001: George Kinder – Making Money the Servant, Not the Master

Jonathan DeYoe: On this episode of the Mindful Money podcast, I’m chatting with George Kinder. He’s the founder of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning and the author of multiple bestsellers, including the Seven Stages of Money, Maturity and, Life Planning for you, which is a bit of a DIY guide to life Planning. He has won many awards in the financial planning industry, including the Financial Planning Association’s first ever heart of financial planning award. He’s been named one of the 35 most influential people in financial services. He’s been named a top icon in financial planning, one of 15, transformational advisors whose visions most change the industry. He’s been featured in every media source and interviewed by every great pundit covering the industry for the last 40 years. And he didn’t blink when I invited him on the Mindful Money podcast. So I very much appreciate, his being here. His most recent book, it’s an ongoing effort, reflections on Spectacle Pond. It’s coming out serially in a weekly email, and we’re going to show you how to get that in the show notes below.

George Valley talks about early lessons about money on the Mindful Money podcast

George, welcome to the Mindful Money podcast.

George Kinder: Great to be here. Thank you for bringing me on.

Jonathan DeYoe: So where do you call home and where are you connecting from now?

George Kinder: Right now I’m in Massachusetts, and for the entire Covid time, I’ve pretty much been here, but as you probably know, maybe other people don’t. I spent a lot of time in Hawaii, mostly in a, very small, kind of outback, almost indigenous community known as Hana Hana maui. And I also spend a good deal of time in London. I love the charge of the city there. Here in Massachusetts, we live on a pond not far from Walden Pond where Thoreau wrote his great book.

Jonathan DeYoe: Where’d you grow up?

George Kinder: I grew up in St. Clairsville, Ohio, which is a very conservative rural. It was both, farming and mining, so it was along the Ohio river valley. So it was one of the most depressed areas during the 70s, during a formative time for myself during the rust Belt era, and also one of the most depressed areas in the country in the Great Depression. And that’s also had something to do with how I think about life, and equity and all of those things.

Jonathan DeYoe: I wasn’t anticipating this, but I grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota, also very farming and ranching and very conservative. And there’s interesting some of these parallels that we learn about each other and how we end up where we are. So without, as of yet, judging the quality of the lessons. What were some of those early lessons you learned about money when you were growing up?

George Kinder: I think as I’ve maybe matured or aged or whatever it is that’s happened to me as I’ve grown older, I changed my thoughts. Originally, I thought it was about the paper route I had and about the poverty that I saw around me and the value that I saw in books. In our family, I’m seeing the books behind you. And we had a, library of books. That was just incredible. But as I’ve grown older and kind of explored more, I think that the lessons were deeper and earlier and richer and went back even before money was a conscious thing for me. In fact, one of the memories that I’ve worked back to, I’ve, always been fascinated with how it is. What’s the experience that we have as we come into life? And what was the experience that we had before we entered life in the womb? And I’ve worked my way back to very early experience of actually popping out on the world and being put on this hard, kind of antiseptic surface in a hospital right as they check to see if there’s any bacteria there or anything like that. And I absolutely hated that experience. It was intense for me because it was so unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. And then I was so relieved to find myself on my mama’s, belly, in her chest and at her breast. And it’s funny, we don’t have those memories verbally because we didn’t know English or whatever language we speak. So I had to reconstruct it both from feelings and from visual memories. That abstraction of being on the hard surface isn’t that different from money. Money is an abstraction. What’s important is life. Each of our lives and the freedom that we feel in life. The richness of that life, that feeling worked its way through in many different ways, in my life. And became part of the reason that I’m known in the field as being the person who introduced life planning for the financial planning audience.

Jonathan DeYoe: I love the idea that the hardness of the surface, like money, is an abstraction. And at the same time, I want to have a conversation that sort of make things concrete. So can you point to what does that abstraction mean? And what do you draw from that in terms of now that you’ve aged and you’re experienced, what sort of money lessons do you learn from that really early trauma?

George Kinder: Yeah. Well, the deepest lesson and the most important one is that your life, most important thing you got and live it, richly and to the full. That’s the most important lesson. But at the same time, looking back there from now, back at the abstraction of the Ohio Valley General Hospital and the doctors and the machines that were worrying around me, I realized that if I hadn’t had that experience, gosh, just knowing about early births and the, devastation that they caused mamas and children in the early days, I might not have survived. The architecture that we create. Here we are. Ah, I’m looking at your architecture of holding the books and it’s holding the paintings, but there’s also machines there. And this architecture that we live in is incredibly valuable for us. And money provides an extraordinary architecture for our freedom just as much as a home does. So how we approach money, so that it actually gives us the skills to thrive with all the freedom we can imagine. Wow, that’s the best way to do it. And I think one of the phrases that you’ve used, and one of my favorite phrases is to keep it simple, how do we do it so that it’s really simple, so that it doesn’t get in the way, like that early experience. Many people have a love hate relationship with money, just as I had that first experience, a love hate relationship with the architecture around me. How do we come to terms with that and find its usefulness and know how that usefulness will deliver us into the most incredible life we can imagine having.

You’re a trailblazer in Fengel services, keeping things simple

Jonathan DeYoe: When you say, and this is actually getting right into the heart of the thing I want to talk about the most, and that is your position in the industry, the things you’ve done to kind of change the industry, or maybe not change, but pull the industry in a direction. You’re a trailblazer in Fengel services, and this idea of keeping it simple, I think is important. But even today, 35, 40 years after you started, we still really make things horribly complex. So I want to go back to the beginning. Were you an advisor who developed a meditation practice, or were you someone who meditated, who became an advisor? And which came first in that for.

George Kinder: You, it relates to freedom. There was a saying became popular after kind of, I’d grown, into adulthood. Although you’d think it happened when I was there, it wasn’t in the statement happened, which was, do what you love and the money will follow.

Jonathan DeYoe: Right.

George Kinder: Nobody ever paid me a dime for a meditation. They never paid me a dime for, a poem that I wrote, and I never sold a painting. Money was something that I was compelled to do because I couldn’t just live in the freedom that I wanted to live in. So I already was meditating, but I minored in economics at Harvard for, briefly, I majored in it. and that was fascinating and all of that. And the reason I left it was because I argued in the going to become a period of tremendous inflation in the 1970s, and I got laughed out of the department. So I moved over to english literature, where I knew there was room for imagination, and it was my weakest subject. And I thought, well, I’ll take on the challenge. So I think one of the reasons I’ve been a trailblazer is that there’s, a part of me that’s fearless and is willing to take on challenges when it doesn’t look right in some way. So I came to finance. I dived into a tax practice, figuring that I could work part of the year, just do tax returns for a year, and have the rest of the year to be free. But what happened was, I was very good at it, so I created a business out of it and then had to back off and go to, wait a minute, I’ve got to have my life back. So there was always this movement back and forth between being very good at the business, side of things, the money side of things, and knowing that my passion was to live more deeply, more profoundly.

Jonathan DeYoe: Did you have to remind yourself of that, or did you waken up to that? Did you say, oh, wow, what about this other stuff?

George Kinder: It was always there. It was always first. And it’s just like, you get into a habit and you’re really good at it. You play a game and you’re really good, and you do it a lot more than you should, the kids on those iPhones. So I was just really good at it. So I would every once in a while, I have to go, wait, that this is too far. And you feel the stress when you go too far in a direction most of us do, toward the pure money side of things, as opposed to, any intermingling of money and meaning. And that’s the reason that we keep it simple.

How did you come to the realization within the industry that life outcome is more important

Jonathan DeYoe: How did you come to the realization within the industry that, and it sounds like maybe you never lost this. I think I did. This is why I’m asking the question. How did you come to the realization or return to the realization that life outcome was more important than financial outcome?

George Kinder: I knew that from the beginning because I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to live a deep, spiritual life. I wanted to be a painter, and there was no place for me to do it. People told me career counselors would say, well, you like to write. Why don’t you become a journalist? Or they’d say, gosh, you love painting. Why don’t you become a graphic designer? And right from the beginning, I just thought, no, they don’t get it. They’re trying to mold me into an economic life. I want to live with my writing, with my spirit, with my graphics, with my art. I want to live like an artist. I want to live completely free in that world, so that what I bring into the world is pure and unusual and intriguing and not governed by financial forces. So I had that all along. There was this struggle to maintain that spirit of freedom, to acknowledge it, to embellish it, to strengthen it, to build walls around it, to preserve it, whatever I needed to do. so somehow I knew it from early on. That’s the reason I took you back to the birth memory, because I think it, just happened early on.

Do you think having freedom is a privilege or a necessity

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. I have so many different questions here. The one that’s sort of coming to the top is, I don’t know what your history was, other know, Ohio, and I don’t know if you were born with a relatively lesser means, but I do know you went to harvard, so maybe not so much. Do you think that’s a real privilege, to be able to focus on that?

George Kinder: Yes and no. I feel that it’s a necessity. As far as we know, we’re only born once. I mean, you go over to Asia, you go to India, and they may be born multiple times, but here in America, most of us feel like we’re only born once. And, boy, you better make something of it. And so I feel that it’s a necessity. And one of the works that I’m working on now is something I’m calling the three domains of freedom. I’m really arguing that those domains should be our focus. And here in civilization, my most recent book, before the reflections ah, on spectacle pond, was about civilization. And I argue in it that we need to expand the freedoms. It’s not just freedom of speech, but we need to feel freedom inside of us. So I feel that it’s a necessity for me, it’s like breathing. I need enough oxygen to be able to breathe. And I feel that most people. I mean, I’ve traveled the world, I’ve trained people from 30 different countries, in life planning, and spent some time, wonderful time in India with financial advisors, bringing them back to their meditative roots at times. And I feel that whether we’re in cultures of poverty or we’re in wealthy cultures, everybody has a dream of freedom. And for everybody, it goes deep in here. For most of us, it has to do with family. But there’s something about the environment that’s there for everybody. There’s something about the spirit that’s there for most people. So I think that kind of freedom is not a luxury, is not a privilege, but is a necessity. And we better pay attention to that in the west. It’s time for us to expand those freedoms and not to diminish them.

Jonathan DeYoe: So I completely agree, and I’m trying to come at it from the angle of somebody that is born and raised with far fewer blessings, that experiences a lack or a, limitation on just basic resources that you and I probably didn’t ever experience. I mean, I wasn’t raised with much, but I had food every day. And I think to them looking at, us talking about this, they would say, well, you can do that. You may say it’s a necessity. It’s not a privilege. It’s a right, or it’s a responsibility even. But to them, it’d be like, I can’t see that. It’s easy to talk about it from a point of privilege.

George Kinder: I hear that a lot, and I hear it mostly from people of privilege, imagining what it is like for someone in poverty. Occasionally I hear it from someone who’s very angry, very upset about life, who is in poverty. But most of the people I’ve known who live in poverty or who have lived in poverty would argue the opposite. I have as much right as you do to my dream of freedom. I have as much right to my life of spirit as you do. This is not about privilege. This is about being a human being. Each of us are human beings. I think the Dalai Lama said this, but I totally concur. I think that it’s an enormous moral failure in America and in the west that three men own as much as half of the american population own. I think that’s immoral. So someone might say, you have a position of privilege. Well, wait a minute. Let’s look at people who have a position of privilege, and let’s do something about it. And that’s something that I’m all in for and we can join around, we can get separated if we forget that fact.

Jonathan DeYoe: That was a bit of a tangent from my intended direction, but I appreciate you, working with me on it.

How did you make the transition from artist to training advisors

What was the stimulus to go from artist, painter, poet, maybe advisor to training advisors? How did you make that transition?

George Kinder: Wonderful. And by the way, I loved the transition. That was great. too much. We talk about money, and you and I in particular, coming from the financial world, we’re going to talk about it in terms of financial planning, life planning, proper financial advice, good financial habits and all of that. But if we forget that it also has roots in the structures of civilization and that a lot of the problems that we have have roots in those structures, I think we’re failing, ourselves and we’re failing the industry. It was dumb luck. I had a girlfriend who pushed me into it. Always the case, always the case. But it was great. I mean, I was off in Maui and running a place very on the cheap, but a big long lawn out toward the ocean. And it was just incredible. And I got something in the mail and she said, you got to speak at this conference, George. And I said, no, I don’t speak at conferences. And she said, no, you believe in this? And she talked me into, she said, if you don’t call them and talk your way into speaking this conference, I’m going to call them and make sure you get in there. So I got shamed into doing a talk in front of what was the early stages of the FPA, before the FPA came out. And it was enormously popular. And I suddenly realized I had an audience I didn’t realize that I had. And from that I partnered with one of the leaders in the financial planning association, or back then it was the ICFP named Dick Wagner. And we partnered in creating a think tank. And then I broke from that think tank. After 13 years of partnering with him, I broke and created kinder institute. But the notion was, I’m passionate about freedom. I’m passionate about delivering it into my clients life was passionate, first about finding it for myself and living it myself. And it became a no brainer. If you’ve got a, way of doing it, gosh, let’s train people in how to do it and get everybody primarily focused on the freedom for their clients and for themselves. Wow.

Jonathan DeYoe: So I had anticipated a little bit of a different direction with this. And obviously anticipation always gets you in trouble when I took my practice. So I started in 1996. I had been meditating, but I didn’t really bring meditation or mindfulness into the financial practice. I went deep in a brokerage world and selling product and doing the wrong thing. And it wasn’t until a conversation with Alice Walker where she said, why don’t you bring these two parts of your life together? I think you’d be a lot more valuable if you did this. That was 20 years later. So I was going to ask you things like, was it hard for you to bring the two together? But for you it was just completely natural development. For me, I was afraid it was too squishy that I would be judged by the industry. You were like, screw all that. I’m going to drag the industry with me. Do you get that sense?

George Kinder: Yeah, there’s a lot of truth to that, Jonathan. And at the same time, we’re all human, and you can’t help but feel that you’re being judged for it being squishy. I remember one of the first talks I gave to over a thousand people that there was, I’d say close to 10% of the audience walked out. And one of the write ups said, this fellow George was talking about psychology. He belongs in an institution. He ought to be institutionalized. They were that antagonistic to notions of emotional health and that they might not have emotional health as financial advisors, and that their clients might be looking for empathy or looking for a great listener, or looking for someone to be on their side in a humane way. So I got that anyway. But yes, I was. At the same time, I’m doing this, but you still feel shaky. You can’t help but you feel shaky at times when you get those kinds of reviews or that kind of response. It’s the price of leadership.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah.

Jonathan Franzen: Does it disappoint you that life planning hasn’t gained wider adoption

So that being said, it’s interesting to me that the thing that you focused on, you had 1000 people in the audience, 100 left, and the thing you focus on is the hundred that the 900 stayed and probably drank it in like, oh, we’ve wanted to hear this. And the thing that’s like the hedge is, oh, ah, but 100 left. Someone wrote something bad, right, right.

George Kinder: The first article I was in, this is one of those lessons where you learn that all news is good news in a way. first, time I was in the Wall Street Journal, it might have been the first time I was in a major publication of any kind. They had my picture on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. It was famous, I think Dick Vodre, who was a leader in the Nazaredan community, said, george is famous for being the first person ever to appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in an aloha shirt. But the article mocked what I was doing. I was the first person talking about the psychology of money. And it mocked that in truth, I got a bunch of calls from psychologists, from therapists, from counselors going, right. So, all publicity is good publicity is what that frame, does it disappoint.

Jonathan DeYoe: You at all all these years later? And I looked at these numbers on your website, 4000 advisors trained in life planning. I think in that time frame there’s probably 1.2 million advisors. Does it disappoint you at all that it’s not had greater adoption? I mean, we now have Nobel prizes that say behavioral is important, that say psychology matters. And still when I go to a conference, it’s really all about the s and p 500 and how much did you participate? And is there alpha and is beta a thing? And how do you invest? And it just seems like the world isn’t really open to it. Even now?

George Kinder: Even now. And even the behavioral stuff is a lot of, analysis and it’s fine tuned and often about how to sell better, maybe, or where your clients have weaknesses and vulnerabilities that you might be able to exploit. I mean, it’s not the good stuff that you would hope. And similarly, the CFP board recently added the psychology of money, as being one of the elements. And again, it’s very much an analytic orientation. As opposed to how do you serve your clients to discover what is their dream of freedom and how to deliver them into it in the deepest and most humane possible way. And that’s what I’ve dedicated my life to. And I’m thrilled that it’s 4000 and I’m thrilled it’s 30 countries. But yes, of course it’s ridiculous. But Jonathan, again, that brings us back to the industry and the fact that we are in a culture that is dominated by large institutions, hierarchically driven, driven largely by profit motive, or that are controlled by extremely wealthy individuals or other institutions. And they have a particular frame of interest, of self interest, that it is hard for us in our simple humanity sometimes to break through. But you keep doing it and people recognize this is the way it should be done. This is the way it should be done.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah, I don’t disagree about the large institutions and the concentrated wealth being part of the problem, but I think there’s also this internal thing where we see things being had away from us, or great experiences or vacations or fantastic meals, if you remember, like the early social media. People just take a picture of their plate of food, and they put it up there, and people would comment on how great that looked and all that kind of stuff. It’s just all envy all the time. and humans are especially subject to that, and it’s been weaponized against us with social media. I don’t even know what to do about that or how to help individuals out with that.

George Kinder: Once I’m through with the spectacle pawn book, which we can talk about in a moment, I’m looking forward to that. But the book that’s coming up after that, that is in a rough draft form right now, is called the three domains of freedom. And it looks at claiming freedom as being the primary thing, as opposed to that plate of food, as opposed to the number of hits on social media, as opposed to our bank accounts, necessarily, although all of those things can help to refocus. And one of those domains of freedom is this practice of mindfulness that I know you’ve been a practitioner of for over 20 years. And another domain of freedom is life. Planning, knowing, designing your life, and knowing, this is who I want to be. This is who I was born to be. And then the third domain of freedom that we’re dancing around a little bit is the civilization freedom. It’s not meant for just three individuals. It’s meant for all of us. And how do we create that civilization so that everybody is on all cylinders going for that freedom? So the piece that you’re talking about, the peace where we trap ourselves, can rob us of any one of those freedoms. So it’s extremely important to do the inner work, but also, if we don’t do the outer work, you have the know you back to Henry VI in England, and where you had these monasteries, brilliant monasteries, incredible work coming out of them. Profound, contemplative, work. But he didn’t get the divorce he wanted, and he knew where the money was. It was in the monasteries. So he shut them all down, took all the money for himself, and there it was. All three domains are important. All three domains are important.

Jonathan DeYoe: Absolutely.

What is enough effort and energy people spend on personal finances

I do want to get to the current project, but before we get there. In many ways, the investing world has always been about more, and the financial planning world has been about defining financially in numbers. What is enough? My hope for this podcast is I’m trying to put money and personal finance back in the context of life. So making money the servant, not the master. So I think of enough in terms of the effort and energy people spend on their personal finances that worrying about it, planning it. And I think it should be less. I think it should be minimized.

Jonathan Mayer: There are a couple of actions people can take that add value

And so we want to touch on a couple of actions that people can take that really do add value, maybe that the culture doesn’t talk about, and then a couple of things that we talk about all the time that adds no value at all. And could you just point to a couple of those?

George Kinder: Yes, I’d love to point to four or five, but really quickly, just because I was thinking about this before coming in, because I noticed that that is a theme that you’re working on, and people haven’t interviewed me about some of these things. Surprisingly enough, I thought, what were my main lessons? The main lesson, of course, is that your life is yours, and this is extremely important. But once you know that, what are the skills that you need with money? What are the attitudes or the behaviors? And, the first one is saving is really valuable. The more you can save, the better, and the more early on you can save and put it to use so that it compounds. It’s just amazing. So, number one, save as much as you can live. Simply live a simple life. You talk about simplifying other things inside the brain, but living a simple life also helps. So saving. The second thing is about investing, to know that you can also invest. I mean, it was amazing for me, Jonathan. I shifted at one point. I was a very active investor for a long time, and I shifted to a much more passive approach. And there was a particular moment where I did it, and it gave me this enormous amount of freedom because I no longer had to worry about what’s happening in the market, and I was worrying about it for all my clients as well. I just shifted. And I’ll say this, I don’t have clients anymore, so I can say this without worry. But since I shifted, maybe a few years after I shifted, I bought in so profoundly that I don’t think I’ve really looked at my finances. This might sound like a horrible thing, but I think it’s actually a virtue. I haven’t had to look at my finances in 30 years, and the reason is, I know what they’re doing. I know from the model I chose and the people, the system that I put it into, I can be completely at peace. Now, my wife, she doesn’t have that knowledge of finance. She was good in business, but she doesn’t have any of that finance. So she’ll pour all over it, and I’ll come in, I’ll go, okay. But I don’t look at it, because I know that it works. So choosing an investment system where you don’t have to worry about it all the time. The third thing in regard to that is, I think having someone could be someone like yourself, someone who’s active in the investment world, who is profoundly knowledgeable, you know, that by looking at all the skills, their degrees or whatever, but also, Ah, just an incredible listener, you know, they’re there for you. So finding that person, because you don’t want to try to master all the elements of insurance and of how retirement systems change and how the tax law changes, so much easier to have one person that you can trust and go to. They should be a fiduciary, preferably fee only, and they should be a life planner, someone who puts your life first. So that’s the third thing. Fourth thing is, in terms of retirement, one of the things that I popularized. In fact, I thought I discovered it. And before any books were written about it, I’d gotten all this data from 1926. It was Ibtson’s original data on stock markets and bond markets and money market. And I figured out that this thing called the 4% solution worked. Now, there wasn’t anything like that when I figured it out, I just went at the computer and I did all these permutations, and I went, wow. All I have to do is I can just take 4% every year of whatever my savings is if I have it balanced reasonably well in stocks as well. And so to learn that, now, some people argue it’s only two and a half, some people argue it’s 6%. But to learn enough about it that you can be the armchair philosopher, sitting with your advisor and going, well, look, this is what I’ve got. This is what I think. What do you think? And you’ve got a position, so that would be one other thing. I think that’s the main things. Yeah.

Jonathan DeYoe: I love it. Those are all critical things, for sure. Is there anything out there that people hear a lot about that they should just ignore?

George Kinder: They should ignore how the market’s doing. They should ignore the terrors around the market. Go buy one of John Bogle’s books. I mean, because he’s a big name and he’ll tell you, but there are lots of. Charlie Ellis has written a great book. There are lots of very simple books on just basically keeping it simple in the investment. So I wouldn’t pay any attention to that. I think the thing that probably, I should emphasize more than anything in your interview here is the life planning piece, because, your audience might not know at least the subtlety with which how I think about it, and I mentioned a moment ago, you want to find someone who’s a great listener. The reason that I do, mindfulness, I do mindfulness because it works and it’s made my life. I’ve done it for hours a day, since 1969, for over 50 years. I’ve done it for hours a day. And I do it because it brings me more freedom and it gives me more courage, it gives me more quickness, mental agility, more alertness, brings a lot of equanimity, brings energy, brings happiness, all of these great things. In the financial world, what’s quite wonderful is that actually what mindfulness is, is it’s a practice of inner listening. And that’s the subtitle of one of my books. I wrote one book on meditation called transforming, suffering into wisdom. And it’s the art of inner listening. All you’re doing is really listening inside yourself without learning to listen, without reacting, without judging just there, just listening. Isn’t that what we want from the people we love? And wouldn’t that be the best thing to have from an advisor, is someone who is really just totally there without judging us, without reacting to us, really listening? So that’s one of the ways that I’ve brought mindfulness in, was that it just seemed the right thing to train people in. And then I’ve made them their lives happier, too. It’s been wonderful because, of course, they love it and they establish a practice. But anyway, that life planning is a lot about listening and then inspiring the client to articulate what would be the best life they could have. And we have many things. I’m famous for something called the three questions. You can find them written up all over the place. But to be inspired and to find someone who is as inspired by your dream of freedom as you are, and that’s a great life planner.

Jonathan DeYoe: Absolutely. Amen. So tell us what you’re working on right now. Tell us about on the pond.

George Kinder: Yeah, great.

George Kinder is giving away his book for free on his website

All right. So I mentioned earlier that I couldn’t get anybody to pay me a dime for my meditations or, my photography or whatever. So I’m giving my book away for free. And you can all get it. Go to georgekinder.com and you’ll find a thing. You have to subscribe, but you get it for free in your email once a week. You will get. I think they’re beautiful photographs. I subscribe.

Jonathan DeYoe: They’re beautiful.

George Kinder: Thank you, my friend. And poetry of the moment, it’s really mostly it’s a poetry exploring how we can live more in the moment and a lot in nature. So I view it as an environmental work as well. My dream of freedom had three elements to it, my life plan. One of them was I wanted to live in the weather. The second thing was that I wanted to create illuminated manuscripts. And the third thing was I wanted to live a deeply spiritual life. That’s what I really wanted. And so I’ve put it all together. I arrived at this place called Spectacle Pond. I’ve got a little peninsula that goes out into an 80 acre lake. And I saw it and I went, this is where I’m called to do my work, my legacy. And so for 30 years, I’ve been taking photographs and writing poems every day. And now I’ve put them together at first in a weekly edition, and then I’m just working on. I’ll finish it within a year, the daily edition, I’ll have almost 1000 pages of photographs and poetry going through every day of the year. And so anyway, you can get it for free. And I’m finishing that up. And then I’m going to probably go back and work a lot with civilization. I think it’s really important that democracy thrive, that the planet thrive. And I think it’s our responsibility to do it. We can get codependent and think it’s their responsibility, the governments or the industries or whatever. I think we’ve got the responsibility, and I think we can make it happen.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah, it’s beautiful. And just so everyone knows that’s know, if you sign up still, you have access. And I learned this, I asked Laura, and yeah, yeah, here’s a link. You get all the access to the old ones. You don’t miss anything. You get to go back to the beginning and start from the very beginning. You don’t miss the first couple of months. If you sign up today, I want to say thanks very much for coming on. It’s getting very close to the end here.

What is the last thing that you actually changed your mind about

I like to close with a couple of questions that I think we should be allowing ourselves to do more often. So the first one is, what is the last thing that you actually changed your mind about? Wow.

George Kinder: What is the last thing I actually changed my mind about? I’m sure it was something as simple as, will I have coffee or tea?

George Kinder: In terms of my life, there was a major change that occurred at one point where I fell in love with London. And I had no idea that that was going to happen for me. That happened quite a while ago. That happened, a decade or more ago. And then I just started going there a lot. The thing I have noticed is that when I do change my mind, I move immediately in that change. I’m sorry, I’m stumped. If I’d had an advance, I would have thought this through and really come up with something that’s a great one.

Jonathan Schneier: Jonathan, the world of financial services knows you

Jonathan DeYoe: The second thing is, I’ve heard this before, and I’ve loved some of the conversations. This is, you know, is there anything about you? The world of financial services knows you. You’ve been on covers of know, Wall Street Journal, et cetera. Is there anything that people don’t know about you or that have, experienced you and may not remember about you that you really wish they’d remember or know?

George Kinder: Well, I think what that brings up for me is the question you asked earlier, the kind of the psychological question that you and I can get troubled by at times, which is that response of the industry to what it is we’re trying to do. When I think about what I would love as, Tombstone, what people might say about me is that he encouraged us to be more of who we are. He encouraged us to be more ourselves.

Jonathan DeYoe: I, got shivers. I think that should be on your tombstone for sure.

George Kinder: Yeah.

Jonathan DeYoe: Tell us how people can connect with you. Give us the URL for the subscription, and then, we’ll go from there.

George Kinder: Great. The two websites. And Laura often, responds for me, which is just fantastic at my age and condition of life. But the kinderinstitute.com is the. We, have a register of thousands of financial advisors from all over the world, and, life planners and Georgekinder.com will cover some of those things that you just mentioned, some of those things that people don’t know about me, that you might not know about me. Georgekinder.com.

Jonathan DeYoe: Great. We’ll make sure that’s all in the show notes. And I just want to say thank you for being here, for being willing participant on the very beginning of the Mindful Money podcast. I appreciate.

George Kinder: Great, great. Wonderful, Jonathan, thank you.