My First Million - 99 Years of Charlie Munger Wisdom in 44 Minutes

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Episode 525: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) pay tribute to Charlie Munger by telling stories about how his wisdom changed their lives and businesses.  No more small boy spreadsheets, build your business on the free HubSpot CRM: https://mfmpod.link/hrd — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:00) To get what you want, deserve what you want (6:30) I'm not entitled to an opinion unless... (8:00) Churchillian self-confidence (12:30) Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance (18:00) Optimize for the truth (23:00) Invert, always invert (35:30) Learn all the big ideas in your space — Links: • MFM meetups - https://getriver.io/mfm • Cloud Poker tournament - cloudpokernight.com/mfm • Free 2024 Goal-Setting Session - https://planfor2024.com/ — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Today, there's going to be literally a thousand threads that are Charlie Munger was, lived till 99. Here's 99 lessons I learned and they're going to regurgitate the stupid quotes of Wikipedia. But this is my first minute. We do things differently around here. We're not just going to give you the regurgitated quotes. I got to give you that, you know, little special ju, that old ju that you can dip that sandwich in. I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. Charlie Munger has died at age 99, and all around the world, people are remembering Charlie, this guy who was Warren Buffett's business partner. Bill Gates called Charlie, you know, maybe the broadest thinker he knows. He said that he has the best 32nd brain of anybody he's ever met. And we wanted to dissect that brain. What's inside that?

What made Charlie so prolific? Why did Warren Buffett say that Berkshire is shaped in the mold of Charlie Munger, that he is one of the smartest and wisest men he's ever met? and we pulled out seven of the big ideas. Charlie said a lot of things over the years, but we identified what we think are the seven big, big bits of wisdom that Charlie has shared. And what we wanted to do was instead of just making a listicle,

which you're going to see a lot today, you're going to see people on Twitter, every thread boy is going to be like, Charlie Mugger died at 99. Here's the 99 bits of wisdom. And they're going to copy paste Wikipedia. We didn't want to do that. What we wanted to do was take the seven that we thought were really,

really impactful and specifically tell a story of how we learned that lesson in our own business life or in our life. It made for, I think, a pretty amazing episode. I told Sam, I said, dude, this notes document that we have for this episode, the thing is, you got a handkerchief? This thing is dripping with wisdom. And that's how you're going to feel at the end of this podcast. You're going to need to take a shirt.

You're going to need to wipe the old podcast player because this episode is about to be dripping with wisdom. I hope you enjoy this episode on the seven bits of wisdom from Charlie Munger. All right. So let's jump into the wisdom. So what I think would be fun is we just sort of trade our favorites because this guy's got little quips or quotes about the way the world works, about the way minds work, about the way the markets work. All right. You go first.

Okay. I'll start with a very easy one. So one of his big ideas is to get what you want, you need to deserve what you want. And so he says, you know, the easiest way to get everything that you want is to deserve it. And it's so simple that it's almost like obnoxiously simple this advice. If you want the partner you want, you should be deserving of that level of partner, right? Make yourself worthy of a partner like that. Same thing with investments.

He kind of calls out a few things that money can't buy. So he's like, trust in other people, success and admiration. Those are things you cannot buy. You can only earn. And so if you want somebody's admiration, deserve it. If you want somebody's trust, deserve it. If you want success, deserve it. And I'll share like a very simple, more practical.

anecdote about this. Because again, his big ideas are amazing, but they just sort of float in the clouds unless you bring it to Earth with a real tactical example. So when we sold the Milk Road, I've said this before, but one of the reasons we sold to the guys we did was I really,

really respected these guys. It was not the highest offer, but these were the highest quality people that we could sell to. And we just had a hunch that like selling to the highest quality people will result in the best long-term outcome. For every dollar we're taking less today, we might create three more dollars in the future. just by being around high quality people.

And I'll tell you a story that came out of the due diligence that was like a nugget of gold that stuck with me that was exactly this. So one of the guys that sold his businesses for about 90 to 100 million and the other guy had sold his business for over 200 million. And both of them had built businesses that were SEO based. And I know a lot of things about marketing and growth, but I know zero about SEO. I am an absolute beginner, novice. I never touch SEO.

I don't do businesses that are SEO based. I literally know nothing. And so one of the ways I priced in the deal was, oh, I'm going to learn SEO from these guys who are, frankly, masters at SEO. And so we get to the point where we do the deal. We're not negotiating anymore. And I'm like, oh, good. I'm going to start digging. I'm going to start picking these guys' brains for SEO shit.

So I sat them down. I was like, you're going to teach me about SEO now. And they started to tell me something. But I was like, okay, okay, that's the general stuff. I've heard that stuff before. Like, what's the like real like master shit? What's the real like black belt shit that I don't know about that you can't just Google and read and some blog that helped you guys create,

one guy created the number one search result for if you say, I want to buy gold online. And that's the business that was sold for a few hundred million dollars that he bootstrapped that never raised any money. And he did it because he knew how to be the top result for buy gold online. It's like, how'd you do it, bro? What'd you do?

Was it some hack, some technique? And he's like, you know, we did all the normal things. And he's like, and I tried some of these hacks or techniques. It didn't really work. And he's like, so then he's like, you know, what happened was one day I googled how to buy gold online. And we were the fifth result at the time. He's like, so then I printed out all five of the results, us being number five. And I printed one through four also.

And I sat down for an hour and I just looked at them and I read them. And he's like, I had an honest conversation with myself of why would I click on my page? What is better about my page than these other pages? And I was like, wait, so you didn't like do some like black. hat SEO shit that was like this like advanced trick. And he was like, no, he's like, we didn't deserve the click. We weren't better pages. He's like, so all I did for the next year was every week, I printed out all the pages.

And then I made my page like 10% better. I figured out one way that we could be better as objectively better, even if we weren't moving up in the ranks yet that I could look at it and say, this is a better page. We deserve to be higher ranked. And I literally never heard this. And I was like, on one hand, in the moment, honestly, I was kind of disappointed. I was like, dude, I came to you for that secret juju about SEO. Like, I'm not trying to have this like, you got to work hard and just actually make a better

page. But it was also kind of like refreshing. It's like, you go to the people who are masters of SEO and they're like, yeah, you can do all the tricks. But at the end of the day, you have to have the best result. Like, you have to have the best page and you have to have an honest conversation with is your page better than these other pages. He's like, if you really want to sustainably like climb the ranks and be the number one,

that's it. And that was such a tangible business example of like to get what you want. You have to deserve what you want. And I'll never forget that. That was like one of the biggest takeaways I had of the whole process. That's beautiful. I like that one. He also had another line munger did where he's like,

I never tried to disagree with someone's opinion unless I understand their side better than they do. And that's like a specific example of like, let's say, debate of how he was like, I need to deserve this. Right. So that's number two. I love that one. He says, I'm not entitled to an opinion. Like, I can't have conviction until I can argue the other side better than someone who believes

the other side. And he's like, he's like, people think, he's like, people think this is some like crazy high bar. And those people haven't ever asked somebody who believe something, why they believe it. Like, it's actually quite a low bar to surpass their own like, can, their own understanding of something. And, you know, I think about this with like Bitcoin, for example, I'm a Bitcoin believer. and my approach to this was always to say,

here's all the reasons why I believe in Bitcoin. It just makes sense for reason A, B, C, and D. But actually, the better way to do is to say, smart people who don't believe in Bitcoin would say A, B, and C. And I understand that. And here's what I think about those and why I've landed on the side of conviction that I have. It's just a much better logical way to think than to just say, here's what I believe and I'm going to come up with all the evidence.

I'm even going to make up some of it to justify my opinion, which is I would say how what would be called it? Steel Manning? Yeah, so Steel Manning is like, argue the other side better than they would even argue it. There's this cool story from, I think it's called Making of an American Capitalist.

And so they talk about how, here I'll read just this part from the book. They go, physically, Munger was unimpressive. He had an elf-like face, pasty skin, and glasses an inch thick. Though something of a snob and highly judgmental, he had a deep sense of ethics. and his smarts were matched by Churchillian self-assurance.

Once he was asked if he could play the piano, and Munger replied, I don't know, I've never tried. And I thought like, what a telling line. Like, what a telling line. So most people, you say, no, I can't play the piano. This was, I probably could. There's definitely a potential that I will be a great piano player.

I just haven't tried. And when I read that line, I just thought this man's beautiful. This man's one of a kind. And I love people like that because myself, you, most everyone, we default to, can you do this? It's like, of course not. I don't have the capabilities. I cannot do that.

Where that little mind shift of like, well, not yet. Dude, you're noticing that drops to you. I read that line in the research. I didn't even understand what was remarkable with the line. I just moved on. I didn't even notice it until you just said it like you did. So good on you for even observing it. That's a good one.

Well, that's what I'm saying. When I'm reading about these guys, it's like these little one-off lines or these like, like for example, they'll say he founded this law firm and then next. He was bored there. Next. Like, whatever. And I'm like, well, hold on. Let me go look at this law firm.

And then you start reading about this law firm and like, dude, this is quirky. This is a weird, super strange law firm. And so anyway, yeah, this line, it's a beautiful line about just showing like the day to day about how you can be different. All right. If you're loving this episode, I'm glad. I also want to tell you three things that we are doing as a podcast. Quick little news flash news announcement about MFM.

I have three things to tell you. Here they are. Number one, there's like this meetup thing going on. So there's a woman. She runs a company that basically helps like contact writers like a spin up meetup. So basically what's happening is in like a week or two around the world, there's MFM meetups, which is kind of fun. We're not going to be there because it's like, you know,

they're all happening on the same day in different locations. But forget us. If you're one of these people that listen to the podcast, you're probably going to get along with other people who listen to the podcast. People who listen to this podcast, your business nerds with a sense of humor. And if you like business nerds with a sense of humor, they're all getting together. Everybody's going to like a bar. There's one in Toronto. There's one in California. There's one in Austin. They're going to hang out. It's called the river. So if you go to getriver.io. So get G-E-T and then river, like a stream, river. dot I. You scroll all the way to the bottom and you'll see my first million meetup. They're happening in Austin, in Houston, Denver. Right. So yeah, they did this for All In, I think, and that's kind of one of the proof of concepts. I think this is going to be fun. So do it. We'll try to like, I don't know, call into a couple of these and say hi, but this is cool. So that's happening next week. That's fun. Go meet some other people who are part of Neckbeard Nation. Number two, we're doing the poker tournament. So a while back, we talked about this business that we found fascinating, which was a cloud poker tournament. It's like his digital poker tournament where everybody's webcams on, it could be private for our community. and 300 or 400 people signed up.

We just never scheduled it, but now we scheduled it. It's December 13th. It's happening. We will give away merch and some cool stuff as prizes. We'll come up with some dope prizes, $1,000 bucks or a call or free merch or whatever. So yeah, it's at cloudpokernight.com. So cloudpokernight.com slash MFM.

So if you want to register for that, if you already registered, we'll send out an email to be able to letting them know that that's happening. And last thing is I do a thing every year, which is I this month this month of December is the plan for you know other people are thinking about Christmas I'm thinking about end of your next year hitting my goals and so I basically use this time for planning for 2024 so I'm going to host a free session which basically is I'm currently doing it for all my businesses I make like a one page plan for what I'm trying to do next year and

it's basically like the big goal and then the breakdown of like how I'm going to do it I have a method of how I get to that answer and you walk away with kind of like a clear one pager for your business. Ben had the idea. He was like, dude, I love when we do this. He's like, we should just like do this together with other people that own businesses that want to do it. And so totally free. You'll walk away in an hour with like a bunch of clarity on what's what your next year looks like. I have a bunch of good questions that help people get clarity. So if you want to attend that, plan for 2024.com. So go to plan for 24.com. Ben's going to spin up a website and we'll invite people to that. If you're the type of person that wants to kind of like set the vision

and the intention for next year. Let me give you number four. So my number four Charlieism I want to bring up is, let me tell you a little story about where I felt this first, and then I'm going to tell you the Charlieism. So let's rewind the clock 15 years. I was living in Indonesia. And in Indonesia, I lived in this building that had a ping pong table. And so I used to go down and just hang out by the ping pong table because I thought, well, that's maybe like, you know, my equivalent of like going to having a drink at the bar. Let's just go see if anybody's down here to to play and maybe I can meet some people. And so sure enough,

I would go down, me and my brother-in-law, we would go down and we would play. And my brother-in-law is better than me at ping-pong. And the way he plays is what you imagine somebody who's good at ping-pong. He's not just going to hit it fast. He's going to jump, even though you don't need to jump. He's going to be like, woo, but he's going to just make you feel like he just smashed this shot. And like I was so, like, I was trying to get better than him. He was trying to get better than me.

And I thought, okay, he's brilliant at this. Like he could just hit these amazing shots and I got to be able to hit amazing shots. So I'm practicing hitting amazing shots. And he and so whoever used to come down, he would beat them. He was the best guy in the building until one day this 55, 60 year old man came down named Poppy. And we're like, you're like, you're like, I'm Poppy. He's like, I'm Poppy. All right.

Okay. I don't know if he's a bit flexing on us. If this is a real name. And he takes a paddle out of his, of his like case. And we're like, oh, dude, he's got his own paddle. Oh, shit. It's like the guy who brings us on bowling ball to the bowling alley. You know this guy means business.

So we're already on like a game, basically. And so I play him and Poppy beats me. But he didn't do anything like he wasn't smashing the ball. He wasn't doing it. And I just thought, oh, man, I was off today. All right. Like, Aaron, you play him. And so I have my brother-in-law, Aaron play him.

I'm like, all right, Aaron's never lost to anybody in this building. Let's see what happens. And he starts playing Poppy. And he's trying to do what he always does. He's trying to hit brilliant shots on the corner. down the line, cross court, you know, drop shot. And none of it's working. Poppy is destroying him.

And the way that Poppy plays is like, this is for anybody who's like a real ping pong fan. I need like something to demonstrate. So use his pen. Pretend this is the paddle. Normally when you play ping pong, your arm is back. You're doing like a full stroke like a tennis thing. Poppy used to just, he used to just hold it like this forward, like the paddle just facing you.

And then he would just move left and right like a wall. And he would just, whatever you have. hit, he would just hit back. And the thing about Poppy is, Poppy was never hitting brilliant shots, but he would also never hit it out and never hit the net. And so inevitably, he would just keep hitting it back and one of your brilliant

shots would go out of bounds. You'd hit it too hard, too soft, you'd hit the net. Like, you would mess up, and he would always score based on your error. And he crushed us. And he crushed us that day, and he crushed us every day. And he would just chuckle and say, good game. And he would go upstairs, and we'd be like, fucking

Poppy, man, I'm going to get this guy. And we never got him. The whole summer I was there, we never one time beat this guy. And then one day he invited us up to his house afterward, his apartment in the building. He lived in the penthouse. Beautiful. He was so successful in business. We're like, poppy, dude, you're balling out of control.

He had like a secret poker room. He had a wall of just like super fancy like liquor. Like people have a wine cellar. He had like a fancy liquor wall. It was crazy. He had a shower with like six showerheads. And we were like, dude, this guy, Poppy. And we're like, what do you do?

And he's like, I sell soap. And we're like, you make soap? He's like, no, no, I just import and export. And we're like, is it better soap? He's like, no, it's just soap. He's like, it's good soap. It's not the best. And we were like, well, how do you sell it?

He's like, well, I just go to people that need soap. And we're like, this fucking poppy. Like, this is how he lives his life too. He's just making no brilliant shots, but no unforced errors. And so this is a Charlie Mungerism, which is avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance. And he says, other people, spend their whole life trying to be so smart. All I'm trying to do is not be idiotic. It's harder than people think, but this is more important than trying to be brilliant. And so Charlie was basically like,

how do I just avoid the great errors in life? Let's say it's investing. How do I avoid the great errors of investing? If it's health, how do I avoid the great errors of health? And that's basically what he oriented around. He wasn't perfect at it. But I thought, what a totally different, you know, a different strategy than you'll ever hear, which is about being the best and becoming more advanced and being brilliant and talented. And his thing was just, just avoid stupidity and you'll outperform everybody. Is there a category in the Oscars for, like,

podcasters who can weave in a story to Charlie Munger? If, if yes, I think you might get that nod. That was a wonderful, we got to give it up. That was a wonderful. You had been thralled, and I didn't know where you were going to go with this. I didn't know where I was going to go with it either. Sometimes you just open your mouth and start talking and see where it goes. And you won that, Mr. Wonder.

You totally won that one. That was a beautiful way to tie that in. Copywriting. That's what that was. Honestly, the reason why today there's going to be literally a thousand threads that are, Charlie Munger was lived till 99. Here's 99 lessons I learned and they're going to regurgitate the stupid quotes of Wikipedia. But this is my first minute.

We do things differently around here. We're not just going to give you the regurgitated quotes. I got to give you that little special ju, that old ju that you can dip that sandwich in. You came with heat. That's going to be hard to compete with. Let me ask you something. So right now, it's November 29th. So most people are doing their next year financial planning for their businesses.

For years at the hustle, I made a very similar mistake that I bet you made. And that is over optimism. have you ever hit any of your projections in the first six years of your career? I've never met a goal I've ever set. If you ask people at the hustle, one of my big weaknesses is it's looking at the numbers of the Excel sheet. And you know, you see like a seven million here. And you're like, what if we took that seven and deleted it and put a nine? I'm like, look how much more profit thing?

gave us. Let's just do that. I'm a genius. People would be driven crazy because that's what I would do. I was just look at the sheets. I'm like, yeah, that looks good. Hey, look, if you just delete that number and put it to that number, look how much better this looks. So let's just do that. And I've made that mistake so many times. I bought a property recently or a few years back. And I remember thinking, like, okay, this is only an okay price property. But yeah, you know, I'm going to like take better pictures or I'm going to like, do it. something when I sell it and I'm going to make, that's how I'm going to make all this money is I'm just going to increase revenue. And I'm going to do this, this, this. And guess what? Just like

years of failing at projecting, I totally effed it up. So now I try to be way more modest with my financial projections, but I completely have always messed it up. And Munger's got a bunch of good quotes. He's like, it's dangerous to rely too much on models and formula. The reality is way more complex than that. We're very disciplined in our approach and we're not swayed by flimsy optimism. And then he goes on to say he's like, it's pretty ridiculous that people are biased by both over skepticism and over optimism in the business world. If the micro reality is good, good decisions, good systems are what I look for. Not predictions of macro environment changes. And so basically the point being is his whole philosophy was to buy businesses where if I bought a good business at a good

price, I'm golden. And then, if I ever want to sell it, or if something crazy improves, that's icing on the cake. Whereas what I do, and I bet most people do, and I try my hardest to avoid this nowadays, is I say, I default to, no, the optimism is actually the truth. The truth is just, that's just what they did, because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. You know what I mean? And that's been one of my biggest mistakes in business, is over optimism. And what it does is it crushes team morale and it gets you, in a losing state of mind, and it just sucks. What Munger said was, he goes,

you make a lot of money when you buy a good company at a good price, but you make all of the money by letting it ride for 20 years. So the patience is where the big money is, and I struggle like crazy to do that. I have, this year, I'm trying things a little bit differently, but I have never hit any of my projections because it's just too optimistic. And that is, it's basically just mental masturbation,

is what it is by making these projections. And it's harmful. It's a liability. Well, there's like the thing you want to hit, you know, some people say you want to hit 70% of the goals that you set. And that's like the right balance between ambition and, you know, practicality. Hitting 0% of your goals is obviously means you're setting the wrong goals. And hitting 100% of your goals means you're, you know, obviously being, playing it too

safe and conservatively. And so there is some number of between. You can pick 70, 50, 60, whatever works for you. and yeah, I think most entrepreneurs and investors, for that matter, err on the side of optimism, because, boy, doesn't it feel better in the moment to... Do you want to know something I'm trying to do? No goals.

I'm trying to do no goals. And it's not working out with any of the partners who I'm involved with, who are trying to buy in this. And you know what it's not doing? Working out. Yeah. I'm trying no goals, and I'm getting no buy-in. So...

I hate, I've grown to hate goals, man. Like, it shouldn't change. Like, do you know what I mean? It's like, it's like, this is like your thing with money. Do you have like a weird relationship with money that you need like money therapy? You have probably like a weird relationship with goals that like you just need to work out. Like, you know, these extremes, crazy goals that nobody can hit or no goals. I would just assume that the answer is actually somewhere in the middle, right?

The mongerism is probably somewhere somewhere in the middle. Not either extreme. let's go to one of his other ones I think is kind of related, which is one of Munger's big ideas, the one that he is well known for that I have taken into my life is this idea of inversion. So he says invert, always invert.

And so, what does this mean? It's basically a way to think through problems backwards. So if you, let's say you wanted to solve a common thing that people ask, which is, you know, how do I be successful or how do I be happy in life?

and there might be like a thousand different answers to that question. But what Munger would do is, in order to get to the answer faster, he would invert, right? Why does Bill Gates say he goes from A to Z faster than anyone? He has the best 30 second brain of anyone. It's because Munger's default way of problem solving is to invert. And so he'll say, instead of figuring out how to be happy,

let me just figure out what is the surefire path to misery. He literally wrote it out. Like, I can read you the answer. What he said is the sure path to misery? What did he say? Okay, so his, he actually did a talk and he calls this his prescription for misery. So he says, what a beautiful line, by the way. Is that beautiful language or what?

It is. It's wonderful. And he says, number one, ingesting chemicals to alter your mood or perception. So if you rely on chemicals to change your mood, eventually this leads to misery. This is like, you know, alcoholism or like sort of like overstimulation and whatnot. Number two is envy. He has his great quote, which is the world is not, people think the world. is driven by greed is actually driven by envy. He goes, I'm lucky that, you know, I'm an old man now and I've

conquered my envy. I don't give a damn one anybody else has. I don't want one anybody else has, and I don't care what they have. But most people are not like that. For most people, it drives them up the walls. If they see that the neighbor has a nicer car or that their friend has a higher paying job or that their co-worker gets promoted, they didn't even want it in the first place. But as soon as somebody else has it, envy kicks in and it drives them, it drives, you know, so much of their behavior. And so number two of the prescription for misery is envy. Third related is resentment. If your joy goes down when other people's joy goes up, that is a surefire way to have a miserable life. So those are three that he stole from somebody else. And he says, I'd like to add my four on top of that. He says,

number four, be unreliable. If you are unreliable, you will be distrusted by all of those who matter and that you might be a mighty fine turtle, but you will be outrun by hordes of mediocre turtles if you are unreliable. And even some turtles that are on crutches. So it's like this idea that if you are unreliable, it sort of cancels out any talent that you have. That one hit home for me because as you know, I am a bit of an unreliable person and I've paid the price for that many, many times. Yeah. Hey, by the way, should we bring up that MFM podcast meeting that you missed yesterday? Yeah, just was on a different call and forgot about it. And so these things happened. It is a penalty I paid. It is part of my prescription for misery.

Here's the next one. So he says number five is learn only from your own experience and your own, you know, trials. Basically, if you decide that your firsthand experience is your only way to figure out good versus bad and you're not going to learn from other living and dead people, that is a surefire way to misery because you will learn much slower than somebody who learns the other way. Next one, he goes, when hit with adversity, go down and stay down. That's another prescription for misery is to not bounce back from adversity, the inevitable and unavoidable blows of life. And the last one, he goes, don't be objective. Stay stuck in your ways. Hold on to your initial ideas. Your most loved ideas. Hold them with a death grip. And that is his final

prescription for misery is to never change your mind in light of new facts. Of those that you mentioned, my biggest weaknesses are envy. So this pod is fun for you and I to do. Sometimes it creates a lot of envy because we have all these amazing people on here. Or if it's just you and I, like Sean just did great. Sam didn't do as good. Or if we have all these amazing people on and you start talking to them and you're like, huh, I'm just as smart as this guy. But this guy is, how do you know?

Because when you ask, how old are you? That's the trigger of like, I'm feeling terrible. Can you really just do the finishing blow and tell me that you're two years younger than me? Yeah. And every once in a while, there are people who I'm like, yeah, you're just better. Envious habits. Zillowing people's houses after you see them. That's not really, nothing good happens on the end of a zillow. So I have, I've got, I read a lot and I like reading biographies. And whenever I read a biography, I do sort of what I did up here where I write down like, let's say it's a business biography. I'll write down the years and I'll make notes of interesting things that happened to. to that person in that year. And then if it involves a dollar amount, I'll write the dollar amount.

And then one sell over, I'll say, what's that dollar amount in today's numbers? And then I'll say, how old were they? And so I'm like reverse engineering different people's lives. But you know what I'm really doing? I'm comparing myself to them. Yeah, of course. I'm comparing myself to them. And I justify it by saying, if I read someone and I am better off than they,

than they are, I say, great, I'm doing better than them. And they ended up wonderfully. I'm going to end up wonderfully. Or if they're kicking my ass at my age, I just think, Mother fuck. This sucks. I got to give you credit for your honesty and vulnerability, because you're being honest and vulnerable admitting this.

But I do not advise anybody follow this game plan. This is a recipe from misery. I am not saying that this is helpful. I'm just admitting. And the last thing that I sort of suck at is being bendable. What was the last one? How did you describe it? He's like, you know, don't be objective.

Don't change your mind. You know, stay stuck in your way. Stay stuck in. Hold on to those initial ideas you had before these new facts and circumstances came out. I try to think of myself as bendable, but I could work on that for sure. The ones that I struggle with out of this are the unreliable one for sure. And then maybe envy a second one. I think that's probably like number two. I think I'm pretty good on all these other ones. I want to give you some more stories. I wouldn't have thought, by the way, of you as an envious person. I think that's a hard one to kick. You know, I don't think I'm like, let's say,

terrible at it, but it's definitely there. It's not something that I could be like, yeah, I have conquered that mountain. No, no, no, I'm still somewhere on that mountain. Hey, do you know what the, what I think it's the sixth, tenth commandment is? Thou shall not covent thy neighbor's wife. Right, right.

Don't be jealous. Don't be jealous, my friend. So, even if I said this joke, it's going to get me in trouble with at least five people at minimum in my life, so I'm just going to not make this joke. All right. So I want to give you some examples of the invert. principle because I think this is one of the most important ones. So when he was a military meteorologist,

it's World War II. His job is to keep pilots safe. And he's like, okay, what's everything I do know about pilot safety? And he's like, you know, there's like seven textbooks about everything a pilot needs to know. And then instead he's like, no, no, okay, let's work backwards. What are the most likely causes of crashes or incidents for pilots? And he went and studied that way simpler answer. He's like, okay, I just need to be able to predict snow, ice, and fog really well as a military meteorologist. those three, if I can avoid the, if I can get my pilots out of the way of those three, I can ignore everything else because those three are the real killers. And let me like, so he inverted it in order to like do his job.

Let me tell you another example of this. When I was in college, I got picked as part of some like thing called chiros that was like, I love chiros. Top college startups in the country. Honestly, it was like worse than Forbes 30 under 30 in terms of like credibility. Literally, if you signed up, you won. And even better, if you signed up you won and then you made friends with the person, they would take you on this all expenses paid trip to China for a week to go meet Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba. Or the founder of Alibaba.

And so we go, I get picked on this trip. I go fly to China. I don't even know what Alibaba is. We go to their headquarters. I'm like, holy shit, this is like eBay for China or something. This is crazy. And we get a sit down meeting with the CEO. This guy's like one of the most powerful people in China.

And somebody at, you know, we got to ask questions. questions. One of the kids asked, you know, this sort of simpleton question, like, you know, what's your advice? You know, I want to be successful. What's your advice? Like, what are the keys to success from your experience? And, um, and he says, you know, I was obsessed with this question also. What are the keys to success? What is the blueprint for success? And I talked to a hundred successful people and I got a hundred different blueprints. And I thought, well, that doesn't really help. And he goes, this was actually a guy named David Way, I think is his name. He was this current CEO at the time. He was a current CEO at the time. He was a

the one answering this part. And he goes, every success is different. It's its own little unique snowflake, but every failure is the same. And we were like, you know, we lean in. And he had his answer. And his answer, I don't think is actually the right answer for this, but like he goes, it like tied into the Alibaba story. And he goes, every, every big company that eventually fails. So his answer was like not how to be successful, but how do you not screw it up once you're a big company, which was the problem they were having? He goes, too much money, too much technology. and too many people. And so he tells a story about like how they were going to compete with,

um, with Google and with eBay when they were coming to China. And he's like, we needed to invent our version of Google AdWords. And he goes, Jack Ma said, cool, you get,

um, I think it was like 12, 15 people. He's like 12, 15 people. This is like going to be a huge part of the business. Google has 2,000 people working on this. He goes,

did I stutter? You get 12 to 15 people. Uh, you're going to work. He's like, we need some office space, uh, you know,

give us like a couple floors of the office or whatever. He's like, you're going to work out of my old apartment. He's like, your old apartment, we need a proper office. He goes, I started Alibaba in that apartment. I think it'll work. And he goes, technology is like, we're going to need this many servers. We should get the best stuff. And we need this much, but let's have double that for redundancy in case, you know,

the servers go down. We don't want to lose anything. He goes, if I give you redundant servers, you're going to design a system that goes down. I'm going to give you only the servers you need. And in fact, you go get used servers so it can run on even shitty servers. and you know, he'd sort of David Goggins them. That was like hit the story that he told about like, and they eventually did it.

They pulled it off. But I wonder if that guy found that inspiring at first or like, what's the fuck, Jack? Yeah, it was definitely like a fuck you, man. Come on. But, you know, when it all works out, then you can tell this great story. Bezos has a simple inversion too. They were like, you know, Jeff, tech, you're, you know,

one of the like internet CEOs. Internet's evolving so fast. Technology's always changing. What technology innovations are you most excited for? What's going to change about Amazon in 10 years? And he goes, oh, I don't think about that. Instead, I think about what's not going to change. He goes, customers are always going to want the most selection, the lowest prices,

and the fastest delivery. And so everything else can change, but that's not going to change. And so we focus on what's not going to change because we have to change with the times in order to constantly beat customers' expectations on delivery speeds, low prices, and vast selection. And so, you know, this idea of inversion is so powerful. Even in my own life, I was telling you, like, I'm having a bunch of progress right now with my diet, which is great because, like, you know, the scoreboard is currently, you know, 34 years of no progress and, you know, like a month of great progress right now. Well, what changed?

Well, I did a bunch of things, but I also actually just inverted. So instead of trying to figure out what's the best diet program, what's the best workout program, exactly how many grams of this, how many milligrams of creatine, how many grams of protein, how much of this, instead of trying to like go, is it the paleo-dial devs? Hito diet, Mediterranean diet, what should I be doing? It was just the inversion. Like, what's a surefire way to be fat? And that answer was quite simple. I was like, I need to eat way more calories than I'm going to burn. Eating shitty foods that are fried and ultra-processed.

You know, right now I eat late at night. Pretty sure that's a recipe to get fat. Sitting all day instead of walking for my meetings, probably a pretty good way to get fat is to sit all day. And I just inverted. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm just going to walk more. I'm going to eat less calories that I consume and I'm going to

not late night snack because I always eat crappy food when I do that. It's literally all I changed. And like, boom, like started to get results finally after like, instead of like being like, let me go download 19 hours of Andrew Huberman and try to like follow this protocol.

It's like that wasn't the problem. Right. Like that was the complex solution rather than the easy inversion. That's great. Where do we want to go from here? Let's do a couple more. Do you have any other ones that you like here?

I have a story he told that I thought was pretty cool. Let's wrap up with that story. All right. So he's teaching a class at some college. He goes to like an economics class. So he has this general idea of you need to learn all the big ideas in a space. So he's like, I don't know anything about psychology, but I figure there's probably 20 big ideas in the world of psychology.

And I should just like read the books and try to figure out, what are the 20 big ideas in your space? And he's like, if I know those 20 big ideas, I'm going to be better than like, I'll know more than 98% of people who spend their whole life, you know, 90% of people, including some people who spend their whole life doing this because they're so lost in the weeds. And so one of the big ideas he had was like, so he goes into economics, same thing. What are the big ideas in economics? Everybody knows like economics 101 is the supply demand curve. And, you know, basically the idea is that, you know, as the, you know, supply of something goes down, the demand, you'll go up or the price will go up.

Similarly, if you drop the price of something, the demand should go up. So, like, people know this generally about economics. But Charlie has a thing. He's like, you learn the big idea, but then you also, how do you make this useful is you need to understand the exceptions to those rules. So what is the I before E except after C? So he's like, how do you understand that, okay, generally, when prices go down, demand should go up for that.

You know, the demand for TVs is, let's say, you know, X at $5,000. But if you drop the price of a TV down to $5,000, a lot of people, that will buy it. And so he's like, but what are the exception? So he goes into this economics class. And he goes, everybody understands, you know, when prices go down, demand goes, everybody says, up. He says, okay, fantastic. What are the cases where that's not true? An item that is supposed to signal prestige. Exactly. So hands go up, 50 hands go up, and they say luxury goods. Any item where price is a signal for quality or status. And he's like, you know, this is luxury handbags and whatnot. You know, if a Louis Vuitton bag was $2 tomorrow, the demand would actually briefly go up, but then in the long term go down.

And he's like, so everybody gets that one. And he goes, what else? And now you get crickets, right? Like, what else? And he goes, any industry where demand is based on bribing the purchaser. He goes, yeah, there's like many industries, the defense industry, many parts of the medical industry. where actually it's a screwed up kind of perverse incentives where companies take profits and they use those to, you know, shower, you know, goods or money or experiences on

buying agents, purchasers. And whether that's through advertisement. So like I spend a ton of money advertising and that's how I create the demand. And if I didn't have any advertising budget, I wouldn't be able to create the demand. Or it's things like the military industrial complex where there's like some cronyism where it's like, yeah, you give me this contract today because in five years, you're going to be on my board and your retirement package will be 10 times what you're making in the government. And because we all know that that's true, because I have so much excess profit, you want to reward me with big contracts. And actually, you want to pay more for these contracts so that we can be this really successful company because it rewards you in the end.

And he's like, once you realize that that's an exception to this rule, you will understand how the world actually works. You will understand where the laws of gravity actually break. And I just love that story. I think it told like it's an interesting little nugget business wise, but also the way that capitalism works, but it's also shows kind of the way this guy thinks, which is this I before you accept after C mentality, where he goes into any space.

He tries to speed run and figure out, you know, what are the 10 to 20 big ideas of your space? And then he looks at the exceptions. And, you know, I did this recently. I went to Brian Johnson's house. And afterwards,

I was like thinking about longevity. And I was like, all right, should I be one of these tech? guys that like really fucking cares about longevity like is longevity going to be my shit or am i going to zag and be like longevity's overrated and i was like i need to have an opinion and i decided what munger say hey munger lived to be 99 he didn't look like a longevity freak well somebody said this well the val said this he goes buffett and munger these guys are like in their 90s and

uh you know they famously like you know eat mcdonald's breakfast every day and you know eat m&ms and drink Diet Coke, maybe for show, but they at least do it. They're not sitting there taking metformin and like cold plunging every morning. And he's like, you know, it just goes to show how important, like not being stressed is actually to your health. Yeah. Because these guys actually were quite low stress in the way that they lived their life. You know, they spent most of their days reading, playing bridge, talking, thinking, very few meetings. They didn't sort of like, stress out about investments. They were buying a whole long-term investor type of thing. Like, low stress compared to a lot of successful people.

But on the longevity thing, I was like, all right, let me go learn. What are the 10 big ideas in the longevity space? And I literally carved out two days. And me and Ben, all we did was just deep dive into longevity. Like I read, I read like power skimmed through some books. I read, I was like, who are the five like thought leaders? And then what are their most popular TED Talks? And like, let me go watch those.

Let me go see what these, you know, what is Peter Atia say? What is Brian Johnson say? What's your takeaway of all of it? my takeaway was that the big ideas, and this is like somebody who's a big longevity person will argue with me because I'm going to do the short version of this. But the big idea is essentially everybody in everybody's health declines. We are probably past the age of like the live forever. So there's like one big idea, which is that if we ever figure out a way to reverse aging or like minimize cell damage, it's not just going to be this gradual thing. Like we used to live

till 80, then 90, then 100, 10, 120, 130. There's going to be a stepful jump once we figure out how to stop cell damage. But if you've already had too much damage, they're not going to be able to get you back into your 20s. You're going to be past the point of return. And so, like, the big breakthrough is if you can figure out how to stop cell damage, we don't know how to do that yet. When that happens, there's going to be an age sort of point, a tipping point where people

below that are going to live to like 300 and people above that are still going to live to like 110. And like there's going to be this big like polarity between those two outcomes. That's interesting. The second interesting thing is like in terms of the Peter Atia school of thought of longevity, which is not live forever, but it's like live a longer health span. So health span versus lifespan is one big idea. And the health span idea is at the end of your life, everybody's going to have a marginal decade, which is like your last 10 years of life, your health is going to decline pretty dramatically from like being immobile and pain and pain to like, you know, really, you know, not being able to wipe your butt by the end, right?

So it's like, that's typically the like bad version of aging. What Peter T and these guys are trying to do is basically push that decade out. So if it was going to happen to you from 80 to 90, let's make it from 90 to 100. Or if it was going to have a 90 to 100, let's 100 to 110. And the cost of your today lifestyle in order to affect that final marginal decade, I personally was like, eh, not worth it. I'm going to find the 80, 20 of like healthy things to do that are not so costly, like not so painful or hard to follow or like regimented or whatever.

Like I'm not going to forget to live today in order from my age 90 to 100 to be like better. I was like, you know, my takeaway was basically I don't care about the marginal decade. I'm not going to orient my life around that. There's an 80, 20 of like healthier stuff to do that's like, I don't mind switching to that lifestyle. I'll do those. And then that's good enough for me.

And if like, you know, wonder drugs come out in some point in the future, hopefully I'm in time for that cutoff. That was my conclusion. Do you think that Buffett is going to die like next week now? It's like when partners pass away. You know, like an old couple that they die together. Yeah, like is that like that very well might happen. He, I think he had buffett announced recently.

They're like, he's like, I finally found my successor at the age of 92. I found my guy. Yeah, I think that will probably happen. All right. Well, if you made it this far, Sean, I want to tell you, the people in the YouTube comments have been making fun of you and I. They are saying that I dress like a serial killer, which I don't know what that means entirely, or that I, now that I'm a father, I'm starting to dress like a father or look like an accountant.

And they're making fun of your hair. I don't exactly know what they're making fun about your hair because I think you've got great hair. I looked at that video. Maybe it's messy. I'm also looking exclusively at my hair and that. I had a bad hair day in the sense that I wake up, roll out of bed and I do this podcast right away. I don't even look in the mirror. And, dude, I'm like the hairiest guy.

on earth. Like I got hair on my fucking palms. Like I'm like a, you know, like a gorilla. And somehow, I think I'm losing kind of some hair in the front. I'm getting a little light. And people were like, yo, he's got to start taking whatever the drug is called. I figure what it is. But like finest ride or whatever it is. So do all the commenters, go up yourselves, right? Well, I don't care what other people think of me unless it's related to my looks or my intelligence. And so I did go ahead and wet the hair a little bit today and, you know, try to try to spruce it up. it does hurt my feelings too sometimes if I'm being honest. Hey, but you know what's working?

Sean P. My little Gary V branding pivot is kind of working. In the comments every day, they're like, Sean P. Sean P for president. And right now we're a small but loyal army. I don't think anyone said Sean B for president. There's a small but loyal army. There's, as they said, in Arrested Development, there's tens of us out there.

But it is from that small base. that we shall grow. Sean P. It is. And I feel like Sean P is such a good, such a good brand pivot. I'm actually a little upset. It came to me in my 30s instead of in my 20s.

All right. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.