Bringing Purpose & Meaning To Your Investments with David O'Leary | E028
Socially responsible and impact investing.
In this episode of Financial Planning for Canadian Business Owners, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, and writer, interviews David O’Leary, Founder & Principal of Kind Wealth, a financial planning firm that also helps focus on clients finding purpose in their investing through investing in causes and initiatives that are meaningful to them.
Episode Highlights:
● 00:58 – What is David O’Leary’s career background?
● 02:19 – What is the focus of Kind Wealth?
● 04:37 – David O’Leary explains socially responsible investing.
● 07:00 – How easy is it to match your values with what is out there in the marketplace?
● 14:22 – How many people come to Kind Wealth looking for socially responsible investing?
● 18:15 – What does the term ‘green wash’ mean?
● 23:33 – What is thematic investing and impact investing?
● 36:00 – Do you have to sacrifice financial return to make a positive impact?
● 44:50 – It is hard to outsource your beliefs.
● 28:27 – When it comes to most of King Wealth’s clients, the fee differential is not discouraging them.
● 48:30 – How should clients get started with their financial advisors as far as ESG?
3 Key Points
1. ESG stands for Environmental Social and Governance describes people in the business of evaluating investments and looks at the financial factors that will impact that security.
2. 80% are mildly or interested in socially responsible investing.
3. SHARE is a Canadian non-profit that stands for Shareholder Association for Research and Education, works primarily with institutional investors to help them practice good shareholder activism.
Tweetable Quotes:
● “I consider myself a reformed free market capitalist. We’re from the same generation. I kind of was born and raised and cut my teeth in an industry where we are taught that maximizing shareholder value is the sole and only goal of a business.” – David O’Leary
● “Kind Wealth, we focus on helping people take control of their money so that they can live life on their own terms.” – David O’Leary
● “Your portfolio will not be perfect. There will be some aspect of it that you will not be happy with.” – David O’Leary
Resources Mentioned:
● Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook
● LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn
● FintechImpact.co – Website for Fintech Impact
● jasonpereira.ca – Website
● Linkedin – David O’Leary’s Linkedin
● KindWealth.ca – Website for Kind Wealth
Full Transcript:
Producer: Welcome to the Financial Planning for Canadian Business Owners Podcast. You will hear about industry insights with award winning financial planner and entrepreneur, Jason Pereira. Through the interviews with different experts with their stories and advice, you will learn how you can navigate the challenges of being an entrepreneur, plan for success, and make the most of your business and life. Now your host, Jason Pereira.
Jason Pereira: Welcome to Financial Planning for Business Owners. Today's show, I have David O'Leary. David is the founder and principal of Kind Wealth. Kind Wealth is a financial planning firm that also helps focus on clients finding purpose through their investing by investing in causes and initiatives that are of meaning to them. With that, here's my interview with David.
Jason Pereira: Hi David.
David O'Leary: Hey, thanks for having me, Jay. Nice to be here.
Jason Pereira: My pleasure. So, David O'Leary, tell us all about who you are.
David O'Leary: Well, I consider myself a reformed free market capitalist, we're from the same generation. I'm kind of born and raised and came up and cut my teeth in an industry where we're taught that maximizing shareholder value was the sole and only goal of a business. I spent most of my career, I did an MBA and CFA, and then spent first part of my career at Morningstar. I was evaluating professional money managers and saying whether they were doing a good job of stewarding investor capital. I did that for about 10 years in Toronto and did that for about four years in South Africa. I met my wife in 2010. She comes from a completely different world than I do in the world of humanitarian work. That opened my eyes to an entirely different way of thinking and being.
David O'Leary: I spent some time living in with her in South Africa and traveling parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. I just started to get thinking more and more about what else was going on in the world and there are other people that had a lot less than we did. I started thinking a lot more about how I could use my intellectual, social, financial capital to make a more positive impact on the world. That ultimately led me to... It's a long winding path to get here, but to found Kind Wealth about three and a half years ago now. So, yeah.
Jason Pereira: Tell me about the focus of Kind Wealth.
David O'Leary: Yeah. So, Kind Wealth, we focus on helping people take control of their money, so that they can live life on their own terms. So, I can unpack that a bit for you. I mean, a lot of people make suboptimal decisions with their money from a financial perspective. They're kind of destroying value along the way when they don't take advantage of benefits, when they pay more tax than they need to, when they aren't taking advantage of compounding, when they make kind of poor behavioral decisions.
David O'Leary: So, we kind of help people make good financial decisions, but also really push beyond that and into helping them figure out what matters to them. I think traditional financial planning is often seen as an engineering exercise, which is we need to maximize your wealth and how do we get you from where you are to now to making that all happen financially and doesn't often-
Jason Pereira: I'll say that to the numbers lovers, that's what it is, right? To those of us who actually get involved in our clients' lives to a large degree, as I always say, it's all about getting them what they want out of life. That can actualize itself in any number of ways beyond their wealth, right? It's about experience, it's about their family, it's about the causes that matter to them. It's about leaving the footprint legacy that they want to leave, right? So completely on board with your viewpoint, clearly.
David O'Leary: Yeah. So, we sort of stop and focus on like, "Hey, wait, what do you want to achieve?" Wealth maximization is not the only goal that you might have. Quite frankly, you might have a lot of other goals that reduce your wealth like giving it away to charity, passing it on to heirs to spending it. So, we help kind of people explore that. A big part of that is there's a lot of ways that you can use money to, at the very least, provide more alignment with your values. So, achieve financial security, achieve financial success, but do it in a way that you feel good about it. So, that could come down to conscious consumerism, how you spend your money. It could come to how you give your money away, philanthropy and charity. It can involve your investments.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. So, I brought you to specifically talk about the investment angle and basically giving meaning to the way you invest money and having the way you invest money match other values. You kind of hit upon something earlier, which is basically known as the Friedman doctrine, named after Milton Friedman, where specifically talking about how the only job of a board is to maximize shareholder value, which I think is one of most crackpot things I've ever heard in my life, because my response is really to just survey all the shareholders.
Jason Pereira: Because as every business owner listening to us will attest to, there are probably any number of things that we could do to enrich ourselves at the expense and the detriment of the other stakeholders in our lives, whether that be the employees we have, the time spent with our own family members. I could be wealthier if I spent all my time working on my family, I get to be happy. The government systems, the governments in place for basically through tax evasion or whatever it is, everything right to the environment, right? If I illegally dump stuff, right? Well, it's more profit than getting rid of it that way.
Jason Pereira: So, I think he added to the confines of the law, but as we always also know that what is legal is not necessarily right or matches our ethics. So, I still remember back in university scratching my head about that. I want to say, "I'm pretty sure there's more to it than that."
David O'Leary: Yeah, you're ahead of me, because I mean, I grew up watching Wall Street and Gordon Gekko and that he was a hero in that movie. I mean, partly, facetiously, but I certainly wasn't like he's a bad character and at the end of the movie sort of exposed for that, but it certainly wasn't like, "Oh, he's taken maybe that that even free market capitalism to the extreme because he went into the territory of just outright criminal." I wasn't questioning his philosophy. I think a lot of us who were indoctrinated in the investment world weren't. This idea that you're raising here is that... Let's change shareholders to stakeholders and acknowledge that there are a lot of different stakeholders, both kind of formal and informal that are impacted when a business operates.
David O'Leary: So, yeah, I think that's a realization that's growing tremendously. The very first time I came across an investment that was considered socially responsible was back in the late 1990s when I just starting my career. There was one client I heard who had some of these, it's called ethical funds at the time.
Jason Pereira: [inaudible 00:06:25] exist, different name.
David O'Leary: Yeah, a different name now, but that brand has gone. And then for the next 20 years of my career, 15 years of my career, you didn't hear a whole lot about it in the last three, four or five years, this has really taken off dramatically.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, I think part of that is... Well there's a lot of reasons for it. So, let's first talk about what ethical investing or socially responsible investing or ESG investing. There's a lot of different acronyms, SRI meaning socially responsible, but I think more commonly now the term that we actually define is ESG, Environmental, Social and Governance. So, let's talk about what it means to invest with that type of framework.
David O'Leary: Sure, yeah. So, ESG as you say stands for Environmental, Social and Governance, it can actually mean different things. So, even within the ESG, we need to I think delineate and define our terms. I think, at its most basic and most adopted form, it would be an investment manager who uses what I might coin, and I think Morningstar uses this terminology of ESG considerations. Meaning they're in the business of evaluating investments, stocks, bonds, whatever those investments are. Traditionally, what they would look at are all the financial factors involved that they believe are going to impact the price of that security and dictate whether it's a good investment to make or not.
David O'Leary: There's an increasing recognition these days, which, again getting back to my earlier point just was not common. People were not talking about this and doing it. If you brought it up, they kind of looked at you like you were funny, but recognizing, hey, that these businesses do have an impact on the environment. They have an impact on people, so the social side of things, and then how they're governed obviously has an impact on the business. These factors, these environmental, social, and governance factors present risks to you as an investor.
David O'Leary: So, the obvious one is an environmental side. If you're not cleaning up after yourself and irresponsibly dumping waste, you could very well be suffering financial damage from lawsuits, things like that. So, if you are treating your employees poorly and they unionize or they quit or you can't retain staff, those are all costs to the business.
David O'Leary: So, it's this recognition that right, there are factors involved in my analysis that don't have to do with kind of finances account, traditional financial or kind of accounting measures, which we should be aware of, because they could actually impact the return on our investment. So, that even if you don't care about making the world a better place as a selfish investor who just is trying to maximize their shareholder value, you should still at a minimum be aware of and concerned with these factors.
Jason Pereira: Agree. I mean, this is all about off balance sheet risk from my standpoint. Yes, there's benevolent everyone aspects of it of that. Yes, you want to be investing in good actors. Everybody's got whatever industry maybe they don't agree with. I mean that the standard filters, the industries that sometimes they filtered out entirely in these products tend to be things like alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Those three go pretty quickly. And then you also have issues like nuclear sometimes, pornography sometimes, it's depending on the value set. So, I'm sure there's a lot of people in this world who really don't want to invest in the company dimension became Philip Morris, right? It's a challenge, right? Because short of buying individual stocks for everything.
Jason Pereira: If you're going to do a properly diversified portfolio, it gets really challenging to do that on a stock-by- stock basis. Filtering out for those types of companies can be hard, right? Because if you're going to buy an ETF, you're buying the entire ETF. If you're buying a mutual fund, you're buying the entire mutual fund. So, in terms of the options set available to consumers today, how would you say how easy is it to kind of try to match your values with what's available in the marketplace.
David O'Leary: It depends, and it can be very, very, very difficult. It can be fairly easy depending on what your demands are and what your values are. So, you brought a good point. I mean, this is a strategy called kind of negative screens. So, you can have these screens that say, "I'm going to buy this basket of stocks or bonds or whatever securities, and I'm just going to screen out the ones that meet that are involved with alcohol, tobacco, weapons, whatever those things are." Those are fairly easy to find.
David O'Leary: The more demand there is for something and the less prohibitive that screen or that criteria is to the way you'd normally go about investing or the least disruption to that basket of stocks, the more the industry is going to adopt it, right? You've got a lot of people who want it, right? Let's take for instance, weapons. It's not really not that hard to just remove weapons from your portfolio. It's not going to limit you from all sorts of sectors of the economy and then destroy your risk return profile or dramatically change out investment. Manager has to go about managing their portfolio. A lot of people won't-
Jason Pereira: That's why the S&P 500 is made up of 20% of weapons manufacturers, right? It's like you get to have this massive variance from the index because you cut out weapons.
David O'Leary: Yeah. So, the more people who want that, the more the managers are immediately going to go, "Great. We'll at least offer a version of our portfolio without it." It's easy to do and a lot of people want it. The less demand there is and the harder it is, the more complicated it makes their job, because they've got to change how they go about what they're doing then the more difficult that becomes. So, I think what we see is if you've got some pretty basic ones, like some negative screens around some industries like weapons, tobacco, pornography, no problem. The best manager will offer portfolios with no pornography. I think probably a lot of your portfolios won't have it anyway.
David O'Leary: But if you say like, "Hey, I want to make sure that all my businesses are really focused on gender equality or racial equality and racial justice and meet these 17..." We take Equileap as an example of a provider of gender equality ratings and information on businesses and they meet all of these criteria. Okay, well, how many people are asking for this and how much work is this going to be for us to do that and how expensive is it going to be?
Jason Pereira: But I would say the demand thing is kind of broken, right? Because I mean, if you look at the statistics on the growth in ESG investing on the whole, it has been going gangbusters for a decade in the institutional markets. So, pensions, all kinds of large institutions have basically said, "If we're going to invest, we're going to consider these factors." Whereas on the retail side, only recently is this starting to take off. I mean, I blame "the advisor populace," they just get stuck in a rut doing the thing we've always been doing. Change almost never comes easy to this industry. But I think that frankly, if these conversations were had more meaningful with clients, the amount of demand would go up. Just even in my own practice, I don't specialize in this, but I support it, right?
Jason Pereira: All we've done is add one question to our risk tolerance questionnaire around whether or not these types of factors are important to them in consideration of the portfolio and simply, "No, not really. I want to learn more and discuss more," or "Yes, absolutely." We know two out of three results in a conversation, and we'll see where we go from there. Whereas the average advisor is just not having this conversation. So, I honestly think we would have a lot more demand for a lot more of these [inaudible 00:13:00] consumers were actually asked about what was important to them when investing.
David O'Leary: Yeah, no doubt. Listen, but consumers do want it. It's just a matter of how much, how badly. If their advisor's sitting down or not talking about this, they have to be extra motivated to remember to have that conversation, to bring it up, to feel like their advisor can do something about it. So, I think a lot of people, as you're saying, they'll definitely do it, but they're busy and they've got a million other things to do. If their advisor's not really entertaining the discussion, they're not going to, "I'm going to leave my advisor and transfer all my assets." Some people will, but a big percentage of the population won't. So, I think you're right, advisors could play a very meaningful difference in [inaudible 00:13:36] accelerating this.
Jason Pereira: Well, the real-life data point I have for this is Wealthsimple, the country's largest robo-advisor, who simply by nature of asking the question, I think has like 50% of their assets go to ESG mandates, right? A lot of times I would get pushback from different vendors saying, "Well, do you really think there's a market for this?" I'd just be beating my head against the wall saying like, "Look, in my book alone, I think like 15 to 20% of our mandates are in this space, right?" We have a much smaller amount of options to select from in this country unfortunately, when you go this route, but this is important to people.
Jason Pereira: One company, mass market testing, just asking the question, 50%, right? Now, you can argue that millennials are more likely to do that, because they want to find purpose in their investments, but still, it definitively proves that there is something there.
David O'Leary: Yeah, I mean, 100%. I mean, we have 80% of people come to Kind Wealth, prospects not just clients, because we ask it in the intake form as a prospect comes through the door. 80% of them are mildly or very interested in it. I think what's interesting, Morningstar actually did some good research out of the US that kind of debunks the myth around millennials are more interested in it. It's like the traditional belief is that it's women and younger people. They said, "Well, sure, if you ask people to kind of self- identify, hey, are you interested in this? You'll find that it's women and millennials.
David O'Leary: But what they did was... I'm trying to remember the terminology for this kind of survey approach, but it's basically instead of basically people explicitly telling you, they infer your preferences from your answers to a whole bunch of questions. So, these questions, you're making essentially trade-offs, you're given a bunch of like multiple choice scenarios where like, "Hey, here's a stock, and it has this type of impact and this type of return profile. You're kind of making these choices," without labeling it socially responsible or anything. And then they just infer, okay, what's implied by the choices you're making in terms of the trade-offs you're willing to make?
David O'Leary: What they find is that this interest in responsible investing goes right across the board. It's not just younger people and women, which I think is true, because when you ask people to say like, "Oh, I want socially responsible investing," it's laden with-
Jason Pereira: Connotation-
David O'Leary: Connotation, yeah.
Jason Pereira: ... that identifying group.
David O'Leary: I mean, I want to be associated with that group.
Jason Pereira: If you're an active manager for argument's sake, my process includes us not only looking at what's on the balance sheet on the income statements. We dig into their environmental history. We make sure that their governance is in place. We make sure that they're not abusing the populaces that they're involved in, right? That's due diligence, right?" It's just that we've slapped the label on it, because frankly, it's just people are saying that these things are more important to me than not. When you frame them a certain way, I think they're important to almost everybody. I mean, I've had one client joke that "No, no, no, give me the vice fun. Give me the opposite of [inaudible 00:16:20]," right? Which hey, if it floats your boat, it floats your boat, what can I say?
Jason Pereira: So, we talked about one thing briefly earlier, which was negative screening, which was cutting out companies based on industry. Let's talk about the other mechanisms for how companies select which stocks or bonds are going to be in the portfolio. So, what other methodologies do they bring to the table for trying to figure out who's included, who's not, and to what degree?
David O'Leary: Yeah. I mean, I think I started down a path like within ESG, I would say you've kind of got three different approaches to it. So, you just do consideration, which I sort of started explaining, which is hey, while I'm doing this analysis, I'll think about and consider these social, environmental and governance factors or something I would consider ESG integration, which is oh, no, no, these ESG factors aren't just sort of slapped on after we're done evaluating a stock or a bond and valuing it. They're infused right into the entire process for how we go about doing research and how we go about coming up with the value of these securities. So, it's a much more integrated approach.
David O'Leary: And then there might be something called ESG engagement. ESG engagement, integration often can go hand in hand and not always, but they can. Engagement would be where hey, we own positions in these companies. We're going to be active shareholders to try to pressure these companies into making positive changes on ESG factors. So, what you'll see in the landscape is that there are I think the number is somewhere in the neighborhood of thousands of funds that would fall under ESG consideration.
David O'Leary: The number, when you talk about engagement or integration, gets down to a couple hundred at most. I would say there's a lot of opportunity for greenwashing in the ESG and the consideration area, because it doesn't take anything for anybody to say, "Oh, yeah, I'll consider it." But to integrate it into your process fundamentally isn't much bigger.
Jason Pereira: Well, it really comes down to this meets all your other criteria, but do you actually walk away from it? Now you mentioned the term called greenwashing. Can you explain to us what that means?
David O'Leary: Sure. So, greenwashing is essentially, you can think about it as I think maybe two different things. There's kind of a say-do gap. So, hey, we say we are going to do this. We don't necessarily do it or do it as much as we lead you to believe. So, I think ESG consideration, where you say, "Yeah, we factor in ESG considerations," would be is why I think there's just kind of that ripe opportunity for it. We say it, but it actually doesn't change much how we go about doing what we do.
David O'Leary: And then I think about it sometimes as like what you're kind of claiming that your impact is versus what it actually is in practice. So, it's all about kind of gaps between what you're reporting and what you're leading people to believe and what's actually happening in practice. It's not so much like lying or fabricating it but exaggerating and or/not really following through on it.
Jason Pereira: I'll be a little bit more nasty about this and say that I honestly believe that everything in this world where is money to be made, there are some people who take the concept, slap a sticker on it without making any fundamental changes or without making sufficient fundamental changes and try to profit from the trend, right? Not all ESG funds are created equal and that I'm sure a lot of times when you start unpacking what's actually held in some of these things, some clients will just look at and be like, "What is going on?" So, one example that always came up is Suncor, right? Suncor, a big, big, big energy company in the oil sands. As soon as you hear the oil sands, you think, "Wait a sec, wait a sec, environmental, what's going on here?" But they have really strong governance, really strong social scores.
Jason Pereira: When people do weighted scores on where they rank, Suncor, lo and behold, makes a cutoff, right? Does that necessarily match someone's ESG beliefs? Possibly not. I'm going to plug. Tim Nash from Sustainable Economist has a wonderful resource for this. He does a lot of independent research on the individual offerings in the market, and more than one occasion has more or less politely outed some firms who are basically saying, "Oh, yeah, this is ESG. On a scale of 0 to 100, this is a 1. So, congratulations."
Jason Pereira: Unfortunately, there isn't a way to be a little bit pregnant in ESG. You're never 100% not. You also brought an interesting point earlier about the engagement piece, right? So, voting your proxies to basically try to push them to do the right thing. There's a story I heard years ago, this is amusing. I don't know if you remember years ago, there was this commercial from Campbell Soup about how they cut back salt in their soup cans, right? It was here's this guy. We'll call him Dave. Dave was started questioning. He works in our line. He started questioning about the amount of salt going into our soup. We decided to cut back and how much is that? They show them this giant room like up to his waist and soul.
David O'Leary: Amazing.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, that's BS. So, basically what happened was one of the largest ESG investment firms in the US was the source of that pressure. That basically pushed for that. Specifically, in particular, because they just taken a large stake in McDonald's, so same basic pressure. So, that just shows you that it can go beyond even the things that we consider normal. To them, that was a social aspect, right? Because it's worrying about your consumers health, right? So the thing is, is that the more and more money that's plowing into these types of funds, the more and more you're going to start to see hopefully a lot of these votes, a lot of these pressurings coming on boards to do the right thing, which is fantastic.
David O'Leary: Yeah, I mean, there's a great nonprofit called SHARE of the Shareholder Association for Research and Education. They are Canadian-based, and they work with primarily institutional investors to help them proxy vote and practice good shareholder activism and will often negotiate on behalf of their institutional clients because they have kind of expertise there.
David O'Leary: Yeah, there's all sorts of ways in which if you are an active shareholder and you have that type of institutional money behind your dollars, where you're going to get an audience with the executive leadership of these firms, you can take really bad offenders and make investments and say, "What an amazing opportunity I have to make a massive impact," or if it's a collection of investors where, "Hey, we've dramatically improved McDonald's nutritional profile or its environmental impact. It has such a big impact on the economy, because there's so many restaurants and so many chains and so many people that are affected."
David O'Leary: So, it's harder to move the needle with a bigger organization, but provides opportunity to your point, which is you could have investments and things that otherwise you're like, "What? That's not a socially, environmentally responsible investment." Well, if your goal is to make change, it might be an excellent investment to make.
Jason Pereira: I think it's interesting. I've even seen some fund companies go so far as to say, "Look, we're going to start applying ESG thinking to our mandates, but we know we don't have competency in a bunch of these areas," and literally have said, "We're going to actually assign all our proxy votes on all the shares we own to this one organization who does nothing but proxy vote on ESG issues." That type of ethical voting can be outsourced. Frankly, it's having good results slowly over time. So, that's in general ESG. I want to come on to this concept that was known as thematic investing around Environmental, Social, and Governance. Can you speak to what that is and how it's different?
David O'Leary: Yeah, I mean, to my mind... Everyone's got slightly different takes on these things. Definitions aren't perfectly nailed down. But I look at thematic as you say, "Here's an issue or cause or an area that's important to me, it could be I really believe in the power of finding clean technologies to replace existing dirty energy solutions. I want to support carbon reduction strategies. I want to support gender equality. I want to get rid of child labor in the supply chains," whatever those kind of issues are. You either look for investments and/or build your portfolio with that in mind. It doesn't have to just be one theme, it could be a variety of themes.
David O'Leary: To me, that's where the conversation goes from on an ESG front where the I think the dominant discussion there, not always, but is sort of starts with "What ESG factors will maximize my financial risk return?" In some cases, in ESG, you can get into, "No, I care about these things for other reasons than just the financial kind of return."
David O'Leary: But when you get into thematic, I think you're more likely to be having a conversation about, "There's something that's important to me, and I want to see it expressed." It could be a financial call, like, "Hey, I think clean technologies are going to really outperform, so I'm making that choice." But I think it's more often that people build those portfolios that way, because they have a value or some issue that is important to them. So, I want to say that lightly, because I don't have data to back that up.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, but I mean, you're right. They're built, right? They're sold that way, right? I mean, some of the themes I see more commonly, you mentioned clean tech, fossil fuel free, right? I mean, you can still have a very well broad market diversified portfolio for fossil fuel free or fossil fuel reduced. Typically, what they do is they reduced, something the effect of "Well, as long as carbon emissions are below a certain threshold and more than 50% comes from renewable resources, we'll consider you for inclusion," right?
Jason Pereira: And then one of the ones that's clearly thematic is women in leadership, right? We've seen a couple of funds surrounding your board has to have X number of women and X percentage of women minimum in leadership positions in your firm. Basically, that's something that's a value and importance to you, then that's something that should be contemplated.
David O'Leary: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, in a lot of these cases, you actually do have a financial case to be made for it. I mean, I think there's good evidence that having diverse leadership teams, whether it's gender, racial, whatever the case is, actually performed better. Diversity as a factor I think is pretty well documented that that leads to better kind of outcomes. When you're dealing with teams-
Jason Pereira: The alternative is a bunch of people who went to the same schools and have the same life experience, right?
David O'Leary: To mem this is only gets rather uncontroversial like these things. When you call about gender equality and you were gender lens investing, then somebody might go... To your point earlier, depends how you frame things, right? It could be the exact same thing framed two different ways and you get a very different response to it. I think you just talked about like, "Hey, these leadership teams have diverse and complementary skill sets and perspectives." You'd be like, "Yeah, yeah, I definitely want that."
Jason Pereira: But it's kind of funny too, because I look at it from the standpoint of very often one of the things that people talk about as a problem in leadership is groupthink, right? So, you have a bunch of people on the table and they just kind of like coalesce around an idea and they get this form of groupthink because no one challenged the thoughts. Well, if you have a bunch of people with similar backgrounds, similar upbringing, similar everything, I think you just get into groupthink a lot faster with a diverse set, aren't you?
David O'Leary: Yeah, you're at risk of it anyway, because you're all working together so much. And then we're working for the same organization. I mean, you might as well give yourself the advantage of like, "Hey, we're not starting with you as clones of each other." Yeah, it's surprising. I kind of come back to, again, the traditional mindset that I grew up in and cut my teeth in the industry, which was maximize shareholder value and this underlying implicit assumption that if you did something positive, it had to be at a cost. I think that's largely been dispelled, but sometimes it has a cost, but sometimes it doesn't. There are just genuinely-
Jason Pereira: Well, it's impossible to look at that from a single framework, right? I mean, every business out there is wildly different. Don't get me wrong. If you're a toxic waste disposal company, I think you got a pretty hard time trying to figure out how to do things ethically. I mean, not ethically, but do things with a minimal impact on the environment. That's your job, but there's always going to be a footprint, right? Whereas if you're an app developer, like how hard is it to really include diversity of opinion, all that? I think, you can't look at all business with the same lens.
David O'Leary: No, I think that's right. It's just we're coming from a world where again, the implicit was like, "Oh, if it's something good or positive, it's going to make the world a better place, it's definitely going to cost us something." That's touchy feely. When you just think about it as just by and large, would you say that a business that's governed well, that's responsible about how it cleans up its messes and how it interacts and treats its people well? I don't know. I just think like, "Oh, yeah, I know, that sounds like a better investment, like [crosstalk 00:28:23]."
Jason Pereira: Yeah. Well, I also say, "So what? What makes you think that the only parameter for what people want is return?" They're being able to sleep at night and knowing that "Oh, yeah, I didn't have anything invested in that company that did that horrible thing the other day," right? I think there are people in this world who want to know that that's not the case, right? Everybody's got at least one company in this world that they probably can't stand dealing with, right?
Jason Pereira: Knowing that part of your investment portfolio is in there, maybe something you don't want to do. Now we'll come back to the entire return concept and multi-dimensions of return lastly, but before we get there, I want to touch upon something else and other branch of social responsible investing all together, which is impact investing. Can you speak to me about what impact investing is?
David O'Leary: Yeah. So, impact investing is where you have unlike ESG investments or socially responsible investments, which are typically traditional businesses. These businesses are making shoes. They're disposing of waste. They're producing oil, whatever the case is. When you're talking about ESG or socially responsible businesses, they're going about doing that in a way that is as responsible as possible to minimize the damage and potentially maximize the positive impacts of what they're doing as much as possible. Impact investments, on the other hand, are made into businesses that the entire business is set up to solve a problem. It's not, "I'm making shoes and how do I do that better?" It's, "Hey, our actual business here, our business model is solving some sort of problem."
David O'Leary: So, there's a small impact investment based out of Toronto that works kind of internationally called Lucky Iron Fish. I use it as like a really kind of neat example. It's how I kind of distinguish that. So, Lucky Iron Fish was, as I mentioned, kind of created out of Toronto. There's a doctor who did a lot of work in Cambodia. Anemia is a big problem in Cambodia, because largely poor population, diets are very starch heavy, so a lot of noodles and rice and not getting a lot of iron in their diets.
David O'Leary: So, he was looking at "How do we reduce anemia rates? We need to increase the iron in their diets. How do we get them to ingest more iron?" Iron tablets aren't particularly effective because they are very hard on the stomach. Also, you just have a hard time... Some strangers coming in and saying, "Here, take this pill." A little bit like "Why do I want to do that? Is it worth it?"
Jason Pereira: Yeah, pills are medicine, right? They're not food. That's the way people looked at it.
David O'Leary: Yeah. There's a trust factor. It's also just remembering to do it and all that. So, when he came up with the idea of like making an iron puck, literally it's a puck of iron and they make a lot of stews in Cambodia. So, they could just put this in the stew while it's doing all day. It's literally leaching iron into their stews, and that's how they're increasing their iron intake. It didn't really take off, but somebody came up with the idea, I'm not sure exactly who it was, but press that puck into the shape of a fish because fish is a lot as a lucky symbol in Cambodia and adoption rates went through the roof.
David O'Leary: But the point is that they sell this product, they don't give it away. Humanitarian organizations often buy them because it's a remarkably effective way to reduce anemia rates. They also kind of have a buy one, give one. So, they sell it in developed markets as well as where some percentage of the population faces anemia, and you can put it in your water or you can put it in your food, whatever you want. For everyone that's bought, they give one. So, we can debate the merits of the business model, but the point is-
Jason Pereira: This is not a sell for profit maximization, it's set up for multiple parameters of success, which is-
David O'Leary: Yeah, one of which-
Jason Pereira: ... yeah, you return a profit.
David O'Leary: I mean, the more profit they make, the more they can grow their business and expand, and they got to pay salaries and all that, but again, is that as profitable potentially as other business models? We can debate that, but the point is the more successful the business is, the more they sell of what they do, the more impact that they're having or should be having on the world. So, impact investments have a stated intention and to make positive impact and then go about measuring that impact.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. I'm going to take the time to plug someone I know, [inaudible 00:32:12], which is probably, I think, still one of the most successful impact investments in Canadian history, which was Solar Share. Michael Brigham was behind that, and it's a co-operative that essentially raised money to install tons of massive solar projects around North America. The way they did it was they knew they were going to get guaranteed contracts coming from the government, but they needed money to pay for all this. So, they floated a bond that would pay 5%. This is a couple years ago, interest rates a little bit higher. They'd pay 5%, and essentially, they even had a sinking fund coming up that would retire the bond.
Jason Pereira: So, they use the bond money to buy the solar properties, put it up. They would make money off the property, pay a split to the landlord. There was enough money coming in guaranteed from governments from the estimated production that they were able to turn around and continue to pay that 5% but also retire a lot of these bonds. So, wildly successful project, feed-in tariffs are no longer as lucrative as they used to be.
Jason Pereira: So, the economics don't necessarily work as well anymore, but overall, I mean, there's a perfect example, right? There is a way that investors made a pretty decent good return, right? Maybe in a free market where with that kind of risk profile, the bond rate would have been 7%, 7.5%. But if you're making 5% and also at the same time helping build the solar infrastructure across North America, hey, that's a great message for people.
David O'Leary: Yeah, 100%. There's another firm, CoPower, which I know you're familiar with. They do similar things where they're financing kind of green, energy-efficient infrastructure that it's typically not getting financed in traditional channels through banks and investment banks and all that. So, they're going to investors who care about financing this and they're using it to finance solar but also geothermal LED retrofits on condominium buildings, right?
David O'Leary: Where the condo says, "Hey, they've got all this kind of old lighting, we can install LED lighting. It's going to dramatically reduce your energy and electricity bill demand and carbon footprint.” Don't have the upfront funds to pay for it or getting the condo board to agree to incur the cost of the entire retrofit is difficult sometimes. So, they fund it upfront and you pay it back through the energy savings, which is fairly productive.
Jason Pereira: Win-win, yeah, win-win. No, it's just another way of basically finding win-win situations that basically have a specific state of purpose, like you said. I mean, the challenge with this industry in general is it's always been a cottage industry quite honestly, but lately, luckily, there's more and more involvement. There's been a couple of near private issues of large pooled funds in Ontario. I'll give a shout out to Rally Assets for their recent floating of that first kind of this client in Canada, partially private, partially public.
Jason Pereira: I've also seen a couple of other large-scale mutual fund companies looking to come to market with what they call an impact sleeve that unfortunately, if it's a private company, it's hard to get into the average investors hands. There are several public companies out there that do have social mandates as part of what they're doing and do focus on impact. So, those companies are starting to attract a pool of capital specifically for doing that sort of thing. So, it is possible. A lot of times there's amongst certain groups a negative cultural connotation to corporations as being these greedy beasts, which I always find it bizarre, because corporations are people. They're not things.
Jason Pereira: So, it's just a series of decisions made by a bunch of people, but those people can basically now be rewarded in terms of capital pools for making decisions that are benevolent upon the rest of the universe. So, the biggest pushback we always hear on this is this misnomer or this debate. Most advisors in the space will often believe that "Oh, no, if you do that, your returns are going to be worse." There's some truth to that. There's some fiction to that, and it's a nuanced debate. So, tell me about your stance on it. I'll add in a couple points and my general thoughts.
David O'Leary: Yeah. So, I think the answer is it depends. As dissatisfying as that may be, it depends.
Jason Pereira: That is the standard financial planning answer to every question asked.
David O'Leary: Everything.
Jason Pereira: Everything. It always depends, there is no universal law.
David O'Leary: Of course, if you want a yes or no, if the question is "Do you have to sacrifice return to make a positive impact?" Unequivocally no, you don't have to. If the question is, "What type of impact do you want to make?" We can give very clear examples. We're doing something slightly positive is actually going to improve your return. If all depends on how you phrase the question. If you said, "Will you always improve your return if you make a positive..." No, definitely not. So, the answer is it depends. It depends on how you phrase that question.
Jason Pereira: Exactly. I mean, in general, people [inaudible 00:36:44], if I cut out a bunch of stuff, not going to do as well. Okay, well, fine. But if you look at the actual returns on ESG investments in the last 10, 15 years, they've actually outperformed the general index. Now, that said, it's a very short time, right? Ten to 15 years sounds like a long time but now when it comes to parsing data, it's not. Frankly, ESG tends to skew towards growth factors which have done very well in the last little while. Now, I will give you the alternate theory which for the record, Ben Felix covered very well on an episode of Common-Sense Investing in another episode of Rational Reminder.
David O'Leary: Yes, we had a lively debate on Twitter.
Jason Pereira: I almost break you boys up on Twitter, that was funny, but the academic literature is pointing towards that yes, there is a cost. But I will preface this by saying that it really falls down to the argument of if you stop withholding capital from one group and giving it to another, what that does is lower the cost of capital and therefore they can invest in lower return projects. Whereas the other one has a higher cost of capital and don't invest in higher return projects. Over time, if you don't hit some sort of equilibrium, then the group that's got the higher cost will likely outperform. Also, some of the outperformance we'll be seeing can be attributed to the fact that there's a growth tilt, but growth tilts historically underperform value tilt.
Jason Pereira: So, I always say historically, it can underperform for 10, 15 years, but typically value more as back and smash the crap out of growth at some point. Now, does that happen in the future? Who knows? But there is a legitimate academic argument for why there isn't underperformance. However, that said, I always come back to the debate of "So what?", because that's not the primary reason people are doing this, right? This is about informed consent.
Jason Pereira: If you say to people, "Look, you could do as well. Academia says, 'You're probably going to do a little bit worse.' Recent track record says, 'You could do a little bit better, we don't know for sure.' But one thing's for sure you're going to invest in a way that's more in line with your values, and hopefully have a lot more positive impact on the world. Do you want to make that trade off?" There's plenty of people who absolutely are going to say yes, right?
Jason Pereira: So, I liken it to "Would you rather earn 7% basically polluting the air with coal?" as the worst example I'll give, or "Would you rather earn 6% generating power from renewable resources?" Some people are going to be like, "Renewable resources are BS. I like the coal. I want the higher return," but I have to think that most people are going to stop and say, "Okay, that's the trade-off you've given me, I'll definitely consider the slightly lower return, because hey, yeah, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do these things. I wouldn't do that in my normal life. Why would I do that with my investing?"
David O'Leary: Yeah. Actually, I don't think we disagree at all. I mean, my disagreement with the Twitter argument that we had was really just about the only honest answer we can give to this question is we don't know.
Jason Pereira: I think Ben's argument was that thus far research he's seen points to there being a cost, which I'm willing to accept, but I think it's-
David O'Leary: That's if somebody says to me, "Listen, I've done research. I think there's a really good academic kind of theoretical case here for why," you gave two things. One was the past data shows that it did outperform. There's good reasons to maybe discount that and say why that might not continue, because it's tilted towards growth factors, growth happened to do well. I've also got this theory that this is what should happen logically, and this is what economic theory suggests. I don't have any problem with that. It makes sense, but like the world is littered with people with academic theories that are eventually proven wrong.
David O'Leary: So, I think the only answer we can say is "I've got a theory. This is what I think, but we just don't actually know because we don't have enough data." And then we just don't know what the future holds, so. I think that's the only honest answer to that question.
Jason Pereira: Well, I mean, I think there is definite validity to the academic study, but I've also seen other things. So, for example, dimensional fund advisors, they have a lot of ESG products in the US to come to Canada with that. In their analysis, they've shown that, hey, if we were going to apply this in a scientific way like they do with everything else, and they come up with certain screens and certain weighting factors. Certain things like if your carbon footprint is beyond whatever, they're going to reduce your exposure or eliminate you for X. So, they got their entire system and then they've tested that against what if they had done that the entire time versus their traditional portfolios.
Jason Pereira: What they found is that they really haven't given up much return, there's been a little bit more volatility, but they found is that there's been a trade off in the factor. So, they're typically exposed less to value and more exposed to small cap and less exposed to cash flow. But when you added those three factors and how they traded off together, it still ended up with a performance that was not statistically significant from the different groups. So, I think part of it also comes down to how is it you're defining this? Right? How is it you're defining social responsible investing?
David O'Leary: So, I want to say two things on this. So, that's part of why I think you're only honest answer is we don't know. I mean, even let's take the academic theory or any research you've seen that says that they should underperform, well, how are you defining that? We haven't even agreed upon our terms in this industry. I mean, there's some agreement.
David O'Leary: I'm overstating that a little bit, but until you can say, "Hey, listen, we've all got one uniform definition," in any of those cases, you have to define what you mean by ESG or socially responsible. If you change those parameters, you have to redo the analysis or the study or the research. So, if you look at DFA's results, well, depending on if you change the underlying factor that are testing, you might get very different results for how you define socially responsible ESG.
David O'Leary: The second thing I'll say is I think... I agree with your conclusion, which is I just don't even think this is a productive discussion, because I think what we'd be better to do is focus our time on, let's talk about returns, but let's just stop talking about only financial returns, because your investments generate all sorts of returns. They are social returns, environmental returns, and admittedly, that still kind of sounds fluffy and far out there, but it's not.
Jason Pereira: It doesn't have to be. It could be personal experience, right? We have clients who basically were involved with associations suing oil and gas firms for unfortunate treatment of labor that happened overseas, including like horrific accidents, right? Spending time trying to get these victims' money. From what they saw in that fight, they're like, "I don't ever want to own a single dollar in any oil and gas producer." I can't fault them for that, right? They had that personal experience, right? I think one of the things that's going to be interesting and one of the trends developing in the US is there's a trend towards direct indexing. Now that a couple of platforms in the US are zero cost of trade, you've seen Schwab and Fidelity start to offer direct indexing to their direct to consumer channel.
Jason Pereira: So, that means instead of owning the S&P 500 ETF, you own all 500 shares, because now you can own them in fractions. We don't have that in Canada yet. But what I think is exciting about that is the ability to now overlay your value system onto that. So, you can apply the same ESG screens, you can get data from different companies to apply screens. I even met a company that wants to actually put together a LGBTQ-friendly index by looking at company's policies towards people of LGBTQ affiliation, whatever cool acronym you might use for that.
Jason Pereira: But the point is, is that they overlay that data, screened out companies. They basically said, "Hey, this is what matters to you, you could do this," right? You start thinking about the possibility for doing that, but also picking out specific names like "Oh, I don't want to deal with Canadian banks." For example, my family member got unjustly fired by this company and treated incredibly poorly, right? Hey, if that matters to you, let's respect that. Let's show you the deviation from the default market portfolio. If you're willing to accept that, fine, right? But right now, we're not quite there, but it's an exciting possibility to happen.
David O'Leary: Yeah, I agree completely and that will I think revolutionize our ability to customize... One of the big complaints that you have as well, you buy this SRI portfolio and then three people look at it. One person is happy with it, and two other people are like, "Whoa, that's not what I mean by socially responsible." To be able to customize it for individual's preferences, I think, is a game changer. I'd be very excited when we have that.
Jason Pereira: Well, I think you said in a previous interview somewhere where you learned it's very hard to outsource your beliefs, right? A simple example I have is a client who came back at one point and said, "I want to move from this company to whatever else you have, because there was already a social responsible investing company." I'm like, "Why?" It's like, "Well, they invest in Caterpillar." I'm like, "Okay." He's like, "Well, they sell equipment to the State of Israel to plow over Palestinian homes." At that point, I just threw my hands up in the air. I'm like, [inaudible 00:45:13] face to face. I'm like, "Okay, that's your definition, man."
Jason Pereira: I basically said to him, "I cannot promise you there's any general product on the market that is going to exactly line up with your values. So, we'll go through everything. You are going to have to make the best strategic decision with the available opportunities set." Even with the client process we have is that if they answer yes to learning more about it, it's a conversation. It's like, first questions is what does that mean to you? What does that mean to you?
David O'Leary: So, the very first thing I start every conversation when we get into these conversations, your portfolio will not be perfect. There will be some aspect of it you are not happy with if you dig deep enough, because it's a rabbit hole, right? The more you start to go down that rabbit hole, the more you realize, "Oh, what about this What about that? What about that?" You can't ever have the underlying portfolios of moving parts and changing variables and the businesses are making decisions and changing. So, don't make perfect the enemy of good. So, this is often used "Look, this SRI portfolio has this, this and this in it," most people would be shocked. That means not socially responsible. Look how silly this idea is. That's just preposterous to me, because what?
David O'Leary: So, we shouldn't ever try to make any progress, because it won't be perfect from day one. I mean, let's just take the wins where we get them. Don't make perfect the enemy of the good and just accept that it won't be perfect. We'll try to make it better and better as the options improve, then we get more sophisticated. Even the client, you get a better understanding about what's important to you and figure out where your trade off lies between practicality and your values.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, one of the things we do to address though is that there can be a cost differential to some of this stuff. I mean, I think we both [crosstalk 00:46:53] in particular about how expensive compared to non- SRI options we find some of these products. Although that being said I'm happy to say that that is changing. There is a lot more lower cost product coming on the market, except for when it comes... I tell you, this is the bane of my existence.
Jason Pereira: When I've tried to put together fossil fuel free mandate and look at the underlying cost as being double of what I'm doing elsewhere, just because lack of options. So, let me ask you this. So, when you deal with clients who basically look at that and you discuss the fee differential, how does that conversation go? Is that something they want to pay for? Is there resistance? Are there alternatives that you'd address?
David O'Leary: I'd say most of our clients, the fee differential is not discouraging them. That said, I'm very mindful about fees and try to find options that keep that fee differentials as small as possible. So, I don't ever advocate anybody take it lightly for a long time. It's the reason why I didn't like Wealthsimple SRI options, because it's just for the price differential. They've made some meaningful changes to their SRU portfolio.
Jason Pereira: They went and created their own ETFs because they were sick of it being too expensive, which are available to everybody [crosstalk 00:47:58].
David O'Leary: Yeah. So, I think it's actually improved the workflow and reduced the cost, which is a nice one. But yeah, but most of our clients, getting back to this, "What do you value? What are you willing to pay for it if needed?" Right now, there is a pretty meaningful cost differential. But I mean, ultimately, the cost question is a return question, right? Because we know that just one for one reduces your return by that exact amount.
Jason Pereira: Bingo. So, if someone listening to this, once they started talking to their advisor about investing along the lines of their beliefs and values, what do you suggest how that conversation should start or what do they come to the table with?
David O'Leary: I mean, because the industry is still so full of advisors who are not knowledgeable about this space and particularly willing to engage it. I mean, what I probably start with is to test the waters. I mean, if your advisors never had a conversation to you about it before, you could sort of start with a real honest kind of innocent question like, "What do you think about ESG and SRI investing?" I mean, their response to it will probably speak volumes about whether they are likely to be able to help with it. So, for instance, if their response is "Oh, that's a load of nonsense and you're going to lose your returns. It's going to cost you a fortune and you're not going to meet your financial goals. What are you thinking?", there's probably not much point in continuing the conversation with them.
David O'Leary: I mean, you can try to argue with them and debate, but if an advisor doesn't know much about the space and feels threatened by it because they don't know much about it, you're going to have a hard time getting much of anywhere. I think you kind of need to either think how badly you care about it and then either find another advisor or not. I mean, you can ask them explicitly about "Well, hey, it does matter to me. I'd like to get invested." But if their initial reaction's so averse to it, you're going to have a hard battle ahead of you. Either knowledgeable or willing to engage it, then great, continue the conversation.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, it's interesting you say that on two fronts. First off, I mean, that is a common response. It's just like, way to tell your clients though it matters to them doesn't matter to you. That is just terrible way to handle that conversation, right?
David O'Leary: I'd be firing my advisor if they said that to me.
Jason Pereira: It's like what's really important to me is they give a bunch of money to my kid who needs money. No, no, you should never do that. No, you want to talk about trade-offs, you want to talk about everything else, we can do that. But just outright dismissing is just not respecting someone's values. It's interesting because on countless occasions, I get prospects coming in and conversation goes the wrong way, it normally does. And then, they'll ask a question "What about social responsible investing?" I said, "Yeah, we support that. A certain percentage of our client base specifically do that.
Jason Pereira: What we need to have is a conversation about what your definition of that is and if there's a match to market and making sure that there's an understanding of that. We'll explore options together." I kid you not almost every time the response is "Wow, that is a very different answer than everyone else I've spoken to." I'm like, "Let me guess, they all try to talk you out of it right away." "Well, yeah, what do they have against it?" I'm like, "Big question other than lack of understanding," right?
David O'Leary: I think that's a big part of it, right? Listen, be fair, it's kind of you take a big group of humans, not everyone's going to respond this way. Then you put them on the spot on something they don't know anything about in an area where they feel like they need to have all the answers, they need to be able to be the expert, they're going to feel insecure, right? So, it shouldn't be surprising. It's not a good behavior. We don't kind of want to reward it, but it is just a reality and kind of understandable how that happens.
Jason Pereira: Well, I mean, Stephen Covey said, "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail," right? When you think you've got the portfolio that's going to work for everybody and someone says, "Well, what about something else?" You're just so used to swinging that hammer, right? You maybe need to realize it's a screw, not a nail, right? Change your toolset.
David O'Leary: The last thing I'll just say, I want to say quickly, I think with these advisors need to really think... A lot of advisors, again I'm talking about kind of the masses and there's exceptions obviously. There's good advisors out there, but a lot of them that they think that their value is that they're putting together the best portfolio and they're going to select the best investments. They're going to make the best calls. They're going to produce the best return. That's just not the case. I mean, it's hard enough for the best institutional investors in the world. This is the most competitive arena in the world, the stock market, right?
David O'Leary: So, unless you've got the best people, the best resources and the scale necessary to keep your costs as low as possible, you don't have a chance of outperforming. John in Burlington working on his own is not beating the market. So, his value is not bad, his value should be "How do I make sure that my client feels good about this?", has a prudent risk management. By the way, one of those things can be expresses their values in their portfolio if that matters to them. That is something I can do.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. I think I would actually say best is now measured by number of PhDs in computer science and technology as opposed to how many guys you have reading charts.
David O'Leary: Pouring through perspective.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, no, that is not best. Anyway. So, it's interesting. I brought you specifically on Business Owner Podcast in particular, because I think one of the messages, takeaways from here is that every business owner listening, they conduct themselves in a certain way. Many of them would basically probably not invest in companies that did not share their belief structure. I mean, if you were approached to make an investment in your friend's business, and that friend was, on an ESG metric, terrible. He was a polluter, legal dumper, treats his employees terribly, cheat on his taxes, are you really cutting a check? Are you really going to cut a check for that? You're not, right?
Jason Pereira: Nor if you're a business owner, really expect to be able to get full market value for selling your business if that was your operation as well, right? So, it's not a foreign concept that people who've been in leadership to basically understand that leadership has to make calls that sometimes are maybe suboptimal up to profitability but are just the right thing to do. So, that's kind of just to close the loop on this. So, before we go, I just want to thank you for coming on and where can people find you?
David O'Leary: So kindwealth.ca. That's where you can find us. I've got a blog there. I've got a podcast on impact investing, if anybody's interested called the Impact Investing Podcast. It's available on all the platforms. So, that's where you can find me.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. Thank you very much.
David O'Leary: Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Jason, a lot of fun.
Jason Pereira: So that's my interview with David O'Leary. I hope you enjoyed that. As always, if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review on iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, take care.
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