We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP581: Richer, Wiser, Happier Q3, 2023 w/ Stig Brodersen & William Green

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

On today’s show, Stig Brodersen talks with co-host William Green, the author of “Richer, Wiser, Happier.” With a strong focus on kindness, they discuss what has made them Richer, Wiser, or Happier in the past quarter IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 06:27 - How not to let negative emotions run 21:15 - How to stay humble in your search for your approach 32:36 - How to set up a process for validating the truth  58:35 - How to play games you are equipped to win 1:07:13 - How to understand the emotions of the best investors 1:16:42 - How a job selling flowers can change your life  1:30:21 - How to think about intentions when you want to help your fellow man Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Tune in to Stig Brodersen and William Green’s episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q2 2023, or watch the video. Listen to Stig Brodersen and William Green’s episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q1 2023, or watch the video. Listen to Stig Brodersen and William Green’s episode on Money and Happiness or watch the video. Tune in to William Green’s interview with Daniel Goleman & Tsoknyi Rinpoche or watch the video. Listen to William Green’s interview with Arnold Van den Berg about going from poverty to power or watch the video. William Green’s book Richer, Wiser, Happier – read reviews of this book. William Green’s book, The Great Minds of Investing – read reviews of this book. Tara Bennett Goleman's book, Emotional Alchemy – read reviews of this book David Hawkins’ book, Power vs. Force – read reviews of this book David Hawkins’ book, Letting Go – read reviews of this book David Hawkins’ book, Transcending the Levels of Consciousness – read reviews of this book  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota CI Financial Sun Life AFR The Bitcoin Way Industrious Briggs & Riley Meyka Public Vacasa American Express iFlex Stretch Studios Range Rover Fundrise USPS Shopify Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

You're listening to TIP. Every quarter, my co-host will in Green and I discuss what has made us richer, wiser, and happier. We lean on our personal experiences and countless conversations with the world's greatest investors. In our newest episode, we outline what Charlie Munga taught us about not letting negative emotions run and transition into a broader discussion of having a humble approach when searching for the truth. Perhaps my favorite part of the episode is at the very end where we learn from Arnold Vandenberg, It works wonderful story of selling flowers and how that has changed his life. And perhaps how kindness can change your life too.

With that said, here's the Q3-20203, Richard Weiser, happier episode. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to The Investors podcast. I'm your host, Dick Browderson, and today I'm here with my co-host, William, how are you today?

Hi, Stig. It's lovely to see you. I love the fact that we always have this comically awful attempt to get our technology to work at the start. It's very humbling that these two supposedly smart people who are supposed to say things that are vaguely wise can barely get on the call in the first place. So I think people should apply some kind of discount to these two idiots who can never figure out. the technology. Well, said, well, and we spent like a good half an hour

being able to hear each other. And I think the conclusion was we were not sure why. We're not sure what went wrong. We're not sure how it got solved,

but here we are. Yeah, and that's a big part of today's conversation actually is about how little we and anyone can know about certain things. So it's very appropriate that we struggled so much

and we still don't really know why we struggled. Yes, it is very telling and so this episode is called or titled Ritio, Weiss are happier Q3, 2023. And we'll talk about what has hopefully made us, if not Richer Wiser, perhaps happier

over the past quarter. So there are three segments here of today's episode. And I would like to play a clip from one of your episodes on your show, William Ritzerweiser, Happier episode 28 here in the first segment. And it's an episode where you discuss what you learn from Monis Papry, Tom Gainer, and John Spias. And I would say that what I learned from this episode where you also play clips is actually not so much for any of those three titans, but it's more of your reflections after you're speaking with Mnish. And this is what you're saying, William.

And as Hawkins puts it, the more that you can reject these kind of weak attractors, the better. So you're trying to move away from things like resentment or jealousy or self-pity or fear or anxiety. or greed. And I think one of the things that was striking to me when I read Hawkins that feels true to me is that things like shame and guilt calibrate an incredibly low level. And so the practical lesson that I drew from this that I think is really valuable is that you kind of want to flood the zone with these positive emotions like love and compassion and forgiveness and the like. And the less you can indulge in these weaker emotions, the better. And I remember talking to Munger about some of this stuff, not about Hawkins,

but Munger said to me, when we were talking about negative emotions, he said, you know, he famously has said that envy is the dumbest of the seven deadly sins because it's not even fun. And he said, with these things like envy, anger, really intense anger, jealousy, he's like, I just don't indulge them. I do not let them run. And I said, how come, how do you do it? And he said, well, I just know that they're stupid, so I don't let them run. So this is a really powerful and important issue, I think, because it gives you a sense of, these are sort of guiding principles. They're simple, but they're very powerful guiding principles.

So this is what I got, I think, from Power v. Force. But then I started to fall down this deeper rabbit holes. I started to read some of these other books by Hawkins. And there's, I mean, they're all worthwhile, but I'm going to pull out a page from one of them. It's not my favorite of his books, but there's a particular page that's absolutely extraordinary in a book of his called Transcending the Levels of Consciousness. And then there's a subtitle, I think, is the stairway to enlightenment. And I don't get the idea that I'm anywhere close to enlightenment, but I'm reading this list

of virtues that he's talking about. And I'm like, God, this is the most unbelievably helpful list. And so he talks about how simple tools consistently applied are incredibly. incredibly powerful, which is something I write about in my book, right, the importance of simplicity that you don't need to get that complicated. And he says, some tried and true basic tools that have brought about tremendous results over the centuries are as follows. So the first one in this list, and I'm not going to read you the whole list, but the first one, he says, be kind to everything and everyone, including oneself all the time with no exception, right, which is what

we read from par versus four, something very similar. Then he says, revere all of life in all its expressions no matter what, even if one does not understand it. And then he says, presume no actual reliable knowledge of anything at all. And this has been really helpful to me because I keep thinking, whenever I'm trying to judge someone or I'm thinking about like, I can't believe this happened to me, or this is terrible, or I don't understand somebody else's behavior and I think it's reprehensible in some way, I start thinking, well, presume no actual reliable knowledge of anything at all. What on earth do I know? And I don't understand these people. I don't understand the way they're behaving. And then he says something that I think about a great deal. He says, forgive everything that is

witnessed and experienced no matter what. And I just find that an incredibly helpful idea that whatever happens. And it's hard to forgive everything. But at least I know that that's an incredibly powerful guiding light. To me, this is immensely profound here what we just listened to. And I would like to jump into a discussion about your comment here on the positive and negative emotions. I guess I've come to realize that you cannot live a life without negative emotions. But how we react is to some extent up to us. And what I've also found is that the more that we resist to our negative emotions, the more

we also keep them alive. And I think that if I were more enlightened, I would probably just observe my own. my emotions, that is supposedly how it should be done. I'm not there yet, and I don't know if I'll ever be. You have a wonderful episode. I want to say it's the one with Daniel Goldman, when you talk about this, William. Yeah, Daniel Goldman and Sokney Rinpoche. Yeah, you should just observe your emotions. Whenever I heard that, it was like, this is so beautiful. And then I tried doing it. It was at least for me. And again, it might be my lack of enlightenment. That was really, real difficult for me. And so I guess what I would like to talk about here is if you're also not

able just to observe your emotions, I found something that I'd used for years that I would like to share with you that might be a bit more approachable for you. And it's a concept called habit pairing. And I cannot for the life of me remember which book I read about habit pairing. It might have been one of the bellies books. That would be my best guess, but honestly, I don't know. But basically, The idea is if you do something you don't want to do, or if you're supposed to do something you don't want to do, you tend to procrastinate. And very often it ends up with not happening in the first place. And so what you would want to do whenever you do habit pairing is you want to do something

you really enjoy while you're doing something that you do not enjoy to avoid procrastination. And so, for example, whenever I'm doing the dishes, which isn't a lot of fun, which to me is luxury. I don't focus on anything else. I just listen to sports podcast. That certainly does not make me smarter, if anything, it probably makes it a little sad because my favorite sports team always doing so poorly. But, you know, it's sort of like, it's something I enjoy and are doing it's something that's less fun. So I do that. So sports podcast, unfortunately, is not enough for me whenever I deal with negative emotions. You would need a stronger remedy. But I wanted to use that as an approachable example of the concept in itself. And I would say that, like so many others, I have my own demons.

And this was a long way around referring to Chalamonger that you refer to in this audio clip here, because he talks about how you're not supposed to let your negative emotions run. And for many, many years, I've been really difficult for me. And so what I found to be useful for me, which may or may not be useful for you, William, anyone else, is that I've used a different type of habit pairing for some of those negative thoughts I can get from time to time. And what I've done is I've set something, I've set a goal that's very important for me to achieve. And for a long time, there has been financial independence.

And it could be anything else for you, but it's something that used to be very important to me. So every time I had these negative emotions running, I would get up because very often it would be when I'm in bed or in sofa or doing something. I would literally get up and I would start working towards that goal. And it has two wonderful implications. First of all, like the brain is a complex thing, but you can generally just focus on one thing. So if you really focused on your goal, it's very difficult to have these emotions at the same time.

But also, if you channel your energy towards something you really want, at least for me, because I used to have many negative emotions, well, the closer you get to that goal, It's sort of like supposed to be a gift for herself or a present for yourself that unfolds. And it might sound a bit silly, but there's a sort of a different layer to that because the more we feed those negative emotions, the more they take over. So as soon as you start welcoming those negative emotions, this suddenly become less frequent. And I don't know if I'm being too vague here or if it's something that only works for me, but I would highly encourage anyone listening to this to test it out.

and I want to throw it back over to you, William, and then ask you, how do you attract positive emotions in your life and perhaps eliminate? I'm not sure that's the right word, but how do you deal with bad emotions? Yeah, lots of different approaches. And I like that one that you were talking about. That's very interesting. And it reminds me vaguely of stuff that I read in that BJ Fogg book about habits, tiny habits, which I think is worth reading for people. I didn't finish it because one of my habits is that I read it. so many books at the same time that I forget what book I'm reading. But I remember him talking about, if I remember correctly, you know, if every time you went to the toilet, for example, you came out,

you did one push-up, you're connecting, you're pairing different things. So one thing becomes a trigger for some other kind of behavior, for some positive behavior. And likewise, Charles DeHiaig, in his book on Habits, talked about the same sort of thing, like having this sort of sequence of things where I think for you, I may be misremembering it, but I vaguely remember him saying, for example, if you put out your sneakers or something like that, you know, it's more likely to trigger you going out for a run. So this idea of just sort of stacking the odds, slightly in favor of you behaving optimally is really smart. And of course, I fail to do it the whole time. But on the subject of emotions, yeah, as I say, I have a lot of different

approaches to this stuff. Maybe because I'm a fairly emotional person and I feel emotions pretty intensely. And so, you know, I'm definitely prey to things like, you know, stress or anxiety or fear or the like, although it's funny because I don't feel any of that particularly at the moment. So you have to sort of cast your mind back into that state. But one thing I also irritability, irritability and sort of, which I think is a kind of probably an English version of anger. It's like that we're too polite to be visibly. angry, but my wife can see it. My wife can see if I'm a little snappy. And so for anyone else, they'd be like, oh, really? That was anger, but actually it is anger. It's frustration.

But it's just covered up by this veneer of English politeness and etiquette. So the first thing, I think, is to be very aware of the emotion, to know what it is your feeling. And I think that requires some kind of quietness, whatever the technique is, whether it's from meditation or anything else, just pausing and seeing where the emotion is, particularly in your body, where you can see, I mean, I was thinking this morning, for example, when I was in England last week, to give a couple of speeches. In the run-up to that, I'd had a twitch in my left eye quite a lot over the last couple of weeks, and I was just thinking this morning, oh, that's totally gone. And so it clearly must have been related, I guess, to this trip where I was going to do a couple of, kind of,

you know, speeches that were demanding and, you know, even though I did a lot of preparation and I knew what I was going to do, obviously there was something being expressed in my body. So to have some sense of what's happening in your body is really important. And I think you see it with a lot of investors, right? I remember reading, I think it was the Alchemy of Finance by George Soros, where he talked about listening to his body and realizing that when he started to have really bad back pain. It was a sign that there was something wrong in his portfolio that he needed to address. And likewise, Jeff Finnic, who was one of the great investors of his time who

managed the Magellan Fund after people like Peter Lynch and was an extraordinary investor who became a manager of the biggest mutual fund in the world in his early 30s. He once said to me that when he felt physically nauseous when he was buying a stock, that was a clue to, that was a clue to him that it was probably bottoming out, that it was so hated, it was so unpopular, so out of favor, that it made him feel sick to buy it. So I think some sort of self-awareness of what's going on is really valuable. I remember Guy Speer saying to me that one of the great benefits of moving to Zurich was that, and to a fairly quiet neighborhood in the suburbs of Zurich, he said, look, I have this very, very busy, distractible mind. And I want my mind to be like a calm pon,

so that I can see the ripples. So I think that's really important to find a way to put yourself in a context, whether through meditation or whether going for walks in nature or whether living somewhere quiet that's a little detached so that you can see the ripples in the water, so you can see what's happening. That's a really important first step, I think. And I'll caveat all of this by saying, I'm by no means an expert on all of this. I'm just observing other people and observing myself and then finding strategies that work.

So, apologize to anyone who's truly an expert. I'm just an expert at using the glitchy, faulty machine called William Green. And even that, I'm not much for an expert on. So that's the first thing, self-awareness. The second thing that you were alluding to before when you were talking about this whole idea that came up in my podcast with Daniel Goldman, the author of emotional intelligence, and Soap Nurempich, this great Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, they have an extraordinarily powerful technique that I think is very profound,

which grew in part out of work that Dan Goldman's wife, Tara, has done. She's a psychologist, very, very smart, wrote a book on emotion, something called like the Alchemy of Emotion or something like that. It's a very good book. We'll put it in the show notes. She's called Tara Bennett Goldman or Tara Goldman-Bennett. And so the technique that came out of their discussions, Tar and Dan and Sokney Rimpershei, is basically identifying what they would call your beautiful monsters.

So these emotions, these difficult negative emotions, difficult recurring patterns. And then really sitting there and abiding with them, being aware of them. But then Sokney has this beautiful technique called handshake practice that you can find out more about in that episode and also in this book, Why We Meditate that he and Dan Goldman wrote, where you abide with the emotion. So you see, so let's say you're suddenly assailed with a sense of anxiety. So let's say you have a lot of stuff to do and you're like, oh my God, I've got to prepare for a speech or a meeting. And at the same time, I've got all these issues with my kid. And at the same time, you know, like my business is struggling. What if it's not okay? And my wife is, you know, my wife

is unhappy with me over this or whatever it is. So suddenly you're feeling like the pressure of the world and one thing triggers another and you start to go into this spiral. And so one of the things that Sokne Rimbusha would do is he uses this practice, handshake practice where you're looking at the emotion with a kind of warmth and kindness. You're not trying to suppress it or judge it or project it onto anyone else or to change it, you're moving towards it in the spirit of a handshake. Maybe you're literally, you're like smiling at it or you're speaking at it. So you see the emotion like fear or anger come up or anxiety.

You're like, oh, hi, there you are. There's anxiety. Oh, and I feel it in my forehead. I feel my jaw clenched. I feel like a twitch in my eye. I feel like a little stress in my stomach or whatever it might be. Like, I would often find the, I'm no great meditation master by any means. The idea is comic.

But I find often when I'm, when I'm meditating, I realize the extent to which I'm clenching my jaw. So these are clues when you look at your body. You're like, oh, that's what's going on. I'm on a much more pressure than I realized. And then you watch it. You watch it in your body with this kind of affectionate warmth. And the paradox is that even though you're not trying to change it, it changes because as we know from Buddhism and from our own experience, everything is impermanent. Everything is in flux. And so one of the things that David Hawkins talks about also in his book, Letting Go that I've discussed before on the podcast, is that it's the resistance. And you mentioned this before as well. It's the resistance to the emotion that often keeps it going. And so when you drop that resistance and you have this kind of radical.

non-resistance, the energy behind it dissipates. And so this is very profound because when we were growing up, in my case in England, where we were pretty repressed and not very good at dealing with our emotions and talking about our emotions or acknowledging our emotions, this stuff is all just churning under the surface of the ocean and you're not really aware of it and you don't talk about it. And so you're kind of controlled by it. And so once you become a little more of it, it's possible to have this kind of affectionate, warm, kind attitude to it and it dissipates. And Sokney-Rimpshay had this wonderful saying in one of his classes. He has a course called Fully Being, that I think is a beautiful course online. He's really remarkable. He said in one of his

recordings, one day we will be friends with all of our beautiful monsters. And so that's a beautiful attitude where instead of being a little bit ashamed of these emotions, oh, look, I have fear or anxiety or something. You're like, no, it's, I'm, I'm human. Let me have a little self-compassion towards this. And then, you know, he'll talk about, it's as if, you know, you're sitting on your meditation cushion, but it can be on your sofa, it can be like in a meeting or whatever. And he's like, you're bringing up a blanket for your beautiful monster. And you're like, yeah, okay, here, Here's my fear. And so that to me is a very beautiful approach.

In practical terms, if people want to explore this, I would listen to the interview that I did with Sokner-Rimpershey and Dan Goldman. But I would also look at letting go, the book by David Hawkins, where in chapter two he describes this mechanism of letting go that I think is tremendously similar to this approach of handshake practice. practice. Thank you for sharing, William. And I think it's different from, I guess everyone listened to this would get different things out of it. And we just talked about just before we started recording how Buffett and Monger, for example, are not religious. And this is not the

intention of this is not to talk about religion. That's very much not the purpose of anything we do on TAP. We don't want to be political. We don't want to be religious in any kind of way. But I wanted to pull on a thread that you talked about as you were explaining this, William, before we started recording, where you said, that channel is not open to Buffett and Munger. And I kind of felt that was an interesting take. Yeah. I mean, my analogy is I'm never going to be Michael Jordan. I'm never going to be Buffett. I don't have the wiring and the intellect that he has.

But there are other things. There are other channels that are open to me. So I can read fiction in a way that maybe he or manga can't and can find things in it that are totally related to investing, that are really profound for investing. That's just something that's open to me. It's not a particularly valuable thing. I'm not trying to say it in a self-aggrandizing way. You know, being able to sit there in an interview with someone and understand, feel what they're feeling was a very different. skill than if you're a fairly unemotional investor who's extraordinarily good at analyzing situations

in an unemotional way. I mean, I was thinking of this whole question of Buffett, an emotion. I don't know if you remember at the annual meeting back in was it May. There was an extraordinary moment where during the Q&A, Buffett said, I can't recall any time in Berkshire's history when we made an emotional decision. And he turns Charlie and he's like, have we ever made an emotional decision, Charlie? And I was like, no. And one of them said, I can't remember which one it was, said, you know, you don't want to have no emotions in other areas of your life, but in business, it's really helpful. And so this whole question of how we deal with our emotions is really important in our relationships, in our marriages or relationships with kids or family members or whatever.

But it's also really important in investing. And so you have to actually know how you're wired emotionally as an investor so that you can make adjustments to prevent yourself blowing yourself up. And one of the most helpful things I've seen in terms of investing an emotion is something I wrote about in, I think the chapter about Munger in my book, which is called Don't Be a Fool, where I talked about this friend of mine, Ken Schuvenstein, who's a very, very thoughtful guy who was a very successful investor who then quit the investing business in his late 40s and became a neurologist. And so he's an expert on the brain. And he's taught the advanced investment. He taught, the Advanced Investment Research class at Columbia Business School for a decade. It's very smart about investing and the brain. And one of the things he's said is that he has this mnemonic Holt PS, which he uses to remind himself that when he's hungry, angry, lonely, tired, in pain or stressed, he's likely to make suboptimal decisions.

And so Holt P.S. reminds him of each of the, those states so that when he's upset, for example, I mean, he became a doctor right at the start of the COVID pandemic and he was working in an emergency room, working with people in a room full of ventilators. And it was just how it was like fighting a war. And he had just had his first child a few days before and couldn't see the child because he couldn't risk infecting the child or his wife. And so he was staying in a hotel away from his, wife and newborn kid and treating dying patients. And he said it helped him immensely, this mnemonic that he'd used whole PS during his investing career to say, well, what state am I in

while I'm making decisions for patients and while I'm dealing with their family? And so he said that his back, you know, he had a back injury from wrestling in his teens, his back hurt. And he was wearing this PPE equipment that was very tight and uncomfortable. And so he had to really, be aware of how his fear, his physical discomfort, how these were likely to be messing with his judgment. And so this is a very profoundly practical intervention for our listeners that when you're feeling in one of these states, just slow down. Just be extra careful about the way you talk to people, about the decisions you make.

Because we know from the scientific literature that we make worse decisions. decisions when in those states like hunger, anger, loneliness, tiredness, pain, stress. And so one of the things that Ken would do was when he started to become overwhelmed with work, for example, he would start to cancel lots of unnecessary meetings. He would clear his calendar. And this is something I really internalized. When I'm starting to feel overwhelmed, I'm like, no, I have to simplify. And another thing he would do that I think is incredibly practical is he said, we know there are four things that optimize brain health and brain function and their sleep, good nutrition, exercise and meditation.

And he's like, we know this scientifically. We've seen the impact on the brain of these things. Like Dan Goldman wrote a book called Alter Traits about the impact on the brain of meditation. And we know from things like why we sleep by Matthew Winkler, who I've interviewed before about the power of sleep. So one of the things Ken would do is he would say, okay, let me get back to basics. I can see that I'm in a bad state. And so he did this during the financial crisis where he was having terrible time with redemptions from his fund and the like.

And he really made a point of going back to eating lots of fruit and vegetables and fish and the like and trying not to eat ice cream with crumbled Oreos in it, which was one of his particular downfall. And so I think just if you're self-aware, if you know what emotional state you're in and you know you're a little bit jangled, it helps you to adopt these good habits. And then the other thing, before we move on to a different subject, the other thing that Ken said that I thought was it really wise. And I'd never heard anyone else say is he said it's really important to develop these good habits before the storm. And so he said it's great once the storm hits to have a good meditation practice and have good sleep and have good exercise regimen and the like. But he said it's much better to have those things really bedded down before the storm hits.

I thought that was a very wise and just it's so practical and it just makes total sense. 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. These aren't abstract ideas. These are tools real people are using right now. You'll be in the room with about 2,000 extraordinary individuals, dissidents, founders, philanthropists, policymakers, the kind of people you don't just listen to but end up having to.

having dinner with. Over three days, you'll experience powerful mainstage talks, hands-on workshops on freedom tech, and financial sovereignty, immersive art installations, and conversations that continue long after the sessions end. And it's all happening in Oslo in June. If this sounds like your kind of room, well, you're in luck because you can attend in person. Standard and patron passes are available at Osloof Freedomforum.com with patron passes offering deep access, private events, and small group time with the speakers. The Oslo Freedom Forum isn't just a conference. It's a place where ideas meet reality and where the future is being built by people living it.

If you run a business, you've probably had the same thought lately. How do we make AI useful in the real world? Because the upside is huge, but guessing your way into it is a risky move. With NetSuite by Oracle, you can put AI to work today. NetSuite is the number one AI class ERP, trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It pulls your financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM into one unified system. And that connected data is what makes your AI smarter. It can automate routine work, surface actionable insights, and help you cut costs while making fast AI-powered decisions with confidence.

And now with the Netsuite AI connector, you can use the AI of your choice to connect directly to your real business data. This isn't some add-on, it's AI built into the system that runs your business. And whether your company does millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get their free business guide, demystifying AI at Netsuite.com slash study. The guide is free to you at Netsuite.com slash study. When I started my own side business, it suddenly felt like I had to become 10 different

people overnight wearing many different hats. Starting something from scratch can feel exciting, but also incredibly overwhelming and lonely. That's why having the right tools matters. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. from brands just getting started to household names. It gives you everything you need in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics. So you're not juggling a bunch of different platforms. You can build a beautiful online store with hundreds of ready-to-use templates, and Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions and even enhance your product photography.

Plus, if you ever get stuck, they've got award-winning 24-7 customer support. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing... Sign up for your $1 per month trial. today at Shopify.com slash WSB. Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show.

So thank you for sharing William. And I think that's a good segue to go to the next segment here of the show where we talk about seeking the truth, staying objective, and then perhaps also talking about if that's even possible. You know, much inspired by Manny's Paraguay, and I probably should say in turn by David Hawkins, I've started to live a more truthful life. And truthful is not the same as being impolite or unkind. I do think that it's, that's, I do think there is a lot to be said about that. It is, especially if you are in a privileged position, it is often way more challenging to be kind than to be honest. So truthful can take many different interpretations. Living a life with more

honesty in where you're more authentic can give you a few more bruises. That's my disclaimer, especially in the beginning. But I also say that I found that it pays dividends immensely in the long term if you do that. And you just attract people of a really, really high quality who also want to live that way. And it's... a relatively rare quality, but it's one of those things where whenever you meet those people, you can almost just continue talking with them. There's almost like this bond with those people where you sort of like get attracted to each other. The other nuance I wanted to bring to the table was to this idea of always looking for the truth. And Redellio, who I'm sure most in the audience,

know, he has this wonderful, I'm going to say quote, but I'm going to butcher. So I would just say He said something along the lines of, if you agree with another person, the chances are that at least one of you are wrong and would you like to know if that was you? Now, that seems very, very simple, but most people do not want to know if they're wrong. Like, that's just not how we are wired. We might say that we want that, but it's almost like saying, yes, I eat healthy and I go to the gym. We say things, but it's not always if you monitor our behavior how it turns out.

And I recently had a conversation with a very intelligent friend. And if you ask him, I think he is as much on a quest for the truth in life and financial markets as I am. And so my friend just out of the blue, he sent me a message with an audio. It was like a YouTube video. And it was about a somewhat controversial financial topic. And he was super excited about this talk and, you know, that contained, quote, unquote. What was it about steak? Yeah, yeah, be more specific.

So actually, there's a reason why I don't want to be specific because it is quite a controversial topic. And so I know I'm cupping out on this, but the reason why... Were we talking like ESG or cryptocurrencies or inflate, like what sort of realm? Like, don't be specific if that's... Right, right, right. Yeah, it will be something along the lines of something in financial markets. It's not like one of those pro-life, pro-choice type of, like, but divisive probably for no one else than in financial markets.

Let's put it like, but then it's very divisive in financial markets. I'm such a relentless journalist that if we were sitting here privately, let it be known that within two minutes, I would know this. Because I just, once I see that there's something, like, I can't let go. So I apologize for asking the question. No, no, no. That's completely fine, William, man.

And I'm going to come out on this because it's part of the process for those people listening to this point. Because if I told you what it was, everyone would already have made up their mind about this topic. And so they would either automatically agree with me or they would agree with my friend. And the entire point of this exercise is not to agree with anyone. It's more about finding the right process for validating truth, for staying objective. It's very much on purpose that I'm not saying what the topic is.

So he sent this to me and I watched it because I was curious. It wasn't typically something I would because I had an idea of what this person, which is a known figure in financial industry, I had a pretty good idea what he would say. And so I watched the clip and I was a little horrified to be completely frank. He sort of like said what I thought he would say, but just even more. And I honestly felt it was a bit like watching a cult leader speak. I felt it was very, like, very narrow perspective, very biased.

Every time he said something, the audience cheered. And to say the least, I was quite skeptical about the message that wanted to pass along. Now, I then jumped on a call with my friend to discuss this clip and a few other things. And again, this friend who I perceived to be highly, highly intelligent, he just right out of the gates, he said, have you ever thought about if you would go to something like Omaha, listen to Buffett and Munger, it's sort of like being in a cult.

And I was like, what? You know, it's sort of like, it was kind of interesting because he sort of like beat me to the punch, right? Like I was supposed to tell him that this person that he sent me this YouTube clip from, like he was the cult leader. And here he was like out of the blue talking about that, you know,

Buffett and Munger was a bit like being a part of a cult. And I was like, thinking to myself, I have a lot of respect for Buffett and Munger and I find them to be such objective thinkers. But then I thought to myself, is that because they kind of have the same opinions as I do? And would then that be an oxymoron in itself? Like, do we think that other people with the same opinions on ourselves are objective and seek the truth? And it just seems like in this world where we all live in those echo chambers, and we hear so many people talking about the truth, including you and me here today, William, it's just such an interesting topic to discuss, more like to be meta about, thinking about how we're thinking.

So this is my long way of asking you, William. And then perhaps after we start recording, I can tell you more about the topic. but do you actively seek the truth? And if yes, how do you even define it? How do you validate if something is truthful? Yeah, I'm obsessed with truth seeking. As a journalist, that's what you're trying to do. People have these very distorted and dogmatic views of the media.

But that is essentially what you're doing is a good journalist. It's kind of like being an investor. They're great investors and they're a lousy investors. So when you look at the best journalists, what they're doing is they're trying to figure out how to present the in inverted commas truth in a somewhat fair and balanced, open-minded way. And so the whole thing really is a pursuit of truth. And likewise, investing is the pursuit of truth, right? You're searching in very murky circumstances where you only have a limited amount of information.

You're trying to figure out what the future holds, despite the fact that the future is unknown. And so we're always seeing as through a glass darkly, right, trying to grope our way through the fog with very incomplete information, trying to figure out what's at least approximately true or more likely to be true than not. And even the concept of truth is a difficult one, right, whether there is any such thing as an objective truth. And so I think the mindset to start with that's really valuable to have is just to have no illusion that you're an objective observer,

that you're trying to analyze something that's extremely murky and you have your own biases and prejudices and blind spots, limited, limited intelligence, limited knowledge, limited experience. And so starting from a position of humility, I think is really, really valuable.

And think also of the line that I quoted from David Hawkins earlier, I think in that first excerpt that you played, where he said, presume no actual reliable knowledge of anything at all. That is an incredibly valuable mindset to start with the assumption that I don't know. And think of Howard Marks, who has said to me before, he's talked about how he belongs to the I don't know school of investing. He's not coming at things with the arrogance to believe that he has the ultimate answer. he's always making probabilistic guesses, basically. He's like, well, I think this is more likely to be true.

This is more likely to happen. So that attitude of humility is a really helpful starting point. And I've seen ample reason to accept my own limitations on this front, my failure to see the truth because I've failed as a journalist before to see what was really going on. I remember very early in my career, in my early twenties, I was writing for a great English magazine. It was probably the best English magazine at the time, the independent magazine. And I went off to Spokane, Washington to do an article about a family of gypsies who the New York

Times and Life magazine had written about. And they had been, it's murky, the details all those years ago. It's about 30 years ago, I think. But they had got involved in a conflict with local law enforcement. And law enforcement had come in and had been searching for stolen goods and the like. And the gypsies were saying, you know, they touched our women and they made our women marry me, which meant impure. And I read this in the New York Times and life. And I went out to Spokane to see this family.

And they were led by the gypsy king of Spokane, Washington. And it was a fascinating story. And for me, as a young liberal journalist, I was very much open to the idea I would assume that their civil rights were being violated. And there was a moment where I was interviewing the assistant district attorney. And he starts showing me transcripts of conversations, if I remember rightly they had wiretap stuff, something like that. And I started to realize, oh, this is nothing like I believed it was. Like there's, you know, he's showing me evidence that, you know, there were all these allegations that they were, they had stolen goods and they were, you know, and you start to realize, oh, wait a second, this isn't as clear cut a case of people's rights being violated by an oppressive state. It's like, no, no, it looks like they were doing something really bad. And then they're using this, um, this very smart and probably to some degree justified argument that their rights are being violated. And there was a moment in that interview with the assistant district attorney, maybe he was the district attorney, I think the assistant DA, where I just realized how blinded I had been by my own prejudice. And I also realized that Life magazine and the New York Times had kind of got it wrong, at least in my perception. And then there was a moment, sometimes as a journalist, you know, you do what you call the lay down, where you sort of, you know, you lay down the evidence that you have.

I remember talking to the son of this gypsy family. I'm not in any way trying to say this in any way that's sort of, you know, politically and sensitive. I know these are sensitive questions. I start to tell him the evidence that I've been looking at that makes me disbelieve what he's saying. And he starts to get kind of really agitated and he's like brandishing this gun in his kitchen and it was a pretty intense situation.

And so because I had that very early... experience of seeing how my own prejudices and biases to believe that the state in some way was violating the rights of these individuals. I just could see the dangers of going into anything with a closed mind, anything with prejudice. And that situation, that story is so murky in its own in its own right. I mean, you could interpret what happened with that family and with the police in so many different ways. And I still don't really know what happened. And so I think seeing your own history of getting the wrong end of the stick is really valuable. But then the real question is, okay, so what do we do? You know, if once we're aware of how limited we are and how murky life is

and that we should not presume any reliable knowledge of anything at all, what do we actually do. And so one thing is to start with what you might call a beginner's mind, right? There's a famous book called Zen Mind Beginer's Mind. I remember interviewing an investor who said to me that whenever she went to analyze a company, someone called Mariko Gordon, who is a very, very smart thinker about investing. She said whenever she would go interview the executives at a company, she would start with a beginner's mind willing to ask stupid questions that might make her look foolish. And that's a very helpful attitude to start with a blank slate. I mean, one of the reasons why I messed up in that story that I was doing for the

independent magazine about this family in Spokane was that I was with a photographer who was extraordinary. And so I wanted, he worked, I think, for the Magnum Agency, which is legendary agency. and I wanted him to see how tough and smart I was. And so I think there was an element of ego there. Also, once you're a little bit older and wiser, hopefully you're at least self-aware enough that you're like, well, I don't want to show off to the photographer.

Let me ask the stupid questions. So starting with that beginner's mind of being prepared to go in open without prejudice or at least be aware of your prejudice is very helpful. And then to have this mindset that Munger talks about where he very consciously was cloning the attitude of Darwin and Darwin's ability to seek disconfirming evidence. Darwin had religious beliefs that made it very, very difficult for him to write on the origin of human species.

And yet, he was willing to, challenge his most loved beliefs. And that's an extraordinary mindset. So Munga actively congratulates himself anytime he destroys one of his most cherished ideas, one of his most cherished beliefs. So that's really helpful in practical terms, just to have that attitude of seeking disconfirming evidence. So if, for example, you're a conservative Republican, you read the op-ed page of the New York Times, so you can broaden your mind. And if you're left-leaning, you read the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal to challenge your views. And so that's a really practical thing to rewire yourself so that you're actively seeking disconfirming evidence rather than trying to be in an

echo chamber. The other thing is to surround yourself by people who are willing to challenge you. So Munger was described by Buffett famously as the abominable no man because he's willing to challenge anything that Buffett believes. And so Buffett might want to make some investment. And Munger was opinionated enough and clever enough that he didn't hesitate to say, no, that's the most foolish thing I've ever heard. And so that's really helpful to actually structure your ecosystem so that there are people who can challenge. challenge your views. And so this is something also that journalists are doing the whole time that is very, very valuable, this process of triangulation where when you're trying to figure out the truth in a situation, you go to multiple people and you see whether they confirm

what other people have said. And so if you're assessing a CEO, for example, you want to be talking to multiple people and saying, what have I missed? And Ken Schuvenstein, the doctor and a hedge fund manager that I mentioned before would very consciously clone this from people like Munger and Darwin, always saying, what would make me wrong here? So it's actively embracing this scientific attitude of looking for disconfirming evidence. And then one other piece of very practical advice I would give is that once you start to be aware of your own myopia, the fact that you see such a limited amount of things and that you're liable to be wrong, you have to hedge against your own blindness, your own capacity to miss what's going on.

So I think of someone like Jeff Gundlack, who's often called the King of Bonds, who I interviewed at some length of my book, but didn't write about a length in my book. He once said to me that he's wrong about a third of the time. And she said, the real question is, what's the consequence if I'm wrong? So once you're aware of how flawed your judgment is and how little you really see and how murky everything is and how unknowable the future is, it's very important to say, well, what's the consequence if I'm wrong? So let's say I make a dumb bet on Alibaba, which I did.

It didn't hurt me because I went into it with this sense of what's the consequence if I'm wrong. And so I invested enough so that I would be pleased if it quadrupled, but I didn't invest enough so that it would jeopardize my daughter's final year at college. And that's really important. And so just this awareness of your own, your own inability, your own blindness is not enough. You have to have some practical safeguards. And so diversifying, having small enough positions, sizes with investing so that you're not going to be destroyed if you're wrong is hugely important. And so one thing I came to the conclusion, I don't know if I wrote about this in the chapter called the resilient investor. I think that's probably where it is.

I came to the conclusion that if you have all of your money in one asset class or one country or one currency or even one bank or one brokerage firm, you're probably playing with a loaded gun and just have the assumption that things can go horribly wrong that I can't imagine is very, very valuable. So diversification, there's a very interesting book called War and Wealth or something like that by Barton Biggs, late Barton Biggs, who's a hedge fund manager and wise guy. And he talks at one point about diversification. He talks about, he made this sort of passing quip about how people would have all of their

money in farm animals. And then there would be a drought. And this thing that it always worked just no longer worked. And so he talked about diversification as this sort of prudent principle that had served us wells through the ages. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up. And customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. Instead of chasing spreadsheets and screenshots, VANTA gives you

continuous automation across more than 35 security and privacy frameworks. Companies like RETA, Ramp and Ryder spend 82% less time on audits with Vantta. That's not just faster compliance, it's more time for growth. If I were running a startup or scaling a team today, this is exactly the type of platform I'd want in place. Get started at vanta.com slash billionaires. That's vanta.com slash billionaires. Ever wanted to explore the world of online trading, but haven't dared try?

The futures market is more active now than ever before. and plus 500 futures is the perfect place to start. Plus 500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments, the S&P 500, NASDAQ, Bitcoin, gas, and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals, 4X, crypto, and beyond. With a simple and intuitive platform, you can trade from anywhere, right from your phone. Deposit with a minimum of $100 and experience the fast,

accessible futures trading you've been waiting for. See a trading opportunity. You'll be able to trade it in just two clicks once your account is open. Not sure if you're ready, not a problem. Plus 500 gives you an unlimited risk-free demo account with charts and analytic tools for you to practice on. With over 20 years of experience, Plus 500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit Plus500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone.

Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500, it's trading with a plus. Billion dollar investors don't typically park their cash in high yield savings accounts. Instead, they often use one of the premier passive income strategies for institutional investors, private credit. Now, the same passive income strategy is available to investors of all sizes thanks to the Fundrise income fund, which has more than $600 million invested and a 7.97% distribution rate. With traditional savings yields falling, it's no wonder private credit has grown to be a trillion dollar asset class in the last few years. Visit fundrise.com slash WSB to invest in the Fundrise income fund in just minutes. The fund's total return in 2025 was 8% and the average annual total return since inception is 7.8%. Past performance does not

guarantee future results, current distribution rate as of 1231, 2025. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show.

You know, one thing I would like to add here, William, is that I often wonder how much of a survivor bias you have with some of the wealthiest people. And that's, I know that can probably come across as envy, but at least I've learned so much from childmonger not to have envy because it's the only deathly sin you cannot have fun with. So it's not that. There could be an element of survivor bias because by definition, even if everything was completely up to luck, which is not the case, obviously. But if it was, those who would be most concentrated would also be at the very top.

It's just how math works. One thing, and I'll also say that many of these very successful people are extremely assertive and not just assertive, but extremely assertive whenever they communicate. But then there are some, there are a few, and they're very good at talking about articulating that they don't know a lot of things, or they know something about small pockets of, say, financial markets. And one that I really admire is Red Alio, who you interviewed it a few times also, William. And Delio talks about in his books and in his interviews with you, how he has made more money

by what he doesn't know than what he actually did know. And I kind of feel that's just an interesting first principle. And that comes from Dalio. And I don't know what is his net worth, $20 billion or something like that. Like, he'll be okay. Even if he misses a few bets. But that humility where you say, I just don't know. And sort of like go back from that rather than say, this is.

is what I know. And then you sort of like try to align the facts in your favor. So you will get into why I'm inclined to say Alibaba is a good investment. That's only because I've, I haven't lost my shirt, but it hasn't been the opposite either. I think I'm down 25% on that position. But again, it goes back to what you also mentioned, sort of like to go full circle on that, William, it's the waterline principle, like diversify. So the other thing, Stig, I think, is to focus on areas where you really have competence. And so I have some competence in understanding who the smartest investors are.

And so my default, when I had Munger and Lou Simpson talking to me about why they loved Dali Baba was, oh, these guys know what they're doing. There's some justification to that, even though I was outsourcing, which is kind of dumb. But I didn't really know. I didn't really do the work. And then when things went wrong,

Lou Simpson has now passed away. I can't talk to him about it. I haven't talked to Munger about it again. I don't really know why I should own it. I sort of have a sense, but I'm a little bit paralyzed. So sticking to things where you really know, so it's not just this blanket idea of, oh, well, how little we know. It's also play games that you're equipped to win. And I had this very powerful example of this a week or so ago when I was in London. And I, we was speaking at a conference of Black Rocks. And there was a session where they had half a dozen people from different countries working for BlackRock in their value-added real estate business. And they're talking about these mega themes that Black Rock has identified. And BlackRock is managing what, $10 trillion? I think it's the biggest asset manager in the world. So very sophisticated. And in each of these countries, they'll be in Sweden and they'll have a guy who speaks fluent Swedish, who's on the ground, looking for properties that fit these five mega force themes that BlackRock's identified that are driving the property market. And likewise, they have a really smart person in France

and a really smart person in Spain and a really smart person in the UK. And I'm just looking at this and I'm like, how can you compete with this team that has specialists in each of these countries looking specifically for one or two properties that could fit these mega force themes. And it was just a really vivid, visceral reminder of the importance of having specific expertise. They're more likely to come out with a good solution and a good outcome than someone who's in America trying to figure out how to invest in European property. but they're actually an expert in the stock market, not in property, right? So it's so obvious, but just this idea that also comes from manga

and from Ed Thorpe, who I write about in the book as well, talking about this, of playing games that you're equipped to win is huge. So you want to stick with your circle of competence, and yes, you want to expand your circle of competence the whole time. But just this ability to know the limits of your own knowledge and expertise is hugely valuable. Yeah, it's about playing the odds. Nothing is certain.

It's all about probabilities. I'd like to use a poker metaphor. I don't know if it hits home. If you don't play poker, perhaps it doesn't. But poker is all about probabilities. And even if you're sitting with the so-called nuts, which is the best possible hand you can get, there's still no guarantee if you're winning.

And you might be saying, but you're sitting with the best possible hand. But like now, DeC. Dol Brunson would say, you know, back in Texas, back in the day, if you want all the money, someone could pull a gun on you. Nothing is certain. It's all about odds.

And I think it's so important not to be susceptible to resulting. We've talked about resulting a few times, and I would like to take the opportunity to recommend any Duke's book, speaking about poker. And Quit is a fantastic book. She also has a book Thinking Betts is probably the most famous one, and then how to decide. All wonderful books, and they all talk about the concept of resulting,

which just briefly is that don't think that because of result being XYC, then it was necessarily a good decision or bad decision. It's all about the process. And I thought a lot about that recently because, you know, I only invested with one money manager ever for public equities. That was Moneish. And or that is Monez, I'm still investing with him. And he sent me a kind note here the other day to me and some of the other investors. And I'm in P.I.F. 3, if anyone who's like really into the weeds. But I'd say roughly, I've dealt my money with money is all the past

short of 18 months now which is not supposed to happen like I'm not again full disclosure and I'm invested and yada yada yada don't get any commission I don't know how many other disclosure I could possibly make but like anyone would be pretty excited about that

so proudly told that to my wife as it was my accomplishment and not money's just an accomplishment and there was like for a second I was thinking well stick you spoke with like 500 people whatever on the podcast and you chose one, and that was Mnish, that must be.

And I thought probably up to a full millisecond that was because I was genius, not as smart as Mnish, but at least I picked him. And then I thought to myself, okay, stick, now you're going to go back in the track record of this specific fund that you chose and take the past 18 months just before you invested and see how that fund performed.

And no, it did not double. And there was just this element of, and Mnich didn't change, I didn't change, but for a number of, of different reasons. I just chose to invest starting January 1st, 2022. Or sorry, April 1st, 2022. So that was just very, like, there was lucky. I don't know what you want to call it, but like, don't be susceptible to resulting. It's about the process,

and you have to stay true to that process. Yeah, and look, I know Monash very well. I spent a lot of time with Monash over the years, and he's a friend and someone I admire greatly. And I didn't invest with Monash. And one of the reasons is that he's more of a risk taker than I am. He's bolder, more aggressive. So I'm pretty confident that he'll do really well. But his ability to take enormous outsized bets is scary for me. So I think part of it is just being aware of our own risk profile, our own risk appetite. And it's not necessarily about beating the market. Some of it is about staying in the game and survival. And so your situation is very different from other people's situation and your risk appetite is very different. And so I think with all of these things,

it's really important to know yourself, to know how aggressive you can afford to be. I often talk about Bill Miller, for example, I spend a huge amount of time interviewing over the years. And Bill said to me recently a few months back that he basically has three investments that he calls the Holy Trinity. And so he has a huge Bitcoin investment, which he started buying at like $200 a coin. And he has a huge Amazon investment, which he started buying back in 1999, 2000.

And he has a private investment in this company clear that when you go through the airport, they give you quick clearance of the airport. And that's true that he has this Holy Trinity of investments. But actually, he has so much other stuff. I can't even tell you. I've been in his house in Maryland, which is beautiful. I've seen his art and his other collections.

You know, I've asked him about some of the other stocks he owns, and I know that he owns other stocks because we've talked about them. And I'm sure his small investments that are rounding errors in other stocks are bigger than my entire portfolio. And his book collection is worth more than, you know, you can imagine. And so, I don't know, it's very important to put in context. when people are saying, well, I have this one investment or I have these three investments. And this is something Guy Speer talks about a lot, is just being aware when someone says, oh, I'm all in on this thing.

You know, like Munga makes an aggressive bet on Alibaba. It's not that big a bet. You know, like compared to his stake in Berkshire or whatever. You know, so I think just to just to have a sense of context and a real focus on surviving, reaching the finish line and not getting too carried away by other people's successes, by other people making more than you.

It's very valuable. A lot of what we're managing is ourselves, not our portfolio. Yeah, like Findem saying, don't be fooled and the easiest one to fool is yourself, something along those lines.

And I think it's true. And I think you're speaking about manga, that's also why he's such a biography nut. I think that's what he calls himself because you really need to understand the context of the person before you can see if it applies to you, which it likely does not. And one of the things that you talk about in Rizzo Wiser Happier is that the best investors are typically, they're just wired differently. I think this was, and you would know this by all right, but I think it's Chris Davis who said something along the lines of they're just not emotionally attached the same way as most. Whereas, you know, the CEOs of the world, you know, they have a high EQ and they used to be captains on the football team.

And then you have these brilliant investors. They are not good with team sports. They might be playing tennis or swimming or whatever they were doing. Very, you know, individualistic type of sport. Yeah. And even that is nuanced day because I gave a, I talked to Chris yesterday. Actually, Chris Davis is a very thoughtful guy who's, he's in an upcoming episode of the podcast. So we had a lovely conversation yesterday.

But I gave a speech a year or so ago, maybe two years ago at Brian Lawrence's house. And Chris was there. And I'd been talking about Charlie Munger, I think, and saying how unemotional Charlie was. And Chris came up to me afterwards and said, you know, it's not quite true. You know, Chris is very close to Charlie. And he said, if I remember rightly, he said, you know, back in, I guess it was 73, 74 around then, when Charlie was managing a limited partnership, he took a massive hit. And maybe he was down 50% or something, I can't remember.

And he said it was really painful for him. It was very emotional. And so I think one of the great benefits of partnering with Warren was, it worked for him emotionally. And likewise with Bill Miller, Bill is very, very unemotional about investing. he can make these super rational probabilistic bets about investing. But when I talked to him on the podcast last year, I think it was, he said, look, I cry when I listen to music. I'm not unemotional.

And likewise with Monish, who I, you know, has this very tough exterior and is hyper-rational. When I see Monash, I think Monash is a very soft-hearted person. The very gentle, very emotional soul just doesn't seem like it. So this is one of those things where I'm starting to realize how much more nuanced this question is about our emotion. You know, we maybe we can make unemotional, rational business decisions if we're buffered a manga. But even for manga, I'm not sure he's as unemotional. It's not as simple as I think I had led myself to believe. It's more nuanced.

Maybe there are areas where you can be unemotional. But I don't know. So I think, again, you need to have some self-awareness so that you're not putting yourself in situations where your emotion is going to torpedo your judgment. So think of Joel Tillinghast, who I interviewed on the podcast, one of the great fidelity investors of all time. He once said to me,

I know that biotech stocks are going to make me crazy. They're too unpredictable. they're too volatile. And so I stay away from them because they're going to make me crazy. So I think once you have a sense of how you're wired emotionally, you can develop some kind of work around. So one thing I know, I know that I'm going to look for the best in people.

And so it's really dangerous for me when I'm trying to pick a fund to invest in. So I have to, again, triangulate. So I'll ask other people. I mean, there was a moment where there's someone I invest with. And I showed Monash the portfolio. And I'm not really supposed to, but I showed it to him. And I said, what do you think? And he's like, yeah, yeah, it's good.

It's a smart portfolio. And that's just a way of seeing, is there something that I'm missing that somebody smarter than me about this can see? and when I went to Omaha for the annual meeting, I was sitting a couple of seats to Monish's right at a dinner that he held that evening. And there's a famous defensive line man, enormous guy. I think a defensive line man, I don't even know these terms, but an enormous 300-pound footballer, lovely, lovely guy,

who you would not want to get hit by on a field, who is sitting to my left next to Monash. and I said to him, look, when you make millions of dollars on, you know, you're signing your new contacts, just whoever you invest with, just have Monash look at it and tell you, am I doing something stupid? And so again, that attitude of seeking disconfirming evidence, having the humility, and having a few people in your life that you trust who are really smart. And so maybe you don't have access to Monish. But, you know, when I was getting engaged to my lovely wife, Lauren, 30-something years ago, I called my mother and I called my father and I called my brother independently beforehand to say,

is there something I'm missing? Because I was 24 and it was a really important decision. And they were all like, no, no, she's really lovely. She's really lovely. And so just this habit of being humble enough to seek disconfirming evidence. It's really helpful in every area of life. Yeah, and I think just as a concluder remark here, before we go to the last segment here in our outline, William, I think it's so important to understand this nuance you talked about. So, for example, like Mnish, like either you have to be sizing appropriately, whereas

investing with Monez is just a small part of your portfolio, or you, you know, you have to be wired the way that he is. And he mentioned in your book, Ritsa Wiser, Heap here, that he was down, I want to say 67%, but it was dramatic during the Great Financial Crisis. And he mentioned that his then wife couldn't feel a thing, which is probably not the case for most as a manager's, but that's how he's wired and you need to be able to sort of like be on that roller coaster ride. And I think you're absolutely right. We all wired differently. And I I think it's so, speaking about Mnish, it's okay to clone, but you need to understand what you are, what you are cloning. And I guess the volatility of investing in someone like Mnish,

and I know volatility is a lot easier to grasp whenever it's volatility in your direction and not the other direction. You really have to know yourself and start off small and figure out how you react. So I put myself through school playing poker. And so I think at times I'm probably also very unemotional. I've seen and experienced myself and others lose 100% with a flag of a card. And so whenever the stock market is down 3%, and everyone is running for the hills, and you'll go like, but that's 3%. That's like a slow 15 minutes at the poker table.

You're just wired differently, and that's completely fine. You probably shouldn't do that with your finances, but there's probably certain things you can do before you start getting obligations. I think you need to understand. And that, but at the same time, don't feel that to your point, William, that it's in all walks of life. You know, I think someone who is looking at someone like, like Manish, who is like very unemotional, like you said, in many ways, he's probably not.

And I can see it in myself. Like, I think most would probably be shocked to see how we react with XYC drawdown, but then I have a really, really hard time not being with my wife. And I can get almost like anxiety and like, I have like, can have really strong needs of emotions. Whereas perhaps for others, I don't know if that's the best example, if I'm going to say they were happy not to be with the wife, but they cannot do it like a one percent. It's a great example, Stig, because it shows how nuanced emotion is. So when I'm sort of saying, oh, look, the great investors are all unemotional. It's like, yeah, when it comes to making financial decisions, maybe, when it comes to making a bet where the odds are stacked very heavily in their favor.

but it doesn't make them unemotional in other areas of life. But even that, you know, they may not be great with relationships. I mean, there is evidence that a lot of these guys end up getting divorced. Maybe it's because they're not great with their emotions, but it may also just be that they're very intense and very driven and obsessed with their work and super competitive. And so don't give enough attention to their spouses. So I don't know.

It's complicated. and like everything in life, just the admission that it's complicated, that it's murky is very valuable because it means we don't need to be dogmatic and we don't need to come from the school of I know. William, let's jump here to the third segment

and it's working progress, but here in our notes, I call it the living a wiser, richer and happier life. And I kind of feel that ties very well into our discussion about changing, perhaps eliminating our biases and looking for that truth. But I think I want to start with whenever I read Richard Weiser happier, and I'm currently rereading it for, I don't want to make you blush, William, fifth time, something like that. And, you know, still every time I read it, the investor stands out to me, that's Arnold Ventenberg.

And this is like, if you ever read William's book, like this is a, like the threshold, like talking about like a tough company to stand out from the crowd. Like you have your monger and above it in there and the other titans. But it's really Annenberg that's probably have gone below the radar for a lot of investors out there. To me, that's really who stand out to me. And I'm going to, I want to play this clip from a recent interview you have with him on Ritzweiser, have your episode 30. But perhaps before we do, William, and just to make sure people

don't go to episode 30, which they probably should do afterwards, I don't know if I could ask you to just do a brief introduction of who he is, because I think that would tie very well into the club that we're going to listen to here next. Arnold is a very remarkable person. And when I first wrote my book proposal, I sent it to Scribner, which is done by Simon Schuster. And there's famous editor there, Rick Hogan, who's had something like 100 bestsellers, and he sends me back these very smart notes about it. And one of the things that he wrote back is, I don't understand why Vandenberg is in the book. And that was a very helpful thing to have an editor say, because then I had to think, why? Why is this obscure guy who nobody is heard of, who nobody's ever written about

based in Austin, Texas? Why is he the person that, along with Monash, when I, I first started reporting the book, which took me five years, right? I mean, it was a pretty big mountain to climb. The first things I did, I traveled to India for five days with Monash, and I went to Texas and spent two days with Arnold. And so why? Why was he so important? And the way that I explained it in the epilogue of the book, because I end the book with Arnold, is that he's not the most successful investor I've ever met, but he's the most successful human being I've ever met in the investing world. And so I really wanted to explain through Arnold what being a successful human being looks like, what having a truly rich and abundant life looks like. And Arnold,

one of the reasons why he's so fascinating and so inspiring is that his success was so unlikely because he was dealt such an awful hand. And so he starts off, he was born in 1939 on the same street as Anne Frank in Amsterdam as a Jewish kid at a time when the Nazis were invading the Netherlands and rounding up Jews and killing them. And so he spends the first couple of years of his life in hiding and then is smuggled to an orphanage by a girl who risked her life to save his life. So it's an extraordinary story and he came out of the orphanage barely able to walk because he'd been so malnourished. There was a suspicion that maybe had brain damage because he'd been malnourished at such an important, formative time of his life. And he came out as a teenager

full of rage and very low self-esteem, barely made it through high school. And his father made him work unbelievably hard, more or less, to support himself from the age of 13. And so he had, in many ways, the worst possible hand you could have dealt to you. Yet he's transformed himself into this extraordinary human being, this incredibly kind and loving and decent human being. And he once said to me, look, I could lose all of my money and I would still be rich. And so when I see Arnold, I see someone who is an extraordinary role model in life in so many ways. And so the story that you're about to zero in on is a story that he and I have discussed a few times over the years that came at a very important time in his life when he was this

very damaged kid without, you know, with a sense that he was living in a hostile world where he had lost 39 members of his family during the Holocaust and was struggling at school, struggling to make a living, struggling to support himself, wanted to buy a car so he could take a girl out in his car. And so he was working as a flower salesman among many other things. So that's my setup for this story. Wonderful, Peter William. So let's go ahead and listen to your conversation with Arnold now. Then you had that extraordinary job when you were about 16. It's a little bit of a detour sematically, but I think it's important to mention your flower selling job, which is one of the great stories you've ever told me. So I wondered if you could

could tell us what happened when you were selling flowers? Well, there was a job. There was a couple of kids at school that had a flower route. And what they would do is they would recruit kids from the high school. And you'd put you on the corner and you'd sell flowers. And what we learned is that some corners really were good because they were in good neighborhoods and people made a lot of money. And there were other parts of town that were kind of tough and people didn't have that much

money and you didn't do it. So when you were new, they put you into the worst corner. And that is so you can prove yourself. And if you proved yourself, they kind of knew what was a good job and what was kind of halfway. So they had a quota for each quarter. So anyway, the way to move up to the best corner is to continue to outperform the quotas in the bad neighborhoods. And then you move up to the neighborhood. Well, I worked for months to work myself up to the next.

the best corner, which was in Bel Air near Beverly Hills, right? I even had Tony Curtis buy flowers for me. He came up on his Cadillac with his wife and so forth. But anyway, I was really excited because it was hard work in the neighborhoods that weren't too good. Just stood there for hours sometimes, and that's fell very much and gets kind of discouraging. But anyway, finally worked up to the corner. And as I was so excited that, you know, getting up in the morning knowing that I'm going to be in this great corner. So anyway, I was there about an hour show, and then it started raining. And it got really bad. I mean, it was a real downpour. And I thought, oh my God, I've worked all this time to get up at this corner. And now I'm not going to be able to do very good when it's raining.

And as I was thinking about it and going back and forth, people kept stopping in the rain and I was selling the flowers. And I thought, well, I'm already wet. Yeah, I mean, I was drenched. I'm already wet and people are still buying, so I'll just keep selling. So I kept selling. Finally a lady pulls up and says, young man, what are you doing in the rain? I said, well, I'm selling flowers, 35 cents a piece and three, four, a dollar. And she just looked at me and shook her head and she whispered to her husband. And she says, how many flowers do you have?

I said, oh, I got plenty. How many do you need? She says, no, no, I want you to count exactly how much you get. I want to buy all the flowers. I said, what? She says, I want to buy them all. And I said, what are they for? She says, young man, would you just count those flowers?

I said, okay, $16. So I said, $16. You know, that's like $100 today or even more. So she said, okay, she pulls out the money and I hand her flower and she says, now get in. I said, what do you mean? She says, young man, I'm buying those flowers to get you out of the ring. So get in. We only live a few blocks from here. You'll get dried out and I'll get you some soup and so forth. So I was just shocked. I mean, I never experienced anything like that. So I said, okay, I got into college. It went home. She made me some soup. The husband came out with a beautiful shirt. And he said, here, put this on. You know, after I was dried out, I said, boy, that is a beautiful shirt. He said, okay. So we sat there and I watched TV with him for a while and then things went. by and I said, you know, I'm going to have to get back to my corner pretty soon because my boss is

going to come and pick me up. So they said, okay. So I went to take off the shirt to give me shirt. He says, no, no, that looks so good on you, you keep it. Now, I'm, where am I in heaven or something? I couldn't believe people doing that, you know? So they drove me, dropped me off. And my boss came by and he said, where's all your flowers? I said, well, I sold them. He said, you sold them in the rain? I said, well, let me tell you what happened. This lady came by, one to get me out of the rain, and she bought all my flowers. And he goes, you're kidding. Yeah, he was shocked, you know.

I said, yeah. He says, all right, well, that's great. So anyway, that really was an amazing experience. I've never forgotten it. And it has influenced the way I think, because at that time, I didn't think there were people that cared about other people and one of the help people and all of that. I mean, that just didn't enter. In our neighborhood, people didn't do things like that, you know?

It was totally out of character. So anyway, I always made a mention of this. Whenever I see the Girl Scouts selling cookies or something like that, I always buy a big batch of them. And when they looked at me and there's kind of a surprise, I said, you know, that wasn't my idea. There was a lady, and I tell them the story that came by and wanted to get me out of the rain,

and she bought all my flowers. And I know how good that felt. And so I want to make you guys feel good. So thank you for all the cookies. And then I say, okay, what's your favorite? What's your favorite? Mom, what's your favorite? And then I divide it up and give them all to them.

I love the fact, Arnold, that this thing that happened to you, what, 67, 68 years ago, has reverberated over the decades. And so you once said to me, when somebody touches your heart like that, it changes you forever. I remember you once saying to me, I don't know, it sounds a little tactless to say it, but I think it's worth saying, you know, you had come through the Holocaust where you'd been, you know, you'd gone through appalling things and 39 members of your family had been killed by the Nazis. And so one thing you once said to me is, in a way, one reason why this event had such a profound impact on you

is because this couple was non-Jewish. And so there was this, it was an incredibly powerful thing for you to see, Jewish people taking care of you? Yes, and that was very much because my mom was born in Poland in a small ghetto, and bad things happened from an anti-Semitic thing, and they always had problems, and then they moved to Amsterdam, Holland, which was very good compared to where they came from. My dad was from Germany. But the point I've always heard all my life is the Jews are one thing and Gentiles are another,

you can't really trust the Gentiles because look what happened to us and so on and so forth. So I never had this viewpoint that Gentile people could be good people and they want to help Jewish people. Of course, you know, people hid my folks during the war. And there's also people who turned them into the Nazis. So I wasn't quite clear about that. But when I saw this couple who was non-Jewish and treated me like, you know, I was their son. I mean, they treated me as good as a son. So I thought that changed my viewpoint, and it opened my eyes to the fact that the things I heard about Gentiles were kind of biased, you know, was through their experience, you know.

And so if you have that experience, and that's the only experience you had, then that's what you believe. Yeah, and it's probably one of the reasons you became so open to studying different faiths, the teachings of Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism and all these other faiths that you started to see, oh, Well, wait a second. It's not just my own tradition that has valuable principles. Yeah, and I think that's the value of kindness. When you are kind, and I'll talk about it later, it actually creates chemicals in your body, serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, and things of that nature. So one of the things that we'll talk about later is if people want to be happy, they have to do the things that create those chemicals because the brain is a chemical instrument.

And so the more you do the right things that create these endorphins and dopamine and seroton and so forth, the happy you're going to be. Well, it turns out having good diet, doing exercise and being in the sun and being kind and being honest, those all are things that create that. So all you have to do to be happy is to live a good life. It's dedicated by your chemicals and your brain. So, I mean, this is just such a wonderful, wonderful story. And I have to say that whenever I was tuning in Italy at the time, I was already, I was already in a bit of emotional state for, I was in Italy, I had a lot of fun, but I was already like, I was for different reasons. My wife wasn't there. So I'm always a bit on edge whenever that's the case. And so like I was almost tearing up whenever I was listening to that. It was such a beautiful story. I had to rewind and listen to it again because it just like, it makes you just makes you feel good. And I think, I think one of the things that I took away from that, It really reminds me of this, what beautiful Abraham Lincoln quote where he says, when I do good, I feel good.

And when I do bad, I feel bad. That is my religion. Because if we can really go full circle on the first clip we had there for episode 28, you and Manish talk about how ethical behavior is such a huge competitive advantage. And it's really the same principle that's at stake here because it's incredible self-serving to be kind to other people. It's incredible selfish because it is truly the recipe for living a richer, why so happy your life. Like do good to other people.

Yeah, I'm certainly very struck when I look at the investors I've interviewed who are the happiest that they tend all to be sharing in extraordinary ways. They're not perfect individuals, as you can imagine, like all of us, they have their flaws. but they've all built into their lives, a degree of serving others, being kind to others, lifting up others. You see it with Monish with the Daxhana Foundation, which is extraordinary, which I really encourage people to look at. He's built into his life, the idea of lifting people who are very, very deserving and incredibly talented out of poverty. That's an incredible thing. And I don't know, it was very striking to me when I did my interview with Monish on the

podcast where we were talking about David Hawkins and I said to him, it's curious to me that you came out of it thinking the virtue I want to go big on is being more truthful. And I said, to me, I came out of it thinking it's really about being kinder. And he said, well, it's easier for me to be truthful and to be kind. And that made me think, oh, well, maybe it's easier for me to be kind than to be truthful. And so maybe I need to do more to try to be truthful. And so again, none of this stuff is simple. But one of the things you learn from Hawkins is that when you find a great virtue, whether it's being truthful or kind, you want to go big on it. And one of these great timeless virtues, if you really take it seriously, can take you a very long way. And so in terms of,

you know, the transformation of your own consciousness. And so I, one thing that I've memorized from Hawkins is this line where he said simple kindness to oneself and all that lives is the most powerful transformational force of all. And I think about that a lot because it's just in a very complex and confusing world. If I keep coming back to that idea of simple kindness to oneself and all that lives, I know that I'm going to be approximately okay over time. But then I was looking this morning, I was looking for the quote from Power v. Force that that came from. And I know Power Versus Force isn't your favorite of Hawkins' books. And I agree. I mean, I think it's very profound and important book, but there are other books that I've found probably even more helpful. But I tracked

down the quote, and I had written the entire quote, the longer part on a card that I had attached to my wall in a really prominent place in my study that I kept looking at. And I'd taken it down because I had my study painted. But I actually typed it out again this morning. And so I have it in front of me, and I wanted to read it to you because it's such a, the full quote is extraordinary. and it's really worth internalizing. So here's what Hawkins says. It says simple kindness to oneself and all that lives is the most powerful transformational force of all.

It produces no backlash, has no downside, and never leads to loss or despair. It increases one's own true power without exacting any toll, but to reach maximum power, such kindness can permit no exceptions, nor can it be practiced with the expectation of some selfish gain or reward,

and its effect is as far as far. reaching as it is subtle. That to me is very powerful on a number of fronts, right? I mean, for one thing he's saying, it's not just kindness to all that lives, it's kindness to yourself as well. So when you see your own flaws, your own failings, you stumble to look at yourself and say, well, yeah, I'm human, I'm flawed. And I'm, you know, let me let me let go and start again with self-compassion and try to do better next time. So it's not giving yourself a total blank slate carte blanche to do whatever you want that's lousy because, you know, you're going to be forgiven for it and we're all flawed. But it's at least saying, yeah, I'm human and I'm flawed. So let me be

kind to myself, which was never particularly easy for me. So I'm trying to rewire myself on that front. But then this idea, the kindness, it can't be practiced with the expectation of some selfish gain or reward. Partly with everything that we do, it's the intention behind it. the consciousness behind it. So it's really wonderful to be kind and generous. And because of what we know from Robert Chialdini and the reciprocation process, you know, people are going to reciprocate. And if you're kind and you're likable and you're decent and you're ethical,

they're going to respond and you're going to draw people towards you who are also kind and decent. And that's a tremendous benefit. But there's also this higher level that, where you don't just do it for. a selfish gain, you do it because, I mean, at the highest level, you know, sorry to put it in spiritual terms, but there's a word Lishma, which in Hebrew means to give pleasure to your creator. You do it to say, well, whether I believe in a creator or not, it's like, this is the best part of myself. Let me give strength to the best part of myself. So I think there's,

there is a difference when you do the right thing with a different intention. And I, I, I, I, I, I remember Chris Davis, who you mentioned before once saying to me that he thinks the fact that Charlie doesn't necessarily think he's going to get rewarded in the afterlife for behaving ethically and honorably. He said it's almost kind of better. Like there's something about behaving honorably without any expectation of reward that's kind of better. I don't know if any of that makes sense.

I think it makes a lot of sense, especially if you put in those terms of do good and feel good. And I'm almost ashamed to say that whenever I started adopting that, it was partly for selfish reasons. I realized how good I felt whenever I was nice to other people. And I'm shocked that it took so many years for me to figure out. And I think some of those things are, you know, I read, I think it was How to Win Friends and Influence People, but it was many years ago. And in that book that he talked about Benjamin Franklin and like the different virtues and choosing with virtues to be part of your life. And I remember thinking at the time, and even to some extent today, that it felt so daunting.

It seemed so ambitious to live a life like that and live according to all those virtues. But I think I want to quote a good friend of the podcast, Tom Gainer, and say, be directional correct. That's enough. And then see what happens. And even if you don't come any closer than directional correct, it's still wonderful. and you will be ahead of 99%. And so I think I would leave it at that.

It's, at least for me, it's been immensely helpful. And I wanted you to have the last word here, William. Yeah, I'll just give you one really small anecdotal insight on this, on this subject of kindness. Well, so we have that story from Arnold, right, where this kindness of this woman, something like 67 years ago, has reverberated over decades. and has had this immense impact that she would never have known on Arnold. But Arnold then is doing things like mentoring this young investor, I know, who's kind of remarkable. And so I see him carrying it forward in a really wonderful way.

But then at the same time, I've had this very vivid example of kindness and unkindness this week where my daughter Madeline, who's 22, who's at college in Boston, just in her final semester or two at college, has been desperately struggling to get, to find her way through this bureaucratic mess where she could sign up for classes at Buckley College of Music while also being in classes at Emerson College, where she officially is a student. And it's complicated. And she's always late on things. And it's always complicated and you get rejected from certain classes and they're overful. And it got to a point literally where yesterday we thought she might have to leave college this semester, like this, semester may just be a total bus. She may, the classes she got accepted into from Berkeley,

she may no longer be allowed to stay in because she doesn't have enough credits from Emerson. And a couple of people really like came out of the woodwork and just totally took charge of the situation and saved her semester. Totally. I mean, literally yesterday, she basically would have had to pull out of college for the semester. And it was just because a couple of people, one of whom she'd never met and she wrote to this woman and said, You know, I've missed your first two classes. This is the only class I can get into where I get these credits and I'll be able to stay in college and do these other classes at Berkeley that I'm desperate to do. And this woman, despite her missing the first two classes, was like, yeah, okay, I see how desperate you are.

And you don't have the pre-requirements to be in my class. So you need to talk to the chairman of the department to get those waived. and someone else writes to the chairman and gets them waived. And it was really extraordinary to see, sorry to be so self-referential, but to see this situation where a couple of people, for no reason, except that they were kind, stepped up and, you know, salvaged a really difficult situation for someone who was really struggling and who was very deserving and really talented but really confused by the system and not served well by the system.

And there were other people who really did the opposite. So that to me is a really beautiful and very tangible and very vivid thing. And it's literally been happening in the last day. So, I mean, I declined a FaceTime call from my daughter while we were having this conversation. So this is a very live, live issue. And so it's just a reminder that these things that don't seem like that much, like writing an email, at an opportune moment to the right person can actually change somebody's life. What a wonderful way to end this podcast episode, William.

I think I'll just leave it at that and hope that people will turn in another time whenever William I having these quarterly, richer, wiser, happier conversations. So let's just end it there. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to Millennial Investing, the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence.

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.