SOLVED with Mark Manson - What Nobody Tells You About Getting Rich (ft. Morgan Housel)

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

Everybody wants to get rich. But is the pursuit of wealth really about the money, or are we actually chasing something much deeper? These are just a couple of the fun ideas I toss around in this episode with Morgan Housel, New York Times Bestselling author of the smash hit, The Psychology of Money, which has sold more than four million copies worldwide. We’ll dig deep to uncover our relationship with money, answer the timeless question “Will getting rich make me happy?” and share some of Morgan’s best investing tips. So put away your spreadsheets, step away from the credit card, and for god’s sake stop trading crypto for five seconds, and settle in for this one. We might just make you filthy fucking rich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose. Dot app. It seems like everybody wants to get rich, but is the pursuit of wealth really about the money? Are we actually chasing something much deeper? These are just a couple of the fun ideas that I toss around in this episode with Morgan

Housel, the New York Times bestselling author of the smash hit, The Psychology of Money, which has sold more than 4 million copies worth. worldwide. Morgan is a partner at the venture capital firm, The Collaborative Fund, and he sits on the board of the Markle Group. He's been a columnist for the Motley Fool, the Wall Street Journal, and in 2022, Market Watch named him one of the 50 most influential people in the world of finance, which is way more impressive than anything I've done. But what I love most about Morgan's approach to money is that he digs deep to uncover the emotional and the irrational relationship that we all have between our wealth, our self-worth, and our happiness. So put away your spreadsheets,

away from the credit card and for God's sake stop trading crypto and settle in for this one. Who knows? We might just make you filthy fucking rich. Wait, are you allowed to say fuck in your podcast intro? Oh fuck. I just did. This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Morgan, dude, it's so good to have you here. So good to finally see you. Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to this. We've been pen pals for many years. We're fans of each other's books, but we've never actually spoken face-to-face. So it's great to have you here.

Great to have you as one of the inaugural guests on the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast. Excited to see your fuck's not given. It's so mutual, Mark. I'm thrilled to be here. There's a few people I'd rather talk about this topic than you. All right. So I figured I'd start with the easy questions. My first question is, why do humans attach so much moral value, both positive and negative

to wealth? This is starting with the easy question. This is like the deepest as it goes. I think it's very true that humans are wired for status and not for happiness. And wealth is just the most tangible form of status that exists. There's lots of forms of status. I mean, another example here is like, why do we put so much emphasis on a college degree? Particularly in an era where the vast majority of undergraduate degrees,

you can learn everything you can, even at a top school on YouTube. I don't think there is virtually anything taught about economics or philosophy or psychology, even at Harvard that you can't learn on YouTube. But we put so much value in the degree because it's a very tangible, easy to identify form of status. That's really what it is. So since we're all geared towards status,

money is just the scorecard for so many people. And the problem here, the right word is definitely a problem because it's the cause of so much anxiety in society is that people measure their status and their net worth relative to people around them. Like there is no such thing as an objective measure of wealth where it's like,

Once you hit X dollars, you're wealthy. Everything is just relative to those around you. If you pull up to a traffic light in a Lamborghini, nobody cares because there's six other lambos right there. And they cost more than yours. So it's all just a relative game. And so in a world where by and large, in most capitalistic societies, things get better over time.

People get richer, get wealthier. It's this never-ending treadmill of things are actually getting better and no one feels any better for it because they're all chasing the status of money and the only scorecard is relative to other people who are also doing well around you. Right. Things can objectively be getting better for you, but if they're not getting better at the same rate that they're getting better for the people around you, you still feel like you're losing. It's always been an issue of like comparing yourself to others. Social media in just the last 10 years has increased it by, I think, literally an order of magnitude. Yeah. When I was coming up with this question, I was thinking of counter examples, right? Because

there are a lot of other things that denote status within society. Having a lot of friends, having a great marriage or family or your kids are super successful at school, that denotes status. There are a lot of very intangible ways that we judge status of each other. But you don't see people making these vast moral judgments of like, oh, he thinks he's so good because he has so many friends. What a dick, right? But if somebody has a billion dollars, we feel completely justified in making statements like that. I mean, two of the traits that I most value out of my friends and family and coworkers are humor and wisdom.

That's what I really like in people. But how do you measure that? You can't quantify it. And even when you said like number of friends, what counts as a friend, a casual acquaintance or your spouse? Like you can't, whereas net worth is just so easy. You can measure it literally down to the scent and compare yourself against others. I think that's the only reason.

Most people, I think are closer to me where what they really value, are things like humor and wisdom and love and compassion, but they don't actually chase those things because there's no hard number around it. It's funny. I was just about to make a joke when you said, like, how do you measure a friend that I measure friends by Instagram followers?

But then it made me think that actually you're starting to see that. You're starting to see people shit on people with millions of Instagram followers for being shallow, for being vapid, for being a sellout, all the same criticisms that people have leveled that millionaires and billionaires for decades now. And it's so true on social media. I see this on Twitter all the time, where someone will figure out

how the Twitter algorithm works, and they'll be like, oh, if I tweet a thread or if I tweet like this, I'm going to get a zillion likes and a zillion retweets. And they use that quantification to be like,

see, it's good. They like me. It's working. And for a lot of those people, it's like, no, you're just tweeting bullshit and so cringe-worthy, but it tickled the algorithm correctly,

so you got a bunch of distribution. You got a bunch of likes on it. I think there's analogy there with money, too. where it's like, if I have more money, I'm going to be happier. My life's going to be better. So people end up chasing that, even if it's not what they actually want. What they want is a great spouse and great friends and control over their time.

But it's so hard to like get feedback on those things and measure the progress of those things that they just chase what's so easy to measure. I like this analogy a lot. And I think we can even extend it a little bit further, right? Because fundamentally, that example you just gave, somebody kind of figures out the Twitter algorithm. They start posting a certain type of content. they get, say, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers. On one level, you could say, that's great. This person has figured out how to give hundreds of thousands of people value,

that they value enough to give him a follow and continue to follow him and read future stuff. That's the system working as it's supposed to. I think where the moral judgment starts to creep in is when you get this idea of what some people call audience capture, which is as the creator, you start putting your own interests and values aside and you're like, let me just reflect back to the public whatever they want to hear. And then I'll socially and monetarily benefit from that practice. And I think the same applies to money as well. Where we get really judgmental about money

is when people do the business equivalent of audience capture of like, well, I'm just going to put a bunch of random garbage and pills and market it on an infomercial because that's what people want to hear and then I'll make me wealthy. Or I would say another example of that is like people who got rich trading meme stocks. Okay, you made money, but like there's nothing impressive about it. There's nothing noble about it. And to me, what a lot of this comes down to is I'm not interested in anything that's not sustainable, not friendships, not investing strategies, not careers.

If I can't do it indefinitely, I'm not interested in it. And I think that's like a very simple rule of thumb to guide your life. And a lot of people in audience capture on social media, cool. you got a lot of followers and you got a lot of likes, but can you, you're now beholden to the algorithm that might change tomorrow. It's not a sustainable thing to do. Yeah. Whereas I think if your audience really loves you and they like you and they're willing to buy your work and maybe you have half as many followers as the other guy, I'd much rather be in that situation than just pandering to something that's out of my control. The most successful stock of all time in the history of the

U.S. economy. And there's nothing even close, not Berkshire Hathaway, not Microsoft, not Tesla. It's Philip Morris. And what's so interesting about that, of course, like, it's addictive. So we could just end the story there. But the other thing about that is they make the same product today that they did 100 years ago. It's just a product that people like. Now, of course, they might like it for reasons that we're not thrilled about. But I think that's like good products win in the long term. Products that people like, and like you don't need to change them. It's not a constant, like, iterate on this cycle to figure out how are we going to advertise this? It's just like, build a product that people want to buy and just keep it going. And other examples, the most successful

stock market industry and sector are consumer staples like toilet paper soap toothpaste that's what works forever because people want toothpaste today as much as they did 50 years ago which you can't say that about iPhones or a dws or anything like that that might be gone tomorrow it makes sense too because it doesn't matter how bad the economy gets you know i still got to wipe my ass and brush my teeth so it all just gets back to like what's sustainable is what you should be chasing that's like such a like a broad-based rule of life. So does earning or losing great amounts of money, do you think this fundamentally changes a person,

or does it simply expose parts of them that was always there but maybe wasn't seen before? It's different on either end. Earning a ton of money just always exposes what's there. Just recently, Elon Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson came out, and Walter Isaacson was interviewing Elon Musk's first wife. I think her name is Justine Musk. And she was saying she met and started dating Elon when he was a nobody.

They were still in college. He hadn't started any company who's just a broke nobody from South Africa. And she went into detail about how much money and fame completely changed him and utterly changed who he was. And I think you've even seen that if you look at who Musk was 10 years ago when he was a mere single billionaire compared to the centa billionaire he is now, very different person. Another thing that I think is really interesting is look at some of the interviews of Donald Trump from the early 80s, very calm, very measured, very balanced, very political,

very respectful and you see because he really wasn't that famous back then if it's in the early 80s and you see what fame and my and more money did to him and there are a lot of people like that back to memes there's a meme of Jeff Bezos in 1999 and he's like a skinny dork with a horseshoe and then after he became the richest man in the world he's jacked and he's got a half billion dollar yacht and whatnot so I don't think any of us not me not you anyone if we stumbled across a billion dollars tomorrow we would be different people yeah I think that's I think there are so few exceptions to that. There might be some, but there are so few to that.

And I think it's because in a very good, healthy way, the fact that I rely on other people in society to help me and to maybe employ me to buy my books means that I'm going to be measured in what I say. Right. You know, of course this is true. When I'm alone at a bar with my friends, I say things that I would not say on this camera.

When I know a lot of people are going to, of course that's the case. But once you have fuck you money and not just fuck you money, but fuck you status, then I think it all just comes out. Now, losing money in the other direction is a completely different thing. Here's a great example that you are going to know because you may have actually written these words. In Will Smith's biography, he writes that becoming famous is amazing. Being famous is a mixed bag. And losing fame is like the most painful thing you can ever experience in life. You may have written those words. So I need to give you credit there too. And I think that's very true for money. Like becoming wealthy, gaining wealth is amazing.

having wealth is okay and losing wealth is absolutely chaotic to your soul and your personality it's just going to rip you to shreds because it's just the dopamine that we're chasing it's not even the money that we want we just want the dopamine of like oh i used to have a hundred dollars now i have two hundred dollars it's just the increase that you want and going in the other direction is just an absolute catastrophe for for most people this is why in investing i think most people take too much risk because it's so easy to underestimate what a 50% decline in the stock market is going to do to you. And it's not just not just to your portfolio, but it's going to, for a lot of people, it's going to really shatter their identity and their personality and their confidence. You really see like a form of national depression when you have a big stock market decline.

Like it was called the Great Depression for a reason. I think that that was a very apt word to use. It was just like it's shattering for people to go in the wrong direction. There's something else here now, something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scary as Hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-fi Vision calls it the best show streaming right now. We're running out of time and we still don't know the rules.

Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Do you think that's because the hedonic treadmill in our mind, no matter how much money we make, our default expectation rises to meet that amount. And at a certain point, even if you have $500 million, it feels as normal as when you had $50,000 or $5,000. And so losing all of that, in a way, it feels even more catastrophic because not only are

you losing all of your money, but you're also losing that status, that prestige, the reputation that you've built up over. Like nobody, nobody who has $5,000 is like, their social identity isn't built around their $5,000. But if you have $5 billion, a huge percentage of your social identity

is built around your $5 billion. So losing that is like almost like a traumatic ego experience that happens. For sure. I mean, there's the joke from Chris Rock. He says, if Bill Gates woke up with Oprah's money, he'd jump out the window. And I think that's so true.

Like, even though because Oprah's worth like $3 billion or something, it's worth $100 billion. When Bear Stearns, the bank, went out of business in 2008. The chairman was a guy named Jimmy Kane. And Jimmy Kane, before the Bear Stearns went under, was worth a billion dollars. And afterwards, he was worth $100 million.

He lost 90% of his network. And he had a quote in the newspaper where he said, when you go from a billion to $100 million, it's only your heirs who suffer. Like made no difference to his life. He kept his apartment. He kept his private jet, et cetera. It was just his heirs. And I remember reading that and thinking, like, that is a very rare response.

Maybe he didn't actually feel like that because there's almost no one that would actually believe that to go from a billion to 100 million and be like, ah, whatever, it doesn't matter. It's only my ears. I think it had to be and have been so tied up in his identity, not only the net worth, but using the net worth as a scorecard for his career success, for his ability as a CEO and a manager that was now completely shattered. And sometimes I think about, I think the wealthiest I ever actually felt in my life is when I had $5,000 in the bank.

And I remember hitting that milestone and just being like, this is unfathomable, like, five thousand dollars and happy to report i have quite a bit more than that now but i felt the wealthiest back then because it's just the gap between what you had and what you have now that brings happiness and for me going from a hundred dollars to five thousand felt so much bigger than going from one million to two million or whatever it would be because just in percentage terms it was so much different so i think people are always just chasing the gap between what they used to have and what they have today. And when what you used to have is more than you have right now, I think it just shatters people. And there's also a thing in the stock market where all of your

success as an investor in the stock market is just not panic selling. That's your whole lifetime success is just don't freak out and you'll be fine. And so everything that I do for my own money is kind of geared around that because everybody, including myself, if my net worth down, what went down 50%, it might change how I think about my long-term optimism. And my long-term faith in the U.S. economy and whatnot. So it's just like trying to avoid what a catastrophic loss does to your psyche in those situations. I remember, so I started having enough money to invest 2012, 2013.

There was a pretty sizable dip in 2016. I remember I shat my pants. I was like, oh my God, the bear market's coming, you know, panic sell, freaking out. Obviously, that was stupid. There was another big dip in 2018. There was 2020. I've lived through a couple of crypto markets. I remember in 2020, I kind of hit this point where, like, I remember just watching those red candles.

And I was like, I'm young. I'll be fine. But I feel like I needed to go through those early panics, you know, earlier in my investment career to like understand that. They're like, yeah, yeah, don't be an idiot here. Like just you're young, stick with it. How much of it is just simply getting used to the pain? I think it's a lot of it. and not only just living through it, but understanding the long-term history of the stock market, where if you look over the last 100 years, on average, the stock market falls 10% or more

every 10 or 11 months for the last 100 years. So when the stock market falls 10%, the headlines on CNBC in the Wall Street Journal will be like, dark clouds are here, catastrophe on the horizon. That is something that happens every 10 or 11 months for the last century. And even like a 30% decline is something that historically happens every three or four years. And so even something where it's like, it feels really, really bad. If you look historically, it's perfectly normal. And to understand that and contextualize that is probably the most important investing skill to deal with it.

And you're definitely right that the more you deal with it, the easier it becomes. Although I would say every big decline is for a different reason. So in 2008, it's easy in hindsight for us to say now, oh, you should have just kept the course. And it was a great buying opportunity. And that is the right takeaway. But there are so many alternative histories in which 2008 could. have turned into something way worse than the Great Depression. So there's a lot of hindsight bias in looking back and seeing what you should have done.

But it's definitely true that the more you've been through it, the more rodeos you've been through, the easier it becomes to hold on. But it's also true that people overestimate their ability to hold on. And when times are good, as they pretty much are now, it's very easy for people to say, oh, if the market fell 30%, I would be a buyer. That'd be an odd buying opportunity. You're not. Like, turns out you're not Warren Buffett and you're shitting your pants too, just like everybody

else during that moment. Yeah, as Mike Tyson famously said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. That's the one. This kind of ties into your upcoming book a little bit, but I'm curious what you think. Do you think social media has affected our understanding of investing or money, given the rise of meme stocks, crypto, the intense pessimism, constant pessimism that seems to always be present in the financial news media? I'm curious if this feels different at all, or as your book title says, is it same as ever? I think what's really true is that for me, most information, not just in investing, but political news, whatever it is, people don't want information. They want their views validated by somebody else. Their preexisting views validated.

And what social media does is no matter what you believe, you can believe anything about the economy of the stock market. There are a thousand other people who believe the same thing, gladly welcome you into their tribe. And this is, it's such a difference from 20 or 30 years ago. And now you look at it today and it's infinite. And so virtually 30 years ago, not that long ago. Like when my parents were our age, virtually everyone was getting the same investing information and listening to the same opinions. And now it's just choose your own adventure for whatever you want to hear. And I do this as well. Like I curate my Twitter followers.

And I bet you, I don't do this intentionally, but I bet you if you went through, I follow people who say what I want to hear. And I think virtually everyone does that because you don't want new information. You want to reduce uncertainty because reducing uncertainty feels great. It just turns confirmation bias into something that is orders and magnitude. greater than it was even 10 years ago. The meme stock bubble, which really began and thrived on Reddit, that's something where you like historical information about shorting stocks in the 1940s, like it does not matter at all anymore. We're in a completely different world where it is now. And I think a lot of hedge funds really got fucked because of that, because they had based their entire career

on studying historical evidence that just in a matter of 10 years became completely invalidated because of social media. It just seems like the velocity is amped up, right? Like you used to get bubbles, you used to get groupthink, you used to get, you know, people would all hop on a bandwagon together and then get screwed down the road. It just seems to happen so fast now, given all the access that we have to each other. I think that's really true. Like the Great Depression started in 1929 and didn't really bought them until 1933.

It was a four-year process. And even in 1999, the stock market peaked. in March of 2000 and it bottomed in, I think, the summer of 2002. Like that took quite a while. I took two years to wash everything out. Whereas I definitely think we saw this during COVID. Like we went from everything's great to the world is coming to an end in like three days. It did happen pretty quickly.

And because of that, like in COVID, from the time that people first heard the word COVID, to the time when it was actually like the economy was starting to perk up and the stock market was perking up was less than 90 days. Compare that four years in the Great Depression to 90 days during COVID. And a lot of that is so much, not just some, but the majority of trading on the stock market is our bots and algorithms that are scraping the news feeds in milliseconds. And before you and I can read the first letter of a press release, there are 10,000 computers that have already traded on that news.

There are stories of Warren Buffett back in the 1950s and 1960s, where he was buying stocks at two times earnings, which if you're not familiar, is just like as cheap as it possibly gets. and he was like digging through the library archives to like dig out these old dusty papers to find it. And that's how he could find those opportunities. Now when everything literally happens in, it's measured in millions of a second, there's even some traders that are that trade in Pico seconds, which is a billionth of a second. And compared that to what happened in the 1950s when you're digging out dusty papers from the library. It's totally different world.

Do you think there's any point in trading at all? For individuals, absolutely not. Zero. It gets back to like, is it possible that you could trade successfully for six. months or 12 months or even three years. Unlikely but possible, yes. Is it possible that you as an individual can day trade successfully for 30 years? It's not 100%, but it's so close to 100% that you might as well give universal, just make it universal and say, like, no, no, you can't. And here's the thing. I think there are individual traders that would say, no, I've outperformed the S&P 500 by

one percentage point, whatever it would be. And my response to that is like, A, awesome, congratulations, but you also need to subtract all the effort that you put into it. So if you are working 80 hours a week to formulate your trading strategy, that's the cost that you need to subtract in it versus in an index fund if you can literally just do nothing and go to the beach and sleep in and hang out with your family and have no input in it and still earn a really great return, then I think even like the after tax, after effort profits that you're going to earn trading are round to zero even for the successful traders. Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds like it's akin to deciding you're going to start a career as a blackjack player.

You might do well for a month or a year, but in the long run, the house always wins, right? And what's so hard about trading too is that the barriers to entry are so low that everyone thinks they can do it. Like if I said, I want to be a heart surgeon, you're like, all right, that's going to take me 20 years of education to get there. But if I say, I want to be a day trader, great, open a Robin Hood account in 60 seconds and have at it. There's no barrier to entry. And because of that, every young man thinks they can be the next George Soros and just open up an account and just start going at it. It's also one of the few skills where, like, you actually have a pretty good chance of succeeding based on luck. So if I were to perform open heart surgery on someone tomorrow, there is a zero percent chance that would be successful.

There's a hundred percent chance that person would die. But if you are 19 years old and you open up a brokerage count, you might, by luck, do very well early on. Yeah. So because the possibility of luck exists, it just, like entices so many people. The worst thing that can happen to you as a young investor is to do well early on by luck because it increases your confidence more than your ability and you're just going to keep on taking bigger risk until it blows up in your face. I think the best thing that happened to me as an investor, I started investing when I was 19 and I started like everyone does as a day trader

that seemed like the cool thing to do. And what the best thing that happened to me is I lost a lot of money. And then I was like, I was like, okay, I'm going to pick stocks and hold them for like a month, which seemed like a long time for me. And I lost a lot of money. doing that. And that was so great for me because by the time I was probably 25, it had pushed me towards what I now think is a very sustainable and proper long-term investing strategy of just buying and hold a diversified portfolio. But if I had done well day trading based off of luck, I may have kept trying to do it for another 10 years and been in a way worse position than I am right now. So you wrote psychology of money. It came out 2020. I imagine you probably wrote it

2018, 2019. I imagine you had a stable, well-to-do career. You were doing fine before the book. Obviously, since the book, you've sold millions of copies. You're probably doing the speaking circuit. You've probably gotten very good book deals for future books. I imagine you have gone from respectable middle class to scummy rich bastard. So I'm curious, now that you've made the leap yourself, by the way, welcome to the point one percent. We've got caviar, champagne, some jet skis if you want them. But I'm curious, now that you've made that leap, has there been anything that surprised you, first of all? And second of all, is there any of your own advice that you have struggled to take? Both really good questions. I don't know. Here's what I would say, because the book's success

was complete and utter surprise to my wife and I never planned for it. And we were very happy and satisfied with our income and our net worth before the book. So all of this in the last three three years has been like total out of the blue and I think we're still to this day trying to process it and what to do with it. The first thing I would say is without giving any numbers, we haven't spent really any of the book money. We live in the same house, we drive the same car, and that's very intentional because the biggest challenge is how do we raise kids? Our kids are four and seven. How do we raise kids who are not spoiled and who have who will grow up to have their own ambition and realize that they need to work hard and build their own path? That's been the hardest thing.

to deal with. And that's the reason we live in the same house and drive the same car. If we didn't have kids, it would probably not be the case. But you realize how quickly kids can become spoiled and how ruinous that can be to their long-term success. And I think the goal of every parent, certainly us, is not to raise good kids, it's to raise good adults. I want my kids to be good functioning adults. And the only way to do that is if they really value a dollar. And they're not going to do that if we just spoil the hell of them. So that's been the hardest thing to deal with. and the biggest barrier to our spending is not wanting to raise little pricks. That's really, that's really been the hardest thing.

The other thing, I probably saw this coming, but the extent of its truth has probably been surprising is that we are no happier whatsoever. We're plenty happy. We were happy back then. But it's really done nothing to our day-day happiness. And I could have seen that coming because what makes people happy, at least for us, is relationship with my wife. Are our kids thriving at school?

or do our kids have good friends? Do we have good friends in the area? Am I sleeping eight hours? Am I healthy? And for the most part, money is not going to change that at all. Now, I'm probably more content. I'm more independent. And those are great feelings, but it's not happiness. Happiness is not part of that. And what I just said, I wrote in the book. But the irony is like after making money from the book, it's really just been slammed in my face how true that was. I'm there with you, man. After subtle art blew up, money in a lot of ways actually made. me less happy for a short period of time. I think it complicated my life quite a bit in ways that I didn't expect I wasn't prepared for. And then it was funny because as I kind of worked through

and navigated all those complications, I realized that most of the advice that I needed to overcome those issues had been written in my fucking book. And I just had never fought and applied them to this new life experience. When I wrote everything in that book, I was I was looking at back and applying it to all the challenges that I had already overcome, and I never, it had never occurred to me to look at the potential future, future challenges that I might overcome. But I think this topic's really interesting. And it's something, it's funny because it's something that I, when I go on podcasts, I get asked about a lot. And I, I've started to deduce it's just because I'm, maybe I'm the only person who really talks about it. But I feel like

you're probably the perfect candidate to also talk about this. And I guess this is the, I don't want to call it downsides, but maybe like the hidden costs of wealth. When you don't have money, there is this very idealized, rosy picture of like, man, if I could just have this car or this house, like everything would be great. If I could send my kid to this school. And yeah, there's definitely truth to that. But I think there's a lot of unexpected social and psychological challenges that come with wealth that most people don't know that they're signing up for.

And then when they happen, they don't really know how to navigate that. I do think for everybody that with every dollar of wealth that you gain comes probably a few pennies of what I would call social debt. It's not actual debt. It's not credit card debt, but it's like with every dollar of wealth is this little bit of whether it's social debt could be an increase in your own expectations in life that's going to like whittle away at your wealth over time. It could be friends and family members asking you for loans and expecting you to pay at dinner. there's all the social debt that comes with every dollar. And people who make a lot of money have a lot of social debt. I've told the story before, but two or three years ago, I did a consulting session with a group of NBA rookies.

And the purpose of it was everybody knows that most professional athletes, including the NBA, these guys go broke. They go bankrupt. They have a three-year career where they make $20 million, then they all go bankrupt. And one of the players, he was 19 years old. He said something that I thought was so astute and so smart. He said, when you grew up in inner city,

poverty and then you sign a $10 million contract when you're 19. He said, that's not your money. That is mom's money, dad's money, cousins money, grandma's money, neighbor's money, your friend down the street's money. And he said, the reason that so many athletes go bankrupt is not because they bought themselves a mansion, it's because they bought a modest house for their fifth cousin, who they felt obligated to help. So these NBA athletes, they make $10 million, and with that comes, let's say, $30 million of social debt piled on top of it. And it's so, It's very easy to count your net worth. Everyone knows your net worth.

But social debt is very obscure. And most people don't even know it exists until they realize how complicated their life has become. There's a very good book written, I think 1905, a very old book. And it's called The Quest for the Simple Life. And basically what it is, it's like, it's not that money can't make you happy. That's not the case because money can bring some form of happiness. But it's that money can also make your life very complicated. And without a doubt, people whose lives are complicated,

are less happy than people who have a simple life. And I think that is timeless advice. Yeah. That said, so this question of money and happiness, you say that since becoming very wealthy, you have not seen your happiness tick up at all. I would actually say my happiness dipped for a few years. Just in the last year or two,

I would say I'm happier than I was pretty subtle art. So I've had this kind of like bust boom cycle that's happened with me. What's interesting, so the research around happiness and money, for a long time, the conventional wisdom was money makes you happier up to like 7580K and then it like levels off. What they've recently found in the last few years with some better studies is that actually it does continue to increase. It just increases at a much more marginal rate past six figures. And as far as they've measured, it doesn't ever completely level off. It just kind of slows down over time. And what's super fascinating about the research is that they find that people who are

unhappy without money, money improves their happiness up to about 80 to 100K and then it stops. But people who are happy without money, money continues to make them happier forever and ever. It's super interesting because you would assume that it's the people who are unhappy without money probably think money is going to fix their happiness problems, but then it doesn't. Whereas the people who are happy without money probably don't feel like they need any money to be happy, but those are the ones who actually become happy. It's a classic backwards law situation. To me, what's definitely been true for me, and I think a lot of the studies will bear this out, is that, and this might seem very nuanced, but it's important, is that it's not that money can't make your life better.

It's that happiness is probably the wrong word. And the right word that money can do for you is contentment. That's really true for me. Before the book, I think I had a lot of career anxiety of just, am I going to make it? Am I like, is this the right thing to do? Is this the right career? Can I hack it in this career? do I need to find something else to do?

It gave me a lot of anxiety and sleepless nights. And postbook, I really don't have that anymore. But that's not happiness. It's just contentment. One thing my dad used to always say that I think is very wise, is he said that money doesn't buy happiness. It buys away unhappiness. It's not that your problems go away when you become wealthy.

It's that your problems become much more controllable. Like when I was broke, I had plenty of problems in my life. And a large percentage of those problems were completely outside of my control. You know, a storm hits, the train is out of service. I can't go to work that day. I'm so fucked. I need to pay rent. I need to buy food.

Whereas when you're wealthy, you don't have that problem anymore. You're like, oh, well, I'll get a car. I'll hire an Uber or, you know, whatever. I'll work from home today. But the problems that happen when you're wealthy, they tend to be more inside your control. It's like, oh, I hired a shitty housekeeper who charged me five times more than they probably should have. Or I bought a house that's too big. that's a class. That's the big mistake I made. I bought a house that's too big. And I feel obligated

to fill it with shit that I don't want. And it's like this is actually just causing me more problems. But it's like ultimately at the end of the day, that's my fuck up. And it's completely within my control to remedy that situation. And so I think one way to look at it is that wealth simply moves your problems from being more external to being more internal. I do think it's true that for everyone there is such thing as an ideal net worth, like a net worth at which beyond that, you get no material benefit, but your life does become more complicated. And I think that number is lower than most people think. That's the peak improvement that you're going to get for money. One way to like to think about this, among the 10 richest men in the world, there are 15

divorces between all of them. That's a great stat. And I think one of the reasons this occurs is like if you are that successful in your career, if you're Bill Gates or Elon Musk, your life is very, very complicated. There's a really good thing. a book called The Snowball, which is the biography of Warren Buffett. It's the most in-depth biography of him. And anyone reading that book will realize how complicated is the most charitable word you can use. His personal life is. I mean, it's not an exaggeration to say that since he's been 10 years old, he's devoted every waking moment to picking stocks. And a lot of that came at the expense of his family, his children, his wife, his personal relationships. And I think

someone like that didn't really have a choice. Their mind is just so wired towards their career that they had to do it. But I think for me, and for a lot of people, would read that and say, I don't want that life. I don't want a life that is so fundamentally in balance that it's going to come at the cost of my children knowing me and my wife wanting to leave me. That sucks.

I think that's why there are so many divorces among those people. Bill Gates went like 30 years without taking a single day off. He worked seven days a week for 30 years. There are some people who might aspire to that. I'm definitely not one of them. There's no amount of money that would ever make that worth it to me. And he probably doesn't regret it. I assume that's true.

But there's a cost to all of that and just making your life very, very complicated that I think of most people, if they got that kind of money or had a career that was going to pay off that kind of money, would realize the downsides that are so easy to overlook. Has becoming wealthy changed your politics? Oh, that's good. I want to say no, but I will tell you, I always consider myself fairly moderate. I think in my tire life, I've probably voted. If you look at like senators, Democrat presidents, I probably voted Democrat 70% of the time

and Republican 30% of time, which I feel like is actually pretty rare. That's like, that's like as moderate as it gets. But I'll tell you, I read this morning that the 2017 tax cuts actually expire in 2025. And depending on who's in Congress, like they might get rolled back. And it was a first time in my life where I was like, oh, shit, no, no, you can't do that. But let's pivot off politics before we get canceled. In your opinion, and obviously, your kids are still young so you haven't you haven't gone through the failures and iterations yet to give like really strong advice on this but was the 80-20 advice for teaching your kids about money so you're right that my kids so they're four and seven so talking about money but especially my my seven-year-old

son you know he is in a stage where he because he spent so much time on youtube that is markets to him so effectively his list of wants is enormous every day he wants something else when kids watch someone like mr beast all of a sudden my seven-year-old's uh definition of success is driving a Lambo and giving millions of dollars away to your friends. That's the definition of success. Whereas I grew up watching Ninja Turtles. Yeah, right. So, so much of social media and YouTube is so geared towards materialistic wealth that it really inflates the aspirations of kids. And my son lives, he doesn't know it, but he lives such a ridiculously good life, but he doesn't know it because his expectations are

so high. And he has so many more toys and gadgets than 99.9% of other kids, and it's never enough because this other kid he saw online has something different. And when I see that, I realize how easy it is to spoil your kids, how easy it would be for my wife and I to give in to his every little desire that he sees on YouTube and just ruin him socially. When my children are in their 20s and 30s, they can function on their own with proper expectations. That's all I want to do. And I can see it, especially in my seven-year-old son, little tinges of him already becoming spoiled. And my wife and I've tried so much. hard to not do it, but if you're just given a little bit, they become spoiled so quickly and so easily.

And so I don't know if I have any great advice. I've done quite a bit of work with like very wealthy families. And this is their biggest concern is if you're a billionaire, how do you raise kids who are still ambitious and whatnot? And I've come to believe, I think, that the very hard but honest answer is give them less money. That's the only thing you can do. You cannot give your child a billion dollars or a million dollars or ten thousand dollars and have it not affect their sense of entitlement. I think it's impossible. I think there are no counter examples to that. And that's a really tough thing for a lot of those people to hear, but that's the truth. The only thing you can do to not spoil your kids is give them less money, give them fewer toys,

make them work for it. And the crazy thing is that virtually every one of those billionaire families of its first generation, the reason they are successful is because they grew up poor with a chip on their shoulder and work their ass off from the day they were 18. And that's the one thing that they can't give their children. They can give their children a house

and a car and a private jet. The one thing they can't give them is the ambition of needing to work. My dad was a hard ass. And I actually wrote a newsletter about what he did with us when we were kids. And I got so many replies from parents

saying, tell me more. Like, give me the playbook. My dad, he started each of us, my brother and I, started each of us on an allowance when we were five. If we wanted anything that cost money, it went into a ledger. I remember being like six years old and being at a restaurant and wanting to play like an arcade game,

like Pac-Man or something. And I asked my dad for a quarter and he was like, well, I can give you a loan on your next allowance, but you're going to pay interest. I was six. I remember I ended up playing like four games. So I spent a dollar playing the arcade game. And I remember the next Sunday came around and he gave me, you know, instead of my $3 allowance, he gave me like a buck 80.

And I was like, I was like, where the fuck's the other dollar 20? Like, where's my money, dad? And he was like, well, you know, remember, I loaned you that dollar at the restaurant on Tuesday. And, you know, you paid 20 cents interest. I was six. I hated him for this for so many years. I saw all my friends, they got new bikes, they got Nintendo's. They got it.

I had to fucking rake the yard, do the dishes, clean my room and get paid weekend, week out for it. I had to take loans from him. I remember taking a loan to buy a Lego set when I was about eight, and I spent about a month paying it off. He called it the bank of dad, and he would calculate interest, and we had ledgers, and we had a notebook in the kitchen and everything. I thought he was a fucking psychopath, and then I got to college and all my friends were broke, and I had like $1,000 in the bank. I was like, wow. And then I think it was around 25 that I finally went back to him, and I was like, thank you for doing that. I mean, not only did it teach me the importance of saving, managing money,

teaching me the understanding concepts like interest and loans and things like that, I was absolutely one of those kids. My family had a lot of money, and I didn't know it until I was a teenager. We were very well off, and I had no idea. And I certainly was not experiencing it. So that's another benefit that came out of that. I would say two things here. And thank you for sharing that because that's such a good story.

I do think on the nature-nurture spectrum, how well you do with money actually leans towards nature. Because for every one of those stories that you just told, you could tell a story about someone whose parents were just as smart as teaching their kids about money, and they went on to just be profligate spenders. And to the counter that, some people whose parents were terrible with money that ended up doing very well. Warren Buffett always talks about people, some people have the money mind and some people don't. And if you have the money mind from age five, no one needs to tell you to save and invest. You just get it. It's just in your DNA. You just understand it. And I think there's also the other end of that of people who are just,

no matter what you tell them, they're going to be compulsive gamblers. No matter what you tell, they're just going to be just absolute degenerates with money. My parents were and are very, very good with money, but they never sat down and taught us. They never sat down and said, here's what you should do. Here's how much you should save. I think it was just kind of natural. No one needed to tell me to save. From the time I got my first job at 16, I was saving half my paycheck. I don't think I even knew why or why I should do it or what I was saving for. It just seemed like the natural thing to do.

And I'll tell you another example. For my son, I don't want to throw him on the bus because he's only seven, but I've tried to get him to save. I have offered him because we give him a small allowance too. I've offered him 50% interest per week, 50% per week to save that I will pay him in interest. He won't do it. As soon as he gets money, it burns a hole his pocket's gone. Wow. And so maybe on the nature, nurture spectrum, I hope he watches this podcast in 20 years and he's pulled it together. There you go. Also, I mean, just at that age from a developmental point of view, I mean, seven-year-olds have no impulse control.

I don't think I started to appreciate my dad's arrangement until probably around 10. I remember it was by the time I got the middle school, I had figured the game out. I was like, all right, if I save up allowances for like three months, I'm going to end up with, you know, 50% more money than if I, go spend every day. So it took a while. It's the family and friends event at Shoppers Drug Mart. Get 20% off almost all regular priced merchandise. Two days only. Tuesday, April 28th and Wednesday, April 29th. Open your PC optimum app to get your coupon. The other thing that's been really hard for us with allowance is that my son got really into Legos as I was when I was a kid. And my wife and I were like, well, Legos are educational. It's like engineering and he's building it himself and it's creative.

So Legos don't count towards allowance. If he wants new Legos, we'll get, and then it turned into he wants a new $200 Lego every day. It's actually really difficult from a parent to want to foster your children's creativity. Yeah. And have that not spill into spoiled little brat without even knowing it. I love it. He's teaching you guys about loopholes.

Totally, totally. My parents' rule was only books. They would buy me as many books as I wanted, which is interesting because it actually, incentivized me to want books. And I remember actually asking for books a lot because I knew that would always be free. So were you a big reader and writer when you were young? You know what's funny? So yes, when I was really young, yes. I remember sitting in my room writing short stories. I remember I started writing a memoir of sixth grade. Wish so badly that I still had it. Obviously it got lost on some computer somewhere. I used to write a lot when I was young.

But at a certain point, I think two things happened. One is I discovered music. That got me a lot more social approval than writing did. And then the second thing that happened was I actually got bad grades in school for writing. And looking back, it was because I didn't follow the assignment. I would just go on some crazy tangent and run with it. And the teacher was like, no, no, no, that's not what I told you. But I thought I was a bad writer for that reason.

I actually didn't realize I was a good writer until I had been publishing online for about two years. I'm willing to bet, though, that even if you were getting Cs or Ds or whatever in writing in school, you were doing it because you were deviating from what they told you to do. But that's probably why you are a good writer because you've never just tried to follow the script. You've just tried to, you just carved your own path and said, literally said, fuck you, I'm going to go do my own thing. Absolutely, which then raises the question of like what is, I mean, obviously there's a practical side to writing instruction, which is teach grammar and teach kids how to put two sentences together and argue a case. Like that makes sense, right?

But it's, again, too, I grew up in a pretty conservative part of Texas. So there wasn't a lot of respect for creative deviations, right? I think I had one teacher, my entire school career, I had one teacher that was kind of encouraging. She was like, you're very creative. You should keep exploring this. But it kind of just went in one ear and out the other. I almost had the opposite experience. My education background was very unique.

I effectively have no high school education. I was a competitive ski racer, and I just basically bypassed high school, not because I was smart, just because I was doing something else. And so when I got to college, I had to start at a local community college when I started. And I effectively had an eighth grade education at that point.

So I had to start the most basic remedial level. And I had such low self-esteem in terms of like my intelligence, which was justified because I really didn't have a high school education. And there was one, it was a psychology class. and we had to write a paper. And the teacher pulled me aside and said, you know, you're actually a really good writer.

And I remember just being stunned. I think in that moment, my self-confidence increased more than at any other point in my life. Wow. And so, like, it's really easy to underestimate what a little compliment can do for the right person and, like, push them in that right direction to just, like, keep going a little bit more.

That always sticks out to me. I had a high school teacher of mine who we were friends on Facebook. This was like 10 years ago. he posted on Facebook that he was leaving my high school after like 20 years there and he was so grateful and he like kind of shared a story of like it was the last day of school and a student of his kind of came in and got a little bit emotional and thanked him and said that he had changed her life and he just on his Facebook post he said he was like yeah I guess we as teachers we have no idea the impact that that we have on our students sometimes and I actually replied and I said

you know this extends much further than you think because I was a total shithead and high school. I was all my teachers' worst nightmare, slept through every class, never did homework. And I remember he had been one of the teachers that was pretty hard on me. And I told him, I said, there are a lot of things that you said to me when I was 16, 17, that I blew off and thought was a joke at the time. But three years later, I looked back and I was like, oh shit, Mr. Wick had a point. And I told him, I said, you probably have no idea how many people are walking around in the world right now where something you said, like a seed you planted in 10th grade, took five years to like finally sprout and actually made an impact on them. So it's all the teachers out there.

Don't, don't underestimate yourselves. I think there's a counter to that too of it's easy to underestimate if you're a teacher what telling a kid that you're not good enough or some negative connotation is just going to shatter their confidence at that point. I think every student from kindergarten through college is so fragile emotionally in terms of their confidence. And to me, the biggest value that I got out of school was not what I learned because I could have learned to everything on YouTube or in the library. What I got out of it was confidence. And particularly in college, if it was like, if I can go through four years and get good grades and get a diploma, I can do anything out in the real world. It was just the confidence that it gave me.

That was all the value from it. So your next book coming out is called Same as Ever. and I believe the core premise behind it is that everybody is so obsessed with what's changing and what's different, whereas we kind of overlook the things that never change. What are the things that we overlook that never change? There's literally hundreds of them. If you look over human behavior, it tends to be the same story over and over and over again. And the cast of characters changes and the script changes a little bit, but it's the same movie again and again. Every war is the same. Every recession is more or less the same. even if what's causing them is different, the way that people react to greed and fear and emotion and their desires is the same today that it was 500 years ago.

And it'll be the same 500 years from now. And that's really important because everyone knows how bad we are at forecasting, what the economy is going to do, who's going to win the election, because we're always focused on, we're trying to guess what might change. And I think if you just focus all of your effort on what's never going to change, you have a much clearer sense of what the future is going to hold. Like, I have no idea what the stock market's going to do over the next 10 years. Nobody does. But I know exactly how people are going to respond to greed and fear during that period.

So, like, let's just focus on that. There's a great quote from Jeff Bezos where he said, everyone is always asking what's going to change. And he said, a much more important in questions what's never going to change. Because at Amazon, he said, you cannot imagine a future where consumers don't want low prices and fast shipping. It's impossible to imagine a future where those two things are not desired. So therefore, he could put all of his effort, into investing in those things, knowing that they would be just as relevant 20 years from now as they are today. And there's so many things in life that are like that about our strong propensity to like to be persuaded by a good story. Not the best answer, not the right answer. The best story always wins.

Just the person who tells a story that you want to hear is the person who's going to get the attention and who wins. That was true 500 years ago and it'll be true 500 years from now. So I think understanding the persuasiveness of a good story is like so fundamental to understanding how society works. Understanding like how fragile the world is and how just the little tiniest little nudge of nothing can have a massive impact on history in your personal life and throughout the economy. That's always been the case. Understanding the power of incentives was influential 500 years ago and it'll be influential 500 years from now. So the book is 23 little stories, very short chapters, similar to psychology of money, of just things that have always been a powerful driver in human

behavior that you can put all of your faith in will be just as relevant in the future. I think psychology of money was really the psychology of you, the individual, and same as ever is the psychology of us, the collective. It's just like, what do people do in groups that keeps happening over and over again? It was so much fun to write. I imagine you could even reach back to ancient times and probably find analogs all over the place. Every chapter includes a story that is an example of these things happen. And most of them are from the last, I would say, 200 years or so. But yeah, I mean, it's always true that if you looked back at ancient times, I mean, one of the opening quotes that I use in the book is from Schopenhauer who says, the wise have always said the same things and fools have

always done the opposite. Like the reason that we enjoy stoicism, so much of which was written 2,000 years ago is because it's just fundamentally true. It was true 2,000 years ago and it's true today. And I think it's actually like when researching this book or just when thinking about the idea from this book, how few people had really tried to tackle this concept. It's always like what's going to change is way more appealing. It's sexier. It's way more, it's way more enjoyable. But I think it's always the case that if you look back across whether it's in business or in life or in marriage or in military, the things that never changed are always what matter the most. Because there is this bias, especially recently with all the technological change, there's this

constant bias of like, oh, what's changing? What's going to be the new paradigm? What's going to be this and that? I've kind of developed a little bit of a, I wouldn't say fully contrarian take on AI, but I guess my my counter argument to AI is just this really fundamental sense that people will always value connection to other people. People will always value authenticity. I talk to a lot of internet tech business people and, you know, they're like, oh, AI is going to replace this and that. and, you know, books are going to be written by AI and TV shows are going to be made by AI. And I'm like, I don't think we read a book or watch a TV show only for the content, only for the information. A huge reason of why we watch it is because humans made it. And we want to feel connected

to those humans and we want to know that they feel the way that we feel and they worry about the same things we worry about. And I don't think there's any way that AI could ever fundamentally replace that. Totally agree. I mean, so much of what I love about a book or about music, let's say, is not even like the wisdom that I gained from it. It's the awe that a fellow human wrote this thing. Yeah. That a fellow human had this much information that I never knew about. And same for music. Like if you listen to your favorite musician, so much of it is just awe that another human who wakes up in the morning just like you could make this. And there's no way you could, but they could. And you're just astounded by that. Absolutely. And I do think

it will put a premium on human connection. I almost think of it in the same way, like, IKEA is a huge furniture business, but like people will pay 10 times as much for a handcrafted piece of furniture that in some ways is probably less perfect and less efficient. And that's actually what they're paying for. They're paying for the lack of efficiency. They're paying all the time and craftsmanship that went into it. I always think of this. I'm sure you will, you will respect this too. I have such a newfound respect for how hard it is to write a book. And now when I I walk into a library or Barnes & Noble, every single book on the shelf is one to 10 years of somebody's life. And it's like whenever I walk in, it's just you can see the amount of effort put

into it. And if all of that was replaced by an algorithm that just spit it out in two seconds, all of the all of the allure is gone from it. Yeah, I think people underestimate the intangible value of creative work in general. Last two sections. The first one is, so one of my favorite personal pet theories I came up with and I write about a lot is this idea that the best thing about a person or a thing is usually also the worst thing about a person or a thing, right? It's like Warren Buffett, since he was 10 years old, spent all of his waking hours trying to pick the best stocks. That's what made him Warren Buffett. But it's also the worst thing about him because it completely wrecked his home life. And probably every significant problem he's

ever had throughout his life was caused by the same thing that gave him all of his successes. My question to you is, what is that trait in you that you believe? I don't even need to spend one second thinking about this because it's so obvious for me, which is that I'm a people pleaser. I just want, I think I hate confrontation and I want people to like me. I don't think that's a good thing, but that's, it's true. And so I go out of my way to please everyone around me. And so the good side of that is I think most people would say I'm easy to get along with. The bad side of that is I let a lot of problems just stew. And it's easy for me to just like bury that probably like, like I don't like that this person's doing this to me, but let's

ignore it because I just, I just want to get along with them. And then the problem just boils and boils and boils until it explodes. And it's caused me a lot of problems in my life, even though I think on net it's been a good trait, but it's like barely on net because I'm always letting problems do. What are the things that you've done in your life to try to get better about it? I think what's true for me is that since I'm so incapable of having a conflict with people, that rather than like, oh, I'm going to be friends with this person who I don't really like, just because I want to be a people pleaser and like I'll deal with the bad parts later.

I think I've gotten much better at just kind of being very picky and choosy of who I surround myself with. I've always been the kind of person that has two really close friends rather than a dozen acquaintances. I've always just been like, there's going to be two to five people who I talk to in life and everyone else can go fuck themselves. I can say this on that podcast. If I had to constantly battle over conflict, I couldn't do it.

I would just roll over like a puppy dog with my belly in the air and be like, take me. Like, I can't, I can't fight on this. So just, so I need to find someone who I don't have conflict with because I'm so incapable of dealing with it. Well, maybe next time you come on, I'll just compulsively disagree with literally everything you say. I'll burst into tears and hang up. Stop being mean to me, Mark. Cool. Well, thank you for sharing that.

That's actually, that's a very common one. I imagine there's thousands of people listening who struggle with that. It's definitely something I've struggled with in the past a little bit. And it's, yeah, it's important to deal with. I think also, too, is that part of that selectivity of who you led into your life is making sure that you're surrounding yourself with people who aren't going to take advantage of that about you. Yes, totally. I think that's the biggest thing.

Okay. Last segment. Are you familiar with the game Fuck, Mary Kill? Yes. Okay. So we're going to play Fuck Mary Kill. 80% chances gets me canceled, but let's do it. That's what we're here for.

Hey, we're here to not give a fuck, Morgan. All right. Fuck Mary Kill. Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, George Soros. Oh, this is so, this is so great. Okay. Mary Munger. I think he's the wisest person of modern times.

I don't think that's an exaggeration. A lot of people disagree with that, but I think it's really true. It's not necessarily the wisdom. It's just his ability to explain it. So he's someone I want in my life. Kill probably. Soros. No offense.

I'm sorry. I'm not even going to go into detail, but let's just leave it there. Fuck, I'm going to say, I'm going to have to say Warren. I'm not going to go into detail there, but you're really forcing me into this question. Well, I mean, Warren's failures as a family man are well documented, so I can understand the fuck. But he is quite pithy and seems very charming. So I can understand.

So he would be great to take out on a date because he's so patient. Yeah, yeah, just spend a night with. I could see him being good for that. Charlie seems like a solid family man. Soros, you know, I don't want to say too much. The tinfoil hat crowd might show up and start spamming me. Okay. Fuck Mary Kill.

Stocks, gold, Bitcoin. Oh, so, oh, God, the two, the last two are hard. Mary Stocks, it's the best long-term investment. Kill, gold. It's a shitty long-term investment. Fuck Bitcoin. And I know I would actually, I'm going to change the meeting. I'm not going to, I'm not going to say like, sleep with Bitcoin.

I'm going to say fuck Bitcoin. I'm just going to say fuck Bitcoin. I just going to say fuck Bitcoin. So I actually don't have much wrong with Bitcoin. I just think it brings out the worst and not just some people, but the majority of people in Bitcoin, it brings out the worst in them. I have watched myself get sucked into the crypto world for three straight bull runs. And I feel like half of it is just I like, I like risk.

But it is so fascinating from a psychological point of view. Last year there was a saying that was going around, which was that crypto was speed running financial history. I would add other things to that. I would add religious cults. I would add black markets. If you're interested in human nature, crypto is almost like a dangerous place to be because it is so endlessly fascinating.

I so agree with that. Not only would I fuck with Bitcoin, but I absolutely have and I have the herpes to prove it. I think there have been a lot of people on this point. I'll make this quick about with the declining religion has come an increase in tribalism elsewhere. So whether that's sports or politics or Bitcoin, I think a lot of that is just in a previous lifetime, these people all would have been going to church every Sunday. And now that they're not, they find their crowd, their tribe in something like Bitcoin.

And by the way, I'll call it apocalypse porn has transferred as well, right? It's like it used to be, if you were a very apocalyptic person, you would probably end up in church most days of the week. Now, if you're a very apocalyptic person, you're probably on zero hedge every morning. You're probably putting all your money in Bitcoin and gold. You're probably reading some crazy far right or far left wing website and thinking that George Soros and Bill Gates are going to take over the world. All right.

Last one. Fuck Mary Kill. Diversification, dollar cost averaging, dividend investing. Why do you got to do this to me? This is the hardest one. This is the hardest one. Can I be polygamous? I'm going to go polygamy on this one.

I'm going to marry all of them. I would say all three of those, I dollar cost average into index funds that I plan to hold for 50 years. That's how I invest. So all three of those are just square in the merry category. Okay.

I'm cheating on this one. You're cheating. We've got polygamist. All right. All right. We'll let you be polygamous on that. Morgan, it's been a pleasure, dude. It's been a blast.

Definitely want to have you back at some point. book or no book. I don't give a shit. This has been fun. I've admired you for years as a writer, as a person. I'm so glad we finally got to do this. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. Everybody, same as ever. Morgan Housel is coming out or it is out when you're listening this. I don't know, but check it out. Psychology of Money, obviously. It's fucking hit. I actually think psychology of money, I think, is the last book I read in one sitting. I was thinking about that this morning. That means a lot to me. It doesn't happen often, and I think that was the last time. I was just like, I sat down for 30 minutes and next thing I know it's like four hours later and I'm like,

oh, I have 20 pages left. Oh, shit. It's not a very long book, but the metric that I wanted to maximize for was not even sales. It was how many people read to the end. And the only way that you could do that was like a very short, punchy chapter. Make your point, get the hell out of the way. Yeah, it is extremely readable. You can tell that you put a lot of thought into that, into keeping people engaged, keeping people flip into the next page. It's a great read. I'm excited to read the new one. Everybody check out Morgan Housel. You're at Collaborative Fund. you've got a blog there. You're on Twitter.

You're on all the places. We'll put links to the other places. As always, everybody, thank you for listening. Be sure to leave a review. Give us five stars because my ego desperately needs it. And we're a new podcast and those things matter for us. So thanks, everybody. See you next time.