Executive Summary
The "succession crisis" is a common point of discussion in the financial advice profession. The succession crisis typically refers to two related issues: a lack of general succession plans (for retirement or emergencies), and owner-advisors retiring at a later than ‘typical' age. The former presents a challenge in the event of emergencies, but can also make retirement itself challenging, given that succession plans can take years to execute effectively. Which leads to the latter challenge: even when advisors have a plan in place, they may not execute it in a timely manner and may retire far later than originally planned.
In this 182nd episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss why aging founders may be reluctant to retire… and what younger advisors can do to preserve career momentum. The latest Kitces research on What Actually Contributes To Advisor Wellbeing (2025) provides key insights here: wellbeing and work satisfaction increase with age, which means that in their 60s+, many advisors are at their peak of satisfaction. At this stage, advisors have built deep client relationships, high income, and a rewarding work/life balance. In other words, why would anyone leave when they are maximally satisfied with their work and life?
Yet this dynamic poses a real dilemma for younger advisors seeking to grow. If older advisors have little incentive to exit, how can the next generation gain opportunities to lead? One answer may lie not in forcing succession, but in reframing it. Instead of asking senior advisors to leave, firms can focus on gradual transitions – offloading select clients, creating staged equity pathways, or formalizing ‘elder statesperson' roles that preserve the wisdom and influence of veteran advisors while opening space for new leadership. Just as clients often retire to something rather than from something, the same may apply to advisors; absent a compelling vision for what comes next, many are unlikely to let go of something they love.
Interestingly, the study also found that the happiest advisors are three times more likely to retire than their less-satisfied peers. This may seem counterintuitive, but it points to the role of internal contentment and the concept of ‘enough'. Advisors who are fulfilled by their work and relationships may also be more confident in stepping away when their personal goals have been met – whereas those who chase external metrics like income or firm size may never feel finished. This distinction echoes broader financial planning principles: knowing what's enough, and aligning decisions with core values, is key to a well-lived life and a thoughtful exit. As such, younger advisors may gain more momentum by taking on advisors' least favorite tasks and dimensions of client load. Or, much as they would with clients, advisors may hold a planning meeting to collaboratively brainstorm what the next ten years could look like.
Ultimately, the key point is that succession planning is about more than timeline and ownership… it's also about the deep psychological and emotional dimensions of advisor careers, which tend to be extremely relationship-oriented. As such, advisors may find greater success in planning transitions in roles rather than outright exits. Much like financial planning itself, the most effective transitions come from honest dialogue, aligned incentives, and a shared vision of what comes next – for both clients and advisors alike!
Authors:
***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
Kitces Report: What Actually Contributes To Advisor Wellbeing- What baby boomers can learn from millennials at work – and vice versa (Chip Conley)
- "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
- Delegate Your Least-Favorite Work By Hiring Your Opposite (Not Your Mini-me)
Kitces & Carl Transcript
Michael: Well, greetings, Carl.
Carl: Hello, Michael Kitces. I feel like you stole my "greetings" salutation.
Michael: The word "greetings"?
Carl: Yeah, I was the first one ever to use, "Greetings, this is Carl." And now you're using it.
Michael: No, I'm just...what did I say before I met you back in the dark days when I had a different vocabulary?
Carl: Before "greetings" was invented as a salutation?
Michael: Or apparently before I stole it from you. I had to have something. I didn't just grunt at people when I met them, but I really don't know what I said. We'll have to go back. We'll pull up the original first few episodes and see how this started out back in the old days.
[Producer's Note: Carl opens episode one with "Greetings." Point, Carl.]
Carl: How are you? It's super good to be talking with you again.
Michael: It is good to see you. We are recording here in late December. We are the new year of 2026 by the time this is going live. And so look, in the theme of, I guess new years and looking to the future, I actually put out a call to our listeners a couple of weeks ago through social media channels to ask them what would you like to hear us talk about more? So much of what we cover on this podcast are emails you get, emails I get, things that people ask us at conferences. But we haven't really polled the social media audiences for a while and the advisor community out there. And so we got an interesting question that I wanted to talk to you about today. The premise is pretty straightforward. So this is what someone had written. We'll call her Lisa to protect people's anonymity. Lisa said, "I find the future of our industry very interesting. What will attract younger generations to find this profession? And perhaps more importantly, what will push aging advisors to finally say now is the time to step back and transition their book and officially retire to create opportunities for the young people coming in?"
Carl: Gosh, it seems like an age-old question.
Kitces Wellbeing Research: Are Older Financial Advisors Happier? [02:28]
Michael: So yes, we've been talking about some version of the old dude or dudette won't get out of the way so I can move up since forever. Yes. But what prompted me around this...So we just wrapped up our well-being study on the Kitces platform. So we do four research studies every two years on a rotating six-month basis, one on technology, one on marketing, one on productivity, and one on well-being, essentially what actually makes us happier in our jobs and our careers and what we do. And so we do this research. We ask 1000-plus advisors about their well-being. We use a framework called the Cantril Ladder that comes from Gallup research. Actually, it comes from researcher named Cantril, but Gallup has popularized it and used it literally in happiness surveys around the world. So it's kind of cool. We get neat comparative benchmarking data to the average person in every country on the planet.
And then we do all the internal analysis to try to figure out what factors are particularly associated with happiness for advisors. What makes us happier? What makes us feel better? Is it about where you work? Is it about what you do? Is it about the nature of your clients? Is it about how much team or support you've got? Is it your tech? All the different things. And we let the data guide us. And one of the most striking things that we found in our research is that one of the single biggest predictors of advisor well-being is your age. And the chart is a straight line up and to the right from starting out in my early 20s to still going in my 60s and 70s. The older you are, the happier you are, on average. Obviously, individual exceptions can occur. And that, in essence, peak happiness for advisors is being an advisor who's still going in your mid 60s or later. 65-plus was happier than 55 to 65, which was happier than 45 to 55, which was happier than 35 to 45, which was happier than under 35.
Carl: Holy moly.
Michael: In a fairly material way. They were not just 0.001 differences. They were multiple standard deviations difference from the youngest to the oldest advisors.
And so on the one hand, this has fun takeaways. For anyone who's a young advisor and really miserable in the early days, I can tell you empirically speaking, it literally gets better, quite a bit. If you can keep going through the marathon. But relative to questions like Lisa's, what will push the aging advisor to finally say now is the time to step back and transition their book? It gets really interesting when we find, just broad base across the advisor community, the happiest advisors are those over 65. The highest earning advisors also typically those over age 65, simply because you've had more years to accumulate your client base, and grow your clients, and move up market with your clients and build a team around you so that you make more money while working fewer hours while in very rewarding relationships with people that you've been serving for ten or 20, 30 years who remunerate you incredibly well while much of your client meetings are playing golf. You can kind of see why the happiness thing kicks in.
And so to me, it gets really striking to say...the industry frames this as we have a succession crisis because there are many advisors who have not implemented formal succession plans, even including folks in this age group. And then I look at the data and say… well, okay, if peak income and peak happiness and peak psychic value and peak relationship depth all come in your late 60s and 70s as a financial advisor, why would you retire? Short of literally demographics is destiny. At some point, health events will clearly come to bear. Unfortunately, that is an inevitable reality. But we are not a highly manual labor-intensive job. This is not my body wears out when I'm 63 and I'm just trying to make it to Medicare. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, many professional services, businesses like ours have practitioners that are still going into their 80s if their health is permitting. And it's an interesting dynamic to me to say, what if the only thing that gets an advisor out of the way is a health event? It will eventually play out, but it means all the discussion that a third of advisors are retiring in the next ten years, maybe that's going to be 15 or 20 years.
Carl: Yeah, man, there's so much interesting about that.
Michael: So, yeah, how do you take all this in? Where do you want to go?
Carl: Yeah. This is, I believe, a complete different take on it. So I don't want to...Let's circle back to where you go with it. And I think you've already stated one...
Michael: Sure. Take it in a different direction.
Carl: Yeah, one interesting conclusion is, yeah, why would they? Here's what I'm trying to...You just told me this, so I didn't have any time to think about this, but my initial reaction is one of sadness that...and I'm trying to make sense of it.
Michael: Okay. Yeah. Why are you sad? What's...?
Carl: And what are we waiting for to be happy? That's the thing that I was like, wait...
Michael: But we're not waiting to be happy. We are. What if the job is more fulfilling than retiring away from the job that wasn't fulfilling?
Carl: But it was like we had to get to 65 to get to peak happiness. And again, I hear all this and I'm like, in my mind, there's something deeply beautiful about somebody in their 70s and even 80s coming in as the elder statesman or woman reading the newspaper, helping clients. When I see those people in our industry, I love...I can think of one right now named Burt. Still building an amazing firm in his 80s. That's amazing. But this is pointing to something slightly different though. Just tell me where I'm wrong about this is the counter to this is you are going to be slightly less miserable every five years. And is there something embedded in this that's very close to a natural human tendency, which is I'll be happier when, right, and is there part of that that we need to be better at modeling, right, like decoupling the idea of...So that's where my first thought of this was, was there's a natural human tendency that we all fall prey to that we can point to it by calling it the grass is greener, or "I'll just be happier when…" right? If I buy that car, if my business produces this amount, if...Is there a piece of that that's in there too or you just don't see it?
Michael: No, I don't know that I do because here's the distinction. This isn't advisors looking to the future and saying, "I'll be happier when…" This is advisors who are in that future saying, "I am happier now."
Carl: Yeah. But the 35-year-old is in their 35-year-old moment saying, "I only put my happiness at seven or I put my happiness at six."Do you know what I mean ? So if we take a slice...
Michael: Because my client relationships are still newer because I'm still working my backside off trying to survive.
Why Life Satisfaction Increases With Age [11:12]
Carl: Okay. Let me ask you in a different way. And I think you're going there, but I want to make the question really clear. Why isn't the 35-year-old advisor reporting higher happiness?
Michael: So I'd answer this a few ways. The first, just to level set overall, the 30-something-year-old advisor has the same happiness as the median American.
Carl: Okay. Fair. I like that. That's fun.
Michael: The younger ones are definitely lower, as many of us have been through with the challenges...
Carl: Is there a number to this unit of happiness? Can you give me a number?
Michael: Oh yeah, sure.
Carl: Like a 7 or a 12 or a what?
Michael: Yeah. So it's a 1-to-10 scale. The median happiness, I think literally in the world...There's a world happiness report that measures this. The median score around the world is 6.7.
Carl: Okay. All right. Great. And please, for those of you listening, I don't really want to...it doesn't help to argue about the specifics of the data, but just to know that, okay, we're talking about a seven.
Michael: Yeah. So human median is 6.7. Young advisors are 6.4. By the time you're in your late 30s, you're at a 6.9. And by the time you're 65-plus you're at an 8.
Carl: 8 out of 10...
Michael: 8 out of 10 on average.
Carl: ...units of happiness.
Michael: Yes.
Carl: Okay. So this is just, I think, worth exploring because it's fun. What is it about the job? The success of the job, the income, the revenue, what is driving that happiness?
Michael: I'm not even sure it's the income and the revenue.
Carl: What is it?
Michael: It's awesome relationships with clients I've been serving for ten, 20, 30 years. Why don't I feel the same happiness when I'm 38? Because I haven't had client relationships for 30 years. For a lot of us, by the time we're that far in...I've been to weddings and funerals and celebrations with client families. You have a lot of them by that stage. And practically speaking, as many of us have experienced, the planning work tends to be a little bit less intensive in that stage, right? My clients are mostly retired, their life circumstance...I don't get a lot of, "Oh my gosh, the company just told me we're IPO-ing and we have two weeks to make the decision about all these really complex stock option issues." It's like, "How the grandkids doing? Do we need to update the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan this year because you had another chronic health condition?" I'm not trying to make light of it, but just, yes, there is a phenomenon that...
Carl: Are you saying it's easier?
Michael: The client...
Carl: Less complex?
Michael: Yeah. We see it just empirically, hours worked tends to go down. Through some combination of my client relationships are more established and a little bit less demanding. We've been through all the upfront complex planning work many times over if my average client's been with me ten, 20-plus years. They're just genuinely deep relationships. It's not a client meeting. I'm hanging out with a friend that happens to pay me as their advisor.
Carl: This is a fun line of thought. And we can then get back to what we were talking about. The question in my head that I'm just circling around, which is really interesting to me, is what am I waiting for to be happy? And is there any element of this that is, I will be...and you're not saying this as a 35-year-old, but is there any element of the belief system that we're embodying that says, I will be happier when it's less complex, or I will be happier when I have better relationships? Rather than saying, why isn't the 35-year-old human happy now? And is there any link to this? And the only reason I'm curious about this is because I think you want to be a better financial planner, be a better human. You sort of start modeling the thing we're hoping to help our clients do. And one of the things we're hoping to help our clients do is be the thing now. Be enough now. Live the life you want to live now, with the trade-offs that you always have to make. But it's like these are the good old days. It doesn't get better than...35-year-old, it doesn't get better than it is right now. And by the way, it's going to be better, but it's going to be better in different ways. Is there any part of that that lands for you?
Reaping Rewards Vs Being "In The Thick" Of It [16:17]
Michael: Yes, but I think part of the implication is there are ways that it's better. I can live a great life, but a great life with people I've had 30-year relationships with is better. We're social animals.
Carl: Wait, wait, wait, wait, just let that sit for a second. So a life where I've had 30-year relationships is better.
Michael: Than a life where I haven't.
Carl: I'm just reflecting on 30 years of marriage.
Michael: Maybe 20 years if you don't want to stretch it quite that hard, but...
Carl: Well, no, we just celebrated 30 years and it's amazing. And I often look back on the first five and I'm just like, that was so awesome. Do you know what I mean ? I wish I had realized how awesome it was at the time. I wish I'd realized what an adventure it was and how amazing it was. You know what I mean ? So I'm just wondering about, it is awesome and it's awesome in completely different...the depth of it is so beautiful.
Michael: And it's more awesome when you've got 50 of them or 100 of them.
Carl: It's interesting.
Michael: Oh, and by the way, they pay you more than ever before because you built all this success with them. Oh, and you don't have to work as many hours as you used to for whatever combination of their complexity is easier, you now have a team, you can delegate more.
Carl: Those two, I don't...They pay me more than ever before and I have to work less, those are two that I'm like, ah, I don't think a life of ease makes me happier. I think there's some pretty good research around that. Michael Easter's work on the comfort crisis will be a good primer on it.
Michael: It's not a life of ease. It's not a life of ease. It's a life of...So it's not a life of ease. It's a life of doing the really hard work of maintaining great relationships you've had for multiple decades with people who greatly value your service that you provided them, where you've had a meaningful impact that you can literally see over decades of working with them. It feels pretty fricking good.
Carl: By the way, I'm not in any way diminishing 65-year-olds' 8.7 on the happiness scale. That's amazing. I'm more focused on the idea of, man, what about being happy now no matter where you are on the scale? And I realized this is probably a pretty deep tangent, but the reason I care about it is because the modeling, I found that the more we can in embody the practice of aligning our use of capital with what's important to us, the more we can embody that, the more powerful our advice becomes with clients. And I just wish I had...I remember being frantic hustle guy, grinding, stressed, worried financial planner. And I think I could have been better for my clients had I not been the stressed part. And I don't mean work less. I'm not saying that necessarily. I'm just saying, I think the embodying of it.
So yes, great for 65, 75-year-old 7.8 on the happiness scale guy.
Michael: 8.0. 8.0.
Carl: 8.0. Yeah.
Michael: Average.
Carl: And I just am encouraging the lesson that I would draw from this, I would hope would be, yes, it's going to get better. Yes, you're going to get...that's great to know. And I promise you, these are the good old days right now. When you're 35, you're...man, please. I was just having this conversation with a 37-year-old advisor who was like, "I'm in the thick of it, and the three kids, and it's busy, and I'm going to..." I'm like, "Bro, please enjoy it. I know it feels that way. But man, you're going to look back..." I was just driving down the street the other day seeing a little seven-year-old girl with two ponytails that looked just like my daughter did at that age. And I thought, oh my gosh, I wish...not I wish, not necessarily I wish, but oh my gosh, that's beautiful to be in the thick of it. And it doesn't feel that way when you're in it. It feels overwhelming, and tiring, and you're exhausted, and who's going to do the dishes, and at 10:30 at night, you're still cleaning up whatever, and then you got your own work to do, and you're going to look back and say, man, those were awesome. So that's the only thought I had about this whole thing.
Creating Space As The Younger Advisor [21:21]
Michael: So how do you tie this back to Lisa's original question? So what does this mean for our...I guess the industry version is succession crisis. Lisa's framing is how do we bring in new talent if the old talent won't get out of the way?
Carl: Yeah, to me, in light of this conversation, I think...and I think some of the work that Chip...and I can't remember Chip's last name, the Modern Elder Academy. Chip Conley, Chip Conley. I think maybe, in light of this conversation, the one idea that comes to mind is we start thinking about how to make room for the elder stateswoman, elder statesman role in this business, and maybe there's a conversation to be had around that like, "Hey, I don't want to push you out. And we got to make room for me." And man, the wisdom and the...that's what Chip's work...He found himself in his 50s looking around realizing he was 20 years older than the next person at Airbnb. After building a really successful hotel hospitality business, he sold his business and then he got hired to be in the C-suite area of Airbnb. And they slowly started working into the idea of like, how do we leverage your wisdom instead of thinking it's time for you to go? And I don't know what that looks like. I'm just thinking, wouldn't it be interesting if we could figure out roles...just like we would with internships, could we figure out roles that leverage that wisdom, leverage that ability to be around? That's all I've got on it.
Michael: Yeah. It certainly suggests at the least that if you're the younger person trying to move in and move up, [find] something that begins the process more gradually. Can I buy a piece? Can I buy a tranche? Can I take over some clients? Whatever that multi or staged succession might look like that you're probably going to be on a better track by saying, "How do we start down this journey?" than, "Why aren't you gone yet?" to someone who, at the end of the day, is probably peak relationships, peak income, and peak happiness. And I don't know what they're going to do on the other end of that retirement, but it's probably not going to be as relationshipy or incomey as the thing that they've already got, which means you're...
Carl: And with their identity and all that stuff.
Michael: And tied with their identity. I think a lot of us have seen this with clients as well. There are clients that retire from something and there are clients that retire to something. And a happy, experienced advisor doesn't have a reason to retire from and may not have anything to retire to that looks better than what they've already got.
Carl: Yeah, it's of no consolation to our metaphorical Lisa, but the conclusion I'm seeing is if you're in one of those situations where it's pretty clear that this person feels the way you're outlining here...because I can think of other examples, right? Of course, there are advisors that are excited and ready and have other things they want to do, but then maybe we just get more clear-eyed about the reality of those particular situations of now maybe you have...Remember when Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast [and] Slow, he said something like, "I have no hope that this book will help you avoid mistakes. It's just now when you make a mistake, you'll know what to call it?"
Michael: Yeah.
Carl: Maybe this is one of those where it's like, now you understand there might be...we have another little insight into this particularly challenging problem. And if you find yourself in that challenging problem, you can say, okay, I can either go somewhere else, I can leave and create my own thing, or is there a way to leverage this deep wisdom from the person I'm working with and do I want that path? And you just get a little more clear-eyed about it, which is no consolation to the people who are hustling like crazy to try and get a foothold in their own thing, but at least maybe it gives you some language for it.
Defining ‘Enough' As An Experienced Advisor [26:14]
Michael: Now, the one other interesting finding that I would note from the research that was a little bit surprising to us, not withstanding everything just said about why would you retire when you're at peak relationship, peak income, peak happiness, we did find that advisors who are feeling very happy and thriving in their advisory business are actually about three times more likely to retire.
Carl: What? Sorry.
Michael: Happier ones were more likely. ..
Carl: I'm not the smartest guy in the world. Explain this to me.
Michael: Unfortunately, the way we measured the data was a little bit limited to suss out what was going on, but what appears to be happening...So one of the factors that drives happiness, we find it in our well-being research turns out it's kind of a human thing. People who can get comfortable that they have enough and are happy with what they've got tend to be happier than those who are continuously striving for more income, more dollars, more wealth, etc. So we actually find...
Carl: No surprise there, right?
Michael: ...advisors who came into the profession for the income and earning potential tend to be less happy than advisors who came into the profession because they wanted to help and serve others.
Carl: Wow.
Michael: Just from a motivator's perspective. And so there is a small, interesting double-edged sword that the advisors who are happiest with the relationships and income are actually slightly more likely to say, "And you know what? I've made enough. I can do the things I want to do. My goals are achieved. I'm ready to move on to the next phase of life."
Carl: I think this really points to what I was pointing to then. If ‘enough', or your identity or happiness is tied to a number, it'll never be enough. Because as soon as you get there, it will always be a little more.
Michael: Correct. But if your identity is tied to, I have amazing relationships with the clients that I serve and they're incredibly rewarding, and I can also live the lifestyle that I enjoy and the work hours aren't too tough, that's kind of sweet to hang out with.
Carl: Well, to me, that points to, yeah, you've done some different level of work that my sense of identity and my sense of my own worth is linked to things like relationships, impact, making a difference in somebody's life. And why would you ever stop that? You just get to the point where you're like, I would like it to fit the right size box in my life. But why would I ever want to stop that if I deeply love...? I'm never planning on retiring, ever. I love what I do.
Michael: I happen to be right there with you.
Carl: I just want to continually try to get rid of things I don't enjoy about it, which is typically ancillary stuff, email, calendars, whatever, and to allow myself to do more of what I'm uniquely good at. And I feel like right now, I think the next ten years and the ten years after that, I'm going to double in terms of impact. I'm only getting better. Why would I ever want to leave that? And I think some of the really high-quality advisors I see, as long as we make room for them, feel the same way.
Michael: So I guess relative to Lisa's question...
Carl: Yeah, Lisa's question is tough.
Michael: I guess from what we see in the research...And if folks want to see the whole thing, we have the study online, so kitces.com/wellbeing, and you can read the whole study. It's also in the main navigation of Research if you just go to the site. To me, there's kind of two related paths to me. Either you're going to your senior advisor and saying, "Hey, I can see you really enjoy the work that you do and the relationships that you've got and that you're trying to delegate and let go of some stuff that you don't enjoy as much anymore so you can just do the things that you really enjoy. Could we start shifting clients and/or ownership gradually? Are there a few I can take off your plate? As I do more around the firm, could I buy into a small share of the firm?" Not like, "I want to buy the whole thing because you have to get out of the way because I want to live my future," which might be true, "but you're not going to leave because you're enjoying what you do." Can we do this gradually? Not more and faster, but something to get started down the path.
Carl: Can I just mention something here? I love that I'm seeing a graph, like if I were to sketch this out, just the idea of impact is going to continue to grow, your impact, your wisdom. Can we leverage your impact, your wisdom? But it's probably reasonable that your day-to-day desire to do specific things is going to go down as we go along.
Michael: And as I take more responsibility to drive that firm...
Carl: Can I be the person to offload?
Michael: ...I'd like to participate a little bit in the growth that we're driving. Or option two, door number two is having a conversation of, "I'm just wondering, is there a threshold where you feel like you've gotten enough from the business to achieve your financial and other goals?"
Carl: Yeah. What's so funny to me...
Michael: "What would be enough for you to make this transition where I can become the successor and take over the firm? Is there a number that we collectively have to hit that we can all agree to is the enough number so when we get there, or if we are there, then we can begin the transition process." It's not a certain number of years because those goalposts can always move. Is there an enough number?
Carl: Yeah, and enough might be defined as hours, enough might be defined as number of clients, enough might be defined as revenue.
Michael: That's true. It doesn't have to be financial, for sure.
Carl: I think it's really fascinating to think, Oh my gosh, this sounds awfully familiar. This sounds like financial planning and the types of questions we're asking our clients, which is back to want to be a better planner, be a better human. And I think it's so interesting to me how little of these types of conversations we've often had ourselves, which is a very fascinating thing for a junior advisor to sit down and say, "Hey, Mrs. Senior Advisor, can we talk a bit about what the next ten years look like for you? What would enough be? What's your ideal calendar look like ten years from now? Do you want to be doing the same level of work? What is it about the work you love? What is it about the work that's on your stop doing list? What about your stop doing list three years from now?" And like, "Can we frame out a plan here?" I think that's...yeah, it's a lot of hard work and it's a tough conversation, and not all humans that happen to be financial advisors will be willing to have this conversation with somebody, but hopefully our metaphorical Lisa works with somebody who is willing. But I love that. Like, "Yeah, let's make a plan." Wow, that's a crazy idea.
Michael: As planners.
Carl: Oh, not for ourselves. No. No.
Michael: Well, thank you, Carl. Interesting conversation discussion.
Carl: That was super fun. Thanks, Michael.
Michael: Thank you.
