The Pomp Podcast - #655 Lessons from the best investors in the world w/ William Green

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

William Green is the author of RICHER, WISER, HAPPIER: How the World’s Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. Green has interviewed many of the world’s most successful investors, exploring in depth the question of what principles, processes, insights, habits, and traits enable them to achieve spectacular success—and how we can profit by reverse engineering and replicating their winning ways. In this conversation, we discuss rational thinking, habits of the best investors, risk management, durability, concentrated portfolios, controlling human psychology, and emulating the greatest investors of our lifetime.  ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. William Green is the author of Richer, Wiser, Happier, How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. Green has interviewed many of the world's most successful investors, exploring in depth the question of what principles, processes, insights, habits, and traits enable them to achieve spectacular success, and how we can profit by reverse engineering and replicating their winning ways. In this conversation, William and I discuss rational thinking, habits of the best investors, risk management, durability, concentrated portfolios,

controlling human psychology, and emulating the greatest investors of our lifetime. I really, really, really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. They recently launched a new Bitcoin Rewards credit card. It's a regular credit card that when you swipe it, you get Bitcoin back rather than cash back or airline miles. I'm really enjoying using mine. There's some sort of psychological element to wanting to spend money so that you earn more Bitcoin back. It's kind of crazy. Go check them out at

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it's good for you to retirewithchoice.com slash Pomp. All right, let's get this episode with William. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression

of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got William here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. Oh, I'm delighted to be here. Sorry, I was just taking a sip at the exact wrong moment. No problem. You wrote Richer, Wiser, Happier. And after I read this book, I knew that I had to get you on the podcast because there's so many ideas that are packed into one single book that I think not only speak to an individual that is interested in investing in markets, but also has ramifications from understanding life and kind of how to just be happier, as the title says. So let's just start with why did you want to write the book, right? Like, what was the purpose when

you said that? You said, you know, I'm going to write this book. What was the thought process? I really just wanted to share the best ideas that I'd got from interviewing the greatest investors over really the last 25 years. Because I was in this very strange position where originally as a journalist writing for magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and Money, I got to interview all of these legendary investors. And then over the years writing books, I also got to interview these amazing investors. And so I just was very fortunate that I had access to a lot of these extraordinary minds. And then I thought, well, okay, that's great. So I can interview them about how to get rich. But then I was thinking, well, how cool is it if I can also talk to them about

how to think better and how to live more wisely and what's worked in their lives? And how do they recover from setbacks and public failures? And how do they deal with their mistakes? How do they deal with stress? How do they balance their family life and their work life? And what do they figure out is actually really important in life? Once you hit the jackpot and you make all the money in the world? Do you actually discover that money is important or isn't that important? And so if it isn't that important, what is important? And so it gave me this incredible opportunity in writing this book, basically to go back to the smartest investors I've interviewed and re-interview them or interview them more deeply at great length about these questions that have really been on

my mind for many years. Because what I'm trying to figure out is, yeah, okay, so I want to get richer and I want to be financially independent and secure, but I also want to figure out how to live, how to live a successful life and what actually constitutes a successful and abundant life. And so partly in writing the book, what I'm doing is answering that question for myself. I'm trying to think through these very complicated questions. And partly what I'm doing is literally I'm just answering this question for other people. And I'm trying to share the ideas, the insights that I've learned from interviewing all of these great investors. Part of what has me so excited about this conversation is when I was reading the book,

there was multiple points where I said, oh, there's got to be more there. I know he has more information. And he's done his best to kind of condense all of this value into this one paragraph or this one chapter. And so maybe let's start with some of what I'd consider the more overarching themes of the book, and then we'll dig into some of the examples and you can kind of elaborate on them. But the first one is this idea that much of investing and understanding markets is less about actually pursuing profit and making money, but it's more so the pursuit of being a rational, clear thinker and understanding how to make better decisions. Explain a little bit about kind of what appears to be a counterintuitive learning that you had where the best investors,

they actually are pursuing thinking and kind of rational thought rather than just pure profits. Yeah. In some sense, if you think about investing, what you're trying to do is say, the future is unknowable. And yet I'm going to try to make decisions about how to act in a rational way so that I stack the odds in my favor of having a successful outcome. So everything is changing. Everything is impermanent. Everything is inconstant. The future is unknowable. And yet we have to make decisions. And you have to try to make good decisions that stack the odds in your favor. And that's the case, whether you're thinking about the stock market and what to buy, or whether you're thinking about whether to get married,

or whether to have a kid or whether to move home. So it's all really about decision-making. And so what kind of fascinated me was the idea that the greatest investors are an incredible filter for thinking about how to make rational decisions. And what gradually occurred to me is the reason why they're such extraordinary decision-makers is because they have skin in the game. And so if you're a journalist like me, or you're an academic with tenure at a really good college or something like that, or you're an economist prognosticating about the future of the economy, you don't really have a tremendous amount of skin in the game. If I'm wrong about something, I tend not to pay a huge cost, a huge price. But if you're managing a billion dollars

or $50 billion or $100 billion, as some of the people I'm writing about do, there's an enormous cost if you're wrong, and also tremendous rewards if you're right. I think part of what happens is that the sheer amount of skin in the game forces them to be tremendous rational thinkers because there's such a price to pay if they're wrong. And I think what's also really interesting about the greatest investors is because of those high stakes, they're tremendous pragmatists. And so if there's an idea or an insight or a way of thinking that helps them, that they discover in any area, in any field, they'll borrow it. And so they're looking at, say, the world of mathematics or the world of physics or biology or sports or mindfulness meditation. And they're

just saying, oh yeah, I'll grab that. That's really helpful. So that to me makes them an incredibly useful filter because really they're teaching us how to make decisions in a very uncertain world. And so part of what I'm setting out to do in the book is to say, well, here's how they do it. Here's how they stack the odds in their favor in all of these different ways. One of the key pieces to this decision-making is not thinking in a binary manner, but thinking much more probabilistically. And you talk a little bit about it in the book. How do you see that being trained? Or are these people who innately are probabilistic thinkers? Is it a book they read? Is it a class they took? Is it something they learn over time and then they pursue

constantly reinforcing that? How does that come about? Yeah. I once had, I asked this question of Howard Marks, who managed something like $140, $150 billion. And I was basically sort of saying, so can I learn to think more probabilistically? And it sort of became pretty clear that he didn't think I could, I would say. But it seems to be something where certain people are just wired to think in terms of probabilities. And I do think it's a talent that certain people have. They're more wired to think in terms of probabilities. But I actually think, like many things, once you become aware that there are different ways to think, you're like, oh, that's completely obvious. So, I mean, just to give you an example, my mother I was talking to earlier today, and she said to me, my cousin who's living in Israel is trying to decide whether to get her third vaccine shot or not. And she's worried about it because she's a really smart person.

She reads all this stuff about the dangers of the third shot or the benefits of it. And she's just trying to weigh things. And I'm immediately turning to what Howard Marks said to me about various things. So Howard said to me at one point, I'm always thinking, where's the mistake in what I'm doing? Where's the mistake? And he's always thinking, what's the downside? If I'm wrong, what's the downside? And so even just that way of thinking where you're saying, OK, so there's a certain downside if the vaccine backfires. here's how well I could get. But there's a probably even greater downside if I get COVID.

Like, yeah, so I know that there can be some complications if I get the vaccine and I have a bad reaction to it. But there are some really shitty complications to getting COVID, which include dying. And so just that way of thinking of, okay, so here's this decision where I need to think about the downside, where I need to think about survival. So what you really want to do, both in markets and in life is avoid catastrophe, right? You want to stay in the game. And so that's something that you're trying to do when you invest. There's also something you're trying to do when you're trying to survive a pandemic.

So that sort of filter of just being aware of simple questions that you want to ask, like, okay, where's the mistake here? What's the probability that I'm wrong? What's the downside if I'm wrong? What's the consequence if I'm wrong? Those are things that I think you really can learn. You can you can learn to think in that way. And it doesn't it doesn't particularly come naturally to me. But I think having spent so much time with great investors, I've I've learned just to ask some of those basic questions.

So if if, for example, I was talking about this with someone recently, I had I had a couple of bottles of wine with a great investor in New York City. And I and I get the train home and I'm my car's waiting at the train station. I'm trying to decide whether to drive home or not. And I'm thinking, I'm probably sober. I'm pretty sure I'm sober. But then you're thinking, but if I'm wrong, if I'm deluding myself, what's the downside? What's the chance of catastrophe? And so then I end up calling my son and my son kind of picks me up and I get a lift home

and I leave my car at the train station. And of course, then I forget that I've left my car at the train station for the next 36 hours, which I wouldn't advise people to do. But just that way of thinking in terms of the downside, in terms of of trying to avoid catastrophe, that's that's a very distinctive way of thinking that I think people like Howard Marks have. And that's that's definitely learnable, I think. Another key takeaway, I think, is this idea that, which is actually an old idea around circle of competence or understanding where you have an edge and where you don't and electing to play the games that you can win and you think you can win over and over and over again

because of your edge versus not. Is this something that almost every great investor has or is it possible for a great investor actually to go into markets where they don't have an edge and because they're a great investor, a great thinker, they can be successful? I think pretty much without exception, the great investors I've met have this tendency to stick to games that they specifically can win. And this was something that came through to me very clearly when I spent time with Ed Thorpe, who was not only an extraordinary hedge fund manager who didn't have a losing quarter in 20 years with his hedge fund, but also figured out how to count cards and beat the casino at blackjack.

He was kind of the inventor of card counting, as I understand it, then figured out how to beat the casino at roulette. So here's a guy who's the ultimate game player. And he said to me, look, if I don't have an edge, I don't play. And so when I talked to him about this question, I said to him, well, so how can I tell if I have an edge? And he said, well, if you don't have a rational reason to think that you have an edge, then you almost certainly don't. And that, for me, was quite unsettling because I started to think, well, so when it comes to buying individual stocks, for example, do I have an edge? And I'm pretty certain that I don't. I mean, it's pretty clear to me that I don't have the best temperament for this, that I don't necessarily have the technical knowledge.

I don't have the patience to analyze balance sheets and the like. I'm not that interested in going through the numbers really patiently and seeing whether there's a discrepancy or a lie or something in a footnote. And that's just not what interests me. And so that, for me, was a really profound realization, just to learn from Ed Thorpe, OK, so if I don't have an edge at this particular game of picking individual stocks, let me just not play that game. That's not a game that I'm likely to win.

And so occasionally I violate it. And I violated it again a couple of weeks ago and bought an individual stock. And it kind of tortures me because I'm aware that it's an irrational and stupid thing for me to do, that I'm much better off just giving the money to someone else who's better equipped to win that game. And so for your listeners, I just think that's an incredibly important idea of sticking to games that you're equipped to win and avoiding games that you're really not equipped to win. And it sounds so obvious, but most of us don't do it. And so what's really striking is how many of the great investors end up telling you, no, no, you should just index. And that, in a way, is the most rational thing for most of us to do. Howard Marks says most investors should index most of their money. And so part of my default position in investing my own money is that I own a couple of index funds because I sort of figure I should try not to delude myself into thinking this is a game I'm likely to win.

But then I also figure I've spent 25 years interviewing many great investors. And so I do figure I might have some edge in terms of picking good fund managers because I know a lot of them. And so it's possible that I have an edge there. And so I do own about three actively managed funds. But I think that, again, is a really good filter of just asking yourself, do I have a rational reason to believe that I have an edge? And let me stick to games in which I do have an edge. What's fascinating to me is you've talked to the best investors in the world. You've studied them for 20 plus years. You've literally written a book on them. You could sit here and articulate over and over and over again, playing the games that you have an edge and to

index, et cetera. But then you said that you bought a stock. And so walk through, is it more of like an entertainment thing? Is it something that you say, oh, in this one sector, I have an edge? Like walk me through kind of the psychological thought process, full well knowing that we're all human. And maybe it's just, hey, I know what I'm doing is probably not smart, but I want to do it. right? Like, how do you balance that? Yeah, it's slightly moronic. And I'll tell you what happened with me. And I can only tell you this slight sort of, I'll be a little bit enigmatic. I had a call a few weeks ago with a very legendary investor. And the only reason I'm being slightly enigmatic is because I don't think it was really on the record. And there were a couple of other

legendary investors. And it was clear to me, we were talking a bit about a Chinese company, a Chinese tech company that's been killed recently due to all of this regulation. And one of them who's like really a kind of genius was saying, you know, look, if I had the cash, I would go all in on this company. But I mean, this is a guy who's a multi-billionaire. It's not like he doesn't have the cash, but he doesn't want to sell his other stuff. um but so he had clearly bought a major position then another of the legendary investors on this call was like yeah i bought it yesterday so it's bound to keep going down and so i'm like oh shit you know like this it's exactly it's it exactly plays all of my prejudices all of my biases right

it's a it's a really contrarian bet on something that's been killed but that clearly has really good long-term prospects, the crowd is doing something so totally different. So it plays to all of my psychological desires to be smarter than the crowd and to applaud myself for being so contrarian and so smart. And then it also plays to my prejudices of the fact that it aligns me psychologically with a couple of the greatest investors of all time who I know have been buying this themselves. And so it just plays into sort of my vanity, my sense that I have like knowledge of what the greatest investors are doing. But the difficulty is they deeply understand it. And I partially understand it. And so when the shit hits the fan and it does

really badly, which of course it has immediately, I mean, it's not done terribly, but it's down probably 10, 15%, because Chinese tech stocks have been getting killed amid all this regulation. But they understand it well enough to have tremendous conviction. Whereas for me, I sort of understand it, but I'm just trying to be a smart aleck and outwit the crowd. And so it is a long-term investment. I'm thinking it's already a 10-year investment, but we'll see. I don't really have the confidence or the knowledge in the position. And so, I just had lunch with a great hedge fund manager and I was asking him about this. And he just said, he used to own this stock years ago. And he just said, yeah, I just realized I didn't know enough about China

and it's just not a game I want to play. And he's like, look, I only own 10 stocks or at the moment, 12 stocks. And he's like, that's just not a game I need to play. I don't need to understand that company. And there's much greater wisdom in his approach than in my approach. He has this temperamental ability to say, no, that doesn't play to my strengths and I don't need to own everything. And just because it seems really cheap and is in a market that's getting killed and because other great investors are buying it doesn't mean I should play that game. And so this is one of the reasons why I outsource my money for him to invest rather than do much myself because he just, he clearly has much more, much more emotional control and temperamental

control. But there is a part of me that quite likes owning two or three stocks. And so I do own three stocks at the moment. And one of them is Berkshire Hathaway, which, you know, is a very long-term investment. But I don't think it plays to my strengths. And I think, I think it also burns away a lot of emotional and intellectual energy for me because I spend too much time thinking about it. And I think it would be easier for me if I just said, no, it's not a game I'm playing. Let me just outsource that totally. But then I hear a conversation like that about something being super cheap and I have all of that access to all of these brilliant minds and I can't help myself and I violate my rule once again. I love the book and it makes me feel so

much better that you're human too. No problem. Deeply human, deeply flawed, I'm afraid. There are two people in the book, early in the book, that you talk about. One is Pabrai and the other is Templeton. And what I found fascinating is, in some way, the main idea of both of these investors is almost counter to each other, right? So Pabrai obviously has this whole idea of cloning. And he basically looks at Buffett and other great investors and says, hey, well, if they're the best, I'm just going to do what they do. And as closely as I can mirror what they do, then I'm likely to get similar type results. Uh, and it works out fantastically for, uh, Pabrai, but then Templeton basically says,

you know, in order to get, uh, better returns than the crowd, you have to do something that is different. And so in one way it is cloning in another way, it is doing something different. And so, is it fair to think about this from like do different than the crowd, but clone the best, or is there some other framework that you would use to kind of balance these two ideas? Yeah, it's a very complex and nuanced question. um and one of the things one of the things i was doing in writing those two chapters which

almost are diametrically opposite is saying yeah life is complicated and there are many paths up the mountain and so here's john templeton who literally when i said to him who influenced you he said nobody and i said not even your parents when he said no not even them he said i didn't want to listen to anybody he he solved the problem for himself of figuring out how to invest and that was partly because when he started, he said there was literally only one investing book that he could read. This is before even Ben Graham wrote his books, like The Intelligent Investor and Securities Analysis. And so, Templeton was kind of inventing the field in many ways. Part of what Templeton was doing was he had grown up in a small town in Tennessee, and he had seen

people lose everything during the Great Depression, for example, where he was at Yale at the time. And his father wrote to him and said, I literally can't spare a single dollar for your education. You're going to have to support yourself. And so he saw people in dire straits having to sell cheap. And so he looks at that and he says, well, so how would I get a bargain? Well, it's obvious that I'm going to get a bargain because people are desperately selling. And so what you want to do is always look for assets in places where people are desperate to sell. And that's how you're going to get cheap stuff.

So it was a brilliant logical deduction of his own based on what he'd seen in places like Tennessee during the Great Depression. For Manish Pabrai, who grew up as a relatively poor kid in the outskirts of Mumbai in India, he came to America, studied electrical engineering and the like and was a brilliant student and set up a tech consultancy firm. And then at a certain point, I think in 1994, he's in Heathrow Airport and he's just killing time. And he starts reading One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch and discovers Buffett's returns. And he sees Buffett's extraordinary returns and he thinks, wow, this guy's mastered the game of compounding. Let me reverse engineer what he did and figure out the rules of the game. And because Buffett and Munger have been so open about what they do, that's actually, it's this low-hanging fruit that's available for all of us, where you can say, well, let me reverse engineer what the smartest people have done, and then let me apply that fanatically, but in a way that suits my own temperaments and talent. So for Moniz, who's a brilliant, very analytical, very financially oriented, very unemotional guy, he was perfectly suited to reverse engineering Buffett and Munger, who were also brilliant mathematicians, supremely logical and supremely unemotional. And so it wasn't just that he was cloning them, that he was reverse engineering what they did. It was that he was cloning people who happened to be the masters of a game that he was particularly suited to. And so there's a nuance, even with cloning, that it's not just about taking ideas from people who

are smarter and wiser than us and have already figured stuff out. It's that you want to take ideas from people that actually work for your temperament and your talents. And so there was a time, for example, during the financial crisis in 2008, 2009, when Monash's hedge fund was down something like 67%. And I said to him, how did you deal with the stress? And he said, well, I don't have stress. And he's like, no, it was orgasmic. He said the stocks were so cheap that it was orgasmic. I had a blast. I knew I was going to make five times my money over the next few years. And so he has a temperament that's very similar to Munger's temperament. And they're close. And when I was interviewing Charlie Munger, Munger bought Wells Fargo at what he called the

bottom tick in 2009, March 2009. And the last thing you wanted to buy was a financial stock and the global financial system is melting down. And I said to him, was it difficult for you emotionally? And he said, no, no, not at all. I said, so you're not really fighting these emotions like fear and anxiety? And he said, no, no. And he said, Warren's wired exactly the same way. He doesn't feel those things either. And so you do want to clone. You want to figure out what people who are smarter and wiser and more experienced have done, how they've laid out the rules of investing, how they've laid out the rules of everything, really, because it's not just investing. You can apply the technique of learning to anything that you do, figuring out who does

this best and what do they do and what have they figured out about what works. But I think you have to do it in a way that suits your temperament. Yeah. One of the pieces to this that kind of continues is once you understand which game to play in terms of market selection or kind of strategy selection, it's also the balance between maximizing your returns versus building this like robustness or this ability to survive over a long period of time. And when you write about Howard Marks, one of the ideas is basically taking his portfolio, his life, his relationships, the business he builds, and also the assets he selects, and really not optimizing for ultimate maximization of the return and more so being able to weather any storm. And so there is this like,

again, kind of counterintuitive element to most investors when they see an asset, it's how much money can I make, right? You described earlier, well, maybe asking, well, how much money can I lose? Maybe one of the more important questions, but also if you understand that, how do you ensure that you do make money, right? If you just constantly are just avoiding risk and avoiding loss, it does that mean that you'll make money over the longterm or do you see it as a balance between maximizing versus also minimizing risk. Yeah. So it's a really profoundly important point. And so what Howard said to me is you really have to ask this question of how much are you pushing the limits? Are you overreaching? Are you investing money that you can't afford to lose?

Are you over leveraged? Are you indebted? Are you buying stuff you don't really understand? hand? How exposed are you to potential disaster? That's really key. And so you clearly, you have to live in a way where you're not overreaching so much that if this unknowable future turns against you, you're suddenly going to come undone. Not only are you going to be forced to sell, but you're not going to be able to handle the stress emotionally. And so that idea of not pushing the limits is a really key aspect of survival and resilience. But then he said something to me that had a huge impact on me, which is, he said, at a certain point, risk avoidance can become return avoidance. And so if you actually are so risk averse

that you don't bet, then you're also dooming yourself to return avoidance. You're just going to make no money. And so what he said to me is it's not about avoiding risk, eschewing risk totally. What it's about is taking intelligent risk. That's a really important nuance. And so when you look at the great investors, I would say in almost every case with the people I'm writing about, there's this kind of extreme patience where they're sitting on their hands, sitting on their hands, sitting on their hands. And then suddenly, the odds turn massively in their favor. There's a mispriced gamble, to use a wonderful phrase from Charlie Munger. And then they snatch it with what he calls gumption. And so, it's not about

taking masses of risk all the time. It's about waiting until the odds are in your favor. And so to a great extent, when you look at the rules of the game, as revealed by saints, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, the patron saints of money and markets, what they're really showing you is this combination of extreme patience and then extreme aggressiveness and then going back to doing nothing. And you saw this also with Howard Marks during the financial crisis, where Marks was extremely cautious around 2007, saw all of the ways in which the market was being reckless, saw that people were accepting deals that they never would usually accept because they were pushing the limits. And so he was very cautious. And then suddenly, when everything went to hell in 2008, 2009, he starts to get very

excited at the same point that everyone else is panicking. Because suddenly he sees that the valuations have shifted the odds so that suddenly the odds of making money are tremendously in his favor. And so there was this extraordinary period that he talked about with me that I write about in the book where over 15 weeks, at the pinnacle of fear and panic during the financial crisis, he and his partner, Bruce Koch, invested $500 to $600 million a week in toxic bonds that were imploding. And so here's a guy who's extremely cautious, who is a self-confessed warrior, and yet he's

waiting, waiting, waiting. Suddenly, the odds turn in his favor, and he bet something like $8 billion and made about a $9 billion profit during the financial crisis because of those bets that he made at the peak of the financial crisis. And so it's a very nuanced question, how you weigh risk and how you think about the necessity of surviving by not pushing the limits too much, but then also recognizing that there are moments where suddenly the odds turn in your favor and you really need to grab those opportunities. So there's this strange kind of contradictory talent for both being very cautious and then suddenly turning extremely aggressive. When you think about some of the other folks in the book, one of the other kind of themes is this idea of simplicity. And it comes up over and over again when you talk about Greenblatt or others. And this idea of simplicity, again, almost feels too easy, right? It feels like we as humans, in order to outperform, need to have the next great high-frequency

trading algorithm. But ultimately, it seems like most of these investors have relatively small portfolios. They're highly concentrated. They're very simple. They know their circle of competence. And so is that part of doing something different than the crowd, the fact that they just keep it really simple? Yeah, there's a guy I write about later in the book called Ken Schubenstein, who's a

very brilliant guy who's a friend of mine who actually quit the investment business to become a neurologist a couple of years ago, a very unusual guy with a great understanding of the brain. And he once said to me, the part of the problem for highly intelligent people is that they got rewarded at school and college for solving really complex problems. And so if you were someone like him, he got into medical school, he got an MBA, he's got so many degrees from Columbia, and he's taught at Columbia. And so, here was someone who was just rewarded for being really bright. And then you get in the investment business. And as I write in the book, it's not like Olympic diving where there are extra points for difficulty. The market

doesn't care whether you pick something that's really complex and subtle and required great sophistication. And so, you can actually make a tremendous amount of money just by keeping it simple. And the thing that brought this home to me really beautifully was when I interviewed Joel Greenblatt, who famously made 40% a year for 20 years at Gotham Capital. So he's one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time. And when I interviewed him at his home in the Hamptons, was quizzing him about simplicity and about what his secrets of success were, he just said to me, look, it all comes down to this. All you're doing is valuing a business and then buying it for much less than it's worth.

And he said, everything else is really just nonsense. None of it matters. And he said, for example, if I'm buying a supermarket, for example, in the Midwest, why do I care if they're having a sovereign debt crisis in Greece, for example? And so he said, people are reading the newspaper and they're getting swept up in all of this news that's actually totally irrelevant. And so he said what he's trying to do, he's not trying to predict what's going to happen with inflation or what's going to happen with the stock market, which is kind of unknowable. Nobody can predict whether it's going up or down.

All he's trying to do is find a business, value it, and then buy it for much less than it's worth. And he said that's an incredibly clarifying thing to do because you suddenly realize that most of what everybody else is doing is nonsense. And it enables you to simplify your entire pursuit of investment success. And what's fascinating to me is that I actually think you can apply this in pretty much every area of life. So you can say, I interviewed Dean Ornish, this famous expert on health, for example, who figured out the Ornish diet for how to reverse heart disease. And basically, Ornish has spent like 45 years studying nutrition and exercise and all of these other things to figure out how you reverse heart disease and other chronic ailments.

And he summed it all up in something like eight words where basically he was very close to Steve Jobs, who's one of his closest friends. And he said that Steve Jobs had the same attitude that Jobs used to say to him, I'm prouder of what I've left out of our technology than what I put in. It was always about simplicity, simplifying everything, reducing complexity. and so this to me becomes a kind of master principle is how do you simplify things so that you're you're getting at the essence of everything and and one of the most beautiful examples to me which i write about in the book which people may think i'm nuts but i think it's a perfect example of this is there are 613 commandments in the old testament and nobody can remember what these 613 commandments are and so then you look at the 10 commandments and you're like okay so we needed

this top 10 list. You reduced it to 10. And then there's this wonderful thing where there was this great sage, Hillel, who was asked by some convert to sum up the entire Old Testament while standing on one leg. And he said, do not do to others what you wouldn't have them do to you. It's just the golden rule. And he said, all the rest is commentary. Now go learn. And so it basically just becomes love thy neighbor. Just behave in a decent way. Just be kind. Don't do to people what you wouldn't want them to do to you. And it struck me that that's a kind of master principle. If you can reduce the complexity of the Old Testament, of the entire Old Testament into that one rule of just behave decently to other people, because you wouldn't want them to behave meanly to you.

And you can reduce all of nutrition science to eight words. And you can reduce all of investing down to value a business and buy it for less. That's a really important principle. And so part of what I'm doing in the book is I'm trying to find these kind of master principles that apply in multiple areas of life, because it makes me think, well, if this applies just as well in spirituality and in medicine and health as in investing, it's probably true and it's probably powerful. And I think that's the case with cloning as well, that when you look at something like cloning, just this idea of borrowing the best ideas from people who are smarter and wiser than you rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. You see it in every area. You see it in literature,

in painting, in music, in medicine, and you see it in business as well. I remember Charlie Munger talking about Walmart and saying that Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, just was absolutely fanatical about taking the best ideas from other businesses and then just using them himself. And it was his fanaticism that set him apart. And I think that's often the case with the most successful people. It's not necessarily the principles, their operating principles are different than the rest of us. It's this element of fanaticism.

It's when you find a concept that works like cloning or like simplicity, you really want to go a thousand percent on it. If it's a really smart idea that resonates with you, go big on it. And that's, that's definitely what I see with people like, like Manish Pabrai when, when he discovered, um, cloning, he, he just went crazy. He was like, why would I not do this? And he's like, if nobody else will do it, let me do it. It makes, it makes so much sense when you put it with such clarity. Uh, one of the other ideas that you talk through is, uh, when writing about Nick's sleep, um, this idea that basically, uh, don't focus on the things with the, uh, or you

have to focus on things with the longest shelf life, not necessarily the things that come and go. And then you even go into this idea of being willing to withstand suffering, right? If you really understand the long-term, almost the short-term doesn't matter. And that also kind of plays into this idea, Tom Gaynor, where you talk about the best investors build habits that compound over time. And so as you start to kind of think through this, it feels like most investors, that long-term thinking ends up actually putting them at ease in the short-term and they focus more on process than outcome, understanding that if I do the process correctly, I have a long-term time horizon. I am likely to end up winning more than I'm losing. Is that, is that a fair

characterization? Yeah, I, this is a really important idea. I ended up writing about this guy, Nick Sleep, who you mentioned, who's a fascinating character who Nick and Nick and his partner, Zach, who they retired as hedge fund managers at the ripe old age of 45 and decided that they would spend the second half of their lives giving away the money, basically. They set up a hedge fund called Nomad that they regarded almost as an intellectual and spiritual and metaphysical experiment where they thought, well, let's just do everything in the highest quality way. So we're going to do everything totally different than the sort of short term, get rich quick strategies on Wall Street. They were like, we're going to treat our shareholders

incredibly fairly. We're going to be really long-term, really patient. And so they set up this fund, Nomad, and they beat the market by something like 804 percentage points over the next 13 years. So it's an incredible experiment in how to do things in a very hyper-rational, hyper-patient way that's the opposite of what Wall Street did. And so what's really fascinating is it becomes this morality tale about the benefits of deferred gratification. So what Nick pointed out to me is most people on Wall Street, they're fixated on all of this short-term stuff, like, is this company going to beat its quarterly earnings estimates? So they're focused literally on information for the next 12 weeks, or will it beat its

estimates for the year? And so people are constantly fixated on the short-term, and they sit there with their four Bloomberg terminals, which are sort of four Bloomberg streams, which are pumping all of this material at them constantly, these flashing figures of what the latest numbers are, what the latest news alerts were. And what Nick and Zach did, they literally put their Bloomberg terminal, their one terminal, on a low side stool with no chair, so that it was physically uncomfortable for them to sit at this thing. Zach said, at a certain point, you would just say, oh, my back's And you'd have to you'd have to move away from this very ephemeral short term information, because what they wanted to do was to play what they call this long, simple game where they would just own a handful of companies that they understood incredibly well and that had good long term prospects.

And so this has led them to invest enormously, for example, in Amazon and Costco. And so both of them, when they retired, I mean, Nick's stock portfolio when he retired was a nine-figure stock portfolio. His personal portfolio was literally Costco, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway. That was it, a three-stock portfolio. Now he owns four stocks. Zach owned about six stocks, but most of it was in Amazon, Costco, and Berkshire. He had more than 70% of his personal portfolio in Amazon. And it was just because they were playing this long game.

And they were saying, well, Amazon has an amazing destination because, look, they keep treating their customers better and better. They keep giving them more and more value, more and more efficiency, faster and faster service, cheaper and cheaper products. And so the destination is likely to be good in 10, 15, 20 years. So in a world where most people are focusing on the short term, on what's going to happen over the next 12 weeks or six months or a year, it became an enormous advantage for them to focus on the long term. And that turns out to be true, I think, in every area of your life. If you think

about things like studying college, I mean, it's a pain in the butt to be studying really hard to become a doctor or a lawyer or an investment banker or whatever. It's hard, right? But the rewards come down the road. Same with exercise. I can't stand exercise, but clearly it has tremendous benefits. And so I have to do it. Same with dieting or controlling what you eat. You're taking the short-term pain because of long-term benefits. And I think there's a wonderful thing where Charlie Munger had said that if you're not born with a deferred gratification gene, it's very hard to be a great investor. And I think that's true. I think you have to be able to focus on the reward that's going to come down the road if you adopt good habits. And that applies

in every area of your life. So you want to always be thinking, well, am I doing something that's leading me towards this good destination in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years? And what are the inputs that will get me to that destination? And because most people are focusing on the short term, The more you can shift your life and your investing toward that focus on the long term, the more I think it becomes an enormous competitive advantage. The last topic I want to talk about comes out of a little bit around Arnold Vandenberg, where it's essentially being rich is not just financial, right? There is this idea of money, but also happiness, kind of a clarity of mind or a calmness, a

peace of mind as well. And obviously you titled the book Richer, Wiser, Happier. Around happiness, how many of these guys, and they all tend to be guys, are happy versus they are pursuing something else? And is there anything that really stuck out to you as you talk to the best investors in the world around happiness and kind of the non-financial aspects of their life? Yeah, I think one of the greatest lessons that I've got personally from spending so much time with these investors is that you realize that it's hard to be happy unless you're deeply aligned with who you are. And so when I look at people like Mohnish Pabrai, who I think is a happy person, or my friend Guy Spear, who I write about just briefly, but who I helped write his autobiography, The Educational Value Investor, or someone like Charlie Munger, who I interviewed, I

would say for the most part, they've been very happy because they're deeply aligned with who they are in all of its idiosyncrasies. And I think what the money does more than anything for these people who've made tremendous amounts of money is that it gives them this independence, this ability to live in alignment with who they are. But it doesn't shield them from these other problems that all of us have in life. It doesn't shield them from difficult relationships with their wives or their kids getting sick or their own health. They've all had problems. You look at someone like Charlie Munger, his son died at the age of nine. I mean, Munger has had an incredible, happy, rich, successful 97-year life,

but he lost a son to leukemia. He lost an eye. He's lost two wives. You know, he had one marriage ended in divorce, and his second wife died after many years of marriage. And so one of the reasons why I write about that is that I think that gives you a certain indication that however much money you have, you really need to focus on where you're going to get your resilience, where you're going to get your equanimity.

And so I write a lot, for example, about Bill Miller, who's this great investor who went through hell during the financial crisis. And Miller is obsessed with Stoic philosophy, which resonates with a lot of the great investors. And one of the reasons why Stoic philosophy is so useful, both for investing and in life, is that what the Stoics focused on is saying, well, I can't necessarily control all of the external circumstances in my life, like what happens with COVID variants or what happens with the economy or what happens with inflation or whether the stock market goes up or what happens with my family's health or anything like that. But let me focus on the things that I can control, like my own attitude of mind, behaving honorably, behaving decently to people, treating people well. And so they were constantly focusing on distinguishing between what they can and can't control. And so for Bill Miller, one way that he got equanimity after the disaster of the financial crisis was saying, well, I can't really control what people are going to say about me. But I can control being honest about the mistakes I've made, learning from the mistakes I've made.

So in his case, diversifying a little more because he said, I didn't realize how catastrophically wrong I could have been because he'd only been right for decades, basically. And suddenly, he was incredibly wrong. And so he learned from his mistakes. He had good humor about his own flaws. And he really worked hard at the process of doing the right thing in the way that he invested. He said, look, if I continue to buy stocks for less than their worth, I think that over the long run, that works. And so he's had this extraordinary recovery over the last decade or so, where he's been one of the most successful fund managers in the world over the last 12, 13 years by just sticking with it, persevering. And so I think there are clues

there about how to behave. You know that however rich you are, however successful you are, however famous you are, however handsome you are, however lucky you are, you're still subject to what Hamlet called the slings and arrows of fortune. We all go through the ring sooner or later. So you have to work on your equanimity, have to work on your peace of mind, which is one reason why so many of the great investors focus on things like meditation and exercise because they understand that it's really important to have peace of mind, both in markets and in life because you're going to go through the ringer at a certain point. I think one of the other clues you get from seeing the great investors lives is that the ones who are happiest tend to have a

purpose beyond themselves. And I think the ones who are just focused on maximizing their own wealth and their own brand name and their own fame, I think there's something very stunted and limited about that. And so one of the reasons why I write about Arnold Vandenberg as the final person to focus on in the book, is that he really embodies for me what it means to have a truly successful life and truly abundant life. And that includes not just the fact that he's been a very successful investor over many decades, but the fact that he has incredible relationships, really deep, wonderful relationships, not only with his family, but with the people he works with and with friends. And he's very focused on his health. I spent a couple of days with him in Austin,

Texas and he was virtually starving himself except for when he was eating like sort of celery and beetroot smoothies because he said he wanted to get back to his fighting weight and he went about 40 pounds less than me already and still wanted to lose about five pounds. So he's really focused on fitness and health. He's now 82 and he does so much hot yoga that he could put his foot above his head here you know while standing um so so relationships are absolutely key um health is key finding finding ways to share with others philanthropically finding ways to share your time your your your love your talents whatever it is with other people absolutely key so so i'm not looking at the greatest investors and saying oh look they're all really rich and so as a result

they must be happy that that would be really dumb but i think because they're very rational they really think a lot about what it takes to have a happy life. And they give you really important clues about these things like resilience, equanimity, sharing with others, getting beyond your own ego, your own wealth. But at the same time, understanding that the money isn't irrelevant because what it gives you is this independence, this ability to live in a way that's aligned with who you truly are. And part of it for me, part of the lesson for me is I don't think I actually need to be vastly wealthy to live in alignment with who I am. I need to know that that's really important and that there are certain things that play to my skills and my interests and

my temperament. And let me focus on that because being truly aligned with who I am is clearly really important because again, it goes back to what we were saying before. You want to play games that you're equipped to win. And so I think one of the key lessons for me from seeing the great investors, the ones who are happier and more successful is to decide when I'm appraising a project to do or who to work with or where to live or what type of home to live, is it deeply in alignment with who I am, with what I care about? And I don't think you have to be vastly rich to do that. It helps to have money. But I think just knowing that that deep alignment with your idiosyncrasies and your priorities, knowing that that's key is really helpful to me anyway.

When you think about moving forward, you have these conversations obviously for the book, but you also have these conversations with great investors all the time. Are there questions that you have left or questions that are unanswered, things that you're now kind of intellectually pursuing and you're trying to get answers to? Yeah, constantly, constantly. I mean, I'm talking with Bill Miller tomorrow and I've interviewed Bill Miller over 20 years, probably for about a hundred hours. And there's always stuff that you're trying to learn from someone like that because his mind is so active. And likewise, I just had lunch with a remarkable hedge fund manager And I'm asking him about his meditation practice and seeing how his meditation practice has changed.

And just to see, we're comparing our meditation practices because I'm saying, well, so has he figured out something that I've not figured out and I have to shift what I'm doing? And one of the things we were talking about, it sounds like a really minor point, but he was saying he's really trying to listen to what's the ideal thing for me to be doing at this point? should I be reading an analyst report? Should I be reading an annual shoveled letter or should I be meditating or should I be exercising? And he said, he's really trying to listen intuitively to what's the best thing for him to do at that moment. And so I was saying to him, do you find it helpful for you just to have set routines where you're just saying, no, no, I should meditate at this time and I should do this. And he's saying, yeah, that's how he used to be, I used to just have rules, but now it's much more intuitive. So he said, I have a default

position that I should be meditating first thing in the morning. But he said, I'm also aware that it doesn't have to be that way, that I can go in a different direction. And that sounds like a really, excuse me, that sounds like a really esoteric question. But that's something that I'm wrestling with the whole time, because I'm trying to think, I always have this slight sense that I'm dropping about a dozen balls, you know, that I'm juggling 20 balls and I'm dropping a dozen of them. And so I'm always trying to think, what should I be doing at this moment? And so do I need to have more rules? Do I need to have more routines? Or can I be more intuitive? And so that's just an example that just come up in the last couple of hours is something where I'm

actually wrestling with how to think about my own habits and routines and whether there's something I can learn from him about how to structure things like my own meditation and just knowing the fact that also when I asked him about that Chinese stock that I had bought, and he's like, yeah, that's just not a game I'm going to play. He has a 12 stock portfolio. And he's like, I don't need to own that. That's really clarifying for me just to say, it's just reminding me, yeah, play the games that you're equipped to win and stop messing around. Stop trying to complicate things. Keep it simple. That his tremendous advantage is his ability to know himself and be simple and play this long, simple game. He owns 12 stocks. Most of his money is in

the top six or seven and he doesn't trade and he ignores the volatility of the market and he sticks with what he does well. There's incredible simplicity to that. So some of it is learning new stuff when I'm interviewing these people and some of it is reinforcing these old lessons. It's saying, there's someone who actually embodies the essence of what I'm writing about when I'm writing about simplicity and playing games you win. And it just reminds me, okay, I need to reorient. I need to recalibrate. I'm a little out of whack here. Let me be more like him. Does that make any sense? It's an incredible answer. I think that when you start thinking about balance and you start thinking about habits and you start thinking

about that fanaticism we talked about earlier, some people end up being what I would consider fanatical about the intricate details, I have to wake up at 7 a.m. I have to be meditating by 7.15. I have to eat this exactly. And in some way, you can be a believer in maybe like a Jocko Wilnick, discipline equals freedom. But you also can become a prisoner of that discipline to some degree as well, where your entire day is ruined if you don't meditate right at 7.15, or you happen to maybe eat a little bit more food or a little less or something a little different, etc. And so I think that ultimately, it's more of a directional, you know what works for you. And it's okay if you meditate at 717, not 715. The world doesn't end, right? But yeah, or if you or if you say today,

it's not going to happen. Today, it's not going to happen. But this is this is a phrase that I use from Tom Gaynor had a profound effect on me where Tom Gaynor says, you you want to pick habits that are directionally correct. And so, you know that you're going to be calmer and more rational if you meditate. And you know that you're going to be fitter and healthier if you exercise. And you're probably going to deal with stress better if you exercise. And you know that your health is going to be better if you don't eat enormous amounts of sugar and carbs and the like, right? packaged goods, right? We basically know this stuff. But some people are going to have to be utterly fanatical and perfect because of their nature. But what Tom Gaynor said to me,

which had a profound impact on me, is he thinks that it's more sustainable if instead of trying to be optimal, you're constantly just trying to be directionally correct. And so just the knowledge that you need to get back to meditating, get back to exercising, get back to eating right, that all of those things affect your cognitive performance, that all of those things affect how you deal with the emotional trials of the market and of your relationships, things like that. They make you less reactive to traffic or to the argument with your kid when your kid says something insulting to you or whatever. If you can be directionally correct with all of those things, that's massively helpful. And so, one thing that I would say, if you combine that

idea of being directionally correct with this other thing that I talk about in the book, which is the art of subtraction, this is massively helpful. And so, for me, the art of subtraction is basically saying, here are the things that really play to my strengths. Here are the things that I care about most and that I'm best at. These are the games that I should be playing and everything else is peripheral. And so if you pick a handful of things that are really the key things in your life and you go big on them, and then you adopt habits that are directionally correct, that make you better and better towards this sort of good destination, good long-term destination, that's pretty unstoppable. And so for me, partly because my mind is kind of all over

the place. And I'm always thinking about lots of different things. I have to subtract. I have to say, okay, so what really matters here? Let me really keep thinking about what's going to make a difference in my life, what I'm really built to do, and kind of filter out almost everything else, and then just try to be directionally correct in those areas. And this sounds, I don't know, maybe it sounds kind of banal, but I think it's really important to focus on the things that are really key to you and that you're best at. And when I look at someone, say like Bill Miller, one thing that the money has done for him is he just doesn't bother with things like filling his car with gas or getting his house decorated. You know, he gets other people to

do that because he's just not interested. And so he's just focusing on adding value for his shareholders by just reading, thinking, investing, and that's it. Everything else is peripheral. And so I think knowing yourself well enough to know what game it is you're playing, what you're likely to win, what you care about most, and subtracting the rest, that's a really key part of how to live a successful life. And then if you combine that with what Nick Sleet calls destination analysis, where you're saying, okay, here's the desirable destination in 10, 15, 20 years, what are the inputs needed to get there? That's a really powerful approach. And I think because most people are just reacting to whatever's happening to them in the moment, there's this sort of scattered ad hoc quality where you're just being buffeted by the waves and the storm every other minute. And so that combination has been really helpful for me. That's what I keep trying to come back to is subtracting, is saying, let me not do more. Let me focus on what's really important here.

It's fascinating when you think about LeBron James, the NBA player who spends a million dollars a year, he says, on his body, on making sure that he's fresh, making sure that he is prepared, right? Making sure he's focused on what he needs to do. I don't have the ability to make sure i'm stretching or massaging myself or what right no i need the help and spending the money is well worth it given the output and performance that i have and so it's very similar to what you're talking about here yeah mostly we don't think of the investor as the athlete but it's pretty close right yeah i i i think you see this with high performers in every field that they're focusing they're focusing pretty narrowly and deeply and so so it's saying this is the game

I'm playing, let me go deep on this. And so, so for me, I keep thinking of this because for example, I think, well, so should I be doing a podcast? Should I, should I host a podcast? Cause I could interview all of these famous investors. And then I'm like, but does that get me away from writing or not? Is it, is it just going to distract me or does it add, let me think really. And so that's the filter that I'm thinking of it through or journalism. Should I be writing for magazines? Or should I really just be focusing on books? Cause they're less ephemeral. They're lost. They can have an enduring impact. And what really plays to my strengths here? And that's something I've really learned from the great investors is that filter

of just saying, no, no, this is one phrase I kept having in my mind when I was working on this book is I kept saying, what's the eye of the eye of the bullseye? What do I really want to focus on here in this chapter? What's the eye of the eye of the bullseye? And in a way, I think you want to do that with your life as well and and i don't think you can do that many things well and so so for me i really care about my family and i care about reading and learning and my philosophical and spiritual life that's really important for me i don't really care about exercise that much but i can see that it's really important so i do it um meditation important um for equanimity and for your spiritual life all of that um and then and then it's writing and and so

just to know okay so there are about five things i mean it sounds like more but it's basically it's about five things i can probably only do two or three of them really well um and so i i would encourage you to kind of go through that process of just thinking about what can i subtract it is uh it's something where when i talked to you um this went better than i thought it would i i i really enjoyed the book and, um, it's good to start with low expectations. No, definitely not. The, the book I think was, it was so clear that you thought so deeply about so many of these things. And then you also were talking to people who had thought very deeply about them. And so there's a level of quality, I think that comes out when you put those two types of people together

in a conversation. Um, where can we send people to get the book if they would, uh, would want to read it? And I, I honestly, those that listen, no, I'd never do this, but I highly recommend people go get this book. It really is one of those that I could see myself reading again and again through the years. So where can we send folks? You can buy the book anywhere. It's called Richer, Wiser, Happier. It's pretty cheap on Amazon these days. I think it's $20 for the hardback, which is pretty good value. I have a website, which is williamgreenwrites.com, which is something that I cloned from Michael Lewis, because when I saw that the URL williamgreen.com was gone, I just thought, well, what does Michael Lewis do? Because he's a really good writer and

he has michaellewiswrites.com. So I just climbed that directly. And that has stuff about me, stuff about the book and lots of podcasts and interviews and stuff that I've done that you can get there. And then I'm on Twitter. I think my handle is WilliamGreen72. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. And I'm really happy to hear from people. I mean, one of the things that's been most joyful about this process because writing itself is pretty hellish. But the process of after the book came out of having people write to me and tell me what's had an impact on them and ask me questions and recommend books to me and ask me to recommend things, that's been a really joyful process. I love the fact that people are reading the book and are deeply engaged in these questions.

And I feel like I'm on a journey with the reader where I'm trying to figure out how to think better and how to live better and how to invest better. And so I really welcome that dialogue. So please feel free to reach out to me. I'm not always brilliant about replying, but I try to do it. Well, listen, if you're going to keep on your journey, I'm going to keep paying attention.

So I appreciate you coming on, Williams, and spending the time here. Again, everyone go grab the book, Richer, Wiser, Happier. And we will definitely have to do this again in the future as you continue on your journey. I would love to. Thank you so much for having me.