Financial Expert: Passive Income Is A Scam! Post-Traumatic Broke Syndrome Is Controlling Millions!

Morgan Housel, global expert on personal finance, shares powerful lessons on Warren Buffett’s hidden struggles, Elon Musk’s sacrifices, money trauma and financial habits, how to invest wisely, and the psychology behind saving, spending, and success. Morgan Housel is a partner at Collaborative Fund, former columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and a speaker on investing, saving, spending, and financial independence. He is also the bestselling author of books, such as: ‘The Psychology of Money’ and ‘The Art of Spending Money’. He explains: ◼️ Why more money rarely solves unhappiness ◼️ How envy and social comparison drive overspending ◼️ Why extreme wealth often comes at the cost of health and relationships ◼️ How inflated definitions of “wealth” fuel endless consumerism ◼️ Why true happiness comes from family, friends, and health - not luxury (00:00) Intro (02:33) The Importance of Spending Money (04:43) Why Will This Podcast Make My Life Better? (07:54) Is There Something Wrong With Chasing Status? (10:26) What’s the Evolutionary Basis for This Stuff? (15:43) There's Always a Trade-Off (17:55) Saving Addiction (19:41) Can Money Make You Happy? (25:08) Are We All Stuck in a Status Game? (29:14) Is the "Freedom" Culture Actually Making People Unhappy? (31:12) Your Favorite Form of Saving Is Spending (33:17) Jealousy of Other People’s Wealth (35:17) The Spectrum of Financial Independence (38:57) How Do People Achieve Financial Independence? (41:32) How Does Dopamine Factor Into All of This? (49:07) We're Wired to Want More (54:51) People Retiring Early Tend to Wish They Hadn't (55:52) Passive Income Myths (58:06) Ads (59:07) Do I Need to Know About Economics for This? (1:05:01) What’s Going On in the World? (1:08:55) How Wealth Inequality Is Dividing People (1:10:50) The Charlie Kirk Shooting (1:19:04) Is There a Way Back From This Divide? (1:23:39) What Should We Be Doing to Help? (1:25:28) Are You Optimistic About the Western Economy? (1:27:23) Favorite Chapter From the Book (1:32:34) Ads (1:34:42) Why You Should Try New Things (1:37:29) Are You Chasing a Lifestyle That's Not Right for You? (1:40:48) Does Jack Think Steven Is Happy? (1:49:37) Should We Feel Guilty About the Lack of Contentment? (1:52:49) The Relationship Between Money and Kids (1:55:42) The Exact Formula for Spending (2:02:05) Humble Bubble (2:04:07) Do You Have Major Regrets in Life? Follow Morgan: Instagram - https://bit.ly/3KllnvJ X - https://bit.ly/4pJf4lT You can purchase Morgan’s book, ‘The Art of Spending Money’, here: https://amzn.to/46F9JTO The Diary Of A CEO: ◼️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ◼️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Linkedin Jobs - https://www.linkedin.com/doac Vanta - https://vanta.com/steven Replit - http://replit.com with code STEVEN

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  People talk a lot about passive income.

• 0:01Morgan Housel?

  It is not a thing. Look, there's two ways to get wealthier, and passive income is not part of that equation. But what's really important for people is how we should spend money. Because I've written about money and finance and investing for 20 years, and I can tell you, the correlation between how much you spend and how happy you are, it can exist, but it is not as simple as you think.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  Morgan Housel is the legendary financial guru.

• 0:22Morgan Housel?

  Revealing that everything we've been told about saving and spending money

• 0:25Speaker 03

  could be our biggest downfall, and here's why.

• 0:28Morgan Housel?

  If you're unhappy with your life, it is a very easy assumption to make that if you had more money, a bigger house, a better car, whatever it might be, things would be better. And it's a lie we tell ourselves, of course. Because here's the truth. So much of spending is a psychological itch that you're trying to scratch, and that manifests in so many different ways. For example, life is a competition. It doesn't matter how well I'm doing, it matters how well I'm doing relative to you. And the most tangible way to do that is the material stuff.

• 0:52Steven Bartlett?

  I was reading some funny stats. They say that if you win the lottery, the probability of your neighbor going bankrupt increases.

• 0:58Morgan Housel?

  It's an amazing statistic. So be careful who you socialize with, because you're going to anchor to them as a baseline level of success and happiness.

• 1:06Steven Bartlett?

  So is it wrong to buy a Rolex?

• 1:07Morgan Housel?

  Absolutely not. But when it's controlling your personality, it's no different than any other addiction, where it's forcing you to do things you otherwise don't want to do.

• 1:14Steven Bartlett?

  What about people who don't seem to spend anything?

• 1:17Morgan Housel?

  It's just as dangerous. Like, there's something called post-traumatic broke syndrome, and I'll talk about that. But I guarantee you that everyone can spend money in a way it's going to make them happier.

• 1:25Steven Bartlett?

  So if I wanted to make a framework to know how to spend my money, where do I start? But also, based on everything you know about money, if I want to get complete financial freedom, what's the five things that I should be thinking about?

• 1:36Morgan Housel?

  The first thing that I think is most important is...

• 1:43Steven Bartlett?

  Morgan, everybody loves to talk about investing. They love to talk about saving money. But I've never heard anybody emphasize the importance of spending money. You've written this book, The Art of Spending. So it begs the question, why would someone like you, who sells tens of millions of copies of their books when they write about something, and really, really cares about the art of writing, commit themselves to writing a book about the art of spending? When you could have written anything that you wanted to, it would have been a success.

• 2:15Morgan Housel?

  So I've written about money and finance and investing for 20 years, and almost never had I myself... Said, what is my spending philosophy? I could tell you how I invest. I can tell you how I save. I could tell you why I do those things. If five years ago, if you said, Morgan, tell me your philosophy about spending in your own life, I'd be like, I don't really know. And as I looked into it, there are literally tens of thousands of books on how to invest, how to grow your money, how to get rich, how to help your career. That topic is endless. There is virtually no book out there written about spending money. And I think the reason why is because we don't, I think we intuitively think nothing needs to be said because the answer should be obvious. More is better, fancier is better. That's the end of the topic.

• 3:00Morgan Housel?

  But if you know particularly wealthier people, I mean, it affects everybody, but particularly wealthier people, you know, it's not that simple. That the correlation between how much you spend and how happy you are, it can exist. Everyone can spend money in a way it's going to make them happier, but it is not as simple as you think. And as I started digging into it in my own life of when have I been envious of other people, of their material possessions? Why was I envious? Why, when have I been jealous? Why was I jealous? What kind of spending made me happy? What left me completely flat? It's a much more complicated topic than it seems at the surface. You know, another title for the book could have been the psychology of spending money because that's what this is.

• 3:41Morgan Housel?

  So it's a look at the psychology of greed and envy and social aspiration and like climbing the social ladder, who you're trying to impress, whether those people are paying any attention to you. That's what this book is.

• 3:53Steven Bartlett?

  So for someone like me who wants to improve my relationship with spending, I guess the question, I guess the first question is, understanding the art of spending money, simple choices for a rich, what is it going to do for me? How is it going to make my life better to understand this? Why does it matter to the person that's listening right now?

• 4:13Morgan Housel?

  I think it is a very easy assumption to make. If you're unhappy with your life, that if you had more money, those problems would go away. Sometimes it can be true. It's not automatically false. It's just easier to assume that that's true than it actually is. And so I guarantee you that every single person listening to this right now has some degree of that. If I had a little bit more money, my problems would go away. Even if they don't necessarily know it or not. So much of spending is a psychological exercise. There's an itch that you're trying to scratch and that manifests in so many different ways. And so I've often thought of money. Look, is money the root of society, the core of society? No, there's obviously a million things more important than money. But I do think it's the clearest window that we can look through to try to figure out

• 4:57Morgan Housel?

  what's going on in our own lives and other people's lives in society. It shows very starkly what people value, what they're scared of, what they're aspiring to become. There are many more elements to the puzzle. Your health, your friends, your family, we can go on that forever. But money is a very clear window that if you see how somebody engages with money, you're like, oh, I understand your insecurities. I understand your aspirations. I understand your self-confidence. I understand what you think of other people. You can learn a lot about that.

• 5:23Steven Bartlett?

  It's kind of like a reflection of your trauma.

• 5:26Morgan Housel?

  Yes. And it manifests in very different ways. There's a great financial writer named Tiffany Alishay. And she's, she grew up very, very poor. And now she's extremely successful. And she calls it post-traumatic broke syndrome. Well, even though she has a lot of money right now, she, I don't want to put words in her mouth. My understanding is like she's afraid to spend it because she's, the feeling in her head is, I will never go back to that. I can't ever go back to that poor person, post-traumatic broke. And so it can manifest in very different, sometimes opposite ways. And so the point is not like if you grew up poor, you're going to want to display it. But the point is that it's a psychological itch. It's not just, I want the nice car because nice cars are better. There's a social signaling.

• 6:09Morgan Housel?

  You're signaling to others, you're sending to yourself, it's a trophy for yourself of what you've overcome. The more I dug into it, the more it was so clear of like, spending is not just on material stuff. It's not just, I want to buy this car or this house or these clothes or these jewelry because it's nice. It's I'm trying to send a signal to others or to myself of what I've overcome. One of the ways I thought about this in my own life is if I was on a deserted island, where maybe just me and my family. Nobody could see how we were living. Nobody can see your house. Nobody can see your car. Nobody see your clothes. Nobody can see your jewelry. How would I live? For me, and I think most people in that exercise, you immediately gravitate away from status and towards utility. Like, I would not want a Lamborghini. I'd probably want like a pickup truck. Something that has like more utility.

• 6:53Morgan Housel?

  If nobody could see it, I would just want utility. I would not want an enormous house. I would want a house with a nice view. Because I'm not trying to show off to other people. I just want something that is calming and serene to myself. And so, once you start seeing the stark difference between utility and status, what, what, once you, once you force yourself to see it, you're like, oh, it's everywhere.

• 7:14Steven Bartlett?

  Is something inherently wrong with status? Is it wrong to buy a Rolex?

• 7:18Morgan Housel?

  Absolutely not, particularly at certain points of your life.

• 7:21Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so when, when is it good? When is it bad? When is it indifferent, like indifferent?

• 7:24Morgan Housel?

  I don't know. I don't know. It's hard to say what's good and bad in terms of a formula, because everybody's different. But I would say this. My own personal desire to show off materially happened when I was in my late teens, early twenties. And looking back, I didn't know this then. But the reason why is because I had nothing else to offer the world. I had no intelligence. I had no wisdom. I didn't know how to love anyone. I had nothing else to offer. Friends, family, spouses, whatever it be. And so, the last remaining lever, if you're trying to get attention and respect, is, well, look, I have no intelligence to offer. I have no wisdom to offer. Maybe people will admire me for my car. That was why I wanted it. And now that I, I hope, in a, in, I, I hope today, 20 years later,

• 8:06Morgan Housel?

  I have a little bit more to offer to my wife, to my friends, to my family, to employers and customers, whatnot. Then my desire for those things has gone down. Not to zero, but it's gone down. There's a great Warren Buffett quote where he says, "Success in life is when the people who you want to love you do love you." And key to that is like you have to ask the question like, who do you want to love you? And for a lot of people, the quick knee jerk reaction is everybody. And so you want to have a nice car, nice clothes, nice jewelry, because you think everyone's going to stop and stare. When I drive this down the road, people are going to be stop and say, look at that guy. Look at her. That's amazing. Like, they're so successful. I admire them. I respect them. And by and large, that is almost never true.

• 8:51Morgan Housel?

  Because no one's thinking about you as much as you are. They're not, they're not paying attention to your car, or your clothes, or your house. They're busy worrying about themselves. Jimmy Carr, I think you've had on the show before, is that right? Love Jimmy Carr. He said this a couple of weeks ago, I heard it, and it was one of those, I had to stop and write it down because it was so profound. He said, in your twenties, people worry about what other people think of them. In your thirties, you say, I don't care what anybody thinks of me. And in your forties, you finally realize the truth, which was, nobody was thinking about you the whole time. They were busy worrying about themselves. And, look, that's not black and white. Of course, people think about you, and look at you, and sometimes judge you, but not nearly to the extent that we think. And that was why I get back to the exercise. If nobody was watching, how would I live?

• 9:35Morgan Housel?

  The truth is because virtually nobody is watching. Except the people who I really love and admire. And they're going to admire me for things that have nothing to do with the kind of car that I drive, or the clothes that I wear.

• 9:47Steven Bartlett?

  What's the evolutionary basis for all of this stuff?

• 9:49Morgan Housel?

  Life's a competition. It doesn't matter how well I'm doing, it matters how well I'm doing relative to you. It doesn't matter how big my house is. If I'm trying to signal, all that matters is my house is bigger than yours. It's true for all wealth. There's no such thing as, you are wealthy once you have X number of dollars. That, that does not exist. Everything is relative to other people. And the truth is that we live in a world of such material abundance, where the majority of people listening to this will have some sort of shelter, and a car, and, and can buy, can buy clothes and whatnot. And because relative to a lot of history, we live in material abundance. The competition, the arms race for bigger, nicer things, is extraordinary. And it's Way more powerful and potent today than it's ever been for two reasons.

• 10:34Morgan Housel?

  One is social media. So I am now aware of the homes that other people live in, the cars that they drive, the clothes, the vacations that they take. I'm now aware of it in a way that we were not 15 years ago. The other thing is because the internet has democratized access to audience and attention, the ability to become extremely rich is much more powerful than it's ever been. It's still rare, of course, but it's it's easier today than it's ever been to become very, very wealthy, even if only a small number of people are doing it. Because your your potential customer base is now the entire world. You know, 100 years ago, if I was a businessman, my customer base was whoever lived in my town. Now, if you're a businessman, your customer base can be the entire world.

• 11:18Morgan Housel?

  And so it's easier to make a huge fortune. And because of social media, once you make that fortune, people are probably going to know about it. Because a lot of those people who've become very rich are going to say, look at how I'm living. And so you have this trickle down aspiration of everyone else being like, my definition of wealthy, if you're a young person today, a young person's definition of wealthy might be a multi billionaire with a private jet and a private island. Where I think 80 years ago, people's definition of wealthy was a three bedroom house and one car and a happy family. And so we live in a world where aspirations have inflated by such a dramatic degree that the arms race of spending just gets that much that much higher.

• 12:01Steven Bartlett?

  I think there's something in this idea that you almost have to develop the skill of disconnecting your admiration from your aspirations if you want to live a good life. Because so many kids will look up to you and say, I want to be like Morgan when I'm older, because they admire what you've done. But the reality is they they're just seeing the sort of shop window of your life. And so people do this with Elon all the time.

• 12:23Morgan Housel?

  Right. And Elon has even said, he's like, you might think you want to be me, but you you don't. And the clip where he did that, he points to his head and he's like, it's a tornado up here. And I think it's true that for most people who are extremely successful, who are the ones that people tend to look up to, like the extreme outlier successes, a lot of the reason they're so successful financially and in their career is because they've devoted every second of their life to that career, which. Most of the time comes at the expense of everything else. So they are very successful, made a lot of money, and that came at the expense of their health, their relationships, relationships with their their spouses, their children. So I make the point in the book that of the top 10 richest men in the world, there are a cumulative 13 divorces among the top 10 richest people.

• 13:07Morgan Housel?

  And it's a small sample size, like you can't really, you know, say that that that much with that. But this is a group that is almost universally admired, particularly among young men. You know, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, how how amazing would it be to have that much money? But if you dig into their actual, their their their whole life, not just their net worth, not just the house and the jet that they have, but if you look at holistically their entire life, you're like, I don't know, it's it's it's not that great. It's it's one thing to admire someone if you can pick bits and pieces. I want I want his house and her car and his career and his physique. But you can't pick bits and pieces, you have to take the whole thing. And once you take the whole thing, you realize that like a lot of the people who you may have been looking up to

• 13:51Morgan Housel?

  either did not have a better life than you did, or it was just marginally better in a way that was easy to overlook.

• 13:57Steven Bartlett?

  I had this conversation with a girl in New York last week. I was at a shoot, a client, like a brand shoot, and she sat me down to interview me for TikTok. And she said, she goes, what age did you become a millionaire? And I said, about 24, 25. And she went, oh, I'm 24, 25 now, and I'm not a millionaire. And I remember saying to her, I was like, yeah, but would you would you take my trade? And I explained to her, I was like, so I was lonely between the age of 18 and roughly 20. I was working in call centers, my parents wouldn't speak to me, so I had no contact with my family really through that period. And then I started shoplifting at about 18, 19 to feed myself. And my brother had given me this big sort of industrial packet of oats.

• 14:39Steven Bartlett?

  And what I had to do is it's like powder, I mix the powder with water. And there's there's there's a photo online, I think from my previous TED Talk, my first one, where I was just drinking this this powdered water. So I said to her, I said, and I was a millionaire at 24, lonely, not speaking to my family, drinking powdered oats, shoplifting, working night shifts in multiple. Call centers.

• 14:59Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 14:59Steven Bartlett?

  Would you take the trade?

• 15:00Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 15:01Steven Bartlett?

  And she went, no.

• 15:02Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 15:02Steven Bartlett?

  She went, absolutely not. She wouldn't take the trade. And I said, so you can't, you can't pick it apart because I, if you want my outcome, you have to take the path that I took if you want my specific outcome. And people don't think about that. Like, one of the things this podcast has actually taught me is to think through the framework of trade offs.

• 15:18Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Steven Bartlett?

  So think about everything as a trade off. Think of a ZenPEC as a trade off. There's a trade you're making somewhere. And even, you know, when you aspire or you admire people, if you admire what we've done here, for example, think about the trade off. Like even with this team, the team have been working here every single day, including the weekends, from morning till night for the last fourteen days here in New York, every single day.

• 15:41Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 15:41Steven Bartlett?

  Do you wanna, do you wanna, do you wanna podcast?

• 15:43Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 15:44Steven Bartlett?

  Do you want the trade? And if you do, fine, but just be informed about, as you say, both sides of the trade.

• 15:48Morgan Housel?

  Another Jimmy Carr quote that I love, he's a profound individual. Not only is he hilarious, he's very smart. The quote is, everyone is jealous of what you've got. Nobody's jealous of how you got it.

• 15:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Morgan Housel?

  And I think it's just so easy to overlook. One of the things I write in the book is what's called the reverse obituary, which is it's a very good, helpful exercise to write down, it's kind of morbid, but what do you want your obituary to say? Kind of a weird thing, but for me, everyone's different, but for me, I would want it to say, Morgan was a good father, a good husband, a good friend, helped his community, was a good worker. That's what I would want it to say. Never in a million years in that obituary, what I wanted to say, what my income was, how big my house was, how many times I went on vacation, how many horsepower my car had. Like, it's ridiculous to think that that's what it would be. I would want it. You instantly drift towards the things that you know you're actually, you actually want in life.

• 16:43Morgan Housel?

  And of course, it's gonna be different for everyone, but I, I found it a helpful thing because you realize that it would be completely absurd to put the things that I might be chasing in my life in my obituary. And so if, in any given day, in any given year, you're like, I gotta earn a higher income and I wanna buy a bigger house and I, I need a new car. And oh, did you see they came out this watch? But at the end of your life, you know that's not gonna matter. What's gonna matter is, were you a good spouse, a good parent, a good worker? Were you honest? Were you a good friend? Were you funny? That's it. You know that's what's gonna matter because that's what you want in your obituary.

• 17:13Steven Bartlett?

  I think part of the reason people spend in the way that they do as well is linked to that, which is sometimes that behavior, which is also linked to the point about trauma at the start, might result in a savings addiction. I often wonder this because, you know, when I was younger, I had this crazy spending problem. And I've also seen people who don't seem to spend anything and they're just like hoarding capital. You talk about this a bit in the book, like, what is that equally bad behavior?

• 17:37Morgan Housel?

  Yeah, I think it's equally bad because both of them are the exact same thing, which is money's controlling you. Money should be a tool that you use to become a better version of yourself, to become a happier, more content version of yourself. But when it's controlling your personality, it's no different than like any other addiction, where you don't, it's forcing you to do things that you otherwise don't want to do. And that can manifest on either end of the side. Either people can't stop spending, or they cannot spend enough. A lot of financial advisors will tell you one of the biggest problems that they have are clients who have saved enough money for retirement. Good job. You saved for 40 years. You maxed out your 401k. You did everything you're supposed to. And now you're 70 years old and you have enough money to travel and play golf and you won't.

• 18:21Morgan Housel?

  You won't do it. And I think it's because they become so accustomed to the identity of I'm a saver. Every month I save and every month my net worth goes up. And they cannot bring themselves into switching gears and going in the other direction. And for a lot of those people, the money is in full control over their identity. It's telling them how to live, what to like, what to aspire to, what to enjoy. The money is totally in control of their personality. And it's just as dangerous and just as detrimental as you when you were a teenager of I can't stop spending. It's, and both of those are in, are there, the money is like playing the marionette doll of your life. It's telling you exactly what to do and when to do it.

• 19:01Steven Bartlett?

  If I wanted to make a framework to know how to spend my money, where do I start? Do I have to get clear on something? Do I, you know, and I guess the other question, which is somewhat linked to this, is this overarching debate around can money make you happy?

• 19:12Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 19:13Steven Bartlett?

  But I'm trying to figure out, like, where do I start? Because I want to, one of the things I want to get out of today is I want to have a clearer framework for how to spend my money.

• 19:21Morgan Housel?

  Well, those two points that you just brought up, I think, are very related. The first on the point of can money make you happier? The answer is yes, but there's a, there's a, there's an asterisk next to it that we need to get to. For years, there was a big academic debate of does more money make you happy? A lot of, some of the studies showed, yes, clearly it does. Others showed, studies showed, no, it really doesn't. And academics, the economists were like battling for decades. It's kind of been cleared up in the last, just the last couple of years, this last couple of decades, with some nuance, which is this. If you are already an unhappy person, if you're already anxious, if you're already depressed, by and large, having more money will not help you, at least that much. It might help you a little bit around the margins. If you're, if you start as an unhappy, depressed, anxious person.

• 20:05Morgan Housel?

  If you are already a happy, content, joyful, laughing person, having more money will give you a better life. So in either direction, it's just leveraging who you already were. It's not going to change you that much. It's just going to leverage who you already were. Very similar to like, they say this about power. Like, once you gain power in politics or something, it just leverages the personality that you already had. Money is very much like that. And so it's, it's not a panacea in the sense of like, oh, like if you're miserable, like if you had more money, it's going to clear up your problems. It can make some of your problems a little bit easier to deal with. But, I mean, think about it in these stark terms. Let's say you are overweight and unhappy. You hate your job and you're recently divorced and your kids won't talk to you.

• 20:50Morgan Housel?

  But you live in a mansion that has a Ferrari in the driveway. And you got all kinds of fancy stuff. Is, is, is that a good life? If all, if everything else in your life sucked and you woke up every morning going, ah, I gotta go to work today. I hate my job. I can't stand my job. I'm lonely. I'm miserable. I'm overweight. I can't sleep. I'm addicted to alcohol, whatever it might be. Of course, it's a terrible life. The house and the car don't matter at all. But you can flip that around and say like, let's say you live in a very modest, middle-class house. And you drive a 10-year-old Honda Civic. But you love your job. You love your coworkers. You have a great relationship with your spouse. Your kids admire you. You have your friends over for a barbecue every Friday night. Materially, it's very modest. You have what you need.

• 21:34Morgan Housel?

  You're not impoverished. You're not homeless. You have the food that you want, the shelter that you want. But you would be an absolute maniac to choose. The miserable person in the mansion versus the content, happy person in the middle-class house. If your goal is to live a good life, it's psychotic to pick one over the other.

• 21:54Steven Bartlett?

  I felt this quite starkly recently because I flew to Cape Town on my own. I've only ever been there with my girlfriend and with other friends. And the first time, I've only been there a few times. I've got a house there and it's a very big house. And the first time I came was with my family. Second time, it's with my girlfriend and my friends. This time I came on my own. And I felt this deep existential feeling, waking up, walking through that house alone, thinking, fuck me. Like, it was so clear to me that the point of such a, such a thing is to fill it with people and you say.

• 22:26Morgan Housel?

  Yes, that's what I make, I make this point in the book of like, the very simple question, will a big house make you happier?

• 22:31Steven Bartlett?

  I think it will make you depressed if it's empty. Because that's how I felt. I was like, I'd rather be in a studio apartment alone than a big house on my own.

• 22:40Morgan Housel?

  Right. I had a similar realization to you a couple of years ago when I took my, my, my, my, my family and I went to Maui for a vacation. And I love Maui, it's my favorite place in the world. And now I have kids, so I'm building sand castles with my kids on the beach in Maui. And that, I remember thinking like, this is, this is a 10 out of 10. This is like, this is peak life for me. Building sand castles with my kids, everyone's happy in the sun. But then I had this realization of like, if that's a 10, playing with Legos at home on the living room floor with my kids is like a nine. Like, it's really close. Because realization was, what I enjoy is like quality time with my kids. I think a lot of the reason that people like vacate, like travel, is not because they like getting on an airplane and flying around the world and being jet lagged and cramped into a small hotel.

• 23:23Morgan Housel?

  What they like is uninterrupted time away from work, away from all the other stresses of everyday life. That's what they actually enjoy. That's what they like, travel. It's not necessarily the location, it's like what the location is doing for you. So the question of will a big house make you happier? It will to the extent that it makes it easier to have your friends and family over. Because your friends and family are the ones who are actually making you happy. And so the answer can be, can, will, will a nice house make you happy? The answer can be yes, if you're using it for the right reasons. There was this article in the New York Times, this is probably 10 or 15 years ago. And the article said, two things happened to Julia Roberts this week. One, she won the Academy Award. And two, she found out her husband was cheating on her.

• 24:06Morgan Housel?

  And so the column said, pop quiz, did Julia Roberts have a good week? And it's like, you'd be a fool to say yes. It was probably the worst week of her life, I imagine.

• 24:14Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Morgan Housel?

  But what we see from the outside was dolled up in a beautiful dress, accepting the highest honor of her career and seeing like, wow, that must be amazing. But it gets back to you, once you see the full picture, you're like, nah, it's not as easy as it seems.

• 24:28Steven Bartlett?

  You say on page 23 of your book, a quote that I loved, "Show off the inside of your house, not the outside."

• 24:33Morgan Housel?

  Right. Because the inside of your house are what your friends and your family are seeing.

• 24:37Steven Bartlett?

  Is there like a hack here? Like, is there, you know, because you have all these like internet communities, communities that come up with these like hacks, these other ways to live. They, they, they step outside of the matrix and they form their own little, their own little cult that are like doing it differently and not, not abiding by the rules of the, the quote unquote, matrix. I very much feel like most of us are trapped in the matrix.

• 24:57Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Steven Bartlett?

  We're trapped in this like status game, competing against each other, not, not searching for happiness. Like, what is the hack here? How do I get out the matrix and what does that look like?

• 25:05Morgan Housel?

  I think if there is a formula that I lay out in the book, and I make the point that like, there's, there's no formula for how to spend money. But if I did try to make a formula for a pretty good life, and this extends way outside of money, the formula for a pretty good life is independence plus purpose. If you want to say like, how, how can I be a happy person? You need to be independent. You need to be able to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, with whom you want to do it with. And you need some kind of purpose that is higher than yourself. And that could be a million different things. It could be friends, it could be family, it could be career, it could be religion, whatever it might be. I think it is very difficult to imagine anyone having a good life without those two things. If your entire life and your schedule is dictated by somebody else of, you have to

• 25:47Morgan Housel?

  go to this job that you don't like, you have to have a long commute that you don't like, you have to do this when you don't want to do it, it's, it's hard to be happy. And if you don't have any kind of purpose that you're doing it for, it's difficult to be happy. And so the idea that, to me, the best thing to spend money on is independence. And I view it as purchasing. I, I don't view it as saving money. I view it as purchasing independence. That's how I, I view, I feel like I'm buying independence when I save. And so to me, the biggest thing that I spend my money on, and this sounds weird, but I, is saving. And I view that as buying independence. I view that as every dollar that I save is a little bit more independent than I was before. It's a little bit of my future that I now own and control.

• 26:30Morgan Housel?

  And if, if you're listening to this and you're like, look, I'm not financially independent, I have no, I have no possibility of being financially independent. Independence exists on a spectrum and literally every dollar that you save is a little bit more independent than you were before. If you have a hundred dollars in the bank in savings, that can make it so that if you were to lose your job, you have a little bit more flexibility for rent or groceries or whatever it might be that you didn't before. If a thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, any amount that you have is a little bit more independent than you were before. And so when you view, one of the cores of living a good life is independence and any amount of saving money will buy you independence. I think that's a powerful observation for people. And then the purpose part is going to be different for everyone.

• 27:13Morgan Housel?

  For me, right now, in my life, it's being a good father. That's what I want my end, my identity to be. That's my overarching goal in life is to be a good dad. I think the vast majority of parents will tell you that there was no greater joy, purpose, than watching their kids thrive. Can also bring a lot of sorrow and a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of anxiety and a lot of worry that comes along with it. But nothing that I've experienced, right, any of the other parents that I know would, would say that anything in their life has come before that, that it's been a great thing. So we got on this point because the formula is independence plus purpose. For me, the purpose is being a parent. That's not going to be true for everyone.

• 27:50Steven Bartlett?

  But you're trading independence for that?

• 27:52Morgan Housel?

  I'm trading, it's internal independence that I'm giving up. I want to sacrifice for my kids. I want it, like loyalty to people who deserve your loyalty is a wonderful thing. Loyalty to people who don't deserve your loyalty sucks. And so if you are working, if you're giving your loyalty to a company that doesn't respect you, that sucks. That's terrible. Loyalty to people who deserve it is a very fulfilling thing. So my kids deserve my loyalty.

• 28:17Steven Bartlett?

  How did they earn that loyalty?

• 28:19Morgan Housel?

  Just by being my kids. And there's some days where I feel like they, they don't appreciate it, of course, but I, I think that tends to be true. People get into problems when they are loyal to people or organizations or political affiliations who don't deserve the loyalty. That's when it gets dangerous.

• 28:33Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think the promise of independence and freedom?

• 28:38Steven Bartlett?

  Has a secret, hidden, dark trade off that people don't talk about because there's this culture right now of like, you know, be your own boss and stand on your own two feet. And when you think about what makes humans happy, it seems to be collective things. It seems to be actually, in your case, as you're saying, dependence. Your kids depend on you. And in some ways, you depend on them. All the things that seem to be like, having my friends at my house made me happier than being in the house alone.

• 28:59Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 29:00Steven Bartlett?

  But the nar- the public narrative is all about like optimizing for freedom, whatever that means, and really more so optimizing for independence, not depending on someone else. But when you look at the people that seem to be the most unhappy, they seem to be the most independent.

• 29:18Morgan Housel?

  Right. Because they're, if you picture someone like living in a kitchen by themselves in the middle of Montana with no one around them or whatever.

• 29:25Steven Bartlett?

  No family, no pets, freelance work, on a laptop, on their own, in a, in a glass box in Dubai, um, no, no big obligations, not, not in a church.

• 29:35Morgan Housel?

  But back to the formula, independence was purpose. Those people have no purpose.

• 29:39Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yes.

• 29:39Morgan Housel?

  And so I think it's, I think, yes, everyone is gonna be, I'm, I'm dependent on my wife, my kids. But, you know, there, there is dependency there. But I'm, I'm choosing. I chose her as a spouse. I chose to have kids. And so I, I still did it on my terms. And so you're never gonna be, or I think you don't wanna be a hundred percent independent in the sense that you don't rely on anyone and no one relies on you because then you have no purpose. It's choosing who you want. I think it's, I think you're not independent if you have to be loyal to a job that you hate, but you have to have it because it's the only job you got and you, and you have to do it. And you're, you, you have to pay this exorbitant rent on an apartment that you don't even enjoy that much. Like, those are dependence

• 30:20Morgan Housel?

  on things that you don't want. But like, I want to be dependent on my family because that gives me purpose.

• 30:25Steven Bartlett?

  It's like the independence to make the choice, I guess.

• 30:27Morgan Housel?

  To make the choice of who you're gonna be dependent on. Right?

• 30:31Steven Bartlett?

  Good. And on this earlier point, you're talking about saving and that your favorite form of spending is saving.

• 30:37Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Steven Bartlett?

  Someone's listening now, how much money do you think they should at a minimum have saved?

• 30:44Morgan Housel?

  If you try to get technical about it, I would say, what are the odds that at some point in your life, you're going to lose your job and not be able to find another job for six months? The odds are not bad that that will happen to you at some point. Not very comfortable to think about. Maybe it's already happened to you already, but the odds that at some point that will happen are pretty good. And therefore, if you were to say like, look, a good measure of some level of higher end independence, not a low level of independence, but like a medium level of independence is I could keep myself going for six months. Now, for a lot of people, that's a daunting task and it's okay. You're probably not going to achieve that when you're 18. It's going to take some savings to get there. But that is a level at which you can exhale to a degree that most people have never been

• 31:29Morgan Housel?

  able to do before of like, there's going to be some bad stuff happening in your life. It's going to be uncomfortable, but it's going to be okay. And for most people, for most of history, it was there's bad things going to happen to you and you're not going to be okay. It's going to be very traumatic. And, and one of the important things there is when you lose that job, the ability to go find a good job, even a better job, where you want, doing what you want with the people who you like working with is very important. If you don't have any savings, you're going to have to, by default, pick the very first job that you can come across, even if it's a terrible job in a location that you hate, doing something you hate, working with people you don't like. And so the flexibility to give yourself time to find a job that is a little bit easier and better for you, that is the purpose of savings.

• 32:13Steven Bartlett?

  And that goes back to your point about independence, which is you want to, building up those savings is building up the independence or the freedom to make a choice about who you work with.

• 32:24Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 32:25Steven Bartlett?

  If the worst were to happen, you don't have to necessarily go get a job at, you know, some awful place.

• 32:29Morgan Housel?

  Some terrible place.

• 32:30Steven Bartlett?

  You talk about jealousy in the book as well. And I was reading some stats that are quite funny stats, but they say that essentially that if you, if you win the lottery, the probability of your neighbor going bankrupt increases.

• 32:43Morgan Housel?

  It's an amazing statistic, right?

• 32:47Steven Bartlett?

  So what's happening there?

• 32:49Morgan Housel?

  Well, you're looking at your neighbor who won the lottery and your neighbor probably bought a vacation house, bought a new car, sending their kids to private school, whatever it might be. And you, watching that, are like, I need that for myself. It's unfair that they have it and I don't. And I'm going to go do any reckless financial decision to get that. So much of what we think is normal, our definition of success, is what other people around us have. And so if you are watching your neighbor live a better life than you, then all of a sudden, your definition of a good life is what they're doing and you will do some reckless things to get it. I think that's what happens. And so one of the takeaways there is like, be careful who you socialize with, because you're going

• 33:31Morgan Housel?

  to anchor to them as a baseline level of success and happiness. Be very careful with what you do and who you look up to and who you aspire to. I grew up in Lake Tahoe, California, and this was before tech money, when it was not a wealthy area. It is now, because all the tech money from San Francisco came up. But Tahoe in the 90s and early 2000s was just out in the woods. And, you know, you could buy a house for nothing and most people in town didn't have any money. And then I went to college in Los Angeles, where there is a lot of wealth. There are high expectations and there are Lamborghinis and Rolls Royces and whatnot. And one of my observations was, people were happier in Tahoe. And I think the reason why is because the definition of success in Tahoe back then was a two bedroom

• 34:15Morgan Housel?

  house and a pickup truck. That was success. In Los Angeles, the definition of success was a mansion and a Bentley. And so it was easier for people in Tahoe to be like, I'm good. I checked the boxes. Like, look, I'm successful. Look at my tiny little house and my beat up pickup truck. That's success, right? And so that was like, be careful who you socialize with, because you're going to anchor to their level of success.

• 34:37Steven Bartlett?

  I have some graphs in front of you there. I think one of them is... The spectrum of financial independence.

• 34:44Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Steven Bartlett?

  Could you explain to me what that is and how that's useful to understand and why that's useful to understand?

• 34:50Morgan Housel?

  I think it's, I had this friend 10 or 20 years ago and he said, I don't save any money because I don't see the purpose. All I'd be able to save is a hundred bucks a month and what's that going to do for me? And since I don't think it's going to do anything for me, I might as well just go spend it. And I'm thinking, no, that's like a hundred dollars in savings or if you do it for a year, $1,200 in savings. Is $1,200 more independence than you had before? And again, not if, but when you lose your job or your car breaks down, you're going to realize how unbelievably valuable that money is. And it's not savings, it's independence that it's giving you. So the idea that independence is on a spectrum, it is not, you either don't have to work or you have to work. It's not that stark, but most people think of it in those terms.

• 35:32Morgan Housel?

  Why would I try to become independent if I have no chance of not working? And the simple way to view it is every dollar that you save is a piece of your future that you own, that you control, that is yours. The flip side of that is like every dollar of debt that you have is a piece of your future that somebody else controls. It's a, it's a moment in time in the future that is not yours, it belongs to somebody else. And so I've always viewed it on a spectrum. When I was younger and much poorer, I was a big saver, even though like, was I independent? Like, no, of course I had to work. I had to work to pay my rent and pay my groceries, of course. But I viewed it as like every $20 that I saved, every $50 that I saved, put me in a better position than I was before. And looking back on it, I don't think I could have articulated that 20 years ago, but it's what I felt.

• 36:18Morgan Housel?

  A lot of that for me back then was coming from a place of fear. I didn't have a lot of self-confidence in myself and my career. So I was like, I need to save to prepare for when this all comes crashing down. And even though it didn't come crashing down, I'm so glad that I did it. Cause I've had a sense of financial security and I've had a sense of independence financially. Since I was in my early twenties, not because I had saved a ton, I hadn't. But any amount that I saved, I viewed as like the cushion that that gave me a much higher sense of confidence that if or when things go wrong, I'm not going to be flailing. I'm going to have some cushion to fall back on.

• 36:55Steven Bartlett?

  And what is this this spectrum? What are the stages of this spectrum?

• 37:00Morgan Housel?

  So let's start at the very bottom. You're homeless, you're panhandling, reliant on the kindness of strangers. As you go up from there, you can be completely reliant on your boss in a job that you don't like. Now, that's, that's, that's, that's another low level. As you go up from there, you have, look, I'm, I'm reliant on my job and reliant on my paycheck. But I probably have some opportunities. I could go work at another job. I could, I could choose to work here, I could choose to work there. And then you just go from there, it's like, yo, I, I like my job and I have some savings. So if I've lost this job, I can fall back onto it from there. You can go up from there to have, you can live where you want, you can work where you want, you can change fields, you can, you can go and you can do a completely different job. You can take two months off and travel if you wanted to. Like, you're working your way up, all the way to the highest level of financial independence,

• 37:45Morgan Housel?

  which is I don't need to work anymore. I've saved enough and I can, I can, I can wake up every morning and do whatever I would like to do. That's obviously an aspiration that for most people will never be reached until they're maybe in their, you know, seventies and they're retiring and they have social security and some other savings from there. But for most people, like, a good level of independence as a good goal is enough savings so that if you lost your job, if your car broke down, if you needed to replace the roof on your house, you would be able to do it without losing that much sleep. That is a realistic level that I think almost anyone can achieve.

• 38:18Steven Bartlett?

  Based on everything you know about money, if I want to get to that highest level of complete financial freedom, what, what's like the, the five things that I should be thinking about at just a sort of a very simple level? You know, because so many people listening right now think, you know, my goal in life isn't to become a billionaire or tens of millionaire. My goal in life is just to get to that point of freedom as soon as I can.

• 38:39Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Steven Bartlett?

  Where I can start calling the shots. And there's, there was someone who I was speaking to the other day and said that there's, there's this internet movement of kids who are trying to get, what do they call it? It's like they're trying to get to the point where they can retire early.

• 38:51Morgan Housel?

  Fire.

• 38:52Steven Bartlett?

  Fire something.

• 38:53Morgan Housel?

  Financial independence, retire early.

• 38:54Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 38:55Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yep. Yep. Like, how do I get, how do I get there?

• 38:58Morgan Housel?

  The first thing that I think that's most important, this is the first and the last thing, this is the most important part, is that. All wealth, your feeling of wealth is what you have minus what you want. And it's so easy to ignore the latter. I talk about in the book, my, my late grandmother-in-law, my wife's grandmother, she passed away a couple of years ago. For 30 years, she lived off of nothing but 17 or 1800 dollars a month in social security. Not a lot of money. By most accounts, very little money. But she didn't want anything more. She did, she, if she made 1700 dollars a month, she did not want 1700 dollars in one, in one dollar. She was perfectly happy. She, she found all of her happiness working in her garden, going for walks, watching the birds, watching the sunrise, watching the sunset, talking to her friends, hanging out with her family.

• 39:43Morgan Housel?

  But if you asked her, you said, you only make 1700 dollars a month. You're broke. Doesn't that make you unhappy? She'd be like, what? Like, do you think having more money makes the sunset more beautiful? You think having more money makes going for a walk more pleasant? And I'm not saying you should live, like you should be content with that amount of money. But the point is like, she was content. She was totally content and it was her choice. And I think she was happier financially than some billionaires. Cause there's a lot of billionaires who have a billion dollars, but they want two. They have two billion, but they want four. One of the things is that happiness might be the wrong word here. The word that people want is content. When you sit here and daydream about having the bigger mansion, what you're actually doing is you are imagining yourself in the mansion, being content with it.

• 40:27Morgan Housel?

  You imagine yourself sitting in that house and saying, I don't want anything more than this. The feeling that we are aspiring to is just being content. Happiness is always like a 30 second emotion. It's like laughter. Like if I tell you a funny joke, you'll laugh for 30 seconds and then, and that's over. Like very few times in life are you happy for more than a couple of minutes at a time. But what you want that is like an adorable emotion is being content, just saying like, I'm good, I'm good with this. I don't want anything more.

• 40:53Steven Bartlett?

  I interviewed Dr. Anna Lemke and she's like the. The scientist who's most renowned for talking about and writing about dopamine.

• 41:01Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Steven Bartlett?

  And I was wondering how much the molecule dopamine dovetails into this, because I think one of the things she said to me was that dopamine is the chemical for wanting.

• 41:09Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 41:09Steven Bartlett?

  And people have, I think, mistaken it for being the pleasure.

• 41:12Morgan Housel?

  Happiness.

• 41:13Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Morgan Housel?

  It's more, more, more, more. It's like you want more.

• 41:17Steven Bartlett?

  And she told me this crazy study about this rat where they removed the dopamine receptor from its brain, so it couldn't produce dopamine. And then they put food two inches from its mouth and the rat starved to death. Because it, and in that, so I've always thought about that. It's like, okay, so that's what dopamine is. It's the motivation to go get, to go get, to want, to pursue. What role is dopamine playing here?

• 41:38Morgan Housel?

  It's huge. And that's actually a good realization to be like, a lot of this is not something that you can solve on a spreadsheet. It's not something you can solve with a formula. It's chemicals in your brain. And obviously, some people are going to be more susceptible to that than others. I think my grandmother in law just had, for whatever it was, was wired differently than most people. Part of that was like, she was a product of the Great Depression. She grew up during the Great Depression, which probably like lowered her expectations. She never had social media and whatnot. But of course, I think some people are wired differently than others for a level of contentment. But I think just, there's a big thing in psychiatry where diagnosing a mental illness is sometimes more important than the treatment. If you just get a diagnosis of like, oh, you're ADHD, whatever it is, just knowing, just like, the fact that you can stop questioning, why am I having these

• 42:23Morgan Housel?

  thoughts? You can, you can understand why you have those thoughts is more important than the treatment sometimes. And I think that's true here. If, if you, it's easier said than done to completely control your desires. But just knowing why you're doing it and realizing that it's probably not going to give you the happiness that you want, that it's just like any addiction, that the more you chase it, the further away it's going to get, can go a big ways. And so for me, myself, there's, all the time, there are moments where I'm like, oh. I should, I should get that car. Maybe we should get a bigger house. I have those feelings daily. So the feelings don't go away, but I think I'm better now than I've been in the past. I'm reminding myself of like, it's not gonna make you happier. You know that. You've tried this before. You've tried it before and it didn't make you happy.

• 43:06Morgan Housel?

  What is gonna make you happy is spending time with your kids, having a good relationship with your wife, and your own physical health, and laughing with your friends, and having good times with people who you enjoy. You know that's gonna make you happy and you know that's not. And I have to remind myself because it's not intuitive. And I have dopamine that tells me you should want more, more, more, more, more. So you never get over it, but I think once you've diagnosed the problem, it becomes easier at just like spotting that emotion and realizing that it's telling you a story that's probably not true.

• 43:32Steven Bartlett?

  I wonder if I could trade the addiction, because you know, you referred to it there as being an addiction. If it's for dopamine equation, could I not shift my addiction to something more productive? And would that mean that my spending would get better? So actually, when I think about me as 18 years old and having that horrific spending problem, maybe I just shifted the, the thing that gave me dopamine to like building businesses, or to podcasting, or to writing books, or to being a great dad. I don't know.

• 44:00Morgan Housel?

  I think it's probably true that everybody, without exception, is addicted to something. And it's just harnessing that, that process for whatever it might be. So some people are addicted to, my wife's addicted to gardening, let's say. She couldn't care less about, about investing or spending money on a nice, so she could not care less about her car, or my car, or your car. But if you have a good gardener, if you have, you have, you have a pretty garden, she's, she's all over it. So everybody's got their thing and it's just like, can you harness that for productivity? I think a lot of like extremely successful people are people who took their, their natural addiction and harnessed it for productivity into their business. And that's, that's why they're so successful. They just became obsessed with one thing. And it's, it's a good question of whether we can actually guide that addiction,

• 44:44Morgan Housel?

  or if it's just kind of pre-wired in itself. I think it's true for myself, someone who's written books about money for 20 years, thought about money for 20 years. My mom tells a story that when I was three, I would sit there and count pennies. I don't wanna count seashells, I don't wanna count cards, I don't wanna count rocks, I wanna count money. And so I think I've always had this disposition towards being fascinated with money.

• 45:07Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 45:08Morgan Housel?

  I don't know, because I did it when I was three. I did it before I could even think through it. But I think everyone has their little thing. It's always been fascinating to me. I don't think I'm obsessed with money. I don't think it controls my life, but I've had to go out of my way to have a healthier relationship with it. But I think it's definitely been true that the reason that I've found myself in this career is that it's always been my thing. And I think everybody has that thing in their life.

• 45:31Steven Bartlett?

  You know, people talk about addictive personalities and I was reflecting on one of my best friends who was an alcoholic, had a problem with gambling, then had a problem with eating, then got obsessed with marathons. And he traded each one of those things for the next thing. So now he's like obsessed with health and fitness. And so when I was thinking about people that are struggling with money problems and even my own historical struggle with money, I think I probably just traded it for something. And actually, I'm kind of happy about that because I traded it for a better addiction. One that was productive.

• 46:00Morgan Housel?

  Your career?

• 46:01Steven Bartlett?

  My career and I guess doing this. I'm pretty addicted to doing this.

• 46:07Morgan Housel?

  Right. And but I think you enjoy it.

• 46:09Steven Bartlett?

  It's happier than the plasma screen.

• 46:10Morgan Housel?

  Exactly.

• 46:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Morgan Housel?

  I think what's true about a money addiction is that it tends to be the classic addiction of like you tell yourself, if only I get one more hit, so to speak, then I'll be satiated. Then that'll be enough. And the answer is like, no, it absolutely will not. I'll tell you like a personal thing. I don't think this is true, but it made me laugh. My wife and I bought a new house about a year ago. It's an awesome house. We love it. It's great. And my brother-in-law came over the other day and he goes, you know, you're only going to live here for two years before you want to buy a bigger house. And I had to laugh because I'm like, I don't think that's true. I think we're going to live here for a while, but I know what you're saying is right. That's the natural guide towards it, that when we bought the house, it was like, oh, this is going to be so great.

• 46:53Morgan Housel?

  Can you imagine? We're going to get to do this and get to do that. And we have these neighbors and whatnot. And you become accustomed to that very quickly. And then your gaze shifts a little bit higher. And you're like, yeah, but look at that house over there. That one's nicer, isn't it? That's always the natural thing. And that's dopamine at work. That is dopamine purely at work. Because the truth is, our previous house was was great. And our previous house used to be our dream.

• 47:14Steven Bartlett?

  And dopamine exists when there's a gap between where you are and where you want to be with something. And when that gap closes, they often refer to that as the arrival fallacy.

• 47:24Morgan Housel?

  Yeah, right.

• 47:25Steven Bartlett?

  Which is really kind of what you're describing.

• 47:27Morgan Housel?

  You tell yourself, once I get there, then I'll be, then I'll be good. Then that's enough. And it's a fallacy because you know that's not true. As soon as you get to that, whatever that mountaintop is, there's another mountain above it. It pushes you in a way that is not easy. Like, nobody should pretend that you can just go do this today. But it pushes you into appreciating what you have now and finding your joy, finding your happiness through other things that don't have the arrival fallacy. Never have, as I, as a parent, have I said, oh, if only I had one more kid, then, then, then that would be great. There's no, there's really no arrival fallacy for kids. You just kind of be like these, like, I, I just appreciate being around you. I just appreciate all the, and if, if anything, it's the opposite.

• 48:08Morgan Housel?

  It's you look back and you're like, oh, I, I, I miss when you were younger. It was like, oh, I, I'm, it's, it's sad how fast you're growing up. If, if anything, rather than like looking ahead and being like, oh, it's going to be better then. You're looking back and like, oh, I wish I had appreciated that phase a little bit more.

• 48:25Steven Bartlett?

  When you talked about, um, one of the ways to get to early retirement and to live, live a better life is to want what you have. And basically want less things. I go back and forward a lot with this idea because there's like the monks who say that like happiness is not wanting something. And then there's like the reality of life where striving for things seems to make me happy. And everybody describes the journey as being the most enjoyable part.

• 48:51Morgan Housel?

  That's your purpose.

• 48:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So like, what, what, how do, how do I make sense of this? That like the monks are telling me that not to want anything because that's going to make me frustrated and unsatisfied. And then my lived experience is striving for things with a group of people makes me, seems to make me happy.

• 49:06Morgan Housel?

  I think there's a, there's a difference. It's a subtle difference, but between pursuing something that you genuinely enjoy doing, which for you is this and your, your business and whatnot, versus being addicted to something that, chasing something that you don't have yet. And so I imagine, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine when you're doing this, you don't tell yourself, I need to work harder so that one day the podcast can be up here. I, I imagine, tell me if I'm wrong, but I imagine you come to work every day and you're like, I, I like doing this today. I like today. I liked yesterday. I'm going to like tomorrow. And so you're not chasing a false goal. You just actually enjoy doing it.

• 49:39Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what? It's a weird thing because it's, it's a. I'm gonna be honest, because it's an only useful position to take. It's a weird combination of both. So I say like, it's important for us to have some like goal.

• 49:52Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Steven Bartlett?

  But also live in the total understanding that the goal doesn't actually matter.

• 49:59Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 49:59Steven Bartlett?

  And it's this weird dichotomy I live in was like, if we become the biggest podcast in the world, like, set that as a goal because it gives us something to.

• 50:09Morgan Housel?

  Something to chase. I get that.

• 50:10Steven Bartlett?

  KPI and then like, put timeframes against and get excited by and focus on. But then also living in the total realization that it's not gonna matter at all.

• 50:19Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 50:19Steven Bartlett?

  Nothing is gonna change in my life. Zilch.

• 50:22Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 50:22Steven Bartlett?

  What am I gonna get? A better black shirt? It's like.

• 50:25Morgan Housel?

  But here's the truth. The reason that we live in a world with a ton of technology and a ton of great businesses and great medicine and whatnot is because virtually everybody, for all of human history, has woken up every morning and said, it's not enough. I need more. That's the fuel of progress. And I don't wanna live in a world where everyone wakes up and says, I have all I need. Because then progress would stop that day. We'd probably start declining that day. And so there is a paradox here of like, as a whole society, I'm grateful and you should be grateful that people wake up unfulfilled. Because we live in a way better world today than existed 100 or 200 years ago because of that. And the richest people in the world, who I think are by and large tortured psychologically,

• 51:07Morgan Housel?

  have created amazing technology that you and I benefit from. And the reason we're doing this podcast is because people before us, who are way wealthier than you and I, woke up in the morning and said, this is not enough. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, all those people, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, they woke up and said, I don't care if I have 100 billion dollars. It's not enough. I need to create better technology. And that's great. We benefit from that. And so there is a paradox here that what is all, and that will never change. That will never change. So there's a paradox that like, the more, the better society becomes, I think. Like, it's always gonna be the case that as a whole society, we're gonna have a level of angst and anxiety and not be satisfied and say it's not enough. At the individual level, though, I think you can recognize that game

• 51:52Morgan Housel?

  and contextualize it with your own life and say like, look. I want more money. I want to sell more books and have a better career. I want to save more money. I also have to go so far out of my way to put it into context and say, none of it's going to matter unless I have a higher purpose beyond that money. So I think you can aspire for more and still go out of your way to realize what the expectations game is, even if you can't perfectly control it. It's similar to like, I want to eat a good diet. Of course, I want to eat healthy food. I'm not going to pretend for a second that I don't want Oreos and ice cream because they're great and they're always going to taste great. And so I'm never going to get to a point where I say,

• 52:33Morgan Housel?

  I don't want a nicer house. I'm a human and so are you. And so is everyone else. You're always going to have those feelings, but you can recognize the game. You can recognize the voice that's talking to you and realize when that voice lies to you and when it's telling you a story that is either false or just a little bit incomplete. I think if you had to like, say, who is the happiest person in the world on average? Not like naming a person, but if you had to describe the life of like, who's the happiest person out there? My guess is it's probably something close to a middle-class family that lives in a three-bedroom house and has a five-year-old car, but they have an amazing marriage, tons of friends, they're in good health,

• 53:14Morgan Housel?

  but they are by any other statistic, ordinary. And at the end of their life, more than the people who are very, very successful, that ordinary family is going to look back when they're on their deathbed, when they're 95 years old and be like, that was good. That was a good time.

• 53:30Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think, this is a very strange question to ask, but do you think I could make myself like that?

• 53:35Morgan Housel?

  No. Here's the truth. I think on the nature-nurture spectrum, most of what we believe and the feelings that we have is forged at conception. And it's just, we're just wired that way. And there's not much we can do about it. Some people have different aspirations. Elon Musk was born wired very differently than you and I, and there's nothing we can do about that. So we are who we are, but I think we can Put those feelings into a better context. Even if we can't control having those feelings, we can choose. We can put, tell ourselves a more complete story about why we're having those feelings and what those aspirations will actually do to our happiness.

• 54:12Steven Bartlett?

  So on this point of how to retire early, the first one was about managing what you want. Is there anything else there that if I'm trying to increase the probability that I get to retire early, I should know in terms of tactics and strategies?

• 54:24Morgan Housel?

  Well, one of the things, this is a little bit different than the question that you asked, but one of the things that's important is that a lot of the people who do retire early, who they tell themselves, I'm going to save so much money, I'm going to retire when I'm 32 and then life's going to be great. What actually happens is they retire at 32 and six months later, they're bored out of their mind. And they realize that like what actually makes you happy is purpose. And for a lot of people, their purpose can be their career. Or they realize, they had this idea that when they retired, it was just going to be a great life. But the truth is, all of their friends are working and don't have time to go play golf with them on Tuesday afternoon. And so a lot of people who retire early end up going back. They realize it was not what it was made, what it was made out to be. Because they had, if the formula is independence plus purpose, they gained independence, but they kind of lost their purpose.

• 55:10Morgan Housel?

  And then the, and so it was incomplete. They didn't get what they wanted.

• 55:13Steven Bartlett?

  Well, what about passive income? People talk a lot about passive income. I had a friend DM me the other day and say, Steve, I've got some debts, et cetera. But if I could just figure out a way to create some passive income, then that should solve the problem. And this term passive income has become like.

• 55:27Morgan Housel?

  Completely overused. Because for example, a lot of people, when they talk about passive income, they're like, oh, I'm going to own real estate. I mean, I have some rentals and that's passive income. If you think owning a rental property is passive income, you've never owned a rental property because there's nothing passive about it. It is a constant chain of broken toilets and leaky roofs and tenants who don't pay you on time. And there's nothing passive. That's a full-time job doing that. And so I heard someone say this recently, that there's two ways to get wealthier. You can sacrifice more or you can want less. And that's it. And gain passive income is not part of that equation.

• 56:01Steven Bartlett?

  What's the first one? Sacrifice more.

• 56:02Morgan Housel?

  Sacrifice more.

• 56:03Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 56:04Morgan Housel?

  Work harder. Work, work in a job that is, that has a lot of downsides, that might stress you out and requires you to wake up early and go to work and do some things that you don't want to do and spend time away from your kids in a way that you don't want to do. Sacrifice more or want less. Those are your two choices. And I think that's important in the passive income debate because I don't think there's, but there by and large is not a thing of passive income. Even if you're just like, you know, you put your money in a savings account that pays 3% interest. Well, you had to sacrifice to earn that money and to save that money and to delay the gratification of that money. I really think it's an ironclad formula. Sacrifice more or want less. Those are your two options.

• 56:49Steven Bartlett?

  It's not nice.

• 56:50Morgan Housel?

  But it's true.

• 56:51Steven Bartlett?

  People want, you know, tell me which crypto to

• 56:54Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 56:54Steven Bartlett?

  To invest in to get that.

• 56:55Morgan Housel?

  Of course, everyone's always going to want the easy answer, just like for health. The answer is eat a better diet and exercise. Nobody wants that. They just say, what's the, what's the secret potion? What's the secret formula? And maybe now we have Ozempic, so maybe now we have, it's closer to a, to a secret formula. But the truth is, what's the secret to better health? Sacrifice more because working out and lifting weights and running is a sacrifice. It's not fun. It hurts. That's why it's good. Or want less, be happier with your imperfect body. And I think it's a great analogy between health and, and wealth.

• 57:27Steven Bartlett?

  Often the difference between a company succeeding or failing isn't down to its product or strategy. It's down to the people on the inside. After all, the definition of the word company is group of people. And some of the best companies in the world have been largely built by A players because I'll let you in on a little secret. When you hire an A player, they go on to hire more A players and it perpetuates. The challenge is finding those first few A players. I found the majority of mine on LinkedIn who are a sponsor of this show. LinkedIn provides talent I could not find anywhere else. Talent with the necessary skills and culture fit that I'm looking for. Whenever I've paid to promote a role on LinkedIn, I've been able to hire faster and of course, better. Their data supports this too.

• 58:09Steven Bartlett?

  You'll actually get three times more qualified applicants than if you posted the same role for free. So if you're trying to build something truly great, you can get started by posting a job for free by visiting LinkedIn.com slash DOAC. That's LinkedIn.com slash DOAC and you can post your role for free there. Terms and conditions of course apply. How much do I need to understand what's going on in the wider world and the economy in order to understand my own spending behaviors, what I should spend on, how to get wealthy, how to save? Is it important to have any understanding around the macro? Because most people that listen to the show will probably hear these terms being spouted out on by political commentators like the Federal Reserve interest rate, tariffs, et cetera.

• 58:52Steven Bartlett?

  And should I understand any of this? Does any of it really impact me in a way that matters to me and my family?

• 58:59Morgan Housel?

  I don't think it's necessary. And you could point to people I've written about in my books who had no financial education, no training, did not read the Wall Street Journal, could not tell you how the Federal Reserve works, but they had control of their psychology, control of their emotions. They worked hard, they saved their money, they invested it, and that's all you need. So the answer is you don't need to know how this works. Just in the same way that in order to be healthy, you don't need a PhD in biology. You don't need to understand how cell division works in order to be in good shape. And I think it's the same for the economy. And it can actually backfire for a lot of people that once they start reading the Wall Street Journal and learning a bit about finance, it increases their confidence more than their ability. So they're like, oh, like, I read

• 59:42Morgan Housel?

  the Wall Street Journal, I should go day trade crypto now because I read a thing that teaches me how the Federal Reserve works. So now I'm gonna, it increases your confidence more than your skill.

• 59:52Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting.

• 59:53Morgan Housel?

  And so I think it's important to be an informed citizen. And the Federal Reserve impacts your life. And tariffs impact your life. So it's important to have some baseline understanding. But I think that's more about being an informed citizen and informed voter than it is having financial skill.

• 1:00:10Steven Bartlett?

  Of all of my best friends, there's like five or six of them, the one that's most cash rich is the one that knows the least about, I think he's the most rich period, to be honest. He's the one that knows least about finance. And he knows the least about investing. He knows the least about crypto.

• 1:00:25Morgan Housel?

  Well, what's the meme of like the tail spectrum of like, the poor person drives a Toyota, the middle person has a Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, and the rich person goes back to Toyota? Of like, it's like, whether you are very uneducated or extremely wise, you tend to end up.

• 1:00:40Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, this.

• 1:00:40Morgan Housel?

  That's it. And so I think it does tend to be the truth that the people who do the best financially either have like no financial education or extreme financial education. And it's a person in the middle that has their confidence is increased much faster than their ability. And they're like, oh, no, no, I read this thing on Reddit that taught me about day trading. So now I'm going to go bet my entire net worth on this company I've never heard of.

• 1:01:05Steven Bartlett?

  So funny. But so what is it that the person on the left and right side of the spectrum are both doing that is the same here? So for anyone that can't see, I'll put it up on the screen, but it just shows the bottom axis says net worth. And it basically says that people with low net worth buy a Toyota. People with like in the middle, that sort of middle percentage buy Lamborghinis and Porsches and Jaguars. And then people with extremely high net worths buy Toyotas. And obviously it's

• 1:01:33Morgan Housel?

  Obviously, it's not, it's not, it's not exactly perfectly true. But I think people like a lot of comedy, you see it like it's funny because people are like, yes, that's true. That's how it works. I think a lot of it is like, the richer you become, you realize that the big house and the fancy car didn't do anything for you. It didn't give you what you thought it was going to give you. And then so you're like, look, I'm just going to go back to utility. Like status didn't do it for me, so I'm going to go back to utility. It can also be the case that if you're successful and rich, you can gain your admiration and your attention through what the business that you built or the intelligence that you have, or the friendship that you can offer others.

• 1:02:14Morgan Housel?

  And therefore your desire to be like, look at my car, look at how cool my car is, just goes down from there.

• 1:02:19Steven Bartlett?

  The way I also interpret it is that when you're, when you don't have much money, when you don't have a huge financial understanding like my friend, you end up playing the really boring money games.

• 1:02:29Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Steven Bartlett?

  And when you have a huge financial understanding, you probably also spend a lot of time playing the boring money games. And by boring money games, I mean index funds.

• 1:02:38Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Steven Bartlett?

  And the S and P 500 versus like crypto.

• 1:02:41Morgan Housel?

  Yeah, I think you'll see that in investing that like the absolute layperson will invest in index funds. And the extremely experienced Wall Street veteran will invest in index funds as well. And it's a person in the middle that just has like a little bit of intelligence, a little bit of experience, a little bit of information that's trying as hard as they can to outperform the market.

• 1:03:03Steven Bartlett?

  I kind of learned that from reading your, the psychology of money because I, I think like many people thought there was some trick or hack that this book was going to teach me to figure out how to trade coins at the right time or to like do Forex trading or whatever. But ultimately, the book, if there was one overarching lesson it taught me was that like patience and more boring investing is, is the way to get, to build my wealth over the long term and that like all other strategies have hidden trade offs which lead you to being broke.

• 1:03:38Morgan Housel?

  Yeah, I think there's a truth to that. Like there's a, there's an optimal level of intelligence that you want for investing where you want to be smart enough to understand the basics, but not so smart that the basics bore you. And a lot of people get so smart that they're like, look, index funds, compound interest, like I'm, it's putting like, it's too boring. Like I need something really complex to satisfy the intelligence that I have. And I think there's a sweet spot where you're like, for me, I'm just like, oh, index funds and compound interest. Like that's, that's kind of as high as my intelligence goes here. But I think the truth is that that is the best position to be in. Smart enough to understand the basics, but not so smart that they become boring to you. Cause once they're boring to you, you're just like, ah, sweep those away. Let's try to pull some more levers here.

• 1:04:20Steven Bartlett?

  What is going on in the world at the moment, Morgan? There's, it feels like people are more divided than ever before. And I feel like a lot of these subjects we talk about are somewhat interconnected. It feels like there's a rise in inequality. You probably know the numbers better than I do. I mean, there's a graph in front of you there which shows, I think it's, is it wage growth?

• 1:04:42Morgan Housel?

  Yes. Monthly wage growth, going back for about 25 years.

• 1:04:45Steven Bartlett?

  And it appears to be going down.

• 1:04:48Morgan Housel?

  Well, but this is growth. So in any given year, even if the growth is 2%, that's 2% higher than the previous year. So this is not wages over time. Now, it is true that if you look over a 25 year period and you took the average American family, not everybody, but the median, that their wages adjusted for inflation have gone up. Not, not up as much as people would want over 25 years, but that they are better off than they were 25 years ago. What is also true is that the average median family would probably disagree with that statement, even if it is true statistically for several reasons. One of which is their expectations have gone up over the last 25 years. The other is even if you're looking at average wages.

• 1:05:33Morgan Housel?

  Average, and when we talk about these statistics, does not refer to any specific family. This is just a statistical number. Everyone spends their money differently. So if I told you, "Hey, average family, you're richer than you were in the year 2000." And they're like, "Yeah, but I'm trying to put my kids through college, and have you seen the price of college?" And like, "Yeah, that might be true, because the price of TVs has gone down, but have you seen the price of rent and housing?" Like, at the individual level, these statistics don't really mean that much, and never have. I think a lot of economists get into a problem with that, when they're like, "Well, statistically, X, Y, and Z has happened." But ignoring the psychology and the individuality of like, what's happening actually on the ground, in people's heads, and how they spend their

• 1:06:13Morgan Housel?

  money, there's just endless amount of nuance in here. And so, I think it's always been true, that we live in a world where, over long periods of time, there's good economic growth. We become wealthier. We have bigger, better things. We have more income. We have better medicine. It's equally true, too, that like, there is always something legitimate to complain about. And it's legitimate to complain about. It's not just like, "Oh, you should be more grateful." It's a real thing. And so, when I look at a graph like this, actually, what, like, if I was thinking just, like, with my math head, I'd be like, "Oh, there's been quite a bit of growth over the last 25 years." Like, the growth has been gone up and down, but it's growth. You know, never in this chart is growth below zero.

• 1:06:56Steven Bartlett?

  I guess the question there is, are rich people getting richer, and are the poor getting poorer?

• 1:07:02Morgan Housel?

  It depends. I mean, it's at the end of, are the rich getting richer? Yes. Are the poor getting poorer? Statistically, no.

• 1:07:11Steven Bartlett?

  Even adjusted for inflation?

• 1:07:14Morgan Housel?

  I mean, it depends what period we're talking about here. There was about a 20 or 30-year period where the answer was unequivocally yes. There was an interesting trend over the last 10 years, where, in percentage terms, the group of wage earners who had the highest percentage growth were actually the low wage. That was true for two or three years after COVID, where if you were a low, if you were a minimum wage worker, those were, in percentage terms, great years for you for getting wages. It's tapered off. So, the answer to your question is, the rich are getting richer. The poor, I think, are treading water, by and large. There's always people who are doing differently than that. But when one group of society is getting richer, treading water feels like you're falling.

• 1:07:58Morgan Housel?

  And the specifics of how people spend their money. So even if on average, adjusted for inflation, their wages are flat. But if your rent skyrocketed, or you're trying to send your kids through college, or you have a long commute and you've got to put gas in your tank. The individual level, things can feel very, very different from what the statistics show.

• 1:08:16Steven Bartlett?

  And what role do you think this sort of wealth inequality that is widening between the very, very top and everybody else is playing in everything that we're seeing play out at the moment? Because in the UK, it's almost like there's, we're on like the verge of riots, it seems. And I think the last, last month, there was millions of people in London protesting against immigrants coming over on boats and society becoming more multicultural. I'm so fascinated by this subject because, you know, earlier on, we said that unless you have immigration in the Western world, you have population decline.

• 1:08:49Morgan Housel?

  But what's, but population decline sucks.

• 1:08:51Steven Bartlett?

  Because you have a hit.

• 1:08:52Morgan Housel?

  What's the biggest problem right now throughout a lot of the world? At least one of the biggest perceived problems is immigration.

• 1:08:57Steven Bartlett?

  And the same is playing out in the United States. If I go on X, although I know, I know what X is, it's people. And maybe it's just my algorithm, but it's people attacking immigrants and immigration and people that are brown and black and whatever else it might be. I'm wondering how all of this is intertwined and, and if it, if it is connected at all, in your view.

• 1:09:17Morgan Housel?

  I think as an amateur student of history, across cultures, all over the place, all through history, what you want to avoid more than anything in society is when probably a third of the population wakes up every morning and says, this isn't working. That's the point at which it's going to collapse from there, is when enough people wake up in the morning and just have this feeling of like, whatever this is, it's not working out for me. You want to avoid that part. And so like, look, I'm a, I tend to be a free markets guy. I'm a capitalist. I think people should be able to become very wealthy, et cetera, et cetera. You also don't want to get to a point where people become so wealthy that a big chunk of society just wakes up every morning and says, fuck this. This is not, this is not going to work out for me.

• 1:09:59Morgan Housel?

  And I think we've got, we've, we're either there or precariously close to there in a lot of areas in the world. Social media, that's always been the case, and social media makes it 100 times worse than it's ever been. For example, you and I are recording this a day after Charlie Kirk was assassinated yesterday.

• 1:10:17Morgan Housel?

  And there were who knows what number percentage it was, but and I think it was not hard on social media to find people who were celebrating it yesterday. Now, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, did those people exist too who celebrated assassination? Of course, but because of social media, by and large, you did not hear from them unless you were part of that group. Whereas today, virtually everybody yesterday saw people celebrating Charlie Kirk's assassination. And so even if those feelings existed in the past, they're much more apparent today. You see them today in a way that you that you did not before. So because of that, it's easy to say we're more divided today, we're more extreme today, we're more pessimistic than they are today. I think the nuance is that's not actually true, but you're just more aware of it, that

• 1:11:02Morgan Housel?

  those feelings always existed. They existed in the 1990s, they existed in the 1950s. It was just much easier to contain those. And for the average citizen who got their information from one newspaper, one evening news program, to feel like things were much more stable and in control and that people were much more uniform in their opinions than they actually were.

• 1:11:21Steven Bartlett?

  Before we start recording, we were talking about the Charlie Kirk shooting and how

• 1:11:27Steven Bartlett?

  social media's ability to dehumanize other people at a probably a faster rate than history would have done it is pretty remarkable. And you see a lot of that, you see a lot of it taking place on both sides. I think both sides describe each other as being like animals and inhumane and one side's calling the other side Nazis and then the other side is calling the other side, referring to them in in animal terms because of maybe the color of their skin or their behavior. We saw a lot of that when the heinous individual killed the young lady on the on the train in in America. And the way that this person is the fucking worst thing on planet Earth.

• 1:12:08Steven Bartlett?

  But the language was very.

• 1:12:12Steven Bartlett?

  It was putting that person in a group of other people.

• 1:12:15Morgan Housel?

  Yes.

• 1:12:15Steven Bartlett?

  And then making the whole group a pack of animals.

• 1:12:18Morgan Housel?

  Right, because in that situation too, we talked about this earlier. I don't know that individual's name, doesn't matter, but no one refers to him by his name. It's them, it's they. And that, once you dehumanize any group of people like that, and this has been the case for all of human history, that 99.9% of people cannot kill another human, but they're perfectly fine killing them, they, that group. Once you dehumanize, you can do anything. And at that, at a much lower level, everyone realizes this with road rage. I've had road rage. The person cut me off, that son of a bitch, honked my horn, flipped my... I don't, I don't get too extreme with it. But in things I would never do, eye to eye, but once I'm looking at a car, then it's, there's no human there, and my ability to have a level of anger is so much higher than

• 1:13:03Morgan Housel?

  it would be if we were just looking eye to eye. I had this experience a couple of years ago where I was pulling into a gas station and I inadvertently cut somebody off. It was an accident, but I totally cut them off. And he honked and threw up his middle finger at me. And we, since we pulled into the same gas station, we were now like eye to eye, and I walked over to him, and I think he thought I was like coming to like confront him. And I put up my hands and said, I just want to apologize. I didn't, I didn't mean to cut you off. I'm so sorry. I did, it was not on purpose. And he, I think he was so surprised and he was like, wow, thank you. Thanks for like, and we had this moment of like almost hugging of just like, ah, I'm so like, I hope, hope you have a great day. It was one of those of like, once, in the moment when it was, you stripped the humanity

• 1:13:47Morgan Housel?

  off it, when it was two cars, each other, both of us were like, fuck you. Once we looked eye to eye, it was like, oh, brother, like, it's okay, it's okay. And I think that was just like, for me, that was an individual example of what happens at society. When you strip the humanity off it, we're capable of so much anger and hate, eye to eye, we're like, oh, that's all good. And I think all of us know somebody who we disagree with politically, regardless of what it might be. And it's easy to be like, oh, that person's an idiot, they're stupid, they're ill informed. And actually, if you sit down and talk to them, you're like, ah, look, we might have some disagreements here, but it's all good. Cheers, let's have a good night. Like, eye to eye, the vast majority of people get along and get together. But social media has turned all of life into road rage.

• 1:14:28Steven Bartlett?

  Gosh, yeah. I mean, you know that more starkly than anyone as a podcaster, because I sit here with everybody of all political opinions, extreme left, you know, pretty extreme right, and at this table. We get along.

• 1:14:39Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 1:14:40Steven Bartlett?

  We get along, even off camera, we get along.

• 1:14:42Morgan Housel?

  I think so many people have said this in the last 24 hours about Charlie Kirk. One of the most common phrases I've heard was, I didn't agree with everything he said, but at least he was brave enough to have a conversation with people who he disagreed with. That was what he did by and large, was going into schools and being like, I know you disagree with me, let's talk. And, and he turned it from road rage into a conversation between people. And even if you disagreed with him, I think he did it very right in that sense. And I think that's what's, why people from all over the spectrum are devastated in the last 24 hours. It was like, he was one of the people who was doing it right. Even when you disagreed with them, he was having a conversation face to face and bringing people together.

• 1:15:21Steven Bartlett?

  I think that absolutely hits the nail on the head, which is, I think, you know, there's things that I absolutely don't agree with him on, but I actually think that's just completely beside the point because I want to live in a world where there's people that I disagree with. Like, I actually wouldn't choose the world where everyone I encountered agreed with my opinions. There would be no intellectual growth, there'd be no understanding, there'd be no real progress. But also, as you've highlighted, the way that Charlie Kirk went about it was he went to Oxford University and went on the formalized debate panel.

• 1:15:49Morgan Housel?

  He didn't hide in an office and a pine on social media. He went face to face and said, I know you disagree with me, let's talk.

• 1:15:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and I'll listen to what you, he wasn't interrupting people all the time. He's hearing out their points and he was making this.

• 1:16:00Morgan Housel?

  By and large respectful about it.

• 1:16:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Morgan Housel?

  And what is missing from all political discourse today? It's that, it's I know you disagree, but let's talk and let's try to be respectful about it. And I can't think of anyone on either side who, who did that as consistently as he did.

• 1:16:18Morgan Housel?

  Even if I disagree with him.

• 1:16:22Morgan Housel?

  The idea that we're only going to talk to people who we agree with is what causes all the problems.

• 1:16:25Steven Bartlett?

  I don't understand these fucking people. I don't understand.

• 1:16:28Morgan Housel?

  It's much more comfortable to surround yourself with people who agree with you than to accept the nuance of life. And this is the problem with a lot of political media is that it creates much better content when people say, this is right, this is wrong. He's right, he's wrong, to make it very explicit, binary, black and white than it is to accept the truth, which is like, it's complicated.

• 1:16:52Steven Bartlett?

  I think I was like traumatized yesterday when I watched that, when I saw the video of him being shot. I think, like, it was this weird, like, deep sense of likes, like, uh...

• 1:17:02Steven Bartlett?

  I've not been able to articulate what it is, but it was, I don't know Charlie Kirk. I've never met him. There was a time when, you know, we were potentially going to have him on the show and we were trying to figure out like, you know, who to, who to have here with him. Cause he's such an unbelievable debater that he would have ran fucking rings around me. It was like, who can you put?

• 1:17:19Morgan Housel?

  At the end of the show, you'd be like, you'd be like, fine, I'm conservative. Okay.

• 1:17:23Steven Bartlett?

  But there was something really surprising in how I felt when I, when I both heard the news and saw him being shot. This young guy, family person who was out debating, who had ideas that many people disagreed with, but was in a forum where he was having them challenged. Could be executed in public on live stream in a way that his children are going to watch that video and they grow up probably multiple times. And I was like, oh God, what, yeah. What does this say about the society we live in and where we're heading? You know, I know guns play a huge role in this. We have to acknowledge that because it's very, very unlikely that could have happened in the UK. Cause we don't have guns there. So you could have thrown a rock or something, but you could have killed the guy. But it's almost like, it feels like a crescendo of the moment.

• 1:18:07Steven Bartlett?

  Where division and algorithms and now that, you know, X has gone a certain way and other platforms are going certain ways. And if you look at the stats, there's more social networks now that have more than 20 million active users than at any time in human history. It's gone up by 50% in recent times, which means we're becoming more splintered. And then if you, if you understand the commercial models of these algorithms, their commercial model is dependent on you spending more time there. So how do I get you to spend more time there? Well, I give you more of the things that are going to trigger your amygdala, which is, you know, your fear senses and, and the things that are going to drive, you know, drive you into rage and debate and engagement and these, and sharing things. And so I don't know, I wonder if there's a way back from here.

• 1:18:48Morgan Housel?

  I have a, an optimistic view and this is not a forecast because I don't have a hundred percent faith in this. But there are so many endless examples in history when people discount how powerful cycles, cycles can be. And so my optimistic, my hope, it's not even a forecast, it's a hope, is that 15 or 20 years from now, we look back at this era. As when things bottomed politically, from which we grew out of, we improved. And we're going to look back and be like, man, the 2020s were so bad and we are so divided. But that was also a bottom that we came out of, like a generational bottom. And that sounds crazy today, but that's always been the case. If you and I were talking about the economy in the 1930s, it would have been preposterous,

• 1:19:33Morgan Housel?

  completely insane to say the 1950s are going to be the greatest, most unbound prosperity, middle-class prosperity we're ever going to have. That would have seemed insane. If this was the 1970s and we just had a raft of political assassinations in the 60s, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and then Richard Nixon is impeached and resigned for Watergate, it would have been completely insane for you and I to say, hey, you know what? The 80s and 90s are going to be an era of political stability and political faith and trust in government. It would have been insane. It's always when things are the lowest that you feel like you're never going to recover. But if you understand how cyclical things can be, it's usually the case that looking

• 1:20:15Morgan Housel?

  back, you're like, man, it was bad, but looking back, that was the bottom. And I have no idea if the bottom was yesterday or if it's going to come 10 years from now. But I would bet that the most likely scenario, whenever that bottom comes, is that we will look 15 or 20 years back and be like, that was terrible. And at that moment, everyone assumed it would go on forever, but looking back, that was actually a bottom. When enough people came together and said, stop, stop, this is too much. The forces, we've gone too far in the other direction. We need to come around from them. It is always impossible in real time to wrap your head around that and to forecast it. It's only looking back that you're like, yes, that there was the bottom. And you can see things getting so bad. Trust in government is so low.

• 1:20:59Morgan Housel?

  Polarization is so high. That would not surprise me in the slightest if we look 20 years from now and be like, oh, things got better.

• 1:21:06Steven Bartlett?

  I understand that from an economic standpoint. I struggle with it because of the presence of how we like, because of the medium in which we communicate now with social media.

• 1:21:14Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Steven Bartlett?

  And I was looking at the, some of the stats here and it says, in 1994, only 20% of Americans held a very unfavorable view of the other party. By 2022, that number has jumped to 72% among Republicans and 63% among Democrats, according to Pew Research. And this is particularly pronounced in the United States and, and the UK and other parts of Europe. In this report, it says that social media and also cable news's role has only amplified echo chambers, making the divide sharper and more emotional. And I, I can't, especially with AI and the way I go, well, AI is going to make those algorithms even smarter.

• 1:21:56Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Steven Bartlett?

  At understanding exactly what to show me to increase my engagement, therefore increase their advertising dollars. So I'm like, what, what would be the, the mechanism in this context?

• 1:22:06Morgan Housel?

  I have no statistic or even strong thing to back this up with, but my gut tells me that the younger generation in particular is going to be the one that looks at social media and looks at AI and recognizes the bullshit that can come out of it. It's the older generation, it's the boomers today on social media who believe everything that they see. And I think that tends to be where a lot of the polarization comes from, not to blame everything on the older generation. But I think if you were to look at statistically, who is the most gullible on social media of believing every post in their feed, it's the older generation. And it would not surprise me if the younger generation is much more attuned to how quickly you can be led astray into some bullshit rabbit hole that is not reflective of how the broader world works. I don't know if that's true or not, but if

• 1:22:49Morgan Housel?

  you were to ask me to articulate why we're going to get around the social media bubbles, it would be that the generations who have been doing this the longest are going to be the best at recognizing how dangerous it can be.

• 1:23:00Steven Bartlett?

  You're a very smart guy and you're someone that studies, has studied history and understands, you know, you wrote the book Same As Ever, which shows a guide to what doesn't change through history and how things can often stay the same. So this is a bit, bit of a peculiar question for you, but in the wake of what happened to Charlie Kirk yesterday, his, his public murder and all that's rising from that.

• 1:23:24Steven Bartlett?

  What should someone like me and you, who have public platforms, who reach people on a daily basis, do to help?

• 1:23:31Morgan Housel?

  I think we have to remind ourselves two things about social media. One is that it's been designed by the smartest people of our generation to deliver you in your feed not the best information, not the right information, basically what's going to give you the most FOMO, the most anxiety, what's going to like pull out the starkest reaction in you. And the smartest people of our generation have gone to work at Facebook and Google and whatever, and TikTok to make an algorithm that's going to give you that, that's going to give you the thing in your feed that's going to make you go, wow, what, that's so out. And two is that even when it's not that, even when it is just people's thoughts, people go on social media to perform.

• 1:24:12Morgan Housel?

  They go on, they are trying to give you, and I'm trying to do this on social media, so I don't want to give you any random thought in my head, I'm going to specifically give you what I think is going to be interesting and whatnot. So if we view social media as a proxy for the real world, and I think everyone, it kind of intuitively does, even if they, when you say it out loud, you're like, no, of course it's not the real world. But it's easy to assume that when I open up Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, I'm like, I'm just seeing a window into the world. You're like, no, this is people performing for you and the smartest minds in the world ordering that performance for what's going to give you the most anxiety.

• 1:24:48Steven Bartlett?

  Are you optimistic about the Western economy, the US economy?

• 1:24:53Morgan Housel?

  I could be optimistic long term and realistic about what growth means. The reason we tend to have growth in the economy and in the stock market is because, it's specifically because there's short term chaos. So am I optimistic about the next 30 years? Absolutely. I know that my kids will be living a better material life than you and I are. They'll have better medicine, they'll have better technology, they'll have flying cars, whatever it is. Does that, but I'm equally confident, if not more confident, that the path between now and then is going to be chaos. And that's not exclusive, that's not mutually exclusive. Like, the fact that I know I'm extremely confident that there's going to be a lot of growth, and that it's going to be a constant chain of setback and suffering and misery between now and then.

• 1:25:38Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything that you see creating a setback? I mean, there's these new protagonists in the story. There's AI, there's the declining birth rates, which is going to have an impact on the population. Is there anything that you think is your most focused? There's tariffs as well. There's Trump economics, which can cause some instability.

• 1:25:56Morgan Housel?

  Historically, the biggest risk by far has always been the thing that nobody's talking about. So when we, you and I survey the world today, we talk about exactly what you just said, tariffs, birth rate. People know about those things. There's never been a period when the biggest risk was something that was knowable. It's always something like COVID, which nobody saw coming, September 11th, which nobody saw coming, the Great Depression, like all these things, Pearl Harbor, all these things that were not on people's radar that did the most damage. And so it's not that I don't worry about tariffs, or that I don't worry about birth rates. I do. But I would guarantee you that the worst economic story of the next 10 years, the biggest risk is something that you and I are not talking about whatsoever. It's a risk that's going to come completely out of

• 1:26:38Morgan Housel?

  the blue, that is not in any newspaper, it's not in any podcast. That's going to be the biggest risk.

• 1:26:44Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a particular chapter in the Psychology of Money, which was the book that sold, I hear, almost 10 million copies, and had a profound impact on my life and my family's life? Is there a particular story or chapter in this book that is your favorite?

• 1:27:00Morgan Housel?

  I think the chapter on reasonable versus rational, which, to very quickly summarize it, is, don't pretend like you are purely rational, and you're a spreadsheet, and your financial decisions have to, like, make perfect sense. Everyone is a little bit flawed, a little bit emotional, different family situations, different goals. As long as your financial decisions are merely reasonable. That's good. And I think a lot of people, for me and for a lot of people, they're like, oh, thank you for giving me permission because I have this quirky thing that I do with my money. And it doesn't make any sense, but it's reasonable and it makes sense for my personality. And like, as long as it's reasonable, like, don't be unreasonable. But don't think that every one of your financial decisions has to add up perfectly in a spreadsheet. You want to use money as a tool for a better life.

• 1:27:44Morgan Housel?

  And there's many different ways to do that, a lot of which might make sense to me, but not make sense to you or vice versa. And so that's fine. And so I think that to me of just like, hey, this is not an exercise in a spreadsheet where I'm just trying to make sure all the numbers add up. I'm just trying to use money to be a little bit happier and to sleep better. And to give myself, my family, a little bit of a better life, even if it doesn't always make sense. It's as a tool to give me a better life.

• 1:28:09Steven Bartlett?

  If money is a tool for happiness, I guess you have to get really clear, which you talk about in your new book, The Art of Spending Money, you have to get really clear on what your goal is. And I think most of us have never actually done an exercise to get clear on that.

• 1:28:21Morgan Housel?

  Yes.

• 1:28:22Steven Bartlett?

  Which is quite shocking.

• 1:28:23Morgan Housel?

  Jeff Bezos talks about this in a way that I think was really profound. Where he's like, he thought about building Amazon with what he called the regret minimization framework, which was he envisioned himself being 90 years old or whatever on his deathbed. And looking back, and he said, the goal for life was to be on your deathbed and have as few regrets as possible. And he said, if he started Amazon and it failed, he would not have regretted that. But if he never tried to start it, he would regret it. And so it was an easy, of course, he has to do it because he wants to have as few regrets as possible. But I just think that very simple framework of the overarching goal in life, if you have like, what is the base of the pyramid for how to live a good life, you want to have as few regrets as possible.

• 1:29:08Morgan Housel?

  Not take as few risks as you can, just have as few regrets as possible. And I think what's hard is that people, by and large, don't have a good concept of what they will regret. It's easy to do because a lot of things kind of compounds slowly. So. If you eat a poor diet, or if you're like not treating your friends as well as you should, that's like a slow thing. You might regret it eventually, but you're gonna look back. But in real time, you don't really understand what you're doing. So to have a good sense of what you're gonna regret is a difficult thing. But to me, that's the ultimate goal in life. There is a, you know, I heard the story one time of a guy who his last words on his deathbed were so much wasted time. Those were his last words.

• 1:29:53Morgan Housel?

  And I'm thinking like, that's, that's, that's as worse, that's, that's as bad as it comes. To be on your deathbed and look back and be like, man, what a, what a regret. It's just filled with regrets of the things you didn't do, of the way that you treated people, of the risks that you didn't take. And so I think that if there is an overarching philosophy, it's that. And I ask myself a lot, like, do I have a good sense of what I'm gonna regret? And for every decision that I make, do I ask myself, will I regret doing or not doing this thing? Easier said than done, but something I think about a lot.

• 1:30:26Steven Bartlett?

  I think it's generally just hard for us to appreciate that there will be a future self. I was reading a study where they put people in these MRI scanners and then asked them to think about themselves, and then a celebrity, and then themselves in 10 years' time. And that when they thought about themselves, a certain part of the brain lit up. When they thought about a celebrity or themselves in 10 years' time, a different part of the brain lit up, which kind of makes you think that we don't really, our future self is a stranger.

• 1:30:53Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:54Steven Bartlett?

  And so we act, and I think this about the people that I sit here with, I think probably most of the people that I sit here with learning from, if you could like distill it down to why they're here, it's because they were able to think about themselves in 10 years' time. They were able, so they became an athlete and trained, or they became a CEO, or they became an expert in something. They were able to like think, and they got through the PhD and all that. I don't know.

• 1:31:15Morgan Housel?

  There's a great quote from Jerry Seinfeld. He says, self-control is empathy with your future self. It's you are making a decision to either do or not do something today because you have respect for your future self and you care about your future self. You know there's gonna be a Steve in 10 years from now, and you wanna do something today with compassion for that person 10 years from now.

• 1:31:38Steven Bartlett?

  I'm guessing kids help in some regard because they give you a future.

• 1:31:41Morgan Housel?

  To think about.

• 1:31:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Morgan Housel?

  Right. Something that's going to outlive you and you want to teach them something and, and you know, push them into becoming someone that's going to outlive you. So you're having like by default, you're thinking about something that's going to outlive yourself.

• 1:31:55Steven Bartlett?

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• 1:32:39Steven Bartlett?

  it's needed. And they've built the fastest and easiest path to get you there. If you're running a startup and this appeals to you, you can visit vanta.com/CEO and get a thousand dollars off. That's vanta.com/CEO for $1,000 off. AI agents aren't coming. They are already here. And those of you who know how to leverage them will be the ones that change the world. I spent my whole career as an entrepreneur, regretting the fact that I never learnt to code. AI agents completely change this. Now, if you have an idea and you have a tool like Replit, who are a sponsor of this podcast, there is nothing stopping you from turning that idea into reality in a matter of minutes.

• 1:33:22Steven Bartlett?

  With Replit, you just type in what you want to create and it uses AI agents to create it for you. And now I'm an investor in the company as well as them being a brand sponsor. You can integrate payment systems or databases or logins, anything that you can type. Whenever I have an idea for a new website or tool or technology or app, I go on replit.com and I type in what I want. A new to-do list, a survey form, a new personal website, anything I type, I can create. So if you've never tried this before, do it now. Go to replit.com and use my code Stephen for 50% off a month of your Replit Call Plan. You talk in the book about trying new things.

• 1:34:05Steven Bartlett?

  And and why that is, uh, there's a chapter called try something new. And I think a lot of us actually get stuck in ruts in life and that ends up, we get stuck in routine. It's weird how as we age, we like to move routine more, but intuitively, everyone would say that routine makes them.

• 1:34:20Morgan Housel?

  Boring.

• 1:34:20Steven Bartlett?

  Boring.

• 1:34:21Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 1:34:21Steven Bartlett?

  Less, let's, life less spontaneous, less interesting, less awe, less wonder.

• 1:34:26Morgan Housel?

  And there's that thing, people realize this, that summer vacation, when you're 10 years old, seems like it lasts forever.

• 1:34:32Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Morgan Housel?

  But when you're an adult, summer goes by in three seconds and you're like, what, like, why is, why is time going faster? At least one of the theories for why it seems like time goes faster as you age is because when you're a child, every day is something new. You're experiencing something for the first time. It's a constant chain of novelty. When you're an adult, it's probably the same commute, going to the same job, living in the same house. And one day blends into the next and before you know it, 10 years has passed. And so the idea of like trying something new, I think is, is, is, is important. The point I made in the book about trying something new is you don't know what your thing that you really are going to enjoy in life is. It might not be intuitive. Some people value travel. By and large, I don't.

• 1:35:14Morgan Housel?

  Some people enjoy like spending a ton of money on wine. By and large, I don't, but I do spend my money on things that you might not appreciate. Like, everybody's different. You can't, there's no formula for how to do it. You have to try a million different kinds of spending before you're like, oh, I like this. I don't like that. I want to focus more on this. And it's not intuitive what that thing's going to be. My wife and I also had this realization in the last month. So many people, when they talk and think about money and spending, they're like, I want to travel. I want to, I want to have more money so I can travel. And I think by and large, that's great. Travel is an amazing thing. My wife and I realized that like, I think we've done so much of it and because we have kids right now that we're like, I don't think we enjoy it that much. And it wasn't until we were looking at our summer schedule that we were like, okay, we got two more trips coming up. That we were like, oh, really?

• 1:35:58Morgan Housel?

  And we realized the best part of the last several trips that we've taken is coming home. That, that the most enjoyable part of the trip was coming home. And we were like, can we just admit? That maybe we shouldn't be doing this as much as we do.

• 1:36:11Steven Bartlett?

  That's so funny.

• 1:36:12Morgan Housel?

  Even if society tells us that we should do it and everyone else, I travel a lot for work. So like my idea of a vacation is not, not going on an airplane. And, but you have to realize like everyone's unique and different. Like if travel is your thing or someone listening to this, awesome, please go do it. We had to just admit to ourselves that at least at this phase of our life, we want to do a little bit less of it. So the idea that everyone's different is important.

• 1:36:34Steven Bartlett?

  I think, I mean, I think exactly that. I think what underpins, underpins much of your message here is this ability to cultivate self-awareness.

• 1:36:40Morgan Housel?

  Yeah. And I think a lot of what throws people off with money is chasing a lifestyle that is right for somebody else, but not right for them. And that it can be very a hard thing to do because you're like, man, this person over here, he's working this hard and, and she has this house and they're living this lifestyle and it looks like they're pretty happy. And then you try to do it and you're like, but I'm not happy. And the truth may have been that working that hard and spending money on that was right for that person, but it's not right for you.

• 1:37:11Steven Bartlett?

  That's what we don't understand.

• 1:37:12Morgan Housel?

  If you and I had Jeff Bezos's ambition, Elon Musk's ambition, I think we, I, I, I'd drive us, we'd drive ourselves absolutely crazy. It's right for them. It might not be right for us. And so when we view it as it worked for them, so I should do it too. No, no, no, it doesn't work like that. You have to figure it out for yourself.

• 1:37:29Steven Bartlett?

  But also the inverse, right? It didn't work for them, so it won't work for me. It's also incorrect.

• 1:37:35Morgan Housel?

  Right. I think it's immature for people to say, I like this thing and therefore you should too. Or the reverse, this didn't work for me and therefore nobody should do it.

• 1:37:44Steven Bartlett?

  This is the whole workload.

• 1:37:45Morgan Housel?

  That's not, that's not how life works. Right. Right.

• 1:37:47Steven Bartlett?

  And this is what you see raging on LinkedIn is one group of people saying that amount of work and sacrifice is toxic.

• 1:37:54Morgan Housel?

  You should do it or, or the, or the reverse.

• 1:37:56Steven Bartlett?

  Which you're lazy.

• 1:37:57Morgan Housel?

  You have to hustle. You're lazy if you don't live the life that I do.

• 1:38:00Steven Bartlett?

  And both sides are wrong.

• 1:38:01Morgan Housel?

  Yes, it comes from a sense of immaturity that everyone else should enjoy life in the exact same way that I do.

• 1:38:08Steven Bartlett?

  I think there's a few psychological forces at play here. One is.

• 1:38:13Steven Bartlett?

  If you're looking at a bunch of people working really hard and you're not, it's in a weird way, holding a mirror up to you and implicitly sort of like indirectly saying that you're not enough.

• 1:38:23Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:25Steven Bartlett?

  And then maybe on the other side, there's some other force going the other way. But I think both sides are kind of misunderstanding that everybody is not them.

• 1:38:33Morgan Housel?

  Yes.

• 1:38:34Steven Bartlett?

  And that's a good.

• 1:38:35Morgan Housel?

  I can pick apart elements of your life and say, wow, Stephen, his podcast is this and he's got homes here and he's doing this. But there's a million different components of your life and my life and everybody's life that are invisible. And most people, because of self-preservation or because they're trying to get ahead in life, will not disclose what the bad parts of their life are. Of course, everybody does this. I do this, you probably do it. Everyone does that because either they don't want to admit them to themselves or they don't want to talk about it because they think other people are going to judge them for the bad parts of their life. So it's very easy to look at other people's lives and have a sense of like, oh, well, theirs is better than mine because all you can see is what they are advertising.

• 1:39:18Morgan Housel?

  And because of that, it's very easy to be jealous or envious of people and say, if only I had their life, things would be better. And part of it is good. It's part of it's good for me to look at, be like, man, Stephen's been so successful doing this kind of content. Maybe I should do, that's motivation. But once I say their life looks better than mine and if only I had what they had, I would be happier is a very treacherous path, treacherous path to go down.

• 1:39:45Steven Bartlett?

  Jack is the producer on the show. He's done the show with me since the very beginning of us launching on YouTube. And so he understands the intricacies of my life very well. He understands my business. He understands, you know, what it takes and the trade-offs. So Jack, would you want my life? Absolutely not.

• 1:40:07Steven Bartlett?

  No hesitation there.

• 1:40:08Speaker 04

  There's, there's no world where like I could even imagine being in your world. The amount of people that are bidding for your attention on a daily basis is mind blowing to me. The podcast is like such a huge part of your life, but the fact that I barely hear from you on like a weekly basis can probably put into a little bit of perspective how much you have on your plate. I just like couldn't imagine having the magnifying glass on me that much. The, the whole world is kind of looking at me and thinking like has an opinion on you. And you run lots of businesses, so you almost have to perform a little bit.

• 1:40:48Speaker 04

  And I think I see the worst of you and I actually take that huge compliment because you can be yourself around me. I remember the time when you had to schedule your lunch.

• 1:40:57Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, I still schedule my lunch. It doesn't happen, but I schedule it.

• 1:41:00Speaker 04

  You schedule it because you like, don't get time for your lunch. Like you went out of here, you went to the toilet and people are asking you questions in between going from here to the toilet. It's stuff that needs to be asked, but it's, that is your life. That's the kind of thing that you've um gone into. And I don't know if that kind of answered your question. I could probably go on for a long, long time, but.

• 1:41:22Steven Bartlett?

  You should do a whole episode. Why are you doing this to you? Do you know, I've got last question then. So I've got, there's two more questions. But the next question is, do you think that I, do you think I'm happy in my life?

• 1:41:33Speaker 04

  Uh, yes. I don't think you're content. I think you're happy, but I don't think you're content.

• 1:41:39Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So what do you mean by content? Like, what do you mean by content?

• 1:41:43Speaker 04

  You're always trying to chase the next thing.

• 1:41:48Speaker 04

  And I'm not sure why, like you could so easily just do this podcast and it would do so well for you. Like it does do so well for you. Uh, you could spend all your time doing this and I think you're super happy when you do do this. But then there's also other stuff that clearly makes you happy that you wanna do. But then you'll come to me and you're like, we should start this new YouTube channel. And I'm kind of like, yeah, great idea, but I don't know why you want that extra effort. To your core, you're a businessman, so you're constantly trying to build and scale. But on like a personal reflection of how much extra toll that takes on you. And also for Mel, I know your relationship with Mel, you don't see her that much.

• 1:42:28Speaker 04

  So I think that's quite an interesting one, but yes, I do think you're happy, but I don't think you're content.

• 1:42:34Steven Bartlett?

  And last question, what would you like from my life?

• 1:42:37Speaker 04

  What would I like from your life?

• 1:42:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So you said you wouldn't want my, you wouldn't want my life because, and you talked about the downsides. Yeah, what elements of my life would you like?

• 1:42:46Speaker 04

  Hmm. That's actually quite interesting because I was, I think I was talking to Gem and Cosy about this last night. Your life is so engineered to be super efficient.

• 1:42:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Speaker 04

  So you have someone books your cars for you, someone books your flights for you. You, you basically, as far as I'm aware, I don't think you do much kind of normal admin that I would do.

• 1:43:06Steven Bartlett?

  I don't even pick what I eat.

• 1:43:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:08Steven Bartlett?

  I like, I get the surprises. I walk out here and it's there and I go, okay, well, I'm having broccoli today.

• 1:43:13Speaker 04

  And I think so much of like the joys of what comes from life is the little messiness of life.

• 1:43:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:19Speaker 04

  And I actually think Morgan kind of touched on this at the start, that simple kind of family that just, they're not like super ambitious, but they're super happy. Now that messiness of life is kind of, there's so much like beauty in that. I know you asked me what you would want from your life, but I think on the surface, I probably would like that stuff. But I understand and appreciate the beauty of doing those.

• 1:43:39Steven Bartlett?

  I asked the question around, um, um, do you think I'm happy? Because even though you heard all of that stuff and you go fuck me, this guy, like he, he doesn't have much time and he's, he's always working. And like, we took a toilet break, which the audience probably won't know, but yeah, as I walked out of there, two different team members came up to two dishes. They said, someone wants to come on the podcast tonight. I've got this huge meeting in New York City tonight with this major investor for four hours. Then they asked me in the hallway, they said, do you want this major guest to come on the show tonight? Or to cancel this huge meeting with this?

• 1:44:10Speaker 04

  And you have to make the decision in four seconds.

• 1:44:12Steven Bartlett?

  Four seconds.

• 1:44:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:44:12Steven Bartlett?

  So you, you saw me sit down and go tell the team, yes. Which was me making that executive decision and I was on my phone for two and a half seconds trying to make the decision. But it also means that date night is if impacted with my girlfriend who's, so like, that, that was a little representation of my life. And I, I am, I asked Jack if he thinks I'm happy because my opinion.

• 1:44:34Steven Bartlett?

  I could be living in a delusion is that I am happy. And I, the way that I would hazard a guess that I'm happy is I'm not unhappy and I don't have unhappiness.

• 1:44:48Morgan Housel?

  My guess too is that you, if you said, I'm gonna quit the podcast, quit all this, close the business down, you would be beside yourself with anxiety and depression. And so it's less about like, is doing this, does doing this make you happy? I think the better answer is not doing this would make you miserable.

• 1:45:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:07Morgan Housel?

  But that's who you are. And that's how, and I, again, I'm so grateful that people like you exist because I get to benefit from the sacrifices that you made.

• 1:45:15Steven Bartlett?

  It's not a sacrifice to me.

• 1:45:17Morgan Housel?

  Yes, I, I, I get that. But what, from my perspective would be a sacrifice I get to benefit from. Cause you make great content that I listen to and whatnot. And so I like living in a world where most people wake up in the morning and say, this isn't enough. And I, I think I do that too. I wanna write more books, better books. And, but if you don't have some capacity to say, look, I have ambitions, I have goals that I wanna achieve. I wanna work hard to achieve those. I wanna sacrifice to achieve those. But I'm never gonna have a good life unless I can take a step back and be like, man, like, look what I have right now, even if it's not that much. There's a very good book written by a gerontologist named Carl Pilmer. He wrote a book called 30 Lessons for Living, where he interviewed a bunch of elderly Americans. They were like 90 to 100 years old. And he just said,

• 1:46:02Morgan Housel?

  tell me the secret to a good life. You've experienced a lot of life, tell me what you know. And he has a section where he says, of the thousand people who he interviewed, not a single person, looking back at their life, said, I wish I made more money. Not a single person said, I wish I would picked a career that paid more money. Not one, but almost every single one of them, looking back at their life, said, I wish I was nicer to people. I wish I was more helpful to my friends. I wish I spent more time with my family. That was universal. So if you wanna talk about like regrets, what are we most likely, what are you and I most likely to regret when we're 90? It's not making more money. It's spending time with the people around us that we love and appreciate.

• 1:46:40Steven Bartlett?

  I find myself switching between states. And sometimes it's because of a thought, but I find myself switching between these states of being like, in a moment, in a, in a mode of gratitude. So last night I did the Jimmy Fallon show here in New York. My team were there. It was this really wonderful moment. I'm, you know, I woke up this morning feeling incredibly grateful. Last night I was like listening to some of my favorite music. I felt incredibly grateful and really happy. And then I know. That I'm going to switch into the lack of contentment that Jack's referring to.

• 1:47:07Morgan Housel?

  Happiness is always a five minute emotion.

• 1:47:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And, and like today, I'm, I'm back to business and it's like bill, bill, bill, bill, bill. And then I have this moment last night where I was, I was making the Instagram posters to announce that I'd been on Jimmy Fallon. And I noticed my girlfriend next to me in bed had fallen asleep. And this thought comes through my head all the time now, probably from doing this podcast, which is exactly what you said, which is, I am going to regret not spooning her and cuddling her while I have the chance, especially I think as Charlie Kirk had just been shot and I'd seen that.

• 1:47:34Morgan Housel?

  Not how fragile he is.

• 1:47:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Maybe that's why it was front of mind for me. And I remember putting the phone down and thinking, the thing I'm going to regret is not cuddling her. And so I put the phone down and cuddled, cuddled her. And I say, I, I, I'm, I'm strange, I think, because I, I, I flock between these states. And sometimes on an hourly basis, sometimes on a daily basis, sometimes on like a minute by minute basis.

• 1:47:57Morgan Housel?

  The fact that you're just merely aware of those states and the, the false story that those states can tell you puts you way ahead of most people. I think, I think to some extent that there, there's a, there's an interesting book called 10% happier and it's about meditation. And the point, the title came from, everyone's like, oh, can meditation change your life? And his point was like, it can make you 10% happier. But like, that's pretty cool. And I, I think that's true for money as well of like, can it completely change your life? And turn you into a much better person and way happier. Like, I kind of feel like, no, but like it, it can make you 10, maybe 20% happier in life. I think that's, that's probably right. But just being aware of its limitations, like is a huge relief, I think, I think.

• 1:48:38Morgan Housel?

  Be like, no, if you want a happier life, you're going to have to find it through your purpose and your friends and your family and your health. And your other philosophies of life that have nothing to do with money. It can help. It can make you 10, 20, maybe 30% happier. But understanding its limitations and what it's not going to do for you is pretty important.

• 1:48:57Steven Bartlett?

  That lack of contentment, I think I sometimes feel guilty about because I sit with so many people, especially like people that are monks and such, and they tell you that wanting will make you despair and make you unsatisfied. But I find myself as being one of those people that you described, that constantly wants to chase and pursue and pursue. And I think that I do have, I like, am I supposed to feel guilty about that? Is that something like wrong with me?

• 1:49:17Morgan Housel?

  No. I mean, I think that's how humans have evolved is to, because at the core of it is competition. Like where you have that, I think, drive, everyone has that drive, is not necessarily because you want to build another business or build a, grow your podcast. It's competition with others who might be doing that better than you, or who might take your place if you were to step back. That gives you the anxiety. I think that's what everything is, is its core. And that's why I like asking the question, if nobody was watching, what would you want to do? If nobody was watching your podcast, would you still want to do these interviews? If nobody could see your house, would you still, would you buy a house that was as big as the one you did?

• 1:50:01Morgan Housel?

  Sometimes the answer is yes. The answer might be yes to both of those questions. But it's an important question to ask of, are you doing this because it actually fulfills you? Or because you are competing with other people and you think you're gaining their attention by doing these things?

• 1:50:13Steven Bartlett?

  I think everyone who is answering honestly would say for most of the decisions in their life, especially the big ones, the answer is both.

• 1:50:21Morgan Housel?

  Yes.

• 1:50:22Steven Bartlett?

  So like choosing Harvard versus the other university, which might have been better, but it's Harvard. Or buying the house where you bought it, or that watch that you bought, or the Apple Watch instead of the whatever.

• 1:50:32Morgan Housel?

  And signaling is important. You can't just discount it because if you want, you know, to attract the right, the right friends, the right spouse, the right employers, there's a signaling aspect. A college degree is signaling. It's not the education you obtained. It's, you're showing, you're giving a signal to an employer that for four years I showed up and did the material and got the right answers. It's, it's signaling, like signaling can be very, very important. It's not to discount it. But There's a right and a wrong kind of signaling. There's a right kind of like, I'm, I'm doing this. I'm dressing in a way and displaying myself and cutting my hair in a way that's going to attract the right friends and the right mates, the right boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever it might be. There's also signaling of like, I'm going to aspire to buy this car that's a huge pain in the ass and I actually hate driving, but I think strangers are going to look at me

• 1:51:17Morgan Housel?

  and pay more attention to me. That's the wrong kind of signaling.

• 1:51:19Steven Bartlett?

  I think this is the thing that both sides misunderstanding the debate is that someone who is a workaholic, believe it or not, can be happy.

• 1:51:27Morgan Housel?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:51:27Steven Bartlett?

  And someone who does no work or works one day a week can be happy.

• 1:51:32Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:32Steven Bartlett?

  And this is like a really difficult concept for either side to understand about the other side. And that's why as well, I asked the question about Jack, like, do you think I'm happy? Because Jack would know that if I'm like, if I walk out of here and he sees me as this depressed person who never smiles, never laughs and has no joy in my life, doesn't have, you know, then I would very much fit the stereotype of like the tortured workaholic or whatever. But it's, uh, yeah, it's surprising. It's surprising.

• 1:51:57Morgan Housel?

  I think we all just want contentment. So like we, I think we get into a lot of trouble when we chase happiness, when what we're actually going for is contentment. We actually just want to get to an area where we're like, I'm good. I'm all set.

• 1:52:07Steven Bartlett?

  What's the most important thing or the most interesting thing in your book that you can remember that we didn't talk about that maybe we should have talked about?

• 1:52:16Morgan Housel?

  I think the relationship between money and kids is, is an, is an interesting one where every parent wants to use their hard work, what money they might have. It doesn't have to be a ton. You don't have to be rich, but they want to use their hard work in order to give their kids a better life. When a lot of times what the kid needs to do is learn on their own and they're going to learn vicariously the values that you have about money. They're going to learn just by watching. You don't need to sit your kids down and say, let me teach you how to budget. Let me teach you how to save. Let me teach you how to invest. They're going to figure, they're going to watch you and figure it out. And so you have to just lead by example with those kids. You cannot lecture values into them. They're just going to watch how you spend, what you value, how you save, how you judge other people and talk about other people. And they're going to form a philosophy of money based off of that.

• 1:53:02Steven Bartlett?

  I often think about money in terms of like attachment styles, you know, in like dating psychology and romance, they talk about anxious, avoidant, and then the, what's the middle person called? They're like a, basically neutral. But I think I had an avoidant money attachment style. I think money was the, like, the third parent in my household. And I learned that money causes problems, that it doesn't come around as much as we would like, that it's really why we argue in the household, that it's the reason why I am embarrassed when we pull up in that terrible car, and I try and get my, I hope the traffic lights change in a certain way so that I can be dropped off further away from the school so

• 1:53:45Steven Bartlett?

  no one sees me. Like, my relationship with money was established at such a young age, and it was, it's almost like I had like a unhealthy, like, they say relationship, yeah, like an attachment style to it. And I just wonder, like, is that a useful frame to think through? That you have this, yeah, like this romantic-esque relationship with this thing, and in order to change that, you need to unlearn the lessons?

• 1:54:14Morgan Housel?

  I think a lot of like the lessons that we learn about money when we're younger are because, like I said earlier, is because you, when you're young, particularly you're a teenager, you're in your early twenties, most people in that situation have very little other skills to offer the world.

• 1:54:29Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:29Morgan Housel?

  Humor, intelligence, some, some people more than others, but in that situation, you're always going to gravitate towards, if only I had a nicer car when I was being dropped off at school, then they would pay attention to me. But the truth is, if you are the funniest kid in class, it doesn't matter if you're dropped off in a dull junkie car, people still respect you because they're like, man, he's a star of the football team. Like, it's hilarious. It doesn't matter what kind of car he's driving. You gain your attention and your respect from something else. But if you're not the star football player, if you're not funny, if you have nothing else to offer, then you seek your admiration through, oh, he's dropped off in an Escalade, he's cool. That's where you want your attention to come from.

• 1:55:02Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything else we should have talked about that we haven't talked about, Morgan? For people that are trying to get a grip of their life, be happy, make better money choices.

• 1:55:12Morgan Housel?

  To me, like, the common denominator between all three of those books that you're holding is the idea that we talked about quite a bit on all the shows we've done together, which is that there is no formula for it. And that's very disheartening for a lot of people to hear. There's no formula for, here's what I want you to go out and do, which is a lot of what people want out of content, whether it's a book or a podcast, like, just tell me what to do. And the answer is, like, I can't, because I don't know you, and you don't know me. We're all different. But I think that's actually the biggest, like, relief. That's actually the best news, that you don't have to follow somebody else's playbook. You can do it your own way. And it's easier to do it your own way when you come to terms with the fact that nobody is paying as much attention to you as you think they are. You can do it your own way,

• 1:55:54Morgan Housel?

  free of judgment and other people, you know, making fun of you or judging how you're living life, because they're too busy worrying about themselves. You have to figure out what works for you and do it, and that's as close as we can get as a formula for living a better life.

• 1:56:09Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny, because the book is called The Art of Spending Money, but much of the through line throughout the book is really about happiness. And I guess that's really what money is for many people.

• 1:56:18Morgan Housel?

  A tool.

• 1:56:19Steven Bartlett?

  A tool.

• 1:56:19Morgan Housel?

  To become happier.

• 1:56:19Steven Bartlett?

  Tool to become happy. I remember on an interview with Mo Gorda, he wrote a book about happiness. He said to me a line that's always stayed with me. He said, happiness is when your expectations of how your life is supposed to be going are met.

• 1:56:31Morgan Housel?

  Yes.

• 1:56:32Steven Bartlett?

  And so with through that lens, I look at everything. I look at, like, the food that you're given in a restaurant, and if you expected it to be this and it doesn't come like that, there's unhappiness, even if it's like a five-star, A5 wagyu steak or whatever. And then your relationships, all of my arguments I've ever had with my girlfriend all stem back to unmet expectations.

• 1:56:49Morgan Housel?

  Expectations. I was saying, if you ride the Amtrak train from, like, New York to Washington DC, on every train, they have what's called the quiet car. And in the quiet car, you're not supposed to talk at anything above a whisper. No phone calls, no talk with your friends. It's the quiet car. And people go there for peace and quiet and serenity. And the irony is that people are so uptight in there, because if they hear one peep out of everyone, they're like, would you shut up? We're in the quiet car. They're so frustrated about it, because your expectation is, I'm gonna get quiet. And if it's anything other than quiet, you lose your mind. And it's like, at that point, that's when your high expectations are actually working against you.

• 1:57:24Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:57:24Morgan Housel?

  People are actually calmer in the normal car where there's chaos all around them, because that's what they expect.

• 1:57:29Steven Bartlett?

  So that's the unhappiness car.

• 1:57:30Morgan Housel?

  Right. You're like, your expectations are a debt that has to be repaid.

• 1:57:36Steven Bartlett?

  That gives us a controllable element to our happiness, doesn't it?

• 1:57:38Morgan Housel?

  It's your expectations, because your expectations are more in your control than things like what the economy or the stock market is going to do next. Like, I have no, nobody has any control of what the stock market is going to do next. But you have, you do have more control over your expectations of how much money do you expect to make next week? What do you expect out of the stock market? What do you expect out of your career? What do you expect out of your spouse? Like, that is more in your control than influencing other people's behaviour.

• 1:58:04Steven Bartlett?

  And this is probably why all these eastern traditions talk about gratitude, because gratitude is the very realisation that expectations I once had are currently being met.

• 1:58:11Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:11Steven Bartlett?

  And it just, even when you start to think about dreams you once had, that you are now living out, for me, it makes me feel, yeah, that feeling of contentment, it makes me feel really, really good inside. So like, even yesterday, where I took a moment and I was on the Jimmy Fallon show, and it's like this crazy thing to me that I could never have imagined someone like me doing. And it took a minute to just like, think about how far beyond my expectations this stuff was.

• 1:58:33Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:34Steven Bartlett?

  If you feel overwhelmingly good about it.

• 1:58:36Morgan Housel?

  But the truth was, relative, if you just thought about yesterday.

• 1:58:40Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:41Morgan Housel?

  You expected to go on the Jimmy Fallon show. That made your expectations for the day. If you looked at your calendar for the day, it was, I need to go to Jimmy Fallon, I need to perform, I need to say the right things.

• 1:58:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:50Morgan Housel?

  But over the longer scope, that's off the charts of your expectations.

• 1:58:53Steven Bartlett?

  And that's the zooming out, is where we see.

• 1:58:55Morgan Housel?

  Right.

• 1:58:55Steven Bartlett?

  The gratitude, you know, fills us up.

• 1:58:57Morgan Housel?

  Right. And it's, it's very difficult to say this without sounding ridiculous, but you can even zoom out and be like, I'm so grateful to live in a world with antibiotics, like it sounds crazy, because we expect them. Whenever we take penicillin, we're like, yeah, like, it's just a thing that exists. But could you imagine living in a world without that, as 99% of humanity did before us? Like, it's, it's impossible to think of like, the most basic things that we take advantage of, but that's where gratitude, like, you have to zoom out to become more grateful of these things. And you're not going to be content until you can exercise that level of gratitude.

• 1:59:28Steven Bartlett?

  You said something earlier which dovetails into this, where you said that at different levels, people will aspire, you know, the billionaire wants two billion. And I was reading a study many years ago that said, roughly, all the way up the income wealth spectrum, people want like, three times more than they have.

• 1:59:41Morgan Housel?

  Two to three times is what seems like the amount that's going to keep you happy. So if you have $10,000, people are like, once I have 20, then I'll be good. If you have $20 million, people are like, ah, 40 seems like the right amount. It's always two or three times what you have.

• 1:59:54Steven Bartlett?

  And that's just the intentional creation of an expectation gap. It's like creating misery for yourself.

• 2:00:00Morgan Housel?

  Yes, it's this idea that like, if only I had a little bit more money, then these problems that I have, this anxiety, this unfilled hole that I have will finally be filled. And it's a, it's a lie we tell ourselves, of course.

• 2:00:11Steven Bartlett?

  And everyone listening right now has that. Everyone has a number in your head where you think if I got there.

• 2:00:17Morgan Housel?

  Then it'd be good. I, I have that. You have that. We all do. And if you and I have met that number, previous versions of that number, it's the same thing. We're like, okay, but double would be great. Double, double would be awesome. I met someone the other day whose income, annual income is almost exactly two X mine. We were being very open with each other. He's a good friend of mine. And the instant feeling I had, I didn't say this, but the instant feeling I had is like, okay, if I had that, everything would be great. And it's absurd. We do that all day. And I'm sure if my friend met someone whose income was two X of his, he would be like, oh, that's the level. That's the one.

• 2:00:52Steven Bartlett?

  Because your, your overheads go up, but then your competition comparison group also increases. So you're now poorer in a different class of comparison. Like, yeah, you're like, when you bought that new house you just bought, that must have moved you to a new neighborhood.

• 2:01:08Morgan Housel?

  And there's houses in the neighborhood nicer than ours. And my wife and I talk about them. It's absurd. It's absurd. Now, I, I think I'm, I think because I write about this stuff, I think I'm a little bit better at catching myself in those moments, but I won't pretend that I don't have those moments. They're almost unavoidable.

• 2:01:22Steven Bartlett?

  What has worked for you? Is there anything that has actually worked for you in terms of

• 2:01:28Steven Bartlett?

  detaching you from comparison and what people think? Is there anything at all that's worked?

• 2:01:31Morgan Housel?

  I like this term humble bubble. I want to live in a humble bubble. It has to be humble because I don't want to live in a bubble where I don't have empathy for other people. I want to take in the experience of others so I can try to understand the world that I live in. But I want to live in a bubble in the sense of like, I want my expectations not to leave my own house. Easier said than done, but when my expectations don't leave my own house, I'm like, I want good health for myself. I want happy kids. I want a good marriage. And those things don't leave my roof. Once my expectations leave my bubble, my, once, once, once they expand outside of my house, I'm like, oh, look at his house. It's like, I just wanted, I always think about that humble bubble of like,

• 2:02:13Morgan Housel?

  the only thing that's going to make me happy exists underneath my roof. And I know that. And as soon as my aspirations are for, are, are leave that, I know it's just going to spin out of control. I try to think about that a lot. And as I mentioned before, the idea of if nobody was watching, what would I care about? That's that's the most powerful exercise to me. If nobody could see anything that I was doing, how would I choose to live?

• 2:02:38Steven Bartlett?

  I've always wanted to counter this point with some thinking, which is, but if I put myself in a higher status position, I'm going to get more opportunities, which means more money, which is then going to better allow me to focus on utility. Not that that's how it ever plays out for anybody.

• 2:02:55Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:55Steven Bartlett?

  But the thinking is, well, actually, status does equal revenue.

• 2:02:58Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:58Steven Bartlett?

  In a lot of the world.

• 2:02:59Morgan Housel?

  And revenue can give you independence.

• 2:03:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:01Morgan Housel?

  The, the, I think that's right. I think to many extents, that's been my goal. How can I be successful in my career so that I can make enough money to not have to work in the career anymore? Like, it's not that stark, but it's kind of like that. The flaw in it is that I like writing. You like podcasting. And so if we get more successful, like I'm not, I'm not chasing success so that I can stop doing what I'm doing. I just want to do things that I enjoy.

• 2:03:27Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, as you know. Do you have major regrets in life? Then it says, they prove no real purpose. Do you still have regrets?

• 2:03:40Morgan Housel?

  Nothing huge. There are some regrets. I was thinking about this the other day. My wife and I, we have two kids and we're done having kids. And there's part of me that's like, what would have life been like if I had four kids? Three kids? If we'd have done that, like each, both of my kids have given me so much meaning and purpose. And I wonder what a life would have been like if I'd have said fed more. And I can't imagine having just one kid. I can't imagine just having zero kids. But there's an alternative life in which I had four or five kids. And, you know, life gets crazy at that point. And that's not a regret. But you realize like, once you've kind of closed that door on your life, you're like, man, what would have life been if I had done it, if I had done it differently?

• 2:04:23Morgan Housel?

  Because it's given me more purpose than anything that I ever could have imagined. And I could have had more. And maybe it would have been worse, but I wonder what that would have been. I think it's not until you've we've chosen to close that door, that chapter of our life, that we're like, man, what if we had, what if I had done it a little bit differently?

• 2:04:40Steven Bartlett?

  Do you wish you had frozen embryos?

• 2:04:43Morgan Housel?

  No.

• 2:04:44Steven Bartlett?

  Because that would have kept the door open theoretically.

• 2:04:46Morgan Housel?

  Not really, because I think there is a point of like, you want, you need youthful energy to be a parent. I couldn't imagine having a newborn at 50 or 60. I think you need the energy of a 30 year old or 25 or 30 year old to do that. And it's not a regret because I'm very satisfied with the family that I have now. But it's one of those things of like, you realize you're, there's an infinite number of paths your life can go down. And we could have had no kids, we could have had four kids. We chose this path, but it's one of just one, it's one of multiple paths that it could have gone down.

• 2:05:21Steven Bartlett?

  Morgan, thank you. Thank you for doing what you do. You're my favorite author of all time. And I think I've told you this before, but it's the way that you write. I find it so unbelievably engaging. The message within your book is a profound one. All of your books are profound ones, but it's actually the way that you tell the stories. And if anybody's listened to you speak today, they'll understand exactly what I mean. Your books are a mirror of that. The Psychology of Money, as I told you before, is the book that changed my financial life, the one book my brother, who's a very smart person, told me to read. And there's no wonder that it's one of the bestselling books of all time. I think it might be the bestselling book of all time in its category. And your new book, The Art of Spending, continues on the same trend, incredibly accessible, incredibly engaging, incredibly human, but within there, there's a profound lesson

• 2:06:04Steven Bartlett?

  that stands the chance of changing our lives for the better. So I highly recommend everybody goes and gets this book, The Art of Spending Money, which comes out tomorrow.

• 2:06:13Morgan Housel?

  October 7.

• 2:06:14Steven Bartlett?

  October 7. So I'm going to link it below for anybody that wants to grab a copy of this book. And if you're someone that does want a happier life, it is a book about spending, but it's also more broadly a book about happiness and regret. And it tells stories that allow you to make better decisions in your life. And it's through stories, not through frameworks alone or data, that I think we're most influenced. And you can probably relate to this, if you're listening to this, you probably have heard stats before. You probably know you should save. But it's sometimes hearing real stories from real people. That stick into your amygdala and create that behavioural change. And that's exactly how Morgan writes. He writes through the context of great stories that stand a chance of changing your life. So it's a wonderful, wonderful book to read and I highly recommend you do. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much, Morgan. I hope to see you again sometime soon. Likewise.