You are my favorite writer.
You have the most insights per word of anybody that's writing stuff at the moment.
Well, thanks. That means a lot to me. Thank you.
You could have chosen to write about anything. Why choose to write about spending money?
Well, I'll take it back to the start of my career, which was like a lot of young men, particularly in the mid-2000s. The ultimate goal, before tech really existed, was to be an investment banker on Wall Street. And it's hard to remember that era, because now if you're a young person at Stanford or whatever, your goal is to go work at Google, go work at OpenAI. Back then it was all go work at Goldman Sachs. And so my sole kind of life aspiration when I was 20 was to be an investment banker or a hedge fund manager. And I knew I loved investing even at that age. I used to go to Barnes & Noble and read investing books and I loved it to begin with. I was fascinated with money.
And then I haphazardly got a job as a writer because I graduated in 2008. The economy was a wreck and nobody was hiring, no banks were hiring. And so the only finance job that I could find was as a writer for The Motley Fool. Didn't want to be a writer. Hated writing. Was embarrassed that I had dreams to be a powerful investment banker and now I was a journalist. I hated that. But I actually pretty quickly fell in love with it. And what I loved about it was being an outsider who was not being influenced by the incentives of that career. If you are a hedge fund manager, you have a lot of incentives and biases based around that. If you are a financial adviser, you have to think a certain way to fit into that profession. And I felt like as a writer — and I'm not a journalist — as a writer I could just be on the outside looking in. I felt like I was just up in the bleachers looking down and be like, 'Let me try to figure out what's going on.'
You said the players on the pitch.
Yes. And then tell a story behind it. And to me, money — I think I got lucky — money has more fascinating social stories in it than almost any other field, where how you spend money and how you save money and your ambitions are such a window into who you are. And of course there's a lot of other things in life that are more important than money, family and purpose and whatnot, but money is a very clear window into who you are. And so I feel like there's just an endless well of interesting stories to tell about it.
What can you tell about someone from the way that they spend money?
So much of it is about your ambitions and who you think about yourself. I'm really not anti-materialistic at all and I really don't judge other people, but when I see somebody driving a yellow Lamborghini, I'm like, there's a story there. And it's not a judging story, but that's a story of who you want to be and what you want to show off. Now, some people have expensive cars because they love the craftsmanship and the engineering and whatnot. They're truly doing it for...
For vanity. It's still a story.
But whenever I see someone clearly peacocking — and there's a lot of it, you see it — there's a story in there. I found this headline from 1929, which was the peak just before the Great Depression, and it was such a good headline. It was in the Washington Post: 'The more you were snubbed while poor, the more you enjoy displaying being rich.' And I was like, it's almost like you don't even need to read the article. That's it. It's so astute and I think so true that for a lot of people — not everybody, but for a lot of people — the more you are showing off, or you just desire to show off, a lot of it is a wound that was inflicted upon you and you're like, 'I'm going to get back.' And sometimes, too, you're not even showing off for other people. You're doing it to prove to yourself, to signal to yourself that, 'I did it.' I remember talking to Anthony Scaramucci about this and he said that he grew up in one social class where the ultimate signal that you made it to yourself, that you overcame where you came from, was the Lamborghini. That was it. And so he said, 'I don't want it for other people. I want to do it to show myself that that kid who grew up down there made it up here.' So it's a signaling, a story either way. And that's why it's not judging. It's just an interesting window into who you are.
Like retributive materialism is what it's making me think of, that I am going to get back at whatever that thing was from my past.
You see this across everything. You see this across people who spend a lot of time beautifying themselves, because they probably at one point in their life felt quite ugly. Somebody who spends a lot of time accumulating power — well, at one point they probably felt pretty powerless. Somebody who tries to accumulate a lot of wealth while they felt like they maybe didn't have very much freedom, or they didn't have very much independence, or they were very poor. Somebody who makes themselves very powerful and very strong and very big — at one point they probably felt very weak.
It's not a wonderful lesson, because in the calling out of it, it sort of denigrates the thing that most people are chasing, and everyone hates that because it devalues the goal that they haven't yet reached or the one that they have reached. They say, 'Look how hard I worked to get to this place and you're telling me this is part of just some childhood ancestral wound thing.' I get that, but if you look around closely, the reliability of being able to pattern match what somebody becomes or is trying to become and what it is that they fear or what they used to be is really high hit rate.
And the saying that a lot of people know, hurt people hurt people. There's a lot of cousins of that, of just like the way that we behave and act is a reflection of insecurities, things that were done to us in life, or even positive experiences that we've had in life. I think a lot of people who grew up very wealthy, they have a very interesting financial psychology as well. They understand, I think, very acutely what money cannot do for you. So a lot of them, if you talk to them, will be like, 'Yeah, we grew up very rich and we had all these homes and all these cars, but pick whatever story you want: my parents got divorced, my dad didn't have any relationship with me, I was bullied at school.' They're acutely aware that money can solve a lot of problems and build an amazing life for you, of course, but I think when you're poor it's easy to tell yourself that's the solution to all my problems, that if only I had that much money then this hole I have in my soul would go away and it would fill up and everything would be done. People who grew up rich know that that's not true.
Will a big house make you happier?
If you use it as a way to have better relationships with people — if you have a big house so you can have 20 of your best buddies over every Friday night and have a great time — yes. If you have a big house because that's what you need for you and your spouse to have five kids and that's your meaning and purpose in life, yes, absolutely. But I think if you're using it as a way of just like a 'because that's what you should want' kind of thing, then it can be pretty miserable. Very interesting. Harvey Firestone, who created Firestone Tires, he was alive 120 years ago or some odd. He wrote a biography in the 1920s and he pointed this out. He said every wealthy person that he knows without exception buys a gigantic house and every single one of them without exception finds it to just be a tremendous burden. And he was like, why do we do it? And he even said Henry Ford, who at the time was like a cheap miser kind of, he was like, even Henry Ford has a gigantic house that he hates. But he's like, there has to be something in the human soul that just associates large property with success.
Because, and I think a lot of people who have a big house know this, like a big house is a tremendous amount of upkeep, and a lot of people who live in those giant homes will eventually basically seclude themselves to a small little corner of that house that feels homely.
I would love to see people who have homes over 10,000 ft or whatever. I'd love to do one of those GPS tracking maps. You know how they do with wolves? And I'd want to see — oh my god — of the 10,000 square feet that your house is, you use the same 1,500 square ft, right? And you would be able to purchase that in this location, or this is what you lived in. You use the size of house that you lived in when you were 22. And you're still living in that same house. There's just slightly bigger surroundings. But even if you showed that person that information, or for myself, and you said, 'Hey, you can actually only live in a house that's 1,500 ft,' no, no thanks. Not interested.
So that's what Harvey Firestone got right. He was like, 'It's a burden, but you still do it and you're still going to do it.' I have a friend whose parents live in a 20,000-foot house, and he gave us a tour. And the tour was basically, 'Yeah, down that hall there's four bedrooms that nobody ever uses. Down this hall there's a room, it was going to be a gym but we actually put the gym downstairs. Nobody ever uses it.' He was giving us a tour of places that are never used, and just like I said, they basically secluded themselves to the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and that was it.
Behold my obsolescence. Look at that. Yes. Yes. Surplus.
But I think this is why it's such a fascinating topic, because people have always done that and they will always do it.
An interesting point is, even rich people — not all rich people buy fancy cars. Not everyone's into cars.
Yeah. Most rich people fly at a slightly nicer class. I think that's one of the places, but very few people regret choosing to fly business over flying economy if you're in the market for that kind of travel quality.
Yeah, this is what Sam Zell, who is a billionaire real estate guy, he told David Senra. Sam Zell said the only true material luxury is flying private. So Sam's advice — it's ambitious advice. He was like, 'Get to private jet money.' Scott Galloway said, 'Once you were able to own your own home, the only next thing worth buying is being able to have a jet.' And obviously that's 0.001%. I'm like, Scott, the difference — I mean, for a lot of people being able to buy a house is out of reach at the moment. And then the jet thing, but at least to me the funny note on that was like, 'What about a yacht?' He's like, 'Yacht's stupid.' No. Pain in the ass. Yeah. I thought it was so funny.
Uh, how do you define financial success then, after all of this time thinking about it? What does financial success mean to you?
To me, it's independence to be who you want to be. And who I want to be is not who you want to be. Everyone has their own very individualistic definition of that. It's waking up and saying, 'I can do whatever I want today,' and having the independence and the freedom to do that. And the distinction is, there are billionaires who have no control over their time, no control over their schedule, spend their entire day doing things that they don't want to do. And there are people who make $50,000 a year who are living their absolute best life and totally control their life, control where they live, where they work, who they spend their time with, doing the hobbies that they want to do. And so to me, that's really what wealth is. And I think a lot of people can get this wrong in their ambitions, that if your sole financial ambition is 'I want the highest net worth,' and the way in which you're going to get that is to basically put on a performance of somebody that you're not and wake up every morning and do things that you don't enjoy doing. And that's not to say hard work. I think the vast majority of people get a big thrill and a lot of pleasure out of hard work. They like being productive, doing the thing that they want to do. It's working hard on things that you genuinely don't enjoy solely because you're attracted to a bigger bank account. And that's a very common thing. So I think the definition of wealth is the ability, the pleasure of being who you want to be, being independent, waking up every morning and saying what I'm going to do today is the thing that I want to do.
Wealth without independence is a unique form of poverty.
That's what it is for a lot of wealthy people. This, to me, is one of the most fascinating things of meeting a lot of wealthy people. If you associate wealth with material and you go, 'They have a big house, they have a big car, maybe they have a plane,' and you associate, 'Oh, this person is very wealthy' — for a lot of them, not all of them, but for a lot of them, if you get to know them, they spend the vast majority of their day doing things that they don't want to do. And that, to me, still might be appealing to some people. Or if you're not at that, you might say, 'Look, I understand you say that, but let me experience it for myself. Let me try to do that.' That's always the appeal. So I get that. But of the very wealthy people I've met, some of them have truly amazing lives. And I wouldn't say jealous, but I look at them and be like, 'I want to be you.' There's, I think, a greater number, though, that when you get to know them, you're like, 'Wow, that's not what I thought it would be.'
Well, a lot of people have to do things that they don't want to do. And many people who work super hard, two jobs, got the kids, all the rest of the stuff, would say, 'Well, they should do — I have to work hard and so should they.' You go, 'Yeah, but why do you think they made themselves wealthy?' 'What would you do if you were — well, if I was wealthy, I wouldn't have to work the second job.' It's like, if you are the sort of person who is driven to make yourself into the kind of wealth that they have, you can't turn off the switch.
You can't turn it off. You're never going to meet a self-made billionaire — except the very few people who like accidentally got rich — who has a kind of personality that can say, 'That's enough. Let me put it all in muni bonds and go home.' It's not there. The reason that they are successful is because they have the kind of personality where 24 hours a day, all they can think about is their business. And even if I would say I don't want that for myself — of course I want to be financially successful and I enjoy the work that I do — I'm so grateful that those people exist. The vast majority of the great technology and great medicine that we all enjoy in the world came from people who were maniacally obsessed about their job. Even if it came at the expense of their health, their marriage, their relationship with their kids, they created something amazing and that's why they got successful.
Human perpetual motion machines. They're just churning, sucking in problems and spitting out solutions.
Yeah. I think we should be almost the most grateful for people in society who created amazing technology and amazing things at the expense of their own happiness that we all get to benefit from now.
Yeah. I mean, it should be a cautionary tale, but from the outside, everybody looks at it and thinks, 'Some version of that might be true for them, but it won't be true for me.' Watch me dance through the minefield that has been laid by art and literature and movies and songs and stories from my grandparents and the most famous investors from history. Watch me dance through that minefield and not kick any of the trip wires. David Senra has profiled 400 of the most successful entrepreneurs. He's done such a good job doing it. And he says of the 400 entrepreneurs he's profiled, there's two whose lives that he would actually want to live. Who are they?
One is Ed Thorp, who was a card counter in Vegas and then a hedge fund manager, and had just an amazing personal life on the side. Just amazing family, incredible health. I think he's still around. I think Ed Thorp is 90 years old and genuinely looks 55. Incredible life. But of the other, you know, 399 people that he's profiled, that person created something amazing, built an incredible thing, an amazing amount of wealth, technology that we all benefit from, and we should worship that person or admire that person. And I would never want to be them.
Yeah. And evade them as much as you can, at least as a role model. You got this great line: money serves you best when it stops being the thing you think about.
Yeah, I think the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs, with the exception of maybe hedge fund managers, were not chasing the money. They were absolutely fascinated with the problem that they were trying to solve, but they weren't doing it just to get rich. And the money came — it eventually came. If you solve enough problems in a way that's helpful for people, it'll eventually come to you. But I think entrepreneurs whose goal is to become rich very seldom do.
Oh, I actually took that line to mean something else. Money serves you best when it stops being the thing you think about. I took that to mean that your ultimate form of wealth is when you no longer have to think about the cost of a thing. You turn up at dinner and you don't mind putting your card down. You can stop thinking about it.
So, I was in Nashville a couple of months ago on tour, and I was there with Luke, who's my tour manager, and he was telling me this story about how his missus gets mad at him because it's 10 a.m. and he's still WhatsApping away. He has the highest phone use of anybody — Gen Z girls, TikTok addicts — like, he has the highest and it's all work. It's just work. And he just loves it. He used to be a club promoter, same industry as me. The guy is an animal. He's so good at what he does and he is unrelenting and he has a lot of fun doing it too. So it's this kind of weird intersection of all the Venn diagrams, and he made this really wonderful point. He said, 'I have a brain that likes to solve problems. I'm just trying to give it good problems to solve.' And I still get chills on my arms thinking about it, because lots of people have the kind of brains that are just looking to obsess over something to try and fix, that could make this piece fit to that piece. He is fortunate that he has managed to find business and kids and jiu-jitsu and wife and health stuff and a bunch of interesting problems to apply that to. But if you don't have a sufficiently interesting problem, that's when people get obsessed with politics or porn or their ex or whatever it might be. And I think a really great solution to this — maybe you do enough mindfulness to be able to relinquish your permanent obsession with problems, perhaps — but a good interim strategy is just give yourself better problems to solve.
I mean, a cousin of what you just said is the FIRE movement, financial independence, retire early. You had all these people who would try to live incredibly frugal lives with a high savings rate, and then they would retire when they were 28 and had half a million bucks in the bank, whatever it would be. So many of the people who actually did that, who retired when they were 28, were clinically depressed six months later because they realized that what their actual purpose was in life, that gave them meaning and whatnot, was work. And so many of those people who did retire went back to work. And so the idea that we all need meaningful problems to solve is really important. And a lot of people get this wrong with retirement. They spend all of their retirement planning on 'how do I save enough money' and none of it on 'what am I going to do in retirement.' I mean, that's a big problem for people.
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Isn't there some data around people who retire dying more quickly as well? I'm pretty sure that there was a study done on people who decide that they're going to retire at 60 or 65. And there are many things that contribute to how long you're going to live, but one of them seems to be how early you stop working.
And if you stop working earlier, you tend to die sooner. And I mean, continuing to serve your corporate overlord as a longevity strategy might be a little bit of a high-risk move for me to put forward, but I think the lesson is, yes: meaning, purpose, reason to get up, structure, collegial, sharing with other people, problems to solve, keeping the mind active. It's a big suite of things that come from work that is more than just the paycheck.
The only formula that I put in the book — it's the simplest that I could do — is a formula for a pretty good life: independence plus purpose. And I think it's hard to have a good, meaningful life without both of those things: the independence to be who you are and do what you want.
And the purpose, the wisdom to solve interesting problems, hard problems, as you said. I think that's important. I think you need both of those to have a good life. And I guess you need the independence so that you can choose the problems you want to solve.
And purpose will be different for everybody. For me it's my kids right now — that'll change when they're on their own. For some people it's work, some people it's religion, whatever it might be: the independence to be who you are and to chase something that is bigger than yourself, work on a problem that is bigger than yourself.
Talk to me about the relativity of wealth, the comparison and anchors.
I think you have to choose your words carefully when you say this because you can really offend a lot of people, but the average ordinary median middle-class American today, earning $60,000, whatever the median income is, lives a life that would be indistinguishable from magic to somebody 100 years ago. I mean, that's true. Just the access to the simplest things that you and I never think about — Advil, sunscreen, let alone phones and the internet and whatnot — would have seemed like magic to people. It is also true — this is the important part — that nobody wakes up thinking about how magical Advil is and how grateful we should be to live in a world that has Advil and penicillin. Nobody. The speed at which a luxury becomes a necessity is two seconds. And you can easily imagine a world in which our grandkids live in a world that, if we could get a glimpse of it, had a time machine and could see how they're living in the world in 2150, we'd be like, 'You guys must wake up so happy. We've cured cancer. We've done all these things. We're a multiplanetary species, whatever it might be.' And they won't appreciate any of it because it'll just become a normal thing. And so that's always the case, that luxury becomes necessity very, very quickly. It's always been the case that there's no definition of wealth. There's no objective definition of wealth. The only definition that makes sense to people is relative to other people.
And so it doesn't matter how much money that I have. All that matters is that I have more than you.
That's always been the case. It is a hundred times more potent now because of social media. So what I just said was true 100 years ago. It was true a thousand years ago. You judge yourself relative to other people. But your comparison group now that you're comparing yourself to is a curated, algorithmic, highlighted reel of the top 1% of moments of the top 1% of people's lives.
Yes, globally. And so it's created this idea — look, as an iron rule of math, half the population has to be below the median. That's just how it works. Half the population has to be below average. And when everybody, though, is being almost force-fed the top 1% of moments of the top 1% of people's lives, you create the situation where a lot of people are living good lives by any historical standard. But we've created a world where I think most people expect what is effectively a top 1% outcome. And you see this a lot with college students, where a lot of people think that the baseline norm of what they want in life is a bachelor's degree from a flagship university, a corporate job that pays low six figures to begin with, great health insurance, great retirement, a 3,000-foot house with two SUVs. That's become their baseline norm of, that's just what I expect. Anything short of that is a failure. And on one hand, I want to live in a world that has rising expectations. That's what progress is. I want to live in a world where my grandkids live in a world where cancer is cured and they don't even think about it. That's the dream. Rising expectations is progress. That's what it is. But you also have to expect and understand that in that world, growth, individually and as a whole society, is never going to feel like you think it would be, because it just becomes the norm that you expect.
Yeah. The median income is 83,000.
For a household. Individually, it's lower because there's more than one worker per household — there's one and a half or whatever workers per household.
That's interesting. You're right. The median US household income.
Household income, yeah. So individually it's probably 60 or something like whatever, maybe 50, whatever.
Oh, interesting.
I think the relativity thing is completely true. There is no such thing as objective wealth. There is only subjective wealth compared to the people around you, but there's another comparison, and it's you yesterday. So, not only do you need to be more than the people around you, but let's say you even manage to do that, right? Which is by design, you're the outlier in that group. So however big the group is — which is now 8 billion people, but local friend group, neighborhood, whatever it might be — I've done it. I'm in the top 10% or 1% of people that I compare myself to. Okay. And how's your trajectory doing up against you? Because you now have to run on a treadmill that's not only faster than all of the other people running on treadmills next to you, but the treadmill can only get faster on yours irrespective of what they do at the same time. And that trajectory piece — I know you're a massive fan of Jimmy Carr. He's a great friend and the guy rules, dude. He's so smart. He's great. And he has this idea: trajectory is more important than position. If you're the hundredth best downhill skier in the world, but last year you were 150, you are in a subjectively better position than the second-best downhill skier in the world who last year was number one.
Yeah. Oh, that's absolutely true. I think for a lot of people, what they really like with money is not even being rich. It's the process of becoming rich. The change in the trajectory is way more exciting.
The philosopher Andrew Tate once said, 'Having things isn't fun. Getting things is fun.'
Sure, it's an accurate insight.
And I think it was Nas, maybe, who said, 'People don't like you when you have something. They like you when you're pursuing something.' Have you read the book The Evolution of Desire by David Buss?
Fantastic book. One of the things he pointed out, the example that he gave, I thought was so fascinating: what tends to be attractive are not people who have a lot of resources. It's people who have the potential to acquire future resources. So the example that he gave is a med school student.
Might be more attractive to a mate.
Than a doctor. It's the trajectory that they're on. Why is it that the starving guitarist living on his friend's couch can kind of get all of the girls? Why? I'm sure the rockstar could too, as long as he's on the right trajectory. But if the rockstar's facing down, he's kind of like Bitcoin at $1. You were talking about some of the early episodes that we'd done, and when you get to be at the start of somebody's journey — you know, we spoke for the first time before 2019. Does that sound right?
Yeah. 2019, maybe even 2018, before you'd written Psychology of Money, before — I don't even know if you were blogging on Collaborative Fund.
But were you still at Motley Fool?
No, I was at Collaborative Fund, but I hadn't written a book yet. You were a very new podcaster yourself, right?
Correct. Yeah, I was a blobby baby toddler thing. But yeah, talk to me about that trajectory piece. Have you got any examples, any stories that speak to that 'I must be better not only than the people around me but also than me yesterday'?
I think it's, you know, it was weird for me. I had been a full-time professional writer for 15 years before I wrote a book, and I was very comfortable in my position of where I was as a blogger, as an online writer. Felt like I had a great life. Loved what I did, made enough money for my family to be totally happy and have some sense of independence. And then I wrote a book 15 years into it that I never expected to do anything, and the publisher didn't expect to do anything, but it massively increased the trajectory of my career. And it felt great. It felt amazing for, I want to say, a year, and then it became, 'This is just where I'm at now.' I think the reason happiness is a fleeting emotion, which it is — most people are never happy for more than a short period of time. It's a great emotion, but it's always fleeting — is because what makes you happy is surprise. It's experiencing something that you genuinely did not expect. And so when I had this bump in my career, there was a period of surprise. I never expected this to happen. And then after a period of time, it was like, okay, now I'm used to this trajectory and this is where we're at. So I think even when you're on a higher trajectory, you can get used to it very quickly. The gradient continues to get steeper. But the problem is, as the gradient gets steeper, there are fewer and fewer degrees that you can make it go more vertically.
So there's a hedge fund called Renaissance Technologies. It's the most successful hedge fund that's ever existed. So it's not open to outside investors. It's pretty much only employees get to invest in it. And it is in a universe of its own. Its average annual returns going back like 30 years are 66%. Which, if you don't know anything about finance, that is like Michael Jordan times 50. It's a different universe. But look, when you've earned 66% every year for 30 years, and if you earn it next year, like, you got richer, but you're like, 'Yeah, that's just what this does. That's just where I'm at. That's what I expect.' And I imagine like when Taylor Swift makes a billion dollars on tour, like, 'Yeah, that's just what I do.' And anything short of that is a failure. Right? I think that's always the case with anything that you do.
Great line in a John Bellion song. He says, 'If the higher I climb is the further I fall, then why love anything at all.' He's talking about emotional connection and opening up your heart and then potentially being broken. But the same thing is absolutely true when it comes to status and striving and money and success and accolade. And if your last album got a Grammy nomination, well, this year it better get a nomination or win, or you better get two. Or else you're going backward. The one career profession I think is really interesting in here is president of the United States, because you are the most powerful man in the world with anything at your fingertips. And by the beauty of democracy, it's a short-term job.
And after being the most powerful man in the world, one day you wake up and you're just some guy named George Bush. And there's very few careers that are like that, where you are absolutely tippity-top for a moment, but it's going to end. And yes, you can have book deals and speaking deals and have a good fortune, but there's going to come a specific day where nobody cares about you.
I mean, imagine the first book that you write being a global international bestseller at a rate that's unheard of in the entire industry, and then having to write a second one and a third.
And a third one and a fourth one. Yeah. No, it's an interesting thing for me, and yeah, it's been...
But you're in oddly good company with regards to that. James Clear did the same thing. Mark Manson did the same thing. You're in a sort of contemporary club of people who kind of did the same thing, with regards to their writing career. And that's not to say that it can't be beaten, but the ability to be able to beat it is so difficult, because your own and, importantly, everybody else's expectations shift.
Correct. Not just higher, they go stratospheric.
Which says a lot about the importance of expectations.
Yeah. Yeah. It's everything. And I think a lot of the reason that maybe my first book did well, nobody expected anything from it. Readers didn't expect anything. The publisher didn't expect anything. I didn't expect anything. It was all upside right there. And everything that came after that was like, if this is anything short of absolute life-changing in every sentence, I'm going to consider it a failure.
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How much of modern dissatisfaction do you think comes from comparing ourselves to people that we don't actually want to be like?
I think that marries what we were talking about before, which is a lot of the richest, most powerful people on the planet are secretly, or even kind of publicly, miserable.
I think what's more important — you remember the show MTV Cribs? Were you of that generation? That was most people's view into how the other half lives. This is before social media and whatnot. Now it is. But it didn't really inflate your aspirations because, you know, that's not a peer. It's Jay-Z. It's Shaq. Of course he has a bigger house than I do. What social media did is it showed you people who ostensibly should be peers, or at least that's the idea. That's not a celebrity. It's not Shaq. That's just a guy who looks like me, but he's obviously living a much better life than I do. So it created this idea that, like, that's where I should be. And I think that's the poison of what it is. It gives the impression that people who are showing you a tiny little fraction of their life — it gives you the impression that that's what you should be doing right now at this moment, too.
What have you come to learn about the relationship between money and status?
You bring up our friend Jimmy Carr, who I admire. So I think he's so brilliant. I have such a fondness for comedians.
Have you got to speak to him?
We've DM'd a couple of times, but I love the guy. He's so great. And I think what's great about comedians is that if you have a favorite comedian, you don't know and you don't care how much money they make. I saw Louis CK live a couple of weeks ago, and this is part of who he is: he stumbles out on stage and he's wearing a shirt that's way too big for him and his dirty jeans kind of, and people love him. They love every second of it because what you love them for is their comedy. Obviously, it's a rare situation where I'm like, 'What I value you for has nothing to do whatsoever with your financial success.' And so, like the relationship between money and power — if you're talking about a businessman or an entrepreneur, you might measure their success based off of their net worth. If your favorite athlete had a gambling addiction and lost all their money, but they're still just so much fun to watch on the court, you wouldn't care that much. And there's a lot of athletes who did fit that bill, and comedians who might fit that bill. If my favorite comedian — if I found out he hasn't figured out how to monetize it yet and the guy's actually broke and lives in a tiny apartment, I don't care. I'm going to watch every special because I value them for something more than money. And that's true for your best friends.
I wrote about this in the book. One of my best friends — I've known him for 20 years, the best guy — and I have so much fun hanging out with this guy and I've known him forever. Of our peer group, he makes by far the least amount of money. And it really bothers him. And he talks about how inferior he feels and whatnot. And I told him one day, I was like, 'If you are a funny joke-teller and a good friend, you're fun to hang out with, I love our conversations, you're working hard to support your family, you're a good dad, you're a good husband, you're a good citizen — if you do those things, you've earned 90% of the points that I am willing to give anybody. If you also happen to be rich and successful, I might bump you up to like a 9.2. But let's not pretend that what I enjoy about you and like about you is that.'
His issue, though, is not your warmth and respect to him. His issue is his perspective of himself, right?
It's how he feels about himself, not how he feels you feel about him. I think — and in some ways this is unavoidable, so I'm not saying this is even a bad thing, it's just a real thing — but we want to think that what people admire us for is our wealth. And 90% of the time, if you run through the people who are most meaningful to you in your life, they don't value you for your wealth. And the thing that they value you for has nothing to do with money. My kids don't care in the slightest whether my income went up last year or what our net worth is. They care that I listen to them and that I play football with them in the driveway and that I read books to them and that I'm a good dad. I have another friend, the same friend who gave me the tour of his very large house that was mostly not used, who said, 'Sometimes I have days where I wish my dad was just a normal guy who drove a Subaru.' He inherited the money. Yes, right. The money was getting in the way of his ability to just be a normal good dad. And when you have that much money, it was the center of everything that they did in life, was like, 'How do we use our money for philanthropy and the lifestyle that we live?' And he's like, 'Sometimes I just want my dad to just go out and play baseball with me, to be a normal guy.'
Isn't that strange, that people who are struggling for money are obsessed with money and people who have lots of money are obsessed with money? Both groups, at both ends of the barbell, much of what they're spending their time thinking about is their wealth.
I think that's true for a lot of things in life. If you've known someone who's dealt with infertility, they will do anything to have a kid. They would chop off their arms. 'I'll do anything to have a baby.' If you know people who have newborns, they would do anything to sleep tonight. 'I would chop off my arms for this kid to shut up and let me sleep.' So it's always the case that the extent to which you value something — if you want something and you can't have it, you value it more than anything. When you have it, the value diminishes, and if it's taken away from you, then the perceived value goes up tremendously again.
Such playground mentality. This sort of scarcity equals value. For everything. Because dopamine is a hell of a drug.
That's it. That's a lot of it. And in a competitive world where we're all competing for attention, we're competing for jobs, we're competing for spouses, we're always competing. Again, it doesn't matter how much I have. It just matters that I have more than you.
The happiest people I know are the most content, not necessarily the richest, healthiest, or most successful. Is it possible to train contentment?
Pretty difficult. I think there are a lot of things in behavioral finance that it's just who you are, and that who you are was forged at conception, and there's not a lot you can do about it. Daniel Kahneman was a psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in economics, who's basically the godfather of behavioral finance, came up with the vast majority of the theories that we all talk about that dictate how we...
Think about money and success. And we asked him one time, like, has all of this research that he had done over the previous 70 years, has it made him better at making decisions? And like, no, without hesitation. No, no, no. And so you're like, if somebody like him, it hasn't necessarily helped him. So I think for a lot of this, the flaw that people make is they seem like, I can learn about the psychology of wealth and money and investing and then change myself and change my behavior. And I think a lot of it, a lot of the evidence is, no, you can't. I think the best you can do is become more aware of who you are and accept it and build a financial plan and build goals that are around that.
I remember, I'll give you an example of this. Jeff Bezos was talking about when he started Amazon in 1994, I think it was, and he used this, is now famous, the regret minimization framework. And he said, if I started Amazon and it failed, I would not regret that, but if I didn't start it, I would regret that for the rest of my life.
And I remember hearing that and being like, that's awesome. I love that. And that is so not me. If I put everything I had into a startup and raised money from my parents and worked 150 hours a week for five years and it failed, I would be beside myself. And that's, but I'm so glad that he and other people exist,
Which is exactly why he's a billionaire and you're not.
It's not exactly, and never will be. And so the idea that like you have to figure out what kind of person you are. And so back to like, I should not train myself to be like, how can I train myself to have the entrepreneur's mentality? I don't. It's okay. It's not that big a deal. I should just create a life that maximizes who I am than trying to be someone who I'm not.
What are the important things to learn about who you are in this context?
I think so much of it is having goals that don't leave the roof of your own house. Kind of just being very selfish in a positive way. I think a lot of bad financial decisions happen when you are chasing a goal or doing something that is very right for another person but wrong for you. And it's the easiest trap to fall into because you're like, 'Chris did that and it worked for him and he's really happy with it, so I should do it too.'
And it's one thing if you're chasing ideas that didn't work out for other people, then like the writing was already on the wall. But if I try to do something that not only was successful, but that you love, then it's like, well, I should love this too, without the acknowledgment that everybody is so incredibly different. There are a lot of things that I do with my money that other people, maybe you would look at and be like, I don't, it doesn't make any sense to me. I don't understand why you're doing that. And 90% of the time, my answer would be like, 'Yeah, I understand it wouldn't work for you. You probably do things that would drive me crazy too.'
And that's fine. And people understand that very vividly if we're talking about our taste in food or music, that like everyone's different. Like you like Italian food, I like Mexican, it doesn't matter. There's nobody's right. It's all subjective. But when it comes to how you should manage your money and the lifestyle that you should live, it really bothers people. I think part of it is because there's obviously no right answers in how to do this. This is all very uncertain. How to build wealth is uncertain. How to manage it, how to spend it, it's all uncertain. And so when you see somebody doing it differently than you are, you take it as not like, oh, maybe that's a different way to do it. You take it as a threat to the decisions that you make.
So true. This is everything. This isn't just wealth. This is why I think the rent versus buy argument gets so heated because if you've, like, because honestly it's not obviously clear which is better, rent or buy. You, like, anybody can make the argument either way. But if you have a giant mortgage and you put your life savings into your house and somebody tells you renting was better, you're like, that's a threat, that's a threat to my identity and I'm going to respond viciously now. What's that line of yours where you say most debating on the internet are just people with different perspectives being unable to understand the others?
Yeah. People just, most people, whether it's how you invest your money, when people are like, no Bitcoin, no index funds. They're just different people talking over each other.
I'm a Bitcoin guy trying to tell you, an index fund guy, how to be a Bitcoin guy.
And the truth might be like Bitcoin is the absolute right way that you should invest and index funds are the exact way that I should invest. And that's where a lot of people get, like most debates about this, there's people with different time horizons, different risk tolerances, different cultures, different family goals, and not understanding that it's okay for people to have different views.
Spending money to show people how much money you have is a fast way to go broke and an expensive way to gain respect.
It's the fastest way to have less money. Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money. And so, this is why I think one of the most valuable financial assets is not needing to impress strangers.
Yeah, it's the most valuable financial asset that you can have on your balance sheet is to say, I want to use money as a tool to give myself and my family a better life. I do not want to use it as a yardstick of social status, by and large, because we massively overestimate almost always how much other people are paying attention to us.
I've seen some fascinating studies. I thought they were so well-designed, of a study where some researchers took a woman and they put her in an objectively hideous, ugly sweater, like a comically ugly sweater, and sent her into a party,
And she mingled about with a sense of humiliation and she came back out and they said, 'How many people in the party noticed your sweater?' And she's like, 'Everybody. Like everybody's staring at me and laughing.' And they go into the party and they start asking people, 'Did you notice a woman in the ugly sweater?' No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Nobody's thinking about you as much as you are.
And I think so the idea, it's so easy to tell yourself if I had this house, car, clothes, whatever it might be, that other people will notice and elevate my status and pay attention to me and look at me and say, 'Wow, look at Chris. He's such a cool guy.' And the reality is most people aren't thinking about you because they're too busy thinking about themselves inside their own head.
Have you seen the Dartmouth scar experiment?
Similar to that. So study participants were brought in and they were going to sit down and have an interview. As they were putting makeup on them, prosthetic makeup on, they make up a scar across their face. A huge big smile as if you'd been sort of gang violence, this massive scar across their face. And then as they're about to head in, they said, 'Oh, just one moment before you go in. We're going to touch it up and just refine the scar a little bit more.' And the participants weren't allowed to see themselves before they went in. They removed the scar.
They put them in. They said, 'Have the interview. Come back. Tell us, do you think the person noticed the scar? Do you think that the interview went well or badly because of their impressions of this?' 'They couldn't stop staring at it. I'm absolutely certain that they were judging me because of it. This is horrible. This is so bad.' Please look in the mirror. The scar wasn't even there.
Wasn't even there. Right. I think a lot of times it's really interesting if you meet someone the first time and the conversation goes great and sometimes a couple hours later they'll email you and say, 'God, I'm so sorry that I said X, Y, and Z after I thought about it. I really, that probably offended you and I'm really...' And 99% of the time, like, I wasn't, no, it's, I didn't think about it whatsoever. So the idea that most people, they don't have the bandwidth to think about you because they're busy worrying about themselves.
And so in that situation, there are probably people in that room who did have scars, did have birthmarks, did have ugly sweaters. They're worrying about themselves and not thinking about other people.
What's that word for staircase regret? Uh, l'esprit de l'escalier. Familiar with that?
Okay. So, l'esprit de l'escalier. Staircase wit is a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late.
As you're going down. L'esprit de l'escalier. And someone said, 'We'll know when AI has fully reached human intelligence when it regrets not saying the thing it meant to say on its way out of the chat.'
See, this is why I like blogs more than books is because I would always do that. I would write a blog post and a week later I'd be like, 'God, in that second paragraph, you know what sentence I should? I should use this sentence.' That's the next blog. Let, no, I'll just go update it. I just go update the blog. Whereas a book, when it's printed, it's done.
That's the issue with email, right? If you're pumping this stuff out, you don't get back to go back into someone.
They go back into, they get, yeah.
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When you look at the happiest people that you've met, what did they have in common that money alone doesn't explain?
I think they were very internally benchmark focused. Their benchmark for how well their life was doing was like health, marriage, kids, job. It was a very, it didn't leave the confines of their roof. And you can flip that around and say some of the least happy people you met are purely external benchmark. How beautiful am I? How many followers do I have? How many other people do I think are looking at me? It's a very external benchmark focused. That's almost always the case. The internal versus the external benchmark is everything in terms of contentment and money. And contentment is important because the emotion that people want to chase with money is happiness. I want to be happy, but as earlier, happiness is always fleeting. You experience happiness and it's awesome, but no one's happy for more than usually a couple minutes at a time.
I use the example of happiness is like humor. Like if I tell you the best joke in the world, or if we listen to Jimmy Carr, let's say, and it's the funniest joke, you laugh for 30 seconds. You don't laugh for 30 years. This is not how humor works. And if I told you the joke every day over and over again, you're like, 'Stop. It's lost all value at this point.' And I think so happiness is that way. It's a great emotion. It's fleeting. Contentment, though, is permanent.
Isn't it interesting that music is different. You can listen to your favorite song a thousand times and still love it on the 101st, but the same is not true with jokes, movies.
Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, used to be at The Atlantic, wrote about this, that if you watch a movie a hundred times, you want to blow your brains out. It's just, you hate it. But you listen to a song a thousand times, it can get better over time. It's a different part of your brain that's processing it.
But I think that it tends to be the case. But being content, just waking up and being like, I got everything I want and I can live in the moment and just appreciate what I have. And yeah, there's a lot of people who have a lot more than me, but I don't focus on that. I got everything that I need right here. It's a unique mindset.
There's two elements that I thought about a lot last year to do with happiness. One is that happiness can only arise when uncertainty isn't present. Like if you're highly uncertain, and maybe you're uncertain about how the football game's going to go and that's kind of exciting, but when we're talking about life, how ambiguous is my job going to be around in three weeks' time, or is my partner going to stay with me, or is my dog going to die, or is my kid going to come home? Uncertainty is just cancerous to happiness. The second one is from Naval, which is happiness can only arise when you don't want things to be different.
Like if things are uncertain or ambiguous or ambivalent and you want the world to be different, that is, those two things, and they cross over a lot. They're often intersected. It becomes very difficult to be happy. So, in as much as money is able to reduce uncertainty and allow you to want things to be different less,
I think that creates a nice foundation because that's kind of like a price that everybody has to pay. If you've got high uncertainty and you want lots of things to be different, to whatever extent money is able to reduce those things, I think that's a good reason to gain more of it.
Just using it as a tool for optionality to say, 'Look, if we were to experience the second Great Depression, I'm going to be okay and my kids are going to be okay. If I want to change careers, I can do that. If I want to move, I can do that. If I want to work less, I can do that.' Having the mere option to do it, even if you're not exercising that option, is tremendous for people of just waking up this morning and being like, 'My life's in my control.'
35 to 40% of adults in the US say they couldn't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing or selling something.
Shocking, right? And look, here's the thing. If you had said that statistic to someone 100 years ago and it wasn't $400, it was $40, whatever, adjusted for inflation, people would be like, 'Yeah, that's how life works. Life is fragile and brutal.' And the idea that you have unemployment, you need to drastically reduce your lifestyle, that would be the norm for people. I think we're fortunate to live in an era where there's an expectation that ordinary people are going to have some sense of, some semblance of protection and safety in their life, right?
What's your favorite historical example of the difference between being rich and having wealth? Because there is a difference between these two things.
To me, the most interesting family of all the mega-rich families that existed, of all the robber baron families, the mega-rich, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and the J.P. Morgans did a pretty good job managing their money. They lived good lives themselves. They left it to beneficial causes. Not perfect, but they did a pretty good job. The Vanderbilts, I think by far, did the worst. And it's such a fascinating example to dig into the Vanderbilt family of, you know, when Cornelius Vanderbilt died, adjusted for inflation, depending on metrics you use, he had something like 300 to 500 billion dollars adjusted for inflation, and within several generations, three generations, not that long of a period, there was virtually nothing left, and not a tremendous amount went to charity either. Vanderbilt University was kind of their big project, which didn't even cost that much money to fund it, but most of it was spent on three generations of Vanderbilt heirs who were just in a generational pissing contest to see who could spend it the fastest. And if you dig into their biographies, there have been several biographies written about them. It is telling and it's kind of sad because true to the David Sedaris idea of like super successful people who you would never want to be, that's the sense that you get reading the biography of the Vanderbilts. The money told them who they could be. It told them where they could live, who they could marry, who they could socialize with, how they had to dress. They had no independence over their life at all. And a lot of them, it was almost like they were characters in a movie. Like the movie was called The Vanderbilt Family.
And they were just reading from a script on who they could be. They had no independence on who they could be. And a lot of them were just miserable for it.
And this is now a well-known thing, but one of the first Vanderbilt heirs who didn't get a trust fund when there was like no money left over was Anderson Cooper.
And he's talked about this, about how he's kind of the first Vanderbilt heir in 150 years who was allowed to be himself. Had to figure out who he was, create his own identity, make his own money, be his own person. And it was almost like he was the first person who was like relieved of the burden of the money controlling who they were.
Well, he inherited the genetics of somebody that was able to make $350 billion but didn't have to deal with the gravity of managing it, or just dictating who it was. He also had another element, which is that his last name is not Vanderbilt. His mother was Gloria Vanderbilt and his father was a guy named Wyatt Cooper. And so he didn't have the name recognition of it that would follow him around for the rest of his life and change people's opinion of him.
Where did they spend the money on, the Vanderbilts?
Yeah. Most of it, a lot of it was mansions and parties and yachts and just the most ostentatious lifestyle that you can imagine. A lot of it was, you know, some of the mansions that they made, this gets back to the point of what people actually want is like a smaller house. And so some of the mansions that they made were so unbelievably huge that they didn't want to spend any time in them. They were so big and so unhomely that where they wanted to spend was the smaller apartment that they had in New York that felt much more like home to them versus the other house, the gigantic mansion that they had was a trophy. It was to show other people that you had. But nobody needs a house with 70 master bedrooms kind of thing.
It was just to show people what you had. And I think there's another element here, which is when you don't make the money yourself, when it was inherited from somebody else, then the symbolism of what you've overcome doesn't exist. It's not there. If you made it yourself, then the gigantic mansion is a symbol to yourself of what you've done and what you've built and what you overcame in life. And you take tremendous pride and gratitude in that. You inherit it from someone else, you have none of that.
Do you know Eddie Hearn? Boxing promoter.
British boxing promoter. Big, big name in that world. And his dad created the organization that he now runs. And he was asked, what do you regret about childhood or what do you wish had changed? And he says, you know, it was, I really loved my life. Loved my life. Loved my dad, but I never got to do it first.
Yeah. Yeah. I never got to do it first.
And if your parents are unbelievably successful, you know, there's no chance statistically that you'll ever exceed them.
Well, I mean, if you're someone's son and you become a writer, what's the likelihood that you can outstrip The Psychology of Money? You, the guy who wrote it, can't outstrip The Psychology of Money, right? And imagine if one of Elon Musk's children is an entrepreneur and creates a business that's worth a billion dollars.
Imagine if they become self-made billionaires.
And your dad is worth 700 billion.
Oh, that's so cool. Yeah.
I mean, even if, what a horrible bind that you'd be in. And I know that he's got a slightly strange relationship with some of the kids. Even if you were to say, I don't want any of the inheritance. I don't want to even take the name. I'm going to change all of the things. And then you go and independently you become a millionaire or a billionaire.
Yeah. How many people are going to go, 'Yeah, but I mean, you were Elon Musk's kid.' They go, 'I don't even talk. We haven't even looked. Like, I don't even... I'm not even on the...'
Yeah, you were Elon Musk's kid.
Well, look at that, something where you can't necessarily use your parents' status. Someone like Bronny James.
Is that LeBron James' son?
Oh.
Who now plays for the Lakers. He's made the NBA. Unbelievably good himself, but he's always going to be LeBron's son, right?
You know what's interesting though? Steph Curry's got a higher percentage shoot than his dad.
Yeah. So, what you see is typically a regression to the mean in the world of basketball. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz did a wonderful book on basketball, The Mathematics of Basketball. Basically, for every inch that you are over six foot, your likelihood of getting into the NBA doubles. So, it's twice as much, twice as much, twice, and it doesn't stop at 6'7", 6'8", 6'9". It just keeps going. But the regression to the mean usually happens like if you have this outlier freak of an athlete, typically the son goes a bit closer to whatever the median is, except for with more skill-based players, and that is typically free throw shooters.
Yeah, because not only have you got some of that genetic material that's percolating through you, but you've also got all of the expertise, all of the tactics, and all of the training. And Steph Curry is the canonical example of this, that his dad was really, really great at what he did, and Steph Curry's better.
So there's some cool, you know, it's okay. Well, what are the kind of inheritances that I can take from my parents? My dad left school with no qualifications at 16. None. Zero qualifications at 16, and I'm the first person in my family to have gone to university.
But I was able to learn stuff from him that I didn't need to use in an academic setting.
Get a master's in international marketing. I can't remember. No. Like, none of that really mattered.
Yeah. No, that's interesting. I think there's a lot of people who are very talented in their own right, but will always be in the shadow of their parents. Colin Hanks is a very talented actor. Unbelievably talented. He... Exactly. You knew with... I could tell you don't even know who Colin Hanks is, but you know he's Tom Hanks' son and he's unbelievably talented. If you just put him in his own right, he'd be an A-list actor, but I think he'll always be known as Tom Hanks.
There's an interesting explanation about why the children of wealthy families perform so well in school. And it's not the additional tutoring or the after-school clubs or the going to a higher-rated local comprehensive. It's not to do with any of that. Even if you control for all of those things, it seems to be the fact that those are the kinds of kids who are driven to do unreasonable things in a desperate attempt to escape the gravity of their parents' accomplishments.
And that's why you see more drug use among the kids of wealthy parents. Again, not because, maybe because they can afford it. They're having these sort of swanky parties at 16 and they're bringing their friends around and one of them's got ecstasy or whatever it is.
But how much of it is just trying to escape the expectations of their parents? Yes. And how unpopular of an opinion is this to talk, oh sorry, these poor upper-class kids that are out in, you know, Long Island off on the tails of the fish just partying it up in the Hamptons. Like, hey, I mean, these kids are driven to do unreasonable things to get into a Ivy League university, to do the things that are needed, unless you're unbelievably naturally talented, to do the things that are required in order to become a billionaire. If you've read Walter Isaacson's book about Musk, it's evident that he is just on an intergenerational run to disprove all of the that happened to him as a kid.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a different flavor of this. I met, I did some work for a family many years ago that they were multi, multi-billionaires, and it was the grandfather who made all the money, and I was working with the grandchildren who were mostly like probably 18 to 25 years old, let's say, and I was there to teach them about some money stuff. And one of the things they said, because the other element here was all of these kids were very good-looking. The guys and the girls are extremely good-looking and they all have access to unlimited money. Okay.
And live unbelievable lives.
One of them had a helipad in his backyard kind of thing. Just unbelievable quintessential billionaire children.
And one of the things they brought up was how hard it is to date.
And one of the things they said, two things. One is it's almost impossible to find someone who can just look past the money and actually like me for being me. The other thing is that if the relationship progresses long enough, basically the family's lawyer pulls the boyfriend or girlfriend aside and says, 'If this relationship gets to a proposal, you'll be met with the most ironclad prenup that has ever existed in the world.' And after that meeting, so many of the boyfriends and girlfriends are like, 'I don't know. I don't know if this is what I want to do.' And so you have these very good-looking 19-year-olds with unlimited money, and they're almost undatable. It's like, and so that's like a tiny violin thing. But the social pressure, I've called it social debt. There's a social debt that can hang over having a lot of money that's very difficult to contextualize when you don't have a lot of money.
What are the worst ways to spend money then? Like if someone wanted to guarantee dissatisfaction with their wealth, what would you tell them to adopt?
I think you would anchor all of your expectations and all of your goals to chasing the admiration of people who are not important in your life. I desperately want my wife and kids to admire me and love me and pay attention to me. After that, it drops off precipitously. And I think if you were the kind of person, and social media has really put a spotlight on a lot of these people who are just desperate for the attention and the engagement of total strangers, and their life's purpose, like the only thing that matters to them in their life is the engagement of strangers, and it's a very unhealthy way to go about things that I think is always going to leave you empty.
So I think that's the biggest... I want to be very ambitious financially and career-wise to benefit a very small number of people in my life. Fewer than 10 people, my family, a couple friends kind of thing. And after that, I couldn't give two shits about what happens from there. I think that's the goal of happiness and everything around it. The opposite of that, of trying to impress people who aren't paying attention, is the source of the vast majority of financial misery.
Okay. Ultimately, you do end up needing to spend money. And if people get to the place that they want to, which is some kind of wealth escape velocity where they can have more than they need, you're going to end up spending it on some stuff that isn't the necessities. So, what's the opposite? What are the best places for people to spend money?
I think where a lot of people go astray with this, I'll definitely get to what works, but where they go astray is don't spend money on things, spend money on experiences. I think a lot of things are awesome and a lot of experiences can leave you pretty empty. Particularly in the social media world, I think of a lot of people, I would venture to say most people, pick their next vacation based off of what's going to make the best picture on social media.
And I've talked about this before. You know what my personal example of this is? This is very subjective. People can disagree with this. Bali.
I have twice. I came off a moped once.
Okay. So, we might differ in this. I think Bali is super overrated.
Completely overrated. We went there and it's not bad. But I've been to so many other tropical places that were 10 times better.
But if you go to Bali and you post a picture on Instagram or TikTok of you going to Bali, you think at least people are going to be like, 'Wow, you went to Bali. That's so cool. It's so exotic.' Super exotic. And so I think there's quite a bit of that, of like the experience thing is a different...
What are the, other than holidays, what are some other experiences that you think people get to spend money on, experiences not things, staying inverted due to...
The reason I think travel can be beneficial for a lot of people is sometimes it's not even the destination of where you're going or how beautiful the destination is, it's that you need to travel to kind of give yourself permission to detach from the rest of your life. And so if flying to Maui is the only chance that you can have totally uninterrupted time with your spouse or your kids, you just can't do it at home. You're too distracted at home. Your kids are too distracted at home. You have to fly to Maui in order to sit there and spend hours with each other in each other's presence and company. Like that's the value of it.
I think that tends to be true and that's definitely been the case for me, that I have to go somewhere else to totally detach. And if you have some sort of staycation at home or even just a weekend at home, everyone in my family is all kind of just lost in their own world, their own priorities, their own email or friends or whatnot. They're lost in it. And you have to detach from that in order to spend quality time. To me, that's the biggest value of spending money on travel vacations.
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You know what it sounds like? It makes me think about how cool it would be to just have a cabin in the woods that's within 90 minutes of your house that has all of the benefit of not at home, not in work mode, not even in typical family mode. It's got all of our stuff there. And I guess this is why people like caravanning in the UK. I don't think it quite exists in the same way here in America. But a caravan park where what you're doing is you're extricating yourself from the usual day-to-day monotony and you're putting yourself into this new thing, this different thing.
I guess the problem is that if you go there enough, that just becomes...
I think the idea that you just hit on, which is what really gives, what has the potential to make you happy. We said before a lot of what happiness is, surprise, is trying new things. And a lot of it is everyone has their thing that they might spend money on. Cars, food, clothes. Everyone's got a different thing. Everybody has a thing, but it's always different. And it's not always obvious what your thing might be. And so I think you have to experiment with a lot of different kinds of spending to actually figure out what's going to be right for you. So little experiments of like try eating at a fancier restaurant than you normally would. It might not do it for you. Wine is not my thing. I have so many friends who are like, because I'm not a wine guy, and they're like, 'All right, you haven't tried the right wine.' And they're like, 'Here, this is going to change your life, Morgan.' They hand me a glass and I'm like, it all tastes the same to me. I'm sorry, I just don't have it.
I'm a philistine as well.
But there's other people that's like wine gives them so much happiness and purpose and they love the collection, the tasting. Everyone's got to find their thing.
One of the things for me with reading is that I think a lot of the reason that if people don't like reading, they just haven't figured out the kind of book that's going to work for them. And it's not always obvious what you will enjoy. And so for the longest time, I was like, fiction just doesn't work for me. But I knew, I've heard from so many people that like, fiction changed my life. These stories changed my life. And I always tried and I couldn't figure it out. And I finally found like a genre of fiction that would work for me. But I had to experiment so many different times. It's like historical fiction is like, it has a potential. Science fiction just makes, I don't understand why anyone would enjoy it. But historical fiction, this could be true. I'm like, I can just sit there and read this all day long. I love that kind of stuff.
What are some of your favorite fiction books?
You know, some of the, there's one that was a historical fiction of the history of New York City starting back before it had been populated when it was truly just a forest inhabited by beavers and whatnot, and then it tracked a series of families, a Dutch family that originally colonized that, and then through the generations ending up with 9/11 and tracked it. It's like a thousand-page book.
Yeah, I get it. Dude, that sounds awesome.
Because when I think historical fiction, what I think is Fall of the Roman Empire or Game of Thrones, but without the dragons, and something that brings... what's that, Man in the High Castle, that was kind of similar, right? Of if the Germans won. Alternative history, but it's moderately modern history.
Because it has a unique name. No, it doesn't have a unique name. The book's name is New York.
Uh, guy's name is Edward Rutherford.
Okay. I imagine there's lots of books...
He's written. He also wrote one on the history of London and that has a unique name.
And the history of China.
This is such a cool way to do it. All that you do is take some interesting place and then make a story about...
And his kind of how he does it is let's start with a family and then track generations of that family over 500 years.
And right, and it's fascinating and he gets very deep into the culture of what New York was at different periods of time.
