The Savings Expert: The Truth About America Collapsing! The Cost Of Living Is About To Skyrocket!

how important is this tariff situation it has the potential to be the biggest economic story of our lives people are losing a lot of money on tariffs and you're probably a matter of weeks away from empty shelves and there's a button on the president's desk that says "End it right now." So can you tell me what a tariff is i'll keep this very simple morgan Hel is the money mindset guru who's shaking up everything you think about wealth and how to achieve it i looked at the most Googled questions around money and one of the

most popular is how to achieve freedom financially it is largely a mindset you have an obligation to understand how money works and how to manage it and it's one of many topics in which you're going to learn the best by experiencing the downside and I'll come back to that the next question is how to save money so most people view saving money as it's just wasted sitting there but you need the cushion so that when the economy goes south and there is a recession I want to have a level of control over my ability to

support my family so how much money do you think it's sensible to have saved this is a bad answer that no one's going to like but when you look at all these people through history that have generated great wealth are there like certain strategies they've deployed one thing that virtually everyone listening to this could learn from is they were way more patient and had way more endurance than anyone else also I wanted to understand investing and this idea of compounding interest so compound interest is the most misunderstood thing about investing because that's what builds wealth

if you look at like Warren Buffett he wouldn't want to get haircuts because if he invested that money and leave it alone for 50 years in his mind a haircut would cost $10,000 and then do you recommend people try and buy houses or is it just to rent those houses so the truth is this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribe to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what

we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much in 2020 my older brother Jason came to me after spending more than

a decade working in the finance industry and he said to me Stephen there is one book you need to read to understand money and that was your book The Psychology of Money and that's how I came into your world and understood who you were what you think and really this book has shaped how I think about money ever since and this is why I loved having you on the show last time but I was insistent to speak to you again with everything that's going on with the in the world right now morgan what is the

most important thing we should be talking about at this present moment based on I guess the subtitle of this book Timeless Lessons of Wealth Greed and Happiness thank you Steph it's so so good to be back i think what's what I like about what you just said and thank you for for that is that you said the book changed how you think mhm and that's important because the book does not tell you what to do nowhere in the book do I say this is how you should invest your money this is how you should spend

your money because you're different for me and everyone else we're all different i've always just been interested in how people think like what's going through your head when you're making investing decisions and if you can understand greed fear risk envy jealousy those topics that is way more important than anything they will teach you in a PhD finance course at Harvard not that the the technical stuff doesn't matter but the psychological stuff with money is everything i mean so much so many money problems in the real world have to do with impatience envy greed that that's

it it's not that people don't know the formulas don't know the data don't know you know how to calculate compound interest by hand none of that matters it's envy it's in it's impatience and so that as a writer that's was I was always interested in like I'm tired of people giving advice and saying these are the stocks you should buy and here's what the econom is going to do next quarter i was like no one was any good at it but I was always just fascinated in what's going on in people's heads and you asked

why is that important right now well I think it's always important like those topics of you know the subtitle is timeless lessons because I think a lot of these things were as true a thousand years ago as they will be a thousand years from now like greed and envy and impatience is just ingrained in how people think it always has been and so you see what's going on right now with tariffs in the economy stock market's gone up a lot bitcoin's gone up a lot so these points have always been true but a lot of

them are magnified right now a lot of people have made a lot of money on Bitcoin a lot of people are losing a lot of money on tariffs so greed fear envy it all kind of just collides it is right now how important is this tariff situation that we find ourselves in because we're seeing all over the news everywhere tariffs trump's done this 10% here blanket tariff here does it matter and maybe more specifically does it matter to the average person it has the potential to be the biggest economic story of our lives it doesn't

have to be one thing that's very interesting about the tariff story is that if you compare it to 9/11 or COVID or 2008 the banking crisis the tariff issue that we're going through right now can be ended in one minute there's a button on the president's desk that says "End it right now." And even you know if that did happen there would still be some lingering damage in terms of trust and reputation but there was no button on the president's desk for co that said end this all right now it didn't exist and 911 and

Lehman Brothers in 2008 once those risks hit we just had to deal with them through their finish this is different because it it can and is changing by the day so when people have a take on what's going on right now that might that take might be stale an hour from now but it's absolutely true that the global economy to an extent that I think people don't appreciate enough is a very complicated intricate machine and most economic problems come when people like try to fiddle with that machine a little bit they're like ah let's turn

this dial by one degree and see what happens and then like oh it blows up oh I shouldn't have done that tariffs is like let's hit it with a baseball bat a couple times let's hit it with like a crowbar and see and see what happens like the global economy is so interconnected and if you go to your local grocery store Target or Walmart whatever it might be and and go around and look at where that stuff was made it's I mean and it's all over the world it's like very like it's it's everywhere and

once you shut that down and put barriers on that it can become a a big problem very quickly one thing I've noticed in the last couple weeks that I think is very interesting are the number of educated and smart friends that I have who send me a text or a call or an email and say "Hey can you explain what a tariff is i see this word but I don't really know what it is." And I think that's important because I don't think the average person understands what can happen to the economy if this persists

for a long period of time i'm so glad you said that because I've been waiting for weeks now to ask somebody like yourself who studied economics to explain in a simple way what a tariff is and feel free to use an analogy i I think about 50% of people have no idea what a tariff is yeah and then on a sort of an incremental scale um people's clarity gets better and better to I would estimate about 5% of the general population could articulate what a tariff is 5% or less so can you tell me what

a tariff is the first I would say is tariffs have been used for hundreds of years and there is there can be a very good useful purpose for them in the economy i think as they're structured right now in the United States it's a huge mistake it has a potential to be a catastrophe but they can be a useful thing in the economy this is not a black and white thing what a tariff is is let's keep this very simple the United States buys a bunch of computers that are made in China bunch of iPhones

that are made in China they're on a container ship they ship them to United States when they get to the port in the United States the importer which is Apple bringing the iPhones in that are made in China an American company has to pay the tariff oh that's put on it and a lot of people and it's it's very understandable why they would think this would say well no in that situation China pays the tariff and there could be a situation where China starts discounting the iPhones the the the company that's making the iPhones would

discount it like there can be some offset but the person who's paying that tax is the importer so often we think about we've applied the tariff to China right so what's happening is China having to spend the 10% or I think the tariff currently is like 125 145 the number doesn't matter because trade will eventually will just stop at those levels it just won't happen so if Apple import an iPhone now with that tariff level then Apple would have to pay the 145% when it arrives at the shore correct the United States i mean here's

here's an example that most people will understand sales tax you know in in most states in the United States it's uh six to 10% if you go to the store and buy something you add the sales tax to that vat in the UK ex yeah fair who pays that is not the store it's the customer so even if the tax is put on the seller the seller passes it on to you the customer and it says right on your receipt you bought something for $10 and then there is a there's your sales tax and here's

what you're going to pay in the end and so it's similar from that now that let me explain this why there would be a very useful case for tariffs to show that this is not black and white and this is not oh all tariffs are bad this this happened in the United States during co we were virtually 100% reliant on mass N95 masks uh that were made in China and Korea and not in the United States and so when you have a medical crisis in the early days of co and we're like we need hundreds

of millions of masks yesterday they're all made somewhere else we do not want to be in that situation So it would absolutely make sense to have a tariff on masks to make sure that they are so expensive to import overseas that we have to start making them in the United States that makes sense same with military equipment you do not want to go to war with a country and be reliant on that country to make the your military gear your bullets and your bombs and your tanks and whatnot absolutely makes sense to have a tariff

on that to make sure they're made in the United States that said so this is it's not black and white but to have a blanket tariff and say everything that comes from any country anywhere in the world and China's going to be this to an extreme degree is going to have a tariff on it and whether that's between 10% for all countries or 145% from China that you know I I've used this analogy before that if you talk to dieticians there is a huge amount of debate over what's the best diet should you eat should

you be uh keto should you be vegan like everything in between they don't there's so much debate all of them agree that processed sugar is bad nobody nobody thinks processed sugar is good and tariffs are that with economists like there is so much debate among economists on what should the tax rate be what should subsidies be should we you know like you know like free market versus subsidies there's so much debate no serious economist thinks that you should have a trade war and the thing is this is not new we've been doing this for hundreds

of years and it's very well known that in the 1930s the Great Depression we took put huge tariffs on in the early days of the Great Depression uh they didn't know it was called the Great Depression back then because we put them on and it shut down global trade and it's easy to think that if you put tariffs on your own country that will make it easier to manufacture like all those jobs that we shipped overseas of building cars they're all going to come rushing back to America and it it very rarely happens like that

when you have a trade war but what I mean by trade war is we put tariffs on China they respond to put tariffs on us and you just go tit fortat and it's and you go back and forth and it's like mutually assured mutually assured destruction in economic terms so why is Trump doing it then in your view because he's given lots of reasons he said that they're ripping us off he says lots of countries have been ripping off the United States how do you unpack what he's saying there and what do you believe the

true reason is underneath there to his credit Trump has been very consistent on this for literally 40 years you can go go on YouTube he gave an interview in I think it was 1986 he went on Oprah in 1986 talking about how free trade wasn't free and that Japan and other countries were ripping us off and that the solution to it were tariffs so he this is not a new view this has been a lifelong quest that he's had i would say not necessarily Trump's views but I would say it absolutely makes sense that there

is a large chunk of America that looks back to the period of 1950s 1960s when we were a manufacturing powerhouse and says that was better than what we have now and we should go back to that i get why people would say that because it's true that we've lost a lot of manufacturing jobs in the last 50 years i think manufacturing jobs peaked in the late 1970s and we've lost something like 10 million manufacturing jobs that we had you know versus what we had back then and I get why if I was in that situation

I would probably feel the same where I would push back is the situation that we had in the 1950s and 1960s where it was just America manufacturing powerhouse were a very unique period that I think is virtually impossible to bring back and I'll tell you why at the end of World War II 1945 Europe and Japan were in rubble they were decimated from the war America was not decimated whatsoever and so we had basically a a global manufacturing monopoly for a period of time china was not in the equation south Korea was not in the

equation india Bangladesh those they were not in the in the equation it was basically Japan the United States and Europe two of which were just struggling to feed their citizens and once they got that under control it was like we have to rebuild the damage from the war so America had about 20 years from 1945 to the mid 1960s of we have a manufacturing monopoly and then we had 16 million US soldiers come home from the war and there was so much pent-up demand for them to buy homes and washing machines and cars and radios

and all these things and all of them were built in America because nobody else could build them and that created a really special time when like because we had a manufacturing monopoly it was just like factories everywhere we built up so many factories during the war there was endless demand for those products and this is this is an important part too whitecollar workers during that period didn't make that much money relative to what they did before or since and that was important because the wages that the bluecollar manufacturing workers were earning felt great by comparison

so if you were an auto worker in Detroit and you compared your wage in 1955 to the local accountant or dentist or doctor by comparison relative to today you're like "Oh that's it's pretty good." Yeah the doctor makes more than me but not that much more than me you know I drive a Chevy he drives a Cadillac his is a little bit nicer but we're living mostly the same lives and so I think that was a lot of the feeling of prosperity in the 50s and 60s was this very unique period of manufacturing monopoly as

Europe and Japan were rebuilding and by comparison to other workers it felt amazing and then at about the 1970s Japan and Europe had gotten themselves back together from the ravages of World War II and they became manufacturing dynamos in their own right and I don't think we really understood this in America until three companies came in which were Toyota Honda and Nissan and they started selling cars in America and at first it was very easy to be like look at these little like lawnmower toys that they're importing cuz you you compared like an early Honda

Civic to like a Chevy Camaro in the 70s and it was like you can't even compare them so at first the reaction of American car companies were like "These guys are a joke no one's going to buy these little cars." But then gas prices surged in the 70s and 80s and all of a sudden the cars that Americans wanted was the tiny little Honda Civic that got really good gas mileage and then once they started buying them they're like "Hey this Toyota this Honda this Nissan it's actually a pretty good car it's actually pretty well

built." And I think there was a lot of denial among that among a man American manufacturers that other these other nations that we that didn't exist for 20 years in terms of a global manufacturing source we're actually pretty damn good at it now and then one other thing happened to to wrap to wrap this up and this might be the most important part of it the reason that you cannot reasonably expect the manufacturing powerhouse to come back as it was is yes we did ship jobs to China and Mexico and Canada and India that used

to be in America and that has contributed to the massive decline in manufacturing employment but a bigger factor in there is automation and if you look at a mon like I I I would challenge people to do this go on YouTube and look at a Tesla assembly line in the United States i'll put it on the screen it is what you will see it's amazing it is a miracle of engineering what you will see are armies and armies of robots and very few people and if you compare that to the 1950s assembly line what you

see are biceps and backs and people hauling around material so because we got so good at automation even if we bring manufacturing back to America and that we still do a lot of manufacturing in America it doesn't require the amount of employment that it used to doesn't require the amount of manpower and the people who do work on Tesla manufacturing lines by and large are working on computers overseeing the robots i mean here's one stat that I thought was always interesting to me in 1950 there was a US steel plant in Gary Indiana it produced

5 million tons of steel and had 30,000 workers today it's still operating it produces 8 million tons of steel and has 2,000 workers so it's producing more steel today than it was in the 1950s and they went from 30,000 workers to 2,000 because what used to be done with biceps and backs and shoulders is now done with machines and robots and it's no different than what happened in agriculture where a farm 200 years ago was rakes and shovels and today it's tractors and combines like that same thing happened to assembly so to wrap all that

up like I understand and I empathize with people who say we need to bring back manufacturing to America we lost what we once had i get that and I respect it but I think the unique circumstances and automation makes it just extremely unlikely to ever happen how did China get in there and why are they the factory of the world what are the core components that went into them being able to produce all of the things that we use on a daily basis at a fraction of the price that they're able to produce them here

tim Cook of Apple gave a really interesting interview a couple weeks ago and he said "You might think that we manufacture iPhones in China because it's it's cheap labor." And he said "That's not really true anymore it used to be but China is not the cheap cheap labor country anymore that's moved on to Bangladesh and Cambodia and other places the reason they manufacture in China is expertise and I think it's okay to admit and people should admit that your country and also your company and you individually can be very good at some things and not

very good at others china is just extremely good and extremely talented at particularly like low-end manufacturing low-end can be anything from you know inflatable swimming pools to on up to like basic basic electronics they're they're extremely good at it i was talking to a CEO a couple weeks ago and he said uh and he's generalizing here but he said if you go to a a Chinese factory and you say "I want this part made and here's step one step two step three on how to make it they will do it better than anybody in the

world." Nobody can beat them at that but if you go to that same factory and you say "Please go design me a new part." They're not very good at it americans are way better at that and that's why the back of your iPhone says "Designed in California made in China." Like it's just specialization of labor and I think America is the best in the world at a couple things entrepreneurship technology services and like high-end manufacturing like planes and rockets and we're not the best in the world at low-end manufacturing and that's okay that's not an

insult that's not a put down there's specialization of labor and and so I I think I think China just got very good at one thing during a time when we've always been very very good at at at different things and I think that is why global like why for a lot of people not for everybody so if you disagree with this I I get it by why the economic system works so damn well over the last 30 years is because we really got good at specialization of labor you design the iPhone you make the iPhone

we're both better off for it i want to play that clip you're talking about with Tim Cook because I remember seeing it as well and it did it was a bit of an aha moment for me for anybody that doesn't know Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple and he's been at the helm of Apple for more than a decade and as you know most of Apple's products from what I understand are made in China there's a confusion about China that uh and let me at least give you my opinion the the popular conception is

that companies come to China because of low labor cost i'm not sure uh what part of China they go to but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago and th that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view the reason is because of the skill and the the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is like um the products we do require really advanced tooling and the the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with

the materials that we do are state-of-the-art and the tooling skill is very deep here you know in in the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room in China you could fill multi i think when I watch that I think I can understand why there'd be a natural reaction for people to be like "No if they can do it we can do it too." And again I I don't think it's an insult when to say like countries are like we're really good at some things and

less good at others how could that not be true are they on a different living wage from what I understand oh yes absolutely i mean so much of it is you know in you know if if you asked Americans to work those for those wages they they absolutely refuse to do it just because of the expectations we have and that's a good thing we should be proud of that that we have a standard of living which does not uh does not allow or or people would not put up with earning $5 a day or whatever

it would be which means that the products can be made cheaper yes significantly cheaper right right and you know this is where I I understand why people might raise an eyebrow at this but so much of why of what the modern system how it's supposed to work is when you have that specialization products become cheaper and then the iPhone costs $1,000 when in any other world it would cost 4,000 if we're building it in the United States at you know paying wages that people would put up with in the United States so what's the impact

on the average person listening to this now and if this trade war continues if these tariffs continue what is the impact they're going to see in their life it's so unpredictable because as I said earlier it can literally change an hour from now so anyone giving firm predictions of oh here's what's going to happen next that that's not how any of this works but you can you can say though that if the tariffs last one of two things will happen or both of these two things will happen things that we import will get much more

expensive or what's more more likely in places like China if it's 145% is we'll just the the trade just stops and then you're probably a matter of weeks away from empty shelves at at certain for for certain products in certain cases i mean if you're buying you know a pair of slippers from China for $1 and now all of a sudden they're $245 if you're if you're an importer for a lot of those situations they'll say like we're just it's just not going to work or if the iPhone that used to cost $1,000 is now

going to cost $2,500 apple might just say there's not really a market for that we can't really sell those let's just pause and wait for things to happen we were already seeing that um I'm sure this news will change by the time this airs this is moving so quickly but our shipping container imports from China have plunged in recent weeks which is exactly what you would expect when you put that high of a tax on it i mean if you were buying a house for a million dollars and all of a sudden they put on

145% tax on that you're probably not going to buy the house and that's what's happening now you'd be dumb not to wait right i was sat here yesterday with the CEO and she said to me that she gets the majority of her products pretty much all of them from China and when she's looking at the tariff situation she's figured out that if she buys those products and sells them at her current price she's losing money on every unit so she's like I'll lose $9 on importing a for example like a dress it's like I so

I have no incentive now to continue to sell that dress and if my only choice is to raise the price by like 150% to my customer right the two likely outcomes if it persists are much higher prices and empty shelves and then I don't think anyone knows when or to the extent that could happen and the button on the desk that says end this all could be pressed before that happens but if it persists that's what's likely to occur what about the impact it has on trust in the United States because yeah it's huge i

mean can you explain that to me trust is hard because you don't know how valuable it is until you lose it but once you lose it you're like "Oh that was everything." And you know foreign investors people who don't live in the United States have $30 trillion invested in America that's just in stocks and bonds that's not housing or office buildings just in stocks and bonds $30 trillion that they've invested and a lot of the reason they do that well there there's many reasons one of which is because it's by and large seen as a

trustworthy economy a stable economy an economy of rules and predictable laws and trusts that you could not say the same about Russia and so when when global investors are looking where to park their money it is this has been the case for the last 80 years America is usually at the top of that list there's also a thing where a lot of the reason that they invest money in the United States is because they have to because they have a trade deficit with us so if China is selling us a lot more stuff than they're

buying from us like we're importing a lot more from China than we're exporting back to them they're going to end up with a lot of US dollars and what they need to do something with those dollars they have they have to invest them somewhere and historically that's been in Treasury bonds which lowered our interest rates and that was good for everybody and what's a treasury bond it's debt that the government issues from the federal government so it's a bond you're you're loaning money to the government and they're promising to repay you plus interest okay so

less people are going to do that if they have less trust in the United States less trust and also less need to do it because they don't have as many dollars that they need to invest are we heading for a recession because I I saw some stats earlier on that said the probability of a recession has surged by 45% which is the highest since December 2023 because of the tariffs that was from Reuters it's interesting when people point like the odds of recession at 45% because they can't be wrong like if if there isn't a

recession they'd be like "Yeah we said it was 45% we didn't say it was going to happen." So I my answer if you said are we heading for a recession would always be yes if you asked me a year ago if you asked me five years ago like historically there's a recession in modern times it's been every every four to five years that that it's occurred and so we shouldn't pretend that when they happen that they're this crazy out of the blue thing it's an inevitable feature that you're always going to have recessions but is

this going to cause it what is a recession a recession technically is when GDP in the economy GDP is just like economic output how much the economy is is moving when that declines for two quarters in a row that's the technical definition for most people you don't need to worry about technical definitions because a recession in your mind is when you are feeling worse off economically for a long period of time when you feel like you can't get a job or your neighbors your roommates can't get jobs and and it's and it's it's starting to

hurt on you it's you know it's kind of like what's the definition of being sick well it's when you don't feel good but there's you can get more technical than that but a recession for most people is when you don't feel good economically you're not concerned about a recession i It's not that I'm not concerned but it would be like saying if you live in Florida are you concerned about uh hurricanes the answer is yes you should be concerned about hurricane but you also know with a 100% certainty that they're going to come if you

choose to live in Florida and you live in Florida for 40 years you know you're going to get hit by one 100% chance and so it's not that I don't worry about it it's that I think it is inevitable always no matter what's going on this has nothing to do with terrorists with tariffs that's always been the case and so this is where at the individual level personally like room for error and your finances is so critical what I mean by that is just like savings cushion being scared of debt it's when everyone is when

you're wealth when you're gainfully employed and you have a good paycheck and the stock market's going up and Bitcoin's going up everyone feels great you feel amazing and nobody It's very rare in that situation that you want to envision yourself losing your job or losing a job and not being able to find another one for six months or needing to move or getting divorced or having a medical ill like no one wants to envision that but the truth is like what are the odds that one of at least one of these will happen to you

and I over the next 30 years major job loss or just a major impact in in our businesses divorce cancer wayward children i can go on down the What are the odds that at least one of those will occur to you and I in 30 years 100% and for a lot of people they will experience all of those and so the idea that life is fragile the economy is fragile countries are fragile is like people don't necessarily want to admit that because it's hard to get out of bed in the morning if you admitted that

to yourself but I think it's inevitable and it doesn't have to be necessarily scary if you have the right like psychology around it of just yeah like when times are good I don't expect them to last forever that's not how the world works and the right finances around it of like yeah when times are good I'm gonna save because I know this might not last forever and what I value more than anything with money is independence it's not flashy cars or homes i want to be independent so that when the economy goes south and there

is a recession and things are going bad I want to have a level of control over where I work where I live what I'm able to do my ability to support my family that's more than that's that's the top of the list and so when things are going well and for a lot of people they haven't for the last couple years but for a lot of people they did i think that's always important is like I think I think it's a major psychological skill in life in general this goes beyond money is recognizing when things

are abnormally good and preparing yourself for them to go the other way as they as they inevitably will independence you value it sounded like freedom to me yeah can you tell me how to achieve freedom financially and what I should be thinking about in the context of a world that's changing at such incredible speed when we're talking about tariffs and recessions and now AI i've been thinking over the last couple of weeks like what should my f personal financial strategy be how should I be thinking about it is it a strategy is it a psychology

is it a mindset what is it that I should be thinking about to survive this area of tremendous change and Trump economics and get through the other end with that freedom and independence that you and I both desperately value this sounds like such a a squishy BS kind of answer but I think there's a lot of there's a lot of truth to this and I'll explain in a second it is largely a mindset and that that sounds crazy but I'll explain what I mean my grandmother-in-law she passed away a couple years ago she was 92

when when she passed away she for 30 years she lived off of nothing but social security i think she got $1,700 a month from social security and she had nothing else no savings no pension no nothing she was the happiest person you I've met half a half a dozen billionaires in my life i'm sure you have as well none of them were as happy as she was and she was technically she was like financially broke but she had this level of psychological wealth that was like unparalleled and the reason was off $1,700 a month that

was all she needed she was perfectly happy toiling in her garden watching birds going for walks hanging out reading from books from the library perfectly content with all of that she didn't need anything else so she had very little money but she wanted even less and that so like she had a level of independence that a lot of billionaires do not because if you are a billionaire if you have a billion dollars in the bank but you are so encumbered by your business your employees your suppliers your customers you're waking up at 3 in the

morning sweating because you got this email and you're stressed out about it you actually have very little independence in that situation your shareholders or regulators are coming down on you i mean we see this I'm not there's no one in particular here but we've seen very wealthy people kind of become syncopants to politicians and and the truth is a lot of those ex like mega billionaires absolutely rely on politicians and regulators to keep their machine moving and so my grandmother-in-law on $1,700 a month had a higher level of independence than a lot of those people

do and I that's why I say like a lot of this is a mindset because the truth is the vast majority of people listening to this could have a level of independence it's not it's not that you can retire tomorrow but you can have a level of financial independence once you realize that the key is managing your expectations more than it is how can I just pile up as much money as I as I possibly can it's easy to think like how do you become financially independent like save a ton of money and there like

there there there's truth to that of like like of course that's part of it but more of it is just in like what kind of life do you want to live because if your expectations are growing faster than your net worth it's never going to feel like you you'll never be independent never you have a hundred billion dollars but if you want more and more and more like it's it's never going to feel like it's enough or if if you enjoy bird watching and reading books like my grandmother-in-law 1,700 bucks a month you're all set

you're set for 30 years you're rich you're rich and free she was psychologically rich even if she was financially poor and I think that's that's the biggest thing about it adam Smith who was the greatest economist to ever live this was 300 years ago he once wrote about this he was like why do people work so hard and he he was just like it's a simple question but why why do people work so damn hard and he's like it can't just be for for our sustenance because even poor people as he was writing about it

had uh homes and adequate food most of the time he's like "There has to be something else." And what that something else was he wrote "Was to be seen by other people." And it was it was like it was attention and admiration they wanted to be getting rich so that they could have a bigger house and a and a nice car not in his day but they they wanted to be they wanted attention from other people but he was like "It's not that you needed the money." Because even in his day 300 years ago in

in Scotland I think he was he was like "Look people have homes and food like what what what are they doing this for?" And he was not criticizing then like his whole point was like they're going out and innovating or going to have great technology and like it's great to go do that but the reason to do it was not because they had to stop now of course most people to get shelter and food do have to keep working but they're working more than they absolutely need to because they want something else besides independence is

there an evolutionary basis for this i was I was thinking the other day after watching an interview with Naval where Naval talks about how evolutionary perspective humans don't really understand the concept of wealth because once upon a time when we were cave men and women wealth was what you could carry but we do understand the concept of status which really meant a lot to us in our sort of tribes and was life or death for many of us so even though billionaires get all the money in the world the next thing they want to do

is start a podcast yeah do you know what I mean right right because it's just not enough like everyone I know what a lot of them do too is when they have all the money in the world what they want is immortality and you see these guys trying to live forever kind of thing so that happens as well that's interesting but that's linked to status because status was longevity yes like if you had status you had food you had the reproductive potential once upon a time so it's the same evolutionary sort of desire to like

live survival yeah harvey uh Firestone who was a a tire magnet a 100 years ago firestone tires during the explosion in cars 100 years ago he wrote about this in his biography he was like every rich person he knows once they get money buys a house that is way too big than they need not not only bigger than they need bigger than they want because a giant house is just a huge pain in the ass the roof is leaking and like everything's breaking down it's a huge pain to manage so he wrote his biography he

was like why do we do this and he was like I he was he he did it too he's like "I bought a house that is way bigger than I want and it's a pain it's a burden but we all do it." And he's like "Why?" And he's like "It has to be status there's no utility to a 40-bedroom house zero there's a lot of downside in upkeep." But he's like "Every one of us does it." And he said "Even Henry Ford who was like the cheapest sob out there lived in a giant mansion in

Detroit." He was like "It's so natural." And he was like "It's just because we we we want to show other people it's not utility it's not making our lives better it's actually making our life worse but we we have this evolutionary desire to show people that we've made it that's that's the calling card but if it's hardwired then is there much we can do about it i think it's true that virtually everyone who I really admire in life they're by and large they're not hugely successful people that you've heard of they're just people who I've

met and they're ordinary people with ordinary jobs and I'm like man you seem like you've got it all figured out they took themselves out of the system that they were supposed to be in and they're like I'm just gonna go figure out my own way and there's a a really interesting story a guy named Chuck Feny he started a company called uh DFS the uh duty-free stores in airports he made I think at the peak of his wealth he was worth about $9 billion and this was like in the '9s when that was a that

was a lot of money still is a lot of money but he uh the the well-known part of Chuck Feny is that despite that wealth he lived like an ordinary person and he lived in a like a one-bedroom apartment he flew coach he drove like a a like a a normal car lived like a normal guy and some people criticize that from that he he gave all of his money to charity he gave nine billion away lived like a monk himself the less known part of Chuck Feny that I think is is very is is

more important is that when he first got wealth became wealthy in the 1980s he lived the life of a billionaire he had a fleet of private jets he had mansions all over the world he had a yacht and after doing it for a couple years he's like "I don't like any of this." He's like "I I I like being an ordinary simple person and so I'm going to go live an ordinary life i don't care what the world the world tells me this is what I should want now that I have money." But he's like

"But I don't i want simplicity." And what I like about that is not that he chose to live like a monk because I I personally wouldn't want to do that if I had that I I I would have a jet if I had that kind of money so it's not to say that he did it right but what I like that he did is that he said "I don't care what the world tells me to like i'm I'm I'm going to do it on my own terms." And that like that's true independence that's true status

that is that's true status too he's like "I don't care." That's the ultimate definition of FU money of like so much money that like I don't care like you you tell me I'm supposed to live in a mansion in Beverly Hills but I like my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco i like my buddies over here another person who's done that to a very real extent is Warren Buffett lives in the same house today that he bought when he was 27 or whatever it was and he's got 100 billion or something right and of course he

could live anywhere he could buy anything but he likes being with his friends doing it on you know likes playing uh bridge with his buddies in the first case though that gentleman had to have his dream fail him first before he realized and so this raises another question which is am I does the viewer at home have to make the hund00 million and then taste it buy the mansion to realize that it was never about the mansion i think the answer to that is yes oh gosh that it's very difficult you know there's there's a

thing where I I forget who said this but like they're responding to the quote money doesn't buy happiness and they're like okay but let me go figure that out for myself first like if you don't have a lot of money and you see rich people tripping over themselves and people like Will Smith saying like I was no happier at all when I was rich than when I was poor actually I was happier when I was poor if if you are poor when you hear that you're like "Bullshit i don't believe it i have to go

figure it out for myself." I think a lot of lessons in life you have to learn firsthand especially when the all the problems staring you in your face are somewhat associated to money like the pain in your belly the bills on your desk the threats from the court i'm thinking of myself here that I was getting the the letters coming through with the red text on them telling me that my credit cards were expo um going to be shut down the inability to feed yourself to socialize with your friends the heating in your house the

your child's pencil case costs all of it seems to circle back to money and so when you hear people who are wealthy being subjectively honest about their own experience and then what's made them happy it is hard to hear yeah like I I was just imagining if I was hearing this you know these stories when I was in that situation I would still [ __ ] go for it anyway right now let's say there's a there's a big difference between not being able to buy food for your kids and making 200 grand per year and

and you know the the the the difference between 10 grand a year and 200 grand a year is massive takes away so many stresses so many you know worries about being evicted and whatnot but the difference between 200 grand and 500 grand is not that much and the difference between 500 grand and 20 million is not that much and the difference between 20 million and 20 billion is zero i think that's that's a lot of what it comes down to and even I think there is such thing as like a peak net worth that you

would want in life after which all the money that you acrew becomes like a social liability i mean who has more social liability or like pressure than the mega rich you know Elon Musk Bill Gates Jeff Bezos there's a huge amount of pressure like you better donate this money and you better do a good job doing it kind of thing and so and I think that number of like and at a much lower like realistic level for people it's when your friends learn you make a lot of money and we go out for dinner and

they're like you're you're paying right and that's that's a small thing but it can really great on people that like oh it's going to change how people think about me now that that's a good problem to have of course but it's a thing and I think the idea of there is a maximum amount of like there is a net worth level at which your happiness is going to be maximized and it's probably lower than you think do you think it's important for people to have an idea what their number is i don't think anyone really

does because I've done this in my own life i'm sure you have too when I was 19 I was like "Oh if my net worth was this amount I I'll be happy forever." And then I was fortunate enough to get hit that amount and I'm like "Okay but what if what if we got over here?" And you just keep going up the ladder forever is there such thing as FU money like is there a number where you think you've hit FU money i saw some thread on Twitter and it was like "Comment below what you

think FU money is." And it was interesting to see the variation i have a friend Ben Carlson he's a great financial writer he came up this is very subjective there's no science behind this but he was like a net worth of 7 to10 million is you can live an amazing life in the United States have an amazing house paid for send your kids to great schools go on great vacations drive brand new cars on 7 to10 million um and and and he brought that up some people might might wse at this but he brought that

up of it's a lot less than people would think because there'd be a lot of people who would be like "Oh I'm gunned for hundred million." Even if that's just a fantasy it's a dream and $79 million is out of reach for for a lot of people no matter how hard they're working but I think particularly for young people who their definition of I think about my son a lot this he watches Mr beast mr beast is an amazing guy he's I think he's one of the great guys but because of Mr it's like my

son's definition of wealth is a private island a private jet you know keep your hand on the table and win a million dollars kind of thing it's a it's a different level whereas when I was growing up like ordinary people drove dirty pickup trucks and rich people drove clean pickup trucks that was like that was the stratification of what I saw growing up and I think because of social media and other things kids have a very different view on what of like financial wealth actually is these days going back to this issue of tariffs recession

and everything that's going on at the moment are there any things practically for those that don't understand the economy and economics generally that we should be thinking about to make sure that we don't get burnt this is less advice going forward more than just like something to remember next time which is that if you are worrying about if you're worried about being laid off if you're a small business owner worried about going under the need for room for error and cushion and savings and backup plans are were were just as important a month ago as

they are today you're just learning how important they are today and I challenge you to remember that in the future when this is all over whenever it's all over that when the economy is going well and you feel stable in your job stable in your career that is when you also you absolutely need backup plans and room for error and savings and assuing debt and whatnot i have a very high level of cash as a percentage of my net worth and a lot of financial adviserss would look at that and say like "What are you

saving for like what's what's going on here?" And I'm like "I I don't know i'm saving for a world that I know is very fragile and I have no idea what's going to happen to me personally or what's going to happen to the economy but if you're a lay student of history you know that things break all the time and and so my advice to you if you're realizing that for the first time that how fragile the world can be and how the job security that you thought you had might might not have been as

strong remember this next time how important room for error and backup plans are and relative to your personal costs your personal monthly costs or overheads as they call them how much money do you think it's sensible to have saved it's so it's so hard for that because everyone's in a I'm sure people watching this will be in a massive range of of incomes i I would say this is a a bad answer that no one's going to like but as pretty much as much as you can i mean I'll give you one example of this

when COVID first hit in March of 2020 the average restaurant I heard had enough cash on hand to last them for 14 days and then all of a sudden they were looking at a six-month lockdown and so I think one answer to that question is however much you think you you'll need it's probably more the other more practical example of this is in 2008 during the financial crisis a lot of people were losing their jobs not for two weeks or one month but they losing their jobs for 12 months and they got unemployment benefits but

it wasn't enough and so is it practical for to say like you should have 12 months of saving it's probably not practical for a lot of people but the answer is as much as you can while realizing that the world is more fragile than you probably think it is the other protagonist of change at the moment is artificial intelligence and I've spent a lot of lonely quiet hours in my room thinking about the impact it's going to have and trying to develop my own thesis and what it means as a creator as a podcaster as

a investor and I wanted to understand how significant you think artificial intelligence is and if it at all impacts your thesis around money and wealth and investing and saving i'm not even remotely an expert in AI but as someone who has looked at like the history of technology one thing that sticks out clear as day when you study technology when in hindsight when you're looking at a new technology that you know went on to change the world the computer the car the airplane those things when you know like this was a turning point in civilization

if you go back and look at what the optimists were saying at the time they massively underestimated it and that's what the optimists were saying forget the pessimists on it so go back to the 1920s and say what were the optimists saying about the airplane they were underestimating it by 100fold what did the optimist say about the car they underestimated by 100fold computers the same and the Wright brothers themselves the first airplane the United States the Wright brothers themselves only marketed their plane primarily marketed their plane to the US Army because they did not really

foresee much use for an airplane outside of the military they knew you could strap a machine gun on it and the then the army might like that but the did the Wright brothers foresee Delta Airlines like an Emirates an A380 like not in a million years and so I think it's true that in a lot of things life I think I think it was Peter Teal who said this he was like "When things are going wrong you underestimate how how bad they're going to get but when things are going right you underestimate how big it's

going to be." I I may have butchered that quote but it's something like that and it's clear that AI is right and so it's almost certainly the case that even the optimists even the Sam Alman optimists are underestimating where it will go and a lot of the reason for that is because new technologies is not what the inventor whoever that might be built it's what other people go on to manipulate it as and that's why the Wright brothers come up and play and now we have the A380 like it's other people manipulating things along the

way to create something just gigantic one perfect example of that with AI is open AI have created this large language model which can do all these wonderful things but then people are using that same technology to create AI agents which are equally astonishing i spent the last couple of weeks using AI agents to build some software i'm someone that has no ability to code at all yeah but I can sit in my bedroom and speak to this agent and tell it to build me a new to-do list or a new website for the podcast that

tracks who's been on the show and follows them in the new like I can tell it to do anything and for what's probably costing me a dollar a day it's building me software now and we're just at the start of that exponential curve so if we now think that these large language models are going to be able to create things create digital things things on the internet this podcast is on the internet we know that it can create podcasts we know it can create videos images software i look at that and go you play this

forward and if I apply your optimism um analogy your optimism um lens to it where I go we're underestimating this curve it's hard really hard to see how this isn't tremendously disruptive in the long term not even the long term but in the short term I'll give you one example you you you talked about coding there we're doing a little remodel on our house right now and one of the things you can do is take a real picture of of a room upload it in we we use Chad GBT for this and said "Hey paint

it this color remove this wall put this in." It is better than any designer will be able to do it and it's right there boom in front of you seconds and you can multiply that story by 10,000 different versions of that stories for 10,000 different jobs um I I see it as as a writer where I've I I don't use it to write i write all my own words but when one thing that I've played around with I don't really use this as that much of a of a tool but just more of an experiment

of like I'll upload a chapter from a book that I wrote and say "Hey give me some feedback on this." And it wasn't that good a year ago it's pretty good today it's pretty good so if you're looking for like like a writing assistant it's amazing now the downside of that is everyone knows like the high schoolers and the college students who use it to write the essay just write the whole thing yeah that's that that's that's that's probably not great but if you're using it as a helper it's probably the best writing teacher that's

out there so right there in my just like tiny little world if I I I really don't know anything about AI but interior designer editor and go on down the list of jobs that like literally three months ago I would have been like "Oh that's a very valuable job." And all of a sudden you look at this tool for a dollar a day as you said you're like it's pretty good what does history tell us about how this shakes out like when these industrial revolutions come along or the technological revolutions where does the value acrue

and how do I participate in that value i guess one good analogy for my here and it's probably not as powerful as what we're dealing with right now but the the closest is probably you know it wasn't that long ago the late 1800s that 80% of Americans were farmers that that that that's that's what it was and then the industrial revolution and the tractor and the combine came along and all of a sudden al it was like we we don't need that many farmers doing this what people used to do with shovels and rakes can

now be done with a tractor and a lot of those people found themselves out of work and for them it was it was very disruptive but they also the farmer the farm laborer found himself pretty easy to go into the factory because they were working on they they were good at working with their hands and whatnot and so to go from that into the factory was not an easy transition but it was a transition they can make now do you have that that same transition did not take place from manufacturing to technology the auto worker

in Detroit could not just learn to code and work at Google like that and so it was it was much less seamless and I think what we're dealing with now will be even more of a disruption that the people who are being disrupted out of AI are going to have like a much more difficult time historically to move in to where the economy is going next so the idea that an industry is disrupted and you need to go figure out something else to do I think has gotten progressively harder over the last 150 years and

when we moved from machines to technology it was a significant leap also for the user and for the customer and for the as well as for the employee so that transition took time but I was reading something the other day that said now that we're native internet users we all are billions and billions and billions of people use the internet this is like a new application on the internet which explains why it's growing so fast that we haven't had to learn so there hasn't been this big jump in fundamental skills like there was from like

going from a I don't know from piece of machine to an iPhone so this acceleration will be quicker so therefore one would assume that the transition will be more severe and I think about even things like driving i think Tesla are releasing in Austin this month or next month the first autonomous vehicle the cyber taxi yeah the robo taxi whatever it's called and it has no steering wheel and the profession of driving from what I understand is the biggest profession the biggest profession truck drivers drivers in general yeah on my way here today I did

not touch the steering wheel i did not touch the pedals because I'm in a cyber truck and there's a button on it which auto uh drives you to wherever you want to go and typically I'd probably have got an Uber but now I can sit there do my work and it drives for me it's And that's also AI no it's it's it's crazy and back to the analogy like when when the farmer had to go work in the factory it was it was a transition he may have had to move but he but he did

it and that's why he went from 80% of the population were farmers to 2% which is what it is today and but they they were able to to move in the manufacturer to technology struggled and I think it's going to be now like the the truck driver to tell the truck driver well just go get a job at Open AAI kind of thing like it's funny to even think about because it's it's preposterous but the thing with Open AI from what I understand is they have less than 100 employees right and the reason they have

less than 100 employees is because they're using AI to build to do the work to do and they'll increasingly do that especially when they hit AGI right they're probably going to four employees yeah and this is why I think they have 100 employees i think they've purposefully kept it low because they think AGI is around the corner which is this very very advanced form of AI which is going to be able to like I think they call it selfreinforce where it teaches itself synthetic data right so h kind of going from there now I think

if there's an optimistic side it's always been it it was the case that when farming was being disrupted there were a lot of people who just said these people are never going to find jobs like if you if you put the farmer out of business there was it sounds comical today but there was a big push when the car came about to be like no like what are all the the horses going to do like like like have some like have some dignity for the horse and the people who are raising horses and whatnot so

it's always been the case that you cannot foresee what's going to happen next and the optimistic side of capitalism is as messy and as hard and as much personal damage as you can cause to families along the way those people will eventually figure out something to do and when people say that it sounds so callous and coarse and that's why you have so much debate and angst and anger and things like with and disagreements like what with what we're dealing with with tariffs right now you have your son in the green room watching us right

now how old is he nine nine okay so he's got some decisions ahead he's he he's wincing right now I'm sure now that we're talking about him but what if in terms of him building his career acquiring skills generating wealth based on everything you know about how people have made money through history what are the prevailing skills that your son would have to have to assure that he makes money regardless of what the industry is learn how to communicate learn how to get along with people you disagree with i think that's that's a very underlooked

skill in life is particularly in a in a social media driven world where people have very different views on fundamental topics learn how to get along with people who you disagree with learn how to communicate those would be the top two those are extremely high level like I'm I'm not saying go learn calculus 4 kind of thing or go learn engineering but those are timeless skills and I think those two skills can get you pretty far in life and I I look back at at myself i don't know if you had a similar example of

this but I I was not a good student my ability to do math is not any good my ability my grades in science were not any good whatsoever i think if I if there are two skills that I was that I I I didn't even know it at the time it was not really like conscious that I was doing this but learn how to communicate and don't be a jerk like just learn because that for me as a writer that was like learn how to communicate as writing and in the writing business learn how to

get along with people so you can move ahead move your career like be nice to this person so you can move on up i think you see that a lot what about in terms of money making money when you think about great people through history that have accured a lot of wealth what principles would you instill in him so that he had a money mindset it's hard for a parent uh I I'm not I'm not filthy rich by any means but I've sold a couple books and it's hard as a parent to be like I

want to use money to give you a good life but I don't want to spoil you the last thing I want is for you to be a spoiled little brat and it's very difficult for a lot of parents to do that and so one of the things I want him to learn about money and I want him to learn it in a very stark way is like learn the scarcity and the value of $1 and I think the only way to do that is to experience it firsthand so when he was born nine years ago

I wrote him a little letter and I published this on a blog and one of the things I said was "I hope you're poor one day." And I said "Not not struggling not broke but I hope the only way to understand the value of a dollar is to experience the power of its scarcity and I hope there's a there's a period when my wife and I are able to say like look like you're never going to fall flat on your face you're not going to be homeless you're always going to have good healthcare but I

hope you're able to experience the scarcity of a dollar so you value it i did my my parents taught me that in a way that they didn't need to but they let me be poor for a while and most people will experience it because they they they have that's that's a situation they were in so that that's one thing I think about of and I think actually quite a few families deal with that is like how can you help your kids and it goes beyond money this is uh you know so many the the the

helicopter parent era is I want to protect you from downside at all cost emotional downside uh and and I think money is one of many topics in which you're going to learn the best by experiencing the downside for anybody that likes matcha for anybody that likes lattes one of my companies has just launched canned matcha lattes and I was speaking with the founder Marissa and she said that creating this product has been no easy feat they tried launching in 2021 but as is often the case in business the development process turned out to be extremely

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other products grab their readyto- drink canned matcha lattes at Waitros Tesco's and Holland and Barrett and perfected.com where you can use code Steven40 for 40% off your first order men are struggling in a variety of different ways and obviously your son is going to be a man someday if I think about some of the stats here men's labor force participation has declined dramatically over time for prime working age men between 25 and 54 participation fell from 98% in the 1950s to about 80 something% in 2024 10.5% of men aged 25 to 54 were neither working

nor looking for employment compared to with just 2.5% in 1954 and we had a study that came out in the UK recently I think it was the center of social justice that showed that for the first time in a long time in recent history more young men are out of work than young women and I think it was like one in seven men are out of work so it's a different world for a man but but we still have the sort of prehistoric caveman mindset of being a protector and a provider yes absolutely the world

has changed yeah i think it was Scott Galloway recently said that like a really aspirational definition of manhood is is wanting to procreate provide and protect you want to have kids and you desperately want to provide for your family and protect your family and I I do think that there Yeah there's men all over the world to a higher degree than there's ever been that feel like those three things are out of reach for them and because of this a lot of people get involved in get-richqu schemes yes crypto coins meme coins all this stuff

daniel Conaman the great psychologist passed away last year he had a saying he was like "When all of your options are bad you become very risk-taking because you have nothing to lose kind of thing." So whenever you see people participating in get-rich get-rich quick schemes you know it's because they feel like all their options all their options are bad if you knew if you believed that if you could go to college and learn a or not go to college but if you can go learn a skill and go work hard and earn a stable paycheck

to provide for your family 99 out of a 100red men are going to say that's that's the one I want but if you believe whether it's true or not if you believe that that option is not available to you you're like let's throw it all on this this new coin kind of thing and so I think you that's you see that quite a bit there's a lot of things in life where you see people making bad decisions or what you think are bad decisions and it's easy to mock them or look down upon or to

say they're idiots but like deep down there's always a reason that is kind of is there's there there's a deeper reason why they're doing it and for a lot of these things with financial risk takingaking it's it's like a lack of not necessarily a lack of self-esteem but a lack of self-confidence in their ability to earn a good dignified stable wage to provide for their family testosterone plays a role though because if when we think about who becomes gambling addicts and who takes the biggest risks with finances through history it's often men women do seem

to be generally better with managing money than men yeah w with men what a lot of it is is the inability to say that's enough particularly with the risk that they're taking so you see this with with a lot of hedge fun hedge funds are just giant investing pools of money of like rich people on Wall Street managing money they have quite a long history not a lots of them but quite a long history of them blowing up and it's because this very smart genius billionaire Wall Street trader who has a PhD from MIT could

not say that was enough they kept taking more risk more risk more risk until it blew up and we we we definitely see with women managing money that they tend to not earn as high returns on any given year but they don't blow themselves up so to speak financially so they're like men are much more willing to swing for the fences and women are much more willing to say I' I'd like to just take a calm casual swing but I want to keep it going for a long period of time now who's going to do

better over the course of a lifetime in that situation your book profiles a few scenarios of who does better over a lifetime and although I read your book I think it must have been four years ago i will always remember reading a story about I think it was like a stock broker that you write about in your book it was Jesse Livermore tell me that story jesse Livermore was a a trader a Wall Street stock trader uh about a hundred years ago did most of his work in the early 1900s through about the 1920s and

he was the best in the world at getting rich and he had no ability whatsoever to stay rich i think he became the equivalent of a billionaire adjusted for inflation four separate times and went bankrupt four separate times he eventually at his end committed suicide when he went broke for I think the fifth time and and in between there he would become and literally the richest man in the world at one point but he had no ability to say that's enough so when he was the richest man in the world he just kept taking more

risk more risks more risk and then it blew up and he did it over and over and over and over again until he eventually killed himself damn it's it's amaz it's a it's an amazing story because punctuated through his story of failure and bankruptcy and eventual suicide is a level of success that like Steve Jobs could not even fathom he has no one in history I think was better at getting rich than he was and he he could not keep it and for most people like a much better situation of course is like you don't

need to become the richest person in the world you can just make a modest amount of money that's gonna support you and your family but keep it don't keep taking more risk that's eventually gonna blow it up just keep it and it's okay what do you think of crypto i don't own any so maybe that that's the summary of how I feel about it but I also think the only take that I've had on it is like if you don't think that some of it is inspiring and then then you're not paying attention but if

you don't think that 99% of it is a is a joke then you're not paying attention and I I say that because most people are one or one or the other they think the whole thing is is a scam and they don't understand any of it it's a bubble it's going to burst or it's literally the greatest invention of of human history and I I think whenever there's a new technology you're likely to get like those extreme one of those camps but also in the history of technology what you would see is that 99% of

the new players the new companies the new products won't exist in 10 years and a couple of them will turn into Ford or Microsoft or whatever it might be that's always been the case so you can't envision a world in 20 years in which crypto is not having a big part of the global economy and I also think you cannot envision a world in which in 20 years 99% of what exists today doesn't exist anymore yeah I have owned Ethereum for a long time and more recently I just changed it all into Bitcoin because I

think Bitcoin is the safest bet so it seems to be where institutional money has gone to and I I'm doing the same thing as you i've never like traded coins in my life or anything but I think most of it is probably going to zero as we've seen but I think Bitcoin feels like the place that the market has decided will be the stablest but it's not it's not contradictory in history to say that this new technology will change the world forever and and at the same time you're probably not going to make that much

money on it the best example of that were the railroads which was probably the most transformational new industry in US history like to have a railroad going from the east coast to the west coast that changed everything in such a profound way and the vast majority of railroad investors lost all their money so they you could get it right this is going to change the world forever it does not mean that you're going to make that much money on it and that that that's not to say that most crypto investors No I actually I I

would say it's almost certain that most crypto investors will not make that much money that's that that's pretty standard historical the other thing is in cars in the early 1900s there were 2,000 car companies in America and 1,997 of them went bankrupt you ended up with GM Ford and Chrysler the rest virtually disappeared so it's always the case that in a new technology that changes in the world there's a big gap between this is going to change the world and everyone's going to get rich on this one of the things that made me question my

hypothesis on crypto was Google released this new computer i don't know if you saw it called Willow the quantum computer yeah that can crack or in theory in the future i I've talked to people about this that like you can't believe in crypto and quantum at the same time people who are much smarter than me say that's that's not the case that you can augment the system i I I don't really understand it but people who are much smarter than me say they're not worried about it google built a powerful new computer called Willow that

uses quantum technology some people worry it could one day hack Bitcoin by breaking its security system but right now Willow isn't strong enough to do that just yet and they pose that quantum computers may well become strong enough that they'll be able to hack Bitcoin's system that keeps it safe right because there is a certain amount of compute that could affect that doesn't exist right now but could in the future with quantum computers right so like all assets I mean if you look back through history we've used different things as stores of value and many

of those things whether it's the tulips or whatever else aren't our current store of value so it's conceivable to think that bitcoin as a store of value does have a shelf life yes but that's I mean that of course that could be the case I mean gold which has been you know a store of value for thousands of years has gone through periods where it surged merged and then fell 90% and sat there for 20 years you kind of thing so even when you have something that is a historic like you know uh you know

very objective store of value that doesn't mean that you know what the price is going to do next month or next year or even the next 10 years that's a totally different thing when you look at all these people through history that have made money lost money etc generated great wealth are there like certain strategies they've deployed because when I think of like Warren Buffett I'm like "Okay so he like compounded for like 80 years blah blah blah invested he was an investor." Then you've got this other strategy which might be entrepreneurship some incredible company

uh like Elon Musk making SpaceX or Tesla do you have it distilled down into a set of different strategies that are often deployed to equal wealth i think if there's one big one that is is applicable to ordinary people you know you you can come up with like different marketing things but like that's not going to apply to me hear you one thing that sticks out that is a common denominator that virtually everyone listening to this could learn from is they were way more patient and had way more endurance and kept it going for longer

than anyone else david Senra who's a great podcaster right so he has a podcast called Founders he he said this one time he was like he hears from entrepreneurs who are like "Man I listen to your podcast i'm a I'm a founder i have a company and I'm I'm going to sell my company next year i'm I'm do I'm going to sell it to Google." And David's like "Did you learn anything from the historical entrepreneurs of Rockefeller or Steve Jobs or Bill Gas those people ran their companies for 50 years they ran their companies until

the until they died kind of thing these are not people who are looking to be like I'm going to create a company and then sell it and I'm going to start another company and sell it." They keep it going for as long as they possibly can the big wealth usually does not come it almost never comes from like a great idea that just surges out of the middle of nowhere it's usually like a pretty good idea that you can keep going for 40 years or 50 years that's that's where the big money comes from if

Rockefeller I I wrote this in the book 99.9% of Warren Buffett's net worth was accumulated after his 60th birthday so like if when Warren Buffett was 60 he was worth $2 billion like incredible amount of money he could have sold then and sold everything and retired and had an absolutely amazing life the reason that he has accumulated if you count the money he's given away 250 billion is because he kept it going so now he's 93 years old and he's still going same with you know Bill Gates could have sold Microsoft in the 1970s and

made $10 million and had a great little life yeah but he kept it going and kept it going yahoo offered Mark Zuckerberg a billion dollars cash and he was like 19 at the time and he said "No I'm going to keep doing this thing." That's the common denominator that ordinary people can learn from is like endurance and longevity is usually where the big wealth is made endurance keep it going endurance is hard yeah larry Ellison who is the the founder of um of Oracle did an interview in the 1990s and they asked him about Bill

Gates who was a friend but also rival back then and Larry Ellison was like "The secret to Bill Gates yes he's very smart but there's a lot of smart people out there." And he was like "No offense but there's a lot of people smarter than Bill Gates out there but nobody has more endurance than Bill Gates he will outwork you every single time you cannot he he'll keep it going for as long as he needs to keep it going to beat you." And that's his that's his skill it's not intelligence it's endurance on this point

of perseverance why is perseverance so key like if we break it down into what what's actually happening when you persevere i think it's two things it's one in any endeavor that's going to pay off it's going to be difficult it's going to be ext there's going to be more roadblocks and speed bumps and collapses than you want it's absolutely inevitable the unofficial model at at Nvidia the giant chip company it's one of the most valuable companies in the world is we are always 30 days from going out of business now they're not it's one of

the most successful companies in the world but they understand what is true for every business which is that business is is hard like every business is a knife fight of every company that you own or start is going to be very difficult and you need the perseverance to get through that that's one element the other is compound interest that's what builds wealth what compound interest is and why it is so powerful like the people who get rich from it are not the people who earn very high returns it's people who earn good returns for a

long period of time like all compound interest is it's like it's it's returns to the power of time and if you remember like eighth grade math that exponent like time that's doing all the heavy lifting in there and so in investing if you can be good merely good if you can just be average for an above average period of time you do phenomenal and this is where this is like the most misunderstood thing about investing most investors are like "How do I earn the highest returns i want to make the best investments highest returns." And

you can do well doing that you're much more likely to do well if you're like "Hey I just want average returns but I want to be so durable and have so much endurance that I can earn average returns for 40 years and if I can be average for 40 years I'm going to end up in the top 1%." How do you make that real for someone listening who's making you know $1,000 a month disposable income so they've got $1,000 to play with a month potentially how to like how if they've never heard about this this

idea of compounding interest before and the magic that it can create if left to its own devices for a long enough period of time what is the like simple way to show them the power of it so take index funds which are just a very simple collection of businesses at a very low fee you can buy one stock but it's a collection of hundreds and hundreds of different businesses you own Apple and Amazon and Coca-Cola you own you own all the companies in the world and so it's the most boring bland average way to invest

if you invest in that in a very simple way and you do that consistently for 20 or 30 years with no skill with no expertise where you're not getting stock tips from anyone it's the most boring way to invest if you do it consistently for 30 years you will almost certainly end up in the top 1% of investors you almost certainly beat literally 95% of Wall Street pros who were trying to outsmart the market trying to outwit the market and were unable to keep it going for 30 years and so this is where if you

can just be average for an above average period of time you'll be amazing i mean it's it's it's probably similar in health that like if you want to be healthy yes you can go out and become the best bodybuilder in the world the best marathon runner in in in the whole world but actually if you just work out just like modest workouts a couple times a week for 30 years you're going to be one of the healthiest people in your town if you can work out two or three times a week for 30 years consistently

and eat a good diet consistently for 30 you'll be one of the healthiest people that you know and it's the same in investing it's like the people who do the best are not the geniuses it's the people who are ordinary for a very long period of time i was thinking about a a very simple example so that there's a coffee in my cup today and the coffee might cost $5 now with the laws of compounding returns if I don't have that coffee today in 40 years if I got 8% which is I think the S&P

500 get gives about 8% then in 40 years time instead of the the coffee that I had every day with an 8% interest return I would have $440,000 if you did a coffee every day yes yes yes assuming the coffee costs $5 now I like coffee you do too i I I I don't want people to listen to that and say "I should I should stop drinking my coffee." But it's a powerful example uh there's a book called The Snowball which is kind of the most detailed do biography of Warren Buffett and it would talk

about how when he was on his adulthood he wouldn't want to get haircuts because in his mind a haircut would cost $10,000 because it was a $2 haircut but if he invested that money in in the way that he knew he could and leave it alone for 50 years whatever it would be he didn't want to get a car wash cuz he would tell his wife he's like "That's a $5,000 car wash." She's like "What do you mean it costs a dollar?" No no no but if I invest that money and leave it alone so

he was always thinking about not what something costs today but what he could grow that money into in the future i was just thinking about Warren Buffett getting his haircuts so I thought how old's Warren Buffett now he's 93 okay so let's say for 80 years if Warren Buffett didn't get a say a $5 haircut and instead took the put it somewhere in the S&P 500 an index fund which by the way you can invest in on your phone 80 years later Warren Buffett would have 10.3 million that's it that's it and that's why he's

that's why he's worth a quarter trillion dollars today is because you go through 90 years of thinking like that and it it really adds up now that you always have to preface this by being like please drink your coffee and get a haircut it's always it's always a balance but but also understand how incredible it can be by putting away doing very ordinary things for a long period of time can lead to magic it is magic as well that's such a perfect word for it because it seems it's magic because it's not intuitive at all

yes you don't you don't understand it you're like wait what i don't I can't understand how a haircut can turn into $10 million it's not intuitive like we're we're not there's a great example from my friend Michael Batnneck he said if I ask you what is 8 plus 8 plus 8 plus 8 you can figure that out in your head quickly but if I said what is 8 * 8 * 8 * 8 * 8 forget about it can't do it we're not made to think exponentially we're not meant to think in multiplicative terms because

nothing was exponential once upon a time that's largely true yeah you know what I mean i can't think of anything that was really exponential before yeah i'm sure we could come up with a couple examples in in nature and whatnot there there's there's lots of of compounding in nature and that's that's kind of the core of of evolution is like things building upon each other over time yeah maybe brushing your teeth or decay be considered yeah but you know certainly the the stock market is the most pertinent example in most people's lives but there's also

a lot of like bad habits compound smoking one cigarette is not not that big a deal smoking one cigarette every day for 30 years big deal smoking two packs a day for 30 big deal so there are things that like in small doses they're not that big a deal but in if you do them consistently for a long period of time it leads to negative magic so what's your view then on saving money i you're you're working on a book currently which is being released in October this year called The Art of Spending Money what's

your view on saving money you told me to have the coffee cut my hair yeah i I view savings as one thing most people view saving money as like as idle s like like if you're not spending it it's just sitting in the bank doing nothing and it's just kind of a it's just wasted money sitting there i've never viewed it like that at all i view savings as little tokens of independence and every dollar that I save is a little piece of my time in the future that I own and I control it's just

deferred spending and I view that as independence like so if you have a lot of savings it's not just like hoarding money and I'm not going to do anything with it and it's not even that I'm saving this money so that I can spend it in the future if I save a dollar today I have a dollar more independence today i benefit from that today right now like I feel more independent because of it and I am more independent because of it so I view again my my top financial goal by far and I think

this is true for most people whether they know it or not what they really want out of money is independence and autonomy and is be being able to do things on their own terms live the life that they want to live and I view the oxygen of independence is is savings and what's the opposite of that is it debt debt yeah debt is a piece of your future that somebody else owns it's the polar opposite of it when you go into debt you're saying three years from now this company owns a part of my time

they own my labor in the future and savings is the opposite savings is in the future i have this stored up i have this consumption store stored up in the future i can do whatever I want with it i think you know you've written a book called the psychology of money but as you were talking there I was thinking gosh this is all psychology again because at the heart of this we all have our own unique relationship with money and there's lots of people that won't even look at their their own bank statements they won't

look at their own revolute or Monzo app in the morning they avoid their credit cards in terms of like their credit card statements and to even start talking about these subjects of saving and spending we probably need to preface it with some kind of like mindset or mentality towards your relationship with money yeah i think the most important is uh there are two topics in life that will impact you whether you like them or not that's health and money it doesn't matter if you not you're not interested in those topics those topics are interested in

you and they will impact your life you can have a wonderful life not knowing anything about chemistry or meteorology if you don't care about those topics you cannot have a good life if you don't care about money and and health and I that's true for everybody everywhere and so I think everyone has an obligation to understand their own relationship with money now some people are going to be you know fanatics about it and other people just view money as just kind of like a necessary tool that they need to get through life but you have

to understand how it works and what it's doing to you financially and psychologically and so much of modern ills have to do with envy jealousy feel like you're falling behind relative to other people the core of that is usually financial and so even if you're not the kind of person who's like I I don't care about the stock market and like I don't really care that much about money i like having fun with my friends that's great but there is a huge component of sociology and just what's going on in the world all the time

that is financial and I think money is like such an interesting window into people's lives you can learn so much about somebody if you understand what they do with their money how they think about money how much they talk about money how much they want to show off how much how much attention they're putting into their clothes and their cars and their jewelry to show other people how much money that they have you learn so much about someone's psychology you know if I learned about your politics I I don't know what they are but if

I learned about your politics I might learn something about you but if I sat down and I said "Tell me everything about your money tell me how much you make how much you spend what do you value what do you want to do i learned so much about your personality in your work on the psychology of money how much did you think about trauma as a protagonist in the story of one's financial relationships i think less about trauma that's a component of it but more so it's just that we are all prisoners of our unique

past no matter what that is that's trauma for a lot of people different forms of trauma but you grew up in a in a different country than I did you have different parents than I do different values were slightly different ages and so you saw a different side of the world than I did and that taught you different values it taught you to aspire to different things than I did and you and I in a lot of ways are a lot alike i think if you if we sat down and like talked about broader topics

we'd agree on 90% of things but we are different and so we shouldn't pretend that what I want to do with my money is what you should do and I think a lot of times when people argue about money and they're like "Oh you're investing wrong or you're you're you're spending you're you're not spending enough you're spending too much." It's not actually people disagreeing with each other it's people who came from very different backgrounds talking over each other and they just have different aspirations for what you want to do so everyone is is so different

and they're they're a prisoner of of their past my my brother-in-law is a a social worker and I may have brought this up when I the first time I was on your podcast but I think about it all the time and uh in social work when you're working with very disadvantaged kids a lot of those kids who are are homeless and foster children behave very poorly at school they do very poorly their grades are terrible in school they're always getting in fights and he said as a social worker he said "We have a saying in

social work it is all behavior makes sense with enough information." So you look at this child who is uh getting into fights on the playground and failing all of his classes and it's easy for the teacher to be like "What's your problem this is not that hard just behave just stop doing this." And then you look at what that kid's going through at home maybe their parents are beating them maybe they're they're their foster children they're orphans once you piece together what's going on in their life you're like I kind of understand all behavior makes

sense with enough information and I think you can apply that to a lot of areas in life money especially where you're like you see someone driving a yellow Lamborghini there's a story there about someone's past i'm not judging it but there's a story in there of someone being like I want people to know how much money I made and it's not a criticism but there's there's a story there's something that happened in your life that that that led you to there and we all have that's not a criticism because I have bits of my past

that influence how I manage money today too so just recognizing that there's no one right answer in math 2 plus two is four for me and you there is a right answer money's not like that we're all just kind of trying to figure out what works given the lens that we see the world through this is a bit of a bizarre question but it had me thinking as you're speaking about mortality as it relates to money because one of the perspectives on money is yolo do you know what I mean i'm only going to live

once so I might as well have a good time i think I definitely have a more of a bias in that direction although I'm not fully in that direction and my brother who's a year older than me that went as one that gave me your book and has worked as a stock broker an actuarial scientist at 12 years old he was budgeting his pocket money on an Excel document whereas I was just spending spending spending and he thinks much more long term he's like investing in his pension at 21 whereas I was like at the

casino not the not the literal casino a figurative casino i was taking bigger risks and just rolling the dice and my somewhat illogical way of rationalizing my behavior and not investing as much in my pension was I'm only going to live once anyway so I might as well just enjoy my life yeah and when we talk about the coffees and saving and all this stuff a lot of people will be thinking "Yes but compounding's fine but I want to enjoy life." Enjoy life i think about a thing when I was I was in my early

20s at this point and I met I there's a co-orker of mine and he was I don't know 10 years older than me and um he had $25,000 of credit card debt which I could not fathom at the time that was such an incomprehensible amount of credit card debt that he was paying 17% interest on and at the time I just thought and and all the debt came from trips that he had taken he traveled Europe and traveled through Asia and had a great time doing it but he put it all on his credit card

at the time I remember thinking you idiot you do you understand what this is going to do to your future and then he died when he was about 32 wow and now and then and then I remember thinking like I'm so glad you took those trips i'm so glad you went into that credit card debt because the truth was at age 32 he had seen more and done more than most people would at age 62 and so I think about that a lot of like it's always a balance and the truth is that you and

I don't know are we going to live until we're 110 or die tomorrow nobody knows of course one thing I think a lot about as a parent is that I've been a big saver my entire life since I got my first job at age 16 i've saved the majority of what I made in every job that I've ever been in and it would be easy to look at someone like me and say "Morgan if you were on your deathbed tomorrow you'd probably regret the vacations you didn't take and the the dinners you didn't have right

you'd regret that." My answer is absolutely not because if I was on my deathbed tonight I would take so much joy knowing that my wife and kids are going to be okay because of what I saved that would that would that would be the the worst situation I would be in is on my deathbed and looking at my wife and kids and knowing you guys are screwed you get I'm leaving I'm leaving you debt you know and so but that might change as I get older and so when my kids are hopefully financially self-sufficient will

I still think that you know will I still have that need to be like I need to work and save to provide for my young kids that's not going to last forever so it'll change throughout your life that is literally the worst thought in the world isn't it to think that you could be on your deathbed and look over at your family and know that they're about to struggle with bills and with food and they're probably going to have to sell the house and their lifestyle is completely going to change when you go it's I

I don't even have kids yet but I was just thinking about my partner because there's no there's no there's no worse nightmare than that i think there's an opposite of that which is in several of the books and studies that have been done on on dying you know there are quite a few people who have very peaceful deaths people who know they're going to die of terminal illness and they're pretty much at ease with it and when you dig into like what's what is those people's psychology how do you know you're going to die in

six months and you're kind of at ease with it one of the big factors is knowing that your family's going to be okay without you because they are sufficient and they don't rely on you for wisdom and advice as much they can take care of themselves but the opposite if you're on your deathbed and you're like "My my children my spouse is gonna have a real hard time without me." That is that's the most painful thing you can imagine i could also imagine that one of the great regrets one might have on their deathbed is

just not having lived because I was thinking about I sometimes ponder if I die now how would I feel like if I was given a diagnosis God forbid um how would I feel and I feel like I've really gone for it with my life i feel like I've traveled i've seen things i've done things i've met people I've lived so there's a certain feeling of there's a certain smile on my face or gratitude when I think about this being the end so it's a balancing act isn't it between like between the two between my friend

who buried himself in credit card debt even though I'm I'm glad like I'm glad he did it given his short life versus the people who save everything for the end david Cassidy who's a very famous childhood actor had an incredible acting career um he died I don't know when he died 10 years ago 15 years ago whatever it was he his last words were so much wasted time those were his last words and like you think about and this is someone who was like very rich and famous had like a very enviable life and you

can't think of sadder last words than so much wasted time and I think like no matter this is like the the Jeff Bezos philosophy on business was he started Amazon because he was trying to imagine himself at age 90 looking back and having the fewest regrets he was like "That that should be your framework for life is that when you're on your deathbed you have the fewest regrets possible." And he did it because he was like "If I don't start Amazon I'm going to regret it but if if I do start Amazon and it fails

I won't regret that." So just understanding like I think that's a good philosophy that's probably the the broadest definition of risk is understanding what you're likely to regret in the future and I I I I don't think anyone has a perfect calibration on that like it's there's a good chance that heaven forbid if you did get a diagnosis tomorrow as you just said that yes you would look back and say man I really went for it but you also might look back and be like man and not not not you individually but any of us

would look back and say like man I wish I was wish I had done this different I wish I was nicer to that person I wish I had called this person more you know worked less right there I think Brony wear found that that palative nurse in Australia when she interviewed people in their death beds that like I wish I'd worked less was super high and not a single of those people looked back in those situations on their deathbed when they're 90 years old will look back and say "I wish I worked harder." But virtually

every one of them will say "I wish I spent more time with my kids i wish I spent more time with my family i I I I wish I was nicer to myself i wish I'd let myself be who I actually was." I think the top regret of the dying from her work was that I wish I'd lived a life more true to myself which I kind of interpret as like I wish I'd done something else and this gets back to the Chuck Feny idea of the billionaire who said "I I don't want to I

want to live my way." Like being independent is so core to people's happiness and as I said earlier like we come from different backgrounds we have different aspirations but independence is a very human natural universal aspiration to be able to live life in your own way i'm not sure if we talk about this much but for that person who doesn't have financial independence because they're entrenched with debts and bills and all these kinds of things how does one get out of that situation because we can't necessarily just save our way out of that situation can

we people do it's difficult because it's likely that the mindset and psychology that got you there is going to be very difficult to break extremely difficult to break i heard this statistic one time that this is a completely different topic but I think this applies to a lot of things that the statistic that will is most predictive on whether you will cheat on your spouse is how many people you slept with before you got married the implication being it's very difficult to just flip a switch and say I'm a different person now and I think

that that idea can apply to a lot of different things in life and the psychology of I spend way more than I make and I don't care about money and debt debt debt some people can wake up one day and say no more of that i'm going I'm going to run in the other way a lot of people find it very difficult to do i think one of the hard things about money that's hard to admit for a lot of people but there's truth to it is that on the nature nurture spectrum a lot of

it does lean towards nature that some people are just wired your brother was wired to plan and save and you were wired to take entrepreneurial risks in in maybe a way that he wasn't and so a lot of it is yes you can learn yes you can learn from others and learn new ideas to think about but we shouldn't pretend that we can fundamentally rewire who we are the hardest conversations are often the ones we avoid but what if you had the right question to start them with every single guest on the diary of a

co has left behind a question in this diary and it's a question designed to challenge to connect and to go deeper with the next guest and these are all the questions that I have here in my hand on one side you've got the question that was asked the name of the person who wrote it and on the other side if you scan that you can watch the person who came after who answered it 51 questions split across three different levels the warm-up level the open up level and the deep level so you decide how deep

the conversation goes and people play these conversation cards in boardrooms at work in bedrooms alone at night and on first dates and everywhere in between i'll put a link to the conversation cards in the description below and you can get yours at the diary.com just to close off on this point of saving money are there any tactics or tricks or ways to think about how to save for for those people that might be working in a factory and that don't have a ton of excess income every month i think if you view savings as I

need to save for something in the future that's hard for people to do if you have a little bit of a a mindset shift and say "I'm gonna save so I can become more independent so that if I lose my job I don't have to panic and go find the first one that's available i can take my time and find another one." That's independence if you have a medical emergency you you're going to have some options on how to treat it and where to go that's independence viewing every dollar that you save as a token

of independence I think is a mindset shift that get makes it a lot easier for people to do versus if they're just saying "I need to save to buy a new car." I asked this because earlier on I looked at the most googled questions around saving and the most popular question is how to save money how to save money now they might be be asking like what to do with my savings do I put it in a checking account do I put it in a savings account do I invest it that might be part of

it or it might be as similar as you're saying with tariffs people genuinely don't know what it means the second most googled is what is a high yield savings account yeah and this I think that those questions they're not bad questions there's no there's no bad questions i was asking those questions at at one point in my life too but it gets to the point of like you have an obligation to understand how money works and what it's going to do to you and how to manage it it's not a nice to have everyone's going

to have to deal with these topics whether they like it or not i love this quote from your book where you say "One of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn't to raise your income it's to raise your humility." Yeah i think you get there when you realize like nobody's looking at you as much as you are and nobody cares about your Range Rover and your Rolex as much as you did they may have meant a lot to you but no one else was thinking about them that much because they were busy thinking

about themselves they were busy thinking about their own car and you realize how much modern spending and this has increased in the social media age the last 10 or 15 years is trying to get strangers attention it's trying to put on a show put on a performance for people that you think are paying attention to you but they're absolutely not they're not paying any attention to you whatsoever and so like lowering your or like raising your humility is is one way to think about it but it's also just realizing like who do you want attention

from it's different for everybody for me I want my wife my kids my parents and like three friends to love me and I I desperately care about their attention i desperately care what my kids and my wife and my parents think of me and it's it's fundamental to my happiness and from there it declines real quick you know there's a couple really close friends who are in there and then there's some like colleagues and whatnot and it declines very quickly from there and strangers the person driving down the street could not care in the slightest

and maybe that sounds obvious but so much of what we do with money is a performance to impress that guy who's not paying any attention to you whatsoever and so I want to put a lot of effort into fostering the relationships with those six or seven people i want to put tremendous effort into that and very little every from there and here's the thing if I got a Ferrari would my wife love me more like no would my kids admire me more no mh and so the people who I want to love me are not

impacted by the fancy things that I would buy so what do you spend your money on we live a a pretty decent material life but I also spend a lot of money so the biggest expense that I have what I spend my money on is independence and I view that as a thing I'm spending money on i spend money on controlling my calendar i spend money on the ability to say no to work that I don't want to do i view it as I'm financially independent and so I can do the work that I want

to do and I've been working on that for 25 years what what what else do I spend money on here's what's interesting my son back in the green room you asked about him there's a thing I I was thinking about just a couple weeks ago i grew up as a skier i was a ski racer in Lake Tahoe and always particularly when I was younger there were always people on my ski team who had better gear than me they had the newer skis and newer boots and cooler gear and whatnot i always I hated it

made me so insecure i hated it and one of the things that I did was when my son started skiing a couple years ago I was like I'm going to buy you the best stuff because I was insecure and I'm going to I'm I'm going to make up for that little chip on my shoulder i'm going to buy you the best gear and here's the thing he couldn't care less about it he could not care less about the fancy stuff that he has couldn't care less about it so everyone's different in that and it also

gets back to like a lot of spending is based off of a a story or a scar that you had from earlier in your childhood and where is your your capital allocation today we spoke about this a little bit last time but in terms of percentages you have a ton of cash you said roughly what percentage of your uh uh 20 25% maybe we own a house outright and then the rest in stocks it's a very simple our entire net worth is a house cash Vanguard index funds and shares of Markeel where I'm on the

board of directors that's it that's my entire net worth it's as simple and boring as bland as you could possibly get and what I want to do with that the reason I keep it so boring is the variable that I want to maximize for is endurance as we spoke about earlier so if my finances are so simple then I can spend all of my like mental energy all of the strategy is how can I make sure that I can just keep this going for as long as I possibly can so for someone that doesn't know

what a Vanguard index fund is if you had to explain it to your son he probably knows doesn't he but to someone of your son's age how would you explain a Vanguard index fund because you said you got cash people understand that people understand a house vanguard index fund so an index fund is a collection of hundreds if not thousands of businesses so when you buy an index fund you're owning a little bit of Apple Amazon Google Facebook all of them every public company that's available you're owning a tiny slice of them one way to

think about it is when you buy an index fund you're owning a little slice of American capitalism and which index funds do you invest in and why there's lots of them lots of I mean there's tons of them that are are equally good so there this is not to say that there one is better necessarily better than the other you must have a thesis most of what I buy is called the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index ticker is VTI not a recommendation for others but it's it's a it's the broadest index it basically owns every

stock that's available to buy in the world and it does it at a very very low fee and so I'm not making any bet on AI i'm not making any bet on this industry or that company you're owning a little bit of slice of American business and what what has that yielded as on average over the last couple of years if you look at like like a good historical uh comparison to what it would be which is like the the S&P 500 if you go back you can go back a hundred years there's a guy

from Yale University named Robert Schiller who has data going back to the 1880s on US stocks and basically what it shows is over time on average which that that phrase is doing some heavy lifting here but on average 8 to 10% per year and why that is like there's a big asterisk there is you almost never earn eight or 10% in any given year you're much more likely to be up 30% or down 15% and it averages out to eight or 10% per year but it's always chaos in in any individual year and is there

a reason why you don't just bet on technology for example well there's a lot of technology in that index fund that's the highest weight because those are the those are the biggest companies in America amazon Google and whatnot but there's also tremendous amount of value that can be created by a company like Proctor and Gamble selling toothpaste and deodorant and there can actually be more value in those kind of companies than technology because I would bet good money that in 30 years people will still be using Old Spice deodorant i would not bet good money

that in 30 years Google is going to be the dominant way that people find information and so companies that sell the same product for a long period of time have endurance and longevity like can actually create a ton of value for their investors you mentioned the other thing is houses um you have a house yep house sales in 2024 total just 4 million the lowest rate since 1995 yeah i mean it's it's it's one of the biggest social problems and it is it's so much bigger than housing and so much bigger than money i think

you can tie everything from homelessness to heroin to suicide to the fact that we in America and a lot of areas around the world have not built enough homes in the last 50 years that has pushed the price higher and higher and higher and it's pushed out what was a small sliver and now a growing large chunk of society who rightly feels like they cannot afford a basic middle-ass home and it's a hu it's probably the biggest one of the biggest societal problems that we face right now is a housing shortage that has pushed housing

out of affordability for tens of millions of people do you recommend people try and buy houses or is it just to rent those houses here's what So I've purchased three homes in my life every one of those three homes I don't feel like I got a good deal it wasn't like oh this is a bargain got to this is a great deal this is none none of the three were like that i bought them i could afford them they were in my in my I was not going you know doing something that I should not

have been doing financially but the reason I bought them is because they were a good safe home for my my family in a community that we wanted to live in and I was not thinking about is this going to have be a house that I can make a make a fortune on is this going to go up in value is this going to go down in value that was never part of the equation it was yes I can afford this and it's not imperiling my finances at all but the reason I'm doing it is because

it's a a safe good place for my family to live and I think generally that's the way to do it and once people start thinking through the lens of is this a good investment is this going to go up are home prices going to fall maybe I should wait six months because they're going to fall that's when you're just you're shooting yourself you're you're just rolling the dice at that point and it's a and people get into a lot of trouble doing that when they're like "Oh I know like I'm going into a ton of

debt but I think home prices are going to double in the next three years so it's okay." That's like that should not be ever be part of the equation it should be I can afford this and this is where I want to raise my family for the next five or 10 years i think that's that's the formula so it's more about freedom and security than making a quick return absolutely here's here's what's interesting like the psychology of housing too um we we bought a new house eight months ago and sold our previous house and that

house the house that we just sold we we did end up making a little bit of money on because Seattle real estate has gone crazy in the last five years and really interesting something that happened this is just eight months ago when we sold the house the day that we closed on selling that house and I got the proceeds wired to me in my bank account logged in my bank account i see that number from selling the house the numbers meant nothing to me but the house that we sold meant everything to me it was

like my daughter took her first steps at the bottom of those stairs my son had his first day of kindergarten Christmases Thanksgivings like and it was like these numbers don't mean anything to me these numbers are just going into the new house but that house that I left behind meant everything to me so that gets back to like don't think of it as a as a financial transaction it should be this is where you want to raise your family and build some memories how does it compare to investing in that Vanguard thing if we look

at the returns on housing I have no memories of my daughter's first steps in my Vanguard index funds you know that that that that's really it it's you you are investing in a Vanguard index fund because you think you're going to make money over time whereas you should not have that mentality when you buy a house it should be within your financial means but you should be doing it because it's a good place to raise your family for a long period of time it does beg a question for for younger people who are thinking about

building their wealth because the first thing and the most common thing we're taught as it relates to wealth creation is to go buy a house like it's the thing that everybody knows you leave university you get a job and you save as as much money as you can to put that deposit down yeah that was true in previous generations because if you go back to the 1950s,60s7s we were building so many more homes than we are today that they were much cheaper even when interest rates were higher they were much cheaper and so the advice

of hey you got an entry-level job you should go buy an entry-level house probably made sense in the 60s and 70s in a way that it doesn't today the other element here that is very easy to overlook in the housing problem the housing debate is that the homes that we found adequate in the 50s and 60s we would not find adequate today so Levittown in New York was is like the prototypical example that's when like end of World War II build big like like build the middle class community build this huge new community called Levittown

in New York and that was like the the typical white picket fence middle-ass home that we like long for today and they were cheap they were affordable the average new house in Levittown was 700 square feet it had two two bedrooms for an average of a family of five or six moving into it one bathroom for those six people no air conditioning no garage it would be a house that if I showed you today you would be like it's a junk it's a to to to it's a crack house like nobody like would say that

is a beautiful middle-ass house so expectations over time have increased tremendously so now the average new middle class house is 2200 square feet where it used to be 700 so like what an entry-level house is the definition of that has expanded tremendously over time and if your children come to you and they say "Dad I'm 25 years old and I've just got some excess cash here i've got $20,000 $40,000 i'm thinking of putting a deposit down for a house." My wife and I rented for years and looking back at the time and looking back it

was the best thing that we ever did we rented for I don't know 10 years before we bought a house because we lived in five different cities and we could just easily just pack up and go and they would we weren't tied to anything we had flexibility and it was pretty much the week that our son was born when we had our first kid that it was like a switch in my head i was like I I I need to go have my own house because the flexibility that I enjoyed when we were childless it

was the opposite i was like I I value stability now i want a stable house for for my family and it was like instantly that switched and so that was not a financial decision of like I need to go out and buy because I have some extra savings it was like I want I want my house that is mine and it's not there's not going to be a landlord that sends me a letter and says "Oh sorry you're you're evicted." Or "Sorry we're we're we're selling the building you need to leave this is my house."

That's that that that was the shift for me it feels like when we rent we're wasting money though but it's not in the slightest i mean for anyone who's owned a house you know the expenses that go into a house it's not just the mortgage it's the It's the broken water heater it's replacing your roof it's the the expenses that go into it like you want to talk about throwing your money away try replacing your roof on a house that you own that feels like throwing money away and it's hard for the brain to conceive

you know that renting might be the same as buying a house when you when you net out and you factor in opportunity cost and flexibility the ability to get on a plane and go to London to to do that job and you can't quantify that flexibility so my wife and I lived in five different cities some of those were because we got jobs that that we didn't you know in different cities we had to move you can't quantify that flexibility or it's very hard to but in the moment it was everything it was I remember

when my wife got into grad school and it was like great pack up this city and move to this city and there just like no handcuffs just get up and go versus if you own your house like anyone's tried to sell a house like it's a nightmare and so you can't quantify that but it meant everything in the world to us now my brother said this to me he's a very smart guy now now now I reflect upon it he said this to me when I was younger cuz I think at 25 when I got

some money i was telling him maybe I'll buy this house we should look at this house and he explained to me in simple terms that the flexibility that I had to get up and move was actually worth so much more than maybe some of the equity that I might acrue from buying a house and now I look back on it from that day onwards i then moved to New York and I lived there for 3 days then I the pandemic happened and I suddenly quit my job out of the blue unexpectedly and I moved to

Portugal then went to Germany then went to Bali for several months then flew back to the UK London now I've just moved to LA and that's all in the space of four years incredible and I've gone with the opportunity so when the opportunity comes knocking and oh the podcast starts doing well and then this happens and then Dragon's done this i've just moved with the opportunity and if id bought a house you'd be locked down there are so many people today who bought homes in 2021 2022 and their mortgage rate was two or three percent

they have a two or three percent mortgage and a lot of those people want to move today because they can get a better job in another city they want to move and they feel like they can't because because they're they have golden handcuffs for the super cheap mortgage because if they sold their house and bought a new one their new mortgage rate would be 7 and a half% and so those are people who like a lot of those people look back and when they bought in 2021 they're like "We won the lottery 2% mortgage this

is amazing." And looking back they're like "Gosh we would have been so better off renting if we did if we had the flexibility to move." So interesting so much of economic prosperity over history is your ability to move and that that's been true for hundreds of years like if you want to see like a a basic measure of how wealthy any economy is like how often do people move because moving is usually a symbol of opportunity and the more that they're locked down and feel like they can't move the more stagnant and like sclerotic that

economy is going to be what's this idea that you have of asking $3 questions i heard you talking about that i stole that from an author named named Rammit Si oh a very well-known author and he says "Too many people ask $3 questions when they should be asking $30,000 questions." What he means by that are when people say "How can I save more money?" They say "I should stop drinking coffee." That's a $3 question and that does not make any difference to you what you should be asking are $30,000 questions like where should I go

to college should I go to the cheap school or the expensive school where should I live the cheap city or the expensive city should I rent or should I buy those are $30,000 questions and we spend a lot of mental energy on $3 questions that actually that don't move the needle that much in our in our finances for most people they're only a couple of expense items that actually matter to your finances that is your housing payment either rent or mortgage your car payment child care uh healthcare and that that's pretty much it and and

yes you're going to spend money on on other things but those four that's the vast majority of what people spend money on but when you hear people talk about how do you save money it's like oh well stop stop going to Starbucks you can like pack your own lunch to work it doesn't make that much of a difference it's those big four things so am I right in thinking that you think we should avoid either extreme end of the financial like approach that people take so you got yolo on one end and you've got caring

about every coffee on the other end spectrum i think those are what are you are most likely to end up regretting what do you mean there are a lot of people in the fire movement fire stands for financial independence retire early it's this big movement started 10 or 15 years ago of people who are like I'm going to save as much money as I can in my 20s learn how to live as cheaply and frugally as I can and retire at age 27 with you know 600 grand in the bank and that's I'm going to

retire off of that and it was a huge movement so many of those people ended up regretting it because they retired at 27 and six months later they're bored out of their mind if not depressed because they they wake up and they're like "What what do I do now do I I just go for I go play golf or something like all all my friends are out working what do I do now and so I think the extreme ends of like oh yolo I'm just going to spend all live for today i'm going to spend

it all i'm going to go party and travel and whatnot there's there's a somewhat of a chance that you're going to end up regretting that because you didn't save enough for a time in your life when you want to retire and you can't on the subject of retirement me and my friend Jack over there we were talking about people who retire and the impact it can have on the individual and I I think I'd be quite scared to retire because there seems to be lots of data that suggests that once we retire it's quite it's

downhill from there in many respects for many people in terms of purpose and meaning and connections how do you think about retirement is that something we should be aiming at my dad I think retired and went back to work three different times we eventually had to tell him like "No more retirement parties." Like you like you only get one but he would retire and then and then a month later he'd be like "Man I I I really miss work." And in his line of work he could go back he could go back part-time and what

not so that it all worked out for him but I think he starkly saw what a lot of people overlook which is how much of his identity was his job and how much like when he retired the first time and he like woke up and looked in the mirror and said "I'm not I'm not the person who I used to be i used to be a a a this and but I'm not anymore." And and it he didn't like it and I was like it's easy like look every job has downsides that are stressful and

you don't want to do them and they're a pain and you hate them and you can't wait to live a world where you don't have to do the stressful parts of your job but for a lot of us like what we really want to do in our soul is like be productive in the world and add value to the world add value for our family add value to the world and one of the the quickest ways to become depressed is to be very productive and then immediately stop that's a quick path to depression for a

lot of people and so some people are very good at retirement my my my mom on the other hand was very good at retirement she retired never looked back and had a very has a very full life in retirement she keeps herself very busy with hobbies and friends and whatnot so some people are very good at it other people who found their identity in their work that's a lot of people that's me i think that's probably you would would go crazy if if if we ended up retiring you can't say your own book but if

you had to recommend a book that would equipped us to understand money wealth creation and all these kinds of things what book would you recommend oh I would say my own book no um no I think a couple that were really important for me you know it's not bedtime reading but a guy named Benjamin Graham wrote a book called The Intelligent Investor he wrote it in the 1930s so it is written in 1930s English and he was a professor so it's written it's not quite a textbook but it's not bedtime reading but there is more

wisdom about investing in that book than any other book that's been written in the last hundred years and even though he wrote it almost 100 years ago 90% of it is timeless you know he he says certain things that are obviously dated but there's more wisdom in there than anything else that's ever been written that's why the book still sells a lot 90 years after it's been written that was that was a big one learning about World War II and the Great Depression was very influential to me and many other people because both of those

events particularly World War II saw the highest range of human emotions that I think has ever been documented from the most agony and despair and torment to the most like like elation and happiness that it's over like so many the the the fullest range of human emotions were documented during that period from probably 1929 to 1945 mhm those 16 years I think if you learn about what happened in the United States and all over the world of course you learn so much about humanity like World War when you study World War II you're not really

learning about military tactics even though that's part of it you're learning about the psychology of how people deal with uncertainty dread risk doubt fear you could learn more about those topics during that 15- year period than anything else one of the things that I I learned from listening to your podcast which is fantastic i highly recommend people go listen to the Morgan Hustle podcast was you were talking about the dangers of rapid growth yeah and I actually I I took something that you said in the podcast around the danger of rapid growth and I sent

it to my CEO and my chief revenue officer because it's a cautionary tale for a generation of entrepreneurs who are obsessed with growth at all costs to slow things down what in your view what is the and this could be the the dangers of rapid growth in any field it could be someone running a podcast or someone building a business or or anything someone investing money why do we need to be cautious about rapid growth there's a a really interesting analogy that I like with tree growth in nature that if you plant a tree out

in the middle of an open field it because it's out in the middle of an open field it's gorging on sunlight because there's no other trees shading it it's just gorging on sunlight because it gorges on sunlight it grows very very fast it can grow like 10 times faster than a tree that's covered in shade so you might think like that's great that's amazing it's growing so quickly if you're a farmer you love that but when a tree grows that quickly it never has a chance to grow dense and hard it never has a chance

to grow a very established root structure and so those trees even though they grow very quickly they die very quickly they're very susceptible to rot because they never have a chance to grow hard it's just kind of like mushy soft wood inside and if you see a lot of the lumber that is harvested these days and you compare it to lumber from like old growth forests you might as well be looking at a completely different tree a lot of the wood that we harvest today that was grown very quickly is soft and weak compared to

the old dense hardwood that they used to make and I think that's a good analogy that like fast growth is fun it's exciting but there's always it's like speed always comes at the expense of durability always there's a theory in finance is kind of like a tongue-in-cheek theory that however fast you grow that's the halflife for how quickly you can die so like the faster you grow the f the quicker you can die as well m and you see that in nature you see it with businesses as well the hard thing is that if you're

an entrepreneur if you're the CEO or working at a company there is nothing more thrilling and exciting and and gets you up in the morning than fast growth you love it you love every second of it even if it's a danger you just reminded me of an idea I wrote about in my last book about the music industry where they found the same thing the faster a song went to number one in the charts the quicker it came out absolutely because people get in bored of it basically very very quickly it's everywhere it's on every

radio station everywhere and then it falls out the chart all the time the same speed and and the companies that can like produce tons and tons of money even like look at Apple was created in the 1970s didn't really find its stride so to speak until the mid200s and so it's not it's it's it's like sometimes there like there's companies like Facebook I guess that and OpenAI that found product market fit found like incredible success virtually overnight the day that they were invented but one of the problems with with rapid growth too is that the

difference between building a product that's going to grow very quickly that is a very different skill than managing a company that now has a thousand employees those are night and day different skills and so you might be a very talented entrepreneur who can build a product and get thousands of people to buy it that does not necessarily mean that you have the skills to manage a 50 person team or a thousand person team how does your work all dovetail with the subject of happiness Morgan because at the very heart of it clearly everyone who's clicked

on this conversation and got this far although they might be thinking it's money that they're looking for or wealth that they're looking for probably at the end of the day they just want to live a happy life they think money or wealth is a pathway to a happy life with all the work that you've done and the people that you've studied through history and all that you've written what is your current view on how to live a happy life yeah what's interesting is that like when you say hap when anyone says happy you're like how

can you disagree with that everybody wants to be happy a lot of why people run into problems when they're seeking happiness is because happiness is not the emotion that you want to go for happiness is always a fiveminute emotion it comes and goes you experience it but it's a thrill and then it kind of wears off very quickly if you hear a funny joke you go to a comedy show it's funny you laugh at at a joke for 20 seconds and then it's not that funny anymore what you want to go for I think is

contentment and a lot of people like money can buy a good life but when you imagine yourself with the new house the new car the nice vacation when you dream about those making you happy what you're actually envisioning is yourself being content with those things you envision yourself on the beach in Maui being content with it and that's why it feels so good the feeling that you want the feeling that you're actually chasing whether you know it or not it's not happiness it's contentment and I think that little shift too is because most people are

out there seeking happiness but they're like I'm not I'm not I don't feel that much better than I used to because what you actually want to seek is what my grandmother-in-law had which was being content with the little bit that she had and that's why she was so happy and may maybe again that's the wrong word but she was content she was perfectly content with her very simple very basic boring life boring in other people's eyes she was content and that's why a lot of people would look at her including me with a sense of

envy is probably the right word how did you do that how were you so happy it's because she was content with what she had i was thinking about the goals that I wrote in my diary at 18 years old where I said that I wanted to be a millionaire girlfriend Range Rover six-pack and actually when I envisioned that life what I envisioned was contentment yes I imagine yourself driving in the Ferrari and you're like "Ah that would be so great." What you're actually imagining yourself is yourself in a Ferrari being content with that Ferrari but

what ends up happening is when if you are in the Ferrari you're like "Oh look at that Lambo oh that's nicer than mine isn't it?" You're not content with it when I get the Lambo I will be content right and then you want the Rolls-Royce whatever it is like you're always whether you know it or not that's what you're actually seeking is you just want to be content with what you have because that's true joy how does one be content now people have been talking about that for thousands of years the philosopher Arthur Schopenower has

this quote that I love he said "If you only want to be happy that is very easy to achieve but people want to be happier than other people and that is much more difficult." I think that's that's what it is it's like so much of it is just a comparison game and for for a lot of people it's like I don't necessarily want a a nice house what I want a house is a house that's nicer than yours i don't necessarily want an expensive car i want a car that's more expensive than yours that's that

it's a weird thing to say but at the core that's what a lot of people want and so being content to answer your question is moving from the external benchmark of comparing myself to you and others and towards the internal benchmark of as I said earlier the only thing that's actually going to make me happy in life is my family my health that that's that that's pretty much it i I could end it right there and put a period there and say that's what's going to make me happy it's the internal benchmark it's not comparing

what I have to what you have it's just if nobody else was looking would I be happy with this because the truth is nobody else is looking another really interesting example is just if everyone else was made extinct on planet Earth and it was just you right what would you do what kind of life if nobody was watching what kind of life would you live and I think in that life would you want a Ferrari or would you want a Toyota pickup truck that has utility that actually like makes your life easier kind of thing

there's a a great like a a thing that I heard a couple years ago which is that a high-end Toyota is a much nicer car than an entry-level BMW oh yeah because a high a high a high-end Toyota is like you got the cushy seats and the moon roof and the good sound system an entry-level BMW is just status or the appear like you think it's status it's just you're buying it for the chance that you're going to influence somebody else's view of who you are and people like massively overestimate how much it's going to

actually influence other people do you not think there's something hardwired into humans that makes us want to strive though yeah because life is always a competition for resources it always has been of there's a limited amount of food a limited amount of land a limited amount of mates a limited amount of potential and so what has mattered historically is not whether I'm a good hunter it's whether I'm a better hunter than you and the reason I'm here now is because my ancestors outco competed everybody else in that situation yes so I was I have competition

in my DNA absolutely and always will you we're never going to get to a world this is what Adam Smith wrote about 300 years ago he's like if people just needed basic food and shelter they could stop right now because virtually everybody has those but we keep going because we want to be seen by the people who are we're competing with and showing you look I'm better than you i made more money than you i'm more worthy for a spouse or attention than you are it's always a competition it's kind of a a a sad

thing to think about and of course I think people are intelligent enough to know how silly that game can can be and to take themselves out of the game to some extent but it's we're never going to be at a time when that's not the case it's that's definitely hardwired in us what is the most important thing we didn't talk about that we should have talked about is there anything comes to mind for the person at home that's dealing with all of this tariff craziness AI all of this stuff it might seem like the world

is more uncertain today than it's ever been and I I don't think that's the case with tariffs and AI it it has been more uncertain at many points in the past it just doesn't feel that way because we know how the story ended in the past and we don't know how this story is going to is going to end so it's always the case that the world that we're living in today feels especially fragile and especially uncertain and I think historically it's it's not it's it's it's uncertain and fragile in its own unique new way

but it's always the case that it feels like the world used to be great we used to have it and now it's not anymore there's a great John Stewart quote where he says the reason the world felt like a better place during your childhood is because you were a child and just because we know how the story ended it it it makes it feel like today is a very uncertain place even if it's kind of part for the course historically we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next not

knowing who they're leaving it for and the question left for you is what is one thing you valued starting out that you no longer value one thing that I this was not necessarily changing my mind as it was just kind of growing as an adult was when I was in my 20s I really valued travel and getting out and seeing the world as you should in your 20s when I became a father I valued being at home with my kids and it's almost like in my 20s a terrible night would be at home on the

couch that that's a failed night and in my 30s there's nothing or in my 40s now there's nothing better than being at home on the living room floor playing Legos with my kids nothing better so that was a shift in values but it wasn't because I changed my mind it's just a different state of life morgan thank you for doing what you do it's um so incredible because you know you referenced that book The Intelligent Investor i tried reading that book and I just bounced off it straight away it's really really tough yeah but your

book the one that my brother gave to me all those years ago has probably made me millions and millions of pounds because I read it when I was young enough because it helped me to have a lens and a framework to think about a lot of this tempting get-richqu investing mentality that you see today i wouldn't even call it investing it helped me to understand the emotional elements of saving spending investing um and ultimately it gave me a strategy for what to do if I ever made money and although it's a boring strategy it's a

timeless one and that is part of the reason why so much of my money currently is in really safe places like index funds yeah and it it's so important to read books like this because when you read it and you hear the stories of these individuals and what happened and what didn't happen to them whenever you experience an emotion that is similar or you find yourself in like a similar situation where you can relate to one of these characters in the story you have a a blueprint for what happens next and so you ultimately can

like ident oh my god that was like that guy in the book who couldn't stop um gambling even after he'd won or he had predicted the stock market correctly once and then he predicted it incorrectly the next time and then ended up killing himself and it's and it's it's for so many moments in my life whether it was crypto or investing in certain particular stocks when I used to like pick stocks or starting businesses it's given me this wonderful framework and same as ever is the book that I wish I had written myself and it's

written in a style that I wish I'd written myself and in fact my last book which um which many of my listeners would have um listened to was very very much inspired by your writing style because it is it it is so accessible it is so story driven and it's so the the subjects you talk about in this book are so diverse but they're so pertinent to everything all the time and it's there so such wonderful books you're the author I admire the most of all authors that I've ever met that means the world to

me because of the way you write your books so Well thank you that means the world to me and I think you're the absolute best in the world at what you do keeping a keeping a conversation going for a couple hours is an unbelievably difficult skill and there are virtually no one else in the planet who can do it better than you so thank you Stephen i hope everybody goes and gets your books thank you so much Morgan we'll see you again soon this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that

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