In this episode, Carl questions one of the foundations of traditional financial planning: risk tolerance. Reflecting on decades of uneasy experience with risk tolerance questionnaires, he asks three simple but powerful questions: Does risk tolerance really exist? Can we measure it? And does it stay constant over time? Then he introduces a provocative idea: when someone appears to have a "high tolerance for risk," maybe it’s not tolerance at all. Maybe it’s an underdeveloped understanding of consequences. Carl invites us to reconsider whether risky behavior reflects personality—or simply a failure to fully grasp what’s at stake.
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