William Green on Becoming Richer, Wiser, and Happier

Living a life in full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED Talk or the author of one of your favorite books, or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is brought to you by the new fellowship and certificate programs now being offered by the center for Global Initiatives. As you may know, the center is an all volunteer organization and the same is true for the faculty in these programs. So all the tuition goes to support the work of the Center. It has always been our ethos to open source humanitarian intervention and these programs use the same approach in that all the materials we use are freely available all the time to anyone, everywhere, even if you don't take a course. We have built a world class faculty and contracts with other universities, medical schools and partnered NGOs. There are two fellowship tracks, one for those wishing to start their own nonprofit or non governmental organization and one for those seeking mentorship for career development and advancement in humanitarian work. Our initial certificate programs include humanitarian intervention, social Entrepreneurship and global health practice. Please consider taking a world class masterclass with us. Visit alifeinfull.org and click on the CourseWorks tab to learn more. Thanks welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. Over the last quarter of a century, William Greene has interviewed many of the world's best investors, exploring in depth the question of what qualities and insights enable them to achieve enduring success. William has written for many leading publications in the U.S. and Europe, including the New Yorker, Time, Fortune, Forbes, Barron's, Fast Company, Money Worth, Bloomberg Markets, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe Magazine, the New York observer, the London Spectator, the Independent, and the Economist. He is reported in places as diverse as China, India, Japan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the United States, Mexico, England, France, Monaco, Poland, Italy and Russia. He has interviewed presidents and prime ministers, inventors, criminals, prize winning authors, the CEOs of some of the world's largest companies, and countless billionaires. While living in London, William edited the European, Middle Eastern and African editions of Time. Before that, he lived in Hong Kong, where he edited the Asian edition of Time during a period which it won many awards. William has collaborated on several books as a ghostwriter, co author or editor. One of them became a number one New York Times and number one Wall Street Journal best sellers in 2017. He also worked closely with the renowned hedge fund manager Guy Speer, helping him to write his much praised 2014 memoir, the Education of a Value Investor. William also wrote and edited the Great Minds of Investing, which features short profiles of 33 renowned investors, along with stunning portraits created by Michael O', Brien, one of America's preeminent photographers. And in this conversation, we'll be doing a deep dive into his newest book, Richer Wiser how the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. He's also given many talks about the lessons we can learn from the most successful investors who not only about how to invest, but how to improve our thinking. Born and raised in London, William was educated at Eton College, studied English literature in Oxford University, and received a Master's degree in Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in New York with his wife Lauren and their two children. Welcome to the show, William.

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

It's great to have you on. I had the treat of first learning about your book from our mutual friend, Guy Speer. He'd been a guest on the show and I very much enjoyed, enjoyed you being on his show. So I know a smidge about your background, but for those that haven't had the pleasure of that, maybe we could kind of go back to your origin story. Could we talk about your time at Eton and the ponies? And my question is, I'm guessing, was that the genesis for your interest in investing or. Tell us about that.

Yeah, basically I went to this very posh English school, Eton, which is, I don't know, something like 700 years old. And it's, it's where two of the last three British Prime Ministers went. Boris Johnson and David Cameron and Prince Harry and Prince William. And I think my, I didn't come from a very posh background. We were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Ukraine and Poland. And so most of the people there were sort of really posh aristocrats. And we were, you know, we had sort of scrambled our way into the school because my parents, my father and my grandfather had worked extraordinarily hard. And so I was at this school, supposed to be becoming this posh gent who would behave nicely and do my family proud. And instead, when I was about 15, I would say I became obsessed with gambling on horses. And so on these long, lazy summer afternoons where you basically had a choice. You could either go play cricket, you could go rowing on the river, or, or you could go do good Social works in this neighboring town. I somehow figured out a way to sort of sneak off to Windsor, where Windsor Castle is the queen's castle. And I found what in England is known euphemistically as a turf accountant, which is basically a fancy term for a betting shop. And I would go off and I would bet on horses all afternoon. And my friend who I used to do this with was this brilliant guy who ended up actually in prison for various reasons. And so we were these two kind reprobates who I think. I think I just wanted to make money without having to get my hands dirty in any way. And I thought I took it seriously. I mean, I had these multicolored ink pens, and I had this notebook, which I found a few years ago, now I've lost again, where I kept these really detailed records of horses and courses and what horses would do well on particular ground. And initially I did really well. I just thought, this is the most fantastic thing. And then I started to lose, and I really. I stopped cold turkey. And I just. I had no interest in horses themselves. I just wanted to make money without working. And so once I realized that this wasn't going to happen, I just stopped. And I've never gambled since. I have no interest in gambling in casinos or betting on sports. And then I guess about a decade or so later, I came into a little bit of money. Not a huge amount, but my brother and I had owned an apartment in London, and when we sold it, I had to figure out what to do with the money. And so I started to really study the stock market and to read about stocks and funds. And I thought, well, this is the real game. This is actually what I was after when I was 15, because the odds are so much better. And that fascination, I think, has never quite disappeared. And it's. I do still think there's a part of me that's kind of this lazy reprobate that wants to. That loves the idea that you can just use your mind to make money. And if you think, well, you can use your money to make more money without actually really doing anything, without having to get your hands dirty or work in an office and have to be respectful to a boss you dislike. And so there is a sort of childish fantasy there. But then I think over the years, as we'll no doubt talk about, my interest in the great investors deepened. And there's still a slightly subversive side to me where I like the fact that you can use your mind and you can outthink people and achieve Independence by outthinking people. But I think I also came to realize that actually there's something much more profound going on. And the great investors, they're not just brilliant at making money, they're actually extraordinary thinkers. And that's, and that's where my interest kind of deepened. And I started to think, oh, actually, if I can reverse engineer these people and figure out how they think and why they win, that's pretty interesting. There's something deeper going on there than just making money without getting your hands dirty.

That's good. You know, it reminds me, I did a couple of books some years and years ago, literally decades ago, for one of them called from the Other side of the Couch. And it was kind of early on in my career as a psychologist. And I was, you know, you certainly see people as role models, you know, in supervision and professors and academia, but you never really, you know, it's, it's. I maybe was too shy, too inhibited to kind of raise my hand and ask these questions, but I was always kind of curious about certain kinds of things that, that might be a little off color even to ask, you know, about ethical dilemmas or, you know, doing something maybe that, you know, was not everybody would accept as being, you know, sort of canon to the profession. And I called it from the Other side of the Couch. And it was, it was kind of a fun project. I mean, by no way am I, you know, a journalist other than a journalist wannabe. And then I did another set of books called the New Humanitarians. And that was when I was starting my nonprofit. And I just, I'd seen all these people doing amazing work. And I just kind of wanted to find out, you know, how is it that you, you know, were able to create, you know, Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders and got to be able to interview those and ask those kinds of questions. So for you, with your background, you didn't go into finance, you didn't go into business, you became an extraordinary writer and journalist and investigator. Was your evolution of that and your time at Columbia, was it always kind of finance related or was it more eclectic and then you fine tuned into finance or. Tell us about that.

It was much more eclectic, I think, in the early days, despite my desire to get rich without working too hard, I sort of regarded people on Wall street as being pretty crass and superficial and vulgar. You know, here they were, all they wanted to do was make money. This was my sort of somewhat naive assumption about them. And so I literally, when I was first living in New York, I Moved. In my early 20s, the New York Times would arrive and I would just instantly jettison the business section. I just had no interest in business because I thought at that point that I was going to a famous novelist or something like that. And I would look at the New Yorker and I would see people like Calvin trillin or John McPhee and I thought, well, yeah, that's going to be me. And in those early days as a journalist, in my early 20s, I would go off and do these amazing reporting assignments in places like Mississippi, where I would go write, for example, about Byron Delay Beckwith, the guy who killed Medgar Evers in the 60s, and how he was being brought to justice, you know, decades later. And it was this opportunity for Mississippi to redeem itself and so much more narrative driven, general interest stuff. I was always writing about murderers and fraudsters and the like, very colorful stuff. And I think then when. So then I guess a couple of years later I started to invest seriously. And then I started to think, well, this is pretty cool because I can actually go interview these great investors and I can figure out how to make money myself because they'll teach me how to invest. And then the deeper I got into it, the more I started to realize these are really colorful and strange and interesting people. And so I did things like I went off to the Bahamas and spent a day, for example, with Sir John Templeton, who at the time was this 86 year old multi billionaire, very eccentric guy who was probably the greatest global stock picker of the 20th century. And at that point he had basically retired, sold his investment firm and was obsessed with what he called spreading spiritual wealth. He was doing things like funding research into where the prayer worked at Harvard. And he would talk to me about, you know, does it make a difference whether you, whether you pray that God's will be done or that you put your hands on them or that they pray for themselves. And he was investigating these things in a really, really interesting way that I was at the time much more closed minded about than I would be now. And I just thought, wow, what a fascinating character. And so I guess what happened to me is I started to realize that you could write incredible narratives about these guys within the world of finance. And that because it was generally regarded by writers of my ilk as being slightly crass, that world, you weren't really competing with that many people who were terrific writers and wanted to write about money and business because most writers, they don't have much money, they're not that interested in that stuff. We all have English literature degrees. We're not naturally drawn to Wall Street. And then there was a tiny minority, like people like Jonah Serra was an amazing writer about this stuff, and Jim Stewart, who now writes for the New Yorker, and Brown Burrow and Michael Lewis. So it was a handful of people writing really good narratives about this stuff. And I think at a certain point I just thought that would be pretty cool if I could write about this area with a sense of style and character and narrative, but also with a deep interest in how this world of money works. And so I don't know if you've found this as someone who's spanned so many different areas and professions, but I think often the most interesting things we do are when we combine two different disciplines that seem to have nothing to do with each other. And so somehow to combine an interest in money in the stock market with an interest in narrative. Narrative writing seem to be very fertile and kind of untrodden ground, largely.

Yeah, I agree. It reminds me of Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, where he talked about it. Sometimes it's very difficult to be, you know, number, number one or in the top, on the podium in a certain specific area or niche. But if you can combine different areas, then oftentimes it's, you know, you from a career kind of aspect, it can be successful. But I think with, you know, I'm making a guess with you, and I'm projecting from myself that there's also a certain level of creativity that feels a little different that way. You know, to be able to bring these different kinds of things in, from whatever experiences you had with, you know, the early days of writing then to kind of finding this Templeton experience and going, you know, I wonder if this is, you know, is this a one off, or are all these folks a little bit, you know, you know, 10 degrees off, off, skew or how does this work? So from a. From a mechanics perspective, like, put us into the time. I know that there's confidentiality around this, so. So I respect that. But how did you get into ghost writing? And was that because you were already kind of established as a name with all the other publications in the work of Time, or how does one. How did that happen for you?

Yeah, I think. I think like most things in my career, by accident. I've tried to plan a few things over the years, and nothing has ever worked out the way I planned. Things have always taken me in some strange direction. So I think part of what happened, I had this great career at Time magazine where I'd Been in Asia and then in London. And I loved this job. I was editing magazines and it was just incredible fun, incredible, incredibly interesting work. And then during the financial crisis, Time Inc. Which was at the time the most powerful magazine company in the world, kind of got in trouble because it was part of Time Warner. And so there were lots of layoffs and they didn't want to invest in the magazine business. And so I got laid off. And it was kind of this crushing blow because at the time I sort of felt full of self importance and was interviewing prime ministers and presidents and editing this big magazine. I thought I was kind of a big shot. And so then I was, I was thinking, well, so my industry is collapsing, the journalism world is collapsing. What do I do? And so I very luckily got a job at one of the few magazine, one of the few journalism businesses that was still thriving. And I hated it. And so while I was there, I was writing these long narrative features and I, I wrote a big profile of a very colorful Iranian Jewish billionaire with the greatest private collection of Islamic art. And he was just an extraordinary character, remarkable guy. And at the end of this process, after the story had come out, which was an incredibly flattering story, it was pretty balanced, he said to me, I have this manuscript. Would you like to edit the manuscript? And, and this gave me a fantastic opportunity to leave this job that slightly irrationally, I hated. And so I quit and I went and worked on his manuscript. And that was just a really interesting project because I got to write about art and money and business and he was a very characterful guy. And then Guy Speer, who you were mentioning earlier, who's a well known and very smart and really kind and decent bloke who's an excellent investor who runs a hedge fund that I happen to have been invested in for about 20 years, he told me, well, I've got this manuscript that I've been working on and it's about to be published and I haven't finished it and would you look at it and would you edit it? And so I sort of wasn't that interested, but I was kind of struggling and I was miserable. And, and I, and I was living in London at the time and he was in Zurich. And so I started to, I guess I went to Zurich and I. He cleverly took great care of me and he would come to the airport in his beautiful Porsche and pick me up and take me home. And I start reading this thing and I'm like, this is kind of terrible. And his editor, I think, thought it was pretty good and was happy that it was going to be good. And, you know, it was kind of good enough. And because I love Guy, who is a really close friend of mine, I thought, this is not going to be good for his reputation. And I kind of know how to fix it, I think, anyway, because I was sort of arrogant writer who'd been editing stuff for a long time. And so I started to get stuck into it. And so we then spent, I'd say, the next probably about 50 days or so revamping this book. And it was just an incredibly intense and interesting and fun experience. It was. It's kind of. There's something about ghost writing. It's almost like you're their therapist, you're their friend, you're their confessor, you're their editor. It's a very deep and intense relationship, and I just really enjoyed it. And Guy is brilliant. He's got a wonderful mind. But he's very scattered, which I am, too. And he doesn't write particularly well, but he speaks incredibly well. And so, for me, it was just a joy because I would just ask him questions, and he would speak in this incredibly articulate, eloquent way. And my job was to capture those words and to shape it. And so there was something kind of beautiful about the process that you're going deeper and deeper and you're drawing out of someone what they may not even realize themselves is important. There was a wonderful moment where he was talking about the financial crisis, for example, where his fund was kind of having a terrible time, the market was imploding. And I think his money was with Bear Stearns, which could have gone under. They were holding all of his capital. And so it could have been a disaster, even though legally, I think he was totally protected. And his father was one of his biggest shareholders, and he founded the money. He founded the fund partly with money from his father, who was an Israeli businessman and very successful, very smart guy. And as I talked to Guy about this, he suddenly starts to realize the extent to which he was standing on the shoulders of this giant with his father, and that his father had sort of saved him at this terrible moment, and that his father had kind of held firm at a moment where everybody was panicking. And it turned out that his father. One of his jobs in the Israeli army was actually to defuse bombs. And there was something kind of wonderful about the fact that he was this guy who had the courage and the temperament to stand firm when the world seemed to be melting down. And that, for me, that's Part of the joy of ghost writing is that you're able to draw out of someone something that's actually more deeply true, more true to who they are, more authentic. And so for me, that was the first of. I guess that led to a number of other books that I ghostwrote that were sort of more high profile, but my role in them was concealed. Whereas Guy was very open. His book's called the Education of a Value Investor. And he was very open and very generous about my role in it. And it was just. It was a kind of beautiful experience. And also, I think, because I was a slightly repressed and frightened writer, there was something about writing in someone else's voice that in some ways cleared the pipes for me. I had so many words going through me, but without worrying that I was going to be judged for being a terrible writer. And so I think, in a way, writing in Guy's voice and then writing in the voice of other very well known people, there was something about it that helped me as a writer. I think it sort of cleared those pipes and in some strange way, I think, set me up to write my own books.

Wow. Gosh. I just. I almost have to sit with that for a second because I know with Guy's book, you know, it was not, you know, some as. I think the vocabulary is a treatment. You know, it wasn't like, you know, this is, you know, gonna be some fluff piece. I mean, there's a great deal. And I'm sure from you describing this that you said, you know, it felt probably a bit like, you know, therapy and probably a certain level of catharsis for Guy. But it's an interesting juxtaposition between being like a, you know, quote unquote reporter of, you know, here's the facts and here's the deal. You know, maybe, you know, with a certain, you know, no point of view and, you know, journalistically going in deep and finding out things and then sharing those things with the world, I would imagine then, you know, working collaboratively with someone like this, then, you know, there's a lot of stuff that gets left on the editing room floor, so to speak, that wouldn't be appropriate or doesn't fit in well with the narrative. But that the level of trust that someone has with you is pretty much like a therapist or like in confession or something. And what a responsibility that makes for you as well, too.

Yeah. And there was a wonderful moment while I was working with Guy where initially, I think I had come on thinking, well, I'll make some money. And I'll get over this crappy period in my life and I'll do this job, even though I don't really want to. And then I start to get really deeply involved in it, deeply engaged. And we would sit in his dining room in Zurich together, and we'd be talking and we'd. We, oddly, we would often start the day talking about sort of more spiritual stuff, and that would kind of. Kind of free us up a bit. And then we would start writing, and we would also drink enormous amounts of cappuccino and eat Swiss chocolate. And there was one point where I think he started to get really excited because we've been talking about something, writing something that I think he sensed. This is deep and this is true, and it's really interesting. And I have this very vivid picture of walking into his kitchen with him, and he's been very, very honest about his mistakes and his flaws and the ways that he got. You know, he's writing about this journey of his from sort of darkness to light, basically. And there's a mo. And so he's very exposed. He's saying stuff, with my help, that could be kind of damaging to him, where he's admitting mistakes that he's made. And he says at one point,

I

don't even care if this book ruins my reputation. I just want to give an honest accounting of myself. And there was something so wonderful about that that I think that was the moment where I thought, this is something special. This is someone who just wants to give an honest accounting of himself. And I think that is why that book has resonated so deeply with people, is because I think people smell whether you're just out for yourself, whether you're just trying to build your brand or your name, or whether you're actually trying to share ideas that are helpful. And I. I think once I realized that Guy wanted to be truthful and authentic, it kind of changed everything. And I think that's something that when I write about other people in my own book, this most recent one, richer, wiser, happier, I'm very consciously focusing on people who I think are being truthful with me. And I don't really have any interest in writing about people who are just concealing and fooling themselves and trying to fool you and trying to build their business. I mean, I don't have anything against people trying to build their business. We all have to make a living. But I particularly drawn to people who are searching for something. They're trying to figure out how to live. They're trying to Figure out how to make sense of their lives, how to become a better person despite all of our flaws and failings. And I think there was something. There was something really lovely about the fact that Guy was prepared to expose his flaws and failings and talk about what he'd learned. And that was very inspiring for me. And that. I think. I don't know, our relationship has deepened because of that experience, because we were in the trenches together. I was trying to help him, and he was being honest, and I was trying to help him be honest. And a lot of it for Guy, I think, goes back to Reading Power vs Force by David Hawkins, which I don't know if you've read his writing, has had a great impact on me as well. And Hawkins just has this idea that being truthful calibrates at some very high level and that people somehow smell whether you're being untruthful, even if they don't know whether you are. They sort of sense it, and it makes them uncomfortable. And so I think Guy and Mohnish Pabrai, who's a very close friend of his, who I write about at great length in Richer, Wiser, Happier, they just decided, well, we're just not going to lie anymore. And that's a really fascinating risk once you start to decide, oh, well, let me try to be more authentic, let me try to be more truthful. And I think that's a. They were further along in this journey than I was, and I'd never heard of Hawkins. And when I started to read that stuff, I started to think, ah, that's really interesting. So, yeah, maybe I should try to be more authentic. And so. And I don't think I was particularly dishonest, but I think. I think knowing that that's a goal, to try to be truthful and not to try to spin, that's very, very clarifying. And I think to write a memoir as Guy did, and not be truthful, not be authentic, what a waste of time. So I took some of that in my own book when I was writing my own book. In the epilogue, I talk about getting laid off and about resilience and fear of not being able to take care of your family and stuff. That's. It's not, you know, you gulp before you write something like that, because it doesn't. It doesn't put you in a very good light, but I think when you. Or not, in a very flattering light, but I think if your goal is to be more truthful and more authentic, then it's very clarifying. Because you think, well, how can I conceal this and write something honest about myself?

Yeah, I think it very much comes through and I think it, I, I also feel like it comes through in your depiction of your experiences with these people because you've been, you know, very honest about your opinions of them as well, too, and, you know, and, and frank about that, which I think also helps, you know, the reader go through the book and feel like this isn't, you know, a, you know, just some, you know, polished brand enhancement. So let's let. This is probably a really great segue into to the book. So let me, let me, let me do a formal thing. So. Richer, Wiser, Happier how the World's Greatest Investors Win Markets in Life. Before we go into a deep dive with this, I have to share some of the endorsements for it, which are just spectacular. There's a number of them and we don't have enough time today to go through all of them. But they're all bouquets. Guy, which is an appropriate one, says about your book, it's the most important investment book of the decade. Richer, Wiser, Happier is going to be a classic and for generations will define what it means to be a better investor and better human. Ralph Dobelli, author of the international bestseller the Art of Clearly, Pardon me of Thinking clearly, said, nobody writes better about money than William Green. A breathtaking trip through the hearts and minds of the world's most successful investors. This book not only teaches you how to invest, it teaches you how to think. Not reading it might turn out to be one of your life's monumental errors. And Annie Duke, who people may know, poker champion and author of Thinking in Bets, said about it, superb. Richer, Wiser, Happier does a wonderful job of showing how to consistently stack the odds in your favor, both in markets and life, by dramatically improving the way you think and reach decisions. Men's Journal said that it was one of the best new books in 2021. Finance Monthly named it one of the best investment books for 2021. And it quickly catapulted to Amazon's number one new release in investing basics. So congratulations. Well, well earned praise. That is just.

Thank you.

Just wonderful. So your book is really kind of a. I found it to be kind of like a smorgasbord of ideas for readers to kind of choose and see what works for them, what conspired, what led you to getting to this point to put this all together into this book and to balance it with, you know, because it's, it's the richer is on the finance, but the wiser and happier, I think, you know, speaks to living a life in full, but then also to thinking processes and decision making.

Yeah, it's a very eccentric book. And one of the risks in writing it was, am I totally nuts? Is anyone going to agree with me that you can learn from the greatest investors not only about how to make money, but actually about how to think better and possibly even how to live more wisely? Which is a. A pretty counterintuitive idea, because I think most of us assume, when we think about very rich investors, we think of people from shows like Billions or films like Wall Street. We think that they're probably scumbags and superficial and they're snakes. And I'm writing about a very small, elite group who are obsessed with what John Maynard Keynes called worldly wisdom. And they're a strange and interesting tribe of people who I think are almost like practical philosophers. And so they're in the business of investing, but they're thinking very deeply about life. And if you think about what investing is, one of the things at its heart is you're making bets about the future, and yet the future is absolutely unknowable, and everything changes all of the time, as we know from Buddhist philosophy, that the world is in this constant state of flux, and yet you're having to bet very real money on this unknowable future, on conditions that are changing constantly. And in many cases, these people I'm writing about have thousands or even millions of shareholders who've entrusted them with their life savings. And so there's something about the fact that they have so much skin in the game that makes them these extraordinary pragmatists. I think they're thinking very deeply about how to think about how to make decisions. And they'll take ideas from any discipline, if they'll work. They're totally undogmatic. So if they look at meditation and mindfulness and they think, oh, yeah, that could help me. I could have a. I could have a clearer mind and make better decisions, they'll be like, yeah, I'll grab that. And if they think, okay, so there are ideas from biology or physics or math that they could take, they'll be like, yep, I'll take that. I'll use that. And so they become this really interesting filter through which to see the world. Because they're so pragmatic, all that matters. Charlie Munger, Buffett's partner, who I interviewed. Excuse me, Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, who I interviewed, says all he cares about is what works and he studies what works and what doesn't work and why. And so the more time I spent with these people, the more I thought, oh, this is a really interesting way of viewing the world and approaching the problem that nothing is knowable, the future is unknowable, everything changes. We have no idea really how to, how to live and how to think and how to, and how to make decisions. And yet these people somehow are stacking the odds in their favor through these different habits of thinking, these habits of behavior. And I thought if I could synthesize what they figured out and what they do to stack the odds in their favor, that would be really helpful. And partly selfishly, I was thinking, well, it's going to be really helpful for me because I'm totally confused. I have no idea how to live and how to think and how to get through life. But it's also really useful for my kids and for my friends and for my family and for all of these strangers that would read the book. And I think that's what's been really kind of thrilling about working on the book and discovering since it came out. I get messages from people constantly, literally, pretty much every day saying what an effect it's had on them. And I'm not saying that in a self aggrandizing way. It's because I'm, I'm actually wrestling with these questions myself, trying to figure out how to live and how to think. I figured I was a kind of bridge between these great investors and the reader and if I could exploit the fact that I have great access to these people as a writer and reporter and share those ideas, that would be pretty great. I think throughout the process. Writing is such a difficult and painful and long and lonely process. And I just kept coming back to this idea of, of let me just write something helpful where I'm taking these ideas and it's going to help people in some way. And I think by trying to have this slightly altruistic motive, it kind of got me, it got me through the lows of writing when you just have no idea whether it's going to resonate with anyone or whether you're just banging your head against your computer screen for no reason. And I, of course, being slow and absolutely obsessive, I was about two years late on my deadline. Oh gosh, I'm probably being generous to myself there. And so for me I just kept going, kept going because I was just thinking, well, no, there are more ideas here to share. There are more ways to think better that I need to Distill and share with people. And so yeah, it's been a long and intense and very all consuming process.

Well, I think we all get to benefit from that. And the pings you get in your email of thanks I think is kind of a testament to that. I want to unpack some of those various areas. You mentioned Mohnish Pabrai, and I know that he and guy are BFFs. One of the things that sort of resonated throughout the book was his approach and kind of very transparently and chest pounding of the benefits of copying other people's ideas and about trying to the power of cloning. And for example, I think for him it was Buffett's approach. Can you talk about that and what Mohnish has done or what other people have done where it's trying to mimic best practices?

Yeah, this is for me a very profound and life changing idea. And one of the first things I did when I decided to work on this book is I arranged to travel with Mohnish Pabrai. And so I went and spent about five days with him in India because I wanted to figure out how does this guy think, how does he operate? He's an extraordinary investor, but he's also an incredible philanthropist. One of the things that he's done is he's taken his ability to bet on the stock market brilliantly and used it to lift thousands of kids out of poverty in India. I wanted to see if there was a common thread between the way he thought about philanthropy and the way he thought about investing in. And there is. And the thing that underlies it all is that Mohnish is obsessed with this idea of cloning. What he basically does is he says most people are always trying to reinvent the wheel and we're desperate to be original. And he said there's this really low hanging fruit there, which is you want to look at the people who are better than you, smarter than you, wiser than you, more experienced than you, who've already figured out how the game works and then you reverse engineer them with tremendous care. I mean, he studies things in a really obsessive, relentless way. Totally understands how people like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have won this particular game. And then he says, well, let me now relentlessly clone that. And it has to be done in a way that suits your own personality and your own skills and your own circumstances. But it's an extraordinarily powerful technique. One of the things that he did is he said, well, I can see that basically Buffett has revealed the laws of investing. And he said they're basically as fundamental as the laws of physics. He says when he discovered that most fund managers actually weren't living by Buffett's laws, he said, he said it was just unbelievable. He said it's like discovering a whole generation of physicists who don't believe in gravity. And he has this very colorful, expletive filled way of talking. I won't quote him in full, but he basically says gravity is going to pull you down whether you like it or not. What he said is, okay, so once I understand Buffett's laws of investing, I'm going to apply them with, with relentless attention to detail. Basically, there are these three core rules which are, okay, so they all come from Buffett's teacher, Ben Graham. And it's basically, well, when you invest in a company, you're not just speculating on a piece of paper. You're not just trading paper. You're actually buying a portion of a business and it has underlying value. But because the market, the stock market is kind of nuts. It's not like this weighing machine, it's a voting machine. And so the price that you're quoted in the stock market doesn't necessarily reflect the true value of the business. Once in a while, this bipolar stock market goes nuts, and it presents you with this opportunity to buy stocks at a discount to their intrinsic value. The whole game, basically, for Buffett and Munger, and for people like Mohnish, becomes waiting for what Munger calls mispriced gambles. Munger has this beautiful image where he says, you're basically like a spear fisherman. And he said, you're just sitting by the side of a stream, and once in a while a fat, juicy salmon swims by, and you spear the salmon and then you go back to doing nothing, and you may not do anything for another six months. To me, this is a really beautiful idea about investing because it tells you, well, most people are doing the wrong thing. They're hyperactive, jumping in and out of the market, they're trying to time the market. And in fact, the whole game is really simple. It's just about waiting for these moments of tremendous opportunity and grabbing them with what Manga calls gumption. But this actually applies in so many other areas of life that you can say, well, if I want to clone, if I want to learn from people who are better than me and who are smarter than me, and who figured stuff out before, who do I clone? What habits do I clone? And so for me, one of the first things I would do is I, as I say, well, as a nonfiction writer, I want to be studying people like Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, Oliver Sacks, who I really admire, and really reverse engineering what they do and what they figured out about how a book is structured and how to tell a story. And so this becomes a really profound way actually to live your life. It's a very practical tool. And Mohnish's view is that there's something in human DNA that kind of prevents us from taking care, from taking advantage of this tremendous opportunity. And so he said, well, look, if the other guys won't do it, the Indian guy will do it. I'll do it. And I feel the same way. I feel like I have no shame in trying to figure out what people who are smarter than me have figured out already and then. And then applying it. And it seems to me the beauty of this is that actually you end up being original anyway because we're all so strange and idiosyncratic that even though you're trying to clone and replicate what they've done, it ends up being your own thing anyway. But I think. But I think it's such a powerful idea for investing and life to say, yeah, somebody else is smarter than me. Let me take this idea that they've figured out, this solution they figured out, and let me apply it in my own life.

You know, it's interesting. It makes me think of your discussion about Joel Greenblatt and how he had his sort of formulaic way of approaching the market and maybe getting to that point of being able to identify the Charlie Munger version of that salmon swimming by. And that, if memory serves, there was sort of like he did sort of like a little, you know, study to see, you know, people could either follow his formula or he could, like, invest using his own formula with people investing into that, you know, that fund at the time. And he found that people just could not be disciplined enough and that his. His fund did, you know, just as he expected it to do, which was very well. And people trying to apply those principles, bringing. I guess what they brought to that formula was not something that was beneficial, that they just couldn't help themselves. So is that what you see, too? I mean, it's sort of like this bringing. Bringing oneself into these things, that sometimes it can be an enhancement, but also sometimes it can, you know, it can be our own worst enemy.

Yeah, it's a profound observation. And there's a great line from Charlie Munger where he says that investing is simple, not easy. What Joel Greenblatt figured out he did much the same as Mohnish Pabrai, and he figures out how to distill the essence of this investing game into its purest form. And so he says, well, the essence is just so simple. Basically, all you're doing is you're valuing a business and then buying it for much less than it's worth. And he says, that's it. That's the whole game. But once you actually start to think about that, you think, well, actually, that's pretty difficult because a, do I know how to value a business? Well, most people don't. And B, do I actually have the temperament that would allow me to buy a business that's cheap, which probably means that everyone else hates it? And what if they hate it because they're right and it's doing terribly and it will do terribly? Or what if they hate it because they're idiots and they're overreacting to bad news, for example? And so it requires a degree of technical ability to value stuff, but also the temperament, the equanimity, the peace of mind, the clarity. And so part of what I'm trying to do in the book is say to people, yeah, here's how you win the game. Here's what these guys have figured out about how you win the game. But are you actually equipped to win the game yourself? And one of the things I realized as I was writing the book and interviewing these people is I'm actually not really equipped to win the game. I'm much more fearful than they are. I'm not really that interested in valuing businesses. I don't have the patience, I can't count. I have no interest in accounting, and I'm much more interested in the ideas behind investing, the philosophy of it, and the personality. And so that self awareness actually has pretty profound implications, because once you stop deluding yourself and you say, well, no, this isn't a game I'm really equipped to win, then you just say, well, so let me stick with games that I am equipped to win. And so I think one of the first things you want to do both in investing and life is to define what are the games you actually want to play, what are the games where you really have a competitive advantage? And my realization that someone like Mohnish Parabrai or Joel Greenblatt has a much better temperament than I do has pretty practical and profound implications. Part of what I've done is just say, all right, so let me give some money to people like Guy's beer. Let me give some Money to a couple of other investors who I think have great temperaments. Let me own a couple of index funds and let me not buy individual stocks because I should stop deluding myself and I should also be spending more time on the things that I'm actually equipped to do like interviewing people and reading books and writing and trying to share ideas. That's a game that I'm actually more or less equipped to compete in. Properly. Beating the stock market, not so much.

Well, it seems like one of the. I have to say I want to circle back to this in more specific, but to set a context for my question. In some sense, it seems like there are quite a few, most common denominators amongst a lot of the people that are in the book and their approaches. But there also seem to be some huge divergencies. But one of the things it seems to be maybe the majority of time appearing is that a lot of folks, and like you've mentioned, you know, like with, with the Greenblatts and with the Mungers and with the Buffetts of being extremely patient. I remember Berkshire Hathaway was, you know, kind of getting lambasted a few years ago for like, you know, just sitting on their hands and not, you know, and Warren would forthrightly say, well, it's because there's nothing, you know, I want to buy right now. So being patient and being selective. But how do managers then deal with such a long term approach to wait for that proper salmon swimming along versus investors who really look at it quarter to quarter or have much more of a very shorter term time horizon. How do they balance that to say, hey, keep quiet, everything's fine, steady as we go, versus I expect these kinds of gains quarter after quarter after quarter.

I think it's incredibly difficult. There's a tremendous amount of pressure on fund managers to continue consistently to deliver good returns when the market is totally unpredictable. There's a fascinating guy I interviewed who I wrote about in the epilogue of the book, a guy called Jason Kopp. He basically had the most successful hedge fund startup in history. I think he, he attracted about $4.5 billion instantly. He's a very charming, very bright guy who came in the top four in his class at Wharton. And he's kind of handsome. He looks like a GI Joe and he was a sort of all American squash player and everything he touched turned to gold. And he gets off to this incredible start with his hedge fund. Everything's going brilliantly and everyone thinks he's a God. And then it started to go wrong. And he had a couple of years where it was massively underperforming. And he said it was just torture. And he said to me, the thing that makes it so painful is that there's this kind of disconnect between your process that may be really smart and really well thought out, and the result, because the market is so erratic and so irrational. And he had this fascinating observation that he said. He talked to me about these experiments with lab rats where I guess they would pull a lever and it would either electrocute them or it would give them a cookie, an electric shock or a cookie. And he said, that's a bit like what the stock market feels like. And he said, at a certain point, those lab rats actually they induced insanity in them because they had no control. And he said to me, I feel like that's what's happening to me. And it's funny because a few months later, he quit the business and. And returned, like, well over a billion dollars. And when I talked to him a while later, he said to me, look, I was clinically depressed while I was running that fund. And he said, I was clinically depressed even while I was at my most successful. And so I think that how you deal with the pressure, the stress, the fact that the outcome doesn't necessarily reflect your effort, is tremendously difficult. And. And so there's a strong thread throughout the book of talking about emotional resilience, psychological resilience, how you deal with failure, how you deal with stress, how you deal with setbacks. Because the rules themselves for how you play this game, how you win this game, are not that complicated. But you do need to set yourself up to be able to handle the pain. And that, to me, is one of the areas where there's a tremendous crossover between investing in life. Because for me to be a successful writer, I need to be able to deal with my fear of failure. I need to be able to deal with the fact that I'm staring at a blank page, and I don't know if I'm going to be able to come up with something sensible. I don't know if someone's going to understand what I've written or pillory it or mock me or. And yet I have to keep going. And it strikes me that all of us, in our different ways, are dealing with these stresses and strains. So I write a lot about how the best investors deal with pain, deal with failure, and try to gain equanimity. And I think one of the things I love about writing about investors is that they're so pragmatic about this. And so a friend of mine that I write about, Ken Shubenstein, who's a doctor and a neurologist but previously was a very successful hedge fund manager, said to me, yeah, I don't make decisions when I'm hungry, angry, lonely, tired, in pain or scared or stressed. And so he's slowing things down because he knows that there are these states in which his brain is going to mess up, that he's more likely to be cognitive neurotransmitters, cognitively vulnerable. And so I think you have to think about these softer skills. It's not just about the rules of how to win in life. It's how you're going to deal with the pain, the uncertainty, the failure, the stress. And I think for me, having gone through that period where I got laid off by time and then had a job that I hated and facing the uncertainty of my journalism industry collapsing and having to, to kind of rebuild my life and my career, those issues of how you deal, how you become more emotionally resilient, that's a strong theme for me. And part of what I was doing in interviewing all of these great investors was saying, how do you deal with this stuff? And I think because I'm pretty nakedly open about my own vulnerabilities in this area, they were wonderfully candid in talking about how they deal with it themselves.

Yeah. Well, speaking of Ken Shubenstein, I remember he talked about having kind of an awareness of one's weaknesses. And he talked, I think about having an authority bias was kind of one of his Achilles heels. And Jeffrey Gundlock, yeah, he talked about. It was kind of funny that he's wrong 30% of the time so that when you do make a mistake, make sure that it's a non fatal mistake. And I think also was it, I think it sounds like Munger. It was either Munger or Buffett talked about the non idiot's guide to Life. You know, what you called in the. That's. I think that was your terminology but of Munger's standard stupidities kind of thing. So how does one go about, I mean, do you have to like have one of those shocking experiences? You know, there's an old cliche of a good scare is better than good advice. So is it like withering weathering, going through like a down period or a stock market crash or a pullback? Or is it, you know, the monish style of seeing. Well, here, you know, it's happened, it's bound to happen again. Here's how these Other people dealt with this. I'm going to clone that approach to being, you know, antifragile or resilient or what were some of your experiences of, or learning from the experience of some of those that you talked with.

Yeah, Buffett always quips that it's, it's better to learn from other people's mistakes than your own because it's so much cheaper. But I think, but I think the reality is that going through these things yourself and failing, messing up, it steers the lesson into your brain in a way that studying other people probably doesn't. I think you can learn from these great investors how to avoid a lot of chaos and a lot of failure. There are these tricks that you can use that I think are incredibly practical, but there's nothing like a lesson that comes from your own failure. But one of the things that I try to do in this chapter about Charlie Munger is really lay out how he goes about systematically reducing what he calls standard stupidities or unoriginal error and idiotic behavior. All of these ways that are really common ways of messing up and sabotaging ourselves. And so although it's clearly true that you're going to end up learning from your own mistakes more powerfully and more memorably, I think you can prevent a lot of grief by just applying some of these very practical tools of mungus. Like one of the things that he'll say is, he says, he says, imagine a terrible outcome. Basically he actually collects examples of disasters, things where people have made total cock ups of things. And then he says, then he investigates what the causes of those disasters are. And he says, well, let me not do that. And so this approach is inspired by this great 19th century mathematician called Gustav Jacoby, who famously said, invert, always invert. And so Munger applies this to investing in life. And he says, okay, so if I invert, the first thing I want to do, if I want to figure out how to be a great investor, let me first figure out how to be a terrible investor. So this is why he's collecting these examples of terrible decision making. And so if you think of the ways in which people are standardly stupid about investing, they pile into whatever's hottest and sexiest at that moment, whether it's Tesla or Bitcoin or solar energy stocks. They invest in things they don't understand. They invest in things because the crowd is investing in them. And because they're afraid of missing out, they try to time the market jumping in and out, even though we know that doesn't work, we know that if you get lucky and you guess right one time, when are you going to get back in? It's just too difficult. And so this approach of just saying, okay, let me figure out all the ways I can be stupid and try not to do that is incredibly practical and powerful approach. Not just investing, but to life. Because. Because what Munger would also say is, well, if I want to have a happy and successful life, let me first figure out what's a prescription for an absolutely miserable and disastrous life. And so he'll go through and he'll list all of those things. He'll say, well, okay, so you want to ingest chemicals and become addicted to drugs and alcohol. You want to harbor resentment. You want to be envious, which he describes as the dumbest of the seven deadly sins, because he says it's not even fun. And. And he says you don't want to learn from other people's mistakes. So he lists all of these things that are standard stupidities that he says be unreliable, undependable. And I think this simple idea of inverting and listing all of the standard ways to be stupid becomes very helpful in any situation. You can say, well, I had this discussion recently where a relative of mine was saying, should you be buying bits Bitcoin? And I'm thinking, well, yeah, maybe. I mean, it could keep searching. But this is a perfect example of something where I don't really understand it. I don't really understand why it's soaring. I can't really value it. I'm not sure anyone can really value it. But I do know that it's a really hot, sexy asset that people love. And so that's a really. That's a really good way to hurt myself. So betting on something I don't understand, that's really popular, let me not do that. And so maybe I'm wrong in that individual case and it will continue to shoot to the moon. And that's eminently possible. But if I reduce that kind of dumb behavior over the course of my lifetime in a fairly consistent and conscious way, the odds of my having a successful life are higher. And if I apply that to my marriage or to my work life, it's the same, right? So if you say, think of standard ways in which friends or people you know, have screwed up their lives, right? They love their spouse, but they're unfaithful, and then they blow up their marriage, or they cheat on their taxes and they get caught, or they cheat on their expenses, or they lie in some way that gets them in terrible trouble. These are all things where there's a little. There's definite upside, right? There's the pleasure of the affair, there's the money you save on your taxes or your expense report, but there's a massive downside, which is the destruction of your family or your reputation or your career. Part of what people like Munger are doing is they're saying, well, let me make fewer bets where there's limited upside and massive downside, because the first thing you want to do is avoid catastrophe. I think there are these simple ideas that, once you understand them, like, okay, let me stay in the game. Let me avoid catastrophe. Let me not make decisions with massive downside. They actually do keep you out of a lot of trouble. And Munger's view is that it's really hard to be smart, but it's actually surprisingly easy not to be stupid. And so if you go through your life trying not to be stupid and learning from other people's mistakes and actually really studying other people's mistakes, it's very helpful. But what he also does is he studies his own mistakes. And he says, I really like people who admit they were horses asses and rub their nose in their own mistakes. And so I remember going to Omaha for a Berkshire Hathaway meeting and him saying, well, yeah, we totally blew it when we didn't buy Google and we blew Walmart too. And so here's this guy with 45,000 people in the audience who were there to watch Buffett and Munger and. And he's actually publicly declaring his mistakes. And so if you think about most of us, how we're sort of embarrassed to admit our mistakes and we kind of bury them, not only from other people, but from ourselves. This is a really smart approach because it just makes it so much easier to learn from your errors. And Munger says, any year in which I fail to destroy one of my most cherished books, beliefs is a. Is a. Is a wasted year. So he's actually celebrating the discovery that he's wrong rather than. Rather than trying to conceal.

Reminds me of. I'm sorry for being so full of cliches, but, you know, what is it? Strong beliefs, loosely held, you know, kind of thing to be able to. And I guess that's one of the things, again, kind of throughout the course of your book, there's a lot of focus, I think, these days on how people think and how we make decisions and, you know, how we. You do whatever these choices are. And I really love the overlap of using in some sense the context of finance because like you said, they're fairly agnostic. I mean, I'm sure people have biases and favorites and things like that, but just taking a look at overall what's going on in the world to not hopefully be pulled in by your whatever authority bias or anything else. So we're pushing on an hour. I have just a few more questions and if I may, do you have time for it?

Absolutely.

Okay, awesome. Good. Well, one of the things. So we've talked about a lot of the similarities between different approaches and different investors, but I also saw that you found that sometimes there's some contradictions and maybe this speaks more to the art than the science of finance. And investing like Mohnish and Greenblatt and Sleep tend to talk about having a lot of their money in just a few stocks. But isn't that kind of contrary to Graham's advice around diversification? And then you describe some others that own quite a couple of baskets full of stocks. Do you have any thoughts or feelings about what you've seen from those what seemed to me maybe I'm just misinterpreting it, but seem to be opposite or contrary perspectives?

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And there's a lovely line, I think, from F. Scott Fitzgerald where he talked about how genius is the ability to hold contradictory ideas in your mind simultaneously. I think one of the things that makes investing so interesting, so sort of endlessly fascinating is that there are these great paradoxes, these things that every time you say something, yeah, this is true, you're like, well, well actually if I'm honest about it, the opposite is also true. I'm not trying to come up with a one size all fit solution and say, yeah, you should all just put your money in four stocks as Munger would be happy to do. Munger says a well diversified stock portfolio can have as few as four stocks. But that's fine if you're as smart as Munger and Munger has his money in Berkshire Hathaway, Costco, then a few stocks that this Chinese investor Li Lu owns, and that's kind of more or less it. And that's fine if you're as smart as him and if you understand those businesses really well. But for someone like me, I don't understand that much. I don't have that great confidence in my opinion. And so I have to diversify more. And so I think part of success in investing and in life is being sufficiently self aware that you operate in a way that's consistent with your Own personality. There's a terrific investor. I write about a guy called Matthew McLennan who manages about $90 billion, almost $100 billion, huge portfolio, and he owns maybe 120, 140 stocks. And he says, well, if you go back to, I think it was 1926, he said most of the returns actually came from about 4% of the stocks in the stock market. Most of the others died, went bankrupt. And so he says, if you concentrate too much on a handful of stocks, you're likely to miss those Walmarts and Googles and Facebook and the like. And so you don't want to be so concentrated that you miss those huge outliers. And that's also true. And so there's always this tension. And I think the solution, if there is a solution, is to invest in a way that suits your temperament. So you can say, well, I'm going to have a heart attack if I invest in four stocks, so I need to diversify more. But then also to be aware that if you diversify more, the chances are that you're not going to beat the market. Then maybe you should just own an index fund and have very low expenses. I think understanding that tension between diversification, concentration, high returns and outperformance, and just being a closet index fund, it's really important to understand that stuff and to invest in a way that suits you. It all, I think, comes back to this idea of playing games that you can win and I think having that discipline to say, is this a game I can win? No. I'm going to invest in three funds that other people manage because I can't do this myself. That's how I've resolved these contradictions in my own mind.

That's great. Well, let's maybe, just as we wrap up, talk a little bit about some of the personal kinds of things. What are some of the ways that you live your life in full? What are some of the applications, if not we don't have to get super private or anything, but that you wouldn't mind sharing from your experiences with these times with these folks and how they've managed their lives.

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is this idea that I got from the great investors of reducing complexity and simplifying my life and focusing on a handful of things that I'm best that matter most to me. There's a tension here because my mind is all over the place and I'm nonlinear and I'm scattered and there are lots of things coming at me. Then I Have this desperate desire to have more order and more focus and more control. One of the ways in which I'm applying what I've learned from the great investors is to try to think really clearly about what's the game I want to play, what's the game I'm suited to win. How am I going to reduce complexity instead of constantly adding needless complexity and doing things in a very superficial, distracted way? Because I see this a lot with the greatest investors, that they're incredibly focused, they reduce complexity in an extraordinary way. And so while everyone else is very scattered and distracted, they're narrow and deep, I would say. And so in a sense, it's not about having a full life for me, of doing more and more and more. It's going deeper in a few narrow areas. So I'm thinking, okay, so I want to meditate more because I know that peace of mind is absolutely critical to me. My spiritual life is pretty important to me. And so I spend a lot of time studying Kabbalistic texts or Buddhist philosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, things like that that I just find really, really interesting. I spend a lot of time reading literature. I have an extraordinary book club that's full of writers, basically all writers. And so that's important to me because I know that relationships are one of the key things. My family is critically important to me. I've grudgingly come to realize that my health is also important. And so I try to use a stationary bike down in my laundry room, glamorously by my washing machine and dryer. So it's the tour de laundry room. And so I've tried, instead of having a full life that sort of spirals out in many different directions, I've tried to say, okay, so here are the four or five things that really matter. And so in a sense, it's going deep and narrow. And I was wondering, I mean, when I look at your resume and you've just done so much and you've written so many books and you've done, you know, you've done, you know, you have this psychology career and philanthropy and set up corporations and stuff. I really was wondering how you wrestle with this question of narrow and deep versus wide and how do you do it? How do you not go shallow when you do so many different things? Because this is really what I'm wrestling with in my own life.

Well, I wouldn't guarantee that I haven't gone shallow in quite a few of the things. Part of, I guess the things have been a little bit of a sampler. I don't know if you would know, but there's like these, these candies called Whitman samplers. And you would kind of get all these little different chocolates and you could kind of sample the different ones. And then if there was one that you really like, that almond nougat that you could go get a whole box full of those, but you could sample and get a, you know, a feel for things. And I feel like my immaturity in, in growing up through, through life and through career, there would be these things probably bright and sparkly that I'd have a curiosity about. So I would go give them a test drive and a things that I would try to do. I found I didn't, it wasn't what I thought it was. It turned out to be, you know, a little different once, you know, I got a little bit more educated about it or fully in it. And some things I felt they just sort of kind of ran their natural course. And some of those are by virtue of like my age. And you know, I had used to climb a whole lot and then I had a family and then that seemed a little too inappropriate of taking care of my family and being on a climb that wasn't necessarily super safe. And then as they grew up and got older, I grew up and got older and then became less capable of climbing, you know, so it's sort of like these different kinds of things. I'm fortunate that there are some things that are bellwether for me that I have enjoyed. I feel like psychology has been a way to inform me to be a better parent and to be a better consultant when I'm, you know, looking at issues with a startup or that may not even necessarily be focused on behavioral health, but more so the dynamics of the leadership and the group that's putting the, putting together the startup and just, I just very much have always enjoyed, you know, the writing aspect. And then that gets me into a certain level of discipline and humility of feeling like, you know, I can't write a frickin sentence, you know, because it's, it's so awful, you know, so what, what value do I have in, you know, the hubris of thinking anybody else wants to read what I have to write. So there's those kinds of things that are not comfortable, but I feel that have nevertheless been growthful. So it's sort of like again, back to smorgasbord, like how we started. I sample different things. Some I keep, some I let go. Some I probably should have let go sooner. Some I may always be an amateur, but very much enjoy the process.

That's interesting. For me, I think I've tried to strip away stuff gradually and to say, no, no, this is what really matters to me. And it's taken a long time to do that, partly because I would get caught up in things like editing, for example, which I think in some ways was a distraction because it came very naturally to me. And so it was much easier for me than writing my own stuff, which was really painful.

Did you enjoy the editing, though? Was that pleasurable?

I did. I love the. Much like the ghost writing, I love the relationship part of it, where you're finding people who are incredibly talented and nurturing them and helping them to be the best they can be. When it goes well, sometimes you're just rolling up your sleeves and fixing stuff that's broken, which is probably less satisfying. And, I mean, I did things like I hired a guy called Aravinda, digitized by Google, who I actually lured out of college. He was doing a postgrad degree at Columbia, and he showed me his writing, and I was like, this guy's amazing. And I got him to leave New York and move to India for Time magazine. And he left Time magazine and ended up winning a Booker Prize for his first novel. Incredible talent. And so to be able to work with people like that, that's an incredible joy. So I did enjoy the certain aspects of the editing a great deal. But I think also it was a way of hiding from the writing, which was probably what I was supposed to do, probably what I was built to do, but which is harder. And so, yeah, for me, it's this constant search to try to figure out what am I really supposed to do? And to have this. I find at some really deep level, I actually don't really know what I'm supposed to do. And so I think partly it's a sense of humility, of, like, all right, well, show me, please. I don't know. What am I supposed to do next? Which book am I supposed to do next? And so I'm slightly sort of mystical and intuitive about these things. Even though I write about all these people who are incredibly rational thinkers. I'm not very rational myself. I'm sort of. I'm deeply led by intuition. And I don't know, I wish I were more rational. But maybe there's something. Maybe there's something about that attitude of not really knowing and becoming a little softer and a little more humble about it that allows you to be more open and to hear better than if you blundered through thinking you knew everything, right?

I mean, William, it sounds like you're really kind of like on your journey, you know, that there's a certain awareness that you have that is, you know, very much grounded in the rational, which is good. I mean, that's clear minded, clear thinking critically, you know, looking at things and examining things. And you know, part of your process is this journey as you've described, with, you know, identifying what's important and, you know, and then processing it. And I have to say too, you know, you've kind of circled, you know, back around to it's one thing to be an author and a writer and a journalist and produce what those people produce, you know, articles and books and manuscripts, but you've also, in your journey of doing it, it sounds like, and I don't mean to get real woo woo about this, but you know, you've given a gift of people by virtue of a side effect of your journey of looking at these investors and big names in hedge funds, et cetera, in the process, your journey as well, and then being able to share that with us through a hugely enjoyable book, which is kind of a neat gift and a wonderful artifact.

Thank you. It's really kind of you to say. And I think because my mind is kind of confused and I'm all over the place, I have to reduce things to a few simple principles that kind of guide me. And so if I, if I just keep saying to myself, well, let me at least be a force for good, let me try to be a force for good. That's very clarifying. And so if I think with my writing or coming on podcast, let me try to be a conduit for something that's good and that's helpful to people. I'm not trying to say this in a kind of self righteous way because I'm as flawed as anyone, but having those simple principles where you keep coming back and saying, yeah, yeah, let me try to share something that's useful, that helps people that, that. I don't think I ever would have thought that way early in my career as a writer. I think I was much more trying to settle scores, show people how smart I was. It was, it was all, I mean, I, I literally, because I, I went to Oxford, right, and I studied English literature, but I didn't do particularly well there because I was kind of lazy. So then I kind of come out and I'm like, like I'm going to write book reviews. I'm actually going to get published in the greatest magazines for my literary criticism. So you guys gave me a crap grade in my finals. But actually I'm so good that I'm going to, that I'm going to write about this stuff professionally. So there was a lot of that kind of motivation in my earlier years of wanting to prove myself to the world, to my parents, to my family, to anyone who'd ever rejected my. Me.

Yeah.

And I find, and it worked, it was very powerful because those, those negative emotions do have an energy to them, but it's a very fragile way to. It's a fragile foundation. It's very exhausting.

Yeah, it's, yeah, it's not sustainable. Absolutely.

So I think what I found as I've got older is actually if I say, let me just try to write something helpful and say something helpful and try to be a force with a. It actually it's much more sustainable and it has the advantage that it makes me feel happier. And so it's changed my motivation for everything that I'm doing in quite a fundamental way that I suspect applies. I'm not saying this to be sort of self congratulatory. It's because I actually think there's something quite profoundly helpful in that idea that you can apply in, in whatever profession that you have. If you say, yeah, let me just try to be a force for good. Let me just, let me just try to be a conduit for light. However you define that, it doesn't, doesn't have. And look, I write about Sir John Templeton. I couldn't have been more cynical about his more spiritual goals. But now I look back and I'm like, oh, I was totally wrong. I've been more open minded. He was telling me this stuff 20 years, 20 something years ago. Yeah, that could have saved me so much pain and trouble. And so now I sometimes think he would kind of laugh at me, you know, from the upper world. He's sort of looking down saying, yeah, you schmuck. Yeah, I told you, I told you. And so that also is a reminder that I need to be a little bit less arrogant about my views and a little more open minded because I'm probably wrong about half of this stuff. So. And yeah, I was just trying to get through.

Yeah, you and everybody else. I mean, you know that I think that's, that's really a good point to have that kind of self awareness to go, you know, well, what if I am wrong? You know, what if, you know, like if what was Stephen Covey, you know, seek first to understand, you know, well, what if someone feels so strongly about X and I feel so strongly about Y. Maybe I need to know more about X. Or maybe, you know, I'm mistaken about Y. Well, to wrap up. So in terms of your what's next, am I correct? Are you developing a course too, or catch us up on the book is out and doing very well. So what's next?

I know what I'm going to do next. I'm trying to delay thinking, committing to anything too seriously. I think I'm almost certainly going to do a podcast that grows out of It'll be a kind of richer, wiser, happier podcast. Wonderful conversations with the people I've talked to for the book Ask. So I think that'll be a kind of companion to the book. And then beyond that, I'm torn between writing more about great investors and wanting to go off in a totally different direction and writing more about some of the spiritual and philosophical stuff that I'm interested in. But they're not really disconnected. It's all the same. It's all all. It's all just us trying to figure out how you make your way through a murky and confusing world where nothing is really clear. And so whether I like it or not, if I write about investors or I write about Tibetan Buddhist lamas, I'm kind of writing about the same thing. How do you deal with uncertainty? How much is unknowable? How do you deal with stress and failure? How do you get a clear mind? What. What makes for a truly abundant and worthwhile life? And how do you serve other people and become happy, paradoxically, because you're forgetting about your own ego a bit and focusing on other people. So these themes, whether I like it or not, whatever I write about, these things I think are going to reveal themselves. I pretend that I'm writing about other people, but I'm really just writing about the stuff that's obsessing me.

That's good. We all get to benefit from that. Well, as that evolves and develops, keep me in touch. I'll be happy to share that with everybody that's part of this. And I definitely would very much enjoy hearing you with the interviews live on a podcast. That sounds wonderful.

Wonderful. Thank you.

Well, to wrap up, what are some of the best ways for people to learn more about you, your work, to get your books, et cetera?

Yeah, My website is www.williamgreenwrights.com, which is cloned from Michael Lewis website, which is Michael lewiswrights dot com.

Oh, good. Okay.

I'm on Twitter. I think it's William Green, 72, you can follow me on LinkedIn and I'm pretty receptive if you email me, message me on LinkedIn on Twitter. I really enjoy the interaction that I've had with people who've read my book. There's this ongoing discussion and conversation where people are saying, no, you should read this and have you thought about this? Maybe you should interview this person. And so even though I'm a little bit scattered, I love hearing from people. And so I hope your audience will want to read the book and finds it helpful, but will actually want to communicate now. I'll try to reach out back to them.

That is very.

But they're welcome not to read the book as well.

Well, I certainly encourage that it will be to their benefit, but you're very generous with that. I mean, a lot of times people just sort of get the book out and get their nose back to the grind, but having that openness to sharing a dialogue and interact is wonderful and refreshing. So thank you for that. And I also just personally want to thank you for really a great body of work and doing the background on you. And it was just the tip of the iceberg, but all the work that you've done around the world is just really amazing. And the fact that you were able to carve out this amount of time today and it was just a pleasure to learn from your experiences in the book and then to be able to do a little, little deeper dive, to mercenarily scratch some of the itches and questions that I had is very generous of you and I think it speaks to who you are. William, thank you so much.

Thank you. It's an honor and a pleasure to be chatting with you. So I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. Living a Life in Full is a production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Corporate Gordian Knot, LLC. Assistant producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien executive producer and host Dr. Chris Stout to learn more, stop by our website at lifeinfull for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks and until next time,