Motley Fool Money - Interview with Mark Matson: Experiencing the American Dream

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

What’s the first step in building wealth? How do we know if we’re on track financially? What does abundance look like? Motley Fool contributor Rich Lumelleau talks with Matson Money Founder and CEO Mark Matson, author of Experiencing The American Dream: How to Invest Your Time, Energy, and Money to Create an Extraordinary Life.   Host: Rich Lumelleau  Guest: Mark Matson Producer: Bart Shannon, Mac Greer Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, "TMF") do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If I don't have a purpose for my money in my life, then no amount of money will ever be enough. You win the lottery and win $100 million. That's not enough. It won't make you happy. That was Mark Mattson, author of Experiencing the American Dream, How to Invest your time, energy, and money to create an extraordinary life. I'm Motleyful, producer Matt Greer. Now, Motleyful contributor Rich Lumello recently talked with Mattson about investing, success, and experiencing the American Dream. Welcome to Motley Fool Conversations. I'm your host, Motley Fool contributor, Rich Lamello.

Today's guest is someone who spent his career, helping people rethink the way they build wealth. Mark Mattson is an entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Mattson Money, and the author of several books, including Main Street Money, The Dirty Filthy Lives My Broker taught me, and most recently experiencing the American Dream.

His work draws heavily on academic research and behavioral finance, and he's known for challenging the traditional Wall Street mindset while empowering everyday investors to make smarter, more intentional decisions. Mark, welcome to The Motley Fool. It's great to be with you, Rich. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on. And as the intro would indicate, there's a lot to get to.

But I guess for the listener who doesn't know your full story, how did you first become, for lack of a better word, you know, kind of passionate about rethinking how Americans invest? Yeah. Like so many people that had to rethink things, what I was doing wasn't working. I went to work for a large broker-dealer, Chubb securities at the time. They're very, very large into financial planning, insurance, and investments. And I would put my clients in actively managed mutual funds, you know, that had 20 or even 30-year track records.

And I would notice at the age of 27 that these managers who had these great long track records weren't repeating. And my clients were losing money anywhere from 3% to 5% a year, sometimes even worse, trying to chase the track record of these managers. and I attended a workshop in San Francisco, a debate between Rex Sinkfeld and a guy named Donald Yachman, who was one of the top money managers at the time. And the debate was, look, our market's so inefficient that beautiful, brave, smart people can consistently beat it, or is the market relatively efficient such that only random and

unpredictable people beat the market and then they don't repeat their performance going forward? And that explained to a large degree why this whole thing of stock picking, market timing, and track record investing wasn't working for my clients. How would you summarize your core investing philosophy in a couple of sentences? Yeah, number one is that understanding that markets are efficient. All the knowable and predictable information is factored into the price today. Therefore, only random or unpredictable of interchange prices going forward. The second is that the returns come from the cost of capital, meaning that every stock has a cost of capital, a risk, a number of raising money, that is the equivalent to the return to the investor, and then you've got broadly diversify globally

to reduce the risk long term. I know you said that investors don't need to try to outsmart the market, but instead try to stop outsmarting themselves. What do you mean by that? And what's an example of a way an investor, you know, kind of tries to outsmart himself in a way he can, you know, kind of arrest that. Well, in the book I talk about the fact that the human brain is not situated very well for investing. You know, you don't go back 5,000 years ago and find a pie chart and standard deviation on the wall of a cave somewhere. This is relatively new for human beings in the last couple hundred years. And there's all kinds of problems with the human brain.

One is familiarity bias. We like to invest in buy stocks that we're familiar with. Hindsight bias. We say, oh, wow, look how great Navidia did over the last 10 years. Well, yeah, but that's hindsight. You don't get to go back in a time machine and buy it right before it did its performance. FOMO, fear of missing out. We want to chase what's hot.

We want to chase what other people are buying. hurting bias. If your neighbors are doing it, if they're talking about it on TV, hurting is great for zebra, terrible for investors. And then of course you have instincts and emotions. Emotionally, we're very excited when things go up. We tend to dump more money in those things. And then we have fear and anger, sadness, grief when we lose money, and it causes us to be extremely imprudent with our assets. And your own human behavior, even if I gave you the perfect model and said, just do this for 30 years and rebalance, I've never, seen anyone be able to do it, pull it off over the last 30 years. So your own brain is, I think,

your own worst enemy. What does leadership really look like? On the power of advice, a new podcast series from Capital Group, you'll hear from athletes, entrepreneurs, and executives who've led on the field, in the boardroom, and in their communities. It's not about titles. It's about impact. Discover what drives them and the advice they carry forward. Subscribe and start listening today. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. your first book, which we'll get to in a second, came out about 20 years ago. What do you think has changed the most in the investing world over the last two decades? And what, from your perspective, hasn't changed at all is, you know, very consistent with when you first started writing books. Well, that's a great, wow, what a great question. So I think the world would be a much better place if people could admit when they're wrong, especially politicians, that'd be helpful. In 1991, when I started the company, I was 27 years old. And I thought, made me a bit naively, is that, This academic methodology of investing, efficient market theory, factor model, and modern portfolio theory, that it was so obvious and so clear that this is the way the world had to function and

work that people would stop gambling with their money, they'd stop speculating, they'd prudently invest, they would be discipline, and nothing has been further from the truth. Not only do I not see investors doing it, I don't see advisors doing it either. It's easy to say diversify and rebalance. However, when markets run way up, advisors tend to double down on the asset categories that are high. For example, right now, most portfolios are overweighted to large U.S. tech companies. They're not rebalancing. They're chasing more of what's high. So this idea of stock picking, market timing, track record investing, being destructive and getting away from it, it's been the exact opposite.

There's more stock picking, more market timing, because now we're bombarded 24-7 with the Internet, with 24-7, news programs we didn't used to have back then in 1991. And now you have more exotic, destructive investments than you did in 1991. Now we have 1,500 ETFs, 99% of them. No one should actually own because they're just gambling. We have Bitcoin, which is toxic because there's no assets actually backing it up. We have commodities you can trade. You can literally take out your cell phone right next to your draft kings and you can get on Robin Hood and you can trade stocks all day long. So this idea of ending speculation, ending gambling, and prudently investing for your life goals, that got completely hijacked by technology and the media.

And I think it's worse now than it was worse. I think what hasn't changed is it's no easier to beat the market than it was 30 years ago. 85% of all active managers fail to deliver a market rate of return. Of those 15% that get lucky over any 10-year period of time, there's zero correlation about their ability to continue that into the future. future. So markets have stayed extremely efficient. It's extremely hard to beat them. And it's very, very dangerous for most investors to try. And that hasn't changed. In the book, you talk about how investors are trained to kind of delegate their thinking to their brokers. Well, I guess in 2005,

clearly like the CNBC's, and you had a lot more information than you might have had 15 years prior to that. But do you think that that's still the case, or do you think we've kind of evolved from there? Well, I know specifically answer this question because every year, we manage to $12.2 billion for investors all of the United States. And every day we analyze portfolios. So I know exactly what they have in their portfolios. Most investors have what I call a Frankenstein portfolio. They have maybe six or seven of the big magnificent eight in there. They've got some growth mutual funds. They might have some commodities. They might have some reits. They might have some Bitcoin. And so one year this asset looks good. Oh, that stock's high. I'll buy that one.

Oh, Bitcoin's high, let's buy Bitcoin. Oh, gold. Peter Schiff told me gold's never going to go down. I'm going to buy that. So they end up putting all this garbage into their portfolio. No one seriously analyzes the risk return, the standard deviation, the volatility of the portfolio. So they're doing all of it. They're stock picking themselves.

They're hiring advisors. They're getting a Morningstar and they're buying, you know, five-star mutual funds. They're gambling with Bitcoin and crypto. They're doing Commod. commodities. So I was in an interview with Dr. Phama, a Nobel Prize winner, and I said, what do you think about all this technology? And he said, well, I think you can lose your money faster than ever before. I concur with that statement. But Rich, they're doing it all. And there's no rhyme or reason to any of it other than whatever was high over the last two or three

years. Bam, that's what they're putting their money in. Right. Yeah. And, you know, kind of along those lines, you also talk a bit about activity bias, the feeling that, you know, if you're doing something, if you're, I don't want to say the word churning because it's your own account, but if you're in there actively doing something that's better than nothing, how does that hurt returns? And do you think that that's still an issue, you know, kind of 20 years on? Yeah, I think you're right, Rich. I think it's turning your own account for sure, churning it. You know, you go to Vegas. First of all, you can't just go straight to your hotel room. They make you wind your way through the casino, know, right? Hopefully they'll grab you and you'll start gambling on your way to your room.

They used to pull the arm on the games, but now you push the button. And it's whirls around people who love playing slot machines. They feel like they have more control, the more they push the button. The reality is, because it's gambling and speculation, they actually have more risk, and they're more out of control. You know, it's like drinking. The more you do it, the more out of control you become. And people feel like because they're at least doing something that they're having some control over their portfolio, but it's not true. They're chasing what's hot, so it's more dangerous. They're incurring commissions. They're incurring bid-ask spread cost. If they did make a gain on the stock, now they're paying capital gains tax. So this whole churning, you can lose a lot of money for

churning. And normally what they're doing is they're just chasing what's been hot over the last three to five years, having no analysis. I always ask investors, is risk important? And they say, yeah. And I said, okay, well, how do you measure risk? And they go, I don't know how to measure it. I said, well, do you think you can control something? You can't even measure? And they're like, no, I don't think I can. And that's a very good way to look at it. But you measure it with standard deviation and volatility. And you never want to invest in something that you don't actually fully understand the risk of. How do you define abundance as it relates to money? is different for everybody.

So in the light of no purpose for money, there's no amount of money that's enough. So if you don't have a purpose, and not just your money, but for your life, because your purpose for money is your purpose for life. If I don't have a purpose for my money in my life, then no amount of money will ever be enough. You win the lottery and win $100 million, that's not enough.

It won't make it happy. If I have a purpose, though, for my life and for my money, for example creating love or creating freedom for other people then i technically don't even need money you know if i didn't have if i just had enough to eat and just a you know bare minimum in life i could visit a person in the hospital hold their hand you know spend time with them make sure that they know they're loved and cared about and this is a lesson that people have known whether it's gondy or mother teresa or other people that had very very little wealth that had amazing lives full of abundance and love and relatedness to other people. So focus on the purpose. Don't focus on

the money. Focus on helping other people. Don't focus on the Ferrari. You might get a Ferrari. You help enough people. That's one of the great things about capitalism. If you help enough people, you will make money. So focus on asking great questions, focus on a massive amount of action, focus on what your screens are and recognize when you have a disempowering screen and how can I change that screen so that it gives me power to take action. Yeah. These days, I'm all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If it's not well-made and versatile, it's just not worth it. That's honestly what I love Quince. The fabrics feel elevated, the cuts are thoughtful, and the pricing actually makes sense. Quince makes high-quality wardrobe

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too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to QINCE.com slash Motley for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash Motley. And for a listener who is starting from zero or is very early in their, you know, kind of investing days, what's the first step you would argue for, you know, kind of building wealth? Dollar cost average. If you're just starting out, if you're just starting out, you're in your 20s or 30s. You know, pay yourself first. This is one from my dad way back in the day. But even if it's 200 a month, 100 a month, just start.

Don't wait until you've paid off your school debt. Don't wait until you've paid off your credit card. Don't listen to Dave Ramsey. Look, start paying yourself and start doing it now. You know, most of you are going to have some level of debt from now until the day you die, so get used to it. But start putting away your memory. money right now because with compound interest over time, it's going to make a big difference. And

don't get Robin Hood on your phone. Don't get draft kings on your phone. Don't go down this new Gen Z methodology of gambling and speculating with your money. It's not worth it. And ignore what your friends are doing because they don't have any idea what they're doing. Yeah, it's not a game. For a listener who is maybe not a beginner, but is also not, you know, kind of 60 years old, let's let's say they're kind of in their 30s or their 40s, how do they know if they're on track financially without kind of obsessing over the numbers, whether it's how close am I to being able to retire?

What are the metrics? And obviously, everybody's different, but just kind of broadly speaking. That's a great question. The reality is that's almost an impossible question to answer. It's almost impossible because, number one, is you don't know what life circumstances you're going to have in 20 years.

You have no idea what your expenses are going to be. You have no idea what health insurance is going to do. You have no idea what Social Security is going to do. You have very little idea what real inflation is going to do. So it's a very murky water to swim in. And to assume that, wow, if I just, I calculate it, I need eight and a half percent rate of return to reach my goal at age 65, that's financial planners like to play that game, but that's not a very good game to play.

Another thing they will say is, you know, oh, count on using 4 percent, the 4 percent rule. If I have a million dollars, that's going to give me $40,000 a year of income. Here's what I would say to most people. Don't ever retire. I think the idea of retirement is an outdated thing that when you had a defined benefit pension plan, when you worked for GM or you work for Ford and you were on the line for 30 years and then you retire, I think that was a bygone age. But I think also retirement is a recipe for death.

You would look at people's health, their vitality, their life tends to dramatically go down when they retire. I would try to pick a job, a career, consulting. I'd pick something that can keep you passionate until the day that you die. You know, if you end up being a multimillionaire and you have $30 million, great, retire if you want. But if not, find something you love and don't ever stop doing it. What question do you wish more people asked you about money or just asked about money? Like, what question do you wish people were more curious about?

That's a great cool. Wow, you've had so many great questions. I have never had that question. I have never, let me think, what do I wish they would ask me about? I wish they would ask me how to use money as a way to create fulfillment and love and connection in life because money so many times can cause jealousy, anger, and resentment, even family members. So if people would focus more on how can I use money as a powerful tool to make the world a better place, that would be an awesome question, one that's worth spending a lifetime answering.

That's a great answer. Well, Mark Madsen, thank you so much for the time. Obviously, as I kind of said at the beginning, he's written a number of books that are great to read, and there's so many other kind of mediums where you can find his work. Mark, thank you very much for coming on Motley Fool Conversations. Thanks so much. That was blast. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the

Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. so don't buy our sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Full editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For the Motley Full Money team, I'm Matt Greer. Thanks for listening, and we will see you tomorrow.