The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Growing Your Nest Egg: A primer on investing for my grandchildren and other young adults by John W Weiser

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Growing Your Nest Egg: A primer on investing for my grandchildren and other young adults by John W Weiser https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Your-Nest-Egg-grandchildren/dp/1778836879 COVERING THE BASICS OF INVESTING, Growing Your Nest Egg offers tips and pointers to familiarize readers with the benefits of saving for retirement, especially through owning stocks and bonds. It provides the wisdom of expert Wall Street investors and shares the benefit of the author’s own experiences-and his infectious enthusiasm for seeking and finding sound investments.

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Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today, we're an amazing young man on the show. We're going to be talking about his book and all that good stuff. It is entitled, Growing Your Nest Egg, a primer on investing for my grandchildren and other. other young adults out July 28th, 2025 by John W. We're going to talk to him on the show and get into all the good details and stuff that maybe you can do. Make your life and your future

children, grandchildren, be better. John Weiser serves on the Senior Advisory Council, the United Religions Initiative and the world's largest grassroots interfaith organization. He graduated from Harvard Law School and served as a partner of Shearman and Sterling, a white street law firm, before taking the post of General Counsel of Vegetal Group, Incorporated, an international engineering construction firm. He and his late wife, Maria, had nine children, one of whom died as a toddler. They have 12 grandchildren, and he's currently married to Susan Coney, who has six children, 12 grandchildren, and one great grandchild. He's the author of a memoir, A Thousand Kisses, a Family's Escape from the Nazis to a new life and grasped the nettle, appreciating the bold life of Bishop W.E. Swing. Welcome

the show, John. How are you, sir? Fine, thanks. I'm delighted to talk to you. Delighted to have you as well, John. It's wonderful. And you're a multi-book author we should mention as well. Give us your dot-coms or website, social media, emails, wherever you want people to get to know you better. www.johnwise.com. So give us a 30,000 over you. What's in this book? This is a very simple overview of investing, of the forces that push stocks up and push stocks down, of the various ways in which you can invest. Ultimately, I recommend a simple way for everybody. Simple is better, maybe, huh?

Yes. And so you, the focus is this is how you do your investing and your intention to pass that along to your grandchildren and how to make sure that they can enjoy the fruits of your knowledge. experience. That's right. In today's world, very few people end up having a pension or a retirement plan. Almost everybody has to invest for themselves in an IRA 401k plan. And so this is some advice about how you can build that nest egg to support yourself, because most of these kids will retire when they're 65, and they'll live for another 20 years. So they need to have to have. some money to support themselves. Yeah, and it's always good for emergencies too. Absolutely. You never

know. I mean, some people say I think like the average person can't survive a $400 extra bill to their budget in America right now. It's a very sad situation. Very sad, very sad. And so the book is billed is providing the wisdom of expert Wall Street investors and your own experiences. Tell us about some of your experiences, investing and some of the tips, maybe you know, tease out some of the favorite tips you have in the book. I found the best thing was to start saving early, let it accumulate. And the wonder about our stock market is if you're invested in the stock market, historically it goes up. And so as long as you're invested, you generally do get some increase in your value. increasing your value is always good absolutely you need that money when you retire most definitely now

let's see here some of the things you tips that you have in the book what would be a tip that you could tease out to people that maybe a story of your experience in investing that was a way that you came up with to maybe get better results i've had one terrible mistake in my life in investing and there's always something to be learned from your mistakes. I got caught up in the hype of the technology boom back in 2000 when all these new technologies were coming on computers and all the things they could do for us. And I followed a very good fellow called George Gilda, who is a excellent expert in computers. In fact, he went and advised president. Reagan on it. Oh, wow.

But what he did was he knew all the good things those companies could do, but he didn't do a lot of homework in the management and how they pursued their goals. And the end result was that I wrote along

with him up to a very high number. I had over $10 million in technology stocks. The cost, when it all collapsed in 2002 or whatever it was, all that $10 million turned down to nothing. So it was a very, very bitter lesson.

Oh, yeah. To be careful how you invest. So then I started studying what people like Warren Buffett did or Peter Lynch and other people who had been very successful in the stock market. The first thing I learned from Warren Buffett is that he avoids technology stocks because they're too volatile and that's not his style. Yeah. He likes those insurance stocks.

Oh, yes, he does because they provide what he calls float. Yeah. That is the you pay your premium today and then there's no claim for the next 10 or 15 years. In the meantime, you have that money to invest free of interest. Yeah. Where he built his empire. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty brilliant, right?

It is. Yeah. But you find that he and his partner, Charlie Munger, would study all of the possibilities they had, and they reject about 90 to 95% of the possibilities and spent a long time looking very carefully at what they were going to invest in. And they're both very, very smart men.

And even they made some mistakes. But what you realize is that investing like that takes a lot of work. You have to be pretty smart, and then you have to spend a lot of time digging into, to what you can invest in. So Warren Buffett comes into the office and he sits at his desk and he spends all day long reading annual reports of companies

trying to find something that fits his requirements. Peter Lynch did another way. His view was that we all can be good investors if we just pay attention to what's happening around us. So one day his wife went to the grocery, store and she saw a display for Haynes undergarments. And she bought one. She brought it home to Peter and he looked at it and he talked to her and he went to the

store himself and he saw that Haynes had found a new way to distribute their products. Most of the people who sold clothes like they did sold them in department stores. But these people found a way to sell them in grocery stores. And the difference is that women were. and go to the grocery store almost every day, but they only go to department store maybe once a month, once every other week. So they had a way of showing their products to people much more quickly. So that was Peter Lynch's example of what's right in front of you, just keep your eyes open. But then he also wrote a book, giving you all the details of how you have to check the capital and the income

and the depreciation and the capacity of management. There's a lot of work to be done. And so ultimately, I came to the conclusion that most people, including me, are better off investing in an index fund that is a mutual fund that mirrors the stocks and the index. The indexes are ways of measuring how different classes of securities are doing. So you have a whole range of mutual funds and some of the index funds in the sense that they use an index to follow. And my recommendation at the end of the day was get a broad S&P 500 index and just take the benefit of the market rising.

And don't try to pick an individual winner because that takes a broad S&P 500 index and just take the benefit. more work that most of us are willing to do. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, generally overall, those indexes usually tend to go up. I mean, there might be bare markets, but overall, right? They pretend to go upward. Overall, the market tends to go up over time. Yeah. Because it reflects the earnings of the companies that are in the market, and most of them

are profitable, make money, and their value rises. and the ones that fail, they disappear and they come out of the index. You keep holding the winners and drop out the losers. Yeah. I mean, that's really smart because, you know, if you own stock and I'm just going to use an extreme example, one company, let's say. Maybe you own Sears at one point in time. I think I can't remember Sears filed bankruptcy or they were bought out by a trust fund, which is the same thing, not a trust fund, but a monetary fund, which is the same thing. They eventually cut it up and sell it to bankruptcy court and then buy it back,

pennies on the dollar from themselves. But so you invested in Sears or something or something that went bankrupt, Kodak, maybe, I don't know. The, you know, you'd lose all your money that you'd invested, right? Exactly. But if you do what you're talking about, buying into, you know, a thing that compiles all the top funds and an index, then you're, you've got some bulwark against that and some safety. That's right.

They say the losers drop away and the winners keep going. That's what they do. And the index follows the winners. That's what they tell me after 18 years of being in podcasting and watching the millions of podcasts go full zombie. And why is this important to pass on to your grandchildren? Do you have some tools or vehicles that you utilize, maybe trusts or other funds, other ways of transferring that money tax-free to, or at least, you know,

minimizing taxes in some sort of vehicle to a financial vehicle so that it could be inherited by your kids. What I've done is when one of my grandkids was born, one of my great grandkids now is born, I usually set up a trust and I put in a certain amount of money and we just leave it there. And of course, the kid doesn't have to go to college for 20 years. So there's 20 years of accumulation and reinvestment. And the end result is that most of these kids start out, let's say, with $100,000, and by the time they already go to college, there's a half a million dollars in that fund.

So they've all been able to go to college. And that's been very satisfying for me. That is awesome. That is awesome. Now, you entitled the book, All of Some Fun Here, You Entitled the Book, Primer on Investing for My Grandchildren. Did you not want to invest for your children, children, children? My children have already had the benefit all that. Oh.

Now, a new group coming up. Now, are you taking the people who want to be adopted as your grandchild? Because I'm open for an inheritance. You might get some calls and emails after this. But I just thought I just had some fun with the title there. And, you know, it also mentions young adults. Is this a sort of style of investing you would recommend for young adults? to eventually build the nest egg so that when they do hit those older ages,

they can retire and enjoy their work. Yes, I think, I mean, the idea is it's for my grandkids. They were the initial audience. Then I thought about it. I said there's lots of other people like my grandchildren, the same age, the same situation. They just came out of college. They're just starting to work.

And the first thing they have to learn is to start saving money, which is not easy because there's so many things to spend on. But you have to start saving to build a nest egg. That's true. That's true. Otherwise, my dad used to do this funny thing. He loved in studying, investing, and got a lot of books on it that I read when I was a kid. And he would do this thing with you where he'd say,

would you rather have a penny every day with compound interest for 10 years? Or would you rather have, I can't remember what the figure was, a million dollars or something maybe? And we would always go, you know, a million dollars, whatever it was. Don't quote me, folks. I'm just doing a show here. I'm time to look it up. But it turns out the penny compounded interest every day,

you know, far exceeds whatever that number was that he would utilize. I believe it was a million dollars or something like that. I don't know. I'd have to go back to the book. It could be. Yeah. I'm getting cold. Remember what was told to me as child.

Yeah. Power of compound interest is. Power of compound interest. And same thing with compound investing, right? Yes. If you can get a, if you can beat. market rates or the passbook savings rate, which is really low these days. When I was growing up, when I was a kid, the past book savings rate was 6% in the bank.

But now I think it's, I don't know, one, two, three percent or something. It's very low. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they just send me notices on it. And I'm just go, that's cute. Thanks for that. PayPal also does that to me.

They send me a thing like, you've got some cash back. $3. Wow. Wow. Wow. I'm going to write home to Mom. Bob, guess what? I got $3 today for spending $50 grand a month in fucking three. Now you're a multi-book author. How many books do you have?

I have three now. I have this book, Building Your Nest Egg. Then I have a book called A Thousand Kisses, which is a story of the family's flight from Nazi Germany to the United States. And then I have another book called Growing the Grass the Nettle, which is a story about a good friend of mine, Bishop Swing, a remarkable guy, still alive at 90s, still working away. Really a wonderful man. And now the story A Thousand Kisses of Families Escape from Nazis to New Life, this is about your family story, correct?

Yes, it is. Wow. That's got to be a hell of a story, right? It is. My father was a successful doctor in Vienna. A mother was from a large family that all the oldest restaurant in Vienna. And we were happy living a very nice life when the Nazis came in an extastria. Were you guys in that sound of music video? No, I'm just kidding.

I'm sure it wasn't quite as fun as the movie. But yeah, that's quite a story to tell about your life. I mean, you know, you probably wouldn't be here. Maybe if the Nazis had caught these folks and done the horrible things that they were doing to people back then. It doesn't seem like much has changed. Sometimes it's just a different title of humans being horrible to each other. So work on that, folks. That's why we have the Chris Fosha to make the world better.

But no, it's great you wrote that book. Gras the Nettle, appreciating the bold life of William E. Swing. When did you first start writing books? So when did you first, maybe, you know, have the epiphany that, yeah, I think I have a knack for this. to do this? I think it was about 15 years ago when I wrote a thousand kisses. And what happened is my mother had died and we went to her apartment and we found in the apartment a bag full of letters and other documents that they had saved. And they were the letters that they had exchanged in 1938 when my father had fled Austria and my mother was still there trying to get

permission to leave. Then all of that is they wrote trying to get somewhere because no countries were accepting refugees in Europe. And they all had good excuses, but they just wouldn't take them. And finally, by sort of a happy coincidence, we got a visa to go to Brazil as tourists. The only problem with being a tourist is you can't work. We were in Brazil for a couple of years. Parents weren't able to work, but they had a fee. my sister and me and themselves. So I finally found a job way out in the country away from civilization. And we were doing fine until the guy who ran the factory,

who owned the factory hired a German who was himself a Nazi sympathizer. So he then turned my father over to the authorities, and we had to go find some way to get out. But fortunately, because there was a war, raging in Europe, none of the people who would usually leave Europe to come to the United States were able to come. The quota opened up in the United States for Hungarians. My father was Hungarian, so we were able to come in on the quota as normal approved immigrants. Got to the United States. My father had to go through the licensing to become a doctor in the

United States and did that. Then he had to be a resident and an intern and all those things, which was okay for a kid, but a little harder for a guy in his 40s who had two kids to feed. So they went through some difficult time. But eventually, the United States is such a great country. If you're willing to work hard, you can land on your feet and do okay. And we did. That's awesome.

And then what did you guys do when you got here? My father, I say, went through the drill to become a doctor in the United States, eventually opened a practice and managed to do okay and get me into school. Then I won a college scholarship. I went to a good college. Got out, I got to law school on a GI Bill. And then I got to practice and made enough money to get my kids to school. So it all worked out very well.

That's awesome. That is just freaking. awesome. You know, what a life. My great-grandfather came from Nazi Germany in the 1800s. Warman Colt went out and recruited him to move to Utah. And he came here without knowing a lick of English. When they dumped him off of the train at Union Pacific Station in downtown Salt Lake City, he couldn't speak English. He spoke German. And he went to work at one of the famous feed mills that's still around. And so here I am. So without his journey, that he took and the dangers of what he, I'm sure he went through and coming over here probably

on a ship. They didn't have planes back then, folks. Just so you know, Jenz of yours. They're like, what, what are ships? I'm just teasing you guys. But, you know, he made quite the journey. I mean, he gave up everything. He came here with whatever he could carry on his back. I had $3 in his pocket. Yeah, that sort of thing. And, you know, if you or I came to a city where we couldn't speak English nowadays, they probably, I don't know, they'd have a security or something. But, But they took him. They found some other Germans in town that could speak his language, you know, because it was really small back then.

And they took him in, they fed him, they gave him a job, they gave him housing, took care of him. And here we are today. So I wouldn't be here without it. But these stories are amazing, the journeys, the risks that our families took. It's pretty, I don't know that I have that sort of gumption, would you? Oh, you're right. You're right. We're much softer.

I'm like, ah, I'm not getting up. of my lazy boy. So is there any future books that you have? Maybe you're working on. You want to tease out to people? I'm thinking of writing a book about civics. But I don't know. We'll see.

My kids want me to write a book about what I believe. Yeah. So that's the other alternative. Civics, you know, civics are really in trouble. A lot of people, you know, I'm just, you go online and everyone quotes the Constitution, but clearly no one's read it because I've read it. And they'll be like, yeah, the Constitution says that you can own tanks and meet with aliens. And you're like, that's not in there.

I just checked it again, and it's not in there. I mean, most journalists we have on the show, and, you know, they adhere to high journalistic standards. At least the ones we have on. We don't have Fox News people on. But we have high journalistic standards. And they keep a copy of the Constitution on them. And nowadays, it just seems like no one has read the Constitution. no one has read the federal's papers.

And if you're out there and you haven't read the federal's papers, please read them. It's the detailed kind of journalistic account of how they develop the Constitution, why they developed the Constitution the way it was, why they set up several things. So I think if you did a book on civics that helped educate people, and then the one thing a lot of local governments have been doing to make sure their people are stupid and they keep working coal mines is they've made it so they don't teach civics anymore. So a lot of schools don't teach it anymore. And so that's why we have this whole dearth of adults that are like,

and you're like, yeah, yeah. So I would think a book like that would be great. We'll see. Yeah. Or, you know, whatever else you want to write about. Don't write about what I'm telling you to do. I don't know. But, you know, it's beautiful that you're writing,

you're helping your grandchildren, you're having an influence, you're passing it down. And hopefully they can learn from your example and do just as good. and pass it forward, pay it forward. That would be nice. That's the hope. That's the hope. Challenge really is just to keep my family together, enjoy each other and support each other.

Now you've got pretty well. Now you got quite the big family here. If I understand the math correctly, with your original wife, Maria, you had nine children. Yes. And then 12 grandchildren of that. And you're currently married to another woman, Susan, who has six children. So you technically have 15 children. Do I have that count?

That's right. And she has 12 grandchildren. You got 24 grandchildren? 24 grandchildren. And one great grandchild. Now, in the meantime, since that was written, I've had three great grandchildren. Yeah. And he's had another great grandchild.

So we're up to five great grandchildren. It's moving faster. Hope. Hope for more. I just got a call from the family. family and they just had one more where we're on the show. When you've got a litter that big in a basketball team or football team, you know, things move fast.

It is. Yeah. And I don't know if you know this. I don't know if you've done this, but they've done scientific studies on why people have kids. There's actually something that happens there. The scientists look at everything, don't they? No, they know. So as we go out, give people a final pitch out to order up your books and find out more about you on

the interwebs, whatever.com's, emails or social media you want to reference. Just I recommend that you look at this book, growing a nest egg, then a thousand kisses and grafts the nettle. My website is www.johnwiser.com. I'm delighted to have had the opportunity to speak to Chris and threw him to you. And we appreciate the opportunity to have you on the show. And please come back with future workings that you do there. and making everything better. Thanks, John. Thank you very much, Chris.

Thank you. Thanks to Arndon's for tuning in. Orup His Book, wherever fine books are sold, Growing Your Nest Egg, a Primer on Investing for My Grandchildren and Other Young Adults, out July 28, 2025 by John Wiser. And by the way, that's his grandchildren, not my grandchildren, because I don't have any grandchildren because I don't have any children. I let John fill in for me on having extra children. And so he filled in for my part there.

Thanks, John. Thanks for us for us for it says Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com, YouTube.com, Facebook.com. Always Chris Voss, one word. See you there. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.

You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning. Consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed. All right, John, great show. Wonderful.