William Green on Living a Richer, Wiser, Happier Life! Classics Series
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I think what you're seeing with all of these investors is this independence of mind where they're just looking around at what works, where they can get the best information. They're trying to play games that they can win, where they have an advantage and avoid games where they're going to lose. So you have Buffett famously said, how do you beat Bobby Fischer?

And he said, "Well, play them at anything other than chess." And so they have this very rational, very pragmatic way of thinking about life. Munger says again and again that he studies what works and what doesn't work.

So for someone like me, who's trying to figure out the code, who's trying to grope his way through the fog of life, these guys provide unbelievable clues about what works and what doesn't work. And so what I was trying to figure out is how do I reverse engineer these people and then apply certain things in my life?

Welcome to What Got You There, where curiosity leads to wisdom. I'm your host, Sean Delaney, a former professional athlete turned executive life coach for high performers and author of two books, Masterpiece in Progress and Insights of the Ages.

This podcast is a journey into the minds of exceptional individuals to uncover the key lessons and wisdom they've uncovered while scaling the heights of success in business, sports, investing, and everything in between. For the last 10 years, my journey has been one of unwavering dedication to the mastery of peak performance and the art of transformative personal growth. My mission is clear, to be a catalyst in unlocking the vast potential that resides within people.

As a coach to CEOs, investors, executives, and athletes, I strive to unlock the limitless potential within each individual, guiding them toward a life rich in purpose and fulfillment. Now, I hope this podcast will do that for you. And if you're interested in finding out more of what I do, head to whatgotyouthere.com.

Today on the podcast, I'm sharing two wisdom-rich conversations I had with William Green and combining them into one episode. Now, William is the author of Richer, Wiser, Happier, How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life.

Now, over the last quarter century, William has interviewed many of the world's best investors, and he explores in depth the question of what qualities and insights enable them to achieve enduring success. Now, he's going to share many of those principles on these conversations. Now, the first one took place in April 2021, and the second one in July of 2023. Now,

Now, every time I sit down with William, I leave with pages and pages of notes. And I think the same is going to be true when you guys listen to this episode. Please enjoy. William, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today? I'm terrific. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm excited for this one. But I would love to start at an interesting place. And I think a great place to start is around horse racing. And I'm wondering how horse racing influenced your frameworks for thinking decisions and even your later career path.

Well, I was a slightly subversive child. I went to this very posh English boarding school called Eton, which is, I think, about six or seven hundred years old and was supposed to become this kind of clean cut, nice gentleman like Boris Johnson and Prince William and Prince Harry who were there. And when I was about 15,

I became kind of obsessed with horse racing. And so instead of going rowing or playing cricket or doing sort of charitable work as the better behaved kids did, I actually would sneak out on these kind of lazy summer afternoons to Windsor, which is the neighboring castle where the queen has a, at the neighboring town where the queen has a castle. And I would go to what in England was called a turf accountant, which is,

really just a euphemism for a betting shop. And so I would spend my offnoons with a friend of mine who ended up actually going to prison for a while, betting on horses. And what I really loved about it was the idea that basically you didn't have to get your hands dirty. I was pretty lazy and I thought, well, this is the most fantastic thing. If I could possibly make money without having to work, this would be fantastic.

And so initially it went kind of well, and I made something like a hundred pounds off a few sort of lucky bets. And I thought, wow, I'm incredibly smart. And then I started to lose. And I just realized at a certain point, wow, I actually have no edge at all here. I have no knowledge, have nothing that's going to really help me. And I just stopped. I've never gambled since, at least in a casino or on a horse or anything like that. And then a few years later, I'd say about

A decade later, maybe a little less, I discovered the stock market. And I just thought, wow, this is the real game. This is somewhere where instead of the house kind of skimming off this enormous amount in terms of taxes and expenses and all of that, this is something where actually,

If you can think better than other people, you can do extraordinarily well. And that kind of led to this obsession that I've had over the last 25 years with investing, which initially really was born of this kind of lazy, smart Alex quality that I have, which is how do I get rich without actually having to get my hands dirty? And then gradually, because I got to interview all sorts of extraordinary investors over the years, I started to realize,

oh, actually, that's not all that this is about. There's something much deeper going on here. And these extraordinary people, this kind of tiny group of investors who can defy gravity by beating the market over very many years, usually over decades, there's something that they're doing that's different than what everyone else is doing.

And that became kind of this intellectual obsession for me to figure out what are the habits, what are the practices, what are the principles, what are the insights, what are the temperamental advantages that they have over the rest of us? And in a sense, that's the overarching question that I'm trying to answer with this book.

So would you say one of the underlying threads throughout your career has been this curiosity around intellectual stimulation? Yeah, I'm obsessed with learning constantly and trying to figure out how, at the most fundamental level, what I'm trying to figure out is how to live. You want to figure out how to make money and how to become financially independent, how to become secure. But I'm really trying to

grope my way through the fog and figure out, well, is this just a Darwinian dog-eat-dog game and it's all luck and it's all random? Or is the world a little more orderly? Are there ways that you can control your fate? Are there things that you can control and things that you can't control? Are there ways to optimize your chances of a happy and successful life? And so I think

I think because, I mean, it's partly, I think, because I was a very miserable teenager and I was full of sort of existential angst. And then, and so I think there was an element of me trying to think, well, is it all just random or is there more meaning here? And how do I actually build a happy, successful and meaningful life? And I think when I look at a lot of the people who

who were searching for the truth about these sort of things, whether it's a Tim Ferriss or a Tony Robbins or you or my friends in the investment business. I think a lot of us were people who weren't just kind of

coasting through life in a sort of happy blur, thinking, "Well, everything's great." I think it's interesting that Tony Robbins had a terribly difficult childhood. He was a very abusive, physically abusive mom who used to whack his head against the wall, or that Tim Ferriss had a lot of depression early in his life in particular that he's talked about with tremendous candor. And so I think because I didn't find everything easy,

I was looking for answers. And so there's a kind of restness there that I think drives me. And then there's a pure intellectual joy, which is,

There's a wonderful guy that I interviewed for this book, a guy called Matthew McLennan, who manages something like 80 or $90 billion and is an incredibly smart guy. He said to me that when you figure out an idea that you reduce to its essence and it feels true, he said, it's really like the joy of catching a wave as a surfer. And I feel that. There were moments in writing this book where I agonized over something for months and I finally got to a point where I'm like, oh, that's what it means.

And it's an exquisite joy. There was one point where actually I came up in chills about something. I was like, "Oh, that's true. That's something that's true." And so there's a degree of angst probably motivates my search for truth. And then there's also a degree of sheer joy of just figuring out stuff that seems true and right and in some sense beautiful.

Sorry, it's a very long-winded answer. No, no, this is fantastic. I'm actually really intrigued about the clarity that comes for you. And you mentioned that one instance within the book where you were kind of pounding your head against the wall for a number of months. What is it that leads to the clarity for you the majority of times? I think there is a degree of having to withdraw from the world and think in a very quiet way

over a long period of time that's quite painful because you're placing yourself almost in this void. There are times when you're writing a book, if you're like me, where it takes a long time, where you almost start to wonder if you exist because you're not really seeing many people other than your family and a few very close friends. You're very detached from the normal hubbub of day-to-day life.

But I think that quietness, that withdrawal from the noise enables you to think quite deeply about some of these issues that are just kind of knocking around in your head for months. So, for example, there's a chapter where I write about the importance of simplicity.

And that's why I have a strange mind where I'm reading in lots of different areas. So I might be studying Buddhist philosophy, Kabbalistic spirituality, exercise, meditation, investing. Then I'm perennially trying to lose weight. So I always try to study nutrition and stuff like that. And then I start to see these connections between them. So for example, at one point,

I sort of think, well, that's really interesting that Occam's razor is this idea in science where the simplest solution is usually best. And then I'm thinking, well, when I'm studying the Old Testament, for example, there are 613 commandments in the Old Testament. And then it gets reduced to the top 10 list, the 10 commandments, which I can never remember. And then it basically gets reduced to one where there was this great sage a couple of thousand years ago who was asked to sum up the entire...

Old Testament in the time that he could stand on one leg. And he said, basically, do not do to others what you wouldn't want them to do to you. All the rest is commentary. Now go learn. And so I'm thinking, oh, that's really interesting. So you have this reduction of 613 to 10 to one rule. And

And then I'm thinking, oh, well, Google has this home screen where it's just like this little, it's just a few words and like this little kind of pill-shaped capsule that you type your search into. So there's this tremendous simplicity there. And then you think, oh, well, Apple is a company that's entirely built on simplicity because Steve Jobs was inspired by Zen. So I start to get kind of really excited about that, where I start to think, oh, so there's actually...

a kind of master principle at work here which is this ability to simplify extremely complex things and and reduce them to their essence and there's a there's a wonderful investor that i interview in the book who i profile in one chapter guy called joel greenblatt who's this kind of legend who averaged

40% a year for 20 years at his head front, which basically means you turn a million dollars into, I think, 800 million, which is a pretty slick trick. It's an amazing thing. And when I talked to Joe Greenblatt at Great Links, trying to figure out what's the essence of what you do, he said, well, it all comes down to this. He says, value an asset and

and buy it for less. And he said, that's the entire game. And he said, once you realize that that's the essence of investing, everything else seems kind of silly and trite. And so for me, that

Part of the joy of writing and of interviewing these people is that I get to worry away at these particular themes and keep coming back at them from the books that I'm reading and from the interviews that I'm having. So I was able to talk to him about this question of simplicity, or I would talk to Howard Marks about it, or any of the investors that I was interviewing. So I kept coming back to the same principles.

And then, so the principles like deferred gratification, the importance of deferred gratification in a world where most people are caught up in this sort of instant gratification culture where you can get all sorts of information instantly. You can trade your stocks instantly with no expenses. You can get every flavor of pornography that you might desire instantly. You can...

You could just do anything. You can get limitless food delivered. So this ability to kind of control your impetuosity, your desire for gratification right now becomes a kind of superpower. So there were ideas like this that I think I had developed over the years that I thought these are really, really important principles, like the ability to simplify, the ability to defer gratification.

And I got these ideas from things that I'd read, from my own thoughts, from my own observations, and from interviewing these extraordinary people. And then I just kept going deeper and deeper into them. And then you get this kind of enormous amount of information, this enormous amount of material. And the real challenge is how on earth do I synthesize this? And that's part of what makes writing in some ways quite agonizing.

But it's, you know, totally overwhelming. I mean, there was one moment where my poor daughter, who now is 19, but when I started the book was probably about 14, where I was just sitting on the floor of our kitchen thinking, I'm just never going to be able to finish this bloody book. Well, it just totally overwhelmed. And here I am being comforted by my 14-year-old child who's telling me, no, no, Dad, it's going to be great. It's going to be fine. And so I think I write in the acknowledgement. So it really wasn't clear at certain points who was doing the parenting.

But I think that's part of the thrill of writing is that you're able to go deep on these ideas that are, I think, quite profound and quite helpful. But it's also part of the agony of it that if you have a mind like mine that goes all over the place, trying to synthesize all of this stuff, it's actually extraordinarily difficult. And if you're trying to get at something that's deeply true, that is...

kind of overwhelming. But when you get to this, this kind of essence that someone like that guy, Matt McLennan was mentioning to me where it's like catching a wave or, or Joel Greenblatt, where he kept reducing and reducing, reducing and reducing the essence of investing to its purest essence. There's something deeply joyful about it because you do feel like, oh, I figured out something that if not true is probably approximately true, which is, which is pretty good.

Hey guys, it's Sean, and when I'm not interviewing game changers on the podcast, I've been helping peak performers in finance, business, and professional sports reach the pinnacle of their fields for over a decade with my executive performance coaching. Now, I'm not one of those coaches who work with a ton of people and give them all the same frameworks. I work with a very limited number of clients who are truly trying to elevate their abilities.

Now, I provide tailored strategies that help sharpen your decision-making, help you navigate unknown high-stress situations, how to enhance your focus, and then uncover what's going to make for a truly meaningful life for you.

Now, if you're interested in finding out more, head to SeanDelaneyCoaching.com. No, no, I love the intellectual stimulation there. Referring to Occam's razor and the simplicity makes me think of Lao Tzu and to obtain knowledge every day, add something, and to obtain wisdom, remove something every day. I'm wondering for you, though, in order to have a deep enough understanding of the broad concepts that you can really simplify things,

There has to be an amount of initial work that goes into that, correct? You can't just automatically start simplifying without having just years of knowledge. Or am I off on this? No, you're totally right. And I had a very interesting conversation with Dean Ornish, who's one of the – this wasn't for this particular book, but –

Dean Ornish is one of the great experts on nutrition and health. And he created this program, Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease. And he said to me, I talked to him about simplicity. And he said, well, I've done 40 years of groundbreaking research on this. And he said, I've basically reduced it to eight words. And it was, if I remember rightly, move more, eat better, stress less, love more.

And that sounds kind of trite and simplistic, but actually those eight words, the essence of what he'd figured out about nutrition, about movement, about the impact of stress on our bodies, and about the importance actually of relationships and community, which I think is something we've seen during this COVID period in terms of our mental and physical health. And he said to me, when you deeply understand something,

over many, many years, actually you gain this ability to reduce things to its essence. And he was very close friends with Steve Jobs. And he said to me that Jobs used to say to him, I'm prouder of the things that I left out of Apple's products than the things that I put in. And I think Jobs, partly because of this kind of fascination that he had with the beauty and simplicity of Zen,

understood the importance of stricking away things. So I think it requires a great deal of work to get to this essential simplicity. And Matt McLennan, the guy I mentioned before, said to me that he keeps these ideas in, I think, in his phone, basically. And he said, I keep going over the same ideas again and again, raking them like a Zen garden. I thought that was a lovely idea. And they're

I have various scattered notes about future books that I'd like to write. And there are a few ideas that I just keep going over and keep adding to. And I have this sense that there's something there that's valuable, but I don't really know what it is. And I think it may be that those books never come over. It may be that it's years, but I think there's something about that ability to keep going over the same fundamental questions and adding value.

adding as you contemplate more. I think it's a very important habit. There's one remarkable investor that I write about in this book, a guy called Paul Launces, who's entirely self-educated, really. He's a remarkable guy who said to me that there are two books, one by Ben Graham, who's kind of the

patron saint of value investing and financial analysis, and one by a guy called Phil Fisher that was written in the 50s, that he said he's probably read 50 to 60 times. I think that's a really remarkable idea that often it's not actually about, it's not actually about breadth necessarily, although breadth is really important. It's also about

focus on a few really important ideas or a few really important books. And so you're kind of trying to get this combination of breadth in your searching for knowledge and information.

and tremendous focus. And there's a beautiful line from Charlie Munger, Buffett's polymathic genius of a partner who's now 97, where Munger says, take a simple idea and take it seriously. And

It sounds so simple that like most great truths, our eyes glaze over and we don't take it to heart. But actually, that's something I think about almost every day. When you find a simple idea that works, that's really robust, take it seriously and make it the core of what you do. I'm wondering for you around this situation.

synthesizing process because I know for me, especially like early on, I've just got to read incredibly broadly and this takes months, years, and then all of a sudden it starts to crystallize and becomes clear. And then for me, I mean, I have my specific notes and then I just still those down even further. I've got my operating principles that I revisit similar to what you were talking about with your ideas.

For you, though, with the number of interviews, the number of years, what does that actual synthesis process look like so you can tease these out and be able to revisit them? The synthesis process is so appallingly in a session in my case. Well, I'm glad to hear that. I have this constant yearning for order and order.

And then the reality, which is that my brain is so disorderly. So I was thinking this morning, I was looking at my phone and I'm like, oh yeah, there's that Wunderlist app that has a list of all the things to do. And I don't think I've opened it in six months. And so, or I still subscribe to Evernote because I heard Josh Waits again, who I love, who wrote the brilliant book.

him, but the art of learning, how I listened to him on, on some podcasts where he was talking about how he uses Evernote and everything's kind of tagged in Evernote. I've had Evernote for years and I've never managed to do that. And then I bought this scanner that went with Evernote so I could scan stuff in and then the fucking thing stopped working. It's now sitting in my closet and I don't know, I don't have the heart to throw it away. So for me, there's this kind of fantasy of order.

And then there's the reality. But one thing that I find really helpful that I do for this, when I'm gathering ideas about future books, I like this app Things, where I just have, it's the most unromantic term for it, but I think in terms of buckets. So I think, well, here's a bucket for things.

ideas that I'm exploring for another book. And then I just keep dumping stuff in that bucket. And for this book, I think I had, it ended up being about nine chapters, including the epilogue, maybe 10, including the introduction. And so I regarded it as here are nine or 10 buckets. And so I would have a Microsoft Word document, I would just keep dumping stuff in it.

as I thought of ideas or as I read something. And because I take so long over everything, it took me years. And so then when I come to write it, I see all of that stuff. And now I write this enormously long outline that I'm ashamed of just how long it is. It's like if people saw just how long my outline is, I'd be embarrassed. And then I'm gradually synthesizing it and synthesizing it. And so I'm not recommending any of this to anyone else, but I think because my mind is very unruly

The idea of having these kind of buckets where I just dump everything in them and then I keep synthesizing and synthesizing. And then I just go over and over it again and again with the writing. So by the time I'm done with writing a chapter, basically nothing that I want to change. I mean, there's not a word that I want to change. So there's a sort of obsessive relentlessness to the rewriting and the writing.

that I think whittles it down to the essence. And so then there are times where I reread something that I've written and I, because I don't have a very good memory, I've forgotten what I wrote. And I'm like, oh, oh, that's actually, that seems true to me. And that's really helpful. And so I'll actually read it because it's true to me because I obviously figured it out at some time before. And I was listening to this wonderful guy, a meditation teacher, a guy called George Mumford, who was the coach,

to people like Michael Jordan, LeBron James, if I remember rightly. He wrote a book called The Mindful Athlete that I like. And George Mumford said something in an interview with Dan Harris on the 10% Happier podcast where I think he said he'd read his own book something like 40 times.

I thought that was really fascinating that you could actually find your own book really helpful because you'd figured out certain things and got them down into the essence. So there's something kind of, it might sound self-congratulatory, but actually there are times, you know, there's a part in my epilogue about stoicism, about the need for resilience, where I'm talking about the way that certain great investors are

handled extremely intense periods. And there was a time a few weeks ago, I was having a really tough day. I went in and read that. And I can't tell you how much better I felt afterwards. I was like, oh, well, that's how Bill Miller dealt with intensity when the financial crisis

everything up in his life. And that's, this is how this guy, Jason Kopp handled intensity. And this is, and it kind of reoriented me. So it's kind of, I'm writing this book as much for myself as for anyone else, because I'm trying to figure out how to navigate difficult times as we're going through at the moment. Yeah. You mentioned,

George Mumford revisiting his book 40 plus times. Yeah, The Mindful Athlete is one I very much enjoyed as well. That has me thinking we recently had on Randall Stutman, who works with a lot of the investing legends, a lot of pro coaches, things like that. And he has his wisdom journals that he's distilled down. Do you have things like that that aren't public, but are a distillation of your own thinking, your big buckets that you revisit?

I think what I have that I find really, really helpful is you can't see this, even though you can see me on Zoom, but my study where I'm sitting is full of Post-it notes on the wall. And I would say every few days I'm adding something that I've got from somewhere. So for example,

I'm looking just on my right here, and there's something from this book, Power Versus Force, that says, wisdom can ultimately be reduced to the simple process of avoiding that which makes you go weak. Nothing else is really required. And so that's a reminder, for example, and that's pretty random. That's probably one of the 100 things I have posted here. That's a reminder that there are certain types of behavior like,

lying, cheating, self-delusion, arrogance, vanity, all of those sort of things that I think at some deep level people smell, whether you're just out for yourself, you're just truly selfish. And there are other things like kindness, compassion, love, mercy, generosity that make people go strong to use David Hawking's language. And so that's a simple thing where

That just happened to catch my eye right now. And then on another wall, this is one of my favorite quotes that just starts. This is again from David Hawkins. And it just starts simple kindness to oneself. All that lives is the most transformational force of all. And it goes on. It's a longer quote.

But in terms of simplicity, I come back to that idea the whole time. I've spent a lot of time over the years studying philosophy and spirituality and literature and all of that. And because my mind is kind of wayward, I can get totally confused and totally in the weeds. And if I can come back to the simple idea of saying, well, it's ultimately about kindness. How do you become kinder?

But then I think one of the reasons why that quote about simple kindness to oneself and all that lives is the most transformational force of all. The reason why that struck me so hard, probably, was because it never really occurred to me to be kind to myself. I come from a tough family.

competitive English background where everything was very, it was very zero sum game. When I was at Eaton at high school, you literally, there was a moment where you would sit in a room with 220 other kids from your year and they would read out loud from 220 to one where you had come in the year. So it's very hard not to become super competitive, super judgmental of yourself and others. And

I think that's one reason why people from Eaton have been so unbelievably successful. Even if the last prime minister, Boris Johnson, was at Eaton, David Cameron was at Eaton, it's...

it works in some way, that tremendous competitiveness, but it's not a very happy place to be in terms of your own mindset. And so, so I think part of what I've done in terms of searching for wisdom is, is reading very widely. And then as I learned stuff being like, Oh, that's something I need to remember. And I literally, I, I, I post it on my wall so that I'll see it. And I,

I think that's a very helpful habit for me to keep coming back to those same ideas again and again. It's very helpful. Well, thinking about simple principles, I'm wondering now that you've been able to look back on your career, what were you doing early that in hindsight now you would have eliminated at a much sooner date? It's a good question. One thing that I was very wary of was having people think that I was exploiting them in any way.

And so the idea, for example, of networking was what for an Englishman would have seemed really tawdry and kind of cynical.

And so for a long time, I would meet these extraordinary people and I would become friends with them or I would meet them socially. And then I wouldn't stay in touch because I didn't want them to feel that in some way I was taking advantage or that I only wanted to know them because they were successful.

And so I did all of these kind of self-harming things where I withdrew from relationships with people who were really kind of wonderful and interesting and would have been happy to be friends. And I think that was my own insecurity and idiosyncrasy. And I think one of the great joys of my life is that as I entered, probably when I hit my 30s,

I'm 52 now. So when I hit my 30s, I became more comfortable, a little more comfortable, I guess, just saying, well, this is who I am. For all of the flaws, this is who I am. And maybe even more so in my 50s, although not entirely. And so maybe I became a little more comfortable just saying, yeah, to hell with it. I'm just going to try to be myself. And so if I meet someone I really like, I try not to conceal it. And a couple of years ago,

I decided I'm going to organize a book group, for example, and we're just going to say great literature. And I got these really wonderful people to join. We're all writers. They're all extraordinary writers or editors of books and magazines. And they're just remarkable people. And in some ways, that was overcoming that fear that somehow I was foisting myself on people who didn't want me to foist myself on them. So I think

I don't know if that's even vaguely helpful to anyone else because it's so idiosyncratic, but maybe it's an example of the ways in which we just do self-defeating stuff for stupid, irrational reasons. And I think when I see some of the people that I'm close to, partly people that I've written about who are extraordinarily successful, I think they set their lives up so that their relationships are just not a zero-per-sum game. They're constantly giving and sharing.

And I'm sometimes just astonished by my good fortune and just being surrounded by these people who are just incredibly kind and decent. And so I think, I think I needed that paradigm to shift so that I started to understand, well, no, I just want to, I just want to have these relationships that are really kind and giving and sharing way of kind of looking out for each other. And it sounds, it sounds trite and superficial in some ways, but

One of the great investors that I write about at great length is this guy, Tom Gaynor. And he said to me at one point, one of my great advantages is that I'm a nice guy. And he said,

As a result, I'm just surrounded by people who wish me well and want to help me because I'm always trying to help other people do favors. And it's true. I mean, he let me come and spend two days with him. And he's the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And I just spent two days interviewing him. And he cooked me dinner and we went to the supermarket together. He has me home for dinner with his wife. Just incredibly kind, decent guy. And so he said he actually, he views himself as a node.

in a neural network surrounded by all of these other extraordinary people. And so this thing that sounds kind of trivial turns out to be incredibly important. To be a nice, decent, sharing person surrounded by other remarkable people turns out to be an enormous, enormous benefit in life. And when my friend Guy Speer had lunch with Buffett,

a few years ago, he and another friend of mine, Monish Pabrai, who I write about at great length in the book, won this auction where they paid $650,000 to charity to have lunch with Warren Buffett. And one of the things that Buffett said to them is,

Hang out with people who are better than you and you can't fail to improve. So Guy once said to me, relationships really are the killer app. So just my failure to develop these relationships with remarkable people early on, probably because I felt in some way unworthy,

was, I think, I think that was something I needed to overcome. And then I think you have to overcome your sense of agenda, which you probably never totally overcome, at least if you're me. And so you, you have to overcome that sense of like, well, I'm doing this because this could lead to this. And, and I think you, you have to say, actually, I just, I just really like this person. It's kind of great to get to hang out with them. And, and,

So I think gradually you try to elevate your agenda a bit so it's not quite so self-seeking. And I think people can tell whether you're just out for yourself or not. So I think there are benefits as you work on yourself and you become more comfortable with yourself and more comfortable in dealing with other people.

William, you hit on two, as I view these foundational principles. One is every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So you think about those positive summer relationships, treating others the way you want to be treated. It's amazing over time what that blossoms into. And then the other thing you hit on, which it seemed crystal clear when you brought up all the different investors, and that's they're true and authentic to themselves. And I think you can see this in sports with coaches or great athletes.

They might have different styles, but that style is who they are. And I think that's a really interesting point. Is that something you felt that you saw within a lot of the investors that you sat down with over the years? I think it's profoundly important and it's very perceptive on your part. I think the ability to become more and more authentic, again, like most great truths, sounds so superficial and so trite that most people don't take it seriously.

I think it's, if not everything, it's certainly a central core principle. And there was a wonderful moment in that lunch that Manish Papparai and Guy Stier had with Buffett, where Buffett talked to them about the difference between people who live by an ultra scorecard, which is really what we were doing at Eaton, where your ranking in the year was read out loud, and people who live by an inner scorecard, where they're really judging themselves by their own high standards.

And Buffett had this wonderful line where he said, you can tell whether you live by an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard by asking yourself,

would I rather be the best lover in the world, but known publicly as the worst, or the worst lover in the world, but known publicly as the best? And one of the things, after one of the annual meetings for Butch Hathaway in Omaha, Guy Sverem, Manish Pavarai, and I got this wonderful private plane back that Guy had rented to go back to New York. And we spent the entire time on this flight talking about the importance of the inner scorecard. And Manish was saying,

all of the greats in investing, they all live by an inner scorecard. He listed all of these guys like Li Lu and like Nick Sleep, who I write about at great length. Buffett himself, he said to Monish at one point,

I know a Tote Monash's daughters who came to that lunch with him. He said, I don't eat anything that I wouldn't have touched when I was five years old. So he has this ridiculously childlike diet. And for most people, it would have killed them at 50. But somehow he drinks rivers of Coca-Cola, cherry Coca-Cola, I think, and red meat. And he goes to McDonald's every morning for his burger on his way to the office.

Again, it sounds kind of silly and trite, but what it really is, is him living in this way that's profoundly aligned to who he is. And Monish, who decided that he was going to clone Warren, which is his term basically for modeling or replication. He was just going to take the smartest guy in the investment business, reverse engineer what worked and figure out how to replicate that. He...

He not only did it with Warren as an investor, but he figured out, well, how do I clone the way he lives? And one of the things that he decided is, I'm just going to live deeply in alignment with who I am. And so Monish, for example, gets into the office pretty late. His

The secretary brings him some printouts of emails at around 11, and he just kind of writes a couple of words on the top, which is something that he's cloned from Charlie Munger. And then he basically just sits and reads in his office all day, except for when he goes out to play racquetball or to go biking. And then he, then he takes a kind of guiltless nap in the afternoon. And then he goes home in the evening and he reads until nighttime.

And so he's basically just decided he's going to live in complete alignment with who he is. So he said he really doesn't like the

the whole mumbo jumbo of having to market his funds. He said, I just don't enjoy that. So he decided that he simply won't have any marketing meetings at all. So he'll meet his shareholders once a year for his annual report where he talks with total candor about his mistakes, everything that he's done. And then the rest of the year, he just won't talk to them. And he won't make any sales calls. And his average day, he has zero meetings and nothing.

And so he's just left his time totally free to think and read and to do what he wants. And in some ways, there's something profoundly antisocial about that. And in some ways, there's something really beautiful about it, that he's structured his life in a way that's true to who he is. And he literally said to me,

if I have a lunch or dinner with someone, I'll say to myself, did I enjoy that? And he said, if I didn't, I would never have lunch or dinner with that person again. And he said,

When I meet someone, I'll say, is this person going to make me better or worse? And he said, if they're not going to make me better, I will just not meet with them again. And so there's something about that that's kind of brutal and kind of deeply admirable that he's basically structured his life to be in alignment with who he is. And I think one of the great gifts of having money is that these great investors have the independence to...

live in a way that's profoundly aligned with who they are in all of its splendid idiosyncrasy and peculiarity. And I think that's one, maybe that's why I started gambling in the first place on horses and why I became obsessed with the stock market. So I think I always had this craving not to be answerable to anybody. And the idea that you could achieve that kind of life

by simply thinking better. That's a very beautiful, beautiful route to success. And Bill Ackman said the same thing to me about money. He just said, I know he was a guest on your show at one point. Oh, sorry. No, that's not true. He was on a different show. I'm sorry. I'll have to

I'd love to have him on. So yeah, he would be, he would be great. But Bill Ackman said to me, what money was about for him was just independence. It was the independence to, to do what he wanted, to think what he wanted, to say what he wanted. And some people are kind of upset by Ackman because he's, he could be kind of brusque and he can seem kind of arrogant, but I think again, he's, I happen to, I happen to like him and admire him a great deal, but I,

I think he was able to structure his life in a way that he could do what he wanted and say what he wanted and think what he wanted and live the way he wanted. And that's a tremendous gift that the money gives these people. How did that merger for you happen between the love of investing and being able to think along with journalism and how those kind of intertwined together for you? Yeah, it was a long process.

I always felt slightly sheepish about the fact that I was so obsessed with investing, I think, because I studied English literature at Oxford, right? And I left Oxford and I thought, I'm going to write screenplays. I'm going to write novels. I'm going to be this amazing, amazing writer. And when I was very young, I...

I wrote for the Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker. And so I used to joke that I was anonymously famous because in those days you didn't have bylines in the Talk of the Town. And so I had these very high-minded aspirations of being a really great writer. And I regarded investing as slightly different

We literally, when the New York Times arrived, when I was first living in New York, when I was about 21, I literally, I would take out the business section, just toss it away. It didn't even occur to me to look at it.

And I think part of what happened is when I was about 25, my brother and I owned an apartment in London. This is before property in London became hugely valuable. And we sold it because he wanted to move into a much grander place. And I didn't need it because I was living in New York. And so I got this sort of small windfall where I suddenly had to figure out, well, what do I do with this money? And so I started to read obsessively about the stock market.

And about funds, just because I was like, well, you know, I don't want to lose this money and I want to make it grow. And so I think it was, I think my fascination was a personal one where I was actually trying to figure out this game. And then when I started to interview all of these extraordinary investors as a journalist, when I was in my mid-20s,

I just found them fascinating. I mean, to be able to go off to the Bahamas and spend a day with Sir John Templeton, who was probably the greatest global stock picker of the 20th century, or to go interview someone like I went to interview in Houston, and he literally had an El Greco painting on one wall, and he has this fifth century Syrian mosaic that he's imported from some Syrian church.

and put together in this beautiful office in Houston. And I just thought, this is really interesting. This is really good color. I mean, as a novelist, what would be better than spending your time with this guy who literally has this huge fat cigar and he's sitting there in his office with this priceless stuff and he's known as the Sphinx because he's an Egyptian billionaire who never talks to the media. And I'm sitting there interviewing the guy. So I think

I think I saw that there was this beauty to the stories. I thought, wow, these are really interesting, colorful characters, and I want to figure out, I want to tell that story not so much as a sort of practical how-to, but to figure out what makes them interesting as characters. How do they view the world? How have they made sense of this puzzle?

How have they cracked the code? What can I learn from how they've cracked the code? What ideas can I share with other people about how they've cracked the code? How can I become richer or more independent so I don't have to take crap from anyone by applying what they've taught? And so there was this kind of beautiful convergence where

it was interesting as a storyteller but it's also there's a practical payoff both for me and other people if you can if you can think better you actually can achieve total financial independence which is a wonderful gift for a writer because then you don't have to take projects that you don't want to take and you have to you have the time to do your work properly

But I think also because most other journalists weren't really investing seriously themselves, they didn't have skin in the game, so they didn't care as much as I did. And also because I had this strange interest in storytelling and literature, I really saw it as a narrative. So when I see someone like, the book ends with this extraordinary character, Arnold Vandenberg, who was a Holocaust survivor who grew up in hiding

on the same street as Anne Frank. That's an extraordinary story. And so I'm trying to tell the story of how he survived, who saved him, what he learned, how it changed his life, what we can learn about this kind of inner mastery that he achieved.

in his own mind in order to gain control over our own minds and to figure out what actually matters in life. That's very much a storytelling approach, a narrative-driven approach to writing about investing that I don't think many other people take. Where I'm just fascinated by these people as characters and as codebreakers, in a sense, who are figuring out how to play this game in a particularly smart way that the rest of us can learn from.

Yeah, William, that language resonates deeply in terms of figuring out and cracking the code and learning how to play this game better. I loved the story of Annenberg. That deeply resonated. I don't care who you are. That's going to move you emotionally to some degree, unless I guess you're some of these legendary investors who emotion doesn't seem to play too much of a...

of a part. I am wondering, though, I mean, just 25 plus years of sitting down with some of the legends of all time investing. Was there an interview or a meeting that just kind of really shaped you early on? I still wrestle a great deal with the time that I spent with Sir John Templeton 20 years ago. And I think one of the reasons why I wrestle with it so much, I write about this a lot in a chapter in the book,

is that I didn't really like him very much. And he was this legendary, iconic figure. I mean, he had this extraordinary, extraordinary reputation where he had, I think he'd averaged 40.5% a year over 38 years, which is an astonishing record. And then he'd continued to be extraordinary in his 80s and beyond.

And so he's this iconic figure, but I found him extremely austere and stark and kind of slightly, slightly dark.

judgmental and sanctimonious and holier than thou. And I think it highlighted for me, because he had such extraordinary control over his own mind and over his time and over his money and over his thoughts, it highlighted for me just how chaotic my inner life was, how not in control of my thoughts and my emotions I was. And so I think probably

I was predisposed not to listen to him because it would have been painful to look at myself more honestly. And also at the time, I think I was probably somewhere between agnostic and atheistic. And he was very spiritual. And the joke is...

that I was super judgmental of him, kind of dismissed him, his spirituality totally. And as I've become older, I've become more and more spiritual. And I'm no longer atheistic. And one thing you can be sure of is that I've been wrong at this because I've basically taken all of the positions. I've been agnostic, atheistic, and spiritual. And so you can just be absolutely sure that I'm wrong at some point, at which point it's not really clear. But

So there's a part of me that thinks,

what did Templeton figure out that I wasn't ready to listen to? And I think there's a point in the book where I actually mentioned reading some of the books that he gave me back then that he'd written about the laws of the universe, where I literally blushed and groaned out loud and realized, oh my God, this is stuff that he was trying to teach me 20 years ago, that I was too bloody stupid and too closed-minded to listen to.

And so for me, one of the great lessons of Templeton's life is just the enormous importance of keeping an open mind. And he was extraordinarily inquisitive. So he was doing this crazy stuff as I saw it then. Like he was funding with his billions of dollars research at places like Harvard into whether you could prove scientifically that prayer works. And so he was sort of saying to me, well,

Does it work better if you say, "Thy will be done"? Does it work better if the person you're praying for is there, if you put your hands on them? Or does it work better if they're praying for themselves? And I just was so close-minded that I kind of rolled my eyes at this. And I think one of the reasons why he was so successful was that he retained that open-mindedness. And so I think for me, I still...

I still wrestle with my initial interviews with him and the fact that I was embarrassingly closed-minded. And I try to tread a little more lightly these days and to acknowledge that I just don't know. And someone like Howard Marks, who I focus on at great length in the book, said to me, "I belong to the 'I don't know' school." And so he really accepts that there are certain things that he just doesn't know.

That sounds in some ways disempowering, but in fact, it's enormously empowering because once you recognize that

that there are certain things you just don't know, you can stop worrying about them. So if you can't predict the future, if you can't tell whether the stock market's going to go up or down, or you can't tell what's going to happen with inflation or interest rates and stuff, you can actually just say, well, I'm not going to really worry about that stuff that much. I'm just going to try to find a company and buy it for less.

less than it's worth and that's the game or buy an index fund and sit in it for 20, 30, 40 years and keep adding to it. The admission of your own intellectual limitations turns out to be an enormous strength rather than an admission of weakness.

but I think I was probably too, too arrogant and too, too psychologically fragile to admit my own limitations in those states. Maybe I just become more aware of my limitations as they, there's been more evidence of them over the years. Yeah. I wish I had started using the saying, I don't know a bit more frequently when I was younger and didn't wait so long.

I love these stories about some of the investors. I'm wondering, though, has there been one? We're viewing them almost like an onion where we're peeling back multiple layers and it's just like, wow, I'm just getting deeper and this is more and more interesting. Is there anyone like that who comes to mind for you? One of the most extraordinary investors in the book who I write about a lot and I think about a lot is Ed Thorpe, who I describe as probably the greatest game player in the history of investing. And

And Ed is a model in so many ways for how you want to think and how you want to live. And he's remarkably colorful. I met him when he was

probably 84 and he looked about 20 years younger and he's kind of like this this handsome unshaven guy who looks just full of joie de vivre and happiness and joy and he I think he just got engaged to a 50 year old woman and and he looks totally fit and healthy he's wearing his black leather jacket and he just looks kind of comfortable with himself and comfortable in his own skin and Ed

You can understand why he'd be comfortable in his own skin. He was the guy who figured out how to beat the casino of blackjack. And so he was kind of the inventor of card counting. And then he'd figured out how to beat the casino at roulette.

So he and this other guy called Shannon, who was a famous, a famous guy at MIT made the first wearable device. I think the first wearable computer that, that Ed would activate with the big toe in his shoe. And it would basically calculate the velocity of the ball and the wheel and the roulette wheel. So he could say, well,

So there are 38 pockets where it could fall. And if I can add this information by knowing the velocity, I can predict with a little bit more certainty than anybody else where the ball might land. And so

So he said, you're turning a mugs game that's totally random into one where you're adding a little bit of information that gives you an advantage. And so he's just approached life time and time again by stacking the odds a little bit in his favor, giving himself these marginal improvements in his own odds of winning, but then compound massively over time.

And just that example, I think is very powerful. Once you see someone like that, you start to say, for example, well, so do I have an edge in investing? I asked him this question, like, how can you tell if you have an edge? And he said to me, well, if you don't have any really rational reason to think that you have an edge, then you almost certainly don't.

And one of the things that Ed Thorpe does is he says, well, I only play games that I can win. And so why would I want to play the game of picking individual stocks or speculating on big macro trends if it's not a game that I can win? And so he said to me, for example, for most people, they're just going to do way better to buy an index fund. And he said, the market

tends to go up over the long term because you have this improvement in the economy, you have this improvement in productivity. And so gradually, gradually, gradually over time, it's just going to continue to go up. And he said, if you can bet on an index fund for the long term, then you have very, very low expenses. He said, there's no croupier taking the money, which is also a term Jack Bogle used with me who founded

the Vanguard company that now manages something like $6.3 trillion. So if you can remove the croupier, who's constantly taking a part of your, your profit each year, you're increasing your odds that you're going to win. And so you're actually, you're actually going to beat something like 80% of all invest, probably 80% of all the professionals just by admitting what you can't do and riding the market over the long run with very low expenses. And,

And so I think about this sort of thing constantly. Am I playing a game that I can win? And how do I stack the odds in my favor in everything that I'm doing? So for example, if... I mean, this applies to everything, right? The great investors are constantly looking for these asymmetrical bets where there's very limited downside and very high upside. And so...

Someone like Ed Salk, the way he approached COVID, for example, was to say, well, I'm not going to trust any government with this information to tell me what I should do. I'm going to analyze the numbers myself.

And so very early on, he told me that I think it was in January or February of 2020, he was studying the data from Wukong and was looking in particular at things like unexplained deaths and was making inferences from the 1918 flu pandemic that killed his grandfather.

to extrapolate what he thought was the true fatality rate and what was actually going to happen. And so in February, before there was a single death in the U.S. reported, he gathers his family together. He says, I think there are going to be 200,000 to 500,000 deaths in the U.S. over the next 12 months. We need to get supplies now.

And so they stock up on masks, a lot of detergent, all of these things a month before anybody else figured out that they should be clearing up stores of masks and everything else. And he put himself basically in isolation in Laguna Beach, where he has this beautiful home with his wife.

and pretty much didn't see anyone except for he would see his kids outside with a mask because he was 85, 86 at the time. And so you think about that, that's an incredibly logical approach to life where you're thinking, how do I survive catastrophe? How do I avoid being

being blown out of the game? How do I act rationally for myself? How do I analyze the data for myself, not believing what the experts tell me?" Which is exactly what he'd done with gambling as well. Everyone said, "Well, you can't win a blackjack. You can't win a roulette. You can't beat the casino." And he said, "Well, let me study the evidence for myself." And so I think what you're seeing with all of these investors

is this independence of mind where they're just, they're looking around at what works, where they can get the best information. They're trying to play games that they can win, where they have an advantage and avoid games where they're going to lose. So you have Buffett famously said, how do you beat Bobby Fischer?

And he said, well, play them at anything other than chess. And so they have this very rational, very pragmatic way of thinking about life. Munger says again and again that he studies what works and what doesn't work.

So for someone like me, who's trying to figure out the code, who's trying to grope his way through the fog of life, these guys provide unbelievable clues about what works and what doesn't work. And so what I was trying to figure out is how do I reverse engineer these people and then apply certain things in my life? And so something like just that simple idea of

from Ed Thorpe, but you want to avoid catastrophe. If you can stay in the game and survive the dip, survive a period like this pandemic,

you're much more likely to win. And then if you stick with games where you have an advantage, and then if you're a continuous learner like Buffett, so you're just constantly, constantly deepening your knowledge of things that you're good at and that you understand, games where you can win. Some of these principles, they...

They're so simple, but when you combine a bunch of these different principles and you take a simple idea and take it seriously, the cumulative effect is actually kind of overwhelming. And so what I'm kind of trying to do with the book is synthesize for myself what these super principles are.

And share it with other people. And so I and with my own kids, because I I want them to be able to to say, oh, there are certain things that work and certain things that don't work in life. Yeah. To take the simple ideas, combine them to use a Charlie Munger term, a Lollapalooza effect where there's an exponential outcome there.

Exactly. It's funny that you use that word because I thought about that a lot and I, I sort of using that phrase to describe that and I didn't, and I didn't use it. So it's really, it shows that you've thought deeply about Munger that you've actually, you've used the phrase that I didn't use, but that I, that I probably should have used. Yeah. Munger has been formative in shaping my thinking along with Ed Thorpe, who won't be a guest on the show. He gave me the art. No, but to talk about his thinking process, you bring up a great point in the book

about how he, I think it was, ran the calculations on the number of deaths by bicycle. And he went for a bike ride one day and realized it was the last time he was going to do that. I just found that humorous. Well, and you have to do that in every area. So Tom Gaynor said to me,

If I apply Charlie Munger's inversion principle, which is basically, Munger took this idea from Caldwell's stuff, Jacobi, Algebras, that you invert, always invert. So instead of saying, how do I make this a wonderful outcome? You say, well, what causes a disaster and how do I avoid that? So you're constantly inverting. You're constantly looking for what can go terribly wrong rather than what can go terribly right, for example. And Tom Gaynor, the CEO, co-CEO of Markel, said to me,

you apply the monger inversion principle, you can say, for example, well, I really happily married. I really love my wife. He's been married to the sort of who he dates when he was 15. I mean, it's an amazing thing, right? They've been married forever and she is lovely. And he said, if, if I am happily married, I don't want to wreck my marriage.

I'm not going to go to bars and get drunk on my own. If I go to a bar, maybe I have two drinks instead of 10 drinks because I don't want to put myself in difficult situations where there's enormous downside and no upside. And again,

Again, it sounds like a trite example, but if you think of things like cheating on your taxes or cheating on your wife or cheating, lying to yourself, driving too fast in bad conditions, these are all things with limited upside and massive downside. So just that simple principle of

that is essential to the greatest investors in markets turns out to be hugely applicable in every area of our lives. And so I think of these things constantly. I would say to my son when he was first learning to drive, think about the margin of safety.

think about, remember that there are blind spots. And before you turn, you kind of turn and look as well, rather than just checking your mirror. Once you really understand the way that the greatest investors are navigating the world, it becomes profoundly helpful in every area of your life, whether it's deciding what habits will benefit you, how to invest, how to

how to structure your relationships, how to structure your time. Because they're just these tremendous pragmatists. And so

It's not like a journalist who pays no price, really, if they're wrong, unless they get sued. It's not like an academic who has tenure who could just bloviate about things in a totally wrongheaded way. It's not like political pundits where they pay no price for being wrong. With the greatest investors, they have money on the line and they have millions of people's lives that are affected by the quality of their decisions. And so I think there's something about the stakes that are involved, the

the fact that there's skin in the game that forces them to be better thinkers and that forces them to

to think about what really works in an agnostic way and just say, well, if it's really helpful for me to meditate, if that's going to help me make better decisions, let me start meditating. If it's helpful for me to exercise because I'm going to have more equanimity, let me exercise. If it's helpful for me to reverse engineer people who are great investors, let me do that. If it's helpful for me to surround myself with people who are better than me, let me do that. So there's a kind of, there's a brute pragmatism to it.

to the way that they approach the problem, not just of investing, but the problem of life and solve those things that I think is profoundly helpful for all of us.

One of the stories you brought up, I'm pretty sure it was teaching your son driving. You said every time you're on the road, someone out there is trying to kill you. You just don't know which person it is. I thought I thought that was a great model. Oh, I think you've got that from somewhere else. I don't think I said that, but I wish that I could. I could have sworn this was from your book. I've been trying to use it all the time when I'm on the road now. I would love to take credit for it, but I but I don't think that's from that's from me.

But I mean, there's a similar thing from one of the great investors that I interviewed that says you always have to know that when you're buying an asset or selling your asset, there's somebody on the other side of that transaction. And I think it was Templeton said to me, you need to know more than that person.

And so you're constantly thinking not just about your own position, but the position of everybody around you. So you're thinking, well, so how do I stack the odds in my favor by getting this kind of informational advantage, which is what he was doing? And

So, yeah, I don't know if that's related, but I wish I could claim your insight about driving. Well, I'm wondering, and this is going to be different for each person, but being able to study all of these legendary investors, distill down a lot of the best mindsets and skill sets they have, what do you think or which mindset is just the hardest to be able to implement or adopt in your own life? I think one of the things that's very striking to me is how rational people

objective, unemotional and analytical the best investors are. And I'm not. I mean, I'm not a particularly rational human being. I'm fairly mystical about things. I mean, I think if most people knew how I actually think and how I actually operate, they'd be kind of appalled. And

So I kind of have to accept the fact that I'm not really kitted out to be a super rational, super unemotional person. And that self-knowledge is actually really, really valuable, both in investing and life. So for example, when the market's going to hell, when it's falling apart, I can't tell you how easy I find it to remain calm. That doesn't bother me at all. I somehow...

Somewhere deep in my psyche, I'm able to buy when everything's falling apart. That's not a problem for me. It's very hard for me

to be super optimistic about the future when everything is going well and everybody else is happy. I'm always waiting for the ship to hit the fan and for it to fall apart. And I think that maybe, maybe partly because from being Jewish, you know, we were refugees from Russia and Ukraine and Poland. We were always fleeing. And I think it's very striking that, that,

that Ben Graham, who came up with this idea of the margin of safety was from the same background. I mean, he, he came from his family came from Poland. I think his grandfather was the chief rabbi in Warsaw. And he then went to London where my family was from. And then he went to New York and his family had a fortune and they lost the fortune. And then his mom

lost what was left in, I think, the panic of 1907, where she had money that all got wiped out then. And so she ended up with a boarding house that also, I think, went bankrupt. So Graham's obsession with the margin of safety and with resilience was born of the same sort of chaos that my family went through as refugees from Russia and Poland and Ukraine. And so I think there's a kind of fearfulness to my mindset that

Certainly would never enable me to be a venture capitalist and have a belief that everything's going to be great and everything's going to turn out. But it does probably position me to take advantage of uncertainty. When everything's going to hell, I have this basic sense of like, oh, there's disruption here and there's tremendous uncertainty. And this is when people do stupid stuff. And I believe there are tremendous opportunities at times like that. And so, yeah.

Just my knowledge of how different my own mindset is from the optimal mindset of great investors is very, very helpful. And so I think one, without wanting to be too self-referential, if I can make this apply to your listeners, I think one of the most valuable things that you can do as an investor is really to be honest about your own

psychological makeup, your own strengths, whether you're equipped to win this particular game of picking individual stocks, for example, of having a very concentrated portfolio, whether you are unemotional, whether you're inclined to get overexcited when things are good or over-dispondent when things are bad. And so Howard Marks, for example, said to me that he's inclined to be fearful.

And so he said, I have to be careful and I have to be humble about my limitations, but people are not paying me to be a chicken. And so during the financial crisis, when the market was imploding and nobody would buy toxic bonds of companies that seemed in danger of bankruptcy.

He and his partner literally invested $500 to $600 million a week for 15 weeks, and they ended up making something like $9 billion in profits. And it was partly because he knows that he's going to see the world through this filter of maybe pessimism and fearfulness, and that he has to compensate for it. So I think this ability to be conscious of your own limitations and your own makeup,

and to create workarounds and to stick with games you can win. This is enormously helpful both in

business and markets and life, I think. Yeah. Potentially the most important words in investing or life is know thyself. So that definitely applies. We're going to wrap up here in a minute. I've just got two more and we're going to make sure we link up everything with the book. But the book Richer, Wiser, Happier. I mean, this is a distillation of 25 years of some of the most profound minds in investing. I'm wondering, though, other books that you've come to over the years that you wanted to revisit, relive,

rethink about or give to others. Are there a few that come to mind for you that have been really impactful and maybe not as well known?

There are. There are books that I read again and again. And one of the books that I gifted recently to both of my children, I mean, I do this a lot where I buy multiple copies of the same book. There's a book by David Hawkins, who I mentioned before, who wrote this book, Power Versus Force. It's a very profound and important book that had a huge impact on people like Manish Pabrai and Arnold Vandenbergh.

There's a book that he wrote very late in life, I think. And Hawkins had been a very successful psychotherapist who then became something of a mystic. And I think he's writing from the position of someone who's actually, if you believe in this sort of thing, kind of enlightened and is telling you, this is how it is. This is reality as it is. It's this book, Letting Go, that

There's one chapter in it, chapter two, where he's talking about how to relate to your own emotions, which was not something we were taught growing up in England, certainly. I don't know if you were taught it in America, but more in places like California and New York than we were in English boarding school, where we wore tailcoats and waistcoats and starched white collars, and until World War II wore top hats as well. So we weren't very in touch with our emotions. Hawkins talks about instead of

Instead of judging your emotions or trying to change them, you're becoming aware of them and abiding with them.

And I guess knowing their impact on your body and gradually by being with them without judging them or trying to change them, the energy behind them dissipates. And I think that's an enormously important idea. And it runs also through the teachings of this great Tibetan Buddhist called Sotni Rinpoche, who's fascinating. I've been doing a course that is online called Fully Being, which I think is a very interesting course. And

I think that idea of how to deal with your own emotions is fascinating. And I've always been inclined to think, well, if I have these wayward emotions, whether it's anxiety or fear or self-loathing or despair or sadness or anger or whatever, I should be trying to change them and replace them. And Tony Robbins, who I'm friends with and who I admire a great deal, focuses a lot on this in the last chapter of his book, Unshakeables.

he talks about when when you when you're being kind of assaulted with some kind of emotion that's not helpful you focus maybe on appreciation or love whatever it is that can can transform that emotion and i think that's clearly really powerful it's a very important idea

But there's something really fascinating to me that I continue to explore about this idea of being with your emotions in a non-judgmental way, sitting with them and letting the energy dissipate. And if this is true, which I'm inclined to think because this is wisdom that's come down through a thousand years of Tibetan Buddhism, and those guys were kind of masters of the mind, that's a very important and profound idea

And that's a pretty good example of something where I'm taking books from different areas. So books by Sotni Rinpoche and his father as well, who's a great Tibetan Buddhist master, and this book, Letting Go from Hawkins. And I'm trying experientially to see if that's...

if that's helping me. And I think that's a very profound idea and with great practical importance. And I wanted my kids to benefit from that as well, because I think I do wish people had taught us to deal with our

with our emotions at school. And in English school, it would be very much stiff upper lip. What's wrong with you? I remember a friend of mine once saying, I was at Oxford with him, and he said he was talking to this friend of ours, and he said, she was telling me she has a problem. And he said, I listened to her problem, didn't sound like much of a problem. And then he said, a couple of days later, she said, I have a problem. And he said, that's strange, two problems. And

And I think that was very much our English attitude of not really wanting to look too deeply at emotions, which was slightly embarrassing and slightly comical. I think Hawkins provides a technique for dealing with emotion that I think is probably very powerful and quite profound. It's excellent. I love getting some new book recommendations. Power vs. Force is one that's been sitting on my bookshelf and then it came up multiple times in your book. So I knew I was going to dive into this. Now another one excited about that.

I know you've sat down with almost all of the legendary investors, and this doesn't have to pertain to investors specifically, but is there anyone dead or alive, not a family member or friend, that if you were going to be able to spend the weekend just having interviews with, who would that be?

I've spent a lot of time studying Kabbalistic wisdom over the years, which for me is the most profound thing I've ever studied. And there was a great Kabbalist called Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, A-S-H-L-A-G, who wrote these books like The Wisdom of Truth, The Thought of Creation, these extraordinary books. And you have this sense that he wasn't

He wasn't making an intellectual argument. He wasn't groping for the truth in the way that I am, where I'm sort of, I'm in the fog with a blindfold trying to figure out what's true. You have a sense with some of these great sages like Rav Ashak that they're actually, they're revealing what's true. And there are these extraordinary things where he'll say something like, I reveal one hair's breadth and conceal two.

And so it's literally like they've been given permission to reveal certain secrets about the way the universe operates. And he had an extraordinary student, a guy called Ralph Brandwein, who's very remarkable. And he had an extraordinary student who I met who died a few years ago called Ralph Berg.

And you had a sense... I've interviewed a lot of presidents and prime ministers and billionaires and legendary people. And you had a sense that this guy, the Rav, which means teacher, was the most powerful person you'd ever met. And...

I suspect you'd get that from great Buddhist sages or Jesus or whoever. This isn't a denominational thing. I just think there are certain people who have overcome their ego to some great extent, and they're just operating at a different level. You have a sense that they're seeing truth. I think Rav Ashlag, if I could meet someone, that would be pretty high on the list. And when you're with someone like that, you...

I think there is some, a friend of mine who's a very deep student of Buddhism said there's a kind of transmission when you're with one of these great Buddhist sages. And I do think it's a deeper version of what Buffett was saying about hanging out with people who are better than yourself and you can't help to improve. And so I think you want to do that in every area of your life with your, with your friends, with everything, but then, but,

and with your teachers. But then there's this beautiful line from Munger that you'll know well, where he talks about also hanging out with the eminent dead. And so Munger, because he couldn't find very many people on earth who were as clever as him or as wise, was hanging out with people like Ben Franklin and Einstein through their books and Richard Feynman, all of these remarkable people. But probably Franklin more than anyone.

And I think what's kind of fantastic is the fact that you can create your own sort of board of directors by assembling this group of dead people who can be your guides through life. And so I...

So for me, it's not so much meeting these people. I want to have things like Marcus Aurelius' book, Meditations, or there's a wonderful book, The Book of Joy, that Nick Sleep, one of the great investors I write about, recommended to me, which is a book of conversations between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Those are the sort of books you want to keep around and keep going back to because you think of people like the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu who...

lived through such difficult times in Sataspera and Apartheid era, they really understand what it takes to be resilient at all times. The Dalai Lama's family being cast out of its country, being a refugee for the last 50 or so years, and he'll talk about why that's been such a gift. And you see them laughing together uproariously, these two old friends from different religious and spiritual parts. And so I think

You want to surround yourself somehow with these people who give you direction through the fog. And it doesn't have to be meeting them. I think that idea of befriending the eminent dead is a really beautiful and profound idea. I love the thought.

about going through the fog. Howard Mark shared a great quote in one of his members a few months back. It's something about we're all walking into the future with our chests puffed out, thinking we know exactly where we're going and we're walking around blindfolded with a cane out in front of us, something along those lines. I totally butchered that, but it's a thought I love. Your board of directors is a thought experiment I do frequently when trying to solve something. I think about how would this person in this scenario think this through? And it's one of the things I love about your book because it helped me add a few other people with my board of directors, how I can

think about some of the tough problems in life. I want to make sure the listeners can get set up with you and the book Richer, Wiser, Happier, which is going to be out now on April 20th. We talked a lot about what is uncovered, some of the great stories, the distillation of knowledge here. Anything else you want to leave the listeners with if they're interested in picking it up? Well, I'd love to hear from your listeners what they find resonated for them in the book. It's really curious to me. One famous investor who read it

mentioned just privately, I'm not going to name him, but one of the most famous investors in the book was talking about what struck him most was the number of divorces among famous investors. And he said, yeah, it's understandable because we all got so absorbed by what we did. It was so absorbing that of course we neglected our spouses. And maybe they're also kind of unemotional, they don't have great EQ. And I just thought that was really fascinating, but that was what

that was what resonated so much. Another investor said to me the other day, a well-known author and investor, was saying that the chapter on high performance habits had the biggest impact on him. And then Manish Pobrai said to me, the three most important words in your book, Scale Economies Shared, which is in this chapter about Nick Sleep and his partner, Zach, said,

He said that chapter has changed the way that he sees the world and invests, which is really fascinating to me. It's something about Nick Sleep has totally changed this great investor who's the character in the first chapter of the book. So I'm really interested to hear what resonates for other people, because I'm trying to share what resonates most with me, because there were so many things I could have written about. But so if there's stuff where

You think, yeah, yeah, this is a really important idea. You should read this about such and such because this will really help you. Tell me. Or if there's someone I want to interview because they're remarkable, tell me, please. And so you can reach me on social media, whether it's Twitter or I think my handle, if that's what you call it, is WilliamGreen72 or befriend me on LinkedIn or email me or whatever. But yeah, I hope it's an ongoing conversation because I'm not coming at the book with a sense of,

"Oh, I figured this all out. I'm so wise." I'm borrowing the wisdom of these other extraordinary people and trying to synthesize it and pass it on. So I feel like I'm on a journey with the reader.

And I'm trying to provide them with resources that can help them on their journey to become richer, wiser, and happier. But it's my journey as well. So if there's cool stuff you discover that I ought to be thinking about or writing about, please let me know. Well, all that will be linked up in the show notes. But William Green, I cannot thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There. Thank you so much. It's been delightful chatting with you. Thank you. And now you're going to hear my second conversation with William Green, which took place in July of 2023. Please enjoy.

So many of our conversations have led to so many more interesting conversations in my own life. You're one of those people who I view as cascades of knowledge. You're like a waterfall that leads to so many interesting insights that I want to explore. And I think that's what's going to happen here as it did on our first conversation on episode 243. But I'm really curious, looking back over your entire career, has there been a mindset of yours that you think has been incredibly impactful for your own life personally?

I think having relentless curiosity is pretty helpful. Just not really knowing where anything is going to take you, but being open to just learning stuff. And maybe because I don't have a very orderly mind,

I'm inclined to just chase after whatever does interest me, which is kind of, it's a little frustrating at times. I can never remember if this is actually true or I've sort of invented this in my mind, but I have this image of watching the Simpsons movie many years ago. And there's a moment where I think Homer is trying to rescue

his son and he suddenly stops and is like, "Ooh, donuts," and totally forgets he's trying to rescue his son. And I have a little bit of that where I just, I'm going down one lane and then suddenly I'm like, "Donuts." And that donut might literally be an extraordinary work of fiction that then I start reading and then forget that I'm reading. And

But I'm very intensely involved with it while I'm reading it. And then I shift to something else and I'm very intensely involved with that. One of the most surprising things I've found is that these areas that I chased down that seemed to be weird digressions turned out to be the main path in retrospect. Often these things that I was slightly sheepish and embarrassed about because

Look, I started off as an English literature student at Oxford, right? Had no interest in business, money, finance. I thought that was all kind of crass and vulgar. And then I start to discover the stock market in my twenties and that becomes a weird obsession. And then I become really interested in investing, but I become weirdly interested not in the numbers or anything like that.

but actually in the psychology of it and the philosophy and these deep questions like, well, if you're trying to predict the future and yet the future is unknowable and everything changes and nothing stays the same, how the hell do you do that? Are you just lost or are there ways in which you can stack the odds in your favor? And then that radiates out in all these different directions because at the heart of Buddhist philosophy is this idea that everything changes, that nothing's permanent.

And then I start studying that in other areas. And so I'll be sitting on a Shabbat in a very eccentric place where I go for a Shabbat service every Saturday. And I'll be looking at one of the portions that we're reading and it'll say something like, everything withers, everything dies, everything withers, but his word is forever. And I'm like, wait a second. So these guys are saying actually that the creator, that's permanent. There's something that

isn't impermanent. And then I start to study more Buddhism and like, oh, wait a second, within this space where everything is happening, there's this open space, like the sky, where there's just sort of awareness of things happening in there. And I'm like, so there's some sort of permanence even there, like your consciousness, or I was talking to someone the other day, it was an extraordinary guy who is a translator from Tibetan

And he was saying to me, well, I believe that our mind stream continues from one life to the next. In this weird kind of erratic, slightly irrational way, I'm just chasing after all of these things. And then in a way, it's a great disadvantage because my mind isn't linear and it's not just on this great track, this single track where I can set up a schedule that works and keep at it. But in a way, it's a great advantage as well because I'm going off in these weird directions.

and then making odd connections. I think if there's any takeaway at all, it's that you somehow have to embrace your own form of craziness and idiosyncrasy in order to perform well at anything. I can't deny the fact that my brain is wired that way and that I'm just intensely curious. I have to harness it in some way while also being aware that there are weaknesses to that approach and that it would be good if I could struggle

strengthen my ability to be more linear, for example. It's interesting how the disadvantage becomes the advantage for you.

It's really interesting to see people finally accept those idiosyncrasies. And it might be Graham Duncan, who's got a great article speaking about embracing your funk and those idiosyncrasies, because those are what's going to sustain. That's you getting in touch with that. And I'm wondering for you, what opened up the floodgates to allow you to do that? Because so many people go through their lives trying to fit another mold. That's not them.

I still haven't fully embraced it. I think there's some element of shame and guilt about this the whole time where you look at things and you're like, why can't I have a linear structure to my day? Why can't it go? I'll start the day with a plan to do something and then it's just gone in a totally different direction. And I do feel some guilt and some shame about that. But then increasingly I'm

trying because of my slightly half-assed meditation practice, because that's as distractible as everything else, to watch that happening, to watch the guilt and to watch the shame and to be like, oh, look, there's a little bit of shame arising. There's a little bit of guilt arising. And where do I see that in my body? And where do I see it in my mind?

And why has that served me? What was I doing to allow myself to beat the crap out of myself so that I could wrestle myself to the ground and try to perform in a way that would satisfy other people? And so obviously it worked to some degree, this effort to beat myself up and to feel a little guilt and a little shame. But I think it was kind of a primitive technique. And as I get older, I'm

I'm trying to be more aware of these things that kind of worked when I was younger, but they don't really serve me. They don't really help me. I think it's a form of fragility in some way to beat yourself up a lot. It makes you unhappy. It's not a very resilient way to live. If you think of raising kids, if you were constantly like, I can't believe you did that, you schmuck, it has a totally different effect. Maybe they would smarten up their act for

an hour or 15 minutes or whatever, but I don't think it works in a lasting way. Whereas if you put your hand on the shoulder or the head of your young kid and you say, "You're a really extraordinary person and I have so much

confidence in your talent and your ability and your kindness and your decency and your compassion, your ability to do extraordinary things in your life. And I know you feel lost, but I can see that you're going to be extraordinary. That has a totally different impact. And it's curious to me that we often don't do that to ourselves. And so as part of my attempt, I'm constantly trying to

work on stuff that I have no sense of. I've figured this out and here I am. And this is what I do. I'm constantly a work in progress. And so one of the things that I've been working on for years is this kind of rewiring where I'm trying to be kinder to myself. I got a message from someone on LinkedIn the other day, a lot of the guy who I've never met in person, but who I'm

who's, I think he's a PhD in computer engineering, something like that. Like really smart guy, really talented, accomplished guy. And he writes me something asking for advice about how to deal with some flaw of his. I think it was jealousy, envy. And obviously I've written about this and talked about it a bit because one of the things that I spoke to Charlie Munger about when I interviewed him was about how you deal with these negative emotions

And I was just trying to say to this guy what I'm trying to say to myself, which is,

You didn't ask to be wired this way. Have a little self-compassion. To some extent, it's like our survival instinct. It's the organism trying to keep itself safe. It's like we're trying to beat out other people and do better than them and get ahead. And it's part of how we were wired to survive. I think there's a kind of better way to do it. And then when you sort of shift towards things like appreciation and a sense of abundance, a sense of your own good fortune,

And this beautiful idea in Buddhism, which I'm no expert on, although I read a lot about it, this beautiful idea of empathetic joy. So there are these things where you can build these tremendous virtues like empathetic joy, where you're actually really happy for other people's success. But then you see it. You see these moments where these negative emotions come up and you're like,

you look at someone else and you're like, I can't believe they've done so much better than me. I'm smarter than them and I'm more talented and I work harder and I can't believe everyone else likes them so much. And I'm trying more as I get older to see that stuff as it arises and not judge it. And partly this is the

that I've benefited tremendously from studying this great Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, a guy called Sokny Rinpoche, who I had on the podcast with Daniel Goleman. And Sokny Rinpoche has this beautiful idea. I don't know if I've talked to you about this before, maybe because I've been playing with this idea for a few years now, but Sokny has this beautiful idea where you

you do what he calls handshake practice, where as these beautiful monsters, these negative thought patterns or negative emotions arise, you don't judge them, you don't condemn them, you don't try to apply an antidote to them.

you handshake them and you sort of say, "Hi, oh, there you are." There's jealousy arriving. There's self-contempt. There's self-laceration. There's sadness. There's anger. And there's something about the acknowledgement of them, the seeing where they are in your body and your mind in a gentle, warm way without condemning them that I think allows the energy to dissipate a little bit. And so in a way, it's not

Yeah. It's not that I've somehow reached some sort of incredibly elevated state where I don't have all these negative emotions anymore and I don't feel like shame, guilt, envy, pride, all of these things. I feel all of them. But I try to be a little more gentle about the fact that they exist. I try to recognize them so I don't necessarily succumb to them.

And Munger said to me, when I asked him how you deal with this stuff, like how you deal with these really intense negative emotions, he's like, "I just don't let them run because I know they're stupid." And maybe that works for him. I mean, to know that anger, that extreme anger is just stupid, that is helpful to have this. I look back and I think of the times when I've been angry in my life

and told someone what they'd done wrong or what I was annoyed about, I can't really think of a single occasion in my entire life when that wasn't a mistake, when I didn't create more damage. So there is an intellectual understanding like, "Oh, I better not go there. That's probably not so good."

But I still feel the anger. I still feel it arising. And I felt this the other night. My daughter was going to help me clean up the kitchen and I had to work until like 11 something at night. And I'm like, really now I've got to clean the kitchen because she's gone off to her room because she said she's not feeling well. And I still feel the irritation rising. And usually I would just let it rise and just become really irritated. But I was actually sort of watching it.

And it became an object of curiosity. And then I didn't get quite so swept up in it. So I think this is really helpful for all of us, really, like this practice of trying to abide with the emotions that are coming up and the feelings that are coming up. So seeing where they are

in your body and your mind, just not denying them. I don't know, because I remember, I became kind of friendly or friends with Tony Robbins over the years, but I haven't seen him in a couple of years. And he has a totally different technique where he immediately

replaces, I'm probably sort of mis-precising what he says, but he'll have a negative emotion come up and he'll sort of replace it with a different emotion. So I remember once getting sort of in a contentious situation with him and I was kind of upset with him and I could see that he was looking at me with this tremendous compassion.

as we were talking. And so he was very consciously instead of going into a place of being defensive and reactive,

he was going into a place, we talked about it afterwards, and he was like, "I'm looking at this guy and I'm like, well, this guy's my friend. I don't want him to be upset. I don't want him to be sad. And I really appreciate him. He's done all these things for me that have been really helpful." And I could see it as I looked at him, I could see like his eyes are tearing up. And so he's got a totally different approach to dealing with these negative emotions coming up. And he's like, in a situation like that, when it's really contentious, it's very hard to go straight to something like being more loving.

But it's pretty easy to access appreciation, for example. I don't think there's one way to approach these things like guilt, shame, anger, envy, all of these things that come up. I think it's a multi-pronged attack. You can dismantle them in different ways. But I'm very drawn to the approach of Sokri Rinpoche, which is, I would describe almost as radical non-resistance. You see the stuff arise and you're not fighting it or condemning it. And there's something...

very beautiful about that practice. And I found it unbelievably helpful.

Yeah, I love the handshake technique there. You said it's interesting. We all have our own little ways of handling this. For me, it's just a simple what I call a 4A framework. So awareness, accept, aim, action. So first, aware of the unsettling emotion and what you're feeling. The next step, and I think that's what you're alluding to, is the acceptance, not trying to change it, just accepting that for what it is. And then the last two is aim. Well, what do I want right now? You mentioned your interaction with Tony. What do I want right now?

And did you guys want to go down that negative spiral and fighting or do you want to get to a better place? And that's the action. So it's aware, accept, aim, act, and then just go right into that and allow that. So I think it's a bit of a merger maybe between the two.

Yeah, I think that's a beautiful approach and it probably works for your personality as well. So I think you've got to find something that works for your personality and your stage of life and whatever. I think sometimes I would argue with myself. I would use sort of rational analysis and I'd sort of be like, well, you shouldn't be jealous because look, you've got this and this and this. But then your mind goes in all of these kind of spirals. And one of the things I learned from studying David Hawkins and the

the book Letting Go, was that often one emotion is surrounded by thousands of thoughts. So really in a way,

I found it not that helpful to go through these intellectual arguments sometimes of why I'm wrong to feel this emotion. And in a way, just to be aware of the emotion and to watch it and then watch it change also because everything is impermanent. And so the emotion is going to shift anyway. And so then watching it subside is really helpful. And then you mentioned the other day in an email, this meeting that I'd had with this extraordinary Buddhist teacher called Khandro, very remarkable person. And

She only speaks Tibetan, so a friend of mine, Adam Kane, was translating and I had a few minutes with her. It was an incredible privilege to spend time with her. What was extraordinary was the degree to which she talked to me about anger and about dealing with anger. I didn't ask that, but she was talking about the fact that really the emotion itself, and this goes for all of these negative emotions, it has no...

permanent, inherent essence to it. This is one of the great teachings of Buddhism, right? It's not like a stable entity where it's like the anger is going to stay forever. It's this thing. It's like everything, it has this kind of emptiness. So part of her point to me was when you're getting irritable or angry about something,

It's a frustration over things not working the way they should. It's, wait, I'm the one who's working till 11. And here's my daughter who's on vacation from college and she can't tidy up. And really? And, you know, and then I'm going to have to get up and work at 7 a.m. tomorrow because I got another deadline. And she's, you know, you start to have these arguments in your head. But Candrila, this great Buddhist teacher, her point is you're clinging to something.

You're fixating on something that doesn't even really exist, that has no inherent stable essence. And as you watch it and you see it change, it just drifts away. It just melts away. And I had this extraordinary sense after seeing her where this image came to my mind that I'm clinging

to air or water. There are all of these things that I'm like clinging to my fury about the unfairness of something or the... I say, "Really? What a joke. It doesn't even exist. It's just going to be gone in a minute or in a day and I'm not even going to remember this. And why did it upset me so much?" So I think there's also... It's a little bit esoteric, but actually incredibly profound, this idea that because everything is changing,

And nothing has this kind of inherent stability where it's just going to be there forever like this. We don't really have to fixate it and cling to it quite so much. We can let it go. And so part of what I'm trying to do is actually just sort of lighten up a bit and watch it, watch the storm system pass through my brain. And the anger and the irritation and stuff, it's not such a common thing.

It's like more dramatic thunderclouds, but it's not that common. Maybe because I'm a repressed Brit and most of this stuff is happening under the surface. What's more common probably is anxiety, where it's like a general sense of, "Oh my God, I know I'm doing the wrong thing. I can't remember what it is I'm supposed to do." And I've got about six different jobs. So you always know that you're dropping one of these balls, like failing to reply to someone or something like that. And so I think being aware of this low

this low buzz of anxiety is also helpful because you can, you'll be, if you're a little quieter, you can watch this stuff and you're like, oh, as I said that my eye twitched. So last week I was trying to decide whether to go do a speech in Australia. And as I was, and it was like, and then I'm going to fly

from New York to California, do a speech in California, then hang out for a few days and then go to Australia and then fly back to New York. And I've got about four other jobs I'm doing at the same time. Am I going to be able to do it? And as I'm thinking of this, my eye is twitching. Not right now, but when I was thinking of it last week, my eye was twitching. And so just to be aware of it, what's my body telling me? What's going on here? What are...

is my body telling me not to? And it's funny because I worked through this whole issue and things came together over the last few days. And I am going to go to California and do the speech. I am going to go to Australia and do it. And as I speak to you about it, my eye is not twitching and I'm comfortable with it and something that's happened. So I'm able also to look at it a little bit more and be like, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm okay with this. Maybe it's not too much. So I think that's just like,

This general sense that having greater self-awareness of what is happening to you gives you an opportunity to make slightly more skillful decisions. Can you even dive further into that paradox, right? Between the desire and striving to become as opposed to just being here in this present moment? Because you said before that you're constantly curious, you're constantly trying to learn. So how do you wrestle with that?

Yeah, it's funny. We were talking before we started about this conversation I had with Pico Iyer on my podcast and Pico has- Incredible. I need to tell my listeners because it was one I sent to multiple people. It really impacted me a lot. It was a beautiful conversation.

Thank you. Well, Pico has this kind of doubleness to him, right? Where he's a travel writer who I think by the age of 30 had already traveled a million miles on one airline. And yet he's also obsessed with what he calls the art of stillness. And he's been on retreat about a hundred times, usually to a Catholic monastery, even though he's not Catholic, in the mountains of California. And so there's this tension in his life between

the monastic desire to be still and silent and the travel writers insatiable, relentless desire for movement. So I think all of us have this kind of doubleness to us in certain ways, this contradictory-ness in certain ways. And so I have this desperate yearning for peace and quiet.

And then this kind of almost comic inability to remain peaceful and quiet and a desperate yearning for order and this comic inability to attain order. And even like I was laughing the other day, because I did finally go on a silent retreat with Sokny Rinpoche last year.

And the guy, Adam Kane, who was the translator I was mentioning for Candler, was the translator for Soakney Rinpoche. And I was chatting to Adam a couple of days ago and saying I was the least silent retreatant of all time. It turned out anyone who wanted to talk would end up asking me if we could have a chat while I was walking. And I would end up like walking up a mountain with someone chatting. And then I would discover afterwards that

It was the only conversation they had had. There was something about me that I was the one who was always talking with people. And so I don't know. Yeah. So I have, so in the same way, this question that you ask about trying to become something and trying just to be, and to be present in the moment, there's this constant contradiction, this constant conflict. I'm always trying to change and trying to improve. And I greatly admired, Arnold Annenberg, who you mentioned before, when he, when

He, when he said to me, when I was interviewing him for my book, look, I'm going to, I'm going to be working on myself till the day that I die. And I spent a lot of time with him. I've got another podcast episode coming out in a week or two. And he's still, he's working on himself constantly. I really admire that. But then there's also this part of me that's constantly trying to remind myself to drop into this moment and to be present here. And this was actually the question that I asked Candela when I met her, because I, I

you had an opportunity to ask several questions and I actually literally only got to ask one question because the conversation about it ended up lasting longer. And really what I was saying is, look, I have so much stuff that's coming at me all of the time, so many pressures, so many different demands on my time. And in many ways, it's really beautiful. It's a really beautiful life. Thank God I have all these

amazing things I get to do. It's a joy. I get to chat with you and interview all these amazing people and stuff is beautiful. I get to do some really wonderful things, but I said to her, I find it hard to enjoy it a lot of the time because I feel too much anxiety or too much stress or

And this is very hard for me actually to receive the gift in a way. And so this really is a big issue for me. Like how do you simultaneously try to work on yourself, try to become something, try to improve yourself and yet also be present now in this moment. So it's something I'm wrestling with constantly. I feel some degree of guilt when I meditate because I'm like,

really now I should be going off and doing this other thing. And sometimes I skip it. I try to do what I describe as a kind of morning connection where I do a few kind of Kabbalistic prayers and things. And I am more fanatical about doing that every day or nearly every day than I am about my meditation. So that's really important to me, but I still feel guilt about it. Wait, I've got these deadlines. I should be doing this other thing. And

But there's a part of me that's constantly trying to drag myself back into this moment. And we might have talked about this privately before when we chatted

not on the podcast. I have, I tend to have a lot of post-its or things that I've written stuff on. Because my study was painted, I don't have many of them up anymore. They're in a desk drawer, but they're kind of important to me, these messages that I keep trying to pound into my head. And so one thing I have is I got a scribe

to write out in Hebrew a bunch of phrases that have important lessons for me. And one of them in there, one of the words is "Hineni," which is, you'll recognize it from a Leonard Cohen song, and it's something Abraham says means "Here I am." And it has many different connotations. But one of the connotations for me is, I'm here in this moment, right here now.

Let me remind myself to be here. But then there's a great teacher of mine, a guy called Michael Berg, he's a great Kabbalist.

I once said to him, there's something about this word that's very powerful to me. What are the connotations? What does it mean? What's the significance of it? And he said, well, there's something that I think it's the prophet Jeremiah said, where he says, and he said, I think God is calling out or someone is calling out saying, who will do this? And Jeremiah, I think it was, puts his hand, or maybe it's just in the book of Jeremiah. This is the level of my scholarship.

puts his hand up and says, which means something like, here I am, use me. And so there's a sense in this

phrase, Hineni of like, here I am, yes, present in this moment. But then there's also a sense of, yeah, here I am, use me, let me be a channel for something useful that can help other people. And I love this sort of thing where a word radiates out in all of these different ways. And there's so many different interpretations of the same word, but in a way by constantly coming back to that phrase, Hineni and to the phrase, Hineni sholakheni, here, here I am,

and here I am, use me. It's a reminder of, okay, let me try to be present. And let me also try to be useful. Let me also try to be someone who helps other people. And I remember once I was seeing Tony Robbins, when you go out on a stage, you have 12,000 people. What do you say to yourself? What's the thing you say to yourself in your head? And he said to me, I say, Lord, use me. I think that's a very, very interesting insight when you hear someone's inner monologue.

that tells you something about where they're coming from. And I'm not trying in any way to be proselytizing. I think that's a very interesting mindset where you're trying to tap into being helpful to other people, where you're increasingly over the years, I've come to think that setting your intention is incredibly important in terms of your consciousness, where your intention is.

And I think if you start out by saying, "Yeah, use me. Let me be a conduit for something helpful, something beyond my own ego." You put yourself in a different space than when you think, "Let me see how many downloads I get and how many likes I get and how much money I get." And I'm still very attached to all of those practical material worldly things. I'm not in any way disconnected from

the bullshit that you see on social media where it's like how many people

followed this person or liked this, like these companies figured out something deep about the less admirable parts of our personalities. And I don't want to deny that I'm subject to it. But I think if I keep trying to put myself back in this place of, let me try to be a force for good somehow, let me try to be a channel for something more than my own kind of lowly ego, it's a better place to come from.

We had a beautiful discussion. This was offline where you walked me through your office with all of your post-it notes and some of the amazing quotes and sayings. And after that call with you, one of the things that was in my notes is how can I be a conduit for good? It was one of those things you kept saying again and again. I just love that phrasing. How can I be a conduit for good? And just thinking about that, like you just said, the intention of that every single day.

really has a tremendous impact and one of the things I'm interested in hearing about the impact is Kandra law and When she was with you in her presence, what was that like? I'm asking this because I know you're a fan of George Mumford the performance coach for Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant I was talking to him recently and he said being in Michael Jordan's presence There was a different energy

And I know a few of the people who were in your small group with Condro and the energy that she had was different. I'm just wondering what your experience was like with her. Yeah. Yeah. And I should mention, I was listening to your George Mumford.

interview this morning. I love George Mumford. I think he's very extraordinary. I listened a lot to his class on 10% Happier when I was writing my book. And his concept of finding the eye of the hurricane, of finding a place of peace within chaos is a very beautiful idea. It's very profound. And I

I think he's quite special. And it was interesting even hearing your interview because you're like intense and you're fast and you're moving and he's slow, even though he was obviously sort of hustling a bit and he'd

overslept and he'd had an interview with Sharon Salzberg on her podcast the night before. And he was obviously more jostled than usual, and yet he's still slow and calm, poised and balanced. And so I think when you come in the presence of people who embody certain characteristics, it's very, very powerful. It's more powerful than what they say often. And so with Candrila likewise,

One of the things that was most striking to me is there's this kind of, a, there's a kind of joyfulness to her, a sense of freedom that she's just there. She just floats into this room. And so there were about 11 of us there and she floats into this room with a couple of, a couple of monks and a couple of handlers.

And she has this very joyful, peaceful energy. And I was supposed to welcome her, I guess. And I completely screwed up and forgot what I was supposed to do. And a friend of mine stepped in and started to introduce her. And there was some aspect of like,

It was all a little otherworldly. You think you're in control and you're going to do this and you're going to be a polished moderator type. I've interviewed so many people. I've moderated panels. I interviewed presidents and prime ministers and stuff. And then the moment she comes in, my any smooth English hosting skills just disintegrated and I forget to introduce her and welcome her properly. And then nothing went to plan. So instead of

instead of just going into this little cube where she would have these private interviews, she sits down with us and talks for 45 minutes in this beautiful extemporaneous way. So she's just kind of going with the flow in this very light way. So that in itself is a very powerful example, like not trying to cling too much to your plan for how everything's going to be. She comes in, she sees the energy of the room,

And she starts to talk and she goes with the flow of it in a different way. And then she went in the cube and did a series of maybe 12, 14 private meetings each for about 15 minutes and just no sense of tiredness at all. Just totally fresh because she's helping you. And so I think as Arnold Vandenberg would say, when you're just trying to help other people, it's tremendously energizing.

There was a, and then in my interview with her, there was a very, there was a very, this is an interview in a more Buddhist sense of you're sort of sitting down for a private audience with someone and you ask them a question and they teach you something that is very personal, I guess, in this case, at least. And

One of the things that was very powerful to me was about halfway through, she's beaming at you and she's lighthearted and she looks almost like a child. There's a joyful lightness of spirit to her. And about halfway through, she's telling me all this stuff about how to live a happy, free life and how really a happy and truly wealthy life requires you to tame the mind.

it's all an inside job. And so how you deal with these aversive emotions and things like that is really a tremendous part of having a truly wealthy life. And I look at her and I see that her eyes are totally welled up. And just seeing that there's a total stranger you've never met before, who's trying to teach you something. And as she's trying to teach you something, she's choked up.

not in a way that's obvious. She's not crying. And it's not like I was telling her anything traumatic that would be upsetting. She's literally, she's just looking at a stranger who she's trying to help. And she's so full of compassion and kindness and what I would call love for no reason that her eyes start to well up. And when I look at that, I start to choke up because it's so moving to see someone who just loves you for no reason. And so I think when you see that,

in your life, it has a tremendous impact on you because

I'm not some great Buddhist student or anything. I regard myself much more... Tibetan Buddhism is a very important part of my life, but my primary path is studying Kabbalah, which is this great sort of old mystical tradition, which I just find infinitely rich, but they're very similar in very many ways. And so I find it incredibly fruitful studying both. So I'm not in any way trying to present myself as a great Buddhist.

a Buddhist scholar or practitioner. I'm really in the shallow end of the pool and flailing with my armbands, my, what do you call them in America? The water wings. That's more my image. I'm not like some sophisticated Buddha sitting on a rock in a cave. I know enough about this to know that they talk about bodhicitta, about loving kindness and compassion. And when you see someone truly embody that

you feel it and that's a very beautiful thing. I think part of the takeaway for me,

is if you take this in a more crass sort of pragmatic way, think of Buffett saying, hang out with people who are better than you because you can't fail to improve, which is something he said to my friends, Guy Spear and Manish Pabrai when he had his famous charity lunch with them back in 2008, I think, or 2009. So choosing your environment, choosing who you hang out with, choosing who you spend time with,

whether it's the company you keep physically or your physical office space or your friends or the books that you read. Think of Munger saying that he hangs out with the eminent dead by reading about Ben Franklin or all of these people. Constructing the right environment is very powerful because it's going to tilt you in either direction. And so for me, part of the great benefit of spending time with Kandrila, albeit a short amount of time or spending time

with Sokny Rinpoche or spending time with someone like Dan Goldman, who wrote the Emotional Intelligence book, who's a close friend both of Sokny Rinpoche and Kandrula. You see these people who are very, very evolved, very present. I mean, when you, I don't know if you've ever interviewed Dan Goldman. Yeah, a couple months ago he was on.

Okay, great. So I came friends with Dan just through a great friend of mine, Matt Ludma, who I share an office with. I hope one day you'll get to interview because we're working on a book of his that you'll want to talk to him about in a year or so. But so I met Dan through my friend, Matt.

And one of the things that strikes me about Dan is he's tremendously present. When you're with him, he's just there. There's not a lot of disturbance or distortion. He's with you. And I've seen this when I ran into him with my daughter a year or so ago, and he's totally present with her. And I don't know, he's just...

That's the result of, I think, to a great extent, 40 or 50 years of meditation. Like he's deeply present. But there's also a calmness and a kind of joyfulness there. And there's not a lot of ego. I don't see any evidence of ego in meditation.

the way he behaves. It's not like he's trying to impress you with how important he is or that his books sold like 5 million copies or more. It just doesn't care. And partly it's that he's older, but partly I think it's that he's done a lot of work on himself. And so for me, that's very valuable because I see Dan as someone, I think he's probably 76 or something like that. I'm 54. So I see Dan, and age is a little bit of a bogus construct anyway. I'm not saying that

But I see him as someone who is further along the path. I see the benefits of the habits that he's had, of the meditation, of the fact that he's trying to help other people, the fact that he's deeply present. I think, oh, let me get more of that. And so I think part of what we want to do

is I have this compulsion to try to make this in some way useful and not self-referential. And so I keep wanting to say, you know, so the takeaway from this is, but I do think this is a valuable takeaway is, you know, to look at people who really deeply embody qualities that you want to have, that you value and spend time with them and look at them and think, why, how did that come about? You know, some of it is probably just

nature is probably just in his wiring that he's like lighter spirited and it's not a huge amount of ego and stuff. Maybe it's like the time of life, but I think some of it is stuff that he's worked on himself. I saw it also when I went to the TED conference recently,

And I saw Ray Dalio, and again, like this tremendous presence, like after decades of meditation, like there was a moment where I guess I'd only interviewed him over Zoom. And we've talked a few times over the last couple of years over Zoom. And I said to him, Ray, I don't know if you remember, I interviewed you on my podcast

William Green, and he leans forward and he's like, yeah, you did a fantastic job. That was fantastic. You know, that was a wonderful injury. And I'm not saying this to be self-congratulatory. It's like he leans towards you and there's this tremendous presence and intensity to it. You don't feel there's any distortion where he's focusing on all of these other things. And that's, so when I see that characteristic, I sort of think, so how am I going to get

more presence in the moment? How am I going to be more concentrated on the person I'm talking to? What are these people doing? And so it gets back to something I write about in Richer Ways Are Happier, this idea from Nick Sleep of destination analysis. You think of a desirable destination and then you work backwards. And so if part of the destination for me is I want to be a

When I grow up and I'm in my 70s, God willing, and I look back, I'd like to be, you know, okay, so I became more compassionate, kinder,

person, what am I going to do to get that? And so all of these things really are practices to help me to get there. So what we were talking about before with handshake practice, like to see these things that are really just sort of, they're like negative emotions that just block me from happiness. And I remember Candela said to me,

when you become irritable or angry about something. And she wasn't even really wording it as like you, so it didn't feel like an attack on me. It felt like she was saying one when one does this, but it was clear that she was saying it to me, I think. She was, because also she didn't say this to anyone else. So it was clearly designed to help me. But she said, you need to say to yourself, this is just my confused mind. It's my own confusion.

And when you look at the other person, you realize where they're coming from, what they're going through. They're just trapped in their own confusion. And so you should have compassion for them. They're suffering. And so in a way, it gets back to what Tony did with me, where he looks at me when I'm really upset. And he's like, I see my friend is just suffering. I don't want him to suffer. I appreciate him. And

And so he's putting himself in a different state. These habits are calling on you to be more compassionate and kinder to others and yourself. It's just incredibly helpful, I think, when you look at people who embody

those qualities. And then at the same time, part of the hope, I guess, I don't really, I'm not very conscious about thinking about this, but part of the hope is that you become a better embodiment of these things. And I think we do think of this with our kids, right? Like I very consciously during the pandemic started to use a Peloton pretty religiously because I wanted to

partly control what I could control, which was my own health and weight and fitness and all of that. But probably I wanted to be a good example to my kids. And so I do think the desire to model good behavior is an incredibly powerful thing, although I'm not doing it very well at the moment because I have an exercise in a few days. Busy schedule.

Chandra law you were saying how she floated into the room and constantly had this joyfulness about her It reminded me of this line I heard about the Dalai Lama that I've never been able to forget and it was ebullient is his resting state Ebulance is his resting state and I think there's something just really incredible about that like you said try to Strive to get to that at some point later in the future. I just wanted to bring that up because it was so beautiful hearing about her and

Well, I have a great teacher, Kabbalist called Eitan Yardenny, who's a wonderful guy. And when I first met him about 15 years ago, one of the things that struck me was that he seemed free. There was a sort of softness and a lightness of spirit to him. And he's gone through plenty of stuff over the years. But I remember once coming to, I met him in London. I remember once I was in New York and I met him in New York again. I said to him, where does that come from?

that lightness where you just don't seem, there's no heaviness or worry or anxiety or anything. Seems very present and very free. And he said to me, well, William, at a certain point you have no burdens of your own because all you're doing is taking care of other people's burdens.

And I think that's a consistent strain when I look at people like Soapneer Rinpoche or Kandrila, Eitan, or this other great Kabbalist that I study with, Michael Berg, who's a guest on the podcast in a few weeks. Because they're serving others constantly, they really have this desire to help other people. There's this strange paradox that they become freer. Yeah.

And it's very helpful to remember this because, you know, most of us are sort of so stuck on the hedonic treadmill and we're desperately trying to fill this hole.

where we're like, if I just work harder and get more respect or make more money or build an extension or buy the new iPad, which I got yesterday. Hilarious. Because I was, William, growth here. I literally had it in my cart in Amazon. And I said, you know what? I do not need this. Put this away. Yeah. Well, I will confess that my, my,

My current iPad is like nine years old and the only thing I can do on it is read the New Yorker. It's literally the only thing. It's not totally decadent buying the new one, but there is this attempt constantly I find to fill the hole.

with these things that you know aren't going to work. Where if I work harder, if I get more respect, if I get more success, if I get more money, if I get more this, more that, more possessions, if I redo the floor in my study with hardwood floors, which I am going to do again, because I'm a sucker for these things. I like beautiful things as well. Then I'll be happy and satisfied. And the great paradox really is

that when you start to help other people more, you sort of get out of your own trap of... So it's a terrible trick of the universe that you chase after all of these things that you know aren't going to work, and yet they're so addictive that you keep chasing them. And then there is this beautiful paradox that as you let go of that,

and you serve others, then weirdly you get the happiness that you were chasing. And I see that with people like Arnold Vandenberg, or I see the delight that he gets in helping other people. I see it with Serge Nuremberg or Michael Berg, Etienne Yardeni, and it's very powerful to see that. And I think you don't really have to proselytize about these things. It's not about being self-righteous, it's enlightened self-interest. You're like, okay, so if I want to be happy,

I'm going to have to build some form of service into my life. And so then if you're

If your intention when you do your podcast is, let me be a force for good. Let me help other people. Let this book be something that's useful. Let me, yeah, I want it to do well. Yeah, I want to have financial independence. Yeah, I want people to think I'm talented or smart or that it's better that I'm alive than not. But let my intention over and over again be somehow to be a force for good.

that puts you in a whole different space and it weirdly makes you happier. So there's a kind of master move there, I think, in shifting away from all these things that are designed to satisfy the ego. And the funny thing is the more you study these things, the more you find these principles in every spiritual path. And so one thing that I think you and I have talked about before

that had a really powerful impact on me was reading these books by this great Kabbalist, Rav Yehuda Ashlag. And he talks about how you're born with what he calls the desire to receive for the self alone. And so it's like a little baby with their hands clenched, desperately wanting milk now and wanting their diaper changed now. And that's

a little bit like I am in trying to get the new iPad and I want it now. And it's like, really? The keyboard isn't going to arrive for two weeks? It's so outrageous. I'm like the little baby, like crying, crying on the bed. And then what Rav Ash, what Rav Ash said is that you gradually transform that desire to receive for the self alone into the desire to receive for the sake of sharing. And that's a really beautiful idea because

You're not saying you don't want to receive. You're not saying you don't want blessings in your life. You're not saying, "Oh, I'm so righteous and so holy that I don't care about having a nice home and a nice family and financial security as much as there's any security in anything in life and good health and all of these things." You want those blessings. You want to receive those gifts, but it's to share.

And that's a very beautiful principle that once you start to understand it, then you start to look at your own life and you start to say, okay, so when was I happiest? And you're like, oh, I was really happy when I didn't necessarily get that thing for myself. I think of this, I'm articulating this very poorly, but that meeting with Cantala, all of it was arranged really by my friend, Matt Ludma, who I mentioned before, I hope you'll interview down the road.

And Matt, having managed not to get COVID the entire time through the pandemic, got COVID like the day before Candler came. And so he's hosting the whole thing. I think he's paying for the whole thing. It's in the place where we have an office together, which is this really beautiful space in Westchester, New York. And he's put so many hours into this thing. He's like getting the deck painted and he's getting it all cleaned and he's got flowers and he's physically not there.

And yet he set this thing up in such a beautiful way that I saw how joyful he was while everyone else was having this incredible experience. And so there you see it. You see someone who's tapped into joy.

this idea of transforming the desire to receive for the self alone into the desire to receive for the sake of sharing. So he was disappointed not to be there, but he was sort of on an iPad in a conference room and intermittently people would go in and chat to him. And he was just sort of sitting there blissed out,

on a yoga cushion, on a meditation cushion, meditating for many hours, just smiling and delighting in the fact that he'd provided this extraordinary experience for these friends of his. That's a very beautiful thing when you see it. I think you sometimes see it with your own kids or something where you're like, you don't get to go to an event because you gave your kid the ticket. Your family has two tickets for Hamilton and your daughter goes instead of you. And you're like, she's going to enjoy it.

And so I think we all feel it. We've tasted it. It's like when you were interviewing George Mumford and he said, you were asking him, how do you talk to these people about getting into this flow state and finding this still place in the eye of the hurricane? And he's like, well, we've all felt it. We've all been there. And so I think once you look back and you remember viscerally a time when you were happy because you weren't just looking out for yourself, you actually helped someone. Then you're like, oh, this isn't just like some

dumb principle that people are trying to persuade me. It's like, no, it's actually true. And so if I want to be happier, if I want to have true abundance, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to actually be more sharing. How are you instilling this in your kids? I think your son's 25. I'm pretty sure your daughter's 22 right around there.

How are you helping them understand these principles when it seems like the whole world is trying to, what we were talking about earlier, add more intensity, get this checkmark, do that? I'm just wondering how you navigate that as a parent.

I give them a lot of mixed messages that are not helpful, I suspect. Because on the one hand, I have the anxiety of a parent who wants their kids to do well and make a mark in the world. And they're both really talented and they're singers and writers and artists. And my son is teaching at the moment. And I'm

I'm kind of like, there's a part of me that I'm sure they feel my sense of urgency and competitiveness and all of my base instincts. I want them to do well in life and be able to make money and be able to support themselves. And then there's a part of me that I really want them to be kind and loving and compassionate human beings. And I want them to understand the importance of things like meditation and stillness and kindness, all of these things. And so I think

I think I probably give them slightly distorted and contradictory messages that will require many years of therapy to untangle. I did things, I mean, if I think of things that I, when my better self was somehow involved over the years,

One of the things that I think was probably helpful, and my wife is, I think, probably a much better parent than I am anyway, so that's helpful as well. One of the things that we did is very early on,

we said to my son when he was very young, "We won't judge you by how well you do at school," things like that. "We'll judge you by how kind you are to your sister." And I think that they remember the fact that there was only one rule in the family, that was to be kind to each other. And they have their moments where they're in conflict like everyone, but that emphasis on kindness, I think was very helpful. And I remember a couple of years ago reading an article in the New York Times where

I think it was Adam Grant had written about how families with fewer rules have more creative kids. It was like the only time in my entire life that I've read any article on parenting. I thought, yes, I got something. Because we literally, we were struggling to think of any rules that we had at all. We never managed to set a consistent bedtime or anything like that. But

So the one rule, and my daughter has talked about this in the last couple of weeks, she's like, "Well, the one rule that you had was kindness." And the other thing I would say that I hope is made up for a lot of flaws and mistakes and mixed messages and stupidity on my part is I think we've been consistently loving. And so I think they have no doubt at all that they're deeply loved. And I think that's very important, knowing that your parent

just really cares about you, just really loves you and wants to ask you. I think that makes up for a lot of things. It's kind of like what I was saying before about setting intentions. I sort of feel like if your basic intention is to be a force for good, it makes up for a lot of mistakes and stumbling and stuff because you're coming back to that true north again and again. Likewise, I think if you're consistently

If you're consistently being loving to your kids and you emphasize kindness, that's very powerful. But the other thing, it has to be modeled behavior because they see when you're full of crap and when your words don't amount to stuff. So I think trying to actually model the behavior that you would like to see in them is really important. So they can see if I'm kind to my wife.

And that's more powerful than me saying, be kind to people. They can see if I'm actually bothering to clean the kitchen and stuff. And I'm no saint on any of these matters, but they see.

And so likewise, they see if you exercise or if you meditate or if you watch what you say and you sort of, you don't just say the unkind thing, which has been something I've worked on a lot in recent years. That's a very easy thing to change, actually. It's quite hard to change things like simmering anger and frustration when you're stressed at the world not doing what it should do. But I've become better over the years at

holding my tongue.

certain moments where I wanted to say something that was smart-alecky, slightly cruel. Actually, my family would contradict this. I'm constantly saying things that are smart-alecky and sarcastic, but I definitely do a lot not to say unkind things. I probably censor about 80% of the unkind things that I would be likely to say. Usually, they come out more when I'm stressed or irritated.

And so, yeah, I think it's the modeling of behavior probably is the single most powerful thing. Yeah.

You mentioned kindness and something that you've shared with me that has had a tremendous impact on me. And you brought him up earlier, David Hawkins. I had been exposed to his book, Power Versus Force, and then you opened me up to letting go. And I'm pretty sure it's chapter three on emotions, which is what you were talking about earlier, which was incredible. But the line you shared with me from David Hawkins that has forever stuck with me is simple kindness to oneself and all that lives is the most powerful transformational force of all.

It produces no backlash, has no downside, and never leads to loss or despair. It increases one's own true power without exacting any toll. But to reach maximum power, such kindness can permit no exceptions, nor can it be practiced with the expectation of some selfish gain or reward, and its effect is as far-reaching as it is subtle. You shared that with me, and I've thought about that just as much as any other quote I've come across.

Yeah, it's very powerful. And I think I talked about this on a recent podcast where I did a sort of highlights podcast.

It was called something like Legends of Investing or something like that with Manish Pabrai and Tom Gain. The Tom Gainer episode was awesome. Thanks. And I was worried that people would think I was nuts. I went off on about a 20-minute comprised chat about why Hawkins has had an effect on me because I was trying to sort of synthesize and distill and express some of the reasons why he's had an effect on me. And that single line, that distillation,

to this true north of kindness is very powerful. I think I talk about a different book here, which I think is Transcending the Ladder of Consciousness or something like that. It has some kooky title. A lot of his books have these wonderfully eccentric titles, like literally just be the letter I and then a colon. I love this stuff. I have an infinite capacity for reading these things. But in that book on transcending the levels of human consciousness, I think it was called something like that,

He talks about the importance of finding a few principles that have stood the test of time. And as I would put it, really going big on them. And he lists about 10 of them. And I think this process of simplification is incredibly powerful. I write about it in my book, right? This idea that in a very complex world,

where there's so much information coming at us. There's so many different ways we can go in life. So many competing ideas, so many competing practices. For me, because I have this slightly disorderly brain that's going off in all different directions, it's very important for me to have a few simple guiding principles that I can come back to again and again as a true north. So every time I'm getting confused, I'm like, just try to be kinder. Just try to be

Just try to be more compassionate. And there's something about the repetition that's very helpful, whether it's through mantras or affirmations or looking at a quote like that one that you read, which I used to have on a card just sort of stuck to my wall, although it isn't since I got my room repainted, but it's in my desk. The repetition is very powerful. And so when you find these things that resonate with you, I think you want some way

to keep coming back to them. I have one of the crazy things that I have in my study is, you know, on that list of words that I mentioned that have been written out in Hebrew, that the word "Hineni," "here I am," is written on. There are about six lines and it's in a kind of pyramid. So I had it designed so it has about six different phrases.

And so I'm not particularly organized or disciplined about coming back to the same schedule every day. But one of the things that I found helpful is to use something like Habitify, the app where you at least have a bunch of these habits that you're going to be reminded of that you're going to tick off at some stage. Some days I forget to tick off any of them. But one of them, because the top word on that list is lishma, which is a Hebrew word

basically Rav Ashlag, the canvas I spoke about before, used to talk about giving pleasure to your creator. Because that's at the top of this kind of pyramid on my Habitify app list of things that

lead towards a more successful day. One of the categories is the Lishma mountain. And it's just reminding me like, okay, so look at these phrases. And so one of the phrases, so Lishma, that idea at the very top, very, very powerful idea that it's like, so whether you believe in a creator or not,

And however you define it, I just think of it more as not as like an old man with a beard on a cloud. I'm thinking like this force for good, love, kindness, compassion, truth, sharing. So it's something you feel rather than an institution or anything like that. And everyone else will define it how they want. It's very personally idiosyncratic. But so...

If you want to give pleasure to your creator, then you start to think, well, so how am I going to become more truthful, kinder, more compassionate, more loving, despite all of the flaws, all of the, the primitive instincts that make me want to dominate, win, succeed, get whatever it is, all of my baser instincts. And, and then, and I think Hawkins is saying much the same thing with his ladder of consciousness, that you're trying to climb this ladder of consciousness where things like shame,

guilt, envy, anger, just calibrate very low. And so the more you can give power to things like love, strength, kindness, compassion, the better. And so...

So again, having that word, Lishma, to give pleasure to my creator on that list is a way of dragging my mind back to that intention that goes in many ways against my instincts as a man who wants everything to go my way. Then underneath that, one of the phrases is Gamtsu Latova, which is basically means, and this too is for the best.

And again, this is something I really tried to hardwire into my brain in the last few years is the sense that whatever happens, it's for the best. Whatever happens, it's from the light, it's for your benefit. And this is something that Tony Robbins would say over and over, right? He would say, "Life happens for you, not to you." And when I was younger, I would have thought that this was puerile and self-delusional. I would have thought just 'cause you wish it to be true,

doesn't make it true. And these people who believe this crap are just delusional children. And I think increasingly what I believe is because your consciousness creates your reality, you get to choose your thoughts. You get to choose, do I believe that the world is a hostile place that has it in for me and that wants me to suffer and all life is suffering and everything's going to hell and it's getting worse and that I just am a random person

beneficiary of good luck at times and a random victim of bad luck at times. Maybe that's true, but I also think your consciousness creates that reality. And if instead you go through saying, this too is for the best. Everything is for my good. But at a certain point, it becomes self-fulfilling.

And you start to look at everything that happened to you. I used to be sort of, my daughter was saying to me yesterday, we were out on a walk and I said something in passing. I was like, when I got whacked by Time Magazine, and she's like, that language isn't very useful. And I said, I actually, there's no emotion to it anymore when I say I got whacked by Time. Because I look back,

right what an unbelievable gift that was that it sent me off in this different direction that's been so fruitful and it's made me so much happier thank god and so so that's a data point where i can go back and i can say well and this too is for the best it didn't feel like it at the time

But did I make it that way because of my attitude and because of my behavior or did I just get lucky? I don't know. But that guy, Eitan Yadani, who I mentioned ages ago, the one who said to me, you know, at a certain point you have no burdens of your own because all you're doing is take care of other people's burdens. I had just started studying Kabbalah with him when I got whacked, like back in 2008 during the financial crisis.

And I remember walking into a classroom where he was teaching and he said, "How are you William?" And I said, "I'm good except I just got laid off." And I had two kids in private school who were being paid for at school by Time. And I lived in a beautiful home in London that was paid for by Time. And suddenly it's the middle of the financial crisis and magazines are falling apart and I'm laid off. And Eitan puts up his arms and he says, "Such a blessing." And I look back now

I'm like, yeah, he was absolutely right. And part of what we do in life, right, is we tell ourselves these stories about who we are and what our life means and what happened to us. And so to some degree, we're just constructing narratives and we do kind of choose what the narrative is. And so when I look back at that narrative,

I'm starting to think, and there's a part of me that's very English and very Jewish and doesn't want to tempt fate and that's sort of superstitious and remembers my grandmother sort of would always sound like the Cossacks were coming any minute. And I don't want to tempt fate, but there's a part of me that looks back and the narrative I think now is, God, I was being blessed all along.

I thought I was being cursed. I thought there was some terrible thing happening to me. My life was falling apart and nobody appreciated how great I was and how talented I was, how hard I worked and all that. And poor me. Then I look back and I'm like, what an incredible gift. I was like being lifted up, put in a different situation, put in a different environment, given challenges to overcome that didn't break me. They were really hard. They almost felt like they were going to break me, but they didn't quite.

And they allowed me to break a big part of my ego in a very helpful way. Because when you're really smashed like that, you can't really walk around thinking like you're master of the universe. And so that also breaks you open and makes you receptive to things that you wouldn't have been receptive to. So I never would have been receptive to teachings from

Etan Yadani or Michael Berg or Sukhner Rinpoche or Khandro, I would have thought it was silly to be in a room with a great Tibetan Lama. And not silly, I would have thought it was curious. I would have wanted to do it because it was interesting anthropologically, but I wouldn't have thought I'm going to learn from this person. Yeah. Everything you were just saying there, William, it makes me think of this line from Tolstoy and it's wisdom is understanding how eternal truth can be applied to life.

And I just love that there are some of these big principles that are so foundational, so fundamental, and you need to apply them to your life. So I just love some of the insights you provided there. I'm going to let you get out of here in a minute, but I'd be so intrigued to hear decades of interviewing some of the world's most successful people, some incredible people that you've mentioned thus far. If you could sit down and do another interview with someone over all those years, who would you like to go back to? Yeah, I don't know. I really don't know. There...

There's definitely been a pressure to interview people because they were a big deal, because they were rich or famous or powerful or had amazing returns or whatever. And what I find increasingly is that the people I most love interviewing are the people who there's something a little more soulful there.

And I mean, that's why to interview someone like a Pico R or a Dan Goldman or a Soakney Rinpoche is like such a joy. And one of the things that's kind of scary when you do that is that you're breaking away from the easy low hanging fruit of an interview with someone famous who's a great brand name, who's got a huge following and everyone's going to be impressed that it's such a gap.

And I think there's a sort of tension here, right? Because there's a part of us that's very connected to material success and how people think of us. And then there's a part of me that's like, well, I sort of don't really care about that stuff increasingly. I kind of do.

But at the same time, when you talk to someone who's really elevated in a remarkable way, it's such a beautiful thing. And in Hawkins terminology, it makes you go strong. So if I think about the most impressive people I've met, someone like this guy, Michael Burke, I have coming on the podcast, who's a great Kabbalist and who started translating the Zohar, which is great.

spiritual text in 23 volumes. He started translating at the age of 18 and was part of this team that finished over 10 years. His father was probably the most extraordinary person I ever met. And I wish I'd got to spend more time with him. I never met him except after he'd had a stroke. And even then you would shake when you were in his presence. I mean, there was something very extraordinary. I

you felt like you were in the presence of something very, very powerful. And it's funny because he would often get maligned and the Kabbalists would always get persecuted and maligned and were often physically attacked or excommunicated. It's like the mystics in every path, whether it's the Sufis or whatever, it's sort of the secret teachings. And so

There's a part of you that's judging this from a very worldly perspective and thinking, am I right here? Am I confused? And am I missing something? And then there's a part of you where when you're with someone like that, boy, do you feel it? So in a way, when I look back, I kind of wish that I'd spent less time

worrying about, you know, this guy manages a hundred billion dollars or this guy's made $20 billion and had spent more time with the people who in some way made you go strong because there was something so powerful about their consciousness. There's something deeply subversive about the fact that I have this supposedly investing podcast, the RicherWise Happier podcast, but that I get people like Soap Nero and Pache on it. And I love the fact that here I have the only

It's probably the only episode of any investing podcast with a guy wearing saffron robes, speaking in a Tibetan accent. And there's something really kind of beautiful about that to me, because you're trying to get at these deeper questions. So what actually is wealth? What actually makes for a rich life? What actually makes for a successful life? And so I think all of us,

Because we're pragmatic people from a country that's full of hustlers trying to make money, trying to get ahead, trying to build the extension, trying to buy the latest iPad. We're very much consumed with that mindset. But then when you actually connect with people who are going deeper, it kind of works out beautifully. And I'm sort of surprised when I look at the numbers, I don't know if you've seen this with your podcast,

I'm shocked at how well the interviews with people who are not as famous, but are really deep thinkers, how well they do. And so I think there's some

part of us that connects to this stuff where when you know something is true or someone is deeply thoughtful, you feel it. And even if that's not what they set out wanting, they listen and they're like, oh yeah, that's powerful. That's beautiful. That makes for a better life. And so I want increasingly to do more of that stuff. But I also, I interview a lot of investors who I think are like a very tiny minority of the investment world who are very

thoughtful, soulful, intellectually interesting. I'm less interested in interviewing people these days who I don't really admire. I think in my youth, I spent a lot more time interviewing people because it was kind of sexy in some way. Like I would write about a murderer or a con man or something like, you know, I had an eye for a good scandal that I could write a good article about. And that was really fun. I would have these amazing experiences where I would

I remember once writing about some guy, there's this thing as a journalist where you would do this moment where you lay out what you've got, what you figured out in your investigation and then give them a chance to respond. And I remember once doing this in Spokane, Washington, and this guy takes out his gun and he's standing in his kitchen with this huge rifle and stuff.

It's a little scary, but it's really fun as well. So going off to scandalous, edgy stuff was really fun. And so then you'd be like, "Well, so I'll write about this scummy billionaire who's made a fortune, but is kind of rapacious. And I don't really want to do that anymore." And even in my book, I Am Richer, Wiser, Happier.

I really like pretty much everyone I interviewed. There were probably one or two people who I... And I'm not lionizing them in any way, everyone has their flaws, but I've increasingly been focused on people who I think are a force for good and they are thoughtful. And I think maybe that's a natural evolution. Maybe we're just less impressed with just really that's what you did with your life. You made billions of dollars and you left a trail of lawsuits and people who hated you.

Like how impressive is that? Whereas I look at people, you know, someone like Arnold was talking to Arnold Hannenberg recently.

and he's helping this young kid, a fellow, a mutual friend of ours. There's nothing in it for Arnold. And I just see the joy that he's getting out of helping this guy. And that's just really cool. And I just, I admire that so much more. In a way, I kind of wish I'd wised up to this earlier. The fact that those are the sort of people I should have been interviewing. But maybe we have to go wrong. Maybe we have to go the wrong way. And then

And then when you screw up, you know, you look back and you're like, God, that was wrongheaded. So let me do it a different way. Yeah. Sometimes you got to go through to get to it.

William, this has been fascinating. You're one of those people, I told you this multiple times, that you make me go strong. You open up my mind. You help me explore other things and help me uncover more of those deep, eternal truths that I highlighted with Tolstoy. Your book is incredible, the podcast. We brought it multiple times. There are some incredible interviews. So I highly recommend everyone pick that up and go download the podcast, Richer, Wiser, Happier. Anywhere else you want to direct the listeners? I have a website that's, William,

WilliamGreenWrites.com. I'm so incompetent about updating it and I've never figured out how to track anyone who goes on it. I don't collect any information about anything. I've never figured out how to do an email list or anything as sophisticated as that. I'm a marketer's nightmare. But I'm on Twitter and stuff at WilliamGreen72 and I do use Twitter to some degree. And

and I'm on LinkedIn. And I'm always happy to hear from people. And I'm not always brilliant at replying, but I do try to reply because I like the fact that we're all on this journey together and we're trying to figure out stuff. And I think you learn more if you're actually trying to help other people. So, I mean, I think when you're trying to...

when someone asks you a question and they're like, "What do I do about this?" And you try to say, "Well, here's what's worked for me and here's what hasn't worked and here's what I've read." It forces you to think better about this yourself. I've really enjoyed that dialogue with people who've followed me

or connected to me or written to me. And so there is that part of me that wants to kind of build my brand and become more successful. And there's a part of me that knows it's all bullshit. And I just enjoy the fact that we're like this community, this tribe of people who are trying to figure out how to live better and how to be happier and how to be better people and what actually constitutes wealth. Are we really going to chase after just money, money, money and possessions and then look

I'm back and be like, really? That was it? And so I think we're all kind of wrestling with these questions of how to live. I like it when people connect with me because they're on that journey. And that's what the podcast is as well. It's like people just trying to figure out like, how do we live? What makes sense? What principles will help us? And I enjoy the fact that you're very much on that journey as well. And you have this great characteristic of just being really, really curious and open and

And you've had amazing guests and you're clearly trying to synthesize this material in a way that can help other people. And so I feel like we're fellow travelers on the same kind of path. And so I'm looking forward to learning more from you as well as I hear more of your podcasts in the years to come. Absolutely. Well, thanks again, William.

You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There? I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you found value in this, the best way you can support the show is giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends, and also sharing on social. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys listening to another episode.