Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvLFT4v4LQ
if you're buying a house because you don't do it run for your life Mr Morgan H he's the author of the psychology of money one of the bestselling business books of this decade he can help anyone build wealth and change their life the world is split between people who don't know how to start making money and people who don't know when to stop making money and if you are stuck in a low-income job you feel like you don't have the opportunity to generate wealth but once you realize that opportunities are available for everybody you can choose where you want to live what job you want when you retire because you can be rich prove it people like Ronald Reed and he was a janitor what does it take to amass Mr Reed's $8 million Fortune he's a fascinating story of somebody who became Rich despite not having the skills that you normally associated with wealthy people then there's Warren Buffett he's worth $100 billion do but the real secret to their success investing my parents are a great example of this we were very poor no Financial background and they have like minimal financial interest but now they'd probably be in the top 3% of professional investors if you want to do well with money you don't need to be a genius if you have endurance in your investing you're going to be filthy rich but when most people say I want to be a millionaire what they actually mean is I want to spend a million dollars I want some nice clothes bigger house the nicer car ask yourself what is your relationship with money if your expectations rise faster than your income you're never going to be happy with your money that's the problem so if I have1 what's the first thing that I should do I keep it as painfully simple as I can so ladies and gentlemen you're about to meet the man whose book changed my entire life as it relates to money and finance about four or five years ago my brother who's a investment banker said Steve there's one book I need you to read about wealth investing and money in finance and he passed me a book called the psychology of money that book changed my fortunes it is the reason I've been a successful investor and it's the reason I've been able to hold on to my wealth and build it it's this man and that's the reason why you need to stay
tuned and listen to this [Music] episode Morgan you wrote what I would consider to be the greatest book on money and finance ever written I say that because I remember when I came into money when I was 25 20 no 27 27 28 years old and my brother turned to me and said there's one thing I ask of you he said you have to read this book called the psychology of money it will stop you losing all of the money you've just earned from your career and it changed my life I've talked about it for years and years ever since and that's why I was so Keen to have this conversation with you because I really believe if people choose to listen to this conversation it stands the chance of changing those two so let's begin why of all the things that you could do with your life Morgan why are you writing books about the subject matter that you explore what is the reason well first that's a that's a big statement that's a lot to live up to it's kind of scary to hear that because I've I've often been and this gets to the why I I've defined it as selfish writing where I write for an audience of one and that is me and I like to think of myself as a pretty selfless person but for writing I don't try to say I'm going to write a book for this person or that person or that audience I write what I'm interested in and I write it in a way that I think is interesting and I try to solve my own problem problems and then I take a leap of faith that if this is interesting to me and it's going to help me maybe it'll help somebody else that's very different from the traditional writing style of saying know your audience know your audience very quickly turns into Pander to your audience and I think a lot of people maybe they don't even know it but if they read a book and they don't necessarily like it it's because they were being pandered to they were being spoken to in a way that a person would never speak to them in real life so I just this is almost like my diary I think in terms of these are the topics that I found interesting for myself and so I guess that's the why I feel like I've really found myself in a career where I can just figure out my own problems and try to figure out what I think and what's interesting to me and
then kind of put it out to the world and then hope that other people will enjoy it let's start with the psychology of money what is the benefit to my life if I understand the things that are written in the psychology of money well let me start with I think most Finance books will their their answer to that question would be when you're done with this book you will know how to pick stocks better you will know how to balance your checking account or what credit cards that you should use for my book I think when you're done with it I hope that you will just look in the mirror and say who am I which is kind of what I did with this trying to figure out who I am and what I want and why I was insecure why I wanted to show off to other people the car that I drove so if you become more introspective about who you are and what you want out of life and what money can do for you and cannot do for you and become a little bit more introspective about why you think about where you are in the social hierarchy and greed and fear and why you think about these things that you do I I honestly think that I I I hope at least because it was this way for me that when you're done for with the book that's kind of when the learning begins because maybe this will just spark a bit of curiosity for you to then go for a walk and think about what you want out of life and whatnot so I think most books when you're done with the last page the learning is done this I hope is just sparked something in you that will get you to think more clearly about what you want with money and what money can and cannot do for you part of that journey of understanding what you want helps you to define the word on the front of this book wealth what is your definition of wealth well I I I made up these definitions in the book so these are just my things that I made up but I defined rich as you have enough money to buy what you want to pay for your mortgage to make your car payment to go out to dinner with your friends you have money in the bank wealth I think is very different wealth is money that you did not spend and maybe you will not spend so wealth is hidden it's the money that you didn't spend on a car it's the money that you didn't spend on a big house you didn't spend on jewelry and that's really important because wealth that's
saved up the unspent money is what gives you Independence and autonomy and just the ability to wake up every morning and do whatever you want with your with your life and so I think separating that is really important because when most people say I want to be a millionaire what they actually mean is I want to spend a million dollars that's what they mean and when I think about being a millionaire I think it's you have a million dollars that you're not going to spend and that because you're not going to spend it you have this giant cushion that will give you Independence and autonomy and so you can wake up tomorrow and say I can do whatever the hell I want today I can work for who I want I can work for as long as I want I can retire when I want the World is Yours like every bit of savings that you have is a piece of your future that you own it's a you're just buying your time in the future so that it's yours and you can do whatever you want with it and that to me has always been the goal there's a quote from Charlie Munger where he says I never wanted to become rich I just wanted to become independent and that when the first time I read it it was like that's me too that's what I want I don't want a Lamborghini I don't want a mansion and a yacht I want to wake up every morning and just say whatever I want to do today it's mine nobody's going to tell me where to work when to work what to do it's all me and to me for not just work but for your family life for your health for your mental sanity there's nothing more important than that it sounds like you're talking about your father my dad it was he has such an interesting background my my my mother too their background is so crazy and I didn't realize how crazy it was until I was an adult the early part of my childhood when my parents were in school we were very poor my parents were students living off of student loans and grants we had no money and then my dad became a doctor when I was 12 or 13 and things changed it wasn't we were not rich but like things got very comfortable and what was really important is that the frugality that my parents had to have when they were poor stuck with them even after they started making a little bit of money they didn't buy a Lamborghini no no we grew up in a
very like modest house it was a nice house and we took some like decent family vacations but my we always live well below our means way below our means did that confuse you because you must have known that your dad had the money yes particularly when I was probably like 16 17 and I could learn like how much does a doctor make you can go look it up and figure it out and and then it was like I definitely looked down on my parents at that age because I was like I know you can afford a better car I know you can buy me better Christmas presents I know we can afford a bigger house and you're and you're not doing it because you're mean I think that was I think that was my view and then it really clicked about 10 years ago this is not that long ago so my dad is an ER doctor which is one of the most stressful jobs that you can imagine it's literally people dying in your arms every day and he did this for 20 years and after after 20 years of doing this night shifts children dying in your arms literally every every week he said he he had had enough it was it was a lot he put in his dues he did it for 20 years and he said I'm done I'm I'm going to retire and the reason he could do that is because he had saved up so much money he was living well below his means they had a very high savings rate the moment he woke up and said I want to be done he was done and that was it and if you contrast that with so many other people including some of his colleagues who were also burnt out at age 60 who were also so burnt out by having people die in their arms for 20 years they wanted to retire and they couldn't because they had the bigger house because they had the nicer car that I thought that we should have had when we were growing up and when they quit and moved on to their next phase of Life they got so much happier and so it was like so that this was 10 years ago I was in you know in my late 20s at this point I was like now I get it he was Frugal he saved a lot and that made him independent and the Independence made him Happ than any car would have done made them happier than any big house would have done so it's like I think that is one of the keys to happiness happiness is like the most complicated topic you can imagine but one of the big puzzle pieces is independence and there's been a lot of work on this
studies on this of like one of the things that makes people really happy in life is having control over what they're doing and it's more so the flip of side of that it's like what makes people very unhappy in life not having control over what happens in their future not having control over their schedule where they're going to work whether they're going to get laid off having that uncertainty is a massive anchor and waight on your life your health absolutely I mean that was a big thing for my dad too he was working night shifts for for 20 years with this it it's very bad for your health it's not great at all so the ability the financial ability to just wake up one day and say I'm done done with that is huge I I was reading studies about this idea of autonomy because I was trying to figure out what you have to have professionally to love your work and I came up with these five different points one of them was autonomy and control and I I came up with that because I read studies where people who work jobs where they had a low autonomy and control had physiological consequences they were more likely to get disease they experienced stress significantly more more likely to have cardiovascular problems and heart disease which is the single biggest killer of of people generally I thought [ __ ] hell just not having control in your life yeah makes your body shut down yes you know this is something that I think everybody has experienced if they have something really stress going on at life they get into bed they're tired you can feel your heart pounding like the physiological response of stress is huge it's massive and if you have that going on every day for 5 years 10 years 20 years 30 years forget about it forget about it this's this great quote from John D Rockefeller he's the richest man in the world and he lived till I think he was 99 something like that he was 97 and his doctor talked about why like his key to longevity and the doctor said quote he never lets any anything bother him he spends plenty of time outside and he leaves the table when he's still a little bit hungry that was his key to longevity it was just and and when you read his biography you realize how true that was no matter what was going on in his life and the most stressful business
conditions you can imagine none of it ever bothered him he just had ice in his veins and he could just keep going and so I I I do think that's that's definitely one of like the keys to physical health is lowering that amount of stress and there are not many other things in life that are going to increase the stress that you have have than not having control over what you're doing in life Freedom chapter seven of your book this is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy doing something you love but on a schedule you can't control starts to feel the same as doing something you hate psychologists call this reactants that's right you know I I do think there are a lot of I think the best example are CEOs who might make $30 million a year $50 million a year but they have no control over their time every single second of day is planned and demanded by somebody else and they have to do things that they don't want to do if they wake up and they're tired too bad you got to go to your meetings today they wake up and they're exhausted too bad you have to travel to China to close this deal they have no control over their time and compare that to someone who makes much less but they wake up they can wake up and do whatever they want whatever they want to do you want to hang out with your friends you want to sleep in you want to take a nap at 2 o'clock whatever you want to do the person who I think really sticks out in that in that vein is Warren Buffett who is the the CEO who makes a zillion a year he's worth hundred billion do but if you dig into how he structured his day total control 100% autonomy can do whatever the hell he wants all day long what he wants to do is get up and go to work but he he has delegated things so effectively that he can do whatever he wants and that's not only the key to his I think business success but his health lifestyle success why he's 93 and still going as strong as ever I I was thinking about my calendar when you were talking about the CEO that makes $30 million a year but is just dragged around by his schedule sounds a lot like me to be honest I feel like the more successful I've got in my professional career the more my calendar the minute I wake up in the morning I'm just like a puppet master to these little boxes on my Google Calendar yeah
they drag me around the world and there's very little I actually said to my assistant about a month ago I was like um Sophie please can you do me a favor could you just put lunch in for 30 minutes because I'm not eating could you just put like could you just put that in midday every day at the same time so you can breathe so I can have a little bit of a moment I do nothing and then also the other thing I've put in now I have a personal trainer 7 days a week and I've just put that in my calendar it was before then a residual beneficiary as was everything for me well not for me because my work is for me but um it it got the time that was left over when all my priorities were done and I do reflect on that and go like how like a when does that stop because it's clearly not going to stop when I make money because I have the money and B how much control do I actually have and you know what I do sometimes I think I've noticed about myself I think sometimes I councel things just to prove to myself that I still have control that's great see that's a good thing there's a quote from n talb where he says like you are wealthy when the money that you deny tastes better than the money you accept so you get someone comes to you with a business deal and you say no thanks I don't want it when that tastes better to you than accepting the deal it feels better to you that's like one definition of of Rich there's another great quote from TYB where he says the world is split evenly between people who don't know how to start making money and people who don't know when to stop making money and I think there are a lot of people that are watching this that are in kind of our field who are easily in the ladder they have all the money that they could ever want to spend or maybe not not that much but they have more money than they ever thought they would have but for every gold that they hit oh when whenever my net worth is X all my problems are going to go away everything's going to feel great and then they hit X and they just keep moving the goalpost down and down so I read in the book that like the hardest Financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving it's the hardest thing in the world it's hard for everybody because virtually everybody thinks if my net worth or my income was this level
I'll be fine I'll feel great no more problems I'll wake up every morning with a smile on my face and then if you're lucky enough or you work hard enough to get there you realize it's not the case at all you're just going to keep pushing it keep pushing it keep pushing it forever have they done studies to test that in terms of analyzing whether people's goal posts move off into the future even when they're like billionaires and whatever I mean here's here's the broadest way that I would frame this up that as has been studied if you look at America today the average household adjusted for inflation is making twice as much money than they were in the 1950s to adjusted for inflation the average household double the income that they were back then and we less happy the statistics that try to measure happiness over time it's not an easy thing to do but we're less happy today than we were back then and this is why like look can money buy happiness yes and to some extent does it yes like people who are in abject poverty are not as happy as people who are covering the basics and they have food and shelter etc etc but over time when you when the society is getting richer and you're comparing yourself to other people and maybe the average American's income doubled but so did their neighbors so did their co-workers so did their siblings so you just automatically adjust to that I talked about Rockefeller before Johnny Rockefeller who died in I think the 1930s he was worth adjusted for inflation almost half a trillion dollars during his day adjusted for inflation but he never had during his life penicillin Advil sunscreen polio vaccine keep keep going down the list of things that virtually everyone can take advantage of today that he never had but you can't say that the average American is living better than Rockefeller today because we have all of these technologies that he never did because we just look at what other people have and assume that that is the Baseline so you can imagine a world in which my kids my grandkids are earning twice as much as me adjusted for inflation and they're no happier for it because the new technologies whatever it would be that would seem like magic to you and I will just become their Baseline and that's always been the case
if there was if Thomas Jefferson or somebody came to the year 2023 he would faint at the new technologies and the medical discoveries that we have and these are technologies that you and I don't spend one second being grateful for because we've just accepted them as a new Baseline it reminds me of something in your new book which is out in November which is you know I've gassed up a lot of books on this podcast before but this is one of my favorite of all time it's just so easy to read and so engaging because you you're one of those authors in this book that realizes the world that the reader living in and they are busy and they want the point and they want you to you know give them not one word more than you need to it is so brilliant it's so brilliant um in this book you talk about exactly that you say the first rule of happiness is low expectations Y and that's exactly what you're talking about is comparison is the thief of Joy because it just raises our own expectations right when with that out the window goes our happiness yeah and it's it it it seems counterintuitive to people that if you want to be H for most people it's if you want to be happier you need to be ambitious you need more you need to make more money work harder have a more successful startup whatever it would be and there's that's true but that's half the equation the other half the equation is keep your expectations low so the gap between those two it's a gap between those two that actually accru to happiness over time how did you learn that I think it's just I think there have been a couple little stories that really stuck out to me one that I love that just knocked me on my ass the first time I read it was Stephen Hawking the late physicist who was without exaggeration one of the smartest people to ever walk this planet he was just an absolute genius and a quirky of course is that he had a motor neuron disease and he was paralyzed from head to toe he had no control over his body he spoke through a computer not a single muscle in his body could he actually control by himself so he was you know physiologically it's one of the worst Liv that you can imagine and he did an interview with the New York Times a couple years before he died and during the interview he's talking about how
happy he was and how amazing his life was and the New York Times said they asked him they said what is your secret to happiness like if there's anyone who has the right to complain about life it's it's that guy and he's talking about how happy he was and he said my expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21 which is when he got his disease and he said everything else since then has been a bonus so this is like the who whose life is like has ended up in a way that most people watching that would say like that's among the worst scenarios you can imagine and he's probably happier than you and I because his expectations were so low that just waking up in the morning and seeing the sunrise and getting to go to work and talk to people was this magical gift I mean you can imagine not to get too morbid about this but imagine you're on your deathbed and the doctor is very confident that you're going to die tomorrow and let's say that you make it one more day what is that Sunrise going to feel like what's that you know holding your your wife's hand for one more day going to feel like it' be amazing just because your expectations were on the floor and so it it's always like that and you go through life seeing so many people who have everything all the money the great family all the health the beauty everything you can imagine and they're not happy for it and it's because with everything that they have their expectations rise not only to that level they might rise above it so if you are some if your expectations rise faster than your inome you're never going to be happy with your money no matter how much money you make you can make a billion dollars a year but if you needed and wanted 1.1 billion you're broke you feel broke and the reverse of that is true too there are people who make $50,000 a year but if they only need 40 to be happy they're sto they feel great and so that's I think that's one of the reasons it's so important is because managing your own expectations is more in your control than managing your circumstances in terms of raising your income raising your investing return it's not that you can't control raising your income you can be ambitious and smart and entrepreneurial of but it's more in your control to just inside your
head to say I'm going to try to want less that that's just a mental exercise that's it's not to say it's easy it's not easy at all but you have total control over doing it so how in a practical sense can one go about keeping their expectations below their circumstances I guess here's here's one that really made an impact on me and it's great that we're in La cuz that's where this story took place I was a valet here in La all throughout college at a fstar hotel here in town so a I I was young I was you know aged 19 to 24 or something like that and all day it was people driving in in Ferraris and Lamborghinis and rolls-royces and one day it hit me just I I I remember the moment because it was like out of the blue it hit me whenever someone would drive in in a rollsroyce or something never once would I look at the driver and say that guy is cool like wow look at him he's so cool what I did is I imagined myself as the driver and then I thought if I was a driver people would think I'm cool and I was like wait don't you see like the disconnect here nobody cares about the driver but they want to be the driver because they think people will then care about them and once you realize that like the takeaway is nobody is thinking about you as much as you are nobody cares about your stuff as much as you do nobody cares about your car or your house or your clothes or your jewelry as much as you do because to the extent that they're even looking at them they're looking at your car looking at your house really what they're doing is imagining themselves with that nice car they're not giving you the credit they're imagining themselves having it so once I realize like that was the game that was being played in society once you once you recognize that's the game your willingness your desire to show off plunges and of course I I like nice stuff I like nice cars I want some nice clothes I live in a decent house but once you realize that it plunges and I think the most valuable Financial skill that anybody can have is not needing to impress other people if you don't need to impress other people that is an asset on your balance sheet that is worth a billion dollars because so much of society as a whole and individual is just geared towards how can I get other people's attention how can I show off to
other people how can how can they like me more I both agree and understand but agreeing and understanding is different from being able to do I think at the society level it will never be it'll always be like that same as ever it's never it's never going to move away from that if you can manage it around the edges at the individual level it's massive for your life one thing that's important here is that if you are a young person and you're kind of looking for a spouse a mate a boyfriend a girlfriend a wife a husband whatever it would be then your ability to look really nice and to signal and to kind of put up your peacock feathers is important and I get it and I did it back in the day once you are more settled down in your career in your relationships if at that point you are still hanging on to the desire to impress other people that's when it's broken that's when it's just pure net loss in your life because you're trying to show off to for people who you don't even need or want to love you there's a great quote from Warren Buffett where he says the definition of success is when the people who you want to love you do love you and so for me it's like five people it's like my parents my wife and my kids and like that's it that's it those are the people who I want to love me and if they love me I I probably have 90% of the happiness that I'm capable of and if they don't love me and then I'm never going to have more than like 10% of the happiness that I'm capable of in that chapter about happiness you talk about your friend Brent as well in his theory on marriage yeah my friend Brent B sure has this great theory on marriage where he says marriage only works if both Partners want to serve the other partner and expect nothing in return so you wake up every morning and you say I want to serve my spouse but I expect nothing in return from them and if you both do that simultaneously you're both pleasantly surprised because what happens is I didn't expect you to do anything for me but you did and vice versa and both of you just wake up every morning you're like but you did that for me you you helped me out here you you're empathetic to me there and it feels great you exceeded my expectations exceed my expectations and I think what breaks down any marriage or career or
whatever it would be is when you become needy like nothing breaks love more than being needy and really what needy is is just your expectations are so high that you wake up and you say I expect to do this for me I expect you to help me I expect you to serve me that's just like massively high expectations that you have in that relationship it's it's also like expecting an external factor in that case your partner to validate you in some way or to and that kind of goes back to your point about money where in order to stop showing off and focusing on those five people that we want to love ourselves we need to understand and ideally solve our often toxic relationship with like our need for validation and that I guess brings me to the first chapter in your book where you talk about the stories of money that we have and where they've come from and something that's always baffled me is when you go into low-income areas there's more gambling shops yeah and I can attest to it when I was 18 19 years old and I'm shoplifting pizzas to feed myself and I'm doing all sorts of stuff when I got my student loan in I was in university for one day and they gave me like the first payment of my student loan I don't think I've ever said this before I put the entirety of the payment on a bet wow and I lost it in the six in the an injury time of that football match I don't bet and did you need that money for tuition like it it was then it was then gone I needed it to eat yeah I wasn't speaking I had no money I don't come I didn't come from money and my parents I'd gone to University with 50 Quid and I got this like, sent to me from student loan whatever I was so reckless with money when I didn't have money the minute I got money it's like everything just chilled the [ __ ] out and I I became really longterm I made responsible decisions I stopped buying flashy things I like don't even own a TV now I'm very Sim I feel like the more money I have the less my material desires are for sure for sure when I say that out loud I'm like oh absolutely why is that that when we have less we are Reckless with our money well I think there's two sides to this one of my theories is that what everyone wants in the world is respect and admiration from other people
and there's kind of two ways to get that you can get your respect and admiration through your wisdom through your love through your humor or if you don't have that to offer from the to offer to the world you're going to get it through your material possessions so if you can gain respect and admiration through your business success your wisdom your love your friendship great then you're going to get it and you're going to fulfill that bucket if you can't get it from those things then you're like well might as well show off my car it's all I got to do that's all I have I think that's one side of it so as you become more successful your desire to show off diminishes because you're gaining respect and admiration through other things that are not matural the other side of this that's so important is that you know I saw this statistic years ago that the poorest 10% of Americans buy like 80% of the lottery tickets in America and these are people who can like barely feed themselves lowest 10% they're literally struggling to put a roof over the head and feed themselves are going out hand over fist buying scratcher tickets and the the knee-jerk reaction when you hear that is morons what are you doing you idiot and maybe that is the right reaction but I started thinking about it and it was like okay maybe if you try to put yourself in those people's shoes maybe they would say something like this if you are stuck in a low-income job and you feel like there's no way out you feel like you don't have the opportunity to work your way up the ladder become an entrepreneur you feel like you're stuck in this position buying a lottery ticket might be the only thing in life that gives you a little bit of hope it might it's might be what feels like literally your only ticket to get out and that might be not something that you and I feel like because because we have we we we at least feel like we might have other opportunities I it's you're so right because when I gambled what I then did the same day before the result of my bet or my lottery ticket came in and I said this to my team the other day is I would go on right move and like auto trader and look at stuff that I would buy if I won yeah yeah I think there's a sense too that if you are stuck in a lower spot in life if you have a feeling
that the world is unfair and very often it is so some maybe that that might be the right mindset but if you feel the world is unfair then it's very natural to think I might as well cheat too if the world's unfair why not might as well cheat and I think that at least at some level has some explanation for the relationship between poverty and crime that word hope is is so is so true I think it's true too just a glimpse of Hope because it gives you even if it's a 0.00001% chance if it's the only thing in your day that made you smile a little bit made you feel like you had a little bit of hope then I get why they do it the other reason the other thing I think a lot about here is that if you are in a low-income job and you're working graveyard shifts and you're exhausted and you're taking three buses to get your kids to school if the only thing that day that gives you a little bit of pleasure is a cigarette and some alcohol I get it I totally get it and that's also the relationship between health and poverty is a lot of that too so it's very easy for people who are of higher means to look down at those people and point out all the bad decisions that they're that they're doing in life but I think you underestimate how much that desire to just have a little bit of Hope a little bit of pleasure and if those feel like your only avenues for Hope and pleasure maybe that's the explanation for at least part of it quick one this is really really fascinating to me on the back end of our YouTube channel it says that 69.9% of you that watch this channel frequently over the lifetime of this channel haven't yet hit the Subscribe button I just wanted to ask you a favor it helps this channel so much if you choose to just subscribe helps us scale the guest helps us scale the production and it makes the show bigger so if I could ask you for one favor if you've watched the show before and you've enjoyed it and you like this episode that you're currently watching could you please hit the Subscribe button thank you so much and I will repay that gesture by making sure that everything we do here gets better and better and better and better that is a promise I'm willing to make you do we have a deal let's speak then to 18-year-old Steve that was in that little room with the
stack of these what they call County Court judgments and bays and stuff stack of letters on his desk what advice based on all you know about money and finance can you give to somebody who is Maybe making a, $1,000 $2,000 a month covers their rent just about doesn't have a lot of money left over what is the best way to go from that position to a position of wealth in your view I think one of the best ways to think about it at the lower levels and I explained a little bit this earlier but to dig into it is a lot of what's probably giving you stress in life is that you don't have control over what you're doing and if you view every dollar of savings that you have as a bit of your future that you own and control then I think that mind that mindset can shift pretty dramatically and it's like that's that's the ticket out the ticket out is not a nicer car it's not a bigger house it's not better closeth the ticket out is Independence that's what's going to give you the better career that's what's going to make you happier it's what's going to make you healthier and the only thing that's going to give you Independence is having enough money saved up so that you can choose where you want to live maybe even what job you want you can choose at at at some point down the road when you retire if you get sick it's not just going to break you immediately having that Independence is going to take more weight off your shoulders than anything else you can do in life save money that's it that's the the title of that chapter in the book is save money because you can't put it any clearer or Starker like that's that's it he says there are three types of people those who save those who don't think they can save and those who don't think they need to save yep three types of people which one are you those who save those who don't think they can save and those who don't think they need to save I tell you what I've been all three in my life that's interesting I've always been a saver no I haven't and see that I think that's actually very rare that you change who you are really on the nature nurture Spectrum I actually think and this is kind of disappointing to talk about it's not fun to talk about but on the nature of nurture Spectrum I think a lot of money is nature Warren Buffett talks
about the people who have the money mind which means like either they get it or they don't and if they get it they get it instantly and if they don't they'll get it never at all I I I actually don't believe in it it's that black and white Charlie merer explains it like that he says when explaining financial matters to young people they either get it instantly or never at all and he's putting that too starkly I think I don't think it's that black and white but on the nature nurture spectrum is it 8020 is it 7030 I think it's probably something in that range so let me give you a count a counterargument to that then so as I said I've been someone that didn't think he could save because I didn't have money and I just thought oh you know but I could have saved in it looking back now I know I could have saved I could have saved a small amount but I didn't see the value in saving small numbers I didn't understand the laws of compounding returns which we'll definitely talk about I have also been the person that saves and I've also been the person who thought they didn't need to save I've been all three my Counterpoint to this goes back to a story that I read from your early years where two of your friends died on a ski trip yeah and it also links to something youve said in your new book same as ever where you speak about how sometimes in life like hitting rock bottom is the greatest incentive to change our lives yeah so I put those two things together and go that moment when you were two of your friends died on a ski trip that you were on when you were younger it had an impact on your risk appetite and your attitude towards and therefore your attitude towards money yep what what happened what happened so I grew up skiing in in Le Tahoe California and I was a competitive ski racer right uh so all throughout my childhood and teenage years I skied six days a week 10 months a year all over the world and it was great there about 12 of us on the squad Valley ski team we had grown up together and we had spent our entire lives together and when I was 17 this is in 2001 I was skiing with my two two of my best friends brenon Allen and and and Brian Richmond and we would ski out of bounds which is illegal you're not supposed to do it we would
duck under the rope that says do not cross and we'd ski out of bounds because that's where a lot of the good skiing is and when we would do this it would spit us out on this back country road where we'd have to hitchhike back there's no chairlift when you ski out of bounds you have to hitchhike your way back so so we did it one morning in February 2001 the three of us did it and when we did it we triggered a very small Avalanche and I I remembered it so clearly like I can still feel it 21 year 22 years later I can still feel what is like it's the weirdest sensation of that I've had in my life because when you get hit by an avalanche rather than pushing on the snow to gain traction with your skis the ground is pushing you so all of a sudden you're skiing along and you got control and all a sudden boom you have no control everyore the the ground is pushing you around probably similar to what it feels like if you're standing on the ground during an earthquake like the ground's pushing you but it was a pretty small Avalanche maybe came up to our knees ended pretty quickly and we kind of like literally high-fived about it at the bottom and went about our day we get back around to the the base Lodge we hit shik back and Bren and Brian said they wanted to do it again they wanted to ski again and I said hey for whatever reason I I I just didn't want to do it so I said hey rather than hit cheing back why don't you guys go do it again and I'll drive my truck around and pick you up so we said great we made our plans went our separate ways they went skiing I went back around to take my boots off and jump in my truck and go pick them up 20 30 minutes later I go to pick them up at the pickup spot and they weren't there and I knew it only took us a minute to ski down the hill so 20 minutes later I knew like they they they weren't coming I I was not worried I figured that they had already hit hike home but so after waiting for another 20 or 30 minutes I just left and I went back to the lodge I expected them to be there and they weren't and I still didn't really worry like we didn't have cell phones back then and people were just comfortable being out of touch if you didn't know where your your buddy was like wasn't that that wasn't that big a deal so we went about the day I I started worrying a little bit I remember I stopped at
Brendan's house and expected him to be there and he wasn't there either and I remember calling and leaving a message on his voicemail and I remember ending the voicemail by saying I hope you're okay man those are my last words I remember that very clearly the day went on and I think at about 4 or 5:00 Brian's mom called me and she said Brian never showed up for work today do you know where he is and I told her what happened I said we skied the backside of squa where we'd hit Chik back I was going to pick them up but they never showed up and I haven't seen them since and I also remember so clearly Brian's mom saying oh my God and hanging up the phone and that was so like so it's then we started getting worried we called the police the police didn't take it very seriously because they thought ah they're out at a party they ran off with a girl for the night like they weren't worried but we finally got search and rescue involved and Rescuers of probe poles frowned Brenan and Brian buried under 6 ft of snow and they were they had been killed from a massive Avalanche and so look I think virtually everyone listening to this I'm sure you to have lost somebody close to you somebody that you love so I know the experience was not unique in that way but it was the first time that I had experienced loss and it was the first bad thing that had ever happened to me in my life so it had a big impact on me and there were a lot of takeaways I think at the time I didn't have the cognitive tools to piece together what happened or to learn about what happened like have any sort of takeaways but as I got older and thought about it and looking back I put together all these like realizations of what that did to me how it changed me and what were some of the lessons from it too one that I talk about in the book that I think about all the time is my decision to not go with them on a second run was this completely brainless decision I put no thought into that decision it was not a cost benefit analysis I didn't think through it but it's the most important decision I've ever made in my life 100% chance if I was with them I would have died and I had skied literally thousands of runs with Brendan and Brian how many times did I deny a second run with them or say you guys keep going I'm going to go in
almost never the one time I did it saved my entire life and so that you really realize that the world hangs by a thread everybody thinks like oh you're going to put a lot of thought into your big decisions to make sure that you're successful in life where you go to college what your career is going to be who you marry that's all great but the world hangs by a thread and there are tiny little no nothing decisions maybe that you made today of maybe it was when to cross the street maybe it was when to leave to get in your car that can utterly change the course of your life and so when once you accept that of how much the world hangs by a thread I think you become much more humble with your willingness to make forecasts about the future what the economy is going to do who's going to win the election what's going to happen in my life my career my family's life we have no clue we have no idea because all we can think about are the big decisions we cannot piece together the chaos theory of I got in my car at the at the wrong time I met the wrong person or I met the right person or you know I I decided not to take a second run we cannot forecast the impact of those things and so that had a big impact on me too of just who are we to fool ourselves that we can predict the next recession that we can predict where our careers are going to be in 10 years that we can predict how long our marriage is going to last that we can predict how long we're going to live we can't nobody can because we can't predict how crazy these tiny events can turn into and this comes right back to investing doesn't it because most people that consider themselves to be investors whether that's just putting a couple of quid into crypto or something else engage in the idea that they can predict the future yeah um and this is where it appears that most money is lost I mean think about the biggest risk to the US economy over the last two generations Co mean that's one of them the others would be Pearl Harbor okay 911 Co and maybe uh Lan Brothers couldn't find a buyer in 2008 which sparked the financial crisis of 2008 those are the biggest Risk by far and the common denominator of every one of those stories is that nobody saw them coming they were not in any newspaper before they happened they were
not in any economic Outlook nobody was going on TV warning you that this was coming the common denominator of those is that they did all of their damage in two seconds and that would be the case going forward you can guarantee that the biggest news story and the biggest risk over the next year or the next 10 years of our life whatever it is is something that nobody's talking about today that you and I have can't even fathom because it's always been like that there's never been a time when the biggest news story was foreseeable and it's all and it'll be like that going forward so that's another just like embracing how fragile the world is there's a great quote from a financial adviser who I really admire Nam Carl Richards and he says risk is what's left over when you think you've thought of everything H you can go out of your way to think about all of the risks that are in your life and like great and like how you're going to prevent them great that's a good thing to do when you're done with that exercise what's left over that you're not thinking about is what risk actually is it's like by definition we can never plan or even imagine what the biggest risks in our lives are going to be you say that in same as ever you say I think the the chapter title is risk is the things you can't see or something risk is what you don't see risk is what you don't see that was a little bit terrifying and it's true and I think I think sometime you can phrase it as terrifying it's also kind of relieving that like why are you going to put so much effort into trying to predict what the stock market's going to do next what the econom is going to do next why are you building a forecasting model to figure out what the econom is going to do over the next 10 years when you look at the last 10 or 20 years how could you ever predict 911 or Co and even look like something like Co there's like a 2015 Bill Gates Ted Talk where he talks about the biggest risk to society is a viral pandemic so it's not that nobody saw that thing coming but the specifics of when it's going to happen how bad it's going to be is it just going to shut down the economy for a week or two years that is completely impossible but there's also lots of other TED Talks that say everything's going to be great
of course of course there's proba there's a lot more so on balance the world had no idea I think on balance the world breaks once per decade not exactly once per de but on average once per decade everything that you thought about risk and uncertainty and stability goes to [ __ ] so how do I prepare if risk if risk is what I don't see how do I prepare there's another great quote from Nasim talad that I like where he says invest in preparedness not in prediction so rather than going out of your way to be like here's what I think is going to happen in crypto here's what I think is going to happen in the stock market just make sure that you have a big enough buffer in your finances cash liquidity being scared of debt so that no matter what happens you're you at least have a Fighting Chance of enduring it and make through one thing I've I've often thought about is that you should have enough cash in your investing portfolio the amount of cash you should have should feel like it's too much it should feel it should make you winse a little bit because if you only have enough cash to put up with the risk that you can Envision and the risk that you can foresee you're going to miss a surprise every single time every single surprise is going to be a surprise to you but if you feel like you have too much cash then at least you have a Fighting Chance of putting up with the 911 the co the Harbor whatever it might be so when people look at my asset allocation my investments a lot of people look at it and say you seem really conservative why do you have this much cash what are you saving for and my answer is always I don't know I have no idea what I'm saving for who are we to assume that we can predict the risks that are going to be in our own personal lives and throughout the broader World nobody can do it the only way to prepare for it is to have what feels like too much safety what is your capital strategy how do you invest your money um this is you know this is the thing people want to know most about you I keep it as painfully simple as I possibly can so literally my entire net worth is cash a house and index funds and some shares of Marquel where I'm on the board of directors and that's it there's nothing else my entire I can summarize everything so easily and so cleanly and truly that's it and it's
not even like I have 20 bank accounts I I have one bank account one brokerage account like in a house and that's it so simple why why index funds you're the reason I your Capital allocation strategy is almost identical to mine I want to talk about the house thing as well but um after reading your book I stopped trying to pick stocks yeah and I invested all of my available Capital into index funds outside of investing it in starting companies so I'm a shareholder in I don't know 50 60 70 companies I all my other available capital is invested in index funds and then I have a very long-standing position in ethereum which I've held for like six years or something which has done me very well yeah that is it and the ethereum investment is also based on the fact that I run a software business that is in blockchain and I could see that developers are building on top of ethereum more than any other blockchain so that Insight was really beneficial to me and six years so even with the big fall of the last two years you're still up a lot yeah I I think your book taught me that successful investing is when you lose the pass to your investment account yes that's exactly it I don't actually think you said that in there but that's like when I lose the password to my investment account I'm so proud of myself yeah because it means I haven't checked it in forever and so it was funny because you were coming today I thought oh yeah well I have all this money in these index funds I'll check it and I thought [ __ ] I don't know the password good that's why you're going to do okay the reason I do this what's important is that I am not one of the people who says nobody can beat the market so therefore use index funds that's not what I believe I think there I think it's extremely hard to beat the market and very few people will do it but I think there are really smart people who can do it and people who I know who I could invest with the reason I don't is not because I don't believe it can be done it's because the variable that I want to maximize for in my investments is endurance if I can just earn average returns for an above average period of time it's going to lead to amount of success that will literally put you in the top 5% of investors my parents are a great example
of this my parents are smart people but they really they have no Financial background and they like minimal financial interest I would say and but they have dollar cost average into index funds for going on 40 years now and literally if you look at the returns they've never sold anything ever and literally if you look at the returns they'd probably be in the top 3% of professional investors what is for anyone that doesn't know what is dollar cost averaging and what is an index fund dollar cost averaging means you buy the same dollar amount of Investments every single month come hell or high water doesn't matter what the stock market's doing recession boom bust you say I'm going to put $100 or whatever it is in the stock mark on the first of every month now most people who like have a 401k at work are doing this whether they know it or not they have $100 or whatever removed from every paycheck and it goes into the funds that they own and they don't have to do anything whether you know it or not you're actually doing it the contrast to that would say I'm G to buy and sell based off of how I feel in the stock market I wake up I watch CNBC I decided to sell and I'm going to put it back in when I feel better about the market it's the contrast to that an index fund is just a single fund that owns hundreds or or thousands of stocks within it and if it's diverse enough if it's big enough really what you're doing is you're owning a slice of the global economy which is how I think about it it's thousands of individual stocks in there Tesla Apple whatever it would be but really what you're doing is you're owning a slice of capitalism if I was your son and I said Dad prove to me that that's a better long-term wealth creation strategy than buying crypto or buying companies that I use or like how would you explain that to your to your kid your ability to do well over the next one year or 5 years is going to have no role whatsoever on your lifetime ability to generate wealth all that's going to matter is not what are the best returns you can earn all that matters are is what are the returns that you can sustain for the longest period of time all that matters is your endurance it doesn't matter if you can double your money this year or even double your money again the next year all that
matters is can you stick and keep it going for 50 years that's where compounding comes from prove it all because the formula for compounding is returns to the power of time that's not quite it but like more or less that's it so in that equation if you understand the math all of the heavy lifting comes from the exponent prove it because that's how exponential growth works that's how it works it's literally exponential give me a case study where someone has followed that strategy and done well okay here's one way to explain it that I use in the book 99% of Warren Buffett's net worth was accumulated after his 60th birthday after he turned 60 years old 99% of his wealth Jesus has been accumulated after that period because the longer do you hold that for the crazier the numbers get when he was 60 I think he was worth about $3 billion lot of money he's a multi-billionaire but now that he's 90 he's worth over hundred billion and he's given like a 100 billion away to charity so if he didn't do that he'd be worth he'd go from three billion to 200 billion since he's been 60 because the numbers just get crazier at that point he's worth a hundred billion dollar so if his if his Market if his net worth goes up 10% in one year he makes $1 billion which is three times that he was worth when he was 60 so that's when you look at somebody like Buffett is he a great investor is he a great stock picker of course but the real secret to his success is that he's been a good investor for 80 years and if he had retired at age 60 or at age 50 nobody would have ever heard of him he would have been like one of the other multi-billionaires who lives in Florida and plays golf and like you've never heard of him the reason he use a household name is because he's been doing this non-stop since he's since he's been 11 years old and he's never stopped it's just the endurance that's made him so wealthy not necessarily the annual returns patience it's a difficult thing it also reminds me of the story that you talk about in the introduction of your book about the janitor Ronald James Reed yeah who when he died in 2014 age 92 had a net worth of over 8 million and he was a janitor how did he do that he took what very little money he could save from his job as a janitor
mopping floors at the gas station he put it in stocks and he left it alone for 70 years and that's it that's all you need that's all you need to do if you have endurance in your investing and you can keep it going for years or decades you don't need to be a genius stock picker and not only you do not need to do it if you have endurance you're going to beat literally 97 or 99% of the genius stock Pickers and what's so interesting about it is like picking the right stocks is hard it's supposed to be hard like there's no world in which everybody who tries to beat the market is going to do it of course it's hard just like being an NBA player is hard and but having endurance is like largely in your control it's so much easier to just be patient than it is to pick the right stocks every single day now I think some people nature nurture some people like probably Ronald Reed and my parents Ju Just understand it naturally it's not hard for them to be patient but do like there are professional investors who work 80 hours a week for 30 years to try to beat the market and they can't do it not only some that that explains like most of them and even the ones who can do it are maybe going to beat the market by half a percent per year 1% per year but if you can have Endor that is that's a bigger benefit than you can have by even being like a very successful stock picker like somebody who outperforms the market by one percentage Point per year and they can do that for 10 years that's amazing that's like Mount Rushmore investor but somebody who earns average returns and does it for 20 years is going to have way more money you do it for 30 years you're going to be Filthy Rich you be like Ronald Reed you can be a janitor who leaves 8 million to charity when you die but so in the case of Ronald Reed do you not look at him a little bit and go listen bro if you had eight or9 million in the bank you should have been living it up see this is one I I do kind of regret that in the book that I'm I kind of I didn't say it explicitly but I kind of make him out to be a role model and I don't think that's the case he he's not my role model I think he's a fascinating story of somebody who became Rich despite not having any of the pedigree or any of the skills that you are
normally associated with wealthy people but you're right that he lived in a a a s wed housing and he worked as a janitor that's not my goal so I I I want to live a nice life I want to be independent but he's the most extreme example that you can come up with and I I I wish I had stated that more clearly in the book A lot of people have this conversation around pensions and in the UK we we can pay money from our salary into our pension but I think a lot of people think gosh when I'm 60 when I'm 65 I want to be rich I want to be rich when I'm 25 yeah and I can go to Vegas and you know ball out and buy nice things and have great experiences not when I'm 65 yeah no I think that's true I think there are a lot of people a lot of financial advisers will say that one of the hardest things they do as an adviser is getting their clients to spend money because they've been so conditioned to save save save save save that when they finally retire at 65 they don't know how to spend they have no clue how to spend money there's a great uh author I think you've had him on your show RIT Siti who talks about this a lot like how you like you need to learn how to live a a rich life and figure out what that is for you for some people like for me it's just like my my happy state is like sitting on the couch in sweatpants reading a book going for a walk with my wife that's that's that's my rich life that I love doing and to do that I need to be independent and autonomous so I can do that all day long I can do that on a Wednesday afternoon rid talks a lot about like maybe your rich life I think for him it's flying first class and wearing nice clothes and he talks about like he drives I think like a beat up Honda but he flies first class and he dresses very nicely so you just have to figure out what is the little thing that's going to make you happy and I think a lot of people's problem is that Society tells you what you're supposed to do to be happy you're supposed to have a nice car you're supposed to have a big house supposed to wear nice clothes that's what Society tells you to do and for some people that might be the case for other people like me I think it it's not that's that that would not ever make me happy what does make me happy is Independence so I can just do these little quirky things that I like to do
so I think you just have to figure out the little things that make you happy rather than just being forced by Society into what they want you to do knowing when enough is enough this was one of the most interesting things that I think really rang true to me was how do I know in my life when enough is enough I've definitely been a victim to that external narrative that I need to have these things in my life to be a happy person but how does one go about knowing when enough is enough I think back to the story of my father he just woke up one day and it was obvious that he would he had been doing what he did for long enough and it was he had felt like he had enough and whatnot and he and he broke away from it I think for for a lot of people it's just I one thing that's important about the concept of having enough in Independence is that when most people even if they are independent they wake up every morning what they want to do is go to work one of one of the big problems with the fire movement the financial Independence retire early movement where people are like they're going to be a Super Saver and then retire at age 31 whatever it' be so many of those people who actually did that and retired at age 31 they once they retired after about two weeks they were bored out of their mind and if they did it for six months they were clinically depressed cuz for most people you want to be productive you want to keep doing it so having enough doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to stop working it just means you're going to keep doing only the work that you want to do there's a really interesting question that Patrick oesi asked a lot of people uh in in his office he says if you won a billion dollars in the lottery but you had to stay at this job you're a billionaire but you can't quit what did this company would you want to do and what would you get rid of and virtually everyone has an answer for that question they say oh if I didn't need the money but I have to stay I would love to work on this project I love working on this thing this that and the other is all [ __ ] to me so like in any job there's going to be something that you want to do there's going to be some project there's going to be some position or or or maybe
it's like being an artist whatever it would be it's not that you stop working it's that when you have enough you get to pick and choose which of those things you're going to end up doing it's often too late in our lives when we realize the cost that we've paid for enough never being enough you know it could could be family it could be Health whatever um I always reflect on the with Brony we wasn't it who interviewed people on their deathbeds and found out that the biggest regret of the dying was not living a life true to themselves working too much Etc but that's on your deathbed there's nothing you can do at that point right and I think a lot about this like what am I going to regret yes I think about that too I think this is this is pretty morbid to think about but I think about if I were on my deathbed tomorrow would I regret working hard and saving a lot of money and my answer is absolutely not it would give me so much pleasure to know that my wife and my young kids are going to be fine and the opposite of that I cannot fathom being on my deathbed and looking at my wife and my 8-year-old son and my four-year-old daughter and thinking you guys are screwed that would that that would that would be the biggest regret I can fathom so I think a lot of people would look at someone with a high savings rate like me and would assume that I'm going to regret it on my deathbed and who knows but I I I have to think it would actually be the opposite what makes me gives me so much happiness and pleasure is taking care of my family and if I were to go tomorrow I wouldn't regret for one second the car that I didn't buy the big house I didn't buy the nice clothes I didn't buy not for a second would I regret not doing those it's a really good frame to think there isn't it about our financial decision- making and you know a lot of people like saving up to buy a lot of nonsense that's going to depreciate and would you rather have a little Nest Egg left over for the ones you love or buy that Lamborghini there's another great book called die with zero which basically the title is self-explanatory and one of the concepts is even if you want to give money away way to your family don't wait until you die don't make your kids wait or like hope you're going to die so they can get their inheritance give it to
them when it really matters which for most people is in their 30s and 40s if you wait until you die at age 90 and your kids are 60 and then they get your money like what's the purpose of that give it to them when they need it when they're raising kids and whatnot that's when they need your money I I I really like that concept I think about that with my own kids the counter point to that is though if I just give my kids money then like the chth quote they might lose it quick think about that especially as you know someone that has a lot of cash they could give I think about this because at some point I'm G to have kids and they're going to Daddy I want to do a driving lesson or they're going to be 18 and go off to University or whatever God I hope they don't go to university um and they're going to say like I've got nowhere to live or I found this nice apartment dad and in those moments do I make the decision to pay for it because I can or withhold it because they need to learn the hard way I have this yeah I'd call it an argument with my girlfriend where I say babe listen when we have kids they're going to sit an economy and she's like absolutely not yeah and I'm like no babe when they get okay we made a deal I think we got to about when they're 12 years old I'm going to put them in economy so they can learn for themselves the value of things see we we made this mistake I don't think I've ever talked about this but it was about a year ago we flew my son who was me I guess he was seven at the time we flew first class and we explained to him that this was not normal this was not going to be the way it is as soon as as he did it he went home he told all of our neighbors told all of his friends told everybody at school and that was when my I like can't can't do this never again you see how quickly somebody can be spoiled or use that to try to show other people that they are superior to them that's when it was like no no we can't ever do this ever again and you moved his expectations in a way absolutely I didn't fly first class till I was 35 and he did it at 7 and so that my when I first did it at 35 I remember feeling a I earned this I worked for this and Al felt so special to me because I'd flown coach 9,000 times before that so it felt amazing and so that's I I I think about
that a lot there's a great quote from Charlie Munger where one of his rich friends says Charlie if I give my kids all of my money is that going to ruin their ambition and Charlie says of course it will but you have to do it anyways and the guy says why and Charlie says because if you don't your kids will hate you and I think that's that too is like lots of Charlie Monger quotes are are framed as black and white they're extreme but I think that's probably like 80% true really that it's it's maybe 70% true that if you are a wealthy person and I'm not talking billionaires if you just have a moderate amount of wealth that you might pass along to your kids someday that your two options are kind of at least to some extent hurt their ambition or risk some level of strife and it's always child dependent like I always make the example that if 18-year-old Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk inherited a billion dollars would have made any difference to their ambition they would have they would not have slowed them down by one second but most people including myself it would have like I was driven by fear of not making it which is what most people are I was I was scared shitless that I was not going to find the right career that I wasn't going to make it and that's what drove me some people don't need that but I think it's very rare I think the huge majority of people if you give them an easy life they will take it and embrace it with both hands making money and keeping money require two different skills you you've spoken about a few of the skills that are required for making money the one that really stuck out to me that you've discussed so far is this idea of endurance patience regardless of what's happening in the markets regardless of the volatility lose your password and sit on your hands just on that point as well I remember reading somewhere it might have even been your book you know it's so crazy because the things that I know about money I can't remember where I've got them from but most of them came from this book like most of the principles came from this book and one of the things that I read was that Warren Buffett would go like five years without allocating capital and this where he said the hardest thing to be a great investor is to be able to
sit on your hands and do nothing sit on your ass and do nothing that's it that's that's AER quote and that's what they're doing right now right now Berkshire hathway which is Warren Buffett's company has like $150 billion dollar of cash right now and that's their entire uh 60-year history of Warren Buffett and Brookshire hathway is build up a shitload of cash wait 10 years for an opportunity deploy it all and then go back to waiting and building up cash crazy and that's that's that's how they done it good opportunities are rare of course they are they should be rare it shouldn't be that anybody can just open up their stock account and find the opportunity of a lifetime what are the gonna come once a decade what are the other skills then endurance patience to create to get money for the for the ordinary person endurance and patience is 99% of what you need as an investor because the opportunities there to invest in a lowcost Index Fund are available for everybody and you can do that from your phone like you do it from your phone open up a Robinhood account buy some index funds anybody can do that and so that and but that was not always the case it used to be 20 years ago that the only people who could invest were people who had a lot of money and could afford a broker and had connection to a broker and you yet to like make a phone call make a phone call you had to know a guy and even then you were going to pay a ridiculous fee to that person for do pieces of paper and all kinds it was a joke and that's 20 years ago it's not that long ago so I think like people aren't grateful enough or appreciative enough of how much things have changed that open up those opportunities for everybody you talk about the skill of keeping money which is different from the skill of getting money is predicated on Survival Financial survival and just putting up with all the unpredictable nonsense that's going to happen between now and the end of your life and we talked earlier about the surprises Pearl Harbor 9911 all these big surprises just it's just your ability to endure things like that that's going to be literally 90% of your financial success and your investing success so gaining money is like being an optimist and taking a risk like being optimistic about yourself swinging for the fences you need that to
get rich staying rich is is like the exact opposite you need a level of being conservative you need to be scared you need to be like acknowledge of all the unknown risks that are in front of us and have a financial allocation and a mindset that's going to allow you to endure them and survive them financially you need both of those skills at the same time so well your kid is 20 years old he's broke do you tell him to go and take huge outsized risks he's not got a family he's not got a mortgage he's not got a dog what advice do you give him at that age to create wealth I would actually say I think this is a little counterintuitive that when somebody is Young you you think you would say you got 50 years in front of you swing for the fences go for it it's also when your life is the most fragile it's when you're most likely to be laid off most likely to change your career most likely to break up or get divorced whatever it would be and so for that you need quite a bit of financial flexibility just cash and liquidity so once you had some level built up whatever the level might be for a different person then like do something crazy I also think for careers some of the best career advice that's maybe not Universal but when you graduate college and you're looking at your career don't take the safe job which is usually like the big company the blue chick company go for the weird company why go for something crazy because when you're older when you're 40 and you have two kids and a mortgage you're not going to want to take the weird job that's when you want the stability that's when you're probably going to want the job that's has good benefits and a stable paycheck cuz you need that when you're 22 and you're not tied down by anything don't go work for Goldman Sachs or apple or deoe or something like that go for the weird startup where you like you're you're going to learn something completely different linked to that point is in the weird startup you're going to be so close to the failure and failure is the knowledge you're going to learn so much much and there's so many people who take the blue chip the safe job out of college and it puts them on a very predictable track you're going to be an analyst for two years and then if you're good you'll get promoted to
senior analyst and then you'll get promoted to associate it's like very stable and linear and that's the like it's you're capping all of your upside where if you go for the weird company you're either going to do one of two things it's either going to fail and you're going to learn a lot from that or it's going to take off and you're going to learn a lot from that and then maybe when you're 40 after going through all that then you want the stable job at the big company it's interesting I was thinking as you're speaking that the proximity from your desk and the CEOs probably needs to widen over time yes I think I think that's that's true yeah absolutely and mo most people I think if they if you do it the other way around or most people would never do it the other around if you start your career in the stable company you're probably never going to leave you're going to get addicted to the nice paycheck the stable benefits whatnot and you're never going to take a risk and do anything else maybe that's okay maybe for some people's personalities that's exactly what they want but I think there is a higher level of regret for people that start in a safe company and then they get the golden handcuffs they can't leave and by the time they're 40 and they realize that they wanted to work at the crazy company they can't because they got a mortgage and two kids and they're saving for retirement and they can't take the risk at that level of their life you introduced this concept of tales long tales and this also changed my life changed my investment strategy I should probably say you talk about the example of venture capital where for every 50 Investments That Venture capitalists make statistically half of them will completely fail 10 will do okay and one or two will make huge profits that drive 100% of the funds returns yeah this is a lesson about investing in finance but it's also me a lesson about life it's always life yeah it applies to everything Tales where just a couple of things that happen explain 90 or 99% of what matters it's always the case you see it in business where you take in the United States there are you know thousands of public companies that you can buy stock in but the huge majority of the value in the US
Stock Market is in like 10 companies Apple Tesa Microsoft so even though you have thousands of companies 10 of them are the ones that really matter and are going to drive all of the r turns over time so why you just buy those 10 because nobody knows what they're going to be at least in hindsight that that that's the argument for owning a thousand of them is that you know that the 10 that are going to be the next big ones are going to be in there all of this is a case for humility this is honestly what I took away from your book you're expecting to walk away with tips all these tips these tricks these special ways to make more money than everybody what I came away with is this one important lesson that I've never been able to unsee which is I don't know I I think that's great and that back to I wrote this book for myself that's been the biggest lesson for me is not only do I know but nobody else knows either everyone everyone else is bullshitting their way through the investing Market too they don't know either I'm in this crypto chat where one of my friends I won't disparage him one of my friends he's the guy in the chat that's always posting the forecast graphs you know those ones where they kind of like the little logger graphs where they forecast where the stock or the crypto where they think it's going to go right and it's always it's always up and to the right um and it's kind of like male horoscopes I heard someone say that that that's such a great yeah no I think that's I think what's closest to investing is something like the horoscope or even if you know it's [ __ ] you want to read it why because it's comforting what a lot of people want out of their investing forecasts or whatever it is is they want to reduce the uncertainty that's giving them stress because everyone I think intuitively knows that the future in front of us is unknown and it's unknowable but that hurts and so if it hurts you try to reduce that stress by finding someone who says I do know what's going to happen you know what this applies as well is I read Amazon's Jeff Bezos who's the CEO and founder of Amazon his shareholder letter where he says we have to be the best place in the world to fail um we swing for the fences 10 times and for every 10 swings nine of them are in the Amazon graveyard he's
talking there about a9.com which nobody knows cuz failed the fir phone which nobody knows but the one in 10 pay for the entirety of the graveyard the one in one 10 is going to be AWS which make 70 billion this year right he talked about that when the fir phone from Amazon which if you don't know Amazon built a cell phone it's called the fir phone and it was a joke it was a disaster it was a massive flop and he was doing like an analyst call and this analyst talked about like hey the Fire Phone flopped like what happened there and bezo said if you think that was a big failure just wait you've seen nothing yet and like that's why Amazon's successful they're willing to try a thousand things with the idea that they know 990 of them are going to fail but the 10 that work are going to be massive and you can fail well and have the mentality to fail and the financial backing to be able to fail like make sure your bets are not that big and you can just keep taking little risks all the time the optionality that you get from that like the odds that one or two of those are going to explode are huge it's massive I mean it's no different than how do you win the lottery you have to buy thousands and thousands or millions of tickets if you buy billions of tickets you'll probably win the lottery it's probably not going to pay off because it doesn't work like that but it's the same concept like if you if you if you take enough swings at bat one of them is going to hit eventually and this is also a reason why some companies look Innovative they look like their Geniuses but in fact their failure rate is massive massive there's a story at at at Netflix several years ago where there was uh a report to the CEO and the and the report was all of the new movies that we've come out that that we've that we've produced have been successful and whoever presented that probably thought this is great this is what you want hear and the CEO said that's terrible that means we're not taking enough risks if every movie that we release is a hit we're not taking risks like you want your failure rate to be at least some that that's when you know you're at least trying something new it's the same like if you're managing uh a hotel you don't want every room to be sold out because that means you're not pricing
high enough you know you're doing a good job when you have 10 empty rooms that's when you know you're pricing the other rooms at a high enough rate so there's always going to be like some level of what looks like failure that you need and if you don't have it you're not taking a big enough risk Daniel X sat here and he said the same thing he goes one of the most important metrics that I think about at Spotify is our mistake rate yeah and people will think okay so he wants to limit mistakes very much the opposite he wants to make sure that the company maintains that sort of startup mentality and they increase their rate of mistakes and this brings me to something which I kind of hit me like a truck um in your new book same as ever which was this idea that we need to keep running now there were areas in my professional life where I've been successful poas is doing well I think doing pretty well and I had a I had a car Journey with Jima who's through the wall who you met and we last time we came to well I'm in the front seat of the car and I go Jima do you know what our biggest um our biggest threat is now complacency when people get successful they play defense to their detriment um they don't play offense as much as they need to to keep up with the rate of change in the world and then a young Scrappy agile incumbent who has a high risk appetite will take their cheese right and your chapter on keep running there's two quotes that I really pulled out chapter is called keep running and the quot two quotes that I pulled out were competitive advantages tend to be shortlived often because their success plants the seeds of their own decline one more quote it's easy to overlook how many forces pull you away from your competitive Advantage once you have one specifically because you have one success has its own gravity that's right and the the the the biggest source of gravity there is laziness the reason you're successful is because you work so hard to get to where you were and now that you feel like you've made it now that you feel like you're on the top of the mountain top you get lazy and that's so many companies fall for that so many careers fall for that there's a great story from Jerry Seinfeld where he said that one of the reasons that he quit the show when it was still going gang
Busters is because he could start to sense that what made the show successful was starting to be was starting to go away he said and part of the reason is was because he got so famous when he was not that famous he could go sit in a coffee shop and watch how people ordered their coffee and make a joke out of it he was observing how Society worked once he got very famous he couldn't do that anymore he was too famous to go sit in a deli and watch how people order their sandwiches he couldn't do it so therefore he didn't have a lot of the source material that he had before and so he was like look what made me so funny and the show so successful I can't do anymore so like red alert let's pull the plug before it gets really bad here so that's like a very specific example but what he realized that what made him successful was gone and a lot of a lot of CEOs will will have this problem too where what made them successful was that they were a scrappy startup founder and they were very good at building a product but now that the company is big and successful they also need to be an HR Manager they need to be a finance specialist they need to be a marketer they need to be all these other things and therefore their time is pulled away from what they're actually good at which was building a product a good example of this if I can say it was Travis kenck of uber the founder of uber probably nobody in the world was better at scaling a company like uber than he than he was and there were a few people who were worse at managing a big company than he was so it's like what made Uber successful is what pulled him away from being a successful manager at that he was very good at one thing he was the best in the world at that one thing but you shouldn't think that like it's going to last during when another phase of the company's life my person I consider a mentor and a friend of mine been a long-term friend of mine a guy called Shaquille Khan he was one of the very first investors in shop in Spotify um new Daniel the founder from the very Beginnings he said to me um a piece of advice that stayed with me and I've also imparted on other people at a time when I'd left my company I was now financially successful um financially free by all regards and and I called him after leaving my company and I said D I
said Shaq what should I do now with my life he said to me Stephen the reason you were successful was because you were hungry you need to realize that you're no longer hungry for the same reasons and what he told me to do was the hardest [ __ ] thing I've ever done in my life which was nothing he said spend a year don't rush back into starting the same business again because he said to me the reason why you were so unbelievably disciplined and would go to the office seven days a week was because you were like an insecure kid that was like fighting to survive that's gone now so sit on your hands for a year do absolutely nothing and get inspired again get get hungry again about something new um because my Temptation was just to run back in and start a big marketing business again or whatever yeah I that's kind of what you're you're speaking of as well is that like the need to understand that our motivations evolve and change over time and the thing that made us successful might not be the thing that makes us successful again in a new Venture I think there are some people who really can keep it going some people who do keep running like Elon [ __ ] perfect example guy worth a quarter of a trillion dollars still works 100 hours a week so there are those people who exist but I think for a lot of people this should not be a scary thing the fact that after you've made it and have some success and some some wealth that you're not as hungry as you used to be that's fine just you just have to accept it it gets dangerous when people don't realize it and they they are less hungry they're not as motivated but they're still going to try to go start a new business even though they don't need it anymore and then they're shocked when that business doesn't work he said to me you need to take on a moonshot and cuz he know he goes you you did the first business you did well whatever Etc he goes the thing that will make you hungry and sufficiently terrified is you now need to find a big scary terrifying goal that's what Elon did with Twitter yeah he'd already become the richest man in the world and he probably got bored a little bit and he said I need to do something that's crazy and that even for someone like me is going to be an absolute stretch to pull off crazy which is buying Twitter
and running into the ground I mean there's no surprise that billionaires will seem to start rocket companies yeah I mean the reason that they are successful is because they have that complete swing for def fenses I mean most people would quit full stop when their net worth hit 10 million or less 3 million and so for someone to have a net worth of 10 billion and to wake up and say I'm going to keep going as hard as I possibly can that's why they have that level of success it's complete insatiable Hunger for More I sat with a billionaire when I was 20 going to say 24 years old and I sat in his office and I thought okay this could be really interesting I get to meet this very successful person in Manchester and I looked into his eyes and said why are you doing this like you have all this money and it became completely apparent to me that it was not about the money it was all about competition I then went and met another billionaire who was in Manchester runs another big company Manchester everybody knows the company and it was the same thing with him it was the thing that had got him to a billion was the thing that was going to keep him going after a billion yeah I mean there's there's a chapter in my book about natural Maniacs like people like wild Minds people the kind of person like Elon Musk who has that mindset to say you know when he was 30 years old or whatever he took on GM Ford Chrysler and NASA when he was like 30 the kind of person who thinks that is not the kind of person who's going to say I have enough I'm going to put it all in Muni bonds and go live on the farm like it's not the person who thinks they can do that and can pull that off is the kind of person who's never going to stop if Elon Must List till he's 97 he's going to be starting new rocket companies for sure do you think he's happy no absolutely none I think most people in that situation the word that I would use is tortured I think they wake up every morning tortured at the problems that they are aspiring to solve that they haven't solved yet there's almost no biography of a very successful person like that of that level of success that you would read their biography and say that life sounds great it's one of the things that hit me like a train truck was those two billionaires
I met were just the most miserable people absolutely and I met their their one of their sons and they go dad is so unhappy I remember him saying that to me and just go [ __ ] he's going to that office every single day has a billion dollars and his kids think he's like sad there's this amazing story do you remember uh Myspace back in the day before before Facebook and the guy who ran it his name was Tom I forget his last name but when you signed up for Myspace Tom was your first follow he was the founder of Myspace and every he followed everybody and he sold Myspace I think to Qualicom maybe no I'm sorry he sold he sold Myspace to Viacom and uh did pretty well let's say I'm guessing let's say he made $50 million it's probably something in in in in that range it's it's probably nothing that's dramatic 500 was it he sold the company for that much actually don't but it was it was it was it was a good but not extraordinary sum of money and you can see his life on Instagram it's not exaggeration he's like travels around the world with his girlfriend hiking in Bali it looks like at least from Instagram he lives this amazing life and then think about Mark Zuckerberg who is like every year hauled before Congress where he's like screamed at for causing all of society's ills and he has so much on his shoulders and Facebook stock fell 70% last year because everyone thinks it's going to and like it looks like a very stressful incredible amount of pressure on his shoulders if you were to ask me which one of those lives would I take would I rather be someone with $50 million who was traveling around the world hiking in Bali with my wife or would I be wor a hundred billion do and wake up every morning scared shitless with so much pressure on my shoulders for me it's obvious I'd much rather be Tom than Mark but that pressure is a drug in the sense that when I say the pressure is a drug I mean we know from motivation psychology and I mean I think I saw on the back of your your book yeah Daniel H pink y Daniel pink told me that when people aren't sufficiently challenged they lose motivation and their level of challenge kind of increases so to be engaged with a task you need to um and you think of this like game psychology the levels need to get harder and harder for you to
be engaged that's why every game we play it's not on level one over and over and over again we need it to go to level two crosswords get more difficult we stay engaged do you not think that's the case with like a big famous CEO know that their engagement appetite their challenge appetite just grows and that's the only way they can stay engaged solve bigger problems I think if you look at someone like Bill Gates I think he had figured out business and in 2000 he he effectively quit Microsoft but he immediately moved on to what I think was in his mind a bigger problem which was like how do I give this money away effectively and how do I eradicate malaria those kind of problems and so even for someone like him who was able to extract himself from the business they' immediately move on to something that I think in his mind was more problematic and a bigger challenge so there's never going to be a period where someone like that were to say I've had enough I'm just going to retire to read books like that will never be the case it's always going to be I think they're addicted to the challenge is what it is yeah and I think I I think I am I think I think everybody is to some extent and the mus and the gates those people are extreme examples of it but every I think everybody needs a minimum level of stress in their life and the irony is that we all kind of dream about like what can I do to at the stress so I just wake up in Nirvana every day and you can't everyone needs to have some sort of conflict Strife challenge stress in their life and for I think for a lot of people if they don't get it from real places they just make up fake problems in their life that's that's a big problem with people for people who richer people who have a lot of things they will start worrying and stressing about the most minute things because they need that stress in their life on that point as well just popping back to we were talking about the complacency the other thing that I think successful people become a victim of is their own correctness I think about that with me like I've been right about several decisions in a row so surely that creates evidence that I'm probably right again and that can be your downfall as well or what a lot of it is is you were right on this topic and then therefore
you assume that you're going to be right on another topic and you didn't know the role luck might have played you didn't know what luck would play but let's say you're a very successful investor and then and they'll say you're like massively successful a lot of those people will think therefore I can also be an effective politician therefore I can also be an expert on Co whatever it would be because they think they're so smart in this area that they must be smart in other areas a lot of doctors have this problem with investing where they think I'm a doctor I'm very successful I got a PhD from a great school therefore I can pick the stocks because I'm a smart person and that level of overconfidence is their undoing can success I think your book the one of the key things that stayed with me and I didn't need to recap myself on was the stories you told about people that accurately predicted what was going to happen in the stock market against all conventional wisdom they all from what I recall they went on to lose their money eventually anyway a lot of them yeah yeah what is that story you told in your book there's a story about a guy named Jesse Livermore who was back in the 1920s he was the most successful investor in the world and what's so amazing about Jesse Livermore is that I think four different occasions in his life he became the equivalent of a billionaire adjusted for inflation and then went bankrupt four separate times in his life so he was the person who was like better at anyone in the world at making money and had no skill whatsoever at keeping money and that's someone who like even when he became at one point he was the richest man in the world and rather than saying I have enough it's enough he have said let's cap te bigger bets let's swing even harder next time it goes never enough and he eventually the last time he went broke he eventually ended up killing himself it's the most amazing like just fascinating life that you can imagine of someone who is so good at making money but never knew when to stop and it is actually the more money he made the more risk he wanted to take so it was always like his I I think his outcome was always predestined because there was never going to be a moment like the Richer he be the more successful he became the
higher the odds that he was going to fail and I think there's some version of that for a lot of people because it because their success increases their confidence more than their ability and they don't even know that that's a problem that you can't self diagnose like if you're confident you think it's earned and you think it's real and and then because you're successful a lot of people who when you were poorer or less successful they would tell you you're being an idiot you're wrong you're not right about this but when you're rich maybe because you employ them or because they think that you're so smart even when you say something stupid they might go yeah maybe it's right go for it and therefore you don't have people who are telling you how overconfident you are that again it comes down to humility doesn't it a lot of it yeah and like I think that's that's that's so much of it and like and I think you have to go out of your way sometimes for that humility that when you have some level of success in your life whatever that level is just always remind yourself I think I remember there was a quote that I think it was um Roman Warriors that when they would come home from a battle that they won and they were in like the Parade of you know like we won the battle and we're going to go in the parade that like we're we're the victors were so great that they would have someone by their side whispering in their ear something something along the lines of you're not that great because they're in this parade where they're glorious and like Victorious but they need to someone to bring them back down to earth and be like hey you're just a you're just a dude you're just a guy you're not that special you're very fallible like make the like tame it down they would actually hire people to do that for them and I think if you look at a lot of like the great entrepreneurs a lot of the great investors they will have some sort of partner with that Charlie Munger is that to Warren Buffett like when Warren Buffett comes up with an idea a big part of Charlie munger's job is to tell him when he's being an idiot and to have someone like Warren Buffett who will trust a person like that and to have someone like Munger who is willing to do something like that is so critical just a quick Interruption
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$150 on the Pod cover that I have on my bed the one I'm talking about grab your pod cover send me a DM and let me know how you get on confidence which comes from success often really does create blind spots and that's something I think about so much like how do I stay aware of those blind spots in my life that you know the success I've had in various areas has undeniably created and honestly a lot of I just go just save loads of money Steve because the day you're wrong you don't want to go broke I also think about that like whenever the curtain comes down on my career I want to make sure that I can say like hey thank you for for for letting me have this I'm so grateful for it but I I've saved enough that like I'm ready to pass a baton to someone else and that's a form of humility too there's a quote from Denzel Washington where he's talking to Will Smith After Will Smith slapped Chris Rock remember that whole debacle after that show Denzel Washington comes up to Will Smith and he says will when you're at your highest moment in your career that's when the devil's going to get you and it's like when when when you when your career is so high and you're so famous you think so highly of yourself that you can do anything that's when you're going to get yourself into trouble what a powerful quote and I think just paying attention to that that's the natural humility that goes into it and it's not false humility it's not like oh I you know false humility is like I I didn't do any of this I just got lucky that's all false humility I think real humility is like I built this through hard work and I made some good decisions but I'm just I'm just a guy I'm as fallible as anybody else I think that's it's that's not just important I think that's critical to any amount of sustainable success you taught me that the price you pay to be wealthy is the volatility you have to incur along the way kind of how I think about it in my head that's the cost of admission to being to being wealthy and to to be to any level of success is putting up with an enduring unknowns and volatility and Booms and busts and then other [ __ ] that you put up with in the investing market and in your career and in your relationships there's always a cost for anything good in life there's a cost
that you have to pay like of course like nothing's free like that but most of the costs that you pay are not they don't have a price tag that you can just measure very cleanly like the cost of doing well at investing is putting up with volatility the cost of a successful career might be long hours where you were pulled away from your family the cost of a relationship is like always needing to sacrifice and compromise for the other person nothing is ever free and so much of the success in life is just identifying what the cost is and being willing to pay it because for all of those things I just laid out investing career relationships the cost of admission is worth it putting up with the volatility is worth it over time because if you can put put up with the stock market falling 30% if you could just say ah it's not that big a deal I'm just going to hold tight 10 years from now the cost is well worth doing that be rich if you can put up with the compromise that takes to have a successful relationship by and large that's going to be a cost that's worth paying because you know like so much of what matters in life is just the relationships that you have and once you identify the cost of that relationship you're like oh I'll pay that cost all day long so worth it this requires you to be cognizant of time Horizons and your own time Horizons which is something you talk a lot about in chapter 16 of the psychology of money why is it important for us to know our time Horizons and what do you mean by time Horizon it's the the amount of time between now and whatever your goal is which is very different for everybody not just by your age but like if you want to retire early or whatever would be like everyone's going to have a slightly different time Horizon what's yours mine I mean I you would break it up into different chunks like I want to get to a point or maybe I'm nearing a point in my career where I'm just doing things because I enjoy them there's really no Financial incentive to what I'm doing that's one time Horizon another is like okay once my kids start getting older I I want to make sure that like I'm always there for them when they need me teenage years are so difficult for people like I'm always 24/7 I'll be there for you which means I'm going to
have to pull back there's going to be a point where I just say look I've accomplished what I want to with writing and I want to be able to move on to something else and there's going to be a point where I say I really don't want to work that much anymore I just want to move on and maybe I need to take care of my parents would it be so like there's multip multile different time Horizons at different goals of your life is buying a house a good or bad financial decision I'll tell you my own experience which was in my 20s and early 30s my wife and I lived in like seven different cities and there was nothing better for us some of those were just like let's try this new city for fun some of it was moving for work we moved for her school and our ability to just get up and go hand the keys back to the landlord nothing was more valuable than that once we had our son our first kid then very quickly nothing became more valuable to me than having an established secure home base that nobody could take away from me that was The Cure and also like kids are loud and they scream and I didn't want Neighbors in an apartment building that I was going to have to like try to keep my kid quiet from so I was I want my own house that's mine and it's just a standalone house my kid can scream as loud as he wants not bothering anybody else that became important to me like instantly so it's Le I think people get caught up when they're like well the housing market returns 4 and a half% per year that's it's like with the spreadsheets like just do what's going to work for you I know I know RIT Siti has a lot of thoughts about this on renting versus buying and I think one one of like the differences between remit and myself is I have two young kids and so like that that if I didn't have kids I think I would be like rent rent forever really and try and try different cities move all move all around what could be better than that but when you have kids what's more important to me is stability I want my kids to go to a stable School know their neighbors have friends that they can be friends with for years that's important if we just think about investing then in terms of is buying a house a good Financial investment my brother who works in my company and he's the one that introduced me to your book many
many years ago said to me something along the lines of Steve don't buy houses to make money because you have the ability to play a different set of games that very few people can play yeah and what I mean by that is he kind of explained it to me goes listen everyone can buy a house so the returns there aren't going to be huge go find a game that like only you can play you'll get bigger returns if you're buying a house because you think it's going to be a good Financial investment stop like even if it turns out in hindsight that it was it doesn't matter I think these are just purely lifestyle decisions and I think so many people get screwed up when they're in a spot in their life where they should be renting because they need to be mobile they need to move around to a new job new career new school whatever it is but they end up buying because they think they're going to make money doing it and that's like that's the problem so I own a house and if I ended up losing money on it I I I I don't think I'd care that that's not why I'm owning it I'm owning it just cuz I want the stability for my family I've just made an offer on my first ever house and I cuz I played I played other money games for the last decade of My Life um and now I have a partner and we've been together many years and we're both like 31 years old and we're getting into that position now you know Y and my brother explained to me he goes listen this is a bad financial decision but it's a good emotional social life decision and you need to know how to separate the two don't mark this down as a way that you're trying to make money like you might make money in 20 years time if you just like if you're still living there look at it as you know you need somewhere to live and he must have got that from you when I when I when we bought our last house which was after I wrote this book so this is a different experience um I thought at the time and still think today I I probably paid a little bit too much I mean I paid the market rate but if you said like oh did you get a good deal I say no no not didn't bother me in the slightest that's not what I was doing it for it would I mean it would be like if you ask like if someone is deciding whether or not to have kids and they think about the cost of kids like forget of course you're
going to dump hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into your kids and it's G it's like if if money is coming into the equation like stop right there this is it should not do it you're doing it for very different reasons this is not an investment people people buy houses because they think that they're making loads of money from because there have been periods in time in which people have made loads of money historically like that's the anomaly historically in the US and the UK housing prices adjust over inflation go nowhere it's just been the last 20 or 30 years that there's this very brief window of time that owning a house was a great investment Robert Schiller won the Nobel Prize about a decade ago for his work in showing that over the last 150 years in the United States adjusted for inflation most home prices have been flat as a pancake it's just the last 20 years that have inflated people's expectations of what a house can do statistically there's going to be at least one person listening to this that has made an offer as we speak for a house under the assumption that it's going to help them stack wealth if they were purely doing it for those reasons what would you tell them to do instead if that's purely the reason run for run for your life don't do it particularly I mean it it used to be and maybe it still is like this in many cities in America in the UK but it used to be that rentals were almost without exception shitty houses there were no good rentals a big change at least in America in the last 20 years is that most cities have tons and tons of luxury apartments to live in and that are great places to live and they're in the city centers and they got beautiful granite countertops and they're great places to live don't fall for the idea that you can't live well if you're renting I think that's that's that's the problem and realize that if you're doing it for financial reasons you're probably about to borrow a shitload of money for an investment that historically has been a very bad investment like if you put it in those terms like what are we doing here man going to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for an investment that historically has been a loss that's what you're doing here does you feel good about that that's what I'd say to
that person God speed I I would love to be in the room somewhere where that person has just looked at their partner after persuading them to make that offer because it was going to make them Rich sorry guys the um this new book same as ever essentially it's 23 short stories about things that never change in the world y well there's a couple of really interesting things that I pulled out one of them again which really hit me in the face was this idea that the best story wins I know this I know this intuitively I talk about it on stage but I don't think people understand the power of the best story wins because when you think about entrepreneurship or investing or pitching or sales what most people do is they lead out with facts stats and figures yeah and even one of the things I've noticed about you from our conversation now is you have a remarkable ability to tell stor thank you and there's a huge power in that prove to me that the best story wins I mean it's it's always the case that it's not the right answer or the best answer or the mathematically accurate answer it's just whoever gets people to nod their heads in the right direction that's who's going to win over time some of the examples of this that I Love Ken Burns one of the most famous uh documentary filmmakers of all time most of what is are in his documentaries is is information that people already know he'll make a documentary about Civil War World War II Vietnam whatever it would be there's not you're not learn necessarily learning something new in there but he is massively successful massively popular because he's probably the greatest Storyteller of our time so even when you're taking information that people already know if you can spin a good story about it you get people lining up and they will knock your door down to listen to you one other example of this are people who tell comedy if you're a good comedian like that's all just storytelling and a lot of what a good comedian does is takes something that's very obvious and simple but you can make you can tell a good story about it you can make people laugh and all of a sudden you get their attention and they'll remember it you said in the book
not the best idea or the right idea or the most rational idea just whoever tells a story that catches people's attention I think there are dangerous stories which is when people want to is when people tell you what you want to hear oh I got a dangerous story The vaccine gives you autism I think I think it's a story that people wanted to hear some people wanted to hear that and if you tell people what they want to hear you can be wrong forever and people won't care because you tell them what they want to hear T shrot who's a neuroscientist sat here and she told me a story of Donald Trump stood on the debate stage and they panned over to Dr Tucker Carson I believe he's called and asked him about the vaccine and he basically gave stats facts and figures He said That vaccine doesn't give kids autism and then they like pan over to Donald Trump and Donald Trump tells this elaborate story about a friend of his one person one friend of his clearly doesn't exist one friend of his and he describes the needle like this he goes this huge needle yeah and he so vivid Vivid personal and emotional yep and you get people nodding their heads to that and and and capturing their attention tally said I'm a neuroscientist I knew it was wrong however there was something about hearing it that even as a neuroscientist I look to my daughter and go [ __ ] I think we've always been storytellers and that's what's really set humans apart that's the whole idea from youval no Harari is that like what sets humans apart is our ability to tell and remember stories and it's made it so it's just a tool to simplify facts in the world like most people the other thing is powerful about stories is that you remember them you think about in school when you had a math test and the teacher just said memorize this formula to regurgitate it on the test literally 5 minutes after the test is done you forget it you have no idea what it was but if you remembered a good story even that you were told when you were two years old you remember it for the rest of your life so it's just a tool for getting people to remember how the world works and they be so persuasive and so good at eliminating the uncertainty that grates on all of us that people will listen to and believe things even when they're just obviously flagrantly not
true if it's what they want to hear people talk about um when we're talking about investing but generally life people talk about compounding interest and we all know the I think a lot of people should know the power of compounding interest now but we rarely think about how compounding interest can negatively slowly impact our lives and in your chapter about tiny and magnificent you explore that and again this hit me like a truck in the face because I I think I spend my time now thinking about how getting things to compound in my fa favor will change my life but I don't spend a huge amount of time thinking about how things are compounding against me right now yeah what what's really true is that most good news happens slowly and most bad news happens very fast so bad news is like Co literally happens overnight boom you got a you got a virus it's going to kill millions of people shut down the economy happens literally overnight 911 Happ happens start to finish it's like 30 minutes like boom just happens immediately good news is usually slow compounding over time so I use the example of the book of like the Improvement in heart disease mortality over the last 70 years is Bonkers we've made so much progress and saved literally tens of millions of lives in the fact that we've gotten better at treating heart disease and but nobody talks about it it's like it most people are aren't even aware that it's happened because if you look at what happened it was the mortality improved it got better by about 2% per year now if you compound 2% per year for 70 years it's off the charts we're like living in such a better world now than we were 70 years ago but in any given year you didn't even notice it you're never going to see a news headline like breaking news heart disease mortality improves by 1.4% that's not a headline like all the headlines are bad news because bad news happens fast so once you realize that then it's like most of the news is going to skew negative not because there's some producer who's trying to toy with your brain it's just because what is obviously happening today tends to be the bad news where the good news is just very slowly compounding over time that can go in the other direction of like bad news that compounds over
time I think about our health smoking Health like that's like in like one cigarette is not going to do anything bad for you but one cigarette per day for 30 years is catastrophic and so that's that's really what it is like same with like getting one bad night sleep not that big a deal but if you're sleeping 6 hours a night every night for years on end you're going to reduce your life expectancy by a tremendous amount this idea of compounding interest and compounding returns and how important it is I've spent so long trying to explain to people that compounding interest and compounding returns this very hard thing to think about is so important I imagine you have two what is your go-to way of explaining to like your eight-year-old kid or someone else the power of compounding we were actually going to get like a bowl of rice here and I was going to do some experiments the rice is the best the the rice board experiment if you if people aren't familiar with it it's this story that's probably not true that back 500 years ago someone uh you know told the king they said hey here's a here's a chess board I'm going to put one grain of rice on the first Square two on the second Square four on the third and then let's do that and by the end of the chessboard that's like it's like more rice than exists in the entire world because like if you double something again and again and again it's just completely counterintuitive how big it can grow the one way that I I I had a friend of mine Michael batnick explained this to me years ago I think he wrote this in a blog post he said if I ask you what is 8 plus 8 plus 8 plus 8 you can do that in your head like it's it's not it's not that hard but if I say what is 8 time 8 time 8 time 8 like forget about it even if you are really mathematically inclined there's no way you can like very few people could figure that out in their head so our minds are just not good at exponential thinking that's just not it's it's just not something that we're really geared towards doing like 8 plus 8 plus 8 it's like so simple linear thinking so simple exponential thinking not intuitive in the slightest and because it's not intuitive it's so common to underestimate what smoking is going to do to you that compounds over time what investing is capable of doing
to your wealth because it's so counterintuitive that 99% of Warren Buffett's net worth came after he was 60 years old not intuitive at all and so since exponential thinking is not intuitive both on the positive and the negative side we go through life underestimating what's going to happen to us in good things and bad things it's like a religion we have to adopt I think I think that's a great way it's it's like a mathematical religion because just like a lot of religion it's like it's not intuitive and it almost takes like a leap of faith to be like I know it's seems crazy but this is this is what I believe I think there's a sense of that to compounding where like it's just math you can just put the numbers in a spreadsheet and they'll tell you what it is but since it's not intuitive there's almost like a religious aspect that you need to believe how powerful it can be over time two of the chapters in your book same is ever speak to the importance of discomfort one of the chapters is called when the magic happens and you say in that chapter stress pain discomfort shock and disgust for all its tragic downsides it's also when the magic happens and then the other chapter where you kind of speak to this is It's supposed to be hard most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress uncertainty dealing with quirky people bureaucracy other people's conflicting incentives hassle nonsense long hours and constant doubt that's the overhead cost of getting ahead what's interesting is I never tied those two chapters together but you're right they're they're almost the exact same idea that for the the whole economy for the whole world when the biggest improvements in society takes place is when there's some sort of disaster like for all of its obvious downside and death and destruction nothing has been more technologically Progressive for the world than World War II the number of inventions that came out of World War II from atomic energy to Jets and like go on down the list penicillin all of these lists for things that you and I are taking advantage of today happened not in spite of but because of World War II because there was this period where everyone in the world came together and they're like holy [ __ ] we got a big
problem to figure out let's put our heads together and figure this out right now but that's also on a personal level on a personal level it happens as well too like there there's there's there's a book written many years ago called the upside of down that's I thought that just a brilliant title like the like the upside of being down and it happens a lot that when you have maybe it's a job layoff or a breakup or a medical emergency whatever it can be that it changes you for the good and it's hard it's always impossible to see that silver lining in the moment you don't ever imagine there's going be a silver lining in that moment but when you look back in hindsight it will be I saw this recent example of this that really knocked me on my ass it was Steven coar who I might be getting these details wrong but I think when he was uh a young child his father and brother died tragically and he said at one point that uh I don't want to put words in his mouth but he said something along the lines of like he is grateful for that and he was asked like what do you mean you're grateful for that and he said look of course I wish it never happened but it allowed him to understand the emotions of other people and get closer to other people who had also experience something like that and so even in like the deepest darkest moment of his life that he says he of course he wishes it didn't happen it taught him something about Humanity that he's Greatful for today that's an extreme example but I think for a lot of people being laid off from a job in the moment is going to be the hardest thing they've ever dealt with and in hindsight it's going to be one of the best things that ever happened to their career a breakup might be the hardest thing you've ever been through and in hindsight it might be the best thing that's ever happened to you so I that's always like that's when the magic happens is when things get really tough It's just always impossible to see that when you're going through it a lot of people would have clicked on to this conversation and if they've gotten to the end of the conversation well done to them what conclusion can we offer them based on everything we've talked about as it specifically relates to wealth creation and money first I think for both of these books we're almost ending
exactly where we started which is like I hope they get you to think about your life in different way both of these books and the Publishers hated this there's no advice in the books never do I say and therefore you should do this and the publisher wants you to do that and I said no no no because I don't know you I don't know the person reading this book who am I to say what you should do with your own life I don't even know to do with my own life but I hope it gets you thinking about what you want and who you are and what you are capable of what you're not capable of if it gets you thinking about your life then I think I've been successful doing this rather other than trying to assume that I can give you specific advice about what to do Morgan we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is what is your biggest regret in life and how has that experience changed you I think I've uh always been prone to mild depression not not significant but mild depression and anxiety and I wish I could go back to different periods of my life in a time machine and just say it's going to be okay it's not going to be easy it's not going to be perfect but it's gonna it's it's going to be fine and I I I look back not with regret but how much time have I wasted worrying about things that never happened and were almost certainly never going to happen a tremendous amount and even if I recognize that today I know I'm going to worry about something tonight and tomorrow and next week about something I really shouldn't be worrying about I don't know if I regret it because I think having a sense of worry has kept me safe A lot of times it's kept me out of trouble in in a lot of things but I do look back at the course of my life and think man like I could have been happier than I was if I had accepted a certain level of just telling myself it's going to be okay well you're not going to have to worry about your book because it's superb thank you genuinely I I you know hope my audience trust me um but I I would really implore them to get both books I mean the psychology of money I think is the best book on money ever
written it's pretty much also the only book I've ever read on money and then same as ever is just it's everything it's advice on money life relationships everything that matters because there are a set of enduring principles that speak to the fundamentals of life in a way that is completely enduring you have a wonderful ability to write enduring things and you tell wonderful stories like you say I actually didn't even notice that you didn't give me advice when you said that You' not given me advice any and I never will to anybody bullshitting but you know think about it you didn't I I garnered my advice from the stories you told and the evidence you provided Morgan thank you so much I'm so glad we' managed to have this conversation and it's been a huge honor and pleasure um to meet you thank you as well because I can't imagine how many millions of pounds you've Saved Me by writing this book genuinely it's such an honor to do this with you Stephen this been a lot of fun thank you as you'll know this podcast is sponsored by hu and we're going into that last quarter of the year it's getting a little bit colder back into our routines back into our work rhythms and it's in those moments that I need to focus most on my diet as I get back into the swing of work I need to get back into a routine as it relates to my diet and that's really where hu's RTD they're ready to drink range comes in handy in a bottle you have a nutritionally complete meal that you can consume in a minute so this is a real Lifesaver in terms of my health it is my Ally and my friend and my companion on my busiest days and it means that even when I'm pursuing all of my professional goals my health goals can be pursued at the same time there's a link in the description below if you've never tried heels rtds this is the time if you're falling off of the wagon this is the sign you needed to get back on there's a link below in the description order yourself a pack stay healthy throughout this busy period do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know you'll enjoy it [Music]
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