Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.
This week on the podcast, I get to sit down with Jason Swig and William Bernstein remembering their friend Jonathan Clements. Jonathan was a Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist and author for almost twenty years. He's beloved by those people in the industry. In many ways, Jonathan has done as much as anybody to push the idea of indexing, at
least anybody since Jack Bogel. I thought this conversation, despite the fact that we know Jonathan received a terminal diagnosis and we already know how it ended, I thought this conversation was interesting, uplifting, and fascinating. I think you will also with no further ado, my remembrance of Jonathan Clements with jason's Wig and William Bernstein.
Thanks Barry, glad to be here.
So let's start out with the beginning. I want to talk a little bit about who Jonathan was. We'll talk about his two most recent books, including the one coming out in May of twenty twenty six. But how did each of you meet Jonathan? What were your early impressions of him like, let's start with you.
You want me to go first.
Yeah.
So Jonathan and I met the third week of March in nineteen eighty seven when I joined Forbes Magazine and he was already there, and we almost instantly became good friends. I would say we probably went out to lunch at least twice a week for the next four years, certainly every Wednesday, fish cakes and spaghetti at the New Courtney on Urteenth Street in Manhattan, which I think was I want to say was four dollars in ninety five cents.
That's right. The Forbes office is right over there on was eighteenth and fifty. All the Faberge eggs were there the whole the whole building was kind of uniquely.
Situated Fifth Avenue and twelfth Street, very close. And Jonathan had a he had a really unusual sparkle. He always had a twinkle in his eye. He thought almost everything was funny, because of course, almost everything is funny if you think about it the right way. And you know, he might be writing about some con artist who was stealing people's money, or some mutual fund that was overcharging people.
But he always found the humor in the situation and I loved that about him, and we were friends from that moment on ever since.
Bill, How'd you meet Jonathan?
I met him a little later. It wasn't until about the mid nineties when I was still practicing medicine and I was finding my feet in finance and I was starting to write. And I did what edny aspiring financial writer does, which is you start chatting up financial journalists, and he responded and he started quoting me on the journal. And for many years I was just a source until you know, maybe the late the early twenty tens, the late aughts, and then we became friends personal friends after that.
And you know, he did think that everything was funny, and he just had such a pleasing personality. He had a high hedonic set point. He was always in a good mood, and he always thought that everything was funny, which is a fabulous combedy. And the other personal characteristic that he had which just powered his career, I think, was that he was willing to talk about the hard things in his life, his struggles with money, and he was willing to talk about his divorces, and of course,
in the end, his impending demise. And so it was those three things together. I think that really made him such a unique financial journalist and human being.
So when I was doing preparation for this, I learned a lot of things I was wholly unaware of, including a quote from you, Bill, which was, you owe your entire career investments to Jonathan's work. You have to explain how a neurologist in North Bend's, Oregon ended up having a career change by a personal finance journalist.
Well, I happened to live in a country that doesn't have a functioning social safety net, and so I realized I was going to have to vest on my own if I wanted to survive my retirement financially. And so I approached it the way I thought anybody would scientific training would do, which is I read the peer review literature, the basic textbooks, and I collected data and I built models. And when I was done with all that, I had actually had something that was useful to small investors and
in a couple of instances even too professional investors. And so I started writing about it. The Internet came to my community about that time. I put the stuff on the web, my material on the web, and Jonathan picked it up, and so he started quoting me in the in the in the Wall Street Journal. And then that was that opened the door to getting my books published and also to you know, a financial advisory business as well. And so it's like a lot of a lot of
things in a complex life. It was just serendipity, one thing leading to another.
Huh, really really interesting, Jason, You're you're with Jonathan at Forbes and then you're together at the Wall Street Journal. But I'm struck by nineteen eighty seven, starting not only the year of the Great Crash, but long before indexing was the dominant intellectual framework, certainly in terms of money flows into mutual funds and ETFs. What was it about Jonathan's writing that seemed to reshape a lot of the conversation about investment.
Well, I would say, I don't think this is an exaggeration. I would say more than any other individual except Jack Bogel, Jonathan put index funds on front and center for American investors. And you know, he realized very early on, I'm that active management in the aggregate was not earning its keep. It was charging more than it could possibly deliver for clients. And Jonathan realized there's an alternative and I'm going to
keep telling people that's what they should do. And he wrote he must have written two or three hundred columns telling people that they should buy Index ones and a lot of his readers, particularly professional readers, hated that because he was essentially saying, don't hire them, you know, hire Vanguard or State Street or another Index. Lack rod.
Think about the Big three, the three biggest mutual fund of ETF companies today really derive the lion's share of their assets, certainly half at black Rock, probably over half at Vanguard from Index.
And you know, you can eat the math is not hard to do. You know, investors have saved hundreds of billions of dollars in superfluous management fees by moving from active to passive investing. And Jonathan deserves a lot of credit for that because I can attest coming sort of coming to it. I don't know what would I say two or three years behind him, the amount of hate
mail I used to get and hate phone calls. You know, it's not easy to tell people that they should not have a right to make as good a living as they have been. They don't like hearing that. But if it's in the best interest of the larger part of your audience, and that's the message you have to deliver. And that's the choice Jonathan made really before any other investing or personal finance journalist in the country. And once he made that choice, he would not be moved.
Go ahead, Bill, Yeah, I mean fortune favors the prepared, and I think what prepared Jonathan for that was from about what nineteen ninety to what nineteen ninety four he covered mutual fund managers, and boy, that's an awful sandbox to have to play. And because how do you get into that sandbox, Well, you take a lot of risk and you get lucky, and going forward the track record
is not so good. And he saw that often enough that I think it drove him to the conclusion that Jason was just talking about.
I think it was Professor French at Dartmouth of FAMA French fame said it takes about twenty years to figure out if a fund manager is skillful or lucky. At least two or three years of returns certainly only doesn't tell us anything.
Yes, he has one example that just stays in my memory, which is that if you have a hedge fund manager who can beat the market by five percent per year, and the extendard deviation of stocks is twenty percent per yeer. If you grind through statistics on that, it takes sixty four years to get the statistical significance.
Wow, that's quite amazing. He called the at his own advocacy for index funds an obsession that some readers found irritating. And when I read that line, I thought of your quote, which is your job is to write the same column week after week after week, but in a way that neither your readers or your editors figure out. So how do you continually write about indexing if your readers are finding it irritating?
Well, I think Jonathan arrived at the same place I did. And of course, even though he was slightly younger than me, he was a couple of years ahead of me because he just started on this topic earlier than I did. But we both ended up in the same place, which is you you keep your message consistent, but you frame it, you tell it, you ornament it in different ways every single time. And Jonathan was an unparalleled master at writing
what some people you know, disparagingly call listicles. He would, you know, come up with twenty five funny things that active managers say to justify their underperformance. And you know, he would run through all these bullet points, each one of which would be very funny, and then at the end he would say, and that's why I think you should put all your money in next ONNDS.
I wonder how many of those lines came from angry emails from fund manager.
Probably a lot of them.
So so one of his core principles is that successful investing should be comprehensively, almost aggressively boring, which is kind of ironic. Both asset management and financial journalism are unusually noisy, fomo based industries. So how do you make a message stick as an island of rationality in a sea of noise and emotional driven stimulus.
Silence. That's that's that's a tough one. You've become what Jason has become a master of, which is saying the same thing and in so many different ways that your editors and your readers don't notice that you're saying the same thing over and over again.
No doubt about and very sorry if I can jump in. You know, I think one thing that is underappreciated about somebody like Jonathan is the amount of integrity and courage it takes to stick to a simple message. You know, the job of the job of an investigative journalist is to get people who don't want to talk to you to tell you things they don't want you to know. The job of a mainstream journalist is to tell your readers things that they need to know, whether they want
to hear them or not. And that's what Jonathan was brilliant at.
Yeah, and it's again, the word integrity comes up so many different times when you're talking about Jonathan because here he is working in a sandbo you know, active fund managers, that's how he pays, he's paying his mortgage, and he, you know, wakes up one morning and he says, this is intellectually dishonest. I've got to find something else. I've got to find some other message. And very few journalists,
i think, make that choice. They just keep on plugging away and don't question what they're doing.
Really interesting, and you know, we're talking about investing in money, but Clements emphasized this wasn't about getting rich, it was about building a good life. So when do you think his thinking shifted from simple building a portfolio to something a little more philosophical.
I think that that happened in the early two thousands, when I think all three of us started to come across, and maybe all four of us started to come across the well being research that academic neuropsychologists were doing. What makes people have money is a very small part of that.
And that's what Jonathan you made into. I think his mission and financial journalism was it was exploring the connection between money, money and happiness, and that's not something of very many financial journalists venture into.
I know, there is more money when you're broke is better than less money, but it plateaus holding steady for things like divorce and illness. It plateaus surprisingly rapidly. So let's channel Jonathan for a moment. What is the purpose of money and how does it help one live a rich fulfilling life.
Well, so Jonathan really explored that research into hedonic psychology, particularly the implications of does money by happyiness? How can you use money to achieve happiness? And there's an enormous, voluminous amount of research on this in very very obscure academic journals, and when Jonathan started working on this, very few non academics were even aware that this research existed. But I would say there's a handful of takeaways from
that work that research. One is that possessions don't generally make people happy. Now there's exceptions to that, but as a general rule, the bigger house, the fancier car, the painting on the wall, the bigger couch generally don't move people's happiness as much as they expect. And that's really the key is the difference. It's the gap between what you spend and what and the happiness you expect to get from the spending that causes the disappointment that people feel.
And you know, I think everyone listening has had a similar experience. You know, you've been in a starter house. You see a new house you love, you talk about it with your significant other, you agree we're going to take the plunge. You buy the house and you move in and you're just thrilled. And then you know a year later you look around and the paint is chipping, and you know, there's like rats in the attic, and it's more money, more problems.
Right.
And the next level beyond that observation that possessions are not the key, is that you want to use your money to create experiences with people you love, shared experiences. You want to use money to create memories, and so you spend your money on things you can do with friends and family, joint vacations, commemorative events, family reunions, things
like that. And then it's the final level that Jonathan explored more and more in the later years of his life, and especially after he got his terminal diagnosis, which is using money to create, meaning finding something bigger than yourself that you can support or promote or strengthen with your money, giving to a cause you care about, putting something front
and center in your life. You know, supporting a nonprofit, volunteering, all of those activities can really move the needle much more than you would get if you bought a new table or some other possession you've had your eye on.
Yeah, and the thing about Jonathan was he he lived that ethic every day of his life. And you know, he didn't make a lot of money as a financial journalist. I think he worked for a couple of years at citycarp and made a pretty decent salary, but you know, his lifetime earnings were not that high, and yet he amassed a significant amount of assets by hammering away at being frugal and amassing enough financial capital so that so that he didn't have to depend upon his human capitals.
As he put it, I never saw him so happy as when he shows up at our place in Portland having spent two dollars to take the Max train in from the airport, you know. And then the other thing that so Jason just just explained very nicely the three levels that he climbed, and I think there was yet another level on top of that, which is to have enough assets to so that you don't have to worry
about assets, in other words, to happen now. It's the only purpose of money, I think for Jonathan was not having to worry about.
Money, right right, you know, he said something and I may even be lifting this from the headline of one of his early diagnosis articles, which was dying as easy, but a state planning and taking care of your loved ones after you're gone is hard. And that struck me just as such a quirky, matter of fact observation about something we all are going to face. That well, eventually, he just had to face a little earlier, and with the sense of humor dying, you know, the old joke
about dying is easy. Coin is hard. No. No, estate planning and taking care of your loved ones, that's what's hard.
Yeah.
I mean, if there's one thing that Jonathan didn't believe, it's that he who dies with the most toy wins, right. Yeah.
Coming up, we continue our conversation with William Bernstein and jason's Wig Remembering Jonathan Clements, discussing his most recent book, The Best of Jonathan Clements. I'm Barry Richolts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry Ridults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio in an extra special edition of the show. This week is all about remembering Jonathan Clements, the Wall Street Journal personal
finance columnist and author. And my special guests are William Bernstein and jason's Wig, who know and have worked with Jonathan for many decades. So let me pull on one little thread, which is the idea of delayed gratification. And I already know what your answer is going to be, but I have to pose the question. So here's somebody who's diligent about saving, diligent about postponing that sort of gratification, and then, unfortunately doesn't get the full fruits to enjoy it.
Give us, give us your explanation as to how and why he was perfectly fine with that.
Well, So I talked a lot with Jonathan the last year of his life. I'm you know, I think he called me maybe two or three weeks after he got word of his terminal diagnosis. And the thing that struck me, Barry, was that, you know, having been his friend for decades, I could instantly tell that none of this was an act.
You know, most of us if we got a terminal diagnosis, particularly one like Jonathan's where he was given five to originally five to twelve months, I think is what they said, right Bill, we would put on a brave face, we would like be faking it for our friends and family. But Jonathan was from the very beginning, he was totally at peace with it. And I can't tell you that
I can totally explain that. I think he meant what he said, which is he felt he had lived the best life he could have, and he had done everything he wanted, He accomplished most of what he wanted to achieve, and he was somehow he was okay with the news that would just absolutely devastate most people.
Yeah, I mean. Neuropsychologists use a personality scale as a five item scale, and one of the items is something called neuroticism, which is basically how much you focus on the problems in your life. And he had a very high Haydonic set point. He was always in a good mood most of the time, and so his neuroticism score, as far as I could tell, was zero, and he was in a good nude most of the time. So he dealt with his own mortality as as well as
he could. A sense of humor. My gosh, you know, he joked to everybody what a great marketing strategy terminal diagnosis was. If you're trying to flog a book.
Don't recommend it. You only get to use it once. But that is only someone with the sense humor can say that. So let's talk about the book the best of How did this book come together? Whose idea was it? What was it like working on a project with Jonathan under his awareness of his terminal diagnosis.
Who's who'se I well, I think I was going to look at you and say, whose idea was it? I think it was. I think I think it was Jonathan's idea. Actually, yeah, he just decided he wanted to put together a compilation and I think his his main goal was to raise funds for a charitable purpose, which it took us a while to evolve. Uh and and and that was that was the project.
And so let me just interrupt you. The Jonathan Clements getting going on savings initiative funding roth Ira contributions for young adults from low income households. That sounds less like a book torn more like a policy intervention.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. And that was It turned out that that translating that idea into something practical was a bit harder than everybody had than anybody he realized, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
And so Jason and I and Jonathan put together a list of his columns on I think it was Jonathan who basically gave us the list, and Jason helped me organize it, and we self published it through through Amazon, and it has raised a substantial amount of money for the initiative which we eventually arrived at, which I don't know if we want to talk about that, just.
Yeah, sure we could talk about it. Let's talk a little bit about how much money did it raise and did anyone have any targets in mind? Was this was this all upside surprise?
Yeah, all in the order of about sixty thousand dollars, which a substantial amount of money. We actually raised a lot more money through the through the Bogel Center, through personal donations that came into the John C. Bogels and our financial literacy, So you know, even that that raised a whole lot more money, and that money is going into a research project. You know, Jason, I nevermember what JPAL stands for. So that's that's that's the group, the research group is doing this.
Yeah. So JPAL is behavioral economics research institute based at MIT in Boston and it's run part partly by Esther Duflow who shared a Nobel Prize in economics and I want to say twenty twenty three. And j PAL does all kinds of interventions based on behavioral economics research trying to encourage people from low income households around the world, by the way, to form more construction of savings habits,
to borrow more prudently, to become long term investors. And we partnered with them because we really felt that getting Jonathan's vision from an idea into an actual program was beyond us. We needed help, and so JPOW works with academics at universities all around the world, and between Boston University, University of Chicago, and some other Northeastern Northeastern we were able to round up some great economists and researchers to
make the program a reality, and it last summer. It was piloted with some basically high school kids in Boston from poor families who were randomly selected to get money to open a roth ira. And we're testing whether there's particular kinds of messaging or other techniques that can not only encourage them to invest, but then to turn them into investors by changing their own behavior over the long term.
And it's still very early. We don't know whether it'll work, but we hope it will, and even if it fails, we're pretty confident we'll learn some useful things about how to encourage good long term investing behavior here.
Yeah, it turns out it's really hard to give away money to kids for a roth ira.
Yep, this is before we passed. I don't know if you want to call them baby bonds or Trump accounts or whatever. That thousand dollars initial tax.
To parity predates that.
Yeah, so so, and by the way, that dates back to I'm drown a blank on his name, but he's a VC out in California who might as well first first proposed this, you know, a decade ago, and it was slogging away trying to get it accepted. So let's let's those are what the proceeds are going to be used for. Let's talk about the book itself. Sixty sixty columns out of over a thousand. That has to be a tough list. Anything on the list surprise you make you scratch your head. What how do you think of
the arc? Now that you guys helped structure and organize this, which really is half the battle. Once you have it structured, it becomes a whole lot of ease.
Yeah.
I don't think that Jonathan had an organizing principle. I think he just went through his his thousand and nine columns actually was more than that two and he picked out just his favorite ones and then it fell to the three of us to organize the book, which which took some took some work, and you know, they were organized according to you know, the things that Jonathan wrote about I mean, you know, the principles of indexing, the importance of saving, how to calculate how much money you need,
and then all of the behavioral issues that we that we talked about, and so I think we came up with seven or eight basic chapter headings.
But also Jonathan did something else that was unusual and frankly risky, which is he wrote really often about his family and their issues with money. Particularly he I don't think Hannah and Henry would mind my saying this. He sort of used his kids as guinea pigs to test out how do you motivate children, to say, how do you get them to become long term investors? And we
did not do this in my household. And on the one hand, I'm glad we didn't, because I think it can make your kids a little crazy if you turn them into lab rats. But on the other hand, his kids probably have a probably have healthier finances than my kids.
Do, and healthier financial outlook too. I mean, Mike, I'm about a decade older than more than that than than Jonathan was, and so are my kids. In fact, you're considerably older than his because I had my kids later than he did. And a couple of the tricks that he came up with. I just like, God, damn, I wish I had thought of that. You know, when your kid asks for a soda, you know, the four dollars soda at the restaurant, it's like, I'll give you a
buck if you take the water. You know, I'd be richer if I, you know, I brought to have a couple of grand I'd be a couple of grand richer if I'd thought of that one first.
That's a great parenting hat. Share some others. What other financial tricks was he using that ended up having a good impact on the on the children either of you.
Well, the bank of Mom and Dad. He closed that so instead of you know, you know, opening your wallet for the endless supply of five and tens and twenties when they wanted something, you know, at age eleven or twelve, he gave them ATM cards that he would load up, you know, at the beginning of the month, and then when the money was gone, the money was gone, and.
That's until the next month.
Yeah, and that's that's that's a great trick.
I got to imagine a lot of parents are listening to this and saying closing the bank of mom and dad. What happens when they burn through the ATM in week one? Now you have three weeks of whining? How do you how do you manage around that?
Yeah? That's that's tough. That's tough, monkies.
Yeah, you ignore the whining.
Apparently, plan better next month and we won't be having this conversation, right that that's really that's really pretty amazing. So it appears to me that Jonathan spent a big part of his career and I always hate this word, but democratizing good financial advice. It sounds like this initiative is the culmination of all of that, and and maybe further because he's trying to reach people that are normally completely ignored by the wealth management and mutual funds world.
Yeah, I mean we you know, part of the problem that we have is is the behavioral problem of getting people to save. And hopefully, you know, this initiat, this research project will shed a little bit of light on that. That will that will help people you know, save in their own for their for their own retirement, both through employer plans and on their own.
So, so let's talk a little bit about the behavior gap both of you have written about this. Jonathan has written extensively about it. Essentially, it's what people know they should do and then what they end up doing despite knowing what they should do. How do we, uh, how do we contextualize this behavior gap from Jonathan's perspective?
Well, I think Jonathan did something really important, which is there was a firm which I won't name, that in the nineties used to say that the behavior gap was oh seven or eight percent a year for people who didn't use stockbrokers to buy their mutual funds. And in other words, if you were willing to pay an upfront sales charge to buy a mutual fund, you would end up earning a much higher return than somebody who didn't go through a stockbroker.
Does the math bear that out?
The math does not bear that. No, No, the behavior gap is real, but it's in nowhere near that big two.
To three percent. Something along those lines are.
Mostly a little smaller.
I remember a Vanguard's study that specifically said for people, for people who have behavior issues, it's worth paying half a percent of one percent to somebody if it prevents them from making three four percent in eras I'm talking
my book, they were talking their book. How do you perceive the ability for someone to talk and invent or off the ledge when every instinct in their body is like, no, no, we want to sell now because in March o nine or March twenty twenty, this is going to get much worse than this right now.
Yeah, that's that's that's a completely separate issue than what we're talking about. I mean, you know what we're talking about is what is the gap? And the answer is it's not seven or eight percent. It's closer to one percent or one or one and a half percent, which is less than the cost of engaging conventional advice, certainly through a full service financial institution. The other issue, what you're asking is how do you prevent people from jumping
off the ledge? And the answer is that's very hard to do because you have to be able to impart a sense of financial history to people, which is something that maybe one out of fifty investors takes.
Seriously, that's a low the numbers are that low because I'm thinking about your quote about managing your own Olympics system. If you can't do that, you're going to die poor. Tell us about how all these columns and the book from Jonathan.
Well, the Olympic system, very very crudely is system one. It's the fast moving system that you know, engages when we when we see that, when we hear the hiss of the snake or the see the yellow and black stripes in our peripheral vision on the African savannahs. We overcome it with our system two, which is our our thinking part of the brain, the neocortex basically, and the neocortex has to learn something about financial history, and good luck with that.
Well, good luck with not only teaching it. But it seems that half life of financial literacy is really short that even if you teach people stuff, you got to keep drumming it in because events seem to move so fast. People kind of forget pretty quickly.
Yeah, people, people you know, do learn when they get hit over the head by two by four, which they did. And wait two thousand and you know, Einstein is supposed to have said that the most powerful force in the universe has compound interest, which of course he never said. But the most powerful force in the financial universe is amnesia. People forget it.
But what's the Galbrith quote? The one thing we learned about financial history is no one learns from financial history. So it's really true. So let's talk a little bit about this book, starting with first of all, who gets a terminal diagnosis and says, I know I will write a book. I mean, every one of us at this table have written more than one books, and I think we would all admit they're kind of a slog. Where did this come from? What was the motivation here?
You know, Jonathan never told He didn't tell me he was doing it. I don't know if he told you.
Bill, No, he did not.
I only found out about it several months after he died, and I think it was part of how he coped with knowing that, you know, his time was limited. He just wanted to make the most of the time he had left. He spent a large part of every day with family and friends and you know, creating new memories that the people who remained behind when he was gone would be able to cherish. But I think he also spent part of every day doing what he liked best, which was writing.
Yeah, where you ask Jonathan who he was and what he did, he would say, first of all, it's about my family, and then secondly, who I am is a writer and he could no sooner stop writing, as if he could stop breathing.
So the book Money and Me combines a lot of writing he did at the Humble Dollar, as well as some fairly personal reflections on his diagnosis. Is this book very different in tone and goals and ambitions and his earlier writings. What are your thoughts on this?
Yeah, it's a biography. It's a not a biography.
It's a biography, but I, having not read it yet, I suspect it's a biography with a lot of insightful lessons learned along the way.
Yeah. We covered a lot of those in the first segment of the interview, which is, you know, what's what's money for? What's life all about? What's the meaning? What's the meaning of life?
You know?
That's that's that's what he wanted to approach. He wanted to put a coda onto his life, and I think that's that's what the book was, for a CODEA.
Yeah. I mean I I've been thinking a lot about this because I mentioned Jonathan and the writing he did at the end of his life in a book I've just finished of my own, and the way I sort of came out was that I think Jonathan took heart from giving heart. He gave heart to so many people in the last year of his life by writing incredibly candidly about what is it like to know you're dying? You know, what do you have to do before you're done?
And how do you go about accomplishing everything you want to achieve in the very limited time that's left to you while retaining your dignity, while spending time with the people you love, And how do you set those priorities
and how do you put all that in context? And Jonathan got not hundreds, but thousands of emails and letters from people who were dying, people who were taking care of loved ones who were dying, people whose loved ones had died, people who were afraid of death, people who had gotten a terminal diagnosis and then gone into remission or been cured completely, and over and over again, those people just it was this incredible outpouring of gratitude and love.
And you know, the thing that I think is the biggest tribute to Jonathan is, you know, in the writing that I did about him in the last year of his life in my column and also in the newsletter I do for The Wall Street Journal, got. I easily got three four hundred emails myself. And the single most common thing that readers said about Jonathan was he was my friend. And they said that even though none of them had ever met him. They all said he was my friend. And it was true. He was because he
really cared about the average person. He loved his readers, even the ones he'd never met, and he understood that, you know, when you're an individual investor, you're just like this little piece of plankton in a sea of sharks and barracudas, and you're at the bottom of the food chain. And Jonathan was their advocate. And then when he got that terminal diagnosis, he realized he could be an advocate for an entirely new group of people, you know, those who have been touched by by terminal illness.
Yeah, he had an ability that almost no journalist has, which is that you read him and you say, this man knows my life. And even before he got his terminal diagnosis, you know, he quits City Corp. Around two thousand and eighteen or no, twenty fourteen or so, and he says, well, what am I going to do? I'm going to give back, And so he founds Humble Dollar, which you know, continues publishing even after after he's gone.
So he's created something that's still you know, was very useful while he was publishing it, and it's still providing a service. So you know, I mean that his life was service more than anything else.
Coming up, we continue our conversation with William Bernstein and jason's Wig discussing Jonathan Element's forthcoming book, Money and Me. I'm Barry Rittolts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry Riddolts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guests today are Jason Zwig and William Bernstein. We are remembering Jonathan Clements, the Humble Dollar and Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist.
He has a new book coming out posthumously, Money and Me. So let's talk a little bit about service, not just to his readers, but to his family. So if you preach delayed gratification and then you realize, hey, that window is only small, you then want some of that gratification. When I interviewed him after his diagnosis, he was planning a number of events and travel and other sorts of
things with his family. Tell us a little bit about what he got to do in the last year of his life that he might have postponed under different circumstances until years later.
Right, Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, we should be respectful of Jonathan's privacy, but I think I can share most of this.
He did, He did discuss a lot of it, and I'm assuming some of this is in the book, so I'm not asking for secrets. No, no, tell us what he was public.
I mean, his son was planning to get engaged, and got engaged and got married, and Jonathan and his wife, Elaine, got to travel to London to you know, go the wedding. Jonathan himself accelerated his engagement and marriage to Elaine, his wife. He did, he did. He organized those things knowing that they were important to him and his family. And he also went on a bunch of trips with his mom and and his siblings, and you know, he had to cancel a couple of trips because he was at various
points he was too sick to travel. But his siblings and kids would meet in Philadelphia, they would meet, they went to a couple other places together, and he just maximized the amount of time that he spent with his family, but also with his friends. I mean I visited him twice. An another mutual friend of ours from our days at Forbes Magazine went with me on one of those visits. Is this, to London, No, No, to Philadelphia huh unfortunately
to Philadelphi. Philadelphia is great, Don't get me wrong. I love Philly, but London is maybe more is more fun, maybe for an American anyway. But he and I guess the thing I would point out, because I saw this firsthand, is that that may not sound like that being a deal to most people listening or watching us, you know, sort of like, oh yeah, your time is limited, so speed stuff up and make it happen. Making it happen
isn't as easy as it sounds. I mean, you know, you're getting chemo, you're getting radiation therapy, you're getting you know, uh, surgical cement squirted into your spine, You're you know, you're getting cut open for this thing or that thing. Uh, you know, your hair is falling out eventually. You know, walking is difficult. And through all that, Jonathan was like, yeah, come on, you know, come next Tuesday. Uh, you know, I got nothing but time.
No, nothing but nothing but time when you we all have limited time, and and he knows pretty pretty realistically how short that is. It sounds like this could be a morbid or depressing category. But uh, but knowing how he discussed things after his diagnosis, I have a sneaking suspicion that this book is more uplifting than depressing. Tell us a little bit about the tone he takes in what most of us would think of as really difficult circumstances.
Well, most of the book doesn't cover his his terminal illness. That's maybe five that's maybe ten or fifteen percent of the book. And he does a beautiful job of describing just what Jason did. What he's really describing is his journey through the relationship between money and happiness and how he arrived at the place that he that he that
he did. You know, the thing that that struck me when when I would go to visit him was and talk to him on the phone, was you know, I've been in the practice of medicine, I spent a lot of time talking to dying patients, and he was just the easiest person to talk to. You would you would you would get off the phone with him, you would come off away from a visit with him, you would feel uplifted. That's I can tell you that's not true most of the time.
And does that translate into the book.
Yes, yeah, I mean what I would jump in with Barry is that I think the I mean it may sound like a strange word, but the word I guess I would use his joy. I mean, Jonathan talked about, talked and wrote about dying from the most positive perspective you could possibly imagine. And you know, it's as if he really felt that he had lived the life he wanted to live, and above all, he wanted to go out on a high note, and he wanted to bring everybody along with him.
Yeah, that was his great gift and his great endowment. We talked a bit about hedonic set point. You know, he just wasn't a glass half full kind of guy. He was a glass seven it's full kind of grind.
Well, just that headline I remember it was the Journal or the Times piece Dying as easy, planning for death as hard, just is filled with that sort of mischievous sense of humor about something that everybody else takes very seriously and when confronted with it, it's like, hey, you got no choice but to laugh and plow ahead, And that seems to be what he did.
Yeah. I mean, one of the lines he used that I'll never forget is and it was maybe the second to last phone conversation I had with him. He said, you know, when when I got my original diagnosis, they told me I had five to twelve months to live, and that was I want Now. I may not be remembering correctly. I think I think at the time he was talking with me, it was maybe thirteen months prior. And he said, so, you know, I'm I'm already playing in time. And I mean, I burst out laughing just
the way you did. My friend is dying, and I'm laughing, but I'm laughing with him as he jokes about him. Yes, And and he wasn't. It wasn't like if that if that had been me, I might have been joking, but I would have been joking to like cover my fear and whatever. And he was joking because he thought.
It was funny.
Yeah.
So, so there's a line from Howard Marx that I suspect reflects a lot of what's within this book. And I'm just curious as to your thoughts experiences, what we get when we don't get what we want and in the journey of the overlap between happiness and money and that then diagram which has I suspect less overlap than most people realize until they get that experience which might not be what they wanted. How, How has his journey evolved?
How has his perspective Jonathan's perspectives changed about his thoughts, his thoughts about money, happiness, and the purpose of living a rich life.
Yeah, I mean, I think he started out as a young man the way he describes in the book, with a conventional view of money, which is that, you know, money is to to buy things and to help you get by in life. When he started out his his career in journalism, he had credit card debt, he had student debt, and you know, probably all that he was thinking about was getting out from from under that. And unlike most people, he evolved beyond that very very very quickly.
Uh to you know, get to the higher the higher uses of money that we've been talking about.
Anything to add to that, I mean, I guess maybe the thing I would add, Barry is just that it takes a lot after all the years that I've been doing financial journalism to get me to feel I really learned something important because i've sort of, I guess I haven't seen it all, but I've seen most of it. And I really learned from Jonathan that, you know, how you live under sort of the ordinary conditions of daily life is one thing, but how you live when you've
got a death sentence is something else. And he really shows that. I'm you know, you can still celebrate, and you should, and you should figure out how to comfort the people who love you in a way that will always console them after you're gone. And you know, the book really shows that, of course we're all afraid of dying, but we're probably afraid of it for the wrong reasons.
And I think what Jonathan really showed is the thing you should be afraid of about dying is going out the wrong way, like not giving the people who will live after you the positive things that you can give them as gifts. And that's what he did.
Yeah. And the other thing which he was aware of is he he realized he was a very positive person and that he was dealing with his terminal illness as well as any person could, and he was much more acutely aware of how much harder it was for the people around him, and he talked about that a lot, about about how hard it wasn't, particularly on his kids.
That makes perfect sense. So so last question. If Jonathan were here, what do you think he would want the takeaway to be from the book about the relationship between money and a life well lived?
He would tell you to figure out who the heck you are and what you really enjoy doing, and that's what the money is for.
Sounds wise, Jason, you want to.
I have I have nothing to add.
Did we did we miss anything? Is there something I haven't brought up that you guys? Because I don't want this to be a morbid conversation. We're all solemn, but I know each of you have a long and positive relationship with Jonathan, So I don't want this all to come across as morbid, because just because it involves death, it doesn't mean it's said or morbid. What else do you want listeners to take away from Jonathan's life, his work, his books? What should people be aware that this isn't
a downbeat book, This isn't depressing. We're being respectful, but at the same time, he was a happy, joyful person.
We don't want to get into anything that's morbid, but you know, or when I was in My dad died when I was in college, when I was twenty two, and I remember the thing that he was most worried about as he like, as he lay dying, because he died of lung cancer. He kept saying to me, I don't want you to remember me like this, you know, as a sick person. And I kept saying to him, I'm not going to remember you like this. And I couldn't know that that was true, but it was. I
don't remember my dad as a sick person. I remember him as this incredibly vital, physically strong, you know, mentally agile, impressive person. And what I will always remember about Jonathan is every time I think of him, I hear him laughing. That's the first thing that comes in my head. Is he didn't just laugh, He cackled, and his laughter was contagious and it never stopped. The last conversation I had with him, he was laughing at himself at how you know,
dying with such a weird thing. And you know, if people only knew what it was like, could they, you know.
They wouldn't fear it. They wouldn't well, they would fear it less. Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate you guys coming in to talk about the life and times of Jonathan Clements. It was a absolutely unique life, one that left behind a tremendous legacy for all of his not just friends and family, but readers, the ability to touch tens of thousands of people and in a very positive way. It
is a very very rare thing. I hope people appreciate the conversation not as a morbid remembrance, but as a hopeful and uplifting one for somebody who left a very positive mark behind.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, gentlemen for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Jason Dwig and William Bernstein remembering the lifetimes and writings of Jonathan Clements in anticipation of his final book, Money and Me, coming out May twenty sixth, twenty twenty sixth. I would be remiss if I didn't thank the Cracked team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my podcast producer.
I'm Barry Ridolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio