Why Some People Become Ridiculously Rich | William Leith | Modern Wisdom Podcast 183

William Leith is a journalist & an author. Acquiring an incredible fortune is the goal of many, but what is the true cost of being stupendously rich? Expect to learn how to make money from The Real Wolf Of Wall Street Jordan Belfort, the downside of wealth from a Russian half-billionaire who lives alone in a British mansion with his butler, how to avoid risk by the hottest thinker on the planet Nassim Taleb and much more... Sponsor: Shop Tailored Athlete’s full range at https://link.tailoredathlete.co.uk/modernwisdom (FREE shipping automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Buy The Trick - https://amzn.to/2BJK959 Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #thewolfofwallstreet #wealth #happiness - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think that this pushing the envelope is part of us. And I think the people who make the most money are kind of, sometimes they are unbridled examples of this, they're runaway examples of pushing and pushing and pushing.

• 0:25Chris Williamson?

  William, how are you?

• 0:27Speaker 00

  I'm okay. I know the world's in a, this is what I say to everybody, I'm fine. I dread to think what's gonna happen next. The world is in a very peculiar state. For me, it's the same. I'm doing the same thing as I always do, which is try and think of things to write, sit at home, go for walks, you know, meet the same few people, socially distanced. Now, although obviously not things like my son and that sort of thing, but my life's more or less the same. But I know that loads of people are either, I just had this conversation, I suppose I must have it every day, because it is the conversation to have.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  You're either, some people are locked in a situation they hate, some people have to go to work and put themselves in terrible danger. Anyway, so I keep thinking of that. But, you know, like you said, it's lovely weather, you can go for walks, and my life's the same, so.

• 1:30Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I keep on saying it to people that I appreciate for some, it might be challenging, but for me, it's not a massive difference from what I'm used to. You know, I've got slightly fewer people to see, slightly more time to read, and a little bit worse internet connection, because everybody's online, but other than that, it's all good. So today, we're talking about money, very sort of passionate topic, a very viscerally emotion-inducing topic. We're talking about why some people can make it and others can't.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  It's a very weird thing, money, because you think you know what it is, you spend your whole life with this concept of money, you know, you've got it, you haven't got it, what is it? Oh, it's what's in my pocket. And then when you try and sort of drill down into it, try and understand what it is, how it arose.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  What it does to your head, then it becomes this very weird thing. And I realized that quite quickly. That's why I wanted to write about it, because I didn't understand it. There was a big, you know, the global financial crash. And I think that wasn't the very first time I'd thought about money, because I'd once tried to write about it. And found, after writing, I wrote a 1,200 word article on the origins of money from first principles. And I thought, God, not going there again. That is so weird. And then we had this big crash.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  And I realized that there was something wrong with, you know, money was something that really helped us and really enabled all sorts of things to happen. But there was something deeply wrong with it. And I wondered what that was. And was there a way I could simply understand it? Was there a simple way to understand what was wrong? So after that, I began to think about it a bit. And I was thinking, yeah, money, God, I could write about that. No, I couldn't. No, no, no. And then one day, and I realized all this time, I kept interviewing these people who made tons of money. And I would say, you know, how did you make this money?

• 3:50Speaker 00

  And it's almost like you're asking somebody, hey, your garden's tidy, how did you do that? And they say, well, you see that grass? I got this mower, I mowed it. And then I painted the shed, like all this. And you ask people how they make money and they go, well, first of all, I thought, yeah, you know, what's going on in the hi-fi market? And then I thought, yeah, I could make it a bit cheaper. You think, yeah, that's a good point, yeah. And then I made it a bit cheaper. And how much did you make? Oh, you know, like 10 million. So you think the people who make a load of money, they sort of understand it and it seems like this logical thing. But for 99.9% of us, it's

• 4:36Speaker 00

  It's not logical and, you know, obviously if you could do it, if you could do it, you would. And I couldn't do it. And I actually had some pathological problem with money, which is that even when I made a load of it, it would somehow get into me and change me. So I'd become this person who had some money and then it would all be gone. Because identifying as yourself with your money is terrible. You've got to be the person who doesn't have money and then have the money.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  So I thought my problem with money was a bit like, you know, I'm a, what do you call it? Reformed alcoholic. I've been teetotal for seven and a half years.

• 5:19Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Congratulations.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  Well, I wouldn't, you know, and I know that I can't touch alcohol. You're drinking, what is it, an energy drink?

• 5:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, this is, there's no, there's no caffeine in this. Although shout out to Noco. Thank you for supporting the podcast, but this is just some BCAAs. Flavored, flavored elderflower, nothing, nothing too excessive.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Right, right. So, so I'd had this, you know, and anything that sort of, that sped life up, whether it was, you know, cocaine, I had a terrible thing with that. Alcohol, somehow I would be unable to, the person who had had the substance was, seemed to be not me, but some raging crazy person. So like two drinks and the chance I have a third drink is very high. Three drinks and the chance I have a fourth drink is so high that all bets are off.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  And then where do I wake up? I don't know.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  So, so, and I had that relationship with money, which is like, oh, I've got some money, you know, I can have this, I can have that. Well, why not? Oh, it's all gone. Well, I'll borrow some. Anyway, so obviously there was some sort of drug-like quality to it. And it became part of you. It becomes part of you because it's like,

• 6:50Speaker 00

  The way I explain it is it's like part of you is a bully. And is saying, go on, have this, have this. And another part of you is like, well, I guess I could. I guess I could have that. And you buy yourself out of every, you know, oh, I'll go to both parties and then I'll get a taxi back. Rather than, you have to make a choice, you know, which party are you going to go to? So, um, I knew I had a problem with it, which was even more reason to. To write about it, to try and sort of study it. And I kept on interviewing these people and I thought, yeah, they do tell me how they make money, but I'd like to think about this a bit more.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  And the turning point came when I interviewed Jordan Belfort, who was the, who is the person who was. Portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film The Wolf of Wall Street.

• 7:50Chris Williamson?

  Did you, did you interview him before you knew you were going to write The Trick?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Basically, um, the, the story was that I had got a contract to write a book about money. And I, and I didn't know how to do it. So.

• 8:08Chris Williamson?

  Jordan, mate.

• 8:11Chris Williamson?

  Are you there? I've heard that you did okay with money.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  It was, well, the thing is, you did okay with money, but also had a terrible problem with it. And I realized that. He was, he was everything that. He was the confusion in one person, which is. How do you make a hundred million? But then, why, when you've made a hundred million? Do you commit a fraud that might well land you in jail for money that you could never spend? So I thought. Here's something that's interesting because he's got a real gift for making money. But it's almost like, why would you then commit a fraud?

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Why would you then, you know, put yourself at that risk of going to jail if somebody catches you? Which they did. So I thought that was really interesting. So I spent a few days with him and he was rehabilitating himself. Actually, in a way that was quite admirable, you know, he's really down and out. He owes a hundred million at this point. And he's wanting to teach people how to make money. And he's got this great confidence and this great salesmanship. And he's telling me that the greatest part of his life was when he had this company and he had this room full of brokers.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  And he was every day giving them these talks to inspire them, to motivate them. And whatever he said worked and he wanted to get back to being that person. Because that was where it really, that was one of the things that it was for him. Was the ability to be on stage and talk to people about how to pull off some trick. And this was, or a series of tricks, which was how to buy stocks and then get other people to buy them so they were worth more. And that worked to a certain extent.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  And then he met somebody who said, do you know what you can do if you want to do even better? You can actually pay people to buy the stocks and then tell them when to sell them. And you can then manipulate the market in a way which is completely illegal. So he did the completely illegal thing and was caught and went to jail. And so here he was after this had happened in his new life, doing a similar thing of getting up in front of people and saying, this is what you have to do if you want to make money. And one of the things was...

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Don't let your stupid emotions get in the way. Another of the things, the overriding thing, I think, and this comes, you mentioned Nassim Taleb, who we'll get to.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  But what he said to me, the first thing I remember he said was,

• 11:30Speaker 00

  "When you get rich, you get rich quick, but that's not at the start. You have to do an awful lot of things before it kicks in. But when it kicks in, it happens very fast. In other words, you're going to spend a long time putting all these pieces together, working out what it is you have to do. And if you do it a bit wrong, it, it, nothing happens. And if you don't do all of it, nothing happens. You have to get this complicated series of things to work. But then when you do, everything happens. So it's a bit like, this is not a linear thing. You go along and, and I thought to myself, it's a bit like learning a language, right?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  You're translating the language into your own language and it seems all very stilted. And every day you learn a new word and every week you learn a new bit of grammar. But basically, nothing much happens. And you think, will I ever get anywhere? And then one day, somehow, it clicks and you realize you, you've got to think in the new language. And then you start, "Oh God, that's what it is. This isn't this painstaking bit of translation. It's not, it's not, you, you, you know, it's not all these labels. It's, it's, it's not the same world with, with, with all these labels on it. It's, it's a different world.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  And the labels are different and the way they think is a bit different. But once you've accepted that and you see that, you're in that new world. So I thought, that's probably how people get rich. It's, it's, it's a complex set of things. And if you read...

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Genuinely good self-help books, ones that don't say, here's a magic, here's a bit of magic, you just need to concentrate on money and it'll all come through your door.

• 13:31Chris Williamson?

  What would you put into that category? Can you put your mouth is with that?

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm saying something like The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. Basically says, you're gonna, if you want to succeed at something, you're gonna have to learn all about it. So let's say you wanted to learn a language, or let's say you wanted to learn the, you know, how to run a garden centre, or whatever it is.

• 14:00Chris Williamson?

  The art of selling.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, anything you want to do, you have to learn about it. And you're gonna start learning about it, and there's gonna be a period in the middle where you don't seem to be getting anywhere, because you're not, you don't seem to be making any progress. But actually, all the work you're putting in now, and will be putting in for the next couple of years, is gonna pay dividends eventually when everything comes together. You're gonna be glad you did all that learning. So you've got to think with the idea of, there's gonna be a future me, who knows how to, you know, make a film, write a book, whatever it is.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  But there's gonna be many, many days when you feel, oh, this isn't working, and how can I move forward? So basically, that's how almost everything seems to work. And that's the, that's the kind of big lesson, that if you want to do something, you've got to do it over and over. It's the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours. It's not entirely that, because...

• 15:09Speaker 00

  You, well, he does say, Malcolm Gladwell does say, you've got to have feedback. You've got to learn. And I realized also that this is very much like science. Right? It's all about looking for patterns. You have a, you have a hypothesis. It's not necessarily your belief. It's something that you're saying might be the case. And then you try and disprove it. And you set up all these experiments to, to, to say, why doesn't this work? And eventually the thing that your hypothesis might survive. And, and then you, you know that you might be getting closer to the truth. So,

• 15:55Speaker 00

  it's kind of like, um, all of these people and all of these people that I interviewed had a method that was a bit like that. They, they, they, um, I mean, I didn't put this in because there was just so much of it, but I'd spent about a year studying Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett.

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  Great guy. Him and Charlie Munger are both fan favorites from this show.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Right, okay. So the thing that, um,

• 16:24Speaker 00

  impressed me, I mean, lots of things. I mean, he's obviously a very, um, strange and very unusual guy. Um, and you realize that when he went to, when he went to Columbia, when he went to university.

• 16:40Chris Williamson?

  Is it the, the Wharton College? Is that what it is?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Well, he, he went to the Wharton and then he went to Columbia and he met Benjamin Graham, who was the guy who wrote The Intelligent Investor. And, um, I think Graham would, he, he had a class of people and he would, uh, you know, say, well, let's talk about the insurance industry or something. And the, the sort of student age Buffett would know all about it and would say, yeah, well, I would say that this company is doing this and next month we'll see that. And Benjamin Graham was like, I beg your pardon. You know all this stuff. Um, but what impressed me, what was incredible is that.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  I remember I did this thing where I I got all the sources I could find and I I imagined a day in his life when he was sixteen. And I think he ran eleven businesses when he was sixteen. And they weren't major businesses. One was a car wash business where he hired kids to wash cars. And actually, there came a point when he dumped that because it wasn't making enough money. And he had a golf ball business where he realized that you could you could go to a golf course in Nebraska. And you could go into the lake where there there were these sunk, you know, sunk costs, the golf balls are all gone. You could get somebody to get the golf balls from the bottom of the lake.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  And then you could post them to some golf ball, secondhand golf ball guy in Illinois, where people paid more for golf balls. So you could, you know, you could just hire people to to get golf balls and then.

• 18:22Chris Williamson?

  Arbitrage opportunity in a lake somewhere in wherever it was he was, yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  And yeah, and there were there were stamp collections, you know, he he realized that a full collection of stamps was worth, you know, two hundred dollars, but a collection with ten stamps missing was worth five dollars. So he would then look at the the sorts of stamps that needed to be, that that that most collections were missing and he'd make up the collection, you know. And he he did, he did ten or eleven of these things all the time when he was sixteen. So he was constantly running these businesses, made more money than his teachers, his parents, extraordinary. And what he was learning was how businesses worked from the ground up.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  So you got an incredible view of what a business was trying to do.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  And how the people who ran it were contributing to it and how how they were frittering things away or not. So he would home in on what really worked about a business. So when he started buying businesses, he had an incredible sort of gut sense. You know, he'd spend a day with people, you know, tell me about your day, tell me what you're buying. And he would really get a sense of how they worked. And so that's learning, isn't it? That's making it a science. It's kind of imbibing it.

• 19:49Chris Williamson?

  So I think one of the interesting things about that, that I've been thinking about recently is because of the imbalance, because of how disproportionately we see people's successes and not their grinds and failures before they are successful, we don't get to see the handle of the hockey stick.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:15Chris Williamson?

  We just get to see the head.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:18Chris Williamson?

  So for the people that are listening, if you can imagine a graph, and it's the shape of a hockey stick laid on its side, and it's going along, and it's flat, and it's flat, and it's flat, and then it just kicks up, and it hits a hits a inflection point, right? Tipping point, as it might.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:32Chris Williamson?

  And the best, because it's rare that you have in normal day to day life, like my mom doesn't have a graph of the stuff happening in her life, you know, like how maybe how much she's meditating if she uses the Headspace app sufficiently. Mum, keep using the Headspace app. But very often, you don't have an objective measure. However, I have done, and it's been this podcast. And I promise you, it's the shape of a hockey stick. It's the shape of a hockey stick. You do tons and tons and tons and tons of work, and not really that much happens. And then something happens and it just goes whoop. And there's a quote that James Clear uses.

• 21:17Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember the American football team. Someone who's listening will know the one that I mean. There's an American football team who has on their wall a quote about a stonemason. And they say, um, we know that it isn't the 100th hit which snaps the stone. We know it is the 99 which came before.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:38Chris Williamson?

  The point with that is that it takes a lot of time to become an overnight success.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:46Chris Williamson?

  And all of the things that we've come up with there. So Jordan Belfort, someone who started off with penny stocks. He learned from the ground floor up. Anybody that's seen the movie knows this. Then he starts to hone his craft on stage in front of a big group of people. Then, moving forward, he even repurposes that now, now that he's barred from operating in the financial sector. He now repurposes that. Then you've got somebody like Warren Buffett, who runs so many businesses. I found out the other day, Warren Buffett, Warren Business, Warren Buffett has 90% of his net worth attributed to 10 trades.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that.

• 22:26Chris Williamson?

  90% of his net worth attributed to 10 investments. Unbelievable. So we've got these people who are all showing the same thing. And yet, all of us, yourself, me, everyone is seduced by the idea of get rich fast. The 10 minute booty abs blaster workout to lean your bum out in this time. Despite the fact that we are shown time and time and time again, that the way to become an overnight success is actually to just grind away at something effectively with a feedback mechanism. Making sure you're doing deliberate practice for a long time.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  I want, I mean, I want so, I don't know if you follow football, that thing that used to happen. But the former England player, Rio Ferdinand, was once asked.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Who is the best player that you ever played with, that you ever, you know, trained with or played with? And he said, and I've forgotten the name of this guy, he said it's such and such, and it's not a familiar name.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  And so the interviewer said, yeah, I kind of remember him. Didn't he play a few games for West Ham or whatever? And he goes, yeah, yeah, he's got so much natural talent, this, this guy. And, you know, he'd had his career, he was now about 30 odd.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  But he said, this guy was, he, he had more talent than anybody I've ever played. What, you mean even so and so? Yeah, yeah, this guy was really extraordinary. And so the interviewer said, well, what happened to him? Why, why, you know, he obviously could play in the Premier League, but why didn't he, why don't we all know his name? And he said, well, he, he didn't have the same work ethic as all these other people. It's like, you know, you, you have to train every day, you have to stay behind after training. If you've got a bit of a, you know, if your fitness isn't quite there, you have to try again and again and again. And maybe you're going to have to work on this move or that move.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  And everybody who succeeds does that. And pure ability isn't quite enough, even if you, even if you train.

• 24:46Chris Williamson?

  Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, exactly. If this guy had trained, maybe he would be better than anybody. He would have been better. This is what Rio Ferdinand was suggesting. But, you know, it's not that these other guys weren't brilliant, it's just that this guy didn't, you know, he worked 95%, but not 99%, and it's that last little bit.

• 25:12Chris Williamson?

  That's where the growth occurs as well, right? And also, as you start to see, as with anything, if there's a bell distribution of normal, right? Out onto the tails, the further that you can push yourself out towards them, the fewer people you are going to have to compete with by definition, right?

• 25:28Speaker 00

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 25:29Chris Williamson?

  So, right, I want you to tell us about the Russian half billionaire and his butler, please. So we've learned about Jordan Belfort, who's this, who's this Russian?

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Well, this, this, this guy, the interesting thing about this guy, somebody was saying to me. This guy lives in the nicest house in, you know, the country, maybe the world. It's, it's this house, a very special house that was built in sixteen ninety-eight or it took a few years, seventeen hundred. And it was built by Nicholas Hawkesmore, the famous architect. But it was originally designed by Christopher Wren, the most famous architect in, in history.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  And, and Wren passed the project on and between them, they managed to concoct this beautiful house. And it has beautiful grounds and it has, you know, the avenue of trees and the amazing reflecting pool. So that you can stand behind the house and you can see it doubled in this reflecting pool and it's, everything is thought of.

• 26:36Chris Williamson?

  Where is it?

• 26:36Speaker 00

  It's, it's in Northamptonshire.

• 26:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay. And why is it, what, what makes it so special? Like it's just pretty and it's got a pool?

• 26:43Speaker 00

  It's, it's, it's beautiful. It's, it's, it's, if you imagine something like Buckingham Palace, but smaller and prettier.

• 26:53Chris Williamson?

  Pretty big, pretty high bar to set there.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's kind, it's kind of, it's, it's a lot smaller than Buckingham Palace, but it's, it's got perfect dimensions. And all these architecture critics would say, ah, this, this house is, it's, it's one of the best houses ever made. So I was interested in the fact that some Russian guy had bought it and I thought, who is he? And so they gave me this story to go and spend a day at this house of this Russian guy. And it was odd, the, the whole thing was odd because he, he'd made us an awful lot of money in the, in the rag trade, clothes. And he had these, these concessions in, in department stores all over the world.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  And, and a lot of stores in China, a lot of stores all over the Far East, a lot in America. And he had somehow, he, he, he dialed, he, he'd found the point at which the, how, how expensive it was to make something compared to how many you sell, compared to the price point you sell it at. And he's got this computer-like brain. And so, and I said to him,

• 28:12Speaker 00

  You sound a bit like Ingvar Kamprad. You know, because I once did this thing on Ikea. I couldn't, Kamprad wouldn't see me, but he actually let, you know, I stayed in some nice house on a lake somewhere in Sweden and I did meet his designers. And the story about Kamprad is that, you know, the designer could show him a table. Here's a table. And say it's made out of, you know, teak or it, well, it's made out of oak or whatever it is, you know, pine, it's made out of pine. And this is how big it is. And Kamprad would look at it and his brain would go, I'd get the pine from the Ukraine and then that would be such and such a ton.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  And if we made, you know, 10,000 tables, that would cost this much per table and the trucking costs, but then we'd have to buy in, in Swedish crowns and then we'd have to sell in, you know, whatever it is. And then we'd, we'd blah, blah, blah, and then the petrol costs. And he would, his mind would be buzzing with all these things. And then he would just say to the guy, okay, do it.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Or like, no, this one's not going to fly. Because he, he would look at everything and he, he would just be working out the whole supply chain. And that's what he was going, I said this to the Russian guy and he said, yeah, that's exactly me. You know, he thinks about where you can get the cotton and who you can, which factory, he has loads of factories in China, you know, which one would it go to? And then where would I sell it? This would be good for Los Angeles stores and it would be good for the blah. And then you'd sell it for $600. Yeah, we'll do it.

• 29:58Chris Williamson?

  We've still got here an unbelievable dexterity and kind of depth of understanding of their own operation. You know, you look at these people who make a lot of cash and sometimes you can discount them as just lucky, fortunate idiots. It doesn't sound like you really, doesn't sound like this Russian guy or Jordan Belfort is, is one of them.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  No, all of these people, I mean, including Alan Sugar and including Howard Schultz and these are people that I interviewed.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  They all looked at their business with a real depth of understanding. You know, Howard Schultz and his coffee shops, how much, how much per square foot would you get back if you rented this, how many, how much would you have to make, you know, he knew all that. And you put comfortable chairs in, you change it a little bit, and he managed to, he had an idea that if you, if you made coffee shops a little tiny bit more like bars, you'd get all the business for coffee. And he was right.

• 31:06Chris Williamson?

  Who does Alan Schultz own, by the way?

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Howard Schultz, he, Starbucks, he was the guy who started Starbucks.

• 31:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  And, and again, he's one of these guys. He's, he, he's obviously brilliant. So many of these guys, they've got a sort of, they remember everything and it's almost like, and it's like with Taleb and his, and his, um, his graphs and, you know, you can see him thinking about like mathematical equations and he can sort of almost draw them, they're in his head, he lives them. It's, it's not like, I mean, he, he, he understands the, the value of how options

• 31:55Speaker 00

  are priced and how likely or unlikely something's about, something is to happen and therefore how much you should spend on predicting that it would happen.

• 32:06Chris Williamson?

  So what, tell me, just tell me what it was like being in this building then, this Russian guy, who's he there with?

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Well, as I, as I say, he, he was living in this vast estate at the time with his butler. It was him and his butler. And the thing I found-

• 32:23Chris Williamson?

  No one else, no-

• 32:24Speaker 00

  No one else. Well, he was, he, he, he would sometimes get models to try on his clothes and he would have these- He ended up marrying one of them, not the one that was there the day I was there, incidentally. But it struck me that he was plowing a lonely furrow in a way, but in this extraordinary luxury. And he said to me, he was going to have dinner. And I said to the butler, you're going to cook him dinner? And he said, yeah, yeah, I always cook him dinner. I said, what, do the two of you just sit around eating? And he goes, oh, no, I eat in the servants quarters.

• 33:00Chris Williamson?

  That's so, so interesting, isn't it?

• 33:02Speaker 00

  I know. So the guy, the guy had a church as well on his, on his land, in his grounds, lovely old church. And it's like, you've got a church, you haven't got a congregation.

• 33:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's just you, it's just you in there. So something I've been thinking about a lot recently as well, actually, is the price that you need to pay for someone's success. So people might look at Nassim Taleb or this Russian billionaire, half billionaire, or Conor McGregor, or some Instagram model or whatever, and say, I want that. But they don't understand the price that you need to pay, not as in the long hours and stuff like that, but the pathologies that come along with having a mindset which permits you to do the thing which you think is good, right?

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:46Chris Williamson?

  What is the price that you need to pay psychologically, biologically, routine wise, in terms of your sleep, in terms of your mental health, in terms of the thoughts that go through your head when your head hits the pillow at night? All of those things, right? Like, what, what is the price that this Russian half billionaire has to pay in order to be such a complete, sort of crazy advanced thinker with regards to his supply chain?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Exactly. The best case I had of that was Felix Dennis.

• 34:20Chris Williamson?

  Who's that?

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Who was, he, he'd made about the same amount of money, about, in, in, in pounds, about probably four or 500 million pounds, that sort of thing. And he, he had this big estate in Warwickshire. And he also had, that was the only place of his I went to, and I went to it twice. And it, but he also had places, he had an estate in the Caribbean, and he had one in Connecticut, and he had various houses. But when I went to his estate in Warwickshire, which was his kind of main place.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  There was, he'd got these, he'd got an avenue of statues which led up to this kind of barn that he'd converted into this kind of luxurious, crazy a place where he sat and contemplated and wrote poetry and that kind of stuff. And the line of statues, and you know, who commissions full-size statues these days? Well, he's dead now, but it was him and the odd kind of dictator, but not many people. And at the very end of this avenue was this a pond

• 35:43Speaker 00

  and a statue of Icarus plunging to his death, the person who in legend had flown too close to the sun. Which I thought was a bit odd because, you know, he himself had done all this unfettered, capitalistic, making these great moves and tons of money. And yet, the thing that was outside his very, the place he went to think was a warning, the warning, "Don't do this too much." So I went in there and I asked him about this and and he said, he thought that making money was

• 36:24Speaker 00

  he kind of said, you know, it had driven him insane in a way, it had driven him crazy, he'd become a crack addict, he'd had an existential crisis which lasted for years, he'd nearly killed himself, and arguably did kill himself with all the crack smoking, because he ended up dying of lung cancer, so surely that had something to do with years of smoking crack. And he said, yeah, he'd made himself into a different person, a person he didn't like. You know, this person who who was hard-driving and obsessive and permanently focused on how to make money, how he could get an advantage in the market of whatever it was he was doing.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  And in a way, he, you sort of think, well, he'd made like 450 million quid or whatever. But he, he should have stopped at 50. That last 400, what was that worth to him? Um, it had, it had done him in. So why do you think he kept going? Well, this is the, this is the big question, and it's a quite, it's a bit like a question for the human race. You know, we want more and more luxury and we're prepared to go to the very edge of um our own sanity and also our own, um, you, you know, we're prepared to take big risks to get just a little bit more.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  We're prepared to, we, we will say, well, I've heard that these forests are, are crucial to the earth's um upkeep. But hell, we want a bit more luxury, so let's chop them down and see if we can get away with it. We might, we might find a way of tweaking it so that we're all right. So I think, I think that this um, this pushing the envelope is part of us. And I think the people who make the most money ha, are kind of, sometimes they are unbridled examples of this. They're, they're runaway examples of pushing and pushing and pushing.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  And also, I mean, I'm going to use an analogy of, of drinking, which isn't necessarily the same, but um the writer and drinker Kingsley Amis once said, um, it's not about being drunk, it's about getting drunk. So the process of getting drunk, the, the, the constant change from being less sober and less, I mean, being drunk, you can keep that. It's getting drunk that's the thing. And so these people, if you think about it.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  The best time they ever had in their life was when they were on that curve. The hockey stick was going right up. Now, they can't, how do they keep going? They don't, they don't want to stop and say, do you know what? Let's have another infinity pool. Let's, let's commission a few more statues. That's part of the, in a way, the pathology. Uh, it, the thing that they crave, it seems to me, is the actual making of the money. You know, you, you can only-

• 39:37Chris Williamson?

  Not the money itself.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can only spend it on certain things. You, what, you, once, once you've spent it on, you know, you can have a private island. You can have a nice house on a private island. You can have a-

• 39:53Chris Williamson?

  A jet and a helicopter.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and, and, and once you've, you can have a Ferrari and then you can have a slightly better Ferrari and also a Range Rover and then a one with tinted windows. And that, you run out of things to buy pretty quickly. Um, and so the, it, it was that process of making money that was so exciting.

• 40:15Chris Williamson?

  Isn't, isn't that, that's something quite profound, I think, there, that the richest people in the world, or some of the richest people in the world, who have more money than they can ever spend, are not, what they're not doing is focusing on the money. They're not focusing on the outcome. They're focusing on the journey. And yet we look at these people and we think, I want the end of that journey. I don't want the hockey stick. It's almost like they're, um, keeping that grinding mentality going because that's where the pleasure is actually brought from, right?

• 40:57Chris Williamson?

  Another thing as well is the, the virtuous mean, I've been throwing this around recently, that we're absolutist beings, right? If you tell me to have one biscuit out of a packet, it's really hard. If you tell me to have none or all of them, that's actually quite easy. I find it quite easy to have no biscuits or all the biscuits, um, because it's a very- Sharp line in the sand, right? Whereas just to have one, to have enough, but not too much is really challenging. I had a neuroscientist on talking about the seven deadly sins, you know, like the fundamental problem with humanity. And every single one of them is fixed by sloth. You need a little bit, but not too much wrath. You need a little bit, but not too much lust. You need a little bit, but not too much.

• 41:39Chris Williamson?

  And it's the same. It's the same greed. Spoke a lot about greed on that as well. You need a little bit. You need to get yourself over the inertia of having nothing. But when you push yourself forward and you chase it too much, it becomes as anything. You turn a tonic into a toxin. You pathologize the thing which liberated you into something which is now actually a prison.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And I looked into, I wondered what greed was. And you've got this Michael Douglas, greed is good, you know, and that's in that film Wall Street where he, he says greed is what's going to save us. Greed's what's going to make America great, etc. And that's going back to Adam Smith, which is, you know, if everybody does what, you know, seeks what they want. Then in a way, you all come together and find the value of everything. And everybody knows what they need to provide to make themselves some money. And it's a self generated, it's an emergent system.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  And of course, that's true up to a point. I actually began to wonder what that point was and where things started.

• 42:52Chris Williamson?

  But that's a good question. Where do we, how do we draw that line?

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Well, I looked, I looked into the history of, of money. The, the whole idea of prosperity is that once we start to exchange things, i.e. trade.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  We naturally start to specialize and people who are good at things end up doing what they're good at. And so at the top end, you've got everybody who's good at something is doing that thing. And they're also, because they only have to do that thing and they can, they can outsource all of the other things, they, they tend to become inventive. So if you, if you raise, if you're good at raising chickens, just say, pretty soon you're going to find out that, you know, if you feed them this, they get a bit bigger quicker. And if you feed the, the males a different one diet from the females, then you'll get more eggs or whatever it is. And you wouldn't have known that if you hadn't specialized. So

• 43:51Speaker 00

  when everybody's specializing, you get all of this innovation. And then you get more and more trade and that leads to more innovation, et cetera. So swapping things is great. When you have money, swapping things is easy because they find a price. And we can all agree on what the money's worth. And I think the, the thing that starts confusing people is when you start applying that to money itself. So when you start applying, you know, trading and specialization to the exchange of money and financial products, it seems

• 44:34Speaker 00

  to me that people can't get their heads around it in the same way that they can get their heads around trading money for goods. Trading money for money, you get, you get bubbles and crashes.

• 44:45Chris Williamson?

  But orders of magnitude there, right?

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:48Chris Williamson?

  You're multiplying the thing by the manipulation of the thing.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. So, so, so it's acceleration rather than speed or whatever. It's, it's things taking off.

• 44:58Chris Williamson?

  Where's Taleb?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  What about him?

• 45:01Chris Williamson?

  Nassim, we need to work out, when me and you were fumbling our way through probably to him, grade one mathematics, trying to work out the term, and we need to ring him and say, Nassim, what's the word for this, mate?

• 45:14Speaker 00

  The thing is that some people like him do, it doesn't do their head in, but most people it does. And, you know, the people who work in money, in banks, they'll often, I mean, as a pure example, if you look at rogue traders like Nick Leeson and many others, Peter Young, all sorts of other people who started making bets, and then they went a bit crazy, they kept on making bets that were losing, and they become like gamblers chasing

• 45:54Speaker 00

  their losses. A lot of bankers have that problem. They're not unemotional, mathematical machines who can say, ah, look, I need to invest in this, lose a bit of money so I understand how it works, and then see where I can make the big money. They just end up getting emotional and chucking a lot of money away. And when lots of people are betting like that, you get this kind of mayhem, and sometimes all this value is wiped off the system, and nobody really understands where it's gone. And now, when it's machines that are doing that, I mean, half the time, it's machines that are doing that. And I remember

• 46:38Speaker 00

  reading this account of the so-called flash crash, where algorithms kind of became confused, and they lost billions in about half a second.

• 46:52Chris Williamson?

  When was this?

• 46:53Speaker 00

  2009. There was some problem with algorithms, you know, they're programmed, they're instructed to do, you know, this in this circumstance, and if this, then do that, and if that, then do the other. And normally, these reflect quite sensible ideas.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  But when it all happened so fast and they're sort of interlocking robots and they don't understand each other, you know, there is a problem. And in this case, it magically reasserted itself because the algorithm somehow managed to see what was happening and claw it back before it.

• 47:36Chris Williamson?

  Completely annihilated the market.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:39Chris Williamson?

  Dear me. Okay, so we've just touched on him there. We've danced around him a couple of bits. Nassim Taleb, very, very, what did you call him? The hottest thinker on the planet?

• 47:49Speaker 00

  I was saying that that that's he this he Kate, when I interviewed him, I saw him a few times. And I think the Sunday Times had called him the hottest thinker on the planet. And it was at a time when he was when people like David Cameron were asking his advice. And if you see The Big Short, that movie, he's not in it, but he represents those people who who could see that there was something wrong with the housing market.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  What was happening wasn't sustainable. And it had to end. And when it ended, or even when it started to change a bit, even when it flattened out, every all the houses would come onto the market, they would lose value. And all the people, all the different funds that had invested in those mortgages would find that they were underwater. And all the banks that were relying on those funds for short term money so they could keep their

• 49:04Speaker 00

  and it was this big kind of circular, you know, and a few people who were sort of outsiders spotted that this was bound to happen. And, I mean, Michael Burry was one of them who was featured in The Big Short. Now, these were people who weren't part of the crowd, you know, that and the thing about Taleb is that he was brought up in Lebanon.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  And he's now about sixty. So when he was about twenty, um, there was this terrible war in Lebanon. And everybody said to him, oh, yeah, this is, we occasionally have these wars. Uh, don't worry, it'll be over by Christmas, you know? And then it wasn't, and it just kept on dragging on and, and nobody predicted that that this would be such a long-term, immensely destructive conflict. Nobody could sort of bear to imagine that the whole world of Lebanon would, would change. And even when they saw it happening, they were still wanting to hold on to the belief that, oh, you know, it's going to be all right soon.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  And so he began to think, um, weird things happen, things that people don't want to believe will happen. But it's not just that. It's that these weird things are the triggers of history. So nobody thought the First World War was going to be a four-year kind of bloodbath. They thought it was going to be a few months. In fact, it, it's almost like an accidental war. It's like this treaty meant that this country had to say, I'm going to back that country if you do this. And all these treaties, this complex system sort of clicked into place and suddenly

• 51:05Speaker 00

  you're having a war in France and Belgium that's

• 51:09Chris Williamson?

  Has brought half of Europe into it.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and it sees no sign of stopping and what the hell is that all about? And so it's this, this thing that changed history that nobody was expecting. And he began to think, God, you know, um, these weird things that nobody predicts, um,

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Now, I would say we're in one of them now. He has said, oh, you know, this isn't a black swan. He calls them black swans. These unexpected, but very important events. And he says, this isn't a black swan because people predicted it. And actually, I think, well, yeah, technically, but it's really not, did a few people predict it? It's what does the world at large think? And I think we weren't prepared for this. I mean, I actually wrote an article about flu epidemics. Just a general thinking it was a normal, I was reviewing a book.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  And the headline was something like, what about, are we prepared for the next one? And I didn't even think about it. Somebody had put that headline in. Now I can send this article to people and say, look.

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  Look at me, I'm a clairvoyant from the future.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  But the point is, I didn't, you know, no way did I think of this as a real thing. I just thought, yeah, we've had these flu epidemics. Some of them take off and some of them don't. The last one that really took off was in 1918. Let's look at the reasons for this. But nobody had planned for it. And Taleb's argument was, all sorts of, history is basically dominated by these unexpected moments. And so if you know how to position yourself to deal with them, you can make a ton of money if you're in the markets. So that was his basic thing.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  But in the end, you know, he made a ton of money, but wanted to get out of just trading and get into sort of thinking about history. And that's what he's done since 2009, I guess.

• 53:27Chris Williamson?

  What was it that you, the summary that you gave to do with how people don't like to be wrong? Or they don't like to be proved wrong, so they always presume that the same thing's going to repeat? I can't remember.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, it's kind of like.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  You've got two ways of investing and you would imagine they balanced each other out. So you can invest in things that you think are going to get better. And so you can put money into things that are going to get better. And if you're right, then you'll mostly get small returns back all the time. But then, when the thing crashes, you might blow up, you might lose the lot. On the other hand, you can bet on things getting worse. And most of the time, they don't. So you're losing money all the time.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  But when they do get worse, you make your big killing. And the point is that these things aren't mirror images of each other, because people, it's cheaper to invest in things going up than it is to invest in things going down. Because not many, it's very lonely. It's a lonely place to be losing money every day, in the hope that everything crashes. So not many people do it. So it turns out, the odds are better and the returns are bigger. It's a bit like with job safety, you know, safety is overpriced. So people can, people can, a lot of people want a job for life.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  So they're prepared to be underpaid for it.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it turns out that it's actually probably safer to do something else.

• 55:19Chris Williamson?

  Also, those jobs, as proven by the fact that we're in the middle of a chaotic global pandemic, actually aren't all that safe. They're not hugely safe industries to be in. So what did you learn, if you could sort of synopsize what your time with Taleb, and you know, a little bit of one on one time with that man would be very envied by a lot of people on this planet, you know, as you mentioned, David Cameron, governments and politicians asking his advice. What did you, I mean, is it learning about being prepared to be in the out group, to remove your emotions from the situation? What was it?

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's that's interesting. I think it's I think what he says is in a way it sums up what all the other people do. It's kind of have a deep understanding of something. You have to put you have to sink a lot of money and a lot of time into understanding things. And then when they move, they move fast. So it's it's kind of like nothing happens and then everything happens. Who was it that said, you know, nothing have most decades, nothing happened, but there are some weeks in which decades happen. Was that Churchill who said that?

• 56:36Chris Williamson?

  It was someone Russian. There's another one which I absolutely adore, which I'm going to miscue. I'm not even going to bother trying to quote who it's from. But the quote is, history doesn't crawl, it leaps.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's exactly right. This is like the evolutionary pattern. You know, things change, animals change into new species. But it's not like a gradual progression. It's much more like nothing much happens. And then there's a leap. And then they become something new. And maybe they'll survive, and maybe they won't as that new thing. So that's another thing. Things happen in leaps and bounds. The things that are important are often unexpected.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  And history is all about these weird, unexpected things. So if you if you try to expect the unexpected, you will do a lot better because nobody else is looking.

• 57:38Chris Williamson?

  And I suppose, as you identified before, we have this comfort predisposition, even for bankers who must have an idea that there's a potential boom bust cycle, you know, they're not going to be completely ignorant to it. They're certainly going to be at least a little bit better informed than the normal proletariat on the street. But because we have this predisposition, because we don't like to think about bad things happening, we we tend to not fully account for the effects of them occurring. And that that leads to it's just like a sweeper under the rug type thing, like put it behind the wardrobe, no one's ever going to see.

• 58:21Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And it's like we're in this crisis now.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  And most people talk about it as if, well, we've it's we're done now. It's nearly done. And and and you get the occasional person saying, do you realize we're at the very beginning? We don't even understand what it is that we're up against. And sure, it might vanish into thin air, but it might be 10 years of

• 58:54Speaker 00

  readjusting and reinventing.

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  Changing the way that society works. Do you think that there is a a limit to where we should put positive thought? So naturally, I have quite a catastrophic mentality, which I think I inherited. It's half genetic, half socialized.

• 59:19Chris Williamson?

  So I tend toward negative thought, but I've worked quite hard to to overcome that. Right? Like, I've worked quite hard with doing gratitude to actually have a more positive mindset and and and turn things around. But when you start to scale that either across societies, across countries, across policymaking, or just maybe scale it across people.

• 59:47Chris Williamson?

  Is there kind of an upper bound on how much we should be pushing that level of sort of it's all bright and rosy, just look for the silver lining?

• 59:57Speaker 00

  I guess you you have to go imagine, because we haven't evolved much since we had, you know, very, very rudimentary tools and lived in a groups of 150. And I guess you you you needed people, didn't you, to say, we could get across that river. We do, we would just need, I don't know. And once we're over there, the the bison are much bigger. And you need people to say, yes, you're right. We'll we'll bloody well do it. We can get across this ravine.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  But you needed some pessimistic, depressed people to say, oh, God, are you kidding me? Not this again. Do you remember when we lasted it and all those people fell in? And it was terrible. So you need a mixture of people, don't you, and a mixture of emotions?

• 1:00:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  And I mean, there's an awful lot of.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  Have you ever read Ian McGilchrist?

• 1:00:56Chris Williamson?

  No, what should I read?

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Um, he, he wrote this book called The Master and His Emissary, and it's all about the two sides of the brain. But it's, the, the takeaway thing is, you know, part of our brains are, are looking out at nature. That's what they do. That's what they did for 200,000 years. They looked out at nature, at the sky and the rain and the clouds and the, you know, the trees and all this. All the time, they're looking out at nature and the, the other side of the brain is thinking, how can I make a tool out of that? You know, I could chop that branch off and then it would be this big. And if I chopped it in half, I could then join them together. And that's what the other side of the brain's thinking. And of course, the, that side of the brain, the left side, the, the tool making side,

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  begins to make more and more tools. And until what the right side is looking at is not so much nature, but tools. You go into a city and you're looking at tools. You're looking at cars and computers and, and, you know, telegraph poles. And then you're making tools out of those tools. The left side's saying, yeah, how could I make tools out of those tools? Oh, I know, I could sell them in advance and then charge interest and then come, you know. And, um, and so of course, we have, we have sort of created a new environment that we're not quite, we're not quite up with yet.

• 1:02:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, and I, I suppose because it's so safe as well, because we don't,

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:24Chris Williamson?

  we don't have that. Fewer people are falling into the ravine and more people are making it across on the log. And then the tool, the tools to the power of tools, uh, is a cool concept. I like that. It makes me think about the financial products that we were talking about and they're like,

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:02:41Chris Williamson?

  Uh, houses to the package of mortgages, to the package of bonds, to the package of da, da, da, da, da, da, da, all the way up, right? So, final thing, final question. Um, you spent all this time, clever people, Nassim Taleb and a Russian billionaire and his butler and, uh, Jordan Belfort, Wolf of Wall Street. So what did you learn about money? What did they teach you? Are you, are you rich now?

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Uh, no, I've never been, well, no, yeah, I've never been rich. I've been richer than, you know, many people, but I don't think I'll ever be fabulously rich. Uh, and I, I could, I could be comfortable if I, if I keep a, uh, if I, if I put a break on my spending, which of course, I have done now because I can't even, uh, go to the shops. Um, so, so, uh, also I don't, uh, you, you know, all of those things that say, um, if you've got enough money that you're not frightened of, um, you know, people knocking on your door, you can't get much better than

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  that. You know, I've got a nice, nice-ish car. I could get a nicer car. Would it make me happier? Not really. I could get a fabulous car. Would it make me happier? Not really. I, I'd, I'd be, I'd be sick of it in a week. And I'd think, yeah, it's okay. My old car was pretty good, too. I didn't really bother about that. That was fine. Um, so I'm, I'm aware that obsessing about it isn't the way to go. You know, what, what you want to be rich in is time and also your relationships with other people. And being obsessed with money can take those things away.

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  So you, you, you want to use your time. You want to know that you're using your time well. And I think you feel it if you're learning things, if you spend your life learning things and spending time with people talking and all of this. That's great. And you think to yourself, well, if I had an extra 10 grand in my pocket, would I feel happier? Uh, not much. It wouldn't, it wouldn't have enhanced. You know, you could go to a restaurant with people and have a great time. And if you had twice as much money, you could say, yeah, I want the best champagne, you know. But that might be a distraction and it, it's not necessarily going to make anybody any happier, really. Of course, people are going to go back and say, do you know what? I had the best

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  champagne. But that would have been really a distraction. I once went to this, um, This, I was reviewing this resort where the wine was so expensive that I think I drank a thousand dollars of wine and I wasn't even a bit drunk. You know, the point, this is back when I drank, but the point is that you could spend, I wasn't spending the money, but it was, you know, the money was being spent on my behalf, incidentally, but I could have, it would have taken me a couple of grand to get pissed, you know.

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  It's an expensive night.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  And this is a resort for the super rich and of course, they go there and they think, oh, wonderful, look, this bottle of wine's a grand, fantastic.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  Oh, they've got, they've got the cheap stuff here, darling, they've got the cheap stuff here.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  And, and, and you know, all of that is, once you've seen it, it's like, okay, fair enough.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  So, so was that, was that the answer to your question?

• 1:06:16Chris Williamson?

  I think so. Well, let me, let me see if I can repurpose it into, let me see if I can try and define what I think that was. Having money is a comfort and is useful in that it liberates your time to spend doing things that you want to do with people that you want to do it with.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, but of course, you've got to be the person who can use that time well. And if you spend all your time making money, you might find that you've got, you do get

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  to buy yourself some time, but you don't know what to do with it because you just want to be making more money. So, so you, you know, there are things you can spend your time doing. Felix Dennis, who had thought about this a lot because he, he felt he'd ruined his life with money in some ways. And he said something like, you know, if I write something, I haven't wasted my time. But if I buy something, I might be sick of it and I might feel it's not really going to help me, you know, spending money isn't the answer, whereas sort of making something.

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  Makes you a lot happier.

• 1:07:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, doesn't that, doesn't that speak to what we, what we touched on earlier as well about it's the process of becoming, not being or having.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. As soon as you're drunk or, or, or rich, um, you, you, you've reached the finish line.

• 1:07:48Chris Williamson?

  Is that, is that the, is that the rule of thumb? As soon as you're drunk or rich, you've reached the finish line.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Well, what I, what I mean is if you're, if you're a drinker, it's the getting drunk. And if you're a, um, if you're a tycoon, it's the making of the money. But if you were to place all these people in their luxurious habitats and say, right, there you are, you can spend the rest of your time sitting by your infinity pool, drinking your

• 1:08:14Chris Williamson?

  Thousand.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  Thousand pound wine and, and have, and, and having, you know, if you want to drive your Rolls Royce, you don't even need to reverse it because your garage has a rotating floor, you know, and that Felix Dennis had this, he had his Rolls Royce. Put into a rotating garage so that you could always be pointing outwards. You know, you didn't have to do that pesky thing of reversing into what was actually quite a big drive or, you know, it's not like there was a cramped space to reverse into, but you wouldn't even have to bother reversing because you could just make the garage rotate. So, you know, you can buy an endless number of those things, but they, they have diminishing

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  returns, don't they? Um, and it's really something else, something much more elusive that will make you happy.

• 1:09:10Chris Williamson?

  I love that. I really do. I hope I'm continuing to drill this into the listeners heads, the hedonic treadmill that we're all on and the fact that if it's not a study saying that anything over 56,000 pounds doesn't have increases in happiness, it only has increases in satisfaction, or whether it's you speaking to the smartest or richest people on the planet, or, you know, Morgan Housel from Collaborative Fund and The Motley Fool telling us that all that money does is give you time to spend with people that you like doing the things that you want to do, you know, how many different directions do we need to hear this from before we can start to kind of rid ourselves of this materialistic predisposition that we all have? Maybe just that one more podcast that we've done right

• 1:09:54Chris Williamson?

  now, William. So, uh, the trick out now, available, Amazon?

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 1:10:01Chris Williamson?

  All other good bookstores?

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  You can buy it, you can download it and you can listen to an audio version, which I was really pleased with. I didn't read it, by the way.

• 1:10:13Chris Williamson?

  Who did you get to read it?

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  Well, it's a guy called Rich Keable and his voice is a bit like Jack Dee. So it sounds like my book read by Jack Dee with that, that kind of, um, I don't know, it's just perfect. And I actually emailed him and said, my God, thank you so much. Uh, so, so it's worth listening to the audiobook too.

• 1:10:32Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Link is in the show notes below. If you want to buy it through that, you will be supporting the podcast at no extra cost to yourself. If you don't already have an Audible subscription, I recommend that you go and get one. And if you do that, you can actually get this book for free, just because you get your first book for free, which is amazing. And you still get paid. So that's a great way to do it. Look, William, man, thank you so much. Final, final point for the people that are just watching, have a look at how beautiful the cover of this book is. You will see it if you're walking through Waterstones or in the airport or whatever, you will see this. No one's in an airport at the moment, actually, either. You're never going to be in a Waterstones either. In 2022, when we finally reopen, you will be able to see it in an airport. But look, William, thank you so much for your time. It's been great, man.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  Thank you.