#655 Lessons from the best investors in the world w/ William Green

William Green is the author of RICHER, WISER, HAPPIER: How the World’s Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. Green has interviewed many of the world’s most successful investors, exploring in depth the question of what principles, processes, insights, habits, and traits enable them to achieve spectacular success—and how we can profit by reverse engineering and replicating their winning ways. In this conversation, we discuss rational thinking, habits of the best investors, risk management, durability, concentrated portfolios, controlling human psychology, and emulating the greatest investors of our lifetime. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. William Green is the author of Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. Green has interviewed many of the world's most successful investors, exploring in depth the question of what principles, processes, insights, habits, and traits enable them to achieve spectacular success, and how we can profit by reverse engineering and replicating their winning ways. In this conversation, William and I discuss rational thinking, habits of the best investors, risk management, durability, concentrated portfolios, controlling human psychology, and emulating the greatest investors of our lifetime. I really, really,

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. They recently launched a new Bitcoin Rewards credit card. It's a regular credit card that when you swipe it, you get Bitcoin back rather than cash back or airline miles. I'm really enjoying using mine. There's some sort of psychological element to wanting to spend money so that you earn more Bitcoin back. It's kind of crazy. Go check them out at blockfi.com/pomp today. I'm an investor in the business, and I'm really enjoying this new product. Again, it's a Bitcoin Rewards credit card that you can get at blockfi.com/pomp. Go check it out today and let me know what you think. You can go search on Twitter and tons of people are tweeting all their

• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

  photos as they get the credit card. Blockfi.com/pomp. Next up is Choice. Choice is rebuilding the way you approach retirement, which starts with making it simple to include Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in your savings. More than 20,000 Bitcoiners, myself included, have already signed up to start investing. Whether we are talking about crypto or stocks, Choice lets you trade real Bitcoin and Amazon in the same place, all without paying a dime in your capital gains taxes. And if you want to hold your own keys all the way to the moon, you can do that, too. Either way, Choice is on a mission to give you full control over your retirement savings. So head on over to retirewithchoice.com/pomp. Again, that's retirewithchoice.com/pomp and sign up for an account today. And one more thing, you know how I feel about it, but if you have a pro that manages your money...

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't take any of their nonsense. Choice has tools for them too. Take back control today and visit retirewithchoice.com/pomp. Again, retirewithchoice.com/pomp. I've got an account with them for my retirement and you should go check it out and see if it's good for you too. Retirewithchoice.com/pomp. All right, let's get this episode with William. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got William here with me. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm delighted to be here. Sorry, I was just taking a sip at the exact wrong moment.

• 3:03Anthony Pompliano?

  No problem. You wrote richer, wiser, happier. And after I read this book, I knew that I had to get you on the podcast because there's so many ideas that are packed into one single book that I think not only speak to an individual that is interested in investing in markets, but also has ramifications from understanding life and kind of how to just be happier, as the title says. So let's just start with, why did you want to write the book, right? Like, what was the purpose when you said that? You said, you know, I'm going to write this book. What was the thought process?

• 3:34Speaker 02

  I really just wanted to share the best ideas that I'd got from interviewing the greatest investors over really the last 25 years. Because I was in this very strange position where originally as a journalist writing for magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and Money, I got to interview all of these legendary investors. And then over the years, writing books, I also got to interview these amazing investors. And so I just was very fortunate that I had access to a lot of these extraordinary minds. And then I thought, well, okay, that's great. So I can, I can interview them about how to get rich. But then I was thinking, well, how cool is it if I can also talk to them about how to think better and how to live more wisely? And what's worked in their lives? And how do they, how do they recover from setbacks and public

• 4:20Speaker 02

  And how do they deal with their mistakes? How do they deal with stress? How do they balance their family life and their work life? And what do they figure out is actually really important in life? If you, you know, once you hit the jackpot and you make all the money in the world, do you actually discover that money is important or isn't that important? And so if it isn't that important, what is important? And so, so it gave me this incredible opportunity to, in writing this book, basically to go back to the smartest investors I've interviewed and re-interview them or interview them more deeply at great length about these questions that have really been on my mind for many years. Cause, cause what I'm trying to figure out is, yeah, okay. So I want to get richer and I want to be financially independent and secure. But I also want to figure out how to live, how to live a successful life

• 5:05Speaker 02

  and what actually constitutes a successful and abundant life. And so partly in writing the book, what I'm doing is, is answering that question for myself. I'm trying to think through these very complicated questions. And partly what I'm doing is literally I'm, I'm just answering this question for other people. And I'm, I'm trying to share the ideas, the insights that I've learned from interviewing all of these great investors.

• 5:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Part of what has me so excited about this conversation is when I was reading the book, there was multiple points where I said, oh, there's gotta be more there. I know he has more information and he's done his best to kind of condense all of this value into this one paragraph or this one chapter. And so maybe let's start with some of the, what I'd consider the more overarching themes of the book. And then we'll dig into some of the, the examples and you can kind of elaborate on them. But the first one is this idea that much of investing and understanding markets is less about actually pursuing profit and making money. But it's more so the pursuit of being a rational, clear thinker and understanding how to make better decisions. Explain a little bit about kind of what appears to be a counterintuitive learning

• 6:10Anthony Pompliano?

  that you had where the best investors, they actually are pursuing thinking and kind of rational thought rather than just pure profits.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, in in some sense, if you think about investing, what what you're trying to do is say the the future is unknowable, and yet I'm gonna try to make decisions about how to act in a rational way so that I stack the odds in my favor of having a successful outcome. So everything is changing, everything is impermanent, everything is inconstant, the future is unknowable, and yet we have to make decisions. And you have to try to make good decisions that stack the odds in your favor. And that's the case whether you're thinking about the stock market and what to buy, or whether you're thinking about whether to get married, or whether to have a kid, or whether to move home. So it's all really about decision making. And so what kind of fascinated me was the idea

• 7:01Speaker 02

  that the greatest investors are an incredible filter for thinking about how to make rational decisions. And what gradually occurred to me is the the reason why they're such extraordinary decision makers is because they have skin in the game. And so if you're a journalist like me, or you're an academic with tenure at a really good college, or something like that, or or you're an economist prognosticating about the future of the economy, you don't really have a tremendous amount of skin in the game. If if I'm wrong about something, I tend not to pay a huge cost, a huge price. But if you're if you're managing a billion dollars, or fifty million dollars, or fifty billion dollars, or a hundred billion dollars, as some of the people I'm writing about do, there's an enormous cost if you're wrong.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  And so and also tremendous rewards if you're right. And so I think part of what happens is that the sheer the sheer amount of skin in the game forces them to be tremendous rational thinkers, because there's such a price to pay if they're wrong. And I think what's also really interesting about the greatest investors is because of those high stakes, they're tremendous pragmatists. And so if there's an idea, or an insight, or a way of thinking that helps them, that they discover in any area, in any field, they'll borrow it. And so they're looking at, say, the world of mathematics, or the world of physics, or biology, or sports, or or mindfulness meditation, and they're just saying,

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll grab that. That's really, that's really helpful. So that, that to me makes them an incredibly useful filter because really they're teaching us how to make decisions in a very uncertain world. And, and so part of what I'm setting out to do in the book is to say, well, here's how they do it. Here's, here's how they stack the odds in their favor in all of these different ways.

• 8:49Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the key pieces to this decision making is not thinking in a binary manner, but thinking much more probabilistically. And you talk a, a little bit about it in the book. How do you see that being trained? Or are these people who innately are probabilistic thinkers? Is it a book they read? Is it a class they took? Is it something they, they learn over time and then they pursue constantly reinforcing that? How, how does that come about?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I once had, I asked this question of Howard Marks, who managed something like a hundred and forty, a hundred and fifty billion dollars. And, and I was basically sort of saying, so can I, can I learn to think more probabilistically? And it sort of became pretty clear that he didn't think I could, I would say, that it, it seems to be something where certain people are just wired to think in terms of probabilities. And I think, I do think it's a talent that certain people have. They're more wired to think in terms of probabilities. But I actually think like many things, once you become aware that there are different ways to think, you're like, oh, that's completely obvious. So, so, I mean, just to give you an example, my, my mother, I was talking to earlier today and she said to me,

• 9:55Speaker 02

  my cousin who's living in Israel is trying to decide whether to get her third vaccine shot or not. And she's worried about it because she's a really smart person. She reads all this stuff about, about the dangers of the third shot or the benefits of it. And she's just trying to weigh, to weigh things. And I'm immediately turning to what Howard Marks said to me about various things. So, so Howard said to me at one point, I'm always thinking, where's the mistake in what I'm doing? Where's the mistake? And he's always thinking, what's the downside? What, what, if I'm wrong, what's the downside? Where, and so even just that, that way of thinking where you're saying, okay, so.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a certain downside if the vaccine backfires. Here's how ill I could get. But there's a probably even greater downside if, if I get COVID. Like, yeah, so I know that there can be some, some complications if I get the vaccine and I have a bad reaction to it. But there are some really shitty complications to getting COVID, which include dying. And so just that way of thinking of, okay, so here are these, here's this decision where I need to think about the downside, where I need to think about survival. So what you really want to do, both in markets and in life, is avoid catastrophe, right? You want to stay in the game. And so that's something that you're trying to do when you invest. There's also something you're trying to do when you're trying to survive a pandemic.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  So, so that sort of filter of just being aware of simple questions that you want to ask, like, okay, where's the mistake here? What's, what's the probability that I'm wrong? What's the downside if I'm wrong? What's the consequence if I'm wrong? Those are things that I think you really can learn. You can, you can learn to think in that way. And it doesn't, it doesn't particularly come naturally to me. But I think having spent so much time with great investors, I've, I've learned just to ask some of those basic questions. So if, if, for example, I was talking about this with someone recently, I, I had, I had a couple of bottles of wine with a great investor in New York City and I, and I get the train home and I'm,

• 12:01Speaker 02

  my car's waiting at the train station, I'm trying to decide whether to drive home or not. And I'm thinking, yeah, I'm, I'm probably sober, I'm pretty sure I'm sober. But then you're thinking, but if I'm wrong, if I'm deluding myself, what's the downside? What's, what's the chance of catastrophe? And so, so then I end up calling my son and my son kind of picks me up and I get a lift home and I leave my car at the train station. And of course, then I forget that I've left my car at the train station for the next thirty six hours, which I wouldn't advise people to do. But just that way of thinking in terms of the downside, in terms of, of trying to avoid catastrophe, that's, that's a very distinctive way of thinking that I think people like Howard Marks have. And that's, that's definitely learnable, I think.

• 12:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Another key takeaway, I think, is this idea that, which is actually an old idea around circle of competence or understanding where you have an edge and where you don't and electing to play the games that you can win and you think you can win over and over and over again because of your edge versus not. Is this something that almost every great investor has? Or is it possible for a great investor actually to go into markets where they don't have an edge? And because they're a great investor, a great thinker, they can be successful?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  I think pretty much without exception, the great investors I've met have this tendency to stick to games that they specifically can win. And this was something, it came through to me very clearly when I spent time with Ed Thorp, who is, was not only an extraordinary hedge fund manager, who didn't have a losing quarter in 20 years with his hedge fund, but also figured out how to count cards and beat the casino at blackjack. He was kind of the inventor of card counting, as I understand it, then figured out how to beat the casino at roulette. So here's a guy who's the, who's the ultimate game player. And, and he said to me, look, if I don't have an edge, I don't play. And so when I talked to him about, about

• 14:00Speaker 02

  this question, I said to him, well, so how can I tell if I have an edge? And he said, well, if you don't have a rational reason to think that you have an edge, then you almost certainly don't. And that for me was quite unsettling because I started to think, well, so when it comes to buying individual stocks, for example, do I have an edge? And I'm pretty certain that I don't. I mean, it's pretty clear to me that I don't have the best temperament for this, that I don't necessarily have the technical knowledge, that I don't have the patience to analyze balance sheets and the like. And I'm not that interested in, in, in going through the numbers really patiently and seeing whether, whether there's a discrepancy or a lie or something in a footnote. And that's just not what interests me. And so

• 14:43Speaker 02

  that for me was a really profound realization, just to learn from Ed Thorp. Okay, so if I don't have an edge at this particular game of picking individual stocks, Let me just not play that game. That's not a game that I'm likely to win. And so occasionally I violate it and I I violated it again a couple of weeks ago and bought an individual stock. And and it and it kind of tortures me because I'm aware that it's an irrational and stupid thing for me to do, that I'm much better off just giving the money to someone else who's who's better equipped to win that game. And and so for for your listeners, I I just think that's an incredibly important idea of sticking to games that you're equipped to win and and avoiding games that you're really not equipped to win.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  And it sounds so obvious, but most of us don't do it. And and so what's really striking is how many of the great investors end up telling you, no, no, you should just index. And that, in a way, is the most rational thing for most of us to do. How Howard Marks says most investors should index most of their money. And so part of my default position in investing my own money is that I I own a couple of index funds because I I sort of figure I should try not to delude myself into thinking this is a game I'm likely to win. But then I also figure I spent 25 years interviewing many great investors. And so so I do figure I might have some edge in terms of picking good fund managers because because I know a lot of them.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  And so it's possible that I have an edge there. And so I I do own about three actively managed funds. But I think that, again, is a really good filter of just asking yourself, do I have a rational reason to believe that I have an an edge? And let me let me stick to games in which I do have an edge.

• 16:29Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating to me is you've talked to the best investors in the world. You've studied them for 20 plus years. You've literally written a book on them. You could sit here and articulate over and over and over again, playing the games that you have an edge and to index, etc. But then you said that you bought a stock. And so walk through, is it more of like an entertainment thing? Is it something that you say, oh, in this one sector I have an edge? Like, like, walk me through kind of the psychological thought process, full well knowing that we're all human. And maybe it's just, hey, I know what I'm doing is probably Not smart, but I want to do it, right? Like, like, how do you balance that?

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's slightly, it's slightly moronic. And so I'll tell you, I'll tell you what happened with me. And I can only tell you this slight sort of, I'll be a little bit enigmatic. I had a call a few weeks ago with a very legendary investor. And, um, and the only reason I'm being slightly enigmatic is because I don't think it was really on the record. And there were a couple of other legendary investors. And it was clear to me, we were talking a bit about a Chinese company, a Chinese tech company that's been killed recently due to all of this regulation. And one of them, who's like really a kind of genius, was saying, you know, look, if I had the cash, I would go all in

• 17:50Speaker 02

  on this company. But I mean, this is a guy who's a multi billionaire. It's not like he doesn't have the cash or he doesn't want to sell his other stuff. But so he had clearly bought a major position. Then another of the legendary investors on this call was like, yeah, I bought it yesterday, so it's bound to keep going down. And so I'm like, oh shit, you know, like this, it's exactly, it's, it exactly plays all of my prejudices, all of my biases, right? It's a, it's a really contrarian bet on something that's been killed, but that clearly has really good long-term prospects. The crowd is doing something so totally different. So it plays to all of my psychological desires to be smarter than the crowd and to applaud myself for being so contrarian and so smart.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  And, and, and then it also plays to my prejudices of the fact that it aligns me psychologically with a couple of the greatest investors of all time, who I know have been buying this themselves. And so it just plays into it sort of my vanity, my sense that I have like knowledge of what the greatest investors are doing. Um, but the difficulty. Is they deeply understand it and I partially understand it. And so when the shit hits the fan and it does really badly, which of course it has immediately. I mean, it's not done terribly, but it's down probably ten, fifteen percent. Because Chinese tech stocks have been getting killed amid all this regulation. But they understand it well enough to have tremendous conviction.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, tremendous conviction. Whereas for me, I sort of understand it, but I'm just trying to be a smart aleck and outwit the crowd. And and so it is a long term investment. I'm thinking it's for a ten year investment, but um but we'll we'll see. I don't really have the confidence or the knowledge in the position. And so I just had lunch with a great hedge fund manager and I was and I was asking him about this. And he just said, uh, he used to own this stock years ago. And he just said, yeah, I just realized I didn't know enough about China. And um, and it's just not a game I want to play. And he's like, look, I only own ten stocks or at the moment twelve stocks. And he's like, that's just not a game I need to play. I don't need to understand that company.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  And there's much greater wisdom in his approach than in my approach. It's he has this temperamental ability to say, um, no, that doesn't play to my strengths. And I don't need to own everything. And just because it seems really cheap and is in a market that's getting killed. And because other great investors are buying it, doesn't mean I should play that game. And so this is one of the reasons why I outsourced my money for him to invest rather than do much with myself. Because he just he clearly has much more much more emotional control and temperamental control. But there is a part of me that quite likes owning two or three stocks. And and so I do own three stocks at the moment. And one of them is Berkshire Hathaway, which, you know, is a very long term investment.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Um, but I I don't think it plays to my strengths. And I think I think it also burns away a lot of emotional and intellectual energy for me. Because I spend too much time thinking about it and. I think it would be easier for me if I just said, no, it's not a game I'm playing. Let me just, let me just outsource that totally. But, but then, but then I hear a conversation like that about something being super cheap. And, and I have all of that access to all of these brilliant minds and I can't help myself. And I violate my rule once again.

• 21:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I love the book and it makes me feel so much better that you are human too. No problem.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Deeply human, deeply flawed, I'm afraid.

• 21:26Anthony Pompliano?

  There are two people in the book, early in the book that you talk about. One is Pabri and the other is Templeton. And what I found fascinating is in some way, the main idea of both of these investors is almost counter to each other, right? So Pabri obviously has this whole idea of cloning. And he basically looks at Buffett and other great investors and says, hey, well, if they're the best, I'm just going to do what they do. And, you know, as closely as I can mirror what they do, then I'm likely to get similar type results. And it works out fantastically for Pabri. But then Templeton basically says, you know, in order to get better returns than the crowd, you have to do something that is different. And so in one way it is cloning, in another way it is doing something different.

• 22:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And so is it fair to think about this from like, do different than the crowd, but clone the best? Or is there some other framework that you would use to kind of balance these two ideas?

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a very complex and nuanced question.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  And one of the things, one of the things I was doing in writing those two chapters, which almost are diametrically opposite, is saying, yeah, life is complicated and there are many paths up the mountain. And so here's John Templeton, who literally, when I said to him, who influenced you? He said, nobody. And I said, not even your parents? And he said, no, not even them. He said, I didn't want to listen to anybody. He, he, he solved the problem for himself of figuring out how to invest. And that was partly because when he started, he said, there was literally only one investing book this is that, that he could read. This is before even Ben Graham wrote his books, like The Intelligent Investor and Securities Analysis. And so Templeton was kind of inventing the field.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  In many ways, um, um, part of what Templeton was doing was he had grown up in this small town in Tennessee and he had seen people lose everything during the Great Depression, for example, where he was, he was at Yale at the time and his father wrote to him and said, I literally can't spare a single dollar for your education. You're going to have to support yourself. And so he saw people in dire straits, having to sell cheap. And so he looks at that and he says, well, so how would I get a bargain? Well, it's obvious that I'm going to get a bargain because people are desperately selling. And so what you want to do is always look for assets in places where people are desperate to sell. And that's how you're going to get cheap stuff. So it was a, it was a brilliant logical

• 23:52Speaker 02

  deduction of his own, based on what he'd seen in places like Tennessee during, during the Great Depression. For Monish Padraig, who grew up as a relatively poor kid in the outskirts of Mumbai in India, he came to America, did, studied electrical engineering and the like, and was a brilliant student and set up a tech consultancy firm. And then at a certain point, I think in 1994, he's in Heathrow Airport and he's just killing time and he starts reading One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch and discovers Buffett's Returns. And he sees Buffett's Extraordinary Returns and he thinks, wow, this guy's mastered

• 24:34Speaker 02

  the game of compounding. Let me reverse engineer what he did and figure out the rules of the game. And because Buffett and Munger have been so open about what they do, that's actually, it's, it's this low hanging fruit that's available for all of us, where you can, you can say, well, let me reverse engineer what the smartest people have done. And then let me apply that fanatically, but in a way that suits my own temperaments and talent. So, so for Monish, who's a brilliant, very analytical, very financially oriented, very unemotional guy, he was perfectly suited to reverse engineering Buffett and Munger, who are also brilliant.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Mathematicians supremely logical and supremely unemotional. And so it wasn't just that he was cloning them, that he was reverse engineering what they did. It was that he was cloning people who happened to be the masters of a game that he was particularly suited to. And so, so there's a nuance even with cloning that, that it's not just about taking ideas from people who are smarter and wiser than us and have already figured stuff out. It's that you wanna, you wanna take ideas from people um that actually work for your temperament and your talents. And so there, there was a time, for example, during the financial crisis in two thousand eight, two thousand nine, when Monish's hedge fund was down something like sixty seven percent.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  And I said to him, how did you deal with the stress? And he said, oh, I don't have stress. And he's like, no, it was orgasmic. He said, the, the stocks were so cheap then it was orgasmic. I had, had a blast. I knew I was gonna make five times my money over the next few years. And so he has a temperament that's very similar to Mungo's temperament and, and they're close. And, and, and I, when I was interviewing Charlie Mungo, Mungo bought Wells Fargo at what he called the bottom tick in two thousand nine, March two thousand nine. And the last thing he wanted to buy was a financial stock and the global financial system is melting down. And I said to him, was it difficult for you emotionally? And he said, no, no, not at all. I said, so you're not really fighting these emotions like fear and anxiety? And he said, no, no.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  And, and he said Warren's wired exactly the same way. He doesn't feel those things either. And so, so you, you do wanna clone. You wanna figure out what people who are smarter and wiser and more experienced have done, how they've laid out the rules of investing, how they've laid out the rules of everything really. Because it's not just investing, you can, you can apply the technique of cloning to anything that you do. Figuring out who, who does this best and what do they do? And what have they figured out about what works? But I think you have to do it in a way that suits, that suits your temperament.

• 27:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, one of the pieces to this that kind of continues is once you understand which game to play in terms of market selection or kind of strategy selection, it's also the balance between maximizing your returns versus building this like robustness or this ability to survive over a long period of time. And when you write about Howard Marks, one of the ideas is basically taking his portfolio, his life, his relationships, the business he builds, and also the assets he selects, and really not optimizing for ultimate maximalization of the return and more so being able to weather any storm. And so there is this like, again, kind of counterintuitive

• 28:01Anthony Pompliano?

  element to most investors, when they see an asset, it's how much money can I make, right? You described earlier, well, maybe asking, well, how much money can I lose? Maybe one of the more important questions. But also, if you understand that, how do you ensure that you do make money, right? If you just constantly are just avoiding risk and avoiding loss, does that mean that you'll make money over the long term? Or do you see it as a balance between maximizing versus also minimizing risk?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a really profoundly important point. And so what Howard said to me is, you really have to ask this question of, how much are you pushing the limits? Are you overreaching? Are you investing money that you can't afford to lose? Are you over leveraged? Are you indebted?

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Are you buying stuff you don't really understand? How exposed are you to potential disaster? That's really key. And so you clearly, you have to live in a way where you're not overreaching so much that if, if this unknowable future turns against you, you're suddenly going to come undone. But you're not, not only are you going to be forced to sell, but you're not, you're not going to be able to handle the stress emotionally. And so, so that idea of not pushing the limits is a really key aspect of survival and resilience. But then he said something to

• 29:23Speaker 02

  me that had a huge impact on me, which is, he said, at a certain point, risk avoidance can become return avoidance. And so if you actually are so risk averse that you don't, that you don't bet, then you're, then you're also dooming yourself to return avoidance. You're just going to make no money. And so What he said to me is it's not about it's not about avoiding risk, eschewing risk totally. What it's about is taking intelligent risk. That's a really important nuance. And so when you look at the great investors, I would say in almost every case with the people I'm writing about,

• 30:07Speaker 02

  there's this kind of extreme patience where they're sitting on their hands, sitting on their hands, sitting on their hands. And then suddenly the odds turn massively in their favor. There's a mispriced gamble, to use a wonderful phrase from Charlie Munger. And then they snatch it with what he calls gumption. And so it's not about, it's not about taking masses of risk all the time. It's about waiting until the odds are in your favor. And so to a great extent, when you look at the rules of the game as revealed by saints Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett,

• 30:48Speaker 02

  the patron saints of money and markets. What they're really showing you is this combination of extreme patience and then extreme aggressiveness. And then going back to doing nothing. And you saw this also with Howard Marks during the financial crisis where Marks was extremely cautious around 2007. Saw all of the ways in which the market was being reckless. Saw that people were accepting deals that they never would usually accept because they were pushing the limits. And so he was very cautious. And then suddenly, when everything went to hell in 2008, 2009, he starts to get very excited.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  At the same point that everyone else is panicking because suddenly he sees that the valuations have shifted the odds. So that suddenly the odds of making money are tremendously in his favor. And so there was this extraordinary period that he talked about with me that I write about in the book where over 15 weeks at the pinnacle of fear and panic during the financial crisis, he and his partner Bruce Cauch invested 500 to 600 million dollars a week in toxic bonds that were imploding. And so So here's a guy who's extremely cautious, who is a self-confessed warrior. And yet he's waiting, waiting, waiting. Suddenly, the odds turn in his favor.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  And he bet something like $8 billion and made about a $9 billion profit during the financial crisis. And because of those bets that he made at the peak of the financial crisis. And so it's a very nuanced question, how you weigh risk? And how you think about the necessity of surviving by not pushing the limits too much. But then also recognizing that there are moments where suddenly the odds turn in your favor. And you really need to grab those opportunities. So there's this strange kind of contradictory talent for both being very cautious and then suddenly turning extremely aggressive.

• 33:00Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about some of the other folks in the book, one of the other kind of themes is this idea of simplicity. And it comes up over and over again, where you talk about Greenblatt or others. And this idea of simplicity, again, almost feels too easy, right? It feels like we as humans, in order to outperform, need to have the next great high-frequency trading algorithm. But ultimately, it seems like most of these investors have relatively small portfolios. They're highly concentrated. They're very simple. They know their circle of competence. And so is that part of doing something different than the crowd? The fact that they just keep it really simple?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a guy I write about later in the book called Ken Schubenstein. He's a very brilliant guy, who's a friend of mine, who actually quit the investment business to become a neurologist a couple of years ago. A very unusual guy with a great understanding of the brain. And he once said to me, the part of the problem for highly intelligent people is that they got rewarded at school and college for solving really complex problems. And so if you were someone like him, he got into medical school. He got an MBA. He's got so many degrees from Columbia and he's taught at Columbia. And so here was someone who was just rewarded for being really bright. And then you get in the investment business and...

• 34:22Speaker 02

  As I write in the book, it's not like Olympic diving where there are extra points for difficulty. The market doesn't care whether you pick something that's really complex and subtle and required great sophistication. And so you can actually make a tremendous amount of money just by keeping it simple. And the thing that brought this home to me really beautifully was when I interviewed Joel Greenblatt, who famously made forty percent a year for twenty years at Gotham Capital. So one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time. And when I interviewed him at his home in the Hamptons, was quizzing him about simplicity and about what his secrets of success were, he just said to me, look, it all comes down to this.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  All you're doing is valuing a business and then buying it for much less than it's worth. And he said, everything else is really just nonsense. None of it matters. And he said, for example, if I'm buying a supermarket, for example, in the Midwest, why do I care if they're having a sovereign debt crisis in Greece, for example? And so he said, people are reading the newspaper and they're getting swept up in all of this news. It's actually totally irrelevant. And so he said, what he's trying to do, he's not trying to predict what's going to happen with inflation or what's going to happen with the stock market, which is kind of unknowable. Nobody can predict whether it's going up or down.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  All he's trying to do is find a business, value it, and then buy it for much less than it's worth. And he said, that's an incredibly clarifying thing to do because you suddenly realize that most of what everybody else is doing is nonsense. And it enables you to simplify your entire pursuit of investment success. And what's fascinating to me is that I actually think you can apply this in pretty much every area of life. So you can say, I interviewed Dean Ornish, this famous expert on health, for example, who figured out the Ornish Diet for how to reverse heart disease.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Basically, Ornis has spent something like forty five years studying nutrition and exercise and all of these other things to figure out how you reverse heart disease and other chronic chronic ailments. And and he summed it all up in something like eight words where where basically he he he was very close to Steve Jobs, it's one of his closest friends. And he said that Steve Jobs had the same had the same attitude that Jobs used to say to him, I'm prouder of what I've left out of our technology than what I put in. It was always about simplification simplicity, simplifying everything, reducing complexity. And so this to me becomes a kind of master principle is how do you simplify things so

• 37:10Speaker 02

  that you're you're getting at the essence of everything. And and one of the most beautiful examples to me, which I write about in the book, which people may think I'm nuts, but I think it's a perfect example of this, is there is six hundred and thirteen commandments in the Old Testament, and nobody can remember what these six hundred and thirteen commandments are. And so then you look at the ten commandments and you're like, okay, so we needed this top ten list, you reduced it to ten. And then there's this wonderful thing where there was this great sage, Hillel, who was asked by some convert to sum up the entire Old Testament while standing on one leg. And he said, do not do to others what you wouldn't have them do to you. It's just the golden rule. And and and and he said, all the rest

• 37:52Speaker 02

  is commentary. Now go learn. And so so basically it just becomes love thy neighbor, just just behave in a decent way, just be kind, don't do to people what you wouldn't what you wouldn't want them to do to you. And it struck me that that's a kind of master principle. If you can reduce the complexity of the Old Testament, of the entire Old Testament, into that one rule of just behave decently to other people because you wouldn't want them to behave meanly to you. And you can reduce all of of nutrition science to eight words. And you can reduce all of investing down to value a business and buy it for less. That's a that's a really important principle. And so so part of what I'm doing in the book is I'm trying to find these kind of master principles that apply in multiple areas of life, because it it makes me think, well, if this applies just as well,

• 38:38Speaker 02

  In spirituality and in medicine and health, as in investing, it's probably true and it's probably powerful. And I, and I think that's the case with cloning as well, that when you look at something like cloning, just this idea of borrowing the best ideas from people who are smarter and wiser than you, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, you see it in every area. You, you see it in literature, in painting, in music, in medicine, and you see it in business as well. I remember Charlie Munger talking about Walmart and saying that Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, just was absolutely fanatical about taking, taking the best ideas from other businesses and then, and then just using them himself. And,

• 39:18Speaker 02

  and it was his fanaticism that set him apart. And I, and I think that's often the case with, with the most successful people. It's, it's not that necessarily the principles, their operating principles are different than the rest of us. It's this element of fanaticism. It's, it's when you find a concept that works, like cloning, or like simplicity, um, you really want to go a thousand percent on it. If it's, if it's a really smart idea that resonates with you, go, go big on it. And that's, that's definitely what I see with people like, like Manish Padraig. When, when he discovered cloning, he, he just went crazy. He was like, why, why would I not do this? And he's like, if nobody else will do it, let, let me do it.

• 40:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes, it makes so much sense when you put it with such clarity. Uh, one of the other ideas that you talk through is, uh, when writing about Nick's sleep, um, this idea that basically, uh, don't focus on the things with the, uh, or you have to focus on things with the longest shelf life, not necessarily the things that come and go. Um, and then you even go into this idea of being willing to withstand suffering, right? You, you, if you really understand the long term, almost the short term doesn't matter. Um, and that also kind of plays into this idea, uh, Tom Gainer, uh, where you talk about the best investors build habits that compound over time. And so as you start to kind of think through this, it feels like most investors, that long-term thinking ends up actually putting them at ease in the short term, and they focus more on process.

• 40:48Anthony Pompliano?

  An outcome, understanding that if I do the process correctly, I have a long term time horizon. I am likely to end up winning more than I'm losing. Is that, is that a fair characterization?

• 40:56Speaker 02

  I, yeah, I, this is a really important idea. I, I ended up writing about this guy Nick Sleepy, who you mentioned, who's a fascinating character who Nick, Nick and, Nick and his partner Zach, who,

• 41:10Speaker 02

  they, they retired as hedge fund managers at the ripe old age of forty five. And, and decided that they would spend the second half of their lives giving away the money, basically. They, they set up a hedge fund called Nomad, but they regarded almost as a, an intellectual and spiritual and metaphysical experiment where they thought, well, let's just do everything in the highest quality way. So we're going to do everything totally different than the sort of short term, get rich quick strategies on Wall Street. They were like, we're going to treat our shareholders incredibly fairly. We're going to be really long term, really patient. And so they set up this fund Nomad and they beat the market by something like eight hundred and four percentage points over the next thirteen years. So it's an incredible experiment in, in, in how to do things

• 41:55Speaker 02

  in a very hyper rational, hyper patient way. That's the opposite of what Wall Street did. And, and so what's really fascinating is it becomes this kind of this morality tale about the benefits of deferred gratification. So, so what Nick pointed out to me is most people on Wall Street, they're just, they're fixated on all of this short term stuff like, is this company going to beat its quarterly earnings estimates? So they're focused literally on information for the next twelve weeks. Or will it beat its estimates for the year? And, and so people are constantly fixated on the short term and they sit there with their four Bloomberg terminals, which are sort of, four Bloomberg screens, which are pumping all of this, this material at them constantly.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  These, these flashing figures of what, what the latest numbers are, what the latest news alerts were. And what Nick and Zach did. They literally put their Bloomberg terminal, their one terminal, on a low side stool with no chair, so it was physically uncomfortable for them to sit at this thing. Zach said, at a certain point, you would just say, oh, my back's hurting. And you'd have to, you'd have to move away from this very ephemeral, short-term information. Because what they wanted to do was to play what they called this long, simple game, where they would just own a handful of companies that they understood incredibly well, and that had good long-term prospects. And so, this, this has led them to invest enormously, for example, in Amazon and Costco. And so, both, both of them, when they retired, I mean,

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Nick's stock portfolio, when he retired, it's a nine-figure stock portfolio. His personal portfolio was literally Costco, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway. That was it, a three-stock portfolio. Now, now he owns four stocks. Zach owned about six stocks, but most of it was in, was in Amazon, Costco, and Berkshire. He had more than seventy percent of his personal portfolio in Amazon. And it was just because they were playing this long game, and they were saying, well, Amazon has an amazing destination, because, look, they keep treating their customers better and better. They keep giving them more and more value, more and more efficiency, faster and faster service, cheaper and cheaper products. And so, the destination is likely to be good in ten, fifteen, twenty years. So, so in a world where most people are focusing on the short term,

• 44:09Speaker 02

  on what's going to happen over the next twelve weeks, or six months, or a year, it became an enormous advantage for them to focus on the long term. And that turns out to be true, I think, in every area of your life. If you think about things like studying, a, a, a college. I mean, it's a pain in the butt to be studying really hard to become a doctor, or, or a lawyer, or an investment banker, or whatever. It's hard, right? But the rewards come down, down the road. Same with, with exercise. I, I can't stand exercise, but clearly it has tremendous benefits, and so, so I have to do it. Same with dieting or controlling what you eat. It, you're, you're taking the short-term pain because of long-term benefits.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  And I, I think, there, there's a wonderful thing where Charlie Munro- Had said that if you're not born with a deferred gratification gene, it's very hard to be a great investor. And I think that's true. I think you have to be able to to focus on the reward that's going to come down the road if you adopt good habits. And that and that applies in every area of your life. So so you want to always be thinking, well, am I doing something that's leading me towards this good destination in five, 10, 15, 20, 30 years? And what are the inputs that will get me to that destination? And because most people are focusing on the short term, the more you can shift your life and you're investing toward that focus on the long term,

• 45:37Speaker 02

  the more I think it becomes an enormous competitive advantage.

• 45:40Anthony Pompliano?

  The last topic I want to talk about comes out of a little bit around Arnold Vandenberg, where it's essentially being rich is not just financial, right? There is this idea of money, but also happiness, kind of a clarity of mind or a calmness, a peace of mind as well. And obviously, you titled the book Richer, Wiser, Happier. Around happiness, how many of these guys, and they all tend to be guys, are happy versus they are pursuing something else? And is there anything that really stuck out to you as you talk to the best investors in the world around happiness and kind of the non-financial aspects of their life?

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think one of the greatest lessons that I've got personally from spending so much time with these investors is that that you realize that it's hard to be happy unless you're deeply aligned with who you are. And so when I look at people like Monish Pabri, who I think is a happy person, or my friend Guy Spear, who I write about just briefly, but who I helped write his autobiography, The Educational Value Investor, or someone like Charlie Munger, who I interviewed, I would say for the most part, they've been very happy because they're deeply aligned with who they are in all of its idiosyncrasies. And I think what the money does more than anything.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  For these people who've made tremendous amounts of money is that it gives them this this independence, this ability to live in alignment with who they are. But it doesn't, it doesn't shield them from these other problems that all of us have in life. It doesn't shield them from difficult relationships with their wives or their kids getting sick or their own health. They've, they've all had problems. You look at someone like Charlie Munger, his, his, his son died at the age of nine. I mean, Munger's had a incredible, happy, rich, successful 97 year life, but he lost a son to leukemia. He lost an eye.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  He's lost two wives, you know, he, he had one marriage end in divorce and one, his, his second wife died after many years of marriage. And so one of the reasons why I write about that is that I think that gives you a certain indication that however much money you have, you really need to focus on where you're going to get your resilience, where you're going to get your equanimity. And so I write a lot, for example, about Bill Miller, who's this great investor who went through hell during the financial crisis. And Miller is obsessed with Stoic philosophy, which resonates with a lot of the great investors. And, and one of the reasons why Stoic philosophy is so useful, both for investing and in life,

• 48:28Speaker 02

  is that what the Stoics focused on is, is saying, well, I can't necessarily control all of the external circumstances in my life, like what happens with COVID variants or what happens with the economy or what happens with inflation or whether the stock market goes up or what happens with, with, you know, my family's health or anything like that. But I, but there, but let me focus on the things that I can control, like my own attitude of mind, behaving honorably, behaving decently to people, treating people well. And so they were constantly focusing on distinguishing between what they can and can't control. And so for Bill Miller, one way that he got equanimity after the disaster of the financial

• 49:10Speaker 02

  crisis was saying, well, I can't really control what people are going to say about me, but I can control being honest about the mistakes I've made. Being learning from the mistakes I've made, so in his case diversifying a little more because he said, I didn't realise how catastrophically wrong I could have been. Um. Cause he'd only been right for decades, basically, and suddenly he was incredibly wrong. And so he learned from his mistakes, he had good humour about um his own flaws. And he really worked hard at the process of of doing the right thing in the way that he invested. He said, look, if I continue to buy stocks for less than they're worth, I think that over the long run that works. And so he's had this extraordinary recovery over the last decade or so, where he's been one of the most successful fund managers in the world over the last twelve, thirteen years.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  By go by just sticking with it, persevering. And so I think there are clues there about how to behave. You you know that however rich you are, however successful you are, however famous you are, however handsome you are, however lucky you are. You're still subject to to what Hamlet called the the slings and arrows of fortune. You know, we all we all go through the wringer sooner or later. So you have to work on your equanimity, have to work on um on your peace of mind, which is one reason why so many of the great investors focus on things like. Um. Meditation and and exercise and and um. Because they understand that it's really important to have peace of mind, both in markets and in life, because you're going to go through the wringer at a certain point.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  I think one of the other clues you get from seeing the great investors' lives is that the ones who are happiest tend to have a purpose beyond themselves. And I think the ones who are just focused on maximising their own wealth and their own brand name and their own fame. I think there's something very stunted and limited about that. And so one of the reasons why I write about Arnold Fendenberg as the final person to focus on in the book. Is that he really embodies for me what it means to have a truly successful life and truly abundant life. And and that includes not just the fact that he's been a very successful investor over many decades.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  But the fact that he has incredible relationships, really deep, wonderful relationships, not only with his family, but with the people he works with and with with with friends. And he's very focused on his health. Um, he's, he, I, I spent a couple of days with him in Austin, Texas, and he's, he, he, he was virtually starving himself, except for when he was eating like sort of celery and beetroot smoothies. Because he, he said he wanted to get back to his fighting weight and he, he weighed about forty pounds less than me already. And, and still wanted to lose about five pounds. So he's really focused on, on fitness and health. He was, uh, he's now eighty-two and he can still sort of, uh, he does so much hot yoga that he could put his foot above his head here, you know,

• 51:57Speaker 02

  while standing. Um, so, so relationships are absolutely key. Um, health is key, finding, finding ways to share with others philanthropically, finding ways to share your time, your, your, your love, your talents, whatever it is with other people, absolutely key. So, so I'm not looking at the greatest investors and saying, oh, look, they're all really rich. And so as a result, they must be happy. That, that would be really dumb. But I think because they're very rational, they really think a lot about what it takes to have a happy life. And they give you really important clues about these things like resilience, equanimity, sharing with others, um, uh, getting beyond your own ego, your, your own wealth.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Um, but at the same time, understanding that the, the, the, that the money isn't irrelevant because it, what it gives you is this independence, this ability to live in a way that's aligned with who you truly are. And, and part of, part of it for me, part of the lesson for me is I don't think I actually need to be vastly wealthy to live in alignment with who I am. I need to know that that's really important and that there are certain things that play to my skills and my interests and my temperament. And let me focus on that because being truly aligned with who I am is clearly really important. Because a, again, it goes back to what we were saying before, you want to play games that, that, that you are equipped to win. And so, so I think one of the key lessons for me from seeing the great investors,

• 53:24Speaker 02

  the, the ones who are happier and more successful is to decide. When I'm appraising a project to do, or who to work with, or where to live, or what type of home to live, is it deeply in alignment with who I am, with what I care about? And I don't think you have to be vastly rich to do that. It helps to have money. But I think just knowing that that deep alignment with your idiosyncrasies and your priorities, knowing that that's key, is really helpful to me, anyway.

• 53:56Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about moving forward, you have these conversations, obviously, for the book, but you also have these conversations with great investors all the time. Are there questions that you have left, or questions that are unanswered, things that you're now intellectually pursuing and you're trying to get answers to?

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, constantly, constantly. I mean, I had, I'm talking with Bill Miller tomorrow, and I've interviewed Bill Miller over 20 years, probably for about 100 hours. And there's always stuff that you're trying to learn from someone like that, because his mind is so active. And likewise, I just had lunch with a remarkable hedge fund manager, and I'm asking him about his meditation practice, and seeing how his meditation practice has changed. And just to see, we're comparing our meditation practices, because I'm saying, well, so has he figured out something that I've not figured out, and I have to shift what I'm doing?

• 54:56Speaker 02

  And one of the things we were talking about, it sounds like a really minor point, but he was saying he's really trying to listen to what's the ideal thing for me to be doing at this point? Should I be reading an analyst's report? Should I be reading an annual shovel the letter? Or should I be meditating? Or should I be exercising? And he said he's really trying to listen intuitively to what's the best thing for him to do at that moment. And so I was saying to him, do you find it helpful for you just to have set routines, where you're just saying, no, no, I should meditate at this time, and I should do this? And he's saying, yeah, that's how it used to be. I used to just have rules, but now it's much more intuitive. So he said, I have a default position

• 55:38Speaker 02

  that I should be meditating first thing in the morning. But he said, I'm also aware that it doesn't have to be that way, that I can go in a different direction. And that, that sounds like a really, he said, excuse me. That sounds like a really esoteric question, but that's something that I'm wrestling with the whole time because I'm trying to think, I always have this slight sense that I'm dropping about a dozen balls, you know, that I'm shuffling twenty balls and I'm dropping a dozen of them. And so I'm always trying to think, what should I be doing at this moment? And so do I need to have more rules? Do I need to have more routines? Or can I be more intuitive? And so that's just an example that just come up in the last couple of hours or something where I'm, I'm, I'm actually wrestling with how, how to think about my own habits and

• 56:22Speaker 02

  routines and whether there's something I can learn from him about how to structure things like my own meditation. And just knowing the fact that also when I asked him about that Chinese stock that I had bought and he's like, yeah, that's just not a game I'm, I, I'm gonna play. It's, he has a, is a 12 stock portfolio and he's like, I don't need to own that. That's really clarifying for me. Just to say, it's just reminding me, yeah, play the games that you're equipped to win and stop messing around. Stop trying to complicate things. Keep it simple. That his, his tremendous advantage is his ability to know himself and be simple and play this long, simple game. He owns 12 stocks. Most of his money is in the top six or seven and he doesn't trade and he ignores the volatility

• 57:06Speaker 02

  of the market and he sticks with what he does well. There's incredible simplicity to that. So, so some of it is learning new stuff when I'm interviewing these people and some of it is reinforcing these old lessons. It's saying, there's someone who actually embodies the essence of what I'm writing about when I'm writing about simplicity and playing games you win. And it, and it just reminds me, okay, I need to reorient. I need to recalibrate. I'm, I'm a little out of whack here. Let, let, let me be more like him. Does that make any sense? It's a

• 57:35Anthony Pompliano?

  It's, it's an incredible answer. I, I, I think that when you start thinking about balance and you start thinking about habits and you start thinking about that fanaticism we talked about earlier, some people end up being what I would consider fanatical about the intricate details. I have to wake up at seven AM. I have to be meditating by seven fifteen. I have to eat this Exactly. And in some way, you can be a believer in maybe like a Jaco Willink, discipline equals freedom, but you also can become a prisoner of that discipline to some degree as well, where your entire day is ruined if you don't meditate right at 7:15, or you happen to maybe eat a little bit more food or a little less, or something a little different, etc.

• 58:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I think that ultimately it's more of a directional, you know what works for you, and it's okay if you meditate at 7:17, not 7:15. The world doesn't end, right?

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, or if you say, today it's not gonna happen. Today it's not gonna happen. But this is, this is a phrase that I used from Tom Gainer, had a profound effect on me, where Tom Gainer says, you, you wanna pick habits that are directionally correct. And so you know that you're gonna be calmer and more rational if you meditate. And you know that you're gonna be fitter and healthier if you exercise, and you're probably gonna deal with stress better if you exercise. And you, you know that your health is gonna be better if you don't eat enormous amounts of sugar and carbs and the like, right?

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Packaged goods, right? We, we basically know this stuff, but some people are gonna have to be utterly fanatical and perfect because of their nature. But what Tom Gainer said to me, which had a profound impact on me, is he thinks that it's more sustainable if, instead of trying to be optimal, you're constantly just trying to be directionally correct. And so just the knowledge that you need to get back to meditating, get back to exercising, get back to eating right, that all of those things affect your cognitive performance, that all, all of those things affect how you deal with the emotional trials of the market

• 59:52Speaker 02

  and of your relationships, things like that, they make you less reactive to traffic or, or to the argument with your kid when your kid says something insulting to you or whatever. If you can be directionally correct with all of those things, that's, that's massively helpful. And so.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  One thing that I would say, if you combine that idea of being directionally correct with this other thing that I talk about in the book, which is the art of subtraction, this is massively helpful. And so for me, the art of subtraction is basically saying, here are the things that really play to my strengths. Here are the things that I care about most and that I'm best at. These are the games that I should be playing. And everything else is peripheral. And so if you pick a handful of things that are really the key things in your life, and you go big on them, and then you adopt habits that are directionally correct, that make you better and better towards this sort of good destination, good

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  long-term destination, that's pretty unstoppable. And so for me, partly because my mind is kind of all over the place, and I'm always thinking about lots of different things, I have to subtract. I have to say, okay, so what really matters here? Let me really keep thinking about what's going to make a difference in my life, what I'm really built to do, and kind of filter out almost everything else, and then just try to be directionally correct in those areas. And this sounds, I don't know, maybe it sounds kind of banal, but I think it's really important to focus on the things that are really key to you and that you're best at. And when I look at someone, say like Bill Miller, one thing

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  that the money has done to him is he just doesn't bother with things like filling his car with gas, or getting his house decorated. You know, he gets other people to do that because he's just not interested. And so he's just focusing on adding value for his shareholders by just reading, thinking, investing. And that's it. Everything else is peripheral. And so I think knowing yourself well enough to know what game it is you're playing, what you're likely to win, what you care about most, and subtracting the rest. That that's a really key key part of how to live a successful life.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  And then if you combine that with with what Nick Sli calls destination analysis, where you're saying, okay, here's the desirable destination in ten, fifteen, twenty years. What are the inputs needed to get there?

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  That that that's that's a really powerful approach. And I think because most people are just reacting to whatever's happening to them in the moment,

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  there's this sort of scattered ad hoc quality where you're just being buffeted by the by the by the waves and the storm every other minute. And so so that that that combination has been really helpful for me. That that's that's what I keep trying to come back to is subtracting is saying, let me not do more, let me focus on what's really important here.

• 1:03:00Anthony Pompliano?

  It's fascinating when you think about LeBron James, the NBA player, who spends a million dollars a year, he says, on his body, on making sure that he's fresh, making sure that he is prepared, right? Making sure he's focused on what he needs to do. I don't have the ability to make sure I'm stretching or massaging myself or what, right? No, I need the help and spending the money is well worth it, given the output and performance that I have. And so it's very similar to what you're talking about here.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Mostly we don't think of the investor as the athlete, but it's pretty close, right?

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I I think you see this with high performers in every field, that they're focusing, they're focusing pretty narrowly and deeply. And so so it's saying, this is the game I'm playing, let me go deep on this. And so so for me, I keep thinking of this because, for example, I think, well, so should I be doing a podcast? Should I should I host a podcast? Because I could interview all of these famous investors. And then I'm like, but does that get me away from writing or not? Is it is it just going to distract me? Or does it add? Let me think really. And so that's the filter that I'm thinking of it through. Or journalism, should I be writing for magazines? Or should I really just be focusing on books because they're less ephemeral? They're they're lost, they can have an enduring impact. And what really plays to my strengths here?

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  And that's something I've really learned from the great investors is that filter of just saying, no, no, this is, this is, um, one phrase I kept having when I, when I was in my mind, when I was working on this book is I kept saying, what's the eye of the eye of the bullseye? What do I really want to focus on here in this chapter? What's the eye of the eye of the bullseye? And in a way, I think you want to do that with your life as well. And, and I don't think you can do that many things well. And so, so for me, I really care about my family and I care about reading and learning and my philosophical and spiritual life. That's really important for me. I don't really care about exercise that much, but I can see that it's really important. So I do it.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Um, meditation, important, um, for equanimity and for your spiritual life, all of that. Um, and then, and then it's writing. And, and so just to know, okay, so there are about five things. I mean, it sounds like more, but it's basically, it's about five things. I can probably only do two or three of them really well. Um, and so I, I would encourage you to kind of go through that process of just thinking about what can I subtract?

• 1:05:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it is, uh, it's something where when I talked to you, um, this went better than I thought it would. I, I, I really enjoyed the book and, um,

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  It's good to start with low expectations.

• 1:05:38Anthony Pompliano?

  No, definitely not. The, the book, I think was, it was so clear that you thought so deeply about so many of these things. And then you also were talking to people who had thought very deeply about them. And so there's a level of quality, I think, that comes out when you put those two types of people together in a conversation. Where can we send people to get the book if they would, uh, would want to read it? And I, I honestly, those that listen know I never do this, but I highly recommend people go get this book. It, uh, it really is one of those that I could see myself reading again and again through the years. So where can we send folks?

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  You can you can buy the book anywhere. It's called Richer, Wiser, Happier. It's pretty cheap on Amazon these days. It's I think it's $20 for the hardback, which is pretty good value. I have a website, which is WilliamGreenWrites.com, which is something that I cloned from Michael Lewis, because when I saw that the URL WilliamGreen.com was gone, I just thought, well, what does Michael Lewis do? Because he's a really good writer, and he has MichaelLewisWrites.com, so I just cloned that directly. And that has stuff about me, stuff about the book, and lots of podcasts and interviews and stuff that I've done that you can get there. And then I'm on Twitter. I think my handle is WilliamGreen72.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  You can connect with me at LinkedIn. And I'm really happy to hear from people. I mean, one of the things that's been most joyful about this process, because because writing itself is pretty hellish. But the process of after the book came out, of having people write to me and tell me what's had an impact on them, and ask me questions, and recommend books to me, and ask me to recommend things, that's been a really joyful process. I love the fact that people are reading the book and are deeply engaged in these questions. And I feel like I'm on a journey with the reader, where I'm trying to figure out how to think better, and how to live better, and how to invest better in it. So I really welcome that dialogue. So please feel free to reach out to me. I'm not always brilliant about replying, but I try to do it.

• 1:07:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, listen, if you're going to keep on your journey, I'm going to keep paying attention. So I appreciate you coming on, Williams, and spend the time here. Again, everyone, go grab the book, Richer, Wiser, Happier. And we will definitely have to do this again in the future as you continue on your journey.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  I would love to. Thank you so much for having me.