Why Humans are Wired for Status, Not Happiness | Morgan Housel PT 2

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2:32Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. Kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing.

3:15So let's get into it.

3:21Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to part two of my interview with Morgan Housel. This is the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm a big fan of Morgan's books. He's a great writer, great thinker. Look, I like books that are filled with stories. I think that's how the Stoics taught best. I think there's a reason that Jesus spoke in parables. I think there's a reason that Aesop spoke in fables, right? We learn by stories, by anecdote. There's actually a great chapter in Morgan Housel's new book, Same as Ever, called The Best Story Wins. And I think he's absolutely right. Thinking a lot about this now, I am starting part four of the Wisdom series.

3:57I started this earlier this week. And I'm chugging away on that and just trying to come up with the stories that I'm going to build this book around to teach the lessons that I want to teach. He does that very well in the new book, Same as Ever, which is about the things that don't change. And of course, how change doesn't change. His first book, The Psychology of Money, has sold millions of copies. It's been translated into more than 50 languages. And I'm sure the same will be true for the same as ever. You can follow him on Instagram at Twitter at Morgan Housel. You can pick up The Same as Ever and The Psychology of Money.

4:30We should still have some signed copies in the painted porch or grab them on Amazon or whatever independent bookstore is closest to you. If you want to check out in depth Q &A with Morgan and I, you can check him out in the Daily Stoke Wealth Challenge, which is about. The Stokes can teach us about how to be wealthy in that truest sense. That's at dailystoic.com slash wealthy. And I'll link to his first episode on the podcast back from 2022 as well.

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7:53So speaking of books, you had a great line. You said, I'm going to read more books and less newspapers and that changed your life. Why? Books are more likely to be, not always, but more likely to be timeless. Whereas newspapers are much more likely to be almost entirely based off something that happened in the last 48 hours. I used to be a columnist of the Wall Street Journal. And one of the things that the editors would always say, I would turn in a column and they'd say, hey, cool column, but what does this have to do with the news this week? Where's the news hook? Where's the news hook? And I would always be like, it doesn't.

8:26And that's why I think it's good. In my view, if you wrote something, a book or an article, if it was not relevant 10 years from now, it's not relevant today. That's always how I thought about it. And I always wince a little bit at authors who write a book that has a time limit on it about who's running for president this year. You stand no chance of selling one copy two years from now. No one's going to read it. And so, I think books, they're more likely to be timeless in it. And And you're more likely to read something that will be as relevant 20 years from now as it is this week. Nassim Taleb has this quote when he's talking about authors.

8:59He says, to write a book that people will read 20 years from now, write something that people would have read 20 years ago. You just have to find something that's timeless. And I think both of us, the work that we do is that. We at least stand a chance of someone buying it 20 years from now and liking it. But I think this is relevant about the information diet, right? You're saying you remember very little of what you read from the New York Times 10 years ago, but you could at least name... You don't remember that much that you read from books 10 years ago, but there's at least some recall. I can't name a single article, a news article that I read 10 years ago that is on my mind.

9:37It's completely out of my memory, but I can probably name 10 or 20 or more books that I read 10 years ago and at least give you like, oh, here's the three things I remember from that book that stuck with me. So it's just much more likely to be timeless. I also think since it's a longer format, you're more likely to take it seriously. A lot of news. I read the news every day. I still do, but it's a skimming process. It's just like skimming down and be like, oh, there's an interesting sentence. Okay, move on. I'm not interested in any of this. Books, you're like, I bought this book. I paid 20 bucks for it.

10:05I'm going to sit down and take it seriously. Yeah, no, I think that's actually a huge part of it, right? It's like it was free because it's not worth that much. Yes. Right? Or it was cheap because it's not worth that much. And it's not like books are insanely expensive, but you pay most of it upfront, right? You pay the purchase price and then you got to spend a certain number of hours with the thing to get the idea. And it's kind of a slow release tablet. And so the chances of that information having a longer half-life are much higher. And the chances of it pertaining to something that has a much bigger impact on your life or higher, right?

10:47Because you're not going to write a book about what happened at a city council meeting, right? You're going to write a book about something that has to do with human nature. Or maybe the history of the city council. At least it's a little more, it's broader. I also think a lot of, and this is no disrespect to them, it's just how the industry works. A lot of journalists write because they have to fill a quota. And it's not necessarily that like this journalist thought that this topic was the most important thing in the world. It's probably not the case. They have to publish twice a week. Whereas most authors are like, this probably was something that was really, that they had been thinking about for years.

11:23And of all the topics they could have picked, they picked this one because they thought it was the most important. It's just a more thoughtful process. Well, yeah, they had to spend so much more time with it also. Yes. And they spent time with it with the idea that it'll spend a good chunk of time out in the world as opposed to this is what we know about this right now. Yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, I think about this as a blogger and a book writer. It's so easy to take risks in a blog because I can be like, look, if this sucks, it's going to like people just move on from it. But a book, you're like, look, this is going to sit on my mantle for the rest of my life.

11:57You really got to put your work and make sure that this is the good one that you're putting out. You only get a handful of swings. Yes. It's a much higher lift. Yeah. Now, of course, there are lots of shitty books and some very good news articles that have been written. It's not a black and white thing. I just think your odds of learning something that will stick with you are much higher in a book. It is interesting, right? Like you have elected leaders, you have CEOs or whatever, and you go into their office or you look at their information diet and it's terrifying how much of it is based on real time information.

12:28Yeah. Right? Like CNBC is running in the background or Fox News or MSNBC is running in the background. And they're just mainlining like opinions about real time events and developing information about real time events. And it is true that, yes, they have to make a lot of real time decisions. But they also have like real time reporting, like from intelligence agencies usually or people on the ground. But for the most part, their presidency or their legacy is going to be impacted by big macro decisions. They made with information that came in over the previous 10 minutes. I remember Obama was talking about when he was working with his book agent for his book.

13:13The agent was like, we need to move on this very quickly. And Obama was like, in my world, very quickly means in the next three seconds. It's like we need to authorize this attack now. So he was like, tell me what you mean by very quickly. Do you mean over the next six months? Because my definition is different than yours. That's true. But I mean, they're making decisions that actually would be best informed, not without the real-time data, but be best informed by three or 4 ,000 years of human experience that they are not consistently reading about because the president would be mocked for leaning back and putting his feet up on the Resolute desk and reading a book.

13:55And reading a book, but that would be the best thing to do. Absolutely. I remember back to the short-term information. I remember hearing for the nuclear strikes that if the president was told, Mr. President, there is a nuclear missile coming in from Russia. Do you want to launch retaliatory strike? He has 60 seconds to make that decision. And the information might be completely imperfect. And he's either, if he says no, the US might get wiped out. If he says yes, he might wipe out someone. And you have 60 seconds to make that decision. So I understand why in that world, you would be drowning in short-term information, but you also want some long-term wisdom in that person as well.

14:28Well, no, it's funny. Most people don't read, right? And then people who read a lot, like when Obama does that book list every year or whatever. And even then that list, I would say probably 90, 95 % of that list is books that came out that year. People do the best books I read this year. And there is this implicit assumption that when I say my favorite books of 2024, I'm supposed to mean books that came out in 2024. As if I've read everything up until this point and I have the luxury of just getting caught up. It's like, I have such a pile to dig through. So I would say at least 50%, probably more like 60 or 70 % of the books that I read, even the books I sell in my bookstore are really old.

15:18And my bias is actually towards the older, the better. Yeah. I mean, the time tested. And really, when you see a book list of my favorite books this year, and it's all new books, really what that shows is that reader, whoever it was, was just impacted by the marketing that happened that year. You read that book because it was being marketed heavily because it's a new book. Yeah. And I say this as a person who puts out new books. Like, of course, I want you to buy the book when it comes out. But I'm also, as a reader though, I'm like, I'll get to that later if I get to it. But I want to read all the books that I haven't read.

15:57There's a quote from Truman. He says, the only thing new in the world is the history you have not yet read. And so if you've not read the book, it is a new book. You know what I mean? And it cracks open the same way and the pages are stuck together the same way as a new book. It was probably printed, unless it's out of print and you're buying some used copy or whatever, it was probably printed just as recently as the new book that you're reading because they're selling out of it because it's still relevant and it has real staying power. I know the book Endurance about Ernest Shackleton's voyage, it was either first published in the 1920s or someone else wrote the exact same story and it went nowhere.

16:38Nobody cared. And then it was either republished or maybe it was a new book recently that exploded. It's phenomenal. So I always wonder like, what else is out there like that? A book that was published in 1920 that nobody knows about, nobody cares about, but it's phenomenal. And there are so many out there. Well, one of the books I've raved about and like we can't keep it on the shelf of the bookstore and the printers always haven't written more is, so Tolstoy writes this book called The Calendar of Wisdom. And it's just a collection of his favorite quotes from Thoreau and the Stoics, from Christian thinkers, from Eastern thinkers.

17:11And then he's sort of meditating on them. He wrote like a page a day book. But he writes it sort of near the end of his life. He's obviously most well known as a novelist. And then he dies and the Soviets suppress the book. So it basically is only rediscovered like in the late 80s, early 90s. and uh obviously i had not read it i didn't read it when i was a kid or something um but then i discovered it and i was like this is amazing this is a book that for almost a hundred years no one was allowed to read yeah but it's totally timeless it's like fresh out of the vault because it's it was relevant when it came out it would have almost everything in it could have been written a hundred years or earlier or a thousand years earlier and so yeah there's tons of things out there that you don't know about, but it's actually the perfect thing for the scenario that you are in because not that much has changed about being a human being in all that time.

18:12I also think there is a truth that writing styles changed dramatically over the generations. So if you read a book that was written in the 1920s, you know the language that it's going to be written in. Long paragraphs, dense sentences, big words, some of which you don't even understand. And if that person in 1920 were to read a book that was published in 2024, they would be like, what are these short, snappy sentences? It's like that style changes. So I understand why people might gravitate towards newer books that are written in a style that they're more familiar with. But when you read real classics, what you tend to find is that person was not out of step in their time, but they went to what is fundamentally human and interesting and timeless, right?

18:54So Hemingway is, of course, a groundbreaking stylist, but at the same time is going to the essence of what he's talking about, right? He's stripping it down as opposed to sort of building it up. When you read Mark Sturelius' meditations, you're like, oh, this is just a person talking to himself the way that people talk to themselves, which is not sort of long-winded and pretentious and inaccessible. But is the meditations translation into English? Is that the key that made it readable? There are, of course, better translations than worse translations. But even if you get like a George, George Long translated in the 1800s, even if you read like I have some like the 1500s.

19:34Yeah, sure. There's thou art shall whatever. But like Shakespeare is tough to read, but also one of the most quotable people in the English language, because when he's on to something, he gets, you know, he was kill all the lawyers. Right. Like that, that's, that is such a, he's capturing a, frustrating part of the human experience that was true in the 16th century. And it's true now, right? The truth is still timeless. And so even though he's speaking in an archaic language, when he's getting to the essence of what he said to be or not to be, even though the play itself, you might need a teacher to walk you through it, or it might seem a little accessible, the great one lines in it, or the great lines in it, the great passages in it, band of brothers, You know, those core things, he was getting to the essence of something and you could have a ninth grade education and still get what's there.

20:42You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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23:52There's also, there's so many examples of like great Russian novels that are translated into English and the translated version is not that great. You just can't recreate the quips and the turns of phrases once you translate it. The one standout there is the book Sapiens, where it was written in his native Hebrew. And then when it first published, my understanding, and when it was published in Hebrew, it sold okay. And they translated it to English and it's one of the best-selling nonfiction books of all time. So I think now 30 million copies. Did he write it in English or did someone say it? I think it was translated.

24:21And I think it was just one of the best translations that's maybe ever existed. And you compare that to all the Russian novels that are, as I understand, just incredible in Russian, but in English, they're like, it's okay at best. And I think that's more likely. With my books, I'm sure you have this experience. Some of the translations of Psychology of Money are amazing from my understanding, and some are not. It's kind of hit or miss. And I can't fact check, was this Korean version done well? I have no idea. I just have to take the faith that you're going to do it well. But so much of what makes writing great is the turn of phrase.

24:53It's the unique word here or there that doesn't really translate perfectly. Yeah. That's one of the things I love to do with meditations is I'll take a line that I love and I'll go, I want to look at five translations in different eras. And you realize, okay, first off, our understanding just of what he meant evolved over a thousand years. Yeah. And then also from each translator, it evolves. what they saw, what stood out to them. There's a huge amount of room for interpretation for something that we think is pretty straightforward. Like this word means this word in this language. So therefore, right.

25:30Back in that era, it did not. Yeah. And expressions and idioms and cliches and allusions, these things all evolve also. And so, yeah, you realize that there's a many different people over many different points in time will understand the same thing very differently. And that is the magic of the classics, of course, that this meant this to this society, which meant this to this society, which means something now to this society, and that it changes and evolves. And so that's kind of destabilizing a little bit, but it's also really empowering because you go, oh, actually I myself, just the same as all, I have the ability to interpret it differently.

26:17You can still, you can pick up something new from something that human beings have been talking about for 2000 years. And this is what they call the great conversation, right? Like the great conversation between the classic texts and the people and the society that are relying on them and using them and making stuff from them. You know, the founders meant one thing in the constitution and Lincoln decides, no, no, no, The fundamental founding document is the Declaration of Independence and the idea that all men are created equal. That's not in the Constitution. In fact, the Constitution says some people are worth three-fifths of other people.

26:56And Lincoln manages to see that. And he makes such a cogent, compelling, and aspirational argument to it that millions of people fight a very deadly war to rewrite it essentially in blood to mean something else. And then there's a battle over that afterwards when he dies. And this is what we call the lost cause. And then someone like Martin Luther King comes equally steeped in all these classical texts and the founding documents. And he makes such a compelling, beautiful argument that actually, no, Lincoln had it right, that he convinces a country that's effectively half racist at this time, probably more than half racist, that, no, this is right.

27:44And so the ability to take something that has not changed and change it or orient inside a story, that's really powerful. You say this in the book, the most powerful story wins, right? Like the ability to understand a story and to tell that story, that's how change happens, perceptions shift, and the world gets remade. Yeah. I think wherever you look in business and politics, wherever, it's always the best story wins. It's not always the best decision or the right answer or the best answer. It's the most compelling story that you're telling. I have to think about this with books too. I can't track down who said this, but I can't take credit for this, that people don't remember books.

28:24They remember sentences. I think that's really true. Even for the best books, I'm like, oh, this book changed my life. I can probably tell you three or four lines that really stuck with me, that when I read it on the page, I had to stop and be like, oh, yes, that's the thing I've been looking for. And so even within a great story, it's usually a couple lines that just really move the needle for you. Stories are more powerful than anything. I mean, that ghoul, Stephen Miller, when he was in the Trump administration, they were trying to do one of the Muslim bans, one of those horrible sort of xenophobic racist laws.

29:01Someone goes, what about, give me your poor, give me your huddled masses. They start reciting the story that's on the Statue of Liberty. And he goes, you know, that's not a law, right? Like he's like, you know, that's not in the constitution. And he's right, but he's also wrong because the lady that wrote that, and she wrote that as a poem to raise money, but she was sort of motivated by an understanding of sort of Jews fleeing Europe. And she writes this beautiful poem to raise money to erect the Statue of Liberty. Um, but that story is so powerful and it touches something in what we want to be true about ourselves that it feel like people, it feels like something that has been codified in law because we all have agreed more or less on that, uh, the, the sentiment in that thing.

29:55And then, and then it was true. People were passing by the Statue of Liberty. And so it felt like, oh yeah, we all agree. this is how it is because that's how our grandparents got here, our great grandparents got here. And it has no binding force other than the fact that it's an aspirational, compelling, beautiful idea. We've all agreed on it. It's like a handshake law. It's not written down, but we've all agreed that this is what we're doing. Yeah. And so when people want to effectuate change, I think they sometimes fuck up because they come up with things that are not great stories or they're complicated stories, or in other cases, they're actively bad stories.

30:37The slogan is demonstrably false or demonstrably dangerous or strikes people in a way that gets their reservations up. And it has the exact opposite effect of bringing about potentially real or meaningful change. I think you see this a lot with academics who are discovering incredible of things in all kinds of disciplines and the vast majority of them are terrible communicators. And in the white papers that they write, they're just writing for other academics. If you and I pick up a cancer research report, we more or less can't make any sense of it. And it's tragic because if you take all of that information and those discoveries and give it to a good storyteller, there's so many world-changing insights in there that just gets lost amid a jumble of terrible writing and acronyms that nobody understands.

31:24ChatGPT is actually very good at this to upload an academic PDF and say, summarize this for me in layman's terms. He's actually very good at doing that. I mean, COVID is the quintessential example of this. Like, you know, CDC is putting out these like charts and you have to go like. Yeah. Like no one, no one's understanding. No one's going to do that. And you compare that to Steve Jobs saying a thousand songs in your pocket with the iPod. Like he could have said digital MP3 player for the next generation. Like no, a thousand, thousand songs in your pocket. Like you can't beat that. Winston Churchill is another good example of someone who by all accounts was a terrible politician in terms of actually moving the needle politically.

31:58But he was one of the best orators of his time, one of the best writers of his time, got people's attention, which is what you needed during that era. You didn't need someone who was necessarily making the best policy. You needed someone who can make a speech to get everyone fired up and moving in the same direction. And he was the best in the world at that. Well, the obstacle is the wayness of Winston Churchill is first, he basically has these horrible parents who abuse him and don't love him or neglect him and don't love him. So he's forced to retreat into books and ideas. That's where he finds happiness and excitement.

32:30And it's a bigger world than the world that he lives in. So that's his sort of first. And then the second is because they basically blow his inheritance. He has, from aristocratic family, but he doesn't have any money. He has to make a living as a writer. He's buried in debt. And he makes a lot of money as a writer. He's one of the best paid writers in the world ultimately. And then when he is kicked out of power in the 1920s and 1930s, he has to really go make his living as a writer and he loses his platform. He loses institutional power. And so he has to cultivate power as essentially a media personality.

33:11He has a radio show and he writes articles and he writes these books and he builds this enormous platform. He's actually more famous in America than he is in the United States in the run up to World War II. But because he's talking to people about these ideas over and over again, not only does he figure out really how to express them and he gets the truth of them, he's one of the only leaders with the time to read Mein Kampf. He knows. So he's taking Hitler literally. And then he understands that this is a battle of ideas. And so when he comes back to power, yeah, he's not just, he's prime, he is, the man is meeting the hour, right?

33:50In the truest sense of the world, in that he has developed the exact media skills, the exact background, you know, he is perfectly formed to do this thing. And if he had gotten what he wanted all along, he wouldn't have done it. He would have probably been like every other politician. If he'd been in power, he probably would have made the same mistakes that they had made. So, yeah, we have this sense that we want things to be a certain way. And it may well be that the circumstances that you're in are perfectly forming you for some moment that you can't anticipate. Yeah. I think it's true for all modern politics.

34:24There's a famous JFK-Nixon debate, which was the first televised debate. JFK understood how TV works. He wore makeup. Nixon was like, none of this matters. And it was like, that's what changed the election. And also whether it's Reagan or Obama or Trump, no matter who it is, they're all extremely good at communicating what they want. Sometimes the ideas are better than others, but they're extremely good at saying, this is where we're going and getting people involved. Hitler may be the best example of the most atrocious ideas of humanity, but saying them in a way that got millions of other Germans to be like, yeah, sounds good.

34:57Let's do it. So I think like the power of storytelling can be incredibly powerful on either end of the spectrum. It can be devastatingly powerful. It can be incredibly powerful for good on either end. But it's almost never the middling just good idea, right idea, told poorly that's going to change the world. Yeah. And it's never the idea that is most morally correct or the most. The most complete. Yes. Like within the best context. It's always just like a slogan. A slogan that people are like, yep, sounds good. But I think at its core, this is true for writing too, it gets down to how impatient most people are.

35:31Of just like, I don't have time to sift through all the details of your 50-page PDF. Give me the two-line summary of what your idea is. And if that two-line summary, they're like, ah, love it, love it. Then they'll remember you. They'll buy your book. They'll go for it. Yeah. Well, it's also though, like, it's not that people won't read a 15-page PDF or they won't read a thousand-page book. They will. It's just got to be really good. Yes. Right? And so people will engage with complex ideas if someone can create a world in which that it is in their interest to do so, in which they are pulled from sentence to sentence or idea from idea to idea, right?

36:12Like people will fight in a multi-decker war about something if you have made it clear why they should do so. Yes. And you've given them something that sustains them through that. And the problem is most people go, I'm right. This is obviously good. I care a lot about this. And what they lack is the empathy, the ability to understand what you need to get someone from the beginning to the end. They have to be pulled along or motivated along. I forget if it's David Perel or Jack Raines who's made this point that they push back on the idea that people are interested in short-term content. And that's all they'll consume is short-term content.

36:49And I forget Jack or David says that's not true at all. They'll watch a 14-hour series on Netflix. They'll binge it. They'll watch it 14 hours straight because it's a good story. It's well done. What people have no patience for anymore is like rambling incoherent long-form content. That is completely gone. Even in short-term video, you think, oh, a minute. It's because people will sit there for a minute and they won't. Actually, as I see this on the reels for Daily Stoic or Daily Dad, you actually have like two seconds or you have one second. To catch your attention. So it's not that they'll watch a minute.

37:22It's that if you capture them for one second or a half second, if you get them at the beginning, they'll make it through to the end. And the same is true for a book or for an idea or a movement or a company. If you can create something that is immediately compelling and then moves someone along through a process or in sales, they call it a funnel, that can work. but if you don't have the immediate grab, the thing that provides a compelling reason or a way into something, you're dead. Who was the guy on YouTube who made those ads? Welcome to my garage kind of thing. It was like, yes. Those YouTube ads, some of them were like 15 minutes long.

38:00The ad was 15 minutes long. But the first five seconds, you're like, wait, what? You're going to take me into your house and you got a Lambo sitting there? They were so compelling. Now, I think a lot of people actually watched all 15 minutes of that ad. Yes. It's like an incredible thing to do to make it that compelling. What he's doing there is being fundamentally shameless. Yes. He is capturing something that most people are not tapping into because you'd be too self-conscious. Yeah. Right. And this is where demagogues and charlatans and people come in is that they're often willing to do things that other people would be too self-conscious to do.

38:39Yeah. And so for people who are not astute or people who are naive, they don't understand the distinction. So that seems like what a wealthy person would do. Of course, they wouldn't. That seems like what, oh, that person has a lot of books. They must read a lot. That's sort of not how it goes. And so they can sometimes in the short term capture a certain amount of attention or build a sort of insipid movement. But Lincoln's thing about you can't fool all the people all the time. Eventually it comes out because there's no there there, right? But for that capturing the one second of attention or even 15 minutes of attention, it can be quite effective.

39:27I think there is some exception to it, particularly in finance, where there are pundits who have been wrong their entire career and still get people to line up to listen to them. Because I think to some extent, if you tell people what they want to hear, you can be wrong forever with no penalty or very little penalty. You have to ask, what is the... Maybe you've heard this in therapy. A therapist will say something like, I have this problem. I have this belief. I have this pattern that I do. And they go, what is that doing for you? Yeah. Right? Because there's almost nothing that we do on a regular or consistent basis that is not serving some purpose for us.

40:05That is not serving a function in our life. Yeah. And so it seems bad that you overcommit or you do all this stuff and you go, oh, but it's salving some wound or it's keeping me busy. It's serving a function for you. And so, yeah, a financial pundit who's wrong all the time, at the most fundamental level, are they entertaining? Most of them are pessimists. And there is a big market for pessimism. And I think for a lot of people, the reason they want to hear pessimism is because the only way to deal with their own personal inadequacies is to fantasize about a world in which other people are suffering too.

40:45So they fantasize about the economy collapsing. They fantasize about the stock market collapsing. And when there's a pundit who says big crash is coming, then that person who is kind of stewing in their own inadequacy is like, yes, other people are going to suffer too. I want to listen to this guy. So that person is not actually providing financial services. They're providing like a therapy for them. But it's masquerading as financial advice. Yeah. But there are so many of them who have literally been wrong for 40 years and still sell a zillion newsletters per year. once you listen to someone and they're wrong enough times, you now have, now there's another purpose, which is now we have sort of your basic cognitive dissonance here.

41:24Now do you want to be the person who was an idiot for listening to so-and-so? This is why people stay in cults. This is why people don't change their identity because to admit that one was wrong or that one was taken or that one was manipulated or that one was naive or whatever it is, that's really hard to do. So that person who has this thing that's fundamentally always going to be attracting people is like predicting, you know, doomerism or, you know, extremism or whatever the thing that's drawing a certain percentage of the people in. You do that long enough, a certain percentage of those people are going to stick.

42:03And then once they've stuck, they can't leave. Right. And so you've just accumulated a base of, you know, just people who - It's part of your identity. Yes. This is incredible story from the heaven's gate cult, who I think all committed suicide later. But at one point in their, in their cult, they believe that a spaceship was going to come in to save them. So they bought a telescope to look for the spaceship and they point the telescope to the sky. They see nothing. They take the telescope back to the store where they bought it. And they said, this telescope is broken. And the store said, Oh, is there something wrong with it?

42:32They said, no, but we didn't see the spaceship that's coming. So clearly the telescope is broken. I can't see the spaceship. Like at every level, just stewing in their own bullshit and incapable of getting out of it. There's a great book. I think it's called The Big Con. It's all about how con men operate. And I didn't, you know, you think a con man is just like ruthlessly and manipulatively tricking people. And it's much more complicated. First, the con has to, There's that saying, you can't con an honest man. First off, the con has to catch someone who is interested in getting away with something or getting something for free or finding a shortcut.

43:14So first off, you self-identify or offer yourself up to be conned by putting yourself in a vulnerable position. But the part that I didn't understand that was really, I think, illustrative is what happens at the end of every successful con. So like in the 20s or whatever, they'd be like, we're going to fix a boxing match, right? And so they'd get someone to put up the money to help them commit a con, right? We're going to fix this boxing match. And then what they would do at the end, actually the boxing match is fixed, but in a way they don't understand, they'll have like one of the fighters like pretend to kill the other fighter.

43:59Like they'll have it go horribly wrong. So then the con man and his partner, who's actually the mark, flee in different directions. The exit from the con is the part that a great con man figures out. They have to understand that you have to give the person a way out to separate from yourself. So it's important that you realize when people are caught in a bad political movement or a social movement or some investing cycle or a cryptocurrency or whatever it is, first off, they were vulnerable because they believed it was possible to get something for nothing or that they could break the rules and get away with it.

44:43And then where you tend to meet them is at this part where you're trying to convince them that they're in the thing. And they can't because they don't have a way out that doesn't make them feel stupid. And so what the con men figure out is they go, that's why they have to have a way that they both flee. So that person doesn't go to the police and get the police to invest it. So they want that person to have some kind of guilt that makes them stay silent with it. That's why Ponzi schemes can be so successful for so long is because you're constantly giving until it ends. Everyone has a way out. You want your money back?

45:18I'll give you your money back. There's always a way for them to leave the process. And they don't want to see, even as the evidence is adding up that there's something off about this, it's weird. To admit that to yourself would mean first admitting that you fell for a Ponzi scene. And then two mean that the gains that you have so far are illicit. And that if you try to get out, you might not be able to get out by the time the whole thing collapses. or that in getting yours out, the whole thing collapses. And then, so you're caught up in it. Even at some level, you talked about like, you don't know why you walked away from that moment.

45:57You didn't go skiing again. It could have, you're probably experiencing some existential dread or doubt at some level you don't understand. And that's also what's happening. And people are like, they know this marriage is bad for them. They know this thing isn't working, but they just can't get out because to get out would mean facing some real dark shit about themselves or the world.

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48:25I was asked not too long ago with my skiing incident whether I had survivor's guilt. And I said, I think survivor's humility is a better word. It's like I never felt guilty about it, but it's just like a stark example of just like, man, there's so much out there that's out of your control that I didn't realize at the time. But I think that's probably true for some people who got caught up in like Madoff's Ponzi scheme of just like understanding that something you thought to be true and decision that you made, you thought was a good decision to, in hindsight, be like, it was actually completely different than I thought.

48:55It can be a very jarring experience. Yeah. I mean, I have that. I worked for a couple of different people who sort of built these kind of cults of personality around themselves and I was in it, but also out of it at the same time. And so I do have a certain amount of empathy for the people who are still in it or are still falling for it. I go, I get it. I get what part of yourself that person is manipulating or inflating or helping with. And then, yeah, you have to have the sense that it very easily could have gone the other way. If you were one different thing that happened in your childhood or some event, you could have been open or vulnerable to being sucked in more fully in a way that could have changed everything.

49:38And the truth is you and I and everyone is sucked into some sort of bullshit movement right now, whatever it would be that we don't know. Everybody is to some degree, whether it's the political party I affiliate with, whether it's the identity I face as an American, as a white male, whatever it would be. Sure. Like we're all just kind of mirrors of what we've experienced and we don't realize for the most part how unique the experiences that we have had are relative to everybody else. Well, the Joan Didion line, and this is actually her table, the Joan Didion line is we tell ourselves stories in order to live.

50:11Yeah. And people, you know, in the way that things become Instagram quotes or things that, you know, they say at a wedding or something, we take that, we've taken that to mean that like, you know, humans are storytellers or something. She means we fucking lie to ourselves. Yes. So we can live with ourselves. Yes. It is a dark ass quote, right? But it's so profoundly true. That is what humans do. We tell ourselves stories so reality can seem somewhat stable, right? So that it is not the incredible mess of contradictions and hypocrisies and terrifying prospects and uncertainties that it undoubtedly is.

50:57You can't wake up and not have some story about who you are, why you're one of the good guys, and why things are going to get better. Or you can't function without those stories. So we are lying to ourselves. There's a thing in psychology called depressive realism, which basically means that people who are clinically depressed make better predictions about the future. Because they're more realistic about what's not in your control, how corrupt the system is, how evil people can be. They're more realistic about it than you and I might be. And I think that's a lot of like people who wake up every, like most people who are not depressed need to wake up and be like, I'm a good person.

51:35The system's good. This is all going to work out. Even if it's not necessarily true, you have to tell yourself that just to get out of bed in the morning. Yes. Yeah. I mean, because it's not far from the absence of those stories into some kind of nihilism. Yeah. And that's not a great place to be. But you don't want to be the depressed person, but they're more realistic about how the world works. Yes. Yes. So I'd rather be blissfully ignorant, happy. Yeah. That's an interesting part of the book. Obviously, in both your books, you sort of talk about what it means to be wealthy or successful. That's sort of what we're all aspiring to.

52:16And then how few successful or wealthy people would measure that success or wealth in any kind of happiness or contentment, which of course is the thing that matters. There's that Naval Ravikant line, I think, like, if you're so rich, why aren't you happy? Or if you're so smart, why aren't you happy? You could break it down with any kind of adjective is like, that's what we're all working towards. and then you end up hitting a different target. I think there's a truth too, that humans are wired for status. They're not wired for happiness. And status, there is an element of status within happiness, but only to a small part.

52:58So people, I think they're just naturally wired to say, I would rather make a lot of money than be happy. I would rather live in a big house than be happy. That's how they've been wired. I think it's true just from an evolutionary perspective of like, it's a competition for resources. Happiness does not play into that. What matters is that you get the land, you get the mate, you get the job, whatever it's going to be. So they're wired to chase that, not necessarily happiness. To achieve happiness, to chase that requires like going out of your way to ignore what you might be naturally pushed to gravitate towards and be like, I could make more money.

53:31I could work longer hours, but I just want to be happy. I just want to hang out with my kids and go for a walk and go kayaking. And you really have to fight back against the natural urges that you're moving towards. Well, I think the trouble is the other things are much more defined. They're much more attainable in the sense that they are concrete. Quantifiable. And usually a product of very specific actions. Whereas happiness is like a reputation or something, or respect is a byproduct. So it's not a thing that you really pursue. And so we tell ourselves, I'm doing X, Y, and Z because I think happiness will be a byproduct of that.

54:15Even though historically there's not much correlation. In fact, there's the opposite. I was thinking about, we all kind of know extreme wealth tends to tear apart families, tends not to make people happy, the plot of the TV show Succession or really any historical or literary work, right? And yet, what are most people working on and then secretly hoping for? That their company isn't just pretty successful, but is transformatively successful. They're hoping that the lottery ticket is the big winner. They're hoping that the book sells a billion copies. Deep down, we are hoping for a thing that we know will be ruinous.

55:07Yeah. And it's a lie. That's just how we're wired, though. Yeah. It's how we're wired. I wrote about this recently. Among the top 10 richest men in the world, there are a combined 13 divorces. And seven of the top 10 have been divorced at least once. It's a very small sample size, but for a statistic that is so critical to your lifetime happiness, among a group of people that are so universally admired, I want to be a centibillionaire. It's an interesting thing. I'm just like, you take these guys who are like, everyone wants to be, but if you actually dug into their lives, you're like, I don't know, is that great?

55:43It doesn't seem that great. They have no privacy. They're constantly being harassed. Most of them have been divorced at least once. They're working 100 million hours a week. I think most people, if you actually put the full context of what their life is like, it's back to the Elon Musk quote of like, you might think you want to be me, but you really don't. Well, and divorce is just something that since it's a legal status, it's pretty measurable. Right. How many of them have relationships with their kids? How many of them? Things are less quantifiable. Know the names of all their grandchildren or their spouses.

56:15Right. It would probably bring you to tears. The human wreckage accumulated there in the, say, top 10 richest people in the world. And so that should be like a warning, I think. But also one of the things that I try to think about is I go and say, you have a happy marriage. You have a relationship with your kids or you have a job that you enjoy. You go, I have a thing that money cannot buy. Yeah. I found this as an author. I would just, you know, you meet these really successful people as they read your books. And like, you know, you think you're going to learn from them. You're going to talk about them and all this stuff.

56:57and then you find out secretly, they just want to find out how to write books. And you're like, wait, that's what you want to do? I thought you, I thought - You're already successful in your own thing. Yeah, yeah. And actually they want, they don't like that thing that much and they want to do this other thing because they think it's more meaningful to them. And I go, I had to stop as I was interested in all these other things. I was going to start this company to do this. I go, wait, I have this thing that billionaires can't buy. It's like, there's a line in the first episode of Yellowstone, And Kevin Costner's character is like getting in his helicopter and he's telling his son, who's like the lawyer, he says, you know, if someone had all the money in the world, this is what they would buy.

57:34Yeah. And he was trying to remind himself like, this is, I have it. Obviously the tragedy of that show is basically him destroying himself to expand it and to keep it exactly as it was instead of being like, I'm the luckiest person in the world. Yeah. And so that's the tragedy, I think, of a lot of these people is that they have all the money in the world, but what they fundamentally want, what humans want. Not only do they don't have it, they can't have it. Right. Because what they might want is privacy and autonomy and whatnot, or time with their family. But they want things that fundamentally you could never buy with money.

58:11Yeah. Happiness, being a good person. Relationships. Relationships, feeling like you're enough. Yeah. You know, like something broke in them when they were seven that made them feel like the only way to feel good is to be a billionaire. And then it turns out actually being a billionaire doesn't address the seven-year-old wound. Yeah. So that's the tragedy. The other thing is like two stories from Bill Gates have always stuck with me. One is that he worked seven days a week for 25 years. Didn't take a single day off in a quarter of a century when he was building Microsoft. The other that may or may not be true, but it's a great story, is that he removed the radio from his car.

58:47Because when he was commuting to the office, he did not want any distractions whatsoever. He just wanted to think about Microsoft and nothing else. And the idea that he might be able to listen to the radio for 10 minutes was like, no, no, I don't want that distraction. He was depriving himself of the ability to do a human thing. Yes. Because he just wanted to think about Microsoft and nothing else. And when I hear things like that, it's, I'm so glad that he exists and people like him exists because they create these things we all benefit from. My second reaction is I would never in a million years want that for myself.

59:15Yeah. And I think it's important to like, when you're looking up to these people, you might be like, oh, it would be so great to be worth a hundred billion dollars. That would be so amazing. You're like, the sacrifices that came with it, the life that he had to live is very different from my definition of a successful life. When I think about a successful life, it's time with my kids. It's time outside. It's helping people. It's sleeping in. It's exercising. It's not working seven days a week for a quarter of a century. Sure. People will go, oh, well, he hit the lottery in all these ways, right?

59:44He was born at this time, born on this street, had this lucky break, started this company, whatever. But you hit the lottery, you as an ordinary person, in so many ways in that you are not fundamentally broken in that way. Yes. Not him, not Bill Gates specifically, but any person for whom there is essentially never enough. that the insatiability or the ambition or the compulsion to do and do and do that makes someone a conqueror or Julius Caesar, you know, 2000 years ago, or makes them a, you know, a Wall Street baron 150 years ago, or a, you know, a billionaire, a tech billionaire today. You hit the lottery in not having to be that.

1:00:30Yeah. You don't think about it that way, but you did. Like, I'm so glad that I was not tortured to be the kind of person that would work seven days a week for 25 years. Yeah. Lincoln said he had this engine of ambition in him that knew no rest. And to have no engine of ambition at all is a terrible curse. To have one that knows no rest. And actually Lincoln wasn't being fair to himself because he wasn't a Julius Caesar or a Genghis Kahn or even a Nixon or, you know, wasn't fundamentally broken at that level because clearly he was cared about certain things more than himself. Right. Yeah. But if you know, the, the, the engine with no rest, that's a curse.

1:01:19And then even if you're someone like I would, if, if I'm, there's a spectrum between those two, I'm not even in the middle. I'm, I'm more here, but I, I, it has some, I've found some breaks for it. Right. Like I have some control over the speedometer. I can't get it to zero, but it's not broken on the, it's not falling out of the other side of the speedometer either. Right. And to think like, oh, you have the luxury. I mean, you know, obviously someone who cheats on their spouse is not a great person, but very few of us go like, I'm glad I don't have whatever the genetic cocktail is that makes that harder to resist, right?

1:02:01Or that something didn't happen to me as a kid or the way my parents were that makes me think that that's okay, right? So, you know, there's so much you can be grateful for as a person about what you have that we often skip over when we are jealous of people that if we actually knew what it was like to be them, you would not want to. Wouldn't want to do it. I was talking to someone last night, and this is a somewhat related point, that if you were a previous alcoholic and then you went dry and you're like, I haven't had a drink in 20 years and huge congrats to that person. But that person by one definition is still an alcoholic because alcohol still controls them.

1:02:41The fact that they say, if I had one drink, I might fall again. Alcohol still controls them. And our thing was like, you're only not an alcoholic if you can drink once in a while and it doesn't control you. And I think it's the same with money as well. Like there are a lot of people where their money or their ambition owns them. They don't control it. It controls them. I think this is really true for ambition. Go down that list of centibillionaires, Musk, Bezos, Gates. I think ambition controls them. They don't control it. It is in full control of their personality. And that is a thing that I would not want for myself.

1:03:12I think that's a curse in many ways to not control it. Seneca was talking about this Roman general named Marius, who's the most successful like sort of politician, general strongman in Rome's history probably. And he says, Marius commanded armies, but ambition commanded Marius. And so fundamentally, he was not in command of himself, which the Stokes would say is the greatest empire. So there's all the people that want to control this plot of territory. There's all the people who want to control this market, control this product, this position of power, and then how few of those people are in control or command of themselves.

1:03:51They're slaves. Epictetus is in the court of Nero alongside Seneca. And he realizes, yeah, I'm a slave. I legally do not own myself or my labor. But he kind of looks around and he goes, I think I might be freer than most of the people here. Because I don't want anything from these people. I can live within my means. I control my emotions. I control my thoughts. I'm not a slave to my passions. He basically realizes that there's different levels of slavery. And of course, the fundamental legal or form of chattel slavery is this grave injustice that no one should be subjected to. But then there's also these self-imposed forms of slavery that sit above it.

1:04:33And we don't see those people as fundamentally unfree, but they are not free. That was a definition I heard of addiction, which is you lost the freedom to abstain. Yeah. You don't have a choice about whether you do it or not. But maybe also the freedom to do it if you wanted to. So the person who cannot drink, are they still alcoholics? Because they don't have the freedom to have one drink if they wanted to. They're still being controlled by it. To me, that's what that quote means. They don't have the freedom to not do it or do it. Or do it. They're still controlled by it. It's not in... But even putting aside the mantras of recovery, that doing it or not doing it is not a choice that they have.

1:05:16They are under the compulsion of their thing. And so they can build up edifices or programs or commitments or the law can make it harder or easier for them to do it. But they are a slave to that thing. And I, from my understanding of addiction, this is a thing that sort of you get a gene for, and then that gene gets turned on or off depending on your upbringing. So I'm not, it's actually important that we make it clear that this isn't a willpower issue. Just like Elon Musk isn't waking up and going, I'm going to be a bigot today or an idiot today, or I'm going to cause chaos today. There is something that has sort of broken inside of him or broken its bounds inside of him.

1:06:02And he has lost the ability to corral that. He's still ultimately culpable and responsible for the damage and the consequences of that. And it is a salvageable situation. It would just be, it just would demand him first admitting that he's not in control. Yeah. And I do think everybody is addicted to something that they're out of control of. I was just thinking so much, and I'm sure it's true for you and every parent, so much of my happiness is going to be tied to my children's happiness. If they're not happy, really hard for me to be happy. Sure. But what if my two children have that genetic cocktail that is going to lead them to misbehavior and they end up getting arrested or whatever it might be.

1:06:44So therefore, like I'm tying my happiness to something that's out of my control. Yeah. And in a very similar way of just like, I'm just kind of crossing my fingers and hoping that this all works out. Yeah. There's a saying, you're only as happy as your unhappiest child. Of course. Yeah. And yeah, so to have children is to fundamentally make yourself vulnerable to them and life, right? Your heart's running around inside this other person. But I think stoicism, I think also just healthy boundaries. You do have to cultivate the, you know, you have to go, yes, I am inordinately attached and irrationally attached to this person.

1:07:21That's what having a kid is. But you also have to cultivate this kind of, you have to go, yes, but like their job is not a reflection of me. How they're doing in school is not a reflection of me. Them being depressed, obviously you're going to feel that, right? Yeah. But it's not your job or your place or in your power to make them undepressed, nor did you make them depressed, right? All you can do is be there and be of service to them. But if you as a parent think that you have the ability to control your kids in terms of make them what you want them to be or save them from the shittiness that is being a person, you've set yourself up either for unhappiness or - I think it's really hard too because it evolves as a parent.

1:08:14So when you have an infant, when you have a newborn, if that infant is hungry, that's the parent's fault. And if your two-year-old has a dirty diaper, that's the parent's fault. So you create this sense of everything about the child is relied on me. Their happiness, their unhappiness, it's all about me, the parent. But then as that child grows, then you have to detach yourself from that. And if your 25-year-old child is depressed, it might not be your fault whatsoever. But you still have that parental feeling of like everything that's going on in your life is a reflection of me, the parent. I think it's hard to evolve like that.

1:08:46Yeah, no. And that's like basic boundaries and codependence that you have to learn as a person. And the tricky thing is, yeah, because humans develop a good chunk of our development is outside the womb, but we're still fundamentally dependent, developing organisms, right? Like a horse that comes out and it can walk like 30 seconds later. Right. But for a kid, that's like two years. And so, yeah, when, when, when do they become the second person? Yeah. And I think, you know, if your idea is that that's 18, you done fucked up and you, you know what I mean? It's much, it's both earlier and later than you think.

1:09:28And this is probably why parenting a young teenager, like 12 to 14 is probably so difficult Because I think for a lot of people, that's the clear transition from child to young adult. And it's probably very hard for the parent to let go of the idea that I'm not responsible for your happiness anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And that actually I have to allow you to be unhappy. I have to allow you to fail. I have to allow you to experience the consequences of your actions. I have to allow you to feel and say things towards me that are - I don't want to hear. Incredibly painful and hurtful. and um yeah if you if you can't do that you are not only um first off you are uh you're just depriving them of the ability to do this and and you're not saving them from anything in fact you're just setting them up for uh intense pain and anguish later like doctor have you read dr becky's stuff no she wrote this book good inside she's incredible she's saying You know, parents, your job as a parent is not to preserve and protect your kid's happiness.

1:10:33It's to give them resilience and the ability to regulate and handle their own emotions. Yeah. And find out who they are. Yes. And so if no one's like, no one looks back and goes, my parents saved me from heartbreak and pain and trouble and self-discovery. and all the painful things in life. And I'm so grateful to them, right? It's the opposite. You're going to be 30 and be like, why am I experiencing this horrible thing for the first time? And it's like, I didn't develop the immunity for it. She even talks about this idea of emotional vaccination. You have to help them deal early on with exposure to these things so then they can regulate and do it themselves.

1:11:17And so, yeah, your job, your job is not to raise happy children. Your job is to raise well-adjusted children. And you can, you can use some version of that expression for pretty much everything that parents wrongly value. Your job is not to raise kids with good grades. It's to raise well-adjusted children. It's not to raise well-behaved children. It's to raise well-adjusted children. Like the whole point is to ideally raise a person who's well-adjusted, able to regulate their emotions, bounce back from failure, deal with things that are outside their control. It's just the whole suite of what allows humans to be humans.

1:11:56Actually, you have a great line in your book. You talked about prediction versus preparedness. So if you think your job is to predict all the terrible things that could happen to a person in life and to shield your kid from them, you're missing the point. To prepare them for that anguish. Exactly. The other way I've heard this phrase is your job as a parent is not to raise good kids. It's to raise good adults. Yes. Like that's the target. And you're going to raise a good adult. If as a child, that child can experience heartbreak and failure and et cetera, et cetera. You've written the book. Well, no, no.

1:12:26When I, when I sign copies of daily dad, cause the subtitle is 366 meditation on parenting, love and raising great kids. Usually when I sign it, I'll, I'll grab it and I cross out kids and I just write adults. Adults love it. Perfect. Because you're not trying to raise a kid. Like if you have, if you do this for 18 years or 20 years or whatever. If there's still a kid, again, you done fucked up. And everyone knows the 35 year old kid. Yes. And I think that can be a reflection on the parent of what the parents didn't let them experience. Yeah. You were supposed to raise a well-adjusted adult, not a kid.

1:13:00Not a kid. And age really after a certain point has nothing to do with whether someone is an adult or a kid, you know, a man or a woman or a child, right? Like it's about the suite of skills that you have and how you see yourself and how you hold yourself. And that ultimately is what you're supposed to do as a parent. I also see this. I mean, you will understand this. Every parent understands this. I have two kids raised by the same parents in the same household with the same rules, the same everything, and they could not be more different. Their personalities are 20 miles apart. And then, so you see so clearly like what is not in your control, What is nature nurture?

1:13:37They've been nurtured the exact same way and they are utterly different people. So then it's like, it's a humbling experience in a good way to realize like what's not in my control. What is just the genetic soup that they were born with that I can't control? Right. So if you're trying to raise two professional golfers or two, you know, executives to take over the family business, whatever, you're going to be sorely disappointed. You have to zoom out and go, what are the things that across the spectrum of humanity, different people, different cultures, different what are the things that happy, successful resilient people, what do they share in common?

1:14:16That's one of the few areas that you have a little bit of control or that's where you should spend your attention. Yeah, absolutely.

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