More Money Podcast - 418 What We Can Learn from the Best Investors in the World - Author of Richer, Wiser, Happier, William Green

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

What sets us apart from the best investors in the world, like Sir John Templeton, Jack Bogle, Ed Thorp, and Howard Marks? What hidden talents do they have that made them millionaires or billionaires? And what lessons can we take away from their journeys that can help us become better investors too? William Green, financial journalist and author of Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life, joins me on the podcast to share what he was able to glean from interviewing these major players in the financial industry. He also breaks down what we can learn from their successes and failures, including the fact that money isn't everything. Follow me: Instagram @jessicaimoorhouse Threads @jessicaimoorhouse TikTok @jessicaimoorhouse Facebook @jessicaimoorhouse YouTube @jessicamoorhouse LinkedIn - Jessica Moorhouse For full episode show notes and transcript visit jessicamoorhouse.com/418 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, and welcome back to the More Money Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Morehouse, and for this episode, I'm going to be speaking with award-winning financial journalist William Green about how we can all learn from the titans of investing on how to become richer, wiser, and happier. And that also happens to be the name of his book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, how the world's greatest investors win in the markets and life. And it comes out in paperback on January 7th and was praised as one of the best investing books ever written by Charlie Munger, who, if you don't know, was not only a successful investor, made billionaire, but was also the former vice chair of Berkshire Hathaway and second in command to

Warren Buffett. That is praise indeed. Now, in his book, William draws from interviews he's conducted with the world's best investors, such as Sir John Templeton, Jack Bogle, Ed Thorpe, and Howard Marks to find out what are their hidden talents when it comes to investing, if they have any. How do they deal with the pressure? How do they deal with failure and public humiliation if they make a bad call? And that does happen. And besides the money, what actually drives them? We have such a good conversation in this episode. Also, William has a podcast also named Richer, Wiser, Happier. So make sure to go take a listen.

I will include all the details about his book, his podcast, everything in the show notes for this episode. So check that out after this episode. And I also will be giving away a copy of his book. So make sure to listen to the end of this episode to learn how to enter to win. But without further ado, let's get to that interview. Welcome, William, to the More Money Podcast. So excited to have you on the show. Where are you coming from? You've got a lovely UK accent. I am English, but I got lost at some point and ended up in New York when I was about 21 or so and went on the only ever blind date I went out on, met my wife. And here we are 35 years later,

34 years later, something like that. That's a lovely story. Oh my gosh. I love that. I love New York too. So I get it. Once you get there, you're like, it's hard to leave. We did leave a few times. We ended up, we lived in Hong Kong for about five years and then we lived in London again for seven years and then we came back. And weirdly, we live about 10 minutes away from where we got married all those years ago. So yeah, I've done a round trip. No kidding. No kidding. And so to kind of get a sense of how you ended up where you are writing this particular book, which I really loved, tell me a little bit about your upbringing. I know you kind of put in your intro that you went to Eaton and all these fancy things. Yeah.

And part of what happened is I loved gambling. And so when I was at boarding school, I was supposed to be becoming this very posh English gentleman. And I used to sneak off to Windsor where the Queen had her castle and there was a gambling shop across the way from the castle, which in England euphemistically would be to the turf accountant and lay bets on horses and at first I did really well and I thought god this is amazing I'm going to make a fortune gambling and then on my 16th birthday my parents refused to buy me a subscription to a service called time time form I think it was it would tell me the ratings for all the horses and I was so outraged that I actually fought with my parents on my 16th birthday I remember sitting in the car just like fuming at how unreasonable they and the world were. And they're like, why does our son want that for his birthday? Yeah, it's like we did everything right.

We sent him to the fanciest school in the world and he just wants to gamble on horses. And then I started to lose money and I totally stopped. And I haven't gambled since. You know, I'll occasionally go to a casino just because there's a hotel there that I need to stay out for work. But I haven't even used a slot machine in probably 40 years. So I totally gave up gambling because I didn't like the idea of just being a mug. And then when I discovered the stock market in my mid-20s, I just thought it was the coolest

thing because the odds were so much better. And I could see that if you actually thought well, you could do really well. So it appealed to the same kind of lazy, indolent, slightly subversive part of my character that didn't want to work hard and certainly didn't want to do anything that required me to be respectful towards my elders or, you know, be in a job where people would sort of treat me badly, stuff like that. And so I think partly it started out just as a fantasy that this was the coolest thing where you just would think well and you could kind of get ahead in life. And to some degree, that actually has turned out to be true. I mean, I think when, you know, I've been a journalist and an author and the like for so many years.

And when I look at the difference between my friends who really invested and my friends who didn't because we were all writers and didn't care that much about money, the ones who really got interested are just in so much better a position. In over 30, 40 years, the friends of mine who, because I worked at a place like Forbes and Fortune and Money and Barron's, I would write for these publications. So I had friends who really understood this stuff. And so those guys would stop money away. And so now in their 50s and 60s, they're multimillionaires. And the friends and peers of ours who were, you know, writing for Vanty Fair and then New Yorker and stuff like that, and were too intellectually proud to get interested in

money because it was so tawdry. Those guys, you know, are worrying a lot more. So in a way, it's a really good test case for why actually you should care about this stuff. Yeah, as early as possible. I'm curious if you were so interested in that, did you ever consider having a career in finance? Or you're more just like, no, I just want to learn this so I can do what I love journalism, and then get rich and, you know, retire early or something. I occasionally flirted with it. And the great cosmic joke of it is that I've ended up as an advisor to various investment firms. And so I actually, weirdly, now they're all of these kind of really successful and really intelligent

investors who seek advice from me. And I feel like a total pretender and imposter at times because I never got a degree in business or accounting or finance or anything like that. But I went such a strange route that it's actually turned out to be incredibly helpful because I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours interviewing famous investors over 30 years. And so at a certain point, you start to understand things about how their minds work, how they think, what sort of tools they're using to avoid stupid mistakes, and how they read, how they study, how they continuously improve, what sort of habits they develop, how they deal with failure and setbacks and mistakes and the like. And so in a weird way, because I didn't have a conventional financial training, I sort of made up for it with other things.

And in a somewhat unexpected way, it turned out almost to be more helpful because I think these experts in the financial world can find any number of people with great accounting skills. And here I was reading philosophy and literature and history and finding these weird parallels that were very helpful. And so I think in some ways, I don't know if you've found this in your own life, that often you look back and it's the unexpected skills that you developed

and interests you had that turned out not to be a digression and a diversion after all, but actually turned out to be the most helpful thing. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, as much as I think traditional, you know, education is super important. I mean, you kind of did something that I think, well, of course, you're going to know you're going to be an expert. That's your 10,000 hours of interviewing the smartest minds in finance. It's probably, you're going to probably learn more than a textbook that. Yeah.

And I also think when I, I used to be friends with a very well-known Indian writer called Ved Mehta, who died a few years ago, who was, who was blind and he developed these extraordinary skills that I think if he had been cited, he wouldn't necessarily develop. So I remember hearing a story after he passed away, someone was doing a reminiscence of him. He was an amazing New Yorker writer for decades. And someone told a story about being in a lobby of a hotel and Ved saying, you know, James or whoever this guy was. And he recognized

his voice from something like 30 years earlier. And so I sometimes feel like the fact that I didn't have certain skills, that I couldn't just look at financial statements and break them apart and see where things were being hidden that shouldn't be hidden. It meant that I developed other skills in the same way as Ved did. And so I think if there's one thing that I got that was incredibly precious, it was I spent so much time with these great investors and I would see them in their homes and on their planes and on their boats and in their churches and with their family and at dinner and stuff. And so I would see them when they were under incredible pressure, for example. So I would know when their wife wasn't talking to them or when their kid had become bulimic or

wasn't talking to the mom or the dad. So I could see the pressure they were under. So I was able at a certain point to see, oh, well, this isn't just a matter of understanding numbers. There's also a kind of temperamental and behavioral aspect to investing that's hugely important because we're so subject to our mood swings and our emotions. And we all know that things like fear and greed play a big part. But I think there's almost an assumption that with the great investors, they're sort of immune to these emotions. And I would see people going through periods where they underperformed massively, for example, for year after year after year. And people would turn on them and they'd get reviled in public, in the media. And so just understanding the kind of pressures

on everyone to be a successful investor, all of the things, not only externally, but internally, that make it hard to be a successful investor was very helpful. And it makes you also understand, okay, well, so how am I wired to play this game? And so I can see increasingly that my own anxiety about the future, my fear about the future, my fear of uncertainty, I have to deal with that. I have to, you know, I come from a family of Jewish refugees who fled from Russia and Ukraine and Poland over the last century or so. And that's deeply in my wiring, that fear of what happens if it all falls apart.

And so that's going to really affect my attitude to risk. And so understanding that I need to invest in a way that actually accords with my own weirdness and my own idiosyncrasy and my own family history and my own temperament is really important. And I see that with the great investors as well. They have to do the same thing. I have this close friend, someone called Guy Spear, who I helped write his memoir, The Education of a Value Investor. And I spent an enormous amount of time with Guy over many years. I'm an advisor to the board of his firm. And so I've been with him during really difficult periods. I remember at the start of 2016, he had a relatively concentrated portfolio. And he had one of his biggest investments just blew up. And I saw the pain that he was going through. I was

visiting him at his home in Zurich. And I remember him saying to me at one point, I understand why ship captains sometimes say, please, you need to remove my command. You need to release me from my command. And I said to him, you hear what you're saying? And he said, yeah, I'm saying, take me out of my pain. And so just to know that, and so to be able to say to him, no, no, no, look, your returns over 20 something years have been really good. You screwed up. You made this one mistake. All is not lost. And then likewise, when I see him on top of the world because he's done really well I have to sort of say guy don't get carried away you know so understanding the role of emotion has been really critical yeah I mean it's interesting especially hearing from some of these like titans

of the investment world some you know you kind of think yeah are they more in control of their emotions do they not have the same you know, kind of behaviors that are usually in our way, just the typical investor? And also too, they're not necessarily playing with their money. They're playing with other people's money. Do they care that much? Because they're, you know, sure, they can lose their job, but they're not losing a billion dollars of their own net worth or something like that. So it's nice to hear that they are human. Also does not make me want to be in their shoes. I think one of the things that I tried to convey in the book was the idea that we all suffer.

Just because you're a multi-billionaire doesn't mean you don't suffer, right? They go through these periods where everything's going wrong and often very publicly. They'll get pilloried in public. And I find that kind of comforting because when I'm going through a really lousy period, when I'm feeling, you know, full on, I feel like the world doesn't love me as much as I clearly deserve to be loved. It's comforting to know we'll know. It's one of the great Buddhist truths, right? Like everyone suffers. We all experience pain. And so to know that one of the things that you have to learn to deal with in life is adversity, things not going your way, is really valuable. And so I found in my early days of writing about money and investing, I was much more interested in how do I get rich

without having to work too hard. And then gradually, my questions for a lot of these great investors changed because I started to think, well, how do I learn from them about dealing with adversity, about dealing with pain, dealing with failure, dealing with public humiliation, dealing with setbacks, dealing with uncertainty, dealing with stress. And so I would interview someone like Bill Miller, who was a legendary fund manager. Bill famously beat the market for 15 years running, which nobody has ever done. I mean, it's unheard of. And he's kind of a genius, brilliant guy. And I've spent the best part of 100 hours interviewing him over maybe 25 years.

And starting probably with a profile that I wrote of him for Fortune many, many years ago, back in about 2000 or 2001. And then I wrote about him in a book that I wrote called The Great Minds of Investing. And I would interview him for Time Magazine when I was working at Time. And then I wrote about him in Richer Wiser Happier, this most recent book. One of the things that happened to Bill is after he'd had that 15-year streak, everyone basically thinks he's a total genius and that he can do no wrong. And then during the global financial crisis, he makes this huge analytical mistake. And as all of these stocks like Lehman Brothers, all the financial companies are going down,

Merrill Lynch, all of these companies are under tremendous pressure. He did what he had always done, which was to be a contrarian value investor, buying the stuff that everyone hated and expecting it to rebound, and for the government to intervene and all of these companies to come back. And for the first time in his life, he was wrong. And he was incredibly candid in talking to me about it, because I remember going to visit him in Baltimore where he was working at the time. And he talked about how something like, I think, 100 people working for his investment firm, which in those days was like Mason, got laid off. And he said, yeah, because of a mistake that I made. And he had the assets under management went down from something like 77 billion to 800 million. And yeah, I mean, it was just excruciating. And I asked him how he

dealt with it. And he was such an extraordinarily candid person. And he would talk about how he had studied Stoic philosophy very seriously. He had a very unusual background he he came from a kind of a really really modest background his father was a taxi driver and um so he grew up with no money at all and he would make money you know umpiring baseball games and stuff and would use it to invest in stocks and um and so he said look i didn't mind losing my money because i i grew up without money i know what it because I grew up without money. I know what it's like to be without money. But he said losing money for my investors was really painful.

But he studied philosophy instead of being in an MBA program. He had been working towards a PhD in philosophy. And so he was drawing on stoic philosophers during the financial crisis. And he was saying, well, yeah, I know that I can't really control my reputation, what people say about me, but I can control my own honesty about the mistakes that I make. I can have integrity in terms of trying to get back the money for the people who entrusted their money with me. I can learn from my mistakes. I don't have to try to repair my reputation, but I have to be honest. And so he really made this very clear distinction between

what he could control and what he couldn't control, which was one of the most important things that the Stoic philosophers had talked about. And for me, this was very powerful because I was editing the European, Middle Eastern, and African edition of Time. And then the financial crisis came. And when Lehman Brothers went under and the world economy was kind of getting killed and magazines were getting killed, I got laid off in the middle of the financial crisis. And so when I was talking to him about how do you deal with the pain and adversity, really, I was trying to figure it out. Honestly, I wasn't preying on him, trying to expose his wounds.

I was dealing with the fact that I felt kind of ashamed and in pain and humiliated and worried about the future, you know, with two young kids in private school trying to figure out, wait, if my journalism career has fallen apart at the age of 40, what the hell do I do? And so for me, in many ways, this process of interviewing great investors became a way of figuring out how do you live? How do you deal with uncertainty? How do you figure out what you can control? How do you deal with adversity? And so just those, you know, seeing someone like Bill Miller deal with his adversity and come back from it in this just staggeringly successful way has been kind of a joy to see. And the funny thing is the things

that made him so contrarian that led to the trouble during the financial crisis were also the making of him on the rebound. So at one point he asked Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, are your financial statements right? Because if they're right, I'm the biggest individual shareholder of Amazon who's not called Bezos. And so he quietly through all those years had built just this immense stake in Amazon. Wow. I mean, enormous stake. At one point when I first wrote about him, his fund had bought 15% of the company. So he had always understood Amazon before almost anyone else. And then in the last few years, he built this enormous position in Bitcoin, which everybody in the value investing community, all these people like me thought, what the hell are you doing,

Bill? But he was always such a maverick, free thinking intellectual. And he had started buying when it was $200 a coin. And he just said, well, there's a supply demand imbalance. And what people don't understand is there's a finite supply of these things. And it doesn't really matter if it has intrinsic value. If demand goes up, it doesn't matter. And so he's made such an enormous fortune on Bitcoin as well. So when I saw him recently, he said, yeah, it's like the holy trinity of investments I have. He's got a fortune in a small business that went public. He's got a fortune in Amazon and a fortune in Bitcoin. And so precisely the thing that killed

him during the financial crisis, the boldness, the contrarian-ness has been the making of him. Yeah, you'd think that like, especially, you know, when you take a risk, I mean, he obviously had success, but then to have that big kind of public failure, you know, I think most of us would probably rethink our strategy. We're like, maybe we have to do something different because it's not working anymore. But he just kept on doubling down. He's like, no, this worked. I just have to be patient. I'm curious because you mentioned what the book is really about is talking to these really successful investors and seeing what are you doing differently than the average investor isn't.

Are there across the board patterns or is it very different depending on who you're talking to? There are so many different paths up the mountain. And so they're all different. So I think one of the most important lessons is that you have to find an investment approach that suits you, suits your personality. So someone like Bill Miller, it's a bit like trying to make sense of a Michael Jordan or a Wayne Gretzky and draw lessons from them. It's like, great, if you're Michael Jordan, then try playing like him. But there are parallels. I mean, you look at the really extraordinary outliers like Bill Miller or Charlie Munger, who I interviewed for the book, who was Warren Buffett's famous partner, or Howard Marks, who I interviewed for the book, who manages $200 billion or something.

And they're all very independent-minded, very free-spirited. So if you think about what it takes to beat the market, you have to be willing to diverge from the market. So most of these guys are deeply eccentric, very idiosyncratic, non-tribal, willing to diverge from the crowd, willing to go their own way. So they have to be brilliant. But they also, I remember once many years ago, maybe 20-something years ago, saying to Bill Miller when he'd been buying Amazon as it fell from $90 to $6 a share. And everyone thought it was going bankrupt. And here he is building a 15% position in the company. And I said to him, man, you have to have a lot of balls to do what you do.

And he said, yeah, but I have to be right as well. Yeah, that's true. That's the problem. You can't just be ballsy and free. Yeah, you can't just be like, I'm really good at risk. It's like, you've got to also be good at failure yeah and you've got to be you you've you've got to be deeply knowledgeable you've got to be really smart and so so so there's a sort of ambiguous message to the book on the one hand i'm saying to people this is what the greatest investors do and they're really important lessons to learn from them but one of the most important lessons for people like me is to say, well, I'm not them. And so if I'm not wired like

Bill, and I'm not as smart as him, and I'm more fearful, then I have to find an investment approach that suits me. And so that kind of self-awareness is really critical. So there's a legendary investor who I write about in the book. I interviewed over a three-hour breakfast of Eggs Benedict and cappuccino at this beautiful hotel in New York, this guy called Ed Thorpe, who's probably the greatest game player in the history of investing. This is the guy who figured out how to count the cards yeah and beat the casino blackjack so very very extraordinary guy and i said to i i was asking him about gambling and game playing and he said look if if i don't have an edge i don't play and i said to him well so how do i know if i have an edge when it comes to investing and he basically said well if you're having to ask me that question and you're wondering if you have an edge you don't have an edge dude i remember reading that part i'm like i don't have an edge when it comes to investing. And he basically said, well, if you're having to ask me that question and you're wondering if you have an edge, you don't have an edge, dude.

I remember reading that part. I'm like, I don't have an edge. I know. But that's an incredible realization, right? If you know that you don't have an edge, then you have to say, okay, so how can I play this game intelligently so that I can win? And so one of the things that Ed Thorpe said is, look, there's a default position in investing where you buy index funds at an incredibly low cost. And over time, the chances are, you know, it's not a certainty, but the chances are that over time, the market goes up as companies become more productive and maybe the population grows or maybe, you know, all these productivity gains from AI or whatever, gradually you ride up the market and you'll probably do well over time. And if you live within your means

and you keep tucking money away, you keep adding to the pot, you keep your expenses down, you're sensible about taxes and things like that. So you use sensible tax advantage vehicles like here in the US, where I am, you know, IRAs and 401ks and 539s. We got RSPs, TFSAs, all the same thing. Exactly. Exactly. So if you're smart about those things, you control what you can control,

you're likely over time to do really well. It's not a total certainty. The world is still very uncertain, but you're likely to do well. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just like something I'm glad you're saying this because I talk about this on the show all the time, have for like the past decade. Index funds, I think they're a great investment for most people, especially even like that's what I do. Honestly, I'm like, I've interviewed how many people? 400 plus people. I know me and I think it's really important that, yeah, we talk about just being self-aware

and realize I love talking to people like this. I am not one of these people. I think that's very powerful to have that awareness. This has had a huge impact on me to say whatever I'm considering in life, whether it's an investment strategy or a job or a project to say, is this a game that I'm equipped to win? So for me, for example, like you, I set up a podcast, right? So after the book came out, Richer, Wiser, Happier, I set up a Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast.

That kind of plays to my strengths. It's like I've spent the last 30 years interviewing famous investors and famous authors and the like. That's a game I can kind of win. Picking individual stocks when I don't really want to sit around analyzing balance sheets, I can count to about nine if I'm lucky. And I'm just not that interested. It doesn't really play to my strengths. That self-awareness is really critical. And then I maybe do have some edge possibly, or maybe I'm deluding myself, in picking fund managers who have a particular style of investing. So I'm deeply immersed in a particular type of value investing where I've just interviewed so many people over so long who understand the value of basically waiting patiently for some sort of

disruption in the market and then saying, all right, well, I'm going to grab that with gumption, as Charlie Munger would say, and I'll buy a mispriced bet. And then I'll go back to doing nothing until there's another mispriced bet. And that's sort of my community, right? I've spent a lot of time interviewing those people. So it's possible that I have an edge in picking some of those guys. So over the years, I've invested probably in three hedge funds run by people like that. So they're very concentrated portfolios. They don't own very many stocks. They're extremely patient. And they wait for mispriced bets. And they're very independent-minded. of they tend to be people who meditate and are very calm and really aware of their own emotions and then they see when

everyone else is losing it and panicking and they have the financial skills to go in and look and say well actually that's incredibly cheap i have one friend for example who uh during um i guess this was during the early days of covid who said well wait all of the airlines uh shut down are grounded nobody's ordering uh new planes so he looks he looks at the the companies that provided airline parts like parts parts for aircraft, that were totally dominant, and that if the world didn't come to an end, at some point, they were going to have this huge monopoly, and they were the companies that had long-term service contracts with airlines. And so he bought them incredibly cheap, and he put the, I wasn't invested in his fund at that time, sadly, but he put like a quarter of his fund in two of these companies.

And then a couple of years later, when Meta, Facebook, everyone detested and everyone thought it was in deep trouble, he again bought an enormous position in that. And I don't think he's really done anything since then. So I like that kind of investing. I think if you have the temperament for it, that's an amazing way to win the game. And so I do write about those people and about the principles that they help you understand. And those principles are valuable, even for those of us who don't want to do this ourselves. I mean, when you actually look at what all of these guys do, they're all basically doing what Joe Greenblatt, one of the legendary hedge fund

managers who I wrote about, explained to me where he said, basically, you can distill the entire essence of investing to this. He's like, you value an asset, and then you buy it for much less than it's worth. That's it. I think the execution of this is really complicated. Yeah, that's the hard part. Yeah, but the the hard part. Charlie said to Howard, anyone who thinks this is easy is stupid. And Charlie's point was, why should it be easy to make vast amounts of money? I mean, it's not easy. It's a tough game.

But Charlie did these extraordinary things. He talked about, he read Barron's. I went to interview him in Los Angeles. And at the end of this event before which I interviewed him, he then answered more questions to this crowd of groupers who came every year to hear him talk. And he was talking about reading Barron's for 50 years. And he said, in 50 years, I made one investment based on all of those years of reading Barron's every single week. And he said, it was this really cheap stock,

but he said, I spent about 90 minutes studying, and I made $80 million. And then I took that $80 million, and I gave it to this other guy, Li Lu, who's this brilliant investor who managed a portion of Charlie's fortune, and he turned it into $300 or $400 million. And he's like, what's the moral? What can I can i tell you are you gonna impersonate me emulate me reading parents for 50

years and making one investment he's like that's a pretty strange personality but at least it gives you a sense that you know you don't want to be playing the game that everyone else is playing where they're jumping in and out of the market, trying to time the markets, thinking they can predict the future, jumping into the most expensive stocks that are the hottest assets. Here's Charlie doing exactly the opposite. He's looking at some dowdy, I think it was like literally it was a car parts manufacturer. I mean, it couldn't have been a more boring stock. Very patiently waiting for a mispriced bet that was so cheap that he couldn't lose. And so I think for most of us, you know, I mean, one of the morals of that is just, in the moments where the market is getting hit, at the very least, don't panic out of it.

I mean, if you can, buy more. Very difficult to do though, as we've seen time and time again. Very difficult, but at least be paralyzed and don't sell. And so I think, I mean, I've never seen any great investor who was super emotional and jumped in and out. So, I mean, even as you're studying these guys and saying, well, I can't do that, at least don't be stupid. Exactly. You can still learn a little bit of, like, I mean, a lot of the stories you share in your book, it really, it's not about the money or the numbers. Like, I feel like a lot of the investors that you interviewed probably didn't get into it for the money, maybe initially, but they didn't stay for the money.

It was really about the love of it, the passionate of it, sometimes maybe just the thrill of getting it right, even if it means waiting five, 10 years to get that one thing and it paying off. It's more than money. They love the game. I mean, I do think in the early days, many of them, probably in the same way that I loved the idea as a teenage gambler of making money just by using my brain. I know that someone like Bill Miller, when he made money off a stock in his teens, he was just like, this is the greatest thing. They did fall in love with that. But at a certain point, they'd made enough that it was kind of irrelevant. Yeah, it's not about, yeah, you have so much money, you'll never be able to spend it in your lifetime. So it's no longer really about the money because you don't need more. I mean, I read a lot about this in the epilogue of the book because I say, okay, so given that I've spent all this time

studying these people who in many ways won the financial jackpot, I mean, I think Bill Miller at one point had the biggest yacht in the country. And I don't think he's flown commercial in more than 20 years. And he doesn't pump gas or anything like that. And so I asked this question, okay, so what does the money actually give them? I think there are very important lessons there that apply to us, even though we're not likely to be multi-billionaires, they do apply to us. And so I think one of the things you see is that the money gives them this ability to be independent, to live a life that's true to who they are. And so I see this with Bill Miller, where at a certain point, I remember someone saying to him, can you come give a keynote speech at this annual gala?

And he's like, what's the dress code? And they said, black tie, I have to wear a tuxedo. And he's like, nah, I threw away my tuxedo and I'm never buying another one. And so I see one of the joys of looking at Bill over so many years, because I've seen his trajectory up close over 25 years. One of the joys of it is to see him becoming more and more true to himself. And so he's not having to live in a way that anybody else wishes. And so that's the gift of the money. There's a guy called Manish Pabrai who I write about at the start of the book

who has had a big impact on me because I saw the way he structured his life. And he was a great student of Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger became kind of a mentor and close friend and kind of father figure to Manish. And one of the things that Manish would do is he just he he just struck to this life that was so ridiculously aligned with his idiosyncratic personality so he he he just said yeah i don't like doing marketing meetings i'm not prepared

to meet prospective investors in my hedge fund so he's like i i just don't like all the mumbo jumbo of marketing. So he's like, I'm just not going to do it. And so you would look at his calendar and on a typical day, he would literally have zero meetings. And he would just, he would get up, he'd go to his office. He would read obsessively. He's a very brilliant guy. And he would just read, just think his, his assistant would print out emails for him, which is what Charlie Munger's assistant did for him. And he would scroll a reply on top of the email usually, and she would then send it back to the person. And so he had just structured his life.

So he sort of was doing what he was built to do, which was sitting quietly in a room waiting for a mispriced bet. And then he would go play racquetball a little bit. He'd go bike a bit. He'd have a guiltless nap every afternoon. Whereas I would have, you know, like a five minute nap and I'd feel kind of guilty. Like I didn't want anyone to see how lazy I'd been. And so one of the great lessons from Monash is that I just thought, okay, well, I'm never going to be as rich as Monash, but let me structure my life in a way that's true to who I am. And so one of the great revelations was just,

I'm never going to work for someone who I dislike ever, ever. And so I haven't become a vastly rich trillionaire, but I've made enough money thanks to investing that I don't have to work for people who I would use swear words to describe that I'm probably not allowed to use on your podcast. And so that's been an incredible gift. And so I think if there's a takeaway for our audience, it's really to think about what will the money actually give you in terms of structuring your life so that you do the stuff you love and that you're good at and that you value and you get rid of the nonsense that you

really dislike and that's very idiosyncratic i mean the you know i i'm happy to sit around reading like really weird esoteric stuff about Tibetan Buddhism and Kabbalah and history and literature. I mean, I can't tell you how little I read about investing. You know, I don't sit around reading investing books. I'm packing to go on a trip tomorrow for a few days for work. And it's like, I have a book by P. K. Wyer, this friend of mine who's a great travel writer. I have Proust, which I've been trying to get through for much of the last 40 years. Yeah, it's like my third time trying to read this 4,000 page novel. I don't have an investing book with me. And so I don't know, like knowing that I want to structure my life that way is really, really important. I mean, there's a reason I wanted you on my podcast and most of the authors who've written

adjacent investment books, I invite them on my show. They're not about, it's never really about the money because I feel like I invited a lot of those guests on earlier seasons. And every time after I'd finished the episode, I'm like, they kind of just said the same thing. So I want to kind of dive into the behavior, the episode, I'm like, they kind of just said the same thing. So I want to kind of dive into the behavior, the psychology, because those are actually the philosophy, the

things like that, because those are actually the things that will give you that edge that will change things. It's not about like you said, investing is very simple. It's not rocket, it's really not as complicated. I mean, it can be if if you want but it doesn't have to be for you to be extraordinary yeah anything like to be truly extraordinary is probably pretty difficult yeah but to be really good and to get almost all of the benefits of investing sensibly you really don't have to be that smart you don't have to be a genius to build wealth achieve your version of financial freedom which for me totally is taking naps love Love a nap. Guilt-free naps, they're the best. And not working for people that, yeah. I mean, on so many levels, I'm like, I completely agree.

I love the fact that I'm allowed to say, nope, don't want to work with them and don't have to. I had something recently where a famous investor insisted on using um i have to be careful what i say i said yeah i i was scheduled for to interview him on my podcast and he was like yeah but i'll only use teams i'm like but i use oh god and he was like and his handlers were like no but he'll only use teams and i'm like all right, then don't come on my podcast. And I'm like, just to get to a stage in life where you're like, I'm not dealing with crap behavior. Who records a podcast on Teams? What is this?

I don't know. I don't even know how. I actually recently had that with also a person or a guest on the show and they were more familiar with teams and they're like, Oh, could we do it that way? I'm like, no,

I'm not changing how I literally have recorded this podcast for the past four years. Cause you don't know how to, it's a, but you just have to click on the link. Riverside is so easy. Yeah. I,

so I don't know. So I, I think knowing yourself well enough to know what really matters is really important. But I think one of the problems that I know you come across a lot in teaching people about investing as well is the smart long-term behavior that's good for us financially doesn't actually come naturally. It goes against all of our instincts to want action, to want to prove ourselves, to want to get rich quickly. And I think one of the things that's happened to me is I've experienced through my own stupidity and failure all of the things that

actually are pitfalls. And so I experienced what it was like to be in a hurry to get rich. And so I invested, I think, about three or maybe four times in private companies where I just felt like, oh, I'm the smart money and they're letting me into this thing. And I think the best of those investments, I only lost about 85%. And I mean, in none of the cases were they things that like destroyed me thank god that's good you didn't invest your life but they were painful enough that I looked at when I'm like no I I have to be aware of the fact that one of my weaknesses as a human and as an investor is that I'm susceptible to feeling like oh oh, I'm so important because all of these important people will let me in and they'll let me do what they do. And it's like, that's such a,

the markets are so brutal that if you have these character flaws or weaknesses, the market will expose them. Absolutely. And so I just figured, no, I'm going to be more patient. I'm not going to just invest in things because I feel good. But then I still fall for it. I mean, I- Because you're human. I do the same thing. Like I have some stocks that I know I shouldn't have invested in and I still have them because

of some cost fallacy. I'm like, well, what if they go up? So we're just going to keep them. They're literally like 2% of my overall portfolio. Don't mean anything to me, but I can't let them go because I don't want to lose yet. Yeah, I talked to Annie Duke about this on the podcast, precisely this. And she talked to me about having kill criteria where you get to a certain point. You're like, well, this is what would cause me to sell it.

And I talked to her about the fact that I had bought Alibaba because literally I'd been on a Zoom call with Charlie Munger and Lou Simpson, two of the greatest investors of all time. And they had both been piling into Alibaba. Charlie Munger said to me, yeah, if I had more cash at the moment, I'd be all in. And Lou Simpson, who had had this amazing record running Geico and was for a long time was going to be Buffett's successor if Buffett keeled over. He had bought it the day before. And I'm like, wait, these guys who love my book are telling me that they've been buying Alibaba. And so I felt, so it was like, it was this perfect sort of lollipalooza of stupid characteristics of mine, right? So my laziness and not wanting to do my own due diligence,

the fact that I was flattered because two of these great investors were telling me they loved my book. The fact that I felt like an insider because they were telling me, wait, this is, this is why Alibaba is so cheap. And it's down something like 56% since I bought it. And I can't bring myself to sell it. Because yeah, it would be like the admission of failure. But also, partly, it doesn't matter anymore, because it was never that bigger position. And it's become a really minor position because it's dwindled. And also, Munger would

often talk about the value of rubbing your nose in your own mistakes. And so I think it's helpful for me to have it in the portfolio as a sort of reminder of my own hubris and stupidity. It keeps you humble. Maybe that's why I'm keeping those stocks. Whenever I look at them, when I look at my other portfolio that's doing so well, I'm like, oh, but remember those mistakes?

Remember? You're not perfect. You're like, you know what? Yeah, these are important to keep me grounded. Yeah, I only own two individual stocks. And so it's Alibaba and it's Berkshire Hathaway. And I bought Berkshire, I've owned Berkshire for a long time, but I bought Berkshire multiple times during COVID when the market was getting killed. Everyone was, everyone was doing. But I never talk about that. The self-congratulation of like, oh, look how smart it was. I was buying it, you know, when everything was closed down at the start of COVID.

And it's gone up, you know, 150, 175%. It's like, no, no. Like probably this is the first time I've mentioned that in public. Whereas I probably talked about my failure with Alibaba like 75 times. Interesting. Because it's really, it's not helpful for me to talk about how smart I am. It's much more helpful for me to talk about my own idiocy. Because I wrote about this in the book a bit.

Howard Marks talked to me about how lucky he feels he is in life. And I talked about how it protects him from what I would call master of the universe syndrome, where you start to think, oh, I really know. I really know what I'm doing. And I think you so often see in investing these really smart people screwing up and you wonder like, why? What on earth were they thinking? I remember a friend of my mother's was a very brilliant scientist who I think was widely tipped to win a Nobel Prize at some point. And he lost such a fortune during the dot-com bubble in the late

nineties that he had to move to this tiny house in the woods, you know, like sell their home and stuff like that. I mean, this guy, he probably had 80 more IQ points than I did, but like he thought he knew what he was doing because he understood technology.

And it was a very, it was a very intoxicating period, the late 90 Buffett always talks about how it's much cheaper if you learn from other people's mistakes. But it's hard to do, right? I mean, to actually internalize viscerally what it feels like when you've done something like buy Alibaba and write it down or buy into a private company and write it to zero. It may be that we actually have to learn our lessons by going through some sort of failure ourselves. I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, I haven't met an investor, I mean, over these almost past 10 years of having this podcast who hasn't made an investment. Like people that are richer, smarter than me that haven't made some sort of mistake. So there's no such thing as a perfect investor. I haven't met one. And it's true. It's like sometimes those mistakes are meant to happen. So you really learn that lesson and don't do it again.

And sometimes it's harder to learn from someone else's lesson because it's not as sticky. Yeah. I remember Sir John Templeton, this famous investor who was probably the greatest global investor of the 20th century once said to me, I went to interview him in the Bahamas many, many years ago. And he said, yeah, I tracked all of my investment decisions for the first decades of my career.

And so about 500,000 investment decisions. And he said about a third of them was, he put it, the opposite of wisdom, which was a nice euphemism. But yeah, I screwed up massively. And so someone like Sir John Templeton, who was utterly brilliant and became a multi-billionaire and had been a Rhodes Scholar and was probably the first great international stock picker at a time when, you know, most Americans certainly didn't have a passport and he was traveling around the world, you know, buying up cheap stocks in Japan and places like that. If he could screw up a third of the time, that's very humbling. And so I interviewed a guy called Jeffrey Gundlach for the book, who's often called the King of Bonds, who at the time was managing something like 140, $150 billion. And he also said to me, he was wrong about a third of the time and he said the question

that he asked himself before he makes an investment is what's the consequence if i'm wrong and so that's been hugely powerful for me because even with something like alibaba, where I screwed up, it doesn't have an odor of an impact on my lifestyle or on my kids' ability to go to college or anything like that. And so just the knowledge that if you're going to be wrong a third of the time, if you're a brilliant investor, you have to ask yourself, what's the consequence if I'm wrong? If you fell in love with cryptocurrencies, which is just not my thing. Cryptocurrencies. Me neither. Can't stomach it. Not for me. Yeah. It's not the game I want to play. And people often attack me for having, or not attack me, but they look at me with sort of raised eyebrows. Like why, you know, Bill Miller was telling me to buy Bitcoin when it was at 8 000 that i didn't and then at 12 000

and at 30 that you know so i've been wrong about this many many times but it's not really it doesn't really suit my skills or my talents again with the whole point of our one of the the major messages of our conversation is being true to you so why would you invest in something you know it's probably gonna not work out well if you're gonna do do something you're like, I know I shouldn't do it. Exactly. But let's say you disagree with me and it really does play to your strengths. You're like, no, I understand crypto and I understand why I'm going to do it. You still shouldn't put like 80% of your net worth in it. And some people will be like, yeah, I've got 150% of my net worth in it. I mean, if you're Bill Miller and you say, well, yeah, I have the holy trinity of investments,

and it's Bitcoin, Amazon, and this other company, Clear, that went public that he's owned for a long time, it's very different because I've seen his art collection. I've seen his book collection he he has individual books that are worth more than you know my entire net worth um i mean he's he you know he's i've been in his mansion it's pretty beautiful he's okay he's gonna be just fine if he makes a financial mistake you know he can sell some of those paintings you know yeah yeah i remember remember once I was in his house and I said, I think it was, I was talking about going once many, many years ago to interview a famous investor called Faya Sarafim, who's known as the Sphinx.

He was an Egyptian billionaire who very rarely gave an interview. And I went to interview him in his office in Houston, Texas. And he had an El Greco on the wall, which was very, very rare. And I think it was a Kandinsky, if I remember correctly. And he had a fifth century Syrian mosaic floor that he'd imported from a church in Syria. And so I was recalling this to Bill Miller when I was in his house in Maryland, I guess it was. And I said, yeah, I remember Faisal Seraphim had this really amazing kandinsky and he's like oh yeah i got a kandinsky there and he just points off

about the seconds and so you know when you're yeah when when you're in a position where you know you can just throw a few pennies uh famous uh artists you know you don't have to worry about it so even when mangaunger was saying, I would be all in an Alibaba, it's the guy who's already a multi-billionaire, right? Yeah. You know, it doesn't, it didn't matter that Alibaba. We're not playing the same game.

And that's the thing. It's like, it's fascinating to know what these ultra wealthy, ultra successful investors do, but also we are not billionaires. We're not playing with the same rules or board game or chips or what have you. So we need to keep that in mind, but it's still interesting to know what are they doing? What can we take away a little bit? Some things that may be helpful. Yeah. And the focus on survival is really important. So even for someone like Bill Miller taking these enormous risks, there's still, he avoided catastrophe, right?

I mean, it was relatively catastrophic for him, but he bounced back. He always invested on margin. He always personally. Wow. I mean, he's a risk taker. That is fair. I could never.

And so he got divorced during the financial crisis. And so he lost half his money there. And he was on margin. So he was down at one point something like 80% his net worth. I mean, it was pretty brutal. But he said to me when he looked back on that experience, he said, well, look, I'm really happy that I didn't have enough margin that it ruined me and and the rest of us should have no margin i mean if if you bill maybe okay uh i mean he's incorrigible but um he said and i'm also really glad that i didn't curl up like a tortoise in its shell and get so scared after losing that money that I didn't buy stocks.

And he was courageous enough that he saw things like Amazon getting pummeled and bought more. And so he survived. So even in the perfect storm where he got everything wrong and he lost a fortune and he was on margin, he still survived and came back. And so there's a really important lesson to that, which is that we need to structure our financial lives so that whatever happens, we're going to survive. And so the ability to stay in the game over many years, keep living within your means and keep adding to the pot, just avoiding catastrophe, I think, is huge. And so I've increasingly focused more on survival and less on the idea of beating the market. I mean, if you're a professional investor, you kind of have to beat the market to justify your existence over the long term. And that's incredibly hard to do.

I mean, there are professional investors who can say, no, I'm going to get you across the ocean in a safer way, in a risk-adjusted way, that's going to be beneficial. I think there's real value to that. But for most of us, I'm just not trying to optimize anymore for beating the market. I mean, that's one reason why I'm happy to own Butch Hathaway. I know that he's sitting on 300 and something billion dollars in cash. And I know that if the world is in big trouble, they're going to survive. And so I'm not necessarily thinking, oh, I'm going to beat the market by a mile with Berkshire, which now is over a trillion dollars in market value. I mean, I don't know how big it can grow. And Buffett is 94. This isn't by any means a stock recommendation. It's just, it's my sense of, well, I want to survive. And also, I feel like you're not paying any expenses.

He's not charging you a fee. And so again, it's like this principle of how do I bring down my fees, my expenses as an investor so that they're not quietly eating away at my portfolio over time. And so I have a couple of index funds that I own and I have Berkshire and then I have those actively managed funds that I own. So in a way, it's a recognition of certain principles like you want to keep your expenses down. You want to ride the market overall you want to be diversified uh if you're if you're going to try to beat the market be aware that you're probably deluding yourself and so don't have too much of your money in that stuff and so yeah and i'm i'm sort of i'm investing i'm investing in a way that suits my personality where it's not – I think it would be kind of boring for me only to index.

And I like – it's also idiosyncratic. I really like the relationships with these great investors and sort of have them in my life and have a bit of money in their funds. Yeah, it provides you value in maybe a different way. I think so. Yeah, I think that makes sense. There is psychic benefit benefit i wanted to ask you a question though yeah because i was looking at your book that's coming out soon that's coming out very soon probably before this podcast is out it's on well i don't know when's it when's your that sounds terrible when's your book coming

out we're always going to ask you this at the end of the episode my paperback is coming out january 7th but yours is coming out late December. Mine's coming out just a little bit before that, December 31st, New Year's Eve. So just a week before yours. First of all, congratulations. But second, I saw in the summary of the book, when I was looking it up on Amazon, you were talking, or on your website, I can't remember which, you were talking about how to heal these emotional traumas related to money

and how to deal with that. And I, that really got me thinking, cause I, I was talking to my wife just this morning about the fact that we have so much, um, fear that I think we internalized over the years from seeing things like the financial crisis happen when, you know, when I lost my job and simultaneously, one of the funds that I invested in was down 46% that year. And thankfully, I had no debt. And so I didn't sell anything and actually added to my stock portfolio. But I still think I'm very much affected by that trauma all these years later. And I still feel like one of the things that keeps happening to me in my own financial life is I

keep taking more and more work on. And one of the reasons is that I think there's a part of me that's like, yeah, but what if everything goes to hell? Because I've seen it go to hell before. And so I was thinking when I read your book, I'm like, so how do you deal with that? What do you actually do when something like that is sort of deep in your muscle memory, deep in your memory? How do you deal with it? I'd say the first thing, and it sounds like you're already kind of doing the work yourself is recognizing those things exist. Cause most of us have no idea. There's these traumas, whether they're personal, like they're a personal trauma has nothing to do with money, but it affects your money or it's a financial trauma.

So it's financial related. And then there's, of course, you mentioned, you know, because your family background, there's generational trauma. So I've got a lot of that too, with my background of family and just hundreds of years of poverty, those things are so ingrained with you. But most of us don't realize that we have that and how powerful it is and how it's actually affecting our decision making. So a lot of us are, you know, making decisions based off fear, shame, a lot of kind

of negative emotions. So the first step is to recognize what's going on and then to try to figure out how can I better emotionally regulate when those things, when I get triggered, when there's something that reminds me, but everything can go to crap because, oh, you know, I remember feeling like that when in 2020, the markets were going down. I'm like, gosh, this just reminds me so much of the great recession. And that was when I graduated university and I thought everything was going to go great. And then it was just really difficult for a long time trying to find work and stuff. And for me, because I have the luxury of having this podcast, talking to people like you, reading a ton of books from these amazing investors, I knew how to self-regulate.

I still wasn't perfect at it, but that's one thing. And then also a big chunk of the book is having some systems in place to keep you in check. And then also everyone should see a therapist. Therapy's great. I did a lot of therapy for the book and it was very helpful. Should I be offended when my children say, dad, you really should go talk to a therapist? No, I think everyone should. If you go to a dentist and a doctor, you should go to a therapist. Because again, it's not, you not admitting, I'm a terrible person. It's just, I think there's something going on and I don't know how to deal with it myself. I think it's amazing how much these things come back to self-awareness.

And I did a podcast recently where I was looking back at some of the biggest lessons from the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast interviews. And so I was talking about this with ray dalio on the podcast and he was he was he was talking about self-awareness like like just being honest about your flaws and failings and weaknesses so that then you can compensate for them and find workarounds and so i think with investing as with so much of life it comes back to self-awareness because otherwise otherwise you you can't find workarounds so but i but i still find it difficult because i'm struck i mean i've spent so much time thinking about this i'm pretty self-aware i think um but although that's probably

a sign for diluting myself no it's it's what i've discovered is it's to overcome these hidden barriers and there's a lot of them that may exist within you it's a practice there's no cure so that's the thing it's striking that it's i was going to say is it's it's in your body whether you like it or not so i had something kind of stressful happen this morning and i and i could feel I had a couple of important calls and I could feel this degree of anxiety in my body that turned out to be totally and utterly uncalled for. Like neither call was a big, you know, both were positive, but I just, you know, there's like this part of you that's spinning off thinking, well, what if this falls apart? What if that doesn't work out? And so I think one of the things that's, I mean, this relates to investing definitely

is once you start to be more aware of what's actually going on in your body, not only your mind, but in your body, you at least know that you shouldn't make decisions in that state. That is the worst thing you could do is you want to, you know, there's a whole thing in the book that talks about polyvagal theory where, you know, you can find out what state you're in in terms of your emotional regulation. And if you feel like, yeah, you're just, you're really anxious or, or you're, you know, it's a fight or flight or something like that. You should not be making any decisions, especially with your money. Cause I guarantee you when you do,

just like all those people who freaked out during 2020, sold their whole portfolios. I talked to a lot of those people, unfortunately. I'm like, why did you do that? Well, it's because it came from a place of emotion. And the best thing you could do when it comes to money is do everything but emotion. Don't be emotional. It's hard to do because we're humans. But again, so that recognition of what's going on in your body and your mind, and then waiting until you calm down. So things are more logical. Just like, you know, if you have a bad day, you're like, oh, everything's going to crap. Go to sleep. The next day you're like, I don't even know what I was really mad about or, you know, anxious about. It's a different day. You're in a better headspace. You can make better decisions

that day. There's a, there's a, no, I think you're absolutely right. There's a, there's a part of my book in the chapter that I write about Charlie Munger, which is, which is called, don't be a fool. It's about how not to be stupid as an investor, but also in life. And there's a guy I interviewed there who, who's a, a, a good friend of mine, a guy called Ken Schubenstein, who was very successful investor who then quit in his late 40s and became a neurologist. He's an expert on the brain, but he's also an expert on investing. I had sat in on his class. He taught the advanced investment research class at Columbia Business School. He's very smart about the way that your brain screws you up as an investor.

One of the things that he said to me that I write about in the book is he said, after studying a lot of addiction literature as a doctor, he said, one of the things he'd learned from addiction literature is this mnemonic that he had, which was HALT-PS, which stands for hungry, angry, lonely, tired, in pain, stressed. And he said, I know that in those states, I'm going to make suboptimal decisions. And so this had really helped him as an investor. But then, as I write about in the book, in the early days of COVID, he had just had a newborn child, like a child who was a few days old. It was his first child. And he went to be a doctor in a room full of patients on ventilators dying of COVID.

I mean, this is when it really felt like a war. And he was in New York. And he said to me that he used that checklist every day. He said, I needed to remind myself that because my protective equipment was hurting and he had a back injury from when he'd been a wrestler at college, I think he'd broken his back. And so he said he was in physical pain and then he was sad and upset because he wasn't with his newborn child and his wife. And he was angry about the fact that they didn't have enough protective equipment because the policy making was so terrible. And so he said, I just knew that I had to get really be doubly

careful in the way I treated my patients, in the way I spoke to their families, to be more compassionate, not to make decisions really hastily. And he was very serious about meditation, but he didn't actually have time to meditate in the midst of that maelstrom. So he said, I would go into the bathroom in the emergency room and would just have mindful moments for 10, 15 seconds where I would just breathe and try to get back to normal. And I thought it was just really interesting that you could see the great investors just being incredibly pragmatic about things like dealing with stress that they were they were saying well okay so given that i know this is how i'm wired given that i know that i'm dealing with stress and adversity what kind of workarounds can i have and so just understanding you know having these

practical tools i called ps or um meditation or just one of the things that he taught me that had a huge impact on me was he said when he was really overwhelmed and his life was just too stressful, he would just go back to his calendar and he would just clear his calendar as much as possible. And he said he would just get back to four basic habits. He said, we, we know from brain research that there are four habits that, um, help with brain health and brain function. And he said, so we know sleep matters. We know good nutrition matters. We know meditation matters. And we know exercise matters. And so during times like the financial crisis, he would very consciously say, all right, I'm going to

stop getting Oreos and mashing them up in vanilla ice cream, which was his drug of choice. And I'm going to go back to eating salmon and salad and going to exercise. And so there are these very practical ways in which I think you can study great investors because they're such high performers. And you can then say, all right, so how am I going to navigate adversity and stress and mistakes and things myself? And so I think that's a lot of why these guys interest me so much is that it ceased to be about how to get super rich and it became much more about how to live. How to live. Yeah, I completely agree. And that's why I think

the title of your book is really interesting, Richer, Wiser, Happier, because most people, I think, are interested in the rich part, but it's like, but actually we want richer, wiser, happier. Because most people I think are interested in the rich part, but it's like, but actually we want to become wiser and happier. And what you'll find out later, like those are actually the most valuable things, more than money. Money can go away or it can come back. Yeah. And the real question is what actually constitutes a really rich life? Even if you look at what constitutes a really rich life, you start to think, okay, so equanimity has to be a part of that. Friendship, relationships, they have to be a part of that. And so I would see this with the

great investors that I could see. I asked Charlie Munger at one point, I said, what can we learn from you and Warren about how to have a happy life? And he immediately starts talking about relationships. And so you look at, I mean, he said, look, I've been a good partner to Warren. He's been a marvelous partner to me. And so there's something even in the phrasing of that, that he was kind of humble about his own role. He was flattering about his friend. They were kind and honest and decent to each other.

They never fought, even if they disagreed with each other. And so oddly, after all of these years of studying great investors, one of the things that really profoundly had an impact on me is, well, okay, so I need to invest more time in my relationship. So tomorrow I'm going to Colorado to give a speech, but then I'm flying from Colorado to London to go to my brother's 30th wedding anniversary. And then I'll come back a couple of days later. And so that sort of thing, that's a very, it's a very tangible outcome from just realizing, oh, when you look back at the end of your life, you know that it's going to have been a richer life if your relationships were good. And so how do you have good relationships? You

got to invest in them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know we could probably go on for another hour because you are a great conversationalist, obviously, hence why you have your own podcast. And it's also called Richer, Wiser, Happier, and people can listen now. But your book, like you mentioned, is coming out paperback January 7th. Are you online? I am. Yeah, you don't want to be. I am. I have a website called williamgreenwrites.com. Wonderful. That will at some point in the next few weeks be updated for the first time in about four years. And you can find me on what was previously known as Twitter, x at williamgreen72.

And you can befriend me on LinkedIn and places like that. And I'm moderately active on social media, but part of having a successful and happy life is not being obsessed with it. Absolutely. No, I mean, that's where I'd love to be one day. Just, yeah, that's the dream. But you have the podcast. The podcast is an amazing platform

for you to actually connect with a big audience and to talk to people. Oh, it's the best. It's a beautiful thing. Yeah, and connecting to people like audience. It's the best beautiful thing. Yeah. And connecting to people like you. That's it's wonderful. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. It was literally such a pleasure having you. It's great being here. And I was listening earlier today to one of your previous episodes. And I'm like, Oh, this is a really good podcast. She's really good at what she does.

The only thing that upset me, Jessica, was when I heard you talking to one of your guests who had written a book in like five months and you'd written a book in 10. Oh yeah. Was that my friend Cara? Yeah. You know what? I don't know how she did it. My book took me five years. Well, it's a different type of book. So I know. So, so other than, other than the fact that you made me feel incredibly inadequate for 12 times longer than you to write a book i i've really enjoyed listening to your podcast so far and i'm a new fan oh thank you thanks william and that was my episode with

william green you can check out his website williamgreenwrites.com and also make sure to grab a copy of his book that is now in paperback, January 7th, Richer, Wiser, Happier, How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. And yeah, I hope you really enjoyed this episode because honestly, I'm going to say I don't pick favorites when it comes to guests at all, but he was a delight to have on my show. I will just say we had a great time. So I mentioned I am going to be giving away a copy of his book. So let me share how that works. If you go to jessicamorehouse.com slash contest, you will not really find it on my website. You

have to go to that link. So you have to be listening to know how to enter to win. There will be all of the books that have been featured on this season of the show available for you to enter to win. So you can enter to win all of them. I don't care. And then sometime, maybe like mid to late January, I will, you know, cut it off and choose a winner. So you really don't have too much time to enter to win. So make sure to go to jessicamorehouse.com slash contest. And there you go. And if you want to learn more about William or any guest that I've ever had on the show, you can just go to jessicamorehouse.com slash podcast or jessicamorehouse.com slash the number of that particular episode. I include all this info in like the description of each episode, no matter where you're listening. So it should be easy for you to find, you know, whatever episode.

But I also am happy if you send me a DM or an email. I get them all the time asking, hey, who is this person about this thing? Someone recently just DM'd me being like, there was a person, I can't even remember what the episode was about. And I'm like, well, I don't exactly know who you're talking about, but here are three possible episodes that it may be about. So I don't mind. Shoot me an email., but here are three possible episodes that it may be about. So I don't mind. Shoot me an email, Jessica at JessicaMorehouse.com or find me on Instagram at Jessica I Morehouse.

There you go. So we, you know, are getting close to the end of this season. And since I have my little spreadsheet here, here we go. So we've got, oh gosh, one. And that's possibly two. And then there's a little bonus episode. So we're getting close to the end of the year and getting close to the end of this season of the podcast. And then next season in January will be season 20. And that will be kind of leading us to our 10-year anniversary of the podcast, which is super exciting.

But even more exciting is in a few weeks' time, my own book will finally be hitting bookshelves. It's called Everything But Money, The Hidden Barriers Between You and Financial Freedom. And if you're listening to this now, please pre-order it so you get it right away when it's out. I actually don't know when you get it. I'm not the postal service, but you will get it as soon as possible. But also you get access to a bunch of extras, worksheets, video, a bunch of great important stuff that I'm giving access to anyone who pre-orders the book. So if

you want these, they're like connected to the book. They're like exercises and things like that. It'll make sense when you read the book and get access to these freebies. So just go to jessicamorehouse.com slash book to learn more about the book, how to pre-order, how to submit your information and proof of purchase to get access to these exclusive extras. And yeah, we're getting there. We're getting close to it. I'm very excited. So yeah, very exciting times. Okay, so that's it for me. Thank you so much for listening. Keep safe, keep warm and have a good rest of your week. The More Money Podcast

would not be possible without the amazing talents of video editor Justice Carrar and podcast producer Matt Rideout, who you can find at MRAVCanada.com. M-R-A-V Canada dot com. This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at women in media dot network.