Welcome back to another podcast episode. Today's episode is not going to be the traditional retirement

planning, Roth conversion strategies, investment withdrawals, all the typical stuff. Instead, today is a look

behind the scenes at Root Financial. It's a conversation between myself and Ari Taublieb to talk about

how do we approach things at root so that we can help implement the strategies we talk about with our

clients. So if you're looking for specific tips and strategies, awesome. I'm going to direct you to previous episodes or wait until next week's episode. But today is not going to be that. Today is going to be a peek behind the scenes. And I hope you enjoy my conversation with R.A. Taubbleed. So last week, we talked about how do we hire advisors at Root? How do you know if you reach out to Root, you're going to get that same vibe you get from watching James videos or my videos. And we went into detail. We talked about, hey, how do we hire? And we use analogies almost like, hey, if we're a baseball team, right now, we want to help as many people as we can. So we need some free agents. But at the same time, we want to develop so that we're getting the best of the best, and they're growing right from the roots, if you will. So today it's going to be a little different spin where all of you out there listening right now, many of you either have an advisor. You're wondering if you should get an advisor. Maybe it's not today,

but it's in the future. And you're just wondering, why would I pick Root over anyone else?

And that's what we're going to explore. So, James, if you were to describe Root in one word versus

any other firm, what would you say? I would say a word. That's probably not what most people

think. I would say protector.. That's probably not what most people think.

I would say protector.

And let me explain with about a thousand words, what I mean by that one word.

What's the difference in different kinds of advisors?

You know, what's the, this advisor says comprehensive financial planner.

This advisor says comprehensive financial planner.

That one says fiduciary.

Like, how do you distinguish what advisors actually do?

And I think that there's traditionally, there's pickers, there's planners, and there's protectors.

Historically, if you had a financial advisor, there's picking stocks for you.

They're picking mutual funds for you.

Cool.

Who cares?

Anyone can pick stocks. Anyone can pick mutual funds. You can do it online for practically free at this point. That's not valuable. Then the industry kind of evolved into planners. I think that's kind of where it is today. Like, okay, cool. Now they're an advisor that not only picks stocks or mutual funds or ETS for me, they're also planning,

...