Hello and welcome to money talks from Slate Money.

This is a really special one.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, but this is actually all three of us, me, Emily Peck of

Axios. Hello. Elizabeth Spires of New York Times and Slate and various other places.

Hello. We are all going to talk to James Choi. James, you are a professor at Yale. What do you

profess? I profess finance. And when people ask me,

what do you study? I say that I study dumb things people do with their money.

You wrote a fantastic paper where you tried to work out what it is that personal finance books are saying.

And then compared it to what the

economic orthodoxy says, there's a bunch of stuff that the personal finance orthodoxy

might have got wrong. We're going to find out all about it. Coming up and slate money.

I'm super excited about this show because while we very, very occasionally give financial advice, not too often, I don't think we've ever given financial advice advice.

And James, this is your job. You have spent more time reading financial advice advice and james this is your job you have spent more time reading financial advice

than any other human being i've ever come across you are now an expert on financial advice

and my first question is like just how painful was that it was I mean, these books are written to sell.

So that means that they are written to be somewhat easy to get through, to be entertaining

to a certain degree.

And, you know, I didn't read every single page.

I certainly glanced at every single page of these 50 books.

You're like, this one has words on it.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, I kind of pre-specified ahead of time which topics I wanted to cover

...