The Tim Ferriss Show: #702: Morgan Housel — Contrarian Money and Writing Advice, Three Simple Goals to Guide Your Life, Journaling Prompts, Choosing the Right Game to Play, Must-Read Books, and More

This episode is brought to you by Kamatir that's spelled C-O-M-E-T-E-E-R.

Kamatir is hyper fresh, expertly brewed, flash frozen coffee that produces an incredibly delicious cup.

Now, I have to be honest, I was very skeptical of flash frozen coffee and I thought,

at face value, this is probably just a gimmick, yadda yadda yadda.

But, as you know, I am an avid coffee drinker. I talk about caffeine and coffee a lot on this show.

And when it landed on my doorstep, when I first started testing it, I thought to myself,

this is actually incredible. It is locked in at peak freshness and you can sample coffee from some of the top roasters,

not just in the US, but around the world. And I went in with one eyebrow raised and I'm sure some of you have one raised right now,

but the coffee is absolutely delicious. It's pretty incredible. And I'm able to avoid bitterness completely.

Kamatir lets you prepare your coffee with no mess, no machines, no burning, no bitterness whatsoever.

It's a fast and foolproof way to a truly delicious cup of specialty coffee.

They source high quality beans from the country's top roasters and some outside of the country.

That includes counterculture, bird rock, George hell, equator coffees, which I used to have.

I used to drive 45 minutes from my house in San Francisco to have equator coffee just to give you an idea

and you can get it through Kamatir, Birch, Joe Coffee, Red Bay, Go Get Him Tiger, Clatch Onyx, Square Mile,

Black and White, Intelligencia, which was in the four hour chef as an example in Chicago, and on and on.

So you can get all sorts of coffee you wouldn't otherwise be able to get because it is frozen using their process.

Their coffee is brewed using proprietary technology to pull out more flavor compounds and antioxidants.

Then it's flash frozen at minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit to lock in the incredible flavor and freshness of the specialty brew.

I already mentioned this, but it's worth reiterating.

Kamatir ships to you in 100% recyclable capsules that you store in the freezer.

And if you were to walk into my kitchen right now and look in the freezer, it is chock full of Kamatir coffee.

Simply add hot water and you've got a game changing cup of coffee, liquidy split.

It's very fast. It's easily customizable in seconds for ice coffees, lattes, espresso martinis and more.

If you've never had an espresso martini, I recommend it.

It's pretty game changing. We'll cover that another time.

Kamatir is also great to travel with when you need a cup and don't want to sacrifice quality.

Their capsules are TSA approved.

So check it out, learn more, try it perhaps.

Order today at kamatir.com slash Tim.

That's C-O-M-E-T-E-E-R dot com slash Tim.

And listeners of this podcast will also receive a free eight pack of barista's choice.

A rotating selection of limited edition specialty roasts from world class roaster partners like George Howell, Onyx and Intelligencia.

Names many of you will recognize and certainly names many of you will come to recognize and you will look them up because this coffee is that good.

So again, visit kamatir.com slash Tim to learn more and receive a free eight pack of barista's choice when you join the future of coffee with Kamatir.

This episode is brought to you by Mementis.

Mementis offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories,

including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support and more.

I've been testing their products for months now and I have a few that I use constantly.

One of the things I love about Mementis is that they offer many single ingredient and third party tested formulations.

I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later.

Personally, I've been using Mementis Mag3nate, L-Theanine and Apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep.

Now, the Mementis Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients.

I've also been using Mementis Creatine, which doesn't just help for physical performance, but also for cognitive performance.

In fact, I've been taking it daily, typically before podcast recording, as there are various studies and reviews and meta analyses pointing to improvements in short term memory and performance under stress.

So those are some of the products that I've been using very consistently and to give you an idea, I'm packing right now for an international trip.

I tend to be very minimalist and I'm taking these with me nonetheless.

Now back to the bigger picture.

Olympians, Tour de France winners, Tour de France winners, the US military and more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Mementis and their products.

Mementis also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world class products to market,

including a few you will recognize from this podcast like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett.

They also work with Dr. Stacey Sims to assist Mementis in developing products specifically for women.

Their products contain high quality ingredients that are third party tested, which in this case means informed sport and or NSF certified.

So you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else.

And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition and supplement world very well, that is a differentiator that you want in anything that you consume in this entire sector.

So good news for my non US listeners.

More good news not to worry.

Mementis ships internationally so you have the same access that I do.

So check it out.

Visit live momentous dot com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off.

That's live momentous L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.

This is Tim Ferriss.

Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show.

Today we have a repeat guest and good Lord did his last episode do well.

It did spectacularly well.

You guys loved it.

So back by popular demand is Morgan Housel.

You can find him on Twitter at Morgan Housel H O U S E L.

He is a partner at the Collaborative Fund.

His book, The Psychology of Money, which we really dug into in depth last time has sold

more than 3 million copies and has been translated into 53 languages.

Didn't even know there were that many languages.

I'm kidding.

Of course, he is a two time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of

American Business Editors and Writers and winner of the New York Times Sydney Award.

I might be jealous.

I might be jealous in 2022.

Market watch named him one of the 50 most influential people in markets.

Good friend to have.

He serves on the board of directors at Markel.

Morgan's new book is same as ever.

Subtitle a guide to what never changes.

You can find my first and as I mentioned before, widely popular interview and very

tactically dense interview with Morgan at Tim dot blog slash Morgan Housel.

And without further ado, Morgan Housel dot com and Morgan himself.

Nice to see you again.

Nice to see you, Tim.

Happy to be back.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely.

So let's start with a cryptic prompt.

And I'll let you run with it, which is Buffett Snickers.

Where should we go with that?

So after psychology of money, I was really debating what to write next for my next book.

I had thrown around all these different topics and I had some good ideas, but it really

hadn't hit me what I wanted to write about.

And I was at a retreat with a group of investors about three years ago.

And one of the investors, he was actually a CEO of a large public company.

And he's pretty good friends with Warren Buffett.

And he told the story that I had never heard before about Buffett and it's pretty rare

to have a story about Buffett.

Everybody knows every Buffett story, but this was a new one.

And he said, the CEO said that in 2009, during kind of the peak of the great recession

when the economy was in pieces, he was driving around Omaha with Warren Buffett.

Buffett was driving.

He was a passenger and the CEO said to Warren and they're driving past like closed up shops

during the great recession, like the whole country's in tatters.

And the CEO said, Warren, how are we ever going to pull out of this?

Like the country's never going to be the same after this.

And Warren said, let's call this guy Jim.

That's not his real name.

But he said, Jim, do you know what the best selling candy bar was in 1962?

And Jim said, no.

And Warren said, Snickers.

And Warren said, do you know what the best selling candy bar is today?

And Jim said, no.

And Warren said, Snickers.

And that was the end of the conversation.

He just stopped right there.

And that was his answer to, is the country ever going to be the same?

And I think if you look at Warren Buffett's success,

he has been betting on things that stay the same forever.

And it really hit me in that moment that this was the book that I wanted to write

because for my entire career as a writer, I had been cynical is probably the right word

and just astounded at how bad people are at forecasting,

not just in finance and the stock market and the economy, but in politics.

And it's been like that forever.

The most famous experts ability to predict what's going to happen next is atrocious

and it's always been atrocious.

And again, that just made me cynical.

It was just like the whole pundit industry is a scam.

That was kind of my view.

And then it was like, okay, is there a positive spin to this?

How can I use knowing how bad we are at forecasting to try to like do better at my ability

to look forward in the future?

And I think what I settled on is people are so bad at predicting the future

because they're always trying to predict what's going to change.

They're always trying to predict what's the next new technology.

Who's going to win the next election?

When's the next recession going to come?

And our ability to do that is zero.

It's virtually zero.

But for the people like Buffett who focus on what's not going to change,

their ability to understand the future is actually pretty good.

And so they're focusing on parts of human behavior that have never changed,

that were true 500 years ago, that will be true 500 years from now.

And so I have no idea when the next recession is going to come,

but I know exactly how people are going to respond to greed and fear

because that's never changed.

There's a great quote from Naval where he says,

if your life played out a thousand times, a thousand different iterations of your life,

what would be true in 999 of them?

And those are the things that you want to focus on in life

because those are not things that are guided by luck or chance

or just the quirky ways of the world.

That to me was like, I love that framing.

And it also occurred to me that a lot of what I had been writing about

for the previous 15 years were things that never change.

I think in many ways psychology of money is the psychology of you, the individual.

It's like what's going through your head and same as ever is a psychology of us as a collective.

It's just what do we keep doing as a society, as a group over and over and over again?

One other thing that really struck me here that was kind of influential to this book for me was

one of my favorite books is a book called The Great Depression, A Diary.

And it was it's written by a lawyer named Benjamin Roth

who during the Great Depression kept a very detailed diary

about what he saw all over his town in Ohio that his son published.

And it's like it's the best economics book ever written.

And during that diary, there's one diary entry from I think 1932

where he says what I see around The Great Depression in 1932

it reminds me exactly of what happened in 1920 and in 1878 and in 1865.

And he's like, it's the same forces happening over and over and over again.

I thought, oh, that's really interesting.

And then a couple pages later, it dawned on me that what he was writing

in 1932 is exactly what happened in 2008.

The way that people were dealing with uncertainty and greed and fear never changes.

It's the same movie over and over and over again.

And so if you focus on those things that never change,

I think it's our only ability to really understand the future,

your future, society's future, the economy's future.

It's just not as exciting as focusing on what is going to change.

Like all of the attention in the media focuses on

what's the next big technology, what is going to change.

Hence the news.

Exactly.

It's because that's exciting and it's fun.

So the premise of this book is like, let's stop doing that.

Let's focus on what we know with certainty is going to be a part of your future.

And that's the best that we can do to see the future.

I've been excited to have this conversation for a couple of reasons

and I'll sort of edge into those by way of maybe a few anecdotes.

So one, I'm not going to get the attribution right

and I'm not going to get the phrasing totally on point.

But there was an announcement.

I think it might have been Donald Nooth, K-N-U-T-H.

But there's a blog post that I wrote some time ago

which was looking for decisions that remove a thousand decisions.

And he made an announcement when he stopped using email.

Now, I'd be curious to know how well that's held up over time.

However, he said, in effect, I realize that I no longer want to stay on top of things.

I want to get to the bottom of things.

So that's phrasing that has really stuck with me.

And maybe we'll come back to stories.

And that's his entire email was maybe a mini story and had an arc.

And that has stuck with me for years now.

The second is, in the last few weeks,

I've become very interested in ancient Sumer and the dynasties in Ur and Uruk in modern-day Iraq

and looking at the birth of writing, as we understand it, in cuneiform,

which I never knew was cuneiform instead of a different pronunciation.

In any case, the stories as you listen to them in these various podcasts,

if you did a search and replace with a handful of names,

this is true for letters from a Stoic or the moral letters to Lechilius as well from Seneca the Younger.

If you just did a search replace with some names, it's the same set of dynamics.

It's the same foibles of human nature.

It's the same consequences of fear, greed, wrath, fill in the blank.

And my question for you is, given how much you've thought about writing,

given how much you have written,

I mean, you've written, I would imagine, hundreds, thousands of pieces.

And we spoke quite a bit about writing in our last conversation.

And the fact that writing is on some level or good writing,

at least the type of writing that we do is sort of intrinsically selfish, right?

We're writing for at least an audience of one.

And that I'm just going to do a quick recap on some of the things

that stuck with me from our last conversation,

which have proven to be true again and again and again.

For instance, good writing is easy, bad writing is hard, right?

If you're just like struggling through word by word this slog of a piece,

chances are it's just not going to be good.

Also, if you have writer's block, there's a damn good chance.

It's just a shitty idea or a mediocre idea that you're trying to force into some existence

of all the things that you could write about.

How did you choose to do this, especially after the success of your last book?

I was told many years ago by Jason Zweig, a great friend and mentor of mine from the Wall Street Journal,

that you should only write a book if in your brain you have to do it.

Not like, oh, I should do it.

Or like, oh, that's a lot of money that I could get for doing it.

Only doing it if you're like, I can't sleep until I get these ideas on paper.

And even in blog form for my entire career, that's always been the case.

I'm not a sit down at my desk at nine o'clock and published by four o'clock kind of person.

I've always been, I'm just going to toss around a bunch of ideas in my head.

And I'm only going to sit down and write when I can't do anything else until I get this done.

The idea is so fresh and it's just spilling out of me.

And there's been plenty of times when we'll be like grocery shopping with my wife and kids.

And I'm basically just like, I need to go sit down at the computer and write this out.

And the opposite of that, if I'm like, oh, I should probably write something this week.

Let's force out the words. It's garbage every single time.

And so I feel like I didn't necessarily choose to write this book.

I think I would have been really happy just stopping at psychology and money and saying,

that's great. I'm just going to quit while I'm ahead, which is a general idea that I really admire.

But I think it got to the point where I was like, I really, I have to do this.

And it struck me around.

It was kind of the early days of COVID when this really struck me.

I was writing almost every week, almost every day about things that never change and putting a lot of thought into it.

And it really became like a philosophy that guides my entire life.

And I think to tell you the truth, it relieved a lot of anxiety from my life.

Once I kind of internalized a lot of these ideas, anxiety about the future.

What's my future hold? What's the economy going to do next during the early days of COVID?

What's COVID going to do next?

Once you admit that we have no idea, we have no clue, we have no clue what's going to happen.

But that doesn't mean that you're giving up or just becoming a fatalist.

It's just like, let's shift our attention to what we know is going to be true.

And I honestly think I became happier and calmer and like my life improved once I got to that point.

So in a sense, is that a serenity prayer applied to your life through the lens of human nature over time?

I mean, in a sense, I mean, separating the things that you can change from the things that you cannot,

the things that you can predict with some certainty versus the many things that you cannot.

Is that what reduced the anxiety?

I think so. And of course, this is not an idea I came up with.

That's kind of the core of stoicism.

It's been around for 2000 years.

It's like, what can you control and what can you not?

Just you really need to be able to figure out how to separate those.

So I'm not claiming at all that I came up with these ideas.

Wait a second. You created Buddhism and stoicism?

Good for you.

Exactly.

And in 2020, it was amazing.

It was a very productive year.

But once I kind of crystallized them and I could contextualize that in a way that made a lot of sense to me,

I honestly think it improved my life in a pretty profound way.

So we're going to come back to that and we're going to come back to it quickly.

But since I am getting back into writing and I've been experimenting with fiction largely,

but I'd like to actually write some nonfiction blog posts in the old style.

Back when there were blog roles, I want to really rewind the clock and go retro with some of my writing.

Because I do have some ideas that are so persistent that I feel like it would be beneficial for me

to write in order to think about them more clearly.

And what we didn't cover in our last conversation was how you draft your first drafts or your rough drafts.

Because you have these ideas, you're at the grocery store, you're out on a walk, you're in the shower, whatever it might be.

What does it look like when you put first words on paper or screen?

Because that is where I often procrastinate facing the empty screen, the blinking cursor.

What's your move there?

I first need to disclose that what I'm about to say is probably the worst writing advice you could give someone.

So if you are a new writer or an aspiring writer, plug your ears and fast forward this.

But I've always been including the worst advice for writers.

I've always been like this.

I don't think it's a good strategy, but it's been my strategy.

I'm kind of a first draft and published writer.

I think the best way to write is to write a shitty first draft, get it done,

and then go back and edit and clean up and rewrite and whatnot.

I've always been one sentence at a time and when I'm done with that sentence, it's final.

So by the time I get to the bottom of the article or the bottom of a chapter, it's pretty much done.

But that's not because I can write a perfect first draft.

It's because I'm not going to leave this sentence that I'm writing until it's perfect.

I'm not going to move on to the next sentence until every word is perfect.

So that's always how I've been.

I believe Kurt Vonnegut talked about swoopers and plotters.

I may be getting the wording wrong, but swoopers are the vomit of first draft,

refine, refine into a diamond, and then the plotters are the line at a time,

one small facet at a time, and then they're kind of done.

I tend to err on the side of being closer to that myself.

However, that doesn't seem to work unless you have a clear idea of what your structure is going to look like,

or at least of where you're going to start so that you're not then endlessly swapping things around

or scrapping the first half, in which case you're edging more towards that refine, refine, refine.

So how do you figure out the structure of a piece or what your lead is going to be?

When I start an article or a chapter even, I have no idea where it's going to go.

It's not like all the ideas are in my head and I just need to put them out on paper.

And I feel like the process of writing is the research process for me.

And so that's kind of where the plotter style comes in, which is I write one sentence and I sit there and stare at it.

And it's like, oh, that reminds me of this, oh, like that prompts another thought that I had.

That paragraph I just wrote reminds me of something else I can pull in.

That's really where it comes from.

So coming up with an idea, honestly, I think most blog posts, I start with a headline.

And I'm like, I want to write an article called Everything is Psychical, whatever it might be.

And let's just run with that, like that idea, like because everything is psychical.

And I'm sure I could put together a story about why that is and a couple examples of that.

So let's just start there and see what happens.

And I just start throwing things on the page.

And usually within the process of a blog post or a book chapter, I'll go for three walks around my neighborhood.

And during that walk, I'm 100% focused on what I'm writing and thinking about.

What did I just write? Is that true? Oh, it actually, that reminds me of something else.

So that's always a process.

If I'm sitting at my desk, I really can't get my brain to work as well as it is

when I'm getting up and walking around.

So very often too, if the weather is bad outside in the middle of writing,

I'll like get up and fold the laundry or get up and do the dishes.

Get up and just walk around the house.

It's just like, I think movement is really critical to forming new thoughts and moving the piece along,

which is so critical when you don't know where it's going to go when you started writing it.

Let's look at a post of yours.

And I read three in prepping for this conversation.

Respect and admiration, rich and anonymous, and then expectations debt.

How did you decide to write rich and anonymous?

And maybe that's a way to move into discussing some of the content,

some of the messages, some of the stories in that piece, but how did that come to be?

Rich and anonymous came to be because this was probably about two years ago.

I did a consulting session with a group of NBA athletes, most of them were NBA rookies.

And the topic of conversation was everybody knows that NBA athletes, all pro athletes,

have a very high rate of going bankrupt.

They have a three to five-year career where they make tens of millions of dollars,

they blow it all, and then they're done.

Everyone knows the story.

So the topic of conversation is like, how do we prevent that?

And one of the athletes who's 19 from the NBA, he had very recently been drafted

to a dec-a-million-dollar contract, massive amount of money.

He brought up this fact that I thought was so astute, particularly for a 19-year-old.

And he said, when you grow up in inner-city poverty and then you make tens of millions

of dollars at age 19, that's not your money.

That is mom's money, dad's money, cousin's money, brother's money, neighbor's money,

grandma's money.

You can't just tell all of them, I got my money, like good luck to you all back in

inner-city poverty.

It doesn't work like that.

And he said, the biggest reason that athletes go bankrupt is not because they bought themselves

a mansion, it's because they bought their fifth cousin a modest house and they felt

so much obligation to help them.

So that was this idea.

I don't know if I came up with it, but I called it social debt.

And I think with every dollar that you earn comes some amount of social debt.

And for somebody like an athlete or a movie star, there's a ton of social, for every dollar

that they earn, there's probably $4 of social debt that comes on top of it.

And it's very easy to track your net worth.

It's incredibly difficult to track your social debt.

It's the obscure figure, but it's always there.

And even if we're not talking about dec-a-million-dollar athletes, I think for the average person,

who gets a raise, their salary goes from $50,000 to $55,000, with that even comes an increase

in expectations of now they expect to live in a bigger apartment to where nice or closed,

eat out more.

And just their expectation increase that comes with that is a form of social debt that came

with it.

And so that is this idea.

I'm pretty sure that Neval came up with this phrasing too, that the best spot you want

to be in in life is rich and anonymous.

The worst is poor and famous, which was maybe like Monica Lewinsky or something, like very

famous and no money.

That's the worst position you can be in.

Rich and anonymous is the best.

I spent some time with a family two or three years ago.

The family is worth $8 billion.

And if you Google their name, nothing comes up.

They are completely anonymous.

They're not on any Forbes list.

They've not done any interviews.

They donate their money anonymously.

And that's all very intentional.

And so this family has is worth $8 billion, and they have virtually no social debt.

They could just walk down the street.

They can go to any cheap restaurant.

Nobody knows who they are.

And they've been very cognizant of doing that.

When I see how happy they are and how well balanced they are, how well balanced their

children were, it was like, that's the spot that everyone wants to be in.

So even if you're not worth $8 billion like that, realizing that every dollar of net worth

that you gain comes with probably at least a couple pennies of social debt, I think is

a really important thing to think about and contemplate.

So let me ask you more about this family.

$8 billion.

That's non-trivial.

So you would think that this family would be on many radars, many lists, whether they

want to appear there or not.

And I think it's probably sector dependent.

I don't want you to share anything you don't want to share.

But there may be some sectors, there are more sectors that are prone to being publicly

exposed or of public interest than others.

If you're a defense contractor, maybe the people who read People Magazine are not as

interested as if you are a movie star or fill in the blank.

So what are some of the decisions outside of anonymous donations that you think were

critical for them or might have been part of this plan?

And then I have some other questions related to their kids and the happiness of their kids.

Because last time we spoke about, I'm blanking on the name of the book, but I think it was

the Vanderbilt fortune and how almost uniformly miserable everyone was downstream of the

inflation adjusted, whatever crazy number it was, $400 billion or something like that.

So coming back to the question that I led with, what were some of the decisions or types

of decisions they made that contributed to that outcome?

What's so interesting about this family, and of course I'm not going to give any details

to disclose who they are, but they made their money in a very ethical way.

It's not like they're trying to hide the fact that of how they made their money.

And what's also interesting is that if I told you the name of the company, you would know

it.

It's not this hidden obscure business.

You would know what it is.

But again, they've been very intentional about doing everything anonymously, not being part

of any fundraiser gala.

They actually live a fairly good life, but it was all based around this idea of how do

we not ruin our children?

I think that was really it.

How do we raise children who are well-balanced and understand the world and are not treated

differently than anyone else?

Back to the Vanderbilt, which is such a crazy story.

There is this anecdote in one of the books where one of the Vanderbilt grandchildren

wants to learn how to play soccer.

So they gather up all the servants in the mansion that they live in, and they're like,

go play soccer with their kid, and they're watching it.

And the servants who are adults-

I have to imagine where this is going.

The servants all just get in their ass kicked by this eight-year-old.

They let every goal go through.

No one is going to try to take the ball from them.

But of course, the eight-year-old is like, I'm so good, I'm so good at soccer.

So as soon as people know who you are and what your last name is, how much they treat

you differently.

Yeah, laugh at all your dumb jokes.

And that's not good.

That is a terrible thing.

Dorsal your dumb ideas.

I don't think I've ever talked about this before, but I've told my wife this.

In my tenure at the Collaborative Fund, there's a period early on when I was doing deals,

and I was meeting with entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who were trying to raise money from the Collaborative

Fund.

And it was astounding that when I was talking to an entrepreneur who wanted to raise money,

every joke that I said was so funny.

Every insight that I had was so wise.

When people want something from you, they treat you differently, and it's not good.

So this back to the family that I did some work with, they wanted to move mountains to

avoid that.

They wanted their children to be treated normally.

And I have so much respect and admiration for that.

And going into this, a lot of what I was going to do was talk to the children about money.

That was kind of my role in this experience.

And if I'm honest, going into it, I expect them all to be spoiled little brats.

And they were the opposite.

They were the most well-balanced, polite, well-mannered kids.

And what they had that I thought was so great is a sense of anxiety about who they are in

the world.

And that's really rare for a child who grows up with that kind of means.

Most of them are just kind of, it's in their identity that I'm special, I'm the best, I'm

the richest, I'm the smartest.

That tends to be their identity.

And these were completely normal.

If you didn't know their net worth and you met them, you would think that they were the

children of plumbers and accounts.

If I could pause for one second and I want to get into some specifics, maybe what you

took away from that or some of the things that they did if you were able to share to

produce that outcome.

Now, maybe just out of the box, this family is programmed a little differently.

So we're looking at maybe, I don't want to say a reversed causality, but we might be

looking at something that existed out of the box, so to speak, psychologically.

However, there are probably some levers that people can pull and this doesn't just apply

to families with $8 billion.

For instance, I grew up without very much money and in my neighborhood on Long Island,

the family that made 75K versus the families that made 40K had a similar psychological

dynamic.

The kids had better toys.

They had bigger TV and that came with it unchecked a certain arrogance.

Even though they were by no stretch close to a family with $8 billion, the positional

economics of it were something similar.

As I think more about kids myself, I think about this a lot because you don't need to

be in the stratosphere economically for this to be a relevant topic to think about.

If you're born in the US with your native languages English in a reasonably safe place,

you've already won a lot of lotteries.

From a global perspective, you can also subconsciously develop some pretty perverse orientation

throughout the world.

What are some things that they did or that people can do to produce kids or bend the

arc a little bit towards kids who are less entitled and more self-aware in the way that

you're describing?

I've thought about this a lot and it's a question I get a lot about how do you raise

kids that don't grow up to be spoiled little brats?

I've come to the conclusion that the only answer is give them less money.

It's the answer that nobody wants to hear, but I don't think there's any other way around

it.

The reason that money is valuable is because you usually have to work hard for it.

If you don't have to work hard for it, it becomes not that valuable to you.

I see.

So give them less money, not just in the sense of inheritance, but you're saying on an ongoing

basis like allowance, toys, etc.

Of course, like everyone, I just kind of anchor to my old childhood and thinking about this.

My parents, particularly later in my childhood, they had some means and I got very little

from it.

And at the time that sucked, I looked back on it and think that was great.

That was so good because from age 16, I learned how to be self-dependent and I learned how

to work.

And there's a good friend of mine named Chris Davis.

His grandfather, Shelby Davis, is one of the Mount Rushmore investors.

He became a billionaire in the 1980s just from picking stocks.

And Chris Davis and his cousins and siblings got nothing, did not get one single cent

from it.

And his grandfather, Shelby Davis, would tell them, I'm not going to rob you of the

opportunity of earning your own income.

That's the right way to view it.

And I think every cent that you give your children, particularly your older children,

you are robbing them of that opportunity.

My wife and I think a lot about that with our own kids of every cell in your body as

a parent wants to say, I want to provide for my kids, support my kids, boost my kids, give

them all the benefit.

And it's so hard to push back against that natural mentality and say, no, I'm going to

make you do it on your own.

I'll give you one perfect example here.

I grew up ski racing.

My son, who's now seven, I started taking him skiing about two years ago.

And because I'm a fairly advanced skier, it was no problem for me on the first day to

hold him between my legs and ski down.

It was no problem for me to do that.

And so that's what I did.

And I thought it was the right thing to do.

Hey, I'm going to make this easy for you.

I'll just hold you between my legs and we'll ski down together.

And my son is very physically coordinated, very physically talented.

But because I did that, it took him about 10 sessions of going skiing before he could

do it on his own because I babied him.

What I should have done is just strapped him in and kicked him down the slope.

Go for it.

Learn yourself.

Learn how to fall.

And if I did that, he would have gotten it in two runs instead of took him 10 sessions

to do it.

And I think it's a great analogy for what money can do to your children, too.

It's so hard to do.

But when you see examples of it, I think every parent listening will understand this.

Like sometimes you just got to click them into their skis and kick them down.

So on this, I'm going to hijack this for my own selfish purposes for a second.

I find it very frustrating.

I have found it very frustrating over the last, say, five to 10 years when speaking

to very ultra high net worth people from a philanthropic standpoint, if I'm fundraising

for something that is clearly high leverage, clearly capital efficient with good operators,

but in the nonprofit space, how many demure or pushback with some argument along the lines

of they wouldn't word it this way, but compounding more into dynastic wealth, I'll do more

good later.

Often the subtext of that is they want to give this dynastic wealth to their kids.

They will not say that explicitly, but there's a protecting of the nest egg, so to speak,

in their response.

And what I'm curious to hear from you, because you spent a lot of time around very, very,

very wealthy people, if you had a billion dollars of net worth, and how many kids do

you have?

Two.

All right.

What would you give to your kids versus give away before you die versus something else?

What would you do with that?

Such a good question.

And of course, we don't have a billion dollars, so this is all, it's great that this is purely

hypothetical.

My guess, I mean, it might be greater if you had a billion dollars, I don't know.

But yeah, it's hypothetical, so it's easy to talk about.

And this is what we plan to do now, of course, our kids would get the best education.

They would always have health care, no matter what decisions they make in life.

We probably pay for a great wedding and some great family vacations.

If we were billionaires, we might say, we'll buy you a house.

And that's pretty much it.

I think that's pretty much it.

I love the idea from the book, Die With Zero, that if you're going to give your kids in

here.

I was just going to mention it.

Yeah.

It's such a good book.

It's a wonderful book.

Everyone should read.

And a lot of the premise is, if you're going to give your kids money, don't wait until

you die at age 97 to do it.

Give your kids money when they need it in their 30s and 40s.

And so my wife and I think our kids are four and seven, but I think about that now.

And thankfully, my kids won't listen to this episode for many more years, hopefully.

Part of my exploding seven-year-old demographic.

Start them young on The Tim Ferriss Show.

Exactly.

We don't plan to leave them much of any death inheritance, but to the extent that we're

going to give them a very small amount of money, we're probably going to give it to

them in their 30s and 40s when they need it the most.

Let's continue with this hypothetical thought exercise.

So you don't give them an excess.

Let's just say you add up all of those things and while you're alive, God willing, you give

your kids, who knows, inflation adjusted, you have a billion dollars just to keep it simple.

Let's assume that's all reasonably liquid.

Each of them gets two million bucks before you kick the bucket.

People have not figured out vampire transfusions with 20-year-olds from Lithuania or whatever

all the tech billionaires are trying these days, whatever the latest and greatest is,

hasn't really panned out.

So you arc and then you come to a natural end.

That still leaves a lot left over.

Would you, again, as a thought exercise, would you donate most of that over the course of

your lifespan?

What would be the plan for the leftover $998 million?

I'm really ashamed of this.

This is not a good thing, but it's only been in the last two years that my wife and I have

really thought about giving money away and we just started doing it in a very modest amount.

For people who have done it, I think you'll agree with this.

It's actually a lot harder than you'd think.

It's actually very, very difficult to give it away in a way that you feel like is making

a big difference and you feel great about it and is going to the right causes.

It should be easier than it is, and it's not.

It's actually very difficult.

I've always been most interested in micro philanthropy, would I call it?

Rather than donate to a big charity, I want to find a single mother who's struggling and

give money directly to her, that sort of thing.

And that's actually, I think, the hardest form of charity to do.

I'll tell you two examples of this that I've had that were really profound for me.

One was, I was in New York City and I walked past, I think it was a CVS and there was a

mother and a child who looked like my son and who were saying, can we please have some

money for food?

Because the child looked like my son, it was like, I have to stop.

So I went to the mother and I said, grab a shopping cart and fill it up and you can get

anything you want, which by the way, my mother did.

I saw my mother do this to someone when I was a child, say grab a shopping cart and filled

up no limits.

So we did this.

She went into CVS.

I followed them around and I said, no, let's just fill the cart up.

And when they were done with it, I paid and they just walked out, not a thank you, not

a look in the eye, nothing.

Let me make it clear, I was not doing this because I wanted the attention or because

I wanted to thank you, but I wanted some indication that I made a difference.

I wanted some information that it helped and I didn't get it.

And that's what made it really hard.

And in my heart, I'm like, I know this made a difference.

I know that kid can eat and that's why I did it.

But in anything you do in life, you want feedback that what you're doing is working.

And in a lot of these situations, you don't get it.

And of course, people who are begging for food for their child probably don't have the

emotional capacity to say, thank you, it's not what's going through their head.

I completely understand it.

But that's what makes it so difficult.

And I've had that similar situation happen many times to do it.

So when I think about if giving away $200 is very difficult, how do you give away $998

million?

If you're Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, how do you give away $200 billion?

Very, very difficult to do.

Extremely difficult to do.

I mean, I think the best analogy for this is really what the federal government is, is

a giant charity program with the exception of defense and whatnot.

That's kind of what it is.

And it's not very well run.

Most people don't like how it's run because it's so difficult to do and make everybody

happy.

Yeah, totally.

I mean, if your options are, somebody put it to me because I've been asking a lot of

people this question because to emphasize again, this might seem like rarefied air and

people are like, come on, why are we talking about a billion dollars?

Number one, because it's sort of a large absurd amount of money and unwieldy for the reasons

that you just described.

Although I think a lot of people who are in that upper echelon let perfect be the enemy

of good, they want to do more homework and do more diligence and they could do a lot

of good sooner on compounding problems.

But they put it off because they're hoping for perfect information that will let them

pick the winning stocks of all the nonprofits, which I think is very challenging to do and

often just a means of postponing things.

But they said, look, your options are taxes to the US government, your kids, or charity.

Which would you prefer?

Like you said, I mean, look, I pay taxes like everybody else, but it's not always the best

run.

So would you prefer it to go there?

Would you prefer it to go to a nonprofit or a set of nonprofits if you're choosing?

Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs.

These days, every new potential hire can feel like a high stakes gamble for your small business.

So you want to be 100% certain that you have access to the most qualified candidates.

That's why you should check out LinkedIn Jobs.

LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the right people for your team faster and for free.

Read your job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the

word that you're hiring.

Simple tools like screening questions make it easy to focus on candidates with just

the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview

and hire.

It's why small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus

leading competitors.

LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to faster.

So post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Tim.

That's LinkedIn.com slash Tim to post your job for free terms and conditions apply.

Let's zoom out because I want this to apply, obviously, to more people.

Mention the Stoics a little bit earlier, Seneca the Younger, who's a very controversial figure

for a lot of good reasons, but he's a hell of a quote machine.

He's like the Arnold Schwarzenegger one liner of the Stoics.

I said, you know, people talk of having riches when often riches have them much like a fever,

right? And this is paraphrasing, but of course, we're all paraphrasing.

It's translated.

It wasn't published in English, but how would you suggest people think about money or income

and happiness? This has come up on the podcast quite a lot, but this is something that comes

up in human history even more often.

What are some patterns or takeaways or lessons learned from your observation and study of

these things?

One thing that I think is really true and it's coming out a lot more in the data is that

if you are already happy, gaining more money will probably make you happier.

But if you're already kind of depressed, gaining more money is probably not going to help that

much.

There's a really interesting documentary about J. Paul Getty, who used to be the richest

man in the world.

And I think that the interview is taking place in the 1960s or 1970s in his castle in England,

and it is a bona fide castle, like straight out of a fiction book.

When he's sitting there in this 700 foot long dining room surrounded by gold and diamonds,

the most ostentatious thing you can see, and the interviewer says, who are you envious

of?

And the interviewer says, obviously, everyone's envious of you, who are you envious of?

And the guy, he's so morose, he's so glum, and he just kind of looks down and he says,

people who are happier than me.

And it was like, that's the case, money didn't help him because he was already depressed.

And in that situation, it's not going to do much.

But I think if you are the kind of person who already has a chipper disposition, you're

already happy, then getting more money will probably improve your life.

That I think is kind of an unfortunate, I don't know, just like, because so many people

who are depressed will think to themselves, if only I had money, it would fix everything.

And it's probably not the case.

There's a really great quote in Will Smith's biography, where he says, when Will Smith

was poor and depressed, he could say to himself, if only I had more money, everything would

be better.

When he was rich and depressed, he didn't have that hope anymore.

Money actually subtracted the hope from his life because he realized there's nothing else

to strive for.

So I think that's the case.

If you're already depressed, that's who you're going to be when you're rich.

And this is just highlighting something that a million people have said and everyone already

knows, is that money just accentuates who you are.

If you're a jerk, it's going to make you more of a jerk.

If you're happy, it's probably going to make you happier.

It's like power or alcohol or many drugs, so it's an amplifier.

Exactly.

One of the things that's really interesting to me, the new biography of Elon Musk, Walter

Isaacson, is interviewing Musk's first wife, whose name is Justine.

And she met Elon in college before he was any successful.

He was just an immigrant from South Africa.

He didn't have any money, no success.

That's when she met him.

And she talks about how much money and fame changed him.

It just completely altered his personality.

The other thing that I've always found interesting is that if you go back and look at an interview

of Donald Trump in the early 1980s, there are several you can find on YouTube.

When he was known but not famous and he was probably wealthy but not rich, you would not

recognize him.

Utterly different person, very calm, very measured, very reasonable.

And even if you are a huge Trump fan, I think you would be stunned at who the person is

on camera.

So any of us, me, you, anyone, if we came into that level of fame and power and money,

it would change us.

And there's another quote from J. Paul Getty where he says, nobody would be the same if

they could afford to be different.

And I think that's a sad quote, but I think there's a lot of truth to that.

Can you say that again?

He says, nobody would be the same if they could afford to be different.

What do you think he meant by that?

I think he was probably mentioning in the sense of does money make you happier?

Does money change who you are?

And I think all of us want to imagine that if you and I stumbled across a billion dollars

tomorrow, we would be the same people.

We would have the same friends, the same interests, the same hobbies, the same disposition, the

same personality.

And I think there's enough examples of this where the answer is we would not.

I think there are probably some exceptions that we could think of, but I think every

single person who comes into that kind of money is a different person, becomes a different

person, is going to have a different personality.

I wonder if they become a different person or if it's similar to the quote, I wish I

could recall the attribution, but adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it.

I wonder if it's kind of like watching someone with money interact with a waiter or a waitress

who's having a tough first day or a busy section when people don't need to be nice anymore?

How do they behave?

Yes.

Exactly.

That's exactly it.

When you're still in building mode, on some level, especially if you're socially aware,

you're playing, I shouldn't say all people, most people are going to play the game consciously

or subconsciously, be on better behavior, but when you really have, fuck you, money,

how often do you actually say fuck you?

I think that's maybe a measure of what was a kernel of the personality or the hidden

personality, the better hidden personality beforehand.

Also, I don't want to end on basically, if you think your life sucks now, it doesn't

matter what money you make, you're probably going to still think your life sucks because

it's pretty, even if it's true, it's sort of a sour note to end this chapter of the

conversation on.

I want to explore it a little bit further, but what were you going to say?

I was going to say, I was in Omaha, Nebraska last week, obviously Warren Buffett's hometown,

and I was driving along the freeway and there's a giant building, one of the tallest buildings

in town, that on top of the building in enormous, probably 50-foot letters says, Buffett Cancer

Research Center.

He's funded it.

He's bought it.

Warren drives by past that building every day and sees that, and there is no way that

seeing your name on something like that, there's no way that he's the same Warren Buffett

who drove past that building when he was 13.

It's going to completely change just your view of who you are in the world.

To your point about, let's not leave this on a sad note because you're right.

I do think money can be used to give yourself a better life.

The distinction we need to make is the distinction between happiness and contentment.

Does money buy happiness?

I think that answer is pretty firmly no.

Can money buy contentment?

I think that's a pretty firm yes, and that's great.

Contentment is a great trait that makes your life better, but it's very different from

happiness.

Could you just define that term so we understand what we're talking about?

I would say happiness as you wake up grinning ear to ear.

Happiness is you're out at a bar with your friends.

Happiness is you hear the funniest joke you've ever heard.

That's what I think people strive for, and they think that money is going to give to

them and it won't.

I think contentment is you just wake up with a low or virtually no level of anxiety.

You're like, I'm good.

I'm pretty satisfied with my career.

I'm satisfied with my relationships.

I'm satisfied with the house that I live in.

That's not happiness though.

I think money can reduce the number of sad days that you have, but it's probably not

going to increase the number of happy days that you have.

That's awesome.

That's a huge life improvement, but it's not happiness.

Unless you have stand-up comedy budget and you go to more stand-up comedy shows.

That's actually a great point.

I'm not really kidding.

That's something that I do quite a lot of.

I've been on such a comedy binge lately, just Netflix specials.

I've said this many times, but I think comedians are the only good thought leaders.

Because when you listen to the good comedy-

They're the only practical philosophers left.

Exactly.

And not only do you laugh, but you get smarter.

I think George Carlin was a bona fide genius.

I think Bill Burr is a genius.

Those guys understand human behavior better than any psychology PhD does.

Let's take a hard left from what we're talking about.

Let's talk about avalanches.

I'll let you take the baton and go from there.

Avalanche is scared the living hell out of me.

I do have a decent amount.

I'm no expert skier to the extent that you used to compete and so on, but I have done

in the last handful of years quite a lot of side country and back country skiing.

This just scares the wits out of me.

Yeah.

It does not get less scary with each passing year.

So tell me about your experience with avalanches.

I grew up as a competitive ski racer in Lake Tahoe and most of those big years were when

I was a teenager, 16, 17, 18.

My friends and I, there were about a dozen of us on the Squaw Valley ski team.

We skied six days a week, 10 months a year.

We skied all over the world, always traveling around.

And one day, this is February of 2001.

I was 17 years old at the time.

Lake Tahoe where we lived had just been dumped on, just got an absolute monster blanket of

snow dumped on.

The layering of snow was very important to the story.

So at one point, Squaw got about two feet of very light, fluffy snow.

And then after that, it got about two feet of very wet, heavy snow on top of that, which

we didn't think about this at the time, but that creates a textbook perfect avalanche

condition because you have heavy snow on top of light snow.

It slides very easily.

So one day in February, 2001, myself and two of my friends, Brendan Allen and Brian Richmond,

were skiing and we would ski out of bounds at Squaw Valley.

We would duck under the ropes that say, do not cross to ski the untouched, untracked parts

of the mountain that are so much fun to do.

When you do that, there's no chairlift at the bottom.

We would ski to the bottom and then hitchhike back once we got spit out on a backcountry

road.

The three of us did this run on the backside of Squaw.

We had done it maybe a half dozen times before, not that often because it's such a pain in

the ass to hitchhike.

But we ski down like it was so great, so awesome.

And halfway down, we triggered a small avalanche and it was pretty small.

It like came up to our knees and it's the most bizarre feeling because you very suddenly

have no control at all because rather than pushing on the snow to gain traction, the

snow is pushing you.

So all of a sudden, you go from skiing to I'm on a roller coaster is how it feels.

But it ended pretty quickly and we got to the bottom and I remember saying to Brendan

and I remember saying like, holy shit, did you see that avalanche?

So we laughed about it and we hitchhiked back and didn't say another word about it.

We get back down to Squaw and Brendan and Brian say, hey, let's do it again.

I have no idea why, but I said, I don't want to do it again.

I think hitchhiking kind of freaked me out.

But Brendan and Brian said, okay, we're going to do it again.

And I said, hey, rather than hitchhiking, I'll drive my car around and pick you guys

up so you don't have to hitchhike.

So we went our separate ways.

Brendan and Brian went and did the run again.

I went down, took my boots off, drove around to pick them up.

And when I got to the spot we were going to pick them up, they were not there.

I didn't think that much about it.

I thought maybe they had already hitchhiked back.

I think I was late.

So I was like, I felt bad that I was late picking them up and they had already left.

And I drove back to our locker room and they weren't there either.

And no one, no one had seen them.

And this is before cell phones, but like prior to cell phones, people were very comfortable

being out of touch, unlike they are today.

If you didn't know where someone was, it was like, whatever, there's somewhere else.

So we didn't think anything of it.

And later that day, Brian's mom called me and she said, hey, Brian didn't show up for

work today and she also just spoken to Brendan's dad and Brendan missed a dentist appointment

that afternoon.

And she said, do you know where they are?

And I said, yeah, we skied the backside of Squaw, which we were not supposed to do is

out of bounds.

And I was going to pick them up, but they never showed up and no one's seen them since.

And Brian's mom, who's an expert skier, said, oh my God, and she clicked the phone.

She hung up.

And I think in that moment, both of us figured out what happened without saying it.

Both of us knew what happened.

And the day went on, we called the police.

We got a missing persons report.

The police didn't take it serious at all.

But eventually that evening, we got search and rescue involved.

And they went out to a Stila Blizzard.

They had a team of search dogs and these giant floodlights to search for them.

And the next morning, about 9 a.m. the next morning, the search dogs had honed in on a

spot in the avalanche field and rescuers with these giant probe poles to probe the snow

found Brandon and Brian buried about six feet down from a massive avalanche.

The rescuers had just said, it looked like half the mountain had been torn away.

They were dead, of course.

And so that, you know, I was 17, that had like a huge profound impact on my life.

This is not that unique of a story.

Everyone has lost somebody close to them.

Everyone's had a near-death experience themselves.

But this was my version of that.

And it shredded me, completely tore me to pieces.

And it wasn't until years later that I had pieced together a couple of takeaways from

this that impacted my life personally.

One was my decision to not go on the second run with them was completely thoughtless and

bring this.

I didn't weigh the pros and cons.

I didn't say, oh, no, it's too dangerous.

I didn't think anything of it.

I think I was probably just tired.

And I said, you guys go do another run and I won't.

If I had went with them, I would have 100% chance I would have died.

So the most important decision that I ever made in my life, it was not where to go to

college.

It was not whom to marry.

But the most important decision I ever made on my life was to not go on the second run

with them.

And I put no thought into it.

It was a complete random fluke.

And so one of the takeaways there for me was just how fragile life is.

There's this great quote from Tim Urban, who I think has probably been on your show before,

where he says, if you had a time machine and you could go back in time, you would be terrified

because you would realize that the tiniest little no-nothing decision that you make can

flourish into completely change your life in good ways and bad.

Most people, how they met their spouse was a complete random fluke that ended up really

important to them.

And so you realize just how incredibly fragile life is and how there might be a decision that

you make today, that I make today, that we think nothing about, the random decision that

goes on to change everything.

That story, that experience had a profound impact on me on thinking about risk, thinking

about the tail end consequences of risk, thinking about how fragile the world is.

It went on to impact virtually everything in my life from that one day.

Number one, I'm so sorry, obviously, for the loss of your friends.

And the story for all the reasons you described is terrifying, not just from the avalanche

perspective, but from the angle of looking at how small decisions can have huge impacts.

And also how, I think as we discussed in the last conversation, risk is what's left when

you've thought of everything else.

Now, in this particular case, I suppose, if you'd really taken my moment to sit down with

the pro and cons, you probably would have figured out that it was a bad idea.

But in the moment, you could have very easily made the wrong decision.

I suppose part of what I'm wondering, because you've become very good at interrogating the

world and your own thoughts with questions, right?

And that in that particular moment, you made a snap judgment.

It's not really a snap judgment.

You made a snap decision that saved your life.

But you have questions that you seem to explore or revisit with some regularity.

Some of them we discussed in the last interview, but I'm just going to read a few.

So what are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in a year?

Which of our current views would change if our incentives were different?

And it goes on and on.

I mean, there are many others.

I mean, there's one that I had not heard before, which is what hassle you're trying to

eliminate that's actually an unavoidable cost of success.

That's pretty interesting to me.

Who has the right answers?

But we ignore because they're not articulate.

What looks unsustainable that is actually a new trend we haven't accepted yet.

So my macro question about these questions is how you arrived at these questions, whether

it was coming up with them or borrowing them or adapting them.

And which of these might be worth exploring as our next chapter in this conversation?

I think maybe the core of a lot of these questions is that everybody, including

myself, thinks that their experience in life is roughly how the world works without

realizing that their experience in life is so very unique to their life.

And so you and I are white American males.

And I think it's common for us naturally to think that the experiences that you and I

have had and how people treat us is how everyone else is treated.

And of course, that's not true.

And so I think when you accept that the world that I've experienced is so different from

the world that you've experienced and other people, then I think you just start asking

these questions about like, what else is out there that I haven't seen, that I'm oblivious to?

And the fact is that I and you and everyone is oblivious to 99.99% of the world, completely

oblivious to how it works because we're centered on what we've experienced.

So that's where a lot of it comes.

I think a lot of it too, and this is an unhealthy mindset, but I spend 99% of my life thinking

about the past and contemplating the future, the worst thing that you can do virtually

never present.

So I think I'm constantly interrogating the past of like, what could it have been?

Why did that happen?

What would my life have been like if that happened?

My parents were visiting us just last week and my mother was and is at a very high risk of

breast cancer.

By age 42, she was the oldest surviving female in her family, her sister, her mother, her

grandmother, everyone had died of breast cancer.

And my mother is now 70 and she's healthy.

Fingers crossed, knock on wood.

But we were talking the other day about when we were growing up and myself and my siblings

were children that my father and mother would cry if my mother had a lump that needed to

get checked out.

They would hold each other and cry about this is going to be the one.

And it's so bonkers for me to contemplate if my childhood had ended up differently.

And it's so easily, not only could it have, it probably should have statistically, she

should have died of breast cancer 30 years ago.

And the fact that it didn't.

So I actually spent, this is probably unhealthy, but I spent a lot of my time contemplating

what would life have been like if my mother died when I was 10 years old.

Actually, I'll take that back.

I think that is a pretty healthy thing to think about, to imagine a life that's different

than it could have been.

Because I think it prepares you for a more variant future than you're expecting.

And the truth is that nothing would have been the same.

I would have gone to different schools.

I would have had different friends.

I would have had a different mindset.

I would have a different career if that had happened.

And you can say that for a billion different things in life.

And then you realize that the path that got you to where you are today was completely

unforeseeable and completely random and in many ways outside of your control.

Everyone, I think particularly successful people want to think that their success was

entirely, if not overwhelmingly due to the decisions that they made.

And I think in virtually any condition, in any example, that's not the case.

It's also a very fragile framework, right?

Because you're then either excellent or terrible, depending on the outcome.

And you're not in both cases, you're not factoring all of the chance involved.

It seems to be a fragile mindset in a sense.

It's a vulnerable mindset.

There's a German philosopher whose name I'm forgetting, but he has this idea

and this is probably a pretty common idea.

I don't know if he came up with this, but he just talked about it, that there are

an infinite number of possible worlds, an infinite number of ways the world could

have turned out, and we just happened to live in this one.

There are just an infinite number of alternative histories that could have

gone another way during the Revolutionary War in the United States.

It was the Battle of Long Island and George Washington and his troops were

very close to being wiped out by the British.

All the British had to do was they basically had them cornered just outside

of Brooklyn and all they had to do was sail at the East River and it would all

been over and that was their plan and George Washington troops were starving

and hungry and they were whipped.

And then night that the British were planning to sail up the river and corner

him, the winds changed direction and turned the other way and they could not

sail at the East River and that gave George Washington his troops just enough

time to get away.

David McCullough, who was one of the world's foremost authorities on this

topic, was interviewed by Charlie Rose and Charlie Rose said, if the winds

were blowing the other direction that night, would there have been any United

States? And David McCullough said, absolutely not.

The entire reason this exists is because the winds in Brooklyn changed

directions. When you hear enough stories like that, you realize this is like

literally nothing is certain about the future.

It could all go in any different direction for the tiniest little reason,

not a big reason, but for me, it was not going on a second run.

I thought about it afterwards.

I had probably been on something like 3,000 runs with Brendan and Brian over

the course of my life, priced something in that neighborhood.

And how many times did I say, hey, you guys do another, I'm going to skip?

Probably never.

I think it was probably the first time I'd done something like that.

And when you hear a story about the winds changing direction or for me, it

just makes you so incapable of having any kind of confidence that we know what

the future is going to bring for any of us.

Let's maybe shift to the meta level one more time and I'll make it more

specific in terms of the question about the questions.

And then I want to segue to not in a rush, but asking about perhaps things

that are more inside of our control in terms of coming back to the

serenity prayer, which you so kindly invented in 2020.

Although I guess the be here now, you did not steps from the cannon in terms

of the past and the future, in any case, still working on that one.

Yeah.

So these questions, like what are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly

obvious in a year?

Were these questions that you generated or used mostly in thinking about

investing?

Are these prompts that you came up with for writing or something else?

The, where did these questions come from?

Let me start with that specific question about what's going to be

shockingly obvious in the air.

I remember, I forget who it was, but it was during the dark days of COVID.

So like March or April, 2020, and somebody tweeted, I forget who it was,

but they said, in one year, we're either going to be in the second

great depression, and it's going to be so obvious that that was where we

were heading, or we're going to be in a giant boom.

And it's going to be so obvious that that's where we were heading.

Either of those outcomes would be so obvious.

And the truth is one year later, by most measures, we were in a giant boom,

stock market boom, a con, like things were exploding in 2021, the meme stock bubble.

And for a lot of people, it was so obvious, the Fed printed all this money.

We did $6 trillion, who anyone could have seen this coming.

But the truth is that if we were in the second great depression, it would

have been just as obvious.

Most of these questions that I posed in that, in the end of the chapter there,

are questions that I think are impossible to answer.

So what is going to be shockingly obvious today, one year from now in 2024?

I think it's an impossible to answer, but it's going to be shockingly obvious.

And maybe the answer will be who is going to win or who's going to lose the

presidency, and when it's going to happen, it's going to be so obvious.

A lot of people did this with Trump in 2016.

When he won, they said, yeah, I saw this coming.

Maybe, or if he had lost huge, that would have been obvious too.

So most of these questions I just going to have in my kind of semi-depressive

walks around the neighborhood sometimes, and I'm walking my dog contemplating

what the past could have been or what the future is going to hold for me.

But I actually kind of enjoy doing these things.

I think it's fun to contemplate a world that is so outside of your little

comfort bubble of what you've experienced.

So let me touch on another one of the questions, which is, which of our

current views would change if our incentives were different?

And I want to tie it to another line that I have in front of me that I

want you to elaborate on.

And maybe these parallel, maybe they don't, but they seem like they could.

And it is the most valuable personal finance asset is not needing to impress anyone.

I'll tell you what's so stark to me about the topic of incentives, about how

would I be different if my incentives were different?

One of the passages that I've read that stuck out to me the most and stopped

me dead in my tracks was from this book on World War Two.

As we were just saying, it's a book called What We Knew.

And it's a book that interviews German civilians who are around during Nazi

Germany. And the book just asks, what did you see?

What did you know during this period?

Did you know about the Holocaust?

Like just in a very non-judgemental way, because they're all civilians.

Just tell me what you saw.

And there's a German civilian who mentions that when Hitler came to

power, virtually every German supported him.

And the interviewer says, like, why, what, what it was so appealing.

And the civilian says, we have to understand in 1920s, in the early 1930s,

the German economy was an utter catastrophe way worse than the great

depression that we had in the United States.

They had hyperinflation, everything fell to pieces.

And I'm simplifying this, but Hitler came to power and said, I have a better way.

I'm going to give you all jobs.

I'm going to make you all wealthy again.

We're going to restore German pride and power.

And in that situation, when everyone was literally starving and had nothing,

this civilian said, if someone comes along and promises you a better way,

you accept it and you say, yes, I'll go with you.

And they said, everyone was so willing to overlook the obvious downsides of

Hitler because he gave them the incentive to be like, Hey, do you want a job?

Do you want prosperity?

I'm the way.

And they said, sign me up.

I'll do it.

There's another example.

It was a documentary in Mexico where El Chapo was, of course, one of the most

ruthless murderous drug lords of all time, but he's actually very well

supported by a lot of local communities in Mexico.

This interviewer had asked these people, why, why do you support this

murderous dictator?

And they said, we got to understand we have nothing.

We have no money and Chapo comes to town and he says, I'll build you homes.

I'll give you health care.

I'll give you food.

I'll give you jobs.

Takes care of all of them.

And they're incentive.

The civilians incentive is to say, this guy's great.

Love this guy.

So I think a lot of society, when you look at why was Hitler supported?

Why is Chapo supported?

Can at least in part be explained by those people have incentives that you and

I don't, and what is scary, but in undoubtedly true is contemplating whether

you or I, if we lived in Germany in the 1930s or if we lived in Mexico in the

last 20 years, would have supported those people.

And I think you are fooling yourself if you say, no, I would not have.

And so I think if you have a cynical view of everyone who lived in Germany was

a monster, of course, a lot of them were, but if you see, they all were monsters.

Everyone who supports El Chapo is a monster.

I think if your conclusion is that if all of them, you are misunderstanding the

power of incentives and how you would be different yourself.

Yeah, I agree.

So let's use that as a segue to maybe the unrelated, maybe the related.

The most valuable personal finance asset is not needing to impress anyone.

Is that something you can cultivate or is that also a preset out of the box?

There are definitely people who are more insecure than others.

And I think where a lot of this comes from is that everybody wants respect and

admiration from people around them, particularly the people who they want to

admire them, their friends, their spouses or coworkers.

And there's a couple of different ways to cultivate that.

If you can cultivate respect and admiration through wisdom and intelligence

and humor and love and empathy, then you can get all of it from that.

If you don't have any of those traits, most people will resort to trying to

gain admiration with horsepower and square footage.

And they'll just try to show off to other people.

I can't gain your respect with humor and wisdom, but look at my car.

It's really cool, isn't it?

That's a lot of where it comes from.

And we were talking about comedians before.

Louis C.K., I'm fine saying this because I think he would have made to it.

He looks like a fat slob.

Nobody cares because he's so funny.

He doesn't need to show off his six pack.

If he drove a Honda Civic, nobody would care.

They admire him because he's funny.

And I think there's a lot of insight in that, that everybody just wants

respect and admiration.

There was like a picture of Justin Bieber the other day, and he's wearing like

a dirty wife beater and like ripped sweatpants.

It doesn't matter.

He's Justin Bieber.

He can do it.

It does not matter.

If you gain your respect and admiration from other ways, you don't need to show it off.

And so I think that's a big part of this.

And for the huge majority of people, the biggest financial liability that they have,

it's not student loans, it's not a mortgage.

It's their desire and their need to impress other people.

I think that the way that you can cultivate this is realizing that those people

are a by and large, not paying attention to you.

They're worried about themselves.

The people who you think are looking at your car are not.

They're thinking about their own car.

That's a big part of this.

Or the other part of it is there's probably seven people in my life who I want to

love me, my parents, my wife, my kids, one or two friends, that I would say, I

really desperately want them to love me.

It's really important that they love me.

And that's it.

The other 7.999 billion people on the planet, I would like you to like me, but

that's about it.

So once you realize that, then it's like, I want seven people to really

respect and admire me.

And I'm going to put all my effort into that.

And everyone else, I really don't have much care about.

I think once you accept that, it's a huge relief off your shoulders.

So you mentioned earlier, the most important decision of your life being

that snap decision to not take the extra run.

Very quickly, either just before or just after you mentioned that you talked

about marriage or who you marry.

So how would you suggest people think about that?

If there is a way to think about it, or is it just a crapshoot, right?

It's just like, Hey, look, you're in the casino and either you're going to

roll lucky sevens or you're not, but best of luck to you.

Is there a structured way to think about this or a particular way, a mode of

thinking about this, any suggestions, asking for a friend.

Gun to my head, Tim, it's the latter.

I think a lot of it is a tremendous amount of luck that's involved in it.

A lot of that is because most people want to get married during a pretty narrow

window of their life from probably age 25 to 35 is when most people want to get married.

So during that window, you're really just like, who am I meeting?

Particularly as you get older, a lot of people are like, I really want to get married.

I just met this guy or this girl like, okay, that's, that's what I got.

We're going to, we're going to marry that's, that's what's in front of me.

That's what we're going to do.

I do think there is a sense though that a lot of people, particularly when

they're young, particularly in their early to mid twenties, are obviously

maximizing for the wrong variables.

Guys are maximizing for beauty and women will tend to maximize for money and

prestige.

That's a very generalized statement that is not black and white.

So if you're offended by that, I'm not talking about you, but obviously

what's going to work in the long run is just like, are you best friends with

this person?

That's it.

That's it.

I think there's an analogy to investing here where a lot of investors

want to maximize for the variable.

How do I earn the highest returns this year?

And in many ways that is like maximizing for beauty.

It's like super fun.

It's super exciting right now.

I'm going to get a lot of dopamine right now, which is what you'll get

from an attractive spouse.

And it's what you'll get from like owning a meme stock in 2021.

But what actually works in the longterm is owning a boring index fund for

50 years.

And what's actually going to work in marriage is marrying your best friend,

even if they're not the most attractive or richest person that was in your

social circle.

That's like really clear as day.

Now there are some people who will marry their best friend who was also very

wealthy and very attractive.

Like of course, like it works out, but I think a lot of it is just people

maximizing for the wrong variables in there.

When I look at my own marriage, my wife and I met when she was 19 and I was 21.

So we were very young.

We were in college.

You know, we've been together for 17 or 18 years now.

And when I look back at it, I think it was overwhelmingly luck.

And I think the biggest element of luck in there is that we grew together.

And hey, by the way, I'm going to say we've grown together so far.

Fingers crossed that we continue to do so.

But if you understand what happens to most relationships, it's much more

difficult than you would think.

I attribute that a lot to luck.

And there were periods in our relationship when I started to go one way and

she started to go another and we came back, but you can see it.

How did you do that?

Could you get maybe, you don't have to give a concrete example if it's not

comfortable, but this is a relationship breaker that divergence breaks a lot of

relationships or it just causes an incredible amount of strife.

And it's not clear that the lines come back to converge, right?

I've seen many seemingly great relationships self-immolate because of this

divergence that does not converge in time to save the relationship.

So what did you guys do to rein it back in or what happened there?

The best definition I've heard about love is you love someone if you respect

them for their faults as much as you do their, their, their good traits.

And I think that was really true that in, in,

what does that mean though?

I mean, it sounds good.

I'm going to push back a little hard because I'm not like, yeah,

this person's always late.

I really respect that they're always fucking late when they show up to dinner.

I told you to say what you mean.

And I think maybe respect is the wrong word, but it's more acceptance.

If my wife does something that irritates me, of course that's happened.

And vice versa, more so vice versa.

I have to go out of my way, but I try to go out of my way to say, I know she means

well, I know she's doing the best she can.

Even if it really bothered me.

And I think if you can hold on to that, it's easier not to look over things,

but to compromise on things.

The other thing is, I think for, this is true for French, everyone knows the

friendship with your best buddy, not your spouse or your mate, but your best buddy

that all it takes is for one person to pick up the phone and give you a call.

And if you can do that, you can keep a friendship going for 20 years, 30 years.

And I think if one person in the relationship really wants us to work,

you can really make it work.

I have a close friend who their relationship is not that healthy.

And they've said that at any given time, one of them wants to leave, but there's

never been a time when both of them want to leave.

And that's why they've stuck together.

And so I think if there's one person in the relationship that is willing to

compromise and make it work, there's a good chance that it's going to work over

time.

I don't think I've ever said this.

I really have three major life goals.

I want to stay married.

I don't want to get fat and I want to be there for my kids.

Is that in weighted order?

One to three.

Okay.

Probably not, probably not.

I think that's like respect for my relationships, respect for my body and

respect for my family is one other way that you can put that.

Those are really the goals that if I'm on my deathbed and I have not achieved

those, I'm going to have some regrets.

If those are that powerful, then you're willing to compromise on a billion

different things to make it work.

And there's a friend of my name, Brent B.

Shore, who says, if both you and your spouse want to serve each other and

expect nothing in return, then it works.

I want to serve my wife and I don't expect her to serve me.

And if both of you do that, you're always going to be pleasantly surprised.

You're always going to be like, wow, you did this for me.

I didn't like, I didn't, you're always going to be in the sense of all of the

other person that is kind of idealized.

Of course, it sounds, it's much easier to say than to do.

But I think it's a pretty good guiding philosophy.

Once you would be like, I'm in the service industry.

I want to try to serve my wife and I don't want to expect much in return.

If I can do those things, I'm probably going to wake up pretty satisfied with

the relationship most days.

That's probably true for life, broadly speaking, in the sense that reality

minus expectations equals some state of being, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So let me ask you a question that I brought up a little bit earlier.

I'm just, I've never heard it posed or read it posed.

And so I'm curious to know how you might answer this if you had a gun against the

head, because I'm not saying this is intended to immediately produce answers.

But if you had to answer it or answer it for other people, what hassle are you

trying to eliminate that's actually an unavoidable cost of success?

And the reason that I want to return to this is that this ties into the question

of money, happiness, contentment, et cetera, is that many people who achieve

what would be considered by most financial success are people who have been

rewarded for solving problems over long periods of time.

And they probably identify as being a good problem solver.

And they are therefore conditioned, their behaviors are shaped to look for

problems to solve.

And that does not always foster a sense of well-being, if that makes sense.

So what hassle are you trying to eliminate that's actually an unavoidable

cost of success?

How would you answer this or how have you answered it?

Or how have you seen other people come up with answers?

We'll give you a technical answer and then maybe a more personal answer.

I think when I wrote that question, I was probably thinking of stock market

volatility, very technical, probably not where you thought I was going.

A lot of investors try to eliminate volatility and they say they view it as

a burden and something that you should get rid of when actually it's like, no,

that's the cost of success.

Right.

It's the fee and not the penalty, right?

It's the fee and not the penalty.

That's probably what I was thinking.

One thing that comes to mind is a blog post that you wrote many years ago, I

think, about the cost of fame.

Yeah.

11 reasons why not to become famous.

Yes.

And you were very open and forthcoming about what it's done to your own life.

And anyone who reads that will read that and say, some version of, I don't

envy what Tim's going through.

And the irony of coming to that conclusion after millions of people will look

at the books that you've sold and the money that you've made and the downloads

of your podcast would say, I want to be like Tim.

And you read that and it's like, I don't know, maybe, but I don't know.

It's not at all clear anymore.

Among the top 10 richest people in the world, there are, I think, 14 cumulative

divorces, which is obviously like a massive outlier within there.

I think the reason why that is, is because to become very successful, you

need to devote every waking hour to your career.

And so your spouse, your children, your friends, like, bye, like, sorry, don't,

don't have any time for you.

If you read the biography of the snowball, which I reread recently, it's

a biography of Warren Buffett.

As someone who's been such a Buffett fanboy my entire life, and a lot of

people will fall into that category, you read his biography and at the end,

you're like, to tell you the truth, not the life that I want.

He has devoted every waking hour since he's been 11 years old to picking

stocks.

That's not an exaggeration.

And it came at the expense of his personal life, his marriage, his children.

There was an interview with Elon Musk several years ago, where they're

talking about how hard he works and he breaks down in tears and he says, all

this has come at the expense of spending time with my children.

And it's like, I don't want that.

There's not any version of life in which I would be on my death bed and say,

that was worth it.

I made a ton of money, but who are these children that I had?

I don't even know them.

And so if you want the success, but you want to eliminate the downsides

of it, you're completely fooling yourself.

You have to make a decision.

I would be willing to bet too, although I don't want to put words in your mouth,

that despite that blog post, when you're talking about all of the downsides

that you have experienced, if you had to go back to before, when you wrote

four hour work week, you would not change your mind.

You would still do it.

That the cost was worth it.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm willing to bet that's true.

You know, I would say it's a both end.

There are ways in which it is worth it.

And there are many ways in which it is not worth it.

And that's what makes it so tricky on a forward-looking basis, thinking about decisions.

Although it's easier for me now because I've realized some of the

Faustian bargains, and I've also realized how, to your earlier point, how

much money is an amplifier rather than a savior, if that makes sense.

And of course, it depends on where you are on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

But chances are, if you're listening to this podcast, and you've made it

however long, hour, hour and a half, that using the global average as a reference

point, you are in the top one percent.

And you are doing very well from a global standpoint.

And that, I think, well, I'd say a few things just to give myself a little bit

of slack, the younger self, that I don't think hope is trivial.

And that seems like such a self-evident statement, but this is part of why, and

I'm not sure if we talked about this, but there are some people I've come across

who are like, ah, lotteries, you know, lotteries are taxes on the dumb.

And I think about it.

I'm like, well, if you feel trapped, if you don't have mobility and 10 bucks, when

the Powerball gets over $500 million, buys you a week or a couple of days of

hope and excitement, is that really a bad investment?

Totally worth it.

I would actually push back and say it's actually probably not a bad investment.

It's actually probably a great investment, as long as you don't overdo it.

And similarly, I think that without the delusion early on that money would fix

all of these problems and would resolve all of this inner conflict and turmoil

and insecurity without, I think that was actually a very valuable delusion.

Yeah.

What was my alternative, right?

Compared to what I think is a question we need to ask more often, right?

Risky compared to what is it this compared to what is that person a good

match compared to what?

And for me, it was like, all right, what was the best alternative?

To just not have any hope to assume that this steady state of at the time, you

know, quite a bit of suffering and depression was going to last forever.

I don't think that was a viable alternative.

Even though I've arrived at a point where I need to find other solutions, I think

that's better than having given up hope 20, 30 years ago.

But I would have made some very different tactical decisions along the way to

minimize some of the risks and downsides, for sure.

But it's tricky.

Even if that's in hindsight, definitely true, I think it would have been

impossible because there's no way for you to learn about the downsides of fame

other than to go through them.

So like it almost would have been very difficult to preempt it.

I think there are some things to do back to the $8 billion family.

They learned vicariously through other families, what not to do, and they

preempted a lot of it.

So to the extent that you can learn those mistakes from other people, and I

would say reading that blog post from you, Tim, had a profound impact on me.

And I think what a lot of people who are in any degree of public spotlight don't

understand is that you think you're gaining attention, but where you're

actually fostering is envy, and envy will come back to haunt you tenfold.

And so like be very careful when you put your successes out there.

Because even for people who are clapping for you, they're clapping for you

while they're biting their lip because they're envious of what you have.

And even if they don't feel that envy in the moment, and I may have mentioned

this and that piece, but it's like the poles, the extreme switch sides very easily.

Although it tends to be unidirectional in sense that the people who are your

biggest, most extreme fans have the most dedication are in my experience.

This is not my own experience.

I've spoken to a lot of people who would reinforce this.

They can switch to being the most violent, terrifying attackers very easily.

And that can get physically dangerous.

I mean, there are many examples that I don't have to get into it.

But that particular set of experiences has also led me to rethink, honestly,

the podcast in the sense that to compete, and I'm less and less

interested in competing in most things.

Although by nature, I'm very competitive.

I enjoy competing.

I enjoy winning.

I guess it's a better way to put it.

Or maybe I just hate losing.

Who knows, we can psychoanalyze that another time.

But to compete right now, you need to, as a podcaster, in this type of format,

not true crime.

There are exceptions like this American life.

But if you are interview format, if you really want to compete, you basically

have to produce a television show.

And one, I think of the mostly hidden risks, which is kind of obvious.

I think in retrospect, when people look back a year or five years from now, it

will seem very obvious and they'll say, well, how could it have turned out any

different, but the risks of video micro fame or macro fame and the degree to

which a much higher percentage of the population is going to be subject to

stalkers and death threats and very, very, very scary things.

People showing up at their homes because they bought it in their own name and

not through an LLC or trust or whatever.

That I think is going to be a cost that a lot of folks are not seeing down

the pike that I think is unavoidable.

So for me personally, particularly as I shift into new chapters in my life, I

have been thinking about meditating on, writing on quite extensively how I want

to adapt or stop or modify what I'm doing to mitigate some of those risks.

Because I do view them as unavoidable.

And I just don't think most people having never experienced that, having never

been in a car crash, they're like, what do you mean a car crash?

Like, sure, I'll wear my seatbelt, but I don't have to pay attention to A,

B and C and D factors.

It's like, no, you probably should because the downside risk is so high.

Anyway, not to paint a dark picture.

I think a lot of these things can be avoided, but the temptation, like you

said, and the performative aspect of so much of this on, say, social media and

the reinforcement and the way that these platforms have been designed to take

advantage of the baser drives and fears that humans have is remarkable.

They're very well tuned.

And maybe it's easy for me to say, right?

Because I've had enough success on, say, the podcast that I could afford to

pull the cord if I wanted and do something else.

That's what's most interesting to me are the people, the young people on social

media who are very reasonably like waving their arms to get attention because

they don't have any attention yet.

And they're trying to break through.

I see this with a lot of new people on Twitter, a lot of new bloggers,

a lot of new podcasters.

How do you stand out?

You stand out by being ridiculous.

A lot of new politicians, by the way, some of whom are running for office right

now, if you're not a household name, how do you become one by saying the most

ridiculous thing possible?

When attention is the currency and the only way to become wealthy in that sense

is to do something like so far out of the norm and norm breaking.

It's a really dangerous world to live in.

Social media came to be when I was in my early twenties, but I see my son who's

seven and is already interacting with YouTube, not any other social media platforms,

but even in YouTube, the influence that it has on him is astounding and growing

up with Mr.

Beast, which I think is like reasonably wholesome content for young people to

watch.

It's not that bad, but even that, I can see what it does to his expectations and

I see what it does to his ambitions and I see what it does to his willingness to

want to put on a prank video or his willingness to want to catch people's

attention by doing something absurd.

That is a pretty unhealthy mindset to learn from a young age.

And I think every child is learning it today.

It's just what's being shoved down their throats in social media.

Yeah.

And also it's like on the spectrum of things as a male or a female, what

you're trying to do to get attention, how close is it to say a modeling career

and how close is it to say being a professor, which are very different things.

And you could use different fill ins for that, but like the closer you are to

model or professional athlete, right?

Let's just say you're doing something that is very physically intensive that you

can only sustain for a short period.

Like the longevity of that career is going to be very short until the newer

vintage comes in to replace you, which they will.

So also thinking about like what the nature of the attention is and what's

involved and what the longevity is, which frankly, even when I was in my early

twenties, I probably wouldn't have been terribly receptive to hearing.

Yeah.

If I were an attractive woman, I could just show my ass and get to the point

where I'm making the intensive thousands of dollars a month for holding

energy drinks in my photos.

Like, I mean, who am I to say I wouldn't do it?

I mean, I think there's a good chance I would have.

I think it's super dangerous in any life to attach your identity to

something that's unsustainable, whether it's being a model or having a certain

career, having an investing strategy.

If you attach your identity to something that you cannot sustain, when it

ends, you're going to be morally crushed.

It's just going to destroy you.

And this like back to investing, the variable that I want to maximize for

is how long can I do this for?

It's not, can I earn the highest returns?

It's, can I maintain this investing strategy for another 50 years?

And I know that I couldn't earn a higher return this year and over the next

five years, if I did something different.

But I'm way less confident that I could keep it going and sustain it.

And I think it's the same for relationships.

Like you might be able to find a more attractive or a wealthier spouse or

partner, but can you keep that going?

Is it something you can maintain?

I'm not interested in anything that's not sustainable.

Friendships, investing, careers, podcasts, reading habits, exercise habits.

If I can't keep it going, I'm not interested in it.

And I think the only way to really do that is if you are going out of your way

to live life at like 80 to 90% potential.

If you're always trying to squeeze out 100% potential for something, almost

certainly it's going to lead to burnout, whether it's a friendship or

relationship or an investing strategy.

So I think it's not easy thing to do.

And if you're a type A person, it's almost impossible to do.

But going out of your way to live life at 80% has always been a strategy

that I want to do just because I want to keep it going for a long time.

Yeah, as we're talking about, I've never really mentioned this publicly, but

in my experience of having various chapters in my career and life so far, it

seems like in my case, if I'm trying to peek around corners and adopt, I wouldn't

say cutting edge, but sort of dull edge technologies.

I'm very rarely the first.

I mean, there's some examples of me doing things very early.

But generally, if you look at, say, angel investing, the angel

investing had existed for a decent, actually a very long time in Silicon Valley

terms, but there wasn't, and there were a handful of let's call the micro VCs.

But beyond that, there was a pretty wide open field for advising and

investing.

And so I was, I don't know, let's call it like number 100 to the field, but

there was a period where the game was kind of like Google AdWords in the very

beginning.

I wasn't the first to use Google AdWords, but man, was there a golden period?

Yeah, for like three to five years where everything seemed to work.

And that's not true in angel investing, but a lot of things worked.

I also got very lucky with timing.

But I look at that, it's like, okay, my sweet spot was really from like 2008 to

2012, but let's push it out from like 2008 to 2015.

It was about seven years.

And then it became really popular.

Everyone with an audience started building VC funds and man, oh man, did

that game get hard?

Money came in from China at one point, terms started getting really wild.

Valuations went ballistic.

And I was like, okay, I was playing with like single deck blackjack and now it's

like five deck blackjack.

This is a much harder game to play.

And so I stopped for an extended period of time.

And then you look at podcasting, it's like, okay, I started in 2014.

I would say the main meat and potatoes earning potential growth potential was in

the first seven years, podcasts still doing great, but I'm coming up on the 10th

anniversary and the game has become very, very, very challenging.

Anyone who's being honest at the higher end in the podcasting game will tell you

a lot of brands have been cutting back due to global macro factors, a lot of

these studios who have raised money for podcasting.

And part of the reason you see, you still see podcast growth, but a lot of

it is because these studios are putting out 50 new shows.

They're not necessarily focusing on making the next Charlie Rose and doubling

and tripling down on single shows.

There are some examples of that and there's some great shows out there, but

the discovery problem for listeners and the competitive problem and many other

factors have made this for me again, reminiscent of angel investing.

When I started to think, you know, part of being good at a game is choosing the

right game and part of what makes the right game is the right competitive

landscape and the right ratio of sort of opportunity to cost and risk.

And the podcasting game is getting very hard and it's getting dragged into

the territory because of platform competition.

Let's just say, you know, Instagram and YouTube and so on versus TikTok, this

short form or video reward system, incentive system, it's pulling people

like me or others in a direction where inevitable costs, fixed costs, being in

single locations, which are all antithetical to the reasons why I started

in the first place.

And I saw this also with the angel investing where it's like, wait a second,

I'm being forced now into a position where I'm heavily tempted to do things that

are counter completely to the strategies that have worked for me up to this point.

Do I want to adapt and end up being one of a thousand people trying to do the

same thing or do I want to try something different?

So I'm just observing this sort of, if I choose really well, the shelf life for a

lot of what I've done seems to be five to 10 years.

And then in, let's just say the last 50% of that, I need to have my eyes open for

what the next chapter looks like that could give me perhaps that type of runway,

right, like five to 10 years, which is different in a way from what you're

describing, but I'm just observing that my own experience.

Let me ask you this and we can, of course, take this wherever you'd like.

But where do you think text goes from here?

Because I think that all that is old becomes new.

Once again, you look at sub-stack, you look at any number of these things.

Like, yeah, text has been sort of the redheaded stepchild, wasn't sexy, but you

look at the success of, say, a Matt Levine, incredible.

It still works and text still travels, even though the platforms, if we look at

those social media platforms as necessary, which I think is a question mark,

actually, text is not going to necessarily be as heavily rewarded as the

things that they're prioritizing to meet their own quarterly goals and so on.

But where do you think text goes in the next handful of years?

Here's what's so shocking to me in my experience.

The audio book version of Psychology of Money outsells the physical book, the

text book by two to one, never in a million years would I have thought that

because I'm a book reader.

I read physical books for that kind of book.

I know it's for that kind of book.

It's bonkers, but talking to other authors, it's similar.

The number of people who are willing to get their contact through their ears

versus through their eyes is way bigger.

Reading is hard for most people.

It's a slog.

They have to reread paragraphs, but listening is great.

It's also single-tasking.

It's a single activity, whereas the listening in an attention economy where

people are trained to feel there is a scarcity of time.

The other experience I've had is that because of that experience with the

audio book four months ago, I started a podcast and I've put virtually no

effort into it.

I've done like 14 episodes.

They're all about 10 minutes long.

That podcast is already larger than my blog that I've been working on for 16

years.

It just exploded, which is kind of depressing, but I think it just goes back

to the audience that's willing to listen is way bigger than the audience that

will read.

Now, I do think it's the case that not only is reading hard, but writing is hard.

It's easier to speak than it is to write in text.

So the people who are good at it will always have an audience that will always

be there.

If you write a textbook, if you start blogging again, as he said,

you would, you'll have an instant audience because you're good at it.

But I think there are a lot of people I would be willing to bet without knowing

this, I'd be willing to bet that Joe Rogan is not a good writer, but he's a

very good speaker.

And so there's just very different skills.

They're very different.

I will say that I actually think Joe, if he wanted to make it a high

priority, would be a very good writer.

That might be the case.

And I'm probably being unfair to him.

I think it'd be good.

That might be the case, but I do think they are very different.

They can be mutually exclusive.

They don't have to come as a pair.

Yeah.

So there are people who are good writers and not good speakers and vice versa.

I think that the people who try to do both will by and large be not that great

at either of them.

And I think most people should probably try to pick one or the other.

When I started my podcast, I thought 90% chance it's not going to work.

Now I put those odds at like 60% chance it's not going to work.

Just because I've always been a writer, I like typing.

That's when I think I do my best work.

And so I think there's always going to be a market for either and the content

creators who are going to screw themselves or the people who try to be

everything to everybody.

Most book publishers want authors to narrate their own audio books.

And I haven't done it for either of my books because it's not my skill.

And I want to pass it to someone whose skill it is.

And it's always been astounding to me that they want authors who are not good

speakers to do it, even if they're not that good at it.

I think that's an analogy for where text is going to.

I was just laughing because I thought of this story.

Hope I'm not speaking out of school here, but pretty sure he's mentioned it

publicly, AJ Jacobs, who's an amazing writer.

He wrote the Year of Living Biblically.

He's written many books that I think are very, very smart.

They're also very, very funny.

I recommend people check out also Esquire piece.

He wrote called, I think you're fat, which is an experiment in radical honesty.

Such a great writer.

And he said to me when he was.

Persuaded to read his own audio book, he went in for the recording session

and a few hours in, they said, look, AJ, why don't you just go home, get some

rest, take some decongestants and we'll see you when you're feeling better.

And he's like, what do you mean, feeling better?

This is just my voice.

It's so good.

Something along those lines.

It was so funny.

And we are not all designed to read audio books.

But let me come back to text versus audio.

This is going to be hard to get from any analytics.

So there's going to be some guesswork involved.

But do you value a read of, say, one of your blog posts in the same way

that you value a single listen of a podcast episode?

And embedded in this is, do you think they are the same audience?

Or is it like speaking at a general business conference versus speaking at

Ted, where you get maybe 10,000 people in the first and a thousand people at

a second, but that does not mean the latter is automatically worth 10% of the

former.

It's definitely not the same audience.

And the reason I know that is because every podcast episode I do, I'm reading

an old blog post and nobody cares because the people who are listening to it did

not read the blog post.

So for them, it's all brand new content.

I just came up with some of these blog posts I wrote 10 years ago, but it's

all new to them.

So I know it's not the same.

And I think there are people like myself, I will listen to podcasts on planes.

And that's it.

But other than that, I just read when I'm home.

I never listen to anything.

I just read and even at night when I'm falling to sleep, I can try Netflix for

a little bit, but really what I want to do is read a book.

And for me, I think the reason why I like reading better is because it's easier

to zip your eyes up and reread a paragraph than it is to rewind and try to figure

into like, what that guy just say?

It's easier to just zip your eyes to read it again.

And so I think you absorb a lot more of it by reading.

At least that's true for me.

And I would be shocked if I deviated from that.

I think I'll be reading text forever.

And I think I'll want to be a writer forever.

Even if my podcasts were to become very successful, I think I would say, I'm a

writer, I'm curious what your thought is that because you are a very successful

writer before you started the podcast.

If you go back to 2013, before your podcast started, would you have

shaken your head and disbelief at the idea that you didn't abandon writing,

but you became much more of a speaker than a writer?

I certainly wouldn't have seen it coming.

I started this podcast as an experiment.

I think I committed to six episodes to see if I could refine my conversational

skills, question asking, reduce my stammering and get rid of some verbal

ticks with the assumption that even if I stopped after six episodes, that would

help me with my interviewing for nonfiction writing.

So I couldn't have foreseen it.

Having done so many interviews prior to starting the podcast, I had

confidence that I could do interviewing well, but I never could have

foreseen the podcast getting to a billion downloads.

That would have been so far outside of any mental schema for thinking about

anything that I would do.

It wouldn't have occurred to me.

Tim, when you think about the arc of your career, would you put the podcast

above the four hour work week in terms of importance and success, however

you want to measure that?

I don't think I would, because if I separate them out into discrete

independent pieces, I think that's a mistake since there was a domino effect.

And without that first domino, the second and the third and the fourth domino

don't tip over.

So I would have to still give the four hour work week by far.

Love it or hate it for me.

Blessing and the curse.

That is what made everything subsequently possible.

So I still have to give the four hour work week the vast majority of credit.

Remarkably, that book and probably Tools of Titans are my two bestselling books

still to this day.

And I would say a third, probably almost all of the tools referenced in the

four hour work week are out of date.

That makes me very happy though, because the philosophical backbone, the core

fundamental pieces are timeless in a sense.

They really don't have an expiration date.

So I've been very pleased to see that, but it's nonetheless remarkable that the

book continues to be read and recommended, despite the fact that I'm

telling people to go to a magazine rack and use various tools to determine

readership of magazines as a way of sizing audience.

I mean, that's model T or maybe the horse drawn carriage compared to what we can do today.

So at some point, perhaps I'll update that, but that's a losing game.

Also updating tools is just a losing game.

I could have updated three years ago and then chat GPT and other LLMs come along

and I have to do a complete revision after that.

So I assume the principles will enable people to find the tools, but the

podcast, I would say certainly at this point, nine out of 10 people who come

up to me on the street will mention the podcast and will not mention any book,

which is astounding.

Nonetheless, I do think the decay rate on the podcast is much higher and will

be on a totality much faster than the book.

In other words, not only will people forget a given episode, they will forget

that I had a podcast or anything related to my podcast.

I think much faster than they will.

The books simply because there's so much fucking noise.

There's so much.

The replacement rate is so high and people can only hold so much in their

heads, myself included.

So the sort of first in, first out mental archiving is such that I do think if

I stopped podcasting today and people continued listening to podcasts who were

devout listeners of the Tim Ferriss show, I think they would forget about the

Tim Ferriss show within a few years, one or two years, if I'm being optimistic.

Whereas I do think the books for whatever reason seem to have a more

persistent, enduring foothold in the mind than do the podcast.

Even if it's the best episode I've ever put out, doesn't matter.

I don't disagree with it.

I'm just trying to figure out why that would be.

And maybe it's because in a book, if it's 20 chapters, that's all you got.

It's just 20 chapters in front of you.

So it gives the impression or the truth that what is there is profound.

Whereas if you open up Apple podcasts, there are 3 million podcasts or

whatever there is in each of those has dozens or hundreds of episodes.

It's so much in there that it's hard to take any single bit of it seriously.

Maybe that's true for books too.

You're walking to Barnes & Noble, there's a million books in there as well.

But when you're holding a book, it's like, this is all that's in front of me

right now.

And so I need to pay attention to every word.

Whereas a podcast, it's just a living, breathing thing.

And if you watch the daily news, particularly like 24 seven cable news, none

of it should be that profound because there's just so much of it.

If you're just constantly updating people on the news of the hour, odds

are it's not that important.

Whereas if there was a one hour newscast per year, that was updating you on the

most important news of the previous 12 months, it would be very important.

You have to watch that.

It's very, very important.

So I think a lot of it is just the scale that it's much easier to make a podcast

episode than it is to publish a book chapter in physical form.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I mean, the spitballing ideas.

I also think that if someone commits to reading a book, if

they finish it, especially if the assumption is buying a nonfiction book

that is prescriptive in its advice is that you're going to take action

after a book.

There are a few things that happen in the process of doing that.

Number one, you're contextualizing the book for your own life as you go.

Number two, you're harnessing some cost fallacy in a sense.

Because you have put more time into this book, I think you are more likely

to try to take some type of action to justify that investment.

And I would say also with the book and single tasking, you have captive

attention and I think people are more engaged.

This is true for a novel versus say a film also in co-creating the visual

experience of traveling through these pages.

Then when people, if they take action after reading a book, that is an

extension of the experience of reading the book and is forever associated

with that book as are, I think, downstream effects of those first steps.

Whereas listening to a podcast, I think the preset mentality coming into it.

And this is true for me too.

When I'm listening to a podcast is I'm listening to something while I'm

going for a walk while doing something else and I have absorbing information,

but the expectation is not given the absurd volume of podcasts out there

and also just the absurd volume of podcasts and audiobooks that I listen to.

The assumption, I think, in my mind is passive ingestion less than I'm

going to take some notes and actually commit to making meaningful change

in my life after I listen to this podcast.

I wish you were different.

Yeah, I agree.

I know it's definitely true.

Like when I do listen to podcasts, it's a pleasure.

And I think when I read books, I'm like, I really want to learn something

here and take notes and highlight it and read wise and really get something

out of this.

What I did start doing recently, that's been very helpful, is when I'm

listening to a podcast and I hear something that's really profound, I'll

just screenshot it and therefore I have a timestamped of like, oh, on Tim's

podcast at one minute and 23 seconds, and then I'll go back and find the

transcript and like try to take notes that way.

That's been the best note taking process that I've had for podcasts to try

to gain more insight out of it rather than just passive pleasure.

Speaking of books, so let's go through a list and I'd love for you to

pick one or two.

We can certainly talk about all of them, but great books that you've read

lately, Triangle Fire, Empty Mansions, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald

Crowhurst, and then one that's a little cryptic, Robert Caro, if I'm

getting the pronunciation right, comma, working.

I don't know what that refers to.

Maybe we start there because I believe that as the author of The Power

Broker.

Yep.

Could you maybe start with Robert and what that refers to?

Robert Caro is probably the greatest biographer of all time.

He's certainly the most thorough biographer of all time.

Most of his books take between 10 and 30 years for him to write.

He's on biographies on Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, who was an instrumental

figure in building the modern New York City.

And he's just ridiculously thorough.

And so he wrote a book called Working, which is his life and practice and

strategy as a writer.

How did he become a writer and how does he do it?

And you realize that his talent is just patience.

Like he will sit in an archive for 15 years and he has this motto, turn every page.

So he talks about when he decided to do a biography of Lyndon Johnson, the

first thing that he did is he moved his wife to the middle of nowhere, Texas,

where Lyndon Johnson grew up.

And he said, there's no way that he could understand the man unless he lived

in the town that he grew up in, like full on understanding.

Wife, exactly.

There's a funny quote where his wife said, why couldn't you have done a

biography of Napoleon and they could have like moved to Paris or something?

So, so he moved there.

And then he sits in the, and he goes to the Lyndon Johnson presidential library.

And there's, I think it's literally like 8,000 boxes of material.

And he goes through every page.

He goes through every page.

It takes him decades to do this.

And so there's just no one that is as thorough as him.

Sounds like a prison sentence.

Seriously.

But I think, I think he loves every second of it.

I think the hunt for him is incredible.

So even with something like Lyndon Johnson, Robert Moses is a little more

obscure, but everybody knows Lyndon Johnson's life was so well documented.

But Robert Carroll will find these nuggets that no one else has ever uncovered before.

I have so much admiration for that in terms of sticking out as a writer and

doing something different.

A crazy stat that I've always, you can take the several different ways, but

there are 1,100 biographies of Winston Churchill published biographies of the

same person talking about the same life.

But I bet there's like 50 of those that really stand out because they found

a different angle, they found a different fact, or they told a better story.

Here's how I'd phrase this.

Ken Burns, who does the documentaries, his skill is telling a story.

And most of the information in his documentaries is already well known about

the Civil War, World War II, whatever it would be.

It's not new information, but he tells such a good story that it's captivating

and you're going to watch it.

Robert Carroll, and I mean this with the most respect, is not the best storyteller,

but his ability to uncover new information is unparalleled, completely unparalleled

to everyone else.

So I admire him that like his skill is just he works harder and he's more

patient than any other writer that's ever existed.

Is there anything else that you took from that book that you have applied or hope

to apply to your own writing or creative process?

One of it that I think this, and I'm not saying this below smoke, but it

reminds me of you, is that in his interviewing process, when he's interviewing

people, he would always just stop and say, tell me more, tell me more, keep going,

tell me more.

And there's one scene from the book where he's talking about Lyndon, he's

interviewing Lyndon Johnson's chauffeur, who is with him for like 30, his entire

career as a politician, Lyndon Johnson did the same driver.

This driver saw everything and Robert Carroll says, tell me like, when Lyndon

Johnson was in the backseat of the car when he was campaigning, what was he doing?

And the chauffeur is like, I don't know, I wasn't paying attention, but he just

kept asking, no, no, tell me more, what was he doing?

What was he talking about?

What would he do?

And he kept getting the answer.

I don't know.

I wasn't paying attention.

And finally, after like weeks of asking the same question, the chauffeur says, you

know what?

After campaign rallies, Lyndon Johnson would talk to himself in the backseat of

the car and he would say to himself, mumbling to himself, this worked, this

didn't, I need to get better at this, I need to double down on this.

And like, that's fascinating that he would talk to himself and it took

Robert Carroll weeks of asking the same question before he got to that.

Like a black site interrogation, just wearing him down.

Yes, but I think that's true for everyone.

And I think a lot of it is, if you asked me, what did I do last week?

I'd say, I don't, I don't really remember.

But if you kept asking, I probably did something that was meaningful to me.

Like if you kept asking and kept pushing, then the memories start to bubble up.

And I think Robert Carroll is just a pro at that.

What if these other books, maybe we pick one, if you had to pick two from this

list, so Triangle Fire, Empty Mansions, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald

Crowhurst, or maybe you can give just a very brief, not to leave people hanging.

What are these books?

And then if you had to pick one more, if you could only pick two for you

personally from this list, what the other one would be.

Yeah.

Here's what's really interesting about the Triangle Fire.

I think most, if not everyone here listening to this knows what the Triangle Fire is.

It was a fire in the early 1900s.

Oh, that's okay.

This is great then.

It was a fire and the Triangle Shirt Waste Company in New York City, which was

a company in the, I think it was 1911 that was making, you're saying everybody knows

about this.

I feel like an idiot.

I've never, never heard anything about this.

All right.

Okay.

No, this is even better than it was a fire that took place in this shirt garment

factory in New York City.

And it was in the middle of the workday and there were several hundred.

They were all virtually all young women who were making shirts in New York City

in 1911 and a fire took place on the factory.

And the punch line of the story was very tragic.

I think 200 of them died.

A lot of them jumped out of the ninth story building.

The building is now, I think it's either part of or right next to NYU.

It's the building still exists.

And there's a plaque in front of the building, but it was horrendous.

Several hundred of them burned to death.

Several dozen of them jumped out of the building.

It was absolutely horrendous.

And I think until 9 11, it was the deadliest fire in New York City, the

deadliest burning fire.

It was just an utter tragedy.

And when I saw a book about this, I had heard about this in documentaries and

whatnot, but I thought, how can you make a 250 page book about a fire that from

start to finish was 30 minutes?

There's got to be so much rambling in here.

And there wasn't because actually the actual fire was just a seed of a much

bigger story, which was after the triangle shirt was fire.

What happened is all of the fire escapes in the building were locked intentionally

so that the workers, these women could not take an unscheduled break.

It was literally lock you in a room to work.

So when there was a fire, they all went to the fire escapes and they were

locked and those women either burned to death or jumped out of the building.

And so this set off this unbelievable moral panic across the United States.

Of worker rights.

And one of the witnesses of the fire who stood on the sidewalk and watched the

women jump out of the building was a young woman named Francis Perkins.

And Francis Perkins, a lot of people will know that name.

She became FDR secretary of labor.

She was the first female cabinet member of any administration.

And she was so moved by the triangle fire, as were so many other people that

after she witnessed it, she said, I'm going to devote my life to worker rights.

And after a century or more, several centuries of just horrendous

sweatshop conditions, the triangle fire was the impetus that was needed to

start all kinds of worker rights.

And there's a quote from Francis Perkins when she said, without the triangle

fire, there would have been no new deal, the new deal of worker rights in the

1930s that moved everything, like so much progress in the world starts when

something very tragic happens and starts on things are really bad.

The Great Depression, World War II, the triangle fire, so much innovation

and improvement comes from those because there is no motivation in life more

than just shock and necessity.

So the triangle fire as tragic and awful as it was, it really was the reason

that we have so many workplace protections.

And within a year or two of the triangle fire, there were all kinds of new

laws in New York City about worker rights and simple things like fire escapes

and whatnot that didn't exist until that happened.

So that's why you can take a 30 minute fire and turn it into a 200 page

book is because what the triangle fire sparked in terms of worker rights

in America was unprecedented.

What book or books have you reread many times?

What's in the top five list, if any come to mind for books that you've read,

not just twice, but I should say not just read twice, but more than twice.

I'm pretty sure I've read Doris Kern's No Ordinary Day three times.

It's 710 pages.

It's a very meaty book.

And I think I'm very confident that each three times I read, I read to the last page.

One thing I would say is that I always use that book as an example as brevity

does not mean short because that book is 710 pages and every single

sentence needs to be there.

It's about FDR and Eleanor during World War II.

And it's specifically about their home life, not the decisions that he made during

the war.

It's about like the emotions that he was going through during that period that

he and Eleanor went through during World War II.

And it's fascinating because you think of the pressure on somebody like that.

Of course, today we know the outcome, but FDR never knew the outcome.

He died two weeks before Germany surrendered.

So during this entire period, he really feels and he's right that the fate of

the world is on his shoulders.

The decisions that he makes is literally the outcome of humanity.

And it was as stressful as you would imagine.

So the book just goes through what he went through, how he managed stress,

who he surrounded himself with.

And there's so many just incredible little anecdotes about how he lived his life

and what he did.

For example, every single evening, I think at six PM, no matter what was going on

that day, no matter how stressful or important the day was, he shut everything

down and he brought two or three friends into this little dark room in the

White House where he would have a drink and his rule was no politics.

Do not say a single word about politics.

We're here to talk about life and friendship and movies and books.

And he did it every day at six PM.

And I think if he didn't do that, he would have lost his mind.

It would just been too much.

There's all these little anecdotes about that that I, that I really admire.

I'll tell you one little other anecdote that really stuck with me for this

book on the night before D day.

So almost nobody in the world knows what's going to happen.

He and Eleanor do.

And he's talking to Eleanor and he asks her, he says, how does it feel to not

know what's going to happen tomorrow?

Literally the fate of the world relies on what's going to happen tomorrow morning.

And nobody else knows it but us.

And Eleanor says to be 60 and still rebel against uncertainty is a bit

ridiculous, isn't it?

So, so I love that quote.

She's like, she's like, if you've made it to age 60 and you're rebelling against

uncertainty, like what, like, of course, we don't know what's going to happen.

And there's nothing we can do about it.

So just go to bed, Franklin.

And there's all these, there's all these little anecdotes like that that I love.

I think, and beyond the content, I think it's one of the best written books ever.

Like I said, it's just 700 pages and every sentence needs to be there.

Doris Curran is good when there's a remarkable historian and writer.

She's amazing.

She's amazing.

Yeah.

She and I had a really fun conversation on this podcast actually a few years ago.

She's an absolute gem.

Yeah.

Which I recommend people check out.

Also, Ken Burns, we had a conversation about his creative process, which I encourage

people to check out.

Let me ask, and then I promise we'll move on, but this title, this is probably the

one that I would have picked up because it has a, for me at least, a very seductive

title, the strange last voyage of Donald Crowhurst.

What is this?

One of the most interesting people that is not very well known.

And to set the stage here, there was a boat race in 1968 that took place in

England, was sponsored by a local newspaper.

And it was the first person to sail around the world solo wins 5,000 pounds.

And actually nobody in human history had ever sailed around the world solo.

So the first person to win this race is going to be crowned the greatest sailor of

all time.

Donald Crowhurst was at best an amateur sailor.

He was like a weekend warrior.

And he had kind of been a failure at everything he had done in his adult life.

He was a failed businessman.

He got kicked out of the army for insubordination.

He was a, he failed out of pilot school.

And he kind of viewed this race as like his last shot at redemption, his last shot

to like prove to the world that he was worthy of their attention and their respect.

So he set sail, this guy who really doesn't know what he's doing.

He actually built his own boat, which he didn't know he was doing there either.

And he set sail and like to his credit, he makes it pretty far.

He makes it like halfway down the coast of Africa.

And then his boat springs a leak.

He can bail out with a bucket.

It's not a catastrophic leak, but he knows that if he keeps sailing, he's screwed.

And he's going to sink and die.

Because at night in the Southern Atlantic, the waves are much bigger.

So he knows he's done.

So now he's like, okay, I can either turn around and go home and face shame and

humiliation, or I can keep sailing and die.

And then he's like, no, actually there's, he's by himself doing this in his diary.

He's like, no, there's actually a third option here, which is fraud and deceit.

And so what he did is he turned his boat around and he sailed right into the

middle of the Atlantic Ocean where the waves were like very calm and placid.

And he drifts in circles aimlessly for six months.

And all the while he's doing this, he's sending fake radio communication back

to England to make it seem like he's still sailing around the world.

He would literally send back a radio communication, be like, oh, I'm passing

the Falkland Islands.

Here's what they look like.

It was all a scam.

He was drifting aimlessly in the Atlantic.

His plan was to kill enough time doing this that he could have plausibly sailed

around the world and then sail back to England with his dignity intact.

And like, just tell people that I sailed around the world.

I did it.

After six months, he starts to sail back to England and he realizes that the other

sailors had taken so long to sail around the world that he's going to sail back

to England as the winner.

He's actually going to win this race or at least appear to win this race.

And he realizes that that's a catastrophe because he's going to get so much

attention that they're going to uncover his fraud and deceit.

They're going to scrutinize it.

They're going to they're going to scrutinize it and he's done.

So now he's very mentally unstable at this point as anyone for six months at

sea alone would be.

So he realizes the gig is up and I'll cut to the chase and get to the punch

line. His body was never found.

His boat was found.

But the only plausible kind of accepted outcome is that after he realized it was

all up, he threw himself into the ocean and took his own life.

And to me, it's a very astounding story of someone who is so obsessed with

gaining the respect and admiration of other people.

All he wanted to do was for other people to admire him.

That's it.

He wanted that so badly that he was willing to have the six month fraud to

deceive everybody.

And when it didn't work, he just decided that life wasn't worth living.

And that to me is like just an astounding mental state that someone would

want respect from strangers and the press that badly, that it's worth

everything to them.

And so it's just an astounding story of like the lifestyle that you choose to

live and the goals that you tend to have.

Like he wanted this goal more than anyone else.

And when he couldn't have it, he took his own life.

There's a quote from Nassim Talib.

I'm going to butcher it, but it's like, how interesting it is.

That more people commit suicide from financial loss than from medical diagnosis.

He said it more eloquently, but that's roughly what he said.

And it's true.

Losing your status or your internal dignity, however you want to define it, is

more disturbing to people and more damaging to people than getting a

terminal cancer diagnosis for a lot of these people.

So it's just an astounding story of someone making this crazy decision, the

decision to deceive people and the decision to take his own life for reasons

that just kind of make you shake your head.

I'm going to act as a stand-in for the audience, which is also acting as a

stand-in for myself.

So people listening to you describe these various books might think to

themselves, for fuck's sake, Morgan, these are some really hardcore, dark books

that you read.

They don't sound very reassuring.

Now I understand that it gives you perspective on how your life could have

done differently, probably leads to perhaps valuing your life, being grateful

for things that you could take for granted.

But let me ask you, are there any books that you have reread or really love that

are more upbeat, but still decently high on the cryometer for yourself?

We're like, oh, God, that book just makes me feel so good.

I shed a tear.

A book that doesn't involve math, deaths and destruction.

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, exactly.

Right, burning to death or committing suicide at sea.

Right.

Fair point.

I have one next to me that I'll give.

This book, it's called The Tau of Charlie Munger.

Charlie Munger is one of the most quoted people ever.

And this book does a better job than I've ever seen at distilling his best wisdom

in a way that half of the quotes, as even as a Munger fanatic, I had never seen

before, and they're just laid out in a very succinct way that this book is like,

if you're an investing fan or a Charlie Munger fan, you should read, read

this book once a year.

It's very easy because it's basically a book of quotes.

But I think Munger is like, I think he's nine out of 10 on wisdom.

And he's 10 out of 10 on succinctness and like saying something in a pithy way.

And you put those two things together and it's like, he's a really powerful

person and nobody burns to death in the book.

So that's the upside of it.

Also, what I appreciate about Charlie, which I think goes hand in hand with

his succinctness is he gives zero fucks, which is so fun, especially when he's

on live TV talking to somebody at like CNBC and he's like, oh, it's bullshit.

It's pulling.

They're like, ah, Charlie, oh, I can't read a mirror.

It's so fun.

Yeah.

I've talked about like some people have fuck you money.

Charlie has fuck you intelligence, where at least in his own mind, he's like,

I'm smarter than you.

I'm going to tell you how it is.

And I don't care what you think about it.

He has actually talked about that.

That's one of his worst traits.

That's a trait.

No shit.

I didn't know that.

He would not recommend other people have that.

I think that's just, I actually don't think it's fuck you money.

I think he had that trait when he was 13.

Oh, no, I don't think it's fuck you money.

He just gives zero fucks, but I think it's his preset to really beat over the

head, this word that I keep using.

It rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

And I think it also can be to, if I were to, you know, even though I'm a massive

fan, I'm not just going to say he's the perfect person because I think that.

Shut up and let me tell you how it is.

Mentality can lead to a sense of egotism that makes you blind to a lot of how

the world works.

And there are, I don't know if I can think of one off the top of my head, but

there have been a number of times.

This is why I say he's nine out of 10 on wisdom, not 10 out of 10.

There are some Charlie Munger quotes where it's like, I think you believe

that because you're a 90 year old billionaire.

I actually don't think that's how the world works for most people, you know?

I think Buffett is much more open to how the world works versus the world in

which he's experienced.

Hmm.

Fascinating.

All right.

Might dig into that separately another time.

So let's talk about same as ever.

How has writing this book, thinking about the content, developing your

own thinking around these lines, informed how you make decisions?

If that's a good question, feel free to rephrase it.

If there's a better way to put it, but how has this informed how you operate

in the world, how you make decisions, how you react emotionally to things?

However you want to answer that.

I think I've always been as an investor.

Let's focus on that.

Of the view, I mentioned this earlier that no one has any idea what the

future is going to hold.

But if you can have the right behaviors, then it doesn't matter.

Whatever the future throws at you, you're going to be okay.

If you have a level head and a proper asset allocation for you to absorb all

the surprises.

So I've never been the kind of person who's like, let's predict what the

stock market is going to do in the next year.

Let's predict the next recession.

I've always just been like, Hey, if I can manage my asset allocation and my

mindset so that I can absorb anything that might happen, that's the best we

can do.

And not only is it the best you can do, if you can actually do that, it's really

good.

I think a lot of it can be summarized as viewing life from 30,000 feet is not

only the best that we can do, it's actually a really good spot to view how

the world works.

And for so many topics, I would say, look, if you have cancer, you want a

doctor who understands the very fine minute details of that.

If you're talking about investing or philosophy or politics, you want to stay

at 30,000 feet.

That's as good as you're going to get.

So a lot of this is just like understanding the behaviors that are very

broad and macro rather than fooling yourself into thinking that you can

understand the finer details of what's going on around you.

Who's this book for?

Which someone, if you want to build on that, what is the audience for this

book? What should they hope to come away from the book?

Having learned or absorbed?

The answer to that will indeed make every publisher shake their head because

they don't like it, but it's the truth for all of my writing.

The answer is that the book is for me.

I wrote it for me.

I wrote psychology of money for me.

I wrote my, all my blog posts for me.

I call it selfish writing, an audience of one.

The reason I do that is not because I want to think of myself as self-centered.

The reason I do it is because I think you do your best work.

If you are being introspective about yourself and quote, unquote, knowing your

audience, that slips into pandering very quickly and pandering is the worst

writing not only is it the worst content, it's the worst writing styles to

pander to your audience.

And so I wrote this book answering questions that I have about myself and

I wrote it in a style that is interesting to me.

And I tell stories that I think are interesting.

There's probably a lot of death and destruction because as you can tell,

that's kind of, it's kind of what I gravitate towards.

Look, in most of the world, I want to think of myself as a selfless person,

except for writing.

And then it's like, it's just me and the keyboard and nobody else.

And I think that's serving well as a writer, just to stick with an

audience of one for myself.

Now I hope, and I think that I can take a leap of faith that if I have these

questions about myself, other people probably have it about themselves, not

everybody, you're never going to please everybody.

But that's the leap of faith that I took with psychology of money.

It's like, those topics were really interesting to me.

And I bet they're interesting to you too.

That's what I say.

Now I hope at the end of both books, psychology of money and same as ever,

you become more introspective about what you want out of life.

You start answering questions that you didn't have before about life.

And the things in the world that confuse you and cause you angst in investing,

in money, in politics, in global affairs, whatever it might be.

You have a greater sense of equanimity around them, not because you have a new

answer, but because you come accepting that there are some things we can't answer.

And the best things that we can do is just understand the broader behaviors

that guide how people react to these topics.

Getting on the same page as Eleanor Roosevelt.

Trying to.

Trying to.

Morgan, always enjoy our conversations.

Is there anything else that you would like to add?

Anything else you'd like to mention, whether it's a story, maybe a request of the

audience, anything you'd like to draw attention to, anything you'd like to say

at all before we wind to close here?

The only thing that comes to mind after having done this twice with you now,

Tim, is that most conversations in life, I'm exhausted after 20 minutes and I

could go for three hours with you and keep doing it all day.

So it's such an honor to do this.

And I really admire your skill as an interviewer.

It makes these things so much fun.

Here's what I would say too, as I think about what we just did here.

I think a half of what I just said, I had never said before on another podcast

and a quarter of it had never even crossed my mind before, which is a

testament to the questions that you asked.

So thank you for doing this.

Oh, thanks, Morgan.

Really appreciate you saying that.

Fun for me.

Also, super fun.

So that's a testament to your ability to jazz improv.

In the way that you did in this conversation, people can find you online at

morganhousel.com, Twitter at morganhousel.

IG, that's Instagram for you, folks of my vintage, the Graham at Morgan

Housel and the book is same as ever, a guide to what never changes, which

people can find at fine booksellers worldwide.

And Morgan, thank you so much again.

Really appreciate all the time.

And to people listening, we will have links to everything in the show notes

as per usual at tim.blog.com, just search Morgan and this and Morgan's

first episode will pop right up until next time.

Be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself.

And as always, thank you for tuning in.

Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off.

And that is five bullet Friday.

Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a

little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people

subscribed to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five

bullet Friday, easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest

things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.

It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps

gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on.

They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts, guests and

these strange esoteric things end up in my field.

And then I test them and then I share them with you.

So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness

before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.com, slash Friday,

type that into your browser, tim.blog, slash Friday, drop in your email and

you'll get the very next one.

Thanks for listening.

This episode is brought to you by Momentus.

Momentus offers high quality supplements and products across a broad

spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health,

hormone support and more.

I've been testing the products for months now and I have a few that I use constantly.

One of the things I love about Momentus is that they offer many single

ingredient and third party tested formulations.

I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later.

Personally, I've been using Momentus Mag3n8, L-Theanine and Apigenin, all of

which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep.

Now the Momentus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three

of these ingredients.

I've also been using Momentus Creatine, which doesn't just help for physical

performance, but also for cognitive performance.

In fact, I've been taking it daily, typically before podcast recording, as

there are various studies and reviews and meta-analyses pointing to improvements

in short-term memory and performance under stress.

So those are some of the products that I've been using very consistently.

And to give you an idea, I'm packing right now for an international trip.

I tend to be very minimalist and I'm taking these with me nonetheless.

Now back to the bigger picture.

Olympians, Tour de France winners, Tour de France winners, the US military and

more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Momentus and their

products.

Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to

bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from

this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Stara.

They also work with Dr. Stacey Sims to assist Momentus in developing

products specifically for women.

Their products contain high quality ingredients that are third party tested,

which in this case means informed sport and or NSF certified.

So you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else.

And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition and supplement

world very well, that is a differentiator that you want in anything that you

consume in this entire sector.

So good news for my non-US listeners, more good news, not to worry.

Momentus ships internationally.

So you have the same access that I do.

So check it out.

Visit live momentus.com slash Tim and use code Tim to check out for 20% off.

That's live momentus.

L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off.

This episode is brought to you by Cometeer that's spelled C O M E T E E R.

Cometeer is hyper fresh, expertly brewed, flash frozen coffee that produces

an incredibly delicious cup.

Now, I have to be honest, I was very skeptical of flash frozen coffee.

And I thought at face value, this is probably just a gimmick, yada, yada, yada.

But as you know, I am an avid coffee drinker.

I talk about caffeine and coffee a lot on this show.

And when it landed on my doorstep, when I first started testing it, I thought to

myself, this is actually incredible.

It is locked in at peak freshness and you can sample coffee from some of the top

roasters, not just in the U S, but around the world.

And I went in with one eyebrow raised and I'm sure some of you have one raised

right now, but the coffee is absolutely delicious.

It's pretty incredible.

And I'm able to avoid bitterness completely.

Cometeer lets you prepare your coffee with no mess, no machines, no burning, no

bitterness whatsoever.

It's a fast and foolproof way to a truly delicious cup of specialty coffee.

They source high quality beans from the country's top roasters and some

outside of the country that includes counterculture, birdrock, George

hell, equator coffees, which I used to have.

I used to drive 45 minutes from my house in San Francisco to have equator

coffee, just to give you an idea and you can get it through Cometeer, Birch, Joe

coffee, Red Bay, go get them tiger, Clatch onyx, square mile, black and white

intelligentsia, which was in the four hour chef as an example in Chicago and on

and on.

So you can get all sorts of coffee.

Wouldn't otherwise be able to get because it is frozen using their process.

Their coffee is brewed using proprietary technology to pull out more flavor

compounds and antioxidants.

Then it's flash frozen at minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit to lock in the

incredible flavor and freshness of the specialty variety.

I already mentioned this, but it's worth reiterating.

Cometeer ships to you in 100% recyclable capsules that you store in the freezer.

And if you were to walk into my kitchen right now and look in the freezer, it

is chock full of Cometeer coffee.

Simply add hot water and you've got a game-changing cup of coffee, lickety

split. It's very fast.

It's easily customizable in seconds for ice coffees, lattes, espresso martinis

and more. If you've never had an espresso martini, I recommend it for the game

changing. We'll cover that another time.

Cometeer is also great to travel with when you need a cup and don't want to

sacrifice quality. Their capsules are TSA approved.

So check it out, learn more, try it perhaps.

Order today at cometeer.com slash Tim.

That's C-O-M-E-T-E-E-R dot com slash Tim.

And listeners of this podcast will also receive a free eight pack of barista's

choice and rotating selection of limited edition specialty roasts from world

class roaster partners like George Howell, Onyx and Intelligencia.

Names many of you will recognize and certainly names many of you will come

to recognize and you will look them up because this coffee is that good.

So again, visit cometeer.com slash Tim to learn more and receive a free eight

pack of barista's choice when you join the future of coffee with Cometeer.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.