Kitces & Carl Ep 166: Financial Planners As The Guide To Help Clients Navigate Potentially Changing Terrain?

***Editor's Note: Can't get enough of Kitces & Carl? Neither can we, which is why we've released it as a podcast as well! Check it out on all the usual podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, and YouTube Music.

Show Notes:

• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't by Jim Collins
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
• Kitces & Carl Ep 160: Calming Clients With Anxiety About Trump Tariffs And Trade Wars

Kitces & Carl Transcript

Carl: Hello, Michael.

Michael: Hello, Carl. How are you doing today?

Carl: Things are very good. There are signs of spring that we made it through another hard winter.

Michael: Is that a very sad thing for you, being in Utah, because that means ski season is ending?

Carl: There's a mix. About this time, I think it's why we have seasons, is because, about this time, I'm ready to ride my mountain bike. It's good. And then it snows, I'm like, "Oh, good, one more." So it's kind of that mix.

Michael: Because you're not leaving the mountains and the outdoors. You're just going to flip from skiing to mountain biking.

Carl: Yeah, for sure.

Michael: Mountain skiing to mountain biking. Okay.

Carl: Yeah, we just hope that the mud season isn't very long. That's the problem, is when you can't ski or mountain bike.

Michael: That's neither good for skiing or biking. Okay.

Carl: Exactly. Things are good. Speaking, wow, we've had so many of these little...what do we call these, entrees?

Michael: Okay. So, did we cue you up for whatever you want to dig into today?

Carl: Yeah, environments. Navigating terrain. Navigating terrain.

Michael: That's the actual theme, navigating terrain. Okay.

Understanding 'Wicked' Vs 'Kind' Learning Environments [01:16]

Carl: Well, yeah, I'm really curious. I see a lot of challenges. I've had a lot of challenges myself, and I see a lot of challenges in both the work we do with clients, because it involves the human called the client, it involves the collection of humans called markets and economies, and then we've got our own businesses to run, too. So we've got...

Michael: That, too.

Carl: And I've seen a lot of challenges in navigating and making decisions that come from misunderstanding the terrain you're navigating. If you don't understand the landscape...and I understand this needs a little bit of explanation or context. So I want to talk about one specific subset of ways to get clear about the terrain that you're navigating or the landscape that you're navigating. There's lots of ways we can look at this. We can look at it through complexity theory. So we can look at simple, complicated, complex, or chaos landscapes. And I think we've talked a little bit about it in the past, and I'm sure we'll do it again. But today I wanted to talk about this concept, which I just love because of, I think, the phrasing, and it comes from...it's really fun when you find academic work that uses fun language. I love this idea of wicked and kind learning environments. Wicked and kind learning environments. Are you familiar with those terms?

Michael: I went to school in New England, so we used 'wicked' a lot, but it probably has a different meaning than what you're talking about here. So I think we need more context.

Carl: Let's talk about this. One place to...if people are curious about this, you can read...David Epstein did a great job of talking about this in his book, "Range." But let's give a little description. In a kind learning environment, the rules are clear, feedback is immediate, and patterns repeat. So you can think of chess, and even checkers would be an even kinder learning environment. Tennis. Maybe even golf.

Michael: Patterns mostly repeat. They tell me they'll repeat if I hit the ball the same way. I swear I can't make them go the same place, but I get the principle.

Carl: Yeah. In a wicked environment, you just sort of get the flip of each of those. The rules are ambiguous, so the rules are unclear. Feedback is delayed or misleading. And I want to give you an example of this from backcountry skiing, actually. And your experience can actually reinforce the wrong lesson.

Michael: Don't we usually just call this life?

Carl: Yeah, which is why I think it's so important, because there are parts of our lives that are kind, there are parts of our businesses that are kind, there are parts of our interactions with clients that are kind, and there are parts that are wicked. If you're mistaken about which one you're in, you tend to use the wrong tools. So let me give you an example. If you ski in avalanche terrain, so outside of the resort where nobody's taking care of you, it's your job to decide if it's safe. You often get what's called non-event feedback. So you go do something, and nothing bad happens. There was no event.

Michael: I ski off-terrain or however the words are. I ski outside of the boundaries, as I'm obviously not a skier. I ski out of bounds, and nothing bad happens. I have a great run down the slope.

Carl: Yeah. Let's say you ski some really steep slope that's big and open. You get to the bottom, it was amazing, and you think you've done something smart and safe. That's just because the feedback was...first of all, the rules were ambiguous. She didn't know what the rules were. Second, the feedback was delayed or misleading, meaning you didn't even... And so when you get down...and this happens all the time with my kids' friends, 24-, 25-year-old, mainly male in their attitude, because they'll say, "What are you talking about, old man? That was totally safe. I've skied it ten times, and nothing happened." Well, that's actually reinforcing bad behavior. And so I think...

Michael: Because the idea is it's still avalanche territory, and the next run...

Carl: You just got lucky.

Michael: ...could be a catastrophe even though nothing happened the past ten times in a row.

Carl: Yeah, you just got lucky. And my proposition to you is financial planning isn't chess. It's avalanche terrain. So I want to talk about that a little bit, that financial planning, people's lives, much of financial planning, people's lives, the markets, is a wicked learning environment. Things change. And I want to talk about this right now because so many things are changing. And we can talk about this in terms of the financial planning we do for clients, or we can talk about it about how we're running our own businesses. Both, I think, are interesting.

Michael: Yeah. My head goes to directions in both, from the planning end. You said earlier, wicked environments, the rules are ambiguous, feedback is not fast, and sometimes...

Carl: Or misleading.

Michael: ...experience reinforces the wrong lessons. I'm like, "Yeah." So, like life, the rules are ambiguous, you often don't get clear feedback, and sometimes your experience reinforces something that was not actually the right lesson to learn. Seriously, I feel like a part of that is feedback. Sorry, a part of that is life. And I really do feel like a nontrivial amount of what I end up doing with the client is trying to help them unlearn lessons they think they learned that weren't feedback they thought they got that wasn't right.

Carl: Can you think of an example?

Michael: Yeah. I bought this tech stock, and it went to the moon. I'm a freaking stock-picking genius.

Carl: For sure. For sure. Isn't that interesting how...?

Michael: Or pick a crypto coin of your choice right now. I'm a brilliant investor because I put my money in one of these things and it's gone to the moon. And so I'm a brilliant investor, and the advisor that tells me not to buy it is an idiot who doesn't know what they're talking about because this person has not gotten any negative feedback that comes in a bear market, and their experience of only being successful with the particular attempts they made may be their skill or maybe them unable to distinguish between luck. I'm not particularly trying to take a swing in a particular tech stock or crypto coin, but I think we've all had enough experiences with clients where someone has struck it wealthy by putting all their money into one of these things and having to go amazingly well, and now that has crafted their worldview around what the terrain is. I'm trying to take this back to your language. They think they're operating in a kind, safe terrain. Or you just skied down avalanche country and happened to not get an avalanche. It doesn't actually make you a brilliant skier navigating avalanche terrain. You might have just gotten lucky that nothing knocked loose today.

Carl: Yeah.

When Clients May Not Have Experienced Losses From High-Risk Behavior [09:26]

Carl: So let's just talk about the tools if you're in a kind learning environment. How do the tools you use change?

Michael: I feel like kind is...

Carl: In fact, it might be... Go ahead.

Michael: Kind is easier. The rules are clear. You did a thing. It didn't go well. We all agree we're not going to do that again, right?

Carl: Yeah. And how much of the work that we do, because there's plenty of work that we do, I think, could be categorized that way? Rules are pretty clear, right? Feedback is pretty clear. I'm almost thinking, as I'm saying this out loud, it's tax.

Michael: Yeah, that's where mine was going. File your taxes. Here are certain tax strategies that just are valid. The rules are clear. The feedback is immediate. You file your return. You get the tax savings. You do it wrong. You get the nastygram from the IRS. You do it every year. The pattern repeats. You do it every year. The strategy works. We do it with all our clients, and the strategy works. So, yeah, a lot of tax. I think tax planning particularly fits that well, but I feel like a lot of what we do in planning, to me, kind of fits that framework around the advice we give. I guess the only asterisk I'm thinking, feedback is not always immediate. Sometimes, that's challenging. Trust me, diversification is a good idea. A little bit challenging in wicked environments because the feedback is delayed, and in the short term, client is like, "Why didn't you onboard the thing that went up and none of the thing that went down?" Because...

Carl: Literally a hallmark, right? Misleading feedback.

Michael: Yeah. So tax planning is a kind environment, and investment management is a wicked environment.

Carl: Yeah, it's interesting, too. There was a great example, I think it was in "Range," but I may have read it somewhere else, where there was a study, and as I recall, it was a Rice University study around accounting, which was interesting, that experienced accountants were asked to study a new tax law for deductions that replaced a previous one. They did worse than novices. And this is an interesting problem, which I'm just really curious about. And I haven't read the whole study, but what it's pointing to is this idea of...the study's author called it cognitive entrenchment.

Michael: Well, if I got a strategy that works, I keep doing the strategy that works. Don't mess with my strategy.

Carl: Totally. So, how do we deal...?

Michael: Half-joking, half-serious. 'I got a strategy. It works. Don't mess with my strategy. Thank you, IRS, federal government, DOGE, whatever it is. Don't mess with my tax strategy. I got a thing. It works. I do it with my clients. They love it.'

Carl: Yeah. Yeah, until it doesn't. And how do we maintain flexibility around that? Because it feels to me like, increasingly, we need to almost operate as if we're in a complex or...they're not exactly synonymous, I shouldn't use it that way, but in a wicked environment.

Michael: Yes, except if all you do is spend all your time waiting for the bad things to happen, you can lose out on a lot of good opportunity by not just doing the thing that works and systematizing the heck out of it and building and scaling it up. You may be shifting a little bit from the financial planning end to the business end. Most great businesses get built because there's a particular thing they do that they're really good at, and they just stick with it. What's his name, wrote the whole one thing book? The literal point is find the thing you're good at and do that. Jim Collins' the Hedgehog Concept. So much of business success comes down to finding the thing you're good at and doing it repeatedly. Yes, every now and then, a business has a Kodak moment, including literally Kodak. Yes, they also had a wonderfully successful business for 50 years and made billions and billions of dollars. So they could have been super hyper vigilant about everything, and they never would have gotten blindsided in the Kodak moment because they never would have been a successful company in the first place.

Carl: I love that. I love that. To me, it's really interesting. So let's pretend for a minute. Where are things particularly wicked?

Michael: Investments. That's where it comes... The rules are ambiguous. Feedback is delayed.

Carl: How about client income? Do you feel like it's getting...?

Michael: Experience can reinforce the wrong lessons.

Carl: Do you feel like it's getting increasingly sort of uncertain and maybe even wicked on, "How do I make my money? Is my job secure? Is my job safe?" Do you feel like any of that's shifting for you?

Michael: Well, I live in the D.C. area, so we have a lot of that right now.

Carl: Yeah, tough question.

Michael: As DOGE does what it's doing. So, yes, I think when the economy is struggling and hiring rate is down and unemployment rate is up, I think there's always a cycle of that just economically speaking as the citizen of a country.

How Business Leadership Changes In Predictable Or Chaotic Environments [15:05]

Michael: I'm wondering, though, where you take this in terms of, so what are we supposed to do as advisors with clients? Again, I feel like there's a little bit of a distinction even between the "What do I do as a financial planner?" and "What do I do as a financial planning business owner?" Because I will admit, at least from the business owner, if you're in a kind environment, just do the thing that works and scale it up, and you at least need to watch for when the environment might be shifting so you know when to change. But preparing for change that isn't coming just gives up on a lot of opportunity to systematize and grow and scale a business.

Carl: Yeah. Yeah. There's a bunch of stuff we could talk about in terms of what you do. I do want to emphasize the idea that, and this was often the case with my column, I'm okay with asking really good questions and not having all the answers because I don't have them, and I think it's fun to just explore. Because even in that case, it's really interesting. If you're operating in a wicked environment, and this is, I think, basically, the premise of Epstein's book, "Range," if you're operating in a wicked environment, being a generalist is really valuable, right? Because you don't get that cognitive entrenchment, you're able to see trends, you're able to move and change. If you're operating in a kind environment, specializing is really valuable, right? And I think I was thinking about that as I thought about this as a topic. I was thinking about just niche marketing, being a specialist, solving a specific problem, building your whole business around even the service models and everything around solving that specific specialized problem.

Michael: And it's a good example in context because as I look at just like our advisor marketplace, most advisors are afraid to build niches for some version of wicked environment. What if I go after them and then the environment changes and I can't serve them anymore? And most of the firms that I know that have grown wildly successful grew with niches by saying, "The environment is not that wicked. It's actually pretty kind. Find the people you're good at and repeat on them and grow a great business." And it turns out, if the environment changes later, it's not a life sentence. You can adapt. And ironically, it's actually a lot easier to adapt in many ways when you add a core segment of clients that you grew very successful with, and you just literally have more money and team and resources to make the adjustment when the adjustment comes, right?

The irony even in the context of the infamy of the Kodak moment, Kodak made the first digital camera. They had the resources. They just couldn't get out of their own way, not because it wasn't successful to scale up in a kind environment but because they didn't appreciate when eventually it turned to a more wicked environment and other people were doing the same thing, and their risks were going up.

Carl: Yeah. I love that. I think that's really, really smart. And I think thinking through, where does it make sense to be worried about every little thing and where does it make sense to just put your head down and execute, that's the art and the skill, right?

Michael: There was a book that came out many years ago by Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz called "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," and a lot of it just is the story of the truly wild, crazy, wicked environment ride that he had building tech companies in the late '90s and early 2000s through the hypercompetition and the mega boom and the crash and everything that was going on in that environment, in that era. And one of the striking points that he makes in the book that I think is another version of this is that, as he frames it, from a leadership perspective, there are wartime CEOs, and there are peacetime CEOs.

Carl: Interesting.

Michael: Peacetime CEOs are really good at growing and scaling companies, now my words for this, in kind environments. They invest in their team, they focus on values, they deepen their culture, they expand and scale their core offerings, and it's wonderfully profitable and successful. But not all times are peaceful for all companies. Sometimes you're at war, it's a hyper-competitive environment. There's a major competitor that's coming after you. Something big changes in the landscape. And when you're in that environment, the wartime CEOs succeed, the ones who can rally the troops for a near hopeless battle to take on a major competitor who's kicking their backside but somehow manages to turn the company around and get everyone fired up to create the thing that successfully gets them through this battle. Oh, and by the way, next week, a new one is starting.

And so part of the point he kind of makes in the book is there are peacetime CEOs and wartime CEOs. And one of the troubles that companies get into is they have a peacetime CEO when the war comes, and they get blindsided and take out the competition. But strikingly, he also makes the point, the other version of the problem happens as well, which is you take a wartime CEO and they put them in a peacetime company, and they don't grow and scale anything. They keep breaking stuff left and right.

Carl: Breaking things.

Michael: They're finding enemies to fight that don't actually exist and aren't there, which, to me, is why I'm kind of fascinated with this kind and wicked terrain environment framing because kind strategies in a wicked environment can be as bad as wicked strategies in a kind environment.

Carl: That, to me, is the really important takeaway, is, okay, so the things that would be...and you pointed to this earlier, it's easier to change the business if you've been profitable. So, what are some things that matter?

Adjusting Financial Advice To A Client's Personal Environment [21:27]

Carl: And I'd love to just spend a few minutes as we get closer to wrapping up here on clients. So if a client comes in and things just got wicked in their lives, this could be unrelated to the market. This could be something happened, an insurance claim, a death in the family, a job loss, could be something positive. Let's just mainly focus on negative things. The plan just blew up. The tool...

Michael: About external circumstances, just to be clear. Not the advisor's fault.

Carl: See, this is that thing. The tools that we should pull out of the...we should literally put on a different backpack, right? Grab a different...it's a different toolbox. It may be the same technical tools. You may still use the same Monte Carlo calculator, it's fine, but the language you're going to use around it. So we're in a...

Michael: And what changes for you? How would your language shift?

Carl: Yeah. So first, empathy. In a kind environment, we may just be reinforcing data, reinforcing data, reinforcing data. But in a wicked environment, we need to...somebody's nervous, somebody's scared, the plan just blew up. This is very close to something we recently recorded around scary markets, right? It's still empathy. The skills in a wicked environment are things like asking better questions, carefully considering edge cases. "Okay, let's look at all this. Let's do a bunch of scenario planning. Let's stress test this," right? And your range of potential outcomes just widened a whole bunch, probably. So you need to be comfortable with the idea that, "I don't know. Let's see where the edges of this are," right?

The third tool...so two, asking better questions, considering edge cases, nuance and edge cases, and the third thing, I think, that's really important, I want to talk about four, is that now you're going to put on a set of lenses. I almost think of them as binoculars. You're going to go up on the watch tower, and after you make a plan of action that may only be a day, a week, a month, "Call the bank, get this information, call me back," or, "Let's see what happens next month when the bonus comes," you're like, once you've made a plan of action, you're going to climb up on the watch tower with your goggles, your binoculars, and you're going to actively, and this is a very important posture, actively look for disconfirming evidence. You're no longer looking for confirming evidence, confirmation bias. You're actively on the...for those of you listening, I'm actually putting binoculars up to my eyes and looking out over the landscape.

Michael: No, no, no. For those of you listening, he's got hand goggles up to his eyes and pretending they are binoculars, which is much more entertaining than actually having binoculars.

Carl: Which is why you should all be on YouTube. You're not hiding from disconfirming evidence. You're actively looking like, "Okay, I'm probably wrong here because the range of outcomes got really wide all of a sudden. So I'm probably wrong. I just don't know how yet. So I'm going to look for it." And disconfirming evidence will actually be greeted with sort of good news because it will help correct you to where the range of outcomes. And then the last thing is anywhere you can, I call it a flight to simplicity, anywhere you can, you make things simpler. "Hey, that thing you were thinking about doing..." "Oh, we were going to buy a new house." "Okay, could we not buy the new house?" "Could we not get the new car?" "Could we not even sign up for the new Netflix subscription?" Anywhere we can, we're going to try and make things simpler for a little bit. Because when the complexity goes up, you want to get out of complex terrain to the degree you can. And there's only certain things. Remember, effective...

Michael: The avalanche is coming, just get off the trail, get off the mountain.

Carl: Get out of the big mountains. Get to a simpler place.

Michael: Go sideways. You don't go down the hill faster. I'm assuming and knowing actually nothing about avalanches.

Carl: Fair enough.

Michael: You don't go down the hill faster. You go sideways and get out of the avalanche behind you.

Carl: Get to a ridge. Get to a ridge. Get into a forest. Get to safe terrain. Forests aren't always safe, but generally, disclaimer. So you look for ways. And then remember, there's this great term around residual risk. I love residual risk, right? You're going to try and reduce inherent risk. And then always remember, you've still got this pile of residual risk leftover, and that residual risk, now, hopefully, you may have been able to cut it down by 10%. Maybe if you're lucky, you cut it down by more by flying to the flight to simplicity. So those are the kind of operating procedures when you're like, "Oh, no, Mr. and Mrs. Client, things just got uncertain. The plan just blew up. Let's empathy. And now let's go to work." And that's a different...I don't love the analogies around war, but that's a wartime operation, which I think is actually a very effective analogy, versus a peacetime operation.

Creating 'Safe-To-Fail' Environments When Clients Are Reluctant To Change Their Behavior [26:44]

Michael: And so then just one question I've got left as we come to the end. I don't know. Does any of this show up in the language and conversation with clients when you're dealing with someone who's been operating in the wicked terrain and don't realize it? It's the person who skied the out-of-bound slope ten times without an avalanche, and he's like, "It's totally safe." You're like, "No, it's literally avalanche terrain. It's not safe." And the clients, again, just, I tend to come back to the investment context, they bought some things. They went up a lot. Therefore, I'm an investing genius. They don't say it like that, but they become really resistant to advice around things like diversification because they believe they're in a kind environment. "I'm following the rules. I bought the thing. It went up. I got immediate feedback. The pattern is going to repeat." And you know they're not in that.

Carl: Just setting themselves up for much bigger, yeah. Yeah. It's super interesting. I've been having this conversation a lot over the last couple of years around risk because it's my favorite topic, and specifically with people who take big risk in the mountains and the markets, so both the mountains and the markets. And the question that comes back all the time is, is there any way to get somebody to know it without experiencing it? Can I tell the 25-year-old without either getting caught in one or having one come close?

Michael: As a parent who's told their children a lot of things that they shouldn't do that they continue to do anyways, I'm not optimistic on where you're going with this.

Carl: Yeah. As a 53-year-old child who has been told a million times by my wife not to play football with the 22-year-olds and I still come home with torn hamstrings, I know this feeling. So the answer is, man, it's really hard. You see this with cigarette advertisements. The pictures, graphic images can do something, but I think the better way to think about this is, how could you create safe-to-fail experiments? Not fail-safe. Not fail-safe because that's a totally different thing. Safe-to-fail environments.

Michael: Okay, you want to own the thing. Let's put it in an unmanaged account. You can put a couple percent into it. Do your thing. I'll handle your safe money that you can't afford to lose for your retirement, and you do the thing you want to do with the portion that you can afford to take some risk with.

Carl: Yeah, that's a classic one. The problem is that could go "right for them, wrong for you" a couple of times.

Michael: Correct. Then you do the thing, and it goes up a ton.

Carl: Two or three times. They're like, "Yeah, I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again." So another way to do that would be, and I think we talked about this maybe in a recent episode around different people creating different tools for data visualization, we could literally say...you could create an experiment where you're like, "Hey, let's go back." You don't even have to say this. You could say, "Hey, before you do that, could we just play a little game?" Let me give you...we could create an environment where we go back ten years so we know what happened and say choose, right? We could create the small day trading account, which we always do. I think the day trading account idea, I'm just calling it day trading account idea, you would want to set up real strict rules around, "Hey, let's keep that at a certain percent. And guess what, if it goes well, you can peel some of that off and rebalance back into your account and keep it at the small percentage." The chances of them following that rule, we both know, pretty challenging. You and I have been through this because we...

Michael: A little easier if you set it up in advance.

Carl: Yeah, it will be at least easier, at least more possible. You and I have lived through the crappy risk tolerance era, risk tolerance questionnaire era, where there was...and again, these were generic. I'm not talking about any specific brand of risk tolerance. It was just you and I lived through the invention of risk tolerance questionnaires. And we got exactly what we're talking about here, is misleading feedback. Because when you've been through a period of low volatility, high returns, and somebody takes a risk tolerance, a crappy designed risk tolerance questionnaire, they literally are saying, "What risk? What are you talking about? This is amazing." And then you have the same person take the same questionnaire after a 30% drop, and they're like, "Get me the cash."

Michael: Yep. Which, to me, isn't actually a risk tolerance questionnaire problem per se. It's their perceptions, right? They change their understanding of what kind of environment they're in, right? A super risk-averse person who believes they found a stock that'll go up 25% a year without fail would still buy it. It's just like a 25% bond. I have a 4% bond. You buy a 25% bond. They're thinking the wrong game, but that's not a tolerance issue. That's, do you know what kind of environment you're in? And I think vice versa as well. You can be totally risk-tolerant. If you think the market is going to zero, you still go to cash. If you really think it's going to zero, you go to cash.

Carl: Yeah, that's well stated. That's why I think this is really important. Actually, I think understanding the landscape...because that's where I wrote that manifesto that you cannot buy that we hand out all over the place, is around you're not a defender of an outdated...a real financial planner is not a defender of an outdated map. They're a guide in a changing landscape. And I think when we understand the changing landscape...and sometimes the landscapes are not changing. You could think of your government...well, see, even that, right? I was just going to say your government pension.

Michael: Yeah.

Carl: But...go ahead.

Michael: I think, then, you frame it well to say that one of the values of being a financial planner is a guide in a, call it, potentially changing landscape and the fact that we, as an advisor, can help clients realize when they're changing landscapes and how to navigate. It's a version of the company needs someone to make them realize you're heading into wartime, you might want to swap out the peacetime CEO, or vice versa, that helping clients navigate potentially changing terrains is part of the value proposition.

Carl: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I think where I would maybe wrap with that idea is just maybe thinking of them as two separate toolboxes. And they might even be the same "tools." There might be a hammer in both. But it's how you use it is the tool, your posture, your language, your certainty. And I think you're emphasizing process and adaptability over predictions and perfect plans. And I think, to be fair, the earlier in the engagement that we start using that kind of language, this is a process, this is about general resilience, you're in the ballpark, and the less certainty we sell, the better we set ourselves up for what you called earlier life. I think it was just like reality, right?

Just think of it as a toolbox. And I guess what I'd leave with is just start asking yourself questions every once in a while. "Oh, geez, what environment is this? What kind of environment is this?" So you just start practicing noticing because then you can pull the right toolbox down.

Michael: Yeah. I like it. I like it, Carl. Thank you.

Carl: Yeah, cheers, Michael.

Michael: Cheers.