Welcome to the inaugural episode of Financial Behavior Thought Leaders! In this kick-off conversation, guest host Dr. Kristy Archuleta turns the tables on our regular host, Dr. Mary Bell Carlson, putting her in the hot seat to share her own story. Together, they invite you behind the scenes of the Financial Behavior Keynote Group (FBKG) and explore the mission of this podcast: to shine a light on top financial thought leaders and help professionals and event planners discover dynamic speakers driving impactful change in financial services.

Mary opens up about her own journey from Pentagon presentations to PhD research and the pivotal moment that inspired her to democratize access to world-class financial speakers. She explains why this podcast exists—to make the expertise of leading thought leaders accessible to a broader, global audience, whether you’re booking your next keynote or looking for inspiration to ignite your practice. Kristy and Mary discuss the unique evolution and growing demand for financial behavior topics, shedding light on why skills like emotional intelligence, empathy, and the psychology of money are more essential than ever.

The conversation also covers the origins of the Financial Behavior Keynote Group, the special “community of artists” it fosters among thought leaders, and what truly sets FBKG apart from traditional speaker bureaus. Mary shares practical insight into booking a speaker and reveals how even smaller events can spark life-changing “aha!” moments for both clients and advisors.

Five Key Takeaways:

1. Democratizing Financial Thought Leadership: Mary founded this podcast and FBKG to make important, research-driven financial topics accessible to more people—not just those lucky enough to be in the room for a live event. The goal is to break down barriers and empower both financial professionals and the audiences they serve with transformative ideas.
2. The Rise of Financial Behavior and Essential Skills: There’s an industry-wide shift from technical know-how alone toward the “human side of money”—skills like emotional intelligence, financial empathy, and client communication. Mary and Kristy discuss how these so-called “soft skills” are now recognized as essential skills for driving real change, meeting client needs, and staying relevant in a rapidly evolving, tech-driven field.
3. Where Evidence Meets Experience: FBKG is uniquely positioned at the intersection of research and real-world practice. Speakers are experienced professionals with deep academic credentials, able to deliver evidence-based insights in engaging, actionable ways that connect with both advisors and clients.
4. Community Over Competition: The origin story of FBKG is rooted in collaboration. What started as a small mastermind group has grown into a vibrant “artist community” where thought leaders support and elevate one another. Mary believes in an abundance mindset—“rising tides lift all boats”—and emphasizes that breakthroughs happen when practitioners and researchers bridge their worlds.
5. Accessible, Impactful Experiences for Every Audience: Booking a high-impact financial behavior speaker isn’t just for big conferences—smaller team trainings and intimate client events can be just as transformative. FBKG streamlines the process, matching event needs and making logistics easy, whether you have a firm plan or just a spark of an idea. Sometimes, the most profound changes happen when a fresh voice helps people see money and themselves in a new way.

Subscribe to Financial Behavior Thought Leaders and stay tuned as we bring more behind-the-scenes conversations with the brightest minds in financial behavior and advice!

Watch Dr. Michael Thomas’s TedX Talk on Financial Empathy: https://youtu.be/3hoM5ly2igk.

Find a speaker for your next event or client meeting: https://keynote.financial/speaker-search/

Put your date on hold: https://keynote.financial/contact-us/

Welcome to Financial Behavior Thought Leaders. This podcast takes you behind the scenes with top speakers in financial services, helping you to discover, vet, and book the best thought leaders for your next event. I'm your host, doctor Mary Bell Carlson.

And I'm doctor Christy Archuleta. And I've known Mary for a number of years, So I'm really excited to be taking over the first episode to introduce Mary to you all and put her in the hot seat to share the story behind FBKG or financial behavior keynote group, why she started it, and how it's helping financial professionals and event planners bring world class speakers to their audiences. Mary, welcome to your own show.

Thanks, Chase. Yeah. Look. Nervous to be in the hot seat with you, though, because you do know a lot. So wondering what questions you're gonna pop to.

Yeah. So this should be fun. So let's start with an obvious one.

K.

Why launch a podcast, and why now? Question.

Well, I've had the pleasure of getting to know several people in this industry that are emerging thought leaders, that are doing incredible work, and I have been able and privileged to see it behind the scenes. And it just hit me of I was speaking a couple of years ago, and there was a room of about a hundred people. And I thought several people came up to me afterwards and said that was phenomenal. That was life changing, all these things. And yet it hit me there's only a hundred people in the room. And so in my mind, I was like, we have to get this message out to a broader audience, and how do we democratize this thought leadership and get it out to help the profession as a whole? So, yes, I hope you're one of the lucky ones that are in the room to hear some of these thought leaders, but even more, how do we make it globally accessible for people all over the world that are wanting to hear and know what's coming in financial services and really what's behind behavior and really understanding this idea of behavior. So that's where we began. So whether you're an event planner and you're looking to host a perfect keynote or you're in practice and you're wanting to hear some of the greatest and latest thought leadership and to sharpen up your own skills, this is the place to hear it.

And these are the voices that are really making the change in this profession.

Awesome. And you have quite a lineup of thought leaders who are really movers and shakers in this space. So I'm excited to hear from them as well. So from those tuning in or for those turn tuning in, what can they expect from this podcast?

Well, this is gonna be your all access insider path. Not only are you gonna be able to get to know the speaker a bit and see what it's like to work with them, but you're actually gonna get to hear what they speak about. What are their trends? What are they seeing changing in the field? As well as what are you gonna hear on stage? A lot of times in the speaking world, the way you get booked is someone hears your speech before, and I think this is a great way to be able to take those speeches out and be able to hear and make changes throughout the world. So you're gonna be able to vet your speakers with confidence knowing what they're gonna show up with and knowing how they're going to bring value to your clients, whether it's your clients as a financial professional or whether it's your audience members as an event planner. So we're here to bring you those real world insights, and, essentially, we're bringing the stage to you, which is my favorite part is you can enjoy it from the comfort of your own home or on a walk, and you don't always have to be in a large audience type setting that you get to hear these things firsthand right here.

So making it really easy to hear these thought leaders, see what their content is, bringing it to to the masses really in in really short segments. I love that. Maybe that's because my attention span is short and getting shorter. So Of course. I think. So I love that, you're bringing really important content in, in a short space. Okay. So let's back up for just a minute.

For those who don't really know you or know your full background, how did you get into speaking? You've been doing this for for quite a while now. So how did you get into speaking?

You bet. When you start talking in decades, you know that it's been a while now. Right? I actually really started in the Pentagon. I after doing some lobbying here in DC and then switching over to wealth management for a while, I landed in the Pentagon during the global war on terror, and I was flying all over the world giving presentations on financial specifics for service providers that were specific to military service members. I loved being on stage. But what I also learned in that time is we were hiring professional speakers to come in and do these roadshows with us. And I remember one in particular, John Sillio, who talks on identity theft. He was an incredible speaker, and he was just able to bring to life the ideas he was saying from the stage in a way I had never experienced before.

And I really revered him and looked up to him and admired that. And it was something that I started studying after that. And so I went on and got my PhD, worked at a military base, came back to DC. There's a lot happening there, but I stayed true to really upping my game. I joined Toastmasters. I joined National Speakers Association and just felt this drive and this power and this energy behind speaking. I was at a speaker training last year, and Michael Port and Amy Port run heroic public speaking, and they said something that was profound to me. They said a speech has the power to change the world and the people in it, including you.

And that just resonated with me. You think about Martin Luther King's speech, how that really energized and changed the world from his words. You think about some of the greatest speeches of all time, and it does. It moves people to action. And that's what I think is so powerful about speaking is just the mere fact that not only are you getting to change your world, which I do often through speaking. I'm the one that probably learns the most from all the sweat and hard work and tears that goes into putting together a speech. But at the end of the day, you see the change that is taking place in the audience, and that is so fulfilling for me, not only as a teacher, but just as a professional and just as a better human being is when you have the power to change other people, it's incredible. And that's what excites me about speaking.

So we've talked about, you know, your background, how you got into speaking, talking about you know, you have a group of people that are these thought leaders that are gonna be on this podcast, but really behind it all is what we call financial behavior keynote group. And, can you tell us more about that? What inspired you to start financial behavior keynote group?

Well, it started small. I think as most things do, there were only four of us. So yourself, Michael Thomas with University of Georgia, Edmond Ryan Lauf with Utah Valley, and the four of us were in a mastermind together. And we talk about all kinds of things that we're seeing or trends that are happening. And I remember asking a question one day and saying, so what do you wanna do more of? And I I posed that for each of you. And the response that I got back from all three of you was I wanna do more speaking consulting. And it hit me at that moment that actually putting together an event and finding speakers, I had been on several boards in the past that had tried to do this, and it's a lot of work. And I thought there's not a lot in our domain or field.

There's a lot of financial speakers out there, but there isn't a one stop shop. And I felt like that was really important to bring together these minds specifically in financial behavior that are really changing the scene, that are bringing innovation to the profession. And so I said, let's do it together. So it started literally with four of us and has since grown more than I could have ever imagined. So we are three years heading into our fourth year, and it has just been an incredible experience to see not only people resonating from the outside from that thought leadership, but even internally. I would say what we're doing inside is creating what I call an artist community. Everyone has their own artwork and is creating their own craft and their own beauty to share, but we're doing it in this community space, and it makes all of us better. I'm a really big believer on a blue ocean concept.

I believe that there is abundance and the more abundance we see, the less competition that's out there and that we can each help each other. And the second thing I see is that rising tides rise all boats. And I believe that so strongly that is we help one another. Not only are we helping each other in our own businesses, but we're actually changing the profession. We're making it easier and more accessible for people to hear innovative cutting edge ideas and research to be able to really implement and take back and discover and book the speakers that are making that change happen. And so that's where this all came from is just that idea of we together are better than each one of us individually alone. And so it's been an awesome exciting adventure, and we continue to ride that amazing experience of just that synergy that comes from building a community.

Yeah. And that's really kind of unusual to see that kind of concept or that kind of model in, in the business today. So, I love the concept of rising tides, rise all boats and really Yeah. Make each other better. So I think that's really, really cool and very, very powerful. So, I mean, in thinking about that, in terms of you talked about there's this need for a one stop shop, a space for financial behavior speakers and topics. Can you talk a little bit about how you've seen that evolve over the years and why that demand for financial behavior topics is growing so quickly? Because I know both, you and I can remember there was a time that no one wanted to talk about this topic. It was, you know and if we if if they did want, it was called soft skills and and still it is called soft skills, but I actually hate that word, so I'm just gonna throw that out there.

Right. It's it's so much more than that. It's essential skills to be able to work with the topic financial behavior or the psychology of money where you are really that's where most everything happens. We don't things numbers just don't show up on a page. People make decisions, not necessarily rationally, but how they because of how they think or how they feel or how they relate to others around them regarding money and that their behaviors back that up. And that's how you see the numbers on the page. So talk to us more about this demand for this topic and how you've seen this evolved over the years.

Oh, totally. You know, we're human first and a planner second or third. We've got many identities, but that humanness is such an important part. That is the connecting link. And I've been seeing that more and more as we have been moving and shifting with the move of AI with the advantage of technology. There's a lot of things we can do now that back in the day, we used to have to do on spreadsheets or I should say chisels and abacusis. Right? Like, that really took a lot of technical knowledge. In this day and age, there's computers that do that.

There's AI that can do those things for us. So the question has become, well, what value am I providing? And I have seen that shift and even financial planners that are really struggling or have been struggling with that question. Well, if I am not just providing value in AUM or at which is assets under management, we shouldn't use that. So but as we provide those things in that human side of money, that's the connecting link. So let me give you two examples here. I remember being in an FPA conference. Again, we're talking in decades. And there was a single breakout room.

There are multiple breakouts happening, but there was one room that had so many people in it that they were literally filtering out the door and around the corner, that people were just trying to get their ear up to hear what was going on. And guess what? That topic was emotional intelligence. It was fascinating to me because there were so many other rooms taking place that were very technically sound, but it was the emotional intelligence. And that was really a light bulb moment that I thought I was studying my PhD at the time, and I thought this what I'm learning in this space of financial behavior and psychology, this is the next big thing. So fast forward, I met doctor Michael Thomas and listened to his TEDx talk on financial empathy, which he gave in 02/2017. And I remember tell him telling me, like, Mary, when this came out, it was good. People liked it, but it was okay. Like, nobody really went viral with it.

And he said five years, specifically during COVID, the shift in demand for that topic has exploded. And now we're seeing the industry change and shift who want to know more about things like financial empathy, care, compassion. How do you practice questions? How do you ask questions? How do you listen better? All of the parts that make us the human side of money rather than just saying, I've got the technical knowledge. Trust me. I can take it from here. And I think clients are demanding that as well. They want more than just a spreadsheet. They can get a printout or a spreadsheet, but they really wanna be understood.

And I think advisors are starting to realize, yes, you need to be technically sound, but that emotional intelligence, that financial psychology, which even the CFP board has undertaken to be very important and at it, is really what's truly serving clients. That's the part that helps them get to the next level.

Yeah. So you're taking this topic to the masses. You're doing that through financial behavior keynote group. So for the event planners and advisors listening, what sets FBKG apart from other speakers bureaus?

Yes. That's an easy question because it's in our name. We're hyper specialized in financial behavior. We really focus on wellness, psychology of many, and really all things for financial advisors and professionals. And that can include technology changes. It can include marketing changes. But, really, the second part that makes a big difference for us is where evidence meets experience, and that's our tagline. We came from a background of research, but we also come from practice.

And as we research informs practice and practice informs research, that is what's advancing our profession as a whole. To me, that's what excites me every day is, yes, we're making changes on small stages, but together, we're making changes on an even bigger stage. We're advancing that profession together. And it's really important to hear because often I hear, well, researchers go read the research. Right? And practitioners do it this way because Bob's done it this way for fifty years, so it must be right. But as we start to inform each other and really work on that connecting link of what actually works in practice that may not work in theory and vice versa. But we're finding in this research and really evidence based practices, how is that helping all of us advance and give us the academic credibility as well as the professional insight to really make it seamless. Right? And so those are the two things that I think really stand out for us is our specialization.

We've been in the industry. We know the industry. We've lived this industry. And so it's that ability to take these thought leaders while also understanding financial advising, financial professionals, and what their needs are, and then elevating those conversations to the next level. So for us, we wanna be the most simple to work with, but also making sure that we bring evidence and experience to the stage.

Yeah. So so as someone who is a researcher, a teacher, former practitioner, someone who supervises students in in doing this work, I I love love love, you know, I'm a huge fan of connecting research and practice, which is so important and oftentimes a huge missing link in, like, everything that we do because we're not great about communicating, between academics and and practitioners. And a lot of times they don't wanna talk to each other, and it really doesn't matter the field that you're in is that's, that's really a very common experience as someone who has a multi disciplinary background, it that that's really normal. And so I love that it's really important for thought leaders to bring that evidence and talk about how it connects with experience.

Well, and, Christy, let me add in something right there too, because I do think it's really important as researchers that we're also bringing an entertaining and interesting idea to the stage. Right? It's not just about the topic and the evidence, but it's in how we present that.

Yeah.

How we get excited about that. And that is vital if you're willing to share that knowledge that you have. And let's be honest, there's a lot of knowledge there. You've gotta do it in a way that people are inspired by that and getting picking up those pieces that they can implement that are tangible for them. So it's one thing to go through and read a dissertation paper. It's a whole another thing, though, to implement and put those things into practice, and that's our responsibility. I feel like as speakers that we are bringing cutting edge information in a digestible manner that makes sense for practice and vice versa, that we can hear from practice what is needed to be able to inform better.

Yeah. So I'm almost thinking, like, maybe the tagline should be expanded, like, where evidence meets experience in a dynamic, practical way.

Love it. Man, I'm coming up with all kinds of things today.

No kidding. Alright. Okay. So if someone is about wanting to book a speaker, how do they go about booking one of the FBKG speakers?

We try to make it as easy as possible and simple on you. So go to keynote.financial. Tell us a bit about your event. Is it tell us your audience, your topic, your budget. We'll match you with the right speaker or if you've got someone in mind, we're happy to put a date on the calendar for them. Now on the opposite side, maybe you aren't a big event planner booking large keynotes. Maybe you're a financial adviser with a small clientele or an office full of financial advisers that you want to bring in someone to shake things up and to have your advisers think in a different way. We also do that.

Like, we can do trainings inside client meetings. We can do small client events. In fact, some of the most successful ones we've seen have been pretty intimate small groups with clients. Carl Richards tells me one of his favorite things he does when he does client events is having that spouse that usually is not the one that's engaged, not the one that's interested in talking about money, and quite frankly fought tooth and nail to come to the event in the first place, walk up to him at the end and say, that inspired me, That helped me. And so I think as a financial adviser, we can tell the client and tell the client and tell the client multiple things over, but sometimes it takes a different person saying it in a different way to really help make that change. And that way, they're deeper and more meaningful ways to make change. So it's been cool and exciting to book large conferences, but it's also really exciting for us to do smaller events. And things that work, whether it's through a webinar format or in person, we can make that happen for you, and we'll handle the logistics from start to finish.

You just tell us what's on your mind. Maybe you don't have an audience or a topic or a budget yet in mind. That's okay. Reach out. Give us your idea, and we'll help you bring that thing to life.

Yeah. As someone, I just wanna echo. It's a couple of things that you've said. Yeah. One is speech can change lives. I'm totally summarizing that, but a speech can change lives. And the fact that you never really know how you're impacting someone. Just thinking about a a recent event that that I did with there was a client event.

I had people coming in up to me, and then even the advisers later were saying, you know, our clients were talking about things like, we've never thought about that. We've never talked about that. The advisers themselves were saying we hadn't really thought about that before, and we have some talking with our own partners to do, our our own spouses. And the clients were saying the same thing. And so you just never know how or what someone is needing in that moment that makes can make really big powerful changes for them. So I I love all of the things that you're doing, Mary. So thanks so much for sharing your story and creating a space for these really important voices where they can shine and have a huge impact and change people's lives.

Thank you, Christy. It's what gets me up every day, and I appreciate people like you and many of our thought leaders who are willing to go on this journey with me. It's been an exciting journey. And to our listeners, whether you're planning your next event or you're just curious about where the field is headed, subscribe to Financial Behavior Thought Leaders. We're just getting started.