We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH059: Ask Me Anything w/ William Green

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. 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. All right, folks, I'm thrilled to be back with you on the richer, wiser, happier podcast. I'm joining you on a beautiful summer day here in New York. And my plan today is to bring you something a little different. For the first time ever, I'm recording a special Ask Me Anything episode. So instead of interviewing a guest, I'm going to answer an array of questions that have been

Starting point is 00:00:48 submitted to me by listeners from around the world. Over the last couple of weeks, I received dozens of questions over LinkedIn and X and through email. I also got a slew of terrific questions that were sent by subscribers to the Intrinsic Value newsletter, which is part of the Investors Podcast Network Empire. So thanks a lot to Sean and Daniel, who host the Intrinsic Value podcast for very kind gathering those questions from their followers. In any case, I'm going to do my best to answer a good number of questions, but I got so many that I'm almost certainly going to save some of them

Starting point is 00:01:23 for a future episode of the podcast. And of course, in my dream version of this episode, I was going to prepare a lot and figure out what I would say first. But of course, I've did it in a maelstrom of activity the last few weeks. And so I'm going to really just answer questions and see what comes out. and hopefully something in here will be useful for you, or at least it'll be honest. In any case, the first question is from someone called Thomas Sinclair from Fairbanks, Alaska. And Thomas wrote to me, Hi, William, you write a lot about others and what has helped them in their journey. What are the three best decisions or investments that you have made in your own life?

Starting point is 00:02:04 Well, the first one, without any doubt, actually, is that I got married, really young, really surprisingly young. I met my wife Lauren when I was 22 and I had just come to New York and I was a young aspiring journalist and we went out, both of us on the only ever blind date we went on and we met at the museum Monat and I think the first date lasted about nine hours and the second date lasted a couple of days and really within a couple of weeks we moved in together and when I think we were probably 24, we got engaged. We went to this beautiful restaurant in New York, one of by land, two of by sea. And after I posed the question to my wife as to whether she would marry me,

Starting point is 00:02:51 she realized she'd been letting wax from the candle fall on her hand and burn her hand. In any case, we then got married at 25 and we were sufficiently young and irresponsible and I guess sort of creative and subversive that we walked to, down the aisle with our dog, Dizzy, who was named after Dizzy Gillespie. Yeah, so it was very young. And so in some ways you could say it was kind of, it was kind of reckless. So rather than this being a great decision, you could argue that it was sort of overly impulsive of overly reckless to get married at that age. But here I am, you know, 35 years almost after we met and still, thank God, very happy. I'm very incredibly grateful. And I actually, I wrote at the very end of my book,

Starting point is 00:03:36 richer, wise, happier. At the end of the acknowledgments, I said, and then there's my wife, Lauren Cooper, the kindest and most caring of people. I met Lauren when I was only 22 years old, and everything that's best in my life stems from that one miraculous stroke of good fortune. And I think that's true, particularly our kids, but also to have a spouse who looks out for you, watches over you, is an amazing piece of good fortune in life. And so I don't take a great deal of credit for that decision, except in a couple of ways. So one is before we got engaged, I actually called three people. I called my late father, my mother, and my brother independently. And I said, I'm thinking of proposing to Lauren, am I getting something wrong here? Am I missing

Starting point is 00:04:26 something? And all of them said, no, no, she's great. And you're very fortunate. And I think I was officially surprised that anyone would date me, that they probably were like, yeah, yeah, just go for it. It's an amazing piece of good fortune. But then a year or two ago, when I interviewed Annie Duke on the podcast, we had been talking about her book, Quit. And it really struck me that she was advising people to bring in what she called, I think, outside voices to challenge any decision you're making, any important decision that you're making. And she talked about Danny Kahneman, who she had been close to the Nobel Prize winning economist, who obviously was one of the great decision-making experts. And Kahneman had apparently appointed a friend of his,

Starting point is 00:05:19 who was also a Nobel Prize winning economist, Richard Thaler, to point out his mistakes and his blind spots. And he asked Thaler to challenge him if he was missing something. So I think it's curious that even though I was a sort of reckless and impulsive 24 year old getting engaged, that at least I was bringing in outside voices to see if I had missed something. I think that was probably a pretty good early recognition of the fact that I might be doing something really foolish. And I just wanted to check with people who cared about me and were likely to be looking out for my best interests. The other thing I would say, obviously, you know, everyone's, marriage and everyone's relationships are different. And, you know, you can't extrapolate

Starting point is 00:06:05 too much from one person's experience. But what I've said to my kids, Henry and Madeline, who are 24 and 27, many times over the years, is I think the single most important thing is to find someone who's kind. I think if you're with someone who's kind and who looks out for you, that makes up for a lot of problems. But I think that's also something that you probably have to nurture. And it's very conscious. And so I don't know, I'm pretty useless in so many ways around the house. And, you know, I'm pretty self-centered and I'm pretty obsessed with my work, which is probably illustrated by the fact that I'm recording this on the 4th of July, which is a federal holiday and everyone else is off.

Starting point is 00:06:44 But one thing that I do that I think is probably pretty good and is easily clonable is even though I'm not that handy in any other way, I do make coffee every single morning. for Lauren and for me because I drink ridiculous amounts of coffee. And I take a coffee in bed every morning. And it's just a small way of trying to even a little bit at the balance of someone who does so much more for me than I do for them. But also there's this moment as I'm waiting for the coffee to brew where I'm like, do I actually empty the dishwasher? And I don't like emptying the dishwasher. But Lauren dislikes it more than I do. And it depresses how when she gets

Starting point is 00:07:27 up and the very first thing in the day is emptying the dishwasher. And so I thought about this this morning, right? As I'm, I was going to work all day and she was off for the day. And still, I'm like, no, let me just empty the dishwasher, even though it's annoying. And then I went off and I had a conversation with a couple of friends over Zoom for an hour or so, which I do every Friday. And then Lauren came in with these beautiful flowers, these wild flowers that she'd picked in our garden and had put in a vase that she made that I had admired yesterday. And I just, I just think that's such a lovely thing to have someone who, you know, you're not, you're not counting who's ahead and who's done more, which is lucky since the answer in this case would be pretty obvious. But somebody who

Starting point is 00:08:16 is trying to make you happy. And, you know, she knew that I had particularly liked this vase that she had made. It's really beautiful. And she had just brought it yesterday from this pottery studio, where she's been going a lot. And so she brings me these beautiful flowers that she's grown. And, you know, it just, it's a small thing, but it's these little acts of kindness that I think after 30-something years, keep your marriage good. So it's, it's not one decision. In a way, it's, there was the original decision and there are all the ways that you subsequently try to live up to those original promises. And I, I feel constantly on this.

Starting point is 00:08:52 I'm always falling short. but I sort of feel like eventually, hopefully I'll deserve this gift that I was given when I was ridiculously young. So that's the first decision that I made that I think was probably the single best decision of my life. Then in terms of more investment oriented decisions, you know, the best decision in some ways was just to start to become obsessed with investing when I was about 26. So the fact that very early, or comparatively early, at least, I started to invest in the stock market. And so to get a good runway, I mean, obviously, if I had been Buffett and it started at the age of 11 or something like that, it would have been much better. But it was pretty good.

Starting point is 00:09:36 And one of the things that I did when I was fairly young was I investing in Guy Spears Fund, the Aquamarine Fund. We used to go have lunch together in New York City when he was living here instead of living in Switzerland. and we would chat a lot and I liked him and I could see that he was very, very smart and driven. And I think around 1999 when Buffett was hugely out of favor, Guy put something like 20, 25% of his fund in Berkshire, I think it was at 40,000 at the time. I mean, it was really cheap and very out of favor. There were a lot of people already predicting that Buffett was sort of finished and that he'd lost his touch. And so I made this very contrarian investment.

Starting point is 00:10:19 And I probably, maybe a year later, maybe in 2000, possibly 2001, around then, I invested in his fund. And I didn't realize I was one of the first investors. And so again, it was a good decision where I got kind of lucky because I didn't realize actually, you know, I ended up helping him with his book, the educational value investor many years later. And I think I only realized then when he wrote so candidly about. his experiences before setting up his fund. I only realized I really hadn't done my due diligence and I was just sort of making a call on the fact that this guy was clearly highly intelligent and ambitious. And I thought he was going to make money and I wanted to make money with him. So I think I got pretty lucky there. But again, in a similar way to maybe my good fortune with

Starting point is 00:11:07 my decision to get married and then the fact that I sort of protected that decision in some ways through trying to behave decently for the most part. Subsequently, the thing that made me lucky with the aquamarine decision is I then had the patience to hold. So I've probably been in the fund for 24, 25 years, something like that. And similarly, I bought index funds very early, not that early, but certainly mid to late 20s and kept them for 30-something years. I had another fund that I owned for about 14 years until finally I got turfed out of it because they could change the structure. I would have kept it indefinitely. Berkshire I've owned for a long time, though not nearly long enough. I wish I'd bought it way earlier. But so I think, I think in a way,

Starting point is 00:11:58 you know, with each of these things, the original decision was decent. Like I made a decision during, um, during COVID where I bought Berkshire, maybe three or probably three, maybe four more times. I kept adding to my position. So I think that was smart, but I think the thing that was really smart, and God knows I made a huge number of mistakes. So I'm just highlighted the good decisions here. The thing that was smart was the holding. It was the patience. And I think, again, that's really replicable. So that's been very fortunate. And then again, there were really good things came out of investing in Aquarine. So my friendship with Guy, which has been an important. part of my life because he's been kind to me on so many different fronts over so many years.

Starting point is 00:12:44 That was very important and led to lots of good things because Guy would introduce me to people like Monish Pabri or Nick Sleep and Ken Schubenstein. I mean, lots of people who became friends of mine were important sources for my book and things like that. So so many things came out of that friendship. And also I think one of the strange things in my approach to investing that came out of this is I've ended up several times investing with friends, which is probably unconventional and often a really lousy idea. But I think I, I think I'm invested in four actively managed funds and that all managed by friends and mine, all by people I really like personally who are very smart investors, but also people I trust personally. And maybe part of

Starting point is 00:13:35 investing with friends is it's a, it's a judgment call about that. personality and whether they're trustworthy and the like. But part of it is that I think it helps me to be patient because I don't want to disappoint them in some way and have them feel like I've betrayed them by cashing out something. So maybe it's using my own personality in a way that helps me do the right thing and be patient as an investor. The third thing I would say in terms of one of the the three best decisions or investments that I've made in my life was actually the decision to write my book, Richer Wiser Happier, which was in some ways a foolhardy act of courage because everyone would tell you how the book publishing industry was falling apart and it was incredibly difficult

Starting point is 00:14:24 to make money off a book. And I've put lots of people off writing books myself. And I just put everything into the book. I mean, I just really put heart and soul into it. I think I spent six months, even on the book proposal before I got started and I went to India with Monish for five days to report just so that I could write the book proposal. And so it's a tremendous investment of time and energy and emotional commitment. And as I've mentioned, lots of times before, I took five years on the book. And I didn't take a single vacation. I really try not to work on Saturdays, but I very frequently work on Sundays and holidays. So it was intense and I put everything into it.

Starting point is 00:15:10 And it was very stressful because when you're writing a book, you have no idea if it's going to resonate. And it's a long, quite lonely and quite painful process. And you're very exposed. And I missed my deadline by a couple of years. So I felt a tremendous amount of pressure. My editor, Scribner, told me I was sitting in an office not far, about 15 feet from the office where I'm recording this, told me at one point, you realize that

Starting point is 00:15:37 we can cancel your contract and get the money back. And his boss came to my paperback book party release recently and said to me, ah, we never would have done that. And I told him that. And he's like, no, no, we would have done. I mean, I was really at risk. And so I had this feeling that I had failed before I even started, that, you know, I hadn't even turned the book in and I'd already failed. And so it was very painful, very emotionally difficult. So I think if there's any lesson from that, it's that the things that we do that are hardest tend to be the things that are most rewarding. That's not always true, of course. But there's a great principle in Kabbalah, this ancient spiritual wisdom that I've spent a lot of time studying over the last 17 or so years. They talk about

Starting point is 00:16:26 restriction, this ability to go against your own nature, that in a sense there's a there's always this kind of force of opposition that you need to overcome in order to earn great light, as, you know, to put it metaphorically. And I remember someone, the teacher, using the metaphor of playing soccer and not having a goalkeeper and taking penalties and it would just not be very rewarding. You know, you need the struggle for it to be worthwhile. And so I'm still a little bit shell-shocked even a few years after the book came out because it was so intense and so challenging. But at the same time, the book has done really well, and it's created so many amazing opportunities for me and really changed my life in so many ways, including creating

Starting point is 00:17:10 this podcast and giving the opportunity of speeches around the world and various other opportunities. It's been an amazing thing, life-changing thing for me. So those three things, I would say, were at least off the top of my head, the three great decisions, the three great investments, I guess you could call them. And it's interesting that there are a mix of personal, financial, professional. It makes me think of Charlie Munger saying everything is one damn relatedness after another. All right. The second question comes from a listener called Tyler Hart. That's H-A-R-D-T. And Tyler is his chief portfolio manager at a firm called Pelican Bay Capital Management and lives in Naples, Florida.

Starting point is 00:17:58 a concentrated value investor. And Tyler wrote to me, good morning, Mr. Green. I would, I like this question already. Anyone who treats me with respect like that is greatly to be applauded. I have, good morning, Mr. Green. I would like to submit the following question for your Ask Me Anything podcast. Given your extensive experience interviewing these super investors and observing their consistent application of principles that extend beyond finance into their personal lives, do you believe there's a common thread, perhaps a master principle, that underpins their ability to cultivate both exceptional wealth and a profound sense of well-being, even when facing significant market volatility or personal adversity? If so, what do you think that singular overarching

Starting point is 00:18:43 principle might be? Thank you for all that you do and your contribution to making us better investors and people. Have a great day, Tyler Hart. That's a wonderful question. Thank you. There's so much to this, the idea of a master principle underpinning the ability of all these great investors to cultivate both wealth and a sense of well-being amid adversity. And I think one of the things that's been very striking to me that became very clear when I was working on the epilogue of the book, when I was kind of pulling back and trying to look at what actually makes for a happy and successful life, was I got this sense that nothing is more important than the ability to handle adversity. And in fact, there's a sentence in that epilogue where I wrote, we cannot hope to lead

Starting point is 00:19:30 happy and successful lives unless we learn to cope well with adversity. And I think I've been surprised again and again by the fact that you look at these incredibly successful lives, right, of a lot of the people that I'm writing about. And yet, almost all of them have been through a great deal of pain and suffering along the way, particularly the older ones. And I tend to focus on people who, who've succeeded over very long periods of time. Think of someone like Charlie Munger, right, who died, I think, 34 days short of his 100th birthday and, you know, was more or less sainted by the time he passed.

Starting point is 00:20:10 I mean, everyone admired him greatly. And he had an extraordinary last few years where I think people, people realize what a great role model and sage he was in so many ways. And yet Charlie lost his full. first child to leukemia, lost his first marriage, got off to a really bad start financially, partly because of that. Later, he lost his eye, lost his second wife after, I think, if I remember rightly, she fell down stairs, something like that, but that was after many decades of marriage. And he talked about the idea, I'll misquote this slightly, but it's a very

Starting point is 00:20:48 important insight that I've quoted it a lot, where he talked about this idea that you should treat life as a series of adversities that give you an opportunity to behave well or badly. That's a really great filter. And I remember him saying that when you get old, this attitude is all the more important because the adversities come thickened fast, as I think he said. And I see this a lot. I mean, in some ways, if you think about the actual game of investing, Tampleton's, John Templeton once told me many years ago, maybe 25, 30 years ago said to me that he had looked back at something like half a million investment decisions he'd made and realized that he'd been wrong a third of the time. Although his term for it, he said a third of those

Starting point is 00:21:37 decisions were the opposite of wisdom, which I guess Charlie would have called foolish. Jeff Gunlack said the same thing to me that he was wrong about a third of the time. So built into the game of investing is the fact that we're wrong a lot. So we're always having to recover from mistakes and we're having to make sure that as Gunnlach said to me, you've got to ask yourself, what's the consequence if I'm wrong? So you've got to make sure your mistakes are non-fatal, as he put it. But built into this game is the fact you're going to be dealing with these setbacks. And I saw this very, very vividly with Bill Miller, who I've interviewed an enormous amount over the last 25 years or so when he had a terrible time during the financial crisis.

Starting point is 00:22:19 And I've hugely admired the way he came back from that with this sense of honor and strength and good grace and good humor in admitting his mistakes and the like. And Bill many years ago was the guy who got me to start studying Stoic philosophy. This is really a long time ago, because Bill had been a PhD philosophy student as well as going into military intelligence. It's a very unusual background, very brilliant man.

Starting point is 00:22:47 So Bill got me to read people like Marcus Aurelius, who wrote this amazing book, Meditations, that many of you will have read, and Epictetus, who is extraordinary, I believe, was a slave, and yet gained extraordinary control over his mind, over his inner landscape. And also, Bill got me to read this book by Vice Admiral Stockdale called Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, which I found very helpful. And so these were really all about, you know, as Epictetus taught, Everything really was about how you get control of your inner landscape so that no one can really touch you. And Marcus Aurelius did the same thing. He, I think, referred to the greatest of all contests being the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens.

Starting point is 00:23:33 And there's a beautiful line that I discussed with Samantha McElmore, Bill Miller's successor on the podcast that had affected both of us from meditations, where Marcus Aurelius talked about how you should be like a rock. that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it. And so I think whatever you do, both in investing and life, like developing this sense of resilience, this ability to handle adversity is really important. And so doing things like meditating, like building strong relationships,

Starting point is 00:24:11 having some sort of spiritual resource, some sort of spiritual belief that, you can draw on in difficult times. It's very, very helpful. But it's not just resilience in that negative sense of sort of, you know, waiting for things for disaster to crash into you. There's also this kind of resilience that I see in just the incredible ability to keep compounding knowledge and good habits and persevering. So maybe really the underlying quality that all of these people have is this kind of indomitable perseverance. And I always love this phrase that Peter Kaufman from Glen Eyre,

Starting point is 00:24:50 who never really speaks publicly, but was a great friend of Charlie Mungers and is a sort of philosopher king within the business and investing world. He would talk about dogged incremental progress over time. I think that was the phrase he used. That's certainly the way I remember it. And I think about that a lot, that that's the quality you need,

Starting point is 00:25:10 this sort of commitment to dogged incremental progress over time. time. And Chris Begg, who I've had on the podcast as well and who's become a good friend, he created an acronym for this, which is Piper, which I believe stands for persistent incremental progress eternally repeated. And Chris was fissionally taken with this concept to the Piper mindset that when he had a child on January 1st, which would have been child's 101st birthday, he called the child. He and and his wife Sam called the child Piper. So I think that gives you a sense that what you need is this ability not only to deal with setbacks and recover from mistakes and handle adversity, but this indomitable commitment to forward progress. I think that's a prerequisite for success. And I've certainly seen that in my own career, not to hold myself up as, you know, the

Starting point is 00:26:12 equivalent of Charlie Munger and Marcus Aurelius and the like. But, I mean, along the way, you know, if you're a writer, you deal with a lot of pain. And I mean, A, there's the pain of the blank page and not knowing what you're going to say and having to wrestle with your thoughts, which I find hard. But B, it's been in some ways a terrible industry for, you know, ever since I left Oxford at the age of, you know, 20 and then I came to New York and went to Columbia Journalism school when I was about 22. And ever since then, so I've been writing for magazines and then later books and like since I was 21. So this is, you know, 35 year career. It's always been hard. I mean, I had so many stories killed over the years. And, you know, you would spend weeks or months on a

Starting point is 00:27:03 story and then it wouldn't come out. And, and then you'd have to, you'd have to just hold it together and be like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to come back from that. And for a long time, I think I was very motivated by almost a desire to, I mean, the negative word would refer it would be revenge. It's not really that, but it was a desire to show them. It's like, I'm going to show those guys. I used ruder words than that in my own head. You know, they never should have killed my story. And just that attitude of indomitability, whatever it is, that, motivates you, I think it's very, very important. I think as I've got older, there's less of a desire to show everyone and prove them wrong and all of that, although that's still part of my

Starting point is 00:27:50 psyche, but there's probably more of a desire to be of service and to help and in some way, hopefully to be a conduit for insights that'll help people. And that's a better place to come from, I think, than those negative emotions of anger and a desire to prove. of yourself and the vulnerable ego that goes with it. But wherever you get your strength, that ability just to keep going, indomitable perseverance, I think is the single most important thread. I'm probably wrong here. But I don't think you could do without it.

Starting point is 00:28:31 I mean, there are plenty of other things you need, certainly to be a very successful investor. So you need a calm temperament probably to some degree, at least to be able to make rational and emotional decisions about money. You need to be able to think probabilistically to calculate the odds and the like. You need to be highly intelligent. You need to be able to go against the crowd and to think for yourself. So you need a fierce independence. You need a weird mix of self-confidence to go against the crowd.

Starting point is 00:29:03 and yet the humility to check your decisions and to wonder if you're wrong and to be open to dissenting opinions. So in a way, there's a, there are conflicting characteristics there, the humility and the confidence. So there are so many things like that. You need to be fiercely competitive, fiercely driven, fiercely persistent. So in some ways, I sometimes think that the greatest investors are like, oh, weird chemical experiment where so many things had to go, had to go right or just had to be in some weird balance for them to come out as they were. But I think it's helpful. You know, some of these qualities are not really clonable because they're probably part of your wiring

Starting point is 00:29:52 and you probably can't necessarily just emulate them. But I think the awareness that you're going to fail, you're going to be wrong, you're going to make mistakes. you're going to look foolish at times, and yet you're going to have to persevere. I think just that simple awareness is quite helpful. So for me, when I look at my own career, I think indomitable perseverance, indomitable persistence has been the single most helpful quality that I've had. That would be my guess. So maybe I'm just projecting onto great investors, and I'm certainly not a great investor,

Starting point is 00:30:31 but maybe I'm projecting onto them that I see they have to have that capacity just to keep going. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine 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, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history. This is where you hear firsthand stories from people using Bitcoin to survive currency collapse, using AI to expose human rights abuses, and building technology under censorship and authoritarian pressures.

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Starting point is 00:34:38 Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. I don't think it's just me observing this because I have this friend. who I wrote about in the book in the chapter called the Resilient Investor, Matt McClannon. And Matt said to me, I think I quote him, he had started off at Goldman Sachs for many years, and he was once wondering why the people who had done so well at Goldman had done so well,

Starting point is 00:35:13 what they had in common. And he said much the same. He said what he'd learned over time was that it was just the, often it was just the people who didn't give up. They just kept learning. They kept evolving. They stuck to it. And they were willing to live through adversity.

Starting point is 00:35:30 So yeah, the ability never to give up is key. But with the great investors, it's also, I mean, it's not just dogged perseverance. It's also that the game itself is so fascinating that they don't stop.

Starting point is 00:35:45 And so it's that element of obsession with cracking the code that I think they also have. All right, next question. This is from a listener called Eric Chen, lives in Hong Kong, and he says, I'm running my own hedge fund, and I'm a big fan of William's book as well as Buffett and Munger. And he writes, hi William, you have interviewed and written about many great investors who have already become rich, wise, and happy. And then he says, if you were to inquire into the period before they became rich, wise and happy,

Starting point is 00:36:18 was there any anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, or any other typical negative emotions felt by them? If yes, what's the common characteristic that you observe in this group of great investors to eventually overcome those negative emotions and get there? It's a very interesting question. And I think it's probably one that a lot of our listeners who are hustling

Starting point is 00:36:40 to become very successful in their careers think about. And I think I would, first, I would challenge challenge one assumption in the question because Eric talks about how I focus on a lot of these investors who've already become rich, wise and happy. But actually, I would argue that most of them don't have that trifecta of wealth wisdom and happiness. I think, as Charlie mentioned, when he read the book, he was very struck by how many of the great investors got divorced. and I think to be extraordinarily successful often requires a kind of extreme focus, almost a fanaticism that leads people to neglect certain other aspects of their life.

Starting point is 00:37:23 So sometimes they become extremely rich, but not that wise. Sometimes they become extremely rich but not that happy. It's difficult. It's difficult to have all three. There are a few people who I know who have all three, but they're a definite minority. So this question of whether they were dealing with these very difficult emotions before they became successful, like anxiety, self-doubt, frustration and the like. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the common denominators in pretty much all of the super, super successful investors that I've interviewed is that there was a great hunger in those early years.

Starting point is 00:38:05 There was a great desire to make it, to make something of themselves, to succeed, to be independent. Think of Charlie Munger talking about his hunger for independence, the fact that what he and Warren wanted was not to be subservient to anyone, subordinate to anyone who could tell them what to do. They didn't want to be in some big hierarchical organization being told what to do. think of someone like Mario Gabelli, who I've interviewed before. I wrote about him in the great minds of investing and quoted him a little bit in ritual-wise happier, but not much. Mario came from a very poor background and really had this hunger for money. He was driven, I think, to make money and to prove himself. And he was an information hound, as he put it to me. He just, you know, he wasn't super intellectual, he was very highly intelligent,

Starting point is 00:39:00 wasn't interested in reading books or novels or anything like that. I would say he had no interest in wisdom as far as I could make out, but he had a great deal of hunger to get ahead. Think about someone like Will Danoff, who I wrote about in Rich or Wise a Happier. There's a wonderful story that I think is tucked away in a footnote that I love telling of when Will went, I think, to an analyst meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, decades ago when he was a young investor. And Bill Miller, who became a close friend of his, was a young investor. And someone introduced them. And Bill Miller told me that he stretched out

Starting point is 00:39:37 his hand and said, hi, Will, nice to meet you. I'm Bill. And he said, Will Danilf didn't stretch out his hand and just said, I'm going to beat you, man. I'm going to beat you. And so I think that kind of competitive spirit, that sort of fire was always there very early on this desire for success for recognition. And Will Danov talks about how one of his shareholders many years ago sent him a photo. It was a couple sent him the photo of their young child, their baby, who had just been born, I think, and said, you know, this is, this is who you're managing money for. And so I think

Starting point is 00:40:14 he's done a great job of really keeping that idea front and center, remembering the idea that there's an element of service here. But there's still a great competitive spirit. I mean, he said to me once, something along lines of frankly, I care more. And I love a phrase like that, I care more because, you know, it's three monosyllabic words and yet, boy, do they have a lot of power to them, there's a sort of essential truth to them. So where does that sense of care come from?

Starting point is 00:40:46 I mean, some of it's a desire to serve. Some of it, sometimes in, in many of these cases, is a desire for money or a desire for recognition or independent, I remember Bill Ackman talking to me once about how he just really wanted to have money so that he could say what he wanted, do what he wanted, think what he wanted, you know, a real desire for a sort of bristling hunger for independence. And so I'm not really celebrating these characteristics. I'm not saying, oh, this is what you should be like. I don't think always those characteristics that kind of hunger and fire and intensity is a recipe for happiness. there's a dissatisfaction and a drive often to the most successful people. I'm just sort of describing what I think is, what I think just I observe a lot.

Starting point is 00:41:39 And I think part of the subtext of Eric's question, if I'm understanding correctly, is, you know, we're all dealing with our doubts and our anxieties and our frustrations as we try to get our careers airborne and become really successful. So in a way, I think it's very helpful to know that these super successful people, you know, yeah, sure, some of them probably started with this kind of very unusual self-confidence. But I think a lot of them, a lot of them went through difficult times. A lot of them had very lucky breaks and ended up just in positions where things sort of broke right for them. I don't know. I mean, I also, I was very struck once a story that Arnold Vandenberg's son, Scott, who became president of his. his company, century management once told me where Scott looked at Arnold, who had built a very

Starting point is 00:42:33 successful life in so many ways professionally, but also personally. And Arnold is a good example of someone who's rich, wise, and happy. And Scott said to him, I think Scott was sort of struggling early in his career as soon as 20s, maybe, maybe 30, that sort of thing. And he said something to Arnold about, was it hard for you? And Arnold, who's incredibly honest and had started with absolutely nothing and had an incredibly difficult early life, talked to him about in the early days of setting up his investment firm, just putting his head down on his desk one afternoon and just sobbing. So I think it's helpful to know that these people, it wasn't just handed to them.

Starting point is 00:43:15 They had to struggle too. It was difficult. And so how you overcome those negative emotions, I don't know. I mean, we've talked a lot in various episodes of the podcast, particularly my quarterly discussions with Stig Brodusson, about how to deal with difficult emotions. And I had an episode of the podcast, one of my favorite episodes of my podcast, where I talked to Daniel Goldman and this great Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, Sokney Rimpichet, about dealing with difficult emotions. I would definitely encourage people to go back and listen to that. But then Eric, in writing this question, also asked the second part of the question, which is, if you were to inquire into their mental state after they have already made it, what is the one reason that keeps driving them to become richer, wiser, and happier? And that's a really interesting question, I think. I had a very interesting dinner a few months ago with a famous investor in his eight years.

Starting point is 00:44:11 has an incredible record. It's a formidable guy. And he was talking a bit about maybe setting up a new firm, having already set up very successful firms in the past. And I said to him, why not just manage your own money? I mean, this guy has already made huge amounts of money. Clearly doesn't need the money. He's got a great reputation. And he just answered in one word. He said, competitive. I thought that was really fascinating, that someone who's been a successful as him just can't help it. He's just competitive. And I like this guy a lot. It's very nice man, but I think, I think there, these are often kind of dysfunctional people harnessing this intense drive and desire for competition, victory, better returns, more money. And that's fine. I'm not

Starting point is 00:45:06 knocking any of this. And I'm, and again, I'm not saying this critically. I'm trying just, and I'm, And I'm not saying this is what you should be like. I'm just trying to describe what it is I see. What I would say about the ones who are wisest and happiest is that they've managed to take that tremendous desire and transform it in some way to benefit other people. And if you look at the description of Arnold Vannberg in the epilogue of the book, you see that here's a guy who overcame unbelievable difficulty, unbelievable pain, anger, disappointment, rage,

Starting point is 00:45:51 you know, he couldn't have had a worse start his life. And yet he's become this extraordinarily kind, decent, loving, sharing person. And I think that points at something really important, which is that he's just looking out for other people. He's trying to lift up other people. And so I think there's this great paradox here. that to be extraordinarily successful, I do think you have to have that desire, that intensity of desire.

Starting point is 00:46:19 But to be happy, it really helps if you're focused on taking care of other people, looking after other people. And in many ways, Monish Pabrai, who I write about in chapter one of the book, is a very good example of this. He's taken his strange ability to sit on his own in a room

Starting point is 00:46:38 and assess probabilities and make that. and he's used it to set up Daxana, where he's lifted thousands and thousands of really talented, really smart kids from really underprivileged families out of poverty. And that's a really beautiful thing to observe. And he's done a tremendous amount of good. He talks about infinite good as a goal. And it's pretty clear to me from my conversations with Monash over the years

Starting point is 00:47:06 and from traveling with him in India to go visit those students. the Daksana scholars, the thing he loves most, the thing that gives him the most joy in his life is actually when he goes to visit those families of the scholars in India. And so that's interesting, right? He has a zestful life. He loves making money, he loves investing. He's full of zest and pleasure and joy at the game of investing. But he hasn't lost sight of the fact that it's got to serve some grander cause for there to be some kind of flow of energy, I think, where it's not just about, look at me, I'm so important and I'm so smart and I'm so successful, but it's actually benefiting other people. I think there's an important clue in that when you see people, people like

Starting point is 00:48:00 Monish, Arnold, or someone like Nick Sleep in case Akaria, who I write about in the book also, who quit the investment business at 45 and set out basically. in the second half of their lives to give most of their fortunes away in a way that would help as many people as possible over the long term. That's interesting to me that those people seem happy. And like I was someone like Tom Gaynor, who's very charitable and very kind and decent, the CEO of Markell, who I write about in the chapter on high performance habits. So I think we have to be quite clear-headed about our intention. here and to be aware that the thing that's going to make is very successful professionally or

Starting point is 00:48:46 financially is often something pretty dysfunctional, necessary, but pretty dysfunctional, which is that hunger and ambition and drive, maybe for recognition, maybe for independence, maybe for money, you know, to prove yourself to your mom or your teacher who didn't admire you or your sibling who, you know, seem to be loved more, whatever it is, you can harness all of these negative emotions to be successful. But to be happy, I think there has to be on the whole, this element of sharing, of focusing on others, of lifting up others. And that's very thought-provoking to me. So I think somehow part of my kind of proselytizing mission is to help people figure out that there's a way to have a truly rich and abundant life that includes that professional success.

Starting point is 00:49:36 but that's also motivated pretty heavily by trying to help other people. Our next question is from a listener in Israel, who actually I know this is a lady named Inbal Mayors, and Inbal is an executive communication coach and consultant who helps people with public speaking and storytelling and strategic communication for leaders. And actually, when I gave my TEDx talk, she was a really key person in helping to coach me. And I was hugely grateful to her because one of the things that happened to me with my TEDx talk is that I've talked about this occasionally.

Starting point is 00:50:18 It was during, it was in the midst of COVID. And so I spoke in a theater in the Berkshys here in the US. And it could only be about a third full and everyone was wearing masks because of social distancing and the like. And I'd been, I'd been at home. sort of out of public life for a long time. And then suddenly I find myself sort of cast into this strange situation where I'm on a stage and I'm under these Kleege lights. And I tried to memorize my speech, but I was like really busy at the time. And about two minutes into the

Starting point is 00:50:59 speech, I think I stumbled and kind of messed up what I was saying. And it kind of tipped me. into this situation where I was like, oh my God, what was I going to say next? And I kind of froze. And amazingly, my daughter Madeline, who was about 20, 21 at the time, actually called out my next line from about 25 rows back and totally saved me. And there was something kind of deeply moving about the fact that I was kind of saved in this moment of embarrassment and shame when everything went exactly how I didn't want it to go, that Madeline, um, um, that Madeline, um, um, came and kind of rescued me. And you don't see this in the video because Inbal very kindly edited it.

Starting point is 00:51:47 And so, you know, you can't see this moment that for me is the most kind of profound and kind of moving memory of the thing. And so the TEDx talk has done really well, thankfully. But, you know, for me, almost the most memorable part of it is screwing up in public having the worst, you know, the thing I had dreaded happened. and then being saved by Madeline, but then also being saved by Imbal. So I'm very grateful to Imbal on multiple fronts. And if you ever need someone to help you with speaking, with public speaking, or a TED talk or TEDx talk, she's really great. And let me know and I'll help put you in touch.

Starting point is 00:52:24 So Inbaal's question is, which of the principles you learned about from all your interviewees did you adopt in your personal life and how did it affect your life? that's a great question and there are few things that I've adopted in a big way because I I spent so much time with these people and with their ideas and trying to distill their ideas and share what seemed to me most important that I really have had a huge opportunity to incorporate them in my life and I've not only written about them but I've also spoken about them a lot in speeches and on podcasts and the like so I really had to chance to pound in the things that are most important to me. So one of the things that had a really

Starting point is 00:53:08 profound impact on me is this idea of the art of subtraction, the idea that at a time when most of us are really overly busy and there are so many inputs, there's so much noise, there's so much coming at us and life is faster and more complicated than it seems to have been ever before. I think in some ways the superpower is this ability to subtract complexity. And I've seen this again and again with the great investors that think of someone like Bill Miller, for example, who he really has simplified his life to a point where he's reading, he's investing, he's thinking, he's hanging out with his wife. He's like, he explained to me once, I always loved this story that someone had asked him if he could speak at a gala or gala, as I think you would say in America.

Starting point is 00:54:10 And he said, yeah, what's the dress code? And they said, black tie. And he's like, no, I threw out my tuxedo and I'm never buying another one. And I loved that, that there's a kind of self-awareness, a slightly ornery self-awareness that has him say, no, I'm just not going to do it. I'm not going to do these things aren't right for me. And he, I remember visiting him. him at this home that he had in Maryland, and it had been decorated by his sister. And he had a home in Florida that had also been decorated, I think, by his sister. And he had a bulldog that he really loved, because you have to have a bulldog if you want a bull market. And he even, he had a beautiful, sort of handsome portrait of the bulldog in his library at home. But his

Starting point is 00:54:52 sister used to walk the bulldog often. He didn't even pump gas in his car. He didn't fly commercial. He hadn't flown commercial, I think, in 20 years or something. And yeah, it's fine to point out, well, it's all very well if I was super rich. I would live the same way. But actually, the idea of subtracting complexity and focusing on what matters most is very, very replicable. And so watching someone like Bill had a big impact on me, but similarly watching Monash, for example, who said basically that he's just sitting around with a very empty

Starting point is 00:55:32 his schedule, studying stocks, reading, playing some sports, biking, doing his philanthropic stuff. He would say he would go out for a meal with someone and if he didn't really enjoy it, he would be like, nope, never seeing them again, that's it. Didn't want to meet with prospective clients because he just didn't like, because he called it the mumbo jumbo of all that marketing stuff. So he didn't do that, even though it meant that he would raise fewer assets. So there was an element of kind of ornery self-awareness in just saying, I'm only going to do what matters most to me and what I'm best at.

Starting point is 00:56:13 And so I've tried to be pretty clear-minded about sticking to what I'm best at and what I care most about. And at the same time, I fail totally a lot of the time to simplify my life because I take on too many things and then there's too much complexity. and it becomes really difficult. And so maybe the fact that I fail so much at the art of subtraction and actually in practicing the art of addition or multiplication is one of the reasons why this idea is so important for me. And I think one of the things to combine with this is a hugely important idea that I write about in the chapter on Nick and Zach,

Starting point is 00:56:55 which is this idea of destination analysis, which I only write about relatively briefly, which they applied to picking stocks, right? So they would look at companies like Amazon and Costco, and they would say, here's a desirable destination for this company in 10, 15, 20 years. What are the inputs to get them there? And then they would work backwards and say, well, is the company treating its shareholders right? Is it treating its customers right?

Starting point is 00:57:17 Is it allocating capital intelligently? Are they trying to please Wall Street or are they actually trying to create long-term value? Right. So you start with a desirable destination and then work back. to study the inputs, whereas as Nick said to me, most people are just focused on the outputs, short-time outputs, which is totally wrong. And so when I'm thinking about what to subtract and what to focus on, I'm constantly thinking about what the destination is and what the destination is in my life. And so it's pretty clear to me, for example, that I don't want to be doing ephemeral stuff.

Starting point is 00:57:56 and I'm not knocking anyone else who does this. Everyone has their own twist on how they want to live. I'm not interested in pumping out a newsletter, a sub-sect newsletter. It's just not what I want to do. I worked for weekly magazines for many years, and I'm just not interested in pumping out lots of mediocre stuff. There are people who can pump out really good stuff and more strength to them. I couldn't.

Starting point is 00:58:23 I have a kind of slow metabolism in so many ways. I'm much more interested in quality than quantity. And so I'm much happier to do 12, 14, 16 episodes of the podcast a year than I would be to do 24, 36 or 50 or so. I just couldn't bear it. I'm just not interested in maximizing output. And when I think about what I want to do by the end of my life, I look back and I think, okay, if I've done, three books that I'm really proud of. That would be fantastic. So I've done one book that I'm really proud of. I mean, I've ghostwritten various books. We've been very successful in the

Starting point is 00:59:05 light, but they're not really mine. I edited a couple of magazines where I worked with some amazing writers and I learned some skills. I had some very, very rich, interesting experiences around the world. But that's ephemeral. That stuff will be forgotten. So it's important to me that I write something really valuable and that really helps a lot of people and that's truthful and that's enduring. And that's a lot of pressure to put on myself. And so I think, you know, when I actually finally decide I'm going to write another book, it's a very big decision because it'll take over my life for much of a decade probably, including, you know, the planning, the writing and being out there talking about it. So destination analysis is really important for me.

Starting point is 00:59:50 And when I think about what a really rich and happy life is, it's clearly got to have great relationships. And so that's been hugely clarifying for me in my study of the super investors is to realize the extent to which their relationships really drove their success and their happiness, the richness of their lives. And so that's also been very clarifying for me that I think I, in the years where I was really hungrily driving to get ahead and also just to survive in the very difficult world of magazine writing and magazine editing, I naturally underestimated the importance of relationships because I was so busy working. And I think I'm much less prone to do that now. I have much, much more, much more of a keen awareness of how important it is for me.

Starting point is 01:00:50 to invest in my relationship. So that's been really key. And then the other thing that has affected my life hugely that I learned from great investors is Munga's idea of avoiding stupidity. That's become an extremely practical tool that I use constantly. And just the idea of really thinking about what not to do in any situation is hugely helpful. And then I think the other thing that's just become increasingly clear to me, not only from watching the happiest investors, but also from all of the more spiritual and philosophical stuff that I study, it's clearly hugely important to serve others and to help others. And I just think I wasn't that focused on it. I mean, I think I had an inherent sense of the beauty of something that was well done. Like, I was deeply committed to quality.

Starting point is 01:01:48 So when I wrote an article or I worked on a book as a ghostwriter or as an author myself, I was deeply committed to doing as good a job as I possibly could. Same with speeches. Like I just really deeply care about quality being good. And it was something that was driven by a fear of being judged and, you know, having people think I was mediocre. And some of it was just driven by an inherent love of things that are beautifully done, beautifully made.

Starting point is 01:02:16 but I don't think I had a keen sense of service. I didn't really have a keen sense probably until pretty later in my 40s and maybe around 50 of just how important it is to take your talents and use them to help other people. And yeah, it's just much more obvious to a lot of other people. I don't know. It took me a long time to figure that out. And so again, watching and trying to reverse engineer the lives, are very successful people and seeing where they fail and where they succeed and what makes them

Starting point is 01:02:52 happy really made me focus a lot on things like the quality of their relationships, the quality of their commitment to a few simple habits that would compound and the removal of all the stuff that was ephemeral or unimportant or didn't play to their strengths. So I think that kind of ruthlessness about focusing on what matters most to you and focusing on what you're best at. That's been really, really helpful to me. Our next question is from a listener called Parin Meta, who is an investor, and board director, a VC, and an executive coach to founders and executives based in Singapore. And Parin asks, what is the single biggest challenge to overcome in today's world for anyone looking to apply the principles you identified in the rich or wiser, happier book and your interviews.

Starting point is 01:03:49 And I think this is related actually to what we talked about before about the artist subtraction because I think the greatest challenge for me at least, and I assume for many of you, is this tremendous pressure to do more, to run faster, to be busier. The tremendous pressure to take in more inputs, more information. and somehow to find order and peace and clarity within this noise and this busyness and this speediness of everything. And so I think in some ways the challenge becomes not only to subtract stuff and to decide what it is that's most important to you, but also to build habits that are going to develop peace of mind for you. And it was striking to me actually when I looked up Paren on LinkedIn that he had written a post saying that he loves to walk in nature.

Starting point is 01:04:43 and to have conversations with people, he'll have these walking conversations. And he has this goal of walking 50 million steps in his forties, which he said is the circumference of the earth. And so Perrin is clearly understanding this himself, the importance of somehow finding spaciousness within the world of work. It's not, it's, it's, look, a lot of us are ambitious, driven people and we want to do a lot in our lives. So it's not like we're looking to opt out, but we need to inject more spaciousness into our lives.

Starting point is 01:05:19 And I'm very intrigued by people like Laura Gerrits, for example, who I wrote about in the High Performance Habits chapter of my book, who is a very successful, very smart, very driven investor, a very good fund manager, who's extremely rigorous in her analysis and her research, but who regards the investment challenge as more like freestyle verse, as she puts it, you know, free verse rather than just stilted prose. And she applies this mindset to the way she lives her life. So on Fridays, she'll have these very free-form days where she'll often go sit by a stream with a journal and a book and she'll just read and think and gather her thoughts.

Starting point is 01:06:10 And so it's a very cerebral, very peaceful way of approaching the investment game. But at the same time, she travels a tremendous amount and goes to visit enormous numbers of companies around the world. So she's working really intensely and really hard, but there is this sense of openness and freedom that's less rigid. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up,

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Starting point is 01:09:58 All right. Back to the show. And it struck me the other day. I spent a bunch of time recently with a terrific hedge fund manager, a very successful hedge fund manager who kind of flies below the radar. So I've never formally interviewed him at all. It's actually turned me down in the past for a formal interview. But we've become friends. And we were talking. And we were talking the other day about his meditation habit. And he was saying that he's probably meditated for 20,000 hours over the years. And he was talking about what a tremendous advantage that's been, that it's helped him to run this big company with billions of dollars in assets under management because he said he would have been able to run a company maybe with

Starting point is 01:10:45 three people if he hadn't meditated. But to run a bigger company and to be really present, the meditation has been invaluable. And you feel that when you're in his presence. Like there's an openness to his manner, a spaciousness to his manner, and a centered quality to the way he is in a conversation that I could see is a very rare and unusual characteristic in a busy, intense, hugely competitive business,

Starting point is 01:11:15 like the investment business. So I think part of it for me is that when I see people like that, who are able somehow to be very successful, very productive in the regular work world, and yet have a sense of spaciousness and calm. I think, okay, I've got to reverse engineer what they're doing. And so just spending time with him was one of the reasons why I sort of, I mean, I'm always committed to my meditation practice, but there are times where I'm more rigorous about it or at least more excited about it

Starting point is 01:11:50 than other times. And I found just in the last few days, I was much more excited and more purposeful about meditation because I can see why I want to do it. And likewise, I think when I sent time with Dan Goldman, who I've interviewed on the podcast, maybe three times, who's been meditating for 50 years and wrote this book, altered traits about how meditation actually rewires you, rewires your brain. When I spend time with him, it also confirms for me, like, this is a, who is a, you know, hugely important practice. And to be as successful as he's been as a non-fiction writer and a coach and a psychologist and all of these things, but also as a really wonderful human being, can see that that's built, that his presence and his openness and his joyfulness is built on

Starting point is 01:12:38 this practice of meditation that allows him to be very spacious. So I think for all of us, in this world of just massive inputs, you know, this kind of cascade, this barrage. of inputs, trying to figure out what to do with the gadgets, trying to figure out what to do with the screens, trying to figure out what to do about this compulsive desire to fill every space in our lives with checking something, doing something, and instead to be more thoughtful, more mindful about how to keep some of that space open. I think that becomes increasingly important and the people who are thoughtful about it will have a tremendous advantage. And it's interesting to me that as people worry more and more about things like AI replacing humans in a lot

Starting point is 01:13:27 of white collar jobs, these human skills, these deeply human skills and qualities become more important. And so things like intuition, things like being able to listen with real openness and real compassion, real presence to people, those human qualities become really more important because those are quite hard to replicate, I think. And there's a related question, which I think I can fold into this from a listener called Justin Miller, who's a process improvement manager for, I think it's pronounced, the P-U-L-T-E, but I may be mispronouncing that. If so, I'm sorry.

Starting point is 01:14:06 And Justin wrote very generously over LinkedIn. He said, your interviews on the richer, why is a happier podcast, feel so intimate, insightful and deeply human. When you're preparing to sit down with someone as complex and accomplished as Monish Pabri or Howard Marx, what does your preparation process actually look like? How do you balance research with intuition? So the conversation feels both deeply informed and genuinely alive.

Starting point is 01:14:33 First of all, thanks so much, Justin, for those very kind comments. I think this very much relates to what I was saying before about deep presence. that for me, for me, part of the preparation for an interview, and I think this relates to any meeting and certainly to meetings with CEOs where you're interviewing them as an analyst say, part of what I'm doing is I'm obsessively and relentlessly preparing as much as I can,

Starting point is 01:15:00 given the pressures on my time, but I tend not to be able to help myself. I just sort of work really intensely on preparing for interviews. So I do as broad research as I can. I read as many articles. I go through my old interviews with the person if I've interviewed them before. I listen to other podcasts that they've done. And I'm looking for, I'm looking for things that probably most people aren't looking for that are curious to me. Like, like before I interviewed Bill Nygren, for example, I was very intrigued. I knew that he, he answers certain questions the same way, usually and so I was really trying to get away from that. And so I was looking for for ways of talking about his childhood experiences, his youthful experiences that would sort of be some kind of

Starting point is 01:15:50 key to unlock who he was. And so there's deep preparation, there's intense preparation. But then having done that preparation, there's a kind of letting go. So I'll go into the interview typically with about eight pages of questions that I've whittled down that morning or the night before from about 16 pages. So there's a sort of, there's an initial process of great breadth. Then there's a synthesis and a distillation. And then there's a sort of further synthesis and distillation. And I can just about manage to get my head around seven or eight pages of questions during an interview. So I sort of have a sense of where I'm going. But then having, having got all that on, you know, in a Microsoft Word document and having a general sense of where the interview is going,

Starting point is 01:16:38 there's always a kind of arc, there's a sort of thematic structure and sometimes some sort of chronological structure as well to the interview. Then I have to have the presence of mind actually to change direction totally once I'm actually in the interview. And so this gets back to the question of how are you going to develop this ability to be deeply present in any conversation. And I think the art of listening, it's definitely, it's definitely helped by things like meditation because maybe there's a little less noise in your head. It's also just helped by deep curiosity.

Starting point is 01:17:18 I mean, I'm just really interested in the people I'm listening to. And there's a sense of flow when I'm in an interview where I'm so engaged in the topic I'm listening so intensely. But it's a strange process being in an interview because there's a part of my brain that's always looking at the questions and thinking about where I'm going next. And simultaneously, I'm present and listening to them as they're answering and figuring out where they're going to end and how I can follow that in any direction. So I might have about four or five different directions that I can go in as they approach the end of what they're saying so that I know how to follow up. And so in a way, it's like I'm perched there very calmly in that present moment,

Starting point is 01:18:08 waiting to see, oh, this is the direction I've got to go. Oh, no, I'm going to go in this direction. And so there's a deep trust in your own intuition and your ability just to shift direction. And I do think this very much relates to analysts and fund managers interviewing CEOs because I had this conversation with a friend of mine a few months ago over lunch because I was preparing to give a speech on the art of interviewing. And so I was asking my friend for insights about how he interviews CEOs. And he talked about interviewing a famous CEO who said to him, there's magic in small teams.

Starting point is 01:18:53 My friend said he had so many questions to ask that were already on his, in his notepad, that he just moved on. And he said, when a guy, as famous as this tells you there's magic in small teams, he's like, you drop everything and you just go with him in the conversation. And he was really frustrated with himself that he didn't have the presence of mine in that moment. to do that and it changed the way he would approach interviews with CEOs afterwards. He really made sure to be, yes, very well prepared, but also willing to drop his preparation and go with that person in any direction. And I think one thing that's been helpful for me on this front

Starting point is 01:19:40 is just listening to people who are really, really great at this. And so I just do this with everything I'm trying to be good at. this habit of cloning that I write about in the book with Monash, where you're studying people who are really good at something and you reverse engineer it. And so one of the people I listen to pretty obsessively is Terry Gross, who's hosted this show Fresh Air on NPR for many decades, and is a wonderful interviewer. And so I listened to her podcast very regularly.

Starting point is 01:20:14 And there are moments where, I mean, obviously she's very well prepared and she has a team that I assume helps her of producers and the like. But she's so calm and so present and so relaxed, having done this for many decades and just being great at it, that sometimes a person will say something surprising in an interview and she just goes with them. She always goes with them. And there are moments where I literally find myself saying out loud,

Starting point is 01:20:43 nice question, Terry, because it's sort of like just noticing someone who's a grandmaster in your profession and realizing, oh, she nailed that. So this question, I think, of how you develop presence and spaciousness in a really speedy world is an important one. And one of the things that's been helpful to me, actually, are the teachings of Sokneurimpeche, who I had on the podcast with Dan Goldman. He's great Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, and they wrote a book together called Why We Meditate, which isn't the best. best title doesn't really reflect the book that much, which is a very good book. But I think Sokney is extremely good at figuring out how to settle the body so that you bring your energy

Starting point is 01:21:30 down so that you're grounded and so you can be present. And so there are these different types of breathing, for example, like where you can breathe so that the energy is kind of below your belly button, things like that. And I don't know, this stuff can sound pretty satiric and it might sound like I'm going off the deep end, but Honol van der Berg sent me a very long document a few days ago, all about breathing, that he's assembled an enormous amount of information on how to breathe. And so this ability through different techniques like breathing exercises, meditation, Tai Chi, yoga, whatever it might be, that enable you to be grounded, centered, and open at a time that's anything but grounded. and anything but centered, anything about focus,

Starting point is 01:22:20 that is hugely, hugely valuable, and I believe we'll become increasingly valuable. The next question comes from listener named Tyler, whose second name, I'll withhold just at respect. I don't know whether he wants me to share his identity or not. And he writes, Hi, William, I'm a huge fan of your book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, and your podcast.

Starting point is 01:22:42 Your questions, guests, and views on life have really influenced me for the better. I try my best to meditate and stay calm through the storm, so thank you for everything you do. I have one question for you. I know you've spoken about this, but I wonder if you have any advice for me or anyone else who might be going through something similar. I'm a video editor who currently works in unscripted TV in Los Angeles. You may or may not know, but the Hollywood industry is crumbling. And many people have been out of work for months or even years.

Starting point is 01:23:10 People say I'm good at the job, but I'm finding it harder and harder to find work. On top of that, I'm a new dad. My wife and I had our first child, if you want to see her, I would gladly send you a pick. So I'm starting to get extremely anxious, worried and possibly scared about providing for my family during industry change. I know you went through something similar when you lost your job at Time magazine, and publishing went down and never really recovered, but you adjusted and were able to write some of your best work. So I have three questions for you. One, did you have similar emotions to me that I'm having right now? what did you do to keep your emotions in check? Two, would you suggest perseverance or pivoting when the industry you work in declines or changes?

Starting point is 01:23:51 I love the work I do. It's the only work I've done. But in some ways, because of the new family, I could see myself doing something else too that's completely different. Three, how did your family react to the change when you were working for time? Were they wired as well? Please let me know. Thank you. This is a wonderful question.

Starting point is 01:24:08 And I got this question a couple of weeks ago from Tyler. And I started thinking about it really a lot and thought this alone was a reason to do this podcast episode because this is such important questions. And so, yeah, back in 2008, the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers went under the journalism world was getting pummeled at the same time, partly because of the internet, partly because advertising had fallen off as business moved towards the internet. And, you know, Time Inc, where I worked, had also done this catastrophic merger with AOL that had destroyed enormous amounts of value. And so for various reasons, and because I was extremely expensive, because I was editing the European, Middle East and African edition of time. So for various reasons, as the company was sort of in trouble, I got laid off.

Starting point is 01:25:07 And it was very shocking for me because I felt like I was very good at my job and I had worked ridiculously hard. And I was really obsessed with the work. And I kind of loved the work, the editing and working with amazing writers and amazing photographers and designers. And we had this incredible team. And I was deeply committed to it. And it was in some ways, you know, just a hugely satisfying, interesting job. You would go off and you'd interview presidents and prime ministers and you could get almost any want to write for you. It was, it was an amazing time. And so then when I got laid off right in the

Starting point is 01:25:43 middle of the financial crisis, probably around September, October 2008, it was a huge part of my identity. But there was also a great deal of uncertainty because I was living in a beautiful home in Belgrave, in London that was largely paid for by time. And they sent my kids to private school. And I'd been living abroad for quite a long time, because previously I'd been in Hong Kong for five years editing the Asian edition of time for a while and before that being the deputy editor. So I hadn't been in America for many years. And so I didn't really know where I should live. I had young kids who were in school and I didn't really know what to do. And I didn't want to mess up their lives by yanking them out of their expensive private schools and stuff. And so my industry was

Starting point is 01:26:29 sort of collapsing. And I was really good at it. And it was like, but wait, the thing I'm good at, what am I supposed to do? It's just not needed or I'm not needed because I'm too expensive. And I was young, or at least it feels like I was young in retrospect. I think I was 40. So now I'm 56. So yes, it was very painful. So the first thing I would say, Tyler, is, yeah, I feel your pain. I mean, it was very difficult. And I remember calling home. My boss at the time called to tell me that I was being laid off. And I called home and my son Henry literally projectile vomited in the living room of our home in London. And so it was very intense. And, you know, we were a very close family and we talked about everything.

Starting point is 01:27:18 We didn't hide stuff. And so it was painful to sort of feel that, you know, my screw up in some way. You know, my failure was going to have this terrific effect potentially on my family. And so I think part of what you deal with and, you know, was it my screw up? I don't know, yeah, I definitely could have sucked up more to bosses and I can be more political. I was never very good at that stuff. But I don't think I, you know, I think I just got swept up in a bigger wave as I think is happening now with a lot of people with AI and various other technological changes that are hitting the workplace. And so I think the first thing is that sense of shame and that

Starting point is 01:28:00 sense of failure and that sense of embarrassment and sort of humiliation, that's really understandable. and first of all, I'm really sorry, Tyler, that you're going through this and other people are going through it. It's painful. It's really painful. I think part of the issue is that our identities are so wrapped up in our work, especially if you're driven and you're good at what you do and you work really hard. It's very difficult not to identify yourself with the job. And so I remember doing an episode of the podcast. I try to remember, yeah, I was with Brad Stolberg. who wrote this book, Master of Change, which is an interesting book, and we had a very interesting discussion. Part of what Brad says is that you need to diversify your sense of identity. So we kind of need multiple identities in a way.

Starting point is 01:28:49 You know, it's like you're a father, you're a husband, you have your spiritual life, you have your social life, you have your work, you have philanthropy, whatever it is, your sports, your interests. And so I think part of what was difficult for me was I was so locked in to one identity. So I think I think Brad is right that it's very helpful to not just see yourself as as your job. He would talk about, you know, different rooms in the house that need to need to exist and be decorated as well. So I think that's that's part of it. Part of it is having

Starting point is 01:29:26 self-compassion and looking at the fact that you go through this and being like, yeah, you know, we suffer and this was always the case. This is the, the, the, there's always been creative destruction and industries have always gone through this sort of change. So there's a very good book called the Self-compassion workbook that Kristen Neff, a researcher at the University of Texas, co-wrote. And part of self-compassion, as I understand it, is recognizing that other people go through the same thing. You know, so part of it is the self-awareness to see what you're going through and to see how it expresses itself in the body and other ways. And just recognizing it, part of it is things like, you know, self-care, like she would talk about sort of, you know, stroking your arm, stroking your face, you know, things like that, like comforting yourself. And so sort of recognizing or acknowledging your suffering, but also looking at other people suffering and being like, yeah, this is the human condition.

Starting point is 01:30:24 This happens. It happens to other people. And I think part of my sense of humiliation was that it seemed kind of unfair that I would see other people who I didn't think were necessarily as good at their jobs, had kept their jobs and were doing fine. And here was I who'd done my jobs so well and I was kind of drowning. And so there was a sense of both embarrassment and unfairness. And so that was hard. So I think recognizing that, yeah, we just go through. things that this is hard. There are periods where this happens. That was helpful for me.

Starting point is 01:31:00 But one of the things that was really helpful to me was really, really to use this setback to think hard about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be. And so instead of just falling into a sense of victimhood and persecution and unfairness, which was really not very helpful, helpful. Charlie Munger would always talk about, you know, the perils of self-pity and envy. You know, he didn't like to compound a problem by falling into self-pity. And so I didn't want to just see myself as a victim. And I had started studying Kabbalah, which was incredibly helpful a couple of weeks before this all fell apart. And one of the great teachings, I had a great teacher then, who I still have now as great teacher, a guy called Etan Yadeni. I remember walking into the Kabbalah center in London. And he said to me, how are you doing, William? And I said, I'm great, except I just got laid off. And he said, raised his arms. And he's like, such a blessing. And it took me several years to realize that it was such a blessing. And so I really had to focus on saying, okay, as, as Tony Robbins would say, life happens for you, not to you. And so whether this is true or not, I had to act as

Starting point is 01:32:20 if it was true and to say, all right, I'm going to try to rebuild my life on a better foundation. I'm going to assume that in some way I needed this to happen and try to figure out how to build a life that was closer to what I ought to be. And I think one of the things that I realized subsequently is that, yeah, it was a really good editor, I think. I'm sorry if this sounds self-congratulatory. I'm just trying to be honest and, you know, think aloud and share what I'm thinking, share what I'm thinking in an honest way. I was a really good editor, but there were aspects of being an editor

Starting point is 01:32:54 that I was actually really bad at, like managing up. Like, I just don't have a lot of respect for authority. I'm pretty subversive. I don't, I was much more obsessed with quality and making things read beautifully or look beautiful than any of the political stuff, which I just sort of neglected totally.

Starting point is 01:33:15 And so something like this podcast, where I'm really just free, thanks to my friend Stig Bruterson, to do pretty much what I want to do. Like, that's, that's amazing for me. You guys who are listening may disagree. But I love being free to do my own thing and explore my own thing. And writing books is perfect for me because painful as it is and difficult as it is. You have tremendous freedom to explore your ideas.

Starting point is 01:33:43 I mean, you still have an editor sort of hovering over you who can beat you up. I might reject you. book, but it suits me much more. It's like me sitting, thinking, reading, trying to figure out the truth and then trying to share it, if there is such a thing as truth, you know, trying to distill a lot of practical wisdom and then share it. That's very, very close to my purpose in life, I think. And so for me, there was almost like a decade-long process of moving closer to that sense of being aligned with who I really am. And that was a painful and difficult process

Starting point is 01:34:23 that had a lot of fear along the way, a lot of fear of like, what if I can't provide for my kids and my family? What if I'm never very successful? You know, it was difficult. It requires courage and persistence and perseverance. The other thing in practical terms that I think is hugely important

Starting point is 01:34:42 is in some ways to prepare for these periods of great change and uncertainty by living within your means and saving. And so part of what helped me is I had no debt at all. I didn't even own my own home. I had this renter time partly because Time magazine was paying for a big chunk of it. But partly, and partly because I love the stock market. And I had sold my house in New York so that I could invest and so that I could go work for time in Hong Kong and then London.

Starting point is 01:35:16 But it was very conscious because I had survived maybe five different rounds of layoffs. I sort of felt like I was always going to get laid off sooner or later, most likely. So I didn't have any debt and I had saved pretty seriously. I'd lived within my means. And I think that was hugely important. I think if you're really overstretched, you're forced to do things that you don't really want to do. And there was a period where I did some work that I really detested. I got a job at another magazine that I really disliked.

Starting point is 01:35:48 I just really disliked the culture. The work itself was interesting, but I didn't have control over it. And I think I need control. Personally, I want to have control. It's important for me because I don't want anyone compromising the quality, my view of what the quality is, even if my view is misguided. So the fact that I could leave that job, so I got laid off from one job, but then I quit the next job to go write books.

Starting point is 01:36:14 that required courage, but it also required, it required, in practical terms, having saved and lived within my means, not had debt. So that's really important not to overreach. And this is very connected to what I write about Howard Marks in Rich or Wiser, happier, about just not pushing the envelope, not overreaching, because you want to have that optionality that comes from living within your means. And I still have very little debt. But I think the other thing, And this idea of just trying to be much more deeply aligned with who you are is very valuable. And I would often think there was a beautiful teaching from this great capitalist, Gravberg, who I started with who passed away several years ago, who used to say that every day of your life you should be asking,

Starting point is 01:37:03 please, show me the purpose of my soul. And I think that's a really lovely idea to be trying to fulfill the purpose of your soul, to say, look, there are particular talents that I have, particular opportunities I have, particular place where I was born, people I knew, an environment in which I operate, particular skills I have, please help me to take advantage of those skills and do everything that I can to be a force for good in the world. And I think if you set your intention that way, whether you believe there's some greater force guiding you or whether you're just talking to some deeper part of yourself, whatever it might be.

Starting point is 01:37:48 I think that's a really helpful mindset is to set that intention to be a force for good, to help other people, to be of service, but also to use your own skills and talents and opportunities for the best. there's a beautiful Hebrew word that I often quote, which is Lishma, which, as I understand it, this from a great sage called Ravashag, he would talk about how you want to give pleasure to your creator. So this idea of Lishma is like, you know, please help me to give pleasure to my creator. Like, so you, Tyler, you, you're a father, you have particular skills in terms of video editing, but you have to, you know, you have to ask yourself, you know, what am I really built for?

Starting point is 01:38:37 What do I, where I really love? What are, um, what are the talents and interests that I had in my use, for example? And for me, the, the investing thing had always been something in the background. I had, I'd written a lot for magazines like money and Forbes and fortune and time and the economists, all of these places I, I'd, over the years, I, um, and they'd have barons and the like. So I'd always interviewed famous investors throughout. Like even when I was at Time Magazine, I would interview famous investors and I'd write an occasional column. But it wasn't front and center what I did. I mean, I was an editor of general interest stuff.

Starting point is 01:39:12 I loved editing the art section of the international editions of time where I would get these amazing writers to write reviews of fiction and like. It was an incredible thing to be able to hire people like Pico Aya to write book reviews. It was just, I mean, you know, I was an English literature graduate from Oxford. I wasn't a financial analyst. But when I started to explore different things that I could do when my career fell apart a bit in 2008, 2009, I could look back at this thing that I'd always been interested in, deeply interested in investing, but that had become kind of a secondary thing. And it became much more prominent.

Starting point is 01:39:54 And I think often what you have to do is combine things that don't necessarily seem to go together. So I think for me, part of what was really beautiful and fruitful was that I was an English literature student who was really deeply interested in spirituality and philosophy and the like. And then when I came back to look at investing and I went and interviewed a lot of these great investors, I was sort of able to combine those interests. So I was looking at them as practical philosophers. And so I had a different perspective. So I think sometimes it's combining things is very fruitful. And then I think you also really need, you, you really need kind friends who help you and steer you towards opportunities. So one of the things that happened to me is I started off ghostwriting a book after I quit my job in 2009 or 2010 that I hated.

Starting point is 01:40:52 and I then started working on Guy Spears' autobiography with him. I helped him on that. And then Jason's Weig, this old friend of mine who I'd worked with at Money Magazine many years ago, whose great writer for the Wall Street Journal, had been offered this opportunity to write what became the great minds of investing, and the Wall Street Journal wouldn't give him permission. And so he recommended me, and that led to me doing that. And then a really nice guy, Dan Ross, who works,

Starting point is 01:41:22 was the editor-in-chief at LinkedIn. It was a very important job at LinkedIn recommended me to a famous person whose book I goes through it. And that was kind of a huge thing. It was like a number one bestseller. And I wasn't on the cover of the book or anything. But, you know, it was a very valuable experience. And I wrote two books of that guy.

Starting point is 01:41:41 And then I was writing my own book. And so it all came from relationships and the kindness of other people. And so I think that's also one of the lessons is. is that we kind of need to be there for other people when they're struggling. Because, you know, I was really helped by people who sent opportunities my way. I mean, Jason, Jason's Wigan, Dan Roth and Guy Spear, all of these people really had a profound impact on my life. And even then when it came time to write Rich or Wiser Happier,

Starting point is 01:42:16 guys publisher from Power Grave McMillan was this lady Laurie Harting, who I then asked to recommend agents, and she recommended Jim Levine, who became my agent for the book, who's an amazing agent, incredible agent, who represents all these people like, you know, Howard Marx and Ray Dalio and lots of famous businessman and investors and authors. And so everything has been built on the kindness and generosity and help of other people. So I don't know. I hope there's something in there that's helpful. I think of all those things that I've sort of thrown at you.

Starting point is 01:42:58 And sorry if I've been overly self-referential and overly candid. Of all the things, I think that idea of using this as an opportunity to become more closely aligned with really who you are is a very powerful process. And if you can do that with the hope of helping other people, that's really powerful. And at the same time, I think, you know, have self-compassion as you deal with the emotions. It's like, yeah, there's fear. Yeah, there's shame.

Starting point is 01:43:26 There's sadness. There's regret. There's a sense of unfairness. There's a sense of, I mean, I had a real terror of like, what if I couldn't take care of my family? That was a huge thing for me. There's a painful emotions. The other thing I would say is I really wanted to model being resilient for my kids. and they saw how challenging that period was.

Starting point is 01:43:50 And I think when things worked out, thank God. And now I'm much happier than I was actually when I was at Time Magazine. Really, thank God. I mean, it's, you know, Aitam was right when, when he said such a blessing, it has been a blessing. You know, that, that blow of losing my job at time sent me in a much better direction.

Starting point is 01:44:09 But I think, I think deciding that I was going to try to model perseverance, determination, and doing stuff with integrity, things like that. That was very helpful because when my kids saw that I turned things around, it was a way of saying, oh, well, okay, at least I can show them how to deal with adversity. And, you know, my adversity wasn't that great.

Starting point is 01:44:36 There are much worse things that can happen in life. And I always think of that line from Neil Young, the singer who says my problems are so meaningless, but that don't make them go away. So for me, these problems were big, but in the grand scheme, you know, they're nothing. But it was an example of trying to do what Charlie did where he talks about adversity. If you see life's a series of adversities that give you an opportunity to either behave well or badly. I'm sort of proud of the fact that I approach that period with courage. And, you know, in the same way that Bill Miller said to me, he was proud of.

Starting point is 01:45:13 of how he dealt with a setback of the financial crisis where so much winners went up in smoke for him. But he said, I didn't curl up like a tortoise and stop investing. He still found incredibly cheap stuff that then became the basis of this extraordinary rebound. And so I think to model resilience and to model courage and to model grace under fire, especially as you have a young child, That's a beautiful thing. And so anyway, I wish you lots of strength during this difficult period. On a very different note, our next question comes from a listener in Brussels, who works for an investment firm in Brussels. And his name is Arnaudu, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, Arnau.

Starting point is 01:46:02 And he sent me a message over LinkedIn saying, if you were young again, how dare you? If you were young again, how would you invest your money? would you be more concentrated? It's a really interesting question. I think actually, in many ways, the smartest thing to have done would have been just to index and then forget about it.

Starting point is 01:46:25 And just to say, okay, I'm going to put my money, all of it in the Vanguard, you know, total market stock fund and the Vanguard International index fund. And I have over many years, I own those for many years. I think that's a pretty good default position.

Starting point is 01:46:48 It's what I would often do for my wife's accounts and for my kids' accounts is just split them between a U.S. total stock market index fund and a foreign stock market index fund. And then just stay fully invested in those and fully fund my 401K on my IRA, which I did do. I always did that very thoroughly. and then just not move around. And the reason I say that is partly because of an insight that the aforementioned Jason's why shared with me many years ago where I said to him, look, basically you're one of the

Starting point is 01:47:27 few people who actually could beat the market because you've interviewed like me, so many of the great investors. And so you have a sense of who's really good. And yet you've ended up really almost. exclusively just indexing. And I was like, basically, you're so smart, you've come up with the wrong solution. And so we would have this debate over the years. And one of the things that Jason said to me that rings true is that a big problem with actively managed funds is that things change, that something goes wrong with the institution, or something goes wrong with the fund manager,

Starting point is 01:48:03 with their health, or with their marriage, or they take on too many assets so it becomes bloated, or they fight with their partner or, you know, there are so many institutional things that can go wrong. So even if they're good, which is hard. I mean, we know this is a very hard game. There are still so many, so many reasons why they're unlikely to succeed. And so I think that's the first thing is to have a foundation. And this is very idiosyncratic. And I don't know even if I fully agree with myself, but I'm sharing these ideas and you can make of them what you will.

Starting point is 01:48:39 I think to have as a foundation, a big chunk of your money in index funds, a significant amount. I mean, Howard Marks said to me that most investors should have most of their money in index funds. I think that makes sense. But the real thing, and look, I mean, I'm totally committed to investing in actively managed funds. I can't help myself. So I may, you know, that I have a bunch of retirement money and the like and a bunch of my wife's money is in index funds. But I still, you know, my heart is in concentrated value-oriented funds that are very contrarian, tend to find a few missed price bets and snap them up at really opportune moments and then hold them for a very long time. That's sort of where my heart is.

Starting point is 01:49:29 I think that's a really beautiful approach. And that is the essence of what I've tried to do, although I don't do it. myself, I farm it out to people I trust who I think are really good at that. But there is the problem of how long will they do it. So I try to find people who have a long runway, who are experienced and have a long runway, but things change them. And what if it doesn't succeed? So I think that's one of the biggest problems actually that I've encountered is over the course of a really long investment career, 30, 40, 50 years. What are you going to do with the fact that a lot of these people who you're betting on are not going to stay at their prime. And so even if

Starting point is 01:50:12 you made the right choice, you know, what are you going to do when they retire, when they get sick, when they get divorced, when they take on too many assets, all of these things, when they leave the firm, when there's a fight. I think that's a real problem. But the other thing I would say is the real mistake, the real mistake that I've made more often than not, there was a real problem. that was really harmful along the way that I wish I had understood earlier is that it's absolutely not necessary to be in a hurry. And I think there were things that I did when I was overreaching because I was greedy or I wanted to get rich quickly. There really turned out to be a mistake. And so, for example, while I was living in Hong Kong, I invested in two private companies run

Starting point is 01:51:00 by a friend of mine who's very smart and very charismatic, but I think in retrospect turned out to be pretty dishonest. And those were a total disaster. And I wasn't really equipped to analyze them. Then I invested in another private company with a relative who's incredibly smart and talented, and that was a disaster. And I think could I just continued to plug away with, you know, my boring stock funds that, you know, there was one stock fund that I, well, it was a separate account that I had with a famous investor should just have stuck with, but he, he got old and he wasn't doing well and his head wasn't in the game. So there was a problem with the change, you know, that something changed in this great investor ceased to be a great investor.

Starting point is 01:51:47 But I still should have just stayed in the market and not been in a hurry to invest in private companies, which I just wasn't equipped to do. If I have any competitive advantage and I may have none at all. I may just be deluding myself. It's that I know a lot of great investors. And, you know, I'm probably a reasonable judge of character and talent and temperament. Maybe not great, but reasonable. And so it makes sense for me to outsource to people who I think are really talented and then just not move, not do anything else, just not, you know, just stick with it, not to get tempted off the path of just investing in stocks and not moving away into private companies and the like because I felt important or I felt like part of the in crowd or because there was

Starting point is 01:52:37 a chance of making an enormous amount of money quickly. That was a mistake. But I think in some ways, if you stay in the game and you really don't screw up massively, you know, if as Gundack would say your mistakes are non-fatal. It's pretty forgiving because, you know, I was very conscious of not doing anything that if it went so badly, it would destroy me and knock me out of the game. And so I just, so I just, so yeah, I lost some money along the way by making stupid private investments, but it wasn't money that I couldn't really afford to lose. I would have had much more money if I hadn't done it. But I think the broader point is, it's very hard to understand viscerally when you're young, what compounding at 8, 9, 10, 11, 12% actually does?

Starting point is 01:53:28 And I remember Francis Chu, great Canadian investor, once saying to me, I was talking to him about exactly this subject. And he's like, oh, 10% is enormous. Something along those lines are slightly misquoting him. But, you know, over time, 10% a year compounded over decades is fabulous. And so there's no need to do anything spectacular that blows you out of the water. So it's not really in answer to your question that I would be more concentrated. I still am a great believer in concentration.

Starting point is 01:54:00 I would actually be very diversified with a chunk of my money in index funds, which I did. But I would just stick with stocks and not overreach or not try to do anything crazy and not try to be in a hurry and just understand just the importance of resistance. all of the temptations to do something stupid and to be in a hurry. But it was difficult at the time, partly because when I made a couple of those private investments, the stock market, at least when I made one of them, the stock market had just gone nowhere for like a decade. And so you started to think, well, maybe the way to make money is in these private companies, because here are all these people I know who've done really well.

Starting point is 01:54:39 So it's really hard not to get lured away from, just this very plain vanilla straight thing. The other thing I would say is the key, I think, in retrospect, or at least a key, is just to get the big things right. So if you live within your means and you keep adding to the pot and you keep your fees and expenses down and you keep taxes down and you take full advantage of, you know, 529 plans and 401K plans and IRAs and all of these things, and you just add to the pot year in, year out,

Starting point is 01:55:16 you will do well. And that has proven to be the case over more than three decades. And so despite all of my stupidity and all of my mistakes and all the ways I was tempted to get into private companies that I didn't understand, it still worked out pretty well so far. And, you know, it's difficult because you do sometimes want to roll the dice. And so, I mean, there was a time where I wrote a profile of Bill Miller for four. fortune that's probably an eight or nine page profile back in 2001, where I was really focusing on the fact that he had bought 15% of Amazon. And almost everyone thought he was nuts. And I could

Starting point is 01:56:00 see that it was kind of brilliant. And the stock had come down from 90 to 6. And I had huge admiration for Bill. I was spending a lot of time with him. And I didn't buy it. And so, you know, partly that was because I didn't really, you know, it would have been a conflict of a interest and so I had to wait a bit because I wrote the story for fortune. I had to wait several weeks before I was allowed to buy it. And I didn't have much free money at the time. I had a young child, maybe two young kids by then. And so I didn't have a lot of spare cash. And so sometimes you actually do want to take the risk. And then similarly, a few years ago when I was working on Richelweiser Happier and I interviewed Bill, he told me I should be buying Bitcoin and it was at like $8,000 or $10,000 or

Starting point is 01:56:46 12,000 or something. And I was like, there's no way I'm buying this useless thing that I don't even understand how to buy it. And, you know, I don't understand technically how to buy it. And I don't understand what it is. And, you know, so I don't know that my belief in staying out of trouble and surviving by not overreaching and doing things I didn't understand. In general, that's been a good thing. But, you know, it would have been good if I had violated those principles and bought Amazon and bought Bitcoin. But look, you know, I might have followed Bill and bought lots of those financial companies that were getting killed during the financial crisis. And he was wrong on that occasion. So it's difficult. I think,

Starting point is 01:57:27 I think you have to make, you have to make an array of kind of rational investments where if you're wrong, it's not going to destroy you. So as Jeffrey Kandleck said, you know, ask yourself, what's the consequence if I'm wrong? And so the mistakes I made, thank God, didn't kill me. I learned from them. And generally over time, if you just keep funding those accounts and you just keep plugging away, this is a really beautiful game. And it's very rewarding. And it's been kind of joyful because not only did I learn about the world and investing in markets, but I got to learn from all of these great investors about how they think and how they live. So it's just been a very rich experience. So I'm very aware of the fact that I've talked way too much and have failed entirely to answer many

Starting point is 01:58:19 of the questions that you guys sent me. So I think I'm going to do this another time. I'll come back and do another episode because you guys sent me amazing questions and I want to come back and answer more of them. So maybe in six months or nine months or something like that, I'll do another ask me anything. And in the meantime, I had promised, I think, at least in my head, and possibly in public, that I was going to send a signed copy of the three. my book, Richard Wiseer, happier to someone whose question I answered here. And so I'm going to send a signed copy of the book to Tyler, the video editor whose question, you can tell God under my skin. And so I'm going to ask Tyler for his address and I'll send him a copy of the book in California.

Starting point is 01:59:08 And in the meantime, I'll be back very soon with more great guess. I've got some really interesting stuff lined up that I hope you'll enjoy. And I just wanted to mention one other thing, which is that I'm launching again my ritual-wise, a happier masterclass, which I've been doing over the last year. It's a one-year course that's an opportunity to study with me. And we meet up once a month over Zoom and chat for a couple of hours about a chapter in the book and the themes in that chapter. And then we've met a couple of times in person, which has been really joyful.

Starting point is 01:59:42 and it's been such a fun experience that I'm going to do this again. I'll put together the detail soon. And this is something that I do charge for, but it's just been a really fun experience, partly because it's just for a very small group. The last year I capped it at 20 people. And I'm going to do exactly the same again. It's going to be a maximum of 20 people studying closely with me

Starting point is 02:00:07 over the course of the year. And they're really amazing people. as I've mentioned occasionally in discussions about this in public, they tend to be fund managers, people managing family offices, CEOs, entrepreneurs, professional gambler in there, a very renowned theoretical physicist turned quant investor. So these are amazingly high quality people studying with me over the course of the year discussing these topics. And so if that sounds like something that would interest you. Please write to my friend Kyle Greve, K-Y-L-E at the Investorspodcast.com.

Starting point is 02:00:48 And please add yourself to the waiting list. And hopefully the stars will align. We'll get to meet later in the year. But in the meantime, just thanks so much for all of your great questions. I really enjoyed looking over what's been on your mind. And there's so much more to talk about. So keep the questions coming. I'll gather them up and I'll come back and talk.

Starting point is 02:01:09 talk about them more at another time. Thanks so much. Take care. Bye. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Richer, Wiser, happier on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.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 permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH059: Ask Me Anything w/ William Green

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