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The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
TIP730: Richer, Wiser, Happier, Q2 2025
02:25:25
Stig and William invite you to join their journey as they share what's made them richer, wiser, and happier over the last quarter.
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- [00:01]
William Green
You're listening to tip.
- [00:03]
Stig Brodersen
Every quarter, William and I discuss what has made us richer, wiser, and happier. In this episode, we talk about life designs. As you can tell, William and I approach our lives very differently. And the intention is not to tell anyone what to do. Rather, we intend to bring you along on our journey to explore how to live a life that's aligned with your values so you can be the best version of yourself. We discussed the seemingly paradoxical idea that the opposite of a virtue is also a virtue, because you want to say no to almost everything, to focus on what's important to you. But on the other hand, you don't always know what's important before you're in the middle of it. So you also want to say yes to the unknown to let serendipity happen. In the second part of the conversation, we dive into our favorite books, ranging from the titans of literature to mathematical theorems and everything else in between. Thank you for joining William and me in our quest for quality and meaningful relationships.
- [01:02]
William Green
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 hosts, Steve Broderson and William Green.
- [01:28]
Stig Brodersen
Welcome to the Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Dick Brodersen. And as always, for these richer, wiser, happier conversations, I'm joined by my co host, William Green. William, how are you today?
- [01:39]
William Green
I am very well, very happy to see you. Thank you for having me on again, making this happen.
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Stig Brodersen
You bet. It's always a lot of fun to chat with you. And the first topic here of today is life design. And so what was that sound? It's a sound that says we're about to to do something I don't even know if you could cover in a podcast episode. And not even that. Life design is one of the three topics I want to discuss today. William, so I don't know, it might be a 10 hour podcast. Let's hope it won't be. But it's a big topic. How do you feel about talking about life design?
- [02:15]
William Green
I'm always delighted to talk about life design. One of the things that comes through to me from thinking about this is the sense of challenge of how stunted I am in this area. So it'll be interesting. This will help me to think it through as well rather than set myself up as some sort of wise expert on this subject. We'll probably just be exposing my lack of design.
- [02:37]
Stig Brodersen
The intent is really to talk about designing a life that's true to your values, which sounds like an incredible, ambitious project, of course. And I think partly it comes from a positive angle, basically living a good life. It probably also comes from sort of like avoiding negativity. I kind of feel I learned the hard way that you can get that type of anxiety whenever you're doing something where you're not aligned with your values. Perhaps your boss is asking you to do things you don't want to do. Perhaps you have a friend who's asking you to be in a place you don't want to be, mentally or physically or whatever it could be. And some years ago, it might have been five years ago, I don't remember. I was reading this book about designing the optimal life, and I don't even remember the author or the name of their book, which is absolutely terrible. But what I remember the most is an Amazon review I read of the book, and it said something along the lines of, this is another ridiculous book about designing a life where everything is possible and it's not applicable for the rest of us having a normal life. It says something along those lines, like, hey, I have kids and a job and a mortgage. And this author was a very famous, wealthy author that could basically do whatever he wanted to do. And so the point was, perhaps those life lessons just isn't applicable for the rest of us. So, anyways, I think I wanted to make that disclaimer because I wanted to talk about this idea of life design. And I think we make all these kind of assumptions about how to live a good life, Then what is a good life for one person isn't necessarily a good life for another person. And then, William, you and I might talk about. Not that we plan to, but we could say, go to Omaha and meet up with kindred spirits. Which I think, by the way, is a wonderful piece of advice. But again, not everyone has the means or the time just to do that. So please take it with a grain of salt. I can't speak for William, please. Whenever I'm sort of saying, hey, this is kind of like how I want to decide my life, please look at that through the filter, which is, we all have different values. We all have different ideas of what a good and a bad life is. And some probably see it very, very differently. So I wasn't really sure how to talk about how to design a good life. What I typically do in situations like that is I would start to invert so what is a bad life? And so this was something I started implementing Some years ago. And again, I have all my own kind of biases and running my company from home and all that good stuff. But I generally only have calls with other people between 2 and 5pm and so before 2pm I want to do deep work and after 5pm I often still work, but I just don't want to have calls. It's just not sustainable with the way I live my family life. And I had some incredible interesting people who are on the west coast in the States. So I'm in Denmark, which is nine hours ahead. So I say no to some incredibly interesting conversations because it's just after 5pm and generally just don't want that. And it might seem like I'm constraining myself, but that is not how I see it. My wife, who is much wiser than me, she keeps telling me that discipline is a freedom. And I tend to agree with her. It's not a no to wonderful people. Whenever you're as rigid as I am, it's really a yes to family, friends and health. And I want to be a good version of myself. And sometimes being a good version of myself is more a question of not being a bad version of me. So I have a bit more to this framework, but I kind of feel like I've been babbling here going into this episode and I just welcomed you and then I stole the mic.
- [06:32]
William Green
I'm happy to delve more into what you do first because it's interesting. And I remember you had said to me that you have this perfect number of weekly calls and a perfect number of what you call family allowed days or something like that, and like a sort of 7, 6, 3 framework, or 736, like, can you explain a little, like, what those things are? Because you've obviously put a lot of intention and thought into this. But also, if you could give a sense of, like, what the origin is of those ideas, like, how did you come up with that sense of a framework that you were going to, that you were going to impose on your life so that you'd have some structure?
- [07:15]
Stig Brodersen
Yeah, good point. Yeah. So I called it the 736 framework. And I've called it for. I called that for a week because it's a week ago since I sent you the outline. I actually didn't know I called it that. But that is the way that my life has worked for quite some time. And so it's this idea that the first seven hours of the day and I can be very granular. What happens within those seven hours, I don't know if that's interesting for everyone. I generally don't speak with anyone that's not my wife through those seven hours. And then the next three hours. That's the three hours I have available for calls. And then I have six hours afterwards with his friends and family time. And then I would also put in a bit of work there. And so they say that strategy is sort of like. Is a way. Because you use the word impose, which I absolutely love. You impose things because otherwise things just sort of takes off on its own. And so I impose different things on my life, and then sometimes my life imposes different things on me. And so if I don't have time to do deep work, I won't be able to run a company, for example. And so a mutual friend of ours once said to me, with absolute love, he said that if I cannot waste hours, I would waste. Yes. And I kind of like. So I waste a lot of hours in those first seven hours, which probably sounds completely ridiculous. One of the things I do is that I would always go for a walk at around 11am and that is usually where I waste the most time, but it's also where I get the best ideas at the same time. So it's sort of like a bipolar time. And I would walk by myself, and I would typically think about a certain problem I want to have solved, or sometimes I would just let my mind wander, and then sometimes something good would come up, and very often nothing. And that's okay, too. That's part of the process.
- [09:04]
William Green
So that's interesting. It sounds pretty structured, but actually there's a fair. There's much more looseness and flow within it and lightness of spirit and empty space within it than actually you make it sound when you first talk about how structured your life is.
- [09:20]
Stig Brodersen
Yeah, it's sort of like a. It's a very structured way of not having things planned, if I can put it like that. Because the other thing is also that I remember reading about Buffett, like so many listening to this podcast, and he talks about having an open calendar. And I thought to myself, wow, let me do what Buffett is doing. That sounds great. And so I tried structuring a day where I, for example, didn't have any meanings at all. If I have more than one of those days, I go absolutely nuts. And I wish I could be like, oh, are we doing the same thing as Buffett? Aren't we cool? I cannot have a day again. He probably speaks with different people. I don't know. I don't know what he's actually doing. But I love meeting with interesting people and having interesting conversations. If I don't speak with anyone from Monday to Friday, I have this golden rule which is I want to have five to eight calls a week. If I had zero calls, this is going to sound terrible, but doing business is just so much fun. And so if I don't have those five to eight calls, I would be frustrated. But then if I have more than eight calls, I would also be too stressed. And so it probably sounds rigid. And then I have now become a bit more grand. I have 26 family approved days annually where I can allocate time to chat after 5pm One of those days are today. And so we try to make our schedules work out and so we typically talk 10 Eastern, which is 4pm here. So that's wonderful. I can do that 26 days a year. And again, disciplines by freedom. It probably sounds extremely constrained, but for me it gives me a lot of freedom. And so I already have different things planned. I already know to a large extent how going to allocate those 26 days for 2026, which probably sounds absolutely ridiculous.
- [11:11]
William Green
And who, who approved those days? Is that you and your wife Sophie? Or, or is it. I don't know, where does the approval come from?
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Stig Brodersen
Yeah, so I call a family approved. I've never spoken to my wife about let's do 26. That's actually my, my sort of like my own rule. And this is something I'm sort of imposing on myself. It's not something that comes from my wife. I feel like I can have one late meeting every other week. That works perfect for me. So that's where the 26 comes from.
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William Green
You'll be glad to know it's a very holy number.
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Stig Brodersen
Oh, okay.
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William Green
It's a sacred number. Yeah. Because in Hebrew different letters have different numerical value. So the most powerful name of God has the numerical value 26. So you see, you claim not to be spiritual. You're quietly channeling all this stuff subconsciously. I think stick, this brings up so many things, what you're saying. I mean, I think when you had described the structure of your design of your ideal life before, it seemed to me it sounded really quite rigid. And actually when you talk about it now, it's interesting because it seems like there's actually a lot of freedom built into it. And so I'm assuming, I mean you talked about inversion before and how you figured out the way to do this by really screwing it up and feeling when you're out of Whack. I assume when you get way out of alignment with this general plan, you start to feel really anxious. You start to feel a little out of control. So in a way, this design, it's not so much designed to maximize productivity, it seems, and to be like, I'm going to become a master of the universe, it seems like in a way, I mean, there's obviously a part of that. Am I right in thinking there's also just an aspect of emotional and mental well being that comes from this design?
- [13:04]
Stig Brodersen
Yeah, I think you're right. And it's about coming into this virtual cycle. Like, if I have too few meetings or too many meetings, I don't feel I'm a good husband. And if I'm not a good husband, I'm also not a good son, I'm not a good brother, I'm not a good CEO of the company, and so on and so forth. So I know there are many other things to my life than just the number of meetings. I chose that as exam because I kind of felt it was somewhat relatable. But I would do the same thing in terms of how many steps I would walk, for example. And so I've calibrated according to when I feel I'm the best version of myself. I know this might sound a bit silly to some. I have this gold number, around 17,000 to 18,000 steps every day, and I can deviate from day to day. But generally if I walk significantly more than that. I was going for a walk and talk here the other day and went for a run and it was way too much and I clocked in more than 30,000 steps and I felt like I was just a bad version of myself. But then I would other days where I would not clog in a lot of steps and I would also be a bad version of myself. So it's about knowing not how to be a good version of myself, but how to avoid being a bad version of myself.
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William Green
So based on your experiment in designing a life that works for you, what advice would you give to me or any of our listeners on how you go through this process and design a framework, a structure that kind of works for who we are? What have you learned from this that's actually cloneable?
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Stig Brodersen
Yeah, I think it's a question of what you want to say yes to. And start with your yeses. And then the nos would be a bit more of a given. And I make that sound easier than what it is. So let me provide a few examples. I tend to think about my life very Much as a stock portfolio. It sounds so absolutely boring and terrible, but I think very much an opportunity cost. And I also have this entrepreneurial mindset where there is a new shiny item and sounds absolutely wonderful. I don't know necessarily if that's very cloneable. But what I want to talk about here is if I say yes to this, what am I then saying no to? And I was going back to this point before where I had 26 family approved days. If I said yes to one, what would I then have to say no to? And so I would then think about what things in my calendar are absolutely yeses. Which one of them are my negotiables or which one are none at all. And so I would have for example, my five to eight calls. That's sort of like that's where I start and how many steps I put in and how many hours I can waste. That's all like. And then I work the rest around that and I don't know, sort of like where that puts people. One thing I used to do 10 years ago, which I for different reasons don't do now, is I started every day by reading an hour and that could be a non negotiable. And a lot of people have done that with success. I think Chatty Munger is one of them. Start one of your days or all your days by giving the most valuable hour to yourself. And so this is not my way of saying five to eight calls should be your golden rule or so. And so many steps and perhaps you don't live a in a place or don't have time or whatever, but what is really important to you and then you work down. I think that's probably where I've come from in terms of being cloneable.
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William Green
Yeah, there's so much there. Thanks for breaking that down. It'll shock you to know that my strategy or my non strategy for designing my life is much more based on feel and improvisation and intuition and kind of openness. And in some ways it may be that this is just an excuse for disorder and chaos and disorganization, a lack of linearity, I don't know. So I'm not in any way saying that my approach is good or better for sure because obviously we come at things very differently always. And I think my approach feels kind of chaotic and disorganized often. And I'm slightly embarrassed and self conscious to talk about it, you know, because I think I feel some sense of shame about it because you know, when you hear people talk about their sort of life Hacking and all of that. There's a sense of like, oh, my God, they're sort of optimized in this amazing way to be incredibly productive. And I feel like my. My approach is much more about being open to letting things unfold. I have a few consistent habits, and I have a few consistent guiding principles, but even those, I kind of forget them pretty often. So, I mean, most days I try to do some sort of what I would call a morning connection, some sort of spiritual connection where I do certain prayers and stuff. And it sounds kind of like. I don't mean to sound sort of holier than that or anything like that, because I'm really not. But it's some attempt to get my head in a particular space where it's like. It reminds me there's something about prayer or affirmations or anything like this. The repetition is very powerful because you keep putting your intention back in a certain direction. And I try also to do some meditation in the morning, and I try to do some reading in the morning, usually of something more spiritual and interesting and philosophical to me than temporary and ephemeral and newsy. And then this morning, all of those things went out of the window, and I was preparing for our conversation and thinking about things that I wanted to talk about. And then at a certain point, it's like, I didn't really have time to meditate, and I didn't really have time to do my morning connection. And then I start thinking, well, if I prepare properly for this conversation, then in a sense, that replaces the morning connection and the reading and the meditation, because the conversation itself, you're trying to share ideas that you're working through and thinking about, and that could hopefully be helpful to other people. So it's like there's a concept in the Zohar that I often talk about with you. The Zohar, not this concept where someone at one point says, well, one precept replaces another precept. So these guys, they miss doing their morning prayer because they were collecting money for, you know, a woman who didn't have a dowry and was getting. Was getting married. And so they said, well, it's okay. You know, this. This boy who's a sort of prodigy smells that they haven't done their morning prayer, and they explain why. And he's like, oh, okay. And so I don't know. So this morning is a pretty good example where I've immediately lost track of my routines that I try to stick to every day. But I think, you know, I. I have to kind of flow with it a bit because every day is a little different and things, things change. Things don't go. I don't know. I'm very unrigid about it. I'm very unstructured. But I do come back to certain things very consistently. So. Most days I'll do meditation. I feel like I'm almost constantly reading all of the time. So there's a sort of constant forward motion of learning and also of drinking coffee. So there are a few consistent things. Otherwise there's not much consistency. There's more a kind of generalized sense of forward pressure, of intensity, of always wanting to do stuff. So I do waste plenty of time. But even when I'm wasting time kind of watching TV with my wife in the evening, it's not really wasting time because it's like we're hanging out. And it's like I've spent the whole day kind of thinking and filling my head with ideas and learning and sort of wrestling with ideas. And it may be actually that I need some kind of rest from thinking and that tuning out by watching something that's kind of good and kind of interesting and by being with my wife is a necessary form of medicine. So I don't know. One of the things that I was thinking about yesterday, I was just thinking about this whole issue of how to design a life and how we approach these things with very different mindsets. Yours very, very intentional, very numbers oriented, and mine much more free flowing, much more intuitive, much more chaotic, much less strictly organized. I went back to this article that I remembered from many, many years ago that I'd read in the New Yorker that I've referred to a lot. I often think about it, but I hadn't reread it for probably a few months. And it's called Twin Peaks, and it's by a very good New Yorker writer called Burkhart Bilger. And it came out in 2004. And it's about these two ski champions, Herman Mayer and Bode Miller. And I don't know much about skiing. I was a modestly awful skier in my youth, and then I kind of stopped because my wife didn't like skiing. So I haven't really been much for a long time. But metaphorically, it's really interesting because this article explains basically how they ended up with the same times, more or less. I mean, like a split second different, if I remember rightly. And they were both champions, but their approaches were totally diametrically opposite. So Mayo was described as this kind of slightly robotic conversationalist and a Guy who had this textbook style of skiing and really regimented workouts and perfect textbook technique. And he used all this amazing technology that now would probably seem ancient, but then in 2004, was unbelievably sophisticated. So he had all of these sort of magnetic pulses going into his body, and he slept in some pod that was apparently made of quartz and I think had been designed for cosmonauts in the Russian space program and was based on Chinese meridians and all of the like. And they would do daily blood tests on him. And so he was known as the Herminator, right, because he was Herman Meyer, but like the Terminator. And he said, at one point, I wanted to be like a machine. So on the one hand, you have this guy who's the perfect embodiment of practicality, technique, 10 hours a day of training and being in whatever hyperbaric chambers or whatever it would be. And then Bode Miller comes at exactly the same times with totally the opposite approach. So he's the son of hippies. He's really kind of gawky. And growing up, he was always sort of impossibly late for races or training. And he would lean back like a water skier, and he'd often forget to plant his pole, and he went too fast, and he's always crashing. But he had this amazing footwork that came partly from the fact that he wasn't just skiing the whole time. He played tennis really well. I think his parents had a tennis camp, and he played soccer really seriously. And literally, he would ride a unicycle and would do tightrope walking and log rolling, standing on logs, and would go fly fishing on the. So he had this incredible balance. So someone said it was literally like throwing a cat onto an icy driveway, because he just would always land on his feet. And so he's kind of this wild man, skiing with total abandon, totally pure and unencumbered. And there's a beautiful description in the article from some former ski racer who became a writer who was talking about what they were like before the race, in the few seconds before the race. And he said, herman is like a bull in the gate at a rodeo. And he said he works himself into this animal state. He's ferocious. He thrashes around until strands of spit are coming out of his mouth. And then he describes Bodie Miller, and he says he just stands there looking out across the valley. He looks stoned. He doesn't even plant his poles on the other side of the line until the last second. And then he just sort of Tips over. And towards the end of the article, Bodie says, you know, I'm just trying to have a happy life. And being happy seems to help me perform at my peak. And so it's a really beautiful reminder to me, in a way, of the thing we've talked about when we talked about Annie Duke, this idea that the opposite of a virtue is also a virtue. And so I think you can build a really successful life with either extreme right, like the sort of Hermeneter kind of discipline, or the Bodie Miller kind of, I'm going to go ride a unicycle now and stand on a log, and maybe they'll end up helping me be more adaptable. And. And then you also have the kind of the Buddhist idea of the golden mean that also comes the middle path that also comes up in all of these other spiritual practices. Aristotle talking about the golden mean, always some balance. So you can either be super extreme on one side, super extreme on the other, or have some kind of golden mean. And they all work. And so I think in some way, really, it's about finding the approach that works for you, but also having the flexibility to know that on different days, it's going to be different. I mean, I've been kind of out of control the last few weeks because I went to London for a work trip and saw family and the like, and then I went to Omaha for the Berkshire meeting. And, you know, it's just been kind of a maelstrom. And so I don't have a lot of peace of mind and structure at the moment. And it's not good. It doesn't feel good. It's like I'm out of whack. I'm misaligned. So I think always it comes down to these questions, like you were asking before, about what matters most to you. What are you really optimizing for? Also, what are you best at? And then being somewhat ruthless in removing the other things. And I was struck, I think, when I was thinking about how the best investors have dealt with this. At least two investors that I know of, this would be Christopher. Christopher Tsai and Chris Begg, who've both been great guests on the podcast, were very much influenced, I think, by Peter Kaufman's idea of the seven. The seven steps of the ladder, where Kaufman, who is a lot of our readers will know, is very, very close to Charlie Munger. And he's a kind of silent sort of intellectual giant within the investing world because he doesn't really talk publicly, but he'll meet people privately. So you know, I interviewed him for Richer, wiser, happier for the book, but I couldn't attribute anything to him by name. And so he's this intellectual giant who's provided a lot of clarity for a lot of investors. And so he talked about this seven step ladder that he described as, I guess, co priorities for a balanced and harmonious life. So it's not like one is the most important. You have to invest in all of them and somehow integrate them all instead of focusing sequentially on one area at a time. And so as I recall, he basically brings it down to health, which Chris Begg kind of in his own way described as total wellness. So there's health, there's family, there's career, your professional life, there's friends, there's spirituality, there's community, and there's hobbits. And Christopher Tsai did the same thing, right? He took these ideas, but then he said to me, look, the seven steps are pretty much in this order with health at the beginning and then family, friends, career, community, spirituality and hobbies. Because he said, well, the most important is health because it's multiplicative. And he said, if you take health and you multiply it by zero, everything else goes to zero, which is not good. So you want to focus on that first and foremost. But he said, I really try to hit these seven pieces of the ladder as best as I can. And so what Christopher Tsai said is I think that only two of the areas are places where I'm lacking. And he said, I'm lacking on the community side and on the spirituality side. And so he said over time, I think these are the two steps of the ladder that I really want to work on. So I think that's really interesting, just the ability to clone people like Peter Kaufman who are very systematically minded and have thought about this, because then you can start to say, okay, so where am I out of whack? So I can do this kind of diagnosis of my own life. And I can say, okay, well, what would be the things that are most important to me? Clearly family, clearly friends, clearly my spiritual life, which in its own right is kind of a little bit messy and mixed because I study a lot of Kabbalah, which is this ancient spiritual wisdom, but I also study a tremendous amount of Tibetan Buddhism. And then I'm always looking at other areas of study. So even within that, it's not that simple. It's kind of complex and always spiraling out of control a bit. But that's a really, really important part of my life. There's some kind of weird yearning to elevate and become a better person. And also a terrible sense most of the time that I'm utterly failing and falling short. But that's a key bucket for me. And then there's the whole thing of physical, mental and emotional well being. So what Chris Begg calls total wellness, which is important. And I'm much better at the mental and emotional well being part than I am at the physical part. So I definitely am feeling bad about neglecting the physical part. And then the other thing, and this is not in any particular order, I think it's become increasingly clear to me that what I want to do in life is basically be learning and sharing ideas. So I do that through writing books or hosting the podcast or hosting the masterclass or doing speeches or being an advisor to an investment firm or a board member of another investment firm. But so basically it's me kind of trying to help other people by sharing ideas and at the same time nurturing my own passion for learning. So I think I have a pretty good sense of what the buckets are, and I think that's key. So I think for our listeners, just to be aware that there are these people who are more systematic than I am who've been like, look, break it into seven and you have these areas and then figure out your priorities and then structure your life around that. And then I think it's very instructive to look at great investors like a Bill Miller or a Buffet say. So Bill Miller basically made it pretty clear to me that he spends an enormous amount of time reading, investing and learning. He's not going to do things like pumping gas or decorating his houses. He's just not. So he had really simplified his life massively around the things that are most important to him. And he has a lovely wife, so a lot of great kids, a lot of time with family, and also a lot of time with things like collecting where he collects amazing books and the like Buffet. I was very struck last year at the AGM in Omaha where he was talking about him and Charlie. And he said we always lived in a way where we were happy with what we were doing every day. He said Charlie liked learning. He was interested in more things than I was. I was narrower. What I like is having more problems to solve. And he said he lived his life the way he wanted to and got to say what he wanted to say. So they were very clear about how they wanted to live. And you would see it with Charlie, right? Charlie saying that the reason we made the money was basically so we wouldn't be subordinate to anyone, so we could live the way we liked. And so think of the amount of time he spent fishing, playing bridge, reading voraciously. And then I loved the fact that Christopher Sai said to me at one point that Charlie actually really liked watching Law and Order reruns. And that kind of made me happy to realize, oh, I don't need to feel guilty about watching some tv. Even the great Charlie Munger watched Law and Order reruns. Kind of binge watching. And my brother, who's a very successful barrister, litigator, King's Council in England, was talking to me about a friend of his who's this absolutely legendary law lord, a very brilliant guy. And I think he would watch is it Boston Legal? So here's this guy who's one of the most famous judges and human rights lawyers in the world, and he's watching Boston Legal on TV in his downtime. So I find that kind of comforting. Everyone's wasting a little bit of time, I think, or we're inhuman. And then I think it was Dirty, who had been Charlie's assistant for decades, 30 something years if I remember rightly. She talked about how basically, I think it was her who said this, that basically Charlie would just eat chicken salad every day from California Pizza Kitchen. And in the past he'd eaten McDonald's. Then at a certain point he discovered that California Pizza Kitchen was better. And so we just get the same chicken salad from there every day. And then Mohnish said to me that he was basically allowed peanut brittle twice a month. So there was a sort of order and calm to it. So I don't know, I think within what we've discussed, you get a sense of what's worked for people, right? Like the range of things where you need to be investing time and energy and how to be aware of when it's getting out of whack, right? So think of, think of Chris Davis when he came on the podcast and was talking about looking at his next 10,000 days and inverting and saying what would stand in the way of these being a really enriching time of life. And he said, look, health is clearly really important. If I don't take care of myself, I'm going to be. That's a really good way of wrecking the next 10,000 days. And similarly, I got to invest in relationships because if I don't maintain and invigorate my relationships and get to know my kids, partners and stuff like that, my life's not going to be great either. So I hope that gives people a few ideas for how to go about this that go well beyond me saying how to go about it, because I think it's pretty clear my approach is not optimal.
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Stig Brodersen
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [35:12]
C
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- [39:13]
Stig Brodersen
I don't know if that's true though, William. I think going back to what you said, we all have different the most important thing is that we align with our own values and how we want to do things. And I've heard a lot of people talk about how Buffett lived a terrible life. And going to your point before and again, Buffett has his own ups and downs and no one is home free. Right? We all have that. It's just called life. I think by and large Buffett has very much lived according to his values and so it's probably easy to us to say, oh, he worked really, really hard and he didn't spend as much time with his kids and that's a failed life. Or I've heard many different versions of that story. And this is not my way of saying you shouldn't spend time with your kids. I guess this is my way of saying in many ways I think that we put our own values on what is right for other people. Someone who is born in 1930 and absolutely love his job. It doesn't sound nice, but perhaps Buffett comes out with it and he's like, he kind of Lived by his inner scorecard. Now, you might not agree with those, but I don't know. Perhaps Buffett beats himself up every day about not being more present with his kids growing up. I don't think he does. I think he would say today that he lived a good life, made mistakes like the rest of us. And so you prioritize things, and then the rest sort of have to work out. And so I know that, for example, you, William, you talked about that you have a certain group of friends that you say yes to every Friday at a certain time. And so whenever you do that, you also say no to other things.
- [40:57]
William Green
Yeah, and actually, Stig, that's a really good. That's a really good example. Right. So I have these three friends that I meet on Zoom every Friday, and even on the morning before the Berkshire Hathaway agm, I had breakfast really early, went into the lobby, and I was interviewing Chris Begg at ValuexPRK, the event that Guy Spier hosts at 10:30. And I still got on to my call with my friends. And then we have this extraordinary teacher in Nepal who calls in sometimes on a Friday. And so she called. And so I'm sitting there with my friends, and also Dan Goleman, who's part of the group when our teacher calls, and his lovely wife as well, Tara, who's also a psychologist and author. And so I'm sitting there in the lobby with my friends, sort of walking through the lobby, having to stand up and kind of say hi to people as they come in. But I'm basically live streaming a conversation from Kathmandu with this amazing teacher right before I go do my interview with Chris Begg on stage. And so that's really important. I try to stick with it and make it a consistent thing. But then last Friday, my wife suddenly said to me, I forgot to tell you, I'm going to the doctor, and you need to wait for me and drive me home. And then she gets the address wrong because she's sort of. She's dealing with too many things. And so we go to the wrong place and we try, you know, so I miss my meeting. And then I discovered that our teacher has called in and given this amazing teaching. And I felt kind of crestfallen and, you know, like this sadness that I missed this conversation with my friends, and also this sadness I missed this unbelievable teaching from our teacher. And then at the same time, I'm sort of aware that I have to be there for my wife. And, you know, she wouldn't hesitate to be there for me always I mean, she's incredibly kind and. And sharing. And so I'm having to be flexible enough to say, okay, things aren't going the way that I want them to go. Here I am driving through rush hour traffic to the wrong place because we have the wrong city that the doctor's office is in, and it's really frustrating and nothing's going to plan. But I'm like, maybe that is what I need right now. Maybe actually this is an opportunity for me to work on my patience, my kindness, and my generosity, because I'm feeling kind of irritated and I'm feeling kind of crestfallen that I'm not having this conversation with the teacher and what am I missing? And so I think I have a sense increasingly that's totally. It's not empirically based, but it feels real to me and increasingly real, which is that life is just unfolding in this somewhat dreamlike way. And it's much more like freestyle skiing, what I'm doing. I'm just trying to adapt in every moment to what that situation requires. And so there's some sense of surrender to the unfolding of what's happening. So there was the structure of wanting to do a particular thing on the Friday morning, and there was the recognition that I had to let go of it and trying to be deeply present in that moment so that I could sense what was called for in that moment. So there is something kind of mystical here, right? This sense that you're being guided rather than being in control, and you're having to adapt rather than impose your own will on everything. And there's a sense, Tony Robbins would always say how life happens for you, not to you. And whether that's true or not, adapting in that moment where I'm sitting in rush hour traffic, going to the wrong place and being like, it's okay, it's okay, and this is fine, this is where I'm supposed to be. That's good. And there was a. You know, it's very helpful to me. And there's a really beautiful teaching that I heard recently that's had a very profound effect on me that I'll share with you. I have this really wonderful teacher, Michael Berg, who I've had on the podcast before, who's a great kabbalist. And for me, he's a really wonderful role model in the same way that these great Tibetan Buddhist teachers like Sakhni Rinpoche, who I had on the podcast was. And also Khandrela, this other teacher that I have, who just is unbelievable, who I missed On Friday, and someone was telling me a story about Michael Berg. And I said to this guy, do you think Michael's always happy? And he said, yeah, yeah, basically all the time. You never really see his consciousness lapse, just happy the whole time. And he said, yeah, I saw this really interesting thing where someone dropped something and it smashed. And everyone was looking over at this thing as it dropped because it was like this really loud noise, and it was kind of shocking. And he said, and I happened to look at Michael at that moment, and I realized Michael was just whispering very quietly to himself. It's perfect. And that's had a big impact on me in the last few weeks because I think what he's basically doing is saying, as he would put it, everything that happens is for my benefit. There's nothing that happens that isn't for my benefit. And so a lot of my anger and irritation in life is when things don't go the way I expect them to. It's like, but wait, I wanted to do my morning connection. But wait, I wanted to meditate. But wait, I want to. And it's like, then life doesn't go that way. And often there are things that I really feel are good for me and good for other people, and I did them with the best intentions, and then it still didn't work out or it went horribly wrong. And I think part of what I'm trying to work towards is a sense of fluidity where anything that happens is good. And there is. There is a spiritual component to this. Michael Berg would say, everything is just the light of the Creator. There's nothing that's happening to you. There was a really interesting moment on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, where, in some ridiculous, conflicted English way, I stayed at the Yale Club the night before. It's the most WASPy thing to do on the night before Rosh Hashanah. So I could be in New York City. And so I go there, and in the morning, I'm vegetarian, and I don't eat. I doubly don't eat pork as a Jew. And it's Rosh Hashanah, it's this really holy day. And so I order a vegetable omelet and they bring me an omelette, and I dig into it and I realize it's got ham in it. And so I'm really upset, right? And I'm like, what the hell? And I said to Michael Berg later, so was the ham that I had to eat on Rosh Hashanah while I'm trying to purify it and stuff. Was that from the Creator too? And he's like, yep, that too. Ham as well. All from the. From the light. And so whatever one makes of that as a sort of spiritual claim. And some people will roll their eyes, and I would have rolled my eyes at this for a lot of my life. I think it's a very powerful way to live your life where you're like, everything is kind of divine, everything is kind of transcendent if you regard it that way, and it's all there for your benefit. We're learning from the bad experiences, the difficult ones, the challenges, when it doesn't go our way, when your schedule goes out of whack, when you miss your flight, whatever. And so I feel like we're groping our way through the fog and we're trying to live in a way that works for us. And so we create these structures and design these lives in the hope that it won't spin out of control and that we won't fall off the axis in some way. But I think there has to also be this kind of lightness of spirit. It's a bit like, you know, that whole idea of, you know, strong beliefs loosely held, or if I'm quoting it vaguely correctly, you know, it's like you want the structure, you want the organization, and you want the design. And yet in a moment, you want to be able to let go of it because otherwise you're going to be fighting this sense of anger and frustration because the world and life are just constantly defying our expectations. And for me, that's. That's. That's actually one of the biggest things that I have to work on in life is my frustration at things not working out the way I want them to. Even though I. I come in with the best intentions and then I screw up and it doesn't work out and I fail and I do the wrong thing and I upset someone and I. My, you know, and I want to be super productive, and then I fail to be. And, you know, so maybe that the thing I'm getting the opportunity to work on is that. Is that sense of patience or the sense of self flagellation or whatever that comes up when I fail and fall short. So I don't really know that being as productive as possible or as famous as possible or building my brand as much possible. I just don't think those are the things that I'm really focused on ultimately. So I also have to adapt my sense of what I'm optimizing for what I'm designing my life for so that I can be aware that maybe that moment where I don't have my Friday meeting with my friends, even though I know that it's really nourishing and helpful in so many ways, that maybe not having it is precisely the most helpful thing for me at that moment, because I'm with my wife instead, dealing with my own frustration and impatience and irritability. Does any of that make sense? Stick?
- [50:24]
Stig Brodersen
Yeah. I think this might come across the wrong way, because I wonder if you actually think the same way, because I was about to say, I think it makes sense for you, but whenever I say that, it sounds so terrible in my own head that I was like, no, no, no, no, that's not what I should. Because I think that there is an irony, and it sounds like. And please correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like I'm coming from a place where I am extremely intentional about everything. But I do think everything is random. Whereas you come from this. Everything is chaos, but it's almost design chaos. So perhaps we actually mean the same thing. We just come at it from two different angles.
- [51:02]
William Green
Yeah. And I think, anyway, our consciousness creates our reality. So if you just think it's all random and it's chaotic and it's hellish and it's all falling apart, then you find evidence for that. And if you go through it thinking it's all unfolding in this strange and beautiful way full of synchronicities and coincidences and learning opportunities, even from the things that aren't going my way, you find a lot of evidence for that as well. And I find that I find my life much happier when I live it that way. And in the old days, I would have thought, well, that's kind of pure out. Just because you want to believe that it's a certain way doesn't mean it's a certain way. But actually, I believe pretty strongly, as strongly as I can believe anything, because I tend always to see the opposite side as well. I believe pretty strongly that our consciousness is creating our reality. And so there's a treme. I mean, I remember once having this conversation with Ed Thorpe, and I asked him, do you believe in God? And he said, no, Data. And I remember thinking, that's a really smart answer, but actually from a different perspective, it's an incredibly stupid answer. Not to be critical of Ed, because everything is data. For Michael Berg or for Candla, who are kind of these very enlightened, very elevated people. Everything they look at, every single thing, is the Light of the creator. Well, I mean, Kandla wouldn't put it in those terms, the Tibetan Buddhists, because they don't really talk about the source of these things. But there's a sense that all of these appearances, everything that's just arising, all of these phenomena are divine. They're all just. There's something kind of, I think when you're so awake as a great Buddhist practitioner, the world just is very vibrant. It's all lucid awareness, it's an awareness of light. And so they wouldn't say, oh, this is God, because they don't like concepts which knock us out of the experience and of limited usefulness. But I think the actual experience is the same experience that Michael Berg has where it feels like you're just watching this sort of dazzling display of light. So from a certain perspective, Ed is totally wrong and it's all data. So I don't know. I think to some extent that the pragmatic philosophers that Bill Miller loves had it right where they would say, ideas are like forks and knives. You pick them because they're useful to you. And for me, the idea that everything is a learning experience, that even these difficult moments that make me impatient or upset or irritable or angry or whatever, are opportunities to work on those characteristics that I have. And so maybe actually it turns out to be a much more important and valuable moment or experience than having things go my way and feeling like, oh, I've got this beautiful schedule and everything works out and I've planned it all so well and I'm so peaceful and look at me, I've got so much peace of mind. It's like I can't delude myself into thinking I have peace of mind. My mind's, you know, a hostile environment a lot of the time, and I have to live with that reality. And I think it's probably helpful for us to be honest about that because I think there was a period in the last decade where people kind of fell, including myself, people fell into this trap of becoming obsessed with the sort of the life hacking kind of views of the Tim Ferrisses and the humans and the Josh Waitskins and the like. And these are all amazing people and amazing practitioners of things that make you better in life and more productive and the like. But I think it's very easy to start turning on yourself and then being like, but these guys are so in control and they're so good and I'm terrible. And I feel that a little bit when I interview Chris Begg on the podcast and I can see, wow, he's got so much more balance than I have. But it's like, you know, here I am after 35 years with the same lovely wife who still puts up with me, and, you know, and somehow I've muddled my way through and written a bunch of books and, you know, hosted a podcast and edited a couple of magazines and stuff. So in my sort of, you know, I have two lovely kids who are only annoyed at me, like, about a third of the time. And so in some way, it's kind of worked out while being completely imperfect and failing and messing up and stumbling a lot of the time. And so I think it's helpful for us to have this understanding that people like Warren Buffett, much as he's this extraordinary figure, has screwed up certain things, Charlie screwed up certain things, and they got better. And I think that's what we're trying to do. I felt this when I went to Omaha for this last agm, and I've just recorded a podcast celebrating Warren. I haven't heard the results yet. We'll see how it turns out. But my. My sense towards the end of it, towards the end of the AGM, the Q& A session was, oh, Warren has really become, like, this remarkably elevated figure for all of his flaws. Like, he finally actually did become the sage of Omaha, and he wasn't before. And it reminded me of this thing that this great Western mindfulness teacher, Joseph Goldstein had said about Ram Dass, who was a famous spiritual figure who wrote those books like Be Here Now. And when Ram Dass was dying, Joseph Goldstein said to him, I've never met either of them. But Joseph Goldstein said that he told Ram Dass, you finally became what we always thought you were. And I feel like that's what. What's happened with Warren. It's like he finally became what we always thought he was. He was actually a deeply flawed character who I think has kind of become the sage of Omaha. So that gives me hope as well. It's like, we're not designing the optimal life so we can be perfectly productive and have the perfect six pack and the perfect peaceful mind and the perfect family. It's like, no, we're a hot mess and we're confused and we screw up and things don't go to plan, and. And yet we persevere.
- [57:26]
Stig Brodersen
Wonderful. William. I don't think I could say it any better myself. And I feel tempted to say, seek and you shall find. I know we're going to talk more about the book Letting Go in our third segment where we talk about books that we read. But it's sort of like I think a lot about confirmation bias and I think I think more about it more than I do it well and avoid confirmation bias because I find it remarkable, especially in the first part of the book, how I thought that I might be reading a spiritual book, but I actually felt it was incredibly non spiritual and it confirmed the lack of spirituality in the universe, which I count to be incredible ironic coming in from David Hawkins. But then I could also see that if you came into the book with a different mindset, you would come up with a completely different conclusion. So I wanted to round this thing out. Well, actually I actually had a two part about life design. We've gone through the first sub point and then we went in all kinds of directions. And thank you for that, William. You know, one thing I just want to mention, and I don't want to know what to call this, but it's something that's been helpful to me and I wonder if that's something I'll learn from you. William, I've learned a lot of smart things from you. And you previously talked about how you. Whenever you find a deep truth, it's sort of like. It's almost like a feeling in your body. That's the way I've heard you describe it. So I was on a call the other day and it was very, very unusual. It was a Saturday night at 7pm and I never have called Saturday night at 7pm it's probably the first Saturday night call ahead in 10 years or something like that. But there are very specific reasons.
- [59:15]
William Green
That's when you schedule Disco Danc.
- [59:18]
Stig Brodersen
Exactly. That's where whenever I go discus do. And it was sort of like it was a myriad of different things. It was something a good friend has set up and it might be about acquiring a company. And on the west coast it was 10 in the morning. And so there are different reasons for that. And I felt three to four days before I felt bad. I felt bad about having that. And I should say there's nothing wrong with the call, but I felt I was so misaligned with my values it was almost like there was a shiver going through my body. And I was like, this is wrong, it feels wrong. And I don't know what I can assign that to other than having a call at 7pm on a Saturday is just not the right thing for me. And so why am I telling that random story? I'm telling it for two different reasons. I'm talking about it from a Life design perspective where I told about this very, very rigid 7, 3, 6 framework before and whenever you decide to say yes to certain things in life, whether it's this special call on Friday, thank you for sharing those stories. Williams. I've realized that whenever something is very much tied to identity, I am William, I have this call on Fridays or I am Stick. I never have calls after and certainly never like there was something very powerful there. And very often no one's perfect, no one can do it all the time, but you find a way where you can tie a beautiful bow around what you say yes to. And so after I realized that I want to live my life a certain way way, for example, whenever I have calls, which is kind of tricky because it's mainly a US based company, even though I'm based in Denmark and so on, so there are different things with the time zones. But then you realized, okay, I need to create a culture in, in this case tip that's so powerful and so full of trust that I don't speak to, I don't need get to speak to people on the team because there are only so many calls. You want to have a certain period of time. And I realized that the other day I was speaking with someone on the team and I realized, and I'm going to come off as the worst company leader that you ever heard of. I realized because we're in a small company with like 20 people in the company or full time, right? So they're in their freelancers and so on and so forth. But like it's a very small company and we got to chat And I realized it was two and a half years ago since I last chatted with her and she's been doing a great job, like a wonderful job. But there was this bond of trust where she would just like, apparently I need to check in every two and a half years. But even when I do that, she's still even better than last time I chatted with her. So my point is that I don't know where that's coming from, but it's almost like. And perhaps that is what you're talking about, William, but it's almost like I can best describe it as an emotion you have in your body. Sometimes it's a negative emotion and it gives you certain directions. It could also be a positive emotion and it also gives you certain directions whenever you have that.
- [62:35]
William Green
Yeah, I talked about this with Chris Beg on the podcast where I interviewed him. This he has a sense that I'll misquote him, but in A sense that truth is embodied, that it's an embodied experience, that we feel it. I often feel it in my. In my legs. Weirdly, Arnold Vandenberg often feels it in his right arm, where his right arm will start to tingle. And it sounds kind of silly, but I think the brain and the body presumably evolved in ways that give us signals very quickly about things that we don't necessarily have a chance to think about in depth and analyze. So I think part of it is tuning into that stuff and just being sensitive to it. And so, I mean, to go back to our analogy of freestyle skiing before, a lot of what I'm trying to cultivate in life, partly through meditation, partly through other stuff, is actually to be deeply present in the moment, so that if a different type of mogul comes up or my ski gets caught on the mogul or whatever, I can change direction in some way. And I think this is the case with interviewing as well. Right. Like, I am extremely prepared, obsessively prepared, when I go in for an interview on the podcast. But with something like my interview with Chris Begg, I started, and I really. I really intended to ask him about this whole idea of what he calls the Piper mindset, which is perpetual, incremental, or maybe it's persistent incremental progress, eternally repeated. And he had just had a new child on January 1st, Charlie Munger's birthday, who he had named Piper. And so I was going to start the interview there, and then liberation day comes and the market is tumbling, and I'm here on a podcast with my friend who's in Central America and looking incredibly calm as the market has been plunging. So I had to change direction. I didn't have to, but I was present enough and he was present enough that I just totally changed direction. And the whole of the first part of the podcast became about what it's like for him in a market meltdown like that, and how he manages to be so calm and so open and so free. And so I think if you can cultivate a kind of deep presence and a calm and an openness, then as circumstances unfold, whether it's in the markets or in life, like the traffic jam, heading to the wrong place to take my wife to the doctor, you're just much more able to adjust. And so even though there's a kind of chaos and a lack of order to my approach to life and to my design of my life, I feel like I'm constantly investing in things like building that capacity for deep presence. And so even though I Screwed it up this morning and didn't do my meditation, didn't do my morning connection. I know that I'm coming back to that. There's a sort of relentless forward motion to the way that I do this. So it's disorderly, but there are these persistent themes that I keep coming back to or persistent skills that I keep trying to develop. So I do think it's kind of key to have some sort of guiding principle, some sort of overwhelming sense of what matters to you.
- [66:15]
Stig Brodersen
They say that the grass is always greener. It's incredible how present you are and how you can go in different directions. I love the episode you did with Chris Beck. And I think what stood out to me, other than I'm not sure I mentioned again how wonderful you managed that into, was how aligned he seemed to be with his choice of lifestyle. And I would be the first to say, not that it matters at all, but I would first say I could not live the life he wants to live. And I would be surprised if you could do the same. But that's not the point. The point is that he's living a very aligned life. And perhaps, again, I don't know him too well, perhaps it has come through some ups and downs, and then he realized what he wanted to do. And it makes me think of Bill Miller. And we've talked about him and his life a few times, and certainly, again, it comes for all of us. But there's certainly been some very, very challenging times. And I think if more than anyone, and perhaps together with Chris and others, he figured out very much in recent years, like, oh, this is how to be aligned with the way I want to live my life now, whether that's not putting gas in your own car or not decorating your own house or whatever it might be, it's like, I don't know what is right for other people. But whenever you speak about Chris or with Chris and Bill, they seem incredibly aligned.
- [67:40]
William Green
Yeah. And Pico Iyer as well, who maybe we'll talk about a little later. And so I think, was it who said this to me? I think actually it was Pico, who's an amazing author, said this to me recently when we were talking that my approach to interviewing the great investors he had just reread Richer, Wiser, Happier, was deeply idiosyncratic because I was focusing on things that were really deeply personal to me, and other people wouldn't be focusing on the same things. And so I think if you look at the book, the book is really about how to live it's. Concealed within all this discussion of how to invest. But really it's about there's a deeper yearning there of how do you crack the code financially so that you can have total independence, so that nobody can tell you what to do, so that you can live in a way that's true and aligned to who you are. Which I think is what I was wrestling with at the time, that that was. And I think that's probably to some extent why it resonates deeply for a lot of people. I think the podcast in some way is a continuation of that. And it's like, now I have much more independence and can live in a way that's more true and aligned in a way. You know, I'm less subordinate, less dependent on other people to some degree. But I'm really trying to figure out how do you, how do you build happiness and peace of mind and joy and equanimity into your life while still being really productive? You know, like, how do you, you know, Tony Robbins had said to me at one point that it's not about work life balance, it's about work play integration. So I'm like, how do I have a really. Or maybe he had said it to Peter Diamandis and Peter Diamandis said it to me and I attribute. But the source was Tony. So really, the fact that these discussions about building an aligned life and designing your life come up so much in so many of these podcast episodes is because that's what I'm doing, exploring. It's like there's a tension here that we're discussing today about how free flowing should it be, how flexible should you be, how adaptable should you be, how structured should you be? A few years ago, I think we fell into the illusion or the delusion that if you just were structured enough and drove yourself hard enough and did enough life hacking, then you'll make it. And if you don't make it, it's because you are failing to apply these rules that these people have figured out. And it' no, no, that didn't work. And so then it requires a higher level of playing the game. And the higher level becomes. You sense that it comes from people like Daniel Goldman, Soknur Rinpoche, Pico Ayer, Michael Burke. They're just more elevated, they figured out more stuff. And so the game continues. This exploration that we're going through is really an exploration of, you know, at an earlier stage of development. It's like, how do we get independent so that we're not having to kowtow tie to anyone and how to have more time, more freedom and the like. And then it becomes how do I become more joyful? And then it's like, how do I serve other people better? How do I lift up other people? So the game just keeps getting more nuanced, I think. And maybe like it sounds like more of a value judgment, but in some sense it is more elevated and you see these people who are really joyful and it's not because of money. And you start to be like, God, how do I get more of that? I think we've kind of been playing the money game a lot, thinking that the money or the self control or the self discipline would do it. And there's an increasing sense, I think when you listen to people like Pico or Chris Begg or Michael Berg or Soknu that it's like, no, no, that's not going to do it. So things like serving others, helping other people, being more true to yourself, being kinder, being more loving, having more open space in your life, more time, more free, not just time, but actually being more awake so that you can notice what you're doing rather than just be sort of blindly sprinting. I think that's a little bit what's going on at the moment in. In our explorations.
- [72:11]
Stig Brodersen
That's wonderful put. And I was just about to say how to sleep more so you can be more awake. But I more or less mean that literally in the sense of I know I'm in a good space if I sleep a lot anyways. It's sort of like a topic in itself. You can certainly overdo it. But I think where it came from, I have an executive coach I speak to once in a while and she asked me how I know I'm in a good state. And I said it's whenever I sleep well. And I'm not talking necessarily about sleeping 12 hours or anything like that. That's probably not. But if I consistently sleep eight hours, sometimes I can even do eight and a half and I do that consistently. That's whenever I know I'm in a good state. If I have. And it's usually always something to do with a relationship. If there is a relationship that's not good, I can feel it immediately in terms of how I sleep.
- [73:07]
William Green
Yeah, there's a lot there. I mean, I've studied sleep a bit because I worked on a book as a ghostwriter that was a number one bestseller where I had to interview famous people about sleep and nutrition and all of these things that I failed to apply in my own life. I think this stuff is true and right and you want to master these principles, and at the same time, I think you can start to worship them and you sort of lose the spirit of them. And I'm somewhat skeptical about some of the sleep stuff. It's like, you know, it's clear that we need different amounts. I don't set my alarm or anything. And I pretty much wake up at the same time. And partly this is. What was the guy who wrote why We Sleep? Matthew.
- [73:55]
Stig Brodersen
Matthew Walker. Yeah.
- [73:56]
William Green
So I had interviewed him and I asked him about my weird sleep habits and he was like, no. Sounds sort of okay. It's like I take a nap sometimes in the afternoon, but it's never more than like, seven minutes. I don't set the alarm. And I don't know, I think it's really easy to fall into this delusion that if I just get my eight hours and if I just invest this amount and if I just turn over this many rocks in picking stocks, it's all going to be good. And then you chase and you chase and you chase. And then when happiness and peace of mind still eludes you, it's really depressing. And then you're like, if I had only run a bit faster and slept a bit more and had the ideal temperature in my room, it would have been that much better. And it's like, yeah, yeah, it's probably better to have it 67 degrees or whatever than 71. Like, yes. But look at Warren, who said at the annual meeting, Charlie and I never really exercised much. We were carefully preserving ourselves. And it's like they've made it to 99 and 94. And being happy and loving their work, I think probably has contributed a great deal to longevity. So I think given that I'm anything but a health guru, you can discount 60% or 90% or whatever of what I say. But I think there's something kind of important here about don't fall into the delusion of thinking that if we just nail all of this sort of life hacking optimization stuff, then happiness will come. It's like, no. When I look at the people who are happiest and have most peace of mind, they tend to be people who are very sharing, very kind, very appreciative doing work that they really love and that serves other people. I think it's too easy to fall in love with these tools and techniques and assume that they're gonna rescue and save us and redeem us. And it's like, they don't do It.
- [75:57]
Stig Brodersen
No, if I can sort of like take it down to one line, if that's even possible, I would say it's about being aligned. It all comes back to being aligned. So whenever we look at very people like Buffett, people like Munger, they're just very aligned. And to your point, I don't think that there is a recipe of this is like, as long as you check these boxes, that's the path to nirvana. And then another thing sort of like takes me to the next point here about life design, which I kind of feel is completely useless because now we're checking off different boxes. Anyways, that's the irony of this conversation. But I wanted to shift gears here a bit. And I almost feel bad about it now that William, that we talked about being aligned, checking off boxes. I've tried something new this year, and I've typed up here my notes that I try to be intentional about being less intentional, which sounds completely ridiculous in this context here. So I think that there is also something to be said about you want to optimize for different things depending on where you are in life. And whenever we hear about a certain way of living your life, not only might it not be right for you because you just wired differently, it might also be that that person is just in a different state of their life. And so I thought about that recently. I was trying something new this year, and I typed up here that my wife is very intentional about doing certain things in certain years, whereas I kind of feel like time flows more for me from one year to the next. And then I'm like, that's such a ridiculous example because we just illustrated here, speaking with William, I'm super, super structured. And here I am saying I'm actually not that structured. And so the metaphor I probably want to use here as I go on to the next point is if you are. Perhaps it's one of those things. If you are on the 80th floor of a building and you look down at a different building, one is at the seventh floor and the other one is the 11th, that looks like they were very much leveled. Whereas if you're on the ninth floor, you can certainly tell the difference between the seventh floor and the 11th floor. So I don't know, it might be both that my wife and I are very intentional. I don't know. But I'm trying something new this year, and it's a framework I wanted to share with the audience. And then perhaps there is something to be cloned, and perhaps it's just completely ridiculous. Let's see. So I used to travel quite a bit, but here in 2025, for different reasons, I want to travel less. I would probably do four days here in London, September, to hang out with you, William, and some of your friends with the Masterclass. But other than that, I plan to stay here in Aarhus, Denmark. And in my 20s, I wanted to travel. I always wanted to travel, but in my 20s, I very much did it to check out different sites. So I would go to Paris and then, you know, get my photo of the Eiffel Tower. Then I was like, oh, you know, check mark. Now I have a photo of the Eiffel Tower. So that was very much how I traveled whenever in my 20s, and I don't regret that period at all. It was a lot of fun, very different way. It was bunk beds and hostels and pasta and ketchup and all that good stuff. In my 30s, I traveled to spend time with interesting people. And there's something beautiful happening whenever you can really speak for a long time with the same person and do that for consecutive days. And it's something even with all this digital technology and zoom calls and all that stuff, which it's absolutely used and it's wonderful. There's something about continuing a very long conversation for multiple days that just can't be replaced with modern technology. And so I wanted to do something different this year. I think part of it also has to do with probably become a bit more comfortable. It's the same airports, it's not necessarily the same hotels. But as much as I love interesting conversations with wonderful people, sometimes it's just too much stress with all the traveling and so on. So I tried something new this year, and I wanted to see if I can bring the world here to my doorstep. And so I tried something new. I've said to the Mastermind community, also to your masterclass, William, that if anyone wants to visit me, just send me a text and let's hang out. And I really got inspired. And this is actually something I practiced for a few years and now sort of like trying to do it in a different way. But it was from this book Factfulness by Hans Rustling, which is a wonderful book in his own right. And he got invited different places with Bill Melinda Gates, and then he would just have those interesting conversations with them. And to me, it was just a very interesting framework. I know Bill Melinda Gates have a lot of means and can do other things than the rest of us, but this idea of, oh, this is an interesting person, now I'm going to Invite this person and then continue that in person, really. And so this was something that I've tried doing, inviting different people here. And sometimes they say yes. All the time, they say no. And that's completely fine. Sometimes calendar just don't align and sort of like it is what it is. And so to me, being as intentional as I am, I actually feel this is quite unintentional. At least it is for me, where I feel like I'm opening up my calendar for a lot of people and sort of like for the Mastermind community and for the masterclass, you vetted those people, Kyle and Clay. And so I know that they're high quality people, otherwise you wouldn't be hanging out with them. But it's also people that I don't know. And I'm sort of also putting an extra layer of complexity. So it's not like New York or London where you sometimes happen to be because you're visiting friends or conducting business. Like, if you want to visit me in Aarhus, Denmark, you really have to mean it. The connections are terrible. The weather sucks. It's like, if you want to visit, you want to visit, which is kind of wonderful. So there is a level of friction there that makes some of those conversations just frankly more interesting. And so I don't know if this is necessarily something people can. Can clone. You might use a different selection process, but it's something that I've tried here this year and it's been an absolutely wonderful experience and sort of like, try to let serendipity take place. And sometimes, you know, you connect really, really well with a person and sometimes less so. But you get the chance in a different way than a zoom call that's scheduled for an hour. And I don't know, it might be just the way that I'm wired, but sometimes it's like for an hour you have an agenda. It doesn't flow the same way. You don't necessarily connect the same way. And there's just something about meeting up in person that's very, very difficult to replicate on a zoom call. So let me throw it over to you here, William.
- [83:19]
William Green
Yeah, there's so much there. And it reminds me a bit of Guy Spier saying to me many years ago, I think when I was helping him with the educational value investor, he said to me, there are certain people you should be willing to cross the ocean to see. And he would really make an effort to go see Mohnish Pabrai. Right? They would go across the ocean to see each other and to hang out and that had a big impact on me because I remember sort of thinking, I'm always in such triage mode and here I am in this industry as a writer, that the magazine business had just collapsed and fallen apart and I was starting to ghostwrite books and it was like I didn't really know if that would work out or not. And I was like, well, it's all very well for you to structure your life where you got fees pouring in and you're already rich and you got family money and you can afford to travel and do this. And I'm always having to hustle. And so I remember sort of both, I think, admiring and probably envying and resenting the fact that a lot of these great investors had the freedom and flexibility to travel. And a guy one year couldn't go to TED in Vancouver, so he gave me his ticket and I went and hung out with Mohnish there and with Picoire. And I said to Mohnish, why do you come to TED every year? And he said two words, Guy Speer. And the reason he went was so he could be with Guy. And the talks and everything were interesting, but really he got to be with Guy. So I think there's deep wisdom there in this sense that the thing that's going to bring richness to your life is relationships where you're getting to hang out with people you love and admire and who are aligned with your values and the like and who you learn from. And if you can do it in great places, whether it's in Aarhus or in Omaha or in New York or London or whatever, that's great. So I think just knowing that it's about the relationships that that's really key. Right. And so this is a pretty good example of the upside of my free flowing approach. And there, there are plenty of downsides because I often feel overwhelmed and, and like I'm doing too many things. But you know Josh Tarasoff, a friend of mine who was introduced to me by Guy Spier. Josh is a very good hedge fund manager, has become a good friend, lovely person. Josh said to me at one point a couple of years ago, I think you'd really like to, you'd really like Chris Baggage. And so I traveled into New York from Westchester. It was a pain getting there and it was a thunderstorm and it was pouring. And he was staying at the Essex House Hotel because he was teaching his class at Columbia that week. And so he'd flown in from the jungles of Central America to teach. But it took me ages to get there and I had a three hour breakfast with him. And later that day he was interviewing someone like Seth Klarman or something in his class, some great investor. And we just really liked each other. We had a lot in common. And I think pretty soon after that, I decided that I was going to go visit him at the hotel that his wife runs in Central America. And I don't usually take vacations, let alone, you know, travel across the world to hang out a bit with someone I don't know that well. And I went with Laura and my wife and we spent like nine days there. And I had so many creative ideas and we saw a fair amount of Chris and his wife and the like and met some other great people. But I also just walked a lot on the beach and I wrote a lot of stuff, wrote a lot of notes and really thought it was really. I was really putting into operation what I'd learned from Guy in many ways. And then that leads me to become friends with Chris. I end up investing with Chris. I end up interviewing him on the podcast twice. And he'd always been kind of under the radar. Nobody really knew he existed that much. I mean, he's like. He's like a sort of cult figure under the radar because he teaches the class that Ben Graham taught and because he's a lovely guy. But so then I went and sat in on his class when he had Nick sleep and Todd Combs come. And then I interviewed him in Valuex a couple of weeks ago in Omaha. And so it's all really about building these relationships however you do it. And sometimes the fact that it's difficult and that you have to go out of your way to do it is a really important thing in its own right, because I think it's showing to that person that it matters. I struggled massively to get to my brother's 30th wedding anniversary. A few months ago. I flew from Vail, where I was giving a speech, to London. I think I had three defective planes, one plane that had to turn around while it was halfway over the Atlantic. It took me 36 hours to get to London. But I think it was really important because it was a declaration of love. In a way. It's like, I care so much that I'm not abandoning this trip. I'm coming to your wedding anniversary no matter what. And then my brother came to New York for my paperback book launch a couple of weeks later. I think because I had done that. And so I think knowing that there are certain people in your life that you're prepared to travel for is really important. And then also if you invert it, I think your idea of making it kind of difficult for certain people is also a really interesting kind of funnel. I'm having lunch with someone in an hour or so who was one of the speakers at Valuex, and he's an investor from London and I've never met him except to say, hi, Valuex. And he had written to me and said, I'm going to be in New York, could I see you? And I said, yeah, you're welcome to see me if you're willing to come out to where I am in Westchester, which is basically an hour outside the city, and I'll meet you for lunch. And it's like I put, you know, I can't do it that often, but it's like I put up a little bit of a barrier. So it's like if he's willing to travel for two hours, like between coming here and going back and spend a couple of hours with me, all right, I'm open to that. And I think this gets a part of the tension for me in the way that we're designing our lives is if I open the floodgates to too many people, my life spirals out of control and I have no peace of mind and I have no time to do my work. And then I feel guilty and I'm falling behind and I'm letting people down and missing all of my deadlines. But if I don't open myself up to people, I'm missing the possibility of that breakfast with Chris Begg that leads to a really beautiful friendship that is a life enriching thing for me. And so, I don't know, I think there has to be a kind of, a kind of looseness within the discipline. So as Guy once said to me, these are invitations to serendipity. There are reasons why you go to a party, for example. It's an invitation to serendipity. And I have a very strong yearning to pull up the drawbridge and not let people into my life because it's a pain. And then the relationships become difficult. And then some people are difficult and some people are too demanding. And then it gets too complicated and then I get kind of flooded and fall apart. And then I'm like, no, no, no. All of the best things come from being open to serendipity. And so I think there is a tension here. But I think the idea of being willing to go out of your way and also seeing if other people are willing to go out of their way to spend time with you. It's a helpful filter.
- [90:57]
Stig Brodersen
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [91:00]
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- [94:40]
Stig Brodersen
All right, back to the show. It is a very helpful filter for sure. I have a friend who I met up with on four different continents which has been wonderful. We've seen amazing things, but it's always been for the conversations. It's never been for the sites and beautiful things in life just compound. And whether that's capital or relationships.
- [95:05]
William Green
I'll tell you one thing, Stig, before I let you move on to the next subject is I think if there to go back to the thing that Tony said about workplace integration, if there are ways of combining a bunch of things, that is a lollapalooza. So for me to go to Omaha with my son Henry, which I did last week and you know, here I am sharing a room with my 27 year old son. In some ways you could say, you know, really I'm too old to do that. It's like what a joy to have a 27 year old son who actually wants to come with you and is happy to share a room with you. And so I don't know. So there I'm spending time with family, extended time with my son. You know, it was three and a half, four days with my son. I'm introducing him to friends so he gets to hang out with, you know, Guy Spear and his family and Chris Beg and Christopher Sai and Chris brought his daughter along, who's lovely, his teenage daughter and they had a dinner and you get to meet all these other great People and all these great investors. And then the masterclass group, I think, like, 18 people had come, maybe 19 people had come in from six different countries. And so he gets to hang out with people like that. And they're an incredibly interesting group of people. And so in some way, I think. I think if you can combine this stuff, it's like. It's like people who go for a walk every day. There's a famous cartoonist from the New Yorker who I think has gone for a walk with one of her closest friends or her closest friend every day in Central park for like, 20 or 30 years or something. I think that's the smart way to do it. I want to find more ways to do that, to integrate multiple good things at the same time.
- [96:50]
Stig Brodersen
All right, so, William, I wanted to take this recurring segment we have in this episode about books that we read in the last quarter. Two of the three books that I'm going to talk about here actually came from you. Two of them are spiritual, and one is about math, and people can guess out there for themselves. Which two of them I got from you, William. But the first one I wanted to talk about is this book, Letting Go by David Hawkins. And it was a very different book than Power vs. Force, which I felt had a. To be frank, I never finished Power versus Force. To me, it's just like. It's too difficult to read, and it's just the way it's written. But I think the message from Power versus Force is very powerful. And I feel it's ironic how I've tried reading that book multiple times. I can never complete it, and still I find it to be so impactful in my life. So, anyways, Letting Go was, to me, a lot easier to read, less difficult to read. I felt the examples that were used were just much easier to relate to. I specifically zoomed in on chapter two. Read that multiple times. I read the entire book, but especially because you said, or like Last Quarter, Chapter 2, that is a chapter you continue to read. And I found that to be incredibly helpful. The idea is that if you have negativity, it's really the resistance that keeps it alive. And what the book talks about is if you lean into that. Which sounds counterintuitive, because that is exactly what we as people don't want to do, because it's uncomfortable. But actually, if you lean into that being uncomfortable, that is actually what releases that negativity.
- [98:42]
William Green
Yeah, These negative emotions. So something like fear or anger or anxiety or guilt or shame, whatever arises, you're not suppressing it. You're sort of abiding with it with keen awareness and curiosity. Non resistance, radical, non resistance.
- [99:03]
Stig Brodersen
I don't doubt that the technique works. I've figured out that it works. I have a hard time doing it if I'm not in a good state of mind. If I am in a good state of mind and for whatever reason I get triggered by something negative, I can imply the teaching, the technique. If I'm in a really bad state of mind, I'm hungry, I'm tired, I'm, whatever, stressed out, and then I get a trigger or something and I have these negative emotions, it's much, much more difficult for me to apply the technique. But I wanted to share that book. And one of the other things that I wanted to highlight was that we've talked about how you can calibrate on a high frequency or low frequency. And I've heard you multiple times say to me here on the show, william, like, this emotion calibrates higher or lower. But it was not. And I kind of, I think, intuitively understood it, but it was not before I actually saw the book and saw, I think Hawkins called the map of consciousness. And ever the mathematician, he assigned a numerical value to each of the emotions. And ironically, that was whenever I thought. Now I really understand about recalibrating on a higher frequency.
- [100:18]
William Green
So to me, that was important because you see the things. This is what I've said to you before, I think, is you see that things like shame and guilt calibrate really low. Apathy and even anger calibrates higher than shame because at least there's energy to it. But then things start to become kind of positive, I guess at 200 on his scale from zero to a thousand. And so then you start to realize, okay, so unconditional love is 540 on his scale. And so you start to think, what if I could really start to be unconditionally loving to people and to myself? What an amazing thing that would be. And so his view, in a way, is that a lot of. A lot of these great rational thinkers top out around 499. And I have no idea whether these numbers are true or verifiable or maybe they're directionally correct, metaphorically. They all feel to me to be very helpful. But I'm not that hung up on the numbers themselves. But I think. I think it points at something really, really important, which is that a lot of the people that we revere in the investment world are these hyper rational people who've built the rational mind muscle about as well. As you can build it. So you look at Charlie Munger, you look at Ray Dalio, their ability to look at blind spots and biases and the like and just be super rational. They've taken that to an extraordinary extreme that enables all of the great achievements in science and logic and law and things like that. But for me, one of the things that has been very helpful about reading books like Power vs Force or Letting Go or the Eye of the Eye, I read a lot of the Hawkins books many times, is you start to realize that there's this nonlinear reality that's in certain ways higher and deeper and more profound than the purely rational. And so I think part of the challenge is that at a certain level, you need to let go of this tool of tremendous rationality in order to get beyond it. And I think that's extraordinarily difficult for the sort of highly intelligent, articulate, rational people that we feature on the podcast and that listen to the podcast because we celebrate the rational mind so much. And yet there's also, I think we're starting to realize the power of deep intuition, the power of things that you sense but you can't really explain, or synchronicities and these things that point to something deeper but that's not verifiable scientifically. And so I think the blockage at a certain point becomes that rational mind. And there's a very remarkable book I've been reading, sorry to hijack you, that's sort of not dissimilar, by Tara Springett called the Stairway to Heaven. Nine Steps of Consciousness From Unawareness to Full Enlightenment. And it's not dissimilar in certain ways to Hawkins and to Ken Wilber, this sense that there's this sort of a scale that you're ascending and reality changes at each of those levels. You're actually seeing a different reality at those levels. And part of what's helpful in reading her book is that you can sort of get a sense of where you are in these levels of consciousness and how to strengthen yourself in certain ways, how to elevate in certain ways. And so, for example, so she's a psychotherapist, among other things, and teaches Tibetan Buddhism as well, in England, I believe. I don't know much about her, but this had a big impact on me, this book, recently. And part of what she's doing with a lot of her patients is different, depending on where they are in their own reality, in their own life, but is simply to send love to people and to difficult people in your life to be Thinking of them, to think, I wish you to be happy and I wish you to be healthy and also to be able to do that to yourself when you're full of self loathing or anger or self hatred or whatever, and guilt or shame or whatever. And so I think part of what's interesting about that, in the same way as the letting go mechanism that Hawkins explains in chapter two of Letting Go, I think Tara Springett is pointing towards a very powerful mechanism there that sounds so obvious that it's really easy to dismiss where you're just building your capacity for being more loving. And given that love calibrates really, really high in Hawkins terms, that's an important thing to do. And so I don't know, I think these scales are kind of interesting. The sense that there are these ascending levels of reality. And also just really important to know if this is true, which I feel that it is. But what the hell do I know if it's true that we're each really seeing a different reality based on our level of consciousness. That's very helpful because then you look at people who you're sort of bewildered by and you're like, well, of course they see a different reality to me. And then likewise, if you're Sakhni Rinoche or you're Michael Berg or you're a Candela, you're seeing a totally different reality than I'm seeing because they see a sense of oneness, that everything is just magical display of light. And I'm sitting here thinking, I can't believe that I'm stuck in this traffic jam when I should be. So I think it helps you to sort of tread more gently a little bit and be aware that we're seeing such a narrow part of the picture because we're seeing everything through the lens of our own level of consciousness.
- [106:28]
Stig Brodersen
So that takes me to the other book I wanted to talk about. A Flame by Pico Aya. I think the premise of the book, or perhaps I should say my premise, going to your point about how we all look at things from where we're coming from and our own consciousness. This idea of being alone with your thoughts, to me that was very powerful. I sometimes find that to be challenging depending on which state of mind that I'm in and one way measure that, it's terrible. I measure everything. But if I'm not in a good state of mind, I would typically have all kinds of stimuli, typically something I listen to. I'm very auditive and it's not all negative. So part of my Job. A part of my play, a part of who I am, is I listen to things because I find them interesting. So it's not necessarily I'm in a bad state of mind if I listen to one of billions podcasts, but I can sometimes.
- [107:25]
William Green
Hopefully not.
- [107:26]
Stig Brodersen
Hopefully not, no. I can certainly overdo it if I'm in a bad state of mind because of whatever thing I feel lonely or I feel angry or whatever it might be, I would sometimes listen to something almost regardless of what, just to have something so I'm not alone with my own thoughts, which I find to be a good short term fix and a terrible long term fix. And that's probably not how it should be addressed in the first place.
- [107:56]
William Green
Can I pause on that? Because I think you've actually put your finger on something that's hugely important that I think a lot of us are experiencing at the moment, which is that the world is so crazy at the moment and it's so intense and the news is so intense and there's so many sources of dysregulation, so many things coming at us, that I think there's a very powerful tendency to numb ourselves or narcotize ourselves. Whether it's me watching TV in the evening or I find I'm always listening to podcasts. And it becomes we're building that muscle and we can say, well, I'm just a learning machine, and I'm a continuous learning machine, like Warren and Charlie and the like, and it's great, but sometimes it is just because we are numbing ourselves and that we don't want to be with our emotions. And so I think to resist that is actually. And I'm speaking to myself here, because this is something I'm keenly aware of, my own falling short here. To be aware of that is really important. And if you look back at what Tsokny Rinpoche was talking about with your beautiful monsters and handshake practice, that's another way of dealing with what David Hawkins is dealing with, with his letting go mechanism, which is you sit there and you recognize what's coming up, so you actually pause and you think, okay, so I want to numb myself now with a piece of toast or a piece of chocolate or six pieces of chocolate or six pieces of toast or another podcast or whatever, or more news. And just to recognize that and to do what he would call handshake practice, where you, you sort of nod at it and smile at it, and you're like, oh, there you are. Okay, I see you. I see, I see you there I think that's really important because it's breaking a little bit of the immediate impulse to act on this thing that's really just sort of a band aid over this kind of wound or, you know, an unsophisticated way of dealing with our anxiety or our fear or our loneliness or our sadness or whatever. And it's fine to narcotize ourselves a bit, but we don't want to give strength to it too much. And think of that famous line from Viktor Frankl about how there's this moment of free choice in the space between stimulus and response. And so I think part of what meditation is doing is allowing you to expand that space between stimulus and response. And so I think Pico, who doesn't meditate, has used. Has constructed a life where he's been over a hundred times to this monastery that he writes about in a flame. So he goes on retreat every quarter. He doesn't have a cell phone. He doesn't have a car. He's created a really simple life, a very quiet life in the suburbs of Kyoto and Nara in Japan. And he's a travel writer. He has a ton of stimulus in his life. He's traveled billions of miles, but he's so rigorous and disciplined about creating spaciousness in his life. And so I think this gets at what we've been discussing about life design is as you become more aware of the. Of what's going on under the surface, you can be like, okay, I can make a more skillful choice here and build in more space, more time, recognize my emotions, and try not to hide from them and try not to just apply, you know, the quickest treatment. Does any of that make sense, stick?
- [111:44]
Stig Brodersen
Yes, that 100% makes sense. I just. I need to do it instead of just talking about it. But you're absolutely right. And it is one of those things where at least I have a tendency to do quick fixes with a lot of things, and then the underlying concern just continues to build up, which is obviously not what you want to have.
- [112:07]
William Green
Happened, but you're aware of it now. That's a huge advantage. So I think part of your thing of staying at home this year instead of traveling a lot is you've recognized that you need more spaciousness and more simplicity, and you're going for these 17,000 steps, walks, and the like. You're giving yourself more spaciousness. And I would just say what would happen if you didn't listen to a podcast the whole way or if you didn't have your phone with you at all what would happen. And so I think these are just sort of experiments in sort of, to put it in pretentious terms, experiments in micro spaciousness, you know, like. Like what would. What would happen if you found little ways to inject more spaciousness. And I'm speaking to myself here as well because I'm big on narcotizing myself and numbing myself so that I'm not alone with my thoughts too much.
- [113:03]
Stig Brodersen
Yeah, it's interesting that you say that because I have two different experiments, one here in 2025, where I don't want to travel other than brief stay in London with you, like I mentioned before. And then my wife and I are going to Singapore next year and spend some extended time there, which is another type of experiment. And it's kind of interesting, whenever I talk to this setup with other people, there is one group of people and they say, oh, not traveling. That sounds like really, really nice. And tranquility. Finding yourself, working on yourself. And then there's another group of people who are like, why not travel if you can? That's just stupid. Full stop. Life short, which I completely understand. So it goes to this point I want to tie a few things together here about like how we look through different filters based on where we are and what we optimize for. I was hosting a mutual friend of ours here in Aarhus not too long ago, William. And this goes to this point here about Letting Go and recalibrating at different frequencies. And unfortunately at the time I hadn't read Letting Go, but I tried some of the techniques without knowing it and they were very effective. So I wanted to share that with you. I've been incredibly lucky with a few things in my life. Some of this deeply personal is something I really prefer not to talk about. But there have been some. Some things I've been just. Why I've just been incredibly lucky and for whatever reason and probably for the wrong reasons or who knows, it has filled me with. With guilt which calibrates very low. And I think where that comes from is that, you know, I have someone close to me that's sort of like falling a hard times of no fault of her own. And. And you know, I don't know. I think that's sort of like where the guilt is coming from. I really don't know. But what a friend said to me whenever I was talking to him about this emotion, he said to me that he has likewise been very, very lucky. I should also say he's extremely talented and worked really, really hard. But he said that he sort of felt the same way that I did, and then not at all. He said he felt irresponsibility of making sure that other people were lucky because he has gotten so lucky. And it's sort of like it lifted a fog of my mind, of that part of my brain that was just full guilt, which is just such a ridiculous, terrible feeling to have, and then calibrate on a higher frequency of responsibility and how to use that in service of other people. And I should have basically just listened to you the first time you told me to read Letting Go. But for me, that was so powerful and I didn't really understand it before because I'm such a numerical person. Before I sold different numbers to different emotions. I was like, oh, so that is what it's all about. So I just want to say thank you for that, William.
- [116:09]
William Green
Oh, sure. I mean, we each have different ways of connecting to truth. And so for some people, you could really look back on your life and think, when was a time where I really felt no guilt, I just felt joyful and aligned. And you might be like, oh, I had this amazing time where I was with this person I loved, or I was with these people and I was helping them. I sensed that I helped them and lifted them out of their pain, and I just felt great. And so you'd actually just remember an experience and you wouldn't need the number. You'd be on the scale. You'd be like, oh, I remember how that felt, you know, so I, you know, I'm by no means an expert on this, but I remember at one point reading something about Tibetan Buddhism and it would say how, you know, the Buddha had designed so many thousands of different methods of connecting and learning because we're all so different and we have so many different ways, you know, so it doesn't really matter what your portal is. I mean, I. I think I was talking recently, you know, with. With the Masterclass group, which we've referenced a few times here. Sorry about that. But it's, you know, it's a really. It's become a really important part of my life. Right. Because it's this group of 20 people that we study with every month we do a different chapter of the book. And so it's a one year process that we're probably halfway through. So I was really focused on the whole concept of simplicity in the last class a couple of weeks ago where we were talking about Joel Greenblatt. And I was really struck when I went back and I listened to my earlier podcast with Joel, when I was talking to him about his feelings about his life, and he said, overall, I feel very blessed. And he said, because of that, I feel like I owe it to give back. And I think that's a. You know, that's a really lovely response. Right. He feels his good fortune, and instead of falling into guilt and being like, oh, my God, it's so ridiculous that I'm so lucky, and then, you know, or feeling somehow like, well, it's also random that it's all going to end anytime, because just as I got it randomly, I gotta lose it randomly, you know, he's like, well, I've been so blessed. Let me try to help other people. Which is very similar to what Warren said last year in Omaha, where he said, if you've been lucky, try to make other people lucky as well. I think these different teachings, whether it's from Tibetan Buddhism or whether it's from studying someone like Joel Greenblatt, who's just a really thoughtful, really decent, lovely guy, or David Hawkins, they just give you a sense of, oh, this works. And then sometimes when you study things like Hawkins, it explains what you knew already. And I was thinking about this last week. I think I talk about this on the podcast that I've got coming out celebrating Buffet, where Nick Sleep had said to me that Buffet really gave him and Zach the confidence to do what they already knew was true. I think we know these things already. But when you meet someone who's sort of a little bit wiser, whether it's a writer who's written it in a great book like Marcus Aurelius or whatever, or someone like a Buffett or a Munger or a Joe Greenblatt, you're like, oh, okay. That's why I felt that way when I did, when I was aligned with this kind of behavior. And that's why I felt awful when I was misaligned. And so it's very clarifying, I think.
- [119:32]
Stig Brodersen
William, thank you for sharing. I have one more recommendation I want to make, and I kind of feel like it's going to be a very brute change. It's a math book. It's actually a recommendation by Buffet. That should be my segue. Yeah, It's a book called Famas Last Theorem, and I think it's a bit of an acquired taste for me. It was the best book I read last quarter. Not helpful in the same way as A Flame and Letting Go. It's just like, to me, it read like a thriller to most people, probably just put them to sleep, but it sort of like is what it is. And I still wanted to share it. You know, some of you might remember basic math. You learn Pythagoras, he taught us that X squared plus Y squared equals C squared. And then the French mathematician Fermat, he made this bold claim that X to the power of N plus Y to the power of N equals Z to the power of N. It has no whole number solution for any n higher than 2. So I feel like a bit of a jerk as I'm saying this next, because it makes for a terrible podcast, especially if you can't see it in front of you. But in essence, it's actually very simple. And it looks simple, at least if you're a math nerd for the rest of the world, it's probably like what he's talking about now. But anyways, what was interesting is that Fermat claimed to be able to prove this theorem, but the proof was never found. And actually, it's not simple at all, once you really start digging. It has been something that mathematicians have been trying to prove for centuries. And it's kind of ironic that the first time I read it, I was like. And I should say, it has been proven, but the first time I read it, I was like, oh, I can do that. And it was just like, come on. No. The greatest mathematicians have been puzzled by this problem for centuries. No, of course you can't solve it. And so it's such a wonderful book. And I really fell into this rabbit hole with the story, and there's. There's this one line that really stuck with me, and there's this math block. Yes, there are such things as math blocks out there. And the writer then said, I think we all remember where we were whenever we heard that Fermat's last theorem was proven. And to me, that was just such a wonderful and liberating quote, because I would imagine that 99.99% of the people listening to this podcast have never heard about Ethereum before. And if they have, they probably do not remember where they were whenever they heard it got proven. And it's one of those things where. So, for example, I was not in Omaha, and I felt like whenever Buffett met his surprise announcement there at the end, I was like, oh, my God, this is historic. This is something that people are going to be talking about for thousands of years. This is amazing. And don't get me wrong, I wanted to have been there and standing ovation. It was just like, it was such a beautiful thing. And I was just sitting in my Couch. Right. But that quote very much goes to that feeling where we are all in our own pocket of the world. And regardless of how successful you are or how much you fail, 8 billion people on this planet couldn't care less about it. And at least to me, there's something really liberating about that.
- [122:57]
William Green
That's great. Yeah. And tell us the name of the author.
- [123:00]
Stig Brodersen
Simon Singh.
- [123:02]
William Green
Simon Singh, Yeah. I love that. I'm going to recommend two related things, one of which is a documentary film and one of which is a book. And they're totally related, as people will see. So I don't know if anyone other than me noticed this and was excited by it, but Warren in the AGM used the phrase turn every page three times by my count, and I'm not. And he talked, for example, at one point he said, if I remember rightly, he talked about how he found the Japanese companies, those five big holding companies, by reading. I think it was like a 2000 page book. And these things just jumped at him. And then later, I think he was talking about doing lots of shoe leather reporting as a young investor, maybe when he was about 24. And I can't remember whether it was. I mean, this happened obviously when he was at Geico, right, Where he went to Geico as a young man, he knocked at the door and it was closed and someone lets him in and he ends up meeting the CEO and hearing all about it, and it ends up becoming one of his great investments. And then there was another, another similar reporting story where he did sort of shoe leather reporting research on a company. And I think if I remember rightly, he talked about how Jay Pritzker gave him an amazing lesson about business and investing. And a couple of times he would say, so that also goes under the category of turn every page. And so no one there practically, I'm assuming, actually knew what he was referring to, which is a documentary called Turn Every Page, which is about the relationship between the great nonfiction writer Robert Caro, who wrote so far four books about Lyndon Baines Johnson and also the power broker, this 1300 page book about Robert Moses and the building of New York and his relationship with his editor, a guy called Robert Gottlieb, who's the greatest editor of his generation. And so I started rewatching that documentary earlier this week because I was like, I had loved it when it came out a year or two ago. It was made by Robert Gottlieb's daughter, so the editor's daughter, because Caro and Gottlieb are both Kind of ornery and private, and neither of them would have wanted to give anyone access. But finally Gottlieb was convinced to give access by his daughter. And so what you have is the greatest nonfiction biographer of his generation, Robert Caro, and his editor who edited the New Yorker, but before that was head of Knopf, and before that was head of Simon and Schuster. You have them Talking about their 50 year relationship and how they created these astounding books. And one of the things that Caro says fairly early in the book is in the movie is that he had been at Princeton and he was a young reporter, and he was hired at Newsday. And there was a managing editor at Newsday who hated kids from fancy schools. So Caro claimed that as a joke, he was hired while this guy, Alan Hathaway, the managing editor, was away. And so Hathaway, the managing editor, comes back and finds this kid from Princeton, Cairo, and is totally unimpressed and won't talk to him. And then one day, Caro is going through these federal agency files, and he writes a long memo on it, and he gets summoned to see Alan Hathaway, the managing editor, and he's expecting to be fired. And Hathaway says to him, from now on, you do investigative work. And he says, basically, I didn't know that someone educated at Princeton could do such good research. And he gives Caro one piece of advice, and these are his exact words. He says, just remember one thing. Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page. And so Buffett sees something in this documentary that really profoundly impacts him. And I know that it impacted him because I went to a party, I think, last year, and there were a couple of people talking about how one of them was related to the woman who. I may be gobbling this, but I think I have this right. One of them was like a sister or something of the or relative of the woman who had made the film. And Buffett had flown her out to Omaha to meet her because he loved the film so much. And so I'm kind of putting together these things, and I'm like, oh, that's so cool. Buffett has been making these references to this documentary because it in some ways embodies what he does, which is this kind of really painstaking work of research. I mean, it's interesting. There's one point in the documentary where Caro sort of says one of the agents who first met him said, I can make you a star. I can make you famous or whatever. And Caro's like, I don't care about that. He just cared about doing the work beautifully. And so with the Power Broker, he did, I think, 522 interviews and literally thousands of interviews for the books on Lyn and Baine Sjonsen. He still hasn't finished the fifth volume and he and Gottlieb, who are now 90, are hoping that they'll live long enough for him to finish that final volume. And so there's something about these two giants working together that also I suspect is reminiscent of the relationship between Warren and Charlie, which also spanned over 50 years. They built Berkshire over 50 years. And Gottlieb and Cairo have been working together for 50 years. And it's been kind of a fractious and difficult relationship because they both care immensely. So there's one point where they talk about punctuation and they're kind of. Caro had a really idiosyncratic way of using semicolons and they would fight over it. And Gottlieb, when he's explaining what makes Caro so brilliant and what he admires so much about Caro, among other things, is he says everything is of total importance. The first chapter and a semicolon are both worth fighting a civil war over. And he says Caro is industrious. He's nothing if not industrious. And he talks about how he spent seven years just on the Power Broker. And I think he spent like 40 years basically on his, maybe longer on his Lyndon Baines Johnson biographies. And so in some ways, it's about a whole philosophy of life where you are doing everything with an extraordinary attention to detail and quality. And you think about Warren talking about how Berkshire became his masterpiece. It was like his artwork that he's painted over the last 60 years. And it's very similar. And so I can see why this film would have had an effect on Warren. And then there's a related book which is Caro Paused. I mean, Caro is now in his 90s, but he paused in the middle of writing this immense Lyndon Baines Johnson series to write a book called Working, which talks about his relentlessness as a reporter, which is just stunning. And so there's a story in there, for example, of how he figured out that Lyndon Baines Johnson stole the election to become a senator. And basically he tracks down this 84 year old guy, Cairo tracks down this guy who's moved to Mexico and then Texas, and he's this old man who I think in the 1980s had been so tough that he literally killed someone in a bar brawl. And then Sort of goes and disappears. And so Caro tracks him down in 1986, and he's this enforcer who'd worn a revolver that reached almost to his knee because it was so big. And he basically confesses to Cairo about how he tampered with this vote in 1948 and how he'd lied under oath about it. And he talks about how he had pulled paper ballots out of the box and he said, if they weren't for Johnson, I made them for Johnson. And he gives Cairo this 94 page manuscript that he'd written about what happened, because he wants to tell the truth before he dies. And so there's something kind of really beautiful about this mindset of just relentless reporting. And Caro said, I think in the book that he said, now if anyone ever says, we wonder if Lyndon Johnson stole that election, the Senate election, he's like, now we know he proved it. And so there's a beautiful thing in that book that I'll just read you very quickly before I let you go. And he says there was a part of him that kept leading him to think of new avenues of research that even as I thought of them, I felt was crucial to head down. It wasn't something about which I had a choice. In reality, I had no choice at all. In my defense, while I'm aware that there is no truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth about anything, there are facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts through reading documents or through interviewing and re interviewing can't be rushed. It takes time. Truth takes time. And I gave a talk recently for an investment firm about the art of interviewing. One of the things that I focused on was Caro and this idea that truth takes time. And I think it gets at something really essential and eternal about both investing and writing and interviewing. And anything that you do with any quality is truth takes time. And there's this kind of this obsessiveness, this relentlessness that you need. And there's a beautiful thing in the film where there's a Chet Baker song called do it the Hard Way that plays, I think, at the end of the film, if I remember rightly, and I was looking in my notes in my phone that I'd written ages ago when I first watched the film. And I wrote, you have to focus on what matters and what you're great at and care about every semicolon. You have to want things to endure in a world of entropy. And so that's my note to myself, is focus on what matters and what you're great at and care about every semicolon, because we live in a world of entropy where most things die sort of unnoticed, Right? And Caro said that the reason he rewrote every section of his book so many times, first by hand and then eventually typing it, is that he said, I want these books to endure for me, both the film and that book working. And his other books, I've only read, I think, two volumes of the LBJ biography. They're a reminder to do things with a sense of quality. And so it's very consistent with the whole message from people like Robert Persig that guys like Nick Sleep and Kate Zakaria picked up on. It's a particular mindset and philosophy, and Warren embodies it, and Charlie embodied it. And so I think, in the same way that I'm saying in my podcast celebrating Warren, that Nick and Zach were just trying to move closer and closer to Buffett. When you study people like Caro and Gottlieb or Buffett and Munger, this is what they embody. And it is a kind of frequency. In the same way that Hawkins or this woman, Tara Springett, in her book the Stairway to Heaven, they're identifying. There's a certain kind of consciousness. It's like a certain type of frequency, and it's a shift towards the timeless, towards infinite games, towards quality and away from the ephemeral, away from the selfish, away from all the things that make you go weak and towards the things that make you go strong. And so I think in some way, these books and films and going to Omaha and surrounding yourself with the right people and traveling across the ocean to see the right people, they're all ways of just subtly tilting the odds in your favor that despite all of our flaws and failings, we're just a little bit more likely to act wisely.
- [135:27]
Stig Brodersen
You know, I'm really happy that you brought up Kara's book working. I picked it up and I thought, Will and Green, and I thought, percyk. That's a compliment, in case anyone is wondering. And there was a part of me, whenever you just read the first page, you're like, this is a different book. That was the first thing I'm like, I'm not sure what's going on, but this is a different book. That was the impression I got, which, again, it should be positive, it shouldn't be negative. And then to your point, it's its own frequency. It's Sort of like the same thing I get with Tolkien. I don't remember how long it took for him to come up with Lord of the Rings universe, but it was like, we're talking more than a decade. There are some experts out there who know all the details, but you can feel it. And it doesn't mean that it has to be complex. It's not a question of now we spend a long time. But it's more like I'm gonna say, I'm gonna clone something. You actually, I'm just gonna quote you, Willem, because you say everything much better than me. But I've heard you say that whenever you really distilled, for example, the book reads your wiser, happier. It was like you took those truth and then a part of you was thinking, but that's so simple. It almost seems banal that it's so simple, but it's such a deep truth at the same time. And I think that's such an important concept. Whenever you start a Cairo and you're like, did this dude only cover Johnson? You're like, that's not at all what it's all about. You know, you can feel it. So I'm going to go to a background to you, William. You'll be able to articulate it much, much better than what I just did.
- [137:05]
William Green
Well, I mean, think of that line from Gottlieb, the great editor who, among other Things, edited Catch 22. And it originally was called Catch 18, but someone wrote a book called Mila 18. So then one night, Gottlieb phones Philip Roth and says, I've got it. It should be catch 22. That's even funnier than 18. And so here's this amazing editor, and think of that line for him where he just said, everything is of total importance. The first chapter and the semicolon are worth fighting a civil war over. So it's a sense that everything matters. So every action, every thought, every word, every intention matters. And it has an impact, and it has a particular calibration, and it has an effect on the people around you. And so at one level, we're all nothing, right? We're just ashes and dust. We'll be gone in a moment. And on another level, we're everything. And we affect enormous numbers of people, and we can have a huge impact on people. And both of those things simultaneously are true, I think. And so I think you just have to decide with your investing, with your family, with your relationships, with your creative work, whatever it is, where do I want to align myself? Do I want to align myself with the ephemeral and the selfish and the self seeking and the destructive, or that's all just going to perish. It's all just going to be gone. Or do I want to try to connect to something that's a little bit more timeless and permanent, like these values like integrity, love, kindness, compassion, all these things that make you go strong. And I think there's a reason why Berkshire has endured and grown. Look at what, what Nick Sleep said to me where he said, I believe that good things grow. And so in some sense, you know, you said earlier on, and I'll leave you with this thought, you said, well, I don't think I'm spiritual. It's like it's all spiritual, Stig. It's all like it's anything. You know, all of these values of trying to share knowledge, trying to figure out how to live more wisely, trying to be a kind and decent employer, trying to be a kind and decent son or husband or whatever, it's all treating things as if they're of total importance and being aware that the intention you put into them, despite all of our failings and all of our mistakes and all of that, it matters. And so I think Buffett, in quoting without saying why he's quoting it, the phrase turn every page, is pointing us towards something. A kind of a focus on quality, a focus on responsibility, a focus on perseverance, a focus on building something through a painstaking, deep appreciation of quality. And so I think that leaves us with a sense that in whatever way we can, we should try to shift the balance in the same way that Warren has. We're not Warren, but we each have our own way in which we can shift the balance. So that would be my parting thought. I hope that's vaguely helpful.
- [140:34]
Stig Brodersen
I think it's helpful. If I can accommodate you, I would say Joseph Campbell and the Monument. I think it's all in the same. And perhaps Buffett and Munger would be the first to say that they don't have that channel open. But I want to say it's all in the same. Even though we might call it different things.
- [140:52]
William Green
Yeah, it's all pointing at quality and things that endure. These values that endure. You build a company based on integrity. And even just look at the fact that Buffett made the announcement so that we all, as shareholders, got the news at the same time as Greg Abel. He's telling you something. In behaving that way, he's telling you, you are my partners and I'm not going to keep you in the dark and treat you like second class citizens. And so that's such a small gesture, but it's kind of everything.
- [141:28]
Stig Brodersen
I think that's the best way we can end the conversation. William, thank you as always for enriching these conversations. Any concluding remarks here before we end the episode?
- [141:39]
William Green
No. It's been a total delight chatting with you, and I always start with a sense of like we're not going to have anything to say, and then I'm always shocked that we can't stop talking. So anyone who's made it to this stage of the podcast, you know you deserve some sort of gold medal.
- [141:54]
Stig Brodersen
Well said. All right. Thank you, William.
- [141:57]
William Green
Thanks. 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.