RWH059: Ask Me Anything w/ William Green

27:41I think as I've got older, there's less of a desire to show everyone and prove them wrong and all of that. although that's still part of my psyche, but there's probably more of a desire to be of service and help and in some way, hopefully to be a conduit for insights that'll help people. And that's a better place to come from, I think, than those negative emotions of anger and a desire to prove yourself and all the vulnerable ego that goes with it. But wherever you get your strength, That ability just to keep going, indomitable perseverance, I think is the single most important thread. I'm probably wrong here, but I don't think you could do without it.

28:31I mean, there are plenty of other things you need certainly to be a very successful investor. So you need a calm temperament probably to some degree, at least to be able to make rational, unemotional decisions about money. You need to be able to think probabilistically to calculate the odds and the like. You need to be highly intelligent. You need to be able to go against the crowd and to think for yourself. So you need a fierce independence. You need a weird mix of self-confidence to go against the crowd and yet the humility to check your decisions and to wonder if you're wrong and to be open to dissenting opinions.

29:12So in a way, there are conflicting characteristics there, the humility and the confidence. So there are so many things like that. You need to be fiercely competitive, fiercely driven, fiercely persistent. So in some ways, I sometimes think that the greatest investors are like a weird chemical experiment where so many things had to go right or just had to be in some weird balance for them to come out as they were. But I think it's helpful. Some of these qualities are not really clonable because they're probably part of your wiring and you probably can't necessarily just emulate them. But I think the awareness that you're going to fail, you're going to be wrong, you're going to make mistakes, you're going to look foolish at times, and yet you're going to have to persevere.

30:07I think just that simple awareness is quite helpful. So for me, when I look at my own career, I think indomitable perseverance, indomitable persistence has been the single most helpful quality that I've had. That would be my guess. So maybe I'm just projecting onto great investors, and I'm certainly not a great investor, but maybe I'm projecting onto them that I see they have to have that capacity just to keep going. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Most leaders are automating work they've never actually watched happen. They know how the process is supposed to go. Someone walked them through it once.

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33:31NetSuite Next is the next huge leap because now AI is built into everything you do. It surfaces custom insights throughout your day. AI agents work alongside you on the routine stuff. And anytime you've got a question about anything, you just ask, like you're talking to a colleague. And I use it. And really, I think you should too. For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenue is at least in the seven figures, go to netsuite.ai slash tip. Built for every industry, ready for every boardroom, netsuite.ai slash tip. All right, back to the show. I don't think it's just me observing this because I have this friend who I wrote about in the book, in the chapter called The Resilient Investor, Matt McLennan.

34:19And Matt said to me, I think I quote him, he had started off at Goldman Sachs for many years, and he was once wondering why the people who had done so well at Goldman had done so well, what they had in common. And he said much the same. He said what he'd learned over time was that it was just the, often it was just the people who didn't give up. They just kept learning, they kept evolving, they stuck to it, and they were willing to live through adversity. So yeah, the ability never to give up is key. But with the great investors, it's also, I mean, it's not just doggie at perseverance. It's also that the game itself is so fascinating that they don't stop.

35:03And so it's that element of obsession with cracking the code that I think they also have. All right, next question. This is from a listener called Eric Chen, lives in Hong Kong. And he says, I'm running my own hedge fund. And I'm a big fan of William's book, as well as Buffett and Munger. And he writes, Hi, William, you have interviewed and written about many great investors who have already become rich, wise and happy. And then he says, if you were to inquire into the period before they became rich, wise, and happy, was there any anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, or any other typical negative emotions felt by them?

35:43If yes, what's the common characteristic that you observe in this group of great investors to eventually overcome those negative emotions and get there? That's a very interesting question. And I think it's probably one that a lot of our listeners who are hustling to become very successful in their careers think about. And I think I would first, I would challenge one assumption in the question because Eric talks about how I focus on a lot of these investors who've already become rich, wise, and happy. But actually, I would argue that most of them don't have that trifecta of wealth, wisdom, and happiness.

36:22I think, as Charlie mentioned, when he read the book, he was very struck by how many of the great investors got divorced. and I think to be extraordinarily successful often requires a kind of extreme focus, almost a fanaticism that leads people to neglect certain other aspects of their life. So sometimes they become extremely rich, but not that wise. Sometimes they become extremely rich, but not that happy. It's difficult. It's difficult to have all three. There are a few people who I know who have all three, but they're a definite minority. So this question of whether they were dealing with these very difficult emotions before they became successful, like anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, and the like.

37:08Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the common denominators in pretty much all of the super, super successful investors that I've interviewed is that there was a great hunger in those early years. There was a great desire to make it, to make something of themselves, to succeed, to be independent. Think of Charlie Munger talking about his hunger for independence, the fact that what he and Warren wanted was not to be subservient to anyone, subordinate to anyone who could tell them what to do. They didn't want to be in some big hierarchical organization being told what to do. Think of someone like Mario Gabelli, who I've interviewed before.

37:54I wrote about him in The Great Minds of Investing and quoted him a little bit in Richer, Wiser, Happier, but not much. Mario came from a very poor background and really had this hunger for money. He was driven, I think, to make money and to prove himself. And he was an information hound, as he put it to me. He wasn't super intellectual, was very highly intelligent, wasn't interested in reading books or novels or anything like that. I would say he had no interest in wisdom as far as I could make out, but he had a great deal of hunger to get ahead. Think about someone like Will Danoff, who I wrote about in Richer, Wiser, Happier.

38:34There's a wonderful story that I think is tucked away in a footnote that I love telling of when Will went, I think, to an analyst meeting in Phoenix, Arizona decades ago when he was a young investor and Bill Miller, who became a close friend of his, was a young investor. And someone introduced them. And Bill Miller told me that he stretched out his hand and said, Hi, Will. Nice to meet you. I'm Bill. And he said, Will Danhoff didn't stretch out his hand and just said, I'm going to beat you, man. I'm going to beat you. And so I think that kind of competitive spirit, that sort of fire was always there very early on, this desire for success for recognition.

39:16And Will Danoff talks about how one of his shareholders many years ago sent him a photo. It was a couple sent him the photo of their young child, their baby, who had just been born, I think, and said, you know, this is who you're managing money for. And so I think he's done a great job of really keeping that idea front and center, remembering the idea that there's an element of service here, but there's still a great competitive spirit. I something along the lines of, frankly, I care more. And I love a phrase like that, I care more, because it's three monosyllabic words, and yet, boy, do they have a lot of power to them.

39:58There's a sort of essential truth to them. So where does that sense of care come from? I mean, some of it's a desire to serve. Some of it, sometimes in many of these cases, is a desire for money or a desire for recognition or independence. I remember Bill Ackman talking to me once about how he just really wanted to have money so that he could say what he wanted, do what he wanted, think what he wanted, you know, a real desire for a sort of bristling hunger for independence. And so I'm not really celebrating these characteristics. I'm not saying, oh, this is what you should be like. I don't think always those characteristics, that kind of hunger and fire and intensity is a recipe for happiness.

40:45There's a dissatisfaction and a drive often to the most successful people. I'm just sort of describing what I think is, what I think just I observe a lot. And I think part of the subtext of Eric's question, if I'm understanding correctly, is, you know, we're all dealing with our doubts and our anxieties and our frustrations as we try to get our careers airborne and become really successful. And so in a way, I think it's very helpful to know that these super successful people, you know, yeah, sure, some of them probably started with this kind of very unusual self-confidence, but I think a lot of them, a lot of them went through difficult times.

41:30A lot of them had very lucky breaks and ended up just in positions where things sort of broke right for them. I don't know. I mean, I also, I was very struck once, a story that Arnold Vandenberg's son, Scott, who became president of his company, Century Management, once told me where Scott looked at Arnold, who had built a very successful life in so many ways, professionally, but also personally. And Arnold is a good example of someone who's rich, wise, and happy. And Scott said to him, I think Scott was sort of struggling early in his career, as soon as 20s, maybe 30, that sort of thing. And he said something to Arnold about, was it hard for you?

42:13And Arnold, who's incredibly honest and had started with absolutely nothing and had an incredibly difficult early life, talked to him about in the early days of setting up his investment firm, just putting his head down on his desk one afternoon and just sobbing. So I think it's helpful to know that these people, it wasn't just handed to them. They had to struggle too. It was difficult. And so how you overcome those negative emotions, I don't know. I mean, we've talked a lot in various episodes of the podcast, particularly my quarterly discussions with Stig Brodersen about how to deal with difficult emotions.

42:50I had an episode of the podcast, one of my favorite episodes of my podcast, where I talked to Daniel Goleman and this great Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, Sokny Rinpoche, about dealing with difficult emotions. I would definitely encourage people to go back and listen to that. But then Eric, in writing this question, also asked the second part of the question, which is, if you were to inquire into their mental state after they have already made it, what is the one reason that keeps driving them to become richer, wiser, and happier? And that's a really interesting question, I think. I had a very interesting dinner a few months ago with a famous investor in his 80s.

43:30He has an incredible record. He's a formidable guy. And he was talking a bit about maybe setting up a new firm, having already set up very successful firms in the past. And I said to him, why not just manage your own money? I mean, this guy has already made huge amounts of money, clearly doesn't need the money. He's got a great reputation. And he just answered in one word, he said, competitive. I thought that was really fascinating that someone who's been as successful as him just can't help it. He's just competitive. And I like this guy a lot. He's a very nice man. But I think these are often kind of dysfunctional people harnessing this intense drive and desire for competition, victory, better returns, more money.

44:23And that's fine. I'm not knocking any of this. And again, I'm not saying this critically. I'm not saying this is what you should be like. I'm just trying to describe what it is I see. Um, what I would say about the ones who are wisest and happiest is that they've managed to take that tremendous desire and transform it in some way to benefit other people. And if you look at the description of Arnold Vandenberg in the epilogue of the book, you see that he is a guy who overcame unbelievable difficulty, unbelievable pain, anger, disappointment, rage, or, you know, he couldn't have had a worse start to his life.

45:13And yet he's become this extraordinarily kind, decent, loving, sharing person. And I think that points at something really important, which is that he's just looking out for other people. He's trying to lift up other people. And so I think there's this great paradox here that, To be extraordinarily successful, I do think you have to have that desire, that intensity of desire. But to be happy, it really helps if you're focused on taking care of other people, looking after other people. And in many ways, Monish Pabrai, who I write about in chapter one of the book, is a very good example of this.

45:52He's taken his strange ability to sit on his own in a room and assess probabilities and make bets. And he's used it to set up Dakshana, where he's lifted thousands and thousands of really talented, really smart kids from really underprivileged families out of poverty. And that's a really beautiful thing to observe. And he's done a tremendous amount of good. He talks about infinite good as a goal. and it's pretty clear to me from my conversations with Manish over the years and from traveling with him in India to go visit those students, the Dakshana scholars, that the thing he loves most, the thing that gives him the most joy in his life is actually when he goes to visit those families of the scholars in India.

46:41And so that's interesting, right? You know, he has a zestful life. He loves making money. He loves investing. He's full of zest and pleasure and joy at the game of investing, but he hasn't lost sight of the fact that it's got to serve some grander cause for there to be some kind of flow of energy, I think, where it's not just about, look at me, I'm so important and I'm so smart and I'm so successful, but it's actually benefiting other people. I think there's an important clue in that when you see people like Monish, Arnold, or someone like Nick Sleep and Kay Sicario, who I write about in the book also, who quit the investment business at 45 and set out basically in the second half of their lives to give most of their fortunes away in a way that would help as many people as possible over the long term.

47:38That's interesting to me that those people seem happy. And likewise, someone like Tom Gaynor, who's very charitable and very kind and decent, the CEO of Markel, who I write about in the chapter on high performance habits. So I think we have to be quite clear headed about our intention here. And to be aware that the thing that's going to make us very successful professionally or financially is often something pretty dysfunctional, necessary, but pretty dysfunctional, which is that hunger and ambition and drive, maybe for recognition, maybe for independence, maybe for money, you know, to prove yourself to your mom or your teacher who didn't admire you or your sibling who, you know, seemed to be loved more, whatever it is, you can harness all of these negative emotions to be successful.

48:27But to be happy, I think there has to be on the whole this element of sharing, of focusing on others, of lifting up others. And that's very thought-provoking to me. So I think somehow part of my kind of proselytizing mission is to help people figure out that there's a way to have a truly rich and abundant life that includes that professional success, but that's also motivated pretty heavily by trying to help other people. Our next question is from a listener in Israel, who actually I know this is a lady named Inbal Meoz. And Inbal is an executive communication coach and consultant who helps people with public speaking and storytelling and strategic communication for leaders.

49:17And actually, when I gave my TEDx talk, she was a really key person in helping to coach me. And I was hugely grateful to her because one of the things that happened to me with my TEDx talk is that, I've talked about this occasionally, it was during, it was in the midst of COVID. And so I spoke in a theater in the Berkshires here in the US, and it could only be about a third full and everyone was wearing masks because of social distancing and the like. And I'd been at home sort of out of public life for a long time. And then suddenly I find myself sort of cast into this strange situation where I'm on a stage and I'm under these Klieg lights.

50:09And I tried to memorize my speech, but I was like really busy at the time. And about two minutes into the speech, I think I stumbled and kind of messed up what I was saying. and it kind of tipped me into this situation where I was like, oh my God, what was I going to say next? And I kind of froze. And amazingly, my daughter Madeline, who was about 20, 21 at the time, actually called out my next line from about 25 rows back and totally saved me. And there was something kind of deeply moving about the fact that I was kind of saved in this moment of embarrassment and shame when everything went exactly how I didn't want it to go, that Madeline came and kind of rescued me.

50:58And you don't see this in the video because Inbal very kindly edited it. And so, you know, you can't see this moment that for me is the most kind of profound and kind of moving memory of the thing. And so the TEDx talk has done really well, thankfully. But for me, almost the most memorable part of it is screwing up in public, having the worst, the thing I had dreaded happen, and then being saved by Madeleine, but then also being saved by Imbal. So I'm very grateful to Imbal on multiple fronts. And if you ever need someone to help you with speaking, with public speaking, or a TED talk, or a TEDx talk, she's really great, and let me know and I'll help put you in touch.

51:42So Inbao's question is, which of the principles you learned about from all your interviewees did you adopt in your personal life and how did it affect your life? That's a great question. And there are a few things that I've adopted in a big way, because I spent so much time with these people and with their ideas and trying to distill their ideas and share what seem to me most important, that I really have had a huge opportunity to incorporate them in my life. And I've not only written about them, but I've also spoken about them a lot in speeches and on podcasts and the like. So I really had a chance to pound in the things that are most important to me.

52:25So one of the things that had a really profound impact on me is this idea of the art of subtraction, the idea that at a time when most of us are really overly busy and there are so many inputs, there's so much noise, there's so much coming at us and life is faster and more complicated than it seems to have been ever before. I think in some ways the superpower is this ability to subtract complexity. And I've seen this again and again with the great investors that think of someone like Bill Miller, for example, who he really has simplified his life to a point where he's reading, he's investing, he's thinking, he's hanging out with his wife.

53:16He explained to me once, I always loved this story that someone had asked him if he could speak at a gala or gala, I think you would say in America. And he said, yeah, what's the dress code? And they said, black tie. And he's like, no, I threw out my tuxedo and I'm never buying another one. And I love that, that there's a kind of self-awareness, a slightly ornery self-awareness that has him say, no, I'm just not going to do it. I'm not going to do these things aren't right for me. And he, I remember visiting him at this home that he had in Maryland, and it had been decorated by his sister. And he had a home in Florida that had also been decorated, I think, by his sister.

54:00And he had a bulldog that he really loved because you have to have a bulldog if you want to bull market. And he had a beautiful sort of handsome portrait of the bulldog in his library at home. But his sister used to walk the bulldog often. He didn't even pump gas in his car. He didn't fly commercial. He hadn't flown commercial, I think, in 20 years or something. And yeah, it's fine to point out, well, it's all very well. If I was super rich, I would live the same way. But actually, the idea of subtracting complexity and focusing on what matters most is very, very replicable. And so watching someone like Bill had a big impact on me.

54:43But similarly, watching Monish, for example, who said basically that he's just sitting around with a very empty schedule, studying stocks, reading, playing some sports, biking, doing his philanthropic stuff. He would say he would go out for a meal with someone and if he didn't really enjoy it, he would be like, nope, never seeing them again. That's it. Didn't want to meet with prospective clients because he just didn't like, because he called it the mumbo jumbo of all that marketing stuff. So he didn't do that, even though it meant that he would raise fewer assets. So there was an element of kind of ornery self-awareness in just saying, I'm only going to do what matters most to me and what I'm best at.

55:32And so I've tried to be pretty clear-minded about sticking to what I'm best at and what I care most about. And at the same time, I fail totally a lot of the time to simplify my life because I take on too many things and then there's too much complexity. and it becomes really difficult. And so maybe the fact that I fail so much at the art of subtraction and actually practicing the art of addition or multiplication is one of the reasons why this idea is so important for me. And I think one of the things to combine with this is a hugely important idea that I write about in the chapter on Nick and Zach, which is this idea of destination analysis, which I only write about relatively briefly, which they applied to picking stocks, right?

56:21So they would look at companies like Amazon and Costco, and they would say, here's a desirable destination for this company in 10, 15, 20 years. What are the inputs to get them there? And then they would work backwards and say, well, is the company treating its shareholders right? Is it treating its customers right? Is it allocating capital intelligently? Are they trying to please Wall Street or are they actually trying to create long-term value? right so you start with a desirable destination and then work back to study the inputs whereas as nick said to me most people are just focused on the outputs short-term outputs which is totally wrong and so when i'm thinking about what to subtract and what to focus on i'm constantly thinking about what the destination is and what the destination is in my life and so it's pretty clear to me for example that i don't want to be doing ephemeral stuff uh and i'm not knocking anyone else who does this everyone everyone has their own twist on how they want to live i'm not interested in pumping out a newsletter a subsect newsletter it's just not what i want to do i worked for weekly magazines for many years and i'm just not interested in pumping out lots of mediocre stuff.

57:35There are people who can pump out really good stuff and more strength to them. I couldn't. I have a kind of slow metabolism in so many ways. I'm much more interested in quality than quantity. And so I'm much happier to do 12, 14, 16 episodes of the podcast a year than I would be to do 24, 36, or 50 or so. I just couldn't bear it. I'm just not interested in maximizing output. And when I think about what I want to do by the end of my life, I look back and I think, okay, if I've done three books that I'm really proud of, that would be fantastic. So I've done one book that I'm really proud of. I mean, I've ghost written various books have been very successful in the light, but they're not really mine.

58:26I edited a couple of magazines where I worked with some amazing writers and I learned some skills and I had some very, very rich, interesting experiences around the world, but that's ephemeral, that stuff will be forgotten. So it's important to me that I write something really valuable and that really helps a lot of people and that's truthful and that's enduring. And that's a lot of pressure to put on myself. And so I think, you know, when I actually finally decide I'm going to write another book, it's a very big decision because it'll take over my life for much of a decade probably, including, you know, the planning, the writing, then the being out there talking about it.

59:06So destination analysis is really important for me. And when I think about what a really rich and happy life is, it's clearly got to have great relationships. And so that's been hugely clarifying for me in my study of the super investors is to realize the extent to which their relationships really drove their success and their happiness, the richness of their lives. And so that's also been very clarifying for me that I think in the years where I was really hungrily driving to get ahead and also just to survive in the very difficult world of magazine writing and magazine editing, I naturally underestimated the importance of relationships because I was so busy working.

59:58And I think I'm much less prone to do that now. I have much more of a keen awareness of how important it is for me to invest in my relationship. So that's been really key. And then the other thing that has affected my life hugely that I learned from great investors is Munger's idea of avoiding stupidity. That's become an extremely practical tool that I use constantly. And just the idea of really thinking about what not to do in any situation is hugely helpful. And then I think the other thing that's just become increasingly clear to me, not only from watching the happiest investors, but also from all of the more spiritual and philosophical stuff that I study, it's clearly hugely important to serve others and to help others.

1:00:55And I just think I wasn't that focused on it. I mean, I think I had an inherent sense of the beauty of something that was well done. Like I was deeply committed to quality. So when I wrote an article or I worked on a book as a ghost writer or as an author myself, I was deeply committed to doing as good a job as I possibly could. Same with speeches. Like I just really deeply care about quality being good. And it was, some of it was driven by a fear of being judged and, you know, having people think I was mediocre. and some of it was just driven by an inherent love of things that are beautifully done beautifully made but i don't think i had a keen sense of service i didn't really have a keen sense probably until pretty late in my 40s and maybe around 50 of just how important it is to take your talents and use them to help other people.

1:01:54And yeah, it's just much more obvious to a lot of other people. I don't know. It took me a long time to figure that out. And so again, watching and trying to reverse engineer the lives of very successful people and seeing where they fail and where they succeed and what makes them happy really made me focus a lot on things like the quality of their relationships, the quality of their commitment to a few simple habits that would compound and the removal of all the stuff that was ephemeral or unimportant or didn't play to their strengths. So I think that kind of ruthlessness about focusing on what matters most to you and focusing on what you're best at, that's been really, really helpful to me.

1:02:41Our next question is from a listener called Parin Mehta, who is an investor and board director, a VC, and an executive coach to founders and executives based in Singapore. And Parin asks, what is the single biggest challenge to overcome in today's world for anyone looking to apply the principles you identified in the Richer, Wiser, Happier book and your interviews? And I think this is related actually to what we talked about before about the artist's attraction, because I think the greatest challenge for me at least, and I assume for many of you, is this tremendous pressure to do more, to run faster, to be busier, the tremendous pressure to take in more inputs, more information, and somehow to find order and peace and clarity within this noise and this busyness and this speediness of everything.

1:03:41And so I think in some ways, the challenge becomes not only to subtract stuff and to decide what it is that's most important to you, but also to build habits that are going to develop peace of mind for you. And it was striking to me, actually, when I looked up Parin on LinkedIn, that he had written a post saying that he loves to walk in nature and to have conversations with people. hill, have these walking conversations. And he has this goal of walking 50 million steps in his forties, which he said is the circumference of the earth. And so Perrin is clearly understanding this himself, the importance of somehow finding spaciousness within the world of work.

1:04:23It's not, it's, look, a lot of us are ambitious, driven people, and we want to do a lot in our lives. So it's not like we're looking to opt out, but we need to inject more spaciousness into our lives. And I'm very intrigued by people like Laura Gerritz, for example, who I wrote about in the High Performance Habits chapter of my book, who is a very successful, very smart, very driven investor, a very good fund manager, who's extremely rigorous in her analysis and her research, but who regards the investment challenge as more like freestyle verse, as she puts it, free verse rather than just stilted prose.

1:05:11And she applies this mindset to the way she lives her life. So on Fridays, she'll have these very free form days where she'll often go sit by a stream with a journal and a book and she'll just read and think and gather her thoughts. And so it's a very cerebral, very peaceful way of approaching the investment game. But at the same time, she travels a tremendous amount and goes to visit enormous numbers of companies around the world. So she's working really intensely and really hard, but there is this sense of openness and freedom that's less rigid. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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1:09:23So I've never formally interviewed him at all. He's actually turned me down in the past for a formal interview. But we've become friends. And we were talking the other day about his meditation habit. And he was saying that he's probably meditated for 20 ,000 hours over the years. And he was talking about what a tremendous advantage that's been, that it's helped him to run this big company with billions of dollars in assets under management, because he said he would have been able to run a company maybe with three people if he hadn't meditated, but to run a bigger company and to be really present, the meditation has been invaluable.

1:10:03And you feel that when you're in his presence, like there's an openness to his manner, a spaciousness to his manner, and a centered quality to the way he is in a conversation that I could see as a very rare and unusual characteristic in a busy, intense, hugely competitive business like the investment business. So I think part of it for me is that when I see people like that, who are able somehow to be very successful, very productive in the regular work world, and yet have a sense of spaciousness and calm, I think, okay, I've got to reverse engineer what they're doing. And so just spending time with him was one of the reasons why I sort of, I mean, I'm always committed to my meditation practice, but there are times where I'm more rigorous about it, or at least more excited about it than other times.

1:11:01And I found just in the last few days, I was much more excited and more purposeful about meditation, because I can see why I want to do it. And likewise, I think when I spent time with Dan Goldman, who I've interviewed on the podcast maybe three times, who's been meditating for 50 years and wrote this book, Altered Traits, about how meditation actually rewires you, rewires your brain. When I spend time with him, it also confirms for me, like, this is a hugely important practice. And to be as successful as he's been as a nonfiction writer and a coach and a psychologist and all of these things, but also is a really wonderful human being, can see that that's built, that his presence and his openness and his joyfulness is built on this practice of meditation that allows him to be very spacious.

1:11:51So I think for all of us in this world of just massive inputs, you know, this kind of cascade, this barrage of inputs, trying to figure out what to do with the gadgets, trying to figure out what to do with the screens, trying to figure out what to do about this compulsive desire to fill every space in our lives with checking something, doing something, and instead to be more thoughtful, more mindful about how to keep some of that space open. I think that becomes increasingly important. And the people who are thoughtful about it will have a tremendous advantage. And it's interesting to me that as people worry more and more about things like AI replacing humans in a lot of white collar jobs, these human skills, these deeply human skills and qualities become more important.

1:12:44And so things like intuition, things like being able to listen with real openness and real compassion, real presence to people, those human qualities become really more important because those are quite hard to replicate, I think. And there's a related question, which I think I can fold into this from a listener called Justin Miller, who's a process improvement manager for, I think it's pronounced the PULT group, but I may be mispronouncing that. If so, I'm sorry. And Justin wrote very generously over LinkedIn. He said, your interviews on the richer, wiser, happier podcast feel so intimate, insightful, and deeply human.

1:13:27When you're preparing to sit down with someone as complex and accomplished as Manish Pabrai or Howard Marks, what does your preparation process actually look like? How do you balance research with intuition so the conversation feels both deeply informed and genuinely alive? First of all, thanks so much, Justin, for those very kind comments. I think this very much relates to what I was saying before about deep presence that for me, part of the preparation for an interview, and I think this relates to any meeting and certainly to meetings with CEOs where you're interviewing them as an analyst say, part of what I'm doing is I'm obsessively and relentlessly preparing as much as I can, given the pressures on my time, but I tend not to be able to help myself.

1:14:14I just sort of work really intensely on preparing for interviews. So I do as broad research as I can. I read as many articles. I go through my old interviews with the person if I've interviewed them before. I listen to other podcasts that they've done. And I'm looking for things that probably most people aren't looking for that are curious to me. Like before I interviewed Bill Nygren, for example, I was very intrigued. I knew that he answers certain questions the same way usually, and so I was really trying to get away from that. And so I was looking for ways of talking about his childhood experiences, his youthful experiences that would sort of be some kind of key to unlock who he was.

1:15:02And so there's deep preparation, there's intense preparation. But then having Having done that preparation, there's a kind of letting go. So I'll go into the interview typically with about eight pages of questions that I've whittled down that morning or the night before from about 16 pages. So there's an initial process of great breadth, then there's a synthesis and a distillation, and then there's a sort of further synthesis and distillation. And I can just about manage to get my head around seven or eight pages of questions during an interview. so I sort of have a sense of where I'm going. But then having got all that in a Microsoft Word document and having a general sense of where the interview is going, there's always a kind of arc, there's a sort of thematic structure, and sometimes some sort of chronological structure as well to the interview.

1:15:57Then I have to have the presence of mind actually to change direction totally once I'm actually in the interview. And so this gets back to the question of how are you going to develop this ability to be deeply present in any conversation? And I think the art of listening, it's definitely helped by things like meditation, because maybe there's a little less noise in your head. It's also just helped by deep curiosity. I mean, I'm just really interested in the people I'm listening to. And there's a sense of flow when I'm in an interview where I'm so engaged in the topic, I'm listening so intensely.

1:16:39But it's a strange process being in an interview because there's a part of my brain that's always looking at the questions and thinking about where I'm going next. And simultaneously, I'm present and listening to them as they're answering and figuring out where they're going to end and how I can follow that in any direction. So I might have about four or five different directions that I can go in as they approach the end of what they're saying so that I know how to follow up. And so in a way, it's like I'm perched there very calmly in that present moment, waiting to see, oh, this is the direction I've got to go.

1:17:22Oh no, I'm going to go in this direction. And so there's a deep trust in your own intuition and your ability just to shift direction. And I do think this very much relates to analysts and fund managers interviewing CEOs, because I had this conversation with a friend of mine a few months ago over lunch, because I was preparing to give a speech on the art of interviewing. And so I was asking my friend for insights about how he interviews CEOs. And he talked about interviewing a famous CEO who said to him, there's magic in small teams. My friend said he had so many questions to ask that were already in his notepad that he just moved on.

1:18:13And he said, when a guy as famous as this tells you there's magic in small teams, he's like, you drop everything and you just go with him in the conversation. And he was really frustrated with himself that he didn't have the presence of mind in that moment to do that. And it changed the way he would approach interviews with CEOs afterwards. He really made sure to be, yes, very well prepared, but also willing to drop his preparation and go with that person in any direction. And I think one thing that's been helpful for me on this front is just listening to people who are really, really great at this.

1:18:55And so I just do this with everything I'm trying to be good at. This habit of cloning that I write about in the book with Monish, where you're studying people who are really good at something and you reverse engineer it. And so one of the people I listen to pretty obsessively is Terry Gross, who's hosted this show Fresh Air on NPR for many decades and is a wonderful interviewer. And so I listen to her podcast very regularly. and there are moments where I mean obviously she's very well prepared and she has a team that I assume helps her producers and the like but she's so calm and so present and so relaxed having done this for many decades and just being great at it that sometimes a person will say something surprising in an interview and she just goes with them she always goes with them and there are moments where I literally find myself saying out loud, nice question, Terry, because I see it's sort of like just noticing someone who's a grandmaster in your profession and realizing, ah, she nailed that.

1:20:02So this question, I think, of how you develop presence and spaciousness in a really speedy world is an important one. And one of the things that's been helpful to me, actually, are the teachings of Sokni Rinpoche, who I had on the podcast with Dan Goldman. He's a great Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, and they wrote a book together called Why We Meditate, which isn't the best title. It doesn't really reflect the book that much, which is a very good book. But I think Sokni is extremely good at figuring out how to settle the body so that you bring your energy down so that you're grounded and so you can be present.

1:20:43And so there are these different types of breathing, for example, like where you can breathe so that the energy is kind of below your belly button, things like that. And I don't know, this stuff can sound pretty satiric and it might sound like I'm going off to the deep end, but Arnold Vandenberg sent me a very long document a few days ago all about breathing, that he's assembled an enormous amount of information on how to breathe. And so this ability through different techniques like breathing exercises, meditation, tai chi, yoga, whatever it might be, that enable you to be grounded, centered, and open at a time that's anything but grounded and anything but centered, anything but focused, that is hugely, hugely valuable.

1:21:33And I believe will become increasingly valuable. The next question comes from a listener named Tyler, whose second name I'll withhold just out of respect. I don't know whether he wants me to share his identity or not. And he writes, Hi, William, I'm a huge fan of your book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, and your podcast. Your questions, guests, and views on life have really influenced me for the better. I try my best to meditate and stay calm through the storm, so thank you for everything you do. I have one question for you. I know you've spoken about this, but I wonder if you have any advice for me or anyone else who might be going through something similar.

1:22:08I'm a video editor who currently works in unscripted TV in Los Angeles. You may or may not know, but the Hollywood industry is crumbling, and many people have been out of work for months or even years. People say I'm good at the job, but I'm finding it harder and harder to find work. On top of that, I'm a new dad. My wife and I had our first child. If you want to see her, I would gladly send you a pick. So I'm starting to get extremely anxious, worried and possibly scared about providing for my family during industry change. I know you went through something similar when you lost your job at Time Magazine and publishing went down and never really recovered, but you adjusted and were able to write some of your best work.

1:22:47So I have three questions for you. One, did you have similar emotions to me that I'm having right now? What did you do to keep your emotions in check? Two, would you suggest perseverance or pivoting when the industry you work in declines or changes? I love the work I do. It's the only work I've done. But in some ways, because of the new family, I could see myself doing something else too that's completely different. Three, how did your family react to the change when you were working for time? Were they worried as well? Please let me know. Thank you. This is a wonderful question. And I got this question a couple of weeks ago from Tyler, and I started thinking about it really a lot and thought this alone was a reason to do this podcast episode because these are such important questions.

1:23:34And so, yeah, back in 2008, the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers went under, the journalism world was getting pummeled at the same time, partly because of the internet, partly because advertising had fallen off as business moved towards the internet. And, you know, Time Inc., where I worked, had also done this catastrophic merger with AOL that had destroyed enormous amounts of value. And so for various reasons, and because I was extremely expensive, because I was editing the European, Middle East and African edition of Time. So for various reasons, as the company was sort of in trouble, I got laid off.

1:24:17And it was very shocking for me because I felt like I was very good at my job and I had worked ridiculously hard and I was really obsessed with the work. And I kind of loved the work, the editing, working with amazing writers and amazing photographers and designers. And we had this incredible team and I was deeply committed to it. And it was, in some ways, just a hugely satisfying, interesting job. You would go off and you'd interview presidents and prime ministers, and you could get almost anyone to write for you. It was just an amazing time. And so then when I got laid off right in the middle of the financial crisis, probably around September, October 2008, it was a huge part of my identity.

1:25:01But there was also a great deal of uncertainty because I was living in a beautiful home in Belgravia in London that was largely paid for by Time, and they sent my kids to private school. And I'd been living abroad for quite a long time because previously I'd been in Hong Kong for five years editing the Asian edition of Time for a while, and before that being the deputy editor. So I hadn't been in America for many years, and so I didn't really know where I should live. I had young kids who were in school and I didn't really know what to do. And I didn't want to mess up their lives by yanking them out of their expensive private schools and stuff.

1:25:38And so my industry was sort of collapsing and I was really good at it. And it was like, but wait, the thing I'm good at, what am I supposed to do? It's just not needed or I'm not needed because I'm too expensive. And I was young, or at least it feels like I was young in retrospect. I think I was 40. So now I'm 56. So yes, it was very painful. So the first thing I would say, Tyler, is, yeah, I feel your pain. I mean, it was very difficult. And I remember calling home. My boss at the time called to tell me that I was being laid off. And I called home and my son, Henry, literally projectile vomited in the living room of our home in London.

1:26:23And so it was very intense. And, you know, we were a very close family and we talked about everything. We didn't hide stuff. And so it was painful to sort of feel that, you know, my screw up in some way, you know, my failure was going to have this terrific effect potentially on my family. And so I think part of what you deal with, and, you know, was it my screw up? I don't know. Yeah, I definitely could have sucked up more to bosses and I can be more political. I was never very good at that stuff. But I don't think I, you know, I think I just got swept up in a bigger wave, as I think is happening now with a lot of people with AI and various other technological changes that are hitting the workplace.

1:27:06And so I think the first thing is that sense of shame, and that sense of failure, and that sense of embarrassment and sort of humiliation, that's really understandable. And first of all, I'm really sorry, Tyler, that you're going through this and other people are going through it. It's painful. It's really painful. I think part of the issue is that our identities are so wrapped up in our work, especially if you're driven and you're good at what you do and you work really hard. It's very difficult not to identify yourself with the job. And so I remember doing an episode of the podcast, I try to remember, yeah, it was with Brad Stolberg who wrote this book, Master of Change.

1:27:48It's an interesting book and we had a very interesting discussion. Part of what Brad says is that you need to diversify your sense of identity. So we kind of need multiple identities in a way. It's like you're a father, you're a husband, you have your spiritual life, you have your social life, you have your work, you have philanthropy, whatever it is, your sports, your interests. And so I think part of what was difficult for me was I was so locked into one identity. So I think Brad is right that it's very helpful to not just see yourself as your job. He would talk about different rooms in the house that need to exist and be decorated as well.

1:28:33So I think that's part of it. Part of it is having self-compassion and looking at the fact that you go through this and being like, yeah, we suffer. And this was always the case. There's always been creative destruction and industries have always gone through this sort of change. So, you know, there's a very good book called the Self-Compassion Workbook that Kristen Neff, a researcher at the University of Texas, co-wrote. And part of self-compassion, as I understand it, is recognizing that other people go through the same thing. You know, so part of it is the self-awareness to see what you're going through and to see how it expresses itself in the body and other ways.

1:29:16And just recognizing it, part of it is things like, you know, self-care, like she would talk about sort of, you know, stroking your arms, stroking your face, you know, things like that, like comforting yourself. And so sort of recognizing or acknowledging your suffering, but also looking at other people's suffering and being like, yeah, this is the human condition. This happens, it happens to other people. And I think part of my sense of humiliation was that it seemed kind of unfair that I would see other people who I didn't think were necessarily as good at their jobs, had kept their jobs and were doing fine.

1:29:50And here was I, who'd done my job so well, and I was kind of drowning. And so there was a sense of both embarrassment and unfairness. And so that was hard. So I think recognizing that, yeah, we just go through things, that this is hard. There are periods where this happens. That was helpful for me. But one of the things that was really helpful to me was really to use this setback to think hard about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be. And so instead of just falling into a sense of victimhood and persecution and unfairness, which was really not very helpful. Charlie Munger would always talk about the perils of self-pity and envy.

1:30:41He didn't like to compound the problem by falling into self-pity. And so I didn't want to just see myself as a victim. And I had started studying Kabbalah, which was incredibly helpful, a couple of weeks before this all fell apart. And one of the great teachings, I had a great teacher then who I still have now as a great teacher, a guy called Eitan Yardeni. I remember walking into the Kabbalah Center in London and he said to me, how are you doing, William? And I said, I'm great, except I just got laid off. And he sort of raised his arms and he's like, such a blessing. And it took me several years to realize that it was such a blessing.

1:31:20And so I really had to focus on saying, okay, as Tony Robbins would say, life happens for you, not to you. And so whether this is true or not, I had to act as if it was true and say, all right, I'm going to try to rebuild my life on a better foundation. I'm going to assume that in some way I needed this to happen and try to figure out how to build a life that was closer to what I want to be. And I think one of the things that I realized subsequently is that, yeah, I was a really good editor, I think. I'm sorry if this sounds self-congratulatory. I'm just trying to be honest and think aloud and share what I'm thinking in an honest way.

1:32:00I was a really good editor, but there were aspects of being an editor that I was actually really bad at, like managing up. Like I just don't have a lot of respect for authority. I'm pretty subversive. I don't, I was much more obsessed with quality and making things read beautifully or look beautiful than any of the political stuff, which I just sort of neglected totally. And so something like this podcast where I'm really just free, thanks to my friend Stig Broderson, to do pretty much what I want to do, that's amazing for me. You guys who are listening may disagree, but I love being free to do my own thing and explore my own thing.

1:32:44And writing books is perfect for me because painful as it is and difficult as it is, you have tremendous freedom to explore your ideas. I mean, you still have an editor sort of hovering over you who can beat you up and might reject your book. But it suits me much more. It's like me sitting, thinking, reading, trying to figure out the truth and then trying to share it. If there is such a thing as truth, you know, trying to distill a lot of practical wisdom and then share it. That's very, very close to my purpose in life, I think. And so for me, there was almost like a decade-long process of moving closer to that sense of being aligned with who I really am.

1:33:30And that was a painful and difficult process that I had a lot of fear along the way, a lot of fear of like, what if I can't provide for my kids and my family? What if I'm never very successful? for. It was difficult. It requires courage and persistence and perseverance. The other thing in practical terms that I think is hugely important is in some ways to prepare for these periods of great change and uncertainty by living within your means and saving. Part of what helped me is I had no debt at all. I didn't even own my own home. I had this rented home partly because Time magazine was paying for a big chunk of it.

1:34:13But partly because I love the stock market and I had sold my house in New York so that I could invest and so that I could go work for Time in Hong Kong and then London. But it was very conscious because I had survived maybe five different rounds of layoffs. I sort of felt like I was always going to get laid off sooner or later, most likely. So I didn't have any debt and I had saved pretty seriously. I'd lived within my means. And I think that was hugely important. I think if you're really overstretched, you're forced to do things that you don't really want to do. And there was a period where I did some work that I really detested.

1:34:55I got a job at another magazine that I really disliked. I just really I disliked the culture. The work itself was interesting, but I didn't have control over it. And I think I need control. Personally, I want to have control. It's important for me because I don't want anyone compromising the quality, my view of what the quality is, even if my view is misguided. So the fact that I could leave that job, so I got laid off from one job, but then I quit the next job to go write books. that required courage, but it also required, in practical terms, having saved and lived within my means, not had debt.

1:35:33So that's really important, not to overreach. And this is very connected to what I write about Howard Marks in Richer, Wiser, Happier, about just not pushing the envelope, not overreaching, because you want to have that optionality that comes from living within your means, and I still have very little debt. But I think the other thing, you know, this idea of just trying to be much more deeply aligned with who you are is very valuable. And I would often think there was a beautiful teaching from this great Kabbalist, Rav Berg, who I started with, who passed away several years ago, who used to say that every day of your life, you should be asking, please show me the purpose of my soul and i think that's a really lovely idea to be trying to fulfill the purpose of your soul to say look there are particular talents that i have particular opportunities i have particular place where i was born people i knew an environment in which i operate um particular skills i have please help me to take advantage of those skills and do everything that I can to be a force for good in the world.

1:36:45And I think if you set your intention that way, whether you believe there's some greater force guiding you, or whether you're just talking some deeper part of yourself, whatever it might be, I think that's a really helpful mindset, is to set that intention to be a force for good, to help other people, to be of service, but also to use your own skills and talents and opportunities for the best there's a beautiful hebrew word that i i often quote which is lishma which as i understand it this from a great sage called ravash like he would talk about how you want to give pleasure to your creator so this idea of lishma is like you know please help me to give pleasure to my creator like so you tyler you you're a father, you have particular skills in terms of video editing, but you have to ask yourself, what am I really built for?

1:37:48What do I really love? What are the talents and interests that I had in my youth, for example? And for me, the investing thing had always been something in the background. I had written a lot for magazines like Money and Forbes and Fortune and Time and The Economist, all of these places I'd, over the years, and later Barron's and the like. So I'd always interviewed famous investors throughout, like even when I was at Time Magazine, I would interview famous investors and I'd write an occasional column. But it wasn't front and center what I did. I mean, I was an editor of general interest stuff.

1:38:23Like I loved editing the art section of the International Editions of Time where I would get these amazing writers to write reviews of fiction and the like. It was an incredible thing to be able to hire people like Pico Ayer to write book reviews. I mean, I was an English literature graduate from Oxford. I wasn't a financial analyst. But when I started to explore different things that I could do when my career fell apart a bit in 2008, 2009, I could look back at this thing that I'd always been interested in, deeply interested in investing, but that had become kind of a secondary thing. And it became much more prominent.

1:39:04And I think often what you have to do is combine things that don't necessarily seem to go together. So I think for me, part of what was really beautiful and fruitful was that I was an English literature student who was really deeply interested in spirituality and philosophy and the like. And then when I came back to look at investing and I went and interviewed a lot of these great investors, I was sort of able to combine those interests. So I was looking at them as practical philosophers. And so I had a different perspective. So I think sometimes it's combining things is very fruitful. And then I think you also really need kind friends who help you and steer you towards opportunities.

1:39:52So one of the things that happened to me is I started off ghostwriting a book after I quit my job in 2009 or 2010 that I hated. And I then started working on Guy Spears autobiography with him. I helped him on that. And then Jason Zweig, this old friend of mine who I'd worked with at Money Magazine many years ago, who's a great writer for the Wall Street Journal had been offered this opportunity to write what became The Great Minds of Investing, and The Wall Street Journal wouldn't give him permission. And so he recommended me, and that led to me doing that. And then a really nice guy, Dan Roth, who works as the editor-in-chief at LinkedIn, it was a very important job at LinkedIn, recommended me to a famous person whose book I ghost wrote.

1:40:42And that was kind of a huge thing. It was like a number one bestseller. And I wasn't on the cover of the book or anything, but it was a very valuable experience. And I wrote two books for that guy. And then I was writing my own book. And so it all came from relationships and the kindness of other people. And so I think that's also one of the lessons is that we kind of need to be there for other people when they're struggling. Because you know, I was really helped by people who sent opportunities my way. I mean, Jason Zweig and Dan Roth and Guy Spear, all of these people really had a profound impact on my life.

1:41:21And even then, when it came time to write Richer, Wiser, Happier, Guy's publisher from Power Grave Macmillan was this lady, Laurie Harting, who I then asked to recommend agents and she recommended Jim Levine, who became my agent for the book, is an amazing agent, incredible agent, who represents all these people like Howard Marks and Ray Dalio and lots of famous businessmen and investors and authors. And so everything has been built on the kindness and generosity and help of other people. So I don't know, I hope there's something in there that's helpful. I think of all those things that I've sort of thrown at you, and sorry if I've been overly self-referential and overly candid, of all the things, I think that idea of using this as an opportunity to become more closely aligned with really who you are is a very powerful process.

1:42:23And if you can do that with the hope of helping other people, that's really powerful. And at the same time, I think, you know, have self-compassion as you deal with the emotions. It's like, yeah, there's fear. Yeah, there's shame. There's sadness. There's regret. There's a sense of unfairness. There's a sense of, I mean, I had a real terror of like, what if I couldn't take care of my family? That was a huge thing for me. These are painful emotions. The other thing I would say is I really wanted to model being resilient for my kids. And they saw how challenging that period was. And I think when things worked out, thank God, and now I'm much happier than I was actually when I was at Time Magazine, really, thank God.

1:43:08I mean, Atom was right when he said, such a blessing, it has been a blessing. That blow of losing my job at time sent me in a much better direction. But I think deciding that I was going to try to model perseverance, determination, doing stuff with integrity, things like that. That was very helpful because when my kids saw that I turned things around, it was a way of saying, oh, well, okay, at least I can show them how to deal with adversity. And my adversity wasn't that great. There are much worse things that can happen in life. And I always think of that line from Neil Young, the singer who says, my problems are so meaningless, but that don't make them go away.

1:43:57So for me, these problems were big, but in the grand scheme, you know, they're nothing. But it was an example of trying to do what Charlie did, where he talks about adversity. If you see life's a series of adversities that give you an opportunity to either behave well or badly. I'm sort of proud of the fact that I approached that period with courage. And here in the same way that Bill Miller said to me, he was proud of how he dealt with the setback of the financial crisis where so much went up in smoke for him. But he said, I didn't curl up like a tortoise and stop investing. He still found incredibly cheap stuff that then became the basis of this extraordinary rebound.

1:44:42And so I think to model resilience and to model courage and to model grace under fire, especially as you have a young child. That's a beautiful thing. And so anyway, I wish you lots of strength during this difficult period. On a very different note, our next question comes from a listener in Brussels who works for an investment firm in Brussels, and his name is Arno Swayers. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, Arno. And he sent me a message over LinkedIn saying, if you were young again, how dare you? If you were young again, how would you invest your money? Would you be more concentrated? It's a really interesting question.

1:45:25I think actually, in many ways, the smartest thing to have done would have been just to index and then forget about it. And just to say, okay, I'm going to put my money, all of it in the Vanguard, you know, total market stock fund and the Vanguard international index fund, you know, so two, and I have over many years, I owned those for many years. I think that's a pretty good default position. It's what I would often do for my wife's accounts and for my kids' accounts is just split them between a US total stock market index fund and a foreign stock market index fund, and then just stay fully invested in those and fully fund my 401k or my IRA, which I did do, I always did that very thoroughly, and then just not move around.

1:46:23And the reason I say that is partly because of an insight that the aforementioned Jason Zwei shared with me many years ago, where I said to him, look, basically, you're one of the few people who actually could beat the market because you've interviewed, like me, so many of the great investors. And so you have a sense of who's really good. And yet you've ended up really almost exclusively just indexing. And I was like, basically, you're so smart, you've come up with the wrong solution. And so we would have this debate over the years. And one of the things that Jason said to me that rings true is that a big problem with actively managed funds is that things change, that something goes wrong with the institution or something goes wrong with the fund manager, with their health or with their marriage, or they take on too many assets, so it becomes bloated, or they fight with their partner or, you know, there are so many institutional things that can go wrong.

1:47:25So even if they're good, which is hard, I mean, we know this is a very hard game. There are still so many reasons why they're unlikely to succeed. And so I think that's the first thing is to have a foundation. And this is very idiosyncratic. And I don't know even if I fully agree with myself, but I'm sharing these ideas and you can make of them what you will. I think to have as a foundation, a big chunk of your money in index funds, a significant amount. I mean, Howard Marks said to me that most investors should have most of their money in index funds. I think that makes sense. But the real thing, and look, I mean, I'm totally committed to investing in actively managed funds.

1:48:14I can't help myself. So I may, you know, I have a bunch of retirement money and the like, and a bunch of my wife's money is in index funds. But I still, you know, my heart is in concentrated value-oriented funds that are very contrarian, tend to find a few missed priced bets and snap them up at really opportune moments and then hold them for a very long time. That's sort of where my heart is. I think that's a really beautiful approach. And that is the essence of what I've tried to do, although I don't do it myself. I farm it out to people I trust who I think are really good at that. But there is the problem of how long will they do it?

1:48:53So I try to find people who have a long runway, who are experienced and have a long runway, but things change them. And what if it doesn't succeed? So I think that's one of the biggest problems actually that I've encountered is over the course of a really long investment career, 30, 40, 50 years, what are you going to do with the fact that a lot of these people who you're betting on are not going to stay at their prime? And so even if you made the right choice, what are you going to do when they retire, when they get sick, when they get divorced, when they take on too many assets, all of these things, when they leave the firm, when there's a fight?

1:49:34I think that's a real problem. But the other thing I would say is the real mistake that I've made more often than not, that was really harmful along the way that I wish I had understood earlier, is that it's absolutely not necessary to be in a hurry. And I think there were things that I did when I was overreaching because I was greedy or I wanted to get rich quickly that really turned out to be a mistake. And so, for example, while I was living in Hong Kong, I invested in two private companies run by a friend of mine who's very smart and very charismatic, but I think in retrospect turned out to be pretty dishonest.

1:50:17And those were a total disaster. And I wasn't really equipped to analyze them. Then I invested in another private company with a relative who's incredibly smart and talented, and that was a disaster. And I think, could I just continued to plug away with my boring stock funds? There was one stock fund that I, well, it was a separate account that I had with a famous investor, should just have stuck with, but he got old and he wasn't doing well and his head wasn't in the game. So there was a problem with the change, that something changed and this great investor ceased to be a great investor. But I still should have just stayed in the market and not been in a hurry to invest in private companies, which I just wasn't equipped to do.

1:51:05If I have any competitive advantage, and I may have none at all, I may just be deluding myself. It's that I know a lot of great investors. And I'm probably a reasonable judge of character and talent and temperament, maybe not great, but reasonable. And so it makes sense for me to outsource to people who I think are really talented, and then just not move, not do anything else, just stick with it, not to get tempted off the path of just investing in stocks and not moving away into private companies and the like, because I felt important or I felt like part of the in crowd or because there was a chance of making an enormous amount of money quickly.

1:51:50That was a mistake. But I think in some ways, if you stay in the game and you really don't screw up massively. If as Gandhak would say, your mistakes are non-fatal, it's pretty forgiving because I was very conscious of not doing anything that if it went so badly, it would destroy me and knock me out of the game. So yeah, I lost some money along the way by making stupid private investments, but it wasn't money that I couldn't really afford to lose. I would have had much more money if I hadn't done it. But I think the broader point is, it's very hard to understand viscerally when you're young, what compounding at 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 % actually does.

1:52:38And I remember Francis Chu, a great Canadian investor, once saying to me, I was talking to him about exactly this subject, and he's like, oh, 10 % is enormous. Something along those lines are slightly misquoting him. But over time, 10 % a year compounded over decades is fabulous. And so there's no need to do anything spectacular that blows you out of the water. So it's not really in answer to your question that I would be more concentrated. I still am a great believer in concentration. I would actually be very diversified with a chunk of my money in index funds, which I did, but I would just stick with stocks and not overreach and not try to do anything crazy and not try to be in a hurry and just understand just the importance of resisting all of the temptations to do something stupid and to be in a hurry.

1:53:32But it was difficult at the time, partly because when I made a couple of those private investments, the stock market, at least when I made one of them, the stock market had just gone nowhere for like a decade. And so you start to think, well, maybe the way to make money is in these private companies, because here are all these people I know who've done really well. So it's really hard not to get lured away from just this very plain vanilla straight thing. The other thing I would say is the key, I think, in retrospect, or at least a key, is just to get the big things right. So if you live within your means, and you keep adding to the pot and you keep your fees and expenses down and you keep taxes down and you take full advantage of 529 plans and 401k plans and IRAs and all of these things, and you just add to the pot year in, year out, you will do well.

1:54:28And that has proven to be the case over more than three decades. And so despite all of my stupidity and all of my mistakes and all the ways I was tempted to get into private companies that I didn't understand, it still worked out pretty well so far. And it's difficult because you do sometimes want to roll the dice. And so, I mean, there was a time where I wrote a profile of Bill Miller for Fortune that's probably an eight or nine page profile back in 2001, where I was really focusing on the fact that he had bought 15 % of Amazon. and almost everyone thought he was nuts. And I could see that it was kind of brilliant.

1:55:13And the stock had come down from 90 to six. And I had huge admiration for Bill. I was spending a lot of time with him and I didn't buy it. And so, you know, partly that was because I didn't really, you know, it would have been a conflict of interest. And so I had to wait a bit because I wrote the story for Fortune. I would have had to wait several weeks before I was allowed to buy it. And I didn't have much free money at the time. I had a young child, maybe two young kids by then. And so I didn't have a lot of spare cash. And so sometimes you actually do want to take the risk. And then similarly, a few years ago, when I was working on Rich, Wise, Happier, and I interviewed Bill, he told me I should be buying Bitcoin.

1:55:53And it was at like 8 ,000 or 10 ,000 or 12 ,000 or something. And I was like, there's no way I'm buying this useless thing that I don't even understand how to buy it. And I don't understand technically how to buy it and I don't understand what it is. So I don't know, my belief in staying out of trouble and surviving by not overreaching and doing things I didn't understand, in general, that's been a good thing. But it would have been good if I had violated those principles and bought Amazon and bought Bitcoin. But look, Look, I might have followed Bill and bought lots of those financial companies that were getting killed during the financial crisis, and he was wrong on that occasion.

1:56:35So it's difficult. I think you have to make an array of kind of rational investments where if you're wrong, it's not going to destroy you. So as Jeffrey Kandlack said, ask yourself, what's the consequence if I'm wrong? And so the mistakes I made, thank God, didn't kill me. I learned from them. and generally over time, if you just keep funding those accounts and you just keep plugging away, this is a really beautiful game and it's very rewarding. And it's been kind of joyful because not only did I learn about the world and investing in markets, but I got to learn from all of these great investors about how they think and how they live.

1:57:20So it's just been a very rich experience. So I'm very aware of the fact that I've talked way too much and have failed entirely to answer many of the questions that you guys sent me. So I think I'm going to do this another time. I'll come back and do another episode because you guys sent me amazing questions and I want to come back and answer more of them. So maybe in six months or nine months or something like that, I'll do another Ask Me Anything. And in the meantime, I had promised, I think, at least in my head and possibly in public, that I was going to send a signed copy of my book, Richer, Why is a Happier, to someone whose question I answered here.

1:57:59And so I'm going to send a signed copy of the book to Tyler, the video editor, whose question, you can tell God under my skin. And so I'm going to ask Tyler of his address and I'll send him a copy of the book in California. And in the meantime, I'll be back very soon with more great guests. I've got some really interesting stuff lined up that I hope you'll enjoy. And I just wanted to mention one other thing, which is that I'm launching again my Richer, Wiser, Happier Masterclass, which I've been doing over the last year. It's a one-year course that's an opportunity to study with me. and we meet up once a month over Zoom and chat for a couple of hours about a chapter in the book and the themes in that chapter.

1:58:49And then we've met a couple of times in person, which has been really joyful. And it's been such a fun experience that I'm going to do this again. I'll put together the details soon. And this is something that I do charge for, but it's just been a really fun experience, partly because it's just for a very small group. The last year, I capped it at 20 people. I'm going to do exactly the same again. It's going to be a maximum of 20 people studying closely with me over the course of the year. And they're really amazing people. As I've mentioned occasionally in discussions about this in public, they tend to be fund managers, people managing family offices, CEOs, entrepreneurs, professional gambler in there, a very renowned theoretical physicist turned quant investor.

1:59:41So these are amazingly high quality people studying with me over the course of the year discussing these topics. And so if that sounds like something that would interest you, please write to my friend Kyle Greve, K-Y-L-E at theinvestorspodcast.com. And please add yourself to the waiting list. And hopefully the stars will align. We'll get to meet later in the year. But in the meantime, just thanks so much for all of your great questions. I really enjoyed looking over what's been on your mind and there's so much more to talk about. So keep the questions coming. I'll gather them up and I'll come back and talk about them more at another time.

2:00:21Thanks so much. Take care. Bye. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Richer, Wiser, Happier on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.