A Random Walk Down Wall Street with Dr Burton Malkiel

Foreign to the long-term investor. I'm joined today by Dr. Burton Malkiel. Bert, thank you so much for joining me here today.

My pleasure. We're here mostly to talk about the 50th anniversary of *A Random Walk Down Wall Street*. One of the first books that I read when I came out of college. I think I mentioned to you earlier that I read it again in 2016, and just in the past couple weeks, I read the newest edition that just came out this week. And I have to say, it's one of those books that is great for both the novice as well as people with a lot of experience. There's a lot of good reminders of the basics that seem to hold through, excuse me, seem to hold true throughout all time. And so I'm hoping we can kind of start with some of those basics with the efficient market hypothesis. So let's just dive right in. Can you, in your own words, explain what is the efficient market hypothesis? What it is, what it isn't, and the two fundamental tenets of it?

Well, the idea of this is that information gets recorded quite quickly into stock prices. If there is a drug company that invents a new cure for cancer, and it was selling at $20, and it should be selling at $40 with this new information, that the price doesn't go to $40 slowly over time, but goes to $40 right away. Since if anyone knows that it's going to be worth $40, they're not going to keep it at $30. They're going to jump in and buy it at $40. And so the general idea of efficient markets is that information gets recorded quite quickly.

Now, in that example of the drug company, it may be that the market might underreact to the news, and it might overreact to the news. But it's not clear to anybody that this under or overreaction implies an opportunity to make excess profits. And so the idea of this is then that if the market is pretty darn good at reflecting news, there really aren't going to be these opportunities for unusual profits. Maybe sometimes the market gets it wrong, and the market does get it wrong quite often. And there are people who will make money on particular trades, but there are also people who will lose money on those trades. And just in general, there aren't what we economists tend to call arbitrage opportunities.

The way I like to put it with my students, there's a great joke about the professor who is walking along the street with one of his graduate students. The graduate student sees a hundred dollar bill on the ground and stoops to pick it up. And the professor says, "No, don't stoop to pick it up. If it were really a hundred dollar bill, it wouldn't be there because someone would have picked it up." Now, my advice is, pick it up right away because it sure isn't going to be there long. There are too many smart people around looking for opportunities. It doesn't mean prices are always right. You know, in some sense, prices are always wrong. Even if everybody is completely rational and prices stocks as the discounted present value of all of the future cash flows, the cash flows and the future can only be estimated, and no one's going to get this perfectly right. In some sense, prices are always, always wrong. But nobody knows for sure whether they're too high or too low. So the idea of it then is that the market is a, does a pretty darn good job of pricing stocks efficiently relative to all the information that is known. And therefore, the way I put it in the first edition of the book, and what I still believe, that in some sense, a blindfolded chimpanzee throwing darts at the stock pages, I really can't use that anymore because the stock pages don't now have all of the stock quotes. But if they did, that monkey would choose a portfolio that could do as well as the experts. So that's the general idea of efficient markets. And of course, what comes out of that is you don't really want to throw darts, you don't really want to pick and choose individual stocks. You really want to hold everything. You want to hold the market. And a stock or exchange traded fund or mutual fund that holds the market is called an index fund. And so the lesson that comes out of it is, no, don't throw darts.

That sounds good, but don't throw darts. Just the core of your portfolio ought to be a broad-based index fund, and that will be an optimal investment strategy. That is a beautiful explanation. I love the hundred dollar bill example because I think at some point in time, everybody's stumbled upon a dollar bill or twenty dollar bill. I've never stumbled onto a hundred dollar bill, but it's one thing to pick that dollar bill up. It's another to spend your entire life looking for scattered twenty dollar bills or hundred dollar bills on the street. You're just, you're eventually going to go broke and hungry doing that. And to your point, we don't know if prices are right or wrong, too high or too low, but they're pretty good estimate. You know, crowds, like you said, they do get it wrong frequently enough that that stock prices need big adjustments. But so many people don't even think that they're throwing darts. They think that they have some special knowledge. And I think that somewhat underestimates the level of competition that is in markets.

One of the things that I love about *A Random Walk* and I think that people misunderstand is what that means, "random walk." I think they think throwing darts, even though they might tell themselves, "Well, we're really doing a lot of homework." What, what exactly does it mean, *A Random Walk Down Wall Street*? What, and what does it not mean?

Well, the idea of it was, if you go back to the general definition of efficient markets, that they include information. They also include information that might be in past stock prices. And the idea of the random walk is that any information that might be contained in past stock prices will already be reflected. For example, chartists think that by drawing a stock chart, by drawing a trend, that they will have an advantage because they can spot the trends in the making. And random walk says, yeah, there is a little momentum in the stock market from time to time. There are some things that look like trends, but they also reverse with a frightening speed. And in fact, when a statistician looks at the pattern of stock prices, it looks very, very much like a statistical random walk, where the future price is, in some sense, independent of the prices that moved before. Now, it's not perfect. There is a little momentum, there's no question about that. But the market is sufficiently close to this statistical ideal of a random walk that it really isn't useful for investors. And if you want to go and follow trends, it'll work sometimes. But we've also seen that there can be frightening reversals of these trends. Oh, growth stocks are the things to buy, and then all of a sudden, nobody wants the growth stocks at all anymore. So again, the idea is that it's, it's not perfect, but the market is pretty close to it, so that future prices are unpredictable based on what's happened before.

And let me just say one other thing about efficient markets. There's an economist friend of mine from MIT, Andy Lo, who is an engineer and an economist. And he says, look, if you were talking about an automobile engine, would you ever say that that engine is perfectly efficient? No. There's no engine that's perfectly efficient. But relative to some ideal of perfectly efficient, you might say that it was 90% efficient. Well, in some sense, that's what we mean by saying the market is efficient. No, it's not absolutely perfect, but it is awfully close to the ideal of being 100% efficient. And it is pretty darn hard to beat. And that's really what the lesson of efficient markets is. It's not that nobody can do it. There are a few instances where people can do it. There are some wonderful stories of billions that have been made. But it's pretty darn hard to beat, and most people who try it actually fail. So rather than thinking that maybe you are that unique individual who's got the super insights to do it, if you try to do that, you're much more likely to be behind the eight ball. So better think of it as the market's damned hard to beat, and you're better off buying an index fund than trying to actively manage or even get one of the expert actively managed funds.

And Bert, the market return is really great. I think a lot of times people get distracted and forget how powerful the market return can be, where a lot of success just comes down to minimizing mistakes. And there has been a lot of innovation. I mean, even since the first publication of your book in 1973, all sorts of things have changed. And you actually list several really interesting examples in the introduction. I always think about how successful investing is less about what's working right now and more about what has always worked. So with that in mind, I'm kind of curious, what do you feel like are some things that have always worked and some things that have always not?

Well, in terms of what's always worked for people starting out their careers, regular savings and putting regular amounts into a simple index fund, where you will, in fact, benefit from the long-run growth of the economy, which, as you correctly point out, has been really exceptional. That investing in stocks has produced rates of return of something between 9 and 10% over many, many years. And just, in some sense, doing the simple thing of regular savings into index funds produces just extraordinary returns. I've got a table in the book that starts in 1978, which is when the first index fund actually existed. When I first recommended index funds, they didn't exist in 1973 when I first wrote the book. But just buying an index fund and putting $100 a month into that fund produced a total at the end of the period, the end of last year, of almost a million and a half dollars. So that an individual of modest means, who was simply able to put aside something like $20 a week, could produce a very comfortable retirement. And if they were lucky enough to work for a company that matched the $20 a week, they could have $3 million. So it is actually possible. It requires the discipline to save regularly, to do the simple thing of just buying a broad-based index fund and letting the earnings compound. So that's the, you know, it's not often in life that the simple thing to do is actually the best thing to do. So that's on the positive side.

Now, the other, as you correctly point out, is avoiding mistakes. And two of the biggest mistakes are, one, that you go through a year like 2022 when it looks like the sky is falling, and you go through a year like 2007 when we had the world financial crisis, and it looked like the whole world was going to cut, the whole financial world was going to come to an end, and you look at a period now back into the 1980s when the stock market dropped 20% in one day, and you then sell out. That's what, that's what will kill this simple long-run investment program. Because it's precisely at those times when you're putting the money in that you're getting the best returns. You're getting more than the 10% returns. So that's, I would say, cardinal sin number one. And sin number two is, gee, my neighbor just said that he made a hundred thousand dollars when Bitcoin went from $50,000 over to $67,000. I need to sell all my stocks and get into Bitcoin. And it doesn't have to be Bitcoin, it could be any other thing that's hot and very sexy type of investment that is the talk of the internet. Those are the kinds of errors that will ruin an investment program and that will be the death knell for somebody's saving for retirement. So I would say those are the two big errors. And what the simple, right thing to do is, and it's not easy. I mean, look, it requires discipline to keep saving. It requires discipline to say that you need to keep buying when everybody is nervous and everybody is saying things are very, very tough. But as probably one of the best investors we know, Warren Buffett, says, you know, it's exactly the time you ought to be buying when people are very, very nervous. And I'm not suggesting you try to time the market. Nobody can do that. But regular investing will assure you that you will be buying at those times that are the most propitious times to make investing successful, namely the times when everyone is scared to death.

When we started out by saying how wonderful the market return is, and those average market returns, like you said, if you're regularly investing, those include holding through the bad periods as well as enjoying the good periods. And I think it's really interesting you emphasize the discipline and the simplicity and just letting compound interest do its thing. And why the reason I find that so interesting is someone with as decorated a background as yours, and most people that you speak to who really know their stuff, understand that investing, unlike all other endeavors in the world, doesn't necessarily require you to work as hard as possible to get the best result. Because most things that we do, we're taught at a very young age to work harder in order to achieve more. But like you said, with investing, oftentimes the best thing is to keep it simple and remain incredibly disciplined so that you can let that compound interest work.

The other thing that seems, based on what you're talking about, that can sometimes conflict with our intuition is people get all riled up. And good investing and remaining disciplined sometimes requires us to ignore what our very instinctual reactions. You know, good investing requires us to ignore all of our natural human instincts to stay the course, because our ancient ancestors, if they heard a rustle in the bushes, they didn't calculate the probability of it being a lion versus the wind, they just took off and ran. But investing, you do have to sit there and stay patient. I think that's really wonderful. Some examples that you've given there, and I think it also helps to just be familiar with history in general. There's some lessons learned within history and bubbles. That I really liked the idea you pointing out that most bubbles in the book, you say that they're mostly associated with some new technology or with some new business opportunity. I was hoping maybe you could share an example or two of how this has played out throughout history.

Well, the classic bubble actually happened in Holland. Where a botanist from the Middle East had brought to Holland the tulip bulb. And the Dutch planted tulips, and they were really quite beautiful. And with the soil that existed in the Netherlands, it was just a sign that if you wanted beauty in your backyard, plant some tulips. And what happened then was that some of the bulbs got affected with a virus that then, instead of having the tulip be just one color, there were variegated stripes in the tulip. And these were actually called bazaars. And people were so fascinated with it that the price of a tulip bulb that had been affected with this virus sold for a little more than other tulip bulbs. And then people sort of started to think, well, gee whiz, you know, if I had bought these bulbs before they went up to sell for more than a regular tulip bulb, I could have made a lot of money. And so some merchants decided, I'm going to buy an inventory of these things and hold them, hoping that they might increase in price a bit more. And it sounds absolutely incredible, but what happened was that the price of tulip bulbs started rising, first slowly, then a little more quickly. And when people went to the local bar and talked about this, you found that, gee, your neighbor was getting rich. And there's nothing that makes you feel worse than, gee, what a schlump I am. My neighbor just bought these tulip bulbs and made a killing. I better get in myself. And so you had this enormous, it sounds unbelievable, but we had this enormous bubble in tulip bulbs where the price of a single bulb rose to an amount that was the equivalent of a nobleman's castle. And like all bubbles, at some point, people started to say, hey, wait a minute, why am I paying these crazy prices for a tulip bulb? The bubble popped, and tulip bulbs then became no more expensive than a simple onion. So the idea when people talk about bubbles, they talk about it being "Tulip Time," and it refers to this craze in Holland in the 1700s.

And there have been so many more. And the tulip bulb wasn't really a new technology. But in 1995 to 2000, we had what has been called the dot-com bubble. That this was really where the internet was taking off. It was going to change our entire lives, which it indeed did. But internet stocks doubled, and then doubled again, and then doubled again until the beginning of 2000, when there was a crash. And even companies, major companies like Microsoft and Amazon, actually lost more than 95% of their value because they had been bid up to such astronomical prices. And we keep seeing this again and again. We saw it with Bitcoin, that got bid up to over $67,000. Bitcoin is today selling in the $16,000 range. We saw it with so-called meme stocks, where particularly over the internet, people thought that GameStop, a company that was not profitable, that was selling games through stores at a time when the distribution of games was almost entirely done online, but that didn't prevent people from having GameStop double, and then double again, and double again until it popped. So these things have happened throughout history. They've happened throughout history because there's nothing that bothers people more than seeing their neighbors get rich on something and thinking that, boy, I want to do this as well. And again, this goes back to the lessons that people like you are wonderfully talking about, that avoiding those kinds of mistakes that can kill an investment program are just so important to keep in mind. And this is why history, a knowledge of history, is so very important. Avoiding bubbles is a major, major lesson. And I spent a lot of time on them in my book because two ideas of investing: one, doing the simple thing that works, and secondly, avoiding the things that we know not only don't work, but that can lead to disaster.

I think that your book does such a nice job going through some of the examples that you just gave. And I've spent at least the past decade of my career coaching clients about the normalcy of losses. Because a really easy, frequent occurrence that people can stumble into and do better at is just living through a 10% downturn. 10% downturns are so normal. It's almost laughable. Even 20 and 30% downturns, when you really think about it, are entirely normal. And so that's pretty easy for me when speaking with end investors to coach them to be prepared for. There doesn't require a lot of knowledge of history other than just showing the data and saying, hey, look, this is normal. But some of the narratives, and I think for me, particularly the one about the South Sea, the South Sea Shipping Company, and all these new issues, and it just sounded so much like what was going on in cryptocurrency the past couple years. And I think, you know, the reason I asked you the question, the reason we're talking about it, is that it's not just market history, it's understanding the stories that really stirred these animal spirits so that when you do hear that your neighbor made a killing in something, or you do feel like you're missing out on what looks like easy returns, to remember what has happened in the past when people felt this way. And it's not things just like tulips or like cryptocurrency. I mean, you talk about the Nifty 50, the biggest stocks in the country, even the way that people were mindlessly plowing money into that seemed a little off. And so I think that that element of history is important. You do such a nice job of summarizing it.

The other thing that I noticed in the book that really aligns with something that I talk a lot about are the drivers of stock returns. So I often talk with clients backward-looking and saying, hey, look, when you look at past returns, they're driven by earnings growth, cash return to the shareholders, whether it's dividends and buybacks, and changes in valuation. And in your book, you're talking about the determinants of a stock's value. So a little bit more forward-looking. And so as a result, you have to add in interest rates there. So you're talking about, hey, if I'm going to determine what a stock is worth, you're going to think about what earnings growth rate is going to be, what its dividends are going to be, what the changes in valuation would be, which is probably more a mix of psychology than calculus there. But that interest rates, I think, is really interesting because we've had such low interest rates for the past decade and a half. What do you think has really, you know, how has have those low interest rates impacted returns in your opinion, and how do you expect that to change now that we're trending away from this zero interest rate policy?

Well, I don't think there's any question that low interest rates were very important in increasing the stock price, stock price valuations. When your alternative is essentially getting a zero rate of return on a treasury security, you almost are forced into the stock market. And it's no question about it that it increased stock prices. And by increasing prices, it tended to increase returns. It also, frankly, made bonds a lousy investment. And particularly for older people who then are living off of their accumulated savings, it made the idea of having nice, safe bond returns on which you could live on the interest coupons that were paid every six months, it made that very, very difficult.

Now, what has changed, and actually has changed in the last year, is that interest rates are now much more at normal levels. You pointed out quite correctly that in the long run, stocks have given very nice returns. It's been between 9 and 10%. In the long run, bonds have given something in the 5 to 5% range. And it wasn't true last year, it is true this year. And so there is an alternative. It does mean that stocks, price earnings multiples and various other valuation metrics will be lower than they were in the zero interest rate environment. It also means that particularly retired people could and should probably have some bonds in their portfolio because bonds now do give you a rate of return. So I think that yes, it's changed and probably means that the allocation for retired people has changed as well. But I think it has not changed for young people who are accumulating. I still would say, if you're starting off and you've got a 401k plan or you've got, and what I recommend for people is a Roth IRA, which I think is the best way for young people to start saving. You, in that situation, I think should be an equity investor. And so this brings another point that I've tried to stress in the book, that the same portfolio is not appropriate for all people. A retired person living off accumulated savings needs a different portfolio from a 20-something year old starting off a lifetime of hopefully earnings and savings.

We'll, Bert, you talk about how bond returns were so low, as recently as a year ago, and so there wasn't a great incentive to own them from a return perspective. But there was still a really good case to own bonds from a diversification perspective. You obviously talk about modern portfolio theory in the book. This might be a nice way to transition to that. I really, in particular, loved the example of the island economy with only two businesses, the large resort and the umbrella manufacturer. Maybe you could share that with our listeners and viewers just to give them a little sense of how modern portfolio theory really paints a picture for the advantage of diversification.

Well, that's exactly right. That the idea of portfolio theory is that diversification generally reduces risk. And the example that I used was the island economy had two businesses, a resort and an umbrella manufacturer. And in a year that was terribly rainy, the resort did terribly, but if you also owned the umbrella manufacturer, people were buying a lot of umbrellas, and you had a much more stable set of returns. Whereas in sunny seasons, the resort did beautifully, but nobody was buying umbrellas. So again, diversification tends to give you more stable returns and a more stable portfolio. And that's important for people because people get upset with too much volatility. In terms, they look at their, you know, the joke was, I looked at my 401k and it was a 201k. By diversification, you generally have a more stable, more stable values for your nest egg.

Now, what was interesting, though, in this last year, is it became a little more nuanced. That in general, you wanted bonds in your portfolio because often bonds did well when the stock market did poorly. The argument typically has been that you go into a recession and stocks don't do well, but the Federal Reserve is pushing interest rates down, and when interest rates go down, bond prices tend to go up. And that was the general argument. Now, it's become a little more nuanced because, frankly, 2022 was one of the few years when that didn't work. That long-term bonds actually went down at the same time that stocks went down. In general, what diversification says is you want things in your portfolio that aren't correlated with your major asset, which is often stocks. It did not work in 2022 because the Federal Reserve was pushing interest rates up, and it made existing bonds go down. So what you needed, it wasn't the diversification might not help you, but long-term bonds didn't do it for you. You needed very short duration bonds to give you that protection. Now that interest rates are more normalized, my sense is that bonds will do what they've always done. But again, 2022 was an unusual year. And as one wag put it, the only thing that protected you, the only thing that goes up when markets are poor, is the correlation between asset returns and bonds. And stocks and long-term bonds were very definitely highly correlated with stocks. Unusual. That isn't what happens normally. It is not, I believe, what will happen in the future because bond yields have become normalized now. But what you should remember, and this is something I think is so important for people who are living off of their accumulated savings, what you want to make sure, particularly when you're taking your required minimum distribution out, that you've got in that portfolio some short-term safe securities. And today, you can buy one-year treasury bills yielding 4%. Not a super high rate of return, but will have stability in terms of their prices. And this is what you need for the RMDs, required minimum distributions that you expect to take over 2023 and 2024.

Well, Bert, the diversification seeming to not work in 2022 naturally frustrated and in some cases, I'm sure frightened some investors. And even a few weeks ago, I had an episode called "Is the 60/40 Portfolio Dead?" Just looking at the fact that stocks and bonds were down in the same year. And hey, one bad year, first of all, it's happened before. And two, doesn't mean that a long-term approach is broken. And with modern portfolio theory, it's all about adding assets that zig with others that zag. And while stocks and bonds may have moved in tandem more so in 2022 than they have in the past, you know, long-term that pays off. I think that, you know, the conversations I have, particularly with well-diversified clients, is that there's always going to be some part of their portfolio where they're a little upset or they have extra questions about. And really, since the financial crisis, that has primarily been that focus has been aimed at international stocks. You may not think international diversification has been helpful if you're only looking at the returns because they've trailed U.S. stocks for so long. But a globally diversified portfolio, as you had mentioned, diversification smooths returns. And if we have two portfolios with equal average return and one is a little less volatile, well, compound interest is going to work a whole lot better. So when I look at international diversification, and within the framework of modern portfolio theory, you know, I'm curious how you might explain to someone the reason that they should still remain globally diversified going forward.

I believe they should, in large part, because I think people do not pay enough attention to demography. One of the things we know about the Western world is that populations are growing very, very slowly. And whatever growth there is, has been in the older cohorts. That we tend to be aging quite rapidly. And so the working-age population is, in fact, not really growing at all in the Western world. And in some Western countries, such as, and I'll consider Japan a part of the Western world, populations are actually declining. And Japan will actually lose a third of its population by 2050. So one of the reasons why, even though again, all markets were down in 2022, there are differences between markets. And in emerging markets, these are the only places in the world where populations are growing, and they are not aging. They have very young populations. A place like India has the most rapid growth rate of any country in the world, and India has a very low, very low age, a very young population. So I think one of the reasons why you still want diversification is, number one, because these global economies don't always go up and down in lockstep. They sometimes zig when others zag. And in the long run, growth depends upon a growing labor force. And the areas of the world where the labor force is growing tend to be the emerging economies of the world, the Indias of the world, the Vietnams of the world, the Indonesias of the world. And I think that international diversification will give you a little smoothness and also will probably benefit your returns in the long run.

Shifting gears from this traditional economic and financial theory side of things, you dedicated a decent portion of the book towards behavioral finance. When I came out of college, ahead of the financial crisis in 2007, that wasn't a big part of my economics curriculum. It was almost non-existent. And, you know, I'm kind of curious, how have some of these ideas changed the way that you think about investing, both recently and even dating back to the original publishing of *A Random Walk Down Wall Street*?

I think what behavioral finance has taught us is really how our behavior can play tricks on us, and how very often we are our own worst enemy. That we tend to overemphasize what we know and our abilities. We tend to see streaks where they don't exist. A couple of little examples from behavioral finance. These behavioral psychologists surveyed a group of college students and asked a question, "Do you think you're a better driver than the other students in your class?" And 90% of them said, "Yeah, we're better drivers than the other students." We all tend to think that we're above average, like in Lake Wobegon, where we're better than everybody else. We can make better predictions. And it's precisely that hubris that gets us in a pack of trouble. The other thing that they've done, which is very interesting, is that people see streaks where they don't exist. And this gets back to charting and the idea that you can notice trends in the stock market and act on them. And these behavioral psychologists have actually looked at the free throw shooting records of college and professional basketball teams. And professional players are absolutely convinced that they are streak shooters. That if they made the last two or three free throws, they're more likely to make the next one. But when you look at the statistics of it, if you are a 50% free throw shooter, your chances of making the next one are 50%. They're not any higher because you made the last few. And so what this does is protects you from yourself. And as Pogo used to say, sometimes in investing, we ourselves are our worst enemy. And one of the things that's one of the reasons why the book has changed over time is we have learned some things. And behavioral finance is one of the most important things we've learned. And so I put a whole new chapter in, describing having this, describing what this means for the individual investor and how it can protect us from making terrible mistakes.

Bert, I have read a lot of behavioral finance books over the course of my career, and I would say what you chose to focus on was absolutely perfect for the reader, and I think gives people that solid foundation and self-awareness that they need to be successful investors. There's something you'd said quite a bit earlier, actually, that, you know, hey, the same portfolio is not going to work for everybody. But if I were to assume that there were a perfect portfolio for each person, even if it may be different for you, your perfect portfolio might be different than my perfect portfolio, how do you think someone would know that they have the perfect portfolio or that they don't?

Well, I have tried, actually, in the book, is to put some sample portfolios up. And at least one, one could do is take that portfolio that you have, compare it with these samples that seem to have worked well for people over time. It isn't going to be perfect. I don't think there's any way that you know this for sure. But just as an example, let's take the retired person who's taking required minimum distributions and has a portfolio that's 90% equity. I think they could look in the book and look at the suggestions that I have made that suggest that you do need some limited duration bonds and maybe a lot of limited duration bonds to make sure that when you take the money out, it's going to be there and it's going to be there at a relatively stable value. So I don't think there's any perfect answer. But I think the general idea that look at your age. If you're in your 20s and 30s, look at the portfolios that I have recommended that are largely equity portfolios. Compare yours to that. And if yours is way off, at least think about why and think about maybe making some changes. And if your portfolio, as a retired person, has a lot of equities, you might think, do I really want this? And you might decide you do, because people who have enough money to live on, who have their retirement 401ks that are throwing off enough money for living expenses, and who are investing for their children and grandchildren, and they have a lot of equity, that's fine. But at least it gives you some basis for comparison and asking yourself, okay, if I'm very different, what are the reasons, and do they make sense?

Bert, this has been an absolute treat for me. As I mentioned, I've read the book three different editions now, and there are over two million copies in print. I'm sure there will be many more. The latest is absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much again for joining me today. And for all of our listeners and viewers on YouTube, please like and subscribe. Leave comments. Let us know what you think about our conversation. Bert, best of luck with this next book, and I appreciate your time so much.

Thank you very much for the excellent questions and for your good comments. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

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