Editor's Note: This interview was conducted April 8, 2025, and the book "The Best of Jonathan Clements Classic Columns on Money and Life" has now been published.
On this episode of The Long View, author and Wall Street Journal columnist, Jason Zweig, discusses lessons from Ben Graham for every investor, the impact of Jonathan Clements in the world of finance, and what investors can learn from the book Zweig coedited called The Best of Jonathan Clements Classic Columns on Money and Life.
Here are a few excerpts from Zweig's conversation with Morningstar's Christine Benz and Jeffrey Ptak.
Christine Benz: You've coedited a book of Jonathan Clements' Wall Street Journal columns. It's called The Best of Jonathan Clements Classic Columns on Money and Life, and it should be available fairly soon. Jonathan, as our listeners may know, announced in 2024 that he was dealing with a terminal cancer diagnosis. I'm hoping you can talk about Jonathan's impact on your career.
Jason Zweig: I'll try to do it without crying, Christine. Thank you. Jonathan and I have been friends since March 26, 1987, but who's counting? And we worked together at Forbes for several years, seven years, actually, I think. And we became very good friends. We used to have lunch almost every day with other friends sometimes. Always at exactly 12:30, Jonathan's stomach is like an atomic clock. It keeps incredibly precise time. Jonathan wasn't my mentor when we worked at Forbes. He was just my friend, but we learned from each other. We both were young. He's slightly younger than I am. And we grew up together, learning about investing and how to communicate good investing principles to the public. And then we stayed in touch over the years. He eventually left and went to The Wall Street Journal. I worked at Time Inc. for many years. And then in 2008, he got in touch with me and said, I'm going to be leaving the journal. Would you be interested in my job? And I said, yes, I certainly would. And so, he recommended me as his replacement, which is a term I don't endorse. I didn't replace him.
I simply stepped into a different role after he left because Jonathan wasn't and isn't replaceable. And Jonathan wrote 1,009 columns. And never once, to the best of my knowledge, wrote anything that was flagrantly wrong. He never misled or fibbed, or lied to his readers. He constantly filtered out the nonsense and the noise in Wall Street propaganda. And he just always conducted himself with honor and integrity. And he's a role model for any financial journalist, any investing commentator, and anyone who wants the general public to stand a better chance of being able to achieve their financial goals. I'm proud to have been Jonathan's friend for so long. And I'm thrilled to be able to participate in this project.
Jeff Ptak: If I can ask, what are a couple of your favorite columns of Jonathan's?
Zweig: I really like the columns Jonathan did where he would deconstruct Wall Street jargon and kind of cut through the fog and poke gentle fun at the lingo that people throw around to confuse and obfuscate people. And in 2015, when I wrote a little glossary of Wall Street terms called The Devil's Financial Dictionary, when I was working on that book, I had a bunch of Jonathan's columns in the back of my mind. I tried to be a little tattier and maybe a little meaner than Jonathan was. But I think those columns were wonderful. I also love the columns that Jonathan wrote about educating his own kids about money, which, in my family, we wish I had taken more to heart and imitated in my family.
Benz: The proceeds from the book will go to help young people get started in investing, possibly, which is something that Jonathan feels passionately about. Can you share more about that part of the book project and the related project?
Zweig: We've teamed up with some behavioral economics researchers who, with Jonathan's blessing, want to run some experiments to figure out how we can best motivate young people who don't come from families with investing experience, how to take those young people and turn them into long-term lifelong investors. And the idea is to give them $1,000 a piece to open Roth IRAs and then to track them over time to see whether they sustain those accounts and add to them as the years pass. And it's a very complicated project. As you can attest, Christine, it's had way more obstacles and wrinkles than I think any of us ever expected. But we are optimistic that we've got them all ironed out, and we can proceed with this. And we're hopeful that we can really accomplish something and maybe even blaze a trail for other researchers and policymakers to follow.