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The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
TIP703: Richer, Wiser, Happier Q1, 2025 w/ Stig Brodersen & William Green
02:10:19
Stig Brodersen talks with co-host William Green, the author of “Richer, Wiser, Happier.”
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- [00:01]
Steve Broderson
You're listening to tip.
- [00:03]
William Green
Every quarter I look forward to my episode. My friend and co host, William Greene. It's a journey about investing, business and life. Which is why we call our episodes Richer, Wiser and Happier. Through starting billionaires and the best investors in the world, William and I feel we have found something more profound than the principles of accumulating capital, the principles of how to live a good life. And frankly, we found many pitfalls you want to avoid. Our conversations are far from how to guides. As you can tell from this in previous episodes, we are struggling in life just like everyone else. In this episode we talk about why some things makes us go strong and others weak. We talk about how to attract the right people into our lives and why it's so difficult. Finally, we end the episode with a discussion of the books we've read in the recent quarter and what we have learned. It's tempting to say that if you want to live a richer, wiser and happier life, this is the podcast episode you should listen to. But as you can probably also tell, it's just as elusive to us as it might be for you. And yet we're still on this, this quest of finding just that. Please join us on our journey.
- [01:12]
Steve Broderson
Since 2014 and through more than 180 million downloads, we've studied the financial markets and read the books that influence self made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Now for your host, Steve Broderson and William Green.
- [01:39]
William Green
Welcome to the Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Dick Brodersen and today I'm here with my friend and co host William Green. William, how are you today?
- [01:47]
Dick Brodersen
I am very well, much better for seeing you. It's always a great treat when we get together for these quarterly conversations. So yeah, thank you, thank you so.
- [01:55]
William Green
Much for taking the time, William. And I'm going to jump right into the first topic here of today and it's about this idea of going weak and going strong. And actually it's probably very timely. You asked me a very, very simple and nice question going into it and I was like, yeah, I don't really want to talk about makes me go weak for reasons I'm not completely sure of. But it is one of those things. I've heard you talk about it a few times now. This idea of something can make you go weak, something can make you go strong. And I think a lot about that whenever I'm making a decision. And I don't know if I can come up with a good example here, but here it Goes. I feel I have a natural bias of this fear of rejection. And I feel that it makes me lose out on a lot of wonderful things in life. And then there have been streaks of my life where I felt I've overcome it, at least to some extent, and it's been wonderful. It opens up a lot of different opportunities, and then I sort of default to the whole fear, rejection kind of thing. And it's so weird. That feeling sometimes makes it go weak and sometimes makes me go strong. And I want to explore that a bit more with you here today, William. So perhaps if we can, let's kick it off. And let me ask you, where does this framework come from? And what makes you go weak and what makes you go strong?
- [03:13]
Dick Brodersen
It's such a rich topic, and I promise you I will get to that. But I kind of am getting sidetracked by the first part of what you said, which is about this. This natural bias, right? This sort of fear of rejection and the like, and that it. It makes us lose out. It's a. It's a really important subject, and it's something that's been very much on my mind. And I've been thinking about it actually just this morning, because I. I had something, I guess, like, I woke up and I got a message that cast me into this kind of familiar set of emotional patterns where you start thinking things like. I mean, I think the underlying message in these emotions is often, but what if I'm totally unlovable? What if I'm not good enough? What if, you know, what if the world will see what a schmuck I am and I'll be rejected? And so this is something I've thought about so much over the last few years, and it's something I discussed with Dan Goldman, who wrote the book Emotional Intelligence, who's become a friend, and also with Soak Me Rinpoche, this great Tibetan Buddhist teacher who I've studied with and who wrote a book with Dan. And so I interviewed them on the podcast, and it's such a. It's such an important topic because I think it hampers all of us. We each have our own sort of flavor of this, but it's one of those things that really does block us from building what. What I would call a richer, wiser, happier life. And so it's worth pausing for a moment and thinking about this. So Soakney is kind of remarkable because he comes from this very long lineage of about a thousand years of these great Buddhist meditation masters, and really, they would sit off in caves for many years looking at the mind. And so. So they became kind of scientists of the mind, right? They had this extraordinary granular knowledge of the way our work. And he then became friends with Dan Goleman and Dan's wife, Tara Bennett Goldman, who wrote a book called Emotional Alchemy. And there was a sort of mind meld where they took the best of kind of Western cognitive behavioral therapy and Eastern knowledge of how the mind works, and they figured out this remarkably practical and helpful stuff. So when you think about these things, like the fear of rejection, or my sense of, like, well, what if I'm not good enough? What if I'm failing? What if I disappoint people? What if I'm just fundamentally unlovable and will never be lovable, right? So there are these. These difficult habitual emotional patterns or neuroses. And I'm no psychotherapist, and so feel or sartis. So. So everyone should apply a discount to what I say. But hopefully, as Tom Gainer would say, it's directionally correct. So as I understand it, based on, you know, reading Tara's work and another work, we develop these difficult emotional patterns from our formative experiences, whether it's difficult relationships we had as a kid or difficult distressing circumstances we were in when we were kids. And so they leave us with these kind of wounds, these psychological wounds that make us feel sort of helpless or limited or that we overreact in certain situations because something comes up and it touches this thing that's underlying. So I had this recently where I have these really great friends who I meet with every week. And one of them, who is such a nice guy, suggested that we have sort of make these sessions more orderly and more linear and more structured. And as you know, I'm not a very structured, linear person. And for some reason, this enraged me, right? Like, it just is so unreasonable, my reaction to it. And so it clearly came from some aspect of going to kind of tough, linear English boarding schools where you were. You were supposed to do everything that you were told. And I literally found myself. I said at one point, I am not a good boy. You know, it's like. And this friend of mine said, wow, that came from a deep place. And so, you know, it's. It's very helpful to look at these things when these things come up and to say, okay, there's something really deep going on here that I have to clean up in some way. But I think the process of cleaning these things up by going to see psychiatrists and stuff and talking this through much as it's incredibly helpful, I think really valuable. There's this parallel or alternative approach which I find incredibly helpful, which was developed by Sokni Rinpoche with Tara Bennett Goldman, Dan's wife, with her support, which is basically. It's what he would call handshake practice. So what Sogni does is he. He looks when. When these things arise, when a difficult emotion arises. Right. So when you feel that sense of, like, okay, you asked me a particular question, I'm going weak, and it's actually making me, you know, it's lowering my energy. I don't feel good. You know, I want to avoid it. I want to discuss something else. What Sukhni would do, which I think is a really beautiful, an incredibly helpful thing, is he'll look at this emotion with this kind of benevolent curiosity, and he's not reacting to it, he's not judging it. He's not trying to apply any kind of antidote to it, like saying, well, of course I feel this way because this happened and this person's in the wrong. It's like, no, no, no. He's just looking at it in this kind of somatic way, like, seeing how it shows up in your body. Like how my shoulders doing, are they rising up, like, you know, to my ears, you know, do I have, like, you know, my breathing feels slightly constrained, even. Even as I'm talking to you about this. You know, maybe it's like an intensity in the forehead, or maybe your, you know, your hands are clenching or your throat is clenched. I often find this, that if I meditate, I feel like, oh, wow, my jaw is so clenched and tight, my throat is tight. And so you're just becoming aware of what's going on in your body. And what Sokna Rinpoche would say is that typically we react to these things, these sort of emotional blockages or challenges. I guess they're sort of distorted patterns of reaction often that come up. We're sort of unconsciously triggered by these things going on under the surface. And so when these emotions come up, maybe we suppress it, or maybe we hide from it, or maybe we project something onto somebody else and say, well, this person, they did this to me and how dare they? Or maybe we just run away from it. My favourite, probably one of my favourites is just to distract myself by maybe I'll go get another piece of toast or something. And so we're kind of numbing ourselves. The problem is that if we don't deal with this stuff, there's a tendency to overreact or blame people or criticize or just to feel unworthy and to feel limited. So the thing that's kind of remarkable is that Sokhnes practice, that he calls handshake practice, is basically engaging. It's just being aware of these things as they come up in your body, basically, and then staying with them and listening to what's going on with kindness and compassion, connecting to the emotional feeling without suppressing it or indulging it even, or running away from it or applying the antidote. And one of the things he said that I really love is he said non judging is the kindness. And he would actually, I mean, I once asked him about this because I went on a meditation retreat with him and I found much to my surprise, a lot of sadness came up where I guess I sort of remembered those teenage years of being stuck in a boarding school and feeling a little bit trapped and claustrophobic. And when I asked him about it, he said, yeah, just smile at it. Just smile at those emotions as they come up. They can't hurt you now. Just smile at it. And there's something about that warmth, that kind of generally benevolent attitude that I think if you play with it, it's very, very healing. And my sense from talking to Daniel Goleman about this, who was a science reporter at the New York Times for many years and then wrote Emotional Intelligence and wrote this book Altered Traits, which is about the impact of meditation on the brain. My sense is that there's something about this kind of almost, I would call it radical acceptance, this approach of radical non resistance that prevents some kind of triggering of this neural alarm circuitry in our brain. So there are scientific reasons why this would work. It's sort of, but it's kind of miraculous. And it's accompanied by Sokni with this sense that he would say the feeling that you have the emotional feeling, like my sense of, oh my God, maybe I'm just not good enough, or maybe I'll, you know, maybe I'm unlovable or something like that, or your, your fear of rejection. He would say the feeling is real, but the message is not true. And so this idea that it's real but not true is really profound because you're looking and you're like, well, yeah, it's real in my body. I feel this way. I'm afraid that, you know, I mean, look, as I'm talking to you, I'm like, I'm kind of exposed, right? I'm talking about this thing that's quite sensitive and quite personal. I'm Pretty exposed. And so there's a fear there. But at the same time, I can say, yeah, but the message is not true. I'm not really in danger. I'm just talking to my friend here, and we're discussing something that maybe, hopefully will help some of the people in our audience. And there's something about that benevolent, kind attitude towards ourselves that's very helpful. And for Sokni, it's part of this sort of broader kindness, I would say. So Buddhists will sometimes talk about. I guess the word is bodhichitta, and it's this kind of vast, unbiased sense of altruism because we all suffer, right? We all go through difficult stuff. And so Sokni has a beautiful line in this book that he wrote with Dan Goldman called why We Meditate, where he said something like, be kind to yourself. Be kind to your beautiful monsters. Be kind to your children. Be kind to your parents. Be kind to everyone. And I think there's something very consistent with what David Hawkins, who we've discussed before, wrote about in Letting Go. And I ran this by Sokni and Dan Goldman. Yeah, yeah, totally. So in Letting Go, it's a very important book, I think, by. By David Hawkins, who, in addition to being a great mystic and spiritual teacher, was a very successful psychotherapist with, I think, at one point, the biggest psychotherapy practice in New York. He wrote this book, Letting Go, towards the end of his career, where he describes the mechanism very similar. And so he said, when something comes up that's painful, some sort of difficult emotion, he said, basically, you want to be aware of the feeling, let it come up, and then just stay with it, abide with it, and let it run its course without trying to make it different or do anything about it. And the thing that he said, which I think is very powerful, is that basically it's the resistance to it that keeps it alive. So when you drop that desire to resist it or vent or be afraid of it or condemn it or judge it, he said, the feeling that's not resisted actually disappears and the energy behind it dissipates. So for me, this has been profoundly important over the last few years, because when this stuff comes up that's upsetting, as it did this morning, I don't think I really had a way to deal with it before. I mean, a few years ago, I just would have. I would have discussed it with my wife, we would have talked it through. I would have had some intellectual understanding of it, but it would still be beating away at me in this kind of somatic way, right. I'd still be feeling upset and jangled by it. And so I think being able to deal with it on an emotional level is really helpful. And so for people who want to. Who want to look into this more and get a better explanation of it than I can give, I would look at chapter two of Letting Go, which is very important, which I've looked at so many times, I can't tell you where Hawkins discusses the mechanism for letting go. And then I would. I would go back and I would listen to the episode that I did with Daniel Goleman and Sokni Rinpoche where we talk about beautiful monsters, because I think there's huge. There's huge healing here. That's maybe. I don't know, I'm about to say something stupid. I was going to say maybe particularly for men, but I think we wouldn't. We were really not taught to deal with our emotions and successful sort of alpha male types. It's like you're supposed to just kind of roll up your sleeves and get on with it and tough it out. And so we tended to deny this stuff. And there's a kind of courage in the willingness to look at these difficult emotions and not resist them. And Sokni would sometimes say, be willing to take a beating. And so there's actually, there is actually real strength and courage in being able to look at these vulnerabilities honestly and just say, well, yeah, look, this stuff happened when I was a kid or when, when I was at school or when someone hit me or when someone rejected me or whatever. And there, you know, I had these, these, these ways of dealing with it that have served me really well throughout my life. But maybe at a certain point they became kind of a little bit outmoded and I can upgrade. So this leads us, in my slightly long winded way, to your real question, which was about this whole idea of what makes you go strong, what makes you go weak, and the connection between what I've just talked to you about and your question is that it's David Hawkins who's really the thinker behind this idea of what makes you go strong and what makes you go weak. So Hawkins had this, this approach that I don't really. I don't really know whether it's valid or replicable or what. I'm not saying this as I don't have a feeling either, either way, right. So he would use kinesiology, right? This where he's testing the effect on your muscles of certain things. And they would either make you go strong or make you go weak. And he would. He would assign things a certain calibration based on your response to it. So if, you know. And this could be. It could be certain foods, it could be certain types of behavior. It could be virtues or flaws. It could be different books, they would each get a kind of calibration. And he writes about this in Power vs Force, which is subtitled the Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior. But really, it runs through all of his books. And I've read about seven of his books many, many times. And so the important thing here is really this idea. I mean, this is the really practical conclusion, which I took from reading Hawkins many times, is that there are certain things that just calibrate at a really low level. Like, for example, apathy or hatred or anger or fear or jealousy or shame or guilt. And I actually think, as I say those words, we sort of go weak. Like, if you're sensitive to this sort of stuff, like, there's some impact. It sort of makes you kind of tilt forward a little bit and feel a little down. And then there are these other things that calibrate at a much higher level, right? Like being truthful, being compassionate, being honest, being kind, being empathetic, being loving. And he would say, for example, that unconditional Love calibrates at 540 on his scale of zero to a thousand. And so enlightenment is at 600. Right? So unconditional love is incredibly powerful. And this runs through all of these different spiritual paths, right? Whether you study Buddhism or Judaism or Christianity or Sufism or whatever it might be, this sense of the importance of unconditional love runs through all of them. So we know that it's kind of directionally correct. So my conclusion from this was that I want to stay away as much as possible from those kind of behaviors that make me go weak. So an obsession with shame and guilt, for example, I just don't actually think is very helpful. I think it's more helpful to me to focus on trying to be kinder and more loving. And this very much goes with what I was saying before about Sokni and the importance of kindness. So I often quote this line. I'm sure I've quoted it to you before on this show, where Hawkins said that simple kindness to oneself and all that lives is the most powerful, transformative force of all. And so that, in a way, for me, becomes sort of the North Star. It's like, well, I'm going to be flawed in so many ways. I'm Going to do so many stupid things, I'm going to trip up so many times, but let me at least try to be consistently kinder. I mean, there's something in the epilogue of my book, Enrich, Wiser, Happier, where I think it's often attributed to Philo of Alexandria, where he says, a few thousand years ago he said, be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. And so I feel like whether you are studying Stoic philosophy or Christianity or Hawkins or anything, you see this idea of kindness coming up again and again. So when you talk about does it make me go strong or weak? I think it's just this very simple filter in a very complex world to say, do I want to stay away from this person or go towards them? Do I want to stay away from this kind of behavior or go towards it? I think in a complex world that kind of simplicity is very helpful. So think of Nick Sleep and Kay Zakaria and their obsession with Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, which is really all about what Robert Percy calls the metaphysics of quality. So again, you can just say in any situation, what's the high quality move here and what's the low quality move? I once heard someone say, gave a great lecture in London and he said, the simplest filter is just to say, is this good for my soul or bad for my soul? So I think in a way your question is getting at that fundamental question of, in any situation, how do you decide which way to go? What's going to make you strong? What's going to make you weak? And in a way, what I like about it is that you're such a rational and systematic and cerebral person. And what I like is that this question of does it make me go strong or weak in a way is helping you tap into your intuition and is making you trust this other part of yourself that just says, well, I don't know why, but I don't want to be with this person, or I don't want to, I don't want to eat this thing, or I don't want to be in this place. And so I think, I mean, look, I'm no expert on evolutionary biology or anything like this, but I feel like we were given these intuitive capabilities as part of our arsenal of tools and the fact that you're not only looking at things intellectually and rationally, but you're just saying, how does this thing make me feel? That's a very powerful tool in your armory.
- [22:12]
William Green
That's so wonderful. Thank you so much for your thoughts on this. William, if you allow me to explore this a bit more with you. I remember listening to that specific episode you talked about and the Beautiful Monsters. And I remember thinking, this is something I need to do more. And I probably did it all of two or three times. And then to your point before, I have a similar mechanism as you where I try to avoid it because it's not nice. How do you find that intersection where you want to extend a handshake to the Beautiful Monsters, but also at the same time you probably want to avoid it? Should you avoid it? How do you. I don't know if I can. This is going to sound like a ridiculous example, but it's sort of like in the intersection of something I'm a bit embarrassed about, but also not really something I would mind coming out in the public space. But I have this similar to you. I went to a boarding school, not as prestigious as yours, I probably should say, but I might have some of the same monsters. And I had this ridiculous thing with an eggplant. And why do I have that? Because we have like an eggplant lasagna. And I thought at the time it was like a. Can I say real lasagna, but it wasn't. So I put a lot of my plate and I remember the headmaster's wife was there and she got very offended about me, you know, putting all that food over my plate and then not eating because it was a whole thing about like you're only supposed to be, you know, you're supposed to finish what you put on your plate and you know, you have to be respectful and you can't just be spoiled brats, whatnot. So there was like a very, very long, you know, story to why you were doing things. It wasn't really representative of whatever a 15 year old kid would talk to the headmaster's wife about. But to me it was like, I don't like eggplants, so why would I eat it? And it turned into this whole kind of weird power struggle. And I remember even as an adult sometimes I'd be like, oh, but that's eggplant. I was like, oh, wait, wait, you've moved on. And I know that was sort of like probably a silly example, but you have different experiences where you forget what's being done, you forget what's being said, but you don't remember how it made you feel. And so whenever something like that would come up, you would, at least in my case, I would just try to avoid it. How do you, how do you find that intersection where you Extend that warm handshake. Perhaps you avoid it. How do you best handle some of your. Some of your beautiful monsters?
- [24:42]
Dick Brodersen
It's a. It's a lovely and important question. I think. There's obviously one of the things I talked about with Soak Me in that episode is there are times where actually the thing is so painful that it's sensible to go up to it, deal with it a little bit, shake hands that acknowledge it, but then actually step back and go to what he would call a kind of emotional base camp. And so if someone's dealing with something really traumatic, there are people dealing with very real intense problems that are way above my pay grade to deal with. And obviously you need expert help with these things. But I think what was lovely about what Sokni was doing is you're not avoiding this stuff. You're greeting it with this attitude of kindness and compassion and general benevolence. So you're sort of smiling at it. You're going into it and you're being like. I mean, he would literally say, hi there, welcome, and he's like, one day we will be friends with and trust all of our beautiful monsters. So that attitude of, like, literally, like, he would be meditating and a beautiful monster comes up. Like his fear of heights. He often talks about that he had when he was a boy trying to cross that very high tower. I think it's in the petrobath building in Kuala Lumpur that has a sort of glass floor. And he often talks about that, you know, for something like that, dealing with it head on, but knowing also when to retreat because it's too much is very powerful, I think. And he. He has a brother, Mingyur Rinpoche, who's also a famous meditation teacher. And Mingya people can look up on. I think it's on YouTube. He talks about dealing with panic attacks that he had when he was a kid. And Soknia Mingya's father was called Tuko Urgent Rinpoche, who was an amazing teacher, like kind of legendary teacher. And so they come from this great lineage where they've really learned how to. How to deal with these things. And so Mingy Rimshe talks about fear of fear and how you can compound the problem by being so afraid of the panic. So it's hard for me to express this well, but I think you don't wanna compound the problem by being so afraid of the thing coming up that you run away from it. And Hawkins talks about this where there's something in letting go, where he talks about sitting with a particular thing, basically, that was so huge that he sat with it for 10 days, and then the resistance kind of went away. And I'm pretty sure, having read a biography of him, that it was that he lost his stepdaughter. His stepdaughter died, I think, in her early 20s, and they were unbelievably close. And it was just this huge, devastating trauma for him. And it's a measure in some ways of how remarkable Hawkins was that he could deal even with that. But I don't know, for me, I mean, there's a. There's a time and a place as well, right? So I had this upsetting thing happen this morning, and I kind of was aware of it. I talked to my, you know, I was physically aware of what it. What the impact was. I sort of know how it triggers certain patterns of like, wait, I'm being rejected. Does that mean I'm not good enough? Does that mean I'm unlovable? You know, and you look at that and instead of going into all of the thoughts about it, you kind of smile, you nodded it, and you're like, okay, and where am I feeling it? And, you know, soak me also talks about not indulging it. So you're not going into it and saying, you know, just obsessing about it all day long. I'm thinking, okay, well, I've got to prepare for my conversation with Stig. And so I'm not going to become super indulgent and just obsess about how I'm feeling, but I acknowledge it and then I move on. I think the danger is if we don't acknowledge this stuff, it's going to bite us in the backside sooner or later because it's just swirling underneath. Once you start to recognize that we're all going through these things, it's also very comforting because. And look, I mean, I interview so many multi billionaires and super successful people, and I'm struck by just how vulnerable they all are as well. And it's. So there's this sense of, I think, this slight shame and embarrassment over admitting that we have these vulnerabilities. But once you start to look at other people, you realize, oh, we're all fighting this great battle, as that great stoic quote would have it. And it makes you, I think, more compassionate to other people. Because then when I'm feeling this myself, I can look at other people and be like, oh, well, he's struggling too. She's struggling too. She's, you know, and that idea of sokniz that it's real, not true is also really important. So the feeling of, you know, like what I said before, I'm not a good boy, that feeling of defiance because people want to tell me what to do. And that's a very real emotion. But I have to be mature enough actually to look at it and say, my friend was not telling me what to do. He truly wasn't. I mean, that wasn't his. His purpose at all. He wants to help me and support me. And so once you have a little bit more detachment from these difficult, challenging emotional patterns, you can respond to them more skillfully. So I think the danger. The danger is of being played by things that you don't even know exist under the surface. And once you're aware of them, you can be a little more skillful. Does any of that make sense, Stick?
- [30:25]
William Green
Yes, it makes a lot of sense. And Will, I'll make sure to. You said the name of the book was Let It Go, Chapter two.
- [30:32]
Dick Brodersen
Yeah, There's a book called Letting Go. Okay. I mean, it's interesting because Hawkins wrote all of these books that had different levels of sort of spiritual complexity and depth. And then right at the end of his career, he writes this book, Letting Go, that's really much more drawing on his psychotherapy career. And it's very profound, but it's also incredibly practical. And there's almost. So there's a section in chapter two that's literally just called the Letting Go mechanism that I come back to again and again. There are so many other books of his that are extraordinary. So, I mean, you. You and I have discuss power versus force, which a lot of people read, which is sort of the. The entry drug for most people. And I. That's what Mohnish Parabrai got me to read. And I think it's a very valuable book, and it probably is a sensible starting place along with Letting Go. But then you once sent me a copy of the Eye of the Eye, which is subtitle from which nothing is hidden. And that's an amazing book. And then there's another book of his that I've been reading recently. I'm sort of always dipping into Hawkins books. There's one called Discovery of the Presence of God that I've been reading. And I'm not trying to proselytize by saying any of this, but it's just really profound. And then he wrote books with titles like I, the Letter I, Reality and Subjectivity or Truth versus Falsehood, how to Tell the Difference. And I just think whatever Anyone makes of the scale, the calibration scale, the consciousness scale that he talks about, or the method, or whether kinesiology is his kinesiology techniques are replicable or not, I just don't know. I find his observations unbelievably helpful and there's something deeply clarifying about his writing. So much so that there's almost no time when I'm not reading one of Hawkins books. I mean, it would be a very rare week that would go by without me dipping into one of his books. Now I tend to dip into them kind of randomly. And it's interesting when I read that biography of him recently, I think it was by someone who'd been a close disciple of his and then kind of turned on him, it's turned against him or became less enamored of him. I mean, it's amazing what he went through. He had like this job, like life. I mean he, he was early in his, early in his life. I mean he was very, I'd say he was probably bipolar and he, he was addicted to drugs and alcohol and he had severe depression and he had a divorce and I think his parents were bipolar and had many divorces between them. And you know, he lost one of his biological children and then he lost that adopted daughter. You know, I mean he had so, so many things that he went through and I think he had probably a photographic memory and he, and he was a speed reader and so he just, it was a bit like Charlie Munger. Like he just digested and synthesized this enormous amount of knowledge and wisdom and then he clearly went through some kind of incredible spiritual transformation. So I, I feel like when I'm reading him that he's actually explaining from a very high level what it's like to be enlightened and what you see when you're enlightened. But there's something kind of remarkable about that book Letting Go because he's able to kind of connect to our regular world, our day to day world, and provide this technique that has great depth to it and great practical applications.
- [34:02]
William Green
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [34:05]
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- [35:07]
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- [37:09]
William Green
Thank you William. Thank you. It's always wonderful hearing your reflections and the impact that Hawkins had on you and still has. I wanted to shift gears here a bit, I think. First I wanted to talk a bit about your Interview with Terry Smith that came out not too long ago. It was just absolutely wonderful. And there were so many things I could take away from that episode. But one of the things that lingered a bit was that he mentioned that Americans are very good at admiring success. And I found that to be true as well. Every time that I go to the States, I absolutely love that about the country. And I guess for you being Englishman, but then having lived in New York for such a long time, I don't know if that's even something that you think about today. But I think things generally very healthy for a country that you're encouraged by success. We talked very briefly about a bit of my background here before we hit the record button. And I kind of feel like sometimes we have a law. I don't know, it's not a real law, but it's. It sort of lives in the folklore we have here in Denmark, where I'm based, that we sort of try to take people down rather than being encouraged by their success, which is sort of, like, sad. But I think there's probably an element of truth to it. Even though it probably would be too simplistic to just make that distinction. But, you know, with so many other things, there's always a nuance to it. And another thing I thought about was this tendency to keep up with Joneses, which I think some of us have been caught up in from for one time, perhaps still at times. And I don't know. I think another thing I found in the States whenever I'm there is that I was about to say the opposite of virtue is also a virtue. But as much as you also get encouraged by success, there is almost a tendency where I feel sometimes whenever I go to the States, if someone's net worth is a million bucks, you do whatever you can to Signal is actually 5 or 10. Whereas perhaps here, which I don't necessarily appreciate, is like, if you have a $10 million net worth, you do whatever you can not to make it look like you have. And you would never buy a Ferrari. You'd be publicly shamed if you bought a Ferrari and drove around in it. And I know I'm just musing here about different cultures, and I'm probably way too simplistic. I don't know if I've offended anyone in our audience, but the way that I think about it, because I noticed the difference. I noticed the difference with friends and acquaintances in different countries. And ever since I adopted your framework that you might have adopted from Hawkins about this going weak and going strong I've been thinking about how can you take a situation and make it for you, to make you go strong and then perhaps still deal with your beautiful monsters. And so one thing that I found helpful personally, that I want to share with the audience in case anyone else would find helpful, is this idea of really empowering yourself to be kind to friends and family. And even more the idea that if they're not friends or family, it actually makes you go even stronger, which I don't know, might sound counterintuitive. And it doesn't have to be flashy, it doesn't have to be expensive. Perhaps it's gifting away books, small box of chocolates, sending flowers to a nurse that treated you well at the hospital, whatever it could be. And so one way I try to implement it, it's one of those things where that's probably easier to say than actually do, is that I have this two minute rule. It's actually a rule I got from my wife that's related to chores around the house. But she said to me, like, hey, if it takes less than two minutes, don't put it on your to do list, just do it. And I kind of like just smarter than me in all walks of life. And I thought about that too. Like if you can do something nice for another person and it takes less than two minutes to do it, just do it. And I've done that different ways and I encourage others to try to tap into it as well, perhaps even for selfish reasons. You know, it could be as simple as having a stock of Amazon gift cards certificates on your desk. Or it could be physical, it could be virtual, and it might sound odd, but I found it to be extremely helpful, especially if I feel a little blue, which sometimes can happen. I was about to say out of the blue, but there will always be like a button there that I didn't intend to, but it's really. I find it to be a valuable mechanism in a time whenever you don't feel too well, then to trick yourself into going strong. And I don't know, sort of like where that comes from. You know, one of the things that I try to talk with different people about and I've almost stopped doing because I always feel like, come off like such a jerk whenever I do. Which is probably why I'm now putting it out in the public space. Probably sounds ridiculous, but I've tried speaking with friends and family about this. I have this. I have this weird feeling of guilt and I feel I've been very, very lucky with a lot of things in my life. And there are a lot of things about. I don't talk about. And then we will talk about here on the show, but for different things happen. I've been very lucky. And I think anyone who knows me know I'm pretty hopeless at most things in life. You know, my. My wife the other day had to give me detailed instructions to how to use the washer because I had no clue how to. How to do it. I'm probably married too well, but I think I have this sense of guilt where I feel like I'm hopeless in so many situations in life. And for whatever reason, I might have a slight edge in some games where it's been rewarded excessively by capitalistic society to be, I don't know, read financial statements or allocate capital, whereas I'd probably be a terrible policeman or terrible nurse. But for whatever reason, we decided to reward one. And saving lives and enforcing law and order apparently isn't as important as one would think. And so whenever some of that would sort of like, almost like roll over me, I know it's almost. It sometimes feels like. Almost like a wave. I think that's the best way I can explain it. Metaphorically. I feel weak, and I need different triggers to make me feel strong. And one of the things is I immediately think, can I do something nice for another person? And I would like to say that it's because I'm nice. I'm saying that it's actually a very selfish deed. It's something I do because if you do something nice for other people, it actually makes you go strong. And so it's just something I wanted to share. I want to throw it over to you here, Willem, before I pin myself too much into a corner.
- [44:07]
Dick Brodersen
I love that it's very thought provoking. I think one of the reasons why I like writing about great investors is that they're such pragmatists, and they think about, as Charlie would say, what works and doesn't work and why. And so you can take these big questions about how to live and how to operate in your life and. And you can just observe what. What these great investors have done, how they figured out the role of generosity and kindness and things like that. And you can sort of say, well, they're pretty pragmatic, and here's what worked for this guy, and here's what didn't work for this guy, and here's why I want to stay away from this guy, and here's why I want to be closer to this guy. They're a great microcosm to study. So I've given a lot of thought to this subject that you're discussing because I'm looking at the great investors and trying to figure out what we can learn from them. Not about just how to get financially rich, but about how to get rich in the deepest sense and what that actually means. And so think of someone like Ben Graham, who was Buffett's teacher and the great pioneer of value investing. When I talked to Charlie Munger about Ben Graham after my book came out, he said he had this really lovely principle where he said, try to do something generous every day. Now when you look up that original quote that Charles referring to, although I think they probably talked about it as well, he also talked about doing something creative every day and something foolish every day, which I think means being kind of light hearted in some way, you know, not taking yourself so seriously. So do something foolish, but also something creative. And Graham was amazing. In addition to being an investment giant and writing the most important investing books, he was a translator. He was absolutely. He would translate a Latin American novel and teach himself a language so that he could translate it. I mean, he was a very extraordinary guy. So creativity was definitely part of his way of living. He wasn't just obsessed with making as much money as possible, but the generosity was really key, this idea of doing something generous every day. And Charlie said to me, look, Ben taught for free at Columbia for 30 years. And he said he helped a lot of people. And Charlie then said it was a very worthwhile life. And when I think of Charlie, I also think, well, it was a very worthwhile life. Not just because he became a multibillionaire and helped to build Berkshire Hathaway into a trillion dollar company and was a great partner to the greatest investor of our generation. It's because he lifted up so many other people by sharing his knowledge and his wisdom. So that's an act of kindness, of generosity, right? So when you think about the things that you can share, the ways in which you can be generous to other people, right? There's money, obviously, but there's also your time, there's your, your love, your affection, there's your talent. You can use your skills to help other people. There's also your attention. I mean, you can. I, I feel this often when I'm with people and I'm not at my best. I'm not really paying attention. I'm not fully present. And when you're fully present, people feel it, right? Like they, so, So I think there are all of These, all of these things you can give, all of these, these ways you can be generous that go beyond money. And I remember someone once saying to me, on the whole, if something is harder for you to share, that's what you should share. And I, I don't know that I've really taken that that much to heart, but I think it's an interesting idea that you lean into the thing. I. It's not that I disagree with it, I think that they're probably right, but I've probably avoided it. But you lean into the thing that's difficult, that's really challenging for you to share. But I see this again and again, this whole issue of generosity and sharing and kindness among the greatest investors. So you see Arnold Vandenberg, who I write about at the end of the epilogue of my book. Arnold said to me at one point that his hobby is giving books, because he said, a book can really change someone's life. And I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago and he said to me, william, I'm putting together a program for you that's going to help me become more physically healthy and vibrant and fitter and slimmer and all of that. And it's like, here's this guy in his 80s, famous investor. There's no reason for him to be spending his time trying to figure out he's running a big company, he's got lots of money under management, he's looking after his wife who had fallen recently and who he was helping. And here he is focusing on trying to help me to get my health in gear. But then you see how happy he is and how excited he is as he's doing it. And you realize, oh, it works like it actually. When you're focused on somebody else, you're. You're tapping into this master principle of the universe that it does. It just somehow makes you happier when you're lifting up other people. So it would be crazy not to do more of it. And I see this also with Guy Speer, who's always been an incredibly generous friend to me. I remember once when we were working on the Educational Value Investor together, I would come in from London, I would visit my son at school, and then I would fly to Zurich. And I still remember Guy bothering to come to pick me up and at the airport and taking my huge case and putting it in the back of his beaten up Porsche, which it didn't fit into properly. And, you know, it was a. It was important for him to show that he cared. And I felt it. The message was Received. And I think that's one reason why that book turned out beautifully is because it was a. It was a collaboration between friends who were helping each other in life. I see it with Nick Sleep. I mean, Nick and I were emailing recently and he doesn't talk much in public, as you know. He hasn't done an interview, I think, since he talked to me for my book, A very private guy. But we were discussing wealth and charity, and he was saying in his email how people kind of delude themselves about what it's going to mean when they become wealthy and they think, well, the point is going to be that I'm going to have more money and so I'm going to be able to go to fancy places and do fancy things. And he's like, yeah, that's nice, he said. But his exact words to me were, the real point in the excess wealth is surely to do something for your fellow man. And then he said, preferably without anyone else's knowledge. And so that's interesting to me when someone as wise and thoughtful and smart as Nick says, yeah, you get all of this excess wealth and it's surely to do something for your fellow man. So I feel like we're just tapping into this deeper principle about what works in life, and you can find evidence for it wherever you look. I mean, you read Robert Cialdini and you talk about the reciprocation principle. There's this sense that if you're generous and kind to other people, they're going to reciprocate in some way. So you could. There's a sort of relatively base, pragmatic level at which you can use this principle and sort of say, I'm going to behave in this way because then this person will treat me better and then it'll benefit my business and I'll become a better salesman and I'll get more assets under management or whatever, and that's fine. I mean, if that's your game, go for it. But I think this principle goes really, really deep. I remember a great teacher of mine, Karen Berg, I had her son Michael Berg, on the podcast. And Karen, who's a remarkable person, said once something along the lines of, when your goal in life is to help other people, the universe conspires to help you. And there is something, I think, that we all sense. When you're more generous, kinder, and more compassionate to other people, it just. Life. Life just works better. And I don't know whether that's because there's some deeper order in the universe. I tend to think there is, and that these principles are not just random, that there's something going on here that's deeper. But it doesn't really matter because as you say, it makes you feel better, it makes you happier. And when you look at these people behaving honorably and generously, you can see that you're the beneficiary and the recipient of their generosity, but you can also see that they're the beneficiary, that it makes them happy. So there is an element of enlightened self interest about it. I think at its highest level, when you see really extraordinary people, they're doing it without any agenda and without any expectation of return. Elevating our consciousness where we start off thinking, well, if I'm. If I share my toy, then this kid's gonna share his toy. And then we're like, you know, and then my mom won't be mad at me or my dad will give me an extra ice cream because I shared with my sister or whatever, whatever it is, you know, I mean, I think we start off with, at least for me, pretty selfish based motives. But I think the highest level is sort of in. I mean, it's hard. It's hard not to say, you know, this is so not a level at which I'm at. So. So I'm saying more from observing other people. The highest level is you see people who. All they're trying to do is relieve other people's burdens. And there's this extraordinary teacher, I think I mentioned you for this Tibetan woman that I've been studying with. And she'll come on the on zoom with a handful of us every couple of weeks and all she's doing is just trying to lift us out of our pain and suffering. And when you see someone like that where there's no agenda at all except to remove pain and suffering from as many people as possible. It's such a beautiful thing. And so, I don't know, that's sort of the ultimate level, I think, where there's this kind of vast empathy and kindness. And when you see. Reminds me of that story that Arnold told me, where Arnold talked, I think in the book about this woman who saw him getting soaked as a teenager when he was selling flowers and she bought all his flowers so that he would just get out of the rain. And he said, when someone touches your heart like that, it changes you forever.
- [54:59]
William Green
That was such a beautiful story. I remember I was in, I was in Bologna at the time. Whenever I listened to that interview, I distinctly remember where I was in my hotel room and I almost teared up, and I rewinded and I had to listen to it again because it was such an emotional. And actually, please correct me if I'm wrong. I think in that episode, Honor talks about this idea of if you and I probably don't do him justice, as I'm saying this, William. But he was sort of getting to that point of, if you just want to do something really nice for yourself, be nice to other people. That's actually how it works. And I don't necessarily think that's why he's doing it. So please don't get me wrong. I think he has very good motives. But it was kind of like you were saying, make the world a better place, and if you don't want to do it for other people, do it for yourself, because that's just the way the world works. And then you benefit from doing nice things for other people at the same time.
- [55:56]
Dick Brodersen
He said something extraordinary to me recently, which I don't know if I've told you where. He said to me, because of your book and your podcast interviews with me, I've been able to help so many people. And he said to me, thank you, thank you, thank you for helping me to fulfill my dream of helping other people. And when you see his joy, the fact that this was his dream was to help so many other people, and you see the delight that he takes in it, it's such an inspiration. And I once said to him that it's remarkable how much pleasure you take out of helping others. And he said, I was sort of always like that. And he told me this amazing story about this friend of his who's at high school with him when he was a teenager, who, like him, was from a very tough family where they were sort of. I think they were both kind of beaten up a bit by their dads, and they had, you know, and they used to go fight together. They were really tough, tough kids who are still friends in their 80s. And this guy had a car that he really loved, and he smashed up his car, and he was just heartbroken. And Arnold said, you know, don't worry, we can fix it up. And they went and got, like, scrap parts, and they painted the car over days, and they made it beautiful. And Arnold said to me, I got as much joy out of fixing his car that I would have got if it was my own. You know, I mean, he was just. And this is one of the great virtues that the Buddhists talk about. I think it's called Empathetic joy. And I find it really hard, like, you know, when other people do really well. There's a little piece of me that still lives in this sort of, not even a little piece of me. There's a part of me that still lives in this kind of zero sum game way that feels like I in some way am worse off because someone else has done really well. And it's, it's one of the aspects of myself that, that I'm least proud of. I mean, it's there and I can't deny it. But I think, you know, the more, the more I wish other people well, the happier I'm going to be. And, and so just to know that that's a trajectory that it's. And think of Charlie. Right. Charlie would talk again and again about the. I mean, I think he said to me at one point, certainly when I went to that 2017 Daily Journal meeting, he talked about, he said my theory of life is win win. And he said, I don't want to screw my suppliers. You know, I want the other person to be treated well. And so I think, I think this is just one of those principles that works in life. I mean, you see, you see people like Charlie or Nick Sleep or Arnold behaving in this altruistic, generous way. And it's not that they're saints, it's not that they're perfect, but you see that and you see the quality of their relationships and the joy that they get from helping other people. And it's very helpful because it gives you confidence that this approach works. There's also a beautiful line from this guy, Joseph Goldstein, that I think I quoted in the book where his great Buddhist teacher, one of the great Western mindfulness teachers, and he talks about the joy of non remorse. And I think there's a certain joy that you see when people behave well and you can look at yourself in the mirror and think, oh man, I kind of behaved honorably and generously and decently there. And you know, maybe you don't want to fall too much into self congratulation, but I think there's a, there's a real joy in behaving kindly and generously. That joy of non remorse.
- [59:36]
William Green
You know, William, I don't want to let you hanging there whenever you mention this thing about envy. I feel the same way. And I know I, I know I shouldn't and I've been recording this, this episode here recently that's, I don't know, probably going to come out sometime in, in April. It's sort of like, I'm still trying to figure out what the right angle should be. It's, it's. It's about advice I would give myself 8, 20. And there was something about hindsight's 20, 20 and 20 advice for you at 20. I don't know. I need to figure out how to. How to best put it together. But one of the things I typed up was this idea of, I remember around age 20, how much I thought that if someone got ahead, I would come up with all kinds of excuses why it happened to that guy and not to me and why that wasn't fair and they had a rich dad, whatever. And I wish I could say that I don't have any of those thoughts anymore. And I would like to say it's gotten better as I'm now turned 40. I think it's gotten less bad. I don't necessarily think it's gotten better, but for me, it's been a very negative mindset to have. And I would like to say I don't think like that anymore, but that's just not the case.
- [60:50]
Dick Brodersen
I think part of it, Stig, is. I think I've probably quoted this to you before. I remember once hearing this very wise woman talking to on the 10% Happier podcast with Dan Harris. And I can never remember who she was, but this had a profound impact on me. She. She said when these things come up, she said, it's just the organism trying to keep itself healthy, trying to keep itself alive, you know, and so there is, There is that survival instinct that we have that feels like there are limited resources, and if someone else gets too much of them, that's less for us. And it's the same thing. Probably that is related to racism and xenophobia and being afraid of people with different sexual orientation or different skin color or different accents or whatever. It's the organism trying to keep itself safe. And so once you look at that, you can say, okay, so there is that. Like, in the same way as our beautiful monsters, we were looking at these things like fear of rejection or, you know, I mean, fear. Fear of not fitting into the tribe. Right. Fear. I mean, maybe going all the way back to your. Your feelings about the, the lasagna. You know, you're basically being told you're an ingrate, you don't appreciate this. And here are all these people who aren't as fortunate as you, and you're so spoiled, and that plays into your feelings about wealth and your culture and not wanting to seem too successful or too flashy or whatever. You know, so I think. I think just being aware of these things and knowing that it's part of the human condition, that it's part of our evolution, is very helpful because then you can make more skillful choices and you can look at it and you can say, yeah, there is that instinct, right? There's the part of me that when someone attacks me in some way or criticizes me in some way, is going to respond by. By being incredibly defensive and by blaming them, being like, yeah, but you did this and you're wrong in this way. But actually, if I'm aware of these tendencies, I can look at the situation and be like, well, actually, they're kind of right because I did screw up in this way. I did screw up in this way, and I am flawed in this way. But that doesn't mean that I'm totally useless. It means that I'm human and that I screw up and I'm imperfect and let me work on this. And so I think all of these things, like just being. It's part of healthy evolution is recognizing honestly what's going on, even though we have all these forms of self delusion and biases and blind spots.
- [63:27]
William Green
I think. On that note, William, I wanted to transition into the next segment here in this quarterly episode about what has made us richer, wiser and happier. And I named this segment attracting the right people into your life. You know, I'll be the first to say that I don't know how it happened. Actually, I do know because of Guy's beer. But I would like to say I don't know how it happened, how you came into my life, but I'm very grateful for that. So thank you.
- [63:57]
Dick Brodersen
First of all, Guy has been a conduit for many good things in both our lives.
- [64:02]
William Green
He has. And so whenever Preston and I started the investors podcast back in 2014, I subscribed to this podcast for this gentleman who built online businesses. And I spent a lot of time studying stock investing. But I had this idea that it would be a lot of fun to turn the podcast into a business. And today it probably seems like something everyone would do, like in this creative economy and everyone's an influencer. Back in 2014, it wasn't as prevalent as is today. So I listened to a few hundred episodes of this gentleman's podcast, and I remember trying to connect with him on LinkedIn and just to thank him, probably also to be, if not friends with him. But then I remember he interviewed his friends and they were all building online businesses. Sound really cool. And I Remember, that was kind of like a group it would be fun to hang out with, which I should say never happened. I know this is going to sound silly, but I tried connecting with him and I was completely ignored. And of course, someone like him, millions of people would probably want to connect with this guy. And so it was ridiculous to be upset about it. It was a random dude connecting with him on LinkedIn. And obviously none of this was personal. You know, he was probably spending time with his friends, family, on his business, whatever, all good reasons not to connect with me. And so I know this is going to sound very petty, but a part of that negative feeling. I just remember it today how I felt back in 2014. And I remember promising myself that if Preston and I were able to become successful with this thing we call the investors podcast. And no one listened to, of course, other than whenever we forced our parents to. I remember I promised myself that every time someone would reach out, I would connect with them and I would respond to them. And even, especially in the beginning, I would jump on Google, meet with them, or it's probably called Skype back then, just because I was so excited about anyone wanted to. Wanted to speak with me. And of course, I'm also a hypocrite whenever I'm saying all of this. You know, thanks to wonderful people such as you, William. You know, going into the year, we had 180 million downloads and it doesn't require a high fraction of listeners to connect before it just becomes too overwhelming. And it has been something I struggle with a bit. Like this promise I made to myself and then not really being able to keep up with it. I. Speaking of Guy, I was actually speaking with him about it. I know he's getting a lot of requests from people who want to connect with him, and I asked him, and he was very, very kind to help me set up a system to do some filters and all of that good stuff. I have a wonderful, wonderful team that's also helping, responding to some messages and so on and so forth. But to avoid this becoming too self serving, which is probably already too late, I wanted to reframe the framework here because some of the listeners might be sitting out there and saying, well, if you have a podcast, it's probably an issue, but what do you mean? What do you mean? I generally tend to believe that it's something we all face to a certain extent, you know, having more priorities and relationships than we have time for. And it's very often the right relationships that stands in the way between us and having A richer, wiser and happier life. And because we all know that all good things in life comes from compounding. And that's true for capital. It's definitely true for relationships as well. You know, I've started to increasingly think about every time you spend time on one relationship, you're not spending time on another relationship. And saying no to a new relationship could be a yes to speaking with William, who I fortunately have known for years now. And so there is this situation that perhaps some of the listeners can resonate with where you want to compound your best relationships. But at the same time, you probably also don't want to mute yourself from new amazing relationships with people you just haven't met. How do you juggle William this? On one hand, you want to attract the right people into your life and build on those relationships. But life change, the world changes, and there are other wonderful people out there who reach out to you. And how do you juggle that?
- [68:29]
Dick Brodersen
I do it really badly. I mean, I'm, I'm constantly struggling with the challenges of greater and greater complexity in my life. And there are lots of people who write to me on LinkedIn or X, or my website, my email, and they write me these lovely messages and I read them. I'm really happy to read them. And sometimes I'm on deadline and I mean to reply and I don't. And sometimes someone asks me for help or advice and I'll give it. And sometimes they write such a sincere, lovely message, I'm like really distracted or I'm traveling or I just don't have time and I think I'll come back to it and then I'm sure I don't. And it's a problem and I feel bad about it. I wrestle with it constantly. I'm not very systematic about it and I'm, I'm sorry to any of our listeners who I've let down by doing this. I mean, the intent is to try to be kind and open and generous to people. But then there's also a danger, right, that you leave yourself with no time for deep work or for the people you're closest to. And so it's a, it's a real challenge. I mean, I, I'm not trying to say this in a self congratulatory way at all. I stayed in yesterday afternoon, on Sunday afternoon and spent the best part of two hours chatting to a guy who, really lovely young investor who I was giving career advice to and sort of life advice too. And that's my Sunday afternoon. And it made me really happy to talk to him. I didn't realize until he got on the zoom call that I did actually recognize him. You know, I said hi to him a few times. That's a. You know, I mean, it. It's a. It's a real problem, though. On the one hand, you really want to be kind and generous and open, and on the other hand, you have things to do. But then there's a part of me that's like, I don't really know what it is I'm supposed to do in my life, and what if I can have a real impact on his life? And so I do this in a somewhat random way, you know, so I'm constantly disappointing people, and I. I think there's some part of it for me that's very intuitive, that sort of entirely unsystematic, where somebody writes something that just strikes a particular chord and I don't know, it's not. It's not rigorous. I don't have systems. I. I know that there are people who write to Mohnish or to Guy, and it goes to somebody else, or it. There's a particular reply. Or, you know, you see Preston on LinkedIn and it just says, you know, I don't reply to DMs. And I sort of envy people who have that kind of systematic process. And at some point, maybe I'll have to do it so that people don't feel insulted and offended, because I'll have so many people write to me and say, for example, can I get advice on writing my book? And it's like, not really. I don't really have time to do that, and I don't know, very hard. Or advice on ghostwriters. Where can I find a good ghostwriter? It's really difficult. And these are often complex questions. And so there's just a real tension here because as we were saying in the previous part of our conversation, you want to do something generous every day, and at the same time, you don't want to neglect your wife or your kids or your parent or your closest friends, whatever. And so it's just difficult. So I. I don't. I don't have any. Any good solution for this. But I. There are a few people that I see with approaches to this that I think make sense. Right. So. Or at least some aspect of it makes sense. So I think of someone like my friend Matt Ludmer, who I share an office with a. Matt has often talked to me about creating containers. And so you create a container for people where, for example, he created this place The Align center, which is where I'm recording this, where people come together sometimes. And we have what the Buddhists would call a sangha, like a little group of four of us that meets every Friday, that includes Matt and a couple of other terrific investors. That's a container. And so I've talked to you before about setting up my book group that no longer exists. But that was a really good container to meet friends semi regularly. And part of the delight of that that's come out of that is one of the people, this great filmmaker, Ramin Barani, who wrote a beautiful adaptation of the White Tiger, this terrific novel that another friend of mine wrote, Aravinda Diga. And it's a film on Netflix. It's really excellent. And Ramin got an Oscar nomination for writing the adaptation. My friendship with Ramin really came out of creating that container of the book group. And so I think in some way, this idea of creating containers where you're going to regularly bring people together is a really good thing. And then there's something that my daughter Madeline, who's 23, said to me when she was going off to college that had a big impact on me, where she. She had sometimes felt like she was excluded from things because she came. She came from England and went to high school in the suburbs of New York. And, you know, she's an eccentric person who's a singer and a writer and an artist. And she would come into this suburban school wearing this beautiful blazer that her grandmother in London had given her. You know, she very. And she would roller skate or whatever, or skateboard or go on a. On one of those raises down the corridors of the school. And she would. She would play her ukulele or her mandolin or whatever under the stairs, you know, at the school, and would sing. She's very eccentric, wonderful human being. And so she said when she was going off to college, she decided, I'm going to be the includer. I thought that was a beautiful idea. Like, instead of being the person trying to fit in, be the includer. And so she would really welcome other people. She would create situations where other people would be included. And then you have Mohnish's approach, right, where Mohnish would, in typically brutally pragmatic, rational way, would meet someone and say, is a relationship with this person going to make me better or worse? And if he didn't think the person was going to make him better, he wouldn't see them. And I would never go that far because I think there's also the question of what if the person needs you, what if they're in your movie in some way because you know the movie of your life because you're supposed to help them in some way and you, you don't really know. And so I have this slightly mystical, not rational sense that I'm being kind of moved around, not necessarily of my own volition and being put where I need to be. And so when someone comes into my life, I want to be open enough to the serendipity of people moving into my life. I mean, I had this wonderful thing at Omaha last year, I don't know if I've told you this, where a couple of people couldn't come to this dinner that we were hosting. I think it was Clay Fink and I were hosting it. And so we had various terrific investors were coming to meet this group that was part of the TIP Mastermind group. And I had two people dropped out and I replaced one of them. And I consciously didn't tell anyone, including Clay, that there was an empty space. And then my friend Chris Begg wrote to me and said, can this friend of mine, Frederick Blackford, who's a venture capitalist, lovely, lovely guy from England, do you have time to meet him? And I was like, no, I'm giving like four speeches or whatever in the course of 36 hours. I don't have any time, sorry, but I have this space dinner. Would he fit there? And Chris literally just wrote, yes, he's one of us. And solely on the basis of Chris saying that I invited Frederick, who I'd never met, to this kind of important dinner. And he's become a good friend and he's just a really, really lovely guy. And so there's something kind of beautiful about leaving, leaving space open for that sort of serendipity and trusting your instincts. And likewise, I'll look at people and I'll be like, someone will have bad mouth a person. And I look at them and I'm like, yeah, but look, his eyes are really glowy and warm. And I'm like, that's fine. I'm going to be friends with this person, you know, So I don't think you can be too. I don't think you should be too rational about this stuff. You want to leave some space for the serendipity of odd people coming into your life. People coming into your life who you can help. People coming into your life who are going to help you in some way that you couldn't possibly imagine. And so I don't know. That's totally non rational. Non systematic way of dealing with all of this stuff.
- [77:51]
William Green
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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- [81:17]
William Green
All right, back to the show. That is absolutely wonderful way of doing it, William. Different strokes for different folks. And I don't want to make it sound like I figured it out. Actually the next point I wanted to chat about here is that I haven't figured it out. So I think it's very timely to hear how you, how you go about it. So I wanted to, I want to use a segue here where I talk about my favorite TV show of all times. That is the TV show Friends, which I don't know if it's your shortcut to Richard Wiser Heavier Life, but I, I grew up with that show and I, I just, I absolutely love it. I've watched it, I don't know, an embarrassing amount of, of time and got the trio pursued version of the show. And like, it's, it's, it's terrible. But anyways, so there's this scene and two of the main characters, Rachel and Monica, they're discussing whether or not Rachel should start dating Monica's brother. And Monica argues that it would be wonderful because it would be like starting on the 15th date. And then their friend Phoebe jumps in and she's saying, yeah, but it would be like starting on the 15th date, end quote. And I love that scene. And perhaps I put too much emphasis on that because I just love the show too much. But it takes me to this wonderful Scott Fitzgerald quote where he says that the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. And I love that because it makes me think about this idea of making friends in the value investing community. Sort of like, to your point about what you experienced in Omaha, and some of the best relationships I have in my life is from the, that very community. And it's so wonderful because you start on the 15th date, like you have so much in common already. If you meet up at a dinner in Omaha. Like, there are so many ways where you have similarities in business, investing, in life, and at the same time, it can also be very tricky because you're Starting on the 15th date, some of that magic disappears, and to some extent you might be boxed into behaving a certain way. I was at a dinner not too long ago with a group of value investors, and for whatever reason, this conversation went into a discussion about this very prominent value investor who wasn't present. And all of a sudden the conversation got a bit emotional and some of the guests had a very strong opinion about that investor that was positive, whereas others had one that was a bit negative. And so this group was curious about my take on that person. It doesn't matter who it is. Like, as everyone in this world, you know, there is something nice to be said about him, and there's probably something not as nice to be said about him. But I found it to be quite uncomfortable, actually, and I was very much censoring what I said, which is not the way you're supposed to be around friends, because you're supposed to be relaxed and just be honest whenever you're around friends. But at the same time, you know, if I can put the spotlight on you, William, like you're William the author of Richer Weisser happier, and you probably don't want to say something about a person that you won't tell to their face. So you realize that just like you have an upside on starting on the 15th date, you also have the same downside. And I haven't found a way around this. I think it's one of those things where the best thing you can hope for in life is to struggle well, and you can have anything, but not everything. But William, with the success that you have with richer, wiser, happier, and so many people wanting your attention, how do you look at your relationships inside and outside of the value investing community?
- [84:59]
Dick Brodersen
Well, I'll tell you one thing on this question of saying kind or unkind things about people, you know, I always feel worse afterwards when I've bad mouthed someone. I always feel guilty about it, and I just think I would have done better to keep my mouth shut and. But it's difficult because as a, as a journalist or an interviewer or an author, you're building that muscle of being discerning and discriminating and being able to judge things. And that's very important, to have that ability to see clearly. And yet at the same time you want to be compassionate and understanding and empathetic. And so maybe you're right that it just is a matter of struggling. Well, that it's difficult. And I don't know, I think with this whole broader question of relationships with people in the value investing community or outside. I think one of the biggest struggles I've had over the years is, is when I felt very needy and I wasn't coming from such a good place. It was difficult. There was, there was always probably a transactional undertow to it. There was a sense that you wanted something from them or that you felt somehow lacking. And I think that's a terrible place to be coming from. It does, it doesn't feel good. And I think people smell that. And it's difficult because you want somehow, you want somehow for it to feel much more equal or for it not to feel like you're trying to get something from them. I always remember this conversation I had with a really lovely guy, he's a very good investor who I won't name, who called me and was setting up an investment firm. And he said, we talked for a long time and then at the end, towards the end, he said, can I ask you a favor? And there was a moment where I was like, oh, here we go, this will be interesting. You know, is he going to ask me to introduce him to this person or this person? How am I then going to feel guilty and embarrassed? Ask that person for help and awkward or, you know, and he just said, can you keep me in your prayers? And it was such a lovely thing. It was so, it was so non transactional and it just, it just said so much about. And again, I'm not saying this in any way to be proselytizing. I just thought what a lovely human being of all the things he could ask. Literally that's what the guy asks. And you just think there's just something very generous, spirited and very genuine about that person. And so, I don't know, I think for me, when I see people like that behaving really beautifully, I just think, well, how can I try to be more like that and less transactional and less needy? I think what's difficult is there are periods in your career and your life where you really, you know, unless you were born with an enormous fortune or you were just so brilliant that you're an incredible success instantly or so lucky. I don't know. There are these times where you feel needy and you feel like you're not doing well and you need help and that's hard. I don't know. I found it very difficult for many years when I was, when I was struggling after the magazine business kind of collapsed and I was kind of trying to rebuild my life as a writer of books. Difficult. And it's become easier, thank God, since my career sort of got on a much better trajectory. But it's still hard. And there's still always the fear of like, what if it all falls apart and what if I'm not okay? God forbid, what then? And so again it gets back to what we were talking about before, about. It's just the organism trying to keep itself safe. There's this part of us that when we see other people we worry, do we belong to the tribe? Are we going to be rejected? Do people love us? Do people appreciate us? And I don't know. I think I try when I'm at my best and my least venal and self serving just to think, okay, well, let me at least try to be a force for good in the world, you know, let me try to be there for this person. And I think a lot about that, that line from Charlie Munger where he said to have a good partner, be a good partner. And so I think, okay, so how would I be a good friend to this person rather than what can they give me, what can they do for me? Let me think about how I can be present for them. But I fall short of this constantly. I can't even tell you. So I feel like I, my words are pretty empty here because there's what I say I ought to do and there's what I actually do.
- [89:47]
William Green
Yeah, I'm happy you say that, William. And all we can hope for is probably just to be directionally correct. And I also hope it comes across to the audience like we're not pointing fingers. I think that there is something to be said about someone who's young and hungry and know that to succeed in life he probably has to ask for things. And you know, I certainly remember whenever I was a lot younger and try to find my way, I was asking for favors all the time and I don't regret that time. I think it's almost like a rite of passage to some extent. Whenever you are on the other end of that, perhaps you see things a little bit differently. And it's also important to be able to have empathy for the person who is on the other side of it. I was going to this gathering of value investors sometime last year and it was a place where you were as well, William. And it was sort of wonderful because the organizer went up on stage and talked about how he was, you know, supposedly in non solicitation, which I think was very much in the, in the spirit. And then the mic went off and I just felt hunted, you know, but you know, it's like. And because, you know, there was, there was a lot of young people there who, who wanted XYZ and you know, who, who can probably, who can blame them? But at the same time, you know, if, if you go to a place and, and you just want to meet nice people, I don't know, I have this weird sense of. I don't know if it's weird, I don't know if it's natural or not, but this sense, I can sometimes feel very lonely and I want to meet friends. And I feel like the best way to find friends is in the value investing community. And the same time I feel extremely restricted finding friends in the value investing community. And so there's this disappointment in the fellow man whenever you had a wonderful conversation for perhaps not for as long as in your example, but perhaps you're speaking with someone at a conference or whatnot, five, ten minutes, and then at the end of it it's like, oh, by the way, could you do this for me? And then you're like, oh, are we doing business? Are we just. I don't know. And it's probably just me who would be naive, who would go to different places and hope to find a good friend. And then, I don't know, I found it to be, to be ever challenging. And I. You probably just find friends outside of the value investing community. But then we're back the whole 15th date. And I probably put way too much emphasis on a TV show that was recorded somewhere sometime in the 90s. So please take it for what it does.
- [92:12]
Dick Brodersen
It's also one of the things I try to remind myself is I'm very appreciative that I'm actually in a position where I might be helpful to people rather than being the person who is feeling sort of really needy. And remember how Warren and Charlie, you used to quote Ben Franklin saying an empty sack can't stand straight. And I've been in that position before where I'd lost a job or I was unhappy in a job. And your confidence is battered and it takes great courage to get out of that situation. And part of the courage actually is going up to people and dealing with your own discomfort in saying, look, I'm in this lousy position or I'm really struggling with this, or I really want to get to do this. And do you have any advice for me? Is there any, you know, what would you do in my position? And I'm really grateful not to be in that position because I know how painful it is. I'm grateful to be able to be of more assistance in helping other people with advice and the like, but also aware simultaneously that I often can't help that much. And also because I have a 26 year old son, Henry, a 23 year old daughter, Madeline. I know that they're at stages where they need people to help them and they need, they need mentors and they need advice and they need people to see something in them that people nourish and latch onto. And so I, I don't know, it's. All of this stuff is hard. I, I feel like with our conversations we're always groping towards something. We're trying to figure out how to live in a kind of decent, honorable way when we're kind of confused and these things are in conflict and it's difficult and there are no easy answers. And maybe sometimes just leaning into the fact that there's a problem and a conflict and a challenge there is helpful.
- [94:11]
William Green
I think we were back to the whole Fitzgerald quote, right? Because you want to be helpful and you want to help as many as you possibly can. But if you do that, ironically it means that there are so many other people that you can't help if that's the way you want to do it. And so I was.
- [94:25]
Dick Brodersen
But your default position should be to have an open heart and to be generous and to try to be a force for good. So I think there are times where you have to say, no, enough, I'm not going to be able to do my work and I got to do my work or I'm not going to be able to be a good father or a good husband or a good friend to my friend who's in trouble because I'm doing all these other things. So, you know, sometimes you do need this kind of sort of justice to come in and say, no, enough. I have to focus. But I think the default position should always be to try to be more open hearted and generous and kind spirited. I, I don't think I. In the same way that I, when I look back on my life, the grand wisdom of a 56 year old man talking like he's a sage while deluding himself. I look back on my life, I tend to regret all the times I badmouth people, even if I was right, all the times when I was angry, even if there was something justified about it. I don't think I regret any of the times when I was generous or kind to someone, even if maybe it was misplaced. And so I don't think I can think of an exception, really.
- [95:40]
William Green
Thank you, William. I wanted to transition to the last segment here in this episode. And we chatted the other day and you were like, didn't we used to talk about books we read? I was like, oh, yeah, that's true. I don't know how and why we start doing that. We should probably reintroduce that. So I think I wanted to ask you, do you want to go with the books that you read? Do you want me to go? How do you want to do this segment?
- [96:06]
Dick Brodersen
Sure. You talk about the books you've read and what's on your mind first, and then I can either respond or then I can add some stuff about some books I've been reading.
- [96:17]
William Green
Wonderful.
- [96:18]
Dick Brodersen
I'll not have finished any of the books that I've been reading. Whereas you read all the fields from start to finish. Yeah, I rarely manage that.
- [96:26]
William Green
It's terrible, actually. I have this note system where I have three types of notes for all the books and I mark them and it's absolutely terrible. I'm way too structured, way too rational. William.
- [96:39]
Dick Brodersen
Great. I am full of admiration.
- [96:43]
William Green
I don't know if you should be. I think the way I read books are very inefficient. It's very much an A to C kind of thing. But the book I wanted to chat about is called the Speed of Trust, and it was a book that Preston and I originally read back in 2016. I'll link to it in the show notes. But I think if I. You know, there's this saying that a man can cross the same river twice, right. Because it's a different man, it's a different river. I think it would be too cringe worthy for me to go back and listen to what I said at the time. But I think it would be very, very different if I read the book today or I record the episode because I reread the book and I just remember reading it very differently today. And I feel a little torn about recommending the book because I feel that the concepts are important and they're rewarding if implemented right. But I also don't think the book is that good. So I am a little torn. The book is written by Stephen Covey, and it's not the Stephen Covey that you might be thinking about if you're listening to this, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It's by his son, also named Stephen Covey. And my lack of enthusiasm probably comes from this. I don't know, I think I've probably read too many books that's been written by consultants and I don't know, there just seems to be this underlying theme where the road to nirvana is found through more management consulting. And there's this wonderful Optus Sinclair quote, which is, it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. And I sometimes feel that to be the case with some of those books. But this book, the Speed of Trust, gives you the rules and the blueprint to play one of the best games you can win in life. And that is the game of well deserved trust. As many of the listeners of this podcast would know, they might already be thinking about this wonderful Buffett quote where he talks about it takes 20 years to build a reputation and then five minutes to destroy it. And it is somewhat similar when it comes to trust. Of course, each trust account you have with each person is unique. But typically in life, the deposit you put into a trust account is typically smaller than the withdrawals. Sometimes the withdrawals can even be so big that trust can never be rebuilt. And just like success, trust is a game where there's no shortcut for a very long time. You have to say what you do and do what you say to get this trust wheel spinning. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. Many people go easy on themselves, in which case life will be hard on them instead of going hard on themselves, and then sometimes find that life will go a bit easier on them. One way to look at trust is remember how it was to fly before 911 and how much hassle you had to go through today because there's just less trust. And I found that to be the case in business and in life. If you team up with trustworthy people, you would spend less time negotiating, reading contracts, definitely fewer conflicts. Probably more importantly, you can spend your time and energy focus on the good things in life and the things that makes you go strong instead of the thing that makes you go weak. And I would encourage the listeners of this show to think about who they trust in their life and who they don't trust and then think about why that's the case. I found that to be very fascinating to do that. Of course, the book lists different factors, but I would actually encourage you, if you listen to this and stop and think about why do you trust certain people, why do you distrust other people, in case you don't stop, which is perfectly fine, too. The book lists three factors that I would like to go through here. The first one is integrity and trust starts with being trustworthy. And the example that the book has is the tennis player Andy Roddick, strong player. He had a match point in the 2005 Italian Masters, and his opponent, Berdasco, he hit the second serve and the umpire called the ball out. And then the crowd began cheering for Roddick. His opponent moved toward the net because the match was seemingly over. But Roddick didn't accept the point. He asked the umpire to overrule him because he could see that, you know, it was actually the opponent should get the point. And by the way, Badasco actually won the match. But what really impresses you whenever you listen to this story is that it's Roddick's extraordinary example of sportsmanship and antiquity. The other factor is intent. People will trust you if you genuinely care for others. And that goes back to this point about there's no shortcut. You have to genuinely care. You can't just say that you do. And consider why we tend to trust NGOs more than politicians and used car salesmen. For example, if you work in an ngo, you probably don't do it because the money is so good. And you don't necessarily do it as a career. Perhaps you do it as a call in. And so whenever you do business with people and you clearly state what your intentions are, and you don't have a hidden agenda. I don't know if I've read too much Hawkins whenever I'm saying this, but I think the other person can sense that. And you can probably sense that, too. You're speaking with another person, but you know there's going to be some kind of inappropriate ask, perhaps at the end of the sentence. Sometimes you can just feel that. And of course, to William's point before you want to help other people, it's not because if people ask you about any favors, they're bad people, anything like that, but you can sort of like, you can almost sense. You don't necessarily know why, but your subconscious mind is sort of like telling you there's something going on. Yes, this person is smiling at me, but probably can't trust that person for whatever reason that it might be. The third and final point is Results. I'm going to borrow an example here from the book because it's was just wonderful because it was about Lord of the Rings, which is one of my favorite movies. So I'm going to nerd out a bit here and talk about Lord of the Rings. So for some people, it's a waste of time to watch nine Hours with hobbits, sorcerers and orcs. And I know that because I remember whenever I met my wife, we made a deal. I had to watch Sex and the Shield with her and then she had to watch Lord of the Rings, all three movies. We made it halfway through number two and she was like, it's just not worth it. It's just not worth it. I cannot do it anymore. Get to Mordor and get this over with. Anyways, I love that movie, but even the biggest fans would probably say that, hey, Frodo needs to throw that ring into the volcano at the end. Otherwise, what's the point? So in other words, this is about results and you trust people who have a track record of success and dependability. That's just how we're wired. If it's William, I'm sure, and you also mentioned this previously here in this episode, that a lot of people will come to ask you for advice about how do I write a good book? And why wouldn't they after reading Richard Weiser happier. And you've been editor for Time magazine in Asia and Europe. So you have credibility and a track record of success. And that's very important whenever people think about who can they trust on a certain topic. If I can throw it over to you, William, I'm curious to learn about how you think about building trust in your relationships and whether or not you've reflected on who you trust and who you don't trust and why.
- [104:07]
Dick Brodersen
Yeah, I can actually give you some uncharacteristically quick and brief advice on this because I'm just going to quote someone who's much smarter and wiser than me, which is Tom Gaynor, the CEO of Markel. And so I think when I had him on the podcast, I talked to him about exactly this, this issue of building trust based relationships. We talked about how do you build a network of trust based relationships. And Tom, who's a very good human being, very decent human being, and also a great pragmatist, as he has to be because he's running a big company with something like 20,000 employees, said to me, what you do is you extend trust first, you extend love first, and then you see if the other person honors it or violates it. And I thought that was really helpful, practical advice. So you start by assuming that everyone is trustworthy. This would be the lesson I take from him. You start by thinking, this is an honorable and decent person and I'm going to treat them as such. And then you see if they honor it or violate it. And if they violate it, you try to get away from that person. And think of Charlie two years ago at the Berkshire Annual meeting where he said, you have to get toxic people out of your life and get them out fast. And Warren said, yeah, but try to do it with a little tact. And Charlie said something along the lines of, I don't mind a little tact, but just get them out of your life fast. And so the impact of this, once you have this sorting mechanism, what you're left with, according to Tom, is just this incredible ecosystem of trust based relationships whose benefits compound. And I think you and I have both experienced that, right? You see people, I mean, both you and I have dealt with each other in ways that are just trusting. And then you see whether the other person honors that or violates it. And in every case the other person has honored it. And so then you're like, okay, this is good, let's keep going. And so it's not impractical or overly idealistic, but there is a degree of idealism in it of just assuming that the other person will be good, will behave well. So I like that framework. But I have to say I do trust my intuition to some extent when I'm dealing with relationships. And I'm just, I. I'm trying to assume the best in the other person. But I'm also aware this is what makes it so complicated. I'm trusting my intuition, I'm looking for the best in the person. And I'm similarly simultaneously aware that I'm probably likely to miss their flaws because I have a bias towards seeing their virtues and that's dangerous. And so I was at an event last week where I was interviewing a great investor and at the same time there was a great economist speaking, and the economist was making some predictions about the economy. And he said, but you have to be aware that I systematically have this particular bias that makes me underestimate by 0.4% a year how good the economy is going to be. And however much I tried to correct for my bias, I'm incapable of it. And so I think it's helpful to know that we have these biases and blind spots. And one of my biases and blind spots is that I do tend to look for the good in other people. And it means I'm probably more easily suckered. I'm less likely to be really wary of a person. That's an issue. And now, because I gave you a relatively, by my standards, short answer to that, I'll tell you about the books that I've been reading. So, as always, I don't read in a very orderly and systematic way. So I have these enormous stacks of books by my armchair in my study. And I was thinking about what I had. It's a Monday. As we're recording this conversation, I was thinking about what I'd been reading over the weekend. And so there were three or four books I read. I didn't read all of them over the weekend, but so yesterday I went back to a book by Sokna Rinpoche's father, Tulka Urjen Rinpoche, called as It Is, that's just an amazing book that I dip into again and again. It has so many markings in it, and it's just deeply profound book. I think sometimes you discover teachers who, and almost all of our listeners will, if they listen to it, will be like, if they buy it, will be deeply disappointed and be like, what the hell is this guy up to? But, you know, he's. He was a great Buddhist teacher who is identifying the nature of the mind, what the, what the mind is like. And so there's great profundity in that. And so I'm not really saying that as a recommendation for people unless they like studying this sort of thing, but it's just a. An amazing book. And then, as I said before, I was reading David Hawkins book Discovery of the Presence of God, which also is an amazing book and just deeply profound. And so you have these two great sages telling you this is how the world works, this is how it operates. And I'm deeply partial to books like this. I think I've often mentioned to you in the past there's this great sage called Rav Yehuda Ashlag A S H L A G. And I think I probably have about six or seven of his books. And there's one that Michael Berg translated called the Wisdom of Truth that I come back to again and again. And these are just people who I think saw certain things and they're just revealing truth. And I think that's one reason why I keep coming back to Hawkins books is I think he was revealing truth. And often with these deep spiritual questions, people will say, yeah, well, we'll never know. And I sort of think, yeah, we will. There are people who saw things. You know, you have the same thing when you read someone like Ramana Maharshi or there are these great sages who I think saw things. And I have a huge appetite for reading that stuff. So I almost embarrassed how little I read about investing and how much I read these other things. So the other book I was reading just or listening to on audiobook, which I couldn't remember buying, but I had obviously bought a few months earlier, is called Bird by Bird. And the subtitle is Instructions on Writing and Life by Annie Lamott. And it's funny and it's weird, and there's no real reason why I should be reading it, except I think I heard her in an interview, and she's just great. She's a terrific writer and she's funny and she's wise. And there's a story in there, basically about how her brother, I guess when they were kids, came back from school and was massively late on some project, was writing about, you know, certain types of birds or whatever. And he looks despairingly at the father and says, who's a writer? And says, what am I going to do? How am I going to do it? And his father just says, bird by bird, son. Just bird by bird. And so it's sort of about dogged, incremental progress over time. You just approach life bird by bird, and it's how you write and it's how you invest. It's like dogged, incremental progress. But then the book I really wanted to mention is this book that's been a big part of my life over the last month or so, which is called Aflame, which is one word, A, F, L, A, M, E. And it's by my friend Pico Ayer. And it came out recently. And I've interviewed Pico about the book for an upcoming episode of the podcast that I think comes out in mid March. But I also interviewed him at the Asia Society in New York, so at a live event. So I spent a lot of time thinking about this book and thinking about Pico. And Pico has been on the podcast before, and it would definitely be one of my three or four favorite episodes of the podcast with Pico. And he's become a friend partly because of the podcast and because we've met since then. He's just a really wise, really thoughtful person. And a flame is about the fact that he's gone more than a hundred times on retreat to a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur in California, and Pico describes himself as a non believer, and he's a non joiner. So he's not going because he's Christian. He's, in fact, not Christian. He's not really anything. But I would argue that he's deeply spiritual, but he would probably deny that. But he's a great friend of the Dalai Lama and has been traveling with the Dalai Lama consistently since he was 17. And so he's known the Dalai Lama for over half a century because his father was also friends with the Dalai Lama, and he was also great friends with Leonard Cohen, the singer who became a Zen Buddhist monk at one point. And so it's a powerful book. It's a short, very contemplative book that's powerful because basically, it's writing about this monastery and his experiences in this monastery over 34 years that's in an area that's surrounded by fire and flames. And so, in a way, it's a metaphor for something that the Buddha said, which is, life is a burning house. And so it's a metaphor for the fact that we're always sort of a little bit on a cliff edge. You know, there are wild snakes in the mountain at night by his monastery. There's always a risk of fire, earthquake, whatever, death, disease. And yet somehow you have to figure out how to live peacefully and with equanimity in a world on fire. And I think that's one of the central questions of life. How do you do that? And I guess this is something I was dealing with in the epilogue of my book was I was saying, if you have all the money in the world, but you don't have peace of mind, you're sort of lost. And so this idea of investing in peace of mind is hugely important. And Pico is wonderful on so many fronts as a role model, because he's thought really deeply about how to structure his own life so that it's deeply true to his own extremely idiosyncratic priorities. And so he lives in a really small apartment in the suburbs of Kyoto and Nara in Japan. He travels to California a lot. And he once told me he had traveled a million miles on one airline by the age of 30. And so he has this mixture of being a kind of famous travel writer who's been everywhere from North Korea to Iran to Cuba, just all over the world. And at the same time has written a book on the art of stillness and keeping still and going nowhere and being contemplative and going inside his own mind. And one of my favorite things is that he talks About Leonard Cohen, how Leonard Cohen took care of this old abbot who was Leonard Cohen's teacher. And the Abbot died at 107. And here's Leonard Cohen, this heartthrob rock star, who would cook chicken soup for his old teacher and drive him around and sweep floors and take him to the doctor and when he became incontinent, would change his diaper. And Leonard Cohen said to Pico, that's what this practice is. That's what this whole life is about. And you look at that and you think, oh, okay, so here's one of the coolest, most talented writers and singers of the last century. The guy who probably really should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature when Bob Dylan won it. Not that Bob Dylan isn't great as well. And he's just taking care of his teacher. And he's telling you that life is about service. It's about helping other people. And so it goes back to what Nick Sleep was saying before, when he said, surely when you have excess wealth, you want to use it to help your fellow man. And so I think all of these things converge, right? You see, we're living amid tremendous change, tremendous impermanence, tremendous risk. And yet there are these clues. When you study a great investor, a great singer like Leonard Cohen, a great writer like Pico Iyer. They're all pointing you at the same thing, which is trying in some way to dismantle your ego, overcome your ego and help other people and lift up other people. And I think there's deep truth in that. And, I don't know, we're all stumbling, we're all failing, screwing up the whole time, failing to live up to our words. But I think it's helpful to know that that's what these wise people are doing. And then also to see that building, investing in peace of mind, building some silence and some contemplation into your life. So it's actually structured into your life. So we're not just always doing and becoming something, but we're actually trying to be is really important. And then there's also a really lovely thing in Pico's book where I think it's some old lady who lives permanently at the monastery says to him, talks to him about the things she's lost and how it makes you treasure things that much more. And Pico says we cherish things precisely because they cannot last. And so, yeah, everything's changing. Everything's moving really fast. None of it's permanent. And yet you can find some peace within the flames by helping other people. Cherishing what you've got, working on yourself, trying to overcome our baser nature, the jealousy and the envy and all of that. And then probably also having a little bit of a sense of humor about it. So I love the thing that I was thinking recently of Charlie Munger, of how, how humorous he would be in the face of adversity. And he told this great joke, I think it's great anyway, where he talked about the comedian George Burns, who lived to something like 101, who you would recognize in his photos. He used to smoke this big fat kind of Havana cigar looking things. And someone said to George Burns, what, What does your doctor say about you smoking cigars? He said, I don't know, my doctor's dead. And so there was something so dark, dark and funny about Charlie's ability to look at the reality of, of change and adversity and still laugh. So, so that's those, those are the sort of books I've been reading recently. And I should probably be reading more stuff about investing, but this stuff, it's really all kind of about how to live. How do you live in a changing world where you don't know what's going to happen?
- [119:23]
William Green
That's so beautiful, William. And if you allow me to ask a question, I should probably ask Nick Slieb instead. One of the things, and there are many things I admire about Nick Slieb is that whenever he is giving to charity, he's doing it privately, which most people are not. They want the recognition, which I don't think is bad, but I can see how someone like Nick Sleep can do it on an even higher level. I'd be curious, I don't know if you know this, but I think that's a fascinating trait about him. How do you think he would think about this idea of, yes, he's treating his investors really, really well, for example, by closing down the partnership and say, look, there's no reason why, why that would get fees from investing in those three companies. But then also if he continued with asset management, he would have made hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars and he could have anonymously donated and made the world a better place. And I know I'm asking sort of like unreasonable question because I probably should ask Nick and not you. And then at the same time also that there was something very rewarding about helping your fellow man sitting right next to you and do one thing for one person and perhaps change his or her life. And at the same time, someone like Nick Sleep can donate a billion dollars and change the world for thousands of tens of thousands of people. Ever the economist. How would Nick respond to a question like that?
- [120:48]
Dick Brodersen
Yeah, I don't know. Nick was never in it for the money. He was drawn to solving problems. He liked solving the problem of how to invest. And there was always, for him and Zach, a number X above which everything would be swept back to society. And they didn't keep expanding that number as they got richer. And so I think because they were pretty well adjusted, there wasn't this sense of the yearning for money was just this ever widening pit that just would never be filled because it was really a psychological pit that was never what they were in it for. And so I think that's one reason why they seemed relatively free, because that wasn't what they were optimizing for. And I asked Nick recently when he was in New York, I asked him about how he prevented the money bending his family out of shape and kind of corrupting them. Because he, he has good relationships with his family and he always strikes me as a very happy person. And, and he said one of the. And even though these are some private conversations, I don't think he would object to me sharing this. He said, he said one thing they would do is they would always talk at dinner with his three daughters about what they were doing philanthropically. He said they really didn't talk about the making of money when he was a fund manager, back when his kids were teenagers. And like they would talk about how they should share the money, how they could give it back to society, what were the best ways to do that. And he said that really played a big role in his kids not being bent out of shape by the money. It didn't ruin them. And so I think again, there are lessons in this that the more, the more you're focusing on other people, the happier you're likely to be. It just sort of works. Whereas I think if you're really thinking about how can I make the most amount of money so people respect me, so I can get a flashier car and a bigger house and all of that, it's great. That stuff's nice. But we shouldn't have this dream that this illusion that it's somehow going to fill that psychic need that we have. I think, I think the thing that's going to, the thing that's going to fill those psychic needs, as you were alluding to before, is the feeling you're helping other people and you're lifting up other people. That's actually what works and doesn't mean you should take a vow of poverty and not enjoy your Ferrari, if that's what turns you on. Not enjoy having a beautiful extension to your house or whatever it is. But I just think. I just think we should. We shouldn't delude ourselves. And I think also it's fine to give money away, charitably. And to get credit for it, or to build a wing of the hospital and name it after your mother or whatever. Great. I'm not trying to be moralistic about all of these things, but I think probably there are ever higher levels where it's just not for your ego at all. It's because you're lifting up your fellow human, as Nick would say.
- [124:04]
William Green
I can't think of a better way to end the episode. William, this is so rewarding. So thank you for making time, William. I also hope that the listeners are appreciating. I can certainly say it's almost like you should bail me for therapy. It's so wonderful. I should say, William, I've spoken with not just one, but several people on it doesn't matter who it is, but let's just call them investors on Dadaroma who've said William should bill me for therapy lessons because speaking with him always makes them smarter about themselves. So I just wanted to compliment you here before we end the episode.
- [124:43]
Dick Brodersen
That's very kind. I always love chatting with you, and I really don't have any of the answers. I'm just sort of wrestling with these problems myself and trying to figure it out. But it's really helpful to look at people who are. Who have some piece of the puzzle, whether it's these great investors or authors or whatever. And then we're just wrestling aloud with these very difficult, challenging, thorny questions. And they're usually contradictory. As you were saying from F. Scott Fitzgerald, there's always some sort of paradox and contradiction, but we're getting there. We'll figure it out. By the end of the fourth quarter, Stig, we will have figured it all out.
- [125:24]
William Green
We'll have a checklist with ballpoints about. This is how to get a richer, wiser every life. Exactly right. All right, William, thank you so much for your. For your time. As always, it's a privilege.
- [125:36]
Dick Brodersen
Thank you so much.
- [125:37]
Steve Broderson
Thank you for listening to tip. Make sure to follow. We study billionaires on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com this show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.