Bullshit on Stilts: Tackling the bullshitology of financial decisions.
Join two financial brains turned podcast hosts unleash their wit and wisdom drawing on vast financial backgrounds. Using highly-tuned bullshit sniffers they call out the clichés, crap spackle and flapdoodle spewed by so-called experts across the landscape of financial advice. Identifying as doctors of bullshitology you can count on your hosts to bring you a lively if not deadly mix of serious analysis, hijinx, and tomfoolery. All within a 99.1% bullshit free safe space.
Bullshit on Stilts: Tackling the bullshitology of financial decisions.
Spotting Sloppy Investment Advice: The Fab Five Questions on Investments.
Want to sharpen your financial acumen and spot the pitfalls of bad investment advice? On this episode of Bullshit on Stilts, we promise to equip you with the essential tools to develop your "bullshit sniffer" for investments. We'll introduce you to the "Fab Five" critical questions that put you in the driver's seat of your financial journey: what you own, why you own it, how you're performing, compared to what, and how much you're paying. This episode will help you manage your investments with the same strategic finesse as a seasoned athlete or an experienced sailor.
Ever wondered if your investment performance stacks up against the market? We break down the importance of benchmarks and indices, using relatable analogies and humor to demystify these financial concepts. Learn how to measure your diversified portfolio's success with clear, practical insights, and understand why the S&P 500 can be a useful benchmark. Discover the nuances of blended returns and the dangers of comparing apples to oranges in the investment world, illustrated with a cautionary tale of a misleading money manager.
Join us as we highlight the significant divide between genuine financial advisors and salespeople, revealing the often-overlooked bias in financial decision-making. We stress the importance of character and true advising over mere compliance. By the end of this episode, you'll be armed with the knowledge to avoid misleading financial sales tactics and select trustworthy professionals. Through the concise framework of the Fab Five questions, gain clarity and confidence in your financial decisions, ensuring your investments truly align with your goals.
Developing your financial bullshit sniffer one episode at a time.
Welcome to Bullshit on Stilts, a podcast hosted by two guys with vast financial backgrounds and great bullshit sniffers who call out the cliche crap, spackle and flap doodle spewed by so-called experts across the landscape of financial advice, identifying as doctors of bullshitology.
Speaker 1:You can count on your esteemed hosts okay, maybe knuckleheads to bring you a lively, if not deadly, mix of bullshitology. You can count on your esteemed hosts okay, maybe knuckleheads to bring you a lively, if not deadly, mix of serious analysis, hijinks and tomfoolery, all within a 99.1% bullshit-free safe space. Let's get after it. So this segment we're going to be talking about how you develop your bullshit sniffer as a consumer. I mean, you and I, mark, have a lot of time and experience in pulling stuff apart, putting it back together from investments, insurance, estate plans you name it and so it becomes very familiar to us, and we can gloss over lots of big terms because we're familiar with the language of the overall financial planning landscape. So how does a consumer, though, start to develop? What are some ideas or thoughts that you would give a consumer to develop your bullshit sniffer?
Speaker 2:Well, let's start by prevention, and the prevention, at least on the investment side, might be the Fab Five. So please run through what the Fab Five is for us, and then I might add a little color in here on how that prevents bullshit.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, that's fair enough. So the Fab Five we developed, which is basically a five-question self-test for you as a consumer out there when it comes to your investments.
Speaker 2:Know what I own, why I own it, how I'm doing compared to what and how much I'm paying by me answering the five questions I'm good.
Speaker 1:So the first question is what do you own? And when we're asking that question, we're actually really wondering what do you own in terms of what kind of securities do you own? Are they direct stocks or bonds? Are they mutual funds or exchange-traded funds? What kind of securities do you own? More importantly then, in what mix do you own those securities? You hear the term asset allocation. It's simply a recipe. What's the mix of stocks versus bonds versus cash versus, maybe, specialty or alternative investments? So that's the first question. How does that help a person start cutting through the bullshit on stilts out there?
Speaker 2:Well, if I know what I own and perhaps that's being explained to me by my advisor and I have a statement. Of course, it means I have a level of control that I know, if I have individual stocks, why I have those individual stocks. If I have mutual funds, why do I have five mutual funds? Why do I have 10 mutual funds If you know what you own?
Speaker 1:those have probably been answered, which means I have a level of understanding and knowledge of what is that for someone out there that's meeting an advisor for the first time, or maybe getting ready to retire and thinking about taking their 401k money and rolling it into a individual retirement account, and they're going to talk to a financial advisor out there.
Speaker 2:First of all, if you have an outside account and let's say it's an IRA, why do I own it? There's a couple of things there that can be tied to a short-term, intermediate or long-term investment strategy, so that, within that portfolio, why do you own it? Well, I have this for short-term, I have this for intermediate and I have this for long-term purposes in my portfolio. That's probably the more important part of it. But why do I own it? It's because I have a certain risk preference. I also have an idea of certain sectors that I think might perform well.
Speaker 2:This is my touch, or my advisor's touch, to perhaps adding some extra return to my portfolio, because I think a certain sector might perform well. I don't want small caps, these are all large cap companies. Sector might perform well. I don't want small caps. These are all large cap companies and I have four or five of them to complement what I'm doing with my mutual funds. So, as long as there's an explanation for knowing what you own, why you own it, both individually as well as an aggregate, they all have a purpose in the portfolio. That is, control.
Speaker 1:I often look at why you own something, what you want to and why you own it, as the posture you take. So if you're a fighter, you take a posture just before you get into fight, your fighting stance. If you're a golf player, you set your feet a certain way depending on the type of shot you have. So you set your posture. And so if you're sailing a boat and the weather's going to get kind of rough, you set the sails because of what's going to come about.
Speaker 1:In knowing those two things, you start to understand how are you positioned in your investment account to weather the storm that is the financial stock and bond market, that storm being they go up, they go down, they go sideways, they go left, they go down, they go right, they're all over the place. And yet how are you postured? And thus, knowing what I own and why I own it, I can also start learning to have some expectation of what is that roller coaster ride my investment account is going to go on. How far down will it go, how far up could it go, and what's that ride look like after the fact, after the last two years or three years? And that indication of knowing what you own and why you own. It helps to set into your brain what are you positioned for and how will the storm treat you when and if it hits.
Speaker 2:All right. So that's, you're coming at that from a risk standpoint. So the posturing also and I like the analogies that you use or the similes that you used is also what are my expectations out of the portfolio? And it's not just the roller coaster and I can take the roller coaster to get a particular expectation realized out of it. I want growth and I understand there's going to be some risk to this. I'm risk adverse.
Speaker 2:So this is why I own primarily CDs and short-term bonds, because I don't want a lot of risk. So I know why I own it and I know that inherent in me, looking for maximizing my return, I could have a roller coaster ride. So it's positioning not only to a risk preference, in other words, what my gut can take, it's what my expectation is. And then the art is in that blend of modulating the return potential or my expectation to a particular risk level. That's right, yeah, and I think in retrospect we don't look at it as I think it's more on the expectation, on the return. If my return expectation is three, four or 5%, I really don't care about the volatility because there isn't going to be any. But, conversely, if I am in a market where I want 10, 11% rates of return and I'm positioned primarily in an equity portfolio. I know it's going to be a roller coaster ride, so what my expectations are is to hit that number return number, not quibble about. My portfolio was a 28% standard deviation or a 32.
Speaker 3:Yeah, percent standard deviation, or a 32, yeah, so what you're saying is um, if my returns are low, I shouldn't be a bumpy ride, and yet, if I want big returns, I'm gonna have a bumpy ride.
Speaker 1:Is that about it? Yeah, yeah, no, that's true, that's true. So so we've talked about what do I own? Number one why do I own it? Number two? Third question in this Fab Five set is how are you doing in terms of how are your investment accounts performing? Are they growing? Are they growing really fast? Are they not growing? Have they been set in the doldrum of flat returns for the last three or four years? And you're wondering why, right. So how are you doing? Comment a little bit about how does a consumer recognize? How am I doing?
Speaker 2:That is the key critical question right there how am I doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The first one know what I own could be as naive and as simpleton as you can recite the inventory of your statement.
Speaker 1:That's it.
Speaker 2:Why I own it is the next level. Sure, because you've put some thought into this and you have expectations. The third one is the critical question, and that answer is critical also how did I do so? We've assembled an inventory. We had a purpose for that inventory. Did it come to fruition? Did we do anything? Did I add value? Did my broker add value? My advisor add value? Did we meet our expectations, either on the return side or protecting to the downside? How did I do? Did any of this work?
Speaker 1:out, yeah, and so we're talking really about performance return right Year to date. Last 12 months, three years or whatever we're also talking about was the rollercoaster ride what I expected. Was it a little bit better? Maybe it was worse, as an example. So, in that, what my return is, it's performance. It's also yield or interest or dividend income that's being paid inside my portfolio. So there's a number of how do I do in terms of measuring the investment performance of your account?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I deviate, I think, from standard practice in this regard. The thinking is that we can. The only thing we can control is the risk you take. And yeah, I get that. So I could be all in US treasuries. Yeah, there's still a risk there, but let's say I'm all just sitting in cash or short T-bills and so I can control the risk there.
Speaker 2:We all say that we can't control return because return is in the hands of the gods. So whatever the market brings is what the market brings. But if you say that you're blanking out on the fact that returns go both ways, so we say we can manage to the risk or the downside, but maybe you can't because returns go both ways and we know that when the market's correct anymore it seems like they all correct. So for us to say, well, I can manage to this risk and we're going to have a standard deviation or the purported roller coaster ride ain't going to be that bad for you. And then really, what the top side is? Well, we can just go by history on this and it might approximate this, but that's really all in the hands of the gods. Well, really both are. So I'm saying it's more of a seat of the pants correcting as you go along. Perhaps there's a lot of art to money management and a lot of parts of it that don't lend themselves to forecasting predictions, spreadsheets, graphs and charts. That's just my opinion, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we got the three. We got. What do you own? Why do you own it? And then, how are you doing? Number four is are you comparing that to something relevant?
Speaker 1:I was in China years ago. I was in Hong Kong at the corner of an intersection huge, busy intersection and I'm assuming there was about 100 to 200 people at this corner. I'm five, seven and I was one of the tallest people in Hong Kong at this corner getting ready to cross. So my measuring stick was boy, I'm tall. All of a sudden, a week later, I'm back in Chicago and I'm on the corner After getting off of the subway. There was about 50 people there and I was one of the shortest people there because I'm in America and the average height around me was about 5'11", 6 foot. So all of a sudden, my measuring stick changed. And I'm not that tall, was the response. So how do you bring the question of number four into play as a consumer to measure your performance in number three that you recognize well, are you doing good, are you not doing good? How do you do that with number four?
Speaker 2:Number four is there has to be a standard or a benchmark, a comparison for you. It was your height, and so how do I compare all of this work, all this rigor that I've gone through? How did I do and should I have done better? Or do I get an attaboy or an attagirl Because I did a little bit better? So it comes down to what your benchmark is. So if you are in stocks, then what you would want to do is benchmark that to a market index. What could I have done without all the rigmarole and the management and the asset allocation decisions, all of that? What could I have just done passively? That's a good benchmark. And did I?
Speaker 1:approximate You're referring to passively, like buying the S&P 500 index fund? Yeah, like buying an index fund?
Speaker 2:Yeah you can't buy the index, but you can buy it as an index fund. Good point, because there are fees involved there which we'll get to.
Speaker 1:Talk to this. Let's say someone is on step four, they're trying to figure out how did I do compared to what? And they're figuring out they're compared to what. Well, most people that are planning for retirement don't just have stocks, they have stocks and bond. So how do you approach that as a consumer? I mean, we talked about if you have stocks, s&p 500 index might be a good index to compare your performance. Maybe, maybe. But let's just go with that for a second. Let's not get too detailed around other indexes.
Speaker 2:Oh, but I have to in one story, I have to in a story.
Speaker 1:Okay, but let me finish. So then the question is what do you do for the bond part of your portfolio? Let's say you have 60% in stock, 40% in bond. How do you compare that to only a stock index? Do you? Do you compare your 60% of your monies in stocks, large cap US let's say 40% of your money is in US bonds Do you still compare that investment plan to just the S&P 500 index?
Speaker 2:You know what the arm motions that you were just using? You looked like the statue outside the municipal building in downtown Detroit. All you were missing were the planets in your hands, just so you know, oh boy.
Speaker 1:I could pull that off man. Yeah, yeah. So, you're saying I'm sort of like an Atlas shrug kind of a physique.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're kind of like. So you're saying I'm sort of like an atlas, shrug kind of a physique. Yeah, you're kind of like. So you're saying I'm hot, yeah, but that's a given. I was trying to get a little bit more nuance than just saying you're hot, thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, that statue certainly gets hot because it faces west, but anyway, getting back to this if you've got an all-stock portfolio, and let's say it's large company stocks, then maybe an index like the S&P 500 might be a good index to measure it against, even though the S&P 500, as we know, is not the 500 largest companies. It's leading companies and leading industries. So we can get even more refined with that. But good enough with that. One Large stock portfolio, s&p 500, good measurement. But wait a minute. I've got 40% in bonds, the bonds that you have, and let's presume they're a mix of corporate and government bonds and pretty much intermediate term maturities. So let's say like five, three to ten years, something like that. Then what you'd want to measure that against would be an intermediate bond index. So let's make the math easy. Let's say you're 50% in stocks and 50% in bonds. Stocks did 10% and the bonds did 5%. The indexes did, so blended, their return would be 7.5%. So if your portfolio did 7, 8%, good on you.
Speaker 1:So walk through real quick. Though how did you arrive at 7.5, right? This math in the air is tough for people, so if I have 50%-.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not even sure that was the right number. Oh shit, oh it was. You're solid, Okay.
Speaker 1:So if it was 50% in an index that generated a 10%, well, 50% of 10 is 5% right. And if I'm 50% in bonds that generated a 5% return on the year. 50% of 5 is 2.5, and we add 5 plus 2.5, we come up with 7.5. Real simple.
Speaker 2:You know what? We did? The same thing, this exercise with arriving at the tip when we were out for Mexican food.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:We did. So my math, it was equal weighted, so I got 5%, I got 10% over there and I got 5, equal weighted. I add them together and divide by 2.
Speaker 1:Oh, so you did it that way, I did it that way. Oh see, you did it that way, I did it that way. So you got the wrong answer at 7.5?.
Speaker 2:Yeah, were we right on the tip.
Speaker 3:Well, you know what they say arriving at the answer.
Speaker 2:The wrong way is wrong, even if the answer is right.
Speaker 1:Is that the case, uh-huh? That's why I always had to show my work, probably. Yeah, because I had all the right answers, but the work was abysmal it was horrible.
Speaker 2:I got to get back to the sometimes about the stock and if it's all stocks, you can measure it against the S&P 500. And I know you recall this story and this is a gentleman who is a well-known money manager out of Stanford and he was showing me his portfolio and he said his portfolio beat the S&P 500. Now what was interesting is that the S&P 500, I believe that year was up about 15% and he was up like 23%. He says I kicked butt on the S&P 500. I said, dude, these are all small cap stocks and that index was up 30%.
Speaker 1:Right, so he was essentially saying I'm the best basketball player in the land of munchkins because, that's how I measured it. I measured it against an index the 500, that's large companies, but I own all these small companies that have a lot more steam underneath their performance when they perform. I mean double the performance of large companies, and so yeah, so you peel back the onion a little bit and you find the real story.
Speaker 2:We don't want to peel back the onion. A little bit and you find the real story. We don't want to peel back the onion Because when you peel back a layer of onion, what's beneath that?
Speaker 1:Just another layer of onion, another layer. It's like a parfait. Yeah, it's just another layer of onion.
Speaker 2:There's no insight there.
Speaker 1:You're going Shrek on me now, all right, okay.
Speaker 2:But anyway, here's where we can use numbers to falsify the very truths we're seeking In that. He said to me that he beat the S&P 500, where actually he underperformed and didn't earn his fee.
Speaker 1:The small cap index yeah, he underperformed it. So you change the yardstick to an appropriate yardstick and all of a sudden you get the real reading on. How did you do when you compare it to the appropriate benchmark or yardstick. So you underperformed and I paid you, which leads to number five, which is so number five on the Fab Five is what are your total costs of investing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what did you pay right and how much was that itemized?
Speaker 1:let me ask you this real quick before you go on how many individuals when you were practicing individuals and institutions because you ran pension monies and so forth as well but how many of them could figure out the total cost of their investments?
Speaker 2:none seriously, yes, none.
Speaker 3:This just in from the bullshit monitoring room. Mark has made an absolute statement, followed absolutely by an emphatic absoluteness. Diane, your reaction.
Speaker 1:Bullshit. And why is that? Do you think it's that hard? Don't they disclose everything? They say, hey, here you go. This is the industry. We're transparent. This is exactly how much you're spending, sure the term transparency.
Speaker 2:You know it's one of my pet peanut allergies yeah because I can show you something.
Speaker 2:Some hives starting to show some some complete something that is completely transparent and you can look at it. Uh, it might look like a piece of modern art, a kandinsky work of art or even a early picasso, and you look at that and say, oh, that's totally transparent. I see all of it and I don't know what the hell I'm looking at. I don't know a thing I'm looking at. So well-intended regulators have had what is called pricing saliency and posted commissions, and then there was we're even going to show markups and markdowns on bonds and advisory fees and all of that, and people still don't. They don't know.
Speaker 2:They don't know what they're paying for, and a lot of them are buried. You just don't see them unless you actively are looking for them. And oh, by the way, you better take a Sherpa with you when you're looking for these things, because they just don't show up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what's interesting is on those structures of the fees, right, so you have your advisor fees potentially Assumed inside that advisor fee if you're working for a large corporate entity whatever it is it could be the investment side, it could be the insurance side. But there are all sorts of fees packed into that Platform fees.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, yes so let's say it's a 1% advisor fee but inside that advisor fee that 1% isn't going to that advisor that works with a corporate entity. That 1% is divvied up and that advisor is getting a portion of it and the rest is paying for the platform. Quote unquote.
Speaker 2:Yes, the wrap, it's the wrap.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, beyond that, you have your fund expenses right. Depending on mutual funds or index funds and so forth, they have very different price points and yet they're all diversified. You have your administration fees. If you're dealing in bonds especially, you might have a markup or markdown of the price that ends up being the commission earned by the broker or the platform that you traded through.
Speaker 3:Frankly, one or the other.
Speaker 1:It doesn't always have to be a human being that's charging those markups. Is that fair? That's very fair, okay, so it could just be the entity that has it baked into that pricing mechanism, specifically and almost always for fixed income assets. It might show up nowadays in limited partnerships. I'm not sure about if there is markups or downs in the limited partnerships. So you can get to a point where all these fees, one on top of the other, becomes a very meaningful a small percentage number, but meaningful in terms of dollar value of that fee or those fees that is being pulled out or sucked out of your overall accumulated asset.
Speaker 3:Oh my God, is that fair to say?
Speaker 2:That's very fair to say. So that number can be 1%, 2%, maybe 3% in the aggregate, which raises the question if I can buy instruments that we're measuring this against at a fraction of the cost, a 10th of the cost, why am I going through all this rigmarole? Why am I doing that?
Speaker 1:And that brings up a great subsequent conversation around the focus on managers and the number of managers inside of an investment or retirement account. That's a separate conversation.
Speaker 1:But to your point, it's interesting when you don't know and you don't know what to ask, just having fabulous five questions and not letting the sales professional get out of dodge scot-free. Make sure they explain to you in a satisfactory way. It doesn't have to be the techno-speaking, jargon-filled answer. They should have the chops to be able to break that down into plain, everyday Main Street USA conversation. I don't, it might be an indicator. They might be the wrong advisor for you just because you're not on the same wavelength with communication and how they answer your questions.
Speaker 2:So let's take it to another level and let's use the S&P 500. You purchased for me three active managers, mutual funds with a portfolio management team let's call it with the expectation that they are going to beat the market, that I can buy at a tenth of their cost. If not even less than that, what would be your justification for putting those managers in there?
Speaker 1:This is the explanation that I've probably run into more than any other explanation. This is the explanation that I've probably run into more than any other explanation. Actively managed investment funds have human beings making decisions on selling and or purchasing securities inside the fund on behalf of the fund shareholders. There are times in the environment of a financial markets where active management can and has historically outperformed just passive. Buy an index, nobody's managing it, and once or twice a year the names in the index gets shuffled a little bit, like maybe 5% of the names get kicked out and new names are added.
Speaker 1:That's very, very different. It's just you're just taking I want to see the ballgame. I don't care what seat I'm in, just I want to see the ballgame. That's the passive strategy. I want to see the ball game. That's the passive strategy. I want to see the ball game. I want to be on the third base. I want to be right adjacent to the third baseman. I want to have two seats up behind the dugout. That's active management, metaphorically speaking, very precise. And so the reason why people sell active is because there may be an environment coming up where actively making decisions on what to buy and sell may outperform those passive strategies like the indexes we've been talking about and, as a result, the question is how many of those active management funds actually do outperform their index that they use as their measuring stick. What is that that percentage is?
Speaker 1:It's certainly under 10%, very, very low, and so this brings up this comment about how this all kind of works out in the world of investments and in investment management sales itself, where advisors will come up with cliche statements, right Jargon, sort of the bullshit on stilt. This is why I put people's money to work in this way, which might be 180 degrees different than the person down the hallway that has a very different take on it, and at the end of the day they'll put you into the same mix 60 stock, 40 bond, different funds, different exchanges, different wraps, different this, different that. How do you discern what's right for you versus what's just the sales job facilitating the salesperson's own bottom line, and or it's just bullshit on stilts because that's what they practice.
Speaker 2:Kelly, you're making financial advisors sound like they're pie salesmen. They just are selling pie charts.
Speaker 1:There are hundreds of thousands of financial service professionals running around out there, and there are undoubtedly a big group of them are really doing great work.
Speaker 1:Well, that's no surprise at all but the vast majority of people that have biases built inside of them when it comes to financial decision-making. Working with advisors or professionals, those people have either run into the other side of the industry not so strong of advisors right, Really, just show up, throw up salespeople. They're practicing overcoming your objections and so forth, but not really taking care of your best interest. They don't have the character. There's a huge part of the industry that's just like that and it's because it's a sales-oriented industry. So you get paid, you get performance bonuses, you get all these good things when you sell and in order to put food on your table, you have to sell.
Speaker 1:So what do you do? You become really good at selling, which is very different than advising, and we hold that. Most of the people we've run into that we've helped rectify problems it's because they were sold from a financial sales professional. They were never advised by a professional advisor that had their best interest through a character of that individual at their hand all the time, Never mind laws and rules. That's BS. It's what is that person made of? And do they really work with you in your better interest or not?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So let's summarize the Fab Five here real quick. So, know what you own. That gives a sense of control, a sense of knowledge why you own it. Well, there's been some thought, some rigor that has gone into this, and perhaps a plan short-term, long-term or intermediate or all of those. So we know what we own, why we own it, how we're doing shows the efficacy. Is this even working? Do we need to make some changes here? Shows the efficacy. Is this even working? Do we need to make some changes here? So it allows us a point to be corrective with what we own and why we own it, and those can change also. So how we did is a way again to measure the efficacy of that. How we're doing, how much we're paying for it, as long as you know and if you want to pay for active management, that's fine, but at least know what you're paying for, that's right. So it's really a preference. So, for example, how I'm dressed right now, let's say that's what I own, what I'm wearing, and it's an allocation of clothes.
Speaker 2:yeah the coconut bra looks nice, but yeah, it doesn't you know, I've been shifting it around yeah, but it doesn't too much knocking sound on the recording here, and what are you paying for and how much is that? Now, I know you wouldn't pay what I paid for this outfit here, but as a consumer, that's my choice. So I knew that I wore this, because it didn't make me look fat yes, and it makes me look very distinctive.
Speaker 1:Slimming yeah.
Speaker 2:So at least I'm in control here. So by me answering the five questions, know what I own, why I own it, how I'm doing compared to what and how much I'm paying. I'm good, I guess I'm good there.
Speaker 1:You are probably a step above 90% of the people I've encountered in 25 years.
Speaker 2:So I've already transcended a lot of bullshit, potentially me having control. I am able to verify I have the right answers and I'm asking the right questions to get the right answers. That's right. So this is the preventive part of bullshit. Yes, before we even get into the snippet part.
Speaker 1:It's sort of a recipe for you to consider. I have five questions. Let me pose these, let me get real clear on what the answers are for myself and, in the process of doing that, just confirm for you that if you are working with a professional, or even interviewing a professional, that their answers rise to a level that you deem to be trustworthy. Whatever that is, your belly will tell you Come to the table with an empty cup and then work through these questions with them, help them explain to you satisfactorily to your level of understanding, why and what's of all these questions.
Speaker 2:It's a powerful mix. Yeah, good Cool, good, good stuff.