Transcript: Remembering Jonathan Clements with Jason Zweig and William Bernstein
The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Remembering Jonathan Clements with Jason Zweig and William Bernstein, is below.
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Masters in Business: Remembering Jonathan Clements
with Jason Zweig and Bill Bernstein
Barry Ritholtz (00:00:16): This weekend on the podcast, I get to sit down with Jason Zweig and William Bernstein, remembering their friend Jonathan Clements. Jonathan was a Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist and author for almost 20 years. He’s beloved by people in the industry. In many ways, Jonathan has done as much as anybody to push the idea of indexing—at least anybody since Jack Bogle. I thought this conversation, despite the fact that we know Jonathan received a terminal diagnosis and we already know how it ended, was interesting, uplifting, and fascinating. I think you will too. With no further ado, my remembrance of Jonathan Clements with Jason Zweig and William Bernstein.
Jason Zweig (00:01:05): Thanks, Barry. Glad to be here.
Barry Ritholtz (00:01:07): So let’s start at the beginning. I want to talk a little bit about who Jonathan was. We’ll talk about his two most recent books, including the one coming out in May of 2026. But how did each of you meet Jonathan? What were your early impressions of him like? Let’s start with you, Jason.
Jason Zweig (00:01:25): You want me to go first? So Jonathan and I met the third week of March in 1987 when I joined Forbes Magazine. He was already there, and we almost instantly became good friends. I’d say we probably went out to lunch at least twice a week for the next four years—certainly every Wednesday, fish cakes and spaghetti at the New Courtney on 14th Street in Manhattan, which I want to say was $4.95.
Barry Ritholtz (00:02:06): The Forbes office was right over there—was it 18th and Fifth?
Jason Zweig (00:02:11): Fifth, yeah.
Barry Ritholtz (00:02:12): All the Berger eggs were there. The whole building was kind of uniquely—
Jason Zweig (00:02:16): Situated. Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. Very close. And Jonathan had a really unusual sparkle. He always had a twinkle in his eye. He thought almost everything was funny—because, of course, almost everything is funny if you think about it the right way. He might be writing about some con artist who was stealing people’s money, or some mutual fund that was overcharging people, but he always found the humor in the situation. I loved that about him. We were friends from that moment on, ever since.
Barry Ritholtz (00:03:07): Bill, how’d you meet Jonathan?
Bill Bernstein (00:03:09): I met him a little later. It wasn’t until about the mid-nineties, when I was still practicing medicine and finding my feet in finance. I was starting to write, and I did what any aspiring financial writer does, which is you start chatting up financial journalists. He responded, and he started quoting me in the Journal. For many years I was just a source, until maybe the late aughts or early 2010s. Then we became personal friends after that. And he did think everything was funny. He just had such a pleasing personality—a high hedonic set point. He was always in a good mood, and he always thought everything was funny, which is a fabulous combination. The other personal characteristic that powered his career, I think, was that he was willing to talk about the hard things in his life: his struggles with money, his divorces, and of course, in the end, his impending demise. It was those three things together that really made him such a unique financial journalist and human being.
Barry Ritholtz (00:04:28): When I was preparing for this, I learned a lot of things I was wholly unaware of, including a quote from you, Bill: that you owe your entire career in investments to Jonathan’s work. You have to explain how a neurologist in North Bend, Oregon ended up having a career change thanks to a personal finance journalist.
Bill Bernstein (00:04:53): Well, I happened to live in a country that doesn’t have a functioning social safety net. So I realized I was going to have to invest on my own if I wanted to survive my retirement financially. I approached it the way I thought anybody with scientific training would: I read the peer-reviewed literature, the basic textbooks, and then I collected data and built models. When I was done with all that, I actually had something that was useful to small investors—and in a couple of instances, even to professional investors. So I started writing about it. The internet came to my community about that time, and I put my material on the web, and Jonathan picked it up. He started quoting me in the Wall Street Journal, and that opened the door to getting my books published, and also to a financial advisory business. Like a lot of things in a complex life, it was just serendipity—one thing leading to another.
Barry Ritholtz (00:05:56): Really interesting. Jason, you’re with Jonathan at Forbes, and then together at the Wall Street Journal. I’m struck by 1987—not only the year of the great crash, but long before indexing was the dominant intellectual framework, certainly in terms of money flows into mutual funds and ETFs. What was it about Jonathan’s writing that seemed to reshape a lot of the conversation about investing?
Jason Zweig (00:06:35): I don’t think this is an exaggeration: more than any other individual except Jack Bogle, Jonathan put index funds front and center for American investors. He realized very early on that active management, in the aggregate, was not earning its keep—it was charging more than it could possibly deliver for clients. Jonathan realized there’s an alternative, and he was going to keep telling people that’s what they should do. He must have written two or three hundred columns telling people to buy index funds. A lot of his readers, particularly professional readers, hated that, because he was essentially saying, don’t hire them—hire Vanguard, or State Street, or BlackRock.
Barry Ritholtz (00:07:48): BlackRock. The thing about the big three—the three biggest mutual fund and ETF companies today—is they really derive the lion’s share of their assets from index. Certainly half at BlackRock, and probably over half at Vanguard.
Jason Zweig (00:08:04): And the math is not hard to do. Investors have saved hundreds of billions of dollars in superfluous management fees by moving from active to passive investing. Jonathan deserves a lot of credit for that. I can attest, coming to it two or three years behind him, to the amount of hate mail and hate phone calls I used to get. It’s not easy to tell people they should not have a right to make as good a living as they have been. They don’t like hearing that. But if it’s in the best interest of the larger part of your audience, that’s the message you have to deliver. That’s the choice Jonathan made, really before any other investing or personal finance journalist in the country. And once he made that choice, he would not be moved.
Barry Ritholtz (00:09:13): Go ahead, Bill.
Bill Bernstein (00:09:15): Fortune favors the prepared. What prepared Jonathan for that was that from about 1990 to 1994, he covered mutual fund managers. And boy, that’s an awful sandbox to have to play in. How do you get into that sandbox? You take a lot of risk and you get lucky, and going forward the track record is not so good. He saw that often enough that it drove him to the conclusion Jason was just talking about.
Barry Ritholtz (00:09:46): I think it was Professor French at Dartmouth, of Fama-French fame, who said it takes about 20 years to figure out if a fund manager is skillful or lucky. Two or three years of returns certainly doesn’t tell us anything.
Bill Bernstein (00:10:01): Here’s one example that stays in my memory: if you have a hedge fund manager who can beat the market by 5% per year, and the standard deviation of stocks is 20% per year, when you grind through the statistics, it takes 64 years to get statistical significance.
Barry Ritholtz (00:10:20): Wow, that’s quite amazing. He called his own advocacy for index funds an obsession that some readers found irritating. When I read that line, I thought of your quote: your job is to write the same column week after week after week, but in a way that neither your readers nor your editors figure out. So how do you continually write about indexing if your readers find it irritating?
Bill Bernstein (00:10:49): I think Jonathan arrived at the same place I did. Even though he was slightly younger than me, he was a couple of years ahead of me, because he started on this topic earlier. But we both ended up in the same place: you keep your message consistent, but you frame it, you tell it, you ornament it in different ways every single time. Jonathan was an unparalleled master at writing what some people disparagingly call listicles. He’d come up with 25 funny things active managers say to justify their underperformance, run through all these bullet points, each one very funny, and then at the end he’d say, and that’s why I think you should put all your money in index funds.
Barry Ritholtz (00:12:01): I wonder how many of those lines came from angry emails from fund managers.
Bill Bernstein (00:12:06): Probably a lot of them.
Barry Ritholtz (00:12:08): So one of his core principles is that successful investing should be comprehensively, almost aggressively boring—which is kind of ironic, since both asset management and financial journalism are unusually noisy, FOMO-based industries. So how do you make a message stick as an island of rationality in a sea of noise and emotionally driven stimulus?
Bill Bernstein (00:12:45): That’s a tough one. You become what Jason has become a master of, which is saying the same thing in so many different ways that your editors and your readers don’t notice you’re saying the same thing over and over again.
Barry Ritholtz (00:13:04): No doubt about that.
Jason Zweig (00:13:05): And Barry, sorry—if I can jump in. I think one thing that’s underappreciated about somebody like Jonathan is the amount of integrity and courage it takes to stick to a simple message. The job of an investigative journalist is to get people who don’t want to talk to you to tell you things they don’t want you to know. The job of a mainstream journalist is to tell your readers things they need to know, whether they want to hear them or not. That’s what Jonathan was brilliant at.
Barry Ritholtz (00:13:51): And again, the word integrity comes up so many times when you talk about Jonathan. Here he is working in a sandbox—active fund managers—that’s how he’s paying his mortgage, and he wakes up one morning and says, this is intellectually dishonest. I’ve got to find some other message. Very few journalists make that choice. They just keep plugging away and don’t question what they’re doing. Really interesting. We’re talking about investing and money, but Clements emphasized this wasn’t about getting rich—it was about building a good life. So when do you think his thinking shifted from simply building a portfolio to something more philosophical?
Bill Bernstein (00:14:43): I think that happened in the early 2000s, when all of us—maybe all four of us—started to come across the wellbeing research that academic neuropsychologists were doing on what makes people happy. Money is a very small part of that. That’s what Jonathan made into his mission in financial journalism: exploring the connection between money and happiness. That’s not something many financial journalists venture into.
Barry Ritholtz (00:15:20): I know more money when you’re broke is better than less money, but it plateaus. Holding steady for things like divorce and illness, it plateaus surprisingly rapidly. So let’s channel Jonathan for a moment. What is the purpose of money, and how does it help one live a rich, fulfilling life?
Jason Zweig (00:15:47): Jonathan really explored that research into hedonic psychology, particularly the implications of: does money buy happiness? How can you use money to achieve happiness? There’s an enormous, voluminous amount of research on this in very obscure academic journals, and when Jonathan started working on it, very few non-academics were even aware it existed. There’s a handful of takeaways from that work. One is that possessions don’t generally make people happy. There are exceptions, but as a general rule, the bigger house, the fancier car, the painting on the wall, the bigger couch generally don’t move people’s happiness as much as they expect. That gap—between what you spend and the happiness you expect to get from the spending—is what causes the disappointment people feel. Everyone listening has had a similar experience. You’ve been in a starter house, you see a new house you love, you talk about it with your significant other, you agree to take the plunge. You buy the house, you move in, and you’re thrilled. Then a year later you look around and the paint is chipping and there are rats in the attic, and it’s mo’ money, mo’ problems, right? The next level beyond that observation is that you want to use your money to create experiences with people you love—shared experiences, memories. So you spend money on things you can do with friends and family: joint vacations, commemorative events, family reunions. And then there’s the final level that Jonathan explored more and more in the later years of his life, especially after his terminal diagnosis: using money to create meaning. Finding something bigger than yourself that you can support or strengthen—giving to a cause you care about, supporting a nonprofit, volunteering. All of those can move the needle much more than buying a new table or some other possession you’ve had your eye on.
Bill Bernstein (00:19:21): And the thing about Jonathan was, he lived that ethic every day of his life. He didn’t make a lot of money as a financial journalist. I think he worked a couple of years at Citicorp and made a pretty decent salary, but his lifetime earnings were not that high. And yet he amassed a significant amount of assets by hammering away at being frugal—amassing enough financial capital so that he didn’t have to depend on his human capital, as he put it. I never saw him so happy as when he showed up at our place in Portland, having spent $2 to take the MAX train in from the airport. Jason just explained very nicely the three levels he climbed. I think there was yet another level on top of that, which is to have enough assets so that you don’t have to worry about assets. The ultimate purpose of money, for Jonathan, was not having to worry about money.
Barry Ritholtz (00:20:26): Right. He said something—and I may be lifting this from the headline of one of his early diagnosis articles—which was, dying is easy, but estate planning and taking care of your loved ones after you’re gone is hard. That struck me as such a quirky, matter-of-fact observation about something we’re all going to face eventually. He just had to face it a little earlier, and with a sense of humor. The old joke is dying is easy, comedy is hard. No—estate planning and taking care of your loved ones, that’s what’s hard.
Bill Bernstein (00:21:05): If there’s one thing Jonathan didn’t believe, it’s that he who dies with the most toys wins.
Barry Ritholtz (00:21:12): Coming up, we continue our conversation with William Bernstein and Jason Zweig, remembering Jonathan Clements and discussing his most recent book, The Best of Jonathan Clements. I’m Barry Ritholtz, and you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I am Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio, in an extra special edition of the show. This week is all about remembering Jonathan Clements, the Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist and author. My special guests are William Bernstein and Jason Zweig, who have known and worked with Jonathan for many decades. So let me pull on one thread: the idea of delayed gratification. I already know what your answer’s going to be, but I have to pose the question. Here’s somebody diligent about saving, diligent about postponing gratification, and then unfortunately he doesn’t get the full fruits to enjoy it. Give us your explanation as to how and why he was perfectly fine with that.
Jason Zweig (00:22:37): I talked a lot with Jonathan the last year of his life. He called me maybe two or three weeks after he got word of his terminal diagnosis. The thing that struck me, Barry, was that, having been his friend for decades, I could instantly tell none of this was an act. Most of us, if we got a terminal diagnosis—particularly one like Jonathan’s, where he was given originally five to twelve months—would put on a brave face. We’d be faking it for our friends and family. But Jonathan, from the very beginning, was totally at peace with it. I can’t tell you I can fully explain that. I think he meant what he said: that he felt he had lived the best life he could have, and he had done everything he wanted. He’d accomplished most of what he wanted to achieve, and he was okay with news that would absolutely devastate most people.
Bill Bernstein (00:24:15): Neuropsychologists use a personality scale—a five-item scale. One of the items is neuroticism, which is basically how much you focus on the problems in your life. He had a very high hedonic setpoint; he was in a good mood most of the time. So his neuroticism score, as far as I could tell, was zero. He dealt with his own mortality as well as he could, with a sense of humor. My gosh—he joked to everybody about what a great marketing strategy a terminal diagnosis was if you’re trying to flog a book.
Barry Ritholtz (00:24:54): Don’t recommend it. You only get to use it once. But only someone with a sense of humor can say that. So let’s talk about the book, The Best Of. How did it come together? Whose idea was it? What was it like working on a project with Jonathan under his awareness of his terminal diagnosis?
Bill Bernstein (00:25:17): Whose idea was it? I was going to look at you and ask. I think it was Jonathan’s idea, actually. He just decided he wanted to put together a compilation. His main goal was to raise funds for a charitable purpose, which took us a while to evolve. That was the project.
Barry Ritholtz (00:25:44): Let me just interrupt you. The Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative—funding Roth IRA contributions for young adults from low-income households. That sounds less like a book and more like a policy intervention.
Bill Bernstein (00:26:00): Yeah. It turned out that translating that idea into something practical was harder than anybody had realized. But it seemed like a good idea at the time. So Jason and I and Jonathan put together a list of his columns—I think it was Jonathan who basically gave us the list, and Jason helped me organize it. We self-published it through Amazon, and it has raised a substantial amount of money for the initiative, which we eventually arrived at—I don’t know if we want to talk about that just yet.
Barry Ritholtz (00:26:38): Sure, we can talk about it. How much money did it raise, and did anyone have targets in mind? Was this all upside surprise?
Bill Bernstein (00:26:47): On the order of about $60,000, which is a substantial amount of money. We actually raised a lot more through the Bogle Center—through personal donations that came into the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy. That money is going into a research project. Jason, I can never remember what J-PAL stands for. That’s the research group doing this.
Jason Zweig (00:27:19): So J-PAL is a behavioral economics research institute based at MIT in Boston. It’s run partly by Esther Duflo, who shared a Nobel Prize in economics in, I want to say, 2023. J-PAL does all kinds of interventions based on behavioral economics research, trying to encourage people from low-income households around the world to form more constructive savings habits, to borrow more prudently, to become long-term investors. We partnered with them because we really felt that getting Jonathan’s vision from an idea into an actual program was beyond us. We needed help. J-PAL works with academics at universities all around the world. Between Boston University, the University of Chicago, and Northeastern, we were able to round up some great economists and researchers to make the program a reality. Last summer, it was piloted with high school kids in Boston from poor families who were randomly selected to get money to open a Roth IRA. We’re testing whether particular kinds of messaging or other techniques can not only encourage them to invest, but turn them into investors by changing their behavior over the long term. It’s still very early. We don’t know whether it’ll work, but we hope it will. And even if it fails, we’re pretty confident we’ll learn some useful things about how to encourage good long-term investing behavior.
Bill Bernstein (00:30:00): It turns out it’s really hard to give away money to kids for a Roth IRA.
Barry Ritholtz (00:30:07): This is before we passed—I don’t know if you want to call them baby bonds or Trump accounts—that thousand-dollar initial tax-deferred account.
Bill Bernstein (00:30:17): Correct. Predates that.
Barry Ritholtz (00:30:18): And by the way, that dates back to—I’m drawing a blank on his name—a VC out in California who first proposed it.
Jason Zweig (00:30:28): Mike Bell.
Barry Ritholtz (00:30:29): Who first proposed this a decade ago and was slogging away trying to get it accepted. So those are the proceeds. Let’s talk about the book itself. Sixty columns out of over a thousand—that has to be a tough list. Did anything on it surprise you or make you scratch your head? How do you think of the arc, now that you guys helped structure and organize it—which really is half the battle? Once you have it structured, it becomes a whole lot easier.
Bill Bernstein (00:31:00): I don’t think Jonathan had an organizing principle. I think he just went through his thousand and nine columns—actually more than that—and picked out his favorites. Then it fell to the three of us to organize the book, which took some work. They were organized according to the things Jonathan wrote about: the principles of indexing, the importance of saving, how to calculate how much money you need, and then all the behavioral issues we talked about. I think we came up with seven or eight basic chapter headings.
Jason Zweig (00:31:44): Jonathan also did something else that was unusual and frankly risky: he wrote really often about his family and their issues with money. I don’t think Hannah and Henry would mind my saying this—he sort of used his kids as guinea pigs to test out how you motivate children to save, how you get them to become long-term investors. We did not do this in my household. On the one hand, I’m glad we didn’t, because I think it can make your kids a little crazy if you turn them into lab rats. On the other hand, his kids probably have healthier finances than my kids do.
Bill Bernstein (00:32:42): And a healthier financial outlook too. I’m about a decade older than Jonathan was—more than that—and so are my kids; they’re considerably older than his, because I had my kids later than he did. A couple of the tricks he came up with, I just thought, God, I wish I’d thought of that. When your kid asks for a soda—the $4 soda at the restaurant—it’s, I’ll give you a buck if you take the water. I’d probably be a couple grand richer if I’d thought of that one first.
Barry Ritholtz (00:33:18): That’s a great parenting hack. Share some others. What other financial tricks was he using that ended up having a good impact on the children, either of you?
Bill Bernstein (00:33:30): Well, the bank of mom and dad—he closed that. Instead of opening your wallet for the endless supply of fives and tens and twenties whenever they wanted something, at age 11 or 12 he gave them ATM cards that he’d load up at the beginning of the month. When the money was gone, the money was gone.
Barry Ritholtz (00:33:51): Until the next month.
Bill Bernstein (00:33:52): And that’s a great trick.
Barry Ritholtz (00:33:55): I’ve got to imagine a lot of parents are listening and saying, closing the bank of mom and dad—what happens when they burn through the ATM in week one? Now you have three weeks of whining. How do you manage around that?
Bill Bernstein (00:34:08): That’s tough. That’s tough nuggies.
Barry Ritholtz (00:34:10): You just ignore the whining. Plan better next month and we won’t be having this conversation. That’s really pretty amazing. So it appears to me that Jonathan spent a big part of his career—and I always hate this word—democratizing good financial advice. It sounds like this initiative is the culmination of all of that, and maybe further, because he’s trying to reach people who are normally completely ignored by the wealth management and mutual fund world.
Bill Bernstein (00:34:48): Yeah. Part of the problem we have is the behavioral problem of getting people to save. Hopefully this initiative, this research project, will shed a little light on that, and help people save for their own retirement, both through employer plans and on their own.
Barry Ritholtz (00:35:13): So let’s talk a little about the behavior gap. Both of you have written about this, and Jonathan wrote extensively about it. Essentially it’s the difference between what people know they should do and what they end up doing despite knowing it. How do we contextualize this behavior gap from Jonathan’s perspective?
Bill Bernstein (00:35:40): I think Jonathan did something really important. There was a firm, which I won’t name, that in the nineties used to say the behavior gap was 7 or 8% a year for people who didn’t use stockbrokers to buy their mutual funds. In other words, if you were willing to pay an upfront sales charge to buy a mutual fund, you’d end up earning a much higher return than somebody who didn’t go through a stockbroker.
Barry Ritholtz (00:36:18): Does the math bear that out?
Bill Bernstein (00:36:19): The math does not bear that out. No. The behavior gap is real, but it’s nowhere near that big.
Barry Ritholtz (00:36:30): Two to 3%, something along those lines.
Bill Bernstein (00:36:33): Probably a little smaller.
Barry Ritholtz (00:36:34): I remember a Vanguard study that specifically said, for people who have behavior issues, it’s worth paying half a percent or 1% to somebody if it prevents them from making 3 or 4% in errors. I’m talking my book; they were talking their book. How do you perceive the ability for someone to talk an investor off the ledge, when every instinct in their body says, no, no, we want to sell now—because in March ’09 or March 2020, this is going to get much worse than it is right now?
Bill Bernstein (00:37:13): That’s a completely separate issue from what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is, what is the gap? And the answer is, it’s not 7 or 8%, it’s closer to 1% or 1.5%—which is less than the cost of engaging conventional advice, certainly through a full-service financial institution. The other issue you’re asking about is how you prevent people from jumping off the ledge. The answer is that’s very hard to do, because you have to impart a sense of financial history to people, which is something maybe one out of 50 investors takes seriously.
Barry Ritholtz (00:37:56): That low—the numbers are that low? I’m thinking about your quote about managing your own limbic system. If you can’t do that, you’re going to die poor. Tell us how all these columns and the book from Jonathan address that.
Bill Bernstein (00:38:09): The limbic system, very crudely, is system one. It’s the fast-moving system that engages when we hear the hiss of the snake, or see the yellow and black stripes in our peripheral vision on the African savanna. We overcome it with system two, our thinking part of the brain, the neocortex. And the neocortex has to learn something about financial history. Good luck with that.
Barry Ritholtz (00:38:37): Good luck not only teaching it, but it seems the half-life of financial literacy is really short. Even if you teach people, you’ve got to keep drumming it in, because events move so fast people forget pretty quickly.
Bill Bernstein (00:38:53): People do learn when they get hit over the head by a two-by-four, which they did in ’08, ’09, and in 2000. Einstein is supposed to have said the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest—which of course he never said. But the most powerful force in the financial universe is amnesia. People forget.
Barry Ritholtz (00:39:14): What’s the Galbraith quote? The one thing we learn about financial history is that no one learns from financial history. So it’s really true. Let’s talk about this book, starting with: who gets a terminal diagnosis and says, I know, I’ll write a book? Every one of us at this table has written more than one book, and I think we’d all admit they’re kind of a slog. Where did this come from? What was the motivation?
Jason Zweig (00:39:48): Jonathan never told me he was doing it. I don’t know if he told you, Bill—he didn’t. I only found out about it several months after he died. I think it was part of how he coped with knowing his time was limited. He just wanted to make the most of the time he had left—he spent a large part of every day with family and friends, creating new memories that the people who remained behind, when he was gone, would be able to cherish. But he also spent part of every day doing what he liked best, which was writing.
Bill Bernstein (00:40:39): Yeah. If you asked Jonathan who he was and what he did, he’d say, first of all, it’s about my family, and secondly, who I am is a writer. He could no sooner stop writing than he could stop breathing.
Barry Ritholtz (00:40:59): So the book, Money and Me, combines a lot of writing he did at HumbleDollar, as well as some fairly personal reflections on his diagnosis. Is this book very different in tone, goals, and ambitions from his earlier writings?
Bill Bernstein (00:41:19): It’s a biography. An autobiography.
Jason Zweig (00:41:22): It’s a biography. But, having not read it yet, I suspect it’s a biography with a lot of insightful lessons learned along the way.
Bill Bernstein (00:41:33): We covered a lot of those in the first segment: what’s money for? What’s life all about? What’s the meaning of life? That’s what he wanted to approach. He wanted to put a coda on his life, and I think that’s what the book was for.
Jason Zweig (00:41:52): A coda, yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, because I mention Jonathan and the writing he did at the end of his life in a book of my own that I’ve just finished. The way I came out was that I think Jonathan took heart from giving heart. He gave heart to so many people in the last year of his life by writing incredibly candidly about what it’s like to know you’re dying. What do you have to do before you’re done? How do you accomplish everything you want to achieve in the very limited time left to you, while retaining your dignity, while spending time with the people you love? How do you set those priorities and put it all in context? Jonathan got not hundreds but thousands of emails and letters from people who were dying, people taking care of loved ones who were dying, people whose loved ones had died, people afraid of death, people who’d gotten a terminal diagnosis and then gone into remission or been cured. Over and over, it was an incredible outpouring of gratitude and love. The thing I think is the biggest tribute to Jonathan is that, in the writing I did about him in the last year of his life—in my column and in the newsletter I do for the Wall Street Journal—I easily got three or four hundred emails myself. And the single most common thing readers said about Jonathan was, he was my friend. They said that even though none of them had ever met him. And it was true, because he really cared about the average person. He loved his readers, even the ones he’d never met. He understood that when you’re an individual investor, you’re just a little piece of plankton in a sea of sharks and barracuda, at the bottom of the food chain. Jonathan was their advocate. And when he got that terminal diagnosis, he realized he could be an advocate for an entirely new group of people: those who’ve been touched by terminal illness.
Bill Bernstein (00:45:07): He had an ability almost no journalist has, which is that you read him and you say, this man knows my life. Even before he got his terminal diagnosis—he quits Citicorp around 2014 and says, well, what am I going to do? I’m going to give back. So he founds HumbleDollar, which continues publishing even after he’s gone. He created something that was very useful while he was publishing it and is still providing a service. His life was service more than anything else.
Barry Ritholtz (00:45:53): Coming up, we continue our conversation with William Bernstein and Jason Zweig, discussing Jonathan Clements’s forthcoming book, Money and Me. I’m Barry Ritholtz, and you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I am Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guests today are Jason Zweig and William Bernstein. We’re remembering Jonathan Clements, the HumbleDollar and Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist. He has a new book coming out posthumously, Money and Me. So let’s talk a little about service—not just to his readers, but to his family. If you preach delayed gratification and then realize that window is only small, you then want some of that gratification. When I interviewed him after his diagnosis, he was planning a number of events, travel, and other things with his family. Tell us about what he got to do in the last year of his life that he might otherwise have postponed until years later.
Jason Zweig (00:47:26): Obviously we should be respectful of Jonathan’s privacy, but I think I can share most of this.
Barry Ritholtz (00:47:35): He did discuss a lot of it, and I’m assuming some of it’s in the book, so I’m not asking for secrets. Tell us what he was public about.
Jason Zweig (00:47:42): His son was planning to get engaged, and got engaged and got married, and Jonathan and his wife Elaine got to travel to London for the wedding. Jonathan himself accelerated his own engagement and marriage to Elaine. He organized those things knowing they were important to him and his family. He also went on a bunch of trips with his mom and his siblings. He had to cancel a couple of trips because at various points he was too sick to travel, but his siblings and kids would meet in Philadelphia, and other places—they just maximized the amount of time they spent together, with family and with friends. I visited him twice. Another mutual friend of ours from our days at Forbes went with me on one of those visits.
Barry Ritholtz (00:49:07): Was this to London?
Jason Zweig (00:49:08): No, to Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s great—don’t get me wrong, I love Philly—but London is more fun, maybe, for an American. The thing I’d point out, because I saw it firsthand, is that this may not sound like a big deal to most people listening—oh yeah, your time is limited, so speed stuff up and make it happen. Making it happen isn’t as easy as it sounds. You’re getting chemo, you’re getting radiation therapy, you’re getting surgical cement squirted into your spine, you’re getting cut open for this thing or that thing, your hair is falling out, walking is difficult. And through all of that, Jonathan was like, yeah, come on, come next Tuesday, I’ve got nothing but time.
Barry Ritholtz (00:50:26): Nothing but time—when we all have limited time, and he knows pretty realistically how short his is. It sounds like this could be a morbid or depressing category, but knowing how he discussed things after his diagnosis, I have a sneaking suspicion the book is more uplifting than depressing. Tell us about the tone he takes in what most of us would think of as really difficult circumstances.
Bill Bernstein (00:51:06): Most of the book doesn’t cover his terminal illness—that’s maybe 10 or 15% of it. He does a beautiful job of describing just what Jason did: his journey through the relationship between money and happiness, and how he arrived at the place he did. The thing that struck me when I would visit him or talk to him on the phone—and in the practice of medicine I spent a lot of time talking to dying patients—was that he was just the easiest person to talk to. You’d get off the phone with him, you’d come away from a visit, and you’d feel uplifted. I can tell you that’s not true most of the time.
Barry Ritholtz (00:52:00): And does that translate into the book?
Jason Zweig (00:52:03): Yes. What I’d jump in with, Barry, is that—it may sound like a strange word, but the word I’d use is joy. Jonathan talked and wrote about dying from the most positive perspective you could possibly imagine. It’s as if he really felt he had lived the life he wanted to live, and above all he wanted to go out on a high note, and bring everybody along with him.
Barry Ritholtz (00:52:51): That was his great gift and his great endowment. We talked a bit about hedonic setpoint—he just wasn’t a glass-half-full kind of guy. He was a glass-seven-eighths-full kind of guy.
Bill Bernstein (00:53:01): Just that headline—I don’t remember if it was the Journal or the Times piece—dying is easy, planning for death is hard—is filled with that mischievous sense of humor about something everybody else takes very seriously. When confronted with it, it’s like, you’ve got no choice but to laugh and plow ahead. That seems to be what he did.
Jason Zweig (00:53:24): One of the lines he used that I’ll never forget—it was maybe the second-to-last phone conversation I had with him—he said, when I got my original diagnosis, they told me I had five to twelve months to live. I may not be remembering correctly; I think at the time we were talking it was maybe 13 months prior. And he said, so I’m already playing in overtime. I burst out laughing, just the way you did. My friend is dying and I’m laughing—but I’m laughing with him.
Barry Ritholtz (00:54:12): As he cracks jokes about it.
Jason Zweig (00:54:13): Yes. And it wasn’t like—if that had been me, I might’ve been joking to cover my fear. He was joking because he thought it was funny.
Barry Ritholtz (00:54:28): So there’s a line from Howard Marks that I suspect reflects a lot of what’s in this book, and I’m curious about your thoughts: what we get when we don’t get what we want. In the overlap between happiness and money—that Venn diagram, which I suspect has less overlap than most people realize until they get an experience that might not be what they wanted—how has Jonathan’s perspective changed about money, happiness, and the purpose of living a rich life?
Bill Bernstein (00:55:19): I think he started out as a young man, the way he describes in the book, with a conventional view of money: that money is to buy things and help you get by in life. When he started his career in journalism, he had credit card debt and student debt, and probably all he was thinking about was getting out from under that. Unlike most people, he evolved beyond that very quickly to the higher uses of money we’ve been talking about.
Barry Ritholtz (00:56:00): Anything to add to that?
Jason Zweig (00:56:02): The thing I’d add, Barry, is that it takes a lot, after all the years I’ve been doing financial journalism, to get me to feel I’ve really learned something important—because I’ve seen most of it. I really learned from Jonathan that how you live under the ordinary conditions of daily life is one thing, but how you live when you’ve got a death sentence is something else. He really shows that you can still celebrate, and you should, and you should figure out how to comfort the people who love you in a way that will always console them after you’re gone. The book really shows that, of course, we’re all afraid of dying, but we’re probably afraid of it for the wrong reasons. What Jonathan really showed is that the thing you should be afraid of about dying is going out the wrong way—not giving the people who will live after you the positive things you can give them as gifts. And that’s what he did.
Bill Bernstein (00:57:56): Yeah. The other thing he was aware of is that he realized he was a very positive person, dealing with his terminal illness as well as any person could. And he was much more acutely aware of how much harder it was for the people around him. He talked about that a lot—how hard it was, particularly on his kids.
Barry Ritholtz (00:58:18): That makes perfect sense. So, last question. If Jonathan were here, what do you think he’d want the takeaway to be from the book about the relationship between money and a life well lived?
Bill Bernstein (00:58:34): He would tell you to figure out who the heck you are and what you really enjoy doing. And that’s what the money is for.
Barry Ritholtz (00:58:45): Sounds wise. Jason, you want—
Jason Zweig (00:58:48): I have nothing to add.
Barry Ritholtz (00:58:50): Did we miss anything? Is there something I haven’t brought up? I don’t want this to be a morbid conversation. We’re all solemn, but I know each of you have a long and positive relationship with Jonathan, so I don’t want this to come across as morbid—just because it involves death doesn’t mean it’s sad. What else do you want listeners to take away from Jonathan’s life, his work, his books? People should be aware this isn’t a downbeat book. It isn’t depressing. We’re being respectful, but at the same time, he was a happy, joyful person.
Jason Zweig (00:59:39): We don’t want to get into anything morbid, but—when I was in college, my dad died, when I was 22. The thing he was most worried about as he lay dying—he died of lung cancer—he kept saying to me, I don’t want you to remember me like this, as a sick person. And I kept saying, I’m not going to remember you like this. I couldn’t know that was true, but it was—I don’t remember my dad as a sick person. I remember him as this incredibly vital, physically strong, mentally agile, impressive person. And what I’ll always remember about Jonathan is that every time I think of him, I hear him laughing. That’s the first thing that comes into my head. He didn’t just laugh, he cackled, and his laughter was contagious. It never stopped. The last conversation I had with him, he was laughing at himself, at how dying was such a weird thing—and that if people only knew what it was like, they…
Barry Ritholtz (01:01:07): They wouldn’t fear it.
Jason Zweig (01:01:09): They wouldn’t—yeah.
Barry Ritholtz (01:01:09): Well, they would fear it less. Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate you guys coming in to talk about the life and times of Jonathan Clements. It was an absolutely unique life—one that left behind a tremendous legacy for all of his friends and family, but also his readers. The ability to touch tens of thousands of people in a very positive way is a very rare thing. I hope people appreciate the conversation not as a morbid remembrance, but as a hopeful and uplifting one, for somebody who left a very positive mark behind. Thank you, gentlemen, for being so generous with your time. We’ve been speaking with Jason Zweig and William Bernstein, remembering the life, times, and writings of Jonathan Clements, in anticipation of his final book, Money and Me, coming out May 26th, 2026. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer, Sean Russo is my researcher, Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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