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The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
TIP757: Richer, Wiser, Happier Q3 2025 w/ Stig Brodersen & William Green
02:07:49
Stig and William reflect on the lessons and stories that have made them Richer, Wiser, or Happier over the past few months.
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You're listening to tip.
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Every quarter, I sit down with my friend and co host William Green, and these conversations always end up somewhere unexpected. We quickly find ourselves wrestling with the big questions. What does it mean to live wisely? How do we deal with uncertainty investing in life? And why is it so tempting to think that our own perspective is so much more enlightened than others? I'll admit it, as you hear in this episode, we are as guilty as charged as everyone else. We also talk about how history, literature, and even the market's chaos can all be teachers if we're willing to pay attention. So if you're curious about how investing intersects with philosophy and why the search for a good life is often much harder than it looks, I think you'll enjoy this conversation. Since 2014 and through more than 180.
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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.
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B
Welcome to the Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Dick Broderson. And today, as always, for these richer Weiser heavy conversations, I'm joined by my co host and good friend, William Green. William, how are you today?
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A
Hi Stig. I'm very well indeed and very happy to be here with you.
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B
So, William, today we are going to tackle a very modest topic. We'll be talking about the search for universal truths. How more modest can we really start?
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We'll nail this one.
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I think we will. And we have three topics here for today. The first one is universal truth. The second one is about money and happiness. And then we have a section about books that may have made us richer, wise and happier over the past quarter. But if we can jump into the first segment here, I'm amazed by the number of intelligent people who do not understand that what gives them purpose and happiness just isn't so for everyone else. And then I'm amazed by how often I fall into the same trap. I sometimes think that this is what works for me, so it must be working for you. And of course that's not the way life is. But the more I explore the concept of universal truth, the fewer examples I can find. And sure you have some. Like you could say that 2 and 2 equals 4. That was a universal truth even before math was invented. But whenever it comes to living a good life, which we're going to talk about here today, it's really, really hard. At least it is for me. And I would like to share a Few personal anecdotes, just, I guess, really just to display my own ignorance. So this was. I want to say it was back in 2019, so I was traveling around Marrakesh, and I was chatting up a local about the good life. I was just curious to hear how the locals live. And that was a conversation I would soon forget. So the locals said to me that to him, he felt like if you were in your 40s or in your 50s and you didn't live with your parents, if you were in lucky situation to have your parents, you were a spiritual poor person. Because to him, it was such a gift to be living as many generations together in the same house as you possibly could. Three, if you could. Four is even better. And I don't really want this to come across as me not liking my parents. I sure do, but I. I don't want to live with them. I guess one of the reasons why I'm such good terms with parents is because we don't live together anymore. After I moved out and started college, we haven't lived in the same household. And so that was just one example. And perhaps it's silly to some. Perhaps some would say it's about one culture versus another. Okay, let me give you another example. So I often get asked about career advice, which is kind of terrible because I almost always go the same route, which goes something along the lines of quit your job and start your own company. And it's such a ridiculous piece of advice, because I think it basically comes from my own biases, where the thought of having a boss just drives me absolutely nuts. And for me, that's just been such a strong driver for so many good things happening in my life. But then at the same time, I would have friends and family who are just very happy about having a job on the bus. And to them, it feels like if you run your own business, it's like a weird masochistic behavior because then you're never truly off work. And so, keeping that in mind, you know, I kind of feel like there must be some universal truth whenever it comes to living the good life. So who would then I look to in this regard? And of course, I have to say Mike Tyson. Who else can we relate to here? So Iron Mike famously said that the best three years of his life was whenever he was in prison. So, okay, if you can't even count on something as prison being terrible, what kind of universal truth can you really rely on in terms of living a good life? And so I want to throw it over to you William, and ask you, if we define a universal truth as something that holds truth at all times and agreed by everyone, what kind of universal truth will capture living a richer, happier and wiser life? And how can we make sure that this is just not a reflection of the time we live in and our own experiences?
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There's so much there. I think one of the most important things is just to stop questioning the idea that anything is really universal, because I think we often make this lazy assumption that certain things are necessarily true. And maybe one advantage for me is even though I grew up in London, I then moved to New York, and then I moved to Hong Kong, and then I moved back to New York. And so my kids, for example, grew up all over the world as a result. And then I would report all over the world as a journalist. And so you. You get this very vivid, visceral sense that your prejudices and biases and ways of viewing the world are not necessarily the correct ones. And I. I remember once when my. When my kids went to the Canadian International School, even though we're not Canadian in Hong Kong, they would be pretty much the only white kids in a class of Hong Kong Chinese kids. And they would be referred to as guilos, which I think meant white ghosts. And one of the things I really loved was that they would share their snacks with their Hong Kong Chinese friends. So they would eat all of these foods that to us, to me and my wife, seemed wonderfully exotic, you know, so we would send them with sandwiches or whatever, or cookies or whatever unhealthy Western stuff we would send them with. And their friends would have, you know, congee or whatever. And I always remember going on vacation in Kuala Lumpur once. My daughter Madeleine, we were staying in a beautiful hotel, I think the Mandarin Oriental there. And there were two breakfasts. There was the Western breakfast, and there was the Asian breakfast. And Madeleine just immediately went over and got her chopsticks and got her dumplings and got her. It was really lovely. And so it kind of gave you a sense of the arbitrariness of the values that we take to be standard often. And you just saw how random they were. Really, a lot of it depended on where you were born and what you were exposed to. And I was reading something yesterday that I really love, one of my favorite books. It had big influence on me when I was writing my proposal for Richer, Wiser, Happier for the Book. And I was rereading it yesterday. It's this book about Montania that I have here. It's called how to Live Or a life of in one question and 20 attempts at an answer. And it's by a woman called Sarah Bakewell. It was written in about 2010 and there's a chapter in there. It's all about this great 16th century philosopher, Montaigne, who is a wonderful writer. He wrote these essays, something like 107 essays. And actually the reason we used the word essay at school is because he invented the essay as far as I remember, which I guess in French means to try. So it was sort of attempt to look at himself and understand himself and the world around him. And so he wrote these essays. He was born, I think, in 1533, so nearly 500 years ago. He wrote. And there's an essay where he would write these essays about the customs in different countries and he would collect these. And Sarah Bakewell writes about this as this sort of habit that he developed to remind himself just how arbitrary our own customs are, our own beliefs, our own sense of what everyone takes as necessarily true. And she talks about how our eyes are dulled by habit. And so what he would do is, is Montaigne would defamiliarize the familiar, she said, by collecting all of these examples of different ways of seeing the world. So you could, as she would say, recognize yourself from the proper angle. So he collects all of these wonderful customs. So I'll give you a handful of them that he collected, which I really loved. So bear in mind this is a guy 500 years ago in France, living in a castle, studying different people from around the world, different cultures. So one of the examples he liked was that in certain cultures, people would blacken their teeth because they viewed white teeth as inelegant. Another is he found a culture where people would shave the hair on the left side of the body, but not the right. Then there were other cultures where children would be nursed until they were 12 years old. So there were all of these kind of weird, different cultural beliefs that Montaigne would collect sort of as a reminder to look at his own beliefs and say, we think these things are standard, but not. They give you this ability to kind of look at your own life and say, okay, I have this very partial, biased view of what's really going on, of what's actually universal. And so Bakewell, the author here of this book how to Live, would talk about how we can never escape our limitations altogether. We always have this limited, partial view of reality. And so one of the most obvious lessons from this, which Montaigne drew was that you can't be dogmatic about anything, that there is no fixed truth, that everything is provisional. And so his writing is full of words like perhaps or it seems to me, or I think so I think that's really helpful, just to start with this sense that nothing is really so obviously true that we can bank on it either in investing or life. And Montaigne had this habit. He had a beautiful study in his castle in France where he had these beams. And he would write quotes on the beams. And so one of the quotes that he had on a beam. There is only one thing is certain, that nothing is certain. And that's a really valuable principle. It goes back to Socrates, I guess, who said, all I know is that I know nothing. And Bakewell, actually, at the very start of the chapter, has a twist on that where she says, all I know is that I know nothing, and I'm not even sure about that, which I love. So it's this sense that nothing can truly be established as absolutely certain and that you have to, as Montaigne said, train your soul to be aware of your own fallibility. And he would have these lovely examples of this. He would get into other people's perspectives. He would see from other people's points of view. And there's this famous anecdote of his where he said, when I'm playing with my cat, here I am thinking that she's my pastime, but in fact, I may actually be my cat's pastime. Who knows? Maybe. Maybe I'm the plaything and she's the boss. I don't know. And so this can sound sort of pretty esoteric and far out and irrelevant, but I actually think it has really profound implications both in life and investing. Because anytime you can stop being less dogmatic and less sure of your views, you're less likely to screw up. You're less likely to get caught up in things like recency bias, for example, where you just assume whatever's been happening in the market for the last few years must always happen, right? Like, stocks must always go up. You must always buy at the dip. You'll always be rewarded if you buy at the dip. You'll always be okay if you invest primarily in America, because America is special and nowhere else is as good. And if you look at history, you see that these things that we've come to believe are true, most of us are not necessarily true, that circumstances change, conditions change, there are long periods where stocks don't go up or where foreign markets actually outperform much better. And when I think of some of the great investors I've interviewed over the years, particularly Bill Miller, I think, who is very steeped in philosophy. Part of his advantage was that he questioned everything. He questioned all of these widespread assumptions. I mean, think of even something like bitcoin, where when I interviewed him on the podcast about three years ago, I was asking him about Buffett Amonger, who he has great reverence for, saying that bitcoin was rat poison squared. And there was this great thing, I think it was at the 2021 annual meeting in Omaha, where Buffett basically said, look, if you offered me all of the bitcoin in the world for $25, I wouldn't take it, because what would I do with it? He's like, it's not going to do anything. It doesn't produce anything. And he compared it to apartments or farmland that produce food or rent. And so there's this concept, like this assumption that investing, you don't want to own things like gold because they don't generate cash. And yet gold has been an unbelievable investment for the last few years, right? Or the danger of bitcoin because it doesn't produce anything. And so when I talked to Bill Miller about this, he said, basically, who said that the goal of investing is to own assets that generate cash? I thought the goal was to make money. So there's something in Bill's ability to look at things philosophically and sort of say, yeah, but are these assumptions that even Buffett amonger who I revere, are they right? Can you look at this from a different angle? And maybe it's fine to own a speculative asset that's driven by greater fool theory. And if there's a limited supply, as there is with bitcoin and a lot of fools, maybe that's great. Or maybe there really is something there and it really is digital gold. I don't know. But I think that ability to question everything is really vital. To accept the truth is provisional, that nothing's certain. And even now, there's this assumption. I think it's almost because bitcoin went up for so many years. There's an assumption that, well, it must be a real asset class and it must be worthwhile. And that's exactly the time when. When you want to look at it and say, what if Buffett was right? What if actually this doesn't generate any cash and so you can't really value it and maybe it's kind of worthless? I don't have a dog in this fight. But I think that general sense of questioning everything is really really valuable. And then at the same time, we do need some universal truths. Well, maybe they're not universal truths, but we need some guiding princip to live a good life or to invest. And so I think when I started to publicize my book and I really had to look back and think, what did I mean? What was I trying to espouse here? What was I preaching? One idea that I or realization that I came to was that I was looking for insights or principles that are approximately true on average over time. And I think that's a pretty good way to think about it. It's not always the case that if you buy assets for much less than they're worth, you're going to be rewarded for it. There are times where momentum investors who don't really care about the valuation but are just piling on are going to look much smarter than the people who buy things cheap. But I think on average, over time, if you continue to overpay for assets, you're eventually likely to get punished. And if you underpay and you find cheap stuff and you know how to value it, you're likely to do well. And I see that again and again with the great investors, right? I mean, Howard Mark said to me the biggest risk is overpaying for an asset. And so the real question is how much optimism is priced in how cheap is it? Joe Greenblatt said to me that the whole essence of investing is basically to value an asset and then buy it for much less. Charlie Munger said to me that the art of successful investing, it always involves buying more prospects than you're paying for, getting more than you're paying for. And he said you can do it in lots of different ways. He said you could do it like Bill Miller and buy things like Amazon when people didn't appreciate it, or you could do it like Howard Marks and go into areas like distressed debt that no one was looking at. But even these trends really change. There's a book I really like that I wrote about a little bit in Richer, Wiser, Happier, which is by Barton Biggs, who is a hedge fund manager, also a very good writer. And he wrote a book, I think it was called Wealth, Wisdom and War or something like that. And he would look at how attitudes were different in different eras. So there was a period, for example, I guess this was around World War II, when stocks were basically deemed an inappropriate asset for pension funds and the like, or insurance companies, I can't remember which, but it was like basically a whole asset class was deemed to be Inappropriate. And likewise, one of the things that launched Howard Marks career was that this whole asset class, like distressed debt, was deemed to be inappropriate. And so he could go in and look at companies in bankruptcy and junk bonds and stuff and he could see, well, actually this is so cheap that the prospects are pretty good. And actually, paradoxically, it's less risky than all this stuff that's priced for perfection, like in those days, the nifty 50. And so I think in some ways the lesson from Bill Miller and the lesson from Montaigne and Sarah Bakewell is just to examine things from all angles and just to accept the fact that these things that we hold to be true, obviously and self evidently true, are not necessarily true. Or maybe under certain conditions they're true. And so think, for example, even of the widespread assumption that we play into as well. We try to interview people on our podcasts who beaten the market over the long term. I think that's right because we want to focus on people who are really good at this game and can prove that they've won the game over long periods. But the assumption the be all and end all is to beat the market is also a really dubious assumption. I was on a call the other day listening into partners meeting, a shareholders meeting for a fund that I invest in, and the manager was talking about how goal number one is just to preserve capital. And a lot of the money in his fund is his family's fund is his family's money, and he doesn't want to lose it, and he doesn't want to lose his friends and relatives money and his shareholders money. And he said goal number two is to continue compounding over the long term. And he said goal number three is to beat the market, but that's not the priority. And he said, I'm never going to jeopardize the first and second priorities by taking such risks that I'll beat the market in the short term, but I'll end up getting hurt in the long term. Because his real goal is to build wealth in a resilient way over many, many, many years. Holding them lightly, our principles is very helpful and being aware that circumstances can change and that things that we assume are really wise can cease to be wise. I think it's very helpful and it enables you, I think, to tread a little more lightly and hopefully to be a little less judgmental of other people because they have different priorities and different experiences and different goals that have led them to have these assumptions that we don't necessarily share. And ours may well be Wrong.
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Thank you for sharing, William. That was very eloquent. There are so many things to unpack there. I'm going to tell you first, a very quick anecdote, and then I'll go back and relate to a few of the things that you mentioned. I was speaking with Guy the other day, and I think generally the way that I have a conversation is that I would probably speak for way too long, and then the other person would speak for some time and then so it wouldn't be a lot of back and forth. And Guy was sort of like looking at me multiple times, as in, he wanted me to interrupt him. And he was like. And he said to me. He said to me, I was too polite. I was like, you make sure they interrupt me. And then he was like. I was like, I don't really. That's not how I converse with other people. I generally don't like to do that. And he said that he would bring me to Israel one day and see how often people would interrupt each other in conversations. And that was actually meant as a. As a nice thing. It actually meant they were really engaged. Whereas sometimes whenever you let someone speak for like 15 minutes, it sort of means that you don't really care what they say. And it was like. It's actually quite the opposite for me. And so anyways, that was just the anecdote. It was so wonderful, all the things you said there, William. If I can just highlight a few things there. This idea of not knowing anything and be very embracing, that you don't know the truth, I find to be wonderful. I once read a book many years ago, and it talked about how you shouldn't be too confident and why you should say things as it seems and could it be. And to your point before. And I use Grammarly in all my writings. And Grammarly always like, no, no, no, no. You can't say it seems. It doesn't sound confident enough. But the entire point is that I don't want to sound confident because I don't know. Something seems to be something. I don't know if it's true.
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A
I think another thing related to this is when you read books about different stages of development of consciousness, whether it's David Hawkins or There are plenty of other people who write about this stuff. There's a book I've mentioned before by Tara Springett that I really liked, where you can see that reality changes depending on your own level of development of consciousness. And so you're actually seeing Ken Wilber, also the integral philosopher, talks a lot about this I'm no expert in Ken Wilber, but there's this sense that the lenses that we're wearing based on our own level of development going to shape everything that we see. So it's another reason why you can't really be judgmental of other people who maybe have ideas that you look at and you're like, well these are really primitive. Really, that's all you're interested in. And likewise there are people who are way more evolved than us who are going to look at us and be like, yeah, it must be like looking at a two year old child asking for the pacifier and having a hissy fit about not having the pacifier. And so I think that again, it's something that I think about a lot, like what am I not seeing? Just because I have the, the blinders or the particular lens of my level of development. And there's something in one of the Hawkins books that I often refer to, he talks about how the view of God changes depending on your level of development. And so it might go from being this punishing God who's seeking retribution or whatever, or some external God to being something that's kind of imminent, as in immigration. A N E N T. So it's sort of in you as well. I mean, I remember once talking to a teacher at my daughter's school in London and he was a kind of amazing man. He was a Latin teacher who said to me he had had a girlfriend when he was about 18 and she said to him, where do you think God is? And he said, talked about it. And she said, no, no, I picture it right here in my solar plexus. And he said that really kind of changed his whole view of life. And there are people who are like super evolved, super enlightened and they're just like, well, everything is just the light of the Creator. You just look, you know, like there's nothing that isn't God. And so then it's like, and it's not even a word that's helpful because it's really just, you're looking at the play of light or whatever. Right. Well, I just think it's an interesting idea that your view of something as fundamental as that changes depending on the lens that you have based on, you know, so it's not that one person is right and one is wrong. It's like they actually might be totally right at their level of development. To see the world as a kind of alien, hostile, dangerous place is right probably at a certain level of development. And then to see it you remember Einstein talking about how you can live as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is a miracle. And so I think you can actually look at everything with this incredible sense of wonderful. And so it's just a. And I think you could apply this to any. Any area. Right. Right. Where you would just look at it through this different lens, and it would remind you that there's not a fixed truth. And that's very helpful because it just. It makes you a little bit warier of overconfidence, which is one of the great perils in investing. I don't know if we've discussed this before. I love this. This podcast that Michael Lewis did a few years ago where he talked about a study that had been done at Columbia University on overconfidence and male overconfidence. And men are particularly prone to overconfidence. I think we overestimate what we know by something like 30%, whereas women systematically underestimate what they know. And I had been exchanging messages. I think I sent that podcast to Samantha Macklemore, Bill Millers successor. And we'd been laughing about this wonderful story that Michael Lewis told on his podcast where there was a woman who said. Who was talking to someone else about being a direct descendant of Marie Curie, the scientist who won two Nobel Prizes, I think, for physics and chemistry. And some man overhears this and helpfully intervenes and says, no, no, it's pronounced Mariah Carey. And I just love this. And Samantha loved this, as an example of men who think we know what we're talking about but don't. And it's just really dangerous. And so I think anything that undermines our sense that we know is kind of helpful. And then at the same time, we don't want to be paralyzed by a sense that we don't know anything, because then how would you ever invest? And so it's this curious paradox, I think. I think of this a lot with someone like Howard Marks, that he had to have the conviction, say, in 2008, 2009, when he was investing incredibly aggressively, five or $600 million a week for 15 weeks as the market was crashing. You have to have the conviction to go against the crowd. And yet at the same time, you need the humility to say, yeah, and I may be wrong. And even in that situation, he thought that he had great confidence, but he didn't have a sense of certainty. He said, look, there is a chance that the market could melt down. But he said, it's pretty much binary. And if we look back, and we had what seems to be one of the great buying opportunities of our lifetime, and we failed to buy because we were too chicken. Then we've let down our shareholders. And so even then, while making one of the great contrarian investments that I think made Oaktree about $9 billion in profit, even then he wasn't sure that he was right. So I think it's the ability to hold in balance these contradictory, conflicting things, to have conviction and yet be humble and question whether you're right.
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B
I absolutely love that, William. There's so much to unpack there. I listened to episode the other day with Hagstrom, which was a wonderful episode in itself, and I want to tie in a few things into what you said. All of it is going to. For the benefit of praising you. At least that's my intention.
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That's a very important goal.
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Very important goal. We all need purpose in life.
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I'll just sit back and drink a cappuccino in that case.
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Right. So one of the things I wanted to talk about was this idea of whether an investment should generate cash flows, which I thought for the longest time, because Buffett is supposed to be right about everything. Right? And that is what he said long time ago, perhaps asked about something else. Who knows? And I loved how Hextrom said, well, what about a Van Gogh painting that doesn't generate any cash? It's not a farm, it's there, but sure it has some value. And you mentioned, like Munger said, he wouldn't have all the bitcoin in the world for $25. I'd probably take that. Better take all the gold in the world for $25. I'm okay with that. It's interesting. I read a lot of shareholder letters, and out of nowhere someone would say, and by the way, bitcoin is absolutely terrible. It's almost like, you know, Marcus Cato was like, car sets should be destroyed. Like, he would just say that at the end of all sentences. And I'm like, it's kind of weird because I read those letters because of. Because of what they say about equities. And then out of nowhere, it's like, and by the way, if you invest in bitcoin, you're just a terrible person and it's a big scam. Who knows? Perhaps they're right. My question is not whether or not they're right. It's just, where does that come from? I would probably be upset if I had spent 40 years building my track record in equities. And then someone came along and bought this weird thing called bitcoin and made the same return as me. Let's make this applicable for tip. I would probably be upset if someone came along and by the help of ChatGPT, got as many downloads as we got on this podcast and spent more than a decade doing. I'd probably come up with all kinds of, oh, this is not human connection. There's not real podcast because it's made with AI. Whatever. I had actually had a point. I should go back to this idea here with Hackstrom. I think it all ties together. I hope I can tie all the loose ends together at the end. In that discussion they had there with Hagstrom, you talked about God. And it wasn't so much a question of whether it was true or not. It was question of what makes you happy. I might be misquoting you here.
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A
Yeah, that was how I heard it. We were talking about pragmatic philosophers who would. So the pragmatic philosophers, like William James would talk about ideas as like forks and knives, like tools. And so the idea is, does it work for you? Like William James would talk about the cash value of an idea. So my point was, if believing in God makes me happier, then that's great. If it makes me behave better, which it sometimes does, then that's great. So again, it gets at this idea that there's not really a fixed truth about anything.
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B
And I very much like that because I was listening to an episode with Etio, the episode from last quarter, and I said at some point in time that I thought that the world was random. And your response to that was, you would rather be happy. And it was not before long, long after, when actually I'm doing the editing, because my mind is buckling with a gazillion different things. I was like, I think the reason why I think the world is random is not because I know it's random. I can speculate. Obviously, I don't know if it's true. I think I have this idea that the world is random because it makes me happy. The way I'm wired, it feels very empowering that the world is random because that gives me control. Whereas I can see some people would find it completely counterintuitive and say, if someone has a plan for me, it's much, much better, and it's probably a good plan. I probably have this narrative that whether or not it's true, it's because that is what makes me happy. And perhaps you would have a different perspective, the listener would have a third perspective, because that is what Makes them happy. And so I was listening to this wonderful episode you did with Hagstrom and about it's not a question of what is right and what is wrong, but more what it does for you. But at the same time, you're also talking in that episode about, in investing, it's about having facts. And we also see some of that. Like for the longest time, some investors refused to believe what they saw happening with Enron. And so if you're investing in Enron, it's probably a very good idea to know the facts, which means you're probably not long Enron. And so to me, I find that to be fascinating. And I think it's very important for people who are tuning in that I hope they don't consider that I have any kind of truth. That's actually my very intention to say I don't have the truth. And I think if you are on the quest of looking for truth, whenever you speak about something, see if you can speak without identity. I don't know how to find truth, but I sometimes like to think I know how to look at the very opposite. So if you, if you say, because this is my nationality, I know that, or because this is my political opinion, I know this, it might be more difficult for you to find universal truth. And perhaps whenever it comes to universal truth, perhaps you can make the argument that doesn't really matter. Isn't that just some kind of intellectual kind of thing that doesn't really matter? You mentioned Hawkins before. One thing that really stood out to me from this wonderful book, letting Go, is that letting go of negative emotions, which is why I picked it up and I kind of felt it had some very interesting techniques. And Hawkins was talking about that you can go to a therapist and they will explore together with you why you have those emotions. And he says that's probably fine, but it could also. But isn't the purpose of you to let go of those emotions more than necessarily figuring out why you have them in the first place? And perhaps that can lead to some resentment and anger, perhaps even something you didn't have in the first place. Isn't it more personal letting go of those negative emotions? And so this is my long winded way of saying you should really listen to William. That's the first thing, one of the.
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Great morals of life.
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Yeah. Figuring out when you need to have the facts and when you don't need to have the facts. And it's very different circumstances where it's important. I'm going to throw it back over to you. William, I know there was a lot of different directions.
- [36:35]
A
There's a lot there. I mean, just to pick up the point you mentioned about Hawkins a moment ago, one of the things that we've discussed before that had a very powerful practical impact on me is that Hawkins was saying once you start to unpack the reasons behind certain negative emotions or thought patterns you might have, it just generates millions of other thoughts. And he had the biggest psychiatric practice in New York, so he was very well versed in this area. But he said it's better just to. It's more effective sometimes just to. To sit with the emotion, abide with it, see where it's manifesting in your body. And at a certain point, if you apply this kind of radical non resistance while being aware of it, it will dissipate, the energy will dissipate. So you can actually sort of loosen the hold of that emotion just by being with it. And so it's not that talk therapy isn't really helpful or that medication isn't really helpful, but there's this other way of attacking the problem, which is simply to abide calmly without resisting the emotion. And he said that resistance is often the thing that keeps the negative emotion going. And so I find this a lot that in practical terms, if I'm upset or anxious about something, just to sit there and be with the emotion and to look at it and to think, well, it doesn't really have any solidity to it. If you look at the essence of your anger or your upset, you don't, you know, it doesn't really have, you know, it's more like a sort of a cloud that floats through, and sometimes it's a really thick black cloud, and sometimes it's kind of a gray cloud, and sometimes it's sort of a little wispy cloud, but then it just kind of passes eventually. And so I don't know. So it gets at this idea I think that we've been discussing, which is that there are so many different ways of viewing the same thing, and they're all valid, so many different approaches. And so I think sometimes when you meet someone and they're super excited about their particular insight into something and they really want to ram it down your throat, and you just really don't want to listen to it because it's like, well, it's just not what I'm interested in. There's a sort of insensitivity and a dogmatism to it. And I mean, if you think all those years ago, I wrote about this in Ritual Wiser happier about when I went to visit Sir John Templeton in the Bahamas when I was probably 30 years old. So this is like 27 years ago. I was a young father, I just had my son Henry and I go visit this old sage who's in his 80s. And really I had sort of more or less played a trick on him. It was like a sort of bait and switch where I had said, I want to talk about this whole campaign of yours to increase spiritual wealth a thousandfold. I think it was where he was looking at how to prove empirically, for example, that these virtues like kindness, love, empathy and the like actually work. And he was sponsoring research at Harvard on whether prayer works. And I really just wanted to talk to him about investing and how to get rich. But I sort of got the interview by saying that I was really interested in the spiritual stuff. And you know, the joke is like at a certain point he got really frustrated with me because I just wasn't interested in the spiritual stuff. And then 20 years later when I was writing about him in Richer, Wiser, Happier, I'm like, oh my God. All of the stuff that he was trying to teach me that I was just so obtuse and so close minded that I just couldn't listen to. If only I'd been more open to him. And I think there was probably a point, there was one point where he said to me, you're going to have a very. Because I've looked over my notes from those interviews, he said, I predict you're going to have very successful career. It was very encouraging to this young whipper snapper. But it was also really clear that he was kind of irritated by me. And at a certain point I think he kind of washed his hands of me. And he's like, I'm just not going to get through to this numbskull. And he got a little frustrated. And so, I don't know, it's like a real reminder to me that I probably do the same thing as well where I'm foisting my views on other people who just, just aren't interested. And I. And I don't know, I think part of the challenge is to meet people where they are, right? When you meet someone who has different opinions or different values to tread lightly enough and take yourself unseriously enough that you can meet them where they are rather than be like, I'm going to take this opportunity to teach this person and set them straight, you know, I don't know. I think in some ways this is one of the great skills that people learn as interviewers is in a sense to hollow out the ego a little bit and just be curious about how the person they're interviewing views the world and to try to see the world through their eyes. I think that's been a very helpful thing for me to be forced to do over many years. And I don't know. I was talking to Arnold Vandenberg the other day and we were chatting about his wonderful wife Eileen. And he was saying that sometimes he would meet someone. If he had an important meeting with someone, say if he was doing business with them, he would arrange to go for dinner and he would invite Eileen because Eileen has incredible intuition about people. And he would say to her, how on earth did you pick that up about them? And she said, well, you're always talking, you don't listen. And she said if you just listened, you would hear she said what she believed and you just didn't listen to it. And so at our best, we're much better at listening, but I tend to talk too much. So I'm sorry. So with that, I should close my mouth.
- [42:33]
B
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [42:36]
C
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D
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C
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- [46:26]
B
Back to the show. I love listening to you William and I should also just say before we started the conversation we always talk a bit back and forth, this time about Italian food, but we also sometimes talk about other things, and we talked about how to get our. How to be in the right mindset. And for me, it's very much listening to you. I don't know. You make me go strong. And so I want to say thank you. And I'm going to make a very harsh transition into something else here, which is absolutely terrible. After I praised you, I'm going to talk about colonialism. And I was like, I'm sort of typing up a nose. He's like, I can't go from how wise William is and then talk about colonialism. It has completely the wrong connotation here. It goes to the point that you were saying before William bowed, imposing your views on other people. I don't necessarily talk about you, you as more like a universal you, which I certainly do from time to time, which I shouldn't. And if you look back in history books, even something as terrible as colonialism, the conqueror typically believed that they were just more civilized and they were just more enlightened, and they were spreading whatever kind of thing that they were now spreading, and they were actually doing for the greater good with those costs that came with that. And you don't perhaps see that to the same extent today as you have in the past, but the principle is probably still there where most of us, perhaps all of us, like to think that we are more evolved than others, and in a clumsy attempt to help another person, we tell them how right we are and how wrong they are and how they. How they live their lives. And I. It's probably a very natural thing. And one thing that I also mentioned to William here, this is going to, like, I'm going to relabel this episode just being called Praising William. That's going to be the title.
- [48:30]
A
One of the things is three listeners.
- [48:35]
B
Because I heard you say this thing about this is beneath me. And I heard you say that, you know, tell it to yourself 500 times a day.
- [48:45]
A
Yeah, I was quoting something that Charlie Munger said. What Munger said is, it's very helpful at certain times just to say. To look at certain types of behavior and just say, no, this is beneath me. And so it's a different standard, for example, than saying, this is legal. Right. So there are things that you can do in the investment business if you're managing people's money that are totally legal, but they're sort of unethical. I remember Jason Zweig once on the podcast saying to me that you should have the would I sell this to my mother test. Why would you Create a product that was so lousy, that was sort of overpriced and was bound to perform badly or mediocrely, and sell it to shareholders when you wouldn't want your own mother to own it. And so Munger had this great standard where he would just say that in the military, for example, you could say, this is conduct unbecoming of an officer. And so I think that's a lovely idea, that instead of saying, well, the measure of whether this behavior is okay or not is that it's legal, is to say, no, there's certain types of behavior that's actually just beneath me. And so I was really stealing an idea from Charlie. I mean, it's a very practical thing just to say, no, no, this is beneath me. But at the same time, I need to be honest about the fact that I constantly fail to live up to that standard. But it's helpful to know that that's an important guiding principle, even if we fail to live up to it.
- [50:18]
B
Well said, William. Thank you. To me, it's very powerful. As you also mentioned, I fail this all the time. Whenever I'm in a good state of mind, there are a lot of things where I can say, this is beneath me, and then I won't do it. But then life happens, and I don't always think I can take the high road, even though it always makes me feel bad afterwards. I want to transition to the second section here of the episode today, and it's a section about money and happiness. And it's something that we have discussed a few times together. William and I found a new angle this time, or so I hope. But I was reading the Economist the other day, and they were referencing a study done by Matthew Killingsworth from University of Pennsylvania, and it was a study about money and happiness. And I was like, I'm speaking with William here soon. We have to talk about this study. And in a way, there was not something new about the study. And then in a way, there was. So there's this more famous study done by Kahneman and deaton back in 2010. It's cited a gazillion times. And it's about, if you make more than $75,000, extra money has no impact on unhappiness. And of course, you have to take those 75,000 with a grain of salt. First of all, it's in $2010, so it's closer to 110 today. Kahneman and Deaton were also the first to say, look, this is different if you're based in New York than perhaps in more rural area. But by and large that was what they found. And what Killingsworth found was that aside from a subset of around 20% of the sample size, aside from them where it didn't make any difference to generate high income for the remaining 80%, it actually did make a difference. And I should say it wasn't because those 20% were already super, super rich. It was because they had other issues, deep rooted psychological issues, relationship life challenges they just money couldn't solve. It was not because they were the richest or because they were the poorest. That was just it really. And really what stood out to me because I went back and actually read the study after it was referenced in the Economist, was that they collected a ton of data. This was all U.S. data. And they collected a ton of data and they found that household income up to $500,000 bought you more happiness. And the same dollar didn't give you the same amount of happiness. It was different if you had 400,000 than if you had $100,000. But more money still made you happier. And I should also say that they only had up to $500,000. So it looked like if you look at the coefficient in the study, that it's probably a trend that's going to continue. But it's very difficult to survey Bezos and Musk and have 10,000 of them and create a regression based on that. So they had data up to 500,000. It was very, very strong evidence that more money brought more happiness. And what was also interesting was that they measured it as positive emotions and negative emotions. And the more money you made, the more positive emotions you had and also the less negative emotions you had and the higher up you went, yes, you still got more positive emotions, but it was very much about avoiding negative emotions above a certain threshold. And so to me, it's just every time I read something about money and happiness in itself, it's interesting. And it really made me think about this wonderful quote from Upton Sinclair where he talks about that it's really, really hard for a man to believe in something whenever his compensation depends on not understanding it. And I was like, I kind of didn't want to believe in this study. I kind of felt it left me sort of like in a negative state of mind. Because a lot of the things we talk about here on this show is that more money doesn't buy more happiness. And here we are where they started saying money buys happiness. It was a bit like, ugh, I didn't really like that. And I Remember, whenever I started on this journey a long time ago, and again, the Kahneman study was referenced so many times. The $110,000 seemed so plausible. It seemed achievable for so many people, including myself, whereas the $500,000 just seemed a lot harder, probably also for a lot of listeners tuning into this episode here. And so I was going a bit back and forth on how to best cover this study, because I don't really know if this is good news. So I think I want to throw it over to you here, William. How do you look at a study like this? I mean, intuitively, whenever I see something, I don't want to believe it. I'm thinking about. Because I know how these papers are being published, from having a background in academia. I'm like the sample size, the collected of the wrong data. It was massaged. I have all kinds of excuses why this can't be true. But do you believe that money buys happiness above a certain cap, whether it's 110,000 or 500,000 or whatever it is? Is it a universal truth, even that money buys happiness? And how can we turn this into something positive for our listeners?
- [55:30]
A
I'm generally very wary of studies like this. I share your skepticism. I think they always have an element of truth in them. There's sort of truthiness about them. But when I was writing the epilogue of my book, which is really about this subject, of what money can and can't do for you, I really wanted to base it on my own observations of this sort of very extraordinary subset of people that I've spent much of the last 20, 30 years interviewing, these very, very rich people who hit the jackpot and so fulfilled the fantasy of so many other people. And because I've had a lot of access to them and I became friends with many of them, and I spent a lot of time asking them impertinent questions, and I observed their lives. I could really see what the money did do for them, what it didn't do for them, what was more important. And so my approach is not data driven. It's much more anecdotal. But it's rooted in a weird degree of access to people who've made enormous amounts of money. And so I tried to give a kind of nuanced view where I didn't just come in and say, no, no, money doesn't matter. There are all these other things that matter. Part of what I was trying to say is money does matter. And you can see, but only up to a point, but you could see for example, from my interviews with someone like Howard Marks, he said, yeah, look, being rich, and Howard is a multibillionaire, so he's way beyond the sort of levels that we're talking about here in this study. But he said, wealth has made me less afraid. He said, there's a degree of freedom and security that's come from having money. And at a lesser level, but also a very successful person. Someone like Irving Kahn, who I interviewed when he was 108, probably the last interview that he did before he passed away at the age of 109. He had built this very successful investment career, really starting in 1929, I think it was during the crash of 29, the Great Depression he had started. And he'd been the teaching assistant to Ben Graham at Columbia. And I interviewed his son and grandson, his son Thomas, both of whom worked with him. And Thomas, his son, said that when his father died, they had to go through his portfolio and his investments. And he said he basically had, if I remember rightly, something like a 50% cash reserve. And he said it wasn't optimal. But he said he was never really trying to maximize his returns. He wanted to spend his life solving problems by managing money and studying and learning. And he wasn't really interested in spending much. He lived massively within his means. The only thing he would spend money on was books, basically. And he much preferred eating hamburgers to going to a really fancy restaurant. And Thomas said to me that there was a. There was a great gift to that. He said, if the market goes down, so what, you can still eat hamburger. And he said, it's a really nice thing to be able to say, sure, I'm unhappy, but I'm not on the ledge like these other people. And so that, to me was really important was the sense that money gives you peace of mind to some degree, that having a cash reserve, living within your means, not being overstretched, not having excessive debt or leverage, not having negative cash flow does do something for you. I remember Tom Gaynor once saying to me, if you're living within your means, you're already rich. So I wrote this paragraph in my book that I'm actually going to quote because not as part of the let's praise William thing, but because I think it's nuanced in my. Trying to sum up what I'd learned about the security that you get from money, why it does matter. And so I wrote, money can provide an invaluable cushion, a lifeline, a critical defense against uncertainty and misfortune, but it's not enough. We also need the mental fortitude and resilience to weather those storms and rebuild in their wake. For most of us, the quality of our lives depends less on our finances than on inner attributes such as equanimity, acceptance, hope, trust, appreciation, and determined optimism. As John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, which he dictated after he went blind, the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. And I think that gets at a bunch of things right. Money is powerful as this cushion against uncertainty. And I found that in my own life that as I've made more money and lived within my means, I do think it's quietened a good deal of my anxiety about uncertainty. And even as I say that, I feel a little stab of pain in my lower back, which reminds my body, telling me that I don't much like uncertainty. And so having savings, not living beyond my means is very, very valuable. But you don't need a fortune to do that. You need positive cash flow and you need. I mean, it's interesting that you don't have a car, for example, right? I mean, or that you live in a condo. And likewise for me, when I bought my new car probably nine months ago, I bought it with cash. And it's a Hyundai Tucson. It's not super fancy, but it's kind of nice. And it has all the trappings, you know, really good stereo, Bose stereo with like 12 speakers or whatever, and it's got a nice sunroof that, you know, is the whole roof. But I literally, I thought I was going to treat it well and stuff. And I literally, I haven't got it washed since I bought it. It's absolutely filthy. And I'm kind of playing this game of chicken where I hope someone in my family will get embarrassed enough to take it to get washed at some point or there'll be a big enough storm that will clean it. So I don't, you know, I don't really care about how elegant it looks, but I really like the fact that it's got great stereo. And so some of it, I think is, for me, it's actually more valuable to have a less expensive car. I don't want to be driving a Ferrari or whatever and be pushing the envelope and have extra stress and have to work for people I don't like because I'm living beyond my means. And so there's a degree of self awareness I think we have to have when we look at our finances to say what's actually important to me. And for me, I feel philosophically like we live in a very, very uncertain world and anything can happen. And my family and my wife's family both had to flee from different countries at different points over the last century. And I want to have optionality. I'm not saying that's going to happen again, but I want to have optionality that comes from having a diversified portfolio, not having much debt. I mean, I have ridiculously little debt, no leverage, and the ability to turn away projects that I don't want to do with people I don't want to work for, that's immensely valuable to me. So there are a few things we're getting at here that the money does give you, right? So, protection from stress to some degree, some degree of practical protection against uncertainty, some ability to live in an independent way, to live in a way that's aligned with your own values and priorities and interests. Those things are all really, really valuable as far as I'm concerned. But as that paragraph that I read to you suggests, you can still be living in hell while having a tremendous amount of money, because your mind can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven. And so the way that you look at your life, your ability to look at life with a sense of appreciation or trust or hope or determined optimism, or your ability to build equanimity and acceptance is going to have a huge impact on your lived experience. So I think this is one of the things that, having established in that epilogue, okay, yeah, money does matter. Here's what it gives you. It gives you certain things. Then I'm trying to move beyond that and say, but it only gives you so much. Because if you don't have control over your inner landscape, or if you're not working to tame your inner landscape in some way, you can have as much money as you want, you're still going to be miserable. And I know people personally who've made enormous amounts of money and been suicidal. And that's very profound. Once you see friends of yours who are immensely successful, who have mansions and beautiful cars and can always fly first class and stuff like that, and yet they've been suicidal, that's a very powerful indication to me that even though I want to take care of my external conditions, I want to take care of my finances, because it gives me an ability to ease up a little. Not that I do put an ability to take time off when I want to, or at least just read as much as I want to, which is a real gift for me, even though it's valuable in practical terms, to have money. If I don't cultivate some kind of inner equanimity, I'm toast. That's been a hugely important pursuit for me, is just to say, let me continue to focus on building happiness, on building equanimity. And I see that very, very vividly again and again with the people I interview, that they're not protected from the pain of having sick kids, God forbid, or a wife who doesn't love them or who's sick of them or doesn't understand them, or who's just mad at them because they spend all of their time working and are just too obsessive about their work and physical problems that they have. So for me, this whole area of study has kind of convinced me, yes, I need to take care of my finances and live a certain way that gives me independence, but I better really focus on this inner landscape. And so one other twist to this that I get from just observing the people who are happiest of the investors that I know, as I mentioned the other day, I had this wonderful conversation with Arnold Vandenberg the other day, who in so many ways embodies what I regard as a really successful and abundant life. He's 86 years old, and he's so joyful and so full of energy and just learning constantly and constantly wanting to share what he's learning. And so we had this long conversation. We actually spoke twice this week because he's coming to be a guest in a week or so at a session I'm doing with my masterclass, where, as you know, I have this group of like 20 people who I meet with once a month. I bet, launch another one. Sorry, I don't want to sound like I'm advertising this, but feel free to write into us if you want to join. And so Arnold is coming to the last session because it's about the epilogue of the book. And so he arranged to have a kind of pre interview the other day so that we could talk about what we'll discuss. And then he kind of couldn't help himself and called the day before as well. So we ended up having two conversations about two hours over two days. And at one point, at the end of, I think I counted, it was something like an hour and 26 minutes in, he says to me, and I'll give you an exact quote, he says to me, I appreciate your time, because it's always important for me to be able to leave people with something they can use in life. And then he says, you know, if you have Any thoughts between now and the time of this class in a week? Like, don't. Don't hesitate to text me or call me or email me. And he says, because I want to do everything I can to be ready. And then he says, thank you so much for your time. And so here's this guy who all he's doing is giving his time to help 20 total strangers who are. Some of them are money managers, some of them are CEOs, very successful people. And he's saying, it's always important for me to be able to leave people with something they can use in life. And I just thought that was such an incredibly powerful clue as to what actually makes for a really rich and abundant life, that here he is just trying to make life better for other people. And so I think when I look at this whole question of money and happiness, I'm really struck again and again by the fact that the happiest money managers I know have some purpose beyond their own ego, where they're looking out for other people, lifting up other people, whether it's Mohnish Pabrai with Dakshana, or it's Tom Gaynor with all the philanthropic stuff he does. Or. I had this wonderful email exchange with Nick Sleep a while back where he said to me, you really have to invert and say, well, what was the money even for? And he said, most people are just so obsessed with making money, but they're not asking. And then what? And the exact quote he gave me in this email that he sent me is he said, what's the real point of generating excess wealth? And he said, to do something for your fellow man. So again and again, you're looking at these people like Arnold Vandenberg or Nick Sleep or Tom Gaynor, and you're like, why are they happier than most of the money managers I know? And I think it's because they're taking what they've learned and what they've achieved, and they're using it to share something with other people, whether it's their money, their wisdom, their time. And I just. I want to pound into myself this lesson from looking at Arnold. I. It was my birthday a couple of days ago, and I was telling my daughter Madeline about this conversation with Arnold and how he thanked me for the. You know, like, he's giving me his time for nothing. And he thanks me for. For my time. And Madeline, my daughter, said, so the basic lesson is we should all just be more like Arnold. And I'm like, yeah, kind of. So I. I don't know, I think as we try to think about how to construct, like really happy, really abundant lives, it's like, don't ignore the financial, the financial part, the money matters because it's going to give you optionality freedom, a little bit less worry, a little bit more of an ability to live in a way that's true to you, but don't become obsessed by it, don't be controlled by it, and understand that a lot of what it gives you is this ability to share more with others, the freedom to decide how to use your time and whether to use it just for yourself or to lift up other people. And then that other lesson, just about making sure that you're doing something that's going to give you greater equanimity and resilience and hopefulness and optimism and the like. So never to forget the importance of actually having practices that cultivate and nurture your inner landscape.
- [71:09]
B
Thank you for sharing your reflections, William. One thing I would like to underline here in defense of Matthew Killingworth, who I've never heard about before and never met. But I also think it's important to think about whenever we talk about money and happiness. And again, I don't know what a specific threshold is, but the people that William is referring to here are very, very wealthy people and probably well above that threshold where more money makes you happier. Perhaps there is something to be said about $200,000 making you happy on $100,000 because it alleviates you from, from some worries depending on your financial situation. One of the things that's often being highlighted whenever you hear about the most successful people is that they don't have good relationships, which I don't have any qualms with. I think that's probably very true. And they say that the world belongs to the discontented, and it's probably sour grapes. But I do believe that some of the most successful people to have that drive, they have to have something that they're not happy about. Again, it just sounds kind of sounds like sour grapes whenever I say that. But it is a very small subset of people that we're talking about here. Of course, I was thinking about this recently as last night I was speaking with a good friend. He's based in British Columbia. And I met this friend on four different continents. And we talked about where we're going to meet next and we talked about meeting halfway. And apparently if you, if one is based in Denmark and the other in British Columbia, it's Halifax. And the reason why we wanted to do that was because I Could bring my wife and she always, like, she had this fascination with Anne of Green Gables and we want to visit Prince Edward island and so on and so forth. And we have this sort of like standing arrangement. If I'm on his continent or he's on my continent, we always find a way to meet up. And so you don't need to be a multi billionaire to do that. But it still requires money, it still requires time to do that. And sometimes, at least in my case, some of the kindred spirits in my life are just not nearby. Some of them just live on different continents. And money does make that a little bit easier, which again, doesn't require a billion dollars. In being obsessed with work, you know, I very often get asked about money and happiness, and I don't necessarily think I'm very qualified to give advice on either. But one counter question I often ask is, what do you optimize for? Whenever I get asked a question, it could be about money, it could be about happiness. But if they say I optimize for happiness, which I think it's perfectly legitimate, I would very often say that about what do you optimize for? But it's really, really difficult to optimize for this metric called happiness because it's a bit like sleep. At least that's sort of how I'm looking at it. It's almost like an inactive state of mind. You know, it's not like an active state like running. Like, you can't just put on your running shoes and then run. You can't just say, 1, 2, 3, sleep. But you can facilitate your environment. Like, I don't mean shut the drapes and, you know, be in a quiet room or make sure that you're tired, whatever. Like, you can facilitate circumstances for you to go to sleep. And I think you could say the same thing about happiness. You can't be, 1, 2, 3, I'm happy. But you can facilitate different things that everything else equal increases your odds of being happy, which again, is different from person to person. You know, it's another observation is that the thing that makes you happy doesn't always make you happy while you do them. There are these studies, and again, I'm referring to studies which is probably flawed and all that good stuff. But whenever you ask parents how happy they are, whenever they spend time with their kids, especially whenever they're very young, they're quite unhappy, but they find it deeply meaningful. And whenever they're looking back at that time, it makes them happy. But while they're doing it, it's doesn't seem to be a happy experience. And another angle I also wanted to make sure that I mentioned is that I've often been thinking about why rich people do things they don't need to do for money they don't need. And whenever you hear it spelled out like that, I'm sure it sounds pretty stupid. Especially if you don't believe in this study about more money makes you happier. And perhaps it's silly and perhaps it's not. If you are the world's best surgeon, you almost certainly have to do things you don't want to do to continue winning. And so if you don't think about how steady your hands are, how rested you are, how prepared you are before a big operation, you're just not going to win. Winning as in being the best surgeon. And so perhaps you would rather go out and celebrate with your friends the night before, but that is just not the recipe for success. And I remember that you referenced this then 83 year old money manager and he loved the game of raising capital for a fund. And I remember the first time I heard that, I was like, hey dude, shouldn't you be out, I don't know, playing with your grandkids or great grandkids, why? And obviously this is, or not obviously, but this is a gentleman who, who certainly doesn't need the money, you know, I was like, why do you do that? But again, perhaps that is, that is the best version of himself. That is what makes him happy. He likes to compete. That is his scorecard. I don't know, I just wanted to tell one, one personal anecdote here before I throw it over to you, William. So I got married to my wonderful wife Sophie almost 15 years ago. And the budget we had for that wedding was less than a thousand dollars. I should say that included the gown and also my suit. I didn't own a suit whenever we got married and my wife was like, you have to have a suit not only to get married then, but also you're going to do job interviews. We were still students at the time, so she's like, you have to apply for jobs and you sort of need nice clothes. We gotta buy a suit. All of that was for less than $1,000. It included food we cooked ourselves, including for the sakersva, which was a friend of a friend, so we didn't pay anything. And I sometimes think back on what if we got married again, having a bit more money today. And I don't think I would change a thing about that wedding. Like that was so Much the wedding that was perfect for us. And perhaps it's just us, we're cheap. I don't know. I've met a lot of people who said that they had this grand wedding, it was the best day of their life and it was just amazing. And that's probably right for them. But I want to throw it over to you one more time, William. It's such a fascinating topic.
- [78:18]
A
Well, I'll just say there are certain things that I've spent money on that have been really, really enriching. And this stuff is very idiosyncratic. But I would say the best thing that I've spent money on in the last year or so is I have this study at home where I work most of the time. And I got this really great master craftsman to come in and build floor to ceiling bookshelves. And I have a lot of books, as you can imagine. And there's even like a little nook in. There's wall to wall bookshelves on either side of this armchair that I have. And there's even a nook that he built into the bookshelf at my request where I can put my coffee mug because, you know, like Balzac, I drink rivers of coffee. And at least for now, until I'm told that I have to stop. And so that has proved to really surprise me how much my life is better because I'm surrounded by books, which I absolutely love. And my study is now much more orderly, which is really important for me because my, my mind is kind of messy and all over the place. And so to have this very tidy study that's full of beautiful things, that's full of books, is really helpful. And say to the left of my armchair, there's just an enormous kind of wall of floor to ceiling books on one set of maybe four shelves, that's all kind of kabbalistic books. And then on another shelf to my right, it's pretty much all Tibetan Buddhist books. And then there's a sort of business and investing site that's not nearly as big. And just the fact that I can sit there and kind of dip into all of these Tibetan Buddhist books, which I spend a lot of time reading, has been really helpful and really clarifying because usually I'm so overwhelmed with books because I buy so many books. I'm also given a lot of books that I can never find what it is that I was reading or wanted to read. And so having a little bit more order in my study and to be surrounded by this thing that I love and that it's beautifully made and that it's bespoke. That's been a great source of joy. It's actually tangibly improved my life. And it's funny, I was thinking this morning, there's a famous quote from Virginia Woolf where she talks about the importance of having a room of one's own. And I think it was £50 a year or something like that, or £500 a year to. So that you would have the independence to think and write. And she was an incredible writer. Books like Mrs. Dalloway are amazing books, novels that she wrote. And so, I don't know, that's been something where actually to create an environment in which I can think and read peacefully has made a tangible difference to my life. And then I would say I have this habit of just buying any book that I'm vaguely interested in that might be useful at some point. I don't care if I'm going to read it now, many years from now, or not at all. If it sounds like something that could be rich and helpful for me at some point, I'll just buy it and sort of set it aside and have it somewhere there sort of waiting for me. And I don't have any limits on what I spend on books. So, yeah, I've been reading a great novel that I've been listening to on Audible lately, and I'm like, I really need to write in the book because there are some profound things. And so then I buy the hardcover, which I haven't yet opened. And so I would say just deciding what kind of spending actually really enriches your life is quite valuable. And so for me to stay in beautiful hotels is something I really like. I'm kind of a hotel snob. I really like a good hotel. I really like some expensive clothes. I suck of really expensive shirts made in London and things like that that are really high quality and are well made. So it's not like I've taken a vow of poverty where I'm like, oh, I'm so evolved. I'm just not going to care about physical objects. But I'm pretty conscious about trying not to spend money on things so that it'll impress other people. I don't want to have a fancy car just so people will think I'm successful. And I'm not knocking people who do. And there are certain people who just love a really beautifully made car, and that's totally fine. But I think giving away books also, I often buy books for people and sometimes they're quite expensive books. I'm not saying in a self laudatory way, I'm just saying and you often give books, which is really lovely. So I think part of it is spending money on other people is really pleasurable. And then I recently went to Anguilla with my wife and said a really nice hotel. And I don't really skimp on the size of the room or stuff like that. Like it's, it's a good experience and if it's like a couple hundred dollars extra a night, I'll spend the extra money. And so those are some of the things where I think as money has become less of an issue and it's not like I have total financial freedom and like I'm done, I don't have to worry. But as money has become less of an issue since my kids got through college and stuff like that, I, I like just not having to worry about what I spend on. I mean I, I like the feeling of going into, you know, for my birthday the other day, we didn't go to a super expensive restaurant. I didn't really want to go to a super expensive restaurant. We went to a nice restaurant and I realized afterwards I didn't even look at the bill, I just sort of paid it, which I know is irresponsible, but like I like not having to worry about it, not having to think about it, not having to, to count the pen is. And so in some way it's about having the freedom not to think too much about it, it's not being controlled by it. And it's also about the freedom to give away money at times and not have to worry too much about that. And I think that's a really lovely thing as well. So in a way, and again, I'm not trying to say this in a self praising way, but one of the most joyful things I did in the last few months was, was I give quite a lot of speeches and I tend to get paid a decent amount to give speeches. And I went into a friend's investment firm and gave a speech and agreed with him in advance that he would give the money to a particular charity that both of us really value. And it's pretty idiosyncratic charity cause but it's something that both of us valued. And I felt such a deep sense of joy at the end of that session together. Where so often in my life I'm thinking, where should I be? What should I be doing? Why am I doing the wrong thing? There's a sense of sort of misalignment or I better be onto the next thing and why am I wasting my time with this thing? And I felt this total sense of peace and this total sense of there is nothing more I could have in this moment than this joy of being with this lovely guy who's a great investor, who I really like, who I'm becoming friends with. I've just given my time for free to this cause I like. And it was such a. I don't know, again, I'm really not trying to say it in a self praising kind of way, but it was a real sign that often the thing we're looking for that makes us happy is not the big score financially. It's like a sense of contribution, a sense of friendship, the relationship, sharing knowledge, sharing wisdom, sharing our time. And so I think it's just about. And that doesn't mean I'm going to speak for free a great deal, but the ability, the freedom to make that decision over when to give your time or your money or your energy away is a really wonderful thing. And I think when it came more from a sort of flight or flight kind of mindset, when I really was like, oh my God, my industry journalism is collapsing and what if I can't make money and what if I can't support my kids? God forbid, what would I do? That was a horrible place to come from. And so I think so much of working hard and saving and living within your means is about getting yourself the peace of mind and latitude so that you can relax a little bit, relax that tension and share your money, help other people, not have to spend all of your time working, not have to count every penny. And so a friend of mine, Matt Ludmo, who I'll have on the podcast at one point, talks about this whole process of ease up, of being successful enough, taking care of your finances enough so that you can ease up so there's more spaciousness in your life. And I'm not a huge distance completed in that journey, in that process, but that's a big part of what I'm trying to do is to create more spaciousness. And so I have time to go meditate, I have time to go on a retreat, I have time to go on vacation with my wife. And I still work too hard and the like, but having that spaciousness to buy things that you want, but without the flash, without it being like, oh, look at me, and it's all about ego. And I'm not knocking people who are driven by that stuff, but that becomes less important, I think. So I hope that at least is a discussion that prompts people who are listening to think about how they can spend their money in a way that really enriches their life and what it is they're saving for and why it is it's worth working hard and living within your means and why it's worth compounding. Is that helpful at all? Does that resonate with you at all?
- [88:21]
B
Stig I definitely think it, it resonates and I can just say you're very kind here the other day and sent me a photo of your library. It's so beautiful. Like it just, it almost it calmed me down just to look at the photo. And of course it was like it was you sitting among all of those books and with a cup of coffee and it's just like that was just so wonderful. It just really made my day. It was hard not to smile.
- [88:46]
A
I want to get to a point where I have a desk that's full of lots of different post its that I once in a while take out that used to be on my wall that I would look at more regularly before it got painted. And there was one that just said just this. And it's a reminder just to be in that moment and to be fully present and fully awake in that moment. And there are times where I'm in my study where I'm a little bit less stressed and a little more relaxed or I'm reading and I got a cup of coffee and I'm surrounded by books. I'm like just this. This is everything I want. Maybe my dog comes and sits on my lap and I don't know that feeling. And it's not just about resting and being like I'm done with my work and so I just need spare time so I can just read or what. It's like it's that feeling of I have everything I need already to be happy. And even though I'm trying to build more and compound and share more and all of that, just the sense of being complete and abundant in that moment is so precious. And I don't feel that that often because I think when you feel anxious and stressed, it's tipping you into the next moment, into the future. So you're always grasping something more. You never feel fully complete. And so it's difficult because to achieve stuff and get to a point where you have total financial security and independence and freedom, you need to work pretty hard and be pretty intense often, which makes it difficult to be fully present. And so you need both capabilities. You need to be, you need to be moving and at the same time you need to be able to find peace and freedom. And so in a way that's become a much greater part of what I emphasize these days. And so having a room of my own that I love that has a beautiful carpet and a beautiful desk that I inherited from my great Aunt Lila that is kind of cracked and rickety but full of character, and having pictures by an old friend of mine, Carl, who died but who is a great artist next to my desk and I have a picture of Mount Fuji that my son Henry sold to me that he painted, and a picture of a wolf and a boy that my daughter painted that is on my bookshelf. And so to be surrounded by physical objects that you love and to have that kind of peace and clarity in there and that sense of order and to be surrounded by books in the sense there's so much wisdom in these books, there's something kind of sacred and holy and very grounding about that. And so that's something that spending can give you. But it's not about the external stuff, the flash. It's more that internal sense of, oh, this makes me feel more grounded and more at peace.
- [91:57]
B
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [92:00]
D
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- [95:24]
B
All right, back to the show. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing, William. And just as the last point I have before we transition to the book section of the episode, I just wanted to say that another wonderful thing that money can buy, but also where there's a cap, is that I'll be seeing you in London here in a few weeks. So it certainly doesn't require millions and millions of dollars to make that trip. But time and money can sometimes be helpful in terms of hanging out with some wonderful people. And so yeah, thank you for taking the time to cross the pond.
- [96:01]
A
Yeah, and again, that's the masterclass group that's just finishing and they're coming to London and My friend Manish, who's in the group, has organized this amazing weekend for everyone and has taken it upon himself to take everyone out for dinner one night. To be able to afford to take everyone out for dinner and to be that generous and to spend the time organizing it, that's an incredible. Manish is a very evolved guy. And so I think that's the other thing is realizing the friendship and the company. Hanging out with people you like is itself a really powerful form of abundance. And so it's not the amount of money in your bank account that really is the key. It's not like, who dies with the most wins. It's the fact that he's using his time and success to create a beautiful experience for other people. And the people are flying from, you know, around the world to come meet us in London, and you're coming. That's a really wonderful thing. So I think all of this is pointing us towards stuff that we already kind of know about. The power of experiences, the power of friendship, the power of relationships, the power of being with friends along the path. And, yeah, it's helpful to observe this stuff and ask yourself, when was I happiest to notice these moments where, you know, your wedding. It wasn't the fact that it was flashy and had amazing champagnes or whatever, or that Sophie was wearing, like, a $10,000 ball gown or whatever that made the difference. And I had the same thing with my kids bar mitzvahs. I think I spent less than $1,000 on each of their bar mitzvahs, but they were very powerful for me. I spent much of the time crying. It was like such an emotional thing to see your kid at 12 in the case of a girl, 13 in the case of a boy, just sort of being celebrated by community and having people sing and having people give them blessings, and it was just really lovely. And yet there is a time to go to a really unbelievably expensive restaurant and pay a lot for a great meal. So I'm not trying to be sanctimonious about this stuff, but it's like my birthday dinner the other day was beautiful. Not because it was an amazingly expensive restaurant, but because my kids came and my wife came.
- [98:31]
B
Wonderful. William. I wanted to transition into the last section here of this episode and talking about books that has made us richer, wiser, and happier over the past quarter. Many people that I meet, they would say that they want to read more books but struggle to find time. And I know this is going to sound absolutely ridiculous, but I sometimes feel I have the opposite problem. I feel like sometimes I'm reading too many books. I don't know if that's a thing, but I felt for the longest time, or at least for some time, that I probably read too many books. So I tried something over the past quarter just to test myself, and that was to restrain myself from reading books. And I wanted to share some of my idiosyncratic findings from that. No, I have this weird thing, and this is gonna just sound terrible, so take it for what it is, but if I have eight unread books on my table, I've already planned the next five reading sessions and calculated how many pages per minute I'm going to read the next five times. And I know that's not necessarily how you do it, William. To me, it's more like. It's like breathing. I can't. It doesn't require energy for me to do that. It's just the way that I'm wired. And so I think for me not to buy books and have them unread in my condo is a bit like not having candy in the house for some people or, I don't know, go keto or vegan. It's sort of like a way for me to discipline myself. And I really wanted to see what would happen if I didn't have any unread books on my shelves. And especially also, whenever I make the decision, we're sort of like entering earnings season, which is always a lot of fun. I always just tells everyone how big of a geek I am. But it's sort of like what it is, because to me, at least, there's something magical about reading a 10k or 10q the minute after they're published. I know that's not the way you should act. It's just so much fun. It's like day after day, someone's going to give you a Christmas present. You're just unwrapping it. I mean, what can be more fun than reading financial reports? And so over the past quarter, I've read significantly fewer books. But my effective reading time has still stayed the same, which was also the intention. Then I wanted to see what would happen. What would I start reading if I allocate the same number of hours every day to reading, but not read new books? And one of the things is that you do more rereading, which is just. At least in my case, I found it very often to be better reading for the lack of better words. Sometimes I would read different bookshelves around in the house. Or in the condo. And then I would stand in front of it. And sometimes some books will call to me more than more than others. And so that's just a lot of fun to do that. And so I sort of want to go against my natural tendency to sort of devour books from A to C. We had this wonderful conversation. It was one of the first conversations we had, William, that we recorded. And it was about your superhuman, at least in my eyes, your superhuman skill to put a book down if you didn't like it, which to me was just really, really difficult. And so one thing I've learned has been to stop reading books you don't like. And that's difficult. What's even more important is what I call the walking debts. And so this is a term I borrowed from Silicon Valley. So you have these VC funded companies that are doing exceptionally well. And then it's very easy to know that that is what you should hold onto. And then there are some terrible companies that go bankrupt and it's also easy to relate to that because they're bankrupt. But then you sort of have the businesses in between, which is referred to as Walking Deads. So they might be spinning off a little bit of money, but it really takes a lot of your resources. You should really be focusing on the great companies. And that's sort of how I feel about a lot of the books that I read. The books are Walking Deads. I can't just put them down and be like, this is just terrible. But at the same time, they're not amazing books. And so one of the things I've been working on for the past quarter has been how do I let go of the Walking Deads? And so over the past quarter, I, for example, started reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. And I know this is like, I'm not supposed to say this, but to me that was kind of like a Walking Dead. So there's this epic 1200 page novel from 1867 that everyone praises. And it was quite an accomplishment. I know the rest of the world doesn't care, but for me it was quite an accomplishment for me to stop reading it. That is so much harder than completing it or not reading after the first page, actually start reading it seriously and then stop. That's really tricky. And so I did find time though to read a few books because I can't help myself. I wanted to highlight Dalio's book How Countries Go Broke. And ironically, I want to say, of the four major books that he has written is probably the Biggest, least good book of the four. It was still so good that I read it three times the first month, which actually is not a lot compared to the other books, but to me they're just amazing. And even if you're not interested in macro, but just more interested in the personal finance and achieving financial independence, which I know is something that would reason with a lot of listeners, I think you can still apply the same principles and avoid the same pitfalls. After all, countries are the aggregates of the citizens. If you are thinking, okay, so if that is the least good book out of the four major works, what's the best one? The Changing World Order. And I'm shameless going to say William's very first episode here on We Study Billionaires. That was that very book with Dalio. So I'm just seriously going to mention that.
- [104:11]
A
That was a scary interview. There was a moment where I was trying to remember to put the microphone in the right place and hit the button or something, and Ray Dalio said something like, well, you've done this a lot before. And I didn't have the heart to say no. This is my first. I mean, I've been interviewing people for 30 some years, but I didn't have the heart to say no. This is the first podcast episode I've ever done. I have no idea what I'm doing. And so I always think of Tim Ferriss saying that you should start by interviewing friends, so there's no pressure at all. I started, I think, with Ray Dalio, Tony Robbins, Howard Marks, Joe Greenblatt. It's like, oh, Bill Miller. It was like, it was very, very stressful.
- [104:53]
B
Yeah. I don't know if I told you this before, William. I actually watched the first part of that episode, what was pre recorded before he went live. I could see that. And I completely resonate with that. I'm not a very technical person. And I remember the first probably year at least whenever I started the podcast and I had friends and family asking me, oh, so are you nervous whenever you're going to interview this? EBES was like, yes, but it's because I'm nervous about the tech not working. It's not about speaking with the person. I'm so bad with tech. And so I could sense that with you there's a different kind of anxiety about I'm doing an interview, but then also I don't really know what's going to happen whenever you press record. And I know to a lot of people it seems like the easiest thing ever. To me, I was using a piece of equipment for a year before I realized it didn't work. That's how bad I am with tech.
- [105:46]
A
I get stressed about this stuff. So, anyway, other books that you are reading, beyond Dalio, is there anything else that's had a profound impact on you?
- [105:56]
B
I think I would very often read books about personal growth in whatever kind of direction that would take me. But I think what I would highlight here is another format that I tried, which was something. I should probably explain what the format was. So I met a good friend in the Mastermind community, and so we organically tried a format where we would just Send each other 10 to 15 minutes Voice messages about how to have a richer, wiser, and happier life. And that was fun. We probably did that for a few weeks. And it basically just started with him sending me a WhatsApp message saying, what's going on? Just like 10 seconds, something like that. And then, of course, I can't just respond in 10 seconds. I probably responded like 15 minutes or whatever, because he was like, what's going on? Couldn't help myself telling you what was going on. It was really an interesting way of having a conversation. And I don't know if that's just the way that I'm wired and the way he was wired, I don't know. But the idea of talking about small things, but also some big things, and then reflect on that. Have a day to reflect on it and then go for a walk, still reflect on it, perhaps listen to the. To the voice message again, and then send another. I never thought about communication that way, but it was actually quite interesting. I absolutely love the conversations that we have, William, and I think it's very powerful. We would. Typically on a day like this, we would talk for three hours, and that would be very difficult to do every day. And it has its own dynamic to it. Whenever you have a conversation for three hours, and then it will have a very different dynamic. If you're meeting up with someone for coffee and you meet twice a year, you have a very different dynamic with someone you would see, perhaps someone you're sharing your office with, which is every day. But then it's not as formal, and it's like. So it was a very different dynamic. It was a lot of fun. And so another thing I've been thinking about is this idea of whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that you speak with people who are similar to you. And I've hear some very, very smart people tell me that diversity is good, and it's good if you look at things very differently. And in many ways I would say, William, that you and I are very different. That is one of the things that's so enriching in the conversations. And then perhaps we are in our own echo chamber, because I was thinking very much about that. I was speaking to my friend for this data where we're like, oh, we're so similar. And also. But, oh, we're so different. So if we met the man on the street and we were like, look, we're William and Stick. Look how different we are, they would be like, so you're doing this pilgrimage to Omaha, of all places, and you're interpreting something that Munger said 30 years ago. Slightly different, but the rest you really agree with. You're so similar, you and William, and of course, you and I. Everyone likes to be unique, and we like to think we're very, very different. And so one reflection is this idea that if you read the same books, even if you interpret them very differently, perhaps you have more in common with them than more than meets the eye. We all live in somewhat of the same echo chamber. Another reflection is as you read a lot of books and have this back and forth with friends, I'm sometimes amazed by what was politically correct whenever I was growing up. Will get you canceled today. That's sort of another thread I probably shouldn't pull too much on. But going back to this idea of the universal truth, just before I throw it over to you, William, I sometimes have this idea whenever it comes to reading, that the longer something has survived, the more validity it may have. And I also think it's completely flawed to think that way, which we might talk about later. But I think that was a very interesting way. Sort of like the Lindy effect, you know, where it's like, if this technology has existed for a long time, the wheel, it's probably going to exist for a long time. Still think about a post on social media, Poof, it's gone. There's a reason for that. But then even something like that's very in demand right now, like the Stoics. That's lasted for so many years. There's definitely been times where it was seen as downright immoral for hundreds of years. Yeah, there was a lot of different thoughts going into that. It was very unstructured. But, William, I wanted to sort of hear your reflections and also throw to you and hear what has made you richer, wise, and happier and what can be cloned by our listeners whenever it comes to reading.
- [110:35]
A
Yeah, as you would expect, my reading Habits are totally different to yours. Which gets back to this idea that this isn't a one size fits all thing. It's about finding a way to live. Spend your money, spend your time, read whatever in a way that's true to who you are. And so I just. I read in a very unstructured way. Like you. I read constantly, but I read whatever comes to hand. I'll literally grab things. I'll grab different things from that. That bookshelf to my right with all of the Tibetan Buddhists. Almost every morning I'll just sort of sit down and start reading. I start reading in the middle. I don't start reading in the. In the beginning of the book. Often. I'm usually rereading books and so they're heavily marked up. And I often go back and read. I'll see that there's a particularly marked up chapter and I'll go back and read it over again and mark it up even more. I'm often reading backwards. I find myself, weirdly, I'll start a book like Far to the Right, and then I'll sort of be like, oh, this is an interesting chapter. Let me go backwards. And so I'm reading in this very disorderly way, but constantly. And partly it's very nonlinear, but partly I have this weird, maybe slightly irrational, mystical view that the universe is kind of speaking to you in some way all of the time. And so I'm perfectly happy to kind of tap in wherever I'm being called to tap in and to follow my intuition and randomness and chance and just dip in wherever, wherever I'm drawn. And so I've always liked this. When I was a kid at Eton in England, I would go to Windsor, near Windsor Castle. I would go to Tower Records or hmv. Yeah, I guess it was HMV in those days. And I would buy albums kind of randomly. I would be like, oh, so I've heard of this guy Louis Armstrong. So I'll buy him. And then I'd be like, I wonder who else is good on trumpet. And I'd buy Dizzy Gillespie. And then I'd be like, oh, so Charlie Parker played with Dizzy Gillespie. I'll buy Charlie Parker. And that was sort of how I discovered things like Bob Dylan and Bob Marley. And when I was, you know, 13, 14 years old, just going in and buying stuff kind of randomly. And so I like that wild goose chase. I mean, I read all these obscure books. I've been spending a lot of time reading about Tibetan Buddhism, partly because this whole idea of gaining control over Your inner landscape is so important. And I. I think in some ways, Tibetan Buddhism is the science of mind, right? You're. They. They sat around in caves for many years studying the mind, and they figured out certain things about how the. How the mind works. And so it's very helpful as I'm trying to get control over my wayward thoughts and emotions, or not control, but figure out how to deal with them and how to live and how to be happy and how to have equanimity. It's very helpful to go in and draw on all of that old wisdom. And so I would go in and I'd read. I found some really obscure book about the teachings from the 1990s that Sokni Rinpoche, who was a guest on the podcast, gave, who's an amazing Tibetan Buddhist master. And then I would see in the footnotes that the guy who had been a translator for Sagnay in the 90s had also translated all of these other books. And one of them was called Way of the Realized Old Dogs. And I just looked at that. And so it's obviously about old meditation masters who became fully realized, but I love the fact that it's called Way of the Realized Old Dogs. So I put it entirely based on the title and then read it one night on my Kindle. And, you know, it's not a long book from start to finish. And I'm not saying this to. To recommend any of these particular books, which are pretty obscure, but actually to recommend this process of the wild goose chase of actually, you know, I think for very productive, successful people, there's been such an obsession with using your time productively and being linear and being directed and making sure you're taking notes in the most constructive way. And are you really digesting stuff? And I, in a way, I'm taking the absolute opposite approach. And I'm like, no, let me tumble down this rabbit hole and just see what's there for me. And so I don't know. So I'm reading a lot of books by Sagna Rinpoche's father, who was called Tuku Urjen Rinpoche, who is a great master. Then there are these ancient books where they would be writing commentaries on books like the Way of the Bodhisattva. So I'd go back and I would read parts of that, and I have that on audiobook as well. And then I would go back. There's a famous book by a guy called Patrul Rinpoche called Words of My Perfect Teacher, which I'm studying with a group at the moment, with a great teacher sort of explaining it to us. And so in some ways, I'm kind of trying to surround this subject and figure out how on earth am I going to get some degree of control, if that's even the right word, which it's not, over this crazy mind of mine. And what have these people over 2,600 years figured out about how to gain control of the mind? And where does meditation fit into it? And where does having a great teacher fit into it? What does having a great teacher do to help you? Because I think a great teacher can transmit certain lessons to you almost by their presence. You see how they behave. Being on that call with Arnold Vandenberg the other day and just seeing his excitement and enthusiasm and sharing his ideas and his time so selflessly, that transmits some lesson to me that just reading about someone wouldn't help me to learn. And so I'm just kind of surrounding these subjects and just in this slightly erratic but slightly overwhelming way, just trying to figure out how I'm going to tame my mind. And I don't know. It's very helpful to me. And then at the same time, I'm still reading quite a lot of fiction. So in the last few months, one of my two or three favorite writers is Isaac Basheva Singer, who's the only person who ever won a Nobel Prize while writing in Yiddish. And he came from a similar background to my family's background, where they fled from Poland and places like that. And there's a novel of his that I'm listening to on Audible that then I also bought the hardcover of which is called Shadows on the Hudson, which is about basically a group of people in New York, Jews who had fled from during and after the Holocaust. And their lives have all kind of been damaged in different ways. Some of them have lost their wives and kids in Auschwitz or elsewhere. Some of them see no reason for living at all and are just sort of waiting to die. Some of them are charging around sleeping with as many people as possible. Some of them are incredibly spiritual, despite the fact that they've just been through this absolute trauma. And so reading that is just really helpful to me on so many fronts. Because with fiction, you're always getting into other people's minds. You're always expanding your empathy and learning about other people's points of view. And so for me to think of all of these people who've been through the greatest trauma in many ways of the last century, I mean, look, it depends, but Obviously World War II, there were just such a catastrophic period. And they're thinking in all of these different ways about how to find meaning in their lives and what religion means to them, whether they believe in God or not, how to behave, whether to give themselves up to physical pleasures, because that's all that exists. Whether to get remarried, trying to communicate with their dead relatives through mediums and in seances and the like, you know, and so they all have, like, different ways of dealing with it. And I think in some ways it. It connects to what we were discussing way back in the. In, you know, when we were talking about Montana, is to be aware that our way of living and our way of thinking and our way of finding meaning is not. Is not the only one and is not necessarily any more valid than anyone else's. And we're all just kind of groping our way through the fog, trying to figure out how to live. I think that's one reason why I so loved that book about Montana that Sarah Bakewell called it, how to Live. And I kind of feel like, both with my book and with my podcast, really that's the question is how to live. That's how I think of it in my own mind. And so when I'm interviewing great investors, I'm trying to figure out, how do you live, how do you deal with risk, how do you deal with uncertainty? How do you deal with the fact that nothing is knowable? How do you deal with the fact that you have limited knowledge? How do you deal with your setbacks? How do you deal with your disappointments? And likewise, when I'm reading fiction, I'm trying to figure out, how do people live? How did they? And I like the fact that someone like Isaac Basheva Singer is able to express views that he doesn't believe in by writing from the perspective of other people in his novel. I also really love a novel of his called the Slave, which I reread a month or so ago. Amazing novel. And so, I don't know, it's all part of the same quest, which is to figure out how to live. That's why I'm interviewing people. That's why I'm reading. That's why we're chatting about this stuff. And it's a beautiful unfolding journey. And at times it's really painful. But it's really helpful that we have friends like you to discuss this with. We have great teachers who are further along the path than us who point out certain things. There are people like Arnold who embody certain qualities, and so it's all just part of that same exploration. And I think part of the. Sometimes it probably sounds like self indulgent for us to have these conversations, or maybe it sounds like we think we actually know something when we really don't. But I think part of it is to have an honest inquiry into what we're learning and studying and to try to share that with other people because some of it might help them. I think that's a really valid thing. And so I've become much clearer over the last few years. That's probably to some extent why I'm here, is to read stuff, study stuff, listen to stuff, try to figure out what it means, study people's lives and see what works and doesn't work and why, as Charlie would say, and then try to pass that on to other people. Not because I know, but because it's the most helpful stuff that I've studied that helps me get through the day. And it's kind of wonderful that you can go back and you can read about this guy Montaigne in the 1500s who figured out the same thing about how unreliable our perceptions are and our beliefs are and our customs and habits are that then help Bill Miller make a fortune because he could also look at Amazon and Bitcoin and the like and say, well, people don't understand them either, and they just apply their own filters and lenses. So we're just kind of on this ongoing exploration to figure out how to live.
- [122:32]
B
I can't think of a better way to end this episode. And yet I can't help but ask you one more question. Otherwise it will drive me crazy the next few weeks before we meet up in person. William, whenever you say that you meet some teachers that are further along the path than you are. And I hope this doesn't come across as saying we can't learn something from other people or that's not my intention at all because I kind of. I'm afraid it's going to sound like that. But whenever you oh, it's terrible, because I'm going to ask about definition, which is what I shouldn't be doing. But why is it. I guess that's my question. Why is it you think that they're more further along the path than you are? Is that because you want to get where they are? Because they ask different questions? And I'm sure that there will be some other listeners who would then look at the people. I don't necessarily think that you would name them, but when it's like, no, that is not a teacher for them, but it's clearly a teacher for you. So it's more to make it cloneable for our audience when there's this beautiful saying, when the student is ready, the master appears. But I also think we have different masters because we want to achieve different things. Not because it's universal truth, but because we're different people with different values and want to achieve different things on whatever kind of level you want to talk about. So I'm kind of curious to hear how you think about that.
- [123:52]
A
Yeah, I don't try to idealize every teacher and assume that this person embodies everything and is a perfect person because I think often it's helpful to look at someone who embodies certain characteristics that you want to clone. Right. So Charlie Munger, you want to clone his incredible integrity and his extraordinary rationality and his way of thinking in an unbiased way and, and many other qualities. But you wouldn't want to clone everything. But then there are. So I think whenever you're trying to study with someone, you don't want to fall into the trap of thinking, oh, this person is perfect and they've overcome all of their capacity for self delusion or lust or impurity or greed or whatever it is. Right. We're all human and we all mess up. But I think there are certain people I've encountered who you just smell that they're really, really evolved in certain ways and that there are things they embody that they can teach you that are really beautiful. And so when I look at someone like Soknirinpoche, who again people can see on the podcast, I think he's very, very free and very joyful and very low ego. And I have a friend who's his translator. And so I'll often talk to Adam Kane, who you'll see translating like one word on that podcast because Sokni speaks beautiful English. But I'll hear from Adam what it's actually like to hang out with Sokni a lot of the time. And so I think there are qualities of Sokni's that are really, really deeply worth cloning, that are built to be totally free and without ego and funny, light hearted and yet constantly sharing insights. So when you see someone who's kind of free in that way, free spirited, light hearted, and has tremendous equanimity, if that's something that you yearn for, that feels very powerful to me. That makes me so long to be more like that. I feel that often with Dan Goleman, who's also been a Guest on the podcast, very remarkable person. And I, and you know, I have this amazing Tibetan Buddhist teacher as well. You know, there's some, there's some, there are some constraints where people sort of say, oh, it's not appropriate to say someone's your, your teacher because it can be sort of conceited. But I, I've been studying with this incredible woman, Kandra, who has a website, Kandra Ling. It's K A H A N D R O l I n g.com and she's an extraordinary teacher. And when you see someone like that who is so free and so compassionate and kind and all she's doing is trying to help other people and lift other people out of their suffering, that's a very life changing thing. And I feel the same when I see someone like Arnold Vandenberg. Just the kindness and the desire to help other people. And so I think if you can find a few people in your life, maybe it's a grandmother, maybe it's a mother, it can be one of your kids, whatever, who really embodies certain qualities to look at that and think, how do I close the gap between me and them? And there may be areas where we're much more developed than someone else. I mean, someone might be really naive about how to make money and have an impact in the world by making lots of money and sharing it and creating systems. So it depends, as you were saying before, what you're optimizing for. But for me, when I see people like this who embody certain characteristics, it creates a kind of yearning, a deep yearning, and also a sense of gratitude. I mean, sometimes I was reading one of Soknir's books a few weeks ago and my wife said to me afterwards, she's like, do you have some kind of allergy? Why your eyes are so watery? And I realized it really choked me up because I just realized these people have such unbelievably beautiful wisdom that they've figured out and it's all there and they're just sharing it with you. And it's like there's something deeply moving about realizing that there are these teachers out there who I think of in many ways kind of overcome their own ego and are just there to serve others. And when you see that, when you see that generosity, the kindness, and you realize just what it means, what they've done, it's very humbling and very moving. And so I don't know. So I'm not trying to idealize these people. And at the same time, I really have profound gratitude. And I think for all of us, it's helpful to find a few people who can do that for you. And as Charlie would say, you can do it by hanging out with the eminent dead. You can do it by reading about Franklin or Darwin or Einstein or whoever it is that inspires you. But it's all there. And I feel like there's a kind of continuum here. There's. There's this process where certain people have figured out something over the last few thousand years, whether it's a Marcus Aurelius or an Epictetus or a Seneca or Montaigne or Jesus or Buddha or whoever it is, and they've kind of planted flags along the mountain or along the path, kind of saying, here, come here. This is going to help you. And if this stuff speaks to you, you'd be crazy not to say, oh, they already figured this out. Let me study what they figured out. And that's the case with Warren and Charlie. It's the case with Arnold. It's the case with various spiritual teachers. And we just want to have our eyes and ears open so that when they're pointing the way and saying, don't go that way, dude, because that's going to lead to misery, you listen. And when they say, no, no, follow this way, you're like, okay, they already figured this out. I don't need. I don't need to solve this problem myself, because they already figured out the answer. Is that helpful at all?
- [130:18]
B
I think that's absolutely wonderful. Thank you. Yes. We want to clone what we want to clone. If I can sum it up, not everything. What's important to you. Thank you, William. I don't know how to end the episode other than saying, thank you for your time, William. It's absolutely amazing. I look forward to meeting you again here soon. It is one thing to have these wonderful calls, is another thing to give you a hug and be like, great to see you again, William. So looking forward to that. And for the listeners, I look forward to recording an episode with William again, coming out next quarter.
- [130:53]
A
Thank you so much, Sig. And thank you to everyone for listening to us. I sometimes feel like we're overly self indulgent, and I know this isn't overly self referential, and I know this isn't for everyone. And then sometimes someone will come up to me and say, actually, those are my favorite episodes. And so it doesn't have to be for absolutely everyone. But I think these questions that we're grappling with are questions that a lot of our listeners are grappling with. And so I'm really grateful to people for coming along on this journey with us. So thank you.
- [131:24]
B
Yeah, and it's interesting you say that because I hear the same thing and I kind of feel bad the same way as you. I kind of, like feel weird sometimes or I talk too much about myself. Not you, William. But those are very often the episodes that people relate to. I don't necessarily think they relate to the answers as much, but I think they relate to the questions and the thought process and they find their own answers, what is right for them. And that's beautiful. That is what we want to achieve. So, yeah. Thank you everyone for tuning in. And William, as always, great seeing you again.
- [131:57]
A
Great to see you. Thanks, Nick. 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.