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- [00:00]
Barry Ritholtz
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- [02:02]
this
- [02:02]
is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.
- [02:08]
This week on the podcast I get to sit down with Jason Zweig and William Bernstein remembering their friend Jonathan Clements. Jonathan was a Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist and for almost 20 years he's beloved by those people in the industry. In many ways. Jonathan has done as much as anybody to push the idea of indexing, at least anybody since Jack Bogle. I thought this conversation, despite the fact that we know Jonathan received a terminal diagnosis and we already know how it ended. I thought this conversation was interesting, uplifting and fascinating. I think you will also with no further ado, my remembrance of Jonathan Clements with Jason Zweig and William Bernstein.
- [02:57]
Jason Zweig
Thanks Barry.
- [02:58]
William Bernstein
Glad to be here.
- [02:59]
Barry Ritholtz
So let's start out with the beginning. I want to talk a Little bit about who Jonathan was. We'll talk about his two most recent books, including the one coming out in May of 2026. But how did each of you meet Jonathan? What were your early impressions of him like? Let's start with you.
- [03:16]
Jason Zweig
You want me to go first?
- [03:17]
William Bernstein
Yeah.
- [03:18]
Jason Zweig
So Jonathan and I met the third week of March in 1987 when I joined Forbes magazine, and he was already there. And we almost instantly became good friends. We, I would say we probably went out to lunch at least twice a week for the next four years, certainly every Wednesday. Fish cakes and spaghetti at the. At the New Courtney on 14th street in Manhattan, which I think was, I want to say was $4.95.
- [03:58]
Barry Ritholtz
That's right. The. The Forbes office is right over there
- [04:02]
Jason Zweig
on 18th and 5th.
- [04:04]
Barry Ritholtz
All the Faberge eggs were there. The whole. The whole building was kind of uniquely situated.
- [04:08]
Jason Zweig
5th Avenue and 12th Street. Yep. Very close. And Jonathan had a. He had a really unusual sparkle. He always had a twinkle in his eye. He thought almost everything was funny because, of course, almost everything is funny if you think about it the right way. And, you know, he might be writing about some con artist who was stealing people's money or some mutual fund that was overcharging people, but he always found the humor in the situation, and I loved that about him. And we were friends from that moment on ever since.
- [04:59]
Barry Ritholtz
Bill, how'd you meet Jonathan?
- [05:01]
William Bernstein
I met him a little later. It wasn't until about the mid-90s, when I was still practicing medicine and I was finding my feet in fine, and I was starting to write, and I did what any aspiring financial writer does, which is you start chatting up financial journalists. And he responded, and he started quoting me in the Journal. And for many years, I was just a source until maybe the early 2010s, the late aughts. And then we became friends, personal friends, after that. And he did think that everything was funny. And he just had such a pleasing personality. He had a high hedonic set point. He was always in a good mood, and he always thought that everything was funny, which is a fabulous combination. And the other personal characteristic that he had, which just powered his career, I think, was that he was willing to talk about the hard things in his life, his struggles with money, and he was willing to talk about his divorces. And, of course, in the end, his impending. And so it was those three things together, I think, that really made him such a unique financial journalist and human being.
- [06:20]
Barry Ritholtz
So when I was doing preparation for this, I learned a lot of things I was wholly unaware of including a quote from you, Bill, which was, you owe your entire career in investments to Jonathan's work. You have to explain how a neurologist in North Bend, Oregon ended up having a career change by a personal finance journalist.
- [06:44]
William Bernstein
Well, I happen to live in a country that doesn't have a functioning social safety net. And so I realized I was going to have to invest on my own if I wanted to survive my retirement financially. And so I approached it the way I thought anybody with scientific training would do, which is I read the peer reviewed literature, the basic textbooks, and then I collected data and I built models. And when I was done with all that, I had actually had something that was useful to small investors and in a couple of instances, even to professional investors. And so I started writing about it. The Internet came to my community about that time. I put the stuff on the web, my material on the Web, and Jonathan picked it up and so he started quoting me in the, in the Wall Street Journal. And then that was, that opened the door to getting my books published and also to, you know, a financial advisory business as well. And so it's like a lot of, a lot of things in a complex life. It was just serendipity, one thing leading to another.
- [07:50]
Barry Ritholtz
Huh. Really, really interesting, Jason. You're, you're with Jonathan at Forbes and then you're together at the Wall Street Journal. But I'm struck by 1987, starting not only the year of the great crash, but long before indexing was the dominant intellectual framework, certainly in terms of money flows into mutual funds and ETFs. What was it about Jonathan's writing that seemed to reshape a lot of the conversation about investing?
- [08:27]
Jason Zweig
Well, I would say, I don't think this is an exaggeration. I would say more than any other individual except Jack Bogle, Jonathan put index funds on, you know, front and center for American investors. And you know, he realized very early on that active management in the aggregate was not earning its keep, it was charging more than it could possibly deliver for clients. And Jonathan realized there's an alternative and I'm going to keep telling people that's what they should do. And he must have written two or three hundred columns telling people that they should buy index funds. And a lot of his readers, particularly professional readers, hated that because he was essentially saying, don't hire them. You know, hire Vanguard or, or State street or, or another index, BlackRock.
- [09:40]
Barry Ritholtz
The thing about the big three, the three biggest mutual fund and ETF companies today really derive the lion's share of their Assets certainly half of at blackrock and probably over half at Vanguard from Index.
- [09:55]
Jason Zweig
Yep. And you know, you can. You. The math is not hard to do. You know, investors have saved hundreds of billions of dollars in. In superfluous management fees by moving from active to passive investing. And Jonathan deserves a lot of credit for that because I can attest to coming sort of coming to it. I don't know, what would I say two or three years behind him? The amount of hate mail I used to get and hate phone calls. You know, it's. It's not easy to tell people that they should not have a right to make as good a living as they have been. They don't like hearing that. But if it's in the best interest of the larger part of your audience, that's the message you have to deliver. And that's the choice Jonathan made, really, before any other investing or personal finance journalist in the country. And once he made that choice, he would not be moved.
- [11:06]
Barry Ritholtz
Go ahead, Bill.
- [11:07]
William Bernstein
Yeah, I mean, fortune favors the prepared. And I think what prepared Jonathan for that was from about what, 1990 to about 1994. He covered mutual fund managers. And boy, that's an awful sandbox to have to play in, because how do you get into that sandbox? Well, you take a lot of risk and you get lucky. And going forward, the track record is not so good. And he saw that often enough that I think it drove him to the conclusion that Jason was just talking about.
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Barry Ritholtz
I think it was Professor French at Dartmouth of Fama French fame said it takes about 20 years to figure out if a fund manager is skillful or lucky, at least two or three years of returns certainly doesn't tell us anything.
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William Bernstein
Here's one example that just stays in my memory, which is that if you have a hedge fund manager who can beat the market by 5% per year and the standard deviation of stocks is 20% per year, if you grind through the statistics on that, it takes 64 years to get the statistical significance.
- [12:12]
Barry Ritholtz
Wow, that's quite amazing. He called his own advocacy for index funds an obsession that some readers found irritating. And when I read that line, I thought of your quote, which is, your job is to write the same column week after week after week, but in a way that neither your readers or your editors figure out. So how do you continually write about indexing if your readers are finding it irritating?
- [12:41]
Jason Zweig
Well, I think Jonathan arrived at the same place I did. And of course, even though he was slightly younger than me, he was a couple years ahead of me because he, he just Started on this topic earlier than I did, but we both ended up in the same place, which is you. You keep your message consistent, but you frame it, you tell it, you ornament it in different ways every single time. And Jonathan was an unparalleled master at writing what some people disparagingly call listicles. He would come up with 25 funny things that active managers say to justify their underperformance. And he would run through all these bullet points, each one of which would be very funny. And then at the end, he would say, and that's why I think you should put all your money in index funds.
- [13:53]
Barry Ritholtz
I wonder how many of those lines came from angry emails from fund managers.
- [13:57]
Jason Zweig
Probably a lot of them.
- [13:59]
Barry Ritholtz
Mm. So. So one of his core principles is that successful investing should be comprehensively, almost aggressively boring. Which is kind of ironic. Both asset management and financial journalism are unusually noisy FOMO based industries. So how do you make a message stick as an island of rationality in a sea of noise and emotional driven stimulus?
- [14:37]
William Bernstein
Silence? That's a tough one. You become what Jason has become a master of, which is saying the same thing in so many different ways that your editors and your readers don't notice that you're saying the same thing over and over again.
- [14:56]
Barry Ritholtz
No doubt about that.
- [14:57]
Jason Zweig
And Barry, sorry if I can jump in. You know, I think one thing that is underappreciated about somebody like Jonathan is the amount of integrity and courage it takes to stick to a simple message. You know, the job of, the job of an investigative journalist is to get people who don't want to talk to you to tell you things they don't want you to know. The job of a mainstream journalist is to tell your readers things that they need to know, whether they want to hear them or not. And that's what Jonathan was brilliant at.
- [15:42]
William Bernstein
Yeah, and again, the word integrity comes up so many different times when you're talking about Jonathan, because here he is working in a sandbox, you know, active fund managers. That's how he pays. He's paying his mortgage. And he, you know, wakes up one morning and he says, this is intellectually dishonest. I've got to find something else. I've got to find some other message. And very few journalists, I think, make that choice. They just keep on plugging away and don't question what they're doing.
- [16:11]
Barry Ritholtz
Really interesting. And, you know, we're talking about investing and money. But Clements emphasized this wasn't about getting rich, it was about building a good life. So when do you think his thinking Shifted from simple building a portfolio to something a little more philosophical.
- [16:35]
William Bernstein
I think that that happened in the early 2000s when I think all three of us started to come across, maybe all four of us started to come across the well being research that academic neuropsychologists were doing. What makes people happy. Money is a very small part of that. And that's what Jonathan made into. I think his mission in financial journalism was exploring the connection between money and happiness. That's not something that very many financial journalists venture into.
- [17:12]
Barry Ritholtz
I know there is more money when you're broke is better than less money, but it plateaus. Holding steady for things like divorce and illness. It plateaus surprisingly rapidly. So let's channel Jonathan for a moment. What is the purpose of money and how does it help one live a rich, fulfilling life?
- [17:39]
Jason Zweig
Well, so Jonathan really explored that research into hedonic psychology, particularly the implications of does money buy happiness? How can you use money to achieve happiness? And there's an enormous voluminous amount of research on this in very, very obscure academic journals. And when Jonathan started working on this, very few non academics were even aware that this research existed. But I would say there's a handful of takeaways from that work, that research. One is that possessions don't generally make people happy. Now, there's exceptions to that, but as a general rule, the bigger house, the fancier car, the painting on the wall, the bigger couch generally don't move people's happiness as much as they expect. And that's really the key is the difference. It's the gap between what you spend and the happiness you expect to get from the spending that causes the disappointment that people feel. And you know, I think everyone listening has had a similar experience. You know, you've been in a starter house, you see a new house you love, you talk about it with your significant other, you agree we're going to take the plunge, you buy the house and you move in and you're just thrilled. And then, you know, a year later you look around and the paint is chipping and you know, there's like rats in the attic and it's mo money, mo problems, right? And the next level beyond that observation that possessions are not the key is that you want to use your money to create experiences with people you love, shared experiences. You want to use money to create memories. And so you spend your money on things you can do with friends and family, joint vacations, commemorative events, family reunions, things like that. And then it's the final level that Jonathan explored more and more in the later years of his life, and especially after he got his terminal diagnosis, which is using money to create meaning, Finding something bigger than yourself that you can support or promote or strengthen with your money, giving to a cause you care about, putting something front and center in your life. You know, supporting, nonprofit, volunteering, all of those activities can really move the needle much more than you would get if you bought a new table or some other possession you've had your eye on.
- [21:13]
William Bernstein
Yeah. And the thing about Jonathan was he lived that ethic every day of his life. And he didn't make a lot of money as a financial journalist. I think he worked for a couple years at Citicorp and made a pretty decent salary, but his lifetime earnings were not that high. And yet he amassed a significant amount of assets by hammering away at being frugal and amassing enough financial capital so that he didn't have to depend upon his human capital, as he put it. I never saw him so happy as when he shows up at our place in Portland having spent $2 to take the max train in from the airport. And the other thing that Jason just explained very nicely, the three levels that he climbed, and I think there was yet another level on top of that, which is to have enough assets so that you don't have to worry about assets. In other words, the ultimate purpose of money, I think, for Jonathan was not having to worry about money.
- [22:18]
Barry Ritholtz
Right? Right. He said something, and I may even be lifting this from the headline of one of his early diagnosis articles, which was, dying is easy, but estate planning and taking care of your loved ones after you're gone is hard. And that struck me just as such a quirky, matter of fact observation about something we all are gonna face eventually he just had to face a little earlier and with a sense of humor. Dying. You know the old joke about dying is easy.
- [22:51]
Jason Zweig
Comedy is hard.
- [22:52]
Barry Ritholtz
No, no. Estate planning and taking care of your loved ones, that's what's hard.
- [22:57]
William Bernstein
Yeah. I mean, if there's one thing that Jonathan didn't believe, it's that he who dies with the most toy wins, right? Yeah.
- [23:04]
Barry Ritholtz
Coming up, we continue our conversation with William Bernstein and Jason Zweig remembering Jonathan Clements discussing his most recent book, the Best of Jonathan Clements. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. For a limited time, when you get a new Apple card and purchase AirPods Pro 3 at Apple, you can earn back the cost up to 250 daily cash. New AirPods Pro and up to $250 bonus daily cash back. Now that's music to your ears. Subject to credit approval limitations and spend requirements apply. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at Apple Co AirPods so there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now a Global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions. Resolving 94% of common questions, not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business.
- [24:33]
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- [25:18]
Barry Ritholtz
Public Holdings Brokerage services by Public Investing Member FINRA SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors SEC Registered Advisor Crypto Services by ZeroHash all investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures@public.com disclosures. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. In an extra special edition of the show, the this week is all about remembering Jonathan Clements, the Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist and author. And my special guests are William Bernstein and Jason Zweig, who know and have worked with Jonathan for many decades. So, so let me pull on one little thread, which is the idea of delayed gratification. And I already know what your answer is going to be, but I, I have to pose the question. So here's somebody who's diligent about saving, diligent about postponing that sort of gratification, and then unfortunately doesn't get the full fruits to enjoy it. Give us, give us your explanation as to how and why he was perfectly fine with that.
- [26:33]
Jason Zweig
Well, so I talked a lot with Jonathan the last year of his life. You know, I think he called me maybe two or three weeks after he got word of his terminal diagnosis. And the thing that struck me, Barry, was that, you know, having been his friend for decades, I could instantly tell that none of this was an act. You know, most of us, if we got a terminal diagnosis, particularly one like Jonathan's, where he was given five to. Originally five to 12 months, I think is what they said, right, Bill, we would put on a brave face. We would, like, be faking it for our. For our friends and family. But Jonathan was, from the very beginning, he was totally at peace with it. And I can't tell you that. I can totally explain that. I think he meant what he said, which is he felt he had lived the best life he could have and he had done everything he wanted. He'd accomplished most of what he wanted to achieve, and he was, somehow he was okay with, with, with the news. That would just absolutely devastate most people.
- [28:11]
William Bernstein
Yeah, I mean, neuropsychologists use a personality scale. It's a five item scale. And one of the items is something called neuroticism, which is basically how much you focus on the problems in your life. And he had a very high hedonic set point. He was always in a good mood most of the time. And so his neuroticism score, as far as I could tell, was zero. And he was in a good mood most of the time. So he dealt with his own mortality as, as well as he could. A sense of humor. My gosh, you know, he joked to everybody what a great marketing strategy terminal diagnosis was. If you're trying to flog a book, don't recommend it.
- [28:51]
Barry Ritholtz
You only get to use it once. But that is, only someone with the sense of humor can say that. So let's talk about the book, the Best of. How did this book come together? Whose idea was it? What was it like working on a project with Jonathan under his awareness of his terminal diagnosis?
- [29:12]
William Bernstein
Whose idea? Well, I think I was gonna look at you and say, whose idea was it? I think it was Jonathan's idea, actually.
- [29:19]
Jason Zweig
I think it was.
- [29:20]
William Bernstein
Yeah, he just decided he wanted to put together a compilation. And I think his. His main goal was to raise funds for a charitable purpose, which it took us a while to evolve. And, and, and that was. That was the project.
- [29:39]
Barry Ritholtz
And so let me just interrupt you. The Jonathan Clements getting going on savings initiative funding Roth IRA contributions for young adults from low income households. That sounds less like a book tour and more like a policy intervention.
- [29:55]
William Bernstein
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. And that was. It turned out that translating that idea into something practical was a bit harder than anybody had realized. But it seemed like a good idea at the time. And so Jason and I and Jonathan put together a list of his columns. I mean, I think it was Jonathan who basically gave us the list and Jason helped me organize it and we self published it through Amazon. And it has raised a substantial amount of money for the initiative which we eventually arrived at, which I don't know if we want to talk about that just yet.
- [30:33]
Barry Ritholtz
Sure, we could talk about it. Let's talk a little bit about how much money did it raise and did anyone have any targets in mind? Was this all upside? Surprise?
- [30:43]
William Bernstein
Yeah, on the order of about $60,000. Which substantial amount of money? We actually raised a lot more money through the, through the Bogle center through personal donations that came into the John C. Bogle center for Financial Literacy. So you know, even that, that raised a whole lot more money and, and that money is going into a research project. You know, Jason, I can never. What Jason J. PAL stands for. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's the group. The research group is doing this.
- [31:14]
Jason Zweig
Yeah. So J. PAL is a behavioral economics research institute based at MIT in Boston. And it's run part partly by Esther Duflo who shared a Nobel Prize in economics in I want to say 2023. And Jay Powell does all kinds of interventions based on behavioral economics research trying to encourage people from low income households around the world, by the way, to form more constructive savings habits, to borrow more prudently to become long term investors. And we partnered with them because we really felt that getting Jonathan's vision from an idea into an actual program was beyond us. We needed help. And so J. PAL works with academics at universities all around the world and between Boston University, University of Chicago and some other.
- [32:46]
William Bernstein
Northeastern.
- [32:46]
Jason Zweig
Northeastern, yeah. We were able to round up some, some great economists and researchers to, to make the program a reality. And it last summer it was piloted with some basically high school kids in Boston from poor families who were randomly selected to get money to open a Roth ira. And we're testing whether there's particular kinds of messaging or other techniques that can not only encourage them to invest but, but then to turn them into investors by changing their own behavior over the long term. And it's still very early. We don't know whether it'll work, but we hope it will. And even if it fails, we're pretty confident we'll learn some useful things about how to encourage good long term investing behavior.
- [33:55]
William Bernstein
It turns Out. It's really hard to give away money to kids for, for, for a Roth ira.
- [34:02]
Jason Zweig
Yep.
- [34:02]
Barry Ritholtz
This is before we passed. I don't know if you want to call them baby bonds or Trump accounts or whatever. That thousand dollar initial tax deferred predates that. Yeah, so, so, so would. And by the way, that dates back to. I'm drawing a blank of his name, but he's a VC out in California who first, first proposed this, you know, a decade ago. And it was slogging away trying to get it accepted. So let's, let's. Those are what's the proceeds are going to be used for. Let's talk about the book itself. 60. 60 columns out of over a thousand. That has to be a tough list. Anything on the list surprise you, make you scratch your head.
- [34:46]
William Bernstein
What.
- [34:46]
Barry Ritholtz
How do you think of the arc now that you guys helped structure and organize this, which really is half the battle. Once you have it structured, it becomes a whole lot easier.
- [34:56]
William Bernstein
I don't think that Jonathan had an organizing principle. I think he just went through his thousand and nine columns. Actually it was more than that. And he picked out just his favorite ones. And then it fell to the three of us to organize the book which, which took some, took some work. And you know, they were organized according to, you know, the things that John Johnathan wrote about. I mean, you know, the principles of, of indexing, the importance of saving, how to calculate how much money you need, and then all of the behavioral issues that we, that we talked about. And so I think we came up with seven or eight basic chapter headings.
- [35:39]
Jason Zweig
But also Jonathan did something else that was unusual and frankly risky, which is he wrote really often about his family and their issues with money. Particularly he. I don't think Hannah and Henry would mind my saying this. He sort of used his kids as guinea pigs to test out how do you motivate children to save, how do you get them to become long term investors. And we did not do this in my household. And on the one hand I'm glad we didn't because I think it can make your kids a little crazy if you turn them into lab rats. But on the other hand, his kids probably have a, probably have healthier finances
- [36:36]
William Bernstein
than my kids do and healthier financial outlook too. I mean, Mike, I'm about a decade older, more than that than Jonathan was, and so are my kids. In fact, they're considerably older than his because I had my kids later than he did. And a couple of the tricks that he came up with, I just thought, God damn I wish I'd thought of that. When your kid asks for a soda, you know, the $4 soda at the restaurant, it's like, I'll give you a buck if you take the water. You know, I'd be. I'd be. I'd be richer if I. You know, I probably have a couple grand. I'd have. Be a couple grand richer if I thought of that one first.
- [37:14]
Barry Ritholtz
That's a great parenting hack. Share some others. What other financial tricks was he using that ended up having a good impact on the. On the children, either of you?
- [37:25]
William Bernstein
Well, the bank of mom and dad, he closed that. So instead of, you know, you know, opening your wallet for the endless supply of five and tens and twenties when they wanted something, you know, at age 11 or 12, he gave them ATM cards that he would load up, you know, at the beginning of the month, and then when the money was gone, the money was gone.
- [37:46]
Barry Ritholtz
That's it till the next month.
- [37:48]
William Bernstein
Yeah, and that's. That's. That's a great trick.
- [37:50]
Barry Ritholtz
I got to imagine a lot of parents are listening to this and saying, closing the bank of mom and dad. What happens when they burn through the ATM in week one? Now you have three weeks of whining. How do you. How do you manage around that?
- [38:03]
William Bernstein
Yeah, that's. That's tough. That's tough. Nuggies.
- [38:05]
Jason Zweig
Yeah, you just. You ignore the whining.
- [38:07]
William Bernstein
Yeah.
- [38:08]
Jason Zweig
Apparently.
- [38:09]
Barry Ritholtz
Plan better next month, and we won't be having this conversation.
- [38:12]
Jason Zweig
Right.
- [38:12]
Barry Ritholtz
That. That's really. That's really pretty amazing. So it appears to me that Jonathan spent a big part of his career, and I always hate this word, but democratizing good financial advice. It sounds like this initiative is the culmination of all of that. And maybe further, because he's trying to reach people that are normally completely ignored by the wealth management and mutual funds world.
- [38:44]
William Bernstein
Yeah. I mean, part of the problem that we have is the behavioral problem of getting people to. To save. And hopefully this initiative, this research project, will shed a little bit of light on that, will help people save for their own retirement, both through employer plans and on their own.
- [39:08]
Barry Ritholtz
So let's talk a little bit about the behavior gap. Both of you have written about this. Jonathan has written extensively about it. Essentially, it's what people know they should do and then what they end up doing despite knowing what they should do. How do we. How do we contextualize this behavior gap from Jonathan's perspective?
- [39:35]
Jason Zweig
Well, I think Jonathan did something really important, which is there was a firm, which. I won't name that in the 90s used to say that the behavior gap was, oh, 7 or 8% a year for people who didn't use stockbrokers to buy their mutual funds. And in other words, if you were willing to pay an upfront sales charge to buy a mutual fund, you would end up earning a much higher return than somebody who didn't go through a stockbroker.
- [40:13]
Barry Ritholtz
Does the math bear that out?
- [40:15]
Jason Zweig
The math does not bear that.
- [40:16]
William Bernstein
No, no, no, no, no.
- [40:19]
Jason Zweig
The behavior gap is real, but it's nowhere near that big.
- [40:26]
Barry Ritholtz
2 to 3%, something along those lines,
- [40:28]
Jason Zweig
probably a little smaller.
- [40:29]
Barry Ritholtz
I remember a Vanguard study that specifically said for people who have behavior issues, it's worth paying half a percent or 1% to somebody if it prevents them from making 3, 4% in errors. I'm talking my book. They were talking their book. How do you perceive the ability for someone to talk an investor off the ledge when every instinct in their body is like, no, no, we want to sell now because in March 09 or March 2020, this is going to get much worse than it is right now.
- [41:08]
William Bernstein
Yeah, that's, that's, that's a completely separate issue than what we're talking about. I mean, you know, what we're talking about is what is, what is the gap? And the answer is it's not 7 or 8%. It's closer to 1% or 1 or 1 or 1 and a half percent, which is less than the cost of engaging conventional advice, certainly through a full service financial institution. The other issue which you're asking is how do you prevent people from jumping off the ledge? And the answer is that's very hard to do because you have to be able to impart a sense of financial history to people, which is something that maybe 1 out of 50 investors takes seriously.
- [41:51]
Barry Ritholtz
That's that low. The numbers are that low. Because I'm thinking about your quote about managing your own limbic system. If you, you can't do that, you're going to die poor. Tell us about how all these columns and the book from Jonathan.
- [42:05]
William Bernstein
Well, the limbic system, very, very Crudely is System 1. It's the fast moving system that engages when we hear the hiss of the snake or see the yellow and black stripes in our peripheral vision on the African savannas. We overcome it with our system too, which is our thinking part of the brain, the neocortex, basically. And the neocortex has to learn something about financial history. And good luck with that.
- [42:32]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, good luck with not only teaching it, but it seems that the half life of financial Literacy is really short that even if you teach people stuff, you gotta keep drumming it in because events seem to move so fast, people kind of forget pretty quickly.
- [42:48]
William Bernstein
Yeah, people do learn when they get hit over the head by a two by four, which they did in 08. And you know, Einstein is supposed to have said that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest, which of course he never said, but the most powerful force in the financial universe is amnesia. So people, people forget.
- [43:10]
Barry Ritholtz
What's the Galbraith quote? The one thing we learn about financial history is no one learns from financial history. So it's really true. So. So let's talk a little bit about this book, starting with, first of all, who gets a terminal diagnosis and says, I know I will write a book? I mean, every one of us at this table have written more than one books and I think we would all admit they're kind of a slog. Where did this come from? What was the motivation here?
- [43:43]
Jason Zweig
You know, Jonathan never told. He didn't tell me he was doing it. I don't know if he told you, Bill.
- [43:49]
William Bernstein
No, he did not.
- [43:51]
Jason Zweig
I only found out about it several months after he died. And I think it was part of how he coped with knowing that, you know, his time was limited. He just wanted to make the most of the time he had left. He spent a large part of every day with family and friends and, you know, creating new memories that the people who remained behind when she, when he was gone would be able to cherish. But I think he also spent part of every day doing what he liked best, which was writing.
- [44:35]
Barry Ritholtz
Yeah.
- [44:35]
William Bernstein
Were you to ask Jonathan who he was and what he did? He would say, first of all, it's about my, my family. And then secondly, who I am is a writer and he could no sooner stop writing as if he could stop breathing.
- [44:55]
Barry Ritholtz
So the book Money and Me combines a lot of writing he did at the humble dollar, as well as some fairly personal reflections on his diagnosis. Is this book very different in tone and goals and ambitions and his earlier writings? What, what are your thoughts on this?
- [45:14]
William Bernstein
Yeah, it's a biography. It's an autobiography.
- [45:17]
Barry Ritholtz
It's a biography. But I, having not read it yet, I suspect it's a biography with a lot of insightful lessons learned along the way.
- [45:28]
William Bernstein
Yeah, we covered a lot of those in the first segment of the interview, which is, you know, what's, what's money for? What's life all about? What's the meaning of life? You know, that's what he wanted to approach. He wanted to put a coda onto his life. And I think that's what the book was for.
- [45:47]
Barry Ritholtz
A coda.
- [45:48]
Jason Zweig
Yeah. I mean, I've been thinking a lot about this because I mention Jonathan and the writing he did at the end of his life in a book I'm. I've just finished of my own. And the way I sort of came out was that I think Jonathan took heart from giving heart. He gave heart to so many people in the last year of his life by writing incredibly candidly about what is it like to know you're dying? You know, what do you have to do before you're done? And how do you go about accomplishing everything you want to achieve in the very limited time that's left to you while retaining your dignity, while spending time with the people you love? And how do you. How do you set those priorities, and how do you. How do you put all that in context? And Jonathan got not hundreds, but thousands of emails and letters from people who were dying, people who were taking care of loved ones who were dying, people whose loved ones had died, people who were afraid of death, who. People who had gotten a terminal diagnosis and then gone into remission or been cured completely. And over and over again. Those people just. It was this incredible outpouring of gratitude and love. And, you know, the thing that I think is the biggest tribute to Jonathan is, you know, in the writing that I did about him in the last year of his life, in my column and also in the newsletter I do for the Wall Street Journal, I got. I easily got three or four hundred emails myself. And the single most common thing that readers said about Jonathan was he was my friend. And they said that even though none of them had ever met him, they all said he was my friend. And it was true. He was. Because he really cared about the average person. He loved his readers, even the ones he'd never met. And he understood that when you're an individual investor, you're just like this little piece of plankton in a sea of sharks and barracudas, and you're at the bottom of the food chain. And Jonathan was their advocate. And then when he got that terminal diagnosis, he realized he could be an advocate for an entirely new group of people, you know, those who have been touched by terminal illness.
- [49:02]
Barry Ritholtz
Yeah.
- [49:04]
William Bernstein
He had an ability that almost no journalist has, which is that you read him and you say, this man knows my life. And even before he got his terminal diagnosis, he quits Citicorp around 2018 or no, 2014 or so. And he says, well, what am I going to do? I'm going to give back. And so he founds Humble Dollar which you know continues publishing even after after he's gone. So he's created something that's that still, you know was was very useful while he was publishing it and is still providing a service. So you know, I mean that his his life was service more than anything else.
- [49:48]
Barry Ritholtz
Coming up, we continue our conversation with William Bernstein and Jason Zweig discussing Jonathan Clement's forthcoming book Money and Me. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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- [52:35]
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guests today are Jason Zweig and William Bernstein. We are remembering Jonathan Clements, the humble dollar and Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist. He has a new book coming out posthumously, Money and Me. So let's talk a little bit about service, not just to his readers, but to his family. So if you preach delayed gratification and then you realize, hey, that window is only small, you then want some of that gratification. When I interviewed him after his diagnosis, he was planning a number of events and travel and other sorts of things with his family. Tell us a little bit about what he got to do in the last year of his life that he might have postponed under different circumstances until years later. Right?
- [53:35]
Jason Zweig
Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, we should be respectful of Jonathan's privacy, but I think I can share most of this.
- [53:44]
Barry Ritholtz
He did discuss a lot of it, and I'm assuming some of this is in the book, so I'm not asking for secrets. Tell us what he was public about.
- [53:51]
Jason Zweig
I mean, his son was planning to get engaged and got engaged and got married. And Jonathan and his wife Elaine got to travel to London to, you know, go to the wedding. Jonathan himself accelerated his engagement and marriage to Elaine, his. His wife. He did all he did. We organized those things knowing that they were important to him and his family. And he also went on a bunch of trips with his mom and, and his siblings. And, you know, he had to cancel a couple of trips because he was, at various points, he was too sick to travel. But his siblings and, and kids would meet in Philadelphia. They would meet. They went to a couple other places together. And he just maximized the amount of time that he spent with his family, but also with his friends. I mean, I visited him twice. Another mutual friend of ours from our days at Forbes magazine went with me on one of those visits.
- [55:16]
Barry Ritholtz
Is this to London?
- [55:17]
Jason Zweig
No, no, to Philadelphia, unfortunately. To Philadelphia. Philadelphia is great, don't get me wrong. I love Philly, but London is maybe more, is more fun, maybe for an American anyway. But he. And I guess the thing I would point out, because I saw this firsthand, is that that may not sound like that big a deal to most people listening or watching us. You know, sort of like, oh, yeah, your time is limited, so speed stuff up and make it happen. Making it Happen isn't as easy as it sounds. I mean, you know, you're getting chemo, you're getting radiation therapy, you're getting, you know, surgical cement squirted into your spine. You know, you're getting cut open for this thing or that thing. You know, your hair is falling out eventually. You know, walking is difficult. And through all of that, Jonathan was like, yeah, come on, you know, come next Tuesday, you know, I got nothing but time.
- [56:34]
Barry Ritholtz
No, nothing but. Nothing but time. When you're. We all have limited time.
- [56:40]
Jason Zweig
And.
- [56:40]
Barry Ritholtz
And he knows pretty. Pretty realistically how short that is. It sounds like this could be a morbid or depressing category. But knowing how he discussed things after his diagnosis, I have a sneaking suspicion that this book is more uplifting than depressing. Tell us a little bit about the tone he takes in what most of us would think of as really difficult circumstances.
- [57:16]
William Bernstein
Well, most of the book doesn't cover his terminal illness. That's maybe 10 or 15% of the book. And he does a beautiful job of describing just what Jason did. What he's really describing is his journey through the relationship between money and. And happiness and how he arrived at the place that he did. You know, the thing that struck me when I would go to visit him was. And talk to him on the phone was, you know, in the practice of medicine, I spent a lot of time talking to dying patients, and he was just the easiest person to talk to. You would get off the phone with him, you would come away from a visit with him, you would feel uplifted. I can tell you that's not true most of the time.
- [58:09]
Barry Ritholtz
And does that translate into the book?
- [58:11]
William Bernstein
Yes.
- [58:12]
Jason Zweig
Yeah. I mean, what I would jump in with, Barry, is that I think the. I mean, it may sound like a strange word, but the word I guess I would use is joy. I mean, Jonathan talked about. Talked and wrote about dying from the most positive perspective you could possibly imagine. And, you know, it's as if he really felt that he had lived the life he wanted to live, and above all, he wanted to go out on a high note and he wanted to bring everybody along with him.
- [59:00]
William Bernstein
Yeah, that was his great gift and his great endowment. We talked a bit about Hedonic Set Point. You know, he just wasn't a glass half full kind of guy. He was a glass seven, eight full kind of guy.
- [59:10]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, just that headline. I don't remember if it was the Journal or the Times piece. Dying is Easy. Planning for Death is Hard, just is filled with that sort of mischievous sense of humor about something that Everybody else takes very seriously. And when confronted with it, it's like, hey, you got no choice but to laugh and plow ahead. And that seems to be what he did.
- [59:33]
Jason Zweig
Yeah. I mean, one of the lines he used that I'll never forget is, and it was maybe the second to last phone conversation I had with him, he said, you know, when I got my original diagnosis, they told me I had five to 12 months to live. And that was I want. Now, I may not be remembering correctly. I think. I think at the time he was talking with me, it was maybe 13 months prior. And he said, so I. You know, I'm. I'm already playing in overtime. And, I mean, I burst out laughing just the way you did. My friend is dying and I'm laughing, but I'm laughing with him as he
- [60:21]
Barry Ritholtz
cracks jokes about it.
- [60:22]
Jason Zweig
Yes. And it wasn't like, if that had been me, I might have been joking, but I would have been joking to cover my fear and whatever. And he was joking because he thought it was funny.
- [60:37]
Barry Ritholtz
So. There's a line from Howard Marks that I suspect reflects a lot of what's within this book. And I'm just curious as to your thoughts. Experience is what we get when we don't get what we want. And in the journey of the overlap between happiness and money and that Venn diagram, which has, I suspect, less overlap than most people realize until they get that experience, which might not be what they wanted. How has his journey evolved? How has his perspective, Jonathan's perspectives changed about his thoughts about money, happiness, and the purpose of living a rich life?
- [61:28]
William Bernstein
Yeah, I mean, I think he started out as a young man, the way he describes in the book, with a conventional view of money, which is that money is to buy things and to help you get by in life. When he started out his career in journalism, he had credit card debt, he had student debt, and probably all that he was thinking about was getting out from under that. And unlike most people, he evolved beyond that very, very, very quickly to get to the higher uses of money that we've been talking about.
- [62:09]
Barry Ritholtz
Anything to add to that?
- [62:11]
Jason Zweig
I mean, I guess maybe the thing I would add, Barry, is just that it takes a lot, after all the years that I've been doing financial journalism, to get me to feel I really learned something important because I've sort of. I guess I haven't seen it all, but I've seen most of it. And I really learned from Jonathan that, you know, How you live under sort of the ordinary conditions of daily life is one thing, but how you live when you've got a death sentence is something else. And he really shows that, you know, you can still celebrate, and you should. And you should figure out how to comfort the people who love you in a way that will always console them after you're gone. And, you know, the book really shows that, of course, we're all afraid of dying, but we're probably afraid of it for the wrong reasons. And I think what Jonathan really showed is the thing you should be afraid of about dying is going out the wrong way, like not giving the people who will live after you the positive things that you can give them as gifts. And that's what he did.
- [64:05]
William Bernstein
Yeah. And the other thing which he was. Was aware of is, you know, he realized he was a very positive person and that he was dealing with his terminal illness as well as any person could. And he was much more acutely aware of how much harder it was for the people around him. And he talked about that a lot, about how hard it was, particularly on his kids.
- [64:27]
Barry Ritholtz
That makes perfect sense. So, last question. If Jonathan were here, what do you think he would want the takeaway to be from the book about the relationship between money and a life well lived?
- [64:43]
William Bernstein
He would tell you to figure out who the heck you are and what you really enjoy doing, and that's what the money is for.
- [64:55]
Barry Ritholtz
Sounds wise. Jason, you want to.
- [64:57]
Jason Zweig
I. I have. I have nothing to add.
- [64:59]
Barry Ritholtz
Did we. Did we miss anything? Is there something I haven't brought up that you guys. Because I don't want this to be a morbid conversation. We're all solemn, but I know each of you have a long and positive relationship with Jonathan. So I don't want this all to come across as morbid. Cause just because it involves death, it doesn't mean it's sad or morbid. What else do you want listeners to take away from Jonathan's life, his work, his books? What. What? Should people be aware that this isn't a downbeat book? This isn't depressing? No, we're. We're being respectful. But at the same time, he was a happy, joyful person.
- [65:48]
Jason Zweig
We don't want to get into anything that's morbid. But, you know, when I was in. My dad died when I was in college, when I was 22. And I remember the thing that he was most worried about as he lay dying, because he died of lung cancer, he kept saying to me, I don't want you to remember me like this as a sick person. And I kept saying to him, I'm not going to remember you like this. And I couldn't know that that was true, but it was. I don't remember my dad as a sick person. I remember him as this incredibly vital, physically strong, you know, mentally agile, impressive person. And what I will always remember about Jonathan is every time I think of him, I hear him laughing. That's the first thing that comes in my head is he didn't just laugh, he cackled. And his laughter was contagious. And it never stopped. The last conversation I had with him, he was laughing at himself, at how, you know, dying was such a weird thing. And, you know, if people only knew what it was like, they, you know,
- [67:17]
Barry Ritholtz
they wouldn't fear it.
- [67:18]
Jason Zweig
They wouldn't.
- [67:18]
Barry Ritholtz
Or they would fear it less. Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate you guys coming in to talk about the life and times of Jonathan Clements. It was a absolutely unique life, one that left behind a tremendous legacy for all of his not just friends and family, but readers. The ability to touch tens of thousands of people and in a very positive way is a very, very rare thing. I hope people appreciate the conversation not as a morbid remembrance, but as a hopeful and uplifting one for somebody who left a very positive mark behind.
- [68:06]
Jason Zweig
Yeah.
- [68:07]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, thank you, gentlemen, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Jason Zweig and William Bernstein, remembering the lifetimes and writings of Jonathan Clements in anticipation of his final book, Money and me, coming out May 26, 2026. I would be remiss if I didn't thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
- [68:52]
On June 10, Bloomberg Invest is back in Hong Kong. We look at the role Hong Kong plays between China and the world as major powers compete and markets realign as global investors rethink risk. We'll explore the forces driving Asian demand and the future of private capital. Catch exclusive interviews with top newsmakers, plus a live recording of Bloomberg's Odd lots podcast. Visit BloombergLive.com investhongkong to learn more. Supporting sponsor Deutsche Bank.