00:00:00
How important is this tariff situation? It has the potential to be the biggest economic story of our lives. People are
00:00:05
losing a lot of money on tariffs and you're probably a matter of weeks away from empty shelves. And there's a button on the president's desk that says, "End
00:00:11
it right now." So, can you tell me what a tariff is? I'll keep this very simple. Morgan Hel is the money mindset guru
00:00:17
who's shaking up everything you think about wealth and how to achieve it. I looked at the most Googled questions
00:00:22
around money and one of the most popular is how to achieve freedom financially. It is largely a mindset. You have an
00:00:28
obligation to understand how money works and how to manage it. And it's one of many topics in which you're going to learn the best by experiencing the
00:00:35
downside. And I'll come back to that. The next question is how to save money. So most people view saving money as it's
00:00:40
just wasted sitting there. But you need the cushion so that when the economy goes south and there is a recession, I want to have a level of control over my
00:00:47
ability to support my family. So how much money do you think it's sensible to have saved? This is a bad answer that no
00:00:52
one's going to like. But when you look at all these people through history that have generated great wealth, are there like certain strategies they've
00:00:59
deployed? One thing that virtually everyone listening to this could learn from is they were way more patient and had way more endurance than anyone else.
00:01:05
Also, I wanted to understand investing and this idea of compounding interest. So, compound interest is the most
00:01:10
misunderstood thing about investing because that's what builds wealth. If you look at like Warren Buffett, he wouldn't want to get haircuts because if
00:01:16
he invested that money and leave it alone for 50 years, in his mind, a haircut would cost $10,000. And then do
00:01:21
you recommend people try and buy houses or is it just to rent those houses? So the truth is
00:01:28
this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribe to the
00:01:34
show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way
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that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do
00:01:46
everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests
00:01:52
that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.
00:02:00
In 2020, my older brother Jason came to me after spending more than a decade
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working in the finance industry. And he said to me, Stephen, there is one book
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you need to read to understand money. And that was your book, The Psychology of Money. And that's how I came into
00:02:18
your world and understood who you were, what you think. And really, this book
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has shaped how I think about money ever since. And this is why I loved having you on the show last time, but I was
00:02:29
insistent to speak to you again with everything that's going on with the in the world right now. Morgan, what is the
00:02:37
most important thing we should be talking about at this present moment based on I guess the subtitle of this book, Timeless Lessons of Wealth, Greed,
00:02:44
and Happiness? Thank you, Steph. It's so so good to be back. I think what's what I like about what you just said, and
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thank you for for that, is that you said the book changed how you think. Mhm. And that's important because the book does
00:02:56
not tell you what to do. Nowhere in the book do I say this is how you should invest your money. This is how you should spend your money because you're
00:03:02
different for me and everyone else. We're all different. I've always just been interested in how people think. Like what's going through your head when
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you're making investing decisions. And if you can understand greed, fear, risk,
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envy, jealousy, those topics, that is way more important than anything they
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will teach you in a PhD finance course at Harvard. Not that the the technical
00:03:25
stuff doesn't matter, but the psychological stuff with money is everything. I mean, so much so many
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money problems in the real world have to do with impatience, envy, greed. That
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that's it. It's not that people don't know the formulas, don't know the data, don't know, you know, how to calculate compound interest by hand. None of that
00:03:43
matters. It's envy. It's in it's impatience. And so that as a writer, that's was I was always interested in.
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Like I'm tired of people giving advice and saying these are the stocks you should buy and here's what the econom is going to do next quarter. I was like no
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one was any good at it. But I was always just fascinated in what's going on in people's heads. And you asked why is
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that important right now? Well, I think it's always important like those topics of you know the subtitle is timeless
00:04:08
lessons because I think a lot of these things were as true a thousand years ago as they will be a thousand years from
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now. Like greed and envy and impatience is just ingrained in how people think. It always has been. And so you see
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what's going on right now with tariffs in the economy. Stock market's gone up a lot. Bitcoin's gone up a lot. So these
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points have always been true, but a lot of them are magnified right now. A lot of people have made a lot of money on Bitcoin. A lot of people are losing a
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lot of money on tariffs. So greed, fear, envy, it all kind of just collides. It
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is right now. How important is this tariff situation that we find ourselves in? Because we're seeing all over the
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news everywhere. Tariffs. Trump's done this 10% here. blanket tariff here. Does
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it matter? And maybe more specifically, does it matter to the average person? It has the potential to be the biggest
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economic story of our lives. It doesn't have to be. One thing that's very interesting about the tariff story is
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that if you compare it to 9/11 or COVID or 2008, the banking crisis, the tariff
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issue that we're going through right now can be ended in one minute. There's a button on the president's desk that
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says, "End it right now." And even you know if that did happen there would still be some lingering damage in terms
00:05:20
of trust and reputation but there was no button on the president's desk for co that said end this all right now it
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didn't exist and 911 and Lehman Brothers in 2008 once those risks hit we just had
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to deal with them through their finish. This is different because it it can and
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is changing by the day. So when people have a take on what's going on right now that might that take might be stale an
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hour from now but it's absolutely true that the global economy to an extent that I think people don't appreciate enough is a very complicated intricate
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machine and most economic problems come when people like try to fiddle with that machine a little bit. They're like ah
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let's turn this dial by one degree and see what happens and then like oh it blows up. Oh I shouldn't have done that. Tariffs is like let's hit it with a
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baseball bat a couple times. Let's hit it with like a crowbar and see and see what happens. Like the global economy is
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so interconnected and if you go to your local grocery store, Target or Walmart, whatever it might be, and and go around
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and look at where that stuff was made. It's I mean, and it's all over the world. It's like very like it's it's
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everywhere. And once you shut that down and put barriers on that, it can become a a big problem very quickly. One thing
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I've noticed in the last couple weeks that I think is very interesting are the number of educated and smart friends
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that I have who send me a text or a call or an email and say, "Hey, can you explain what a tariff is? I see this
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word, but I don't really know what it is." And I think that's important because I don't think the average person
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understands what can happen to the economy if this persists for a long period of time.
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I'm so glad you said that because I've been waiting for weeks now to ask somebody like yourself who studied
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economics to explain in a simple way what a tariff is. And feel free to use
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an analogy. I I think about 50% of people have no idea what a tariff is. Yeah. And then on a sort of an
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incremental scale um people's clarity gets better and better to I would estimate about 5% of the general
00:07:19
population could articulate what a tariff is. 5% or less. So, can you tell me what a tariff is? The first I would
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say is tariffs have been used for hundreds of years and there is there can be a very good useful purpose for them
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in the economy. I think as they're structured right now in the United States, it's a huge mistake. It has a potential to be a catastrophe, but they
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can be a useful thing in the economy. This is not a black and white thing. What a tariff is is, let's keep this
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very simple. The United States buys a bunch of computers that are made in China. Bunch of iPhones that are made in
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China. They're on a container ship. They ship them to United States. When they get to the port in the United States,
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the importer, which is Apple, bringing the iPhones in that are made in China, an American company, has to pay the
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tariff. Oh, that's put on it. And a lot of people, and it's it's very understandable why they would think this, would say, well, no, in that
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situation, China pays the tariff. And there could be a situation where China starts discounting the iPhones. The the
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the company that's making the iPhones would discount it. Like, there can be some offset, but the person who's paying that tax is the importer. So often we
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think about we've applied the tariff to China, right? So what's happening is China having to spend the 10% or I think
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the tariff currently is like 125 145. The number doesn't matter because trade will eventually will just stop at those
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levels. It just won't happen. So if Apple import an iPhone now with that tariff level, then Apple would have to
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pay the 145% when it arrives at the shore. Correct. The United States. I mean, here's here's an example that most people will understand. Sales tax. You
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know, in in most states in the United States, it's uh six to 10%. If you go to the store and buy something, you add the sales tax to that. VAT in the UK. Ex.
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Yeah. Fair. Who pays that is not the store, it's the customer. So even if the
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tax is put on the seller, the seller passes it on to you, the customer, and it says right on your receipt, you
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bought something for $10 and then there is a there's your sales tax and here's what you're going to pay in the end. And so it's similar from that. Now that let
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me explain this why there would be a very useful case for tariffs to show that this is not black and white and this is not oh all tariffs are bad this
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this happened in the United States during co we were virtually 100% reliant on mass N95 masks uh that were made in
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China and Korea and not in the United States and so when you have a medical crisis in the early days of co and we're
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like we need hundreds of millions of masks yesterday they're all made somewhere else we do not want to be in
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that situation So it would absolutely make sense to have a tariff on masks to make sure that they are so expensive to
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import overseas that we have to start making them in the United States. That makes sense. Same with military equipment. You do not want to go to war
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with a country and be reliant on that country to make the your military gear, your bullets and your bombs and your
00:09:57
tanks and whatnot. Absolutely makes sense to have a tariff on that to make sure they're made in the United States. That said, so this is it's not black and
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white, but to have a blanket tariff and say everything that comes from any country anywhere in the world and
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China's going to be this to an extreme degree is going to have a tariff on it. And whether that's between 10% for all
00:10:16
countries or 145% from China that you know I I've used this analogy before that if you talk to dieticians there is
00:10:23
a huge amount of debate over what's the best diet should you eat? Should you be
00:10:28
uh keto? Should you be vegan? like everything in between they don't there's so much debate all of them agree that
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processed sugar is bad nobody nobody thinks processed sugar is good and tariffs are that with economists like
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there is so much debate among economists on what should the tax rate be what should subsidies be should we you know
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like you know like free market versus subsidies there's so much debate no
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serious economist thinks that you should have a trade war and the thing is this is not new we've been doing this for
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hundreds of years. And it's very well known that in the 1930s, the Great Depression, we took put huge tariffs on
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in the early days of the Great Depression, uh they didn't know it was called the Great Depression back then because we put them on and it shut down
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global trade. And it's easy to think that if you put tariffs on your own
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country, that will make it easier to manufacture. Like all those jobs that we shipped overseas of building cars,
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they're all going to come rushing back to America. And it it very rarely happens like that when you have a trade
00:11:27
war. But what I mean by trade war is we put tariffs on China, they respond to put tariffs on us and you just go tit
00:11:33
fortat and it's and you go back and forth and it's like mutually assured mutually assured destruction in economic
00:11:40
terms. So why is Trump doing it then in your view? Because he's given lots of reasons. He said that they're ripping us
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off. He says lots of countries have been ripping off the United States. How do you unpack what he's saying there? And
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what do you believe the true reason is underneath there? To his credit, Trump has been very consistent on this for
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literally 40 years. You can go go on YouTube. He gave an interview in I think it was 1986. He went on Oprah in 1986
00:12:03
talking about how free trade wasn't free and that Japan and other countries were ripping us off and that the solution to
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it were tariffs. So he this is not a new view. This has been a lifelong quest that he's had. I would say not
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necessarily Trump's views, but I would say it absolutely makes sense that there is a large chunk of America that looks
00:12:21
back to the period of 1950s, 1960s when we were a manufacturing powerhouse and
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says that was better than what we have now and we should go back to that. I get why people would say that because it's
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true that we've lost a lot of manufacturing jobs in the last 50 years. I think manufacturing jobs peaked in the
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late 1970s and we've lost something like 10 million manufacturing jobs that we had, you know, versus what we had back
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then. And I get why if I was in that situation, I would probably feel the same. Where I would push back is the
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situation that we had in the 1950s and 1960s where it was just America
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manufacturing powerhouse were a very unique period that I think is virtually impossible to bring back. And I'll tell
00:13:03
you why. At the end of World War II, 1945, Europe and Japan were in rubble.
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They were decimated from the war, America was not decimated whatsoever. And so we had basically a a global
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manufacturing monopoly for a period of time. China was not in the equation. South Korea was not in the equation.
00:13:23
India, Bangladesh, those they were not in the in the equation. It was basically Japan, the United States and Europe, two of which were just struggling to feed
00:13:30
their citizens. And once they got that under control, it was like we have to rebuild the damage from the war. So America had about 20 years from 1945 to
00:13:37
the mid 1960s of we have a manufacturing monopoly. And then we had 16 million US
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soldiers come home from the war. And there was so much pent-up demand for them to buy homes and washing machines
00:13:49
and cars and radios and all these things. And all of them were built in America because nobody else could build them. And that created a really special
00:13:56
time when like because we had a manufacturing monopoly, it was just like factories everywhere. We built up so many factories during the war, there was
00:14:03
endless demand for those products. And this is this is an important part too. Whitecollar workers during that period
00:14:09
didn't make that much money relative to what they did before or since. And that was important because the wages that the
00:14:16
bluecollar manufacturing workers were earning felt great by comparison. So, if
00:14:21
you were an auto worker in Detroit and you compared your wage in 1955 to the
00:14:27
local accountant or dentist or doctor, by comparison, relative to today, you're like, "Oh, that's it's pretty good."
00:14:33
Yeah, the doctor makes more than me, but not that much more than me. You know, I drive a Chevy, he drives a Cadillac, his is a little bit nicer, but we're living
00:14:40
mostly the same lives. And so I think that was a lot of the feeling of prosperity in the 50s and 60s was this
00:14:47
very unique period of manufacturing monopoly as Europe and Japan were rebuilding and by comparison to other
00:14:54
workers. It felt amazing. And then at about the 1970s, Japan and Europe had
00:15:00
gotten themselves back together from the ravages of World War II and they became manufacturing dynamos in their own
00:15:05
right. And I don't think we really understood this in America until three companies came in, which were Toyota,
00:15:12
Honda, and Nissan. And they started selling cars in America. And at first, it was very easy to be like, look at
00:15:18
these little like lawnmower toys that they're importing, cuz you you compared like an early Honda Civic to like a
00:15:24
Chevy Camaro in the 70s. And it was like you can't even compare them. So, at first, the reaction of American car
00:15:31
companies were like, "These guys are a joke. No one's going to buy these little cars." But then gas prices surged in the
00:15:36
70s and 80s and all of a sudden the cars that Americans wanted was the tiny little Honda Civic that got really good
00:15:43
gas mileage. And then once they started buying them, they're like, "Hey, this Toyota, this Honda, this Nissan, it's
00:15:48
actually a pretty good car. It's actually pretty well built." And I think there was a lot of denial among that among a man American manufacturers that
00:15:56
other these other nations that we that didn't exist for 20 years in terms of a global manufacturing source. We're
00:16:02
actually pretty damn good at it. Now and then one other thing happened to to wrap to wrap this up and this might be the
00:16:08
most important part of it. The reason that you cannot reasonably expect the
00:16:14
manufacturing powerhouse to come back as it was is yes, we did ship jobs to China
00:16:21
and Mexico and Canada and India that used to be in America and that has contributed to the massive decline in
00:16:27
manufacturing employment. But a bigger factor in there is automation. And if
00:16:33
you look at a mon like I I I would challenge people to do this. Go on YouTube and look at a Tesla assembly
00:16:38
line in the United States. I'll put it on the screen. It is what you will see. It's amazing. It is a miracle of
00:16:44
engineering. What you will see are armies and armies of robots and very few
00:16:49
people. And if you compare that to the 1950s assembly line, what you see are biceps and backs and people hauling
00:16:56
around material. So because we got so good at automation, even if we bring
00:17:02
manufacturing back to America, and that we still do a lot of manufacturing in America, it doesn't require the amount
00:17:07
of employment that it used to. Doesn't require the amount of manpower. And the people who do work on Tesla manufacturing lines by and large are
00:17:15
working on computers overseeing the robots. I mean, here's one stat that I thought was always interesting to me. In
00:17:21
1950, there was a US steel plant in Gary, Indiana. It produced 5 million tons of steel and had 30,000 workers.
00:17:29
Today, it's still operating. It produces 8 million tons of steel and has 2,000 workers. So, it's producing more steel
00:17:36
today than it was in the 1950s. And they went from 30,000 workers to 2,000 because what used to be done with biceps
00:17:42
and backs and shoulders is now done with machines and robots. And it's no
00:17:47
different than what happened in agriculture where a farm 200 years ago was rakes and shovels and today it's
00:17:54
tractors and combines. Like that same thing happened to assembly. So to wrap all that up like I understand and I
00:18:00
empathize with people who say we need to bring back manufacturing to America. We lost what we once had. I get that and I
00:18:06
respect it. But I think the unique circumstances and automation makes it just extremely unlikely to ever happen.
00:18:13
How did China get in there? And why are they the factory of the world? What are
00:18:19
the core components that went into them being able to produce all of the things that we use on a daily basis at a fraction of the price that they're able
00:18:24
to produce them here? Tim Cook of Apple gave a really interesting interview a couple weeks ago. And he said, "You
00:18:30
might think that we manufacture iPhones in China because it's it's cheap labor." And he said, "That's not really true
00:18:36
anymore. It used to be, but China is not the cheap cheap labor country anymore. that's moved on to Bangladesh and
00:18:42
Cambodia and other places. The reason they manufacture in China is expertise. And I think it's okay to admit and
00:18:49
people should admit that your country and also your company and you individually can be very good at some
00:18:54
things and not very good at others. China is just extremely good and extremely talented at particularly like
00:19:00
low-end manufacturing. Low-end can be anything from, you know, inflatable swimming pools to on up to like basic
00:19:07
basic electronics. They're they're extremely good at it. I was talking to a CEO a couple weeks ago and he said uh
00:19:13
and he's generalizing here, but he said if you go to a a Chinese factory and you say, "I want this part made and here's
00:19:20
step one, step two, step three on how to make it, they will do it better than anybody in the world." Nobody can beat
00:19:25
them at that. But if you go to that same factory and you say, "Please go design me a new part." They're not very good at
00:19:32
it. Americans are way better at that. And that's why the back of your iPhone says, "Designed in California, made in
00:19:37
China." Like it's just specialization of labor. And I think America is the best in the world at a couple things.
00:19:45
Entrepreneurship, technology, services, and like high-end manufacturing like
00:19:50
planes and rockets. And we're not the best in the world at low-end manufacturing. And that's okay. That's not an insult. That's not a put down.
00:19:56
There's specialization of labor. And and so I I think I think China just got very good at one thing during a time when
00:20:03
we've always been very very good at at at different things. And I think that is why global like why for a lot of people
00:20:10
not for everybody. So if you disagree with this I I get it by why the economic system works so damn well over the last
00:20:17
30 years is because we really got good at specialization of labor. You design the iPhone, you make the iPhone, we're
00:20:23
both better off for it. I want to play that clip you're talking about with Tim Cook because I remember seeing it as
00:20:28
well and it did. It was a bit of an aha moment for me. For anybody that doesn't know, Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple and
00:20:35
he's been at the helm of Apple for more than a decade. And as you know, most of Apple's products from what I understand are made in China. There's a confusion
00:20:42
about China that uh and let me at least give you my opinion. The the popular
00:20:50
conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not
00:20:56
sure uh what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the
00:21:02
low labor cost country many years ago. And th that is not the reason to come to
00:21:08
China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill and the
00:21:15
the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is like um the
00:21:22
products we do require really advanced tooling and the the precision that you
00:21:29
have to have in tooling and working with the materials that we do are state-of-the-art and the tooling skill
00:21:36
is very deep here. You know, in in the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could
00:21:44
fill the room. In China, you could fill multi. I think when I watch that, I think I can
00:21:50
understand why there'd be a natural reaction for people to be like, "No, if they can do it, we can do it, too." And again, I I don't think it's an insult
00:21:56
when to say like countries are like we're really good at some things and less good at others. How could that not
00:22:03
be true? Are they on a different living wage from what I understand? Oh yes, absolutely. I mean, so much of it is,
00:22:10
you know, in, you know, if if you asked Americans to work those for those wages, they they absolutely refuse to do it
00:22:16
just because of the expectations we have. And that's a good thing. We should be proud of that that we have a standard of living, which does not uh does not
00:22:23
allow or or people would not put up with earning $5 a day or whatever it would be, which means that the products can be
00:22:29
made cheaper. Yes. Significantly cheaper. Right. Right. And you know, this is where I I understand why people
00:22:35
might raise an eyebrow at this, but so much of why of what the modern system,
00:22:40
how it's supposed to work is when you have that specialization, products become cheaper and then the iPhone costs
00:22:45
$1,000 when in any other world it would cost 4,000 if we're building it in the United States at, you know, paying wages
00:22:52
that people would put up with in the United States. So, what's the impact on the average person listening to this now? And if this trade war continues, if
00:23:00
these tariffs continue, what is the impact they're going to see in their life? It's so unpredictable because as I
00:23:06
said earlier, it can literally change an hour from now. So anyone giving firm predictions of, oh, here's what's going to happen next. That that's not how any
00:23:12
of this works. But you can you can say though that if the tariffs last, one of two things will happen or both of these
00:23:17
two things will happen. things that we import will get much more expensive or what's more more likely in places like
00:23:23
China if it's 145% is we'll just the the trade just stops and then you're probably a matter of weeks away from
00:23:28
empty shelves at at certain for for certain products in certain cases. I mean if you're buying you know a pair of
00:23:34
slippers from China for $1 and now all of a sudden they're $245. If you're if you're an importer for a lot of those
00:23:40
situations they'll say like we're just it's just not going to work. Or if the iPhone that used to cost $1,000 is now going to cost $2,500. Apple might just
00:23:47
say there's not really a market for that. We can't really sell those. Let's just pause and wait for things to happen. We were already seeing that. Um
00:23:53
I'm sure this news will change by the time this airs. This is moving so quickly. But our shipping container imports from China have plunged in
00:24:00
recent weeks, which is exactly what you would expect when you put that high of a tax on it. I mean, if you were buying a house for a million dollars and all of a
00:24:05
sudden they put on 145% tax on that, you're probably not going to buy the house. And that's what's happening now. You'd be dumb not to wait, right? I was
00:24:12
sat here yesterday with the CEO and she said to me that she gets the majority of
00:24:17
her products, pretty much all of them from China. And when she's looking at the tariff situation, she's figured out
00:24:23
that if she buys those products and sells them at her current price, she's losing money on every unit. So she's like, I'll lose $9 on importing a for
00:24:31
example like a dress. It's like I so I have no incentive now to continue to sell that dress. And if my only choice
00:24:38
is to raise the price by like 150% to my customer, right? The two likely outcomes
00:24:43
if it persists are much higher prices and empty shelves and then I don't think anyone knows when or to the extent that
00:24:50
could happen and the button on the desk that says end this all could be pressed before that happens. But if it persists,
00:24:55
that's what's likely to occur. What about the impact it has on trust in the United States? Because yeah, it's huge.
00:25:02
I mean, can you explain that to me? Trust is hard because you don't know how valuable it is until you lose it. But
00:25:08
once you lose it, you're like, "Oh, that was everything." And you know, foreign
00:25:13
investors, people who don't live in the United States have $30 trillion invested in America. That's just in stocks and
00:25:20
bonds. That's not housing or office buildings, just in stocks and bonds. $30 trillion that they've invested. And a
00:25:25
lot of the reason they do that, well, there there's many reasons. One of which is because it's by and large seen as a
00:25:31
trustworthy economy, a stable economy, an economy of rules and predictable laws and trusts that you could not say the
00:25:38
same about Russia. And so when when global investors are looking where to park their money, it is this has been
00:25:44
the case for the last 80 years, America is usually at the top of that list. There's also a thing where a lot of the reason that they invest money in the
00:25:50
United States is because they have to because they have a trade deficit with us. So, if China is selling us a lot
00:25:57
more stuff than they're buying from us, like we're importing a lot more from China than we're exporting back to them,
00:26:03
they're going to end up with a lot of US dollars. And what they need to do something with those dollars. They have
00:26:08
they have to invest them somewhere. And historically, that's been in Treasury bonds, which lowered our interest rates,
00:26:13
and that was good for everybody. And what's a treasury bond? It's debt that the government issues from the federal government. So, it's a bond. You're
00:26:19
you're loaning money to the government and they're promising to repay you plus interest. Okay. So, less people are
00:26:24
going to do that if they have less trust in the United States. Less trust and also less need to do it because they don't have as many dollars that they
00:26:30
need to invest. Are we heading for a recession? Because I I saw some stats earlier on that said the probability of
00:26:38
a recession has surged by 45% which is the highest since December 2023 because
00:26:44
of the tariffs. That was from Reuters. It's interesting when people point like the odds of recession at 45% because
00:26:50
they can't be wrong. Like if if there isn't a recession, they'd be like, "Yeah, we said it was 45%. We didn't say it was going to happen." So I my answer
00:26:57
if you said are we heading for a recession would always be yes. If you asked me a year ago, if you asked me five years ago, like historically
00:27:03
there's a recession in modern times it's been every every four to five years that that it's occurred. And so we shouldn't
00:27:09
pretend that when they happen that they're this crazy out of the blue thing. It's an inevitable feature that
00:27:15
you're always going to have recessions. But is this going to cause it? What is a recession? A recession technically is
00:27:20
when GDP in the economy GDP is just like economic output. How much the economy is is moving. When that declines for two
00:27:28
quarters in a row, that's the technical definition. For most people, you don't need to worry about technical definitions because a recession in your
00:27:35
mind is when you are feeling worse off economically for a long period of time. When you feel like you can't get a job
00:27:41
or your neighbors, your roommates can't get jobs and and it's and it's it's starting to hurt on you. It's, you know,
00:27:47
it's kind of like what's the definition of being sick? Well, it's when you don't feel good, but there's, you can get more technical than that, but a recession for
00:27:52
most people is when you don't feel good economically. You're not concerned about a recession.
00:27:59
I It's not that I'm not concerned, but it would be like saying if you live in Florida, are you concerned about uh
00:28:06
hurricanes? The answer is yes, you should be concerned about hurricane, but you also know with a 100% certainty that they're going to come. If you choose to
00:28:11
live in Florida and you live in Florida for 40 years, you know you're going to get hit by one. 100% chance. And so it's
00:28:17
not that I don't worry about it. It's that I think it is inevitable always, no matter what's going on. This has nothing
00:28:22
to do with terrorists with tariffs. That's always been the case. And so this is where at the individual level
00:28:29
personally like room for error and your finances is so critical. What I mean by
00:28:35
that is just like savings cushion, being scared of debt. It's when everyone is when you're wealth when you're gainfully
00:28:41
employed and you have a good paycheck and the stock market's going up and Bitcoin's going up. Everyone feels
00:28:47
great. You feel amazing. And nobody It's very rare in that situation that you want to envision yourself losing your
00:28:53
job or losing a job and not being able to find another one for six months or needing to move or getting divorced or
00:28:59
having a medical ill. Like no one wants to envision that. But the truth is like what are the odds that one of at least
00:29:05
one of these will happen to you and I over the next 30 years? Major job loss or just a major impact in in our
00:29:12
businesses? Divorce, cancer, wayward children. I can go on down the What are
00:29:18
the odds that at least one of those will occur to you and I in 30 years? 100%. And for a lot of people, they will
00:29:23
experience all of those. And so the idea that life is fragile, the economy is fragile, countries are fragile, is like
00:29:30
people don't necessarily want to admit that because it's hard to get out of bed in the morning if you admitted that to yourself. But I think it's inevitable
00:29:38
and it doesn't have to be necessarily scary if you have the right like psychology around it of just yeah, like
00:29:45
when times are good, I don't expect them to last forever. That's not how the world works. and the right finances around it of like, yeah, when times are
00:29:52
good, I'm gonna save because I know this might not last forever. And what I value more than anything with money is
00:29:59
independence. It's not flashy cars or homes. I want to be independent so that
00:30:04
when the economy goes south and there is a recession and things are going bad, I want to have a level of control over
00:30:10
where I work, where I live, what I'm able to do, my ability to support my
00:30:16
family. that's more than that's that's the top of the list. And so when things are going well and for a lot of people
00:30:22
they haven't for the last couple years but for a lot of people they did. I think that's always important is like I think I think it's a major psychological
00:30:29
skill in life in general. This goes beyond money is recognizing when things are abnormally good and preparing
00:30:34
yourself for them to go the other way as they as they inevitably will. Independence you value it sounded like
00:30:40
freedom to me. Yeah. Can you tell me how to achieve freedom
00:30:47
financially and what I should be thinking about in the context of a world that's changing at such incredible speed
00:30:53
when we're talking about tariffs and recessions and now AI? I've been thinking over the last couple of weeks
00:30:59
like what should my f personal financial strategy be? How should I be thinking about it? Is it a strategy? Is it a
00:31:04
psychology? Is it a mindset? What is it that I should be thinking about to survive this area of tremendous change
00:31:11
and Trump economics and get through the other end with that freedom and independence that you and I both
00:31:16
desperately value? This sounds like such a a squishy BS kind of answer, but I
00:31:21
think there's a lot of there's a lot of truth to this and I'll explain in a second. It is largely a mindset and that
00:31:27
that sounds crazy, but I'll explain what I mean. My grandmother-in-law, she passed away a couple years ago. She was
00:31:32
92 when when she passed away. She for 30 years she lived off of nothing but social security. I think she got $1,700
00:31:39
a month from social security and she had nothing else. No savings, no pension, no nothing. She was the happiest person you
00:31:46
I've met half a half a dozen billionaires in my life. I'm sure you have as well. None of them were as happy
00:31:52
as she was. And she was technically she was like financially broke. But she had this level of psychological wealth that
00:31:58
was like unparalleled. And the reason was off $1,700 a month. That was all she needed. She was perfectly happy toiling
00:32:05
in her garden, watching birds, going for walks, hanging out, reading from books from the library. Perfectly content with
00:32:12
all of that. She didn't need anything else. So, she had very little money, but she wanted even less. And that so like
00:32:18
she had a level of independence that a lot of billionaires do not because if you are a billionaire, if you have a
00:32:24
billion dollars in the bank, but you are so encumbered by your business, your
00:32:29
employees, your suppliers, your customers, you're waking up at 3 in the morning sweating because you got this
00:32:34
email and you're stressed out about it. You actually have very little independence in that situation. Your shareholders or regulators are coming
00:32:41
down on you. I mean, we see this I'm not there's no one in particular here, but we've seen very wealthy people kind of
00:32:47
become syncopants to politicians and and the truth is a lot of those ex like mega
00:32:53
billionaires absolutely rely on politicians and regulators to keep their
00:32:59
machine moving. And so my grandmother-in-law on $1,700 a month had
00:33:04
a higher level of independence than a lot of those people do. And I that's why I say like a lot of this is a mindset
00:33:09
because the truth is the vast majority of people listening to this could have a level of independence. It's not it's not
00:33:16
that you can retire tomorrow, but you can have a level of financial independence once you realize that the
00:33:21
key is managing your expectations more than it is how can I just pile up as
00:33:26
much money as I as I possibly can. It's easy to think like how do you become financially independent? Like save a ton
00:33:31
of money. And there like there there there's truth to that of like like of course that's part of it but more of it
00:33:37
is just in like what kind of life do you want to live because if your expectations are growing faster than
00:33:43
your net worth it's never going to feel like you you'll never be independent. Never. You have a hundred billion
00:33:49
dollars but if you want more and more and more like it's it's never going to feel like it's enough. Or if if you
00:33:54
enjoy bird watching and reading books like my grandmother-in-law 1,700 bucks a month you're all set. You're set for 30
00:34:00
years. You're rich. you're rich and free. She was psychologically rich even if she was financially poor. And I think
00:34:06
that's that's the biggest thing about it. Adam Smith, who was the greatest economist to ever live, this was 300
00:34:11
years ago. He once wrote about this. He was like, why do people work so hard? And he he was just like, it's a simple
00:34:17
question, but why why do people work so damn hard? And he's like, it can't just be for for our sustenance because even
00:34:24
poor people, as he was writing about it, had uh homes and adequate food most of the time. He's like, "There has to be
00:34:31
something else." And what that something else was, he wrote, "Was to be seen by
00:34:36
other people." And it was it was like it was attention and admiration. They wanted to be getting rich so that they
00:34:41
could have a bigger house and a and a nice car. Not in his day, but they they wanted to be they wanted attention from
00:34:46
other people. But he was like, "It's not that you needed the money." Because even in his day, 300 years ago in in
00:34:52
Scotland, I think he was, he was like, "Look, people have homes and food. Like, what what what are they doing this for?"
00:34:58
And he was not criticizing then. like his whole point was like they're going out and innovating or going to have great technology and like it's great to
00:35:03
go do that but the reason to do it was not because they had to stop. Now of course most people to get shelter and
00:35:09
food do have to keep working but they're working more than they absolutely need to because they want something else
00:35:16
besides independence. Is there an evolutionary basis for this? I was I was thinking the other day after watching an
00:35:22
interview with Naval where Naval talks about how evolutionary perspective humans
00:35:29
don't really understand the concept of wealth because once upon a time when we were cave men and women wealth was what
00:35:36
you could carry but we do understand the concept of status which really meant a lot to us in our sort of tribes and was
00:35:42
life or death for many of us. So even though billionaires get all the money in the world the next thing they want to do
00:35:48
is start a podcast. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Right. Right. Because it's just not enough. Like everyone I know
00:35:54
what a lot of them do too is when they have all the money in the world, what they want is immortality. And you see these guys trying to live forever kind
00:35:59
of thing. So that happens as well. That's interesting. But that's linked to status because status was longevity.
00:36:04
Yes. Like if you had status, you had food, you had the reproductive potential once upon a time. Yeah. So it's the same
00:36:11
evolutionary sort of desire to like live survival. Yeah. Harvey uh Firestone who
00:36:17
was a a tire magnet a 100 years ago. Firestone tires during the explosion in cars 100 years ago. He wrote about this
00:36:23
in his biography. He was like every rich person he knows once they get money buys a house that is way too big than they
00:36:30
need. Not not only bigger than they need, bigger than they want because a giant house is just a huge pain in the
00:36:35
ass. The roof is leaking and like everything's breaking down. It's a huge pain to manage. So he wrote his biography, he was like why do we do
00:36:41
this? And he was like I he was he he did it too. He's like, "I bought a house that is way bigger than I want and it's
00:36:47
a pain. It's a burden, but we all do it." And he's like, "Why?" And he's like, "It has to be status. There's no
00:36:53
utility to a 40-bedroom house. Zero. There's a lot of downside in upkeep." But he's like, "Every one of us does
00:36:59
it." And he said, "Even Henry Ford, who was like the cheapest sob out there, lived in a giant mansion in Detroit." He
00:37:06
was like, "It's so natural." And he was like, "It's just because we we we want to show other people. It's not utility.
00:37:11
It's not making our lives better. It's actually making our life worse, but we we have this evolutionary desire to show
00:37:18
people that we've made it. That's that's the calling card. But if it's hardwired, then is there much we can do about it? I
00:37:24
think it's true that virtually everyone who I really admire in life, they're by
00:37:29
and large they're not hugely successful people that you've heard of. They're just people who I've met and they're ordinary people with ordinary jobs. And
00:37:35
I'm like, man, you seem like you've got it all figured out. They took themselves out of the system that they were
00:37:41
supposed to be in and they're like, I'm just gonna go figure out my own way. And there's a a really interesting story, a
00:37:46
guy named Chuck Feny, he started a company called uh DFS, the uh duty-free stores in airports. He made I think at
00:37:53
the peak of his wealth, he was worth about $9 billion. And this was like in the '9s when that was a that was a lot of money. Still is a lot of money. But
00:38:00
he uh the the well-known part of Chuck Feny is that despite that wealth, he lived like an ordinary person. and he
00:38:06
lived in a like a one-bedroom apartment. He flew coach. He drove like a a like a
00:38:11
a normal car. Lived like a normal guy. And some people criticize that from that he he gave all of his money to charity.
00:38:17
He gave nine billion away. Lived like a monk himself. The less known part of Chuck Feny that I think is is very is is
00:38:24
more important is that when he first got wealth, became wealthy in the 1980s, he lived the life of a billionaire. He had
00:38:31
a fleet of private jets. He had mansions all over the world. He had a yacht. And after doing it for a couple years, he's
00:38:36
like, "I don't like any of this." He's like, "I I I like being an ordinary, simple person, and so I'm going to go
00:38:42
live an ordinary life. I don't care what the world the world tells me this is what I should want now that I have money." But he's like, "But I don't. I
00:38:48
want simplicity." And what I like about that is not that he chose to live like a monk because I I personally wouldn't
00:38:54
want to do that if I had that I I I would have a jet if I had that kind of money. So, it's not to say that he did it right, but what I like that he did is
00:39:01
that he said, "I don't care what the world tells me to like. I'm I'm I'm going to do it on my own terms." And
00:39:07
that like that's true independence. That's true status. That is that's true status, too. He's like, "I don't care." That's the ultimate definition of FU
00:39:13
money of like so much money that like I don't care like you you tell me I'm supposed to live in a mansion in Beverly
00:39:19
Hills, but I like my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. I like my buddies over here. Another person who's done that to a very real extent is
00:39:25
Warren Buffett. lives in the same house today that he bought when he was 27 or whatever it was. And he's got 100 billion or something, right? And of
00:39:31
course, he could live anywhere. He could buy anything, but he likes being with his friends, doing it on, you know, likes playing uh bridge with his
00:39:38
buddies. In the first case, though, that gentleman had to have his dream fail him
00:39:44
first before he realized. And so this raises another question which is am I does the viewer at home have to make the
00:39:50
hund00 million and then taste it buy the mansion to realize that it was never about the mansion. I think the answer to
00:39:56
that is yes. Oh gosh. That it's very difficult. You know there's there's a thing where I I forget who said this but
00:40:02
like they're responding to the quote money doesn't buy happiness and they're like okay but let me go figure that out for myself first. Like if you don't have
00:40:10
a lot of money and you see rich people tripping over themselves and people like Will Smith saying like I was no happier
00:40:16
at all when I was rich than when I was poor. Actually, I was happier when I was poor. If if you are poor, when you hear
00:40:22
that, you're like, "Bullshit. I don't believe it. I have to go figure it out for myself." I think a lot of lessons in
00:40:27
life you have to learn firsthand. Especially when the all the problems staring you in your face are somewhat associated to money. Like the pain in
00:40:34
your belly, the bills on your desk, the threats from the court. I'm thinking of myself here that I was getting the the
00:40:40
letters coming through with the red text on them telling me that my credit cards were expo um going to be shut down, the
00:40:47
inability to feed yourself, to socialize with your friends, the heating in your house, the your child's pencil case
00:40:53
costs, all of it seems to circle back to money. And so when you
00:40:58
hear people who are wealthy being subjectively honest about
00:41:04
their own experience and then what's made them happy, it is hard to hear. Yeah. Like I I was just imagining if I
00:41:09
was hearing this, you know, these stories when I was in that situation, I would still [ __ ] go for it anyway.
00:41:15
Right now, let's say there's a there's a big difference between not being able to buy food for your kids. Yeah. And making
00:41:21
200 grand per year. Yeah. And and you know, the the the the difference between 10 grand a year and 200 grand a year is
00:41:28
massive. Takes away so many stresses, so many, you know, worries about being evicted and whatnot. But the difference
00:41:33
between 200 grand and 500 grand is not that much. And the difference between 500 grand and 20 million is not that
00:41:40
much. And the difference between 20 million and 20 billion is zero. I think that's that's a lot of what it comes
00:41:45
down to. And even I think there is such thing as like a peak net worth that you
00:41:50
would want in life after which all the money that you acrew becomes like a social liability. I mean who has more
00:41:57
social liability or like pressure than the mega rich you know Elon Musk, Bill
00:42:02
Gates, Jeff Bezos. There's a huge amount of pressure. like you better donate this money and you better do a good job doing
00:42:07
it kind of thing. And so and I think that number of like and at a much lower
00:42:13
like realistic level for people it's when your friends learn you make a lot of money and we go out for dinner and
00:42:18
they're like you're you're paying right and that's that's a small thing but it can really great on people that like oh
00:42:24
it's going to change how people think about me now that that's a good problem to have of course but it's a thing and I
00:42:29
think the idea of there is a maximum amount of like there is a net worth
00:42:34
level at which your happiness is going to be maximized and it's probably lower than you think. Do you think it's important for people to have an idea
00:42:40
what their number is? I don't think anyone really does because I've done this in my own life. I'm sure you have too. When I was 19, I was like, "Oh, if
00:42:47
my net worth was this amount, I I'll be happy forever." And then I was fortunate
00:42:52
enough to get hit that amount and I'm like, "Okay, but what if what if we got over here?" And you just keep going up the ladder forever. Is there such thing
00:42:59
as FU money? Like, is there a number where you think you've hit FU money? I saw some thread on Twitter and it was
00:43:04
like, "Comment below what you think FU money is." And it was interesting to see the variation. I have a friend Ben
00:43:09
Carlson. He's a great financial writer. He came up, this is very subjective. There's no science behind this, but he was like a net worth of 7 to10 million
00:43:17
is you can live an amazing life in the United States, have an amazing house paid for, send your kids to great schools, go on great vacations, drive
00:43:24
brand new cars on 7 to10 million. Um, and and and he brought that up. Some people might might wse at this, but he
00:43:30
brought that up of it's a lot less than people would think because there'd be a lot of people who would be like, "Oh, I'm gunned for hundred million." Even if
00:43:36
that's just a fantasy, it's a dream. And $79 million is out of reach for for a lot of people, no matter how hard
00:43:42
they're working. But I think particularly for young people who their definition of I think about my son a
00:43:47
lot. This he watches Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast is an amazing guy. He's I think he's one of the great guys. But because of Mr. It's like my son's definition of
00:43:54
wealth is a private island, a private jet, you know, keep your hand on the table and win a million dollars kind of
00:44:00
thing. It's a it's a different level. Whereas when I was growing up, like ordinary people drove dirty pickup
00:44:06
trucks and rich people drove clean pickup trucks. That was like that was the stratification of what I saw growing up. And I think because of social media
00:44:12
and other things, kids have a very different view on what of like financial wealth actually is these days. Going
00:44:18
back to this issue of tariffs, recession, and everything that's going on at the moment, are there any things practically for those that don't
00:44:24
understand the economy and economics generally that we should be thinking about to make sure that we don't get
00:44:30
burnt? This is less advice going forward, more than just like something to remember next time, which is that if
00:44:35
you are worrying about if you're worried about being laid off, if you're a small business owner worried about going
00:44:41
under, the need for room for error and cushion and savings and backup plans are
00:44:47
were were just as important a month ago as they are today. You're just learning how important they are today. And I
00:44:52
challenge you to remember that in the future when this is all over, whenever it's all over, that when the economy is
00:44:57
going well and you feel stable in your job, stable in your career, that is when you also you absolutely need backup
00:45:04
plans and room for error and savings and assuing debt and whatnot. I have a very high level of cash as a percentage of my
00:45:11
net worth and a lot of financial adviserss would look at that and say like, "What are you saving for? Like what's what's going on here?" And I'm
00:45:17
like, "I I don't know. I'm saving for a world that I know is very fragile and I have no idea what's going to happen to
00:45:23
me personally or what's going to happen to the economy. But if you're a lay student of history, you know that things
00:45:28
break all the time. And and so my advice to you if you're realizing that for the first time that how fragile the world
00:45:35
can be and how the job security that you thought you had might might not have been as strong, remember this next time.
00:45:42
how important room for error and backup plans are. And relative to your personal costs, your personal monthly costs or
00:45:48
overheads as they call them. How much money do you think it's sensible to have saved? It's so it's so hard for that
00:45:55
because everyone's in a I'm sure people watching this will be in a massive range of of incomes. I I would say this is a a
00:46:02
bad answer that no one's going to like, but as pretty much as much as you can. I mean, I'll give you one example of this. When COVID first hit in March of 2020,
00:46:09
the average restaurant, I heard, had enough cash on hand to last them for 14 days and then all of a sudden they were
00:46:15
looking at a six-month lockdown. And so I think one answer to that question is however much you think you you'll need,
00:46:21
it's probably more. The other more practical example of this is in 2008 during the financial crisis, a lot of
00:46:27
people were losing their jobs not for two weeks or one month, but they losing their jobs for 12 months and they got
00:46:33
unemployment benefits, but it wasn't enough. And so is it practical for to say like you should have 12 months of
00:46:38
saving? It's probably not practical for a lot of people. But the answer is as much as you can while realizing that the
00:46:43
world is more fragile than you probably think it is. The other protagonist of change at the moment is artificial
00:46:49
intelligence. And I've spent a lot of lonely quiet hours in my room thinking
00:46:55
about the impact it's going to have and trying to develop my own thesis and what it means as a creator, as a podcaster,
00:47:00
as a investor. And I wanted to understand how significant you think artificial intelligence is and if it at
00:47:06
all impacts your thesis around money and wealth and investing and saving. I'm not even remotely an expert in AI, but as
00:47:13
someone who has looked at like the history of technology, one thing that sticks out clear as day when you study technology, when in hindsight when
00:47:19
you're looking at a new technology that you know went on to change the world, the computer, the car, the airplane,
00:47:25
those things, when you know like this was a turning point in civilization. If
00:47:30
you go back and look at what the optimists were saying at the time, they massively underestimated it. And that's
00:47:36
what the optimists were saying. Forget the pessimists on it. So go back to the 1920s and say what were the optimists
00:47:42
saying about the airplane? They were underestimating it by 100fold. What did the optimist say about the car? They underestimated by 100fold. Computers the
00:47:50
same. And the Wright brothers themselves the first airplane the United States. The Wright brothers themselves only
00:47:56
marketed their plane, primarily marketed their plane to the US Army because they did not really foresee much use for an
00:48:02
airplane outside of the military. They knew you could strap a machine gun on it and the then the army might like that.
00:48:07
But the did the Wright brothers foresee Delta Airlines like an Emirates an A380
00:48:12
like not in a million years. And so I think it's true that in a lot of things life I think I think it was Peter Teal
00:48:19
who said this. He was like, "When things are going wrong, you underestimate how how bad they're going to get, but when
00:48:24
things are going right, you underestimate how big it's going to be." I I may have butchered that quote, but it's something like that. And it's clear
00:48:30
that AI is right. And so, it's almost certainly the case that even the optimists, even the Sam Alman optimists
00:48:36
are underestimating where it will go. And a lot of the reason for that is because new technologies is not what the
00:48:42
inventor, whoever that might be, built. It's what other people go on to manipulate it as. And that's why the
00:48:47
Wright brothers come up and play. And now we have the A380 like it's other people manipulating things along the way
00:48:53
to create something just gigantic. One perfect example of that with AI is open AI have created this large language
00:48:59
model which can do all these wonderful things. But then people are using that same technology to create AI agents.
00:49:05
Yeah. Which are equally astonishing. I spent the last couple of weeks using AI
00:49:10
agents to build some software. I'm someone that has no ability to code at all. Yeah. But I can sit in my bedroom
00:49:16
and speak to this agent and tell it to build me a new to-do list or a new website for the podcast that tracks
00:49:24
who's been on the show and follows them in the new like I can tell it to do anything. And for what's probably costing me a dollar
00:49:31
a day, it's building me software now. And we're just at the start of that exponential curve. So if we now think
00:49:38
that these large language models are going to be able to create things, create digital things, things on the
00:49:44
internet, this podcast is on the internet. We know that it can create podcasts. We know it can create videos,
00:49:49
images, software. I look at that and go, you play this forward. And if I apply your optimism um
00:49:57
analogy, your optimism um lens to it where I go, we're underestimating this curve. It's hard. really hard to see how
00:50:05
this isn't tremendously disruptive in the long term. Not even the long term, but in the short term, I'll give you one
00:50:11
example. You you you talked about coding there. We're doing a little remodel on our house right now. And one of the things you can do is take a real picture
00:50:17
of of a room, upload it in. We we use Chad GBT for this and said, "Hey, paint it this color, remove this wall, put
00:50:24
this in." It is better than any designer will be able to do it. And it's right there, boom, in front of you. seconds
00:50:29
and you can multiply that story by 10,000 different versions of that stories for 10,000 different jobs. Um I
00:50:35
I see it as as a writer where I've I I don't use it to write. I write all my
00:50:41
own words. But when one thing that I've played around with, I don't really use this as that much of a of a tool, but just more of an experiment of like I'll
00:50:47
upload a chapter from a book that I wrote and say, "Hey, give me some feedback on this." And it wasn't that
00:50:54
good a year ago. It's pretty good today. It's pretty good. So, if you're looking for like like a writing assistant, it's
00:51:01
amazing. Now, the downside of that is everyone knows like the high schoolers and the college students who use it to write the essay, just write the whole
00:51:06
thing. Yeah. That's that that's that's that's probably not great. But if you're using it as a helper, it's probably the best writing teacher that's out there.
00:51:13
So, right there in my just like tiny little world, if I I I really don't know anything about AI, but interior
00:51:18
designer, editor, and go on down the list of jobs that like literally three months ago I would have been like, "Oh,
00:51:24
that's a very valuable job." And all of a sudden you look at this tool for a dollar a day as you said you're like it's pretty good. What does history tell
00:51:31
us about how this shakes out? Like when these industrial revolutions come along or the technological
00:51:37
revolutions where does the value acrue and how do I participate in that value?
00:51:43
I guess one good analogy for my here and it's probably not as powerful as what we're dealing with right now but the the
00:51:48
closest is probably you know it wasn't that long ago the late 1800s that 80% of Americans were farmers. that that that
00:51:55
that's that's what it was. And then the industrial revolution and the tractor and the combine came along and all of a
00:52:01
sudden al it was like we we don't need that many farmers doing this. what people used to do with shovels and rakes
00:52:06
can now be done with a tractor. And a lot of those people found themselves out of work. And for them it was it was very
00:52:13
disruptive, but they also the farmer the farm laborer found himself pretty easy
00:52:20
to go into the factory because they were working on they they were good at working with their hands and whatnot. And so to go from that into the factory
00:52:27
was not an easy transition, but it was a transition they can make. Now, do you
00:52:33
have that that same transition did not take place from manufacturing to technology? The auto worker in Detroit
00:52:39
could not just learn to code and work at Google like that. And so, it was it was much less seamless. And I think what
00:52:44
we're dealing with now will be even more of a disruption. That the people who are being disrupted out of AI are going to
00:52:50
have like a much more difficult time historically to move in to where the economy is going next. So the idea that
00:52:57
an industry is disrupted and you need to go figure out something else to do, I think has gotten progressively harder
00:53:02
over the last 150 years. And when we moved from machines to technology, it
00:53:08
was a significant leap also for the user and for the customer and for the as well as for the employee. So that transition
00:53:15
took time. But I was reading something the other day that said now that we're native internet users, we all are.
00:53:20
Billions and billions and billions of people use the internet. This is like a new application on the internet. which explains why it's growing so fast that
00:53:27
we haven't had to learn. So there hasn't been this big jump in
00:53:34
fundamental skills like there was from like going from a I don't know from piece of machine to an iPhone. So this
00:53:42
acceleration will be quicker. So therefore one would assume that the transition will be more severe. And I
00:53:47
think about even things like driving. I think Tesla are releasing in Austin this month or next month, the first
00:53:53
autonomous vehicle the cyber taxi. Yeah. The robo taxi, whatever it's called. And it has no steering wheel. Yeah. And the
00:54:01
profession of driving from what I understand is the biggest profession. The biggest profession truck drivers, drivers in general. Yeah. On my way here
00:54:08
today, I did not touch the steering wheel. I did not touch the pedals because I'm in a cyber truck and there's
00:54:13
a button on it which auto uh drives you to wherever you want to go. And typically I'd probably have got an Uber.
00:54:20
Yeah. But now I can sit there, do my work, and it drives for me. It's And that's also AI. Yeah. No, it's it's it's
00:54:27
crazy. And back to the analogy like when when the farmer had to go work in the factory, it was it was a transition. He may have had to move, but he but he did
00:54:34
it. And that's why he went from 80% of the population were farmers to 2% which is what it is today. And but they they
00:54:39
were able to to move in. The manufacturer to technology struggled. And I think it's going to be now like
00:54:44
the the truck driver to tell the truck driver, well, just go get a job at Open AAI kind of thing. Like it's funny to
00:54:50
even think about because it's it's preposterous. But the thing with Open AI from what I understand is they have less
00:54:55
than 100 employees, right? And the reason they have less than 100 employees is because they're using AI to build to
00:55:00
do the work to do and they'll increasingly do that, especially when they hit AGI, right? They're probably going to four employees. Yeah. And this is why I think they have 100 employees.
00:55:07
I think they've purposefully kept it low because they think AGI is around the corner which is this very very advanced
00:55:12
form of AI which is going to be able to like I think they call it selfreinforce where it teaches itself synthetic data
00:55:19
right so h kind of going from there now I think if there's an optimistic side it's always been it it was the case that
00:55:26
when farming was being disrupted there were a lot of people who just said these people are never going to find jobs like if you if you put the farmer out of
00:55:32
business there was it sounds comical today but there was a big push when the car came about to be like no like what
00:55:38
are all the the horses going to do like like like have some like have some dignity for the horse and the people who are raising horses and whatnot. So it's
00:55:44
always been the case that you cannot foresee what's going to happen next. And the optimistic side of capitalism is as
00:55:51
messy and as hard and as much personal damage as you can cause to families along the way. Those people will
00:55:57
eventually figure out something to do. And when people say that, it sounds so callous and coarse. And that's why you
00:56:03
have so much debate and angst and anger and things like with and disagreements
00:56:08
like what with what we're dealing with with tariffs right now. You have your son in the green room watching us right
00:56:14
now. Yeah. How old is he? Nine. Nine. Okay. So, he's got some decisions ahead. He's he he's wincing right now, I'm
00:56:19
sure, now that we're talking about him. But what if in terms of him building his career, acquiring skills, generating
00:56:26
wealth, based on everything you know about how people have made money through history, what are the prevailing skills
00:56:33
that your son would have to have to assure that he makes money regardless of
00:56:38
what the industry is? Learn how to communicate. Learn how to get along with people you disagree with. I think that's
00:56:45
that's a very underlooked skill in life is particularly in a in a social media
00:56:50
driven world where people have very different views on fundamental topics. Learn how to get along with people who you disagree with. Learn how to
00:56:56
communicate. Those would be the top two. Those are extremely high level. Like I'm I'm not saying go learn calculus 4 kind
00:57:03
of thing or go learn engineering, but those are timeless skills and I think those two skills can get you pretty far
00:57:09
in life. And I I look back at at myself. I don't know if you had a similar example of this, but I I was not a good
00:57:15
student. My ability to do math is not any good. My ability my grades in science were not any good whatsoever. I
00:57:22
think if I if there are two skills that I was that I I I didn't even know it at the time. It was not really like
00:57:28
conscious that I was doing this, but learn how to communicate and don't be a jerk. Like just learn because that for
00:57:34
me as a writer that was like learn how to communicate as writing and in the writing business learn how to get along
00:57:39
with people so you can move ahead move your career like be nice to this person so you can move on up. I think you see
00:57:44
that a lot. What about in terms of money making money when you think about great people through history that have accured
00:57:50
a lot of wealth? What principles would you instill in him so that he had a money mindset? It's hard for a parent.
00:57:57
Uh, I I'm not I'm not filthy rich by any means, but I've sold a couple books. And it's hard as a parent to be like, I want
00:58:04
to use money to give you a good life, but I don't want to spoil you. The last
00:58:09
thing I want is for you to be a spoiled little brat. And it's very difficult for a lot of parents to do that. And so, one
00:58:15
of the things I want him to learn about money, and I want him to learn it in a very stark way, is like learn the
00:58:21
scarcity and the value of $1. And I think the only way to do that is to experience it firsthand. So when he was
00:58:27
born nine years ago, I wrote him a little letter and I published this on a blog and one of the things I said was,
00:58:32
"I hope you're poor one day." And I said, "Not not struggling, not broke,
00:58:37
but I hope the only way to understand the value of a dollar is to experience the power of its scarcity. And I hope
00:58:44
there's a there's a period when my wife and I are able to say like look like you're never going to fall flat on your face. You're not going to be homeless.
00:58:49
You're always going to have good healthcare. But I hope you're able to experience the scarcity of a dollar so
00:58:56
you value it. I did. My my parents taught me that in a way that they didn't need to, but they let me be poor for a
00:59:03
while. And most people will experience it because they they they have that's that's a situation they were in. So that
00:59:09
that's one thing I think about of and I think actually quite a few families deal with that is like how can you help your
00:59:16
kids and it goes beyond money. This is uh you know so many the the the helicopter parent era is I want to
00:59:23
protect you from downside at all cost emotional downside. Uh and and I think money is one of many topics in which
00:59:30
you're going to learn the best by experiencing the downside. For anybody that likes matcha, for
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00:59:41
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00:59:48
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Steven40 for 40% off your first order. Men are struggling in a variety
01:00:38
of different ways and obviously your son is going to be a man someday. If I think about some of the stats here, men's
01:00:43
labor force participation has declined dramatically over time. For prime working age men between 25 and 54,
01:00:50
participation fell from 98% in the 1950s to about 80 something% in
01:00:57
2024. 10.5% of men aged 25 to 54 were
01:01:02
neither working nor looking for employment compared to with just 2.5% in
01:01:08
1954. And we had a study that came out in the UK recently, I think it was the center
01:01:14
of social justice that showed that for the first time in a long time in recent history, more young men are out of work
01:01:22
than young women. And I think it was like one in seven men are out of work.
01:01:27
Yeah. So it's a different world for a man, but but we still have the sort of prehistoric caveman mindset of being a
01:01:33
protector and a provider. Yes. Absolutely. The world has changed. Yeah. I think it was Scott Galloway recently said that like a really aspirational
01:01:40
definition of manhood is is wanting to procreate, provide, and protect. You
01:01:45
want to have kids and you desperately want to provide for your family and protect your family. And I I do think that there Yeah, there's men all over
01:01:52
the world to a higher degree than there's ever been that feel like those three things are out of reach for them. And because of this, a lot of people get
01:01:57
involved in get-richqu schemes. Yes. Crypto coins, meme coins, all this stuff. Daniel Conaman, the great
01:02:03
psychologist, passed away last year. He had a saying. He was like, "When all of your options are bad, you become very
01:02:09
risk-taking because you have nothing to lose kind of thing." So, whenever you see people participating in get-rich
01:02:15
get-rich quick schemes, you know, it's because they feel like all their options, all their options are bad. If
01:02:21
you knew, if you believed that if you could go to college and learn a or not go to college, but if you can go learn a
01:02:26
skill and go work hard and earn a stable paycheck to provide for your family, 99
01:02:33
out of a 100red men are going to say that's that's the one I want. But if you believe, whether it's true or not, if
01:02:38
you believe that that option is not available to you, you're like, let's throw it all on this this new coin kind
01:02:43
of thing. And so I think you that's you see that quite a bit. There's a lot of things in life where you see people
01:02:49
making bad decisions or what you think are bad decisions and it's easy to mock them or look down upon or to say they're
01:02:54
idiots, but like deep down there's always a reason that is kind of is there's there there's a deeper reason
01:03:00
why they're doing it. And for a lot of these things with financial risk takingaking, it's it's like a lack of not necessarily a lack of self-esteem,
01:03:06
but a lack of self-confidence in their ability to earn a good dignified stable
01:03:11
wage to provide for their family. Testosterone plays a role though. Because if when we think about who
01:03:17
becomes gambling addicts and who takes the biggest risks with finances through history, it's often men. Women do seem
01:03:24
to be generally better with managing money than men. Yeah. W with men. What a
01:03:29
lot of it is is the inability to say that's enough, particularly with the risk that they're taking. So you see
01:03:35
this with with a lot of hedge fun. Hedge funds are just giant investing pools of money of like rich people on Wall Street
01:03:41
managing money. They have quite a long history, not a lots of them, but quite a long history of them blowing up. And
01:03:47
it's because this very smart genius billionaire Wall Street trader who has a
01:03:52
PhD from MIT could not say that was enough. They kept taking more risk, more
01:03:57
risk, more risk until it blew up. And we we we definitely see with women managing money that they tend to not earn as high
01:04:04
returns on any given year, but they don't blow themselves up, so to speak, financially. So they're like men are
01:04:11
much more willing to swing for the fences and women are much more willing to say I' I'd like to just take a calm
01:04:16
casual swing but I want to keep it going for a long period of time. Now who's going to do better over the course of a lifetime in that situation? Your book
01:04:22
profiles a few scenarios of who does better over a lifetime. And although I read your book I think it must have been
01:04:27
four years ago. I will always remember reading a story about I think it was like a stock broker that you write about in your book. It was Jesse Livermore.
01:04:34
Tell me that story. Jesse Livermore was a a trader a Wall Street stock trader. uh about a hundred years ago, did most
01:04:41
of his work in the early 1900s through about the 1920s and he was the best in the world at getting rich and he had no
01:04:49
ability whatsoever to stay rich. I think he became the equivalent of a billionaire adjusted for inflation four
01:04:55
separate times and went bankrupt four separate times. He eventually at his end committed suicide when he went broke for
01:05:00
I think the fifth time and and in between there he would become and literally the richest man in the world
01:05:06
at one point but he had no ability to say that's enough. So when he was the richest man in the world he just kept
01:05:11
taking more risk more risks more risk and then it blew up and he did it over and over and over and over again until he eventually killed himself.
01:05:18
Damn. It's it's amaz it's a it's an amazing story because punctuated through
01:05:24
his story of failure and bankruptcy and eventual suicide is a level of success
01:05:30
that like Steve Jobs could not even fathom. He has no one in history I think was better at getting rich than he was
01:05:37
and he he could not keep it. And for most people like a much better situation
01:05:43
of course is like you don't need to become the richest person in the world. You can just make a modest amount of money that's gonna support you and your
01:05:49
family, but keep it. Don't keep taking more risk that's eventually gonna blow it up. Just keep it and it's okay. What
01:05:54
do you think of crypto? I don't own any. So maybe that that's the summary of how I feel about it. But I also think the
01:06:00
only take that I've had on it is like if you don't think that some of it is
01:06:08
inspiring and then then you're not paying attention. But if you don't think that 99% of it is a is a joke, then
01:06:14
you're not paying attention. And I I say that because most people are one or one or the other. They think the whole thing
01:06:20
is is a scam and they don't understand any of it. It's a bubble. It's going to burst or it's literally the greatest invention of of human history. And I I
01:06:27
think whenever there's a new technology, you're likely to get like those extreme one of those camps. But also in the
01:06:33
history of technology, what you would see is that 99% of the new players, the new companies, the new products won't
01:06:40
exist in 10 years. And a couple of them will turn into Ford or Microsoft or
01:06:46
whatever it might be. That's always been the case. So you can't envision a world in 20 years in which crypto is not
01:06:53
having a big part of the global economy. And I also think you cannot envision a world in which in 20 years 99% of what
01:07:00
exists today doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, I have owned Ethereum for a long time and more recently I just changed it
01:07:06
all into Bitcoin because I think Bitcoin is the safest bet. So it seems to be where institutional money has gone to
01:07:13
and I I'm doing the same thing as you. I've never like traded coins in my life or anything but I think most of it is
01:07:19
probably going to zero as we've seen. But I think Bitcoin feels like the place
01:07:25
that the market has decided will be the stablest. But yeah, it's not it's not contradictory in history to say that
01:07:32
this new technology will change the world forever. And and at the same time, you're probably not going to make that
01:07:37
much money on it. The best example of that were the railroads, which was probably the most transformational new
01:07:42
industry in US history. Like to have a railroad going from the east coast to the west coast, that changed everything
01:07:48
in such a profound way. And the vast majority of railroad investors lost all
01:07:54
their money. So they you could get it right. This is going to change the world forever. It does not mean that you're going to make that much money on it. And
01:08:00
that that that's not to say that most crypto investors No, I actually I I would say it's almost certain that most crypto investors will not make that much
01:08:06
money. That's that that's pretty standard historical. The other thing is in cars in the early 1900s, there were
01:08:13
2,000 car companies in America and 1,997 of them went bankrupt. you ended up with
01:08:19
GM, Ford, and Chrysler. The rest virtually disappeared. So, it's always the case that in a new technology that
01:08:25
changes in the world. There's a big gap between this is going to change the world and everyone's going to get rich on this. One of the things that made me
01:08:32
question my hypothesis on crypto was Google released this new computer. I don't know if you saw it called Willow,
01:08:37
the quantum computer. Yeah. That can crack or in theory in the future. I I've talked to people about this that like
01:08:43
you can't believe in crypto and quantum at the same time. People who are much smarter than me say that's that's not
01:08:49
the case. That you can augment the system. I I I don't really understand it, but people who are much smarter than me say they're not worried about it.
01:08:55
Google built a powerful new computer called Willow that uses quantum technology. Some people worry it could one day hack Bitcoin by breaking its
01:09:02
security system. But right now, Willow isn't strong enough to do that just yet. And they pose that quantum computers may
01:09:08
well become strong enough that they'll be able to hack Bitcoin's system that keeps it safe, right? because there is a
01:09:14
certain amount of compute that could affect that doesn't exist right now but could in the future with quantum computers right so like all assets I
01:09:22
mean if you look back through history we've used different things as stores of value and many of those things whether
01:09:27
it's the tulips or whatever else aren't our current store of value so it's conceivable to think that bitcoin as a
01:09:34
store of value does have a shelf life yes but that's I mean that of course that could be the case I mean gold which
01:09:39
has been you know a store of value for thousands of years has gone through periods where it surged merged and then fell 90% and sat there for 20 years. You
01:09:47
kind of thing. So even when you have something that is a historic like you
01:09:52
know uh you know very objective store of value that doesn't mean that you know what the price is going to do next month
01:09:57
or next year or even the next 10 years. That's a totally different thing. When you look at all these people through history that have made money, lost
01:10:03
money, etc. generated great wealth. Are there like certain strategies they've deployed? Because when I think of like
01:10:09
Warren Buffett, I'm like, "Okay, so he like compounded for like 80 years, blah blah blah, invested, he was an
01:10:14
investor." Then you've got this other strategy which might be entrepreneurship. Yeah. Some incredible company uh like Elon Musk making SpaceX
01:10:22
or Tesla. Do you have it distilled down into a set of different strategies that are often deployed to equal wealth? I
01:10:29
think if there's one big one that is is applicable to ordinary people, you know, you you can come up with like different
01:10:35
marketing things, but like that's not going to apply to me. hear you. One thing that sticks out that is a common denominator that virtually everyone
01:10:41
listening to this could learn from is they were way more patient and had way more endurance and kept it going for
01:10:47
longer than anyone else. David Senra, who's a great podcaster, right? So, he has a podcast called Founders. He he
01:10:53
said this one time. He was like he hears from entrepreneurs who are like, "Man, I listen to your podcast. I'm a I'm a
01:10:59
founder. I have a company and I'm I'm going to sell my company next year. I'm I'm do I'm going to sell it to Google." And David's like, "Did you learn
01:11:05
anything from the historical entrepreneurs of Rockefeller or Steve
01:11:10
Jobs or Bill Gas? Those people ran their companies for 50 years. They ran their companies until the until they died kind
01:11:16
of thing. These are not people who are looking to be like, I'm going to create a company and then sell it and I'm going to start another company and sell it." They keep it going for as long as they
01:11:23
possibly can. The big wealth usually does not come, it almost never comes from like a great idea that just surges
01:11:29
out of the middle of nowhere. It's usually like a pretty good idea that you can keep going for 40 years or 50 years.
01:11:36
That's that's where the big money comes from. If Rockefeller I I wrote this in the book, 99.9% of Warren Buffett's net
01:11:42
worth was accumulated after his 60th birthday. So like if when Warren Buffett
01:11:48
was 60, he was worth $2 billion. Like incredible amount of money. He could
01:11:53
have sold then and sold everything and retired and had an absolutely amazing life. The reason that he has
01:11:59
accumulated, if you count the money he's given away, 250 billion is because he kept it going. So now he's 93 years old
01:12:06
and he's still going. Same with, you know, Bill Gates could have sold Microsoft in the 1970s and made $10
01:12:11
million and had a great little life. Yeah. But he kept it going and kept it going. Yahoo offered Mark Zuckerberg a
01:12:18
billion dollars cash and he was like 19 at the time and he said, "No, I'm going to keep doing this thing." That's the
01:12:24
common denominator that ordinary people can learn from is like endurance and longevity is usually where the big
01:12:30
wealth is made. Endurance. Keep it going. Endurance is hard. Yeah. Larry
01:12:36
Ellison, who is the the founder of um of Oracle, did an interview in the 1990s
01:12:42
and they asked him about Bill Gates, who was a friend but also rival back then. And Larry Ellison was like, "The secret
01:12:48
to Bill Gates, yes, he's very smart, but there's a lot of smart people out there." And he was like, "No offense, but there's a lot of people smarter than
01:12:54
Bill Gates out there, but nobody has more endurance than Bill Gates. He will outwork you every single time. You
01:12:59
cannot he he'll keep it going for as long as he needs to keep it going to beat you." And that's his that's his
01:13:05
skill. It's not intelligence, it's endurance. On this point of perseverance, why is perseverance so
01:13:10
key? Like, if we break it down into what what's actually happening when you persevere? I think it's two things. It's
01:13:15
one in any endeavor that's going to pay off, it's going to be difficult. It's going to be ext there's going to be more roadblocks and speed bumps and collapses
01:13:23
than you want. It's absolutely inevitable. The unofficial model at at Nvidia, the giant chip company, it's one
01:13:30
of the most valuable companies in the world, is we are always 30 days from going out of business. Now, they're not
01:13:36
it's one of the most successful companies in the world, but they understand what is true for every
01:13:42
business, which is that business is is hard. Like every business is a knife fight. of every company that you own or
01:13:48
start is going to be very difficult and you need the perseverance to get through that. That's one element. The other is
01:13:53
compound interest. That's what builds wealth. What compound interest is and
01:13:58
why it is so powerful like the people who get rich from it are not the people who earn very high returns. It's people
01:14:04
who earn good returns for a long period of time. Like all compound interest is
01:14:09
it's like it's it's returns to the power of time. And if you remember like eighth
01:14:15
grade math, that exponent like time that's doing all the heavy lifting in there. And so in investing, if you can
01:14:21
be good, merely good, if you can just be average for an above average period of
01:14:27
time, you do phenomenal. And this is where this is like the most misunderstood thing about investing. Most investors are like, "How do I earn
01:14:33
the highest returns? I want to make the best investments, highest returns." And you can do well doing that. You're much
01:14:39
more likely to do well if you're like, "Hey, I just want average returns, but I want to be so durable and have so much
01:14:44
endurance that I can earn average returns for 40 years. And if I can be average for 40 years, I'm going to end up in the top 1%." How do you make that
01:14:51
real for someone listening who's making, you know, $1,000 a month disposable income? So, they've got $1,000 to play
01:14:58
with a month potentially. How to like how if they've never heard about this this idea of compounding interest before
01:15:04
and the magic that it can create if left to its own devices for a long enough
01:15:10
period of time. What is the like simple way to show them the power of it? So take index funds which are just a very
01:15:17
simple collection of businesses at a very low fee. You can buy one stock but it's a collection of hundreds and
01:15:23
hundreds of different businesses. You own Apple and Amazon and Coca-Cola. you own you own all the companies in the
01:15:28
world. And so it's the most boring, bland, average way to invest. If you
01:15:34
invest in that in a very simple way and you do that consistently for 20 or 30 years with no skill, with no expertise,
01:15:42
where you're not getting stock tips from anyone, it's the most boring way to invest. If you do it consistently for 30 years, you will almost certainly end up
01:15:48
in the top 1% of investors. you almost certainly beat literally 95% of Wall Street pros who were trying to outsmart
01:15:56
the market, trying to outwit the market and were unable to keep it going for 30 years. And so this is where if you can
01:16:01
just be average for an above average period of time, you'll be amazing. I mean, it's it's it's probably similar in
01:16:06
health that like if you want to be healthy, yes, you can go out and become the best bodybuilder in the world, the best marathon runner in in in the whole
01:16:14
world. But actually, if you just work out just like modest workouts a couple times a week for 30 years, you're going
01:16:21
to be one of the healthiest people in your town. If you can work out two or three times a week for 30 years
01:16:26
consistently and eat a good diet consistently for 30, you'll be one of the healthiest people that you know. And it's the same in investing. It's like
01:16:33
the people who do the best are not the geniuses. It's the people who are ordinary for a very long period of time.
01:16:40
I was thinking about a a very simple example. So that there's a coffee in my cup today and the coffee might cost $5.
01:16:49
Now with the laws of compounding returns, if I don't have that coffee
01:16:54
today in 40 years, if I got 8% which is
01:16:59
I think the S&P 500 get gives about 8%. Then in 40 years time instead of the the
01:17:07
coffee that I had every day with an 8% interest return, I would have $440,000.
01:17:15
If you did a coffee every day. Yes. Yes. Yes, assuming the coffee costs $5. Now, I like coffee. You do, too. I I I I
01:17:21
don't want people to listen to that and say, "I should I should stop drinking my coffee." But it's a powerful example. Uh
01:17:26
there's a book called The Snowball, which is kind of the most detailed do biography of Warren Buffett, and it
01:17:32
would talk about how when he was on his adulthood, he wouldn't want to get haircuts because in his mind, a haircut
01:17:37
would cost $10,000 because it was a $2 haircut. But if he invested that money
01:17:43
in in the way that he knew he could and leave it alone for 50 years, whatever it would be, he didn't want to get a car wash cuz he would tell his wife, he's
01:17:49
like, "That's a $5,000 car wash." She's like, "What do you mean it costs a dollar?" No, no, no, but if I invest that money and leave it alone. So, he
01:17:55
was always thinking about not what something costs today, but what he could grow that money into in the future. I
01:18:02
was just thinking about Warren Buffett getting his haircuts. So, I thought, how old's Warren Buffett now? He's 93. Okay. So let's say for 80 years if Warren
01:18:09
Buffett didn't get a say a $5 haircut and instead took the put it somewhere in the S&P 500 an index fund which by the
01:18:16
way you can invest in on your phone 80 years later Warren Buffett
01:18:22
would have 10.3 million. That's it. That's it. And that's why he's that's why he's worth a quarter trillion
01:18:28
dollars today is because you go through 90 years of thinking like that and it it really adds up. Now that you always have
01:18:34
to preface this by being like please drink your coffee and get a haircut. It's always it's always a balance but
01:18:41
but also understand how incredible it can be by putting away doing very ordinary things for a long period of
01:18:47
time can lead to magic. It is magic as well. That's such a perfect word for it because it seems it's magic because it's
01:18:53
not intuitive at all. Yes. You don't you don't understand it. You're like wait what? I don't I can't understand how a
01:18:58
haircut can turn into $10 million. Yeah. It's not intuitive. Like we're we're not there's
01:19:04
a great example from my friend Michael Batnneck. He said if I ask you what is 8 plus 8 plus 8 plus 8? You can figure
01:19:11
that out in your head quickly. But if I said what is 8 * 8 * 8 * 8 * 8? Forget
01:19:16
about it. Can't do it. We're not made to think exponentially. We're not meant to think in multiplicative terms because nothing
01:19:23
was exponential once upon a time. That's largely true. Yeah. You know what I mean? I can't think of anything that was really exponential before. Yeah. I'm
01:19:29
sure we could come up with a couple examples in in nature and whatnot. There there's there's lots of of compounding in nature and that's that's kind of the
01:19:36
core of of evolution is like things building upon each other over time. Yeah. Maybe brushing your teeth or decay
01:19:41
be considered. Yeah. But you know certainly the the stock market is the most pertinent example in most people's
01:19:46
lives. But there's also a lot of like bad habits compound. Smoking one cigarette is not not that big a deal.
01:19:52
Smoking one cigarette every day for 30 years, big deal. Smoking two packs a day for 30, big deal. So there are things
01:19:58
that like in small doses they're not that big a deal. But in if you do them consistently for a long period of time,
01:20:04
it leads to negative magic. So what's your view then on saving money? I you're
01:20:10
you're working on a book currently which is being released in October this year called The Art of Spending Money. Yeah.
01:20:16
What's your view on saving money? You told me to have the coffee cut my hair. Yeah. I I view savings as one thing most
01:20:23
people view saving money as like as idle s like like if you're not spending it
01:20:28
it's just sitting in the bank doing nothing and it's just kind of a it's just wasted money sitting there. I've never viewed it like that at all. I view
01:20:35
savings as little tokens of independence and every dollar that I save is a little
01:20:41
piece of my time in the future that I own and I control. It's just deferred spending and I view that as
01:20:47
independence. Like so if you have a lot of savings, it's not just like hoarding money and I'm not going to do anything
01:20:52
with it. And it's not even that I'm saving this money so that I can spend it in the future. If I save a dollar today,
01:20:58
I have a dollar more independence today. I benefit from that today, right now. Like I feel more independent because of
01:21:04
it. And I am more independent because of it. So I view again my my top financial goal by far and I think this is true for
01:21:11
most people whether they know it or not. What they really want out of money is independence and autonomy and is be
01:21:17
being able to do things on their own terms, live the life that they want to live. And I view the oxygen of
01:21:23
independence is is savings. And what's the opposite of that? Is it debt? Debt. Yeah. Debt is a piece of your future
01:21:28
that somebody else owns. It's the polar opposite of it. When you go into debt, you're saying three years from now, this
01:21:34
company owns a part of my time. They own my labor in the future. And savings is the opposite. Savings is in the future.
01:21:41
I have this stored up. I have this consumption store stored up in the future. I can do whatever I want with it. I think you know you've written a
01:21:47
book called the psychology of money but as you were talking there I was thinking gosh this is all psychology again because at the heart of this we all have
01:21:53
our own unique relationship with money and there's lots of people that won't even look at their their own bank statements. They won't look at their own
01:21:59
revolute or Monzo app in the morning. They avoid their credit cards in terms of like their credit card statements.
01:22:06
And to even start talking about these subjects of saving and spending, we probably need to preface it with some
01:22:11
kind of like mindset or mentality towards your relationship with money. Yeah. I think the most important is uh
01:22:17
there are two topics in life that will impact you whether you like them or not. That's health and money. It doesn't
01:22:23
matter if you not you're not interested in those topics. Those topics are interested in you and they will impact your life. You can have a wonderful life
01:22:30
not knowing anything about chemistry or meteorology if you don't care about those topics. You cannot have a good
01:22:36
life if you don't care about money and and health. And I that's true for everybody everywhere. And so I think
01:22:41
everyone has an obligation to understand their own relationship with money. Now some people are going to be, you know,
01:22:47
fanatics about it and other people just view money as just kind of like a necessary tool that they need to get through life. But you have to understand
01:22:54
how it works and what it's doing to you financially and psychologically. And so much of modern ills have to do with
01:23:02
envy, jealousy, feel like you're falling behind relative to other people. The core of that is usually financial. And
01:23:08
so even if you're not the kind of person who's like, I I don't care about the stock market and like I don't really care that much about money. I like
01:23:14
having fun with my friends. That's great. But there is a huge component of sociology and just what's going on in
01:23:19
the world all the time that is financial. And I think money is like such an interesting window into people's
01:23:26
lives. You can learn so much about somebody if you understand what they do
01:23:31
with their money, how they think about money, how much they talk about money, how much they want to show off, how much how much attention they're putting into
01:23:37
their clothes and their cars and their jewelry to show other people how much money that they have. You learn so much
01:23:43
about someone's psychology. You know, if I learned about your politics, I I don't know what they are, but if I learned
01:23:49
about your politics, I might learn something about you. But if I sat down and I said, "Tell me everything about your money. Tell me how much you make,
01:23:55
how much you spend, what do you value, what do you want to do. I learned so much about your personality. In your work on the psychology of money, how
01:24:01
much did you think about trauma as a protagonist in the story of one's financial relationships? I think less
01:24:07
about trauma. That's a component of it, but more so it's just that we are all prisoners of our unique past. No matter
01:24:12
what that is, that's trauma for a lot of people, different forms of trauma. But you grew up in a in a different country
01:24:18
than I did. You have different parents than I do, different values. were slightly different ages and so you saw a
01:24:25
different side of the world than I did and that taught you different values. It taught you to aspire to different things than I did and you and I in a lot of
01:24:32
ways are a lot alike. I think if you if we sat down and like talked about broader topics, we'd agree on 90% of
01:24:38
things, but we are different. And so we shouldn't pretend that what I want to do
01:24:44
with my money is what you should do. And I think a lot of times when people argue about money and they're like, "Oh,
01:24:50
you're investing wrong or you're you're you're spending you're you're not spending enough. You're spending too much." It's not actually people
01:24:55
disagreeing with each other. It's people who came from very different backgrounds talking over each other and they just
01:25:01
have different aspirations for what you want to do. So, everyone is is so different and they're they're a prisoner
01:25:06
of of their past. My my brother-in-law is a a social worker. And I may have
01:25:12
brought this up when I the first time I was on your podcast, but I think about it all the time. And uh in social work, when you're working with very
01:25:18
disadvantaged kids, a lot of those kids who are are homeless and foster children behave very poorly at school. They do
01:25:24
very poorly. Their grades are terrible in school. They're always getting in fights. And he said as a social worker,
01:25:30
he said, "We have a saying in social work. It is all behavior makes sense with enough information." So, you look at this child who is uh
01:25:36
getting into fights on the playground and failing all of his classes. And it's easy for the teacher to be like, "What's your problem? This is not that hard.
01:25:43
Just behave. Just stop doing this." And then you look at what that kid's going through at home. Maybe their parents are beating them. Maybe they're they're
01:25:50
their foster children. They're orphans. Once you piece together what's going on in their life, you're like, I kind of understand. All behavior makes sense
01:25:56
with enough information. And I think you can apply that to a lot of areas in life, money especially, where you're
01:26:02
like, you see someone driving a yellow Lamborghini, there's a story there about someone's past. I'm not judging it, but
01:26:09
there's a story in there of someone being like, I want people to know how much money I made. And it's not a
01:26:15
criticism, but there's there's a story. There's something that happened in your life that that that led you to there.
01:26:23
And we all have that's not a criticism because I have bits of my past that influence how I manage money today, too.
01:26:29
So, just recognizing that there's no one right answer in math. 2 plus two is four for me and you. There is a right answer.
01:26:36
Money's not like that. We're all just kind of trying to figure out what works given the lens that we see the world
01:26:41
through. This is a bit of a bizarre question, but it had me thinking as you're speaking about mortality as it
01:26:48
relates to money. Because one of the perspectives on money is yolo. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? I'm
01:26:54
only going to live once, so I might as well have a good time. I think I definitely have a more of a bias in that
01:27:01
direction, although I'm not fully in that direction. And my brother, who's a year older than me that went as one that gave me your book and has worked as a
01:27:08
stock broker, an actuarial scientist, at 12 years old, he was budgeting his pocket money on an Excel document
01:27:14
whereas I was just spending, spending, spending. and he thinks much more long term. He's like investing in his pension
01:27:21
at 21. Yeah. Whereas I was like at the casino, not the not the literal casino,
01:27:28
a figurative casino. I was taking bigger risks and just rolling the dice. And my somewhat illogical way of rationalizing
01:27:34
my behavior and not investing as much in my pension was I'm only going to live once anyway, so I might as well just
01:27:41
enjoy my life. Yeah. And when we talk about the coffees and saving and all this stuff, a lot of people will be thinking, "Yes, but compounding's fine,
01:27:47
but I want to enjoy life." Enjoy life. I think about a thing when I was I was in my early 20s at this point, and I met I
01:27:53
there's a co-orker of mine, and he was I don't know 10 years older than me. And um he had $25,000 of credit card debt,
01:28:01
which I could not fathom at the time. That was such an incomprehensible amount of credit card debt that he was paying
01:28:06
17% interest on. And at the time I just thought and and all the debt came from trips that he had taken. He traveled
01:28:13
Europe and traveled through Asia and had a great time doing it, but he put it all on his credit card. At the time I remember thinking, you idiot. You do you
01:28:19
understand what this is going to do to your future? And then he died when he was about 32. Wow. And now and then and
01:28:25
then I remember thinking like, I'm so glad you took those trips. I'm so glad you went into that credit card debt
01:28:30
because the truth was at age 32, he had seen more and done more than most people would at age 62. And so I think about
01:28:38
that a lot of like it's always a balance and the truth is that you and I don't know are we going to live until we're
01:28:45
110 or die tomorrow. Nobody knows. Of course, one thing I think a lot about as a parent is that I've been a big saver
01:28:52
my entire life since I got my first job at age 16. I've saved the majority of what I made in every job that I've ever
01:28:58
been in. And it would be easy to look at someone like me and say, "Morgan, if you were on your deathbed tomorrow, you'd
01:29:03
probably regret the vacations you didn't take and the the dinners you didn't have, right? You'd regret that." My
01:29:09
answer is absolutely not. Because if I was on my deathbed tonight, I would take so much joy knowing that my wife and
01:29:16
kids are going to be okay because of what I saved. That would that would that would be the the worst situation I would
01:29:22
be in is on my deathbed and looking at my wife and kids and knowing you guys are screwed. you get I'm leaving I'm
01:29:28
leaving you debt, you know, and so but that might change as I get older. And so when my kids are hopefully financially
01:29:36
self-sufficient, will I still think that, you know, will I still have that need to be like, I need to work and save
01:29:42
to provide for my young kids? That's not going to last forever. So, it'll change throughout your life. That is literally
01:29:47
the worst thought in the world, isn't it? to think that you could be on your deathbed and look over at your family and know that they're about to struggle
01:29:54
with bills and with food and they're probably going to have to sell the house and their lifestyle is completely going
01:30:00
to change when you go. It's I I don't even have kids yet, but I was just thinking about my partner because there's no there's no there's no worse
01:30:07
nightmare than that. I think there's an opposite of that, which is in several of the books and studies that have been
01:30:12
done on on dying. You know, there are quite a few people who have very peaceful deaths, people who know they're
01:30:17
going to die of terminal illness and they're pretty much at ease with it. And when you dig into like what's what is
01:30:22
those people's psychology? How do you know you're going to die in six months and you're kind of at ease with it? One of the big factors is knowing that your
01:30:30
family's going to be okay without you because they are sufficient and they don't rely on you for wisdom and advice
01:30:37
as much. They can take care of themselves. But the opposite, if you're on your deathbed and you're like, "My my
01:30:43
children, my spouse is gonna have a real hard time without me." That is that's the most painful thing you can imagine.
01:30:50
I could also imagine that one of the great regrets one might have on their deathbed is just not having lived. Because I was thinking about I sometimes
01:30:56
ponder if I die now, how would I feel? Like if I was given a diagnosis, God forbid, um how would I feel? And I feel
01:31:04
like I've really gone for it with my life. Yeah. I feel like I've traveled. I've seen things. I've done things. I've met people, I've lived. So, there's a
01:31:11
certain feeling of there's a certain smile on my face or gratitude when I think about this being the end. Yeah.
01:31:18
So, it's a balancing act, isn't it, between like between the two, between my friend who
01:31:23
buried himself in credit card debt, even though I'm I'm glad like I'm glad he did it given his short life versus the
01:31:29
people who save everything for the end. David Cassidy, who's a very famous childhood actor, had an incredible
01:31:35
acting career. Um he died I don't know when he died 10 years ago 15 years ago whatever it was he his last words were
01:31:42
so much wasted time those were his last words and like you think about and this is someone who was like very rich and
01:31:49
famous had like a very enviable life and you can't think of sadder last words
01:31:54
than so much wasted time and I think like no matter this is like the the Jeff Bezos philosophy on business was he
01:32:02
started Amazon because he was trying to imagine himself at age 90 looking back and having the fewest regrets. He was
01:32:09
like, "That that should be your framework for life is that when you're on your deathbed, you have the fewest regrets possible." And he did it because
01:32:15
he was like, "If I don't start Amazon, I'm going to regret it. But if if I do start Amazon and it fails, I won't
01:32:21
regret that." So, just understanding like I think that's a good philosophy. That's probably the the broadest definition of risk is understanding what
01:32:29
you're likely to regret in the future. And I I I I don't think anyone has a perfect calibration on that. Like it's
01:32:35
there's a good chance that heaven forbid if you did get a diagnosis tomorrow as you just said that yes you would look
01:32:41
back and say man I really went for it but you also might look back and be like man and not not not you individually but
01:32:47
any of us would look back and say like man I wish I was wish I had done this different I wish I was nicer to that person I wish I had called this person
01:32:53
more you know worked less right there I think Brony wear found that that palative nurse in Australia when she
01:32:59
interviewed people in their death beds that like I wish I'd worked less was super high and not a single of those people looked back in those situations
01:33:05
on their deathbed when they're 90 years old will look back and say, "I wish I worked harder." But virtually every one
01:33:11
of them will say, "I wish I spent more time with my kids. I wish I spent more time with my family. I I I I wish I was
01:33:16
nicer to myself. I wish I'd let myself be who I actually was." I think the top regret of the dying from her work was
01:33:22
that I wish I'd lived a life more true to myself, which I kind of interpret as like I wish I'd done something else. And
01:33:27
this gets back to the Chuck Feny idea of the billionaire who said, "I I don't want to I want to live my way." Like
01:33:33
being independent is so core to people's happiness and as I said earlier like we
01:33:39
come from different backgrounds we have different aspirations but independence is a very human natural universal
01:33:45
aspiration to be able to live life in your own way. I'm not sure if we talk about this much but for that person who
01:33:51
doesn't have financial independence because they're entrenched with debts and bills and all these kinds of things.
01:33:58
How does one get out of that situation? Because we can't necessarily just save our way out of
01:34:05
that situation, can we? People do. It's difficult because it's likely that the
01:34:10
mindset and psychology that got you there is going to be very difficult to break. Extremely difficult to break. I
01:34:16
heard this statistic one time that this is a completely different topic, but I think this applies to a lot of things that the statistic that will is most
01:34:24
predictive on whether you will cheat on your spouse is how many people you slept with before you got married. The
01:34:30
implication being it's very difficult to just flip a switch and say I'm a different person now. And I think that
01:34:35
that idea can apply to a lot of different things in life. And the psychology of I spend way more than I
01:34:42
make and I don't care about money and debt, debt, debt. Some people can wake up one day and say no more of that. I'm
01:34:47
going I'm going to run in the other way. A lot of people find it very difficult to do. I think one of the hard things
01:34:53
about money that's hard to admit for a lot of people, but there's truth to it is that on the nature nurture spectrum,
01:34:59
a lot of it does lean towards nature. That some people are just wired, your brother was wired to plan and save and
01:35:05
you were wired to take entrepreneurial risks in in maybe a way that he wasn't. And so a lot of it is yes, you can
01:35:11
learn. Yes, you can learn from others and learn new ideas to think about. But we shouldn't pretend that we can
01:35:17
fundamentally rewire who we are. The hardest conversations are often the
01:35:22
ones we avoid. But what if you had the right question to start them with? Every single guest on the diary of a co has
01:35:28
left behind a question in this diary. And it's a question designed to challenge, to connect, and to go deeper
01:35:34
with the next guest. And these are all the questions that I have here in my hand. On one side, you've got the
01:35:40
question that was asked, the name of the person who wrote it, and on the other side, if you scan that, you can watch
01:35:47
the person who came after who answered it. 51 questions split across three different levels. The warm-up level, the
01:35:53
open up level, and the deep level. So, you decide how deep the conversation goes. And people play these conversation
01:36:00
cards in boardrooms at work, in bedrooms, alone at night, and on first dates, and everywhere in between. I'll
01:36:07
put a link to the conversation cards in the description below and you can get yours at the diary.com. Just to close off on this
01:36:13
point of saving money, are there any tactics or tricks or ways to think about
01:36:19
how to save for for those people that might be working in a factory and that don't have a ton of excess income every
01:36:24
month? I think if you view savings as I need to save for something in the future, that's hard for people to do. If
01:36:32
you have a little bit of a a mindset shift and say, "I'm gonna save so I can become more independent so that if I
01:36:37
lose my job, I don't have to panic and go find the first one that's available. I can take my time and find another
01:36:42
one." That's independence. If you have a medical emergency, you you're going to have some options on how to treat it and
01:36:47
where to go. That's independence. Viewing every dollar that you save as a token of independence, I think, is a
01:36:54
mindset shift that get makes it a lot easier for people to do versus if they're just saying, "I need to save to buy a new car." I asked this because
01:37:00
earlier on I looked at the most googled questions around saving and the most popular question is how to save money.
01:37:08
Yeah, how to save money. Now they might be be asking like what to do with my savings. Do I put it in a checking
01:37:14
account? Do I put it in a savings account? Do I invest it? That might be part of it. Or it might be as similar as
01:37:19
you're saying with tariffs. People genuinely don't know what it means. The second most googled is what is a high yield savings account? Yeah. And this I
01:37:27
think that those questions they're not bad questions. There's no there's no bad questions. I was asking those questions at at one point in my life, too. But it
01:37:33
gets to the point of like you have an obligation to understand how money works and what it's going to do to you and how
01:37:40
to manage it. It's not a nice to have. Everyone's going to have to deal with these topics whether they like it or not. I love this quote from your book
01:37:46
where you say, "One of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn't to raise your income. It's to raise your humility." Yeah. I think you get there
01:37:53
when you realize like nobody's looking at you as much as you are and nobody cares about your Range Rover and your
01:38:00
Rolex as much as you did. They may have meant a lot to you, but no one else was
01:38:05
thinking about them that much because they were busy thinking about themselves. They were busy thinking about their own car. And you realize how
01:38:11
much modern spending, and this has increased in the social media age the last 10 or 15 years, is trying to get
01:38:18
strangers attention. It's trying to put on a show, put on a performance for people that you think are paying
01:38:23
attention to you, but they're absolutely not. They're not paying any attention to you whatsoever. And so, like lowering
01:38:28
your or like raising your humility is is one way to think about it. But it's also just realizing like who do you want
01:38:35
attention from? It's different for everybody. For me, I want my wife, my
01:38:41
kids, my parents, and like three friends to love me. And I I desperately care
01:38:46
about their attention. I desperately care what my kids and my wife and my parents think of me and it's it's
01:38:53
fundamental to my happiness. And from there it declines real quick. You know, there's a couple really close friends
01:38:59
who are in there and then there's some like colleagues and whatnot and it declines very quickly from there. And
01:39:04
strangers, the person driving down the street could not care in the slightest. And maybe that sounds obvious, but so
01:39:11
much of what we do with money is a performance to impress that guy who's not paying any attention to you
01:39:17
whatsoever. And so I want to put a lot of effort into fostering the relationships with those six or seven
01:39:23
people. I want to put tremendous effort into that and very little every from there. And here's the thing, if I got a
01:39:30
Ferrari, would my wife love me more? Like no. Would my kids admire me more? No. Mh. And so the people who I want to
01:39:37
love me are not impacted by the fancy things that I would buy. So what do you spend your money on? We live a a pretty
01:39:44
decent material life, but I also spend a lot of money. So the biggest expense that I have, what I spend my money on is
01:39:50
independence. And I view that as a thing I'm spending money on. I spend money on controlling my calendar. I spend money
01:39:56
on the ability to say no to work that I don't want to do. I view it as I'm financially independent and so I can do
01:40:02
the work that I want to do. And I've been working on that for 25 years. What what what else do I spend money on?
01:40:07
Here's what's interesting. My son back in the green room, you asked about him. There's a thing I I was thinking about just a couple weeks ago. I grew up as a
01:40:13
skier. I was a ski racer in Lake Tahoe. And always, particularly when I was younger, there were always people on my
01:40:19
ski team who had better gear than me. They had the newer skis and newer boots and cooler gear and whatnot. I always I
01:40:25
hated it. Made me so insecure. I hated it. And one of the things that I did was when my son started skiing a couple
01:40:32
years ago, I was like, I'm going to buy you the best stuff because I was insecure and I'm going to I'm I'm going
01:40:38
to make up for that little chip on my shoulder. I'm going to buy you the best gear. And here's the thing, he couldn't care less about it. He could not care
01:40:44
less about the fancy stuff that he has. Couldn't care less about it. So, everyone's different in that. And it
01:40:49
also gets back to like a lot of spending is based off of a a story or a scar that you had from earlier in your childhood.
01:40:56
And where is your your capital allocation today? We spoke about this a little bit last time, but in terms of
01:41:01
percentages, you have a ton of cash. You said roughly what percentage of your uh
01:41:07
uh 20 25% maybe. We own a house outright and then the rest in stocks. It's a very
01:41:12
simple our entire net worth is a house, cash, Vanguard index funds, and shares
01:41:18
of Markeel where I'm on the board of directors. That's it. That's my entire net worth. It's as simple and boring as bland as you could possibly get. And
01:41:25
what I want to do with that, the reason I keep it so boring is the variable that I want to maximize for is endurance, as
01:41:32
we spoke about earlier. So if my finances are so simple, then I can spend all of my like mental energy, all of the
01:41:38
strategy is, how can I make sure that I can just keep this going for as long as I possibly can? So for someone that
01:41:43
doesn't know what a Vanguard index fund is, if you had to explain it to your son, he probably knows, doesn't he? But
01:41:50
to someone of your son's age, how would you explain a Vanguard index fund? Because you said you got cash. People understand that people understand a
01:41:56
house. Vanguard index fund. So an index fund is a collection of hundreds if not
01:42:01
thousands of businesses. So when you buy an index fund, you're owning a little bit of Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook,
01:42:08
all of them, every public company that's available, you're owning a tiny slice of them. One way to think about it is when you buy an index fund, you're owning a
01:42:15
little slice of American capitalism. And which index funds do you invest in and why? There's lots of them. Lots of I
01:42:20
mean, there's tons of them that are are equally good. So there this is not to say that there one is better necessarily
01:42:26
better than the other. You must have a thesis. Most of what I buy is called the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index ticker
01:42:31
is VTI. Not a recommendation for others, but it's it's a it's the broadest index. It basically owns every stock that's
01:42:37
available to buy in the world and it does it at a very very low fee. And so I'm not making any bet on AI. I'm not
01:42:44
making any bet on this industry or that company. You're owning a little bit of slice of American business. And what
01:42:50
what has that yielded as on average over the last couple of years? If you look at like like a good historical uh
01:42:57
comparison to what it would be, which is like the the S&P 500, if you go back, you can go back a hundred years, there's
01:43:03
a guy from Yale University named Robert Schiller who has data going back to the 1880s on US stocks. And basically what
01:43:09
it shows is over time on average, which that that phrase is doing some heavy lifting here, but on average 8 to 10%
01:43:15
per year. And why that is like there's a big asterisk there is you almost never earn eight or 10% in any given year.
01:43:21
You're much more likely to be up 30% or down 15%. And it averages out to eight
01:43:27
or 10% per year. But it's always chaos in in any individual year. And is there a reason why you don't just bet on
01:43:33
technology for example? Well there's a lot of technology in that index fund. That's the highest weight because those are the those are the biggest companies
01:43:39
in America. Amazon, Google and whatnot. But there's also tremendous amount of value that can be created by a company
01:43:45
like Proctor and Gamble selling toothpaste and deodorant. And there can actually be more value in those kind of
01:43:50
companies than technology. Because I would bet good money that in 30 years
01:43:56
people will still be using Old Spice deodorant. I would not bet good money that in 30 years Google is going to be the dominant way that people find
01:44:02
information. And so companies that sell the same product for a long period of time, have endurance and longevity, like
01:44:09
can actually create a ton of value for their investors. You mentioned the other thing is houses. Um, you have a house.
01:44:16
Yep. House sales in 2024 total just 4 million. The lowest rate since 1995.
01:44:21
Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's one of the biggest social problems. And it is it's so much bigger than housing and so much
01:44:28
bigger than money. I think you can tie everything from homelessness to heroin
01:44:33
to suicide to the fact that we in America and a lot of areas around the world have not built enough homes in the
01:44:39
last 50 years that has pushed the price higher and higher and higher and it's pushed out what was a small sliver and
01:44:46
now a growing large chunk of society who rightly feels like they cannot afford a
01:44:51
basic middle-ass home. And it's a hu it's probably the biggest one of the
01:44:57
biggest societal problems that we face right now is a housing shortage that has pushed housing out of affordability for
01:45:03
tens of millions of people. Do you recommend people try and buy houses or is it just to rent those houses?
01:45:09
Here's what So I've purchased three homes in my life. Yeah. Every one of those three homes I don't feel like I
01:45:15
got a good deal. It wasn't like oh this is a bargain. Got to this is a great deal. This is none none of the three
01:45:20
were like that. I bought them. I could afford them. They were in my in my I was not going, you know, doing something
01:45:26
that I should not have been doing financially. But the reason I bought them is because they were a good safe home for my my family in a
01:45:34
community that we wanted to live in. And I was not thinking about is this going to have be a house that I can make a make a fortune on? Is this going to go
01:45:40
up in value? Is this going to go down in value? That was never part of the equation. it was, yes, I can afford this and it's not imperiling my finances at
01:45:47
all, but the reason I'm doing it is because it's a a safe, good place for my family to live. And I think generally
01:45:53
that's the way to do it. And once people start thinking through the lens of is this a good investment? Is this going to
01:45:58
go up? Are home prices going to fall? Maybe I should wait six months because they're going to fall. That's when you're just you're shooting yourself. You're you're just rolling the dice at
01:46:05
that point. And it's a and people get into a lot of trouble doing that when they're like, "Oh, I know like I'm going into a ton of debt, but I think home
01:46:12
prices are going to double in the next three years, so it's okay." That's like that should not be ever be part of the equation. It should be I can afford this
01:46:18
and this is where I want to raise my family for the next five or 10 years. I think that's that's the formula. So, it's more about freedom and security
01:46:24
than making a quick return. Absolutely. Here's here's what's interesting, like the psychology of housing, too. Um, we
01:46:30
we bought a new house eight months ago and sold our previous house. And that house, the house that we just sold, we
01:46:36
we did end up making a little bit of money on because Seattle real estate has gone crazy in the last five years. And
01:46:42
really interesting something that happened. This is just eight months ago when we sold the house. The day that we closed on selling that house and I got
01:46:49
the proceeds wired to me in my bank account, logged in my bank account. I see that number from selling the house.
01:46:55
The numbers meant nothing to me. But the house that we sold meant everything to me. It was like my daughter took her
01:47:02
first steps at the bottom of those stairs. My son had his first day of kindergarten, Christmases, Thanksgivings. Like, and it was like
01:47:08
these numbers don't mean anything to me. These numbers are just going into the new house. But that house that I left
01:47:13
behind meant everything to me. So that gets back to like don't think of it as a as a financial transaction. It should be
01:47:20
this is where you want to raise your family and build some memories. How does it compare to investing in that Vanguard
01:47:26
thing? If we look at the returns on housing, I have no memories of my daughter's first steps in my Vanguard
01:47:31
index funds. You know, that that that that's really it. It's you you are investing in a Vanguard index fund because you think you're going to make
01:47:37
money over time, whereas you should not have that mentality when you buy a house. It should be within your financial means, but you should be doing
01:47:43
it because it's a good place to raise your family for a long period of time. It does beg a question for for younger people who are thinking about building
01:47:50
their wealth because the first thing and the most common thing we're taught as it relates to wealth creation is to go buy
01:47:56
a house. Like it's the thing that everybody knows. You leave university, you get a job and you save as as much money as you can to put that deposit
01:48:02
down. Yeah, that was true in previous generations because if you go back to the 1950s,60s7s, we were building so many
01:48:09
more homes than we are today that they were much cheaper. even when interest rates were higher, they were much
01:48:16
cheaper. And so the advice of, hey, you got an entry-level job, you should go buy an entry-level house probably made
01:48:22
sense in the 60s and 70s in a way that it doesn't today. The other element here that is very easy to overlook in the
01:48:28
housing problem, the housing debate is that the homes that we found adequate in the 50s and 60s, we would not find
01:48:35
adequate today. So Levittown in New York was is like the prototypical example.
01:48:40
That's when like end of World War II, build big like like build the middle class community, build this huge new
01:48:46
community called Levittown in New York. And that was like the the typical white picket fence middle-ass home that we
01:48:53
like long for today. And they were cheap. They were affordable. The average new house in Levittown, was 700 square
01:48:59
feet. It had two two bedrooms for an average of a family of five or six
01:49:04
moving into it. One bathroom for those six people, no air conditioning, no garage. It would be a house that if I
01:49:10
showed you today, you would be like it's a junk. It's a to to to it's a crack house. Like nobody like would say that
01:49:16
is a beautiful middle-ass house. So expectations over time have increased tremendously. So now the average new
01:49:23
middle class house is 2200 square feet where it used to be 700. So like what an
01:49:29
entry-level house is, the definition of that has expanded tremendously over time. And if your children come to you
01:49:34
and they say, "Dad, I'm 25 years old and I've just got some excess cash here.
01:49:40
I've got $20,000, $40,000. I'm thinking of putting a deposit down for a house."
01:49:46
My wife and I rented for years. And looking back at the time and looking back, it was the best thing that we ever
01:49:51
did. We rented for, I don't know, 10 years before we bought a house because we lived in five different cities and we
01:49:57
could just easily just pack up and go. And they would, we weren't tied to anything. We had flexibility. And it was
01:50:03
pretty much the week that our son was born, when we had our first kid, that it was like a switch in my head. I was
01:50:08
like, I I I need to go have my own house because the flexibility that I enjoyed when we were childless, it was the
01:50:15
opposite. I was like, I I value stability now. I want a stable house for for my family. And it was like instantly
01:50:20
that switched. And so that was not a financial decision of like I need to go out and buy because I have some extra savings. It was like, I want I want my
01:50:27
house that is mine and it's not there's not going to be a landlord that sends me a letter and says, "Oh, sorry, you're
01:50:32
you're evicted." Or, "Sorry, we're we're we're selling the building. You need to leave. This is my house." That's that that that was the shift for me. It feels
01:50:39
like when we rent, we're wasting money, though. But it's not in the slightest. I mean, for anyone who's owned a house,
01:50:44
you know, the expenses that go into a house, it's not just the mortgage. It's the It's the broken water heater. It's replacing your roof. It's the the
01:50:50
expenses that go into it. Like you want to talk about throwing your money away, try replacing your roof on a house that you own. That feels like throwing money
01:50:57
away. And it's hard for the brain to conceive. You know, that renting might be the same
01:51:06
as buying a house when you when you net out and you factor in opportunity cost and flexibility, the ability to get on a
01:51:13
plane and go to London to to do that job and you can't quantify that flexibility. So my wife and I lived in five different
01:51:18
cities. Some of those were because we got jobs that that we didn't you know in different cities we had to move. You can't quantify that flexibility or it's
01:51:25
very hard to but in the moment it was everything. It was I remember when my wife got into grad school and it was like great pack up this city and move to
01:51:31
this city and there just like no handcuffs just get up and go versus if you own your house like anyone's tried
01:51:36
to sell a house like it's a nightmare and so you can't quantify that but it meant everything in the world to us now.
01:51:42
My brother said this to me he's a very smart guy now. Now now I reflect upon it. He said this to me when I was younger cuz I think at 25 when I got
01:51:47
some money. I was telling him maybe I'll buy this house. We should look at this house. And he explained to me in simple
01:51:54
terms that the flexibility that I had to get up and move was actually worth so
01:51:59
much more than maybe some of the equity that I might acrue from buying a house.
01:52:05
And now I look back on it from that day onwards. I then moved to New York and I
01:52:11
lived there for 3 days. Then I the pandemic happened and I suddenly quit my job out of the blue unexpectedly and I
01:52:17
moved to Portugal then went to Germany then went to Bali for several months
01:52:22
then flew back to the UK London now I've just moved to LA. Yeah. And that's all
01:52:29
in the space of four years. Incredible. And I've gone with the opportunity. So when the opportunity comes knocking and
01:52:35
oh the podcast starts doing well and then this happens and then Dragon's done this. I've just moved with the opportunity. And if id bought a house
01:52:41
you'd be locked down. There are so many people today who bought homes in 2021, 2022, and their mortgage rate was two or
01:52:48
three percent. They have a two or three percent mortgage. And a lot of those people want to move today because they
01:52:54
can get a better job in another city. They want to move and they feel like they can't because because they're they
01:52:59
have golden handcuffs for the super cheap mortgage because if they sold their house and bought a new one, their new mortgage rate would be 7 and a
01:53:05
half%. And so those are people who like a lot of those people look back and when they bought in 2021, they're like, "We
01:53:11
won the lottery, 2% mortgage. This is amazing." And looking back, they're like, "Gosh, we would have been so better off renting if we did, if we had
01:53:17
the flexibility to move." So interesting. So much of economic prosperity over history is your ability
01:53:23
to move. And that that's been true for hundreds of years. Like if you want to see like a a basic measure of how
01:53:29
wealthy any economy is, like how often do people move? Because moving is usually a symbol of opportunity. And the
01:53:34
more that they're locked down and feel like they can't move, the more stagnant and like sclerotic that economy is going to be. What's this idea that you have of
01:53:42
asking $3 questions? I heard you talking about that. I stole that from an author named named Rammit Si. Oh, a very
01:53:49
well-known author. And he says, "Too many people ask $3 questions when they should be asking $30,000 questions."
01:53:55
What he means by that are when people say, "How can I save more money?" They say, "I should stop drinking coffee."
01:54:00
That's a $3 question. And that does not make any difference to you. What you should be asking are $30,000 questions
01:54:06
like where should I go to college? Should I go to the cheap school or the expensive school? Where should I live?
01:54:11
The cheap city or the expensive city? Should I rent or should I buy? Those are $30,000 questions. And we spend a lot of
01:54:17
mental energy on $3 questions that actually that don't move the needle that much in our in our finances. For most
01:54:23
people, they're only a couple of expense items that actually matter to your finances. that is your housing payment,
01:54:30
either rent or mortgage, your car payment, child care, uh healthcare, and that that's pretty much it. And and yes,
01:54:36
you're going to spend money on on other things, but those four, that's the vast majority of what people spend money on.
01:54:42
But when you hear people talk about how do you save money? It's like, oh, well, stop stop going to Starbucks. You can
01:54:48
like pack your own lunch to work. It doesn't make that much of a difference. It's those big four things. So am I right in thinking that you think we
01:54:54
should avoid either extreme end of the financial like approach that people
01:55:00
take? So you got yolo on one end and you've got caring about every coffee on the
01:55:05
other end spectrum. I think those are what are you are most likely to end up regretting. What do you mean? There are
01:55:11
a lot of people in the fire movement. Fire stands for financial independence retire early. It's this big movement
01:55:17
started 10 or 15 years ago of people who are like, I'm going to save as much money as I can in my 20s, learn how to
01:55:23
live as cheaply and frugally as I can and retire at age 27 with, you know, 600
01:55:28
grand in the bank and that's I'm going to retire off of that. And it was a huge movement. So many of those people ended up regretting it because they retired at
01:55:36
27 and six months later they're bored out of their mind, if not depressed, because they they wake up and they're
01:55:42
like, "What what do I do now? Do I I just go for I go play golf or something like all all my friends are out working.
01:55:47
What do I do now? And so I think the extreme ends of like oh yolo I'm just going to spend all live for today. I'm
01:55:53
going to spend it all. I'm going to go party and travel and whatnot. There's there's a somewhat of a chance that
01:55:58
you're going to end up regretting that because you didn't save enough for a time in your life when you want to retire and you can't. On the subject of
01:56:04
retirement, me and my friend Jack over there, we were talking about people who retire and the impact it can have on the
01:56:11
individual. And I I think I'd be quite scared to retire because there seems to be lots of data that suggests that once
01:56:16
we retire, it's quite it's downhill from there in many respects for many people in terms of purpose and meaning and
01:56:24
connections. How do you think about retirement? Is that something we should be aiming at? My dad, I think, retired
01:56:29
and went back to work three different times. We eventually had to tell him like, "No more retirement parties." Like you like you only get one. But he would
01:56:36
retire and then and then a month later he'd be like, "Man, I I I really miss work." And in his line of work, he could
01:56:41
go back. He could go back part-time and what not. So that it all worked out for him. But I think he starkly saw what a
01:56:47
lot of people overlook, which is how much of his identity was his job and how
01:56:52
much like when he retired the first time and he like woke up and looked in the mirror and said, "I'm not I'm not the
01:56:57
person who I used to be. I used to be a a a this and but I'm not anymore." And
01:57:03
and it he didn't like it. And I was like, it's easy. Like look, every job has downsides that are stressful and you
01:57:09
don't want to do them and they're a pain and you hate them and you can't wait to live a world where you don't have to do
01:57:16
the stressful parts of your job. But for a lot of us, like what we really want to
01:57:21
do in our soul is like be productive in the world and add value to the world, add value for our family, add value to the world. And one of the the quickest
01:57:28
ways to become depressed is to be very productive and then immediately stop. That's a quick path to depression for a
01:57:35
lot of people. And so some people are very good at retirement. My my my mom on the other hand was very good at
01:57:40
retirement. She retired, never looked back and had a very has a very full life in retirement. She keeps herself very
01:57:46
busy with hobbies and friends and whatnot. So some people are very good at it. Other people who found their
01:57:52
identity in their work, that's a lot of people. That's me. I think that's probably you would would go crazy if if
01:57:57
if we ended up retiring. You can't say your own book, but if you had to recommend a book that would equipped us
01:58:03
to understand money, wealth creation, and all these kinds of things, what book would you recommend? Oh, I would say my
01:58:08
own book. No. Um, no, I think a couple that were really important for me, you know, it's not bedtime reading, but a
01:58:14
guy named Benjamin Graham wrote a book called The Intelligent Investor. He wrote it in the 1930s, so it is written in 1930s English. And he was a
01:58:21
professor, so it's written, it's not quite a textbook, but it's not bedtime reading. But there is more wisdom about
01:58:27
investing in that book than any other book that's been written in the last hundred years. And even though he wrote
01:58:32
it almost 100 years ago, 90% of it is timeless. You know, he he says certain things that are obviously dated, but
01:58:39
there's more wisdom in there than anything else that's ever been written. That's why the book still sells a lot 90
01:58:44
years after it's been written. That was that was a big one. Learning about World War II and the Great Depression was very
01:58:52
influential to me and many other people because both of those events, particularly World War II, saw the
01:58:58
highest range of human emotions that I think has ever been documented from the most agony and despair and torment to
01:59:05
the most like like elation and happiness that it's over. like so many the the the fullest range
01:59:13
of human emotions were documented during that period from probably 1929 to 1945.
01:59:18
Mhm. Those 16 years I think if you learn about what happened in the United States and all over the world of course you
01:59:25
learn so much about humanity like World War when you study World War II you're not really learning about military tactics even though that's part of it.
01:59:31
You're learning about the psychology of how people deal with uncertainty, dread, risk, doubt, fear. you could learn more
01:59:39
about those topics during that 15- year period than anything else. One of the things that I I learned from listening
01:59:44
to your podcast, which is fantastic. I highly recommend people go listen to the Morgan Hustle podcast, was you were talking about the dangers of rapid
01:59:51
growth. Yeah. And I actually I I took something that you said in the podcast around the danger of
01:59:57
rapid growth and I sent it to my CEO and my chief revenue officer because it's a cautionary tale for a generation of
02:00:05
entrepreneurs who are obsessed with growth at all costs to slow things down. Yeah. What in your view what is the and
02:00:12
this could be the the dangers of rapid growth in any field. It could be someone running a podcast or someone building a business or or anything someone
02:00:19
investing money. Why do we need to be cautious about rapid growth? There's a a
02:00:25
really interesting analogy that I like with tree growth in nature that if you plant a tree out in the middle of an
02:00:31
open field, it because it's out in the middle of an open field, it's gorging on sunlight because there's no other trees
02:00:38
shading it. It's just gorging on sunlight. Because it gorges on sunlight, it grows very, very fast. It can grow
02:00:45
like 10 times faster than a tree that's covered in shade. So, you might think like that's great. That's amazing. It's
02:00:50
growing so quickly. If you're a farmer, you love that. But when a tree grows that quickly, it never has a chance to
02:00:56
grow dense and hard. It never has a chance to grow a very established root structure. And so those trees, even
02:01:02
though they grow very quickly, they die very quickly. They're very susceptible to rot because they never have a chance
02:01:07
to grow hard. It's just kind of like mushy, soft wood inside. And if you see a lot of the lumber that is harvested
02:01:13
these days and you compare it to lumber from like old growth forests, you might as well be looking at a completely
02:01:18
different tree. A lot of the wood that we harvest today that was grown very quickly is soft and weak compared to the
02:01:24
old dense hardwood that they used to make. And I think that's a good analogy that like fast growth is fun. It's
02:01:30
exciting. But there's always it's like speed always comes at the expense of durability always. There's a theory in
02:01:37
finance is kind of like a tongue-in-cheek theory that however fast you grow that's the halflife for how
02:01:42
quickly you can die. So like the faster you grow the f the quicker you can die as well. M and you see that in nature.
02:01:49
You see it with businesses as well. The hard thing is that if you're an entrepreneur, if you're the CEO or working at a company, there is nothing
02:01:55
more thrilling and exciting and and gets you up in the morning than fast growth.
02:02:01
You love it. You love every second of it, even if it's a danger. You just reminded me of an idea I wrote about in
02:02:07
my last book about the music industry where they found the same thing. The faster a song went to number one in the
02:02:12
charts, the quicker it came out. Absolutely. because people get in bored of it basically very very quickly. It's
02:02:18
everywhere. It's on every radio station everywhere and then it falls out the chart all the time the same speed and and the companies that can like produce
02:02:25
tons and tons of money. Even like look at Apple was created in the 1970s didn't really find its stride so to speak until
02:02:32
the mid200s and so it's not it's it's it's like sometimes there like there's companies like Facebook I guess that and
02:02:38
OpenAI that found product market fit found like incredible success virtually overnight the day that they were
02:02:44
invented. But one of the problems with with rapid growth too is that the
02:02:50
difference between building a product that's going to grow very quickly. That is a very different skill than managing
02:02:55
a company that now has a thousand employees. Those are night and day different skills. And so you might be a
02:03:00
very talented entrepreneur who can build a product and get thousands of people to buy it. That does not necessarily mean
02:03:06
that you have the skills to manage a 50 person team or a thousand person team. How does your work all dovetail with the
02:03:11
subject of happiness Morgan? Because at the very heart of it, clearly everyone who's clicked on this conversation and
02:03:16
got this far, although they might be thinking it's money that they're looking for or wealth that they're looking for,
02:03:22
probably at the end of the day, they just want to live a happy life. They think money or wealth is a pathway to a happy life. With all the work that
02:03:28
you've done and the people that you've studied through history and all that you've written, what is your current view on
02:03:34
how to live a happy life? Yeah. What's interesting is that like when you say hap, when anyone says happy, you're like, how can you disagree with that?
02:03:40
Everybody wants to be happy. A lot of why people run into problems when they're seeking happiness is because happiness is not the emotion
02:03:46
that you want to go for. Happiness is always a fiveminute emotion. It comes and goes. You experience it, but it's a
02:03:52
thrill and then it kind of wears off very quickly. If you hear a funny joke, you go to a comedy show, it's funny. You
02:03:57
laugh at at a joke for 20 seconds and then it's not that funny anymore. What you want to go for, I think, is
02:04:03
contentment. And a lot of people like money can buy a good life, but when you imagine yourself with the new house, the
02:04:11
new car, the nice vacation, when you dream about those making you happy, what you're actually envisioning is yourself
02:04:17
being content with those things. You envision yourself on the beach in Maui being content with it. And that's why it
02:04:24
feels so good. The feeling that you want, the feeling that you're actually chasing, whether you know it or not, it's not happiness, it's contentment.
02:04:30
And I think that little shift too is because most people are out there seeking happiness, but they're like, I'm
02:04:36
not I'm not I don't feel that much better than I used to because what you actually want to seek is what my grandmother-in-law had, which was being
02:04:43
content with the little bit that she had. And that's why she was so happy. And may maybe again that's the wrong
02:04:48
word, but she was content. She was perfectly content with her very simple, very basic, boring life. Boring in other
02:04:55
people's eyes. She was content. And that's why a lot of people would look at her, including me, with a sense of envy
02:05:01
is probably the right word. How did you do that? How were you so happy? It's because she was content with what she had.
02:05:07
I was thinking about the goals that I wrote in my diary at 18 years old where I said that I wanted to be a millionaire, girlfriend, Range Rover,
02:05:12
six-pack. And actually, when I envisioned that life, what I envisioned was contentment. Yes, I
02:05:19
imagine yourself driving in the Ferrari and you're like, "Ah, that would be so great." What you're actually imagining yourself is yourself in a Ferrari being
02:05:26
content with that Ferrari. But what ends up happening is when if you are in the Ferrari, you're like, "Oh, look at that
02:05:31
Lambo. Oh, that's nicer than mine, isn't it?" You're not content with it. When I get the Lambo, I will be content, right?
02:05:37
And then you want the Rolls-Royce, whatever it is. Like you're always, whether you know it or not, that's what you're actually seeking is you just want
02:05:43
to be content with what you have because that's true joy. How does one be content? Now, people have been talking
02:05:49
about that for thousands of years. The philosopher Arthur Schopenower has this quote that I love. He said, "If you only
02:05:55
want to be happy, that is very easy to achieve, but people want to be happier than other people, and that is much more
02:06:02
difficult." I think that's that's what it is. It's like so much of it is just a comparison game. And for for a lot of
02:06:10
people, it's like, I don't necessarily want a a nice house. What I want a house is a house that's nicer than yours. I
02:06:15
don't necessarily want an expensive car. I want a car that's more expensive than yours. That's that it's a weird thing to
02:06:21
say, but at the core, that's what a lot of people want. And so being content, to answer your question, is moving from the
02:06:28
external benchmark of comparing myself to you and others and towards the internal benchmark of, as I said
02:06:34
earlier, the only thing that's actually going to make me happy in life is my family, my health. That that's that
02:06:40
that's pretty much it. I I could end it right there and put a period there and say that's what's going to make me happy. It's the internal benchmark. It's
02:06:46
not comparing what I have to what you have. It's just if nobody else was looking, would I be happy with this? Because the truth is nobody else is
02:06:53
looking. Another really interesting example is just if everyone else was made extinct on planet Earth and it was
02:06:58
just you, right? What would you do? What kind of life if nobody was watching, what kind of life would you live? And I
02:07:05
think in that life, would you want a Ferrari or would you want a Toyota pickup truck that has utility that
02:07:11
actually like makes your life easier kind of thing. There's a a great like a a thing that I heard a couple years ago,
02:07:17
which is that a high-end Toyota is a much nicer car than an entry-level BMW.
02:07:23
Oh, yeah. Because a high a high a high-end Toyota is like you got the cushy seats and the moon roof and the
02:07:28
good sound system. An entry-level BMW is just status or the appear like you think it's status. It's just you're buying it
02:07:34
for the chance that you're going to influence somebody else's view of who you are. And people like massively
02:07:40
overestimate how much it's going to actually influence other people. Do you not think there's something hardwired into humans that makes us want to strive
02:07:47
though? Yeah. Because life is always a competition for resources. It always has been of there's a limited amount of
02:07:54
food, a limited amount of land, a limited amount of mates, a limited amount of potential. And so what has
02:08:00
mattered historically is not whether I'm a good hunter, it's whether I'm a better hunter than you. And the reason I'm here
02:08:05
now is because my ancestors outco competed everybody else in that situation. Yes. So I was I have
02:08:11
competition in my DNA. Absolutely. And always will you we're never going to get to a world this is what Adam Smith wrote
02:08:16
about 300 years ago. He's like if people just needed basic food and shelter they could stop right now because virtually
02:08:22
everybody has those. But we keep going because we want to be seen by the people who are we're competing with and showing
02:08:29
you look I'm better than you. I made more money than you. I'm more worthy for a spouse or attention than you are. It's
02:08:35
always a competition. It's kind of a a a sad thing to think about. And of course, I
02:08:41
think people are intelligent enough to know how silly that game can can be and
02:08:47
to take themselves out of the game to some extent, but it's we're never going to be at a time when that's not the
02:08:52
case. It's that's definitely hardwired in us. What is the most important thing we didn't talk about that we should have
02:08:58
talked about? Is there anything comes to mind? for the person at home that's dealing
02:09:03
with all of this tariff craziness, AI, all of this stuff. It might seem like the world is more uncertain today than
02:09:09
it's ever been. And I I don't think that's the case with tariffs and AI. It it has been more uncertain at many
02:09:16
points in the past. It just doesn't feel that way because we know how the story ended in the past and we don't know how this story is going to is going to end.
02:09:22
So, it's always the case that the world that we're living in today feels especially fragile and especially
02:09:28
uncertain. And I think historically it's it's not it's it's it's uncertain and fragile in its own unique new way. But
02:09:36
it's always the case that it feels like the world used to be great. We used to have it and now it's not anymore.
02:09:42
There's a great John Stewart quote where he says the reason the world felt like a better place during your childhood is
02:09:48
because you were a child. And just because we know how the story ended, it
02:09:53
it it makes it feel like today is a very uncertain place. even if it's kind of part for the course historically. We
02:09:59
have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is what is one
02:10:05
thing you valued starting out that you no longer value?
02:10:10
One thing that I this was not necessarily changing my mind as it was just kind of growing as an adult was
02:10:17
when I was in my 20s, I really valued travel and getting out and seeing the
02:10:22
world as you should in your 20s. When I became a father, I valued being at home with my kids. And it's almost like in my
02:10:29
20s, a terrible night would be at home on the couch. That that's a failed
02:10:34
night. And in my 30s, there's nothing or in my 40s now, there's nothing better than being at home on the living room
02:10:40
floor playing Legos with my kids. Nothing better. So, that was a shift in values, but it wasn't because I changed my mind. It's just a different state of
02:10:46
life. Morgan, thank you for doing what you do. It's um so incredible because
02:10:51
you know you referenced that book, The Intelligent Investor. I tried reading that book and I just bounced off it straight away. It's really, really
02:10:57
tough. Yeah. But your book, the one that my brother gave to me all those years ago, has probably made me millions and
02:11:03
millions of pounds because I read it when I was young enough because it helped me to have a lens and a framework
02:11:08
to think about a lot of this tempting get-richqu investing mentality that you
02:11:14
see today. I wouldn't even call it investing. It helped me to understand the emotional elements of saving,
02:11:19
spending, investing. Um, and ultimately it gave me a strategy for what to do if I ever made money. And although it's a
02:11:26
boring strategy, it's a timeless one. And that is part of the reason why so much of my money currently is in really
02:11:33
safe places like index funds. Yeah. And it it's so important to read books like this
02:11:39
because when you read it and you hear the stories of these individuals and what happened and what didn't happen to
02:11:46
them, whenever you experience an emotion that is similar or you find yourself in like a similar situation where you can
02:11:52
relate to one of these characters in the story, you have a a blueprint for what
02:12:00
happens next. And so you ultimately can like ident oh my god that was like that guy in the
02:12:05
book who couldn't stop um gambling even after he'd won or he had predicted the stock market correctly once and then he
02:12:11
predicted it incorrectly the next time and then ended up killing himself and it's and it's it's for so many moments
02:12:17
in my life whether it was crypto or investing in certain particular stocks when I used to like pick stocks or starting businesses it's given me this
02:12:23
wonderful framework and same as ever is the book that I wish I had written myself and it's written in a style that
02:12:29
I wish I'd written myself and in fact my last book which um which many of my listeners would have um listened to was
02:12:36
very very much inspired by your writing style because it is it it is so accessible. It is so story driven and
02:12:43
it's so the the subjects you talk about in this book are so diverse but they're so pertinent to everything all the time
02:12:49
and it's there so such wonderful books. You're the author I admire the most of all authors that I've ever met. That means the world to me because of the way
02:12:55
you write your books. So Well, thank you. That means the world to me and I think you're the absolute best in the world at what you do. Keeping a keeping
02:13:01
a conversation going for a couple hours is an unbelievably difficult skill and there are virtually no one else in the
02:13:07
planet who can do it better than you. So, thank you, Stephen. I hope everybody goes and gets your books. Thank you so much, Morgan. We'll see you again soon.
02:13:13
This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the
02:13:19
show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way
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that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do
02:13:30
everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests
02:13:37
that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.
02:13:44
[Music]
02:13:55
Where? [Music]
