99 Years of Charlie Munger Wisdom in 52 Minutes (#525)

Today there's gonna be literally 1,000 threads that are, Charlie Munger was, lived till '99. Here's 99 lessons I learned, and they're gonna regurgitate the stupid quotes on Wikipedia. But this is my first minute. We do things differently around here. We're not just gonna give you the regurgitated quotes. I gotta give you that, you know, little special jus, that au jus that you can dip that sandwich in. All right. Charlie Munger has died at age 99, and all around the world, people are remembering Charlie, this guy who was Warren Buffett's business partner. He's a billionaire, but he's so much more than that. He was a guy who, uh, he was in the military. Uh, he dropped outta school, went to the military, then he somehow talked his way into Harvard Law, even though he didn't even have an under— undergraduate degree. Um, you know, he started a law firm that people don't even ever talk about. That's, you know, does hundreds of millions in revenue. We, uh, he, you know, started investing with Warren Buffett and has basically outperformed the stock market over like a 50-year period by a huge degree. And, um, you know, Bill Gates called, uh, Charlie, you know, maybe the broadest thinker he knows. He said that, um, he has the best 30-second brain of anybody he's ever met. And we wanted to dissect that brain. What's inside that? What made Charlie so prolific? Why did Warren Buffett say that Berkshire is shaped in the mold of Charlie Munger and that he is one of the smartest and wisest men he's ever met. And we pulled out 7 of the big ideas. Charlie said a lot of things over the years, but we identified what we think are the 7 big bits of wisdom that Charlie has shared. And what we wanted to do was instead of just making a listicle, which you're going to see a lot today, you're going to see people on Twitter, every thread boy's going to be like, Charlie Munger died at 99. Here's the 99 bits of wisdom and they're gonna copy paste Wikipedia. We didn't wanna do that. What we wanted to do was take the 7 that we thought were really, really impactful and specifically tell a story of how that's happened. Uh, you know, how we've, how we learned that lesson in our own business life or in our life. Um, it made for, I think, a pretty amazing episode. I told Sam, I said, dude, this, uh, this notes document, uh, that we have for this episode, this thing is, you got a handkerchief? This thing is dripping with wisdom. And you're gonna, that's how you're gonna feel at the end of this podcast. You're gonna need to take a shirt. You're going to need to wipe the old podcast player because this episode is about to be dripping with wisdom. I hope you enjoy this episode on the 7 bits of wisdom from Charlie Munger. So let's jump into the wisdom. So what I think would be fun is we just sort of trade our favorites because this guy's got hundreds of little Charlie-isms, you know, little quips or quotes about the way the world works, about the way minds work, about the way the markets work. And I just thought it'd be great to just like pull out, you know, let's just trade. You go first and then I'll go on, you know, some of our favorites and either, I think we can just, you know, talk about them or share, you know, a way that we've either heard him talk about it or how it's played a role in our life.

All right. You go first. Okay.

I'll start with a very easy one. So one of, you know, one of his big ideas is to get what you want, you need to deserve what you want. And so he says, you know, the easiest way to get everything that you want is to deserve it. And it's so simple that it's almost like obnoxiously simple, this advice. But he's like, whether it's the real, like, you know, if you want the partner you want, you should be deserving of that level of partner, right? Make yourself worthy of a partner like that. Same thing with investments. And he kind of actually calls out a few things that money can't buy. So he's like, trust. In other people, uh, success and admiration. Those are things you cannot buy, you can only earn. And so if you want somebody's admiration, deserve it. If you want somebody's trust, deserve it. If you want success, deserve it. And, uh, I'll share like a very simple, more practical anecdote about this, because again, like, his big ideas are amazing, but they just sort of float in the clouds unless you bring it to earth with like a real tactical example. So when we sold the Milk Road, I've said this before, but one of the reasons we sold to the guys we did was I really, really respected these guys. It was not the highest offer, but these were the highest quality people that we could sell to. And we just had a hunch that like selling to the highest quality people will result in the best long-term outcome. And even if every, even if like, you know, we lose a dollar today, actually just being in business with these guys is going to create, you know, for every dollar we're taking less today, we might create 3 more dollars in the future just by being around high-quality people. And I'll tell you a story that came out of the due diligence that like was like a nugget of gold that stuck with me. That was exactly this. So these guys that we were selling to had built businesses that one of the guys that sold his businesses for about $90 to $100 million and the other guy had sold his business for over $200 million. And both of them had built businesses that were SEO-based. And I know a lot of things about marketing and growth, but I know zero about SEO. I am an absolute beginner novice. I never touch SEO. I don't do businesses that are SEO-based. I literally know nothing. And so one of the ways I priced in the deal was, oh, I'm going to learn SEO from these guys who are frankly masters at SEO. And so we get to the point where we do the deal. I've built up, you know, we're not negotiating anymore. And I'm like, oh good, I'm going to start digging. I'm going to start picking these guys' brains for SEO shit. Like, tell me. And so I sat them down. I was like, you're going to teach me about SEO now. And they started to tell me something, but I was like, okay, okay, that's the general stuff. I've heard that stuff before. Like, what's the like real, like master shit? What's the real, like, you know, black belt shit that I don't know about that you can't just Google and read in, you know, some blog that like helped you guys create, you know, one guy created the number one search result for if you say, I want to buy gold online. And that's the business that was, you know, sold for a few hundred million dollars that he bootstrapped that, you know, never raised any money. And he did it because he knew how to be the top result for buy gold online. I said, how'd you do it, bro? What'd you do? Was it some hack, some technique? And he's like, you know, we did all the normal things. And he's like, and I tried some of these hacks or techniques. It didn't really work. And he's like, so then he's like, you know, what happened was one day I Googled how to buy gold online and we were the 5th result at the time. He goes, so what I did was I clicked the link. He's like, I just, you know, thought to myself, what does Google really want? Google wants to give you the best search result, meaning If somebody searches for how to buy gold online, they want you to get to a page that's going to answer those questions and not have you go search again. He's like, so then I printed out all 5 of the results, us being number 5, and I printed 1 through 4 also. And I sat down for an hour and I just looked at them and I read them. And he's like, I had an honest conversation with myself of why would I click on my page? What is better about my page than these other pages? And I was like, wait, so you didn't like do some like black hat SEO shit that was like this like advanced trick?

Yeah. Why aren't you using the word AI?

And he was like, no, he's like, we didn't deserve the click. We weren't better pages. He's so, he's like, so all I did for the next year was every week I printed out all the pages and then I made my page like, you know, 10% better. Why? I figured out one way that we could be better as objectively better, even if we weren't moving up in the ranks yet. That I could look at it and say, this is a better page. We deserve to be higher ranked. And I had literally never heard this. And I was like, on one hand, in the moment, honestly, I was kind of disappointed. I was like, dude, I came to you for that secret juju about SEO. Like, I'm not trying to have this, like, you got to work hard and just actually make a better page. But it was also kind of like refreshing. It's like you go to the people who are masters of SEO and they're like, yeah, you can do all the tricks, but at the end of the day, you have to have the best result. Like, You have to have the best page and you have to have an honest conversation with yourself of is your page better than these other pages? He's like, if you really want to sustainably like climb the ranks and be at number 1, that's it. And that was such a like tangible business example of like to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. And, uh, I'll never forget that. That was like one of the biggest takeaways I had of the whole process.

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HubSpot. Grow better. All right. If you're loving this episode, I'm glad. I also want to tell you 3 things that we are doing as a podcast. Quick little newsflash, news announcement about MFM. I have 3 things to tell you. Here they are. Number 1, there's like this meetup thing going on. So this is kind of cool. So there's a woman. Do you remember her name? I'm sorry, I'm not remembering her name off the top of my head. Rachel, I think it is. I think her name is Rachel. Sorry, Rachel, if it's not Rachel.

That's all right.

She runs a company. She runs a company that basically helps content creators spin up meetups. So basically what's happening is in a couple weeks, we'll put the link in the description. I'll also tweet it out. But in like a week or two around the world, there's MFM meetups, which is kind of fun. We're not going to be there because it's like, you know, they're all happening on the same day in different locations. But forget us. If you're one of these people that listen to the podcast, you're probably going to get along with other people who listen to the podcast. It's just like a thing. Uh, you know, like people who listen to this podcast, you're business nerds with a sense of humor. And if you like business nerds with a sense of humor, they're all getting together. Everybody's going to like a bar, you know, like there's one in Toronto, there's one in California, there's one in Austin, and they're going to hang out.

It's called the River. So if you go to getriver.io, so get, G-E-T, and then river, like a stream, river.io, you scroll all the way to the bottom and you'll see My First Million meetup. There's, um, they're happening in Austin, in Houston, Denver, Nashville, Atlanta, Cincinnati, all, all over North America, I believe.

Right. Oh, her name's Ray. You were right. Okay. So Ray, uh, move us to the top for this week because we gotta, oh, here we go. So My First Million. So, so yeah, uh, they did this for All In, I think, and that's kind of one, one of the proof of concepts. I think this is going to be fun. So do it. We'll try to like, I don't know, call into a couple of these and say hi, but this is cool. So that's happening next week. That's fun. Go meet some other people who are part of Neckbeard Nation. And then what do you think? Is that a thing? Number 2, we're doing the poker tournament. So a while back we talked about this business that we found fascinating, which was a cloud poker tournament. It's like, is digital poker tournament where everybody's webcam's on. It could be private for our community. And 300 or 400 people signed up. We just never scheduled it, but now we scheduled it. It's December 13th. It's happening. We will give away merch and some cool stuff as prizes. We'll come up with some dope prizes, maybe like, you know, whatever, $1,000 or a call or free merch or whatever. So yeah, it's at cloudpokernight.com. So cloudpokernight.com/mfm. So if you want to register for that, if you already registered, we'll send out an email. To be able to let them know that that's happening. And last thing is I do a thing every year, which is I, this month, this month of December is the plan for, you know, other people are thinking about Christmas. I'm thinking about end of year, next year, hit my goals. And so I basically use this time for planning for 2024. So I'm going to host a free session, which basically is I am currently doing it for all my businesses. I make like a one-page plan for what I'm trying to do next year. And it's basically like the big goal and then the breakdown of like how I'm going to do it. I have a method of how I get to that answer and you walk away with kind of like a clear one-pager for your business. Ben had the idea, he was like, dude, I love when we do this. He's like, we should just like do this together with other people that own businesses that want to do it. And so, yeah, if people want to do it, I'm just going to be on a Zoom and I'll walk you through my process totally free. You'll walk away in an hour with like a bunch of clarity on what's, what your next year looks like. I have a bunch of good questions that help people get clarity. So if you want to attend that, planfor2024.com. So go to planfor2024.com. Ben's going to spin up a website and we'll invite people to that if you're the type of person that wants to kind of like set the vision and the intention for next year.

I like that one. He also had another line, Munger did, where he is like, I never tried to disagree with someone's opinion. Unless I've under— unless I understand their side better than they do. And that's like a specific example of like, let's say debate of how he was like, I need to, I need to deserve this.

Right. So that's number 2. I love that one. He says, I'm not entitled to an opinion. Like I can't have conviction until I can argue the other side better than someone who believes the other side. And he's like, he's like, people think, he's like, people think this is some like crazy high bar. And those people haven't ever asked somebody who believes something why they believe it. Like, it's actually quite a low bar to surpass their own, like, their own understanding of something. And, you know, I think about this with like Bitcoin, for example. I'm a Bitcoin believer and my approach to this was always to say, here's all the reasons why I believe in Bitcoin. It just makes sense for, you know, reason A, B, C, and D. But actually the better way to do it is to say, Smart people who don't believe in Bitcoin would say A, B, and C, and I understand that. And here's what I think about those and why I've landed on the side of conviction that I have. It's just a much better logical way to think than to just say, here's what I believe and I'm going to come up with all the evidence. I'm even going to make up some of it to justify my opinion, which is, I would say how 9 out of 10 people—

What do we call that? Steelmanning?

Yeah. So steelmanning is like, argue the other side better than they would even argue it.

So one of my favorite— I'll bring up one good line, but I, whenever I hear about these like freaks, I call them freaks and I mean that in an admirable way. I like when they're on the Berkshire Hathaway podium giving their speech, they're basically set up like a comedian in order to like give these beautiful lines. What I try to find is just weird day-to-day quirks that they have and like ways that they're acting on a day-to-day basis. And so I've got, you know, our good friend Jack, like when I'm with him, he'll be like, oh, I didn't name my daughter. I was like, why? He was like, well, I need to get to know her first. You know, we're, I'm going to wait to name her. So she's just named Baby for now. But once we get to know her and I'm like, that's so weird. And then you start thinking about it and you're like, that's actually not weird. It is kind of weird to name a human being before you've got to meet her. So that's like an example of like an everyday, well, One of our friends, Jack, wildly successful. He's been successful in odd ways and you see how he acts in daily life. There's this cool story from, I think it's called Making of an American Capitalist. And so they talk about how, here, I'll read it. Just the, this part from the book. They go, physically, Munger was unimpressive. He had an elf-like face, pasty skin, and glasses an inch thick. Though something of a snob and highly judgmental, He had a deep sense of ethics and his smarts were matched by Churchillian self-assurance. Once he was asked if he could play the piano and Munger replied, I don't know, I've never tried. And I thought like, what a telling line. Like what a telling line. So most people, you say, no, I can't play the piano. This was, I probably could. It's, there's definitely a potential that I will be a great piano player. I just haven't tried. And when I read that line, I just thought, I thought, this man's beautiful. This man's one of a kind. And I love people like that because myself, you, most everyone, we default to, can you do this? It's like, of course not. I don't have the capabilities. I cannot do that. Where that little mind shift of like, well, not yet.

Dude, even noticing that, props to you. I read that line in the research. I didn't even understand what was remarkable with the line. I just moved on. I didn't even notice it until you just said it like you did. So good on you for even observing it. That's a good one. Well, that's what I'm saying.

When I'm reading about these guys, it's like these little one-off lines or these, like, like for example, they'll say he founded this law firm and then next he was bored there, next, like whatever. And I'm like, well, hold on, lemme go look at this law firm. And then you start reading about this law firm and like, dude, this is quirky. This is a weird, super strange law firm. And so anyway, yeah, this line, it's a beautiful line, uh, about just showing like the day-to-day about how you can be different.

Let me give you number 4. So my number 4, um, Charlieism I want to bring up is, let me tell you a little story about where I felt this first, and then I'm going to tell you the Charlieism. So let's rewind the clock 15 years. I was living in Indonesia, and in Indonesia I lived in this building that had a ping pong table. And I don't know anybody because I'm living in Jakarta, Indonesia. I don't have any friends there. And so I used to go down and just hang out by the ping pong table because I thought, well, that's maybe like my equivalent of going, having a drink at the bar. Let's just go see if anybody's down here to play and maybe I can meet some And so sure enough, I would go down, me and my brother-in-law, we would go down and we would play. And my brother-in-law is better than me at ping pong. And the way he plays is what you imagine somebody who's good at ping pong. I would serve and he would hit back, but like we would get to this point where he would hit like a smash. And my brother-in-law is kind of a character. If you've ever met him, he's like, he's not just going to hit it fast. He's going to jump even though you don't need to jump. He's going to be like, woo. He's going to just make you feel like he just smashed this shot. And like, I was so, like, I was trying to get better than him. He was trying to get better than me. And I thought, okay, he's just got higher skill. He's more advanced. He's brilliant at this. Like, he could just hit these amazing shots and I gotta be able to hit amazing shots. So I'm practicing hitting amazing shots and he, and so whoever used to come down, he would beat them. He was the best guy in the building until one day this 55, 60-year-old man came down named Poppy.

Uh-oh.

And we're like, your name's Poppy? He's like, I'm Poppy. We're like, okay, I don't know if he's flexing on us, if this is a real name. And he takes a paddle out of his case and we're like, oh, dude, he's got his own paddle. Oh, shit. It's like the guy who brings his own bowling ball to the bowling alley. You know, this guy means business. So we're already on A-game, basically. And so I play him and Poppy beats me, but he didn't do anything he wasn't smashing the ball. He wasn't doing it. And I just thought, oh man, I was off today. All right, Aaron, you play him. And so I have my brother-in-law Aaron play him. I'm like, all right, Aaron's never lost to anybody in this building. Let's see what happens. And he starts playing Poppy, and he's trying to do what he always does. He's trying to hit brilliant shots on the corner, down the line, cross court, drop shot, and none of it's working. Poppy is destroying him. And the way that Poppy plays is like, this is for anybody who's like a real ping pong fan. I need like something to demonstrate. Let's use this pen. Pretend this is the paddle. Normally when you play ping pong, your arm is back. You're doing like a full stroke, like a tennis thing.

You're just looking dope.

He used to just hold it like this forward, like the paddle just facing you. And then he would just move left and right like a wall and he would just, whatever you hit, he would just hit back. And the thing about Poppy is Poppy was never hitting brilliant shots, but he would also never hit it out. And never hit the net. And so inevitably he would just keep hitting it back and one of your brilliant shots would go out of bounds. You would hit it too hard, too soft, you'd hit the net, like you would mess up. And he would always score based on your error. And he crushed us and he crushed us that day and he crushed us every day. And he would just chuckle and say, good game. And he would go upstairs and we'd be like, fucking Poppy, man, I'm going to get this guy. And we never got him the whole summer I was there. We never one time beat this guy. And then one day he invited us up to his house after his apartment in the building. He lived in the penthouse. Beautiful. He was so successful in business. We're like, Poppy, dude, you're balling out of control. He had like a secret poker room. He had a wall of just like super fancy liquor. People have a wine cellar. He had like a fancy liquor wall. It was crazy. He had a shower with like 6 shower heads. And we were like, dude, this guy Poppy. And we're like, what do you do? And he's like, I sell soap. And we're like, you make soap? He's like, no, I just import and export. And we're like, is it better soap? He's like, no, it's just soap. He's like, it's good soap. It's not the best. And we were like, well, how do you sell it? He's like, well, I just go to people that need soap. And we're like, this fucking Poppy, like this is how he lives his life too. He is just making no brilliant shots, but no unforced errors. And so this is a Charlie Mungerism, which is avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance. And he says other people spend their whole life trying to be so smart. All I'm trying to do is not be idiotic. It's harder than people think, but this is more important than trying to be brilliant. And so Charlie Munger was basically like, how do I just avoid the great errors in life? Let's say it's investing. How do I avoid the great errors of investing? If it's health, how do I avoid the great errors of health? And that's basically what he oriented around. He wasn't perfect at it, but I thought, what a totally different, you know, a different strategy than you'll ever hear, which is about being the best. And becoming more advanced and becoming, you know, being brilliant and talented. And his thing was just avoid stupidity and you'll outperform everybody.

Is there a category in the Oscars for like podcasters who can weave in a story into Charlie Munger? If yes, I think you might get, I think you might get that nod. That was a wonderful, we gotta give it up. That was a wonderful, you had me enthralled and I didn't know where you were going to go with this.

I didn't know where I was gonna go with it.

Sometimes you just open your mouth and start talking and see where it goes. And you won that, Mr. Wonder. You, you, you totally won that one. That was a beautiful, the beautiful way to tie that in. Copywriting. That's what you, that's what that was.

Well, I'm honestly, the reason why today there's gonna be literally 1,000 threads that are Charlie Munger was lived till 99. Here's 99 lessons I learned and they're gonna regurgitate The stupid quotes on Wikipedia. But this is my first minute. We do things differently around here. We're not just gonna give you the regurgitated quotes. I gotta give you that, you know, little special jus, that old jus that you can dip that sandwich in.

Well, you came with heat. That's gonna be hard to compete with. I, um, let me, let me ask you something. So right now it's, uh, it's November 29th. So most people are doing their next year financial planning for their businesses. For years at The Hustle, I made a very similar mistake that I bet you made, and that is overoptimism. Have you ever hit any of your projections in the first 6 years of your career?

Never. I've never met a goal I've ever set.

Yeah, dude, if you ask people at The Hustle, like, one of my big weaknesses is, is it's looking at the numbers of the Excel sheet and, you know, you see like a 7 million here. Uh, and you're like, what if we took that 7 and deleted it and put a 9? I'm like, look how much more profit they gave us.

Let's just do that.

I'm like, genius. That's basically— people would be driven crazy because that's what I would do. I would just look at the sheets. I'm like, yeah, that looks good. But hey, look, if you just delete that number and put it to that number, look how much better this looks. So let's just do that. And I've made that mistake so many times. I bought a property recently or a few years back, and I remember thinking like, okay, this is only an okay price property, but yeah, I'm going to take better pictures or I'm going to do something when I sell it and I'm going to make, that's how I'm going to make all this money is I'm just going to increase revenue and I'm going to do this, this, this. And guess what? Just like years of failing at projecting, I totally effed it up. So now I try to be way more modest. With my financial projections, but I completely have always messed it up. And Munger's got a bunch of good quotes. He's like, it's dangerous to rely too much on models and formula. The reality is way more complex than that. And he says, we're very disciplined in our approach and we're not swayed by flimsy optimism. And then he goes on to say, he's like, where's the exact quote? He talks about how he basically says like, It's pretty ridiculous that people are biased by both over-skepticism and over-optimism in the business world. If the micro reality is good, good decisions and good systems are what I look for. I don't use predictions, or not predictions of macro environment changes. And so basically the point being is his whole philosophy was to buy businesses where if I bought a good business at a good price, I'm golden. And then if I ever want to sell it, or if something crazy improves, that's icing on the cake. Whereas what I do, and I bet most people do, and I try my hardest to avoid this nowadays, is I say, I default to, no, the optimism is actually the truth. The truth is just, that's just what they did because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. You know what I mean? And that's been one of my biggest mistakes in business is overoptimism or, uh, overoptimism. And what it does is it crushes team morale and it gets you in a losing state of mind and it just sucks. What, what Munger said was, he goes, you make a lot of money on when you buy a good company at a good price, but you make all of the money by letting it ride for 20 years. So the patience is where the big money is. And I struggle like crazy to do that. I have this, this year we're, we're, I'm trying things a little bit differently, but I have never hit any of my projections. Because it's just too optimistic. And that is, it's basically just mental masturbation is what it is by making these projections. And it's harmful. It's a liability.

Well, there's like, there's like the thing you want to hit, you know, some people say you want to hit 70% of the goals that you, that you set. And that's like the right balance between ambition and, you know, practicality, you know, zero hitting 0% of your goals is obviously means you're setting the wrong goals. And hitting 100% of your goals means you're obviously playing it too safe and conservatively. And so there is some number in between. You could pick 70, 50, 60, whatever works for you. And yeah, I think most entrepreneurs and investors for that matter err on the side of optimism because boy, doesn't it feel better in the moment to be optimistic?

Do you want to know something I'm trying to do? No goals. I'm trying to do no goals. And it's not working out with any of the partners who I'm involved with who are trying to buy into this. You know what it's not doing?

Working out.

Yeah, I'm trying no goals and I'm getting no buy-in. So I hate, I've grown to hate goals, man. Like it shouldn't change.

This is like your thing with money. Do you have like a, you have like a weird relationship with money that you need like money therapy? You have probably like a weird relationship with goals that like, uh, you just need to work out. Like, you know, these extremes, you know, crazy goals that nobody can hit or no goals. Like, you know, I would just assume that the answer is actually somewhere in the middle, right? The Mungerism is probably somewhere in the middle, not either extreme.

The analogy that I would give people is like, let's say Usain Bolt is in the Olympics in the 100-meter dash and he runs this race. Like it doesn't matter if we timed the race. A, he won and B, like just tracking that time, like he ran faster than everyone else. Who cares? Who cares about the time? You know, who cares about that stuff? And so I'm like, it doesn't matter.

So compare yourself to others is the answer instead.

Well, we're talking about Munger and these guys were the analogy kings, man. Come on.

And this analogy, you're Usain Bolt, correct?

Yeah. Okay, good. I just, I get fed up with over-tracking and over-planning. So like we're, you know, Hampton is 18 months old, let's say 12 months old. And we're trying to look at, so they want to plan 12 months out. And I'm like, yeah, that's 50% of the company's existence.

Let's go to one of his other ones I think is kind of related, which is one of Munger's big ideas. The one, one that he is, is well known for that I have taken into my life is this idea of inversion. So he, he says invert, always invert. And so, you know, the, what does this mean? It's basically a way to think through problems backwards. So if you, let's say you wanted to solve a common thing that people ask, which is, you know, how do I be successful? Or how do I be happy in life? And there might be like 1,000 different answers to that question. But what Munger would do is, is in order to get to the answer faster, he would invert, right? Why does Bill Gates say he goes from A to Z faster than anyone? He's, he has the best 30-second brain of anyone. It's 'cause Munger's default way of problem solving is to invert. And so he'll say, instead of figuring out how to be happy, let me just figure out what is the surefire path to misery. And he literally wrote it out. Like, I can read you the answer of what he said. Is this your fire path to misery?

Or what did he say?

Okay, so his, he actually did a talk and he calls this his prescription for misery.

So he says, what a beautiful line, by the way. Is that beautiful language or what?

It is. It's wonderful. And he says, number one, ingesting chemicals to alter your mood or perception. So if you rely on chemicals to change your mood, Eventually this leads to misery. This is like alcoholism or sort of like overstimulation, whatnot. Number 2 is envy. He has this great quote, which is, the world is not— people think the world is driven by greed. It's actually driven by envy. He goes, I am lucky that I'm an old man now and I've conquered my envy. I don't give a damn what anybody else has. I don't want what anybody else has, and I don't care what they have. But most people are not like that. For most people, it drives them up the walls if they see that the neighbor has a nicer car or that their friend has a higher paying job. Or their coworker gets promoted. They didn't even want it in the first place. But as soon as somebody else has it, envy kicks in and it drives them. It drives, you know, so much of their behavior. And so number 2 of the prescription for misery is envy. Third related is resentment. If your joy goes down when other people's joy goes up, that is a surefire way to have a miserable life. So those are 3 that he stole from somebody else. And he says, I'd like to add my 4 on top of that. He says, number 4, be unreliable. If you are unreliable, you will be distrusted by all those who matter. And that you might be a mighty fine turtle, but you will be outrun by hordes of mediocre turtles if you are unreliable, and even some turtles that are on crutches. So it's like this idea that, you know, availability is the best ability, that if you are unreliable, it sort of cancels out any talent that you have. That one hit home for me because, as you know, I am a bit of an unreliable person and I've paid the price for that in many, many times. Yeah.

Hey, by the way, should we bring up that MFM podcast meeting that you missed yesterday?

Yeah, just was on a different call and forgot about it. And so these things happen and it is a penalty I pay. It is part of my prescription for misery. Here's the next one. So he says another number 5 is learn only from your own experience and your own, you know, trials, basically. If you decide that your firsthand experience is your only way to figure out good versus bad, and you're not going to learn from other living and dead people, that is a surefire way to misery because you will learn much slower than somebody who learns the other way. Next one, he goes, when hit with adversity, go down and stay down. That's another prescription for misery, is to not bounce back from adversity, the inevitable and unavoidable blows of life. And the last one, he goes, don't be objective. Stay stuck in your ways. Hold onto your initial ideas, your most loved ideas, hold them with a death grip. And that is his final prescription for misery is to never change your mind in light of new facts.

My, of those that you mentioned, my biggest weaknesses are envy. So this pod is fun for you and I to do. Sometimes it creates a lot of envy because we have all these amazing people on here. Or, or if it's just you and I, like, Sean just did great, uh, Sam didn't do as good. Or, uh, if we have all these amazing people on and you start talking to them and you're like, huh, I'm just as smart as this guy, but this guy is—

how do you know? Because when you ask, how old are you? That's the— yeah, that's the trigger of like, I'm feeling terrible, can you really just do the finishing blow and tell me that you're 2 years younger than me?

Yeah, like, we have so many And every once in a while there are people who I'm like, yeah, you're just better. So I'm not going to be envious.

Zillowing people's houses after you see them. That's not really, nothing good happens on the end of a Zillow.

So I have, I've got, I read, I read a lot and I like reading biographies and whenever I read a biography, I do sort of what I did up here where I write down, like, let's say it's a business biography. I'll write down the years and I'll make notes of interesting things that happened to that person in that year. And then if it involves a dollar amount, I'll write the dollar amount. And then in one cell over, I'll say, what's that dollar amount in today's numbers? And then I'll say, how old were they? And so I'm like reverse engineering different people's lives, but you know what I'm really doing? I'm comparing myself to them.

Yeah, of course.

I'm comparing myself to them.

You're Usain Bolt running that race, except for you're not Usain Bolt, you're Tyson Gay, and you're watching Usain Bolt in front of you.

And I justify it by saying, uh, uh, like if I read someone and I am better off than they, than they are, uh, I say, great, I'm doing better than them. And they ended up wonderfully. I'm going to end up wonderfully. Or if they're kicking my ass at my age, I just think, motherfuck, this sucks.

I got to give you credit for your honesty and vulnerability because you're being honest and vulnerable admitting this, but I do not advise anybody follow this gameplay. This is a recipe for misery.

I am not saying that this is, I'm not saying this is helpful. I'm just admitting. And the last thing that I sort of suck at is being bendable. What was the last one? What did, how did you explain it?

Yeah, he's like, you know, um, don't be objective. Uh, don't change your, don't change your mind. You know, stay stuck in your ways, stay stuck in, hold onto those initial ideas you had before these new, new facts and circumstances came out.

Yeah. Uh, you know, I, uh, I try to think of myself as bendable, but I could work on that for sure.

Um, the ones that I, uh, struggle with out of this are the unreliable one for sure. And then, um, maybe envy, a second one. I think that's probably like number 2. I think I'm pretty good on all these other ones.

That's interesting. I would, I wouldn't have thought, by the way, of you as an envious person.

I think that's a hard one to kick. Uh, you know, I don't think I'm like, let's say, uh, terrible at it, but it's definitely there. It's not something that I could be like, yeah, I have conquered that mountain. No, no, no. I'm still somewhere on that mountain.

Hey, do you know what the, uh, what I think it's the 6th, 10th commandment is? Thou shalt not, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.

Right, right.

Don't be jealous. Don't be jealous, my friend.

So I have a joke, but I think if I said this joke, it's going to get me in trouble with at least 5 people at minimum in my life. So I'm just going to not make this joke. All right. So I want to give you some examples of the invert principle because I think this is one of the most important ones. So when he was a military meteorologist, it's World War II. His job is to keep pilots safe. And he's like, okay, what's everything I need to know about pilot safety? And he's like, you know, there's like 7 textbooks about everything a pilot needs to know. And then instead he's like, no, no, no. Okay, let's work backwards. What are the most likely causes of crashes or incidents for pilots? And he went and studied that way simpler answer. He's like, okay, I just need to be able to predict snow, ice, and fog really well as a military meteorologist. Those 3, if I can avoid the, if I can get my pilots out of the way of those 3, I can ignore everything else because those 3 are the real killers. And let me like, so he inverted it in order to like do his job. Let me tell you another example of this. When I was in college, I got picked as part of some like thing called Kairos that was like, I love Kairos, top college startups in the country. Honestly, it was like worse than Forbes 30 Under 30 in terms of like credibility. Literally, if you signed up, you won. And even better, if you signed up, you won, and then you made friends with the person, they would take you on this all-expenses-paid trip to China for a week to go meet Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba, or the founder of Alibaba. And so we go, I get picked on this trip, I go fly to China. I don't even know what Alibaba is. We go to their headquarters. I'm like, holy shit, this is like eBay for China or something. This is crazy. And we get a sit-down meeting with the CEO. This guy's like one of the most powerful people in China. And somebody asked, you know, we got to ask questions and one of the kids asked, you know, the sort of simpleton question, like, you know, what's your advice? You know, I want to be successful. What's your advice? Like, what are the keys to success from your experience? And he says, you know, I was obsessed with this question also. What are the keys to success? What is the blueprint for success? And I talked to 100 successful people and I got 100 different blueprints and I thought, well, that doesn't really help.

And this is Jack.

Uh, this was actually a guy named David Wei, I think is his name. He was the current CEO at the time. He was the one answering this part. And he goes, um, he goes, every success is different. It's its own little unique snowflake, but every failure is the same. And we were like, you know, we lean in and, you know, he had his answer and his answer I don't think is actually the right answer, but for this, but like he goes, um, it like tied into the Alibaba story and he goes, every, every, every big company that that eventually fails. So his answer was like, not how to be successful, but how do you not screw it up once you're a big company, which was the problem they were having. He goes, too much money, too much technology, and too many people. And so he tells a story about like how they were going to compete with Google and with eBay when they were coming to China. And he's like, we needed to invent our version of Google AdWords. And he goes, Jack Ma said, cool. You get, I think it was like 12, 15 people. He's like, 12, 15 people? This is like gonna be a huge part of the business. Google has 2,000 people working on this. He goes, did I stutter? You get 12 to 15 people. Uh, you're gonna work. Um, he's like, we need some office space. Uh, you know, give us like a couple floors of the office or whatever. He's like, you're gonna work outta my old apartment. He's like, your old apartment? We need a proper office. He goes, I started Alibaba in that apartment. I think it'll work. And he goes, uh, technology. He's like, well, you know, we're gonna need this many servers. We should get the best stuff. and you know, we need this much, but let's have double that for redundancy in case, you know, the servers go down. We don't want to lose anything. He goes, if I give you redundant servers, you're going to design a system that goes down. I'm going to give you only the servers you need. And in fact, uh, you go get, go get used servers so it can run on even shitty servers. And, you know, he sort of David Goggins them. That was like the story that he told about like, and they eventually did it. They pulled it off.

But I wonder if that guy found that inspiring at first or like What the fuck, Jack?

Yeah, it was definitely like a fuck you, man. Come on. But, uh, you know, when it all works out, then you can tell this great story. Um, Bezos has a simple inversion too. They were like, you know, Jeff, tech, you're, you're, you know, one of the like internet CEOs, internet's evolving so fast. Technology is always changing. What technology innovations are you most excited for? What's going to change about Amazon in 10 years? And he goes, oh, I don't think about that. Instead, I think about what's not going to change because customers are always going to want the most selection, the lowest prices, and the fastest delivery. And so everything else can change, but that's not going to change. And so we focus on what's not going to change because we have to change with the times in order to like constantly beat customers' expectations on delivery speeds, low prices, and vast selection. And so, you know, this idea of inversion is so powerful. Even in my own life, I was telling you, like, I'm having a bunch of progress right now with my diet, which is great because like, You know, the scoreboard is currently 30, you know, 34 years of no progress and, you know, like a month of, of great progress right now. What changed? Well, what changed? And, well, I did a bunch of things, but, but I also actually just inverted. So instead of trying to figure out what's the best diet program, what's the best workout program, exactly how many grams of this, how many milligrams of creatine, how many grams of protein, how much, how much of this, instead of trying to like go, is it the paleo keto diet, Mediterranean diet, what should I be doing? It was just the inversion, like what's a surefire way to be fat? And that answer was quite simple. Yeah. I was like, I need to eat way more calories than I'm gonna burn. Eating shitty foods that are fried and ultra-processed. You know, right now I eat late at night. Pretty sure that's a recipe to get fat. You know, sitting all day instead of walking for my meetings, probably pretty good way to get fat is to sit all day. And I just inverted and I was like, okay, cool, I'm just going to walk more. I'm going to eat less calories than I consume and I'm going to not late night snack because I always eat crappy food when I do that. It's literally all I changed and like boom, like started to get results finally after like, you know, instead of like being like, let me go download 19 hours of Andrew Huberman and try to like follow this protocol. It's like that wasn't the problem, right? Like that, that was the complex solution rather than the easy inversion.

That's great.

Let's do a couple more. Do you have any other ones that you like here? I have a story he told that I thought was pretty cool.

Let's wrap up with that story.

All right. So he's teaching a class at some college. He goes to like an economics class and he's like, so he has this general idea of you need to learn all the big ideas in a space. So he's like, I don't know anything about psychology, but I figured there's probably 20 big ideas in the world of psychology. And I should just like read the books and try to figure out what are your, what are the 20 big ideas in your space? He's like, if I know those 20 big ideas, I'm going to be better than, like, I'll know more than 98% of people who spend their whole life, you know, 98% of people, including some people who spend their whole life doing this because they're so lost in the weeds. And so one of the big ideas he had was like, so he goes into economics, same thing. What are the big ideas in economics? Everybody knows, like, Economics 101 is the supply-demand curve. And, you know, basically the idea is that, you know, as the supply of something goes down, the demand will go up or the price will go up. Similarly, if you drop the price of something, the demand should go up. So people know this generally about economics. But Charlie has a thing. He's like, you learn the big idea, but then you also, how do you make this useful is you need to understand the exceptions to those rules. So what is the I before E except after C? So he's like, how do you understand that? Okay, generally, prices go down, demand should go up for that. If, you know, the demand for TVs is, let's say, you know, X at $5,000, but if you drop the price of a TV down to $5, there's a lot of people that will buy it. And so he's like, but what are the exceptions? So he goes into this economics class and he goes, everybody understands, you know, when prices go down, demand goes, and everyone says up. He says, okay, fantastic. What are the cases where that's not true? So let me just put you on the spot as if you're one of the students. So what's a case where that's not true, where the opposite happens?

An item that is supposed to, uh, signal prestige.

Exactly. So hands go up, 50 hands go up and they say luxury goods, uh, any item where price is a signal for quality or status. Um, and he's like, you know, this is luxury handbags and whatnot. You know, if a Louis Vuitton bag was $2 tomorrow, the demand would actually, you know, briefly go up, but then in the long term go down. And, um, he's like, so everybody gets that one. And he goes, what else? And now you get crickets, right? Like, shit, what else? And he goes, he goes, any industry where demand is based on bribing the purchaser. And he goes, what? He goes, yeah, there's like many industries, the defense industry, many parts of the medical industry where actually it's a screwed up kind of perverse incentives where companies take profits and they use those to, um, you know, shower, you know, goods or, or money or, um, experiences on buying agents, purchasers. And, um, whether that's through advertisement, so like I spend a ton of money advertising and that's how I create the demand. And if I didn't have any advertising budget, I wouldn't be able to create the demand. Or it's things like the, you know, um, the, the military industrial complex where there's like some cronyism where it's like, Yeah, you give me this contract today because in 5 years you're going to be on my board and your retirement package will be 10 times what you're making in the government. And because we all know that that's true, because I have so much excess profit, you want to reward me with big contracts. And actually you want to pay more for these contracts so that we can be this really successful company because it rewards you in the end. And he's like, once you realize that that's an exception to this rule, you will understand how the world actually works. You will understand where the laws of gravity actually break. And I just love that story. I think it told like, it's an interesting little nugget business-wise, but also, you know, the way that capitalism works, but it's also shows kind of the way this guy thinks, which is this I before E except after C mentality where he goes into any space, he tries to speedrun and figure out, you know, what are the 10 to 20 big ideas of your space? And then he looks at the exceptions and, um, you know, I did this recently, I was, I went to Brian Johnson's house and afterwards I was like, thinking about longevity and I was like, all right, should I be one of these tech guys that like really fucking cares about longevity? Like, is longevity going to be my shit or am I going to zag and be like, longevity's overrated? And I was like, I need to have an opinion. And I decided—

what would Munger say? Hey, Munger lived to be 99. He didn't look like a longevity freak.

Well, somebody said this. Well, Naval said this. He goes, Buffett and Munger, these guys are like in their 90s and they famously like eat McDonald's breakfast every day and eat M&M's and drink Diet Cokes maybe for show, but at least they at least do it. They're not sitting there taking Metformin and like cold plunging every morning. And he's like, it just goes to show how important like not being stressed is actually to your health.

Yeah.

Because these guys actually were quite low stress in the way that they lived their life. They spent most of their days reading, playing bridge, talking, thinking, very few meetings. They didn't sort of like, you know, stress out about investments. They were buy and hold long-term investor type of thing. Like low stress compared to a lot of successful people. But on the longevity thing, I was like, all right, let me go learn what are the 10 big ideas in the longevity space. And I literally carved out 2 days and me and Ben, all we did was just deep dive into longevity. Like I read, I read like power skim through some books. I read, I was like, who are the 5 like thought leaders? And then what are their most popular TED Talks? And like, let me go watch those. Let me go see what these, you know, what does Peter Attia say? What does Bryan Johnson say? What are like the quotes?

So what's your takeaway of all of it?

My takeaway was that the big ideas, and this is like somebody who's a big longevity person will argue with me because I'm going to do the short version of this, but the big idea is essentially everybody's health declines. We are probably past the age of like the live forever. So there's like one big idea, which is that if we ever figure out a way to reverse aging or like minimize cell damage, it's not just going to be this gradual thing. Like we used to live till 80, then 90, then 100, and then 110, 120, 130. It's going to be like, there's going to be a step full jump once we figure out how to stop cell damage. But if you've already had too much damage, they're not going to be able to like get you back into your 20s. You're going to be like past the point of no return. And so like, The big breakthrough is if you can figure out how to stop cell damage, we don't know how to do that yet. When that happens, there's going to be an age sort of point, a tipping point where people below that are going to live to like 300 and people above that are still going to live to like 110. And like, there's going to be this big, like, disparity, you know, polar, you know, polarity between those two outcomes. That's interesting. The second interesting thing is like, in terms of the Peter Attia school of thought of longevity, which is not live forever. But it's like live a longer healthspan. So healthspan versus lifespan is one big idea. And the healthspan idea is at the end of your life, everybody's going to have a marginal decade, which is like your last 10 years of life. Your, your health is going to decline pretty dramatically from like being immobile and pain and pain to like, you know, really, you know, not being able to wipe your butt by the end. Right. So it's like, that's typically the like bad version of aging. What Peter Attia and these guys are trying to do is basically push that decade out. So if it was going to happen to you from 80 to 90, let's make it from 90 to 100. Or if it was going to happen from 90 to 100, let's make it 100 to 110. And the cost of your today lifestyle in order to affect that final marginal decade, I personally was like, eh, not worth it. I'm going to find the 80/20 of healthy things to do that are not so costly, not so painful or hard to follow or regimented or whatever. I'm not going to forget to live today in order for my age 90 to 100 to be better. I will take the instant gratification, please. And so I was like, my takeaway was basically, I don't care about the marginal decade. I'm not going to orient my life around that. There's an 80/20 of healthier stuff to do that's like, I don't mind switching to that lifestyle. I'll do those. And then that's good enough for me. And if wonder drugs come out at some point in the future, Hopefully I'm in time for that cutoff. That was my conclusion.

Do you think that Buffett is going to die like next week now? That like, is this like a, you know, like an old couple that they die together? Yeah. Is that like, that very well might happen. He, uh, I think he, Buffett announced recently, they're like, I, I, he's like, I, I finally found my successor at the age of 92. I've, I've found my guy. Um, all right, well, that's the pod. Before we go, if you made it this far, Sean, I want to tell you The people in the YouTube comments have been making fun of you and I.

What?

They are saying that I dress like a serial killer, which I don't know what that means entirely, or that I, now that I'm a father, I'm starting to dress like a father or look like an accountant. And they're making fun of your hair. I don't exactly know what they're making fun about your hair. Cause I think you've got great hair.

Well, no, I looked at that video and I was like, I'm also looking exclusively at my hair in that I had a bad, I had a bad hair day in the sense that I wake up, roll out of bed, I do this podcast right away. I don't even look in the mirror. And dude, I'm like the hairiest guy on earth. Like, I got hair on my fucking palms. Like, I'm like a gorilla. And somehow I think I'm losing kind of some hair. I'm getting a little light. And people were like, yo, he's got to start taking whatever the drug is called. I forget what it is.

But like, so to all the commenters, go fuck yourselves, right? We're just doing our thing.

Well, I don't care what other people think of me unless it's related to my looks or my intelligence. And so I did go ahead and Wet the hair a little bit today and, uh, you know, try to, try to spruce it up.

It does hurt my feelings too sometimes, if I'm being honest. But besides that, you're going to hear me say, oh, I don't read the comments. It doesn't bother me.

Hey, but you know what's, what's working? Sean P. My little Gary Vee branding pivot is kind of working in the comments every day. They're like Sean P, Sean P for president. And, uh, right now we're a small but loyal army.

I don't think anyone said Sean P for president.

There's a small but loyal army. There's, as they said in Arrested Development, there's tens of us out there. And, uh, but it, but it, but it is from that small base that we shall grow. Sean P it is.

All right. That's the pod.