If you had told me seven years ago that we'd be working with a few hundred clients across the country,

that we'd have 30 different team members helping to support those clients,

that we would have about a billion dollars in assets that clients had entrusted to us to help the manage,

I would have said, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are out of your mind that is not going to happen.

I was very happy at my old firm, prior starting route, never saw myself going anywhere,

yet here we are. And so, Ari, what we're going to do today is we're going to tell the backstory

of both how Root came into existence, how you and I met, how we've grown what we've grown,

and what that ultimately means for the team here, for clients that we serve, and hopefully for the industry

at large.

This is another episode of Ready for Retirement. I'm your host, James Connell, and I'm here to

teach you how to get the most of the life with your money. And now, on to the episode.

It's going to be a special episode, and this was prompted by your guys' comments. So yes, we look at

those and we appreciate them. We have a really special announcement in that we have a name for the show

officially. I'm going to tell it to you guys all in one second, but I have to shout out some

awesome names that came through that we heavily considered.

We saw someone say, you should just call it retirement made easier, discussion about dollars,

curb your volatility, a reference, curb your enthusiasm, the J&A show, twin minds, lots of awesome comments.

So thank you guys for leaving those.

We are going to call this

Root Talks. And it would not be right to start Root Talks without the story behind how Root got

founded. So that comment was left left by Alan Young 159, who says, you guys should do a video on how

you guys met, how Root came about,

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