Libsyn Directory

Episode 380: John Y. Campbell - Fixing Personal Finance

Release Date: 10/23/2025

Episode 403: Patrick Adams - When Stock Crashes Matter for Long-Term Investors

The Rational Reminder Podcast

What if your biggest investment risk isn’t the stock market—but your own income? In this episode, we are joined by Patrick Adams, a PhD candidate at MIT, for a fascinating deep dive into how income risk, spending commitments, and liquidity constraints reshape what “optimal” investing actually looks like. Drawing on large-scale administrative tax data, Patrick challenges the conventional wisdom that young investors should be heavily—or even fully—invested in equities. We explore why stocks appear safe over long horizons but become risky when real-world constraints force investors to...

Episode 402: The Problem with Private Markets

The Rational Reminder Podcast

In this episode, we unpack the growing tension in private markets—private equity, private credit, and private real estate—and examine whether their long-standing appeal holds up under scrutiny. With increasing pressure to bring these investments to retail investors, the discussion explores how illiquidity, valuation opacity, and complex fee structures may be masking risks rather than reducing them. We break down how private assets are marketed, why their “smooth” returns may be misleading, and what recent events—like gated funds and forced asset sales—reveal about their true risk...

Episode 401: Eduardo Repetto & Caitlin Ebanks - Opening the Avantis CAGE

The Rational Reminder Podcast

What if factor investing in Canada became as simple—and affordable—as buying a single ETF? In this episode, we are joined by Eduardo Repetto, CIO of Avantis Investors, and Caitlin Ebanks, Director of ETF Strategy at CIBC, to unpack the long-awaited launch of Avantis ETFs in Canada. This conversation explores how a partnership built on client-first principles and fee discipline is bringing sophisticated, evidence-based investing strategies to Canadian investors in a dramatically more accessible way. We dive into the structure and philosophy behind the new ETF lineup, including how Avantis...

Episode 400: The Evolution of Index Fund Investing

The Rational Reminder Podcast

In this special 400th episode, the Rational Reminder hosts reflect on 50 years of index investing and the profound impact it has had on financial markets, investor behavior, and the cost of investing. The episode features a panel moderated by Ben Felix at the New York Stock Exchange—hosted by Vanguard and S&P Dow Jones Indices—bringing together leading voices in the indexing world to explore how passive investing evolved and what it means for the future of capital markets. Ben is joined on the panel by Tim Edwards (S&P Dow Jones Indices), Jim Rowley (Vanguard), and Shelly...

Episode 399: James Choi - Portfolio Theory in a Spreadsheet

The Rational Reminder Podcast

In this episode, we welcome back James Choi, Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management, to unpack one of the most important—and misunderstood—questions in personal finance: How much of your portfolio should be in stocks? Drawing on his new paper, Practical Finance: An Approximate Solution to Lifecycle Portfolio Choice, James walks us through the classic portfolio choice problem first solved by Robert C. Merton, later extended by Francisco Gomes and co-authors, and now made dramatically more usable through a spreadsheet-based approximation. We explore how risk aversion, wealth,...

Episode 398: Tom Hardin - Ethics, Financial Crime, and Redemption

The Rational Reminder Podcast

In this episode, we sit down with Tom Hardin, also known as “Tipper X,” the former hedge fund analyst who became one of the most prolific informants in the largest insider trading crackdown in U.S. history. Tom walks us through his journey from rule-following soccer referee in Georgia to Ivy League graduate and rising Wall Street analyst—before crossing the line into insider trading at age 29. What makes this conversation so compelling is not just the crime, but how ordinary it felt at the time. Tom explains how small rationalizations, cultural pressures, ambition, and the normalization...

Episode 397: Hendrik Bessembinder - Constant Leverage & Measuring Investor Outcomes

The Rational Reminder Podcast

In this episode, we welcome back return guest Hank Bessembinder for a deeply analytical conversation spanning leveraged ETFs, volatility, and the future of performance measurement. Hank walks us through his latest research on leveraged single-stock ETFs, clarifying the misunderstood concept of “volatility decay” and decomposing returns into rebalancing effects and frictions. The results are striking: meaningful underperformance relative to simple levered benchmarks, driven by both embedded costs and the mechanics of daily resets. In the second half, we shift gears to a more foundational...

Episode 396: Theresa Ebden - Protecting Investors at the OSC

The Rational Reminder Podcast

In this episode of the Rational Reminder Podcast, we are joined by Theresa Ebden, Vice President of the Investor Office at the Ontario Securities Commission, for a deep dive into how regulators are thinking about modern investor risks—from AI-powered scams to finfluencers and the gamification of investing apps. Theresa explains how the OSC works to protect investors through policy, education, behavioral research, and direct engagement with the public, and why investor education is one of the most powerful tools regulators have. Key Points From This Episode: (0:01:55) Overview of the OSC...

Episode 395: Charles Chaffin - The Psychology of Financial Planning

The Rational Reminder Podcast

Ben Felix and Braden Warwick are joined by Dr. Charles Chaffin, a leading voice in financial psychology, to explore why investors so often act against their own best interests—and how better tools and frameworks can help bridge the gap between rational plans and real human behavior. The conversation blends behavioral finance, goal setting, and risk profiling, while also introducing a new evidence-based risk tolerance questionnaire now being made publicly available to listeners. The episode digs into why humans are wired for short-term survival rather than long-term optimization, how biases...

Episode 394: Equal Weight vs. Market Cap Weight Index Funds

The Rational Reminder Podcast

Equal-weighted index funds sound like an elegant solution to some of today’s biggest investor anxieties: high market concentration, elevated valuations, and outsized influence from a handful of mega-cap stocks. In this episode of the Rational Reminder Podcast, Ben Felix, Dan Bortolotti, and Ben Wilson take a deep, evidence-based look at whether equal weighting actually improves portfolios—or simply introduces new risks under a different name. The discussion breaks down how equal-weighted indices differ fundamentally from traditional market-cap-weighted indexes, why equal weighting has...

More Episodes

What if capitalism itself is confusing your personal finance decisions? In this week’s episode, Harvard economist John Y. Campbell joins us to unpack his new book, Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone, co-authored with Tarun Ramadorai.

John argues that the financial system—while essential—is failing ordinary people through complexity, hidden costs, and misplaced incentives. Drawing on decades of research in household finance, he explains why products are too expensive, advice too conflicted, and decisions too difficult, and how policy and design can fix it.

Key Points From This Episode:

(0:04) Introduction – Rational Reminder’s focus on sensible investing and decision-making.
(1:46) Why Canadian finance feels broken: complexity, branding, and lack of competition.
(4:53) Introducing John Y. Campbell and his new book Fixed.
(5:43) The role of the financial system in everyday life: smoothing income, enabling investment, and managing risk.
(7:14) The two main problems in modern finance—products are too complicated and too expensive.
(9:17) Why financial decisions are so hard: our brains didn’t evolve for math, and temptation bias wins.
(11:36) How far financial literacy education really helps—and its limits for inequality.
(14:26) The “corruption of capitalism”: how capitalists exploit consumer confusion and misperceived value.
(18:15) Cross-subsidies: how the mistakes of the poor often subsidize the wealthy.
(21:05) Competition only works when consumers can compare price and quality.
(22:15) Financial innovation—when technology helps vs. when it deceives.
(24:24) Conflicts of interest in advice: why “trusted” advisors often don’t act in clients’ best interests.
(26:26) Why loyal, long-term bank customers often get worse deals.
(27:20) The illusion of opting out: why avoiding finance (or choosing crypto) is “jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.”
(30:24) The global emergency-savings problem—why volatility hits the poor hardest.
(32:26) Is college worth it? Returns, costs, and who actually benefits.
(35:47) How to think rationally about buying versus renting a home.
(38:16) Housing in retirement—why reverse mortgages make sense but are misunderstood.
(40:25) Mortgage mistakes: not shopping, not refinancing, and the racial gap that results.
(44:41) Using utility theory to make better insurance and investment choices.
(46:55) Principles for investing in stocks: participate, diversify, minimize fees, and ignore short-term noise.
(48:24) How real investor behavior deviates from these principles—chasing returns and confusing investing with gambling.
(51:17) Insurance mistakes: overinsuring small risks, underinsuring big ones.
(54:11) How much to save for retirement—and how most people fall short.
(55:40) Lifecycle investing: why target-date funds are good but could be better.
(57:56) Why annuities make sense, and how better framing could make them more popular. (59:30) Technology’s double edge: lower costs but higher temptation and discrimination.
(1:02:17) Lessons from crypto: why stablecoins matter and what regulators should learn.
(1:05:26) From nudge to shove: how governments should actively design simpler, safer products.
(1:10:02) Where regulation goes too far—and why governments shouldn’t run finance directly.
(1:13:10) Priority areas for reform: retirement accounts, transaction accounts, and insurance.
(1:14:49) The four design principles for a better system: simple, cheap, safe, easy.