Today our guest is Andrew Tobias, who you may know as the author of “The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need.” Andy Tobias graduated from Harvard, and he has written for a number of magazines, including New York Magazine, Esquire, Time, Parade, Harvard Magazine, and the New York Times Sunday magazine. He has written 12 books, and he continues to do a lot of great stuff in the country, whether it's finance-related or not finance-related. We were very excited to chat with Andy, and we are sure you will enjoy all of his insights as well.
Andy Tobias' Early Years
Your work has affected me personally, and I've just gotten done introducing you before I brought you on. But let's hear a little bit from you. We want to hear about your upbringing and maybe how it affected your views on money.
“I had great success in choosing my parents. When I was 4, I got $4. That was 71 years ago. I don't really remember that, but I remember getting $5 when I was 5 and $6 when I was 6. Then, I was hooked. When I was 10, my grandfather gave my brother and me each 10 shares of General Motors and 10 shares of General Dynamics. Actually, it's a little embarrassing, but I started looking at the stock pages every day and nothing ever happened. It was the most boring thing. If you're going to give your kid 10 shares of something, please make it one of these ridiculous volatile stocks that's going to go to zero, but at least it'll be fun. They will learn not to take terrible risks. Owning 10 shares of General Dynamics or General Motors was so boring, but we did learn a little bit about investing.
I spent three months behind the Iron Curtain when I was 16. I came back a little Communist for about five minutes until I wound up running the student businesses in college and going to work for a company called National Student Marketing Corporation after college. That stock went from 6 to 140 in 18 months. With stock options worth a fortune, at least in my terms, it turned out that the creative accounting that the company was practicing was so creative you could really only call it fraudulent accounting. So, the president went to jail. I went to business school, wrote a book about it, and here we are.”
Tell us about your education. You did undergraduate at Harvard as well as an MBA there, correct?
“I majored in Slavic languages and literature, which means that I read “War and Peace” in English in the trot. I read the little Cliffs Notes things, because I was not a good student. The real world was much more interesting to me. Every day, I would ride my bike up to Harvard Student Agencies, which is a little student-run business that rented the refrigerators and sold class rings and all those things that undergraduates do to make a little extra money in college. It was so much fun. Then they let me run a thing called “Let's Go: The Student Guide to Europe,” which at the time was just one book for Europe. I was a little business guy. I was not a good student. My brother was Summa Cum Laude. I wasn't Summa, I wasn't Magna. I was barely in the top 60% or something, but I sure did sell a lot of “Let's Go: The Student Guide to Europe.” I've been interested in business and money forever.”
Where has that taken you in your career? Tell us some of the things you've done.
“I expected after my high-flying stand as a 21-year-old vice president of National Student Marketing Corporation that I would surely do something that involved lots of assistants and junior vice presidents working for me. While I was in business school, I did get an offer from Boston Consulting Group, which made me feel good. But New York Magazine had put me on the cover when I was just starting business school because of the article and the book I wrote about the fraud that I was involved with, even though I was innocent. The company didn't do so well.
New York Magazine asked me to come write for them after I got out of business school. I told them I was not a writer. I only wrote that thing because I happened to be in the middle of it. I had a choice between going to Boston Consulting Group or working for New York Magazine. Happily, I chose the latter. I've been writing magazine articles and books, and I had some computer software called Managing Your Money before Quicken for a bunch of years. I had a very good fortune from that.
Then somebody called from the White House and said, “If a president of the United States asked you to be treasurer of the Democratic party, would you say yes?” I said, “Richard, what are you calling me for? You clearly dialed the wrong number.” It was supposed to be a two-year ceremonial kind of gig, and it wound up being 18 years. I didn't get paid to do that job, but it wasn't full-time. So, I had that detour, and now I'm 150 years old and I'm still keeping busy.”
The Creation of The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need
You've been publishing financial books since 1971, really. I count at least 12 books. How many books have you actually published? Not including new editions and translations.
“I hear you're a terrific doctor, but you also count perfectly. That's exactly the right number. The very first one was the book about national student marketing. It was sort of a financial book because it was a cautionary tale. But at New York Magazine, everybody thought, ‘Oh my God, he's been to business school. He writes about all this stuff. He's got to be so smart.' Everybody from the receptionist to the editor in chief would ask me what to do with their money. I always wondered why they were asking me. I didn't feel like I knew anything special. I know Ben Franklin said, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.' I know you spend less than you make. Brilliant insights like that. But I did my best at it.
It also got kind of tedious because I would say the same thing over and over again. The advice would vary a little bit if I was talking to the editor who had a big income and lots of rich friends. That would be a little different advice than for the receptionist, but not that different. I realized rather than me doing this over and over and over again that I should just write it down once, and then I could give it to everybody. I already had some pretty good success by then with a book or two, not specifically about money. So I called my editor and said, ‘Hey, I have this little investment guide. It's tiny.' The virtue of it, especially back then, it was much smaller than it is now because the world's got more complicated. I asked my editor to publish it.
They looked and said it was not for them. I said, ‘Come on. I mean, you don't even have to give me an advance. I don't want to start with some other publisher. Give it a try. Why not?' I told them my last book was on the New York Times bestseller list for them. They told me no. So, I took it someplace else, and it has sold millions of copies by now. It's the luckiest thing I ever did. At first, the money was what was so great, frankly. I mean, I got paid a lot of money, the paperback, I couldn't believe they were going to buy it in paperback on top of the hardcover. Now it is nice to get the royalties, but the emails I get and the letters from people, ‘I bought your book 40 years ago and we just retired and I give it to all my kids at graduation,' and all those kind of things. That's the royalty that keeps paying.
It's been a lot of fun but also embarrassing because it's called The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need. I explain in the book how that title came to be, but if it's the only one you'll ever, ever need, I shouldn't really have to revise it, right? But they do things without my permission, by the way. They invented the internet. They invent IRAs and Roth IRAs. Then crypto and meme stocks. Every five or six years, I find myself revising it. It's really fun to do because much of it stays exactly the same and I'm very lazy, so I don't have to rewrite it. But then there are new challenges. What do you say about crypto and about all these things? It's been fun and it just came out again and there won't be another one for probably five or six or seven years, by which time I'll be 156.”
You're in a very select group of people whose writing ability I don't just admire. I'm, frankly, jealous of it. That list is very short. It includes basically three other people: Morgan Housel, Bill Bernstein, and Jonathan Clemens. Your writing is both useful and entertaining. It doesn't sound like you had any formal training in writing. How did you learn to write so well?
“First of all, you're very kind. In the ninth grade, I had a teacher named Dana. I might get even a little bit choked up because nobody remembers Dana. But he was the class right after lunch, my English teacher in my high school. Just after lunch is not a good time for 14-year-olds. They don't pay a lot of attention to somebody who has a monotonal kind of expression. But he taught us how to write. What is a semicolon? What are ellipses? It wasn't the kind of writing I do now because now I break the rules all the time, but at least I know I'm breaking the rules. Now, I write the way I talk, for better or worse. Probably a little bit worse, as people are beginning to realize. I tried the hand stuff, that's the punctuation. I tried to get the hands in there, but again, it comes back to a good choice of parents. My dad was terrific. He was the original Don Draper basically—not literally—of Mad Men. He won all sorts of awards for his copywriting. My dad was a very good writer. And maybe I picked up a little from him. Thank you for the compliment and letting me tell you about my dad.”
More information here:
Best Financial Books for Doctors
Have a Financial Plan Before Worrying About Investments
The bestseller here, the most popular one, it sounds like, is pretty clearly The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, which I read pretty early on in my financial literacy journey. I don't know how many editions ago it was. Probably three or four editions ago. But I actually have that book fairly high on my recommended list in the personal finance section. I think the book section on personal finance is even better than the investing information you include in it. Why do you think it's so important to take care of the basics and have a financial plan in place before worrying about investments?
“Well, first of all, most people, not your audience, your audience is doing very well, by and large, which is awesome and well deserved. By the way, sorry for the digression. But my plan is medical school should be free, and it should be paid for by doubling tuition at law school. Too many lawyers and it's too hard for docs. But anyway, the basics of personal finance: having an overall strategy and getting into habits that will allow you to come out at a few thousand dollars ahead each year or a few hundred for just starting out, instead of a few thousand behind, is critical. If you're a doc, everyone wants to lend you money. It's easy to build up all kinds of debt. But unless it's done very well and with lots of good strategy behind it, you don't want to be in debt at all. Your mortgage, of course, is different.
From my point of view, most of the people in this country, again, not your audience, they don't have any money. We have all kinds of problems. My only real talent in this thing is to try to make it fun enough so people get motivated to actually try getting better habits. Make a game out of it. If you have a goal, you're not sacrificing a night out at the movies or sacrificing a Starbucks or whatever. Actually, this is part of a goal where, in three years, you're going to be out of debt, and in 10 years, you're going to have half a million dollars.
Then all of a sudden, you're doing it because you want to, not because, ‘Oh gosh, I can't afford to go to Starbucks or people are telling me not to.' Basically, I try to help people own their financial futures. If you make a plan, at first, it's very hard as with any kind of new habit. But once you get going, it becomes part of who you are and you wind up being the person who doesn't smoke and has an extra million dollars when they're my age instead of having no money and lung cancer. That one habit of not smoking, I tell people, forget the whole thing about health. Think about the money. That's why you shouldn't smoke. And it's interesting, that's more of a motivator for some people.”
I've been using that in my practice. I think you mentioned that in your book at some point. I have had that financial discussion with patients many times. “Well, let's see. What are you paying for a pack: $8? How much do you smoke? Pack a day. Well, what's that work out to, $240 a month? That's $3,000 a year. That's a pretty nice vacation down to Mexico. Would you like to go to Mexico every year, or would you like to keep smoking?” It's the first time they've ever added that up.
“It's so powerful and also it's tax-free. It's like getting a $5,000 raise. Better still, if you put it in a Roth IRA and you start compounding it, it makes an amazing difference. Also, not to belabor the point, but your life insurance premiums will be a lot lower if you're not a smoker. You save a great deal of money there. You'll have fewer sick days and less of all the other things that you don't have to buy. Here I am prescribing to you. You're going to be healthier. It saves a fortune.
These basic things like making a budget sound so boring. I tell people, ‘Well, start by making a budget.' And somebody finally said, ‘How do you do that?' Which is why I wound up writing about it. It's in a chapter in the book, but I think I first wrote it for Parade. I used to have the cover of Parade Magazine one Sunday a year or something. It was so fun because it takes some real thought to remember everything you need in the budget. It's a really useful exercise. Once you get in the habit of keeping track, then you don't even have to think about it. But to get into the habits, you've got to organize yourself and make a plan and see the difference it can make and find ways that you can. Instead of coming out $2,000 a year behind, you come out $4,000 a year ahead. The difference over a lifetime is enormous. Last I looked, the money the bank would pay you on your savings was a couple of percent. The money they would charge you on your credit card was around 20%. A lot of people who may even have some money in a savings account, they're earning 2% before tax with their right hand and paying 20%, which is not tax-deductible on a credit card with their left hand. They need to get organized.”
More information here:
Financial Planning for Doctors. You Need An Investing Plan!
Changes in the Financial World Over the Last Several Decades
Now, the updates in this book, the number of additions in it is significant. I mean, this book has existed in six different decades. Take us on a journey through history over that time period. What are the changes you've had to make to this book over the years? What changed in the financial world that made you say, “I have to do a new edition?”
“There are two kinds of things. One would be just world events and where we are in the cycle. It annoys some people because not everybody agrees with my perspective, but I usually recap where we've been and what the next few years may have in store. In the last edition, I said interest rates are really low. They're not going to go lower. At some point, they're going to start to go higher. When they do, that's very tough on long-term bonds. It's a disaster for long-term bonds and higher interest rates are a challenge for stocks as well as for real estate. When I first wrote the book, it was just coming off of enormous inflation. Treasury bills were yielding 15%. Last year, they were yielding a 10th of a percent. A huge difference. We had this long period from 1982, basically, down to about five minutes ago when the wind was in our back and long-term interest rates were just unbelievably low. Just when you thought they couldn't get any lower, they kept getting lower. That's fantastic for the stock market. It's fantastic for business and for everything else.
In the last edition I said, I don't know how long, it's not going to get any better. At some point, it's going to get worse. In this edition, which I finished writing a few months ago, I said it looks like it really will get worse because of the stimulus and with the state of the world. Anyway, one part of the new editions is just to put things in historical context and help people see where we are in these long cycles of interest rates, productivity, and technology. The other part of it is mechanical. Before there were IRAs, you couldn't write about them. Before there were Roth IRAs, which were better than traditional IRAs for almost everybody, you couldn't write about them. There were mutual funds, but then there were no-load mutual funds. And then there were exchange-traded funds which have an even lower expense ratio. That kind of thing.
Now, in this edition, I've added crypto and I've added venture investing, which is very fun. I've talked a little bit about meme stocks and Robinhood and all the things that people spend a lot of time thinking about. You've got to be very careful and know what you're doing because most of this stuff is not a good idea for people.”
Crypto is Not An Investment
Let's go through those three things that you added in the most recent edition of the book. You include crypto assets in the book and you've been observing investments for a long time. As you mentioned, you're 150 years old. I'm curious after watching markets for decades and decades: what's your take on crypto?
“Crypto is not an investment. People who understand investing would agree. It's not productive. It doesn't pay dividends. It doesn't pay interest. It's not an investment. It's basically a substitute for money. But it's not a good substitute for money for two reasons. Money is two things. It's a medium of exchange, and it's also an accounting mechanism. Corporations do their bookkeeping in dollars in the US and much of the world, not in Ethereum or Ripple or Bitcoin or whatever. Bitcoin is so volatile, obviously, that it's not like a medium of exchange, and it's certainly not a way to do accounting. As money, it's not great. Also, it takes so much energy to make it. I was just was watching David Pogue on CBS. He had a great little 7-minute segment on all this. He went through a lot of the caveats, but he missed the one that nobody ever thinks about, but at some point, it's going to be an issue. I have tons of friends, and I'm sure you do, too, that have made a fortune on Bitcoin, at least on paper if they haven't cashed it in yet. That's great and hooray for them. But if you spend Bitcoin, let's say, you buy a Tesla with Bitcoin. Even if you buy just a coffee at some coffee shop that takes Bitcoin, technically that's a taxable event. If you're buying the Tesla or the cup of coffee with Bitcoin selling at $30,000 today—or whatever's going to be—but you paid only $1,500 for this $30,000 Bitcoin, it's almost entirely a capital gain, either long term or short term. You probably won't be audited, but technically you have to pay tax on all the Bitcoin that you spent. I don't think people are taking that into account.
It may never go down from wherever it is today, but there's no particular reason for it to go up any faster than inflation. It's not the best inflation hedge. What it really is, it's a hedge against collapse of the government and the world order, or at least the order in the particular country you live in. Most of us, the US. If you want to bet against the success of our government and society, it could be a good bet. I tried to buy some when it got $30,000 back down to $3,000, I just figured I'll buy 10 of these things and I'll have something fun to write about when I lose it all. I didn't wind up doing it for kind of a boring, mechanical reason, but if I had it, I wouldn't probably sell it, at least not too much of it, because it's fun. You'll feel like an idiot if it goes to a million dollars of Bitcoin and you sold it.
But a much better hedge against inflation for the long term are stocks, real estate, private businesses, or your own education. Getting another degree to enhance your earning power. I don't think that ultimately the US government is going to say, ‘Yeah, forget the dollar. Bitcoin is how we want to collect our taxes.' Anyway, that's crypto. I'm not a big fan, as you can tell. Sorry to go on at such length.”
More information here:
Bitcoin Is Just like AOL; It Won’t Win the Race for Best Cryptocurrency
Venture Investing
“I am a big fan with an enormous caveat that you have to assume you're going to lose your money. This has to be money you can afford to lose, which is true with the stock market or anything else. But I had so much fun in the book. I wrote a long paragraph in the book. I wrote about how I lost $30,000 with this thing. I lost $50,000 in that. When I was putting it together, I went, ‘Wow, I've lost even more than I thought in all these things. I've lost money in everything you can imagine.' But every once in a while, you hit one that works.
If anybody drinks Honest Tea, we sold that to Coca-Cola, and it worked out pretty well. I had another investment that I didn't really know exactly what it was, but it was something having to do with logistics. The trucks would come back with something in them instead of empty. I vaguely remember the name. Many, many years went by. It was going well at first, but then something bad happened and I lost track of it. I have an email account, you may do the same thing, which isn't my best email account. I have one for all the newsletters and all the spam and all this stuff. I run my eye over it every once in a while. I saw a sender from Case Stack. I thought it sounded familiar. It had an attachment, so I thought it was trying to put a virus on my computer. But I decided to read the email and not open the attachment. The email said, ‘This isn't the email we sent you last week. This is something else you have to sign.' I said, ‘Oh, OK. They're finally going bankrupt and they want me to sign waivers or whatever happens when they go bankrupt and you're a shareholder.;
But I looked and sure enough, the previous week they had sent me something with another attachment. And that email said they had just sold the company for $252 million. I'd like to tell you I own 10% of the company. Not quite, but I own enough that it made up for an awful lot of mistakes. The thing that I love about venture investing, other than it's fun and interesting, is depending on the venture, of course. But the ones I tend to invest in, if they work, they will make the world better.”
What is a reasonable percentage of your portfolio to have in something like venture investing?
“For most people, zero. But it depends on your overall circumstances. One way to do it is to choose a fund where rather than you picking the venture yourself, you can diversify because you might be in 10 or 20 or 30 with professionals who spend a lot of time trying to figure out which ones are going to work. One of the funds that you can go into actually has a way to get people like us, who normally wouldn't be able to get into the really hot Silicon Valley stuff like Kleiner Perkins or something like that. They have figured out a way to get the little guy into those things.
In my case, it's probably half my net worth, but I'm not typical. I'm very lucky. Everybody's different. This sort of segues into another thought if I can offer it, which is, you're a doctor, you're a surgeon, you're a dentist, you're doing incredibly important work. It's wonderful. Your goal isn't to become the richest man in the world or be able to go into space on your own spaceship or anything. You have this great life. Most of your money should be over time, at least the money that you want in the stock market, which is most of it for your long-term money. Most of it should be in index funds and you will do better than 90% of your friends and neighbors—and even those of your friends who went to business school instead of to medical school.
Index funds have the lightest possible jockey. Think of mutual funds as horses in a horse race. An index fund will have a 20-pound jockey. An actively traded fund will have 100- or a 200-pound jockey. Especially when you figure some of the tax consequences, it could be a 300- or 400-pound jockey. Over the long run, most of the money should be on a regular basis of dollar-cost averaging and should be in index funds. But if you're human, and I think virtually all of the audience are, it's so boring. I think to carve out 10% or 20%—not more than 20% and it is kind of meaningless to be less than 10%—for speculative things in the stock market, not where you're trying to find crazy risks and you don't have to do it all at once.
If you find some new medical device or something that you think is going to be great—and it hasn't been approved yet, but you know about it, because this is part of your field and you think this company could be really good—put a little money into that. The ones you lose on up to $3,000 a year lowers your taxable income. And that saves you a little bit on taxes. The ones you win on, and every so often you might have one where you do make 10 or 20 times your money, as long as you've held it for more than a year and a day, first of all, that's a nice, big win. But if you do any charitable giving, it shouldn't be with money, and it shouldn't even be with stock, although that's a great way to do it. It should be through a thing called either the Fidelity charitable gift fund or the Vanguard charitable gift fund or the Schwab gift fund. I don't want to go through all the details, but it makes it so much more convenient and so much more tax effective.
You have fun. Most of your money is sensibly invested, but you have some fun. And you have the tax control to come out ahead, even if you break even. I hope you do better than break even, but if you just break even, after-tax you come out ahead. So that's a little piece of this.”
More information here:
10 Reasons I Invest in Index Funds
Meme Stocks
Speaking of index funds and maybe the opposite of index funds, you include a section about meme stocks in your newest edition. I understand you have a connection here. You've got a cousin that's the CEO of AMC. Give us your take on meme stocks.
“A good example of meme stocks is what happened with GameStop. GameStop was in big trouble, and a lot of very sophisticated professional investors shorted the stock, knowing it was going to go down because it had to go bankrupt. Somehow on Reddit, the little guys were angry about this, and rightly so. It’s tough being a little guy when there were so many people with 400-foot yachts and all this stuff, and they said, heck no, we're going to buy this. It was $3 or $4 a share. They said I'm going to buy 50 shares for $200. And millions of people bought the shares.
The people who shorted either had to—or got scared and started buying to—cover their shorts. The stock at one point, I think it hit $480 up from $4 or $2 or whatever it was. This was the triumph of the little guy, not because GameStop was suddenly going to make so much profit and pay out so much dividends for any business reason. It's just the crowd; they like tulips. As long as it's going up, it's going up. As long as someone will pay more.
My baby cousin, who is not 150, is the CEO of AMC. I love the movies and I love my cousin and I love popcorn, but they were in pretty rough shape. Because with COVID, nobody was going to the movies and the movie business wasn't spectacular because of Netflix and other streaming options. The stock went from a couple of bucks up to, I think, $78 or something, which makes 35 times your money in a few months. That's pretty appealing. Anyway, I could tell you lots more about that, but suffice to say, I have a wonderful cousin. I don't think it was a good buy at $78. I didn't buy it at $78.
Meme stocks are for you if you want to play musical chairs or you want to go to Las Vegas. Obviously some people go to Las Vegas and they hit the jackpot. But it's not because they were so smart in Las Vegas, unless they are counting cards, in which case they're going to get their knees broken. The slow but steady wins the race. My job in the book is basically to try to make it fun or give people enough confidence so they don't spend so much money on professional advice. It's going to be well-intended, but if spending $2,000 a year on professional advice is going to have you do really well, and $6,000 will make you do three times, it doesn't work that way. The professionals do average. They have good years; they have bad years. But by and large, with rare exceptions, you can't have everybody doing above average. The trick is to keep your expenses really low, which is why you want a 20-pound jockey, not a 200-pound jockey.”
High Earners' Financial Mistakes
Our audience is composed of high-income professionals, most of them doctors. What financial mistakes do you see those folks making specifically? And do you have any specific advice for them?
“I do know that doctors and dentists and so on are real targets. Every life insurance agent in the world wants to sell whole life or variable life, universal life, one of these life insurance products that are impossible to understand and compare, which is one of the reasons that they're so profitable for the insurance companies. Your audience are targets for all kinds of sales pitches. You may need life insurance, but you probably want inexpensive term life insurance that doesn't require a salesman. There are some people who look for somebody with a very large medical practice. You have an accountant, talk to your accountant. Don't listen to me about some of this stuff, because there are situations where you might want a different setup because of taxes and one thing or another.
But by and large, you don't want that. You don't want to be sold annuities by an annuity salesman who gets a huge commission. One of the things the book does is go through all these things to be aware of, to arm you for the conversation when your college classmate, who may be a terrific woman or a lovely guy, tries to sell you something. They would like to see you do well, but they make a big commission and they persuaded themselves that this is something you should buy. The most important thing is don't spend a lot of money on the expenses on the fractional cost of this stuff, because that does not add to your return.
It used to be that people assumed you could get 10% a year in the stock market. At least. How could you not? So, to pay 1%, okay. But 1% is 10% of 10%. So, 10% is not nothing. If we have a period where you only get 3% or 4% in the stock market, 1% of 3% or 4% is a lot of it. If you say, how could we ever have a period like that? I remember 1966 when the Dow Jones industrial average broke through a thousand for the first time in history. It didn't close above a thousand, but intraday broke through a thousand. It took 16 years to get back to 1,000. Sixteen years is a long time to wait. Somebody listening is in their 30s or 40s, 16 years to break even on your stock in GameStop or whatever is a long time. It's really important to keep expenses low. The easiest way to improve your return is not to give up expenses that you don't have to give up.”
More information here:
What Is a Financial Advisor? How to Choose the Right Fit
Inflation
Inflation is now over 8%. You were a columnist, an author, the last time we had significant inflation back in the '70s. What advice do you have for our listeners regarding inflation now?
“I like to think this is going to be different because aspects of it are very much tied to the aftermath of COVID, all that pent-up demand and obviously Ukraine and oil and oil prices or energy prices go into everything. It may well be that over the next year or two, we get this more or less under control and things come back to more or less normal. We could have a recession in the meantime, I don't know. I think we're done with crazy low interest rates, but you never know. It's also possible that it's going to be tougher than that and it'll be inflation of the type that we had in the '70s. Eventually, we will fix it because we have to. Everybody knows we have to. The Fed knows we have to, the Congress knows we have to, the voters know we have to. We'll fix it, but it may be painful.
One thing to know is it's not going to be forever. I don't think the dollar can become worthless the way the Russian ruble did in 1917 or the way the German mark did in the Weimar Republic in the '30s where you needed a wheelbarrow of cash. No. 1, I think we may get off easy, or at least it's certainly going to end. I don't think it's going to be like it was in the '70s. I could be wrong. But the other thing, an even more important thing is, whatever happens, people are going to need places to live and places to work and the things that they buy.
Think of it this way. You own a house. Oh, it's top of the value. Well, it's still a four-bedroom house. It hasn't doubled in bedrooms or in bathrooms or in swimming pools. You still own a house. It's kept up with inflation. If you own stock in a company, it depends on the company and how it's run. But basically over the long run, no matter what happens with inflation, your shares in that company could not only keep up with inflation, but because the company is productive and maybe growing and becoming more productive with better technology, you can do great with the company. So, you certainly don't want a lot of money sitting in the bank. Most importantly, you don't want any of it in long-term bonds because you're going to get killed in inflation.”
I thought I had a deal with the Fed. I thought the deal was if inflation starts going up, they're going to raise interest rates. I don't feel like they kept up their end of the deal. They kept them low for so long that now even these six little raises they're planning this year, it feels like too little too late. I mean, 10-year Treasury yields are 2.8%. My high yield savings account is paying 0.5% and inflation is at 8%. What do you think about the path the Fed steered us down the last couple of years? Are they behind the eight ball?
“We have big challenges ahead, that's for sure. I don't know if the Fed did it wrong. I do think the stimulus may have been, there were reasons for it, but to send money to people who didn't lose their jobs and send them $1,400, it didn't seem to me as targeted as to send it to the people who actually needed it. There are things that in hindsight, especially if there weren't the mechanics, that could be very difficult. It's one thing to have the idea. It's another thing to do it in a way that doesn't involve fraud and months and months of adjudication and all that. There are things that probably could have been done better, but people weren't thinking about inflation until quite recently. But we did have the possibility of a global depression and collapse. Those are very hard to come back from. You don't flip the switch on that. It is possible the Fed and the stimulus saved the world from global depression, which also can lead to more wars and to civil war and to horrible things. The bad things that haven't happened, they could have happened and we kept them from happening. I think that we should feel pretty good that we kept them from happening. Now we have some inflation to deal with. In the next couple of years, hopefully, we'll get it under control, ideally without a recession. But we'll see what happens.
I got to interview Paul Volcker when he was chairman of the Fed in that period when inflation was 15% and Treasury bills were yielding 15% and mortgages were as much as 18%. Crazy times. It was the most interesting few hours I ever spent. He's the one who put the screws on the whole thing and gave us this terrible recession but killed inflation. It turns out that the job of being the chairman of the Fed, even though you've got to be a great economist and all that, you're really the national psychologist. You've got to try to get in the collective head of the American people on what are they expecting. How do you get them not to expect inflation? Because if people expect inflation, then we're going to have inflation. Right now, people can absolutely imagine and they should imagine that it will be tamed because it will be. But anyhow, Volker was a hero and we had a very rough recession that was necessary. This time, we absolutely may not need a terrible recession, and we may not even need a recession at all. Oil prices can come down very quickly. Some months ago, not more than a year ago, people who own oil stocks were moaning that the price was so low and now no one thinks it can ever get low again. It's going to come back down in part because renewables are getting so much more competitive. It's cheaper now, renewables, than coal and fossil fuels in many situations. And that's just accelerating. There are tons of reasons to be optimistic.”
Investors have to be optimistic. That's kind of the nature of being an investor. And usually, despite the fact that being a pessimist sounds smarter, the optimists have won historically.
Political Polarization
Let's get even more political for a minute. Not for a long tangent, but just a brief one. Although you count many Republicans among your friends, you served as the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee for many years. Now, many people view today's political polarization as a huge problem. I'm curious if you do, and if so, what do you think should be done about it?
“It is a terrible problem with polarization and it's playing right into Putin's hands. I think he had something to do with Brexit. I think that he wants us to be as polarized as possible, because if we're polarized, we don't get anything done and it could lead to all kinds of terrible stuff. It's not only Putin, of course, but there's a lot of money to be made in the extremes. You raise a lot more money, whether you're a media outlet or a political fundraiser, if you scream and shout horrible things that might have a grain of truth but are so overdone on either side. It's a terrible problem.
Compromise is really important if we're going to get anywhere. The solutions are fixing the gerrymandering. There are ways to do that. Also, fixing the primaries, especially mailing ballots for primaries, so that you don't have to be a real super-duper activist to take the time to go to the primary. We should get rid of the caucuses. It should all be primaries. It should be easy to vote in the primaries so more people do it—not just the extremes – so average people do it. There should be rank choice voting. It's also called instant runoff voting, which means you vote for Ralph Nader as your first choice because, ‘Oh my God, he's fantastic.' Or you vote for Marjorie Taylor Greene because, ‘Oh my God, this is the real truth.' But if need be, as your second choice, you would vote for Gore instead of Bush, let's say, or you would vote for whoever is on the other side instead of Marjorie Taylor Greene. That gives moderates and it gives all the politicians some reason to try to appeal to people in the middle, people who are not rabid left-wing or rabid right-wing. Those structural changes which are possible, and we're making some progress in some of them, that would help to deal with the polarization, and we need to.”
Tobias' Crusade Against Smoking
Another area of your life that I think people would find really interesting is you have been on a bit of a personal crusade against smoking. Can you tell us about some of the things you did to fight smoking?
“I'm just a bit player in this, but I did a couple of things. Every summer, airplanes would go up and down the beach with these banners, ‘Newport, the perfect recess.' There were a couple of others. I forget now. But after a couple of summers, I called up and I found it's not that expensive to get one of these planes. So, I hired a plane to follow the other plane. And mine said, ‘Newport, the permanent recess.' And I had another one, ‘Larry Trish sells cancer sticks.' I had all these planes following their planes. The following summer, they stopped.
The other thing I did was, I went to Russia back when everything was changing. I had read in the Wall Street Journal that you could buy a minute of time or 30 seconds on the nightly news for $3,000. I figured, ‘Wow, I have $3,000. I even have $30,000. I'll buy 10 30-second spots.' By the time I got over there for various reasons, it turned out it wasn't 30 seconds. It was a minute. And it wasn't $3,000. It was $1,200. There were only three networks back then. For 15 nights, night after night, on all three networks in December when it was way too dark and cold to go outside during the nightly news, and you couldn't mute the TV and go to the other room for beer because they didn't have remote controls, I ran my spots. This was around 1992, and things were pretty primitive back then. I annoyed the entire former Soviet Union with my dreadful high school Russian. The ads were different, but the tagline of each one was, ‘Kids, don't become slaves to the tobacco companies like your parents.' My reasoning was you can't tell kids what not to do, because that's not going to work. But if you tell them that their parents are kind of dumb, that they might react to.
Anyway, I know it annoyed the whole former Soviet Union because about six months later, somebody sent me a tape. Somebody on a big popular comedy show made a spoof about me. They had spoofed my terrible American accent and all that. So yeah, kids, don't smoke. Doctors know this better than anybody. You have shown how you can turn it into a financial thing and get people to stop smoking that way, too.”
Our time is getting short, but tell us what you're working on now.
“The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need. And what am I working on right now? I have little daily blog posts. I've done about 6,500 of them. If you've missed any of them, they're all archived. If you have two minutes, go at andrewtobias.com. Sometimes I offer irresponsible stock recommendations for money that you can truly afford to lose. I always stress that. As my readers can tell you, we truly have lost on many of them, but others have worked out quite well. But much of it by now is of politics and what's going on in Ukraine. After 200,000 years, when nothing pretty much happened until somebody invented fire and somebody thought of the wheel. These were big things and language was good. But basically, nothing happened until what, 10,000 years ago? Then the Romans learned how to do indoor plumbing, but they forgot. So, that didn't really count. Gutenberg is 500 years ago with the printing press. That was pretty big. Since then, it has just speeded up until what, 150 years ago, information could never travel more than seven miles an hour, as fast as a horse could run or whatever.
The next 10 or 20 years will set the trajectory. We are either on the cusp of unparalleled prosperity as the species. Cancer, in a few years, you will just take a pill and the cancer's gone. The vaccines we're able to do now, which by the way, were DARPA. Hooray for Moderna and for Pfizer. But it's DARPA that did the underlying, which is the big, bad government that got this thing going. You are on a cusp of unbelievable prosperity, where almost everybody could have a decent, comfortable life and all that. Or more likely, probably, we're about to hurtle off the rails as a species. The cockroaches will be here, but we won't. There are so many ways this could go wrong.
This is a time to pay attention and to figure out how you want to live your life and how much of the world’s resources . . . can you have a good time living light on the land? If the only way to be happy is to have something that consumes a huge amount of fossil fuel and so on and so forth. Well, OK. But if you could find another way, it might be better and might save you a lot of money and set you up for a better retirement.”
Pace Yourself
Our time is now short, but you've got the ear of 30,000 or 40,000 high income professionals, mostly doctors. What have we not yet talked about today that you think they should know?
“I guess one of the things that I like to say—and many of your listeners know this—but I think that happiness, which is after all what we're all after, is a matter of direction, not amount. Especially for your younger listeners. I think if you had two families: one earning $50,000 a year but somehow knowing that it's headed up to $150,000, and another earning $500,000 a year but somehow knowing it's headed down to $250,000. I think the first family earning $50,000 is a happier family or happier individual doc than the second, because things are looking up. Things are going in the right direction. Things can get better every year.
What I counsel everybody, and I apologize, because you have a very sophisticated audience so this may be too simple minded, but pace yourself. Pace yourself. A luxury, once sampled, becomes a necessity. Maybe you can afford, especially if you take a loan, and you can certainly get a loan as we were talking about before. You can afford to go first class, but once you get used to first class, it's so depressing to have to go to Greece or to the Bahamas or someplace in coach. Anyhow, it's a direction, not amount.”
Andy, thank you so much for being on the White Coat Investor podcast today. For the listeners out there, check out his book. If you have not yet read this one, this is one of my favorite books on both personal finance and investing: The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need.
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Full Transcript
Intro:
This is the White Coat Investor podcast, where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high-income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
This is White Coat Investor podcast number 261 – “The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need” with Andrew Tobias.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Have you ever considered a different way of practicing medicine? Whether you are burned out, need a change of pace, or looking to supplement your income, locum tenens might be the solution for you.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Not sure where to start? Locumstory.com is the place where you can get real, unbiased answers to your questions. They answer basic questions like, “What is locum tenens?” to more complex questions about pay ranges, taxes, various specialties, and how locum tenens can work for you. Go to locumstory.com and get the answers.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Welcome back to the podcast. I missed you guys. It's a great week. Wonderful spring weather here in Utah, which means it might be a blizzard or it might be sunny and hot. You never know out here. Spring is a weird season in the Intermountain West.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Our quote of the day today comes from Randall Bell, PhD, who said, “Achievers prefer the term setback. The term success and failure imply a final point of destination.” And I think that is definitely the truth.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. If nobody's told you thanks for what you do today, let me be the first. I know you're on your way into work, you're on your way home from work. Maybe you had a bad day. Those happen sometimes in the high-income professions. Maybe you're off working out. Whatever you're doing though, if no one said thanks today, let me be the first.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
In case you're not aware, I have a new book out. It's called the White Coat Investors Guide to Asset Protection. I think it is a great book. If you are interested in protecting your assets from lawsuits and understanding what your risks really are, this is a book you should read.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
It's not that long. It's a relatively short book. In fact, about half of it, close to half of it, is the most comprehensive list of state-specific asset protection laws that I know about. The asset protection laws are always state specific. So, the important thing to know is what are the laws in your state and in the states where you may do business or have assets. And so I've compiled that as a significant part of the book. You don't have to read every state's asset protection laws. You only got to read about the states you care about. In reality, you probably only need to read about 60% of the book.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And it's about as long as the White Coat Investor book, the original one. But I think it's really worthwhile. If you're worried about losing everything to a lawsuit, if you just want to make sure you've done the basics of asset protection, if you want to learn more about advanced asset protection techniques, if you're thinking about going to see an asset protection lawyer, if you've been named in a lawsuit, whatever. Whatever your purpose is to be interested in this topic, I recommend you pick up the White Coat Investors Guide to Asset Protection. It's available on Amazon, like all of the other books.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. We have got a great guest today. One of the fun things about having your own podcast is you can interview whoever you want, as long as you can talk them into coming on the podcast. Sometimes that allows me to go out and find people who've had a significant impact on my financial life and bring them on the podcast and just get to know them a little bit better. And that's partly what we're doing today.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
We're going to be bringing on Andrew Tobias, who you may know as the author of “The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need.” Which was how I was introduced to his work, was reading that book. And there's been many different additions of it. He's got a new addition out of that book if you're interested in picking it up after hearing from him today.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Andy Tobias, he graduated from Harvard. He was there in the 60s. So, he's an older guy now. But eventually, he got an MBA from Harvard. He's written for a number of magazines that you've heard of. These include New York Magazine, Esquire Time, Parade, Harvard Magazine, New York Times Sunday magazine. He's written 12 books I believe. And he just continues to do a lot of great stuff in the country, whether it's finance-related or not finance-related. So, I'm looking forward to getting him on the podcast and getting to know him a little bit better. Let's get him on.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right, Andrew Tobias. We're going to call you Andy today, right? Welcome to the White Coat Investor podcast.
Andrew Tobias:
Thank you so much, Jim.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
It's wonderful to have you here. Your work has affected me personally, and I've just gotten done introducing you before I brought you on. But let's hear a little bit from you. We want to hear a little bit about your upbringing and maybe how it affected your views on money.
Andrew Tobias:
Well, I had a great success in choosing my parents, and they gave me $4 which was a lot of money back then. I'm 75 now. When I was four, I got $4, 71 years ago. And I don't really remember that, but I remember getting $5 when I was five and $6 when I was six. And I was hooked. And then when I was 10, my grandfather gave my brother and me each, I think 10 shares of General Motors and 10 shares of General Dynamics or whatever.
Andrew Tobias:
And actually, it's a little embarrassing, but I started looking at the stock pages every day and nothing ever happened. I mean, it is the most boring thing. If you're going to give your kid 10 shares of something, please make it one of these ridiculous volatile stocks that's going to go to zero, but at least it'll be fun. And they'll learn not to take terrible risks. Owning 10 shares of General Dynamics or General Motors was so boring, but we did learn a little bit about this.
Andrew Tobias:
I spent three months behind the iron curtain when I was 16. I came back a little communist for about five minutes until I wound up running the student businesses in college and going to work for a company called National Student Marketing Corporation after college. That stock went from 6 to 140 in 18 months. And with stock options worth a fortune at least in my terms, it turned out that the creative accounting that the company was practicing was so creative you could really only call it fraudulent accounting. So, the president went to jail. I went to business school, wrote a book about it, and here we are.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
So, tell us about your education. You did undergraduate at Harvard as well as an MBA there. Correct?
Andrew Tobias:
I majored in Slovic languages and literatures, which means that I read “War and Peace” in English in the trot. The little cliff notes things, because I was not a good student, but the real world was much more interesting to me. So, every day I would ride my bike up to Harvard Student Agencies, which is the little student-run business that rented the refrigerators and sold class rings and all those things that undergraduates do to make a little extra money in college. And that was so much fun.
Andrew Tobias:
Then they let me run a thing called “Let's Go: The Student Guide to Europe,” which at the time was just one book for Europe. And then we added some other countries and other continents, I guess. So, I was a little business guy. I was not a good student. My brother was summa cum laude. I wasn't summa, I wasn't magna. I was barely in the top 60% or something, but I sure did sell a lot of “Let's Go: The Student Guide to Europe.” So, I've been interested in business and money kind of forever.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Where's that taken you in your career? Tell us some of the things you've done.
Andrew Tobias:
Well, I expected after my high-flying stand as a 21-year-old Vice President of National Student Marketing Corporation, I figured, “Well, I don't know what I'm going to be, but obviously it's going to involve lots of assistants and junior vice presidents working for me and all that stuff.”
Andrew Tobias:
And in business school, I did get an offer from Boston Consulting Group, which made me feel good but New York Magazine had put me on the cover when I was just starting business school because of this article and this book I wrote about the fraud that I was involved with, even though I was innocent, but the company didn't do so well.
Andrew Tobias:
So, they said, “When you get out of business school, come write for us.” And I said, “I'm not a writer. I only wrote that thing because I happened to be in the middle of it.” So, I had a choice between going to Boston Consulting Group or working for New York Magazine. And happily, I chose the latter. I've been writing magazine articles and books, and I had some computer software called Managing Your Money before Quicken. So, for a bunch of years, I had a very good fortune of that.
Andrew Tobias:
And then somebody called from the White House and said, “If a president of the United States asked you to be treasurer of the democratic party, would you say yes?” And I said, “Richard, what are you calling me for? You clearly dialed the wrong number.” No, no, no president, whatever. And so, for 18 years, it was supposed to be a two-year ceremonial kind of gig and it wound up being 18 years. And still, I didn't get paid to do it, but it wasn't full-time. So, I had that detour and now I'm 150 years old and I'm still updating this every time.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
So, you've been publishing financial books since 1971, really. I count at least 12 books. How many books have you actually published? Not including new editions and translations.
Andrew Tobias:
I hear you're a terrific doctor, but you also count perfectly. I mean, that's exactly the right number. And actually, the first one, the very first one was this book about national student marketing. And it was sort of a financial book because it was a cautionary tale. Stock went from $6 to $140. And then in about five minutes, it went down to three ace or something. Interestingly, you could have made as much money buying it at three ace. Never did go back up, and letting it recover to 10 times that as you could have made in the very beginning. So, there are different ways it was going to cut.
Andrew Tobias:
But at New York magazine, everybody thought, “Oh my God, he's been to business school. And he writes about all this stuff. He's got to be so smart.” And everybody from the receptionist downstairs up to the editor and chief, I don't know how many people remember now, but Clay Felker invented not only New York Magazine, but all regional magazines. He was this huge guy, a very big character. Rupert Murdoch is the one who wound up buying this whole thing and wrecking his life.
Andrew Tobias:
But everybody from the receptionist on up would say, “So what should I do with my money?” I'm thinking, “Why are they asking me? I mean, no, I don't know anything.” I know Ben Franklin said, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” And I know you spend less than you make.” Brilliant insights like that. But I did my best at it.
Andrew Tobias:
But it also got kind of tedious because I would say the same thing over and over again. The advice would vary a little bit if I was talking to Clay who had a big income and lots of rich friends. That would be a little different advice than for the receptionist, but not that different.
Andrew Tobias:
I realized rather than me doing this over and over and over again, why don't I just write it down once, and then I can get it to everybody. And I already had some pretty good success by then with a book or two, not specifically about money. And I called my editor and said, “Hey, I got this little investment guide. It's tiny.” The virtue of it, especially back then, was much smaller than it is now because the world's got more complicated. “But would you publish it?”
Andrew Tobias:
And they looked and they said, “Well, yeah, it's not for us.” And I said, “Come on. I mean, you don't even have to give me an advance. I don't want to start with some other publisher. Give it a try. Why not?” And I said, “My last book was on the New York Times Bestseller list for you. I mean, can't you risk this thing?” And no.
Andrew Tobias:
So, I took it someplace else and it has sold millions of copies by now. It's the luckiest thing I ever did. At first, the money was what was so great, frankly. I mean, I got paid a lot of money, the paperback, I couldn't believe they were going to buy it in paperback on top of the hardcover. The thing was terrific.
Andrew Tobias:
But by now, it's not frankly, knock wood, compound interest. And if you're 150 years old by now, you better be doing pretty well. So, I'm okay. It's fine to get the royalties, but the emails I get and the letters of people, “I bought your book 40 years ago. And we just retired and I give it to all my kids at graduation,” and all this kind of stuff. That's the royalty that keeps paying.
Andrew Tobias:
So, it's been a lot of fun, but also embarrassing because it's called The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need. I explain in the book how that title came to be, but if it's the only one you'll ever, ever need, I shouldn't really have to revise it, right? But they do things without my permission, by the way. They invented the internet. They invent IRAs and Roth IRAs and stuff. And then crypto and meme stock.
Andrew Tobias:
So, every five or six years, I find myself revising it. And it's really fun to do because much of it stays exactly the same and I'm very lazy, so I don't have to rewrite it. But then there are new challenges. What do you say about crypto and about all these things? So anyway, it's been fun and it just came out again and there won't be another one for probably five or six or seven years, by which time I'll be 156.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Well, you're in a very select group of people whose writing ability, I don't just admire, I'm frankly, jealous of it. That list is very short. It includes basically three other people, Morgan Household, Bill Bernstein, and Jonathan Clemens. Your writing is both useful and entertaining. It doesn't sound like you had any formal training in writing. How did you learn to write so well?
Andrew Tobias:
Well, first of all, you're very kind. Other than in the ninth grade, a guy named Dana. And I might get even a little bit choked up because nobody remembers Dana, but he was the right after lunch English teacher in my high school. And everybody else after lunch is not a good time for 14-year-olds. They don't pay a lot of attention to somebody who was a monotonal kind of expression. But he taught us how to write. If you listen, what is a semicolon? What are ellipses? It wasn't the kind of writing I do now because now I break the rules all the time, but at least I know I'm breaking the rules.
Andrew Tobias:
You're right. I write the way I talk for better or worse. Probably a little bit worse as people are beginning to realize. And I tried the hand stuff, that's the punctuation. I tried to get the hands in there, but again, it comes back to a good choice of parents. My dad was terrific. He was the original Don Draper basically, not literally, but of Mad Men. He won all sorts of awards for his copywriting.
Andrew Tobias:
He introduced Patek Philippe watches to America and Ronzoni Sono Buoni means Ranzoni is so good. That's my limit of my Italian. Oh, actually, do you know Manischewitz wine? Everybody listening is too young. But the slogan for Manischewitz was super famous back in the 50s and 60s of the last century.
Andrew Tobias:
And one day I and a billion and a half other people on the planet were watching television. When one astronaut said to the other, ” Man-O-Manischewitz, will you look at that crater?” And I remember this and I wrote about it a few years ago. And I said, “Am I really remembering that right?” They had invented the internet and Google, so I Googled “Astronauts Manischewitz wine.” And not only did they say it once, they said it like 20 times from the moon, all free impressions. My dad was a very good writer. And maybe I picked up a little from him. Thank you for the compliment and letting me tell you about my dad.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
So, the bestseller here, the most popular one, it sounds like is pretty clearly The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, which I read pretty early on in my financial literacy journey. I don't know how many editions ago it was. Probably three or four editions ago. But I actually have that book fairly high on my recommended list in a personal finance section. I think the book section on personal finance is even better than the investing information you include in it. Why do you think it's so important to take care of the basics and have a financial plan in place before worrying about investments?
Andrew Tobias:
Well, first of all, most people, not your audience, your audience is doing very well by and large, which is awesome and well deserved. By the way, sorry for the digression. But my plan is medical school should be free and it should be paid for by doubling tuition at law school. Too many lawyers and it's too hard for docs. It's a little late for your listeners, I guess, in case they adopt this plan.
Andrew Tobias:
But anyway, the basics of personal finance, having an overall strategy and getting into habits that will allow you to come out at a few thousand dollars ahead each year or a few hundred for just starting out, instead of a few thousand behind, which if you're a doc you can easily, I mean, everyone wants to lend you money. So, it's easy to build up all kinds of debt. But unless it's done very well and with lots of good strategy behind it, you don't want to be in debt at all. Your mortgage of course is different.
Andrew Tobias:
So, the basics and also from my point of view, most of the people in this country, again, not your audience, but they don't have any money. We have all kinds of problems. My only real talent in this thing is to try to make it fun enough so people get motivated to actually try getting better habits and see if you can make a game out of it.
Andrew Tobias:
And if you have a goal, you're not sacrificing a night out at the movies or sacrificing a Starbucks or whatever. Actually, this is part of a goal where in three years you're going to be out of debt and in 10 years you're going to have half a million dollars.
And then all of a sudden, you're doing it because you want to, not because, “Oh gosh, I can't afford to go to Starbucks or people are telling me not to.” Basically, I try to help people own their financial futures, and not to say that bad things can't happen. You can't totally control it.
Andrew Tobias:
But if you make a plan, at first, it's very hard as with any kind of new habit, but once you get going, it becomes part of who you are and you wind up being the person who doesn't smoke and has an extra million dollars when they're my age instead of having no money and lung cancer.
Andrew Tobias:
I mean, that one habit of not smoking, if you can, I tell people, forget the whole thing about health. It's probably good for you. It makes you sexier and all kinds of things. Think about the money. That's why you shouldn't smoke. And it's interesting, that's more of a motivator for some people.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I've been using that in my practice. I think you mentioned that in your book at some point. And I have had that financial discussion with patients many times. “Well, let's see. What are you paying for a pack? – $8. – How much do you smoke? Pack a day. Well, what's that workout to? $240 a month. That's $3,000 a year. That's a pretty nice vacation down to Mexico. Would you like to go to Mexico every year or would you like to keep smoking?” And it's the first time they've ever added that up.
Andrew Tobias:
It's so powerful and also, it's tax-free. So, it's like getting a $5,000 raise or better still, if you put it in a Roth IRA and you start compounding it, it makes an amazing difference. Also, not to belabor the point, but your life insurance premiums will be a lot lower if you're not a smoker. So, you save a great deal of money there. And you'll have fewer sick days and less of all the other things that you don't have to buy. Here I am prescribing to you. You're going to be healthier. It saves a fortune.
Andrew Tobias:
So, those kinds of things. Making a budget. It sounds so boring, and I would tell people, “We'll start by making a budget.” And somebody finally said, “How do you do that?” And I'm thinking, “Duh. What do you mean, how do you do that?” So, I wound up writing. It's in the chapter in the book, but I think I wrote it for Parade. I used to have the cover of Parade Magazine one Sunday a year or something. And I think I did it for Parade for like 20 million people. And it was so fun because going through it, it's like naming the states. You go through all the states and you're up to 46 and then you're “Oh yeah, oh yeah. Okay. Missouri, Missouri.” And no offense for anybody listening from Missouri.
Andrew Tobias:
And 47. But boy, does it ever take a long time for you to come up with Delaware or whatever it is. It's very hard to get all 50, but the chapter on making a budget and remembering, “Oh yeah, lawn care, lawn care. Or maybe I should just do something different with the lawn.” It's a really useful exercise.
Andrew Tobias:
And keeping track, once you get in the habit, then you don't even have to think about it. But to get into the habits, you've got to organize yourself and make a plan and see the difference it can make and find ways that you can, instead of coming out $2,000 a year behind, come out $4,000 a year ahead. The difference over a lifetime is enormous.
Andrew Tobias:
Because last I looked, the money the bank would pay you on your savings was like a couple of percent. The money they would charge you on your credit card was like 20%. So, a lot of people who may even have some money in a savings account, they're earning 2% before tax with their right hand and paying 20%, which is not tax-deductible on a credit card with their left hand. They need to get organized.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, for sure. Now, the updates in this book, the number of additions in it is significant. I mean, this book has been in what? Six different decades this book has existed. Take us on a journey through history over that time period. What are the changes you've had to make to this book over the years? What changed in the financial world that made you say, “I got to do a new edition?”
Andrew Tobias:
Well, there are two kinds of things. One would be just world events and where we are in the cycle. It annoys some people because not everybody agrees with my perspective, but I usually recap where we've been and what the next few years may store.
Andrew Tobias:
In the last edition, I said interest rates are really low. They're not going to go lower. At some point, they're going to start to go higher. When they do, that's very tough on long-term bonds. It's a disaster for long-term bonds and higher interest rates are a challenge for stocks. And for that matter, for real estate, and for everything.
Andrew Tobias:
So, we had this long period. When I first wrote the book, it was just coming off of enormous inflation. Treasury bills were yielding 15%. Last year, they were yielding a 10th of a percent. A huge difference. So, we had this long period from 1982, basically, down to about five minutes ago when the wind was in our back and long-term interest rates were just unbelievably low. And just when you thought they couldn't get any lower, they kept getting lower. That's fantastic for the stock market. And it's fantastic for business and for everything else.
Andrew Tobias:
But in the last edition I said, I don't know how long, it's not going to get any better. And at some point, it's going to get worse. And this edition, which of course, I finished writing like two, three, four months ago. But this edition had said yeah, it looks like it really will get worse because with all the stimulus and with everything going on.
Andrew Tobias:
Anyway, part of the things that we could talk about all that, because this is on a lot of people's minds. Part of the differences are just to put it in historical context and help people see where we are in these long cycles of interest rates, productivity and technology and all that.
Andrew Tobias:
And part of it is just mechanical. Before there were IRAs, you couldn't write about them. And before there were Roth IRAs, which were better than traditional IRAs for almost everybody, you couldn't write about them. There were mutual funds, but then there were no-load mutual funds. And then there were exchange-traded funds which have an even lower expense ratio. That kind of thing.
Andrew Tobias:
Now, in this edition, I've added crypto, I've added venture investing, which is very fun. I've talked a little bit about meme stocks and Robinhood and all this stuff that people spend a lot of time thinking about. You've got to be very careful, and know what you're doing because most of this stuff is not a good idea for people.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Let's go through those three things that you changed in the most recent edition of the book or added to the book rather. I shouldn't say changed. I mean, you include crypto assets in the book and you've been observing investments for a long time. As you mentioned, you're 150 years old.
Andrew Tobias:
Yes, exactly.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I'm curious after watching markets for decades and decades, what's your take on crypto?
Andrew Tobias:
Crypto is not an investment. People who understand investing would agree. It's not productive. It doesn't pay dividends. It doesn't pay interest. It's not an investment. It's basically a substitute for money. But it's not a good substitute for money for two reasons. I mean, well, for a bunch of reasons, but money is two things. It's a medium of exchange and it's also an accounting mechanism. So, you can make sensible decisions and corporations do their bookkeeping in dollars in the US and much of the world, not in Ethereum or Ripple or Bitcoin or whatever.
Andrew Tobias:
Bitcoin is so volitile, obviously, that it's not like a medium of exchange and it's certainly not a way to do accounting. As money, it's not great. Also, it takes so much energy to make it. But one thing, I was just was watching David Pogue on CBS. He had a great little seven-minute segment on all this stuff. And he went through a lot of the caveats, but he missed the one that nobody ever thinks about but at some point, it's going to be an issue.
Andrew Tobias:
I have tons of friends and I'm sure you do. And a lot of the people listening have made a fortune on Bitcoin, at least on paper if they haven't cashed it in yet. So that's great and hooray for them.
Andrew Tobias:
But if you spend Bitcoin, let's say, you buy a Tesla with Bitcoin. But even if you buy just a coffee at some coffee shop that takes Bitcoin, technically that's a taxable event. If you're buying the Tesla or the cup of coffee with Bitcoin selling at $30,000 today, or whatever's going to be, but you paid only $1,500 for this $30,000 Bitcoin, it's almost entirely a capital gain, either long term or short term.
Andrew Tobias:
And yeah, probably won't be audited. And certainly, for the cup of coffee, it's going to be very hard to figure out. But technically you have to pay tax on all the Bitcoin that you spent. People I don't think are taking that into account.
Andrew Tobias:
Anyhow, it may never go down from wherever it is today, but there's no particular reason for it to go up any faster than inflation. And it's not the best inflation hedge. What it really is, it's a hedge against collapse of the government and the world order, or at least the order in the particular country you live in. Most of us, the US.
Andrew Tobias:
And if you want to bet against the success of our government and society, it could be a good bet. I mean, look, especially if you bought it. I tried to buy some when it got $30,000 back down to $3,000, I just figured I'll buy 10 of these things and either I'll have something fun to write about when I lose it all, maybe, and now it'd be worth a lot of money.
Andrew Tobias:
I didn't wind up doing it for kind of a boring, mechanical reason, but if I had it, I wouldn't probably sell it, at least not too much of it, because it's fun. You'll feel like an idiot if it goes to a million dollars of Bitcoin and you sold it. All that kind of stuff.
Andrew Tobias:
But a much better hedge against inflation for the long term are stocks, real estate or private businesses or your own education. Getting another degree to enhance your earning power. I don't think that ultimately, the US government is going to say, “Yeah, forget the dollar. Bitcoin is how we want to collect our taxes.” Anyway, that's crypto. I'm not a big fan, as you can tell. Sorry to go on at such length.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Let's talk for a minute about venture investing. What's your take on venture investing?
Andrew Tobias:
Well, there I am a big fan with an enormous caveat that you have to assume you're going to lose your money. This has to be money you can afford to lose, which is true with the stock market or anything else. But I had so much fun in the book. I thought of maybe reading it to you, but I don't want to do that.
Andrew Tobias:
But I had this long paragraph. I lost $30,000 with this thing. I lost $50,000 in that. When I was putting it together, I went, “Wow, I've lost even more than I thought in all these things. I've lost money in everything you can imagine.”
Andrew Tobias:
But every once in a while, you hit one that works. Honest Tea, if anybody drinks Honest Tea, we sold that to Coca-Cola and it worked out pretty well. And I had something that I didn't really know exactly what it was, but it was something having to do with logistics. So, the trucks would come back with something in them instead of empty.
Andrew Tobias:
And I vaguely remember the name, many, many years went by, like 12 years went by. And the thing, basically, it was going well at first, but then something bad happened and I lost track of it. I have an email account, you may do the same thing, which isn't my best email account. I have one for all the newsletters and all the spam and all this stuff. But I run my eye over it every once in a while. And I'm deleting hundreds at a time.
Andrew Tobias:
And I see a sender from Case Stack. I'm thinking, “Hmm, that sounds familiar. What is that?” And it had an attachment, so I was thinking, “Oh-oh. I hope they're not trying to put a virus in my computer, all that stuff, so I won't open the attachment, but I'll look at the email.” It said, “This isn't the email we sent you last week. This is something else you have to sign.” I said, “Oh, okay. They're finally going bankrupt. And they want me to sign waivers or whatever happens when they go bankrupt and you're a shareholder.”
Andrew Tobias:
But I looked and sure enough, the previous week they had sent me something with another attachment. And that email said we've just sold the company for $252 million. Please. I'd like to tell you. I own 10% of the company. Not quite but I own enough so that made up for an awful lot of mistakes. And the thing that I love about venture investing, other than it's fun and interesting, is depending on the venture, of course, but the ones I tend to invest in, if they work, will make the world better.
Andrew Tobias:
I don't know what's going to happen with my investment in real time, but if we get FFA approval and it works finally, and all this, everybody listening, when you take a flight on the 737 or an A320 at some point, not in the next few months, but in the next few years, you won't have to wait for a tug to pull you back out from the gate. And the plane will be able to twist when it gets to the gate and park parallel instead of nose in. So, you can board and deplane from the front and the back door, which cuts 15 minutes.
Andrew Tobias:
I mean, it's going to make every airline and every airport 10% or 15% more efficient because the time you spend on the ground is wasted and it's going to make every passenger etc. So, I have a whole bunch like that and some of them are going to fail, but if one or two succeed, I'll be able to go the next 150 years without having to work.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
So, what's a reasonable percentage of your portfolio to having something like venture investing?
Andrew Tobias:
Well, for most people zero. But it depends on your overall circumstances. One way to do it, of course, is to go into funds that do this. Most of them, I have a lot of caveats in the book about why the expenses wind up being so much, and it's not necessarily the best way.
Andrew Tobias:
But there are some, where rather than you'll pick the venture yourself, you can diversify because you might be in 10 or 20 or 30 with professionals who spend a lot of time trying to figure out which ones are going to work. One of the funds that you can go into actually has a way to get people like us, who normally wouldn't be able to get into the really hot Silicon Valley stuff like Kleiner Perkins and all these big deal people do. They've kind of figured out a way to get the little guy into those things.
Andrew Tobias:
So, in my case, it's probably half my net worth, but I'm not typical. I'm very lucky. Everybody's different. But this sort of segues into another thought if I can offer it, which is, you're a doctor, you're a surgeon, you're a dentist, you're doing incredibly important work. It's wonderful. Your goal isn't to become the richest man in the world, or be able to go into space on your own spaceship or anything. You have this great life. So, most of your money should be over time, at least the money that you want in the stock market, which is most of it for your long-term money. Most of it should be in index funds and you will do better than 90% of your friends and neighbors, and even those of your friends who went to business school instead of to medical school.
Andrew Tobias:
Index funds have the lightest possible jockey. Think of mutual funds as horses in a horse race. An index fund will have a 20-pound jockey. An actively traded fund will have 100 or a 200-pound jockey. Especially when you figure some of the tax consequences, it could be a 300 or 400-pound jockey.
Andrew Tobias:
Over the long run, most of the money should be on a regular basis of dollar-cost averaging, and should be in index funds. But if you're human and I think virtually all of the audience are, it's so boring. I think to carve out 10% or 20%, not more than 20% and it is kind of meaningless to be less than 10%, for speculative things in the stock market, not where you're trying to find crazy risks and you don't have to do it all at once.
Andrew Tobias:
But if you find some new medical device or something that you think is going to be great, and it hasn't been approved yet, but you know about it, because this is part of your field and you think this company could be really good, to put a little money into that. And if your son or your cousin or something has some money, to put five or six chips down in risky things, ones you lose on, which of course, it could be all five or six, but the ones you lose on up to $3,000 a year lowers your taxable income. And that saves you a little bit on taxes.
Andrew Tobias:
The ones you win on, and every so often you might have one where you do make 10 or 20 times your money, as long as you've held it for more than a year and a day, first of all, that's a nice, big win. But if you do any charitable giving, it shouldn't be with money and it shouldn't even be with stock. Although that's a great way to do it. It should be through a thing called either the Fidelity charitable gift fund or the Vanguard charitable gift fund or the Schwab gift fund. I don't want to go through all the details, but it makes it so much more convenient and so much tax effective.
Andrew Tobias:
So, you have fun. Most of your money is sensibly invested, but you have some fun. And you have the tax control to come out ahead, even if you break even. And I hope you do better than break even, but if you just break even after-tax, you come out ahead. So that's a little piece of this.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Well, speaking of index funds and maybe the opposite of index funds, you include a section about meme stocks in your newest edition. And I understand you have a connection here. You've got a cousin that's the CEO of AMC. Give us your take on meme stocks.
Andrew Tobias:
Meme stocks are the notion, what really happened is as a lot of people know, there was a company called GameStop that was in big trouble and there were some others, but GameStop was the first one. And a lot of very sophisticated professional investors, shorted the stock, knowing it was going to go down because it had to go bankrupt.
Andrew Tobias:
And somehow on Reddit, one place from another, little guys were angry about this and rightly. It’s tough being a little guy when there were so many people with 400-foot yachts and all this stuff, and they said, heck no, we're going to buy this. It was $3 a share or $4, whatever it was. I'm going to buy 50 shares, $200. And millions of people bought the shares.
Andrew Tobias:
The people who shorted either had to, or got scared and started buying to cover their shorts. And the stock at one point, I think it hit $480 up from $4 or $2 or whatever it was. And this was the triumph of the little guy, not because GameStop was suddenly going to make so much profit and pay out so much dividends for any business reason. It's just the crowd, they like tulips. As long as it's going up, it's going up. As long as someone will pay more. It’s musical chairs.
Andrew Tobias:
So, my baby cousin who is not 150, he's actually the CEO of AMC. And I love the movies and I love my cousin and I love popcorn, but they were in pretty rough shape. Because with COVID, nobody was going to the movies and the movie business wasn't spectacular even before because with Netflix and everything else and streaming. And the stock went from like a couple of bucks up to, I think, $78 or something, which makes 35 times your money in a few months. That's pretty appealing.
Andrew Tobias:
Anyway, I could tell you lots more about that, but suffice to say I have a wonderful cousin. I don't think it was a good buy at $78. I didn't buy it at $78. And meme stocks, this is if you want to play musical chairs or you want to go to Las Vegas, obviously some people go to Las Vegas and they hit the jackpot. But it's not because they were so smart in Las Vegas unless they are counting cards, in which case they're going to get their knees broken.
Andrew Tobias:
And yeah, the slow but steady wins the race. And my job in the book is basically to try to make it fun or give people enough confidence so they don't spend so much money on professional advice. It's going to be well-intended, but if spending $2,000 a year on professional advice is going to have you do really well, and $6,000 will make you do three times, it doesn't work that way.
Andrew Tobias:
The professionals do average. They have good years, they have bad years, depending. But by and large, with rare exceptions like Warren Buffet and Peter Lynch and all that, you can't have everybody doing above average. So, the trick is to keep your expenses really low, which is why you want a 20-pound jockey, not a 200-pound jockey.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Our audience is composed of high-income professionals, most of them doctors. What financial mistakes do you see those folks making specifically? And do you have any specific advice for them?
Andrew Tobias:
Well, I do know that doctors and dentists and so on, are real targets. Every life insurance agent in the world wants to sell whole life or variable life, universal life, one of these life insurance products that are impossible to understand and compare, which is one of the reasons that they're so profitable for the insurance companies.
Andrew Tobias:
And so, your audience are targets for all kinds of sales pitches. You may need life insurance, but you probably want inexpensive term life insurance that doesn't require a salesman. There are some people who look for somebody with a very large medical practice. You have an accountant, talk to your accountant. Don't listen to me about some of this stuff, because there are situations where you might want a different setup because of taxes and one thing or another.
Andrew Tobias:
But by and large, you don't want that. You don't want to be sold annuities by an annuity salesman who gets a huge commission. And one of the things the book does is it just goes through all these things that you don't want to do to kind of arm you for the conversation when your college classmate, who may be a terrific woman or a lovely guy, and they would like to see you do well, but they make a big commission and they persuaded themselves that this is something you should buy.
Andrew Tobias:
So, the most important thing I guess, is that, yeah, you may well have your accountant and you may have people you trust, but don't spend a lot of money on the expenses on the frictional cost of this stuff, because that does not add to your return.
Andrew Tobias:
It used to be that people assumed you could get 10% a year in the stock market. At least how could you not? So, to pay 1%, okay. But 1% is 10% of 10%. So, 10% is not nothing. And if we have a period where you only get 3% or 4% in the stock market, 1% of 3% or 4% is a lot of it. And you say, how could we ever have a period like that? Well, I remember 1966 when again, did I mention that I'm 150 years old? In 1966, I'm actually 75. So, I'm half. This is half true. Everything I say by the way, half true.
Andrew Tobias:
So, in 1966, I remember the day. The Dow Jones industrial average broke through a thousand for the first time in history. It didn't close above a thousand, but intraday broke through a thousand. It took 16 years. So, 1982, I think I had that right. But 16 years to get back to 1,000. 16 years is a long time to wait. Not for me, by now, it goes very fast. But if somebody listening is in their 30s or 40s, 16 years to break even on your stock in GameStop or whatever, it's a long time.
Andrew Tobias:
So, it's really important to keep expenses low because you can't assume, especially your after-tax return and your after-inflation return. I mean, it's tough to make 3% after-tax after inflation on your money. The easiest way to improve your return is not to give up expenses that you don't have to give up.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Well, inflation is now over 8%. Now you were a columnist, you were an author the last time we had significant inflation back in the '70s.
Andrew Tobias:
That's right.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
What advice do you have for our listeners regarding inflation now?
Andrew Tobias:
I like to think this is going to be different because aspects of it are very much tied to the aftermath of COVID, all that pent-up demand and obviously Ukraine and oil and oil prices or energy prices go into everything. So, it may well be that over the next year or two, we get this more or less under control, things come back to more or less normal. We could have a recession in the meantime, I don't know. And interest rates, I think we're done with crazy low-interest rates, but you never know.
Andrew Tobias:
But it's also possible that it's going to be tougher than that and it'll be inflation of the type that we had in the '70s. Eventually, we will fix it because we have to. And everybody, the Fed knows we have to, the Congress knows we have to, the voters know we have to. So, we'll fix it. It may be painful.
Andrew Tobias:
One thing to know is it's not going to be forever, I think. I don't think the dollars can become worthless the way the Russian ruble did in 1917 or the way the German mark did in the Weimar Republic in the '30s where you needed a wheelbarrow of cash.
Andrew Tobias:
So, number one, I think we may get off easy, or at least it's certainly going to end. I don't think it's going to be like it was in the '70s. I could be wrong. But the other thing, an even more important thing is, whatever happens, people are going to need places to live and places to work and the things that they buy.
Andrew Tobias:
And if you own part of the company that sells the now $100 movie ticket or the $200 basketball or the $41 pound of whatever it is, if you own the business and the business is well run of not too much debt and can survive this inflation itself in any recession we have, you will own, I'm not saying it as simply as I should.
Andrew Tobias:
Think of it this way. You own a house. Oh, it's top of the value. Well, it's still a four-bedroom house. It hasn't doubled in bedrooms or in bathrooms or in swimming pools. You still own a house. It's kept up with inflation. If you own stock in a company, it depends on the company and how it's run, but basically over the long run, no matter what happens with inflation, your shares in that company could well, not only keep up with inflation, but because the company is productive and maybe growing and becoming more productive with better technology, you can do great with the company.
Andrew Tobias:
So, you certainly don't want a lot of money sitting in the bank. Most importantly, you don't want any of it in long-term bonds because you're going to get killed in inflation. I tend to run on at some length. The advantage of the book is I can go over and over with a scalpel and I can try to say things. I write so much better than I talk because I can slim it down and slim it down.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
It's interesting. I thought I had a deal with the Fed. I thought the deal was if inflation starts going up, they're going to raise interest rates. And I don't feel like they kept up their end of the deal. They kept them low for so long that now even these six little raises they're planning this year, it feels like too little too late. I mean, 10-year treasury yields are 2.8%. My high yield savings account is paying 0.5% and inflation is at 8%. What do you think about the path the Fed steered us down the last couple of years? Are they behind the eight ball?
Andrew Tobias:
Well, we have big challenges ahead. That's for sure. I don't know if the Fed did it wrong. I do think the stimulus may have been, there were reasons for it, but to send money to people who didn't lose their jobs and send them $1,400, it didn't seem to me as targeted as to send it to the people who actually needed it.
Andrew Tobias:
There are things that in hindsight, especially if there weren't the mechanics, that could be very difficult. It's one thing to have the idea. It's another thing to do it in a way that doesn't involve fraud and months and months of adjudication and all that. There are things that probably could have been done better, but people weren't thinking about inflation until quite recently. But we did have the possibility of a global depression and collapse. And those are very hard to come back from. You don't flip the switch on that.
Andrew Tobias:
So, if the Fed and if the stimulus by saving the world from global depression, which also can lead to more wars and to civil war and to horrible things. The bad things that haven't happened, they could have happened and we kept them from happening. And I think that we should feel pretty good that we kept them from happening. Now we have some inflation to deal with. In the next couple of years, hopefully, we'll get it under control, ideally without a recession. But we'll see what happens.
Andrew Tobias:
I got to interview Paul Volcker when he was chairman of the Fed in that period when inflation was 15% and treasury bills were yielding 15% and mortgages were as much as like 18%. Crazy times. It was the most interesting few hours I ever spent. I was like 12 years old and he was this incredible person with a 20-inch cigar and his feet up. It was awesome.
Andrew Tobias:
What I took away from it was that, yeah, of course, he's a superb economist and he's a brilliant guy. He was a real hero to the country, I think. He's the one who put the screws on the whole thing and gave us this terrible recession but killed inflation.
Andrew Tobias:
But it turns out that the job of being the chairman of the Fed, even though you've got to be a great economist and all that, you're really the national psychologist. You've got to try to get the collective head of the American people on what are they expecting and how do you get them not to expect inflation? Because if people expect inflation, then we're going to have inflation, if it gets to be a syndrome where no one can imagine that it's going to be tamed. Right now, people can absolutely imagine, and they should imagine that we'll be tamed because it will be.
Andrew Tobias:
But anyhow, Volker was a hero and we had a very rough recession that was necessary. This time, we absolutely may not need a terrible recession and we may not even need a recession at all. Oil prices can come down very quickly.
Andrew Tobias:
Some months ago, not more than a year ago, people who own oil stocks were moaning that the price was so low and now no one thinks it can ever get low again. It's going to come back down in part because renewables are getting so much more competitive. It's cheaper now, renewables than coal and fossil fuels in many situations. And that's just accelerating. And there are tons of reasons to be optimistic.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Investors have to be optimistic. That's kind of the nature of being an investor. And usually, despite the fact that being a pessimist sounds smarter, the optimists have won historically.
Andrew Tobias:
Yeah. That's a very good point.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Let's get even more political for a minute. Not for a long tangent, but just a brief one. Although you count many Republicans among your friends, you served as the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee for many years. Now, many people view today's political polarization as a huge problem. I'm curious if you do, and if so, what do you think should be done about it?
Andrew Tobias:
It is a terrible problem with polarization and it's playing right into Putin's hands. I think he had something to do with Brexit. I think that he wants us to be as polarized as possible because if we're polarized, we don't get anything done and it could lead to all kinds of terrible stuff. It's not only Putin, of course, but there's a lot of money to be made in the extremes. You raise a lot more money, whether you're a media outlet or a political fundraiser if you scream and shout horrible things that might have a grain of truth, but are so overdone on either side. And it's a terrible problem.
Andrew Tobias:
I'm a liberal, but basically a moderate Democrat. Eisenhower, and Nixon, of course, he had his issues. But Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. A long time ago, I was on a radio talk show for one of the previous editions of this thing. The publicist warned me, and this was before there was even really a right-wing. This was way back. I think before the tea party, a long time ago. The publicist said, “I just want to tell you this. This fellow, he's a lot of fun. You'll like him, but he's very right-wing. You should just know that.”
Andrew Tobias:
So, we get to the calling section of the show and somebody asked me about something and I realized, “Oh, what a softball. I'm going to convert every right-wing listener.” And I said, “Listen, Peterson. Even Peterson, who was Nixon's commerce secretary, even says, da, da, da.” And the host of the thing starts to laugh and I get a little nervous. I said, “Why are you laughing?” He said, “Listen, you're a nice guy, but you don't get it. To us Nixon was a socialist.” And Reagan, of course, by now, Reagan could never be. This isn't the Republican party. So, if it were the Republican party that most of us knew until about 20 years ago, okay, you might disagree, but you disagree agreeably and you compromise and all that.
Andrew Tobias:
Compromise is really important if we're going to get anywhere. So, yeah, it's a terrible problem. And the solutions are fixing the gerrymandering and there are ways to do that. And for primaries, especially mailing ballots for primaries, so that you don't have to be a real super-duper activist to take the time to go to the primary. We should get rid of the caucuses. It should all be primaries. It should be easy to vote in the primaries so more people do it, not just the extremes, so average people do it.
Andrew Tobias:
And there should be rank choice voting. It's also called instant runoff voting, which means you vote for Ralph Nader as your first choice because, “Oh my God, he's fantastic.” Or you vote for Marjorie Taylor Green because, “Oh my God, this is the real truth.” But if need be as your second choice, you would vote for Gore instead of Bush, let's say, or you would vote for whoever is on the other side instead of Marjorie Taylor Green.
Andrew Tobias:
And that gives moderates. It gives all the politicians some reason to try to appeal to people in the middle, people who are not rabid left-wing or rabid right-wing. So those structural changes which are possible and we're making some progress in some of them, that would help to deal with the polarization and we need to.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Another area of your life that I think people would find really interesting is you have been on a bit of a personal crusade against smoking. Can you tell us about some of the things you did to fight smoking?
Andrew Tobias:
Well, I'm just a bit player in this, but I did a couple of things. Every summer, airplanes would go up and down the beach with these banners, “Newport, the perfect recess.” Now they're not trying to appeal to kids. Tobacco companies do not want kids to smoke. So, recess, which used to be what you've had in between classes in elementary school. That just happens to be a coincidence.
Andrew Tobias:
But anyway, “Newport, the perfect recess.” And there were a couple of others. I forget now. I have to look. But after a couple of summers, I called up and I found it's not that expensive to get one of these planes. So, I hired a plane to follow the other plane. And mine said, “Newport, the permanent recess.” And I had another one, “Larry Trish sells cancer sticks.”
Andrew Tobias:
I had all these planes following their planes. The following summer, they stopped. So that was one. And the other, I went to Russia back when everything was changing. I had read in the Wall Street Journal that you could buy a minute of time or 30 seconds on the nightly news for $3,000. And I figured, “Wow, I got $3,000. I even have $30,000. I'll buy 10, 30 second spots.”
Andrew Tobias:
By the time I got over there for various reasons, it turned out it wasn't 30 seconds. It was a minute. And it wasn't $3,000. It was $1,200. And there were only three networks back then. So, I took for 15 nights night after night on all three networks in December when it was way too dark and cold to go outside during the nightly news. And you couldn't mute the TV and go to the other room for beer, because they didn't have remote controls. This was like 1992 and things were pretty primitive back then.
Andrew Tobias:
So, I annoyed the entire former Soviet Union with my dreadful high school Russian saying, each of the ad was different, but the tagline of each one was, “Kids, don't become slaves to the tobacco companies like your parents.” And my reasoning was you can't tell kids what not to do, because that's not going to network. But if you tell them that their parents are kind of dumb that they might react to.
Andrew Tobias:
Anyway, I know it annoyed the whole former Soviet Union because about six months later, somebody sent me a tape. They had made a spoof, somebody on a big popular comedy show. They had spoofed my terrible American accent and all that. So yeah, kids, don't smoke. And doctors know this better than anybody. And you have shown how you can turn it into a financial thing and get people to stop smoking that way.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Well, our time is getting short, but tell us what you're working on now. Here's the part where you should hold up the book for those watching on YouTube. Show them the book cover.
Andrew Tobias:
No one is still watching or listening. We've been going for three hours. I'm now 152 years old. Here's what. The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need. And what am I working on now? I have little daily blog posts, most days they started out. I've done about 6,500 of them. So, if you've missed any of them, they're all archived. And if you have like two minutes go at andrewtobias.com. Sometimes I offer irresponsible stock recommendations for money that you can truly afford to lose. I always stress that. And as my readers can tell you, we truly have lost on many of them, but others have worked out quite well.
Andrew Tobias:
But much of it by now is kind of politics and what's going on in Ukraine. After 200,000 years, when nothing pretty much happened until somebody invented fire and somebody thought of the wheel. These were big things and language was good. But basically, nothing happened until what? 10,000 years ago, and some cave paintings and some more things.
Andrew Tobias:
And then the Romans learned how to do indoor plumbing, but they forgot. So that didn't really count. Gutenberg is 500 years ago with the printing press. That was pretty big. And since then, it has just speeded up until what? 150 years ago, information could never travel more than seven miles an hour, as fast as a horse could run or whatever.
Andrew Tobias:
The next 10 or 20 years will set the trajectory. We are either on the cusp of unparalleled prosperity as the species. Cancer, in a few years, you go, they'll just take a pill or they'll do a little wand thing and the cancer's gone. The vaccines we're able to do now, which by the way, were DARPA. Hooray for Moderna and for Pfizer. But it's DARPA that did the underlying, which is the big, bad government got this thing going.
Andrew Tobias:
You are on a cusp of unbelievable prosperity, where almost everybody could have a decent, comfortable life and all that. Or more likely, probably, we're about to hurdle off the rails as a species. The cockroaches will be here, but we won't. There are so many ways this could go wrong.
Andrew Tobias:
So, this is a time to pay attention and to figure out how you want to live your life and how much of the world’s resources- can you have a good time living light on the land? If the only way to be happy is to have something that consumes a huge amount of fossil fuel and so on and so forth. Well, okay. But if you could find another way, it might be better and might save you a lot of money and set you up for a better retirement.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. Last question. Our time is now short, but you've got the ear of 30,000 or 40,000 high income professionals, mostly doctors. What have we not yet talked about today that you think they should know?
Andrew Tobias:
All right. I guess one of the things that I like to say, and many of your listeners do know this. But I think that happiness, which is after all, what we're all after. Happiness is a matter of direction, not amount. Especially for your younger listeners, I think if you had two families. One earning $50,000 a year, but somehow knowing that it's headed up to $150,000. And another earning $500,000 a year but somehow knowing it's headed down to $250,000.
Andrew Tobias:
Like I said, $150,000 and the second one will never get lower than $250,000. I think the first family earning $50,000 is a happier family or happier individual doc than the second, because things are looking up. Things are going in the right direction. Things can get better every year.
Andrew Tobias:
So, what I counsel everybody, and I apologize, because you have a very sophisticated audience. So, this may be too simple minded, but pace yourself. Pace yourself. A luxury, once sampled, becomes a necessity. So maybe you can afford, especially if you take a loan, and you can certainly get a loan as we were talking about before.
Andrew Tobias:
You can afford to go first class, but once you get used to first-class, it's so depressing to have to go to Greece or to the Bahamas or someplace in coach. Oh my God. Anyhow, it's a direction, not amount. So, these philosophical kinds of things maybe are important in the long run, such as figuring out which index fund to buy or whether or not to go into crypto.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Awesome. Andy, thank you so much for being on the White Coat Investor podcast today. For the listeners out there, check out his book. If you have not yet read this one, this is one of my favorite books on both personal finance and investing. The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need. You can pick it up at Amazon or wherever you like buying books. And thanks so much for being on the podcast and sharing your wisdom.
Andrew Tobias:
Thank you. It was a lot of fun.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did. It's always good fun to get somebody that you've read their work and followed them a little bit and actually get to know them a little bit personally. So that was a lot of fun.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
You can check out his book, there'll be a link in the show notes that you can check out. While you're there, check out our link to our new asset protection book. The White Coat Investors Guide to Asset Protection. It's my newest book. It may not be as entertaining as Andy's book, but it is a comprehensive book on the subject. If you are interested in anything about asset protection for physicians, this is the book to check out. There will be a link in the show notes for that as well or you can just look it up on Amazon.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
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Dr. Jim Dahle:
Thanks for leaving us five-star reviews. Most recent one came in saying “Great show. I really enjoy your show. After listening to a few episodes, I was totally hooked. It has great direction. It deals with very instructive and interesting topics. I really love this program.” Thank you, Mariann.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
For the rest of you, keep your head up, shoulders back. You've got this and we can help. We'll see you next on the White Coat Investor podcast.
Disclaimer:
The host of the White Coat Investor podcast are not licensed accountants, attorneys, or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.
The post The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need With Andrew Tobias appeared first on The White Coat Investor - Investing & Personal Finance for Doctors.