#14 Morgan Housel: Reading, Writing, and Lifelong Learning

Financial writer Morgan Housel and I discuss reading, writing, filtering information, admitting error, important qualities to have in friends and so much more. Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:08Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host Shane Parrish, the curator behind Farnham Street, which is an online intellectual hub of interestingness. We cover topics like human misjudgment, decision-making, strategy, and philosophy. The Knowledge Project allows me to interview amazing people from around the world to deconstruct why they're good at what they do. It's more conversation than prescription. On this episode, I'm proud to have Morgan Housel. Morgan's a columnist at The Motley Fool and a former columnist of The Wall Street Journal. His work has also been published in Time, USA Today, World Affairs, and Business Insider. I mean, you name it, he's been there. Simply put, he's one of the shining lights of the business press. More than that, though,

• 0:50Shane Parrish?

  he's one of the few people that I read all the time. And as I've gotten to know him over the years, I can also tell you, he's an exceptional person. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

• 1:09Shane Parrish?

  Morgan, thanks for coming on the show. You're one of the very few financial people, very few writers in general, that I read all the time.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Shane, I have a hard time believing that. Well, first, thank you, but you read so much, I have a hard time believing that.

• 1:22Shane Parrish?

  I just don't read the same person all the time.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Well, thanks. I'm happy to be here.

• 1:27Shane Parrish?

  Awesome. So I've had a question I've always wanted to ask you, which is like, what was your first job? And how did you get into the space that you're in now? And maybe you can tell people a little bit about what you do.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Well, my first job wasn't very exciting, but I can, I can move on from that. My first job, I was a host at Denny's. And I worked there for a couple of weeks and I wasn't very excited about it. And then I moved on to, I worked as a valet at a hotel in Lake Tahoe. It was, it was a nice fancy hotel in Lake Tahoe. Valeting, I always thought, even before I did it, would be the coolest job. And it was. It was such a cool job. So I started that in Tahoe. And then I moved to Los Angeles, where I went to college and I kept doing that. So I was a valet for many years.

• 2:10Shane Parrish?

  Is it true that people go on joyrides when they're...

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes, it's true. It's totally true. I mean, nothing, nothing too, nothing too bad. But if you come in, in a nice car, and you give it to a 20-year-old, you know what's gonna happen.

• 2:27Shane Parrish?

  You know what the probabilities are, right?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Right, right. But it was a cool job. I really loved doing that. But how I got interested in finance, I always knew that I wanted to go into finance. And when I look back, you know, when I was a teenager and I was excited about finance, I don't think I knew why. I think it was probably, finance is attractive to a lot of, especially young men in their teenage years because it has the impression of money and power and prestige. And I think when I look back, that's what attracted me to it. And what's funny is that my current job now doesn't have a lot of that. Because I didn't really go into finance, I just sort of write about it. But when I was, so all throughout college, my plan A, B, and C was investment banking. That's what I wanted to do. That was, I didn't have any, that was what I was gonna do.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  I was gonna be an investment banker. And I got an investment banking internship in my junior year. And it was clear from day one, from the first hour of the first day, that it was not gonna be for me. Investment banking has just an incredibly intense, competitive, almost combative culture. That is the opposite of my personality.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  They had this saying that they told us on the first day, and it was kind of a joke, but it wasn't. And that was the culture in investment banking was, if you don't come in on Saturday, don't bother coming back on Sunday.

• 3:48Shane Parrish?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  And it was just a really intense culture that wasn't, it just didn't fit my personality. So it works for some people. If you're just ultra-type A, and you just need the most intense work environment, that's good for some people. It wasn't good for me. So then, so after I ended that, after a couple of months, it was an internship, I got a job in private equity. And I really enjoyed private equity, because it's kind of, you know, you're kind of in the trenches, digging deep into finance, and researching companies, and buying entire companies. And then you own the company outright, so you have a hand in its operations. I really enjoyed private equity. But this was the summer of 2007, and credit markets started blowing up all over the world. And when you are in a business like private equity,

• 4:32Speaker 01

  which requires you to borrow lots of money to buy companies, and credit markets are blowing up, things got pretty tight. And they came to me, and it was the funniest, it was one of the funniest lines of my career. They came to me and they said, "You're not fired, but you can't work here anymore." And I said, okay, that's, that's fair enough. So I'm pretty sure it's called being laid off. But okay, fair enough. So I needed to do, so I needed to find something else to do. Uh, I had, I was one semester away from graduating college. I knew I wanted to go into finance, but I didn't know really what I wanted to do. And I had a friend who was a financial writer and he was writing for the Motley Fool at the time. And he said, hey, you should, you should come do this. You're interested in finance. You know, why don't you come do this? And I had never really written much of anything. I, I studied economics in college, which doesn't require a lot of writing.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  It's a lot of math and whatnot. So I, I had no writing background whatsoever. But I, I gave it a shot without thinking anything of it, thinking maybe I'll do this for six months until I find something else. And that was nine years ago and I just, I just stuck with it and I've been writing about finance ever since.

• 5:32Shane Parrish?

  And you, you seem to love it. I mean, it comes across in your writing that you have a passion for it. You developed one, I guess, even if you didn't have one to start.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Well, you know, when I started doing it, it, there was no, it wasn't like I'm passionate about this and I want to do it. It was, I'm going to try this and see how it goes. But instantly, once I started doing it, it was, it was clear that I, I really did enjoy doing it. I think writing is a great process for anybody in any field, because it really helps you solidify your thoughts. I think in any field, no matter what it is, a lot of people have ideas in their head that they just can't really put their finger on. They know it's there. They can kind of like feel the idea floating around, but they can't, they, they just don't really know what it is. And if you sit down and force yourself to write about that topic, it, things really start crystallizing and solidifying.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And I've really found that true for, there are a lot of topics that, you know, I think I have this idea about behavior or psychology or my, but I can't really figure it out. And once I sit down and force myself to write it, then it's like, okay, that's, that's what I meant to say. So I think writing, writing is a really good process for anyone in any field to go through.

• 6:38Shane Parrish?

  Do you think writing about finance and not being a practitioner in this sense of, I get, well, what are your personal investments? Do you do that still? Are you?

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I'm an active investor. Most of my, so how I invest is basically every month I dollar cost average into index funds. So that's my, that's the core of it. And then on top of that. Rarely, but it is a portion of my portfolio. When I come across an individual stock that is attractive to me for whatever reason, then I'll buy that too. So the core of my portfolio is index funds, but I still have some individual stocks on the side. So I guess some people call that index plus.

• 7:18Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that the writing about the finance gives you a bit of an outsider's perspective, which gives you an advantage?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  I think there are two sides of it. One is, without a doubt, there are parts of the investing field that I don't understand because I'm not a practitioner, that someone who is a financial advisor, or a mutual fund manager, or a hedge fund manager, could very rightly look at me and say, you don't understand X, Y, and Z. And they're right about that, because I'm sitting at the comfort of my desk from an outsider, sort of Monday morning quarterbacking. That's absolutely true. There is another side that I think that, this I think is true for every field too, that it is impossible to think objectively about a field that you get your paycheck from.

• 8:07Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  And I think that's really true for a lot of money, professional money managers, mutual fund managers, hedge fund managers, that no matter how hard they try, it's very difficult to look objectively at your field. And that's where I think if there is an advantage that journalists and financial writers have, it's the ability to think a little more objectively about both the upsides and the downsides of the financial world. So it's balancing that advantage with the inevitable downside that, you know, it's impossible to understand what it's like to manage money for other people until you are actually in the trenches doing it.

• 8:44Shane Parrish?

  So how do you define success for writing about finance? Like, what for you, what are the measures that you kind of gauge?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  I've always thought, like, there are three types of writing, especially financial writing. There is just providing information, which is, I guess, what Reuters and Bloomberg would do, just breaking news, just putting out the objective facts, end of story. And then, so that's one type. A second type is... Sharing opinions, which is a lot of, most of what's out there where you're, you're, you know, there's some facts involved, but it's very clear that this is my opinion. And some people might disagree with this, but this is my opinion. That's the second type. The third type of writing is I think when you are challenging the reader to think differently themselves. Where you are trying, you're not necessarily giving your opinion.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  And you're not necessarily just giving facts, but you're just giving them a different framework to think about a topic. And that's, that's always what I've struck, what I've tried to do, whether successfully or not, that's what I've tried to do is rather than saying, this is how I think about something. Or rather than saying, here are some facts for you to think about. It's putting out a framework to say, here's a different way to think about this, but you need, you need to go think about this yourself. But here's a different way to think about it. So that's, that's always the style of writing that I shoot for. And I guess that would be my measure of success. And it's, I think it's extremely difficult to measure or quantify this, but.

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• 11:12Speaker 01

  At the end of the article, does the reader think about their own life, their own finances, their own investments differently than they did at the beginning of the article? One other thing that I think is that I try to do is I've always had this idea that if an article is relevant today but not relevant tomorrow, then it's not relevant at all. So if, so whenever I write an article, the litmus test I try to ask is if somebody reads this article one year from now, will it still be relevant? And for a lot of articles, I think the answer is no, because it's heavily news-based. It's what does the market do today? What did the market do this week? You know, what did GDP do this quarter? And that's valuable, but I've always thought that the most valuable content comes from things that are more or less timeless.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  So that's, that's another measure that I try to hold myself against.

• 12:00Shane Parrish?

  Okay, I'll have so many questions to dive into this just a little bit. Like, at the end, how do you distinguish? Like, how do you get the feedback? The reader has a different framework for thinking now. Like, how do you know that somebody has thought about it? Is it like, it's not something as simple as the number of shares? Is it the number of people who email you afterwards and say something? Or is it just a gut feeling that you get or comment-based or?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  First thing I say is there's no good answer for that because it's extremely difficult. I do, of course, I get feedback from readers through emails and comments, but you have to be careful with that because this is true for any like product reviews. You get huge skews between people who really like the article or people who really hate the article, not a lot in between. I think feedback is only relevant if like a reader is forced to give it. So you get the biggest, the widest swath of opinions. But most feedback is going to be from the tiny skews on either end. People saying, "I love this article, it's great," or "you're an idiot, you have no idea what you're talking about." So the emails, the comments you get from readers can be valuable, but I think you have to take all of them inevitably with some grain of salt.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  And then we have lots of, of meetings, conferences by the Motley Fool. So I meet a lot of our members and our readers face-to-face. And what's good too, I like about it is that I really enjoy when people are brutally honest and people come up to you and say, Hey, I really disagreed with this last article. I really didn't like when you said this. I really didn't like when, you know, I think you're missing this point. I really like that because I think there's a sense, in person especially. People will say anything online, but in person, there's a tendency for people to bite their tongues and say, you know, just be polite and be civil about it. It's also true that in the comment section on articles, I think every writer blogger knows this, tends to just descend into...

• 13:53Speaker 01

  It just, it kinda, it's a magnet for the lowest common denominator. But once in a while, you get some comments from people who are critical, but you read it and you're like, hey, you know, this is actually, I really appreciate this person pointing that out. They did it in a very civil and rational way, and they pointed out how I was wrong, but you know what? I need to step back and say, you're right about this. So, I mean, to answer your question, it's extremely difficult to really know what you're doing as a writer. Are you, are you changing people's opinions? Because even when you get feedback, you never know if it's, if it's the full picture. And, you know, you can have an article that has tens of thousands of readers, and you might get 20 emails from that. So it's such a small sample size that you really don't know what you're getting.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  That, to me, I think has, to be honest, has bothered me as a writer, that you never really know exactly what you're doing. Whereas I think if you are, say, a doctor or an engineer, it's pretty easy to measure the impact of your work. And that, as a writer, has always, and I think this is true for every writer, that I think you're never gonna fully know what you've done, either for better or worse.

• 15:01Shane Parrish?

  So do you read all the comments on every article that you write? Or do you give it like five days and then kinda go through them and then forget about it?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  I give, I give every comment a quick triage. There's some times where I can read the first sentence and say, okay, I'm done here.

• 15:17Shane Parrish?

  So the second category that you had mentioned was kind of like sharing opinions. And you know what came to mind for me there is how are we in a world of financial opinions and so much noise to distinguish between the people who know what they're talking about at a deep fluent level and the people who just pretend to know what they're talking about?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  I think the hardest thing with that is that everybody, to some extent, suffers from confirmation bias. What do you believe today? And then you're going to go out and try to find someone who shares that view. And that is especially potent in the in the field of of opinion, whether it's political opinion or financial opinion. If you're bullish on the stock market, you can go out and find a qualified, credentialed, rational commentator who agrees with you. And in your mind, that is going to be the person who whose opinion you should listen to. And I think this is true for a lot of psychological biases, that it's really difficult to understand that you yourself suffer from them. So everybody knows what confirmation bias is, and they can tell you what it is.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  But I think most people would say, oh, well, that's something that other people suffer from, but I don't.

• 16:31Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  That's a really natural tendency, but I think everybody does. So everybody's opinion, or I should say, everyone's definition of whose opinion should you listen to is probably going to be, well, the person who who I agree with. I think what I've I try to do, but it's incredibly difficult, is to find, for any topic, whether it's politics or investing or whatnot, find someone who you disagree with, but at the same time, you can say, okay, this person really sounds rational. I disagree with their views, but I don't think this person is crazy. Once you find someone like that, I think you should cling to them with everything you have, because those are really going to be the people that can help change your views or really challenge your current views.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  And there are people like that that I read about a lot about in investing, whose opinions I don't agree with, but I can at least really respect them as an analyst, as a commentator. And when I respect them, I can say, okay, I don't agree with this, but I'm still going to read it. And I'm really going to try to measure it against my views to see where there might be holes in my views that I can, you know, to see if there's something that I'm missing that I can plug in your views in with mine to make sure that I'm getting the fullest picture. But I tell you, Shane, that is, it's a very difficult thing to do, no matter what anyone says or how hard they try. It's incredibly difficult to take someone who you disagree with seriously.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  But I think you will see that trait among a lot of the best investors and the smartest thinkers is that they take people who disagree with them more seriously than people who do agree with them.

• 18:06Shane Parrish?

  Who is that person for you?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  One is John Hussman. If you're, if you're an investor, if you're an investor, you probably know who he is. He has been bearish on the stock market. So actually, he's a mutual fund manager and he's been bearish on the stock market since 2009. And not only bearish, but betting against the market since 2009. And you can imagine what that has done to the performance of his fund.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  But at the, at the same time, he is an incredibly smart guy who has some great insights about market history and market volatility and valuations, different ways to value the market. He's, you know, there are some bears, people who are bearish on the market, who you just read and you're going to say, well, you're, you're crazy. Or you're just mixing your politics in with this, or you're just ranting, you're, you're, you're the end of the world conspiracy theorist. But there are some people like John Hussman, who is bearish, but at the same time, it's like, you know, this guy might be on to something and maybe he's seven years early, which is indistinguishable from being wrong, I think. But, but still, when I read his stuff, it's like, you know, he's, he might be, you know, he may be on to something here. He has some, some good data and some good thoughts that challenge how I view the market.

• 19:17Shane Parrish?

  Do you remember reading something by one of these people who you read, but you don't necessarily agree with, but you have some sort of deep respect for, that you changed your mind on an opinion you had and how that felt?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  You know what, something that I really liked, there was, there's an economist named David Rosenberg. He's, he's, he's pretty famous. He's, he's on TV a lot and he's, he's a really smart guy. And he was very bearish on the economy and I believe the stock market, 2009, 2010 until I think 2011, 2012. And I really disagreed with him back then. But then he came around, I don't know the exact date, I want to say it was probably 2013, where he just kind of flipped the switch and more or less said, you know, I was wrong and now I'm bullish.

• 20:03Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of people, there's a tendency to look at that and say, flip-flopper, changed your mind, you're blowing with the wind. But I so respect people who can do that. Who can look objectively and say, you know what? I was probably wrong about this and I'm going to change my opinion.

• 20:20Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Change your mind when the facts change. There is so little of that among economists and investors and pundits that when I see it, it's really refreshing. So that's someone who, you know, I have so much respect for him now and I'm willing to take his opinions more seriously now because I saw his ability to be intellectually flexible. Which is a trait that is incredibly rare, but extremely powerful and important among people who are analyzing the stock market and the economy.

• 20:49Shane Parrish?

  It's hard enough to do that in the privacy of like your own head alone, you know, coming out and sharing with the world that you were wrong. And it must be orders of magnitude harder to do that than just admitting to yourself, which is already, you know, a degree of difficulty that most of us would rather avoid.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I can't think of anyone who I can think of, but I'm sure there are analysts and economists who cling to positions that they know are wrong. They know in their head are wrong. But because of their career liability, their professional reputation, they don't want to change their mind out of fear of looking like a flip-flopper or out of fear of admitting that they were wrong before. So they cling to ideas that they know are probably not true.

• 21:34Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, there must be so much pressure and there's so much money involved on some of these ratings and recommendations that I can't imagine a system that is non-corrupt and somehow allows people to actually speak their mind and freely have opinions.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Sure, and if you're an analyst and you have a good job and a good salary and a mortgage and some kids in school and you fear that changing your opinion is going to threaten your job, threaten your career. Then no matter how intellectually honest you want to be, you're probably going to make a decision that backs up your personal conflicts. And I don't think you can, I think what's difficult is I don't know how much you can blame people for doing that. You know, it's you, we all want our analysts and our pundits and our commentators to be as intellectually honest as possible. But there is, I think it's just a very real, practical reality

• 22:32Speaker 01

  that the intersection between intellectual honesty and career stability conflict

• 22:38Shane Parrish?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  for a lot of people. And so I think when I hear stories about people in these situations, I really feel for them. It's, it's, it's one thing to point at them and saying, well, you're being intellectually dishonest and you shouldn't, and you shouldn't do that, which is true. That's, that's the right thing to say. But I do have sympathy for people who really struggle with the balance between professional security and intellectual honesty.

• 23:02Shane Parrish?

  So speaking of learning from others, who's the best teacher you've ever had and why?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  This is probably a cliche answer, but I think Charlie Munger has done a better job than anyone alive at taking really complicated topics and explaining them in a way that is simple and entertaining. I think a few people have done it as well as he have, as he has. And I think that is the biggest skill, the biggest benefit that you can do as a teacher is taking something complicated and explaining it in plain terms. And that is such a rare trait, particularly among academics who are, these are our teachers, literally our teachers. And I think there's such a tendency in academia to complicate

• 23:50Speaker 01

  and use bigger words than you need to in an attempt to come off as knowledgeable.

• 23:56Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  But, but in practical reality, you are not teaching as effectively as you can than if you just explain things in simple terms, simple examples. And, and people like, like Munger and Buffett have done that so incredibly well. I think someone else who has done that incredibly well in the world of finance is Jason Zweig in the Wall Street Journal, who has, better than I think any financial journalist in history, taken the complexities.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  And the volatility of financial markets and explain them in a way that anyone can understand. So he was incredibly helpful and influential to me early on when I was learning about finance. Because I just felt like everything I read, it was simple and easy, but at the end of it, it was, there were so many of his columns and books that I read, that at the end of it, it just fundamentally changed how I thought about the topic. But it didn't require me to really rack my brain about what is he saying here? What is, you know, I don't understand these words. It was presented so cleanly and simply that it's just easy to pick up instantly. So anytime someone can take a complicated topic and explain it simply, I'm going to be a fan of that person and try to learn as much from that person as I can.

• 25:08Shane Parrish?

  Well, that's what you're trying to do with your writing, right? So how do you, how do you hone your ability to do that?

• 25:13Speaker 01

  This, I think, is cliche too. Everyone says it, but the best writing is a simple writing. And there is so much tendency, especially among new, young writers, to use the biggest words and the longest sentences that you possibly can. But what's strange about it is that everyone knows the best writers over time, whether it was Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway, use small words in small sentences, short phrases, quick, you know, seven-word sentences with simple words that a 10-year-old can understand. That's what makes the best writing. But it's, it's so, I think it's so hard to wrap your head around that concept as a writer. And it's so easy to pretend and to convince yourself that you're going

• 25:56Speaker 01

  to gain more credibility by trying to sound smart. And, you know, if you look around at the best financial writers today, Josh Brown, Barry Ritholtz, Michael Badnik, these are people too, who use short sentences, small words, and just try to make it easy to understand. And I think so much, there are so many times when I read a white paper by a college professor, and you can tell by, by reading the abstract, you're like, there's some, there's some cool data in this. There's some, there's a big point here. But you start reading the paper and you just have to stop and say, what am I, what is, what am I reading here? I don't... I have to go back and read this paragraph four times to try to figure out what you're trying to say. And I just find that so unfortunate. And the people who can add the most value to

• 26:41Speaker 01

  not only journalism, but just the most value to learning in general, are the people who can kind of decipher the complicated research and explain it to anyone. And the litmus test that I always try to think about is, would my mom understand this? And my mom, my mom's a smart lady, but she has no interest in finance whatsoever. So I always ask myself, after I write a paragraph, would my mom get that? And the answer a lot of times is no. And then you kind of try to go back and simplify it. But not simplified in the way that you're taking away any of the essence of what you're trying to say. Just taking something complicated and explaining it in plain terms.

• 27:16Shane Parrish?

  So switching gears a little bit, what does your typical day look like? Like, what percentage of your time are you reading? Do you schedule time for digesting and kind of chewing on what you're reading? Or is it all moving from one task to the next?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  So I think most writers, I think there's even academic research on this. Most writers do most of their work and their best work, their best writing, early in the day, early in the morning. And a lot of famous writers would wake up and head straight to the typewriter, straight to their computer, and just start cranking out two hours of writing. I've never been like that. And so when I wake up, I read newspapers for maybe two hours. And then I read some articles online. I'm always on Twitter, read research reports, and anything I can get. So I read from this, the time I get up till about four in the afternoon. And then most of my writing is done between about four and 7:00 PM. So that's kind of

• 28:14Speaker 01

  like my peak. That's when I do my writing. And I don't really know why, but that's always, maybe it takes me till four in the afternoon before my brain's awake and I can actually sit down and do some writing. But, and then the other thing is, I walk a lot. I go for probably at least two, sometimes three walks during the day. And that's kind of my digestion time of what did I read this, what have I read lately? And how can I tie it together? And always what's going through my head as a writer is, what am I going to write about next? That's always like the struggle and the stress of someone who writes full time for a living is, what am I going to write about next? What's my next topic? So my digestion, when I go for a walk, is just thinking about, what have I read lately? And how can I turn that into a topic for my next article?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  And it's tough. I think there's a paradox in that most fields, the more you do it, the better you get and the easier it gets. I think writing, especially writing about a single topic like investing, it's the other way around in that. So I've written 3,600 articles now, so the low hanging fruit is long gone. And it's this weird thing that like, the more you do it, the more experience you have, the harder it gets because you start running out of ideas. So I would say probably three years ago, like 2012, 2013 was when it was easiest for me to think of ideas. And it's gotten progressively harder for me. And it's made my walks when I'm digesting what I read more difficult. You feel like you have to dig a little bit deeper and think a little bit harder about what to write next.

• 29:43Shane Parrish?

  Do you have a specific process that you use when you're kind of digesting this material and trying to formulate an answer? Or is it just kind of churning it over in your mind?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  What's definitely true, and I've heard this from other writers too, is that when you sit down and try to force yourself to think about a topic, you're never gonna get it. If you sit down and say, okay, I need to think about something, what am I gonna write? If you try to force your brain into that, it doesn't work. Where I think the, and I've heard this from other writers too, I think you get your best ideas just randomly. You're walking through the grocery store, you're in the shower, you're just kind of zoning off and then it's like, pop, you get an idea in your head and you're like, oh, I gotta go to my computer right now and write this. Like, they just come to you kind of sporadically for specific ideas like that. So I try to not actively think in my head, what am I gonna write about next?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Even though that I need to think of a new topic, I try to push out the idea of actively thinking about a new topic. So instead, I just try to think about, what have I read lately? And what does that mean? What do I think about it? What's interesting? How can I tie it into something else that I've read lately? What did I learn from this book that ties into something else I learned from this book? Without actively trying to think of a new topic, just trying to stay as curious as I can about the topic and hope that new ideas come to me naturally that way.

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• 32:06Shane Parrish?

  And are you always filtering the information that's coming into you? Are you getting rid of sources of information? And what's your process for that? Or is it always just kind of additive?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  I think, I think the few sources that I've gotten rid of, it hasn't happened very often. But the only times I think it has happened is when someone just becomes overtly political in their writing. That's something I have almost no tolerance for, is mixing politics and investing. And there's a lot of it because the two fields are kind of cousins, right? But that's something that I just see almost no good about mixing politics and investing. So those have been the only sources that I have cut loose. But you know, what I really enjoy are link aggregators for people who I trust. So people like the website Abnormal Returns. It's basically a link aggregator of, you know, this investor named Tatas Visconti.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Who reads maybe more than anybody and he links out every day to here are the 10 most interesting articles he's read. I those people I think add tremendous value because they kind of serve as your filter. You know, Tatis is not going to link to anything that is low quality or misleading. He has a very good filter himself.

• 33:20Shane Parrish?

  I love that one too. Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's amazing. So that is, I think, a good way for people to have a filter is to is to pay good attention and use those sites as sort of their daily reading list. Josh Brown also does it. Barry Ritholz does it. So that's a lot. And then I have other people, including you Shane, who are kind of used as my resource for books to buy. You are, I am convinced, read more books than just about anybody I know. And I have, I can't think of a time when you have written about or recommended a book that I was disappointed in. Maybe I haven't finished them all, but I've learned something from almost all of them. So I think it's really important for anyone, whether you're doing this professionally or just you're just you're just interested in finance,

• 34:04Speaker 01

  to have some filter. And the best way to have a filter is to find someone who you trust and let them be your filter.

• 34:10Shane Parrish?

  I think that's an interesting point, especially in the world of kind of algorithmic curation. And what you had just mentioned was people, right? And you're trusting somebody to filter, disseminate that knowledge for you, contextualize it perhaps, and perhaps link it to something else. But you're actually trusting a person at the end of the day versus trusting a machine.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, the amount of the amount of financial content that is published every day. For one, I think is orders of magnitudes more than it was even six or seven years ago. But I mean, it's just so much that there's no possible way that you can just jump blindly into the world of financial content and try to learn something. You're just, you're drinking from, you're drinking from five fire hoses if you try to do that. So I think it's more important than ever and becoming more important to have some sort of curated filter in place for what you're doing. But this again, Sort of the devil's advocate about that is it gets back to confirmation bias. If you're only reading something from one person curated from one person, you're probably going to get a single point of, you know, not necessarily a single point of view.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Cause I think you and Todd, us do a good job of having a wide range of views. But I think you and Todd, us also do a good job of making sure that those views come from qualified, rational, sane people.

• 35:32Shane Parrish?

  Try to anyway. So what book would you say like dramatically influenced the way that you think like that's had a big? It doesn't have to be a finance book, but it's had a big effect on your life.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  I think the three books, so there's, there's a historian. He was, he was sort of an amateur historian in Frederick Lewis Allen, who wrote three books. One, one is called The Big Change. One is called Since Yesterday and the other is called Only Yesterday. And they are about how America changed from 1900 to 1950. How it changed culturally and politically. So the, so all three books just kind of go through in incredible detail, what life was like in America in the early 1900s, the 1920s and the 1930s. What was everyday life like? What was work life? What was politics like? What was culture like? What was food like and transportation like?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  And he wrote the books, I believe in the 1940s and 1950s. So he was looking back, but still early enough that he really, you know, because he lived through these periods, he really understood it. And he's one of the best writers I think I've ever come across. And the books just absolutely captivated me just showing how different life was like. You know, not that long ago, 1930s were not that long ago. We still kind of think of that as recent history, but how incredibly different life was like during that period. And not only that, but how much life changed during that period. I think the difference in how life in America changed from 1900 to 1950 was an order of magnitude greater than how it changed from 1950 to 2000.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  You know, from 1900 to 1950, you had, you, you pretty much started the century with horse and buggy. And you, and by 1950, we're talking jets and the early stages of, of the space race. Just incredible change during that period. And it was just fascinating to see how people and businesses adapted to that change. Where during that period, every year, you just had monumental changes, whether it was the automobile or TV or electricity or the Great Depression and World War II. And he just explains in incredible detail how people adapted during that time. So those three books are my three favorite books of all time. And had a big influence on how I think about adaptation and change among just everyday life.

• 37:58Shane Parrish?

  And do you reread them or is it something you read once and you've just chewed on a lot?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Or? I think I've read both of them twice. Also, so I do all my reading in Kindle and I highlight passages that I think are interesting. So I have constantly going back and reading stuff that I highlighted from those books. Just little anecdotes, little facts, little short stories about what life was like back then.

• 38:20Shane Parrish?

  Do you find the second time you're reading, do you draw your attention to different things?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's definitely true. I think a lot of people, I think really intense focus reading is difficult. And a lot of times when people are reading, they have something else in their head. They're zoning off, they're falling asleep in bed as they're reading. And because of that, yeah, when I go back through and read something a second time, I definitely find things that I didn't pay that much attention to the first time. Because maybe the first time I read it, I was, I was thinking about work or I was falling asleep in bed. So yeah, I'm definitely a fan of reading things again. And I'm definitely a fan of highlighting passages that you think are interesting, that you can go back to and read a second time. And that I think is by far the biggest benefit of something like Kindle, that you can archive things much better than before.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  I, like everybody, miss holding a physical book and the smell of a book. But I'm 100% Kindle now, just because I can search and archive things so much better.

• 39:19Shane Parrish?

  What's your process for kind of reading, I guess, and then going back and reviewing and kind of arc or not archiving, but organizing the information so that it becomes accessible when you need it?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  So I, you know, I tried Evernote for a while, which is what I think a lot of voracious readers do, kind of a way to archive their notes. I never, for whatever reason, I never really got into it. So I don't have a structured process for going back and rereading things. Books that I think I really got excited about, books that I finished through the last page, which is increasingly rare, those, I think most of those books, maybe a year later, two years later, I'll reread them again. But, and you know, just when I'm trying to think about something to write, I'm just trying to spur thoughts in my head, I pretty frequently go back to books that I read in the last six months or the last year and just see what

• 40:13Speaker 01

  I highlighted, to just try to spur some ideas, spur some thinking. So I do that, but there's really no structure to it. I just kind of go back randomly and see what I read and what I highlighted in the past. And there are a lot of times too where I try to, you know, I'll remember reading something in a book, but I can't really remember exactly what it was. And that's when, when I enjoy the ability to search on Kindle. I can just go in and say, you know, there's this topic and I remember these couple of keywords, these, this name, this place, and search for it and try to reread that specific thing. So I do that quite a bit as well.

• 40:45Shane Parrish?

  And do you incorporate any other technology into that process or is it all, it's all Kindle for you now all the time?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  It's all Kindle all the time. I'm also, I'm probably clinically obsessed with Twitter, probably to an unhealthy amount, but that's where I get so much of my, when I'm reading articles or research reports, almost all of those come from Twitter now. Following people on Twitter who I, who I trust that are going to be, you know, good sources that link to good content. So that's where a lot of my, my daily reading comes from now.

• 41:15Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I want to switch gears a little bit here. I'm going to ask you some questions that I was, that got emailed to me that readers want me to ask you, that are more personal than I've typically gotten into, but I think you're game for that.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 41:30Shane Parrish?

  So what indulgences would you enjoy if there were no consequences?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  That's, that's an amazing question. Uh, I'm probably more, I'm not confrontational whatsoever. I dread any sort of confrontation, whether it's at work or, you know, with a clerk at the checkout. I just, I absolutely dread confrontation. And I were, I wish, I guess, that, okay, so here's one way to explain it. There's a hedge fund named, called Bridgewater. Uh, it's the largest hedge fund in the world and they have a pretty firm rule there for employees that you have to be 100% honest to everyone. You cannot talk about people behind their back. If you're in a meeting and you need to say something about something, they call that person into the meeting and you need to say it to their face.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  It is just a culture of 100% blunt forced honesty with everybody. And I, you know, it's, it seems to work for them, but I just think in the real world, almost no one can do that. Everyone to some extent is biting their tongue to avoid confrontation, as I do a lot. So I guess if there was one indulgence that I wish I could have, it would be the ability among myself and other people to just be brutally blunt forced honest with people. Because I, I think people would learn and change so much faster and efficiently if we could do that. But I just, I mean, it's, it's never gonna happen.

• 42:58Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that's true though? Like, I mean, the last time somebody was really bluntly honest with you with no kind of agenda, did you walk away from that changing or did you, I mean, you might've, but I think most of us would become defensive and dismissive and...

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's, there's obviously, there's a difference between being honest and being rude. We have, I have one, there's, I have one coworker here at the Motley Fool, who I think has mastered this really well, the art of being honest while not rude. And he will shoot down your ideas in two seconds, but he does it in a professional way that you are not offended by. Whereas I think other people, even if they know your idea is bad, they might just nod their head and say, okay, yeah, that's, that's interesting. We can, we can talk about that. Whereas I have this coworker who will just instantly say, here's why you're wrong. Here's not what you're thinking about. Here's why we're not gonna do that. But he does it in such a clean, honest way. And I think he would tell you that he got that from his time in the army, where there's really no room for BS.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  If you're out on the field with your troops, he was a captain in the army. There's no room for being polite or to BS with people. It's here's the truth, here's what we're wanting, here's what we're gonna do. Thank you, goodbye. I wish there could be more of that in the world, but balanced in a way that people who are on the other side of that are not offended. Just pointing out people's flaws and saying, hey, this is the reality of what we're doing right now, and here's something you should think about. I think I definitely don't do that enough, and I think a lot of people don't. And you're absolutely right that you can take it too far and just start, you know, you start getting really defensive with people. But I think if you could do it in a way that is, is, just sticks to the facts without much

• 44:41Speaker 01

  opinion and does it in a way that is professional and courteous, that is such a huge benefit to how people learn and change. And I think that's one of the reasons why Bridgewater, the hedge fund that demands that, has been so successful.

• 44:53Shane Parrish?

  Okay, next question. Would you rather be a big fish in a small pond or a small, or a small fish in a big pond, and why?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  I would much rather be the big fish in the small pond. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal, I used to write a column for the Wall Street Journal. That, I think, in there, I was a very small fish in a big pond. And it was more difficult, I think why I didn't like that, well, for, I actually, I have nothing bad to say about my experience at Wall Street Journal, it was a great experience. And I really, I really enjoy and respect the editors I worked with. But it is very difficult to be yourself when you're a small fish in a big pond. It's much easier to, I guess, write your own ticket, for lack of a better word, when you're the big fish in the small pond. And to be yourself and to be unique and to stand out when you're the big fish in the small pond.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  You know, it's, you know, there are, there are benefits to being in the big pond, more leverage, maybe more resources, maybe more help, but I think the... The key to success in so many fields is your ability to stand out. And I think you stand out when you're the big fish in the small pond. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's the answer that pops in my head the quickest.

• 46:07Shane Parrish?

  I think that was really insightful in the sense that you can live, I'm paraphrasing here, but a more meaningful life because you can live more in line with the way that you really want to be if you're a big fish in a small pond versus the other. What qualities would you say are most important to have in friends?

• 46:26Speaker 01

  In friends, that's interesting. I think, and this is true for spouses I see in relationships, is the ability to understand that people have bad days and say things that they don't really mean. The ability to understand that people, that everyone is human and everyone has emotions and everyone has the same ups and downs in life and that almost everyone you see on the street probably has something bad going on in their lives that you don't know. And that's true for your friends too. So I guess the trait that I would look for is empathy. I think that's one of the most important traits in work and life. And it's a rare trait that's hard to have, but the ability to look at someone going

• 47:10Speaker 01

  through a tough period and empathize with what they're going through. That to me is probably the most important trait to have in friendships and with significant others as well.

• 47:20Shane Parrish?

  How do you develop that?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  I think it's rare and I think it's one of like a lot of things that are kind of, you know, I'm loath to say that's something that you're born with because I don't think it is, but I think it's something that you have to get lucky with, that you had an upbringing that developed that, whether it was parents who really forced empathy on you or it was some experience you had in life. Remember when you were a kid, you had a friend who was, maybe you were wealthy and you had a friend who was really poor and it really showed you how other people live in the world and it made you just empathize with their situation better. I think it's difficult because most people, when they're growing up and learning and really developing these traits are going to stick with them for life, sort of by default

• 48:03Speaker 01

  surround themselves with people like them and people in their same socioeconomic class, people who look like them and sound like them, people who work in the same jobs, go to the same schools. And I think it's tough to develop a lot of empathy in that situation. Because then when you find someone who is in a totally different situation from you, it doesn't make sense because your whole life you've been surrounded by people who are just like you. And that is, I think, something that if you weren't raised with a lot of diversity, I think it's hard to accept a lot of diversity later on in your life.

• 48:36Shane Parrish?

  Well, in so many ways, we're becoming less diverse, right? Neighborhoods are becoming, you know, income-specific and you're not seeing the diversity you talk about in order to develop empathy. So you end up losing touch with, I would say, reality for the vast majority of people if you're in one of the more fortunate areas.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And I think, and this is something I think about as a new parent. Nobody wants to send their kids, well, I was gonna say, no one wants to send their kids to a diverse school. They want to send their kids to a good school. And maybe that's the wrong way to put it because of course I want my new son to experience as much diversity as possible, but I want him to go to a good school. I want him to go to the best school in town. And I think almost by default, when you start doing that, the best school in town is probably not going to be the most diverse school in town. It might be the other way around, that the most diverse school that he could go to is the worst school in the poorest neighborhood, but of course I don't want him to do that.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  So it's a big challenge, I think, to expose your kids to diversity while at the same time giving them the opportunities that you want in life. Something that I think I've really looked up to, that I'd like to emulate with our new son. We have, I have a coworker here at The Motley Fool, whose son is, I think, 10 years old and he's been to at least 30 countries. And he's 10 years old. He's just, this coworker is just constantly taking his whole family to all corners of the world. And not at five-star hotels in London, but going to Oman and Saudi Arabia and Brazil

• 50:16Speaker 01

  and countries that most people don't take, don't consider vacation destinations. That, I think, if you can really pull that off, and so his son is 10 years old and has seen dozens of different cultures and different experiences, that I think is something that can only gain, can only teach you and gain you empathy later in life, to tie this back to the original topic we were talking about.

• 50:38Shane Parrish?

  Anything else that you have in mind, like how you plan on developing empathy in your son as a parent?

• 50:48Shane Parrish?

  Like what's, actually, here's a, here's a side question to that. It's like, what things do you want to pass on to your son that you are crafting his life to try to develop?

• 51:00Speaker 01

  I, I want him to understand that, uh, most people in the world do not live like he's going to live, which is to say anything about our quality of life, but he's, he's gonna grow up an educated, white male in America. And I want him to understand from a very early age that 99% of the world is not that. And I think that that's probably the most important thing that I want him to understand. Uh, and, and to get back to, to, to try to teach him empathy about other people's situation. Cause I think that, that lack of empathy is the cause of a lot of problems in the world today. Uh, just one side not understanding

• 51:41Speaker 01

  the other side's point of view. And you see, I think you see that with Brexit recently. You see that with wealth inequality in the United States. It's just a more, a greater segmentation of understanding among different socioeconomic groups. And it just causes kind of a closed mindedness, no matter what segment you're in, whether you're in the top 1% or the bottom 1%, you don't understand the other side. And I think that leads to almost nothing but problems. And the more that I can open his eyes to different ways that the world lives, the better he'll be. But again, the, the hard thing about that is I want to open his eyes to new cultures while at the same time, giving him the best opportunities that I can. And those things sometimes conflict. I want to send him to

• 52:24Speaker 01

  the best school, but I want him to understand that not everyone who goes to the best school is gonna come from the same background as everyone else. So it's, it's a really tough thing, Shane. And I don't, I don't, I don't have the, uh, the clearest roadmap, but I'm gonna do the best I can.

• 52:40Shane Parrish?

  Are there people you look up to as parents, uh, and try to learn from in terms of like now you as a new father, probably see the world differently. Um, things as simple as putting food in your child's mouth has a whole different meaning than putting food in your own mouth.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  I've been, I've been surprised. So my, my, our son is eight months old, is our first son. And I have been surprised. At how news stories affect me now that wouldn't have in the past. Anything involved with violence or terrorism or mass shootings affects me way more now than it would have eight months ago. So I think becoming a father has, it's just, it's just made me more sympathetic and maybe just have a greater touch on life in general. I mean, that's kind of a philosophical, kind of fluffy thing to say, but it's made me much more in touch with suffering and pain in the world. I think whenever someone, when someone comes into your life that you love and want to protect

• 53:41Speaker 01

  and teach now, you become more understanding of how incredibly sad and dangerous it is to put people in danger, whether it's something like terrorism or shooting. So that's just one observation of becoming a new dad is that things like, like mass shootings just affect me a lot more and make, just make me more emotional than they would have eight months ago.

• 54:02Shane Parrish?

  Has becoming a father changed how you live when you're not with your son?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Well, we don't sleep very much anymore. So I guess that, and, and the truth is too, I don't, I read probably half as much as I did before he came along. And of course I, I wouldn't trade him for anything, but I, I miss the amount of reading that I could do. There's no such thing as a Saturday sitting on the couch with a book anymore. It's, I have other duties now. So I, I definitely miss that. But I, I think it's probably, this is, I think almost every parent would say this too. I think it's just made me more focused on priorities now.

• 54:38Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Because as soon as you become a parent, it's not about you anymore. Everything's about the other person. So it's made me much more focused on what are our goals as a family and okay, no BS, cut the crap, we just gotta go out and do that right now. Whatever it takes, we gotta go do it. I think that's something that almost every parent would say.

• 54:53Shane Parrish?

  That's awesome. Uh, two questions left. I'm conscious of the time here. Uh, what's on your nightstand right now? What are you reading that you're liking?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  So there's a book, uh, so there's an author named Siddhartha Mukherjee. He wrote the book called The Emperor of All Maladies, which was like the history of cancer. I think he won the Pulitzer Prize for it. He recently booked, he recently wrote a book called The Gene, which is the history of the gene.

• 55:16Shane Parrish?

  Oh, cool.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  And it's just fascinating. I mean, it sounds like kind of a boring topic, but it's a, he, I mean, he's, he's one of the best science writers out there. And that that's why, uh, his first book on cancer did so incredibly well. But he, and this gets back to what we were talking before, he can take something incredibly complicated like cancer or genetics and explain it in a way that anyone can understand without stripping out the essence or the complexity of the topic. So, and so I'm reading the book right now on the history of the gene, and it's just absolutely fascinating. And what's fascinating to me about it is how incredibly wrong the top scientists were about genetics 100 or 150 years ago. And you, up until the mid 1800s, maybe the late 1800s, around that

• 56:03Speaker 01

  time, just about the time that Darwinism started, uh, picking up. So, I mean, not that long ago, maybe 150 years ago. The main theory for how, uh, human creation works was that inside the sperm was a fully formed human that grew inside the uterus. That there was a fully formed miniature human inside of sperm that grew inside. That was the main scientific theory 150 years ago. And it's just fascinating to me to see how incredibly wrong we were about something that's so important. And when I read something like that, what I start thinking about is what do we think today that we are that wrong about? Cause

• 56:44Speaker 01

  there's probably, there probably is something that is that fundamental that we are that incredibly wrong about. And what, what are we gonna read? What is gonna be the book 150 years from now? That we are going to look back at and realize how that we were as wrong as we were about genetics 150 years ago.

• 57:03Shane Parrish?

  Do you have any insight into what that would be?

• 57:06Speaker 01

  No, I think that's the impossible question to answer. But there is, I think, at every point in history, there has been something, there have been two things, something that we were totally 100% completely wrong about. And at the same time, a sense that we have figured everything out. And you know, we figured out, we figured out everything that's fundamental. Like those two things have always coexisted. And then, so I think it's inevitable, but impossible to answer that 20, 50, 100 years from now, we will look back and say, can you believe that in 2016, we believed X? Something fundamental about science.

• 57:42Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  That we will have just, and I think in a way is that's what science is, is it's just like a field of study that tries to break down things that we believe now.

• 57:53Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Just through experiment and theory, what do we believe now that is not true? And how can we prove otherwise? That's kind of the basis of what science is. So that I think is fascinating, but I think it's almost by definition impossible to say what that might be today.

• 58:06Shane Parrish?

  We're gonna have to check out that book. I'm fascinated by learning about genes right now, so.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 58:11Shane Parrish?

  Okay, last question. What's on your bucket list?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Ah, what's on my bucket list? I have and have had for a long time, a burning desire to become financially independent. And I'm not, I'm not quite there yet, but I have, I have laid out, how can I become totally financially independent? So that I can spend my life just kind of, uh, reading and thinking and, and learning on my own time, at my own free will, on, on, on my own schedule, my own clock. So I guess that's, that's my ultimate bucket list is this getting to the point in life where I can just rely on only myself, uh, so that I can just be kind of a, a full-time learner. And I think Shane, you're pretty much at that point. Just, just, just a full-time learner.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  So you, you, so I guess on my bucket list is become Shane Parrish. That's kind of, that's, that's kind of where I want to get to.

• 59:07Shane Parrish?

  Oh gosh, uh, listen, Morgan, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. We'll have to do it again.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Thanks Shane, this is fun.

• 59:19Shane Parrish?

  Hey guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at farnamstreetblog.com/podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G.com/podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnamstreetblog.com/newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening.