We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH011: The Emotionally Intelligent Investor w/ Daniel Goleman

Episode Date: July 24, 2022

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 03:58 - How a famed Harvard psychologist inspired Daniel Goleman to study high performance. 07:00 - How spiritual teachers like Ram Dass and Neem Karoli Baba led him to study meditation. 12:35 - What neuroscientists have discovered about the impact of meditation on the brain. 20:36 - How self-awareness helps us to manage our emotions and stay “balanced” amid chaos. 23:05 - How to become more keenly aware of our fear and anxiety, so we can recover faster. 29:21 - Why George Soros paid close attention to how he felt—emotionally and physically. 31:47 - Why it’s risky to make big decisions when hungry, angry, lonely, tired, in pain, or stressed. 34:50 - How the brain gets “hijacked” by sudden negative emotions—and what to do about it. 37:48 - How Warren Buffett and Bill Miller succeed by reacting unemotionally to bad news. 41:34 - How we can handle stressful situations by learning to think about them differently.  45:15 - How a simple breathing exercise can help you to calm down and improve your focus. 48:52 - Which meditation app Daniel Goleman and William Green both recommend. 55:59 - How to deal with a barrage of information and distractions without losing your focus.  1:04:34 - How Daniel deals with difficult emotions by “sitting with them” until they dissipate. 1:07:50 - How meditation helps multibillionaire Ray Dalio think clearly and maintain his equanimity. 1:09:30 - What Daniel Goleman has learned from his long-time relationship with the Dalai Lama. *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Daniel Goleman’s books “Emotional Intelligence,” “Altered Traits,” & “Focus.” Daniel Goleman’s website & his coaching/consulting firm, Goleman Consulting Group. Two classic books by Ram Dass: “Be Here Now” & “Miracle of Love.”  The Ten Percent Happier app, featuring classes by Joseph Goldstein & Sharon Salzberg. William Green interviews Ray Dalio in episode 410 of the We Study Billionaires podcast. William Green’s book, “Richer, Wiser, Happier” – read the reviews of this book. William Green’s Twitter. Our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Check out our favorite Apps and Services. New to the show? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Hardblock AnchorWatch Cape Intuit Shopify Vanta reMarkable Abundant Mines HELP US OUT! What do you love about our podcast? Here’s our guide on how you can leave a rating and review for the show. We always enjoy reading your comments and feedback! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

You're listening to TIP. Hi there. One thing I've learned over many years of interviewing great investors is that they're not just incredibly smart. They're also remarkably good at managing their emotions. At times when the average investor is getting yanked around by fear and greed or downright panic, the best investors tend to stay relatively calm and balanced. They're not getting swept up in all those crazy, short-term, manic mood swings of the market. Instead, the most successful investors have the emotional self-control to think more

clearly and to stay focused on the long term in a much more rational and dispassionate way. This ability to manage our emotions seems particularly important right now. As I'm sure you know, in the first six months of this year, the stock market got off to its worst start in more than half a century. A lot of investors are feeling pretty shaken up by these losses, and now they're increasingly worried about everything from surging inflation to the growing risk of a recession. So how can investors, like you and me, achieve the kind of equanimity, balance, and peace of mind we need to succeed not only in financial markets, but in life? That's really the key question we're exploring in today's episode of the podcast.

Our guest today is Daniel Goldman, who's one of the first of the first. one of the world's leading experts on the science of emotion. Dan is the author of Emotional Intelligence, a blogbuster book that sold more than 5 million copies in about 40 languages over the last 25 years. He started out by getting his PhD in clinical psychology at Harvard, and he then spent many years writing about brain research as a science reporter for the New York Times. As you'll hear in this conversation, there's also another side of Dan's life that makes him, an ideal person to help us gain more control over our emotions. More than 50 years ago, he became a serious practitioner of meditation,

traveling to India and Sri Lanka to study with famous teachers like Mim Karoli Baba. Back in those days, meditation seemed like a pretty eccentric and exotic activity to people here in the West in the investment world. But Dan was way ahead of the curve. These days, a lot of the most successful investors meditate, regularly and routinely, including Ray Dalio, the hedge fund multi-billionaire. As Dan Goldman explains, meditation can be particularly valuable for investors because it helps us to make calm, clear-headed decisions instead of getting sabotaged by our emotions.

In this conversation, Dan shares a number of really practical lessons about what we can do when we're flooded with emotion, including a very simple breathing exercise we can use to help restore our peace of mind. He talks about the benefits of recognizing early warning signs of stress and anxiety in your body so you can actually do something about it. He talks about how you can improve your focus in an era when we're all being bombarded constantly by distractions. He also shares some of the most valuable lessons he's learned from his friendship with the Dalai Lama. I hope you enjoy our conversation and find it as helpful as I did. Thanks so much for joining us. you're listening to The Richer Wiser, Happier Podcast, where your host, William Green,

interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. Hi, everyone. I'm absolutely delighted to be here with Daniel Goldman. It's great to see you, Dan. Thanks a lot for joining us. Oh, William, it's my pleasure. I always enjoy talking to you. Thank you. I'd like to start by asking you about two people who, I think, had a very profound and probably life-changing impact on you at a formative point in your life when you were working towards your PhD in clinical psychology at Harvard. And in some ways, I think these two people helped to set you on this extraordinary path that's, I would say, had an impact on many millions of people's lives. So the first one is David McClellan. And in your book, Primal Leadership, you describe him as your

first inspiration, and you say that his research and theories shaped much of your own work. So I wondered if you could tell us who he was, why he was such an important influence on you. What do you learn from him? David was my mentor in graduate school. He was at the time probably one of the most famous living psychologists. He was known for his work on motivation. And what affected me and set a direction for me was his later work, which was on the competencies that you find in star performers,

that you don't find an average. This was a new idea at the time. He wrote a very influential article in the main psychology journal saying, look, if you're going to hire someone, don't look at their grade point average, don't look at their personality profile, look at someone in your own organization who exemplifies outstanding performance in that role and then compare them with people who are in the role who only have average performance, mediocre performance, and assess what competencies or abilities the stars have that you don't see in the average, then hire people that look like the stars. This became the

theoretical or philosophical basis for what's now called competence modeling. And he was one of the pioneers of the competency movement. Most every major corporation in the world now has a competence model for its leaders. Sadly, too many of those models are made by asking leaders what they think matters instead of looking at empirical data on what matters. So they may not be as sound. But people are, I think McClellan's work was so convincing and the others who became pioneers in the movement that companies everywhere now have these models. And I was able to look at more than a hundred of them when I wrote the follow-up book to Emotional Intelligence, working with Emotional Intelligence.

And it was very clear that if you separated them in terms of which are based on purely cognitive ability, you know, your IQ, technical skills, and which are based on emotional intelligence, which means self-awareness, self-management, empathy and social skill. The leadership, top leadership, is 80 to 90 percent based on emotional intelligence. That is to say the competencies that distinguish the star leaders from average are based on emotional intelligence. The reason for this is interesting, and it may be a make sense to your listeners, if you think about what it takes to get in the game, to be a successful investor, for example, you have to have a very high IQ. But you know what? So does everybody else. That means that the threshold for entry into the

field is a high IQ. So what's going to distinguish you isn't your IQ. It's going to be how will you handle yourself? How will you tune into other people? It's going to be your self-awareness, your self-management that sets you apart from the other high IQ investors that you're guess competing with in some sense. So when I wrote emotional intelligence, David McClellan was very influential. Along the way in graduate school, I ran into by sheer accent, a guy called Rondas, who was better known at Harvard as Richard Alpert. He was the first professor ever fired from Harvard University. He was fired because he was famous, along with Tim Leary, for advocating the use of psychedelics. And when I ran into him, he had just come back from spending time in India,

and he was now going under the name Rondas. He wasn't Richard Alpert anymore. He'd gone through a huge transformation. He was basically a yogi. And he'd come from a wealthy family, if I remember rightly, right? He was a CEO of the New Haven Railroad at one time. And when you met him, if I remember rightly, you met him in a farmhouse where he is playing the sitar and wearing white robes. I mean, this is a pretty big shift from the world of being a professor. Well, he was actually his father's country estate. And Rondas was living in one little room, which probably was at one time the maids room. I don't know.

And he was all dressed in white and he had a long white beard. I didn't know who he was when I met him. But then when we started talking, it turned out actually he'd been very close to David McLuhan. I was McClellan who hired him. McCloan was then the chair of the department. And McLuhan also fired him because he was chair of the apartment. And I invited Ram Dass back to Harvard for the first time since he'd been fired. And he gave a talk that was actually quite electrifying, but it wasn't about psychology, really.

It was about the inner game of awakening, if you will. And he went on for, I think, from seven till two or something like that. And people were really entranced. But just to give you an idea of the difference between his view then and that of the department I was in, remember, I was in clinical psychology. So I was having lunch the next day with the professor who reams over to me, he says, very conspiratorially, really. Tell me, do you think he's psychotic? And I looked at this guy and I'm like, who's psychotic here, really?

Because what Bronvus said made a lot of sense to me. So anyway, those two were very influential. And what was so striking in being with Ram Dass that you didn't see in other people that you didn't see in this kind of dry, slightly arid, but intellectually, very rigorous world of the Harvard Psychology Department? Well, you know, Rondas had come from that world, and he was a very popular professor. He was a charismatic lecturer already, and he continued to use that charisma as Rondas in his lectures. And I actually went to see his teacher, whose name was Neme Kroly Baba, who was someone that, unlike anyone I'd ever met before. He was absolutely centered, loving, present, and actually didn't seem to be motivated by the usual

motivations. That was the expertise of David McClellan motivation. The need for power didn't, you know, he actually said, don't come. He told Ramos, don't talk about me when you go back to the States. Ram Dass talked about him all the time. But he wasn't interested, unlike a lot of the Indian gurus who came to America, not interested in power, not interested in money, not interested in, you know, all of the things that someone in that position could take advantage of. And he was just totally present in a way that I had never seen in my Harvard professors. And so you were a leading psychologist at the day, by the way. And so you just showed up at his ashram in India without an invitation, without him

knowing who you were. What did you do? Well, I came with two other friends, and we did what to do in India, which is called having Darshan, which we would call hanging out. It means something like, go and see, right? Something like that. Just be with, because he raised. radiated this interstate. And when you were with him, you felt, as a friend of mine, Larry

Brilliant, who's now a leading epidemiologist. Yeah, and was head of the Google Foundation as well, right? Yes, that's right. Larry had also come to see Neme Kroloibaba, and Larry put it really well. He said, what was surprising wasn't that he loved us, but then when we're with him, we loved everybody, too. You know, it was kind of an emotional contagion. And Niem Krolybaba, if I remember, had a big impact on people like Steve Jobs as well, right? There was something about him that was intoxicating to Westm as he went to see him. Steve Jobs was the close friend of Larry. And I think it was Larry that persuaded Steve to go to India to see Ninkgoly Baba.

But I'm not sure he ever actually saw him. But I know that his bedside reading included a book called The Miracle of Love, which is about Ninkwoli Baba. And is Ram Dass's book Be Here Now, which is kind of a fantastic book, even now, a strange and kind of wonderful book. Is that basically about Niem Kareli Baba as well? Is that the guru he's talking about there? Well, that, yes. So he, that book Be Here Now was inspired by his stay with Nkolli Baba. And that book in turn became a bestseller of the day. And I think was very inspiring. Romdas went on a lecture circuit after that. And tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people went to hear him. What he talked about, was the inner transformation. If I remember rightly, Dan, you were actually bankrupt to go off to India and spend time researching this, and then you came back and you wrote about meditation as an intervention for stress as part of your PhD program in the psychology department. Is that right?

It is right, but the detail is a little more interesting. I had a fellowship actually from Ford Foundation that included a year of travel and study abroad, which actually I didn't know about, But then I took advantage of when McClellan fronted for me saying, oh, yes, he has serious research to do in India. And that allowed me to hang out with Niem Kroly and llamas and Sufis and yogis. I was very interested in how meditative practices and related spiritual disciplines transform the mind and the heart. And when I came back to Harvard, I thought I wanted to communicate this to other psychologists, but other psychologists weren't very interested in the day. And what I ended up doing was showing that meditation was a useful intervention in stress,

which by now, you know, decades later has been well established. But then that was a radical idea. You said at the time that there were only three scientific papers on meditation, right? I mean, this must have seemed... Well, William, actually, by today's standards, they were all somewhat dubious. They're anecdotal reports. and two of them were anecdotal reports, and one was a non-peer-reviewed publication. Our standards are higher these days.

When I look at my dissertation, given the measurements we had decades ago, I don't think it would be published today. Now you would use brain imaging or you'd use much more sophisticated methodology. We didn't have them back then. So I would say this, that the hunch that I had, that meditation really can help you be more call and more focused has been tremendously well validated. I finished a book published a couple years ago with a friend Richard Davidson, who was also a graduate student at McClellan at Harvard, and Richie, as we call him, has gone on to become a world famous neuroscientist, University of

Wisconsin. He and I wrote a book looking at the now thousands of peer-reviewed articles on meditation, which shows very clearly there is a dose response relationship. The more you do it, the stronger the benefits are. It's a brilliant book. We'll hopefully talk much more about meditation later, but this is among other ways of controlling our emotions, both in investing and life. But this is a book called Alter Traits, which is on my table here behind me, and I'll put it in the show notes. But it's a terrific book. So in a strange way, you were coming back as this exotic creature from India and I think Sri Lanka and coming back into this world that didn't really know what it hit it, right? That wasn't particularly interested in Eastern yogis. And so in some,

In some sense, is it fair to say that you were, without maybe being conscious of it, you were somehow reconciling or bringing together these two very different worlds, the scientific realm of the Harvard Psychology Department and the realm of people like Ram Dass and Niem Kuroli Baba and their world of Eastern spirituality, where they'd been sitting around watching the brain for the last 2,000 years, and I think believed that you could change the brain, whereas Western psychology, am I right in thinking, believed it was much more fixed? Well, yes. So at the time, when I came back, we didn't have the understanding in neuroscience of neuroplasticity. That came much later. Neuroplasticity says basically the more you exercise brain

circuits, the stronger the connectivity between the becomes. This is now very well established. Then, no one even entertained that idea. Brain science was just beginning to emerge back in the day. And not only that, there was a lot of skepticism about the East. When I wrote the book, So, as you point out, I couldn't really find a job that suited me in academia after getting my PhD. I went into science journalism. I ended up at the New York Times and writing in science. And it was then that I wrote the book Emotional Intelligence, which I was really thinking

of people in the business world, in the education world. And the message was not one of, you know, in Asia, they completely transformed their brain. in mind, it was more, this will help you. Because Western culture is very pragmatic. It's like, what use is this? Can I focus better? Can I stay calm even in a turbulent situation? I mean, think of an investor. You know, your investment fails and all of a sudden you're overwhelmed by fear or anxiety. How do you handle that? Well, emotional intelligence speaks to that. And how do you stay focused amidst all the distractions that we have today. Emotional intelligence speaks to that.

So I've really made a point of being more pragmatic, even though the way I think about it is deeply informed by what I've been exploring from Asia. So in a sense, you almost had to conceal this, the more spiritual part of your journey, because in a way it was so unconventional in those days, whereas now it's probably much easier for you to talk about that openly. Yeah, I think that the culture has changed enormously.

Mindfulness is kind of everyday news now. You mentioned I was in Sri Lanka. That was on a postdoc. And I went to study with a monk named Nianaponika Tara, who wrote about the mind and how to work with it and how to transform it based on fifth century texts that were written as manuals for meditators. And Nianaponika, who actually was German by birth, but had been very important. been a monk since the 20s, was a scholar of Polly.

And so he had access. And what I realized, William, was there's the psychotechnology, which is well known in Asia, well established. It's been functioning for thousands of years, literally, and that we know nothing about it in Western psychology until very recently, very, very recently. So when I started looking into it, it was unknown. I faced a lot of actual open hostility about it. which probably encouraged me to be a little bit sub-rosa at the beginning because things had not

changed. And it may be that I and a host of other people had a hand in changing it. You know, in India, I met someone named Joseph Goldstein, who became one of the first major teachers of what's called Insight Meditation and a whole generation, Sharon Salzberg, another name in that world. You know, I met Sharon in Delhi and I told her, hey, you know, there's this meditation course. So she went to Boghye and learn what she now teaches. So, you know, I guess I get some karmic credit for all the good sharing. She's an amazing teacher. Yeah. But what I'm saying is that when we all started, this was very new in the West. And of course, that small group can't take credit for the transformation, but was part of it. And now it's much easier to talk about these things. So you were at the New York Times,

I think, from about 1984 to 96, and you were writing about this emerging behavioral science and all this new understanding of the brain. And my sense is they weren't particularly excited about some of this stuff. You started to want to write much more about this. What happened was, you know, when I wrote the book Emotional Intelligence, I went beyond what I had been able to write in the Times. I included some of, actually some articles that I rewrote for the book, but most of it was based on a decade of research about emotions in the brain, which, by the way, my friend Richard Davidson was a leader of that movement and neuroscience, which is very helpful to me. And I've always paid attention to the kind of

scientific and neuroscientific underpinning of the things that I'm bringing, say, to the business world, because I think it's important that it be rooted in something real, not just the fad of the day. And so my actual, my training as a science journalist has been very useful to me in the writings that I've been doing. I think it's fair to say that all of us have been through a pretty stressful and challenging time over the last couple of years and that all of us are kind of trying to figure out how to get our emotions under control. We've had the pandemic. We've had the war in Ukraine. We've got inflation surging at the highest rate in 40 years. Stock market's been plunging. Listeners are who invested in cryptocurrencies, a nursing pretty painful losses. We're seeing

extreme weather events, political mayhem, lots of social division. And so I'd like to talk in some depth about how an understanding of emotional intelligence can really help us to get control over our emotions and deal with stress. And I wondered if you could start by talking about something that seems like a real linchpin of your whole way of looking at emotional intelligence, which is the foundational importance of self-awareness. So there are four parts to emotional intelligence. The first is self-awareness, which leads to being able to manage yourself well. And those are the two abilities, I think, that are absolutely crucial in dealing with the chaos of the day. If self-awareness means you know what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, how it's impacting

you, how it's driving your thoughts, how it's driving your emotions, how it's driving your impulse to act. However, once you know that, maturity is widening the gap between impulse and action. So if you're going to be a good investor, you don't do what your emotions tell you. Sell. You say, well, you know, I'm going to write it out and the market will rise again, for example. And to do that, you need a component of self-management, which is called emotional balance. Emotional balance means, yes, you feel the emotion. You can't dictate what you're going to feel, how strongly you'll feel it, when you'll feel it. Emotions just come to us unbidden.

But once you feel that you have a choice point, and that is how you react. And emotional balance means you can feel the emotion, you can. be with it, you don't have to act on it. In fact, you can recover from it more quickly. The operational definition of resilience is how quickly you recover from being upset. And once you recover, you can think about it more clearly. There's an intimate relationship between our executive centers, the part of our brain that thinks about what to do and makes good decisions and the emotional centers, which can overwhelm it and hijack it. And so being able to recover from that hijacked state, I think is absolutely crucial to anybody, particularly to an investor.

So let's break this down a bit. So if we want to, because we can go through this in really some granular detail, because you have a very unusual set of knowledge and experience here, both of how the brain works and how this works in high performing people. So in terms of techniques for how to become more self-aware, more aware of what we're actually feeling, and what are the sort of questions that you can ask yourself that will actually make you pause and look at yourself and see, God, am I operating in a way that's kind of a perfect precondition for me to make a really lousy decision? Well, I think it goes back in one sense to some research I did while at Harvard, which is about

how people experience anxiety and fear. Some people are very mental, very cognitive, and their thoughts start going in, you know, in this direction or that direction, are usually worried, fearful thoughts. Or they feel it in their body, somatic anxiety. Their stomach feels weird. or they feel trembling in their knees, whatever. One of the things you can do is learn to pick up the early cues in yourself of, oh, I'm getting anxious now. The earlier you notice, the better you'll be at recovery.

It's not to say that it's too late if you never noticed, because then you can think about it and prepare for the next time this happens. Or you notice in mid-Ark, oh, my God, I'm anxious, sweating my heart. heart is pounding. But it's interesting, the moment you can name to yourself what's going on, you shift your neural functioning. When the emotions are dominant, fear, anxiety, whatever, they are the active circuits and they capture the prefrontal area, the part of the brain that thinks clearly and loosely. As you go through the anxiety attack, however, and you can name, oh, I'm anxious, I'm fearful, I'm angry, you deactivate the emotional centers and activate the

verbal cortex, which is in the prefrontal area. It shifts the energy in the brain and starts to let you release the feeling. So that's part of the recovery. It turns out also that if you're a meditator, you'll recover more quickly in general. So the combination is pretty powerful. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine in spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists,

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Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. It's interesting because the greatest investors are actually very, very clued in to their, I would say not only their emotional state, but actually their physiological state. So there's a famous story of George Soros who talked about how he would start to notice the pain in his back and to realize that it was a physical cue that there was something wrong in his portfolio.

and Jeff Vinnick, who managed the biggest mutual fund in the world in his early 30s. I once interviewed him. And he said that when he was buying a stock that had been plunging and he's predicting that it would go up, he said he would feel physically nauseous. And he learned that that sense of physical nausea was actually a positive signal from his body that there was so much fear in the market that it was probably a bargain. Can you talk a little about that, about the sort of specifics of becoming very clued into your own body, like what you would look for to tell whether you're malfunctioning in some way or functioning right,

but just in a way that is kind of unsettling. There's a very famous neuroscientist named Antonio Demosio, who studied decision making and the brain and the body. He calls exactly what you're talking about somatic markers. And he says, you know, the part of the brain which captures life experience, when I did that, it worked, when I said that it didn't work, is very deep in a primitive area of the brain. It's lower in the brain than the part that thinks in words. And it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words. It has very strong connections to the body, to the gut.

So it sends out signals. This feels good. It doesn't feel good. What he says is that if you're going to make a sound decision, it'll be even better if you can include gut sense. It's not just what the spreadsheet tells you. It's not just what the numbers are saying. it's some deeper understanding of the context. So, for example, outstanding entrepreneurs were studied at USC and they found that about how they made decisions, business decisions,

they all said, well, I gather as much information as I can find. They're voracious gatherers of information. They went way beyond what other people might think was relevant, but they always checked it against their gut feeling. It may not feel, maybe I can't trust these guys. Maybe, in other In other words, maybe you know something that you don't know, you know, that you need to pay attention to. That's what those semantic markers are telling you. We know more than we can say. There's a friend of mine called Ken Schubenstein, who I write about at some length in my book, Richer Wies, a Happier, who's got a very unusual background because he was a doctor and then became a hedge fund manager and private equity investor and then quit the business, the investment business a few years ago and became a neurologist. And so he has a very unusual, deep understanding what's going on in the brain, but also an understanding of the practical game of investing in the trenches. And one of the things that fascinated me about his kind of practical workarounds for dealing with emotions in the market was that he had borrowed an idea, I think, from addiction scientific literature, where he said that he knew that there were various physiological states, emotional states, that were going to be preconditions for making terrible decisions.

So he said he had this mnemonic, which was Halt PS, which was when he was hungry, angry, lonely, tired, in pain, or stressed. He said, I just went really slow. I'd look to see what was going. And he's a meditator. And he would look to see what was going on in his body and his mind. And he took this actually during the start of the outbreak of COVID, where he had just had a baby, literally four days before. And he has to go basically to stay in a hotel near this hospital so that he doesn't. doesn't expose his wife and his newborn kid.

And he was treating COVID patients in a ward. And he had a bad back from his wrestling career at college. And he said the PPE equipment was incredibly painful. And you would be unbelievably tired. And you'd be looking at all of these patients on ventilators who were dying. And you'd be having to call their family and you were exhausted. And so he said, looking at his state, knowing that being in these conditions would lead him to make bad decisions.

He just went really slowly. and he made an extra effort to be compassionate because he said, I know that when I'm in pain and I'm upset and I'm missing my kid and he was furious about the government's policies and the lack of PPE equipment. Can you talk a bit about that? Because it seems so interesting the way that you can apply this knowledge, even with a simple mnemonic like whole PS in different areas of your life. So what he's saying, if I could put it differently,

is that when you're upset and he listed six or seven different ways to be really upset, Don't do anything hastily. Widen the gap between impulse and action. That's exactly what he's saying. Think about it before you act. In fact, the school programs that implement emotional intelligence, they're called social emotional learning.

Many of them use a poster, which is of a stoplight, red light, yellow light, green light. When you're upset, think of the stoplight. Red light, stop, calm down, and think before you act. Yellow light, think of a range of different things you could be and what the consequence would be

of each one. Greenlight, pick the best one and try it out. That's good advice for anyone, not just kids in school, investors, or anyone can use that advice because we're all dealing with the same set, the same central nervous system, the same susceptibility to overwhelming emotions, and yet we have to function with those emotions. So he spelled it out very well, I thought. You had a phrase in, I think it was emotional intelligence that I love that. I don't know if it was your own coining or someone else is where you write about an amygdala hijack. Can you talk about that what it is, what's actually happening in the brain when we're dealing with stress, when we're dealing with these disruptive emotions that stirred up? And then we can talk about what the antidote to the

amygdala hijack might be. The amygdala hijack refers to the situation where your brain's radar for threat, which at the time, neuroscience said centered on the amygdala, realized that there was a danger, whatever it may be. Now, the brain was designed to help us survive. And it helped us survive in prehistory, which was when the brain took shape. And the threat in those days was actual life or death threat, something in the bushes that either could eat us or that we had to chase after and eat. And so we had a very quick, sudden response that is the decision rule for this part of the brain, the circuit, and it can take over the rational part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, where we learn, where we comprehend, where we plan, where we make good decisions. In fact,

it captures it. That's the hijack. And the signs of a hijacker three, you have a very sudden emotional reaction. It's negative, anger, fear, typically. And when the dust settles, you really regret what you did. You didn't widen the gap. There's no gap at all. There's a moment where I flush, as you explain this. And I'm like, oh, yeah, haven't done that. And it's a lot. I haven't done that in at least a day. So today, now brain sciences move forward. We realize it's not just the amygdala that the amygdala is part of what's called the salience network, which means what's relevant to me right now.

The salience network is part of the brain which instant by instant by instant simplify life for us by putting aside the huge amount of sensory information we get constantly and picking out just the part that it thinks is relevant to what are the task at hand. So, you know, for an investor, it means what are the forces or what are the data, what's the relevant information for this investment? You know, the Salience Network is doing this for us all the time in every life situation. And the Miglitt is part of that network. And if it thinks there's a threat, and the threat today might be, I'm feeling disrespected, I'm getting blame. Someone else is taking credit. In other words, they're symbolic realities, not biological

of realities. So it turns out the amygdala and that salience network actually makes a lot of mistakes. We get hijacked for things that if we thought about it, maybe we wouldn't be so upset about. It would rather be safe than sorry, essentially. So we end up getting hijacked all too often. And I would say that the hijacked state is the worst state to invest from. I can't think of anything worse. One of the things that's very striking to me in the time I spent with great investors over the last 25 years or so is that the greatest of them don't seem to have the same emotional response that most of us do. In some strange way, they're actually wired differently. So I remember, for example, something like, I think this must have been about 12 or 13 days after 9-11,

when the markets had just had their worst week since 1929, since the Great Depression. And I was with this legendary investor, a guy called Bill Miller, who was in the middle of this streak where he'd beaten the market, I think by then, by 10 or 11 years, which is kind of impossible. And it ended up being about 15 years. And I was with him when he calls his office, we went on his private plane. He had this Learjet that he got basically because he had an Irish wolf found that he liked to travel with that was enormous. And so we go to his alma mater because he's giving a speech, and he gives this talk to the students. And then he calls into the office. And they say to him, this company you bought, it was an energy stock called AES. This company you bought yesterday,

I think he'd put $50 million in, has just come out with its earnings. It's disastrous and the stock has halved. And so I think I figured out, I think if I remember correctly, it had lost $50 million and it wasn't even lunchtime. And Bill, I looked at my notes recently and I had this very vivid description of how he reacted and he gets very, very serious. He's very focused. And he's on the phone and he says, let's see where my cash is.

Let's see what my cash position is. And he just says, he says, all right, let's double the position now. And he explained this later to me that basically because he knew from behavioral finance that investors feel the pain of loss so much more intensely than the pleasure of gain, that his default position is to assume that people overreact to bad news. And so there was some way in which part of his competitive advantage was the fact that when things went wrong, he was very dispassionate. He was a guy who'd been in military intelligence, right?

He was a super unemotional guy. Lovely man, really nice man. But I've seen that again and again, that there's actually some difference, I think, in the wiring of people like Charlie Munger, Buffett's partner. Buffett, my friend Jason's Y talks about how Buffett is inversely emotional. So when the market starts to go wrong and everyone's panicking, Buffett actually is kind of joyful. So I think Buffett has invested some like $50 billion in the last couple of months while everyone else is in a panic. Can you talk a bit about that? I know that you're not obsessed with investing in the way that I am, but are there people who are just sort of wired differently so that they're dealing with intensity in a different way? You can think about it this way, William. It's a couple of things. First of all, the brain is designed to register more strongly negativity than positivity because that helped to survive.

You want to remember the thing that's dangerous. You want to remember the thing that's a threat. You want to remember the thing you should never do again. And so the brain is designed to imprint that memory more strongly than the pleasant things that happen. So that's why all people, all people, not just investors, overreact, bad news. That's why newspapers are full of bad news because it's captivating. It's what we want to read about is what the brain wants to know because it wants to learn the lesson. Oh, that happened to

someone else. I don't want it to happen to me. There are three ways that people differ, individual differences in reacting to threat or bad news. One is how often they're triggered. Some people are triggered a lot. Some people are little. The second is how deeply they're triggered, how intensely they feel the negative emotion. Some people feel it really deeply. Some people feel it very likely. And the third is how quickly they recover. I talked about resilience. So are you more resilient? Do you snap back? And what you're saying, very interesting, is that perhaps the more successful investors are wired differently in those three ways, at least. Yeah. And it's nuanced, because when I talked to Bill Miller about this recently on this podcast, he said, look, I'm actually

pretty emotional. Like he said, when I listen to music, I can cry. And yet, when it comes to financial decisions, there's this supreme rationality. I mean, I remember after 9-11, he said to me, look, the world is safer today than it was the day before 9-11. The threat has surfaced. We weren't aware of the threat. Now we're aware of the threat and we can deal with it. So he said, there's a perception that the threat now is elevated, but in fact, the threat is lower now than it was before. So it's kind of like this, he's like this probabilistic machine going through life, looking at the evidence, rather than being driven by his emotion. So here's the thing. In psychology, we call that re-appraisal, cognitive re-appraisal. It's rethinking the situation. And it turns out

one of the best ways to handle stress or a stressful reality is to think it through and to reframe what's going on exactly as he did. To take the upset and to think, to think, and to think, think about it in a way that's going to help you handle it better. That's the reframe. That's the cognitive re-appraisal. And that, by the way, can be a learned talent. All of these mental skills are learned and learnable. Emotional intelligence, unlike IQ, is learned and learnable. So you can get better at any of these abilities. We haven't even gotten to empathy and relationships, which may or may not matter that much for investors. No, they do. And we'll talk about those later. Yeah, but I think I just want to emphasize that those two are learned and learnable. And in fact, I'm now writing a book about why learning this will benefit an entire culture of an organization, having leaders who say, yes, this matters, offering chances for development to people, putting it in a performance review. It's not just your numbers. How did you get those numbers? Because if you got them in the worst ways, we're going to lose talent. People will hate you who work for you. People cut corners. People. People cut corners. People. People. People.

lose their ethical sense if they're being pressured too much just to get the numbers for the quarter. So leading in the wrong way can hollow out human capital. People don't want to work for bosses they hate. You co-authored a very interesting book, Primal Leadership, that I haven't read fully. I've just been grazing it along with several other of your books over the last week. But you talk about that the importance of, I mean, you build on a chapter in emotional intelligence, right, about managing with heart, leading with heart. Well, William, actually, it's advanced quite a lot since then. I was for 25 years, co-director of a consortium for research on emotional intelligence and organizations. And now the other director,

Kerry Chernis and I, Professor Rutgers, are harvesting more than two decades of research in the business realm, which shows that organizations that have more emotionally intelligent leaders and have more motion intelligent teams, because you can have this at the team level, have higher levels of engagement, higher productivity, higher performance, less turnover, whatever the metric is. It's very, very positive. And what we want to do actually is bring this to companies. I have a group called the Goldman Consulting Group, which is helping companies do this, create a more emotionally intelligent culture. One of the ways is by having groups learn how to become more emotional intelligent together. It's great to coach at the top of the house, but there's

everybody else, all the managers and so on, they don't get that. So we found that there's another methodology you can use to get this more deeply into an organization. That's where my interests are going now with emotional intelligence. So to go back a bit to when we're getting flooded with these difficult emotions, these disruptive emotions, I'm interested in various practical techniques and resources that we can bring to bear. You mentioned reframing them. Someone sent me a question on Twitter for you, who goes by the name, Conservative Capital at Auditor Investor, who said, I love Goldman's work and his demeanor. And he said, I particularly like this talk of his where he shared the benefits of mindful breathing. And he was asking if there are

resources for daily practice, whether it's breathing techniques, happy yoga, whatever, that you found particularly helpful. And we can get to meditation in more detail as well soon. But first, I've heard you talking about breathing exercises before. Can you talk about very practical, simple techniques like that that can help us in these moments where we're getting kind of flooded. Let me start, though, by talking about a time. Actually, it was the business autobiography of Andy Grove, who used to be CEO of Intel when that was like the company in tech, Intel inside every laptop in the day when everybody had a laptop. And Grove said we could have died a few times. one was when we were blindsided by competitors, another was when we shipped a chip that had a flaw.

And he said, if we had, how we survived depended on the emotional reactions of the top team. If we had denied what was going on, if we were paralyzed with fear, if we had panicked, we would not be here today as a company. I think that's a very strong argument for what you're asking, which is how can people learn to handle the ups and downs and the stresses and the challenges and the shocks and surprises of business every day. And this is for family as well with your kids in the workplace as an investor. I mean, what's extraordinary is how many applications your workers actually had for kids,

raising kids. It's absolutely critical to teach them these skills, right? John Cabot-Zinn, another friend of mine from Harvard Day says, calls it the full catastrophe of life. Yeah. Didn't he write a book full catastrophe living, which I think is such a wonderful title? It starts with the same method, and let me just share it with your listeners, if you don't mind. This is kind of a generic attention training, which helps with becoming calm and focused,

even despite what's going on. They're very simple. You just, if you're comfortable, you can close your eyes and bring your attention to your breath, to the in-breath and the out-breath, the full-in-breath, the full-out breath, the sensation of breathing, or maybe at your nostrils or rise and fall in your belly. and then start with the next breath. Do it again, full in breath, the full out breath. Just keep your focus there on your breath.

And when your mind wanders and you notice it wandered, bring it back to the next breath. That's all there is to it. You just stay with the breath, bringing back your mind when it floats away and you can open your eyes. That's the simple core instruction. But if you do it five minutes, 10 minutes in the morning,

it resets your brain for the day. The longer you do it, the better the benefits. And the benefits are very well established now. It makes people calmer, makes them better able to handle stress. It makes them more focused, better able to ignore distractions. It makes them actually better learners. You can multitask, so-called multitask, without losing concentration on what really matters today. So it has numerous benefits, but it's like developing any skill, William. The more you practice, the better the benefit. resource that I found very helpful when I was kind of even more of a nervous wreck than I am usually

while I was writing Richard Wiser Happier, was I used Dan Harris's app 10% happier a lot, which has courses by both of those teachers you mentioned before, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, but also George Mumford, who I thought was terrific, who was a teacher of, I know, was it LeBron James and Michael Jordan, people like that. And I just found those courses incredibly helpful. They were, because I wasn't at that point going to go off to Nepal or something or India to do a long retreat. We're really lucky these days that we have these apps. You can put on your phone and do it in a, you know, do it while you're commuting if you commute or do it anytime you can find time alone and focus on it. 10% happier is a wonderful app.

And as you mentioned, yeah, Jessica Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, two of the teachers on that app and they're very, very good. I recommend it. You've been meditating since you were a junior at Berkeley, right? So this is well over half a century. And I think you've got more and more serious about it since you wrote alter traits. And you studied the science of meditation and discovered the dose response, what it's actually doing, the more you do. But for those of us who aren't in the deep end of the game yet, what sort of meditation is most practical for people who believe in the Pareto principle, right? The 80-20, they want to get most of the benefits for the least amount of effort so that they can remain.

calm and focused, have less anxiety. So they're more likely to make good decisions, whether it's as an investor or with their colleagues or with their spouse or whoever it might be. I'd recommend 15 to 30 minutes a day of that breath exercise. And as you point out, at the beginning, it may be hard to do. You may be very distracted, which is why it's beneficial to be able to listen to someone guiding you through it. So if you can get an app, if you're just starting out, all the better. Yeah. And so you're basically just watching the breath and then as you catch your attention wandering, it's kind of the mental rep of bringing back the attention. Is that the main benefit there? What's happening to

your brain? I suspect, and there's data that suggests this, that every time you notice your mind wander and you bring it back, you're strengthening neural circuitry for staying focused. And think about it. You know, in your day, you're reading a very important article, whatever it may be. and all of a sudden you get a ping, I got a text, I got an email, and you look at your phone, and next thing you know, you're on Twitter, and you lost your concentration, which was up here. When you go back, it's going to be down here and it's take you a while to get it up again, unless you did that simple exercise, because what you're doing is training your brain to pay full attention, to concentrate, and basically to let distractions go.

The moment of mindfulness, if you will, is the moment you notice that your mind has wandered and you bring it back. It's that simple. It's like a rep in a gym. Every time you lift the weight, you're making the muscle that much stronger. Same thing with your brain. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination.

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This whole issue of focus obviously is hugely important to all of us and particularly for a lot of investors who are voracious consumers of information as manga often refers to Buffett as a learning machine. even in its 90s. And you've mentioned you wrote a terrific book called Focus that I was reading last week, which I would have on my stack, but it's in my Kindle. It's called Focus, the hidden driver of excellence. And you were mentioning there, you were talking about attention as this mental muscle that grows with use or atrophies. And obviously this has become much more of a challenge for all of us because of technology with this massive influx of information and data that just

consumes our attention, all of these nonstop emails and texts and notifications from Twitter, I get breathless as I talk about it. And I am constantly in a state of scatteredness between all of these things. It's like, it's very hard for me to sit peacefully on my own anymore. I'm like, God, I should check my Twitter notifications. I should check LinkedIn. I should check my email. I should check text messages.

Or if I'm not doing that, I should be listening to a podcast or an audio book. And so I feel like I've scrambled my brain. And I suspect I'm a sort of slightly extreme version of what most of us are like. Can you talk about how to deal with these constant distractions that are coming from technology? There's a saying in cognitive science, what information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a posity of attention. And today, some estimates are that we get about five times more information in a given times, in a given days, for example.

Then we did 10, 20 years ago. It's just been increasing exponentially, the distraction. as you point out, are worse than ever. I heard a talk by fellow who was one of the designers of the first iPhone. He said, we made it as seductive as we could. He said, today I have kids and I really regret it. This is the problem that we all face is that we're seduced constantly. And what we're seduced for is attention. Attention, our eyeballs is what advertisers want. It's apps want. The longer we stay on it, the better for them. But that means that we're being pulled away from what matters to us most that moment that day. And so I think we all face the need to strengthen the

muscle of attention. I think today more than ever, because it's just basic self-defense. How am I going to stay focused on what matters to me in the midst of this ongoing welter, this cloud of distraction? What do you do in practical terms with technology? Because I've hung out with you and your lovely wife Tara a fair amount and I've seen you in restaurants and cafes and the Align Center where I work and places like that. And I don't think I ever remember seeing you reach for your phone or being distracted. There's a kind of openness and presence to you and to Tara. Tara looks like someone who doesn't even own a phone. She's on a different level from us. She's downloading directly from heaven. How do you deal with technology so that it's not

intruding in your relationship? It's not distracting you in conversations. It's not yanking your attention around constantly? Well, you know, William, I'm a little bit privileged in that I lead a life where I don't have to be on alert all the time. I don't have to be at the beck and call of a phone. So I like to, I'm like an industrial strength meditator. I don't schedule anything before lunch, for example. I'd like to meditate and write in the morning. And I don't feel that there's anything that important coming in on a phone. I'd rather be present for the person in front of me than, you know, looking at a phone. In fact, in 2009, there was an article in Time magazine, which was then the major magazine. The article said there's a new word in English language. The word is pizzled.

It's a combination of puzzled and pissed off. And it's how you feel when someone you're with takes out their phone and looks at the phone instead of you. That was 2009. The norms have changed enormously. People do it now all the time without thinking about it. Although now I saw there's a new word fubbing, which is snubbing with a phone, which may have the same thing. But it speaks to the tension between being present to the person you're with or on Zoom with, whatever, and all the incoming, whatever it may be. And I feel that it's good to limit your attention to the incoming, whatever that means for you, to certain periods, rather than letting it intrude, you know, whenever it happens to come. I've been very struck personally.

personally in seeing you in conversation. I was watching you a couple of weeks ago. My daughter and I were going for ice cream and we ran into you and stopped and had a chat with you. And you were chatting with Madeline. And there's something you're very present in conversation. There's a kind of calmness and openness. And I'm wondering, I'm assuming a lot of that comes from meditation, but also that you've been interviewing people for many years. And I'm wondering what's going on there? Where did that come from? What's going through your mind when you're in conversation that enables you to be so present? So I think this has to do with the empathy aspect of emotional intelligence. Remember, that's the third part.

And there are three kinds of empathy. One is cognitive, understanding how the person thinks. The second is emotional, understanding how they feel, sensing how the person feels. And the third is concerned, caring about the person. And I like to try to be present to the person I'm with because that connotes caring, paying full attention to the person in front of you that, you know, sometimes. it's called executive presence in the business world, I think is very important. And your daughter have to be particularly charming and delightful. So it's very easy to be fully present to her. I'm not sure

I am to everybody else. She said to me afterwards, I'd like to be friends with him. And that was interesting, a 21-year-old with a guy, I don't know, I'm not good at math, but you're somewhere in your 70s, right? And born in 1946, I think. So yeah, yeah, that was kind of lovely. And I think it was because you're very present. And that's something that's had an effect on. me, right? I see that. And I see it also with our friend Matt, who introduced us that he's another person who's meditated for probably 40-something years. And there's a kind of presence and a calmness that I don't see in most other people. And is that one of the great gifts of long-term meditation, do you think? Well, you know, it's hard to separate individual differences. Did Matt or I

have this tendency earlier on? I don't know. But it's clear now from the data that that calmness and focus, whether it's on your project at hand, the numbers or the other person gets enhanced through meditative practice. No question about that. So coming back to this issue of empathy, which is clearly critical in which you've written about and spoken about a lot, I remember you saying once, it's good to have empathy and compassion as your North Star. And there's a listener to the podcast who wrote to me on Twitter, someone called Flobertus, if I'm pronouncing this right, or Charging Bull Capital is his other name, who says, can you ask Mr. Goldman what we can do to increase our empathy or our awareness of others?

Is there, for example, a five-minute exercise or a moment of reflection that can make us a little more emotionally intelligent humans every day? There's a very interesting research coming out of Germany, actually. They have, like the MIT of Germany, where they had people practice and exercise that I'd call a circle of caring, sometimes called loving kindness practice, where you might, in your meditation on the breath with this daily, for example. You think of someone in your life that's been kind to you that you're grateful for and appreciate them. You know, you wish that they be safe and happy and healthy and that the life be fulfilled. You wish it toward yourself. You wish it

toward the people you naturally love, your loved ones. You do this silently. And then you extend it to people who know your acquaintances, people who work with perhaps. And then to everyone everywhere. And you spend a good deal of time doing this. Sharon Salzberg teaches this practice. And the Institute in Germany found that this seemed to strengthen the neural architecture for caring and concern, which seems pretty simple and clear to me, because it's just like with the breath meditation that helps you be calm and focused. Well, it turns out the same neural circuitry does both those things.

And then there's different circuitry for caring, concern. compassion toward other people and that gets exercised by that circle of caring it. I have a close friend who's a, I'm slightly concealing this person's identity, who's a psychiatrist who's specialized in dealing with adolescents and people who've gone through war of veterans who have PTSD and the like. He's a very extraordinary guy and I remember him telling me that he would drive to his BA hospital every day doing loving, kindness meditation on the drive. and he said he had a particularly difficult colleague.

And when this colleague would say stupid stuff that drove him absolutely nuts, he would just sit there in a meeting silently kind of going through these meditations of things like, you know, may you be happy, may you be safe, may you live with ease. And I could see the difference in him. I mean, over the years, I was like, what happened to him? And he did become like more and more. He was always a lovely guy, but he became more and more loving and joyful, I would say. I think it does work. And the data, there's a lot of research on it now, shows people do become

kinder, more generous, more altruistic, more outgoing, and caring toward other people. So I'm not surprised. And again, I think Sharon Salzberg teaches that on the 10% happier app, which I hate to be a shill for, and I'm not being paid to be a shill for it. But it really helped me. And I think that it's a very helpful app. But you have an extraordinary thing in alter traits where you talk about Mingyir and Pesh, one of these great Tibetan yogh. And what was going on in his brain when he was doing compassion meditation? This is the deep end of the pool. Can you talk a bit about what actually we saw in his brain?

So Richie Davidson flew these yogis over from Nepal and India and Europe one by one. One of them was this yogi Mingy Rambeché, who at the time had done 62,000 lifetime hours of meditation. Well, if you do a traditional Tibetan, three-year, three-month, three-day retreat, you get credit for about 10,000, thousand hours. So this guy had done huge amounts. And when they asked him to do a compassion meditation, the circuitry in the brain for that increased in a moment by 7 to 800 percent, never been seen before in neuroscience, such a voluntary jump in the activation of a brain circuit. And this is a circuitry for compassion. So I thought it was pretty astounding. Yeah, I think one of the things that's so remarkable that your book shows is that we're

seeing scientifically this thing that people are sitting in caves for thousands of years in Tibet and the like figured out experientially. And so you no longer need to kind of sound like you're a woo-woo mystic. You can actually show what's going on in the brain. And I say this as a woo-woo mystic myself, so I'm not dismissive of that. Here's the thing. You know, I kind of have a foot in both worlds in the world of, you know, Asian spirituality and methodology and the world of science and psychology and so on. And at first, there was a huge gap between those worlds. But as science has investigated these practices, it's finding, oh, you know what, this works.

And it seems to me there's an ancient psychotechnology that's been well preserved in many Asian cultures. It's only now becoming known in the West. I think it's very important. It's interesting because Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, who's this 98-year-old polymatic genius who studies all these different fields will say, I observe what works and doesn't work and why. And this is one of those things where it's really interesting. You observe it in the laboratory, you observe it in people's behavior. And I'm like, oh, it works. And so I'm struck by how many very successful investors meditate. On this podcast, I talked with

Ray Dalio about the fact that he's been doing transcendental meditation 20 minutes or 40 minutes a day for 50 years, basically. And so here you have the guy who's made, more money as a hedge fund manager than anyone else in history. And I think that's interesting. I mean, he claims that it also makes him much more creative, but that there's, but he talks about amygdala hijackings, actually. He talks about the fact that he's less likely to get swamped by emotion. And he's gone through a great deal as we spoke about in my interview with him. He lost his son a year or so ago. And so he's dealt with extreme pain. And so the fact that meditation has helped to make him more resilient or clear-headed, I think it's curious when these pragmatians,

like Dahlio start to adopt something that used to seem frinn. Well, that's the culture shift that I've seen over the last several decades, is that people like Ray Dallio were doing it as a matter of fact, not a big deal. You know, I go to the gym and I meditate. It's self-care. And I think, if I remember rightly that he said that anyone at his firm, Bridgewater, they would pay for them to go meditate, for them to take Transcendental Meditation and Training, which is very, very interesting that they would regard it as sufficiently a competitive advantage that they would actually bankrupt it.

I didn't know that. So you've become friends over decades with the Dalai Lama, and you wrote a book about him called A Force for Good, the Dalai Lama's vision for the world. And you've spent many hours interviewing him. And I remember you published a book on destructive emotions and how you can overcome them. It was based on a scientific dialogue with the Dalai Lama. And he's clearly fascinated by science. And I wondered if you could talk a bit about what you've learned from him.

I remember I was listening actually the other day to an old interview that you did with Oprah Winfrey, who's a master of emotional intelligence. You can see she's extraordinary. And you said to her, I think he's the person I admire most in the world today. And I was wondering why, what's been so impressive as you've got to know the Dalai Lama? So, you know, I don't like go out for beers with the Dalai Lama. It's not like for buddies, but I've seen him over the years in a number of situations. And one thing I really admire about him is his openness to everybody.

It doesn't matter who it is. He's absolutely present for that person, you know, a beggar, a prime minister, no difference I've seen. He really exemplifies loving kindness, presence. The Tibetan word for the Dalai Lama is not Dalai Lama. It's Kundun, which means presence. I remember I was once at a reception in Hollywood, you know, A-list stars were lined up to meet the Dalai Lama.

And I was standing with a monk who travels with the Dalai Lama. And he said, watch this. He said, at about eight feet or ten feet away from the Dalai Lama, everybody's going to break into a big smile. Because he has this aura around him. It's contagious. And you pick up that calmness and so. And I really admire that. And I admire the fact that he has throughout his life, which has been very turbulent, by the way, talk about ups and downs.

I mean, he lost his country and his people are being tortured by the Chinese and, you know, many upsetting things come to him all the time. But he's remained that calm, loving presence through it all. I really admire that. You also mentioned something in one of your books where you wrote about him where he said something like act now, even if you won't see the fruit of the action in your lifetime. I was very struck by that, that there's a sense, I think you were talking about with him that there were three types of kindness. So there's kindness to oneself. I'm probably gobbling this. Kindness to the people around you, helping the people around you.

And then you said there's kindness to the world at large, which includes the environment. So can you talk a bit about that, about that sense from him of wanting to engage with the world and actually having an impact? Well, I think that he sees things in multi-dimension. And one of them that's really impressed me is that he's a systems thinker. And so he understands that, for example, poverty is built into our economic system. He understands that global warming or the pollution of the environment is a everyday byproduct of the way we live, the way we produce things, the way we consume. And he sees that the solutions need to be systemic as well as individual. And he sees also that each one of us has a sphere of influence.

And for some people, it's very wide. You may be an executive. You may run a company. That's a big sphere. Or you may have friends and family who you can influence. That's a smaller sphere. He says, it doesn't matter. Do something, whatever you can, whatever you're called to do, that will improve our situation.

And don't do something just for benefit now. The benefit may come after you're long gone, but do it anyway. I think you also, you once quoted him saying something along the lines of whenever you make an important decision, you need to stop and ask yourself. Again, I'm probably garbling this, so you correct me. It was something like, who benefits? Is it only me or is it everyone? And is it now or is it for the future? He said, when you're making a decision, think about this, ask yourself three questions. Who benefits? Is it just me or a group? Is it just my group or everyone? And is it only for the

present, for the future too? I found that very profound. He said that at a meeting at MIT. It's interesting to me because when we were emailing before, you kind of disputed the idea that there was this connection in some way between the Eastern mystical, the spiritual tradition that's embodied by like Ram Dass and the Dalai Lama and Nimalibaba and your more scientific work that came out of David McClellan and the Harvard Psychology Department. And I would say, no, no, they're totally, they're totally connected. And it strikes me when I look back at the book, Emotional Intelligence, that in a way it was a kind of stealth spiritual book that he, even though it's incredibly practical. You wrote even in that, there's a line where you talked about the root of altruism lies in empathy. And I think also the book, you talked in there about offering hopeful remedies to a growing calamity in our shared emotional life. And it strikes me that in some ways the book was a plea for civility, caring, empathy, and all of those things.

They're practical and they have tremendous benefits in your life in the workplace. But it strikes me that they were deeply rooted in your spiritual life. Well, William, I think that there is a spiritual dimension to emotional intelligence. But there's a spectrum. There's the absolutely pragmatic benefit of it. And then there's another end of that spectrum, which is spiritual. So, for example, self-awareness, absolutely crucial to handling yourself, to leading yourself. But it also happens to be one of the core principles of every spiritual tradition, know thyself.

mastery over your inner world. Same thing has huge practical implications, but there's a spiritual dimension too. Every spiritual tradition talks about this kind of need for a self-discipline, if you will, or following a set of ethics and morals. Empathy is the root of altruism and compassion, no question. And putting that all together to have beneficial interactions. So, Dan, in terms of your own ability to handle your emotions over the years, have you you got better at this? I mean, I remember seeing, for example, I saw you after the New York wrote some, I thought, really unfair and clever, but slightly deceptive reading of emotional intelligence 25 years after it came out. And I was thinking, like, how do you deal with unfair criticism?

How do you deal with disruptive emotions when someone annoys you, when someone upsets you? Are there ways in which you've become more effective at dealing with the slings and errors of fortune? You know, William, it's hard to tell if it has to do with my meditation practice or aging or something else. But yeah, I was attacked. I thought very unfairly. But I did get four pages in The New Yorker. You know, you can see it different ways. And I sat with the feelings.

I didn't do anything, but I felt them. And they dissipated after a while. And then I went on to the next thing. So that was how I handled that particular sling and arrow. I can't say that there was a particular method, although I've just been writing about something that one of my Tibetan teachers calls handshake practice. Yeah, this is Mingya Rinpoche's brother Sokne Rampichet. Where when you have something that's very upsetting or you get angry or whatever, you sit

with the feeling, you don't deny it. You feel it fully and you accept it. And it turns out that that has the power to actually dissipate the impact of that feeling. So I was using that method, if you will. And I have a book coming out with him in the fall called Why We Meditate, which describes that practice in detail. Yeah, and I'm hoping to lure you back then with Sautnerimpeche himself, who's an extraordinarily impressive guy.

I mean, they're quite a family, that family. Yeah, absolutely amazing. So I wanted to ask you one last thing. There's a lovely thing in your bio on your website where you say, Over the years, my private life has grown increasingly important to me, particularly as the years allow me to spend less time running around and more time just being. I find more and more that what satisfies me has little to do with how well one or another book does, though the good works I participate in continue to matter much. My wife Tara and I try to spend a good deal of our free time

in meditation retreats or traveling together to places we enjoy that nourish this side of our lives, life's simple pleasures, a walk on a beach, playing with grandchildren, a good conversation with a friend have more appeal to me than professional honors or ambitions. And I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about this idea of just being, of relishing life, simple pleasures, because for people like me in my early 50s, I'm still in the throes of chasing after these ambitions that I fear are never going to satisfy me. So can you talk about being and relishing rather than just chasing and trying to achieve? I think that our accomplishments, the kudos, we get over life, the money we earn, as we are dying, will matter not at all. The times that we've

enjoyed with people we love or just being are what will matter ultimately. You also said there was something on Twitter where you had quoted William James, I think, who said the great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. And then you asked, what would you like your legacy to be? Do you think about that? Do you think about as you look back now in your 70s, what this all adds up to and what you'd like your legacy to be? Yes, I would be happy. I'm doing a memoir, by the way, a spiritual memoir. I'd be happy if people in the future got more interested in inner life, in inner practice, meditation, whatever, because of what I'd left behind. That's a great ambition. Well, I want to thank you. I know you have to go down. It's been such a

pleasure. And when my daughter said to me the other day, you know, we should really be friends with him. I said, well, I do regard him as a friend, but I kind of regard him as a role model and a mentor in many ways. And so I look at you as someone who embodies a lot of the qualities that I'd like to develop more. So you're further along on the path and higher up the Mount Everest. So keep planting good flags for the rest of us so that we can find our way. Well, thank you for that perception. Don't know if it's true, but it's always a pleasure to talk to you, William. Thank you. It's been a real delight.

Thanks so much, Dan. Take care. All right, folks. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with. Daniel Goldman. If you'd like to learn more from him, I'd definitely recommend his books. There's a 25th anniversary edition of emotional intelligence that's well worth reading if you haven't read it already. I also really enjoyed a book that he co-authored that's titled Altered Traits. It explores scientifically how meditation changes the body and the brain, making you calmer and more focused and more emotionally resilient. I've included these and various

other resources in the show notes for this episode. Meanwhile, thanks to everyone who sent me questions for Dan over Twitter. I ended up asking a question from a listener in Canada whose Twitter handle is at auditor investor. I also asked a question from a listener in Belgium named Martin, whose Twitter handle is a charging bull capital. As a way of saying thanks, I'm sending each of them a signed copy of my book, Richer Wiser, Happier, which is based on hundreds of hours of interviews that I've done with many of the world's greatest investors over the last quarter of of a century. If you'd like to connect with me on Twitter, you can find me at William Green 72, and please do let me know how you're liking the podcast. It's always a delight to hear from you.

In the meantime, I'm happy to say I'll be back again soon with some fascinating guests, including Jim Grant, Thomas Russo, and the Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Schiller. Thanks so much for listening. Take care. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billioners by the Investors Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to the investorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written

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