The Dividend Cafe - The Moment My Life Changed Forever

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Today's Post - https://bahnsen.co/4aK1R6X Honoring a Legacy: Greg Bahnsen's Influence on Investment Philosophy In this special edition of Dividend Cafe, host David Bahnsen reflects on the legacy of his father, Greg Bahnsen, commemorating the 30th anniversary of his passing. David explores the significant influence his father had on his work at The Bahnsen Group, particularly in investment philosophy and financial advisory. Through personal anecdotes, David discusses his father's dedication to hard work, commitment to first principles, and disdain for relativism, which have all deeply shaped his approach to investment management. He also touches on modern medical innovations and their importance, driven by the context of his father's health challenges. David concludes by highlighting the vital role of intellectual contribution and behavioral management in wealth management, drawing from his father's academic work on self-deception. 00:00 Introduction to the Friday Edition 00:19 Remembering Greg Bahnsen 01:50 Greg Bahnsen's Medical Journey 05:29 Reflections on Medical Innovations 08:10 The Legacy of Hard Work 10:56 Philosophical Foundations in Investment 16:43 Self-Deception and Investment Management 20:56 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Hello and welcome to the Friday edition of the Dividend Cafe. I'm your host, David Bonson. And today I'm going to be spending a little bit of time in the Dividendon Cafe talking about someone named Greg Bonson. Some of you may know who he is. In fact, I know many of you do know who he is.

and many of you do not. But the reason I'm doing this is not just for a little fun family connectivity at Dividend Cafe, but I got the idea in the course of my Thanksgiving Dividend Cafe where I mentioned the gratitude I have for my father's legacy and things he taught me and whatnot. But it really occurred to me after doing that

that there was something very specific in the investment domain to what the actual subject and purpose and intent that the dividend cafe is every week. That was directly correlated to the work of Greg Bonson, to the inheritance I received from him. And I felt it would be important to connect those dots. And I believe it's appropriate from a timing standpoint because I'm sitting here recording on Friday, December the 12th,

yesterday, December the 11th was the 30th anniversary of my dad's passing. And so as a sort of commemoration of his life, and this moment of 30 years ago, it's always incumbent upon me to want to honor my dad and his legacy. But I really hope that if you're listening right now, a podcast or watching the video, that you'll bear with me just to hear what I think the underlying investment message is,

that where Greg Bonson's life and work has impacted the work that we do at Bonson Group. And maybe after hearing it, you'll think, oh, he's kind of stretching there. He just wanted to go talk about his dad for a bit. But I think there's more to it, and I hope you'll give me that chance. And if not, that's okay, too. So just by way of a little context, for those who don't know, I don't really want to go into all of the details here. But it is, when you start saying somebody passed away 30 years ago, I was 21 years old.

My dad was 47. And so there is some context that's required because outside of car accidents and things like that. It's not very common. People pass away at 47, but my dad had a genetic heart defect with his aorta valve. And in 1978, I was about four and a half years old. My dad had just turned 30. He had his first open heart surgery. This aortic defect had been detected when he was a college age student during the Vietnam War era,

and he played sports in college and things like that. And they ended up needing to replace his deteriorated biological. aorta valve with a pig valve. It was reasonably common back then. There had been a number of technological advancements in the 60s and 70s that were life extending. And my dad was a beneficiary of that. But these pig valves don't last forever. And in 1987, that pig valve had to be replaced. And so they did a second open heart surgery. And he had just struggled with various health-oriented things. But then ultimately in 1995, they had to replace that second pig valve. And now at this point, it had only been about seven and a half or eight years. And they were doing a third open

hard surgery. The doctors were really quite concerned to do it quickly. They felt that things had deteriorated. They were optimistic. We went into this surgery believing he'd come out all right. And yet the doctors did feel there was a lot of urgency and pressing concern to do the surgery. And so it was on Tuesday, December the 5th, 1995 that he had the surgery. And that night, the doctors felt things had gone well. It was a really positive report. He was obviously a pretty traumatic ordeal, particularly in your third time having open heart surgery. But on Wednesday, December 6, things took a turn. And he started breaking down. And obviously, the next few days were somewhat horrific. But on Monday, December 11th is the official day.

He had been kind of machine-supported for a little bit before then, but on Monday, December 11th, my dad officially passed on into glory. So why I bring this up in this 30-year moment is I've spent a lot of time more so here at year 30 than I have at some of the other years that mark the anniversary of his passing. And I think a lot of it is me turning 50. I'm now, which is just absolutely surreal thing for me to say, but I am now almost four years older than he was when he died. I have three grown or nearly grown kids of my own. My wife and I have been married longer than my dad had been married. I mean, it's just, you just think about this stuff. And I think a lot about my own career. Let me say, too, I think a lot about I am a avid proponent defender of market economy. The profit motive, free enterprise of the human spirit and human

ingenuity that drives progress. It not only creates the profits that represent the ability for investors to tap into the market economy as a means of obtaining solutions to their own financial goals, the things we do in public and private stock and debt markets, but the enhanced quality of life that it gives as humans go about doing what God made them to do. And I bring that up in the context of dad because he died in late 1995. They would put in a St. Jude valve that is different material composition that they believe would have lasted forever. Of course, he didn't end up surviving that surgery. And then it was just a few years later and fully approved and began wide adaptation of use going into 2002, the technology was in pretty heavy, abundant

presence in 2001 from a company that was ironically in Irvine, California, which was my dad's hometown, where he lived and whatnot, where I spent many years of my upbringing, but that enabled a trans catheter, aortic valve procedure, and there's over one million people that have had that since then. It's now approved and adopted for a lot broader usage, lower, lower risk people. It was originally only used for older and more vulnerable, although I think that my dad would have qualified because even though at 47, a third open heart surgery is not a very good idea. A first open heart surgery is not often a very good idea, just from the fact that if it can be avoided as this Edwards miracle of a transcatheter procedure enables you to not have to cut open

the human body. And so I bring that up anecdotally to where I want to go about some of the stuff for my dad because it absolutely drives me bonkers. When I hear people bemoan our medical device industry, our pharmaceutical industry, our biotech industry, these things that have just saved so many countless lives that have enhanced quality of life for so many countless people. And I think oftentimes when people sit around with their criticisms of that industry, they are not maybe people that have lost someone or who have seen someone save as a result of this progress. This progress comes,

these medical innovations come because we live in an extraordinary time in human history, where we can do things like transcatheter, aortic valve procedures, where we have things like pig valves or have mechanical valves, not to be. to mention going into all the other elements of medical complexity outside of what happened to be the source of my own father's fatality. But I remain very supportive of that industry, very excited for the point and grateful for the point in history in which we all live. And I hope that we will continue driving more research and development and allow greater capital markets innovations to drive greater medical innovations so that more people can live longer and better lives.

And I don't really have anything else to say about that. The issue when we talk about the legacy of my dad, I want to read something real quick because I could easily just do a divin cafe on how I kind of believe a really secret sauce that the Bonson group is that I do work very, very hard. And I can criticize myself in about a dozen different ways. And I'm very aware of my deficiencies, shortcomings, and character defects. But one of them just happens to not be laziness in sloth. I'm grateful for the fact that I'm pretty well wired to work very early in the morning and work very hard year round.

And so I'm out tuning my own horn because I bring it up as this is an easy place just to connect my work in our company and our process and things to my dad. My dad was the hardest working person I ever saw. And I wrote a book about work a year ago. It came out at the beginning of 2024. I dedicated to my father. And I just thought it would be simplest to read the dedication now, right? Because it captures the essence of why this belongs in the list of the things we're going to talk about here, give it a cafe in terms of his own contribution.

And then we're going to get into some very specific philosophical and investment things. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Dr. Greg Gilelea Bonson, who did more work in 47 years than most could hope to do in. double that lifespan. Through his own indescribable and inspiring productivity, he taught me the T-loss found in work. He was the embodiment of diligence, focus, and calling fulfilled. The visual memory I carry of finding him in his study every single morning working is the best visual memory any father could leave his son. The joy he derived from studying, writing, preaching, and ministering as a scholar created this book.

that component of things is incredibly important, but it goes beyond, it contains the modeling he did of hard work, but it goes beyond that because it also goes into the why we work. And I think so many people are taught that they got to work merely as a byproduct of a duty, a responsibility, a burden. And I think it can be all of those things. And we do have a duty and responsibility to work and provide for ourselves and for our families, but there is a joy and a dignity in work when you connect your useful and productive labor to purpose. And that was not something I had to strive for or discover because I was

raised in it. And that's just a legacy that I cannot really put into words. And it was very formative in my own life. But when you get into the specifics of investment, you know my dad graduated summa cum laude with a degree in philosophy from Westmont College in 1979, a Christian college up in Santa Barbara, where my oldest son is in his third year now. And he ended up then going to Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he got a master's in theology and a master's in divinity, obtained two master's degree simultaneously, which had never been done before at that seminary, then came back to Southern California where he lived in L.A. his whole life to attend the University of Southern California, where he got a PhD in philosophy, and I was born at

that time. So his studies at USC went for 1973 to 1975, 76. His dissertation was done and approved, and he had fully achieved the PhD research degree by 1978. His doctoral dissertation advisor was a guy, Dr. Dallas Willard, who many of you might know was utterly brilliant. And my dad wrote his doctoral dissertation on self-deception. And I'm going to come back to that as a pertinent element of the role of my dad and my own investment work. His dissertation was called a conditional resolution of the apparent paradox of self-deception. But my dad's principal concern in his life as a scholar And a pastor and a theologian was in apologetics and philosophy, and his study had been in what's called epistemology, the theory of knowledge, which I could just dumb down to say is how we know things and how we know that we know things. And I am of the belief and have been for some time that an awful lot of people in the investment advisory business do not know what they believe and do not know why they believe them.

and it makes them worse investment managers. That there is a thing called first things that represent certain foundational commitments, certain metaphysical and logical presuppositions and understandings that drive a lot of what we know and believe about reality. And one can have first principles and then do things as an investment manager

that's inconsistent to their foundational principles, and I think that's a big problem. I think it happens a lot in many other domains of society as well, and I'm critical of it, but there also can be a problem of simply not having that core belief system or not having it fully developed. And to the extent that I believe one of the most important elements of not only investment management, but the broader financial So planning, wealth management, service experience is having a discernible philosophy, a belief system around it. And I've written about it.

There's links at divincafe.com today to a lot of this work. Look, my dad did not have a particular investment philosophy. He and I did not sit around talking about different growth investing because I didn't have any money. And he had a house with a mortgage and a car, but either did he. And so the reality is that I developed an investment philosophy, and I developed the belief in the cruciality of an investment philosophy because of him, because he was such a first things-oriented person. And out of his belief about reality was a disdain for the myth of neutrality.

He loathed a relativism that said, all ideas are good ideas, that all beliefs are good. Now, I can specifically critique moral relativism or a certain philosophical relativism like he did, but even in the investment space, to say one person wants to go chase a hot stock, one person wants to time in and out of the market, another person wants to do an age-based target portfolio that is like all other 70-year-olds that would do the same type of thing. Those are all three totally different philosophies. They're all three wrong and deficient, in my opinion, for reasons. Of course, I spend all sorts of dividend cafe time talking about.

But the reality is that if someone says all ideas are good ideas, then why would they be critical of those things? Why not just jump around flavor to flavor at any given point in time? or just sell people what they want to buy because you can find a person out there that wants bad philosophy A to be true, another person wants philosophy B to be true, and just go give them what they want

because you philosophically think it's all neutral, that all ideas are equally valid. And it really was this intense upbringing that held the myth of neutrality and contempt that allowed me to never believe that as an investment professional. If I can make all kinds of mistakes, I can get facts wrong,

I can do poor analysis, but that there must be a cogent philosophy that underlies the decision-making process for a fiduciary investment manager is just something I've never doubted. And I've had a 25-year head start of believing that because my dad taught it to me. And so not only was there this work ethic,

this deep commitment to first principles, a total disdain for relativism in formulating investment convictions and acting upon them. But then last but not least is I get back to the subject of his doctoral dissertation about self-deception. Now, again, his focus in this was apologetical. He did not believe that most people were deceiving themselves, that they believed both P and not P at the same time as he writes it. That what he believed was that they knew P was true, but suppress it. And that humans go through the self-deception process, not out of an intellectual contradiction, but a suppression to meet a contextual need, and often ethical, but situational, what have you. And I'll avoid the detail, the wonkiness of it. It's absolutely brilliant doctoral

dissertation, if I do say so myself. But the financial advisory profession I have dedicated my life to is largely one of dealing with self-deception. And I talk about it a lot in the context of behavioral modification, that there are people that want to go do something at a point in time that could be undermining of their success with excessive euphoria or excessive fear, with emotional responses to things. And so behavioral management and the need to help advise and manage and basically control the right behavior

in the investment process to drive a successful outcome for investors, goals-based. One of my mentors, Nick Murray, has helped reinforce this huge need as the driving determinant for investor outcomes around behavior modification. And we've built a business

that feels a huge, part of our value proposition is in doing just that. But it's incredibly consistent and really a natural outflow of my dad's own intellectual work that, again, was more applied in the domain of apologetics and philosophy. But essentially, I do not believe that investors don't know that market timing is stupid or that chasing something is a bad idea or that exit out of fear because this time something's different or you know I wrote last week about the Bitcoin crazed the amount of self-deception I see that goes into some of these different shiny object things of points in time the mental gymnastics people will do to go through it and the

reason being stuff that I epistemologically understand because of my dad is incredibly connected to that people need it to be true they want it to be true and so they do not simply believe A and not A at the same time, they suppress A to get to an outcome that is more suitable to a given context when they want it to be true. No one actually intellectually thinks that this neighbor promising them this guaranteed return on this 19% per year thing is really guaranteed. It may work, it may not, but it isn't this safe thing no matter what they tell themselves. But the ability of the human mind to go through this exercise, it's not merely cognitive. It's that it transcends the cognitive out of a philosophical place, out of a deeply

human frailty. And that is at the core of what a lot of the burden in wealth management is in the financial advisory space. And I happen to have a dad who wrote a doctoral dissertation on it, even though he never talked once about dollars and cents with it. He could have. He would have been real good at it, I promise you. But that, to me, when you look at these various other components, this is one I'll conclude with, that I think is absolutely vital and connected to so much of our work

in the investment and wealth advisory space, that even a philosopher and Christian intellectual like Greg Bonson would have had a legacy on the way we do things at the Bonson group. So as we now move past this 30-year anniversary, I am very grateful for the legacy. I'm beyond grateful for the memories and the blessing of having my best friend and my mentor and my dad be this individual, Greg Bonson. He was a force of nature. But I also want all of you who are listening to or reading or watching the Dividy Cafe,

in particular, all you are clients of Bonson Group, to know that there was an actual intellectual contribution to the world investment management out of him as well, that not all ideas are equal ideas and not all investment philosophies are to be treated as such. The fact of the matter is that we have a lot of things we believe in the Bonson Group that we act out of, and I got a good portion of them for my late father. Thanks for bearing with me on this kind of unique dividend cafe. I hope there was something beneficial to it for you. I know there was something beneficial in it for me. I look forward to being with you next week of the dividend cafe. I'll be back in New York City all of next week. And we're going to do our final dividend cafe of the year next week

as we get ready to wrap up the 25th year of this so far, rather interesting new century and new millennium. And we're going to look at what the great single obvious investment takeaway is of the last 25 years. And I'll leave you in suspense of what that is. But then the week after that is Christmas, The week after that is New Year's, and we've learned you guys tune out a lot more than we do. And so we will give you that hiatus and then come into the new year. After next week's Dividendant Cafe, our first one will be into the new year with our annual white paper and a year behind, year ahead message going through 2025 and 26. Always a fun one.

But in the meantime, I'll be back with you from New York City next week. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Thank you for reading the Dividend Cafe. The Bonson Group is a group of investment professionals registered with high-taxie. Hightower Securities LLC, member FINRA and SIPC, with Hightower Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor with the SEC. Securities are offered through Hightower Securities LLC.

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