”
• [04:35] – Impact of life changes (kids, health) on investment horizons
• [06:39] – Consumption vs. gift framework
• [10:16] – “What’s it do? Who’s it for?” approach to asset allocation
• [13:07] – Why “you’ve won the game, stop playing” matters
• [23:09] – Ben Hunt on “taking care of my pack” and living well
• [29:23] – Cullen Roche on “risk as uncertainty of consumption”
• [34:25] – Hoffstein on liability-driven investing
• [42:50] – Daniel Crosby: investing = achieving freedom
• [49:33] – Larry Swedroe: Needs v. desires, marginal utility of wealth
• [57:54] – Wes Gray: Peace of mind, safety buffers, and everyday goals

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Flow & Takeaways

• Money’s True Utility:
  The purpose of investing matures from simply “getting rich” to creating options, stability, and meaningful impact—on self, family, and community.
• Transition Points:
  Each investor faces key inflection points (starting a family, retirement, windfalls). These require changes in investing approach and, more crucially, mindset.
• Intangible Wealth:
  “Human capital,” social capital, life experience, education, and values passed to the next generation are as important as financial assets.
• Celebrate Progress:
  Many seek “enough” without realizing they've arrived. Take time to recognize success and adjust for the next purpose-driven chapter.

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Final Reflection

As Matt and Bogomil observe, financial decisions are ultimately about building a life of purpose, freedom, and community—not just maximizing a number. “Once you’ve won the game, stop playing,” means shifting focus to preservation, fulfillment, connection, and enjoying the compound benefits of both money and meaning.

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Transcript

[Matt Ziegler]

One of the goals of our series Show Us yous Portfolio is to help regular investors understand how professional investors construct their own portfolios. But that is only part of it. The other part is to understand how great investors think about money and purpose. The first question we ask in each episode gets at that key question. In this episode of our separate podcast, two Quants and a Financial Planner, Matt Ziegler and Bogomil Baranowski break down some of our favorite answers we have received from our guests to that question. We are including this episode in the Excess Returns feed, but if you want to receive future episodes, please subscribe to two Quants and a financial planner on your favorite podcast program or using the links in the episode description. We hope you enjoy the episode Whenever

[Aswath Damodaran]

I think about investing, I think what its end game is. The end game, at least for me with investing, is to preserve and grow your wealth. That to me is key. It's not to get rich. It's not to beat the market. It's preserve and grow your wealth.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

You want to get to that freedom level where you have freedom and capacity to choose your own path. Those old choose your own adventure books, right? And I think that's important for a lot of people. And that number, whomever you ask is is different.

[Larry Swedroe]

One of the things I try to teach highly wealthy people is that once you've won the game, you should stop playing. So the strategy to get rich is very different than the strategy to stay rich.

[Ben Hunt]

That is what I'm trying to achieve is that notion of funded contentment. I'm 58 years old. I love what I do. We can talk about what I do and why I do what I do and how that impacts what I think about investing. But it's I want enough money to live a life well lived.

[Matt Ziegler]

You're watching Excess Returns, the channel that makes complex investing ideas simple enough to actually use, where better questions lead to better decisions. Bogomil Baranowski, you're here with me today because I've got a whole ton of clips. We ask these questions a lot that are about purpose in your portfolio. And we are way overdue for a recap episode. And because you and I both traffic in this space of working with families and business owners and individuals, we're candidly in these trenches every single day with money and meaning, portfolio and purpose. That's why you're here with me. Are you ready to watch some clips? You got the popcorn? You ready to do this?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

I'm super excited. I love the topic and for me everything begins with the meaning and purpose when it comes to money. And we'll talk more about it in a minute, but I'm super excited.

[Matt Ziegler]

Hey, you and me both. Let's, let's go. Right off the diving board, we're starting with a big hitter himself, Azwath. David Duran, the professor, the Mr. Dean of Valuation. Of course, he has thoughts on this. Jack, Forehand roll, some clips.

[Aswath Damodaran]

Whenever I think about investing, I think about what its end game is. The end game, at least for me with investing, is to preserve and grow your wealth. That, to me is key. It's not to get rich, it's not to beat the market, it's to preserve and grow your wealth. Because I think if you get that starting mission wrong, everything else gets thrown off by it, right? If you say, look, I want to get rich in investing, you're going to put your money in very different places than in. So for me, all through my investing life, it's not been about, can I beat the market? No. If I do, it's great. If I don't, it's, you know, it's not the end of the world. It's about preserving and growing your wealth. So that's kind of animated. Almost every decision I make when I think about how to invest my portfolio, my family's portfolio, my children's portfolio, is that end game drives everything I do.

[Matt Ziegler]

What about has it evolved? Is if I could jump in the time machine and get 20 year old Oswald, does he have the same answer as you today?

[Aswath Damodaran]

Different because I didn't have a family. I was investing for myself. When you're 20 years old, you can recover from mistakes. You can take risks you could not take when you're 40 or 50 or 60. But my philosophy hasn't changed. I was old at 20. I wasn't buying the riskiest stock I could to make a 50, because to me it's, you know, the odds of winning were not good enough for me to do it. Investing, to me, has never been gambling, so I don't think I would have invested that differently. But the burden you carry as an investor changes as you age.

[Matt Ziegler]

As an investor, was there a specific change with having a family, with, with. Did you experience an actual shift in the approach at that point, any of those family milestones?

[Aswath Damodaran]

I think we often talk about time horizon as something we just go pick, right? If you ask an investor, what's your time horizon, their answer is long term. Because that's the answer we're supposed to give. The truth is, life determines your time horizon, right? Which is if you have A family, you have health problems, you have kids who have to go to college.

[Ben Hunt]

Guess what?

[Aswath Damodaran]

Your time horizon just got shorter. Why? Because you need cash in the near term. So one of the things that it's changed is your liquidity needs. That's ebbed and flowed. It's now again back to a point where I don't have to worry as much, but in peak liquidity needs, I'd invest differently than I invest today.

[Matt Ziegler]

What's the end game to preserve and the growth of your wealth? I mean, I have, I have an initial place where my brain immediately goes. But where, where's your head go when you hear Aswath say this?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Well, first of all, when I listen to him, I feel like there's no one answer. There's your answer. Right? And that's how he frames it. He says, that's how I thought about it. But starting with the end goal, I think, you know, coming to investing from any direction you come, and you go in with the assumption you're going to become the richest person in the world, you're going to perform the market for the longest period of time and on and on and on. And then you pause for a second and he says, like, what's, what's your honest end goal? And it was different when he was young. It's different now when he's older. He has kids and a family and everything else. But I think asking, why am I doing this? So when I have new clients reach out to me and we sit down and we look at an amount of money, I want to understand where it came from, how it came about, because it helps us understand it, at least me, where we're going. And then we want to grow it. But if we grow it, what would it change? What does it mean to you? And a whole different level of engagement and thinking shows up. So the end goal is where everything really starts. What about you? How do you think about it?

[Matt Ziegler]

Do you know Peter Medina's work? Mladin A. Have we talked about this before?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Maybe. I don't think so. Refresh my memory. We've.

[Matt Ziegler]

We've had him on. He really shaped my thinking. He really shaped my thinking around this stuff. And he shaped it because he boils it all down to, there's a great old excess, returns, people can dig it out. We've had them on. And as a financial planner, it's one of the, it's one of my favorite conversations I've ever been a part of. He literally says everything is either a. It's either for consumption or it's a gift. And it is such an end state. Thought provoking, forced question of, okay, you're saving this, you're squirreling this away. Is this going to be consumed by you in your lifetime or are you gifting it for somebody else to consume in theirs? And no matter what fancy analysis, no matter what Monte Carlo, no matter what thing we run, is this consumption or is this a gift? And then let's talk about what the purpose is and what this means.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

I like the sound of that. What really hit me listening to Aswath was that he says he was never gambling. And I think it's such a profound revelation when you go into investing and then he takes on the burden of you talk about the gift. Like, who is this money for? It's obviously for him, but it's also for other people. And when you're managing multi generational family fortunes, you realize you're managing money not just for the people in the room, but the people that are not even around yet. And you're doing it because of the people that are no longer in the room. So you're kind of that bridge. I want to highlight one thing that really struck me listening to Professor Damodaran is what I call the quality of the journey. And you can get to the same destination. I wrote a piece about it last summer about a race car and a family car. And you know, I actually had the experience of driving a family car and catching up with a much faster car at the end of the day.

[Matt Ziegler]

Trip Emil, the race car driver. I didn't go.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

I was driving very steady, very slow on a boring road. And whoever that was was speeding up, slowing down, speeding up. I don't think it was possible to have a cup of coffee in that car that was passing me by. But anyways, we ended up at the same gas station at the end of that section of the road. And it made me think of investing just the same way. Could have incredible returns for three years in a row and a massive drawdown. And four good years and a massive drawdown. My clients don't want to sign up for that. And it's a conscious choice. There are no guarantees, as you know and everybody knows. But you can build a portfolio in a way that will make the journey more comfortable.

[Matt Ziegler]

I hear you on this loud and clear. The drawdown, tolerance changes with different phases of life. That's a big part too. Like your appetite for risk might be very different when you're young, even if you're not swinging for the fences or risking risking a zero and you have to actually have the perspective over time on the journey to realize this stuff evolves because that savings goal might start off as something that is purely for consumption. You're investing in something, you're not tolerating the same level of variance because you're buying a higher quality business or however you're approaching it. But over time, if that actually compounds and grows, you might start to have to segregate this of I thought I'd need this for later, for retirement or whatever, but now I only need this much of it and now I need a way to start partitioning and understanding what's consumption, what's a gift, what role does this play? I'm going to bring one other quote into it, then we're going to jump into the next clip. I always go, it's a marketing term, but it's a Seth Godinism and it's the always asking the question, what's it do? Who's it for?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

It's a good one.

[Matt Ziegler]

I can't help but see that in portfolios.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

If I look at your portfolio and you're like this, I have XYZ stock, I have XYZ fund, I have XYZ Private business. Okay, what's it do? Who's it for? And that is to triangulate around to that whole point which is perfect segue. MEB Faber. We got a clip from him. Jack Forehand. Let's roll some clips.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

I want to be on that first rocket spaceship to Mars with Elon. That's what I what's the ticket going to be like 100 million? I think there's a couple things and these obviously can change throughout time. You know, a 20 year old me is going to have a different answer to this than a 40 year old me and 60 and hopefully 80, 100, 120 year old me.

[Wes Gray]

And

[Bogomil Baranowski]

laying the foundation I think is really important because on Fintwit and elsewhere writing academic papers and books, we tend to argue the final 5% because a lot of the base case the foundation is assumed and a good example will be, I think over a certain income and net worth like you want to get to that freedom level where you have freedom and capacity to choose your own path. Those old choose your own adventure books. Right. And I think that's important for a lot of people. And that number, whomever you ask is, is different. The challenge of course, and you see this in all your neighbors, all your friends, people that come into money, people that bought bitcoin at a hundred on and on you adjust there's the sort of hedonic treadmill of income and wealth. And that I think is, is a problem for a lot of people. And then you see all the polls is like, how much money do you need to retire? How much money do you need to be happy? And it's always like twice as much as everyone currently has. The good news is I'm a, I'm a very content human. You know, I, while I work in the financial world, it doesn't necessarily, I'm at the point where I feel a great deal of contentment and peace and freedom. And I think, you know that a lot of the literature shows that you need to get to like that 75k amount of income. Like, like the happiness curve really plateaus after that with inflation printing. Maybe that's going to be a hundred K. But let's just round somewhere in there and then above that it's, it's sort of gravy. And then it gets into Jay Z problems or excuse me, Biggie problems, both of them, but, but more money causing more headaches. And so a lot of people who invest and get wealthy, this is one of the key things you have to avoid too. And William Bernstein talks a lot about this. He's like, once you get to a certain amount of wealth and this means different levels, different people, you've won the game. And he says you don't have to keep playing. He's like, once you win the game, you don't have to keep playing. And one of the biggest mistakes people make is they get wealthy or super rich and they still risk it all.

And that to me is insane.

And so you see example after example after example, wealthy people that have all this leverage and crazy concentration and then boom, the regime shifts and it's all gone. Not like part of it, it's gone, all of it's gone. And so part of the wealth building, what we call, we wrote this four part series last year, or excuse me, last year, it's 2022 now. During the pandemic 2020, we wrote a four part series called Get Rich Portfolio, the Stay Rich portfolio. Which is interesting particularly with what's going on right now with interest rates and bonds, how I invest, which is what we're going to talk about today. And the last was investing in a time of Corona that was specific to some opportunities back in March 2020. But, but part of those buckets, mentally getting rich and staying rich are different for a lot of people. And you see this a lot with business owners. They build their career, they do this Business, they sell it, and then all of a sudden they have all this money and kind of the life they had before and the life they had after. The mental approach, the accounting, and even the portfolios are very different. And this gets on to spending, too. So any long winded answer, which is what you get with me, but basically, you know, I think about wealth as freedom, you know, and we talk a lot about bemoan the fact they don't teach personal finance or investing or money in schools, which I think is a tragedy. But I think that narrative is changing. You're starting to see a lot more states adopting that curriculum. But really reframing, you know, this concept of money as freedom and wealth is the ability to do kind of what you want, live where you want, make the life decisions you want, and not be beholden to, you know, be structured in a way where you're forced to make opportunities, turn down opportunities, or make just life decisions you don't want to do.

[Matt Ziegler]

You want to be on a rocket ship to Mars? I know we just admitted you're. You're a race car driver now, which I'm very impressed. I'm your chim shim in this scenario. Do you want to be on the rocket to Mars? What'd you think of Meb?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

I was in a family car in that story. But anyways, you know what? When I was a kid, I was really fascinated with space and travel and I wanted to go to the moon and Mars. I don't know why, but that idea faded. Maybe I fell more in love with Earth, the planet that I was born on. And whether it's being up in the skies flying small planes or scuba diving and seeing the oceans or spending time in nature in the woods, this is such a beautiful planet. And anywhere near us, there's no planet that I know of that it's anything like it. So it's going to be hard to leave that planet. And maybe I'll let other people take that flight with Elon ahead of me. What about you? Are you going to be on the first one?

[Matt Ziegler]

No, no. I don't have the risk tolerance. I don't have the stomach for that. I don't have the stomach for it. And I also think too, there's a weird concept here and I'm going to take it. I'm going to take it to comic books for a second. The whole. Do you know the character Dr. Manhattan from the Watchmen? Do you know this is big naked blue guy?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Okay, what about him?

[Matt Ziegler]

Anyway, big naked blue guy. That's all you need to know. It's this whole idea that he's basically unstuck from time, if you will. He doesn't experience time in a linear fashion. And it's the unsticking from time where all of a sudden he might as well be an alien or he might as well be a God. He spends a lot of time on Mars. That's part of why he goes to Mars as a quiet place to contemplate, you know, the inner workings of the cosmos. But it's this idea of that if you're not part of time, you might as well be an alien or a God. Like, where else? And so the idea that you're gonna, like, run away. I get the exploring instinct to want to go to Mars. I just don't have that explorer instinct where I'm like, that seems like a crappy place to die in the depths of space. I think I'd rather take a shot like scuba diving or something before I want to be on the. On the space spaceship for multiple years.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

There's so much more to see and experience on this planet. And the more I think about it, you know, we think about growth even in investing bigger, better. But we just have one planet, like, this is it. And everybody that has ever lived has lived on this planet. And at least, you know, in our civilization, even going back, I don't know, there's something that hits you. It's like, this is it. Like this is the only place where we could live so far. I don't know. Maybe that's going to change in the future. But it's such a blessing that we have a planet that has the climate that we like and the abundance of food and just a pleasant, beautiful blue planet to live on. So a lot has changed for me since I was a kid thinking about traveling to space. But maybe that will change again when I'm older. There are many things.

[Matt Ziegler]

It's becoming more of a wuss. Give me the investment implications of this for you. What do you think of Mebs, what he's actually saying about the money side?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

He's talking about freedom. He's talking about the hedonic treadmill. He's talking about enough. He points out something that will come back throughout many other clips that we're going to talk about, but the idea that you don't have to keep playing, and that's something that really made me stop. Other people that we'll talk about today will bring it up, so we'll talk more about it. But I had a very intimate conversation with a Listener of Talking Billions last week. And it's somebody that made really good decisions. A lot of ups and downs on the financial front throughout his life. And he's basically, you know, showing me how things are. He's asking, have I done the right thing? And he's very comfortable. But he told me something that really made me think. He said, I don't want to stop working. And I told him, nobody's making you stop working, although you reached your financial goal. And I think we have to disconnect that idea of that we work just for the money. And we'll come back to it later. That I want to point out, it's not really about the money. A bigger topic that I want to talk about, but I'll come back to it. But I told him, you know, you reached the goal, but the goal was not to work until you have the money. He's working in a profession he really, really loves and enjoys, and he was immersed in it and he's learning more about it. You can continue to do that. Nobody is telling you to stop just because you reached a financial goal. Flip it on its head. Don't continue to work just because you're pushing the financial goal away. That's a whole different thing. I hope people can tell the difference.

[Matt Ziegler]

I love the way that you put that because a. I mean, obviously we're very high paid salary workers here recording this podcast, so clearly we would never do anything unless we were maximizing profit potential. You know, your. Your pockets are stuffed with cash right now too, right?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

In. In my current pants, not so much. But there are other pants that are more podcaster pants are going. Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

So this, this idea, though, of you don't have like, work might be a thing. Talk about this with people retiring all the time. Yeah, work might be a thing. That cash flow comes in. It flows to bank accounts, it fills the 401k, it helps plug the coffers, you send to the kids to school, whatever. All, all the wonderful things that like work for money does. But it's okay to actually keep doing the same job or a variation of the same thing and realize that it's no longer about the money. Not that you have to work for free. Like we are not communists. You can live that way, but you can realize there's other value, there's other stuff that you do that you can treat with the same respect and the authority of a job and that can be part of your identity and purpose, can be to go out and fill those things that you actually take as seriously and I challenge people to think, map out that schedule. Tell me what you're going to do every day of the week. If you're retiring in three years, what's a week actually look like? And most people get the look of panic in their eyes. And I know I would if I was in that case, too, because it's like, well, how are you going to fill that time so that there's actual purpose and identity there? And how do we make this a challenge where it's exciting to fill this time? There's a wonderful Joseph Conrad quote that I'm going to butcher off the top of my head. It's bleak, it's existential, but it's basically like they find this guy swimming in the middle of the ocean and, like, they're like, you should not be out here. And they think they're rescuing this person and they bring him over the side of the ship and they're like, he's like. You think that I was like, out here, like, to drown? I just meant to swim until I sank. And those are not the same thing.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Very true, very true. You got me thinking, you know, it's. It's that flip that we have in our heads that first we work to pay the bills and save a bit of money, and if you found a career that you love, you can stay in it much longer. The other thing, and we'll come back to it in other conversations, is that I see this clear distinction between what got you here will not get you there. Whenever I'm listening to clips like this, because what you thought was the initial goal is not the ultimate or the second goal. And I don't know, it's just like, it's such a clear, visible observation after listening to those eight clips that, yes, you're headed somewhere, and once you got there, there's something else and something more transcendental and bigger. And when you're thinking about a family fortune, it's not a number, it's almost a feeling that you have. And we'll come back to it in the other conversations, but this is a perfect segue.

[Matt Ziegler]

We've got Ben Hunt up next. Jack, roll the clip.

[Ben Hunt]

Friend of mine, Brian Portnoy wrote a book on this, and I think he's really right. He talks about a funded contentment. And I. I think for me, that's. That is what I'm trying to achieve, is that. That notion of funded contentment. I'm 58 years old, right? I. I love what I do. We can talk about what I do and why I do What I do and how that impacts what I think about investing. But it's. I want enough money to live a life well lived. And that's why I, that's why I invest like I invest.

[Matt Ziegler]

What is your idea of a life

well lived, would you say?

[Ben Hunt]

I want to take care of my pec, right. Which is my family. I, you know, extended as much as I can.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Right.

[Ben Hunt]

So that, that, that does come. One, for me, I think that that's true for a lot of people. And two is I want to. I've got something to say. And, and so I, so I want to be able to say it. I, I don't want to look back and yeah, not have. I want to shoot my shot. Right. I want to, I want to say what I want to say and that's. That to me is a, A life well lived.

[Matt Ziegler]

First off, the shout out to Brian Portnoy because the funded contentment idea, the idea of flourishing, there's so much stuff that comes his work on this topic and that's part of why we love Brian and what he's doing. The one that hits me the hardest with what Ben says here is the importance of finding the pack, of finding community, that sense. I'm curious what. I get the great privilege of talking to Ben a lot. What did you take from this one?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Well, I'm a big fan of Brian Portnoy and his books and he was on Talking Billions and we had a fun conversation about fund and contentment. Sometimes it's the choice of words that just strikes the perfect balance. Right. It's like the funded contentment. You do need the money. You do. When I was listening to this clip, I was thinking about this idea that you brought up briefly before, that you know, you would do something if you were not paid to do it. And somebody reframed it for me and said it from the other end of this logic rainbow. He says, how much would it take for somebody to pay you so that you no longer do it? It's a very different. You might say the outcome is the same. You stop doing it or you continue to do it. But the question is very different. The first one implies that maybe your work is not worth anything. That's the risk. Right. The other one is it's worth so much to you that people have to pay you for you to stop doing it. And I'm thinking of founders that sell their businesses. And I was just listening to the founders podcast, the Whole Foods founder, I'm forgetting the name. Wonderful guy, incredible conversation about capitalism, building businesses, entrepreneurship but there's this subtle feeling if you listen to that episode, that he regrets that he sold the business. He wishes he never sold it. And I meet founders who become my clients too, that have this moment where they feel like, I wish I hadn't solved it right. So this is the moment when somebody paid you so much that you did actually stop. This episode is brought to you by indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate.

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[Matt Ziegler]

Ben brings up in this clip, and I think it's related because it's related to the transaction, but on an internal level. And he calls it finding your pack. And I think this is really important, too, because inside of this part of your identity is not just the job you do, but it's the people around you, your colleagues, your family, and everything else. And the critical part, and it's part of where he lands on saying, I want to be able to say the things that I want to say, kind of in a freedom of speechy way, but also in the way of like, I want to be able to freely communicate. You don't communicate by yourself. The pack and the communication are very, very tightly linked here. And in the whole food story, and I see this with founders a lot, the identity is tied with the job, and it's not tied to the people and the family around you as well.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Right?

[Matt Ziegler]

You are immediately on an island. You're immediately Dr. Manhattan. You have been unstuck from time. You're an alien or a God in this world with no basis anymore. You can't relate if you find that pack, though. The beautiful thing about a pack is just like the goal, how you were explaining it earlier, it doesn't stop. Somebody's always dying. Somebody's always being born. Somebody's coming in, somebody's phasing out. And to learn to live inside of that permeability of community is a really, really powerful. A really, really powerful way to think about money and the purpose of saving and everything we're doing.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

I have this image of a surface now. We're talking about the planets. And we are all kind of like planets flying around because of the Internet, because of podcasting, blogging, writing, and being, you know, learning in public. We create this surface that's available for other people to touch and maybe even stick to. That's how I see it. You know, when I write an article and people respond to it, I feel like I made a bigger part of me visible, which is a very vulnerable and comfortable thing for me to do, and I'm sure others as well. But because of it, people saw a surface to land on. And I highly encourage people to experiment with that in bigger and larger circles where you make a bigger surface available, for lack of a better word, to explain it. And you'd be surprised how the pack that you describe can grow and grow and connect with you.

[Matt Ziegler]

All right, we're going to zoom out from pack for a second. This next clip is Cullen Roche. Jack, let's roll the clip.

[Colin]

Yeah, I think starting from a real financial planning foundation, I think the key question for everybody is understanding, like Ken French said, that risk is uncertainty of consumption. And so as we navigate our financial lives, I think the thing that's really difficult for people to compartmentalize is the time horizons over which they're going to have certain assets. And that's, to me that's really become. Time has become sort of the essential aspect of managing all this. Especially, you know, when I had kids, I think kids really screwed up the way that I think about all this stuff. Because when you have kids, you, you create a lot of short term burdens for yourself that you didn't previously have. But you also have to start thinking in this sort of like multi generational perspective. It completely transforms your mentality from thinking solely about yourself and like your wife to thinking then about other people and their time horizons. And so now, you know, in a weird way, having kids kind of kicked me in the butt because it, it motivated me in a way to start thinking about things in not just a sort of hyper productive short term time horizon, but also this weird sort of, you know, unpredictable long time horizon, this multi generational time horizon. So you know, my, my goals essentially are to create certainty of consumption across various time horizons. And you know, we can, we'll kind of get into how I actually build the, you know, the, or quantify the liabilities and then match certain assets to it across specific time horizons. But you know, in a general sense, that's what I'm doing is looking at things in very specific time horizons to try to optimize consumption over all of these time horizons, including time horizons that are incredibly unpredictable. Where, you know, in the, in the long term, my, my own retirement plan, perhaps my demise, perhaps, you know, how Is my wife going to navigate my demise? And then how my children are going to navigate, you know, potentially inheriting some money or benefiting from what I can produce in my lifetime so that they can create greater predictability across their own consumption time horizons.

[Matt Ziegler]

We're getting into another part that's very near and dear to my heart, the Peter Medina ideas of this, like liability driven investing. Colin's actually got a marvelous new book mostly on this topic and how it folds into planning. Where do you come into this one? Risk is uncertainty of consumption. What's Colin making you think of here?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Well, the consumption in the future, the time horizon, the unpredictable future, having a buffer, many things that I wrote down listening to it. But there's a moment when he's thinking beyond one's lifetime, which really spoke to me. Given the clients that you and I work with, they think beyond their lifetime. And I meet so many people that just are not there yet. And then there are people that just saw it and they see that they work towards something that will exceed their lifetime. A legacy of sorts. I was thinking, I don't know why, listening to him, that, you know, retirement, it's not a finish line. And the way I look at it, I meet so many people that are thinking about retirement 5, 10, 15 years from now. And they have a number in mind. And there's something that I wanted to point out that I think gets lost, that the day you retire is not the day when you need. Speaking of the liability, all the money that you saved, it's not. You might have another decade or two.

[Matt Ziegler]

You have to remind. I have to remind people of this all the time. They're looking at it and it's like, well, this is worth, you know, a million dollars or $10 million or $100,000. And it's like, okay, are you going to spend that tomorrow? Because you're talking about it like you're going to spend it tomorrow and you're not.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

I wrote a piece on my substack, Climbing the Mountain, Rolling the Snowball. How so much about the financial storytelling and narrative is about climbing the mountain. And when you actually think about climbing the mountain, Mount Everest, it's easy at first, it's harder later. And you can't stay too long at the top. You have to go back down because it's not a friendly place to be. When you're actually building a family fortune or your own fortune, you're rolling a snowball. It's very hard at the beginning, very little progress. Then it becomes very big and you want to stay at that proverbial top, the preferred place, for as long as possible. That's what my families think about. So it's, we're using the wrong metaphor. So when people think about retirement, they feel like climbed the mountain. I'm finally there and this is it. What about the next day? What about the next decade? You know, we both know that Buffett created the majority of his wealth past the retirement age. He's the, the master compounder. So when people are panicking about the retirement day, you have a few more decades. And if you're thinking about your kids, you might have half a century or a century to roll the snowball.

[Matt Ziegler]

Think about only because it's super related. Corey Hofstein is the next clip. Jack Forehand. Let's get it in here. Because it builds on this point.

[Corey Hoffstein]

Yeah, this is, this is the, the big question, right. And it's changed over time. When I was younger, it was very much about trying to get to that point where I felt comfortable with the assets I had. I've been very fortunate that I think I've exceeded the amount of assets I need to meet my future liabilities. So I should start by saying I'm a really big believer in liability driven investing. That's something that's very popular among pensions. I think individuals, in many ways, all the things that we do, we have these future liabilities that we're trying to meet with our investment assets and our human capital. Right. We're trying to create income, we're trying to put our money to work for us, and we're trying to meet the needs of our children, potentially future retirement, future things we want to spend money on, whether it's vacations or homes or whatever. So for me, I've always very much taken a liability driven approach. I've gotten to the point where I feel confident enough both in the human capital I have, you know, my earnings as well as the investment capital that I've sort of superseded my future liabilities in a good like. So I've, I've met my liabilities. I think I'm totally fine there for the type of spending I want. And now the big question for me is, okay, what, what else do I need money for? And, and I think what I have concluded is sort of two things. The first is that I don't want to have to think about money. I think, right. People say money doesn't solve your problems. Well, money can help de. Stress you in many ways. If you have a problem, you know, it can free up your, your time. It can you can hire someone to help you do yard work or clean the house or all that sort of stuff. So for me, having a little bit of excess money for those needs certainly leads to a higher quality of life. And then as I sort of think about becoming a father soon, a huge priority for me is education with my kids. So I was given a tremendous gift from my parents, which was I was able to go to a private high school, private college, and private graduate school with, and came out with zero debt. My parents were able to pay for all of that. And I recognize that it is just a tremendous gift that I would like to be able to pass on to my children. So as I sort of say, okay, I think, I think I'm on the path for the retirement I want, the next goal for me really is to say, how can I meet that, that dream of being able to give my kids that, that gift of education?

[Matt Ziegler]

So to the point you're just making about the mountain. And this is part of why I wanted to pull Corey in, because the don't worry about money aspect that he introduces on top of this liability driven investing way of thinking. Yeah, I think a lot about how what you have in savings is a product of the cash flow statement, what you have in surplus, which is a product of the calendar over time. So it's over time, you have a surplus, the surplus turns into an asset, the asset turns into this thing. And in our saving years in the pure accumulation mode, we're riding up to the top of that mountain. To your, to your point, you're rolling that snowball and making it bigger and bigger and bigger. And then at the end, because we're not melting the entire snowball down or the mountain all at once, there's potentially a gap where we can kind of coast or we can stop saving in, but the investment is of a big enough size that we can live off of it. And maybe we can live off forever, maybe in the next three generations can live off of the giant snowball we rolled. But we have to shift our mindset from that, like abject saving in the same mechanism to, to decumulation, to spending, to living off of this thing in some responsible way. That mindset shift is so, so tricky. And what Corey starts to get the heart of when I hear him talking about it is that idea of not just not having to think about it, but how hard it is to let go of that last mode of thinking. What about you?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

So many thoughts come to mind. I wrote a piece on my substack that I called Escape velocities of money. And just to give a visual for this audience for their benefit, there's a moment that you will realize that your investments made more money this year than you earned by showing up for whatever job you have. And this moment is really shocking eye opening because you kind of created a second self. You know, it's this idea of making money in your sleep. You're not even there. Right. And I think something interesting happens. And then if you're rolling the snowball and it gets the momentum and speed, so many people experience a moment where they can't, I mean, it's, it's. They can't keep up with the spending. Like they, they realize they will never spend this unless they go really, you know, wild and crazy. They won't spend it in their lifetime. So that snowball is benefiting the next generation. He talks about this feeling that money de stresses you. You know, we say money is not everything, but there's a certain level of financial comfort where you don't have to worry about, you know, changing tickets, booking an extra hotel night or renting a car or doing things. It does give us a lot of this comfort. And he talks about education being paid by his parents. You and I talked about this idea that, you know, we're thinking about the multi generational family fortune, but the idea that the next generation doesn't have to start with zero, which is such important thing, at least for me personally, to think, what can we do to make that happen? His family paid for his education. Education is something that I take calls from listeners that had to change countries, move away, and all they had in the previous country was lost. You and I spoke with some individuals like that as well on some of the recordings. The education that you received, sometimes it's the only asset that you can bring to the other side anyways. It's an incredible gift to receive from your parents, grandparents.

[Matt Ziegler]

Yeah. And you can build off of that, you can rebuild off of that. Education, knowledge, confidence is all foundational.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

And this is, I'm sure you have these conversations too, and I love the way that he brought it up on, on having that as something that he wants to provide for his kids. The teach a man to fish aspect of it all because it's, it's that part where it's what's foundational, what's first principles that you've instilled that goes well beyond the financial assets.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Yes.

[Matt Ziegler]

You and I both preach this. I know in our day job all the time is like, how about your human capital how about your intellectual property? How about your wisdom capital? How about your spiritual or your social capitals or these other things? How does that fit into the actual accumulated savings of your family? Because it's way more than money. If you want to have any chance of flourishing, funding, contentment, all those words.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Can I chime in real quick? I got an email from somebody who is a long time listener, and I'll present it in a way that's very anonymous, but he's thinking about the moment when his parents will pass away and he will receive the inheritance. And it feels like a date, a moment that set in time. And I told him, you know, the gifts that you're receiving, it's not just a financial gift that will come at some point and it will be bittersweet because they will pass away. Right. And a lot of planning is around that date, which I don't think is the best way to think about it. It's a whole different conversation. But you've been receiving things from them that are not monetary for decades now. Right. The family rituals, the education, the principles, the values, how you built your life. So you've been receiving things for a long time. And the financial gift is just one of many. And I love the idea that it's not one singular thing and it's not just the money. You've been receiving things, and you're probably more ready for the financial gift because of all the other experiences you've collected with your parents or grandparents.

[Matt Ziegler]

Absolutely. Difference between picking up a scratchy lotto and winning a bajillion dollars.

[Colin]

Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

And working for something over, over a lifetime. Daniel Crosby is up next. I mean, come on, the soul of money guy. Daniel, what do you got to tell to us? Jack Forehand. Let's roll the clip.

Yeah, this is, this is super easy freedom. I mean, that's like full, full stop. I don't have fancy tastes. I am a simple man from Alabama. I don't need expensive things, but I do need to be left alone. So freedom is really always my ultimate goal when investing. The number one thing that, you know, my wife and I are setting aside for is to just be able to live life on our own terms. To say yes to the things that are valuable to us, to say no to the things that we don't value, and to sort of maximize quality time with family. So that that freedom to me is everything. And it's one of the things that makes me able to, to do some of the hard work of, of, you know, saving, setting aside money, taking risk, because I See this all in service of my freedom. And that, to me, is so much more powerful than, you know, a bigger house or a new car or something.

He's a simple kind of man from Alabama, and I know Lynyrd Skynyrd was really from Florida, but I know they record. I'm pretty sure they recorded simple man at Muscle Shoals in Alabama. Salt. I'm going to Daniel Crosby, wherever you are hearing this, just know I'm singing Simple man in my head to hear right now in service of freedom. And I'm not talking about a car with a embarrassing, you know, American history flag on the side of it. What do you think about this? What's the freedom angle? I mean, it just really hits me hard with Daniel.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Sandra. Well, I love the word freedom. And Dan has been on the show on Talking Williams a couple of times, and he's just a wonderful human being. And I learned something new every time we speak. And he shares his family story. And one of the things he told me that maybe this audience might not know, but he grew up with siblings, at least one sibling, as far as I remember. And the family experienced a very different financial backdrop when he was a kid, when Dan was a kid, and when he's. I think it was brother. And the family just was doing better when the other sibling showed up in the world and how they have very different perception of what money means and what's expected, what's. And it made me really think how, you know, same household we think of. And I work with families where you have multiple siblings a few years apart or sometimes more, and you feel like the same household, the same parents, the same grandparents, the same family, dinners and holidays and two kids grow up with a very different outlook on money and life and career and all that. Anyways, I wanted to throw it in. Freedom. I think it's. It covers it all. And we talked about it with the other guests here, the clips. It's the freedom of choice, the freedom of speech. You can do whatever you want. It's not about expensive things, as Dan says, he wants to be left alone. Left alone, but also free to express himself. Not really care. It's very unconditional. I don't know, maximizing time with family with people that are important to you, living on your own terms. Close your eyes, exhale. Feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today.

[Matt Ziegler]

Well, I'm letting go of the worry

[Bogomil Baranowski]

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[Matt Ziegler]

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[Bogomil Baranowski]

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[Matt Ziegler]

Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw

[Bogomil Baranowski]

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[Matt Ziegler]

Oh, sorry.

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[Bogomil Baranowski]

There is a certain level of financial comfort that allows you to do that. And I'll add a caveat to it that we might noticed notice that it has happened that we arrived and I think this comes across maybe the upcoming clip as well, that we haven't arrived. We already arrived. We don't know we have arrived. You're actually this free already. And I talk to so many listeners of my podcast and I tell them you've already done very well, you're already comfortable from what you're telling me and sometimes we might have to hear it from somebody connected to that. I meet and talk to so many people that have done so well for themselves financially and one thing that hits me is that they've never asked for outside help, which I have a huge respect for. But at the same time I look at myself and I ask for outside help on so many fronts in my life. You know, I have an outside why I'm dental work, a lawyer, an accountant and bookkeeper and on and on and on. A compliance consultant. Why not ask for a little bit of help? And I'm meeting people who are like 65, they've been investing on their own for 30 years and they have a very handsome amount of money and they've never asked for somebody to just even sit down and talk to about what they are experiencing. There are folks out there that would listen and help and have an incredible experience. Even if you choose to do most of it on your own. There are folks that can really, really add a lot more to the experience

[Matt Ziegler]

and so much of it. Just to be able to say those very, very simple words of either, hey, you're okay, or you're doing great. Do you know how great you're doing? Because holding up that mirror for people and saying, maybe you just met me, maybe we've been working together for 10 years, maybe 20 years, maybe I'm working with you, and I worked with your parents and grandparents, which both of us have had the fortune of being in situations like that. But it's to look at somebody and say, you know, you're doing great. Right. You know, like, this is an incredible outcome. You're in the upper echelon of the history of humanity with what you're doing here. Can we take a moment to just snapshot this?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Celebrate very. Celebrate it. Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

All right. Celebrate good times. Larry Swedro is up next. Jack, forehand, roll the clip.

[Larry Swedroe]

I wrote a book, you're a Complete Guide to a Successful and Secure Retirement. And we talk about in that book what your goals should be. And one of the things I try to teach highly wealthy people is that once you've won the game, you should stop playing. So the strategy to get rich is very different than the strategy to stay rich, which is to preserve wealth, not necessarily to try to accumulate more. So the first thing you want to do is establish what your needs are, how much money I'm going to need in retirement. You also might consider what your desires are. So you may desire to take two trips to Europe or anywhere in the world you want to go twice, you know, twice a year, go travel, see the world, buy a new car every three years. Where you have a second home in Colorado if you don't live there the rest of the year, those would be desires, but they're not necessarily needs, right? And so you can. First, you really should. What are the things you really need? What are your things you're willing to desire? Are you willing to take the risks to meet those desires as well? And then you have to think about what economists call your marginal utility of wealth, which, if you think about that, it looks kind of like an elephant, like this. So when someone's starting out, getting out of college, they have maybe no net worth, maybe even some debt. The next dollar that they can save and invest is worth a lot to them in wealth. But let's say once you reach. Let's just pick a number like $2 million. Once you reach 2 million, you know if you can turn it into 3, great, that will. Obviously more money is better than less, but it doesn't likely change your lifestyle all that much or the quality of your life. Because once you have enough money to not worry about putting food on the table and shelter and maybe providing a good education for your kids, the good things in life are either free or relatively cheap, right? I get more joy out of playing games with my grandchildren or taking a long walk in a beautiful park around the lake with my wife. I don't need to spend a lot of money to do those things. So that's what you want to figure out. And once you've reached that kind of top of the elephant's back where the marginal utility worth is bending sharply to the right, still more money is better than less. So the curve never turns down. But once it gets to be pretty flat, you should say, I don't need to take more risk. Some people may want to. They may even have a bequeathed desire to leave a lot of money, either charity or their kids, and that may cause them to take more risk. But the question is, do you really need to? And so that's what you want to focus on, is achieving your life goals. And your, your portfolio should enable that to happen. So set your life goals, figure out what are the needs and desires. If you can afford the desires, great, but you shouldn't take a lot of risk to do that.

[Matt Ziegler]

I bet Larry sweater is a big Cool in the Gang fan. I mean, I could, I could, I could see him throwing down to some jungle boogie or, you know, getting out there and getting down on the dance floor. The Stop playing thing came up again here. Well, I. What are you thinking? What do you think about Larry? This is interesting perspective. Mr. Mostly quant stuff. Larry. To have him reflect like this was really special.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

I think it goes back to what we talked about, but I want to take it in a different direction. He says, you know, turning 2 into 3 million. It's a question that I ask, especially new clients or the next generation that sits down with me. So we have a number. If we double it, what difference does it make? And it's a really fun experiment, thought experiment. What would it change? What would be different? Okay, so both kids will go to better schools. Okay, so you're going to go on three trips instead of two trips. What else? Which part out of what you shared really, really excites you? What makes a big difference? And you're onto something. And we loop back to the purpose and the meaning that we talked about at the Beginning. But I think it's good to pause and realize, where am I? And if we do continue, what difference does it make? And in many cases, the lifestyle doesn't really change. You still will drive the same car. But there are a couple of things that will change, and I think that they can really inspire you to take the leap and continue on this journey. I like what he said, that the good things in life are cheap or free. It's a great reminder that it's very true, isn't it?

[Matt Ziegler]

It's so true. Because it comes down to, like, moments with friends. Back to this pack idea. It's. If you don't have stuff that you've built around the identity of whatever enabled you to save the money and do the investing in the first place, what else have you got? My brain keeps going back to. There's a most deaf lyric. It's something like trying to make a dollar out of what makes sense and adding it up. If you can add that up, then I'll be a rich man. I'm butchering the line. Old Black Star song. Or maybe it's black on both sides, but it's this idea of back to compounding the knowledge and compounding the knowledge in a parallel track to compounding the money. Because you have to also learn to make sense of the experience that you're having and then understand what of that experience to harvest. Because not to take us in, like, a million philosophical directions. This is what you and I do. That's the problem. There's the. It's the parable of. I feel like it's a Genghis Khan story, okay, where it's like, you know, you conquer. He conquers this village. He, like, comes through the thing. He gets. It's. It and it's. It's like he lived there once, like, way, way back in his life. And he goes and he gets in the boat with the guy who's fishing, and he's like, I can't believe I'm here, like, in this childhood village, sitting with this fisherman, catching fish. And this is the greatest thing. I've conquered this city, I've conquered this country. I've killed these people. I've fathered these children. He's got all the things. And the fisherman looks at him and he's like, you know, you never had to leave. But I've been doing this the whole time, very happy. You didn't need to go through so much trouble.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

It's. It's very true. There are certain risks, and risk is such a powerful word. That means different things to different people. But just to frame it for this conversation, if there is a chance that you would lose something that's really meaningful to you, maybe the reward is not worth it. And I think with money it gets very confusing because a lot of people, very smart people that have been written about in articles and books have taken the step to risk what they have to get what they don't need and be totally wiped out. And I think at that point when you get, you know, continue to play the game or don't you get to a point where you have that infinite time horizon like a lot of families that you and I work with, Certain risks are just not worth taking and not being in a rush and taking your time and having a respectable return instead of an excessive very high return. Investing is such a peculiar pursuit, isn't it, when you think about it? If you rush it, if you want to cut corners, if you want to go fast, you could actually end up way, way behind relative to what you would have accomplished had you just kept on going at a decent pace.

[Matt Ziegler]

Especially because you brought up those micro decisions in the pacing. Wes Gray, last clip. Jack forehand, roll this west clip.

[Wes Gray]

I kind of break it down into like big blue arrow ideas and then what I call tactical goals, like things I can actually wrap my head around. So for me, like the big blue arrows are just not having to stress about money, right? Like, so I grew up broke. It was on the free lunch program, didn't have shit as a kid. It just my whole life was just trying to figure out how do I not have to stress out about this. So just not having to stress peace of mind is a big thing for me. The other one is, is being able to fund our business. So, you know, we're kind of all in on Alpha Architect. And I like my team, I like what we've built and you know, we're in a business that has a lot of volatility. So I just want to have enough capital on the personal side where to the extent, you know, things get rocky or crazy, you know, we don't have to fire people. Like we keep on building and keep on maneuvering. Just because I think it'd be a shame if, you know, a financial distress event somehow affected Alpha Architect. And then kind of the last one is just, you know, blocking and tackling, like make sure we can retire and like pay for the kids college, which is obviously getting more and more expensive. Those are kind of like the big blue arrow ideas and those could change, who knows? And then What I call the tactical goals, these are things that are tangible to me that I kind of grab on to. The first one is like not having to cheap out on flights with three kids. So, you know, instead of taking the three connections to go to California, maybe I take the one connection and the non red eye and I pay an extra 50 or 100 bucks. Like, not having to worry about that is awesome. Right? So I'm not at their jet level, but I'm at. Let's not red eye this thing. That's awesome. The other thing is, like, healthy food and nutrition. So I want to be able to go to Costco and buy whatever the hell I want in bulk, even if it's more expensive than, like, the less healthy version. Just because, you know, I value, you know, trying to take care of my body. And same with the fam. And then the third one kind of related to that is being able to afford things that I guess motivate or help encourage activity and exercise for my family. As you guys know, I don't need that because I don't really need extra motivation to go work out, stay in shape, but a lot of people do. So if I can, you know, get lessons, if I can get special gear, whatever it takes to kind of get people motivated, I want to be able to spend on that. And then kind of the last one is just the ability to host, like, cool parties and good community events where no one has to worry about the cost because I can just float it. Just because I always think that's fun, right? Like, you get to go to a big get together. You don't ever have to sweat about, like, the cost of it. I just would rather people just focus on having fun. So those are kind of like my big blue arrows and like, my tactical goals of what I like about, you know, if I had capital, which I do now, I like. I like these things.

[Matt Ziegler]

I wanted to pick up with what you were saying and what Wes says in this, which is the little steps along the way, which is like the little micro activities and having them. He talks about big directions, small tactics, his big blue arrows, and then the technical goals. I've got ways that I think about this. Where's your brain go first with Wes, though?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Well, I mean, so many thoughts about no stress around money, hosting parties that he can pay for having a buffer. The word buffer for me, I don't know if he uses the word, but that's what I'm hearing. You know, just a safety. And then having those tactical decisions, being able to pay for the extra flights or whatever. Just this kind of a comfort. But there's something else underneath it all that he briefly mentions that somehow really stood out to me. And I was trying to frame it and I wrote the word reincarnation which is going to surprise you. Explain why now we're talking about in one life. When you listen to those folks and many people you end up interacting with if you're hosting an investment podcast, I feel like they have lived. I definitely have many, many lives in this singular life. And he talks about being broke at some point. And I meet people that there were times in their life where they really had almost nothing. They came to a country or this country, any country with, with a suitcase and they tell me like I really had nothing. And that stays with you. They tell me it's the feeling of being chased by the wolves and all those very visual images that. That strike you anyways. They might be living in a whole different universe right now. Very comfortable. There's no danger. That's why I called it reincarnation. Because we have to kind of accept that we're no longer the five year old self that remembers that the parents didn't have money to put the food on the table. That's no longer you. And the sooner you accept that, the more you can embrace what's ahead and definitely what's ahead for your kids. And I think that's such a powerful image for me because so many people make the forward looking decisions based on the fears that got ingrained in them at the age of five.

[Wes Gray]

New year new me.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Cute.

[Wes Gray]

But how about new year new money?

[Matt Ziegler]

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[Bogomil Baranowski]

Experian

[Matt Ziegler]

Nollie's as powerful have you. Have you had. Has Wes been on talking billions before?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Not yet. I'm looking forward to it.

[Matt Ziegler]

All right. We got to make that happen. He did. We've done a bunch of stuff with him. My favorite thing that I've done with Wes is an intentional investor.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Okay.

[Matt Ziegler]

And. And Wes is also important. Wes has given me guidance at a couple of different points. Is a very kind and generous person. I Say that in all the ways, because he is. He told a story in our Intentional Investor about being like, he grew up around like a lot of farm type stuff, migrant farm work, things like that.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

And he had this cow and he took the cow to the state fair or whatever it was, and he had like his blue ribbon cow and he got more money than he ever got in his life. And it wasn't a giant sum of money. It was more money than ever. And that was his first in his first exposure to investing was like going to get advice from winning this cow. He showed up on Twitter after the interview. He found himself. He found a picture of. Here's five or ten year old Wes with the cow and the blue ribbon.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

And all I could think of is what you just said. I was like, how hard is it not to approach everything in life, all the stuff he's built with Alpha Architect and the fun structures. How hard is it not to snap back into. I'm just a kid showing my cow. And when the money all of a sudden shows up, I'm like, oh my God, what do I do? I have a whole new fear.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Yeah.

[Matt Ziegler]

Letting go and understanding how you compound through life is a really tricky thing and something you can't do alone. Like, you need other people not. This isn't a go hire an advisor pitch. This is probably a go hire a shrink pitch. And then maybe get some help. Yeah. Get the dentist, get the advisor, get the lawyer.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

And not the cheapest one, please.

[Matt Ziegler]

And not the cheapest one.

[Bogomil Baranowski]

I want to flip it on its head for a second, please. I get to meet people that grew up around wealth. They might have had wealth for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 generations. They and their books written about the inheritance experience. They honestly, on a human, you know, human, genuine, vulnerable level, have not experienced hardship the way many of us might have. And they come from a different place. They can't even imagine losing it. Right. So you have people like Wes or you and I that imagine well, know very well what it's like not to have and appreciate having, but somebody that grew up around comfort cannot imagine not having. And maybe that's a blind spot that needs exploring, that things can go wrong. And how do you prepare for it, how do you protect, how do you not just grow, but how do you preserve what you have so you don't have to experience what some of our guests today talked about, the shortage of consumption or the pressure or the lack of. Anyways, I want to point it out because it's the other side of the experience that's not talked about. It's assumed that if you grew up around money, that you know how, not necessarily. It's something that you're growing into, learning just as everybody else. You have a different starting point. So some things might sound more foreign to you than to other people. But I have a lot of empathy and understanding for that experience as much as I do for the story of, you know, a cow or a five year old self that has no money to put food on the table. That's also a human experience.

[Matt Ziegler]

Once again, it's back to this idea of community. For me, it's everything's going to be a consumption, a gift. Everybody starts at a different place. And the more people you surround yourself with, not just the more assets you accumulate in your bank account or your brokerage account or whatever else, it's the people you surround yourself with that determine the experience. And inside of that community, it's going to be a diverse group of people. I think we both also have the pretty incredible vantage point of seeing people from all these different points of knowing. Like working with the third generation kid who's only grown up flying private, like, it's terrifying to think about what would I have to do if I had to fly on a regular plane? And that's, you know, I remember being a kid and being like, holy crap, I'm about to fly in a plane for the first time. Here's probably a totally different experience, but we can empathize with each other. That doesn't put us at odds. And we get to hear all these stories from these people. We get to relate to them and help think about what do they need to navigate forward. It's a very strange job we both have. When I step back and think of

[Bogomil Baranowski]

it this way, very intense, very special and very intimate. I realized that the conversations, the conversations that sometimes I have with clients, I might be the only person that they can have that kind of conversation with where there's no judgment, a complete safety, and a space where we can talk and observe something instead of judgment or critique or something that they might have experienced throughout their life from so many individuals that even mean well, but just don't know how to approach it as just a human experience. And we can't run away from money whether we have it or we don't have it. We have too little or too much. It's just a human experience. And I think the more time we spend understanding and accepting that money is here to stay, then we have to find a way to interact with it. In the most positive, beneficial way, instead of trying to deny its existence or, you know, claim that it's worthless, claim that it's not helpful. It is helpful. It's solving a lot of problems day in, day out, small ones and big ones, and to find a way to interact with this phenomenon in the best way possible. I think that's the ambitious goal.

[Matt Ziegler]

No truer words have been spoken. No better place to go out than on that statement in and of itself. Vogamil this is an absolute ball. People want to look you up. Where should we send them?

[Bogomil Baranowski]

Substack Bogomil Baranowski, you can look up the podcast, the essays I'm writing, and I'm sharing quite a bit. And I'll also mention that I have this habit of writing emails to my new substack readers. So if you sign up, don't be surprised that you get an honest, real, true, personal email from me because I'm absolutely curious and I'm dying to know your story and I really appreciate when people share their stories and and I love hearing from my readers and listeners.

[Matt Ziegler]

Well, make sure you sign up. Maybe you'll get the golden ticket or the Bogomil custom email you know you want. I'm telling you, I get it. You know you want it. You know you want it. This is Excess Returns. That's Bogomil. I'm Matt Zigler. Like, subscribe, comment all the things below. And we are out.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting and valuable, please subscribe on your favorite audio platform forum or on YouTube. You can also follow all the podcasts in the Excess returns [e-mail] if you have any feedback or questions, you can contact us@excess returnspodmail.com no information on this

podcast should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of the firms of the hosts or their clients.