Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Your Portfolio Is a Fingerprint of Your Personality | Jim Lebenthal

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

A friend of mine sold American Express at $5 a share during the financial crisis. Six months later it was $120. Panic turned a temporary loss into a permanent one, and that story is this entire episode in miniature. --- I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley --- Jim Lebenthal is a Partner and Chief Equity Strategist at Cerity Partners and a regular on CNBC's Halftime Report. Before markets, he was a Navy nuclear engineer who drove submarines. He thinks in systems and decades, and his core truth is simple: stay in the market. Jim ran the numbers on the last five crises. Invest the day before each crash, stay in, and your annualized return is about 10%. The people who got destroyed sold low and chased the market back up. We get into why your emotions aren't the enemy, denial is. FOMO? Scratch the itch with a small buy and keep dry powder. Fear? Find the data. We cover diversification, why 80% of the portfolio he runs sits in tried and true companies, when an ETF beats stock picking, and what he found hiding inside ESG funds. Then the big stuff: crypto, gold, and private markets (liquidity first), why he tells clients not to borrow to speculate, and why patience is the biggest investment virtue. He closes with a story he's never told before, about a client's financial autopsy, and the line I can't shake: your portfolio is a fingerprint of your personality. Stay in. Size it right. Write it down. This is the way. Hanley. Connect with Jim Lebenthal Website: https://ceritypartners.com/team/james-lebenthal/ X: https://x.com/jlebenthal CNBC: Halftime Report, two to three times a week, noon to 1pm Eastern Book: How to Ride the Subway: Getting Around on Wall Street and in Life (Regalo Press, 2026): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVMJFJXL?tag=findingpeak-20 Follow Ryan Website: https://ryanhanley.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanley Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Financial crisis hits, it goes all the way down to $3 a share. I am telling you just from empirical observations, it doesn't work. I've seen it work once in a while, which is the worst thing that can possibly happen to somebody. And what that does, Ryan, is it turns a temporary loss into a permanent loss. I think the biggest investment virtue that somebody can have is patience. Your portfolio is a fingerprint of your personality. It really is. All right, Jim, I want to start an appointment.

place that some of this is going to be my own bias of thinking, but I really want to get your kind of take on this idea and go wherever you want with it. But it's the starting spot that I wanted to begin our conversation with, which is much of the frustration, confusion, anxiety, stress that I see maybe above the norm that we're experiencing today. So if we'd buy in that today, there is a at least measurable amount of additional anxiety, frustration, stress that people are feeling maybe then what baseline would be in other times, if we combine into that idea. I see so much of that being people not living in reality. You know what I mean?

Not playing the game on the field, playing a game that they wished happened. Like I wish that I could just find one stock or one polymarket bet or one crypto coin that's just going to change everything for me. And tomorrow I'm a millionaire, right? And like, but it's like, that's not, we all know that's not how the world works. Or, you know, I wish that this industry was going to be the next thing or whatever. And what you wish, what you hope happens, you can't invest. You can't build wealth around hopes and dreams, right? So, like, how, one, do you buy into and or believe this idea of operating in reality?

And in the world that you live in, and the work that you do, how do we do that? Like, where do we start? How do we know we're making decisions from ground truth versus, you know, some conceptual idea that some talking head had on X that we follow? Yeah. What a great place to start, Ryan. Thank you. And I agree with you pretty strongly about people are living in. and shall we say alternate realities.

I have a pretty strong viewpoint that social media is a cauldron for cooking up those alternate realities. But let's not go down that rabbit hole, at least not just yet. I think I want to start with the punchline, which is you can study what works and what doesn't work. And let me give you an example from the world of investing, which is where I live. There are many stories that you can look out,

again on social media and you can see these people who look like they've made it rich quick. Generally speaking, that doesn't happen. Okay. Making it rich quick is very much the exception. And when it happens, it happens in the world of investing by taking on gargantuan amounts of risk that almost randomly work out. So in terms of something that I very, very passionately believe, And this is a core truth of investing that if somebody wants to say to answer your question, what can they do? It matters that you stay in the market, not try to time the market, not try to say, hey, I think the conflict with Iran is going to end on this date. And that's when I'll get invested. But then we've got the elections coming up and I'll get out a week before that.

I am telling you just from empirical observations, it doesn't work. I've seen it work once in a while, which is the worst thing that. that can possibly happen to somebody, when they get market timing right once, then they think they can do it again and again. And Ryan, I have seen wealth destroyed by that. I've seen people sell at the wrong moments and then try to chase the markets up and up, inevitably getting back in right at the wrong moment. So more than anything, stay in the market. It is your time in the market that matters. The old truism, it's not timing the markets, it's time in the markets. One corollary to this. And believe me, I can go on for a while, so I, you know, I want to give you a chance to interrupt me here.

But an important corollary to this is when you're investing and you're talking about being in the market for a long time, you have to be in high quality stocks. Now, anybody who has watched me on air talk about stocks, they know that I've got a few, you know, flyers in my portfolio. But out of a portfolio of 30 names, you're talking about less than five that are, I don't want to say speculative, because I don't want to be insulting to myself, but maybe have higher risk components to them. The rest of the portfolio, the 80%, that is tried and true Fortune 100 companies.

They're going to make it through thick and thin. And I'll close this soliloquy. Again, I can go on for a while by saying this. If you take the last five crises that the market has faced, so that's the great financial crisis, that's COVID, that's 9-11, if you happened to invest, just before those downturns. Like you got the timing absolutely wrong, but you stayed in.

So you had that downturn, say, in the great financial crisis of greater than 50%, but you stayed in. Your annualized return from investing at the exact wrong point in time is about 10% for each of the last five crises. You just have to stay in. You could only do that with high quality companies. Let me pause there for a second. What is the emotional trigger that we have to be aware of watch that we'll say the average investor, right? So someone who maybe wants to do a little, I mean, and this might not be an investor. Let's take this is kind of our ICP for the conversation.

Is someone who, knowing my audience, most likely has probably most of their wealth in a business they own of some sort, whether it's a side hustle business or. they're a true tried and true business owner. They have 401K or something probably in some like mutual funds or whatever. And then they like to dabble a little more, right? They like to do a little bit more, maybe some individual stocks, etc. Okay. So let's take that kind of as our avatar. What are the feelings, the emotions, the triggers they're going to get that are going to make

them want to pick up the phone and go sell, sell, sell. You know what I mean? You're like, like, how do they, how do, how do you create a system or a mentality that, that allows you to not fall for those moments and, and sell at the wrong time or, or panic sell or panic, panic by like Chase, you know what I mean? Like just stay consistent, stay true. How do you, how do you develop that mindset? You know, that's another great question because I think we have to embrace that emotions are real.

The idea that you're not going to have emotions is, in my opinion, an unrealistic expectation. You know, I spoke before we started about one of your recent podcasts with Mr. Buchowski, I believe, was his name, the fighter pilot. And I really admired that interview when I admired him because he was so objective. You know, with here's the mission and everything works back from that. Every action works back to completing that mission. And that should be the way that you look at investing. But what I'm saying is just to add to that the reality that you're going to have emotions. And what may some of those emotions be?

It may be a form of greed that we call Yolo or you only live once or FOMO, fear of missing out. That's where you feel like I've got to get in today. I got to invest right now. Now, if you feel that about a stock, there's a very simple solution. Just buy a little bit, okay? Save some dry powder because often the FOMO happens. when a stock has already run up quite a bit. And my advice is just scratch the itch, okay?

Buy a little bit so that it's not bugging you, but save enough capital that if it comes down, you can dollar cost average over time into a bigger position. But just, you know, again, what I'm saying is don't deny the emotion. The other thing that you have to consider is fear. And let's face it, you know, the media does a very good job of fanning the flames of fear. I'm not just, you know, throwing rocks from, you know, from an island. I participate in the media. So I see it firsthand. And if I take a look at a current issue,

by the way, such as private credit, that's something that, that's a story that is just tailor made for the media because there's all these headlines about, you know, this company was fraudulent and this executive says it's cockroaches and this fund is gating its investors. Okay, those headlines are catnip for the media, and they're also catnip for your fear processors. So what I invite you to do is when you're feeling that fear is step back and remember what I just said, that if you're in high-quality companies, you're going to make it through thick and thin. In the case of private credit, that means you've got to be in the right managers. But you also have to think a little bit deeper about it.

Now, I'm not selling anyone on private credit right now. I'm just going to use the numbers. Private credit is roughly a $2.5 trillion market cap asset class right now. Above that, or rather below that, is about $10 trillion in private equity capital that has been deployed that would have to basically go to zero for there to be a systemic risk in private credit. That's really unlikely to happen. So follow the data. And there's a heck of a lot more data on that one story. What I'm saying is acknowledge the fear. It's a real emotion, but then manage it. In the case of fear, find out the data. Find out things like how many of these loans are in non-accrual status. What's the loan to value ratio? When you get those data's, data points, you start to get a lot more calmer. So that's, you know, again, just to summarize, the emotions are real, don't deny them, but work with them. Yeah, I like that you said that. I think in anything, whether you're, it's starting a business, getting married, invest,

this idea that you need to have the you need to allow the emotion you need to experience the emotions I think that's the first mistake is trying to act like somehow you know you see you see your favorite talking head talk about some stock they just invested in and it's rip it and now all of a sudden you're like like that's a I get it I mean there's probably no human in the world yourself included you see that there's some small part of you that's like shit I'd love to get in there I mean that looks go it's great but to your point if it's not part of your long-term plan, if it's not part of your investment thesis, if you don't know the industry, right? And it's anything other than some, and I'm interested in kind of how you think about this

and how you talk about it around like what percentage of your portfolio can you do that with, right? Like is there some, is it five, is it two? I've read all these different numbers, like, where, okay, I see Micron and someone says, you know, before the big run up and someone says, and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to take a shot at this, right? I'm going to take some small portion and maybe it hits, maybe it doesn't. Like, how do you, how do we start to structure our decision making so that maybe if we are the type of person that has to chase that, we're chasing it in a way that it doesn't blow our entire portfolio up?

Yeah. So I think trying to answer your question, we can synthesize some of the things that we've been speaking about and maybe bring in a new concept. So synthesizing the idea of long-term. investing. We're not in this to get rich quick. We acknowledge that there are going to be those moments where we have FOMO, fear of missing out, and we want to get into Micron. By the way, I just brought micron last week, okay, in the portfolio that I run, a relatively small position that I can add to over time. I actually think it's fairly valued for the results that it's putting up. I think it's undervalued

to tell you the truth. But let's face it, it's up about 600 percent since the last six or nine months so or so. So it's not like I'm getting in at the bottom. So again, synthesizing the emotions, FOMO, being in this for the long run, taking small bites, but let me add another important critical element to investing, which is diversification. Step back. I'm an equity investor. I'm very comfortable having all of my assets, my personal assets invested in equities. I actually grew up in a family of municipal bond managers. So I was a dyed in the wool, conservative fixed income guy, but I realized at an early age that you can make more money over the long run in equities. And I'm very comfortable being 100% equities. Another client, another investor may not be that

comfortable. And the worst thing as an advisor that I or anyone can do is give a client too much risk. So I may be comfortable with it. But if another client, is not, and you get a downturn in the market, what they're likely to do is call up me or whoever the advisor is at the worst possible moment and say, you know what, I was up all night, I can't take this, sell everything. And what that does, Ryan, is it turns a temporary loss into a permanent loss. And again, I've done these studies, the last five crises that have faced the market. If you could just buckle your seatbelt and get through it, your long-term results are fabulous, but you've got to get through it.

And to get through it, you have to have the proper amount of risk, which means having some fixed income if you're not going to get through those moments where you wake up in the middle of the night saying what's going on in the world. There's another element. No, go ahead. Just give me one more second here. Yeah, yeah, no, go ahead. Maybe a few more seconds.

Another element of diversification, which I very much believe in, is not putting all of your eggs in one industry basket. over the last 15 years technology stocks have just shot the lights out and it continues and today we're talking about chips six months ago we were talking about hyperscalers uh you know it's it's always rotating but for most of the last 15 years tech has been the place to make money don't go to sleep on sectors like health care or energy or financials or industrials because they have a way of sneaking up and giving you excellent returns when technology falters, as it sometimes does. Right now, we're seeing an incredible bid in the market to health care stocks. And for most of the last

18 months, healthcare has been, it's been dead money. It's done absolutely nothing. You know not when the time comes that that sector really catches fire. Obviously, we saw it earlier this year with energy, which if we go back a year ago, it was an untouchable sector. It was doing nothing. So make sure in your equity portfolio, which is a portion of your overall asset allocation, that you're properly diversified into other sectors as well. Yeah, I think that's great. You know, I was going to share a quick story about, I really like Tesla, okay, for not just because of Elon, but for a lot of reasons. you know, both, you know, highly technical reasons as well as just long-term value or whatever.

And what's funny is, you know, I started investing in Tesla probably three or four years ago and just every month buy a couple more shares and it's just what it is. And, you know, I looked like a genius. And then the stock split, it looked like even more of a genius. And then it's kind of sitting around 300, 400, and everything's good. and I just had a stock split. And then all of a sudden, Elon joins Doge and it crashes down to, what, $140 or something like that it got down to? And now all my buddies, or not all my buddies, my buddies that we talk about investing stuff, like, oh, how smart do you look now?

And I'm like, guys, what changed? Like, I'm just going to do the same thing I always do. Buy a share or two every month like I do. And I'm just going to keep going. Like, what do I care? I don't even know. Be honest with you, I didn't even know the stock price was 140. I didn't, I don't know.

I just show up. I do my thing because. Because to your point, and this is where I want to go with this question, is like, I spent time and built a thesis around that company that I really liked and the portion of my portfolio I wanted to be, okay. So if I'm sitting here and I'm listening to this show, how do I find the industries, the sectors that I should be investing in? And let me give a little more context to this question than take it wherever you

want. Like, because, because for me at least, I find, and let me know if you see this with yourself or with others, is like, not only do I need to believe that it's going to be good long term, right, or work long term, but I also feel like I kind of need to be interested in it. You know, like if it's just some random manufacturing company, like I used to own, um, uh, I follow this one guy and I really like this thesis around glass and corning and, and, and, And so I bought some shares. And like, it's going up and everything he's, you know, slowly and just the way this guy said. And that's all good.

And I'm looking at it. And I'm just like, I'm bored. Like I just, I don't care about corning. And like, it's nice to see the stock price go up over time. But like, I just could care less about glass company, you know? Like, so I guess one, am I crazy for that mentality? And two, how do I kind of pick the sectors that I want to participate in? Because it does seem like you need to know.

know a little bit or you get frustrated or you may not understand why it dives for a bit and comes back up. Man, there's a lot to unpack, a lot of good stuff to unpack in what you just laid out. Let's just start with Tesla. It is exciting. And I think anybody who's going to be an investor should be excited in what they're invested in. Tesla's incredibly exciting, least of all, for the electric vehicles, mostly for the optimist robots, for the artificial intelligence, for the data collection from the electric vehicles, full self-driving, all of these things. I mean, there's a lot to be excited about there. And that's how I want investors to think. I go back 30, 35 years to Peter Lynch, a very famous investor, ran the Fidelity Magellan Fund, looks a little bit like Andy Warhol,

or he did 35 years ago with, you know, the shock of gray hair. And he was adamant that anybody investing in individual stocks should invest in something that they know, that they use. use every day. Now, today, that might be an Apple iPhone. I think back in his day, he was talking about things like Coca-Cola. Start with something you know. Start with something you're passionate about. So that's the best way to get started. If I tell you, you know, a stock that's boring to me is Procter & Gamble. Absolutely fine company from a financial point of view. You know, they make tied, they make diapers and all that sort of stuff, but I just can't get excited about it. It has a purpose in a portfolio.

It's a stabilizer. Gives a decent dividend. And over time, it goes up. But it is not going to excite you the way Tesla excites you. But the reason to have a Procter & Gamble with a Tesla is because of what you just described, Ryan, about how Tesla is so volatile. If you're going to get the returns that Tesla has given you, which I'm not going to look it up right now, but I think probably over the last 10 years, it's 35% annualized return, I'm in the ballpark. that return is so far in excess of the S&P 500 that I don't really know how to compare it. But you only get that return by taking on risk, by taking on the volatility that you so well

described of, hey, you know, he joins Doge and all of a sudden people are, you know, keying the cyber trucks. That was so stupid, by the way. But anyway, and the stock goes down below 200 and now it's above 400. you only get those returns by being willing to accept that volatility. I very strongly applaud you for closing your eyes, you're a young man, and you're just buying more shares as you go along. But for people who can't close their eyes,

who look at it every day and they're like, oh my God, I can't believe what's happening to the stock. Just put a little stabilizer in your portfolio. It could be a consumer goods stock, like I said, Procter & Gamble. It could be a utility stock. But just have something in the equity portfolio that's, zinging when Tesla is zagging. And there's just no question that if you want the returns that a Tesla has given you,

you've got to accept that volatility. Yeah, I really like property casualty insurance stocks as stabilizers. They're doing well. They just don't ever go down. They may not go up as much as others. But like if you, you know, when in doubt, pull out, right? Like you pull back on their stock chart, it's just like every single one of them just incrementally, slowly, boring, but just up into the right. They just keep making more money.

And also that's my home industry, like the industry that I came out of and the businesses I started were in the property casual insurance space. So I always go there. But I'm like, I agree with you. But it's like to your point, like maybe find one that you are interested in, right? You can find a boring stock, you know, one of those boring stocks that just kind of slowly goes up into the right. You know, those are terrible boring stocks to do that. Like just maybe find one. I do think that's interesting. I think not a lot of people talk about that, right? Like, I feel like not enough people talk about somehow having a connection to the stocks that you buy because it does, that, that could be one barrier to the quick sell because you, you're like,

oh, I know these guys. Like, yeah, they went down a little bit, but I know this business. Like, it's coming back. Like, I got it. Like, it's good. If you don't know anything about it, like, again, like I talk about corning and nothing against the company. Like, it's a, uh, the investment actually is perfectly fine, but it's like, I don't know how Iran impacts the glass production industry. I don't know how natural gas production

in the shale pits of Canada, you know, whatever, increase the cost base. Like, I have no idea, so it's almost like you're, you feel like you're flying bind. Now, to that point, I know you've talked a lot about individual stocks so far. What about ETFs?

Like, do ETFs play a role? And I'm interested because in the sectors that I don't feel confident enough to pick an individual stock, but I believe in the sector. And I'll give you an example, like quantum, right? About two and a half years ago, I picked one of the quantum ETFs. I can't even tell you which one. And I just started dollar cost averaging in it like I do with Tesla. And it's up like 75%.

it's insane. I have no idea what stocks are in there, like in terms, I couldn't tell you one individual stock, but I was like, I want to make sure that this quantum thing is real. Like, if this actually happens, that I'm kind of on board. So how does that fit in? Am I doing it the right way? Like, you know, like, how do you think about these things? Yes, you are. So we're going to start by going back to your Tesla position because you used a key term. You said, I have an investment thesis in Tesla. and because of that, I don't worry when the stock goes down. I just buy more. Okay, that's the critical starting point if you're going to invest in an individual stock

is you have to have a well-thought-out investment thesis. And you really need to do your research, not just listen to what a guy like me says about a stock on CNBC, but really read the financial statements. Think about who the customers are and then go analyze those customers to see if they're healthy, if they're getting benefits in their business from using the products of their business. from using the products of the company that you're thinking about investing in. Now, I could go on and on about that. But the key point is you have to have an investment thesis.

Let's say that you get to a point where you're in a sector or you're interested in a sector that's somewhat esoteric, like you just pointed out, about quantum computing. And let's face it, I used to be a nuclear engineer. I've got some particle physics grounding. I've read so much on quantum computing. and you're in that nether region where reality gets distorted and electrons can appear simultaneously in two places

and you're in this sort of wacky world. Okay, I'm not going to understand it. And so I can read all the financial statements that I want for these companies, but I'm not going to understand the basic underlying engineering and physics that go into it. For that reason, it's far better for me or for you to use an exchange-traded fund to express that theme without deciding if somebody's got the right particle physics interpretation and the other company doesn't. So that's number one. You get a theme. Yes, use the ETFs. There's also more coarse ETFs that I use from time to time. So you may or one may think from time to time, hey, the financial sector is undervalued right now. For whatever reason, it's been oversold as it actually has been for most of this year. And you've got all these catalysts coming.

The catalyst could be the coming IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic. We've already had SpaceX. It could be that the market hasn't interpreted or appreciated yet, how strong the economy is. It's worried about the consumer and high gas prices. All of these things may make a sector undervalued. And instead of trying to read through the financial statements, which for financial companies, and you know this because this is your industry, financial statements for, excuse, for companies in the financial services industry,

they're like reading the Bible. I mean, they are long and long and long. Sometimes you just want to push the easy button and buy an ETF. Here's what I strongly suggest. Look at the holdings of the ETF. Don't be surprised because sometimes an ETF can hold things you don't want to hold. And you want to make sure that what's in that exchange traded fund really reflects those stocks that you mean to express in your investing.

Yeah. I, one of the things that I was shocked about when, so I'd say maybe like 2017, 2018 is when I really started taking, investing seriously beyond just like dumb money in a 401K. Right. And I started thinking like, hey, this is my life. This is my retirement. This is money that I want to spend. Like I need to, I want to be a little more actively involved. You know, I'm not going to become a financial planner, but I also want to kind of understand what's going on.

All right. So my point in saying that is one of the things that I was shocked by when I started to dig into ETFs is how with very different names, like if you just looked at the name of the ETF, they might have the same exact cross cut. Like you could think you're getting like small cap, you know, 2,500 growth and, you know, growth global, whatever. And they're like the same exact companies. Now you're buying two different ETFs with different management fees, you know, whatever you got it going on. And you're essentially the same companies. Like you're not really diversifying. So like you kind of, like if you want to take ownership to this,

you really do have to dig that deep into what's underneath. Because I feel like a lot of people just window shop this stuff. I think that's exactly right. And when you do dive deep, not even that deep, just look at the holdings of various ETFs. Some things can surprise you. So I'll just give you an example. and I may touch a nerve with people who are listening, I don't know, but ESG, environment, sustenance, governance,

has been a theme over the last several years. Sometimes when I look at stocks that are in an ESG ETF, I'm a little surprised. Now, I haven't looked in a while, but if I go back six years ago, I might find ExxonMobil in an ESG. And that makes you scratch your chin and say, how does that get in there? And it's because of the fact that they have some green initiatives. But if you really think about it deeper, I think what it is is the fund manager for that exchange traded fund saying, look, I think ESG is going to work, but I have to have the core of the S&P 500. I have to have the core of the market overall in there.

And so you would see stocks in there like a Microsoft as well. Now, Microsoft maybe is not as egregious an example as ExxonMobil, but Microsoft I sort of scratch my head again and say, what are they doing that is ESG? They're really just a macrocosm of the market overall. And so you have to really look at what's in those exchange traded funds. I do, you said, and I love talking to you, Ryan, because when you set up a question, you also, you plant a seed and you did just now, and I've got to come back to it, even though it's not necessarily related to ETFs.

I think you were talking about your 401k. I think that's, yeah. And you're younger than me. You're a young man. You got a lot of runway ahead of you. And I think a lot of your listeners may similarly be young. And if there's a few principles in investing that I would want to impart, get your retirement accounts funded early. That power of tax deferral is incredible. And I say this first just from the experience of clients that come to me having retired, with IRAs that are measured in the millions of dollars. And I can tell you they didn't get that way by contributing $8,000 a year. They got that way by having that $8,000 contribution or whatever it is today grow without paying taxes year after year after year. And just having seen it so much,

I want everybody who's listening to aspire to be that client who shows up when they're 60 with an IRA measured in millions. All you have to do is just fund it, Now, we can talk about, hey, should you be in this ETF or that ETF? But given that this is money that most people aren't going to be touching for decades, I just want these young people to put it in the market overall. Buy the spiders, buy the S&P 500 depository receipts, low expense,

and you're in the market for decades and decades to come. Yeah, especially with like a 401K, it just, it's like you can't beat the S&P 500. You know what I mean? You can play around with some different stuff maybe, but like it just, just seems like you're never you're not going to want to log into that account all the time you don't want to be changing the funds you're invested in it's like just you know it's it's another i think you know one of the things i want to take that idea and i want to kind of build on this idea of diversification because we talked a little bit in sectors but i'd also like to talk about it

in terms of like vehicles so we have our 401k right and and i was always taught just put as much in is they'll match or, you know, as like a minimum. So if they're matching 2%, 3%, 5%, just do whatever they're matched, that's free money, do that. Okay, great. So I got my 401k bucket. And then if I'm making under, I think,

what is it, a buck 50 or a buck 30 or something like that, I can have a Roth IRA on the side as well. I can also always have another traditional IRA and then I have individual accounts. And then, like, we haven't talked about any, like, alternative investments like crypto or, you know, physical assets like golden silver or even you know i got a buddy who's constantly trying to get me in this and we can go here if you want to but uh he's got a spv for private companies that he runs

and he's always kind of trying to get me involved there and um so like i i feel like the sector diversification now i'm being very selfish with this question like i feel pretty comfortable with my sector diversification in terms of doing research, having a thesis. Okay. But where I do get a little is in vehicle diversification and what that actually looks like and how I should think about the buckets the money is actually in. Right. I like where you're going with this, Ryan. And I may torture the description a little bit. You said vehicles. I'm now really thinking about asset classes. meaning we've been talking about equities. That's an asset class. We touched a little bit on fixed income, and should you have that to help you sleep well at night, that's another asset class. But then you

went into some of the critical asset classes of today's environment. What are you supposed to do about crypto, about precious metals, about private markets? I think I'll answer that by just talking about how my firm is positioned right now. And when I say right now, this is how we've been position for several years. And we do believe in the private markets. So we believe in private equity, private debt, private real estate funds. But I have to say this very clearly, you have to make sure you have enough liquidity first. You have to have enough liquidity to live your life. And I'm also thinking about this in terms of what we were just talking about of retirement accounts. Because I do think about people who are listening to you and me right now and they may be saying, hey, listen, man,

that's great that Jimmy Labenthal thinks you should put as much as you can in your IRA, but I can't afford that. I totally get that. And I always want to meet people where they are. Do what you can. However much you can put into an IRA, or if you can start funding a 529 plan for your kids, I'm just telling you that tax deferral is fantastic. But please, don't sacrifice your well-being right now. yourself miserable by funding what's going to come decades down the line. And this apply. I don't mean to cut you often, but I saw the stat the other day that was, and I'm going to butcher it and I'm going to try to find it guys in post-production.

But the essence of the stat was that the amount of people, the amount of credit card, like people are putting money in crypto and then running their life off credit cards was essentially what this status. Like they're like there's there in a lot of this is the younger generation like sub 35. They're they're they're leveraging these like yolo type asset classes like polymarket bets and you know all these kinds of things and then living their life off off negative cash flow and credit cards which is absolutely bananas to me but it's kind of like this I don't know. I want to get that I want to get that down the line.

I just I'll throw that in there. Let's circle back to that. Keep going. We better come back to that. That's really important. That comes under the heading of speculative investment. Let's discuss that. Let me continue on the private markets for a second. Because what private markets do is they take out the randomness that comes in the public markets on a day-to-day basis. I'm a former engineer, former nuclear engineer. I drove submarines for the Navy. And in that world, if you pull a control rod out of a reactor by half an inch, the reactor is going to respond the same. way every time. All right? The coolant is going to go to a certain temperature. The steam pressure and the steam generator is going to go to a certain pressure. The turbine's going to spin faster, and you're going to reach a certain speed. There's no question of what's going to happen. But on any given day in the public markets, two plus two can equal five. And there doesn't have to be any reason to it. You were just using a great example with Tesla, which goes from 400 to 140 to 400 to 200, that's not a real measure of the company's worth. What private markets do is it takes

out those vagaries of the day-to-day machinations of the public markets. And it just says, listen, we're investing in this company for the long run. Here's what we're paying. Here's what we think it's going to be worth. And we'll get there when we get there. We're not going to measure it every single day and drive ourselves crazy. That's a very important feature in an overall asset allocation. because it dampens out volatility. Now, somebody may want to say, well, geez, I wish I could mark my own book of securities to whatever I wanted it to be.

Okay, you have to be with the managers in these funds that are noteworthy, that are credible, that have high integrity and a great track record, and then just let it go for the long run. Also, in terms of current positioning, we do have a small allocation to gold right now. Gold, you know, sometimes people look at this and say, hey, it's done so well over the last year, two years, and they think that it's an

absolute return vehicle. It's not. For us, it's a hedge. It's a way of saying there's a lot going on in the world that changes on a day-to-day basis. There's been more than a few times in the last two years where the world has seemed to question U.S. supremacy in terms, that's a bad word, I'm sorry, the U.S. the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar and the status of the U.S. Treasury market as the risk-free benchmark. And as that gets questioned, gold serves as a hedge, what I call an end-of-day's hedge. But we're not saying that, oh, this is going to go up 10, 15 percent over the next year. It's something to protect against on the downside, which leads to a great question. And we're getting more and more speculative as we go on here, Ryan, what to do about cryptocurrency?

Because my rub against cryptocurrency is, I can't value it. And so if I were to tell you or anyone as a client, hey, we're going to buy crypto, we're going to buy Bitcoin today at $59,000. Let's just say that we're not done with the crypto winter yet and it goes to $40,000. And you, Ryan, call me up and you say, Jimmy, why on earth did you buy it at $59,000? You do not want your advisor to lick his finger and stick it in the wind and say, that's what I was doing. I thought $59,000 was good and I turned out to be wrong. you want to have some sort of framework, which in equity investing or fixed income investing,

you can look at a company, you can look at a balance sheet, you can look at cash flows, you know this, you ran a business and you successfully grew it and sold it. You know, there are metrics, key performance indicators that you can look at that are absent in crypto. I will be the first to admit that gold kind of has

some problems valuing it as well, but I do want to have some hedge in the portfolio. that's why we have that. Now, let's go a little bit more into the real speculative stuff that you were alluding to where people max out on credit card debt, which usually is well over 10% in the interest rate. In some cases, it can be 20, 25%. So if you're doing that, you're saying, well, I think the investments that I'm making and financing with credit card debt can do better than that, to which I say maybe.

Maybe. I mean, there's been times where cryptocurrency has more than doubled in a year, but you don't know when that's going to come, and you don't know how far down it's going to go in the first place, and you might lose your nerve and sell the cryptocurrency or whatever the speculative investment is too early, and now you're stuck with this enormous credit card debt. This goes back to what we were talking about with Tesla. You cannot get return without risk. They go hand in hand. So if you're going to do this using credit card debt, you really have to have guts. And I don't think most people have it. I don't recommend using leverage. In fact, I wrote about this in my book, that leverage is really something

dangerous, like riding on the outside of a subway. Most people don't know how to handle leverage and they get called out. They can get a margin call, for instance, when they least want to sell their securities. So I recommend not using leverage, but let me close this on a positive note. There is room for speculation in anyone's portfolio. You just have to keep it in really small size. speculation is basically buying a security on the presumption that somebody will buy it for you later at a higher price, even though there's no framework for valuation. If you have a framework for valuation, you can say, this is worth a dollar. I'm getting it for 50 cents in the public market.

I'm fine with that. But speculation is you don't have a framework for valuation. You just think somebody will buy it for you at a higher price. That may come true. It may not come true. I know plenty of speculative investments that have done. made money. I know plenty of speculative investments that have gone to zero. You have to size it properly. And for most people, well, well below 10% of your overall net worth should be in speculative

investments. Yeah. So I do, I have done in the past. I haven't taken on any recently a decent amount of angel investing. And it's like the same thing. You know, I mean, you're, you know, you maybe you're betting on the founder, maybe you're betting on the industry, the product specifically, the problem they're solving. I mean, but there's no, when a startup company hands you a deck and maybe they have customers, maybe they don't, you know, at the angel level, most of the time they don't. Like, that's pure unadulterated speculation. There is literally no way to know how valuable that company is going to be someday.

And like, I know people and even myself, maybe at different times that you get care of because you start creating all these scenarios in your head. Hey, I saw my favorite influencer on Instagram just told me Ethereum's going to 95 and, you know what I mean? This derivative product options call over here on, you know, or what was it? The last one I read was everybody was pitching shorting SpaceX, you know? And it's like, yeah, but they're just guessing too. You know what I mean?

Like I feel like there's like this somehow people think certain people just know what's going to happen. It's like, no, maybe they're right more often, maybe, maybe their experience allows them to make some calls that other people don't see. But like, at the end of the day, we're all still guessing, you know, and like, to your point, and this is just kind of the way that I run things with my own investments is I just assume that I don't know shit, right? I don't know anything. And I do research and I come up with a thesis I like, regardless of the asset or the industry or whatever. And then I just dollar cost average him because, like you said, I have no idea, like the idea that with all the things I'm doing and then insert everyone who's listening

and all the things they're doing, even yourself, right? It's not like you can track every stock that exists and every alternate investment exists and every new vehicle. It's going to all these things. You can't. So it's like pick some things and then just dedicate like I put $25 a week into Ethereum. That's it. 25 bucks a week. That's what I do. It's not a ton of money. I will never get super rich off of Ethereum. But it keeps me involved. I think the Ethereum is interesting. I do think it has a chance to make a move.

It's $100 bucks a month, right? Like, even if it hits, it'll be a nice, you know, over the course of probably the five years it takes for Ethereum to really hit at some point. Like, if it does ever, like, you know, it's a small, nice little thing. But I don't want it to be more than that. and I have literally no idea when it's going to hit. I do think it'll go up.

I think it has utility. I think that it's, I think there's a lot of other things happening in the market that make it not as sexy or not as interesting right this second. But is it next week or is it a next decade? I have no clue. So it's like just put a small amount, let it build up over time. And if it hits bonanza, you know, I don't know. It just, you know, I feel like sometimes,

like if you just stop chasing, I feel like things get easier. Not easy, not easy, but easier. I think the biggest investment virtue that somebody can have is patience. So once you've done the investment thesis, which also is its own virtue, I mean, to really dive into something.

And I can tell from the way you're talking, you know what you're talking about with Ethereum. I understand what you're talking about. It has utility to a degree that Bitcoin doesn't have. that ether network underlies a lot of applications that are going on right now. I totally get it. And on the other end of the spectrum, I don't want to be in any of these alt coins, which have a different name that you'll use, but I won't.

That's just ridiculous. But patience, once you've made your investment thesis, stick with it. Now, you know, again, the way you set things up, Ryan, you give me so much to work with. And I'm going to respond, I don't think I'm. I've ever said this story before, even in a private meeting. And it's going to be macabra, but I'm going to tell you it. When you were talking about your angel investing, I was thinking about a client who is now deceased. And he was a friend, and I really, really liked him. And when he died, there was a financial autopsy. And there was all this stuff. Okay, there were all these

investments in private companies that people didn't know about. And investments in restaurants in restaurants. And when you started to then have to value this as I and the accountants and the estate lawyers had to do, you started to get in touch with the proprietors of the restaurants and the business owners. And you've been one. So you may know exactly where I'm going with this. That financial autopsy of my friend, Fred, showed what everybody kind of knew, which he wanted to help people. He didn't want to just make money. He saw people starting business. businesses and he wanted to help them. And that that forensic that came out of it made me and everybody love Fred even more than we already did because of how much he just wanted to help people.

Now, he also made sure he had enough money to live his life. He wasn't betting his life savings on the local Italian restaurant that was just starting up. But I want people to think about that. And I'm sorry, this is so macabra. But think about if you were to pass today, and your wife or your kids or your accountant or whomever are looking at your finances. Would they understand why you've done what you've done? Would they see behind it a noble purpose? Maybe that purpose is investing for the long run. Maybe that purpose is, as I've said, helping people out as their starting businesses.

Maybe it's patriotic. I'm not going to wave the flag here. But there can be any of a number of reasons. but your portfolio is a fingerprint of your personality. It really is. I love that idea, and I completely agree with you. I completely agree with you. And I think, you know, just again, speaking for myself,

one of the reasons why I feel comfortable with my spread and where I have various investments is for that reason. And it wasn't always this way. I mean, it's, it's, it's been years and years to get to this mentality, but like, I, the things, like, I could give you a reason. Like, if you said, why this, why this, why this, I could give you a reason for every one of them. And I literally wrote down, like, is it worth creating a little investment narrative that I could throw up on Google Drive? And if something ever did happen to me, you know, now my family, my kids or whoever could go and read it and go, oh, one, we kind of know everything that he's got. and two, this is what he was trying to do

and what he was thinking when he did it. Like, do you think that's a valuable exercise? I do it for myself. I have a journal of my investments and what's behind it. Now, it's a little bit in shorthand. I'm not going to take the time to write prose. But I do that because it also helps me,

you and I have both spoken about an investment thesis in anything we invest in and having to go back to that when the stock goes against you. If you've written it down, it's so much easier to understand. I also do this. Now this is, I'm a stock analyst at heart. So when quarterly earnings comes out, come out, I make it a point of getting on the earnings call and writing up what I think of the earnings call right there.

And I go back to it from time to time because there are times where you're shaken in your investment thesis. Ryan, you're clearly a risk taker. Nobody starts a company the way you did without being comfortable with risk. But I'm sure there are moments where you woke up in the middle of the night, that 3 a.m. wake up and you're like, What have I done? What have I done? And you do have to have some stability, some core of rationality. And if you've written it down, it becomes that much easier to understand why you've done what you've done. I love this idea of an investment journal where, you know, like you said, it doesn't have to be, you know, three daily pages or whatever.

But, you know, just any time you make a substantial investment or a decision, right, you just write in your thought process as to why you did it. Like, you know, I could say, hey, I could describe to you today why I'm in all these places, but maybe in truth, I don't know that I could articulate my exact thoughts at the moment when I decided to make it, right, just because of time and I don't have it written down. Like, I have a high level idea, but like I couldn't reproduce the research for you as to, or the websites I went to or the, you know what I mean? Like, I just have the high level idea in my head still. And I like this idea of just keep it under your desk or whatever.

And even if you make one big investment a year, right? You just, here's why, here's what we're doing. Here's the thought process. Or, hey, I decided to DCA into, you know, SpaceX. And I talked to, you know, Jim and Jim's got me my, you know, auto thing set up and we're good to go. And, you know, that's, this is why we're doing it. And, you know, that's a really interesting idea.

I like it for austerity. But I also like it because then the next idea that you get, you could go back through and look at your winners and losers and say, what would be? was I thinking, what was I possibly missing, and then apply it to maybe make a smarter decision the next time? So, Ryan, it will also show you your evolution as an investor. I started doing a journal when I was doing a lot of trades. And history shows, and my own personal history included, that doing rapid trades generally is a good way to lose money. It's not the way, it's not the tried and true way. I think a lot about the day traders from the late 1990s. Some of them are still

around, but most of them just eventually lost all their money. As I started writing down my trades in a journal, I realized I was trading too much. It was great to just have that feedback of slow down, you're doing too much. There are principles like that. Things to consider not just in terms of the frequency of trades, but a lot of people today think that the options market, just going back to where we started with, everybody has this reality that maybe I'll use alternate from real reality, I think you said false. There's this idea that with options people can get rich. No, there's some stat that 95% of options that are ever issued expire worthless. That it's just, it's a speculative way of people to gamble. It's gotten even worse as time has

progressed to the point where today there are these options called ZTE, zero time to expiration options. They're issued on a daily basis. You can buy them in the more. You can buy them in the morning and it's a bet on where a stock or an index or a sector will close that day. That is not investing. That is being in an alley rolling dice with a bunch of other guys. And the house makes money, but the investors don't. I wouldn't even call them investors. That's speculation. Writing things down is a good way to evaluate where you are and see yourself evolve over time as an investor. I think when most people do that, they get to the point where they realize the most success is picking high-quality companies, good management, solid balance

sheets, defensible moats to competition, not perfect, but defensible enough, and sticking in it through time, through long periods of time. And one, I'm going to go back to patience here for a second. Some of my best investments have taken a long time to play out. And I can list a few right off the bat. City Group I'm currently in. Cisco Systems is another one, where for long periods of time, they just lay fallow. And they were so cheap, you were scratching your head. Am I wrong about this? You go back to your investment thesis, which you've written down. And you realize, no, it's just the market getting it wrong. And then when it hits, it more than makes up for all that time that you had to wait, but you have to be patient. And being patient helps if you've written down

what it is you're doing. Yeah. Best investment I ever made in my life was waste management. I bought it at $31 in 2010 and DCA'd in for about four years. And I think it's like 175 now, almost 200. It just kept going up and up and up. And it's like, and funny, guys, if you listen, again, I'm not a professional investor in any regard. And I've had just as many not do what waste management did. So just be clear.

Listen to Jim. Don't listen to Ryan. But we can listen to you. You know what you're talking about. But the idea to your point of like, I was living in the city of all. at the time and like any city garbage is a problem garbage everywhere and the waste management trucks would come by and then I saw like a different type of like another company go by and I was like okay

one I didn't even realize there were multiple garbage companies again this is 2010 I'm 15 16 years younger so take that for what it is and I so I started looking at waste management and I realized they have more available landfill space left than any other publicly traded garbage company. And I was like, well, we're never going to have less garbage. And it's got to go somewhere. And then the other thing that I liked about them was they were leading in turning the methane

from the finished landfills into renewable energy, into energy. And I was like, oh, so they're actually making money twice on the garbage, like, this is worth something. I mean, that was literally all I thought was, we're never going to have more garbage or we're never going to have less garbage. And these guys have the most space for garbage. Like, that seems like a good thing.

And like you said, it took almost a decade. But then all of a sudden, you're looking at it going, I look brilliant now. I mean, I didn't, when I first invested in, I invested in a stupid garbage company that paid a one point something dividend, you know, hadn't gone up in years. And then, you know, 10 years later. But to your point, like, it's that patience in having the thesis. And I think, you know, maybe the biggest takeaway for this at a, like, step one level is take some notes and, like, have a plan or, you know, before you invest in something versus just my buddy on the golf course told me I should invest in Coca-Cola this month. So, here we go.

You know, like, it's not meaningful to you, right? So we already, we talked about just a recap here, like, it should mean something to you, unless you're a big Coke drinker, I guess. And then, like, you should have a thesis why you're. actually doing it, how it fits in. And then my question here then becomes, okay, so I, I tend to be someone who likes to do it myself a little more. I do have an advisor that I will go to, but he doesn't have a ton of my money, mostly just my rollovers from other like businesses that I worked in.

But like, how do you interact? Like for you, what is the most successful relationship look like when someone, someone works with you directly, like, how do they communicate with you? How do they, what do they need to share with you so that together you guys can create the best results? Let me start with what I think the most important thing I do as an advisor is. And this won't surprise you based on what I've already said. It's hold people's hands during a downturn and get them through. If we, you know, we can go through any of a number of crises. If we look at where stocks bottomed out and a great financial crisis and COVID, the right thing to do was to hang on to where we are now.

People often say, hey, how can I invest now? The market's at an all-time high. The market is always hitting an all-time high. Sometimes it spaces out time between that, but that's a feature, not a bug, is that you're hitting all-time highs. So the most important thing that I do is hold people's hands through a downturn. For that to be effective, they have to trust me. Now, this is, I don't want to get smarmy here. Trust is, in my opinion, the currency of my industry. It's the most important thing. But it's not something, if you and I, if you were interviewing me as an advisor, Ryan, and we've just met and I said, I want you to trust me. You'd be like, dude, like, I don't even know you. Don't start with that. Trust is something that takes time to build. And it's unfortunate because I have

had times where I've started with a client, new client, just before a downturn, and it's very hard to get them through it. On the other hand, if I look at the last 18 months, casting politics aside, we've had a big downturn because of the conflict with Iran, and then a year before that, we had a big downturn because of the tariff liberation day. Most of my clients who have been with me for 20 years or more, I'd call them up and they'd say, I'm not worried. I know. I don't. I know. I know how the experience gets you through this. In both of those instances, the snapback was pretty pronounced faster than I thought it would be, but the point is still made that it's just a question of when the markets come back, not if. So the most important thing that I can do with a client

is take the time to talk to them, get to know them. I'll meet with clients often. I'll meet with their family members. You really have to establish that bond because you can't just ask for trust. You have to deliver something that makes people trust you. Unfortunately, it really takes time. Now, let's talk about time for a second. I'm going to segue into something that's maybe not directly related to trust, but you've mentioned it a couple of times, and I think it's an important topic, which is DCA or dollar cost average. And it is somewhat involved with trust. Because the dollar cost averaging, folks, is when you say, I'm going to get into the market or a particular stock, but I'm going to do it in segments over time. I personally believe that you should really

dogmatically lay that out. So if I'm going to invest $100,000, a million into the market, I'm going to do it over three months, and that's going to be four equal tranches of $250,000 or $25,000, whichever number you're using, starting now, then one month after that, then one month after that, and one month after that, I'll be finished. It's very important that you do it dogmatically, because what it does is it takes some of the psychology out of investing. People get worried, hey, if I buy something today, the stock market, I'm not going to look right now. Maybe it's 1% off of its all-time high. I don't want to put it all in and then see it go down. No matter what Jimmy says about will be fine for the long run, I don't want to see that. That's going to upset me psychologically.

Dollar cost averaging makes sure that you don't drop all of your money in at the worst time. It also makes sure that you're not going to buy everything at the perfect time, but you're going to have some of each of that. I find it's a very important psychological tool. Now, Ryan, if you and I were computers, we would say to each other, we should never dollar cost average. The numbers actually say that you're going to do better just investing all at once. Yes, once in a while, it'll go wrong. But over time, it makes up for it. Still, as an advisor, and this does have to do with how you establish trust,

You meet people where they are. You understand their human beings with emotions. You empathize with them. Dollar cost averaging, DCA was the abbreviation for it. That's a good way to just get people comfortable with investing and with you as an advisor. Yeah, I like that a lot. And I like that you agree with that philosophy. Because I agree.

Like so much of investing for me has been like, I mean, this is going to sound weird. and again, not a professional, but just the way that my mind works, I kind of detach from the outcome. Not on a on a on a on a on a micro basis. On a macro basis, the outcome is incredibly important. But on a micro basis, I kind of just, I like again, I committed to this thing like like my Ethereum, right?

So every week, 25 bucks into Ethereum. I couldn't even tell you how much Ethereum is today, right? I have this thing. I put it in every day. And then that way, my brain just goes $25 every week to Ethereum, right? It's $100, it's $1,200 a year. You're not getting super rich, but you believe in the thesis.

And look, if it does go from 2000 or 1900, wherever it is today to $95,000, you know, that's a nice little hit all things consider. And I'd like to be a part of that. But that seems like a very small percentage happening. So this this kind of dollaring in makes sense. And if it goes up to $3,000 and I make a couple $25,000, at 3,000 or, you know, make it 100 or whatever you're, whatever you can afford, right? It's not the only thing I'm DCA.

And that's why it's allocated that way. But like, it just, there's not that, like, I'm not as emotionally connected to the outcome of each individual investment that way. Like, I feel like it's just, oh, that one, it was up a little bit. Okay, a couple weeks later, it's down. Okay, I got a couple investments in when it was down a little bit. All right. You know, like, it's, it just, like I say, I, I just agree with you so much.

It takes so much of that emotional toil out of the process. And Ryan, you're, the degree to which you are an objective person is way outside what the average person is. And I'm saying that not to compliment you, but to level set for the people who are watching us today. If you're listening to Ryan saying, I want to be like Ryan. Hey, you know what? I do too. Like you, you sound cooler than me by a lot. And you are objective.

and I've listened to your podcasts. I mentioned earlier, you know, the one you did on 72% of your work gets you is not in your flow state. And you've got to work on getting in that 28%. If you listen to that podcast, what you hear is an objective person saying, these are the rules to get you where you've got to go. And I'm even thinking about the three rules you had about where AI can take over a task for you. It's very thoughtful. it's very objective, it's very clear.

Most people aren't like you. Most people watching are watching you, Ryan, because they want to learn to be like you. This dollar cost averaging and many of the principles that I'm talking about, folks, I'm just trying to help you be like Ryan in terms of how you invest. Ryan, you don't need me to tell you these things.

You know these things. The emotions are there. This is where we started. The emotions are real. I feel them. I think, Ryan, you're able to control your emotions better than me. I think I'm able to control my emotions better than the average investor by a meaningful amount. Just another principle that I want to share with you, and I know I'm jumping

around here, but it's an important principle about market timing. We already talked about it. I've said it many times, just stay in the market. I want you to think about the damage that can be done by getting it wrong with market timing. If you look at the last 30 years of investing, the annualized return on the S&P 500 is about 9%, which is pretty darn good. If you missed the 20 best days in that 30 years, your average return goes down by more than half. You're about 4%. It's a dramatic just for 20 days. Now, that doesn't mean that the 20 days are once every year and a half. They happen when they happen. Here's the worst thing, and here's why emotions and here's why objectivity really matter, is that those best days happen to be clumped, happened to be clustered right around the worst days.

That's the way it works, is after a meaningful market downturn, you get these wooshes to the upside. And so if you're market timing and you're saying, well, I'll know to get back in at the right time, you have to consider that you're going to try to invest when every instinct, every emotion is going to say don't invest because it's just been a bloodbath in the markets. objectivity really matters here. Objectivity really matters. Yeah, and while I appreciate your kind words, I will say my approach to investing is because I am like a highly emotional person.

Like this is how I had to set the guardrails up because otherwise I would be in there every day looking at the stupid thing watching it take up and down by the second. Just talking about timing, I have this horror story. I had a friend who worked for American Express in New York City. during the financial crisis. And I think, might butcher this a little bit,

I think American Express was somewhere like in the 90s to around $100 a share pre-financial crisis. Financial crisis hits, it goes all the way down to $3 a share. He sells at $5 a share.

Six months later, it's $120 a share. That's a painful story to hear. You want to see a grown man cry on a golf course, have him tell you that story. I mean, he'll start crying today when he tells you about it. I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars because he thought the credit, you know, he bought into all the craziness, the world's going to crap, the credit system's done.

No one's, you know, they're going to close American Express, you know, all these crazy stories, right? And to everything we talked about and why I love this conversation is that I feel like the core thesis of what you've described and laid out is how to approach investing in a rational, objective, not emotional way, as much as you can. And like, I hold that story and I tell that story only and I feel horrible for him. He's very smart and has made plenty of money in his life. He's not, he's not destitute. But like, at the time, that was an enormous hit. I mean, that was like half of his personal wealth was in that once because that's where he worked and he had, you know,

taking the shares with the paycheck and all that kind of stuff. And I mean, that's just, that's what happens when you let your emotions get to you, right? I mean, if he believed in the company, he worked there, you know, he waits six months, just holds on for six months and literally his stock is worth more than before the crisis. And, or, you know, it may have been longer than six months, but it was somewhere, it wasn't longer than a year. And like, oh, my God, I just, to this day, I think about that. And I'm like, what are the cryptos called diamond hands?

You got to have those diamond hands. have diamond hands when you're in this game it's crazy and total total that's right and hoddle yeah i love these new words um jen can i say something encouraging yeah go ahead please yeah hey everybody's gonna make a mistake everybody and you're going to learn from the mistake so what you know when you're feeling like you want to cry because an investment you just got it totally wrong just learn from it you can cry if you want to but learn from it and you will see pattern recognition the longer that you invest it's why i want to get investing early, you'll see the patterns that whenever the media is telling you that the world is ending because of tariffs or World War III or whatever, that it doesn't come to pass.

And as you were describing American Express in the Great Financial Crisis, I remember being scared there. I remember thinking like, we're going to go back to a barter system here at the rate things are going. It reminds me of a funny story, at least I find it's funny, from the 1950s, New York Stock Exchange, all of a sudden stocks go down one day, they go down hard, and everybody's asking what's going on. And somebody says, well, we just heard that Khrushchev launched an ICBM attack on the U.S. Now, this story is a little bit apocryphal, but let me work with it. And some smart older man goes to his younger clerk. He says, go buy everything you can right now in the stock market.

And the clerk looks at him amazed. What are you talking about? We're about to have the world then. He says, look, one of two outcomes. Either it's a rumor in case in which. case we're getting everything on the cheap right now, or the world's going to come to an end and it doesn't matter. A little bit witty, okay, but here's the real message. How many times have each of us heard in our lives that the world is ending, that tariffs are going to undo the world

trade order, that America is losing its standing in the world? I'm not being political here. I'm just saying, asking you, how many times have you heard that? Back in 2022, Russia invades Ukraine and all the talk about nuclear war and World War III, for the number of times that we have all heard the world is going to end, you know how many times it's ended? Exactly zero. So odds are you shouldn't believe it when you hear that. Yeah, I completely agree.

I think it's funny. This is off topic, but like I get a lot of hate because I'm a big AI optimist, huge AI optimist. And people are like, well, oh, you know, Dario said this and Sam Wulman said this and whatever. And I'm like, yeah, okay, there's two options. Like, I feel the same way as your story, right? Like either AI is the, you know, is the damnation of our society and takes over and we're

either in matrix bubbles or, you know, whatever, like pretty soon. Okay. In that case, being pro AI doesn't matter. or AI works in our favor, and it's all upside, and you ride this wave, and you have a chance to really take your life for your business and move it to a whole other level. Like, what?

Like sometimes I look at these things, and I'm like, okay, so the worst case happens. We're all F to begin with. So what do you, you know what I mean? Like, why would I even consider that option? Like, what am I going to do? Like, you said, if the world's on fire and we're launching, God forbid, you know,

missiles at each other, like I'm not really going to care so much about how, you know, my Tesla stock is doing. Like, I'm just not really going to care as much. Like, that's not going to matter. Where if that doesn't happen and AI does become a very positive influence and self-driving cars do reduce deaths on the road by the, you know, millions of people that are injured and die every year. And all of a sudden, the world's a safer and more energy efficient place because of all

these, you know, new technologies and new, you know, medical healing and all this kind of stuff. well, I'd rather just, I'd rather tack towards that future and just deal with, you know, we're in a Terminator style post-apocalyptic AI war. You know, I'll just deal with that if it happens. And, you know, skeet towards this way, I, I just don't understand, I don't, I just don't understand, I understand it, but I don't relate to like the scarcity mindset kind of fear-driven stuff. And it's like if you can start to create these reframes, I feel like, not just with investing,

but with so many things in your life, you can, like, reduce all these tension-filled brain cycles that you take because it's just like, okay, so the worst thing happens. Well, then we're all screwed. But otherwise, like, why not just plan for the good outcome? Because if that happens, you know, you're looking at huge, huge returns. I'm with you on the good outcome, both generally and specific to AI. I also want to point out that the corollary to what you described is this nostalgia for times past

that tends to idealize what really was. And I like to read Walt Whitman, and I absolutely love the Hudson River School of Painting, which is mid-19th century landscapes. I find it just gorgeous. But here's the truth. As much as I might say, well, I wish I were back there myself,

I'd have to worry about dying from smallpox or getting mauled by a bear, things that I just don't have to worry about today because technology has advanced. And I'll grant you, there is something nostalgic about those paintings, and I love them. But I live a more comfortable life today than I would have 200 years ago. With AI, I don't know the specifics of how it's going to turn out. I know there's a lot of concern about job losses.

There's an analogy I've been using that I find really quite pertinent. If we go back 30 years ago, mid-1990s, digital technology was really just getting started. Think about the internet. Think about data storage. There used to be companies, Ryan, this may be before your time. I'm not quite sure how old you are. You don't have to say. But there was this company called EMC, which its business was selling data storage,

which is hilariously quaint today, which, you know, an iPhone can store all the data needed to launch an Apollo mission today. But data was scarce back then. And fiber optics were being laid so all this data could be transmitted efficiently. what this meant is that trading on the New York Stock Exchange changed dramatically. It was revolutionized. And whereas 30 years ago, there were 5,500 people on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Today, there's about 300 people.

And I know this because I go do CNBC shows down there about twice a week. And so I see it. It's a ghost town. Now, one might think, well, this is terribly tragic. All those jobs were lost and think not just about it. about the New York Stock Exchange, but the same thing happened at the American Stock Exchange and that the Chicago Board of Options, et cetera, et cetera.

Yes, it did. But here's the punchline. Over the last 30 years, employment and financial services has gone up by 20%, inclusive of the demise of all those jobs. That is creative destruction. And there is destruction, so there aren't as many New York Stock Exchange floor jobs, but there's all these new jobs, financial planners, performance reporters,

high frequency traders. You may not like high frequency traders, but it's a job that did not exist before all this data became cheap and the ability to transmit it became effortless. So jobs are destroyed, but more jobs are created. That's what will happen with artificial intelligence. I completely agree.

I think the grifters out there selling fear porn. I know who you're talking about. Yeah, they have no, they have, like, they never tell the full story. right when you and this is how you can tell it's a grift is you get well you know so-and-so company uh drop 20,000 people and uh you know in the in the note they referenced AI right it's always referenced AI never directly blamed on AI because no one's actually done that but they referenced that AI is one of the things now what none of them say is how many of those people

immediately found new jobs in the same field they never talk about how many of those people immediately found other jobs that just are a different job title. They also never take into account the fact that most of the time, and in my personal opinion, most of these companies are using AI as an excuse to get rid of employees that they felt were bloated anyways, which in most of the companies they are. And like, so you never get the full picture. It's just someone, you know, insert company name that people know, the word AI was used in the announcement and they dropped, you know, X tens of thousands of people.

and therefore AI Apocalypse. And I'm like, yeah, except I have like three buddies who have like blue collar jobs that are building startup little app companies and different things. And they're on the side now that, you know what I mean? So like there's all this additional new commerce that's being created by the new opportunities that AI's created.

So it's like, I just look at it all and I go, there's no benefit unless you are some sort of like, crazy short seller, there is no benefit to the, to operating the scarcity mindset version of this stuff. Like, if it happens, yeah, it's bad, but it's bad for everybody. But if you're properly positioned on the, on the optimistic side, that's where you're going to capture all the value. At least that's kind of the way that I look at the world is I just,

if there was a positive to overindexing on scarcity and negativity and fear, then let's do that. But I just don't see the data points to support that type of mentality. I just, I'm... Ryan, and the data supports you strongly. Consider that we're coming up on the fourth anniversary of chat GPT being launched, four years. And for all the talk about how many jobs are going to be destroyed by it, we've got unemployment here in the United States at about 4.3%. We're going to get a labor report in a couple of days. It's probably going to be positive again. initial weekly jobless claims have shown no uptick in firing.

I like your term fear porn. I'm not going to use names, but there was a research, and for those of you who are listening and not watching, I just put air quotes. There was a research article that came out in February that started with the line, We are not engaging in doom porn, which was then, you know, that was a spoiler alert that that's exactly what they were about to do. predicted that in two years unemployment would be above 10% and no companies would be making any

profit. I can look at the publicly traded software companies, which have been beaten down badly this year on the fears of AI, and in particular, that research report. They are still growing their top line. Their margins have gone down. Why? Because they're investing in AI. They're doing exactly what you're doing, Ryan. They're embracing the future. And so instead of just getting run over, they're co-opting AI and they're going to be better for it as they're still growing their business. Don't give into fear. We talked about that earlier. It's a real emotion. Don't give into it. History shows that that's the wrong thing to do. Jim, I can talk to you all day, man. I love this conversation. I love your mentality. This has been such a great conversation. I know my audience

is going to want to go deeper into your world. We'll have links to the book. But besides the book, where else should people go? And guys, whatever Jim references here, I'll have it, whether you're watching on YouTube or wherever you listen to the podcast, just scroll down in the description, you'll find it. Sure. So I'm a partner and our chief investment officer,

excuse me, chief market strategist at Serity Partners, C-E-R-I-T-Y Partners.com. You can find me there. But probably the easiest way is if you watch CNBC, two to three times a week I'm on the halftime report, which airs from noon to one. Eastern Time. And it's a very vibrant show. It's kind of a talk show radio or sports radio meets finance. Very vibrant. We have a lot of robust discussions. And that's a good way to get to know me as well.

Yeah. I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for your time. This has been absolutely phenomenal. And anytime you want to come back on and talk about this stuff, you got an open invitation, my friend. I could listen to you all day long. And in fact, I have been. You're something special. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you so much.