Why You’ll Never Feel Rich with Morgan Housel

0:01You're listening to Mick Unplugged, hosted by the one and only Mick Hunt. This is where purpose meets power and stories spark transformation. Mick takes you beyond the motivation and into meaning, helping you discover your because and becoming unstoppable. I'm Rudy Rush, and trust me, you're in the right place. Let's get unplugged. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of Mick Unplugged. And today we're talking to a gentleman who gets to raise my kids financially. I don't have to do it anymore. I'm so honored that I could pass the buck off to our next guest. He is truly a visionary.

0:38He's an unstoppable force in understanding the intricate dance between human behavior and financial success. With over 11 million books sold to date, translations over 60 languages. He is the guru. And you all know I don't use that term often. When it comes to wealth, psychology, and the art of living. Please join me in welcoming the brilliant, the insightful, I guess my kids knew like financial father, Mr. Morgan Housel. Morgan, how are you doing today, brother? Doing well. Thanks for having me, Nick. Dude, thank you. So much I want to get into. I was telling you offline, like your latest book, The Art of Spending Money, has changed my household because I don't have to talk about finances anymore.

1:17I get to let Morgan teach my kids and they're already starting to do some cool things and ask me questions. So thank you for letting conversation about money happen into my house. Although my kids don't live home, but they're quasi-adults, as I like to say now.

1:30Morgan Housel:But thank you, brother. It's great to hear. I mean, I always say, I said this in my first book, The Psychology of Money. There are two topics that impact everybody, whether they like it or not, which are money and health. Like whether or not you're interested in those topics, those topics are interested in you and they will have a profound impact on your life. I think health, a lot of people understand that and they want to get in good shape. They go to the gym and maybe they're not always eating the way that they should, but people understand health will impact your life. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, money has been much more of a topic that people feel comfortable putting off and not talking about it.

2:05Morgan Housel:Maybe a part of the reason is that physical fitness and health are visible and money is not. You know, when you're walking down the street, I have no idea what your net worth is, how much credit card debt you have, et cetera, et cetera. So it's easier to hide those problems. But I'm glad some of these topics have sparked a conversation within your old household. No, absolutely. And you're spot on, man. Like those two topics, not only are they going to come find you at some point, we shouldn't run from them either. And I think that that's what happens with a lot of people. You don't talk about health until you have to, and you don't talk about money until you have to.

2:38And both of the times that you have to, it's a problem that you're in dire straits to fix or to try to solve. So again, thank you for allowing those conversations. Great. This is going to be fun. So, Morgan, I always ask, you know, my guests this question about what is your because? That thing that's deeper than your why. You know, Simon Sinek said start with your why. And I think that that's cool. But I think that you're actually fueled by your because, that true purpose that you have. So, Morgan, if I were to ask you what's your why, I could probably guess, right? Your family, your friends, your dedication, whatever that is.

3:14But when I say, but why, that sentence usually starts with, well, because. And I care about your because. And your because changes over time. So if I were to say, Morgan, with all that you've accomplished now and all the things that I know that you're doing, the impact that you're making, what is your because? What is your purpose? Why do you continue to do the things that you do?

3:33Morgan Housel:Well, it's not even my because today. I think my because has always been roughly the same for the last 30 years or so. And maybe most people who you ask that question might give you a positive answer. I would give you a negative answer. And I would say my because is because I'm terrified. I've been terrified since I've been a teenager of not making it in the world. Maybe that's not unique at all. And a lot of people have that. But I always felt like I had a chip on my shoulder. Some of that was my upbringing and some personal faults that I had. And again, maybe that's not unique in the slightest either.

4:04Morgan Housel:But if I look back at whatever motivation I had to make money, to have a successful career, to figure out my own life, it's because I was terrified. It was just, I'm not gonna make it. And to me, the cost of not making it, however you want to define making it, because of course that exists on a spectrum, but the cost of not making it in life was too painful for me to bear. And I felt like there were moments in my life where I felt like a lot of my peers were enjoying life. And I looked at that not with envy of, man, I wish I had as much fun as you did. I looked at it as like, I can't let myself do that.

4:36Morgan Housel:I need to, I'm terrified of not making it and I need to get ahead. That was really true when I was in my late teens, early 20s. I had a very unique educational background. I effectively stopped my education at eighth grade. I was a competitive ski racer. I didn't go to high school. I did an independent study program that required nothing, absolutely nothing. It was basically, I stopped my education when I was 13 or 14 years old. And so it was a really cool teenage years. I skied all over the world. But as I became 18 and all my friends or many of my friends were going off to college, I was like, well, what now?

5:08Morgan Housel:Like I'm an idiot. I am statistically, I have no idea. I have an eighth grade education. And there was a panic. I had a midlife crisis at 18 of like, what am I gonna do with my life now? And I knew, and then this was very justified. This was not a false fear that almost everybody else of my age and my generation was much smarter than I was because they had this fancy thing called a high school education. And so I knew, I absolutely knew that if I wanted to even come close to matching my peers, I needed to work 10 times harder. I didn't have whatever kind of cognitive skill that they did. I just needed to work harder.

5:46Morgan Housel:And I think that maintained all throughout my career. It's still with me today. It's still with me today. I think a lot of those things just become an ingrained part of your personality that whether it is a true fear when you're 17 or imposter syndrome when you're older, it's this fear that like, I'm not gonna make it. I don't deserve what I have and I need to work harder in order to just maintain what I do have. Yeah, that's deep, man. And, you know, I have a very similar because as well. You know, people think that mine is all positive. It was like, nah, it was a crappy household situation and I promised my mom I would change it.

6:22And I live with that promise every day because I can't let anybody else down. So I totally resonate with what you're saying, man. Kudos to you, not only for that outlook, but the fact that you're doing something about it. So again, huge fan of the work that you do.

6:35Morgan Housel:I also feel, if I'll make one small part here, I don't know that I could have not done something about it. I think if you're driven by ambition, it's easy to stop because the path of least resistance is not quite there. It's easy to just be like, I'm really ambitious, but like, maybe I don't need to be that ambitious. When you're driven by fear, you can't stop. It never leaves you. So I think there is a point, someone asked me this recently, if I could give my 20 year old self advice, what would that advice be? And my advice was don't worry so much because it's all going to work out. It's not going to be easy.

7:07Morgan Housel:It's not going to work out like you thought it was going to work out, but it's all going to work out. But then I thought, I think to a very real extent, the reason that it has quote unquote worked out is because I was scared. So is the right advice telling myself don't worry or was there success because I worried? I think that's very much a thing. Totally agree, man. Totally agree. So, you know, Morgan, I told you how I've been a huge fan of yours. I told you about your latest book and what it's done for our household. But here's what's also important, I think, for the viewers and listeners to understand about you and your work, in your body of work.

7:40Morgan, I applaud you, brother, because you delve into like the complex interplay between like human behavior and finances, where a lot of people go into the analytical aspect of money. You really talk about the psychological aspect, right? And I think that for my boys, at least, they appreciated that aspect because it's not like you're storytelling, but it is like you are storytelling and you're not going into the analytics, which can drive most modern people crazy. Did you know that that's initially how you were setting up your books? Because all of your books, bro, are like that. And I have a unique feeling that that's why you've sold as many copies as you have.

8:19Morgan Housel:I think there's a couple of parts to this. Prior to writing my first book, The Psychology of Money in 2020, I had been a full-time professional finance writer for 13 years or so. And I had written during that period, I wrote something like 4 ,000 blog posts. I had a lot of reps in this period of writing about finance. And something that I learned early on in my career as a finance writer is that if I write from an analytical perspective, it's too competitive with other people who can write faster, better, more accurately than you do. So if my blog post was, here's what the Dow Jones did yesterday.

8:53Morgan Housel:It went up 1.2 % and did this. A, it's boring. Nobody cares about that. But B, there's 8 ,000 people who can do it faster than I can. And so there's no competitive advantage. But if I could tell a cool story, that was A, it was timeless. And an article that was relevant yesterday might be relevant 20 years from now. And like, man, there's incredible value in that. And B, it was much less competitive with other people. And I think it got you closer to the truth of how money worked. Because so much of money is not the formulas in the spreadsheets. It's just what's going on inside your brain. Why do you want these things?

9:25Morgan Housel:Why do you want more money? What is your relationship with greed and fear? What are your goals? That's what actually mattered. And so not only did it get you closer to the truth of what mattered with money, from a career perspective for me, it was less competitive. And it let me carve a little niche of just like, I'm not going to give you any analytical advice. Because one, I don't know you. And B, I'm not smart enough to do it. There's other people out there who can do it much better than me. But I can tell you what I think is a cool little story about what happens in your head. And everybody knows from their back in their time in high school and college, you can memorize a formula the night before the test, but you will forget it as soon as you shake your head after the test.

10:02Morgan Housel:That formula just pops right out. You don't remember it at all. But if somebody tells you a good story when you're four years old, you remember it when you're 50 years old. They'll stick with you for life. We talk a lot about trends on this show, and AI is the one that just won't quit. But here's the thing. Talking about AI doesn't make you more productive. Actually putting it to work does. And that's what Zapier did for me. Zapier is an AI orchestration platform that connects top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the apps your team already uses. No coding, no IT bottleneck, no complexity. You just plug AI into your workflow wherever you need it.

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11:26Morgan Housel:And so if you tell a good story, it helps, it's more memorable and it helps people contextualize their own life. So if I teach you the formula for compound interest, useful, important, but you might forget it. And it's just, it's no different in your head than the quadratic formula. And you're just like, I don't really understand what this is. But if I tell a story about somebody who took too much risk and lost their money and regretted it, A, you remember it. B, you can have empathy with what that person went through and you can contextualize, man, here's how I would have felt if I was in that situation.

12:00Morgan Housel:If I lost all my money, I would regret it. I'd be crying. I'd feel shame and horror as well. And so whenever as a writer, you can contextualize, you can help the reader contextualize their life into what you're talking about, the better you're going to do. That was a very long-winded answer to your question of, I think it very much was intentional. The last thing I'll say about that is I've always written for an audience of one. I only care about one reader and that's myself. I've been intentionally selfish in my writing because it's too difficult or it's too easy, I would say, to pander to your readers if you feel like you're trying to teach something to somebody else.

12:36Morgan Housel:Now, teaching is one of life's wonderful gifts, but when you're doing it to an anonymous reader who you don't know, it's very hard and very dangerous. So rather than saying, I'm an expert and let me teach you, Mr. or Mrs. Reader, that's very difficult. I wanted to say, what stories are interesting to me? And maybe there's a leap of faith. If this story is interesting to me, it'll probably be interesting to others. Not everybody, but maybe other people will like this. And so I've always just wanted to write topics that I was interested in, in a voice that I found compelling with stories that I found interesting and then put it out in the world and let people figure out what they wanna do with it rather than myself having a grand plan of what this is supposed to teach you.

13:14No, it's brilliant. And here's what I'll tell you. My youngest son who's in grad school at the University of Miami said to what you were just saying, dad, I can tell this story to my friends, right? Because now you've written it in a way that however that connection was with my son came and whatever piece of the story was important to him, he can now tell and translate that to other people. And I think that is so powerful. And I know you get it. But Morgan, I need you to understand how powerful that is of what you do, bro, because you've got 21, 22, 23 year olds that are able to retell your stories in their way to impact others.

13:52And not many people can do that, brother.

13:54Morgan Housel:Well, thank you. That's great to hear. One thing it reminds me of, from my time in college, pretty much the only course that I remember things from and that I got the most out of was this class on environmental economics, which I didn't give two hoots about then or now, to be honest. But the teacher was this – he was a lawyer and he was an environmental consultant. He did like expert witness stuff. And the entire class, it was every lecture would begin with, hey, I read the story in the Wall Street Journal today. let me tell you some stories about like the background of how that industry works and some of my old war stories from how I dealt with it.

14:31Morgan Housel:And he would be like, oh, so like right now, ExxonMobil is dealing with this. Let me just tell you a story about the history of environmental regulations and how it came to here. And he would just ramble off the top of his head telling stories. And when I compare that to the other professors who stood at the chalkboard and wrote down formulas and asked you to memorize them, what stuck with me more? The formulas or the stories by orders of magnitude, the stories stick with you. And so I think you can apply that to almost any field, no matter what your field is. Yes, technical expertise is very important in engineering, or if you're a doctor or a pilot or something, you need to know which buttons to press, the technical expertise, of course.

15:05Morgan Housel:But there are so many fields where just hearing stories about other people dealing with what you are dealing with in the workplace can be one of the most effective ways to teach. Agree, agree. You know, in the intro, I talked to you or I labeled you as the guru, and I don't use that term lightly with most people. I'd love to get your feedback, your stance, your verbal op-ed on what are people missing when it relates to money and more importantly, money-making decisions? I think there's two things. One, people need to have a very hard conversation with themselves about why their goals are what they are.

15:45Morgan Housel:So I think most people kind of intuitively understand their goals, even if it's just like a primitive urge for more. Like my goal is I want more money. I want a higher salary, I want a higher net worth. I want a bigger house. And that's, it's very normal. I have those primitive goals too. It's important to ask yourself why that is. And I think to some people, that's a weird question. Like, why are you asking me that I want a bigger house? Because a bigger house is better. Of course, if you start asking questions like, well, why, like, why do you want all these things? I think eventually, if you're honest with yourself, you get to this point of, I want to be higher on the social hierarchy.

16:18Morgan Housel:I want a bigger house because I want my house to be bigger than that guy's. And I want a faster car because it has to be faster than that person's. It doesn't necessarily how much you have or how your net worth is or how big your house is. What you want is to be and have bigger and better and larger things than somebody else. You just want to be higher on the social hierarchy. And I think when you frame it like that, a lot of people would be like, well, that's kind of a silly game. Like what I want to be is happy. What I want to be is happy. But what you are driven to achieve is just to have more than other people.

16:51Morgan Housel:And people have understood this for millennia. Montesquieu, the great philosopher, said this quote that I loved. He said, if you only wish to be happy, that is very easy to achieve. But people want to be happier than other people. And that is much more difficult. And so I think for a lot of people, at least this was true for me. Once I started really analyzing that game and where my urges were coming from, then you can redefine your goals in a much clearer sense. of like, what I want out of money is A, independence. I wanna be able to live my life and have the privilege to become myself without chasing other people's dreams, other people's goals, being influenced by other people's priorities.

17:29Morgan Housel:I wanna be independent. And B, I wanted to use money as a tool to live a better, happier, more content life. And look, the idea of status seeking and inserting yourself on the social hierarchy is in many ways unavoidable. It's just how humans came to be. If life is a competition for resources and jobs and mates and whatnot, then it is true that what matters is not how much I have. It matters that I have more than you. And that's really what matters. And so I think a lot of this is unavoidable. But once you come to terms with the game that is being played, you can analyze what goals are worth pursuing in life and what is not.

18:05Morgan Housel:The second thing I would bring up here of what people are missing or is easy to ignore with money is the extent to which my goals might be very different from yours. Not because we necessarily disagree, certainly not because one of us is more intelligent than the other, but because we're different people from different backgrounds, sometimes from different generations, different parts of the country. And we should not pretend that people who grew up and have experienced very different things in life will come to want and value the same things. And so, you know, one like very crude way to think about this is that if you grew up very poor and shunned and were embarrassed of your poverty, sometimes in that situation, a fancy sports car or a mansion is the ultimate symbol to yourself that you made it.

18:48Morgan Housel:And it means a lot to you. And so sometimes the yellow Lamborghini or the big house up on the hill, you're not even doing that to show off for other people. You're doing that as a trophy to yourself. And it feels great. Now, if you grew up well off, privileged, the yellow Ferrari might become the ultimate symbol of gaudy egotism. And it's the last thing that you want. The big flashy house in people's faces is the last thing that you want. And neither of those are right or wrong. It's just people have very different experiences. And so I think a lot of damage is done in finance when we teach it as there's one right way to do it.

19:25Morgan Housel:Here's how to do it. Here's the formula for how you should save, invest, spend, what your goals should be. and there's not. You really have to go figure it out for yourself. A lot of people don't want to do that. They want somebody to give them the answer and it just doesn't work like that. And so I think those two things, the understanding of why you have these urges and goals and the introspection to figure out what you've experienced in life and what truly works for your personality, those are the two biggest things that people tend to miss. Real talk. I'm always on the move, always jumping on some airport wifi or hotel network without thinking twice.

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20:43Go check out nordvpn.com slash mickunplugged. Dude, I've been saying that last part probably for the last 15 years, especially when talking to my children, because I do want them to be not just fiscally, but I want them to be very money aware, very financial literate, right, if that makes sense. because, you know, two people, two households can look structurally the exact same, but from a financial situation be polar opposite or not have the same type of credit score or, you know, the means to capital, but could look almost identical on paper. And I think that's where people get it wrong as well, too, is you compare yourself to someone else in their situation because you think that it's right.

21:31But as I put it in business, the work is always the work, meaning the things that you're doing with your money might look differently to get different outcomes. It's good to have a standard. It's good to have a barometer, but you still have to do things for you that other people or other entities just aren't going to be able to see.

21:48Morgan Housel:Yeah. One way I think about this too is in sports where if you are a power lifter, then being huge and thick and burly is what you want to be. and sometimes a lot of power lifters look obese even they're just gigantic guys with big pot bellies and that's and that's the perfect body for their sport now if you are a marathon runner you want to be a toothpick and you want to be as lean and skinny and lack of muscle as as you can as as as you are world-class athletes the giant dude with a big pot belly and the skinny little twig are world-class athletes they are perfect for what they are doing i think that can be an analogy for like for finance as well, that if you're if you are a type A person and you're like, I'm only happy if I'm starting successful companies and selling them and building my money as fast as I can so I can buy the private jet, whatever it might be.